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29 February, 2012

US to Deport Mexican Immigrants to Home States Instead of Border

The U.S. government says it will begin flying detained Mexican migrants directly to their home states instead of dropping them off at the border, where many have been victimized by drug traffickers.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told reporters in Mexico City on Monday that the U.S. will pay to deport migrants by plane to airports in Mexico and the Mexican government will arrange the last leg of the journey home. The program is to start in April.

Many immigrants from Mexico and Central America are robbed or forcibly recruited by members of organized crime groups on their northbound trip through Mexico, or on the way home.

The U.S. says a record 400,000 people were deported, mostly to Mexico, during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30. Most of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country are from Mexico.

MyFoxMemphis.com reported that a reason for the repatriation by air is to aleviate the workload of the Border Patrol and other authorities working on the border.

"She said the change would ease pressure in areas along the countries' long border where many undocumented people from Mexico and other countries try to enter the US illegally by land, at the same time that US authorities are carrying out deportations by land," the website said.

SOURCE





ACLU of Nebraska to appeal immigration ruling

Opponents of a Fremont city immigration ordinance promised Tuesday to appeal a federal judge's ruling that kept in place a requirement that potential renters prove their citizenship or legal status.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Nebraska said it would challenge the decision, which struck down another part of the ordinance that would have allowed the city to revoke the rental licenses of illegal immigrants.

The Fremont City Council is expected to meet in closed session Tuesday night to discuss how to proceed with the ruling, which would still allow the city to charge a $5 free for a renter's license, if it takes effect. The city has voluntarily suspended the ordinance at ACLU Nebraska's request while the lawsuit works its way through the courts.

ACLU Nebraska filed the lawsuit on behalf of five renters in Fremont, a city of 26,000 about 35 miles northwest of Omaha, as well as two landlords and two local employers. The case will go to the U.S. Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals.

Amy Miller, ACLU Nebraska's legal director, told the council in a letter Tuesday that the appeal could last at least another year. Miller said the lawsuit plaintiffs still believe "that the entire ordinance is an illegal use of city power."

The ordinance stirred a whirlwind of controversy in June 2010 when roughly 57 percent of Fremont voters who turned up at the polls supported it. The measure catapulted the city into the national spotlight and spurred comparisons with Arizona and some cities embroiled in the debate over immigration regulations.

Fremont has seen its Hispanic population surge in the past two decades, largely due to the jobs available at the Fremont Beef and Hormel plants, which are just outside the city. Census data show the number of Hispanics soared from 165 in 1990 to 1,085 in 2000 and 3,149 in 2010.

It's unknown how many illegal immigrants live in the city. According to census figures, 1,259 noncitizens live there, a figure that includes illegal immigrants as well as lawful permanent residents, foreign students and refugees in the U.S. legally.

The measure won't have any effect beyond the city limits of Fremont. That means two major meatpacking plants and some neighborhoods, including some with large immigrant populations, won't be covered by the requirements for businesses to use the federal E-Verify database to ensure employees are legal or by housing permit rules for renters.

The ordinance adds some red tape for businesses and residents in the city. The judge said Fremont can require companies to use the free federal E-Verify system to verify the citizenship status of people they hire. It can also require potential renters to swear they are legal residents and pay $5 to obtain a renting permit. But the city won't be able to revoke the rental permits if applicants are found to be illegal immigrants.

The vote — and the attention it brought — took an immediate political toll. The City Council president, mayor, city attorney and city administrator all resigned within a year, citing various reasons.

SOURCE



28 February, 2012

Deportations Plummet Under Obama's New Immigration Policy

President Obama’s efforts to tighten the leash on U.S. immigration enforcement have caused a sharp drop in the number of deportations, according to a report by the Syracuse University Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. In the last three months of 2011, following the administration’s directive to curb deportations of illegal immigrants without criminal records or who came to the United States as a child or student (among other discretionary factors), deportations have plummeted.

The number of deportation proceedings instituted from October to December 2011 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) plunged to 39,331, a 33-percent decline from the 58,639 filings documented the previous quarter. "Filings are typically lower at this time of year, but even adjusting for this seasonal drop-off and for late reporting," the report noted, "there appear to have been over 10,000 fewer deportation filings than would have been expected last quarter."

The chief priority of the administration’s June 17, 2011 directive was to restrict most deportations to those immigrants with criminal records. "It makes no sense to spend our enforcement resources on these low-priority cases when they could be used with more impact on others, including individuals who have been convicted of serious crimes," Cecilia Muñoz, Director of Intergovernmental Affairs, wrote last August in a White House blog post. "This means more immigration enforcement pressure where it counts the most, and less where it doesn’t," she added. "That’s the smartest way to follow the law while we stay focused on working with the Congress to fix it."

However, according to Syracuse University researchers, there is "little evidence" that immigrants with criminal records are representing a higher ratio of overall deportations. In fact, during the purported timeframe, only 1,300, or 3.3 percent, were to be deported as alleged "aggravated felons." Conversely, from July to September 2011, 3.8 percent were alleged "aggravated felons," while six months ago the proportion was 4 percent. The researchers added:

An additional 4,193 were charged by ICE for other alleged criminal activity last quarter. When considered together with alleged "aggravated felons," the proportion of filings in the last quarter seeking deportation on grounds of any alleged criminal activity was still less than one out of seven (14%). And even this small slice is continuing to decline. Two years ago, slightly more than one of six (17.3 percent) were alleged to have engaged in criminal activity as the grounds ICE cited for seeking removal.

"People have heard about these policy changes but largely haven’t seen any difference," asserted Frank Sharry, executive director of immigration advocacy group America’s Voice.

Many critics have alleged that President Obama’s June 2011 directive was largely political, particularly considering deportations have reached record levels, averaging 400,000 per year, under the current administration. Astoundingly, that’s double the annual average during President Bush’s first term and 30 percent higher than the average when Bush left office. Due to those record numbers, along with Obama’s failure to implement so-called "comprehensive immigration reform," there has been an ignition of criticism among the Hispanic community — a growing portion of the Democratic voter base.

"Latino immigrant voters know that the Alabama and Arizona laws didn’t come about from Democrats. They’re aware the Obama administration is fighting those laws. They know that Republicans blocked the DREAM Act. They know that Mitt Romney is talking about massive self-deportation," Sharry said. "And they’re angry and disappointed that the Obama administration promised a legislative breakthrough, didn’t deliver it, but has delivered on record deportations."

In response, the President has embarked on a political campaign to recover previous support from this pivotal sector of the American electorate.

"What we’ve been able to do is, administratively, we’ve said — let’s reemphasize our focus when it comes to enforcement on criminals and at the borders, and let’s not be focusing our attention on hard-working families who are just trying to make ends meet," Obama said in an interview last week. "We’ve administratively proposed to reform the ‘three and 10" program so that families aren’t separated when they’re applying to stay here in this country."

In emphasizing his newly coined "five more years" campaign slogan, the President assured a Hispanic audience that he would use his second term to push immigration reform. "My presidency is not over," Obama indicated, responding to a question about his failure to actualize an immigration bill. "I’ve got another five years coming up. We’re going to get this done."

Moreover, the President rejected the notion that he broke a campaign promise, while passing the blame to Republicans who were unwilling to embrace any "sensible solutions" on the issue. "So far, we haven’t seen any of the Republican candidates even support immigration reform," Obama charged, targeting his potential opponents in the upcoming presidential contest.

Political analysts and commentators have predicted that the Hispanic vote will be critical for Obama’s reelection bid, as the minority’s rising population has become an increasingly chief component of the American electorate. While many Hispanics who supported Obama in 2008 may refrain from voting Republican, their disappointment over Obama’s immigration efforts may deter them from even voting at all come November 6.

Considering the persistently stale economy — which has led to a sharp drop in Obama’s approval ratings — the President will rely heavily on minority voting groups, observers predict. As the Los Angeles Times reported last October, the President has commenced an "all-out push to rebuild his popularity" with Hispanics, which has been "diminished by the weak economy and a lack of progress toward revamping the nation’s immigration system."

"The excitement isn't there like it was," asserted Ana Canales, a volunteer and the county chairwoman for the Democratic Party of Bernalillo County in New Mexico, where the Obama campaign has accelerated efforts to recruit Hispanic voters. "There are a lot of people who are saying, 'We're not going to vote.' We have a lot of work on our hands … to make sure those Latinos understand that he [Obama] is working for us."

SOURCE





Recent posts at CIS below

See here for the blog. The CIS main page is here.

1. Illegal aliens find a new BFF in President Obama (Op-ed)

2. 'The Hispanic Vote': An Insult Latinos Can Do Without (Blog)

3. Two Hidden Themes at the Recent House Immigration Hearing (Blog)

4. Bursts of Dubious Creativity in the Immigrant Investor (EB-5) Program (Blog)



27 February, 2012

Legal immigrants face deportation for filing false tax return

The Supreme Court rules against a couple who pleaded guilty and paid in full, saying the crime was an 'aggravated felony' subject to automatic deportation. Tax lawyers say the decision is ominous.

This is a pretty absurd action 20 years after the event and after previous administrations have decided to take no action. But I think we can decode it. Obama has said: Go right through the files and deport any non-Hispanics you can so I can get the figures up without riling my base too much. Anyone who happens to be in the way of Leftist politics is likely to get run over

Akio and Fukado Kawashima came to Southern California in 1984 as lawful Japanese immigrants determined to succeed in business. They operated popular sushi restaurants in Thousand Oaks and Tarzana and recently opened a new eatery in Encino.

But after they underreported their business income in 1991, they paid a hefty price. The Internal Revenue Service hit them with $245,000 in taxes and penalties. The couple pleaded guilty and paid in full. A decade later, the Immigration and Naturalization Service decided to deport them.

Last week, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered the final blow, ruling 6 to 3 that Immigration and Customs Enforcement — as the INS is now known — was within its authority to declare such a tax crime an "aggravated felony," subjecting an immigrant to automatic deportation. Once limited to murderers and drug kingpins, this deportation trigger has steadily expanded over the years.

"It's really sad — and really unfair," Wakako Kawashima, the couple's daughter-in-law, said at the door of her home in Thousand Oaks. The restaurants have been the couple's life work, she said, and the family is crushed that a mistake two decades ago could result in their deportation.

Tax lawyers said the ruling in the case of Kawashima vs. Holder sends an ominous warning to legal immigrants throughout the country, and especially to small-business owners whose tax liabilities may be large enough to attract IRS attention.

Under the court's holding, an immigrant who makes a false statement on a tax return could face not only tax charges but also automatic deportation.

The Kawashimas never became U.S. citizens but were granted lawful permanent residency in the 1980s. They pleaded guilty in 1997 to filing a false corporate tax return, and the husband was given a four-month prison sentence.

"They paid a full restitution at the time to everything they owed the government," said Thomas Whalen, a Washington attorney who represented the couple before the high court.

Immigration authorities issued the deportation order under a provision of law added by Congress in 1994 that defined "aggravated felony" to include crimes of "fraud or deceit" that cost the victims more than $200,000, a threshold later lowered to $10,000.

The couple had appealed to immigration judges and to the federal courts but lost in a split decision before the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

Their hopes were revived last year when the Supreme Court agreed to hear their appeal. Judges in other parts of the country had rejected the idea that underreporting taxes amounted to an aggravated felony.

But Justice Clarence Thomas, speaking for the court, said the Kawashimas had "knowingly and willingly submitted a tax return that was false" and "therefore had committed a felony that involved 'deceit.'"

In dissent, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said it was "implausible" to believe Congress saw this tax crime as "sufficiently serious to warrant the drastic measure of deportation." Justices Stephen G. Breyer and Elena Kagan agreed with her.

This decision "should send a shock wave through the resident alien community," said Sanford Millar, a tax lawyer in Los Angeles. "What's surprising is that this would be deemed an aggravated felony." The ruling could, for example, trigger deportation for immigrants working in the United States who fail to report foreign bank accounts as required by the IRS, he said.

But tax experts note that the ruling applies only to criminal tax violations, not civil claims that result in repayments.

Wakako Kawashima said her in-laws are "embarrassed" by the legal tangle and are still trying to absorb the ruling. "They know the decision, but they're trying to figure out what to do," she said.

Her husband, Hiroshi, 36, helps run the restaurants with his parents. On Friday, he was busy at work in Encino, helping to open the newest eatery in their mini-chain.

At the Thousand Oaks eating spot, called Cho Cho San, customers were beginning to fill the seats for the lunch rush. The restaurant, with gleaming glass doors and landscaped gardens, is a popular local stop for sushi and other Japanese specialties.

Stephanie Stanziano, a hostess, said news of the court's decision had not reached the staff. She was saddened by the couple's plight. "Oh, that's terrible!" she said.

SOURCE




Brewer Criticizes Obama Administration on Immigration

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer had harsh words for President Obama on his immigration policy, accusing him of not doing enough to secure Arizona’s border, which she called the “gateway” for illegal immigrants and crime from Mexico to enter the United States.

Speaking on NBC's Meet the Press, Brewer said that California and Texas had done a good job of securing their borders with federal help, but that the government had failed in Arizona. "No, they don't want to secure our borders, or they would secure our borders," Brewer said of the Obama Administration.

"Instead what do they do? They send guns [...] to the cartels and then they don't track them," Brewer added, in reference to the botched federal operation known as Fast and Furious.

Brewer’s statements come just weeks after a tense interaction between Brewer and Obama on the tarmac of the Phoenix airport, during which Brewer could be seen wagging her finger at the president. Some have accused her of disrespecting the office, a claim that has gained traction since she declined to attend tonight's dinner for the National Governors Association at the White House.

"I am a governor. I've got priorities," she said of her decision not to attend tonight's event, explaining she had other commitments.

SOURCE



26 February, 2012

Mississippi House Passes Tough Immigration Bill

A bill modeled after Alabama's tough immigration law moved through Mississippi's House on Friday, although the legislation's sponsor said the language that could get it tied up in a federal court was removed.

The House Judiciary B Committee voted 15-6 to pass House Bill 488, which now goes to the House Education Committee. It would then go to the full chamber.

The bill's sponsor, Judiciary B Committee Chairman Andy Gipson, R-Braxton, said the Mississippi bill should stand up to legal scrutiny. Alabama's law is considered one of the toughest state laws against undocumented immigrants.

Mississippi has a relatively small undocumented immigrant population, although it appears to have grown in recent years. The Pew Hispanic Center estimated that in 2010, the state had about 45,000 undocumented immigrants out of nearly 3 million total residents.

The bill is supported by Gov. Phil Bryant, a Republican who has been campaigning against undocumented immigrants since his days as state auditor. Proponents say the state spends more money providing services to immigrants than it reaps in taxes, and claim that undocumented immigrants, if they leave, will vacate jobs that unemployed citizens can take. They say the bill is about legal compliance and that they welcome legal immigrants.

"I believe that every person in Mississippi, whether they are here illegally or not, is a child of God," Gipson said. "We're not trying to hurt anyone. We're not trying to starve anyone."

Opponents dispute those claims, emphasizing that Mississippi doesn't need to summon any ghosts of its racist past.

"It is still about ethnic cleansing," said Bill Chandler, executive director of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance. "It is still talking about driving people out of Mississippi."

The new version of the bill removed an attempt to create a new crime of failing to carry immigration papers. That provision had led some opponents to nickname the measure the "papers, please" bill. Under the change, a police officer could only check someone's immigration status if the officer had pulled the person over for some other reason.

"The reason it was removed is not because it's a bad idea, necessarily," Gipson said. "The reason it has been removed is it has been enjoined by a federal court in Alabama."

The bill still says law enforcement officials should check for immigration status when "a reasonable suspicion exists" that a person is in the country illegally. The measure bars police from considering race, color or national origin when making that decision, although opponents still fear racial profiling.

The new version also adds an exception if a person is "an international business executive of an international corporation authorized to transact business in the state." In the months after the Alabama law was enacted, police there arrested a Japanese man on assignment at the state's Honda factory and a German man who worked for the state's Mercedes-Benz plant, spurring widespread concern that the law would scare off foreign investors.

Another provision was watered down that allows any Mississippi resident to sue a state agency, city or county that looks the other way on immigration status. The bill now says that an agency or government must adopt a written policy or ordinance to be subject to a lawsuit. The measure is supposed to prohibit "sanctuary cities" that don't enforce immigration laws. Gipson indicated that Jackson is a sanctuary city, but it's unclear if a 2010 ordinance that instructed police officers not to use racial profiling or ask about immigration status goes that far.

Added was a provision that allows churches and charities to meet "immediate basic and human needs" as long as they doesn't charge or use government funds.

Rep. David Baria, D-Bay St. Louis, tried to also exempt government health care facilities and government-owned utilities from provisions that say undocumented immigrants can't enter into business transactions with any state agency or local government. Baria said after the committee meeting that he is worried about the public health consequences of undocumented immigrants and their children not being vaccinated or being able to connect water and sewer services.

"I want to make sure the children of illegal aliens are not deprived of those necessities of life," Baria said. "Are we going to deny that child a vaccination or other medicines that might keep that child from infecting your child?"

Under federal law, emergency rooms would have to continue to treat everyone and public schools would have to continue to enroll undocumented immigrants. But the bill still calls for schools to require a birth certificate and follow up on immigration status of anyone who can't produce one. However, the new version simplifies reporting, saying only that districts must submit to the state a yearly count of undocumented immigrants in each school.

SOURCE





Conservatives mull changes to citizenship rules for babies born on Canadian soil

It's one of the oldest immigration tricks in the book: get pregnant, fly to another country, have your baby, and voila - you've got immigrant ties to said country. It even happens in Canada.

According to the Toronto Sun, Ottawa has discovered a number of unscrupulous immigration consultants in Hong Kong, who are coaching wealthy Chinese mainlanders about how to keep their pregnancies hidden while entering Canada on student or visitor visas.

"Avoid any baby or maternity items in luggage, wear dark clothing going through customs to look slimmer, and arrive in Canada no later than in the seventh month of pregnancy are among the tips given," notes the article.

Once here, the women go into hiding until they are due to give birth and then go to a hospital to deliver the baby. And, because all babies born in Canada are considered citizens, they could return later in life as a student, for example, and sponsor their parents under family reunification.

Immigration minister Jason Kenney admits his department isn't sure how widespread the problem is but is considering citizenship law changes to prevent so-called anchor babies from automatically becoming citizens.

"We don't want people to get the idea that citizenship is a way to get a passport of convenience, that Canada is a country to be exploited," he told the Sun.

Toronto based immigration attorney Michael Niren says he doesn't think anchor babies are a "growing problem" and that changing the citizenship rules would be like "throwing the baby out with the bath water."

"Kenney is on a mission to clean up the immigration system from Refugee cases to Citizenship claims. Yes there are many broken aspects of our immigration system but I think he is going way to far here," Niren told Yahoo! Canada News.

"The solution is not to terminate this method for citizenship all together. Free societies like Canada have always granted citizenship to those born on their soil. This, in my view, should be a right not a privilege.

"[Instead of changing the law,] I think more careful screening of applicants to Canada should be conducted. In some cases, medicals are required which would reveal pregnancies. Sometimes the government gets ahead of itself and forgets that we are still a democracy."

SOURCE



25 February, 2012

Net migration to Britain rose in Coalition's first year despite pledge to cut it

Official figures show that the number of people coming to live in Britain for more than a year, minus those who moved abroad, stood at 250,000 in the year to June 2011. This represents a rise on the figure of 235,000 for the year to June 2010, just after the Coalition came to power.

Fewer people are emigrating while increasing numbers continue to settle here, in particular students from Commonwealth countries in Africa and on the Indian subcontinent.

The number of National Insurance numbers given to foreign-born workers rose by 11 per cent, which is likely to fuel fears that immigration is worsening unemployment figures.

Meanwhile the number of asylum seekers from troubled countries including Libya and Iran rose by 11 per cent and the number of people being deported fell sharply.

It also provides more evidence that ministers will struggle to fulfil their pledge to cut net migration to “tens of thousands” by 2015.

Damian Green, the Immigration Minister, insisted: “Our reforms are starting to take effect.

“Home Office figures from the second half of last year show a significant decrease in the number of student and work visas issued, an early indicator for the long-term direction of net migration. “Net migration remains too high but, as the ONS states, it is now steady, having fallen from a recent peak in the year to September 2010.

“This Government remains committed to bringing net migration down from the hundreds of thousands to the tens of thousands over the course of this Parliament.”

What should the government be doing about immigration?
Nothing, the reforms are starting to take effectThe number of migrants allowed into Britain should be capped furtherThere should be a one-in-one-out immgration policy

But Chris Bryant, his Labour shadow, said: “We need honesty and competence from this government on immigration, instead we get tough rhetoric not matched by the reality on the ground. The country deserves better than that.”

