Friday, June 27, 2008
http://libertarianobama.blogspot.com/2008/...being-more.html
Barr Attacks Obama for Being More Libertarian on Immigration
An excerpt from the Bob Barr mailer posted below: "During my time in Congress, I was a strong advocate of border security. For four years in a row, I voted to authorize the use of the military to assist in border control efforts." The entire thing is posted on Third Party Watch.
This guy claims to be a libertarian?
Contrast Barr's militarize-the-border approach to the Libertarian Party's stance on the issue: "We can spend billions more to beef up border patrols. We can erect hundreds of miles of ugly fence slicing through private property along the Rio Grande. We can raid more discount stores and chicken-processing plants from coast to coast. We can require all Americans to carry a national ID card and seek approval from a government computer before starting a new job.
"Or we can change our immigration law to more closely conform to how millions of normal people actually live.
"Crossing an international border to support your family and pursue dreams of a better life is not an inherently criminal act like rape or robbery. If it were, then most of us descend from criminals."
Barr's letter (I've trimmed it a bit for space):
John McCain and Barack Obama Plan To Bring Back “COMPREHENSIVE IMMIGRATION REFORM”
From The Desk of Rep. Bob Barr
Dear Friend and Fellow American,
We’re facing a “new” crisis: BORDER SECURITY.
But really, this is the same crisis we faced last year at this time, when Senators John McCain and Ted Kennedy tried to push their “Comprehensive Immigration Reform” bill on us—supported by Senator Barack Obama!
The American people were able to STOP the McCain-Kennedy bill—but will we be able to stop PRESIDENT McCain (or PRESIDENT Obama) from pushing it through again?
We need to send a strong message to both the Republicans AND the Democrats, to let them know that WE MEAN BUSINESS when it comes to securing the border!
A lack of border security allows foreign criminals, carriers of communicable diseases, terrorists and other potential threats to enter the country unchecked. We must be aggressive in securing our borders while also fighting the big-government “nanny state” that seeks to coddle even those capable of providing for their own personal prosperity.
...
We don’t need McCain’s OR Obama’s “comprehensive immigration reform” bills. What we DO need is to secure our borders NOW. The fact is, our government doesn’t HAVE an immigration policy right now—one day they want to build a fence, the next day they want to build a “virtual” fence. It changes daily, and it’s ineffective. What we need is simple: Let’s go back to how we USED to do it, when we had a REAL border. If people want to enter America, we require them to come through a checkpoint, check that their health is not dangerous to our citizens, and that they have a legitimate ID.
...
During my time in Congress, I was a strong advocate of border security. For four years in a row, I voted to authorize the use of the military to assist in border control efforts. Our overworked, understaffed Border Patrol Agents need all the help they can get, and I voted to send them that help in preventing the entry of terrorists and criminals into the United States.
Don’t the voters in America deserve the chance to vote for a candidate that will secure our border?
...
I believe that you share my concern about our dangerous lack of border security. I believe that you agree that this is a national security crisis. And I believe that, like me, you want to send a strong message to the politicians who have been pandering to the supporters of compromised security for too long now. The best way to do that today is by helping to get me on every state ballot, so that I can challenge the Washington “status quo” on illegal immigration and border security. CLICK HERE to donate now.
I’m not asking you to vote for me right now. I’m just asking you to help me send a strong message to BOTH the Republicans and Democrats, that the American people are sick and tired of politicians playing games with the national security of the United States.
Help me to turn things around in this presidential campaign, and put the focus back where it should be—on America.
Sincerely,
Bob Barr
Presidential Nominee
United States Libertarian Party
Full Version: 3 Steps to Solving the Illegal Immigration Problem
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 27 2008, 10:55 AM) 
Just another example of Libertarian conflicts of interest within their own philosophy. They don't want to police big business, but it's that same big business that wants to keep our borders open for cheap labor. I suppose they think that if you abolished the minimum wage, then Americans would take those low paying jobs after all.
QUOTE(billfmsd @ Aug 27 2008, 11:12 PM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 27 2008, 10:55 AM)
Just another example of Libertarian conflicts of interest within their own philosophy. They don't want to police big business, but it's that same big business that wants to keep our borders open for cheap labor. I suppose they think that if you abolished the minimum wage, then Americans would take those low paying jobs after all.
Right.
But, I wonder what a true libertarian philiosphy would be on immigration - or is one really possible in the modern setting...
On the one hand -- they want a hands off approach which seems to disagree with the McCain Obama plan wanting a more liberal approach -- on the other hand they want the borders controlled more strictly ...
I guess what it may come down to -- is does a Libertarian treat a non-citizen differently than a citizen...and maybe some rationality can be gleaned from an analysis in this context.
But I also think this is part of the overall problem with immigration reform -- and perhaps part of the reason consensus on the implementation of your plan has been so hard to reach --- because there are elements of your plan which are liberal in nature --- going after employers --- and elements which are conservative --- establishing a National ID system --- so there is an inherent conflict --- and then when you offer amnesty --- well there are segments of the liberal population who support that --- and segments of the conservative population that support it too -- namely big business...but in the same regard you have elements of liberals and conservatives who resist amnesty as well...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 28 2008, 08:04 AM)
I guess what it may come down to -- is does a Libertarian treat a non-citizen differently than a citizen...and maybe some rationality can be gleaned from an analysis in this context.
Libertarians value citizenship. They just don't know what it would cost to protect and maintain citizenship.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 28 2008, 08:04 AM)
But I also think this is part of the overall problem with immigration reform -- and perhaps part of the reason consensus on the implementation of your plan has been so hard to reach --- because there are elements of your plan which are liberal in nature --- going after employers --- and elements which are conservative --- establishing a National ID system --- so there is an inherent conflict --- and then when you offer amnesty --- well there are segments of the liberal population who support that --- and segments of the conservative population that support it too -- namely big business...but in the same regard you have elements of liberals and conservatives who resist amnesty as well...
You are still calling it a plan. Tsk Tsk.The illegal immigration issue cuts across our traditional understanding of liberal and conservative, but our country is actually less divided that way. We are more divided on democracy vs republic, than we are divided on liberal vs conservative. There are many Liberal Republicans and many Conservative Democrats.
But if you really want to get to the heart of the illegal immigration issue it's more of a global democracy vs a global republic issue. The people who are against globalization are the isolationist, mostly poor and middle class republicans and libertarians. The people who are for a global republic are mostly rich elitist democrats and moderate republicans. The neocons just want global fascism. The people who are for global democracy are mostly poor and middle class democrats. But what the poor and middle class democrats don't understand is that we aren't going to get a global democracy by opening the borders or letting big business have their way with the cheap labor market. We need democratic values like global labor unions, enforceable global OSHA and environmental standards, and temporary isolation of economies until they solve their internal corruption problems. That's why I am for open borders in the long run but not until the democratic values take hold globally. It takes time, so globalization needs to slow down. Neocons and big business want to speed up globalization so global fascism can take hold before all those democratic values take hold. Illegal immigration just gives big business the upper hand over labor unions. César Chávez knew it.
QUOTE(billfmsd @ Aug 28 2008, 02:18 PM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 28 2008, 08:04 AM)
I guess what it may come down to -- is does a Libertarian treat a non-citizen differently than a citizen...and maybe some rationality can be gleaned from an analysis in this context.
Libertarians value citizenship. They just don't know what it would cost to protect and maintain citizenship.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 28 2008, 08:04 AM)
But I also think this is part of the overall problem with immigration reform -- and perhaps part of the reason consensus on the implementation of your plan has been so hard to reach --- because there are elements of your plan which are liberal in nature --- going after employers --- and elements which are conservative --- establishing a National ID system --- so there is an inherent conflict --- and then when you offer amnesty --- well there are segments of the liberal population who support that --- and segments of the conservative population that support it too -- namely big business...but in the same regard you have elements of liberals and conservatives who resist amnesty as well...
You are still calling it a plan. Tsk Tsk.
Do we have to still quibble over whether a plan is an approach?
Bill -- they are basically they same thing --- they are synonyms after all...
QUOTE
The illegal immigration issue cuts across our traditional understanding of liberal and conservative, but our country is actually less divided that way. We are more divided on democracy vs republic, than we are divided on liberal vs conservative. There are many Liberal Republicans and many Conservative Democrats.
An astute observation.
QUOTE
But if you really want to get to the heart of the illegal immigration issue it's more of a global democracy vs a global republic issue. The people who are against globalization are the isolationist, mostly poor and middle class republicans and libertarians. The people who are for a global republic are mostly rich elitist democrats and moderate republicans. The neocons just want global fascism. The people who are for global democracy are mostly poor and middle class democrats. But what the poor and middle class democrats don't understand is that we aren't going to get a global democracy by opening the borders or letting big business have their way with the cheap labor market. We need democratic values like global labor unions, enforceable global OSHA and environmental standards, and temporary isolation of economies until they solve their internal corruption problems. That's why I am for open borders in the long run but not until the democratic values take hold globally. It takes time, so globalization needs to slow down. Neocons and big business want to speed up globalization so global fascism can take hold before all those democratic values take hold. Illegal immigration just gives big business the upper hand over labor unions. César Chávez knew it.
I can agree with this -- but where to the conservative republicans fit in are they all big business republicans -- Tom Tancredo favors sanctions on big business -- it seems the social republicans are against illegal immigration --- while the pro-corporate conservatives are pro illegal immigration or at least pro access to cheap labor --- and where do the left wing democrats fit in?
Aren't poor and union democrats isolationist too fearing multinational corporations and illegal immigrants taking their jobs?
But aren't poor minority hispanics --- less isolationist since they have family and friends who may be legal and illegal immigrants and they want to promote more of them being able to avail themselves of the benefits of Amercian citizenship?
It is definitely a complex issue...which is why I think that the approach needs to be more comprehensive in nature and take political metrics into account...
I thought that rla made a fair suggestion above in trying to get us to define the issue before we develop a solution -- as a means to perhaps finding common gorund -- and I made an effort above...which parts of the 15 or so points above do you agree -- disagree with -- and which do you think we might find compromise with --- or what is the problem as you see it?
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 20 2008, 11:58 AM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 7 2008, 01:32 PM)
Maybe we can ask people which elements of my summary they accept and reject...as a next step...and then we can work on the areas where there is a lack of agreement unless Bill wants to offer his own fact scenario and we can blend the two.
1. There are at least twelve million illegal immigrants in this nation at the present time.
2. Estimates suggest that up to a million illegal immigrants cross into the United States annually from our Southern most borders whether they come from Cuba or Mexico (though often then originate in nations south of Mexico).
3. The immigrants come to the US for a number of reasons including primarily quality of life issues: economic (jobs) and politcial (seeking freedom, political asylum).
4. The continued impact on our economy represents a national security threat.
5. Our porous borders in the wake of the 9/11 attacks represent an aditional national security threat to terrorists and spies infiltrating our nation to do our government and our people harm.
6. American employers, and in fact some industries, are dependent upon illegal immigrants to do jobs which are either too low paying and undesireable by Americans because of the type of labor involved whether it be intensely physical or otherwise repugnant.
7. Some of these jobs are even high paying. Finally, communities throughout the nation have seen illegal immigration as a curse with the impact on education costs, health care, law enforcement, etc., particularly in borer states.
8. The present immigration system is suffering from a number of deficiencies which further complicate the system.
9. First, there are inadequate border agents to monitor the complete US/Mexico border.
10. Second, there are inadequate immigrations agents to inspect the millions of US employers who might be engaged in illegal immigration.
11. Third, the present E-verify system is inadequate to give employer accurate information regarding potential and current employees with as much as 7% of the responses being false-positives for identifying legal immigrants or US citizens as illegal immigrants. As a result, it is unfair and onerous to require employers to use a system which does not work and unfair to legal immigrants and US citizens who may be denied employment which they are eligible for because of E-verify errors. Fourth, employers need employees but the present legal immigration system has so much delay that employers are forced to hire illegal immigrants because the guest worker system cannot guarantee adequate legal immigrant employees annually.
12. Fourth, recent heightened immgratiion enforcement has increased detentions overcrowding an immigrant detention system with facilities that have been described as overcrowded and inhumane, and also crowding prisons with illegal immigrants that have been successfully charged and prosecuted for crimes consistent with their entering the United States illegally.
13. Thus, any reform measures which increases enforcement at any level as heightened broder security and employer enforcement is bound to do, will have to take into account the impact on detention faciltiies and prisons which need modernization and increased capacity to handle the increased incarceraton of illegal immigrants which is occuring now and is a natural result of any further immigration reform.
14. Fifth, as touched ohn above, until our legal immigration system can be reformed to expedite review it will be quite dififcult to address the illegal immigration problem. Lastly, there are significiant costs involved for any reform efforts at a time when govenrment resources are particulalry scarce and the ability of effect real change is dependent upon states having the resources to act.
15. The worst thing we could do is pass a law and not provide the funding to accomplish implementation because this would create low expectations and likely advance the status quo which we can ill afford.
1. There are at least twelve million illegal immigrants in this nation at the present time.
2. Estimates suggest that up to a million illegal immigrants cross into the United States annually from our Southern most borders whether they come from Cuba or Mexico (though often then originate in nations south of Mexico).
3. The immigrants come to the US for a number of reasons including primarily quality of life issues: economic (jobs) and politcial (seeking freedom, political asylum).
4. The continued impact on our economy represents a national security threat.
5. Our porous borders in the wake of the 9/11 attacks represent an aditional national security threat to terrorists and spies infiltrating our nation to do our government and our people harm.
6. American employers, and in fact some industries, are dependent upon illegal immigrants to do jobs which are either too low paying and undesireable by Americans because of the type of labor involved whether it be intensely physical or otherwise repugnant.
7. Some of these jobs are even high paying. Finally, communities throughout the nation have seen illegal immigration as a curse with the impact on education costs, health care, law enforcement, etc., particularly in borer states.
8. The present immigration system is suffering from a number of deficiencies which further complicate the system.
9. First, there are inadequate border agents to monitor the complete US/Mexico border.
10. Second, there are inadequate immigrations agents to inspect the millions of US employers who might be engaged in illegal immigration.
11. Third, the present E-verify system is inadequate to give employer accurate information regarding potential and current employees with as much as 7% of the responses being false-positives for identifying legal immigrants or US citizens as illegal immigrants. As a result, it is unfair and onerous to require employers to use a system which does not work and unfair to legal immigrants and US citizens who may be denied employment which they are eligible for because of E-verify errors. Fourth, employers need employees but the present legal immigration system has so much delay that employers are forced to hire illegal immigrants because the guest worker system cannot guarantee adequate legal immigrant employees annually.
12. Fourth, recent heightened immgratiion enforcement has increased detentions overcrowding an immigrant detention system with facilities that have been described as overcrowded and inhumane, and also crowding prisons with illegal immigrants that have been successfully charged and prosecuted for crimes consistent with their entering the United States illegally.
13. Thus, any reform measures which increases enforcement at any level as heightened broder security and employer enforcement is bound to do, will have to take into account the impact on detention faciltiies and prisons which need modernization and increased capacity to handle the increased incarceraton of illegal immigrants which is occuring now and is a natural result of any further immigration reform.
14. Fifth, as touched ohn above, until our legal immigration system can be reformed to expedite review it will be quite dififcult to address the illegal immigration problem. Lastly, there are significiant costs involved for any reform efforts at a time when govenrment resources are particulalry scarce and the ability of effect real change is dependent upon states having the resources to act.
15. The worst thing we could do is pass a law and not provide the funding to accomplish implementation because this would create low expectations and likely advance the status quo which we can ill afford.
rla:
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Sep 2 2008, 07:57 AM)
QUOTE(billfmsd @ Aug 28 2008, 02:18 PM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 28 2008, 08:04 AM)
I guess what it may come down to -- is does a Libertarian treat a non-citizen differently than a citizen...and maybe some rationality can be gleaned from an analysis in this context.
Libertarians value citizenship. They just don't know what it would cost to protect and maintain citizenship.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 28 2008, 08:04 AM)
But I also think this is part of the overall problem with immigration reform -- and perhaps part of the reason consensus on the implementation of your plan has been so hard to reach --- because there are elements of your plan which are liberal in nature --- going after employers --- and elements which are conservative --- establishing a National ID system --- so there is an inherent conflict --- and then when you offer amnesty --- well there are segments of the liberal population who support that --- and segments of the conservative population that support it too -- namely big business...but in the same regard you have elements of liberals and conservatives who resist amnesty as well...
You are still calling it a plan. Tsk Tsk.
Do we have to still quibble over whether a plan is an approach?
Bill -- they are basically they same thing --- they are synonyms after all...
QUOTE
The illegal immigration issue cuts across our traditional understanding of liberal and conservative, but our country is actually less divided that way. We are more divided on democracy vs republic, than we are divided on liberal vs conservative. There are many Liberal Republicans and many Conservative Democrats.
An astute observation.
QUOTE
But if you really want to get to the heart of the illegal immigration issue it's more of a global democracy vs a global republic issue. The people who are against globalization are the isolationist, mostly poor and middle class republicans and libertarians. The people who are for a global republic are mostly rich elitist democrats and moderate republicans. The neocons just want global fascism. The people who are for global democracy are mostly poor and middle class democrats. But what the poor and middle class democrats don't understand is that we aren't going to get a global democracy by opening the borders or letting big business have their way with the cheap labor market. We need democratic values like global labor unions, enforceable global OSHA and environmental standards, and temporary isolation of economies until they solve their internal corruption problems. That's why I am for open borders in the long run but not until the democratic values take hold globally. It takes time, so globalization needs to slow down. Neocons and big business want to speed up globalization so global fascism can take hold before all those democratic values take hold. Illegal immigration just gives big business the upper hand over labor unions. César Chávez knew it.
I can agree with this -- but where to the conservative republicans fit in are they all big business republicans -- Tom Tancredo favors sanctions on big business -- it seems the social republicans are against illegal immigration --- while the pro-corporate conservatives are pro illegal immigration or at least pro access to cheap labor --- and where do the left wing democrats fit in?
Aren't poor and union democrats isolationist too fearing multinational corporations and illegal immigrants taking their jobs?
But aren't poor minority hispanics --- less isolationist since they have family and friends who may be legal and illegal immigrants and they want to promote more of them being able to avail themselves of the benefits of Amercian citizenship?
It is definitely a complex issue...which is why I think that the approach needs to be more comprehensive in nature and take political metrics into account...
I thought that rla made a fair suggestion above in trying to get us to define the issue before we develop a solution -- as a means to perhaps finding common gorund -- and I made an effort above...which parts of the 15 or so points above do you agree -- disagree with -- and which do you think we might find compromise with --- or what is the problem as you see it?
Bill, is this not a fair suggestion?
Seven Years After 9/11, FAIR Releases New Report on Immigration and National Security
Last update: 12:06 p.m. EDT Sept. 9, 2008
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/seve...D&dist=hppr
WASHINGTON, Sept 09, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Seven years after the attacks of 9/11, America still faces the prospect of renewed attacks against our homeland by those who struck against us in 2001. According to the report of the 9/11 Commission, gaping loopholes in U.S. immigration policies and failure to adequately enforce immigration laws were exploited by the people who attacked us seven years ago.
A new report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Immigration and National Security: A Checklist of Unfinished Reforms, follows up on in-depth analyses by FAIR that have been released each year since the attacks. The latest report finds that while some progress has been achieved in closing the vulnerabilities exploited by the 9/11 attackers, many threats still remain. The report details many of the important tasks that have been neglected, or because of pressure from special interest groups, have been brushed aside.
According to Immigration and National Security, the screening of people seeking nonimmigrant visas remains superficial, while vital data necessary to keep track of legal visitors to the United States is not being collected. In addition, America's borders remain insecure, presenting an inviting target for terrorists and others who wish to do us harm.
"As the shock of 9/11 fades from people's memories, the danger of complacency builds," commented Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "While there is a temptation to return to business as usual, or to respond to pressure from interest groups with economic incentives for wanting to keep loopholes in place, the anniversary of 9/11 should stand as a reminder that we cannot afford such luxuries. The guidelines laid out in National Security and Immigration provide reasonable and achievable steps for protecting the nation against attack, while maintaining America as a free and open society for our citizens and for those who are legitimate guests in our country."
Immigration and National Security is available on FAIR's website, www.fairus.org.
SOURCE Federation for American Immigration Reform
http://www.fairus.org
Last update: 12:06 p.m. EDT Sept. 9, 2008
http://www.marketwatch.com/news/story/seve...D&dist=hppr
WASHINGTON, Sept 09, 2008 /PRNewswire-USNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Seven years after the attacks of 9/11, America still faces the prospect of renewed attacks against our homeland by those who struck against us in 2001. According to the report of the 9/11 Commission, gaping loopholes in U.S. immigration policies and failure to adequately enforce immigration laws were exploited by the people who attacked us seven years ago.
A new report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Immigration and National Security: A Checklist of Unfinished Reforms, follows up on in-depth analyses by FAIR that have been released each year since the attacks. The latest report finds that while some progress has been achieved in closing the vulnerabilities exploited by the 9/11 attackers, many threats still remain. The report details many of the important tasks that have been neglected, or because of pressure from special interest groups, have been brushed aside.
According to Immigration and National Security, the screening of people seeking nonimmigrant visas remains superficial, while vital data necessary to keep track of legal visitors to the United States is not being collected. In addition, America's borders remain insecure, presenting an inviting target for terrorists and others who wish to do us harm.
"As the shock of 9/11 fades from people's memories, the danger of complacency builds," commented Dan Stein, president of FAIR. "While there is a temptation to return to business as usual, or to respond to pressure from interest groups with economic incentives for wanting to keep loopholes in place, the anniversary of 9/11 should stand as a reminder that we cannot afford such luxuries. The guidelines laid out in National Security and Immigration provide reasonable and achievable steps for protecting the nation against attack, while maintaining America as a free and open society for our citizens and for those who are legitimate guests in our country."
Immigration and National Security is available on FAIR's website, www.fairus.org.
SOURCE Federation for American Immigration Reform
http://www.fairus.org
ACLU sues to halt RI governor's immigration order
By RAY HENRY 09.04.08, 9:48 AM ET
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. - A civil rights group filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block Gov. Don Carcieri from enforcing an executive order requiring private employers to electronically check the immigration status of new hires.
The lawsuit, filed by the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenges an executive order that Carcieri signed in March to clamp down on illegal immigration.
Carcieri's order requires state police and prison officials to identify illegal immigrants for possible deportation. It also forces state agencies and companies doing business with the state to use a federal database to check the immigration status of new employees. Companies that refuse to comply could lose their state contracts.
The ACLU argues that the database, E-Verify, disproportionately identifies foreign-born employees as ineligible to work and that the database could encourage employers to discriminate against workers who appear foreign.
A 2007 report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security showed 96 percent of people claiming to be U.S. citizens were cleared by the database on the first try. But the report said 3 percent of foreign-born workers with the right to work in the U.S. were erroneously rejected by the E-Verify system, compared with .1 percent of U.S. citizens born here. The report cautioned that the error rates cannot be fixed quickly.
The lawsuit accuses Carcieri of violating the state constitution by interfering with existing contracts and by enforcing an executive order that conflicts with purchasing laws adopted by the General Assembly. It also accuses Carcieri of failing to hold a public hearing about the new rules as required by law.
Carcieri spokeswoman Amy Kempe said the governor was within his legal authority to require state contractors to use the database. She said the ACLU's lawsuit lacked merit and called it an attempt to meddle with Carcieri's ability to enforce federal law.
The governor has said the estimated 20,000 to 40,000 illegal immigrants in Rhode Island are a financial drain on schools, hospitals and state government. His order sparked a raucous debate over illegal immigration in Rhode Island.
Clergy, civil rights advocates and Hispanic leaders have urged Carcieri to rescind the order, saying it could lead to racial profiling and discourage illegal immigrants from contacting police if they are victimized or witness a crime.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/09/04/ap5388726.html
By RAY HENRY 09.04.08, 9:48 AM ET
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PROVIDENCE, R.I. - A civil rights group filed a lawsuit Wednesday seeking to block Gov. Don Carcieri from enforcing an executive order requiring private employers to electronically check the immigration status of new hires.
The lawsuit, filed by the state branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, challenges an executive order that Carcieri signed in March to clamp down on illegal immigration.
Carcieri's order requires state police and prison officials to identify illegal immigrants for possible deportation. It also forces state agencies and companies doing business with the state to use a federal database to check the immigration status of new employees. Companies that refuse to comply could lose their state contracts.
The ACLU argues that the database, E-Verify, disproportionately identifies foreign-born employees as ineligible to work and that the database could encourage employers to discriminate against workers who appear foreign.
A 2007 report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security showed 96 percent of people claiming to be U.S. citizens were cleared by the database on the first try. But the report said 3 percent of foreign-born workers with the right to work in the U.S. were erroneously rejected by the E-Verify system, compared with .1 percent of U.S. citizens born here. The report cautioned that the error rates cannot be fixed quickly.
The lawsuit accuses Carcieri of violating the state constitution by interfering with existing contracts and by enforcing an executive order that conflicts with purchasing laws adopted by the General Assembly. It also accuses Carcieri of failing to hold a public hearing about the new rules as required by law.
Carcieri spokeswoman Amy Kempe said the governor was within his legal authority to require state contractors to use the database. She said the ACLU's lawsuit lacked merit and called it an attempt to meddle with Carcieri's ability to enforce federal law.
The governor has said the estimated 20,000 to 40,000 illegal immigrants in Rhode Island are a financial drain on schools, hospitals and state government. His order sparked a raucous debate over illegal immigration in Rhode Island.
Clergy, civil rights advocates and Hispanic leaders have urged Carcieri to rescind the order, saying it could lead to racial profiling and discourage illegal immigrants from contacting police if they are victimized or witness a crime.
http://www.forbes.com/feeds/ap/2008/09/04/ap5388726.html
I have posted some of Napolitano's positions on this thread before...I agree her choice would be a shot in the arm to the nation's efforts to address the immigration problems our nation continues to face...
December 1, 2008
Editorial
A Cool Head on Immigration
The word is that Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for homeland security secretary, which would make her the country’s top official handling immigration enforcement and border control.
Lucky country. Poor Arizona.
It would be a relief to see the job go to someone with a solid understanding of immigration and all its complexities and political traps. As governor of a border state, Ms. Napolitano knows the landscape intimately. She has a cool head and a proven willingness to pursue policies that conform to reality, rather than the other way around. For years, the country has stumbled in a state of immigration panic, using harsh tactics to create the illusion of control while rejecting comprehensive strategies that would attack the problem at its roots.
