America's Voice Blog

Posted 11/03/11 at 02:01pm By Pili Tobar

As GOP Candidates Pander to Nativists, Report Shows They Have Little Chance of Getting Latino Vote

GOP Elephants One year out from the 2012 election, we've released a report that the Republican Party’s stance on immigration—and what it means for their candidates’ ability to compete for Latino voters—is shaping up as one of the major storylines this election cycle.  The report, Why Do Elephants Put Their Heads in the Sand?, finds that as Republicans continue to embrace hard-right positions on immigration, the Party is distancing itself not only from the legacy of Ronald Reagan and other past Republican leaders, but also from Latino voters in numerous states that are shaping up to be 2012 battlegrounds.

According to our own Executive Director, Frank Sharry: 

With immigration a minor issue for a majority of non-Latino voters, and a defining, personal issue for a majority of Latino voters, the GOP’s position on immigration makes no sense.  It was bad politics in 2008 and 2010, and given the continued growth of the Latino vote, it will be suicidal in 2012 and beyond.

This month marks not only one year before the 2012 election, but also the 25th anniversary of the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), which President Reagan signed and which granted legal permanent residency to nearly 2.7 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S.  Many of those formerly undocumented immigrants have become citizens and voters today, or have family members who legalized under IRCA, underscoring how personal this issue truly is to many Latinos.  

But the Reagan approach stands in sharp contrast to the current crop of Republican presidential contenders, most Republicans in Congress, and many Republican state leaders, all of whom continue to promote deportation-only policies backed by anti-immigrant rhetoric.

Here are some of the key findings of the updated America’s Voice report:

The Republican Party’s stance on immigration flies in the face of demographic changes and recent electoral history, which would suggest that the GOP should be moving toward a pro-immigrant policy stance.  The Republican anti-immigrant push ignores four facts: one, that the nation is undergoing massive demographic changes that are altering electoral maps and electorates; two, that Latino voters do care about and vote on immigration issues; three, that recent elections have proven the dangers of embracing hard-line immigration stances; and four, that outside of small slivers of the electorate, most Americans want immigration solutions, not Republican extremism on immigration.

The GOP field is curiously MIA on Alabama’s anti-immigration law.  At the Republican primary presidential debate in September 2011, Noticiero Telemundo anchor José Díaz-Balart challenged the Republican candidates to explain what they would do about the estimated 11 million undocumented people in the nation, provided that the border was secure to their satisfaction.  The candidate field offered little more than rhetorical fumbling in response to this question, but the general thrust of their responses was this: to continue to enforce the law and hope that millions of people would leave the country either through government action or on their own.  This “attrition through enforcement” agenda, better known as “mass deportation,” is now playing out in Alabama.  The Alabama approach approximates the candidates’ vision for immigration policy, so it’s curious that only Herman Cain has spoken up in favor of this law.  The candidates have spoken out about similar laws in Arizona and South Carolina, where most provisions have yet to take effect, but stayed silent on the Alabama law that is currently being enforced.  Could this be a sign that even they realize that the immigration issue is hurting them with Latinos, given the negative consequences Alabama is experiencing to its economy and reputation?

The Republican candidates for President are pandering to a segment of the base in the primary and closing themselves off from Latino voters they will need in the general election.  The report provides updated snapshots of the current Republican presidential candidates’ positions on immigration.  Unfortunately, when it comes to both rhetoric and policy, each of the leading Republican contenders and most of the minor players are embracing a hard-line, anti-immigrant approach in the primary.  With analysts predicting the Republican nominee will need to win 40% of the Latino vote in order to defeat President Obama, this is particularly illogical.  For most Latinos, immigration is a motivating issue and for most non-Latinos, it is not.  In fact, in Gallup national polling, only 3% of respondents named immigration as the “most important problem facing the country” in October 2011; only 4% named it as such in Gallup’s September 2011 poll.  What’s more, the vast majority of voters support comprehensive immigration reform.      

