REP. SMITH OP-ED: Obama Doing Nothing To Recover Stolen Jobs
December 3, 2009, posted on NumbersUSA

Rep. Lamar Smith

In a bold, aggressive op-ed today in Politico, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) challenged the sincerity of the President’s Jobs Summit today because it is unlikely to look at putting up to 8 million unemployed Americans back to work by removing illegal aliens from their jobs.

If President Barack Obama could snap his fingers and create 8 million new jobs, would you want him to do it? I would. And certainly the 15 million unemployed Americans would, as well.

The good news is that the president can do just that — implement a policy that opens up 8 million jobs. The bad news is that he won’t.

Four weeks ago, after the administration announced that the unemployment rate had hit 10.2 percent and 190,000 jobs were lost in October alone, 21 of my colleagues and I wrote to the president to recommend enforcing current immigration laws to open up jobs for citizens and legal immigrants. The White House has yet to respond.

And this week, notably absent from the president’s jobs summit is any discussion of how to take back the 8 million jobs currently occupied by illegal immigrants and make them available to out-of-work U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.

Instead, the Obama administration has taken the opposite approach to the stolen-jobs problem. Rather than ensuring that American jobs are reserved for legal workers, the administration continues to pursue amnesty. But legalizing 11 million illegal immigrants will only further harm American workers, making it harder for citizens and legal immigrants to get and keep long-term jobs.

How can the administration justify giving millions of jobs to illegal immigrants when the economy is struggling with a 10 percent unemployment rate? Adding insult to injury, it absurdly claims that immigration enforcement is done. That is simply not true. And nowhere is that more clear than in the administration’s record on work site enforcement.

Statistics from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency charged with enforcing the nation’s immigration laws, reveal significant drops in work site enforcement activity across the board. Administrative arrests (arrests of illegal immigrants who will be placed into deportation proceedings) have fallen 68 percent, criminal arrests are down 60 percent, criminal indictments have fallen 58 percent and criminal convictions are down 63 percent — all in just one year!

It is hard to conceive of a worse time to cut work site enforcement efforts by more than half. But that is exactly what the Obama administration has done.

The administration says that it has increased the number of I-9 audits of employers. But those audits are a farce. Employers consider an occasional minor fine just the cost of doing business.

The administration also claims that audits lead to criminal investigations. That statement is true — audits can lead to investigations — but the administration’s own record demonstrates that they haven’t. As the number of audits has increased, the number of cases initiated has dropped by more than 30 percent, from an average of 93 per month to just 61.

And what happens to the illegal workers? A recent Minnesota Public Radio report described the aftermath of an audit that identified 1,200 illegal immigrants in well-paying janitorial jobs: “The most important rumor to dispel was that the workers were arrested.”

Instead of creating jobs for citizens and legal immigrants, the Obama administration simply told 1,000 illegal immigrants to go down the street and knock on the door of the next employer. Instead of creating jobs, the administration created competition for jobs!

With so many Americans’ livelihoods on the line, now is the time for the administration to stand up for citizens and legal immigrants. Now is the time for the president to direct that immigration laws be enforced. When the jobs stolen by illegal immigrants are recovered for legal workers, our true national recovery can begin.

Rep. Lamar Smith (R-Texas) is the ranking member on the House Judiciary Committee.

SOURCE: Politico.com

Roy Beck — Numbers USA

Pro-amnesty movement thinks Americans deserve to be unemployed

Wonder why Washington politicians gathering in Jobs Summits on Thursday show NO interest in pushing illegal aliens out of their jobs in order to put millions of unemployed Americans back to work? A major pro-amnesty coalition has just provided one answer….

HERE

Center for Immigration Studies

Daily news from CIS

Off-duty police officers will be checking the IDs of every worker who steps foot on the Duval County Courthouse construction site – one of the latest steps aimed at screening out [illegal aliens]. — Jacksonville city officials have also pushed all companies on the downtown project to use E-Verify

HERE

MUCH MORE NEWS THAT THE OPEN BORDERS LOBBY HOPES YOU NEVER SEE HERE

KHOU-TV — Houston

Mambo Seafood Restaurants busted by immigration agents

Immigration agents rushed into two Houston seafood restaurants Wednesday and arrested more than two dozen employees. It happened at the Mambo Seafood Restaurants in northwest and northeast Houston. — The agency arrested 33 people. Thirty-one remained in custody at last check…

HERE

Testimony of Barbara Jordan, Chair, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform
Before the U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on Appropriations
Subcommittee on Appropriations for the Departments of
Commerce, Justice, State, the Judiciary and Related Agencies
March 29, 1995

Mr. Chairman, members of the Subcommittee, let me express my gratitude to you for the opportunity to report to you on the progress of the work of the bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform.
In our First Interim Report to Congress, U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility, presented to Congress September 30, 1994, this Commission undertook to recommend a comprehensive strategy for controlling illegal immigration. The comprehensive approach we outlined has eight parts.

