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31 August, 2009

Despite What Advocates of Illegal Immigration Say, There are No Jobs ‘Americans Won’t Do,’ Says Study

A study released by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) shows that native-born Americans fill the majority of jobs in almost every field. According to the CIS, this debunks the idea that immigrants are required to do jobs that Americans would refuse.

The study -- titled “Jobs Americans Don’t Do?” -- found that only four occupations in the United States employ a majority immigrant workforce. The findings also showed that a vast majority of occupations, including many low-skill jobs, are filled mostly by native-born Americans. “It looks like pretty much every job, including the worst paying, the toughest jobs you can think of, are done, typically overwhelmingly, by Americans -- even jobs that you might think are overwhelmingly done by foreign-born people,” said Steven Camarota, director of research for the organization. “The only occupational categories which were found to have majority-immigrant workforces were “plasterers and stucco masons” (56 percent immigrant), “graders and sorters, agricultural products” (54 percent), “misc. personal appearance workers” (53 percent), and “tailors, dressmakers and sewers” (51 percent).

In addition, two occupational categories were found to have workforces that were exactly 50 percent immigrant: “miscellaneous agricultural workers, including animal breeders,” and “sewing machine operators.”

In addition to this study, CIS simultaneously released another study, titled “Worse Than It Seems,” which analyzed unemployment and underemployment rates among both immigrants and native-born Americans. “America appears to have an over-supply, and over-abundance of less educated workers,” Camarota told CNSNews.com. “Not only are so many ‘not working,’ but the share ‘not working’ has been going up for 30 years, and wages for such workers have either stagnated in real terms or actually declined very significantly,” he added.

The study found that immigrants, native-born Americans, and the total population all have a 9.7 rate of unemployment. However, native born Hispanic Americans have a 13.3. percent rate of unemployment, and African-Americans suffer 15.8 percent unemployment. By comparison, Hispanic immigrants have only an 11.1 percent unemployment rate – higher than the national average but less than native born Hispanics. “The overall trend is clear,” he added, “less educated Americans work less and less, and they generally make less and less than they used to.”

Other findings from the studies:

-- There are 93 occupations in which 20 percent or more of workers are immigrants. These high-immigrant occupations are primarily, but not exclusively, lower-wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.

-- More than 23.5 million native-born Americans work in high-immigrant occupations (occupations 20 percent or more immigrant.) These occupations include 19 percent of all native workers.

-- Most native-born Americas do not face significant job competition from immigrants, the report noted, however, those who do "tend to be less-educated and poorer than those who face relatively little competition from immigrants."

-- In high-immigrant occupations, 57 percent of native-born workers have no more than a high school education. In occupations that are less than 20 percent immigrant, 35 percent of natives have no more than a high school education. And in occupations made up of less than 10 percent immigrant, only 26 percent of native-born workers have no more than a high school education.

-- The average wage or salary for native-born Americans in high-immigrant occupations is one-quarter lower than in occupations that are less than 20 percent immigrant.

The study also found that 44 percent of medical scientists are immigrants, as are 34 percent of software engineers, 27 percent of physicians, and 25 percent of chemists. The report also noted that only 10 percent of reporters are immigrants, as are 6 percent of lawyers and judges and 3 percent of farmers and ranchers.

Calls for comment from several immigrant-rights groups were not returned.

SOURCE



Western Immigration and Global Jihad

Comment from Australia

There is always a moral asymmetry between the free West and its enemies. The West is meant to play by the rules, and it usually does. It seeks to conduct it affairs within a moral framework, and certain things are simply off limits. But the enemies of freedom and democracy know no such compunctions. They are quite happy to use any means, including the exploitation of freedoms in the West, for their own purposes.

A classic case of this occurred during the Cold War. The Communists were quite adept at using the benefits and freedoms of the West to undermine it. Marxist morality dictated that the end justifies any means. Thus anything was permissible in the war against the West.

Islamic jihadists likewise seek to use and abuse the Western system for its own ends. They are happy to exploit Western freedoms, tolerance and openness to achieve their aims of a global caliphate and the submission of everyone to sharia law.

One way they seek to do this is by exploiting Western immigration laws and procedures. The West, ever keen to appear to be tolerant, compassionate and inclusive, is quite willing to allow Muslims of all stripes into their lands. Now the majority of these Muslims are usually not too problematic. But a healthy minority are. Radical Islamists are using our openness and porous borders to enter our lands, only with the aim of overthrowing the West from within.

Consider a case making headlines in today’s press. Here is one how news report covers the story: “A follower of a radical Islamic movement that seeks to introduce sharia law and has been linked to terrorist groups is being granted asylum in Australia. The Refugee Review Tribunal has recommended a protection visa for an Egyptian man, who is a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group with links to al-Qaida. The Muslim Brotherhood has been outlawed in several countries, including Egypt. It seeks to establish a pan-Islamic state ruled by sharia law and is committed to the destruction of Israel.”

A spokesperson for the Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council, expressed these concerns: “The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in many countries for good reason. It’s not just its attitude towards Israel that’s of concern. It has strands that are very sympathetic towards terrorism.” The Federal opposition immigration spokeswoman said she would write to the Government, asking to have the decision overturned.

If this were just an isolated incident, a one-off event, then not much more should be said. But if this is part of a much bigger picture, and just one example of a recurring pattern, then we should all be very concerned indeed. And that in fact seems to be the case. In fact, it is the very point being made in several new books.

For example, Sam Solomon and Elias Al Maqdisi make this case in Modern Day Trojan Horse: The Islamic Doctrine of Immigration. Both authors are experts on Islamic thought, but Solomon is especially crucial here, since he used to be a professor of sharia law, but has since converted to Christianity.

The pair examine how a small presence of Muslims in a Western nation eventually builds to a critical mass, with the eventual aim of implementing sharia law, and taking over the host culture. Even seemingly benign measures, such as the building of mosques, can be used for these greater purposes.

Indeed, an earlier volume by the same two authors argued how important the mosque in Western nations is to this overall process. In The Mosque Exposed, they highlight how the Islamists use the mosque to teach, foment and recruit for violent jihad.

In their newer book they document how Western immigration policies are being exploited by these radicals, and how they use such things as taquiya, or deception, to achieve these aims. They seek to hide behind religious devotion and practice as they attempt to wrest control of lands belonging to the kuffar (non-Muslim).

The slow but steady process of Islamisation of Western lands is taking place in many areas, with any attempts to impede this progress met with shouts of discrimination and Islamophobia. And the West is so concerned about not treading on anyone’s toes, that the radicals are making great gains in realising their goals.

Other new books also describe this process. For example, Christopher Caldwell’s new book, Reflections on the Revolution In Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West, examines how changing demographic patterns in the West, especially Europe, are part and parcel of this greater strategy of Islamic hegemony.

Caldwell documents how Western governments are squeamish about appearing to be intolerant or unwelcoming, so they often become their own worst enemies, by allowing the detractors of the West to freely enter their lands, set up shop, and work out their long-term plans.

He documents how the West tends to encourage the ghetto-isation of Muslim arrivals, instead of aiming for their assimilation and integration. This is a recipe for disaster, and we have seen it played out numerous times, especially in major European cities.

Other recent books might be cited, but the message should be clear. Just as Lenin once quipped about how the West would sell the Communists the rope with which to hang itself, so too modern democracies are sowing the seeds of their own destruction, by being naive or ignorant about global jihad, and how the radicals are using the West and its freedoms to in fact bring it to its knees.

To raise these issues is of course not to accuse all Muslims of treachery, jihad and anti-Western crusades. But a clear minority at least of Muslims are using the privileges and benefits of the West to promote Islamic jihad, and bring about the destruction of the West. Vigilance, as always, is clearly the order of the day here. Example here

SOURCE





30 August, 2009

Australian navy intercepts illegal immigrant boat

The 18th such boat this year -- compared with none or close to none in the final years of the conservative government. The flow started as soon as the Leftist government watered down the laws designed to stop such arrivals



An Australian naval ship on Saturday intercepted a boatload of suspected asylum seekers, a government minister said, the latest in a wave of arrivals that has stoked fears of weak border security.

The boat was stopped near Ashmore Island off Australia's northern coast, Home Affairs Minister Brendan O'Connor said in a statement. An initial count showed 55 people on board including three crew. Their nationalities were not known.

Border protection is a hot political issue in Australia. Critics blame a new rise in people-smuggling this year on a softer stance on the issue by Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, compared to the conservative government he ousted in 2007.

"The group will be transferred to Christmas Island where they will undergo security, identity and health checks as well as establish their reasons for travel," O'Connor said, referring to the latest arrivals.

Australia has a processing center for suspected asylum-seekers on Christmas Island, an Indian Ocean possession just south of the Indonesian island of Java.

Many of the people-smugglers are thought to be based in Indonesia, although the asylum seekers are generally from war-ravaged countries like Afghanistan, Iraq and Sri Lanka.

SOURCE



Federal Court Rules in Favor of Mandatory E-Verify for Federal Contractors

The U.S. District Court in Maryland ruled in favor of an executive order first issued during the Bush Administration that would require all federal government contractors to use E-Verify. The order was delayed once by Pres. Bush and three times by Pres. Obama while they were awaiting the outcome of lawsuits filed by various business groups, including the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Under the court's ruling, all federal contractors holding contracts of more than $100,000, regardless of size, will be required to use E-Verify, beginning on Sept. 8. Subcontractors will also be subject to the rule if their portion of the contract is more than $3,000. The court rejected all arguments presented by the plaintiffs.

Judge Alexander Williams, Jr. wrote that "the decision to be a government contractor is voluntary" and "no one has a right to be a government contractor."

Last month, the Department of Homeland Security agreed to implement the rule, and it's been backed by the Senate. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) offered an amendment that was adopted to the Homeland Security spending bill that would require all federal contractors to E-Verify on new hires. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) offered another amendment that was also adopted to the same bill that would require federal contractors to use E-Verify on all existing employees as well. Both amendments, however, must make it through a conference committee in the fall that will rectify the differences between the House and Senate versions of the bill.

After the court's ruling, U.S. Chamber of Commerce official Robin Conrad said that the Chamber is obviously disappointed with the decision.

"Our concern is the practical impact on employers ... employers will be required to reverify existing employees who work on federal contracts, which has the potential to impact hundreds of thousands of workers."

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) applauded the court's decision.

"There are more than 12 million citizens and legal immigrants unemployed, and even higher-than-average unemployment rates among blacks and U.S.-born Hispanics. It would be wrong to allow jobs that should go to them to go to illegal immigrants instead. I am hopeful that the Chamber will choose not to appeal this decision. The Chamber should stand up for American workers and encourage all its member businesses to enroll in E-Verify."

SOURCE





29 August, 2009

ACLU, La Raza, unions identify themselves as enemies of law enforcement

But only when it suits them, of course. They overlook the fact that respect for law depends on it being enforced -- and enforced impartially. With law enforcement as arbitrary as they want, there would be as much respect for law in America as there is in Mexico -- and we can see any day the chaos and poverty resulting from that

A coalition of Latino groups, liberal activists and labor unions have written President Barack Obama asking him to scrap agreements between the federal government and local police departments that allow them arrest illegal immigrants.

The groups — which include the American Civil Liberties Union, National Council of La Raza and United Methodist Church — asked Obama to nix 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement agencies. That includes an agreement with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has used that authority to raid businesses suspected of employing undocumented workers, make arrests and pick up suspected illegal immigrants on crime sweeps.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said earlier this summer the Obama administration plans to rework the 287(g) agreements to focus on picking up fugitive criminals. Arpaio argues that change would weaken their effectiveness.

The ACLU and other critics say the sheriff uses the power to unfairly target and arrest Hispanics, which takes away resources from other policing arenas. The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office of racial profiling.

Other groups signing the letter include the National Immigration Law Center, NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Service Employees International Union, Code Pink Arizona, the Anti-Defamation League, Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, National Center for Lesbian Rights, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Unitarian Universalist churches and the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights.

The San Francisco-based Ella Baker Center was founded by [black Marxist] Van Jones, special adviser for green jobs at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. Fox News Commentator Glenn Beck has criticized Jones far-left political views.

SOURCE



Migrant mothers behind British baby boom

An immigrant baby boom is fuelling Britain's fastest population growth in half a century. The number of people in the UK has passed 61million for the first time, figures showed yesterday. Record immigration levels over the past decade have driven up the number of women of childbearing age. This helped boost the number of births last year to 791,000 - up 33,000 on 2007.

For the first time in a decade, the excess of births over deaths played a bigger role than immigration itself in driving population growth, which is now twice as fast as in the 1990s. The figures from the Office for National Statistics show that net immigration - the balance of those arriving over those leaving - fell by 44 per cent between 2007 and 2008 as economic turmoil triggered an exodus of foreign workers.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas seized on those figures as proof that Britain's borders were 'stronger than ever' and migration was 'under control'. He insisted that previous projections showing the UK population rising to 70million within 30 years were now 'not true'.

Ignoring the baby boom, Mr Woolas said: 'Of course it's the net migration increase that has been worrying people, including me.'

Opposition critics and immigration campaigners reacted with incredulity, pointing out that immigration remains at near-record levels and it is foreign-born mothers who are pushing up the birth rate.

Last month Home Secretary Alan Johnson ruled out any cap on immigration and told MPs he did not 'lie awake at night worrying about a population of 70million.'

Shadow Immigration Minister Damian Green said last night: 'Alan Johnson says he doesn't lose sleep over population growth. Perhaps he should, instead of sleeping on the job. 'These figures show our population is still rising fast, even when the recession is driving hundreds of thousands to leave. 'This puts added pressure on housing and transport, and shows that there is still no proper control over immigration.'

The ONS figures showed 61,383,000 people living in the UK in mid-2008. The figure has leapt by two million - equivalent to a city twice the size of Birmingham - in just seven years. The increase of 408,000 in the 12 months from mid-2007 was the steepest since the baby boom years of the early 1960s. It represented an annual increase of 0.7 per cent - more than twice as fast as in the 1990s and three times the rate of the 1980s. Birth rates have been rising over the past decade, with the ONS measure of fertility now standing at 1.96 children per woman, up from 1.63 in 2001 and the highest in almost 40 years.

ONS statisticians said the rising birth rate was partly due to women born in the UK having more children. While there was 'no single explanation' for this, possible causes included women in their 20s choosing to have babies slightly earlier and changes in government policies on maternity leave and tax credits. However mass immigration has had a greater impact on birth rates, as hundreds of thousands of women of childbearing age have arrived in the UK. They have boosted the number of potential mothers by two per cent since 2001. Foreign-born women also have a higher birth rate - 2.51 children compared with 1.86 for UK-born women.

ONS statistician Roma Chappell said 56 per cent of the 33,000 increase in births between 2007 and 2008 was accounted for by the babies of mothers born outside the UK. Some of these, however, will be of British descent. Across Britain around one baby in four is now born to a mother from overseas. In London, the figure rises to 55 per cent, with the highest proportions last year in the boroughs of Newham (75 per cent) and Brent (73 per cent).

Slight falls in the death rate over recent years mean that 'natural' population growth - the excess of births over deaths - reached 220,000 in 2007/08. Net immigration added 186,000 - down from 198,000 the year before.

Earlier this week, separate health figures showed maternity services under severe pressure. Some 4,000 women were forced to give birth outside maternity wards last year due to a lack of midwives and beds.

While the births figure is rising, numbers at the other end of the age scale are also growing. There are now 1.3million people aged 85 or over - more than two per cent of the population.

The ONS immigration statistics for the year to December 2008 showed 512,000 arrivals, down only slightly on the 527,000 figure of the previous year. But there was a sharp rise in the number of foreign workers leaving the UK. A total of 395,000 people emigrated, up 24 per cent on the year before. They included 237,000 non-Britons, many of them Poles and other Eastern Europeans.

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the MigrationWatch think-tank said last night: 'It is the usual Government spin to claim these numbers as a success for immigration policy when foreign immigration is virtually unchanged at about half a million a year. 'What has really happened is that EU citizens have voted with their feet. The number leaving has doubled in the face of the deep recession in Britain. But EU migration is something over which the Government have no control whatever. 'The bottom line is that the population of the UK will exceed 70million within 25 years even at these levels of immigration.'

The number of Eastern European workers returning home is now nearly as large as the numbers arriving. Figures show that last year the total number of 'A8' citizens coming to Britain from the former Eastern Bloc states slumped by more than a quarter from 109,000 to 79,000. At the same time the number returning to their homelands more than doubled, from 25,000 to 66,000. The trend helped drive down net immigration to 118,000, a drop of 44 per cent and the lowest since the expansion of the EU five years ago.

Karen Dunnell, the Government's chief statistician, said the figures were likely to be due to the economic downturn. She said: 'You have to say that probably unemployment and the economic situation, given that quite a lot from the A8 countries are coming to work, is probably having an impact.' An estimated one million people have flocked to the UK since Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Slovakia and Slovenia joined the EU in 2004. The Government faced fierce criticism at the time for opting to give all new EU citizens free access to UK labour markets, while other major economies imposed strict curbs.

SOURCE





28 August, 2009

U.K. Population Hits 61.4 Million; Immigration Eases

The U.K. population grew at a faster-than-average pace last year as the highest birth rate since 1973 offset a slowdown in the number of foreigners arriving. The population rose 0.7 percent to 61.4 million in the middle of 2008, more than the 0.5 percent annual average since 2001, the Office for National Statistics said. Migrant numbers grew by 561,000, down from a record 605,000 in 2007.

Prime Minister Gordon Brown has implemented the biggest clampdown on immigration since World War II after record numbers arrived following the eastward expansion of the European Union in 2004. Arrivals from the eight accession countries dropped 28 percent, and departures of those nationals more than doubled. “Britain’s borders are stronger than ever before,” Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said in a statement in London today. “Immigration is under control.” [What a liar! It's ILLEGAL immigration that is Britain's problem and just the ones they have caught and told to go home (but who nonetheless are staying on) number half a million. Woollybutt is of his father the Devil, for there is no truth in him (John 8:44)]

Woolas has introduced an Australian-style points system for granting visas and raised restrictions on work permits and marriages to curb immigration from outside the EU. The report also shows the Home Office removed fewer illegal immigrants and granted 4 percent more asylum claims in the second quarter compared with a year ago.

Conservative View

“The figures show our population is still rising fast, even when the recession is driving hundreds of thousands of people to leave,” said Damian Green, a lawmaker from the Conservative opposition who speaks on domestic affairs. “This puts added pressure on housing and transport and shows there is still no proper control over immigration numbers.”

Today’s figures mark the first time a decade that the so- called natural rate of population growth, including births and deaths, outstripped the impact of immigration. The statistics office wasn’t able to say how much of the drop in immigration from the so-called A8 countries was due to the recession. “Quite a lot of people from the A8 countries are coming specifically to work,” Roma Chappell, a government statistician, said at a press conference. “The unemployment and the economic situation there is probably having an impact, but it’s very difficult to prove it.”

The population grew by a total of 408,000 in the past year. Natural change contributed to an increase of 220,000, the most since at least 1992, the report said. Net immigration into the U.K. fell to 186,000, the lowest in four years.

Fertility Rising

The fertility rate, a measure how many children a woman can expect to bear, touched 1.96, the highest since 1973. Also, the number of women of child-bearing age rose, mostly due to an increase in foreign-born women living in the country.

Bank of England policy makers have been watching those figures to assess spare capacity in Britain’s labor market. As the economy tipped into its worst recession in a generation and unemployment rose, the number of migrants departing the U.K. increased, the data released today showed. “Unemployment may not be rising as quickly as we would have thought because workers who lose their jobs may be leaving the country,” said David Tinsley, an economist at National Australia Bank in London and a former central bank official. “The degree of excess capacity in the economy is probably not as great as it would be.”

SOURCE



Illegal migration to Italy

Who in his right mind would want millions of people who have made their own country into a hellhole?

FROM her hospital bed, Titi Tazrar, one of only five migrants who survived a crossing from Libya, described how 73 other passengers had died. They included three pregnant women who aborted at sea. “Some died because they fell into the sea at night,” said the 27 year-old Eritrean. “The pregnant women aboard suffered the most. We didn’t know how to help or comfort them. But soon after losing their children they too died.”

On the very day when Ms Tazrar gave her account, a game designed by Renzo Bossi, son of the Northern League’s leader, Umberto Bossi, called “Bounce back the clandestine migrant”, was removed from his Facebook site. A failure to block enough boats led to a message: “Try again…next time you’ll manage to show you’re a true Leaguer!”

Since May Italian vessels finding migrants in international waters have returned them to Libya instead of taking them to Italy where (whether or not they won asylum) most have tended to remain or else travelled to another EU country. The rescue of the 12-metre craft on which Ms Tazrar was found on August 20th triggered the biggest row yet. The church has been critical: the head of the Vatican’s migrants department, Antonio Maria Veglio, is locked in an acrimonious dispute with a leading Northern League figure, Roberto Calderoli. This matters, for history suggests that Italian governments at odds with the church do not last long. And Mr Berlusconi is already in bad odour with the clergy over his private life.

Yet some of the opprobrium heaped on his government’s immigration policy is misguided. The real objection is that the new approach prevents migrants from applying for asylum even if they are entitled to humanitarian protection (typically around a third of Mediterranean boat people qualify, according to the Italian government). It then forces them back to Libya, an undemocratic state whose leader scoffs at notions of human rights.

But there is no evidence that Italy is actually ignoring the plight of those, like Ms Tazrar, who manage to reach its territorial waters. Officials insist that she and her fellow passengers were rescued by a coastal patrol as soon as it was alerted to their presence. Since June 1st almost 500 people have been taken in by Italy (although, under the new law, they now risk prosecution for illegal immigration).

Graver doubts hover over Malta. Ms Tazrar and her fellow-survivors say that two days before their rescue their dinghy was approached by a patrol boat whose crew gave them fuel and life-jackets and even “turned on the motor because we were too weak”. Malta accepts that its men found the Eritreans, but says the migrants were in good health and rejected an offer of rescue because they wanted to reach Italy. As a prosecutor in Sicily began investigating the incident, Italy’s foreign minister, Franco Frattini, outraged the Maltese government by suggesting that it should limit Malta’s territorial waters because it could not patrol them properly.

