illegal immigration

In a video to constituents, Sen. Marco Rubio has raised the possibility that he could abandon the immigration reform bill he’s been pushing if political “horse trading” waters down his priorities in the bill.

Though he defended the idea of comprehensive immigration reform, Rubio warned that if the individual components (such as E-Verify and border security) aren’t treated “as separate issues even though they are dealt with in one bill, then I won’t be able to support that anymore.”

Read more: http://conservativebyte.com/2013/06/rubio-raises-the-possibility-of-jumping-off-immigration-reform-push/#ixzz2VCYt1tiy
  Read more about Rubio raises the possibility of jumping off immigration reform push

(Washington, D.C. May 29, 2013) The Gang of Eight immigration bill, S.744, is on its way to the Senate floor for a vote, possibly as early as the week of June 10.

The bill was drafted in secret by eight senators and a group of Washington lobbyists. After its introduction on April 17, it received minimal scrutiny at a handful of hearings stacked with supporters of amnesty for illegal aliens and cheap labor for business interests, followed by a hasty Judiciary Committee mark-up in which virtually no substantive amendments were adopted.

“The product of this rigged and secretive effort to hijack American immigration policy under the guise of reform is a bill that can best be described as the mother of all legislative train wrecks,” declared Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). “S.744 includes a massive amnesty for millions of illegal aliens, a massive infusion of foreign labor to compete with skilled and low-skilled American workers, trillions of dollars in unfunded liabilities, and unprecedented discretionary authority for the Obama administration to ignore immigration laws. What the Gang of Eight bill does not include are mandates for border enforcement, or meaningful protections for American workers.”

In anticipation of the bill heading to the Senate floor for debate, FAIR has compiled a list of the Top 40 Reasons to Oppose the Senate Amnesty Bill, including:

The bill would not secure our borders or improve immigration enforcement:

• No border security requirements. The bill merely requires the Secretary of Homeland Security to submit a plan to secure the border.
• A rollback of existing border fencing requirements.
• No biometric exit system at all land, air and sea ports of entry to track aliens who enter and leave the U.S., which is already required under current law.

The bill would not enhance homeland security, or prevent legalization of criminals and terrorists:

• Illegal aliens would be protected from detention or removal merely by filing an application for Registered Provisional Immigrant (RPI) status.
• Would allow illegal aliens with multiple misdemeanor convictions to gain RPI status.
• Allows the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to waive a broad array of unlawful behavior for the purpose of determining whether illegal aliens are admissible, including gang membership, drunken driving offenses, domestic violence and others.

The bill would not protect U.S. workers or taxpayers:

• E-Verify won’t go into effect for all employers until four years after DHS issues regulations implementing the mandatory program, meaning these protections would not be in place for a decade or more after enactment.
• Doubles the admission of new permanent immigrants to compete with U.S. workers.
• Increases the number of guest workers by 50 percent during the first decade of enactment, including as many as 200,000 new low-skilled guest workers.
• Reduces protections for skilled U.S. workers against losing jobs and opportunities to H-1B guest workers.
• Does not require legalized aliens to pay back taxes.

The bill poses an enormous unfunded liability for U.S. taxpayers:

• Future costs of government services and benefits to amnesty recipients could run as high as $6.3 trillion.
• Requires that DHS waive the public charge law when determining which aliens are eligible for amnesty.
• Would allow people with as little as 125 percent of poverty level income to qualify for green cards after ten years AND sponsor relatives to immigrate legally.
• Creates a slush fund for advocacy groups to recruit and assist amnesty applicants.
• Allows illegal aliens, and even broad classes of illegal aliens, to litigate unfavorable amnesty decisions, with taxpayers picking up the legal costs.

The full list of the Top 40 Reasons to Oppose the Gang of Eight Amnesty Bill can be found on FAIR’s website, www.fairus.org.
  Read more about The Mother of All Legislative Train Wrecks:

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) cannot find 266 potentially dangerous foreign nationals who have overstayed their visas, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

According to testimony from Rebecca Gambler, director of the Homeland Security and Justice for GAO, on May 21, 2013 before the House Subcommittee on Border and Maritime Security, DHS identified 1,901 illegal overstays of concern in 2011. As of March 2013, 14 percent remain missing.

Of those that pose security threats, 266 could not be located, and nine individuals had been arrested.

