More bad immigration Laws proposed by Kraus…He apparently wants to waste tax payor money being sued about laws that are already being litigated in other places…
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Tag Archives: State immigration laws
ILW.COM – immigration news:Bloggings on Immigration Law And Policy.
Jusge blocks parts of South Carolina’s New Arizona style immigration law. It specifically blocked the part of the law to require police to determine the immigration status of those the officers deem to cause “reasonable suspicion” as to their legal status. This part of many other laws have been blocked by other Federal Judges. The Supreme Court is set to hear the AZ law this term.
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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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