trump

ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION / Jorge E. Ponce

Andres Oppenheimer challenged, in a December 3rd op-ed, the current immigration policies of President Trump.  His one-sided arguments merit a more impartial rebuttal.

While I submitted a letter to the editor to the Miami Herald and El Nuevo Herald, where Andre’s op-ed was published, my letter was ignored.  I was not surprised given the liberal ideological orientation of both newspapers in a city that just elected a Democrat mayor on December 9, 2025 – the first Democrat elected in 28 years.

He states that the President has labeled “all” immigrants as foreign invaders.  This is only partially true.  The President is lumping only “illegal” immigrants into this cohort.  He has no problem with immigrants who have gained entry to the U.S. by following the legal processes that include a fully-vetted protocol.  Even famous Hispanic civil rights leader and labor-movement activist Cesar Chavez opposed illegal immigrants who undermined the boycotts and strikes orchestrated by United Farm Workers to improve the labor conditions of legal employees.  The legendary former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan (D-TX) also advocated for an immigration policy based on legal means that aimed to have new arrivals be a benefit and not a burden to the country.

He attempts to make President Trump feel guilty by invoking the Emma Lazarus poem attached to the Statue of Liberty that reads: “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” He is not the only one to do this. However, the economy of our country in 1883, when this poem was written, was different than the economy of our nation today.  There is a world of difference in a manufacturing-based economy in 1883 as compared to a 2025 economy that is based on service-oriented industries — where English fluency is a requirement and technological skill-sets are competing with artificial intelligence options.  The 2025 poem in the Statue of Liberty should be interpreted to read as follow: “Give me your legal immigrants with the skill-sets and English fluency that will guarantee them success in our American society.”

To wrap-up his argument, he invokes studies claiming that illegal immigrants on average commit fewer crimes than U.S. born Americans.  This is bogus reasoning.  Unlawful entry and illegal reentry are both criminal offenses that may result in criminal penalties, with enhanced penalties for illegal reentry. When you add both of these categories to the other crime categories, you must reach the conclusion that illegal immigrants commit the most crimes in our country. 

Some Democrats argue that the contributions that illegal immigrants make to the economy by their tax receipts on the purchases they make outweigh their cost to taxpayers.  To those who don’t do their research and who get their information from soundbites from fake-news media outlets, this argument sounds reasonable. 

But those who rely on factual information find out that the argument is wrong.  According to a 2023 report by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) – presented at a hearing before the House Budge Committee in 2024 – the net annual cost of illegal immigration to American taxpayers is 150.7 billion dollars.  This figure is reached by subtracting the gross cost of 182 billion dollars from the 31 billion dollars that illegal immigrants pay in taxes.  So, the bottom line is that illegals pay for only 17 percent of the cost they create – a severe burden on law-abiding taxpayers.

The Democrats under the Biden/Harris administration planned to open the Southern Border to illegal immigrants from all over the world.  Their goal was to provide them with a path to citizenship — with the hope that they would vote to keep the Democrats in power in perpetuity. 

And the question remains why would the Democrats want to substitute their loyal voting bloc of blue-collar workers with illegal immigrants? And the answer can be found in former President Obama’s remarks that Americans in small towns in Pennsylvania and in the Midwest cling to their guns and religion because they are mad as hell. Democrats realized that these blue-blooded Americans would never accept their woke agenda of defunding the police, embracing diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) initiatives and radical climate-change policies, and substituting a capitalist economy with a centrally-planned socialist state (where everyone became poor except those in the political class). 

Democrats gambled that these illegal immigrants would become their steady loyalists in future elections.  The majority of these immigrants belonged to the lower socio-economic classes in their countries, lacked English fluency, had poor educational levels, and were ill-equipped to fill high-skill jobs.  To keep them happy, Democrats resorted to a panoply of welfare programs that would never allow illegals to attain the American Dream of self-sufficiency and success that those who pulled themselves by their bootstraps achieved.

