Immigration Reform

[Brian Baldwin]

Ok... I decided to start this thread in order to discuss all forms of immigration reform. Pros or cons. This is to keep the subject whole under one thread.

I'm starting it off with an article I read today which I totally agree with.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1597189/posts

Ending Illegal Invasions: A Sensible Proposal

by JOHN W LILLPOP

San Jose, CA

Illegal immigration must be stopped, and reversed, both for national security and sheer economic survival. Congressional Leaders from both parties, as well as numerous governors and state officials, recognize that we must protect our borders and enforce our immigration laws in order to remain a sovereign nation. Businesses that employ illegal immigrants must be severely punished. Tragically, such employers do not seem to care about national security or the war on terror. They reap huge profits by exploiting illegals, while the US taxpayer ends up paying the bills.

No reform scenario should sanction illegals already in the US. Reform should require that every last illegal be deported. Our borders should be secured by 100,000 or so US troops, authorized to use whatever force may be necessary to keep illegals out.

Once we have established control of the borders and deported those here illegally, then we can consider reform. For instance, if a Mexican laborer wants to APPLY for a temporary work permit, he would be allowed to do so, PROVIDED he has not been in America illegally within the last five years.

The point is that the US government must have total control over who enters the nation, where they will reside, for what purpose they are authorized, and the date by which they must leave.

No more nonsense whereby the immigrant decides unilaterally to invade America---and gets away with it! So, say the laborer applies for a temporary work assignment in California. The employer who wants his services becomes his sponsor, in much the say way as legal immigrants are sponsored. That means assuring that the laborer does NOT become a burden to the community via health care costs, education, crime etc. Perhaps employers form a cooperative to buy health insurance for migrant workers at group rates. Any and all costs should be absorbed by the employers---not US taxpayers.

The laborer’s work permit should be temporary--not greater than 18 months---and must include that laborer only. We can not afford to have his family burden our health care and educational systems.

Further, the laborer must not be allowed to father an “anchor baby” ....currently, a child born to an illegal becomes a US citizen at birth. The law must be revised to prevent people from manipulating the US in that manner.

Employers should also be responsible for monitoring the laborer’s behavior---no crimes, even misdemeanors, or it’s adios! All income that the laborer earns must be subject to tax withholding and employers must administer that procedure.

The laborer must be made to understand that his permit is temporary only, and that it confers no other rights such as a right to driver’s license, social welfare, in-state tuition breaks, citizenship or any other benefits.

Employers must also assure that the laborer leaves the US when his work permit expires. Any violations should cause the employer to be severely punished, including criminal sanctions. A few stiff jail terms might convince business owners that crime does not pay ....when it comes to the war on terror and illegal immigration!
Immigration reform might work----provided we secure the borders permanently, force employers to obey the law, deport those here illegally, and discontinue making it so easy and attractive for illegal immigrants to cross our southern border.

I'm in total agreement that all reform MUST come after the borders are secured and the illegals are thrown out.

[Brian Baldwin]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1612532/posts

