IMMIGRATION WATCH INTERNATIONAL Mirror September 2012

Guest Workers Can Help End Illegal Immigration

The debate over immigration reform has focused on its long-term effects on America’s culture as well as its economy. But that obscures the fact that for many foreigners seeking to come to the United States, their goal is not to become Americans, but to alleviate economic problems in their home country. These workers have little interest in assimilating or voting. They simply want to work for a while, sometimes for just a few months, and return home.

Last August, the Republican Party adopted a plank in its national platform arguing for “a new guest worker program.” Critics have derided this permission to relocate temporarily without a guarantee of citizenship as either mere crumbs for the workers or corporate welfare for their employers. In fact, a workable guest worker program would expand the market’s ability to accommodate the natural flow of labor, which has been distorted by government policy for too long.

Temporary migration is a market phenomenon, not a government program. During a period when travel was vastly more expensive than it is today, surveys at the turn of the 20th century found that most Italian immigrants to the United States planned to return to Italy after accumulating capital working in America. While many never fulfilled these plans, 40 percent of the 2.1 million Italians who came to America during that time eventually returned home. More recently, from 1986 to 1990, most undocumented Mexican workers stayed for less than 2 years and more than 86 percent returned home within five years.

The Republican Party is right to extend its commitment to free trade to the realm of labor. Its platform document argues for guest workers based on “the utility of a legal and reliable source of foreign labor.” But that’s not the only benefit. An effective guest worker program would also reduce illegal immigration. Prior to 1965, Mexicans faced no quantitative legal limits on entry to the United States. Hundreds of thousands of Mexican laborers came as temporary “Bracero” workers during the 1940s, ’50s, and ’60s. During this period, the Mexican undocumented population was extremely low thanks to the existence of a legal and fairly accessible avenue for legal entry that also met American employers’ needs.

After Congress ended the Bracero program in 1964, illegal entries rose rapidly. The government drove immigrants underground, creating a black market in labor, but as noted earlier, most migrant workers continued to leave. What led to the rapid increase in the undocumented population in the U.S. was increased border security during the 1990s. There was no increase in illegal entries during the 1990s. Rather, there was a huge decrease in departures. By 1998, most immigrants were staying longer than 6.5 years, and only 40 percent returned at all within five years. Workers who would have returned stayed for fear of having to make the dangerous and expensive border crossing twice. In fact, illegal entries actually decreased during the 1990s even while the undocumented population in the U.S. rapidly increased.

Opponents of guest worker programs argue that they often lead to permanent settlement. During the Bracero migration, for example, Mexican naturalizations increased 2,000 to 61,000. Yet this is a very small number compared to the 450,000 or more legal workers that entered each year and, in any case, should be seen as a good thing. Doesn’t it make more sense to assimilate those immigrants who have already spent time in the U.S. and already contributed to American business than those who haven’t?

Opponents also argue that temporary immigration results in more illegal immigration since at least half of the undocumented immigrants in the U.S. originally entered under legal visas that have since expired. But this argument simply leads to the conclusion that temporary work visas should be renewable based on the condition that the immigrant has not needed public assistance and has worked throughout his or her stay.

Critics also claim that guest workers are exploited by businesses, but to the extent that the abuses are real, they are primarily a consequence of the workers not being free to change employers. This would require a simple regulatory change to allow workers to notify the government of a change of employer. Granting this liberty to the workers would also lessen the regulatory burden on employers who use temporary migrants.

Temporary work visas alone will not solve illegal immigration, nor do they provide the only type of immigration that America’s economy needs. But by providing American employers a legal avenue to hire the low skill workers they need, guest worker programs should be considered as part of any “comprehensive” approach to immigration reform.

SOURCE

90pc of Sudanese refugees in Australia want to go home

I support free tickets for them

A new study has found the majority of refugees from Sudan who arrived in Australia over the past decade want to return home.

Many of those surveyed experienced isolation and reported being discriminated against, particularly when it came to employment and housing.

Nyok Gor is one of around 23,000 Sudanese refugees who fled to Australia over the past decade. He arrived in late 2003 as one of the "lost boys of Sudan".

He began studying at university, but found it difficult to get work and accommodation. "While I was looking for accommodation, that was one of the areas that I felt discriminated," he said.

"As a student I was looking for share accommodation and somebody would be calling to organise some of the houses that I was interested to apply for, and when I turn up later would tell me sorry we don't have enough room.

"There were other cases where somebody would ask me over the phone what background do you come from and I would say an African background and they would say no sorry we don't have available room for you."

According to the study by international policy research agency, STATT, that was a common problem among the 350 people surveyed.

STATT researcher Robert Onus says most people found there were good support services provided by the Government, but their ability to get help differed between cities and regional areas.

"People in regional areas felt quite a bit of isolation, particularly because the people that were settled in regional areas didn't have access to some of the support networks that people in bigger cities would have with the larger communities," he said.

"The other thing is definitely with regards to employment. "A lot of people have worked hard to get skills and develop their skills in Australia. "They've done education in Australia but they can't seem to get jobs in areas that they feel that they're skilled at working in."

Mr Onus says many people felt potential employers discriminated against them based on their race.

"On the other hand I think it's the question of getting skills, job skills in the Australian market," he said. "A lot of people don't have the resume that local people might have or people that have been in Australia for a longer time might have."

The study released today also found that since South Sudan gained independence, many people want to return home. "About 90 per cent of people had signalled that they would be intending to return. That includes both temporarily and permanently," he said.

"When it comes to more permanent return, people had a range of opinions about how long they would go and for what reasons."

But Mr Onus says most people who wanted to return to South Sudan did not hold negative opinions of Australia.

"It was very much a question of going home to support the development of their new nation and there's really a lot of positive energy and enthusiasm in the community towards helping the South Sudanese nation develop and repatriating the skills that they've gained here," he said.

SOURCE

Wednesday, November 28, 2012

Australian attempt to get tough with "asylum seekers" falls over

Five year wait for right to work scrapped

NEW rules denying asylum seekers work rights for up to five years will be softened in response to a backlash from Labor MPs and one of the principal architects of the Gillard government's policy to stem the number of boat arrivals.

Paris Aristotle, a member of the government's expert panel on asylum seekers, has described the no-work-rights rules as inconsistent with the policy's controversial "no advantage" test, punitive and in breach of Australia's international treaty obligations.

Mr Aristotle welcomed a nuanced retreat by Immigration Minister Chris Bowen, who signalled a willingness on Monday to put in place "some mechanism" for those found to be refugees, but having to wait several years for permanent protection, "to be able to support themselves".

Mr Bowen announced last Wednesday that, "consistent with "no advantage", those who could not be sent to Nauru or Manus Island would be released into the community with "no work rights and will receive only basic accommodation assistance and limited financial support [of $430 a fortnight]".

The move followed the recognition that too many asylum seekers have arrived since the new approach was announced on August 13 for them to be transferred to Nauru or Manus Island.

It was an attempt to put those who will now be released on bridging visas on the same footing as those on Nauru and Manus Island, but it prompted warnings that it would create an underclass of refugees who would be ill prepared to build new lives when finally granted protection visas.

It has also escalated unrest and anxiety among the 387 who have been sent to Nauru. They say they have been treated unfairly and warn that one Iranian is close to death after being on a hunger strike for 45 days.

After representations from Mr Aristotle and others, Mr Bowen asserted on Monday that the new rules were "not actually linked to the no-advantage principle as such", and were more about the surge in numbers from Sri Lanka and the belief that many were "economic migrants" and not refugees.

He also vowed to work with those in the refugee sector to determine "how we will deal" with those found to be refugees under the new system, where asylum seekers whose claims are upheld must wait for as long as they would have waited to be resettled if they had stayed in a transit country - a period Mr Bowen concedes could be five years.

In comments welcomed by Labor MP Melissa Parke, Mr Bowen said he wanted "over time" to work out how these people had "appropriate support and care, and where appropriate they have some mechanism in place to be able to support themselves".

Writing exclusively in The Age today, Mr Aristotle argues the correct response to concerns about economic migration from Sri Lanka is to "properly and quickly" establish if this is the case by processing applications. "Those that are refugees should be protected and those who are not can be returned," he writes.

"The announcements last week to disallow asylum seekers work rights and timely access to family reunion, even after they have been found to be a refugee, were not recommendations of the panel.

"The measures are highly problematic because they are a punitive form of deterrence in response to a specific and new phenomenon in people smuggling from Sri Lanka, which the government believes is for economic reasons as opposed to refugee protection."

Mr Aristotle expresses dismay at the opposition's proposal to slash the humanitarian quota to 13,750 places and reintroduce temporary protection visas, saying it makes little sense.

He laments that the debate on asylum-seeker issues continues to be on a "destructive and combative course".

SOURCE

Recent posts at CIS below

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

Blogs

1. The Shape of a Future Immigration Deal?

2. Worksite Immigration Enforcement is Minimal — CRS Study Confirms

3. After the Election, More Flexibility for Sanctuaries

4. Even a Stopped Clock . . .

5. If It Sounds Too Good to Be True . . .

6. USCIS Sheds a Little Light on Denial Rates

7. Not Your Grandfather's Immigration Rules

8. "Comprehensive Immigration Reform": an Oxymoron in the Making

Tuesday, November 27, 2012

Clear, Simple and Wrong Answers to the “Demographic Changes”

Since the day after the election Republicans have been analyzing, ruminating, whining and complaining about Mitt Romney’s performance and beseeching the Republican Party to now “reach out” to minorities, lest they not win another national election. Most of the suggestions offered not only wouldn’t work, they would likely lead to the destruction of the Republican Party.

It is, of course, part of the campaign process to study all voter groups, demographics and modern tribal affiliations, to attempt to identify areas of agreement with the candidate in the hopes of “reaching out” to gain their support. All successful candidates do this already. There is no need to admonish anyone on this point.

However, many in the news media and the Republican and Democrat Party have been pushing a concept that is born of faulty analysis and personal prejudice; the idea that the way to attract the Hispanic vote is to push an amnesty for the millions of illegal aliens currently in our country. This suggestion is plainly wrong and the result of political naivety, or sinister or outright stupidity.

H.L. Mencken once opined that, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.

That statement applies 100% to the current discussion about how to attract Hispanic votes. Offering an amnesty, discussing an amnesty, supporting an amnesty, writing amnesty legislation and actually passing an amnesty for illegal aliens has all been done by Republicans in the past and not once did the Republican candidate for President get even close to 50% of the “Hispanic vote.”

Pew Hispanic Research reported on November 7th the Hispanic vote count for the last nine Presidential elections. The 1986 IRCA amnesty, the source of a lot of the “demographic changes” that we have seen for years but are only just hearing about now, didn’t help Republicans in even one subsequent election. John McCain failed to get one third of the Hispanic vote in 2008, and he actually wrote an amnesty bill with Ted Kennedy who was a big supporter of the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, the other source of the “demographic changes.”

If the suggestions of these amnesty supporting dopes weren’t so pathetic they’d be laughable. I’ll summarize their plan:

"The way for the Republican Party to gain support from low income Hispanic voters is to flood the country, and it would be a flood of Biblical proportions, with tens of millions more low income Hispanic workers who, once becoming citizens, would vote for…Republicans."

Any candidate who would believe this drivel is not smart enough to be in public office, even though it is a government job.

Latest example: The Orange Country California Republican Party is now “rethinking” its stance on immigration.

If true, then the Rinos (many are Democrats who re-registered when it was a Republican stronghold) who have been trying to take over that County’s Party since the early 1990s have finally succeeded. The statue of John Wayne at the local airport must be weeping.

Any candidate or organization that endorses this nonsense is corrupt and is more interested in the success of the Chamber of Commerce Clan, than the United States of America. Because, open borders and mass illegal immigration is allowed and encouraged by Democrats and Republicans alike because business needs a new generation of customers to take up the slack left by the Baby Boomer Consumers who are retiring out of their consuming careers at a rate of 10,000 a day.

Not that it makes one bit of difference to those who would sell us out, but, America is more than just an economy, and a great economy it is, or was. America is also the world power that has kept dictators in check for over half a century and freed more people from tyranny, poverty and disease than all the rest of the world’s nations added up throughout history.

American culture and ideals and power have created the world we live in.

In his book, The World America Made, Robert Kagan describes the “American World Order” which has existed since the end of WWII.

Regardless of the attitudes, feelings or beliefs of leftists, socialists, race hustlers and welfare recipients in the United States, it is America’s power that has created a world of relative peace and prosperity for the past 67 years.

Now, I will agree with the crybabies that the world isn’t perfect, far from it. But, it is the best world mankind has seen since Rome collapsed.

America’s power is a direct by-product of America’s wealth; its economy. That economy and power is threatened by the influx of low educated, low skilled people who are willing work in America at almost any wage as it really beats what they left behind. But, the damage from this influx is reflected, in part, in the “demographic changes” that seem to have only just been discovered by some of the political elite, but have, in fact, been the obvious result of our open border policies for years.

Reach out to every voting demographic, absolutely. Only, don’t listen to those who offer simplistic suggestions, especially ones that have already been proven to be failures.

And, by all means, ignore the Democrats who are telling the Republicans how to “reach out” to anyone. That would go far beyond simple and wrong. It would be stupid.

SOURCE

Tony Blair peddles immigration myths

Big business support for his new pro-Europe campaign is nothing but naked self-interest, argues Jeff Randall.

Brilliant news for Eurosceptics: Tony Blair will this week wade into the debate over Britain’s membership of the European Union, claiming that our place at the “top table” has never been more important. At a speech in London, he will seek to rally business leaders behind his campaign for a “grand plan” to bolster the EU’s wobbling edifice.

For those hoping that the United Kingdom will cut its losses and wave goodbye to Brussels, it’s hard to think of an intervention more likely to help their cause. Mr Blair still has traction with some foreign bankers, daft enough to pay for his advice, but as far as domestic voters are concerned, he’s the political equivalent of the merchandise in Del Boy’s suitcase. The goods are not just damaged, they are damaged fakes.

For the purpose of brevity, let’s set aside judgment on the former prime minister’s illegal war in Iraq and focus on his clammy desire to dilute British sovereignty. Had Mr Blair got his way, sterling would have been scrapped and Britain rammed into the eurozone. Undeterred by the euro crisis, he is still urging ministers to keep open the option of joining, describing the possibility of our future participation as an “interesting choice”.

Then there is his record on EU immigration. It was Mr Blair who opened the door in 2004 to workers from accession states, insisting that the impact on our jobs market and social infrastructure would be minimal. Those who challenged this orthodoxy were condemned as racists and bigots.

As John Denham, Labour’s former business secretary, later admitted, we were told to expect 15,000 migrants a year from the new EU states, and “15,000 came to Southampton alone”. In the event, more than 700,000 East Europeans arrived in Britain and the vast majority have stayed.

The myth peddled by Blair’s acolytes – that high levels of immigration generated significant economic benefits for the existing UK population – was demolished in 2008 by a House of Lords select committee. It concluded: “We do not support the general claims that net immigration is indispensable to fill labour and skills shortages. Such claims are analytically weak and provide insufficient reason for promoting net immigration.” Reinforcing this point, the government’s Migration Advisory Committee recently confirmed that immigrants do “displace” some British workers – ie, take their jobs, most likely those at the bottom end of the pay ladder.

Embarrassed by indisputable evidence that Blair’s immigration wheeze (about 80 per cent of first-generation immigrants vote Labour) had “costs as well as benefits”, Ed Miliband now accepts that his party overlooked those who were being squeezed and was too quick to tell them to “like it or lump it”.

Overcoming Blair’s legacy is tougher than it seems, however, as we saw last week when a Labour council removed children from a home in Rotherham simply because the foster parents were members of Ukip. It is the mindset of Animal Farm: “All Immigration Good. All Opposition Bad”.

So what possesses Business for New Europe, the group hosting Blair this week, to align itself with such a discredited ambassador for the erosion of Britain’s independence? Is it anything more than a cynical assessment that all publicity is good publicity and that Blair guarantees headlines?

The answer is that big business has always been prepared to dress up grubby self-reward in the haute couture of national interest – and is at it again. At the CBI’s annual conference last week, its president, Sir Roger Carr, banged on about Europe being “the bedrock of our international trade” and about the need to extol “the virtues of future engagement”.

What he did not mention is that Britain’s annual net contribution to the European Union’s budget is more than £10 billion (equal to 25 per cent of our expenditure on defence). All to be in a club with which we have a monthly trading deficit of £4 billion-plus. With its sales to the UK worth £16 billion a month, why would the EU stop trading with us if we were to withdraw?

For Sir Roger and others like him, who run multinational corporations with brigades of advisers to handle Brussels directives, there are clear advantages to being part of a borderless EU, not least access to a pool of educated young people whose presence in Britain helps suppress local wage rates.

It’s a different story, however, for start-ups. The Federation of Small Business says: “Small businesses are often hampered by EU legislation. The flow of regulation on employment [and] environmental issues, as well as health and safety, can discourage businesses from expanding. It can even contribute to their closure.”

The CBI cannot have it both ways. It calls for the Government to help create a better skilled British workforce, yet there is no incentive for UK companies to invest in indigenous staff and train them properly if they have the alternative of hiring foreigners whose schooling has been funded by somebody else.

The impact of immigration on those living in Cotswolds manor houses is, clearly, not the same as it is on minimum-wage workers in Barking council flats. Tony Blair knows that, but could not care less.

SOURCE

Monday, November 26, 2012

Does sensible immigration reform require a 'path to citizenship'?

Guestworker program a better alternative

I've followed the illegal immigration dilemma for decades and would like to see a rational solution to the problem ("An opportune moment for deal on immigration," Nov. 17).