Continuing illegal immigration across the Mediterranean cries out for a co-ordinated EU response. Carl Bildt, the foreign minister of Sweden, which holds the EU presidency, said new proposals from the European Commission would be discussed by foreign ministers in October. But he added that such a complex problem could not be solved at one meeting. [Sweden has huge problems with its own large and hostile population of Muslim "refugees" so Mr. Bildt can be relied on for nothing more than hot air]

SOURCE





27 August, 2009

Kennedy 'fashioned the modern day' U.S. immigration system

No wonder it is such an abomination

Sen. Edward Kennedy's first major legislative victory helped change the face of the country and shaped his own political career. In 1965, Kennedy had been in the Senate less than three years. His party's leaders gave him the job of pushing a bill to eliminate the quota system that had made it virtually impossible for anyone from anywhere but western Europe to immigrate to the USA.

Eliminating national quotas for immigration had been the goal of every U.S. president since Harry Truman— including Kennedy's brother John F. Kennedy. That was probably one reason that "Ted seized the cause," in the words of his biographer, Adam Clymer. Passage marked "the first of many times Ted Kennedy fulfilled an unfinished dream of one of his brothers," Clymer wrote.

It was also the first of many times that Kennedy found himself at the forefront of an issue of a cause that he came to see as a personal crusade. "From the windows of my office in Boston … I can see the Golden Stairs from Boston Harbor where all eight of my great-grandparents set foot on this great land for the first time," Kennedy told Senate colleagues in a 2007 speech. "That immigrant spirit of limitless possibility animates America even today."

Beginning with the 1965 bill, which opened the doors for the flood of Latin American and Asian immigrants who dramatically altered the nation's demography, to the end of his life, Kennedy remained the Senate's most impassioned advocate for widening opportunities for America's newcomers.

"He fashioned the modern-day legal system of immigration. He created humane refugee and asylum policies. And he has set the stage for a 21st century solution to the problem of illegal immigration," said Frank Sharry, an immigrant rights advocate who worked with Kennedy on legislation. Among the immigration measures that Kennedy helped shape:

•A 1980 bill that established a system for refugee resettlement in the USA and nearly tripled the number of people who would qualify for admission.

•A 1986 bill that granted amnesty to an estimated 2.7 million people living illegally in the USA and established penalties against employers who hired illegal immigrants.

•A 1990 bill that revised the legal immigration system to allow for more immigrants and more high-skilled workers.

For all of his accomplishments, Sharry thinks Kennedy will be best known for the work he did with Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., on a bill that failed. The legislation would have put an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship and plugged holes in the employer sanctions system. It collapsed despite its powerful backers, including President Bush.

Sharry remains convinced that Kennedy "laid the groundwork" for a bill that eventually will pass. President Obama has made an immigration overhaul along the lines of the Kennedy-McCain bill one of his top legislative priorities.

SOURCE



Follower of radical Islamic movement granted asylum in Australia

Extreme Islamic attitudes that are not even acceptable in a Muslim country are acceptable in Australia?

A follower of a radical Islamic movement that seeks to introduce sharia law and has been linked to terrorist groups is being granted asylum in Australia. The Refugee Review Tribunal has recommended a protection visa for an Egyptian man, who is a supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamic political group with links to al-Qaida.

The Muslim Brotherhood has been outlawed in several countries, including Egypt. It seeks to establish a pan-Islamic state ruled by sharia law and is committed to the destruction of Israel.

The Egyptian man initially was denied a protection visa by the Department of Immigration, but the decision was overturned by the tribunal. "The tribunal is of the view that the applicant's decision to abandon ship, insistence on his rights not to return to Egypt for medical treatment, and behaviour towards his captain, if combined with his support for the Muslim Brotherhood, his low-level political activities and past expression of anti-government political views, would generate a profile that could attract the adverse attention of the authorities and focus their attention on his sympathies for the brotherhood," it found. "On this basis, the tribunal is of the opinion that there is a real chance that this could place the applicant at risk of facing arrest, detention and ill-treatment."

Prof Greg Barton of Monash University said the Muslim Brotherhood had been linked to terrorist attacks, such as the Luxor bus bombing in 1997, but had since denounced violence, though many of its goals had been taken up by terrorist groups. "Al-Qaida and other militant groups have benefited greatly from their ideas so it is true that the ideas produced by the brotherhood are taken further by more militant groups," he said. "The brotherhood connection for anybody would automatically give Australian authorities a reason to check into their background."

Jeremy Jones, director of international affairs with the Australia-Israel Jewish Affairs Council, said the brotherhood presented a threat to democratic countries. "The Muslim Brotherhood has been banned in many countries for good reason," he said. "It's not just it's attitude towards Israel that's of concern. It has strands that are very sympathetic towards terrorism."

Opposition immigration spokeswoman Sharman Stone said she would write to Mr Evans asking to have the decision overturned. Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the man would have a rigorous security check before a visa was granted. "Should there be an adverse security assessment, the department cannot grant a visa," he said.

SOURCE





26 August, 2009

The Elephant in the Room

New Publications on Health Care and immigration

While there has been some discussion of whether illegal immigrants should be covered by proposed government insurance plans, the enormous impact of immigration, both legal and illegal, on the health care system has generally not been acknowledged in the current debate. On August 19, the Center for Immigration Studies held a panel discussing the health care issue.

Out of this panel, the Center has produced several related publications:

* Facts on Immigration and Health Insurance -- A memorandum by Steven A. Camarota

* Health Reform Legislation and Immigration -- A memorandum by James R. Edwards, Jr.

* Does the Health Care Bill Bar Illegal Aliens from Taxpayer Funds? Not Really -- A blog by Jon Feere

* Video of Health Care Panel -- By Bryan Griffith

* Transcript of the Health Care Panel -- By the Federal Transcript Service

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. For more information, contact: Bryan Griffith, press@cis.org; (202) 466-8185



America NEEDS foreign-born jail inmates?

That appears to be the thinking behind the lunatic "protestors" below. You'll never guess where the article comes from

In a city with a “don’t ask, don’t tell” approach to immigration status, it may come as a surprise to many that the New York Department of Correction routinely gives a list of foreign-born inmates at Rikers Island to immigration authorities, who use it to question, detain and try to deport thousands of them.

At least 13,000 Rikers inmates have been placed in deportation proceedings since 2004 through this practice, a coalition of immigrant advocacy groups has learned from data obtained in a Freedom of Information Act request. The groups, and their lawyers at the Immigrant Justice Clinic of Cardozo School of Law, will discuss the findings and start a protest campaign Tuesday morning at Judson Memorial Church in Lower Manhattan.

“This is a huge program with enormous consequences for New Yorkers,” said Nancy Morawetz, a professor at New York University School of Law, who helped one of the groups file for the information from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “The experience in New York is a warning about what we can expect nationally as ICE expands its jail-based programs around the country.”

According to information released in response to the request, agents from the federal immigration enforcement agency, typically in plain clothes and under no requirement to provide interpreters, question about 4,000 inmates a year about their immigration status, out of about 105,000 people jailed annually at Rikers. Immigration authorities put a hold, or “detainer,” on roughly 3,200.

Then, instead of being released when they finish their terms — or even if criminal charges against them are dismissed — these inmates are sent to immigration detention centers, often in Texas or Louisiana, far from legal services and relatives, Professor Morawetz said.

The advocacy groups, which include the New Sanctuary Coalition of New York City, Make the Road New York and the Northern Manhattan Coalition for Immigrant Rights, contend that this process is “leaving the deportees’ families abandoned in New York and dependent on our city’s strained social service system.” The groups plan to ask the City Council to refuse federal agents access to pretrial detainees.

Gilliam Brigham, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, defended the program. “By processing these criminal aliens for removal before they are released to the general public, ICE is enhancing public safety,” she said. The Rikers effort, she added, is “one element of ICE’s comprehensive strategy to build cooperative relationships with local law enforcement agencies.”

Stephen J. Morello, a spokesman for the Department of Correction, said the department provides federal immigration officers, who have free office space at Rikers, a list of newly admitted foreign-born inmates. But the information — including country of birth, if a detainee supplies it — is publicly available on the department’s Web site, he said, and if federal agents decide they want to visit a foreign-born detainee, the department cooperates.

More HERE





25 August, 2009

Immigration and national health care

Ryan Avent argues that failing to include illegal immigrants in a national health care plan is shameful:

We’ll treat an immigrant kid with tuberculosis, because we don’t want him infecting our American kids, but you know, we’re not about to acknowledge the basic humanity of people who are enduring many hardships to give their families a better life, just as the ancestors of most of the population of America did. This whole health care mess is enough to make a man lose his faith in people.

Derek Thompson (from whom I found the above) concurs:

Again, I'm with Ryan all the way morally. I think every person in America deserves health care. I think it's an issue of morality, of human rights. And immigrants are people, too.

I realize that few readers of the DR are both (1) in favor of immigration limits, and (2) in favor of national health care. But those are probably both majority opinions on the left, and so I hope someone here can explain this to me.

Here's my question, and I mean it in a completely non-snarky, honest-inquiry way: How can it possibly be the case that by breaking the law of a country, one acquires a claim against its inhabitants?

Consider: Virtually no one would argue that American taxpayers have an obligation to pay for the health care of a Nicaraguan in Nicaragua[*]. But if that person comes to the United States illegally, then apparently it becomes an obligation of Americans to care for him.

So what is it that the illegal immigrant has done that suddenly entitles him to my taxes to pay for his health care? Thompson thinks he deserves health care because he is "in America". But if health care is a "human right", then surely it belongs to the Nicaraguan while he was in his native land.

Maybe it's because the illegal immigrant contributed to the economy here? But I don't see how that can be the case. Suppose the person had remained in Nicaragua as a farmer exporting his entire crop to the United States. Then he is economically linked with Americans just as the immigrant is, but few argue he is entitled to health care.

Now for something like a communicable disease, then one rationale for providing health care would be naked self-interest. But I don't see how that applies to something like cancer or heart disease.

And I think it violates many (most?) peoples' sense of propriety to reward people for breaking the law, even if they don't agree with it. I spoke to several people during the immigration debates of '06 who were outraged about the amnesty proposal despite being in favor of continued (and even increased) immigration. They just did not think it was right that someone from India who had trouble keeping his visa (to take one example I know of) got nothing out of the amnesty, while someone who came here illegally did. And I have very strong sympathy for that viewpoint. Even if you think bad laws should be disobeyed, does it then naturally follow that legal advantages should accrue to that person? That is very odd to me.

So, I'm posing this question to Avent, Thompson, or anyone else who holds positions (1) and (2) above: Suppose there are two brothers in Nicaragua. Brother A illegally comes to the United States and gets cancer. Brother B stays in Nicaragua and gets cancer. Why should I pay for Brother A's chemo and not Brother B?

I'd like to avoid a discussion here of the morality of immigration restrictions and national health care, if possible. I'm saying that taking those as given, why should illegal immigrants here get preference over, say, those who stayed in their native countries?

[*] I'm going to use Nicaragua as a random example of a foreign country from whom many immigrate illegally to the United States here for concreteness sake, but I do not intend to stereotype.

SOURCE



Muslim immigration: the most radical change in European history

I know I go on about Christopher Caldwell’s "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe" a bit much, but it’s only because I believe it’s going to be one of the most influential political books of the next two decades. The benefits of mass immigration are the Emperor’s New Clothes and Caldwell is the little boy who sees the truth, which is why I urge everyone to read it. A friend of mine, who was initially less sceptical than I was about immigration, said the book was so well-written and eye-opening it filled a void in his life that had been left by his finishing The Sopranos and The Wire.

Here’s my review of it in this week’s Catholic Herald:

You might not hear much about this book much in the next month, nor even in the next year, but it will affect your life in some way, and that of our country and continent. Christopher Caldwell is a mild-mannered Financial Times journalist who over the past decade has covered continental Europe (France especially) and its relationship with Islam in particular.

That Caldwell is so mainstream, well-respected and analytical makes his conclusion all the more devastating - that the mass migration of Africans and Asians into Europe since the Second World War was an unprecedented, economically unnecessary and ill-thought-out plan that has had a profoundly negative impact on our way of life.

Furthermore, he says, the mass importation of Muslims at a time when Europe has lost its own faith and Islam has developed a dangerous and powerful radicalism threatens the very freedom of Europe.

Enoch Powell was right, at least in terms of accuracy if not the morality of his chosen words. His 1968 prediction about a non-white population of 4.5 million by 2002 was mocked - in reality it was 4.6 million by 2001. In 1970 he was again scorned for suggesting that Wolverhampton, Birmingham and Inner London would be between a fifth and a quarter non-white by the turn of the century. The figures were 22.2 per cent, 29.6 per cent and 34.4 per cent respectively – and rising.

But Powell’s vision of “rivers of blood” turned out to be inaccurate so far because he was out of step; the Tory MP was a passionate believer in the British Empire, while most of his political contemporaries were riddled with liberal white guilt over colonialism and the Holocaust.

Such self-loathing was at the heart of the immigration experiment and later experiments in multiculturalism and political correctness; only a society so racked with self-hatred would have invited foreign labour in such numbers despite the economic benefits being so thin. Those benefits, Caldwell argues, have been “puny” and short-term, while the social effects are profound and permanent. Anyway most of the new immigrants, such as Pakistanis in Yorkshire and Turks in the Ruhr valley, were actually recruited into industries that were already on their last legs, and most immigrant groups took and still take more out of their exchequer than they pay in.

Illegal immigration is handy because illegal immigrants do the jobs no one else wants to, keeping down inflation and labour costs, so allowing Europeans to work 30 hours a week and retire at 55. The problem is that soon these new immigrants tire of doing the dirty work and new recruits are needed to keep an ever larger number of retirees and other state dependants in villas.

It is a gigantic Ponzi scheme - play today, pay tomorrow - and Europe is starting to pay now, financially and socially. The integration of Pakistanis, Algerians, Moroccans and Turks into England, France, Holland and Germany has been made a lot harder by the rapid and widespread decline of Christianity.

One of the side-effects of this decline is the collapse in the European birth rate: Austria is becoming Islamic not because Muslims are having too many children - their birth rate of 2.34 per woman is very close to the optimum - but because atheism is killing the country. Among Austrians who call themselves Catholics, which would include a majority of non-churchgoers and other nominal Christians, the birth rate is 1.32; among those who profess atheism it is 0.86. It is the same everywhere - in Brussels the seven most common boys’ names are Mohamed, Adam, Rayan, Ayoub, Mehdi, Amine and Hamza. Leicester and Birmingham will soon be Britain’s first-ever majority non-white cities.

And yet the elites have been in total denial about the growth of a Muslim body, arguing that to do so ignores diversity among these communities - which Caldwell compares to denying there is such a thing as a car because Volvos and Volkswagens are different. As well as growing in size every year, this Muslim population is dis-integrating from the European mainstream; children in German Muslim schools learns six hours of Arabic a day and one of German; in England the veil has become a widespread sight; a British brigade fought in Iraq for al-Qaeda; and Muslim “nationalism” in France has led to the creation of suburban ghettos far worse than anyone realises.

Caldwell compares the French ghetto film L’Haine, which portrayed a mixed Jewish and Arab gang, to West Side Story in its realism – that simply would not happen in a Muslim suburb, because the ironic end result of this post-Holocaust guilt is a surge in anti-Semitism at the end of the century, and a Muslim bloc that has pushed Europe in an increasingly anti-Israeli and anti-Semitic direction. Norway threatened to boycott Israeli goods at the same time as Norwegians were being attacked in Gaza over the Mohammed cartoon affair. In France there were black African gangs like Tribu Ka, who roamed around Jewish areas like a “postmodern Freikorps”.

The collapse of Christianity, and the introduction of novel morals such as the belief in sexual freedom and gay equality, totally at odds with both contemporary Muslim culture and European culture of only half a century ago, has made conflict between Europe and the new Europeans even more unavoidable. That is why surveys consistently show Muslims and non-Muslims thinking the other side are “disrespectful” to women, or why a large minority of young British Muslims advocate the death penalty for apostasy or homosexuality.

Can Europe be the same? Clearly not. Can we reach some happy compromise that peacefully integrates such large communities and avoids the conflicts that have plagued such multi-cultural countries in the past? Probably not.

Pim Fortuyn in Holland offered the best hope of a non-racist, liberal Europe that believed in itself; after his murder the future lies either with Nicolas Sarkozy, who believes in republican integration, or the likes of Geert Wilders, whose implacable hostility to Islam is increasingly shared across Europe.

This is a fascinating, earth-shattering account of the most radical change in European history.

SOURCE





24 August, 2009

Fingerprint sharing catching on

Why should fingerprints be "private"? Nobody seems to be saying. They just assert it. What is wrong with being able to identify people?

Calling asylum seekers a "vulnerable group," Canada's privacy commissioner expressed concern Friday about a new government plan to share fingerprint information with Britain and Australia to combat immigration fraud. The three-country agreement was announced Friday with little fanfare, with Canada and the two countries providing assurances that no one's privacy would be violated and that no database for the prints would be created.

A lawyers' group in Australia also raised privacy concerns about the plan, which the United States and New Zealand were expected to join later on.

The offices of Immigration Minister Jason Kenney and Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan made the announcement Friday along with their counterparts in London and Canberra, calling it a "landmark initiative" that would "improve our ability to identify foreign nationals who are seeking to enter Canada and who are trying to hide their past from authorities." The new agreement allows countries to check each other's fingerprint databases but doesn't give them unfettered access.

The measure was touted as a way to better detect bogus immigration and refugee claimants. To allay privacy concerns, the countries said that no central database of fingerprints would be created and all inquiries would be done anonymously. If a set of fingerprints did not produce a match, they would be destroyed.

This information sharing is part of a broader government initiative to introduce biometrics into Canada's immigration and refugee screening system.

The Immigration department, in Friday's news release, also said that it had done a privacy impact assessment. But the spokeswoman for Privacy Commissioner Jennifer Stoddart told Canwest News Service on Friday that it asked Immigration on July 20 to give more details about that assessment.

Though Immigration had "demonstrated its legislative authority" to go ahead with the plan, privacy commissioner spokeswoman Anne-Marie Hayden said, "we nevertheless expressed some concerns, we had some questions, and made a number of recommendations." This included asking Immigration to explicitly explain its rationale or need for the "high-value data-sharing."

In an e-mail, Hayden said: "Highly sensitive information such as fingerprints should be safeguarded with a correspondingly high level of security safeguards. Though threat and risk assessments (TRA) were completed, we were not provided with any details on the assessments, to demonstrate that business and IT controls are adequate, and were not informed whether action has been taken to address risks identified in the TRA — so we asked for more information on this front."

The privacy commissioner also asked for a further explanation of how the government plans to use biometric information in the future and what weight it plans to attach to the data when making an assessment of a particular application, said Hayden. "We very much look forward to receiving further clarity and information from CIC (Citizenship and Immigration Canada) to ensure that this initiative is respectful of the privacy rights of what may be considered quite a vulnerable group," wrote Hayden. "We understand this is just one of several biometrics initiatives being considered by the CIC and we've made CIC aware of our concerns with respect to what seems to be a general trend toward an increased collection of biometric information — so we will definitely be monitoring these issues closely and look forward to being kept informed by the department(s) involved."

The president of the Australian Lawyers for Human Rights told the Sydney Morning Herald newspaper that the new agreement was disquieting. "I'd really like to see the justification for this and see it implemented in a culturally sensitive manner," the group's president, Susan Harris-Rimmer, told the newspaper.

Alykhan Velshi, the spokesman for Canada's immigration minister, said all countries involved had implemented "rigorous privacy protocols" to address such concerns. "But ultimately you can't allow hypothetical concerns about this to get in the way of tangible concrete benefits for the security and safety of Canadians," Velshi told Canwest News Service.

In a 2007 trial, Canada shared the fingerprints of 343 refugee claimants with the United States and found matches in 124 cases, or 36 per cent. Of those, five per cent had a criminal history in the U.S. while 32 per cent had been ordered removed from the U.S., said Velshi. In a similar 2008 trial with Britain, Canada checked 2,000 refugee claimants' fingerprints and got 72 matches, or four per cent, he said.

Velshi also gave the anecdotal example of a Somali who claimed asylum in Britain. He had been fingerprinted in the U.S. while travelling on Australian identification. His fingerprints established that he was wanted for rape in Australia, where he was subsequently convicted and is in prison. "It's a personal priority of Minister Kenney to focus on the security elements in immigration programs."

SOURCE



Japan ignoring the elephant in the room too

Not without some reason, feelings of racial superiority are widespread in Japan so Japanese basically want NO immigrants. But there are already quite a lot working there, both legally and illegally. For an immigrant to obtain Japanese citizenship is however close to impossible. The assertion below that immigrants are a solution to the problem of an ageing population would be disputed by many economists

Like the 800-pound gorilla that sits where it wants, the prickly question of immigration is too big to easily ignore in Japan, a nation running out of the young folks it needs to keep its economy vibrant. Yet with less than a week before Japan's 100 million voters pick their next government, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) and its main rival, the Democratic Party of Japan (DPJ), have chosen to tune out the uncomfortable issue.

That's a shame, because how to stop a population rot that may leave Japan as an irrelevant has-been is probably the biggest test the country faces. The signs of decrepitude are numerous. China this year may overtake Japan as the world's second-biggest economy, and an expected population drop (according to government forecasts) will mean 10 million fewer Japanese walking around two decades from now. In order for the population just to stay flat, the number of children born each year will have to rise by one-third, and nobody expects a new baby boom.

For a long time Japanese politicians didn't bother going out of their way to argue policy issues at election time. Even now, campaigning is often little more sophisticated than cruising neighborhoods in vans repeating candidates' names over and over through bulky roof-mounted horn speakers. Election laws forbid candidates from knocking on voters' doors.

In recent years a willingness to debate ideas has surfaced, and for the coming election, both the LDP and the DPJ have published election pledges. The opposition group's wish list includes a monthly benefit of almost $300 per child, while the LDP has set itself a goal of achieving 2% annual economic growth. But that rate is too low if Japan is going to find enough money to pay the pensions and hospital bills of its burgeoning ranks of retirees; growth of around 5% is probably closer to what's needed. Where the DPJ plans to get the cash to fulfill its promises is unclear.

The solution to Japan's demographic pickle is staring-you-in-the-face simple: bring in more foreigners. But for any politician to say as much would be tantamount to political hara-kiri. The only group suggesting Japan do so is the Happiness Realization Party, the political wing of a fringe religious band that could be described as "happy-ologists" espousing the science of joy. Their chance of ever winning a parliamentary seat is depressingly slim. When forced to discuss Japan's graying, mainstream politicians tend to harangue their fellow citizens for not having more babies or blather on about a technological utopia of robots taking care of granny, the kids, the housework and the shopping.

