Coffee Party Immigration

By AVIVA SHEN, Think Progress

When he was in the Utah Legislature, Stephen Sandstrom championed a “show your papers” law requiring local police to check the immigration status of suspects during felony stops, detention, or arrests. The law is similar to Arizona’s infamous and now-defunct SB 1070, which required police to check the status of anyone stopped for any reason.

Sandstrom’s law is now facing the scrutiny of a federal judge, who heard arguments last month. But, since lobbying hard for the law in 2011, Sandstrom now hopes the law is struck down. What’s more, he’s now a vocal supporter of the DREAM Act.

If you're worried about the economy, you should also be worried about the fate of immigration reform. According to this 2010 analysis by The Brooking

by Michael A. Memoli, LA Times

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor outlined a kinder, gentler House Republican agenda for the coming term that puts a greater emphasis on kitchen table issues, and called for a path to citizenship for the children of illegal immigrants.
 

Two years after the Republicans came to power in the House on a wave of tea party fervor, Cantor’s speech at a DC think tank Tuesday – entitled “Making Life Work” –  marked the start of an effort to move beyond the budget fights that have come to define the party at a time of divided government.

He outlined a handful of initiatives on education and health care the GOP majority has pushed before, but ones that were relegated to the second-tier after a relentless focus on government spending and deficits during the party’s first years in power. The exception was on immigration reform, one of two major issues other than the budget that President Obama has pushed Congress to tackle in the near term.

“While we are a nation that allows anyone to start anew, we are also a nation of laws, and that’s what makes tackling the issue of immigration reform so difficult,” he said. But “one of the great founding principles of our country was that children would not be punished for the mistakes of their parents. It is time to provide an opportunity for legal residence and citizenship for those who were brought to this country as children and who know no other home.” [MORE] 

by Joshua Miller and Daniel Newhauser, Roll Call

Congress has been unable to make any progress on an immigration overhaul for years, but for voters such as dairy farmer Matt Lamb, the party that figures out a way forward will go a long way toward securing his vote. Lamb is a self-described conservative guy and a longtime Republican voter, but he’s considering casting his ballot for Democratic Rep. Kathy Hochul and President Barack Obama because of what he calls his most important issue.

Lamb has more than 2,000 cows on his family farm that need to be milked three times a day, and he struggles to find the labor to do it. He puts ads in local papers but still is at pains to find adequate help. Lamb uses some foreign workers, but the current immigration system makes it almost impossible for him to get visas for potential new employees. And since the push for immigration changes during the George W. Bush administration, he’s seen the GOP move in what he thinks is the wrong direction on his key issue.

“Generally, agriculture votes Republican,” Lamb said in an interview earlier this month. “We traditionally have been [Republican] on this farm. But right now, being able to carry out our business is the single most important thing. I’m a single-issue voter: Where’s my labor going to come from?”

Voters like Lamb — in need of workers, tired of the stalemate in Washington, D.C., — could present an opening for Democrats. And that could be pivotal in close districts such as this one in Western New York. [MORE]

A country is only as strong as its people, and we need more -- starting with Asia...

By Laura matthews for Internation Business.

If polls are to be believed, pro-immigration activists may need to work harder to prevent the reelection of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio

The Justice Dept. is suing him, and pro-immigration activists want him out, but it seems Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio might be here to stay.

The 80-year-old, who declares himself "America's toughest sheriff" and is known for his extreme anti-immigration views, might just secure a sixth term in office as a poll shows that Arpaio is keeping his lead over his closest challenger.

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The White House has released state-by-state reports on some of the programs and services that would be impacted under the sequestration cuts that are scheduled to go into effect on March 1. Here is a breakdown by state and program.

Exerpt from op-ed by MAE M. NGAI, NY Times

The promise to “secure the border” made for good politics even before 1986, when Congress passed the last comprehensive immigration reform bill. In the last quarter-century we have spent approximately $187 billion on enforcement, mostly along the United States-Mexico border. This included a ninefold increase in the size of the Border Patrol since 1980; nearly 700 miles of fencing; and the deployment of surveillance drones and motion sensors. These efforts reduced but did not stop unauthorized entries (only the Great Recession was able to reduce the net flow of Mexican illegal immigration to effectively zero). In fact, the hazards of crossing an increasingly militarized border led many Mexican workers to settle permanently in the United States.

Similarly, proposals for a new guest worker program, which were scuttled from the 1986 legislation because of opposition from labor and immigrant advocates, should again give us pause. From the agricultural “Bracero Program” of the 1940s and ’50s to the current H-2 visa for temporary unskilled labor, these programs are notorious for employer abuse.

If we really want to tackle unauthorized migration, we need to understand why it exists in the first place. The most important cause is our system of allocating green cards, or visas for permanent residency, which stipulates that no country may have more than 7 percent of the total each year. With an annual ceiling of 366,000 family- and employer-sponsored visas, the per-country limit is 25,620.

In practice, this means it is easy to immigrate here from, say, Belgium or New Zealand, but there are long waits — sometimes decades — for applicants from China, India, Mexico and the Philippines. These four max out on the limit every year. When critics admonish prospective immigrants — as well as the 11 million plus undocumented migrants currently in America — to “go to the back of the line,” they should realize that for many people the line is a cruel joke.

The United States has followed this one-size-fits-all rule since 1965. It was, admittedly, a vast improvement over the blatantly discriminatory national-origins quota system, which since the 1920s had favored migration from Northern and Western Europe and excluded Asians altogether. But we can do better.

One alternative might be a plan introduced by Senator Philip A. Hart, a Michigan Democrat, in the early 1960s. Senator Hart, who died in 1976, gave his name to the 1965 immigration law, along with Representative Emanuel Celler, a New York Democrat. But before that, he proposed a system that would have given 20 percent of the visas to refugees; 32 percent to countries in proportion to the size of their populations (recognizing need); and 48 percent to countries in proportion to their amount of emigration in the last 15 years (supporting family unification and existing ties in immigrant communities in the United States).

To keep the immigration stream diverse, he proposed maximum and minimum per-country limits. The overall ceiling and the distribution would be revisited every five years to reflect changing conditions. Finally, Senator Hart recommended continuing the policy of pan-Americanism, which had long exempted countries in the Western Hemisphere from quota restrictions. [MORE]

By Lesill . Maxwell.

Veteran education reporter Lesli Maxwell has worked both inside and outside of major school systems. Join her now as she delves into the educational, policy, and social issues surrounding English-language learners in U.S.

By Joel Kotkin, contributor to Forbes.

This entrepreneurial class of immigrants are increasingly settling in younger, growing cities in the South, and spreading out from traditional inner-city hubs to the suburbs.

“There’s nothing wrong with New York that a million Chinese couldn’t cure,” the urban geographer George Sternlieb once quipped. It may be an exaggeration, but rising Asian immigration has indeed been a boon to many communities and economies across the country.

Over the past 30 years the number of Asians in America has quadrupled to 18 million, or roughly 6% of the total U.S. population. But their economic impact is much greater. They are far more likely to be involved in technology jobs than other ethnic groups, constituting over 20% of employees in the nation’s leading technology companies, four times their share of the overall U.S. workforce. And then there’s the line of connections to the most dynamic economies on the globe: India, South Korea, Singapore and, of course, China.