Conflicts

“He shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed…” Constitution of the United States, Article II, Section 2

The Associated Press reports that Barack Obama’s aunt, a native of Kenya is living in this country illegally and is receiving public assistance in the form of subsidized housing, despite having a standing deportation order against her.

Barack Obama’s aunt, a Kenyan woman who has been quietly living in public housing in Boston, is in the United States illegally after an immigration judge rejected her request for asylum four years ago, The Associated Press has learned.
Zeituni Onyango, 56, referred to as “Aunti Zeituni” in Obama’s memoir, was instructed to leave the United States by a U.S. immigration judge who denied her asylum request, a person familiar with the matter told the AP late Friday. This person spoke on condition of anonymity because no one was authorized to discuss Onyango’s case.

So we have a situation here. Barack Obama has a huge conflict of interest on both the issue of illegal immigration and on redistribution of wealth. His own aunt is in this country illegally and is receiving public assistance. (She also admitted to the British press that she had donated to the Obama campaign – clearly illegal under US election finance laws.)

So, when he speaks on illegal immigration, who is he representing? Who would benefit from any changes made in the immigration laws?

When he speaks of redistributing wealth, who is he speaking for? Who benefits? Who receives those redistributed funds?

This is an enormous problem.

Illegal Commodity

All too often lost in all the conflicting rhetoric about illegal immigration is one persistent bit of nastiness: human trafficking. A major smuggling ring has just been broken up in Arizona, with authorities raiding a large number of "drop houses", arresting 20 so far (more arrests are expected) and detaining 210 illegal immigrants. Suggling illegal immigrants is big business. Authorities allege that the smuggling ring pulled in as much as $130,000 per week. And this is just one of many smuggling rings.

PHOENIX — In a case highlighting this city’s prominent role in the smuggling of illegal immigrants across the border, the authorities conducted a series of raids on Thursday, arresting what they said were the leaders of a ring that helped transport hundreds of people to way stations in Phoenix.

In some ways, it was just a typical day here, where the police regularly discover houses with dozens of people held by smugglers until they can pay their passage from Mexico. In a separate operation, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and the Maricopa County sheriff here announced the arrests of more than 100 people suspected of being in the country illegally who were on probation for various crimes.

But the raids on Thursday morning, by a task force of state, local and federal officers, provided a glimpse behind what the authorities described as one of the more elaborate operations that bring thousands of people across the border in this state, which has more illegal crossings than any other.

At dawn, officers swarmed houses, mostly in western Phoenix, seizing ledgers, money, weaponry and people suspected of involvement in a major, lucrative cell that controlled the transportation of people from a border town, Naco, to Phoenix.

The authorities made 20 arrests, including those of two Cubans accused of directing the operation. They also detained 210 illegal immigrants and discovered 13 so-called drop houses that were way stations for smuggled immigrants, the police said. In all, the authorities planned to arrest about 75 people, they said.

Authorities say that the smugglers charge around $2,500 per person to bring the illegal into the country. They were running as many as four loads of up to ten illegals per day. Again, this was only one of the rings operating in Arizona – 100 drop houses were discovered last year.

Inadvertent Slip

AFP has a dramatic, sob-story article about how Arizona's anti-illegal immigration law is beginning to cause what they dub 'Hispanic Panic.' It seems employers are firing illegals, many of whom are fleeing the state, either back to Mexico or to other states. But they apparently slipped in telling this narrative and left something in that bears paying attention to.

PHOENIX, Arizona (AFP) – One month after Arizona introduced a law cracking down on businesses which employ illegal immigrants, Latino workers are fleeing the state and companies are laying off employees in droves, officials and activists say.
 
Arizona has become one of the frontlines of the US immigration debate and broke new ground on January 1 with a law that threatens to put of business companies which knowingly hire undocumented workers.

The effects of the law have been immediate, according to businessmen, workers and rights activists who spoke to AFP, with companies driving up wages to attract labor while being forced to part company with prized employees.

Even though a federal judge ruled last week that there will be no prosecutions under the law until March, it has done little to prevent a phenomenon being dubbed "Hispanic Panic."