Today there are more than 12 million undocumented immigrants in America, and the number continues to grow. But whenever a rational person speaks out with a proposal other than "path to citizenship," they are branded a racist, bigot, xenophobe or worse.

Illegal immigration involves human trafficking, misery, poverty, abuse and sometimes death. Everyone who studies the problem understands the risks people take to get into this country and how vulnerable they are to "coyotes," the guides who demand exorbitant fees for smuggling people across the border. Afterward, undocumented residents must "live in the shadows" in order to eke out a living.

Francisco Dominguez, whom you described as a worker in Fells Point waiting for a construction job, failed to mention how many times he had to work in unsafe conditions or was stiffed by unscrupulous employers. He also never said he paid taxes or contributed to Social Security and Medicare. To me, this man has been horribly exploited, as have so many other undocumented workers.

Instead of a "path to citizenship," why not create a visa program whereby people could come here to work, be protected under the law, find employment in jobs that don't endanger life or limb, and only then, if they want, be offered the opportunity to become a U.S. citizen?

Republican Rep. Andy Harris is floating this proposal, which makes sense to me. But the idea has been shot down by Gustavo Torres and his supporters at CASA de Maryland.

Your article failed to mention the 1986 amnesty, which never solved the problem. America has an enormous appetite for workers who "live in the shadows" and work below minimum wage.

Once the undocumented people who are here now gain a legal foothold, more undocumented folk will step in to fill their places. It's a cycle that never seems to end.

SOURCE

Australia: NT Govt in the dark on illegal arrivals

THE Territory Government has yet to be told how many asylum seekers to expect following a decision to hand out 8000 bridging visas.

Chief Minister Terry Mills said he had been "left in the dark" on the issue.

"What we do know is police, fire and ambulance services have already been under strain since the detention centre opened," he said.

The Federal Government is to allow asylum seekers who have arrived in Australia since Canberra announced a return to offshore processing to stay on temporary visas without the right to work.

The new visas will also cover future arrivals and will apply even if a person's refugee claim is successful.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen said people could expect to be on the visas for up to five years

The Coalition yesterday said it would overturn the decision if elected next year...

SOURCE

Sunday, November 25, 2012

House to vote GOP immigration bill

Immigration legislation intended to both expand visas for foreign science and technology students and to simplify the residency process for immediate relatives of green card holders, will be voted next week in the House of Representatives.

The new version of the STEM Jobs Act — standing for science, technology, engineering and mathematics — was added a provision that allows the spouses and minor children of people with permanent residence to stay in the United States during the waiting period to obtain their own green cards.

Every year, the U.S. allocates about 80,000 of these family-based green cards. The problem is, there are some 322,000 husbands, wives and children in this category, having to wait more than two years to be reunited. The new initiative would allow sponsored applicants to enter the country one year after they submit their petition for their green cards, although they wouldn't be able to work until they are granted a resident status.

An earlier version of the STEM bill that required two-thirds majority was defeated in September. More than 80 percent of House Democrats voted against it, because it offset the increase in visas for high-tech graduates by eliminating another visa program that is available for less-educated aspirants.

This time, the bill will require only a majority vote, and it is almost certain to pass the Republican-led House. There are still some doubts it will generate enough Democratic support as it heads to the Democratic-controlled Senate.

SOURCE

Cutting off immigration reform

By Ruben Navarrette

After Latino voters helped re-elect President Obama — delivering the battleground states of Nevada and Colorado, and contributing to the victories in Florida and Virginia — a consensus quickly emerged among pundits and political observers that the quid pro quo would include comprehensive immigration reform.

But what does this even mean?

For nativists who fear the Latinizing of the United States, reforming the immigration system means building higher fences and rejecting anything that resembles "amnesty" for illegal immigrants.

For the business community and high-tech industry, it means owning up to the fact that there are jobs that Americans either won't do or can't do, and making it easier for companies to recruit high-skilled workers from abroad.

For those on the far left, it means an expedited pathway to U.S. citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants that would not inconvenience the recipients by making them meet any requirements.

Meanwhile, for the majority of Americans, it means a common-sense combination of three things: A temporary guest-worker program where people could come to the United States for a few years, then go home; stronger and smarter border security that keeps track of who is coming and going, and for what purpose; and a pathway to earned legalization for that portion of the undocumented population that has been here for many years.

When the media talk about the imminent arrival of comprehensive immigration reform, this is what is generally assumed: Supposedly, the tune-up to our immigration system that President George W. Bush first talked about at the White House with Mexican President Vicente Fox in September 2001 is a done deal. We're told: Democrats want it, and Republicans need it.

The assessment is half right.

The Republicans need it. But the Democrats don't really want it. They've never really wanted it. They only say they want it to trick Latinos and immigration reform advocates into voting for them again and again.

Which is why reform probably won't happen. We'll have a debate but no solution will emerge from it.

So why don't Democrats want comprehensive immigration reform? For the same five reasons that Senate Democratic Leader Harry Reid teamed up in 2006 and 2007 with the nativist wing of the Republican Party to kill bipartisan bills and, in 2010, helped scuttle the Dream Act — a mini-legalization program for college students and military.

* Democrats would rather not be known, in subsequent elections, as the "party of amnesty" and solidify their reputation for being dovish on border security. This would not help their chances with white and black voters who feel threatened and want stronger enforcement of immigration laws.

* They want to continue to have a club with which to bludgeon Republicans, and convince Latinos that the GOP is hostile to them and their concerns. This makes campaigning easier, and delivers them votes in crucial states that they haven't earned.

* They want to please organized labor, which opposes any stab at immigration reform that includes mention of guest workers. That is, any proposal that stands a chance of winning the Republican votes necessary for passage because Democrats are so splintered on the issue.

* They want to avoid a contentious debate that would surely divide the Democratic base by pitting Latinos and immigration reformers against labor unions, African-Americans who feel displaced in the racial pecking order, and those who want to restrict immigration to protect U.S. workers.

* They want to preserve the current system, which works great for Democrats. They don't do anything to fix the problem, so they don't get saddled with any of the negative pushback they might get if they took action and Republicans used it against them. The GOP gets the blame for being "obstructionist." Labor is happy. Latinos are duped. All is good.

Don't kid yourself. Regardless of the election returns and the turmoil now engulfing the Republican Party, Democrats in Congress have no appetite for comprehensive immigration reform.

Now that Latino voters have let out a roar, Democrats simply have to be craftier in fooling these voters into thinking they're doing their bidding while they continue to do what they want to do.

This is the inescapable paradigm of the immigration debate. Getting outraged at Republicans on Election Day didn't change it. If you want to change it, try saving some outrage for Democrats.

SOURCE

Friday, November 23, 2012

A shambles! The truth about Britain's leaky borders... Lack of checks let thousands of illegal immigrants stay in Britain

Tens of thousands of illegal immigrants and failed asylum seekers were allowed to stay in the UK without proper checks in yet another borders scandal, it emerged last night. A Government inspector found that thousands of foreign nationals were granted an ‘amnesty’ without their files even being looked at.

Officials at the shambolic UK Border Agency (UKBA) also ignored evidence of deception and fraud by applicants whose cases dated back up to 17 years.

Some 124,000 cases were put in cold storage without proper checks to see if the applicant could be found. It has since emerged 37,500 people involved could have been easily located and potentially booted out.

A further 10,000 cases classified as having ‘legal barriers to removal’ had, in fact, just never been opened.

Officials also repeatedly misled Parliament over what was happening, according to John Vine, the chief inspector of Borders and Immigration.

The grave charge has infuriated MPs and could trigger a new inquiry by the home affairs select committee. Its chairman, Keith Vaz, said last night: ‘This is a devastating report. The failure to properly check asylum cases means UKBA is in danger of overseeing an effective amnesty for many of them.

‘It appears that senior officials of the UKBA have misled the committee about facts and figures. To mislead a committee of the House is an extremely serious matter.

‘Those same officials.... have all received bonuses. On the basis of this report, they should hand them back immediately.’

One official who gave false information to the committee, Lin Homer, has since been promoted to chief executive at HM Revenue and Customs on £175,000 a year.

Mr Vine’s explosive report lays bare the incompetence and confusion which took hold in the Home Office when 450,000 historic claims were unearthed by former Home Secretary John Reid in 2006.

A deadline of April 2011 was set to clear the so-called legacy backlog, which involved 500,000 files.

The Mail has repeatedly highlighted how a huge number of the applications were being rubber-stamped. Mr Vine’s report puts a final figure on the number officially given asylum under this amnesty – an astonishing 172,000.

But he also reveals what happened to the tens of thousands of cases where UKBA officials insisted the applicants could not be found.

In November 2010, then agency chief executive Miss Homer told MPs that 100,000 cases were put in a controlled archive only after a ‘significant number of checks’. Miss Homer left the agency in January 2011.

In April that year, acting chief executive Jonathan Sedgwick told the home affairs committee that each controlled archive case had been checked ‘against 19 databases – Government, Home Office, private sector databases’.

But a sample of cases examined by Mr Vine found that just 4 per cent had been subject to external checks.

In the months leading up to April 2011, cases were put in the archive on the basis that no trace could be found of the asylum seeker. But, the report found, in many such cases that was simply because officials in the unit processing them – the Case Resolution Directorate – had not opened the post to find letters from lawyers.

In April 2011, the remaining cases were moved to the Case Assurance and Audit Unit, based in Liverpool, which quickly became ‘overwhelmed’. It took on 147,000 cases, with fewer that 100 staff.

Such was the chaos that 150 boxes of post were found unopened in the new unit. In the following months, vast numbers of cases were fast-tracked, with just 13 per cent of applicants refused the right to remain here. Some were allowed to stay despite ‘multiple examples of deception’ and even imprisonment for fraud.

Case workers routinely granted migrants the right to stay under Article 8 of the Human Rights Act because they had been here so long, and applicants’ statements were accepted at face value.

There was, the report said, ‘little evidence in a number of cases to demonstrate that they were being considered on their individual merits’.

In a desperate bid to clear the cases, managers allowed case workers to grant the right to stay without even opening the file. Some 3,750 cases were decided this way.

Of the controlled archive cases examined by the inspectors, on average they were not dealt with for more than seven years and one was not opened for 17 years.

Once external checks were finally carried out this year, 31,000 migrants whose cases had been archived were ‘found’. Even now, many individuals are not being chased down immediately because of ‘insufficient resources’.

Mr Vine said: ‘I found that updates given by the agency to Parliament in the summer of 2011, stating that the legacy of unresolved asylum cases was resolved, were inaccurate.’

A Home Office spokesman said: ‘We have known for some time that UKBA is a troubled organisation with a poor record of delivery. Turning the agency around will take time, but we are making progress.’

SOURCE

Australia Defends Tough Media Detention Center Restrictions

SYDNEY — Australian immigration officials have defended restrictions that limit press access to detention centers. While the media are barred from offshore processing camps in Papua New Guinea and Nauru, journalists are allowed into facilities on the mainland but are subject to strict rules and barred from formally interviewing detainees.

Eighteen months ago the Australian Broadcasting Corporation said that the country’s immigration centers were “less open and transparent than Guantanamo Bay.”

Since then, the Immigration Department has given reporters limited access to detention facilities under a Deed of Agreement on media access.

Journalists are permitted to speak with detainees but are not given permission to formally interview them or record their comments, nor are they allowed to publish images of inmates’ faces.

Immigration officials say the restrictions are in place to protect the privacy of asylum seekers, in much the same way that school children or hospital patients have their privacy protected from the press in Australia.

While reporters are allowed to visit mainland immigration facilities, they are barred from recently reopened camps in Papua New Guinea and on the tiny South Pacific island of Nauru, which houses asylum seekers from Sri Lanka, Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and Pakistan.

Senior Australian immigration department spokesman, Sandi Logan, told a forum at the University of Technology Sydney that he hoped the press will eventually be allowed in.

“I have got to say that operationally there are much greater priorities for us in Nauru at the moment than a media access policy. But having said that, I think it is absolutely essential that journalists have access to that facility and likewise to the facility in Papua New Guinea, and that will be something that in time, in time, will be negotiated. And when those two parties i.e. the government of Australia and the government of Nauru have agreed on the settings, the parameters for that media access then it would be my expectation that will occur," said Logan.

Australian journalists say that the Deed of Agreement that governs visits to detention centers is too restrictive, and prevents them from telling the true story of conditions behind the razor wire fences.

The head of the Australian Press Council, Julian Disney, says the public does have a right to know.

“People in those detention centers are there because of government policies," he said. "They are the policies adopted by the governments we have elected and they are having a very substantial impact on people, even if those people are not our citizens. Therefore as citizens of Australia people are entitled to know what the impact of their government policies are. But we think there are substantial ways in which these restrictions go too far.”

Since the restrictions were brought in a year ago, about 50 journalists, including reporters from Switzerland and Germany, have toured mainland immigration centers in Australia.

It is unclear when press access will be granted to Australia’s two offshore detention centers on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, which reopened Wednesday, and another on the tiny South Pacific republic of Nauru, which reopened in September.

Both facilities were used by the former conservative government in Australia. In the past critics derided the policy as cruel and ineffective, and they are taking aim once again.

Amnesty International this week said conditions on Nauru were responsible for a ''terrible spiral'' of hunger strikes and suicide attempts.

Australia grants protection visas to about 13,000 refugees each year under a range of international agreements.

SOURCE

Thursday, November 22, 2012

New leader of French conservatives tougher on immigration

“The Republican Dilemma in French” is what some pundits have dubbed the recent fight for control of France’s UMP (conservative) party formerly led by Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nicolas Sarkozy. Very much like the Republican Party in the U.S. after its defeat for the presidency, the UMP in the six months since Sarkozy was defeated has been undergoing a struggle for its soul between its business-oriented Establishment faction and that comprised of more grass-roots activists — the French equivalent of the tea party — who want a harder line on “red meat” issues such as immigration.

On Tuesday, it appeared as though the latter group had emerged triumphant. In the race to succeed Sarkozy as party president, Jean-Francois Cope—mayor of the working-class town of Meaux (near Paris) and a deputy (congressman)—campaigned as the candidate who would make the UMP the party of what he called “an uninhibited right.”

The rise to political leadership of someone who makes no secret being on the right in a party that has been historically “center right” could well be a harbinger of the path other conservative parties in Western democracies may take. It may also be the beginning of a bid for president of France by Cope himself, whose ambition is widely known.

Denouncing what he called “anti-white racism” in immigrant communities and calling for all-out opposition to Socialist President Francois Hollande’s plan to legalize same-sex marriage, the 48-year-old Cope apparently edged out the favorite of the “establishment,” former Prime Minister Francois Fillon. Although the 58-yar-old Fillon’s supporters claimed figures showing their man with the lead, the final count gave Cope a wafer-thin win—by 98 votes out of more than 175,000 cast by party members.

The results made headlines worldwide in part because polls had shown the urbane intellectual Fillon—who spoke of being more “a pedagogue than a demagogue”—a clear front-runner. Both candidates had close ties to Sarkozy, Fillon having been the former president’s prime minister throughout his tenure (2002-07) and Cope his government’s top spokesman for five years.

But Cope, as the BBC reported last week, “sits further to the right of the former president, particularly on immigration.” As secretary general (chairman) of the UMP since 2010, Cope (who is Jewish) began a debate on Islam in France and said that integration of Muslims in France had failed. He also raised eyebrows by tweeting a claim that a child had been robbed of his “pain au chocolat” pastry by “thugs” who were enforcing the Muslim holiday of Ramadan.

More than a few observers said this approach was a not-so-subtle way of courting voters who had backed the anti-immigration National Front, whose leader Marine LePen drew a stunning 17 percent of the vote and third place in the race for president this year, which was eventually won by Hollande.

“Cope’s ghoulish French kissing the National Front is a crippled echo of Richard Nixon’s Southern Strategy,” Craig Copetas, Paris-based correspondent-at-large for Quartz/The Atlantic Group and author of the acclaimed “Mona Lisa’s Pajamas,” told Human Events, referring to the 37th president’s courtship of Southern voters on the issue of opposing school busing.

But Cope also called for all-out opposition to the Socialist Hollande on the issues of same-sex marriage and the president’s plan to tax people with annual incomes of 1 million Euros or more at a rate of 75 percent. In his words, “we need la resistance against a president who is in the process of paralyzing all economic activity in the country.”

Cope has made no secret of his desire to run for president against Hollande in 2017. As far back as 1991, in fact, he told guests at his wedding: “You’re lucky you’re at the wedding of a future president.” The marriage ended in divorce, but it seems quite obvious that the groom still harbors the ambitions he spoke of at his wedding

SOURCE

Asylum-seeker flood sinks Australian Labor Party's offshore processing policy

THE Gillard government has admitted its Pacific Solution has been overwhelmed, declaring asylum-seekers arriving since the policy was announced will be allowed to live in the Australian community.

As Papua New Guinea's Manus Island processing centre received its first detainees today, Immigration Minister Chris Bowen conceded Nauru and Manus would not be able to accommodate all the asylum-seekers intercepted since the August 13 policy announcement.

He said the government's new “no-advantage” principle would therefore have to be applied to the overflow of unauthorised arrivals brought to Australia.

The principle requires asylum-seekers to wait for a refugee visa for as long as they would have if they had waited offshore to be settled through official channels.

“Accordingly, some of these people will be processed in the Australian community,” Mr Bowen said in Sydney.

“They will not, however, be issued with a permanent protection visa if found to be a refugee, until such time that they would have been resettled in Australia after being processed in our region,” Mr Bowen said.

