Immigration Blog

It's true.  House Republican leader Dennis Hastert (IL) announced nineteen more congressional hearings on immigration for the month of August.  After a month of immigration hearings in July, Hastert continues to refuse to name negotiators to a conference committee to make actual progress on an immigration bill.  The political ploy has become laughable by now.  The ten hearings conducted so far have led to this contribution to the immigration debate:  a House Republican effort to re-label the Republican-sponsored Senate bill.  Many of the titles of Hastert's upcoming hearings concern a non-existent "Reid-Kennedy" bill.  Hastert may not like the fact that Republicans Chuck Hagel and Mel Martinez sponsored the Senate's comprehensive immigration bill, but his attempt to attribute the bill to Democrats is both deceitful and childish.  It is absolutely appalling that Hastert and his cohorts are playing name games rather than working towards progress on an issue on which Americans are demanding reasonable action.  I wish someone would calculate how much money House Republicans will cost U.S. taxpayers to hold nineteen more unnecessary hearings.  Judging by the contributions of past hearings, about the only thing the American people can expect from nineteen more immigration hearings are nineteen more opportunities for House Republicans to embarrass themselves.

 

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The Department of Homeland Security announced a new initiative yesterday to help businesses do a better job of ensuring that their workforces are made up of authorized workers.  IMAGE ("ICE Mutual Agreement between Government and Employers") offers increased collaboration between the Immigration & Customs Enforcement agency of DHS and private employers to reduce employment of undocumented workers.  The IMAGE program requires that employers agree to:  1) receive federal training; 2) submit to an ICE I-9 audit; 3) register and use the Employment Verification Program; and 4) adhere to a list of ICE "Best Business Practices" that includes:

The Washington Times reports that the finances of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, the restrictionist civilian group that patrols portions of the U.S. - Mexico border, have been called into question by its own members.  According to the article, senior members of the group are resigning in protest of the organization's inability to account for "hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of dollars in donations." 

 

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Comments?  Send a message to Jennings Immigration lawyers using the Contact a Lawyer form on the right side of this page.

U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services announced yesterday that registrations for its electronic employment verification system had doubled in the current fiscal year, growing at a rate of 200 new employers a month.  More than 10,000 employers have verified the employment eligibility of over one million hires per year through the system.  The Employment Verification Program compares information from I-9 forms to Social Security Administration and Department of Homeland Security databases to verify the identity and eligibility of potential hires.

 

Faced with withering support from Hispanic voters and growing dismay at the Republican-controlled government's inability to act on the issue, two conservative Republicans officially proposed today an immigration plan that has become known as "enforcement first" in an effort to unite Republicans and pass an immigration bill before the November elections.  Attempting to bridge the gap between the House's focus on enforcement and the Senate's insistence on a guestworker/legalization program, Representative Mike Pence's (IN) and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison's (TX)  plan essentially starts with border security measures with a guestworker program becoming available about two years later once the president certifies that the border measures have been implemented.  The guestworker program would require all undocumented persons to return to their country to apply for a new guestworker visa at "Ellis Island processing centers" that would be operated by private commercial companies.  Only certain countries with trade pacts with the U.S. would be eligible:  Mexico, Canada, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and the Dominican Republic.  The guestworker visa would be good for up to 12 years with an additional 5 year transition visa.  Guestworkers could apply for U.S. citizenship after the total of 17 years.  Those who did not want to apply for U.S. citizenship would have to return to their countries.  As an incentive to leave, they would be given a lump-sum payment in the amount of the Social Secrurity contributions they had paid into the system while employed in the U.S.  In my opinion, the Hutchison-Pence proposal is unlikely to garner much support from either side with the result being the immigration issue on hold until next year after the elections have determined the make-up of the next Congress.

 

Access to education is at the forefront of immigration issues.  Undocumented children are constitutionally guaranteed the right to K-12 public education and each year some 65,000 undocumented children graduate from U.S. high schools.  For most, the celebration of this achievement is short-lived:  this important milestone also means that these young people have to suddenly face the reality of their undocumented status.  Many colleges will not accept undocumented students; of those schools that do, most require that they pay out-of-state tuition even if they had lived in the state since infancy--making higher education financially inaccessible.  Ten states have passed legislation that allows their undocumented high school graduates to qualify for in-state tuition at state colleges and universities:  New York, Texas, California, Kansas, Illinois, Utah, Oklahoma, New Mexico, Washington, and Nebraska.  Even though education eliminates so many of the concerns immigration restrictionists cite about undocumented persons--can't speak English, have no skills, have no prospect of economic prosperity, won't assimilate--restrictionists complain of the burden on public schools and oppose making education more accessible to these children.  Virginia and Massachusetts recently voted down measures that would allow in-state tuition rates for their undocumented children.  Such actions create a self-fulfilling prophecy for, if we deny young people access to education, they will indeed struggle with skills, prosperity, and assimiliation.  Recognizing this fact, federal legislation has been introduced in the form of the DREAM Act that would allow undocumented high school graduates the opportunity to apply for a legal status to attend college or enter the military.  The legal status would then make them eligible to apply for in-state tuition and financial aid.  Despite the obvious benefits of encouraging immigrant students to further their eduction, the DREAM Act has failed to come up for a vote in each of the five years it has been introduced in Congress.  For many, the result is one of the greatest injustices of America's immigration situation:  that children who had no control over the manner of their entry in the U.S. are closed off from the educational tools they need to reach their dreams and aspirations.  One reaps what one sows--how much better if America were to sow a generation of skilled, trained, and prosperous immigrants.

