Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

Immigration Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 08, 2014 32 Comments
As expected, on Saturday Obama nominated Loretta Lynch to replace Eric Holder as Attorney General. I'm not sure how many more times I'll make this disclosure -- but for the second time I'll note that I'm biased in favor of my law school classmate. I remember Loretta as a very nice person, not something that can be said about some of my classmates. Loretta's career, to the extent I've followed it, seems pretty straight forward as a prosecutor:
President Clinton first appointed Lynch to be a U.S. Attorney in 1999. She left for private practice in 2001 before being appointed a second time by Obama in 2010. In her years in the post, Lynch's office in Brooklyn has handled a wide-ranging caseload — cutting-edge cybercrime, high-stakes financial fraud and dramatic Mafia busts straight out of a Martin Scorsese movie. The office also helped convict the masterminds of the thwarted al Qaeda plot to attack the New York subway system. This year, Lynch's office announced it would indict Rep. Michael Grimm, R-N.Y., on federal fraud, tax evasion and perjury charges. Grimm, who won his re-election bid Tuesday, has pleaded not guilty. Lynch has also prosecuted several Democratic public officials, including State Sen. John L. Sampson, former State Sen. Pedro Espada Jr. and Assemblyman William F. Boyland Jr.

Posted by Mike LaChance on October 26, 2014 80 Comments
Non-citizens, who should not be voting, wield significant influence in American elections according to a new report from the Washington Post. Can you guess which party they typically vote for? Jesse Richman and David Earnest reported, here are some highlights:
Could non-citizens decide the November election? In a forthcoming article in the journal Electoral Studies, we bring real data from big social science survey datasets to bear on the question of whether, to what extent, and for whom non-citizens vote in U.S. elections. Most non-citizens do not register, let alone vote. But enough do that their participation can change the outcome of close races... Because non-citizens tended to favor Democrats (Obama won more than 80 percent of the votes of non-citizens in the 2008 CCES sample), we find that this participation was large enough to plausibly account for Democratic victories in a few close elections. Non-citizen votes could have given Senate Democrats the pivotal 60th vote needed to overcome filibusters in order to pass health-care reform and other Obama administration priorities in the 111th Congress. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) won election in 2008 with a victory margin of 312 votes. Votes cast by just 0.65 percent of Minnesota non-citizens could account for this margin. It is also possible that non-citizen votes were responsible for Obama’s 2008 victory in North Carolina. Obama won the state by 14,177 votes, so a turnout by 5.1 percent of North Carolina’s adult non-citizens would have provided this victory margin.
That's kind of a big deal, isn't it? Oh, and then there's this:

Posted by Mike LaChance on September 18, 2014 11 Comments
Luis Gutiérrez is a Democratic representative from Illinois who frequently attacks anyone who is not for amnesty. As an example, here he is on Sean Hannity's show claiming that securing the U.S. border would be a dereliction of his duty. Transcript and video via Real Clear Politics:
Gutierrez: Voting to Secure Border First "Would Be Derelict In My Duty to Protect America" SEAN HANNITY: Last word. You can pass a bill, secure the border first, would you support that? REP. LUIS GUTIERREZ (D-IL): No. Because it would be folly. It would be derelict in my duty to protect America. HANNITY: In the mean time, every day you don't pass that bill -- you're demanding amnesty. GUTIERREZ: I would be derelict to my duty. [CROSSTALK] GUTIERREZ: It sounds great. It sounds good. HANNITY: It doesn't sound great. GUTIERREZ: It sounds good, but it isn't an effective -- HANNITY: If you don't do it, it's a dereliction of duty, sir.
Here's the video:

Posted by Prudence Paine on September 09, 2014 12 Comments
When it comes to red-meat quotes on immigration and calls for President Obama to use Executive Orders to bypass Congress and grant amnesty to millions, news networks know there is one go-to guy: Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL). Just last year, he urged caution and bipartisanship. Not anymore. Yesterday, Gutierrez expanded his political enemies list and went after all "conservatives," of any party. Transcript:
Luis Gutierrez: So the problem here, it seems to me, is that we keep negotiating with conservative Democrats which led us not to do anything when we were in the majority in 2006 and 2008 and had a majority in the Senate. We let conservative Democrats lead the way. And we can't let conservative Democrats and--and Republicans--dictate the pace of justice that we're gonna take for our immigrant [CROSSTALK] make a mistake in doing that and we confuse the public.