Only around 2% of Japan's population is foreign born, the biggest ethnic groups being Korean and Chinese. Japan, apart from being occupied at the end of World War II, has never had to deal with a sudden influx of foreigners. A closed country until only a century and a half ago, the Japanese look with trepidation at the social strains multiethnicity has wrought in the U.S. and Europe. An economic underclass of immigrants would be hard for the Japanese middle class, which is almost everyone, to feel comfortable with. But it may be a price they will ultimately have to pay.

SOURCE





23 August, 2009

A newspaper can find the illegals that British officialdom cannot

Pesky newspaper! The officials don't WANT to find illegals. Too much bother. Just the occasional well-publicized raid on an Indian or Chinese restaurant is their idea of earning their keep. Get a DVD of "Yes Minister" if you have any faith in the British bureaucracy

A coach load of suspected illegal immigrants are being held after they were unwittingly diverted to a Home Office detention centre. The men believed they were boarding a bus to work on a farm in Lincolnshire - but were instead driven to a detention centre following a sting by the News of the World. Fourteen suspect illegal immigrants are now being questioned by UK Border Agency officials.

The paper reported they had been promised jobs for six months on a farm near Spalding by two gangmasters who used their Indian restaurant in East London as a front for the illegal workers racket. The pair charged the paper £500 for arranging the secret work force after bragging they could supply workers up and down the country. The group were then driven straight to the immigration centre in Longstanton, near Cambridge.

A Home Office spokeswoman said 14 suspected illegal immigrants had been detained and were being processed by immigration officials.

The two gangmasters are now being investigated by the UK Borders Agency and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority. The spokeswoman said: "If or when we find any evidence that they have been involved in this type of activity we will arrest them."

SOURCE



Tandarei: The faraway town fat on UK benefit fraud

What is only hinted at below is that most, if not all, of the illegals would have been Gypsies. Minor crime is the traditional Gypsy occupation

Two months ago, a group of 10 bedraggled and bewildered-looking Romanians arrived at immigration control at Stansted airport in Essex on a flight from Bucharest. They had no luggage, spoke no English and had no apparent means of support. One of the group was an alcoholic and another a drug addict.

According to police intelligence, they were benefit “mules”, sent to the UK with the task of claiming benefits for an organised crime gang. Already prepared for the group were forged documents, false work histories and tailor-made families with young children for fraudulent benefit claims. “The information we had was that once they had served their purpose they were going to be returned home,” said one police officer.

This time the group was turned back at the airport after immigration officials contacted antitrafficking police. However, new evidence shows the plundering of Britain’s benefit system by organised crime is a booming trade - and trafficked people, particularly children, are at the heart of it. An estimated £1 billion a year is defrauded from the benefits and tax credits system, with tens of millions of pounds lost to organised crime. While some fraud is inevitable, there is mounting concern about the high proportion of fraudulent claims orchestrated by traffickers which are being rubber-stamped after only the most basic checks.

Some of the suspects behind this fraud can be traced to Tandarei, a town of 15,000 people in eastern Romania which includes a 2,000-strong Roma gypsy population. Over the past five years, previously rundown neighbourhoods have inexplicably prospered. The minor economic boom has seen 100 imposing new homes built, valued at about £20m. BMWs and Land Rovers with British numberplates cruise the dusty streets. Vasile Sava, mayor of Tandarei, said last week: “How can I know where they get the money from? Nobody is telling us how they made the money abroad, legally or illegally.”

British police, who are said to have acquired several mug-shots of the affluent suspects in Tandarei, believe some of this new-found wealth is the proceeds of crime sent back from the UK, Spain and Italy using a variety of methods including Western Union and MoneyGram wire transfer services. The suspected source of the funding is threefold: trafficking, street crime and benefit fraud.

Under strict rules imposed when Romania and Bulgaria joined the European Union in January 2007, new arrivals to Britain from those countries are typically unable to claim benefits for themselves or their children. Claims can, however, be made by the self-employed who have National Insurance numbers and by those who have worked in the country for 12 months. The Romanian gangs use a variety of documents to prove adults are eligible for benefits – and then use the trafficked children in this country to boost the claims.

One of the methods is to create companies which are used to certify that an individual is providing services on a self-employed basis. This testimony is used to obtain a National Insurance number, which then provides access to the benefits system. Another method is to falsify immigration papers indicating that the claimant has been in the country for at least five years and has leave to remain, again getting access to the benefits system.

In theory, child benefit and tax credits for children can be claimed even if the children are not in the country. However, the presence of the trafficked child means extra housing benefit and additional tax credits, and helps if any spot checks are conducted by council officials or benefit investigators.

Many of the families who have had their claims rubber-stamped by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) and HM Revenue & Customs have never worked in this country and are not entitled to benefits. Rudimentary checks on documents are partly blamed for the problem, along with the chaos that has bedevilled the tax credit system since its inception. The crime is relatively risk-free and relies on a simple formula: the more people the gang trafficks, the more benefits they get.

Superintendent Bernie Gravett heads Operation Golf, a 14-strong unit investigating trafficking, based at a north London police station and funded with a £1m EU grant. He said: “This is the exploitation of children for criminal gain. They take control of the payment methods and the accounts into which the benefits are paid and a very small percentage occasionally goes to the actual claimants.”

The activities of the gang first came under the spotlight in 2007. The Metropolitan police began an investigation because of concern about the increase in crime involving Romanians after the country’s accession to the EU – more than 1,000 offences were recorded in the first six months of 2007, compared with 168 in the whole of 2006. In January 2008, police made well-publicised raids on 16 addresses used by the traffickers, discovering homes crammed with young children who had been trained in street crime. Four people were subsequently jailed at Reading crown court for child trafficking in the first conviction under the Immigration Act 2004.

Most of the suspected traffickers, however, were left untouched because of the difficulty of pursuing prosecutions for trafficking. Often the parents are complicit and children are unwilling to give evidence.

The Sunday Times last week spoke to one of the children who police believe was trafficked, but she insisted she went to the UK of her own accord. The 15-year-old girl said: “I went to England because I wanted to.” Undeterred, Operation Golf launched an offensive similar to that used to apprehend the Chicago gangster Al Capone, who was eventually jailed for tax evasion in the 1930s. Their aim was to disrupt any of the activities of the Romanian gang and pursue them for every possible offence. It is these tactics that have garnered the new evidence on trafficking for benefit fraud.

One arm of the gang is under investigation for providing forged documents linked to DWP claims worth £4.5m. DWP officials are understood to have identified about 500 suspect claims linked to the gang. In an operation in northeast London on August 11 involving Romanian officers and lawyers, police visited 24 addresses and identified 20 children believed to have been trafficked. They found individual backdated payments for benefits ranging from £14,000 to £24,000, with suspected fraudulent claims totalling £100,000.

Anthony Steen MP, chairman of the UK all-party parliamentary group on trafficking of women and children, who accompanied the police on the operation in Ilford, said: “Our benefits and legal system are not geared for this type of organised crime. The benefits system is being siphoned off by the traffickers using children who are appallingly exploited.”

Detective Inspector Gordon Valentine, head of Operation Paladin, the Metropolitan police’s specialist anti-child-trafficking team, said that while the Romanian gang was highly organised, there was evidence of traffickers from several other countries targeting the benefits system. In one of the few prosecutions to date, Peace Sandberg, a housing official in London, was jailed for 26 months last year for illegally bringing a child into the country. Sandberg paid more than £300 for a three-month-old baby from overseas so she could get priority housing.

The Home Office said it had a number of ways to target the trafficking, which it views as “a modern form of slavery”. This includes £4m of funding for a national referral mechanism to identify trafficking victims. However, HMRC and DWP now face questions about the effectiveness of their checks against organised crime and whether they have adequately assessed the potential threat. DWP said it had amended its system of allocating National Insurance numbers to “provide further safeguards”. HMRC said in a statement that it “takes fraud extremely seriously and has a range of checks in place throughout the period of the claim, including checking the authenticity of documents”. [That it "takes xyz extremely seriously" is the cracked-record response of any British bureaucracy whenever their negligence gets publicized. It is complete bulldust]

SOURCE





22 August, 2009

Britain still ignoring the elephant in the room

TWO elephants actually. The guff below is basically about restricting LEGAL immigration from India -- while Britain's real immigration problem is hordes of ILLEGAL immigrants, mostly from Muslim countries. And once they arrive in Britain, the authorities seem chronically unable to deport them. Even those who have had a court hearing and had residency denied still stay on -- and there are nearly half a million of them. The second elephant is that citizens of other EU countries have an automatic right to settle in Britain and there are lots of them too. And this waltzing around the real problem is not confined to the Labour government. The Tories are just as bad

A report published earlier this week by the UK’s Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) recommended that Britain demand higher standards of skilled workers from outside the EU, thereby tightening rules to ensure that “British workers are not displaced”.

The Migration Advisory Committee (MAC) describes itself as a “non-statutory, non-time-limited, non-departmental public body, sponsored by the UK Border Agency of the Home Office”. Its remit is to provide “independent, evidence-based advice to government on specific sectors and occupations in the labour market where shortages exist which can sensibly be filled by migration”. The British Government may, from time to time, ask the MAC to advise on other matters relating to migration.

Filling skill shortages in domestic labour markets through the controlled immigration of skilled workers has been a longstanding priority of EU lawmakers, and remains one of the Union’s most politically sensitive issues

In its report on the immigration system, launched last November for filling gaps in the labour force, the Migration Advisory Committee recommended minimum pay levels for skilled migrant workers should be raised to avoid undercutting EU workers. It also said jobs should be advertised for twice as long in the UK before employers and agencies are allowed to look for candidates abroad, raising the minimum threshold from two to four weeks; and argued in favour of strengthening arrangements for intra-company transfers. "Our advice to the government is that the labour market could be helped by requiring higher standards from skilled workers outside of the EU before we allow them to work," Chair of the Migration Advisory Committee, Professor David Metcalf, said, who concluded that overall, the system is “working well”.

However, he sounded a cautionary note in the foreword to the report, warning that “any positive narrative surrounding immigration will be undermined unless it can be demonstrated that immigrants are not displacing or undercutting UK workers”.

The immigration debate in Britain has intensified as the UK jobs markets experienced a strong recessionary squeeze in 2009. "Selective immigration that favours skilled workers, as the PBS (points based system) does, is vital to ensure that the UK continues to be a good place to do business or invest. However, it is important that British workers are not displaced," Metcalf concluded.

The MAC’s findings recommended the PBS be altered to prioritise those with a masters’ degree, and also argued for a minimum earning requirement for skilled migrant workers outside of the EU of £20,000 (EUR 23.200), while workers without qualifications should earn at least £32,000 (EUR 37.000). These guidelines reflect, to a large extent, the European Commission’s original proposal for a European “Blue Card” for economic migrants, which suggested that the gross salary for a Blue Card holder must be at least three times the minimum wage in the member state concerned.

This recommendation is likely to prove contentious both in the UK and EU, reviving the debate on whether the level of income that a third-country national will receive in the EU is a sufficiently valid criterion for deciding on the person's value and benefits to the host society.

UK Home Office Minister Lord West responded to the report by arguing that “the Government's points based system has proven itself to be a powerful and flexible tool in meeting the needs of the British workforce and business in these changing economic times”.

However, the Conservative opposition’s Immigration Spokesman Damian Green countered that “the one big gap in the Points Based System is that there is no overall limit on how many permits can be issued in any one year. "This is why the public has a lack of confidence in the immigration system, which people regard as being out of control”. "This is why the public has a lack of confidence in the immigration system, which people regard as being out of control," Conservative immigration spokesman Damian Green said.

"A Conservative Government would introduce an annual limit, so that Britain can continue to attract those who will help our economy without putting too much pressure on our essential public services," he concluded.

SOURCE



All aboard the real ConAir

America's push to get rid of illegal immigrants with criminal records has generated a boom in deportation flights

It's 4.30am and huge spotlights illuminate the runway. A Boeing 737 - 22 years old, paint peeling, no identification - is ready for loading at the cargo area of Houston's George Bush Intercontinental Airport. A group of US federal agents with shotguns stands before a chain-link fence topped with razor wire. These are the visible defences. ''You don't see all the security; that's the point,'' explains Greg Palmore, a veteran agent with America's leading immigration police force, Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Three sleek white buses roll to a stop, the words homeland security written along each side. Steel grates cover the windows, armoured doors and thick glass separate the driver from the 42 prisoner passengers. As I step inside, a roar of thick Spanish accents builds from the back of the bus. ''Yo! I am going to kill yooouuuu!''

"I would rather die of hunger than come back here," says Carlos Rojas, a 25-year-old prisoner, as he is shuffled from the bus on to the plane. He shakes the chains hanging from his waist and legs. ''They have us like dogs. The only thing they didn't do is put a chain around our neck. I know we broke the law, but this is too much.''

For decades local US police did not check on the immigration status of those they arrested. There was no collaboration with immigration police. Now immigration law clause 287(g) allows the deputisation of local police as immigration officers, in effect giving them the power to begin deportation proceedings. The Obama Administration initially suspended the law for 60 days for review, but in June the plan not only resumed but was expanded.

Rojas, from El Salvador, complains of the huge number of raids organised by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ''There are many more raids now. Roadblocks, on the highway, at work - everyone is getting caught.'' This is the result of a strategy to arrest and deport an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants.

Last year 110,000 foreigners were deported after being arrested for crimes. That is expected to increase sharply. Up to 2 million immigrants with criminal records are expected to be deported over the next few years, making a booming business of this reality version of the Hollywood film ConAir.

Many Americans are heartened by what they see as long overdue enforcement of neglected immigration enforcement. But a Human Rights Watch report last year concluded "many of these non-citizens are a far cry from the worst and most violent offenders. Of those who were legally in the country before their criminal conduct, 77 per cent were ultimately deported for non-violent crimes". In a decade-long study of 897,000 deportees, Human Rights Watch found 27,000 deported for assault and nearly 100,000 for drug law violations. The organisation is lobbying to halt deportations to countries of persecution unless the deportee is guilty of particularly serious crime and is dangerous to Americans.

Here at the real ConAir, burly security guards form two rows and search each convict for hidden weapons, including in their mouths. Next to the prisoners are their possessions, reduced to the size of a supermarket carry-bag. One carries a Bible, a toothbrush, letters and a red belt buckle with cow horns raised - testament to a macho swagger reduced to the clank of chains and the shuffle of laceless sneakers. Without belts and shoelaces - removed to avoid suicides - the prisoners' baggy trousers flop like limp sails.

Despite the restraints, one prisoner months earlier broke free and made it across the runway and over the concertina wire. ''We caught him in the woods,'' an agent says.

The plane's itinerary reads like a milk run - hopping around the American south-west, often until there are no seats left. Today's flight starts in Houston, stops in southern Texas, then on to the east coast, where Salvadorean prisoners are loaded aboard like unwanted cargo and shipped home.

On board, prisoners are ordered to stay seated, silent and obedient. The passenger manifest lists each man's most recent crime - drug trafficking, indecency with a child, assault, drunk driving, theft, aggravated assault, sexual assault.

Each prisoner is handcuffed. Chains bind their ankles so tightly they must take baby steps to avoid falling. Another chain hangs around their waist, pulling their hands down so hard they cannot scratch their faces. As the plane thunders down the runway the prisoners scream like children on a rollercoaster - for many, it is their first flight. Some squeeze their eyes shut. Some pray. ''Look how little the cars are,'' says a man charged with armed assault. He is fascinated by the bird's eye view of Houston. ''This is much better than the bus.''

As the flight levels, closely escorted prisoners use the toilet. It is early in the flight and we are full with 124 prisoners - half of them Mexican, half Salvadorean; rival gangs within rival nationalities. The 15 guards are on high alert, though none is allowed to carry a gun. ''It's illegal for us to arrive in a foreign nation with firearms,'' an agent says. Tear gas is impractical. Between the cockpit and the cons is a row of Akal Security guards, seemingly powerful enough to keep the convicts quiet. ''They are very protective of the cockpit,'' the co-pilot assures me.

But the borders are less secure. One prisoner says: ''I will be back here in less than a month. They say that if they catch me again I will get 20 years, but I am still going home.'' ''Home'' is south Texas, which houses a huge Hispanic population, endless rows of taqueria shacks and the poverty-induced chaos that leads to assault and murder.

As the aircraft approaches El Salvador, the men cheer, hoot and celebrate. ''They talk back [to us] and say, 'I'm going home, nothing you can do to me now,''' says Brett Bradford, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent in charge of the flight.

At the airport the criminals are handed to Salvadorean officials. They march down the gangway. The thick, tropical heat is not fresh, but it is welcome. Hands above their heads, the men form a line and walk towards a grove of palm trees. Their slow shuffle and slumped postures belie their determination to promptly remobilise and head back towards the US.

SOURCE





21 August, 2009

Some Hear More PR, Less Policy at White House Immigration Meeting

Business groups, immigrant advocates, labor unions, law enforcement groups and religious organizations were all represented at a big White House meeting Thursday on immigration. And when it ended, some of the nearly 100 attendees left uncertain about what it all meant, or where things were heading.

Some told Washington Wire that they thought the session, hosted by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, was less about policy and more about public relations, especially given that some advocacy groups are growing more and more vocal and more and more unhappy.

Napolitano made an opening statement about broad principles — nothing new there, some attendees said — before the crowd broke into “working groups.” They covered basic ground — how to bring illegal immigrants out from the shadows, how to fashion a potential guest-worker program, how to improve family reunification, and how to develop effective and smart enforcement. Administration note takers scribbled away. Kal Penn, of “Harold and Kumar” fame, who now does public outreach for the White House, talked with attendees.

They came together again at the end, and just when Napolitano indicated she was ready to take questions, President Barack Obama walked into the room — surprise, surprise — and gave a pep talk. With that, the meeting ended, letting Napolitano off the hook. Some advocates had been looking for a chance to vent their dissatisfaction with the administration’s enforcement approach, part of Napolitano’s responsibilities.

Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum, said in a statement afterwards that “pro-reform constituencies are growing impatient.” He said he was pleased to hear Napolitano and Obama reaffirm their support for overhauling immigration laws, but also made it clear he wants to see more vocal leadership from the administration.

Napolitano’s own statement called the meeting “an important opportunity to hear from stakeholders” and build on her meetings with Congress “on this critical subject.” Officials declined to discuss details about the session.

SOURCE



Complex immigration situation in Italy

Many immigrants, legal and illegal, are making a positive contribution and, historically, Italians are racially tolerant (if we disregard North/South animosities) but the Gypsy and African immigrants have got a lot of Italians up in arms over their high level of criminal and antisocial behaviour. Like most Western governments, however, the Italian government feels unable to exclude just those particular groups so applies restrictive measures to all immigrants

Italy's centre-right government has taken a tough stance on immigration, but studies show that foreign workers are playing a growing role not just in providing cheap labour but also as entrepreneurs setting up their own businesses.

According to a report by Caritas/Migrantes, a Catholic organisation, there are almost 4m foreigners living legally in Italy. By 2050, the number is projected to represent 18 per cent of the population. One out of 10 workers in Italy is born abroad and Unioncamere, a business association, estimates that they produce over 9 per cent of gross domestic product.

"A restrictive immigration policy, like the one carried out by our government, is lowering the number of foreign workers and also has the involuntary effect of removing the more qualified ones. The country is trapped in a spiral of strong restrictions, 'bad' immigration and prejudice," economists Paolo Giordani and Michele Ruta wrote for La Voce, a website.

A recent prize ceremony for entrepreneurial immigrants in Italy, hosted by MoneyGram, a US-based money transfer company, featured among its finalists: Marius Tiberius, a Romanian running a wholesale food company; Ivan Cruscov from Bulgaria, for his iron laboratory; Dava Gjoka, an Albanian heading a social co-operative for foreigners; and fashion designer Margarita Perea Sanchez from Colombia.

All of the finalists live in Italy and present a new face of immigration, which is more often characterised by the reports of criminality among foreigners seized upon by extremist politicians. They want to be called "New Italians" not immigrants, and ask for an active role in society, starting from the right to vote in local elections.

There are an estimated 165,000 businesses run by foreign entrepreneurs in Italy. The number has tripled since 2003, making one out of 37 registered and active companies in Italy foreign-owned. Moroccans, Romanians and Chinese are the most active, representing almost 45 per cent of all foreign entrepreneurs.

Over a fifth of foreign-run companies are based in the prosperous region of Lombardy, even though this area is in the heartland of the right-wing Northern League, whose xenophobic tendencies are influential in the centre-right coalition government. The League recently proposed establishing northern dialect tests for school teachers in the north in order to reduce the high number of teachers coming from the south. [The writer has mentioned this to indicate that Italians are generally intolerant, and there is no doubt about the vast contempt most Northern Italians have towards Southern Italians, but the measures proposed by the "Lega Nord per l'Indipendenza della Padania" are not generally supported]

"Immigrant entrepreneurs have an edge over Italians, who see the [financial] crisis as an insurmountable obstacle. They have a different mentality and approach. They fight for the future, while we [Italians] are anchored to the past and stuck in traditional schemes", said Massimo Canovi, a MoneyGram director.

The 2009 winner of the MoneyGram award was Khawatmi Radwan, founder of Hirux International, an electric appliance exporter. From Aleppo in Syria, Mr Radwan has been in Italy since the age of 17 and his Milan-based company has an annual turnover of €60m ($85m, £52m). "Foreign-owned companies always need to be a step ahead, they are subject to more inspections than Italian ones and must invest in innovation," said Mr Radwan.

SOURCE





20 August, 2009

ACLU sues Ariz. sheriff for immigration detentions

The American Civil Liberties Union is accusing Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies of violating the constitution by arresting two men near a workplace immigration raid. A federal lawsuit filed Wednesday alleges that Julian and Julio Mora's truck was stopped as a result of racial profiling on Feb. 11. Deputies were raiding 66-year-old Julian Mora's employer when they arrested the two men and took them to the company's offices.

The suit says Julian Mora is a Mexican citizen who is a legal U.S. resident, and his 19-year-old son, Julio, is a U.S. citizen. Nevertheless, the Hispanic men were handcuffed for more than three hours as deputies questioned dozens of workers.

Arpaio says detentions during such raids are relatively brief given the number of workers who must be screened and the need to keep deputies safe. Arpaio's office has conducted numerous workplace raids in the past two years and made more than 300 arrests.

SOURCE



Visas halting tide of "Czech" refugees, Canadian officials say

Lying Czech Gypsies, to be precise. Sob stories are a Gypsy specialty

A new policy imposing visa requirements on people travelling from the Czech Republic has proven effective - so much so that Canadian officials say they are no longer speaking with Czech authorities about reversing the policy. The number of refugee claims from Czech citizens was reduced to just three in the 30 days since July 16, compared to the 155 claims made in the two weeks prior to the policy taking effect.