"There's a lot of fear and some people are leaving," said Salvador Reza, an immigrant-rights activist who runs a day labor center in Phoenix.

"The fear is not only at the worker level, it's at the employer level. I've never seen that before in my life."

Workers are going back to Mexico or to other states, Reza said. He predicted small businesses forced to lay off skilled employees like welders will now pay them in cash, creating a black economy.

"The underground economy is going to take hold now, and there will be less money for the state," Reza said.

Ten men were laid off at Ironco, a steel fabrication company in Phoenix which builds large-scale construction projects.

"We had to let them go," president Sheridan Bailey said. "Unfortunately some of these people were our best workers. This is terribly tragic."

Two out of three men who apply at Ironco, a construction firm that specialises in buildings and parking garages made with heavy steel, are Hispanic or foreign-born Hispanic, the company said.

Ironco has raised steel fitters' wages 30 percent from a year ago, according to Bailey. "We've raised wages, competing for a diminishing supply (of workers)," he said. "WeÂ?ve been on a campaign of quality improvement, training, scouring the waterfront, so to speak, for American vets, ex-offenders trying to find their way back into society."

Catch that? Wages have risen 30% for legal workers. They have been trying to hire people who have been forced to the margins of society due to a flood of cheap, illegal workers. And they are paying much better wages in order to do so. High fence, wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who play by the rules. And higher real wages for those who do.

I don't think they meant to tell that in their narrative.

That “Surprise!” Thing Again

A few days ago, I posted about the apparently surprising news that enforcing laws against illegal immigration actually works in getting illegals to go back to their own countries. Lo and behold, Reuters has just noticed the same thing. Illegals are "self-deporting" at record levels.

PHOENIX (Reuters) – Mexican illegal immigrant Lindi sat down with her husband Marco Antonio in the weeks before Christmas to decide when to go back to Mexico.

She has spent three years working as a hairdresser in and around Phoenix, but now she figures it is time to go back to her hometown of Aguascalientes in central Mexico.

"The situation has got so tough that there don't seem to be many options left for us," Lindi, who asked for her last name not to be used, told Reuters.

The couple are among a growing number of illegal immigrants across the United States who are starting to pack their bags and move on as a crackdown on undocumented immigrants widens and the U.S. economy slows, turning a traditional Christmas trek home into a one-way trip.

In the past year, U.S. immigration police have stepped up workplace sweeps across the country and teamed up with a growing number of local forces to train officers to enforce immigration laws.

Meanwhile, a bill seeking to offer many of the 12 million illegal immigrants a path to legal status was tossed by the U.S. Congress, spurring many state and local authorities to pass their own measures targeting illegal immigrants.

The toughening environment has been coupled with a turndown in the U.S. economy, which has tipped the balance toward self deportation for many illegal immigrants left struggling to find work.

There is quite a lot of whining in the story about how the decline of the dollar has undercut the amount of money that the illegal immigrants can export back home and about how the US economy has weakened, making it tougher for them to find work. The upside of all that is that if enough of these folks leave, they will cease to exert downward pressure on wages in the US. It will also decrease the burden of illegal immigrants on local governments. Citizens will benefit.

Some of the illegals are moving within the US to areas where enforcement is not as strict – those places will continue to see that downward wage pressure and an increasing demand on public services and will suffer for it – eventually, the citizens will be screaming for enforcement in those areas as well. If anything, this all proves that the problem of illegal immigration can be solved. We can have strong borders while liberalizing our legal immigration programs.

High fence, wide gate. It will work.

Scottsdale, Arizona: No More

In response to the murder of a Phoenix police officer in September of this year, police in Scottsdale, Arizona have begun asking every, single suspect they arrest for proof of citizenship. If none is produced, Federal immigration authorities are notified. Why are they doing this? Because the cop-killer was an illegal immigrant who had twice been deported and had been arrested by Scottsdale police only 16 months before the murder. Had they taken the killer off the streets of this country then, officer Nick Erfle might not have died at the hands of Erik Jovani Martinez.

Scottsdale police had arrested Martinez on a misdemeanor charge 16 months earlier but they released him then because they didn't know he was an illegal immigrant who had been twice deported.