“People arriving by boat are subject to this `no advantage' principle, whether that means being transferred offshore to have their claims processed, remaining in detention, or being placed in the community.”

Asylum-seekers settled in the community will be placed on bridging visas without work rights and would receive only basic accommodation assistance, Mr Bowen said.

Nauru and Manus Island will accommodate about 2100 asylum-seekers when at full capacity.

About 7000 asylum-seekers have arrived since the new Pacific Solution was announced.

Mr Bowen said all post-August 13 unauthorised arrivals would be processed according on the no-disadvantage principle, even if they were processed in Australia.

He said their status as offshore entrants would be unchanged, and “consideration can be given to transfer these people offshore at a future date”.

A charter flight arrived on Manus Island early today from Christmas Island with 19 asylum-seekers aboard.

The group of seven families from Sri Lanka and Iran, including 15 adults and four children, were accompanied by Australian Federal Police officers, Department of Immigration personnel, interpreters and medical staff.

Mr Bowen also announced the transfer of 100 Sri Lankan men back to Colombo today, the ninth and largest involuntary removal to date.

The transfers come amid growing unrest on Nauru, where 387 asylum-seekers are housed in conditions that have been condemned by Amnesty International.

The human rights body has also expressed concern about nine asylum-seekers who have been on a hunger strike, including one who has not eaten for 40 days.

Tony Abbott said he was “all in favour” of offshore processing but did not believe Labor's plan would stop the boats.

“This government just doesn't have its heart in it,” Mr Abbott said.

“And for this government to say, oh look at the (19) that have gone to Manus when you've got 2000-plus coming every month demonstrates that they just don't get it.”

The Opposition Leader said people who came to Australia could not expect “to be treated like they are staying in a four or five star hotel”.

“The people who have come illegally to this country need to know that they are breaking our laws and that they are, if I may say so, taking unfair advantage of our decency as a people,” Mr Abbott said.

“It is illegal to come to Australia without papers, without proper documentation, without adhering to the normal requirements that we expect of people coming to this country.”

SOURCE

Wednesday, November 21, 2012

300,000 Undocumented Immigrants Have Applied for Deportation

In the three months since the Obama Administration implemented a program that gives a reprieve from deportation to certain undocumented immigrants, about 300,000 have applied, reports the Christian Science Monitor.

Some 50,000, or 17 percent, have been approved, the newspaper said, citing the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS. Approval enables immigrants to obtain work permits.

“I am elated that so many applications are coming in and now that the fear of Romney winning is out of the way,” said Rep. Luis Gutierrez, Illinois Democrat, in a statement quoted by the newspaper. “I think a half-million applications by New Year's should be our goal.”

The program, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, requires immigrants to be 31 or younger, and to have arrived in the United States before the age of 16, besides other criteria.

The program does not give the immigrants legal status, only a waiver from deportation for two years.

Most of the applicants were from Mexico, the newspaper said, not surprising given that most undocumented immigrants are from there. South Koreans comprised the largest non-Latino group, the newspaper said.

California led all states with the most applicants, with 81,500, followed by Texas, which had 47,700, the Monitor reported.

More than 1 million are believed to be eligible to apply for DACA.

Obama announced the DACA initiative in June, as criticism mounted about his failure to come through on his 2008 campaign promise to push comprehensive immigration reform.

In 2010, the House of Representatives passed the DREAM Act, a bill that would have given undocumented immigrants brought to the United States as minors a path to legalization. But the bill died in the Senate, where a vote in its favor fell short of the number needed to stop a Republican-led filibuster.

DACA helped boost Latino voter support for Obama, though polls consistently showed that the majority of Latinos preferred him over his GOP presidential challenger Mitt Romney, who took a hard-line on illegal immigration.

Those who support giving undocumented immigrants brought as minors a path to legalization say that they should not be punished for the decisions and actions of others. Those who oppose DACA and the DREAM Act say they amount to amnesty that rewards law breakers.

Romney had vowed to veto any DREAM Act version if he became president, and said he would not continue DACA.

SOURCE

An innovation crisis?

I suppose it would be churlish to say it is just an area where there is room for improvement -- but I am not a Californian

By Christopher Newfield, a Professor at UC Santa Barbara

In the recent presidential campaign, neither Barack Obama nor Mitt Romney said anything meaningful about how to fix the U.S. innovation system. Both ran as status quo candidates who acted as though there was nothing to fix. Virtually no one who follows the issue agrees with this, but for the moment the political system remains oblivious.

About ten years ago, I began to hear murmurs from high-tech industry people that American innovation wasn't working as advertized. Some of this was disappointment tied to the dot-com bust, but most of it consisted of people looking ahead in their particular technology-based industry and not seeing much. I had a number of off-guard conversations at wedding receptions or post-conference airport cabs in which someone would say, "we don't really have a next big thing in the pipeline anymore." I heard this from a pharma scientist in 2002, then from a corporate computer engineer, and something similar from IT executives at different firms over the ensuing months. Official reports started coming out, such as "Rising Above the Gathering Storm" (2005), which warned that the U.S. was losing its innovation lead. At the time, however, most people assumed, like Romney and Obama this year, that the innovation system just needed a few tweaks and bigger inputs --- more funding for research, more science and engineering (STEM) graduates.

Phase 2 arrived a few years ago, and the gathering storm became a heavy rain. We now have a steady patter of worried, critical books, sometimes written by the U.S. innovation system's biggest boosters. There was Fareed Zakaria's Newsweek cover story in November 2009, bluntly titled, "Can America Still Innovate?" This was followed by his book, The Post-American World (2011). New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman captured the same problem in his title, That Used to Be Us: How America Fell Behind in the World It Invented and How We Can Come Back.

Many systematic academic studies have been moving in the same direction. In 2007, Richard Florida published The Flight of the Creative Class: The New Global Competition for Talent, whose implications for the U.S. innovation system is clear in the subtitle.

More recently, the economist Robert J. Gordon caused a stir with his NBER paper offering quantitative evidence that the rate of increase of multi-factor productivity was higher in 1928-1950 than in the vaunted Internet era. Scholars are now questioning the effectiveness of one after the other of our main innovation pillars. In a recent book by two principals at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation, Robert D. Atkinson and Stephen J. Ezell, note that over the past 30 years the U.S. has lost its position in one major industry after another -- consumer electronics, capital goods industries, machine tools, automobiles. The same then happened in the high-tech sector, when U.S. market share slid in industries from printed circuit boards and desktop and notebook PCs to liquid crystal displays (LCDs), advanced batteries, and compact fluorescent lightbulbs (CFLs). Moreover, U.S. leadership in the industries that will define the future -- including high-performance computing, artificial intelligence, biotechnology, nanotechnology, robotics, energy storage, and clean energy production -- is by no means assured (33).

Why do these declines keep happening? Every element of the country's past success is coming under scrutiny -- the patent process, the higher education system, and the condition of the physical and digital infrastructures, among many others. One perennial target is the bottleneck in U.S. access to the world's technical workforce. This is the subject of Vivek Wadhwa's new book, The Immigrant Exodus, in which he claims that U.S. innovation is gravely threatened by a greatly inadequate number of visas for immigrant entrepreneurs.

Building on statistical research by AnnaLee Saxenian, Wadhwa shows first, that Silicon Valley companies have had a high dependence on immigrant founders, and second, that the ranks of these founders are no longer growing as expected. From 1995 to 2005, he writes, "more than 25 percent of all the technology and engineering companies in the country had one or more immigrant founders. The proportion of technology and engineering companies in Silicon Valley with at least one immigrant founder was 52 percent." A large share of these entrepreneurs came from two countries, India and China (which together have 35 percent of the world's population). India has been a particularly large donor to the skilled California workforce: during the 1990s, "the population of Indian scientists and engineers (S&E) in Silicon Valley grew by 646 percent" (six times the growth rate of the S&E workforce overall). As a result, "within a decade the proportion of Indian-led startups had increased from 7 percent to 13.4 percent."

The problem, as Wadhwa defines it, is that this immigrant flow "has slowed and reversed to an Immigrant Exodus." The term is riveting -- "exodus" suggests a sudden mass outflow of biblical proportions. The book does not actually present evidence of this kind of a reversal. When Wadhwa conducts a 2012 followup to a previous nationwide survey, he finds that "the proportion of immigrant-founded companies had slid from 25.3 percent to 24.3 percent." Wadhwa's research thus indicates not an exodus but a stagnation of immigrant entrepreneurship. He believes that this stagnation indicates a peak and a possible turning point in the proportion of U.S start-ups that are lead by immigrants.

Although the title, Immigrant Exodus, overstates the problem, there is little doubt that the U.S. visa system is clogged. Wadhwa nicely describes the discouraging effects of the long waits and uncertain outcomes on thousands and thousands of highly educated immigrants. His solution consists of seven visa reforms. One is to break open the quota system by eliminating the 7-percent-per-country limit for employment-based and related visas (only 7 percent of visas each year can at present be granted to nationals from a given country). Another is to increase by "3 or 4 times the number of employment-based green cards issued per annum." He also advocates letting spouses of H-1B visa holders work, and proposes a new "start-up visa."

Wadhwa claims that his visa reforms would get the growth in the number of immigrant entrepreneurs back on its earlier, New Economy pathway. This would in turn, he says, give a jolt to the overall American economy: "these measures could conservatively add $100 billion to $150 billion in revenues to the U.S. economy and generate between 1 million and 1.5 million jobs." Since STEM employment is about 6 percent of U.S. employment, or roughly 8 million jobs, Wadhwa is suggesting that ending current visa restrictions could increase U.S. STEM employment by 20 percent in the coming years.

More HERE

Tuesday, November 20, 2012

An "electronic" border fence is a mirage

Long before Google Street View existed, long before we started sending out alerts every time we breached the perimeter of Starbucks, the U.S. government embarked on an epic quest to establish a “virtual” fence along the Mexican border. The year was 1997. And while the U.S. Border Patrol’s surveillance technology then consisted primarily of sunglasses, border hawks and bureaucrats dreamed of a thin technological line of motion sensors, infrared cameras, and video-driven command centers producing the same sort of omniscience we now exert over 7-Eleven parking lots. To realize this bold but improbable vision, Congress approved funds for a pilot project called the Integrated Surveillance Intelligence System, or ISIS.

Thus began a long stretch of failure: cameras that wilted from the heat when thermometers hit a relatively temperate 70 degrees, ground sensors that could not tell a native cactus from an illegal intruder, inept project management, insinuations of fraud and corruption. Periodically, the quest would be canceled and then revived under a different brand name. ISIS begat America’s Shield Initiative, which begat the Secure Border Initiative Network, or SBINet. In January 2011, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano officially pulled the plug on this latest incarnation, thereby ushering in what arguably has been the project’s most successful two-year run. Zero functionality was added during this time, but at least spending came to a standstill too.

Now the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is ready to give the virtual fence still another go. According to the trade publication Defense News, U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP), a division of DHS, has earmarked $91.8 million in its fiscal 2013 budget for the construction of what it calls “integrated fixed towers.” In April 2012, CBP issued a request for proposal to build a single tower near Nogales, Arizona, and more than 100 companies, including Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, and General Dynamics, expressed interest in pursuing the project. CBP was scheduled to choose a vendor in the fall of 2012.

If the federal government and its various contractors have learned anything during the last 15 years, it’s that building a fence, especially a virtual one, over terrain that spans desolate mountains, wind-swept deserts, and meandering rivers, is no easy task. According to Robert Lee Maril, an East Carolina University sociologist who has written two books about the border, much of the equipment that was installed during the ISIS era is now “rotting in the West Texas wind.” SBINet fared similarly. While initial plans called for a series of 1,800 towers deployed across the entire length of the southern border, Boeing, the project’s primary contractor, built just 28 of them in a 53-mile section of Arizona, at a total cost of approximately $1 billion.

After these experiences, CBP is proceeding with the sort of plaintive foreboding more commonly seen in a gun-shy Match.com veteran than a major federal agency. “In all cases, CBP will seek strong confirmation that each offeror’s system is truly non-developmental,” its request for proposal advised. “Offerors must provide strong assurance that the proposed system is now ready, deployable and will not require additional engineering development if they hope to receive favorable consideration.” Translation: It doesn’t need all the latest bells and whistles. In fact, the agency will totally settle for a balding, nondescript, not particularly sexy surveillance system, just as long as it actually works.

The CBP (which was itself rebranded as part of DHS in 2003, uniting functions from two divisions of the Justice Department) wants to take things very slowly. If whatever vendor it chooses can deliver one tower whose associated cameras, radar, and sensors are capable of detecting a “single, walking, average-sized adult” within a range of 7.5 miles, and then transmitting this information in real time to a command post staffed by Border Patrol agents, then maybe, just maybe, it will think about building up to five more of them.

While CBP is terrified of another crushing disappointment, what is perhaps even scarier is the prospect of success. The agency’s failure to construct a viable surveillance system has had at least one tactical advantage: It has kept people from questioning the value of a functional virtual fence. Any attention the project has attracted has focused mainly on diagnosing its immediate shortcomings rather than assessing its long-term utility as a means of deterring illegal immigration, drug smuggling, and terrorists seeking entr�e to the U.S.

Building dozens of towers that don’t really work as advertised has been somewhat costly, but how much would it cost if we had hundreds or even thousands of towers that do work as advertised? In the wake of 9/11, the Border Patrol has grown tremendously. In fiscal year 2000, it had 9,212 agents and an annual budget of $1 billion. Ten years later, the Border Patrol boasted 21,444 agents and a budget of $3.5 billion. A virtual fence, and the monitoring and maintenance it would require, will no doubt ensure a well-staffed, well-budgeted future for the CBP. But what impact would it have on the security of America?

“The main problem the Border Patrol faces isn’t just seeing drugs or illegal aliens coming through,” says Maril, the East Carolina University sociologist. “It’s getting to wherever that’s happening before the people are gone.” While a more functional system may cut down on calls prompted by suspicious agaves, it won’t help agents traverse harsh and often inaccessible terrain any faster. “You can’t just get in a squad car and be there in 10 minutes,” Maril notes.

In any case, there is no guarantee this iteration of a virtual fence will work any better than earlier ones. Tom Barry, a senior analyst at the Center for International Policy who focuses on border issues, notes that a retired Air Force major general testifying at a 2010 congressional hearing confessed that 12 out of 15 sensor activations are caused by wind. “They’re spending many millions of dollars responding to weather events,” Barry exclaims.

Yet the virtual fence continues to attract bipartisan support. The Obama administration has funded it for 2013. Mitt Romney’s official campaign website promises to “complete a high-tech fence to enhance border security.”

Such consensus derives at least partly from the virtual nature of the fence. In its earliest days, it was so ethereal, so magical, that its creators chose fantastical, almost child-like names to describe it (ISIS, America’s Shield.) Now, after 15 years of costly growing pains, its latest moniker is the more pedestrian Arizona Border Technology Plan.

But even with the more utilitarian name and the new emphasis on humble pragmatism, longtime border watchers like Maril and Barry suggest that the ultimate costs and benefits of a virtual fence remain largely undefined, a hazy, constantly shifting mirage of heightened security glimmering in the farthest reaches of the Arizona desert.

SOURCE

Recent posts at CIS below

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

Blogs

1. USCIS, a Judge, and the NY Times Put the Right Spin on a Ping Pong Case

2. Socio-Demographic Variables for U.S.-born Hispanics that May Matter Politically

3. Are the DREAMers a Special Case?

4. Thou Shalt Not Be Comprehensive

5. Putting a Hold on the Effort to Derail Federal Immigration Detainers: A Positive Decision by a U.S. District Court Judge

6. DHS Gives Some Criminals Permanent Protected Status

7. Here's a Switch — Preventing Immigration Fraud Before it Happens

8. Immigration Anomalies: Legals Who Would Rather Be Illegals

9. Carlos Gutierrez, Bush-Era Commerce Secretary, Rips the Republican Party

Monday, November 19, 2012

Protest in regional British city over immigration levels

A protest against "high-levels" of immigration in a Lincolnshire market town has taken place. The Boston Protest Group said the "peaceful demonstration" was aimed at highlighting the pressure put on local services by migrant workers.

About 300 people gathered at the Herbert Ingram memorial for the demonstration, which organisers said was not aimed at individuals.

An estimated 9,000 foreign workers have settled in the town in recent years.

In the shadow of Boston Stump with the statue of the town's former MP Herbert Ingram as a backdrop, scores of people both young and old gathered for the protest.

They held banners ranging from "Free Us From The Shackles of Europe" to "Get Back Our Country".

Many told me they felt it was a chance for them to finally air their views in public after feeling they had been ignored too long by politicians.

There were impromptu speeches on a loudspeaker from some of the crowd, while organisers stressed their beef was not with migrants themselves but with the immigration policies of successive governments.

At one point there was even a good-natured conversation between a demonstrator and a Polish man who made the point he always worked hard himself but sympathised with the protesters and wished them well.

Protest organiser Dean Everitt said: "We had a good turnout of people, the right people, and we put our point across peacefully.

"I hope national government are going to know what we've done - we'll take it to Westminster until we get this issue sorted out."

He added: "We've proved a point - we're not right-wing thugs, we're not racists, we're just everyday people that are fed up and sick to the back teeth of migration.

"I work with Polish people and even they've said there are far too many here now."

But migrant worker Martins Zagers said some English people were not prepared to work in local factories because "it was a hard job".

"I work in a factory where there are only Polish, Latvian and Lithuanians," he said.

"From my side I am working hard and I will not take benefits - I am too proud to take benefits."

A protest march planned for last year was cancelled after the borough council agreed to set up a task force.

A report on population change was published as a result, but campaigners said it had not gone "far enough" and government still needed to listen.