Getting comprehensive reform passed may be a difficult slog for the new administration. But it can move quickly to repair what has gone awry with the enforcement-only regime, starting with reining in state and local crackdowns. Ms. Napolitano would do the country a huge favor by taking a withering look at a fellow Arizonan, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has used the federal 287(g) program, which delegates immigration enforcement to the local police, to terrorize immigrants in Phoenix.
Ms. Napolitano is famously skeptical of the border fence, the Bush administration’s 700-mile, multibillion-dollar desert speed bump. The fence was never going to be the zip-lock seal its defenders clamored for, and is hardly worth the expense or environmental damage it has caused. Ms. Napolitano is well aware that the way to get tough at the border is to bring the visa supply in line with reality and give the Border Patrol the resources to catch drug smugglers and other bad people.
The federal crackdown on illegal hiring is a similar mishmash of hastily erected rules, including much-criticized systems of checking workers’ names against error-plagued databases. Ms. Napolitano would do well to ensure a slow, judicious rollout of electronic workplace enforcement, to avoid mistakes that could ruin the lives and livelihoods of thousands of legitimate employees.
The immigration detention system, which has been scarred by horrifying accounts of neglect and mistreatment, is in dire need of reform to ensure humane standards of medical care. And perhaps most important, the new administration should abolish the disastrous campaign of raids that have sundered families and spread terror through immigrant communities while making no meaningful difference in the undocumented population.
Ms. Napolitano’s departure would leave a void in Arizona, a caldron of resentments and fear and thick-headed immigration politics — a topic on which she has long been one of the cooler voices in the state. She says she likes to begin speeches before tough audiences with a rhetorical question: “Who here favors illegal immigration? Nobody? O.K., we’ve got a consensus on an issue that nobody is supposed to agree on. Let’s go from here.”
Yes, let’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/opinion/...agewanted=print
December 1, 2008
Editorial
A Cool Head on Immigration
The word is that Gov. Janet Napolitano of Arizona is President-elect Barack Obama’s choice for homeland security secretary, which would make her the country’s top official handling immigration enforcement and border control.
Lucky country. Poor Arizona.
It would be a relief to see the job go to someone with a solid understanding of immigration and all its complexities and political traps. As governor of a border state, Ms. Napolitano knows the landscape intimately. She has a cool head and a proven willingness to pursue policies that conform to reality, rather than the other way around. For years, the country has stumbled in a state of immigration panic, using harsh tactics to create the illusion of control while rejecting comprehensive strategies that would attack the problem at its roots.
Getting comprehensive reform passed may be a difficult slog for the new administration. But it can move quickly to repair what has gone awry with the enforcement-only regime, starting with reining in state and local crackdowns. Ms. Napolitano would do the country a huge favor by taking a withering look at a fellow Arizonan, Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has used the federal 287(g) program, which delegates immigration enforcement to the local police, to terrorize immigrants in Phoenix.
Ms. Napolitano is famously skeptical of the border fence, the Bush administration’s 700-mile, multibillion-dollar desert speed bump. The fence was never going to be the zip-lock seal its defenders clamored for, and is hardly worth the expense or environmental damage it has caused. Ms. Napolitano is well aware that the way to get tough at the border is to bring the visa supply in line with reality and give the Border Patrol the resources to catch drug smugglers and other bad people.
The federal crackdown on illegal hiring is a similar mishmash of hastily erected rules, including much-criticized systems of checking workers’ names against error-plagued databases. Ms. Napolitano would do well to ensure a slow, judicious rollout of electronic workplace enforcement, to avoid mistakes that could ruin the lives and livelihoods of thousands of legitimate employees.
The immigration detention system, which has been scarred by horrifying accounts of neglect and mistreatment, is in dire need of reform to ensure humane standards of medical care. And perhaps most important, the new administration should abolish the disastrous campaign of raids that have sundered families and spread terror through immigrant communities while making no meaningful difference in the undocumented population.
Ms. Napolitano’s departure would leave a void in Arizona, a caldron of resentments and fear and thick-headed immigration politics — a topic on which she has long been one of the cooler voices in the state. She says she likes to begin speeches before tough audiences with a rhetorical question: “Who here favors illegal immigration? Nobody? O.K., we’ve got a consensus on an issue that nobody is supposed to agree on. Let’s go from here.”
Yes, let’s.
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/01/opinion/...agewanted=print
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Sep 9 2008, 02:00 PM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 20 2008, 11:58 AM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 7 2008, 01:32 PM)
Maybe we can ask people which elements of my summary they accept and reject...as a next step...and then we can work on the areas where there is a lack of agreement unless Bill wants to offer his own fact scenario and we can blend the two.
1. There are at least twelve million illegal immigrants in this nation at the present time.
2. Estimates suggest that up to a million illegal immigrants cross into the United States annually from our Southern most borders whether they come from Cuba or Mexico (though often then originate in nations south of Mexico).
3. The immigrants come to the US for a number of reasons including primarily quality of life issues: economic (jobs) and politcial (seeking freedom, political asylum).
4. The continued impact on our economy represents a national security threat.
5. Our porous borders in the wake of the 9/11 attacks represent an aditional national security threat to terrorists and spies infiltrating our nation to do our government and our people harm.
6. American employers, and in fact some industries, are dependent upon illegal immigrants to do jobs which are either too low paying and undesireable by Americans because of the type of labor involved whether it be intensely physical or otherwise repugnant.
7. Some of these jobs are even high paying. Finally, communities throughout the nation have seen illegal immigration as a curse with the impact on education costs, health care, law enforcement, etc., particularly in borer states.
8. The present immigration system is suffering from a number of deficiencies which further complicate the system.
9. First, there are inadequate border agents to monitor the complete US/Mexico border.
10. Second, there are inadequate immigrations agents to inspect the millions of US employers who might be engaged in illegal immigration.
11. Third, the present E-verify system is inadequate to give employer accurate information regarding potential and current employees with as much as 7% of the responses being false-positives for identifying legal immigrants or US citizens as illegal immigrants. As a result, it is unfair and onerous to require employers to use a system which does not work and unfair to legal immigrants and US citizens who may be denied employment which they are eligible for because of E-verify errors. Fourth, employers need employees but the present legal immigration system has so much delay that employers are forced to hire illegal immigrants because the guest worker system cannot guarantee adequate legal immigrant employees annually.
12. Fourth, recent heightened immgratiion enforcement has increased detentions overcrowding an immigrant detention system with facilities that have been described as overcrowded and inhumane, and also crowding prisons with illegal immigrants that have been successfully charged and prosecuted for crimes consistent with their entering the United States illegally.
13. Thus, any reform measures which increases enforcement at any level as heightened broder security and employer enforcement is bound to do, will have to take into account the impact on detention faciltiies and prisons which need modernization and increased capacity to handle the increased incarceraton of illegal immigrants which is occuring now and is a natural result of any further immigration reform.
14. Fifth, as touched ohn above, until our legal immigration system can be reformed to expedite review it will be quite dififcult to address the illegal immigration problem. Lastly, there are significiant costs involved for any reform efforts at a time when govenrment resources are particulalry scarce and the ability of effect real change is dependent upon states having the resources to act.
15. The worst thing we could do is pass a law and not provide the funding to accomplish implementation because this would create low expectations and likely advance the status quo which we can ill afford.
1. There are at least twelve million illegal immigrants in this nation at the present time.
2. Estimates suggest that up to a million illegal immigrants cross into the United States annually from our Southern most borders whether they come from Cuba or Mexico (though often then originate in nations south of Mexico).
3. The immigrants come to the US for a number of reasons including primarily quality of life issues: economic (jobs) and politcial (seeking freedom, political asylum).
4. The continued impact on our economy represents a national security threat.
5. Our porous borders in the wake of the 9/11 attacks represent an aditional national security threat to terrorists and spies infiltrating our nation to do our government and our people harm.
6. American employers, and in fact some industries, are dependent upon illegal immigrants to do jobs which are either too low paying and undesireable by Americans because of the type of labor involved whether it be intensely physical or otherwise repugnant.
7. Some of these jobs are even high paying. Finally, communities throughout the nation have seen illegal immigration as a curse with the impact on education costs, health care, law enforcement, etc., particularly in borer states.
8. The present immigration system is suffering from a number of deficiencies which further complicate the system.
9. First, there are inadequate border agents to monitor the complete US/Mexico border.
10. Second, there are inadequate immigrations agents to inspect the millions of US employers who might be engaged in illegal immigration.
11. Third, the present E-verify system is inadequate to give employer accurate information regarding potential and current employees with as much as 7% of the responses being false-positives for identifying legal immigrants or US citizens as illegal immigrants. As a result, it is unfair and onerous to require employers to use a system which does not work and unfair to legal immigrants and US citizens who may be denied employment which they are eligible for because of E-verify errors. Fourth, employers need employees but the present legal immigration system has so much delay that employers are forced to hire illegal immigrants because the guest worker system cannot guarantee adequate legal immigrant employees annually.
12. Fourth, recent heightened immgratiion enforcement has increased detentions overcrowding an immigrant detention system with facilities that have been described as overcrowded and inhumane, and also crowding prisons with illegal immigrants that have been successfully charged and prosecuted for crimes consistent with their entering the United States illegally.
13. Thus, any reform measures which increases enforcement at any level as heightened broder security and employer enforcement is bound to do, will have to take into account the impact on detention faciltiies and prisons which need modernization and increased capacity to handle the increased incarceraton of illegal immigrants which is occuring now and is a natural result of any further immigration reform.
14. Fifth, as touched ohn above, until our legal immigration system can be reformed to expedite review it will be quite dififcult to address the illegal immigration problem. Lastly, there are significiant costs involved for any reform efforts at a time when govenrment resources are particulalry scarce and the ability of effect real change is dependent upon states having the resources to act.
15. The worst thing we could do is pass a law and not provide the funding to accomplish implementation because this would create low expectations and likely advance the status quo which we can ill afford.
rla:
And no one wants to discuss which elements there is consensus for and which there is not a consensus and a need to work toward common ground?
QUOTE
And no one wants to discuss which elements there is consensus for and which there is not a consensus and a need to work toward common ground?
I think you wore everyone down and out...
slight correction to your prior point #1 - the new estimate is close to 20 million.
Its 3 solutions I could agree with but the wall is already being built on the Mexican boarder by Corp of Engineers at expenses way beyond imaginable by tax payer at this time of financial stress already on the public.
One day again in the future Americans may feel the need to cross borders for their own protection or survival....What will Mexico and Canada say to the home of the free then?
One day again in the future Americans may feel the need to cross borders for their own protection or survival....What will Mexico and Canada say to the home of the free then?
QUOTE(Terra @ Dec 1 2008, 01:52 PM)
QUOTE
And no one wants to discuss which elements there is consensus for and which there is not a consensus and a need to work toward common ground?
I think you wore everyone down and out...
slight correction to your prior point #1 - the new estimate is close to 20 million.
I wore every down and out?
Perhaps. Or maybe billfmsd was not looking for any dialogue on the issue beyond people applauding his approach...
I thought rla had a good idea to start at the drawing board to see where consensus is -- and work from there...
No matter -- the issue will progress and I think Janet Napolitano as the NY Times suggests will be an excellent person to make the case for reasonable immigration reform.
I hazard to say, though, its likely to more closely resemble the orginal McCain/Kennedy/Obama plan than what Bill has proposed.
However, I do think that there will be serious teeth added for employers who seek to flout the law.
But that is just what is politically necessary to make a comprehensive immmigration reform plan a reality which is what my amendments to his approach were intended to do all along.
Napolitano Sketches Border Fix
Homeland Security Pick, in Jan. Interview, Sounds Off on Border Enforcement
By TEDDY DAVIS
Dec. 1, 2008
Almost a year before Barack Obama nominated her to be secretary of Homeland Security, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano spoke with ABC News about how the next president should tackle immigration reform.
"I'm a governor, so I always think in terms of budgets," said Napolitano. "Whoever the next president is should give his two-term plan for the border and for immigration reform. Give us an eight-year budget. Plan it out. Show us where it's going. And make sure that every year, those numbers are included. Build some of that into your own accountability. Tell your office of Management and Budget, 'I don't want to sign off on a budget that doesn't include these things.' That's one way you might start building in some confidence."
In the January 2008 interview, Napolitano laid out a four-part plan: beefing up border security with technology and manpower, cracking down on employers who hire illegal workers, increasing the availability of work visas, and offering the country's 12 million illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship.
The Arizona governor argued that stopping illegal immigration would require both border enforcement and going after employers who rely on illegal workers.
"What you need is a sustained plan over time that marries what you're doing at the border . . . with interior enforcement, which means going after employers who consistently and intentionally disobey the immigration law," said Napolitano.
While Napolitano would focus on interior enforcement of employer sanctions, she would also urge Congress to increase the number of work visas because, in her view, the current number is "obviously inadequate to meet our current and future labor needs."
Earned legalization for illegal immigrants must be on the next president's agenda, added Napolitano. In contrast with some congressional Republicans who want to delay earned legalization until new border security measures are enacted, Napolitano said, "I don't know that you should do those sequentially."
In exchange for a pathway to citizenship, Napolitano would require illegal immigrants to pay a fine, learn English, and "get in line."
She would not, however, require illegal immigrants to "touchback" in their country of origin before getting a pathway to earned legalization.
"The notion that we're going to make them go on some kind of ceremonial trip just to make us feel good, I think, is not really an immigration plan," said Napolitano.
"Let's think it through," she continued. "Let's say you are an illegal. You are in the United States. You are from Guatemala. OK, you're supposed to voluntarily return to Guatemala, I guess, as opposed to being deported. All right. Well, then, what are you supposed to do? Show up in front of an office in Guatemala and re-apply for entry into this country, which means there's got to be some government bureaucrat down there on behalf of the U.S. that has to process all of that there.
"And let's say you were the breadwinner for your family," she continued. "Who's taking care of your family up here? Or are they going to go on the welfare rolls up here -- because your kids may very well be U.S. citizens?"
In addition to opposing Republican calls for a "touchback" provision, Napolitano also opposes asking border governors to certify the integrity of the border, a proposal pushed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., during his presidential campaign.
"The certification issue sounds good," said Napolitano. "But it is a snapshot, not a sustained presence, and a snapshot could vary greatly within any given state within any given year."
Relying on governors to certify that the border is secure amounts to shirking responsibility, said Napolitano.
"If you make certification the only criteria for whether you then move into overall immigration reform, what I would be leery of is putting up a process by which you never have to take responsibility for overall immigration reform," she said.
ABC News' Arnab Datta and Ferdous Al-Faruque contributed to this report.
http://abcnews.go.com/print?id=6368281
http://www.barackobama.com/issues/immigration/
Barack Obama will secure our borders:
Obama and Biden want to preserve the integrity of our borders. They support additional personnel, infrastructure, and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.
Improve our immigration system:
Obama and Biden believe we must fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.
Bring people out of the shadows:
Obama and Biden support a system that requires undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.
Plan for Immigration
The Problem
Undocumented population is exploding: The number of undocumented immigrants in the country has increased more than 40 percent since 2000. Every year, more than a half-million people come illegally or illegally overstay their visas.
Immigration bureaucracy is broken: The immigration bureaucracy is broken and overwhelmed, forcing legal immigrants to wait years for applications.
Immigration raids are ineffective: Despite a sevenfold increase in recent years, immigration raids only netted 3,600 arrests in 2006 and have placed all the burdens of a broken system onto immigrant families.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan
Create Secure Borders
Obama and Biden want to preserve the integrity of our borders. He supports additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.
Improve Our Immigration System
Obama and Biden believe we must fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.
Remove Incentives to Enter Illegally
Obama and Biden will remove incentives to enter the country illegally by cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants.
Bring People Out of the Shadows
Obama and Biden support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.
Work with Mexico
Obama and Biden believe we need to do more to promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration.
Barack Obama's Record
Crack Down on Employers: Obama championed a proposal to create a system so employers can verify that their employees are legally eligible to work in the U.S.
Fix the Bureaucracy: Obama joined Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) to introduce the Citizenship Promotion Act to ensure that immigration application fees are both reasonable and fair. Obama also introduced legislation that passed the Senate to improve the speed and accuracy of FBI background checks.
Respect Families: Obama introduced amendments to put greater emphasis on keeping immigrant families together.
Barack Obama will secure our borders:
Obama and Biden want to preserve the integrity of our borders. They support additional personnel, infrastructure, and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.
Improve our immigration system:
Obama and Biden believe we must fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.
Bring people out of the shadows:
Obama and Biden support a system that requires undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.
Plan for Immigration
The Problem
Undocumented population is exploding: The number of undocumented immigrants in the country has increased more than 40 percent since 2000. Every year, more than a half-million people come illegally or illegally overstay their visas.
Immigration bureaucracy is broken: The immigration bureaucracy is broken and overwhelmed, forcing legal immigrants to wait years for applications.
Immigration raids are ineffective: Despite a sevenfold increase in recent years, immigration raids only netted 3,600 arrests in 2006 and have placed all the burdens of a broken system onto immigrant families.
Barack Obama and Joe Biden's Plan
Create Secure Borders
Obama and Biden want to preserve the integrity of our borders. He supports additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.
Improve Our Immigration System
Obama and Biden believe we must fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.
Remove Incentives to Enter Illegally
Obama and Biden will remove incentives to enter the country illegally by cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants.
Bring People Out of the Shadows
Obama and Biden support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.
Work with Mexico
Obama and Biden believe we need to do more to promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration.
Barack Obama's Record
Crack Down on Employers: Obama championed a proposal to create a system so employers can verify that their employees are legally eligible to work in the U.S.
Fix the Bureaucracy: Obama joined Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) to introduce the Citizenship Promotion Act to ensure that immigration application fees are both reasonable and fair. Obama also introduced legislation that passed the Senate to improve the speed and accuracy of FBI background checks.
Respect Families: Obama introduced amendments to put greater emphasis on keeping immigrant families together.
Illegals dig in
By Kathleen Miller
Examiner Staff Writer 12/4/08
Factors including high demand for hospitality workers for the upcoming inauguration and the difficulty of returning home are keeping immigrants in the D.C. area.Examiner FileExperts say the Washington region’s immigrant population remains stable, even as an economic downturn and tougher enforcement have caused the first recent decreases in illegal immigration nationally.
National organizations have seen the number of illegal immigrants decrease, with estimates ranging from 500,000 to 1.3 million fewer people in the United States illegally. But locally, factors from a high demand for hospitality workers for the upcoming inauguration to the difficulty of returning home seem to be keeping immigrants here.
An October report from the Pew Hispanic Center said there were roughly 11.9 million illegal immigrants living in the United States in March 2008, down 500,000 people from the 12.4 million population estimate it reported in 2007.
The study said it was the first time in a decade that more immigrants were entering the country legally than illegally.
From 2000 to 2004, about 800,000 illegal immigrants a year entered the United States, but now the numbers have dropped to 500,000 a year, the report says. Meanwhile, legal immigration remains steady with about 650,000 authorized immigrants moving here each year.
Leaders of local immigrant advocacy groups such as CASA de Maryland and Virginia’s Tenants and Workers United say they’ve heard reports of immigrants heading home in other parts of the country, but they’re not seeing it here. Neither group checks the immigration status of the people they work with, so they can’t speak specifically about illegal immigrants, but they can discuss trends in the area’s immigrant community as a whole.
“The answer is a lot of people talk about it in a wishful way,” said Mario Quiroz, spokesman for CASA de Maryland. “They say, ‘I’m going to go home to be with my family,’ but in actuality, I have only seen one family who’s actually left.”
Quiroz says CASA, which operates day labor centers throughout Maryland, is seeing a 20 percent or so increase in those looking for work.
“Whatever conditions you have here are still probably better than what they have at home,” Quiroz said. “People used to send $300, $400, $500 a month back home; now they’re just saying, ‘Well, we’re having a bad time here too’ and not sending what they used to send.”
The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter controls on all immigration, says the decline in the U.S. illegal immigrant population predates the current economic slump. The group reports a net loss of about 1.3 million illegal immigrants between August 2007 and May 2008, when the population slid from 12.5 million to 11.2 million.
Mark Krikorian, the center’s executive director, said he believes both the economic recession and increased enforcement efforts are causing the decline.
“The bad economy is not necessarily a self-correcting phenomenon for illegal immigration,” Krikorian said. “They’re not just going to leave because the housing market is tanking here when things are bad in their home country too, so increased enforcement is playing a role as well.”
Jon Liss, executive director of Fairfax County’s Tenants and Workers United, a day laborer assistance group, attributed the stability in the local immigrant population in part to the global scale of the economic slowdown.
“People know if the U.S. sneezes, the fact is Latin America probably has the flu,” Liss said.
Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, a group that seeks to reduce immigration, said some illegal immigrants living in this area may be filling an increased demand for food service and hotel workers, in anticipation of the inauguration crowds, but added he believes eventually this region will also see a decline in the illegal immigrant population.
“There are some extra things going on here for a few months, but at the end of the day people will come for $15-an-hour construction jobs, but they won’t remain here for $7- or $8-an-hour service jobs,” Beck said. “When times are hard, the pull of home is much stronger.”
Prince William County Chairman Corey Stewart, who created one of the nation’s toughest local crackdowns on illegal immigration, said his county has already seen a dramatic drop in the number of estimated illegal immigrants.
He acknowledges, however, that there is no official way to track that and he’s relying on anecdotal information and census data about foreign-born residents in general, which show Prince William has lost 7 percent of its total immigrant population. He adds that Fairfax County has had a comparable increase in its foreign-born population and he can’t guarantee Prince William policies have resulted in illegal immigrants actually going home.
“The reality is illegal immigration knows no county boundaries; if we could do it regionally, we would be much more effective,” Stewart said.
Find this article at:
http://www.dcexaminer.com/local/Illegals_dig_in1204.html
By Kathleen Miller
Examiner Staff Writer 12/4/08
Factors including high demand for hospitality workers for the upcoming inauguration and the difficulty of returning home are keeping immigrants in the D.C. area.Examiner FileExperts say the Washington region’s immigrant population remains stable, even as an economic downturn and tougher enforcement have caused the first recent decreases in illegal immigration nationally.
National organizations have seen the number of illegal immigrants decrease, with estimates ranging from 500,000 to 1.3 million fewer people in the United States illegally. But locally, factors from a high demand for hospitality workers for the upcoming inauguration to the difficulty of returning home seem to be keeping immigrants here.
An October report from the Pew Hispanic Center said there were roughly 11.9 million illegal immigrants living in the United States in March 2008, down 500,000 people from the 12.4 million population estimate it reported in 2007.
The study said it was the first time in a decade that more immigrants were entering the country legally than illegally.
From 2000 to 2004, about 800,000 illegal immigrants a year entered the United States, but now the numbers have dropped to 500,000 a year, the report says. Meanwhile, legal immigration remains steady with about 650,000 authorized immigrants moving here each year.
Leaders of local immigrant advocacy groups such as CASA de Maryland and Virginia’s Tenants and Workers United say they’ve heard reports of immigrants heading home in other parts of the country, but they’re not seeing it here. Neither group checks the immigration status of the people they work with, so they can’t speak specifically about illegal immigrants, but they can discuss trends in the area’s immigrant community as a whole.
“The answer is a lot of people talk about it in a wishful way,” said Mario Quiroz, spokesman for CASA de Maryland. “They say, ‘I’m going to go home to be with my family,’ but in actuality, I have only seen one family who’s actually left.”
Quiroz says CASA, which operates day labor centers throughout Maryland, is seeing a 20 percent or so increase in those looking for work.
“Whatever conditions you have here are still probably better than what they have at home,” Quiroz said. “People used to send $300, $400, $500 a month back home; now they’re just saying, ‘Well, we’re having a bad time here too’ and not sending what they used to send.”
The Center for Immigration Studies, which favors stricter controls on all immigration, says the decline in the U.S. illegal immigrant population predates the current economic slump. The group reports a net loss of about 1.3 million illegal immigrants between August 2007 and May 2008, when the population slid from 12.5 million to 11.2 million.
Mark Krikorian, the center’s executive director, said he believes both the economic recession and increased enforcement efforts are causing the decline.
“The bad economy is not necessarily a self-correcting phenomenon for illegal immigration,” Krikorian said. “They’re not just going to leave because the housing market is tanking here when things are bad in their home country too, so increased enforcement is playing a role as well.”
Jon Liss, executive director of Fairfax County’s Tenants and Workers United, a day laborer assistance group, attributed the stability in the local immigrant population in part to the global scale of the economic slowdown.
“People know if the U.S. sneezes, the fact is Latin America probably has the flu,” Liss said.
Roy Beck, executive director of Numbers USA, a group that seeks to reduce immigration, said some illegal immigrants living in this area may be filling an increased demand for food service and hotel workers, in anticipation of the inauguration crowds, but added he believes eventually this region will also see a decline in the illegal immigrant population.
“There are some extra things going on here for a few months, but at the end of the day people will come for $15-an-hour construction jobs, but they won’t remain here for $7- or $8-an-hour service jobs,” Beck said. “When times are hard, the pull of home is much stronger.”
Prince William County Chairman Corey Stewart, who created one of the nation’s toughest local crackdowns on illegal immigration, said his county has already seen a dramatic drop in the number of estimated illegal immigrants.
He acknowledges, however, that there is no official way to track that and he’s relying on anecdotal information and census data about foreign-born residents in general, which show Prince William has lost 7 percent of its total immigrant population. He adds that Fairfax County has had a comparable increase in its foreign-born population and he can’t guarantee Prince William policies have resulted in illegal immigrants actually going home.
“The reality is illegal immigration knows no county boundaries; if we could do it regionally, we would be much more effective,” Stewart said.
Find this article at:
http://www.dcexaminer.com/local/Illegals_dig_in1204.html
QUOTE(cutecat @ Dec 1 2008, 04:20 PM)
Its 3 solutions I could agree with but the wall is already being built on the Mexican boarder by Corp of Engineers at expenses way beyond imaginable by tax payer at this time of financial stress already on the public.
One day again in the future Americans may feel the need to cross borders for their own protection or survival....What will Mexico and Canada say to the home of the free then?
One day again in the future Americans may feel the need to cross borders for their own protection or survival....What will Mexico and Canada say to the home of the free then?
