UNITED STATES CODE

TITLE 8 > CHAPTER 12 > SUBCHAPTER II > Part VIII > § 1324a § 1324a.
HERE

Unlawful employment of aliens

a) Making employment of unauthorized aliens unlawful
(1) In general
It is unlawful for a person or other entity—
(A) to hire, or to recruit or refer for a fee, for employment in the United States an alien knowing the alien is an unauthorized alien (as defined in subsection (h)(3) of this section) with respect to such employment, …
h) Miscellaneous provisions:
(2) Preemption
The provisions of this section preempt any State or local law imposing civil or criminal sanctions (other than through licensing and similar laws) upon those who employ, or recruit or refer for a fee for employment, unauthorized aliens.
(3) Definition of unauthorized alien:
As used in this section, the term “unauthorized alien” means, with respect to the employment of an alien at a particular time, that the alien is not at that time either
(A) an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence, or
(B) authorized to be so employed by this chapter or by the Attorney General.

E-Verify

Department of Homeland Security Fact sheet http://www.usabal.com/news/2007/07-08-10%20E-Verify%20Fact%20Sheet.pdf

*E-Verify (formerly known as the Basic Pilot/Employment Eligibility Verification Program) is an Internet-based system operated by the Department of Homeland Security in partnership with the Social Security Administration 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.

*E-verify is the only official U.S. government source that provides employers in the
United States with real-time data that takes the subjectivity out of verifying employment
eligibility.

* The primary goals of the EEV program are to protect jobs, not lose jobs, for authorized U.S. workers and to ensure a legal workforce in the United States.

Washington Times

Migrants flood through EU open borders

Traiskirchen, Austria —

Thousands of asylum seekers are on the move across Europe as a result of a new relaxation of internal border controls. — Last month’s expansion of a system intended to make it easier for European Union citizens to move among member countries has led to a dramatic rise in illegal aliens.

Some politicians are demanding that the borders once again be closed. Harald Vilimsky, secretary-general of the Austrian Freedom Party, said there had been an “avalanche of asylum seekers,” mainly from Russian-speaking countries.

Gerald Grosz, of the Alliance for the Future of Austria party, said the government was turning Austria into “an El Dorado for fake asylum applicants and criminals.” HERE.

All of the men are illegal immigrants from Mexico

Illegal immigrant who helped run Cobb meth lab to serve life

By YOLANDA RODRÍGUEZ
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

Published on: 01/04/08

A man connected to the first meth superlab found in Georgia was sentenced to life in prison Thursday.

The lab was found in a quiet residential neighborhood in Smyrna in February 2005.

U.S. District Court Judge Clarence Cooper sentenced Alfredo Santiago Moreno to life. He was convicted in April after a one-week trial of conspiring to manufacture and distribute methamphetamine; manufacturing methamphetamine; possession of methamphetamine with the intent to distribute; and maintaining a residence for the purpose of manufacturing methamphetamine.

Three other men in the case pleaded guilty to related charges and were sentenced to long prison terms.

Ramon Oseguera-Alanis, 34, was sentenced to 40 years. Ignacio Cortes-Valencia, 24, was sentenced 21 years, 10 months. Gustavo Lara-Murillo, 31, was sentenced to more than 17 years, 6 months.

All of the men are illegal immigrants from Mexico.

Federal agents, working with local police, found a large-scale factory for making methamphetamine and its more addictive cousin, ice meth, when they raided the home at 200 Church Road.

Inside the home, investigators found nearly 13 pounds of ice methamphetamine. It packaged in one-pound bags — ready for distribution. One pound of the ice meth was found in a vehicle parked in the home’s driveway.

In the basement, they found meth lab equipment.

Other evidence in the case highlights the extent of the operation: 24 large trash bags filled with empty pseudoephedrine tablet boxes and 35 pounds of pure d-pseudoephedrine hydrochloride, essential ingredients in the manufacture of the drugs.
Read the entire news item here.

This is from the “I wish I had writtien this” department. I have added a few hyperlinks to Laura’s column to educate the reader.

Marietta Daily Journal today

Laura Armstrong: ’08 might go down as year of smear

Published: 01/06/2008

What do leftist organizations do when they’re unable to debate an issue on its merits?

They allege. They smear. And they try to undermine those with whom they disagree.

This is what’s happening right now to our local law enforcement officers.

The red flag went up just before the holidays, when Hispanic activist groups made very loud yet unsubstantiated allegations against much-admired Sheriff Neil Warren and his department, accusing them of harassment and violating people’s civil rights. These activists are in a snit because Warren decided to implement the 287g immigration law that allows his staff to identify and hold illegal aliens who commit crimes and end up in his jail.

