Honda introduces bill that would make sweeping changes in legal immigration
By Ken McLaughlin
Mercury News
Posted: 06/03/2009 06:19:02 PM PDT
Updated: 06/04/2009 07:31:16 AM PDT
To ensure that issues involving legal immigration don't get lost in the fiery debate about illegal immigration, Silicon Valley Congressman Mike Honda today will introduce a bill that would give green-card holders the same rights as citizens to bring their spouses and children to the U.S.
The wide-ranging legislation, which already has about 50 House co-sponsors and the support of powerful groups such as the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League, is expected to help build momentum for "comprehensive immigration reform" this year. Two years ago, a reform bill collapsed in Congress amid criticism that it was an "amnesty bill" for undocumented immigrants.
Honda's bill also includes a controversial provision to allow gays and lesbians to sponsor the immigration of same-sex "permanent partners." That issue gained traction recently when immigration authorities tried to deport a lesbian mother from Pacifica to the Philippines.
The law would also increase numerical caps on the number of visas for countries such as Mexico, the Philippines, China and India. People from those countries hoping to immigrate to the U.S. routinely face waits of more than a decade in a system with a backlog of 5.8 million people.
"We're a nation that believes in family values, so to say this is not important to talk about means" that some politicians and activists "are talking out of both sides of their mouths," Honda, D-Campbell, said Wednesday.
But opposing groups argue that the number of immigrants permitted to come to the U.S. each year — roughly a million — is already too high. They are vowing to fight the proposals as strongly as they have fought amnesty for illegal immigrants.
Enough people to fill "a new San Jose are moving to the United States every single year," said Ira Mehlman of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR.
"These kind of numbers have an impact on schools, health care and every institution in the country — an impact lost on people in Congress like Rep. Honda," Mehlman said. "All of these proposals seem to disregard the fact that we now have 9 percent unemployment in this country."
Shrewd move
But Paul Donnelly, a longtime pro-immigration activist and lobbyist in Washington, D.C., said "Honda has done a very shrewd thing here." THE HONDA BIT BY BIT AMNESTY!
"Legal immigration tends to be left out of the immigration debate because the elephant in the room is legalization of undocumented immigrants," he said. "But here's a comprehensive list of things that need to be fixed. It's the right debate to have."
Vivek Jayanand of Santa Clara said he is happy that an issue that so deeply affects him will soon be taken up by Congress. He is among a group of more than a million legal, permanent U.S. residents forced to live without their spouses — and in many cases their children. These green-card holders often wait five to seven years for their immediate family members to come to the United States.
Jayanand, a 32-year-old hardware engineer at Marvell Semiconductor, married his wife, an Indian physician, in February 2007. He said the earliest she will be allowed to come is the end of 2010, after Jayanand becomes a citizen — unless the "incredibly frustrating" law is changed before then.
Such waits are intolerable in a society that believes in fairness and in families, Honda and pro-immigration activists contend.
GET THIS CRAP! ILLEGALS THAT HATE OUR FLAG, CULTURE, LANGUAGE AND LAWS “WEAVE US TIGHTER TOGETHER”…. SUCH UTTER SHIT!
"The nation's strongest family units are immigrant families," he said. "When we talk about the tapestry of our country and its fabric," immigration helps "weave us tighter together."
Fear of fraud
• "Recapture" unused family-based and employment-based visas previously allocated by Congress.
*
• Allow green-card holders to reunite with their spouses and minor children by classifying them as "immediate relatives."
*
• Increase the per-country limits of family and employment-based visas.
*
• Allow orphans, widows and widowers to immigrate despite the death of a petitioner.
*
• Give the attorney general greater flexibility to address numerous hardships, including family separation, caused by a provision that bars, for up to 10 years, individuals who had been illegally in the United States.
*
• Give priority to children of World War II Filipino veterans by exempting them from the numerical caps on visas.
*
• Allow citizens to bring same-sex "permanent partners" to the U.S.
*
Source: Office of Rep. Mike Honda
*
CREATING THE CORPORATE LOW WAGE STATE OF AMERICA FOR WALL STREET. BROUGHT TO YOU BY THE LIFER DEM WHORES, HONDA , LOFGREN, FEINSTEIN, BOXER, PELOSI, REID, WAXMAN, CLINTON, BUSH and now OBAMA!
The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.”
CHRISTIAN SCIENCE MONITOR
from the May 28, 2009 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0528/p09s01-coop.html
What will America stand for in 2050?
The US should think long and hard about the high number of Latino immigrants.
By Lawrence Harrison
PALO ALTO, CALIF.
President Obama has encouraged Americans to start laying a new foundation for the country – on a number of fronts. He has stressed that we'll need to have the courage to make some hard choices. One of those hard choices is how to handle immigration. The US must get serious about the tide of legal and illegal immigrants, above all from Latin America.