Matt Cavanagh, Associate Director at the IPPR think-tank, agreed that the Government has made “no progress” on its pledge of cutting net migration.

“Reducing immigration is a legitimate goal – but politicians should be wary of promising what they can’t deliver. There is also a risk that ministers will be tempted to take more extreme measures in pursuit of their elusive target, including on those areas of immigration which are most important to our economy, and which surveys show the public are less bothered about, including skilled workers and overseas students.”

The Office for National Statistics data show long-term immigration – people who move abroad for at least 12 months – in the year to June 2011 was 593,000, up slightly from 582,000 a year before.

At the same time, long-term emigration fell marginally to 343,000.

Immigration from “New Commonwealth” countries in Asia and Africa reached a record 170,000, with two-thirds of them coming to Britain to study.

In addition, 690,000 National Insurance numbers were given to non-British nationals who wanted to work in the country, an 11 per cent rise on the previous year. About a third went to Eastern Europeans.

Asylum applications were 13 per cent higher at the end of 2011 than a year before, reaching 5,261.

Separate Home Office figures showed a 9 per cent fall in non-asylum passengers being refused entry at ports in 2011 (to 17,173) and a 13 per cent drop, to 52,526, in the number of people being deported or leaving the country voluntarily in 2011.

SOURCE




Obama promises second term action

President Barack Obama, expressing confidence he will win re-election in November, told a Hispanic audience he would use a second term to seek comprehensive immigration reform.

'My presidency is not over,' Obama said in an interview with Univision Radio when asked about his failure so far to push through an immigration bill. 'I've got another five years coming up. We're going to get this done.'

Obama is seeking to shore up support among Hispanic voters, whose strong backing helped him win the White House in 2008. But some in the Latino community are disappointed over the lack of progress toward overhauling the immigration system.

Obama - in an interview broadcast the day before his Thursday trip to Florida, an election battleground state with a large Hispanic population - sought to reassure Latinos he was committed to trying to pass broad immigration reform.

He rejected suggestions that he had broken a campaign promise and put the blame on Republicans in Congress who he said were 'unwilling to talk at all about any sensible solutions to this issue.' 'So far, we haven't seen any of the Republican candidates even support immigration reform,' Obama said, taking aim at his potential opponents in the November 6 election.

Manufacturing growth: Obama spokes at the Industrial Assessment Center at the University of Miami in Miami, Florida, after learning about how the center is teaching students about energy-efficient materials and processes

The White House hopes that hard-line positions taken by Republican presidential contenders on illegal immigration and border control will help Obama with Hispanic voters in vital swing states like Florida, Nevada and Colorado.

SOURCE



24 February, 2012

London is no longer an English-speaking city

Australia has been multicultural much longer than England has so I do understand the frustration of the writer below but I also have some news for him: He will get used to it. After about 60 years of frequent dealings with people who have limited English I just accept that as part of life. And in the end it all works somehow. And the better food has certainly been worth it

I can't boast of being particularly good at languages. But, what with an inordinate amount of to-ing and fro-ing over a lifetime, I manage to get by in most countries when it comes to buying things or ordering a meal.

I even make a point of refusing English-language menus, and, if one is thrust upon me, only ever look at it for amusement value. For example, a Petersburg restaurant once had a mystery item on special, called 'boiled language.' I like mine nice and blue with lots of salt and pepper, I wanted to say, even though I knew that the Russians have the same word for tongue and language (yazyk, if you're interested).

Anyway, by accident of birth I'm bilingual in English and Russian, so whenever I find myself in Moscow (which is as seldom as I can help it) I can ask anything I want, such as 'I like my food hot, my vodka cold, and not vice versa' or 'Please don't hurt me.'

Since I've been spending much time in France for many years, I can go so far as to exchange off-colour jokes with the maître d' at my favourite Paris restaurant, secure in the knowledge that he is duty-bound to laugh at my one-liners (nowadays professional obligation seems to be a precondition for anyone to appreciate what my wife calls my infantile humour).

Having lived in Italy for a while and travelled extensively through Spain, I can order a fairly sophisticated meal in Rome or Madrid, and the waiters don't even feel tempted to insult or overcharge me.

The only capital city in which I can't make myself understood at shops and restaurants is the one where I happen to live: London. And I'd be lying to you if I claimed that my reaction to this linguistic conundrum is invariably good-natured.

This morning I was at a major supermarket where I couldn't find Polish cucumbers in brine, which normally live in the Foods of the World section. I had to stop several assistants before I found one who could understand the word 'cucumber'. Not a single one knew what brine was. 'Vinegar?' they'd suggest helpfully. 'No, not vinegar! Brine! Salt and water!' 'Vinegar,' they'd say with decisive finality.

On another occasion I was driven to distraction by a shop assistant who kept pointing me towards the butcher's counter where I could buy 'peeg', rather than the pickle I had trouble finding. And when buying bread at a French bakery, such as Paul, one had better be able to speak French if wishing to communicate the difference between 'rye bun' and 'rum baba'.

Now I don't mind speaking French, but there's a big difference between not minding and having to. In fact, I'm bloody-minded enough to refuse to speak any language other than English in my city. If they take my money in my country, they should damn well speak my language - just as I try my best to speak theirs in their country.

If this makes me sound as if I were somehow against immigrants working in London, I want to dispel this impression once and for all. I'm not. In fact, I welcome it - it's nice to buy real bread from people who know how to make it; I like ordering my pasta from people who don't pronounce it 'passter'; I'm ecstatic about getting a tapa from a waiter who knows the difference between Serrano and Ibérica hams. I just don't want to have language problems in my own city.

Moreover, I'm a firm supporter of free trade, including the import of labour, though I do draw the line on the import of welfare recipients. I just wonder why I've never met a Paris waiter who doesn't speak proper French (and some of them aren't natives), while these days hardly ever meeting a London one who speaks proper English.

Our economy is in the doldrums, 20 percent of British young people are unemployed (and God only knows how many more on the 'sickie'), and yet catering and retail jobs go to people who don't understand me even when I speak slowly and loudly. I could suggest why this is happening, and even what needs to be done to change the situation, but I'll save that for a different article.

For now I'll just go on saying, 'Well, you better habla, mate. This is England, you know. Inglaterra! Entiende?'

SOURCE






Recent posts at CIS below

See here for the blog. The CIS main page is here.

1. REAL ID Implementation Annual Report Major Progress Made in Securing Driver’s License Issuance Against Identity Theft and Fraud (Backgrounder)

2. Summer jobs for foreigners crowd out Americans State Department program, though well intentioned, is out of control (Op-ed)

3. Illegal Population Stops Declining under Obama After Declining by 1 Million 2007 to 2009 (Announcement)

4. Case History: 32 years Later and Fernando Arango is Still in Court (Blog)

5. Finding Skilled Workers for U.S. Manufacturing Jobs (Blog)

6. Closing Immigration Loopholes That Benefited Capitol Bomber (Blog)

7. Another Terrorist Attempt, Another Illegal Overstay (Blog)

8. Oscar-Nominated Portrayal of an Illegal Immigrant from Mexico (Blog)

9. Case History: Sloppy Government Work Stalls Criminal's Deportation (Blog)

10. Four Films Demand Repeal of Alabama Law (Blog)

11. House Immigration Subcommittee Has a Lively Hearing (Blog)

12. Is the Mainstream Media Incapable of Getting the Facts Right About H-1B? (Blog)

13. 'Civil Rights' Group Endangers Food Stamp Eligibility for Its Own Alien Clients (Blog)

14. A Response to Father Tom Joyce and U.S. Catholic (Blog)

15. Dept. of Labor Loses Migration Enforcement Funds to USDA (Blog)

16. DHS Estimates: Long-Time Illegals Do in Fact Self Deport (Blog)

17. DHS Budget: More Tax Funds for Benefits, Less for Enforcement (Blog)

18. No Mormon Dialogue (Blog)

19. Obama Administration Proposes to Cut 287(g) Funding (Blog)



23 February, 2012

Immigration enforcement program to be shut down

The cost is minute so the cost-saving excuse is a transparent lie

The Obama administration is starting to shut down a program that deputized local police officers to act as immigration agents.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have trained local officers around the country to act as their agencies' immigration officers. Working either in jails or in the field, the officers can check the immigration status of suspects and place immigration holds on them.

The program, known as 287(g), reached its peak under President George W. Bush, when 60 local agencies signed contracts with ICE to implement it. But that trend slowed significantly under President Obama— only eight agencies have signed up since he took office, and none has done so since August 2010.

Now, in their proposed budget for the upcoming year, Department of Homeland Security officials say they will not sign new contracts for 287(g) officers working in the field and will terminate the "least productive" of those agreements — saving an estimated $17 million. All the contracts between ICE and local police agencies run for three years, so that portion of the program could be finished by November when the last contract for field officers expires.

In its budget request, DHS said officials instead will focus on expanding Secure Communities, a program that checks the fingerprints of all people booked into local jails against federal immigration databases. The followup work in those cases is done by ICE agents, not local police.

"The Secure Communities screening process is more consistent, efficient and cost-effective in identifying and removing criminal and other priority aliens," the department explained in its budget request.

The program had been criticized by Homeland Security inspector general reports, which found that local officers were not being properly trained and there was not enough oversight to ensure that local agencies weren't using the program to engage in racial profiling.

A study last year by the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank, found that immigrants developed "fear and mistrust of authorities" when they realized that local police could act as immigration agents.

The main complaint Friday from groups that oppose 287(g) was that the program isn't being terminated immediately, and that its replacement — Secure Communities — is not much better.

"The 287(g) program has been repeatedly called into question by advocates as well as the Department of Homeland Security's inspector general, and should be terminated rather than sustained with taxpayer money," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. "The Secure Communities program is surrounded by grave concerns about the impact to public safety, community policing and civil rights abuses."

Defenders of the program, such as Jessica Vaughan of the Center for Immigration Studies, say Homeland Security is "putting politics ahead of public safety" by cutting back the 287(g) program. She said Secure Communities is helpful but that local officers working in the field are better able to identify illegal immigrants who may not have their fingerprints in federal databases, making it harder to identify them.

She said some agencies such as the Colorado Department of Public Safety have used their 287(g) officers to suppress drug and human smuggling, gang activity and identity theft and said many sheriffs and police chiefs prefer the program to Secure Communities.

"The problem for ICE is that while they may feel that they get political brownie points for this kind of gesture, in reality what the anti-enforcement groups want is for them to end 287(g) and Secure Communities, not curtail (them)," said Vaughan, director of policy studies for the center. "So it's futile — they end up making everyone on both sides angry."

SOURCE






Mass immigration, and how Labour tried to destroy Britishness

Throughout the tenure of the last Labour government this newspaper, and others — while praising the huge contribution immigrants had made to this country in the past — attacked the laxity of what were supposed to be our border controls.

It was clear the very nature of our society was being changed by a new kind of uncontrolled mass immigration — and without the British people ever having been asked whether they supported the policy.

Labour arrogantly accused its critics of racism — though most of the incomers were white — and of scaremongering. It claimed it had no choice but to open our borders to the nationals of ten mainly ex-Soviet bloc countries which joined the EU in 2004. The truth was that — as other EU countries which restricted immigration from these states proved — it did have a choice.

The cynicism did not end there. Such, Labour claimed, was its commitment to ensuring that only people with a right to be in Britain could come here that in 2008 it set up the UK Border Agency. The truth, unfortunately, was very different.

Theresa May, the Home Secretary, has announced that the agency is being wound up next month precisely because it is useless, and the officials who ran it — rather like the borders they supposedly policed — were out of control.

Despite the strong threat from international terrorism, the evidence of eastern European criminal gangs infiltrating Britain, and our overburdened public and social services, 500,000 unchecked people were let in to Britain via Eurostar between 2007 and last year, while countless so-called students were just nodded through.

Though Labour clearly left the system in a shambles, it should be noted that it has taken almost two years for this Government to admit the mess our immigration procedures are in, and to do something about it. So Mrs May’s department — and notably the Immigration Minister Damian Green — also have a case to answer.

They seemed unaware that their officials, too, were ordering the relaxation of controls. Yet while the Coalition has been derelict, Labour was downright malign.

The game was given away in 2009 by Andrew Neather, a former Labour Home Office and Downing Street adviser, who revealed that mass immigration was a deliberate policy by the Left to change the social fabric of the country and to ‘rub the Right’s nose in diversity’.

This appalling policy was never discussed publicly because Labour strategists feared it would upset the party’s traditional white working-class support. For self-interested political reasons, the public could not possibly be consulted.

Mass immigration gratified the Left in two ways that have inflicted enormous damage on our country. It furthered the bogus notion of multiculturalism — undermining national identity and common values, and preventing the successful integration of immigrant communities into the British cultural mainstream.

Moreover, at a time of growing economic crisis, it added an enormous number of people to Labour’s client state.

Recent immigrants were grateful for their admission to the country, and for the costly safety net of the welfare state that was provided for them: a gratitude that, Labour hoped, would help it garner more votes at elections.

That aside, it is generally accepted that new arrivals to a country — who are often relatively impoverished — are more likely to vote for Leftish governments. So although present ministers have much explaining to do, this cocktail of ideology and blatant gerrymandering is of the Left’s making.

In the interests of creating a society with which Leftist ideologues felt comfortable, and which would help shore up Labour’s vote at elections, the wishes of the vast majority of the British people, and their security, were ridden roughshod over.

The idea of multiculturalism was advanced with varying degrees of stealth over several decades by politicians, civil servants and council officials. Its doctrine was spread in schools and in teacher-training colleges.

Weak as it so often is, the Church of England appeared to welcome it, even though it posed a mortal threat to that institution. The BBC, never to be found wanting when political correctness was required, suppressed any debate about mass immigration, took the tenets of multiculturalism as its gospel and preached it to the nation.

Internationalism is one of the core principles of the Left. It abhors the nation state, which it sees as a foundry of bigotry, racism and aggressive nationalism.

The Left has always understood this: that if you manage to wreck a national culture and a national identity, you shatter the ties of history and nationhood forged over centuries.

Although there used to be patriotic Leftists — and there still are one or two — many in the New Labour project in the Nineties and Noughties were, effectively, self-hating Britons.

They tortured themselves with post-imperial guilt, wanted the country to lose its independence and be ruled by Brussels, and sought to have what a BBC executive called the ‘hideously white’ mainstream culture diluted by ‘diversity’.

This was immensely dangerous. In a world where even Trevor Phillips, the chairman of the Equality Commission, highlights the threat that multiculturalism poses to social cohesion, it is surprising it has taken ministers so long to become alert to this danger.

However one of them, at last, has. Eric Pickles, the Communities Secretary, has said that the culture of the majority will once more be given pre-eminence in society. This is utterly sensible and, indeed, indispensable if we wish for a coherent and settled society of shared values.

To promote — as opposed to tolerate — the practices of other cultures is to drive people into ghettos. It prevents integration and assimilation and causes strife in society between religious and social groups who find themselves gazing at one another suspiciously across the social divides created by multiculturalism.

Mr Pickles has specified what this assault on multiculturalism will mean. He has said that public bodies’ obsession with translating leaflets into all known languages — and spending a fortune in public money on doing so — should end. Learning English is one of the fundamentals of grasping the British way of life.

He has argued that tolerance of the beliefs of others should not extend to disowning those of the majority.

He deplored the disciplining of Christian workers who wear crucifixes, and the recent decision to ban prayers before the meetings of a town council in Devon. He has called all these issues ‘the politics of division’, and he is right.

In a society that remains more than 90 per cent indigenously British, it is ludicrous to be ashamed of national traditions, rooted in common values from a shared past. And it is entirely right to expect those who come here to accept those values and traditions, and not be made — usually by mischievous, politically-motivated white liberals — to feel hostile towards them.

When even many atheists recognise the central importance of Christianity to the culture and institutions of our country — and I am one of them — it is offensive to the intellect as well as to the spiritual to seek to downgrade or marginalise that faith.

Our society needs an end to mass immigration.

This is not just because the parts of the country where immigrants most wish to settle are overcrowded, and the public services and infrastructure are cracking under the strain, or because we have 2.7 million unemployed.

It is principally because our national identity — founded on Christian values of tolerance and decency, and on a history of which we can be exceptionally proud — has been gravely injured by Britain’s Left-wing enemy within, and needs to recover from its wounds.

The best way to guarantee a harmonious future for all our people, of whatever racial background, is to make that culture strong again, and for us all to embrace it.

SOURCE



22 February, 2012

REAL ID Implementation

Annual Report Finds Major Progress in Securing Driver's License Issuance Against Identity Theft and Fraud

The Center for Immigration Studies has released its second comprehensive assessment of the status of secure driver's license standards. The report fills a void left by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), which has been silent on the implementation of state license standards in the REAL ID Act of 2005.

The report concludes that by the deadline of January 13, 2013, 36 of the 56 jurisdictions (50 states, Washington D.C., and the five island territories) will be substantially or materially or fully compliant with REAL ID, even if there remains a wide gap between the strongest of state systems and the weakest.

This assessment is by Janice Kephart, former 9/11 Commission counsel and National Security Policy Director at the Center. It covers state driver's license improvements in line with the REAL ID Act, including: overall compliance, production of tamper-resistant cards, verifying and protecting identity before and after issuance, secure card production, and federal funding.

The data is compiled in a chart that forms the heart of the report. Chart analysis shows that (1) states see value in pursuing REAL ID standards because the improvements reduce identity theft and fraud, increase efficiencies, improve customer service, and support law enforcement; (2) states are paying for those improvements with their own budgets outside of federal grant monies; and (3) states are often exceeding REAL ID minimum standards in order to achieve more complete credentialing security.

Specifically, this study finds that:

* In overall compliance, 53 states and territories are embracing REAL ID or the technical tenets of REAL ID; 5 states have submitted REAL ID compliance packages to DHS with a total of 36 materially or substantially materially compliant now or likely will be by the REAL ID deadline of January 15, 2013.

* At least 43 jurisdictions are issuing tamper-resistant cards;

In identity verification and protection:

* 51 are checking SSNs and the remaining five are currently getting online;

* 47 are registered with DHS to check legal presence through the SAVE database;

* only 5 motor vehicle agencies intend to check vital records prior to issuing a driver's license despite nearly all vital record agencies having digitized their birth and death records and 36 having installed the EVVE network that enables interstate queries;

In secure card issuance:

* 32 are issuing their cards from secure or central locations;

* 38 have installed facial recognition software to help reduce fraud and support law enforcement; this technology is expensive and not required by REAL ID.

The states contacted for this report said they no longer have guidance or support from DHS in implementing REAL ID. The Center for Immigration Studies is not in a position to determine the accuracy of state assertions about compliance; instead, the report focuses on states’ self-assessments as to whether benchmarks are met. Thus, the possibility for error exists. Suggestions for corrections from state motor vehicle agencies are welcome.

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. Contact: Janice Kephart, jlk@cis.org, 202-466-8185

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States. The Center for Immigration Studies is not affiliated with any other organization





A very welcome immigrant influx to Australia

Huge numbers of Australian-born people have some Irish ancestry so an Irish influx is rather like a family reunion. Irish people will find goodwill towards them wherever they go in Australia. I would myself be inclined to mention my fond memories of my grandmother Kelly

A young hairdresser from Northern Ireland knew her prospects were turning sour about two years ago when the "old people" in her county's quiet shops started talking about how grim business had been getting.

"Everybody was talking about it," Brona Quinn, 22, said of Ireland's most recent economic downturn and the impact it has had on businesses and families.

Ms Quinn stuck it out for a couple of years, but about six months ago the strain of working three jobs to get a "full weekly wage," finally took its toll.

She secured a working holiday visa to get to Perth, where she had heard there was work.

"We had family over here they were able to tell us that they'd been to Brisbane, they'd been to Sydney and there was a lot of work in Perth," she said.

A jump of more than 50 per cent in temporary skilled visas from July last year suggests Ms Quinn is not the only one to notice the influx of skilled workers from Ireland, where jobs have continued to disappear following the 2008 banking crisis and ongoing financial instability in Europe.

Australian Department of Immigration and Citizenship figures reveal the 3560 Irish workers entering the country on 457 visas since only July last year have almost already pipped the 2010-2011 financial year total of 3890.

Last year's figures were not shy either, topping the previous year's total of 2240 by more than 1500 workers.

Irish workers entering the country on permanent working visas also look poised to double in the 2011-2012 financial year. In December, the financial year halfway mark, the number of new permanent workers was close to the last year's total of 2934.

