1) The Best Way to Stop Illegal Immigration

We have decades of data proving that the biggest declines in illegal immigration happen when we have robust guest worker visa programs.

As the chart below shows, illegal crossings were cut to almost zero in the 1950s and early 1960s when we had the Bracero Program that allowed Mexicans and Central Americans to work seasonally in agricultural jobs.  

We need an expanded visa program for these "guest workers" for farms, factory work, chicken, seafood processing plants, etc. These are jobs that for many decades have been done by hard-working immigrants - some legal and some illegal.

Assigning temporary visas for these foreign workers would be a lot smarter than workplace raids, which have rarely worked.

With nearly seven million job openings already and the pro-growth Trump tax, regulatory and energy policies, the demand for willing workers is likely to skyrocket over the next several years.

Someone in the White House must be reading the HOTLINE:

4) A Tax Loophole that Puts America Last

Congress is looking for smart ways to offset its tax cut.  

Here's an easy one. Eliminate a bizarro tax policy that rewards smoking (and consuming alcohol), tilts the tax system IN FAVOR of foreign production, and costs the federal government $12 billion in taxes owed. All at once!

The House tax bill closes this crazy "Excise Tax Loophole." But the Senate markup foolishly retains it.

Under this multi-billion-dollar tax scam, the U.S. government sends “refund” checks to foreign tobacco companies. These refunds are supposed to be offsets for excise taxes paid when cigarettes are imported into the United States. But in many cases the excise taxes are never collected. So the excise tax is lower on foreign than domestic cigarettes.

Many taxpayer advocacy groups have demanded that Congress end this quirky giveaway. As the analysts at Citizens Against Government Waste put it recently: “tobacco companies are moving their manufacturing overseas to avoid paying the excise tax on cigarettes.”

The whole point of the excise tax is to discourage smoking and promote health. How dumb is this tax dodge?  

The Senate should adopt the House reforms.

5) Ranked Choice Voting Could Create Chaos In New York's Mayoral Election

When New York City voters fill out ballots for Mayor on Tuesday they will rank up to five candidates by preference. If no candidate is the first choice of a majority of voters, this “ranked-choice” voting system will knock out 10 lower-placed candidates until only one is left with more than 50 percent support.

The system may produce a bizarre result. Betting markets give socialist Zohran Mamdani a one-in-three chance of winning because many voters may refuse to rank scandal-tarred front-runner Andrew Cuomo at all.

There are other problems. New York election officials will post initial results from the first round of voting late on Election Night. But preliminary elimination rounds won’t be released until a week later because late mail-in and provisional ballots must first be processed.

We can then expect WEEKLY updates, as more elimination rounds are held.  

Election Day could become election month in New York with all the vote-buying and other shenanigans associated with such a drawn out process.

New York may prove our point that rank choice voting leads to electoral chaos.

6) The Resistance

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