March prosecutions numbered 9,360. That's small compared to the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the US. Nonetheless, "It's working," says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that would like immigration levels reduced considerably.
The hike in prosecutions stems from an expansion of "Operation Streamline" last year by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Under the effort, undocumented aliens caught by border guards are no longer simply steered into "air-conditioned buses," as Mr. Krikorian puts it, and driven back across the border to try crossing again. Instead, they are charged with crimes and detained.
Note that the Christian Science Monitor uses the politically correct lie-speak term "undocumented immigrants". Try "illegal aliens" or "illegal immigrants".
It will be interesting to see whether President Obama continues the practice of prosecuting illegal border crossers. Strengthening immigration law enforcement could raise the wages and labor market participation of poor black men. This would also reduce the future growth of the welfare state and the prison population and the amount of crime and population growth.
Krikorian guesses that in the past, 800,000 to 900,000 illegal immigrants successfully entered the US every year, and about 400,000 left voluntarily or were deported each year – a net growth of about 500,000 illegal immigrants a year.
If current moves to restrain illegal immigration trim that growth by 100,000 to 200,000 immigrants, it should have some effect on the nation's labor supply, notes University of Chicago economist Jeffrey Grogger. He's coauthor of a paper calculating that a 10 percent increase in the supply of a particular skill group caused by higher immigration prompted a reduction in the wages of similarly low-skilled black men by 4 percent between 1960 and 2000, lowered their employment rate by a huge 3.5 percentage points, and increased their incarceration rate by almost a full percentage point.
As soon as the new Congress is elected it will be time to once again start flooding Congressional offices with faxes, emails, and snail mails demanding tougher immigration law enforcement.
PARIS, June 18 -- The European Parliament approved new rules Wednesday designed to standardize the dramatic differences in member countries' treatment of illegal immigrants, whose presence is one of the most heated political issues in Europe today.
The measure, which would allow countries to jail illegal immigrants for as long as 18 months pending deportation, was decried by human rights organizations as promoting excessive detention. Supporters defended it as providing greater protections for the foreigners in countries that now permit indefinite detentions and grant detainees few legal rights.
This ups the costs of being an illegal alien. But how much will EU member states use this new legal power? Enforcement of tough laws would send most illegal aliens fleeing in short order. What is needed is the political will to enforce the laws.
Steven Malanga reports on a huge rise in identity theft driven by illegal immigration.
As everyone knows, America is experiencing an epidemic of identity theft. In the last five years alone, complaints to the Federal Trade Commission from U.S. residents who have had their identity stolen have skyrocketed 60 percent, to 258,427 in 2007—one-third of all consumer fraud complaints that the commission receives. What’s less well understood, however, is how illegal immigration is helping to fuel this rash of crime. Seeking access to jobs, credit, and driver’s licenses, many undocumented aliens are using the personal data of real Americans on forged documents. The immigrants’ identity theft has become so pervasive that the need to combat it is “a disturbing front in the war against illegal immigration,” according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The FTC’s latest statistics help show why. The top five states in terms of reported identity theft in 2007 all have large immigrant populations—the border states of Arizona, California, and Texas, as well as Florida and Nevada. People who pilfer legitimate identities in these states are much more likely than in other parts of the country to use them to gain employment unlawfully—the most common reason that illegal aliens steal personal information. In Arizona, for instance, 36 percent of all identity theft is for employment purposes, compared with only 5 percent in Maine, a state with far fewer illegal aliens. “To many law enforcement leaders in Arizona, this suggests that Arizona’s identity-theft epidemic is directly linked to the problem of illegal immigration,” says a recent report by Identity Theft 911, an Arizona company that helps businesses and individuals protect themselves.
Getting your identity stolen can throw you into a nightmare.
Americans who have their identity stolen by these gangs are in for major headaches. Among the complaints filed with the FTC is that of a Texas man arrested for a crime committed by an illegal alien who had filched his identity. In another case, highlighted by Nevada senator John Ensign in last year’s immigration-reform debate in Congress, the Internal Revenue Service hit a woman with a $1 million back-tax bill, even though she was a stay-at-home mom. An investigation later found that 218 illegal aliens were using her Social Security number. A Los Angeles police detective—who, ironically, worked in the department’s fraud bureau—was unable to buy a home because of bills piled up by an illegal immigrant who stole his Social Security number to gain employment at a processing plant. Then the IRS served the cop with a bill for $40,000 in back taxes; when he protested, the agency threatened to send his case to collection. Other legal residents have had their unemployment claims or workers’ compensation cases rejected after government records showed that someone with their Social Security number was working.
When President Obama takes office you will need to demand your Congressional representatives pass legislation that cracks down on illegal immigration in general and identity theft in particular.
The biggest single site immigration raid in US history netted 390 in an Iowa meat packing plant.
Cedar Rapids, Ia. – The number of illegal immigrants detained Monday in Postville has risen to 390 in what federal officials now describe as the largest single-site raid of its kind nationwide.
The detainees include 314 men and 76 women, according to figures released this morning by federal authorities. Fifty-six detainees – mostly women with young children – have been released under the supervision of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
My own reaction is that since millions of illegal aliens are within US borders and easy to identify the size of this raid is much too small.
How did a few Ukranians and Israelis get jobs in this plant?
The detainees included 290 who claimed to be Guatemalans, 93 Mexicans, three Israelis and four Ukrainians.
Use of labor that is outside the legal system is a temptation for abusive behavior.
Dummermuth declined to comment about possible charges against managers at Agriprocessors, Inc., citing the ongoing investigation. A federal affidavit released Monday detailed several eyewitness accounts of employee abuse, including one floor manager who allegedly struck a worker with a meat hook.
Will President Obama cut back on immigration law enforcement? Anyone have a good basis for answering that question?
The best way to stop and reverse the influx of illegal aliens is to enforce immigration laws against hiring of illegal aliens. Under pressure from a large and vocal movement against illegal aliens the Bush Administration has made some moves to cut down on the illegal influx. But the Bush Administration is trying to get a federal judge to allow the crack-down.
The Bush administration yesterday renewed its drive to crack down on U.S. companies that hire illegal immigrants by slightly altering an earlier initiative stalled by a federal judge since last September.
If the new proposal satisfies the court, the government could begin warning 140,000 employers in writing as early as June about suspect Social Security numbers used by their employees and force businesses to resolve questions about their identities or fire them within 90 days.
Assorted enemies such as the ACLU and the US Chamber of Commerce are fighting this regulation in court because, well, it will make it harder for employers to pretend that their illegal aliens really have US citizenship or a green card.
In the past, employers have been able to comply with the law by obtaining identification documents from new workers. After that, the government notifies employers if the Social Security number on an employee's W-2 tax form doesn't match the number in the Social Security database. That worker may not have earnings credited for Social Security benefits, but no action is taken against the employer.
Under the new rule, employers who get no-match letters would have 90 days to resolve the discrepancy and an additional three days for an employee to submit a new, valid Social Security number. After that, an employer who failed to fire the worker would be subject to civil fines or criminal prosecution.
