Earlier this week, Chapman University law professor John Eastman used the announcement that Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s pick to be Vice President to explain his unorthodox view of the citizenship clause of the 14^th Amendment. Eastman, who’s frequently the only constitutional lawyer on any panel or symposium who believes that birthright citizenship isn’t guaranteed by the 14^th Amendment, used his reasoning to argue that Harris is not a natural‐​born citizen and therefore ineligible to be Vice President because she is ineligible to be President. This is because, according to Eastman’s theory, Harris’ parents were non‐​citizens when she was born on U.S. soil and not subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S. government. Funny enough, Eastman believes that Ted Cruz is a natural‐​born citizen while Harris is not, but this is actually perfectly consistent with his odd interpretation of the 14^th Amendment. So, while it is tempting to poke fun at his seeming partisanship on the Cruz vs. Harris question of natural‐​born citizenship, we must give him the benefit of the doubt on that point.

But that doesn’t mean that Eastman is correct on the broader point. Rather than delve into the legal weeds on this issue, which many others have done, I’ll focus instead on some erroneous statements that Eastman makes about American history.

In his opinion piece, Eastman states that the children of Mexican immigrants born on U.S. soil who were deported during the Mexican Repatriation on the 1920s and 1930s weren’t considered citizens by the government. Eastman wrote:

The children born on U.S. soil to guest workers from Mexico during the Roaring 1920s were not viewed as citizens, for example, when, in the wake of the Great Depression, their families were repatriated to Mexico.

Eastman is incorrect, the government did consider those born to non‐​citizens on U.S. soil to be American citizens. His story about the deportations of Mexicans and American citizens of Mexican descent doesn’t support his point. First, children born in the United States who are minors can follow their parents as they are deported even today. Many today end up staying in the United States with guardians, other relatives, or in the foster care system, but some also leave. Thus, removing or allowing U.S.-born minors to leave with their foreign‐​born parents who are deported doesn’t mean that the U.S. government doesn’t consider the minors to be U.S. citizens.

Second, many of the U.S.-born children of Mexican immigrants who were deported with their families eventually returned because they were American citizens. For instance, Jose Lopez was born to Mexican parents in Detroit in 1926. He was deported to Michoacán, Mexico in 1931 along with his family. As a five‐​year‐​old, there were few alternatives for him to stay and his parents didn’t want to be separated from their young son. Lopez eventually returned to the land of his birth (the United States) in 1945 as he could prove that he was a citizen, but others were not so lucky. Clearly, the U.S. government considered him to be a U.S. citizen then because he was born here.

Third, the term “repatriation” could be fairly applied to the Mexican‐​born immigrants who were being deported to their homeland, but it was surely inapplicable to the approximately half of all deportees who were American citizens by birth. “Mexican Repatriation” is a term commonly used to describe that mass deportation, but it is a phrase that assumes the restrictionist conclusion that all of them were foreign‐​born or non‐​citizens – which is incorrect because about 60 percent were U.S. citizens with most being born here.

Eastman also wrote that the children born to Mexican guest workers under the Bracero guest worker visa program were not considered citizens:

Nor were the children born on U.S. soil to guest workers in the bracero program of the 1950s and early 1960s deemed citizens when that program ended, and their families emigrated back to their home countries.

As far as I can tell from scanning an archive of testimonies by Bracero workers and their families, this isn’t true either. There weren’t many children born on U.S.-soil to Bracero workers because they were supposed to be all men, but children born to illegal immigrants who worked alongside Braceros were citizens, so it stands to reason that so were the few children whose parents were Braceros. Perhaps some U.S.-born children of Braceros were denied citizenship or had trouble proving that they were born in the United States, but I haven’t come across any systematic evidence that the U.S. government did not consider them citizens at the time. I would love to see evidence to the contrary, but I doubt it exists.

Constitutional scholars have been arguing about Eastman’s unorthodox constitutional theories for quite a while and he’s not changing many minds. Interestingly enough, his historical examples do not prove what he thinks they prove. Whether the standard interpretation of the 14^th Amendment is correct or not, the U.S. government has been acting like those born on U.S. soil who aren’t the children of diplomats are U.S. citizens.

