All Issues and News

Linn County does a background check on all job applicants through the Social Security Administration database, but has not used the Department of Homeland Security’s E-Verify database, according to county administrator Ralph Wyatt.

But Wyatt may soon have the county add E-Verify check to its hiring protocol.

Some confusion evolved this week after David Cross of Salem asked in a letter to the editor why E-Verify wasn’t being used.

Commissioner Will Tucker asked staff if all applications were checked to ensure job applicants are legal U.S. residents and he was told...

By this time in recent years, local police agencies already would have trudged miles into remote forestlands to jerk hundreds of thousands of marijuana plants linked to Mexican drug cartels out of the ground and burn them.

The cartels, police say, are responsible for virtually all of the major marijuana gardens on public lands. The "cartel grows," as police call them, are a danger to the public and an environmental catastrophe. Some cartel operations have been booby-trapped and guarded by armed sentinels. Police in Northern California have engaged in gun battles with suspects in...

Illegal immigration has been in the news daily during the Republican primary campaign, even though a depressed economy here, stronger border enforcement, and vast new finds of petroleum in Latin America may soon radically curtail the number of illegal entrants into the United States. But for now, conservatives are warned that coming down hard on illegal immigration (i.e., enforcing federal statutes) would lose them the all-critical Hispanic vote. Meanwhile, in California, some legislators want to grant de facto state amnesty to illegal residents. But lost in the continuing furor, pro and...

People entering the U.S. illegally from Mexico are believed responsible for more than one-third of human-ignited wildfires in Arizona over a five-year period, according to a government report that could stoke congressional debate over illegal immigration.

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) said the Government Accountability Office report supports remarks he made earlier this year after his state was hit hard by wildfires. At the time, McCain was accused of "scapegoating" immigrants.

"I hope this report is a lesson to the activists and public officials that would prefer to engage in...