Our nation became great because of immigration -- legal and illegal. I am not for illegal immigration. I never have been. I never will be.
However, examining the issue and poltiical realities we can talk theoretically -- or we can talk practically. I do not think the discussion would be the same for both.
My approach on this thread has been to try and make Bill's theory a reality...using compromise and political reality to bring it about...
Illegal workers manage to skirt Arizona employer-sanctions law
Borrowed identities, cash pay fuel an underground economy
The Arizona Republic
Published: 12.02.2008
Illegal immigrant workers and employers in Arizona are finding ways to circumvent the state's employer-sanctions law by turning to the underground, or cash, economy.
Blocked by the law from getting payroll jobs, many illegal immigrants instead are performing services or selling items on the side for cash.
Others have tried a different strategy: borrowing the identities of citizens or legal residents to land jobs with employers.
The maneuvers are allowing many illegal immigrant families to remain in the United States despite heightened enforcement of immigration laws and a battered economy that has erased many jobs.
There are no studies that estimate how many illegal immigrants have turned to cash-only work to survive in Arizona. But economists say one of the results is that much of the money immigrants earn is going unreported and untaxed. That deprives the state of income-tax revenue even as tax revenue in Arizona is plummeting because of the faltering economy.
Gabino, a Phoenix resident who asked that his last name not be used for fear of being deported, is among the illegal immigrants who have shifted from the traditional economy to the underground one. A year ago, the 37-year-old man from Guanajuato, Mexico, was assembling electronic parts at a plant in Phoenix, a job he got using fake papers. He not only drew a paycheck but also paid state and federal income taxes.
But in 2007, Gov. Janet Napolitano signed legislation that toughens penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Gabino was fired late that year.
Instead of leaving Arizona, as was intended by proponents of the sanctions law for immigrants such as Gabino, he began working mostly for cash. He sells used items at swap meets and puppies that he breeds in his north Phoenix trailer home. More recently, Gabino assumed the identity of a U.S. citizen who lent him his valid Social Security number to get jobs.
Some economists say that stories like Gabino's bear out their predictions that the employer-sanctions law is having negative consequences for Arizona's economy.
"It's an effect of the sanctions (law) that is exacerbated by the bad economy," said Elliott Pollack, an Arizona economist who regularly advises the state Legislature. "What you've done, because of that law, is taken tax-paying people" and shifted them off the tax rolls.
Supporters of the sanctions law argue that if the law is forcing some illegal immigrants to move to the underground economy, that is a sign the law is working.
"It's unfortunate that they continue to disrespect our laws by working off the books in addition to living here illegally," said state Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills. "But this is one step closer to driving them out of the state. . . . It's making it more uncomfortable for them" to get jobs.
E-Verify at work
Gabino said he has lived in Arizona for 10 years. Until the sanctions law went into effect, he had no trouble getting legitimate jobs on the books using a fake Social Security card with an invented number. Employers never checked to see whether the number he gave them was actually valid.
But that all changed in January when the sanctions law began requiring Arizona employers to verify the work eligibility of new hires using the federal online database E-Verify. The system usually confirms within minutes whether someone is authorized to work. As of the end of September, more than 22,000 employers in Arizona were using the system, according to the federal government.
At the electronics plant, Gabino said he was earning $13 an hour. With overtime, his paycheck came out to about $650 a week. From that, Gabino said his employer withheld about $123 in state and federal income taxes.
Gabino said that in December managers at the plant started getting nervous as the employer-sanctions law was about to take effect.
The managers told him and other immigrants that they were going to review their work documents and if their Social Security numbers didn't check out, the workers would be let go. About a week later, Gabino said, he lost his job.
"It forced us to do a lot more stuff underhanded to survive," Gabino said.
A cash economy
The state's underground economy existed long before the sanctions law was approved, but its size is unknown.
Although illegal immigrants constitute a significant portion of the black-market workforce, it is difficult to gauge how many of them have shifted from company payrolls to the cash economy, economists say.
Anecdotal evidence based on interviews with illegal immigrant workers and immigrant advocates suggests the number is growing, mainly because of the sanctions law and the poor economy.
"I think it's widespread. I think it's more widespread than we know about it," said Hector Yturralde, president of We Are America, a coalition of Arizona pro-immigrant groups. "They (immigrants) knock on doors and ask for gardening work or they are doing handyman work. A lot of these are workers who were employed in construction and they lost their jobs, so this is what they are doing."
The state's cash economy is virtually unregulated. The state's Department of Revenue employs four criminal investigators whose main targets are employers who try to reduce their taxes by fraudulently filling out tax forms. The investigators don't focus on employers who pay employees in cash under the table, said Sandy Schwartz, who oversees the criminal investigations section.
"We haven't had any criminal investigations (of employers paying cash), but we haven't been out there looking for that, either," she said.
Several economists agree that a shift to the underground economy is probably taking place and is worsening Arizona's economic problems by further deflating income-tax revenues. The effect is adding to the state's $1.2 billion budget shortfall.
The impact could be substantial considering the size of the state's illegal immigrant workforce. About 200,000 of the state's 2.6 million workers are undocumented, according to estimates by Judith Gans, a researcher at the University of Arizona.
"It is safe to say it is likely a contributor, but I can't tell you if it is a major contributor or a minor contributor," said Marshall Vest, a UA economist.
Arizona took in about $371 million less in individual income-tax collections from January to September of this year compared with the same period last year, a drop of 13 percent, according to the state's Joint Legislative Budget Committee.
However, sales-tax collections for some necessities have not fallen as precipitously, dropping 2.5 percent for food and 6.8 percent for clothing. That suggests more workers aren't paying income taxes but are still earning money to spend, a sign that Arizona's underground economy is growing, said Barbara Robles, an economist at Arizona State University's Center for Community Development and Civil Rights. Robles said an underground economy isn't all bad because it means workers are still buying goods and paying sales taxes, which is better than removing them from the economy completely.
Some economists believe sanctions-law supporters fail to recognize that illegal immigrants fill labor shortages in the economy and many of them work on the books and pay income taxes, said Vest, who supports temporary work visas.
Although Kavanagh supports a guest-worker program to help meet labor demands in some areas, he said allowing illegal immigrants to legalize their status would be a mistake because they tend to earn low wages and would pay less in taxes than the benefits they use, including emergency health care and education. Legalizing them would provide them access to even more benefits, he said.
Finding a way to stay
In some ways, the underground economy found Gabino.
After he was fired from the electronics plant, he tried getting other jobs using the same fake documents he used in the past. But the documents no longer worked. At job after job, employers ran his Social Security number through E-Verify and sent him on his way.
To earn money, Gabino started buying children's toys and clothing at yard sales and reselling them on Sundays at swap meets. A baby swing in his living room was an example: He bought it for $20 at a garage sale and re-sold it for $40 at a swap meet.
Gabino also sells small Pomeranian and Chihuahua dogs. He bent down in his living room and pulled a Chihuahua puppy out of a cage. "This little guy is worth $380," he said.
Gabino said in a good month, he makes about $800 profit at the swap meet and figures he'll make about $3,000 this year from selling the puppies.
That's not enough to support his family. Gabino and his wife, who does not hold a job, have four children, two of whom were born in the U.S. The oldest is 13, and the youngest 3 months.
But Gabino has still managed to find companies willing to hire him despite the sanctions law.
A few weeks after losing his job at the electronic plant, Gabino said he applied for a job at a factory that needed someone to paint iron gates. The boss offered Gabino the job, even though an E-Verify check showed he wasn't authorized to work, Gabino said.
"Since I didn't have a 'Social' to be able to work, the boss told me he would pay me with a check that belonged to another worker who didn't work there anymore. He said, 'You are now Pedro. You will get Pedro's check.' And he paid me as if I was Pedro," Gabino said.
There was only one catch. The boss was only willing to pay Gabino $7 an hour, 10 cents above the state's minimum wage. Gabino said he was desperate so he took the job. Cashing "Pedro's" check wasn't a problem at a check-cashing place.
"All you have to do is let them take your picture and bring a friend who vouches that you are the same person on the check," Gabino said.
After that job, Gabino quickly found a job at a furniture company willing to pay him $10 an hour in cash under the table.
Laid off there, he came up with a new scheme: He asked a U.S. citizen friend who isn't working if he could use his driver's license and Social Security number to get jobs.
"We are about the same age, and we look alike," Gabino said.
Gabino said he couldn't reveal why his friend didn't need his own documents to work.
Elias Bermudez, founder of the Phoenix-based advocacy group Immigrants Without Borders, said borrowing other people papers has become a common practice among illegal immigrants.
"Right now it's the mode of the day," Bermudez said. "Anyone who doesn't have documents is working for cash or is asking a family member or friend to lend them their paperwork so they can pass E-Verify."
Gabino said he considered himself fortunate. "Other people are charging (illegal immigrants) to use their papers," he said.
With the friend's papers, Gabino said he had no problem passing the E-Verify check for a construction job. Since July, he has been working as a laborer on a block-wall crew building a new strip mall. Gabino said he started off earning $11 an hour, but after two weeks the company cut his pay to $9.50 an hour because of the slow economy.
Still, as long as he can keep making money, Gabino said, he has no intention of leaving Arizona.
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/altss/printst...rontpage/104016
Borrowed identities, cash pay fuel an underground economy
The Arizona Republic
Published: 12.02.2008
Illegal immigrant workers and employers in Arizona are finding ways to circumvent the state's employer-sanctions law by turning to the underground, or cash, economy.
Blocked by the law from getting payroll jobs, many illegal immigrants instead are performing services or selling items on the side for cash.
Others have tried a different strategy: borrowing the identities of citizens or legal residents to land jobs with employers.
The maneuvers are allowing many illegal immigrant families to remain in the United States despite heightened enforcement of immigration laws and a battered economy that has erased many jobs.
There are no studies that estimate how many illegal immigrants have turned to cash-only work to survive in Arizona. But economists say one of the results is that much of the money immigrants earn is going unreported and untaxed. That deprives the state of income-tax revenue even as tax revenue in Arizona is plummeting because of the faltering economy.
Gabino, a Phoenix resident who asked that his last name not be used for fear of being deported, is among the illegal immigrants who have shifted from the traditional economy to the underground one. A year ago, the 37-year-old man from Guanajuato, Mexico, was assembling electronic parts at a plant in Phoenix, a job he got using fake papers. He not only drew a paycheck but also paid state and federal income taxes.
But in 2007, Gov. Janet Napolitano signed legislation that toughens penalties for employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. Gabino was fired late that year.
Instead of leaving Arizona, as was intended by proponents of the sanctions law for immigrants such as Gabino, he began working mostly for cash. He sells used items at swap meets and puppies that he breeds in his north Phoenix trailer home. More recently, Gabino assumed the identity of a U.S. citizen who lent him his valid Social Security number to get jobs.
Some economists say that stories like Gabino's bear out their predictions that the employer-sanctions law is having negative consequences for Arizona's economy.
"It's an effect of the sanctions (law) that is exacerbated by the bad economy," said Elliott Pollack, an Arizona economist who regularly advises the state Legislature. "What you've done, because of that law, is taken tax-paying people" and shifted them off the tax rolls.
Supporters of the sanctions law argue that if the law is forcing some illegal immigrants to move to the underground economy, that is a sign the law is working.
"It's unfortunate that they continue to disrespect our laws by working off the books in addition to living here illegally," said state Rep. John Kavanagh, R-Fountain Hills. "But this is one step closer to driving them out of the state. . . . It's making it more uncomfortable for them" to get jobs.
E-Verify at work
Gabino said he has lived in Arizona for 10 years. Until the sanctions law went into effect, he had no trouble getting legitimate jobs on the books using a fake Social Security card with an invented number. Employers never checked to see whether the number he gave them was actually valid.
But that all changed in January when the sanctions law began requiring Arizona employers to verify the work eligibility of new hires using the federal online database E-Verify. The system usually confirms within minutes whether someone is authorized to work. As of the end of September, more than 22,000 employers in Arizona were using the system, according to the federal government.
At the electronics plant, Gabino said he was earning $13 an hour. With overtime, his paycheck came out to about $650 a week. From that, Gabino said his employer withheld about $123 in state and federal income taxes.
Gabino said that in December managers at the plant started getting nervous as the employer-sanctions law was about to take effect.
The managers told him and other immigrants that they were going to review their work documents and if their Social Security numbers didn't check out, the workers would be let go. About a week later, Gabino said, he lost his job.
"It forced us to do a lot more stuff underhanded to survive," Gabino said.
A cash economy
The state's underground economy existed long before the sanctions law was approved, but its size is unknown.
Although illegal immigrants constitute a significant portion of the black-market workforce, it is difficult to gauge how many of them have shifted from company payrolls to the cash economy, economists say.
Anecdotal evidence based on interviews with illegal immigrant workers and immigrant advocates suggests the number is growing, mainly because of the sanctions law and the poor economy.
"I think it's widespread. I think it's more widespread than we know about it," said Hector Yturralde, president of We Are America, a coalition of Arizona pro-immigrant groups. "They (immigrants) knock on doors and ask for gardening work or they are doing handyman work. A lot of these are workers who were employed in construction and they lost their jobs, so this is what they are doing."
The state's cash economy is virtually unregulated. The state's Department of Revenue employs four criminal investigators whose main targets are employers who try to reduce their taxes by fraudulently filling out tax forms. The investigators don't focus on employers who pay employees in cash under the table, said Sandy Schwartz, who oversees the criminal investigations section.
"We haven't had any criminal investigations (of employers paying cash), but we haven't been out there looking for that, either," she said.
Several economists agree that a shift to the underground economy is probably taking place and is worsening Arizona's economic problems by further deflating income-tax revenues. The effect is adding to the state's $1.2 billion budget shortfall.
The impact could be substantial considering the size of the state's illegal immigrant workforce. About 200,000 of the state's 2.6 million workers are undocumented, according to estimates by Judith Gans, a researcher at the University of Arizona.
"It is safe to say it is likely a contributor, but I can't tell you if it is a major contributor or a minor contributor," said Marshall Vest, a UA economist.
Arizona took in about $371 million less in individual income-tax collections from January to September of this year compared with the same period last year, a drop of 13 percent, according to the state's Joint Legislative Budget Committee.
However, sales-tax collections for some necessities have not fallen as precipitously, dropping 2.5 percent for food and 6.8 percent for clothing. That suggests more workers aren't paying income taxes but are still earning money to spend, a sign that Arizona's underground economy is growing, said Barbara Robles, an economist at Arizona State University's Center for Community Development and Civil Rights. Robles said an underground economy isn't all bad because it means workers are still buying goods and paying sales taxes, which is better than removing them from the economy completely.
Some economists believe sanctions-law supporters fail to recognize that illegal immigrants fill labor shortages in the economy and many of them work on the books and pay income taxes, said Vest, who supports temporary work visas.
Although Kavanagh supports a guest-worker program to help meet labor demands in some areas, he said allowing illegal immigrants to legalize their status would be a mistake because they tend to earn low wages and would pay less in taxes than the benefits they use, including emergency health care and education. Legalizing them would provide them access to even more benefits, he said.
Finding a way to stay
In some ways, the underground economy found Gabino.
After he was fired from the electronics plant, he tried getting other jobs using the same fake documents he used in the past. But the documents no longer worked. At job after job, employers ran his Social Security number through E-Verify and sent him on his way.
To earn money, Gabino started buying children's toys and clothing at yard sales and reselling them on Sundays at swap meets. A baby swing in his living room was an example: He bought it for $20 at a garage sale and re-sold it for $40 at a swap meet.
Gabino also sells small Pomeranian and Chihuahua dogs. He bent down in his living room and pulled a Chihuahua puppy out of a cage. "This little guy is worth $380," he said.
Gabino said in a good month, he makes about $800 profit at the swap meet and figures he'll make about $3,000 this year from selling the puppies.
That's not enough to support his family. Gabino and his wife, who does not hold a job, have four children, two of whom were born in the U.S. The oldest is 13, and the youngest 3 months.
But Gabino has still managed to find companies willing to hire him despite the sanctions law.
A few weeks after losing his job at the electronic plant, Gabino said he applied for a job at a factory that needed someone to paint iron gates. The boss offered Gabino the job, even though an E-Verify check showed he wasn't authorized to work, Gabino said.
"Since I didn't have a 'Social' to be able to work, the boss told me he would pay me with a check that belonged to another worker who didn't work there anymore. He said, 'You are now Pedro. You will get Pedro's check.' And he paid me as if I was Pedro," Gabino said.
There was only one catch. The boss was only willing to pay Gabino $7 an hour, 10 cents above the state's minimum wage. Gabino said he was desperate so he took the job. Cashing "Pedro's" check wasn't a problem at a check-cashing place.
"All you have to do is let them take your picture and bring a friend who vouches that you are the same person on the check," Gabino said.
After that job, Gabino quickly found a job at a furniture company willing to pay him $10 an hour in cash under the table.
Laid off there, he came up with a new scheme: He asked a U.S. citizen friend who isn't working if he could use his driver's license and Social Security number to get jobs.
"We are about the same age, and we look alike," Gabino said.
Gabino said he couldn't reveal why his friend didn't need his own documents to work.
Elias Bermudez, founder of the Phoenix-based advocacy group Immigrants Without Borders, said borrowing other people papers has become a common practice among illegal immigrants.
"Right now it's the mode of the day," Bermudez said. "Anyone who doesn't have documents is working for cash or is asking a family member or friend to lend them their paperwork so they can pass E-Verify."
Gabino said he considered himself fortunate. "Other people are charging (illegal immigrants) to use their papers," he said.
With the friend's papers, Gabino said he had no problem passing the E-Verify check for a construction job. Since July, he has been working as a laborer on a block-wall crew building a new strip mall. Gabino said he started off earning $11 an hour, but after two weeks the company cut his pay to $9.50 an hour because of the slow economy.
Still, as long as he can keep making money, Gabino said, he has no intention of leaving Arizona.
http://www.tucsoncitizen.com/altss/printst...rontpage/104016
DHS Chief Says Illegal Immigration Has Dropped Amid Heightened Border Security
By Alex Kingsbury
Posted December 3, 2008
Changes in border security have cut the flow of illegal immigrants crossing the nation's southern border, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said today. "For the first time, we've reversed momentum," he said.
More News
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Just within the past week, the number of Border Patrol agents serving in the department topped 18,000, Chertoff said. That's more than double the 9,000 agents on duty when President Bush took office in 2000. In addition, Chertoff said that the Bush administration will leave office having completed about 90 percent of the planned border fencing project along sections of the 700-mile U.S.-Mexico border.
But the beefed-up security, combined with a public increasingly more preoccupied with the troubled economy than the issue of immigration, shouldn't preclude legislators from crafting a comprehensive fix for the larger issue, he said.
Despite Bush's inability to implement his immigration reform plan, which Congress twice rejected, Chertoff said that a similar effort was still "the right way to go."
At the time, critics questioned the administration's proposal to create a path to citizenship (which opponents dubbed an "amnesty") without first effectively enforcing existing law and stopping the flow of people across the porous southern border. Since the measures' failure, the government has staged a series of high-profile raids on businesses suspected of employing undocumented workers.
Chertoff said it is still unclear if the boost to security and the tougher enforcement will pacify critics enough to enable the Obama administration to tackle the issue.
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/nation...r-security.html
By Alex Kingsbury
Posted December 3, 2008
Changes in border security have cut the flow of illegal immigrants crossing the nation's southern border, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said today. "For the first time, we've reversed momentum," he said.
More News
WMD Warnings Spark Worries Over Fear Rhetoric
Farrell: Spread the Wealth for Our National Education
Carmakers Return, Seeking $34 Billion
Video: Panel Warns of a Bio Attack by 2013
Just within the past week, the number of Border Patrol agents serving in the department topped 18,000, Chertoff said. That's more than double the 9,000 agents on duty when President Bush took office in 2000. In addition, Chertoff said that the Bush administration will leave office having completed about 90 percent of the planned border fencing project along sections of the 700-mile U.S.-Mexico border.
But the beefed-up security, combined with a public increasingly more preoccupied with the troubled economy than the issue of immigration, shouldn't preclude legislators from crafting a comprehensive fix for the larger issue, he said.
Despite Bush's inability to implement his immigration reform plan, which Congress twice rejected, Chertoff said that a similar effort was still "the right way to go."
At the time, critics questioned the administration's proposal to create a path to citizenship (which opponents dubbed an "amnesty") without first effectively enforcing existing law and stopping the flow of people across the porous southern border. Since the measures' failure, the government has staged a series of high-profile raids on businesses suspected of employing undocumented workers.
Chertoff said it is still unclear if the boost to security and the tougher enforcement will pacify critics enough to enable the Obama administration to tackle the issue.
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/nation...r-security.html
Cracking Down on Border Crossers
Immigrants are now prosecuted instead of just sent home
By Emma Schwartz
Posted April 18, 2008
Crossing the U.S. border illegally has long been a criminal offense. But first-time offenders have rarely found themselves behind bars for simply trying to come into this country. Instead, most have been detained briefly before being sent back home.
That process is starting to change. Responding to pressure to curb illegal immigration, law enforcement officials along the southwestern border are not just arresting more illegal migrants but are also prosecuting them in hopes that a harsher policy will stop them from coming back. "It sends a message that it's not all right to come into this country illegally," says Raymond Kondo, assistant chief deputy U.S. marshal in Tucson, Ariz.
Though a battered U.S. economy has also played a role, the crackdown, which started in Del Rio, Texas, in 2005, appears to be cutting the number of illegal migrants. Apprehensions across the Del Rio sector dropped 66 percent to 22,920 by the end of last year. Among immigrants from countries other than Mexico, the decrease was 79 percent. In Yuma, Ariz., apprehensions have dropped 72 percent since prosecutions were stepped up in December 2006.
Enforcing the law, however, is coming at a price. Critics say the increased prosecutions are overloading an already strained court system and raising concerns about immigrants' legal rights. In Del Rio, the number of prosecutions jumped fourfold since 2005 to 14,419 in 2007. Says William Fry, a public defender: "I just can't help being a little concerned that every defendant is getting as full a measure of due process as I think they should." Some critics also suggest that the crackdown may simply force migrants to cross over elsewhere.
The change has been starkest for Mexican immigrants. For years, first-time Mexican offenders have been sent straight back across the border without any court proceeding—often many times before they ever faced a criminal charge. But migrants from other Central or South American countries have been brought to immigration court simply because they couldn't walk back home. The problem was that most of these non-Mexican migrants were released pending their court dates, and most never showed up. The new procedures are, in part, an attempt to correct this double standard.
Justice in a day. Since many cases are expected to be resolved in one day, defense lawyers say they are forced to counsel dozens of clients at a time, a load that makes it hard to investigate mitigating circumstances that might allow an individual to stay in the United States. "It's very difficult to try to get someone's case resolved in one day when they've just walked across the desert," says Heather Williams, a public defender in Tucson.
Public defender Brenda Sandoval cites one of her clients, a 31-year-old single mother who has lived in the United States legally nearly all of her life as the daughter of a U.S. citizen. (She herself never actually applied for citizenship.) When she tried to return here after a visit to Mexico earlier this year—she had crossed outside a port of entry—she was arrested.
Sandoval says she was convinced her client had been wrongly charged. But the woman carried no documentation and could not even provide a phone number for her mother since her cellphone had been confiscated. The necessary birth certificates arrived the next day, and prosecutors dropped the charges. But that was not enough to set the woman free. She still faced civil proceedings in immigration court and was to be held behind bars until then, Sandoval says. Unwilling to do more jail time, she chose her only other option: returning to Mexico and leaving her two young children with her mother in the United States. She is not sure how to come back, a predicament Sandoval finds all the more unfair because "she was sitting in jail there when she should never have been in jail to begin with."
Most of the cases being prosecuted are clearer cut than that of Sandoval's client, and many immigrants plead guilty to charges of entering illegally, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail.
Still, the program's recent expansion to other districts has further taxed resources, and the Border Patrol can't always charge everyone criminally. The U.S. Marshals Service has limited jail space, and in some places the Border Patrol has had to curb the number of prosecutions.
Meanwhile, courts are trying to reduce caseloads by hiring more attorneys and limiting the number of cases that can be heard in one day. Magistrate Judge Dennis Green, who oversees many of the cases in Del Rio, says that his docket is full. But he also says he's glad the government is taking action. "If you don't enforce the law," Green says, " nobody is going to respect it."
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/nation...ssers_print.htm
Immigrants are now prosecuted instead of just sent home
By Emma Schwartz
Posted April 18, 2008
Crossing the U.S. border illegally has long been a criminal offense. But first-time offenders have rarely found themselves behind bars for simply trying to come into this country. Instead, most have been detained briefly before being sent back home.
That process is starting to change. Responding to pressure to curb illegal immigration, law enforcement officials along the southwestern border are not just arresting more illegal migrants but are also prosecuting them in hopes that a harsher policy will stop them from coming back. "It sends a message that it's not all right to come into this country illegally," says Raymond Kondo, assistant chief deputy U.S. marshal in Tucson, Ariz.
Though a battered U.S. economy has also played a role, the crackdown, which started in Del Rio, Texas, in 2005, appears to be cutting the number of illegal migrants. Apprehensions across the Del Rio sector dropped 66 percent to 22,920 by the end of last year. Among immigrants from countries other than Mexico, the decrease was 79 percent. In Yuma, Ariz., apprehensions have dropped 72 percent since prosecutions were stepped up in December 2006.
Enforcing the law, however, is coming at a price. Critics say the increased prosecutions are overloading an already strained court system and raising concerns about immigrants' legal rights. In Del Rio, the number of prosecutions jumped fourfold since 2005 to 14,419 in 2007. Says William Fry, a public defender: "I just can't help being a little concerned that every defendant is getting as full a measure of due process as I think they should." Some critics also suggest that the crackdown may simply force migrants to cross over elsewhere.
The change has been starkest for Mexican immigrants. For years, first-time Mexican offenders have been sent straight back across the border without any court proceeding—often many times before they ever faced a criminal charge. But migrants from other Central or South American countries have been brought to immigration court simply because they couldn't walk back home. The problem was that most of these non-Mexican migrants were released pending their court dates, and most never showed up. The new procedures are, in part, an attempt to correct this double standard.
Justice in a day. Since many cases are expected to be resolved in one day, defense lawyers say they are forced to counsel dozens of clients at a time, a load that makes it hard to investigate mitigating circumstances that might allow an individual to stay in the United States. "It's very difficult to try to get someone's case resolved in one day when they've just walked across the desert," says Heather Williams, a public defender in Tucson.