Donald Trump has made good on his threats against Chinese‐​owned tech companies, issuing executive orders that aim to effectively ban not only the popular video sharing app and platform TikTok, but also the Chinese‐​owned messaging app WeChat as of September 20. The former is a platform for speech and expression used by millions of Americans, but the order targeting the latter may ultimately be even more disruptive. WeChat’s massive popularity in China—it’s the most popular app in the country by a huge margin, with more than a billion users worldwide—makes it an essential tool for Americans (and visitors) communicating with family, friends, and business contacts there. WeChat isn’t just used for messaging either: it’s also a major payment platform with hundreds of millions of active users (vastly more than domestic equivalents like Apple Pay), which makes the order barring “transactions” with the company a grievous self‐​inflicted blow to any American company trying to compete in Asian markets. It will also disadvantage American makers of mobile devices, who will be stuck trying to sell Asian consumers hardware on which they may not be able to easily install the single most popular piece of software.

And while the “national security” case for targeting TikTok may be little more than an effort to benefit American corporations by forcing the app’s parent company, ByteDance, to sell it off on the cheap, it is harder to see how WeChat, with its primarily Chinese user base, could spin off its American operations as a separate, viable company. Concerns that the app is a target for Chinese surveillance are at least more reasonable in the case of WeChat than TikTok, but insofar as users in the U.S. are most often using it to communicate with people in China, that’s a risk that applies equally to traditional phone calls and text messages: When you communicate with people in another country, there’s a risk that country’s government will be listening in. Moreover, the order will do nothing to address its putative concern that WeChat is used to monitor the “personal and proprietary information of Chinese nationals visiting the United States”—most of whom will presumably arrive in the U.S. with their own mobile devices and software brought from home. The TikTok order is similarly incoherent: It notes that many federal agencies have already (and reasonably) barred the app’s installation on government devices, which is meant to underscore the seriousness of the threat, but leaves it mysterious why Americans who don’t work for the government must be forbidden from making their own decisions about whether the app poses an unacceptable risk.

This is a radical departure from the position the United States has always previously adopted, and still reflected on the Web site of the United States Trade Representative, in a “fact sheet” posted earlier this year:

When governments impose unnecessary barriers to cross‐​border data flows or discriminate against foreign digital services, local firms are often hurt the most, as they cannot take advantage of cross‐​border digital services that facilitate global competitiveness.

The USTR specifically condemns China’s “sweeping restrictions on cross‐​border data transfers and broad‐​based data localization mandates.” Yet the logic of the Executive Orders is effectively a demand for data localization. If TikTok can be sanctioned because of the mere theoretical possibility that the company could be ordered to share data stored in the U.S. with China, then virtually any foreign‐​owned technology company operating in the U.S. could be similarly targeted. (And since, like China, the United States allows the government to secretly demand foreigners’ data from U.S. firms without warrants, other countries would be amply justified in targeting our companies in turn.) After decades of demanding that other countries allow American companies to compete fairly in their markets, we have announced a policy of passing a death sentence by executive fiat on foreign companies that manage to compete too successfully in our markets.

Much like the Trump administration’s invocation of “national security” as a pretext for imposing tariffs on Canadian aluminum without congressional approval, the orders sanctioning TikTok and WeChat reek of capricious economic nationalism wrapped in a gossamer‐​thin security rationale. They are comically hypocritical, dangerous to free expression, and a ruinous attack on the open global digital market the United States used to champion so vigorously.

The Wall Street Journal has published a biased news story regarding state budgets. The piece by Kate Davidson and David Harrison reflects only Keynesian thinking, exaggerates the plight of governments, and only quotes analysts in favor of more federal bailouts.

Here are some of the problematic aspects of the piece:

“State and local governments spent or invested $2.33 trillion in 2019.” That statement is false. The $2.33 figure is the state‐​local portion of GDP (BEA Table 1.1.5). But total state‐​local spending and investment in 2019 was $3.1 trillion (BEA Table 3.3).

“Michael Strain, director of economic policy studies at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said Congress should take similar steps to fill the budget hole for state and local governments, which have seen revenues decline by 15% to 20% in some cases.” It is an error to conflate the budget situations of state and local governments. State governments may face a revenue decline of perhaps 10 percent, on average, but most local governments likely face little decline. Almost three‐​quarters of local tax revenues are from property taxes, and housing values remain buoyant so far during the recession. During the last recession, overall local government revenues did not fall for that reason.

