Recent posts at CIS below
See here for the blog. The CIS main page is here.
1. A Bleak Employment Picture for the Young (Memorandum)
2. Illegal Immigrants Receive Billions of Dollars More from the IRS than They Pay in (Memorandum)
3. The To-Do List (Memorandum)
4. The New Challenge of Medically Caring for the Poor (Blog)
5. Russian News, the Hershey J-1 Protest, and American Values (Blog)
6. New Audit on H-1B Visas (Blog)
7. Common Sense from Across the Northern Border? (Blog)
8. Violence spurs 'Mexodo' to the United States (Blog)
9. DHS Says 'Yes' to Thousands of Illegals Wanting to Leave the U.S. and Return (Blog)
10. Boycott? Never Mind! (Blog)
11. Will the Justice Department Sue? (Blog)
12. USCIS Decides to Burden its Own Appeals Unit with Extra Paper (Blog)
13. USCIS Devotes Much Staff Time to Abused Alien Step-Parents of Citizens (Blog)
14. Time to Sanction the Sanctuaries (Blog)
15. Disentangling Fee-Waiver Data from the USCIS Statistical Swamp (Blog)
16. Thinking of First Responders (Blog)
The Sorry State of Immigration
The conventional wisdom among conservatives is that if President Obama wins a second term, things on the immigration policy front will become worse. But it’s difficult to see how the situation could become much worse when the state of immigration in the US today is in chaos and disarray, with no foreseeable political will to fix it.
Republicans are much more divided on immigration than Democrats. Many pro-business GOPers support lax immigration enforcement and full or partial amnesty for illegal aliens already in the country. Rank-and-file Republicans and Tea Party supporters tend to take a harder line on immigration, favoring more aggressive enforcement of existing laws. They want illegals deported.
And decades of liberal immigration policies have taken their toll on border-state politicians. Even GOP governors have felt the need to run to the left on immigration issues at election time.
A case in point is the leading Republican contender for the presidency, Texas Gov. Rick Perry, whose stance on immigration isn’t much different than Obama’s.
Some of Perry’s policy positions as a governor are almost the mirror image of Obama’s. In 2001 Perry implemented a Lone Star State version of national Democrats’ proposed DREAM Act in Texas. It gave students with three years residency in Texas in-state tuition rates.
In one important respect it is an apples-and-oranges comparison. Obama favors giving illegal aliens a so-called path to citizenship. Perry doesn’t — and couldn’t — because immigration and naturalization are federal matters.
Nonetheless Perry’s similarity to Obama on this hot-button issue is already making some segments of the Tea Party movement uncomfortable with the otherwise appealing candidate.
Perry has assured conservatives that his support for the Texas-style DREAM Act was a one-shot deal and that he won’t enact similar legislation at the federal level.
But the point is arguably moot. Obama’s recently unveiled federal DREAM Act-by-fiat provides relief from deportation using criteria that largely mirror the proposed federal DREAM Act. Like all amnesties it rewards lawbreaking and serves as a flashing green light to would-be illegal immigrants, inviting them to jump the queue. Amnesties beget amnesties. Each one increases the likelihood that another immigration amnesty will follow in the future – and so on and so on and so on.
Despite this slippery political maneuver President Obama is deporting record numbers of illegals. He’s sent close to 400,000 undocumented migrants packing in each of the last two years. The 400,000 figure is almost 10 percent more than President Bush deported in 2008 and 25 percent more than Bush sent home in 2007.
Obama’s uncharacteristic interest in enforcing the nation’s laws by booting illegals out of the country has earned him the scorn of pro-open borders left-wingers like Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL). The radical congressman deliberately got himself arrested while protesting Obama’s policy on deportations outside the White House in July before the president’s targeted amnesty was announced.
But critics like Gutierrez are delighted with other aspects of Obama’s approach to immigration. Under Obama, the federal government has taken the bizarre step of joining a foreign government, Mexico, in suing Arizona to overturn that state’s immigration law.
President Obama has also issued a host of “quasi-amnesties,” according to David North of the nonpartisan Center for Immigration Studies. “These creeping, partial amnesties indirectly encourage additional migration, including illegal migration,” he writes. Some of these programs provide taxpayer-funded benefits even to aliens who are facing deportation, North adds.
Would Perry or any of the other Republican presidential candidates do a better job on immigration issues, or would they “grow in office” after being inaugurated? We’ll have to wait and see.
One thing’s for certain, though: America’s immigration system is an incoherent mess – just the way the Left likes it. Highly skilled, self-sufficient workers have to run a gauntlet of onerous regulations while illegal immigrants sneak into the country to gain free taxpayer-provided healthcare, tuition, and housing.
Some leftists are openly contemptuous of the rule of law. They’re not shy about admitting that the Left uses America’s confusing immigration system to promote so-called social justice.
Eliseo Medina, secretary treasurer of the Service Employees International Union, says that boosting immigration levels will help push America further leftward. Immigration “will solidify and expand the progressive coalition for the future,” said Medina who is an honorary chairman of the Democratic Socialists of America (along with Marxists Frances Fox Piven and Cornel West). The purpose of immigration, says Medina, is to “create a governing coalition for the long term, not just for an election cycle.”
Long ago the Left figured out how to use taxpayer resources to promote progressive-left policies. The Democrats’ cherished National Voter Registration Act has allowed many illegals to unofficially participate in the electoral process since President Clinton signed it into law in 1993. The so-called Motor-Voter law was envisioned by Marxists Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who lobbied for it, as a way to swamp voter rolls with ineligible voters and encourage massive voter fraud.
The federal law requires that everyone applying for certain government benefits be given an opportunity to register to vote. Government workers processing claims for public benefits are prohibited even from asking applicants if they are U.S. citizens.
As I write this article the Obama administration may be planning more made-in-America mayhem by engineering an overhaul of election laws that would make voter fraud by illegal immigrants even easier than it is now. Two weeks ago I reported the disturbing news that attorney Estelle H. Rogers, director of advocacy at ACORN-affiliated Project Vote, visited the White House earlier this year. Rogers, who maintains voter fraud is a figment of Republicans’ collective imagination, met with a senior aide to Obama adviser Valerie Jarrett and with Van Jones’s former chief of staff.
Watchdog group Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Justice Department, demanding copies of all correspondence between department officials and Rogers. Judicial Watch said it is investigating the extent to which the department and Project Vote, Obama’s former employer, “are partnering on a national campaign to use the National Voting Rights Act (NVRA) to register more individuals on public assistance, widely considered a key voting demographic for the Obama 2012 campaign.”
Could illegal aliens, many of whom are dependent on welfare, provide the margin of victory for Obama next year, allowing him to further undermine America’s immigration laws?
And given the policy stances of leading Republicans on immigration matters, does it really make a difference who wins? Time will tell
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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