"Canada has no plans to revisit the decision to impose a visa," Citizenship and Immigration Department spokesman Nicholas Fortier said Wednesday. "The action has met the policy objective of significantly reducing the number of asylum claims," he said. "That has relieved some of the pressure on the refugee system."

Czech government officials have demanded that the visa requirement be lifted as soon as possible. In recent days, those officials have told media in Prague that there have been regular discussions with Canadian officials in the hope of negotiating an end to the requirement. "We are in daily direct contact with the Canadians on the technical and expert level," Hynek Kmonicek, the Czech deputy foreign minister in charge of consular affairs told the daily Pravo on Saturday. "The goal of these negotiations is to prepare clear, co-ordinated and concrete steps leading to the abolition of the visas," he said.

But as far as Canada is concerned, there have been no such talks, said Fortier. "Canadian and Czech officials are in regular contact on a range of issues," he said. "But officials are not engaged in negotiations or discussions on the visa issue, per se."

Czech and Canadian diplomats, along with officials from the European Commission, the EU's executive, met in late July in Brussels to talk about the restriction. After the meeting, Commission spokesman Michele Cercone said the talks were "extremely constructive" and marked the beginning of "a process which we hope will lead to a quick solution." But no formal talks on the visa issue have taken place since.

Commission officials have called the Canadian visa requirement unacceptable, but had indicated they would not recommend retaliatory measures so long as there was a chance for dialogue.

Czech authorities had hoped the European Union could review Canada's visa policy by as early as mid-September. But it could take up to 90 days for a report to be compiled, meaning the EU council may not see it until mid-to late-October.

Canada issued 2,500 visas to Czech citizens between July 14 and Aug. 7, approving 99.4 per cent of applicants. Only 15 applications were rejected. A further 39 study permits were approved for Czech students entering Canada, with no applicants refused, as well as all 222 applications for work permits. Canada hiked the cost of travel visas for Czech citizens on Aug. 4, to 50 euros from 45, but Fortier said that was a result of fluctuating exchange rates.

Prior to 2007, Czech nationals were previously required to have visas when visiting Canada. But since the restriction was lifted, the number of Czechs filing refugee claims soared to roughly 3,000 last year, compared to just five in all of 2005 when the earlier visa rule was still in effect.

Immigration Minister Jason Kenney has accused some Czech citizens of abusing Canada's generous asylum system by jumping the immigration queue and entering Canada basically as economic migrants. He said that on average, each refugee claim costs Canadian taxpayers $29,000. Canada also imposed visa requirements on Mexican citizens.

SOURCE





19 August, 2009

CIS roundup

1. CIS on the Web:

StumbleUpon Profile

Digg Profile

Youtube Profile

Facebook Page

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2. Jobs Americans Won’t Do? A Detailed Look at Immigrant Employment by Occupation

Excerpt: This analysis tests the often-made argument that immigrants only do jobs Americans don’t want. If the argument is correct, there should be occupations comprised entirely or almost entirely of immigrants. But Census Bureau data collected from 2005 to 2007, which allow for very detailed analysis, show that even before the recession there were only a tiny number of majority-immigrant occupations.

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3. Worse Than It Seems: Broader Measure of Unemployment Shows Bleak Picture

Excerpt: While the current high rate of official unemployment is well known, it only includes those who have looked for work in the last four weeks. There is a broader measure of employment, referred to by the Bureau of Labor Statistics as U-6, which includes the unemployed and people who would like to work, but who have not looked for a job recently, as well as those involuntarily working part-time. This report examines the U-6 measure and finds that things are much worse than the official unemployment numbers imply. The situation is particularly bad for minorities, the young, and less-educated Americans. These are the workers who face the most competition from immigrants - legal and illegal. (All figures in this report are seasonally unadjusted and are from June 2009.)

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4. Amnesty's a Year Away, and Always Will Be

Excerpt: In other words, at least some Hispanic pressure groups are playing a long game by outlining ahead of time the story line that the shellacking Democrats are likely to face — first this November in N.J. and Va. and then next November nationwide — is due to the party's insufficient attention to Hispanic demands. In fact, many of the Hispanic groups already believe they're responsible for Obama's election in the first place, despite the fact that he would have won even if not a single Hispanic had voted.

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5. Who Counts?

Excerpt: While reflecting on a recent Quebec meal of french fries bathed in cheese and gravy (who thought that up, anyway?), I read the Wall Street Journal piece linked in the web briefing about the harmful effects of counting illegal aliens in next year's decennial census for the purposes of congressional (and state legislative) apportionment. For details on which states won and lost from the inclusion of illegal (and legal) immigrants in the past two censuses, see my colleagues' work on this (here, here, and here).

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6. “Hidden Cameras on the Arizona Border”: Recent Developments

Excerpt: Since the July 15, 2009, posting of the Center for Immigration Studies’ video, “Hidden Cameras on the Arizona Border: Coyotes, Bears, and Trails,' a lot has happened. None of it can be claimed to have been caused by the video, but there has been an interesting uptick in events in Washington and on the southeast Arizona border since its posting. While each of the events involving the federal government has acquired a hue of spin or premeditated silence, it does seem that a change is a coming – if the pressure keeps mounting. The Border Patrol is ramping up, the Forest Service has closed off some of the worst illegal layup areas due to potential bear encounters, and Congress is asking a lot of questions.

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7. Crime and Economic Punishment in the State of Zacatecas

Excerpt: For years, the economy of the north central Mexican state of Zacatecas has grown increasingly dependent on remittances sent home by sons and daughters living in the United States. Many of the migrants boosted the economy by building homes in their native towns. They returned at Christmas time on the feast days of the local patron saint. Many dreamed of retiring to the place where they had grown up.

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8. Corruption as Convention

Excerpt: In the midst of the debate over state-run health care comes news that blames the steady influx of immigrants for a rise in Medicare fraud.

A top investigator at the Department of Justice tells the Houston Chronicle, 'There's a real problem of health care fraud in recent immigrant communities—we see it every day,' the official said. 'One of the reasons is you're looking at people who don't come up through the educational system, they're impoverished, they think this country is very rich, and they don't view taking advantage of a government program as a crime.'

The statistics on immigrant criminality are incomplete and unreliable, providing a muddled picture at best. But qualitative observation may lend credence to the DOJ official's claim.

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9. New Film Explores Collision of Cultures in California

Excerpt: Mexican director Amat Escalante says 'Los Bastardos,' his stunningly violent new movie about two Mexican illegal immigrants in the uncaring world of California, grew out of his own experiences living there as a child.

'The story comes from this uneasiness I have because of living there for a long time, and from wanting to show how these two cultures could come to collide and to break down in some way,' Escalante says in today's edition of the Mexico City newspaper Reforma.

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. For more information, contact Steven Camarota at (202) 466-8185 or sac@cis.org.



Fresh fight looms over immigration

Obama puts off overhaul; supporters call it 'betrayal'

With President Obama putting off the immigration reform debate until next year, immigrant rights groups are pushing the administration to suspend tough enforcement practices so illegal immigrants aren't punished under the current system.

While acknowledging the need for an overhaul, Mr. Obama last week acknowledged during a visit to Mexico that his agenda is too full and said a solution will have to wait until next year at the earliest -- a backtrack from his campaign pledge to sign a bill in 2009.

With immigration reform slipping away, rights groups have begun to use words such as "betrayal" in describing how they feel they are faring under the Obama administration, and several have said the only interim solution would be to suspend some enforcement so illegal immigrants don't get caught up in a system that advocates contend is broken.

"While a delay in enacting immigration reform is far from ideal, there are immediate actions that the Obama administration can take to ameliorate the human suffering caused by the misguided focus on failed enforcement measures," said Oscar Chalon, executive director of the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities.

The White House referred questions about halting or modifying enforcement to the Department of Homeland Security, where Secretary Janet Napolitano has been fielding questions about the administration's approach as she travels the country.

In an address at a border conference last week, Ms. Napolitano seemed to pour cold water on the calls for leniency.

"Our job is to enforce the laws that we have now, to do it intelligently, to do it with well-trained professionals who are well-supervised," she said. "We will enforce this law smartly and intelligently, and if and when -- and I believe it is when -- the law changes, we will be prepared to enforce that law as well."

She defended the use of a program of electronic worker verification, known as e-verify, to track illegal immigration and said using local police to enforce the laws under a program known as 287(g) is worthwhile, though she said Mr. Obama has added more accountability to the program than existed in the previous administration.

Mr. Obama has been walking a tightrope on the issue after winning a large majority of Hispanic votes in the 2008 election. He has stepped up some enforcement measures even as he says he wants a solution that would include legalization of illegal immigrants. But he also has pushed back the timetable for action until next year at the earliest, saying immigration is in line behind "a pretty big stack of bills."

What those interim steps should be depends on one's point of view.

More HERE





18 August, 2009

New ICE head vows efficient immigration enforcement

John T. Morton, in Los Angeles for a tour, says focus for new administration will be on employers of illegal immigrants



In his first Southern California tour, the new head of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement touted what he called a more efficient strategy to target those in the country illegally and the employers who hire them.

John T. Morton, in Los Angeles today for a meet-and-greet with local media, plans to meet with local law enforcement officials, immigration advocates and others on his way to San Diego. "We're far better off if we have open communication with people who care about what we do," said Morton, who has already met with Mexican leaders. "… They have an important perspective."

Morton, appointed three months ago to assistant secretary of Homeland Security for ICE, held a variety of positions at the Department of Justice and former immigration and Naturalization Service before taking the helm.

Perhaps the biggest shift under the new administration is refocusing immigration enforcement's aim on worksite enforcement, Morton said.

The emphasis will be on planned audits of employers who hire illegal workers on a large scale, not the immigration raids done under the previous administration that targeted employees more than their employers, Morton said. "If you're going to make real change you need to focus on employers," he said. "If you're going to have real change you need to make sure that the worksite community is complying with the laws."

Morton also mentioned the Secure Communities program -- a national program that runs the fingerprints of inmates through federal databases in the hopes of finding suspected criminals who may be in the country illegally. So far only a handful of counties in California, including Ventura, are using the program. A roll-out will become available for Orange County some time in the future but no date has been set. "We're focusing on the worst of the worse… we're focusing on those who are more serious offenders," Morton said.

Morton emphasized that agents will still enforce the law. That means those in the country illegally without criminal convictions will still be eligible for deportation but not a priority for the agency.

He said the Secure Communities program is a more technologically savvy version of the 287G program, which essentially deputizes local law enforcement to conduct immigration enforcement. The new program may eventually lessen the need for the current program in such places as the Orange County Sheriff's Department jail.

The communities program will likely net more people who are in the country illegally than the current 287G program, he said. However, some critics say it has been difficult to deport everyone who is identified in areas that already have the program up and running. "The reality of the situation is that we don't presently have resources to respond to every single person we've identified," Morton said.

In addition, Morton made it a point to reiterate what he said during his confirmation hearings about quotas for illegal immigrant detainees some officials had set within the agency. "We don't have quotas anymore," he said. "I don't think law enforcement programs should be based on hard numbers at the end of the day."

SOURCE



Immigration and the U.S. Labor Force

Two New Studies Examine Economics of Immigration

The two reports released today by the Center for Immigration Studies provide detailed information on the U.S. labor force. The first, entitled “Jobs Americans Don’t Do?,” provides a detailed look at the concentration of immigrants across the 465 occupations that comprise the U.S.-labor market. The second report, entitled “Worse Than It Seems,” examines the broader measure of unemployment, referred to by the government as U-6, which includes the unemployed and people who would like to work but have not looked for a job recently, as well as those working part-time who want full-time work.

Among the findings:

* Of the 465 civilian occupations, only four are majority immigrant. These four occupations account for less than one percent of the total U.S. workforce. Moreover, even in these four occupations, native-born Americans comprise 47% of workers.

* Many jobs often thought to be overwhelmingly immigrant are in fact majority native-born:

o Maids and housekeepers: 55 percent native-born.
o Taxi drivers and chauffeurs: 58 percent native-born.
o Butchers and meat processors: 63 percent native-born.
o Grounds maintenance workers: 65 percent native-born.
o Construction laborers: 65 percent native-born.
o Porters, bellhops and concierges: 71 percent native-born.
o Janitors: 75 percent native-born.

* Immigrants tend to be concentrated in occupations that are primarily, but not exclusively, lower wage jobs that require relatively little formal education.

* In June 2009, the official unemployment rate for native-born Americans was 9.7 percent, but the broader U-6 measure was 16.3 percent. The U-6 measure includes people who would like to work but have not looked for a job recently, as well as those working part-time involuntarily.

* There are 12.7 million unemployed native-born Americans, but using the U-6 measure the number is 21.7 million.

* The unemployment rate for native-born Americans with less than a high school education is 20.8 percent. Their U-6 measure is 33.2 percent.

* The unemployment rate for young native-born Americans (18-29) who have only a high school education is 18.5 percent. Their U-6 measure is 30.3 percent.

* The unemployment rate for native-born blacks with less than a high school education is 27.5 percent. Their U-6 measure is 42 percent.

* The unemployment rate for young, native-born blacks (18-29) with only a high school education is 25.8 percent. Their U-6 measure is 37.4 percent.

* The unemployment rate for native-born Hispanics with less than a high school education is 22.6 percent. Their U-6 measure is 36.5 percent.

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. For more information, contact Steven Camarota at (202) 466-8185 or sac@cis.org.





17 August, 2009

Sheriff Joe creates jobs for Americans

Sheriff’s deputies received information Thursday that approximately 10 to 15 Royal Paper employees, who were subjects of an ID theft investigation, called in sick for work as deputies were conducting a workplace raid at the Royal Paper Company in South Phoenix.

Those employees were scheduled to work later in the day at the second location of 4949 West Lower Buckeye Road that was hit hours after the initial search warrant was served at 711 N. 17th Avenue.

Arpaio says, “This investigation is far from over. I would hope that this Phoenix based company concentrates on hiring people who are legal to work in this country in light of the current economic situation.”

As information of the Sheriff’s Office raid hit local news broadcasts, people began showing up at Royal paper looking for jobs.

“This proves again that people in this country legally are willing to do jobs that many politicians claim they will not do. President Obama and Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napalitano feel that law enforcement should concentrate their enforcement efforts on employers not employees. I feel that we need to enforce all illegal immigration laws.” Arpaio says.

This investigation of Royal Paper marks the 23rd conducted by the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office that has resulted in the arrest of 311 illegal aliens. Yesterday’s raid netted Sheriff’s deputies 44 illegal aliens, 34 of which were for felony ID theft.

Deputies are still looking for another 60 suspects they believe have been employed by Royal Paper using false identification.

“We have potentially created over 300 jobs for legal residents of this country because of these types of investigations. Those are real numbers, not like the estimates that you get out of Washington DC when attempting to justify claims on the success of the recent stimulus bill.” Arpaio says.

Sheriff’ deputies tracked down one suspect at her home near 75th Avenue and Camelback after learning that she had called in sick that day. She was booked into the county jail on forgery and identity theft charges.

Deputy Lt. Joe Sousa said “I can only imagine that these people were watching the news during the initial raid and decided not to come to work.”

SOURCE



A curious story

How Islamist author got past US immigration. A bit hard to believe. Perhaps the guy goes in for fiction as well

Hong Kong: Pakistan-born Islamist scholar and writer Ziauddin Sardar isn't, of course, half as recognisable as actor Shah Rukh Khan. And yet back in 2002, when the London-based co-author of -- among other books -- Why Do People Hate America? was asked to step away from the immigration queue at New York and subjected to an identity check, Sardar had a fairly unique experience.

Here's his account, in his own words: "The book Why do People Hate America? came out in March 2002, barely six months after the 9/11 terrorist attack. It is an exploration of the reasons for anti-American sentiments in many parts of the Islamic world, and I travelled to the US in April 2002 to promote it.

My American publisher came all the way to London to take me back with him. He was understandably nervous, given the atmosphere at that time, and told me, "While at the immigration counter, whatever you do, don't say you're the author of Why Do People Hate America?"

We got to New York, and when my passport was presented to the immigration officer, he asked me where I was born. "In Pakistan," I responded. He said, "Oh! You'll have to take a bit of a detour, I'm afraid."

The officer then called someone else, and my passport was put in a bag, and I was marched off to a small room on the side. At the head of a room there was a platform, and there was a big-built guy with a crew-cut, who looked like a caricature of the conservative right-wing nut. Things didn't look too good.

My passport was given to him, and I was told to sit down. For over an hour he tried to match my photograph against an online database -- perhaps of suspected terrorists -- but of course nothing turned up. After an hour, another man came in with a wad of photocopies with more photographs of suspected terrorists. I watched helplessly as the big-built man began matching my photos with those on each of those photocopies, one after another.

I realised this could take hours, so I went up to him, and said, "Sir, this could take very long, and you don't really need to do that. You know, I am a very famous man!" He looked at me quizzically and said, "What do you mean?" I told him that I was an author and media personality and that in London, where I appeared on TV frequently, people would recognise me wherever I went.

He mulled on this, and then asked me if I had a website. I said I didn't have a personal website, but that if he Googled my name, he would get many results. "How many hits will I get?" he asked me. I responded that depending on the day, he would get up to half a million results. He Googled my name -- and of course the first result that popped up said I was the author of Why Do People Hate America?

He asked me, "Did you write this book?" I responded that I had indeed. To which he said: "Why didn't you say so in the first place? We could have sorted it out rightaway... And as for your book, I can't believe it has taken so long for people to hate America!" He then stamped my passport, and said, "Off you go!" and off I went.

SOURCE





16 August, 2009

Illegal Immigration Enters the Health-Care Debate

In California, Funding Is at Stake for a Clinic That Treats Patients No Matter Their Status; An Issue 'No One Wants to Touch'

A health clinic in this blue-collar city north of Oakland, partly funded by the county, is saving local hospitals thousands of dollars in emergency-room visits by treating uninsured patients who suffer only non-urgent ailments. A watchdog group is now calling on county officials to cut funding for clinic patients who can't prove they are in the U.S. legally, a debate certain to surface in the national health-care overhaul.

With congressional proposals already stirring raw emotions, few supporters are eager to add the incendiary issue of illegal immigration. A provision in the House's health-care-overhaul bill rules out federal funding for illegal immigrants.

But in many ways, illegal immigration is at the nexus of two key health issues: the uninsured and ballooning costs. Roughly half of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. don't have health insurance, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group. Like others who can't afford medical care, illegal immigrants tend to flock to hospital emergency rooms, which, under a 1986 law, can't turn people away, even if they can't pay. Emergency-room visits, where treatment costs are much higher than in clinics, jumped 32% nationally between 1996 and 2006, the latest data available.

The role illegal immigrants play in U.S. health-care costs is "one hot button that no one wants to touch," says Stephen Zuckerman, an economist at the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.

Sutter Solano Medical Center Chief Executive Terry Glubka wasn't looking to enter the immigration debate when she started lobbying for a clinic in 2006. She was trying to balance her hospital's budget. Between 2000 and 2006, Solano County saw a 13.1% increase in total emergency-room visits, more than twice the state average. Nearly 80% of the visits weren't urgent. During 2006, the hospital had to write off $12 million in "charity care" -- or services provided to low-income patients who couldn't pay their bills. The charity helped create a $4 million budget shortfall that year. "They were getting the most-expensive care for what should be treated in a primary-care facility," Ms. Glubka says.

She began shopping the idea of a clinic for low-income residents. Sutter and another nearby hospital, Kaiser Permanente Medical Center, each committed $100,000 annually over three years. Solano County's board of supervisors voted 5-0 in 2008 to contribute $250,000. Ms. Glubka enlisted the help of La Clínica de La Raza Inc., a network of 27 nonprofit community clinics in the San Francisco Bay Area. The clinic opened last November, down the street from Sutter hospital.

Sutter hospital's emergency-room staff now refer about 60 patients a month to La Clínica. With a basic examination at Sutter hospital costing about $500 -- and often going unpaid by poor patients -- that is the equivalent of $30,000 in routine emergency-visit charges that would otherwise be written off as charity. La Clínica charges $85.50 per consultation; low-income patients are charged less. "If we didn't have La Clínica, we'd be in much worse shape," says Angie Hammons, Sutter's emergency-room manager.

About two-fifths of the clinic's patients are Hispanic, while about a quarter of the patients are African-American; one-fifth are white. Along with their medical history, new patients are asked their income to determine what pay on a sliding fee scale. As in emergency rooms, patients aren't asked about their immigration status. Costs at such primary-care centers are probably 10% to 15% the cost of treatment in a hospital emergency room, says Paul Mango, head of the health-care practice at McKinsey & Co.

Residents have since complained to a 19-member county-appointed watchdog group about taxpayer money La Clínica going to health care for people living in the U.S. illegally. Neither the clinic nor the Sutter emergency room ask people their immigration status. "All we can ask them is their name, date of birth and chief complaint," says Ms. Hammons, the Sutter emergency-department manager. "Heavens, we don't deny anybody treatment. You are required to see anyone who shows up at the emergency department."

Mike Reagan, a Solano County supervisor who originally voted for the clinic's funding, now says the facility should erect a "firewall" to prevent taxpayer money from going to illegal immigrants. "I'm not in favor of rewarding illegal behavior in any form," he says. The report from the watchdog, released three weeks ago, recommends that Solano County require that public contributions to the clinic "be limited to serving only Solano County residents who have proof of citizenship or legal residency."

The county's board of supervisors and health director have 90 days to respond. County health director Patrick Duterte says he is bent on keeping the clinic open. "My position is that to have a healthy community we can't have a subset of people who don't have access to health care," says Mr. Duterte. "It's bad public-health policy." Health experts say that giving undocumented immigrants medical care can prevent the spread of illnesses. Meantime, the clinic has extended its hours to keep pace with swelling demand. "We're swamped," says Monique Sims, the clinic's manager.

SOURCE



A Muslim country with a refugee problem

Malaysia is prosperous because of its legacy of British traditions (legal system etc.) and because the population is 30% Chinese -- and they run nearly all the businesses. The refugees from Myanmar (Burma) definitely are real refugees though. Its military government has made it a bit of a hellhole and there are ethnic clashes as well. So we have Buddhists languishing in a predominantly Muslim country. Most of the Chinese Malaysians are Buddhists too, however

A growing number of immigrants from Myanmar are ending up stuck, often for months, in crowded detention centers in Malaysia designed to hold people for only a few weeks. Almost 2,800 Myanmarese were detained at camps in July, more than double the 1,200 in January, partly because of a crackdown on human trafficking, a step-up in raids and a slow economy that leaves the migrants without jobs. People from Myanmar, a desperately poor country with a military junta, are now the biggest group among the 7,000 foreigners at detention centers in Malaysia.

