Immigration Watch International

Excerpt: Legalization advocates had what sounded like a pretty frank discussion of their legislative strategy, at the 7th Annual Immigration Law and Policy Conference in Washington Friday.

The annual summertime gathering of pro-open borders policy wonks and some immigration lawyers took place at the Georgetown University Law School, and was sponsored by the Migration Policy Institute and the Catholic Immigration Network Inc.

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2. Los Angeles City Council Hypocrisy Shines Through .

Excerpt: The Los Angeles City Council was quick to vote to boycott Arizona because of its new immigration law.

The Arizona law will encourage racial profiling, huffed the council’s Resolution.

It’s like Nazi Germany and the beginning of the Holocaust, puffed Council members.

‘As an American, I cannot go to Arizona today without a passport,’ exaggerated Councilman Ed Reyes. ‘If I come across an officer who’s having a bad day and feels that the picture on my ID is not me, I can be … deported, no questions asked. That is not American.’

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3. A Growing Struggle .

Excerpt: The Pew Hispanic Center’s recent analysis of educational attainment data from the Census Bureau’s 2008 American Community Survey finds that only one in ten Hispanic high school dropouts has a General Educational Development (GED) credential, the lowest among any major race/ethnic group.

As the author Richard Fry notes, this is significant since Hispanics have the highest dropout rates. ‘Some 41% of Hispanics ages 20 and older in the United States do not have a regular high school diploma, versus 23% of comparably aged blacks and 14% of whites.” This disparity is driven by the foreign born – 52 percent of adult Hispanic immigrants have dropped out of high school.

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4. Amnesty by Fiat? .

Excerpt: A group of senators sent a letter to the president this week to warn him against something that’s apparently being tossed around inside the administration: granting an amnesty unilaterally, without input from Congress. Apparently, this plan would apply only to visa overstayers and other illegals who’ve applied for green cards as a delaying tactic knowing they won’t qualify — but that would mean maybe 5 million people.

‘Deferred action’ and ‘parole’ aren’t the same as green cards and so don’t lead to citizenship, but they can be indefinite and they come with an Employment Authorization Document and a Social Security number, so they’re all the amnesty most illegals would ever need.

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5. An Unlikely Third Path: Paying Unwanted Migrants to Go Home .

Excerpt: The talk about what to do with America’s illegal alien population has been focused on two alternatives: enforcement and legalization.

Stricter enforcement would, it is argued, deport some illegals, cause others to self-deport, and cause potential illegals to stay in their homelands.

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6. Hip, Hip, Hoorah for Sen. Kyl .

Excerpt: Arizona’s junior senator, Jon Kyl, deserves credit for exposing President Obama’s position on immigration legislation: hold enforcement hostage to amnesty. Further, the senator deserves praise for standing his ground against the waves of hot air rolling his direction from the bully pulpit.

The dispute surrounds a conversation the senator and president had and that Sen. Kyl recounted at a town hall meeting. According to Kyl, ‘The president said the problem is if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support comprehensive immigration reform.’

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7. No Amnesty, No Border Security? The Questionable Premises of an Immigration Grand Bargain .

Excerpt: Reports this past weekend depict a brutally frank exchange between President Obama and Sen. John Kyl (R-AZ) about border control and amnesty legislation. Kyl reports that in a one-on-one meeting with the president they discussed securing the border in the context of pending legislation to enact ‘comprehensive immigration reform.’ Kyl reports the president as saying, ‘The problem is, . . . if we secure the border, then you all won’t have any reason to support ‘comprehensive immigration reform.” He, Kyl, then interprets this sentence to mean ‘In other words, they’re holding it hostage. They don’t want to secure the border unless and until it is combined with ‘comprehensive immigration reform.”

It was only a few months ago at the launch of a new India-UK group on climate change that the British Prime Minister, Mr David Cameron, then leader of the Opposition, warned that not enough was being made of the “potential for the relationship between the two countries.”

That aspiration seemed a long way away, as the new British Home Secretary, Ms Theresa May, announced that it would be capping the number of workers entering the UK from outside the EU to 24,000 in the year to April 2011 — a 5 per cent drop on the year before.

“We understand that the immigration cap should not affect the movement of business professionals,” said the Union Commerce and Industry Minister, Mr Anand Sharma, at a Confederation of Indian Industry meet in London on Monday.

Nevertheless, he added that the Indian Government would be “mindful” of the British plan, he said ahead of a meeting with the Business Secretary, Mr Vincent Cable, a member of the Liberal Democrat party in the coalition government. Mr Sharma is also scheduled to meet Mr Cameron.

