Immigration Policy Center

Published on Thu, Apr 14, 2011

As Florida business and faith leaders speak out against state immigration-enforcement proposals, a new report released Tuesday raises questions about President Obama’s leadership in crafting a federal solution.

Florida business and faith leaders who spoke as part of a National Immigration Forum press conference on Wednesday said proposed state legislature immigration bills are harmful and that immigration is a federal problem that requires a federal solution.

Adam Babington, vice president of government affairs for the Florida Chamber of Commerce said the state needs a federal, consistent immigration policy.

But an Immigration Policy Center report released on Tuesday concludes the Obama Administration and the Department of Homeland Security are not using their extensive authority to make the necessary changes to immigration policy.

Homeland Security is responsible for the nation’s three immigration agencies: U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (aka ICE).

The Immigration Policy Center report states:

From the beginning of the Obama Administration, there has been a tension between enhanced immigration enforcement and a push for comprehensive immigration reform (CIR). This tension increased significantly in 2010 as the Administration ramped up its immigration-enforcement efforts at the expense, many believe, of the very people most likely to benefit from legalization and CIR.

The report adds, “the public looked to the President and his Department of Homeland Security (DHS) for some measure of immigration relief. For the most part, they didn’t find it.”Read more...

Published in the American Independent

Published on Fri, Apr 08, 2011

I guess this is how Republicans do the Latino-outreach thing: Demonize Latino children, threaten to take away their birthright citizenship, and blatantly lie about the numbers of “anchor babies” being born by mothers coming here specifically to have citizen children.

Here’s Sen. David Vitter yesterday on Fox News, promoting his new federal bill to strip American-born children of undocumented immigrants of their birthright citizenship:

VITTER: It’s a very real problem. About 200,000 women come into this country annually from other countries legally, with a tourist visa, something like that, to give birth in this country so that child can automatically become a U.S. citizen. 200,000 a year!

I’m guessing that Vitter’s source for this number is either somewhere up his own nether regions, or those of hate groups such as FAIR and CIS that pump out fake statistics like this for eager Latino-bashers like Vitter and his three Senate colleagues to regurgitate into policy.

Because, as ABC News explained in their own report on this legislation:

Of the 4.2 million live births in the United States in 2006, the most recent data gathered by the National Center for Health Statistics, only 7,670 were children born to mothers who said they do not live here.

Some of those mothers could be “baby tourists,” experts say, but many could be foreign college students, diplomatic staff, or vacationers. The government does not track the reasons non-resident mothers are in the United States at the time of the birth or their citizenship.

Indeed, as the story notes, the “anchor baby” problem is a statistical pimple:

“There’s no evidence that birth tourism is a widespread problem,” said Michele Waslin, a senior policy analyst with the Immigration Policy Center. “There are ways to dealing with that issue without such sweeping changes. This is like using a sledgehammer, not a scalpel.”Read more...

Published in the Crooks and Liar

Published on Sat, Apr 09, 2011

SALT LAKE CITY – Liberal immigration activists are looking to Utah as a compassionate and logical model for shaping the nation's future policies toward illegal immigrants.

Utah leaders — including government, education, business and religious groups — came together last fall to draft a set of principles to guide the immigration debate in the state. Those guidelines, known as the Utah Compact, state in part that illegal immigrants are essential to the economy and deserving of respect.

The recommendations are credited with helping pass immigration changes last month in the Utah Legislature that included enforcement revisions and a guest worker program.

"The leadership in Utah, through the Compact, changed the debate around the country," said Ali Noorani, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based National Immigration Forum. "It's clear the Compact has struck a chord with the silent majority that wants reform."

Noorani is working with Utah officials to create a national version of the plan, which could be announced as early as this summer.

Opponents say the approach will lead to amnesty programs that only benefit big business and caution it will lead to more illegal immigration...

Wendy Sefsaf, of the Washington, D.C.-based American Immigration Council, also points out another reason for skepticism. Even if the principles are laudable, she said, the results in Utah "did not live up to it" because it will create second-class workers who are not citizens.

Still, Utah does provide a starting point.

"We all have aspirational goals, and the compact has great aspirations," Sefsaf said. "But most states are just reacting. Utah at least tried something that wasn't just about deporting people."

Published in the Associated Press

Published on Wed, Apr 06, 2011

Republicans like Reps. David Vitter and Mike Lee and Sens. Rand Paul and Jerry Moran all built platforms on their “pro-family” politics. So, what does it take for these men to paint childbirth as “reprehensible?” You guessed it: these GOP lawmakers are again thumping their drums against “birth tourism,” an illusory epidemic in which illegal immigrants are traveling to the United States to give birth, thus guaranteeing their child, derided by these men as “anchor babies,” national citizenship.

“It is a reprehensible practice,” said Vitter, a Louisiana Congressman whose career survived revelations that he hired hookers.

Hoping to put an end to these illegal immigrants’ life-giving ways, these Republican leaders have drafted legislation that would “correct” a misinterpretation of the 14th amendment, which clearly reads, “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside,” and restrict citizenship to children born to at least one citizen, someone in the military or a legal resident.

Opponents of the legislation not only point out that “birth tourism” hardly represents the trend Rand Paul and company claim (only 7,670 of the 4.2 million babies born in the U.S. in 2006 were by mothers who don’t live here) but also insist that the Republican leaders are playing with constitutional fire.

“The Supreme Court has upheld birthright citizenship several times, and the leading constitutional scholars agree you would have to change the Constitution, not just the Immigration and Nationality Act as they’re trying to do here,” said Michele Waslin from the Immigration Policy Center.Read more...

