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[FYI —
1. The Illusionary Allure of Immigration “Grand Bargains”: An Analysis of Blue Ribbon Task Forces (Paper)
2. NCLR to Republican Senators: ‘Watch Out’ (Blog)
3. Illegal Aliens Less Attractive to Senators than Gay Service People (Blog)
4. Requiem for a DREAM (Blog)
5. Defeat of the DREAM Act – A Time for Modified Rapture (Blog)
6. Senate Gives DREAMers a Reality Check (Blog)
7. Adventures in Babysitting (Blog)
8. Border Patrol Agent Terry’s Death: Illegal Activity Escalating (Blog)
9. A Comparison of Two Exploitative Migrant Worker Programs, H-1B and L-1 (Blog)
10. Importing Labor the Flip Side of Offshoring (Blog)
11. Labor Department Zaps Newspaper for Abusing Its H-1B Workers (Blog)
12. DREAMs of Sugar Plums Dance in Their Heads (Blog)
13. Immigration System Preserves Archaic Agricultural Labor Practices (Blog)
14. DREAM Advocate: It’s All About Race (Blog)
15. DREAM Act Will Shield Some Gang Members from Removal (Blog)
16. The DREAM Political Scheme (Blog)
17. Scary Scenario – China Invests in Bahamas, and Wants to Send Lots of Migrants (Blog)
18. Brits Have a New, Sophisticated Way to Determine Skills Shortages (Blog)
— Mark Krikorian]
1.
The Illusionary Allure of Immigration “Grand Bargains”: An Analysis of Blue Ribbon Task Forces
By Stanley Renshon
CIS Paper, December 2010
http://www.cis.org/illusionary-allure
Excerpt: After the midterm elections, momentum for “comprehensive immigration reform” has slowed considerably, allowing us time to take a step back from attempts to push another enormously complex piece of legislation through Congress without sufficient consideration. Yet the president has repeatedly vowed to pursue “comprehensive U.S. immigration reform” with a view to enacting legislation that would provide a “pathway to citizenship” for 10-12 million illegal immigrants in the United States. That effort when it begins again, and it is just a matter of time before it does so, will be shaped in part by the deliberations and recommendations of three blue ribbon immigration panels that have recently published their reports. The three task forces whose immigration reports will be examined were convened by the Migration Policy Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, and jointly by the Brookings Institution and Duke University. This th! ree-part analysis examines the issues they have debated, the recommendations they have made, and the relationship of those issues and recommendations to the ongoing immigration debate that has been gathering political steam for the last five years.
2.
NCLR to Republican Senators: ‘Watch Out’
By Jerry Kammer
CIS Blog, December 20, 2010
http://www.cis.org/kammer/nclr-watch-out
Excerpt: After the Senate vote on the Dream Act on Saturday, a spokeswoman for the National Council of La Raza issued a warning to the Republicans who voted against the measure.
‘The most immediate repercussions are that – particularly those members in states where the Latino population has political influence – they’d better watch out,’ said Clarissa Martinez, NCLR’s director of immigration and national campaigns. ‘I am talking about persons like Hutchison and Cornyn of Texas, LeMieux in Florida, Kirk in Illinois.’
3.
Illegal Aliens Less Attractive to Senators than Gay Service People
By David North
CIS Blog, December 20, 2010
http://www.cis.org/north/dream-vs-dadt
Excerpt: It is obvious, by now, that allowing gays to serve in the armed forces is more attractive to the U.S. Senate than encouraging illegal aliens to do so. (I suspect that the Senate would not have voted to terminate don’t ask-don’t tell (DADT) 20 years ago.)
That broad mindset is probably good news for the restrictionists, but what intrigues me even more are the 19 members of the Senate who bucked their parties’ leadership in the votes for ending DADT or initiating the DREAM Act, or both. Among these 19 are the votes that will swing the Senate one way or the other in the two years to come.
4.