Erfle's killing "caused us to look at what were asking suspects," Scottsdale police Sgt. Mark Clark said. "If we arrest someone and then find that we called ICE (Customs and Immigration Enforcement) and they put a hold on them, then we know they have been deported and are back again."

Martinez was later killed by police after he stole a car and took a hostage, authorities said.

Now police in the affluent suburb ask every suspect about their citizenship, have ICE agents pick up those who are in this country illegally, and keep a database of possible illegal immigrants in case they turn up again.

Scottsdale Mayor Mary Manross supports the policy change and said that because every suspect is asked about citizenship, police are not engaged in racial profiling.

"I would not tolerate that," Manross said. "I think the chief has struck the right balance to do what we want to achieve."

ICE answers every call and helps get the lawbreakers out of the country. If police in the rest of the country did the same, how fast would the problem begin to go away? My guess is, not very long at all.

Losing The Talent Battle

Craig Barrett, the chairman of Intel Corporation, points out that Europe is making a smart move on granting visas to highly educated foreign immigrants, one that will severely disadvantage the United States in the brain game, as it were. While Barrett obviously has a dog in this fight, he also makes sense in pointing out the asinine visa system the US has in place at the moment.

The European Union took a step recently that the U.S. Congress can't seem to muster the courage to take. By proposing a simple change in immigration policy, E.U. politicians served notice that they are serious about competing with the United States and Asia to attract the world's top talent to live, work and innovate in Europe. With Congress gridlocked on immigration, it's clear that the next Silicon Valley will not be in the United States.

European politicians face many of the same political pressures surrounding immigration as their U.S. counterparts, and they, too, are not immune to those pressures. Nationalist and anti-immigrant factions in several Western European countries have made political gains in recent elections and are widely viewed as mainstream. Despite the hot-button nature of immigration issues, though, E.U. politicians advanced the "Blue Card" proposal in late October.

The plan is designed to attract highly educated workers by creating a temporary but renewable two-year visa. A streamlined application process would allow qualified prospective workers to navigate the system and start working in high-need jobs within one to three months.

This contrasts starkly with the byzantine system in place in the United States, which increasingly threatens America's long-term competitiveness.

To some extent, the high-tech industries have gamed the H-1B visa system, according to some other articles I read some time back, using the highly educated, but lower paid, immigrants to cut jobs for American programmers. So I am not entirely sympathetic to Barrett's arguments here. On the other hand, I am also very supportive of fixing the badly broken immigration system and the securing the border. That high fence, wide gate thing I keep writing about. If European governments approve the EU-backed measure, the US would, indeed, be at a disadvantage in the global talent market. This is something that needs to be fixed. Desperately.

Surprise: Enforcement Actually Helps Control Illegal Immigration

The Tucson Citizen reports that many illegal immigrants are fleeing Arizona in the face of the new state laws mandating sanctions on employers who hire illegals. It is still only a trickle, but the numbers will almost certainly increase if the new law survives the latest legal challenge and actually goes into effect in January.

The number returning to Mexico is difficult to calculate, but there is no question that many families are leaving, according to Mexican government officials, local community leaders and immigrants themselves.
 
"The situation in Arizona has become very tough," Jorge said minutes after driving into a Mexican immigration and customs checkpoint south of the border on Mexico 15.
Dozens of immigrants are leaving the U.S. daily, and even more are expected to leave once the sanctions law takes effect in January, provided the law survives a last-minute legal challenge, said Rosendo Hernandez, president of the advocacy group Immigrants Without Borders.
 
"If people can't find work, they won't be able to pay their bills, so they will leave," Hernandez said.

In what are considered bellwethers of permanent moves back to Mexico, the Mexican consulate in Phoenix has seen a dramatic increase in applications for Mexican birth certificates, passports and other documents that immigrants living in Arizona will need to return home.
In November alone, the consulate processed 240 applications for Mexican birth certificates, three times as many as the same month last year, said Carlos Flores Vizcarra, Mexican consul general of Phoenix.
 
Processing applications

The consulate also has processed more than 16,500 applications for Mexican passports this year, nearly twice as many as last year. Vizcarra attributed some of the demand for passports to stricter travel regulations among the U.S., Mexico and Canada slated to take effect in January. But he said many illegal immigrants are applying for passports in case they lose their jobs due to the sanctions law or a slowdown in the economy and therefore want to go back and live in Mexico.

