Undocumented Immigration
The Immigration Balancing Act: ICE Memo and High Removal Statistics Reveal a Stacked Immigration System
Last week, two separate branches of DHS released important evidence supporting the argument that our immigration laws are fundamentally broken. The Office of Immigration Statistics released its annual report on removal and return statistics, noting that removals in 2009 totaled 393,289—marking the seventh straight year of increase. Meanwhile, ICE released a memo directing legal counsel to review and terminate certain immigration court cases where the immigrant also had an application pending in front of USCIS. ICE estimates that approximately 17,000 people may benefit from this new policy. When you juxtapose the numbers, however—393,289 v. 17,000—it reminds you just how out of balance our immigration system has become. Read More
Anti-Immigrant Hysteria in Arizona Won’t End With the Primaries
The Republican Party primaries in Arizona may be over, but the anti-immigrant demagoguery upon which the winning candidates built their campaigns is unlikely to fade away anytime soon. Governor Jan Brewer and Senator John McCain both managed to reverse their declining political fortunes in large part by raising the phantom specter of immigrant violence—a cynical tactic they are likely to repeat in the midterm elections. For instance, both trumpeted the discredited claim that Phoenix is the number two kidnapping capital of the world after Mexico City, and portrayed their various and sundry proposals to “get tough” on unauthorized immigrants as sincere efforts to save Arizonans from kidnappers and other violent criminals. Read More
The Politics of Immigration: Primaries Reveal Little About What’s to Come
It’s hard to pinpoint how exactly the issue of immigration impacted a range of primary races on Tuesday. In some cases, exploiting our broken immigration system may have helped candidates win elections—as in the case of Governor Jan Brewer. In other cases, talking tough about immigration may have cost politicians their race—like Florida’s Attorney General Bill McCollum, who turned off Latino Republican voters with his pledge to bring SB1070 style legislation to the Sunshine State. Senator John McCain and Meg Whitman beat out their more extreme anti-immigrant opponents in tight primary races, but they definitely weren’t singing the praises of immigration either. However, it’s hard to predict what will happen in November’s general election based on the primary results. Many Republicans like Sen. John McCain turned hard-right in order to get their party’s nomination, yet that will likely subside in the next several months as candidates gear up for the general election. Read More
Florida Legislators Speak Out Against Proposed Anti-Immigration Legislation in the Sunshine State
Today, both Democratic and Republican Florida state legislators joined leaders from the faith and civil rights communities in speaking out against proposed anti-immigrant legislation in Florida, calling the measure “sad,” “not right for Florida,” and “a violation of civil rights.” The bill, introduced this month by Florida Attorney General and gubernatorial candidate, Bill McCollum, goes beyond existing state law and would require law enforcement to check the immigration status of a suspected illegal immigrant when stopped during a violation. The bill, drafted with state Rep. Will Snyder, also allows judges to consider immigration status during bond setting and sentencing and requires Florida businesses to check their workers’ immigration status. McCollum’s immigration bill also requires immigrants to carry identification or face up to 20 days in jail. According to McCollum, Florida’s bill “offers more teeth” and goes “one step beyond” Arizona’s law, after which Florida’s bill was modeled. Read More
How President Obama Can Kiss and Make Up with Latinos
In Spanish, the word cariño literally means “affectionate.” Cariño is used to describe warmth and care, but it is also often used as a pet name for your child or partner, for example, mi cariño/mi cariña. So in the Latino community where the word cariño is an important part of the vernacular, some might be surprised that Latinos have so warmly embraced a “cool and detached” President like Obama. This has been in large part due to his commitment to fixing immigration. However, the President’s recent lack of cariño towards the Latino community coupled with his inability to deliver on immigration reform has both his approval numbers dropping among Latinos and Spanish language media critics asking “Who’s in charge in Washington?” Also, his once masterful speeches are now being called nothing more than “cheap and easy rhetoric.” Read More
Poll Numbers Reveal that Most Border Residents Feel Safe
Passage of the $600 million border bill through the House of Representatives today is a clear indication that Congress is still more interested in throwing money at our broken immigration system rather than rolling up their sleeves and fixing it. Politicians, including President Obama, continue to respond to reports of border violence by upping the budget of DHS without hard facts, relying on media reports that the safety of U.S. citizens is at stake along the U.S.- Mexico border . Read More
The Wrong Side of History: Immigration, the GOP and the Next Generation of Voters
As anti-immigrant fervor continues to swirl in the headlines, it’s not difficult for readers to discern who’s stirring the pot. Over the weekend, House Minority Leader John Boehner (R-OH) became the latest GOPer to publically support the effort to end birthright citizenship—an effort that seeks to repeal the 14th Amendment to the Constitution. Last month, immigration reformers-turned-hawks, Arizona Republican Senators McCain and Kyl as well as Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY), also jumped on the birthright bandwagon. Couple this recent effort with Arizona’s “show me your papers” law saga and months of punditry and restrictionist rhetoric on enforcement and you have a hostile GOP narrative of exclusion and anti-immigration hysteria—which as some point out, is a political recipe for disaster come election time. Read More
Detention Reform: Change We Want To Believe In
BY KAREN TUMLIN* A year ago today, the Obama administration promised a radical overhaul of the nation’s immigration detention system in response to a wave of reports revealing widespread and egregious violations of the basic rights of detained immigrants. Changes to date have been too slow and tinker only at the edges of the problem. Worse, the pipeline to immigration detention is growing: the Obama administration has lifted deportations to historic highs. This ensures that hundreds of thousands of immigrants will face months, and sometimes years, of detention in remote parts of the country and miles from loved ones. This is not the change we had hoped for. Read More
Senate Democrats Propose Alternate Border Security Bill
Today, Senators Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Claire McCaskill (D-MO) released a Border Security Proposal which would provide $600 million in offset funding for various border security provisions. The bill was a counter to a different border security bill proposed by Republican Arizona Senators Jon Kyl and John McCain,… Read More
Hysterical “Tea Party” Rhetoric on Immigration is Devoid of Facts
The ever-hysterical Tea Party is now hysterical about unauthorized immigrants. In a frenzied email blast to its members, the Tea Party Nation warns that the Obama administration wants to grant “amnesty” to the millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, whom the Tea Party alleges have inflicted various “horrors” upon Americans by stealing their jobs and committing unspeakable crimes. Not surprisingly, the Tea Party Nation gets its facts completely wrong. As a litany of evidence-based reports have demonstrated, most native-born workers are not in competition with immigrants for the same jobs, and immigrants are less likely than the native-born to commit serious crimes, regardless of their legal status. Read More
America's story is an immigrant story.