"All of my friends that I have are here - all in different parts of Australia - all the young people that I grew up with - they're all our here or they've been here or coming out here," Ms Quinn said. "Everyday I'm hearing of somebody new who is coming out or planning to come out."

The Perth reception desk at global recruitment firm HAYS has seen a "significant increase" in walk-ins from Ireland looking for work, according to WA senior regional director Simon Winfield. "Our reception feels like we've got half of Dublin in it on a Friday afternoon," Mr Winfield said.

"I think typically if you've been doing any research then you would probably want to be coming through WA or Queensland at the moment."

Mr Winfield said Irish workers on 417 visas seeking construction or property jobs in WA was nothing new, but he had noticed an increase of about 25 per cent in the past six to nine months.

Ms Quinn was among almost 12,000 Irish citizens who received working holiday or 417 visas between July and December 2011, according to the Department's records. The figures revealed a 30 per cent increase on the same period in the previous year.

"Also the demographic has changed slightly because in the blue collar space we've also seen graduate level and experienced graduates coming into the office as well looking for opportunities," Mr Winfield said.

"We've also seen a significant increase in the number of degree-holding Irish nationals looking at the white collar sector as well as the blue collar."

Accounts, finance, construction and office support are attracting the bulk of inquiries at the HAYS office, Mr Winfield said.

The influx has been bolstered by targeted campaigns HAYS and other firms have run for their clients to attract workers to WA from Ireland as labour shortages in the state related to the mining sector are predicted to widen.

"People are aware of the economic situation in the UK and Ireland and certainly are targeting those locations in the hopes they can find the individuals they're looking to find," Mr Winfield said. "When you compare the economics in Perth to somewhere like Ireland there are an awful lot of people who are keen to take those opportunities up."

Many people who have come to Australia on 417 visas seeking to secure 457s were finding success in WA, according to Mr Winfield. "We are finding that those applicants that are starting on a temporary contract on a 417 visa are becoming sponsored," he said.

Ms Quinn said she hopes to find an employer to sponsor her stay in Australia before her visa runs out later this year.

SOURCE



21 February, 2012

Good news for highly-skilled immigrants to the USA

The President authorized several initiatives to make the United States more attractive to highly skilled foreign students and workers. The first initiative will be to expand eligibility for the 17-month extension of optional practical training (OPT) for F-1 international students to include students with a prior degree in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (Stem). Under the current system, the 17-months extension of OPT is only available to F-1 students if the most recent degree they were conferred was in a Stem field. The proposed change expands eligibility to include students with a Stem degree that is not the most recent degree student received. DHS will also review emerging fields for inclusion in the list of eligible Stem degree programs.

The second initiative would allow spouses of F-1 students to enroll in academic classes on a part-time basis while his or her spouse is pursuing full-time studies.

Under current regulations, spouses may only take part-time vocational or recreational classes. This will greatly help those spouses who cannot commit to a full-time student workload because of family or other demands, yet, wish to pursue additional education.

Another initiative would also assist the H-4 spouses of H-1B holders. DHS will propose a change to current regulations to allow certain spouses of H-1B visa holders to legally work while they wait for their adjustment of status applications to be adjudicated. This means H-4 spouses of the principal H1B visa holder who have begun the process of seeking permanent resident status may be granted employment authorization. Presently, H-4 spouses are eligible to apply for employment authorization as adjustment of status applicants. But, if they work with this employment authorization, they lose H-4 status. This is undesirable because, if the adjustment of status application is ever denied, they no longer have an underlying legal status to allow them to remain in the US while either challenging the denial or seeking a new basis to adjust status. This places H-4 spouses in a Catch-22 situation.

One of the most interesting initiatives is the Entrepreneurs in Residence Initiative.

This will be conducted through a series of summits focusing on ensuring immigration pathways perform entrepreneurs a clear and consistent, and better reflect today’s business realities. This initiative calls for the creation of an entrepreneurs in residence tactical team comprised of business experts to work alongside United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) staff in-house. This promises to allow USCIS staff who are removed from current business practices and realities to better understand the environment for which they are adjudicating cases on. This should lead to more approvals of cutting edge business petitions.

SOURCE





Border scandal: failures of British border controls laid bare

In the last week of June 2007, Britain was in the midst of a terrorism crisis after car bombs failed to explode outside one of London’s busiest nightclubs.

Within days, the UK Border Agency had ordered that anyone arriving at British ports and airports was checked against a database which identified those potentially posing a risk to the country.

However, the Vine Report showed that the order failed to secure Britain’s borders and millions of people were able to enter the country with minimal checks.

The Home Office’s “Warnings Index” (WI), first introduced in 1995, is the “single most important electronic check” carried out to identify undesirable people, including suspected terrorists, criminals and paedophiles.

But, almost as soon as the order to check 100 per cent of passengers arriving in Britain against the index had been issued, exclusions already began to be introduced.

Initially, European nationals travelling from French “resorts” such as Disneyland Paris and the French Alps were not checked against the index. This is thought to have led to about 500,000 people arriving in Britain who had not been checked.

In June 2008, the then head of the Border Force also extended this exemption so that school coach parties travelling through Calais were also not automatically checked.

However, it was a more wide-ranging exclusion which led to some of the worst alleged loopholes emerging.

Border Agency executives were given the discretion to temporarily suspend the checks for “health and safety” reasons.

The Vine report found that the definition of a health and safety risk was not clearly defined but it was used regularly when queues became too long.

Labour claimed that the problem became worse after the election as government cuts began to hit the Border Agency, which was reducing staff.

For example, the report found that Warning Index checks were only suspended 6 times in Calais before 2010 – but 83 times since. The report says that some of these suspensions occurred because of a “moderate number of immigration officers on desks”.

In total, the crucial checks were suspended on 354 occasions.

The report concluded: “The Agency’s records relating to the suspension of the WI were poor. We found that records relating to some suspensions had not been kept, whilst other records did not capture important information, such as whether the emergency services had been consulted before checks were suspended.

“There was a lack of effective management oversight of the frequency with which checks had been suspended, the reasons for this and which ports were suspending checks.”

The lax system for checking people against the Warnings Index soon spread to other controls within the immigration system. A second check – Secure ID – is supposed to check passengers’ fingerprints when they are visiting Britain with a visa. This is designed to stop people fraudulently arriving in this country by checking those arriving are the same as the person who applied for the visa.

However, again, as the queues built up at airports and ports, the checks were quickly abandoned. On a total of 463 occasions at Heathrow in the past two years, the checks were suspended “from a matter of minutes to several hours”.

During 2011, Border Agency executives met ministers to discuss a new approach to checking people, the so-called “level two pilot” which effectively meant that only people deemed a higher-risk were thoroughly checked.

This meant it was no longer routine to open the biometric chip contained in the passports of European visitors. Warning index checks were also suspended for European children travelling “in obvious family units or school groups”. In September 2011, a further, potentially unlawful, scheme was also introduced by immigration staff code-named “Operation Savant” which meant that foreign students arriving to study were not routinely checked.

It also emerged that on 14,812 occasions the “biometric chip reading facility had been deactivated” at ports and airports. The Border Agency was unable to explain the exact reasons for this.

The picture that emerged from the 84-page report was one of chaos and confusion, where ministers’ orders to Border Agency executives were either misunderstood or ignored, and Border Agency staff do not consistently apply directives. There were signs that the situation deteriorated significantly under the Coalition.

The result was that millions of people were allowed to enter Britain without thorough checks.

The report also alleged that Brodie Clark, the former head of the Border Force, authorised officials to go beyond the terms of a pilot scheme agreed last summer. The biometric details of non-European visitors were also not checked, although Mr Clark is expected to argue that the instructions were unclear.

Mr Clark was forced to resign last autumn when details of the scandal first emerged. He is currently taking legal action against the Home Office.

For the Conservatives, the resulting scandal is deeply embarrassing as they made political capital out of a succession of immigration errors under Labour. Similar crises caused the resignations of several Labour ministers and the Home Office was branded “not fit for purpose.”

Last night, it appeared that the positions of Theresa May, the Home Secretary, and Damian Green, the Immigration Minister, were secure as the Vine report shared blame between ministers and officials.

However, this summer will see the biggest ever influx of visitors to London for the Olympics and one of the biggest security operations in Britain’s history. Any repeat of the circumstances laid bare in yesterday’s report would spell the end of ministerial careers.

SOURCE



20 February, 2012

French immigration critics use halal accusation to woo voters

NOTE: I have replaced some lazy references to "far right" below with more factual words. Just about all groups referred to by journalists as "far right" are in fact distinctly socialist -- from the parties of Hitler, Mussolini and Mosley to Germany's current NPD and Britain's current BNP.

And Marine Le Pen's advocacy of protectionism is socialist rather than market-oriented. It was a feature of the old Soviet bloc and the most extreme example is currently found in North Korea!



French [National Front] leader Marine Le Pen switched her presidential campaign back to immigration on Sunday, accusing Nicolas Sarkozy of bowing to Muslim pressure over how animals are killed for meat, to try to head off his attempts to poach her supporters.

Le Pen had sought to attract voters by shifting from a traditional emphasis on immigration and French identity to leaving the euro and imposing protectionist barriers, to exploit discontent over the debt crisis in Europe and globalization.

But at a congress of her National Front party in Lille, Le Pen returned to familiar anti-immigration territory, saying she had proof that all meat in Paris was halal - killed by cutting the animal's throat and letting its blood drain out.

"This situation is deception and the government has been fully aware of it for months," Le Pen said. "All the abattoirs of the Paris region have succumbed to the rules of a minority. We have reason to be disgusted."

Le Pen's aides said she would file a legal complaint on the matter. During her closing speech she said the government was bowing down to "Islamic radicals."

The main meat industry association, Interbev, denied the allegation, saying the vast majority of the meat in Paris was not slaughtered under halal practices, but the episode showed Le Pen was trying to win back wavering voters.

Most analysts deem her economic program as not credible and question the strategy of moving from the party's core message. Criticism of her economic policies has provided an opportunity for Sarkozy to woo far-right voters as he did in 2007 when he ran on a strong security and immigration platform.

"Nicolas Sarkozy is trying to renew 2007 by encroaching on our turf," Nicolas Bay, Le Pen's adviser on immigration issues, told Reuters. "That means we have to go on the offensive as we have no intention of letting him do it again."

OPINION POLLS

Le Pen is third in the opinion polls behind Socialist candidate Francois Hollande and Sarkozy. The first round of the presidential election is on April 22.

At one point in January, Le Pen was snapping at the conservative leader's heels, but a BVA poll on Friday showed Sarkozy had an 11 point lead over her in the first round, although it said Hollande would beat the incumbent in the May 6 runoff.

Since announcing his campaign on February 15, Sarkozy has looked further right to win votes and proposed a referendum on battling illegal immigration, something the far right has championed for several years.

In January, his government trumpeted the deportation of a record number of illegal migrants in 2011, and Sarkozy has set himself the goal of cutting legal migration to France to 150,000 people a year, having cut the quota to 180,000 from 200,000.

Le Pen's National Front, founded 40 years ago by her ex-paratrooper father Jean-Marie, is still fuelled by anti-immigrant rhetoric. Among her ideas for protecting welfare are toughening citizenship requirements, shutting borders and forbidding foreigners from access to any social aid.

She said she was the only viable voice of the nation in the face of Sarkozy and Hollande, who she described as the candidates of "globalization, immigration and insecurity."

"People of France, give Nicolas Sarkozy a red card! Get him definitively off the pitch," Le Pen said as 2,000 National Front supporters cheered, brandishing red cards and French flags.

Bay said it was important that issues such as the halal meat accusation were made public to show how Muslim values were influencing policy and endangering secular traditions.

Le Pen says that crimes committed by foreigners had risen as the number of immigrants had risen and that immigration costs France as much as 70 billion euros a year. She has pledged to reduce the number of immigrants to 10,000 a year.

"I think in 2007 (Sarkozy) managed to blindside us using our themes because he was able to appear as a new candidate ... and the National Front didn't have the dynamic we have now with Marine Le Pen," Bay said. "But now he has bad track record and we have momentum around Marine so it will be difficult for him."

SOURCE





Australia: Melbourne in a Greek rush as new wave of migrants arrive

Melbourne is already one of the world's largest Greek cities

MELBOURNE is set for a new wave of Greek migrants as the nation's dismal economy drives away workers in search of jobs.

Fed up with unemployment above 17 per cent, hundreds of aspiring migrants have bombarded local Greek organisations looking for ways to call Melbourne home.

Department of Immigration figures show Australia is on track to record a 65 per cent increase in Greek migrants this financial year, after an influx in the last six months of 2011 as Europe's economic woes deepened.

And Melbourne - which has more Greek-speaking people than any city outside Athens and Thessaloniki - will take the lion's share, says Greek Orthodox Community of Melbourne president Bill Papastergiadis.

He said the organisation had been swamped with hundreds of inquiries a month from Greeks wanting migration advice. "That really took effect once the economic situation deteriorated in Greece," Mr Papastergiadis said.

The number of Greeks visiting Australia on short-term visas also increased, with nearly 4000 arriving last year, up 21 per cent on 2009.

Melbourne already is home to more than 300,000 Greeks, with many arriving in the 1950s and 1960s when government migration schemes sought Greeks and Italians.

Lazarus Karasavvidis said his international recruitment and training firm Skillup Australia had witnessed a tenfold increase in the number of Greek people wanting work in Melbourne in the last six months of 2011. "The vast majority of them are young, urban professionals. They're well qualified, they're looking for a new home," Mr Karasavvidis said.

Melbourne's Ellie Doulgeris, 20, said Greek relatives planned to migrate. "Some are willing to stick it through, but things aren't great," Ms Doulgeris said.

SOURCE



19 February, 2012

Border battleground

Arizona rancher Jim Chilton spots a lone intruder near his barn. He grabs his rifle and rushes out, prepared for whatever may come. No threat. The man drops to his knees, hands in prayer, and offers Chilton his rosary. Chilton declines and instead gives him water. As he gulps it down, he asks, “Which way to St. Louis?”

Chilton cannot help with that. He wishes the illegal immigrant good luck wherever he lands—somewhere no doubt south of St. Louis. Perhaps in detention or in the hands of the criminals who haunt the mountains and canyons of this particularly scenic part of Arizona, where the desert suddenly brightens with glistening greenery against a backdrop of shadowed mountains. Small wonder that ranchers, despite the dangers, don’t want to leave. “I’m here to stay,” says Chilton, a fifth generation rancher who has ample reason to go.

His 50,000-acre cattle ranch stretches 19 miles to the southeastern border, supplying a convenient route for drug smugglers. His house has been burglarized, all his valuables stolen, including a prize antique gun. Chilton always leaves home with rifle and pistol, never sure what he will face. In days gone by, it was mostly immigrants parched after a desert trek. They wanted jobs and better lives in America.

Now the game has changed, he says. The lone immigrant is not seen so much. Border crossers tend to come in packs led by a coyote, a criminal guide. He in turn works for one of Mexico’s cartels, which force the immigrants to carry drugs across the border, or sometimes human cargo held for ransom. They are modestly paid for their effort. Those who collapse from exhaustion along the way are left behind to suffer a slow, agonizing death. The Border Patrol often comes across skeletal remains.

Woe to immigrants who try to avoid the cartels if they happen to get caught. Last summer, an independent-minded coyote was leading some 30 people across the border when they were spotted by cartel members keeping watch from a ridge with powerful binoculars that enable them to scan the countryside for Border Patrol. They swooped down on horseback and drove the group back to a safe house in Mexico, where they raped the women and tortured the men. They made an example of the offending coyote by cutting off all his fingers. Then they took their victims back across the border and turned them in—a clear warning to anyone else who would defy them.

It’s a commonplace that women trying to navigate the border must prepare for rape—the cost of crossing. They’re told to carry birth-control pills. Special treatment for children? Not a chance. More likely they’ll be used to hide drugs. A rancher says our own mafia have some limits to their cruelty. Not the cartels. Violence that is thankfully infrequent in the Southwestern United States is everyday in Mexico, where more than 40,000 people have been killed by the cartels in the last few years. Returning to Mexico after 20 years’ absence, Associated Press reporter Marjorie Miller writes that half the country is besieged by the cartels: “Mexico has become a country of mass murders.”

Fewer illegal immigrants are entering the United States these days, but more drugs. This is misunderstood, says Sylvia Longmire, author of Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico’s Drug Wars. Illegal immigration is controversial, she writes, “but worrying about Juan and Maria is totally separate from the issue of criminal drug trafficking. The cartels have been able to hide behind the immigration issue. It’s perfect for them that the attention is on illegal aliens, not them.” With this camouflage, the cartels now have outlets to distribute their drugs in more than 200 American cities.

A woman rancher north of Nogales—we’ll call her “Mrs. Smith”—prefers not to be quoted by her real name; she fears the cartels will seek vengeance on anyone who gives them trouble. She cites the nearby killing of rancher Rob Krentz after the Border Patrol was alerted to a large amount of marijuana on his property and arrested eight people. His widow Sue, who spoke out forcefully about his death, was later hit and badly injured by a car driven by an intoxicated illegal immigrant. Suspicions arose that she, too, had run afoul of the ever watchful cartel. Mrs. Smith must be just as watchful. She has had no close encounters, but her dog was poisoned, some pipes severed, a water tank drained. She is never quite sure who is passing through. Three Chinese passports were discovered on her ranch.

• • •

There’s much talk of non-Mexicans crossing the border. Yemenis are often cited, but a favorite seems to be the Iranian-backed Hezbollah. Check “Hezbollah in Mexico” on the Internet and up come page after age of dire warnings from dubious commentators. A frequent source is the anonymous “former agent.” Evidence, such as it is, consists of gang members reputed to have tattoos in Farsi and drug tunnels similar to ones dug by Hezbollah in Gaza.

Are the cartels and Hezbollah working together? Nonsense, says George Grayson, author of Mexico: Narco-Violence and a Failed State. The cartels don’t want to jeopardize their lucrative trade by allying with a terrorist-identified group that could bring down the full might of the United States on them. Besides, the cartels are not keen on cooperation and have a way of dealing with competition.

In October, three top U.S. officials involved in anti-narcotic operations testified before Congress that there’s no connection between Hezbollah and the cartels. Rodney Benson of the Drug Enforcement Administration, Mariko Silver from the Department of Homeland Security, and William Brownfield, assistant secretary of state for the Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs, reported that Hezbollah is raising money in some South American countries but is not a threat to the United States. Former Border Patrol undercover agent David Ham says he never encountered any Hezbollah on the border and thinks their presence in other parts of Latin America is exaggerated.

What about the Iranian-American who tried to get the Zetas cartel to assassinate the Saudi ambassador in Washington? Seems he shared the plot with an informant of the Drug Enforcement Agency who gave it away. The event has fired up neoconservatives and others anxious to confront the Islamic Republic, but I’ve found very few Arizonans who believe the story. Tony Estrada, the esteemed sheriff of the border county Santa Cruz, says Iranian operators are ruthless but smart. This action was just plain dumb.

Robert Baer, a CIA case officer in the Middle East for 21 years, agrees. “This doesn’t fit their modus operandi at all. It’s completely out of character. They’re much better than this.” It would help, he adds, if we had a back channel to Iran to explore these controversies when they arise.

• • •

There is a state sponsor behind some of Mexico’s cartel violence, but it isn’t Iran. The U.S. federal government’s “Operation Fast and Furious” involved the transfer of some 1,500 weapons from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms to the cartels, including 34 powerful sniper rifles. “A perfect storm of idiocy,” says Carlos Canino, an ATF attaché at the U.S. Embassy in Mexico. He testified to Congress that “U.S. law enforcement and our Mexican partners will be recovering these guns for a long time as they continue to turn up at crime scenes in Mexico and the United States.”

“This is going to be bigger than Watergate,” asserts Pima County, Arizona sheriff Paul Babeu, who notes that nobody died in the earlier scandal but the current one has led to innumerable Mexican deaths from the misdirected guns—as well as the killing of at least one American, Border Patrolman Brian Terry.

Former Border Patrol Agent David Ham says the giveaway goes against everything he learned in his 13 years working undercover. “Whatever causes harm you don’t spread around,” he says. That most emphatically includes guns and drugs. Guns did away with people who cooperated with him in Mexico. He will not go back to furnish another statistic.

Fast and Furious was supposedly intended to trace the firearms up the ladder to the cartel bosses who could then be apprehended. But the guns were not followed across the border, and Mexican authorities were not informed of the project. So how was anyone to be caught? Don’t worry so much about an explanation, cautioned ATF group supervisor David Voth to dissenting agents in a 2010 email. “If you don’t think this is fun, you’re in the wrong line of work.”