The current Republican party line on immigration is simply self-defeating.  The candidates are pandering to the nativist base in their Party, despite the fact that very few non-Latino voters list immigration as their top issue, and a majority of non-Latino voters support comprehensive immigration reform.  For Latinos, it is a defining, personal issue, and they will be key factors in a number of battleground states.  Rather than capitalizing on President Obama’s potential vulnerability with many frustrated Latino voters, Republican candidates seem to be doing their best to alienate them.  This will not only ensure that the eventual Republican nominee performs well below the target 40% with Latino voters, but cede important battleground states to President Obama.

Read the full report: Why Do Elephants Put Their Heads in The Sand?

For more information, read America’s Voice Polling Roundup of Public Opinion on Immigration.

Posted 09/20/11 at 02:46pm By Van Le

Center for American Progress Panel Discusses How to Welcome New Immigrants into Communities

center for american progressThe Center for American Progress (CAP) released a new report today entitled “All Immigration is Local: Receiving Communities and Their Role in Successful Immigrant Integration,” which discusses what happens when a community reacts negatively to an influx of new immigrants.  Old, established neighborhoods begin to look different, and their longtime residents become anxious.  No one talks about the change, no one addresses their fears, and their caution towards change breeds hostility, xenophobia, even violence.

That’s what happened in Patchogue, New York in 2008, when a group of white teenagers stabbed Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero to death, part of a string of unrecognized violence that youth in the town called “beaner hopping.”  The story of Lucero’s death and what happened in Patchogue afterward has been made into a documentary “Not in Our Town: Light in the Darkness,” to be aired on PBS tomorrow night.

CAP screened part of “Not in Our Town” earlier today before a panel convened to discuss the “All Immigration is Local” report (we livetweeted it here).  The panel stressed the importance of talking to communities that receive influxes of newcomers (“receiving communities”) about immigration, and maintaining a dialogue between newcomers and locals.

As the CAP report says:

How can we expect immigrants to integrate successfully if they feel unwelcome or if their neighbors are not prepared to accept them? And how can we expect their neighbors to welcome them if no effort is made to manage the confusion, fear, and anxiety these neighbors feel about the changing nature of community life? Receiving communities—the places, along with their residents, in which newcomers settle—must be engaged before we can expect them to embrace immigrants.

The proposed solution is fourfold:

  1. First, local leaders—city politicians, police officers, and others who are respected—must be engaged in reaching out to new residents and integrating them into the receiving community.

  2. Dialogue and common ground must be established between immigrants and the native born.

  3. Local governments must be willing to reach out to newcomers.

  4. Local concerns about immigrants and immigration must be listened to, and addressed. 

As panelist David Lubell, Executive Director of Welcoming America said, often “when a neighborhood changes, people have fears and no one talks about it.  And then talk radio hosts fill this void.”

What happens when no action is taken?  More communities like Patchogue, New York spring up, and violence towards one group ultimately leads to instability for all residents.  As panelist Laurent Gilbert, the Mayor of Lewiston, Maine said, “We really find that we’re one humanity.  The more we interact with each other is to our own benefit.”

Read CAP’s full report here.

Posted 09/07/11 at 04:14pm By Pili Tobar

GOP’s 2012 Candidates Abandon Reagan and Latino Voters With Hard-line, Anti-immigrant Policy

GOP Presidential CandidatesOn the day of the Republican presidential debate at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, we are reminded of President Reagan’s immigration legacy and his vision for America.  Yet at tonight’s debate, according to experts on immigration and Latino politics who participated in an America's Voice sponsored press call held earlier today, we will likely hear a very different message from the GOP’s 2012 presidential candidates on the issue. 

Upon signing the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted residency to nearly 2.7 million undocumented immigrants, President Reagan said:

The legalization provisions in this act will go far to improve the lives of a class of individuals who now must hide in the shadows, without access to many of the benefits of a free and open society.

