OBAMA HAS SPENT HIS FIRST TWO YEARS HISPANDERING WITH ENDLESS PLOYS FOR AMNESTY.
OBAMA PROMISES HIS ILLEGAL LA RAZA PARTY VOTERS CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT OF ALL LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS.
THERE IS NO PRESIDENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY THAT HAS SOLD OUT HIS OWN NATION FOR FOREIGN INVADERS LIKE OBAMA! NEXT TO BANKSTERS, ONLY LA RAZA PARTY MEMBERS HAVE INFESTED HIS ADMINISTRATION!
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
*
Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico are EVERYWHERE.
“At a news conference last year, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles publicly lauded Mr. Charney for helping the city with its faltering economy by providing “the dream of a steady paycheck and good benefits for countless workers.” LA RAZA SUPREMACIST & M.E.Ch.A SEPARATIST FASCIST, ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA
*
“Many illegal immigrants use convincingly forged Social Security cards or other fake documents when seeking work.”
ONLY EIGHT STATES HAVE A POPULATION GREATER THAN LOS ANGELES COUNTY WHERE HALF THE JOBS ARE HELD BY ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. THIS SAME COUNTY PAYS (OUT OF YOUR PROPERTY TAXES) $600 MILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS!
*
NEW YORK TIMES
July 3, 2009
U.S. Shifts Strategy on Illicit Work by Immigrants
By JULIA PRESTON
Immigration authorities had bad news this week for American Apparel, the T-shirt maker based in downtown Los Angeles: About 1,800 of its employees appeared to be illegal immigrants not authorized to work in the United States.
But in contrast to the high-profile raids that marked the enforcement approach of the Bush administration, no federal agents with criminal warrants stormed the company’s factories and rounded up employees. Instead, the federal immigration agency sent American Apparel a written notice that it faced civil fines and would have to fire any workers confirmed to be unauthorized.
The treatment of American Apparel, which has more than 5,600 factory employees in Los Angeles alone, is the most prominent demonstration of a new strategy by the Obama administration to curb the employment of illegal immigrants by focusing on employers who hire them — and doing so in a less confrontational manner than in years past.
Unlike the approach of the Bush administration, which brought criminal charges in its final two years against many illegal immigrant workers, the new effort makes broader use of fines and other civil sanctions, federal officials said Thursday.
Federal agents will concentrate on businesses employing large numbers of workers suspected of being illegal immigrants, the officials said, and will reserve tough criminal charges mostly for employers who serially hire illegal immigrants and engage in wage and labor violations.
“These actions underscore our commitment to targeting employers that cultivate illegal work forces by knowingly hiring and exploiting illegal workers,” said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
On Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency known as ICE, said it had sent notices announcing audits of hiring records, like the one it conducted at American Apparel, to 652 other companies across the country. Officials said they were picking up the pace of such audits, after performing 503 of them in 2008.
The names of other companies that received notices have not been made public. American Apparel became a window into the new enforcement tactics because, as a publicly traded company, it issued a required notice on Wednesday about the hiring audit.
The Obama administration’s new approach, unveiled in April, seems to be moving away from the raids that advocates for immigrants said had split families, disrupted businesses and traumatized communities. But the outcome will still be difficult for illegal workers, who will lose their jobs and could face deportation, the advocates said.
Immigration officials have not made clear how they intend to deal with workers who are unable to prove their legal immigration status in the course of inspections, but they said there was no moratorium on deportations.
Executives at American Apparel were both relieved and dismayed after receiving the warning from the immigration agency of discrepancies in the hiring documents of about one-third of its Los Angeles work force. The company has 30 days to dispute the agency’s claims and give immigrant employees time to prove that they are authorized to work in the United States, immigration officials said. If they cannot, the company must fire them, probably within two months.
But no criminal charges were lodged against the company and no workers have been arrested, American Apparel executives and immigration officials said.
The fines followed discussions over 18 months between federal officials and American Apparel, after immigration agents first inspected the company’s files in January 2008, said Peter Schey, an immigration lawyer representing the company. Mr. Schey said a raid had been averted because the company cooperated with the audit and because immigration agents had not found any labor abuses.
“There is no evidence of any exploitation of workers or violation of labor laws,” he said. “And there is not a single allegation that the company knowingly hired an undocumented worker.”
