America's Voice Blog

Posted 01/13/12 at 03:05pm By Van Le

Anti-Immigrant NumbersUSA Makes Anti-LEGAL Immigrant Ad Buy in South Carolina

numbersusaAs many opponents of immigration reform work hard to make clear,  they are against "illegal" immigration (because “illegal is illegal”) and claim they don’t have any beef with people who come here through sanctioned means. (To be clear, we abhor the use of the i-word. It's meant to be inhumane, degrading and insulting. But, that's why they use it.)

“We love legal immigration,” GOP primary frontrunner Mitt Romney said during a November 2011 debate.  “I like legal immigration.”

“Let’s not lose sight of the fact that legal immigration is an engine of growth for this country,” Jon Huntsman reminded Americans in December.

“There has to be a robust and attractive program of legal immigration,” Newt Gingrich writes on his campaign website.

Not all of their friends and allies, however, can say the same thing.

Anti-immigration group and John Tanton organization NumbersUSA is in the middle of a $100,000+ ad buy in South Carolina, attempting to call attention to the “problem” of legal immigration before the Jan. 21 primary.

“Jobs, jobs, jobs,” intones their odious new ad.  “Everybody talks about creating jobs, but who will get the jobs? Not one candidate is talking about why the government is ready to bring in another 1 million legal immigrants this year to take American jobs.  Legal doesn't make it right when there are millions of jobless Americans.  Ask the candidates who should get new American jobs, unemployed Americans or will they bring in another million immigrants?”

Ok.  There are at least a few problems with this ad. 

We understand that anti-immigrant rhetoric is practically a national tradition, with documented movements against Catholics, Germans, Italians, the Irish, and the Chinese.  However, that didn’t stop any of those groups from assimilating, learning the American way, and becoming established and accepted here in the U.S.  As even Mitt Romney has said, “we are a nation of immigrants.”  Immigration is the only reason the vast majority of us are even here, which means that attacking legal immigration is, actually, un-American.

The NumbersUSA ad paints immigrants as sneaky, pernicious, economy-undermining jobs-stealers.  Nowhere is it mentioned that immigrants also create jobs.  One in four companies started in the last twenty years counted at least one foreign-born immigrant among its founders.  Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was born in Russia, while Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, was born in Taiwan.  It is said that the U.S. is facing a critical shortage of scientists and engineers, which is why multiple Republicans have supported “stapling a green card to the diploma” of any foreign-born graduate student who comes here to earn higher degrees in the hard sciences.  Anti-immigration groups like NumbersUSA dream of isolating the country and closing it off; we hope they enjoy ceding competitiveness and dominance to more farseeing countries.

South Carolina last year passed an anti-immigration law similar to Arizona’s notorious SB 1070, parts of which have been blocked.  And earlier this week in South Carolina, Rick Santorum (did we mention his father is an Italian immigrant?  Who, a hundred years ago, would not have been so welcome here?) expressed support for a temporary “slowdown” of legal immigration.

Misguided, short-sighted, nativist, extremist.  That’s just a short list of things we could say.

Posted 11/14/11 at 03:32pm By Pili Tobar

Conservatives Try to Spin the Russell Pearce Loss, Saying “Blame the Messenger”

mark krikorianThe fallout continues over last week’s recall election of Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce (R), the architect of that state’s SB 1070 anti-immigration law.  As analysts ask what the result might mean for the future of anti-immigrant extremism and for Arizona’s potential competitiveness in the 2012 elections, Pearce’s ideological allies are spinning the results to a foregone conclusion – that the anti-immigrant policies weren’t the problem, just the tone and messenger associated with them.

In particular, Mark Krikorian, executive director of the hate group / “think tank” Center for Immigration Studies thinks the lesson from the recall election was that Russell Pearce lacked the needed “good-natured geniality” to put a happy face on extreme, anti-immigrant legislation.  Wrote Krikorian:

Pearce is an angry guy, and that wore thin with lots of voters…Good-natured geniality is, for instance, a big part of Herman Cain’s appeal — not to mention Reagan’s. And if that’s important when discussing taxes and spending, imagine how much more important it is in the immigration issue…This is why my Center for Immigration Studies has always tried to articulate a pro-immigrant policy of low immigration, and why Numbers USA has had at the top of its homepage, from the very beginning, ‘No to immigrant bashing.’  And it’s not a pose. But even if you didn’t believe it, it would be the politically smart thing to do.