Yet according to the experts and a new report from America’s Voice, “Why Do Elephants Put Their Heads in the Sand?” the Republican field has fallen far from President Reagan’s centrist immigration approach, adopting a hard-line, anti-immigrant platform that will only further the Party’s dismal showing with Latino voters in 2012 and beyond.  Some Republicans are starting to realize that Latino voters are, in fact, important players in modern-day politics. But, so far, the GOP candidates have not yet shown a willingness to shed their hard-line, anti-immigrant policy agendas for a more Reagan-esque and inclusive approach. 

Republicans may try to portray a less aggressive image to Latino voters while presenting a hard line front to their primary, far right voters. However, the matter of the fact is that the policies they advocate for remain the same. Experts and strategists from both sides of the aisle agree that the Republican Party needs to win at least 40% of the Latino vote in a presidential election year in order to win the general election – a task that will be inordinately difficult given the Party’s current brand image with Latino voters. 

Polling released in June 2011 by Latino Decisions and impreMedia found that by a 65% - 19% margin, Latino voters trust President Obama and Democrats more “to make the right decisions when it comes to immigration policy” compared with Republicans.  In the 2010 elections, Latinos voted for Democrats over Republicans by roughly 75%-25%, or a 3-1 margin according to election-eve polling of Latino voters conducted by Latino Decisions in eight key states (AZ, CA, CO, FL, IL, NM, NV, TX).

Dr. Matt Barreto, Ph.D., Associate Professor, University of Washington, who is also one of the principals at Latino Decisions, explained:

The tracking poll data from Latino Decisions show very clearly that the Republican Party has an image problem with Latino voters.  So far, we have not seen any signs whatsoever that the Republican presidential candidates are reaching out to Latino voters.  Without serious outreach and a new positive message, the GOP will do very badly with Latinos again in 2012.

Providing context, Maria Cardona, Principal at the Dewey Square Group and expert on Latino politics added:

If the GOP does not address their jaw-dropping deficit of support within the Latino electorate – they need at least 40% support among Latino voters to win and they are currently at  18% - their nominee, no matter who he or she is, will never see the inside of La Casa Blanca.

The new report from America’s Voice documents GOP 2012 presidential candidates’ past and current positions on immigration and analyzes the politics of the issue for the Republican Party. 

For example, even though rivals of Governor Perry (R-TX) are spinning it that he has a moderate record on the issue, such is not the case. In reference to Gov. Perry’s immigration stance, Mitch Ackerman, International Executive Vice President of SEIU said:

Will we see the Rick Perry who once campaigned for Texas Latino support or the one who turned his back on Hispanics this year with an agenda that included a harsh immigration bill with many of the components of the Arizona law he originally opposed, as well as a congressional redistricting plan that diluted the voting strength of Latino ad minority voters, and a budget that severely slashed funding for public education in Texas with a student enrollment that is 51 percent Latino? In a short amount of time, it seems, Rick Perry became a born again nativist.

For Perry and the rest of the field, hiding behind vacuous sound bites such as “border security first” – which really means “comprehensive immigration reform never” – or pledging to expel 11 million undocumented immigrants — the vast majority of whom are Latino, and then defending anti-immigrant and anti-Latino laws like Arizona’s SB 1070, simply won’t go over well with the Latino electorate, even if it is said with a smile. 

Posted 07/13/11 at 01:54pm By Mahwish Khan

New Report: CA Congressmen Bilbray, Gallegly and Lungren Support Bill To Ruin CA’s Economy

Reps. Gallegly, Lungren, and BilbrayYesterday, we wrote about a New America Media article noting that the slow flow of immigrants was already negatively impacting California farms. But, we noted that farmers in California and the state's economy could see things take a turn for the worse if House Republicans have their way and pass E-Verify.  

From California's perspective, one of the worst things about E-Verify is that Republican Congressmen from California actually support it. Over the years, three of them, Representatives Elton Gallegly, Brian Bilbray and Dan Lungren, have been outspoken anti-immigrant members. And, no surprise, all three are sponsoring the E-Verify bill despite the damage it would inflict on their constituents.

