COMMENT:  And some lawmakers and candidates don't think states should take the immigration issue into their own hands...when their own government leaves them completely vulnerable.  This HAS to stop! Thankfully, Tennessee passed some legislation this year and when January comes, we will see a flurry of additional bills.

Short video:
DON'T TRAVEL IN AMERICA--IT'S TOO DANGEROUS 7-19-2010

TN: Illegal Immigrant Votes in Election

In this June 15, 2010 file photo, Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer speaks in Phoenix. With the scrawl of a pen, Brewer awakened a dormant - but politically explosive - issue of illegal immigration, sending shock waves across the political spectrum in an election year when both parties had hoped to sidestep the topic. (AP Photo/Ross D. Franklin, File)

Sheriff Larry Dever of Cochise County, Ariz. (Cochise County Sheriff's office photo)

(CNSNews.com) - Sheriff Larry Dever of Cochise County, Ariz., one of four Arizona counties contiguous with the U.S-Mexico border, said Friday that the U.S. Border Patrol has pulled back from parts of the border in his and neighboring counties because manning those areas has become too dangerous.
 
“And you frankly have Border Patrolmen--and I know this from talking to Border Patrol agents—who will not allow their agents to work on the border because it is too dangerous,” Dever told CNSNews.com in a videotaped interview. “Now what kind of message is that for crying out loud?”

Three states — Washington, New Mexico and Utah — allow illegal immigrants to get licenses because their laws do not require proof of citizenship or legal residency. An Associated Press analysis found that those states have seen a surge in immigrants seeking IDs in recent months, a trend experts attribute to crackdowns on illegal immigration in Arizona and elsewhere.

"It's difficult being undocumented and not having an identification," said Hernandez, of Puebla, Mexico. "You can use the Mexican ID, but people look down on it." An American driver's license is also a requirement for many jobs.

The immigration debate has thrown a spotlight on the license programs, which supporters say make financial sense because unlicensed drivers typically do not carry car insurance. Opponents insist the laws attract illegal immigrants and criminals.

"Washington state and New Mexico have been magnet states for the fraudulent document brokers, human traffickers and alien smugglers for years," said Brian Zimmer, president of the Coalition for a Secure Driver's License, a nonprofit research group in Washington, D.C. Read more here.

Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Ariz., says it is "an outrage" the Obama administration has stopped building the double-layered border fence needed to secure the U.S.-Mexico border. Babeu is shown here speaking at a Capitol Hill news conference on April 19, 2010. (CNSNews.com photo/Penny Starr)

(CNSNews.com) - Sheriff Paul Babeu of Pinal County, Ariz., says it is “an outrage” the Obama administration has stopped building the double-fencing needed to assist the Border Patrol in securing the U.S.-Mexico border and says it is time for the United States to begin fighting illegal immigration and drug smuggling directly at the border instead of within the country where it harms American citizens and communities.
 
By the time Obama was inaugurated in January 2009, according to the Justice Department, only 108 miles of the 262-mile-long Arizona portion of the 2,000-mile-long U.S.-Mexico border had been fenced.

“We shouldn’t be fighting this battle in the interior. We should be fighting it directly on our international border,” Babeu said in an "Online With Terry Jeffrey" interview. “And it’s an outrage that our own federal government stopped building the fence.”

Babeu, whose southern Arizona county sits astride major drug-and-alien-smuggling routes running north from Mexico, has joined with Sheriff Larry Dever of Cochise County, Ariz., and Arizona’s two U.S. senators, John McCain and Jon Kyl, to push a 10-point plan for securing the border. The plan includes, among other provisions, completing the necessary border fencing, deploying 3,000 National Guard troops to cover just the Arizona stretch of the border, and deploying significantly more surveillance aircraft than are currently used to patrol the border. 
 
Babeu, who is also a major in the Army National Guard and who did a tour in Iraq, formerly commanded Task Force Yuma, a deployment of 700 Army and Air Force National Guard troops who worked with the Border Patrol to secure one segment of the U.S.-Mexico border in Arizona. Read more here.

IMMIGRATION MYTHS

by Gregory Kay 

After watching the ongoing debate over illegal immigration, I keep hearing the same old arguments brought up, both by power-hungry liberals, money-hungry conservatives, and collection-hungry clergy about why it’s necessary. They have developed an entire joint mythology around the subject, and, frankly, I am both tired of it and disgusted with it, so I have decided to do a little debunking of these myths, and bust their arguments wide open. Here are the nine most common immigration myths. 
 