That the Bush Administration has gotten this far trying to implement this procedure demonstrates the power and influence of the immigration restrictionist movement.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, it placed 164,000 criminals in deportation proceedings, a sharp increase from the 64,000 the agency said it identified and placed in proceedings the year before. The agency estimates that the number will rise to 200,000 this year.
The elites were willing to allow hundreds of thousands (millions?) of criminal aliens to remain in the country before popular discontent with immigration policy forced them to crack down. We are still paying a big and avoidable price for that past laxness. How many rapes, murders, bank robbers, assaults, and other crimes do Americans suffer daily because the Democrats want more poor Democrat voters and because the upper classes like cheap labor?
Okay, if they tried to deport 164,000 in 2007 but only managed to deport 91,000 then what happened with the other 73,000? Still in the pipeline or managed to avoid deportation?
Two groups of people are now more likely to be placed in deportation proceedings: illegal immigrants who might once have been criminally prosecuted without coming to the attention of immigration authorities, and legal immigrants whose visas and residency permits are being revoked because of criminal convictions.
The number of deported immigrants with criminal convictions has increased steadily this decade, from about 73,000 in 2001 to more than 91,000 in 2007, according to ICE.
I'm pleased to see that legal aliens are getting their residency permits and visas revoked as a consequence of their criminal activity. But I'd like to see efforts to round up criminals who have already been released from prison. We could deport hundreds of thousands of criminals who are out on the streets. We'd benefit from lower crime and lower costs for prisons, courts, and police.
This is a great time to enforce more laws against employers of illegal aliens. The downturn in the economy has already cut back on jobs available to illegals. Now Arizona's new law that will revoke business licenses of companies that employ illegals combined with the economic downturn is causing a flight of illegal immigrants out of Arizona.
PHOENIX — The signs of flight among Latino immigrants here are multiple: Families moving out of apartment complexes, schools reporting enrollment drops, business owners complaining about fewer clients.
While it is too early to know for certain, a consensus is developing among economists, business people and immigration groups that the weakening economy coupled with recent curbs on illegal immigration are steering Hispanic immigrants out of the state.
Immigration amnesty advocates argue that amnesty is the only practical response to large scale illegal immigation. But immigration law enforcement obviously works and quickly too.
Arizona employers have begun firing illegal aliens in order to get compliant with the new law.
Although prosecutors in the state do not plan to begin enforcing the sanctions against employers until next month, several employers have reportedly already dismissed workers whose legal authorization to work could not be proved, as required by the law.
Illegal alien families are moving out of Arizona to other states and back to Mexico.
Property managers report that families have uprooted overnight, with little or no notice. Carlos Flores Vizcarra, the Mexican consul general in Phoenix, said while he could not tie the phenomenon to a single factor, the consulate had experienced an “unusual” five-fold increase in parents applying for Mexican birth certificates for their children and other documents that often are a prelude to moving.
Building contractors find no shortage of willing laborers.
Gary Hudder, president of the Yavapai County Contractors Association board of directors, said that to his knowledge, no members have suffered from the illegal immigrants departing the area at this time.
Hudder believes the slowdown in the construction sector has skewed the magnitude of the illegal immigrants departing the area.
Illegals are fleeing both Arizona and Oklahoma for more lax Texas.
HOUSTON: Illegal immigrants are coming into Texas, but not from where one might think.
While Texas shares a border with Mexico, this rush is coming from Oklahoma, Arizona and other U.S. states that have recently passed tough new anti-illegal immigrant laws.
The two toughest measures are in Oklahoma and Arizona.
Faced with a $550 million budget deficit Rhode Island legislators are getting ready to chase out the illegals in order to cut costs.
PROVIDENCE - Rhode Island, facing a budget crisis that will lead to massive cutbacks, is engulfed in the most intense battle over illegal immigration in New England, with Republicans and Democrats alike calling for a crackdown on unauthorized workers.
In the past few weeks, state lawmakers and the governor have proposed a battery of measures targeting unauthorized workers, from expelling undocumented children from the state's healthcare system to making English the official language to jailing business owners and landlords who harbor illegal workers.
Never mind that the major Presidential candidates are soft on illegal immigration. The populace across the nation can get their will enforced at state and local levels and at those levels they are forcing a crackdown on illegal immigrants. That crack down is going to continue to scale up.
On Thursday, a federal judge in Arizona ruled against a lawsuit by construction contractors and immigrant organizations who sought to halt a state law that went into effect on Jan. 1 imposing severe penalties on employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The judge, Neil V. Wake of Federal District Court, methodically rejected all of the contractors’ arguments that the Arizona law invaded legal territory belonging exclusively to the federal government.
On Jan. 31, a federal judge in Missouri, E. Richard Webber, issued a similarly broad and even more forcefully worded decision in favor of an ordinance aimed at employers of illegal immigrants adopted by Valley Park, Mo., a city on the outskirts of St. Louis.
And, in an even more sweeping ruling in December, a judge in Oklahoma, James H. Payne, threw out a lawsuit against a state statute enacted last year requiring state contractors to verify new employees’ immigration status. Judge Payne said the immigrants should not be able to bring their claims to court because they were living in the country in violation of the law.
By contrast, in an earlier court ruling Hazleton Pennsylvania lost in its attempt to enforce ordinances against illegal aliens. But Hazleton has appealed.
I would like to know who appointed each of these judges. Anyone know of an online resource for finding out which Administration appointed each US federal judge?
If John McCain is elected he's probably going to feel constrained to appoint judges that pass muster with the Federalist Society and other right wing strict constructionist legal organizations. So even though he personally prefers weaker immigration law enforcement at least on the topic of judiciary rulings he's not likely to get his way.
Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama would appoint judges far more likely to overrule local anti-illegal immigrant statutes based on supposed civil rights or federal supremacy in setting and enforcing immigration policy.
Hazleton PA will cite the Valley Park Missouri ruling in Hazleton's appeal.
'Whatever frustrations officials of the city of Hazleton may feel about the current state of federal immigration enforcement, the nature of the political system in the United States prohibits the city from enacting ordinances that disrupt a carefully drawn federal statutory scheme,'' U.S. District Judge James Munley wrote.
In his opinion, issued six months after Munley's, Webber noted he was free to depart from the ruling in the Hazleton case.
''The Court respectfully notes that the Pennsylvania decision is not binding, and therefore, the Court will conduct its own thorough analysis of the issues presented,'' he wrote.
Hazleton has appealed Munley's ruling to the 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Philadelphia. The city's lawyers plan to file a brief with the court Thursday arguing that Munley erred in his interpretation of federal law -- and citing Webber's decision in the Valley Park case.
The American Civil Liberties Union predictably opposed tougher immigration law enforcement in both the Hazleton and Valley Park cases. The ACLU needs US courts to have sovereign power to make decisions that the ACLU wants and yet the ACLU fights for outcomes that ultimately will destroy American sovereignty.
But the losers in the Arizona case are going to appeal as well.
The employer and immigration-rights groups said they would appeal to the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. They had been expecting Wake -- who was openly critical of their arguments in court hearings in December -- to rule against them.
