The primary version of this blog is HERE. The Blogroll. My Home Page. Email John Ray here. Other mirror sites: Greenie Watch, Political Correctness Watch, Education Watch, Dissecting Leftism, Food & Health Skeptic, Gun Watch, Socialized Medicine, Eye on Britain, Recipes, Tongue Tied and Australian Politics. For a list of backups viewable in China, see here. (Click "Refresh" on your browser if background colour is missing) See here or here for the archives of this site
****************************************************************************************
30 June, 2010
New from the Center for Immigration Studies1. Amnesty Advocates Discuss Legislative Strategy .
Excerpt: Legalization advocates had what sounded like a pretty frank discussion of their legislative strategy, at the 7th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference in Washington Friday.
The annual summertime gathering of pro-open borders policy wonks and some immigration lawyers took place at the Georgetown University Law School, and was sponsored by the Migration Policy Institute and the Catholic Immigration Network Inc.
********
2. Los Angeles City Council Hypocrisy Shines Through .
Excerpt: The Los Angeles City Council was quick to vote to boycott Arizona because of its new immigration law.
The Arizona law will encourage racial profiling, huffed the council’s Resolution.
It’s like Nazi Germany and the beginning of the Holocaust, puffed Council members.
‘As an American, I cannot go to Arizona today without a passport,’ exaggerated Councilman Ed Reyes. ‘If I come across an officer who’s having a bad day and feels that the picture on my ID is not me, I can be … deported, no questions asked. That is not American.’
********
Excerpt: The Pew Hispanic Center’s recent analysis of educational attainment data from the Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey finds that only one in ten Hispanic high school dropouts has a General Educational Development (GED) credential, the lowest among any major race/ethnic group.
As the author Richard Fry notes, this is significant since Hispanics have the highest dropout rates. ‘Some 41% of Hispanics ages 20 and older in the United States do not have a regular high school diploma, versus 23% of comparably aged blacks and 14% of whites.” This disparity is driven by the foreign born – 52 percent of adult Hispanic immigrants have dropped out of high school.
********
Excerpt: A group of senators sent a letter to the president this week to warn him against something that’s apparently being tossed around inside the administration: granting an amnesty unilaterally, without input from Congress. Apparently, this plan would apply only to visa overstayers and other illegals who’ve applied for green cards as a delaying tactic knowing they won’t qualify — but that would mean maybe 5 million people.
‘Deferred action’ and ‘parole’ aren’t the same as green cards and so don’t lead to citizenship, but they can be indefinite and they come with an Employment Authorization Document and a Social Security number, so they’re all the amnesty most illegals would ever need.
********
5. An Unlikely Third Path: Paying Unwanted Migrants to Go Home .
Excerpt: The talk about what to do with America’s illegal alien population has been focused on two alternatives: enforcement and legalization.
Stricter enforcement would, it is argued, deport some illegals, cause others to self-deport, and cause potential illegals to stay in their homelands.
********
6. Hip, Hip, Hoorah for Sen. Kyl .
Excerpt: Arizona’s junior senator, Jon Kyl, deserves credit for exposing President Obama’s position on immigration legislation: hold enforcement hostage to amnesty. Further, the senator deserves praise for standing his ground against the waves of hot air rolling his direction from the bully pulpit.
The dispute surrounds a conversation the senator and president had and that Sen. Kyl recounted at a town hall meeting. According to Kyl, ‘The president said the problem is if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform.’
********
7. No Amnesty, No Border Security? The Questionable Premises of an Immigration Grand Bargain .
Excerpt: Reports this past weekend depict a brutally frank exchange between President Obama and Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) about border control and amnesty legislation. Kyl reports that in a one-on-one meeting with the president they discussed securing the border in the context of pending legislation to enact ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’ Kyl reports the president as saying, ‘The problem is, . . . if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support ‘comprehensive immigration reform.” He, Kyl, then interprets this sentence to mean ‘In other words, they’re holding it hostage. They don’t want to secure the border unless and until it is combined with ‘comprehensive immigration reform.”
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. 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
29 June, 2010
Indians criticize tokenistic British restrictionsThe Tory government is hitting the wrong people. Legal Indian immigrants are hard-working people who make a positive contribution to the country by providing needed services. It is the flood of illegals from the Middle East and Afghanistan who are the problem. Their Muslim contempt for Western civilization and their high rate of welfare-dependancy should make them the first to go but there are nearly half a million of them who have had their asylum applications rejected but who are still in Britain — happily living off the British taxpayer
It was only a few months ago at the launch of a new India-UK group on climate change that the British Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, then leader of the Opposition, warned that not enough was being made of the “potential for the relationship between the two countries.”
That aspiration seemed a long way away, as the new British Home Secretary, Ms Theresa May, announced that it would be capping the number of workers entering the UK from outside the EU to 24,000 in the year to April 2011 — a 5 per cent drop on the year before.
“We understand that the immigration cap should not affect the movement of business professionals,” said the Union Commerce and Industry Minister, Mr Anand Sharma, at a Confederation of Indian Industry meet in London on Monday.
Nevertheless, he added that the Indian Government would be “mindful” of the British plan, he said ahead of a meeting with the Business Secretary, Mr Vincent Cable, a member of the Liberal Democrat party in the coalition government. Mr Sharma is also scheduled to meet Mr Cameron.
The British plan, which had been a key part of the Conservative Party’s election campaign but opposed by the Liberal Democrats, was swiftly condemned by Indian business leaders.
“We wouldn’t want to see the cap,” said Mr Chandrajit Banerjee, Director-General of the Confederation of Indian Industry, on the sidelines of the conference.
“We are trying to have a different type of engagement,” he said, adding that it would be difficult with the cap “to take the engagement to a new level.”
A press conference was scheduled to take place later on Monday evening to discuss the results of Mr Sharma’s meeting with the UK Government.
Even within the UK, the cap has created a storm, with business leaders warning that it could damage the country’s relations with India and China in particular at a time when the UK remained vulnerable, and access to top professionals from abroad within the workforce is seen as key to the economic recovery.
Even the Office of Budget Responsibility, set up by the new Government to provide independent forecasts and analysis, has pointed to the dangers of slower growth by 2014 thanks to labour supply shortages from changing demographics.
Ms May has rejected the threat to the UK recovery, insisting that the 5 per cent cap was a “temporary one” to ensure “we don’t get a rush of people trying to come through into the UK” before a more permanent cap is put in place.
The government has said it will conduct a “consultation” with business and other interested sectors to ensure that the cap doesn’t undermine business.
Beware of illegals bearing drugsGov. Jan Brewer said Friday that most illegal immigrants entering Arizona are being used to transport drugs across the border, an assertion that critics slammed as exaggerated and racist. Brewer said the motivation of “a lot” of the illegal immigrants is to enter the United States to look for work, but that drug rings press them into duty as drug “mules.”
“I believe today, under the circumstances that we’re facing, that the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in,” Brewer said.
“There’s strong information to us that they come as illegal people wanting to come to work. Then they are accosted and they become subjects of the drug cartel,” she said.
Brewer’s office later issued a statement in response to media reports of her comments. It said most human smuggling into Arizona is under the direction of drug cartels, which “are by definition smuggling drugs.”
“Unless Gov. Brewer can provide hard data to substantiate her claim that most undocumented people crossing into Arizona are ‘drug mules,’ she must retract such an outrageous statement,” said Oscar Martinez, a University of Arizona history professor whose teaching and research focuses on border issues. “If she has no data and is just mouthing off for political reasons, as I believe she is doing, then she must apologize to the people of Arizona for lying to them so blatantly.”
A Border Patrol spokesman said illegal immigrants do sometimes carry drugs across the border, but he said he couldn’t provide numbers because smugglers are turned over to prosecutors.
“I wouldn’t say that every person that is apprehended is being used as a mule,” spokesman Mario Escalante said from Tucson. “The smuggling organizations, in their attempts to be lucrative and to make more money, they’ll try pretty much whatever they need.”
T.J. Bonner, president of the union that represents border agents, said some illegal border-crossers carry drugs but most don’t. People with drugs face much stiffer penalties for entering the U.S. illegally, and very few immigrants looking for work want to risk the consequences, Bonner said.
“The majority of people continue to come across in search of work, not to smuggle drugs,” he said. “Most of the drug smuggling is done by people who intend to do that. That’s their livelihood.”
A spokesman for a human rights group said Brewer’s comments were “an oversimplification of reality.”
“We have some stories of people being forced to carry drugs,” said Jaime Farrant, policy director for Tucson-based Border Action Network. “We disagree with the assessment that people are crossing (to carry drugs). We have no evidence that’s the truth. We think most people come in search of jobs or to reunite with their families.”
28 June, 2010
UK to introduce cap on non-EU migrantsBritain will begin capping the number of non-European Union migrants coming into the country to live and work for the first time next month, according to Home Office sources. Only 24,100 workers will be allowed in between next month and April 2011 – a five per cent cut on the number who arrived in the same period last year.
The aim is to prevent a sudden influx in arrivals before a permanent annual limit, a key election pledge of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party, is introduced next year. “It’s not about cutting, it’s about preventing a rush,” a Home Office source said.
Home Secretary Theresa May will announce the measure next week along with a consultation on the annual limit, which was part of the coalition deal agreed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats after May elections.
There will be no restrictions on the number of migrants allowed to come in from an overseas company to a branch in Britain under the temporary cap, while other specific groups – such as elite sports people – will be exempt.
In 2008, net migration to Britain was 163,000. This was down from 233,000 in 2007 but the Conservatives vowed in their manifesto to cut this to levels seen in the 1990s when it was “tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands”. This figure includes EU migrants, over whom the government has no control because of the bloc’s open borders.
The electronic Dick wants immigration to Australia cut backAnd he’s putting his money where his mouth is. Dick Smith needs no introduction to most Australians. He is a famous patriot, adventurer, businessman and philanthropist: An Australian “living treasure” and perhaps the most admired person in the country.
His fear about Australia being able to feed a much larger popuulation is misplaced but there is no doubt that a much larger population would seriously degrade the quality of life in Australia. Recent large population increases have already done so — as most Australians find every day with slower and slower trips to work on congested roads
MILLIONAIRE former electronics guru Dick Smith will give $1 million cash to a young person who designs the best population plan for Australia.
The businessman yesterday was “delighted” that new Prime Minister Julia Gillard had announced she opposed a “Big Australia” and had created a ministry of sustainable population.
Mr Smith, fiercely opposed to immigration, said he would devote the rest of his life to educating other Australians, including politicians, about the need to keep the nation’s population from exploding.
“When we design an aircraft, it is built for 25 years of safety,” Mr Smith said. “But if we don’t have a safety plan for allowing the population to grow to 36 million by 2050, then we will all come crashing down. “That is why I am announcing a $1 million award for a person less than 25 years old to design a sustainability plan for our population,” he said.
The ABC will screen Mr Smith’s documentary on population in August, and the businessman said he would make other announcements at that time about incentives to limit the size of the nation.
There are now 22 million Australians and Mr Smith said if that number grew beyond 26 million, the nation could struggle to feed its own people. “I am going to commit the rest of my life to this issue, and to communicate to Australians that they need to wean themselves off constant growth in the economy, too,” he said.
Greater Melbourne grew by more than 93,000 people last year – the biggest increase of any capital, and fuelled by record high immigration.
27 June, 2010
Legal Architect Behind Arizona Law Becomes Sought-After Immigration GuruIllegal immigration crackdowns popping up across the country have a common thread: a 44-year-old constitutional law professor and former Bush administration attorney who crafted the legal framework behind Arizona’s controversial immigration law
Kris Kobach has become a sought-after figure for states and cities looking to replicate tough immigration statutes similar to Arizona’s new law, which gives unprecedented power to local police in questioning and detaining individuals they suspect are in the country illegally.
Kobach was the legal architect behind Arizona’s SB 1070, which is being challenged by the Obama administration. With that combination of cachet and infamy, he’s become the go-to guy for crafters of copycat laws, and he is putting his mark on legislation across the country, most recently in Fremont, Neb.
“I’ve been in touch with state representatives in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Alabama and Idaho,” Kobach said in an interview with FoxNews.com.
Kobach, of Kansas City, Mo., has paved a formidable path for himself in legal and political circles, positioning himself as a rising star within the Republican Party. He has at the same time attracted a host of critics, from lawmakers to civil libertarians who say his work promotes racial profiling.
Kobach’s crusade against illegal immigration began when he was working for the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks. Kobach helped create the “National Security Entry-Exit Registration System,” which required immigration officials to fingerprint and question more than 80,000 male visitors, most of whom were from Muslim countries. None was ever charged with terrorist activity, however, and the program was eventually cancelled.
After leaving the White House in 2003, the Harvard and Yale-educated attorney went on to assist local governments around the country on various immigration statutes, taking him from Hazleton, Pa., to Valley Park, Mo., to Farmers Branch, Texas.
But perhaps in no other place is his legal influence greater than in Arizona. In 2006, Kobach successfully defended an Arizona law that made immigrant smuggling a state crime. In 2007, Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce, the author of SB 1070, contacted him for assistance in drafting the Legal Arizona Workers Act, which ensures that no business in Arizona knowingly hires or employs illegal immigrants. His legal triumphs in defending the two statutes led to state officials recruiting his help in crafting SB 1070.
Aside from his legislative work, Kobach has also represented U.S. citizens as plaintiffs trying to prevent states from giving in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants.
Kobach has most recently come under fire for his role in drafting an ordinance in Fremont, Neb., that implements a ban on hiring or renting property to illegal immigrants. The measure, which passed Monday, sparked an outcry from local activists who say it has fueled anti-immigrant sentiments in a city that has only 1,995 Hispanics. “He has used our community for his own legal career and has peddled a failed idea of local enforcement of immigration laws,” said Kristin Ostrom, a local activist lobbying to overturn the ban.
Kobach is “whipping up a sentiment of fear of Hispanics and using the ruse of illegal immigration for his own agenda,” Ostrom said, adding that “the outcome of his work is a Hispanic community that does not feel welcome in Fremont.”
Critics have also pointed to Kobach’s past work with the Federation for American Immigration Reform — or FAIR — a group perceived by some as extremist.
Of the backlash of criticism over Arizona’s immigration law, Kobach said it’s politics — not issues over its legality — that are leading the charges against it. “I think the Obama administration’s reaction has been very surprising,” Kobach said of the pushback. “They sent the U.S. Attorney General out to comment on the law before he even read it, which was a big mistake and an irresponsible move on behalf of the administration.”
The White House confirmed last week that it plans to challenge Arizona’s law in court, arguing both that it will lead to racial profiling and that it’s the federal government’s responsibility to regulate immigration.
Critics, including the administration, have specifically pointed to language within SB 1070 that gives local law enforcement the right to detain individuals based on “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the U.S. illegally. Opponents argue that such a phrase is not clearly defined and will undoubtedly lead to racial profiling. Not so, counters Kobach, who says “reasonable suspicion” has been “defined or applied more than 800 times by the federal courts.” “That’s a frequently used phrase,” he said.
A professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, Kobach announced in May 2009 his intent to run for Kansas secretary of state, facing off against two Republicans. He summed up his ambition in such a position very simply: to “make a similar impact in stopping voter fraud as I have with illegal immigration.” [All power to him in that! --JR]
New Prime Minister puts the brakes on ‘big Australia’Prime Minister Julia Gillard is breaking free from one of her predecessor’s main policy stances by announcing she is not interested in a “big Australia”.
Former prime minister Kevin Rudd was in favour of population growth, with his government predicting it to hit around 36 million by 2050, largely through immigration. But Ms Gillard has indicated she will be putting the brakes on immigration in order to develop a more sustainable nation.
“Australia should not hurtle down the track towards a big population,” she told Fairfax. “I don’t support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say, a 40 million-strong Australia or a 36 million-strong Australia. We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia. “I support a population that our environment, our water, our soil, our roads and freeways, our busses, our trains and our services can sustain.”
But Ms Gillard says that does not mean putting a stop to immigration all together. “I don’t want business to be held back because they couldn’t find the right workers,” she said. “That’s why skilled migration is so important. But also I don’t want areas of Australia with 25 per cent youth unemployment because there are no jobs,” she said.
Mr Rudd installed Tony Burke as the Minister for Population, but in one of her first moves as Prime Minister, Ms Gillard has changed his job description to Minister for Sustainable Population. Mr Burke will continue to develop a national population strategy which is due to be released next year. Ms Gillard says the change sends a clear message about the new direction the Government is taking.
But an urban planning group is trying to convince Ms Gillard of the benefits of a big population. Urban Taskforce Australia chief executive Aaron Gadiel says a large population increases the tax base to fund improvements to infrastructure and welfare services. “We shouldn’t be trying to fight it, what we should be trying to do is ensuring that we’ve got the investment and infrastructure that makes that process easier to manage,” he said. “I think people should be focussing on how much state, federal and local governments have been investing in urban infrastructure to help absorb population growth.”
A survey earlier in the year by the Lowy Institute found that almost three-quarters of Australians want to see the country’s population grow, but not by too much. The Lowy Institute surveyed more than 1,000 people and found that while there was support for increased immigration, Australians were not quite prepared to embrace the Government’s predicted 36 million. The poll showed 72 per cent of people supported a rise in Australia’s population, but 69 per cent wanted it to remain below 30 million people.
26 June, 2010
British Conservatives grappling with immigration controlBusinesses and universities will be asked to help set the Government’s planned cap on immigration amid Cabinet worries about the impact of the policy.
The Coalition is planning to implement a Conservative election promise to put a ceiling on the number of migrants allowed to enter the UK from outside the European Union each year.
The plan has been criticised by some business leaders, who say it will make it harder for them to recruit the staff they need for their companies.
In private Cabinet talks, Michael Gove, the schools secretary, David Willetts, the universities minister and Oliver Letwin are all understood to have raised similar concerns about the impact of a cap.
They argued that too low a ceiling could hurt British businesses and universities by stopping the entry of talented foreigners.
Following those talks, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is set to announce a wide-ranging consultation over the planned cap. She will ask business lobby groups, company executives and university leaders for detailed recommendations on how many people should enter the UK each year.
But Home Office sources were last night adamant that even though the Government is prepared to listen to concerns about immigration, the total number of new arrivals will still be capped. “There will be a cap on immigration. This is what the British people voted for and this is what we will do,” said one source last night.
The Conservatives have never said what level they would set for the immigration cap, promising to base their final figure on the wider needs of the economy.
During the general election campaign, David Cameron said the cap would mean net immigration to the UK is in the “tens of thousands” instead of the hundreds of thousands as it has been in recent years.
However, the plan to restrict the arrival of new workers from overseas has raised concerns about the long-term impact on the UK economy, especially since a falling British birthrate is set to reduce the number of British-born people of working age in future years.
Last week, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the new independent Government economic forecaster, said that Britain’s long-term economic growth will be lower after 2014 partly because of the fall in the number of economic migrants entering the UK.
The OBR predicted that “trend growth”, the underlying rate of economic expansion, will fall from 2.25 per cent to 2 per cent after 2014 as the UK supply of new labour falls.
Business leaders have echoed those concerns and called on ministers to consult companies in detail before setting any limit on immigration. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development last month said a cap could “leave many employers struggling to hire the talented performers they need”.
Why boycotts about Arizona immigration law are stallingLos Angeles, San Francisco, and San Jose have softened the boycotts they pledged in the wake of the Arizona immigration law’s passage
When Arizona signed its new immigration law, SB 1070, on April 4, the immediate response by several cities and states was to enact economic boycotts against the state, with the aim of pressuring legislators to rethink the law.
Now, with just over a month to go until the law takes effect July 28, maintaining those embargoes appears to have been tough going for most – especially in the wider economic downturn – and several have watered down their actions.
The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday granted itself an exemption to the city’s boycott of Arizona to keep a red light photo enforcement program operating. The program generates about $3.6 million in annual ticket revenue for the city. The day before, Oakland voted to approve a $1 million contract with a multinational advertising company with corporate offices in Phoenix.
San Jose, which has several contracts with Arizona companies cited potential economic harm in stopping short of a full boycott, voting instead for an official denunciation of SB 1070. The Arizona law allows police officers to question anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant, and makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally.
“The comment ‘not so well’ looks to be fairly accurate,” says Jack Kyser, director of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, in describing how boycotts are progressing. From the beginning, Mr. Kyser says, an official boycott is much tougher than just getting the word out. It takes time and money for officials to go through rosters of suppliers and to analyze if another supplier costs more or not.
“Smaller cities and counties can do a boycott, but for larger areas and the state it could be difficult and somewhat embarrassing,” he says. The red light camera contract still has some time to go on it, he notes, even though Wednesday’s City Council action drew heated debate on operating costs, with some putting them higher than the ticket revenue coming in.
Kyser notes that a Los Angeles Police Department plan to send officers to Arizona for special terrorism training “was canceled due to the boycott,” but other actions have gone under the radar. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power awarded a contract for electric vehicle charging stations to a company in Arizona, Kyser says, “but nobody caught that.”
Some cities have pulled back on their boycotts, claiming concern that the action hits only the businesspeople and employees involved – often Hispanic – and not the legislators who created the law. Others have gone scrambling to parse legal definitions – such as the difference between “corporate offices” and “corporate headquarters” – to rationalize which companies are subject to the intent of the boycott.
The main reasons that such boycotts are difficult are at least three fold, says Jack Pitney, Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.
“First you have to figure out which goods and services come from the state. In a complex economy, that determination can be very tricky.”
Next, officials must figure out which contracts may be lawfully canceled. Attorneys have to spend lots of billable hours on such questions, Mr. Pitney says.
“Then you have to arrange for goods and services from some other state,” he says. “In many cases, the locality chose an Arizona company because it was the low bidder or was otherwise superior to the alternatives,” he says. “In tough economic times,” he adds, “it’s hard to justify such a choice.”
25 June, 2010
Bloomberg Plans Big Immigration PushThe bloomer includes a lot of stuff that conservatives would agree with in the hope that it will hide his push for amnesty
Mayor Michael Bloomberg will launch Thursday a coalition of mayors and business leaders to advocate for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration policy, including legalizing undocumented immigrants and more strictly fining businesses that hire illegal workers.
“Our immigration policy is national suicide,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a forum in Midtown Wednesday. “We educate the best and the brightest and then we don’t give them a green card—we want people to create jobs but we won’t let entrepreneurs from around the world come here.”
During his latest inaugural address, Mr. Bloomberg vowed to push to rework the nation’s immigration laws in the same way that he waged battle against illegal guns. This effort will be a cornerstone of the mayor’s third-term agenda, aides said.
The coalition, the Partnership for a New American Economy, supports developing a secure system for employers to verify employment eligibility and strict penalties for businesses that fail to comply. The group wants to increase opportunities for immigrants to enter the workforce and for foreign students to stay in the country.
The group will advocate for securing the nation’s borders and beefing up enforcement to prevent illegal immigration. The coalition supports establishing a legal path for the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the country now.
To effect decision-making in Washington, the group will issue research reports on the economic impact of immigration, poll public opinion, sponsor forums and potentially launch a media campaign. Mr. Bloomberg, a multibillionaire, is expected to provide financial support for the group’s activities, as he has with his gun group.
One City Hall official said the coalition will try to focus on immigration as a “dollar and cent issue,” advocating that open borders help keep the U.S. more competitive.
President Obama has pledged to champion changes to federal immigration policy, but this spring said lawmakers “may not have an appetite” for a grueling debate on immigration this year.
Lawmakers across the U.S. taking immigration policy into own handsWith widespread attention focused on Arizona’s tough new law against illegal immigration — and a measure approved this week in the small town of Fremont, Neb. — similar proposals are under consideration across the country.
Five states — South Carolina, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island and Michigan — are looking at Arizona-style legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. NDN, a Washington think tank and advocacy group, said lawmakers in 17 other states had expressed support for similar measures.
Since it was adopted in April, the Arizona legislation, which gives law enforcement officers the power to check the immigration status of anyone suspected of being in the country illegally, has triggered bitter debate and been challenged in court by advocacy groups. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said last week that the Justice Department plans to sue Arizona over the law, although a department spokesman has said the matter is under review.
This week, the spotlight shifted to rural Fremont, which narrowly passed an ordinance that would outlaw hiring illegal immigrants or renting property to them.
In the first three months of this year, legislators in 45 states introduced 1,180 bills or resolutions dealing with immigrants, an unprecedented number, according to the NCSL. By the end of March, 107 laws and 87 resolutions had been adopted by 34 states, with 38 bills pending. Not all of the proposals were designed to clamp down on illegal immigrants. Ann Morse, director of the Immigrant Policy Project at the NCSL, said they represented “a spectrum” of pro- and anti-immigration measures.
“When I talk to legislators about what they’re doing in the state, they say this is their way of signaling they want federal immigration reform to happen — that they care deeply about the issue, they’re working within the parameters they have and sometimes at the edge, trying to get federal attention,” she said.
ad_iconLast month, the Massachusetts Senate amended its budget bill to require state contractors to confirm that their workers are in the country legally. Earlier, the Massachusetts House narrowly rejected a proposal to restrict public benefits to illegal immigrants.