The British plan, which had been a key part of the Conservative Party’s election campaign but opposed by the Liberal Democrats, was swiftly condemned by Indian business leaders.

“We wouldn’t want to see the cap,” said Mr Chandrajit Banerjee, Director-General of the Confederation of Indian Industry, on the sidelines of the conference.

“We are trying to have a different type of engagement,” he said, adding that it would be difficult with the cap “to take the engagement to a new level.”

A press conference was scheduled to take place later on Monday evening to discuss the results of Mr Sharma’s meeting with the UK Government.

Even within the UK, the cap has created a storm, with business leaders warning that it could damage the country’s relations with India and China in particular at a time when the UK remained vulnerable, and access to top professionals from abroad within the workforce is seen as key to the economic recovery.

Even the Office of Budget Responsibility, set up by the new Government to provide independent forecasts and analysis, has pointed to the dangers of slower growth by 2014 thanks to labour supply shortages from changing demographics.

Ms May has rejected the threat to the UK recovery, insisting that the 5 per cent cap was a “temporary one” to ensure “we don’t get a rush of people trying to come through into the UK” before a more permanent cap is put in place.

The government has said it will conduct a “consultation” with business and other interested sectors to ensure that the cap doesn’t undermine business.

“I believe today, under the circumstances that we’re facing, that the majority of the illegal trespassers that are coming into the state of Arizona are under the direction and control of organized drug cartels and they are bringing drugs in,” Brewer said.

“There’s strong information to us that they come as illegal people wanting to come to work. Then they are accosted and they become subjects of the drug cartel,” she said.

Brewer’s office later issued a statement in response to media reports of her comments. It said most human smuggling into Arizona is under the direction of drug cartels, which “are by definition smuggling drugs.”

“Unless Gov. Brewer can provide hard data to substantiate her claim that most undocumented people crossing into Arizona are ‘drug mules,’ she must retract such an outrageous statement,” said Oscar Martinez, a University of Arizona history professor whose teaching and research focuses on border issues. “If she has no data and is just mouthing off for political reasons, as I believe she is doing, then she must apologize to the people of Arizona for lying to them so blatantly.”

A Border Patrol spokesman said illegal immigrants do sometimes carry drugs across the border, but he said he couldn’t provide numbers because smugglers are turned over to prosecutors.

“I wouldn’t say that every person that is apprehended is being used as a mule,” spokesman Mario Escalante said from Tucson. “The smuggling organizations, in their attempts to be lucrative and to make more money, they’ll try pretty much whatever they need.”

T.J. Bonner, president of the union that represents border agents, said some illegal border-crossers carry drugs but most don’t. People with drugs face much stiffer penalties for entering the U.S. illegally, and very few immigrants looking for work want to risk the consequences, Bonner said.

“The majority of people continue to come across in search of work, not to smuggle drugs,” he said. “Most of the drug smuggling is done by people who intend to do that. That’s their livelihood.”

A spokesman for a human rights group said Brewer’s comments were “an oversimplification of reality.”

“We have some stories of people being forced to carry drugs,” said Jaime Farrant, policy director for Tucson-based Border Action Network. “We disagree with the assessment that people are crossing (to carry drugs). We have no evidence that’s the truth. We think most people come in search of jobs or to reunite with their families.”

The aim is to prevent a sudden influx in arrivals before a permanent annual limit, a key election pledge of Prime Minister David Cameron’s Conservative party, is introduced next year. “It’s not about cutting, it’s about preventing a rush,” a Home Office source said.

Home Secretary Theresa May will announce the measure next week along with a consultation on the annual limit, which was part of the coalition deal agreed between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats after May elections.

There will be no restrictions on the number of migrants allowed to come in from an overseas company to a branch in Britain under the temporary cap, while other specific groups – such as elite sports people – will be exempt.

In 2008, net migration to Britain was 163,000. This was down from 233,000 in 2007 but the Conservatives vowed in their manifesto to cut this to levels seen in the 1990s when it was “tens of thousands a year, not hundreds of thousands”. This figure includes EU migrants, over whom the government has no control because of the bloc’s open borders.

His fear about Australia being able to feed a much larger popuulation is misplaced but there is no doubt that a much larger population would seriously degrade the quality of life in Australia. Recent large population increases have already done so — as most Australians find every day with slower and slower trips to work on congested roads

MILLIONAIRE former electronics guru Dick Smith will give $1 million cash to a young person who designs the best population plan for Australia.