Public defender Brenda Sandoval cites one of her clients, a 31-year-old single mother who has lived in the United States legally nearly all of her life as the daughter of a U.S. citizen. (She herself never actually applied for citizenship.) When she tried to return here after a visit to Mexico earlier this year—she had crossed outside a port of entry—she was arrested.
Sandoval says she was convinced her client had been wrongly charged. But the woman carried no documentation and could not even provide a phone number for her mother since her cellphone had been confiscated. The necessary birth certificates arrived the next day, and prosecutors dropped the charges. But that was not enough to set the woman free. She still faced civil proceedings in immigration court and was to be held behind bars until then, Sandoval says. Unwilling to do more jail time, she chose her only other option: returning to Mexico and leaving her two young children with her mother in the United States. She is not sure how to come back, a predicament Sandoval finds all the more unfair because "she was sitting in jail there when she should never have been in jail to begin with."
Most of the cases being prosecuted are clearer cut than that of Sandoval's client, and many immigrants plead guilty to charges of entering illegally, a misdemeanor that carries a maximum sentence of six months in jail.
Still, the program's recent expansion to other districts has further taxed resources, and the Border Patrol can't always charge everyone criminally. The U.S. Marshals Service has limited jail space, and in some places the Border Patrol has had to curb the number of prosecutions.
Meanwhile, courts are trying to reduce caseloads by hiring more attorneys and limiting the number of cases that can be heard in one day. Magistrate Judge Dennis Green, who oversees many of the cases in Del Rio, says that his docket is full. But he also says he's glad the government is taking action. "If you don't enforce the law," Green says, " nobody is going to respect it."
http://www.usnews.com/articles/news/nation...ssers_print.htm
Posted on Mon, Dec. 01, 2008
Homeland security nominee is tough on immigration
By GREG GORDON
Few people have been closer to the center of the debate over illegal immigration than Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, the top Democrat in a conservative state with little sympathy for illegal immigrants.
While taking a law-and-order posture on immigration enforcement, Napolitano has opposed the construction of a 700-mile wall along the Mexican border and stressed that policing immigration is a federal responsibility.
Now as President-elect Barack Obama's nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, she won't be able to pass that buck anymore. It will be her task to enforce the nation's immigration laws, and her selection might be a signal that Obama wants to chart a moderate course on a volatile issue.
Napolitano's job will be among the toughest in Washington for other reasons, too. She must guide an octopus-like collection of two dozen federal agencies charged with protecting Americans from terrorism and natural disasters.
Her selection drew high praise Monday from key Democratic lawmakers and Republicans such as the current homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, and her home-state senator, John McCain. They said that as a border governor, former U.S. attorney and state attorney general, she has the right mix of managerial skills, law-enforcement experience and understanding of the heated immigration issue to handle the challenges ahead.
In introducing her, Obama said that Napolitano "has spent her career protecting people" as a law-enforcement official and governor and "knows firsthand the need to have a partner in Washington that works well with state and local governments."
James Ziglar, the last commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service under President George W. Bush before Congress shifted its functions to the newly created Department of Homeland Security in 2003, said: "I think she is very understanding of the immigration issue.
"She's a very pragmatic, practical person who understands that enforcement is really important, but that . . . we have to have a way for people to come and go legally and serve the needs of our country in terms of labor and immigration," he said.
While immigration reform efforts have collapsed in Congress in recent years, Ziglar predicted that Napolitano would work with "middle-of-the-road Republicans . . . to get some meaningful change."
Jack Tomarchio, who resigned in August as a top homeland security intelligence official, said he worries that the incoming Obama administration will be so preoccupied with the nation's financial crisis and ending the Iraq war that fighting terrorism might drop in the pecking order.
"That's a pitfall that they could easily fall into," he said.
Last week's terror attacks in Mumbai, he said, should serve as a sobering alert to Napolitano and others in the administration: No more than 10 shooters with "the collective firepower of a U.S. Army infantry squad . . . pretty much brought (India) to its knees for a couple of days."
While U.S. agencies work to defend against a biological or nuclear attack, he said, a low-tech attack might be the greater threat.
"The operational actions of those guys in Mumbai is being discussed by people in the Jihadi Internet," Tomarchio said. "They're studying it. They're looking at how they inserted these guys from the sea. They're looking at the kind of weapons they carried, and they're learning from that. These guys are all copycats."
Tomarchio, who coordinated the creation of 58 to 60 "fusion" centers across the country to ensure that federal, state and local law enforcement intelligence agencies share counterterrorism information, praised the performance of Arizona's unit under Napolitano as "one of the top three."
However, he said, she could face a problem as states face budget shortfalls that could cut fusion center funding.
Mike Signer, a senior policy officer on homeland security for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal research group, said that Napolitano will have a big say in whether to reshape her unwieldy department into "a more nimble, security-focused agency." But first, he said, she must contend with a "staffing crisis" because of a shortage of skilled people for key midlevel jobs in the agency.
As a governor, Signer said, Napolitano should be open to learning from innovative work by cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, which are pioneering ways to infiltrate potential extremist groups and to strengthen surveillance.
"She'll be good at that," he said. "She'll have a natural grasp of the very important role of entities outside of Washington."
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/A...ory/795121.html
Homeland security nominee is tough on immigration
By GREG GORDON
Few people have been closer to the center of the debate over illegal immigration than Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano, the top Democrat in a conservative state with little sympathy for illegal immigrants.
While taking a law-and-order posture on immigration enforcement, Napolitano has opposed the construction of a 700-mile wall along the Mexican border and stressed that policing immigration is a federal responsibility.
Now as President-elect Barack Obama's nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, she won't be able to pass that buck anymore. It will be her task to enforce the nation's immigration laws, and her selection might be a signal that Obama wants to chart a moderate course on a volatile issue.
Napolitano's job will be among the toughest in Washington for other reasons, too. She must guide an octopus-like collection of two dozen federal agencies charged with protecting Americans from terrorism and natural disasters.
Her selection drew high praise Monday from key Democratic lawmakers and Republicans such as the current homeland security chief, Michael Chertoff, and her home-state senator, John McCain. They said that as a border governor, former U.S. attorney and state attorney general, she has the right mix of managerial skills, law-enforcement experience and understanding of the heated immigration issue to handle the challenges ahead.
In introducing her, Obama said that Napolitano "has spent her career protecting people" as a law-enforcement official and governor and "knows firsthand the need to have a partner in Washington that works well with state and local governments."
James Ziglar, the last commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service under President George W. Bush before Congress shifted its functions to the newly created Department of Homeland Security in 2003, said: "I think she is very understanding of the immigration issue.
"She's a very pragmatic, practical person who understands that enforcement is really important, but that . . . we have to have a way for people to come and go legally and serve the needs of our country in terms of labor and immigration," he said.
While immigration reform efforts have collapsed in Congress in recent years, Ziglar predicted that Napolitano would work with "middle-of-the-road Republicans . . . to get some meaningful change."
Jack Tomarchio, who resigned in August as a top homeland security intelligence official, said he worries that the incoming Obama administration will be so preoccupied with the nation's financial crisis and ending the Iraq war that fighting terrorism might drop in the pecking order.
"That's a pitfall that they could easily fall into," he said.
Last week's terror attacks in Mumbai, he said, should serve as a sobering alert to Napolitano and others in the administration: No more than 10 shooters with "the collective firepower of a U.S. Army infantry squad . . . pretty much brought (India) to its knees for a couple of days."
While U.S. agencies work to defend against a biological or nuclear attack, he said, a low-tech attack might be the greater threat.
"The operational actions of those guys in Mumbai is being discussed by people in the Jihadi Internet," Tomarchio said. "They're studying it. They're looking at how they inserted these guys from the sea. They're looking at the kind of weapons they carried, and they're learning from that. These guys are all copycats."
Tomarchio, who coordinated the creation of 58 to 60 "fusion" centers across the country to ensure that federal, state and local law enforcement intelligence agencies share counterterrorism information, praised the performance of Arizona's unit under Napolitano as "one of the top three."
However, he said, she could face a problem as states face budget shortfalls that could cut fusion center funding.
Mike Signer, a senior policy officer on homeland security for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, a liberal research group, said that Napolitano will have a big say in whether to reshape her unwieldy department into "a more nimble, security-focused agency." But first, he said, she must contend with a "staffing crisis" because of a shortage of skilled people for key midlevel jobs in the agency.
As a governor, Signer said, Napolitano should be open to learning from innovative work by cities such as New York, Los Angeles and Seattle, which are pioneering ways to infiltrate potential extremist groups and to strengthen surveillance.
"She'll be good at that," he said. "She'll have a natural grasp of the very important role of entities outside of Washington."
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/politics/A...ory/795121.html
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Dec 4 2008, 11:26 AM)
QUOTE(cutecat @ Dec 1 2008, 04:20 PM)
Its 3 solutions I could agree with but the wall is already being built on the Mexican boarder by Corp of Engineers at expenses way beyond imaginable by tax payer at this time of financial stress already on the public.
One day again in the future Americans may feel the need to cross borders for their own protection or survival....What will Mexico and Canada say to the home of the free then?
One day again in the future Americans may feel the need to cross borders for their own protection or survival....What will Mexico and Canada say to the home of the free then?
Our nation became great because of immigration -- legal and illegal. I am not for illegal immigration. I never have been. I never will be.
However, examining the issue and poltiical realities we can talk theoretically -- or we can talk practically. I do not think the discussion would be the same for both.
My approach on this thread has been to try and make Bill's theory a reality...using compromise and political reality to bring it about...
It was the National ID aspect that killed the bill --- this is what I am talking about with regard to political reality...and the need for flexibility and compromise in order to make the theory a reality...
June 28, 2007 12:18 PM PDT
National ID plan may have killed immigration bill
By Declan McCullagh
Staff Writer, CNET News
http://news.cnet.com/2100-7348_3-6193916.html
The U.S. Senate definitively rejected President George Bush's immigration bill on Thursday, just hours after senators expressed deep misgivings with portions that would have expanded the use of a national ID card.
Because the procedural vote was 46 to 53, with 60 votes needed to advance the immigration legislation, the proposal is likely to remain dead for the rest of the year.
Privacy advocates were quick to claim that a vote against Real ID cards the previous evening doomed the bill.
Wednesday's vote showed that senators were willing to delete the portion of the labyrinthine immigration bill that would require employers to demand the Real ID cards from new hires. Because some of the bill's backers had insisted that the ID requirement remain in place--as a way to identify illegal immigrants--they were no longer as willing to support the overall bill.
"The proponents of national ID in the Senate weren't getting what they wanted, so they backed away," said Jim Harper, a policy analyst at the free-market Cato Institute who opposes Real ID. "It was a landmine that blew up in their faces."
In a press release, the two Montana Democrats, Max Baucus and Jon Tester, said they were happy that a pro-privacy approach killed the bill. "If Jon and I just brought down the entire bill, that's good for Montana and the country," said Baucus, who cosponsored the amendment deleting the employer verification rule.
But supporters of the overall legislation, which would have created a new category of "Z" visas for currently illegal immigrants, expressed dismay at its apparent demise.
Microsoft said it was disappointed by Thursday's procedural vote against advancing the bill, which will "likely result in the collapse of comprehensive immigration reform that is desperately needed to address the shortage of highly skilled talent."
"The American people understand the status quo is unacceptable when it comes to our immigration laws," Bush said.
Opponents of the bill, including Republican senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, said derailing it was a victory. "When the U.S. Senate brought the amnesty bill back up this week, they declared war on the American people," DeMint said.
The American Civil Liberties Union, another longtime foe of Real ID, said the Real ID requirements were a "poison pill that derailed this bill, and any future legislation should be written knowing the American people won't swallow it." Another section of the immigration bill would have given $1.5 billion to state officials to pay for Real ID compliance.
Even if the immigration bill is goes nowhere, however, the Real ID Act is still in effect. It says that, starting on May 11, 2008, Americans will need a federally approved ID card to travel on an airplane, open a bank account, collect Social Security payments or take advantage of nearly any government service.
States must conduct checks of their citizens' identification papers and driver's licenses may have to be reissued to comply with Homeland Security requirements. (States that agree in advance to abide by the rules have until 2013 to comply.)
REAL ID Isn't Real...Yet
Tuesday December 2, 2008
REAL ID is about more than just a new driver's license. If you use your driver's license or state ID card for federal purposes, which includes ordinary events such as flying on commercial airlines and entering government buildings or national parks, you are now required to produce REAL ID-compliant identification.
These new federal identification standards went into effect this past May, however, Department of Homeland Security has extended the requirements for all states until 2009 with an additional extension through 2011 if certain benchmarks are met. This means you have some time before you need to run out and get your REAL ID.
Homeland Security says that the new REAL ID cards support national security by fighting terrorism and reducing fraud. Opponents of REAL ID see the new regulations as a burden on state governments, which have no effect on terrorism and put Americans at a greater risk of identity theft and invasions of privacy.
Legal immigrants already have a tough time meeting the eligibility for state-issued identification cards and driver's licenses. A social security number is a common requirement, yet many immigrants wait months before they're eligible to apply for a SSN. In addition, DMV representatives are not immigration experts and often have a difficult time verifying legal immigration documents to assess a person's immigration status. New federal regulations in the REAL ID Act will not make things any easier.
Find out more about REAL ID by reading up on the pros and cons of the REAL ID Act of 2005...
http://immigration.about.com/b/2008/12/02/...snt-realyet.htm
Tuesday December 2, 2008
REAL ID is about more than just a new driver's license. If you use your driver's license or state ID card for federal purposes, which includes ordinary events such as flying on commercial airlines and entering government buildings or national parks, you are now required to produce REAL ID-compliant identification.
These new federal identification standards went into effect this past May, however, Department of Homeland Security has extended the requirements for all states until 2009 with an additional extension through 2011 if certain benchmarks are met. This means you have some time before you need to run out and get your REAL ID.
Homeland Security says that the new REAL ID cards support national security by fighting terrorism and reducing fraud. Opponents of REAL ID see the new regulations as a burden on state governments, which have no effect on terrorism and put Americans at a greater risk of identity theft and invasions of privacy.
Legal immigrants already have a tough time meeting the eligibility for state-issued identification cards and driver's licenses. A social security number is a common requirement, yet many immigrants wait months before they're eligible to apply for a SSN. In addition, DMV representatives are not immigration experts and often have a difficult time verifying legal immigration documents to assess a person's immigration status. New federal regulations in the REAL ID Act will not make things any easier.
Find out more about REAL ID by reading up on the pros and cons of the REAL ID Act of 2005...
http://immigration.about.com/b/2008/12/02/...snt-realyet.htm
I think this is part of the problem of a draconian deportation policy...and I think that is the type of policy contemplated by Bill's approach...
December 27, 2008
City of Immigrants Fills Jail Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27det...agewanted=print
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.
Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.
After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.
In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.
If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.
Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.
Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.
But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.
In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested.
Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools.
Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.”
Yet in a community whose 1.3 square miles are said to be too small for secrets — “If you sneeze on Washington Street, someone on Pine Street says, ‘Gesundheit,’ ” Mr. Benson said — city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.”
The mystery is in some ways understandable. Though immigration detainees made up one-third of the daily population and a majority of the 4,200 men and women who moved through Wyatt’s 722 beds in a year, most were from other states, and those from Rhode Island did not remain long: Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically transferred them within a week.
Some were legal immigrants who had served time for serious crimes. But increasingly they were the kind of people who in the past would not have been arrested — people without papers, similar to some of the people who play, cheer and live in Wyatt’s shadow. Sometimes the same people.
Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., one of Wyatt’s developers and now the jail’s chief executive, said that who the inmates were made no difference to the jail, which was run like a business, under strict standards. “I’m not interested in getting involved in the politics of immigration,” he said. “All we do is detain people that our clients tell us to detain.”
Swallowed by the System
Over 10 years, Maynor Canté, 26, hardly glanced at the jail he passed as he hurried between home, two jobs and St. Matthew’s Church, where he led a prayer group.
He was 15 when he left Guatemala in 1997, sneaking across the Mexican border to join seven older siblings, legal residents who had spent years scraping new lives out of the industrial ruins of Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley. Caught in Texas, the teenager was quickly let go pending a hearing, like so many arrested under the “catch and release” policy that prevailed while the nation’s boom times demanded cheap immigrant labor. When he failed to show up in court, a deportation order was issued.
A decade later, Mr. Canté spoke near-fluent English, and had spent thousands of dollars trying to legalize his status. Mornings, he cleaned a factory for $8 an hour. Evenings, he worked at his nephew’s new clothing shop on Dexter Street, one of several Latino businesses that had revived a bleak stretch of vacant storefronts.
Then, early one morning in October 2007 when he headed out the door for his cleaning job, five immigration agents hustled him into a van. That night, as frightened relatives tried to find him, he was delivered to Wyatt in chains.
Inside, a plaque declares that the detention center’s mission is “to protect the public from people who pose a threat to society.” One corridor, waxed to an immaculate shine, leads to a darkened control room where correction officers watch a dozen video monitors fed by 200 cameras. A guard can scan an entire unit housing 72 detainees in two- to four-man cells; zooming in on a card game, he can see that one player is holding hearts.
The jail was built for inmates awaiting trial on federal charges — drug possession, child pornography, political corruption. But to help pay off $106 million borrowed for its recent expansion and refinancing, Wyatt was now counting on prisoners like Mr. Canté: administrative detainees not charged with a crime, but held while the government tries to deport them.
Now he found himself slated for deportation without a hearing — or even any way to make a phone call.
“I was scared,” he said, recalling how he prayed the rosary and stared out the tiny window of his cell to watch a freight train pass at 6 a.m.
Outside, his sister Emma, 33, was distraught. Since their mother’s death in 2006, she had felt more responsible for protecting Mr. Canté, a big-shouldered man who was still her little brother. “Three days passed and we didn’t know where he was,” she said.
On the fourth day, after calls to many jails, a high school friend located Mr. Canté, and members of his prayer circle flocked to Wyatt. His priest, the Rev. Otoniel J. Gomez, had never visited the jail in the eight years since he was sent to Central Falls from Colombia. He spoke to his weeping parishioner through a thick plexiglass barrier.
“I thought, ‘This is like a horror movie, talking with a criminal,’ ” he said.
Yet the priest soon realized that Mr. Canté was lucky. “Most of these people didn’t have any relatives or friends near them,” Father Gomez said, “not even a lawyer.”
The official list of free legal help was largely a dead end. Wyatt’s expensive inmate telephone service was often useless, because it took days to set up an account, and it could not be used to call cellphones. Desperate, other detainees passed Mr. Canté phone numbers on scraps of paper, begging him to ask his visitors to call and tell where they were.
Out of Sight, Out of Reach
Plucked from communities from Maine to New York, some had already been transferred through several jails; many would soon be moved again, as the federal immigration agency improvised to make space for detainees from new roundups.
“It’s like having a room with five bathtubs and water coming in and out of each one to maintain an equilibrium,” explained Todd Thurlow, acting deputy director of the Boston field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which contracts for about 1,000 beds in dozens of jails across New England.
Wyatt had a reputation as one of the most professionally run. But for newcomers without help, it could be rough.
One complaint, echoed by former jail employees, was that detainees in pain from illness or injury often went without adequate treatment. Other detainees spoke of going hungry, like Edgar Bocce, 25, a Guatemalan cleaner who said two muscular inmates took away his first dinner tray — rice, beans and spaghetti — while guards did nothing. Spartan meals could be supplemented with food from the jail’s commissary, but only if relatives sent money, or detainees stayed long enough to earn some; on the cleaning crew that kept the jail so spotless, starting pay was 40 cents a day.
Though officials said detainees were housed according to their history of violence, only one unit was dedicated to immigration detainees, and the rest were mixed in with criminal suspects and convicts.
Perhaps the greatest frustration, inmates said, was their inability to make sense of what was happening to them.
“Why am I here in jail?” asked one, a Central Falls mechanic who had been seized at immigration headquarters in Providence when he went to check why his green card application was taking so long. Wyatt guards had no answers. “They tell me, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re not Immigration.’ ”
Mr. Canté’s sisters borrowed money and hired him a lawyer. But a day after the lawyer’s first visit, their brother was gone — transferred to a Boston jail. That week, he was shackled and bused with 60 other men to detention in York, Pa., then put on a government plane with 300 chained immigrants.
He ended up one of 2,000 detainees packed into a windowless tent city that had sprung up only a year earlier in Raymondville, Tex. — the nation’s largest immigration prison camp, run for profit and still growing.
For weeks after his lawyer reopened his case for a hearing in Boston, she could not locate him. He was on the verge of deportation by the time she managed to persuade the government to fly him back from Texas, two days before last Christmas.
Mr. Canté finally appeared before an immigration judge on Jan. 2, after three months in the detention maze. Because his case fell under the more lenient laws in force before 1997, he not only was released on bond, but allowed to work until his immigration hearing in December 2009. He is now trying to pay back thousands of dollars in loans and legal fees.
A Market for Inmates
Mr. Canté, whose time in detention cost federal taxpayers about $10,000, was part of what many call an “immigrant gold rush” that turned the private prison industry from bust to boom.
Across the country, starting in Texas in the 1980s, prison companies built jail cells on speculation as they rushed to cash in on the war on drugs. They overbuilt; abuse scandals and escapes soured many states on private prisons, and by the late 1990s, as competition for inmates increased, the companies’ stock was suffering.
Yet given the lure of easy financing and big fees for constructing deals, developers of prison space did not hold back on growth. Instead, big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and the Cornell Companies added more beds and lobbied harder at the source of the most lucrative inmates, the federal government.
The payoff came after 9/11 in an accelerating stream of new detainees: foreigners swept up by the nation’s rising furor over illegal immigration.
Central Falls was similar, in its poverty, to more remote communities that had hitched their hopes to jails. Set in the river valley where America’s industrial revolution was born, its textile mills had hired large immigrant families — French Canadians and Poles, followed by Syrians and Portuguese — and squeezed them into triple-decker tenements. Even after the work moved away, the mills’ cheap housing continued to draw immigrants, mostly from Latin America.
The city was nearly bankrupt in 1990 when developers made a proposition: Build a profit-making jail for two or three hundred nonviolent federal detainees, and guarantee a steady stream of money and jobs for Central Falls.
But the deal that emerged, like many elsewhere, proved better at paying private investors than generating public revenue. The municipal corporation borrowed $30 million through a state bond issue to build Wyatt, and hired the Cornell company to run it. Six years later, the municipal body borrowed $38 million to refinance, buying back most of the bonds at a premium that gave the original bondholders a lump-sum return of 28.5 percent on their investment in addition to 9 percent annual interest.
And from its opening party in November 1993, Wyatt ran into the same problem as its competitors: finding enough inmates. For a time it imported murderers and rapists by the busload from North Carolina’s crowded prisons. When city residents objected, they learned that Central Falls had no control over who was housed at Wyatt and would get no money unless it was full.
At best, Wyatt paid Central Falls $2 to $3 a day for each detainee — less than $400,000 in the good years — to offset its use of city services. At times when the flow of inmates faltered, payments slowed to a trickle. Yet, following the strange logic of prison growth, Cornell and Wyatt officials were soon pushing to refinance yet again and expand.
Thomas Lazieh, the mayor who had championed the deal that built Wyatt, defended it as the best the city could get. His successor, Lee Matthews, took a darker view and sued to stop the expansion. “The city was sold a bill of goods,” he said.
Wyatt doubled in size anyway, with the backing of the current mayor, Charles D. Moreau. Convinced that it could wrest more revenue from the jail as immigration enforcement boomed, the municipal corporation took full control in August 2007. The budget it approved late that year included $6,000 a month for a Washington lobbyist to seek more detainees at higher rates.
A Recession, and Raids
By then, as in many parts of the country, people in Rhode Island were looking at Latino immigrants as prime suspects in a dismal economy. A polarizing immigration debate had converged with a huge state budget deficit and high unemployment. As this year began, resentment flared.
The catalyst was an ordinary New Year’s feature in The Providence Journal about the first baby born in Rhode Island in 2008. Mother and newborn were still in the hospital when federal agents, spurred by the publicity, raided their apartment in Providence and took away the father on immigration violations. Afterward, the police said, the mother discovered that a roommate from Guatemala had hanged himself behind his locked bedroom door, apparently during the raid.
The baby’s father, initially held in secret at Wyatt, was eventually deported. A Guatemalan landscaper with two misdemeanor convictions, he had been ordered to leave the country in August 2007, but stayed, his lawyer said, because his fiancée, a United States citizen, was pregnant with their second child.
To some, the case illustrated how illegal immigrants, who make up less than 4 percent of Rhode Island’s population, drained public services.
“Rhode Island taxpayers are the real victims!” declared Alice Losasso of West Warwick, in a letter to The Journal. “I’m tired of paying for interpreters so that immigrants can take their driver’s test in whatever language they speak. I’m tired of finding that their girlfriends and children are on welfare.”
Her words echoed a major theme of the governor, Donald L. Carcieri, a Republican. In March, he issued an executive order directing the State Police to help federal authorities round up illegal immigrants, saying that they depressed wages and strained services.
Public approval for that order reached 75 percent in one poll after an illegal immigrant from Guatemala was charged with carjacking and raping a woman outside a mall. He had been arrested twice before by the Providence police, and already had an outstanding order of deportation. The governor appeared on the Bill O’Reilly program to accuse the Providence mayor of sheltering criminals.
In Central Falls, the crackdown sowed panic. At the public charter school two blocks from Wyatt, parents, already afraid to be photographed at school events, were now reluctant to drive to meetings, said Sarah Friedman, a founder of the school.
An 8-year-old girl, one of the school’s high-scoring students, stopped speaking in class when her father disappeared into detention, the girl’s mother said. Without his income, mother and daughter, United States citizens, were almost evicted from their apartment.
At Central Falls High School, some students stopped coming to class because their families had gone into hiding, said Margie Cruz, a school-home liaison: “The child was born here, the child is legal. But the family has to hide because the father will be deported.
“I’ve seen students stopped for a traffic violation and the whole family got deported,” she added. “Children that were here for years. I watched them grow up.”
One longtime Little League mother said she used to worry that child molesters could be watching from the jail windows. Now, she said, she worried that her sister’s children would end up inside — the niece who had just graduated from high school with no path to legal status; the nephew who had been taught that local Quakers hid fugitive slaves, and asked his aunt to hide him if his parents were detained.