In Pennsylvania, an Arizona-style bill is in the pipeline. Although police officers must have a separate reason to stop someone, the proposal would direct them to “attempt to verify the immigration status of suspected illegal aliens.”
South Carolina is set to discuss an almost identical measure next year. And in Albuquerque, Mayor Richard Berry instituted a similar policy, which was upheld by a council vote.
Anti-illegal immigrant measures in Hazelton, Pa., and Farmers Branch, Tex., are being challenged in the courts.
In Fremont, those on both sides agreed that the town’s new ordinance, which will take effect in July, marked a national pattern of local communities taking immigration policy into their own hands.
“I’m afraid this is part of a larger, nationwide trend, most obviously typified by what has happened in Arizona,” said Amy Miller, the legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union in Nebraska, which is seeking an injunction against the Fremont law. “There is no rational reason for Fremont to be worried about protecting our border. But it is a community, like many in rural Nebraska, where the only population growth has been in new immigrants, many of them people of color.”
“What will this lead to? Other municipalities in other states enacting their own laws,” said Fremont council member Sean Gitt, who said he decided to support the measure after it was approved by the community.
“Fremont is an example of ‘If Washington won’t, Nebraskans will,’ ” said Bob Dane, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which supports tougher immigration enforcement. Others note that the economy may determine whether other jurisdictions follow Arizona’s lead.
“The big, overriding issue for nearly every state is the state of their budgets,” said Morse. “Taking on additional law enforcement costs and court challenge costs is not at the front of their task list.”
24 June, 2010
Amid crises, Obama declares war — on ArizonaThe Obama administration has a lot of fights on its hands. Putting aside real wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, there’s the battle against leaking oil in the Gulf, the struggle against 9.7 percent unemployment across the country, and clashes over the president’s agenda on Capitol Hill. Despite all that, the White House has found time to issue a new declaration of war, this time against an unlikely enemy: the state of Arizona.
The Justice Department is preparing to sue Arizona over its new immigration law. The president has stiffed Gov. Jan Brewer’s call for meaningful assistance in efforts to secure the border. And the White House has accused Arizona’s junior senator, Republican Jon Kyl, of lying about an Oval Office discussion with the president over comprehensive immigration reform. Put them all together, and you have an ugly state of affairs that’s getting uglier by the day.
First, the lawsuit. Last week, Brewer was appalled to learn the Justice Department’s intentions not from the Justice Department but from an interview done by Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with an Ecuadorian TV outlet. “It would seem to me that if they were going to file suit against us,” Brewer told Fox News’ Greta van Susteren last week, “they definitely would have contacted us first and informed us before they informed citizens … of another nation.” But they didn’t.
“There certainly seems to be an underlying disrespect for the state of Arizona,” says Kris Kobach, the law professor and former Bush administration Justice Department official who helped draft the Arizona law. Kobach points out that during the Bush years, several states openly flouted federal immigration law on issues like sanctuary cities and in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Respecting the doctrines of comity and federalism, the Bush administration didn’t sue. Now, when Arizona passes a measure that is fully consistent with federal law, the Obama administration, says Kobach, “goes sprinting to the courthouse door.”
Then there is the matter of the White House’s assistance, or nonassistance, in Arizona’s border-security efforts. On June 3, the president, under criticism for refusing to meet or even talk to Brewer, reluctantly granted her an audience in the Oval Office. After the meeting, Brewer told reporters Obama pledged that administration officials would come to Arizona within two weeks with details of plans to secure the border.
June 17 marked two weeks, and there were no administration officials and no plans. There still aren’t. “What a disappointment,” Brewer told van Susteren. “You know, when you hear from the president of the United States and he gives you a commitment, you would think that they would stand up and stand by their word. It is totally disappointing.”
And now, there’s the Kyl controversy. On June 18, Kyl told a town meeting in North Phoenix that Obama personally told him the administration will not secure the U.S.-Mexico border because doing so would make it politically difficult to pass comprehensive immigration reform. “I met with the president in the Oval Office, just the two of us,” Kyl said. “Here’s what the president said. The problem is, he said, if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform.” “In other words,” Kyl continued, “they’re holding it hostage. They don’t want to secure the border unless and until it is combined with comprehensive immigration reform.”
After Kyl’s statement went viral on the Internet, the White House issued a sharp denial. “The president didn’t say that and Senator Kyl knows it,” communications director Dan Pfeiffer wrote on the White House blog. “There are more resources dedicated toward border security today than ever before, but, as the president has made clear, truly securing the border will require a comprehensive solution to our broken immigration system.”
Kyl is not backing down. “What I said occurred, did occur,” he told an Arizona radio station. “Some spokesman down at the White House said no, that isn’t what happened at all, and then proceeded to say we need comprehensive immigration reform to secure the border. That is their position, and all I was doing was explaining why, from a conversation with the president, why it appears that that’s their position.”
Even if it didn’t have so many other fights on its hands, it would be unusual for an administration to align itself against an American state. But that’s precisely what has happened. Soon it will be up to the courts and voters to decide whether Obama’s campaign against Arizona will succeed or fail.
A Broken Immigration Court SystemWe all know how bad the federal government is at controlling our border, but we face the same problem in the system set up to handle immigration cases. Many people do not realize that illegal aliens who are caught end up in immigration courts that are part of the Justice Department’s Executive Office for Immigration Review. These courts are presided over by administrative judges; they are not Article III federal courts.
On Thursday, as BP’s CEO was being pummeled on Capitol Hill, the House Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Immigration, Citizenship, Refugees, Border Security, and International Law held a hearing of its own. Mark Metcalf, a former immigration judge, was one of the witnesses, and he had some startling testimony that went completely unnoticed by the media (full disclosure: Mark and I worked together at the Justice Department).
Mark Metcalf’s research on the deceptive statistics released by the Justice Department is quite shocking. From 1996 to 2008, the U.S. allowed 1.8 million aliens (many of them here illegally) to remain free upon their promise to appear in court when their cases were scheduled to be heard, and 736,000 of them never showed up for their hearings. After 9/11, court evasion by illegal aliens exploded — from 2002 to 2006, over 50 percent of all aliens summoned to court disappeared.
Of course, you’d never know this from the numbers reported by the EOIR, because it masks the true numbers by manipulating its statistics. For example, in 2005 and 2006 EOIR reported to Congress that the “overall failure” rate of aliens “to appear” in court was only 39 percent. The real number of aliens who were free pending their court date who then failed to appear was actually 59 percent. EOIR got the deceptively lower 39 percent figure by combining the appearance rates for aliens who were free pending a hearing and aliens who were actually in jail! That is ridiculous and clearly does not give a true picture of the problem, since someone sitting in jail is not capable of skipping out on his court hearing, at least not without committing the further crime of breaking out of jail. But combining those groups makes the skip rate look lower than it really is.
Only 9 percent of aliens who lose their cases actually bother to appeal; most of them just walk away and disappear. Those dodging deportation orders issued by immigration judges number in the hundreds of thousands. In 2002, there were 602,000 backlogged deportation orders; in 2008, 558,000 remained unenforced. (Of those ordered deported, 45,000 were illegal aliens from countries that, according to DHS, abet terror.) The highest arrest rate for aliens ordered deported was achieved in 2008 when 6.1 percent were apprehended.
One of the biggest reasons for this is not just the lack of resources given to our immigration enforcement agencies, but the fact that because the immigration judges are just administrative judges and employees of the Justice Department, they have no ability to enforce their orders. So enforcement of all of these deportation orders is left up to the whims of the political appointees who run DHS and set the priorities of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, and whose lackadaisical attitude is one of the reasons that Arizona felt compelled to act on its own.
In August 2009, ICE announced it would not remove aliens who skipped court or disobeyed orders to leave the U.S., which gives even more incentives to illegal aliens to treat both our laws and our courts with contempt. So, as Mark pointedly says, “noncitizens who disobey immigration court orders are treated remarkably better than their citizen” counterparts in state and federal courts who are subject to arrest, contempt and incarceration for disobeying court orders.
I can’t think of any word more appropriate to describe this situation than appalling. And no one in this administration seems to have any interest in doing anything to fix this broken system other than to relax all enforcement of our immigration laws and just open up the borders. Oh, yes, and sue Arizona for trying to enforce the law.
23 June, 2010
New from the Center for Immigration Studies1. Steven Camarota Debates Dream Act on FOX News
Video
********
Excerpt: Fox reports that 17 members of the Afghan military have gone missing over the past two years from Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio. While this is an obvious security vulnerability because ‘Each Afghan was issued a Department of Defense Common Access Card, an identification card used to gain access to secure military installations,’ I suspect it’s more likely that they’re washing dishes in the back of a cousin’s restaurant in San Francisco or Northern Virginia. (Actually, these aren’t mutually exclusive, since they could have just sold the DoD ID card and then gone to wash dishes.)
********
Excerpt: A column in yesterday’s Globe and Mail on the ‘honor-killing’ of Aqsa Parvez in Canada by her Pakistani immigrant family gets to the policy point too many want to avoid:
Decades ago, illiterate Italians also immigrated to Canada, bringing with them a harsh, patriarchal culture where religion dominated all. But they didn’t marry cousins imported fresh from the old country. And so they began to raise their children differently.
Despite the pious assertions of the open-borders Right, we cannot address multiculturalism without first reducing immigration. Anyone who claims otherwise is either fooling you or fooling themselves. Only by first plugging the hole will we have any chance of addressing the consequences.
********
4. Congress Gets Three Views of America’s Immigration Courts
Excerpt: Remember the story about the blind men who examined different parts of an elephant and came up with widely differing views of what it was? The man who felt the tusk was sure it was a big piece of polished wood, the one who touched the trunk said it was a snake, and the one who grasped one of the legs called it a tree.
This is essentially what happened yesterday at a hearing of the immigration subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives regarding the nation’s immigration courts. It was hard to tell that the witnesses were describing the same entity.
********
5. Rebranding: New ICE or ICE Zero?
Excerpt: Citing concern over the agency’s image, ICE chief John Morton has announced a makeover and renaming of key bureaus so as to de-emphasize the immigration component of their work. This move is just silly on so many levels, but does illustrate three things
********
6. Brits and Aussies Speak Out on Immigration, Population, and Ecological Sustainability
Excerpt: By and large, American environmentalists remain too politically correct to address immigration and population issues. Meanwhile, our colleagues in the United Kingdom and Australia have recently been showing more courage. I find this hopeful! If it can happen there, it can happen right here in the United States.
In Britain, a small, crowded island filled with nature lovers, concerned environmentalists are fed up with continued population growth. Exhibit A is David Attenborough, respected world-wide for presenting six decades of award-winning nature documentaries for the BBC. Says Sir David, according to an article in the Times of London
********
7. This Just in!! President Reagan Endorses Enforcement-First Immigration Policy
Excerpt: ‘What would the Gipper do’ is a question that some Republicans ask when they don’t understand how, exactly, to apply Ronald Reagan’s core character and worldview to the problems that America faces today. The result is a search for one or more ‘truths’ to validate the author’s speculations regarding what Reagan would have done relying on a direct extrapolation of America’s circumstances in 1986, almost a quarter of a century ago, to those today.
A case in point is an unusual opinion piece for the pro-ever-more-immigration Wall Street Journal, in which Peter Robinson, a former speechwriter for President Reagan, wonders how Reagan would have responded to today’s immigration debates.
********
8. New Arrivals Ripped Off by Their Countrymen
Excerpt: It is an unattractive old story, but it keeps happening.
Newly-arrived aliens, usually with little or no chance of getting green cards, are cheated by their countrymen who promise – for stiff fees – legal status.
Recently four such schemes have come to light as prosecutors have hauled the immigration schemers into court, in New York and Pennsylvania. Three of them involve Haitian applicants (and con artists with what sound like Haitian names) and will be described later in this blog.
********
9. Oil Spills and Immigration Policy
Excerpt: Is there any connection between American immigration policy and the oil spilling onto Gulf coast beaches from BP’s Deepwater Horizon rig?
The answer might seem an obvious ‘no.’ Efforts to make such a connection might seem ridiculous: an example of immigration reductionists’ absurd creativity in finding links between immigration and any problems facing the United States. What’s next, critics might ask. Are you going to blame immigration for the lack of focus in America’s space program, or the profound lameness of Lady Gaga’s latest CD?
********
Excerpt: If you thought the U.S. Department of Justice’s job was to ensure electoral fairness and equal justice under law for every legitimate American voter, think again. And what is happening in Port Chester, N.Y., likely foreshadows mass immigration’s harmful effects on the land of e pluribus unum.
In that suburb, DOJ and a complicit federal judge ordered that town elections take place using a scheme practically intended to ensure race-based election results. That’s right, the standard of one man, one vote is being abrogated by official sanction.
********
11. Occupational Health Officials Oblivious to Legal/Illegal Distinction
Excerpt: Two federal occupational health officials, discussing the severe job-site health issues of immigrants yesterday, simply ignored the variable of legal or illegal presence.
No one is arguing that a physician should not set the broken leg of an illegal alien, but it would be helpful if records were kept as to the likelihood of broken bones among different kinds of migrants.
The setting for the display of this attitude was a sober and otherwise thoughtful discussion entitled ‘Migration and Occupational Health: Shining a Light on the Problem,’ a seminar sponsored by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington.
********
12. Micro-Amnesty for Some Illegals Pending Before Congress
Excerpt: While it is taboo to talk about a policy that would prohibit the admission of migrants who might not be able to assimilate – such as Muslims who insist that women must wear the burqa – soon it may be possible to use the variable of cultural assimilation to give amnesty to an illegal alien.
As the immigration lawyers’ trade paper Interpreter Releases headlined in its May 24 issue (which arrived on June 12). there is a move afoot regarding ‘Sentencing Guideline Amendments Sent to Congress Including Downward Departure for ‘Cultural Assimilation’ in Illegal Reentry Cases.’ The story was based on a May 14 Federal Register filing.
********
13. The Democrats’ New Immigration Strategy: Euphemism
Excerpt: Politico recently reported that the Democrats have come up with a tough new immigration strategy. It consists of ‘talking like Republicans’!
In place of such terms as ‘an earned path to citizenship’ or supporting efforts to allow ‘undocumented’ immigrants to ‘come out of the shadows,’ the new strategy emphasizes calling illegal immigrants what they are, and to ‘require’ that they ‘get right with the law.’
********
14. USCIS Does Right Thing with H-1B, Then Gets Sued – Some Speculation
Excerpt: USCIS has just been sued by an employer’s group for doing the right thing with a segment of the H-1B nonimmigrant worker program, according to an AP story.
It had not been clear to me earlier this year that the policy memorandum on the use of the H-1B program by the so-called ‘body shops’ (who play the same role as crew leaders in the harvest of farm crops) was very significant, but the court case suggests it was the right move.
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. 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
22 June, 2010
200 Tamil Tigers ‘sailing to asylum’ in AustraliaThe Tigers are brutal Marxist terrorists — the last group Australia needs
SRI Lankan officials have warned that a vessel carrying up to 200 asylum-seekers could be headed for Australia.
As Kevin Rudd faces rising internal concern that the issue is hurting Labor, the Prime Minister will today hold a meeting of the full ministry to mark what could be the last parliamentary sitting week before the election, amid rising leadership speculation. Labor backbenchers said yesterday they had “sent a message” to Mr Rudd’s office on asylum-seekers in the past fortnight, and several frontbenchers confirmed it was a live issue in the electorate.
As the Rudd government faces a looming deadline on whether to lift a three-month suspension of Sri Lankan asylum claims, the country’s high commissioner to Australia, Senaka Walgampaya, has urged the Prime Minister to extend the freeze.
Australia has previously sought assistance from Indonesia to turn back a boatload of 260 illegal migrants heading for Australia, and successfully repelled the largest boatload attempting to enter Australian waters since the election of the Rudd government in 2007.
The high commissioner said yesterday he had credible information that a boat, believed to be connected to remnants of the Tamil Tigers, had upwards of 200 people on it. “My information is that there is such a boat,” Mr Walgampaya said yesterday. “Earlier on, the boat was going to Canada; now it is confirmed that they are trying to come to Australia.”
Mr Walgampaya also called on the government to extend the freeze on Sri Lankan asylum claims, saying there was evidence it had been effective. “I would certainly like to continue as it is,” he said. “I think boat arrivals have reduced as a result. If they continued it, that would be good.”
On June 10, The Australian reported that the Philippines Coast Guard had in May issued an alert for the MV Sun Sea, formerly known as the Harin Panich 19.
Mr Walgampaya said the venture was being organised by remnants of the Liberation of Tamil Tiger Eelam (Tamil Tigers). “We are told that the boat itself does not belong to the LTTE but they are people who have links to the LTTE,” Mr Walgampaya said.
Ahead of today’s ministry meeting in Canberra, three Labor frontbenchers conceded asylum-seekers were an issue in the electorate, and one pointed to the Prime Minister himself telling the ALP caucus the government needed to sell its message better. “There’s a a strongly entrenched debate around asylum-seekers,” one frontbencher said. “People are asking: what is Labor going to do about boatpeople,” another Labor MP told The Australian. “Efforts are being made to get that through to the Prime Minister’s office.”
Another Labor frontbencher said: “We’ve all recognised that it’s certainly an issue and we certainly need to communicate what we are doing. “At the moment, there’s a misunderstanding that’s being whipped up by talkback radio. “The Prime Minister said that we need to better communicate what we’re doing in this area.”
The remarks came as outspoken Australian of the Year Patrick McGorry told a World Refugee Day rally in Melbourne that there had been a “failure of leadership” on the issue of asylum-seekers. “If you ask the right questions, you’ll get the right answers from the Australian public and I think they’ve been led down the wrong track by a failure of leadership,” Professor McGorry said.
Nebraska: Town puts immigration control measures to voteAngered by a recent influx of Hispanic workers attracted by jobs at local meatpacking plants, voters in the eastern Nebraska city of Fremont will decide Monday whether to ban hiring or renting property to illegal immigrants.
The vote will be the culmination of a two-year fight that saw proponents collect enough signatures to put the question to a public vote. If the ordinance is approved, the community of 25,000 people could face a long and costly court battle. Either way, the emotions stirred up won’t settle quickly.
“Even if we say ‘no’ … we still need to say, ‘How do we get along with each other now?’” said Kristin Ostrom, who helps oversee a campaign against the measure.
Across the nation, people have been outraged by — and demanded action against — the poor enforcement of federal laws to prevent illegal immigration. A law recently introduced in Arizona requires police to question people on their immigration status if there’s a “reasonable suspicion” they are illegal.
A man who helped write the Arizona law is helping to fight for the ordinance in Fremont, which has seen its Hispanic population surge in the past two decades. That increase is largely because they were recruited to work for the Fremont Beef and Hormel plants, and the city maintains an enviably low unemployment rate.
Nonetheless, residents worry that jobs are going to illegal immigrants who they fear could drain community resources.
Clint Walraven, who has lived in Fremont all his 51 years, said the jobs should go to legal residents who are unemployed — something he believes the ordinance would help fix. Discussions on the issue can get heated, he said, particularly if racism is mentioned. “It has nothing to do with being racist,” he said. “We all have to play by the same rules. … If you want to stay here, get legal.”
When he worked at the Hormel plant in the 1980s, Walraven said, he had one Hispanic co-worker.
From about 165 Hispanics — both legal and illegal — living in Fremont in 1990, the total surged to 1,085 in 2000, according to census expert David Drozd at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. He said an estimated 2,060 Hispanics lived there last year. In May, Fremont recorded just 4.9 percent unemployment, in line with the statewide rate and significantly lower than the national average of 9.7 percent.
How renting, hiring checks would work
If approved, the measure will require potential renters to apply for a license to rent. The application process will force Fremont officials to check if the renters are in the country legally. If they are found to be illegal, they will not be issued a license allowing them to rent.
The ordinance also requires businesses to use the federal E-Verify database to ensure employees are allowed to work.
Supporters of the proposal say it’s needed to make up for what they see as lax federal law enforcement. Opponents say it could fuel discrimination.
Ron Tillery, executive director of the Fremont Chamber of Commerce, which opposes the measure, said businesses are concerned the E-Verify system isn’t reliable and that they would be subject to fines if forced to rely on it. He pointed out that the main targets of the ordinance — the Fremont Beef and Hormel plants — would not be covered by it anyway because they are located outside the city.
Walraven said the measure is necessary because workers send their salaries to family in Mexico instead of spending it in the city. “I understand supporting your family,” he said, “But it’s very much at our expense. We’re footing the bill.”
Those costs include spending on education and medical care, said Jerry Hart, a Fremont resident who petitioned for the vote. He said the ordinance would help curb that spending and protect jobs.
He said it would also end the divisiveness that’s taken over. “The division is because the illegal aliens are here and nobody’s taken care of it,” he said. “If it does not pass, it’s going to get worse.”
21 June, 2010
CIS roundup1. A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California
Excerpt: Between 1970 and 2008 the share of California’s population comprised of immigrants (legal and illegal) tripled, growing from 9 percent to 27 percent.1 This Memorandum examines some of the ways California has changed over the last four decades. Historically, California has not been a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. As a result of immigration, however, by 2008 California had the least-educated labor force in the nation in terms of the share its workers without a high school education. This change has important implications for the state.
********
2. Charging More for Immigration: Closing Financial Loopholes in the U.S. Migration Process
Excerpt: The U.S. Government, fighting two wars and one huge recession, badly needs additional revenues to move toward a balanced budget.
Meanwhile, migration to (and, to a lesser extent, visitation of) the United States offers remarkable financial benefits to the individuals involved and these visitors are not currently paying their fair share to the U.S. Treasury. The following package of revenue-raising proposals would close many of the existing financial loopholes that silently hurt all of us.
********
3. Mark Krikorian Debates New AZ Law
Video
********
4. ICE Program Finds 11% of Inmates Screened Are Removable
Excerpt: Reports released Thursday on ICE’s Secure Communities program confirm that removable aliens comprise a significant share of the nation’s criminal population. According to these statistics, 11 percent of all inmates booked into participating jails are flagged by the system as removable aliens (in comparison, non-citizens comprise nine percent of the nation’s total adult population – see ‘Immigration and Crime: Assessing a Conflicted Issue’). ICE has removed or ordered the departure of 16 percent of these criminal aliens.
The Secure Communities program is an initiative launched in 2008 to automatically check the immigration status of all those booked into participating jails as part of the standard fingerprint check. Currently there are 197 participating jurisdictions in 20 states. As of December 31, 2009, they had screened 1,340,000 new inmates. Of these, 146,000 were identified as removable aliens. A total of 23,000 of those were removed or ordered to depart.
********
Excerpt: Well, the open-borders crowd is at it again. The ‘compassion’ approach to selling the American people on mass amnesty and even higher legal immigration levels failed to attract a following, so the post-Americans are revamping their public message. In other words, open-borders spin spun out on them, so they’re changing the language they use to try to sell amnesty and uncontrolled immigration.
Not that zealots aggressively pushing amnesty and mass immigration believe what they’re saying. Open-borders advocates have simply ‘message tested’ new words and phrases. They learned the hard way that the public doesn’t buy the ‘the undocumented are only here searching for a better life,’ ‘amnesty is the only humane course,’ ‘family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande’ nonsense.
********
6. U.S. Ties Own Hands, Blindfolds Itself Regarding Religious Extremists
Excerpt: The ‘federal’ mentioned in the story is the German federation, not our own, and it serves to remind us how reluctant our government is to examine the impact of religious extremism.
Can you imagine the U.S. government funding a comparable study? Even at a time when U.S.-raised Muslim extremists – like the two from New Jersey arrested as they were heading for Somalia – are clearly becoming a threat? I cannot.
Unlike most of the advanced democracies in the world, our census does not even ask a simple question about religious preferences.
********
7. Sanctuary Cities Succumb to Blackmail
Excerpt: ‘Jailed illegal immigrants pose policy dilemma’ reads the Los Angeles Times headline.
The policy dilemma that sanctuary cities face is self-imposed. Simply put, the dilemma is: Do they support and help uphold all of the laws of the United States, including its immigration laws, and turn illegal aliens who have been jailed over to the federal authorities for deportation, or do they ignore immigration laws and release illegal alien criminals back into the community in order to maintain good relations with the illegal-alien community?
********
8. Moral Myopia at the Arizona Border
Excerpt: The Washington Post recently ran a story about Shura Wallin, an immigration activist who, with her group of 140 volunteers who call themselves Los Samaritanos, assist illegal immigrants making the potentially hazardous trip across the Sonoran Desert. Their moral calculus is simple: ‘they say they are doing moral deeds in the face of a simple reality: Migrants keep coming.’ They seem oblivious to the moral hazard they have helped to create and the arc of their compassion is constricted by their narrow moral vision.