MYTH #1: “Immigration is a Federal problem, not a State problem!” This is obviously wrong. If that were the case, then the Federal Government, not the State, would be paying the full cost of immigration, legal and otherwise. If it was a Federal responsibility, they would be Federal wards, and the Federal Government would foot the bill and provide all logistical services for food stamps, welfare, public housing, public education, bi-lingual paperwork, interpreters, medical care, court costs, and incarceration of all illegal aliens no matter where they were in the United States. As the States are forced to pay most of this now, it is very much a State problem. 
 

MYTH #2: “Jesus, Mary and Joseph were illegal immigrants in Egypt!” No, they were not. Egypt, like Judea, Palestine, and much of the known world, were part of the Roman Empire. By being born into it, they, like the Apostle Paul described himself, were freeborn Roman citizens, with as much legal standing and the same rights as if they had been born in Rome itself. They didn’t cross the border from one country into another; they crossed the border from one Roman province to another, not much different than I might cross the border from West Virginia into Ohio. 
 

MYTH #3: “Illegals do jobs Americans won’t do!” Anyone who says this is either a damned liar or a damned fool, and you can tell him I said so. The number of illegal aliens – not even to mention the legal ones – is about triple the number of Americans out of work, so the only possible mathematical conclusion is obvious. The people who make this claim do so because the illegals, being from the Third World, will work for Third World wages under Third World conditions, something Americans, quite justifiably, will not do. 

MYTH #4: “It’s un-Christian to stop illegal immigrants who just want to better their lives!” Actually, it is un-Christian to support them, because they are, according to the Bible, thieves. Jesus Christ said so himself, in John 10:1: “Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that entereth not by the door into the sheepfold, but climbeth up some other way, the same is a thief and a robber.” Remember, that guy breaking into your house and stealing your TV is just trying to better his life too. There is absolutely no moral difference between them; both are intentionally breaking the law in order to take something, be it a TV or a job – or, more likely, welfare – that is not theirs and they are not entitled to. 

MYTH #5: “We have to accept them because we came here uninvited ourselves!” Tell you what; got out to a reservation and ask an Indian what happens when you allow a bunch of strangers in. There is no moral onus on us that forces us to repeat someone else’s tragic mistake just because we benefited from it. The lesson is plain and in front of us, and we’re fools if we don’t pay heed to it. 

MYTH #6: “It’s morally wrong to throw out women and children!” What if you came home from work, and some strange woman and her brood of brats had moved into your house without your permission, were eating your food, taking your own kids’ belongings, and demanding that you pay for their bills, medical care, and education? They’d be lucky if their little brown butts only bounced three times on the sidewalk before they hit the curb, and you know it. Well, illegal immigration is the exact same thing, only on a larger scale, and should be handled in exactly the same manner. 

MYTH #7: “We will never be able to completely secure the Southern border!” Oh, so we’ve sunk so far we don’t even have the power or technology of the 1960s Soviet Union, who built this little thing called the ‘Iron Curtain?’ It’s much less difficult with modern technology, especially when, in our case, the vast majority of our people are behind the idea. 

MYTH #8: “We can’t realistically deport millions of people!” Of course we can, through a logical, step-by-step process.  

1. Make them want to leave by severing all public assistance funding, including medical care and education for illegals.

2. Begin severely fining businesses and arresting people who hire them, and begin asset seizure proceedings against those who make a pattern of doing so under the RICO statutes, with the said assets to be sold at public auction to recoup the cost of immigration enforcement.

3. Charge any person, organization, or church intentionally harboring illegal aliens with conspiracy to violate Federal immigration law, imprison the offenders, and begin asset seizure proceedings against them.

4. Charge any public official who votes for ‘sanctuary city’ status with conspiracy to violate Federal immigration law and imprison the offenders.

5. Offer a bounty of $1000 dollars a head to anyone giving information leading to the arrest and deportation of an illegal alien.

6. Give any illegal currently living here who owns property the chance to turn himself in; he will be given ninety days to get his affairs in order and put his property up for sale, after which he can leave in an orderly manner. If he fails to turn himself in, all personal property will be seized and he will be immediately deported.

7. Secure the Southern border using a combination of National Guard and regular military troops, a border fence, and high tech surveillance equipment, empowered to make arrests and use deadly force as necessary. Guarding the country’s border is the single most legitimate function of the military.

8. Make any illegal entry subject to one year in Federal prison at hard labor, followed by immediate deportation with no appeal. 