The businessman yesterday was “delighted” that new Prime Minister Julia Gillard had announced she opposed a “Big Australia” and had created a ministry of sustainable population.

Mr Smith, fiercely opposed to immigration, said he would devote the rest of his life to educating other Australians, including politicians, about the need to keep the nation’s population from exploding.

“When we design an aircraft, it is built for 25 years of safety,” Mr Smith said. “But if we don’t have a safety plan for allowing the population to grow to 36 million by 2050, then we will all come crashing down. “That is why I am announcing a $1 million award for a person less than 25 years old to design a sustainability plan for our population,” he said.

The ABC will screen Mr Smith’s documentary on population in August, and the businessman said he would make other announcements at that time about incentives to limit the size of the nation.

There are now 22 million Australians and Mr Smith said if that number grew beyond 26 million, the nation could struggle to feed its own people. “I am going to commit the rest of my life to this issue, and to communicate to Australians that they need to wean themselves off constant growth in the economy, too,” he said.

Greater Melbourne grew by more than 93,000 people last year – the biggest increase of any capital, and fuelled by record high immigration.

Kris Kobach has become a sought-after figure for states and cities looking to replicate tough immigration statutes similar to Arizona’s new law, which gives unprecedented power to local police in questioning and detaining individuals they suspect are in the country illegally.

Kobach was the legal architect behind Arizona’s SB 1070, which is being challenged by the Obama administration. With that combination of cachet and infamy, he’s become the go-to guy for crafters of copycat laws, and he is putting his mark on legislation across the country, most recently in Fremont, Neb.

“I’ve been in touch with state representatives in Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, Alabama and Idaho,” Kobach said in an interview with FoxNews.com.

Kobach, of Kansas City, Mo., has paved a formidable path for himself in legal and political circles, positioning himself as a rising star within the Republican Party. He has at the same time attracted a host of critics, from lawmakers to civil libertarians who say his work promotes racial profiling.

Kobach’s crusade against illegal immigration began when he was working for the Justice Department under Attorney General John Ashcroft in the days following the Sept. 11 attacks. Kobach helped create the “National Security Entry-Exit Registration System,” which required immigration officials to fingerprint and question more than 80,000 male visitors, most of whom were from Muslim countries. None was ever charged with terrorist activity, however, and the program was eventually cancelled.

After leaving the White House in 2003, the Harvard and Yale-educated attorney went on to assist local governments around the country on various immigration statutes, taking him from Hazleton, Pa., to Valley Park, Mo., to Farmers Branch, Texas.

But perhaps in no other place is his legal influence greater than in Arizona. In 2006, Kobach successfully defended an Arizona law that made immigrant smuggling a state crime. In 2007, Arizona State Sen. Russell Pearce, the author of SB 1070, contacted him for assistance in drafting the Legal Arizona Workers Act, which ensures that no business in Arizona knowingly hires or employs illegal immigrants. His legal triumphs in defending the two statutes led to state officials recruiting his help in crafting SB 1070.

Aside from his legislative work, Kobach has also represented U.S. citizens as plaintiffs trying to prevent states from giving in-state tuition rates to illegal immigrants.

Kobach has most recently come under fire for his role in drafting an ordinance in Fremont, Neb., that implements a ban on hiring or renting property to illegal immigrants. The measure, which passed Monday, sparked an outcry from local activists who say it has fueled anti-immigrant sentiments in a city that has only 1,995 Hispanics. “He has used our community for his own legal career and has peddled a failed idea of local enforcement of immigration laws,” said Kristin Ostrom, a local activist lobbying to overturn the ban.

Kobach is “whipping up a sentiment of fear of Hispanics and using the ruse of illegal immigration for his own agenda,” Ostrom said, adding that “the outcome of his work is a Hispanic community that does not feel welcome in Fremont.”

Critics have also pointed to Kobach’s past work with the Federation for American Immigration Reform — or FAIR — a group perceived by some as extremist.

Of the backlash of criticism over Arizona’s immigration law, Kobach said it’s politics — not issues over its legality — that are leading the charges against it. “I think the Obama administration’s reaction has been very surprising,” Kobach said of the pushback. “They sent the U.S. Attorney General out to comment on the law before he even read it, which was a big mistake and an irresponsible move on behalf of the administration.”

The White House confirmed last week that it plans to challenge Arizona’s law in court, arguing both that it will lead to racial profiling and that it’s the federal government’s responsibility to regulate immigration.