"People are fearful. They are getting ready as much as they can (to leave)," he said.
Mexican officials and border authorities expect southbound traffic to rise significantly this week as Christmas approaches.

The exodus has drawn cheers from foes of illegal immigration.

The story should enrage people. The family they profile used falsified documents to obtain work. They are finally leaving because of the new law – which is already doing what it was intended to do before it goes into effect. It took the threat of the law for their employers to bother to check – whereupon the forged documents were discovered and both were terminated. They were then unable to find other jobs because the law, again, functioned as designed.

The paper fails to ask if the two used stolen identities, which would be nice to know, especially for the people who had their identities compromised. They're too busy trying to make the family into sympathetic figures. It would be nice to see some concern for their fellow citizens as well.

Clue to the politicians: enforcement actually works. We can severely reduce the number of people entering this country illegally, control the borders and liberalize the legal immigration system. A high fence, a wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who follow the rules. Short shrift for those who break them.

Intifada On The Mexican Border

This is just lovely. It seems that US Border Patrol agents are coming under increasing numbers of attacks – mostly by rock-throwing Mexicans – at the US border with Mexico. Agents have responded more aggressively in recent months as longer-range, non-lethal weapons have become available. The agents are firing pepper ball weapons and teargas back at the rock-throwers.

The Border Patrol says its agents have been attacked nearly 1,000 times during a one-year period.

The agency's top official in San Diego, Mike Fisher, said agents are taking action because Mexican authorities have been slow to respond. When an attack happens, he said, American authorities often wait hours for them to come, and help usually never arrives.

"We have been taking steps to ensure that our agents are safe," Fisher said.

Mexico's acting consul general in San Diego, Ricardo Pineda, has insisted that U.S. authorities stop firing onto Mexican soil. He met with Border Patrol officials last month after the agency fired tear gas into Mexico. The agency defended that counterattack, saying agents were being hit with a hail of ball bearings from slingshots in Mexico.

U.S. officials say the violence indicates that smugglers are growing more desperate as stepped-up security makes it harder to sneak across the border. The assailants try to distract agents long enough to let people dash in the United States.

The head of a union representing Border Patrol employees said the violence also results from the decision to put agents right up against the border, a departure from the early 1990s when they waited farther back to make arrests.

"When you get that close to the fence, your agents are sitting ducks," said T.J. Bonner, president of the National Border Patrol Council.

Border Patrol agents were attacked 987 times along the U.S.-Mexico border during the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, the agency said. That's up 31 percent from 752 attacks a year earlier, and it's the highest number since the agency began recording attacks in the late 1990s.

About two-thirds of the attacks were with rocks. Many of the rest involved physical assaults, such as illegal immigrants getting into fist fights with guards.

About one of every four attacks occurred in San Diego, and most of those happened along a heavily fortified, 10-mile stretch of the border starting at the Pacific Ocean.

By refusing to deal with this on their side of the border, Mexico is inviting a tragedy. When it comes – and it likely will – it will be their fault, not the fault of the United States.

UPDATE: Same AP report from MSNBC, that link should remain good unlike the Yahoo News one that expires after a short while.

Getting Immigration Right

Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School and the daughter of immigrants, pens an op-ed in today's Washington Post about the need for America to get it right on immigration. Getting it right means not veering to either extreme position in the debate. I think she presents somewhat of a caricature of many of the people who are opposed to the situation we have on our hands at this moment, but she still makes some excellent points.

If you don't speak Spanish, Miami really can feel like a foreign country. In any restaurant, the conversation at the next table is more likely to be Spanish than English. And Miami's population is only 65 percent Hispanic. El Paso is 76 percent Latino. Flushing, N.Y., is 60 percent immigrant, mainly Chinese.

Chinatowns and Little Italys have long been part of America's urban landscape, but would it be all right to have entire U.S. cities where most people spoke and did business in Chinese, Spanish or even Arabic? Are too many Third World, non-English-speaking immigrants destroying our national identity?