At a center near the Kuala Lumpur International Airport, some 120 men sat in neat rows on the floor. Many had their legs drawn to their chests, and all were barefoot. There was not enough space and not enough bedding. "There is no soap for taking a shower, nothing. They don't give us anything," said Kyaw Zin Lin, 23, who said he fled to avoid being drafted into the Myanmar army. "Every day we eat the food just to survive. ... They treat us like animals." "It's very difficult to stay here," said Aung Kuh The, a pale 26-year-old. "We have got a lot of problems. Some people, you know, we want to see the doctor but we don't have the chance."

One reason for the rise in detainees is a crackdown on trafficking. A report published in April by the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations cited firsthand accounts of Myanmarese who said immigration officers turned them over to traffickers. That practice has all but stopped, Myanmar community leaders in Malaysia say. Now, though, the Myanmarese are trapped in detention. The Myanmar embassy often takes six months to register its citizens for deportation and charges them 620 ringgit ($180), much more than neighboring Indonesia. By contrast, detainees from other countries are typically deported within a week. Calls to the Myanmar embassy were repeatedly put on hold and then unanswered.

About half the Myanmarese — those fleeing persecution — may qualify for U.N. refugee status, but that process takes up to four months. The others are economic migrants. Some 140,000 Myanmarese work in Malaysia, but foreign workers who are laid off lose the right to stay.

Some Myanmarese have spent more than six months in crowded, dirty detention centers. One man, whose brother was in detention for four months, said he would rather be sold to traffickers from whom he could buy his freedom. "I prefer to be trafficked," said the man, who would only be identified by his nickname, Ryan, to protect his relatives in Myanmar. "I don't mind paying 2,000 ringgit ($570)." Five of Malaysia's 13 detention centers are overcrowded; four of the five have large Myanmarese populations, according to the immigration department.

Journalists from The Associated Press accompanied the human rights group Amnesty International on a rare visit recently to three detention centers just south of Kuala Lumpur, the country's biggest city. At the Lenggeng Detention Depot, 1,400 people are crammed into dormitories meant for 1,200. Of them about 300 are from Myanmar. [Most of the rest are from Indonesia, I understand]

Hundreds of men jostle each other for room in the bare dormitories. One sleeps on a stone ledge in a bathroom. Each dormitory is fenced by wire mesh and barbed wire, giving detainees just a few meters (feet) of space for walking. "The detention centers we saw fell short of international standards in many respects, as the immigration authorities themselves acknowledge," said Michael Bochenek of Amnesty International. "It's a facility of such size that infectious diseases are communicated readily."

Saw Pho Tun, a refugee community leader, said some immigration officers have singled out Myanmarese detainees for rough treatment, beating them and not allowing them medical assistance. Immigration officials deny beating detainees and say everyone has access to medical care.

On July 1, detainees at another center flung their food trays and damaged some of the mesh fence. Immigration officials blamed the riot on frustration about having to stay so long, but detainees say they rioted because they were afraid of abuse. Most of the blocks have now been shut for repairs, so more than 1,000 detainees — including 700 from Myanmar — were transferred ot other already crowded centers.

Abdul Rahman Othman, the director general of the Immigration Department, said he was taking steps to prevent his officers from being "entangled" in trafficking syndicates. He said officers would be rotated to different posts every three years and have a buddy system to supervise each other. "Ninety-nine percent of us in immigration are good people," he said, denying the problem is widespread.

Police arrested five officers on trafficking allegations last month. They say their investigations revealed immigration officials took Myanmar immigrants to the Thai border and sold them for up to 600 ringgit ($170) to traffickers. The traffickers then told the migrants to pay 2,000 ringgit ($570) for their freedom, or they would be forced to work in the fishing industry, police said. Myanmar community leaders said women who failed to pay were sold into prostitution.

SOURCE





15 August, 2009

Mr. President, We Are Not Demagogues -- Please Talk With Us

A message from Roy Beck

In Mexico, Pres. Obama called us a bad name. He was using his appearance in a foreign country to promise that he is determined early next year to "legalize" 12-20 million illegal aliens and put them on a path to U.S. citizenship. He made it pretty clear that he has a lot more admiration for citizens of other countries who break our immigration laws than he does for his own fellow citizens who oppose a blanket amnesty. The New York Times reported that Mr. Obama said:

(There almost certainly will be) demagogues out there who try to suggest that any form or pathway for legalization for those who are already in the United States is unacceptable.

-- Pres. Obama

Is it possible that Mr. Obama was using the term in its second definition? If so, he was saying that those of us who oppose amnesty are:

A leader championing the cause of the common people in ancient times.

-- Merriam-Webster's 2nd definition of "demagogue"

Well, we at NumbersUSA truly believe that our leadership -- and that of a mobilized grassroots -- in keeping the 2006 amnesty off the House floor and in defeating the 2007 amnesty in the Senate was clearly championing the cause of the common people. But that very positive definition seems to only be applicable "in ancient times."

No, I think when the word "demagogues" rolled off his tongue in this modern time, his erudite brain was operating in Merriam-Webster's first definition:

A leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power.

-- Merriam-Webster's 1st definition of "demagogue"

Mr. President, we need to talk. If you think that our concerns about what an amnesty would do to America's most vulnerable workers and communities are based solely on prejudices and false claims, you obviously know nothing about us -- and perhaps very little about the complexities of the immigration issue.

While there may be many on our side of the issue who despise the millions of foreign workers who illegally take U.S. jobs, I believe most anti-amnesty Americans are like NumbersUSA in bearing no great ill will toward them. Our reasons for opposing amnesty are not based on our dislike of illegal aliens but on our concern for and good will toward our fellow Americans.

You indicated in Mexico that you believe the chief concern should be for fairness for the illegal aliens:

But ultimately, I think the American people want fairness. And we can create a system in which you have strong border security and an orderly process for people to come in. But we’re also giving an opportunity for those who are already in the United States to be able to achieve a pathway to citizenship so they don’t have to live in the shadows.

-- Pres. Obama

I really have not seen any sign that you understand our concern for the fairness to the millions of jobless Americans who have relatively the same education and skill levels as the illegal aliens and who would not be facing the foreclosure of their homes and other economic crises if your predecessors had stopped unscrupulous employers from hiring illegal workers.

Let me explain this to you or your people. NumbersUSA has sought a chance to do this all year, just like you have allowed the pro-amnesty and pro-foreign-worker groups to do. Even the open-border Pres. Bush allowed us to do that.

Mr. President, we are not demagogues. Our claims may be different than yours, but they are not false. We are driven by many of the same high principles that you stated in your campaign for the Presidency: economic justice, environmental sustainability, concern for the well-being of people in the poorest countries of the world.

Let us explain why we think the "comprehensive immigration reform" that you have promised works against all three of those principles. And we will listen respectfully to your reactions.

The officials of your Administration have spent much time this last week calling for civil discussions of the hottest issues of the day. Labeling us as demagogues does not promote civil discussion. Your Administration's refusal to meet with us does not promote civil discussion. When can we start?

SOURCE



Europe's Invasion By Immigration

by Cal Thomas

The Daily Telegraph's headline is meant to shock, or at least get the attention of Europeans apathetic about the threat they face: "A Fifth of European Union Will Be Muslim by 2050."

In a related article "Muslim Europe: the Demographic Time Bomb Transforming Our Continent," The Telegraph's lead sentence summarizes the problem: "Britain and the rest of the European Union are ignoring a demographic time bomb: a recent rush into the EU by migrants, including millions of Muslims, will change the continent beyond recognition over the next two decades, and almost no policymakers are talking about it."

The late British parliamentarian Enoch Powell warned more than 40 years ago that Britain had to be mad to allow in 50,000 dependents of immigrants every year. Powell, who was denounced as a racist and a xenophobe by the intellectual elites, compared it to watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

In retrospect, Powell looks like a prophet. According to Oxford demographer David Coleman, Britain's non-white population is on course "to grow from 9 percent at the last census in 2001 to 29 percent by the year 2051." Coleman estimates that if Britain continues at its current level of immigration -- 191,000 per year by 1999 reports -- its population could increase by 15 million by 2050, which will bring change most Britons don't believe in.

In his new book, "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West," Financial Times and Weekly Standard columnist Christopher Caldwell lays out in undisputable terms and with irrefutable facts the threat faced by the West. He says it is worse than anything al-Qaida can deliver. Caldwell cites numerous reasons for the predicament faced by Europe (and the United States), including the idea of a European Union, which is quickly eliminating individual identity, culture and money (the one size fits all Euro). Without an identifiable culture, immigrants cannot be assimilated, even if they want to be, which in the case of radical Muslims, argues Caldwell, they don't.

In addition to massive immigration, Caldwell says, the high birth rate among immigrants, coupled with the low birth rate among white Europeans (barely enough in some countries to replace those who are dying) means that soon 20 percent of Europe's population would be Muslim.

The rapid population change, writes Caldwell, is startling when you consider that as recently as the mid-20th century there were virtually no Muslims in Western Europe. At the turn of this century, there were between 15 million and 17 million Muslims in Western Europe, including 5 million in France, 4 million in Germany and 2 million in Britain. What is the attraction of these countries, which to some Islamic minds are full of idolatry, hedonism and secularism? All one need do is listen to the radical sermons and the vitriolic statements of certain Islamic leaders and spokesmen and to the radical Islamic media. They say their goal is to subjugate Europe and America to their religion.

At a recent conference near Chicago called "The Fall of Capitalism and the Rise of Islam," Imam Jaleel Abdul Razek responded to a question from the audience about whether the U.S. Constitution or Sharia law should rule the United States when Islam is in control. Razek said Sharia would rule and that the Constitution would have to go.

Caldwell writes that uncontrolled immigration without assimilation "exacts a steep price in freedom. The multiculturalism that has been Europe's main way of managing mass immigration requires the sacrifice of liberties that natives once thought of as rights."

Those who support immigration without assimilation claim the West needs more brainy people to run their computers and discover cures for diseases. Why can't our school systems produce more intelligent people without having to import them? More than "brains" are coming to the West. Those with a radical theological and political agenda are infiltrating us more effectively than our enemies of the 20th century ever dreamed of doing.

Twice in the last century America has delivered Europe from homegrown evil. It won't be able to do so again when that evil is imported and when America is dealing with immigration problems of its own.

SOURCE





14 August, 2009

Canadian immigration expected to fast-track certain applicants

A new proposal regarding Canadian immigration is expected to fast-track people making a visa application from counties that are generally deemed safe.

In an attempt to speed up the laborious and lengthy process that is Canadian immigration, the Conservative party are pushing for a reform to make the Canada visa system more similar to the British.

The reform, if it passes, will change the system so that visa applicants from countries that are generally deemed “safe” will be able to enter the county much more quickly, freeing up resources to allow other applicants to also have their visa application judged more quickly. The reform will allow Immigration Officers to make a judgement on the claims instead of the Immigration and Refugee board.

Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney would not comment on the details of what the reform would include, but he did describe the fast-track proposal. He said the fast-track reform is: “One dominant idea that has been proposed that I think is worth consideration. The reality is there's been, for good reason, a great deal of caution from successive governments about this issue.”

SOURCE



Napolitano on immigration: We’re not Bush

In announcing a $30 million border security plan Tuesday, she sought to emphasize how the administration is shifting priorities

Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Tuesday pledged $30 million in grants to shore up security along America's increasingly violent Southwest border. "At the top of our border security mission is combating violence by Mexico-based drug cartels," said Secretary Napolitano at the annual Border Security Conference in El Paso, Texas.

The $30 million grants will be spread across states that border Mexico and be on top of $60 million given in June to Southwestern states as part of Operation Stonegarden, a program started in 2005 to provide states with federal money to bolster border security.

The announcement comes on the heels of a two-day summit between North American leaders in Mexico that focused on issues of border security and immigration. One of the major issues of that forum was the ongoing drug war in Mexico that is increasing pressure on law enforcement in both the US and Mexico. Yet President Obama also announced at the summit that he would tackle comprehensive immigration reform next year – even though many Hispanic advocacy groups have been pressing the administration to act sooner.

In the context of this disappointment, Napolitano sought to emphasize how the Obama administration is already deviating from immigration policies followed by the Bush administration.

• The Obama administration has revised controversial 287g rules that allow local law enforcement officials to track illegal immigrants and arrest them on minor infractions. Now the government wants police to focus on nabbing immigrants wanted for serious offenses.

• The administration is also revamping immigration detention programs. "These major changes in detention ... will result in a system that deals with detainees in an efficient, transparent, and humane manner," she said.

• In addition, the administration is focusing more on the demand side of the illegal immigration problem, Napolitano said. Immigration and Customs Enforcement issued inspection notices to 652 suspected businesses nationwide on July 2 – more notices than were issued in the entire previous year, she added.

But these new policies have already drawn fire from both immigration advocacy groups and some in law enforcement. "If I'm told not to enforce immigration law except if the alien is a violent criminal, my answer to that is we are still going to do the same thing, 287g or not," Joe Arpaio, an Arizona sheriff, told The Wall Street Journal last month.

Some Hispanic advocacy groups say that 287g still gives police too much power, essentially giving them a green light to racially profile. Marielena Hincapie, executive director of the National Immigration Law Center, said she had hoped the Obama administration would do away with 287g altogether.

But, that said, she still sees a dramatic difference between Obama and Bush when it comes to enforcing immigration law. Gone are the massive roundups of illegal workers and raids on immigrant households, she says.

Obama recently told a group of Hispanic reporters at the White House that he was "less concerned with making criminals out of people who are simply looking for jobs" and that while he has extended 287g, it is being carried out under a "new set of priorities and rules."

SOURCE





13 August, 2009

Are many Brits too lazy to work?

A lot of employers seem to think so. Britain does after all have a welfare state which sometimes means that you are better off not working. So many firms are looking to hire migrants even as British job losses rocket

Companies are planning to hire more migrant workers even as Britain's jobless toll rises by almost 3,000 a day, a new survey shows. Nearly one firm in 12 aims to take on immigrants because they cannot find suitably qualified Britons, according to the report. The hiring plans are revealed in the survey by the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) and accountants KPMG.

It comes as official figures are expected to show the number of unemployed rose 250,000 in the three months to June. This would take unemployment above 2.5 million, with further job losses to follow in the coming months.

The survey shows that 8 per cent of employers intend to recruit migrant workers in the third quarter of 2009. Some bosses said this is because they find migrants more 'hardworking and reliable', while others said they tend to be better qualified. This comes after official figures showed the number of non-UK nationals in employment increased in the first quarter of 2009 while the number of UK nationals fell. The survey undermines controversial claims by Gordon Brown that he wants 'British jobs for British workers'.

The CIPD said Labour was failing to ensure that large sections of the British-born population have the right skills to compete in the jobs market. Gerwyn Davies, public policy adviser at the CIPD, said: 'The best way to provide "British jobs for British workers" is to make Brits better equipped to compete in the jobs market rather than raise barriers to skilled migrants. 'Most are recruited and retained by employers because they provide skills or attitudes to work in short supply among the homegrown workforce.'

Economist Howard Archer, of IHS Global Insight, said the jobless pain will be particularly acute for young UK school and university leavers. He forecasts unemployment will peak at 3.2 million next year. 'Even if the economy does return to growth in the third quarter, activity is still unlikely to be strong enough for some considerable time to come to prevent further net job losses,' he said.

Meanwhile, the Department for Work and Pensions has started an inquiry into why there is a large gap between the unemployment rate, which stands at 7.6 per cent, and the proportion of the population claiming Jobseeker's Allowance, which is 4.8 per cent. There was speculation that this is partly because some of those being laid off are well-paid City workers, while others might not have claimed benefits if they were hoping to get another job quickly.

SOURCE



Arlen Specter Promises to Oppose Health Care Reform that Covers Illegal Aliens

During a town hall meeting Tuesday on health care reform, Senator Arlen Specter (D-Pa.) stated his opposition to legislation that would cover illegal aliens. Specter has been a long-time champion of amnesty for illegal aliens, he was the author of the 2006 amnesty bill (S. 2611) that was widely rejected by the American people. Specter's opposition to including illegal aliens under the proposed reforms is a clear indication of how strongly the public opposes the idea.

Facing constituents in Lebanon, Pennsylvania, yesterday, Specter said he "wouldn't support a bill that extends coverage to illegal immigrants." However, Specter went on to state erroneously that "none of the bills in Congress would provide health insurance to illegal immigrants."

A detailed analysis by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) of the America's Affordable Health Care Act of 2009, H.R. 3200, reveals that illegal aliens would be eligible for government provided insurance, and could easily obtain government "affordability credits" to buy private insurance. An amendment that would have effectively prevented illegal aliens from receiving these benefits was blocked by Democrats on the House Ways & Means Committee. FAIR's analysis of the provisions of H.R. 3200 that pertain to illegal aliens can be found at www.fairus.org.

"FAIR commends Sen. Specter for opposing this costly benefit for illegal aliens," said Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "Illegal aliens and their dependent children account for as much as one-third of the medically uninsured in the U.S. Including them under the plan is unwarranted and would add billions to the price tag. We hope that the senator will use his influence in Congress to ensure that deliberate omissions and loopholes, like those in the House bill, that allow illegal aliens to benefit from taxpayer funded health care, will be corrected in the Senate."

The concerns raised by constituents at the Lebanon town hall meeting reflect the growing costs of illegal immigration both nationally and in Pennsylvania. According to a new report by FAIR, The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Pennsylvanians, state taxpayers spend nearly $49 million annually to provide health care to illegal aliens.

"In Pennsylvania and all across the nation, the public is understandably upset about the staggering costs of illegal immigration and adamantly oppose providing a full range of health benefits to illegal aliens," said Stein. "We hope that others in Congress join Sen. Specter in opposing any provisions that would require American taxpayers to provide the full spectrum of health benefits to illegal aliens."

The above is a press release from Federation for American Immigration Reform, 25 Massachusetts Avenue - Suite 330 Washington DC, 20001, Office 202-328-7004 www.fairus.org. For further comment contact Ira Mehlman 206-420-7733. Founded in 1979, FAIR is the oldest and largest immigration reform group in America. FAIR fights for immigration policies that enhance national security, improve the economy, protect jobs and wages and establish a rule of law that is recognized and enforced.





12 August, 2009

Obama says immigration changes must wait till 2010

Flanked by his counterparts from Mexico and Canada, President Barack Obama on Monday reiterated his commitment to pursuing comprehensive immigration reform, despite his packed political agenda and the staunch opposition such an initiative is likely to face.

Obama predicted that he would be successful but acknowledged the challenges, saying, "I’ve got a lot on my plate." He added that there would almost certainly be "demagogues out there who try to suggest that any form or pathway for legalization for those who are already in the United States is unacceptable."

But in the most detailed outline yet of his timetable, the president said that he expected the Democratic-controlled Congress, after completing work on health care, energy and financial regulation, to draft immigration bills this year, and that he would begin work on getting them passed in 2010.

"Now, am I going to be able to snap my fingers and get this done? No," the president said. "But ultimately, I think the American people want fairness. And we can create a system in which you have strong border security and an orderly process for people to come in. But we’re also giving an opportunity for those who are already in the United States to be able to achieve a pathway to citizenship so they don’t have to live in the shadows."

The president’s comments came during a news conference at the end of a summit of North American leaders. The meeting was aimed at increasing cooperation in the region on a broad range of shared problems and resolving some of the issues that have long strained trilateral relations among countries whose people and economies depend heavily on one another.

During the meetings, which began Sunday afternoon, Obama, President Felipe Calderon of Mexico and Prime Minister Stephen Harper of Canada discussed climate change and clean energy, swine flu, immigration, trade and the growing threat posed by organized crime.

While it was clear at the news conference Monday that the three leaders had not reached any significant new agreements, they expressed understanding for one another’s positions and vowed to keep working to resolve outstanding disputes.

Harper, for example, stood by a decision a month ago to require Mexicans to apply for visas but said the problems were Canada’s, not Mexico’s. "It is simply far too easy to make a bogus refugee claim as a way of entering the country," he said. "And we have to change that."

A "Buy American" provision attached to the U.S. stimulus package has ignited a political storm in Canada, the United States’ most important trading partner. But on Monday, Obama played down the scope of the program, saying it was something he had grudgingly accepted to achieve the greater purpose of pumping money into the flailing U.S. economy.

"I think it’s important to keep this in perspective," Obama said. "This in no way has endangered the billions of dollars in trade taking place between our two countries."

More HERE



US unveils new speedboat for drug, immigration control



U.S. Customs and Border Protection on Monday unveiled a prototype vessel for high-speed pursuits of smugglers ferrying people and drugs from Mexico, Canada and the Caribbean. The 43-foot boat is faster, more stable and carries about twice as much fuel as CBP's current vessels, which were rolled out from 2001 to 2005. The $875,000 prototype comes with infrared cameras and sensors that give detailed images as far as the horizon goes. Currently, agents often use goggles, which detect things only as far as the naked eye.

CBP hopes to get funding to replace its fleet of about 65 vessels for high-speed chases that are stationed in the Gulf of Mexico, Florida's Atlantic coast and in the Pacific Ocean near the borders with Canada and Mexico.

Authorities say heightened enforcement on land borders has fueled an increase in human smuggling by sea, particularly in the San Diego area from launching areas just south of Tijuana, Mexico.

The rickety smuggling vessels favored in San Diego generally can only hit speeds of about 20 mph, but they tend to travel at night far from shore and often elude capture. "It's like looking for a can of soda in a gigantic pool," said CBP spokesman Juan Munoz Torres. "Sometimes you catch them, sometimes you don't."

Kayakers rested their paddles and turned their heads as the new boat zipped past them under cloudy skies at San Diego's Mission Bay, a summer vacation mecca where smugglers have been found to mix with fishing and pleasure boats.

Powerful shock absorbers on the vessels can ease the bumps to passengers at speeds that reach 75 mph.

SOURCE





11 August, 2009

Arrests of corrupt US border police rise

Charges range from drug trafficking to immigrant smuggling

Corruption along the U.S.-Mexican border takes many forms. It can start as simply as a smuggler's $50 gift to the child of a reluctant federal agent, quickly escalating to out-and-out bribes. "Everyone does it," the agent, now in prison, recalls telling himself. Other times, county sheriffs greedily grab thousands from drug dealers. In a few instances, traffickers even place members in the applicant pool for sensitive border protection jobs.

