Athens Banner Herald

D.A. King: Immigration law isn’t optional

Published Friday, January 15, 2010
A recent Banner-Herald story about Athens-Clarke County businesses and a “new” Georgia law brought a nod of sad amusement (Story, “Law change catches businesses off guard,” Tuesday).

In 2006, amid public outrage over illegal immigration, the Georgia legislature passed the Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act. Essentially, it says Georgians must obey existing federal immigration, employment and benefits laws.

Among other things, the law requires government entities and their contractors to use federal tools to verify eligibility for employment and public benefits. It is a federal crime to knowingly hire illegal labor – and by federal law, most public benefits are denied to illegal aliens. The immigration status of noncitizens, and thus their eligibility for public benefits, is verified using a federal online database called SAVE.

The state law used language from federal law to define public benefits to include “any grant, contract, loan, professional license, or commercial license, retirement, welfare, health, disability, public or assisted housing, postsecondary education, food assistance, unemployment benefit, or any other similar benefit for which payments or assistance are provided to an individual, household, or family eligibility unit by an agency of a state or local government or by appropriated funds of a state or local government.”

It should be easy for people to understand that a business license, by any name, is a commercial license and thereby a public benefit. Yet like many immigration laws that do not directly benefit the illegal aliens or the Americans who have created an industry out of using and rewarding them, the 2006 state law was treated as an optional requirement by virtually all local governments in Georgia.

In the 2009 legislative session, another law was passed, despite great resistance from the taxpayer-supported Georgia Municipal Association and Association County Commissioners of Georgia. The 2009 law merely clarified the language of the 2006 law and allowed for potential appropriations problems for agencies that continued to encourage illegal immigration by ignoring state and federal laws.

We now have a law that says we must obey the law that says we must obey the law. And I’m sure I’m not the only one asking why a law is required for any responsible local government to do everything possible to discourage already-illegal actions.

Yet the anti-enforcement crowd surely will regard as “intolerant extremism” any effort to deter illegal aliens from residing in Georgia and taking American jobs, taxpayer benefits and services, while we watch unemployment hover at 10 percent and a legislature that again must cut the state budget.

D.A. King

• D.A. King is president of the Georgia-based Dustin Inman Society, which advocates for the enforcement of immigration laws.

HERE

Michael Cutler — Family Security Matters

Better security needed in visa process

This recent Washington Times article focuses on the efforts of Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) to highlight the need for better security in the visa issuance process. I’ve raised this critical issue on a number of occasions, and I’m pleased that Sen. Grassley has once again demonstrated leadership in this vital area…

HERE

This is our continent, not yours!” exclaimed one banner.

“We are indigenous! The only owners of this continent!” said another.

“If you think I’m illegal because I’m a Mexican, learn the true history, because I’m in my homeland,” read another sign.

“One of the more negative parts of the march was when American flags were passed out to make sure the marchers were looked on as part of ‘America,'” said the group’s commentary on the L.A. rally.

HERE

Orange County Register

Man claims illegal status to evade charges

SANTA ANA – A man misidentified himself, claiming to be in the country illegally to evade attempted homicide charges in Santa Ana, Border Patrol agents reported today.

This morning, border agents in the Ajo Station in the Tucson, Ariz., sector arrested a man who was hanging out with a group of people in an area known for drugs and human smuggling, agent David Jimarez said.

Adolfo Aparicio is accused of attempting to fatally shoot his wife in October in Santa Ana.

Officials said the man first misidentified himself and claimed to be in the country illegally, possibly hoping to be deported, instead of having to face charges for the attempted homicide of his wife in October in Santa Ana.

Santa Ana police identified the man as Adolfo Aparicio, 29, of Garden Grove.

It wasn’t until officials ran Aparicio’s fingerprints through a records check that they discovered his true identity and that he’s a U.S. citizen. The check also revealed a felony warrant for Aparicio’s arrest on charges of attempted murder. He will be extradited from Arizona to face charges in California.

“The fingerprints never lie,” Jimarez said.

Aparicio is a documented gang member who assaulted his wife and sister-in-law Oct. 23, Santa Ana Police Cpl. Anthony Bertagna said.

Police initially responded to a domestic violence call in Santa Ana where they saw the two injured women, before they went looking for Aparicio at his home in Garden Grove.