MYTH #9: “Illegal immigrants contribute to our economy!” This statement is patently untrue. The middle of the road figure in the studies I examined indicate that each illegal alien costs the American taxpayer $9000 per year. There are well over 20 million illegals in this country, so you can do the math. That kind of economic contribution we can do without!

Originally published in THE FIRST FREEDOM monthly: http://www.gulftel.com/firstfreedom/ May be distributed free and unedited only; all for-profit publication by permission of the author only. Contact: gregmkay@yahoo.com

Gregory Kay is the author of THE THIRD REVOLUTION Series, available at
http://www.amazon.com/Gregory-Kay/e/B0037LL4VS/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_1?qid=1278639371&sr=1-1

COMMENT: There are some very troubling statements in this article. Using the political characteristics of illegals aliens as a justification for giving them amnesty seems to me to be compromising the law for political gain. This isn't about whether some of these people would support conservative policies, it is about the LAW!  It is about being a nation of laws and enforcing those laws equally across the board. Wanting our laws ENFORCED does not make us anti-immigration reform or anti-Latino.

What other crime would those quoted in the article agree that the guilty perpetrators should receive no real penalty for committing? Why should those who have already broken the law be allowed to jump in front of those who are trying to come here legally??
This whole dialog doesn't even address the OTMs (Other Than Mexicans -- like Muslims, etc.) that are coming across our porous borders. 
FIRST: Build the fence and enforce the laws passed by our duly elected representatives including the laws against employing illegals. (Amnesty supporters frequently state, as Richard Land did on a radio program on Saturday, that we don't have the political will to deport 12 million people. No one serious is suggesting deportation. However if jobs aren't available many of the illegals will probably leave of their own accord as they have been doing to some extent as our economy has tanked.)
THEN: Calmly look at the whole immigration/worker issue (NOT based on which party can leverage their votes) including a conversation about streamlining the process to come here legally.

Frankly, I don't see ANY Scripture that suggests that lawbreakers should be given special rights.  I do not interpret "treat the stranger as you would yourself" as a blank check for those who break the law.  Does anyone really believe that the 'stranger' here is someone who has broken the law to be where they are? And besides that, enforcing the law is not mistreatment of anyone and should apply to citizen and 'stranger' alike.  Remember,  "Justice" has a blindfold on!!

In the spirit of full disclosure, I have been an active Southern Baptist since 1947.

Obama Wins Unlikely Allies in Immigration

Normally on the opposite side of political issues backed by the Obama White House, these leaders are aligning with the president to support an overhaul that would include some path to legalization for illegal immigrants already here. They are preaching from pulpits, conducting conference calls with pastors and testifying in Washington — as they did last Wednesday.

“I am a Christian and I am a conservative and I am a Republican, in that order,” said Matthew D. Staver, founder and chairman of Liberty Counsel, a conservative religious law firm. “There is very little I agree with regarding President Barack Obama. On the other hand, I’m not going to let politicized rhetoric or party affiliation trump my values, and if he’s right on this issue, I will support him on this issue.”

When President Obama gave a major address pushing immigration overhaul this month, he was introduced by a prominent evangelical, the Rev. Bill Hybels of Willow Creek Community Church in Illinois. Three other evangelical pastors were in the audience, front and center.

Their presence was a testament, in part, to the work of politically active Hispanic evangelical pastors, who have forged friendships with non-Hispanic pastors in recent years while working in coalitions to oppose abortion and same-sex marriage. The Hispanics made a concerted effort to convince their brethren that immigration reform should be a moral and practical priority.

Hispanic storefront churches are popping up in strip malls, and Spanish-speaking congregations are renting space in other churches. Some pastors, like Mr. Hybels, lead churches that include growing numbers of Hispanics. Several evangelical leaders said they were convinced that Hispanics are the key to growth not only for the evangelical movement, but also for the social conservative movement.

“Hispanics are religious, family-oriented, pro-life, entrepreneurial,” said the Rev. Richard D. Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, the Southern Baptist Convention’s public policy arm. “They are hard-wired social conservatives, unless they’re driven away.

“I’ve had some older conservative leaders say: ‘Richard, stop this. You’re going to split the conservative coalition,’ ” Dr. Land continued. “I say it might split the old conservative coalition, but it won’t split the new one. And if the new one is going to be a governing coalition, it’s going to have to have a lot of Hispanics in it. And you don’t get a lot of Hispanics in your coalition by engaging in anti-Hispanic anti-immigration rhetoric.”

Congress is unlikely to pass an immigration law this year. Republicans and Democrats who face re-election in November are skittish about the issue, given the broad public support for Arizona’s new law aiming to crack down on illegal immigration.