Published in the Death and Taxes Magazine

Published on Thu, Mar 31, 2011

Other labor rights advocates are drawing attention to the federal government’s ongoing crackdown on immigrant workers. Worksite audits which require employers to check the immigration status of their workers have resulted in thousands of layoffs in recent months. This sweeping trend hurts families as well as local economies, according to a new report from the Center for American Progress and the Immigration Policy Center.

The report specifically looks at the economic impact of immigrant workers in Arizona, but its findings present much wider implications. Marcos Restrepo at The Colorado Independent sums up the key points:

• The analysis estimates that immigrants on the whole paid $6 billion in taxes in 2008, while undocumented immigrants paid approximately $2.8 billion.

• Increase tax revenues by $1.68 billion.

The report adds that the effects of deportation in Arizona would:

• Decrease total employment by 17.2 percent.

• Eliminate 581,000 jobs for immigrant and native-born workers alike.

• Shrink the state economy by $48.8 billion.

• Reduce state tax revenues by 10.1 percent.

Meanwhile, the effects of legalization in Arizona would:

• Add 261,000 jobs for immigrant and native-born workers alike.

• Increase labor income by $5.6 billion.

Restrepo adds that, in part because of such mounting evidence, immigrants rights advocates are exhorting authorities to recognize immigrants as workers, first and foremost.

Published in the Campus Progress

Published on Wed, Mar 30, 2011

WHEN ARIZONA lawmakers enacted legislation last year inflating the power of police officers to check immigration status when they make even routine stops, they staked out a reputation for the state as a citadel of intolerance. That was by design, for their explicit purpose was to drive away the hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants who, lured by jobs and a booming economy, had arrived in the state in the preceding 10 or 15 years.

The law, hung up by constitutional challenges, has never taken full effect. But it has had an important unintended consequence — as a wake-up call to the nation’s business community, for which a policy aimed at deporting millions of undocumented workers is economic lunacy.

Thanks largely to a backlash from business, state legislatures elsewhere have balked at adopting Arizona-style laws, though a few, particularly in the South, have passed bills designed to deny opportunities to illegal immigrants and keep them in the shadows. The business backlash is motivated partly by fears that other states could suffer Arizona’s fate: boycotts and cancellations that have meant tens of millions of dollars in lost revenue for hotels, restaurants and other businesses that rely on visitors. But businesses also fear the potential economic damage from mass deportation. A new report by the Center for American Progress and the Immigration Policy Center, groups that are sympathetic to illegal immigrants but intellectually serious, examines those costs in detail and concludes that they would be staggering.Read more...

Published in the Washington Post

Published on Mon, Apr 04, 2011

Henry Cejudo could have stayed away. He already left his signature on one of America's hottest hot-button issues. The son of illegal immigrants from Mexico, he held an American flag high while celebrating his wrestling gold medal at the 2008 Summer Olympics.

Henry Cejudo celebrates after defeating Japan's Tomohiro Matsunaga in the finals of the men's 55 kg freestyle wrestling to win the gold medal in 2008.

Afterward, he spoke openly about his mom naively crossing the border in high heels, his drug-abusing dad dying impoverished in Mexico, his itinerant childhood spent evading rent collectors. He put the details in a book titled American Victory.

He settled back in his home state of Arizona. He didn't stay settled for long.

"We're living in the damn '60s, the '50s in Arizona," he says.

A state law passed last year requires police to check the immigration status of anyone they stop, detain or arrest that they suspect is in the country illegally. A federal judge's decision to block the law is being appealed. Another proposed law would deny state citizenship to children born in the USA if neither parent has legal status.

"They've done a lot of articles on this whole 'anchor baby' law," Cejudo says, using the pejorative description that refers to U.S.-born children "anchoring" their illegal parents here. "I feel like I'm a figurehead to that."

He could use the speaking circuit as a platform. Instead, he decided to take on the issue in the only place he's ever felt truly at home: the wrestling mat.

In February he returned to the U.S. Olympic Training Center in Colorado Springs, determined to win another gold at the 2012 Games in London.

"I've done it, and I know I can do it again," says Cejudo, 24, who was born in Los Angeles. "This time I want to have more emphasis on this immigration issue."Read more...

Published in the USA Today

Published on Fri, Apr 01, 2011

It's a story repeated throughout American culture, in theatre, film and novels: the penniless immigrant arrives on American shores seeking a new life and, through hard work and determination, prospers and thrives.

Such tales are a quintessential part of the "American Dream", the idea that anyone willing to work hard and think big can come to the US and "make it".

But, at a time when immigration is a divisive, hot-button political issue, is that dream still possible?

The dream itself is alive and well, says Ben Johnson, the executive director of the American Immigration Council.

"The spirit of the people who have the drive to uproot themselves and pursue this dream across the world is powerful. It continues to shine through," Mr Johnson told the BBC.

But the spirit is not sufficient if the system won't allow it. And America's immigration system does not make it particularly easy to start a new life on its shores.

Quotas reached

American immigration policy is largely family based, meaning residency is most commonly granted to the immediate family of existing residents or citizens.

For others, visas are granted mostly based on skill levels, with highly skilled immigrants having a much easier time getting work permits than unskilled labourers.

So-called skilled workers - usually people with a university education or professional training - have a range of visa options. The most common visa, the H1B class, currently has a ceiling of 65,000 each year.

That quota is easily filled every year. Before the recession, it was filled in the same month the visas were released.

At the moment, Mr Johnson says, it gets filled in eight or nine months, meaning that for several months of the year, H1B visas simply are not available regardless of the demand for them.

For unskilled labourers, the US grants just 5,000 work visas each year to people employed in fields other than agriculture.Read more...

Published in the BBC News