While there, someone told them Aparicio had left with a gun in hand. Soon after, they got a call of shots fired at the Santa Ana residence, Bertagna said. Police soon discovered the woman was shot at but not hit. Police said Aparicio soon left the area. The District Attorney’s office soon issued a warrant for his arrest, Bertagna said.

Jimarez said agents have seen an increase in people with criminal backgrounds claiming to be in the country illegally so to avoid charges in the U.S.

HERE

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photo: louisproyect

HERE and HERE 

CIS
Alien Criminals: Jail or Deport?
By Mark Krikorian
CIS Blog, January 6, 2010

Excerpt: Of course, he should have been deported in 1992 after his first brush with the law. But after his felony convictions he served a year or so of his prison sentence and was then deported. The question is, how to best keep scum like this off America’s streets — keep them in prison for their full sentences (which in this case was 15 years, according to a Utah law enforcement source), at a high costs to our taxpayers, or save money by deporting them quickly, raising the possibility of their re-entry. Handing alien criminals over to immigration before the conclusion of their sentences is becoming more common as states look for ways to cut costs; Marketplace did a radio story on this just a couple days ago regarding Arizona.

HERE

Center for Immigration Studies

Chronic Backlogs at USCIS Show Agency Is Not Ready for CIR-ASAP
By Jessica Vaughan
December 2009

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Jessica M. Vaughan is the Director of Policy Studies at the Center for Immigration Studies.

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One of the many reasons why lawmakers have been loath to enact a mass amnesty and immigration expansion, such as the new Democratic amnesty bill (HR 4321, or CIR-ASAP), has been the government’s chronically poor performance in administering all of our current (and previous) immigration benefits programs. Obama administration officials have assured the public that they are ready for this task.1 But a look at the most recent workload report2 from USCIS reveals that the agency is actually still deep in the weeds and unable to keep up with the existing workload. As of the end of June 2009, the agency had a backlog of nearly 2.7 million applications and petitions that were pending review, above and beyond the 1.8 million that had been completed that quarter. And recent statements3 by agency head Alejandro Mayorkas suggest that huge fee increases for immigrants and hundreds of millions of dollars in increased taxpayer-funded appropriations will be required to improve the situation.

Apparently recognizing that this huge backlog of pending cases might send the wrong signal about the agency’s efficiency and readiness for major immigration expansions, USCIS uses alternative calculations and definitions of the processing backlog as smoke and mirrors to disguise the true scale of the problem. In its last quarterly report to Congress, it claimed the backlog was about 207,000 cases. (Note that the processing backlog, which here refers to the number of applications for immigration benefits of all kinds that the government has yet to act on, should not be confused with the immigrant visa waiting list, which refers to the applications in the queue that results from statutory limits on the number of green cards issued each year. For more on this, see http://cis.org/Vaughan/FamilyImmigrantWaitingList.)

How did they get from 2.7 million pending cases to only 207,000 cases in the backlog? An excerpt from a table in the quarterly report is below. This table is a reminder of both the complexity of U.S. immigration law and the many ways otherwise unqualified people can bypass the conventional green card process (temporary protected status, cancellation of removal, temporary work permit, crime victim, waiver of inadmissibility, etc.). The first column lists the type of immigration benefit, which corresponds to a specific form that has to be filled out by an applicant or sponsor.

MORE HERE

Cloward-Piven Government

By James Simpson

It is time to cast aside all remaining doubt. President Obama is not trying to lead America forward to recovery, prosperity and strength. Quite the opposite, in fact.

In September of last year, American Thinker published my article, Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. Part of a series, it connected then-presidential candidate Barack Obama to individuals and organizations practicing a malevolent strategy for destroying our economy and our system of government. Since then, the story of that strategy has found its way across the blogosphere, onto the airwaves of radio stations across the country, the Glenn Beck television show, Bill O’Reilly, and now Mark Levin.

The methodology is known as the Cloward-Piven Strategy, and we can all be grateful to David Horowitz and his ‘Discover the Networks’ for originally exposing and explaining it to us. He describes it as:

The strategy of forcing political change through orchestrated crisis. The “Cloward-Piven Strategy” seeks to hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse.

Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven were two lifelong members of Democratic Socialists of America who taught sociology at Columbia University (Piven later went on to City University of New York). In a May 1966 Nation magazine article titled “The Weight of the Poor,” they outlined their strategy, proposing to use grassroots radical organizations to push ever more strident demands for public services at all levels of government.