First, we set forth principles. We are a nation of immigrants committed to the rule of law. The Commission believes that legal immigration has strengthened the country and that it continues to do so. We as a Commission denounce the hostility that seems to be developing toward all immigrants.

To make sense about the national interest in immigration, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law, and those who violate it. Therefore, we disagree, also, with those who label our efforts to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is unacceptable.

The second part of our strategy is worksite enforcement. You will hear testimony today about visa overstayers. You will hear that roughly one-half of the nation’s illegal alien problem results from visitors who entered legally but who do not leave when their time is up. Let me tell you in three simple words why that is: they get jobs.

We believe that employer sanctions can work, but only with a reliable system for verifying authorization to work. Employers want to obey the law, but they are caught now between a rock and a hard place. The current system is based on documents. An employer must either accept those documents, knowing that they might be forged, and thus live with the vulnerability to employer sanctions for hiring someone presenting false identification. Or, an employer may choose to ask particular workers for more documentation, which is discrimination.

The Commission has recommended a test of what we regard as the most promising option: electronic validation using a computerized registry based on the social security number. This is the only approach to deterring illegal immigration that does not ignore the half of the problem, the visa overstayer problem you are investigating today. We are pleased with the prompt, bipartisan support that this highly visible recommendation has received, and we look forward to real results from pilot projects before our final report in 1997.

Third in our recommmendations for a comprehensive strategy is making eligibility for public benefits consistent with our immigration policy. Decisions about eligibility should support our immigration objectives. Accordingly, the Commission recommended against eligibility for illegal aliens except in most unusual circumstances.

For legal immigrants, we recommended making abuse of the public charge provision grounds for deportation. The affidavit of support that sponsors sign should be a legally-binding contract. Moral obligations work well enough in church, but the law requires a contract.

But the Commission also recommended that legal permanent residents should continue to be eligible for means-tested programs and against any broad, categorical denial of eligibility for public benefits based on alienage for those who obey our laws. It is important to see a lack of citizenship as something more than “the funding mechanism” for welfare reform. It gets to a fundamental issue for defining the national interest in legal immigration-the relationship between the decision to come here as an immigrant and the decision to naturalize to become a citizen.

Citizenship and naturalization should be more central to the process of immigration. There are many barriers to naturalizing in law and practice, and they should be removed. But it is a debasement of the concept of citizenship to make it the route to welfare.

We on the Commission believe strongly that it is in the national interest for immigrants to become citizens for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. We want immigrants to be motivated to naturalize in order to vote, to be fully participating members of our polity-to become Americans. We don’t want to motivate lawabiding aliens to naturalize just so that they can get food stamps, health care, job training, or their homes tested for lead.

Fourth, deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process. The Commission will have additional recommendations on this crucial matter later this year.

Fifth, emergency management. Migration emergencies such as we have seen recently with Haiti and Cuba do recur, and we must be prepared for them. Again, we will have detailed recommendations on migration emergencies.

Sixth, reliable data. The current debate over the economic impact of immigration is marked by shaky statistics, flawed assumptions, and an amazing range of contradictory conclusions from what ought to be commonly-accepted methods. Rather than attempt to choose sides in this discussion, the Commission has contracted with the National Academy of Sciences to analyze the methods used for evaluating immigration data, to cut through this fog. We will share their interim results with you as we receive them.

Seventh, much as we support enhanced enforcement by this country, we must face the fact that unilateral action on the part of the United States will never be enough to curb illegal immigration. Immigrants come here illegally from source countries where conditions prevail that encourage or even compel them to leave. Attacking the root causes of illegal migration is essential and will require international cooperation.

As a case in point, this Commission is the lead agency for the U.S. government in developing the U.S-Mexico Binational Study to analyze the causes of migration across our border with Mexico. Perhaps we can even come to some agreement, not only on the analysis, but also on the policy prescriptions necessary.