They were part of a generation of Central Falls teenagers born abroad who were coming of age as outlaws in their own town. Some had already lost relatives, like the 14-year-old whose older brother had made a left turn on red and ended up in a detention odyssey that led to deportation.
“My mother’s afraid the same thing that happened to my brother could happen to me, because I play soccer, I’m out there,” he said.
A few blocks from Wyatt, Police Chief Joseph P. Moran III praised the jail as “a great neighbor — it keeps things under control.” But he went on to tell about the difficulty of investigating the killing of a Dominican cabdriver, because witnesses had not come forward for fear of deportation. He talked of the blurring line between police work and immigration enforcement.
One domestic violence call by a husband illustrated the new reality. After a routine computer check, both he and his wife were taken into police custody, and her 8-month-old baby was handed to a friend. The man had an outstanding bench warrant; his wife had a deportation warrant issued by immigration authorities — something not included in the police database a few years ago.
“We work hand in hand with ICE,” Chief Moran said. At the same time, he added: “I have friends from Honduras, Ecuador. My kids went to school here. It makes it very, very difficult.”
Profit and Loss
For defenders of the jail, the bottom line has always been the bottom line: Wyatt’s growth meant more federal money for the city.
“They’re going to detain them somewhere,” said the manager of Mr. Williams True Styles Barbershop, on the struggling Dexter Street commercial strip. “It’s a billion-dollar business. Unless we’re going to free them, what difference does it make?”
But at least in Central Falls, the incarceration economy was not delivering on its promise.
In late June, Mayor Moreau, a big man with a florid face and a police siren in his car, offered up a budget that laid off firefighters — and told angry city employees to get used to it.
“We’re at the end of the financial rope for Central Falls,” he told the City Council, citing more than 200 boarded-up homes, foreclosures at the rate of 25 a week, and cuts in state and federal aid that required a 4 percent property tax increase and an 8 percent spending cut in the new $17.4 million budget.
Outside, past the defunct factory where Hasbro once made G. I. Joe, beyond the rusty hulk of the downsized Sylvania plant, the summer twilight gleamed on Wyatt’s new facade.
What had happened to the windfall of money and jobs it had offered?
The jail’s annual revenue had almost doubled in a year, to $21 million, mainly from increasing immigration detention. But the city budget projected revenue of only $525,000 from Wyatt, which is exempt from taxes.
That was not even enough to cover its share of city services, according to an estimate by the city’s finance department. It was certainly nothing like the $2 million a year that Mr. Benson, the City Council president, had mentioned to a reporter in April. The mayor, he said, predicted the city would get that much in profits formerly reaped by the Cornell Companies, now that the local board had taken over. Neither the mayor nor the board members, unpaid mayoral appointees, would talk about Wyatt.
As for jobs, only 10 of about 200 Wyatt employees lived in Central Falls. The jail’s board was even declining to make the $1,500 donations to local groups it once supported, like a scholarship fund and youth football.
Mr. Ventetuolo, the Wyatt chief executive, would not say how much had been saved by dispensing with Cornell’s for-profit services, maintaining that it had all gone toward keeping prices low for the federal government. Wyatt was still in transition, he said, striving to fill new beds to meet soaring payments to bondholders, now up to $8.4 million yearly from $2.7 million under the terms of the latest refinancing.
Yet Mr. Ventetuolo’s consulting company had won a raise, to $230,000 from $156,000. And as the number of detainees increased, so did revenue from surcharges on their collect calls to relatives, under a contract with Global Tel Link that gave Wyatt a cut of about $564,000 a year. That arrangement had survived a state ban on phone surcharges at prisons, thanks to lobbying that gave Wyatt a loophole.
Other large fees went to lawyers and financiers, as Mr. Matthews, the former mayor, pointed out. “There just happens to be a lot of money made by folks other than the people of the City of Central Falls,” he said.
Out in the Open
City officials in Central Falls — mostly descendants of earlier immigrants — were mindful that they presided over a community at least 60 percent Latino, where fear of the immigration crackdown was widespread.
At the same time, the city had built its hopes for economic stability on a jail that was helping to make that crackdown possible. The combination created a local immigration politics that sometimes verged on denial.
But last summer, Wyatt itself was suddenly caught in the glare of the state’s crackdown.
On the evening of July 15, a dozen State Police officers and 50 immigration agents swept into six courthouses across the state. They arrested 31 cleaners on suspicion of immigration violations, people paid $7.40 an hour to vacuum floors and scrub toilets in Rhode Island’s halls of justice. All worked for two large state contractors, one owned by the brother of a state legislator allied with Governor Carcieri.
In the uproar that followed, experiences that had been private in cases like Mr. Canté’s were put on public display: the difficulty of locating those in custody; the distress of relatives, many of them legal residents or citizens; the absence of basic legal protections familiar to anyone who watches “Law & Order.” Advocates eventually located most of the cleaners. Four were at Wyatt, including a 29-year-old single mother detained in its new women’s unit.
Two days after the raids, as city officials raised the Colombian flag over City Hall to honor that nation’s Independence Day, Mayor Moreau criticized the roundup, and chided Governor Carcieri for spending law enforcement resources on it.
“We have better things to do,” he said, “than chasing the lady that cleans the attorney general’s office.”
A reporter asked how he squared that criticism with Wyatt’s role in holding illegal immigrants, including the cleaning woman locked up there.
“One has nothing to do with the other,” he retorted. “It has nothing to do with the City of Central Falls.”
Soon, a case that drew national attention made that distinction harder to maintain.
On Aug. 6, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a Chinese computer engineer from New York who had overstayed a visa, died in Wyatt’s custody after a year in various detention centers and months in pain.
The Times reported a week later that despite his repeated pleas for help, his fractured spine and extensive cancer had gone undiagnosed until shortly before his death. Officials at Wyatt, where he spent his last month, said he had received plenty of medical attention, and immigration authorities started an internal investigation. But local pastors and Latino advocacy groups gathered outside Wyatt on Aug. 15 to demand an independent inquiry.
A guard who watched the demonstration, who asked that his name not be published for fear of losing his job, voiced the ambivalence toward Wyatt that seems to shape the attitudes of many in Central Falls.
He spoke with sympathy of “good, hard-working people” detained there, and with distaste of the rookie guards — a result of low pay and high turnover — “who talk to people with no respect, like they’re dogs.”
But he added: “Immigration and all that, that has nothing to do with us. We’re just the prison.”
Even in the Latino population, the new awareness of Wyatt stirred little resistance.
“If the Spanish were all registered to vote they could take the city in one election,” observed Councilman Benson. “A lot of them don’t vote because they don’t trust the government, and a lot of them are illegal, so they can’t.”
In contrast, Mr. Canté, who finally had proper papers, said he felt like part of Central Falls for the first time.
“In all these years I’ve been here illegally, everywhere I went, everything I used to do, I used to feel like a reject,” he said. “Now I feel like I’ve been accepted for the community. I don’t feel afraid anymore. I feel, like, free.”
Just how closely Central Falls was entwined in the business of locking up people like Mr. Canté became more obvious this month, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, citing their continuing investigation into Mr. Ng’s death, abruptly removed all immigration detainees from Wyatt, scattering them to other jails in New England, Texas and Louisiana.
With Wyatt’s solvency, if not its survival, uncertain, the mayor lobbied the state’s Congressional delegation to get back a share of the growing market in immigration detainees. Meanwhile, jail officials hunted for deals like the one they narrowly lost last spring, to house 80 Vermont inmates judged criminally insane for crimes like murder and rape.
Mr. Lazieh, the former mayor who first championed Wyatt, called the government’s immigration policies immoral, arguing that “the system has gone overboard — we’ve turned to criminalizing all immigrants.”
But he had no regrets about his city’s part. “If it’s not in Central Falls,” he said, “then this facility would be someplace else.”
December 27, 2008
City of Immigrants Fills Jail Cells With Its Own
By NINA BERNSTEIN
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/27/us/27det...agewanted=print
CENTRAL FALLS, R.I. — Few in this threadbare little mill town gave much thought to the Donald W. Wyatt Detention Facility, the maximum-security jail beside the public ball fields at the edge of town. Even when it expanded and added barbed wire, Wyatt was just the backdrop for Little League games, its name stitched on the caps of the team it sponsored.
Then people began to disappear: the leader of a prayer group at St. Matthew’s Roman Catholic Church; the father of a second grader at the public charter school; a woman who mopped floors in a Providence courthouse.
After days of searching, their families found them locked up inside Wyatt — only blocks from home, but in a separate world.
In this mostly Latino city, hardly anyone had realized that in addition to detaining the accused drug dealers and mobsters everyone heard about, the jail held hundreds of people charged with no crime — people caught in the nation’s crackdown on illegal immigration. Fewer still knew that Wyatt was a portal into an expanding network of other jails, bigger and more remote, all propelling detainees toward deportation with little chance to protest.
If anything, the people of Central Falls saw Wyatt as the economic engine that city fathers had promised, a steady source of jobs and federal money to pay for services like police and fire protection. Even that, it turns out, was an illusion.
Wyatt offers a rare look into the fastest-growing, least-examined type of incarceration in America, an industry that detains half a million people a year, up from a few thousand just 15 years ago. The system operates without the rules that protect criminal suspects, and has grown up with little oversight, often in the backyards of communities desperate for any source of money and work.
Last spring, The New York Times set out to examine this small city of 19,000 and its big detention center as a microcosm of the nation’s new relationship with immigration detention, which is now sweeping up not just recent border-jumpers and convicted felons but foreign-born residents with strong ties to places like Central Falls. Wyatt, nationally accredited, clean and modern, seemed like one of the better jails in the system, a patchwork of county lockups, private prisons and federal detention centers where government investigations and the news media have recently documented substandard, sometimes lethal, conditions.
But last summer, a detainee died in Wyatt’s custody. Immigration authorities investigating the death removed all immigration detainees this month — along with the $101.76 a day the federal government paid the jail for each one. In Central Falls, where many families have members without papers, a state campaign against illegal immigrants spread fear that also took a toll: People went into hiding and businesses lost Latino customers in droves. Slowly, the city awoke to its role in the detention system, and to the pitfalls of the bargain it had struck.
In a sinking economy, immigration detention is a rare growth industry. Congress has doubled annual spending on it in the last four years, to $2.4 billion approved in October as part of $5.9 billion allotted for immigration enforcement through next September — even more than the Bush administration had requested.
Seeking a slice of that bounty, communities like Farmville, Va., and Pahrump, Nev., are signing up with developers of new detention centers. Jails from New England to New Mexico have already made the crackdown pay off — for the private companies that dominate the industry, for some investors and, at least in theory, for places like Central Falls, a city so strapped that the state pays for its schools.
Here, a specially created municipal corporation built the jail in the early 1990s to hold federal inmates, and last year more than doubled its size. As the City Council president, William Benson Jr., put it, “The more inmates they have, the more money we get.”
Yet in a community whose 1.3 square miles are said to be too small for secrets — “If you sneeze on Washington Street, someone on Pine Street says, ‘Gesundheit,’ ” Mr. Benson said — city officials, overwhelmingly non-Latino, seemed uninformed about who those inmates were. “Nobody knows exactly who’s down there,” he said. “I hear some are Arab terrorists.”
The mystery is in some ways understandable. Though immigration detainees made up one-third of the daily population and a majority of the 4,200 men and women who moved through Wyatt’s 722 beds in a year, most were from other states, and those from Rhode Island did not remain long: Immigration and Customs Enforcement typically transferred them within a week.
Some were legal immigrants who had served time for serious crimes. But increasingly they were the kind of people who in the past would not have been arrested — people without papers, similar to some of the people who play, cheer and live in Wyatt’s shadow. Sometimes the same people.
Anthony Ventetuolo Jr., one of Wyatt’s developers and now the jail’s chief executive, said that who the inmates were made no difference to the jail, which was run like a business, under strict standards. “I’m not interested in getting involved in the politics of immigration,” he said. “All we do is detain people that our clients tell us to detain.”
Swallowed by the System
Over 10 years, Maynor Canté, 26, hardly glanced at the jail he passed as he hurried between home, two jobs and St. Matthew’s Church, where he led a prayer group.
He was 15 when he left Guatemala in 1997, sneaking across the Mexican border to join seven older siblings, legal residents who had spent years scraping new lives out of the industrial ruins of Rhode Island’s Blackstone Valley. Caught in Texas, the teenager was quickly let go pending a hearing, like so many arrested under the “catch and release” policy that prevailed while the nation’s boom times demanded cheap immigrant labor. When he failed to show up in court, a deportation order was issued.
A decade later, Mr. Canté spoke near-fluent English, and had spent thousands of dollars trying to legalize his status. Mornings, he cleaned a factory for $8 an hour. Evenings, he worked at his nephew’s new clothing shop on Dexter Street, one of several Latino businesses that had revived a bleak stretch of vacant storefronts.
Then, early one morning in October 2007 when he headed out the door for his cleaning job, five immigration agents hustled him into a van. That night, as frightened relatives tried to find him, he was delivered to Wyatt in chains.
Inside, a plaque declares that the detention center’s mission is “to protect the public from people who pose a threat to society.” One corridor, waxed to an immaculate shine, leads to a darkened control room where correction officers watch a dozen video monitors fed by 200 cameras. A guard can scan an entire unit housing 72 detainees in two- to four-man cells; zooming in on a card game, he can see that one player is holding hearts.
The jail was built for inmates awaiting trial on federal charges — drug possession, child pornography, political corruption. But to help pay off $106 million borrowed for its recent expansion and refinancing, Wyatt was now counting on prisoners like Mr. Canté: administrative detainees not charged with a crime, but held while the government tries to deport them.
Now he found himself slated for deportation without a hearing — or even any way to make a phone call.
“I was scared,” he said, recalling how he prayed the rosary and stared out the tiny window of his cell to watch a freight train pass at 6 a.m.
Outside, his sister Emma, 33, was distraught. Since their mother’s death in 2006, she had felt more responsible for protecting Mr. Canté, a big-shouldered man who was still her little brother. “Three days passed and we didn’t know where he was,” she said.
On the fourth day, after calls to many jails, a high school friend located Mr. Canté, and members of his prayer circle flocked to Wyatt. His priest, the Rev. Otoniel J. Gomez, had never visited the jail in the eight years since he was sent to Central Falls from Colombia. He spoke to his weeping parishioner through a thick plexiglass barrier.
“I thought, ‘This is like a horror movie, talking with a criminal,’ ” he said.
Yet the priest soon realized that Mr. Canté was lucky. “Most of these people didn’t have any relatives or friends near them,” Father Gomez said, “not even a lawyer.”
The official list of free legal help was largely a dead end. Wyatt’s expensive inmate telephone service was often useless, because it took days to set up an account, and it could not be used to call cellphones. Desperate, other detainees passed Mr. Canté phone numbers on scraps of paper, begging him to ask his visitors to call and tell where they were.
Out of Sight, Out of Reach
Plucked from communities from Maine to New York, some had already been transferred through several jails; many would soon be moved again, as the federal immigration agency improvised to make space for detainees from new roundups.
“It’s like having a room with five bathtubs and water coming in and out of each one to maintain an equilibrium,” explained Todd Thurlow, acting deputy director of the Boston field office of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which contracts for about 1,000 beds in dozens of jails across New England.
Wyatt had a reputation as one of the most professionally run. But for newcomers without help, it could be rough.
One complaint, echoed by former jail employees, was that detainees in pain from illness or injury often went without adequate treatment. Other detainees spoke of going hungry, like Edgar Bocce, 25, a Guatemalan cleaner who said two muscular inmates took away his first dinner tray — rice, beans and spaghetti — while guards did nothing. Spartan meals could be supplemented with food from the jail’s commissary, but only if relatives sent money, or detainees stayed long enough to earn some; on the cleaning crew that kept the jail so spotless, starting pay was 40 cents a day.
Though officials said detainees were housed according to their history of violence, only one unit was dedicated to immigration detainees, and the rest were mixed in with criminal suspects and convicts.
Perhaps the greatest frustration, inmates said, was their inability to make sense of what was happening to them.
“Why am I here in jail?” asked one, a Central Falls mechanic who had been seized at immigration headquarters in Providence when he went to check why his green card application was taking so long. Wyatt guards had no answers. “They tell me, ‘Sorry, guys, but we’re not Immigration.’ ”
Mr. Canté’s sisters borrowed money and hired him a lawyer. But a day after the lawyer’s first visit, their brother was gone — transferred to a Boston jail. That week, he was shackled and bused with 60 other men to detention in York, Pa., then put on a government plane with 300 chained immigrants.
He ended up one of 2,000 detainees packed into a windowless tent city that had sprung up only a year earlier in Raymondville, Tex. — the nation’s largest immigration prison camp, run for profit and still growing.
For weeks after his lawyer reopened his case for a hearing in Boston, she could not locate him. He was on the verge of deportation by the time she managed to persuade the government to fly him back from Texas, two days before last Christmas.
Mr. Canté finally appeared before an immigration judge on Jan. 2, after three months in the detention maze. Because his case fell under the more lenient laws in force before 1997, he not only was released on bond, but allowed to work until his immigration hearing in December 2009. He is now trying to pay back thousands of dollars in loans and legal fees.
A Market for Inmates
Mr. Canté, whose time in detention cost federal taxpayers about $10,000, was part of what many call an “immigrant gold rush” that turned the private prison industry from bust to boom.
Across the country, starting in Texas in the 1980s, prison companies built jail cells on speculation as they rushed to cash in on the war on drugs. They overbuilt; abuse scandals and escapes soured many states on private prisons, and by the late 1990s, as competition for inmates increased, the companies’ stock was suffering.
Yet given the lure of easy financing and big fees for constructing deals, developers of prison space did not hold back on growth. Instead, big companies like the Corrections Corporation of America, the GEO Group (formerly Wackenhut) and the Cornell Companies added more beds and lobbied harder at the source of the most lucrative inmates, the federal government.
The payoff came after 9/11 in an accelerating stream of new detainees: foreigners swept up by the nation’s rising furor over illegal immigration.
Central Falls was similar, in its poverty, to more remote communities that had hitched their hopes to jails. Set in the river valley where America’s industrial revolution was born, its textile mills had hired large immigrant families — French Canadians and Poles, followed by Syrians and Portuguese — and squeezed them into triple-decker tenements. Even after the work moved away, the mills’ cheap housing continued to draw immigrants, mostly from Latin America.
The city was nearly bankrupt in 1990 when developers made a proposition: Build a profit-making jail for two or three hundred nonviolent federal detainees, and guarantee a steady stream of money and jobs for Central Falls.
But the deal that emerged, like many elsewhere, proved better at paying private investors than generating public revenue. The municipal corporation borrowed $30 million through a state bond issue to build Wyatt, and hired the Cornell company to run it. Six years later, the municipal body borrowed $38 million to refinance, buying back most of the bonds at a premium that gave the original bondholders a lump-sum return of 28.5 percent on their investment in addition to 9 percent annual interest.
And from its opening party in November 1993, Wyatt ran into the same problem as its competitors: finding enough inmates. For a time it imported murderers and rapists by the busload from North Carolina’s crowded prisons. When city residents objected, they learned that Central Falls had no control over who was housed at Wyatt and would get no money unless it was full.
At best, Wyatt paid Central Falls $2 to $3 a day for each detainee — less than $400,000 in the good years — to offset its use of city services. At times when the flow of inmates faltered, payments slowed to a trickle. Yet, following the strange logic of prison growth, Cornell and Wyatt officials were soon pushing to refinance yet again and expand.
Thomas Lazieh, the mayor who had championed the deal that built Wyatt, defended it as the best the city could get. His successor, Lee Matthews, took a darker view and sued to stop the expansion. “The city was sold a bill of goods,” he said.
Wyatt doubled in size anyway, with the backing of the current mayor, Charles D. Moreau. Convinced that it could wrest more revenue from the jail as immigration enforcement boomed, the municipal corporation took full control in August 2007. The budget it approved late that year included $6,000 a month for a Washington lobbyist to seek more detainees at higher rates.
A Recession, and Raids
By then, as in many parts of the country, people in Rhode Island were looking at Latino immigrants as prime suspects in a dismal economy. A polarizing immigration debate had converged with a huge state budget deficit and high unemployment. As this year began, resentment flared.
The catalyst was an ordinary New Year’s feature in The Providence Journal about the first baby born in Rhode Island in 2008. Mother and newborn were still in the hospital when federal agents, spurred by the publicity, raided their apartment in Providence and took away the father on immigration violations. Afterward, the police said, the mother discovered that a roommate from Guatemala had hanged himself behind his locked bedroom door, apparently during the raid.
The baby’s father, initially held in secret at Wyatt, was eventually deported. A Guatemalan landscaper with two misdemeanor convictions, he had been ordered to leave the country in August 2007, but stayed, his lawyer said, because his fiancée, a United States citizen, was pregnant with their second child.
To some, the case illustrated how illegal immigrants, who make up less than 4 percent of Rhode Island’s population, drained public services.
“Rhode Island taxpayers are the real victims!” declared Alice Losasso of West Warwick, in a letter to The Journal. “I’m tired of paying for interpreters so that immigrants can take their driver’s test in whatever language they speak. I’m tired of finding that their girlfriends and children are on welfare.”
Her words echoed a major theme of the governor, Donald L. Carcieri, a Republican. In March, he issued an executive order directing the State Police to help federal authorities round up illegal immigrants, saying that they depressed wages and strained services.
Public approval for that order reached 75 percent in one poll after an illegal immigrant from Guatemala was charged with carjacking and raping a woman outside a mall. He had been arrested twice before by the Providence police, and already had an outstanding order of deportation. The governor appeared on the Bill O’Reilly program to accuse the Providence mayor of sheltering criminals.
In Central Falls, the crackdown sowed panic. At the public charter school two blocks from Wyatt, parents, already afraid to be photographed at school events, were now reluctant to drive to meetings, said Sarah Friedman, a founder of the school.
An 8-year-old girl, one of the school’s high-scoring students, stopped speaking in class when her father disappeared into detention, the girl’s mother said. Without his income, mother and daughter, United States citizens, were almost evicted from their apartment.
At Central Falls High School, some students stopped coming to class because their families had gone into hiding, said Margie Cruz, a school-home liaison: “The child was born here, the child is legal. But the family has to hide because the father will be deported.
“I’ve seen students stopped for a traffic violation and the whole family got deported,” she added. “Children that were here for years. I watched them grow up.”
One longtime Little League mother said she used to worry that child molesters could be watching from the jail windows. Now, she said, she worried that her sister’s children would end up inside — the niece who had just graduated from high school with no path to legal status; the nephew who had been taught that local Quakers hid fugitive slaves, and asked his aunt to hide him if his parents were detained.
They were part of a generation of Central Falls teenagers born abroad who were coming of age as outlaws in their own town. Some had already lost relatives, like the 14-year-old whose older brother had made a left turn on red and ended up in a detention odyssey that led to deportation.
“My mother’s afraid the same thing that happened to my brother could happen to me, because I play soccer, I’m out there,” he said.
A few blocks from Wyatt, Police Chief Joseph P. Moran III praised the jail as “a great neighbor — it keeps things under control.” But he went on to tell about the difficulty of investigating the killing of a Dominican cabdriver, because witnesses had not come forward for fear of deportation. He talked of the blurring line between police work and immigration enforcement.
One domestic violence call by a husband illustrated the new reality. After a routine computer check, both he and his wife were taken into police custody, and her 8-month-old baby was handed to a friend. The man had an outstanding bench warrant; his wife had a deportation warrant issued by immigration authorities — something not included in the police database a few years ago.
“We work hand in hand with ICE,” Chief Moran said. At the same time, he added: “I have friends from Honduras, Ecuador. My kids went to school here. It makes it very, very difficult.”
Profit and Loss
For defenders of the jail, the bottom line has always been the bottom line: Wyatt’s growth meant more federal money for the city.
“They’re going to detain them somewhere,” said the manager of Mr. Williams True Styles Barbershop, on the struggling Dexter Street commercial strip. “It’s a billion-dollar business. Unless we’re going to free them, what difference does it make?”
But at least in Central Falls, the incarceration economy was not delivering on its promise.
In late June, Mayor Moreau, a big man with a florid face and a police siren in his car, offered up a budget that laid off firefighters — and told angry city employees to get used to it.
“We’re at the end of the financial rope for Central Falls,” he told the City Council, citing more than 200 boarded-up homes, foreclosures at the rate of 25 a week, and cuts in state and federal aid that required a 4 percent property tax increase and an 8 percent spending cut in the new $17.4 million budget.
Outside, past the defunct factory where Hasbro once made G. I. Joe, beyond the rusty hulk of the downsized Sylvania plant, the summer twilight gleamed on Wyatt’s new facade.
What had happened to the windfall of money and jobs it had offered?
The jail’s annual revenue had almost doubled in a year, to $21 million, mainly from increasing immigration detention. But the city budget projected revenue of only $525,000 from Wyatt, which is exempt from taxes.
That was not even enough to cover its share of city services, according to an estimate by the city’s finance department. It was certainly nothing like the $2 million a year that Mr. Benson, the City Council president, had mentioned to a reporter in April. The mayor, he said, predicted the city would get that much in profits formerly reaped by the Cornell Companies, now that the local board had taken over. Neither the mayor nor the board members, unpaid mayoral appointees, would talk about Wyatt.
As for jobs, only 10 of about 200 Wyatt employees lived in Central Falls. The jail’s board was even declining to make the $1,500 donations to local groups it once supported, like a scholarship fund and youth football.
Mr. Ventetuolo, the Wyatt chief executive, would not say how much had been saved by dispensing with Cornell’s for-profit services, maintaining that it had all gone toward keeping prices low for the federal government. Wyatt was still in transition, he said, striving to fill new beds to meet soaring payments to bondholders, now up to $8.4 million yearly from $2.7 million under the terms of the latest refinancing.
Yet Mr. Ventetuolo’s consulting company had won a raise, to $230,000 from $156,000. And as the number of detainees increased, so did revenue from surcharges on their collect calls to relatives, under a contract with Global Tel Link that gave Wyatt a cut of about $564,000 a year. That arrangement had survived a state ban on phone surcharges at prisons, thanks to lobbying that gave Wyatt a loophole.
Other large fees went to lawyers and financiers, as Mr. Matthews, the former mayor, pointed out. “There just happens to be a lot of money made by folks other than the people of the City of Central Falls,” he said.