Neither the street protests on behalf of illegal migrants, nor the quiet protests against them, bode well for the Senate trying again soon to pass a reform bill. Political opportunists see an advantage in keeping this issue hot through the fall elections.
Last week's near-compromise in the Senate fell apart because, as Sen. Edward Kennedy said, "The politics got ahead of policy on this in spite of everyone's efforts to separate this out." Some senators wanted to run on this campaign issue, while others thought a final bill might make them vulnerable to simplistic charges on the campaign trail, and so they threatened to scuttle the proposed deal.
Still, the Senate majority consensus did show that the political divide on illegal migration can start to be bridged - in trying to secure the US border against this massive lawlessness and the possible infiltration by terrorists, as well as in dealing with the millions of illegals "hiding in the shadows" of American society.
The key plank of that consensus was that illegal migrants had violated US law and must pay the price before dealing with their status. (The House already reached that conclusion in passing its reform bill earlier.) That's a necessary and initial agreement for Americans and legal immigrants before this debate can move forward.
Up to now, those who oppose illegal migration have sometimes been tarred as being anti-immigrant, or even racist. Their opponents have also tried to justify the spreading presence of illegal migrants into almost every community as necessary for the US economy, rather than simply seek more legal migration.
Now, as a result of the Senate consensus, the plain issue of illegality has been addressed frontally by Congress. A "nation of immigrants" wants to keep its immigration legal.
A second plank of the Senate consensus is that certain penalties against these lawbreakers are essential to deter more illegal migrants and reduce the bitterness of the millions of migrants who entered the US legally after waiting their turn.
Such penalties would send a message that the US doesn't want to repeat the mistake made by a 1986 law that granted legal status to illegal migrants without any penalty to pay - a move that may have encouraged even more, often-fatal illegal crossings.
A third plank in the consensus is this: The severity of the penalty has to be high enough to create a disincentive for would-be illegal migrants but low enough for current illegal migrants to come out of the shadows and accept the consequences.
The Senate plan included a complicated, perhaps even unworkable, way to implement that difficult way of clearing up this illegal status of millions - short of police raids in every neighborhood. But nonetheless, that principle has now been set for the next round of reform debate.
These three planks should help better frame the debate in the weeks or months ahead. Let's hope Congress doesn't wait another year. If it does, then states may need to innovate with their own remedies while Washington fiddles, as it often does on tough national issues. But both sides found enough common ground last week that Congress cannot abandon efforts to finally secure US borders.

[Brian Baldwin]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1612966/posts

An Insider's View of the Illegal Immigration Threat
By Bill Steigerwald
FrontPageMagazine.com | April 11, 2006


Spend 30 seconds on the website of the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. Worse yet, try to get a human being who works for USCIS.gov to answer a phone. You'll soon realize how horribly frustrating, complicated and bureaucratic everything about our government immigration system is.

Amazingly, Steve Camarota has not gone bonkers from devoting his career to studying this maddening world of immigration policy. Camarota is director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank devoted exclusively to researching and analyzing the economic, social, demographic and fiscal impacts of immigration on the United States.

Non-neutral in the raging political war over how to fix our broken borders and our immigration laws, CIS says it is "animated by a pro-immigrant, low-immigration vision which seeks fewer immigrants but a warmer welcome for those admitted." I talked to Camarota last Tuesday by telephone from his offices in Washington:

Q: If there are 12 million illegal immigrants in the country, how many legal immigrants are there?
A: Well, total foreign-born now is around 36 or 37 million. If you go with the 12 million illegals, the legal immigration is about 25 million. That doesn’t mean they are all citizens.

Q: Is it still true that most illegals live in California, Texas, Florida, New York, Illinois and New Jersey?
A: It’s still very concentrated. The immigrant population is spreading. But the top three states -- California, New York and Texas -- have about half the total. But it’s getting bigger everywhere. It is more than 200,000 in at least 12 states now.

Q: And we’re talking about illegals -- “undocumented” as we want to say?
A: Yes. I like to call them “pre-citizens.”

Q: What percent of illegals are Latino?
A: About 80 percent-plus are from Latin America.

Q: I’ve heard somebody say that half of the people who get here come across the southern border and the other half overstay their visas, come by plane or are students who don’t go home, whatever.
A: The last time anybody tried to estimate was back in 2000 and the INS said that, as far as they could tell, it was a one-third/two-thirds split. One-third overstayed and two-thirds were what they called EWIs: Entrance Without Inspection. Mostly, but not exclusively, around 90 to 95 percent came across the southern border. The rest were people who slipped across the northern border or who came in on ships in one way or another.

Q: So a fence along the southern border would do an important job of eliminating illegal immigration?
A: It is a critically important component.

