Biden Wants Open Borders All the Way South to Guatemala

• The Biden administration has worked assiduously for nearly three years to ensure America’s borders remain open. We now know it wants our Latin American neighbors’ borders open as well.
• Guatemalan President Alejandro Giammattei told us that earlier this year in an interview that he asked Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and Secretary of State Antony Blinken for help closing Guatemala’s border with El Salvador and Honduras to help shut off illegal migration north.
• Mayorkas and Blinken turned down Giammattei’s offer, Guatemalan officials told us, on the grounds that DHS lacked the resources necessary to assist Guatemala in this effort.
• President Joe Biden instead embraced leftist president-elect Bernardo Arevalo, who is scheduled to take power in January. There is no indication Arevalo plans to pursue Giammattei’s border security proposal.
• Congress should reject all funding for the administration’s open-border operations, including the Safe Mobility Offices and services south of our border. 
• Instead, funds should be channeled to ICE law enforcement agents to locate and detain the national security threats inside the U.S. to prevent potential terror attacks. Congress should also review the Giammattei plan and explore similar initiatives with interested partners in Latin America.

Schedule an Interview: Lora Ries and Victoria Coates

Charter Schools Must Avoid the DEI Blunder

• Public school enrollment has dropped by more than 1 million students nationwide since the COVID-19 pandemic. District school leaders expected students to return after the pandemic abated, but enrollment has continued to decline as trust in public schools has hit an all-time low.
• Policymakers and leaders in the charter school sector must avoid making the same mistakes that led to the district school disaster.
• A key reason many parents are fleeing the traditional public system is the concern that schools are indoctrinating students in radical “woke” ideology. Parents are watching as the left-wing ideologies clothed in the mantra of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) spread like wildfire across America's schools.
• Unfortunately, one prominent organization, the National Association of Charter School Authorizers, is working overtime to ensure that public charter schools embrace the very same ideologies from which parents seek to escape.
• Compelling schools of choice to adopt DEI principles is a bad policy on its merits.
• Parents, rather than “experts,” should be entrusted to determine what is best for their children.

Schedule an Interview: Jason Bedrick

Inflation Changes Our Spending Habits

• Inflation has left millions of Americans with no good choices, even when it comes to necessities like what to eat.
• Ironically, as inflation causes people’s spending habits to change, that can minimize official inflation numbers published by the government while also causing additional pain for lower-income earners.
• For example, as the price of relatively expensive options like beef rises, people can afford less of that and shoppers increasingly choose cheaper alternatives, like chicken. That causes an increase in demand for chicken, which further increases the price.
• But the large shift in consumers’ buying habits can cause some inflation metrics to grossly understate the cost increases faced by Americans.
• The Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) has a price index for personal consumption expenditures. It measures the price changes of things that consumers are actually buying, as opposed to a fixed basket of goods and services.
• As long as the federal budget increases, the family budget must decrease. That fact should be front and center as Congress debates over appropriations. The politicians need to realize that every dollar they spend is taking food off a family’s table, one way or another.

Schedule an Interview: EJ Antoni