The article cites analysts at liberal think tanks Brookings, TPC, and CBPP. It quotes a GOP senator who is one of the few Republicans in favor of another big state bailout. It quotes a scholar at conservative AEI who has a big‐​government view on this issue. And it cites Moody’s Analytics, which has a Keynesian economic model programed to show that government spending boosts GDP. Thus, the story cites six people in favor of another bailout and none against.

The article focuses on the most exaggerated estimate of state budget gaps, which is the Moody’s two‐​year figure of $500 billion. Why do they add two years together other than to produce a big‐​sounding number? The authoritative source of state budget data, NASBO, reports data on an annual basis.

The article includes a lower budget gap estimate by TPC, but excludes other recent lower estimates by Tax Foundation and economists Christos Makridis and Robert McNab. The Tax Foundation study shows that these three estimates are similar, and lower than the Moody’s outlier estimate highlighted by the WSJ.

The WSJ does not mention that the “gaps” and “shortfalls” it discusses are differences between pre‐​crisis forecasted revenues and current forecasts. If a state had forecast 2021 revenues to grow 5 percent but now expects 0 percent growth, the gap is said to be 5 percent and translated into dollars. The state would need to keep its 2021 spending flat to keep its budget balanced. That is not a crisis, especially after state general fund spending grew 5.5 percent in fiscal 2019 and 5.8 percent in fiscal 2020.

An alternative way to report budget gaps is to compare expected 2020 and 2021 revenues to actual peak 2019 revenues. That approach shows smaller gaps, as shown in the Tax Foundation study.

The WSJ article highlights Moody’s claim that without more federal aid, state budget gaps will “shave more than 3 percentage points off U.S. gross domestic product and cost more than 4 million jobs.” The Moody’s model reflects the Keynesian view that government spending boosts GDP. But other economists disagree. WSJ reporters might have interviewed Hoover Institution economists whose recent study found that cuts to government spending would boost GDP.

More broadly, Keynesian macro modeling ignores many microeconomic distortions caused by government spending that undermine GDP. I explore such distortions here. At minimum, reporters should note that the supposed stimulative effects that groups such as Moody’s claim are short‐​term impacts and do not include the longer‐​term costs of government spending.

The other day, WSJ publisher Almar Latour criticized “agenda‐​driven reporting” and said his paper’s “news coverage stands as a beacon.” I love the Journal and read it every day, but there is room for improvement in the news department.

President’s Obama’s Department of Labor (DOL) reversed a Bush era rule from 2008 that had expedited the process for hiring the H-2B nonagricultural temporary workers. In 2011, the Obama DOL cited the fact that it found that many employers were violating the program’s rules and asserted that its lengthier process would fix that. A new Government Accountability Office report proves that the agency was wrong. The more complex, onerous, and bureaucratic process is leading to more violations.

Many violations in a regulatory regime could indicate two very different problems. It could mean that many employers are intent on beating the rules, or it could mean that the program is so bureaucratic and complex that technical violations are inevitable. In H-2B’s case, where nearly all violations are minor, it is clearly the latter.

The Obama administration thought bureaucracy would increase compliance

For decades prior to 2008, DOL regulations required an employer to seek a temporary labor certification from DOL to prove that U.S. workers were unavailable at the local prevailing wage for the job. DOL would only approve the employer to hire the H-2B worker if it affirmatively demonstrated that no U.S. workers took the job when offered it at the local prevailing wage for the occupation. DOL would scrutinize the evidence in advance of approving the hire.

This certification model was never easy for the agency to perform in a timely manner, but as demand spiked in the early 2000s, it became even more difficult, so in 2008, the Bush DOL implemented a new approach under which employers would attest that they followed the recruitment protocols without having DOL substantively review each employer’s evidence and issue a certification. Instead, DOL would audit employers after the approval and fine or ban employers that willfully violated the rules in any significant way.

DOL noted that it used the attestation‐​based approach for other immigration programs and that DOL already has to take an employer at its word that it will follow the H-2B rules until it conducts a post‐​employment audit, so audits would be necessary either way.

In 2011, when DOL first proposed to end the Bush DOL’s attestation model, it stated, “Cases audited after certification by the OFLC in the 2 years since the adoption of an attestation‐​based program demonstrate a pattern of non‐​compliance or avoidance of demonstrating compliance.” It made no effort to show whether compliance had increased or decreased since the adoption of the 2008 attestation rules, nor did it detail the percentage of serious violations. The mere existence of widespread non‐​compliance was enough to eliminate the more streamlined system.