 

A diverse group of religious leaders convened last week to discuss the religious implications of immigration policy and how to better include that perspective in the public debate.  Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS), attending the conference, stated that, "I don't think there's a theological perspective" being effectively brought into discussions about pending immigration legislation.  "That's not in the debate."  While Catholics, Jews, and mainstream Protestant groups have actively supported comprehensive immigration reform throughout the debate, evangelical groups who usually play significant roles and have loud voices on issues of morality--Focus on the Family, Family Research Council, etc.--have been almost completely silent on this issue.  A search of the Focus on the Family website and its "values voters" public policy section Citizenlink.org reveals that the organization fails to even recognize immigration as an important social issue.  According to a Family Research Council survey of so-called "values voters," "judicial activism" ranked as a more pressing moral issue than the treatment of the 12 million undocumented persons living among us.  Ninety percent of the respondents stated that undocumented immigrants should be arrested and returned to their country of origin rather than welcomed "as strangers seeking a better life for themselves and their families."  Fifty-nine percent of the "values voters" supported a border wall between Mexico and the U.S.  Richard Land, speaker from the Southern Baptist denomination, attended last week's conference and stated that, "We [Christians] are of two kingdoms, a kingdom of God and a kingdom of man."  In my mind, how we approach the immigration debate is a telling indicator of which of the two we are more firmly planted.

 

Canada's Construction Association is asking the Canadian government to increase the level of immigration in order to fill some 190,000 unfilled construction jobs across the country. "There are not enough people today domestically attracted to our industry," said an Association board member. "To find the skills that we need, we need to have our immigration policies changed." That sentiment matches exactly that of every U.S. construction employer with whom I meet.  A commercial tile contractor told me earlier this week, "They don't have any idea what would happen to construction if they made all of them [Hispanics] leave."  Most interesting in this story, however, is the Canadian Immigration Minister's response to the call for increased immigrant labor: "Countries around the world are increasingly looking to immigration as a primary source of talent and innovation to help them generate wealth and prosperity.  This is also Canada's time to explore proactive immigration policies.  I believe that this is a key to our country's success."  A striking contrast to the gloom and doom portrayals of immigration south of the (northern) border.

 

The U.S. Citizenship & Immigration Services' Office of Fraud Detection and National Security has published its analysis of petitions submitted under the Religious Worker immigrant visa category in a recent six-month period.  Of the 220 randomly-selected petitions, USCIS determined one-third (32.73%) of those petitions to be fraudulent.  The study concluded that field inquiries (onsite investigations) into the Religious Worker immigrant visa petitions were important in identifying fraudulent filings.  Fraudulent filings in all visa categories create significant problems not only for government adjudicators, but particularly for legitimate visa applicants whose must endure longer waits, increased complexity, higher fees, and reduced availability as a result of the abuse.

 

It is quite common for people to view America's immigration debate solely through the painfully narrow lens of border security.  Many voices state that border security is the only reality that needs to be considered in the immigration debate.  National security has, after all, become the national trump card under which the country has sacrificed all manner of things:  privacy rights, due process rights, environmental protections, balanced budgets.  While reasonable people will certainly disagree as to the outcome of such policy debates, allowing all arguments to be reduced exclusively to the national security perspective is folly.  The immigration debate is a perfect example.  No one disputes that border security is a legitimate and necessary goal, but it is not the only factor that must be considered in crafting the solution--there are other realities that we ignore at our peril.  One of the realities facing the U.S. and most other developed countries is the demographic aging of our populations.  Of the U.S. population of 300 million, 75 million are baby-boomers who have already left the workforce or will be soon.  Twelve percent of the population is already over age 65.  Thanks to immigration, the U.S. finds itself in a better position than many other global competitors.  According to the Population Reference Bureau, Europe's population is expected to decrease by 55 million (-10%) in the next 45 years, Japan's alone by some 20 million (-21%).  Aging populations mean fewer workers and less entrepreneurship, which means slowing economies.  Slowing economies mean lower standards of living and decreasing economic competitiveness.  Russia, facing a nearly 25% decrease in its population over the next 45 years, has turned to immigration to deal with the crisis, attempting to draw ethnic Russians back from former Soviet republics.  The U.S., in comparison, is experiencing modest population growth .  A January 2006 PRB report showed that the demographics of the U.S's ethnic white non-Hispanic population resembled that of Germany's:  a fertility rate of 1.85 and a declining population.  However, the U.S.'s total fertility rate is exactly 2.0, the replacement level, when all ethnic populations are combined and, when added to migration levels, is actually allowing modest population growth.  These demographic realities and their implications for the country's future economic competitiveness should play just as significant a part of the immigration debate as border security.

 

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