Posted by Amy Miller on September 06, 2014 11 Comments
Today, Barack Obama formally declined to commit electoral suicide on behalf of every democrat running for higher office in a "leans Republican" state. Speaking under the condition of anonymity, a White House official told the Associated Press today that President Obama has abandoned his pledge to implement immigration reform by the end of the summer. Via Fox News Latino:
"Because of the Republicans' extreme politicization of this issue, the president believes it would be harmful to the policy itself and to the long-term prospects for comprehensive immigration reform to announce administrative action before the elections," a White House official said, asking for anonymity. Nonetheless, he added that Obama wants reform carried out in a "sustainable" way, and for that reason will take action "before the end of the year." ... "The president is confident in his authority to act, and he will before the end of the year. But again, nothing will replace Congress acting on comprehensive immigration reform and the president will keep pressing Congress to act," the official said.
As one blogger in Texas put it,, President Obama allowed this leak "early on a Saturday morning, ripe with the possibility of the least amount of Americans noticing." He claims that he's putting off comprehensive reform to save future efforts, but with 60 days to go until the election, we know that "not wanting to politicize the issue" is really code for "not wanting to lose the Senate to Republicans in 6 swing states."

Posted by Amy Miller on August 15, 2014 12 Comments
The news is full of stories and interviews detailing the failure of the Obama Administration to enforce immigration law, the cost to taxpayers because of this failure, and what this means for the state of electoral politics in the run up to November. None of these stories, however, address the human element of what Texans are dealing with every single day. Women like Doctor Corrine Stern, who serves as a medical examiner in Webb County, Texas, sees every day the brutal consequences of an Administration who refuses to enforce the law. Bloomberg News has published a searing exposé of what it truly means to cede power to lawlessness. Doctor Stern's jurisdiction covers the vast border lands surrounding Laredo, where she spends at least 25% of her office's resources in the examination and identification of the abandoned dead:
Her struggle to put names to the bodies offers a glimpse into how intractable the border crisis is as it strains the services of South Texas’s counties. Stern, who estimates that the task takes up 25 percent of her office’s resources, is dealing with migrants from at least six countries, confronting bureaucratic and linguistic hurdles all along the way. She has conducted at least 400 autopsies of immigrants since becoming Webb’s medical examiner in 2006. On any given day, Stern plays the role of forensic expert, homicide detective or even diplomat, asking the governments of Mexico, El Salvador, Guatemala and other nations for help in naming the dead and getting their remains home.
Journalists and pundits tend to focus on the costs of apprehending, housing, evaluating, and deporting illegal immigrants, but the real story--and a good portion of the real scandal--lies in how much time and effort American doctors and other officials spend in either repatriating or laying to rest the bodies of those who die during ill-fated border crossings.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 08, 2014 45 Comments
I remember the dread of exiting the Queens-Midtown tunnel into Manhattan from Long Island before I left for Rhode Island in the early 1990s. Would we make the first traffic light, or get stuck at a red light and be subjected to the squeegee men? The squeegee men would either spray something on your windshield then demand payment to clean it off, or just start cleaning the windshield figuring you'd pay them rather than risk a confrontation. It set the tone for the city, along with graffiti and other petty hooliganism. It was one of the realities of life in NYC until Rudy Giuliani was elected Mayor and cleaned it all up. It was the broken window theory:
Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in rundown ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing.
The squeegee men and similar public displays of lawlessness were held in check even after Rudy left office -- until now. The election of uber-liberal Bill DeBlasio ushered in a new era of the bad old days, as The NY Post reports: NY Post Squeegee Men
They were the ultimate symbol of the lawlessness and blight of the 1980s and early 1990s — and now they’re making a comeback. Squeegee men are menacing motorists across New York City, including spots near the Holland, Lincoln and Queens-Midtown tunnels, as well as the Queensboro Bridge, The Post has learned.

Posted by Leslie Eastman on August 02, 2014 54 Comments
As an environmental health and safety professional who has written a book about "bloodborne pathogens," such as the Ebola virus, I read with both interest and alarm Bruce Carrol's post, No concerns here: Ebola patients headed to Georgia. Shortly after writing that book, I was hired by the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta to present a safety training program. While I was there, I was privileged to tour their containment facilities, which were highly impressive. The personnel in charge of running those facilities were also (and remain), highly trained, very professional, and have well placed pride in their innovative and protective measures. I would like to give you an idea of what goes into a BioSafety Level 4 Containment Facility, to which the Ebola-infected Americans are being sent:
  • The use of a positive pressure personnel suit, with a segregated air supply, is mandated.
  • Entrances and exits  contain multiple showers, a vacuum room, an ultraviolet light room, and other safety precautions designed to destroy all traces of the biohazard.
  • Multiple airlocks are employed and are electronically secured to prevent both doors from opening at the same time.
  • Members of the laboratory staff have extremely thorough training in handling extremely hazardous infectious agents, and have already had much experience in handling lower hazard biological agents.
  • The containment facility is either in a separate building or in a controlled area within a building, which is completely isolated from all other areas of the building.
For the very interested Legal Insurrection fan, more information is given here. In other words, if I were an American infected with Ebola, this is where I would want to be sent. The most knowledgeable medical experts on exotic infectious diseases are there and this facility is best equipped to stop the spread of the pathogen to anyone else.