The Home Office said it was working to cut net migration from hundreds of thousands to tens of thousands by the end of this Parliament and its tough new rules were already taking effect.

Mr Everitt said further protests were being organised - with the next one likely to take place in Spalding.

SOURCE

50 more Sri Lankans turned away from Australia

A FURTHER 50 Sri Lankan asylum-seekers have been forcibly sent home as the government struggles to cope with record boat arrivals.

Immigration Minister Chris Bowen yesterday confirmed the largest involuntary transfer to Colombo to occur since Labor's tough new processing regime took effect on August 13.

"This latest group takes to 282 the number of Sri Lankans returned involuntarily," a statement from Mr Bowen read.

"The men were advised of their status and that they were subject to removal from Australia."

This year there has been a dramatic spike in the number of Sri Lankan arrivals, resulting in the continued returns to Colombo.

Home Affairs Minister Jason Clare last night confirmed two new boat arrivals, with a combined 195 asylum-seekers on board. A third boat, carrying 53 asylum-seekers was intercepted on Saturday.

The vessel brought to 247 the number of boats to arrive in Australian waters this year, carrying 15,504 passengers, according to Customs. Detention centres continue to be swamped by detainees.

Last night 2224 asylum-seekers were being housed on Christmas Island, well over the planned capacity of 1500.

The Australian understands tents are being used at the facility for recreational purposes, but no asylum-seekers are sleeping in the makeshift accommodation.

Mainland detention centres are also near or at capacity, with tents also being used for recreational purposes.

At the tented facility on Nauru, tensions are continuing to escalate with another asylum-seeker being admitted to hospital as part of a hunger strike. Last week an Iranian asylum-seeker by the name of Omid was transferred to Nauru hospital after more than a month of voluntary starvation.

The Refugee Action Coalition's Ian Rintoul said an Iraqi had been admitted to hospital yesterday after eight days of starvation and kidney failure.

A total of 387 asylum-seekers are being housed on Nauru, with the latest transfer occurring last Monday.

Labor says transfers to Papua New Guinea's Manus Island will occur "shortly".

SOURCE

Sunday, November 18, 2012

Rubio Attempting to Forge an Immigration Policy That His Fellow Republicans Can Love

Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., is shaping immigration into an issue that Republicans can embrace without getting lambasted by the party base. He is doing it by moving away from discussing whether the current undocumented population should have a path to citizenship and talking instead about the future flow of immigrants into the United States. Both the message and the policy reflect a sensible, conservative viewpoint best expressed in business terms: It’s a question of supply and demand.

“If your economy is demanding 2 million people a year to fill 2 million new jobs at a certain level, but you’re only allowing 1 million people to come in, and of those only a third are employment-based, you have a supply and demand problem,” Rubio said on Thursday at the Washington Ideas Forum sponsored by The Atlantic and the Aspen Institute.

The thorny question about whether to legalize 11 million undocumented immigrants is a distraction, he said. “If you don’t have a legal immigration system that matches those two things, we’re going to wind up in the exact same spot we’re in today within a decade.… The legalization of people here today is politically charged, but you either do it or you don’t and then you argue about how to do it.”

Rubio’s rhetoric on immigration will be very important in the coming months as lawmakers grapple with one of the toughest policy issues of the decade. His rock-star profile as a potential presidential candidate puts him close to the heartbeat of the Republican Party. He will not embrace any policy that the GOP faithful cannot eventually support. Yet he cares passionately about immigration and about expanding the GOP’s appeal to Latinos. Immigration is complicated, emotional. It contains a minefield of loud, unruly constituents. If Rubio can find a way through that minefield, it’s a safe bet his colleagues will follow.

Rubio’s evolution on the “dreamers”—undocumented youth who were brought to the United States as children—illustrates his savvy in navigating immigration. On Thursday, he characterized them as “refugees,” saying they deserved a permanent solution as a matter of human rights. Last year, he floated a modified Dream Act that would legalize those young people but not give them citizenship.

That idea didn’t go over so well with Republican leaders. He was rescued by President Obama’s deferred-deportation program for the dreamers. Rubio then pivoted his message toward business interests and the future flow of immigrants.

Both Republicans and Democrats have difficulty with immigration, Rubio said on Thursday. Labor unions oppose large expansion of work visas, fearing the loss of jobs for U.S.workers. Democrats also insist that immigration policy must contain a family component. Sen. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., has been the champion of immigration policy as a means to keep families together, an insistence that roiled Republicans in 2007 when the Senate last debated the issue.

In a speech on Wednesday, Menendez outlined a framework that would create a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants and ensure family unification. “We must keep families together. Spouses should not be separated from each other or from their children,” he said.

Rubio has no problem with that. “I am committed to continuing a family-based system of immigration. I think that’s important. I think that’s a marker for success. My parents came here in 1956,” he said. Rubio is thus embracing the broad vision articulated by people such as Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., who said that the nation’s immigration policy should contain both family- and employment-based components.

Expect Rubio to repeat his own story repeat endlessly. The retelling will help Republicans who grew up in a whiter culture envision how they can be conservatives and also embrace a legal immigration system.

In Rubio's Latino-heavy Florida community, everyone came from somewhere else. He knows people who are undocumented. Some of them overstayed visas. Some of them were lured by fraudsters posing as immigration experts who shepherded them into the United States and then abandoned them. Some came for a job because their family was starving and now they are stuck. “I know people who are in this circumstance. I know people who love people who are in this circumstance,” he said.

Perhaps most important, Rubio wants Republicans to speak in a nicer way about immigration. Terms like “deportation” or “self-deportation” are not helpful to the party’s broader message of fiscal conservatism. “It’s really hard to get people to listen to you on economic growth, on tax rates, on health care if you want to deport their grandmother,” he said.

Rubio is not the only Republican urging his party to broaden its message. Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal told the Republican Governors Association that the GOP should stop “dividing voters.” Minority voters were clearly turned off by GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney’s comments to donors that he didn’t need to appeal to 47 percent of the electorate and his recent statements that Obama won a second term because he promised “gifts” to different constituencies, including Latinos.

SOURCE

Mexico's own immigration debate

By Ruben Navarrette

If you think the debate over immigration from Mexico into the United States is complicated, just take a trip south of the border and look at it from that side.

Complicated isn't the half of it. The immigration debate is also dishonest and hypocritical and filled with people who would rather pursue their own interests than solve the problem. And it all revolves around a broken system that stays broken because important and powerful interests want it that way.

This is true in both countries. Mexico is just as reluctant as the United States to confront the larger issue of migration — both of its own people north to the United States and along its own southern border, where Central and South Americans want to get into a country that many natives are desperate to flee.

Nor does the Mexican elite want to swallow its pride and admit that the real engine behind the Mexican economy isn't people like them but Mexicans who don't even live in Mexico anymore — immigrant workers in the United States.

In Mexico City, politicians, journalists and intellectuals are eager to avoid the issue altogether. They point out that migration to the United States from Mexico has slowed to a trickle. With a U.S. economy that is sluggish and a Mexican one that is bouncing back, many would-be migrants find that going north isn't worth the trouble.

The part about the trickle is true enough. Take it from Princeton professor Douglas S. Massey, an expert on Mexico, whose research shows that net migration between the two countries has fallen to its lowest level since the 1950s. Or take it from the Pew Hispanic Center, which found that the illegal immigrant population in the United States is shrinking and that fewer illegal immigrants are arriving than in previous years.

But things change, and migration is unpredictable. When the U.S. economy improves, and if the Mexican one falters, the flow of illegal immigrants is likely to increase. Besides, for many young men in Mexico, going north is a rite of passage. Grandpa did it. Dad did it. And they want to do it.

Mexico is a permanent fixture of the immigration debate in the United States, whether Americans like it or not. It is no secret that this country is responsible for most of the migration into the United States — both legal and illegal. By some estimates, Mexicans account for as many as six out of 10 illegal immigrants in the United States.

Better make that, partly responsible. It's also well-known that Mexico has a co-conspirator: U.S. employers. These folks often prefer to hire Mexican laborers over American counterparts. And not because the foreigners work for lower wages but because they tend to have more of a work ethic and less sense of entitlement.

The way that many Americans see it, Mexico gave up the right to comment on how the United States treats immigrants when it failed to provide opportunities for its own people so they had to look elsewhere.

Not that the Mexican people, or their leaders, are likely to keep quiet. When the immigration debate starts up again in Congress, as is likely to happen in the next few months, we can expect Mexicans to put in their two cents.

With a full 5 percent of its population living north of the Rio Grande, and countless Mexican families feeling the strain that comes from having parents separated from their children, Mexico can't afford not to defend the expatriates. The catch? If it comes off as too aggressive, its advocacy could backfire — and hurt the very people it wants to help by hardening the views of Americans.

For much of the 20th century, when it came to migration, Mexico had a good thing. It got rid of millions of people that its economy didn't have room for, and then those people went on to send home remittances that today total more than $20 billion.

Now it's time for Mexico to develop a 21st-century approach. This includes acknowledging the enormous contribution that Mexicans living abroad make to the motherland, and working diligently to provide them better services through Mexican consulates across the United States.

But it also involves not lecturing a neighbor about how to treat people that you've expelled.

SOURCE

Friday, November 16, 2012

Reasons Amnesty Would Be Political Suicide For The Republican Party

John Hawkins

Of all the misguided, corrupt and deranged ideas floating around inside the D.C. bubble, perhaps the single worst one is giving illegal aliens amnesty as part of some sort of attempt to capture the Hispanic vote. If the GOP were to pursue a policy that primarily benefits corrupt business owners, the government of Mexico, and Democrats at the expense of our country and our own base, we'd truly deserve the "Stupid Party" moniker that has so often been hung around our neck. This policy wouldn't be a calculated risk or even a longshot; it would be a game of Russian Roulette with a bullet in every chamber.

1) We'd be bringing in a huge influx of Democratic voters. Roughly 70% of Hispanic Americans already vote for the Democrats and you have to expect that the Democrats would capture an even larger percentage of illegal aliens. Keep in mind that for the most part, illegals are poorly educated, have minimal English skills, come from socialistic countries and make a living here doing low end, poorly paid manual labor. The GOP would be lucky to capture 20% of that block of voters.

Now, let's do a little rough math. We don't know exactly how many illegal aliens are in the country, but 10 million seems like a nice conservative estimate. If the Democrats did actually capture 80% of those voters, it would lead to a net gain of 6 million potential new votes for the Democrats. Meanwhile, if only 407,000 votes had flipped from Obama to Romney in Florida (73,858), Ohio (103,481), Virginia (115,910) and Colorado (113,099), Mitt would have won and Chris Matthews would still be on a depression-related leave of absence. In other words, this is like coming up just short in a 100 yard dash and deciding to “fix” the problem by starting 25 yards farther back in the next race.

2) There would be a tremendous backlash from Republican voters. The GOP pushed for amnesty in George W. Bush's second term and it was hit with a political buzzsaw the size of the Hoover Dam. What makes anyone think it would be any different this time?

Personally, I'm willing to pledge my support to ANY viable primary challenger who takes on a Republican in Congress who votes for an amnesty bill. Put another way, even if it were Jim DeMint, Marco Rubio, Rand Paul or Paul Ryan, if you're for amnesty and have someone who can conceivably beat you in a primary, I'm for your opponent. There's no other choice because this policy is like playing a game of chicken with an oncoming train; so stopping amnesty is priority one and if it can't be done, then we should at least send as many of the politicians responsible to the political graveyard as possible.

3) It would be terrible policy for the country. At a time when the unemployment rate is sky high and the country is running a trillion dollar deficit, how much sense does it make to bring in 10 million new citizens who'll be a huge net drain on the country? We're not talking about bringing in ten million engineers, scientists, computer programmers and entrepreneurs to expand the tax base.

To the contrary, we're talking about offering the gift of American citizenship to 10 million, largely uneducated manual laborers with minimal English skills, most of whom would draw tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars more in government benefits than they pay out over the course of their lifetimes. You MIGHT be able to make a case that we need a guest worker program to handle some of these low skill jobs, although even that would be difficult when so many Americans are out of work, but it's impossible to make any sort of coherent argument that 10 million brand spanking new poor Americans are going to do anything other than hurt the country at a time when we're already running a trillion dollar plus deficit every year.

4) Amnesty distracts us from the voter outreach we really need to be doing. As a party, the GOP does almost no Hispanic outreach. Just to give you an idea of how bad it is, in 2009 I found out that the Democrats had 20 senators scheduled to attend the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce’s 19th Annual Legislative Conference while the Republicans had none. After raising holy hell about that on Right Wing News, senators like Orrin Hatch and Lamar Alexander suddenly agreed to be on the roster. Conservatives shouldn't need to publicly shame the Republican Party into showing up at the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

Additionally, while I don't think the Republican National Committee could have possibly made a better selection for its first national Director of Hispanic Outreach than my friend Bettina Inclan, why did we have to wait until the last election cycle for it to happen? It's not as if we just realized that we had a problem with Hispanic voters in 2011.

Although I'm constantly beating the drum to get more donors to help out the conservative new media, our #1 financial priority as a party should be minority outreach. We need our own National Council of La Raza and our own MEChA. We need more Hispanic blogs, more Hispanic talk radio and Hispanic conservatives who can take our message to places where it isn't getting a fair hearing today. We need Hispanic conservatives calling out the Democrats for their disgusting, patronizing and racist comments about Hispanics and we need to have their voices amplified by the big websites and talk radio hosts out there.

Now, will this take money, time and effort? Yes. Will everybody like this kind of change? No. Will it fix everything in one or two election cycles? No. But, is this exactly the kind of hard work we need to start doing year in and year out to level the playing field with Hispanic Americans? Yes, it is. The more time we spend focusing on a gimmicky, sure-to-fail Hail Mary like amnesty, the less time we'll spend making the changes that can bring Hispanic Americans home to where they belong, in the conservative movement.

5) Why does anyone think amnesty would allow the GOP to capture the current Hispanic vote? There is absolutely no reason whatsoever to assume that the GOP would be able to capture the Hispanic vote if we pass an amnesty. None. Zero. Zilch. If that's all it takes, well, keep in mind that Reagan signed on to a "one time" comprehensive illegal immigration plan while he was in office. So, if it's all about amnesty, why aren't Hispanics already voting Republican? By that same logic, why aren't all black Americans voting for the Republican Party today since, percentage wise, more Republicans voted for the 1964 Civil Rights Act than Democrats?

Here's a hint: The Democrats are beating us with Hispanics by around 70/30, blacks 90/10, Jews 70/30, Muslims 80/20 and Asians 75/25. They're not doing that by signing on to major legislation; they're doing it with identity politics. Incidentally, nothing would change if we signed on to an amnesty because Republicans will never be able to hand out more free goodies than the Democrats. If we offer a legal status short of citizenship, the Democrats will offer citizenship and say we hate Hispanics because we won't do it. If we offer citizenship in 10 years, they'll offer it in five and say we're dragging our feet because we hate Hispanics. If we offered amnesty for every illegal tomorrow, Democrats would ask for a new amnesty every year for anyone who sneaks across the border and they'd say that we hate Hispanics if we disagree.

Then, over the long haul, the percentages for Hispanic voters wouldn't change much at all because as we've seen, the tactics the Democrats are using have been proven to work again and again. The Democrats understand that, so why don't we get it? If you're actually naive enough to believe that amnesty will bring Hispanics over to the GOP, then ask yourself a simple question: Do you really think the Democrats would strongly support a policy that’s going to cost them millions of votes?

SOURCE

Immigration to Germany up

The number of Greeks relocating to Germany has shot up by nearly 80 per cent during the first half of the year, as workers from crisis-hit southern European states seek refuge in Europe’s biggest economy, data released yesterday showed.

The German statistics office said 501,000 foreigners had moved to the country between January and June 2012 — a rise of 15 per cent compared with the same period last year.

Germany’s economy has slowed in recent months, but economists expect the nation to avoid the kind of recessions currently gripping large parts of the 17-member euro zone.

The latest figures show a sharp rise in migrants from countries at the centre of the long-running debt crisis, with the numbers from Greece increasing by 78 per cent and by 53 per cent rise from both Portugal and Spain.

It follows a 20 per cent gain in total immigration for the whole of last year. The statistics office said the largest number of immigrants — 306,000 — arriving in Germany were from the European Union.

The nation’s net migration — the difference between arrivals and departures — leapt by 35 per cent to 182,000 in the first half of the year, the statistics office said.

SOURCE

November 15, 2012

America must ’seize the moment’ on immigration, Obama says

But he's already got the Hispanics in his pocket so he won't spend any political capital on it

President Barack Obama says America must ‘‘seize the moment’’ to seek an overhaul of the immigration system and he expects that work to start soon after his inauguration for a second term.

In his first news conference after winning re-election, Obama says conversations are already taking place among his staff and members of Congress.

Obama said it was his ‘‘expectation’’ that a comprehensive immigration reform bill would be introduced ‘‘very soon after my inauguration.’’

His support among Hispanics was one of his keys to victory over Republican rival Mitt Romney, who staked out conservative positions on immigration changes during the GOP primaries. Obama failed to make progress on comprehensive immigration changes during his first term but said he planned to after his inauguration.

The White House is already engaged in conversations with Capitol Hill.

Obama said the legislation should make permanent the administrative changes he made earlier this year that allow some young illegal immigrants to remain in the country legally. He said that the overall bill should include a ‘‘pathway to legal status’’ for the millions of immigrants who are in the US illegally but and haven’t committed crimes unrelated to immigration.

Obama urged lawmakers to codify his decision earlier this year to stop deporting young illegal immigrants brought here by their parents.