99% of the people making false claims at US borders are trying to come in from Mexico, not Canada.
In announcing an end to the "honor system" under which Americans and Canadians can enter the United States simply by presenting a driver's license or declaring their citizenship, Chertoff wrote to lawmakers that people had made 1,517 false claims of U.S. citizenship at land crossings in the past three months. That included one man with an outstanding arrest warrant for a homicide charge in California.
A spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection acknowledged this week, however, that only 20 of the recent cases -- and 210 out of 31,060 false claims in the past three years -- occurred at the border with Canada. The other 99 percent came at the Mexican border.
One wonders about the 210 on the Canadian border though. How many were Muslims?
The people on our southern border have less respect for the law than the people on our northern border. I think immigration law enforcement policy should reflect that fact. We need to finish and enhance the US-Mexico border barrier so that illegal entry becomes difficult and very rare.
Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota has just signed a series of executive orders designed to crack down on illegal aliens and the employment thereof.
Among the executive orders Pawlenty signed:
• Minnesota law enforcement officers will work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to help enforce immigration laws. Seifert said that’s primarily state-level law enforcement, such as Bureau of Criminal Apprehension.
• New state employees and contractors doing business with the state will be required to verify their citizenship through an Internet-based system operated by the federal government, known as E-Verify.
• The Department of Public Safety will conduct a review of Minnesota’s driver’s license database to catch duplicate photos and study them for possible fraud.
• The DPS will conduct summits for law enforcement, including local law enforcement officers, to provide training in targeting criminal activity related to illegal immigration.
The legislative parts of his proposal face an uphill battle.
He also proposed several measures that lawmakers would have to approve, including stiffer penalties for identity theft and a ban on so-called sanctuary ordinances that prevent police from asking about immigration status. He described his ideas as "reasonable steps to help combat illegal immigration."
"These are legitimate concerns both in Minnesota and across the country. Other states are moving to address them and we have been as well, but more needs to be done," Pawlenty said, flanked by GOP lawmakers, police chiefs and state commissioners.
Most of Pawlenty's illegal immigration plan failed two years ago, when Republicans controlled the House. Prospects for the latest package appear even worse now that Democrats rule both legislative chambers. Key Democrats were panning the plan minutes after the governor's news conference wrapped up.
Growing popular support for illegal immigration crackdowns have turned similar proposals into state law in other states. Maybe trends in Minnesota will eventually result in enough pressure on the state legislature to get these proposals passed as well.
A law with real enforcement teeth to get employers to stop hiring illegal aliens is going into effect on January 1, 2008 and employers who knowingly employ illegal aliens can loose their business license.
Businesses knowingly employing illegal immigrants face corporate death penalties.
The first offense can result in a 10-day suspension of a company's business license. The second offense can mean loss of the business license altogether. The law is widely viewed as the toughest of more than 100 passed by states and municipalities nationwide since the summer to crack down on illegal immigration.
Employers can comply by checking all applications against a US federal database.
The state sanctions law is the toughest in the nation. It is aimed at turning off the job magnet that has drawn more than 500,000 undocumented immigrants to Arizona. In addition to punishing businesses for knowingly employing illegal workers, the measure requires employers to use a federal online computer program known as E-Verify to check the work eligibility of all new employees hired after Jan. 1.
If employers refused to hire illegals then the illegal aliens would stop coming and, in fact, would turn around and go home. In fact, self deportation by illegals is already accelerating. If Arizona's law is not overturned in court it could cut the number of illegals in Arizona and set an example for what could be done on a national scale.
Arizona has a huge illegal alien problem.
Arizona stands out in illegal hires – about 10 to 12 percent of the workforce. This border state with only 6.2 million people has more illegal immigrants than Illinois or New York. Two-thirds of Arizona's foreign-born population are not in the US legally, and the vast majority of them live at or near the poverty level.
The political impetus behind the law is due in large measure to the state's social services being overwhelmed in recent years by a flood of migrants evading tighter border security in California and Texas. The state, in other words, may represent the United States of the future, unless more is done to address the problem of both illegal (too much) and legal (too little) immigration. Since 2000, the US has seen its highest increase in immigrants, but more than half were illegal.
Cutting back on the supply of illegals will accelerate the automation of agriculture.
And one economist, Philip Martin at the University of California, Davis, predicts higher wages will force needed mechanization and increased productivity in farming and not significantly raise prices for produce. That was the case, he says, after the "Bracero" Mexican guest-worker program ended in the 1960s.
Lettuce field worker salaries have already risen with increased enforcement.
Simonds said, "What that means is you got workers who are not seasoned. They don't know how to work a field, and so production is way down across the board,. If you have new people showing up every day, you are going to spend half your day or more training them how to adhere to food safety standards."
Because employers have to compete more for workers, Rademacher said he has raised salaries from about $7 three years to close to $10 this year.
Waters said some growers are paying $15 to $18 an hour this season.
Some of the legal Hispanic field workers think like farmer workers union leader Cesar Chavez did and oppose the illegals since the illegals drive down wages.
Ramona Ortiz, 55, who has been working in the fields since she was 16, said that there are undocumented workers, contrary to growers who say most workers are documented. And she would like to see fewer of them.
"Too many workers hurt the people with documents," she said. "It holds the salaries down."
But that is why the employers want the illegals: to lower their costs of labor while sticking the rest of us with higher taxes to pay for welfare, police, jails, crowding, and other costs. Privatize profits, socialize costs. I say we put a stop to this.
Maybe the US government is going to enforce tougher rules on illegal alien hiring.
The Department of Homeland Security is expected to make public soon new rules for employers notified when their worker's name or Social Security number was flagged by the Social Security Administration.
The rule, as initially drafted, requires employers to fire people who cannot be verified as a legal worker and cannot resolve within 60 days why the name or Social Security number on their W-2 doesn't match the government's database.
Employers who do not comply could face fines of $250 to $10,000 (€180 to €7,300) per illegal worker and incident.
My reaction is along the lines of "I'll believe it when I see it". Our political masters are not keen to stop the use of illegal alien labor. They've pretended to get tough in the past. Immigration has become such a huge political issue that their pretending is getting hard to do.
After first proposing the rules last year, Department of Homeland Security officials said they held off finishing them to await the outcome of the debate in Congress over a sweeping immigration bill. That measure, which was supported by President Bush, died in the Senate in June.
Now administration officials are signaling that they intend to clamp down on employers of illegal immigrants even without a new immigration law to offer legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the workforce.
The popular winds are blowing so hard for real immigration law enforcement that even Senator John McCain is supporting enforcement-only changes in immigration policy.
Farmers are starting to feel the effects of tougher immigration law enforcement. Necessity being a mother, tougher policies against illegal aliens have led to the use of prisoners as farm labor.
The ongoing debate over illegal immigration in the U.S. is having some strange and unintended consequences in the West, where farmers facing acres of unpicked crops are replacing immigrants with inmates.