ATF supervisors are not as talkative now that a congressional investigation is under way. The scandal has already claimed several scalps: the U.S. attorney for Arizona has resigned and two top-level ATF administrators have been reassigned. “More heads will roll, as well they should,” says George Grayson. One neck that’s on the block belongs to U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder, who has been caught in contradictions. Documents released by the Justice Department, which supervises ATF, show there was a cover-up of Fast and Furious. Department officials said they didn’t know about it. They did.

Republican Congressman Darrell Issa, leading the congressional investigation, told Holder: “Your lack of trustworthiness about Fast and Furious has called into question your overall credibility as Attorney General. The time has come for you to come clean to the American public.”

Mexico has been the recipient not only of ATF guns but of money from the Drug Enforcement Administration. The New York Times reports that in another effort to track down cartel kingpins the DEA has allowed millions of dollars from illicit drug sales to be returned to Mexico, fattening the cartels’ coffers. But the Times says this has led to no real disruption in drug trafficking. It may take months or years to make a seizure or an arrest, while the cartels carry on undisturbed. It seems DEA and ATF are making up their own rules—and losing.

• • •

There’s a different border around the city of Nogales, a kind of oasis of calm amid the tension. An imposing new 20-foot iron fence and more than 800 law-enforcement personnel keep Nogales and the surrounding area safe and under control. Even so, it is not without problems: tunnels are dug under the fence since it’s a lot more difficult to go over it. Recent ones have emerged under metered parking spaces close to the border; the car above has a trap door through which drugs are lifted. Ordinarily, the tunnels are a tight, claustrophobic squeeze, but recently one was discovered that was 319 feet long, equipped with support beams, electricity, and water pumps—a home away from home.

Tunnels aside, peace extends across the border to much larger, more festive Mexican Nogales. There, in contrast to the rather subdued American side, stores open early and cheerful crowds gather in the streets. There’s no sign of hostility toward Americans. There’s talk of reviving tourism despite the dangers elsewhere, and officials on both sides of the border are pleasant and accommodating.

This used to be one city, says Tim Smith, comptroller of the upscale clothing store Bracker’s, who has lived in Nogales 27 years. Crossing the border was like crossing the street. It could be again. People appear much the same on both sides, mostly Hispanics who tend to have relatives on either side. Each morning a long line of Mexicans waits to cross the border for better paying jobs. At night they return to Mexico with its lower cost of living.

This interaction is an underrated part of border life, says Jonathan Clark, managing editor of the Nogales International newspaper. There should be less emphasis on security, he insists, more on economy. True enough, says Bruce Bracker, one of the owners of the store in his name and president of the Nogales Downtown Merchants Association. “We are physically in the United States but economically in Mexico.”

Mexicans spend a million dollars a day on goods and services in the United States, accounting for 49 percent of sales taxes in Santa Cruz County. Much of the produce consumed in the United States comes from Mexico through the port of Nogales. Mexico is now the largest importer and exporter in Latin America.

Yet that is slowing down. Responding to fears of terrorism, customs officials examine documents more closely these days. Mexican drivers wait as long as four hours to cross the border, pedestrians an hour and a half. Many more customs officials are needed to relieve the back-up. Clark says many Americans, distrustful and fearful of the border, wouldn’t understand why he wants to make it easier for Mexicans to come into the United States. But these are the Mexicans who should be coming here, he says, the more the better for both countries.

It would certainly be better for Deborah Grider, who runs the only store in the border town of Sasabe, population 11. She relies on Mexican trade, now much diminished because fewer U.S. visas are granted. The Arizona Republic ran a front-page tribute to her staying power. She serves mixed drinks inspired by the border, e.g., “El Pollero,” the smuggler. Surviving the border today requires imagination.

Despite the slowdown, some American manufactures are moving just across the border to take advantage of lower labor costs while maintaining close proximity to the U.S. market. No need to go all the way to Asia for less rapid delivery of products. Optimists say this is a way of reviving American-owned manufacturing, crime permitting.

Given the current economy, we shouldn’t be too eager to expel illegal immigrants, says criminal defense attorney Scott Donald, who handles immigrant cases in Phoenix. He says there are currently some 100,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona who, like it or not, are vital to the state economy. Under economic and political pressures, many are returning to Mexico. As a result, businesses are hurting, schools are closing, tax revenues are in decline. It’s forgotten, he says, that immigrants, whatever their status, buy products, ride trains and buses, and pay taxes.

Another border area illustrates this dilemma. Because of the unparalleled violence in Juarez, Mexicans have been fleeing in large numbers to the safety of El Paso, Texas. It’s hard to turn down people in clear danger of their lives even without proper documentation, and most of those crossing are thought to be middle-class families, professionals, and business people. There’s no question they’ve changed the look of El Paso, what a demographer calls “a binational living space.” All the discussion about amnesty for illegals may have been overtaken by events in this Texas city. Is this the future?

President Obama has proposed a two-tiered treatment for illegals. Individuals considered dangerous would be deported, while others would be permitted to stay under certain conditions. This would help relieve the huge backlog in the 59 U.S. immigration courts. But it would meet serious resistance. Says former Border Patrol Agent Ham: “If you’re here illegally, you should go back home—period.” The New York Times editorializes that the plan seems too vague to make much of a difference.

And then there are the drugs, whose use grows with the U.S. population. Sheriff Estrade says bluntly, “The American people create the problem.”

What to do about it? Most of the people I’ve talked to—left, right, or center—say legalize marijuana. It’s the main drug of the cartels, and legalization would take a large chunk out of their profits. To be sure, it would not put them out of business. Sylvia Longmire notes that the cartels are quite adaptable and are now stealing oil from pipelines and hawking pirated goods, as well as other drugs like cocaine and heroin. But she says certain practical steps can be taken toward legalizing marijuana, beginning with creation of an independent commission that would study the economics of the drug and how it might be produced and regulated like tobacco and alcohol.

President Obama came to office supporting medical use of marijuana, but his administration has been raiding and shutting down state-approved facilities on the grounds that federal law preempts state law. Governors from two of the 16 states that allow medical marijuana—Christine Gregoire of Washington and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island—have petitioned the federal government to let the states continue. Governor Gregoire says that legitimate patients are being made to feel like criminals when medical marijuana is taken away from them.

It’s said that in the war against drugs, the drugs have won. George Grayson writes that the United States spends an estimated $40 billion a year trying to stop the drug traffic and pursue and punish offenders. Yet less than 15 percent of illegal drugs reaching the United States are seized. “The rest feed a $200 billion a year illicit business that caters to an estimated 13 million Americans each month.”

The war, in fact, is spreading south of Mexico to Central America and north to the United States. Don’t consider Arizona’s vast southwestern desert under reliable control, says Sheriff Babeau. “We have people who are kidnapped, people who are executed. We have bodies that are dumped in our desert.”

Nothing on the scale of Mexico’s bloodshed—yet. But when will our devastated next-door neighbor become as important as Iraq and Afghanistan? “The U.S. takes Mexico for granted,” says Sheriff Estrada. “We should help Mexico to help ourselves.” That means doing something about our unquenchable drug consumption that drives the crime in Mexico and increasingly in the United States. Either we cut back, which seems unlikely, or we stop paying the cartels for it, which can be done.

SOURCE





UK's new immigration regulations: Indian chefs may lose their jobs to EU counterparts

Thanks to the skill of Indian cooks, curry has become the favourite food of the English so this is a serious matter

The chicken curry in Birmingham may not taste the same anymore. And the blame for this lies squarely with the United Kingdom's new immigration policy. The new rules make it impossible for specialised chefs from India to move to Britain.

"Under the rules for Tier 2 skilled migrants, chefs from non-European Union countries who will be allowed to work in the UK have to earn a minimum amount of £30,000 annually. This is far too high and the restriction has badly hit Indian restaurants in the UK," says Keith Vaz, a Labour MP. Vaz, whose family is from Goa, has been a vocal critic of the new immigration rules.

According to the revised policy, non-EU migrants who want to work as chefs should have a minimum of five years' experience in a similar job and graduate-level qualifications. Further, an announcement by UK's immigration minister Damian Green last week on a threshold salary range of between £31,000 and £49,000 annually has also caused resentment among the Indian community. Green's statement means that those chefs from India, who fall below the salary limit, will now have to leave the country after five years, and will not be eligible for permanent residence.

UK's curry industry, which has been valued at over £3 billion, has been severely hit by the stringent immigration rules of the David Cameron government. The home office rules allow only the top 5% of chefs into the country from non-EU countries. Vaz, who had initially suggested a four-year chef visa to allow foreign chefs to live and work in the UK on a non-permanent basis, is now concerned about the impact on curry houses of the stringent policy.

"Indian cuisine is very popular in the UK. It is an ancient and traditional cuisine and finding skilled chefs from outside the Indian subcontinent is very difficult. Even if chefs from India start training locals in the UK, it would take some time. Till then Indian chefs should be allowed into Britain for the sake of the curry industry," he says.

Concern for Students

Chefs are not the only people Vaz, who chairs the home affairs select committee in UK parliament, is worried about. Foreign students, who till now had the option to remain in the UK post their studies and look for work, will have to return to their home countries. The new Tier 4 rules have shut the doors on this option.

"Before the changes for foreign students were announced, we at the home affairs committee had reached out to different organisations, including industry bodies in India such as the Confederation of Indian Industry (CII) and Federation of Indian Chambers of Commerce and Industry (Ficci), to make an assessment of the impact. The pattern of foreigners coming to study in the UK is intrinsically linked to the leave to stay back and work for a few years provision. The new rules are likely to hit the number of Indian students coming to the UK," he says.

Vaz felt that while making the assessment, the Migration Advisory Committee of the UK must have used a few isolated incidents of students doing unskilled jobs. "Just because there's one graduate they may have found working at the tills of a supermarket chain doesn't mean that all graduate students are doing the same thing. Indians students are a very vibrant community and continue to remain vital for the UK higher education institutions," he adds.

More HERE



18 February, 2012

Please, A Little Honesty About Illegal Immigration

Victor Davis Hanson

President Barack Obama recently assured El Salvador that the United States would not deport more 200,000 Salvadorans residing illegally in the United States. As the election nears, and the president looks to court Hispanic voters, he also created a new position of "public advocate" for illegal immigrants. His duties would appear to be to advocate that millions circumvent, rather than follow, current federal law.

The administration has also said it will focus enforcement only on those who have committed crimes -- with the implicit understanding that it is no longer a crime to illegally enter and reside in the United States. In contrast, Obama has caricatured those supporting completion of a fence on the border as wanting to place alligators in the Rio Grande.

It is time that Americans revisit the issue and ponder very carefully the morality of entering the United States illegally.

True, American employers have welcomed in illegal aliens as a source of cheap labor. Employers were happy to pass the ensuing social costs on to taxpayers. To summarily deport those who have resided here for 20 years, obeyed the law, worked hard, stayed off public assistance and are now willing to pay a fine, demonstrate English proficiency and pass a citizenship test would be impracticable, callous and counterproductive.

Most, however, probably do not fit those reasonable criteria.

More importantly, we forget that the influx of millions of illegal aliens unfairly undercuts the wages of the working American poor, especially in times of high unemployment.

Crossing the border was also hardly a one-time "infraction." It was the beginning of serial unethical behavior, as illegal aliens on everyday forms and affidavits were not truthful about their immigration status.

The legal process of immigrating to America was reduced to a free-for-all rush to the border. Million of applicants abroad wait patiently, if not naively, in line to have their education, skills and capital resources evaluated. But they are punished with delay or rejection because they alone follow immigration law.

Billions of dollars in state and federal social services do not just help provide parity to illegal aliens, but also free them to send back about $50 billion in remittances to Latin America each year. That staggering sum also suggests that Mexico and other Latin American governments, as an element of national policy, quite cynically export human capital to gain U.S. dollars, rather than make the necessary economical, social and political reforms to keep their own at home.

Nor is it very liberal to turn illegal immigration into an issue of identity and tribal politics. Too many advocates for open borders and amnesty argue about the politics of ethnic solidarity rather than considerations of immigration law. In other words, we do not hear much national outrage over the plight of the occasional Pole, Nigerian or Korean who overstays his tourist visa, but rather equate the circumvention of immigration law almost exclusively with social justice for Latinos.

How reactionary and illiberal that debate has become, when Mexican Americans who object to the undermining of immigration law are slandered as sellouts, while non-Hispanics who do the same are smeared as racists and nativists.

In fact, illegal immigration unfairly warped perceptions of undeniable Hispanic success. If one does not include millions of recently arrived poor Latin American foreign nationals in federal and state surveys, then Hispanic American citizens prove statistically to be assimilating, intermarrying, integrating, and finding economic success at rates comparable to many other immigrant groups of the past.

To mean anything, laws have to be followed. When newcomers choose to ignore them, then the entire structure of jurisprudence crashes as well. If aliens are free to ignore federal immigration law, then cannot citizens likewise pick and choose which statutes they find inconvenient?

Finally, illegal immigration has wrongly been couched in terms of a xenophobic and insensitive exploiter preying on a more noble and defenseless guest. In truth, the United States is the most generous host in the world, and never more so than during the present age.

There are now about 40 million foreign-born people residing in the United States, both legal and illegal immigrants. That is both the greatest absolute number and percentage of the population in our nation's history. No other country in the world is more liberal in its legal immigration policies or has been more caring toward new arrivals. To suggest otherwise is dishonest and shows an ignorance of how most countries, who now export their citizens to the U.S., treat any who would do the same to them.

We can argue about the history or the future of illegal immigration. But please spare us the psychodramatic appeals to a higher morality.

In most regards, illegal immigration has proven as immoral as it is unlawful.

SOURCE






No wonder the illegals are flooding in to Australia

WASHING machines, microwave ovens, DVDs and plasma TVs are among a 60-item welcome gift pack for asylum seekers offered rent-free homes in the community. To fulfil a promise to move an influx of families out of detention, the Gillard Government is now fitting out each home with up to $10,000 worth of furnishings and electronics. They are given food hampers upon arrival at rented homes where they wait for their claims to be processed.

The revelation comes as border protection authorities reveal they have intercepted two more boats carrying asylum seekers overnight, five boats in the past week, and middle - and high-income families struggling with cost of living pressures brace for cuts to private health rebates and the impact of the carbon tax.

Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare said this morning HMAS Leeuwin intercepted a boat carrying 65 people north north-east of Christmas Island late last night.

HMAS Ararat intercepted a vessel carrying 71 people west of Christmas Island early this morning, bringing to five the number of boats intercepted since last Saturday.

Everything from beds, fridges, mattresses and lounges to an alarm clock radio, clothes hangers and containers for biscuits are being bought in a "household goods formation package" that contains more than 60 items. It includes a television at a minimum size of 53cm.

An average family of five is eligible for $7100 worth of goods, while larger families of more than nine people can be provided with up to $9850 in furnishings, the Opposition has revealed after Senate estimates this week.

Special consideration is given to providing computers, internet access, mobile phones, bikes, skateboards, rollerblades, iPods, games consoles and sewing machines.

There are 97 homes being rented in Sydney suburbs - and funded by taxpayers - at an average cost of $416 a week with families arriving to a hamper of bread, butter, milk, eggs, other "essentials" and cleaning products. Asylum seekers are living in Ashfield, Auburn and Bankstown, Blacktown, Cabramatta, Dural and North Curl Curl.

Families with a baby can access a $750 pack of basic supplies. Phone and electricity connections are also paid for.

The assistance is on top of free doctors' visits, dental care, pharmaceuticals, education and payments of up to $433.25 a fortnight to sustain asylum seekers unable to work. Almost 1600 asylum seekers are housed in community detention across the country.

Opposition Immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the revelations would disappoint families struggling with cost of living rises.

"The cost of Labor's border protection failures is a slap in the face to every Australian family trying to cope with rising costs of living, made worse by Labor's carbon tax and their abandonment of private health insurance," Mr Morrison said.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the government was being responsible in providing asylum seekers with basic provisions while their claims were being assessed. "We have a duty of care to provide essential items such as cleaning supplies, furniture and bedding, and baby items such as prams, for vulnerable asylum seekers in community detention," a spokesman said.

"People do not keep the goods, they remain in a house when a family moves out and are used by the next people who move in. These people are not allowed to work."

Asylum seekers late last year were asking for housing, visas and internet access when they arrived.

For more than five years the Red Cross has been contracted to provide the packages, but the numbers of people in community housing has exploded since Mr Bowen pledged in October 2010 to move most children out of detention. "They are basic supplies, we are not talking about luxury," Red Cross spokesman Michael Raper said.

SOURCE



17 February, 2012

580 foreigners a DAY got a job in Britain last year... as the number of British-born unemployed soared

There really are "Jobs Britons won't do". The notoriously feeble British work ethic and strike-proneness make the recent trends entirely understandable. Besides, why work when you can live as well or better on welfare payments? If I were an English businessman, I wouldn't employ a whingeing Pom either

AROUND 580 foreigners landed a job in the UK every day last year while the number of British-born workers collapsed, official figures revealed today.

The Office for National Statistics said the number of British-born workers with a job crashed by 208,000 last year. But this is the exact opposite of what is happening to foreign-born workers, with numbers jumping by 212,000 last year.

Figures also revealed that women bore the brunt of the latest rise in unemployment, as figures showed today the number of female jobseekers has leapt to its highest rate in 23 years. Two thirds of the 48,000 extra unemployed in the last quarter were women, as Britain's jobless rate rose for the eighth month in a row.

More than a million women are now unemployed in this country, the highest number in nearly a quarter of a century and a rise of 91,000 over last year, according to the think tank IPPR.

Young workers have also been hit hard by unemployment, with over million aged 16-24 now jobless, and nearly 250,000 unemployed for more than a year.

The total number of those out of work in the last quarter of 2011 leapt to 2.67 million, a jobless rate of 8.4 per cent, the worst figure since the end of 1995. Numbers claiming Jobseeker's Allowance rose by 6,900 in January to 1.6 million, the 11th consecutive monthly increase.

Of the 48,000 out of work in Britain at the end of last year, up to 33,000 are women and the remaining number of over 15,000 are men.

More than 530 workers every day are losing their jobs as Britain’s unemployment crisis deepens, official figures from the Office for National Statistics revealed today. Between October and December, 48,000 people joined the swelling ranks of 2.67million unemployed people in this country.

This means around one million people have lost their job since the credit crunch struck in August 2007, and face a battle against other desperate jobseekers to find another one.

The resulting clamour for employment means there is an average of almost six people chasing each job vacancy, with record numbers forced to accept part-time work because they could not find a full-time job.

Ministers insisted there were 'encouraging signs of stability' in the labour market, but one union boss today gave a bleaker outlook, describing 'the worst employment prospects for Britons since the recession began.' Other union bosses also rounded on the Coalition in light of the rising unemployment figures

The number of women claiming the allowance increased by 1,500 last month to 531,700, the highest figure since the summer of 1995.

Reacting to the figures, Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the think-tank, Migrationwatch, described the extraordinary increase in foreign-born workers as ‘quite extraordinary’. He said: ‘Given the continued increase in the number of British workers who are unemployed, it seems quite extraordinary that some employers are still employing agencies to recruit workers from overseas.’

Recently, the Employment Minister, Chris Grayling, was asked about why one branch of the sandwich chain Pret a Manger appeared to be staffed entirely by foreigners.

He said: ‘It is certainly a situation that I find unacceptable. Of course, this country has benefitted from people coming in from other countries to work. ‘But I want to see more young people in positions in this country and I want…to see them getting jobs that become vacant, rather than people coming into the UK.’

The data also prompted anger from gender equality groups. Anna Bird, acting chief executive of the Fawcett Society, said: 'These new figures must act as a wake-up call to Government - we are in a time of crisis. 'Cuts are threatening women's equality as jobs dry up, benefits are slashed and vital public services disappear.'

A record number of people are working part-time because they cannot find full-time jobs - up by 83,000 over the latest quarter to 1.35 million.

Employment increased by 60,000 to 29 million, mainly due to a rise of 90,000 in the number of part-time employees to 6.6 million.

Other data from the Office for National Statistics showed a 22,000 increase in youth unemployment to 1.04 million, which includes 307,000 in full-time education who were looking for work. The 48,000 increase in unemployment was the smallest quarterly rise since last summer.

Economic inactivity, which includes students, long-term sick, people who have retired early or those who have given up looking for work, fell by 78,000 to 9.29 million, 23 per cent of the working age population.

Average pay increased by 2 per cent in the year to December, unchanged from the previous month, although in the public sector it fell by 0.2 per cent to 1.7 per cent, the lowest figure since records began in 2001.