Q: When we talk about social services and whether illegals pay more in taxes than they get in services, the number $10 billion a year is often used.
A: The $10 billion is what I estimated. They use $10 billion more in services at the federal level than they paid in taxes. ... The kicker for me is, if we legalize illegals and they began to pay taxes and use services like legal immigrants with the same level of education, the cost would roughly triple. An unskilled illegal immigrant is costly but an unskilled legal immigrant is a fiscal disaster because, although presumably he is being paid on the books and he pays his taxes like he’s supposed to, he is now eligible for everything, or a lot of things, but he still doesn't make any money.

That’s the problem. The reason immigrants create a fiscal cost is not because they are illegal. They create a fiscal cost because they have very little education and people with very little education don’t pay much in taxes, because they don’t make very much. But they tend to use a lot in services. If we legalize them, it makes the problem much worse.

Think about this: every unskilled worker who’s paid on the books mostly gets our $32 billion Earned Income Tax Credit. That means that every unskilled worker comes with a bill. That’s one of the reasons the costs explode so much if you legalize illegal immigrants. Right now, I estimate that illegals are getting one-tenth of what they are entitled to but if they began to get the EIT fee like legal immigrants, with the same level of education, well, the costs would go up 10 fold. That’s a welfare program a lot of conservatives like, but it’s also one that’s very expensive.

Q: Is it true that illegals don’t take advantage of social and medical services as those in their same socioeconomic class?
A: Put a different way: Let's assume uninsured immigrants use 10 percent less in health care than uninsured natives. It doesn’t change the fact that they are 600 percent more likely to be uninsured in the first place. Roughly about 13 percent of natives are uninsured, but about two-thirds of illegals are uninsured. So it's probably true every illegal is using about 10 percent less than his uninsured native-born counterpart. But it doesn’t change the fact that he is 600 times more likely to be uninsured in the first place. That is the kicker.

But the biggest kicker to keep in mind is that the problem here is that unskilled immigration is simply incompatible with a modern American economy that doesn’t offer very much to unskilled workers and the modern American welfare state.
Now, if you’d like to get rid of the welfare state, OK. But always remember this: It’s not about cash-assistance welfare, which is the thing that really ticks people off. If you want to save money when it comes to illegals, you have to be prepared to get rid of Medicaid, free school lunches for poor kids and things like the Women Infants and Children’s program. Just say the name of the program and you can guess how quick we’re going to get rid of that one.

I’m not making the case for it. I'm saying here is my position: If you want to have large-scale unskilled immigration, then you better get rid of the welfare state first.

[Aplomb]

I'm not clear on where people are getting their information to give figures for things like health services and that illegals are doing jobs that Americans won't do. It would be of vital importance to make changes based on facts and understanding the reasons for why illegals do what they do. Policy making and reforms come about generally without fully grasping the situation and without contemplating realistically the overall consequences for whatever measures are taken.

But in any case, I live and work with illegals in Colorado, and have done so for over 10 years now in several different cities in and around Denver. This is factual first-hand knowledge:

In the areas I'm speaking of and the people who I know are not here legally, resources such as medicaid and WIC are used regularly by the women FOR their children because the women are having their babies here. Medicaid is medical insurance that covers hospital stay and clinic visits without even having to pay a co-pay. The men who are here generally use far less services, except for extreme measures. Basically, when illegal aliens are not using medical services it is because they don't want to risk giving enough information to have them sent back to Mexico and lose their jobs here. A case in point is when a neighbor boy had his head hit with a thrown rock that put a huge gash in his scalp. After I cared for the wound and alerted his mother, she refused any further medical care for him at a clinic or hospital.

In this area, illegal aliens have paychecks that are larger than mine, sometimes double what I make. I am dead SERIOUS. There are some who are making less money or choose to not work or because of drug or alcohol or other problems have to work through lower paying temp agencies. Still these wages are livable, especially considering that they are sharing living expenses with their friends and relatives who are also illegals. Like all groups of people, Mexicans have their share of both lazy and hard-working individuals. A plus for them is to secure positions where they can take several weeks off in a row to go back to Mexico to visit family. Yes, they do pay taxes, but I do know of several individuals who claim several exemptions to pay less than a single person without dependents would normally pay. They don't mind taking jobs that require overtime. And just like Americans, they DO leave a job that is too demanding for little pay to seek a better position.

