Archive for the ‘Immigration’ Category

by Peter Lee

Janitors in Colorado Sue Over Having to Speak English

A group of Hispanic custodians at the Auraria Campus in downtown Denver are claiming they are victims of discrimination.

They’ve filed a complaint against the campus operator that could be reviewed by a federal judge.

What started out as a miscommunication over a schedule change for employees working the graveyard shift has become a full investigation by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

“Too many things have happened to me there that I don’t even know how to explain it,” said Auraria custodian Bertha Ribota.

Ribota said she was injured at work because she couldn’t read a warning sign that was in English.

“If I could speak English I wouldn’t have the problems that exist,” said Ribota.

Last week 12 custodians from the Auraria Campus filed an EEOC complaint against the Auraria Higher Education Center, which is the organization that maintains the campus for Metro State University of Denver, the Community College of Denver and the University of Colorado Denver.

“What is sort of a neutral business practice, that they speak English on campus and it’s an English-only campus has a discriminatory impact on this group of workers,” said attorney Tim Markham.

The complaint accused the campus of purposely leaving employees that only speak Spanish in the dark on the terms and conditions of their employment, changes in their working status, safety and more.

When asked if it was a problem those employees were not being informed of those things in their native language, campus spokesman Blaine Nickeson replied, “I don’t know if that’s a problem. I think it’s one of the concerns. I will go on to say there’s not a statute to translate.”

Campus operators said there is no state law requiring complete translations. It is standard at other universities in Colorado.

The Auraria Campus believes employees should understand some basic English.

“It’s not our goal to provide every document translated or every conversation translated. Our employees are expected to interact with members of the public and that interaction we expect them to be able to understand English,” said Nickeson.

The EEOC could take several weeks to review the case. If they find actual damages the Department of Justice would get involved.

REFORM "ANOTHER WORD FOR GOVERNMENT FAILURES" $6.3 TRILLION to Fund Immigration Reform

Study pegs cost of immigration bill’s mass legalization at $6.3T

Published May 06, 2013 | FoxNews.com

The comprehensive immigration overhaul being taken up in the Senate this week could cost taxpayers $6.3 trillion if 11 million illegal immigrants are granted legal status, according to a long-awaited estimate by the conservative Heritage Foundation.

The cost would arise from illegal immigrants tapping into the government's vast network of benefits and services, many of which are currently unavailable to them. This includes everything from standard benefits like Social Security and Medicare to dozens of welfare programs ranging from housing assistance to food stamps.

The report was obtained in advance by Fox News.

"No matter how you slice it, amnesty will add a tremendous amount of pressure on America's already strained public purse," Robert Rector, the Heritage scholar who prepared the report, said in a statement.

The numbers could raise additional concerns for Republicans as a Senate committee prepares to consider the legislation later this week.

The comprehensive study also factored in the cost of public education and other services like highways and police. The government is already providing some of those services to illegal immigrants, so the $6.3 trillion figure would not represent all new costs.

But most of that cost would be new spending, according to Heritage, as illegal immigrants gain access to additional government benefits. The study acknowledges that, for a 10-year period, illegal immigrants seeking a reprieve would be barred from these benefits. After that window, though, Heritage forecasts the costs skyrocketing.

On an annual basis, the report estimates the cost will be $106 billion after the interim phase is over. In the course of their lifetime, the report estimates that illegal immigrant households would receive an average of $592,000 in government benefits. Read more: http://nation.foxnews.com/immigration-reform/2013/05/06/63-trillion-fund-immigration-reform#ixzz2SYx0XtVK

By John F. Di Leo –

There aren’t many things that this nation of immigrants agrees on, but there is one: that our immigration system is broken. Not just mildly in need of correction, but terribly, destructively and counterproductively errant.

Americans are horrified that there are tens of millions of noncitizens in the United States, without permission, while others are horrified that those millions aren’t granted the same full legal status that citizens enjoy.

The severity of the problem is such that an effort is afoot for what its supporters call “comprehensive immigration reform,” and its supporters have the mainstream media so deep in their pocket that even the naive conservative firebrand Marco Rubio has been convinced to risk his political career in support of the current proposal.