American Apparel and its outspoken chief executive, Dov Charney, have waged a campaign, emblazoned on T-shirts sold across the country, criticizing the immigration crackdown of recent years and calling on Congress to “Legalize L.A.” by granting legal status to illegal immigrants.
Most garment workers in American Apparel’s huge shop in Los Angeles work directly for the company, not for subcontractors, its records show. They earn at least $10 to $12 an hour, well above minimum wage, and receive health benefits.
At a news conference last year, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles publicly lauded Mr. Charney for helping the city with its faltering economy by providing “the dream of a steady paycheck and good benefits for countless workers.”
While it has been no secret that American Apparel’s largely Latino work force probably included many illegal immigrants, Mr. Schey said the company had been careful to meet legal hiring requirements. Many illegal immigrants use convincingly forged Social Security cards or other fake documents when seeking work.
In a statement, Mr. Charney said that many of his workers cited by the immigration agency were “responsible, hard-working employees” who had been with the company for more than a decade. Mr. Charney, an immigrant from Canada, said he hoped they would be able to prove their legal status. But because of the recession, the company said, it will not be hurt financially if it has to replace them.
Mr. Schey said the hiring audit at American Apparel had been “professionally done.” By contrast, Mr. Schey has brought more than 100 damage claims against the immigration agency on behalf of American citizens who said they were illegally arrested last year in Los Angeles in an immigration raid at a different company, Micro Solutions Enterprises.
Immigration officials, who asked not to be identified because the case is continuing, said the fines to American Apparel so far were about $150,000.
Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, said it had taken steps to limit negotiations with employers that in the past had resulted in steep reductions in fines the employers ultimately paid.
Representative Brian P. Bilbray, a California Republican who heads an immigration caucus in the House, said the amount of the fines was crucial.
“If this is a truly conscientious effort to get tough with employers to say the days are over of profiteering with illegal immigrants, that’s fine,” said Mr. Bilbray, who opposes any effort to give legal status to illegal immigrants. “But if the fine will be so low that it’s just part of doing business, there’s no deterrent.”
Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, an advocacy group, said she welcomed the end to “showboat enforcement raids.” But in the end, Ms. Salas said, “there is still enforcement of laws that are broken,” adding, “The workers will still lose their jobs.”
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
*
Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico are EVERYWHERE.
*
THESE FIGURES ON WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY ARE DATED. IT NOT EXCEEDS $600 MILLION PER YEAR!!! (source: Los Angeles County & JUDICIAL WATCH)
*
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1949085/posts
*
http://www.wehirealiens.com/browse/index.asp
*
“At the hearing, Dr. Rakesh Kochar, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Hispanic Center, testified that in the year following the official end of the recession (June 2009), foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost an additional 1.2 million jobs.”
*
Dependence on illegal labor is the elephant in the room for the U.S. restaurant business. And experts say the Chipotle ICE investigations are a wake-up call for an industry that is one of America's biggest employers and generates over $300 billion in annual sales, according to research firm IBISWorld Inc.
In its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission dated February 17, 2011, Chipotle Mexican Grill revealed that it fired approximately 450 workers at 50 of its restaurants in Minnesota last year as the result of an audit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
*
THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
*
EXPORTING POVERTY... we take MEXICO'S 38 million poor, illiterate, criminal and frequently pregnant
The Mexican Invasion................................................
Mexico prefers to export its poor, not uplift them
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0330/p09s02-coop.html
*
Heather Mac Donald: White House doesn't want to enforce immigration
By: Heather Mac Donald
OpEd Contributor
August 4, 2010
The real motivation for the Justice Department's lawsuit against Arizona's new immigration statute was the only one not mentioned in the department's brief: The Obama administration has no intention of enforcing the immigration laws against the majority of illegal aliens already in the country.
It is that policy alone which conflicts with SB 1070: Arizona wants to enforce the law; the Obama administration does not. Reasonable minds can differ on whether that conflict puts Arizona in violation of the Constitution's Supremacy Clause.
But what is indisputable is that the failure of the federal government to openly acknowledge the real ground for its opposition to SB 1070 has rendered incoherent not just its own public arguments against the law, but the judicial ruling which largely rubber stamps those arguments as well.