[Brian Baldwin]

One step forward and two steps back. Time to vote these idiots out of office. Every one of them.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1613622/posts

Any immigration legislation passed by Congress this year will not include the inflammatory provisions approved by the House last year that make it a felony to be in the United States illegally, Republican leaders on Capitol Hill said yesterday. House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist said in a joint statement that "it remains our intent to produce a strong border security bill that will not make unlawful presence in the United States a felony." The commitment removes a primary concern held by many Democrats who say that the yearlong imprisonment carried by a felony conviction is too harsh. House Republicans also said yesterday they are committed to rewriting a section of their immigration bill that caused an uproar among religious and humanitarian leaders who say the law could be used to prosecute them if they unwittingly give food or shelter to someone who turns out to be an illegal alien. Since the House passed its bill in December, Democrats have seized upon the criticism as another reason for opposing the border security legislation. "It is certainly not in keeping with my understanding of the Scriptures, because this bill would literally criminalize the good Samaritan and probably even Jesus himself," Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, said last month. House Judiciary Committee Chairman F. James Sensenbrenner Jr., Wisconsin Republican, said the provision is aimed at the ruthless "coyotes" and "snake-heads" who smuggle people into the country. "Since the House bill's passage, many have misconstrued the House's good-faith effort to bring human traffickers to justice as a way to criminalize humanitarian assistance efforts," Mr. Sensenbrenner and other Republican leaders wrote in a letter to the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "The House bill does no such thing, nor did it intend to."

[falcon]

May 5 and June 30 have been selected as the days for 1 day "strikes", where American Citizens will transact no commerce:

Remain home from work, using vacation, leave, sick time or whatever is available to you.

Take no public transportation. Transact no business.

Make no purchases. Consider turning off your TV, radio and computers.

For one day, make no contribution to the economy of the nation.

For one day focus on the home, family, books etc.




How About a Citizens' Strike?
By: Sher Zieve: on Apr 05, 06

After all of the illegal aliens’/immigrants’ (you make the choice as to which word you want to use) marches, demanding they be given the same rights as US citizens, I’d like to make a counter-proposal. Why don’t we-the-people (that’s “US-citizen-people") decide to organize a 1 day strike of our own?

Those who are in our country illegally want to show the country that it cannot survive without them. They have all sorts of leftist groups organizing and spurring them on. These groups include MEChA, Mexica Movement, LULAC, International ANSWER and Open Borders. Most of these mentioned-groups want to “take back their country” in order to establish either the Anahuac Nation, the mythical empire of Aztlan or to simply dissolve the US—as a separate and sovereign country—entirely. As the protestors (the illegally-in-country people who not only demand their “rights” but chant “no one is illegal except Europeans”) continue to wave their Mexican flags and use the US flags as headscarves—or worse—we US citizens are expected to accept them into our family as ‘welcome guests’.


Note: I don’t know about you but, if individuals decided to enter my house, uninvited, and then proceeded to demand that I give them everything they ask for, I would NOT view them as either welcome or guests. Instead, whenever I could, I’d call the police to haul them off to jail! However, the police at our borders (Border Patrol Agents) aren’t being given what they need to actually protect the country from the current invasion; an invasion from the South that is crippling and taxing services in, at least, the Southwestern states. Only the citizens’ group, the Minutemen, is doing anything to attempt to stop this Tsunami of bodies pushing across our nation.


