Posts Tagged ‘Unauthorized Immigrants’

Why New York state should pass the DREAM Act

June 19, 2016

The proposed New York DREAM Act would allow unauthorized immigrants who’ve earned high school diplomas in New York state to apply for tuition assistance to attend state colleges and universities.

The documentary film profiles six hard-working young people who might benefit from the new law.

State law doesn’t not protect them from deportation, but it gives them the same right to attend public school as citizens and legal immigrants. The proposed law would give them an equal right to apply for financial aid.

An estimated 4,500 undocumented students graduate from New York high schools each year.  An estimated 90 to 95 percent of them do not pursue higher education.


How to drive down American wages

February 5, 2016

Americans used to say that service jobs were safe from the impact of globalization because there was no way for companies to ship them overseas.

But employers can achieve the same goal by employing unauthorized immigrants, who, like the workers in Asian sweatshops, are outside the protection of American labor law.

A recent example of this was contracting the delivery of the Boston Globe to a company that employed unauthorized immigrants.  The public was upset by the huge number of delivery problems.  It should also have been upset by the loss of jobs of American workers who formerly provided reliable service.

The problem is not the unauthorized immigrants, who are hardworking people who are trying to get by the best they can.  The problem is those American employers who are trying to drive down American wages by any means necessary.


All the News That’s Fit to Print: How the Media Hide Undocumented Workers by Aviva Chomsky.

The tide of illegal Mexican immigration ebbs

November 20, 2015



  • 5.9 million legal immigrants from Mexico
  • 6.9 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico.
  • 5.3 million unauthorized immigrants from other countries.

By 2014, the figures were:

  • 6.1 million legal immigrants from Mexico
  • 5.6 million unauthorized immigrants from Mexico
  • 5.7 million unauthorized immigrants from other countries.











The passing scene: January 1, 2015

January 1, 2015


Gun Trouble by Robert H. Scales for The Atlantic.









Bush and Reagan on illegal immigrants, 1980

November 23, 2014

During the 1980 Republican Presidential primary campaign in Texas, George H.W. Bush said the children of unauthorized immigrants should have the right to attend public schools, and Ronald Reagan advocated an open border so that Mexicans could work temporarily in the United States.

The video above cuts off Reagan’s statement in mid-sentence.  His full statement is:

I think the time has come that the United States, and our neighbors, particularly our neighbor to the south, should have a better understanding and a better relationship than we’ve ever had.  And I think that we haven’t been sensitive enough to our size and our power.  They have a problem of 40 to 50 percent unemployment.

Now this cannot continue without the possibility arising—with regard to that other country that we talked about, of Cuba and what it is stirring up—of the possibility of trouble below the border.  And we could have a very hostile and strange neighbor on our border.


This is the only safety valve right now they have, with that unemployment, that probably keeps the lid from blowing off down there.

Republicans have changed a lot in the past 30-some years.

As have we all.


What Reagan said about a border wall by Chris Ladd on GOPLifer.

Ronald Reagan Says ‘Open the Border Both Ways’  by Jesse Walker for Reason magazine.

Illegal immigrants: not a problem, but a fact

November 21, 2014

One of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld’s rules was that if a problem cannot be solved, it may not be a problem, but a fact.

I think the presence of millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States is a fact.  I don’t say their presence is a good thing; I say it is not feasible to deport them all.

Given this fact, I think the choices for the United States are to continue to have an underclass outside the protection of American law or to find a way to assimilate these immigrants into American society.

RonaldReaganonamnestye_oI think this would be the lesser evil, even from the standpoint of native-born American citizens and legal immigrants who have to complete with the unauthorized immigrants.

Greg Abbott, Ted Cruz and other Republican leaders threaten to impeach President Obama for using prosecutorial discretion to concentrate on border security and unauthorized immigrants who break domestic law, giving the others a free pass.  Even though the federal government doesn’t have the resources to discover and deport all unauthorized immigrants, they say decisions to prosecute should be made on an individual basis and not about categories of immigrants.

They’ve got a point.  Hard cases make bad law.  I’d take the Republican leaders more seriously if they were equally indignant about the administration’s use of prosecutorial discretion in financial fraud committed by “too big to fail” bankers.

I sympathize with poor people from Mexico or Central America who break the law by coming to the USA to get jobs and help their families.  I have no sympathy at all for Wall Street manipulators who break the law in order to get richer at the expense of everyone else.


Obama’s huge new immigration plan, explained by Dara Lind for Vox news.

Obama’s Immigration Order: The Right Thing in the Wrong Way by Conor Friedersdorf for The Atlantic.

Obama Pretends to Put Immigration Reform in Play by Yves Smith for Naked Capitalism.

Cowering behind a border wall by Chris Ladd on GOPLifer.