Out in the Open
City officials in Central Falls — mostly descendants of earlier immigrants — were mindful that they presided over a community at least 60 percent Latino, where fear of the immigration crackdown was widespread.
At the same time, the city had built its hopes for economic stability on a jail that was helping to make that crackdown possible. The combination created a local immigration politics that sometimes verged on denial.
But last summer, Wyatt itself was suddenly caught in the glare of the state’s crackdown.
On the evening of July 15, a dozen State Police officers and 50 immigration agents swept into six courthouses across the state. They arrested 31 cleaners on suspicion of immigration violations, people paid $7.40 an hour to vacuum floors and scrub toilets in Rhode Island’s halls of justice. All worked for two large state contractors, one owned by the brother of a state legislator allied with Governor Carcieri.
In the uproar that followed, experiences that had been private in cases like Mr. Canté’s were put on public display: the difficulty of locating those in custody; the distress of relatives, many of them legal residents or citizens; the absence of basic legal protections familiar to anyone who watches “Law & Order.” Advocates eventually located most of the cleaners. Four were at Wyatt, including a 29-year-old single mother detained in its new women’s unit.
Two days after the raids, as city officials raised the Colombian flag over City Hall to honor that nation’s Independence Day, Mayor Moreau criticized the roundup, and chided Governor Carcieri for spending law enforcement resources on it.
“We have better things to do,” he said, “than chasing the lady that cleans the attorney general’s office.”
A reporter asked how he squared that criticism with Wyatt’s role in holding illegal immigrants, including the cleaning woman locked up there.
“One has nothing to do with the other,” he retorted. “It has nothing to do with the City of Central Falls.”
Soon, a case that drew national attention made that distinction harder to maintain.
On Aug. 6, Hiu Lui Ng, 34, a Chinese computer engineer from New York who had overstayed a visa, died in Wyatt’s custody after a year in various detention centers and months in pain.
The Times reported a week later that despite his repeated pleas for help, his fractured spine and extensive cancer had gone undiagnosed until shortly before his death. Officials at Wyatt, where he spent his last month, said he had received plenty of medical attention, and immigration authorities started an internal investigation. But local pastors and Latino advocacy groups gathered outside Wyatt on Aug. 15 to demand an independent inquiry.
A guard who watched the demonstration, who asked that his name not be published for fear of losing his job, voiced the ambivalence toward Wyatt that seems to shape the attitudes of many in Central Falls.
He spoke with sympathy of “good, hard-working people” detained there, and with distaste of the rookie guards — a result of low pay and high turnover — “who talk to people with no respect, like they’re dogs.”
But he added: “Immigration and all that, that has nothing to do with us. We’re just the prison.”
Even in the Latino population, the new awareness of Wyatt stirred little resistance.
“If the Spanish were all registered to vote they could take the city in one election,” observed Councilman Benson. “A lot of them don’t vote because they don’t trust the government, and a lot of them are illegal, so they can’t.”
In contrast, Mr. Canté, who finally had proper papers, said he felt like part of Central Falls for the first time.
“In all these years I’ve been here illegally, everywhere I went, everything I used to do, I used to feel like a reject,” he said. “Now I feel like I’ve been accepted for the community. I don’t feel afraid anymore. I feel, like, free.”
Just how closely Central Falls was entwined in the business of locking up people like Mr. Canté became more obvious this month, when Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, citing their continuing investigation into Mr. Ng’s death, abruptly removed all immigration detainees from Wyatt, scattering them to other jails in New England, Texas and Louisiana.
With Wyatt’s solvency, if not its survival, uncertain, the mayor lobbied the state’s Congressional delegation to get back a share of the growing market in immigration detainees. Meanwhile, jail officials hunted for deals like the one they narrowly lost last spring, to house 80 Vermont inmates judged criminally insane for crimes like murder and rape.
Mr. Lazieh, the former mayor who first championed Wyatt, called the government’s immigration policies immoral, arguing that “the system has gone overboard — we’ve turned to criminalizing all immigrants.”
But he had no regrets about his city’s part. “If it’s not in Central Falls,” he said, “then this facility would be someplace else.”
Not even red states like the Real ID program anymore...
Utah House votes to opt out of REAL ID compliance
Associated Press - February 26, 2009 7:05 PM ET
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The Utah House has voted to forbid state agencies from complying with the federal REAL ID Act.
The REAL ID Act was launched after the 2001 terror attacks to make driver's licenses more secure. Under the act, driver's licenses would only be issued after a number of identity checks, including immigration status and verification of birth certificates.
The plan has been unpopular in many states because critics say it is too expensive, an invasion of privacy and won't make the country any safer.
The House approved the bill Thursday 68-6 over concerns that Utah residents wouldn't be able to board airplanes without a compliant driver's license.
On the Net: House Bill 325 http://le.utah.gov/ 7/82009/htmdoc/hbillhtm/HB0325.htm
http://www.localnews8.com/Global/story.asp...nav=menu554_2_3
Utah House votes to opt out of REAL ID compliance
Associated Press - February 26, 2009 7:05 PM ET
SALT LAKE CITY (AP) - The Utah House has voted to forbid state agencies from complying with the federal REAL ID Act.
The REAL ID Act was launched after the 2001 terror attacks to make driver's licenses more secure. Under the act, driver's licenses would only be issued after a number of identity checks, including immigration status and verification of birth certificates.
The plan has been unpopular in many states because critics say it is too expensive, an invasion of privacy and won't make the country any safer.
The House approved the bill Thursday 68-6 over concerns that Utah residents wouldn't be able to board airplanes without a compliant driver's license.
On the Net: House Bill 325 http://le.utah.gov/ 7/82009/htmdoc/hbillhtm/HB0325.htm
http://www.localnews8.com/Global/story.asp...nav=menu554_2_3
Friday, February 20, 2009
Napolitano debates Real ID
Audrey Hudson (Contact)
As governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano was no fan of the Real ID program that sets federal standards for state-issued driver's licenses which will be required in the future to board airplanes.
Now that she is Homeland Security secretary and overseeing the department that governs the contentious law, Miss Napolitano says she wants to examine "realistic options" with the officials who must put the program into action - the nation's governors.
Specifically, Miss Napolitano said she is looking at Washington state's modified version of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative program. The Pacific state issues security-enhanced driver's licenses that are accepted for crossing into the state from Canada.
In addition to Arizona, more than a dozen states have passed legislation prohibiting the implementation of the Real ID program, and similar legislation passed by the Virginia House and Senate last week is awaiting Gov. Tim Kaine's signature.
"Governors are committed to improving the security and integrity of state driver's licenses and identification systems, but the timelines and requirements mandated by Real ID are unrealistic," the National Governors Association (NGA) says in its policy position paper.
The NGA calls the program an unfunded mandate of $11 billion over five years that its members cannot afford.
Miss Napolitano said Real ID will be the focus of conversation when she drops by the NGA's winter meeting this weekend. She said governors need options to make identification more secure, but not necessarily "under the rubric of Real ID."
"Enhanced driver's licenses give confidence that the person holding the card is the person who is supposed to be holding the card, and it's less elaborate than Real ID," Miss Napolitano said.
According to the NGA, the Department of Homeland Security secretary should be granted the flexibility to recognize innovation at the state level.
"Several states have updated their systems to meet objectives similar to those of Real ID," the paper said.
Washington created its own pilot program as an alternative to the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative requirements put in place in January of last year, that required American citizens re-entering the U.S. from Canada, Mexico and Bermuda to present a passport.
The enhanced driver's license requires proof of citizenship, identity and residence and contains certain security features similar to a passport.
The Real ID program requires the state to implement 18 security standards, from the physical security of the card itself such as holograms and digital photos, as well as the process of how licenses are issued. For example, these advanced photos would be taken before the paperwork is begun on a license, so if the person provides false information and the license is denied, officials would have a picture of the person.
A process would also be in place to ensure multiple licenses have not been issued to a person from another state, and checks for legal immigration status.
Marcia Hofmann, staff attorney for the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), said they are impressed that the new administration is commitment to protect civil liberties, and that they will be watching for concrete actions that reflect that commitment.
"At the very least, Secretary Napolitano should follow the Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee's recent suggestion that DHS improve the Real ID final rule," Miss Hofmann said. "Of course, the biggest problem with Real ID is the law itself, so we hope Secretary Napolitano works with Congress to do away with this fundamentally flawed program."
The advisory committee sent a letter to Miss Napolitano on Feb. 5 with 16 recommendations on privacy issues facing the department, including the need for more privacy officers for different components of the agency and creating a culture of privacy throughout the agency. The advisory committee also asked Miss Napolitano to review privacy and data security issues pertaining to the Real ID program.
Meanwhile, Miss Napolitano also announced Thursday that Mary Ellen Callahan has been appointed as the department´s Chief Privacy Officer.
"Homeland security and privacy are not mutually exclusive, and having a seasoned professional like Mary Ellen on the team further ensures that privacy is built in to everything we do," Miss Napolitano said.
Ms. Callahan, a law partner at Hogan and Hartson specializing in privacy, security, and data protection is also the co-chairman of Online Privacy Alliance, a group of corporations dedicated to creating online trust and privacy.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/f...ebates-real-id/
Napolitano debates Real ID
Audrey Hudson (Contact)
As governor of Arizona, Janet Napolitano was no fan of the Real ID program that sets federal standards for state-issued driver's licenses which will be required in the future to board airplanes.
Now that she is Homeland Security secretary and overseeing the department that governs the contentious law, Miss Napolitano says she wants to examine "realistic options" with the officials who must put the program into action - the nation's governors.
Specifically, Miss Napolitano said she is looking at Washington state's modified version of the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative program. The Pacific state issues security-enhanced driver's licenses that are accepted for crossing into the state from Canada.
In addition to Arizona, more than a dozen states have passed legislation prohibiting the implementation of the Real ID program, and similar legislation passed by the Virginia House and Senate last week is awaiting Gov. Tim Kaine's signature.
"Governors are committed to improving the security and integrity of state driver's licenses and identification systems, but the timelines and requirements mandated by Real ID are unrealistic," the National Governors Association (NGA) says in its policy position paper.
The NGA calls the program an unfunded mandate of $11 billion over five years that its members cannot afford.
Miss Napolitano said Real ID will be the focus of conversation when she drops by the NGA's winter meeting this weekend. She said governors need options to make identification more secure, but not necessarily "under the rubric of Real ID."
"Enhanced driver's licenses give confidence that the person holding the card is the person who is supposed to be holding the card, and it's less elaborate than Real ID," Miss Napolitano said.
According to the NGA, the Department of Homeland Security secretary should be granted the flexibility to recognize innovation at the state level.
"Several states have updated their systems to meet objectives similar to those of Real ID," the paper said.
Washington created its own pilot program as an alternative to the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative requirements put in place in January of last year, that required American citizens re-entering the U.S. from Canada, Mexico and Bermuda to present a passport.
The enhanced driver's license requires proof of citizenship, identity and residence and contains certain security features similar to a passport.
The Real ID program requires the state to implement 18 security standards, from the physical security of the card itself such as holograms and digital photos, as well as the process of how licenses are issued. For example, these advanced photos would be taken before the paperwork is begun on a license, so if the person provides false information and the license is denied, officials would have a picture of the person.
A process would also be in place to ensure multiple licenses have not been issued to a person from another state, and checks for legal immigration status.
Marcia Hofmann, staff attorney for the Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF), said they are impressed that the new administration is commitment to protect civil liberties, and that they will be watching for concrete actions that reflect that commitment.
"At the very least, Secretary Napolitano should follow the Data Privacy and Integrity Advisory Committee's recent suggestion that DHS improve the Real ID final rule," Miss Hofmann said. "Of course, the biggest problem with Real ID is the law itself, so we hope Secretary Napolitano works with Congress to do away with this fundamentally flawed program."
The advisory committee sent a letter to Miss Napolitano on Feb. 5 with 16 recommendations on privacy issues facing the department, including the need for more privacy officers for different components of the agency and creating a culture of privacy throughout the agency. The advisory committee also asked Miss Napolitano to review privacy and data security issues pertaining to the Real ID program.
Meanwhile, Miss Napolitano also announced Thursday that Mary Ellen Callahan has been appointed as the department´s Chief Privacy Officer.
"Homeland security and privacy are not mutually exclusive, and having a seasoned professional like Mary Ellen on the team further ensures that privacy is built in to everything we do," Miss Napolitano said.
Ms. Callahan, a law partner at Hogan and Hartson specializing in privacy, security, and data protection is also the co-chairman of Online Privacy Alliance, a group of corporations dedicated to creating online trust and privacy.
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/f...ebates-real-id/
Finally - we can get a plan that might have a chance to work...but any plan in order to work needs resources and that means money...
Why would a state adopt a program that is going to cost taxpayers more money?
It wouldn't...and thus the problem with the billfmsd approach and why my suggestion at a more comprehensive approach is more viable...
Why would a state adopt a program that is going to cost taxpayers more money?
It wouldn't...and thus the problem with the billfmsd approach and why my suggestion at a more comprehensive approach is more viable...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 5 2009, 03:26 PM)
Why would a state adopt a program that is going to cost taxpayers more money?
It wouldn't...and thus the problem with the billfmsd approach and why my suggestion at a more comprehensive approach is more viable...
Go back and read the first post of the thread and tell me where I advocate for taxpayers to pay more money. Your straw man positions may cost more money, but I've offered no such positions. I've offered positions that would reallocate existing funds, but none that require "more" money.It wouldn't...and thus the problem with the billfmsd approach and why my suggestion at a more comprehensive approach is more viable...
No matter how many times you try to turn a general approach (between a plan and a goal) into a detailed plan, it won't disprove the validity of the approach. The difference between a general approach and a detailed plan is that there are many more possibilities with an approach. Unless you can disprove all possibilities (not just the ones you assume), you can't disprove the validity of the approach.
For example:
A goal: "Put out the forest fire"
Various approaches:
1) "Put out the forest fire by removing the oxygen"
2) "Put out the forest fire by removing the heat"
3) "Put out the forest fire by removing the fuel"
Detailed plans for approach #3.
Plan A. "Remove fuel by cutting down trees in the path with an axe"
Plan B. "Remove fuel by cutting down trees in the path with a chain saw"
Plan C. "Remove fuel by burning trees in the path in a controlled environment"
Just because plan "A" is not feasible, less effective, or ineffective, doesn't mean that approach #3 is invalid. You must disprove plan "B", "C", and any other possible method of "removing the fuel" before you can say that approach #3 won't work.
Whether or not you accept this, we are not in the position to do a detailed plan for solving the illegal immigration problem because it requires access to classified information about the allocation of law enforcement resources, something Congress officials have that you don't. So, you can continue to fill this thread with reasons why you think your detailed plans based on my approach won't work. But it won't disprove the approach. You can either agree with the approach or dispute the approach with an alternate approach. You can't dispute the approach with a detailed plan that you think would fail, because you would only be arguing against your own incompetence in planning. It would be no better than Republicans using their own failure to govern as proof that government doesn't work.
QUOTE(billfmsd @ May 4 2008, 01:16 PM)
Here's my 3 step solution on the issue of illegal immigration:
Step 1) Stop mixing the issues. We don't have a legal immigration problem. We have more than enough people willing to migrate legally to this country. We have more than enough American citizens willing to fill those job positions that would be filled by immigrants as long as its for a fair wage in the mean time. The only thing we don't have is corporations willing to pay what the American job market will bear for those American jobs. There is simply no excuse to use illegal immigrants for labor; so we can and should address illegal immigration separately.
Step 2) I know many are going to hate this, but we need national I.D. cards, at least for employment. Every citizen can pay for their own if they want to work in this country. Applicants have been paying for everything else involved in the hiring process. An employable citizen I.D. shouldn't cost more than the gas and dry-cleaning required for a few job interviews.
Step 3) Crack down harder on illegal employment. If we just did this, we wouldn't need a border fence or deportation for the vast majority of illegal immigrants. Most of them are just seeking work.
Aside from the cheap labor, there are also National Security issues with illegal immigration. I take the same "focus on demand" approach to solving those as well. We can stop spies and terrorists easier by giving them less of a reason than we can by attempting to deny them access. If we followed step 3, then the terrorist and spies would have a harder time entering illegally because they wouldn't have those illegal immigrants seeking employment to hide amongst.
Step 1) Stop mixing the issues. We don't have a legal immigration problem. We have more than enough people willing to migrate legally to this country. We have more than enough American citizens willing to fill those job positions that would be filled by immigrants as long as its for a fair wage in the mean time. The only thing we don't have is corporations willing to pay what the American job market will bear for those American jobs. There is simply no excuse to use illegal immigrants for labor; so we can and should address illegal immigration separately.
Step 2) I know many are going to hate this, but we need national I.D. cards, at least for employment. Every citizen can pay for their own if they want to work in this country. Applicants have been paying for everything else involved in the hiring process. An employable citizen I.D. shouldn't cost more than the gas and dry-cleaning required for a few job interviews.
Step 3) Crack down harder on illegal employment. If we just did this, we wouldn't need a border fence or deportation for the vast majority of illegal immigrants. Most of them are just seeking work.
Aside from the cheap labor, there are also National Security issues with illegal immigration. I take the same "focus on demand" approach to solving those as well. We can stop spies and terrorists easier by giving them less of a reason than we can by attempting to deny them access. If we followed step 3, then the terrorist and spies would have a harder time entering illegally because they wouldn't have those illegal immigrants seeking employment to hide amongst.
The problem is billfmsd -- you never advocate that taxpayers pay more money - you advocate an approach that calls for a National ID system (well in practical terms we have a Real ID system which adopts one of your "steps")...
Well, in order for that system to work -- then you need every state to adopt it -- well no state is going to adopt it when it has certain consequences -- those being the costs involved...
If the states are not going to pay for it...then someone has to -- which means the federal government -- and since taxpayers fund the federal government the only way to get your National ID program is by increasing taxes...or oherwise using taxpayer dollars unless you want to offer another alternative which would be a new addition to the debate -- since you have yet to make such a suggestion...
I have been trying to get you to move from your approach...to the real world of implementing that approach...but you remain resistant...which is fine if you never want your approach to ever come to fruition...but as I have said...I prefer to secure results...and in order to secure results...one must deal with political reality which often requires compromise...
By refusing to accept this reality your "approach" remains intact...but it also remains an impractical concept...
I am for making it into a practical reality...but it seems that was never your goal...
So, your 3 steps to solving the immigration problem...will never become reality...because you refuse to compromise...and integrate them into a comprehensive plan...
An approach is flexible...but it sits on the shelf and withers and dies so long as its author is not flexible enough to deal with the practical realities of making a concept into an actual initiative...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 10:03 AM)
The problem is billfmsd -- you never advocate that taxpayers pay more money - you advocate an approach that calls for a National ID system (well in practical terms we have a Real ID system which adopts one of your "steps")...
Well, in order for that system to work -- then you need every state to adopt it -- well no state is going to adopt it when it has certain consequences -- those being the costs involved...
If the states are not going to pay for it...then someone has to -- which means the federal government -- and since taxpayers fund the federal government the only way to get your National ID program is by increasing taxes...or oherwise using taxpayer dollars unless you want to offer another alternative which would be a new addition to the debate -- since you have yet to make such a suggestion...
Again, that's your assumptions based on one of many possible detailed plans, based on the approach. Your arguments as to why it wouldn't work are mere arguments against your own assumptions about how to execute that plan.Well, in order for that system to work -- then you need every state to adopt it -- well no state is going to adopt it when it has certain consequences -- those being the costs involved...
If the states are not going to pay for it...then someone has to -- which means the federal government -- and since taxpayers fund the federal government the only way to get your National ID program is by increasing taxes...or oherwise using taxpayer dollars unless you want to offer another alternative which would be a new addition to the debate -- since you have yet to make such a suggestion...
The way to avoid increasing taxes is to re-allocate funds and/or have the employee pay for the processing of what would be a license for employment just like any other license.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 10:03 AM)
I have been trying to get you to move from your approach...to the real world of implementing that approach...but you remain resistant...which is fine if you never want your approach to ever come to fruition...but as I have said...I prefer to secure results...and in order to secure results...one must deal with political reality which often requires compromise...
By refusing to accept this reality your "approach" remains intact...but it also remains an impractical concept...
The only way to prove it's impracticality is to eliminate all possibilities for implementation.By refusing to accept this reality your "approach" remains intact...but it also remains an impractical concept...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 10:03 AM)
I am for making it into a practical reality...but it seems that was never your goal...
I was never opposed to making it into a practical reality. I just know that neither you nor I are in a position to do it.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 10:03 AM)
So, your 3 steps to solving the immigration problem...will never become reality...because you refuse to compromise...and integrate them into a comprehensive plan...
As if I'm the only one in the world capable of making it a reality.QUOTE(billfmsd @ Mar 10 2009, 11:14 AM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 10:03 AM)
The problem is billfmsd -- you never advocate that taxpayers pay more money - you advocate an approach that calls for a National ID system (well in practical terms we have a Real ID system which adopts one of your "steps")...
Well, in order for that system to work -- then you need every state to adopt it -- well no state is going to adopt it when it has certain consequences -- those being the costs involved...
If the states are not going to pay for it...then someone has to -- which means the federal government -- and since taxpayers fund the federal government the only way to get your National ID program is by increasing taxes...or oherwise using taxpayer dollars unless you want to offer another alternative which would be a new addition to the debate -- since you have yet to make such a suggestion...
Well, in order for that system to work -- then you need every state to adopt it -- well no state is going to adopt it when it has certain consequences -- those being the costs involved...
If the states are not going to pay for it...then someone has to -- which means the federal government -- and since taxpayers fund the federal government the only way to get your National ID program is by increasing taxes...or oherwise using taxpayer dollars unless you want to offer another alternative which would be a new addition to the debate -- since you have yet to make such a suggestion...
Again, that's your assumptions based on one of many possible detailed plans, based on the approach. Your arguments as to why it wouldn't work are mere arguments against your own assumptions about how to execute that plan.
The way to avoid increasing taxes is to re-allocate funds and/or have the employee pay for the processing of what would be a license for employment just like any other license.
Bill --- you tell me how an employer is going to feel like gettinig his migrant farm workers, etc. IDs -- that he is really going to want to deal with the hassle and how these day laborers who barely have any money to begin with are suddenly going to be able to afford an ID that costs upwards of $20.00 if it is going to meet minimum security requirements. It is impractical. Employers will not stand for such requirements. The legislation would never pass.
You really think that employers are not going to oppose a bill that requires them to provide a national ID --- so remember its a national ID which means it is going to be standardized -- and someone is going to have to develop the minimum framework -- and then it is going to have to be securitized...but you don't want any taxpayer money for this -- so there is at a minimum going to need to be seed money before they collect any revenue from the workers...and who is going to provide that? The employers?
Professional licenses for are sought by persons who have certain skill sets - after which they have been trained etc. Here you are suggesting a requirement that anyone who does not have a valid drivers license (I assume that you are not going to make this mandatory for all persons). Here you are suggesting a federal mandate that all employees have to be registered nationally...which is slightly different...
This does not seem to have been thought through too much.
And Bill my assumptions are based on the fact that you never want to make any assumptions about how to execute the plan.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 10:03 AM)
I have been trying to get you to move from your approach...to the real world of implementing that approach...but you remain resistant...which is fine if you never want your approach to ever come to fruition...but as I have said...I prefer to secure results...and in order to secure results...one must deal with political reality which often requires compromise...
By refusing to accept this reality your "approach" remains intact...but it also remains an impractical concept...
The only way to prove it's impracticality is to eliminate all possibilities for implementation.By refusing to accept this reality your "approach" remains intact...but it also remains an impractical concept...
Bill:
I prefer to concern myself with making things happen -- I do not work to eliminate all possibilities of implementation --- I tend to work from the standpoint of how can we make it work - what plan can we develop to implement the approach....
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 10:03 AM)
I am for making it into a practical reality...but it seems that was never your goal...
I was never opposed to making it into a practical reality. I just know that neither you nor I are in a position to do it.Maybe you are not in such a position, but as I have indicated to you I have been involved in state government devloping and movinig dozens of pieces of legislation through legislatures...I know how its done -- and I know how the process works -- and based upon that knowledge I have been offering you counsel on this issue which you have politely rejected.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 10:03 AM)
So, your 3 steps to solving the immigration problem...will never become reality...because you refuse to compromise...and integrate them into a comprehensive plan...
As if I'm the only one in the world capable of making it a reality.Well, so far as I am aware you are the only even discussing such a proposal so if it is not even something that you are interested in making a reality -- then I would suggest there is no one else intereted in making it a reality...
And maybe that is where we leave things...
Instead of crafting from your approach a workable plan...that could be adopted, and implemented by the US Congress...we leave it as an approach to wither and die...like many of our other musings...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 12:53 PM)
Bill --- you tell me how an employer is going to feel like gettinig his migrant farm workers, etc. IDs -- that he is really going to want to deal with the hassle and how these day laborers who barely have any money to begin with are suddenly going to be able to afford an ID that costs upwards of $20.00 if it is going to meet minimum security requirements. It is impractical. Employers will not stand for such requirements. The legislation would never pass.
Employers aren't the only ones who vote. They aren't even the majority of voters.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 12:53 PM)
You really think that employers are not going to oppose a bill that requires them to provide a national ID --- so remember its a national ID which means it is going to be standardized -- and someone is going to have to develop the minimum framework -- and then it is going to have to be securitized...but you don't want any taxpayer money for this -- so there is at a minimum going to need to be seed money before they collect any revenue from the workers...and who is going to provide that? The employers?
Again, tax money can be re-allocated without being raised.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 12:53 PM)
Professional licenses for are sought by persons who have certain skill sets - after which they have been trained etc. Here you are suggesting a requirement that anyone who does not have a valid drivers license (I assume that you are not going to make this mandatory for all persons). Here you are suggesting a federal mandate that all employees have to be registered nationally...which is slightly different...
I'm not talking about a professional license. I'm talking about a license to be employed. QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 12:53 PM)
This does not seem to have been thought through too much.
I never intended to think it completely through. It would be a waste of my time, not having access to classified law enforcement information and budgets. QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 10 2009, 12:53 PM)
Well, so far as I am aware you are the only even discussing such a proposal so if it is not even something that you are interested in making a reality -- then I would suggest there is no one else intereted in making it a reality...
And maybe that is where we leave things...
Instead of crafting from your approach a workable plan...that could be adopted, and implemented by the US Congress...we leave it as an approach to wither and die...like many of our other musings...
