Cross-posted at Huffington Post.
In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee yesterday, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano reiterated the Obama Administration’s plan to push for Comprehensive Immigration Reform legislation early next year.
In her opening statement, Napolitano said:
Finally, we look forward to working with you on immigration reform. The President is committed to that. He is committed to reform that includes serious, effective and sustained enforcement, that includes improved legal flows for families and workers, and a firm way to deal with those already illegally in the country.
We need to demand responsibility and accountability from everyone involved. The Department of Homeland Security, our law enforcement partners, businesses who must be able to find the workers they need here in America, and immigrants themselves as we enforce the law moving forward.
So I look forward to working with you, Mr. Chairman and Senator Sessions and others on this Committee to develop a path forward early next year to reform the immigration system as a whole.
Napolitano’s testimony yesterday echoed her November 13th speech at the Center for American Progress, where she laid out a vision of a “three-legged stool” that includes a commitment to serious and effective immigration enforcement, improved legal flows for families and workers, and a firm but fair way to deal with those who are already here.”
Importantly, Napolitano again gave us a timeline – and as the President himself has stated:
[I]f there are no deadlines, nothing gets done in this town.
This post is a weekly feature by Nezua, Media Consortium Blogger.
The nation’s 10% unemployment rate is feeding anti-immigrant sentiment, as Marcelo Ballvé reports for New America Media. Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) critiqued President Barack Obama’s recent jobs summit as “fatally flawed” because President Obama did not discuss wresting millions of jobs away from undocumented families. Smith’s argument is flawed.
A “known Capitol Hill immigration hardliner,” Smith asks us to assume that for every job the U.S. could theoretically “take back” from an undocumented worker, an eager U.S. citizen would flock to fill it. But, as Ballvé reports, “several studies suggest that among Americans and legal residents, it’s mainly those lacking a high school diploma who are competing directly with undocumented immigrants for jobs (and by most estimates, that’s less than one out of every 10 U.S. workers).”
Smith’s reasoning is a leap that only a hardliner could make, and is simply not borne out by any reliable data or experience.
In fact, a soon-to-be released book called Working in the Shadows: A Year of Doing the Jobs (Most) Americans Won’t Do by journalist and SEIU researcher Gabriel Thompson tells the opposite story, as In These Times reports. Thompson went undercover to work alongside migrant workers for one year. The work was so strenuous that Thompson used painkillers to make it through. But he gained a crucial perspective: Despite the detached and abstract imaginings of Republican politicians, these are jobs that “even most unemployed and destitute ‘Americans’ are not necessarily willing or able to take … even if the pay is decent.”
The Washington Post has a devastating feature today entitled, “Left behind: A child’s burden,” and subtitled, “An undesirable inheritance.” In it, N.C. Aizenman reports on the diverse ways in which the U.S.-born kids of undocumented Latino immigrants are coping with poverty, as well as the fact that they are two times more likely to face poverty than other American children.
Aizenman reports that a full forty percent of U.S-citizen children of Hispanic immigrants have one parent (at least) who is living in the U.S. without proper legal status, arguing:
Of all the disadvantages that U.S.-born children of Hispanic immigrants might confront, none is more significant than being raised by parents who are in the country illegally.
Forty percent — or 3.3 million of these children — have at least one parent who is an illegal immigrant, mostly from Mexico or Central America, according to a recent analysis of census data by demographer Jeffrey S. Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center. And researchers warn that the long-term consequences for the country could be profound.
“The fact that so many in this population face these initial disadvantages has huge implications in terms of their education, their future labor market experience, their integration in the broader society, and their political participation,” said Roberto Gonzales, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied this generation.
The most immediate result has been a substantial increase in the number of American children growing up in poverty. Partly because illegal immigrants tend to have low levels of education and partly because their immigration status makes it harder to move up the job ladder, their U.S.-born children are almost twice as likely to be poor as the children of legal immigrants or native parents, the Pew Hispanic Center found.
The piece quotes America’s Voice Executive Director, Frank Sharry, who argues that, “When you talk about someone who is undocumented, the chances are extremely high that they are in a mixed-status family. . . . Legalization would be one of the best anti-poverty strategies we could employ.”