The Euphemism of the Day

Among the most offensive aspects of the Democrat bill being pushed by the Gang of Eight is its title. There is nothing comprehensive about this so-called reform.

The program would legalize most of the twenty to thirty million non-citizens currently here (of all nationalities, by the way, not just those from Latin America), giving them a promise of quick citizenship if they just pay a miniscule fine and agree to accept being added to the tax rolls. It would allegedly increase border enforcement in the future – though without adding walls or fences, one wonders how – and it does little else.

For all intents and purposes, the program accepts the status quo, ensures that there will be no punishment for the millions who came here illegally, and gives the Democrats some twenty million plus new voters within a couple of election cycles.

If the Republicans had any hope of winning back the White House in 2016, or possibly ever again, this bill would kill it.

And still they call it reform. It’s anything but.

Real Problems Demand Real Solutions

What are America’s problems today? Crime, unemployment, government overspending, government taxation, skyrocketing government debt, cultural balkanization, authoritarian and invasive government, a loss of both traditional morality and the work ethic.

Immigration – unmanaged and overwhelming – is at the heart of so many of these problems. This isn’t to say that unchecked immigration is the sole cause; America is a nation of immigrants, and must acknowledge the good as well as the bad. But even so…

The drug and robbery gangs, and the prisons and morgues they populate, have seen their numbers swell with illegal immigrants.
The welfare rolls, already bankrupting the nation and dooming millions in a nearly inescapable underclass, bleed oceans of red ink by sharing this doom with illegal immigrants.
Our hospitals and clinics, particularly those along our southern border and in our biggest cities, are being bankrupted as they must provide free healthcare to tens of millions of illegals, giving the impression that the problem is with our healthcare and insurance systems, when in fact one of the biggest causes is the poverty and crime of that largely (though not entirely) immigrant underclass that uses, but cannot afford, our healthcare.
Our governments, from the local school board to the presidency, have been corrupted by an electorate that no longer understands the philosophy of America, the philosophy of personal freedom and economic liberty that enabled our nation to succeed.
Yes, there are plenty of American-grown problems too. Many longstanding citizens born and raised in the USA are at fault for these matters as well, but we must deal with them separately. We can and should deal with the illegals first; their problems are of their own making, having come to America unbidden and without permission, a potentially far easier matter to resolve (logically at least, if not practically).

Fairness to the Legal Immigrants

America’s population didn’t get to 300 million plus from a single path. Northern Europeans, mostly British, settled our east coast first, and served as the source of our Founding generation’s forebears.

But we also grew by encouraging the assimilation of the Native American population already here, by participating in the global slave trade (almost entirely through purchasing slaves from African slave traders), by welcoming more Europeans, and others from across the globe, in the 19th century when we had few quotas and usually only checked the incoming for contagious diseases.

The 20th century saw more quotas, and the establishment of more formal approaches for entry – waiting lists, the issuance of Green Cards, testing and ceremonies for citizenship after years of patience. Respectable and generous exceptions were sometimes made, with cause; legal immigrants who served in World War II were granted citizenship automatically at the war’s end (Senator Rick Santorum’s father’s path, for example).

This new path was necessary as the need for added population decreased, and the recognition of the need to temper immigration with assimilation grew. Millions of patient people all over the world have followed the rules, waiting for openings in their visa quotas, so they could enter the USA as legal and welcomed individuals and families.

Michelle Malkin has spoken powerfully of the debt we owe to the honesty of these patient immigrants, for following the rules despite the knowledge that illegal paths of entry have been temptingly easy for decades. It would the greatest insult to them if we offered an amnesty to the gate crashers and line jumpers.

To whom does a nation owe the greater respect? To those who entered the relationship in a crime, or to those who entered the relationship with respect for their future neighbors and hosts?

There are some Republicans today who, terrified by demographics and maps, forget these basic rules of civility. They are easily tempted to take an easy path to solve without solving, to win friendship bound to be fleeting… without recognizing that such a path will be a slap in the face to the patient and legal immigrants who already populate the nation, and who are the party’s far greater prospects on Election Day anyway.

