On last night’s show, Levin said that Waxman is afraid that the Republican Party may return to its roots and “embrace the reason people sneak into this country in the first place: liberty, not government!”
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According to a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report released last week, “nearly 3,000 sex offenders are part of the 59,347 immigrants who the courts have ruled cannot be held” as of September 2012 because they were unable to be sent home. These immigrants were released “under some sort of supervision.”
As Stephen Dinan of the Washington Times noted, though, the GAO concluded that “about 5 percent of the time U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement didn’t ensure that the immigrants released were properly registered with local authorities as sex offenders.”
“I’m surprised that only 5 percent of them are not properly registered,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: Olivier Douliery/Abaca Press/MCTDozens of leaders in the immigration movement were arrested Thursday after they blocked a major intersection near the Capitol in a protest of Republican opposition to an immigration overhaul that would include a pathway to citizenship for the nation’s 11 million immigrants who are in the country illegally.
More than 40 leaders were taken into custody after they walked onto Independence Avenue and locked arms, chanting in Spanish “Si, se puede” – “Yes, we can.” Another, smaller group of activists were arrested later in the afternoon after they blocked the hallway outside the office of House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio.
As members of Congress prepared to leave Washington for a long summer recess, organizers said they wanted to send the “strongest message possible” to Republican leaders in the House of Representatives that they’re dissatisfied with progress on immigration and they’ll continue to fight for a comprehensive overhaul that includes a path to citizenship.
“We have to turn up the heat,” Jess George, the executive director of the Latin American Coalition in Charlotte, N.C., said minutes before she was arrested. “We have to let the House of Representatives know that America deserves a vote on citizenship. The vast majority of Americans want this. It’s democracy, and we need to make (House leaders) pay attention.”
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Photo Credit: Getty ImagesThe state Senate on Monday approved legislation that would allow immigrants who are not U.S. citizens to assist voters casting a ballot.
The measure from Assemblyman Rob Bonta, D-Alameda, would allow for up to five non-citizens to serve at a particular polling site. Those poll workers must be permanent U.S. residents who legally entered the country.
Those residents could provide much-needed help to voters with limited English skills, said Sen. Norma Torres, D-Pomona, who presented Bonta’s bill. There are 2.6 million eligible California voters who are not fully proficient in English, she said.
“These individuals have the absolute right to make fully informed voting decisions on Election Day,” Torres said.
More than three dozen organizations involved in elections and immigrant advocacy have signaled their support for AB817.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: APImmigrants — both legal and illegal — have accounted for all of the job gains in the U.S. labor market since 2000, according to a report that highlights the stiff competition for jobs in a tight economy as Congress debates adding more workers to the mix.
The Center for Immigration Studies report, which is being released Wednesday, says 22.4 million immigrants of working age held jobs at the beginning of this year, up 5.3 million over the total in 2000. But native-born workers with jobs dropped 1.3 million over that same period, from 114.8 million to 113.5 million.
Meanwhile, the number of Americans who aren’t in the labor force at all has jumped by almost 13 million to reach 48.6 million — a finding the report’s authors say signals profound changes in the American job market and challenges conventional wisdom that immigration is good for the economy.
“The last 13 years, or even the last five years, make clear that large-scale immigration can go hand-in-hand with weak job growth and declining rates of work among the native-born,” the authors, Steven A. Camarota and Karen Zeigler, say in their report. “Given the employment situation in the country, the dramatic increases in legal immigration contemplated by the Gang of Eight immigration bill seem out of touch with the realities of the U.S. labor market.”
Whether immigrants compete for jobs is a heated topic — though the Senate all but ignored it during the chamber’s debate on its bill to legalize most illegal immigrants and create opportunities for new immigrants and temporary workers to enter the U.S.
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Photo Credit: AP
The Big Apple proposal, though, could resonate with other municipalities, inspiring them to follow suit — and, if Congress approves an otherwise unrelated immigration overhaul, the number of newly eligible immigrant voters could swell into a potent voting bloc on the local level.
That’s because the national overhaul being considered in Washington creates a so-called pathway to legal status for millions of illegal immigrants. By itself, this does little in the near-term to give non-citizens the right to vote. But if New York City approves its plan to give its 800,000 legal immigrants a say in city politics, illegal immigrants could eventually join the voter rolls there as well. And they wouldn’t have to wait for citizenship to vote.