Finally, the Commission recommends better border management. Far more can and should be done to meet the twin goals of border management: deterring illegal crossings while facilitating legal ones. But we have to recognize both goals.

The Commission on Immigration Reform endorsed a border crossing fee in principle as a user fee. It should not go into the general treasury. It should be used to avoid the kind of counterproductive backups which happen all the time in border towns. Many people who are authorized to cross the border legally simply tire of waiting in line and cross illegally to save time. This is a waste of resources for the Border Patrol, which frequently apprehends such people. We applaud the efforts of innovative Border Patrol leaders, such as Silvestre Reyes with Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, and we must do our part, as well.

A border crossing fee, properly applied, would benefit the border towns immensely. It would be a kind of NAFTA fund, used along both borders, to ensure that legal crossings are convenient and secure. It is to fund the future prosperity of border towns like El Paso, Laredo, Nogales, and San Diego that depend so much on crossborder trade.

So that is our eight-point strategy for dealing with illegal immigration in a comprehensive, systematic way. The Commission made all of these recommendations unanimously, by consensus. We are nine Commissioners, Republicans and Democrats, a diverse group. We might have been expected to simply throw up our hands at the difficulty of the task Congress mandated for us. But we put aside rhetoric. We determined that we would look for answers-and not excuses. And our work is not done.

I must leave here shortly, Mr. Chairman, to return to my colleagues just around the corner here, who are engaged in the second day of consultations on legal immigration reform. The Commission is well along in its consideration of the national interest in legal immigration, of the qualities that we seek in immigrants, of the limits. Our first report represented a hard-won, bipartisan consensus on emotionally-tough, intellectually-complex issues.

We ask that you give us the chance to try to reach such a bipartisan consensus on legal immigration reform. Bipartisanship ought to be more common. There is a time and a place for partisan battles, to be sure. But immigration, like foreign policy, ought to be a place where the national interest comes first, last, and always.

Immigration is far too important to who we are as a nation to become a wedge issue in Presidential politics. We have seen that kind of thing happen before, and it is not productive. I, for one, wish that we would do away with all the hyphenation and just be Americans, together.

I will be glad to answer any questions you may have.

HERE

Testimony of Barbara Jordan,
Chair, U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform
Before the U.S. House of Representatives
Committee on the Judiciary
Subcommittee on Immigration and Claims
February 24, 1995
——————————————————————————–

Mr. Chairman, members of the Subcommittee, let me express my gratitude to you for the opportunity to report to you on the progress of the work of the bipartisan Commission on Immigration Reform.
In our First Interim Report to Congress, U.S. Immigration Policy: Restoring Credibility, presented to Congress September 30, 1994, this Commission undertook to recommend a comprehensive strategy for controlling illegal immigration. The comprehensive approach we outlined has eight parts.

First, we set forth principles. We are a nation of immigrants committed to the rule of law. The Commission believes that legal immigration has strengthened the country and that it continues to do so. We as a Commission denounce the hostility that seems to be developing toward all immigrants.

To make sense about the national interest in immigration, it is necessary to make distinctions between those who obey the law, and those who violate it. Therefore, we disagree, also, with those who label our efforts to control illegal immigration as somehow inherently anti-immigrant. Unlawful immigration is unacceptable.

The second part of our strategy is worksite enforcement. You will hear testimony today about visa overstayers. You will hear that roughly one-half of the nation’s illegal alien problem results from visitors who entered legally but who do not leave when their time is up. Let me tell you in three simple words why that is: they get jobs.

We believe that employer sanctions can work, but only with a reliable system for verifying authorization to work. Employers want to obey the law, but they are caught now between a rock and a hard place. The current system is based on documents. An employer must either accept those documents, knowing that they might be forged, and thus live with the vulnerability to employer sanctions for hiring someone presenting false identification. Or, an employer may choose to ask particular workers for more documentation, which is discrimination.

The Commission has recommended a test of what we regard as the most promising option: electronic validation using a computerized registry based on the social security number. This is the only approach to deterring illegal immigration that does not ignore the half of the problem, the visa overstayer problem you are investigating today. We are pleased with the prompt, bipartisan support that this highly visible recommendation has received, and we look forward to real results from pilot projects before our final report in 1997.