In Colorado, which last year passed some of the strictest immigration laws in the country, a new program aims to stem a severe labor shortage by using prisoners to work fields once farmed by migrant workers. In Arizona and Idaho, farmers are begging for the expansion of existing prison labor programs as states begin to target employers who hire illegal immigrants.
Great. Make people who are a financial drain on the rest of us do work that at least partially pays for the costs of their criminality.
But farmers who can't afford to pay market rates for labor should either get out of farming or automate their operations or switch to crops that require less labor. We are going to see a lot more farm automation as a result of vigorous immigration law enforcement.
Senator Jeff Sessions (R AL) says the Senate immigration amnesty bill (now S.1639) will not decrease illegal immigration by much even with the $4.4 billion in funding for what is supposed to be increased immigration enforcement.
WASHINGTON— U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL) made the following comments regarding the $4.4 billion included in the immigration bill Sen. Reid reintroduced yesterday:
“If we assume that the Administration and the bill’s drafters were serious about their commitment to enforcement, the recent promises of guaranteed funding are unnecessary.
“The only significance of the promised funding is to effectively say ‘we’re going to fund what we already promised to fund.’ The $4.4 billion will not build additional miles of fencing, provide any new technology, hire additional agents or acquire more detention beds than already promised by the President and included in the bill’s provisions that trigger amnesty.
“Let me emphasize that this money will do nothing more than fund the enforcement trigger in the bill, which was already a solemn promise to the American people. The real problem is that the enforcement trigger does not go far enough. It will not adequately secure the border or restore the rule of law.
“The trigger remains very weak. It does not ensure – and the mandatory spending does not provide for – construction of the 700 miles of fencing already authorized by current law. The immigration bill only provides for construction of a total of 370 miles. A mere 87 miles of fencing exist today on our 2,000 mile southern border. Likewise, current law requires 43,000 detention spaces by the end of fiscal year 2007, but the bill’s enforcement trigger provides for only 31,500. The trigger does not require completion of the U.S. VISIT exit system, which is absolutely critical to ensure that foreign workers and visitors do not overstay their visas. To assert that these enforcement items are an assurance to the American people is disingenuous.
“Most significantly, the $4.4 billion will do nothing to change CBO’s conclusion that the bill will only reduce illegal immigration by 13 percent. CBO assumed the bill’s enforcement items would be funded when it published its June 4th cost estimate. If the Senate bill is enacted, CBO projects an additional 8.7 million new illegal immigrants will be in the U.S. in 20 years. These new promises do nothing to prevent that.”
Congress has repeatedly pretended to adopt policies that will reduce illegal immigration. The fact that advocates of increased immigration are prominent supporters of this latest bill provides a strong indication that they are pretending and trying to deceive us yet again. Do not be deceived.
If Congress was serious about cutting illegal immigration they wouldn't let their amnesty trigger kick in till illegal crossings of the border dropped by 99%. But why have an illegal alien amnesty in the first place. We can and should deport all the illegal aliens. We should also reduce legal immigration and set high requirements on who gets to come to America.
Update: If you want to follow the shifts in voting positions by US Senators on whether to vote for cloture on this bill (and 60 votes for cloture would assure the bill's passage) then read Noam Askew's cloture vote counting page. The vote is probably coming on Tuesday. So you should call your Senators early Monday morning and tell them you are opposed to S. 1639. Also, check out the Numbers USA web site and follow their recommendations on how to oppose this bill. You can use their site to send faxes to your Senators.
The European Union looks set to start taking a much tougher line against illegal aliens. The United States could benefit from following the EU's lead on immigration policy. The European Commission is developing a new law to cut back on illegal immigrants.
The European Commission has presented a new Directive to crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants. The proposal is part of a comprehensive European Migration policy supporting legal migration, fighting illegal migration and building cooperation with Third Countries. "It is vital to acknowledge that the near certainty of finding illegal work in EU Member States is the main driving force behind illegal immigration from third countries," said Vice-President Franco Frattini, EU Commissioner responsible for Justice, Freedom and Security.
Anyone caught employing illegal immigrants would be banned from taking part in national public procurement contracts or from receiving subsidies for up to five years. The measure would affect farms, for example, that benefit from generous EU or national agriculture subsidies and are caught employing illegal crop pickers.
Companies would also be fined and forced to pay the cost of repatriating illegal migrants to their countries of origin. For more serious abuses such as human trafficking or the repeated employment of illegal workers, EU states could impose jail sentences, though the proposal leaves the length of jail sentences to the discretion of national governments.
Frattini said the legislation would require countries to increase from 2 percent to 10 percent the number of companies they inspect each year for illegal employment.
The Europeans want to cut employer demand for illegal immigrant workers.
As it stands, 19 of the EU's 27 member states have criminal sanctions against those who employ illegal entrants. In the UK, bosses face fines, and a new law will introduce jail terms of up to two years. Commissioner Fratini, however, wants to ensure that errant employers face more consistent penalties, because legislation and enforcement rates vary widely.
Harmonised jail sentences, although being considered, were not touted at the Wednesday announcement.
Behind the proposal is a desire to reduce exploitation of undocumented immigrants and the "pull" factor that drives illegal entry. Mr Frattini also believes that the employment of illegal immigrants distorts competition.
We need more immigration law enforcement against US employers. Also, putting the cost of deportations on employers is an excellent idea. It contrasts with the practice of so many American businesses which increase private profits by socializing costs.
The conservative government of newly elected French President Nicolas Sarkozy seeks to fulfill campaign promises to cut back on immigrants in France by paying them to leave. The new French government has created a new department to enforce immigration laws more aggressively. Also, the French government promises to initiate a vigorous program to pay legal immigrants to leave.
France is home to over 5 million immigrants -- and the new conservative-led government doesn't plan on making things any more comfortable for them. While the new regime in Paris is determined to curb illegal immigration, it is also looking to encourage legal migrants to reconsider their decision to stay in France -- by paying them to go back home.
New immigration minister, Brice Hortefeux, confirmed on Wednesday that the government is planning to offer incentives to more immigrants to return home voluntarily. "We must increase this measure to help voluntary return. I am very clearly committed to doing that," Hortefeux said in an interview with RFI radio.
Under the scheme, Paris will provide each family with a nest egg of €6,000 ($8,000) for when they go back to their country of origin. A similar scheme, which was introduced in 2005 and 2006, was taken up by around 3,000 families.
The French should levy big fines on the employers of illegals and use the money to fund the bribing of legals to leave. Also, they should follow the British approach (see further below) of increasing fees on applications for legal residency and use that money to deal with illegals. Why force the citizens to pay for the foreigners?
"We must increase this measure to help voluntary return. I am very clearly committed to doing that," said Hortefeux, who last week was named in the rightwing government of President Nicolas Sarkozy.
Hortefeux heads a newly-created ministry of immigration, integration, national identity and co-development that is expected toughen up immigration policy and tailor it to France's employment needs.
Hortefeux estimates that France has between 200,000 and 400,000 illegal immigrants. The United States should be so lucky.
Thanks to Dragon Horse for the tip.
Britain is taking a different approach: The cost of staying in Britain is going up.