Our new report released today from highlights the fact that mandatory E-Verify would impose new burdens on American workers and businesses, devastate California's agriculture industry, and further the GOP's political problem with Latino voters.

Among the key report findings:

Bad for Business, Bad for Taxpayers:  The new report highlights a range of studies that show that a forced E-Verify program will hurt the economy and will be ineffective. 

Example: according to a recent Bloomberg study, making the E-Verify program mandatory would cost small businesses an estimated $2.6 billion to implement.  That's $2.6 billion they have to spend on government regulation, not job creation.  The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimates that mandatory E-Verify would cost taxpayers more than $17 billion in lost revenue, as more jobs move into the cash economy.  And all this for a program that wouldn't even work as designed! According to a study from the research corporation Westat, E-Verify identifies undocumented workers run through the system less than half the time.  The National Immigration Law Center estimates that up to 421,886 legal workers in California would be unable to work because of E-Verify errors.  And foreign-born legal workers (34.9% of California’s workforce)—including naturalized citizens—would be disproportionately harmed by this legislation, as their error rates are twenty times higher than those of native-born workers.  

Devastating to California's Agriculture Industry:  The report also makes clear that E-Verify would devastate California's agriculture industry, which is dependent on undocumented workers.  Yet, Gallegly and Lungren want to rid the state and the country of existing and experienced farm workers and replace them through an employer-friendly, worker-unfriendly rehash of the infamous bracero program.  If mandatory E-Verify went nationwide, like Reps. Gallegly and Lungren and others really want, it would do for California what Georgia is going through today when they passed E-Verify in the state a month ago.  In Georgia, the state's new anti-immigration law has lead to a labor crisis that is forcing the state to place probationers in the fields to replace the experienced immigrants who are afraid to come to work.  Already, food is rotting in the fields and growers are reporting major economic losses.  Mandatory E-Verify would not only destabilize the entire agriculture industry, causing farms to close and sending food production overseas, but it would kill a range of related jobs that rely on farm production. 

As a matter of fact, each American agriculture job generates three additional jobs upstream or downstream, all of which would be jeopardized by the Gallegly-Lungren-Bilbray bill.  That's some jobs program, Congressmen. 

Bad Politics for the California Republican Backers of Forced E-Verify:  Separate from the economic burdens and problems of mandatory E-Verify, the report makes it clear that pushing this bill is a political problem for California Republicans as well.  A June 2011 poll from Latino Decisions and impreMedia shows that immigration continues to be the top issue for Latino voters, the fastest-growing segment of the electorate, beating jobs and the economy by 16 points.  And by a 65% to 19% margin, more Latino voters trust Democrats than Republicans on the issue.  One only needs to look at the results of the 2010 elections, and the handling of the immigration issue by California Republican candidates Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina, for fresh evidence of the GOP’s Latino problem.  Yet the California Republican congressional delegation doesn't seem to be learning its lesson.  In fact, of the thirty co-sponsors of the mandatory E-Verify bill, 33% (10/30) are Republicans from California.

Redistricting to Further Entrench GOP's Latino Problem: With the congressional redistricting process underway, some of the very same California Republicans pushing for mandatory E-Verify are likely to be facing new districts with a higher percentages of Latino and Democratic voters.  Gallegly, Lungren, and Bilbray are all likely to have more difficult races - and Latino voters could make the difference.  This makes their advocacy for mandatory E-Verify, and refusal to debate common sense measures like AgJOBS and comprehensive immigration reform, all the more confusing. 

What is it about these California GOP Congressmen that they would gladly burden small businesses with new costs and regulations, cripple their home state’s agriculture industry, tie up job seekers in mountains of red tape, and remove billions of dollars in revenue from the federal tax coffers - all for a forced E-Verify program that doesn’t even work half the time? 

One would assume the answer is politics.  But in this case, the politics of this issue are working against the California Republicans. The co-sponsors like Bilbray, Gallegly and Lungren are threatening their own political careers while ensuring that the California Republican Party continues to have problems with Latino voters. That's their decision, but it's irresponsible for those three to let their extreme views on immigration and fealty to the flawed E-Verify bill wreak havoc on their state.