But Democrats relied on the famous quote by the former minister of propaganda for the German Third Reich, Joseph Goebbels, that “If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” Democrats aimed to have these immigrants treat them as their patron saints and not ask any questions – also a risky proposition.

Ours is nation of laws and enshrined in Judeo-Christian traditions.  Our immigration policy should be based on entry to the country through legal means and ensure that entrants do not become a burden to our taxpayers, pursue assimilation and English proficiency, and respect the cultural traditions of the homeland.

The United States is a beacon light to those who respect all of our laws from the very beginning – without any exceptions.  I fully embrace this ideal and so does President Trump.

Examining The Past To Understand The Present / Jorge E. Ponce

Some friends have expressed disillusionment at the disrespect that the United States has received lately from dictators, terrorist groups, free-speech detractors, and theocratic mullahs.  Most attribute this malaise to the weak foreign policies of former President Joe Biden. 

Other friends are outraged at the Biden’s economy where most Americans could hardly make ends meet because of inflation.  Despite all the feel-good, make-belief propaganda disseminated by Biden’s acolytes, Americans confronted reality when they went to pump gas for their cars, when they bought groceries at the supermarket, when they went out for lunch or dinner at a restaurant that had reasonable prices for their menu entrees in the past, when they purchased airfares for a needed vacation, when they went out to buy or lease a car, when they wanted to buy a house and the interest rates for a mortgage approached 8% – basically, when they bought any services that were affordable when President Trump occupied the Oval Office and which have started to improve under his second term.

Hispanics are the latest group to say that they’ve had enough with the failed policies of Democrats.  But this presents an “inconvenient truth” to the liberal cabal.  To discredit this switchover, they have called conservative Cuban-Americans all kinds of pejoratives – Batista sympathizers, inveterate hardliners, cavemen, reactionaries, Miami Mafia, and unauthentic Hispanics.  I’ve addressed the truth about Cuban-Americans by writing an article in my book.

Moreover, Hispanics realize instantly when politicians are only interested in their vote and not on their issues of concern.  When First Lady Jill Biden gave a speech in San Antonio, Texas and tried to ingratiate herself with Hispanic voters, she called them “breakfast tacos.” When Biden addressed a gathering of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus during the 2023 Hispanic Heritage Month, he mistook it for the Congressional Black Caucus. And some in the Democrat cabal have done the unthinkable when it comes to the Spanish language – they want to make it gender-neutral by using the term “LatinX.” Democrats ignore the basic fact that Latinos and Latinas will vote for politicians who have their backs.

It is smart when politicians learn directly from Hispanics what motivates them to vote and who resonates with their aspirations and values.  Hispanics do not react well when non-Hispanic politicians attempt to speak for them. 

Many Americans are ready to hang up their hats and say that the era of reaching the American Dream and attaining life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness is over. I ask them a simple question: what have you done lately to restore freedom and democracy to the country that we all love?!!! Let the road to recovery begin with you!

It is precisely when answering my own question that I tell others what I have done lately for my country. I spent a year writing the book – and editing it with my wife’s help – “Examining the Past to Understand the Present – The Journey of a Cuba-American Refugee and What Led to His Conversion from Democrat to Republican.”

The book will be helpful to those “legal” immigrants and political refugees who have made the decision to leave their homeland. I narrate my life story in Cuba and the United States in parts 1-4 of my book.

Although the book has over sixty of my articles on many subjects ranging from politics, philosophy, civil rights, religion, Hispanics, and Cuban-Americans in part 5 of my book, I do dwell on my transformation from a Democrat to a Republican and what led up to it. I tell past friends who got annoyed with my conversion that life is a journey that cause us to learn new things, and that changes how we view the world.

But the challenge that I’ve faced is to market the book in conservative and Hispanic networks.  The conservative ones have ignored my interview requests because I’m not a public figure like the ones who publish books regularly on the Fox News network.  The Hispanic ones don’t want to hear from me because they think that my book message is antithetical to their leftist ideology. 

Make a difference.  Buy my book.  Write a review. Help out a conservative who contributed his grain of sand to “Make America Great Again!”