In other words, Krikorian thinks that if Pearce had more kindly told immigrants that they were going to be racially profiled and their families were going to be split up, everything would be ok.

Krikorian completely ignores the possibility that Pearce’s obsession with an anti-immigrant agenda, including the SB 1070 “papers, please” law and his push to repeal birthright citizenship, grew tiresome for voters more interested in bread and butter concerns. 

According to Frank Sharry, Executive Director here at America’s Voice:

According to Mark Krikorian, Russell Pearce’s sin was that of blatancy.  So his theory goes, instead of masking his true intentions behind a façade of smiling respectability, Pearce was too angry and too obvious in his anti-immigrant and anti-Latino ways.  Not only does this absolve Krikorian and his allies from any responsibility about the failures and consequences of their mass-deportation agenda, but it rings hollow given Krikorian’s own record of transparent gaffes.

This attempt to pin the loss on the angry messenger is especially ironic coming from Mark Krikorian, a man with a long history of slip-ups that expose his true uncompromising and hardline agenda.  Krikorian’s own writings include calls to strip Puerto Ricans of their citizenship, pleas to Anglicize the pronunciation of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s name, efforts to pin Haiti’s problems on the belief that it had not been colonized long enough, and straight-faced endorsements of reports blaming immigrants for everything from global warming to the health care crisis to the subprime loan financial collapse. 

Concluded Sharry:

There’s simply no way to endorse or implement mass-deportation policies in a manner that doesn’t expose them for what they are – blatant attempts to round up and deport the entirety of the undocumented population in our country.  As we’ve seen in Arizona and now in Alabama, it’s not the tone of law supporters that’s to blame.  It’s the laws themselves and their negatives consequences on state economies and reputations.

Posted 10/20/11 at 01:22pm By Mahwish Khan

In Alabama, Widespread Pain and Problems from HB 56’s “Attrition Through Enforcement”

no juan crow signPowerful editorial in today's NY Times about the impact of HB 56 on people across Alabama. The new harsh law is impacting everyone, not just its intended target of immigrants. It's exactly what the proponents wanted:

Alabama’s law is the biggest test yet for “attrition through enforcement,” a strategy espoused by Mr. Kobach and others to drive away large numbers of illegal immigrants without the hassle and expense of a police-state roundup. All you have to do, they say, is make life hard enough and immigrants will leave on their own. In such a scheme, panic and fear are a plus; suffering is the point.

The pain isn’t felt just by the undocumented. Legal immigrants and native-born Alabamans who happen to be or look Hispanic are now far more vulnerable to officially sanctioned harassment. Many of those children being kept home from school by frightened parents are born and bred Americans.

The problems do not stop there. Farmers are already worrying that with the exodus, crops will go unpicked. Like much of the rest of the country, Alabama needs immigrant labor, because too many native-born citizens lack the skill, the stamina and the willingness to work in the fields — even in a time of steep unemployment.

The new law has also added frustrating layers of paperwork for Alabamans who must now prove legal status when enrolling schoolchildren, signing leases and interacting with government. After the law went into effect, the lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Birmingham grew so long that officials had to bring in portable toilets.

Alabama’s reputation has also taken a huge hit just when it is trying to lure international businesses. No matter how officials may try to tempt foreign automakers, say, with low taxes and wages, the state is already infamous as a regional capital of xenophobia.

Again, this is what Mr. Kobach and his ilk wanted.

Posted 10/07/11 at 03:52pm By Pili Tobar

AP: Alabama’s Anti-Immigrant Law “May Be Backfiring.” Supporters of Mass Deportation Cheer

alabama pinNews reports continue to highlight the devastating effects of Alabama's new immigration law on children, families, and entire industries. Meanwhile, supporters of the law, including anti-immigrant members of Congress and nativist organizations, seem quite comfortable with its destructive impact. 