In 2012, DOL finalized the rule mandating pre‐​employment evidentiary reviews, stating that “the results of the audited cases demonstrate that an attestation‐​based process does not provide an adequate level of protection for either U.S. or foreign workers.” It rejected commenters concerns about how the reported audit results failed to differentiate between serious violations that warranted disciplinary action and technical violations that didn’t. DOL stated, “regardless of the type of violations or their consequences, our concern is that these audits evidenced a pattern of non‐​compliance with program obligations toward workers, regardless of the degree of such non‐​compliance.” I interpret this double “regardless” sentence to mean that violations were, in fact, generally minor.

The Obama H-2B rule did not increase compliance

Thanks to litigation alleging that DOL didn’t have independent rulemaking authority over the H-2B program, the 2012 rule was never implemented, but DHS and DOL jointly issued a similar rule that finally ended the attestation process in April 2015. In April 2020, the Government Accountability Office (GAO) released its first report on the H-2B program since the rule changes took effect. We now can see that the rescission of the attestation‐​based certification model did not reduce violations.

Figure 1 shows that not only did compliance not increase, there was a 20‐​percentage point decline in the share of employers in 100 percent compliance with program rules from 2010 under the attestation model to 2018 under the certification model. This was a decline from 55 percent in compliance in 2010 to 35 percent in 2018. If DOL were consistent, it would revert back to the attestation model based on its finding of widespread noncompliance. 

H-2B’s complexity cause H-2B violations

The majority of employers are not desperately searching for ways around the rules. Instead, the H-2B program is so bureaucratic and complex that violations are inevitable.

Figure 2 shows that of those 2018 audits, DOL found that nearly all the H-2B violations were minor, not warranting anything more than a warning letter. Despite nearly two thirds of employers having a violation, 96 percent of employers were either in complete compliance or had only minor violations. GAO didn’t review all the reasons for the warning letters and comments only that “several warning letters noted violations related to the period of employment of H-2B workers, such as failing to notify OFLC when H-2B workers left their jobs earlier than planned.”

It is difficult to explain briefly how complex the H-2B program can be, but there are about, by my count, 170 separate H-2B rules that apply to employers and workers. Many of the rules are exceedingly complex to understand and follow. Others, like reporting when a worker goes home, are mundane but easy to overlook. There are two exceedingly complex wage rules that Congress has defunded the enforcement of, but which DOL still insists create some kind of obligation on the employer possibly in the future.

Some H-2B rules seemingly contradict others in ways that create confusion, such as 20 CFR § 655.40(b)‘s requirement to conduct recruitment actions in 14 calendar days, while 20 CFR § 655.45(b) requires 15 business days of recruiting at the job site. Another requirement to provide free housing to itinerant H-2B workers also doesn’t exist explicitly in the code of federal regulation at all and contradicts the plain language in 20 CFR § 655.20(c) allowing housing charges.

The attestation versus certification debate still matters because DOL is now again routinely exceeding its H-2B processing deadlines. In the two years before the Bush administration attestation rule, 38 percent and 29 percent of applications took longer than DOL’s 60‐​day target. In 2009, when the rule took effect, 67 percent were delayed. DOL hasn’t published its performance from 2010 to 2011, but by 2012, DOL was processing 100 percent on time. It maintained a fairly high rate of timeliness through 2015—when the Obama rules took effect—but since 2016, delays have become much more pronounced. In FY 2020 through three quarters, the delays were nearly as bad as 2008 (Figure 3).

Conclusion

DOL should recognize the failure of the 2015 H-2B rules, streamline the processing of H-2B applications, and rescind many of its complex rules to end processing delays and increase compliance with the program. The Obama DOL’s experiment with more bureaucratic H-2B processing has clearly failed. It’s time for reform.