Amanda Terkel at Think Progress cites a New York Times article today, in “Sotomayor’s opinion marks the Supreme Court’s first use of the term ‘undocumented immigrant:’”
Yesterday, the Supreme Court “released its first four decisions in argued cases this term,” including one marking Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s debut. The case concerned “whether federal trial-court rulings concerning the lawyer-client privilege may be appealed right away,” to which Sotomayor said no. The New York Times notes one particularly noteworthy part of Sotomayor’s opinion:
In an otherwise dry opinion, Justice Sotomayor did introduce one new and politically charged term into the Supreme Court lexicon.
Justice Sotomayor’s opinion in the case, Mohawk Industries v. Carpenter, No. 08-678, marked the first use of the term “undocumented immigrant,” according to a legal database. The term “illegal immigrant” has appeared in a dozen decisions.
Terms like “illegal alien” and “illegal immigrant” are considered pejorative and offensive by immigrants rights organizations.
Culture Kitchen, a New York political blog, had this to say today about the term “illegal:”
Language matters in politics, especially in this digital age when repetition and redundancy are all what’s needed to establish the use of a term as eternally acceptable in the mainstream. Case in point: “Illegal Alien” is a nativist, bigoted and even bordering on racist term that has become common parlance in mainstream media.
Lawmakers on Capitol Hill will get an earful this week about why it’s time for Congress to tackle comprehensive immigration reform. Janet Napolitano, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, will likely be making this case when she appears before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, December 10th.
Napolitano, who in a major speech last month outlined the aggressive steps her agency had taken to enforce current immigration laws and secure the U.S./Mexico border – including increasing the ranks of the border patrol to more than 20,000 officers, building more than 600 miles of fencing along the border, stepping up interior enforcement and going after employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers – is expected to encourage lawmakers to move forward with broader legislative reforms that will enhance those efforts. Acknowledging that the progress made so far will be undermined if the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the U.S. is not resolved, Napolitano said last month:
The more work we do, the more it becomes clear that the laws themselves need to be reformed…If you really want to deal with immigration, it is best to take up the whole problem.
These sentiments are shared by immigration, national security and law enforcement experts who today urged Congress to act. They include James W. Ziglar, former commissioner of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and Stewart Verdery, former Assistant Secretary for Border and Transportation Security Policy at DHS. Like Napolitano, they understand that reforming the immigration system is not contradictory to enforcing immigration laws. Still, continuing the same failed enforcement strategies of the past is counterproductive without legislative reform. It will not restore control and order to the broken immigration system.
By Tania Del Angel, Communications Specialist at Casa de Maryland.
Last week, a conglomeration of anti-immigrant groups, led by “Help Save Maryland” and FAIR (recognized a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center), organized a rally against my organization, CASA de Maryland.
The heavily promoted rally, which was announced in CAPITAL LETTERS on the website of Help Save Maryland, was supposed to draw the anti-immigrant forces from around the state. Their website implored:
JOIN HELP SAVE MARYLAND, PEOPLE FOR CHANGE IN PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY, FEDERATION FOR AMERICAN IMMIGRATION REFORM (FAIR) AND OTHER CITIZEN GROUPS!
SATURDAY, DECEMBER 5, 12-1 PM, AT CASA OF MARYLAND’S LAWLESS DAY LABORER CENTER, 734 UNIVERSITY BLVD E (NEAR PINEY BRANCH RD), SILVER SPRING 20903.
LIVE COVERAGE OF OUR EVENT BY WFMD 930AM FREDERICK RADIO!
Don’t let the threat of a few raindrops and snowflakes scare you off.
The Rally Against CASA of Maryland and Illegal Immigration in ON!
HSM Members are driving in from Anne Arundel, Baltimore, Baltimore City, Harford, Howard, Montgomery, Prince George’s, and Washington Counties.
Now, before I go on, it’s important to note that many political-types in Washington actually believe that the anti-immigrant forces are vast and numerous— not just noisy. Because of this, conventional wisdom on how immigration is hard to change. Well, for anyone in DC who missed how badly anti-immigrant candidates lost in 2008, please turn your attention to Maryland.