He said the country needs to build on momentum from the last week’s election.

SOURCE

New Zealand criminal gets "asylum" in Australia

There's an invitation to the crooks of the world!

A FORMER New Zealand bikie, given refugee status in Australia after seeking asylum from fellow criminals, has become the centre of a new political row in Canberra.

A tribunal decided that the 36-year-old Kiwi, who was in a witness protection scheme before flying to Australia in 2005, faced a threat of significant harm in his home country.

News Limited reports that Australian Immigration Minister Chris Bowen appealed the ruling in the Federal Court. But the court cleared the man to stay because of the government's own protection visa rules.

Opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said the Labor government's new asylum laws had allowed a convicted criminal from New Zealand to gain asylum from "fellow crims and bikies back in New Zealand who want to settle some scores.

"What's next? An 'underbelly visa'? This absurd farce is just another mess of Labor's own making," Mr Morrison said.

News Limited says the man was warned when he arrived in Australia that if he committed one offence on his temporary visa he could be removed.

However, he went on to drink and drive, commit forgery, and breaching his bail conditions. He has also been charged with weapons and drugs offences, and receiving stolen property.

SOURCE

Wednesday, November 14, 2012

LET’S NOT MAKE AN IMMIGRATION DEAL

Our friend Ed Morrissey adds his voice to those urging Republicans to “cut a deal on immigration.” He makes both a policy argument and a political one. Ed’s policy argument is that the nation shouldn’t go four more years without reforming its broken immigration system:

[T]he issue of border security has been left in limbo for more than 11 years after 9/11, and more than seven years after the 9/11 Commission rightly demanded better security on both borders, and the broken visa program that offers no follow-up on expired entries. If we continue to punt rather than compromise, we will be left waiting for at least four more years to get any kind of solution.

By focusing first on policy, Ed adds to the debate, which, in conservative circles, has focused almost solely on the politics of immigration reform. However, I doubt that improving border security in relation to terrorists requires Republicans to buy Chuck Schumer’s immigration reform agenda, including a path to citizenship for millions of illegal aliens (and future Democratic voters).

The Democrats cannot risk a terrorist attack that is traced back to a lapse in border security on their watch. Such an attack might well derail President Obama’s second term and adversely affect his legacy. Obama, therefore, is unlikely to tolerate a heightened risk of an attack caused by poor border security.

Accordingly, if the current system is so flawed as to create an undue national security risk, Republicans hold a winning hand. The key for them is to flag this issue big-time by holding hearings in the House and, if necessary, by passing a House bill fixing just this aspect of the immigration system.

Right now, Democrats are convinced that the Republicans will cave on immigration reform, and with good reason. Indeed, they have long understood that strong elements within the Republican Party want to cave; this was clear during the Bush administration’s attempt at immigration reform. If Republicans can demonstrate that they won’t cave, Democrats will be unlikely to accept a heightened risk of a terrorist attack just to prove a point.

As to the political dimension, Ed argues:

[C]ontinued obstruction means that immigration reform will continue to hang around the GOP’s neck like an albatross. Hard-liners argue that a Republican compromise won’t convince Latinos to shift to the Republican Party, and they’re correct in the short run. However, it’s difficult to make the kind of free-market and family values pitches that might make some serious inroads with Latino voters when Republican candidates and activists talk about deportations — self-initiated or otherwise — of family, friends, and others within their communities. That conversation has lasted far too long, and it has caused significant damage.

But Republicans don’t need to talk about deportation. There are middle ground positions between deporting illegal immigrants and providing them with a path to citizenship. To be sure, the Democrats won’t accept anything short of the citizenship path. Thus, meaningful compromise is impossible.

Under these circumstances, Democrats will continue to have a significant upper hand in the quest for the Hispanic vote. But they will have one anyway, even if Republicans capitulate on citizenship.

However, by proposing a middle ground position, Republicans won’t be talking about deportations. If, as Ed says, it is this talk that’s standing in the way of a greater Hispanic embrace of Republican “free-market and family value pitches,” the problem can be solved without capitulating to the Democrats, as Republican leaders now seem quite inclined to do.

JOHN adds: I think the immigration system should be reformed in a number of ways, so that it will better serve the interests of the United States. We should be encouraging and promoting the immigration of skilled workers from other countries, and we should not be accepting, let alone encouraging, immigration of unskilled workers, with only rare exceptions. The forgotten man in this story is the American citizen who does unskilled and semi-skilled work, and whose wages have been beaten down for many years by competition from unskilled immigrants, especially illegals. Republicans should be on the side of those unskilled and semi-skilled Americans, about whose welfare the Democrats hypocritically pretend to be concerned, not on the side of the Chamber of Commerce types who want cheap labor, and least of all on the side of non-American citizens who came here illegally.

Consistent with that approach, we should be enforcing our existing laws to protect American citizens against inherently unfair competition from illegals. It would be perverse, I think, to facilitate such competition by granting citizenship or even amnesty to existing illegals.

Where, exactly, does the clamor for “comprehensive immigration reform” come from? I don’t see any existing problems that would be solved, as a matter of policy, by “comprehensive immigration reform,” as opposed to more effective law enforcement, e.g. at the borders. The real motivation on both sides seems to be political: Democrats want to add millions of loyal Democratic voters, and Republicans are afraid that opposing “comprehensive reform” will cause them to lose votes with Mexican-Americans and others who are already citizens. Both sides cannot be right in their political calculations, and when it comes to political calculation, it is generally a good bet that the Democrats are the ones who have it figured out. In my opinion, the idea that the illegals who would become voters by virtue of “comprehensive reform” are Republicans in training is delusional.

So, yes, Republicans should propose immigration reforms: 1) make it easy for skilled workers to come here from every corner of the world; 2) make it difficult or impossible for unskilled workers to come here legally; and 3) tighten up border security and law enforcement. These policies will help lower-income Americans more than just about anything the federal government can do. There will still be a considerable number of illegals here for the foreseeable future, but so what? There is no need to talk about deportation, or anything else.

SOURCE

Federal judge revisits SC immigration law

Attorneys argued Tuesday over how long motorists may be detained on the roadside while police check their immigration status under South Carolina's new law.

The answer seems to be that while 38 minutes may be reasonable, 90 minutes violates 4th Amendment protections against unreasonable search and seizures.

The argument came during a hearing before U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel, who is revisiting an injunction he issued a year ago blocking most of the state's tough immigration law from taking effect.

Since then, the U.S. Supreme Court has tossed out most of the Arizona law on which South Carolina's statute was modeled. Included in both laws were provisions making it a state crime not to carry immigration papers and for illegal immigrants to transport or house themselves.

But the high court let stand an aspect of the Arizona law allowing police to check the immigration status of those they pull over for another violation if they are suspected of being in the country illegally. South Carolina's law has a similar provision.

Andre Segura, an attorney representing the American Civil Liberties Union, asked the judge to keep the injunction against that provision in effect, saying it's not at all clear how South Carolina would apply it.

"I think there needs to be a line drawn," he said.

Gergel asked state Assistant Deputy Attorney General Emory Smith how long a motorist could be detained while his immigration status is checked without violating constitutional protections. He noted the U.S. Supreme Court has indicated that 90 minutes is too long.

Smith responded that, in a case heard by the federal 4th Circuit Court of Appeals, the circuit that includes South Carolina, 38 minutes was found to be reasonable. He said the amount of time would depend on the circumstances but "we certainly don't dispute what the Supreme Court said."

"I'm very concerned if the attorney general gives an opinion that officers can detain people until their status is verified," Gergel said, adding that local law enforcement looks to such opinions for guidance in how they should enforce the law.

Gergel, who said he would issue a ruling in a few days, said the law was clearly crafted because state lawmakers didn't think the federal government was being aggressive enough in enforcing immigration laws.

"Arizona is a resounding confirmation of the role of the federal government in immigration," he said, noting, however, that the states did get something. "They get the right to make an inquiry" about someone's immigration status, he said.

Gergel said South Carolina has tried to go its own way before when it didn't like what the federal government was doing.

He quoted Charlestonian James L. Petigru who famously quipped when South Carolina seceded from the Union in 1860 that the state was "too small to be a republic and too large to be an insane asylum."

"We went down that road before," he said. "It didn't work out as well as we had planned."

SOURCE

Tuesday, November 13, 2012

Britain powerless to stop tens of thousands of Bulgarians and Romanians moving to UK next year

Britain is powerless to stop tens of thousands of Eastern European immigrants from coming to live in Britain from next year, Theresa May has admitted.

Five year old quotas limiting the number of people from Bulgaria and Romania who can move to live in Britain are due to expire in just over 12 months' time.

This will give 29 million Bulgarians and Romanians the right to live and work unrestricted in Britain in 2014 under European "freedom of movement" rules.

In an interview on BBC1, the Home Secretary said Britain would not be able to extend the so-called "transitional arrangements" to limit the expected influx.

Mrs May hinted that Britain might try to deny them benefits and access to the National Health Service to put them off from coming.

She told the Andrew Marr programme: "There are no further transitional controls that we can put on - the transitional controls end in December 2013.

"But that's where the importance of looking at some of the issues about what it is that is attracting people to come here, in terms of things like our benefits system and access to the health service, is so important."

The sudden influx could mean that the Coalition struggles to hit its target of cutting net migration - the difference between the numbers arriving and leaving - to tens of thousands by the next general election, expected in 2015.

Mrs May added that as part of a general review of free movement across the UK she will be looking at the attractions of why Romanians and Bulgarians wanted to settle in the UK.

This could lead to Bulgarians and Romanians being denied benefits or use of the health service if they came to live in the UK. However any attempt to deny benefits to European Union citizens in Britain will almost certainly be open to legal challenge in the courts.

She said: "I will be looking at what we call the pull factors, what is it that attracts people sometimes to come over here to the United Kingdom, so looking at issues about benefits, and access to the health service, and things like that.

"And then we're doing a wider piece of work across matters relating to Europe more generally but including free movement about that balance of powers between us and the EU."

The citizens of Romania and Bulgaria currently have restricted rights to come to Britain since they joined the European Union in 2007, but those limits end on 31 December 2013, opening the way for them to move freely.

Forecasters have said the removal of the restrictions could lead to a significant number of new arrivals, in the same way as when Poland and other Eastern European countries gained the same rights in 2004, with the scale likely to be increased by the economic crisis gripping the rest of Europe.

The Home Office has made no official predictions of how many more Bulgarians and Romanians will seek to enter Britain when the current limitations end, and argues that most who want to come have probably arrived already, finding work on the black market if they cannot work legally.

However, critics believe that the Government's reluctance to issue predictions is because it grossly underestimated the numbers that came in the previous wave of migration in 2004, when citizens from eight new eastern European EU members, including Poland, were given full access to the UK job market.

SOURCE

Recent posts at CIS below

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

Multimedia

1. Op-ed: Immigration views didn't cost Romney: Pro-enforcement Democrats and Republicans in Congress need to stay focused on jobs

2. Op-ed: Now What? Immigration Edition

3. Video: Jessica Vaughan Discusses Voter Fraud FOX News Boston

4. Video: Mark Krikorian discusses the abuse of executive power

Publication

5. The Revolving Door Deportations of Criminal Illegal Immigrants

Blogs

6. Amnesty and Electoral Outcomes

7. Malpractice by Dr. K

8. Amnesty Is the Best Revenge, or the Empire Strikes Back

9. Shape the Electorate

10. ICE and DoL Correct Huge H-1B Errors Made by USCIS and DoL

11. Adding Sex to Immigration/Marriage Fraud Does Not Negate the Crime

12. Hispanics Were Democrats Long Before Illegal Immigration Became an Issue

13. How the Elections Will Affect the Immigration Subcommittees

14. Fill In the Numbers Later

15. Vote for Gridlock?

16. Today's First Election Result: Candidate Indirectly Linked to Abramoff Loses

Monday, November 12, 2012

Bipartisan Immigration Reform Proposed With Pathway to Citizenship

I am amazed that Republicans fall for the story that it is their oppopsition to illegal immigration that loses them Hispanic votes. It is far more likely that it is Hispanic poverty that loses them votes. Democrats make great play for the poor. Softening the immigration stance would likely have no effect on vote at all. Not all Hispanics are poor but not all Hispanics vote Democrat either -- JR

The re-election of President Obama has brought the issue of immigration to the forefront once again.

With both sides now open to the idea of comprehensive immigration reform, two senators from opposing sides of the aisle are looking to make such changes, including a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants now in the United States.

Democrat Chuck Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsay Graham of South Carolina, who each promoted similar proposals on separate Sunday news shows, said that no path to citizenship would be available until the country's borders were secure.

Only then could those in the U.S. without authorization "come out of the shadows, get biometrically identified, start paying taxes, pay a fine for the law the broke," Graham said on CBS' "Face the Nation."

''They can't stay unless they learn our language, and they have to get in the back of line before they become citizens. They can't cut in front of the line regarding people who are doing it right and it can take over a decade to get their green card."

Schumer told NBC's "Meet the Press" that he and Graham have resumed talks on immigration policy that broke off two years ago and "have put together a comprehensive detailed blue print on immigration reform" that has "the real potential for bipartisan support based on the theory that most Americans are for legal immigration, but very much against illegal immigration."

Graham, however, made no mention of working with the chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, refugees and border security.

Immigration policy, largely ignored during President Barack Obama's first four years in office, has re-emerged as a major issue as Republicans seek ways to rebound from their election performance. More than 70 percent of Hispanic voters supported Obama, who has been more open than Republicans to comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws.

Three days after Tuesday's election, House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, said it was time to address immigration policy. He urged Obama to take the lead in coming up with a plan that would look at both improved enforcement of immigration law and the future of the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally. Boehner, however, did not commit to the citizenship issue.

Graham said that the "tone and rhetoric" Republicans used in the immigration debate of 2006 and 2007 "has built a wall between the Republican Party and Hispanic community," causing Hispanic support to dwindle from 44 percent in 2004 to 27 percent in 2012.

"This is an odd formula for party to adopt, the fastest growing demographic in the country, and we're losing votes every election. It's one thing to shoot yourself in the foot, just don't reload the gun. I intend not to reload this gun when it comes to Hispanics. I intend to tear this wall down and pass an immigration reform bill that's an American solution to an American problem," he said.

Both senators said the overhaul would include developing a secure document to assure employers they're hiring people authorized to work in the country, and allowing legal immigration for needed workers at all skill levels. The path to citizenship would require immigrants to learn English, go to the back of the citizenship line, have a job and not commit crimes.

Graham said the overhaul would have to be done in such a way that "we don't have a third wave of illegal immigration 20 years from now. That's what Americans want. They want more legal immigration and they want to fix illegal immigration once and for all."

In exit polls on Tuesday, The Associated Press found 65 percent favored offering most undocumented immigrants workers in the United States a chance to apply for legal status, more than double the number who said most should be deported. Even among Republicans, the party associated with crackdowns on undocumented immigration, about half favored a path toward staying in the U.S.

SOURCE

Boehner Says Obama Should Take the Lead on Immigration

House Speaker John Boehner on Friday said it was time to address immigration policy and urged President Barack Obama to take the lead in coming up with a plan that would look at both improved enforcement of immigration law and the future of the estimated 11 million people living in the country illegally.

Immigration policy, largely ignored during Obama's first four years in office, has re-emerged as a key issue as Republicans seek ways to rebound from the beating they got from Hispanic voters during the presidential election. More than 70 percent of Hispanic voters supported Obama, who has been more open than Republicans to comprehensive overhaul of immigration laws.

"It's just time to get the job done," Boehner said at a news conference. He said lawmakers from both parties want to resolve the issue. "But again, on an issue this big, the president has to lead."

But Boehner would not commit to supporting legislation that might open a pathway to citizenship - an idea that most Republicans have strongly opposed - for those living in the country illegally.

"I'm not talking about a 3,000-page bill," he said. "What I'm talking about is a common-sense, step-by-step approach to secure our borders, allow us to enforce the laws and fix a broken immigration system."

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said after the election that the vote showed that Democrats are the party of diversity, and he plans to bring up an immigration reform bill next year. He said Republicans would block such legislation at their own "peril."

Boehner, in an earlier interview with ABC, appeared to open the way for discussion on immigration by saying that a comprehensive approach is long overdue, and "I'm confident that the president, myself, others can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all."

That won praise from Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., head of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, who called Boehner's recognition of the urgent need for immigration reform a "breakthrough."

But Rep. John Fleming, R-La., also expressed concern that Boehner was "getting ahead of House Republicans when he commits to getting a 'comprehensive approach' to immigration."

"There's been zero discussion of this issue within the conference, and I'm urging the speaker to talk with House Republicans before making pledges on the national news," Fleming said.

Hispanics proved to be a critical source of support for Obama, and Republicans have since cited their failure to attract Hispanic voters as one reason for Obama's victory. The two candidates offered a stark contrast during the campaign.

Obama has been supportive to immigration law overhaul and in June announced that people brought here illegally as children who had graduated high school or served in the military would not be deported and would be granted work permits. GOP candidate Mitt Romney, meanwhile, supported more hardline policies and at one point called for "self-deportation" to shrink the number of people in the country illegally.

SOURCE

Sunday, November 11, 2012

Republicans may drop opposition to granting illegal immigrants residency

Republican leaders and prominent Right-wingers are abandoning their long-standing opposition to granting 11 million illegal immigrants the right to stay in the United States after Barack Obama's overwhelming victory among Hispanic voters in last week's election.

Remarks by John Boehner, the Speaker of the House, which appeared to break a major conservative taboo on immigration, set up a fierce debate within party rank and file, which is still reeling from the president's re-election last Tuesday.