********
9. One Slice at a Time on Amnesty?
Excerpt: As the name suggests, supporters of “comprehensive immigration reform” have long resisted the mere suggestion that they should try a piecemeal approach and pursue smaller, less politically toxic amnesties. About a year ago, I was on a panel with Frank Sharry of America’s Voice, one of the chief pro-amnesty activists, and Esther Olavarria, the policy director for DHS who used to be Kennedy’s immigration person. In the flush of a new leftist, pro-amnesty administration, both were categorical that under no circumstances would there be a piecemeal approach to amnesty, insisting that everything would be folded into a comprehensive bill.
********
10. USCIS, Rather Belatedly, Proposes to Raise Immigration Fees
Excerpt: Some months after the State Department proposed to raise its migration-related fees, and many months after the Obama administration urged Congress to let the Labor Department do so, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed to raise its fees.
The fee increase will bring in another $200 million, all to be used internally by USCIS; that’s an increase of roughly 10 percent. It is spelled out in a lengthy Federal Register notice that will appear on June 11. It was announced at a USCIS stakeholder’s meeting by Director Alejandro Mayorkas at USCIS headquarters yesterday.
********
11. Big Picture Can Distort Immigration Policy Research
Excerpt: As the amnesty/legalization debate heats up, there will be many a research report on the subject that suggests the impact of immigration on the rest of us is pretty bland.
One type of research that produces these seemingly soothing results was on display on June 7 at a seminar sponsored by the Migration Policy Institute in Washington. Giovanni Peri, a professor at UC-Davis, used regression analysis to examine census data in a report entitled ‘The Impact of Immigrants in Recession and Economic Expansion,’ He concluded
********
12. Is There a General Right to Immigrate to the U.S.?
Excerpt: Recently, Arizona’s Gov. Jan Brewer signed State Senate Bill 1070 into law, the strongest effort yet, at the state level, to reduce illegal immigration. Clearly, with the highest numbers of illegal border crossings in the country and many hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants in the state, Arizonans are fed up with the status quo. They want immigration laws enforced and they want them enforced now, not five or ten years down the line, maybe.
The Arizona law has proved highly popular with the general public. In recent weeks, despite much negative media coverage, national polls have consistently found 65 to 70 percent support for the new law across the country. With continued high unemployment and economic uncertainty, most Americans have little sympathy for law breakers who may be taking employment away from their fellow citizens.
********
13, Voluntary Interior Repatriation in Mexico a Good Idea — in Miniature
Excerpt: Sending Mexican nationals apprehended at the border back to the interior of Mexico is, of course, a good idea. It puts them back in, or at least near, their home communities, which presumably discourages, but does not eliminate, further attempts to cross the border illegally.
Routinely, Mexican nationals caught near the border are simply taken back to the nearest port of entry, and released into Mexico, where they are free to try to cross again the next night.
********
14. Jewish Establishment Censorship of Information on Immigration Policy
Excerpt: It surely comes as no surprise to any one capable of recognizing a push poll that the American-Jewish establishment, employing ones sponsored by the American Jewish Committee (AJC), has, for years, faked data regarding American-Jewish attitudes to immigration and immigration policy – very seriously misrepresenting the true state of opinion among American Jews. The establishment’s goals are obvious: maintaining an illusion of communal consensus and, even more importantly, conveying a false impression to lawmakers on Capitol Hill.
********
15. Fetch Me My Food Stamps, Jeeves!
Excerpt: James R. Edwards Jr.’s recent blog on the nation’s self-inflicted conflict between fighting poverty, on one hand, and importing it through an Open Doors immigration policy on the other, reminded me of a ludicrous extreme of this internal tension.
He pointed out that there is a (slim) segment of the low-income population that is both poor enough to receive Medicaid (their income is less than 133 percent of the poverty level) but since their income is over 125 percent of the poverty level, they are wealthy enough to sign letters of support causing the immigration of their relatives. (If I had my choice, I would leave the Medicaid poverty level alone, and increase that barrier substantially when it comes to immigration.)
********
16. Salt Lake City Police Chief Protecting Illegal Aliens
Excerpt: Not too long ago, Salt Lake City Police Chief Chris Burbank was in Washington along with other big-city police chiefs. They met with Attorney General Eric Holder to complain about how the newly enacted Arizona law (SB 1070) would inevitably lead to racial profiling of illegal aliens and how unfair it was.
So, just how fair is Chief Burbank?
********
17. The Fraternal Order of Police Defends Arizona
Excerpt: The media used up quite a lot of ink covering U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder’s meeting with a number of pro-amnesty, anti-S.B.1070 police chiefs last week. It fit the media’s agenda of promoting mass immigration and therefore was highlighted as exemplary of law enforcement’s position on Arizona’s effort.
What the media failed to highlight was the fact that the event was organized by the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF) as part of a public relations effort to discredit Arizona’s S.B. 1070. The media also failed to note that PERF is an offshoot of the Police Foundation, which was established by the Ford Foundation in 1970. Why is this significant? The Police Foundation – just like the National Council of La Raza, another organization created by the Ford Foundation – regularly promotes amnesty for illegal aliens. As noted on the CIS Immigration Blog last fall, by promoting amnesty, the Police Foundation has sent the message that it is easier to reward illegal aliens for their criminal activities than to convict them of their crimes.
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. 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
20 June, 2010
Groups sue over Nevada immigration initiativeNevada’s high rate of unemployment (the nation’s highest at 14%) should make the proposed laws a shoo-in, so we must not let the people decide, must we!
The ACLU of Nevada and a southern Nevada business coalition have sued over a ballot initiative that would ask voters to approve tough immigration laws in Nevada similar to those in Arizona.
In their lawsuits filed Friday, the ACLU and the Nevada Open for Business Coalition ask Carson District Judge James Wilson to block the initiative from going to the Legislature or voters.
The groups contend it violates state law requiring petitions to contain only one subject, promotes racial profiling and would hurt the state’s economy. “Not only does the intent of the proposal blatantly violate America’s most fundamental values of fairness and equality, the expansive scope of it intentionally confuses voters,” American Civil Liberties Union lawyer Maggie McLetchie told the Las Vegas Review-Journal.
Assemblyman Chad Christensen, R-Las Vegas, the initiative’s sponsor, said his proposal provides protections against racial profiling and would save the state money in medical, education and incarceration costs for illegal immigrants. “Every time I debunk one of their bogus complaints they come up with something new,” he said.
Christensen said he will collect the required 97,002 signatures by a Nov. 9 deadline to have the “Nevada Immigration Verification” initiative considered by the 2011 Legislature. “We’ll hit our mark for sure,” he said.
If lawmakers fail to act or reject it, the petition would be put to voters in 2012.
Among other things, the initiative would require noncitizens to carry proof they are in the U.S. legally, require voters to present IDs at polls, prohibit illegal immigrants from applying for a job and make it illegal to transport or harbor illegal immigrants.
The Arizona law requires that police conducting traffic stops or questioning people about possible legal violations ask them about their immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that they’re in the country illegally.
The ACLU filed its suit on behalf of an advocacy group called What Happens in Arizona Stops in Arizona, which includes the NAACP of Nevada and Robert Johnson, president of Gun Owners of Nevada.
Members of the business coalition include Assemblymen Mo Denis and Ruben Kihuen, both Las Vegas Democrats, and Latin Chamber of Commerce president and CEO Otto Merida.
Denis said the coalition reflects “a broad effort of a wide variety of business, gaming, labor and other community interests.” He said coalition members believe the petition would have a devastating impact on Nevada’s economy. Arizona’s new law already has cost that state nearly $100 million in lost revenue, he added. “We cannot afford that in Nevada,” Denis told the Nevada Appeal. “Every one of us would feel the economic impact of boycotts and lost business, something our state can ill afford in these challenging times.”
Club Fed for Illegal AliensThanks to their international “human rights” advocates, Gitmo detainees receive art therapy, movie nights and video games at their U.S. taxpayer-funded camp in Cuba. Now, the left’s bleeding heart lobby wants to provide similar taxpayer-sponsored perks to illegal alien detainees on American soil. Welcome to the open-borders Club Fed.
According to an internal Department of Homeland Security e-mail obtained by the Houston Chronicle, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency plans a radical overhaul of the immigration detention system. No, the reforms will not increase the nation’s measly, chronically underfunded detention bed capacity — fewer than 35,000 beds last fiscal year to cover an estimated illegal alien population of between 12 million and 20 million. The Obama ICE leadership is headed in the exact opposite direction.
ICE chief John Morton — the same man who signaled last month that he may refuse to process illegal aliens sent to him by Arizona law enforcement officials — has already eliminated 50 detention facilities. This despite a DHS inspector general report released last spring exposing the federal government’s bipartisan failure to expand detention space capacity to end the dangerous game of illegal alien “catch and release.”
Instead, among the p.c. makeover measures under consideration or about to be made by Obama’s ICE agency in the next 30 days:
– “Softening” the physical appearance of privately contracted detention facilities with “hanging plants.”
- Giving illegal alien detainees e-mail access and free Internet-based phone service.
- Abandoning lockdowns, lights-out, visitor screening and detention uniform requirements.
- Serving fresh veggies and continental breakfast and providing Bingo sessions, arts and crafts classes, and, yes, movie nights.
Ensuring humane treatment of detainees is one thing. This, on the other hand, is beyond ridiculous. Detention centers should be clean, safe and temporary way stations for illegal immigrants on their way out the door. These proposals turn the immigration detention centers into permanent Dave & Buster’s-style comfort zones for illegal aliens biding their time until the next amnesty. Dancing lessons? Game halls? This is an invitation for abuse — and a recipe for exploitation by smugglers and drug cartels. Open-borders and civil liberties activists will end up endangering DHS/ICE workers — and the rest of us — under the guise of “immigrant human rights.”
The left-wing campaign by the American Civil Liberties Union, change.org and illegal alien activists targeting our detention system began in earnest after 9/11. Under the Bush administration, hundreds of illegal aliens of Arab descent were detained and questioned as “material witnesses” in counterterrorism probes. The use of immigration laws in the war against Islamic jihadists became a rallying point for the open-borders propagandists.
The New York Times hysterically reported that most of these post-9/11 detainees were held for months without charges. In fact, 60 percent of the 762 immigrants detained after the 9/11 attacks were charged within 72 hours. And the Justice Department inspector general found that there were legitimate reasons for delay in the remaining cases, including logistical disruptions in New York City after 9/11, such as electrical outages, office shutdowns and mail service cancellation that slowed delivery of charging documents. Immigrant abuse charges were hurled recklessly by the likes of Al Gore, who slandered DHS’s detention program during a paid appearance in Saudi Arabia — despite the DOJ’s failure to find any such patterns.
The truth got lost along the way. So did common sense. Allowing illegal alien terror suspects to roam free in the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks would have been a dereliction of duty. And countless homeland security experts and DHS inspector general reports have repeatedly spotlighted lax enforcement in the detention safety net over the past decade.
Hundreds of thousands of “absconders” remain on the loose because of failure (or refusal) to detain them. The immigration lawyers’ racket has lobbied for compassionate “alternatives” to detention that routinely result in deportation fugitives simply ditching the process and disappearing.
Their goal is not to improve detention. Their goal is to sabotage it — all while law-breakers munch on croissants and joyfully shout “BINGO!”
19 June, 2010
Prominent Virginia Politician Urging State To Adopt Arizona Immigration LawThe top elected official of a Northern Virginia county located less than 40 miles from the nation’s capital says he wants his state to pass a very similar version of the anti-illegal immigration law passed earlier this year in Arizona.
Corey Stewart, the chairman of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors, says he will lobby Virginia lawmakers this year in an effort to persuade them to pass a measure that would increase the power of state and local law enforcement to capture, detain and deport illegal immigrants. The plan Stewart is pushing would also outlaw day laborer centers, places where illegals are known to gather.
Stewart, who earned national notoriety in 2007 for instituting a county-wide crackdown on illegals, told Talk Radio News Service that adopting the Arizona bill would drastically decrease Virginia’s crime rate.
“The first two years after the crackdown on illegal immigration in Prince William we had a 37 % drop in the violent crime rate,” he said. “Based upon that experience we believe that we would have similar results in the rest of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”
In fact, of the 2,000 people arrested last year for major crimes — including violence — in Prince William County, only 121 were found to be living in the state illegally. That figure represents a significant decline from the level recorded before Stewart initiated the crackdown two years ago.
However, on a statewide level, over 17% of those arrested in Virginia last year for violent crime offenses were found to be non-residents: A frightening statistic in Stewart’s view. “We need to bring the rule of law to all of Virginia,” he told the Washington Post in an interview this week.
Though Arizona has faced mounting threats of economic boycotts by cities and businesses in neighboring states, Stewart insists that enacting such a bill in Virginia would have minimal negative impacts on the state’s economy. “Businesses do even better, because when you crack down on illegal immigration, the quality of life improves and the crime rate goes down and that’s the type of environment that businesses want to move to.”
Stewart said he expects to encounter push-back on the effort from federal officials, but added that a lack of federal enforcement of the nation’s immigration laws has created a need for action on the local level. “In their typical political fashion I would expect that the Obama administration will try to intimidate the Commonwealth of Virginia, try to sue the Commonwealth of Virginia. But we have to do what is right precisely because the federal government has refused to do anything about illegal immigration.”
An ad hominem approach to immigration statisticsThe report below is critical of a site that put up statistics which showed immigration to the USA in a bad light. But does it show where the statistics are wrong or quote better statistics? No. It simply rejects the statistics on the ground that they were in part taken from a site that is critical of immigration. That government statistics show such things as a high rate of crime among illegals is ignored.
And anybody quoting the sensationalist Southern Poverty Law Center as an authority on anything really is a stone-throwing glasshouse dweller. The very fact-based approach of immigration critics such as the Center for Immigration Studies is sadly missing from the mainstream media. Abuse seems to be the limit of their talent
Intuit-owned online financial tool Mint.com posted an item entitled “The Economic Impact of Immigration” to its MintLife blog earlier this week that quickly caught attention for all the wrong reasons.
The story, which featured an “infographic” and has since been taken down by the company, detailed the monetary impact that undocumented immigrants currently have on the U.S. economy, citing such numbers as 43 percent of all food stamps and 41 percent of unemployment benefits going to these individuals.
Besides being controversial, the numbers behind the imagery turned out to be questionably sourced. The Atlantic, which picked up on the story late Thursday, found that the chart had been sourced in part by Vdare, a site that has a history of posting anti-immigration articles, and has been classified as a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center. Other figures for the chart were taken from places like Pew Research, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Web site.
Mint has had a long history of running infographics, though in the past they have been features on banks, monetary distribution, and taxation, and have usually come from a single source. The one for immigration cited 12.
As David Weigel notes over at The Washington Post, the inclusion of the credible sources into the mix did little to help separate the wheat from the chaff, since the chart was set up in a way that did not show you where each statistic came from. That means Vdare could have very well had its own legitimate source for the information, but without showing which numbers came from where puts the entire chart under scrutiny.
MintLife’s editor Lee Sherman has since taken down the graphic and issued an apology, saying that the company went “too far” and that it won’t happen again. “It’s true that the tone [of the MintLife blog] is often provocative, seeking to engage readers in dialogue around important topics,” Sherman said. “But the recent blog post ‘The Economic Impact of Immigration’ went too far, cited polarized sources, and did not receive the editorial judgment and oversight it deserved.” The apology, though, was not good enough for some Mint users, who have removed their accounts from the service, and are posting about it on Twitter.
18 June, 2010
AZ: Border stretch closed down to AmericansGreat border management!
About 3,500 acres of southern Arizona along the Mexican border is closed to U.S. citizens due to increased violence in the region. The closed off area stretches 80 miles along the border and includes part of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. It was closed in October 2006 “due to human safety concerns,” the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said Wednesday in response to news reports on the closure.
Pinal County Sheriff Paul Babeu told Fox News that violence against law enforcement officers and U.S. citizens has increased in the past four months, further underscoring the need to keep the 80 miles of border land off-limits to Americans.
The refuge had been adversely affected by the increase in drug smugglers, illegal activity and surveillance, which made it dangerous for Americans to visit. “The situation in this zone has reached a point where continued public use of the area is not prudent,” said refuge manager Mitch Ellis.
“It’s literally out of control,” said Babeu. “We stood with Senator McCain and literally demanded support for 3,000 soldiers to be deployed to Arizona to get this under control and finally secure our border with Mexico. “
U.S. Fish and Wildlife officials have warned visitors in Arizona to beware of heavily armed drug smugglers and human traffickers.
“We need support from the federal government. It’s their job to secure the border and they haven’t done it,” said Babeu. “In fact, President Obama suspended the construction of the fence and it’s just simply outrageous.”
Signs have been posted warning Americans not to cross into the closed off territory south of Interstate 8. Babeu said the signs are not enough – he said Arizona needs more resources to help scale back the violence caused by the drug cartels.
“We need action. It’s shameful that we, as the most powerful nation on Earth, … can’t even secure our own border and protect our own families.”
Nobel Laureate Gary Becker says immigrants should payProfessor Gary Becker, a Nobel prize-winning economist, will argue that immigrants should pay for the right to settle in Britain and the United States. Professor Gary Becker will say that it would be up to individual governments to set a price, adding that a charge of $50,000 (£34,000) per immigrant could generate $50bn a year in the US.
The same sum could generate about £17bn a year in Britain, based on Office for National Statistics data which showed 503,000 immigrants arrived between October 2008 and September 2009.
“What the government would do is set a price, and the price would be determined by how many people they would like to admit, and then they would allow everyone to come in who could pay that price, aside from obvious exceptions like terrorists,” he told The Daily Telegraph before delivering the 19th Institute of Economic Affairs Annual Hayek Memorial Lecture in London.
The American economist said that as well as being a revenue raiser for governments at a time of record deficits, the policy would ensure that only the most productive and committed immigrants were attracted, at a time when the present system was not working in countries including the UK and the US.
“If you were just coming temporarily it wouldn’t be worth paying the price, so you’d get people committed to becoming British, or an American, or whatever it may be.”
Professor Becker, who teaches at the University of Chicago and won the Nobel Memorial Prize for Economic Science in 1992, said the most skilled immigrants would still be attracted, because they would be able to generate the highest returns from their investment in the entry fee.
He said the programme would also reduce opposition to immigration, by eliminating the sense that immigrants were getting “a free ride”. He will argue that a government loan system should be introduced to ensure that young, ambitious people could borrow the entry fee and pay it back over time.
“Usually governments are encouraged to make more radical changes when they decide that things are pretty bad and the present solutions aren’t working. That’s the situation the UK is finding itself in, the US is finding itself in, and Germany, Scandinavia, and other countries,” Mr Becker said.
17 June, 2010
Reagan and immigrationPeter Robinson has a piece in today’s Wall Street Journal suggesting that Ronald Reagan might have liked George W. Bush’s (and the old John McCain’s) style on illegal immigration better than the new McCain’s. He points to the 1986 amnesty and other examples of Reagan’s openness to immigration.
There’s no question Reagan was pro-immigration. In his 1989 farewell address to the nation, he said of the Shining City on the Hill “if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” But it is also worth noting that Pat Buchanan supported the 1986 amnesty. That experience chastened a lot of people. Moreover, Reagan also said that, “This country has lost control of its borders. And no country can sustain that kind of position.”
On immigration, there were things that we know now that we did not know then. Since 1970, there has been an increasing mismatch between the skill levels of the immigrants entering the United States and the U.S. labor force. This, combined with our lack of cultural self-confidence, has slowed the historic assimilation process. Some of this is due to sheer numbers. Much of it is due to the fact that the immigrants are choosing themselves: Half of the immigrants who have arrived in the last decade have come illegally; family reunification drives about 65 percent of legal immigration.
There are certainly circumstances where openness to immigration can be conservative. Reagan’s pro-immigrant sympathies were a reflection of his belief in both the greatness of America and the intrinsic value of the individual. But sentimentality about immigration without regard to the facts on the ground isn’t conservative at all. The Shining City’s interests come first.
SOURCE
The Leftist Australian government is finally getting a bit realistic about so-called “refugees”Prompted by strong public opinion against their previous “open door” policies. Since all the Afghans passed through several countries on their way to Australia, NONE of them were in fact seeking refuge. They had refuge as soon as they arrived in Pakistan
MORE than 40 per cent of Afghan asylum-seekers are being rejected as refugees, down sharply on the 95 per cent who were being waved through less than one year ago. Immigration Minister Chris Evans yesterday said more than 220 Afghans had been denied “in the last month or two”. “They are now getting rejected at quite large rates,” Senator Evans said. “The last percentage I saw was over 40 per cent.”
Afghans comprise the biggest group of asylum-seekers who arrived at Christmas Island last year and so far this year.
Crowding on Christmas Island has prompted the Department of Immigration and Citizenship to look for mainland options to house detainees.
Senator Evans said offers were flowing in from organisations on the mainland wanting to house asylum-seekers from Christmas Island. Those making approaches included maverick West Australian MP Wilson Tuckey, who suggested asylum-seekers could live at a pub in the wheatbelt town of Southern Cross.
16 June, 2010
Children born to non-US citizens could be barred from American birth certificatesOne of the politicians behind Arizona’s controversial immigration law has called for children born to non-US citizens to be barred from getting American birth certificates.
Under the 14th Amendment to the US Constitution any child born in the country has an automatic right to citizenship regardless of their parents’ legal status.
But Republican State Senator Russell Pearce will introduce a bill later this year to target so-called “anchor babies,” which he says are used by illegal immigrants to stay in the country.
When they become adults the children can sponsor their parents for legal permanent residency.
An estimated four million children became US citizens after being born to illegal immigrant parents on US soil in 2008.
Arizona is already facing a boycott by other US states and cities following its introduction of a law that requires police to determine a person’s immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” they are undocumented.
Senator Pearce, who sponsored that law, said the fact babies born to illegal immigrant parents become US citizens was “the most irrational and self-defeating provision you could have.” He said those who had written the 14th Amendment in 1868 had never anticipated the “deluge” that would come. “I want to bring a little common sense and integrity back,” he said.
“It’s illegal to enter the United States and yet we are going to create the greatest inducement to breaking our law, and entering illegally, and that’s making your baby a citizen.”
Opponents of the proposed bill say it is contrary to the Constitution and the American spirit. The right of Arizona to attempt to deny US citizenship could ultimately end up in the US Supreme Court. The 14th Amendment was drafted in order to secure the citizenship and Constitutional rights of freed slaves and their children.
On Throwing Rocksby A.X. Perez
So it seems that last week a group of young men tried to cross over illegally from Juarez to El Paso at the Black Bridge. A lone Border Patrol Agent stopped them, arrested one and the rest ran back across the river (Trickle actually as the bulk of the Rio Grande’s water is diverted through canals just up stream to prevent the river from changing channels and thus relocating the Border.) The escapees then began to pelt the BP guy with rocks. He pulled his issue pistol and shot at his assailants, killing one. The incident was videotaped and the tape played on local media. The Mexican government is angry, Immigrant rights Groups are furious, and everyone is getting their panties in a knot.
I believe in open borders, amnesties and all sorts of good stuff. And I say the deceased had it coming. In the first place years of living on the border have taught me that the kids crossing under the Black Bridge are not coming over to work, attend school, meet girlfriends or other honest business. They come to look for trouble. Maybe it’s just a “mischievous lark,” maybe it’s a recce for alien and drug smugglers, maybe it’s to shoplift and commit burglary. Back until the border was sealed in the early Nineties juvenile gangs crossed at the Black Bridge to rob, rape and murder those who crossed informally to look for honest work. Five decades of observation and experience have led me to conclude they are not coming over to live by and celebrate the Zero Aggression Principal.
Secondly, you can in fact kill or at least seriously injure a man throwing rocks. The BP Agent had a choice between retreating and thus letting a suspect he had reason to believe was entering the US for the purpose of committing crimes other than illegal entry go or firing with his sidearm on his assailants. It is appropriate for a law enforcement officer to shoot under those circumstances. I am assuming reasonable marksmanship and just right sized rocks being used by the kids throwing rocks.
Finally, how many kids in Juarez have been murdered in the drug wars tearing up the town to where its murder rate exceeds the casualty rates for the filibusters in Iraq and Afghanistan? Where is the outrage over the drug war in J-Town ten years ago and the deaths it caused? Where is the anger over the systematic robbery, rape and murder of schoolgirls, factory workers and prostitutes that really didn’t stop in the mid Nineties?
People have been found not guilty of murder for using a gun to fight off assailants armed with rocks. As much as I dislike our immigration laws I am not about to require that those enforcing them either fail to do their jobs or submit to potentially lethal assault, especially by those who profit by the maxim that when an activity is outlawed it is taken over by criminals. And I am not going to express support for a ruling class like the one in Mexico condemning the US for violating their citizens rights when they piss on those rights, and the people whose rights they are for that matter, on a consistent and regular basis.
Maybe if I hadn’t spent so much of my life in the area where this happened I would look at it differently. However, I did and my judgment is shaped by what I observed and still observe. Come live In Downtown El Paso, Sunset Heights, and Segudo Barrio and then you can judge also.