In a recent piece at AIER, I argue that the last stimulus didn’t stimulate:

Mailing $1,200 checks to 159 million people, adding $600 to weekly unemployment benefits and rationing forgivable 1% loans for five years did, of course, raise personal income. Relatively small tax credits lifted after‐​tax (disposable) income slightly more. “Disposable personal income increased $1.53 trillion, or 42.1 percent, in the second quarter,” reports the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA). Yet contrary to stimulus promises, consumer demand fell even more than income increased: ‘Personal outlays decreased $1.57 trillion… The [34.6%] decrease in outlays was led by a decrease in PCE [personal consumption expenditures] for services.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raided seven poultry plants in August 2019 and detained over 680 people on suspicion that they were illegal immigrant workers. ICE eventually released 300 of them and prosecuted or removed the rest. Recently, ICE announced that it was charging four employees of the poultry firms on several charges related to illegal employment, employment‐​related identity theft, harboring illegal immigrants, and other crimes. The Mississippi raids took an entire year to produce indictments against employers. This is evidence that work‐​site immigration enforcement is an impossibly expensive and laborious mess that should be abandoned.

Immigration restrictionists are cheering the indictments as a sign that the government is finally getting serious. One wrote, “mandatory E‐​Verify, backed by routine audits and stiff penalties for non‐​compliance” is the single most important way to guarantee that illegal employment vanishes. E‐​Verify has been mandatory in Mississippi for all new hires since July 2011 and the system didn’t prevent the hiring of hundreds of illegal immigrants nor is there any indication that it helped with the investigation. If E‐​Verify was the silver‐​bullet system that its proponents claim, then the ICE raids in Mississippi wouldn’t have been necessary in the first place.

Furthermore, an indictment that took a year after the first arrest to file is not a scalable system as this was a time‐​intensive process for federal prosecutors to file four measly indictments out of seven raided plants. The feds couldn’t even indict one person at each plant. Perhaps the prosecutors are seeking to tap the insights of Gary Becker’s crime model to scare potential violators of employment‐​related immigration law into compliance, which could explain the long potential sentences if they’re convicted, but increasing the probability of arrest is more important for deterring crime in the future. Since this type of prosecution isn’t scalable, prosecutors are not going to much increase the probability of being caught. This means they will rely on the deterrence effect of great punishments, which aren’t as effective as a high rate of discovery and prosecution.

Perhaps prosecutors are seeking to spook human resources departments sectors of the economy in certain regions of the country. That’s a game of whack‐​a‐​mole that won’t ever end. Hilariously, some restrictionists are comparing this strategy to how the government attempts to enforce drug prohibition. As Mark Krikorian wrote:

But by arresting and charging the illegals themselves, prosecutors gain leverage, and are able to offer leniency if the illegal workers rat out their managers. It’s similar to going after a narcotics organization — you want to get the dealers off the street, of course, but you also want to work your way up the chain.

From a restrictionist perspective, I can think of few things more depressing than comparing immigration enforcement to the failed strategies of the war on drugs. Interior immigration enforcement will probably be able as effective as interior drug enforcement, at least under the current law‐​enforcement and prosecutor centric policies. Restrictionist cheering of the Mississippi raids and the year‐​later indictments shows their obsession with that type of enforcement isn’t fading.

The raids in Mississippi have revealed several uncomfortable facts for immigration restrictionists:

1. E‐​Verify doesn’t work well. If it did, there wouldn’t have had to have been raids in Mississippi in the first place.
2. Prosecuting employers for violating immigration‐​related employment law is expensive, time‐​consuming, and probably impossible to scale up.
3. Worksite enforcement of immigration law is a poor use of the government’s time, even from the perspective of an immigration restrictionist. Many more illegal immigrants could have been deported if the same amount of resources devoted to the Mississippi raids and indictments were instead funneled to normal Enforcement and Removal Operations.

Immigration restrictionists could take this inconvenient reality and develop new enforcement strategies, but I doubt it. Their fallback strategy for the last 5 years is a 10,000-year-old technology so I doubt they’ll be interested in really examining the incentives of illegal immigrants, American employers, and how to change them in the cheapest way possible. My recommendation: increase the opportunity cost of illegal immigration by increasing legal immigration.

Senator Kamala Harris is Joe Biden’s pick for vice president. The vice president could play a more important role on immigration than in prior presidencies, so it’s important to understand Sen. Harris’s plans on this issue. From a libertarian perspective, legalizing the act of crossing borders should be the main focus of immigration reform, not merely legalizing those who have already done so. While she generally agrees with making legal immigration easier, Sen. Harris clearly disagrees with the libertarian prioritization of the issue.