For some Americans, even asking such questions is racist. At the other end of the spectrum, the conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly fulminates against floods of immigrants who threaten to change America's "complexion" and replace what he calls the "white Christian male power structure."

But for the large majority in between, Democrats and Republicans alike, these questions are painful, with no easy answers. At some level, most of us cherish our legacy as a nation of immigrants. But are all immigrants really equally likely to make good Americans? Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns, in danger of losing our core values and devolving "into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America"?

My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they couldn't afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor at Berkeley, and I'm a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America's tolerance and opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.

Nevertheless, I think Huntington has a point.

Around the world today, nations face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity. Across Europe, immigration has resulted in unassimilated, largely Muslim enclaves that are hotbeds of unrest and even terrorism. The riots in France last month were just the latest manifestation. With Muslims poised to become a majority in Amsterdam and elsewhere within a decade, major West European cities could undergo a profound transformation. Not surprisingly, virulent anti-immigration parties are on the rise.

Not long ago, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union disintegrated when their national identities proved too weak to bind together diverse peoples. Iraq is the latest example of how crucial national identity is. So far, it has found no overarching identity strong enough to unite its Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.

I think that the number of people who are opposed to immigration on racial grounds is a very small minority, just as I think that the number of people who are in favor of in on racial grounds are a small minority. But Chua's ideas for fixing the current mess sound very familiar. Regular readers will recognize them as being very much in line with what I have been advocating for some time here: A high fence, a wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who play be the rules. The fact is that English should be our official language, but we can and should welcome legal immigrants into this country. Our admissions policies should favor talent and recognize that we do need a good mix of people from all over the world. But the melting pot is still a necessary framework for making America work. So is a strong border that lets us be in control of who gets in.

America has succeeded as a nation of immigrants because we have been able to assimilate wave after wave of people coming from all over the globe. While the new arrivals may always be more in tune with where they came from for many years, those immigrant's children have become Americans. That is how we should still be functioning. I would suggest reading all of Chua's piece. I think she gets the essentials correct.

Common Sense On Common Language

John Fund comments again today on the deal Nancy Pelosi made with the Hispanic Caucus to kill a bipartisan amendment to a funding bill that provides money to FBI, NASA and Justice Department. That amendment would have indemnified the Salvation Army and other employers from efforts by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to penalize them for enforcing English language requirements in the workplace (original post here.). The Hispanic Caucus had refused to vote for a patch to the Alternative Minimum Tax bill if Pelosi didn't kill the amendment. Fund points out the destructiveness of the position taken by the Hispanic Caucus – to Hispanics and other immigrants.

In theory, employers can escape the EEOC's clutches if they can prove their policies are based on grounds of safety or "compelling business necessity." But most companies choose to settle rather than be saddled with the legal bills. Synchro Start Products, a Chicago firm, paid $55,000 to settle an EEOC suit against its English-only policy, which it says it adopted after the use of multiple languages led to miscommunication. When one group of employees speak in a language other workers can't understand, the company said, it's easy for personal misunderstandings to undermine morale. Many companies complain they are in a Catch-22–potentially liable to lawsuits if employees insult each other but facing EEOC action if they pass English-only rules to better supervise those employee comments.

Sen. Lamar Alexander (R., Tenn.), who authored the now-stalled amendment to prohibit the funding of EEOC lawsuits against English-only rules, is astonished at the opposition he's generated. Rep. Joe Baca (D., Calif.), chair of the Hispanic Caucus, boasted that "there ain't going to be a bill" including the Alexander language because Speaker Pelosi had promised him the conference committee handling the Justice Department's budget would never meet. So Sen. Alexander proposed a compromise, only requiring that Congress be given 30 days notice before the filing of any EEOC lawsuit. "I was turned down flat," he told me. "We are now celebrating diversity at the expense of unity. One way to create that unity is to value, not devalue, our common language, English."

That's what pro-assimilation forces are moving to do. TV Azteca, Mexico's second-largest network, is launching a 60-hour series of English classes on all its U.S. affiliates. It recognizes that teaching English empowers Latinos. "If you live in this country, you have to speak as everybody else," Jose Martin Samano, Azteca's U.S. anchor, told Fox News. "Immigrants here in the U.S. can make up to 50% or 60% more if they speak both English and Spanish. This is something we have to do for our own people."….