Critics, including the administration, have specifically pointed to language within SB 1070 that gives local law enforcement the right to detain individuals based on “reasonable suspicion” that they are in the U.S. illegally. Opponents argue that such a phrase is not clearly defined and will undoubtedly lead to racial profiling. Not so, counters Kobach, who says “reasonable suspicion” has been “defined or applied more than 800 times by the federal courts.” “That’s a frequently used phrase,” he said.

A professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Law School, Kobach announced in May 2009 his intent to run for Kansas secretary of state, facing off against two Republicans. He summed up his ambition in such a position very simply: to “make a similar impact in stopping voter fraud as I have with illegal immigration.” [All power to him in that! --JR]

Former prime minister Kevin Rudd was in favour of population growth, with his government predicting it to hit around 36 million by 2050, largely through immigration. But Ms Gillard has indicated she will be putting the brakes on immigration in order to develop a more sustainable nation.

“Australia should not hurtle down the track towards a big population,” she told Fairfax. “I don’t support the idea of a big Australia with arbitrary targets of, say, a 40 million-strong Australia or a 36 million-strong Australia. We need to stop, take a breath and develop policies for a sustainable Australia. “I support a population that our environment, our water, our soil, our roads and freeways, our busses, our trains and our services can sustain.”

But Ms Gillard says that does not mean putting a stop to immigration all together. “I don’t want business to be held back because they couldn’t find the right workers,” she said. “That’s why skilled migration is so important. But also I don’t want areas of Australia with 25 per cent youth unemployment because there are no jobs,” she said.

Mr Rudd installed Tony Burke as the Minister for Population, but in one of her first moves as Prime Minister, Ms Gillard has changed his job description to Minister for Sustainable Population. Mr Burke will continue to develop a national population strategy which is due to be released next year. Ms Gillard says the change sends a clear message about the new direction the Government is taking.

But an urban planning group is trying to convince Ms Gillard of the benefits of a big population. Urban Taskforce Australia chief executive Aaron Gadiel says a large population increases the tax base to fund improvements to infrastructure and welfare services. “We shouldn’t be trying to fight it, what we should be trying to do is ensuring that we’ve got the investment and infrastructure that makes that process easier to manage,” he said. “I think people should be focussing on how much state, federal and local governments have been investing in urban infrastructure to help absorb population growth.”

A survey earlier in the year by the Lowy Institute found that almost three-quarters of Australians want to see the country’s population grow, but not by too much. The Lowy Institute surveyed more than 1,000 people and found that while there was support for increased immigration, Australians were not quite prepared to embrace the Government’s predicted 36 million. The poll showed 72 per cent of people supported a rise in Australia’s population, but 69 per cent wanted it to remain below 30 million people.

The Coalition is planning to implement a Conservative election promise to put a ceiling on the number of migrants allowed to enter the UK from outside the European Union each year.

The plan has been criticised by some business leaders, who say it will make it harder for them to recruit the staff they need for their companies.

In private Cabinet talks, Michael Gove, the schools secretary, David Willetts, the universities minister and Oliver Letwin are all understood to have raised similar concerns about the impact of a cap.

They argued that too low a ceiling could hurt British businesses and universities by stopping the entry of talented foreigners.

Following those talks, Theresa May, the Home Secretary, is set to announce a wide-ranging consultation over the planned cap. She will ask business lobby groups, company executives and university leaders for detailed recommendations on how many people should enter the UK each year.

But Home Office sources were last night adamant that even though the Government is prepared to listen to concerns about immigration, the total number of new arrivals will still be capped. “There will be a cap on immigration. This is what the British people voted for and this is what we will do,” said one source last night.

The Conservatives have never said what level they would set for the immigration cap, promising to base their final figure on the wider needs of the economy.

During the general election campaign, David Cameron said the cap would mean net immigration to the UK is in the “tens of thousands” instead of the hundreds of thousands as it has been in recent years.

However, the plan to restrict the arrival of new workers from overseas has raised concerns about the long-term impact on the UK economy, especially since a falling British birthrate is set to reduce the number of British-born people of working age in future years.

Last week, the Office for Budget Responsibility, the new independent Government economic forecaster, said that Britain’s long-term economic growth will be lower after 2014 partly because of the fall in the number of economic migrants entering the UK.

The OBR predicted that “trend growth”, the underlying rate of economic expansion, will fall from 2.25 per cent to 2 per cent after 2014 as the UK supply of new labour falls.