Requiem for a DREAM
By Mark Krikorian
CIS Blog, December 19, 2010
http://www.cis.org/krikorian/requiem-for-a-dream
Excerpt: As my colleagues have noted below, the DREAM Act has finally been put out of our misery. (Here’s how everyone voted, and see analysis of the vote from Roy Beck and Mickey Kaus.) But it’s bigger than that. The vote was the capstone of 10 straight years of successful defense against amnesties, following the passage of seven amnesties from 1986 to 2000. Only twice in the past decade did amnesties even get the approval of one chamber — the overall amnesty passed by the Senate in 2006 and the DREAM amnesty by the House earlier this month — but neither time did the amnesty reach the president’s desk.
5.
Defeat of the DREAM Act – A Time for Modified Rapture
By David North
CIS Blog, December 19, 2010
http://www.cis.org/north/dream-modified-rapture
Excerpt: While I am very pleased that the Dream Act failed to pass the Senate (though it sailed through the House of Representatives) I think it is a time for only modified rapture.
Yes, the most attractive amnesty proposal of them all – despite the support of the President, the leaders of the Senate, and all the open borders forces – did not get through the upper body. Had it done so, it would have been quickly signed by the President.
6.
Senate Gives DREAMers a Reality Check
By James R. Edwards Jr.
CIS Blog, December 19, 2010
http://www.cis.org/edwards/dream-reality-check
Excerpt: The U.S. Senate early Saturday afternoon voted to block ending debate on the DREAM Act amnesty bill. The legislation fell five votes short of the 60 needed to invoke cloture on the bill. The vote was 55-41. This vote marks a significant victory for amnesty foes.
7.
Adventures in Babysitting
By David Seminara
CIS Blog, December 17, 2010
http://www.cis.org/seminara/adventures-in-babysitting
Excerpt: It’s so easy to find good help these days. But thanks to the power of the internet, illegal immigrants, and those in the country legally but who have no authorization to work, can compete for household jobs on an equal footing with Americans. My wife and I have used sites like www.craigslist.com and www.sittercity.com to find part-time babysitters and housekeepers and have found that anywhere from 25 to 50 percent of the applicants we’ve come into contact with couldn’t prove that they had the legal right to work in the U.S. The respondents ranged from the supposedly ignorant – those who claimed they thought they could work for us on tourist or student visas – to the defiantly brazen, who chastised me for asking about their legal status.
8.
Border Patrol Agent Terry’s Death: Illegal Activity Escalating
By Janice Kephart
CIS Blog, December 17, 2010
http://www.cis.org/kephart/brian-terry
Excerpt: The murder of Border Patrol Agent Brian A. Terry, a member of the patrol’s elite BORTAC squad and veteran of the Iraq war, is not just an unconscionable act, as Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has described it. Terry’s death, the first Border Patrol death in Santa Cruz County, Ariz., since 1998, is another stark reminder that our border is not secure. In the border lands directly southeast and west of Peak Canyon where Terry was killed, there is little to no fencing except near the city of Nogales. Does that mean anything? For those of us who have studied the border, the answer is yes. However, it remains questionable whether Napolitano will ever accept that an escalating problem of violence bleeding over from Mexico and feeding off the illegal activity in the United States requires a real response.
9.
A Comparison of Two Exploitative Migrant Worker Programs, H-1B and L-1
By David North
CIS Blog, December 17, 2010
http://www.cis.org/north/h1b-l1-comparison
Excerpt: One of the grim aspects of America’s programs for temporary alien workers is the wide menu of choices offered to the nation’s employers.
If one program is seen as a little too costly to employers, or a tad inconvenient in its terms, the ever-gracious government provides a wide variety of alternatives. U.S. and alien workers are both hurt by the general laxity of these programs.
10.
Importing Labor the Flip Side of Offshoring
By James R. Edwards Jr.
CIS Blog, December 17, 2010
http://www.cis.org/edwards/importing-labor-flip-side
Excerpt: Liberal economist Harold Meyerson isn’t my cup of tea. I find I usually disagree with him, that he’s too much of a Keynesian rather than a Smithian. But his recent column decrying offshoring to China and elsewhere in the Third World by big international corporations made an excellent point. If Big Business really does regard America as a global asset that directly benefits them, then they should stop shipping jobs abroad. They should sprinkle the field with the seed and fertilizer of capital, sufficiently so as to attract native-born labor.