….The alternative to Americanization is polarization. Already a tenth of the population speaks English poorly or not at all. Almost a quarter of all K-12 students nationwide are children of immigrants living between two worlds. It's time for people of good will to reject both the nativist and anti-assimilation extremists and act. If the federal government spends billions on the Voice of America for overseas audiences and on National Public Radio for upscale U.S. listeners, why not fund a "Radio New America" whose primary focus is to teach English and U.S. customs to new arrivals? 

Locking immigrants into a nether region where they cannot communicate with the rest of the people in the country is a recipe for creating a permanent under-class. It leads to balkanization and fragmentation of the society as a whole. The Hispanic Caucus has not done any favors for Hispanics or other immigrants with this. I disagree with Fund's characterization of people who want English only rules as nativist, however. Some are, but the majority are not. Most Americans are perfectly happy with legal immigrants who want to become Americans. What they are not happy with is an illegal underclass with a different language.

The Minefield

The Wall Street Journal reports that there is growing anxiety among Democrats over immigration issues (like the one in the previous post. Many of the politicians feel that they are in real danger of alienating traditional core constituencies over the party's stand on immigration. The issue is starting to become a very dangerous one for Democrats.

Democrats "are pretty jumpy on the issue," says Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat who pushed for immigration overhaul in the House. "They would prefer to allow the Republicans to shepherd the Hispanic votes into the Democratic column without having to scare away a single other voter themselves," he says.

"That's not likely to happen. "This election could turn on this issue if we don't handle it intelligently," says Connecticut Sen. Christopher Dodd, a Democratic presidential candidate. After a recent Iowa City foreign-policy speech, four of the 30 questions passed up to him from the audience were about immigration.

In a Nov. 5 Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll, 11% of adults — and 4% of Democratic voters — said illegal immigration is their top priority. But members of that minority, organized on the Internet, have created political turmoil by flooding lawmakers' offices with faxes and regularly raising the issue on the campaign trail.

Similarly, a November University of Iowa poll shows just 2.4% of Iowa Democrats consider immigration as the issue "most important" to determining their vote, but 85% said a candidate's position on immigration is important or very important to them.

The report indicates that blue collar, African-American and middle class voters are all in jeopardy for the Democrats if they turn too hard in the direction of appearing to champion immigrant's rights over the needs of those voters. (Which they essentially just did as I pointed out in the previous post.) This is a minefield for the Democrats. If the Republicans get this issue right, addressing concerns over border security and pointing out that stemming a flood of illegal immigrants is in the best interests of immigrants who are here legally as well as other groups who are feeling downward wage pressure, this could swing the election in a new direction.

Failure to address immigration issues hurt the Republicans badly in 2006. It could prove even more devastating to the Democrats.

A Problem For Democrats

The Democratic party may be already starting to hurt itself on immigration issues by this latest example that John Fund writes about today. Both the House and the Senate passed legislation that would shield the Salvation Army specifically and other employers generically from lawsuits over having English language requirements for employees. Nancy Pelosi has agreed to kill that bill after the Hispanic Caucus threatened to block a promised bill that would shield 23 million taxpayers from the Alternative Minimum Tax.

Sen. Lamar Alexander, a moderate Republican from Tennessee, is dumbstruck that legislation he views as simple common sense would be blocked. He noted that the full Senate passed his amendment to shield the Salvation Army by 75-19 last month, and the House followed suit with a 218-186 vote just this month. "I cannot imagine that the framers of the 1964 Civil Rights Act intended to say that it's discrimination for a shoe shop owner to say to his or her employee, 'I want you to be able to speak America's common language on the job,' " he told the Senate last Thursday.

But that's exactly what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is trying to do. In March the EEOC sued the Salvation Army because its thrift store in Framingham, Mass., required its employees to speak English on the job. The requirement was clearly posted and employees were given a year to learn the language. The EEOC claimed the store had fired two Hispanic employees for continuing to speak Spanish on the job. It said that the firings violated the law because the English-only policy was not "relevant" to job performance or safety.