15 June, 2010
Petty bureaucracy againWhy do so many immigration decisions have to be a mockery of due process? Too many low-wattage people are given too much power
With the country’s renewed focus on immigration laws, feds have been stepping up their crackdown on folks getting married for Green Cards. However, more often it seems that legitimate couples are being accused of having sham marriages. The New York Times reports on the marriage of Shari Feldman and Inderjit Singh, which is still being questioned after 17 years of happiness and fidelity. Singh came to the country illegally in 1992, but the two have been going strong since their marriage in 1993. However, they’ve been unable to convince immigration officials that their marriage is legitimate after five interviews.
Feldman wrote in protest, “If I was, in fact, fraudulently married to my husband for the purposes of obtaining a green card for him, would I have continued to file over and over and over again? If my husband only married me to obtain a green card, I am sure he would have left me many years ago and found a wife that would fit the U.S.C.I.S.’s idea of what a couple should be.” But the USCIS refuses to hear their case again, since they apparently gave conflicting answers to things like what they did for Feldman’s birthday, or how much rent they pay. (Feldman said $677.17, Sing said “about $700.”) Petitions by 20,507 citizens were denied last year, though only 506 were for fraud. The rest were for interview discrepancies (could you pass the test?) or failure to show up for an interview.
Their lawyer insists that Singh’s suspicious answers are due to his poor memory, caused when he was hit in the head with a gun during a robbery of a candy store where he used to work. He also seemed estranged from Feldman’s family, though Feldman’s sister said, “I can’t stand him. They have a marriage, I know that. He probably got the questions wrong because he’s an idiot.” At least he’s straight!
Costly “asylum seekers”The good ol’ generous Australian taxpayer again
ALMOST $200,000 a week is being spent on charter flights to ferry asylum seekers and federal staff to and from Christmas Island to ease pressure on the overcrowded off-shore detention centre.
New figures on the cost of the Government’s border protection policy reveal it has been forced to double the number of charter flights on and off the island this year, to an average of one every five days. The cost of the aircraft has also more than trebled in just 10 months to $8.2 million, or $134,000 a flight. And it is forecast to keep rising, with the Government admitting it will cost an extra $8.1 million next year.
According to the latest figures – detailing the cost of flying asylum seekers from the island to 12 locations on the mainland, including Sydney – in the 10 months to April 30, 62 aircraft were chartered to carry 6500 people to and from Christmas Island. In the 2008-09 financial year 32 charter flights carrying 2500 people to and from the island cost $2.7 million – an average of $84,000 a flight.
But the latest figures do not include the recent transfer of 30 Sri Lankan, Afghan and Iranian family groups – 86 asylum seekers in total – from the island to the former mining camp in Leonora, in Western Australia. They also do not include the 189 single Afghan males who were flown from the island on two charter flights to the Curtin Airbase in the remote West Kimberley region of WA at the weekend, costing more than $250,000.
The cost blowout is expected to continue, with the Government also confirming at the weekend it was looking for more sites to house asylum seekers on the mainland, to cope with overcrowded facilities on Christmas Island.
There are already at least 11 detention centres, residential housing or transit accommodation facilities on the mainland at various sites including Sydney, Perth, remote Western Australia, Melbourne, Brisbane, Darwin and outback South Australia.
At a Senate Estimates hearing less than three weeks ago the Federal Opposition claimed the operating costs at Christmas Island were “increasing markedly”.
Immigration Minister Chris Evans was sarcastic in his response. “You have discovered [an] awful truth, which is that as the number of detained [sic] on Christmas Island increases the cost of running Christmas Island increases,” Senator Evans told the committee. “You have got us; we confess; the costs have increased. I know it is amazing, but the costs have increased . . .”
Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said Prime Minister Kevin Rudd was spending more time “running his own airline than stopping the boats”.
14 June, 2010
Texas GOP Decides on Arizona-like Immigration LawsTexas Republicans wrapped up their two-day convention yesterday, calling upon the administration to pass a stricter law against illegal immigration. Over 8,000 delegates and alternates approved a slate of GOP priorities that envisage calls for enacting Arizona-like immigration laws in Texas. The proposed law criminalizes illegal immigration in Texas and makes it compulsory for the law enforcement agencies to verify citizenship when a person is detained.
The convention kicked off on Friday with pledges of unity and anti-Democrat speeches. The final hours of the convention saw heated debates over GOP policy priorities. The discussions and resolutions passed at the Republican Party platform set the base for the policies that GOP activists want from the elected officials.
The proposed law, which is quite similar to the one passed by Arizona, has stirred national debate. Many rights group and Democrats have strongly denounced effort s to bring Arizona-like laws to Texas. Meanwhile, Texas Gov. Rick Perry has warned that Arizona-like immigration laws could be counterproductive for the state and that it was not right way to fix the problem.
Another controversial plan calls for an “open carry” law that allows residents to carry firearms in public even without a concealed weapons permit. On the final day of the convention, Mississippi Gov. Haley said that the stakes in the 2010 polls were much “higher than any midterm election in my lifetime.”. The Gov called upon activists to focus on the Democrats who had led the country to the “biggest lurch to the left in American history.” Barbour asked to resolve their internal disputes amicably and not to seek “purity” test of leaders who may differ with them on several occasions. “We cannot forget unity because some people will let purity be the enemy of unity,” Barbour said. “It’s a big party and we need everybody who is on our side.”
However, Barbour’s rousing speech did not prevent GOP activists from slamming their moderate speaker. They also passed a resolution seeking removal of Straus, who came into power in 2009 with the help of House Democrats. Texas Republicans selected Steve Munisteri as the new chairman in a three-way clash, throwing out incumbent Cathie Adams of Dallas. Munisteri is a 52-year-old retired businessman and Houston lawyer. He will be leading the party for the next two years.
Hispanics leaving ArizonaArizona’s hard-hitting immigration law is driving Hispanics out of the state weeks before the controversial law goes into effect.
Although concrete figures are not available, anecdotal evidence suggests Hispanics, both legal residents and illegal immigrants, are starting to flee. Schools in Hispanic neighborhoods are reporting abnormal enrollment drops, and businesses that serve Hispanics also report that business is down, according to a USA Today report published Wednesday.
The report suggests that the immigration law is compounding demographic trends that have already significantly curtailed illegal immigration during the past two years. The bad economy has been the primary deterrent to many Hispanic immigrants seeking to enter Arizona, says Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.
“If you have a bad economy and a hostile environment, then that’s likely to cause people to think twice about coming, and possibly even to leave,” Mr. Passel says.
Arizona’s new immigration law requires that police conducting routine traffic stops or other checks ask people about their immigration status if there is “reasonable suspicion” that they’re in the country illegally.
The law also makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally or to disrupt traffic when hiring day laborers, regardless of a worker’s immigration status. It would also become a crime for illegal immigrants to solicit work.
Critics contend the law could lead to racial profiling of Hispanics. It could also force an exodus of scared immigrants – legal and illegal. Nearly 100,000 illegal immigrants left Arizona after it passed a 2007 law that penalized businesses that hired them, according to the Department of Homeland Security.
The importance of the economyYet the economy is a far more powerful factor in immigration, says David Gutierrez, a professor of immigration history, at the University of California San Diego. Arizona’s immigrant population, which is more than 90 percent Mexican, has already been leveling off for two years now, due to the recession.
“The economy is always the primary factor in determining migration flows,” says Professor Gutierrez. “It might appear as if these laws are turning back demographic tide in Arizona, but economic forces are a much more important aspect of that development recently.”
The Pew Hispanic Center reports a 40 to 45 percent drop in people coming to the US from Mexico, says Passel. That’s supported by data on border apprehensions, which have dropped 25 percent for two years in a row, he adds.
What’s more, more Hispanics have been leaving Arizona since the recession began. A recent Census report suggests roughly 40,000 Hispanics left the state in 2008.
Where are they going?
About 450,000 Mexicans return to Mexico from around the world, but “those numbers have been flat as a pancake for three years now,” Passel says.
It’s more likely, they’re migrating within the US, says Gutierrez. “It’s got to be an exceedingly difficult decision [to leave],” he says. “Once they return to Mexico, it’s much harder to come back. It’s much more likely we’re seeing internal migration.”
Most Hispanics who flee Arizona will join friends, family, or other Hispanic communities in California, Texas, New Mexico, and other states with large Hispanic populations.
For his part, Gutierrez is skeptical of claims that the law will begin an exodus. “I don’t see a historical trend that has been in place for 100 years will be reversed because you’ve got a few hyper-conservative white legislators trying to turn back the clock, turn back the tides of history.”
Any loss, however, will be a loss for the Arizona economy, Gutierrez suggests. “Latinos…are a highly flexible, highly exploitable work force, a buffer to economic downturns,” he says. “Many of the industries here – agriculture, service industries, low-end manufacturing, construction – are massively dependent on undocumented workers. “If I were able to conduct an experiment and pay all of Arizona’s undocumented workers to not work for two weeks, the economy would come to a screeching, crashing halt instantaneously.”
13 June, 2010
Turnaround in approval ratings of Arizona governor shows how fed up with illegals most voters areA lesson for politicians nationwide, I think
Only nine months ago, politically speaking, Jan Brewer had flatlined; the Arizona governor’s approval rating was at 22 percent. And as recently as three months ago, a Rasmussen poll of likely voters showed her trailing her likely opponent, state Attorney General Terry Goddard, by nearly 10 points in the runup to November’s gubernatorial election.
But voters in the Grand Canyon State have been singing a different tune since April, when Brewer signed SB1070 — the state immigration law that has become the focus of a national controversy.
Since then, Brewer’s approval ratings have skyrocketed, catapulting her to the top of the polls in the gubernatorial race and launching what may be the biggest political comeback of the year in the U.S.
Just one month after signing the law, Brewer had taken a 13-point lead over Goddard, with 52 percent of likely voters backing her candidacy, according to Rasmussen Reports.
It’s a remarkable turnaround for Brewer, who assumed office last year when Gov. Janet Napolitano resigned to become President Obama’s secretary of homeland security. Brewer has pulled far ahead in Arizona’s Aug. 24 Republican primary race, and she has emerged virtually overnight as a national figure in the debate over border security and illegal immigration.
Matt Roberts, communications director at Arizona Republican Party headquarters in Phoenix, says Brewer’s comeback is all the more impressive considering how far behind she was when she took office. “Our former governor really left our current governor in a bad spot,” Roberts said. “The voters hold elected officials accountable, and maybe her polling figures that have gone up are due to the fact that things are going better.”
In a second legislative victory last month, Brewer rallied voters to pass a temporary sales-tax increase to help combat the state’s budget crisis. She also delighted conservatives earlier this spring when she circumvented Goddard’s office in filing a lawsuit that challenges the president’s health care law.
But the signature issue in Brewer’s surge is Arizona’s immigration law, which makes it illegal to be an undocumented immigrant in the state and empowers law enforcement officials to question people they suspect are illegal immigrants about their status. Seventy-one percent of voters in the state support the law, and 63 percent say immigration is “very important” in determining how they will vote. Goddard has said he opposes the law, and Brewer has now hired outside counsel to defend her and the state against impending lawsuits.
Businessman John Munger, who dropped out of the Republican gubernatorial primary race last week due to fundraising problems, said Brewer’s surge is due to the media frenzy over the law, and not because she suddenly won over the hearts and minds of voters. “She’s signed a bill that is very popular with Arizonans and hit a chord with Arizonans, and I think she’s reaping the advantage of that,” Munger said. “Campaigning around the state, I rarely found voters enamored with Jan Brewer.”
Munger said Brewer’s spike in the polls had to do with the perception among voters that she was responsible for SB1070, although he pointed out that she was not involved in formulating the law and that she did not concern herself with the bill before it hit her desk. Indeed, he said, she waited more than four days to sign it. “It wasn’t even clear that she was going to sign (the bill),” Munger said, “but she eventually made the decision to do so, and it turns out that may be the luckiest decision she’s made in a long time.”
Bruce Merrill, a long-time pollster and professor emeritus at Arizona State University, said “immigration is the overriding issue in Arizona, and a vast majority of voters in Arizona support Brewer’s position.”
“She symbolically represents a lot of people in Arizona saying, ‘We’ve dealt with this issue for a long time and this is how we’re dealing with it now,’” Merrill said, adding that even some of the 24 percent of Arizonans who oppose the law may like that Brewer stood up for it. “It’s not just about whether you like or dislike the bill,” he said. “To defend Arizona really helps her with a lot of people — it emphasizes her leadership skills and pride in Arizona.”
Merrill predicted that SB1070 will sustain Brewer through the Aug. 24 primary. “I think (immigration) will be the major issue, and I think she’s picked the right position on it,” he said.
The Obama administration has said that it will send staffers to Arizona in coming weeks to discuss implementation of the law, but with the primary nearing, Merrill said he believes it’s unlikely that such a visit will have much effect on election outcomes.
Munger, too, said Brewer is riding a wave of popularity among her party’s luminati. “She’s certainly captured the imagination of most of the conservative pundits that are listened to by many of your typical Republican voters,” Munger said. “Her name is daily mentioned on most of the shows, so she’s getting astounding amounts of free advertising, and it’s very, very difficult to compete with that in this atmosphere.”
Added Merrill: “The more the liberal media rails against Arizona and against [Brewer], the more it helps her.”
The good ol’ generous American taxpayer againThis story is from 2006 but there is no reason to believe that things have changed much
Parkland Memorial Hospital in Dallas, Texas is a fairly famous institution and for a variety of reasons:
1. John F. Kennedy died there in 1963
2. Lee Harvey Oswald died there shortly after
3. Jack Ruby, who killed Lee Harvey Oswald, died there a few years later by coincidence
On the flip side, Parkland is also home to the second busiest maternity ward in the country with almost 16,000 new babies arriving each year. (That’s almost 44 per day — every day)
A recent patient survey indicated that 70 percent of the women who gave birth at Parkland in the first three months of 2006 were illegal immigrants.’ Crikey, that’s 11,200 anchor babies born every year just in Dallas. According to the article, the hospital spent $70.7 million delivering 15,938 babies in 2004 but managed to end up with almost $8 million dollars in surplus funding. Medicaid kicked in $34.5 million, Dallas County taxpayers kicked in $31.3 million and the feds tossed in another $9.5 million.
The average patient in Parkland’s maternity wards is 25 years old, married and giving birth to her second child. She is also an illegal immigrant. By law, pregnant women cannot be denied medical care based on their immigration status or ability to pay. OK, fine. That doesn’t mean they should receive better care than everyday, middle-class American citizens. But at Parkland Hospital, they do.
Parkland Memorial Hospital has nine prenatal clinics. NINE. The Dallas Morning News article followed a Hispanic woman who was a patient at one of the clinics and pregnant with her third child — her previous two were also born at Parkland. Her first two deliveries were free and the Mexican native was grateful because it would have cost $200 to have them in Mexico. This time, the hospital wants her to pay $10 per visit and $100 for the delivery but she was unsure if she could come up with the money. Not that it matters, the hospital won’t turn her away. (I wonder why they even bother asking at this point.)
How long has this been going on? What are the long-term effects? Well, another subject of the article was born at Parkland in 1986 shortly after her mother entered the U.S. illegally — now she is having her own child there as well. (That’s right, she’s technically a U.S. citizen.) These women receive free prenatal care including medication, nutrition, birthing classes and child care classes. They also get freebies such as car seats, bottles, diapers and formula.
Most of these things are available to American citizens as well but only for low-income applicants and even then, the red tape involved is almost insurmountable.
Because these women are illegal immigrants they do not have to provide any sort of legitimate identification — no proof of income. An American citizen would have to provide a social security number which would reveal their annual income — an illegal immigrant need only claim to be poor and the hospital must take them at their word.
My husband is a pilot for the United States Navy (yes, he fought in Iraq) and while the health care is good, we Navy wives don’t get any of these perks! Car seats? Diapers? Not so much. So my question is this: Does our public medical care system treat illegal immigrants better than American citizens? Yes it does!
As I mentioned, the care I have received is perfectly adequate but it’s bare bones, meat and potato medical care — not top of line.
Their (the illegals) medical care is free — simply because they are illegal immigrants? Once again, there is no way to verify their income. Parkland Hospital offers indigent care to Dallas County earn less than $40,000 per year. (They also have to prove that they did not refuse health coverage at their current job. Yeah, the ‘free’ care is not so easy for Americans.)
There are about 140 patients who received roughly $4 million dollars for un-reimbursed medical care. As it turns out, they did not qualify for free treatment because they resided outside of Dallas County. So the hospital is going to sue them! Illegals get it all free! But U.S. citizens who live outside of Dallas County get sued! How stupid is this?
As if that isn’t annoying enough, the illegal immigrant patients are actually complaining about hospital staff not speaking Spanish. In this AP story, the author speaks with a woman who is upset that she had to translate comments from the hospital staff into Spanish for her husband. The doctor was trying to explain the situation to the family and the mother was forced to translate for her husband who only spoke Spanish. This was apparently a great injustice to her.
In an attempt to create a Spanish-speaking staff, Parkland Hospital is now providing incentives in the form of extra pay for applicants who speak Spanish. Additionally, medical students at the University of Texas Southwestern for which Parkland Hospital is the training facility will now have a Spanish language requirement added to their already jammed-packed curriculum. No other school in the country boasts such a ridiculous multi-semester (multicultural) requirement.
12 June, 2010
Immigration Reform? Divide and PiecemealComprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) is a major hot button issue right now thanks to Senator Russell Pierce (R-Ariz.) creating and Governor Jan Brewer (R-Ariz.) signing Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law. Arizona SB1070 has done more to raise immigration awareness in the general public than any other single event since the amnesty battle of 2007. And now on the national scene, it looks like open-border advocates are going to divide their efforts and piece together a hopeful CIR down payment with the DREAM Act and Ag Jobs bill.
Nonetheless, Senator Harry Reid (D-Nev.) continues to desperately look for GOP support on his 26-page Reid/Schumer/Menendez amnesty proposal. Last week President Barack Obama urged Republicans to work with him. Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said in a statement that he “noted” that several Republicans have supported immigration before, and urged them to do so again.
“Obviously, there were continued differences on some of these issues. But, the President believes that direct dialogue is better than posturing, and he was pleased to have the opportunity to share views with the conference,” Gibbs said.
The DREAM Act has bipartisan support from Senator Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) and Senator Dick Lugar (R-Ind.). It would allow illegal aliens who came to this country as children to become permanent residents if they attend college or enroll in the military. That’s an amnesty.
The Ag Jobs bill would allow illegal farm workers and agricultural guest workers to become permanent residents. That’s another amnesty.
Here’s where it gets tricky. Reid obviously wants his full immigration reform package to find GOP support and move it to a bill. Senator Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) is riding shotgun on the CIR trail. Enter in Durbin with the DREAM Act, which some feel would pass more easily in conjunction with Ag Jobs support from conservative farm states, and you have a top heavy Democratic Leadership pushing immigration reform into the midterm election cycle.
Anything could happen over the next 4 weeks!
There is limited time on the Senate calendar but high stakes for Reid facing a difficult reelection in Nevada, which has a large Hispanic population. If they go after the low-hanging fruit it could have devastating long term effects on the CIR movement. But keep in mind, that as Majority Leader, Reid has the capacity to divide and piecemeal, and to bring whatever he wants to the floor. Get ready for another amnesty push from the White House.
SOURCE See the original for links
Leftist racists take schoolkids on trip to Arizona“La Raza” means “the race” — but blatant Mexican racism is OK apparently
Standing in front of a wall-to-wall mural featuring a who’s who of revolutionaries, including Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and boldly displaying the motto Patria o Muerte, Venceremos!!! (Fatherland or Death, We Shall Overcome!!!), a group of teachers, students, parents and community activists in the Los Angeles Unified School District gathered last month for an unusual field trip — to Arizona, to protest that state’s controversial immigration law.
A video posted on YouTube shows LA social studies teacher Jose Lara interviewing teachers and students on May 28 at the headquarters of an organization calling for a Mexican revolution on U.S. soil. Soon after he shot the video, many in the group left for an overnight “freedom ride” to Phoenix to protest what Lara tells the camera is a “racist and outrageous” law.
Four days later, the school board president implored the superintendent of schools to ensure that students in the district be taught that Arizona’s law is “un-American” and Jim Crow-like. The law, passed in April, empowers law enforcement officials to question the immigration status of people they think may be in the country illegally.
Lara, who made the video, teaches at the Unified School District’s Santee Education Complex with Ron Gochez, another social studies teacher who came under fire last month after he was identified making incendiary remarks in a widely circulated YouTube video that shows him speaking at a 2007 rally for La Raza, a revolutionary group calling for Mexican revolt inside the United States.
In that video, Gochez referred to Americans as “frail, racist, white people, and to California as “stolen, occupied Mexico.” The video’s posting led to a groundswell of anger and a flood of calls for Gochez’s firing, but a school district investigation found him fit to continue teaching history to public school students.
Both Lara and Gochez are active in numerous revolutionary groups, including Union Del Barrio, a La Raza organization that Gochez helped establish across the street from Santee High School.
In the video shot before the trip to Arizona, students, teachers and others are seen gathered at the Union Del Barrio meeting hall and cultural center in Los Angeles, called Centro Cultural Francisco Villa — a nod to one of the leaders of the Mexican Revolution — where wall murals picture revolutionary leaders — including Ho Chi Minh — holding machine guns….
The teachers who accompanied students to Phoenix are no strangers to political activism and controversial speech. Gochez has organized against immigration law enforcement raids and held anti-Immigration and Customs Enforcement meetings at his public high school. Lara has worked to secure scholarships and student loans for high school students who are in the U.S. illegally.
Lara and Martinet did not respond to e-mail requests for comment.
FoxNews.com has also uncovered e-mails sent by Martinet to a Progressive Educators discussion group that reveal her involvement in a May 16 march to protest Arizona’s immigration law and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who gave a commencement speech that day at Pomona College….
Three days after the teachers and students caravanned to Phoenix to protest the immigration law, the Los Angeles school district board passed a resolution opposing it. The board said the district would look into curtailing district travel to the district and business with any Arizona-based companies. The school board president called on the superintendent to ensure that students throughout the district are taught that the immigration law is “un-American.”
Hours after that June 1 school board meeting, Lara posted on his Facebook wall a link to an article titled, “LAUSD board condemns Arizona Immigration law,” along with the comment, “I know what I am teaching tomorrow in class!!!!”
Others weren’t so sure. A Facebook user named Anne responded, “LAUSD CLEAN UP YOUR OWN HOUSE FIRST!” and another, Lou De Pace, a longtime LAUSD educator who’s now retired, wrote, “amazing CA is going to hell in a handbag that is empty and we worry about AZ.” … “Clean your house up so you don’t live in glass house that people can throw stones at it.”
More HERE
11 June, 2010
California Now the Least-Educated StateReport Examines How Immigration Has Changed the Golden State
In 1970, nine percent of California’s population was comprised of immigrants; by 2008 it was 27 percent. A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) finds that as a result of immigration, California now has the least-educated labor force of any state. Historically, California was not a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, like Appalachia or parts of the South. However, immigration has transformed the state. Absent a change in immigration policy, other parts of the country may be transformed in a similar fashion.
The report, ‘A State Transformed: Immigration and the New California,’ is authored by Steven A. Camarota and Karen Jensenius. Among the findings:
* In 1970 California had the 7th most educated work force of the 50 states in terms of the share of its workers who had completed high school. By 2008, it ranked 50th, making it the least-educated state. One in six workers in the state has not graduated high school.
* The decline in education in California is large relative to other states. The percentage of Californians who have completed high school has increased since 1970; however, all other states made much more progress in improving education levels. As a result, California has fallen behind the rest of the country.
* The large relative decline in education in California is a direct result of immigration. Without immigrants, the share of California’s labor force that has completed high school would be above the national average.
* There is no indication that California will soon close the educational gap. California ranks 35th in terms of the share of its 19-year-olds who have completed high school. Moreover, one-third of the adult immigrants who settled in the state in 2007 and 2008 had not completed high school, adding 91,000 new unskilled adults to the state.
* In 1970, California was right at the national average in terms of income inequality, ranking 25th in the nation. By 2008, it was the 6th most unequal state in the country based on the commonly used Gini coefficient, which measures how evenly income is distributed.
* California’s income distribution in 2008 was more unequal than was Mississippi’s in 1970.
* While historical data on welfare are not available, we can say that in 2008 California ranked 11th highest in terms of the share of its households accessing at least one major welfare program and 8th highest in terms of the share of the state’s population without health insurance.
* The large share of California’s adults who have very little education is likely to strain social services and make it challenging for the state to generate sufficient tax revenue to cover the demands for services made by its large unskilled population.
Discussion. California is home to the high-tech and entertainment industries, has one of the nation’s largest tourism industries, and has the most productive agricultural land in the country. Historically, it was not a state with a disproportionately large unskilled population, unlike Appalachia, parts of the American South, or the Rio Grande valley. Relative to other states, it had one of the more educated labor forces in terms of the share of workers who had completed high school. But today it is the state with the largest share of its labor force that has not completed high school.