The support of evangelical leaders is not yet enough to change the equation. But they could mobilize a potentially large constituency of religious conservatives, an important part of the Republican base better known for lobbying against abortion and same-sex marriage. They already threaten the party’s near unity on immigration.

“These cross-cutting clusters are just splinter groups, so far,” said Larry J. Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. “Support for the Arizona law is so strong within the G.O.P. that it will be difficult for the comprehensive-immigration-reform evangelicals to have much short-term impact.”

But some evangelical leaders said their latest strategy was to push a handful of lame-duck Republicans to join Democrats — probably after the midterms — to pass an immigration bill on the ground that it is morally right.

Although other religious leaders have long favored immigration overhaul — including Roman Catholics, mainline Protestants, Jews and Muslims — the evangelicals are crucial because they have the relationships and the pull with Republicans.

“My message to Republican leaders,” said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, the president of the evangelical National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference and one of the leaders who engaged his non-Hispanic peers, “is if you’re anti-immigration reform, you’re anti-Latino, and if you’re anti-Latino, you are anti-Christian church in America, and you are anti-evangelical.”

About 70 percent of Hispanics in the United States are Catholic, but some 15 percent are evangelicals, and they are far more likely than the Catholics to identify themselves as conservative and Republican.

ID Card for Workers Is at Center of Immigration Plan

By LAURA MECKLER

Getty Images

Customs and Border Protection agent Jesus Gomez checks a passport at the vehicle crossing at the San Ysidro Port of Entry in California.

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain.

Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker.

The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past.

The uphill effort to pass a bill is being led by Sens. Chuck Schumer (D., N.Y.) and Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who plan to meet with President Barack Obama as soon as this week to update him on their work. An administration official said the White House had no position on the biometric card.

"It's the nub of solving the immigration dilemma politically speaking," Mr. Schumer said in an interview. The card, he said, would directly answer concerns that after legislation is signed, another wave of illegal immigrants would arrive. "If you say they can't get a job when they come here, you'll stop it."

"It is fundamentally a massive invasion of people's privacy," said Chris Calabrese, legislative counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union. "We're not only talking about fingerprinting every American, treating ordinary Americans like criminals in order to work. We're also talking about a card that would quickly spread from work to voting to travel to pretty much every aspect of American life that requires identification."

Mr. Graham says he respects those concerns but disagrees. "We've all got Social Security cards," he said. "They're just easily tampered with. Make them tamper-proof. That's all I'm saying."

U.S. employers now have the option of using an online system called E-Verify to check whether potential employees are in the U.S. legally. Many Republicans have pressed to make the system mandatory. But others, including Mr. Schumer, complain that the existing system is ineffective.

Last year, White House aides said they expected to push immigration legislation in 2010. But with health care and unemployment dominating his attention, the president has given little indication the issue is a priority.

Rather, Mr. Obama has said he wanted to see bipartisan support in Congress first. So far, Mr. Graham is the only Republican to voice interest publicly, and he wants at least one other GOP co-sponsor to launch the effort. Read more here.

The Snitch in Your Pocket

Amid all the furor over the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program a few years ago, a mini-revolt was brewing over another type of federal snooping that was getting no public attention at all. Federal prosecutors were seeking what seemed to be unusually sensitive records: internal data from telecommunications companies that showed the locations of their customers' cell phones—sometimes in real time, sometimes after the fact. The prosecutors said they needed the records to trace the movements of suspected drug traffickers, human smugglers, even corrupt public officials. But many federal magistrates—whose job is to sign off on search warrants and handle other routine court duties—were spooked by the requests. Some in New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas balked. Prosecutors "were using the cell phone as a surreptitious tracking device," said Stephen W. Smith, a federal magistrate in Houston. "And I started asking the U.S. Attorney's Office, 'What is the legal authority for this? What is the legal standard for getting this information?' "

Those questions are now at the core of a constitutional clash between President Obama's Justice Department and civil libertarians alarmed by what they see as the government's relentless intrusion into the private lives of citizens. There are numerous other fronts in the privacy wars—about the content of e-mails, for instance, and access to bank records and credit-card transactions. The Feds now can quietly get all that information. But cell-phone tracking is among the more unsettling forms of government surveillance, conjuring up Orwellian images of Big Brother secretly following your movements through the small device in your pocket. 
How many of the owners of the country's 277 million cell phones even know that companies like AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint can track their devices in real time? Most "don't have a clue," says privacy advocate James X. Dempsey. The tracking is possible because either the phones have tiny GPS units inside or each phone call is routed through towers that can be used to pinpoint a phone's location to areas as small as a city block. This capability to trace ever more precise cell-phone locations has been spurred by a Federal Communications Commission rule designed to help police and other emergency officers during 911 calls. But the FBI and other law-enforcement outfits have been obtaining more and more records of cell-phone locations—without notifying the targets or getting judicial warrants establishing "probable cause," according to law-enforcement officials, court records, and telecommunication executives. (The Justice Department draws a distinction between cell-tower data and GPS information, according to a spokeswoman, and will often get warrants for the latter.) Read more here.