The Associated Press reported:

Alabama's strict new immigration law may be backfiring. Intended to force illegal workers out of jobs, it is also driving away many construction workers, roofers and field hands in the country legally who do backbreaking jobs that Americans generally won't.  The vacancies have created a void that will surely deal a blow to the state's economy and could slow the rebuilding of Tuscaloosa and other tornado-damaged cities.

And farmers have been complaining to bill sponsors that the new law is causing their crops to rot in the fields:

A sponsor of Alabama's tough new immigration law told desperate tomato farmers Monday that he won't change the law, even though they told him that their crops are rotting in the field and they are at risk of losing their farms. 

Republican state Sen. Scott Beason of Gardendale met with about 50 growers, workers, brokers and business people Monday at a tomato packing shed on Chandler Mountain in northeast Alabama. They complained that the new law, which went into effect Thursday, scared off many of their migrant workers at harvest time. 

"The tomatoes are rotting on the vine, and there is very little we can do," said Chad Smith, who farms tomatoes with his uncle, father and brother.

But according to the law’s supporters, these are exactly the sorts of consequences they expected and intended:

Alabama Congressman Mo Brooks (R) told Politico, “So these aren’t unintended consequences,” Brooks said. “We want illegal aliens out of the state of Alabama and I want illegal aliens out of the United States of America”

As Think Progress reported, Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions (R) also agreed with radio host Laura Ingraham that “enforcement works.”  In response to her question about whether it is a bad thing that Latino kids have disappeared from schools, Sessions said: "All I would just say to you is that it’s a sad thing that we’ve allowed a situation to occur for decades that large numbers of people are in the country illegal and it’s going to have unpleasant, unfortunate consequences."

Mark Krikorian, who heads the anti-immigration organization Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), wrote at the National Review, "The New York Times reports on an Alabama town where illegal aliens are getting the hint from the state’s new immigration law and leaving.  It’s obviously presented as a terrible thing, but this is exactly the point of such measures — attrition through enforcement."

As America’s Voice Education Fund explains in this report, “attrition through enforcement” is just another way of saying mass deportation.  It’s playing out in Alabama today, and that's what Sessions, Brooks, and Krikorian are applauding.

Posted 10/07/11 at 12:48pm By Mahwish Khan

DOJ Asks Appeals Court to Block Implementation of Alabama Immigration Law

Breaking news today on the legal front regarding the Alabama immigration law. The Department of Justice has asked the 11th Circuit to block implementation of the law. A copy of DOJ's motion is below:

The federal government asked an appeals court on Friday to halt an Alabama immigration law considered by many as the toughest in the United States, saying it invites discrimination against foreign-born citizens and legal immigrants.

The federal government filed the challenge to the 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. It claimed Alabama's new law "is highly likely to expose persons lawfully in the United States, including school children, to new difficulties in routine dealings."

The overhaul allows authorities to question people suspected of being in the country illegally and hold them without bond. It also lets officials check the immigration status of students in public schools.

A federal judge in Alabama upheld those two key aspects of the law, which have already taken effect.

As we've noted repeateldy, the new law is already having a devastating impact. Who would have thought we’d see headlines like Hispanic students vanish from Alabama schools and After Ruling, Hispanics Flee an Alabama Town in the United States in the year 2011? But, that's exactly what the bill's supporters want.

The full brief below:

Time Sensitive Motion for Injunction Pending Appeal (10.06.11)

Click here to read more.
Posted 09/27/11 at 12:51pm By Mahwish Khan

Will the GOP Stand By Chris Christie’s Immigration Record?

Here’s a question: Which GOP presidential candidate stated that “being in this country without proper documentation is not a crime.”

The answer? None. Well – none yet.

But if major Republican pundits and donors who continue to call on Governor Chris Christie (R-NJ) to enter the 2012 Republican presidential race get their wish, all that could change. And Christie’s pro-immigration stance will stand in sharp contrast to the rest of the GOP field’s positions on immigration.