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 05/25/11 at 02:09pm By Guest Blogger

Study Reveals That Top Science Students Are Children of Immigrants

girl writingWritten by Bridget Feldmann:

Yet another positive improvement this country gains from its immigrant population was revealed on Tuesday, when a newly released study showed that top science students in the U.S. are primarily the children of immigrants. This new data should strike a chord for a nation at risk of falling behind in the global scientific community. The study states:

While only 12 percent of the U.S. population is foreign-born, 70 percent of the finalists in the 2011 Intel Science Talent Search competition were the children of immigrants, according to a National Foundation for American Policy analysis.

Maybe the reason our country is lacking in scientific progress is that we aren’t giving the right people a chance to contribute. How can we hope to move ahead if we shut out genius from other parts of the world?

Immigrant parents have been stressing the importance of education to their children, seeing it as the pathway to success in the U.S. And, as a result, immigrant youth have been found to be participating in postsecondary education with more frequency than their native counterparts. According to a recent Future of Children Journal article, researchers Allison Hagy and J.F.O. Staniec found evidence that reiterates this fact:

They examine postsecondary enrollment patterns within two years of graduation among 1992 high school graduates. Defining the first generation as the foreign-born children of immigrants and the second generation as U.S.-born children of immigrants, they observe that 75% of first-generation and 71% of second-generation high school graduates enrolled in postsecondary education, compared with only 65% of natives. Controlling for individual characteristics, Hagy and Staniec find that first-generation immigrant status is significant in increasing the probability of enrolling in college.

The article explains this phenomenon as a result of “immigrant optimism.” Immigrants risking everything to come here have higher expectations, as well as much more to lose, than previously documented citizens do. Because of this, even in the face of socioeconomic disabilities, immigrant families (and the eager students they produce) tend to have more psychological motivation to overcome those disadvantages. A Mercury News article quoted Vivek Wadhwa, a visiting scholar at UC Berkeley's School of Information, the director of research in the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University, and a native of India:

"Here you take the cream of the crop from their birthplace abroad, then put them in some of the best schools in the world ... these students are really, really competitive and work very hard, inspired by their parents, and represent all the American ideals”

 Wadhwa stated that families here on H-1B visas are also driven by the goal of regaining former economic status, which is typically lost when they immigrate to the States.

"The families are upper echelon. They leave their country at the top of the social ladder, then come here at the bottom. As an immigrant, you are treated differently, and you have to struggle, and work harder, to catch up again. They watch their parents work hard and struggle and then they gain the same motivation. They seek to prove themselves to their families."

Taking into account the increasingly significant role of immigrants in our society, it is crucial that we do not lose sight of the potential their future generations may bring to the table. If given the adequate opportunity and resources to succeed in postsecondary education, these youth present the ability to push our nation beyond its wildest dreams of progress.

Posted 05/02/11 at 02:25pm By Mahwish Khan

Legal Memo Shows Obama’s Hands Aren’t Tied on Immigration; He Has Power To Protect DREAMers

barack obamaThere's been growing pressure on President Obama to use his executive powers to provide relief to undocumented immigrants, particularly DREAM students. The White House maintains that the President does not have the power to take those actions, but he really does. On Friday, several top lawyers in the immigration advocacy movement provided the legal framework through which the President could protect DREAMers and others. The document is below. The press release from the American Immigration Council provides context: 

President Obama’s insistence that his “hands are tied” by Congressional inaction on immigration has raised questions about how much executive power the President has when it comes to immigration. To this end, top immigration law experts, including former counsels to the agencies that manage immigration, have drafted a legal memo outlining the scope of executive branch authority and examples of its use in the immigration context.