COMMENT: While lots of attention is being focused on the Obama-Reid-Pelosi health care debacle, another battle is revving up. One can only hope that Mexico's ambassador is a prophet.  We won this battle in 2007 and we must win it again.

1.  Rep. Gutierrez Introduces Mass Amnesty Bill
2.  Obama to American Workers: Drop Dead
3.  Rhymes With Dumb:  Legalizing Illegals Before They Even Immigrate.
4.  Catholic Bishops Launch New Push for Immigration Reform
5.  Mexico says immigration reform unlikely in 2010

Rep. Gutierrez Introduces Mass Amnesty Bill

Tuesday, December 15, 2009, 4:47 PM EST - posted on NumbersUSA

Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) introduced legislation today that offers amnesty to the nation's estimated 11-18 million illegal aliens. The Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity Act (H.R. 4321) would increase annual immigration numbers while putting an end to many of the enforcement mechanisms currently put into place by federal, state and local governments.

Rep. Solomon Ortiz (D-Texas) is the bill's official sponsor. The bill was introduced with 91 original cosponsors including Rep. Gutierrez.

H.R. 4321 would offer amnesty to all illegal aliens living in the United States at the time of the bill's passage as long as they meet a short list of requirements, including a criminal and security background check and a fine of $500 which will be waved for children and individuals who entered the country before the age of 16. Illegal aliens can then become citizenship by meeting requirements over a six-year period.

The bill would also discontinue E-Verify in lieu of a new employment authorization system. The initial outline of the bill provided by the American Immigration Lawyers Association does not offer details of the new system, but Rep. Gutierrez championed a biometrics verification system during a Senate Immigration Subcommittee hearing earlier this year. Read more here.

Obama to American workers: Drop dead

By D.A. KING

With the open borders lobby's usual shameless contempt for the intellect of the American people, Gutierrez is calling his bill "Comprehensive Immigration Reform for America's Security and Prosperity."

The 2010 battle for repeating the "one-time" amnesty of 1986 has begun.

Don't expect the legislation to receive nearly as much attention from the media as Tiger Woods' love life. The hope is that we are too busy to remember that President Obama promised to deliver amnesty as part of his "Hope and Change" election campaign — or to consider that nagging detail about America's raging unemployment crisis.

The contrived talking point is that legalizing the current batch of job thieves would result in a "boon to American workers" and somehow "strengthen our economy." I am not making this up.

America's unemployment rate dipped from 10.2 percent in October to 10 percent in November. Many economists put the actual unemployment rate at 17 percent. Using the most positive figures, about 16 million Americans are out of work.

Official statistics show a loss of 11,000 jobs last month. About 190,000 jobs were lost in October.

While monitoring CNN, I heard a reporter tell viewers that there are at least six applicants for each available job.

One pundit put it this way: "Unemployment isn't just worse than Obama said it would be with the stimulus. It's even worse than he said it would be without the stimulus."

In addition to his recent "jobs summit" designed to get ideas on how to cut unemployment, the American president has publicly promised to pursue "every additional and responsible step" to get America back to work. Except, apparently, to stem the flow of illegal immigration into the U.S. and to remove the black market replacement labor from the work force.

Obama could put about 8 million Americans in jobs next week if he would only enthusiastically enforce existing immigration and employment laws today. As a longtime American who studies the organized crime that is illegal immigration — which is directly related to American unemployment — let me share some facts that Gutierrez and Obama hope you will never see.

You are supposed to believe the fairy tale that American borders have been secured.

U.S. Border Patrol apprehended 556,040 new "undocumented workers" illegally crossing our borders in fiscal year 2009, which ended Sept. 30. Optimistic official estimates are one in four or five illegal alien border crossers are captured at the border.

Do the math.  Read more here.

Rhymes With Dumb: Legalizing Illegals Before They Even Immigrate

The proposed House amnesty bill (HR 4321) not only grants legal status to virtually all 12 million illegal aliens in the country, it also provides (in Sec. 317) legalization 100,000 wannabe illegals each year for three years who have not yet even set foot in the country. For a summary of the 644-page bill see here, and for the complete text see here.