On an appearance on ABC’s “This Week” in July 2010, Governor Christie said: 

[Immigration] is a federal issue that should be handled by the feds and should be fixed finally. As a former United States attorney, I had to deal with these issues for seven years, and we simply didn't have the resources to deal with them effectively.  So the president and the Congress have to step up to the plate, they have to secure our borders, and they have to put forward a commonsense path to citizenship for people.  And until they do that, states are going to struggle all over the country with this problem, and so is federal law enforcement, who doesn't have the resources to do it effectively.

We're not hearing the words "path to citizenship" from any of the other Republican candidates. In fact, front-runner Mitt Romney is leading the candidates towards the opposite extreme.

Christie has received an F  from the anti-immigrant organization NumbersUSA – and outraged Lou Dobbs. If he jumps into the mix, the immigration hawks will no doubt savage his views on immigration.

The speculation about Gov. Christie Entering 2012 Presidential Race raises key questions about immigration and the GOP. Will the conservative pundits and Christie’s supporters stand by his views and take on the nativists? Or, will they stand by and remain silent? Will Christie stick with his pro-reform positions or flip-flop, like Romney?

While the loud voices of the extreme anti-immigrant crowd are being heard these days, the vast majority of Republicans support Christie’s path to citizenship.  In May 2011, the Pew Research Center released a poll that asked:

Thinking about illegal immigration in the United States, do you favor or oppose providing a way for illegal immigrants currently in the country to gain legal citizenship if they pass background checks, pay fines, and have jobs?

By a 72%-24% margin overall, voters supported a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants currently in the United States. When broken up by political typology, Main Street Republicans supported a path to citizenship 58%-39% and Libertarians supported it 66%-32.  Among Republican voters, only Staunch Conservatives failed to demonstrate majority support, although they split on the issue 49%-49%. 

Other recent polling has also shown that Republicans are favorably inclined toward practical comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. 

Posted 06/16/11 at 04:33pm By Lynn Tramonte

Mark Krikorian Recognizes Need for Migrant Farmworkers, but Doesn’t Want to Legalize Them

Mark KrikorianToday in National Review, Mark Krikorian published his response to our long list of criticisms about the mandatory E-Verify bill that Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA) are pushing.  After realizing that the government-forced mass deportation of 11 million undocumented immigrants and their families would cost $300 billion dollars to carry out, Krikorian and his allies at the Center for Immigration Studies and Federation for American Immigration Reform have come up with a new plan they call “attrition through enforcement.”  The idea is that if you make life so hard for immigrants in this country, they will lose their jobs, give up, and deport themselves.

Of course, this is a restrictionist’s fantasy from an alternate universe.  For one, E-Verify is so broken, it only flags about 50% of the undocumented workers run through the system.  Out of those who are identified, most will simply head into the underground economy rather than move their families to another country with even fewer job prospects.  Krikorian has no idea how resilient immigrant families are.   

Don’t laugh because the restrictionists are serious.  Mandatory E-Verify is the central plank of their Mass Expulsion 2.0 strategy, and they can barely contain their excitement that it may be advancing.   

Mark Krikorian may be happy today, but American farmers are not.  On a conference call with reporters, the Agriculture Coalition for Immigration Reform laid out all of the reasons why they oppose mandatory E-Verify without broader immigration reform: it will gut the industry and American farms, send jobs and food production overseas, and eliminate related jobs—many of which are held by Americans—in processing, transportation, marketing, and other industries.

In fact, even Lamar Smith and Mark Krikorian have basically acknowledged that the farmers are right.  The Smith legislation gives agriculture employers an extra year to implement E-Verify, and they don’t have to screen their returning workers.  Krikorian writes:

Given the degree of dependence on illegal labor in certain ag sectors, this seems reasonable, and if it makes it easier for farm-state congressmen to support it, so much the better.

Smith and Krikorian are pretty sneaky – they think that growers can be bought off with delayed implementation of E-Verify, the specter of a more captive workforce, and possibly some H-2A guest worker reforms down the line.  But they are equally hypocritical, recognizing U.S. farms’ dependence on immigrant labor without actually making it legal.

Posted 05/26/11 at 04:58pm By Mahwish Khan

Anti-Immigrant Center for Immigration Studies Offers Latino Vote Analysis With No Discernible Facts

Latino VotersThe Center for Immigration Studies, an anti-immigration “think tank” founded by FAIR, just published a new post titled “The Hispanic Vote in 2010: No Discernible Trend."