They’re also concerned, I’m sure, about the domino effect of multiple counties following Cobb’s lead in asserting that 287g authority. Whitfield, Hall and Oconee police departments have now followed Warren’s lead, and that can’t be a good thing from the open borders perspective.

Beyond official releases, Warren-bashers have posted diatribes online, employing the ages-old demonization tactic against this dedicated public servant. One e-mailer, upset over “the bashing and blows being suffered by Latinos in Cobb,” wrote on an activist site that Warren was “the Christmas thief,” tearing mothers away from their children and providing “a mere crackers pack, two chicken wings, cold, and a small juice” for Christmas dinner. Right.

My heart bleeds, especially for mothers who should have been thinking of their babies before they broke the law, countries of origin being irrelevant.

And now, there’s an even more sophisticated smear campaign underway, launched Friday by GALEO, the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials.

GALEO, comprised of just a dozen politicians but many entities who seemingly stand to profit from our broken immigration system, issued an “action alert” encouraging “any person or family member that feels they’ve faced racial profiling by Cobb County Police” to report it in detail by phone this afternoon to a Virginia-based, independent credentialing group, the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, Inc. They’re also encouraging a spectacle – um, excuse me – participation in a public hearing tomorrow at the Cobb County Commission offices.

Of course, allegations, substantiated or not, can be made anonymously, they say, so why not go for it?

Is this latest effort designed to discredit Cobb law enforcement and undermine confidence in them? Curiously, GALEO’s tactics are reminiscent of those used by the left against our military for years, quite effective in a battle for hearts and minds, which this is. Let’s just call Monday’s hearings Winter Soldier II and expect worldwide condemnation from “progressives” everywhere.

If people do indeed have legitimate claims of civil rights violations, (federal “color of law” statutes say this is when a law enforcement officer misuses his authority to abuse an individual) one has to question why GALEO doesn’t help alleged victims seek redress through the established system, i.e. the Department of Justice, rather than using a law enforcement commission, however legitimate, to simply grandstand.

But that would be too easy, wouldn’t it?

Welcome 2008 – the year of the smear.

lbarmstrong3378( at ) comcast.net

This cracks me up…more on this later

Impact of immigration law difficult to gauge 01/06/2008
Associated Press
Marietta Daily Journal

ATLANTA – When Georgia’s immigration law passed in 2006, critics and supporters alike described it as one of the toughest in the country and predicted it would drive illegal immigrants from the state.

“I think what we’ve seen is that it was a big scare tactic that really has no teeth,” said Jerry Gonzalez, director of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials.

Read the entire AP piece here.

THIS IS A MUST READ!
Trouble with Trade
By PAUL KRUGMAN
New York Times
Dec 28, 2007

While the United States has long imported oil and other raw materials from the third world, we used to import manufactured goods mainly from other rich countries like Canada, European nations and Japan.

But recently we crossed an important watershed: we now import more manufactured goods from the third world than from other advanced economies. That is, a majority of our industrial trade is now with countries that are much poorer than we are and that pay their workers much lower wages.

For the world economy as a whole — and especially for poorer nations — growing trade between high-wage and low-wage countries is a very good thing. Above all, it offers backward economies their best hope of moving up the income ladder.

But for American workers the story is much less positive. In fact, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that growing U.S. trade with third world countries reduces the real wages of many and perhaps most workers in this country. And that reality makes the politics of trade very difficult.

Let’s talk for a moment about the economics.

Trade between high-wage countries tends to be a modest win for all, or almost all, concerned. When a free-trade pact made it possible to integrate the U.S. and Canadian auto industries in the 1960s, each country’s industry concentrated on producing a narrower range of products at larger scale. The result was an all-round, broadly shared rise in productivity and wages.

By contrast, trade between countries at very different levels of economic development tends to create large classes of losers as well as winners.

Although the outsourcing of some high-tech jobs to India has made headlines, on balance, highly educated workers in the United States benefit from higher wages and expanded job opportunities because of trade. For example, ThinkPad notebook computers are now made by a Chinese company, Lenovo, but a lot of Lenovo’s research and development is conducted in North Carolina.

But workers with less formal education either see their jobs shipped overseas or find their wages driven down by the ripple effect as other workers with similar qualifications crowd into their industries and look for employment to replace the jobs they lost to foreign competition. And lower prices at Wal-Mart aren’t sufficient compensation.

All this is textbook international economics: contrary to what people sometimes assert, economic theory says that free trade normally makes a country richer, but it doesn’t say that it’s normally good for everyone. Still, when the effects of third-world exports on U.S. wages first became an issue in the 1990s, a number of economists — myself included — looked at the data and concluded that any negative effects on U.S. wages were modest.

The trouble now is that these effects may no longer be as modest as they were, because imports of manufactured goods from the third world have grown dramatically — from just 2.5 percent of G.D.P. in 1990 to 6 percent in 2006.

