Latest On IMMIGRATION TOPICS | VIA Times – July 2014 Issue
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Latest On IMMIGRATION TOPICS

robert gard

By: Robert Gard

 

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Is Comprehensive Immigration Reform (“CIR”) Dead This Year or Is It Just on Life Support? The best chance in three decades to rewrite our Nation’s immigration laws has slipped away. One year ago, the Senate cobbled together a bi-partisan Comprehensive Immigration Reform (“CIR”) bill with 68 votes, and pro-reform groups have mobilized and kept the pressure on for more than 20 months, but bi-partisanship, the overwhelming popular support of the electorate, impressive coalitions of business, religious, and social groups have been no match for the die-hard restrictionists in the House of Representatives. Congressmen and Senators in both parties have said that CIR will not be revisited until President Obama is out of office, but I still hold out some hope that the issue can be revived after the mid-term elections late this year, but only if the Republican Party suffers serious setbacks at the polls in the mid-term elections. If the Republicans are wildly successful in the mid-terms, they may introduce something that they call Comprehensive Immigration Reform, but it will be a primarily enforcement only bill, and will look nothing like the previously passed (in the Senate) bi-partisan S. 744 CIR bill that passed through the Senate last summer. After the mid-term elections, I would not be surprised to see at least a few Republicans in the House and Senate support a grant of Temporary Protected Status (“TPS”) for the Philippines in an effort to secure political support from the Philippine community; a community whose political support has been historically split between the two major parties. The political failure in the House also leaves some 12 million undocumented immigrants in continued limbo over their status and is certain to increase political pressure on Obama to act on his own. “Nothing’s going to happen,” Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said in an interview after denouncing his GOP colleagues for their inaction in a fiery House floor speech this week. “My point of view is, this is over. . . . Every day, they become not recalcitrant, but even more energetically opposed to working with us. How many times does someone have to say no until you understand they mean no?” Chances of legislation advancing in the House are “next to zero,” said Sen. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a member of a bipartisan group of eight senators who led reform efforts in the upper chamber. “It’s a shame,” Flake added. But after talking to GOP colleagues in the House, “there’s just no appetite for it right now.” By now, the litany of questionable excuses is well known; the defeat of House Majority Leader, Eric Cantor, by a Tea Party backed candidate who attacked Rep. Cantor’s insufficiently strident antiimmigration rhetoric; the new crisis erupting on the Mexican border, as tens of thousands of unaccompanied Central American children were apprehended crossing the border illegally into Texas over the past several months; and the repeated attacks on President Obama’s “trustworthiness” to enforce the laws, as the Administration vows to do what it can on the immigration issue, in absence of Congressional action. Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a leading immigrant rights group, predicted that pressure on Obama would “increase significantly in July” because CIR advocates had lost hope in the legislative process. The President has asked immigration activists to put pressure on Congressional Republicans instead of asking the President to take administrative action, but even the President knows that CIR has been lingering on the outskirts of political agendas since it last failed in 2007, and even the most patient of supporters will run out of patience after more than seven years of unfulfilled promises. For their part, the immigration activists put pressure on the President because they know that is where they have some political influence, and they are unhappy that the President has been deporting people at a rate of more than 1,000 per week; far more than any previous Administration. They are also quite aware that the Tea Party and their close allies, the neo- Confederates, have nothing but contempt for them, and their impassioned pleas for CIR will not sway them in the least. Many in the GOP recognize that the demographics are unfavorable for a re-taking of the White House in 2016 unless they can find a way to draw in no-white voters. Republicans’ growing inability to win non-white votes is problematic because the white vote appears to be in an irreversible downward slide as a percentage of the overall electorate. In fact, the white vote has declined as a percentage of the total electorate in every presidential election since 1992. In the 2012 Presidential election, only one in ten people who voted for Romney weren’t white, so there are forces within the GOP that want to get CIR done, they just don’t hold the reins of power in the Party right now. But any small hint of reasonableness that emerges in the Republican House leadership is met with well-funded threats of opposition from the right in primary elections, and a reminder that antiimmigration zealot, Rep. Steve King (R.-IA) is running the show in Congress on the immigration issue, and there are constant reminders to establishment Republicans that the fringe elements that helped the Republicans take control of the House a few years back are now in control of the entire party. While President Obama had preferred that CIR issues be resolved in Congress, and he had earlier provided hints of what he might do if Congress failed to bring CIR legislation for a vote, he made a point of delaying major proposed administrative actions until July to afford the Speaker of the House a final opportunity to act responsibly, and schedule a vote on the bi-partisan CIR bill pending in the House. In May, the President asked Jeh Johnson, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, to conduct a thorough review of U.S. deportation policies. That review has been completed, but the President asked the DHS to hold off on releasing the results of that review until at least July, to avoid antagonizing Congressional Republicans. Expect that review and suggestions for further avenues of prosecutorial discretion to be released early in July. On June 30th, the President announced that he was done waiting for Congress, and would do whatever he could administratively. The President does have the authority to take certain actions administratively that, while sure to anger the “right”, would also reduce immigrant visa waiting times significantly. Right now, immigrant visa numbers are used by the principal immigrant and each derivative/ dependent family member must have his or her own visa number. By not counting derivative/ dependent family members against the visa number quota, many more families could secure immigrant visa numbers, and the limited supply of numbers would benefit so many more people. The President could also expand the concept of Parole-in-Place, or “PIP” to cover persons already in the U.S. who are beneficiaries of approved I-130 Relative Petitions or I-140 Petition for Immigrant Workers, allowing those persons to obtain employment authorization and advance parole while awaiting immigrant visa eligibility and permanent residence in the U.S., rather being stuck in lengthy limbo abroad due to the imposition of the three or ten year bars to inadmissibility due to lengthy unlawful presence in the U.S. Other immigration activists are urging the President to expand the two-year-old DACA Program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) to include many of the undocumented parents of U.S. citizen children. A report released to the Huffington Post in late June found that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency “carried out more than 72,000 deportations of parents who said they had U.S.-born children.” Huffington Post’s Elise Foley commented that the figure reflects “total removals, not the exact number of individuals who were deported.” Still, the report found that “while most of the parents of U.S.-born children deported last year had been convicted of a crime, about 10,700 had no criminal convictions, although they may have fit other ICE priorities for removal.” Representative Gutierrez (D.- IL) has even distributed a manual to other Congressional Offices, outlining strategies and methods that can be used by Congressional Offices to intervene in deportation/ removal cases, and strongly advocate for staying or dismissing removal proceedings. “Many Congressional offices have played, and should play, a key role in ensuring that constituents facing removal are not unjustly separated from their families,” said Carolina Canizales, United We Dream’s Education Not Deportation program coordinator. “At times, it is only action from our elected officials that can prevent immigration authorities from ignoring their own procedures and deporting constituents without review or despite hardship it would cause.”