There were 1.39 million days lost through industrial disputes in the year to last December, the highest figure since 2002.

Around 164,000 workers were made redundant or took voluntary redundancy in the final quarter of last year, up by 17,000 from the three months to September.

The number of job vacancies increased by 11,000 in recent months to 476,000, although this was 21,000 down on a year ago.

The Government said the figures showed that despite continuing economic challenges, the labour market was stabilising. Minister for Welfare Reform Lord Freud said: 'The latest figures show some encouraging signs of stability despite the challenging economic climate. 'With more people in employment and a rise in vacancies, it is clear the private sector is still creating jobs

'However, we are not complacent. With more people in the labour market we know that competition for those jobs is tough and we will continue to make it our priority to find people work.'

Paul Kenny, general secretary of the GMB union, said: 'Austerity means 2.67 million people are not working. 'As it is clear that austerity and deflation as a policy is not working, it is both surprising and shocking that there are so few demands from Tory backbenches, from the CBI, from the City and from the Liberal and Labour parties that the policy be abandoned in favour of sure fire ways of getting people back to work.

John Salt, of recruitment firm totaljobs.com, said: 'Britons are facing their worst employment prospects since the recession began.

The UK's negative Q4 GDP data released last month confirmed the lacklustre growth in the UK economy and this, alongside a backdrop of diminishing demand, has led to nervous employers adapting their 'wait and see' approach to the labour market to start cutting their workforces instead.

'All the more apparent is the widening gap between North and South, with depressed high streets and businesses across the North West and North East struggling to cope with the lack of demand and obstacles to securing finance hindering the North from investing in its workforces.'

TUC general secretary Brendan Barber said: 'These figures are bad, although thankfully not quite the disaster we saw at the end of last year. 'With one in three jobseekers looking for work for over a year, and around six unemployed people for every job, the Government's mantra that there are plenty of jobs out there just doesn't ring true.

'It's encouraging to see a small rise in employment, but this is entirely down to people taking part-time work because there are no full-time jobs available. 'Any job is better than no job at all, even if it's on far lower pay and shorter hours, but people cannot afford to do this indefinitely. We desperately need more full-time jobs paying decent wages.'

SOURCE



Illegal Population Stopped Declining Under Obama

From the Center for Immigration Studies:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will soon release its new estimate of the illegal immigrant population in the United States as of January 1, 2011. (All DHS estimates are for January 1.)

Based on a preliminary analysis of some of the same data DHS uses, the Center for Immigration Studies estimates that 10.9 million (± 200,000) illegal immigrants lived in the United States on January 1, 2011.

If this estimate turns out to be similar to the DHS estimate, it means that the illegal immigrant population stopped declining after President Obama took office after declining by 1 million during the last two years of the Bush administration ─ 2007 to 2009.

Companion post here.



16 February, 2012

Utah: America's Reddest State Has Lost Its Moral Compass on Illegal Immigration

After suffering legislative reverses in 2008 and 2010 when bills passed that mandated the use of E-Verify, Utah's large, pro-illegal alien establishment has reasserted its political power.

Although Utah is considered to be the reddest of the red states because it consistently elects Republicans, that does not mean that it is conservative nor does it mean that its moral compass is working.

With the virtual collapse of the Democrat Party as a viable entity in Utah because of its rejection of the social values held by Mormons who make up the majority of voters, the Republican Party has become the home for many Democrats because that is where the power to get things done lies. The net result is that the Republican Party now has progressives, liberals, libertarians, moderates, and conservatives all in a single party that controls all branches of Utah government.

The main thing that links these disparate elements together is their membership in the Mormon Church and, for a large percentage of the legislators, their willingness to subordinate their strongly held political beliefs to the demands of the Church.

With only limited exceptions, the few elected Democrats in the legislature stick together in their unquestioning support for illegal aliens.

On the Republican side, rural Republicans insist that agriculture has to have access to illegal alien labor in order to survive and they fight all efforts to restrict their ability to hire illegal aliens who are committing multiple job-related felonies.

The Democratic legislators and rural Republican legislators are joined by urban Republicans who are masterfully manipulated by the Salt Lake Chamber, which untiringly works to ensure that its members have access to a large, captive workforce of illegal aliens. Of course, the Chamber always frames the immigration issue as one of crops rotting in the fields rather than as a demand for low-cost construction, hospitality, and other workers who take positions that Americans will do.

A final group that generally comes down on the side of those exploiting illegal aliens for profit are doctrinaire, libertarian Republicans. These elected officials believe in totally open borders and the absolute right of employers to hire whomever they want regardless of the harm it does to American workers and the thousands of Utah children who are the victims of illegal-alien-driven identity theft.

During most of the past decade, this coalition of Democrats and disparate Republicans provided the votes needed to pass illegal-alien-friendly legislation, including a $5 million in-state tuition program and driving privilege cards for illegal aliens.

The Mormon Church intervenes whenever necessary to hold this coalition together in order to protect its large Latin American interests and to preserve its ability to baptize illegal aliens in the United States, even though these individuals are committing and continue to commit job-related felonies that impact hundreds of thousands Utahns, including thousands of Mormon children.

Shocked by the passage of E-Verify legislation in 2008 and 2010 and faced with the possibility that the legislature would pass strong enforcement legislation, abolish in-state tuition for illegal aliens, and end the issuance of driving privilege cards, the pro-illegal alien coalition – with the full support of the Mormon Church – reasserted its power in 2011.

Initially, the pro-illegal alien coalition implemented the disingenuous Utah Compact, then with the full force of the Mormon Church behind it, it passed a Utah guest worker program which is also known as either the “Employers Dream Act” or “Bramnesty.” This program relegates illegal aliens to virtual involuntary servitude.

When it appeared that the Employers Dream Act might fail, the Mormon Church's lobbyists strong-armed legislators into voting for it despite the fact that it went against Mormon principles of compassion, support for the of rule of law, and belief in free agency. On the other hand, Catholic Bishop Wester saw through what was going on and refused to support the legislation.

At the present time, there is no question that the power is firmly back in the hands of the powerful elite that supports illegal aliens.

The governor, leaders of both Houses of the Utah legislature, and a majority of the members of the legislature appear to be determined to consolidate the gains they made during the last legislative session.

They are also committed to killing any legislation that limits the ability of employers to hire illegal aliens or that adversely affects the Mormon Church's worldwide interests even if that means going against what is best for Utah and the nation.

The bottom line is that Utah's major business, political, civic, and religious leaders and organizations will continue to support illegal aliens for their own profit while willingly and knowingly sacrificing thousands of Utah children to illegal-alien employment-related identity theft.

Utah may be the reddest state in the nation but when it comes to illegal immigration it has lost its moral compass.

SOURCE





Middle East Terrorists Operating along Arizona Southern Border

The southern border of Arizona remains unsecure with a growing threat from those who detest America in every way and intend to destroy our country. This threat is not simply Mexican drug dealers, although they are posing an ever increasing and violent presence as they move into Arizona, and then launch their activities into 257 known American cities, according to the National Association for Retired Border Patrol Officers. A more ominous threat of the unsecure southern border into the U.S. is the increased activity of Middle Eastern terrorists. Since Oct, 2003, Border Patrol agents in the Tucson, AZ sector apprehended 5,510 illegals from countries other than Mexico, Central or South America.

In this Tucson sector, captured illegals were Middle Eastern and spoke Farsi or Arabic. A large number of these that were apprehended escaped capture and disappeared into the United States.

The Arizona desert is littered with evidence of illegals coming from countries that are violently opposed to and stated enemies of America; especially countries like Venezuela, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Pakistan, Libya, Somalia, and the spreading al-Qaeda, Hamas, and Hezbollah. Further evidence demonstrates the growing relationship and cooperation by these terrorist groups and drug cartels, as well as criminal gangs like MS-13.

Much of this activity stems from miles of open borders in Arizona, and the fierce open miles of desert unique to southern Arizona. One cannot fully appreciate, much less understand, the rough and unforgiving regions of desert unless you actually have been there – pictures alone will not suffice. Cartels and gangs have taken up residence on multiple pathways, created desert roadways, mountains and command activity within their dedicated region or sector. With military grade weapons, satellite communications, high powered vision aide, these scouts and small pockets of “soldiers” are becoming increasingly formidable. This aids in the movement of small groups of suspected terrorists through the desert deep into Arizona, and then to a final destination.

FOR YOUR ANALYSIS AND CONSIDERATION

1. The U.S. Congress Committee on Foreign Affairs received testimony on February 2nd, 2012, that demonstrated Iran’s growing influence along the U.S. Border south of Arizona. Michael Braun, a former chief of operations for DEA, testified that Hezbollah has developed strong and sophisticated relationships with Mexican drug cartels. One dimension to this relationship is the control of the southern Border of Arizona, then corridors into every region of America.

2. There is growing “chatter” that Iran will strike the United States from within if Iran’s nuclear program is attacked. Once again, the southern Border of Arizona comes into focus, as a significant corridor for assets hostile to America to travel.

3. Besides Iran and Hezbollah, South American satellite terrorist-sponsoring nations like Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Nicaragua are assisting with the massing and training of terrorists, weapons (including medium-range missiles), logistics and other support. Latin America is quickly becoming a platform from which an attack against the United States can be launched. This includes moving aforesaid terrorist groups, with cooperation from Mexican drug cartels, right up to the border south of Arizona and into Arizona, an activity that was revealed in testimony before the U.S. Congress Committee on Homeland Security, subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence on 7 July 2011.

4. Back in 2005, a captured ranking al-Qaeda agent revealed the plan to move nuclear materials from South America through the border and into America for attacks at a later date. Adnan ash-Shukrijumah, one of the world’s most wanted terrorists, it was learned, was chosen by bin Laden to serve as the field commander for the terrorist attack on U.S. soil. The code name: “The American Hiroshima” plan was affixed. This plan purportedly is to launch simultaneous explosions on American cities. American law enforcement agencies have been seriously looking for Adnan ash-Shukrijumah since 2005. The latest “FBI Most Wanted” reports (1/19/2012) indicate that Shukrijumah is still at large.

5. The Federal Government is proclaiming how border apprehensions are down 40%. This is misleading. What is not being shared with the public is the fact that Fed policy is to count only selected groups and allow others to go free or to turn south back to Mexico counting neither category.

This is a quick overview of just one segment of the multifaceted problems associated with the Arizona Border Wars. Although short, the contents should be alarming concerning the sophisticated and dedicated forces accumulating along Arizona’s Border.

The Federal Government knows all of this, and more. The general public does not. The Federal Government is quite aware the border (both the southern border and that along Canada) is porous in many ways, and true undesirables are streaming across. This briefing is not about the migrant looking for seasonal work, but about the hardened criminal, the dedicated terrorist whose plans are to destroy the United States of America in any manner possible.

SOURCE



15 February, 2012

US to pay $350,000 to settle lawsuit over 2007 immigration sweep in New Haven, Conn.

Eleven men who claimed immigration agents violated their rights in 2007 raids on their New Haven neighborhood have won a $350,000 settlement from the U.S. government, which also agreed to halt deportation proceedings against the plaintiffs, their attorneys said Tuesday.

The raids on the predominantly Latino neighborhood of Fair Haven came a day after the city became the first to offer identification cards to illegal immigrants, and critics including the mayor have contended the federal sweep was retaliation for the ID program — a charge denied by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The settlement appears to be the largest ever paid by the United States in a lawsuit over residential immigration raids, and the first to include compensation as well as immigration relief, according to Mark Pedulla, a Yale law student who was involved in representing the plaintiffs.

“They hope to be able to offer an example of what can happen when you stand up for your rights,” Pedulla said.

Ross Feinstein, an ICE spokesman, said the settlement is not intended as an admission of liability on the part of the U.S. government. “The government is settling in order to avoid the additional time and expense of further litigation,” Feinstein said.

The plaintiffs were among roughly 30 people arrested on the raid in the early morning hours of June 6, 2007.

The men argued the agents drew their weapons, forced them out of bed and frightened young children in some of the homes. They claimed the federal agency was retaliating against New Haven, which has a reputation as a “sanctuary city” for its embrace of illegal immigrants, and that they were targeted solely because of their Latino appearance.

“I remember everything that happened to me that morning as if it were yesterday,” plaintiff Edinson Yangua Calva said. “There are things I haven’t been able to get over, it is something that stays with you forever.”

In June 2009, a federal judge ruled that agents violated the constitutional rights of four immigrants in the raids. Immigration Judge Michael Straus said the ICE agents went into the immigrants’ homes without warrants, probable cause or their consent, and he put a stop to deportation proceedings against the four defendants, whose names were not released.

Five of the plaintiffs were still facing deportation proceedings, but those will be halted as part of the settlement agreement, Pedulla said.

The sweeps in New Haven came after the city approved issuing identification cards to all of its residents, regardless of immigration status. ICE officials have denied that the raids were retaliatory, saying planning began the year before.

SOURCE






Recent posts at CIS below

See here for the blog. The CIS main page is here.

1. Response to USCIS Request for Comments on Admission of L-1 Workers (Public Comment)

2. Utah: America's Reddest State Has Lost Its Moral Compass on Illegal Immigration (Blog)

3. Immigration in Two Presidential Races (Blog)

4. How the More-Migration People Manipulate Numerical Ceilings (Blog)

5. Why Obama Doesn't Have a Clue (Blog)

6. Federal Judge Rejects Illegal-Alien Lawsuit Against County Sheriff (Blog)

7. Hidden Double Attacks on our Immigration System (Blog)

8. ICE Names 'Public Advocate' – Call Him! (Blog)

9. When Activism Extinguishes Public Conversation (Blog)

10. Wash. Post to the Less-Educated: Drop Dead (Blog)




14 February, 2012

ACLJ Urges Supreme Court to Uphold Arizona Immigration Law on Behalf of 57 Members of Congress & 65,000 Americans
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Representing 57 members of Congress and more than 65,000 Americans, the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ) today urged the Supreme Court to overturn a federal appeals court decision that declared the Arizona immigration law unconstitutional.

"Our argument is clear: Arizona has the constitutional authority to implement policies to protect its borders and citizens - policies that mirror federal immigration law and incorporate federal standards," said Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel of the ACLJ.

"Because of the federal government's inaction in dealing with illegal immigrants, Arizona passed and signed into law S.B. 1070, a constitutionally-sound measure that is consistent, and does not conflict, with federal law. This case is being closely watched by many states facing similar concerns as Arizona. It's clear that nearly 60 members of Congress and more than 65-thousand Americans understand that Arizona's law is not only proper, but permissible under the Constitution as well. We're hopeful the high court will reach that conclusion."

The ACLJ amicus brief, posted here, contends a decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit should be reversed "because it exalts Administrative 'priorities and strategies' over Congress's clear and manifest intent to welcome state involvement in the enforcement of federal immigration law." The brief argues the appeals court decision "sets up an untenable conflict between Congressional immigration policy and Administrative 'priorities' that the separation of powers doctrine requires the Administration to lose."

The brief asserts that Arizona acted properly by instituting S.B. 1070:

"Although states may not pass laws setting immigration policy, they may pass harmonious laws that further Congress's purposes. Because S.B. 1070 is fully consonant with federal immigration laws, mirroring their standards and definitions, it is not pre-empted. The Ninth Circuit's decision to the contrary is based on conjured conflicts that have no basis in statutory language or other Congressionally established immigration policy."

In requesting the high court overturn the federal appeals court decision, the ACLJ concludes that 9th circuit provided a faulty legal analysis that "tramples upon federalism by stripping the states of their plenary police power to enforce federal law in accordance with federal standards or enact state law that does not conflict with federal law."

The ACLJ represents 57 members of Congress, 55 members of the U.S. House and two members of the U.S. Senate

The Supreme Court is scheduled to hear oral arguments in the Arizona immigration case on April 25th.

SOURCE







A third of illegal boat arrivals in Australia to get visas

A THIRD of asylum seekers arriving by boat will be living in the community on bridging visas next year under a policy shift, the Immigration Department has revealed to a Senate hearing.

The department expects to save $400 million by moving asylum seekers out of detention centres and into the community, where bridging visas will require them to find accommodation and seek work. So far, only 257 bridging visas have been issued because the program only ramped up in December and January. Immigration Department deputy secretary Jackie Wilson said it is expected 6 per cent of asylum seekers would be released on bridging visas this year.

She said by 2012-13, the department expected 20 per cent of asylum seekers to be in community detention where the department provides housing and support; 30 per cent released on bridging visas; leaving just half of boat arrivals behind wire in detention.

The department has projected asylum seekers will arrive by boat at Christmas Island at a rate of 450 a month in 2012-13 in its budget figures. This figure was ridiculed by Liberal Senator Michaelia Cash. Immigration Department secretary Andrew Metcalfe admitted to the Senate committee that, in fact, about 1000 people arrived by boat in November 2011, and 693 arrived in December.

The Immigration Department's budget has continued to blow out due to the federal government's mandatory detention policy for boat arrivals, which has resulted in people being held for years in remote locations while they await the outcome of refugee claims and legal appeals. The department's contract with the private company that runs detention, Serco, is now worth $1 billion over four years.

After the parliamentary impasse on offshore processing Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced in October that mandatory detention would be retained for security, identity and health checks, but bridging visas would increasingly be used. The Immigration Department said yesterday it anticipated a transition period of six weeks when asylum seekers released from detention on bridging visas received support in the community, accessing 89 per cent of the welfare payment, paid by the Immigration Department.

Asylum seekers on bridging visas would have work rights and "the bulk of the group will be able to sustain themselves over time", said Ms Wilson.

The government has failed to gain the agreement of the opposition or Greens to pass its bill designed to overcome a High Court ban on the Malaysia refugee swap.

Independent MP Rob Oakeshott yesterday introduced to Parliament his own offshore processing bill, which he said could be a "circuit breaker". The bill would allow the transfer of refugees to countries that are members of the Bali Process, a regional forum on people smuggling.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the government would examine Mr Oakeshott's bill and seek legal advice before finalising its position.

But opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said Mr Oakeshott's bill was "a carbon copy of the government's bill", lowering expectations it would gain Coalition support.

SOURCE



13 February, 2012

Calls for ‘self-deportation’ of illegal immigrants win applause at conservative conference

Immigration is the hottest of hot-button issues, if a panel today at the Conservative Political Action Conference is any indication.

At a CPAC panel discussion, speakers who called for massive “self-deportation” of immigrants living illegally in the U.S., English as the only language of government and stepped-up enforcement received loud applause. Any praise for immigrants’ contributions to the U.S. economy or comprehensive immigration reform was met with silence or boos from the audience at the largest annual gathering of conservative activists.

Alex Nowrasteh, a policy analyst at the conservative Competitive Enterprise Institute and an occasional Texas on the Potomac guest blogger, argued that the answer is better immigration laws. He argued that immigration brings new ideas and prosperity to America, receiving hesitant applause mixed with boos from the audience. The enemy isn’t immigration — it’s the welfare state, he said.

He denounced the idea of a using a federal database like e-verify, which requires people to “ask permission” before applying for a job, arguing that true free-market conservatives should be disgusted. Nowrasteh said the true problem is the complexity of legal immigration, and he challenged the audience to attempt the process of hiring a temporary worker.

“Let’s bring back the Ellis Island mode of immigration,” he said. “Not because it is good for them, but because it is good for us.”

Kris Kobach, Secretary of State of Kansas, strongly disagreed, citing 13 million Americans looking for jobs and 5 million people waiting to lawfully immigrate as reasons for databases like e-verify. He argued for “attrition through enforcement,” contending that through better enforcement of the law, illegal immigrants would self-deport.

Kobach highlighted the benefits of verification systems like those used in Arizona and Alabama, stating that they have already produced results. He attributed the drop in illegal immigrants in these southern states to these programs (and not the deep economic recession). “If you want to create a job for a us citizen tomorrow, deport an illegal alien today,” he said, receiving loud applause.

Robert Vandervoot, executive director of ProEnglish, didn’t address federal identification databases, but instead argued that English should be the official language of the United States. With 52 other countries that have already made it the official language, he said, America should be next.

Freshman Rep. David Rivera, R- Fla., offered a unique perspective, as he represents a state with many industries that rely on illegal immigrants for labor. He argued that an improved guest worker program would dramatically help the situation, as many citizens do not want to take the jobs these industries offer.

Rivera pointed out that these workers don’t want to become citizens, and that visa reform would make it easier for them to go back to their home countries. Ultimately, he said, a better guest-worker program would be the foundation for better a immigration policy. “It demonstrates and puts the focus on the value of work,” he said.