You think everyone reading this would be discussing it on this thread if they were considering it? Anyone in the world can read this. They don't even have to be members of CGCS. There could be people discussing this approach or something just like it (that originated elsewhere) on another forum online, on an intranet or in a private room face-to-face for all you know. The world does not revolve around the few dozen members opinions at CGCS. But that doesn't mean the world can't get ideas from here and use them elsewhere.
And maybe that is where we leave things...
Instead of crafting from your approach a workable plan...that could be adopted, and implemented by the US Congress...we leave it as an approach to wither and die...like many of our other musings...
Tell me bill -- who has more influence with Congress than employers?
If all employers were lined up against something how do you think that if would fare?
How do you think unions would react to a national employee ID system?
Employers may not have the votes -- but they have the influence...without the US Chamber of Commerce this idea is DOA whether or not a Dem is in the White House...
Tax money can be reallocated without additional taxes being raised...well I guess this is progress of a sort --- the previous post made me think that you thought this could be revenue neutral -- at least you acknowlege costs to the program...now.
With our competition for revenue -- just where do you think your national ID system is going to rank in terms of priority?
Now, if you took my comprehensive plan and its national security -- economic growth dimension...you would have something saleable to a bipartisan constituency and with a much better chance for passage IMHO...
That was my point...that all persons not possessing a drivers license which meets the national security requirements...will have to have an employee ID...is this going to be a federal or a state program...I would suggest a state program would be better...unless you want to create a new federal bureacracy...
Here you go again with this supposed confidential information that you would need at your disposal to be able to advance your plan...which is just so lame...you can take an approach to a pre-legislative situation without having to apprise yourself of all this supposed top secret info...the reality it seems to me is that you don't want to get it off the ground...and make it a workable approach...you want to leave it as is because then you do not have to engage in compromise...to make the approach saleable...in a political context...which means we are just going in circles...
I am sorry the conclusion hear just struck me as particularly humorous...some of us on this site really do have a high opinion of themselves...
If all employers were lined up against something how do you think that if would fare?
How do you think unions would react to a national employee ID system?
Employers may not have the votes -- but they have the influence...without the US Chamber of Commerce this idea is DOA whether or not a Dem is in the White House...
Tax money can be reallocated without additional taxes being raised...well I guess this is progress of a sort --- the previous post made me think that you thought this could be revenue neutral -- at least you acknowlege costs to the program...now.
With our competition for revenue -- just where do you think your national ID system is going to rank in terms of priority?
Now, if you took my comprehensive plan and its national security -- economic growth dimension...you would have something saleable to a bipartisan constituency and with a much better chance for passage IMHO...
That was my point...that all persons not possessing a drivers license which meets the national security requirements...will have to have an employee ID...is this going to be a federal or a state program...I would suggest a state program would be better...unless you want to create a new federal bureacracy...
Here you go again with this supposed confidential information that you would need at your disposal to be able to advance your plan...which is just so lame...you can take an approach to a pre-legislative situation without having to apprise yourself of all this supposed top secret info...the reality it seems to me is that you don't want to get it off the ground...and make it a workable approach...you want to leave it as is because then you do not have to engage in compromise...to make the approach saleable...in a political context...which means we are just going in circles...
I am sorry the conclusion hear just struck me as particularly humorous...some of us on this site really do have a high opinion of themselves...
But rather than going in circles why can't we do what rla suggested and see where we have agreement...
Spell out the concepts involved...
Find agreement...
And take it from there...
Spell out the concepts involved...
Find agreement...
And take it from there...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Aug 7 2008, 01:32 PM)
Maybe we can ask people which elements of my summary they accept and reject...as a next step...and then we can work on the areas where there is a lack of agreement unless Bill wants to offer his own fact scenario and we can blend the two.
1. There are at least twelve million illegal immigrants in this nation at the present time.
2. Estimates suggest that up to a million illegal immigrants cross into the United States annually from our Southern most borders whether they come from Cuba or Mexico (though often then originate in nations south of Mexico).
3. The immigrants come to the US for a number of reasons including primarily quality of life issues: economic (jobs) and politcial (seeking freedom, political asylum).
4. The continued impact on our economy represents a national security threat.
5. Our porous borders in the wake of the 9/11 attacks represent an aditional national security threat to terrorists and spies infiltrating our nation to do our government and our people harm.
6. American employers, and in fact some industries, are dependent upon illegal immigrants to do jobs which are either too low paying and undesireable by Americans because of the type of labor involved whether it be intensely physical or otherwise repugnant.
7. Some of these jobs are even high paying. Finally, communities throughout the nation have seen illegal immigration as a curse with the impact on education costs, health care, law enforcement, etc., particularly in borer states.
8. The present immigration system is suffering from a number of deficiencies which further complicate the system.
9. First, there are inadequate border agents to monitor the complete US/Mexico border.
10. Second, there are inadequate immigrations agents to inspect the millions of US employers who might be engaged in illegal immigration.
11. Third, the present E-verify system is inadequate to give employer accurate information regarding potential and current employees with as much as 7% of the responses being false-positives for identifying legal immigrants or US citizens as illegal immigrants. As a result, it is unfair and onerous to require employers to use a system which does not work and unfair to legal immigrants and US citizens who may be denied employment which they are eligible for because of E-verify errors. Fourth, employers need employees but the present legal immigration system has so much delay that employers are forced to hire illegal immigrants because the guest worker system cannot guarantee adequate legal immigrant employees annually.
12. Fourth, recent heightened immgratiion enforcement has increased detentions overcrowding an immigrant detention system with facilities that have been described as overcrowded and inhumane, and also crowding prisons with illegal immigrants that have been successfully charged and prosecuted for crimes consistent with their entering the United States illegally.
13. Thus, any reform measures which increases enforcement at any level as heightened broder security and employer enforcement is bound to do, will have to take into account the impact on detention faciltiies and prisons which need modernization and increased capacity to handle the increased incarceraton of illegal immigrants which is occuring now and is a natural result of any further immigration reform.
14. Fifth, as touched ohn above, until our legal immigration system can be reformed to expedite review it will be quite dififcult to address the illegal immigration problem. Lastly, there are significiant costs involved for any reform efforts at a time when govenrment resources are particulalry scarce and the ability of effect real change is dependent upon states having the resources to act.
15. The worst thing we could do is pass a law and not provide the funding to accomplish implementation because this would create low expectations and likely advance the status quo which we can ill afford.
1. There are at least twelve million illegal immigrants in this nation at the present time.
2. Estimates suggest that up to a million illegal immigrants cross into the United States annually from our Southern most borders whether they come from Cuba or Mexico (though often then originate in nations south of Mexico).
3. The immigrants come to the US for a number of reasons including primarily quality of life issues: economic (jobs) and politcial (seeking freedom, political asylum).
4. The continued impact on our economy represents a national security threat.
5. Our porous borders in the wake of the 9/11 attacks represent an aditional national security threat to terrorists and spies infiltrating our nation to do our government and our people harm.
6. American employers, and in fact some industries, are dependent upon illegal immigrants to do jobs which are either too low paying and undesireable by Americans because of the type of labor involved whether it be intensely physical or otherwise repugnant.
7. Some of these jobs are even high paying. Finally, communities throughout the nation have seen illegal immigration as a curse with the impact on education costs, health care, law enforcement, etc., particularly in borer states.
8. The present immigration system is suffering from a number of deficiencies which further complicate the system.
9. First, there are inadequate border agents to monitor the complete US/Mexico border.
10. Second, there are inadequate immigrations agents to inspect the millions of US employers who might be engaged in illegal immigration.
11. Third, the present E-verify system is inadequate to give employer accurate information regarding potential and current employees with as much as 7% of the responses being false-positives for identifying legal immigrants or US citizens as illegal immigrants. As a result, it is unfair and onerous to require employers to use a system which does not work and unfair to legal immigrants and US citizens who may be denied employment which they are eligible for because of E-verify errors. Fourth, employers need employees but the present legal immigration system has so much delay that employers are forced to hire illegal immigrants because the guest worker system cannot guarantee adequate legal immigrant employees annually.
12. Fourth, recent heightened immgratiion enforcement has increased detentions overcrowding an immigrant detention system with facilities that have been described as overcrowded and inhumane, and also crowding prisons with illegal immigrants that have been successfully charged and prosecuted for crimes consistent with their entering the United States illegally.
13. Thus, any reform measures which increases enforcement at any level as heightened broder security and employer enforcement is bound to do, will have to take into account the impact on detention faciltiies and prisons which need modernization and increased capacity to handle the increased incarceraton of illegal immigrants which is occuring now and is a natural result of any further immigration reform.
14. Fifth, as touched ohn above, until our legal immigration system can be reformed to expedite review it will be quite dififcult to address the illegal immigration problem. Lastly, there are significiant costs involved for any reform efforts at a time when govenrment resources are particulalry scarce and the ability of effect real change is dependent upon states having the resources to act.
15. The worst thing we could do is pass a law and not provide the funding to accomplish implementation because this would create low expectations and likely advance the status quo which we can ill afford.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
Tell me bill -- who has more influence with Congress than employers?
If all employers were lined up against something how do you think that if would fare?
Employers may not have the votes -- but they have the influence...without the US Chamber of Commerce this idea is DOA whether or not a Dem is in the White House...
If you are arguing for the status quo, I'd say that you have a point. If you are arguing for what should be ideal, I would say that the average person should have equal influence and the majority of people should win, not the majority of dollars. The majority of people are not employers. Why yield to corporatism or fascism?If all employers were lined up against something how do you think that if would fare?
Employers may not have the votes -- but they have the influence...without the US Chamber of Commerce this idea is DOA whether or not a Dem is in the White House...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
How do you think unions would react to a national employee ID system?
With our competition for revenue -- just where do you think your national ID system is going to rank in terms of priority?
Most people don't react favorably to any national ID system. But eventually unpopular solutions win out over failed or non-solutions.With our competition for revenue -- just where do you think your national ID system is going to rank in terms of priority?
The priority would rank somewhere below energy independence and above nationalized health care. I'm sure more base conservatives would support anything that promises to give them back their jobs before they would support anything that smells like socialism.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
Now, if you took my comprehensive plan and its national security -- economic growth dimension...you would have something saleable to a bipartisan constituency and with a much better chance for passage IMHO...
Conservatives will vote for security, but won't vote for amnesty. Anything short of enforcing (not changing) our current immigration laws will be seen as amnesty by conservatives.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
That was my point...that all persons not possessing a drivers license which meets the national security requirements...will have to have an employee ID...is this going to be a federal or a state program...I would suggest a state program would be better...unless you want to create a new federal bureacracy...
Each state has to have a program and each license has to be at least federally recognized in order for it to work. That would be in effect a federal I.D. I could be wrong, but I would be surprised if one could drive on any public roads in any state of the union without a drivers license. If any state didn't comply, then that state would become the new magnet for illegal immigrants and force a federal program, because the illegal immigration problem wouldn't stop at their state line.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
Here you go again with this supposed confidential information that you would need at your disposal to be able to advance your plan...which is just so lame...you can take an approach to a pre-legislative situation without having to apprise yourself of all this supposed top secret info...the reality it seems to me is that you don't want to get it off the ground...and make it a workable approach...you want to leave it as is because then you do not have to engage in compromise...to make the approach saleable...in a political context...which means we are just going in circles...
If you want to speculate on costs, it would be impossible without access to classified law enforcement budgets. And again, it's not my place to get it off the ground or even draw a blueprint for it. Its an idea for an approach that I'm throwing out there for the taking.
quote name='billfmsd' date='Mar 11 2009, 04:03 PM' post='971385'
I thought we were talking about the hear and now and not what we wish the world might look like at some distant time in the future.
I can agree with your aspirational and idealistic suggestions...but again I try and deal with the practical side -- in today's political climate -- how to we make your approach a reality...
In the real world of today - employers hold much more sway than you and I -- and if you are waiting for people to receive equal influence to be the jumping off point for your approach I think by that time the issue will be otherwise resolved along the lines of what I have outlined...
Most people don't react favorably to any national ID system. But eventually unpopular solutions win out over failed or non-solutions.
The priority would rank somewhere below energy independence and above nationalized health care. I'm sure more base conservatives would support anything that promises to give them back their jobs before they would support anything that smells like socialism.
Really -- wow...now I would suggest that would be the ranking if you went with my approach and its national security/economic security dimension...I do not see how your approach is going to gain such priority when it offers nothing in this political environment to either Democrats or Republcians...
We already have the Real ID system which is floundering. Your National ID system is not going to fare much better. At least not without a lot more to offer employers, etc. which is why I proposed a more compehensive approach -- you offer employers immunity if they get their employees - National IDs -- you beef up the E-Verify system so its actually accurate...you provide more INS agents to check employers -- you provide an amnesty program so that employers can use their employees and not suffer economically as a result of their violations...so that they are encouraged to comply with the law for the future...
Conservatives will vote for security, but won't vote for amnesty. Anything short of enforcing (not changing) our current immigration laws will be seen as amnesty by conservatives.
Well, they will not vote for the current system of amnesty...but I believe if you got a system put together that employers were strongly behind...Republcians would support it. Republicans are the party of corporate interests -- they cannot survive without them...and if you get not only an amnesty program for immigrants -- but also for employers to comply -- AND you provide more money for border security and employer enforcement -- AND INS agents to beef of intrastate enforcement...you'll get the Republicans on board...believe me...money talks...
Each state has to have a program and each license has to be at least federally recognized in order for it to work. That would be in effect a federal I.D. I could be wrong, but I would be surprised if one could drive on any public roads in any state of the union without a drivers license. If any state didn't comply, then that state would become the new magnet for illegal immigrants and force a federal program, because the illegal immigration problem wouldn't stop at their state line.
Yes, but you have to provide the revenue for the states to manage such a program. Now, you suggest that reallocating revenue is going to work - but I am telling you its only going to be reallocated if you make it politically appealing and as your plan was originally conceived it is not poltiically appealing...
If you want to speculate on costs, it would be impossible without access to classified law enforcement budgets.
And again, it's not my place to get it off the ground or even draw a blueprint for it. Its an idea for an approach that I'm throwing out there for the taking.
/quote
Well, without more meat it ain't going nowhere - and that is the reality...
Instead of our being at odds - why not follow through on what rla said -- and let me know of my 15 points which you agree with -- and which you disagree with -- so we can see what common ground we have on the issue and work from there?
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
Tell me bill -- who has more influence with Congress than employers?
If all employers were lined up against something how do you think that if would fare?
Employers may not have the votes -- but they have the influence...without the US Chamber of Commerce this idea is DOA whether or not a Dem is in the White House...
If you are arguing for the status quo, I'd say that you have a point. If you are arguing for what should be ideal, I would say that the average person should have equal influence and the majority of people should win, not the majority of dollars. The majority of people are not employers. Why yield to corporatism or fascism?If all employers were lined up against something how do you think that if would fare?
Employers may not have the votes -- but they have the influence...without the US Chamber of Commerce this idea is DOA whether or not a Dem is in the White House...
I thought we were talking about the hear and now and not what we wish the world might look like at some distant time in the future.
I can agree with your aspirational and idealistic suggestions...but again I try and deal with the practical side -- in today's political climate -- how to we make your approach a reality...
In the real world of today - employers hold much more sway than you and I -- and if you are waiting for people to receive equal influence to be the jumping off point for your approach I think by that time the issue will be otherwise resolved along the lines of what I have outlined...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
How do you think unions would react to a national employee ID system?
With our competition for revenue -- just where do you think your national ID system is going to rank in terms of priority?
With our competition for revenue -- just where do you think your national ID system is going to rank in terms of priority?
Most people don't react favorably to any national ID system. But eventually unpopular solutions win out over failed or non-solutions.
The priority would rank somewhere below energy independence and above nationalized health care. I'm sure more base conservatives would support anything that promises to give them back their jobs before they would support anything that smells like socialism.
Really -- wow...now I would suggest that would be the ranking if you went with my approach and its national security/economic security dimension...I do not see how your approach is going to gain such priority when it offers nothing in this political environment to either Democrats or Republcians...
We already have the Real ID system which is floundering. Your National ID system is not going to fare much better. At least not without a lot more to offer employers, etc. which is why I proposed a more compehensive approach -- you offer employers immunity if they get their employees - National IDs -- you beef up the E-Verify system so its actually accurate...you provide more INS agents to check employers -- you provide an amnesty program so that employers can use their employees and not suffer economically as a result of their violations...so that they are encouraged to comply with the law for the future...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
Now, if you took my comprehensive plan and its national security -- economic growth dimension...you would have something saleable to a bipartisan constituency and with a much better chance for passage IMHO...
Conservatives will vote for security, but won't vote for amnesty. Anything short of enforcing (not changing) our current immigration laws will be seen as amnesty by conservatives.
Well, they will not vote for the current system of amnesty...but I believe if you got a system put together that employers were strongly behind...Republcians would support it. Republicans are the party of corporate interests -- they cannot survive without them...and if you get not only an amnesty program for immigrants -- but also for employers to comply -- AND you provide more money for border security and employer enforcement -- AND INS agents to beef of intrastate enforcement...you'll get the Republicans on board...believe me...money talks...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
That was my point...that all persons not possessing a drivers license which meets the national security requirements...will have to have an employee ID...is this going to be a federal or a state program...I would suggest a state program would be better...unless you want to create a new federal bureacracy...
Each state has to have a program and each license has to be at least federally recognized in order for it to work. That would be in effect a federal I.D. I could be wrong, but I would be surprised if one could drive on any public roads in any state of the union without a drivers license. If any state didn't comply, then that state would become the new magnet for illegal immigrants and force a federal program, because the illegal immigration problem wouldn't stop at their state line.
Yes, but you have to provide the revenue for the states to manage such a program. Now, you suggest that reallocating revenue is going to work - but I am telling you its only going to be reallocated if you make it politically appealing and as your plan was originally conceived it is not poltiically appealing...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 11 2009, 03:52 PM)
Here you go again with this supposed confidential information that you would need at your disposal to be able to advance your plan...which is just so lame...you can take an approach to a pre-legislative situation without having to apprise yourself of all this supposed top secret info...the reality it seems to me is that you don't want to get it off the ground...and make it a workable approach...you want to leave it as is because then you do not have to engage in compromise...to make the approach saleable...in a political context...which means we are just going in circles...
If you want to speculate on costs, it would be impossible without access to classified law enforcement budgets.
And again, it's not my place to get it off the ground or even draw a blueprint for it. Its an idea for an approach that I'm throwing out there for the taking.
/quote
Well, without more meat it ain't going nowhere - and that is the reality...
Instead of our being at odds - why not follow through on what rla said -- and let me know of my 15 points which you agree with -- and which you disagree with -- so we can see what common ground we have on the issue and work from there?
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
I thought we were talking about the hear and now and not what we wish the world might look like at some distant time in the future.
We are talking about both. Otherwise you are just advocating for the status quo. The problem is now, the solution is in the future.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
I do not see how your approach is going to gain such priority when it offers nothing in this political environment to either Democrats or Republcians...
My approach offers nothing to cheap labor exploiters. To base Republicans, my approach offers them their jobs back and the hope that illegal immigrants will go home. It may even create some jobs while shifting them from border enforcement to workplace law enforcement. For base Democrats it offers what they always wanted, prosecution of corporate greed that exploits cheap labor which hurts both legal and illegal workers.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
Well, they will not vote for the current system of amnesty...but I believe if you got a system put together that employers were strongly behind...Republcians would support it. Republicans are the party of corporate interests -- they cannot survive without them...and if you get not only an amnesty program for immigrants -- but also for employers to comply -- AND you provide more money for border security and employer enforcement -- AND INS agents to beef of intrastate enforcement...you'll get the Republicans on board...believe me...money talks...
You need to separate the employers willing to exploit cheap labor from the ones who are willing to pay fair wages to American citizens. Nothing you've proposed addresses this problem, and it is the primary reason why we have illegal immigration. A plan that yields to all employers with no distinction will only increase the demand for cheap illegal labor and increase the border enforcement burden.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
Yes, but you have to provide the revenue for the states to manage such a program. Now, you suggest that reallocating revenue is going to work - but I am telling you its only going to be reallocated if you make it politically appealing and as your plan was originally conceived it is not poltiically appealing...
Well, without more meat it ain't going nowhere - and that is the reality...
Now you are just debating a stalemate, my word against your word. You are not dealing with the substance of the approach on principle here. You are still mistakenly calling my approach a "plan," and you are attempting to speak for the masses with your own personal judgment that "it's not politically appealing" or that it "lacks meat."Well, without more meat it ain't going nowhere - and that is the reality...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
Instead of our being at odds - why not follow through on what rla said -- and let me know of my 15 points which you agree with -- and which you disagree with -- so we can see what common ground we have on the issue and work from there?
Taz, we would still be at odds even following rla's mediation. You are trying to re-frame the debate on the level of planning when 1) you are not sold on the approach, and 2) you refuse to admit that the detailed financial planning can only go so far without access to classified law enforcement budgets.
I don't know what I can add to this conversation. But here are my thoughts on this issue.
1. Both Republicans and Democrats need to fix this problem and not worry about jockeying for votes.
2. The border needs to be shut down immediately via a fix, troops or whatever means necessary.
3. The argument that hispanics do jobs Americans won't do is stupid. I seem to recall a news item where 700 people applied for a janitorial job. Somehow I doubt those were 700 illegals applying for this job.
4. All illegals need to be exported and barred from re-entry for 5 yrs and fined $1000 for every year they have been in the US illegally.
5. ICE needs to crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegals
6. A guest worker program needs to be setup to provide avenues for peple to come here to work seasonally etc. This will also allow us to do background checks on who is entering this country.
7. We need to STRONGLY encourage Mexico to deter illegal immigration into the US.
8. Benefits on removing illegals are less strain on our prison systems, judicial systems, health sysetms, education systems. Billions of dollars could be saved by tax payers.
9. Our primary concerns are the citizens of the US first. Not the rights etc of people in this country illegally. As far as I am concerned your status in this country forfeits any rights under the Constitution because you are not a citizen of this country.
I am for LEGAL immigration. And if this country decides to let a million plus hispanics in every year legally then I am all for it. But until that point we should enforce the rule of law and setup a system that best works for America, not people from another country.
1. Both Republicans and Democrats need to fix this problem and not worry about jockeying for votes.
2. The border needs to be shut down immediately via a fix, troops or whatever means necessary.
3. The argument that hispanics do jobs Americans won't do is stupid. I seem to recall a news item where 700 people applied for a janitorial job. Somehow I doubt those were 700 illegals applying for this job.
4. All illegals need to be exported and barred from re-entry for 5 yrs and fined $1000 for every year they have been in the US illegally.
5. ICE needs to crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegals
6. A guest worker program needs to be setup to provide avenues for peple to come here to work seasonally etc. This will also allow us to do background checks on who is entering this country.
7. We need to STRONGLY encourage Mexico to deter illegal immigration into the US.
8. Benefits on removing illegals are less strain on our prison systems, judicial systems, health sysetms, education systems. Billions of dollars could be saved by tax payers.
9. Our primary concerns are the citizens of the US first. Not the rights etc of people in this country illegally. As far as I am concerned your status in this country forfeits any rights under the Constitution because you are not a citizen of this country.
I am for LEGAL immigration. And if this country decides to let a million plus hispanics in every year legally then I am all for it. But until that point we should enforce the rule of law and setup a system that best works for America, not people from another country.
QUOTE(GOPGuy @ Mar 12 2009, 02:07 PM)
I don't know what I can add to this conversation. But here are my thoughts on this issue.
1. Both Republicans and Democrats need to fix this problem and not worry about jockeying for votes.
2. The border needs to be shut down immediately via a fix, troops or whatever means necessary.
3. The argument that hispanics do jobs Americans won't do is stupid. I seem to recall a news item where 700 people applied for a janitorial job. Somehow I doubt those were 700 illegals applying for this job.
4. All illegals need to be exported and barred from re-entry for 5 yrs and fined $1000 for every year they have been in the US illegally.
5. ICE needs to crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegals
6. A guest worker program needs to be setup to provide avenues for peple to come here to work seasonally etc. This will also allow us to do background checks on who is entering this country.
7. We need to STRONGLY encourage Mexico to deter illegal immigration into the US.
8. Benefits on removing illegals are less strain on our prison systems, judicial systems, health sysetms, education systems. Billions of dollars could be saved by tax payers.
9. Our primary concerns are the citizens of the US first. Not the rights etc of people in this country illegally. As far as I am concerned your status in this country forfeits any rights under the Constitution because you are not a citizen of this country.
I am for LEGAL immigration. And if this country decides to let a million plus hispanics in every year legally then I am all for it. But until that point we should enforce the rule of law and setup a system that best works for America, not people from another country.
All but one of your points supports my 3 step approach to solving the illegal immigration problem. Thanks GOPGuy. 1. Both Republicans and Democrats need to fix this problem and not worry about jockeying for votes.
2. The border needs to be shut down immediately via a fix, troops or whatever means necessary.
3. The argument that hispanics do jobs Americans won't do is stupid. I seem to recall a news item where 700 people applied for a janitorial job. Somehow I doubt those were 700 illegals applying for this job.
4. All illegals need to be exported and barred from re-entry for 5 yrs and fined $1000 for every year they have been in the US illegally.
5. ICE needs to crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegals
6. A guest worker program needs to be setup to provide avenues for peple to come here to work seasonally etc. This will also allow us to do background checks on who is entering this country.
7. We need to STRONGLY encourage Mexico to deter illegal immigration into the US.
8. Benefits on removing illegals are less strain on our prison systems, judicial systems, health sysetms, education systems. Billions of dollars could be saved by tax payers.
9. Our primary concerns are the citizens of the US first. Not the rights etc of people in this country illegally. As far as I am concerned your status in this country forfeits any rights under the Constitution because you are not a citizen of this country.
I am for LEGAL immigration. And if this country decides to let a million plus hispanics in every year legally then I am all for it. But until that point we should enforce the rule of law and setup a system that best works for America, not people from another country.