11.
Labor Department Zaps Newspaper for Abusing Its H-1B Workers
By David North
CIS Blog, December 16, 2010
http://www.cis.org/north/h1b-asian-journal
Excerpt: The U.S. Labor Department has penalized a newspaper for abusing the H-1B program in its own hiring practices.
The paper is the Asian Journal, headquartered in Los Angeles, which also prints editions in San Francisco, Las Vegas, New York, and the Philippines. It was not only forced to make more than half a million dollars in payments to its own staff and to the government, it was tossed out of the H-1B program until July 30, 2011.
12.
DREAMs of Sugar Plums Dance in Their Heads
By Mark Krikorian
CIS Blog, December 15, 2010
http://www.cis.org/krikorian/dreams-of-sugar-plums
Excerpt: Who would have thought that businessmen who profit from complexity in the immigration law would lobby for more complexity in the immigration law? Keep this in mind next time an immigration lawyer or his trade association tells a reporter how important it is for Congress to pass the open-borders legislation du jour.
13.
Immigration System Preserves Archaic Agricultural Labor Practices
By David North
CIS Blog, December 15, 2010
http://www.cis.org/north/sheepherders-archaic-labor-practice
Excerpt: Two recent events reminded me that the American government uses immigration to preserve an archaic, Third World, agricultural labor practice. And it does so to please a very narrow economic interest.
The pattern I have in mind is of the sheepherders who follow and protect their flocks in distant mountain meadows, sometimes, if lucky, living in a trailer, sometimes in a tent or a hut. The underlying notion is that there is grass for the sheep to eat in remote pastures during the summer, but in the colder months the sheep must be moved back down to lower elevations.
14.
DREAM Advocate: It’s All About Race
By Jon Feere
CIS Blog, December 15, 2010
http://www.cis.org/feere/kent-wong-dream
Excerpt: The amnesty crowd loves to claim that opposition to mass immigration is all based on race, and that anyone who opposes amnesty is necessarily a racist. Yet the more one listens to amnesty advocates, the clearer it becomes that it is the amnesty advocates themselves who use race-talk to advance their agenda.
15.
DREAM Act Will Shield Some Gang Members from Removal
By Jessica Vaughan
CIS Blog, December 14, 2010
http://www.cis.org/vaughan/dream-shields-gang-members
Excerpt: If Congress passes the version of the DREAM Act approved by the U.S. House last week, ICE will likely have to scale back its successful anti-gang program known as Operation Community Shield, because more than one-fourth of the potential targets could qualify for the amnesty.
16.
The DREAM Political Scheme
By James R. Edwards Jr.
CIS Blog, December 13, 2010
http://www.cis.org/edwards/dream-political-scheme
Excerpt: The Washington Post’s resident apologist for mass amnesty and open borders has written about how he thinks Republican opposition to the DREAM Act amnesty is a strategic political mistake for the party if the GOP wishes to increase its share of the Latino vote.
17.
Scary Scenario – China Invests in Bahamas, and Wants to Send Lots of Migrants
By David North
CIS Blog, December 13, 2010
http://www.cis.org/north/china-migrants-bahamas
Excerpt: China, according to a recent news story, has invested something like $1.7 trillion dollars in U.S. bonds and that if China stopped buying our bonds we would face a really awesome financial disaster.
Meanwhile, a few miles off the coast of Florida, China is reported to be investing $2.5 billion in a massive tourist complex near Nassau, in The Bahamas.
18.
Brits Have a New, Sophisticated Way to Determine Skills Shortages
By David North
CIS Blog, December 13, 2010
http://www.cis.org/north/brits-labor-shortage
Excerpt: There is a strong argument to be made that there is no such thing as a skills shortage, only a wages-and-training shortage, but it is highly unlikely that employers’ desires for low-cost skilled workers from overseas can be thwarted with that sensible line of reasoning.