An Associated Press investigation has found U.S. law officers who work the border are being charged with criminal corruption in numbers not seen before, as drug and immigrant smugglers use money and sometimes sex to buy protection, and internal investigators crack down.

Based on Freedom of Information Act requests, interviews with sentenced agents and a review of court records, the AP tallied corruption-related convictions against more than 80 enforcement officials at all levels — federal, state and local — since 2007, shortly after Mexican President Felipe Calderon declared war on the cartels that peddle up to $39 billion worth of drugs in the United States each year.

U.S. officials have long pointed to Mexico's rampantly corrupt cops and broken judicial system, but Calderon told the AP this isn't just a Mexican problem. "To get drugs into the United States, the one you need to corrupt is the American authority, the American customs, the American police — not the Mexican. And that's a subject, by the way, which hasn't been addressed with sincerity," the Mexican president said. "I'm waging my battle against corruption among Mexican authorities and we're risking everything to clean our house, but I think there also needs to be a good cleaning on the other side of the border."

In fact, U.S. prosecutors have been taking notice. Drug traffickers look "for weaknesses in the armor," said former prosecutor Yolanda de Leon in Cameron County, Texas. One such weakness was her own county's Sheriff Conrado Cantu. With his thick mustache, ample belly and Western hat, Cantu was a backslapping natural in the political machine of Cameron County, population 335,000. The county includes Brownsville, Texas, directly across the Rio Grande from Matamoros, Mexico.

In no time, Cantu rose from constable to sheriff, a job he later acknowledged he was unqualified to hold. In 2005, he pleaded guilty to federal charges of running a criminal enterprise involved in extortion, drug trafficking and bribery. He's now serving a 24-year sentence for extorting money from drug traffickers and illegal gambling operations. "If the opportunity came along, he would take it," said de Leon.

Not all corruption charges that turned up in AP's checks were related to drug trafficking. The researched cases involve agents helping smuggle immigrants, drugs or other contraband, taking wads of money or sexual favors in exchange — or simply allowing entry to someone whose paperwork isn't up to snuff, all part of the daily border traffic that has politicians demanding that the U.S.-Mexico border be secured.

Court records show corrupt officials along the 2,100-mile U.S.-Mexico border have included local police and elected sheriffs, and officers with such U.S. Department of Homeland Security agencies as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Customs and Border Protection, which includes Border Patrol. Some have even been National Guardsmen temporarily called in to help while the Border Patrol expanded its ranks.

More HERE



The Elephant in the Room

Panel on Immigration’s Impact on Health Care Reform

One out of three people in the U.S. without health insurance is an immigrant (legal or illegal) or the U.S.- born child (under 18) of an immigrant. Immigrants and their children also account for one-fourth of those on Medicaid. While there has been some discussion of whether illegal immigrants should be covered by proposed government insurance plans, the enormous impact of immigration, both legal and illegal, on the health care system has generally not been acknowledged in the current debate.

The Center for Immigration Studies will hold a panel discussion to explore what effects immigration policy both current and future may have on health care reform. The panel will be held at 9:30 a.m. on Wednesday, August 19, in the Murrow Room of the National Press Club, 14th & F streets.

Panelists will include:

Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research, Center for Immigration Studies, author of The High Cost of Cheap Labor: Illegal Immigration and the Federal Budget, and an expert in the areas of economics and demography.

Robert Rector, Senior Research Fellow, The Heritage Foundation, an authority on poverty, the U.S. welfare system, and immigration.

James R. Edwards, Jr., Fellow, Center for Immigration Studies, coauthor of The Congressional Politics of Immigration Reform, and former Communications Manager for the Healthcare Leadership Council.

Moderator: Mark Krikorian, Executive Director, Center for Immigration Studies.

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. For more information, contact Steven Camarota at (202) 466-8185 or sac@cis.org.





10 August, 2009

A Congealing, not a Melting Pot--Today's Immigrants Are Different from Waves Past

They're not just like the Irish--or the Italians or the Poles, for that matter. The large influx of Hispanic immigrants after 1965 represents a unique assimilation challenge for the United States. Many optimistic observers have assumed--incorrectly, it turns out--that Hispanic immigrants will follow the same economic trajectory European immigrants did in the early part of the last century. Many of those Europeans came to America with no money and few skills, but their status steadily improved. Their children outperformed them, and their children's children were often indistinguishable from the "founding stock." The speed of economic assimilation varied somewhat by ethnic group, but three generations were typically enough to turn "ethnics" into plain old Americans.

This would be the preferred outcome for the tens of millions of Hispanic Americans, who are significantly poorer and less educated on average than native whites. When immigration skeptics question the wisdom of importing so many unskilled people into our nation at one time, the most common response cites the remarkable progress of Europeans a century ago. "People used to say the Irish or the Poles would always be poor, but look at them today!" For Hispanics, we are led to believe, the same thing will happen.

But that claim isn't true. Though about three-quarters of Hispanics living in the U.S. today are either immigrants or the children of immigrants, a significant number have roots here going back many generations. We have several ways to measure their intergenerational progress, and the results leave little room for optimism about their prospects for assimilation.

Before detailing some of those analyses, we should recognize the importance of this question. If we were to discover that, say, Slovenian immigrants did not assimilate over several generations, there would be little cause for alarm. There are simply too few Slovenian Americans to change our society in a meaningful way. Hispanics, on the other hand, have risen from 4 percent to 15 percent of the American population since 1970. The Census Bureau projects that, if there is no change in immigration policy, 30 percent of the nation will be Hispanic by 2050. To avoid developing a large economic underclass, we need to confront the question of whether they will assimilate

The children of Hispanic immigrants (the second generation) actually stay in school much longer and earn a considerably higher wage than their parents. In fact, the Hispanic rate of assimilation from the first to the second generation is only slightly lower than the assimilation rate of more successful groups of immigrants. Most second-generation Hispanics make up nearly as much ground as the children of European immigrants would if they grew up in the same disadvantaged situation.

But the good news ends there, and two problems arise. First, the second generation still does not come close to matching the socioeconomic status of white natives. Even if Hispanics were to keep climbing the ladder each generation, their assimilation would be markedly slower than that of other groups. But even that view is overly optimistic, because of the second, larger problem with Hispanic assimilation: It appears to stall after the second generation. We see little further ladder-climbing from the grandchildren of Hispanic immigrants. They do not rise out of the lower class....

Taken as a whole, the research on Hispanic assimilation presents two possible conclusions. Either Hispanic assimilation will be exceedingly slow--taking at least four or five generations, and probably several more--or it will not happen. In either case, Hispanic immigration will have a serious long-term consequence: The grandchildren of today's Hispanic immigrants will lag far behind the grandchildren of today's white natives...

Two major changes to our immigration policy are needed to remedy the assimilation problem. First, we should drastically reduce illegal immigration. In the early part of this decade, the illegal-immigrant population saw a net increase of about 515,000 people per year, two-thirds of whom were from Mexico and Central America. The recession appears to have reduced illegal border crossings significantly, but the problem will surely return when our economy improves.

The second change concerns our legal immigration system. While it is important that spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens be allowed to immigrate, our present policy extends well beyond the nuclear family. U.S. citizens can sponsor their parents; their adult children, who may bring their own spouses and children with them; and their adult brothers and sisters, who may also bring their own spouses and children with them. These new green-card holders can then acquire citizenship and bring in their own extended families, perpetuating the cycle. This is "chain migration," and it causes the number of unskilled immigrants in the U.S. to increase swiftly.

Much more HERE



Obama to build more prisons for illegals

But "nicer" ones. Is there ANYTHING this guy cannot find money for? He must have a money tree

Pledging more oversight and accountability, the Obama administration will overhaul the nation's Immigration detention system and transform it from one reliant on scattered local jails and private prisons to a centralized one specifically for civil detainees, officials announced Thursday.

The reforms are aimed at greater control over a system that houses 33,000 detainees a day and has been criticized for inhumane conditions and for failing to provide health care that may have prevented many of the 90 deaths that have occurred since 2003.

"With these reforms, ICE will move away from our present decentralized, jail-oriented approach to a system that is wholly designed for and based on our civil detention needs," U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John Morton said. "The population that we detain is different than the traditional population that is detained in a prison or a jail setting."

The federal Immigration agency plans to review the use of 350 local jails, state prisons and private facilities. Within five years, officials said, detainees without criminal records likely would be held in fewer, less restrictive locations.

Morton also announced that the agency will stop sending families to the controversial T. Don Hutto Residential Center in Texas and instead hold them in a facility in Pennsylvania. The Texas facility, which will still house women, opened in 2006 and faced lawsuits over substandard living conditions. A settlement resulted in changes to how children are treated.

Immigrant rights advocates welcomed the changes but said there is still no clear policy on how detention facilities will be penalized when problems are found.

"We are encouraged that the administration is taking a hard look at what has traditionally been a dark spot in our Immigration system," said Karen Tumlin, an attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. "However, only time will tell if the reforms announced today amount to lasting change or simply creative repackaging of prior policies."

SOURCE





9 August, 2009

Arrogant Australian immigration bureaucrats steal child

POLICE are investigating immigration officials for possible criminal conduct in the kidnapping of a seven-year-old girl without her asylum seeker father's knowledge. In 2003 immigration staff hatched an elaborate plot to spirit the child away to her mother in Tehran as her father, the legal custodian, was in solitary confinement at Baxter Detention Centre. Baxter closed in 2007.

Australian Federal Police are now investigating to see whether officials committed a crime under South Australian law, overstepping federal deportation powers. Children cannot be removed from South Australia without a parent's consent. The national co-ordinator for A Just Australia, Kate Gauthier, who brought the allegations, said immigration staff acted criminally. ''It's this simple: someone took his child without permission and without his knowledge. You cannot tell me that is not a crime.''

In this case, the then Baxter officer tricked the asylum seeker, Mr X, asking permission for he and his wife to take the little girl shopping. Mr X said: ''No problem. Yes, go and enjoy yourself.'' Instead, an immigration official put the girl on a plane to Iran, plotting to distract her with toys if she resisted and asked to say goodbye to her father.

Yesterday, the former immigration minister Philip Ruddock said he was not aware of police investigations and knew of Mr X's case only from reports. ''Was I aware of the precise management of the issue? No. Would I have been micro-managing it and familiar with every detail? The answer is no,'' he said.

The seriousness of criminal allegations in Mr X's case have forced an internal review by Jeff Lamond - who was formerly employed by the Immigration Department - to be referred to Dennis Pearce, a former Commonwealth Ombudsman and expert in Commonwealth administrative law. Professor Pearce's appointment clears a perception of bias created by Mr Lamond's past employment with the department. It is expected the review will be finalised by the end of October.

Ms Gauthier said the case demonstrated a power imbalance between asylum seekers and their keepers which allowed the abuse of detainees to continue unchecked. ''He was an asylum seeker and the Port Augusta police don't give a s--- about what happens in Baxter detention centre.''

Inspector Peter Crouch, of the South Australian police, said any complaints made against a prison were taken seriously. A spokesman for the Federal Police said police diligently investigated such complaints.

Mr X has since been granted asylum in Melbourne. He attempted suicide in the months after the girl's abduction and is seeking compensation. His wife and daughter will be helped to reunite in Australia if they wish, a departmental spokesman said.

SOURCE



Lamar Smith Spells Out Costs of Speaker Pelosi's Insistence on Covering Illegal Aliens With Federal Health Plan

Now, nobody in Congress can claim not to know what is going on with illegal aliens and the proposed federal health plan. Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas has laid out the details in The Hill, a newspaper for the Capitol Hill staffers and Members of Congress.

The Democrats’ bill in the House, H.R. 3200, contains gaping loopholes that will allow illegal immigrants to receive taxpayer-funded benefits. And these loopholes are no accident.

-- Rep. Lamar Smith quoted in the Hill

Rosemary Jenks (NumbersUSA's Director of Government Relations) and I have been doing non-stop radio shows across the country about this. One thing that occurs to us routinely is that the host reads a quote from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi saying firmly that the health plan will NOT cover illegal immigrants.

To that, I have to say simply, PELOSI IS LYING. And she knows she is lying.

I don't talk and write like that often. I tend to give people -- even politicians -- a lot of benefit of the doubt until proven otherwise. But Pelosi and her leadership team have been engaged all year in coming up with deceptive language and amendments to make it look like they are denying illegal aliens benefits, all the while including language that that creates loopholes giant enough to drive 11-19 million illegal aliens through them.

(Read here and here about the vote in House committee last week and then here about the effort to cover up their dirty deed the next day. Also watch my short video from Friday about the subject.)

The costs to the American taxpayer will be incredible, writes Smith, the Ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

If Americans aren’t already concerned enough about the astronomical costs of the healthcare proposal, this taxpayer-funded benefit for lawbreakers should sound the alarms.

Take just the uninsured: According to the latest research from the Pew Hispanic Center, 59 percent of all illegal immigrant adults lacked health insurance in 2007. These figures are dramatically higher than the 14 percent uninsured rate for U.S.-born adults. The children of illegal immigrants are also uninsured at extremely high rates — 45 percent of their foreign-born children are uninsured!

Of course, when it comes to illegal immigration, taxpayer-provided health insurance represents just part of the cost. Healthcare for illegal immigrants costs Americans at least $1 billion each year, not including health costs for children and the elderly. In my home state of Texas, just the price tag of educating the children of illegal immigrants adds up to around $4 billion annually!

-- Rep. Lamar Smith

Of course, Pres. Obama, Speaker Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Reid have a simple solution that would greatly reduce the cost of insuring and providing health care to illegal aliens:

Their solution is to stop calling them illegal aliens and to call them "legal immigrants" and "U.S. citizens." Of course, the cost to the taxpayer will be the same (or probably quite a bit higher as they fully take advantage of more welfare benefits). But since they are no longer called "illegal aliens," nobody can say the costs are attributable to paying for illegal aliens.

Don't you just feel like you have been plunged into a George Orwell novel?

Right now, millions of people around the world are preparing to move to the United States illegally to take U.S. jobs from American citizens because the Congress won't require businesses to use E-Verify.

If Congress now approves a federal health plan that covers any foreign national who can get into the country, just imagine how many more millions of people will be preparing to move here illegally.

Spending billions of taxpayer dollars to overhaul a healthcare system that provides Americans with the best care in the world makes no sense. And using those taxpayer dollars to provide benefits to illegal immigrants is inexcusable.

The Obama administration and Democrats in Congress should not force American taxpayers to provide healthcare benefits to illegal immigrants.

-- Rep. Lamar Smith

I urge all of you to protest at the top of your lungs at all Town Hall meetings of your Members of Congress this month.

If you have Republican Members, protest the fact that the Republican leadership in Congress is taking a pass on this issue. Lamar Smith is high-ranking. But the half-dozen highest ranking Republicans are standing mostly mute. They are not making the inclusion of illegal aliens a big issue. What is wrong with them? Which big-money special interest is keeping them quiet.

If you have Democratic Members, make them understand that YOU hold THEM responsible for the fact that THEIR Party is putting illegal aliens and the corrupt businesses that hire them ahead of the interests of U.S. citizens, taxpayers and workers.

We the People surely can stop an outrage this clear and this gigantic.

SOURCE





8 August, 2009

The New York Times: Home of the Whopper

Last week, I wrote about a whopper of heartlessness in the New York Times. This time it is a glaring oversight in the Boston Globe, which is owned by the New York Times, so, same source.

Reporter Maria Sacchetti writes of “Alan,” who was brought here at a young age by his parents from Mexico, and graduated this June from Harvard with a B average. The title of the article is “Illegal status gives Harvard grad few options.” But ironically, due to the Harvard alumni network, he probably has a few more options than many native-born American college grads in this economy.

The article is part of the series of media pieces that serve to promote the so-called “Dream Act” that would allow taxpayer-subsidized college tuition and a relatively easy path to legal status for people brought here illegally before the age of 16. It could be utilized by people up to 35 years of age. NumbersUSA has pointed out that the "Dream Act" is actually a wide-reaching amnesty.

Alan did not know that he was here illegally until high school, when he wanted to apply for a job. He brought applications home to fill out and asked, “Mom, what’s a Social Security number?’’ “With his teacher’s help, Alan filled out college applications. When Harvard accepted him on scholarship, they were thrilled. They thought the Dream Act would have passed by now.

The article attempts to make the point that despite having graduated from Harvard, “Alan” is now in the lamentable situation of being unable to find work legally in the United States.

But now Alan has hit a dead end, because one night 19 years ago his mother led him across the Mexican border into California, making him an illegal immigrant.

His only legal employment option as a college graduate now is to return to Mexico, where he has few contacts and fewer prospects.

Now Alan sees Mexico as his only option. His mother is against it: Alan barely knows his relatives there, and he has no professional connections. It is unclear whether Mexico’s elite would welcome him, even if he is a Harvard man. "I don’t want to go home and sit on my butt and watch SportsCenter. If I do that, then these last four years have been a waste."

The reporter, Maria Sacchetti, is a graduate of the University of Massachusetts and the University of Texas. Has she ever heard of using the alumni network? As of 2005, 1,174 people holding an undergraduate degree from Harvard were living in Mexico. That was the response from a Harvard staffer. As for graduate degrees, the Harvard Business School alumni directory lists 357 names. Harvard also has graduate schools of law, government, education, dentistry, public health, and more. There are probably some 3,000 Harvard graduates in living and working in Mexico.

The current and former presidents of Mexico both have Harvard degrees.

In 2005, Harvard held an alumni “convocation” in Mexico city that was attended by then-President Vincente Fox, with numerous well-placed Harvard graduates and Harvard-affiliated people. An impressive publication describing the meeting is available online.

There are grounds to believe that Alan will be able to get a job in Mexico by using the Harvard alumni network. Alan has many opportunities and options if he returns to a place where he can work legally.

Further, I would urge Alan to “hold their feet to the fire” by holding the Harvard administration accountable to their stated intentions for the Harvard alumni network:

Besides the Global Series, the Harvard Alumni Association is working closely with Harvard Clubs and graduates in various parts of the world to increase alumni participation ... We envision international Clubs taking an increasingly active role in ensuring meaningful experiences for students while they are studying abroad, and in helping to support graduates once they begin to make the professional connections that are so critical to a vibrant alumni community. Now, more than ever, Harvard Clubs will play a strategic role in developing a truly global alumni network.

Those words were spoken by James R. Ullyot (Harvard AB ’62, MBA ’66), and President, Harvard Alumni Association 2004-2005, at the 2005 “convocation” event at the Harvard Club of Mexico City. I suggest that Alan approach the Harvard Alumni Association about help connecting with Harvard Alums in Mexico. Alan would not be asking them to get him a job, merely to facilitate making connections, and it would be up to Alan to land a job. Alan will need to be charming, persistent, and patient as he uses the alumni network. Most of the people he will talk to already have jobs and will be in no particular hurry to help him get a job. He may have to wait a month just to get a chance to talk to a particular key person. But such is the case with any job search, whether it be in the United States or in Mexico.

Alan will be an asset to Mexico. First, he has a superb education from the United States. Second, since he has spent so much time here, he may realize that it is not acceptable for the Mexican elites to refuse to make the reforms necessary to improve their country. Third, he may have some unique insights into what Mexico needs to do. We need even more people like Alan to return to Mexico so that there is a critical mass of people who can push change.

What may seem fairly obvious to an older person may not be so to a new college grad. Therefore, I sent a copy of this blog to Maria Sacchetti so that she may forward it to Alan in the hope that it will help him get a job.

More HERE



Australian Leftist politician links immigration to terrorism

At last somebody mentions the obvious. The Muslim hostility often seen and heard in Australia (See e.g. here) mostly comes from people not born in Australia.

A FEDERAL Labor MP wants Australia's migration intake to be slashed so authorities can conduct more rigorous security checks. Kelvin Thomson said a smaller migration program would make it easier to assess whether applicants posed a terrorism threat. His comments come just days after police arrested several men in Victoria for alleged links to a Somali-based terrorist group.

"Given time, it would be possible to get to the bottom of the background of applicants from Somalia; and elsewhere work out whether they have any association with fundamentalist groups and make a rational assessment of whether they pose a risk," he told year 12 students at a foreign affairs forum in Melbourne.

Mr Thomson, a government backbencher, said Australia's immigration intake should be cut back to where it was during the Keating years. "Reducing our rates of immigration intake to the rates prevailing back in the 1990s would provide authorities with much more time in which to assess applications, and thereby improve Australia's security," he said. "My own view about this is that there needs to be more vetting of both prospective migrants and temporary residents, including students, to minimise the risk that people who do not respect Australia's laws and legal system will enter this country."

Police arrested four men of Somali and Lebanese descent in Victoria on Tuesday, on suspicion of being linked to Somali-based radical group al-Shabaab. It is alleged the men had planned a suicide shoot-out at Sydney's Holsworthy military base.

Without referring to them by name, Mr Thomson said these suspects were examples of people who did not respect Australia. "Someone who refuses to stand up when asked by a judge, and says 'I stand only before God', does not respect Australia's laws or legal system," he said.

Migration rates had skyrocketed from 82,000 a year in the mid-1990s to 148,000 in 2006 and 2007. The number of temporary entry visas, including students, also skyrocketed from 265,000 in 1995-96 to over 4 million in 2006-07. "This volume is putting our immigration authorities under a lot of pressure, and making it difficult for them to do their job," Mr Thomson said.

The Government's parliamentary secretary for multicultural affairs, Laurie Ferguson, disagreed with Mr Thomson's call to cut back migration, telling ABC radio there needed to be more resources to conduct speedier background checks. Mr Thomson, the MP for the ethnically diverse inner-Melbourne electorate of Wills, stressed the "overwhelming majority" of migrants were not criminals.

SOURCE





7 August, 2009

Incentives needed to keep brightest immigrants in Britain (?)

The UK is failing to retain “super-mobile” workers as immigrants move on because of the economic downturn, according to a report to be published today.

Super-mobiles are the brightest of the foreign workers who arrive in Britain and stay for less than four years, the study says. They move several times in their lifetimes to take advantage of globalisation. The study suggests that tax breaks be introduced to encourage talented workers to stay and that efforts be made to persuade Australians and New Zealanders who arrive in Britain as part of the “Big Overseas Experience” to remain permanently.

