From NumbersUSA.com

Senate AgJOBS Fight Expected on Farm Bill

In July, Leader Reid promised to try to include the AgJOBS amnesty for illegal farmworkers in the farm bill (H.R. 2419) when the Senate takes up that measure, which should occur in October. Pro-amnesty advocacy groups are telling their members that Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) have promised them that the AgJOBS amnesty will be attached to the measure this fall and will be signed into law.

Click here for more information on the AgJOBS fight.

Send a fax ( free ) opposing the AgJOBS amnesty. HERE.

Houston Chronicle
Hope fades for passage of Durbin’s amnesty scheme

The hope for immediate Senate action on the DREAM Act, which would grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants, faded Tuesday as the measure’s chief Senate sponsor acknowledged he was having difficulty surmounting Republican opposition.

The rest here.

Note from D.A. – We have defeated the Dream Act before..and will again. We must: The pandering policticians and the radical open borders ethnic lobby must only win once on this – we must win every time.

Lahontan Valley (Nevada) News

More than 40 arrested in regional illegal alien sweep

Personnel from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement arrested more than 40 employees at 11 Northern Nevada McDonald’s restaurants including Fernley Thursday morning in an apparent sweep of [illegal aliens… criminals] an ICE spokesman confirmed.

Read all about it here.

For Immediate Release
September, 27, 2007
Contact: Phil Kent
Phone: (404) 226-3549

Senators Urge President Bush to Promote English

ARLINGTON, VA – “In the decade since the U.S. Commission on
Immigration Reform urged ‘the Americanization of new immigrants,’ two
successive administrations, one Democrat and one Republican, have utterly
failed to strengthen the English component of the citizenship test or to
take other steps necessary to enhance the role of English in the
assimilation of immigrants,'” says ProEnglish Executive Director K.C.
McAlpin. He praises the just-released letter nine U.S. senators sent to
President George W. Bush that urges him to embrace four key English
initiatives.

The letter was sponsored by Senator James Inhofe, R-Okla., and
co-signed by Senators Tom Coburn, R-Okla., Johnny Isakson, R-Ga., Saxby
Chambliss, R-Ga. Elizabeth Dole, N.C., Richard Burr, R.-N.C., Jim DeMint,
R-S.C., Norm Coleman, R-Minn. and Jeff Sessions, R-Ala.

“Ten years ago the U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform, chaired by
the late Rep. Barbara Jordan, D-Tex., made a number of cogent
recommendations for action that have languished while assimilation policy is
stuck in reverse,” McAlpin said. The senators’ letter urges the president
to:

* Support a law making English the official language of U.S.
government operations;

* Strengthen the English component of the U.S. Naturalization Test.
The letter quotes a Commission recommendation: “The English test should
accurately and fairly measure an immigrant’s ability to speak, read and
write; the current practice of dictating English sentences for applicants to
write is not an effective means of testing English proficiency.”

* Repeal Executive Order 13166 that requires all levels of
government as well as other federal funds recipients to provide translation
and interpreter services for non-English speakers.

* Support new initiatives to encourage individuals, businesses,
government entities and others to foster English fluency.

“Enhancing the role of English in our society will strengthen
assimilation and preserve our country’s unity,” Senator Jim Inhofe said.
“This debate is not just about preserving our culture and heritage, but also
about bettering the odds of our nation’s newest potential citizens.”

McAlpin added, “This letter marking the 10th anniversary of the
Jordan Commission report highlights how much of the Commission’s carefully
considered report has been ignored.” A copy of the letter is available on
ProEnglish’s website: www.proenglish.org.
# # #

E-VERFY ( formerly known as Basic Pilot) For employers who want to obey the law on hiring IT IS FREE AND NOW WITH PHOTOS!

E-Verify (formerly known as the Basic Pilot/Employment Eligibility Verification Program) is an Internet based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) in partnership with the Social Security Administration (SSA) that allows participating employers to electronically verify the employment eligibility of their newly hired employees.

E-Verify is free and voluntary and is the best means available for determining employment eligibility of new hires and the validity of their Social Security Numbers.

What’s New
Photo Tool
E-Verify’s new Photo Screening Tool is the beginning of biometric verification within the E-Verify system. This additional feature will be the first step in giving employers the tools they need to detect identity theft in the employment eligibility process.