Analysis of Census Bureau data through 2008 by the Center for Immigration Studies shows this relative change is a direct result of immigration. California has become a state with one of the most skewed income distributions and it is among the states with high rates of welfare use and lack of health insurance. Immigrants in the state are six times more likely than natives not to have completed high school. While some employers argue that a continuing stream of unskilled immigrant workers is desirable, such a policy has consequences. Productivity, standard of living, welfare use, health insurance coverage, and the tax base are heavily impacted by education levels. The low level of educational attainment in the state is likely to create significant challenges for California in the foreseeable future.
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: Steven 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
English test for foreigners who want marriage visas for BritainThousands of foreigners who want to marry a British person will have to pass an English test before being allowed to enter the country.
The new rule will come into force in the autumn and will mean that non-EU migrants seeking a visa to marry will need to be able to understand English at the level of a child of 5 or 6. Skilled workers, who already have to be able to speak and listen to English at that level, may have to meet a higher standard.
Theresa May, the Home Secretary, said: “I believe that being able to speak English should be a prerequisite for anyone who wants to settle here. The new requirement for spouses will help promote integration, remove cultural barriers and protect public services.”
The Government also indicated that the new tests for those seeking a spousal visa would be made more difficult in years to come.
The English language test will apply to about 38,000 spouses, civil partners and fiancés a year, including many from India, Bangladesh and Pakistan who come for arranged marriages. Officials believe that the number of spousal visas will fall by 6,000 a year.
There has been growing concern in Whitehall that some of those arriving from the Indian sub-continent have no knowledge of English and as a result are vulnerable to exploitation and cannot get jobs.
The new test will apply to spouses or civil partners, fiances or proposed civil partners, unmarried partners or same sex partners of a UK citizen or permanent resident.
Testing will be provided overseas at centres accredited by the UK Border Agency. The Home Office said that it thought migrants would need to undertake between 40 and 50 hours tuition to meet the required standard. Applicants will be able to repeat the test until they pass.
10 June, 2010
Poll: Brewer easily tops Obama in immigration approachMore Americans agree with how Jan Brewer sees the immigration problem than the views of Barack Obama.
But that doesn’t mean they want her to be president.
In a new nationwide Rasmussen Reports survey taken in the days after the pair met — a meeting that gained national attention — 34 percent of the 1,000 likely voters said their views on illegal immigration are closer to that of the president. By contrast, 56 percent said they more closely aligned with those of Brewer.
The pair had sharply divergent opinions on what to do about the issue.
Obama, after their meeting, repeated his call for “comprehensive immigration reform.’’ The White House said that includes more border security but also includes a path to legalization for at least some of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country.
In her own comments following the closed-door discussion at the White House, Brewer said it would be wrong to try to address the question of those already here until the border is secured. She said previous attempts that included what she called “amnesty’’ did nothing to solve the underlying problem of people crossing the border illegally or remaining in this country after their visas expired.
The survey also found that 64 percent of those asked believe the federal government is to blame for the controversy surrounding Arizona’s new immigration law, which requires police to check the immigration status of those they have stopped when there is “reasonable suspicion’’ they are in the country illegally. That blame is based on the government not enforcing its own immigration laws.
Just 27 percent blamed the controversy on Arizona officials for passing the law in the first place.
But the agreement by those questioned with Brewer’s views on immigration are not enough to convince a majority that she should be running the country.
The survey, conducted Monday and Tuesday, found 39 percent would vote for Brewer in a head-to-head race with Obama. The incumbent would pick up 44 percent, with 8 percent unsure and 9 percent saying they don’t like the choice at all and want someone else entirely.
It’s possible, though, the result is based on ignorance of a sort: Asked their impression of the Arizona governor, 26 percent said it was very or somewhat favorable, 20 percent very or somewhat unfavorable — with fully 54 percent said they were not sure what to think of her.
The survey has a margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points.
Strong Anti-Immigration Vote Expected In NederlandPolls often underestimate the vote for conservative parties so Wilders may well do better than expected. Whether his party really is conservative is another matter. Its economic policies don’t seem particularly conservative
If public opinion polls prove correct, the Party for Freedom (PVV) of anti-Islamist leader Geert Wilders should do well in today’s parliamentary election in the Netherlands. The pre-election polls indicate the party, which campaigned on a call to “stop the Islamization of the Netherlands,” as doubling its number of seats in the legislature from nine to 18.
Geert Wilders has relentlessly pursued an anti-immigration line, asserting among other things that the cost of integrating the inflow of non-Western immigrants is a drain on the country’s resources at a time of economic hardship.
After a surprise strong showing in local elections in February, the PVV has been taken more seriously by mainstream politicians.
Wilders was optimistic today as he cast his vote in Amsterdam. “I hope we have an excellent outcome in the results of the elections today, [an outcome that] makes it possible for us to govern, to be part of a coalition, and to change things for the better in Holland,” he said. “We will have to wait and see what the outcome is, but I’m very positive that a lot of Dutch voters will support us.”
But Europe’s financial crisis and worries about the Dutch economy have eclipsed the issue of immigration in the intervening months.
Perhaps surprisingly, the party most in favor of stiff austerity measures is leading in the pre-election opinion polls. The center-right liberal VVD — the People’s Party for Freedom and Democracy, led by Mark Rutte — stands for big budget cuts, including a cut in Dutch contributions to the European Union; smaller government; and reducing benefits for immigrants.
Rutte was confident in remarks to reporters today. “Today is about [electing] the party which will be best able to take the lead in the economic recovery of the Netherlands — and that’s my party, of course,” he said.
The party’s financial expert, Frans Weekers, says the Dutch electorate understands the need for sacrifice to get the economy in order.
Source
Update: As I predicted, Wilders appears to have done much better than the polls predicted. Exit polls show his party getting 23 seats -- JR
9 June, 2010
Welfare states can’t have open bordersIs anything as polarizing as illegal immigration? Yorba Linda City Council members voted last week to support Arizona’s tough immigration law, a position akin to Costa Mesa City Council’s declaration that illegal immigrants are unwelcome there. Meanwhile, Santa Ana took a 180-degree opposite position, condemning Arizona’s law.
Someone’s got to say it. What’s missing amid the impassioned fervor surrounding illegal immigration is common sense.
Ideally, people should be permitted to do whatever doesn’t infringe on another’s God-given rights. Usually, this results in greater benefits for everyone. Not always. It’s an imperfect world.
Ideally, employers should be free to hire whomever they choose. Employees should be free to seek work anywhere. National borders impede this mutually beneficial arrangement by regulating immigration, consequently distorting job markets by perverting supply and demand. Even so, that’s not the central problem of illegal immigration.
Rather, the problem is rooted in well-intentioned institutional evils. As Milton Friedman said: “You cannot simultaneously have free immigration and a welfare state.”
It follows that you can’t build a fence high enough, or deport enough illegal immigrants, or punish businesses enough to completely discourage people from seeking to substantially better their lives, especially if what they stand to gain is free to them, and particularly if they don’t have much to begin with.
If jobs were the only issue, the market would largely self-correct whatever problems are posed by illegal immigration. But it’s not just jobs. Most of the world lives in conditions that make “poverty” in the contemporary United States look extravagant.
About 43 percent of America’s “poor” own their homes, which, on average, is a three-bedroom, one-and-a-half-bath with garage, says the Census Bureau. About 80 percent of U.S. poor have air conditioning. It was only 1970 when merely 36 percent of the entire population enjoyed air conditioning. In the 1940s, my parents slept on the porch to cope with Illinois’ stifling summer nights.
The Heritage Foundation tells us the typical poor American has more living space than the average person – not the average poor person – in Paris, London and other European cities.
About three-fourths of poor Americans own a car, and almost a third have two. A whopping 97 percent of U.S. poor households have color TV, and more than half own two or more. Three-fourths have a VCR or DVD player, and 62 percent get cable or satellite TV. That’s poor in America today.
Haven’t quite got the picture yet? Try this. The Pacific Research Institute tells us that last year, taxpayers spent on average $11,600 per pupil in California public schools, and as much as $22,000 for each child in districts receiving “small schools allowance.” There’s no entry fee to receive that education. Just walk in the door.
Then there’s the fact that no one is turned away from health care in America for lack of ability to pay. Hungry? Food stamps. Can’t pay the rent? Subsidized housing and free shelters.
Before you send hate mail, understand that this is not to say there isn’t poverty, suffering, hunger and need in America. It’s to say that, relatively speaking, the U.S. looks like paradise to substantially poorer people around the world.
What father of four wouldn’t do whatever he could to provide his children the equivalent of $46,400 to $88,000 in annual public school tuition each, completely free, rather than see them grow up poor without the hope that comes with education?
Add up everything the U.S. provides at no cost to recipients – health, education, welfare, food stamps, subsidized housing, etc. We’re fortunate to be insulated by two oceans, or else many, many more desperate poor would flood across our borders to take advantage.
And none of that even takes into consideration the lure of jobs, vastly more plentiful and better paying here than in impoverished nations.
The point is not whether we should turn these people away. The point is they have every reason to want to come. And you would, too. As long as we provide such stuff for free, people who don’t have it will come to get it. The more vital the free stuff, the greater the attraction. The more generous we are in doling it out, the more entitled they will feel.
When I raised this issue on the Register’s OrangePunch blog, a caller lambasted me, insisting we can’t afford to permit open borders because it would attract millions of Third World poor to our communities.
He’s probably right, although some of my colleagues would argue there is no evidence the increase in immigration would be vast. Whether immigration would increase a little or a lot, the fact remains we can’t afford open borders while we operate a welfare state. Neither can we afford to dangle free benefits before a desperate world that regards being poor in America as having arrived in paradise.
We are nearing the time to choose. We must dramatically scale back the overall welfare state to reduce the lure, or else resort to Draconian police-state measures to cope with the overflowing demand. Do we really want a cop, a clerk or a bureaucrat demanding to see our papers on the most contrived excuses? Ask any refugee from a totalitarian state. In an imperfect world, inevitable abuse is built into such systems.
As long as we live in an imperfect world, some regulation of the border is necessary to prevent easy access by those who would kill us, including requiring a criminal background check, a health check and a job waiting for the immigrant. The influx can be reduced from a torrent to a trickle, making reasonable border controls manageable.
If, however, we don’t remove the lure, the truly dangerous terrorist will be much more difficult to sift from the immigrants coming to get, apart from work, their free U.S. entitlements.
There are solutions – for employers who need workers, we need to raise immigration quotas and find a way for those needed to work legally. To address entitlements, the only permanent solution is to permanently end the welfare state in all of its incarnations, for everyone. Otherwise, the growing demand for our “free” public benefits will crush our already over-strained system. There will be even more clamoring for nurses and teachers to become de facto immigration enforcers, and for punishing employers for doing what employers are supposed to do, hire workers.
Finally, lest I’m mistaken for a cold-hearted scoundrel oblivious to my fellow man’s needs, let me say I’m in full agreement with the words inscribed at Ellis Island, our nation’s historic immigration gateway: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”
We are not to oppress foreigners living among us, in part because we are a land of immigrants. In that spirit, the Statue of Liberty’s inscription invited the “wretched” and “poor,” not just the properly credentialed.
But that invitation was extended long before we began providing many of life’s necessities as entitlements, which erodes our own sense of personal responsibility here at home, and looks to the rest of the world like a free ticket to the lap of luxury.
Britain ‘to send back young Afghan asylum seekersThe government is planning to build a “re-integration” centre in Afghanistan to forcibly return failed Afghan asylum seekers, including unaccompanied children, a report said Tuesday.
The new government plans to build the four million pound centre, which immigration officials hope could help return up to 12 under-18-year-olds per month, said The Guardian newspaper.
Returning young asylum seekers would be a major policy shift, since until now their repatriation has been blocked by child protection concerns and a vow only to return them if adequate care arrangements were in place, the daily said.
An official tender for the Afghan centre shows that immigration officials initially hope to return 12 under-18s a month to Afghanistan and provide “reintegration assistance” for 120 adults a month.
The Home Office declined to confirm or deny the report. But Immigration Minister Damian Green — a member of Prime Minister David Cameron’s new coalition government — said Britain was working with European and other countries to deal with the issue.
“No one should be encouraging children to make dangerous journeys across the world,” he said. “Therefore we are looking to work with other European countries such as Norway and valued international partners, such as UNICEF (United Nations Children’s Fund), as well as the Afghan government to find ways to help these young men in their home countries.”
It was also studying how to “return those who are in the UK safely to their home nations with appropriate support once they arrive,” he added in comments issued by his office in response to The Guardian report.
The new coalition government of Cameron’s Conservative Party and the centrist Liberal Democrats, which ousted Labour premier Gordon Brown after May 6 elections has put Afghanistan top of its foreign policy agenda.
Britain has around 9,500 troops in Afghanistan, largely battling Taliban militants in the volatile southern Helmand province.
8 June, 2010
Gallup: Obama losing the Hispanics over immigrationAn interesting split between English and non-English speakers. But the non-English speakers would mostly not be eligible to vote anyway so they won’t matter much in the response to Obama and his party next election day. Right or wrong, what Obama does will influence perception of the Democrats as a whole
The old adage that “in politics perception is reality” may be playing out on multiple fronts for the Obama administration as it battles not only the view that it has been ineffective in dealing with the BP oil spill but also that it is squandering its chance to move boldly on immigration reform.
According to polls released by Gallup today, Latinos have become less enthusiastic about the president’s overall performance as a result of what they see as his inaction on immigration.
Gallup reports that among Hispanics who were interviewed in Spanish, an 11-point drop in the past month followed a steep 21-point drop since January. Among Hispanics interviewed in English, Gallup reported only a 5 point drop. Sixty percent of those interviewed in English give the president a favorable job review, while only 52 percent of those interviewed in Spanish think likewise.
The survey was conducted as a random sample of adults 18 or over between Jan. 2 and May 31, 2010. Gallup surveyed approximately 1000 Hispanics a month during that period, for a sample error of plus or minus 4 percent.
Most Australians prefer a tougher approach to illegal immigration, poll findsALMOST two-thirds of voters support the Coalition’s decision to reintroduce the Howard government’s “Pacific solution” for dealing with asylum seekers who arrive by boat.
The latest Herald/Nielsen poll also finds the Coalition the preferred party overall to deal with asylum seekers which is looming as a central issue in this year’s federal election.
The poll of 1400 voters, taken between Thursday and Saturday, came after the announcement by Tony Abbott that a Coalition government would once more detain asylum seekers indefinitely in locations such as Nauru. The Coalition would also reintroduce the controversial temporary protection visas which Labor abolished on humanitarian grounds.
The poll found 62 per cent of voters supported “the Howard government’s policy of processing asylum seekers in countries outside Australia”. A minority of 33 per cent opposed the policy.
Asked which party had the best asylum-seeker policy, 35 per cent nominated the Coalition while support for Labor and the Greens was 19 per cent and 18 per cent respectively. “A majority of Australians are likely to support policies presented as tough and uncompromising and are less likely to support policies perceived as soft,” said a Nielsen pollster, John Stirton.
So far this year 133 boats have arrived in Australian waters and Labor MPs reported to caucus last week the arrivals were becoming a dominant concern among voters.
The Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, said he would not engage in a policy race to the bottom with Mr Abbott but promised to explain the facts more often to offset some of the myths and fears being perpetrated. For example, Australia took about 13,000 refugees a year, whether they arrived by boat or air. If boat arrivals increased, the net intake would not, he said.
The Opposition claims the government has lost control of the borders. It said the arrival of four boats in two days over the weekend showed the three-month and six-month processing freeze the Rudd government placed on Sri Lankans and Afghans respectively had failed to deter asylum seekers.
Asylum seekers found on the most recent boats were intercepted north of Ashmore Island and Scott Reef. They are en route to Christmas Island where 2436 people are detained in facilities with space for 2500.
The government has budgeted for the arrival of 2000 asylum seekers by boat in the year to June 30 next year. This is a drop on the year before but costs will double as more people fight their deportation and spend longer in detention to do so. The rates of rejection are increasing, with almost half of the 480 who arrived last year rejected as refugees by the Immigration Department in the past two months.
As the government postponed the transfer of about 30 families to the remote mining town of Leonora yesterday, it prepared the detention centre in Curtin to receive hundreds of asylum seekers affected by the April 9 suspension.
“The policy has been as ineffective as it is discriminatory,” the opposition immigration spokesman, Scott Morrison, said. The first transfer of 90 people to Leonora, scheduled for yesterday, was cancelled.
7 June, 2010
British Labour Party infighting: Ed Balls accuses former leader of being too soft on immigrationEd Balls, a Labour leadership contender, called on Sunday for new restrictions on the free movement of unskilled workers in Europe as he accused Gordon Brown of brushing concerns about immigration “under the carpet”.
Mr Balls’s attempts to distance himself from the former prime minister – his patron for more than 15 years – came before hustings on Monday night n which the leadership hopefuls will make their pitch to Labour MPs and peers.
A number of hose hoping to succeed Mr Brown have admitted that Labour lost contact with its core voters on the issue of immigration, but Mr Balls’s proposal to restrict EU immigration was the most dramatic input into the debate so far.
Interviewed on the BBC’s Politics Show, Mr Balls suggested that rewriting the EU treaty’s provisions on the free movement of labour, warning that large flows of unskilled workers put strains on communities. “The hard-headed view says if you believe in European integration – and you want to have the mobility of labour – the free mobility of unskilled labour is not sustainable for communities like the one I represent,” he said.
Mr Balls represents a Yorkshire constituency which saw an influx of immigrants from eastern Europe after the “big bang” EU enlargement of 2004. He said the possible future accession of Turkey could create a similarly “destabilising” exodus of workers across Europe.
While the EU can impose temporary restrictions – the UK has limited immigration from Bulgaria and Romania – he believed that more permanent restrictions on unskilled labour might be necessary. The former schools secretary said he urged Mr Brown to address immigration but his ill-fated encounter with Gillian Duffy, a Rochdale pensioner, suggested that he was in denial. “I think Gordon’s answer to Mrs Duffy showed he had not been having that conversation,” he said.
Mr Balls is facing competition from David and Ed Miliband for the Labour leadership: all three have mustered the necessary 33 nominations from MPs.
Andy Burnham, former health secretary, said he was “confident” he would get enough support to go on to the ballot paper by the time nominations close on Wednesday. He told the Financial Times that while he supported New Labour’s decision to become a pro-business party under Tony Blair, the party gave the impression that it had been “seduced by power, wealth and glamour”.
Mr Burnham said when Mr Brown’s administration rescued the failing banks, the public mistakenly believed “we had acted to save the bankers, not to help savers and the wider economy”.
The former health secretary, who comes from a working-class Merseyside background, will tell MPs he has an “instinctive” ability to understand the concerns of his party’s supporters, including questions of social mobility, the pressures facing lower middle class families and the insecurity of the elderly.
More boatfulls of illegals arriving — so Australia’s Leftist government fires the gatekeepersBy Andrew Bolt
Rudd’s border protection policies are leaking worse than ever:
It comes after a boat with 54 asylum seekers was stopped on Thursday night, just 25 hours after a vessel with 28 people was intercepted in the same area.
Oops – a fourth boat in 48 hours:
In the afternoon, a Customs boat responded to calls for help from another vessel that had engine problems north of Scott Reef. It is believed there were 46 passengers and three crew onboard the second ship.
What on earth made these people think Rudd was soft? Well, perhaps one clue is the sacking last week of many of the tougher members of the Refugee Review Tribunal, which now has on its selection panel the president of the Refugee Council of Australia.
Former RRT member Peter Katsambanis describes what has happened:
In his press release, the Minister makes no mention at all that 21 members were not reappointed. Now 2 or 3 of the 21 did not reapply as they were retiring but the rest were dumped. 46 members were up for reappointment – 25 were reappointed and 21 were not. This includes a number of very senior, very experienced members who have worked on the Tribunals for over 10 years.
Why gut the Tribunal in this way of you are not looking for a softer, more facilitative approach? The sacked members were highly competent individuals who did their jobs well without fear or favour. If it really was a merit-based selection process the only reason you would sack over 40% of the members due for appointment is because of lack of competence. If these people were incompetent then our federal courts would be full of appeals that would succeed. They are not.
No matter how the government dresses this up, it is simply another element of its softer approach on asylum seekers. The people smugglers will be celebrating all over south east Asia.
I’ve looked up just a few of the new appointments to the RRT, and think Katsambanis is not exaggerating at all:
Charlie Powles – Solicitor for RILC (Refugee and Immigration Law Centre) in Melbourne
Anthony Krone – Melbourne barrister who proclaims that he has appeared for hundreds of asylum seekers in Australia and who used to work for the Refugee Advice and Casework Service.
Clyde Cosentino – director of the Brisbane Catholic Archdiocese’s Centre for Multicultural Pastoral Care
Vanessa Moss – Solicitor for SCALES Community Legal Centre (Southern Communities Advocacy Legal Education Service), one of the leading refugee advocacy groups in WA.
Rowena Irish – solicitor for the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre Inc in Sydney
I’m sure these new people will decide each case on the facts – as did those they replace. Yet it seems beyond doubt to me that the message has gone out to be quicker to let in asylum seekers. I’ve already interviewed several serving and former RRT members who say they are in no doubt of this, and work in a “culture of fear”. And that was before this latest news of the appointment of new RRT members who have been previously worked to break down the doors for their clients.
Something stinks.
6 June, 2010
Translating the Code Words of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform
In the wake of Arizona’s new laws, the illegal alien special interests are working overtime making their last ditch pitch for amnesty before mid-terms elections, robotically reciting how they want to “fix” our immigration problems:
“We need to fix our broken immigration system. We need a path to citizenship for undocumented workers so they can go to the back of the line, get right with the law, and implement an orderly flow of needed workers, and a policy which secures the borders.”
For those in the know, of course, it’s all nonsense – word play and empty promises:
Fix A Broken System: When they say the system is broken they actually mean illegal aliens face deportation, and that America is not admitting enough legal immigrants fast enough. The fact is illegal aliens aren’t supposed to be in the United States – by definition they do not have legal status. As regards our level of legal immigration, America currently allows in more than one million people a year, more than any other industrialized country on the planet.
The bottom line is that the only thing broken about our immigration system is an unwillingness to impose sensible limitations and enforce the laws. Truth in labeling might suggest that their version of “fixing a broken system” should be read as “making a broken system worse.”
Path to Citizenship: Euphemisms for amnesty wear thin quickly so the new phrase “path to citizenship” has entered the lexicon. We already have a “path to citizenship” and it starts with applying for a green card and getting in line.
Go to the Back of the Line: To most people, going to the back of the line would mean returning home, filling out the necessary forms, and then waiting for a reply. What amnesty advocates mean by going to the back of the line is that we create a brand new line for those who have broken the law right here in this country.
Get Right with the Law: This phrase suggests that administratively converting 13 million people from illegal status to legal status “gets them right with the law.” Accommodating law-breaking by simply rewriting the rules to fit the circumstances is one of the most insidious aspects of amnesty.
Undocumented Workers: Given the huge sums of money the special interests have, one would assume their high-paid consultants would have told them that this euphemism expired years ago. We all know it means illegal aliens, but amnesty advocates believe that using the adjective “undocumented” magically erases the illegality, while claiming they are “workers” suggests all are gainfully employed, which they’re often not. The proper reference is “illegal aliens.” “Illegal” means prohibited by law. Yes, entry without inspection into the U.S is prohibited. And “alien” is a term defined in 8 U.S.C. Section 1101 and used by legal professionals across the board including the United States Supreme Court. It’s ok to say illegal aliens. You’ll be in good company.
Orderly Flow of Workers: This is a phrase that by its own definition assumes we actually need more workers. It refers to our foreign guest worker program. In addition to the 1.2 million legal immigrants the U.S. admits each year, and the 13 million illegal aliens currently living here, the U.S. also brings in another one million foreign nationals through work visas year after year. With a national unemployment rate of 9.9 percent, any endorsement of our massive foreign guest worker flow, or a suggestion that we should increase it, should be challenged on the grounds that it is imposing unfair competition for scarce jobs. Instead of “orderly flow of workers” the proper translation is “more foreign labor to take your job.”
Secure the Border: They save the biggest and boldest claim for last. Amnesty advocates promise to secure the border for no other reason than to make their plans for massive amnesty more palatable. The special interests don’t mean it and they don’t want to do it. After all, they have stymied every single piece of immigration enforcement legislation in recent years and relentlessly pressured the Obama administration to systematically dismantle most existing immigration enforcement.
There is immigration enforcement and then there is amnesty. One has nothing to do with the other. Revealing the motives of the illegal alien lobby is an ongoing responsibility because as Burke said, “a very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arise from words.”
Ariz. Gov. Brewer wants separating fence completed
Facing off over illegal immigration, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer told President Barack Obama that Americans “want our border secured” and called Thursday for completion of a separating fence. Obama underscored his objections that the tough immigration law she signed is discriminatory.
Meeting in the Oval Office, Obama said Arizona’s law and similar efforts by more than 20 states would interfere with the federal government’s responsibility to set and enforce immigration policy.
Neither side appeared to give ground on the contentious issue although both talked about seeking a bipartisan solution. Obama urged her to “be his partner” in working toward a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s badly fractured immigration system. Brewer told The Associated Press afterward that she told Obama her state is not ready for the comprehensive solution he favors. “I said we need to have the fence completed, have more troops on the border and more resources” for aerial surveillance, she said.