A Picture of Truly Comprehensive Immigration Reform

Do we need a comprehensive reform package? Certainly. The presence of twenty to thirty million illegal residents certainly proves it. But let’s not allow the politicians to pass off something as comprehensive if it isn’t. Let’s do what’s needed, all at once, and see if those claiming to want to solve the problems really mean it.

A truly comprehensive reform package would include, at minimum, the following components:

Employment Reform: When the United States had almost open borders in the 19th century, unemployment was negligible, and opportunities for advancement were everywhere. We now have real unemployment well above twenty percent, when fairly calculated; every new immigrant either adds to the unemployed, or takes a job that an American might otherwise have held.

We must therefore begin immigration reform with the creation of an economic boom that will employ both the unemployed already here, and the newcomers as well. All this requires is a Reaganesque tax cut – reducing the effective corporate income tax to about ten or fifteen percent, rolling back the many regulatory burdens of the past decade that have made America so inhospitable to business, eliminating the monstrosity of Obamacare that has effected a near full stop on the expansion of existing businesses.

Criminal Justice Reform: Among the many reasons to fear increased immigration is the fact that such immigration includes robbers, rapists, drug dealers, terrorists, murderers… our cities are plagued with gangs, many of them offshoots of Mexican and other foreign drug cartels. We rightly fear opening our borders when so many of those we allow in turn out to be criminals – and sometimes, as in the cases of the 9-11 “pilots” and the Boston bombers, mass-murdering terrorists.

We must therefore begin immigration reform with a reform of our criminal justice system… an end to the technicality acquittals and lack of prosecution that have turned our police stations into revolving doors. Our system doesn’t have a problem catching criminals; our police risk their lives to catch them, and then the system lets them go. We need aggressive prosecution, serious sentencing, and a return to the use of capital punishment for the violent rapists, drug dealers, brawlers, muggers, store robbers, gang recruiters and murderers who fill our prisons and bleed our resources.

Healthcare Reform: Also among the reasons to fear increased immigration is the fact that the provision of services for non-paying immigrants has caused the bankruptcy of countless hospitals and clinics all over the country, but especially along the southern border.

Advocates of the current “reform” package claim that citizenship will solve this problem, but that’s a bald-faced lie, as it would only enable hospitals to know the names of the people who can’t pay, not enable them to pay. Economic advances for these patients are far more important to our healthcare system (and to these indigent subjects of the discussion themselves as well), than the question of whether their Social Security Numbers are real or fake. All citizenship will do on its own is to place the economic burden for their care on already-bankrupt state and federal healthcare programs.

Immigration reform must therefore begin with a path to economic independence for the poor, as detailed above, and with the overthrow of Obamacare, a program specifically designed to bankrupt the healthcare sector by funding tens of millions more patients from the government purse.

Education Reform: Our school system is worse than broken. While our nation still has many good schools and colleges, the funding system for them is warped beyond recognition, and the multicultural approach driving them is almost entirely destructive.

Every justification for the government takeover of education – once an entirely private sector affair – in the 19th and early 20th century was based on the theory that it would help assimilate the students into a shared American culture, and provide a net economic benefit by turning students into more productive members of society. The idea was that they would become both better Americans in general and better taxpayers in specific; they would be more informed voters on Election Day, and more productive taxpayers on payday.

But what has really happened? The education establishment has become such a heavy millstone that the average salary delta between the uneducated and the educated is arguably no longer a net positive. Our high educational costs have driven potential employers out of the country at an alarming pace, as the schools themselves – particularly urban ones – have become more effective as gang recruiting offices than as centers of learning.

We need to spend more on guards at many of our schools, and eliminate the massive misdirection of multicultural, bilingual education. This nation is becoming balkanized, and it starts in the schools. Non-English-speaking people can’t understand campaign ads in English to be informed voters, can’t be viewed equally by potential employers, can’t participate equally in the civic groups of their communities.