The Photo Screening Tool feature allows an employer to check the photo on his or her new hire’s Employment Authorization Document (EAD) or Permanent Resident Card (“Green Card”) against the 14.8 million images stored in DHS immigration databases.

Click here for more info. Note: Your city and county governments are employers..are they and their contractors using E-Verify? ASK THEM…

Gracias Jerry!

System verifies work status: Photo database: Employers can check green-card pictures with federal records.
Found in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Written by Eunice Moscoso
Posted on 2007-09-26

By Eunice Moscoso
Cox Washington Bureau

Published on: 09/26/07

Washington —- Businesses, facing a government crackdown on hiring illegal immigrants, now have one more tool to help them verify a worker’s status.

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services unveiled a system Tuesday that matches photographs from green cards and other immigrant work permits against a database of more than 14 million pictures.

If the photos match, the employer will know that the person is using his or her own card, not a stolen or doctored one, federal officials said.

“We are very, very committed to the idea of workplace enforcement,” said Emilio Gonzalez, director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. “If we have workplace enforcement, we can reduce pressure on our border. That allows the assets that we have on our border … to catch bad people.”

The photo system is part of a volunteer employment verification system known as E-Verify that compares employee information against millions of government records.

About 23,000 businesses across the country participate in the program, and about 2,000 are signing up every month, Gonzalez said.

In addition, the Department of Homeland Security is working on regulations that would require all new federal contractors to use the E-Verify system. A draft of the new rules will likely be released next year, said Gerri Ratliff, deputy associate director of the National Security and Records Verification Directorate at Citizenship and Immigration Services.

Ratliff, who demonstrated the photo match system for reporters, said it showed strong success in a pilot program where 93 percent of all new hires were instantly verified as “work authorized.”

If an employee’s photo doesn’t match, the company has eight days to report the discrepancy to the Department of Homeland Security, which investigates within two days, she said.

The employee is given a letter, available in English and Spanish, that explains that the photo didn’t match and details a process to contest the discrepancy.

In the pilot program, most of the mismatches resulted from problems with information from the Social Security Administration, such as a person not updating a change of name through marriage or a change of legal status, Citizenship and Immigration Services officials said.

Only about 5 percent of the inquiries resulted in people being ultimately rejected or never contesting the mismatch.

Ratliff said Citizenship and Immigration hopes to expand the E-verify program to include driver’s licenses photos, but that it would likely require federal legislation.

Businesses and civil rights groups have argued that the quality of government databases poses a problem.

A federal judge put on hold a Department of Homeland Security effort to crack down on companies that ignore warning letters about employees with potentially fake Social Security numbers, in part because of a lawsuit that raised such concerns.

The lawsuit, by the AFL-CIO, the American Civil Liberties Union and other groups, says the rule “would threaten jobs of U.S. citizens and other legally authorized workers simply because of errors in … Social Security earnings databases.”

Find this article at:
http://www.ajc.com/business/content/printedition/2007/09/26/immig0926.html

Where is the fence? Which is more secure: American borders – or DisneyWorld?

And how long would stockholders of The Disney Company Inc. continue to employ Congress and Bush if they were in charge of securing Disney World?

Maybe another amnesty will solve the crisis?

From the San Jose Mercury on the state of the long promised fence.
Border system plagued by problems
TECHNICAL GLITCHES DELAY ‘VIRTUAL FENCE’
By Spencer S. Hsuand Dana Hedgpeth
Washington Post
Article Launched: 09/26/2007 01:36:35 AM PDT

WASHINGTON – Technical and management troubles have caused the government’s effort to secure a portion of the 2,000-mile U.S.-Mexico border with a chain of surveillance towers to fall behind schedule, jeopardizing the success of a costly project meant to showcase the Bush administration’s tougher stance on immigration enforcement.

Ground radar and cameras that were to identify illegal border crossers so that armed patrols could be dispatched to capture them have had trouble distinguishing people and vehicles from cows and bushes. The sensors also are confused by moisture, the officials said.