Without giving specifics, Mr Boehner said that "a comprehensive approach is long overdue". He added: "What I'm talking about is a common-sense, step-by-step approach to secure our borders, allow us to enforce the laws and fix a broken immigration system. It's just time to get the job done."

John Fleming, a Republican congressman from Louisiana, expressed concern that Mr Boehner had not consulted colleagues before "making pledges on national news".

But Mr Boehner's comments raised hopes in Washington that one of the most divisive issues in the country could be resolved after years of bitter debate.

Senator Charles Schumer, the Democratic chairman of a Senate subcommittee on immigration and border security, called Mr Boehner's comments a "breakthrough".

In a sign that grassroots opposition to immigration reform may now change Sean Hannity, an influential conservative media commentator, also said that his views on the subject had "evolved".

Mr Hannity, a Fox News and talk radio host with the second highest national ratings after Rush Limbaugh, said he no longer believed that Hispanics who came to the US without paperwork should be kicked out if they are working, raising families and not committing crimes.

Instead, he said, they should be offered "a pathway to citizenship", a phrase regarded on the Right as a dirty word and a euphemism for an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

An attempt by Mr Obama to "fix our immigration system" - promised in his victory speech last week after he won 71 per cent of the Hispanic vote - is likely to be the biggest social issue he tackles in his second term.

The president's immediate task however is to steer the country clear of the so-called fiscal cliff that would automatically trigger $607 billion of cuts and tax increases on January 1 if he and Congress cannot agree on longer term solutions for controlling the spiralling deficit and debt.

Mr Boehner has hinted that he is also ready to compromise on deficit control, but, given that his party kept its hold on the House of Representatives and remains implacably opposed to tax rate increases, his room for manoeuvre is limited.

Numerous conservatives have said the party now requires an extended period of self-examination, especially about how to attract women and minorities.

Al Cardenas, the head of the American Conservative Union, summed up fears that the party was alienating Hispanics, the fastest-growing ethnic group, as well as other minorities.

"Our party needs to realise that it's too old and too white and too male, and it needs to figure out how to catch up with the demographics of the country before it's too late," he said.

In a sign of the enduring antagonism in some conservative quarters towards the president, a coal mine owner quickly blamed the president's environmental protection policies for 156 redundancies announced the day after the vote.

Robert Murray, the chairman and chief executive of Murray Energy Corp, who made regular media appearances denouncing Mr Obama before the election, read a prayer to workers as he attributed their job losses to the president's "war on coal".

Meanwhile, Freedom Works, which supports Tea Party groups, issued a list of companies it said would have to shed workers because of costs and new taxes it associated with the forthcoming implementation of the president's health reforms, commonly known as Obamacare.

SOURCE

Number of unprocessed immigration cases in Britain is same as population of Iceland: Border chiefs accused of 'camouflaging' the issue

Border chiefs were today accused of ‘camouflaging’ the true scale of an immigration backlog that was ‘spiralling out of control.’

The total number of immigration and asylum cases which have not been processed by the UK Border Agency now stands at more than 300,000 - the equivalent of a city the size of Sunderland - or the entire population of Iceland, the Home Affairs Committee said.

And it has also emerged that the UK Border Agency is set to grant an ‘amnesty’ to some 80,000 migrants as it struggles with a spiralling backlog of immigration cases.

Keith Vaz, the committee’s chairman, yesterday demanded bosses at UKBA ‘get a grip’ on the scale of the backlog - and accused them of trying to disguise the problems from the public.

Mr Vaz said: ‘Entering the world of the UKBA is like falling through the looking glass. ‘The closer we look the more backlogs we find, their existence obscured by opaque names such as the ‘migration refusal pool’ and the ‘controlled archive’. ‘UKBA must adopt a transparent and robust approach to tackling this problem instead of creating new ways of camouflaging backlogs. ‘They need to get a grip.’

Mr Vaz added: ‘There are now about the same number of cases awaiting resolution by UKBA as there are people living in Iceland. ‘The backlog is spiralling out of control.’

The UK Border Agency is set to write off around 80,000 cases where they have been unable to track missing migrants for more than six years. The cases are what remains from nearly half a million found abandoned in boxes at the Home Office in 2006 in a major scandal.

The controlled archive was created to hold what remains of Labour’s asylum backlog. It was intended to hold cases that had not been concluded, so they could be re-opened if the person was found. Since then UKBA officials have been tracking them down - but recently admitted they would abandon those they couldn’t find.

In September, Border Agency chief executive Rob Whiteman said it was ‘not in the best interests of taxpayers’ to carry on looking for them, and the cases would be closed. Around 80,000 are expected to be written off in the New Year.

The committee said they were ‘concerned’ that the closure of the 80,000 files would result in ‘a significant number of people being granted effective amnesty in the United Kingdom, irrespective of the merits of their case.’

At the end of June this year, the UK Border Agency had a total of 302,064 cases outstanding, today’s report shows. That includes 25,000 current asylum cases, 3,500 current immigration cases, and 95,000 archived cases. Worryingly, the numbers within the Migration Refusal Pool reached 174,057 - a rise of 24,057 in just three months. The pool is made up of legal migrants whose work or student visas have expired and who cannot be found.

The Border Agency has awarded a £30million contract to outsourcing firm Capita to help track them down. It began work at the end of October.

Also within the backlog are 3,954 foreign criminals who cannot be deported and have been released on bail by the courts.

Overall, the backlog grew by nine per cent in the three months to June this year.

Six years ago the asylum backlog scandal prompted then Home Secretary John Reid to brand the immigration system ‘not fit for purpose’.

Border officials claim that in many of the cases which remain the individuals will have left the country.

But the MPs said they were ‘not convinced that the agency’s limited checking regime will have picked up all of the applicants who remain in the country’.

‘For this reason we are concerned that the final checks made on these cases should be thorough and that they should not be rushed to meet an artificial deadline.’

Of the asylum archive cases that have been processed, fewer than one in ten have been removed. More than 180,000 have been given the right to stay in the country, while just 41,300 have been kicked out or left voluntarily.

Immigration Minister Mark Harper said: ‘This report raises some legitimate concerns but we are taking robust action and it is working.

‘Every day it gets harder to live illegally in the UK - we are tracking people down and taking action against them. We are restricting access to benefits, free healthcare and financial products, and businesses can be fined up to £10,000 for every illegal worker they employ.

‘We are winning more deportation cases in the courts, exceeding visa processing targets and have introduced interviews to test whether foreign students are genuine - all of which are praised in this report.’

SOURCE

Friday, November 9, 2012

Hispanic voters helped push Obama to victory

A historic turnout by Hispanic voters helped fuel President Obama’s triumph in Tuesday’s election, with exit polls showing a growing share of Latinos casting ballots in a contest that has set off Republican soul-searching and left many Hispanic voters with a greater sense of political voice.

National exit polls showed that 10 percent of the electorate was Hispanic, compared with 9 percent in 2008 and 8 percent in 2004. Those numbers take on more significance when combined with results: Across the nation, 71 percent of Latinos voted for Obama, compared with 27 percent who chose Mitt Romney.

Broad outreach efforts to Latinos helped re-elect President Obama by a 3-to-1 margin, making the he growing power of the Hispanic vote clear in crucial swing states.

“This is a defining moment for the Republican Party,” said GOP strategist Leslie Sanchez. “If Republicans don’t heed this warning, we are certainly in danger of becoming politically irrelevant at a national level.”

Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions, a nonpartisan polling and research firm, said that in Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, “Latino voters by themselves provided Obama with the margin of victory.” He also said the 2012 election shows that in key states — such as Ohio and Florida — a strong showing from Latinos and African Americans “in tandem” was a difference maker.

The Republican Party, he said, “will be doomed if they lose black and Latino votes by these same margins in the future.”

In many battleground states that were a key to winning the election, efforts to get Latinos registered and to the polls appear to have provided an edge for Obama.

The president himself was keenly aware of the importance of the Latino voting bloc before the election. “Should I win a second term,” Obama told the Des Moines Register last month, “a big reason I will win a second term is because the Republican nominee and the Republican Party have so alienated the fastest-growing demographic group in the country, the Latino community.”

The Hispanic vote undoubtedly helped Obama in Florida, where the Puerto Rican population in particular has boomed in recent years in the central part of the state, and where the president held a slight lead Wednesday as officials continued tallying votes.

Many of the new residents in places such as Osceola County — just south of Orlando — are Republicans who twice helped elect Jeb Bush as governor. But the area also went for Obama in 2008 and 2012. Perhaps most important, unlike many other Hispanic groups, Puerto Ricans are American citizens. They have no say in presidential elections back on the island, but in Florida, they are changing the electoral map.

“Here, we get to vote for president, and it matters. We have a voice,” chef Jesus Chevres, 53, said in his native Spanish on Wednesday, while preparing fried plantains and roast pork for the lunchtime crowd at the Broadway Restaurant in downtown Kissimmee.

The increase in Hispanic voting is a reflection of demographic changes, experts said, as non-
Hispanic whites account for a smaller share of the overall population. Exit polls showed 72 percent of voters were non-Hispanic whites, the lowest percentage since 1972.

More HERE

Politically correct bullies don't like ‘illegal immigrant'

Ruben Navarrette

There is a campaign under way to shame media companies into abandoning the term “illegal immigrant” and replacing it with kinder and gentler euphemisms such as “undocumented worker.”

The National Association of Hispanic Journalists — which I've been a member of for two decades and which has rarely stuck its neck out to defend Hispanic journalists, let alone immigrants — has even gone so far as to suggest that the phrase causes hate crimes.

The crusade against the “I-word” began in September when, at an online journalism conference, freelance journalist and activist Jose Antonio Vargas put media companies on notice. He said they would be monitored and when they used “illegal immigrant” — which he claims “dehumanizes” people — the infraction would be duly recorded.

Vargas, who was born in the Philippines and last year revealed his status as an illegal immigrant (he prefers “American without papers”), identified the Associated Press and the New York Times as “two main targets.” Both institutions have since defended the term and continue to use it.

Let's hear it for common sense. Media companies — and the journalists who work for them — need to stand up to these pressure tactics and continue to use the term. Here are some reasons why:

The wording is accurate. When you enter the United States without permission or overstay a visa, you break a law. Vargas notes that “being in a country without proper documents is a civil offense, not a criminal one.” True. But the word “illegal” simply means against the law.

The proposed change is, for the most part, about being politically correct. And this is not a good spot from which to practice journalism. My profession isn't about making folks comfortable. That's public relations.

The word police simply want to sanitize the debate so that immigration reformers don't get their hands dirty by condoning illegal activity. One way to sanitize is to minimize the offense. The idea is to advance the argument that illegal immigration isn't really a crime, just an example of desperate people chasing opportunity to survive.

Many of those concerns about “illegal” can be addressed if we agree not to use it as a noun (i.e., “the illegals”) and if we refrain from using the much more offensive term “illegal alien.”

The charge that the term “dehumanizes” people is ridiculous. It describes an action as much as it does a person. An illegal immigrant is someone who immigrates illegally.

This debate distracts from the real issues — the need for comprehensive immigration reform, walls of separation between immigration agents and local police amd an end to do-it-yourself state immigration laws.

The issue alienates supporters of comprehensive immigration reform and other right-minded people who think we should have a more fair, more honest, and more humane way of dealing with illegal immigrants but who also feel uneasy about scrubbing the language.

This is a squabble among elites. Ask an illegal immigrant if he cares what he's called or whether he is more preoccupied with his struggle to provide for his family, avoid deportation and ensure that his children get legalized, and you'll see that changing the language of the debate doesn't even register.

Finally, the crusade highlights the hypocrisy of liberal Democrats who like to think of themselves as progressives because they eschew a term such as “illegal” but then turn around and support a Democratic president who has racked up record numbers of deportations.

This discussion is a waste of time. It's also a reminder that those of us who support comprehensive immigration reform need to get our story straight.

We have long argued that illegal immigrants should have the opportunity, via earned legalization, to make amends for wrongdoing. Is the new argument that those immigrants needn't bother because they did nothing wrong?

SOURCE

Thursday, November 8, 2012

Arpaio wins reelection as Maricopa County's Sheriff

U.S. Illegal immigration number one enemy won reelection Tuesday. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio obtained the electorate’s preference and will commence a sixth term amid a trail of law suits and accusations of power abuse.

Accused of racial profiling and of targeting Latino’s in his enforcement of SB 1070, on election night, Arpaio offered an olive branch to this community.

"I'd like to get closer to the Latino community, if that could ever happen to try to explain what we do and get better relationships," Arpaio said to the press in Arizona. Although, he warned: "I'm going to keep doing what I'm doing."

Arpaio was challenged by Democrat Paul Penzone and independent Mike Stauffer. The two retired officers have accused the self-proclaimed “Toughest Sheriff in America,” of focusing in operations that brings him the focus of the media and of ignoring the law enforcement duties he was hired for.

“Our sheriff needs to be transparent, he needs to treat everyone with dignity and respect,” a defeated Penzone said, according to The Arizona Republic. “People in this community are going to be watching. They’re going to be holding him accountable.”

Latino organizations challenged Arpaio’s win Tuesday night, saying 400,000 provisional ballots haven’t been counted.

“There are almost half a million people whose votes haven’t been counted,” said Tomas Robles, deputy field director for Promise Arizona in Action.

Latinos with “Adios Arpaio” and “Joe’s Got To Go,” also claimed that voters faced issues at the polls, as waiting in long lines and being turned away because their names were not on the registered voters list. Many were also given provisional ballots, which could take at least a week to count.

SOURCE

Immigration and the British elite

It is asserted that immigration is vital to the economy—indeed, The Economist magazine recently claimed that the Cameron government was foolishly restricting immigration that would benefit the economy. It is difficult to understand such claims when immigration is still running at an extremely high level, against the background of a situation where the UK has no immigration controls at all on the 500m or so citizens of the EU, and a lax policy on “family unification” for many millions of people in Africa and Asia. I think we can interpret The Economist’s ramping of its anti-British agenda as just another example of an �lite group that sees itself as more enlightened than the British population by virtue of its support for cultural change, which is what The Economist would really like to see.

Take unskilled labour, for instance. We are drowning in it. There are many millions of unskilled people in this country living on social security. It may be that they don’t wish to take up employment, or that employers don’t wish to pay a living wage, or that employers don’t wish to take on the feckless long-term jobless—or, most probably, a combination of all these factors. But that does not mean that it is a sensible national policy to allow the millions on unemployment and “disability” benefits to remain out of work.

We don’t need any unskilled immigrants into the UK. I’m sure employers like the way that immigration helps to keep low-end wages down, but this is a case of privatising the gains of foolish policies like immigration and nationalising the costs: the benefits bill has to be paid for the millions who are maintained on social security, and immigration encourages crime and increases the expenditure associated with multiculturalism, costs that have to be borne by the public. From the point of view of a care home seeking people who will work for the minimum wage, the immigration of Filipinos may be a good idea. But from the point of view of the UK economy as a whole, it is not, and if the care home can’t entice people from the dole queues to work in care homes, they should raise the offered wage.

(The financing of long-term care is another, interesting topic: I do not support public provision, especially when the old person in receipt of care has expensive property assets, as this is purely done in order to prevent the sale of his property and allow his heirs to inherit the property, but this is another issue. In general, family members should meet the bill of their parents’ nursing care, or invite their parents into their homes and care for them themselves.)

Do we need mass immigration of graduates? I mean the sort of graduates with general university degrees that are not specifically geared to employment. We are also drowning in graduates, with around half of young people going to unversity and many graduates taking up work stacking shelves in supermarkets.

Consequently, there is no valid argument that such immigration should be welcomed either. There is a class of qualified workers, such as doctors and nurses, whose qualifications are more specific than a general university education, and where lacunae in the workforce may have be filled from abroad. If so, we should aim to find such workers in European economies, or from other states that are culturally similar to us.

However, once again, we need to ask why there are such lacunae in the workforce when so much money is spent on higher education. Maybe there are too many people studying for media studies degrees, and not enough people studying medicine. A correct educational policy would ensure that these workers with highly job-specific qualifications did not need to be hired from abroad either, and we should aim to rejig the higher education system in such a way as to eliminate the need for such immigrants within ten years.

This leaves us with only one category of employment that may genuinely need to be filled by immigrants: truly highly qualified staff of a kind that is hard to replicate or replace. I mean, for example, international footballers, or investment bankers, or CEOs of FTSE companies. This is a very high category of skilled personnel where the people cannot really be replaced by anyone else doing the same job. However, the numbers involved are tiny. You could require such immigrants to be given jobs earning £200,000 a year at a minimum (or, say, eight times the UK average wage on an ongoing basis). Our national policy should therefore be to prevent any immigration from people filling jobs earning less than £200,000 a year.

Although deceitful articles in The Economist claim that the UK needs immigrants, it only really needs the very final category of immigrants—and I would argue that even they should apply for five-yearly visas and should not be allowed to become naturalised citizens, being required to return home when their visas run out. This is, after all, the policy in countries like China.

Immigration has pushed up our benefits bill; added to the general population and required spending on schools and hospitals to cope with a growing population; added to crime and required greater spending on the police, the courts, prisons and insurance; added to business costs through anti-discrimination policies and their related tribunals; taken up our social housing and pushed up property prices for the native population; and created a cultural backdrop that is fractious and negative, where immigrants and their descendants constantly allege the British are maltreating them.

Isn’t it clear that immigration isn’t a policy designed to promote economic growth either? The House of Lords determined in a report (The Economic Impact of Immigration) that immigration did not promote economic growth (it had “little or no impact”—see page 24 of the report), and yet it is constantly asserted that this is the case, as the authorities try to pretend that a policy they favour for political and cultural reasons is really a necessity, for economic reasons.