And the biggest growth in imports has come from countries with very low wages. The original “newly industrializing economies” exporting manufactured goods — South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore — paid wages that were about 25 percent of U.S. levels in 1990. Since then, however, the sources of our imports have shifted to Mexico, where wages are only 11 percent of the U.S. level, and China, where they’re only about 3 percent or 4 percent.

There are some qualifying aspects to this story. For example, many of those made-in-China goods contain components made in Japan and other high-wage economies. Still, there’s little doubt that the pressure of globalization on American wages has increased.

So am I arguing for protectionism? No. Those who think that globalization is always and everywhere a bad thing are wrong. On the contrary, keeping world markets relatively open is crucial to the hopes of billions of people.

But I am arguing for an end to the finger-wagging, the accusation either of not understanding economics or of kowtowing to special interests that tends to be the editorial response to politicians who express skepticism about the benefits of free-trade agreements.

It’s often claimed that limits on trade benefit only a small number of Americans, while hurting the vast majority. That’s still true of things like the import quota on sugar. But when it comes to manufactured goods, it’s at least arguable that the reverse is true. The highly educated workers who clearly benefit from growing trade with third-world economies are a minority, greatly outnumbered by those who probably lose.

As I said, I’m not a protectionist. For the sake of the world as a whole, I hope that we respond to the trouble with trade not by shutting trade down, but by doing things like strengthening the social safety net. But those who are worried about trade have a point, and deserve some respect.

The entire article here.

Is this what Bush meant when he ran on a “smaller government” platform?

East Valley Tribune – Pheonix, Arizona

Court will hide ID of illegal immigrant employer

A federal court will keep secret the identity of an Arizona business owner who admits in a sworn statement to hiring illegal immigrants.
The business owner, who remains anonymous, has filed an affidavit in federal court saying he was employing people not in this country legally last year when the lawsuit was filed, and he intends to continue to do so even with the new state law that took effect Jan. 1.

That law allows a judge to suspend or revoke any state licenses of firms that knowingly hire undocumented workers.

Attorney David Selden, who represents businesses challenging the law, said the purpose of the affidavit was to prove to U.S. District Court Judge Neil Wake that the law will harm at least one company.

The judge had previously indicated he might not be able to rule on the validity of the law without some proof someone could get in legal trouble for disobeying it.

Selden said the move is justified because the business owner faces both the threat of prosecution if his identity becomes known, as well as the possibility of actual physical harm.

Read the rest here.

But not a peep from the White House or the candidates for president in response…

Mexico blasts Arizona employer sanctions law
Associated Press

The Mexican government promised Friday to defend any Mexicans affected by an Arizona law that punishes employers who hire undocumented migrants.

The Arizona law, which went into effect Tuesday, prohibits businesses from knowingly employing illegal immigrants. Violators face business license suspensions for up to 10 days; a second offense triggers permanent revocation.

“Measures like the one approved in Arizona do not contribute to solving the issue of migration by workers between the two countries, and ignore the contributions that migrants make to the U.S. economy and society,” Mexico’s Foreign Relations Department said.

The department said it will “intervene, through its consulates, in any situation in which the rights of Mexican workers are affected, regardless of their immigration status.”

In the past, Mexican consulates have helped with the legal defense of Mexican citizens in similar cases. In Arizona, Mexico has consulates in Phoenix, Tucson, Nogales, Douglas and Yuma.

The Mexican government considers migration an unavoidable phenomenon given the higher wages in the United States. It strongly opposes tightened U.S. controls such as border fences, and instead wants temporary work-visa programs and legalization of workers in the United States.

READ THE REST HERE. Maybe ask your favorite political candidate about the arrogance of the Mexican government?

NBC4-TV — Washington

Illegal alien accused of sex abuse of minor arrested

Fairfax, Va. — Immigration and customs officials have arrested a fugitive immigrant accused of sexually abusing a minor in Frederick. — Raul Ernesto Sarmiento Sanchez, a Honduran national, was arrested on Dec. 27 at a Fairfax County apartment, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said.

HERE…

287 (g) authority coming to Whitfield County, Georgia. Readers may want to know that Hall County
(Gainesville) will be doing the same thing soon…also Oconee County with more to come.

We are guessing that Jerry Gonzalez is not a happy illegal alien advocate right now.
Chattanooga Times-Free Press

Deputies to get immigration enforcement training

Six Whitfield County [Georgia] sheriff’s officers will begin training this month to allow them to identify, hold and even start deportation of illegal [aliens… criminals] booked into the county jail on criminal charges, officials said. — Sheriff Scott Chitwood said his department applied several months ago to the U.S. DHS…

HERE.