The one point that we slightly differ on is point #2. I think we should focus more on removing the demand for illegal immigrants then we should on cutting off the supply. The cheap labor demand is one that Republicans usually overlook or ignore. Republican leaders love illegal immigrant labor for the sake of keeping their top-down corporate-profiteering cheap-labor-exploiting middle-class-punishing friends happy. Corporate Democrat leaders love it too, but I think it's been more of a wedge issue for Republicans between their leaders vs their middle-class and bluecollar base. A stronger border would make it harder to get in. But if the budget for a tighter border takes away from the budget for prosecuting illegal employment, then a tighter border will be challenged with an equal or greater force attempting to penetrate it with bigger battering rams, taller ladders, deeper tunnels and heavier-armed bolder militants with more truck-loads of illegal immigrants fighting to get in. The skies the limit on what we could spend tightening the border. Show me a 50-foot fence and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder.
QUOTE(billfmsd @ Mar 12 2009, 10:58 PM)
QUOTE(GOPGuy @ Mar 12 2009, 02:07 PM)
I don't know what I can add to this conversation. But here are my thoughts on this issue.
1. Both Republicans and Democrats need to fix this problem and not worry about jockeying for votes.
2. The border needs to be shut down immediately via a fix, troops or whatever means necessary.
3. The argument that hispanics do jobs Americans won't do is stupid. I seem to recall a news item where 700 people applied for a janitorial job. Somehow I doubt those were 700 illegals applying for this job.
4. All illegals need to be exported and barred from re-entry for 5 yrs and fined $1000 for every year they have been in the US illegally.
5. ICE needs to crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegals
6. A guest worker program needs to be setup to provide avenues for peple to come here to work seasonally etc. This will also allow us to do background checks on who is entering this country.
7. We need to STRONGLY encourage Mexico to deter illegal immigration into the US.
8. Benefits on removing illegals are less strain on our prison systems, judicial systems, health sysetms, education systems. Billions of dollars could be saved by tax payers.
9. Our primary concerns are the citizens of the US first. Not the rights etc of people in this country illegally. As far as I am concerned your status in this country forfeits any rights under the Constitution because you are not a citizen of this country.
I am for LEGAL immigration. And if this country decides to let a million plus hispanics in every year legally then I am all for it. But until that point we should enforce the rule of law and setup a system that best works for America, not people from another country.
All but one of your points supports my 3 step approach to solving the illegal immigration problem. Thanks GOPGuy. 1. Both Republicans and Democrats need to fix this problem and not worry about jockeying for votes.
2. The border needs to be shut down immediately via a fix, troops or whatever means necessary.
3. The argument that hispanics do jobs Americans won't do is stupid. I seem to recall a news item where 700 people applied for a janitorial job. Somehow I doubt those were 700 illegals applying for this job.
4. All illegals need to be exported and barred from re-entry for 5 yrs and fined $1000 for every year they have been in the US illegally.
5. ICE needs to crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegals
6. A guest worker program needs to be setup to provide avenues for peple to come here to work seasonally etc. This will also allow us to do background checks on who is entering this country.
7. We need to STRONGLY encourage Mexico to deter illegal immigration into the US.
8. Benefits on removing illegals are less strain on our prison systems, judicial systems, health sysetms, education systems. Billions of dollars could be saved by tax payers.
9. Our primary concerns are the citizens of the US first. Not the rights etc of people in this country illegally. As far as I am concerned your status in this country forfeits any rights under the Constitution because you are not a citizen of this country.
I am for LEGAL immigration. And if this country decides to let a million plus hispanics in every year legally then I am all for it. But until that point we should enforce the rule of law and setup a system that best works for America, not people from another country.
The one point that we slightly differ on is point #2. I think we should focus more on removing the demand for illegal immigrants then we should on cutting off the supply. The cheap labor demand is one that Republicans usually overlook or ignore. Republican leaders love illegal immigrant labor for the sake of keeping their top-down corporate-profiteering cheap-labor-exploiting middle-class-punishing friends happy. Corporate Democrat leaders love it too, but I think it's been more of a wedge issue for Republicans between their leaders vs their middle-class and bluecollar base. A stronger border would make it harder to get in. But if the budget for a tighter border takes away from the budget for prosecuting illegal employment, then a tighter border will be challenged with an equal or greater force attempting to penetrate it with bigger battering rams, taller ladders, deeper tunnels and heavier-armed bolder militants with more truck-loads of illegal immigrants fighting to get in. The skies the limit on what we could spend tightening the border. Show me a 50-foot fence and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder.
Lets not forget that shutting down the border helps more than just illegal immigration, it will help against other criminal activity. And as long as people are getting fake credentials they will come across the border even if you crack down on employers. Erect a fence, man using boots on the ground and technology and then begin the process of scrubbing the illegals out of the system.
QUOTE(GOPGuy @ Mar 12 2009, 11:20 PM)
Lets not forget that shutting down the border helps more than just illegal immigration, it will help against other criminal activity. And as long as people are getting fake credentials they will come across the border even if you crack down on employers. Erect a fence, man using boots on the ground and technology and then begin the process of scrubbing the illegals out of the system.
Cracking down harder on illegal employment will at least thin border traffic enough to make spotting other criminal activity easier. For every one employer busted, there will be dozens of others scared into compliance. For every employer scared into compliance, there will be dozens of illegal jobs eliminated. The less jobs, the less of a reason to cross, the less traffic at the border, the easier it is to stop any crime or security threat at the border. You may even see border traffic reversed from jobless illegal immigrants going home to fix problems in their own country.
quote name='billfmsd' date='Mar 12 2009, 12:29 PM' post='971690'
I have never ever on this issue advocated the status quo and you cannot look with a straight face on this and suggest that I have...
My approach offers nothing to cheap labor exploiters. To base Republicans, my approach offers them their jobs back and the hope that illegal immigrants will go home. It may even create some jobs while shifting them from border enforcement to workplace law enforcement. For base Democrats it offers what they always wanted, prosecution of corporate greed that exploits cheap labor which hurts both legal and illegal workers.
No it does not. And that is why its DOA...you need to offer incentives for compliance which is why my amnesty program offers a one time chance to be free of fines for past bad behavior before the fines are quadrupled AND INS agent employer enforcement is ramped up...
You need to separate the employers willing to exploit cheap labor from the ones who are willing to pay fair wages to American citizens. Nothing you've proposed addresses this problem, and it is the primary reason why we have illegal immigration. A plan that yields to all employers with no distinction will only increase the demand for cheap illegal labor and increase the border enforcement burden.
Bill -- where have you been reading?
My employer amnesty program provides just that -- in return for being granted amnesty for their violations -- the employers must comply with state laws in this area -- well there is a minimum wage and there are workers comp laws == etc. So you are wrong here.
Bill we have been up and down with the approach/plan issue -- an approach is a plan -- but despite this reality -- I have tried to keep from using the word "plan" - and I slipped once and you just couldn't let it go...so sue me...as for the point -- your plan is DOA based on our other priorities...who is talking about immigration reform? Anyone? No. It is a low, low priority...so no money is being reallocated for anything unless you can sell it -- and there is nothing to sell here...in your plan to a broad polticial constituency
But I agree with your approach...I believe a national ID system can work -- but it has to be fully funded...I know there are some civil rights issues connected to this --- and employers will balk unless it is madeworkable...
I agree with going after employers as well - but I think your approach will die on the vine as it is presently conceived...first of all you will never get the support of border states for shifting border enforcement to employer enforcement...and you ignore the fact that the E-verify system is inadequate to provide good information...
Second, your idea of just leaving the immigrants to make their way home -- has no chance in any state in the US of receiving support --
Finally your failure to include reforms for legal aliens to be able to renew their green papers in a more deliberate manner also ignores one of the major problems with our immigration system which needs to be handled along with the border issue...
billfmsd the budget copout really surprises me -- you use it over and over and over again...noone said that we had to get to a final number -- we know how much border patrol agents make - we know how much INS agents make -- what additional info do you need?
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
I thought we were talking about the hear and now and not what we wish the world might look like at some distant time in the future.
We are talking about both. Otherwise you are just advocating for the status quo. The problem is now, the solution is in the future.I have never ever on this issue advocated the status quo and you cannot look with a straight face on this and suggest that I have...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
I do not see how your approach is going to gain such priority when it offers nothing in this political environment to either Democrats or Republcians...
My approach offers nothing to cheap labor exploiters. To base Republicans, my approach offers them their jobs back and the hope that illegal immigrants will go home. It may even create some jobs while shifting them from border enforcement to workplace law enforcement. For base Democrats it offers what they always wanted, prosecution of corporate greed that exploits cheap labor which hurts both legal and illegal workers.
No it does not. And that is why its DOA...you need to offer incentives for compliance which is why my amnesty program offers a one time chance to be free of fines for past bad behavior before the fines are quadrupled AND INS agent employer enforcement is ramped up...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
Well, they will not vote for the current system of amnesty...but I believe if you got a system put together that employers were strongly behind...Republcians would support it. Republicans are the party of corporate interests -- they cannot survive without them...and if you get not only an amnesty program for immigrants -- but also for employers to comply -- AND you provide more money for border security and employer enforcement -- AND INS agents to beef of intrastate enforcement...you'll get the Republicans on board...believe me...money talks...
You need to separate the employers willing to exploit cheap labor from the ones who are willing to pay fair wages to American citizens. Nothing you've proposed addresses this problem, and it is the primary reason why we have illegal immigration. A plan that yields to all employers with no distinction will only increase the demand for cheap illegal labor and increase the border enforcement burden.
Bill -- where have you been reading?
My employer amnesty program provides just that -- in return for being granted amnesty for their violations -- the employers must comply with state laws in this area -- well there is a minimum wage and there are workers comp laws == etc. So you are wrong here.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
Yes, but you have to provide the revenue for the states to manage such a program. Now, you suggest that reallocating revenue is going to work - but I am telling you its only going to be reallocated if you make it politically appealing and as your plan was originally conceived it is not poltiically appealing...
Well, without more meat it ain't going nowhere - and that is the reality...
Now you are just debating a stalemate, my word against your word. You are not dealing with the substance of the approach on principle here. You are still mistakenly calling my approach a "plan," and you are attempting to speak for the masses with your own personal judgment that "it's not politically appealing" or that it "lacks meat."Well, without more meat it ain't going nowhere - and that is the reality...
Bill we have been up and down with the approach/plan issue -- an approach is a plan -- but despite this reality -- I have tried to keep from using the word "plan" - and I slipped once and you just couldn't let it go...so sue me...as for the point -- your plan is DOA based on our other priorities...who is talking about immigration reform? Anyone? No. It is a low, low priority...so no money is being reallocated for anything unless you can sell it -- and there is nothing to sell here...in your plan to a broad polticial constituency
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 12 2009, 10:53 AM)
Instead of our being at odds - why not follow through on what rla said -- and let me know of my 15 points which you agree with -- and which you disagree with -- so we can see what common ground we have on the issue and work from there?
Taz, we would still be at odds even following rla's mediation. You are trying to re-frame the debate on the level of planning when 1) you are not sold on the approach, and 2) you refuse to admit that the detailed financial planning can only go so far without access to classified law enforcement budgets.But I agree with your approach...I believe a national ID system can work -- but it has to be fully funded...I know there are some civil rights issues connected to this --- and employers will balk unless it is madeworkable...
I agree with going after employers as well - but I think your approach will die on the vine as it is presently conceived...first of all you will never get the support of border states for shifting border enforcement to employer enforcement...and you ignore the fact that the E-verify system is inadequate to provide good information...
Second, your idea of just leaving the immigrants to make their way home -- has no chance in any state in the US of receiving support --
Finally your failure to include reforms for legal aliens to be able to renew their green papers in a more deliberate manner also ignores one of the major problems with our immigration system which needs to be handled along with the border issue...
billfmsd the budget copout really surprises me -- you use it over and over and over again...noone said that we had to get to a final number -- we know how much border patrol agents make - we know how much INS agents make -- what additional info do you need?
QUOTE(billfmsd @ Mar 12 2009, 10:41 PM)
QUOTE(GOPGuy @ Mar 12 2009, 11:20 PM)
Lets not forget that shutting down the border helps more than just illegal immigration, it will help against other criminal activity. And as long as people are getting fake credentials they will come across the border even if you crack down on employers. Erect a fence, man using boots on the ground and technology and then begin the process of scrubbing the illegals out of the system.
Cracking down harder on illegal employment will at least thin border traffic enough to make spotting other criminal activity easier. For every one employer busted, there will be dozens of others scared into compliance. For every employer scared into compliance, there will be dozens of illegal jobs eliminated. The less jobs, the less of a reason to cross, the less traffic at the border, the easier it is to stop any crime or security threat at the border. You may even see border traffic reversed from jobless illegal immigrants going home to fix problems in their own country.By your metrics and the recent busts all the employers just about are in compliance...but GOP Guy will never go along with an approach like yours that leaves all the illegals in the US to get home to their nation without detention and deportation...another MAJOR flaw in your proposal which my plan addressed...and yours does not...
This is more important than ever now that more people want to get out of Mexico than ever because of the drug wars going on...
QUOTE(GOPGuy @ Mar 12 2009, 10:20 PM)
QUOTE(billfmsd @ Mar 12 2009, 10:58 PM)
QUOTE(GOPGuy @ Mar 12 2009, 02:07 PM)
I don't know what I can add to this conversation. But here are my thoughts on this issue.
1. Both Republicans and Democrats need to fix this problem and not worry about jockeying for votes.
2. The border needs to be shut down immediately via a fix, troops or whatever means necessary.
3. The argument that hispanics do jobs Americans won't do is stupid. I seem to recall a news item where 700 people applied for a janitorial job. Somehow I doubt those were 700 illegals applying for this job.
4. All illegals need to be exported and barred from re-entry for 5 yrs and fined $1000 for every year they have been in the US illegally.
5. ICE needs to crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegals
6. A guest worker program needs to be setup to provide avenues for peple to come here to work seasonally etc. This will also allow us to do background checks on who is entering this country.
7. We need to STRONGLY encourage Mexico to deter illegal immigration into the US.
8. Benefits on removing illegals are less strain on our prison systems, judicial systems, health sysetms, education systems. Billions of dollars could be saved by tax payers.
9. Our primary concerns are the citizens of the US first. Not the rights etc of people in this country illegally. As far as I am concerned your status in this country forfeits any rights under the Constitution because you are not a citizen of this country.
I am for LEGAL immigration. And if this country decides to let a million plus hispanics in every year legally then I am all for it. But until that point we should enforce the rule of law and setup a system that best works for America, not people from another country.
All but one of your points supports my 3 step approach to solving the illegal immigration problem. Thanks GOPGuy. 1. Both Republicans and Democrats need to fix this problem and not worry about jockeying for votes.
2. The border needs to be shut down immediately via a fix, troops or whatever means necessary.
3. The argument that hispanics do jobs Americans won't do is stupid. I seem to recall a news item where 700 people applied for a janitorial job. Somehow I doubt those were 700 illegals applying for this job.
4. All illegals need to be exported and barred from re-entry for 5 yrs and fined $1000 for every year they have been in the US illegally.
5. ICE needs to crack down on employers who knowingly hire illegals
6. A guest worker program needs to be setup to provide avenues for peple to come here to work seasonally etc. This will also allow us to do background checks on who is entering this country.
7. We need to STRONGLY encourage Mexico to deter illegal immigration into the US.
8. Benefits on removing illegals are less strain on our prison systems, judicial systems, health sysetms, education systems. Billions of dollars could be saved by tax payers.
9. Our primary concerns are the citizens of the US first. Not the rights etc of people in this country illegally. As far as I am concerned your status in this country forfeits any rights under the Constitution because you are not a citizen of this country.
I am for LEGAL immigration. And if this country decides to let a million plus hispanics in every year legally then I am all for it. But until that point we should enforce the rule of law and setup a system that best works for America, not people from another country.
The one point that we slightly differ on is point #2. I think we should focus more on removing the demand for illegal immigrants then we should on cutting off the supply. The cheap labor demand is one that Republicans usually overlook or ignore. Republican leaders love illegal immigrant labor for the sake of keeping their top-down corporate-profiteering cheap-labor-exploiting middle-class-punishing friends happy. Corporate Democrat leaders love it too, but I think it's been more of a wedge issue for Republicans between their leaders vs their middle-class and bluecollar base. A stronger border would make it harder to get in. But if the budget for a tighter border takes away from the budget for prosecuting illegal employment, then a tighter border will be challenged with an equal or greater force attempting to penetrate it with bigger battering rams, taller ladders, deeper tunnels and heavier-armed bolder militants with more truck-loads of illegal immigrants fighting to get in. The skies the limit on what we could spend tightening the border. Show me a 50-foot fence and I'll show you a 51-foot ladder.
Lets not forget that shutting down the border helps more than just illegal immigration, it will help against other criminal activity. And as long as people are getting fake credentials they will come across the border even if you crack down on employers. Erect a fence, man using boots on the ground and technology and then begin the process of scrubbing the illegals out of the system.
I agree the border needs to shut down...examine my list of 15 poitns GOP Guy and let me know where you agree with me...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
No it does not. And that is why its DOA...you need to offer incentives for compliance which is why my amnesty program offers a one time chance to be free of fines for past bad behavior before the fines are quadrupled AND INS agent employer enforcement is ramped up...
Bill -- where have you been reading?
My employer amnesty program provides just that -- in return for being granted amnesty for their violations -- the employers must comply with state laws in this area -- well there is a minimum wage and there are workers comp laws == etc. So you are wrong here.
Here you are just trying to out-shout me. But at least you are admitting that you are for amnesty. So it's proof that you haven't even gotten past the approach stage in the debate. We can't debate details until you either agree on the approach or convince me of a better approach.Bill -- where have you been reading?
My employer amnesty program provides just that -- in return for being granted amnesty for their violations -- the employers must comply with state laws in this area -- well there is a minimum wage and there are workers comp laws == etc. So you are wrong here.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
Bill we have been up and down with the approach/plan issue -- an approach is a plan -- but despite this reality -- I have tried to keep from using the word "plan" - and I slipped once and you just couldn't let it go...so sue me...as for the point -- your plan is DOA based on our other priorities...who is talking about immigration reform? Anyone? No. It is a low, low priority...so no money is being reallocated for anything unless you can sell it -- and there is nothing to sell here...in your plan to a broad polticial constituency
You just slipped up twice again. What we have here is a failure to communicate. An approach is between a goal and a plan. An approach is not the plan.QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
But I agree with your approach...I believe a national ID system can work -- but it has to be fully funded...I know there are some civil rights issues connected to this --- and employers will balk unless it is madeworkable...
You don't agree with my approach as long as you think it will work with amnesty:QUOTE(billfmsd @ May 4 2008, 02:16 PM)
As for amnesty. I don't see how the "pay a fine and back of the line" policy would work without some incentive to pay the fine. If paying a fine gives them the right to stay and work here, then it's not really a fine, but instead a purchase of near citizenship. That's just a lesser form of amnesty than outright forgiveness.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
I agree with going after employers as well - but I think your approach will die on the vine as it is presently conceived...first of all you will never get the support of border states for shifting border enforcement to employer enforcement...and you ignore the fact that the E-verify system is inadequate to provide good information...
The E-verify system is not the only possible way of identifying eligibility for employment of citizenship. Again, you are still talking plans. Not approachesQUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
Second, your idea of just leaving the immigrants to make their way home -- has no chance in any state in the US of receiving support --
Finally your failure to include reforms for legal aliens to be able to renew their green papers in a more deliberate manner also ignores one of the major problems with our immigration system which needs to be handled along with the border issue...
That is not my plan. That would be the effect of cracking down harder on law enforcement. But deportation is still an option and would be used, especially for criminals.Finally your failure to include reforms for legal aliens to be able to renew their green papers in a more deliberate manner also ignores one of the major problems with our immigration system which needs to be handled along with the border issue...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
billfmsd the budget copout really surprises me -- you use it over and over and over again...noone said that we had to get to a final number -- we know how much border patrol agents make - we know how much INS agents make -- what additional info do you need?[/b]
Let see. Besides salaries, you have facilities, equipment, supplies, cost of training, cost of outsourcing, cost of legal representation of the agency, cost of internal affairs investigations. Shall I go on? Much of the above is classified because it would reveal the weaknesses of the agency. Not to mention you may have budgets for collaboration between law enforcement agencies, which would also be classified so they wouldn't reveal investigations and tactics.And I'd be surprised if salaries were accounted for even a 3rd of the cost of most law enforcement agencies.
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:08 PM)
By your metrics and the recent busts all the employers just about are in compliance...but GOP Guy will never go along with an approach like yours that leaves all the illegals in the US to get home to their nation without detention and deportation...another MAJOR flaw in your proposal which my plan addressed...and yours does not...
This is more important than ever now that more people want to get out of Mexico than ever because of the drug wars going on...
I can't speak for GOPGuy. But given the choice between:This is more important than ever now that more people want to get out of Mexico than ever because of the drug wars going on...
1) leaving them here with no jobs and no citizenship or
2) giving them jobs and amnesty,
I'll bet he'd pick the former.
QUOTE(billfmsd @ Mar 16 2009, 04:32 PM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
No it does not. And that is why its DOA...you need to offer incentives for compliance which is why my amnesty program offers a one time chance to be free of fines for past bad behavior before the fines are quadrupled AND INS agent employer enforcement is ramped up...
Bill -- where have you been reading?
My employer amnesty program provides just that -- in return for being granted amnesty for their violations -- the employers must comply with state laws in this area -- well there is a minimum wage and there are workers comp laws == etc. So you are wrong here.
Here you are just trying to out-shout me. But at least you are admitting that you are for amnesty. So it's proof that you haven't even gotten past the approach stage in the debate. We can't debate details until you either agree on the approach or convince me of a better approach.Bill -- where have you been reading?
My employer amnesty program provides just that -- in return for being granted amnesty for their violations -- the employers must comply with state laws in this area -- well there is a minimum wage and there are workers comp laws == etc. So you are wrong here.
I agree with your approach as a starting point -- a jumping off point for the discussion...
I agree that your approach could be enacted as you propose it -- it would do some good -- BUT I believe it would fail to achieve the goals you have for it because of problems with it that I have outlined...
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
Bill we have been up and down with the approach/plan issue -- an approach is a plan -- but despite this reality -- I have tried to keep from using the word "plan" - and I slipped once and you just couldn't let it go...so sue me...as for the point -- your plan is DOA based on our other priorities...who is talking about immigration reform? Anyone? No. It is a low, low priority...so no money is being reallocated for anything unless you can sell it -- and there is nothing to sell here...in your plan to a broad polticial constituency
You just slipped up twice again. What we have here is a failure to communicate. An approach is between a goal and a plan. An approach is not the plan.No. I slipped up once. The first was comparing the generic approach -- not your approach...but who's counting...
We could go through your honored tiebreaker the dictionary/thesaurus maybe to settle the debate?
http://www.answers.com/topic/plan
Thesaurus:[b] plan
Top Home > Library > Literature & Language > Thesaurus
noun
A method for making, doing, or accomplishing something: blueprint, design, game plan, idea, layout, project, schema, scheme, strategy. See planned/unplanned.
A method used in dealing with something: approach, attack, course, line, modus operandi, procedure, tack, technique. See means.
Systematic arrangement and design: method, order, orderliness, organization, pattern, system, systematization, systemization. See order/disorder.
http://thesaurus.reference.com/browse/approach
Main Entry: approach
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: plan of attack, resolution
Synonyms: attitude, concept, course, crack, fling, go*, idea, lick, manner, means, method, mode, modus operandi, new wrinkle, offer, procedure, program, shot, stab, style, technique, way, whack*, wrinkle*
But somehow I doubt if this will resolve anything...[/b]
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:05 PM)
But I agree with your approach...I believe a national ID system can work -- but it has to be fully funded...I know there are some civil rights issues connected to this --- and employers will balk unless it is madeworkable...
You don't agree with my approach as long as you think it will work with amnesty:QUOTE(billfmsd @ May 4 2008, 02:16 PM)
As for amnesty. I don't see how the "pay a fine and back of the line" policy would work without some incentive to pay the fine. If paying a fine gives them the right to stay and work here, then it's not really a fine, but instead a purchase of near citizenship. That's just a lesser form of amnesty than outright forgiveness.
You are right...I do not agree with your approach unless it is part of a comprehensive effort...
As I have noted, there are several reasons for this...
The first is political -- no one will pass this legislation into law with the approach that you outlined...there is NO political will out there to do it...and there is significant political will out there to resist it...which means its DOA in the Congress -- and the Congress is the body you need to act to approve it...which means your idea stays on the shelf as it was originally conceived...
The second is practically speaking...the plan cannot work without funding...now you suggest we merely need to reallocate resources...but the only way that such a scheme would work is if you made the plan more palatable to various constituencies. You have acknowledged that employers/business have a strong lobby -- but you seem intent on a waiting game...
Third, your employer enforcement approach is also flawed as I have pointed out multiple times because it relies on an unreliable E-verify system which needs to be overhauled because it is not accurate -- it sometimes fails to identify persons who are here legally or illegally properly. As a result, legal empoyees are detained and illegal employees are not caught. Your plan cannot work without a functional E-verify system.
Fourth, your approach is flawed as well because it ignores other system stressors which need to be addressed:
A. Presently, we have a policy of arrest and deport -- you suggest a policy that no longer does this -- but lets the people find a way back to their native country on their own...well this requires a reversal in policy -- a change in the law which your approach does not provide for...
B. Presently, many employers who have legal immigrants are experiencing dififculty securing green card renewals for their employees because of backlogs -- so they have incentives to hire illegal immigrants until these issues are resolved...your approach provides no means of addressing these systemic problems...
Fifth, your approach fails to acknowledge the political reality that Congress deals with major issues in a comprehensive way -- and rarely if ever -- refines its laws that it enacts unless they have a sunset provision...so it is unlikely that such a bare bones approach like yours would ever see the light of day -- which is another reason why I urge a comprehensive approach...
QUOTE(billfmsd @ Mar 16 2009, 04:43 PM)
QUOTE(tazvil04 @ Mar 16 2009, 04:08 PM)
By your metrics and the recent busts all the employers just about are in compliance...but GOP Guy will never go along with an approach like yours that leaves all the illegals in the US to get home to their nation without detention and deportation...another MAJOR flaw in your proposal which my plan addressed...and yours does not...
This is more important than ever now that more people want to get out of Mexico than ever because of the drug wars going on...
I can't speak for GOPGuy. But given the choice between:This is more important than ever now that more people want to get out of Mexico than ever because of the drug wars going on...
1) leaving them here with no jobs and no citizenship or
2) giving them jobs and amnesty,
I'll bet he'd pick the former.
I kind of think he'd pick neither...
and prefer the status quo...
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