It is rather disconcerting that the Establishment has the propaganda resources to assert these lies—if they wish to have these policies for political reasons, let them make their arguments in political terms—as most people are unsure of whether they are really true or not. I would close down The Economist magazine if I were in power, simply due to the rag’s constant mendacious propaganda in favour of an unfree, bureaucratically-dominated economy and society.

SOURCE

November 7, 2012

Feds delay review of Obama immigration program

Seventeen months have passed since the Department of Homeland Security announced it would create an internal civil rights review of the Obama administration's signature immigration enforcement program, but now department officials cannot say when, or if, they will complete it.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Director John Morton announced in June 2011 that his agency would create a statistical monitoring tool to ensure that law enforcement agencies were not using the Secure Communities program to engage in racial profiling. The program screens all people booked into local jails for federal immigration violations. Despite calls from a Homeland Security task force and outside groups to complete the review, officials are not sure when that will be possible.

"Certain data collection factors have created challenges, delaying the completion of this model," Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler said. He said they are working "diligently" to find an effective way to monitor for civil rights abuses.

People booked into jails have their fingerprints sent to the FBI to check their criminal background. Under the Secure Communities program, those fingerprints are then sent to Homeland Security to check for immigration violations. People who are flagged are then examined by ICE and could be deported.

The program, created in 2008 under President George W. Bush and embraced by the Obama administration, has expanded rapidly. It is now active in 97% of local law enforcement agencies with the goal of 100% participation by 2013.

Several reports have found considerable flaws in the program.

An October 2011 study by researchers at the University of California-Berkeley that examined a random sampling of people arrested under Secure Communities found that about 3,600 U.S. citizens had been erroneously arrested by ICE. The report also concluded that Hispanics were disproportionally targeted through Secure Communities -- 93% of people arrested were Hispanics, even though they make up 77% of the illegal immigrant population.

Another review in September 2011 by a Homeland Security advisory council raised similar concerns. Half of the 14-member review panel said the program was so flawed it should be suspended until it could be fixed.

"Task Force members believe that it makes little sense to expand a program that many community leaders and elected officials consider deeply flawed, especially as to its impact on community policing and civil rights," the report found.

Since then, officials in various jurisdictions in the U.S. have pushed back against the program. The California Legislature passed the TRUST Act, which would have limited the state's cooperation with Secure Communities, but Gov. Jerry Brown vetoed it Sept. 30.

"Here we are a year and a half after this review was begun and I had expected to see results by now," said Brittney Nystrom, director of policy and legal affairs for the National Immigration Forum, a Washington-based think tank. "This statistical oversight piece was the lynchpin of the assurances that (Homeland Security) was going to operate this program in a way that respected civil rights and civil liberties. So the fact that we haven't seen any results from that project concerns me."

SOURCE

Recent posts at CIS below

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

Media

1. Op-ed: Inviting criminals across the border: Obama’s toothless immigration enforcement
2. Speech: The Economic Case for Limiting Immigration

Publications

3. Who Got Jobs During the Obama Presidency?: Native and Immigrant Employment Growth, 2009 to 2012

4. Media Describes Illegal Aliens As “Undocumented Californians”

5. Language in the Immigration Debate Associated Press Pushes Back Against Illegal Alien Activists

Blogs

6. Agent Ivie Death Likely a Result of Confusion Surrounding Drug Smuggling; Another Agent Dead in Texas

7. Extreme Immigration Positions in the U.S. Island Territories

8. You Need a Professor to Write Something This Dumb

9. The Imperfect Market in Services Facilitating Illegal Immigration

10. Another Potential Government Eye on Our Borders, but Not the Type Americans Need

11. Hopeless – Often Pointless – Cases Clog Immigration Courts

12. Assimilation Too Scary for Some This Halloween

13. Digging for Statistical Nuggets in a Decade's Worth of Immigration Enforcement Data

14. A Continuing Problem for Restrictionists: The Missing Allies

15. Fool Me Twice, Shame on Me

16. Eternal Vigilance Is the Price of Border Security

17. Quazi Mohammad Rezwanul Ahsan Nafis: The Quasi-Student Terrorist

18. Migrant Advocate Cites Increasing Exodus from Central America to el Norte

19. Immigration and Driving the American Way

20. You Might Say that Immigration Marriage Fraud Runs in the Family

21. Rising Concern About Immigrants in Greece

Tuesday, November 6, 2012

Attempted illegal immigrants to Australia mount hunger strike over 'hell hole' camps on Nauru

TENSION is mounting among asylum seekers on Nauru, with hunger strikers protesting against "hell-hole" conditions that are set to get worse with four boats carrying 355 asylum seekers having been intercepted since Saturday.

Contracts for a new detention camp on Nauru will be awarded soon, and work is expected to commence soon afterwards, the Immigration Department says.

The 377 detainees on Nauru have been living in tents on the island, and have staged an increasingly impassioned protest, seeking to come to Australia to have their claims for asylum heard.

But there have been mixed reports about the hunger strikes engulfing the camp. The men - who have set up a Facebook page to take their plight to Australians - and refugee advocates say 300 people are now taking part in the hunger strike.

The detainees wrote: "In Modern Period nobody wanna like keep even domestic animal in a tent at 42 Celsius temperature for a months, but the Human being are still living in hell hole Nauru.

"The Asylum seekers in Nauru think once they have taken the risk of deep Indian ocean, now they will take the risk during hunger strikes, untill getting their rights till the death."

The hunger strike entered its fifth day on Monday.

Another man, an Iranian identified by fellow asylum seekers as Omid, was up to his 25th day of hunger strike, the group said.

But the Department of Immigration has consistently cast doubts on the men's accounts of the protest.

A department spokesman said: "[The] department knows at least 200 meals have been claimed at meal times, and large amounts of snack food throughout the day."

The department does not use the term "hunger strikes", but defines "voluntary starvation" as people missing three consecutive meals. It says food and water are provided to asylum seekers at all times. We know steps are being taken to make sure people who don't want to take part can eat," the spokesman said.

"We know there's been a degree of pressure from people who've been unwilling to take part in the protest."

He confirmed that a senior immigration officer had met with the detainees at the weekend, but said it was stressed to the group that "these sort of activities" would not alter their situation. One of the asylum seekers on Nauru told the Refugee Action Coalition that the official "did not have answers" for them, aside from the fact they would be processed according to Nauruan law, and Nauru would be responsible for resettling them.

The Immigration Department spokesman could not confirm this, but said the group was told it would be at least six months before their claims for asylum were processed, in accordance with Australian policy.

Amnesty International said the situation confirmed the need for an independent monitor on the island.

Opposition Leader Tony Abbott said a Coalition government would not rule out expanding the Nauru camps, even to more than 15,000 capacity - 50 per cent more than Nauru's population. "I would do what is necessary to stop the boats because if you can't stop the boats, you can't govern the country," he said.

Meanwhile, refugee advocate Ian Rintoul said two asylum seekers had been handed summonses to appear at a Nauru court on November 19, "presumably" over a protest in September that led to property damage. A spokeswoman for the Australian Federal Police said the AFP had no operational jurisdiction in Nauru, and the matter was a question for the Nauru Police Force.

SOURCE
http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/political-news/hunger-strikers-slam-hell-hole-camps-on-nauru-20121105-28u5q.html

Computerized screening at Australian airports catching more illegals

Civil liberty groups have cautiously praised Australia’s decision to use more computer models and fewer stereotypes to catch illegal travellers.

The comments from Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) and the Australian Privacy Foundation (APF) come on the back of Department of Immigration and Citizenship director of intent management and analytics Klaus Felsche’s announcement of a new computer system to screen all passengers arriving in Australia airports from March 24, 2013.

It comes after the successful trial of a system built on a shoestring budget in February 2011, which cost $9000 and used software bought from Harvey Norman.

Mr Felsche, who previously spent more than two decades in the Australian Army, said that where Customs previously relied on reading body language, movement patterns, profiling and mass interviews, it was now catching and deporting more people using fewer resources.

At Sydney Airport authorities were taking over 2500 passengers aside for additional checks every month, of whom 50 were found to have arrived on false pretences or documents. After the trial system was switched on. the number of interviews dropped to under 1300 but more than 60 passengers were caught per month.

“We were using business-based rules, which were manual to a large degree, and [officers] are very experienced, so they can tell things,” he said. “So they’d say, ‘we don’t like you because your shirt’s not tucked in, bottom button is not done up, you’re off for extra checking.’

“The computer can’t see whether someone in the arrivals hall is sweating but it sure as hell can predict that somebody should be. This means we’ve increased the refusal rate and reduced massively the inconvenience rate for people at the airports.”

Mr Felsche said the models were built by looking at the detailed records of people caught doing the wrong thing and sifting through huge amounts of personal information to find patterns.

“For example, it turned out if you had a Belgian passport, tried to get on board the plane to Perth or Brisbane on a variety of visas using Cathay Pacific flights, there was a 64 per cent chance match against imposters,” he said. “Things like ethnic or nationality profiling are misleading because everyone has weird people, so nationality isn’t a key indicator.

“The beauty with this analytics process is we are on solid ground because it’s all in the data, and I know the system works when we ping the first Brit or the first American or the first Swede because that means it is agnostic.”

EFA executive officer Jon Lawrence said the system could be a positive outcome for personal rights as long as individual privacy was protected.

“If this new system is able to give DIAC an objective evidence base that results in fewer innocent travellers being targeted for invasive questioning and searches, while enhancing their ability to focus on those travelling under false pretences, then to me it sounds like a positive, and in this case very good value-for-money use of technology,” he said.

APF vice-chairman David Vaile was also cautiously positive abut warned the rise of big data in government was being done without enough thought of the longer term impact on rights.

“The people behind Facebook and Google use the motto of ‘move fast and break things’ ... where you make a few things, make some mistakes and start again,” he said. “When you start using personal information and privacy you discover it’s not disposable.

“For example, other associations might come from having been flagged as a possibly suspicious person. If there’s still a record, the flag itself may feed into other big data programs run by other agencies because they’ve corroded the barriers that should exist between different programs.”

SOURCE

Monday, November 5, 2012

Immigration needs a hybrid fix

The article below is generally well reasoned but amounts to a call for amnesty. I would advocate vigorous enforcement of existing laws, a complete border-fence and a legal guestworker program as the remedy for the present mess. Guestworker licences should be for a limited time only -- say 5 years. A bill that called for a guestworker program plus a complete fence should get through Congress fairly readily. Israel has shown that border-fences can be effective

Neither President Obama, whose executive decision in June ended most deportations of children of illegal immigrants, nor Mitt Romney, who generally opposes amnesty for illegal immigrants, has focused on the economics of immigration. Though complex, the economic realities help to illuminate the potential path toward comprehensive immigration reform.

Economically speaking, legal and illegal immigrants could hardly be more different. Legal immigrants are more skilled than the typical American and divide roughly equally among Asians, Latinos and Europeans. Illegal immigrants are mostly low-skilled, earn low wages, and are mainly Latino.

Immigrants, both legal and illegal, do share one trait, however: They gain economically by migrating to America. Legal immigrants, on average, earn $16,000 more per year in the United States than they would in their home countries – a $300,000 lifetime bonus. The undocumented also earn more in the United States than back home, which is why they risk so much to come.

Some contend that, because of a common border, the prevalence of the Spanish language, or an unwillingness to assimilate, U.S.-born children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants have not enjoyed the spectacular generational advances achieved by descendants of earlier European immigrants. That is not true. Education advances of Latinos across generations have been larger than for Europeans.

The successes of previous immigrant generations, however, happened largely because America's public schools did an excellent job of educating both immigrant children and their native-born classmates. If the schools are not working as well for today's children of immigrants – and there are ample reasons for concern – then the successes of future generations are being imperiled.

What about benefits to native-born Americans? Immigrants, legal and illegal, bring benefits to the U.S. economy of more than $10 billion a year, not a small bit of change but small relative to the national economy. These benefits accrue because immigrants, legal and illegal, keep wages lower than they otherwise would be. If immigration does not depress wages, prices cannot fall, leaving no economic benefit. Although all Americans benefit on average, not everyone gains.

What about taxpayer effects? The effects of immigration on taxes are generally positive at the federal level, but they are negative at the state and local levels in places where there are lots of low-skilled immigrants. This is primarily because schooling is financed at the state and local levels.

When combining the taxpayer effects across all levels of government, there is still a positive overall taxpayer effect of legal immigrants whose incomes are high.

In contrast, the combined taxpayer effect is typically negative for illegal immigrants, largely due to school financing and their low incomes. According to a 1997 National Academy of Science study I led, native-born taxpayers in California paid $1,178 more in taxes than they received in benefits because immigrants received more in benefits than they paid in taxes.

These California numbers are surely higher today. Health care costs are not an important part of the equation, primarily because immigrants are healthier than their American-born counterparts.

Largely because of the different taxpayer effects, the economic argument favors high-skilled legal immigrants compared with low-skilled undocumented immigrants. Adherence to the principle that America is a nation of laws reinforces the argument in favor of legal immigrants.

The policy dilemma, however, is that we in America are in the midst of a muddle, with 12 million or more undocumented immigrants already here, many for some time. They are now our neighbors and friends, and, to be honest, we have been complicit in their staying.

Is there a way out of the dilemma? I think there is: a simultaneous combination of a pathway to citizenship for most undocumented immigrants already here and a serious commitment to enforce the law without ambiguity in the future so that any additional undocumented migrants must leave immediately. To unite as Americans, we must agree to both parts of this bargain at the beginning of a new American immigration policy.

SOURCE

Israel’s crackdown on illegal African migrants gets results, draws critics

Measures taken by Israel to stem a flow of illegal African migrants coming across its desert border with Egypt have had a dramatic effect in recent months, reducing the influx of newcomers to a trickle, according to recent government figures and Israeli groups aiding the Africans.

The turnaround — after years of steadily swelling numbers of migrants whose presence had unsettled many Israelis — was hailed this week as a “success story” by Mark Regev, spokesman for Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. However, advocates for the migrants accuse Israel of violating international law by turning back asylum seekers at its border without checking their refugee claims.

In a joint statement this week with Human Rights Watch, two aid groups said the Israeli army has been blocking migrants at the frontier, in some cases pushing them back into Egypt, where the groups say the migrants are at risk of prolonged detention by the authorities, abuse by Bedouin traffickers and forcible return to their country of origin.

The Israeli army said in a statement that it was acting to “prevent illegal infiltration” in accordance with “directives from the political echelon.”

The arrival of the Africans — about 60,000 have come to Israel since 2005, mostly from Eritrea and Sudan — provoked a violent backlash in Israel and posed a challenge to the government, which struggled to contain the influx, described by Netanyahu as a potential threat to Israel’s character as a Jewish state.

Living in limbo and gravitating to poor areas in Israeli cities, the migrants generated resentment among local residents. Angry street protests and attacks against the migrants in low-
income neighborhoods in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem triggered a government crackdown earlier this year. Hundreds of Africans from South Sudan and the Ivory Coast, where conditions were deemed safe enough for their return, were rounded up and deported.

Construction of a 15-foot-high-steel fence along the border with Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula was speeded up, and legislation was amended to permit the detention of illegal migrants for up to three years.

The measures have led to a sharp drop in the number of arriving migrants, many of whom fled war or oppressive governments, seeking work and a better life. In recent years, hundreds crossed the porous Egyptian-Israeli frontier each month after trekking across Sinai, where many were tortured by Bedouin traffickers holding them for ransom.

Sabine Haddad, spokeswoman for Israel’s Population, Immigration and Border Authority, said that the monthly number of illegal migrants entering Israel, which had reached a height of 2,295 in January, had dropped in October to 54. According to the agency’s figures, the falloff began in June, when the government crackdown began and the monthly total fell to under 1,000.

Aid groups say that many of the migrants have been stymied by the border fence and the Israeli army’s practice of summarily turning them back without checking whether they should be granted asylum. Once back in Egypt, the groups said, the Africans were at risk of prolonged detention in Egyptian prisons or, in the case of the Eritreans, forcible return to their country, a repressive dictatorship.

SOURCE

Sunday, November 4, 2012

Anti-immigrant party takes to the streets in Greece

When the U.N. calls someone "Nazi" one has to be cautious. U.N. bodies call Israel that too. Golden Dawn had negligible support before the anarchy (mostly of Leftist origin) triggered by the Greek economic meltdown so most of its current supporters may not have extreme beliefs.

It is a conventional kneejerk to equate anti-immigrant views with Nazism but such views are widespread in Britain and elsewhere and do not translate into any legislation that could reasonably be called Nazi

The Greek Left have engaged in a lot of aggressive anti-establishment rioting so does that make them Communsts? Probably. But there is no reason why the Left should have a monopoly of violence. Violence begets violence. Violence from either side is uncivilized and should be equally condemned

But it should not be overlooked that Greek politics generally has long been an unruly affair. Even Pericles had trouble keeping a lid on the chaos

Thugs wearing the black T-shirts of the neo-Nazi Golden Dawn party are carrying out attacks on immigrant markets and in public squares, according to the United Nations, with victims speaking of areas in the capital which are now strictly off limits.

Malik Abdulbasset, an Egyptian-born shopkeeper, found himself the target of one of the mobs on Wednesday night after the barber across the road was stabbed during a robbery.

Golden Dawn members led a crowd of enraged locals in a protest on Mikhail Voda St that turned violent despite the presence of riot police.

While no one witnessed the attack on the barber, residents were adamant the assailant was black.