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Photo Credit: ros k @ getfunky_paris
No, these immigrants did not come from foreign aristocracies, nor need they come from any particular location, ethnic group or profession.
But before Franklin Roosevelt began establishing an American welfare state, and before a series of Roosevelt’s successors decided they would make no serious effort to secure our national borders, immigrants to America had at least two things in common: The ability to get to a place that was hard to reach and the ability to survive there on their own.
Now America is becoming a magnet for high-school dropouts.
That is why the report that the Congressional Budget Office produced this month for House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan ought to become a focus of national debate, as members of both parties in Congress work with President Obama to try to give foreign nationals living here illegally a way to become citizens.
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Photo Credit: mopsografieA suspected illegal immigrant was rescued Tuesday by San Diego firefighters after becoming ensnared in the razor wire on top of a fence at the U.S.-Mexico border, Fox5SanDiego.com reported.
Border Patrol agents saw the man stuck in the fence east of Otay Mesa just before 3:45 p.m., and they called the San Diego Fire Department, the report said. It took rescuers more than an hour to free the man stuck some 20 feet above the ground. The undocumented man was evaluated by EMTs at the scene and was not injured. He was handed over to border agents and taken into custody, the report said.
The concertina wire on top of the fence is two rows deep and designed to make moving forward or backward excruciatingly painful.
Read more from this story HERE.
Photo Credit: zzpzaThe California Assembly passed a bill on Thursday that would make the state the first in the nation to allow non-citizens who are in the country legally to serve on jury duty.
Assemblyman Bob Wieckowski, D-Fremont, said his bill, AB1401, would help California widen the pool of prospective jurors and help integrate immigrants into the community.
It does not change other criteria for being eligible to serve on a jury, such as being at least 18, living in the county that is making the summons, and being proficient in English.
The bill passed 45-25 largely on a party-line vote in the Democratic-controlled Assembly and will move on to the Senate. One Democrat – Assemblyman Adam Gray, of Merced – voted no, while some other Democrats did not vote.
Democratic lawmakers who voted for the bill said there is no correlation between being a citizen and a juror, and they noted that there is no citizenship requirement to be an attorney or a judge. Republican lawmakers who opposed Wieckowski’s bill called it misguided and premature.
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Photo Credit: Daily Caller By Caroline May. The Department of Agriculture, via the Mexican government, assures potentially ineligible immigrants that they can still apply for food stamps on behalf of their eligible children without giving information about their immigration status, according to documents released Thursday by Judicial Watch.
A USDA Spanish language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy, according to Judicial Watch, reads that if potentially ineligible immigrants want to obtain benefits for their children they “need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.”
The Daily Caller has reported extensively about the USDA/Mexico partnership that seeks to promote taxpayer-funded nutrition assistance among eligible Mexican Americans, Mexican nationals and migrant communities in America.
“USDA and the government of Mexico have entered into a partnership to help educate eligible Mexican nationals living in the United States about available nutrition assistance,” the USDA explains in a brief paragraph on its “Reaching Low-Income Hispanics With Nutrition Assistance” web page. “Mexico will help disseminate this information through its embassy and network of approximately 50 consular offices.”
The documents Judicial Watch released Thursday shed additional light on the partnership, initiated in 2004 under the Bush administration, which Alabama Republican Sen. Jeff Sessions called a “very disturbing policy” last summer. Session has attempted to end the program. Read more from this story HERE.
USDA to Mexico: Illegal immigrants can have food stamps
By Joel Gehrke. With food stamp spending in the United States skyrocketing since the beginning of the recession, the Department of Agriculture is paying to promote food stamp usage to illegal immigrants for the sake of their American children, according to documents obtained by a government watchdog.
“The promotion of the food stamp program, now known as “SNAP” (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program), includes a Spanish-language flyer provided to the Mexican Embassy by the USDA with a statement advising Mexicans in the U.S. that they do not need to declare their immigration status in order to receive financial assistance,” Judicial Watch announced today. “Emphasized in bold and underlined, the statement reads, ‘You need not divulge information regarding your immigration status in seeking this benefit for your children.’”
The USDA said the program is designed to help American children. “[The USDA Food and Nutrition Service] understands that mixed status households may be particularly vulnerable,” FNS’ Yibo Wood wrote to Mexican embassy officials in a January 2012 email. “Many of these households contain a non-citizen parent and a citizen child.” Read more from this story HERE.
