I am giving a CLE tomorrow on basic immigration misconceptions for the KCMBA Small and Solo Committee. Here is a link to the powerpoint presentation I am using
Immigration 101: Myths and Realities of Our Immigration Syst
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Monthly Archives: September 2011
Another round of elections and another session of State and Federal Congress is headed our way. This was originally published on my other sight in September, several months after Georgia passed its newest immigration laws. THis is a great article about the “unintended consequences” of that legislation.
By Markos Moulitsas – 06/28/11 05:55 PM ET
Three months ago, Georgia Republicans proudly passed House Bill 87, an Arizona-style anti-immigrant bill that, among other things, requires employers to use E-Verify to confirm the legal status of their employees.
Today, Georgia farmers (most of whom voted for those Republicans) are leaving hundreds of millions of dollars of crops rotting in the fields, unable to find the manpower to do the grueling work of harvesting in 100-plus-degree weather. Republican Gov. Nathan Deal has even pushed unemployed criminal probationers out into the fields to little effect: The work is just too difficult.
“Those guys out here weren’t out there 30 minutes and they got the bucket and just threw them in the air and say, ‘Bonk this, I ain’t with this, I can’t do this,’ ” one probationer told The Washington Post. Early reports suggest that just half of probationers even bothered showing up a second day. Farmers aren’t happy either. “The plan to put probationers on farms ain’t gonna work,” a farmer told the Gainesville Times. “I want to be a farmer; I don’t want to be a warden.” Even under the best-case scenario, the 2,000 unemployed probationers in south Georgia are just a fraction of the (at least) 11,000 farmhands who have disappeared from Georgia fields, according to the state’s agriculture commissioner.
Those rotting crops don’t just represent a blow to Georgia’s economy, particularly in economically fragile rural communities, but will also show up in marketplace prices, hitting consumers with higher food prices. Given the clear failure of this approach to immigration policy, how do national Republicans respond?
Well, if you’re Rep. Lamar Smith, you spread Georgia’s nightmare to the rest of the country. “Although the bill is a jobs killer for illegal immigrants, the Legal Workforce Act opens up millions of jobs for unemployed Americans and legal workers,” the Texas Republican wrote in The Hill, justifying his effort to mandate E-Verify nationally. “Seven million individuals work illegally in the United States. These jobs should go to legal workers.”
Georgia proves the math isn’t that simple. If Georgians won’t do this backbreaking work in Georgia, does Smith think an unemployed autoworker in Detroit will pack up his family and move to Salinas, Calif., to pick lettuce for minimum wage, no benefits and inhuman working conditions? Smith should leave social engineering on this grand scale to failed communist regimes.
The agricultural industry is certainly terrified. “If we were to use E-Verify now, we’d shut down — either that or farmers would go to prison,” a Fresno-based citrus farmer told The Associated Press. “We’ve admitted many workers are not legal and if you have to get rid of everybody, where do I go to get my labor? Nowhere. We have to have a workforce that we can put in the system.”
The punch line is that E-Verify doesn’t even work. According to a study for the Department of Homeland Security, the system failed to catch 54 percent of unauthorized workers. Why? Because “since the inception of E-Verify it has been clear that many unauthorized workers obtain employment by committing identity fraud that cannot be detected by E-Verify.” In other words, farmers would have a better chance of identifying ineligible workers by flipping a coin.
In a sane world, Georgia’s failed experiment would bring Smith around to considering better options, like a comprehensive immigration reform package that actually provides real solutions to real problems. But ideology trumps reality in today’s Republican Party, leaving sanity in short supply.
Moulitsas is the publisher and founder of Daily Kos.
Source:
http://thehill.com/opinion/columnists/markos-moulitas/168883-a-failed-experiment
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This is a great bog posted by the ACLU aboutE Verify. May state based anti immigration laws seek to make e-verify mandatory and many individual municipalities also are trying to make it mandatory. It is another Kris Kobach brainstorm and while it might seem like a good idea on paper, the system is overrun with errors making many many many people who are perfectly legal to work ineligible and forced to go through a lengthy and cumbersome process of correcting faulty information at their own expense, leaving them unable to find a job in the mean time. It also does not detect anyone using fake papers so if the papers presented to work are real, then the system will often approve them even though they do not belong to the person presenting them. Be on the look out for this proposal to come up again in this legislative session in both Missouri and Kansas and probably another push nationally.
Jobs, Jobs, Jobs — Even the ACLU is Talking About Jobs
Everyone in Washington is talking about jobs these days. It’s not surprising — with the country trapped in a long economic downturn and the President making it his key priority. Job creation is not something in which we claim any expertise, but that doesn’t mean we can’t pay attention to our common sense.
This week the spin over creating jobs has gotten so broad it has even pulled in our issues. Specifically, House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith is pushing the committee to approve legislation to mandate the use of the E-Verify program by all employers. E-Verify is a series of connected databases, in essence a giant list, of everyone who is supposed to be allowed to work in the US. Before you start your job, your employer is supposed to check E-Verify. If you are on the list, you get a job. If not, you don’t (or you have to go wait in line at a Social Security Administration (SSA) office to prove they made a mistake).
Chairman Smith calls this bill, titled the “Legal Workforce Act”, a jobs bill. Chairman Smith says undocumented immigrants won’t be able to take new jobs and these will be freed up for other people. But there are lots of problems with that analysis. Economists say it is wrong, for one. And from an ACLU perspective the biggest problem is that it ignores the effect that E-Verify will have on all of the workers who are lawfully working in the US.
For years the ACLU has complained about high error rates and lack of due process in E-Verify. In spite of improvements, the system is just not that accurate. Trying to keep a list of more than 150 million workers is really tough — due to name changes, data entry errors and many other reasons.