The price tag for naturalization more than doubled in early April to £575, or $1,135, from £200, part of a wave of steep increases in fees to immigrants. The biggest rise was in the cost of the long-term residency permit, known here as indefinite leave to remain, which rose to £750 from £335. Same-day service for the permit costs £950, compared to £500 before the change.
Officials say the proceeds will help pay for a big new push to enforce immigration laws and crack down on illegal arrivals. The Home Office, the government department in charge of domestic security, said it wanted to hire more enforcement agents, build detention centers and increase its ability to process migrants efficiently without spending tax money.
Immigration Minister Liam Byrne said it was fair to require those who benefit economically from living in Britain to pay for the changes.
Note how some of the money will be spent on enforcement activities against illegal immigrants. We start fining employers of illegals and use the money to fund the capture and deportation of illegals.
Update: In 2005 Steve Sailer proposed buying out Muslim immigrants (who are France's biggest concern) in two articles here and here. One interesting thing to note about a buy-out: The more economically successful the immigrant the less enticing the buy-out. So we would tend to get rid of the poorest immigrants (those who pay the least in taxes and cost the most for medical and other welfare state services) if we paid legal immigrants a fixed amount to leave.
Contra the open borders libertarians I do not see the ability to immigrate as a basic right. Any supposed right which, if put into full practice, would destroy many other rights (e.g. by raising crime and taxes) does not strike me as a right. Also, I do not buy the argument that all people should get all the same rights. Rights have to flow from other attributes that people possess. We do not all equally possess the attributes needed to make a free society work. Therefore we should not all possess equal rights. The law already recognizes this, for example, vis a vis children. They are not considered to have the capacity for the exercise of full rights. Neither are retarded people. Similarly, we also shouldn't grant full rights to psychopaths since they lack sufficient motive to respect the rights of others.
Audacious Epigone points out that the welfare state benefits in France serve as a disincentive for legal immigrants in France to leave.
Critics will argue that $8,000 comes nowhere near making up for the entitlements to be accrued by a migrant who elects to remain in France. Stateside, low-skilled workers create an annual net taxpayer liability of over $22,000 per capita. While ascertaining demographic attributes in France is even more difficult than in the US, since the French government doesn't inquire about the race or ethnicity of its residents, in 2002 a private thinktank found that half of the foreign-born in France do menial jobs compared to the one-quarter of natives who do, are twice as likely to be unemployed as their native cohorts, and are three times as likely as natives to make only the minimum wage. The French entitlement structure is even more generous to the impoverished than the one in the US is. So it's safe to assume that for most of the migrants the new initiative will apply to, recouping the $8,000 given up will only take a matter of months.
The French government needs to start restricting welfare state benefits eligibility for legal immigrants and to stop letting in legal immigrants who can't earn more than the average French wage.
Update II: The French approach to immigration is especially heartening because they do not seek just to slow the growth of the problem or to stop its growth. The French approach potentially could reverse the growth of the problem. Since so many of the illegal immigrants to France are Muslims they have a special need to turn back the clock and undo some of the damage. But we too could benefit from this approach.
At 2:10 a.m., a fleet of dark SUVs surged from the garage beneath a federal building onto the deserted streets of Fairfax County, carrying a raiding party of flak-jacketed immigration agents.
Their quarry: illegal immigrants who have ignored and evaded deportation orders. Called "fugitive aliens" or "alien absconders," they have nearly doubled in number since 2001, now totaling more than 636,000.
The Fairfax operation was part of a stepped-up national effort that has increased the number of fugitive arrests from 1,560 in 2003 to a projected 16,000 this year, U.S. immigration officials said.
This is part of Bush's program to appear to get tough on enforcing immigration laws because he thinks that acting tough will help him get an immigration amnesty through Congress. But at the rate of 16,000 per year captured it will take 40 years to capture the illegal alien absconders who are already here. There's an easier solution for future potential absconders: Once someone gets a deportation order do not let them walk out the court room the way they got in. Put them in detention and ship them out under law enforcement supervision.
Steven Camarota says the 600,000 absconders show how the US government neglects immigration law enforcement.
The failure to remove "low-hanging fruit" such as fugitives "may reflect the fact that there's a complete neglect for enforcement, or that even in egregious cases, they just can't get their act together," said Steven A. Camarota, spokesman for the Center on Immigration Studies, a group that advocates less immigration.
We should reduce immigration by at least 99%. The country has enough people. The most desirable places to live are becoming really expensive. We have enough people. We do not need any more.
An advocate for amnesty for millions of illegal aliens cites the US government's failure to round up absconders as an argument against enforcement as a solution to the American immigration problem.
"The absconder population is exhibit number one," said Victor X. Cerda, former chief of staff and general counsel for the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). "We haven't been able to handle the 600,000-plus who went through the legal system. What's going to lead us to believe we're going to handle the 12 million?"
Victor X. Cerda gets this exactly backward. The 600,000 who went through the legal system are exhibit number one that a foreign worker permit program would fail abysmally. If the ICE can't round up absconders now then the US government obviously lacks the capacity to manage and enforce Bush's guest worker program. The presence of 600,000 absconders is proof that the US government lacks the capacity to enforce the law in a foreign guest worker program.
The US government could find many of these hundreds of thousands of illegals if they put up pictures of them on a web site with a financial reward for finding each one. But to implement such an incentive program would require that the US government get seriously motivated to stop immigration law violation.
Documents released in the controversy about eight fired U.S. attorneys show that federal prosecutors in Texas generally have declined to bring criminal charges against illegal immigrants caught crossing the border — until at least their sixth arrest.
A heavily redacted Department of Justice memo from late 2005 disclosed the prosecution guidelines for immigration offenses, numbers the federal government tries to keep classified. DOJ officials would not say Thursday whether it has adjusted the number since the memo was written, citing "law enforcement reasons."
This six times rule is dumb for obvious reasons. But let me go and state the most obvious one anyway: Most illegal crossers are probably going to make it across in less than 6 tries. This rule seems aimed at simply reducing the amount of work prosecuting and holding illegals.
What other justification is there for 5 warnings? Cost is the only one I can see. The Justice Department could argue they can't handle the volume of lawbreakers. But that's an argument for hiring a lot more prosecutors and judges to allow prosecution of all illegals on their first attempts. The effect of such a strategy would be to reduce the number who try to cross illegally in the first place. We should spend much more and try much harder to enforce immigration law for a short period of time. Go all out for a year or two. Then the total number of illegal crossers will plummet and the amount of law enforcement resources needed on the border will drop.
The feds are starting to get serious about deporting illegal criminals who are doing jail time.
A spot check by federal agents has identified 59 street gang members in Southern California jails who are illegal immigrants subject to deportation, sparking a debate about the role of border enforcement in the region's battle against violent gangs.
The initial identification of deportable gang members came during a first-of-its-kind screening of a portion of jail inmates last month.