James Jay Carafano, senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation, said the program’s troubles show the danger of premising immigration law changes such as a new guest-worker program on untested long-term enforcement strategies. Bush officials’ rhetoric last year about the virtual fence raised “kind of unrealistic expectations about what you’re going to get at the front end,” he said.

If the program falters, he added, “it’s embarrassing for everyone” who pressed for comprehensive legislation in Congress this year.

Read it all here.

The Ghost of Immigration Reform

Rumors of amnesty’s death have been greatly exaggerated

By Mark Cromer — September 25, 2007

Was it really just three months ago that the powerful bi-partisan architects of the Senate’s so-called ‘Grand Compromise’ on immigration reform watched as their sweeping legislation imploded in that august chamber?

The bitter rage that flowed from Ted Kennedy and the resentful smirks of President Bush — who had defiantly vowed he would see America “at the bill signing” shortly before the compromise collapsed — looked like reassuring signs for citizens that this time around the stake had been properly driven through the heart of mass amnesty for illegal immigrants.

That stunning accomplishment seemed to herald a rare but critical triumph of middle America’s common sense over an increasingly detached Washington culture that’s now more accustomed to governing by imperial fiat than an honest representation of the majority’s will.

What a difference a few months makes.

Far from chastened by the angry rebuke they were dealt by the American people, the Senate’s elite went right back to work with the strange alliance of labor-intensive business interests and radically ethnocentric Latino activists.

The lesson they took from the defeat of their grand amnesty was not that a vast majority of American citizens demand real border security and sustained enforcement of our immigration laws, including aggressive deportations, before any consideration can be given to the status of some illegal immigrants.

No, the lesson they drew on amnesty was: think big, but start small.

Thus Sen. Richard Durbin has retooled — as quietly as possible — an initial amnesty to be offered to illegal immigrants who crossed the border when they were 15 or younger. With Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s blessing, Durbin plans to attach the bill to a massive defense appropriations bill, rather than thoroughly debate the proposal and conduct a vote on its merits alone.

While not as Biblically epic in its scope as the ‘Grand Compromise,’ Sen. Durbin was cynical enough to imbue it with a wholesome title that could wistfully be evoked by its proponents: The ‘DREAM Act.’ (This is the soundbite-friendly acronym for its full title, The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act)

After all, who would vote against a child’s dreams?

Of course, in order to dress it up as something other than a mass amnesty, the legislation is salted with requirements that apparently are supposed to amount to something Durbin can claim is “earned legalization.” Sound familiar?

Among them are stipulations that illegal immigrants would have to “prove” that they arrived in the United States when they were 15 or younger, have lived here for at least five consecutive years, have graduated from an American high school (or obtained an equivalence certificate) and have no significant criminal record.

Given the massive counterfeit document industry illegal immigrants have now established in the United States — bogus driver’s licenses, Social Security cards, birth certificates and even passports are as readily obtained on the street as drugs — these requirements are just more vintage fiction from the same senators who wanted us to believe they were serious about securing the border and enforcing the law last summer.

Here’s a reality check: The security wall that American citizens were promised along hundreds of miles of the southern border remains non-existent, the high-tech virtual fence is a bust, the National Guard is being withdrawn and the Border Patrol remains overworked and completely unsupported by the Bush Administration.

By this time next year, it’s a good bet another million-plus immigrants fleeing chaos, poverty and corruption to the south will illegally cross the American frontier. And it’s safe to say that among the scores of hard working decent people who are desperate for a better future, there will also be plenty of drug pushers, rapists, gang members, and stone-cold killers coming to America.

With the passage of the DREAM Act, the message that will resonate across Latin America will simply be: Get your kids across the Rio Grande, get them into free public school and within a few years they will be on their way to a Social Security account.

Just how many illegal immigrants will be ushered toward citizenship should Durbin’s bill be passed and signed into law is unclear; partly because the official projection of 12-million illegal immigrants in the country is a vast undercount by every independent measure.

But what is clear is this: taxpayer-funded services, from education to healthcare, are among the most potent “pull factors” that draw illegal immigrants into the United States — as equally enticing if not more so than the prospect of a better job and wage.

Durbin’s DREAM Act manages to ice that cake even further, turning America into Fantasy Island by promising parents that we’ll not only educate their children at no cost to them, but convert them promptly into citizens.