"If it is not relevant, it is discriminatory, it is gratuitous, it is a subterfuge to discriminate against people based on national origin," says Rep. Charles Gonzalez of Texas, one of several Hispanic Democrats in the House who threatened to block Ms. Pelosi's attempts to curtail the Alternative Minimum Tax unless she killed the Alexander amendment.

The confrontation on the night of Nov. 8 was ugly. Members of the Hispanic Caucus initially voted against the rule allowing debate on a tax bill that included the AMT "patch," which for a year would protect some 23 million Americans from being kicked into a higher income tax bracket.

Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a moderate from Maryland, was beside himself. Congressional Quarterly reports that he jabbed his finger on the House floor at Joe Baca, the California Democrat who chairs the Hispanic Caucus, and yelled, "How dare you destroy this party? This will be the worst loss in 10 years."

In order to head off the Hispanic Caucus threat, Pelosi and Hoyer had to promise to kill the amendment. The insistence on requiring employers to hire people who cannot speak English – and refuse to learn it – is likely to bite the Democrats. Forcing the hiring of non-English speakers puts an insane burden on the employer and is very likely to increase resentment in an electorate that is already very unhappy with Washington's inability to deal with immigration issues – especially illegal immigration issues.

I've mentioned before that my mother's parents were immigrants from Norway. They refused to allow my mother and my uncle to speak Norwegian at home and insisted on speaking English. Partly it was for the good of the children, but it was also for the good of my grandparents, who greatly strengthened their own English language skills as a result. There is nothing wrong with asking people who come here to learn to function here. The actions of the Hispanic Caucus are against the best interests of the people they claim to represent.

Changing The System

Steven Malanga, writing in the Washington Post, points out that there is more than just a problem with illegal immigration – there are also problems with the legal immigration system. Those problems need rectification but it will take a discussion over how we, as a nation, want our policies to work.

Hillary Clinton helped to elevate immigration to a central position in the Presidential election when she waffled on the question of whether she favored drivers' licenses for illegal immigrants. Yet much of the public discussion that has followed Clinton's confrontation with questioner Tim Russert has focused only on illegal immigrants. We still know very little about what the candidates would do to reform our broken system of legal immigration.

Our current system results from changes begun in the mid-1960s, when the country scrapped its old immigration policy, based on quotas determined by a person's national origin, in favor of broader hemispheric quotas and visa preferences for family members of those already here. The framers of this new system claimed that they were merely tinkering with policy. "Contrary to the charges in some quarters, [the bill] will not inundate America with immigrants," Sen. Edward Kennedy said.

But not only did legal immigration soar by 60 percent in the first 10 years after the reform legislation; the origins of immigration shifted to poorer countries around the world, and many new immigrants arrived with low levels of education and little job training, stranding them in low-paying jobs and slowing their economic mobility. A recent study by Harvard economists George Boras and Lawrence Katz of Mexican immigrants who came here in the 1970s found that after 20 years in the American workforce these workers were still earning about 40 percent less than American-born workers — a sharp contrast with earlier generations of immigrants, who after several decades here tended to be virtually at par with American workers. The economists also estimated that recently arriving young Mexican workers (and Mexicans make up the largest category of legal immigrants to the U.S.) were starting off with an even bigger wage disadvantage relative to American workers than their predecessors did in the 1970s.

I would point out that the fact that immigrants are not as upwardly mobile as in years past probably has rather a lot to do with the flood of illegal immigrants who are knocking the economic props out from under them. That is, however, beside the point of Malanga's piece. He points to Australia, which uses a very stringent skills based immigration process. That policy has ensured that immigrants to Australia are very successful and very upwardly mobile. In contrast, Canada uses a standard that does encourage better-educated immigrants but is not skills-based. That policy has led to less successful immigrants.

The mess that passes for policy that we have in this country is a disaster for immigrants and native-born citizens alike. It is past time to have a discussion on how to fix the train wreck of our immigration policy. The answer is not opening the floodgates further or leaving things in the state they are in now.

The Immigration Issue

Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, has an opinion piece over at The Politico that should be a must read for Republican party strategists. Brown confirms what I have been saying for some time now: illegal immigration is the key issue for the 2008 election cycle.