It is another visa lottery, this time for some of the people now living in nations that send us illegal aliens, such as Mexico. To be eligible you have to be ineligible for any of the multitudinous other ways that one can obtain an immigrant visa. You have to be out of the country and be willing to "submit to criminal background checks" and, presumably, pass those checks.

This is a case of Thinking Ahead, a program to legalize illegal immigrants before they even do the migrating; maybe before they even think about it.

It is called the "Prevent Unauthorized Migration (PUM) Visa." PUM rhymes with...

The program has a couple of interesting aspects. First, it enables the lottery winners to obtain a conditional visa which can be converted to a green card after three years. In contrast, the conditional visas granted to actual illegal aliens already in the country under the proposed amnesty cannot be converted to the green card until after the passage of six years.

Second, the benefits of the program are to be denied to two classes of people – those with serious criminal records, and those who have graduated from college ("has completed less than a 4-year college degree program"). It sounds like the old rules for voting for the British House of Commons; all citizens could do so, except lunatics and members of the House of Lords.

Most nations have immigrant-screening processes that tilt in favor of those with higher education – but this proposed visa bars such people.

There are other intriguing aspects of the House plan. One is the twisted use of the language. A $500 filing fee – and the immigration process is full of fees – suddenly becomes a fine in this program. This term is used to suggest that the illegals are paying a penalty for their prior status, which makes their legalization OK. One wonders if $500 a head would even pay for the costs of the program.

Another is the provision (Sec. 313) for giving the sons and daughters of Filipino World War II veterans permanent admission outside the annual numerical limitations which routinely keeps migration from the Philippines down to 20,000. (All nations have such a ceiling for what is defined as numerically-limited migration.)

Two thoughts here: 1) if this second-generation reward for service to the cause in WW II is important – and it is not extended to children of those killed in Battles for Britain or Stalingrad – why not give these second-generation members priority over other Filipinos within the numerical ceilings?

2) American governmental history is ignored here. The U.S. government spent millions trying to identify veterans of the Filipino Army right after World War II, in order to pay pensions. Even before WW II the paper records of that army were not the best, and what did exist in 1941 was pretty thoroughly destroyed during the Japanese occupation. Now DHS and State will be asked to match the fragmentary army records with that nation's shaky system of birth records – the opportunities for document fraud are enormous.

Neither the bill nor the summary mention that the U.S. Government, earlier this year, paid out an additional $105 million to the 11,000 surviving Filipino veterans of WW II, in lump sum payments of $15,000 (to citizens) and $9,000 (to noncitizens); these payments were in addition to all other benefits that these veterans had received over the years from the other veterans compensation programs of the two nations.

Some of the children of these veterans – the ones with the special immigration benefits – might be getting a little old for migrating anywhere. The war years were 1941-1945, so the children of those serving were probably mostly born between 1930 and 1970, and thus are now 39 to 79 years of age. Their spouses and minor children would also get such visas.

Mexico says immigration reform unlikely in 2010

By MARK STEVENSON - Associated Press Writer

In an unusually frank assessment, Ambassador Arturo Sarukhan said Mexico will continue its quiet, "under the radar" lobbying for a reform that would benefit the estimated 11.8 million Mexicans living in the United States. A large percentage are undocumented.

"It's not that it is unachievable. It is possible, but it will be difficult," he told a news conference. "And this year, especially, the conditions ... will be particularly difficult." Read more here.

COMMENT: Like the waves on the shore, the liberal agenda just keeps coming.

Homeland Security Secretary Can’t Say If Illegal Aliens Will Get Stimulus Money
Friday, April 10, 2009
By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer
http://cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=46397

A New Argument About Immigration

Read this article online: http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2008/may08/08-05-28.html

Many arguments, pro and con, about how to deal with illegal aliens have been passionately debated over the past couple of years, but there are still other arguments that need public exposure. Mark Krikorian presents a new argument in his forthcoming book called "The New Case Against Immigration: Both Legal and Illegal."

The pro-more-immigration crowd argues that today's immigrants are just like immigrants of a century ago: poor people looking for a better life who are expected to advance in our land of opportunity. Krikorian's new argument is that while today's immigrants may be like earlier ones, the America they come to is so very different that our previous experience with immigrants is practically irrelevant.

The essential difference between the two waves of immigrants was best summed up by the Nobel Prize-winning advocate of a free market, Milton Friedman. He said, "It's just obvious that you can't have free immigration and a welfare state."