It's not just a short-run issue of immigrants competing with citizens for jobs as unemployment approaches 10 percent or the number of uninsured straining the quality of healthcare. Heavy immigration from Latin America threatens our cohesiveness as a nation.
The political realities of the rapidly growing Latino population are such that Mr. Obama may be the last president who can avert the permanent, vast underclass implied by the current Census Bureau projection for 2050.
Do I sound like a right-wing "nativist"? I'm not. I'm a lifelong Democrat; an early and avid supporter of Obama. I'm gratified by his nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court. I'm also the grandson of Eastern European Jewish immigrants; and a member, along with several other Democrats, of the advisory boards of the Federation for American Immigration Reform and Pro English. Similar concerns preoccupied the distinguished Democrat Barbara Jordan when she chaired the congressionally mandated US Commission on Immigration Reform in the 1990s.
Congresswoman Jordan was worried about the adverse impact of high levels of legal and illegal immigration on poor citizens, disproportionately Latinos and African-Americans. The principal beneficiaries of our current immigration policy are affluent Americans who hire immigrants at substandard wages for low-end work. Harvard economist George Borjas estimates that American workers lose $190 billion annually in depressed wages caused by the constant flooding of the labor market at the low-wage end.
The healthcare cost of the illegal workforce is especially burdensome, and is subsidized by taxpayers. To claim Medicaid, you must be legal, but as the Health and Human Services inspector general found, 47 states allow self-declaration of status for Medicaid. Many hospitals and clinics are going broke because of the constant stream of uninsured, many of whom are the estimated 12 million to 15 million illegal immigrants. This translates into reduced services, particularly for lower-income citizens.
The US population totaled 281 million in 2000. About 35 million, or 12.5 percent, were Latino. The Census Bureau projects that our population will reach 439 million in 2050, a 56 percent increase over the 2000 census. The Hispanic population in 2050 is projected at 133 million – 30 percent of the total and almost quadruple the 2000 level. Population growth is the principal threat to the environment via natural resource use, sprawl, and pollution. And population growth is fueled chiefly by immigration.
Consider what this, combined with worrisome evidence that Latinos are not melting into our cultural mainstream, means for the US. Latinos have contributed some positive cultural attributes, such as multigenerational family bonds, to US society. But the same traditional values that lie behind Latin America's difficulties in achieving democratic stability, social justice, and prosperity are being substantially perpetuated among Hispanic-Americans.
Prominent Latin Americans have concluded that traditional values are at the root of the region's development problems. Among those expressing that opinion: Peruvian writer Mario Vargas Llosa; Nobelist author Octavio Paz, a Mexican; Teodoro Moscoso, a Puerto Rican politician and US ambassador to Venezuela; and Ecuador's former president, Osvaldo Hurtado.
Latin America's cultural problem is apparent in the persistent Latino high school dropout rate – 40 percent in California, according to a recent study – and the high incidence of teenage pregnancy, single mothers, and crime. The perpetuation of Latino culture is facilitated by the Spanish language's growing challenge to English as our national language. It makes it easier for Latinos to avoid the melting pot and for education to remain a low priority, as it is in Latin America – a problem highlighted in recent books by former New York City deputy mayor Herman Badillo, a Puerto Rican, and Mexican-Americans Lionel Sosa and Ernesto Caravantes.
Language is the conduit of culture. Consider: There is no word in Spanish for "compromise" (compromiso means "commitment") nor for "accountability," a problem that is compounded by a verb structure that converts "I dropped (broke, forgot) something" into "it got dropped" ("broken," "forgotten").
As the USAID mission director during the first two years of the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua, I had difficulty communicating "dissent" to a government minister at a crucial moment in our efforts to convince the US Congress to approve a special appropriation for Nicaragua.
I was later told by a bilingual, bicultural Nicaraguan educator that when I used "dissent" what my Nicaraguan counterparts understood was "heresy." "We are, after all, children of the Inquisition," he added.
In a letter to me in 1991, Mexican-American columnist Richard Estrada described the essence of the problem of immigration as one of numbers. We should really worry, he wrote, "when the numbers begin to favor not only the maintenance and replenishment of the immigrants' source culture, but also its overall growth, and in particular growth so large that the numbers not only impede assimilation but go beyond to pose a challenge to the traditional culture of the American nation."
Obama should confront the challenges by enforcing immigration laws on employment to help end illegal immigration. We should calibrate legal immigration annually to (1) the needs of the economy, as Ms. Jordan urged, and (2) past performance of immigrant groups with respect to acculturation.
We must declare our national language to be English and discourage the proliferation of Spanish- language media. We should limit citizenship by birth to the offspring of citizens. And we should provide immigrants with easy-to-access educational services that facilitate acculturation, including English language, citizenship, and American values.
Lawrence Harrison directs the Cultural Change Institute at the Fletcher School, Tufts University, in Medford, Mass. He is the author of "The Central Liberal Truth: How Politics Can Change A Culture And Save It From Itself."
No comments:
Post a Comment