As previously noted, my estimate/guesstimate of the total unemployed/underemployed in the United States is roughly 17¾ million people. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, there were 8,628,000 fewer jobs in January of 2021 than in January of 2020, before the economic restrictions cause by the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite an increase of 1,349,000 in the “civilian noninstitutionalized population,” the workforce decreased by 4,295,000, meaning that over four million people got too discouraged to look for work.

Doing the math, and basing my estimate on the U-6 unemployment numbers,^[1]U-6 includes “Persons marginally attached to the labor force are those who currently are neither working nor looking for work but indicate that they want and are available for a job and have … Continue reading I came up with an estimated 11,898,000 people out of work who want jobs, even if they’ve been too discouraged to look for work, plus another 5,950,000 people who need full-time jobs but are stuck working only part-time because they can’t get anything else, for a total of 17,848,000.

My previous article was based on President Biden’s cockamamie plan to find some form of legalization and a path to citizenship for the roughly 11,000,000 illegal immigrants in the United States. If we have roughly 17,850,000 Americans who want full time jobs but either can’t find anything but part-time, or can’t find work at all, why would we ‘legalize’ 11,000,000 illegal immigrants to compete with them?

Is there any way that isn’t utter madness?

President Donald Trump probably never saw the economic collapse over the COVID-19 restrictions coming, but he had what he called an “America First” policy. He would never have agreed to make it easier for non-Americans to compete with actual American citizens for jobs, but that’s what his successor is doing. Under President Biden, we will have more Mexicans and Guatemalans and Venezuelans getting jobs that would otherwise have gone to people born in this country, to people who are real American citizens.

But it’s not just the illegal immigrants. From The Philadelphia Inquirer:

Philly readies for new neighbors as Biden plans to resettle more of the world’s most vulnerable people

Under Biden, more people who have waited years in difficult conditions have hope of better lives

by Jeff Gammage | February 21, 2021

Margaret O’Sullivan remembers frantically trying to hide the condoms.

Scott Lloyd, the Trump administration’s fiercely antiabortion director of the Office of Refugee Resettlement, was due any minute at the Nationalities Service Center in Philadelphia.

“We ran to the men’s room to grab them out, fearful he’d cut our funding,” the NSC executive director said of that 2018 visit. “That’s what it was like trying to navigate through Trump world.”

Now there’s wide hope at NSC and other agencies around the Biden administration’s plan for a robust return to welcoming some of the world’s most vulnerable people to new homes in the region.

Back in the dark ages, journalism schools taught the five “w”s were the first and most important parts of a news story. That way, if a person didn’t finish the article, or go to the “continued on page A-13” part, he still got the “who, what, when, where and why” of the story; the “h”, of “how”, was next.

But not today! Not the #woke reporters. No, Jeff Gammage begins with a trite anecdote, one designed to make former President Trump’s policies look bad. I’m not certain why a “fiercely antiabortion” administrator would cut funding due to the presence of a non-abortifacient contraceptive method — one would think that someone who was “fiercely antiabortion” would appreciate fewer pregnancies among women who would want abortions — but the logic behind Margaret O’Sullivan’s thinking is never explained to the reader. I suppose that it’s hardly surprising, given that Mr Gammage’s brief bio at the bottom of the Inquirer article states, “Jeff covers immigration ― the people, the issues, the conflicts.” There’s a reason I sometimes refer to it as The Philadelphia Enquirer.^[2]RedState writer Mike Miller called it the Enquirer, as in the National Enquirer, probably by mistake, so I didn’t originate it, but I thought it very apt.

Trump squeezed the admission of refugees to a series of record lows, down to a maximum of 15,000 a year. Biden intends to raise the cap to 125,000.

More poor writing from the Inquirer. Rather than “down to a maximum of 15,000 a year,” it should be “down to a maximum of 15,000 for FY 2021.”

This month he issued an executive order to rebuild and enhance the program, saying it promotes stability in unsettled regions and encourages nation-to-nation cooperation amid the worst refugee crisis since World War II. It reinforces America’s long, if frayed, standing as “a beacon of hope for persecuted people around the world,” the president said.

Perhaps 125,000 isn’t that many, not compared with 11,000,000 illegal immigrants that the President wants to ‘legalize,’ but that’s still 125,000 more people, few of whom speak English, few of whom bring with than any resources, and few of whom have the skills to fit into the American economy as anything other than low-wage laborers. That’s still 125,000 people who will need to be fed, clothed and housed, all on the backs of the American taxpayers.

What great ideas are coming from the Biden Administration! Eleven million people to compete with actual American citizens for the too few jobs out there, with many of the lost jobs never to return, and now the President wants to add roughly 125,000 new people, in just the next year, to the welfare rolls.

The article is a long one, designed to pull at the heartstrings. We are told stories of individual refugees, and how they faced persecution, impressment into military service, and many, many hardships. A good, kind-hearted man, President Biden feels for these people, and wants to help them.

But Joe Biden is not President of the World; he is President of the United States, and as President of the United States, his first duty is to Americans, not to refugees from Honduras and Guatemala and the Congo. As he wants to bring in 125,000 refugees, in just a year, refugees who will need to be supported, he seems to have forgotten that there are native-born American citizens who are living in the streets of San Francisco and Minneapolis, real American citizens living in should be condemned shacks in eastern Kentucky, American citizens squatting in dilapidated row houses in Philadelphia.

We need to realize that we need to take care of Americans first. President Biden can have all of the sympathy in the world for foreigners facing persecution and poverty in their home lands, but his actual duty is to Americans first.