The Arizona statute affirms the power of a local police officer or sheriff's deputy to inquire into someone's immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally, and if doing so is practicable. Under SB 1070, such an inquiry may occur only during a lawful stop to investigate a non-immigration offense.
Both the Justice Department and U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, in striking down most of SB 1070, couched their opposition to the statute exclusively in terms of its effect on legal, as opposed to illegal, aliens. SB 1070, Judge Bolton wrote, would impermissibly burden legal immigrants already in the country by subjecting them to unwarranted immigration checks.
There are two problems with this line of argument: First, it ignores the fact that Congress has already anticipated and approved precisely the sort of local immigration inquiries that Judge Bolton now finds unconstitutional. Second, the argument would make all immigration enforcement impossible.
In 1996, Congress banned so-called sanctuary policies, by which cities and states prohibit their employees from working with federal immigration authorities regarding illegal aliens. It was in the federal interest, Congress declared, that local and federal authorities cooperate in the "apprehension, detention or removal of [illegal] aliens."
In pursuance of that mandate, the federal government operates an immigration clearinghouse, the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC), to provide just the sort of immigration-status information to local and state law-enforcement officials that SB 1070 seeks.
It is therefore absurd to now claim, as Judge Bolton and the Obama Administration do, that such local inquiries conflict with the federal immigration scheme. It is even more absurd to argue that the risk that a legal alien will be questioned about his immigration status makes the alleged conflict unconstitutional.
Any immigration enforcement carries the possibility that a legal alien or U.S. citizen will be stopped and questioned. The only way to guarantee that legal aliens are never asked to present their immigration papers is to suspend immigration enforcement entirely. (The same possibility of stopping innocent people for questioning applies to law enforcement generally; that possibility has never been held to invalidate the police investigative power.)
If Congress intended to create such a blanket ban on asking legal aliens for proof of legal residency, it could have revoked the 1952 law requiring aliens to carry their certificate of alien registration. Such a requirement makes sense only on the assumption that legal aliens will upon occasion be asked to prove their legal status.
Such unpersuasive reasoning suggests that something else is going on. That something is the fact that SB 1070 would have put the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of repeatedly telling Arizona's law enforcement officers that it is not interested in detaining or deporting the illegal aliens that they have encountered in the course of their duties; the law, in other words, would have exposed the administration's de facto amnesty policy.
And SB 1070 would have shown that immigration-law enforcement can work simply by creating a deterrent to illegal entry and presence. Even before it went into operation, the Arizona law was already inducing illegal aliens to leave the state, according to news reports.
Illegal aliens are virtually absent from the Justice Department's brief or from Judge Bolton's opinion. Despite this studied avoidance, it's time to have a public debate about how much immigration enforcement this country wants and which enforcement policies--the administration's or Arizona's -- best represent the public will.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and co-author of The
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/White-House-doesn_t-want-to-enforce-immigration-1007060-99891419.html#ixzz0w8gI2nha
*
Obama Administration Challenges Arizona E-Verify Law
The Obama administration has asked the Supreme Court to strike down a 2007 Arizona law that punishes employers who hire illegal aliens, a law enacted by then-Governor Janet Napolitano. (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief). Called the “Legal Arizona Workers Act,” the law requires all employers in Arizona to use E-Verify and provides that the business licenses of those who hire illegal workers shall be repealed. From the date of enactment, the Chamber of Commerce and other special interest groups have been trying to undo it, attacking it through a failed ballot initiative and also through a lawsuit. Now the Chamber is asking the United States Supreme Court to hear the case (Chamber of Commerce v. Candelaria), and the Obama Administration is weighing in against the law.
OBAMA PROMISES HIS ILLEGAL LA RAZA PARTY VOTERS CONTINUED NON-ENFORCEMENT OF ALL LAWS PROHIBITING THE EMPLOYMENT OF ILLEGALS.
THERE IS NO PRESIDENT IN AMERICAN HISTORY THAT HAS SOLD OUT HIS OWN NATION FOR FOREIGN INVADERS LIKE OBAMA! NEXT TO BANKSTERS, ONLY LA RAZA PARTY MEMBERS HAVE INFESTED HIS ADMINISTRATION!
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
*
Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico are EVERYWHERE.