SOURCE







Leftists abuse outspoken immigration opponent

No argument. Just abuse. In their usual way

Controversy over an immigration opponent who spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) blind-sided conference organizers who say they didn't know who he was before this week.

Al Cardenas, director of the American Conservative Union (ACU), which organizes CPAC, said he had never heard of Peter Brimelow, editor of VDARE.com, who has been labeled a white nationalist by the Southern Poverty Law Center. [An organization of professional hysterics. They find racists under every bed]

"I don't really know what his values are," Cardenas said. "I have asked my staff to delve into that." "I want to personally see what he precisely said or written before forming judgement," he said.

The liberal group People for the American Way released a statement condemning CPAC organizers for giving Brimelow a platform. Liberal websites have also attacked CPAC over his inclusion.

"It's shocking that the CPAC would provide a platform for someone like Brimelow," said Michael Keegan, president of People For the American Way. "Responsible GOP leaders should speak out against the bigotry and hatred that Brimelow and VDARE push on a regular basis."

Brimelow participated on a panel discussion called "The failure of Multiculturalism: How the pursuit of diversity is weakening American Identity" at CPAC on Thursday. During the panel discussion, Brimelow and other panelists said immigration is polluting America.

In an interview with Hotsheet, Brimelow, an immigrant from Great Britain, said he's opposed to not only illegal immigration, but legal immigration too. He said it is creating a "Spanish speaking underclass parallel to the African American underclass."

"These are people who are completely dysfunctional. They're on welfare; they're not doing any kind of work - at least not legal work - and their children are having a terrible time. They're dropping out of school; there's an increase in teenage pregnancy," Brimelow said.

Brimelow told Hotsheet California is "rapidly turning into hispanic slum." He said California used to be "paradise" but is now "totally overrun by barrios of illegal immigrants."

Cardenas deflected responsibility for Brimelow's presence at CPAC. He noted that Brimelow spoke at a side panel discussion an not in the main ballroom and that he "was not invited to participate in any of the events that ACU takes responsibility for."

The sponsor of the panel that hosted Brimelow was Robert Vandervoort, executive director of ProEnglish, an organization advocating English as the official language.

Vandervoort did speak at an ACU-sponsored panel in the main ballroom of CPAC, where he also spoke out against immigration. "Now our nation is balkanizing through mass immigration," he said. "America's always been a Judeo-Christian nation."

Cardenas promised to look into the controversy surrounding Brimelow. "If we find... grounds offensive to what American ideals stand for, I will talk to the sponsor and take it from there," he said.

SOURCE



12 February, 2012

Top British judge ordered to scrap human rights ruling

Britain’s most senior immigration judge has been ordered to scrap a ruling which allowed a foreign killer to stay in Britain on human rights grounds.

Court of Appeal judges quashed the ruling in which Mr Justice Blake and a colleague allowed Rocky Gurung, from Nepal, to remain in the UK. They said the original judgment suffered from an “error of approach” and looked like “a search for reasons for not deporting him”.

The decision landed Mr Justice Blake in a second controversy, only days after he was criticised for permitting an Indian male nurse to remain in Britain following a jail term for indecently assaulting a woman patient.

It is expected to increase pressure on immigration judges amid growing concerns over how criminals are exploiting human rights laws.

David Cameron, the Prime Minister, has expressed alarm at the way human rights are preventing dangerous offenders and terrorists such as Abu Qatada from being deported.

Damian Green, the immigration minister, last night joined relatives of Gurung’s victim in welcoming the Court of Appeal’s decision. It means the case will now have to be heard again by the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber, of which Mr Justice Blake is president.

Gurung came to Britain in 2005, just three years before he committed the crime. The victim of his attack, Bishal Gurung (no relation), was a hard-working waiter whose father Cpl Khem Barsad Gurung served with the Gurkhas for 16 years.

In April 2008 Bishal was working at a Nepalese restaurant in Esher, Surrey, when he came to London to celebrate Nepalese new year. After leaving a party on a boat on the Thames in the early hours he was chased along the Embankment by 10 to 15 men including Rocky Gurung. The Old Bailey heard the gang falsely accused Bishal of hitting another man, Kemik Thakali, with a bottle.

One witness told the court that Bishal was “on his hands and knees” being kicked or beaten by seven or eight men and was then thrown into the river by Rocky Gurung and Thakali, from Morden, south-west London. Bishal’s body was in the Thames for two weeks before it was found.

Rocky Gurung and Thakali were both jailed for three years for manslaughter. The law says offenders jailed for 12 months or more are subject to “automatic deportation” but there is an exemption if removing them would breach their human rights.

At the end of his sentence Rocky Gurung, also a Gurkha's son, appealed against the Home Office’s decision to deport him, and lost. He then appealed again to the Upper Tribunal – the case overseen by Mr Justice Blake. He claimed that deporting him to Nepal would breach his “right to family life” even though he was single, had no children and lived with his parents.

In a judgment first disclosed in January last year, the court ruled in the killer’s favour that deporting him would be “disproportionate”.

The Home Office later appealed to the Court of Appeal and a panel led by Lord Justice Rix concluded Mr Justice Blake’s decision was faulty. “It appears to us that there has been an error of approach on the part of the Upper Tribunal,” ruled the three appeal judges.

They said they were “troubled” by the conclusion of Mr Justice Blake that the “nature and seriousness” of the offence did not in themselves justify interference with Rocky Gurung’s human rights through deportation. Such an argument “misplaces the emphasis”, said the panel.

“Much of the determination has the appearance of a search for reasons for not deporting him rather than – as in our view it ought to have been – an inquiry into whether, despite the statutory policy of automatic deportation, article 8 of the Convention would be violated by its implementation,” they said.

Bishal’s sister Karuna, 29, from north London, said: “The previous decision was completely wrong. I am extremely happy it has been thrown out. I would like to see Bishal’s killer deported.”

Ian Macdonald QC, the chairman of the Immigration Law Practitioners’ Association, said: “I’m sure Mr Justice Blake will be feeling like he’s been rapped on the knuckles, but that is how the law works. This is why we have an appellate system.”

The case also illustrates the tortuous legal process faced by the government to deport serious foreign criminals, with the cost of the Gurung case thought to run into tens of thousands of pounds.

Mr Justice Blake, as Nicholas Blake QC, was previously a human rights barrister at Matrix Chambers, which is most closely associated with Cherie Blair, the wife of former prime minister Tony Blair. He was knighted in 2008 and appointed president of the Upper Tribunal Immigration and Asylum Chamber in 2010. Previously he co-authored the legal textbook Immigration, Asylum and Human Rights.

In a judgment published at the end of last week, Mr Justice Blake allowed Milind Sanade, a male nurse from India, to remain in Britain despite being convicted of indecently assaulting a pregnant 21-year-old patient and asking “Does this feel good?”

The Home Office tried to remove Sanade at the end of his prison sentence under automatic deportation rules but Mr Justice Blake and a colleague upheld his second appeal under Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights, which enshrines in law the right to a private or family life.

Sanade, of Chelmsford, is married with two children born in England. Yesterday his family were not at home, and neighbours said they had gone away.

Because Sanade has now been now struck off the nursing register and is under other restrictions which prevent him working unsupervised with women, the judges said: “He is more regulated in his future conduct in the United Kingdom than he would be in India. “Whilst we recognise that this was an offence involving gross breach of trust this is not criminal conduct at the higher end of the range of seriousness.”

Sanade, 36, said last night: “I’m just glad to put my sentence behind me. I’m sorry for what happened but I’ve served the time and now I should be here in the UK with my family.”

Other similar appeals considered by Mr Justice Blake at the same time, involving two Jamaican criminals each with children holding British nationality, were rejected.

SOURCE





Canada: As immigration booms, ethnic enclaves swell and segregate



More than 600 newcomers per day have arrived in Canada since 2006, and many of them have settled in neighbourhoods like Richmond, B.C. The once-quiet farming community on the south end of Vancouver is now home to North America’s second-largest Asian community — and Canada’s densest proportion of foreign-born residents. The city’s strip malls are a haven for dim sum. Richmond’s roads are replete with white delivery vans emblazoned with Chinese characters and massive 150-store Asian-friendly malls seemingly plucked right from downtown Shanghai.

While the Chinese who came to Canada in the opening days of Confederation settled into dense urban Chinatowns, recent Chinese immigrants now occupy large sprawling Chinalands: Large, self-contained and lined with restaurants and supermarkets offering the comforts of the old country. Indo-Canadians, South Asians and others can lay claim to similar booming settlements in the outskirts of Montreal, Vancouver, Toronto — and the resource-rich centres of the Prairies. And it is only the beginning. By 2030, according to Statistics Canada, more than 80% of Canada’s population growth is expected to depend on immigration. Ethnic enclaves are set to fill up faster and longer than ever before.

In almost every Canadian family tree, there is an ethnic enclave: Irish Catholics in Montreal’s St. Anne’s Ward, European Jews in Toronto’s Kensington Market or Ukrainians in the new farming villages of early 20th century Alberta. “People find their footing in these neighbourhoods … they pull comfort from these areas, especially women and elderly people,” said Sandeep Agrawal, a specialist in ethnic enclaves at Ryerson University.

In 1981, Canada had only six neighbourhoods with ethnic enclaves (neighbourhoods where more than 30% of the population is a visible minority). Now, that number has mushroomed to more than 260. In cities like Vancouver, home to nearly half of these enclaves, neighbourhoods are becoming increasingly defined by ethnicity. Unlike the racial ghettoes of the U.S. or France however, Canada’s ethnic communities are often shaped by choice. “People have made the decision voluntarily to move to these areas,” said Mr. Agrawal.

The enclaves of today may have more staying power than the Little Italys and Jewish quarters of years past, explained Mohammad Qadeer, professor emeritus of urban and regional planning at Queen’s University. “They will continue to draw new immigrants who will keep on arriving as far as the eye can see,” he wrote in an email to the Post. While Canada’s influx of Italians, Germans, Jews and Greeks largely ended after only 10 or 20 years, India, China and South Asia represent near-bottomless supplies of new Canadians — particularly as Canada’s immigrant needs are more potent than ever.

The vast majority of these enclaves are in the suburbs. “They’re going to where the land is cheaper and they’re going to where accommodation is available,” said Larry Beasley, former co-director of planning for the City of Vancouver.

And, economic mobility is not what it once was. Although many immigrant neighbourhoods are prosperous — the largely Chinese Toronto suburb of Markham, for example — newcomers arriving in Canada between 2000-2004 on average earned only 61 cents for every dollar earned by Canadian-born workers, according to a recent TD Economics Report. This, coupled with spiralling urban land prices, means that the newcomer of 2012 does not have nearly the economic freedom as the newcomer of 1992. “Although the term ‘ghettoes’ is rarely used in Canada, the concentration of immigrants into ethnic enclaves is similarly often caused by economic factors,” wrote Alex Lovell, a professor of geography at York University, in an email to the Post.

The result, critics fear, is that poorer, far-flung, constantly replenished enclaves have become more susceptible to isolation. Even better-off immigrants have tended to settle in prosperous suburbs filled largely with people of the same background, served by media and merchants focused on one community.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney, under whose watch more than a million newcomers have claimed Canadian citizenship, can often be seen mounting podiums at Chinese restaurants and Indian business associations calling for greater integration. “We don’t want to create a bunch of silo communities where kids grow up in a community that more resembles their parents’ country of origin than Canada,” he said in 2009.

In 2009, a planning firm hired by the city of Calgary ignited outrage when it called for the city to discourage “Asian’’ malls that cater only to a specific ethnic group” on the grounds that it “marginalized ethnic enclaves.” Amid a torrent of complaints from Calgary’s 67,000-strong Asian community, the city omitted the offending passage from the report. “I understand why certain people are concerned about it,” said Tom Leung, the firm’s Chinese-descent president told Postmedia in 2009. “I’m a very strong supporter of the Asian community. But we also have to take a look at the commercial realities.”

Mr. Leung need not have mentioned it. Behind the scenes, the wheels of integration were already spinning. This year, more than 6% of Calgary marriages will be interracial — higher than the national average. Notorious as a centre for white supremacist rallies and marches, in 2010 Calgary also became the first major Canadian city to elect a Muslim mayor, Naheed Nenshi. The son of Tanzanian immigrants, Mr. Nenshi came of age in Calgary’s minority-rich northeast quadrant.

At its height in the 1980s, the 10-block-long Greek section of Toronto’s Danforth Avenue was the largest Greektown in North America. Street merchants hawked spanakopita and lamb souvlaki outside Greek nightclubs and coffee shops — while Greek families filled the verandaed homes of the surrounding neighbourhood.

But lately, there are not a lot of Greeks left in Greektown. The sons and daughters of the Giannopolouses and the Rossos, well-versed in the language and steeped in Canadian culture, moved off to condos downtown and ranch houses in the suburbs — if they have even stayed in Toronto at all.

Every year, the four-lane avenue sees another Greek restaurant or cafe close up shop, soon replaced by a sushi restaurant or a high-end clothing boutique. Some are driven out by rising rents, others close their doors simply because a Canadian-born son has refused to take up the family business. As one Danforth business owner told blogTO.com last March, “I’m afraid the only thing still Greek in a couple of years will just be the signs.”

“As a planner, you’re always sorry when character dissipates,” said Mr. Beasley. “We all love the character of an ethnic area, but to some extent it’s a sign of social dysfunction rather than a sign of social integration,” he said.

Mr. Beasley points to the famous Chinatowns of the West Coast: Dense urban areas in Vancouver and Victoria fronted by ceremonial gates, hung with lanterns and peppered with mysterious alleys, basement cafes and winding former opium dens. They are “physically vivid” sectors of the city, but they are also the scars of ethnic segregation, said Mr. Beasley. In early 20th century British Columbia, Chinese were blocked from high-earning professions and had their children sent to separate schools. Locked out by mainstream society, their culture turned in upon itself and flourished.

But even these storied downtown landmarks may not be Chinese forever. “They’re all looking for alternative destinies for these neighbourhoods,” said Mr. Beasley, referring to the neighbourhood’s modern-day Chinese-Canadian owners. “They’re not saying ‘we’re holding this as Chinatown,’” he said.

Chinalands may share the same fate sooner than we think. In China and India, surging economies are increasingly absorbing the engineering and high-tech talent that once left to find work in Canada. Meanwhile, the Eurozone crisis is promising fresh waves of Irish, Icelandic and Greeks. Since 2009, Filipinos — to the tune of 30,000 per year — have trumped even the Chinese in Canadian citizenship oaths.

Within 15 years, even the daunting Chinese landscapes of Richmond could well be gentrified with hipsters and yuppies — or emblazoned with the text of some African or South American newcomer. Already, the neighbourhood’s veterans are pining to move on. “I’d like a more typical North American city and lifestyle, with not so many Chinese people,” Richmond resident Jeremy Lau, who came to Canada from Hong Kong in 1993, told Postmedia in October.

As it should be, said Mr. Beasley. “Ethnic neighbourhoods are a joy when you have them, and it’s a joy when you don’t have to have them,” he said.

SOURCE



11 February, 2012

The Hispanic vote

The article below argues that the Hispanic vote is up for grabs given disappointment with Obama. It ignores the fact that the GOP would alienate its base if it were more sympathetic to illegals.

So I think this election is really about turnout. Either a lot of Hispanics will stay home or a lot of conservatives will stay home. The stage is set for it to be Hispanics.

Although President Obama garnered overwhelming Latino support in the 2008 election, many Latino leaders have expressed concern with the president’s lack of zeal in fulfilling campaign promises (a recurring, disappointing theme across the entire demographic spectrum of Obama voters, including myself). One of the president’s pledges during the ’08 campaign that resonated with many Hispanic voters: a promise for comprehensive immigration reform that would include providing millions of undocumented Latinos, currently living in the United States, a path towards American citizenship or some type of legal status.

Truth be told, under President Obama’s administration deportations have risen by 30 percent than under his predecessor. As leaders of the traditionally liberal, Latino voting blocs in the West and Northeast began to ingest those numbers, the administration felt compelled last summer to reveal that ICE was now going to prioritize the deportation of convicted felons rather than focusing on the now infamous abuelitas that Newt Gingrich sought to protect from deportation during the Florida debates.

Common sense and a hint of political savvy would indicate that the door is ajar — enough for Republicans to barge in and press Obama on this issue, thereby courting moderate Latino voters and theoretically attracting more Latino votes, particularly in key states like Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico. Unfortunately, the immigration issue in the Republican primary debates had been reduced to echoing layers of jingoistic buzz words and simplistic rhetoric. This not only falls well short of holistically addressing the complex quandary of illegal immigration but also risks alienating Latino Republicans who are discouraged by their party’s shortsightedness.

Former state legislator Juan Carlos Zapata, a Republican, insightfully pointed out to me this week that “one of the major issues being ignored in the immigration debate is the significant economic contribution that the ‘illegal’ population already makes and could potentially increase if they were afforded a path to legal status. . . . On the flip side of that,” the Colombian American added, “no candidate is addressing the feasibility of rounding up over 11 million people and deporting them. What are those figures in terms of costs?”

Granted, in Florida, immigration status does not resonate that prominently as a campaign issue as it does in other parts of the country. That’s mostly because Puerto Ricans, who are concentrated in central Florida, are U.S. citizens at birth. Cuban immigrants, concentrated in South Florida, are granted political exile status and receive preferential treatment over all other nationalities in terms of their accessibility to American citizenship.

The Cuban Adjustment Act is an outdated, unfair Cold War-era relic. I’m hard pressed to believe that the bulk of Cubans arriving on our shores today are political refugees when one day and a year after attaining permanent U.S. residency many are hopping flights to visit Cuba, the very country that was so politically intolerable that they left it — but that is a different issue ripe for another day.

Raquel Regalado, a Cuban-American Republican and member of the Miami Dade School Board, says she’s concerned about the stance her party is taking on immigration because it does not tackle the real-life consequences of immigrants living in the shadows. “By not comprehensively addressing the issue of immigration, the problem seeps into most facets of our governing infrastructure — healthcare, education, you name it.”

Regalado and Zapata are among a cadre of Hispanic Republicans pressing their party leaders to cool it on the hurtful immigrant bashing and work on attracting Latino voters.

SOURCE





Immigration critics say governer is welcoming ‘illegal aliens’ to Florida

A Florida immigration restrictionist group put up a billboard this week saying Gov. Rick Scott is welcoming “illegal aliens” to Florida. Located near the Georgia border, the billboard reads: “Welcome Illegal Aliens: We offer jobs, free health care, education and welfare. Thank Governor Scott.”

Floridians for Immigration Enforcement, the group responsible for the billboard, writes: “This is a wakeup call for Florida Governor Rick Scott who promised Floridians he would work to get mandatory E-Verify enacted to protect our legal workers. He has remained silent and has failed to use the power of the Governor’s office to help get E-Verify enacted.” E-Verify is the electronic federal database used to verify if a job applicant is authorized to work in the U.S.

Floridians for Immigration Enforcement adds that it is time for Scott to fulfill his campaign promise and make E-Verify mandatory for all Florida employers, asking, “Will Florida Republican Leadership AGAIN Block E-Verify?” The group writes that state Rep. Gayle Harrell‘s bill filed early January that would require every private employer to use E-Verify “has yet to have a hearing in either the House or Senate.”

One of Scott’s first acts as governor was to sign an executive order requiring that all state agencies — and all companies that enter contracts with state agencies — use E-Verify to check the employment elligibility of their workers. Last May, Scott quietly issued another executive order which supersedes the one signed in January 2011. Scott said in August 2011 that the federal government needs to do its job: Secure the border, implement a national immigration policy and create a work visa program that actually works.

That same month, when he spoke at a conservative gathering, Scott delivered the same message adding that, “I tried to get an [immigration] bill passed last year. It got through the Senate. It didn’t make it through the House. It will happen this session.”

Immigrant advocate groups, opposed to measures like E-Verify, said this week that the employment authorization program is included in highly controversial immigration “attrition through enforcement” state laws in Alabama, Arizona and Georgia.

Opponents of E-Verify during Florida’s 2011 legislative session included business groups like the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Associated Industries of Florida, the Florida Chamber of Commerce and the Florida Fruit and Vegetable Association.

SOURCE



10 February, 2012

Immigration and Customs Enforcement Hires Officer to Chat With Detainees

In a time when America’s immigration system is swamped – when illegal immigrants are routinely caught and released, many of whom are dangerous – it seems that one of ICE’s top priorities is public relations with illegal immigration advocates. Yesterday, Andrew Lorenzen-Strait announced via the Department of Homeland Security website that he had been named ICE’s “first-ever public advocate.”