The term "welfare state" does not just mean handouts to the non-working. Our welfare state encompasses dozens of social programs that provide benefits to the "working poor," i.e., people working for wages low enough that they pay little or no income taxes.

Immigrants of the previous generation were expected to earn their own living, pay taxes like everybody else, learn our language, love America, and assimilate into our culture. Today's immigrants likewise come here for jobs not welfare.

During those prior major waves of immigration, the United States didn't have a welfare state. Native-born Americans survived the Great Depression of the 1930s without a welfare state.

The Social Security retirement system was established only in 1935. Most other agencies that redistribute cash and costly benefits from taxpayers to non-taxpayers started with Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the late 1960s.

Today's low-wage immigrants and lower-wage illegals can't earn what it costs to live in modern America, so they supplement with means-tested taxpayer benefits. And many immigrants don't learn our language or assimilate into American culture because of the multicultural diversity taught in our schools and encouraged in our society.

Today's immigrants fit the profile of the people who benefit from our welfare state: the working poor with large families. Krikorian sets forth some dismal figures.

About 30 percent of all immigrants in the U.S. workforce in 2005 lacked a high school education, which is four times the rate for native-born Americans. Among the largest group of working-age immigrants, the Mexicans, 62 percent have less than a high-school education, which means they work low-wage jobs.

Nearly half of immigrant households, 45 percent, are in or near poverty compared with 29 percent of native-headed households. Among Mexicans living in the United States, nearly two-thirds live in or near the government's definition of poverty.

Costly social benefits provided to the working poor include Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (now called TANF, formerly AFDC), food stamps, school lunches, Medicaid, WIC (nutrition for Women, Infants and Children), public housing, and Supplemental Security Income (SSI).

The Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) is one of the most expensive parts of income redistribution. Twice as many immigrant households (30 percent) qualify for this cash handout as native-headed households (15 percent).

Health care is another huge cost. Nearly half of immigrants are either uninsured or on Medicaid, which is nearly double the rate for native-born families. Federal law requires hospitals to treat all comers to emergency rooms, even if uninsured and unable to pay.

Hospitals try to shift the costs onto their paying patients, and when the hospitals exhaust their ability to do this, they close their doors. In Los Angeles, 60 hospitals have closed their emergency rooms over the past decade, which imposes another kind of cost.

Immigration accounts for nearly all the growth in elementary and secondary school enrollment over the past generation. The children of immigrants now comprise 19 percent of the school-age population and 21 percent of the preschool population.

The Heritage Foundation estimated that in order to reduce government payments to the average low-skill household to a level equal to the taxes it pays, "it would be necessary to eliminate Social Security and Medicare, all means-tested welfare, and to cut expenditures on public education roughly in half." Obviously, that is not going to happen.

Attempts to limit welfare eligibility for illegal aliens by provisions added to the 1996 welfare reform law, SSI, food stamps, Medicaid and TANF all failed. Krikorian concludes that "Walling immigrants off from government benefits once we've let them in is a fantasy."

As Americans are pinched between falling real estate values and the inflation of necessities such as gasoline, they are entitled to know how their tax dollars are being spent. The big bite that social benefits to immigrants (one-third of whom are illegal) takes out of taxpayers' paychecks should be factored into any debate about immigration or amnesty policy.

How the Government Spends Taxpayers' Money

Read this article online: http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2008/apr08/08-04-23.html

1.  Judges Getting the Message About Illegal Aliens
2.  3 Imprisoned for hiring illegal immigrants for cleaning firm.

Judges Getting the Message About Illegal Aliens

Four children including two brothers were killed, and 12 others were hospitalized with injuries, in Minnesota last week when a van reportedly ignored a stop sign and barreled into a school bus. The driver of the van, who did not speak English or have a valid driver's license, was charged with homicide.

Authorities described the driver as an illegal alien using a phony name. She had pled guilty in 2006 for driving without a license.

For years, courts and lawyers have intimidated towns from protecting themselves against the invasion of illegal aliens. In 2006, Escondido, California backed away from its housing ordinance to curtail leases to illegal aliens and even agreed to pay $90,000 in legal fees to plaintiffs challenging the law.

Last summer, a federal court slapped down an attempt by Hazleton, Pennsylvania to penalize employers and landlords who hire and lease to illegal aliens. Hazleton had been hit by an influx of illegal aliens and victimized by some of their shocking crimes.