“At a news conference last year, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles publicly lauded Mr. Charney for helping the city with its faltering economy by providing “the dream of a steady paycheck and good benefits for countless workers.” LA RAZA SUPREMACIST & M.E.Ch.A SEPARATIST FASCIST, ANTONIO VILLARAIGOSA
*
“Many illegal immigrants use convincingly forged Social Security cards or other fake documents when seeking work.”
ONLY EIGHT STATES HAVE A POPULATION GREATER THAN LOS ANGELES COUNTY WHERE HALF THE JOBS ARE HELD BY ILLEGALS USING STOLEN SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBERS. THIS SAME COUNTY PAYS (OUT OF YOUR PROPERTY TAXES) $600 MILLION PER YEAR IN WELFARE TO ILLEGALS!
*
NEW YORK TIMES
July 3, 2009
U.S. Shifts Strategy on Illicit Work by Immigrants
By JULIA PRESTON
Immigration authorities had bad news this week for American Apparel, the T-shirt maker based in downtown Los Angeles: About 1,800 of its employees appeared to be illegal immigrants not authorized to work in the United States.
But in contrast to the high-profile raids that marked the enforcement approach of the Bush administration, no federal agents with criminal warrants stormed the company’s factories and rounded up employees. Instead, the federal immigration agency sent American Apparel a written notice that it faced civil fines and would have to fire any workers confirmed to be unauthorized.
The treatment of American Apparel, which has more than 5,600 factory employees in Los Angeles alone, is the most prominent demonstration of a new strategy by the Obama administration to curb the employment of illegal immigrants by focusing on employers who hire them — and doing so in a less confrontational manner than in years past.
Unlike the approach of the Bush administration, which brought criminal charges in its final two years against many illegal immigrant workers, the new effort makes broader use of fines and other civil sanctions, federal officials said Thursday.
Federal agents will concentrate on businesses employing large numbers of workers suspected of being illegal immigrants, the officials said, and will reserve tough criminal charges mostly for employers who serially hire illegal immigrants and engage in wage and labor violations.
“These actions underscore our commitment to targeting employers that cultivate illegal work forces by knowingly hiring and exploiting illegal workers,” said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.
On Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency known as ICE, said it had sent notices announcing audits of hiring records, like the one it conducted at American Apparel, to 652 other companies across the country. Officials said they were picking up the pace of such audits, after performing 503 of them in 2008.
The names of other companies that received notices have not been made public. American Apparel became a window into the new enforcement tactics because, as a publicly traded company, it issued a required notice on Wednesday about the hiring audit.
The Obama administration’s new approach, unveiled in April, seems to be moving away from the raids that advocates for immigrants said had split families, disrupted businesses and traumatized communities. But the outcome will still be difficult for illegal workers, who will lose their jobs and could face deportation, the advocates said.
Immigration officials have not made clear how they intend to deal with workers who are unable to prove their legal immigration status in the course of inspections, but they said there was no moratorium on deportations.
Executives at American Apparel were both relieved and dismayed after receiving the warning from the immigration agency of discrepancies in the hiring documents of about one-third of its Los Angeles work force. The company has 30 days to dispute the agency’s claims and give immigrant employees time to prove that they are authorized to work in the United States, immigration officials said. If they cannot, the company must fire them, probably within two months.
But no criminal charges were lodged against the company and no workers have been arrested, American Apparel executives and immigration officials said.
The fines followed discussions over 18 months between federal officials and American Apparel, after immigration agents first inspected the company’s files in January 2008, said Peter Schey, an immigration lawyer representing the company. Mr. Schey said a raid had been averted because the company cooperated with the audit and because immigration agents had not found any labor abuses.
“There is no evidence of any exploitation of workers or violation of labor laws,” he said. “And there is not a single allegation that the company knowingly hired an undocumented worker.”
American Apparel and its outspoken chief executive, Dov Charney, have waged a campaign, emblazoned on T-shirts sold across the country, criticizing the immigration crackdown of recent years and calling on Congress to “Legalize L.A.” by granting legal status to illegal immigrants.
Most garment workers in American Apparel’s huge shop in Los Angeles work directly for the company, not for subcontractors, its records show. They earn at least $10 to $12 an hour, well above minimum wage, and receive health benefits.