  Read more about MISSING: 266 Illegal Overstays that ‘Pose National Security’ Risks

Just across the Rio Grande from Brownsville, Texas, stands a dormitory-style shelter filled with people recently deported from the U.S. and other migrants waiting to cross the border.

The long rows of bunk beds offer immigrants a place to rest on their long journey. But the shelter is no safe haven in a town controlled by the Gulf cartel. Armed men once showed up and took away 15 men, who were probably put to work as gunmen, lookouts or human mules hauling bales of marijuana into the United States.

As Congress takes up immigration reform, lawmakers may have to confront the reality of this place and others like it, where people say the current system of immigration enforcement and deportation produces a constant flow of people north and south that provides the cartel with a vulnerable labor pool and steady source of revenue.

"This vicious circle favors organized crime because the migrant is going to pay" for safe passage, said the Rev. Francisco Gallardo, who oversees immigrant-assistance efforts for the Matamoros Catholic diocese.

If Congress sends more resources to the border, the government will also need to account for shifting patterns in immigrant arrests.

The cartel controls who crosses the border and profits from each immigrant by taxing human smugglers. At the shelter, the cartel threat was so alarming that shelter administrators began encouraging immigrants to go into the streets during the day, thinking they would be harder to round up than at the shelter.

There have been record numbers of deportations in recent years and tens of thousands landed in Tamaulipas already this year, the state that borders Texas from Matamoros to Nuevo Laredo. Arizona is often singled out as the busiest border crossing for immigrants entering the U.S., but more and more migrants are being caught in the southernmost tip of Texas, in the Border Patrol's Rio Grande Valley sector.

Apprehension statistics are imperfect measures because they only capture a fraction of the real flow, but the arrest numbers are definitely shifting.

Arrests in the Tucson, Ariz., sector dropped 3 percent last year, while Rio Grande Valley arrests rose 65 percent. In March alone, the Border Patrol made more than 16,000 immigrant arrests in the Rio Grande Valley sector, a 67 percent increase from the same month last year, according to the agency.

Immigrant deaths are also up. The sector reported last month that about 70 bodies were found in the first six months of the fiscal year, more than twice as many as the previous year.

The makeup of the immigrants apprehended here is changing, too, driven by people flowing out of Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador. The Border Patrol made 94,532 arrests of non-Mexican immigrants along the Southwest border last year, more than double the year before. And nearly half of those came in the Rio Grande Valley sector.

The Border Patrol is responding by redirecting personnel, including sending most new graduates from its academy to the Rio Grande Valley, according to senior Border Patrol officials.

When immigrants from Central America and Mexico arrive in Matamoros ahead of their trip to America, they are met by smugglers who have to pay the cartel tax for every person they take across the border.

Attempts to cross alone are met with violence. Some immigrants are kidnapped and their families extorted by the organization.

Reported murders in Tamaulipas, the state that borders Texas from Matamoros to Nuevo Laredo, increased more than 250 percent in the past four years, according to the Mexican government. Official statistics are generally thought to undercount the real toll. Soldiers recently killed six gunmen in a clash in Matamoros.

And yet, even with the high-degree of danger for immigrants crossing this part of the border, they keep coming.

Central American migrants continue to use the route up the Gulf Coast side of Mexico and through Tamaulipas because it's the shortest to the U.S., said Rodolfo Casillas Ramirez, a professor at Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales in Mexico City. The smugglers choose the route, and even if immigrants have heard about the violence in Tamaulipas, "they trust that the premium they've paid includes the right of passage," he said.

They continue to leave their home countries for economic reasons. Although the U.S. economy has provided fewer jobs for immigrants during the Great Recession and a long, slow recovery, opportunities south of the border have been even more limited, Casillas said.

That's why the Rev. Alejandro Solalinde, a Roman Catholic priest who founded a shelter for immigrants in the southern Mexican state of Oaxaca, said the answer is in regional development, not increased border security.

"This situation has grown because ultimately the migrants are merchandise and organized crime profits in volume," he said during a recent visit to Matamoros.

Rep. Filemon Vela, a member of the House Homeland Security Committee whose district includes Brownsville, said the immigration-reform debate has so far left out discussion of the security and economic development in Mexico.

"The incentive for people to cross over illegally from Mexico will never subside until these individuals feel safe and until they are able to feed themselves and their families," Vela said.

At the 150-bed shelter, more than half of the immigrants have just been deported from the U.S., Gallardo said. The others are immigrants preparing to cross. He said shelter workers constantly chase out infiltrators who are paid by smugglers to recruit inside.