But in August, Newark, New Jersey, no stranger to violence, was shaken by the brutal murder of several college-bound teenagers who were harmlessly enjoying music at a playground. The victims were black, and the perpetrator was an illegal alien from Peru who had been previously charged with raping a five-year-old girl but released despite his obvious illegal presence in this country.

Another imported crime is driving too fast the wrong way on highways, with the headlights turned off, in order to escape detection while smuggling drugs or people. Several deadly crashes resulting from this practice have been reported.

The American people's outrage at law violations by illegal aliens was heard loud and clear by the Senate when it defeated the amnesty bill last year. Now, even judges may be getting the message.

In December 2007, a federal judge in Oklahoma upheld an Oklahoma law requiring state contractors to determine and verify the immigration status of new hires. Judge James H. Payne threw out a legal challenge to the law.

Less than two months later, in January 2008, federal Judge E. Richard Webber emphatically ruled against illegal aliens who had sued to overturn a similar ordinance enacted by Valley Park, Missouri, a town near St. Louis. The court upheld the ordinance, which was directed at employers who were hiring illegal aliens.

The third strike against illegal aliens came in February when federal Judge Neil V. Wake rejected each and every argument challenging a new Arizona law that imposes penalties on businesses that knowingly hire illegal aliens. He dismissed the claim that federal law somehow ties the hands of state and local governments seeking to protect their own citizens.

These three decisions in three different parts of the country included both Republican and Democratic-appointed judges. In the term loved by the mainstream media, there is now bipartisan judicial support for state and local legislation against illegal aliens.

Law Professor Kris Kobach says these decisions give "a green light to other communities" seeking to pass similar ordinances.

The mayor of Hazleton, Lou Barletta, vigorously supported his city's ordinance cracking down on illegal aliens. Despite being vilified by liberal Pennsylvania newspapers, he won nearly 95 percent of the vote in his Republican primary for reelection last year.

But that wasn't all! In the same election, he also won the Democratic nomination on a write-in vote, defeating the leading candidate in the Democratic primary by a stunning 2-to-1 margin.

In the Arizona case, the court noted the research of Harvard economist George Borjas, who concluded that hiring illegal aliens depresses wages for legal workers because the illegals accept lower pay without benefits. Those hardest hit are uneducated legal workers, who lost $1.4 billion in 2006 in the form of lower wages in Arizona alone.

The nine months between now and the November election give states, cities and towns ample time to do what Congress has failed to do: protect us against the lawless entry of illegal aliens. That means penalizing employers who hire illegal aliens and landlords who lease to them.

It is long overdue for our public officials to rid the U.S. of imported crimes and to stand up for our legal workers, especially the poorly educated ones who need an entry-level job to start building their lives. Now that we have a green light from the courts, states and cities should proceed full steam ahead to protect us from illegal aliens.

Further Reading: IMMIGRATION & BORDER SECURITY, JUDGES

Read this article online: http://www.eagleforum.org/column/2008/mar08/08-03-05.html

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3 imprisoned for hiring illegal immigrants for cleaning firm

By Sally Apgar |South Florida Sun-Sentinel

March 5, 2008

A West Palm Beach man was sentenced Monday to more than four years in prison and ordered to pay $16 million in unpaid taxes for his role in a nationwide tax scheme that employed illegal immigrants as janitors to clean for restaurant chains like Hard Rock Cafe, Dave & Busters and Yardhouse.

Scott Cunningham, 44, the former vice president of Rosenbaum-Cunningham International (RCI), was sentenced to four years and three months by U.S. District Court Judge Paul Maloney in Grand Rapids, Mich.

Along with Cunningham, the company's former president, Richard M. Rosenbaum, 61, of Longwood, was sentenced to 10 years and ordered to pay $16.9 million. A third defendant, Christina A. Flocken, 60, who once served as RCI's controller, was sentenced to 2 1/2 and ordered to pay $15.7 million.

Maloney also ordered the three to forfeit bank accounts, life insurance policies and cash totaling more than $3 million that prosecutors said was derived from their illegal activities. Cunningham is expected to forfeit a home in the gated community of Ibis Golf and Country Club.

In handing down the sentence, Maloney said the crimes involved a "massive tax scheme involving illegal aliens."

Assistant Secretary for Homeland Security Julie L. Meyers said, "For too long, unscrupulous employers like those who owned and operated RCI have been able to undercut their competition by building their work force with illegal labor."

Myers added that "targeting employers who profit from illegal hiring is a key component to stopping illegal immigration."

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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/palmbeach/sfl-flpillegal0305pnmar05,0,4670611.story
 

Immigration and Christian duty