At a news conference last year, Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles publicly lauded Mr. Charney for helping the city with its faltering economy by providing “the dream of a steady paycheck and good benefits for countless workers.”
While it has been no secret that American Apparel’s largely Latino work force probably included many illegal immigrants, Mr. Schey said the company had been careful to meet legal hiring requirements. Many illegal immigrants use convincingly forged Social Security cards or other fake documents when seeking work.
In a statement, Mr. Charney said that many of his workers cited by the immigration agency were “responsible, hard-working employees” who had been with the company for more than a decade. Mr. Charney, an immigrant from Canada, said he hoped they would be able to prove their legal status. But because of the recession, the company said, it will not be hurt financially if it has to replace them.
Mr. Schey said the hiring audit at American Apparel had been “professionally done.” By contrast, Mr. Schey has brought more than 100 damage claims against the immigration agency on behalf of American citizens who said they were illegally arrested last year in Los Angeles in an immigration raid at a different company, Micro Solutions Enterprises.
Immigration officials, who asked not to be identified because the case is continuing, said the fines to American Apparel so far were about $150,000.
Kelly A. Nantel, a spokeswoman for the immigration agency, said it had taken steps to limit negotiations with employers that in the past had resulted in steep reductions in fines the employers ultimately paid.
Representative Brian P. Bilbray, a California Republican who heads an immigration caucus in the House, said the amount of the fines was crucial.
“If this is a truly conscientious effort to get tough with employers to say the days are over of profiteering with illegal immigrants, that’s fine,” said Mr. Bilbray, who opposes any effort to give legal status to illegal immigrants. “But if the fine will be so low that it’s just part of doing business, there’s no deterrent.”
Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, an advocacy group, said she welcomed the end to “showboat enforcement raids.” But in the end, Ms. Salas said, “there is still enforcement of laws that are broken,” adding, “The workers will still lose their jobs.”
*
MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com
*
Go to http://www.MEXICANOCCUPATION.blogspot.com and read articles and comments from other Americans on what they’ve witnessed in their communities around the country. While most of the population of California is now ILLEGAL, the problems, costs, assault to our culture by Mexico are EVERYWHERE.
*
THESE FIGURES ON WELFARE FOR ILLEGALS IN LOS ANGELES COUNTY ARE DATED. IT NOT EXCEEDS $600 MILLION PER YEAR!!! (source: Los Angeles County & JUDICIAL WATCH)
*
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1949085/posts
*
http://www.wehirealiens.com/browse/index.asp
*
“At the hearing, Dr. Rakesh Kochar, Associate Director for Research at the Pew Hispanic Center, testified that in the year following the official end of the recession (June 2009), foreign-born workers gained 656,000 jobs while native-born workers lost an additional 1.2 million jobs.”
*
Dependence on illegal labor is the elephant in the room for the U.S. restaurant business. And experts say the Chipotle ICE investigations are a wake-up call for an industry that is one of America's biggest employers and generates over $300 billion in annual sales, according to research firm IBISWorld Inc.
In its annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission dated February 17, 2011, Chipotle Mexican Grill revealed that it fired approximately 450 workers at 50 of its restaurants in Minnesota last year as the result of an audit by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).
*
THE ENTIRE REASON THE BORDERS ARE LEFT OPEN IS TO CUT WAGES!
“We could cut unemployment in half simply by reclaiming the jobs taken by illegal workers,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, co-chairman of the Reclaim American Jobs Caucus. “President Obama is on the wrong side of the American people on immigration. The president should support policies that help citizens and legal immigrants find the jobs they need and deserve rather than fail to enforce immigration laws.”
*
EXPORTING POVERTY... we take MEXICO'S 38 million poor, illiterate, criminal and frequently pregnant
The Mexican Invasion................................................
Mexico prefers to export its poor, not uplift them
http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0330/p09s02-coop.html
*
Heather Mac Donald: White House doesn't want to enforce immigration
By: Heather Mac Donald
OpEd Contributor
August 4, 2010
The real motivation for the Justice Department's lawsuit against Arizona's new immigration statute was the only one not mentioned in the department's brief: The Obama administration has no intention of enforcing the immigration laws against the majority of illegal aliens already in the country.