The result, they predicted, would be “a profound financial and political crisis” that would unleash “powerful forces … For major economic reform at the national level.”

They implemented the strategy by creating a succession of radical organizations, most notable among them the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN), with the help of veteran organizer Wade Rathke. Their crowning achievement was the “Motor Voter” act, signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1993 with Cloward and Piven standing behind him.

As we now know, ACORN was one of the chief drivers of high-risk mortgage lending that eventually led to the financial crisis. But the Motor Voter law was another component of the strategy. It created vast vulnerabilities in our electoral system, which ACORN then exploited.

ACORN’s vote registration scandals throughout the U. S. are predictable fallout.

The Motor Voter law has also been used to open another vulnerability in the system: the registration of vast numbers of illegal aliens, who then reliably vote Democrat. Herein lies the real reason Democrats are so anxious for open borders, security be damned.

It should be clear to anyone with a mind and two eyes that this president and this Congress do not have our interests at heart. They are implementing this strategy on an unprecedented scale by flooding America with a tidal wave of poisonous initiatives, orders, regulations, and laws. As Rahm Emmanuel said, “A crisis is a terrible thing to waste.”

The real goal of “health care” legislation, the real goal of “cap-and-trade,” and the real goal of the “stimulus” is to rip the guts out of our private economy and transfer wide swaths of it over to the government to control. Do not be deluded by the propaganda. These initiatives are vehicles for change. They are not goals in and of themselves except in their ability to deliver power. They will make matters much worse, for that is their design.

This time, in addition to overwhelming the government with demands for services, Obama and the Democrats are overwhelming political opposition to their plans with a flood of apocalyptic legislation. Their ultimate goal is to leave us so discouraged, demoralized, and exhausted that we throw our hands up in defeat. As Barney Frank said, “the middle class will be too distracted to fight.”

These people are our enemies. They don’t use guns, yet, but they are just as dangerous, determined, and duplicitous as the communists we faced in the Cold War, Korea , Vietnam , and bush wars across the globe, and the Nazis we faced in World War II.

It is time we fully internalized and digested this fact, with all its ugly ramifications. These people have violated countless laws and could be prosecuted, had we the political power. Not only are their policies unconstitutional, but deliberately so — the goal being to make the Constitution irrelevant. Their spending is off the charts and will drive us into hyperinflation, but it could be rescinded, had we the political power. These policies are toxic, but they could be stopped and reversed, had we the political power. Their ideologies are poisonous, but they could be exposed for what they are, with long jail sentences as an object lesson, had we the political power.

Every single citizen who cares about this country should be spending every minute of his or her spare time lobbying, organizing, writing, and planning. Fight every initiative they launch. It is all destructive. If we are to root out this evil, it is critical that in 2010 we elect competent, principled leaders willing to defend our Constitution and our country. Otherwise, the malevolent cabal that occupies the government today will become too entrenched.

After that, all bets are off.

God Bless America , more today than yesterday!

Friends –

Virtually no one in Washington expects Congress to act on CIR ASAP, the comprehensive immigration reform bill introduced last month by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Its goal from the start was to jumpstart a conversation – the bill likely to move is the bipartisan measure being crafted by Sens. Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham.

Still, CIR ASAP will hang over the 2010 immigration debate, and its provisions – both good and bad – are sure to reappear again and again.

A politicized commission to set visa limits, increased employer liability for subcontractors, new fees and fines, new burdens for businesses that depend on the H2B visa program – yet no new program to provide the U.S. economy with the workers it needs for economic recovery.

CLICK HERE for IW’s analysis of the provisions most important to employers – most of them things we’ll need to fight to keep out of any bill that does move.

Hungry as employers are for immigration reform, it has to be reform that works for U.S. businesses and the U.S. economy. And we need to be communicating with Congress, making clear what kind of change will and will not work.

Please CLICK HERE and sign up today to join the fight for a bill that works for all Americans.

All best, Tamar

P.S. For more on what’s wrong with CIR ASAP, please visit our webpage, WORKER VISAS UNDER ATTACK.

Tamar Jacoby
President
ImmigrationWorks USA

www.immigrationworksusa.org

CLICK HERE TO JOIN OUR E-MAIL LIST!

Jacoby’s Website HERE