The review will continue, and officials expect during the first year to identify 700 to 800 gang members who are illegal immigrants, according to Jim Hayes, director of the Los Angeles field office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
The pressure on the federal government from popular outrage over immigration has gotten high enough that the US government is doing "first-of-its-kind screening" on jail inmates. These are people in jail. In other words, they are criminals. Yet doing a screening on them to identify illegal alien gang members for deportation is a "first-of-its-kind" event now in the year 2007. That shows how bad things got and how far we still have to go on immigration law enforcement.
Groaning under the weight of thousands of undocumented immigrants who saw this dusty town on the Texas border as the ideal place to cross, federal officials decided in late 2005 to try something radical: Treat illegal immigrants as criminals, rather than violators of civil immigration law.
Just about everyone caught on a 205-mile section of Texas border between Eagle Pass and Del Rio is now charged with a federal misdemeanor and sent before a judge, then to jail. Although the federal law in question - illegal entry - has been on the books for more than a decade, it's never been enforced on such a widespread basis.
We need the same policy along the rest of the border.
Are you shocked to learn that vigorous law enforcement reduces crime?
In the first year of the experiment, monthly apprehensions - a rough measure of illegal crossings - fell 57 percent across the Border Patrol's Del Rio sector and 78 percent in the area around Eagle Pass. Agents here seized more than $15 million worth of narcotics in November, about four times what they seized in the same month the year before - the result, officials say, of more time spent on the line and less processing border crossers.
Perhaps just as telling, immigrants as far away as Central America have heard of the program and have begun to view this stretch of the Rio Grande as a place to be avoided.
Our supporters of open borders for years argued it is futile to control the borders. They wanted us to to give in to feelings of helplessness and passivity. Instead we got angry, yelled at the gub'mint and they did something about it while trying not to. Now we have more narcotics getting seized because the reduction in the flow of illegals frees up more Border Patrol time to go after smugglers. Border law enforcement works, the border is controllable, and illegal crossings can be brought down to a small trickle.
Border Patrol commanders argue the slackening flow of migrants belies the conventional wisdom that it is impossible to stem illegal migration along a 2,000 mile, or 3,200 kilometer, border. Many veteran officers in the force are now beginning to believe that with sufficient resources, it can be controlled.
We need a wall. We need more monitoring gadgets. We need more Border Patrol agents. We also need prosecution of illegal crossers along the entire length of the border. Plus, we need more interior enforcement of immigration laws.
Despite its spartan conditions, the facility in Willacy County, 260 miles south of Austin, is a key to President Bush's drive to create a channel for temporary foreign workers and a path toward legalization for as many as 12 million illegal immigrants living in the United States.
To do so, the government must convince skeptics that it can credibly enforce laws aimed at illegal immigrants and their employers, and can hold and deport those caught by the U.S. Border Patrol. At the same time, the administration and its allies argue that even additional detention beds will be overwhelmed without new channels for legal immigration. Accordingly, the United States has embarked on a huge prison building and contracting campaign, increasing the number of illegal immigrants detained from 19,718 a day in 2005 to about 26,500 now, and a projected 32,000 this summer.
We could deport at least 300,000 illegals who are criminals if we just identified them as illegals and made sure they do not get released at the end of their prison terms.
The Border Patrol made 1.1 million apprehensions last year -- mostly Mexicans who were promptly returned across the border -- but estimates 500,000 people evaded capture or entered legally and then overstayed visas.
An additional 630,000 are at large, ignoring deportation orders, and 300,000 more who entered state and local prisons for committing crimes are to be deported but will probably slip through the cracks after completing their sentences.
Bush wants to end illegal immigration as part of a drive to drastically ramp up legal immigration. Will he get away with it? As the supply of illegals dry up the businesses that make use of cheaper labor will complain about the need to pay more. But any temporary worker permit program will ramp up both legal and illegal immigration.
RICHMOND, Jan. 17 -- Virginia Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell (R) called Wednesday for legislation and an executive order to allow state and local police to enforce federal immigration laws in an effort to crack down on violent criminals who are in the country illegally.
Flanked by lawmakers from Manassas, Prince William County and Herndon -- three Northern Virginia communities with large Latino populations and plenty of public pressure to get tougher on undocumented residents -- McDonnell said law enforcement must be given more tools to stop such criminals.
`McDonnell says state and local officers currently lack the legal ability to detain people on immigration charges. He also wants this authority in order to go after illegal immigrants who have committed crimes, been deported, and then returned. He says that 80,000 such people are in the United States currently.
But the Governor, a Democrat, does not want the police to gain that power. He would apparently rather let violent criminals prey on the people of his state.
Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D), however, reiterated that he does not intend to sign an executive order of the sort McDonnell endorsed. He said immigration enforcement is a federal duty, not a state one.
"What we want to do is demand of our federal delegation and legislators that they provide appropriate funding for anti-immigration activity, and not take the pressure off by having the Virginia taxpayers pay the bill," Kaine said.
Kaine is wrong on a few counts. First of all, Virginia taxpayers are going to pay the bill either way. It is just a question of which government agency at what level takes their money and uses it for that purpose. Second, local enforcement is the most cost effective and most practical way to go. Local police are in every town. Federal immigration agents are rare compared to local police. Also, local police run into illegals in the course of their normal work investigating crimes and doing patrols. Why waste those many fortuitous encounters and all the knowledge they gain when questioning people?
Kaine is most fundamentally wrong when he finds excuses to prevent police from catching violent criminals. The primary purpose of government is to protect our rights. He would rather pander to ethnic interests than to protect the rights and safety of citizens. He demonstrates yet another reason why immigration of non-majority ethnic groups and races causes problems for the white majority.
The U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 8 percent fewer illegal immigrants last fiscal year than the year before, reversing a two-year increase in the historically volatile benchmark, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced yesterday.
Chertoff credited the drop of nearly 100,000 apprehensions largely to the Bush administration's strategy of deporting virtually all non-Mexican border crossers as fast as they are caught, deterring them and others in what had been the fastest-growing group of illegal immigrants. After quadrupling the previous four years, apprehensions of "other than Mexican" border crossers fell 57,144, or 35 percent, to 108,026 last year.
I'd be more convinced by more objective evidence. For example, could regular aircraft flights at night with high resolution digital infrared cameras measure the rate of illegal alien crossings by counting human shape heat signatures along desert sections of the border?
Some knowledgeable observers question Chertoff's interpretation of the figures on apprehensions.
Analysts immediately disputed Chertoff's claim of an unprecedented decline in arrests. Border Patrol apprehensions have risen and fallen like a roller coaster over the years, peaking at almost 1.7 million in 2000 before bottoming out at 932,000 in 2003. Causes include earlier threats of congressional crackdowns; the security climate after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks; and changes in Border Patrol funding and strategies.
Experts instead called yesterday's announcement the administration's latest effort to walk a political tightrope in its handling of illegal immigration heading into the Nov. 7 congressional elections.
In any case, improvements in border enforcement come only as a result of loud and persistent popular demand. Bush doesn't want tougher border enforcement and neither do a majority of the Democrats in Congress.
Chertoff is either a liar or a fool when he says that a guest worker program will help control the southern border.
