The Fremont (NE) Battleground
Appeals have been filed on both sides following last month’s summary judgment on Fremont’s illegal immigration ordinance. The City of Fremont filed a cross appeal after the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund appealed to the 8th Circuit Court of Appeals last week.
U.S. District Court Judge Laurie Smith Camp upheld parts of Ordinance 5165 and struck down other parts in a declaratory judgment on Feb. 20.
Smith Camp issued a permanent injunction and declared void provisions prohibiting the harboring of illegal aliens, providing for the revocation of occupancy licenses and penalties following the revocation of occupancy licenses. Smith Camp wrote those provisions are preempted by the Immigration and Nationality Act and violate the Fair Housing Act.
The rest of the ordinance, however, was upheld, including portions authorizing the city to issue occupancy licenses. The Fremont City Council voted on Feb. 28 to enact employment portions requiring the use of E-Verify, and to continue delaying the rest of the ordinance until legal challenges have been settled.
Amy A. Miller, ACLU Nebraska legal director, announced in a Feb. 28 letter to the city council that the ACLU would appeal Smith Camp’s decision, “because we remain convinced that the entire ordinance is an illegal use of city power.”
The ACLU and MALDEF each appealed Smith Camp’s decision to uphold portions of the ordinance allowing the city to issue occupancy licenses.
The ACLU is also challenging whether Smith Camp’s decision to deny plaintiffs’ claims that the ordinance exceeds the city’s municipal authority, and her ruling that parts of the ordinance found to be invalid are severable from other parts of the ordinance.
The city, in its cross appeal, takes issue with Smith Camp’s ruling holding that parts of Ordinance 5165 are preempted by federal law and violate the Fair Housing Act.
Attorney Kris Kobach of Kansas City, Kansas, who wrote the ordinance and is defending it on behalf of the city, also questions whether plaintiffs have standing to claims in the case.
SOURCE
Recent posts at CIS below
See here for the blog. The CIS main page is here.
1. Panel: The Summer Work Travel Program The $100 Million Work Travel Industry (Video and Transcript)
2. An Unintended Trifecta EB-3: Is the Worst of the Foreign Worker Programs (Memorandum)
3. Brushbacks, Proxies, and Connecting the Dots: Our Immigration Policies Still Put Us at Risk in a Post-9/11 World (Memorandum)
4. Visas for Sale (Op-ed)
5. New DHS Estimates Confirm that Illegal Immigrant Population Stopped Declining Under Obama (Blog)
6. Rethinking TPS for the Syrians: Let's Make It a Freeze, Not a Bonanza (Blog)
7. Sadly Laughable and Laughably Sad: ICE Plans for Improving Employee Morale (Blog)
8. State Department's OIG Rips the Summer Work Travel Program (Blog)
9. New York State's 'Dream Act': 'Good Character' Equals No Violent Felony Conviction (Blog)
10. Medieval Farm Labor Practice OK'd by USCIS (Blog)
11. The Homeland Security Show with Janice Kephart - Premiere Show (Blog)
12. New York State's 'Dream Act': Committing Most Crimes Is No Barrier (Blog)
13. New York State's 'Dream Act': An Ongoing Incentive for More Illegal Immigration (Blog)
14. Suggestions for a Term to Replace 'Illegal Immigrant' (Blog)
15. Less Profit, More Oversight Needed for Exchange Sponsors (Blog)
16. New York State's 'Dream Act' for 'Children': Bait & Switch (Blog)
17. Unfortunate Precedent — the Uruguayan ID Card for Its Illegals (Blog)
18. New York State's 'Dream Act': An Unnecessary Bill (Blog)
19. An Unintended Burst of Governmental Honesty? (Blog)
20. What Will It Take to Get Congress to Clean Up the H-1B Program? (Blog)
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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