His job will be to “serve as a point of contact for individuals, including those in immigration proceedings, NGOs, and other community and advocacy groups, who have concerns, questions, recommendations or important issues they would like to raise.”

This new role, says Lorenzen-Strait, will help ICE “focus the agency’s immigration enforcement resources on sensible priorities” – code for doing less, since the Obama Administration consistently makes a big deal out of the notion that most illegal immigrants aren’t dangerous and therefore should be left to their own devices – and “implement policies and processes that priorities the health and safety of detainees in our custody.” And he has one more job, according to ICE Enforcement Director John Morton: he’ll have to explain to all of us why ICE lets illegal immigrants off the hook.

What did Lorenzen-Strait used to do? He’s been with ICE since 2008. Before that, he was a pro bono attorney in Maryland, doing child advocacy and divorce work via Community Legal Services. How does that qualify you for working in immigration, exactly? And then there’s the question of money spent. It’s more and more obvious these days that working for the government is the quickest road to a healthy paycheck – and Lorenzen-Strait’s salary proves it. In 2010, he was paid $112,224 by the feds. We can only imagine that the salary has risen since then. Not bad for being a public relations officer who does nothing to actually enforce immigration law.

We’re constantly hearing that the government has trouble finding places to cut spending. This seems like a good place to start.

SOURCE





Australia: $1bn to keep "asylum-seekers" in detention

THE Federal Government has been handed a $1 billion bill for the running of Australia's detention centres.

Foreign-owned global security company Serco secretly renegotiated its contract with the Department of Immigration just before Christmas.

The new four-year contract to manage immigration detention centres - including Maribyrnong in Melbourne - has quadrupled from the original figure of $280 million.

The Opposition labelled the blowout a failed "stimulus program" for asylum seekers. The number of detention centres has increased from 12 to 20 under Labor.

While the centres accommodate visa overstayers and illegal workers, the Government admits they make up a small number compared with asylum seekers.

"When Labor came to office there were just four people in detention who had arrived illegally by boat," Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said. "After four years of policy failures on our borders, this grew to more than 5600."

The variation to the contract with Serco - from 2009 to 2014 - was made on December 2 last year. It had been revalued in July last year to $712 million, meaning the cost blowout in the past nine months is almost $400 million.

"The original contract did not cover the number of sites we have now expanded to," Immigration Department spokesman Sandi Logan said. "It has been driven by a simple reason - the expansion in the number of centres in the network."

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said the new contract would not affect the Budget.

Greens senator Sarah Hansen-Young said boat people should be immediately released from detention into the community.

SOURCE



9 February, 2012

Fed appeals court halts deportation of 7 immigrants, puts new immigration directive to test

The 9th Circus thinks a memo is a law

A federal appeals court has put the Obama administration’s new immigration directive to the test by halting the deportation of seven immigrants alleged to be in the country illegally.

In a 2-1 ruling on Monday, the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals demanded the Obama administration explain whether the immigrants can avoid deportation because of two memos released last year by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John Morton urging prosecutors to use “discretion” when deciding whether to pursue immigration cases.

Morton’s initial memo in June said prosecutors should take into account such factors as U.S. military service, criminal records, family ties and length of stay in the country when deciding whether to start formal deportation proceedings against undocumented immigrants. He issued another in November explaining further how to implement the guidelines.

Since then, though, immigration advocates and lawyers have been complaining that prosecutors have been too slow to call off deportation proceedings of immigrants meeting the criteria. The advocates view the appeals court’s rulings as a call to action.

“There is a real concern that the (June) memo is not being utilized to its full extent,” said Laura Lichter, the next president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “It sounded great at the time, but we are waiting for real progress.”

The court ordered the Obama administration to make a prosecution decision on seven people in five cases by March 19. The immigrants involved all appeared to have clean criminal records and appeared to meet the criteria of the memos, the appeals court judges concluded. The same three-judge panel had previously upheld deportation orders of all seven of the immigrants before Judges William Canby Jr. and Raymond Fisher agreed to reconsider the cases Monday in light of the new memos.

The identical two-paragraph order halting deportation proceedings in the five cases prompted a blistering dissent from Judge Diarmuid F. O’Scannlain and charges of “judicial activism” from a prominent Republican congressman.

“The Ninth Circuit’s decision to put five deportation cases on hold is an overreach of judicial authority and shows the inherent danger in the Obama administration’s backdoor amnesty policies,” said Rep. Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who chairs the House’s Judiciary Committee. “The Ninth Circuit has a history of legislating from the bench and now they have turned the Obama administration’s prosecutorial discretion guidelines into an excuse for their judicial activism.”

O’Scannlain chided Judges Canby and Fisher for issuing an order he called an “audacious ruling” and said the judges lacked the authority to make such demands of prosecutors.

“The memoranda cited by the majority offer only internal guidance within the executive branch and squarely disclaim any suggestion that they might create any rights or benefits enforceable by the judiciary,” O’Scannlain wrote.

The American Immigration Lawyers Association says a survey it conducted in November showed that ICE’s 28 offices were applying the new guidelines in varying degrees, causing confusion for immigrants, their attorneys and even prosecutors handling the cases. The Association claimed that many of the offices weren’t using the guidelines at all.

The Obama administration says it wants to focus deportation proceedings on gang members, criminals and others thought to be more dangerous than pregnant woman, students and long-time residents with no criminal history.

ICE officials declined comment, other than to say Wednesday that “the agency is currently working with the Department of Justice to draft an appropriate response, which will be filed in due course with the court.”

SOURCE






California immigration crackdown campaign to enlist American Legion members

Continuing a 93-year fight to control immigration, American Legion leaders are rallying military veterans to convince California voters they should require police to enforce federal immigration law.

"This country is for people who are here legally, who are born here, not for people who came here illegally, who kind of snuck in," said Bill Siler, adjutant of California's American Legion branch.

The Concord resident is co-sponsoring an initiative to keep it that way and plans to enlist help from the 88,780 Legionnaires statewide to help collect the more than half-million signatures needed to put it on the November ballot.

Although better known for its veteran advocacy, devotion to flag etiquette, baseball leagues and patriotic youth programs, the American Legion has lobbied for stricter immigration rules since its founding after World War I.

The group in 1920 won 75 percent of the vote for its first California proposition, strengthening state laws denying Japanese immigrants the right to own land.

The Legion then helped persuade Congress to pass national immigration quotas in 1924 and has sought immigration moratoriums and heightened enforcement every decade since.

"The American Legion, since its inception in 1919, has expressed concern that legal and illegal immigrants arriving in this country in large numbers would be unable to effectively assimilate into our society unless numerical quotas were established and enforced,"

This latest California volley aims, in part, to block liberal Bay Area counties from interfering with federal immigration prerogatives. It would require all counties to fully enforce Secure Communities, the network that alerts immigration agents whenever police book a deportable immigrant at a city or county jail.

"If they go to jail, it takes our taxpayer money to keep them here," Siler said. "If they are here illegally, they should be deported."

The measure would also deny driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants, which is already California law but in danger, according to proponents. And it would order sheriffs of the 20 counties with the worst cross-border gang activity to devote more resources to immigration enforcement.

Hundreds of the veterans voted to support it at their state convention in June.

"Hopefully they'll be the ones to get out the signatures to get it on the ballot," Siler said. If not, "I guess that will be the end of it."

Initiative author and co-sponsor Ted Hilton of San Diego has been drafting immigration control ballot measures since the early 1990s.

Voters have not been supportive of such drives in recent years.

* Hilton's 2009 proposal to revoke automatic citizenship for the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants failed to find enough signatures.

* A Belmont Republican's 2010 initiative modeled on Arizona's immigration crackdown found too few voters willing to put it on the ballot.

* Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Claremont, last month fell about 57,000 signatures short of qualifying a measure to revoke a law allowing financial aid for undocumented college students.
But none of those had a veterans organization promising heavy involvement.

"We have over 490 posts, local units up and down the state," said Siler, a 69-year-old Vietnam War Navy veteran who joined the American Legion 33 years ago and has managed the California branch for six years.

The Secretary of State's Office on Jan. 31 cleared the initiative for circulation. Proponents need 504,760 registered voters -- almost six times the Legion's declining statewide membership -- to sign the petition by June 28.

They call it the Protection Against Transnational Gangs Act and say it may block Santa Clara, Santa Cruz and San Francisco counties from refusing to hold some immigrant inmates for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

"The criminal element, certainly they're going to go to states where there are more sanctuary ordinances or to counties with policies like Santa Clara County," Hilton said.

Most immigrants living in the U.S. illegally are neither gang members nor criminals and to call the immigration initiative an anti-gang measure may confuse voters about what it would actually do, said Pratheepan Gulasekaram, a Santa Clara University law school professor.

"It's a very shrewd move. Who doesn't want there to be less gang activity?" Gulasekaram said. The added enforcement would cost millions of dollars annually, according to the state's independent analysis.

Joining Siler and Hilton as a sponsor is conservative stalwart Tirso del Junco, an 86-year-old retired surgeon who led the California Republican Party in the early 1980s and was a University of California regent. He plans to tout the measure at the Feb. 24 through 25 statewide GOP convention in Burlingame.

It will be a tough sell even if the measure makes the ballot, Gulasekaram said.

"This sort of stuff tends to get passed only when you have the right partisan conditions, when you have a Republican-dominated electorate and a Republican-dominated Legislature, which we don't have in California."

SOURCE



8 February, 2012

Killer's 'family life' plea is thrown out meaning Nepalese thug CAN be removed from Britain

Judges have quashed a notorious ruling which allowed a Nepalese killer with no wife or children to stay in the UK to protect his right to a family life. Campaigners hope the ruling in the case of Rocky Gurung will be the first step towards restoring some common sense to the country’s deportation and human rights laws.

Gurung was one of a group of thugs who killed an innocent man by throwing him into the Thames on a drunken night out. The victim, Bishal Gurung – no relation – was the son of a hero Gurkha.

The Home Secretary wanted to remove the killer from the UK once he had served his jail sentence for what the trial judge called ‘wanton and inexcusable violence’. But, in a judgment that provoked outrage, the Upper Tribunal of the asylum and immigration court ruled that deporting Gurung would breach Article 8 of Labour’s Human Rights Act – the right to a family life.

His parents live in Britain, and he successfully argued that if he were deported, his father would have to go with him to look after him, breaking up his family here.

Critics said it marked an alarming extension in the scope of Article 8, which is blocking more than one deportation every day.

Now, the three senior Appeal Court judges have overturned the tribunal’s verdict.

They said the tribunal seemed to have spent its time looking for reasons why they shouldn’t deport Gurung, now 23. A different panel will look at the case afresh. Gurung will remain here while it is considered.

Last night, the verdict was welcomed by Tory Dominic Raab, the MP who represents the victim’s family. He said: ‘This ruling highlights the shambles in our deportation system. The immigration tribunal allows far too many serious criminals to avoid deportation on inflated human rights grounds.’

The Appeal Court judgment describes Gurung, who was given indefinite leave to remain in Britain in 2005, as a ‘physically fit and intellectually sound young man who had lived in Nepal in the past’. It went on: ‘There was no objective need for his father to return with him, save perhaps briefly, if he was now deported there.’

Bishal Gurung, 23, was a waiter whose father served with the Gurkhas for 16 years. In April 2008, Bishal was chased along the Embankment in London by up to 15 men before being forced to the ground and kicked repeatedly in the head, then hurled into the Thames.

Following a trial in 2009, Rocky Gurung was convicted of manslaughter, along with an associate, and jailed for three years.

SOURCE





Recent posts at CIS below

See here for the blog. The CIS main page is here.

1. Is President Obama Right About Engineers? Significant Numbers Unemployed or Underemployed (Memorandum)

2. Mr. President, we must not allow an engineer gap! (Op-ed)

3. Proposal: Let's Let the Spouses Help Finance the 'Best and the Brightest' (Blog)

4. Abuses in Summer Work Travel Program Extend far Beyond Hershey and CETUSA (Blog)

5. Attrition Through Enforcement: A Workable Plan (Blog)

6. Another Precinct Reporting – Cayman Islands Ups Investments Needed for Visas (Blog)

7. The Kansas Amnesty Plan (Blog)

8. When Lobbyists Write Bills (Blog)

9. The Food Stamp Program Rewards Households with Illegal Aliens (Blog)

10. More Drivel from the Crank (Blog)

11. The President and a Senator Join the H-1B Controversy (Blog)

12. Fact-Free Fact Check on H-1B (Blog)

13. Case History: The Complications Once Deportation Is Ordered (Blog)

14. Jorge Ramos and Mitt Romney's Nationality (Blog)

15. We're Still Waiting (Blog)

16. Alien Workers Who Do Not Pay FICA in the Islands and on the Mainland (Blog)



7 February, 2012

Singapore crackdown gets results

Focusing on those likely to be sympathetic to illegals

The number of immigration offenders arrested continued its steady decline, as the number of overstayers and illegal immigrants caught last year fell.

However, attempts at smuggling in contraband items at the checkpoints reached a record high last year, according to numbers released by the Immigration and Checkpoints Authority (ICA) yesterday.

The number of illegal immigrants arrested fell 35 per cent from 1,430 in 2010 to 930 last year, while the number of overstayers registered a decline of 23 per cent, from 2,830 in 2010 to 2,180 last year.

Overall, the number of immigration offenders fell from 5,560 in 2009 to 3,110 last year.

The ICA said the number of immigration offenders arrested has been steadily declining since 2001, thanks to "thorough examinations and tightened security" at the checkpoints.

The number of vehicles seized for conveying immigration offenders has also generally been on a downward trend since 2001, and dropped by more than half from 18 in 2010 to seven last year.

Also down was the number of people caught harbouring and employing immigration offenders last year, dropping by almost half from 77 in 2010 to 40. Similarly, the number of employers arrested also fell from 26 in 2010 to 23 last year.

The ICA said it has adopted a more focused approach to reach out on harbouring, targeting housing agents, grassroots leaders, students as well as senior citizens.

SOURCE





Greece to build £2.5million six-mile razor wire wall to block worst illegal immigration route into Europe

The busiest crossing point for illegal immigrants into Europe is set to be blocked with a new £2.5million razor wire wall. Greek authorities plan to erect the six mile, 13ft high double fence, on an area bordering Turkey which sees an average of 245 people per day crossing illegally, the EU's border agency Frontex's figures show. And according to latest estimates, around 90 per cent of all illegal immigrants into the EU have come through Greece.

Once inside Europe's visa-free Schengen zone, people are free to travel unchecked through internal borders, and many travel on to the UK.

Greece has been warned that failure to step up border controls would leave the country at risk of being expelled from the Schengen zone.

Speaking to reporters while inaugurating a new police command centre on the border, Public Order Minister Christos Papoutsis told reporters: 'This is an opportunity for us to send a clear message ... to all the EU, that Greece is fully compliant with its border commitments.' 'Traffickers should know that this route will be closed to them. Their life is about to get much harder.'

Papoutsis said work on the fence which will stretch between the villages of Kastanies and Nea Vyssa in the Evros border region, near the north eastern town of Orestiada, would begin next month. It should be linked to a network of fixed night-vision cameras providing real-time footage to the new command center.

Most of Greece's 125-mile border with Turkey is delineated by the Evros River - called the Meric River in Turkey - but the fence will cover a short stretch where the two countries are divided by land.

Greece is already receiving emergency assistance at the Evros border from the EU border protection agency, Frontex.

Despite police efforts to seal the border, illegal immigrants continued to walk across. Three men spotted walking across the frontier in torrential rain told The Associated Press that they had come from strife-torn Syria. 'We've been walking for seven days,' said one of the men, who only identified himself as Said, 24, but gave no other details. 'I'm trying to reach an uncle of mine who lives in Hungary.'

Mr Papoutsis' plans for a strengthened border have been controversial in the past with the European Commission critcising them as a 'short-term measure' that did not deal with the root of the problem. Last year he had said the wall was a necessary measure after more than 100,000 people illegally entered the Mediterranean nation in the previous 12 months.

He added: 'The Greek public has reached its limit in taking in illegal immigrants. We are absolutely determined on this issue. Greece can’t take it anymore.'

SOURCE



6 February, 2012

A line of would-be immigrants? There isn’t one

The following is an interesting and reasonable setting-out of the existing legal position but I think that both sides of politics envisage new Federal legislation

IN THE VENOMOUS debate over illegal immigration, there is a point of agreement between President Obama and some of his would-be Republican rivals, including former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney. They’d like to see undocumented immigrants “get to the back of the line” for citizenship. Unfortunately, that convergence of views distorts rather than illuminates the debate.

Granted, Mr. Obama and Mr. Romney have different ideas of how the “line” would work. The president doesn’t seem inclined to force unauthorized immigrants to leave the country before applying for legal status. Mr. Romney thinks it would be nice if they somehow “self deported,” then lined up back home for legal re-entry to America. In the end, the distinction is meaningless — because there is no line, not even a relevant visa category, for millions of immigrants.

Here’s why. A large majority of the 11 million illegal immigrants are unskilled or low-skilled Mexicans. Many of them have no relatives over age 18 who are either U.S. citizens or permanent residents in possession of green cards.

That makes them ineligible for any realistic visa category. They are barred in most cases from employment-based visas, which favor skilled and well-educated applicants, and from family-based visas, which require applicants to have spouses, parents or siblings who are U.S. citizens or hold green cards. (Even the “line” for those visas often takes 15 to 20 years or more.) There is simply no immigrant visa category for which most unskilled Mexicans qualify and no realistic prospect they could be legally admitted to the United States. About half of the unauthorized adults in the country are Mexicans who probably have no category for admission, according to Pew Hispanic Center senior demographer Jeffrey S. Passel.

However, there will continue to be a demand for their labor. At least 7 million illegal immigrants are in the American work force, in many cases doing jobs most Americans consider too dirty or unsuited to their educational attainment. (A half-century ago, about half of American men dropped out of high school to seek unskilled work; today just 10 percent do.)

There is a tiny number of “other worker” immigrant visas for which Mexicans may apply. But those applications take several years and require employer sponsorship. And no employer would go through the time and expense of sponsorship for an unskilled worker.

It is possible to argue that the United States should shift away from family-based visa preferences toward employment-based ones or that it should create a new category of visas for skilled or unskilled “fortune seekers,” who, like millions before them, want to come to America because of its record of rewarding hard work and hustle.

Likewise, we would like to see an improved guest worker program, one that offered American employers some reasonable prospect of filling jobs with adequate numbers of immigrant employees in a timely way. But as things stand now, those things don’t exist.

On the campaign trail, it may sound tough or fair or common-sensical to demand that illegal immigrants “get to the back of the line.” In fact, it is a convenient fiction, a trope designed more to obfuscate than resolve a policy mess that politicians find too hard to tackle.

SOURCE





SC goes to court of appeal over immigration law

On December 22, 2011, a judge for the U.S. District Court for the District of South Carolina issued a preliminary injunction blocking the enforcement of key provisions of the South Carolina immigration statute. Last month, South Carolina Attorney General Alan Wilson (left) filed papers in the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals requesting that court reverse the lower court’s ruling.

Wilson represents the Palmetto State in its defense of the immigration law passed last year. The challenge to the law’s constitutionality was filed by a group of civil rights organizations and the U.S. Department of Justice.

Of the 20 sections of the South Carolina law, four of them were challenged and, since the ruling handed down in December by District Court Richard Gergel, are now temporarily enjoined from being carried out. These four include provisions which that state criminal sanctions for: “harboring and transporting of unlawfully present persons”; “failure to carry alien registration materials”; “the creation of fraudulent identification documents”; and the directive to state and local law enforcement officials to “determine the immigration status of certain persons encountered in routine traffic stops and other contacts in which there is a ‘reasonable suspicion’ that the person may be in the United States unlawfully.”

The civil rights groups challenging the law argue that enforcement of the law requires de facto racial profiling. The Justice Department argues that the Constitution places all power over the establishment of immigration policy in the hands of the federal government and that the legislature of South Carolina is thus preempted from passing legislation in that area of the law.

The argument is that once the feds have “occupied the field” of this or that area of the law or policy, no other government (state or local) may trespass therein. In short, the Obama administration insists that the federal government has such a compelling interest in establishing laws and policies in a certain area, any legislation in that area passed by another entity (the legislature of South Carolina in this case) would interfere with the enforcement of the federal statutes.

According to the complaint filed by the Justice Department, the South Carolina law, if enforced, would unlawfully conflict with federal immigration statutes and would contribute to a patchwork of state and local laws many of which would contradict currently operative federal immigration policies and principles.