Chertoff backed away yesterday from the Bush administration's pledge to control the nation's borders by 2008, saying it would be "very, very difficult" without a guest-worker program, which the House has resisted. Proponents in Congress say it would take 18 months to six years to set up such a program, after paying for a long-needed computerized worker-verification system to manage it.
Bush and Nancy Pelosi stand a very substantial chance of enacting an amnesty and guest worker program that'll increase legal immigration by millions a year while not decreasing illegal immigration. I've explained in considerable detail how a guest worker program will draw mostly from people who do not now try to enter the US illegally and how the guest workers will increase the influx of illegal immigrants. You can read all about it and know that the guest worker program advocates are lying to you.
What gives with Bush? Howard Sutherland tells Lawrence Auster that Bush sees Mexicans as somehow morally superior to Americans.
George W. Bush is a true believer in amnesty for illegal aliens, at least for Mexicans, and perhaps in some sort of EU-style shotgun marriage of Canada, the United States and Mexico as well. For reasons that beg for psychoanalysis (although from knowing the Texas milieu that produced Mr. Bush I have some speculations), President Bush loves Mexicans. I think on balance he sees the average Mexican as in some moral sense superior to the average American, more genuine in some inchoate way. My impression is that, in his heart of hearts, he likes them better than he likes us. When he says “family values don’t stop at the Rio Grande river,” he is speaking from his heart. That he is sworn to uphold and defend the Constitution of the United States, not the welfare of Mexicans, does not faze him. The amnesty/guest worker program is President Bush’s lodestar, the legacy he sincerely wants to leave America. In the teeth of all the evidence, he believes that we would be better for it and it’s just the right thing to do. It is more important to him than Iraq, so important that he jettisoned the GOP’s best chance to hold on to the Congress rather than back away from it.
Jorge Bush's gut instinct told him in 1999 (really) to invade Iraq to win an easy war that would boost his popularity. This guy has bad judgement which he trusts. Bush makes huge mistakes which he refuses to acknowledge. He also has a condescending attitude toward the vast majority of the American people. He looks down on us and wants to replace us with Mexicans who he sees as more compliant for elites. Stand up against this guy. He's bad news and if he gets away with it his legacy will be huge lasting damage to the quality of life in America.
Immigration restrictionists need to yell even louder and more often in the next couple of years. The foxes are now in control of the henhouse and they mean to destroy what most Americans love about America.
Heather Mac Donald says the Bush Administration refuses to grant Orange County California sheriff's deputies the right to enforce immigration law.
President Bush claims he’s serious about immigration enforcement. Here’s one way he could show it. The Orange County, Ca., sheriff has asked the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to train and deputize his detectives in immigration law and to authorize them to enforce it. That way, when a sheriff’s detective comes across an illegal-alien gang suspect, he can get him off the street immediately on an immigration charge. ICE has sat on Sheriff Michael Corona’s request (which conforms to a 1996 federal law) for ten months. If President Bush wants to demonstrate that he is willing to protect the country against illegal-alien criminals, he should order ICE to approve Orange County’s request without further delay.
But President Bush does not want to protect the country against illegal alien criminals as much as he wants to flood the country with tens of millions more illegal aliens.
Orange County spends $18 million holding illegals who already are wanted for immigration law violations. That's just one county in one state.
Orange County, Ca., spends nearly $18 million a year incarcerating just those illegal aliens who already have immigration holds on them — over ten percent of its jail population; that number leaves out the many other illegal-alien criminals who have escaped ICE detection entirely.
In contrast to most of the existing local immigration agreements, the Orange County plan tries to nab illegal-alien criminals before they end up in jail. Unlike state highway troopers, sheriff’s detectives work in the most crime-prone, often immigrant-heavy, neighborhoods every day; they actively seek out criminals rather than waiting for a law-breaker to come to them. In these gang-saturated neighborhoods, illegal-alien criminals prey on law-abiding immigrants; their law-abiding victims are usually reluctant to provide evidence against them. The only tool that a law-enforcement officer may have for getting an illegal gang-banger off the street is his immigration status; trying to build a case for armed robbery, say, may be futile. Moreover, if an investigator has only enough evidence to detain someone briefly for questioning about a crime, but not yet probable cause to arrest him, a quick check of the immigration database may provide grounds to arrest him rather than let him get away.
We should not have to live with the consequences of Hispanic gangs in our neighborhoods. We should not have to live in a decaying society. We should not have to be governed by lying elites that work to harm our interests.
Due to objections from illegal immigrant advocacy organizations and the Bush Administration illegal immigrant appeasers Orange County has had to water down their proposal.
Orange County’s original proposal would have given sheriffs deputies on routine patrol access to the ICE immigration-crime databases — not just detectives. ICE and immigrant advocates rejected this reasonable idea and also sharply reduced the number of detectives who would be given clearance to check immigration databases.
The Bushies pretend they want to enforce immigration laws. But the Bushies reject any proposal that would be effective. You can't trust them.
We can not trust the President of the United States. Jorge W. Bush feels pressured to pretend that he wants immigration laws strictly enforced.
CINCINNATI, July 30 — Immigration agents had prepared a nasty surprise for the Garcia Labor Company, a temporary worker contractor, when they moved against it on charges of hiring illegal immigrants. They brought a 40-count federal indictment, part of a new nationwide strategy by immigration officials to clamp down on employers of illegal immigrant laborers.
Bush thinks he has a better chance of getting what he wants from Congress on immigration if the US government carries out some high profile immigration law enforcement prosecutions.
The White House is hoping the increased enforcement will strengthen Mr. Bush’s hand in the battle over immigration reform, Homeland Security Department officials said, by pre-empting House Republicans who are pressing a bill they passed in December that centers on enforcement and border security but does not provide a way for illegal immigrants to become legal.
The Bush Administration spent its early years in office gutting what was left of immigration enforcement.
For years, workplace raids were a low priority for immigration authorities. Testifying in June before a Senate immigration subcommittee, Richard M. Stana, a director in the Government Accountability Office, reported that civil fine notices issued to employers dropped to 3 in 2003, from 417 in 1999.
...
While the old immigration agency brought 25 criminal charges against employers in 2002, this year Immigration and Customs Enforcement has already made 445 criminal arrests of employers, officials said. Some 2,700 immigrant workers were caught up in those operations, and most were deported, the officials said.
Bush continued a trend toward decreased enforcement that started back in the mid 1990s. Now he's pursuing an enforcement policy that he personally does not like. Why? He hopes that by temporarily pretending that he wants to enforce immgration laws he can get Congress to pass a massive amnesty and guest worker program.
We need a very tough enforcement-only immigration bill from Congress. Both Congress and Bush will quickly backslide and oppose enforcement once the amnesty people get what they want. Our elites can not be trusted.
Avon Park Florida is very likely to pass an ordinance patterned after that of Hazleton Pennsylvania to fine landlords who rent to illegal aliens and to deny business permits to businesses that hire illegals.
A city up north, Hazleton, Pa., planned to root out and punish landlords who rented to illegal immigrants, fining them $1,000 for every such tenant. Mr. Macklin, whose own small city has swelled with immigrants from Mexico, Haiti and Jamaica over the past decade, swiftly proposed the same for Avon Park.