The message couldn’t be more clear: Just get here.

A dream for Durbin & Co., perhaps, but for the American citizen struggling to get by and living with a public education system already badly eroded, it is now a reoccurring nightmare.

Mark Cromer is a Senior Writing Fellow for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS), www.capsweb.org . He can be reached at Mrcromer@aol.com or info@capsweb.org. Or contact Rick Oltman, Media Director for Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) at 415-215-9550 or 805-564-6626 www.capsweb.org

Georgia Congresman Phil Gingrey on the Cobb County sheriff, Neal Warren’s use of local authority to enforce immigration law

I overlooked posting this in June.

Gingrey praises Cobb County Sheriff’s Office for effort deporting criminal illegal immigrants

Praising Cobb County Sheriff’s Department

Washington

U.S. Congressman Phil Gingrey this week delivered a speech before Congress praising the Cobb County Sheriff’s Department for its efforts to identify illegal immigrants in Cobb County jails. Click HERE to watch a video of his remarks, or read the text of his speech below.
Speech before Congress praising the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office
U.S. Congressman Phil Gingrey, M.D.
Thursday, June 20, 2007

Mr. Speaker, I rise today to highlight the exemplary and important work of the Cobb County Sherriff’s Office. This Georgia agency has begun screening county jail inmates to identify and deport illegal immigrants.

This is a hugely important effort. After these criminals serve their time, we need to deport them. Many jailed illegal immigrants are incarcerated for crimes like rape, armed robbery and drug trafficking. We want to do more than simply get these criminals off our streets; we want to get them out of our nation.

Mr. Speaker, six deputies with the Cobb County Sherriff’s Office recently underwent specialized training with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to identify illegal immigrants in our jails. Cobb County is the first department in Georgia – and indeed one of the first in the nation – to work with ICE on this initiative. They are setting a fine example for communities across America, and our cities will undoubtedly benefit from the widespread adoption of this program.

After all, our state and local law enforcement officials are our “first responders” in the fight against illegal immigration, and they play a critical role in stopping criminal aliens from harming our citizens.

Here’s how this new program works. Local law enforcement officials travel to Herndon, Virginia to train with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They get experience in immigration law, criminal law, document examination, alien processing and cross-cultural communication.

These trained deputies then return home to their communities, where they work with ICE agents to identify illegal immigrants in local jails by comparing fingerprints with ICE and FBI databases and interviewing prisoners.

The program may be new, but it is already working. In the Cobb County jail alone, which holds nearly 2,200 inmates, law enforcement officials have identified 63 people of interest to federal immigration authorities. That’s 63 rapists, robbers and drug lords that we can get off our streets and out of our country.

Mr. Speaker, we know local law enforcement officials are often our frontline of defense when it comes to identifying and removing illegal immigrants from our communities. As we look for solutions to the current illegal immigration crisis, we must empower our state and local officials and help them coordinate with federal agents.

That’s why I proudly supported an amendment to the Homeland Security appropriations bill we passed on the floor today to support this new and promising ICE program.

Last summer, I examined border security efforts along the U.S./Mexican border. During my trip, I observed our border patrol agents loading up buses and planes with criminal illegal immigrants being deported back to their home countries.

Now, Cobb County is playing a vital role in this process, and I am incredibly proud of their efforts. The Sherriff’s Office is helping rid our society of dangerous criminals who have no business being in the United States.

I especially want to recognize Cobb County Sheriff Neil Warren, Cobb County Police Chief George Hatfield, and the six Cobb deputies who went through the specialized training: Paul Harrison, Claudia Cross, Marco Cabrera, Olanda Palmer and Paul Diaz. Their effort to uphold the rule of law is commendable, and I urge more local agencies to consider participating in this critical program.

Mr. Speaker, I ask my colleagues to join me in thanking the Cobb County Sheriff’s Office for its commitment to getting dangerous, criminal illegal immigrants out of our community.

I yield back the balance of my time.

See here.
Shikha Dalmia
Senior Analyst, Reason Foundation

And here. She – and a co- writer could not get through it without name calling…how open borders far-leftish of them.

About REASON here…yikes.
We are guessing that the word “Nationalist” is bad thing here?

For the pro-American side of this see Americans for Sovereignty.