Business leaders have echoed those concerns and called on ministers to consult companies in detail before setting any limit on immigration. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development last month said a cap could “leave many employers struggling to hire the talented performers they need”.

When Arizona signed its new immigration law, SB 1070, on April 4, the immediate response by several cities and states was to enact economic boycotts against the state, with the aim of pressuring legislators to rethink the law.

Now, with just over a month to go until the law takes effect July 28, maintaining those embargoes appears to have been tough going for most – especially in the wider economic downturn – and several have watered down their actions.

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday granted itself an exemption to the city’s boycott of Arizona to keep a red light photo enforcement program operating. The program generates about $3.6 million in annual ticket revenue for the city. The day before, Oakland voted to approve a $1 million contract with a multinational advertising company with corporate offices in Phoenix.

San Jose, which has several contracts with Arizona companies cited potential economic harm in stopping short of a full boycott, voting instead for an official denunciation of SB 1070. The Arizona law allows police officers to question anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant, and makes it a state crime to be in the country illegally.

“The comment ‘not so well’ looks to be fairly accurate,” says Jack Kyser, director of the Los Angeles Economic Development Corporation, in describing how boycotts are progressing. From the beginning, Mr. Kyser says, an official boycott is much tougher than just getting the word out. It takes time and money for officials to go through rosters of suppliers and to analyze if another supplier costs more or not.

“Smaller cities and counties can do a boycott, but for larger areas and the state it could be difficult and somewhat embarrassing,” he says. The red light camera contract still has some time to go on it, he notes, even though Wednesday’s City Council action drew heated debate on operating costs, with some putting them higher than the ticket revenue coming in.

Kyser notes that a Los Angeles Police Department plan to send officers to Arizona for special terrorism training “was canceled due to the boycott,” but other actions have gone under the radar. The Los Angeles Department of Water and Power awarded a contract for electric vehicle charging stations to a company in Arizona, Kyser says, “but nobody caught that.”

Some cities have pulled back on their boycotts, claiming concern that the action hits only the businesspeople and employees involved – often Hispanic – and not the legislators who created the law. Others have gone scrambling to parse legal definitions – such as the difference between “corporate offices” and “corporate headquarters” – to rationalize which companies are subject to the intent of the boycott.

The main reasons that such boycotts are difficult are at least three fold, says Jack Pitney, Professor of American Politics at Claremont McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.

“First you have to figure out which goods and services come from the state. In a complex economy, that determination can be very tricky.”

Next, officials must figure out which contracts may be lawfully canceled. Attorneys have to spend lots of billable hours on such questions, Mr. Pitney says.

“Then you have to arrange for goods and services from some other state,” he says. “In many cases, the locality chose an Arizona company because it was the low bidder or was otherwise superior to the alternatives,” he says. “In tough economic times,” he adds, “it’s hard to justify such a choice.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg will launch Thursday a coalition of mayors and business leaders to advocate for an overhaul of the nation’s immigration policy, including legalizing undocumented immigrants and more strictly fining businesses that hire illegal workers.

“Our immigration policy is national suicide,” Mr. Bloomberg said at a forum in Midtown Wednesday. “We educate the best and the brightest and then we don’t give them a green card—we want people to create jobs but we won’t let entrepreneurs from around the world come here.”

During his latest inaugural address, Mr. Bloomberg vowed to push to rework the nation’s immigration laws in the same way that he waged battle against illegal guns. This effort will be a cornerstone of the mayor’s third-term agenda, aides said.

The coalition, the Partnership for a New American Economy, supports developing a secure system for employers to verify employment eligibility and strict penalties for businesses that fail to comply. The group wants to increase opportunities for immigrants to enter the workforce and for foreign students to stay in the country.

The group will advocate for securing the nation’s borders and beefing up enforcement to prevent illegal immigration. The coalition supports establishing a legal path for the millions of undocumented immigrants living in the country now.

To effect decision-making in Washington, the group will issue research reports on the economic impact of immigration, poll public opinion, sponsor forums and potentially launch a media campaign. Mr. Bloomberg, a multibillionaire, is expected to provide financial support for the group’s activities, as he has with his gun group.

One City Hall official said the coalition will try to focus on immigration as a “dollar and cent issue,” advocating that open borders help keep the U.S. more competitive.

President Obama has pledged to champion changes to federal immigration policy, but this spring said lawmakers “may not have an appetite” for a grueling debate on immigration this year.