Real immigration reform must begin with a renewed commitment to English as the single official language of our nation. No diploma should be granted without proof of fluency; no citizenship should be granted without proof of both fluency and a robust understanding of the Founding principles of this great nation. No government document should be written in any language other than English. And we need privatization of the schools – emancipation of the schools! – so that endless tax dollars no longer provide a blank check to the school monopoly, especially at the college level, where government money has facilitated such a massive unjustifiable increase in the price of higher education.

A Repudiation of Amnesty: Many rightly say that we can’t deport thirty million people. And this is true… not because it’s impossible, but because it won’t stick; many will just return. Deportation is an archaic solution. But we still must show that laws mean things and will be enforced, or we’ll just be establishing a principle that all six billion people on planet Earth are welcome to come to the United States.

We must broaden the work visas offered to applicants from abroad who follow the rules and apply at their nations’ embassies, properly accounting for our nation’s genuine workplace needs. As we improve our economy, these needs will grow, and so can the number of visas offered.

For those here who don’t want to return home, or who cannot because their parents illegally bore them here, we should offer a permanent guest worker program, a green card of sorts that legalizes them and adds them to the tax rolls, but just has no path to citizenship for themselves, only for their future children. An amnesty for line-jumpers and gate crashers and their progeny can not, must not involve any path to citizenship.

We must not saturate our electorate with tens of millions who began their presence here in crime. Legalization of those here is fair, but citizenship – and therefore electoral involvement – is not. If they want electoral involvement, they can go back to their home country and do it right; a generous break like this should not be stretched into a destructive capitulation that rewards lawbreaking with the keys to the republic.

A Cultural Reawakening

America has suffered greatly in the past hundred years. We have fallen far from the principles that our Founding Fathers held when they designed our magnificent form of limited government.

This is certainly not entirely the fault of immigrants, and it would be rhetorically unfair to blame the errors of homegrown destroyers Dewey, Wilson, LaFollette, and their ilk on immigrants or immigration. With the passage of the 16th and 17th Amendments, we did more damage to our nation ourselves than any immigrants ever could.

Nonetheless, our long fall from the Founders’ plan has to be stopped; this erosion of principle and understanding must be reversed. Our Founders designed a system that can only work with a united populace, a civilized, law-abiding, Judeo-Christian community that shares respect for limited government, capitalist economics, and Western Civilization.

Before we further dilute our voting population with even more people steeped in the foreign ways of feudalism, socialism, theocracy and tyranny, we must reawaken in the American mind an appreciation for the thought processes of our Founders.

It can be done. Some of our greatest Founders were immigrants themselves; nobody appreciated American principles more than Alexander Hamilton, Albert Gallatin, Robert Morris, and John Witherspoon, for example. But we cannot expect millions of immigrants to be assimilated into a nation of principled libertarian capitalists, when the body into which they’re assimilating has itself forgotten what that means.

We have much to do. Righting this ship is a complex effort, one well worth taking on… but shortcuts that reward illegality and further poison the well of this great nation are more destructive than any Washington politician dares admit.

Copyright 2013 John F. Di Leo

John F. Di Leo is a Chicago-based Customs broker and international trade compliance lecturer. A descendent of Irishmen, Austrians, Germans and Italians, he’s proud of his ethnic heritage, but he’s prouder still – as we all should be – of our adopted heritage as Americans, as ideological heirs to the Founding Fathers who took the clay of this continent and sculpted from it the greatest nation on God’s green earth.

Permission is hereby granted to forward freely, provided it is uncut and the IR URL and byline are included. Follow John F. Di Leo on LinkedIn and Facebook, or on Twitter at @johnfdileo.

U.S. immigrants –43% on welfare after 20 years
Expanding legal immigration is a contentious issue for voters, the vast majority of whom tell pollsters that they want the levels either retained or decreased.

But most politicians want legal immigration expanded.

During his time in the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama backed bills that would have dramatically boosted legal immigration, potentially by hundreds of thousands a year. As president, he has called for the same thing.

“We need to provide our farms a legal way to hire workers that they rely on, and a path for those workers to earn legal status. And our laws should respect families following the rules — reuniting them more quickly instead of splitting them apart,” Mr. Obama said in a major speech on the subject in El Paso, Texas, in 2011.