"It was almost as if I was sitting in church at a revival and he was preaching to me," Mr. Macklin said of Mayor Lou Barletta of Hazleton, whom he heard promoting that city's Illegal Immigration Relief Act on the radio show last month. "If we address the housing issue — make it as difficult as possible for illegals to find safe haven in Avon Park — then they are going to have to find someplace else to go."
Like Hazleton's proposal, Avon Park's would deny business permits to companies that knowingly hired illegal immigrants.
Some of the employers of illegals are orange groves and cattle ranches outside of town. Therefore they may escape the business permit ordinance's reach. But their illegals won't be able to live in Avon Park if this ordinance is passed and enforced.
I can identify with their wistfulness. I miss the days when Hispanic gangs didn't deface my neighborhood with graffiti.
Both mayors, white baby boomers who grew up in the 1960's and 70's, speak wistfully of the days when nuclear families were the only occupants of single-family homes in their towns, every resident paid taxes and English was the only language heard on the streets. Mr. Macklin said the City of Charm, as Avon Park has long called itself, no longer met that description, despite the gazebo and shuffleboard courts on Main Street, several dainty lakes and ubiquitous live oaks.
"When people come to our area," he said, "they see degrading neighborhoods, homes falling down among themselves, four or five vehicles parked in yards. There's a perception for those that come to this area — looking to perhaps expand a business, move here — that it might not necessarily be where they want to be."
Why can mayors recognize truths that economists fail to see? See Steve Sailer's "Economists On Immigration: What's The Matter?" and also see his "An economist's faith is shaken".
The US Supreme Court has issued a ruling that makes it easier to deport illegal aliens.
The Supreme Court endorsed a tough application of immigration law to certain longtime illegal immigrants, clearing the way for summary deportations of perhaps thousands who have been living in the United States for a decade or more.
By a vote of 8 to 1, the court ruled that the U.S. government properly sent Utah truck driver Humberto Fernandez-Vargas back to Mexico in 2004 because he returned to the U.S. illegally in 1982 after having been previously deported.
A new local court ruling in Arizona also makes immigration law enforcement easier. Maricopa County Arizona (encompasses Phoenix) Superior Court Judge Thomas O'Toole ruled that Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas's practice of prosecuting illegal immigrants for engaging in a conspiracy to violate US immigration laws is constitutional.
PHOENIX -- A judge upheld an Arizona law Friday that created the state crime of immigrant smuggling, rejecting arguments that it was an unconstitutional attempt by the state to regulate immigration.
The ruling was a victory for a prosecutor who has used the 9-month-old law to target not only smugglers but also their customers as conspirators to the crime.
The interpretation led to scores of prosecutions against immigrants in Maricopa County and drew a sharp response from immigrant advocates and the law's author, who said it was intended to apply only to smugglers.
He said state law makes it clear that when two or more people are involved in a plan to break the law, that constitutes a conspiracy.
The judge also said federal immigration laws do not pre-empt states from imposing their own regulations.
That part of the ruling has potential implications beyond the specific questions of the law in question. It also goes to the ongoing fight at the Capitol over whether the state has the power to enact various laws dealing with illegal entrants — and specifically whether it can punish companies that hire undocumented workers.
Following the legal advice of Maricopa County's tough on crime prosecutor Andrew Thomas, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio began arresting illegal immigrants under the new law and referring them for prosecution. Since the enforcement began, 272 illegal immigrants have been arrested and charged. Twenty-three illegal immigrants and one coyote have pled guilty, and will serve jail-time before being deported. With a felony on their record, they will have a slim chance at ever entering the U.S. legally or obtaining U.S. citizenship.
National and local level enforcement of immigration laws has the potential to send the illegals running back to their countries of origin.
Governor Mitt Romney is seeking an agreement with federal authorities that would allow Massachusetts state troopers to arrest undocumented immigrants for being in the country illegally.
...
If the proposal is approved, Massachusetts would join a handful of states and localities that have entered into such pacts since they were first authorized in 1996. That list includes Florida, Alabama, and a few counties in California and North Carolina, where a limited number of officers have been trained to enforce immigration laws.
The US Senate and President are out of step with the rest of the country on immigration.
The "Other Than Mexicans" who are caught on one section of the US border with Mexico are all held, prosecuted for breaking the law, and then deported.
But this year, a 190-mile stretch of riverbank that includes the small border cities of Eagle Pass and Del Rio became a "zero-tolerance zone." If apprehended by the U.S. Border Patrol, illegal immigrants are prosecuted by federal authorities for a misdemeanor, sent to jail for 15 to 180 days and then deported. If they are caught illegally entering the country a second time, they are eligible for a felony charge of illegal entry and as much as two years in federal prison.
"Catch and release" -- in which Mexican citizens are returned promptly to Mexico, but citizens of other countries are given a notice to appear in immigration court at a later date, set free and never tracked down by authorities -- would end here, said Department of Homeland Security officials at a Washington news conference this year. "Catch and remove" would start. And, officials predicted, as this tough policy became known, immigrants would be discouraged from crossing through this slice of southwest Texas.
This is the way it should work on the entire border.
The Border Patrol agents have so much extra time that they are catching many more drug smugglers.
As of June 5, apprehensions of illegal immigrants in Eagle Pass, where Operation Streamline II began Dec. 6, were down 51 percent, and they were down 32 percent in Del Rio, compared with the same period a year ago. Apprehensions of drug smugglers increased substantially between Dec. 6 and June 5, because agents were no longer tied up processing illegal immigrants, Clark said. Since the program began, the value of narcotics seizures has increased 309 percent to $13 million in Eagle Pass and by 176 percent to almost $40 million in Del Rio, he said.
Some of the crossers have shifted to other sections of the border. But this same program could be implemented along the entire border. At first the prisons along the border would be flooded with people. But as word got out the news would deter a substantial fraction of potential illegal crossers.
Border enforcement is possible. We just need the political will to do it.
Arizona lawmakers have approved legislation that would criminalize the presence of illegal aliens and seeks to cut off job opportunities that attract illegal border crossers.
"The House and Senate may not get anything done. So we have an obligation to respond, since this is not just a national border [that's being compromised], it's the Arizona border," said state Rep. Russell Pearce, lead sponsor of the bill that passed the Legislature Thursday.
The bill, which calls for revoking business licenses for repeatedly hiring known illegal aliens and bars illegals from some state services including child care and adult education, has passed both chambers of the Republican-controlled Legislature, but is expected to be vetoed by Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat,
Mrs. Napolitano earlier vetoed a bill that would have expanded the state's trespassing statutes to allow the arrest of illegal aliens who wind up there. She has vowed to veto any further measures that would have this same effect.
I think Arizonans saw what happened to California due to large scale Hispanic immigration (not a few of them are Cal expats who fled the decay) and do not want to see the process repeat in Arizona.
One key distinction is that the new version could be enforced only when police first approach a person about another offense, such as a traffic violation.
A first offense would be a misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail. Subsequent offenses would be a felony carrying a sentence of at least three years in prison.