Thursday’s unusual meeting between the president and the governor was a byproduct of Brewer’s decision to sign a first-in-the-nation law requiring police enforcing other laws to check immigration status if they suspect someone is in the country illegally. The law also makes being in the U.S. illegally a state crime. Brewer sought the meeting and the White House accepted.
Emerging from the half-hour session, Brewer said Obama had assured her that the majority of the 1,200 National Guard troops he is sending to the U.S.-Mexico border would be going to her state. Brewer said she and Obama, at odds over how to control illegal immigration, also agreed to try to work together on solutions. She said White House staff would visit Arizona in a couple of weeks to continue the “very cordial discussion” she had with the president. “I believe the people of Arizona, the people of America, want our border secured,” Brewer said.
Outside the White House, hundreds of protesters, as unhappy with the law as they are with Obama’s inability to overhaul a system he and others say is broken, noisily greeted the Republican governor as she arrived for the meeting.
Nearly 200 people walked in a circle on the pedestrian-only portion of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House _ holding signs, chanting “Jan Brewer, shame on you!” beating drums and, in the case of one man, strumming a guitar.
The Arizona law is scheduled to take effect July 29, unless it is blocked by a court under pending legal challenges. Obama’s Justice Department also is reviewing the law for possible civil rights violations, with an eye toward a possible court challenge. Obama would not discuss any possible Justice Department action in the meeting, Brewer said.
Brewer has said she signed the law because she believes Washington had failed to do its part to protect the U.S.-Mexico border.
Obama said Thursday in an interview that he understands the frustration in Arizona over the influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico but that Arizona’s law is the wrong way to go about solving the problem. “I think this puts American citizens, who … are Hispanic, potentially in an unfair situation,” he told CNN’s Larry King.
Obama has been more outspoken on the issue recently. He has restated his desire to fix the system in a way that would tighten access to the border, help millions of illegal immigrants become U.S. citizens and crack down on employers who knowingly hire them. But he also has reminded advocates that Democrats only have 59 votes in the Senate _ one short of the number needed to overcome GOP stalling tactics.
Some Republicans, including Brewer and Arizona Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain, want tighter border controls first.
Obama has met with Republican senators and telephoned some privately, but Democrats have been unable to get any Republicans to help write an immigration reform bill. Some Democrats also oppose taking up immigration reform this election year, and the legislative calendar is closing.
While lawmakers and border-state governors say more federal troops are needed to fight rising violence in their states, government data obtained by The Associated Press show it actually isn’t so dangerous down there after all.
The top four big U.S. cities with the lowest violent crime rates _ San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin _ are in border states, according to a new FBI report. And an internal Customs and Border Protection report shows its agents face far less danger than street cops in most U.S. cities.
Brewer said in a televised interview last weekend: “We are out here on the battlefield getting the impact of all this illegal immigration, and all the crime that comes with it.” But FBI crime reports for 2009 says violent crime in Arizona declined. And violent crimes in Southwest border counties are among the lowest in the nation per capita _ they’ve dropped by more than 30 percent in the last two decades.
Brewer said after Thursday’s meeting that she believes people across the country “want our border secured” and that she would like to see construction begin soon to complete a fence along the border.
The Obama-Brewer meeting was closed to the media, so reporters did not see them together. The White House later released an official photograph from the meeting.
5 June, 2010
Mexico opens California office to provide ID for illegals
The Mexican government is opening a satellite consular office on Catalina Island — a small resort off the California coast with a history of drug smuggling and human trafficking — to provide the island’s illegal Mexican immigrants with identification cards, The Washington Examiner has learned.
The Mexican consular office in Los Angeles issued a flier, a copy of which was obtained by The Examiner, listing the Catalina Island Country Club as the location of its satellite office. It invites Mexicans to visit the office to obtain the identification, called matricular cards, by appointment.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican whose district includes Catalina Island, said handing out matricular cards will exacerbate an already dangerous situation. “Handing out matricular cards to Mexicans who are not in this country legally is wrong no matter where it’s done,” he said. “But on Catalina it will do more damage. It’s a small island but there’s evidence it’s being used as a portal for illegals to access mainland California.” Rohrabacher added, “If there were a large number of Americans illegally in Mexico and the U.S. consulate was making it easier for them to stay, Mexico would never permit it.”
Mexican officials with the consular office in Los Angeles could not be reached immediately for comment. The matricular consular identification card, is issued by the Mexican government to Mexican nationals residing outside the country, regardless of immigration status. The purpose is to provide identification for opening bank accounts and obtaining other services. But the cards are usually used to skirt U.S. immigration laws, since Mexicans in the country legally have documents proving that status, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.
In 2004 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI officials called the card an unreliable form of identification. The agency said that Mexico lacks a centralized database for them, which could lead to forgery, duplication, and other forms of abuse.
Officers with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said their agency was asked by Mexican officials not to enforce U.S. immigration laws on the island while the cards were being issued. “It amazes me every time that the Mexican government has the gall to tell us what to do,” said an ICE official, who asked not to be named. “More surprisingly is how many times we stand by and let them. This is just an example of one of hundreds of requests we’ve had to deal with.” The island has a sizable Mexican migrant population. Most are undocumented low-income workers.
New Canadian law to stop bogus asylum seekers opposed by Liberals
The Harper government is threatening to entirely scrap proposed reforms to Canada’s refugee system after the Liberals withdrew support for a central feature of the overhaul.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has decided his party can’t support refugee reform legislation as currently drafted. That’s despite the fact the government has amended the bill to encompass changes demanded by the Liberals’ own immigration critic.
Ignatieff’s decision to seek yet more changes follows a stormy caucus meeting Wednesday at which Liberal MPs expressed vehement opposition to the bill. They’re particularly dead set against a provision that would expedite the claims process for refugees deemed to be from safe countries of origin.
A spokesman for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says the safe-country-of-origin provision is essential to the bill and if opposition parties don’t accept it, they’ll forfeit all the other reforms in the bill.
Alykhan Velshi said the government will not accept “poison pill amendments” that undermine its efforts to discourage bogus claimants from safe countries.
Those other reforms include creation of a refugee appeal division, and a 20 per cent increase refugee resettlement from United Nations camps and a 20 per cent funding increase for the resettlement assistance program.
“The government has already accepted amendments negotiated in good faith with the Liberal party’s immigration critic,” Velshi said Thursday. “However, let me be clear. We will not accept poison pill amendments which significantly slow the process or undermine our efforts to disincentivize waves of false claimants from safe, democratic countries.”
Ignatieff’s decision forced the government to postpone clause-by-clause votes on the bill by the all-party immigration committee.
Kenney had hoped the deal he’d struck with Liberal immigration critic Maurizio Bevilacqua would result in speedy passage of the bill before Parliament breaks for the summer later this month.
A spokesman for Ignatieff, Michael O’Shaughnessy, said Bevilacqua “did an excellent job” negotiating amendments.
Nevertheless, O’Shaughnessy said: “After extensive consultation with our caucus, we’ve come to the conclusion that (the bill) is not ready yet and that some issues should be addressed before it should be considered.”
In particular, he cited the safe-country-of-origin provision and another governing applications to stay in the country on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
4 June, 2010
Immigration to Britain soared 20% after Labour Party’s ‘crackdown’
Labour’s supposedly tough points-based immigration system actually led to huge increases in foreign workers and students cleared to live in Britain, it emerged last night. Experts said the new Government had a ‘mountain to climb’ to bring migration under control.
Labour ministers, led by Gordon Brown, repeatedly claimed the Australian-style points system for non-EU nationals would reduce immigration. Economic migration was expected to fall by as much as 12 per cent.
But analysis published last night showed that, in fact, it increased by 20 per cent – while the number of foreign students went up by more than 30 per cent.
The revelation comes as the Tories prepare to set out how they will reduce net immigration to levels not seen since the 1990s.
Sir Andrew Green, of Migrationwatch-which produced the study, said: ‘This is Labour’s guilty secret. ‘When they talked about immigration at all before and during the election campaign, they claimed that they were getting it under control with their tough new system. The truth was quite different.
‘They have left an immigration system in chaos and the coalition with a huge mountain to climb in order to fulfil David Cameron’s election promise that net immigration would be brought down from the present level to tens of thousands, as in the 1980s and early 1990s.’
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week showed net immigration had increased the total population by 142,000 last year.
The points system, introduced in 2008, subjects migrants to a series of tests. It is up to ministers to decide how tough they should be.
Foreign workers are awarded points for their salary, qualifications and past experience. For students, points are based on qualifications and the course they hope to study.
Migrationwatch said Labour ministers had been asked parliamentary questions on the effects of the points system but had not given answers ahead of the election.
However, analysis of fresh government figures shows that the number of non-EU migrants given work permits, or permission to carry on working in Britain, increased by 20 per cent, from 159,535 in 2007 – the year before points were introduced – to 190,640 last year. The total includes dependents.
For students, which came under the points system a year later in 2008, the number of approvals increased by 31 per cent from 208,800 that year to 273,445 a year later.
The figures undermine the repeated claims by Labour that the points system would have a dramatic impact. The issue is not over whether the system itself is effective, but over how high Labour ‘fixed the bar’.
In 2008, Phil Woolas said that ‘had we introduced the points-based system a year ago there would be 12 per cent less migratory workers in the country than there are now’.
During the election campaign, Gordon Brown said: ‘I think we have got to show people that we are taking tough action and the points-based system we have introduced is changing things. I hope that voters understand that we have got a very tough attitude on this.’
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week showed that more than half the 503,000 immigrants who arrived in the year to last September – 270,000 people – were from outside the EU.
At the same time, the number of foreign nationals given British citizenship rose above 200,000 in 2009 – up more than 50 per cent in 12 months.
The ONS also published projections showing the national population will hit 70million in 2029.
Last night, Government immigration spokesman Damian Green said: ‘The Government will be introducing an annual limit on work permits as an important part of bringing immigration down to reasonable levels.’
So how is the Australian Leftist government “kinder”?
Here we go again, needlessly revisiting the suffering and the moral blackmail that John Howard ended but Kevin Rudd has revived:
ASYLUM seekers are once again resorting to self-harm in detention centres amid overcrowding and stalled refugee claims.
The Herald Sun has learned at least 17 immigration detainees injured themselves or attempted suicide in the past 11 months – almost twice the number of incidents of the previous year…
Self-harm by detainees sparked concerns over mandatory detention under the Howard government, and Kevin Rudd’s pledge to be “tough but humane” in his own treatment of asylum seekers.
Catholic priest Jim Carty, who recently returned from nine weeks on Christmas Island, said he knew of at least one detainee who tried to hang himself there… The Herald Sun has also heard of detainees cutting themselves, and of a man destined for deportation who drank bleach and shampoo.
3 June, 2010
A libertarian defence of border control
I hate name tags. I suppose it has something to do with that libertarian streak that dominates my thinking. What annoys me most about convention name tags is that they somehow remind me of the Star of David forced upon Jews in Hitler's Germany.
And so it was no surprise that when I attended the Libertarian National Convention in 2004 that I was accosted by the national Chairman on the convention floor who demanded that I not only present my "papers" but demanded that I display them dangled about my neck. I thought of the ironic comparison between the nation's leading libertarian and a Gestapo agent. And, again, at a 2004 gubernatorial debate I was confronted by a rent-a-cop who insisted that I display my name tag but (another irony) refused to ID himself when I demanded his name.
I've learned to comply. At the 2010 convention I dutifully wore my papers lest anyone demand I justify my presence on libertarian turf.
What I learned is that a conflict exists between the notion of private property (which, in a sense, the Libertarian events are) and liberty. I learned that LP chairman Geoff O'Neil was well within his right to insist I present my plastic-enclosed papers and the Jeffersonville cop, though inexcusable in failing to recognize a gubernatorial candidate, was obliged to secure the debate facility. There is a fact that must be taken to heart by Libertarians: Sometimes personal ID is reasonably justified.
When a person presents himself on my front porch, I have a right to demand that he identify himself and, if necessary, insist he prove it. When conventioneers show up at a Libertarian event, the party's authorities have a right to insure we are properly registered. When immigrants show up at our nation's borders, our government has a right to demand they verify their citizenship.
What holds true of a Libertarian Party convention -- that registered members be obligated to identify themselves by displaying their papers -- also holds true of our nation: Legal citizens may be obligated to identify themselves. For that reason it is questionable to fault the controversial Arizona initiative that allows law enforcement to demand residents display what is tantamount to convention name tags.
I found it amusing while signing in to the 2010 Libertarian Party convention that the staff member refused to view my drivers' license when confirming my registration, then proceeded to process my ID that was required to be displayed as plain as a Third Reich Star of David.
I also note that Libertarians, libertarian fundamentalists in particular, are careful to protect their party from political trolls who care little for small government and would hi-jack the party to pilfer it's invaluable ballot access. They would join in droves, vote out libertarian leaders and replace them with those who hate libertarian ideals. For that reason the party requires members to sign a pledge (as in "allegiance") aligning themselves with libertarian principles.
As the Libertarian Party is justified in opposing open membership, our nation is justified in opposing open borders. As Wayne Allyn Root proficiently noted, open borders will fail as long as the welfare state remains intact. The logic for the nation is identical to that for the party. Hordes of big-government intruders are invading our borders. Once they are granted amnesty they will vote for big-government leftist politicians so they may sap our resources and destroy any vestige of liberty.
Libertarians are to be applauded for standing firm on the front lines against an over-zealous big government's abuse of civil rights and defending the integrity of free trade. But their enthusiasm must be tempered by acknowledging the difference between common-sense practicality and over-reaching authoritarianism.
As name tags are justified to qualify registered convention attendees, identification is justified to qualify legal citizens of our nation. And as open membership would destroy the Libertarian Party, open borders are destroying our national sovereignty.
SOURCE
Illegal immigration into the USA is largely the doing of past and present U.S. governments
A few thoughts, that will probably get me lynched, on the immigration of Mexicans:
Immigration is not something Mexico did to the United States, but something the United States did to itself. Decades ago it changed its laws to favor Latin immigrants, gives immigrant children born in the US citizenship, avidly employs the illegals, forbids police to check their papers, give them social services and schooling, establishes “sanctuary cities,” and in general does everything but send them engraved invitations. And then expresses surprise when they come.
We hear endlessly that Mexicans are “taking the jobs of Americans.” Not quite. Reflect that every time a Mexican gets a job, it is because a shiny white noisily patriotic American businessman gives him that job.
I could take you to whole restaurants in the metropolitan area of Washington, DC, where if I yelled, “Migra!,” the entire staff would disappear out the back door. The owners know perfectly well who they are hiring. Mexicans are easily recognized. They are brown and speak Spanish. Businessmen do not hire them despite their being illegals, but because they are illegals, and therefore cheap.
I always find amusing the claims of love of country and civic responsibility that emanate from businessmen. These frauds will, and do, send American jobs to China, to make a buck. They will, and do, hire Indian programmers to replace more expensive American programmers. They will, and do, sweat children in Indonesian factories to make a buck. And they will hire illegals. If they didn’t, there would be no illegals. They come to work. No work, no come.
‘Nuther topic: I suspect that not one American in twenty has even heard of the Mexican-American War, and maybe one in a couple of hundred can distinguish between the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidlago and, say, the Treaty of Westphalia. Mexicans know that in that war the US simply grabbed half their country, to include little places like, you know, California. The attitude of Americans, if they were told of this war, predictably would be, “Oh. Well, that was some other time, whenever. Tell them to like, get over it.” But Mexicans are not over it. Countless towns and cities have a Calle or Avenida Ninos Heroes commemorating the children who marched out, like the cadets of VMI in another example of Washington’s aggression, to try to stop the oncoming federals.
Don’t expect a lot of sympathy when Mexicans move back into what they regard as theirs in the first place.
Speaking of getting over it, the US will sooner or later will have to entertain the idea of getting over Latin immigration. Allowing the immigration in the first place was a terrible idea, since diversity regularly proves disastrous, but now there is precious little to be done about it. Nativist fantasies notwithstanding, the US is not going to round up thirteen (give or take) million people at gunpoint and force them across the border. If it doesn’t do this, few illegals will leave.
I encounter all manner of fury from conservatives at the idea of granting amnesty to the illegals. Rounding them up is the very thing, they figure. How do you round up thirteen million people who don’t want to be rounded up?
Perhaps at three a.m. you put a lightning cordon of Marines around a ten-block region and then go house to house, kicking in doors and dragging screaming people out. These you would throw into sealed eighteen-wheelers, drive them to the nearest border, and perhaps literally kick them across. Most of the children would be American citizens, but not Mexican. The idea of deporting a couple of million US citizens to a foreign country is fascinating.
Note that large and growing numbers of Hispanics are American citizens. (“Hispanics” are people who speak Spanish, which growing numbers of these folk don’t, but never mind.) In several states Latinos are a majority. Their children rise through the schools toward voting age. Politicians being politicians, legislatures in these states will find it difficult to deport a group when over half the voting population is of that group. That leaves the feds, who do not seem energized by the matter. Short of a Nazi-style war of extermination or forced depuration, America is going to have a very sizable population of Latino origin.
Adding to the complexity is that the country is far from united in wanting mass deportation. As I understand it, some two-thirds of the US wants illegal immigration ended, which means sealing the border. But this is a very different thing from massive expulsion of those already in the country. Laws of the sort recently passed in Arizona may have some effect, but, again, most will remain.
While few will care, it is of perhaps minor interest that after ’48 (the year of both Westphalia and Guadalupe-Hidalgo) a large number of Mexicans, and thus their descendants, became American citizens. These people have been Americans longer than, say, anyone whose ancestors arrived in the great immigrant waves around 1900.
Now, a reasonable question might be, “OK, Fred, what would you do?” If I had the power, I would seal the border to stop the influx, declare blanket amnesty for those already in the country, and get on with life. Part of “getting on” would be to encourage assimilation since the last thing the US needs is another indigestible and permanent underclass.
Note (as I have never seen noted) that keeping them illegal forces them into something close to an underclass. If Pablo wants to start a restaurant or auto-bodywork business, he can’t, because he will be asked for papers and eventually shut down.
The country seems to be trying to cause what it most doesn’t want. Some state or other wants to stop letting the children of illegals attend school. Oh, good. Let’s create a population of angry illiterates who can’t possibly be assimilated. What could be wiser?
The underlying problem is that no solution, or attempted solution, has enough support to get put into effect. Business wants the labor, politicians eye the vote, polls show young Americans as being much less worried about the whole question than their elders.
Conservatives—those, anyway, who are not profiting by immigration—talk of putting the military along the border, but support seems lacking. On Fox News I see people urging the characteristic American solution: high-tech this and that. Anyone with experience with dispersed guerrillas will see the prospects of success. A lot of liberals think immigration is heart-warming and all.
As is so commonly the case in semi-democracies, whatever might work is politically impossible, and whatever is politically possible won’t work. What now, gang?
2 June, 2010
New from the Center for Immigration Studies
Excerpt: Historian John Higham was long known as the dean of American immigration scholars. He is best known as the author of Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, a masterful book on the history of nativism.1 As one scholar noted after Higham’s death in 2003, the book “remains the classic work on the hostility native-born Americans showed toward immigrants outside the Anglo-Saxon fold.’
Strangers in the Land was published in 1955. This Backgrounder is a study of Higham’s views on nativism and immigration policy as he expressed them in the remaining decades of his long career. It draws from his statements to Congress and a federal commission on immigration reform. It also draws from essays published in books and scholarly journals and from Higham’s previously private files at Johns Hopkins University. The author was granted special access to the files by Higham’s widow, Dr. Eileen Higham.
********
2. 2010 Eugene Katz Award
Presented to Arnold Shapiro, Executive Director of ‘Homeland Security USA’
********
3. Corporations, not Citizens, Get the Fastest Service from USCIS
Excerpt: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of DHS is reluctant to issue statistics about many of its operations, but it does – as a service to aliens, citizens, corporations, and their lawyers – publish somewhat out-of-date information on the processing times of some of the petitions it handles, but not all of them.
These waiting times have dropped considerably, and commendably, in the last couple of years, but it is interesting to see where USCIS priorities lie. Which classes of petitions do they handle quickly, and which less quickly?
********
4. More Importation of Poverty
Excerpt: Robert Samuelson, in his weekly column in the Washington Post, highlights a key factor in why U.S. poverty rates seem not to improve. Jesus warned that the poor will always be there. But after concerted efforts and giant leaps over more than half a century, surely America is doing better than the statistics show.
Samuelson’s column, titled ‘Why Obama’s poverty rate measure misleads,’ primarily addresses a questionable poverty calculation the administration has proposed. However, he cites ‘the apparent lack of progress’ in reducing poverty as ‘misleading,’ with one reason being that ‘it ignores immigration.’
********
5. The Staff-Level Problems with Saying No to Migration Applicants
Excerpt: A news article in Sunday’s New York Times reminded me of a conversation I had long ago with a retired diplomat.
He had been our Consul-General in Manila, one of the busiest centers of visa applications in the world:
‘What you may not understand, David, is the enormous amount of work an adjudicator heaps upon himself when he says ‘no’ to a visa application. If he says ‘yes’ to someone who turns out later to be an ax-murderer, for example, the adjudicator likely will be long gone from where the visa was issued, and it will cause him no problems. But if he says ‘no’ to an applicant it is sure to create extra correspondence, immediately, often from politically well-connected people both near the post and back home, conversations with his boss, numerous phone calls, and the like.
********
Excerpt: In the immigration debate, you hear a lot of outlandish claims, unsupported assertions, and loud warnings so questionable they make Chicken Little sound like a calm, reasoned, level-headed voice. But the new claim by big-city police chiefs looks about as bogus as anything put forth in this debate in a while.
The Washington Post reported this bald-faced claim: ‘The new Arizona law will intimidate crime victims and witnesses who are illegal immigrants and divert police from investigating more serious crimes, chiefs from Los Angeles, Houston and Philadelphia said.’ These police chiefs, who are often more politician than policeman, claim that Arizona’s new state law will cause crime to rise in American cities because illegal aliens won’t report crimes.
********
7. N.Y. and Arizona; Different Approaches to State-level Immigration Policy
Excerpt: They are both border states, both with substitute governors, but the immigration-related policies of New York State and Arizona could not be more different.
At opposite corners of the country, and with totally different political bents, Arizona is at the forefront of the movement to control illegal immigration, while New York has adopted a much less-well-publicized program to help certain criminal aliens escape deportation.
********
8. The Currency Is a Federal Responsibility, Too, Right?
Excerpt: The new law in Arizona addressing immigration enforcement has produced the predictable response from the drive-by media. The Denver Post tells us, ‘that the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government, not states, authority over immigration’
********
9. Forget Diplomatic Immunity — How about ‘Illegal-Alien Immunity’?
Excerpt: Most Americans have heard of diplomatic immunity — it provides accredited diplomats with protection from legal action in the foreign countries where they live and work.
Seizing on this concept, illegal immigrants and their supporters now claim what amounts to ‘illegal-alien immunity’ for millions of foreign nationals who live and work unlawfully in the United States.
When campus police stopped Georgia college student Jessica Colotl for a traffic violation, she eventually admitted to officers that she did not have a valid driver’s license. When she was later booked into jail, officers learned that she was illegally in the United States and she was turned over to federal immigration authorities for deportation.
********
10. Just In from New Zealand, a New Way to Beat Immigration Laws
Excerpt: There are lots of ways to use money to beat the immigration laws; some are blessed by Congress (as in investor visas), others are out-right criminal bribery.
I thought I could count all the ways to outwit the system, but learned of a new one (at least new to me) while reading the most recent edition of CIS’ e-news roundup, CISNEWS.
The story caught my eye because it was from New Zealand, where I had spent a lovely year as an alien decades ago (I had a Fulbright) and it was in the Auckland paper, the New Zealand Herald, for which I had written a couple of op-ed pieces.
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. 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
1 June, 2010
Immigration debate in the British Labour party
Rearguard action by the far-Left
Pro-immigration groups and leftwing activists have spoken out against Labour’s leadership candidates for blaming the party’s electoral defeat on lax rules allowing too many people into the UK.
Hina Majid, legal policy director at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, told the FT the group was “worried about the direction the party might be taking”.
Will Straw, editor of Left Foot Forward, an increasingly influential left-leaning blog, said: “The very worst thing the Labour party could do at this time is try to tack to the right.”
Leadership candidates including David Miliband and Ed Balls have suggested that Labour made mistakes over its immigration policy and paid the price at the ballot box on May 6.
“The views of the working classes are a bit more nuanced than is being suggested,” said Ms Majid. “People are quick to mention it, but it is usually more of a symbol for other worries about public services and particularly housing. “There is often hostility on one hand but also an acknowledgement that migration does bring benefits.”
Mr Balls has claimed that Britain let in too many unskilled migrants during Labour’s three terms in government. David Miliband, meanwhile, has said Labour was “playing catch-up on immigration” and Ed Miliband has warned of public perceptions that the party did not take the issue seriously enough.