Immigration is becoming for the 2008 election what affirmative action/racial preferences was 15 years ago — the kind of emotional wedge issue that offers Republicans a way to split rank-and-file Democrats from their leaders. 

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the battle over programs aimed at helping minorities was a major factor in many political campaigns. The election results often appeared to contradict what seemed to be the public’s opinion on the issue. 

Looking back, much of the confusion stemmed from the wording of many poll questions on the subject. They tended to show strong support for “affirmative action,” which was how the programs were described by supporters and, often, the media. 

But opponents used the term “racial preferences” to describe programs that often gave minorities an edge in competition for college admission and jobs. When pollsters used that language to describe the programs, they found strong public opposition. 

Affirmative action is an issue similar to immigration today, one on which Democratic activists, but not necessarily the mass of party members, differ from the general electorate. Activists often infer their opponents are racially motivated — creating strong and often hostile feelings on both sides. 

How immigration plays out politically in 2008 will likely be determined by which side can convince the mass of Americans that their terminology best describes reality. 

We have seen the Licenses for Lawbreakers® scheme put forth by Eliot Spitzer hit the wall at approximately Mach 4. The result is the shattering of Spitzer's hopes for higher office. (And the impact left a pretty darned impressive crater.) We have seen the presumed "inevitable" candidate for the Democrats have a mini-meltdown over the same issue. The blood is in the water there and the sharks are moving in.

If framing is, as Brown suggests, the key, then a simple, powerful slogan makes it work.

High fence, wide gate and a hearty welcome for those who play by the rules. It does not matter where you came from, if you play by the rules and want to be an American, you are welcome here. That simple, that powerful, that American. Make sure that people who are here legally have a path to upward mobility by ensuring that a flood of illegal immigrants are not cutting the props out from under the ones who play by the rules. They will vote for the party that ensures they have a way up. They will detest the party that is trying to keep them down.

Spitzer Running For Cover

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer appears to be running for cover, abandoning his “Licenses for Lawbreakers™” scheme according to an Associated Press report. Apparently, he has seen the light or, as is more likely, the polls.

The governor is due to meet Wednesday morning with New York's congressional delegation, many of whom openly oppose the program. Debate over the issue also has spilled into New York Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign.

The governor's office signaled to New York lawmakers Tuesday that Spitzer will say at the meeting that he is shelving the plan and that immigration is a federal issue to be handled by Washington, according to congressional aides who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because no formal announcement had been made.

Last month, Spitzer sought to salvage the license effort by striking a deal with the Department of Homeland Security to create three distinct types of state driver's licenses: one "enhanced" that will be as secure as a passport; a second-tier license good for boarding airplanes; and a third marked not valid for federal purposes that would be available to illegal immigrants and others.

Clinton has been criticized by her Democratic and Republican rivals for her noncommittal answers on the subject. She has said she sympathizes with governors like Spitzer who are forced to confront the issue of immigration because the federal government has not enacted immigration reform. She has not taken a position on the actual plan offered by Spitzer.

A Siena Research Institute poll released today shows that Spitzer is tanking in the public's opinion. Those results gave him a whopping 25% of voters willing to reelect him.

ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Eliot Spitzer's plan to provide illegal immigrants with driver's licenses has sunk his favorability rating to an all-time low of 41 percent, and has left only 25 percent of voters planning to re-elect him, according to a poll the Siena Research Institute released Tuesday.

Forty-six percent had an unfavorable opinion of Spitzer, and 49 percent said they would "prefer someone else" as the next governor. Last month, 54 percent of voters had a favorable opinion of the governor.

"Eliot Spitzer's standing with voters has fallen faster and further than any politician in recent New York history," Siena spokesman Steven Greenberg said in a written statement. "Everything may not have changed on day one but from the voters' perspective, everything about Governor Spitzer changed in year one."

Spitzer is in a political freefall. There may be enough time for him to recover before the next election, but it does not look good. His antics may well have damaged the Democrats as well. If Clinton manages to win the nomination and then fails to win the general election, Eliot may as well move to another country if he wants to indulge in politics; he will be persona non grata to the Democrats.