About half the six million immigrants who arrived here in the past 30 years have since left, according to the report by the Institute for Public Policy Research. Tim Finch, from the think-tank, said: “The migration debate is fixated with the idea that immigrants come to settle and not enough attention has been paid to the fact that more and more are spending only short periods in the UK.

“Migrants are coming to study and work for short periods and then moving on. As global competition for highly skilled migrants increases in future years, schemes to retain migrants may become as important as attracting them in the first place.”

Migration in which people remain for less than four years doubled between 1996 and 2007; most were students or from countries that joined the EU in 2004. Only a quarter of migrants who arrived in 1998 were still here in ten years later, the report says.

The report warns of increasing competition from other EU countries also keen to attract bright migrants. It recommends that schemes to help students find work be extended and that highly skilled migrants who are committed to remaining here be given extra points. It also suggests that it be made easier for skilled migrants to renew their visas or work permits and for their families to join them in the UK.

SOURCE



Taranto on anchor babies

Taranto relies on some very old precedents for his argument below and that is a fairly weak strategy. Is the Dredd Scott precedent still binding, for instance? SCOTUS can reverse itself and if Congress passed a law interpreting the 14th Amendment as applying only to children of people who were legally in the USA, SCOTUS might well uphold that. Their rulings on the 14th can be so flexible that they ignore its words completely -- as shown by the way that have upheld various "affirmative action" practices. If the "equal protection" clause of the amendment means nothing to them, why should they be fussy about other clauses in it? Note that the equal protection clause was specifically added to prevent discrimination on the basis of race but SCOTUS has ignored it in "affirmative action" cases nonetheless.

Taranto also overlooks that Congress has the right to say what lies within the jurisdiction of SCOTUS. And given their ignoring the 14th Amendment by permitting affirmative action, their rulings on that amendment deserve no respect anyway and removing that amendment from their jurisdiction could well be appropriate. In which case Congress could pass whatever law it liked about "anchor babies" and it would be immune to challenge. Such a law is not foreseeable at the moment but it is not impossible.

The moral case that children should not be punished for the misdeeds of their parents is unexceptionable but whether that is what is at issue is open to debate.

More importantly, Congress could well wish to give the administration the power to deport the many gang bangers among the so-called "anchor babies" and the moral right to do that would probably not be widely disputed

Why are illegal aliens’ U.S.-born children--sometimes called “anchor babies”--considered natural-born citizens? ... The short answer is that the Supreme Court has never ruled on the specific question of whether children born in the U.S. are constitutionally entitled to American citizenship if their parents are here illegally, but the prevailing assumption is that they are. Those who disagree are probably wrong, given the language of the Constitution and the logic of case law on related questions.

Section 1 of the 14th Amendment provides that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Section 301 of the Immigration and Nationality Act echoes this language, granting birthright citizenship to any “person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

The only qualification is that phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof.” To anti-immigrant organizations, it is a loophole big enough to drive a Mexican truck through. A small group of Republican congressmen have repeatedly introduced a bill called the Citizenship Reform Act--the preceding link is to the 2005 version--that would amend Section 301 to provide that a child is “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” only if his mother is a U.S. citizen, national or legal resident alien or--if his parents are married--if his father is. Children of illegal aliens (or legal nonresident aliens, such as tourists) would be deemed outside U.S. jurisdiction and thus ineligible for natural-born citizenship.

The bill, which has never made it out of committee, would apply only to children born after its enactment, so that it would change rather than clarify the meaning of the phrase in question. Our analysis proceeds from the premise that Congress has the authority to enact a law redefining statutory language in this way. What it lacks, however, is the power to alter the terms of the Constitution, except by proposing an amendment. If the children of nonresident aliens are “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” under the 14th Amendment, then Congress may not deny their citizenship.

As we noted above, the Supreme Court has never ruled on precisely this question. In U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898), the court held that a child born to parents who were Chinese citizens was entitled to U.S. citizenship. Wong Kim Ark’s parents had both been legal residents of San Francisco at the time of his birth in 1873, and the justices did not consider the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” aliens, which hardly existed at the time. Nineteenth-century immigration was subject to almost no regulation, with the notable exception of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. That was the law under which the U.S. government sought to classify Wong Kim Ark as a foreigner and prevent him from re-entering America after a visit to China.

The court in Wong Kim Ark recognized three exceptions to birthright citizenship--categories of persons who, at birth in the U.S., were not “subject to the jurisdiction thereof”: children of foreign diplomats, children of foreigners from a hostile power occupying U.S. territory, and Indians born on reservations. (Congress abolished the Indian exclusion by statute in 1924.) What the people in these categories have in common is that they are subject to the jurisdiction of a sovereign entity other than the United States pursuant to international law, including treaties between the U.S. and Indian tribes.

It defies logic to assert that illegal aliens fall into a similar category. Most obviously, immigration laws would be a nullity if violators were immune from U.S. jurisdiction. Illegal aliens also are legally required to pay taxes; they can be charged, prosecuted and punished under federal and state criminal laws; they can be civilly sued; and they won’t get the State Department’s help if they seek to evade parking fines.

Further, the Supreme Court has held that American “jurisdiction” extends to aliens, including illegal aliens, for the purposes of another 14th Amendment provision. In Yick Wo v. Hopkins (1886), Justice Stanley Matthews wrote:

The fourteenth amendment to the constitution is not confined to the protection of citizens. It says: “Nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.” These provisions are universal in their application, to all persons within the territorial jurisdiction, without regard to any differences of race, of color, or of nationality.

In Phyler v. Doe (1982), the court expressly extended this principle to what by then were known as illegal aliens. It overturned a Texas statute authorizing local school districts to refuse to enroll illegal aliens as students. The youngsters in question were not anchor babies, having been born abroad. Their presence in the country was contrary to U.S. immigration law, and they could have been subject to deportation proceedings.

One of the unsuccessful defenses Texas raised was that, as Justice William Brennan summed it up, “undocumented aliens, because of their immigration status, are not ‘persons within the jurisdiction’ of the State of Texas, and that they therefore have no right to the equal protection of Texas law”:

We reject this argument. Whatever his status under the immigration laws, an alien is surely a “person” in any ordinary sense of that term. Aliens, even aliens whose presence in this country is unlawful, have long been recognized as “persons” guaranteed due process of law by the Fifth and Fourteenth Amendments. . . .

To permit a State to employ the phrase “within its jurisdiction” in order to identify subclasses of persons whom it would define as beyond its jurisdiction, thereby relieving itself of the obligation to assure that its laws are designed and applied equally to those persons, would undermine the principal purpose for which the Equal Protection Clause was incorporated in the Fourteenth Amendment. The Equal Protection Clause was intended to work nothing less than the abolition of all caste-based and invidious class-based legislation. That objective is fundamentally at odds with the power the State asserts here to classify persons subject to its laws as nonetheless excepted from its protection.

Phyler might have had a different result had it arisen later. It was a 5-4 decision by a court more liberal than today’s, and Chief Justice Warren Burger wrote a compelling dissent that Justices Byron White, William Rehnquist and Sandra Day O’Connor joined. But on the matter of jurisdiction, the nine were unanimous. As Burger wrote:

I have no quarrel with the conclusion that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment applies to aliens who, after their illegal entry into this country, are indeed physically “within the jurisdiction” of a state.

One could perhaps distinguish the citizenship clause from the equal protection clause on the theory that a narrower construction of “jurisdiction” would not “undermine the principal purpose” of the former the way it would the latter. But it is important to note that the citizenship clause makes no mention of parents. It guarantees citizenship to “all persons born . . . in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

Wong Kim Ark established that a child born in the U.S. to alien parents has a constitutional right to citizenship. Being born is never a crime, and it would be both an injustice and a grave legal error to deny a child his constitutional rights because his parents violated the law.

SOURCE See the original for links





6 August, 2009

Strategic shift on immigration by Obama and his Congressional allies

He is doing some enforcement because he needs to show that he is willing and able to do that if he is to have any hope of getting an amnesty bill through Congress. Even the sacred "undocumented" description of illegals is being abandoned!

But it's tokenism. Only illegals with a criminal record are being deported. The rest are being allowed to stay even if detected and brought to ICE attention by the likes of Sheriff Joe. The door to America is still wide open. How many Americans is that going to impress?

Note that the really high rate of criminality among Hispanics is among the CHILDREN of the illegals and the ones born in the USA cannot be deported at all under current laws. So sending ALL the illegals back home promptly is essential even if crime prevention is the only focus

After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by his predecessor.

Ms. Napolitano’s visit to New York last week was accompanied by protests against federal policy on illegal immigration. A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr. Obama’s Hispanic supporters, who have opened a national campaign against them, including small street protests in New York and Los Angeles last week.

The administration recently undertook audits of employee paperwork at hundreds of businesses, expanded a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized as flawed, bolstered a program of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement agencies, and rejected proposals for legally binding rules governing conditions in immigration detention centers. “We are expanding enforcement, but I think in the right way,” Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said in an interview.

Ms. Napolitano and other administration officials argue that no-nonsense immigration enforcement is necessary to persuade American voters to accept legislation that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, a measure they say Mr. Obama still hopes to advance late this year or early next.

That approach brings Mr. Obama around to the position that his Republican rival, Senator John McCain of Arizona, espoused during last year’s presidential campaign, a stance Mr. Obama rejected then as too hard on Latino and immigrant communities. (Mr. McCain did not respond to requests for comment.) Now the enforcement strategy has opened a political rift with some immigrant advocacy and Hispanic groups whose voters were crucial to the Obama victory.

“Our feelings are mixed at best,” said Clarissa Martinez De Castro, immigration director of the National Council of La Raza, which has joined in the criticism, aimed primarily at Ms. Napolitano. “We understand the need for sensible enforcement, but that does not mean expanding programs that often led to civil rights violations.”

Under Ms. Napolitano, immigration authorities have backed away from the Bush administration’s frequent mass factory roundups of illegal immigrant workers. But federal criminal prosecutions for immigration violations have actually increased this year, according to a study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a nonpartisan group that analyzes government data. In April, there were 9,037 immigration cases in the federal courts, an increase of 32 percent over April 2008, the group found.

Ms. Napolitano said in the interview that she would not call off immigration raids entirely as some Hispanic lawmakers have suggested. “We will continue to enforce the law and to look for effective ways to do it,” she said. “That’s my job.”

Ms. Napolitano, who as governor of Arizona sparred with Republican legislators seeking tougher steps against illegal immigration, said she was looking for ways to make enforcement programs inherited from President George W. Bush less heavy-handed. She also wants to put the enforcement focus on illegal-immigrant gang members and convicts and on employers who routinely hire illegal immigrants so as to exploit them.

Immigration authorities have started audits of employees’ hiring documents at more than 600 businesses nationwide. If an employer shows a pattern of hiring immigrants whose documents cannot be verified, a criminal investigation could follow, Ms. Napolitano said.

She has also expanded a federal program, known as E-Verify, that allows employers to verify electronically the identity information of new hires. Immigrant and business groups have sued to try to stop the program, saying the databases it relies on are riddled with inaccuracies that could lead to American citizens’ being denied jobs.

But officials of the Homeland Security Department say technological improvements have enhanced the speed and accuracy of E-Verify. With 137,000 employers now enrolled, only 0.3 percent of 6.4 million queries they have made so far in the 2009 fiscal year have resulted in denials that later proved incorrect, the officials say. That, opponents note, still means false denials for more than 19,000 people.

In addition, Ms. Napolitano has expanded a program that runs immigration checks on every person booked into local jails in some cities. And she recently announced the expansion of another program, known as 287(g) for the provision of the statute authorizing it, that allows for cooperation between federal immigration agents and state and local police agencies.

In extending 287(g), federal officials also drew up a new agreement, which all of some 66 localities currently participating have been asked to sign, that is intended to enhance federal oversight and clarify the priority on deporting those immigrants who are criminal fugitives or are already behind bars.

But advocates for immigrants said the new agreement did not include strong protections against ethnic profiling. They were surprised, they say, that Ms. Napolitano did not terminate the cooperation agreement with the sheriff of Maricopa County, Ariz., Joe Arpaio, who calls himself the “toughest sheriff in America.” Latino groups in Arizona have accused Mr. Arpaio of using the program to harass Hispanic residents. “If they reform the 287(g) program and Arpaio doesn’t change, it won’t be reform,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a national immigrant advocacy group.

Ms. Napolitano said it would be up to Mr. Arpaio, like other current participants, to decide whether to sign and abide by the new cooperation agreement. Separately, the Justice Department has opened a civil rights investigation of Mr. Arpaio’s practices.

The Obama administration has received support for its immigration position from a leading Democrat, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the chairman of the Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, who will be writing an immigration overhaul bill later this year. In preparation for what is likely to be a furious debate, Mr. Schumer has called on Democrats to show that they are serious about immigration enforcement and is even asking them to stop using the term “undocumented” to refer to immigrants who are here illegally. Democrats have to “convince the American people there will not be new waves of illegal immigrants” after an overhaul passes, Mr. Schumer said in an interview.

Republicans who oppose any legalization of the status of illegal immigrants say they remain unimpressed by the new enforcement measures. “After 20 years of broken promises, it takes a lot more than token gestures,” said Representative Brian P. Bilbray, a California Republican who heads an immigration caucus in the House.

Michael A. Olivas, a professor of immigration law at the University of Houston, said Hispanic advocates were irked by the enforcement measures because they had seen scant sign that the administration was also moving deliberately toward an overhaul bill.

SOURCE



Arpaio to decide on federal immigration-enforcement policy

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio has less than 90 days to decide if he's going to accept a news federal immigration-enforcement policy.

The new policy will likely weaken high fight against illegal immigration as deputies will no longer be able to arrest people solely on the basis of their immigration status.

If Arpaio chooses to stick with his controversial crime suppression sweeps the way he's been doing them, he risks losing a key program in his jails. That program, which is sanctioned by the government and uses federally trained officers, identifies illegal immigrants who are booked for other crimes. It has caught more than 26,000 people since February 2008. In Arpaio's sweeps -- 10 since March 2008 -- deputies have arrested more than 550 people, but fewer than half were undocumented immigrants.

It's the so-called "criminal aliens" -- people who have committed crimes other than coming into the country illegally -- on which the federal government wants to focus. To that end, the Department of Homeland Security clarified its 287(g) program last month. It's 287(g) that allows local law-enforcement-agencies to enforce federal immigration laws.

If Arpaio accepts the new policy, he can still conduct his sweeps under state laws, but he will have to release undocumented immigrants who have not committed other crimes. If he opts to keep doing what he's been doing, he will lose that identification program in the jails.

SOURCE





5 August, 2009

Escape to freedom via underside of immigration agents' bus...

More of that famous British bureaucratic efficiency. They are just there to collect their pay. They don't give a hoot about the job they are supposed to do

British immigration agents in France inspecting border controls at a bottleneck for clandestine crossings were left red-faced Monday as a stowaway hidden under the chassis of their bus escaped to freedom.

The employees of the UK Border Agency, which has responsibility for immigration into England, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales, were blissfully unaware of their extra passenger load as they drove through the Channel tunnel.

It was only when they arrived in Folkestone, on the southern English coast, from Coquelles, that they noticed their intrepid, but uninvited fellow traveller slipping out from his hiding-place wedged near the bus's fuel tank.

The migrant, who managed to climb on board their hired vehicle at Dover, which is by the English entrance to the tunnel, managed to scarper without being apprehended, according to a spokeswoman for the interior ministry.

A full investigation is now underway, she said.

Britain says it prevented 28,000 attempted entries onto its territories in 2008. [28,000! My! That's impressive. What about the half million whom the British courts have told to go home but who just stay on in Britain regardless? THAT'S tough enforcement for you! I wonder why we are not mentioning those?]

SOURCE



What a muddle! The latest British immigration proposals

No mention of illegals, apparently. As far as one can make sense of them, the proposals seem to be aimed at Indians -- but few Indians are accepted as legal immigrants anyway. One therefore gets the impression that the guff below applies both to legal and illegal immigrants!

Immigrants are to be given instructions on how to claim benefits as their first step in a new life in Britain. They will be told to attend ‘orientation days’ at which they will be given information including their right to claim handouts, according to plans published by ministers yesterday.

The instructions were set out in a Home Office paper on how immigrants will in future be asked to qualify for a British passport by earning points and credits. At present those allowed entry into Britain gain citizenship almost automatically after five years.

Among the ideas put forward by Home Secretary Alan Johnson is that migrants should be encouraged to return to their home countries to stem a Third World brain drain. Immigration Minister Phil Woolas said: ‘There are clear risks in depriving developing countries of people and skills they badly need. Government needs to do more to maximise the positive impacts on the developing world and mitigate the negative.’

Possible schemes include allowing workers or students into Britain for just two years before they take their new skills back home.

Ministers also backed a system of ‘circular migration’ in which those who come to the UK will be offered incentives for ‘temporary or permanent return to the country of origin’. Those who opt to return home would be able to travel to live in Britain whenever they choose. They could also progress towards UK citizenship by undertaking development work at home.

Outlining the planned system for migrants to win points that would speed up their progress to citizenship, the paper suggests tougher language and history tests. Those who commit serious crime would be barred from British citizenship. Those guilty of anti-social behaviour – including showing ‘disregard for UK values’ – would lose points.

Mr Woolas said the points test ‘establishes the principle that British citizenship is a privilege that must be earned, providing mechanisms to speed up or slow down the journey towards settlement.’ The plans won support from the all-party Balanced Migration group of MPs.

Its leaders, Labour’s Frank Field and Tory Nicholas Soames, said: ‘This is a welcome step forward. ‘We will never get our popula-tion under control if we continue to allow almost automatic settlement for all economic migrants. ‘There must be a limit for the number of new citizens otherwise the population will continue to grow.’

Sir Andrew Green of the Migrationwatch pressure group said: ‘After years of denial, the Government has at last recognised that immigration is the main component of population growth. ‘These reforms would break the virtually automatic link between work permits and settlement. It’s an important step forward as it will allow us to draw on foreign skills without adding to our population.’

Matthew Elliott of the Tax- Payers’ Alliance said of the ‘orientation days’: ‘We should welcome people to Britain to work hard in the best traditions of entrepreneurship and innovation, not with tutorials on how to claim as many benefits as possible.’

SOURCE





4 August, 2009

Immigrants who jeer at British troops in the street to be barred from gaining citizenship

Immigrants who jeer at British troops in the street or 'show disregard for UK values' will be barred from gaining citizenship. Migrants wanting a UK passport will also have to pass a history test for the first time - an idea ministers had previously spent four years resisting.

Immigration Minister Phil Woolas says that demonstrating against servicemen - as took place recently in disgraceful scenes in Luton - 'enrages' law abiding Britons, and should be a block on a foreigner obtaining citizenship. It is included in tough new rules unveiled today to reduce the all-time record number of citizenship applications being approved by the Home Office.

Mr Woolas said the new points-based citizenship rules would also stop the population from reaching 70million, and bring 'control' to the migration system. And, in an exclusive Daily Mail interview, he revives a previously discredited promise that the population will not be allowed to reach 70million, as is currently predicted by Whitehall statisticians. Mr Woolas said that increasing the UK population - which currently stands at 61m - by such an amount was not 'sustainable'.

His comments came as the Home Office prepared to unveil the radical new points system for judging citizenship applications. At present, migrants who work legally in Britain for an average of five years are automatically allowed to progress to citizenship, provided they pass a short test on Life in the UK, introduced in 2005. The test does not include a single question on British history, as officials judged there was 'too much' and it would not be fair. Under these rules, the number of British passports handed out to migrants is on-course to hit an all-time record of almost 220,000 this year.

Today, Mr Woolas gives an explicit commitment that he wants to use the new points-based citizenship system to cut this number. Migrants will still have to work legally in the UK for a fixed number of years, and pass the Life in the UK test, but will then also have to go through a new screening system.

Points will be awarded for earning potential, any special skills, qualifications, whether a person works in a shortage occupation, speaks a good standard of English and even if they are willing to live in a more remote part of the UK. The number of points needed will be adjusted, on a regular basis, to limit the number of passports being approved, and ensure population growth is kept more firmly under 'control'.

Crucially, a number of factors which could lead to a migrant being deducted points, and effectively stopped from becoming a citizen, will also be included in the new system. These include committing serious criminal or anti-social behaviour - usually resulting in a prison sentence - or 'circumstances where an active disregard for UK values is demonstrated'. This would include attending a demonstration against British soldiers, or showing disrespect to the war dead. Mr Woolas said: 'If you are demonstrating against our soldiers or being disrespectful that could be taken into account. The things that really do enrage people.'

Politically, the most important element of the plan is the decision to break the link between economic migration and citizenship. Today's consultation paper will say: 'This represents a major change in approach, challenging what has been perceived to be an automatic right to move from temporary residence to settlement.' It adds: 'For Government to manage population growth, it must have mechanisms to control who is allowed to stay in the UK on a permanent basis.'

Critics will argue it is long overdue. During the first three months of 2009, a staggering 54,615 citizenship applications were rubber-stamped by the Home Office - up 57 per cent on the same period a year earlier, and the equivalent of nearly one every two minutes. At current rates, the number of immigrants receiving UK passports - and with them the right to claim full benefits - will obliterate the previous record of 164, 540 approvals, set in 2007.

Ministers have also come under sustained attack for refusing to impose a 'cap' on the number of migrants allowed into the country. Mr Woolas, shortly after being promoted to the post of immigration minister last autumn, landed in political trouble by saying he would not allow the population to reach 70m, as is projected to happen within the next 20 years. His comments were interpreted as meaning there would be a cap on migrant numbers, a position from which he was quickly forced to climb down. Today, however, he says that by introducing the new points-based citizenship system he has a policy which can be used to peg the population below 70 - and that he will ensure this happens. He said: 'It is the intention we can use this policy to reduce numbers. We think it is better than a cap.'

The new test on British history and politics will take place after a migrant has completed the citizenship points-test, and undergone a period of 'earned citizenship' - normally lasting for between one and three years, depending on whether they are prepared to carry out voluntary work. The voluntary work - which could controversially include trade union activism - will speed up the citizenship process by as much as two years.

The new test will be the first time a migrant has been compelled to learn British history, despite repeated protests from critics over the last four years that a basic understanding of the nation's past is crucial to integration. The existing multiple-choice Life in the UK test, which will remain, concentrates on questions such as how to contact the emergency services and claim benefits.