It is that policy alone which conflicts with SB 1070: Arizona wants to enforce the law; the Obama administration does not. Reasonable minds can differ on whether that conflict puts Arizona in violation of the Constitution's Supremacy Clause.
But what is indisputable is that the failure of the federal government to openly acknowledge the real ground for its opposition to SB 1070 has rendered incoherent not just its own public arguments against the law, but the judicial ruling which largely rubber stamps those arguments as well.
The Arizona statute affirms the power of a local police officer or sheriff's deputy to inquire into someone's immigration status, if the officer has reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally, and if doing so is practicable. Under SB 1070, such an inquiry may occur only during a lawful stop to investigate a non-immigration offense.
Both the Justice Department and U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton, in striking down most of SB 1070, couched their opposition to the statute exclusively in terms of its effect on legal, as opposed to illegal, aliens. SB 1070, Judge Bolton wrote, would impermissibly burden legal immigrants already in the country by subjecting them to unwarranted immigration checks.
There are two problems with this line of argument: First, it ignores the fact that Congress has already anticipated and approved precisely the sort of local immigration inquiries that Judge Bolton now finds unconstitutional. Second, the argument would make all immigration enforcement impossible.
In 1996, Congress banned so-called sanctuary policies, by which cities and states prohibit their employees from working with federal immigration authorities regarding illegal aliens. It was in the federal interest, Congress declared, that local and federal authorities cooperate in the "apprehension, detention or removal of [illegal] aliens."
In pursuance of that mandate, the federal government operates an immigration clearinghouse, the Law Enforcement Support Center (LESC), to provide just the sort of immigration-status information to local and state law-enforcement officials that SB 1070 seeks.
It is therefore absurd to now claim, as Judge Bolton and the Obama Administration do, that such local inquiries conflict with the federal immigration scheme. It is even more absurd to argue that the risk that a legal alien will be questioned about his immigration status makes the alleged conflict unconstitutional.
Any immigration enforcement carries the possibility that a legal alien or U.S. citizen will be stopped and questioned. The only way to guarantee that legal aliens are never asked to present their immigration papers is to suspend immigration enforcement entirely. (The same possibility of stopping innocent people for questioning applies to law enforcement generally; that possibility has never been held to invalidate the police investigative power.)
If Congress intended to create such a blanket ban on asking legal aliens for proof of legal residency, it could have revoked the 1952 law requiring aliens to carry their certificate of alien registration. Such a requirement makes sense only on the assumption that legal aliens will upon occasion be asked to prove their legal status.
Such unpersuasive reasoning suggests that something else is going on. That something is the fact that SB 1070 would have put the Obama administration in the uncomfortable position of repeatedly telling Arizona's law enforcement officers that it is not interested in detaining or deporting the illegal aliens that they have encountered in the course of their duties; the law, in other words, would have exposed the administration's de facto amnesty policy.
And SB 1070 would have shown that immigration-law enforcement can work simply by creating a deterrent to illegal entry and presence. Even before it went into operation, the Arizona law was already inducing illegal aliens to leave the state, according to news reports.
Illegal aliens are virtually absent from the Justice Department's brief or from Judge Bolton's opinion. Despite this studied avoidance, it's time to have a public debate about how much immigration enforcement this country wants and which enforcement policies--the administration's or Arizona's -- best represent the public will.
Heather Mac Donald is a contributing editor of City Journal and co-author of The
Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/White-House-doesn_t-want-to-enforce-immigration-1007060-99891419.html#ixzz0w8gI2nha
*
Obama Administration Challenges Arizona E-Verify Law
The Obama administration has asked the Supreme Court to strike down a 2007 Arizona law that punishes employers who hire illegal aliens, a law enacted by then-Governor Janet Napolitano. (Solicitor General's Amicus Curiae Brief). Called the “Legal Arizona Workers Act,” the law requires all employers in Arizona to use E-Verify and provides that the business licenses of those who hire illegal workers shall be repealed. From the date of enactment, the Chamber of Commerce and other special interest groups have been trying to undo it, attacking it through a failed ballot initiative and also through a lawsuit. Now the Chamber is asking the United States Supreme Court to hear the case (Chamber of Commerce v. Candelaria), and the Obama Administration is weighing in against the law.
No comments:
Post a Comment