Ben Johnson, Executive Director of the American Immigration Council, noted upon release of the memo:

“Ultimately, responsibility for failing to reform our dysfunctional immigration system rests on Congress. However, it is rarely the case that a President‘s hands are tied by existing law—and where the President disagrees with current law, his or her policy choices regarding the implementation of that law take on even greater importance.  In the context of immigration, the President and his cabinet have a wide range of choices available that can ameliorate some of the worst excesses of current law.  The legal memo attempts to give a short review of these options and demonstrates how wide the ranges of choices really are.

No matter how definitive or rigid a law may appear, the exercise of executive branch authority is critical to the ultimate implementation of the law.  The opportunity to infuse executive branch actions with a generous spirit is always within a president’s reach.  The choice on immigration today is whether the President and his cabinet will act boldly to use their authority to improve the lives of millions, or will allow the current enforcement-only mindset to continue unabated.  Such choices will have an impact for years to come, and require thoughtful and diligent attention.”

Here's the document:


Posted 04/05/11 at 11:11am By Mahwish Khan

Note to GOP: Latino Sounding Last Names Won’t Get Votes, Immigration Reform Will

GOP report on latino voters and immigrationA new report that we released yesterday examines – and demolishes – the claim that Republicans can maintain a hard line on immigration reform and still court the Latino vote simply by running Latino candidates.  This has been a key theme espoused by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), one of our "three amigos" on immigration, and also the architect of the failed GOP immigration strategy to date.  According to Smith:

“the 2010 election actually paints a very bright picture of the Republican Party's relations with this country's growing Hispanic population.”  

Not exactly.

The new report, Attention GOP: Latino Candidates Not Enough to Win Latino Vote, highlights several key findings from the 2010 elections with major implications for Republicans and the 2012 elections.  Here they are:

  • A candidate’s position on immigration matters far more to Latino voters than his or her ethnic background.  In fact, many of the 2010 Latino Republican candidates ran on anti-immigrant platforms and performed poorly with Latino voters.  Neither of the Latino Republicans elected to governorships in 2010—Nevada’s Brian Sandoval and New Mexico’s Susana Martinez—came close to winning a majority of the Latino vote. 
  • Latino voters see immigration as a personal and important issue when voting.  In an election eve poll conducted by Latino Decisions in eight states, 83% of Latino voters said that immigration was an important issue in their voting decisions, and fully 60% said it was the most important issue or one of the most important issues.  In February 2011 polling from Latino Decisions and impreMedia, 47% of Latino registered voters ranked immigration as the top priority for Congress and the President to address.
  • Republican politicians are losing Latino voters because of the Party’s stance on immigration reform.  After passing the notorious Sensenbrenner bill in 2005 and Arizona’s S.B. 1070 law in 2010, and blocking progress on comprehensive immigration reform and the DREAM Act for the better part of ten years, Republican policymakers are seen as increasingly hostile to the Latino community, and Latinos are increasingly trending Democratic.  Latinos voted for the Democratic presidential nominee over the Republican by a margin of 59% to 40% in 2004 (Kerry-Bush) and 67% to 31% in 2008 (Obama-McCain).  The swing was even more pronounced among foreign-born Latino voters, with 52% choosing Kerry in 2004 and 48% choosing Bush—while in 2008 75% chose Obama and 25% supported McCain.  In 2010, a banner year for Republicans generally, Latinos supported Democrats over Republicans by 75%-25%, according to Latino Decisions.
Click here to read more.
Posted 03/21/11 at 04:07pm By Mahwish Khan

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights Recommends End to Immigrant Detention and 287(g) Program

Organization of American StatesLast week, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights released their December 2010 report revealing some (troubling) findings regarding the U.S. detention system. From the introduction of the report:

The Inter-American Commission is convinced that in many if not the majority of cases, detention is a disproportionate measure and the alternatives to detention programs would be a more balanced means of serving the State’s legitimate interest in ensuring compliance with immigration laws. The IACHR is disturbed by the rapid increase in the number of partnerships with local and state law enforcement for purposes of enforcing civil immigration laws.