SOURCE



CIS roundup

1. A Shifting Tide: Recent Trends in the Illegal Immigrant Population

Excerpt: Monthly Census Bureau data show that the number of less-educated young Hispanic immigrants in the country has declined significantly. The evidence indicates that the illegal population declined after July 2007 and then rebounded somewhat in the summer of 2008 before resuming its decline in the fall of 2008 and into the first quarter of 2009. Both increased immigration enforcement and the recession seem to explain this decline. There is evidence that the decline was caused by both fewer illegal immigrants coming and an increase in the number returning home. However, this pattern does not apply to the legal immigrant population, which has not fallen significantly.

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2. E-Verify: Challenges and Opportunities

Excerpt: I am currently the Director of National Security Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies and a former counsel to the 9/11 Commission, where I co-authored the monograph 9/11 and Terrorist Travel alongside recommendations that appear in the 9/11 Final Report1. Prior to 9/11, I was counsel to the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Technology and Terrorism where I specialized in foreign terrorist activity in the United States and worked to pass the federal criminal and redress system in place today for identity theft. Today I focus on issues pertaining to border and identity security and its nexus to national security issues. In September I released an extensive report on E-Verify, and this past March a statistical analysis regarding current use of E-Verify. These two reports will be the focus of this testimony, alongside some basic facts in regard to how border issues affect national security. I have testified before the U.S. Congress ten times, and I am privileged to submit my testimony to the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Management today.

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3. New Film Explores Collision of Cultures in California

Excerpt: Mexican director Amat Escalante says 'Los Bastardos,' his stunningly violent new movie about two Mexican illegal immigrants in the uncaring world of California, grew out of his own experiences living there as a child.

'The story comes from this uneasiness I have because of living there for a long time, and from wanting to show how these two cultures could come to collide and to break down in some way,' Escalante says in today's edition of the Mexico City newspaper Reforma.

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4. He's Just Not That Into You

Excerpt: Schadenfreude alert: 'Obama loses immigration allies; Activists picket, feel betrayed by administration policies.' Actually, though, I'm sure Rahm Emanuel chuckles appreciatively anytime the lefties accuse the White House of being too tough on immigration — if I didn't know better, I'd think he put them up to it just to make Obama (falsely) look tough on enforcement.

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5. The Cosmic Race

Excerpt: The National Council of La Raza has just wrapped up its annual conference in Chicago. While I think Tom Tancredo was engaging in hyperbole when he described La Raza as 'a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses' (that describes instead MEChA and the Brown Berets), there's more to the comparison than people might realize.

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6. 'The Basic Goal Is to Promote the Free Flow of Labor into the USA'

Excerpt: Jim Robb of Numbers USA has some fun with the notes (taken by a participant who grew a conscience) of a closed-door meeting of open-borders lobbyists. It was organized by amnesty czarina Tamar Jacoby, who's the source of the title of this post. None of it's all that surprising — rope-selling businessmen complaining that even in this econony they need more cheap labor. One thing that was notable was that right after lefty wonk Simon Rosenberg said 'Passing CIR [amnesty and increased immigration] will help Democrats lock in the Hispanic vote,' Grover Norquist chimed in to agree that we need amnesty and more immigration. Who's side is he on?

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7. PASS ID Act: A Boon for Criminals

Excerpt: In November 2008, an illegal immigrant facing deportation and running for political office in Rhode Island was prosecuted and found guilty of using her position as a Rhode Island DMV clerk to sell driver's licenses to 'out of state' drug dealers with stolen identities. The scam included 11 others. The beauty of the scam was that the DMV clerk, Dolores Rodriguez LaFlamme, was able to pursue her illegal activity because Rhode Island does not verify an applicant's license information from another state.

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8. 'If Mexico had had an avalanche of foreigners so large'

Excerpt: Sergio Sarmiento, a renowned Mexican journalist whose column is syndicated throughout that country, has some interesting observations about the immigration controversy north of the border.

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9. More Slaves, Please

Excerpt: An op-ed in yesterday's Post is titled 'Immigration Pitfall: Why 'Legalization Only' Won't Fly' and I thought to myself it'd be worth a look to see what pro-enforcement arguments might have made it into the paper. Then I saw the authors and figured out what was up. Penned by former Mexican foreign minister Jorge Castaneda and amnesty czarina Tamar Jacoby, now head of a business-oriented open-borders lobby, the piece argues that amnesty must be coupled with increases in future guest-worker programs if it is to be acceptable to business or to Mexico. (The word 'enforcement' appears just once in the whole piece.) It's actually a good sign politically, because it signals the deep disaffection between the right and left wings of the 'comprehensive immigration reform' crowd, with the lefties figuring their man is in charge now so they can stop pretending to care what rope-selling businesses think. That makes both amnesty and increased immigration less likely, and thus America better off.

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10. Court Crusader Against Illegal Immigration

Excerpt: There's a fair, even-handed profile in the Times today of Kris Kobach, the law professor who's taken the lead role in legal advocacy for local communities seeking to implement their own immigration-related ordinances. (See his CIS report). My only quibble with the article is the headline writer's description that 'a lawyer uses the legal system to try to bring policy change,' based on the reporter's observation that Kobach's activism represents his 're-thinking the conservative tenet that the courts should not be a forum for policy change.' It's the Left that uses the courts that way, seeking to overturn laws duly enacted by the elected representatives of the people. Kobach's fight is precisely the opposite, and precisely what conservatives have been doing for years — defending laws passed by communities against legal assaults from the Left.

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11. No Green Cards for Grads

Excerpt: The U.S. currently has the very sensible policy of not allowing student visas to be the gateway to immigration. Currently the law requires that those seeking student visas must prove they intend only to come to the U.S. to study and will return home at the completion of their studies. There are, however, mechanisms for some students to remain in the U.S. after graduation. Still, as a general policy, the immigration system expects that one comes to the U.S. on a student visa only to be a student.

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12. Think Globally? On the Whole, I’d Rather Not: Interviewing on Al Jazeera

Excerpt: Recently I gave an interview to Al Jazeera English to be aired on a TV show about 'Unemployed Day Laborers in New York City.' When the host called to invite me, the topic initially struck me as oddly narrow and provincial, arguably even a tad esoteric for an audience Al Jazeera claims spans several continents. (I was told the service is 'hip,' multicultural, and has a broad range of viewers.) Nor was it immediately clear to me what my role was to be considering my professional focus. But I was starting out with several mistaken assumptions. I was thinking too abstractly and disinterestedly; the image in my head was an audience curious about American national affairs, the impact of the recession, its social fallout (the show would provide the 'worm's eye view'), and public policy per se. That snap judgment couldn't have been more erroneous. Whenever the show is aired, thousands of viewers will be watching with intense personal interest about a subject that couldn't be more concrete and immediate for them. It will directly address their own lives, and they'll be watching because their economic interests are at stake.

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. For more information, contact Steven Camarota at (202) 466-8185 or sac@cis.org.





3 August, 2009

U.K. to Review and Tighten Requirements for Citizenship

The U.K. government is planning to review its immigration policies, in a move likely to make it more difficult for foreigners to become British citizens. Home Secretary Alan Johnson plans to announce as early as Monday new proposals under which foreigners would have to score a certain number of points to become British citizens -- a requirement already in place for people entering the country to work or study.

This would extend a system, modeled after one in use in Australia and introduced last year, that grades workers and students hoping to enter the U.K. on criteria including education, age and need for their skills. The changes were aimed at making it easier to slow the flow of foreigners looking for work in the U.K. when the economy weakens.

Further details of the new proposals weren't immediately available, but a Home Office spokeswoman said their aim would be to "provide flexibility for the government to respond to the changing economic needs of the country."

The move comes as unemployment is now at a 12-year high and as concerns about terrorism have fueled a surge in protectionist sentiment in the U.K., long one of the world's most open countries. Earlier this year, workers at a number of refineries staged large-scale strikes to protest the use of foreign workers. Meanwhile, once-marginal anti-immigration politicians have been gaining ground.

The U.K. began tightening its immigration policies several years ago. The points-based system has raised hurdles for all but the most highly skilled workers to enter and live in the country.

The Home Office said its proposals will be put out for public and political consultation. The spokeswoman said the proposals would aim to strengthen the country's current citizenship process, which already requires candidates to display good conduct, speak English and demonstrate that they are making a contribution to the community. "The points-based system has already proved to be a powerful tool for controlling migration for the benefit of both British people and the economy," she said.

This week's proposals will likely include changing a rule that allows workers who have been in the country for five years to apply for a passport, by making that period longer, a person familiar with the matter said.

This year, England, which receives the majority of the U.K.'s immigrants, is expected to overtake the Netherlands to become the most densely populated country in Europe. According to government calculations, immigration will add seven million people by 2031 to the U.K.'s population, which is currently more than 60 million. Critics say recent increases are placing a huge burden on public services, as hospitals and schools face increased demand but no increase in their budgets.

In elections last June, two members of the British National Party won seats in the European Parliament, the first electoral success for the anti-immigration party.

Other European countries also are clamping down on new immigration as their economies slow and citizens complain that too many people are being allowed in. Britain, however, with France and Germany, was among the first to open its borders to large-scale immigration from non-European countries after World War II.

Some industries have complained about the increased restrictions. Both Britain's catering industry and its powerful banking sector have said that tightened immigration rules have made it harder for them to attract global talent and fill jobs that can't be filled through local hires.

The points-based system was also criticized this weekend in a report by a committee of U.K. lawmakers, who said it gives undue priority to factors such as qualifications and ignores ability or experience.

Some critics, such as member of Parliament and former Labour government minister Frank Field, have said the points-based system's effect has been trivial, and that it has reduced the number of foreigners looking for jobs in the U.K. by only 8%.

SOURCE



Another Whopper From the New York Times

I could have saved money on my utility bill on Sunday morning because of the New York Times. After reading this article, Debate Intensifies Over Deportations, I could have fried those eggs I had for breakfast on my head instead of the stovetop.

The article is about the Secure Communities Program. This is an effort started under the Bush administration and continued by the Obama administration to identify and deport illegal aliens when they are arrested for other crimes, such as robbery or drunk driving. The article focused on the implementation of the program in Houston, Texas. Sheriff Adrian Garcia was quoted as saying, “We are taking people off the streets of Houston, off the streets of Harris County, who have indicated they are not interested in following the rules around here.”

There were plenty of quotations from people who claim to be “immigrant advocates,” but are really “illegal immigrant advocates,” and actually the correct term under current federal law would be “illegal alien advocates.” I do not accept those persons as having a legitimate point of view because they attempt to facilitate intentional lawbreaking activity when the laws are perfectly reasonable and non-racist. Also, we do not have a worker shortage and I do not believe we ever did. In November, 2006 somebody advertised jobs in New York City at $10.75 per hour, (not a high wage in New York City), thousands of people showed up to apply for the jobs. That event shows that even when the unemployment rate was 4.1% in New York City, at the height of the phony sub-prime economic boom, we had thousands upon thousands of people that were eager to work- if the wage was decent. I strongly suspect that it was and is true in large urban areas all over the United States.

But the most egregious part of the article is this:

Mr. Bringas Nimrod was one of about 10 illegal immigrants the local police had locked up on misdemeanor charges that afternoon. One was Celio Velásquez, a 23-year-old construction worker from Honduras, who was accused of drunken driving and running over a volunteer firefighter with a car, making it necessary to amputate his legs. Another was Jaime López, a 48-year-old Mexican citizen with a bloody bandage over one eye. He had been arrested on aggravated assault charges for the second time. Jay K. Aiyer, a Houston immigration lawyer, said few people here disagree that dangerous criminals should be deported. But Mr. Aiyer said he had handled several cases in the last eight months in which illegal immigrants faced deportation proceedings after the state had dropped criminal charges. But John T. Morton, the assistant secretary of homeland security in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, does not see the roundup of relatively harmless immigrants as a flaw.

“Harmless immigrants.” Unbelievable. A volunteer firefighter has had to have his legs amputated due to the actions of a man who should not even have been in the country, and they are "harmless immigrants."

The case of Celio Velasquez encapsulates the entire macabre circus of illegal immigration. Housing construction has plummeted from 193,000 new housing starts in June, 2005 to 58,000 in June 2009. We have plenty of unemployed construction workers. We do not need Celio Velasquez here illegally working in construction. Nor did we ever need him: some 4 million came here during our phony housing boom of 2002-2007 that was based on sub-prime loans. The home building lobby said, “They are helping us build these houses.” But it was people who should never have been in this country building houses that never should have been built. The illegal aliens earned money and sent a good chunk of it out of the country as remittances to their country of origin. Now, the illegals are still here and they are competing for jobs with unemployed Americans, and we are stuck with these unsold and foreclosed homes. The Bush administration facilitated this with its non-enforcement of the law until this country cried out.

Celio Velasquez ran his car over a volunteer firefighter, causing the amputation of the man’s legs. A man who volunteered to rescue us from danger has lost his legs because of somebody who should never have been in the country. It was a drunk driving incident that never should have happened if our government would enforce the laws.

Another case that happened in the Houston area was that Juan Felix Salinas, here illegally, killed Fenisha, S.J., and Xavier Williams while driving drunk. Now Salinas did have a prior arrest for shaking his wife violently, but I’m sure he held a job and was a hard worker. Nevertheless, he should not have been in this country and those people should have be alive.

In Minnesota, a “harmless [illegal] immigrant” crashed into a school bus and killed 4 school children. She was driving without a license.

In Georgia, a child named Dustin Inman was killed by an illegal alien drunk driver. The Dustin Inman Society was founded in his memory. Links are here and here The website Immigration’s Human Cost has a list of American casualties. FAIR has an ongoing list. But it is impossible to keep track of thousands of deaths and injuries with limited resources.

SOURCE





2 August, 2009

Democrat deception on free health care for illegals

Congressmen lie. Congressmen deceive. Congressmen think the voters in their District are either idiots or too apathetic to notice.

Today's vote on health care for illegal aliens is such a perfect example. The vote was a farce that will be used by many Congressmen to defend themselves against charges that they promote illegal immigration, when in fact their action today just encouraged more of it.

Many Congressmen were stung by the intense phone calls and other outrage from their constituents after they successfully voted on Thursday to kill the "Deal amendment" that would have required verification to keep illegal aliens from getting any new federal health care.

So, they came back today to introduce another amendment that said illegal aliens couldn't get the health care.

HOWEVER . .. . . . the amendment today provided for no verification. And actually reaffirmed other decisions of the last three years to include illegal aliens in various taxpayer-supported benefits.

Our allies in the committee pointed out the deception but the amendment passed on a voice vote.

Expect this to happen: When you criticize any of the Members who voted against the Deal Amendment, you can expect that they will point to this amendment today that they really did oppose rewards for illegal immigration.

SOURCE



Arizona sheriff balks at feds' enforcement change

The self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff in America" has never gotten so much resistance from the federal government. The Homeland Security Department wants Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., to stop arresting illegal immigrants whose only crime was crossing the U.S.-Mexico border without documents.

The thing is, Arpaio doesn't much care. "I'm not going to bend to the federal government, I'm going to do my job," he said. "I don't report to the federal government, I report to the people."

Shifting winds in Washington have led the Homeland Security Department to rework a federal program that has allowed Arpaio's deputies to make federal immigration arrests since February 2007.

It's not yet known whether Arpaio — who has 160 deputies and jail officers trained to make federal immigration arrests and speed up deportations — will sign the new deal. If he doesn't, the feds say he would lose his authority to make any federal immigration arrests.

The revamped program would require Arpaio to clear plans for immigration sweeps beforehand with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and coordinate with ICE before releasing information about such enforcement actions to the news media. Those requirements don't sit well with the sheriff, who is known for his independence and well-oiled media operation.

Even as he considered whether to sign the deal, Arpaio launched a three-day immigration sweep east of metro Phoenix on July 24. Deputies arrested 74 people; 25 of them were illegal immigrants. Ten of the illegal immigrants were released because they had committed no other crimes, and that fact pitted Arpaio against Homeland Security. Arpaio says the feds told his deputies to let them go, while Homeland Security says the decision was exclusively Arpaio's.

That sweep was the latest of 10 Arpaio has conducted in the last two and a half years. Many were held in heavily Latino areas in metropolitan Phoenix, with deputies stopping drivers for traffic violations. The sweeps sparked several angry protests from critics who said they amounted to racial profiling and led to a Justice Department investigation of Arpaio. Arpaio said the people who were pulled over were approached because deputies had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes.

Homeland Security's revamped program focuses on the most serious criminals and creates three priority levels for immigrants who are to be arrested and detained. Immigrants convicted or arrested of major drug offenses or violent offenses such as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery or kidnapping are the top priority. The other two levels pertain to immigrants with prior convictions, but people whose only crime is being in the country illegally are not covered under the program.

Eleven agencies in the country have signed the new so-called 287(g) agreement, while 66 agencies operating under the old program — including Arpaio's — were given 90 days starting July 10 to decide whether they want to agree to follow the revamped program, said DHS spokesman Matthew Chandler.

Arpaio called the new program an amnesty for illegal immigrants.

Chandler said changes to the new program were designed to spend Homeland Security resources wisely. "We feel that, you know, with the limited resources we have we need to be focused on criminal aliens who pose a public safety threat," he said. Chandler declined to say whether DHS could take away Arpaio's option to sign the agreement.

Even if Arpaio doesn't sign it, he vows to continue cracking down on illegal immigration. He will do so by enforcing more limited state immigration laws that prohibit immigrant smuggling and ban employers from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. Just on Wednesday, his deputies arrested 52 illegal immigrants, 48 of whom will face human smuggling charges.

In a news release about the arrests, Arpaio said: "This is yet another example of my continued promise to enforce all the illegal immigration laws in Maricopa County regardless of the ever-changing policies emanating from Washington, D.C."

Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the anti-illegal immigration group Federation for American Immigration Reform, said it supports allowing local law enforcement agencies to make federal immigration arrests and that Arpaio should not be limited to targeting only serious criminals. "If all police departments did was go after serious crimes, most of their other functions would fall by the wayside," he said. "Just because there are murderers in Phoenix doesn't mean cops shouldn't pull someone over for speeding and running a red light."

Alessandra Soler-Meetze, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Arizona, said her group doesn't believe local agencies should be allowed to make any immigration arrests and that Arpaio has abused his power long enough. "He's a rogue sheriff, and he is the clearest, most visible example of why these 287g ordinances are bad for local communities," she said. "Arpaio demonstrates what happens when there's absolutely no federal oversight of a program that has really led to some serious civil rights abuses."

SOURCE





1 August, 2009

Obama loses immigration allies

Activists picket, feel betrayed by administration policies

Three years after President Obama marched alongside Hispanic and immigrant rights activists, they took to the streets Wednesday to march against him, saying he has betrayed them by embracing George W. Bush administration efforts to stem illegal immigration.

Activists marched in Los Angeles and picketed Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano's appearance in New York, angered over the administration's recent embrace of an electronic verification system for employers and a program that allows local police to enforce immigration laws.

The protests highlight the tough political spot Mr. Obama faces: He enjoyed strong support from Hispanics in last year's election, but activists say he's now risking their support in the future.

"I see the sense of betrayal creeping up," said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition, which organized the protest against Ms. Napolitano.

The coalition said the administration is using the right words on immigrant rights but taking the wrong actions to boost enforcement.

"A lot of people see the actions of Secretary Napolitano going in the opposite direction of the reform President Obama promised," she said.

The protests erupted as a report by the Center for Immigration Studies says stepped-up enforcement since 2007 has helped cut the illegal immigrant population in the United States.

The group advocates the reduction of illegal immigration through strong enforcement measures.

The report, being released Thursday morning, says the illegal immigrant population peaked at 12.5 million in summer 2007, or just as Congress was debating a legalization program, but has since fallen to 10.8 million.

Steven A. Camarota and Karen Jensenius, the report's authors, said the fact that legal immigration has not declined shows that enforcement, not the economy, is responsible for the decline in illegal immigrants.

More HERE



Oklahomans hit Justice's meddling on English-only move

Oklahoma's bipartisan congressional delegation this week accused the Obama Justice Department of trying to strong-arm the state into rejecting an English-only referendum by saying it could cost Oklahoma federal funding.

In a stern letter to Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., the lawmakers - six Republicans and one Democrat - said Justice officials were meddling in Oklahoma affairs when they issued a pre-emptive April warning letter, well before any potential violation of law would take place.

"The Civil Rights Division letter was dubiously timed at the peak of legislative debate rather than in response to a particular state action," the delegation wrote to Mr. Holder on Tuesday, questioning whether Oklahoma was being singled out and asking what funds would be jeopardized.

But the Justice Department says Oklahoma lawmakers themselves have already cleared up the problem by changing the referendum in April to remove any conflicts with federal law.

"The proposal appropriately allows languages other than English when required by federal law and, as long as recipients comply with those laws, federal funds are not at risk," said Justice spokesman Alejandro Miyar.

The Oklahoma Legislature voted in April to ask state voters next year to vote on requiring official state actions be conducted in English and preventing individuals from suing to have state services provided in languages other than English.

In her April warning letter, Loretta King, the acting assistant attorney general for the Civil Rights Division, said limiting services could amount to discrimination against persons based on their national origin. She said state programs could lose federal subsidies if they run afoul of discrimination laws.

Mr. Miyar said the letter was designed to let Oklahoma officials know an early version of their legislation might have conflicted with federal law. A week after the letter was sent, the Legislature approved a different version that doesn't conflict with federal laws, and he said that has cleared up any problem.

Still, the Oklahoma lawmakers, led by Republican Sen. James M. Inhofe, said that by acting even before lawmakers had passed their measure, much less before voters had approved the referendum, the administration was acting outside of the civil rights rules the Supreme Court laid out in a 2001 ruling.

"This was not a letter aimed at enforcing actually occurring violations," the lawmakers said.

The lawmakers questioned why Oklahoma received a warning when other states have similar language requirements. State Rep. Randy Terrill, a Republican and sponsor of the referendum, said the letter was an effort to "blackmail" the state.

"The DOJ's argument is legally unsound and tries to equate English-language laws with national-origin discrimination. No court in the country has ever issued a ruling that supports the DOJ's specious legal claims," he said.

Mr. Miyar said Oklahoma's original bill had singled out a Clinton administration executive order as lacking binding authority on states, and Ms. King's letter was intended to alert Oklahoma that other federal laws also apply.

"This was the only English-only bill that we had seen in which Executive Order 13166 was specifically mentioned - and that's the reason it was important to clarify to Oklahoma that Title VI is the federal law that asserts the requirement for recipients to provide reasonable access to [limited English proficiency] individuals," Mr. Miyar said.

The Justice Department under both Republican and Democratic administrations has sent letters to state courts warning against dropping specific translation services.

SOURCE