Other candidates have said that immigration helped to undermine Labour’s popularity, though they have not argued that its policies on the issue were wrong.
Andy Burnham said that immigration was “the biggest issue at the election”, although he added that Labour had taken steps to toughen the system.
All those bidding for the leadership are aware that support for the party sank sharply in one demographic group – the “C2” skilled manual labourers who gave vital support to Labour a decade ago. They see a renewed focus on “core” issue such as wages, housing and migration a way to reconnect with this group.
The new coalition government has vowed to put a cap on the number of non-EU migrants entering Britain each year, without so far specifying the size of the cap.
With net migration from eastern Europe now falling – about 1m people came to work in the UK in recent years – some voices within Labour are calling for restraint on the issue.
Diane Abbott, on entering the contest, said: “One of the things that made me run was hearing candidate after candidate saying that immigration lost us the election,” she said. “We need to be careful about scapegoating immigrants in a recession.” Ms Abbott has acknowledged that the issue was a major electoral factor but suggested it was a proxy for other issues such as housing and unemployment.
Mr Straw agreed, saying: “These are all issues we can deal with without shutting the door on migrants.”
Tim Finch, head of migration at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left of centre think-tank, said Labour had tightened immigration policies since 2005 but failed to communicate this clearly to the public. “If you asked what policies people wanted they would pretty much tally with what the party has brought in,” he said. “The problem with the core vote is the party just didn’t want to listen to them.”
Ministers had also made a mistake by concentrating on the “macro” argument that migration helped the economy, said Mr Finch. They had meanwhile dismissed anyone arguing against migration as stupid or nasty, he claimed.
“Now it is the number one or two issue in the leadership race,” he said. “The worry for some of us is that they are panicked because it came up on the doorstep time and time again. The sensible thing to do is to take a deep breath and find out what is really going on.”
Obama’s Rightward Immigration Shift
The Left-leaning writer below makes much out of a few minor changes probably not driven by Obama himself but it is true that political inaction is a Rightward shift. Conservatives would generally be pleased to see existing laws enforced
As Arizona and about ten other US states mull more draconian anti-immigration laws, the Obama Administration still has not gotten fully engaged in this festering problem. Distracted by the British Petroleum (BP) company oil spill the largest and potentially the most devastating in US history President Obama is now caught up in a looming ecological catastrophe not of his own making. He’s also keeping a wary eye on Iraq and Afghanistan where in recent times things appear to be slipping back into the same old deadly days of the Bush Administration.
So immigration has been placed on the back shelf by the Obama Administration due to a combination of international and domestic challenges and an uncooperative Republican Party that will fight tooth and nail to make sure that no immigration debate reaches Congress before Presidential Elections in 2012. However, the president walks a dangerous tight rope because independent voters, the left and liberals – who form an important plank of his support base – want to see movement on immigration reform. Many feel betrayed by the Administration’s foot-dragging and are impatient with the snail’s pace towards reform.
President Obama knows that this dissatisfaction with him and his inability to deal with comprehensive immigration reform will have a net negative impact when the November mid-term elections come around. Still, he’s literally damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Should he try to appease the left and liberals by tackling immigration he runs the risk of giving both the Republican Party and its bastard horn-child, the Tea Party Movement, campaign talking points about his coddling of the undocumented that could cause voters to bolt from the Democratic Party.
On the other hand, should he ignore and defer immigration reform, putting it off for a more favorable time, he’s going to draw the continued anger of the liberal and left sections of the voting population that helped get him elected. The danger in inaction is by this inaction he will give the green light to other states, especially those with Republican administrations, to not only imitate Arizona but lunge further to the right as they grapple with what is a federal issue.
So when President Obama recently decided to send an additional 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexican border because of escalating violence in Mexican border towns his intent was to appease the right wing and the Republican Party that has long called for securing America’s borders as part of any immigration reform. The president was no doubt calculating that by appearing tough on illegal immigration and giving Republicans what they want the quid pro quo would be established for him to deal with immigration reform sometime in the future. It was a down payment on comprehensive reform of sorts.
But if that is the president’s reasoning I have to say that it is deeply flawed and only forces him to ideologically and philosophically shift to the right on immigration reform. In short, his actions, far from laying the foundation for constructive, comprehensive immigration reform will only complicate matters more. It is precisely this policy of trading immigration votes by tacking on punitive, over-kill law enforcement as part of the deal that has created a deformed, lop-sided system that is top-heavy with enforcement and little else. What we have today is a system that focuses on rounding up, locking up, and deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible while offering almost no legal way for them to regularize their status.
The end result is that under the Obama Administration the United States has deported more people than ever in United States history – a whopping 390,000 in 2009 alone. The conclusion to be drawn from this statistic is that the set of immigration laws that the US now has are effective in tracking, arresting, apprehending, and removing from America people who overstayed their time and have no legal documents.
Correspondingly, in the first year of the Obama Administration $10.1 billion was spent on border patrol that is an 82 percent increase from five years earlier when President George W. Bush was in the White House. The flaw here is that border security and crime prevention is not the same thing as immigration reform. Nor is criminalizing 12 million people because they do not have a valid Social Security number or permission to work in the United States because they overstayed their time.
By taking a tough stance on immigration now in hopes of getting bipartisan support for some form of immigration reform law later down the road President Obama is taking a big gamble. Big stick politics putting muscle on the border, arresting and deporting people and casting a blind eye to the overboard actions of states like Arizona has never worked and there is no indication that this is going to change now or in the future. So he’s simply going to have all stick and no carrot to show for his efforts.
That’s been tried before with near disastrous results the last time in 2007. Today, the immigration climate is a very contentious one because of the failure of Washington and the Obama Administration to push for meaningful immigration reform. There is never going to be a right or perfect time so waiting for one is a fool’s errand. The upsurge in arrests, detentions, deportations, profiling, workplace raids, restriction and denial of basic human rights are the results of the many games played by both Republicans and Democrats when it comes to immigration.
President Obama has just joined the game by obliquely giving his approval for criminalizing the undocumented as evidenced by the escalation of raids, deportations and the like. While saying publicly that he favors immigration reform that includes the undocumented paying a fine and “going to the back of the line” as a way to regularize their status, the disruption and breakup of families continue at an alarming rate.
The president’s swing to the right on immigration was completed with his quiet reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the fact that the Secure Communities program that have deputized local cops to act as immigration enforcement officers that has effectively driven millions of people underground and the stepped up workplace raids have all helped to make the immigration climate in the United States one of the most difficult for the foreign born. Trouble is while progressive elements who back the president cling to the hope that in order to get some form of comprehensive immigration reform Democrats must first demonstrate toughness on “those who break our laws” states are simply doing their own thing.
President Obama must be made aware of the following. The Republican Party and Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate have a one-sided, one-track, hammer-handed approach to immigration reform they see illegal immigration as breaking the law and as a consequence favor the large-scale round up of 12 million undocumented immigrants and deport them as the solution. They want to circle the wagons and make the US border military outposts. To achieve this goal they criminalize and demonize the undocumented because it is easier to deny any and all right to people who are deemed “criminal.”
On the other hand the progressive Left and liberal sections of the Democratic Party and the United States population while recognizing that the undocumented broke the law by overstaying their time in the US argue that there are here any not going anywhere so offering them a path to regularization makes sense. They argue that bringing 12 million people on the federal tax rolls creates an immediate financial windfall in the billions of dollars. Plus, by bringing the undocumented out of the shadows makes it more difficult for terrorists to recruit them to do America harm.
Democrats, and I hope President Obama included, would argue for a progressive immigration law that opens a pathway for the undocumented to “go to the back of the line,” learn English, pay a fine, and ultimately regularize their status. The president must reject the flawed and failed approaches of the Republican Party and its ultra-conservative element. He must not see immigration as a national security issue and resist the temptation to demonize the undocumented mistakenly thinking that’s going to buy Republican and conservative favor.
More HERE
7 June, 2010
British Labour Party infighting: Ed Balls accuses former leader of being too soft on immigration
Ed Balls, a Labour leadership contender, called on Sunday for new restrictions on the free movement of unskilled workers in Europe as he accused Gordon Brown of brushing concerns about immigration “under the carpet”.
Mr Balls’s attempts to distance himself from the former prime minister – his patron for more than 15 years – came before hustings on Monday night n which the leadership hopefuls will make their pitch to Labour MPs and peers.
A number of hose hoping to succeed Mr Brown have admitted that Labour lost contact with its core voters on the issue of immigration, but Mr Balls’s proposal to restrict EU immigration was the most dramatic input into the debate so far.
Interviewed on the BBC’s Politics Show, Mr Balls suggested that rewriting the EU treaty’s provisions on the free movement of labour, warning that large flows of unskilled workers put strains on communities. “The hard-headed view says if you believe in European integration – and you want to have the mobility of labour – the free mobility of unskilled labour is not sustainable for communities like the one I represent,” he said.
Mr Balls represents a Yorkshire constituency which saw an influx of immigrants from eastern Europe after the “big bang” EU enlargement of 2004. He said the possible future accession of Turkey could create a similarly “destabilising” exodus of workers across Europe.
While the EU can impose temporary restrictions – the UK has limited immigration from Bulgaria and Romania – he believed that more permanent restrictions on unskilled labour might be necessary. The former schools secretary said he urged Mr Brown to address immigration but his ill-fated encounter with Gillian Duffy, a Rochdale pensioner, suggested that he was in denial. “I think Gordon’s answer to Mrs Duffy showed he had not been having that conversation,” he said.
Mr Balls is facing competition from David and Ed Miliband for the Labour leadership: all three have mustered the necessary 33 nominations from MPs.
Andy Burnham, former health secretary, said he was “confident” he would get enough support to go on to the ballot paper by the time nominations close on Wednesday. He told the Financial Times that while he supported New Labour’s decision to become a pro-business party under Tony Blair, the party gave the impression that it had been “seduced by power, wealth and glamour”.
Mr Burnham said when Mr Brown’s administration rescued the failing banks, the public mistakenly believed “we had acted to save the bankers, not to help savers and the wider economy”.
The former health secretary, who comes from a working-class Merseyside background, will tell MPs he has an “instinctive” ability to understand the concerns of his party’s supporters, including questions of social mobility, the pressures facing lower middle class families and the insecurity of the elderly.
More boatfulls of illegals arriving — so Australia’s Leftist government fires the gatekeepers
By Andrew Bolt
Rudd’s border protection policies are leaking worse than ever:
It comes after a boat with 54 asylum seekers was stopped on Thursday night, just 25 hours after a vessel with 28 people was intercepted in the same area.
Oops – a fourth boat in 48 hours:
In the afternoon, a Customs boat responded to calls for help from another vessel that had engine problems north of Scott Reef. It is believed there were 46 passengers and three crew onboard the second ship.
What on earth made these people think Rudd was soft? Well, perhaps one clue is the sacking last week of many of the tougher members of the Refugee Review Tribunal, which now has on its selection panel the president of the Refugee Council of Australia.
Former RRT member Peter Katsambanis describes what has happened:
In his press release, the Minister makes no mention at all that 21 members were not reappointed. Now 2 or 3 of the 21 did not reapply as they were retiring but the rest were dumped. 46 members were up for reappointment – 25 were reappointed and 21 were not. This includes a number of very senior, very experienced members who have worked on the Tribunals for over 10 years.
Why gut the Tribunal in this way of you are not looking for a softer, more facilitative approach? The sacked members were highly competent individuals who did their jobs well without fear or favour. If it really was a merit-based selection process the only reason you would sack over 40% of the members due for appointment is because of lack of competence. If these people were incompetent then our federal courts would be full of appeals that would succeed. They are not.
No matter how the government dresses this up, it is simply another element of its softer approach on asylum seekers. The people smugglers will be celebrating all over south east Asia.
I’ve looked up just a few of the new appointments to the RRT, and think Katsambanis is not exaggerating at all:
Charlie Powles – Solicitor for RILC (Refugee and Immigration Law Centre) in Melbourne
Anthony Krone – Melbourne barrister who proclaims that he has appeared for hundreds of asylum seekers in Australia and who used to work for the Refugee Advice and Casework Service.
Clyde Cosentino – director of the Brisbane Catholic Archdiocese’s Centre for Multicultural Pastoral Care
Vanessa Moss – Solicitor for SCALES Community Legal Centre (Southern Communities Advocacy Legal Education Service), one of the leading refugee advocacy groups in WA.
Rowena Irish – solicitor for the Immigration Advice and Rights Centre Inc in Sydney
I’m sure these new people will decide each case on the facts – as did those they replace. Yet it seems beyond doubt to me that the message has gone out to be quicker to let in asylum seekers. I’ve already interviewed several serving and former RRT members who say they are in no doubt of this, and work in a “culture of fear”. And that was before this latest news of the appointment of new RRT members who have been previously worked to break down the doors for their clients.
Something stinks.
6 June, 2010
Translating the Code Words of “Comprehensive Immigration Reform
In the wake of Arizona’s new laws, the illegal alien special interests are working overtime making their last ditch pitch for amnesty before mid-terms elections, robotically reciting how they want to “fix” our immigration problems:
“We need to fix our broken immigration system. We need a path to citizenship for undocumented workers so they can go to the back of the line, get right with the law, and implement an orderly flow of needed workers, and a policy which secures the borders.”
For those in the know, of course, it’s all nonsense – word play and empty promises:
Fix A Broken System: When they say the system is broken they actually mean illegal aliens face deportation, and that America is not admitting enough legal immigrants fast enough. The fact is illegal aliens aren’t supposed to be in the United States – by definition they do not have legal status. As regards our level of legal immigration, America currently allows in more than one million people a year, more than any other industrialized country on the planet.
The bottom line is that the only thing broken about our immigration system is an unwillingness to impose sensible limitations and enforce the laws. Truth in labeling might suggest that their version of “fixing a broken system” should be read as “making a broken system worse.”
Path to Citizenship: Euphemisms for amnesty wear thin quickly so the new phrase “path to citizenship” has entered the lexicon. We already have a “path to citizenship” and it starts with applying for a green card and getting in line.
Go to the Back of the Line: To most people, going to the back of the line would mean returning home, filling out the necessary forms, and then waiting for a reply. What amnesty advocates mean by going to the back of the line is that we create a brand new line for those who have broken the law right here in this country.
Get Right with the Law: This phrase suggests that administratively converting 13 million people from illegal status to legal status “gets them right with the law.” Accommodating law-breaking by simply rewriting the rules to fit the circumstances is one of the most insidious aspects of amnesty.
Undocumented Workers: Given the huge sums of money the special interests have, one would assume their high-paid consultants would have told them that this euphemism expired years ago. We all know it means illegal aliens, but amnesty advocates believe that using the adjective “undocumented” magically erases the illegality, while claiming they are “workers” suggests all are gainfully employed, which they’re often not. The proper reference is “illegal aliens.” “Illegal” means prohibited by law. Yes, entry without inspection into the U.S is prohibited. And “alien” is a term defined in 8 U.S.C. Section 1101 and used by legal professionals across the board including the United States Supreme Court. It’s ok to say illegal aliens. You’ll be in good company.
Orderly Flow of Workers: This is a phrase that by its own definition assumes we actually need more workers. It refers to our foreign guest worker program. In addition to the 1.2 million legal immigrants the U.S. admits each year, and the 13 million illegal aliens currently living here, the U.S. also brings in another one million foreign nationals through work visas year after year. With a national unemployment rate of 9.9 percent, any endorsement of our massive foreign guest worker flow, or a suggestion that we should increase it, should be challenged on the grounds that it is imposing unfair competition for scarce jobs. Instead of “orderly flow of workers” the proper translation is “more foreign labor to take your job.”
Secure the Border: They save the biggest and boldest claim for last. Amnesty advocates promise to secure the border for no other reason than to make their plans for massive amnesty more palatable. The special interests don’t mean it and they don’t want to do it. After all, they have stymied every single piece of immigration enforcement legislation in recent years and relentlessly pressured the Obama administration to systematically dismantle most existing immigration enforcement.
There is immigration enforcement and then there is amnesty. One has nothing to do with the other. Revealing the motives of the illegal alien lobby is an ongoing responsibility because as Burke said, “a very great part of the mischiefs that vex this world arise from words.”
Ariz. Gov. Brewer wants separating fence completed
Facing off over illegal immigration, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer told President Barack Obama that Americans “want our border secured” and called Thursday for completion of a separating fence. Obama underscored his objections that the tough immigration law she signed is discriminatory.
Meeting in the Oval Office, Obama said Arizona’s law and similar efforts by more than 20 states would interfere with the federal government’s responsibility to set and enforce immigration policy.
Neither side appeared to give ground on the contentious issue although both talked about seeking a bipartisan solution. Obama urged her to “be his partner” in working toward a comprehensive overhaul of the nation’s badly fractured immigration system. Brewer told The Associated Press afterward that she told Obama her state is not ready for the comprehensive solution he favors. “I said we need to have the fence completed, have more troops on the border and more resources” for aerial surveillance, she said.
Thursday’s unusual meeting between the president and the governor was a byproduct of Brewer’s decision to sign a first-in-the-nation law requiring police enforcing other laws to check immigration status if they suspect someone is in the country illegally. The law also makes being in the U.S. illegally a state crime. Brewer sought the meeting and the White House accepted.
Emerging from the half-hour session, Brewer said Obama had assured her that the majority of the 1,200 National Guard troops he is sending to the U.S.-Mexico border would be going to her state. Brewer said she and Obama, at odds over how to control illegal immigration, also agreed to try to work together on solutions. She said White House staff would visit Arizona in a couple of weeks to continue the “very cordial discussion” she had with the president. “I believe the people of Arizona, the people of America, want our border secured,” Brewer said.
Outside the White House, hundreds of protesters, as unhappy with the law as they are with Obama’s inability to overhaul a system he and others say is broken, noisily greeted the Republican governor as she arrived for the meeting.
Nearly 200 people walked in a circle on the pedestrian-only portion of Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House _ holding signs, chanting “Jan Brewer, shame on you!” beating drums and, in the case of one man, strumming a guitar.
The Arizona law is scheduled to take effect July 29, unless it is blocked by a court under pending legal challenges. Obama’s Justice Department also is reviewing the law for possible civil rights violations, with an eye toward a possible court challenge. Obama would not discuss any possible Justice Department action in the meeting, Brewer said.
Brewer has said she signed the law because she believes Washington had failed to do its part to protect the U.S.-Mexico border.
Obama said Thursday in an interview that he understands the frustration in Arizona over the influx of illegal immigrants from Mexico but that Arizona’s law is the wrong way to go about solving the problem. “I think this puts American citizens, who … are Hispanic, potentially in an unfair situation,” he told CNN’s Larry King.
Obama has been more outspoken on the issue recently. He has restated his desire to fix the system in a way that would tighten access to the border, help millions of illegal immigrants become U.S. citizens and crack down on employers who knowingly hire them. But he also has reminded advocates that Democrats only have 59 votes in the Senate _ one short of the number needed to overcome GOP stalling tactics.
Some Republicans, including Brewer and Arizona Sens. Jon Kyl and John McCain, want tighter border controls first.
Obama has met with Republican senators and telephoned some privately, but Democrats have been unable to get any Republicans to help write an immigration reform bill. Some Democrats also oppose taking up immigration reform this election year, and the legislative calendar is closing.
While lawmakers and border-state governors say more federal troops are needed to fight rising violence in their states, government data obtained by The Associated Press show it actually isn’t so dangerous down there after all.
The top four big U.S. cities with the lowest violent crime rates _ San Diego, Phoenix, El Paso and Austin _ are in border states, according to a new FBI report. And an internal Customs and Border Protection report shows its agents face far less danger than street cops in most U.S. cities.
Brewer said in a televised interview last weekend: “We are out here on the battlefield getting the impact of all this illegal immigration, and all the crime that comes with it.” But FBI crime reports for 2009 says violent crime in Arizona declined. And violent crimes in Southwest border counties are among the lowest in the nation per capita _ they’ve dropped by more than 30 percent in the last two decades.
Brewer said after Thursday’s meeting that she believes people across the country “want our border secured” and that she would like to see construction begin soon to complete a fence along the border.
The Obama-Brewer meeting was closed to the media, so reporters did not see them together. The White House later released an official photograph from the meeting.
5 June, 2010
Mexico opens California office to provide ID for illegals
The Mexican government is opening a satellite consular office on Catalina Island — a small resort off the California coast with a history of drug smuggling and human trafficking — to provide the island’s illegal Mexican immigrants with identification cards, The Washington Examiner has learned.
The Mexican consular office in Los Angeles issued a flier, a copy of which was obtained by The Examiner, listing the Catalina Island Country Club as the location of its satellite office. It invites Mexicans to visit the office to obtain the identification, called matricular cards, by appointment.
Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a Republican whose district includes Catalina Island, said handing out matricular cards will exacerbate an already dangerous situation. “Handing out matricular cards to Mexicans who are not in this country legally is wrong no matter where it’s done,” he said. “But on Catalina it will do more damage. It’s a small island but there’s evidence it’s being used as a portal for illegals to access mainland California.” Rohrabacher added, “If there were a large number of Americans illegally in Mexico and the U.S. consulate was making it easier for them to stay, Mexico would never permit it.”
Mexican officials with the consular office in Los Angeles could not be reached immediately for comment. The matricular consular identification card, is issued by the Mexican government to Mexican nationals residing outside the country, regardless of immigration status. The purpose is to provide identification for opening bank accounts and obtaining other services. But the cards are usually used to skirt U.S. immigration laws, since Mexicans in the country legally have documents proving that status, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.
In 2004 testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee, FBI officials called the card an unreliable form of identification. The agency said that Mexico lacks a centralized database for them, which could lead to forgery, duplication, and other forms of abuse.
Officers with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said their agency was asked by Mexican officials not to enforce U.S. immigration laws on the island while the cards were being issued. “It amazes me every time that the Mexican government has the gall to tell us what to do,” said an ICE official, who asked not to be named. “More surprisingly is how many times we stand by and let them. This is just an example of one of hundreds of requests we’ve had to deal with.” The island has a sizable Mexican migrant population. Most are undocumented low-income workers.
New Canadian law to stop bogus asylum seekers opposed by Liberals
The Harper government is threatening to entirely scrap proposed reforms to Canada’s refugee system after the Liberals withdrew support for a central feature of the overhaul.
Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff has decided his party can’t support refugee reform legislation as currently drafted. That’s despite the fact the government has amended the bill to encompass changes demanded by the Liberals’ own immigration critic.
Ignatieff’s decision to seek yet more changes follows a stormy caucus meeting Wednesday at which Liberal MPs expressed vehement opposition to the bill. They’re particularly dead set against a provision that would expedite the claims process for refugees deemed to be from safe countries of origin.
A spokesman for Immigration Minister Jason Kenney says the safe-country-of-origin provision is essential to the bill and if opposition parties don’t accept it, they’ll forfeit all the other reforms in the bill.
Alykhan Velshi said the government will not accept “poison pill amendments” that undermine its efforts to discourage bogus claimants from safe countries.
Those other reforms include creation of a refugee appeal division, and a 20 per cent increase refugee resettlement from United Nations camps and a 20 per cent funding increase for the resettlement assistance program.
“The government has already accepted amendments negotiated in good faith with the Liberal party’s immigration critic,” Velshi said Thursday. “However, let me be clear. We will not accept poison pill amendments which significantly slow the process or undermine our efforts to disincentivize waves of false claimants from safe, democratic countries.”
Ignatieff’s decision forced the government to postpone clause-by-clause votes on the bill by the all-party immigration committee.
Kenney had hoped the deal he’d struck with Liberal immigration critic Maurizio Bevilacqua would result in speedy passage of the bill before Parliament breaks for the summer later this month.
A spokesman for Ignatieff, Michael O’Shaughnessy, said Bevilacqua “did an excellent job” negotiating amendments.
Nevertheless, O’Shaughnessy said: “After extensive consultation with our caucus, we’ve come to the conclusion that (the bill) is not ready yet and that some issues should be addressed before it should be considered.”
In particular, he cited the safe-country-of-origin provision and another governing applications to stay in the country on humanitarian and compassionate grounds.
4 June, 2010
Immigration to Britain soared 20% after Labour Party’s ‘crackdown’
Labour’s supposedly tough points-based immigration system actually led to huge increases in foreign workers and students cleared to live in Britain, it emerged last night. Experts said the new Government had a ‘mountain to climb’ to bring migration under control.
Labour ministers, led by Gordon Brown, repeatedly claimed the Australian-style points system for non-EU nationals would reduce immigration. Economic migration was expected to fall by as much as 12 per cent.
But analysis published last night showed that, in fact, it increased by 20 per cent – while the number of foreign students went up by more than 30 per cent.
The revelation comes as the Tories prepare to set out how they will reduce net immigration to levels not seen since the 1990s.
Sir Andrew Green, of Migrationwatch-which produced the study, said: ‘This is Labour’s guilty secret. ‘When they talked about immigration at all before and during the election campaign, they claimed that they were getting it under control with their tough new system. The truth was quite different.