Even using the lowest possible estimates for mistakes, if E-Verify had been mandatory last year, 1.2 million workers would have had to correct errors in E-Verify. Approximately 770,000 would have lost their jobs simply because their information was wrong in a government database. They all would have flooded SSA offices to try to fix their records. If workers don’t succeed they are out of luck — there is no court review of E-Verify errors.
E-Verify is currently being used as a voluntary system and we’re already seeing examples of this problem. Jessica St. Pierre is a US citizen who was offered a high paying job as a telecommunications worker in Florida. Unfortunately she couldn’t be cleared through E-Verify. After countless calls and trips to SSA and the E-Verify office, she still couldn’t fix her record. After months she stopped trying and took a lower paying job at a company that didn’t use E-Verify (eventually it was determined her employer was putting two spaces after her social security number). That wouldn’t be an option if this bill passed.
While the ACLU doesn’t claim expertise in how to jump start the American economy, we’re pretty sure that it doesn’t involve kicking millions of people out of their jobs and miring them in government bureaucracy. If you want to let Congress know what you think of the “Legal Workforce Act” please act now.
http://www.aclu.org/blog/technology-and-liberty/jobs-jobs-jobs-even-aclu-talking-about-jobs
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States, Cities Cry Foul Over Obama’s Immigration Policy
SACRAMENTO BEE (Breton Op-Ed):
By Marcos Breton
September 18, 2011
http://www.sacbee.com/2011/09/18/3918308/marcos-breton-states-cities-crying.html#ixzz1YLDCDJ1O
In June, high-level officials in the Obama administration asked Arturo Venegas Jr. to spend his summer helping them fix America’s broken immigration enforcement system.
The former Sacramento police chief agreed and threw himself into the task until very publicly quitting the process last week. He is one of many notables – including the governors of some large states – who think the Obama administration is wrongly supporting immigration-enforcement policies that make the daunting task even worse.
Venegas believes Obama should temporarily suspend Secure Communities, a cornerstone immigration system employed by the feds, because it is arresting too many of the wrong people.
When his suggestions were ignored, and when the task force he joined failed to include stricter controls on cops in its final report, Venegas quit. So did four other members of the task force, including law enforcement and labor leaders and legal experts.
“I had to part company with them,” said Venegas, 62, who retired here but remains a highly regarded law enforcement consultant. “Continuing this program made no sense whatsoever.”
Run by the Department of Homeland Security, Secure Communities requires the FBI to share fingerprint information of everyone booked into local jails with Homeland Security.
The idea was for the feds to compare the fingerprints and other information gleaned by police with federal immigration databases – all with an eye toward nailing dangerous criminals who were undocumented immigrants.
But Secure Communities began to fill jails with undocumented immigrants whose only crime was selling popsicles on the streets of Los Angeles.
Wrote the Miami Herald: “In fiscal 2010, which ended last Sept. 30, officials deported 392,862 immigrants, comprising 197,090 who had no convictions and 195,772 who did.” According to federal records, 29 percent of these immigrants had no criminal records at all.
Caught in the machinery were people pulled over for routine traffic stops and even crime victims who came to the attention of the feds after first making contact with police.
It wasn’t long before immigrant communities made the connection, which has been a nightmare for cops who depend on people in those communities to report crimes or provide tips that can foil crimes before they happen.
But you don’t have to take Venegas’ word for it – or mine.
In June, New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo suspended his state’s participation in Secure Communities because deporting people with no criminal records was generating fear that made it harder for New York cops to do their jobs.
In July, Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino threatened to withdraw Boston police’s cooperation with the feds for this very reason.
The state of Illinois pulled out of Secure Communities.
I could go on and on, but many in the public do not care. To some, an illegal immigrant is an illegal immigrant and they should all be deported.
I won’t argue the moral point. The immigration hawks who make reasonable reform impossible seem to think they corner the market on morality.
Rather, I’ll argue reality. Last week, Chicago snapped under the financial strain caused by the deport-them-all crowd. The Cook County Board of Commissioners passed an ordinance to free undocumented immigrants they can no longer afford to keep in jails.
As the Chicago Tribune wrote: “Abiding by the federal immigration ‘detainer’ requests costs the county roughly $15 million per year, or $143 per detainee every day, and the federal government offers no reimbursement, county officials said.”
The Tribune also wrote: “The new ordinance, which takes effect immediately, applies to suspected illegal immigrants arrested on misdemeanor and felony charges ranging from traffic violations to minor drug and disorderly conduct charges.”
Got it? Chicago is making a choice: Do we house criminals committing violent crimes? Or do we house immigrants who largely pose no threat to society but are prisoners of our immigration insanity?
Many of our “illegals” wouldn’t be illegals if we ever crafted laws that took into account our need for cheap labor. Bring a farmworker or a hotel maid under a legal umbrella because he or she is providing a service we need and suddenly we have fewer illegals.
But we can’t find the will. We don’t reform our laws, and no politician in Washington, D.C., will honestly touch the issue, because DEPORT THEM ALL rules the land.
You know what? After years of covering immigration, I don’t believe that even the staunchest immigration hawks in government – either bureaucrats or elected officials – believe we can come close to deporting them all. They know we can’t afford it.
But they wave red meat on illegal immigration because they know it’s an easy score with people who blame every societal ill on the guy mowing their lawn.
Last week it was Chicago that said enough is enough. Which city will follow? When are we going to wake up?
Venegas is no immigration advocate. He’s a cop through and through. He arrested people regardless of race or ethnicity. Like Venegas, there is a growing chorus of people whose words should be heeded – people who are saying, “Enough already.”
The nation of immigrants is losing its mind over immigration.
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