After battering his Egyptian assistant, the mob turned on Mr Abdulbasset, who had defied police to keep his shop open.

"I had to turn and point to my Greek children and my Greek wife and say, look I am Greek, we are Greek, if you want to kill us we cannot stop you but you are killing your own."

The riot police watched on but did not intervene and threats of more protests were pasted on nearby doors.

"I will not close my shop because it is not my fault. But at the same time if something was to happen to my shop I will leave Greece because I am not protected."

Ilias Panagiotaris, an MP for Golden Dawn, and a leading party figure in Athens, was unapologetic about his group's methods.

"Most nations, well, not the US or Australia, have a single nationality that defines its culture and Greece must return to this ideal," he said. "The Golden Dawn is a very well organised party that is intervening to support and help people. Without us in a country where two million of ten million people are illegal, there would be chaos."

Support for his party has doubled from the seven per cent it received in the last Greek election, according to an opinion poll this week.

One of its main claims is it would dragoon immigrants on to flights to Islamabad and dare Pakistan to shoot the aircraft down.

Mr Panagiotaris added the 'papers' of every Greek who had acquired citizenship would be thoroughly vetted. "Everyone should have their documents inspected and those that bought their papers expelled."

The undisguised extremism promoted by Golden Dawn is a chilling watershed in Greece's post-war democracy.

Dimitra Xirou, the mother of Argyris Argyropoulos, the stabbed barber, seethed with anger at the nearby hospital, while holding vigil for her son.

The 43-year-old Mr Argyropoulos, came within an millimetre of death when he was robbed for just 10 euros, with the knife just missing his heart.

"It is us who have no one to protect us," Mrs Xirou said. "We are hungry, we have no jobs, there is crime everywhere.

"It used to be one of the best districts of Athens and now it is slum that we can't escape because the Pakistanis all come here when they arrive in Athens."

While the attacks have not specifically been backed by the powerful Orthodox Church, some priests have reportedly been involved in the protests.

Metropolitan Omyotis Moiysides, the local priest in Mrs Xirou’s Panteleiomon district, said the crime wave sweeping Athens as the economy disintegrated was forcing residents to fight back.

“I understand why the people are crying for help. I was pulled from my car and robbed,” he said. “The police do not come and stop these crimes, so the people have to defend themselves.”

SOURCE

Sri Lankan asylum seekers sent home from Australia

A group of Sri Lankan men have been sent home from Christmas Island after they were found not to have legitimate claims for asylum. Immigration Minister Chris Bowen confirmed the 26 men left on a charter flight late yesterday.

Mr Bowen has also confirmed the final member of a group of 15 Sri Lankans involved in allegedly hijacking a boat in Sri Lankan waters has also been returned.

Political correspondent Sabra Lane told AM the group of 26 men sent home was not connected to that case:

   " We understand that this was only the second time that the Minister has used powers available to him under the Migration Act to do this.

    He used these powers last weekend to send home a group of men who were accused of piracy. But this group last night, they were totally separate to that group and not involved in that case.

    These 26 Sri Lankans, according to the department, had no legal right to be here and they didn't make, according to the department, credible or legitimate claims for asylum.

    Crucially here, these men apparently raised no issues about Australia's international obligations.

    They made no reference to Australia's being obliged under the UN Convention for Refugees to consider their claims."

SOURCE

Friday, November 2, 2012

Immigrants Main Beneficiaries of Net Increase in U.S. Jobs

Two-thirds of Employment Growth during Obama’s Term Went to Foreign-born

A new analysis of government data by the Center for Immigration Studies shows that two-thirds of the net increase in employment since President Obama took office has gone to immigrant workers, primarily legal immigrants. Although total immigration has fallen in recent years, legal immigration remains very high. While economists debate the extent to which immigrants displace natives, the new data makes clear that a general labor shortage does not exist. This analysis calls into question the wisdom of bringing in more than one million new legal immigrants each year. The complete study can be found here.

Steve Camarota, the Center’s Director of Research, points out, "It is extraordinary that most of the employment growth in the last four years has gone to foreign-born workers. But what is even more extraordinary is that the issue has not even come up during the presidential election."

Among the findings of this analysis:

*    Since President Obama took office 67% of employment growth has gone to immigrants (legal and illegal).

*   There were 1.94 million more immigrants (legal and illegal) working in the 3rd quarter of 2012 than at the start of 2009, when the president took office. This compares to a 938,000 increase for the native-born over the same time period.

*   Most of the growth in immigrant employment went to newly arrived immigrants, rather than immigrants already in the country. Some 1.6 million new immigrant workers have arrived from abroad since the start of 2009 – we estimate 70 to 90 percent entered legally.

*    Immigrants made employment gains across the labor market. In occupations where immigrant gains were the largest, there were 2.2 million unemployed natives.

*    A large share of employment growth was already going to immigrants well before the president took office. However, he has taken steps to increase the level of job competition from foreign-born workers.

*       He offered work authorization to an estimated 2 million illegal immigrants who arrived in the country before age 16 – nearly 200,000 of whom have applied so far.

*       When auditing employers who hire illegal workers the administration, as a matter of policy, does not detain the illegal workers, allowing them to seek other employment.

*      The administration called on the Supreme Court in 2010 to strike down Arizona’s law requiring employers to verify the legal status of new workers.

* Natives have done better in the labor market recently. From the 3rd quarter of 2011 to the 3rd quarter of 2012, two-thirds of employment growth went to native-born workers.

* Despite recent improvements, in the third quarter of 2012 there was a huge number of working-age (18 to 65) native-born Americans not employed:

7.6 million with less than a high school education (18 to 65)

18.1 million with only a high school education (18 to 65)

15.8 million with some college (18 to 65)

9.2 million college graduates (18 to 65)

*   Some people who are not working do not wish to work. However, the broad measure of unemployment that includes those who’ve given up looking for a job, shows a dismal picture for adult natives (18+) in the third quarter of 2012:

30.8% for high school dropouts

18.1% for those only a high school education

13.8% for those with some college

8% for all college graduates, 13% for college graduates under age 30.

*    While significantly more immigrants are presently working, their unemployment rate remains high and the share of working age adults (18-65) holding a job has only slightly improved since the president took office.

Discussion: The net increase in employment over the president’s term is 938,000 for the native-born and 1.94 million for immigrants. Of course, many jobs are created and lost each month, and many workers change jobs each month. But, by examining the number of people working, this report measures the net effect of the churn in employment. Like the outcome of day spent at a casino, it is the end result of losses and gains that matter. And that is what this study reports.

To be sure, the president inherited an immigration system that allows a million permanent immigrants and several hundred thousand guest workers to be admitted each year. But neither President Obama nor Congress has been willing to modify this system. And while there is no question that the labor market was deteriorating before the president took office, as discussed above he has taken a number of steps that have actually increased job competition for native-born workers.

Economists debate the extent of job competition between immigrants and natives. Research by the Federal Reserve Board, the National Bureau Economic Research, and others finds that immigration does displace natives. But there is not a consensus among economists. What we can say is that in occupations where immigrants made the largest gains, there are currently millions of unemployed native-born Americans. The newest data also shows an enormous number of working-age native-born Americans not employed across the labor market. Given these findings, it is unfortunate that both presidential candidates have chosen not to even discuss possible job competition between immigrants and natives.

Data Source: Data for the report comes from the “household survey” (also called the Current Population Survey or CPS). The CPS, the nation’s primary source of information on the labor force, asks respondents about their socio-demographic characteristics such as race, education level, citizenship and year of arrival in the United States.

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

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

Asylum seekers in Australia told of no-advantage rule

IMMIGRATION Minister Chris Bowen says he has explained to asylum seekers on Nauru that they will not go to the head of the queue in their claims to come to Australia.

Mr Bowen visited Australia's offshore processing detention centres on the Pacific Island of Nauru and Papua New Guinea's Manus Island in early October.

"I have spoken to the people in the centre at Nauru, and I have explained the no-advantage principle to them to their face," Mr Bowen told ABC television on Wednesday. "I have told them that it is a period of years, and talked that through."

The principle was to deter people arriving by boat without a visa as they would not gain an advantage over those who waited in a queue in refugee camps.

On Wednesday, Mr Bowen introduced legislation to remove the migration rights from any asylum seeker arriving by boat on the Australian mainland. The measure is one of the recommendations from the Houston expert panel handed to the government in August.

Mr Bowen defended his and Labor's change of mind on the policy.

In 2006, Labor opposed the measure when then prime minister John Howard tried and failed to excise the Australian mainland from the migration zone.

"If I have a choice between saving somebody's life and being entirely consistent with something I said in 2006, well, I'll go for saving the life, thanks very much," he told ABC radio earlier on Wednesday.

He said not every party had the same position in 2012 as it did in 2006. "In 2006, the Liberal Party supported putting a price on carbon for example," Mr Bowen said.

The Immigration Department confirmed two asylum seekers attempted self-harm at the detention facility on Nauru.

A spokesman for the department said the two people had been treated on Wednesday by health services provider International Health and Medical Services (IHMS) for superficial injuries. "They have since returned to their accommodation," he told AAP.

Two more asylum seeker boats have been intercepted, both detected late on Tuesday off Christmas Island. One was carrying 51 passengers and two crew and the other carried 12 passengers.

The increase in the number of boat arrivals was likely to blow the government's aim of a budget surplus for 2012/13, opposition immigration spokesman Scott Morrison said.

Mr Bowen introduced two bills to parliament on Tuesday requesting appropriation of the money needed to implement the recommendations of the Houston expert panel on asylum seekers.

It comes at a cost of $1.67 billion in 2012/13 and includes $267 million to build regional asylum seeker processing centres in Nauru and Manus Island.

Mr Morrison said before the mid-year budget update the estimated cost of processing and accommodating asylum seekers was $4.97 billion. "That figure today is up to $5.4 billion for this financial year and out over the forward estimates is $6.6 billion," Mr Morrison told parliament.

In the May budget the government had estimated 450 people a month would arrive in 2012/13. That figure had blown out to 2000 each month, Mr Morrison said.

SOURCE

Thursday, November 1, 2012

Mainland removed from zone for asylum seekers

Australia getting tougher on illegals

THE flow of asylum-seeker boats has surged by more than a third since the reintroduction of the Pacific solution, leading the government to adopt a further measure of excising the Australian mainland from the migration zone.

More than 5700 asylum seekers have arrived since August 13, the cut-off date from when the government has warned boat arrivals could be sent to Nauru or Manus Island for processing.

That compares to 4300 over the same period before the cut-off, a 39 per cent increase in boats and a 32 per cent increase in people.

The Houston report commissioned by the government and released on August 13 warned that the Pacific solution alone would not stop the boats and all its recommendations should be implemented.

The recommendation to excise Australia from the migration zone was adopted by the government yesterday.

This means anyone who arrives on the Australian mainland by boat will be sent offshore for processing to Nauru or Manus Island.

Presently, they are processed onshore and receive bridging visas and limited work rights.

The measure was once so controversial that, six years ago, the Howard government backed off trying to introduce it following a revolt by Liberal moderates. In a sign of how the politics has changed, Labor's Melissa Parke was the only person to voice concern when the legislation was put to caucus yesterday for approval. She questioned whether the move was consistent with Australia's international obligations.

The Coalition slammed the government as hypocrites but is likely to support the legislation.

However, two Liberal moderates, Russell Broadbent and Judi Moylan, said they would cross the floor and not support it.

Since 2008, after Labor was elected, only 211 people have reached the mainland by boat whereas more than 28,200 have reached islands such as Christmas Island, which are already excised from the migration zone.

The Immigration Minister, Chris Bowen, said excising the mainland was necessary because more people are expected to try to reach the mainland to avoid being sent to Nauru or Manus Island.

"These are difficult decisions for everybody but we do need to have in place a properly integrated system which says to people there's a safer way of getting to Australia," he said.

Mr Bowen also tabled legislation yesterday appropriating money for the $1.6 billion asylum seekers will cost the budget this financial year. This includes $1.2 billion in costs detailed in the midyear budget update last week and another $267 million taken from the contingency reserve for initial construction costs on Nauru and Manus Island.

Mr Bowen said excising the mainland did not contravene Australia's obligations under the UN Refugee Convention but refugee advocates were outraged.

The human rights lawyer Rachel Ball said the excision was without precedent for a country signed on to international conventions.

"Excision is an affront to justice and the rule of law," she said.

The Labor Left is uncomfortable with the policy direction. Senior figures have sought a dialogue with Mr Bowen to ensure it is at least kept abreast of changes and can monitor them.

SOURCE

Immigration problems in Catalonia too

It has been good for business. Last month, before a giant rally in neighboring Barcelona to support independence, Mr. Shen ran out of the Catalan flags he sells as a wholesaler because customers had snapped up about 10,000 of them in just a week.

But as an immigrant who moved here from Shanghai 20 years ago, he is worried by the way separatists advance their case for nationhood with claims to a distinct Catalan national culture, language and identity that set it apart from Spain. “It’s always best to be part of a larger country, just like having a bigger family to help you,” Mr. Shen said.

Immigrants like Mr. Shen illustrate the complexities of identity in Catalonia, where they have helped make the economy both the largest among Spain’s regions and the most diverse, alongside Madrid, with sizable populations of Muslims, Sikhs, Chinese and others.

As Catalonia prepares for a regional election on Nov. 25 that could become an unofficial referendum on independence, as many as 1.5 million residents of the region, out of a total population of 7.5 million, will not be eligible to vote because they are not Spanish citizens.

While these newcomers have played little part in the separatist debate so far, their sheer numbers and their contributions to Catalonia’s economy have indirectly reinforced the claims by some politicians that the region should occupy a place in the European Union separate from Spain. With annual output of about $260 billion in goods and services, an independent Catalonia’s economy would be larger than a dozen of the union’s 27 members.

Cities like Badalona, just northeast of Barcelona on the Mediterranean coast, illustrate the social and economic challenges that Catalonia faces, whatever the outcome of the separatist drive.

Last year, Badalona, with a population of 220,000, elected a hard-line conservative mayor, Xavier Garc�a Albiol, “in part due to his polemical views linking immigrants from Romania and other countries to crime and promising a tougher stance on illegal immigration,” the United States Department of State said in its most recent human rights report on Spain.

Mr. Garc�a Albiol is one of only a few politicians from the governing Popular Party of Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy to win office in Catalonia. In step with his conservative colleagues, Mr. Garc�a Albiol opposes separation, and he has cast a large shadow over Badalona’s immigrants, to the point that he has been sued based on accusations of inciting hatred against the local Roma population.

“One reason I got elected is because people could see that I was ready to identify a problem and take action to resolve it,” Mr. Garc�a Albiol said in an interview.

Asked to explain the problem, Mr. Garc�a Albiol said, “A large part of the migrants came here to work, but a small part also arrived with the sole intention of becoming delinquents, stealing and making life generally impossible for all their neighbors.” For this minority, he concluded, “the only solution is police pressure, efficient judicial action, and if possible, send them back to their countries.”

This year, Mr. Garc�a Albiol tried unsuccessfully to block the opening of a new mosque in Badalona. The mayor’s immigration policies are “a bad joke,” said Abdelkrim Latifi I Boussalem, who helps run Amics, an association that offers Islamic teaching and Arabic language classes in Badalona.

Still, Mr. Latifi I Boussalem, who left his native Casablanca, Morocco, 22 years ago, said the municipality struggled to accept the Moroccans and Pakistanis who form the bulk of the city’s Muslim population even before the city elected Mr. Garc�a Albiol.

“All the major political parties display some fear of Islam,” he said. “It’s never been easy, but at least other politicians used to talk to us and didn’t just call us a problem.”

Mr. Latifi I Boussalem contended that recent immigrants should have a say in any independence referendum. “We’re not here to dilute Catalan identity, and are ready to work hard to understand the place in which we live, especially since Catalonia has always been a land of welcome and refuge.”

Before World War II, Catalonia’s population was about 2.9 million, but it doubled in the decades afterward as Spaniards flocked to the region’s industries from poorer, more rural parts of Spain. Mr. Garc�a Albiol’s father, for instance, came from Andalusia in the 1960s, at the peak of that migration movement.

More recently, Catalonia has been at the forefront of a wave of immigration that started in the late 1990s, when Spain opened its doors to millions of overseas workers to fuel a construction-led boom. That boom ended in 2008 with the world financial crisis and the collapse of the real estate bubble here, and many of the immigrants have either started to leave or been forced into the ranks of Spain’s unemployed, who now make up 25 percent of the labor force.

“For most of the immigrants we help, their only preoccupations now are finding a job, making sure their papers are in order and meeting their basic needs,” said F�tima Ahmed, the spokeswoman for Ibn Batuta, an association based in Barcelona that offers legal and social services to immigrants. These issues, she said, “are very far from a political debate that they don’t even have the right to vote in.”

In fact, Artur Mas, the president of Catalonia, said in a recent interview that it was unclear whether a formal referendum on separation would be open to legal immigrants.

Sikhs are among the immigrants here who express some empathy for the separatist movement, drawing a parallel with their own struggles at home. An estimated 13,000 of the 21,000 Sikhs who have moved to Spain since 2000, mostly from India’s Punjab region, have settled in Catalonia.

Gagandeep Singh Khalsa, who is fluent in Spanish but prefers to speak Catalan, acts as a local spokesman and interpreter for his fellow Sikhs. “I feel in harmony with the people here,” he said, “because we have been facing the same problems with India over the Punjab as they have with Spain.”

SOURCE

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

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

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

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

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

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

5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: You usually CAN buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.

6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.

I can be reached on jonjayray@hotmail.com -- or leave a comment on any post. Abusive comments will be deleted.