Specifically, the filing claims: "In our constitutional system, the federal government has preeminent authority to regulate immigration matters and to conduct foreign relations. This authority derives from the Constitution and numerous acts of Congress."

Nowhere, however, has the government been able to point to the exact location in the Constitution where there is found exclusive congressional authority to regulate immigration.

The enumeration in the Constitution of specific powers delegated to the federal government is the cornerstone of American political theory and of the constitutional Republic established in 1787. The basic definition of enumerated powers is that the best limitation on power is to not give it in the first place. Powers, as understood by Madison, Jefferson, et al., were only legitimate if they had been granted to the government by the people and written specifically in the document through which the governed gave life to the government — the Constitution.

More HERE



5 February, 2012

Is President Obama Right about Engineers?

Significant Numbers Unemployed or Underemployed

During a recent video chat session, President Obama told a woman that he could not understand why her engineer husband was unemployed because “industry tells me that they don’t have enough highly skilled engineers.” However, data from the American Community Survey collected by the Census Bureau show that there are a total of 1.8 million U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who are either unemployed, out of the labor market, or not working as engineers. This is true for those with many different types of engineering degrees.

The 2010 American Community Survey shows:

* There are 101,000 U.S.-born individuals with an engineering degree who are unemployed.

* There are an additional 243,000 U.S.-born individuals under age 65 who have a degree in engineering but who are not in the labor market. This means they are not working nor are they looking for work, and are therefore not counted as unemployed.

* In addition to those unemployed and out of the labor force, there are an additional 1.47 million U.S.-born individuals who report they have an engineering degree and have a job, but do not work as engineers.

* President Obama specifically used the words “highly skilled.” In 2010, there were 25,000 unemployed U.S.-born individuals with engineering degrees who have a Master’s or PhD and another 68,000 with advanced degrees not in the labor force. There were also 489,000 U.S.-born individuals with graduate degrees who were working, but not as engineers.

* Relatively low pay and perhaps a strong bias on the part of some employers to hire foreign workers seems to have pushed many American engineers out their profession.

* There are many different types of engineering degrees. But unemployment, non-work, or working outside of your field is common for Americans with many different types of engineering degrees (View detailed employment figures for specific types of engineers).

* The key policy question for the United States is how many foreign engineers should be admitted in the future. Contrary to President Obama’s statement, the latest data from the Census Bureau indicate there is a very large supply of American-born engineers in the country. It would be better for the president to seek more diverse sources of information than simply relying on “industry” to determine what is going on in the U.S. labor market.

Data Source: Figures for the above analysis come from a Center for Immigration Studies analysis of the public-use file of the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. Figures on degrees and employment are based on self-reporting in the survey and have been rounded to their nearest thousand. The survey asks about undergraduate degrees, so some of the individuals who have a Master’s or PhD may not have their graduate degree in engineering. Also, those who indicated that they have a “professional degree” are not included in the discussion of those with Master’s and PhDs because a large share have law degrees. The 2010 data is the most recent ACS available.

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. Contact: Steve Camarota, 202-466-8185, sac@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States. The Center for Immigration Studies is not affiliated with any other organization




Japan has illegal immigration problems too

But tiny compared to most other prosperous countries

The number of foreign nationals detained by immigration officials for one year or more has dropped significantly since a more flexible approach was adopted in response to harsh criticism of long-term detentions, according to the Justice Ministry.

As of August, 167 foreigners at immigration facilities in Ibaraki, Osaka and Nagasaki prefectures had been held for at least six months, the ministry said Friday.

Many of them are believed to have overstayed their visas and were waiting to be deported or were seeking asylum in Japan.

Those who had been held for at least one year totaled 47, down sharply from 115 at the end of 2009. The ministry said that since July 2010 it has been actively releasing people who are subject to deportation when it sees no need to keep them in custody.

The United Nations in 2007 criticized Japan's long-term detention of immigrants and recommended shorter periods of confinement, following a rash of suicides and hunger strikes at domestic immigration centers.

Support groups and lawyer associations have repeatedly called on the government to make improvements in the treatment of detainees. They argue that people held at immigration centers receive poor medical care, even though some detainees are suffering from serious illnesses.

Faced with claims that it was taking too long to conduct asylum reviews, the Justice Ministry adopted a target of processing them within six months.

As a result, the number of cases without any decision to grant asylum after six months dropped to 35 as of March 31 last year, a dramatic drop from the 612 cases at the end of June 2010.

In terms of the time taken to review asylum cases, immigration officials spent an average of 12.6 months between July and September 2010 and 14.4 months between October and December 2010 per case. But the periods were curtailed to 4.7 months and 5.2 months in the same periods last year.

SOURCE



4 February, 2012

Supreme Court to hear Arizona immigration arguments April 25

The U.S. Supreme Court said on Friday it will hear arguments on April 25 on the power of states to adopt tough immigration laws, concluding the term's scheduled oral arguments with a major case pitting Arizona against the Obama administration.

The high court released on Friday its April calendar, listing immigration and other cases scheduled to be heard in its final argument sitting for the current term, which began in October and ends in late June.

At issue is whether federal immigration laws take precedence and pre-empt Arizona's controversial law that gives local police broad new powers to crack down on illegal immigrants.

The Supreme Court in December agreed to hear Arizona's appeal arguing the law should be allowed to take effect. It was expected that oral arguments would be held in late April, but the exact date was not known until Friday.

Election-year rulings in the immigration case and on President Barack Obama's sweeping healthcare overhaul are both expected by late June, in the middle of the president's campaign for re-election.

A decision upholding Arizona's law would be a legal and political setback for Obama, who has strongly criticized it. A decision striking down the law would be a defeat for Arizona Republican Governor Jan Brewer, who had a testy airport exchange with Obama last month.

The immigration arguments are expected to be the usual one hour.

The Supreme Court case is Arizona v. United States, No. 11-182.

SOURCE





Australia: Another sinking renews 'stop the boats' call

OPPOSITION immigration spokesman Scott Morrison says efforts in the Malaysia boat disaster are focused on "recovery and rescue". At least eight asylum seekers were found dead early yesterday after their boat capsized off southern Malaysia while en route to Australia. Grave fears are held for about six others who are missing. Thirteen people made it to shore.

"The effort at the moment always has to focus on recovery and rescue," Mr Morrison said in Sydney today.

He said the Coalition remained committed to its policy of reopening the detention centre on Nauru, the reintroduction of temporary protection visas (TPVs) and the towing of boats back to Indonesia. "That is the policy that's proven, that is the policy that's strong and that's the policy that should be restored to stop the boats," he said.

Mr Morrison said there would be no more talks with the Government about resurrecting the offshore processing of asylum seekers. "There is no further talks because the Government has refused to change the legislation," he said.

"The Government clearly has been seeking to do nothing other than trash the Nauru option with their ridiculous costings, which have been lampooned around the country. "They have no serious intention of destroying temporary protection visas, we know they won't turn the boats back."

This week's boat accident comes two months after more than 200 asylum seekers drowned when their vessel sank after leaving for Australia from East Java in Indonesia.

SOURCE



3 February, 2012

Migrants seeking a life in Britain will be asked: Can you make the country better?

Migrants seeking permission to enter Britain must prove they will ‘add to the quality of life’ and not become ‘dependent’ on state support, a minister will say today.

Immigration minister Damian Green will say it is time for a major overhaul of the system left behind by Labour.

He will tell an audience in London: ‘We need to know not just that the right numbers of people are coming here, but that the right people are coming here. People who will benefit Britain, not just those who will benefit by Britain.’

The minister will also criticise the idea of migrants coming to Britain to claim benefits, saying: ‘Importing economic dependency on the State is unacceptable. Bringing people to this country who can play no role in the life of this country is equally unacceptable.’

Mr Green will set out the case for becoming more ‘selective’ about which non-EU citizens are granted a visa to work, study or marry.

He says the debate so far has focused on the Government’s pledge to reduce net migration – the number entering the country, compared to those leaving – from 250,000 last year to the ‘tens of thousands’. But Mr Green argues it is now time also to focus on exactly who is coming here and what they have to contribute.

He will tell the Policy Exchange think-tank: ‘What we need is a national consensus on how we can make immigration work for Britain. We are evidently a long way from such a consensus but I want to start to build it.’

Mr Green, saying the country wants entrepreneurs and exceptional artistic and scientific talent, will add: ‘Britain does not need more migrant middle managers, any more than it needs unskilled labour.’

A string of policy announcements are imminent from Home Secretary Theresa May.

New controls on the spouses of immigrants entering Britain will require them to prove they can speak a certain amount of English, and that they will not be reliant upon benefits. The family will be expected to show they have a household income of up to £26,000 a year.

In a separate move, foreign workers will not be permitted to remain unless they have special skills or investment capital.

Britain will have to find room for three million more people by 2025 even if not a single new immigrant comes here, official estimates revealed yesterday.

The population will grow relentlessly to nearly 65.3million by then, largely because of the impact on the birthrate of mass immigration over the past decade and a half.

Just finding somewhere to put the additional three million people would require three cities the size of Birmingham.

The continuing effects of the large-scale immigration under Labour were set out in Office for National Statistics projections of likely population levels. Without taking any new migrants into account, numbers are predicted to rise from the 2010 population estimate of 62,262,000 to 65,292,000 in 2025. If net migration is 200,000 a year, the 70million mark would be reached in 2027.

SOURCE






Immigration is not just a numbers game – it’s about culture, too

Immigration stirs strong passions. But in Britain the debate about it can be rather confused. During the last election, a friend canvassed a finger-jabbing gentleman who said that he would be voting Liberal Democrat because “Nick Clegg will kick out all the immigrants”.

Most people know the difference between Nick Clegg and Nick Griffin. But do we know what immigration policy we want? Most of us – though fewer than in recent years – back some immigration. Since 1997, the share of our workforce born outside the United Kingdom has doubled from 7 per cent to 14 per cent. Net immigration rose from zero in 1992 to nearly a quarter of a million last year, when half a million people arrived but only half that number left.

The Government is trying to control overall numbers. But voters also want people who will fit in and contribute. Yesterday, Damian Green, the Immigration Minister, gave a speech exploring how to make immigration rules do those two things. He floated the idea that economic migrants might have to earn some kind of minimum salary – perhaps between £31,000 and £49,000 a year.

In this respect, his speech reflects an important change of approach. The Labour administration argued that migration expanded the economy, and had no impact on jobs. The new Government says it is interested not in the total size of the economy, but in the living standards of current residents.

In January, a report from the Migration Advisory Committee looked at whether non-EU immigration improved the welfare of current residents. It concluded that this question was impossible to answer at the moment. How do you compare the effects on jobs, tax, spending, congestion and so on? The report did, however, challenge the idea that migration has no impact on the labour market.

In the long run, migrants don’t “take” anyone’s job. The economy creates new jobs all the time. But it can take a while for this to happen, particularly in a recession. The MAC found that between 2005 and 2010, Britain gained an extra 700,000 working-age migrants from outside the EU. It thought this had reduced the employment of natives by about 130,000. However, they said the same effect might not occur in a period of stronger growth. To put this in context, there are 25 million UK‑born workers, so migrants reduced native employment by half of 1 per cent.

Limiting economic migration to those with better-paying jobs is one way to try to make it more likely that the net effect of immigration is positive for living standards. You might expect migrants with well-paying jobs to have a better chance of fitting in, but other things might help with this, too. For example, the Government has introduced an English language test for spouses, and is considering a test of their attachment to the country. It is also considering a rule that would prevent people on low incomes from bringing spouses. But it is treading warily because of human rights law. Judges recently struck down rules banning spouses aged under 21 from settling in Britain, introduced in a bid to reduce forced marriages.

For most people, culture is as important as numbers. So shouldn’t government also have a policy of integration once people have arrived? English language tuition might help them fit in. What about supplementary schools that mix children with others outside their community? Could housing policy avoid people becoming ghettoised? What kind of public events help people integrate?

The “citizenship test” under Labour became a joke, because it presented being British as if it was mainly about claiming benefits and knowing where the European Parliament meets. But what is Britishness, anyway? While the debate about immigration is becoming more sophisticated, the debate about Britishness and belonging has barely started.

SOURCE



2 February, 2012

Confused? Ron Paul said he doesn't support illegal immigration and said people who break the law should be punished. But he said he opposes any effort to round people up and ship them away

Republican presidential hopeful Ron Paul outlined his views on immigration Wednesday, saying he favors a compassionate policy that doesn't rely on "barbed-wire fences and guns on our border."

Paul spoke to several dozen people organized by Hispanics in Politics, Nevada's oldest Hispanic community group. The Texas congressman has scheduled several days of campaigning in Nevada before the state's caucuses Saturday.

Paul went into much greater detail on immigration policy than he has at most of his campaign stops. He typically steers clear of discussing rights for specific groups of people, insisting that his libertarian-leaning views apply to everyone as individuals.

But in Nevada, which is 26 percent Hispanic, Paul outlined an immigration policy far outside the Republican mainstream.

Paul blasted politicians who blame immigrants for causing the country's economic problems. He compared the situation to Nazi Germany's targeting of Jews in the 1930s.

"When things go badly, individuals look for scapegoats," Paul said. "Hispanics, the immigrants who have come in, are being used as scapegoats."

Paul said he doesn't support illegal immigration and said people who break the law should be punished. But he said he opposes any effort to round people up and ship them away.

"If an individual is found to be breaking the law, serious consideration should be given for them to return. But I would think 99 percent of people who come here come because they believe in the American dream," Paul said to applause.

Paul decried a punitive border policy, which said offended his belief in individual liberty.

"The one thing I have resisted and condemned: I do not believe that barbed-wire fences and guns on our border will solve any of our problems," he said.

Paul also said he was against laws that require immigrants to carry proof of legal status. He says he doesn't want to live in a country where people are required to carry identity papers.

"You say, `Well, this is only for illegals.' That's a bunch of baloney," Paul said. "How do you sort out illegals from legals? Unless you put papers and identification on everybody."

Hispanics in Nevada have favored Democrats over Republicans in recent election years -- a full 74 percent of Hispanics supported President Barack Obama in 2008 over GOP rival John McCain.

But Fernando Cortes, Paul's director of Hispanic outreach in Nevada, said many Hispanic voters had shown interest in Paul's message.

"They're always pandered to by the left and ignored by the right," Cortes said of Hispanic voters. "They're very motivated by the wanting of freedom back and a sound economy.

SOURCE




Alabama's Immigration Law to Cost State Millions in Lost Taxes, Study Says

These studies are only as good as the assumptions behind them. One wonders if the sharp drop in Alabama unemployment was factored in

Alabama's new immigration law is likely to cost the state tens of millions of dollars in lost taxes, says a new study.

The report by the Center for Business and Economic Research at the University of Alabama would cause 70,000 to 140,000 undocumented immigrants to lose jobs and would cost about $1.2 billion to $5.8 billion in the earnings of those immigrants as well as $56.7 million to $264.5 million in lost state income taxes and sales taxes.

"The cost is quite certain," said the center's director, Sam Addy. "It's simple economics. If you have more people you have a bigger economy, less people a smaller economy."

A sponsor of the immigration bill, Republican Rep. Micky Hammon of Decatur, disputed the report. "It's clear the study overestimates the negative and underestimates the positive to skew the result toward an agenda," he said. "If 40,000 illegal workers leave the state, they free up jobs that homegrown Alabamians are happy to have."

Hammon said the state's lower unemployment rate proves the immigration bill is working. "It doesn't take a PhD to see that since the law was signed unemployment has dropped from 10 percent to 8.1 percent," Hammon said. "In Marshall County, once a known hotbed for illegal immigration, unemployment has plunged from 10 percent in June to 6.9 percent last month." Statewide, the unemployment rate has dropped from 9.3 percent to 8.1 percent since January, 2011.

The report found that the economic costs of the new law outweigh the benefits. The report listed benefits of the new law and saving state funds used to provide benefits to undocumented immigrants and making more employment opportunities available to legal residents. But the report said the costs to the state include hurting the state's economic development effort and the cost of implementing and enforcing the law.

The sponsor of the bill in the Senate, Sen. Scott Beason, R-Gardendale, said the study does not take into account that many immigrant workers send much of what the earn to family members back home. "It's our understanding that a tremendous amount goes out of state," Beason said. The study estimates that 20 percent of undocumented workers "send their earnings to their home countries."

SOURCE



1 February, 2012

The Immigrant Investor (EB-5) Visa

A Program that Is, and Deserves to Be, Failing

The EB-5 investor visa, which allows a foreigner to invest in the United States in exchange for Legal Permanent Residence, has seen its requirements watered down by the Department of Homeland Security and Congress in an attempt to increase use of the program. The standards have been so debased that a Wall Street real-estate project in lower Manhattan is successfully claiming to be in a 'depressed area' in order to garner investments through the program, as reported recently by the New York Times.

A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies finds the program inherently flawed, and calls for its elimination or, failing that, for significant reforms. The report, 'The Immigrant Investor (EB-5) Visa: A Program that Is, and Deserves to Be, Failing', discusses the program's design, operation, and results. Author David North is a CIS fellow who has studied the interaction of immigration and the U.S. economy for more than 30 years.

This examination of the EB-5 program shows that, despite massive promotional efforts:
There are comparatively few takers, and only a fraction of them complete the process and get green cards;

No one, citizens or aliens, middlemen or workers, or the economy generally, seems to be getting much out of the program;

Many of the investments turn out to be bad ones, some scandalous; and

Other immigrant-receiving nations run much more rational programs than we do, while securing more significant investments, proportionately, from aliens.

The above is a press release from from Center for Immigration Studies. 1522 K St. NW, Suite 820, Washington, DC 20005, (202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076. Email: center@cis.org. Contact: Bryan Griffith, 202-466-8185, press@cis.org. The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution which examines the impact of immigration on the United States. The Center for Immigration Studies is not affiliated with any other organization




Canadians Are Divided on the Actual Effect of Immigration

Younger respondents endorse the concept of the “mosaic” while middle-aged and older Canadians prefer the “melting pot”

People in Canada are split when assessing immigration, and only three-in-ten believe the country should continue to be a mosaic, a new Angus Reid Public Opinion poll has found.

In the online survey of a representative sample of 1,005 Canadian adults, 39 per cent of respondents believe that immigration is having a positive effect in Canada, while 39 per cent think it is having a negative effect.

Views on Legal and Illegal Immigration

Since September 2010, the proportion of Canadians who think immigration is having a positive effect in the country has increased by five points. Respondents aged 18-to-34 are more likely to regard immigration in a positive light (48%) than middle-aged Canadians (33%) and those over the age of 55 (39%).

Two-in-five Canadians (41%) think the number of legal immigrants who are allowed to relocate in Canada should decrease, including almost half of respondents aged 35-to-54 (46%).

The views of Canadians on illegal immigration have hardened over the past 14 months. Half of respondents (50%, +6 since September 2010) believe illegal immigrants in Canada take jobs away from Canadian workers. In addition, only 23 per cent of respondents would allow illegal immigrants to stay in Canada and eventually apply for citizenship, while 50 per cent think illegal immigrants should be required to leave their jobs and be deported.

Multiculturalism

Three-in-five Canadians (62%) think multiculturalism has been good for the country, including 72 per cent of respondents aged 18-to-34. However, more Canadians (58%) are likely to endorse the concept of the melting pot—immigrants assimilating and blending into Canadian society—than the mosaic (30%), where cultural differences within society are valuable and should be preserved.

At least one-in-four respondents believe Canada is an intolerant society towards Muslims (33%), Aboriginal Canadians (28%) and immigrants from South Asia, such as India and Pakistan (25%). A third of Canadians (32%) believe that racism is a significant problem in Canada, while 55 per cent disagree with this view.

Analysis

The proportion of Canadians who believe immigration is having a negative effect in the country is the lowest in the past four years. The main source of hostility appears to be illegal immigration, with half of Canadians calling for unlawful workers to return to their country of origin. This level of support for the deportation of illegal immigrants is 11 points lower than what was observed in Britain in December 2011, but seven points higher than in the United States in December 2010.

Younger Canadians are more likely to back the idea of a “path to citizenship” for illegal workers, but sizeable majorities of middle-aged and older respondents reject this idea.

The positive views on multiculturalism drop markedly with age, from 72 per cent for those aged 18-to-34, to 63 per cent among those aged 35-to-54, and to 50 per cent for those over the age of 55. Middle-aged and older Canadians are also more likely to support the concept of the melting pot than the mosaic.

SOURCE






Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.


The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:

1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.

2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.

3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.

4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.

5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: You usually CAN buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.

6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.

I can be reached on jonjayray@hotmail.com -- or leave a comment on any post. Abusive comments will be deleted.