Third in our recommmendations for a comprehensive strategy is making eligibility for public benefits consistent with our immigration policy. Decisions about eligibility should support our immigration objectives. Accordingly, the Commission recommended against eligibility for illegal aliens except in most unusual circumstances.

For legal immigrants, we recommended making abuse of the public charge provision grounds for deportation. The affidavit of support that sponsors sign should be a legally-binding contract. Moral obligations work well enough in church, but the law requires a contract.

But the Commission also recommended that legal permanent residents should continue to be eligible for means-tested programs and against any broad, categorical denial of eligibility for public benefits based on alienage for those who obey our laws. It is important to see a lack of citizenship as something more than “the funding mechanism” for welfare reform. It gets to a fundamental issue for defining the national interest in legal immigration-the relationship between the decision to come here as an immigrant and the decision to naturalize to become a citizen.

Citizenship and naturalization should be more central to the process of immigration. There are many barriers to naturalizing in law and practice, and they should be removed. But it is a debasement of the concept of citizenship to make it the route to welfare.

We on the Commission believe strongly that it is in the national interest for immigrants to become citizens for the right reasons, not the wrong ones. We want immigrants to be motivated to naturalize in order to vote, to be fully participating members of our polity-to become Americans. We don’t want to motivate lawabiding aliens to naturalize just so that they can get food stamps, health care, job training, or their homes tested for lead.

Fourth, deportation is crucial. Credibility in immigration policy can be summed up in one sentence: those who should get in, get in; those who should be kept out, are kept out; and those who should not be here will be required to leave. The top priorities for detention and removal, of course, are criminal aliens. But for the system to be credible, people actually have to be deported at the end of the process. The Commission will have additional recommendations on this crucial matter later this year.

Fifth, emergency management. Migration emergencies such as we have seen recently with Haiti and Cuba do recur, and we must be prepared for them. Again, we will have detailed recommendations on migration emergencies.

Sixth, reliable data. The current debate over the economic impact of immigration is marked by shaky statistics, flawed assumptions, and an amazing range of contradictory conclusions from what ought to be commonly-accepted methods. Rather than attempt to choose sides in this discussion, the Commission has contracted with the National Academy of Sciences to analyze the methods used for evaluating immigration data, to cut through this fog. We will share their interim results with you as we receive them.

Seventh, much as we support enhanced enforcement by this country, we must face the fact that unilateral action on the part of the United States will never be enough to curb illegal immigration. Immigrants come here illegally from source countries where conditions prevail that encourage or even compel them to leave. Attacking the root causes of illegal migration is essential and will require international cooperation.

As a case in point, this Commission is the lead agency for the U.S. government in developing the U.S-Mexico Binational Study to analyze the causes of migration across our border with Mexico. Perhaps we can even come to some agreement, not only on the analysis, but also on the policy prescriptions necessary.

Finally, the Commission recommends better border management. Far more can and should be done to meet the twin goals of border management: deterring illegal crossings while facilitating legal ones. But we have to recognize both goals.

The Commission on Immigration Reform endorsed a border crossing fee in principle as a user fee. It should not go into the general treasury. It should be used to avoid the kind of counterproductive backups which happen all the time in border towns. Many people who are authorized to cross the border legally simply tire of waiting in line and cross illegally to save time. This is a waste of resources for the Border Patrol, which frequently apprehends such people. We applaud the efforts of innovative Border Patrol leaders, such as Silvestre Reyes with Operation Hold the Line in El Paso, and we must do our part, as well.

A border crossing fee, properly applied, would benefit the border towns immensely. It would be a kind of NAFTA fund, used along both borders, to ensure that legal crossings are convenient and secure. It is to fund the future prosperity of border towns like El Paso, Laredo, Nogales, and San Diego that depend so much on crossborder trade.

So that is our eight-point strategy for dealing with illegal immigration in a comprehensive, systematic way. The Commission made all of these recommendations unanimously, by consensus. We are nine Commissioners, Republicans and Democrats, a diverse group. We might have been expected to simply throw up our hands at the difficulty of the task Congress mandated for us. But we put aside rhetoric. We determined that we would look for answers-and not excuses. And our work is not done.

I must leave here shortly, Mr. Chairman, to return to my colleagues just around the corner here, who are engaged in the second day of consultations on legal immigration reform. The Commission is well along in its consideration of the national interest in legal immigration, of the qualities that we seek in immigrants, of the limits. Our first report represented a hard-won, bipartisan consensus on emotionally-tough, intellectually-complex issues.