His presumed Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, in June called for increasing legal immigration for students who study in high-tech fields and admitting unlimited family members of those who hold green cards.

“Our immigration system should help promote strong families as well — not keep them apart. Our nation benefits when moms and dads and their kids are all living together under the same roof,” Mr. Romney told the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Mr. Camarota’s report took a broad look at the immigrant population and found that immigrants are contributing to major changes in American society, including that one-fourth of public school students now speak languages other than English at home.

It also found that immigrants as a population lead complex economic lives that aren’t easily put into one category or another.

Immigrants made up more than half of all farm workers, 41 percent of taxi drivers and 48 percent of maids and house cleaners, but they also represented about one-third of all computer programmers and 27 percent of doctors.

The statistics varied greatly by geography. In Massachusetts, native-led households averaged $89,000 in income while immigrant households averaged $66,000.

In Virginia, immigrant-led households averaged $93,000 in income, far outstripping native households’ $80,000 average. Likewise, immigrant families averaged a larger tax burden in Virginia — though they also had higher rates of use of welfare or Medicaid.

The center found that use of public benefits varied dramatically based on where immigrants originated.

Mexicans were most likely to use means-tested benefit programs, with 57 percent, while 6 percent of those from the United Kingdom did. The rate for native-born Americans is 23 percent.

Mr. Camarota said a key dividing line is educational attainment. Immigrants who have been in the U.S. 20 years and who have bachelor’s degrees or higher make slightly more than the average native-born American. But immigrants with only high school educations make less no matter how long they have been in the U.S.

“The fact is the less-educated in particular — they don’t do well over time,” he said. “It’s not reasonable to expect an immigrant who comes to America with only a high school education to close the gap with the native-born.”

Scholars debate whether the current wave of immigrants will assimilate differently from those in the 1800s and at the start of the 20th century.

George Borjas, a Harvard University professor, has argued that second-generation Americans — the children of today’s immigrants — will fall behind in wages by about 10 percent by 2030.

But in “Assimilation Tomorrow,” a report released in November, Dowell Myers and John Pitkin said immigrants of the 1990s eventually will attain high rates of home-ownership and 71 percent will become U.S. citizens by 2030.

Those authors said immigrants were set back by the recent recession but were still on track to follow the same assimilation path as previous waves of immigrants.

They also said a program to legalize the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. would be critical to helping assimilation.

(((Article written by the Washington Times)))

by Stephan Webster

Radio host Laura Ingraham announced on her program Monday that she’s long believed the United States should shut down all immigration from central Asia and any nation with a majority Muslim population.

Going even further, Ingraham said she’s not sure why the U.S. allows people from central Asia either, particularly ethnic Chechnens, two of whom have been identified as the Boston bombing suspects.

“I would submit that people shouldn’t be coming here as tourists from Chechnya after 9/11,” Ingraham said. “Dagistan, Checnya, Kergystan, uh-uh. As George Bush would say, ‘None of them stans.’”

Because the Boston Marathon bombing happened right as the Senate prepares to take up immigration reform, some conservatives who want the immigration system to become more restrictive have cited the incident as cause for a rethink.

Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) in particular said on Friday that the attack is reason enough to put immigration reform on hold.

“How can individuals evade authority and plan such attacks on our soil? How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to enter the United States?” he asked. “How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?”

Grassley later backed off the implication that he was using the Boston bombings to jam up immigration reform, insisting, “I didn’t say that!” during a committee hearing on Monday.

This audio is from “The Laura Ingraham Show,” aired Monday, April 22, 2013, snipped by Mediaite.

By Cameron Josephration Plan
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.) blitzed all five Sunday shows in his most public pitch yet for the emerging immigration reform bill, arguing that it would control the border and rejecting conservative criticisms that it provided “amnesty” for illegal immigrants in the country.
“This is not ‘amnesty.’ ‘Amnesty’ is the forgiveness of something. ‘Amnesty’ is anything that says ‘do it illegally, it’ll be cheaper and easier,’” Rubio, a member of the bipartisan ‘Gang of Eight’ senators set to unveil their immigration bill on Tuesday, said on “Fox News Sunday.”