At Solalinde's shelter in southern Mexico, threats from organized crime forced them to bring in four state police officers and four federal ones, who have lived at his shelter for the past year as protection. Solalinde now travels with bodyguards after having fled Mexico for a couple of months last year following threats.

One immigrant at the Matamoros shelter was a 48-year-old man who would only give his name as "Gordo" because he feared for his safety. He said he had arrived two days earlier after traveling from Copan, Honduras. Gordo said he had lived in Los Angeles for 10 years but had been in Honduras for the past four. He was trying to make it back to California, where he has a 15-year-old daughter.

Asked about his prospects for successfully crossing the river, he said: "It's difficult, not so much for the Border Patrol" but for the cartels.
___

Associated Press Writer Elliot Spagat in San Diego contributed to this report. Read more about Cartel towns pose challenge for immigration reform

The Senate "Gang of Eight" immigration bill, S. 744, now wending its way through the Judiciary Committee, has been sold as a "pathway to citizenship" for the estimated 11 million illegal aliens. It does a lot more damage than that, and the public needs to understand what's in it.

Just a few years ago, key members of the "Gang of Eight" would have seemed content to enact the so-called Dream Act — a more modest amnesty for about 500,000 to 700,000 aliens brought here as young people. This has been replaced with a massive proposal that tries to rewrite virtually every aspect of U.S. immigration law, and not for the better.

Why the big reach now? Because the bill's major sponsors figure the stars have aligned and that it is time to go for broke. Under prodding from President Obama and the supervision of Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat, S. 744 is not just a big amnesty — it goes way beyond that in ways the mainstream media haven't reported. Mr. Schumer has assembled a wish list for every special-interest group that profits from immigration either financially or politically. In doing so, the public and national security interests are in very real danger of irreparable damage.

If you care about effective and enforceable immigration policies, you need to pay attention. The bill has the potential to change everything that makes America a great place to be. Overcrowding, congestion, unemployment and even larger deficits will be the new norm.

Mr. Schumer has presided over the crafting of a stealthy legislative monster that would render any limits on immigration meaningless. Through its 867 pages, the bill explodes overall immigration — more than 50 million people will gain permanent residence or temporary work status in just the next 10 years — while rendering asylum, refugee and immigration laws virtually unenforceable. On top of the expected administrative anarchy, the huge increases in overall immigration could set off the biggest unmanaged population increase in modern history.

Mr. Schumer is not to be underestimated. A 30-year veteran of immigration law and policy, he knows how to design a program to maximize the inflow while derailing integrity. He gave us the fraud-ridden agricultural amnesty in 1986, viewed by most experts as having been riddled with fraud.

Mr. Schumer has built on this experience by authoring a bill designed to promote fragmentation, dysfunction and delay. Instead of actual border security, S. 744 promises us a plan to secure the border, with no consequence for failing to implement it. It hands lawyers carte blanche to tie our legal system in knots litigating denied amnesty claims, even on behalf of criminals and people who have already been deported. The bill would dramatically expand the admission of both skilled and low-skilled labor, while widening the grounds for gaining asylum beyond what is justified by law and common sense.

This bill is a political power grab by those who would sell off residency in the United States to the highest bidder — using a public asset for personal and party gain. Mr. Schumer and the rest of the "Gang of Eight" think they can get away with it because the American people — who still care about borders and the collective good — do not have powerful Washington lobbyists looking out for their interests.

The drafters know the details of the bill would be extremely unpopular if they were widely known, which is why it is being rushed through the Senate before anyone can even fully digest it. After just a handful of stacked hearings, S. 744 is now being rushed through markup in an effort to get it to the floor by June.

The American people need to know more about what is in this bill, and the media have the obligation to explain the scope and probable effects of this bill. Amazingly, even in the wake of the Boston bombings, concerns about the national security implications of the bill have not only not been explored, but dismissed as obstructionist.

S. 744 is much more than a big amnesty program. It shreds our immigration-control system and enshrines every fear that Americans have regarding our loss of border and administrative management. Passing bills first and reading them later is a prescription for disaster. We can only have an honest discussion about our national immigration future if we all have an honest opportunity to read and study the bill.

Dan Stein is president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform. Read more about No need for speed on immigration bill

On Tuesday, May 21st, state and local groups around the country will hold a series of press conferences to highlight their opposition to S. 744, the Senate’s comprehensive amnesty bill. The goal is to call attention to the bill’s many failings and to promote an immigration-enforcement approach to reform.

