12/01/11 Yesterday, the House Judiciary Committee held yet another hearing on immigration. Rep. Steve King (R-IA), the leading anti-immigrant voice in the GOP, exhibited egregious behavior during his questioning of former Sacramento Police Chief Art Venegas, a naturalized U.S. citizen.
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09/02/11 We expect the immigration issue to come to the forefront of the GOP presidential nomination contest this weekend. Two notoriously anti-immigrant leaders, South Carolina Senator Jim DeMint and Rep. Steve King, will be questioning the candidates at at Tea Party event in South Carolina on Monday.
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06/24/11 Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX) is promoting his E-Verify program as a "jobs" bill that will ease unemployed Americans' woes. It's telling that the first GOP "jobs plan" introduced this year would send unemployed manufacturing workers in Ohio or Michigan to the fields to pick fruit and vegetables. It's best described as a 21st Century Grapes of Wrath.
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06/24/11 House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-TX), Immigration Subcommittee Chair Elton Gallegly (R-CA), and Immigration Subcommittee Vice Chair Steve King (R-IA) -- our "three amigos" on immigraton -- keep advancing their wish list of immigration "reforms" that would tighten the screws on immigrants of ALL statuses.
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06/15/11 Today House Republicans, led by Reps. Lamar Smith (R-TX), Elton Gallegly (R-CA), and Steve King (R-IA), unveiled the top bill on their anti-immigration agenda: a plan to make all employers in America use the deeply flawed E-Verify program to check the immigration status of their workers.
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06/08/11 Last month, Georgia passed one of the harshest new immigration laws in the country. Today, the AJC reports that nearly half of the 132 Georgia businesses polled in a private survey this month say they are experiencing agricultural labor shortages.
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05/24/11 Over the next couple weeks and months, we're expecting the anti-immigrant legislation, E-Verify, to start moving in the U.S. House. It's sponsored by Representatives Lamar Smith (TX), Elton Gallegly (CA) and Steve King (IA), who hope this legislation will lead to mass deportation. Fortunately, a strong coalition is building to fight E-Verify. And, it includes a united front from the labor movement
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05/23/11 Imagine if Democrats proposed legislation that would cause the loss of almost 800,000 jobs, force 4 million more workers into an administrative quagmire, cause an undue burden on small businesses, nearly wipe out the agricultural workforce, result in the loss of tax revenue – and had a failure rate of over 50%.
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05/13/11 Today, the Washington Post's editorial board slammed an effort to block the DREAM Act through the referendum process -- and mocked Delegate Pat McDonough for leading the effort.
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05/06/11 As the federal government and state legislatures try to expand the role of police in immigration enforcement, state and local police are pushing back. In Texas, Illinois, California, and elsewhere, law enforcement leaders are speaking out against proposals to gut their community policing policies and require them to participate in the Secure Communities program.
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05/06/11 The President needs to take a detour. Heading into 2012, he can't allow his legacy on immigration to be defined by a record number of deportations and no relief for any of the undocumented immigrants he pledged to legalize. It's great that the President is using his megaphone to put more pressure on Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform. We need it. But we also need the Administration to take bold action to reform its enforcement policies and bring them more in line with their stated priorities.
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04/26/11 There's more news for those naysayers who claim that undocumented immigrants don't pay taxes, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary. Last week, the Institute for Taxation and Economic Policy (ITEP) estimated that in 2010, the state and local taxes paid by households that are headed by undocumented immigrants came to approximately $11.2 billion in state and local taxes.
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04/26/11 California farmers are confirming what we've been saying for months: the immigration policies proposed by Rep. Elton Gallegly (R-CA), the chair of the House Subcommittee on Immigration, pose an economic danger to California and its agricultural industry.
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04/08/11 The Department of Homeland Security hasn't received a lot of praise recently, and the lack of it has finally gotten to them. That's why they've announced an initiative aimed at fighting the negative views that communities have developed over time.
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04/05/11 A recent hearing on the H-1B work-visa program also made it clear that while Reps. Smith, Gallegly, and King have never met an undocumented dishwasher or field hand they liked, they recognize the vital role of high-skilled immigration to the United States.
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03/24/11 New data from the U.S. Census Bureau highlights the dramatic increase of the Latino population over the past decade, in both traditional "gateway" states and throughout the nation, with Latinos now comprising more than 1 in 6 Americans. According to Associated Press analysis of the new data, minority population growth makes up 90 percent of the total U.S. population growth since 2000.
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03/14/11 Last spring, we saw lots of stories about support for an Arizona-type law. Pollsters would ask if voters supported the Arizona law and the results became the story, without highlighting the other side of the equation: that there is strong support for immigration reform. However, with Rasmussen, it's worse -- according to them, there really is no "other side."
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03/11/11 House Republicans really let their nativist flag fly yesterday with simultaneous hearings on "New Jobs in Recession and Recovery: Who Are Getting Them and Who Are Not" (or rather: "Why Immigrants are Supposedly Recovering from the Recession Faster than Natives and What We Can Do to Make Sure They Don't Get Jobs") and "The Extent of Radicalization in the American Muslim Community and that Community's Response."
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03/10/11 As the House Immigration Subcommittee begins its latest controversial hearing on immigration issues, the panel's leadership is facing withering attacks from two Latino leaders in Congress.
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03/09/11 On Thursday, March 10, 2011, the House Judiciary Committee's Subcommittee on Immigration is holding another in its series of blatantly anti-immigration hearings.
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03/04/11 The leaders of House Mass Deportation Caucus, Reps. Smith, Gallegly, and King, are not only driving the GOP immigration strategy, they are driving their party off of a political cliff.
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03/01/11 Today, 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.
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02/25/11 Pew Hispanic Center is out with a new poll. Though they want to focus on letting us know that the "Public Favors Tougher Border Controls and Path to Citizenship" (we already knew that), more relevant to current immigration news is this: Americans don't want to change the 14th Amendment's provision on birthright citizenship.
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02/23/11 For the past couple years, Republicans on Capitol Hill and across the country have been spitting out talking points about the need for stronger "border security." None of them will actually define what it means to "secure the border," but we just know that in their world, there's never enough border security.
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02/16/11 Move over, Jan Brewer, and make room for Kansas GOP Representative, Connie O'Brien. Unlike Brewer, who openly admitted she does not know what an undocumented person looks like (and still had the audacity to sign SB 1070 into law), Representative O'Brien thinks she knows.
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02/14/11 The immigrant bashing rhetoric from the nativist wing of the Republican Party was on full display this past weekend in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC). Showing no concerns about alienating the fastest growing voting demographic, the event showcased some of the worst of the worst, including Rep. Steve King and Tom Tancredo.
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01/27/11 Yesterday, the Immigration Subcommittee (of the House Judiciary Committee), which is led by notoriously anti-immigrant members of Congress -- Lamar Smith (R-TX), Elton Gallegly (R-CA), and Steve King (R-IA) -- held their first immigration hearing since Republicans took control of the House.
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