Quick Notes The U.S. Border is a Constitution- Free Zone THE U.S./MEXICO BORDER – A CONSTITUTION-FREE ZONE by David Bacon – ACLUMagazine, June 2014

Under the Fourth Amendment, the people of the United States are not supposed to be subject to random and arbitrary stops and searches. At the end of June, the U.S. `Supreme Court ruled that law enforcement agencies generally must secure a search warrant to search the contents of a person’s “smart phone.” It’s assumed that the same reasoning would apply to laptops and tablets. U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) routinely searches these electronic devices, asking for passwords or confiscating the devices so that they may be hacked or broken into, with no basis or articulated suspicion required for the search or “fishing expedition. One would think that the recent decision of the Supreme Court would curtail these warrantless searches ”But within 100 miles of a U.S. border, these rules may not apply. Three facts about the Constitution- Free Zone Fact 1 In the “Constitution-free zone,” Border Patrol agents don’t need a warrant or probable cause to conduct a “routine search.” All travelers crossing a border are assigned a risk assessment score that will be retained for 40 years. Fact 2 The Border Patrol can put a checkpoint anywhere in the Constitutionfree zone (think Fifth Avenue!). “One hundred air miles is still, technically, the border,” says Leslie Lawson from the Nogales Border Patrol Station. Everyone at a checkpoint must answer questions about citizenship status. Fact 3 The Constitution-free zone extends 100 miles from any U.S. border. Two-thirds of the U.S. population (197.4 million in 2008) lives within this zone, which includes nine of the 10 largest metropolitan areas, and the entire populations of: Connecticut, Delaware, Washington, D.C., Florida, Hawaii, Maine, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Hampshire, New Jersey and Rhode Island; and over 90 percent of: California, Maryland, New York, Vermont and Washington. COPYRIGHT BY AUTHOR — 2014

 

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