An Arizona-based coalition called Remember 1986 took the lead in coordinating the press conferences. The coalition’s press conference web site page contains a list of planned events. In many instances, participants will be delivering to Senators NumbersUSA petitions that have been signed by a state's citizens.

The events will especially spotlight three key factors about the Gang of Eight immigration bill:

• It won't stop the next amnesty: Its format of amnesty first and enforcement later is the same as the 1986 amnesty in which "later" never came and enforcement promises were all broken.
• It is an attack on the 20 million Americans who can't find a full-time job: The bill doubles legal immigration to meet the desires of a gang of corporate lobbyists to continue to hold down wages. All-told, the bill offers 33 million lifetime work permits to 11 million illegal aliens and 22 million new immigrants in the first decade alone.
• It adds a massive unfunded mandate to government spending and debt: The Heritage Foundation studied the costs of the bill only for the 11 million illegal aliens who would get the amnesty. It projected $9.4 trillion in government services over their lifetime, but only $3.1 trillion in taxes, leaving a net cost of $6.3 trillion.

  Read more about National Press Day Opposing Comprehensive Amnesty Bill

A judge on Thursday refused to halt Gov. Jan Brewer's order that denies driver's licenses for young immigrants in Arizona who have gotten work permits and avoided deportation under an Obama administration policy.

U.S. District Judge David Campbell denied a request from immigrant rights advocates for a preliminary injunction and threw out one of their arguments, but their lawsuit remains alive as they pursue arguments that the young immigrants are suffering from unequal treatment.

Arizona's refusal to view those in President Barack Obama's Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program as legal residents has become the most visible challenge to his announcement in June that some young immigrants would be protected from deportation. The Department of Homeland Security has said immigrants with work permits issued under the policy are lawfully present in the U.S.

Campbell rejected the argument by immigrant rights advocates who said Brewer's policy was unconstitutional because it's trumped by federal law.

"This portion of the ruling is not only a victory for the state of Arizona _ it is a victory for states' rights, the rule of law and the bedrock principles that guide our nation's legislative process and the division of power between the federal government and states," Brewer said in a statement.

But the judge said the immigrant rights advocates are likely to succeed in arguing that the state lets some immigrants with work permits get driver's licenses but won't let immigrants protected under Obama's program have the same benefit.

Cecillia Wang, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the groups representing the immigrants, said those who challenged Brewer's policy will examine their options in court for protecting the young immigrants.

"It's keeping people out on a limb," Wang said of the ruling.

Last summer, the Obama administration took administrative steps to shield thousands of immigrants from deportation. Applicants for the deferment program must have come to the U.S. before they turned 16, be younger than 30, have been in the country for at least five continuous years, be in school or have graduated from high school or GED program, or have served in the military. They also were allowed to apply for a two-year renewable work permit.

Arizona's policy allows anyone with lawful immigration status to get a driver's license, and more than 500 immigrants with work permits have obtained Arizona driver's licenses in recent years. But Arizona officials have said they don't want to extend driver's licenses to those in the new program because they don't believe the youths will be able to stay in the country legally.

Brewer's lawyers argued that Obama's policy isn't federal law and the state has the authority to distinguish between immigrants with work permits who are on the path toward permanent residency and those benefiting from Obama's policy. The state's lawyers argued Arizona isn't violating its own policy by refusing to grant licenses to the immigrants in the program, because the youths haven't been granted legal protections by Congress.

Immigrant rights advocates filed their lawsuit in November on behalf of five young-adult immigrants who were brought to the U.S. from Mexico as children. They were granted deferred-deportation protections under the Obama administration's policy but were denied driver's licenses in Arizona.

The lawsuit said Brewer's policy makes it difficult or impossible for such young immigrants to do essential things in their everyday life, such as going to school, going to the grocery store, and finding and holding down a job.

A similar lawsuit was filed in Michigan after officials there initially decided to deny young immigrants licenses, but the case was dropped when the state changed its policy last month. At least 38 states have agreed to give driver's licenses to immigrants benefiting from the Obama policy, but Nebraska and Ohio officials have also balked.

Brewer has clashed with the Obama administration in the past over illegal immigration, most notably in the challenge that the federal government filed in a bid to invalidate Arizona's 2010 immigration law. The U.S. Supreme Court upheld the law's most contentious section, but threw out other sections. Read more about Judge lets Ariz. immigrant license policy stand