‘They have left an immigration system in chaos and the coalition with a huge mountain to climb in order to fulfil David Cameron’s election promise that net immigration would be brought down from the present level to tens of thousands, as in the 1980s and early 1990s.’
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week showed net immigration had increased the total population by 142,000 last year.
The points system, introduced in 2008, subjects migrants to a series of tests. It is up to ministers to decide how tough they should be.
Foreign workers are awarded points for their salary, qualifications and past experience. For students, points are based on qualifications and the course they hope to study.
Migrationwatch said Labour ministers had been asked parliamentary questions on the effects of the points system but had not given answers ahead of the election.
However, analysis of fresh government figures shows that the number of non-EU migrants given work permits, or permission to carry on working in Britain, increased by 20 per cent, from 159,535 in 2007 – the year before points were introduced – to 190,640 last year. The total includes dependents.
For students, which came under the points system a year later in 2008, the number of approvals increased by 31 per cent from 208,800 that year to 273,445 a year later.
The figures undermine the repeated claims by Labour that the points system would have a dramatic impact. The issue is not over whether the system itself is effective, but over how high Labour ‘fixed the bar’.
In 2008, Phil Woolas said that ‘had we introduced the points-based system a year ago there would be 12 per cent less migratory workers in the country than there are now’.
During the election campaign, Gordon Brown said: ‘I think we have got to show people that we are taking tough action and the points-based system we have introduced is changing things. I hope that voters understand that we have got a very tough attitude on this.’
Figures released by the Office for National Statistics last week showed that more than half the 503,000 immigrants who arrived in the year to last September – 270,000 people – were from outside the EU.
At the same time, the number of foreign nationals given British citizenship rose above 200,000 in 2009 – up more than 50 per cent in 12 months.
The ONS also published projections showing the national population will hit 70million in 2029.
Last night, Government immigration spokesman Damian Green said: ‘The Government will be introducing an annual limit on work permits as an important part of bringing immigration down to reasonable levels.’
So how is the Australian Leftist government “kinder”?
Here we go again, needlessly revisiting the suffering and the moral blackmail that John Howard ended but Kevin Rudd has revived:
ASYLUM seekers are once again resorting to self-harm in detention centres amid overcrowding and stalled refugee claims.
The Herald Sun has learned at least 17 immigration detainees injured themselves or attempted suicide in the past 11 months – almost twice the number of incidents of the previous year…
Self-harm by detainees sparked concerns over mandatory detention under the Howard government, and Kevin Rudd’s pledge to be “tough but humane” in his own treatment of asylum seekers.
Catholic priest Jim Carty, who recently returned from nine weeks on Christmas Island, said he knew of at least one detainee who tried to hang himself there… The Herald Sun has also heard of detainees cutting themselves, and of a man destined for deportation who drank bleach and shampoo.
3 June, 2010
A libertarian defence of border control
I hate name tags. I suppose it has something to do with that libertarian streak that dominates my thinking. What annoys me most about convention name tags is that they somehow remind me of the Star of David forced upon Jews in Hitler's Germany.
And so it was no surprise that when I attended the Libertarian National Convention in 2004 that I was accosted by the national Chairman on the convention floor who demanded that I not only present my "papers" but demanded that I display them dangled about my neck. I thought of the ironic comparison between the nation's leading libertarian and a Gestapo agent. And, again, at a 2004 gubernatorial debate I was confronted by a rent-a-cop who insisted that I display my name tag but (another irony) refused to ID himself when I demanded his name.
I've learned to comply. At the 2010 convention I dutifully wore my papers lest anyone demand I justify my presence on libertarian turf.
What I learned is that a conflict exists between the notion of private property (which, in a sense, the Libertarian events are) and liberty. I learned that LP chairman Geoff O'Neil was well within his right to insist I present my plastic-enclosed papers and the Jeffersonville cop, though inexcusable in failing to recognize a gubernatorial candidate, was obliged to secure the debate facility. There is a fact that must be taken to heart by Libertarians: Sometimes personal ID is reasonably justified.
When a person presents himself on my front porch, I have a right to demand that he identify himself and, if necessary, insist he prove it. When conventioneers show up at a Libertarian event, the party's authorities have a right to insure we are properly registered. When immigrants show up at our nation's borders, our government has a right to demand they verify their citizenship.
What holds true of a Libertarian Party convention -- that registered members be obligated to identify themselves by displaying their papers -- also holds true of our nation: Legal citizens may be obligated to identify themselves. For that reason it is questionable to fault the controversial Arizona initiative that allows law enforcement to demand residents display what is tantamount to convention name tags.
I found it amusing while signing in to the 2010 Libertarian Party convention that the staff member refused to view my drivers' license when confirming my registration, then proceeded to process my ID that was required to be displayed as plain as a Third Reich Star of David.
I also note that Libertarians, libertarian fundamentalists in particular, are careful to protect their party from political trolls who care little for small government and would hi-jack the party to pilfer it's invaluable ballot access. They would join in droves, vote out libertarian leaders and replace them with those who hate libertarian ideals. For that reason the party requires members to sign a pledge (as in "allegiance") aligning themselves with libertarian principles.
As the Libertarian Party is justified in opposing open membership, our nation is justified in opposing open borders. As Wayne Allyn Root proficiently noted, open borders will fail as long as the welfare state remains intact. The logic for the nation is identical to that for the party. Hordes of big-government intruders are invading our borders. Once they are granted amnesty they will vote for big-government leftist politicians so they may sap our resources and destroy any vestige of liberty.
Libertarians are to be applauded for standing firm on the front lines against an over-zealous big government's abuse of civil rights and defending the integrity of free trade. But their enthusiasm must be tempered by acknowledging the difference between common-sense practicality and over-reaching authoritarianism.
As name tags are justified to qualify registered convention attendees, identification is justified to qualify legal citizens of our nation. And as open membership would destroy the Libertarian Party, open borders are destroying our national sovereignty.
SOURCE
Illegal immigration into the USA is largely the doing of past and present U.S. governments
A few thoughts, that will probably get me lynched, on the immigration of Mexicans:
Immigration is not something Mexico did to the United States, but something the United States did to itself. Decades ago it changed its laws to favor Latin immigrants, gives immigrant children born in the US citizenship, avidly employs the illegals, forbids police to check their papers, give them social services and schooling, establishes “sanctuary cities,” and in general does everything but send them engraved invitations. And then expresses surprise when they come.
We hear endlessly that Mexicans are “taking the jobs of Americans.” Not quite. Reflect that every time a Mexican gets a job, it is because a shiny white noisily patriotic American businessman gives him that job.
I could take you to whole restaurants in the metropolitan area of Washington, DC, where if I yelled, “Migra!,” the entire staff would disappear out the back door. The owners know perfectly well who they are hiring. Mexicans are easily recognized. They are brown and speak Spanish. Businessmen do not hire them despite their being illegals, but because they are illegals, and therefore cheap.
I always find amusing the claims of love of country and civic responsibility that emanate from businessmen. These frauds will, and do, send American jobs to China, to make a buck. They will, and do, hire Indian programmers to replace more expensive American programmers. They will, and do, sweat children in Indonesian factories to make a buck. And they will hire illegals. If they didn’t, there would be no illegals. They come to work. No work, no come.
‘Nuther topic: I suspect that not one American in twenty has even heard of the Mexican-American War, and maybe one in a couple of hundred can distinguish between the Treaty of Guadalupe-Hidlago and, say, the Treaty of Westphalia. Mexicans know that in that war the US simply grabbed half their country, to include little places like, you know, California. The attitude of Americans, if they were told of this war, predictably would be, “Oh. Well, that was some other time, whenever. Tell them to like, get over it.” But Mexicans are not over it. Countless towns and cities have a Calle or Avenida Ninos Heroes commemorating the children who marched out, like the cadets of VMI in another example of Washington’s aggression, to try to stop the oncoming federals.
Don’t expect a lot of sympathy when Mexicans move back into what they regard as theirs in the first place.
Speaking of getting over it, the US will sooner or later will have to entertain the idea of getting over Latin immigration. Allowing the immigration in the first place was a terrible idea, since diversity regularly proves disastrous, but now there is precious little to be done about it. Nativist fantasies notwithstanding, the US is not going to round up thirteen (give or take) million people at gunpoint and force them across the border. If it doesn’t do this, few illegals will leave.
I encounter all manner of fury from conservatives at the idea of granting amnesty to the illegals. Rounding them up is the very thing, they figure. How do you round up thirteen million people who don’t want to be rounded up?
Perhaps at three a.m. you put a lightning cordon of Marines around a ten-block region and then go house to house, kicking in doors and dragging screaming people out. These you would throw into sealed eighteen-wheelers, drive them to the nearest border, and perhaps literally kick them across. Most of the children would be American citizens, but not Mexican. The idea of deporting a couple of million US citizens to a foreign country is fascinating.
Note that large and growing numbers of Hispanics are American citizens. (“Hispanics” are people who speak Spanish, which growing numbers of these folk don’t, but never mind.) In several states Latinos are a majority. Their children rise through the schools toward voting age. Politicians being politicians, legislatures in these states will find it difficult to deport a group when over half the voting population is of that group. That leaves the feds, who do not seem energized by the matter. Short of a Nazi-style war of extermination or forced depuration, America is going to have a very sizable population of Latino origin.
Adding to the complexity is that the country is far from united in wanting mass deportation. As I understand it, some two-thirds of the US wants illegal immigration ended, which means sealing the border. But this is a very different thing from massive expulsion of those already in the country. Laws of the sort recently passed in Arizona may have some effect, but, again, most will remain.
While few will care, it is of perhaps minor interest that after ’48 (the year of both Westphalia and Guadalupe-Hidalgo) a large number of Mexicans, and thus their descendants, became American citizens. These people have been Americans longer than, say, anyone whose ancestors arrived in the great immigrant waves around 1900.
Now, a reasonable question might be, “OK, Fred, what would you do?” If I had the power, I would seal the border to stop the influx, declare blanket amnesty for those already in the country, and get on with life. Part of “getting on” would be to encourage assimilation since the last thing the US needs is another indigestible and permanent underclass.
Note (as I have never seen noted) that keeping them illegal forces them into something close to an underclass. If Pablo wants to start a restaurant or auto-bodywork business, he can’t, because he will be asked for papers and eventually shut down.
The country seems to be trying to cause what it most doesn’t want. Some state or other wants to stop letting the children of illegals attend school. Oh, good. Let’s create a population of angry illiterates who can’t possibly be assimilated. What could be wiser?
The underlying problem is that no solution, or attempted solution, has enough support to get put into effect. Business wants the labor, politicians eye the vote, polls show young Americans as being much less worried about the whole question than their elders.
Conservatives—those, anyway, who are not profiting by immigration—talk of putting the military along the border, but support seems lacking. On Fox News I see people urging the characteristic American solution: high-tech this and that. Anyone with experience with dispersed guerrillas will see the prospects of success. A lot of liberals think immigration is heart-warming and all.
As is so commonly the case in semi-democracies, whatever might work is politically impossible, and whatever is politically possible won’t work. What now, gang?
2 June, 2010
New from the Center for Immigration Studies
Excerpt: Historian John Higham was long known as the dean of American immigration scholars. He is best known as the author of Strangers in the Land: Patterns of American Nativism, 1860-1925, a masterful book on the history of nativism.1 As one scholar noted after Higham’s death in 2003, the book “remains the classic work on the hostility native-born Americans showed toward immigrants outside the Anglo-Saxon fold.’
Strangers in the Land was published in 1955. This Backgrounder is a study of Higham’s views on nativism and immigration policy as he expressed them in the remaining decades of his long career. It draws from his statements to Congress and a federal commission on immigration reform. It also draws from essays published in books and scholarly journals and from Higham’s previously private files at Johns Hopkins University. The author was granted special access to the files by Higham’s widow, Dr. Eileen Higham.
********
2. 2010 Eugene Katz Award
Presented to Arnold Shapiro, Executive Director of ‘Homeland Security USA’
********
3. Corporations, not Citizens, Get the Fastest Service from USCIS
Excerpt: The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services of DHS is reluctant to issue statistics about many of its operations, but it does – as a service to aliens, citizens, corporations, and their lawyers – publish somewhat out-of-date information on the processing times of some of the petitions it handles, but not all of them.
These waiting times have dropped considerably, and commendably, in the last couple of years, but it is interesting to see where USCIS priorities lie. Which classes of petitions do they handle quickly, and which less quickly?
********
4. More Importation of Poverty
Excerpt: Robert Samuelson, in his weekly column in the Washington Post, highlights a key factor in why U.S. poverty rates seem not to improve. Jesus warned that the poor will always be there. But after concerted efforts and giant leaps over more than half a century, surely America is doing better than the statistics show.
Samuelson’s column, titled ‘Why Obama’s poverty rate measure misleads,’ primarily addresses a questionable poverty calculation the administration has proposed. However, he cites ‘the apparent lack of progress’ in reducing poverty as ‘misleading,’ with one reason being that ‘it ignores immigration.’
********
5. The Staff-Level Problems with Saying No to Migration Applicants
Excerpt: A news article in Sunday’s New York Times reminded me of a conversation I had long ago with a retired diplomat.
He had been our Consul-General in Manila, one of the busiest centers of visa applications in the world:
‘What you may not understand, David, is the enormous amount of work an adjudicator heaps upon himself when he says ‘no’ to a visa application. If he says ‘yes’ to someone who turns out later to be an ax-murderer, for example, the adjudicator likely will be long gone from where the visa was issued, and it will cause him no problems. But if he says ‘no’ to an applicant it is sure to create extra correspondence, immediately, often from politically well-connected people both near the post and back home, conversations with his boss, numerous phone calls, and the like.
********
Excerpt: In the immigration debate, you hear a lot of outlandish claims, unsupported assertions, and loud warnings so questionable they make Chicken Little sound like a calm, reasoned, level-headed voice. But the new claim by big-city police chiefs looks about as bogus as anything put forth in this debate in a while.
The Washington Post reported this bald-faced claim: ‘The new Arizona law will intimidate crime victims and witnesses who are illegal immigrants and divert police from investigating more serious crimes, chiefs from Los Angeles, Houston and Philadelphia said.’ These police chiefs, who are often more politician than policeman, claim that Arizona’s new state law will cause crime to rise in American cities because illegal aliens won’t report crimes.
********
7. N.Y. and Arizona; Different Approaches to State-level Immigration Policy
Excerpt: They are both border states, both with substitute governors, but the immigration-related policies of New York State and Arizona could not be more different.
At opposite corners of the country, and with totally different political bents, Arizona is at the forefront of the movement to control illegal immigration, while New York has adopted a much less-well-publicized program to help certain criminal aliens escape deportation.
********
8. The Currency Is a Federal Responsibility, Too, Right?
Excerpt: The new law in Arizona addressing immigration enforcement has produced the predictable response from the drive-by media. The Denver Post tells us, ‘that the U.S. Constitution gives the federal government, not states, authority over immigration’
********
9. Forget Diplomatic Immunity — How about ‘Illegal-Alien Immunity’?
Excerpt: Most Americans have heard of diplomatic immunity — it provides accredited diplomats with protection from legal action in the foreign countries where they live and work.
Seizing on this concept, illegal immigrants and their supporters now claim what amounts to ‘illegal-alien immunity’ for millions of foreign nationals who live and work unlawfully in the United States.
When campus police stopped Georgia college student Jessica Colotl for a traffic violation, she eventually admitted to officers that she did not have a valid driver’s license. When she was later booked into jail, officers learned that she was illegally in the United States and she was turned over to federal immigration authorities for deportation.
********
10. Just In from New Zealand, a New Way to Beat Immigration Laws
Excerpt: There are lots of ways to use money to beat the immigration laws; some are blessed by Congress (as in investor visas), others are out-right criminal bribery.
I thought I could count all the ways to outwit the system, but learned of a new one (at least new to me) while reading the most recent edition of CIS’ e-news roundup, CISNEWS.
The story caught my eye because it was from New Zealand, where I had spent a lovely year as an alien decades ago (I had a Fulbright) and it was in the Auckland paper, the New Zealand Herald, for which I had written a couple of op-ed pieces.
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. 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
1 June, 2010
Immigration debate in the British Labour party
Rearguard action by the far-Left
Pro-immigration groups and leftwing activists have spoken out against Labour’s leadership candidates for blaming the party’s electoral defeat on lax rules allowing too many people into the UK.
Hina Majid, legal policy director at the Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants, told the FT the group was “worried about the direction the party might be taking”.
Will Straw, editor of Left Foot Forward, an increasingly influential left-leaning blog, said: “The very worst thing the Labour party could do at this time is try to tack to the right.”
Leadership candidates including David Miliband and Ed Balls have suggested that Labour made mistakes over its immigration policy and paid the price at the ballot box on May 6.
“The views of the working classes are a bit more nuanced than is being suggested,” said Ms Majid. “People are quick to mention it, but it is usually more of a symbol for other worries about public services and particularly housing. “There is often hostility on one hand but also an acknowledgement that migration does bring benefits.”
Mr Balls has claimed that Britain let in too many unskilled migrants during Labour’s three terms in government. David Miliband, meanwhile, has said Labour was “playing catch-up on immigration” and Ed Miliband has warned of public perceptions that the party did not take the issue seriously enough.
Other candidates have said that immigration helped to undermine Labour’s popularity, though they have not argued that its policies on the issue were wrong.
Andy Burnham said that immigration was “the biggest issue at the election”, although he added that Labour had taken steps to toughen the system.
All those bidding for the leadership are aware that support for the party sank sharply in one demographic group – the “C2” skilled manual labourers who gave vital support to Labour a decade ago. They see a renewed focus on “core” issue such as wages, housing and migration a way to reconnect with this group.
The new coalition government has vowed to put a cap on the number of non-EU migrants entering Britain each year, without so far specifying the size of the cap.
With net migration from eastern Europe now falling – about 1m people came to work in the UK in recent years – some voices within Labour are calling for restraint on the issue.
Diane Abbott, on entering the contest, said: “One of the things that made me run was hearing candidate after candidate saying that immigration lost us the election,” she said. “We need to be careful about scapegoating immigrants in a recession.” Ms Abbott has acknowledged that the issue was a major electoral factor but suggested it was a proxy for other issues such as housing and unemployment.
Mr Straw agreed, saying: “These are all issues we can deal with without shutting the door on migrants.”
Tim Finch, head of migration at the Institute for Public Policy Research, a left of centre think-tank, said Labour had tightened immigration policies since 2005 but failed to communicate this clearly to the public. “If you asked what policies people wanted they would pretty much tally with what the party has brought in,” he said. “The problem with the core vote is the party just didn’t want to listen to them.”
Ministers had also made a mistake by concentrating on the “macro” argument that migration helped the economy, said Mr Finch. They had meanwhile dismissed anyone arguing against migration as stupid or nasty, he claimed.
“Now it is the number one or two issue in the leadership race,” he said. “The worry for some of us is that they are panicked because it came up on the doorstep time and time again. The sensible thing to do is to take a deep breath and find out what is really going on.”
Obama’s Rightward Immigration Shift
The Left-leaning writer below makes much out of a few minor changes probably not driven by Obama himself but it is true that political inaction is a Rightward shift. Conservatives would generally be pleased to see existing laws enforced
As Arizona and about ten other US states mull more draconian anti-immigration laws, the Obama Administration still has not gotten fully engaged in this festering problem. Distracted by the British Petroleum (BP) company oil spill the largest and potentially the most devastating in US history President Obama is now caught up in a looming ecological catastrophe not of his own making. He’s also keeping a wary eye on Iraq and Afghanistan where in recent times things appear to be slipping back into the same old deadly days of the Bush Administration.
So immigration has been placed on the back shelf by the Obama Administration due to a combination of international and domestic challenges and an uncooperative Republican Party that will fight tooth and nail to make sure that no immigration debate reaches Congress before Presidential Elections in 2012. However, the president walks a dangerous tight rope because independent voters, the left and liberals – who form an important plank of his support base – want to see movement on immigration reform. Many feel betrayed by the Administration’s foot-dragging and are impatient with the snail’s pace towards reform.
President Obama knows that this dissatisfaction with him and his inability to deal with comprehensive immigration reform will have a net negative impact when the November mid-term elections come around. Still, he’s literally damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. Should he try to appease the left and liberals by tackling immigration he runs the risk of giving both the Republican Party and its bastard horn-child, the Tea Party Movement, campaign talking points about his coddling of the undocumented that could cause voters to bolt from the Democratic Party.
On the other hand, should he ignore and defer immigration reform, putting it off for a more favorable time, he’s going to draw the continued anger of the liberal and left sections of the voting population that helped get him elected. The danger in inaction is by this inaction he will give the green light to other states, especially those with Republican administrations, to not only imitate Arizona but lunge further to the right as they grapple with what is a federal issue.
So when President Obama recently decided to send an additional 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexican border because of escalating violence in Mexican border towns his intent was to appease the right wing and the Republican Party that has long called for securing America’s borders as part of any immigration reform. The president was no doubt calculating that by appearing tough on illegal immigration and giving Republicans what they want the quid pro quo would be established for him to deal with immigration reform sometime in the future. It was a down payment on comprehensive reform of sorts.
But if that is the president’s reasoning I have to say that it is deeply flawed and only forces him to ideologically and philosophically shift to the right on immigration reform. In short, his actions, far from laying the foundation for constructive, comprehensive immigration reform will only complicate matters more. It is precisely this policy of trading immigration votes by tacking on punitive, over-kill law enforcement as part of the deal that has created a deformed, lop-sided system that is top-heavy with enforcement and little else. What we have today is a system that focuses on rounding up, locking up, and deporting as many undocumented immigrants as possible while offering almost no legal way for them to regularize their status.
The end result is that under the Obama Administration the United States has deported more people than ever in United States history – a whopping 390,000 in 2009 alone. The conclusion to be drawn from this statistic is that the set of immigration laws that the US now has are effective in tracking, arresting, apprehending, and removing from America people who overstayed their time and have no legal documents.
Correspondingly, in the first year of the Obama Administration $10.1 billion was spent on border patrol that is an 82 percent increase from five years earlier when President George W. Bush was in the White House. The flaw here is that border security and crime prevention is not the same thing as immigration reform. Nor is criminalizing 12 million people because they do not have a valid Social Security number or permission to work in the United States because they overstayed their time.
By taking a tough stance on immigration now in hopes of getting bipartisan support for some form of immigration reform law later down the road President Obama is taking a big gamble. Big stick politics putting muscle on the border, arresting and deporting people and casting a blind eye to the overboard actions of states like Arizona has never worked and there is no indication that this is going to change now or in the future. So he’s simply going to have all stick and no carrot to show for his efforts.
That’s been tried before with near disastrous results the last time in 2007. Today, the immigration climate is a very contentious one because of the failure of Washington and the Obama Administration to push for meaningful immigration reform. There is never going to be a right or perfect time so waiting for one is a fool’s errand. The upsurge in arrests, detentions, deportations, profiling, workplace raids, restriction and denial of basic human rights are the results of the many games played by both Republicans and Democrats when it comes to immigration.
President Obama has just joined the game by obliquely giving his approval for criminalizing the undocumented as evidenced by the escalation of raids, deportations and the like. While saying publicly that he favors immigration reform that includes the undocumented paying a fine and “going to the back of the line” as a way to regularize their status, the disruption and breakup of families continue at an alarming rate.
The president’s swing to the right on immigration was completed with his quiet reauthorization of the Patriot Act, the fact that the Secure Communities program that have deputized local cops to act as immigration enforcement officers that has effectively driven millions of people underground and the stepped up workplace raids have all helped to make the immigration climate in the United States one of the most difficult for the foreign born. Trouble is while progressive elements who back the president cling to the hope that in order to get some form of comprehensive immigration reform Democrats must first demonstrate toughness on “those who break our laws” states are simply doing their own thing.
President Obama must be made aware of the following. The Republican Party and Republicans in the House of Representatives and the Senate have a one-sided, one-track, hammer-handed approach to immigration reform they see illegal immigration as breaking the law and as a consequence favor the large-scale round up of 12 million undocumented immigrants and deport them as the solution. They want to circle the wagons and make the US border military outposts. To achieve this goal they criminalize and demonize the undocumented because it is easier to deny any and all right to people who are deemed “criminal.”
On the other hand the progressive Left and liberal sections of the Democratic Party and the United States population while recognizing that the undocumented broke the law by overstaying their time in the US argue that there are here any not going anywhere so offering them a path to regularization makes sense. They argue that bringing 12 million people on the federal tax rolls creates an immediate financial windfall in the billions of dollars. Plus, by bringing the undocumented out of the shadows makes it more difficult for terrorists to recruit them to do America harm.
Democrats, and I hope President Obama included, would argue for a progressive immigration law that opens a pathway for the undocumented to “go to the back of the line,” learn English, pay a fine, and ultimately regularize their status. The president must reject the flawed and failed approaches of the Republican Party and its ultra-conservative element. He must not see immigration as a national security issue and resist the temptation to demonize the undocumented mistakenly thinking that’s going to buy Republican and conservative favor.
More HERE
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.