Law Professor to Congress: Obama’s Failure to Enforce Immigration Law Is ‘Dereliction of Duties'
A Vanderbilt University law professor told a House committee on Tuesday that President Barack Obama's failure to enforce federal immigration law is a "dereliction of duties" that puts Americans at risk.
“President Obama’s failure to enforce federal immigration laws raises the question of whether we are a nation of laws or a nation without the courage of its convictions,” Professor Carol Swain said in her opening remarks. “This dereliction of duties places our citizens at risk, and it damages our national sovereignty and standing in the world.”
The hearing before the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement focused on the impact of illegal immigration on American workers and unemployment in the United States.
“The failure to enforce immigration laws means that American citizens are unprotected from a massive influx of people of foreign-born persons who have entered the country without authorization and have openly stolen jobs, goods, and opportunities from law-abiding American citizens,” Swain said.
Instead of enforcing federal immigration law, the Obama administration is thwarting state and local efforts to do so, she testified.
“Not only is the current presidential administration not adequately enforcing immigration laws, it has used the power of the federal government to fight states and localities (that) have made good faith efforts to assist the federal government in performing its constitutional duties to protect the citizenry against domestic and foreign threats.”
Swain said an estimated 8 million illegal aliens are holding jobs in the U.S. labor market while 14 million Americans remain unemployed. Millions more Americans have given up looking for work, she added.
Ranking committee member Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) claimed in her opening remarks that Americans are not doing the kind of jobs that illegal immigrants often fill: “We know that even in this economy, Americans are not returning to the fields” Lofgren said.
“And the wage increase necessary to entice them there would make U.S. food products no longer competitive with imported products.”
Lofgren said this would lead to farm closures and the “off-shoring of millions and millions of U.S. jobs.”
Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas), chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, disagreed: “All credible studies show that competition from cheap foreign labor displaces American workers, including legal immigrants, or depresses their wages,” Smith said.
SOURCE
"We're gonna build it but we're not gonna use it"
That seems to be the intended and quite addled message behind the announcement below -- As Australia's Labor Party government tries to deny the total constipation of their "refugee" policy. Labor won't do what it needs to do in order to stop the "boat people" arriving but it won't give many of them residence permits either. So it just keeps locking more and more of them up! And that means ever more prisons keep being needed
Immigration Minister Chris Bowen says that just because the government is establishing a new 1500-bed immigration detention centre in Darwin it doesn't mean it will necessarily be filled to capacity.
Mr Bowen says the first 500 places at the $9.2 million Wickham Point facility should be ready by mid-year. But, he says, the government can't say how many new asylum seekers it expects to have to house over the next few years. "It's very hard to predict exact numbers ... we don't make forecasts," he told ABC Radio.
"(But) it's well known that the number of boat arrivals has been high of recent times. It's well know that our detention network has been under pressure. "What we do do is prepare for foreseeable contingencies."
The immigration minister said the new centre would ensure against overcrowding but the 1500-bed facility "might not all be necessary or it might all be necessary".
Opposition Leader Tony Abbott says there's only one way to stop overcrowding and "that's to stop the boats and the boats will just keep coming unless the government changes policy".
He said opening a new Darwin detention centre was "yet another broken promise" by Labor. "They said there'd be no more onshore detention centres when plainly there are," he told the Nine Network.
Asylum seekers arriving by boat will still be processed offshore at Christmas Island before being transferred to the mainland.
SOURCE
Background
Postings from Brisbane, Australia by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) -- former member of the Australia-Soviet Friendship Society, former anarcho-capitalist and former member of the British Conservative party.
Why is "La Raza" the one Spanish term that is NEVER translated in the American mass media? Because translating it would make it a lot less respectable. It means "THE RACE" -- The mixed Hispanic "race" of Mexico. Racism is fine South of the Rio Grande only, apparently.
The "line" of this blog is that immigration should be SELECTIVE. That means that:
1). A national government should be in control of it. The U.S. and U.K. governments are not but the Australian government has shown that the government of a prosperous Western country can be. Up until its loss of office in 2007, the conservative Howard government had all but eliminated illegal immigration. The present Leftist government has however restarted the flow of illegals by repealing many of the Howard government regulations.
2). Selectivity should be based on "the content of a man's character, not on the color of his skin", as MLK said. To expand that a little: Immigrants should only be accepted if they as individuals seem likely to make a positive net contribution to the country. Many "refugees" would fail that test: Muslims and Africans particularly. Educational level should usually be a pretty fair proxy for the individual's likely value to the receiving country. There will, of course, be exceptions but it is nonetheless unlikely that a person who has not successfully completed High School will make a net positive contribution to a modern Western society.
3). Immigrants should be neither barred NOR ACCEPTED solely because they are of some particular ethnic origin. Blacks are vastly more likely to be criminal than are whites or Chinese, for instance, but some whites and some Chinese are criminal. It is the criminality that should matter, not the race.
4). The above ideas are not particularly blue-sky. They roughly describe the policies of the country where I live -- Australia. I am critical of Australian policy only insofar as the "refugee" category for admission is concerned. All governments have tended to admit as refugees many undesirables. It seems to me that more should be required of them before refugees are admitted -- for instance a higher level of education or a business background.
5). Perhaps the most amusing assertion in the immigration debate is that high-income countries like the USA and Britain NEED illegal immigrants to do low-paid menial work. "Who will pick our crops?" (etc.) is the cry. How odd it is then that Australians get all the normal services of a modern economy WITHOUT illegal immigrants! Yes: Before the pandemic, you usually COULD buy a lettuce in Australia for a dollar or thereabouts. And Australia IS a major exporter of primary products.
6). I am a libertarian conservative so I reject the "open door" policy favoured by many libertarians and many Leftists. Both those groups tend to have a love of simplistic generalizations that fail to deal with the complexity of the real world. It seems to me that if a person has the right to say whom he/she will have living with him/her in his/her own house, so a nation has the right to admit to living among them only those individuals whom they choose.
I can be reached on jonjayray@hotmail.com -- or leave a comment on any post. Abusive comments will be deleted.
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