Where are our lawmakers and law-enforcers? Why—they’re in Washington DC, inhabiting an elite body known as the “US Senate”. The US House of Representatives actually passed a bill (Anti-terrorism and Illegal Immigration Control Act-HR 4437) that, if implemented and enforced, had the ability to protect our borders from terrorists and the illegals’ onslaught. But, as soon as HR 4437 hit the Senate all manner of Amnesty proposals, college tuition for illegals, etc. were added. Senate Minority leader Harry Reid (D-NV), who in the past has spoken out against illegal aliens but now voices his support for them, effectively stopped the debate on the bill. The McCain-Kennedy Amendment, which the co-sponsors say ‘isn’t Amnesty even though that’s what it provides for the illegal immigrants’, is a slap in the face to “we-the-people US citizens”. The Senators (McCain, Kennedy, Specter, Durbin, Reid ad nauseam) then have the arrogance to tell us that the illegals are the hard-working ones. That leaves nothing to the imagination. Apparently, “our” Senators do not believe that US citizens do very much—anymore. Either that or they think legal citizens (native or naturalized) won’t do anything about their statement. Both political parties are now salivating over potential illegals’ votes.


“Votes-for-illegals” is the next logical boycott/strike/mantra topic for the leftists. It’s coming, folks. In many states they already have drivers’ licenses.


So, as US citizens continue to work for a living, hoping against hope to be able to feed, clothe, provide a safe home for their families and pray that they can send their kids to college, US Senators have already proposed giving all of those to the immigrants who have entered the country illegally—free of charge. Does this make any sense to any of you? Our Senators have become potentates and we are their subjects—but, only “we” legal citizens who have worked to make this country great.


I think it’s time that we actual-and-verifiable citizens took to the streets—or just stayed home—to show our Senators how a “National Day Without Citizens” would impact the country. There are more of us than there are “them”. Immigration (that’s legal immigration) is not a right. It’s a privilege.


isentinel.us/more.php?id=529_0_1_12_M

[falcon]

Send a brick to Congress help build the wall.

I wish I could take credit for this, but I can’t. Send a brick to congress by May 5^th to protest the illegals in our country. They can use them to build a wall on the southern border. Can you imagine the message sent to congress, if every one of them received a brick? The cost is minimal. Ten dollars at the post office, is worth more then its weight. Just place a little note in it saying “This is to help with the wall along the southern border. Hope it helps.”

http://www.minionreport.net/brick.html

[Ryan Ruck]

This effort originated from ARFCOM.

http://ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=...=454259&page=1

http://ar15.com/forums/topic.html?b=...=454121&page=1

[Brian Baldwin]

I'm going to do both. Send a brick and do the no spend thing. One day of commerce losses will open some freaking eyes real fast. Especially if enough people participate.

[Ryan Ruck]

Feel free to print up and distribute far and wide!!

[Brian Baldwin]

Thanks Ryan. I emailed it to several friends with instructions to email it on to others.

[Brian Baldwin]

Petition to enforce border laws.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-.../1614554/posts

[Brian Baldwin]

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1615013/posts

"The Great American Boycott" is spreading south of the border, as activists call for Mexicans to boycott U.S. businesses on May 1.
The protest is timed to coincide with a May 1 boycott of work and shopping in the United States that also has been dubbed "A Day Without Immigrants." The boycott, which grew out of huge pro-migrant marches across the United States, is designed to pressure Congress to legalize millions of undocumented people.
Mexican unions, political and community groups, newspaper columnists and even some Mexican government offices have joined the call in recent days.
"Remember, nothing gringo on May 1," advises one of the many e-mails being circulated among Internet users in Mexico.
"On May 1, people shouldn't buy anything from the interminable list of American businesses in Mexico," reads another. "That means no Dunkin' Donuts, no McDonald's, Burger King, Starbucks, Sears, Krispy Kreme or Wal-Mart."
For some it's a way to express anti-U.S. sentiment, while others see it as part of a cross-border, Mexican-power lobby.
In some cases, advocates incorrectly identified firms as American -- Sears stores in Mexico, for example, have been owned by Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim since 1997.
And ironically, the protest targets the U.S. business community, which is one of the strongest supporters of legalization or guest-worker programs. "At the end of the day, boycotting would only hurt corporations that are backing what people want done in the immigration bill," said Larry Rubin, CEO of the American Chamber of Commerce in Mexico. Rubin is encouraging people to write to their legislators instead of boycotting.