Rubio, a Tea Party favorite, is a key figure in winning GOP support for the bill overhauling the nation’s immigration laws through tighter border security and a pathway to citizenship for those illegal immigrants already in the country.
But the contentious politics also place the potential 2016 presidential candidate in a difficult spot, as many conservatives strongly oppose offering immigrants who came here illegally a chance to stay in the U.S. and eventually apply for citizenship. The charge is the most potent attack conservatives have lobbed at the bill.
Rubio defended the bill on Sunday, saying it would allow illegal immigrants to stay only after meeting a series of requirements, including having a job and paying fines, and would require them to wait years before applying for citizenship.

The Florida senator argued the time was ripe for addressing immigration reform.
“This is an issue that needs to be solved,” he said.
Rubio argued that the current system is “de facto amnesty” and that the bipartisan plan would greatly improve control of the border with Mexico.
He said the creation of an “entry-exit” monitoring system to keep immigrants from overstaying their visas, and an “E-Verify” system to make sure companies aren’t illegally hiring unauthorized immigrants would be a central component of the comprehensive bill.
But some conservatives are marshaling their forces in opposition to the legislation and Rubio has sought to allay their concerns about the bill.
Rubio pushed back against a report from the conservative Heritage Foundation that immigration reform would be costly to the government. A similar report helped derail immigration reform six years ago by undercutting conservative support for the measure.
“Conservatives love dynamic scoring,” he said, arguing the bill’s effects should be taken on the whole and not just looked at from what it would cost the government. “This will be a net positive for our country now and for the future.”
Former Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), a close Rubio ally who helped get him elected in 2010, is now head of the organization — and has long been a staunch opponent of giving illegal immigrants any legal status.
Rubio emphasized on NBC’s “Meet the Press” that the bill was “a starting point.”
“It’s not a take-it-or-leave-it offer,” he said, acknowledging the work ahead to win support.
Speaking CNN’s “State of the Union,” Rubio said the bipartisan group of senators behind the bill wouldn’t stop amendments to the legislation.
“We haven’t agreed to band together to keep anyone from amending it. There are 92 other senators who have their own ideas about immigration reform, who, quite frankly, I think, can help make this bill better,” Rubio said.
The Gang of Eight first unveiled their framework in January and have been negotiating details of the plan since then.
A House group is working on its own bipartisan immigration overhaul, and leaders from both parties have said they hope to move on legislation soon. President Obama has made immigration reform a top priority for his second term.
But House GOP concerns over citizenship and conservative calls for the border to be secured first remain key obstacles.
Rubio has taken a deliberative approach to talks on the bill, and has urged Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) to move slowly, allowing time for senators to build public support for their proposals.
Rubio said on multiple shows Sunday that he wasn’t backing the bill to boost his political prospects or to help the GOP improve its standing with minority voters, but rather because the nation’s immigration policy was broken.
“There are political ramifications to everything we do in Washington, but it’s not the reason to do it and it’s certainly not the reason I’m involved in this,” he said on “Meet the Press.”
“This is not about improving anyone’s poll numbers. This is very simple — I’m a senator. I get paid not to just give speeches, I get paid to solve problems. This is a serious problem here in Florida, this is a serious problem in America,” he added.
Rubio did say the next Republican presidential nominee would need to address immigration, even if his or her views on the issue didn’t match what Rubio has proposed.
“The nominee of our party needs to be someone that has answers to the problems our country faces, and immigration is a serious problem,” he said.

On CNN, Rubio said that he hadn’t considered if the success of the immigration reform bill could affect his own chances in 2016.
“I really haven’t. I have a job. My belief has always been that if I do my job and I do my job well, I’ll have options and opportunities in the future to do things, whether it’s run for reelection, run for something else or give someone else a chance at public service. And that’s how I view this issue,” Rubio said.
Kevin Bogardus contributed

Read more: http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/293743-sen-rubio-defends-emerging-immigration-deal-as-not-amnesty#ixzz2QXANwixQ
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