Posted by New Neo on July 30, 2014 27 Comments
Congress been mulling over some sort of amnesty plan for illegal immigrants for a very long time, whether it's been called "amnesty" or whether euphemisms are used to substitute for the word. But there's a reason Congress hasn't done much about it, and that's because the American people don't want it and Congress is at least somewhat responsive to the people, despite the fact that many politicians and those who give them money are more interested in amnesty than the general public is. Past presidents have understand that, too, and have also understood that it's Congress that needs to deal with this for the most part. Until now. Now we have a president who has the novel idea of completely ignoring the public during his lame duck years. Most presidents are hampered in their power during lame duck time, and they don't want to do anything to hurt their party's standing with the public and therefore their party's election chances. Obama, again, has the novel idea to ignore the public and hurt his party in the short run for enormous gains in the longer run: a demographic that will be reliably Democratic and will insure the party's hegemony (not to mention his "legacy" as a transformative president) . At least, that's the calculation. All the Democratic impeachment chatter ("watch out, the evil Republicans are planning to impeach me, aren't they mean and aren't they silly?") is both an attempt to head outrage off at the pass and to pre-characterize it as inappropriate and hateful, and a simultaneous tacit acknowledgement of the tyrannical nature of what Obama is contemplating. I'm with Patterico on this:

Posted by Kemberlee Kaye on July 30, 2014 21 Comments
Yesterday, Speaker John Boehner indicated the House Republicans will push back against any attempt to hijack their border bill. The bill would allocate $659 million to border authorities, far less than the almost $4 billion President Obama requested. Boehner released the following statement (emphasis added):
“Senator Reid, embarrassed that he cannot strong-arm the Senate into passing the blank check President Obama demanded, is making a deceitful and cynical attempt to derail the House’s common-sense solution. So let me be as clear as I can be with Senator Reid: the House of Representatives will not take up the Senate immigration reform bill or accept it back from the Senate in any fashion. Nor will we accept any attempt to add any other comprehensive immigration reform bill or anything like it, including the DREAM Act, to the House’s targeted legislation, which is meant to fix the actual problems causing the border crisis. Such measures have no place in the effort to solve this crisis, and any attempt to exploit this crisis by adding such measures will run into a brick wall in the People’s House.

“While the White House has abandoned all pretense of governing and the Senate is doing almost nothing to address our struggling economy, Republicans remain committed to addressing the American people’s priorities, and that includes passing a responsible bill this week to help secure our border and return these children safely to their home countries.” 
Boehner's statement was in direct response to Senator Reid's statement indicating the the GOP's border bill could be used as an opportunity to push the ever-ambiguous "immigration reform." The Hill reports:

Posted by Amy Miller on July 29, 2014 6 Comments
Illegal immigrant activists in America would like you to know that they're not terribly concerned about being arrested and deported. In fact, they're so unconcerned that they decided to stand in front of the White House this Monday and demand that the Administration offer a reprieve for parents who have illegally entered the U.S. with their children. This isn't the first protest of its kind, and it certainly won't be the last. The Obama Administration has defined its participation in immigration enforcement by the deliberate dismantling of existing enforcement mechanisms via Executive Order. Starting in 2009, President Obama began bypassing Congress to create the environment that makes today's protests possible. Via Fox News:
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official indicated that even if the protesters end up getting arrested by D.C. police, they’d have to be serious criminals for ICE to get involved. “Unless the individuals meet ICE’s enforcement priorities, it’s unlikely that the agency would get involved in the case,” the official told FoxNews.com. Under a policy that’s been in effect for several years, ICE focuses deportation mostly on serious criminals and – in some cases -- those caught in the act of crossing the border. The agency prioritizes deportation for felons, repeat offenders, gang members and others with a serious criminal record. But the agency largely gives a pass to other undocumented residents.
The problem with this philosophy of non-enforcement is that it breeds optimism in the thousands of people who illegally cross our border. James Carafano at the Heritage Foundation recently articulated what Republican legislators, foreign leaders, and even residents of border states have been saying for months: our illegal immigration problem is Barack Obama's problem:
Accessibility by WAH