Yes, that’s right. The same group that used its vast expertise on issues like climate change and public health to conclude that immigrants cause global warming and teenage obesity is now remaking itself into an “expert” on the Latino vote.

Clearly, CIS’ goal is to lull the Republican Party into complacency over the immigration issue. They and their allies in Congress, led by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), have been desperately trying to rewrite the results of the 2010 elections after Latino voters—galvanized by anti-immigrant politicking from Republicans like Sharron Angle and Meg Whitman—saved the Senate for the Democrats. 

Here are the unimpeachable facts about Latino voters and the 2010 elections—drawn from actual polls and real scientific analysis, not conjecture from the Latino voter “experts” over at CIS.

  • FACT ONE: The national exit polls are seriously flawed when it comes to capturing the voting behavior of Latino voters.  The media organizations that paid big money to sponsor the national exit polls may not want to admit it, but those polls are notoriously flawed when it comes to reporting on the behavior of subgroups like Latino voters.  Even the head of the 2004 national exit poll, Warren Mitofsky, has admitted as much.  In a rigorous post-election analysis using precinct-by-precinct voting data, Dr. Matt Barreto of Latino Decisions proved that the Nevada and Arizona exit polls’ Latino results were “mathematically impossible,” and that the election eve polls from Latino Decisions were much more accurate in reporting actual voter behavior.  According to the Latino Decisions election eve poll of 3,200 Latino voters, only 24% of Latinos supported Republicans in 2010—not the 38% from the exit polls touted by the Center for Immigration Studies.

Click here to read more.
Posted 05/18/11 at 03:31pm By Pili Tobar

Roy Beck, Executive Director of NumbersUSA, Has No Idea What “Hate Speech” Is

roy beckSomeone needs to get Roy Beck a dictionary.  Apparently this man has no idea how to define "hate speech."

Last week, Georgia signed into law anti-immigrant Arizona copy-cat legislation.  Musician Carlos Santana reacted and expressed his disbelief and disappointment, saying:

I am here to give voice to the invisible…I would invite all Latin people to do nothing for about two weeks so you can see who really, really is running the economy.  Who cleans the sheets? Who cleans the toilets?  Who babysits?

According to Roy Beck, this is “a new low in hate speech against American workers.”  Either Roy Beck doesn’t understand what hate speech means, or he’s just making a really bad joke.

Let’s put the cards on the table and lay down some facts. 

Roy Beck is the Executive Director of NumbersUSA, which is an anti-immigrant, pro-mass deportation organization. He created NumbersUSA under the umbrella and mentorship of John Tanton, who has recently been referred to by the New York Times as the “Anti-Immigration Crusader”.

Click here to read more.
Posted 05/13/11 at 01:39pm By Van Le

Meet Anti-Immigrant Leader, Rep. Lou Barletta (R-PA)

lou barlettaFirst-term Congressman Lou Barletta (R-PA), in the news lately for creating a House Freshmen Immigration Caucus and proposing a bill that would defund “sanctuary cities,” is the focus of a Right Wing Watch article today questioning his ties to Neo-Nazis.

Earlier this year, at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), Congressman Barletta joined former Congressman Tom Tancredo (R-CO), former Congressman Virgil Goode (R-VA), and political activist Bay Buchanan on a panel hosted by the Youth for Western Civilization (YWC) group.  What did they talk about?  How to save White America.

As Tom Tancredo announced during the panel:

No more of this multiculturalism garbage.  The cult of multiculturalism has captured the world [and is] the dagger in the heart [of civilization].

Choice words from Virgil Goode:

[Immigration] will not only kill the GOP but will kill the United States of America…today, being a citizen means you’re second class…Who could really be against doing away with birthright citizenship?

Yikes.

Among the questions asked to the panel (read the whole article): whether we could control immigration from the Islamic and Arab world, whether Congress could defund the "Ku Klux Klan"-like National Council of La Raza, whether American society will devolve into South Africa given the declining population rate of “European Americans,” and whether all the ethnic groups could just live separately.

Click here to read more.

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