We ask that you give us the chance to try to reach such a bipartisan consensus on legal immigration reform. Bipartisanship ought to be more common. There is a time and a place for partisan battles, to be sure. But immigration, like foreign policy, ought to be a place where the national interest comes first, last, and always.

Immigration is far too important to who we are as a nation to become a wedge issue in Presidential politics. We have seen that kind of thing happen before, and it is not productive. I, for one, wish that we would do away with all the hyphenation and just be Americans, together.

I will be glad to answer any questions you may have.

——————————————————————————–

HERE

Frontera NorteSur — New Mexico State University — Las Cruces

Mexican presidential campaign underway… in Los Angeles

Although it is still two years off, Mexico’s 2012 election campaign is picking up on both sides of the border. In an early instance of cross-border politicking, Mexican Congressman Cesar Nava traveled to Los Angeles this week to recruit members for President Felipe Calderon’s conservative National Action Party (PAN)…

HERE

Denver Post

Denver weighs random immigration-status checks for contractors

The city of Denver may consider doing random checks on the immigration status of contract workers after a construction company was found to have used more than a dozen illegal immigrants to work on city projects. — After being alerted by a constituent last summer, City Councilwoman Jeanne Faatz asked…

HERE

A Case Study in Immigration Fraud

New Video Highlights Weaknesses

WASHINGTON (November 2009) – The Center for Immigration Studies is releasing the third video (HERE) in its series Border Basics by Janice Kephart, Three Years of Fraud in the U.S.: The Case of Manoj Kargudri.

Following closely on the heels of Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s announcement that she is looking forward to working with Congress on “comprehensive immigration reform,” Janice Kephart explores how the agency that would be responsible for carrying out an amnesty of 12 million illegal aliens still cannot ferret out fraud in a single simple employment petition even eight years after 9/11.

Kephart examines the case of Manoj Kargudri, an Indian national who exploited simple loopholes in our immigration system five times over three years to enter and remain in the United States. Kargudri was finally stopped at the San Antonio airport on August 28, 2008, by the Transportation Security Administration. He was not stopped because of his immigration violations, but rather because he had a one-way ticket to Washington and in his carry-on luggage were box cutters and a homemade battery strapped to his MP3 player. Luckily, he turned out not to be a terrorist, but the fraud in the immigration system allowed Kargudri to obtain a visa and enter and stay in the United States for three years before he was finally arrested and deported.

Kephart concludes that while Kargudri’s employment fraud is largely solvable, the agency responsible for adjudicating immigration benefits, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, has been making unfulfilled promises for years about upgrading its systems to effectively reduce application fraud. In a broader context, the Kargudri case raises more questions about the soundness of pursuing amnesty within a bureaucracy where applicant fraud still runs rampant.

# # #

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution that examines the impact of immigration on the United States.

Health Care Provisions Still Soft on Illegal Aliens

Amendments Expected to Target Issue

WASHINGTON (December 2009) – Assurances that the two health-care reform bills would not benefit illegal aliens are not accurate. A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies examines in detail the immigration-related provisions of both the House-passed HR 3962 and the bill now being debated in the Senate, HR 3590. The report concludes that the bills, in their current form, would indeed give illegal aliens access to taxpayer-funded health care well beyond emergency medical treatment.

The report, “Immigration-Related Provisions of Senate and House Health Reform Bills,” is authored by CIS Fellow James R. Edwards, Jr.

Key findings include:

HR 3962 ensures illegal alien access to the exchange and public option. HR 3590 states illegal immigrants are excluded from these.

Both bills ostensibly bar illegal aliens from receiving the premium subsidy, and both bills use some form of eligibility verification for the subsidy.

Both bills expand Medicaid eligibility. Both bills lack verification requirements based on citizenship or immigrant status. Both contain serious loopholes to enroll illegal aliens easily into Medicaid. HR 3962 automatically covers anchor babies.

The eligibility verification process in each bill falls woefully short of protecting taxpayer liability to cover or subsidize people living unlawfully in the United States. Both the House and Senate bills’ verification processes will encourage large-scale fraud and abuse.

The Senate bill exempts illegal aliens from the mandate that everyone have health insurance or else face a tax penalty. This perverse exemption treats illegal aliens better than the bill treats American citizens.

# # #

The Center for Immigration Studies is an independent research institution that examines the impact of immigration on the United States.