Surge in migrant children? Maybe not

August 15, 2014










What would William Wilberforce do?

July 22, 2014

Refugees from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala are fleeing to Mexico and many other countries, not just the United States.  But there is a particular reason, besides the obvious economic reason, why so many of the refugees are unaccompanied children.

This is the William Wilberforce Trafficking Victims Protection Re-authorization Act, passed with broad Democratic and Republican support and signed into law by President George W. Bush in 2008.  Children were already turning up at the border then, and Central American children turned back into Mexico were easy prey for prostitution rings and other human traffickers.

William Wilberforce

William Wilberforce

It provided that any child caught crossing the border, if not from Mexico or Canada, would be granted a hearing to determine whether they were genuine refugees.

Under the international Refugee Convention, signing nations are required to give refuge to persons with a well-founded fear of being persecuted because of race, religion, nationality, group membership or political opinion, and no protection from their own government.

The law was appropriately named for William Wilberforce, the great British Evangelical Christian reformer, who campaigned for the abolition of the African slave trade and then for the abolition of slavery in the British West Indies.

I think he would have approved of the law that was enacted in his name, and I think he would have been sad to see American politicians breaking their nation’s promise to give refuge to children.

Of course once the law was enacted, word filtered down to Central America that unaccompanied children, if caught by the Border Patrol, would have a shot at being able to stay in the United States—even though somebody fleeing criminal gangs does not really fit the technical definition of refugee.

We Americans remember how in 1939 our government turned away ships carrying Jewish refugees because of our immigration restrictions, and how many of these Jewish people were later killed by the Nazis.  We will have further cause for shame if we turn away children who wind up being killed or forced into prostitution and crime.


Crime and justice: Links and notes 11/4/13

November 4, 2013

British lawyers to get higher legal-aid fees for early guilty pleas by Owen Bowcott for The Guardian.   Hat tip to Boing Boing.

judge1Talk about perverse incentives!  The British Ministry of Justice has announced a new fee schedule for Legal Aid lawyers which will pay them more if they persuade their clients to plead guilty than if they bring the cases to trial.  Fees could be 17 percent to 20 percent in common types of criminal cases.   The overall Legal Aid budget is being cut.

It seems to me that if your assumption is criminal defendants too poor to pay lawyers should be presumed guilty, it would be simpler and cheaper not to have legal aid at all.  In fact, you could save a lot of money by not bothering with the trial.  On the other hand, it costs a lot of money to feed and shelter an innocent person in prison.

I don’t know of anything like this in the USA, but the caseload of public defenders in this country is so great that we might as well have, because they don’t have the time or resources to give most of their clients a proper defense.

Nobody Should Shed a Tear for JP Morgan Chase by Matt Taibbi for Rollilng Stone.

Too-big-to-jailJP Morgan Chase and its CEO Jamie Dimon recently agreed to pay a $13 billion in fines for its part in the sub-prime mortgage fraud which lead to the 2008 financial crisis.  The fraud consisted of writing mortgages for people they knew could not repay, then repackaging the mortgages as securities and selling them to suckers.

The fine seems like a lot of money, but, as Matt Taibbi pointed out, it is a lot less than the $25 billion in TARP funds that JP Morgan Chase received, not to mention other government subsidies.  And it also is a lot less than the $100 billion to $200 billion that JP Morgan Chase might have had to pay if pending lawsuits had gone to trial.

And, unlike with Bernie Madoff, no guilty individual will pay a dollar in fines or spend a day in jail.  It will all be paid by that fictitious person, JP Morgan Chase.

CNBC discovers a firing offense by Alex Pareene for Salon.  Hat tip for this to Bill Elwell.

HHS Secretary Kathleen Sibelius deserves to be fired because of the messed-up rollout of Obamacare, according to CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo.   When Alex Pareene said on an earlier show that Jamie Dimon should be fired as CEO of JPMorgan Chase for multiple violations of the securities laws, Bartiromo regarded this as crazy talk.  But nobody was bankrupted or foreclosed on because the ACA web site doesn’t work right.

Congress’ Illegal-Immigration Detention Quota Costs $2 Billion a Year by William Selway and Margaret Newkirk for Bloomberg Businessweek.  Hat tip to Kids Prefer Cheese.

detention_center_0112-thumb-640xauto-4858U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement is locking up and deporting more unauthorized immigrants than ever before.  The late Senator Robert Byrd, a West Virginia Democrat, inserted into Homeland Security’s 2009 budget a requirement that ICE keep a minimum of 33,400 illegal immigrants locked up at all times.

Keeping all those people locked up costs $120 a day each, or $2 billion a year.  Congress has twice rebuffed White House budget requests to cut the quota and use less expensive means, such as electronic ankle bracelets, to keep track of detainees.  I imagine the for-profit private prison lobby was opposed to the change.