Research for the report began in 2008, and included a team of investigators visiting six detention centers in Arizona and Texas. What they found was not pretty, according to the New York Times:

Immigration enforcement in the United States is plagued by unjust treatment of detainees, including inadequate access to lawyers and insufficient medical care, and by the excessive use of prison-style detention, the human rights arm of the Organization of American States said Thursday.

It was exactly one year ago that approximately 200,000 people gathered together in front of the Capitol in Washington, DC to show our nation's leaders (who have repeatedly promised and pledged “change”) of their unwavering support for comprehensive immigration reform. Besides calling on the President and Congress to end splitting families apart, and to stop enabling a system that allows employers to easily exploit workers, a number of those advocates came to the National Mall to protest the increasing number of men and women who are sent to languish in detention facilities around the country. Though the Obama administration promised reforms to the detention system two years ago, Filipe González, president of the commission, sounds a little skeptical to the extent that will happen:

“According to the information that we have so far, it’s not clear that it’s been implemented or will satisfy the international standards” of human rights, he said in an interview.

In other recommendations of note, the commission believes that the enforcement program notoriously known to us (but highly revered by some of the more power-hungry; see Arpaio) as 287(g) be shut down.

It has also been reported that a spokesman for DHS, who oversees enforcement, said that the department would review the report. Sadly, we all know what that means: Absolutely nothing.

Posted 03/01/11 at 09:43am By Frank Sharry

House GOP Holds Another Hearing To Push Mass Deportation Agenda While Revealing Craven Hypocrisy

civil rights scorecardToday, the leaders of the House Mass Deportation Caucus, Reps. Elton Gallegly (R-CA), Steve King (R-IA) and Lamer Smith (R-TX), have organized a hearing that they've disingenuously titled “Making Immigration Work for American Minorities.”  That's not what it's about.  Yes, the Gallegly/King/Smith crew now feign concern about how immigration affects African-American and other minority groups. This new found concern is a particularly craven attempt to rebrand their mass deportation agenda on immigration.  Once again, their actual voting records differ substantially from their rhetoric. 

Using civil rights scorecards for the 111th Congress issued by the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights and the NAACP, America’s Voice found that the Republicans trying to portray themselves as defenders of minority workers actually have dismal voting records on issues of importance to these key institutions. Read our analysis, specifically:

  • House Immigration Subcommittee Chair Rep. Elton Gallegly received a 0% on the Leadership Conference scorecard and a F grade, 18%, on the NAACP scorecard;

  • Rep. Steve King received a 0% on the Leadership Conference scorecard and a F grade, 8%, on the NAACP scorecard; and 

  • House Judiciary Chair Rep. Lamar Smith received a 6% on the Leadership Conference scorecard and a F grade, 18%, from the NAACP. 

Can't get much lower. In other words, despite the cloying overtures to minority workers that we are likely to hear today, the voting records of this hearing’s organizers simply don’t match their rhetoric. That makes this hearing an even bigger sham. 

AV's staff will be livetweeting from the hearing.

It's just another day and another hypocritical attempt by Republican immigration hardliners to disguise their mass deportation agenda in more popular terms.  But these politicians have been voting against the rights of workers for years.  This hearing is a transparent attempt to rebrand their extreme, anti-immigration agenda, and it won’t work.  Instead of a public relations strategy, voters want a policymaking strategy that results in real, comprehensive immigration reform.

Indeed, Gallegly and King have made “birthright citizenship” one of their signature issues, and drawn a strong backlash from civil rights groups because of it.  The Leadership Conference and other organizations have joined forces in Americans for Constitutional Citizenship, a coalition of leaders and organizations opposed to gutting the 14th Amendment.

As if their rank hypocrisy wasn’t bad enough, the Committee leaders are wrong on the facts, as well.  A series of recent economic studies and analyses have concluded that immigrants do not harm African American workers and that comprehensive immigration reform would be a boon to the U.S. economy, strengthen tax revenue, and raise wages for native-born workers across education and skill levels.

Click here to read more.

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