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A Mandatory Employment Verification System without Reform is a Recipe for Disaster

Unabashed promoters of E-verify have had a busy week, moving from hearings in the Senate and House to Rep. Heath Shuler’s (D-NC) pep rally for the 2009 version of his fatally flawed SAVE Act—a bill that continues to promote the deportation-only version of immigration reform. Step back from all this activity, however, and two things are clear: 1) serious problems continue to plague a wide-scale implementation of an electronic employment verification system (EEVS); and 2) those problems won’t be tackled except in the context of comprehensive immigration reform. Read more at ImmigrationImpact.com. (July 23, 2009)

New Yorker Profile of Joe Arpaio is Not a Pretty Picture

The July 20th issue of The New Yorker paints a detailed portrait of Maricopa County, Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio—and it is not a pretty picture. The profile of “Sheriff Joe” that emerges from the story by journalist William Finnegan is that of a man obsessed with publicity and self-promotion, who has a deep streak of sadism and little regard for the U.S. Constitution, civil rights, actual crime-fighting, or protecting the safety of the public he ostensibly serves. While Arpaio persists in his personal crusade against unauthorized immigrants, serious crimes go unsolved, emergency-response times climb, and the rights of native-born Americans and immigrants alike are routinely trampled in the process. The most remarkable aspect of this story is that Arpaio is still legally permitted to carry a badge and a gun after more than a decade and a half of egregiously abusing his power. Read more at ImmigrationImpact.com. (July 22, 2009)

Senate Hearing on Employment Verification System Leaves Many Questions Unanswered

Today the Senate Immigration Subcommittee held a hearing addressing electronic employment verification. While today’s hearing acknowledged that employment verification is an important element of comprehensive immigration reform, serious questions remain about how a mandatory employment verification system should be designed. Today’s momentum building must be paired with serious analysis of the many serious issues involved with a large, mandatory employment verification system. Read more at ImmigrationImpact.com. (July 21, 2009)

Rise in Latino and Asian Voters Marks Significant Change in Political Landscape

Today, the U.S. Census Bureau published new data, Voting and Registration in the Election of 2008, which tracks demographic characteristics of the 131 million U.S. citizens who reported that they voted in the 2008 presidential election. The Census Bureau’s new data set shows a significant increase of about 5 million voters from the 2004 presidential election—including 2 million more Latino voters and 600,000 more Asian voters. Relative to the presidential election of 2004, the voting rates for blacks, Asians, and Latinos each increased by about 4 percentage points. The voting rate for non-Latino whites decreased by 1 percentage point. Read more at ImmigrationImpact.com. (July 20, 2009)

Old Anti-Immigrant Ideas, Even Bad Ones, Die Hard

Without an ounce of originality, tired old anti-immigrant groups are once again joining forces to exploit California’s bad economy and scapegoat the Golden State’s immigrant population. Through a ballot initiative, they seek to cut benefits to U.S. citizen children and throw the 14th amendment of the U.S. constitution, which grants individuals born in America their citizenship, out the window. According to the L.A. Times, the organizers of the amendment are seeking to curb what they call “invasion by birth canal” and are using the bad California economy as their latest opportunity to bash immigrants. Read more at ImmigrationImpact.com. (July 17, 2009)

CIS Proposes Unique Approach to Union Organizing

What’s the best way to help workers form a union in a workplace where managers have spent years wantonly violating labor laws by threatening and intimidating workers into resisting unionization? If you’re the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the answer would seem to be “get rid of the workers.” At least, that is one of the main recommendations contained within a rather confusing new CIS report on the aftermath of the January 2007 immigration raids conducted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents at the Smithfield pork plant in Tar Heel, North Carolina. Holding up Smithfield as a prototype for the nation, the CIS report vaguely suggests that destructive immigration raids and a flawed electronic employment-verification system will not only succeed in draining millions of unauthorized immigrants from the United States, but bolster unionization for American workers, too. These are fanciful notions at best. Read more at ImmigrationImpact.com. (July 16, 2009)

Including Immigrants in Health Care Reform Makes Economic Sense

Soon after the health care debate began in Washington, Congress immediately started running into immigration potholes. For the most part, the health care conversation centers around plans to insure as many Americans as possible. Experts, Members of Congress and the Administration generally agree that it is less costly in the long-run to include as many people as possible. However, it gets trickier when they begin considering that approximately 12% of the U.S. population is foreign-born. While most in Washington have completely written off the possibility of including undocumented immigrants in any kind of coverage plan, Congress continues to be perplexed over legal permanent residents—our citizens-in-waiting. Yet loads of good data present a compelling argument for why it makes more sense to be inclusive... Read more at ImmigrationImpact.com. (July 15, 2009)