Overall, Harris generally adopts the same pro‐​immigration agenda of Biden. But in the primaries and now, Biden’s plan was more clearly pro‐legal immigration than Harris whose plan barely mentions the subject. Her plan mostly details how she would use executive authorities to allow illegal immigrants to obtain legal status or deferred action. This reflects the majority of her time in the Senate, which has focused mainly on the treatment of illegal immigrants in the United States. This is a reversal from her time as a prosecutor where she worked with ICE to deport juveniles who were not charged with a felony.

On legal immigration, she wrote only that “she’ll reverse President Trump’s Muslim Ban on Day One and fix the family visa backlog.” The family visa backlog has nearly 4 million immigrants in it, but Harris didn’t explain what her “fix” would be. Biden has suggested exempting some categories from the caps and providing temporary visas to those in the backlog so that they can wait in the United States.

Related Event

Online Book Forum

In his new book Free to Move: Foot Voting, Migration, and Political Freedom, Ilya Somin explains how broadening opportunities for foot voting can greatly enhance political liberty for millions around the world, often more effectively than voting at the ballot box. Professors Peter Margulies and Bryan Caplan will provide additional insights, comments, and criticisms. Please join us for a timely and lively discussion.

She is the lead Democrat sponsoring the Fairness for High Skilled Immigrants Act in the Senate. The legislation—which I have written about in detail—would repeal the employment‐​based country caps that cause Indian foreign workers to face a near century long wait for a green card. The fact that she was willing to sponsor this bill demonstrates a level of awareness about the problems facing skilled legal immigrants. She was also an original cosponsor of the NO BAN Act (which I have written about here) that restricts presidential authority to ban legal immigrants.

There are some points of concern. Her focus on executive action may imply that she believes a Biden administration should be less willing to compromise with Congress to make a deal. She was also one of just three Democrats to vote against a bipartisan immigration bill in the Senate in 2018 that would have given President Trump congressional appropriations to build his border wall in exchange for a path to citizenship for most immigrants brought to the United States as children. Then‐​Vox reporter Dara Lind correctly called it the Senate’s “last best hope” for immigration reform. The bill failed by 6 votes.

She has also basically said that she will act on behalf of labor unions, stating a “commitment to fight for organized labor.” This is concerning because labor unions vehemently oppose all forms of temporary worker programs, which are the primary or, for unskilled workers, the only means for foreign workers to enter the United States for work. She led an effort to stop the Trump administration’s only mildly pro‐​immigration reforms of the H-2A program and has introduced legislation to require all farmers to pay overtime to farm workers.

On the other hand, Biden’s plan called the current temporary workers “cumbersome, bureaucratic, and inflexible” and promised to protect or expand them (with normal caveats about protecting U.S. workers).

She also advocates an increase in the federal minimum wage to $15 per hour, which the Congressional Budget Office and others have found would destroy 1.3 million low‐​skilled jobs—disproportionately among immigrant communities. It would price out many future immigrants from being able to come to the United States to work legally. California’s high minimum wage is likely one reason why its share of the illegal population has halved since 1990. 

Harris also advocates for expanding Medicare to include all illegal and legal immigrants—a policy that Biden opposes—in her Medicare for All plan (also opposed by Biden). There is some evidence that expansion of welfare benefits makes no difference to poverty rates among immigrants. There’s also evidence that government health insurance has no significant effects on health outcomes, despite increasing usage. This policy is anathema not only to conservatives, but moderate Republicans and libertarians as well. If she insisted on it, it would doom any compromise on immigration (as a similar health care issue did in the House in 2013).

Harris’s criminal justice record as a prosecutor was also extremely poor from a libertarian perspective, and given the criminalization of various immigration violations, this could be important as well. While she mostly disavows this record today, she still touts her prosecution of employers who—in her words—“exploit” illegal immigrant workers, but often that can amount to simply denying immigrants the ability to work for anyone.

Overall, Harris will likely advocate for the rights of immigrants already in the United States to live and work here without federal interference. She would push Biden to immediately undo all the harm the current president has done to the legal immigration system. But she hasn’t shown much interest in fixing the legal immigration system, and her positions toward guest workers are concerning. Her votes on Dreamers in 2018 indicate an unwillingness to compromise even when her own party wants her to. Her executive action plans and extreme left policies on health care make it uncertain whether she would be willing to compromise with Congress to make permanent changes that benefit immigrants and Americans.