Undocumented Immigration
And the Beat Goes On: Immigration Reform and the Road Ahead
As Washington and the rest of the country continue to reflect on the monumental legacy of the late Senator from Massachusetts, many are contemplating the enormous leadership gap left in his passing. A tireless champion of health care, civil rights, foreign policy, education, immigration and many other worthy causes, Senator Kennedy’s first major legislative victory—eliminating the national quotas for immigration— “helped change the face of the country and shaped his own political career.” But the question remains, how do we continue Sen. Kennedy’s drumbeat on immigration reform? Read More
Leader, Visionary and Friend: Today We Remember Senator Edward M. Kennedy
The Capitol is quiet, its halls silent, its chambers shuttered. The Senate is in recess, and in the midst of that quiet, one of its greatest members has passed away. It’s fitting that Sen. Edward M. Kennedy died while his beloved Senate was in recess. There were no committee hearings to chair, no deals to negotiate, no fiery speeches to give. His voice is silenced, but his words and actions will live on. For immigration advocates, Senator Kennedy was a friend, a visionary, and a supreme strategist. He was the architect of the Refuge Act of 1980, a piece of legislation that, since its passage, has fostered a new life for hundreds of thousands of refugees and asylees, sheltering them from persecution in their home countries. He will forever be remembered as the heart of comprehensive immigration reform, fighting back the worst of the changes anti-immigration forces sought to make in 1996, authoring reform bills that would restore due process to the immigration system, and most importantly, forging a plan for comprehensive immigration reform that continues to be the model for today’s legislation. Read More
Plugging into the Millennial Generation
Today, the Center for American Progress released a new publication, The Coming End of the Culture Wars, which explains that the conservative white working-class population is waning while the younger “millennial” generation, who is much more liberal on social issues including immigration reform, is expanding. The report states: Millennials—the generation with birth years 1978 to 2000—support gay marriage, take race and gender equality as givens, are tolerant of religious and family diversity, have an open and positive attitude toward immigration, and generally display little interest in fighting over the divisive social issues of the past. Read More
Faith and Leadership Required: A Closer Look at Last Week’s White House Meeting
Last week’s White House meeting on immigration marked another chapter in the years-long effort to enact comprehensive immigration reform. Janet Napolitano’s invitation to more than one hundred representatives from business, labor, faith, law enforcement, and immigration groups was a genuine attempt to listen to concerns and solicit ideas. The format—large group meeting addressed by the Secretary, small group discussion led by various DHS and White House officials, summary and surprise remarks from the President—gave people a chance to say just a little, but the cumulative effect was more important than we may realize. Read More
The President and Secretary Napolitano Reaffirm Commitment to Immigration Reform
Yesterday, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano met with immigrant advocates, faith leaders, labor, business and law enforcement officials at the White House to discuss moving forward with a comprehensive immigration reform bill this year. President Obama appeared at the end of the meeting to reaffirm his commitment to reform and pledge that “we can get this done.” While the President commended Sens. Charles Schumer’s (D-NY) and Harry Reid’s (D-NV) efforts to move a bill forward, he also urged participants to work together in a bipartisan effort to advance a sensible and human immigration system that is consistent with our American values. Read More
South Carolina Senator in Search of Solutions
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY), Chairman of the Immigration, Refugee and Border Security Subcommittee, has tapped Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) to help garner GOP support for a comprehensive immigration bill this year. While not always voting in favor of common sense solutions to our broken immigration system, Senator Graham has shown himself to be at least one Republican leader who understands the importance of our nation’s changing demographic—especially in his home state of South Carolina—on future electoral races. Read More
Health Care Reform and Immigration: The Sideshow Antics of the Anti-Reform Crowd
Today, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a new fact sheet about immigrants and the health care system. At a public event, CIS made it clear that while immigrants may not be to blame for all the problems with the U.S. health care system, they certainly are part of the problem, and the only solution is to step up immigration enforcement and reduce future immigration. Hmmm, isn’t that their solution to everything? While stating that free health care for “illegals” is a problem (even though the bills in Congress explicitly deny coverage to undocumented immigrants), CIS focused on health care benefits for legal immigrants, implying that legal immigrants should be denied affordable health care and that comprehensive immigration reform would destroy the health care system. This is simply the latest attempt to silence any constructive discussion about important issues and scare the American public by using immigrants as a handy scapegoat. Read More
CIS Misses the Mark on Immigration and the Economy
In a pair of new reports released yesterday, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) presents an array of demographic and employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau to obliquely suggest that the recession-plagued U.S. economy doesn’t really “need” immigrant workers. Although both of these reports are surprisingly nuanced in their analysis compared to many previous CIS efforts, they nevertheless present a portrait of immigration and the U.S. economy that is over-simplified and off the mark. In gauging the potential impact of immigrant workers on native-born workers, for instance, CIS fails to fully account for the many differences between immigrants and natives in terms of where in the country they live, how much education they have, what occupations they’ve worked in, and how long they’ve been in the labor market. In contrast, an IPC report that was also released yesterday explores all of these variables. Read More
New Report from Cato Institute Highlights Economic Benefits of Legalizing Unauthorized Immigrants
Leading economists agree that the cornerstone of any immigration reform bill should be some form of legalization for the roughly 12 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the United States. Critics of legalization, namely enforcement-only cheerleaders, fail to realize that legalization would improve wages and working conditions for all workers—including the native-born—and would yield a net benefit to the recovering U.S. economy. One study estimates that an immigration reform bill which includes legalization would yield a net benefit of $180 billion over a ten-year period, while enforcement efforts alone would actually cost $80 billion over the same period. Read More
Anti-Immigrant Minutemen Join White-Supremacist Militias on the Radical Right
Anti-immigrant groups like the “Minutemen” vigilantes are not only proliferating, but are rapidly beginning to resemble the white-supremacist and anti-government militias that have populated the netherworld of the Radical Right since the early 1990s. Adding insult to injury, the farcical conspiracy theories that circulate among both extreme nativist groups and right-wing militias are now being mainstreamed by commentators on CNN, MSNBC, and FOX News. Although the various strains of far-right extremism have by no means coalesced into a single movement, the ideological lines that once distinguished them have begun to blur. Read More
All gifts are matched dollar for dollar
No one should face the immigration system alone