Girl smuggled into Britain to have her organs harvested by Steven Swinford of The Telegraph.

British authorities reported a young girl was brought from Somalia for the purpose of having her organs removed and sold to people desperate for transplants.  The World Health Organization estimated that about 7,000 kidneys are obtained for transplant illegally each year.  The transaction requires organization—a recruiter to find a victim, someone to arrange transportation, medical personnel and someone to market the organ.

Unemployment and unauthorized immigration

February 20, 2013







Is immigration a right?

September 15, 2012

Years ago, when I first learned there was a controversy in California over whether unauthorized immigrants could get driver’s licenses or send their children to public schools, I wondered how that could even be an issue.  If someone is in the United States who is known to be here illegally, why is the person not deported immediately?

After a little bit of reading and thinking, the answer became obvious:  Because it is to the benefit of employers to have an underclass of workers who are outside the protection of U.S. law.

David Bacon, a former union organizer and immigrant rights advocate and current photojournalist, spelled out in detail just how this works in his 2008 book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants.  He drew a picture of the authorized immigration situation by connecting a great many dots that usually are not connected.

He began the book by describing the labor struggles of Mexican immigrants at a luxury hotel in California and a meatpacking plant in North Carolina.  He showed how employers used immigration enforcement as a means to suppress workers who asserted their rights or tried to form union.  Then he went to the parts of Mexico where many of these workers came from, and described the conditions which forced them out of their homes.

Some came from Oxaca in southern Mexico, where imports of cheap mass-produced U.S. corn, and the cessation of Mexican government purchases of corn for government grocery stores, bankrupted many small farmers and turned them into migrant laborers, like the Okies and Arkies during the U.S. Great Depression.  Others came from Sonora, where copper miners in Cananea went on strike against wage and benefits cuts, and were blacklisted.

Historically the Mexican government provided some protection for small farmers and union workers, but, Bacon reported, these were withdrawn under pressure from the International Monetary Fund, World Trade Organization and administrators of the North American Free Trade Agreement.  They operated under the “neo-liberal” philosophy that says that benefits to farmers and working people are illegitimate because they interfere with free trade and the free market.  Unemployment in Mexico and Guatemala rose to 25 percent.  In order to survive, Mexicans and central Americans came to work in the United States without legal rights, at a time when U.S. workers were losing ground on wages and benefits.

Bacon described the political struggles of Mexican immigrant workers in the United States, and their sometimes successful efforts to form alliances with the African-American community and the U.S. labor movement.  Mexican immigrant workers, African American workers and white Anglo workers should recognize that they’re all workers, and not allow themselves to be pitted against each other, he wrote.

He ended the book by tracing the history of Filipino immigration and labor struggles in the United States, and a report on immigrant workers’ struggles in Germany and Britain, which are similar to the U.S. conflict.

He rejected sanctions against employers as a solution to unauthorized immigration, for the reason that sanctions have not been enforced.  In practice, they are used as a rationale for threatening Immigrant workers who stand up for their rights.

He said “guest worker” programs and the H-1B visa program for high-tech immigrant workers are another form of exploitation.  Both programs leave immigrants at the mercy of their employers, with no right to quit their jobs.  They are like the indentured laborers of colonial America, who were obligated to serve a particular employer on his terms for a specific period of time, such as seven years—the difference being that, after serving our their indentures, they were free to remain.

Do unauthorized immigrants have a right to remain in the United States in violation of U.S. law?  Bacon argued that if corporate executives have a right to shift capital freely from country to country in search of profit, surely people have the same right to go from country to country in search of work.

There is a legal doctrine which, I think, is called “adverse possession.”  If I allow my neighbors to use a footpath across my land for decades, and never close it off, at some point they gain a right to use it.  If migrants are brought into the United States, and the laws against their being here are winked at, do they not at some point gain a right to stay here?

A friend of mine knows a man who does work abroad as an architect and subcontractor for work on U.S. embassies and consulates.  He had just got back from doing work in Norway.  My friend said he told him that Norway deals with its immigration situation by strict enforcement of wages and hours laws.  Contractors could import workers from the Balkans or Turkey, but what would be the point if they had to pay the same wages and benefits as a Norwegian workers?

Bacon would say that is the real question.  If workers in all countries could earn sufficient wages to provide for themselves and their families, immigration would not be an issue.

Click on David Bacon News for his home page.

Click on How Mississippi’s Black / Brown Strategy Beat the South’s Anti-Immigrant Wave for an article by David Bacon in The Nation about a political alliance between Mexican immigrants and African-Americans defeated anti-immigration legislation in Mississippi.