Thread: Say what you want but....

Immigration Officials Arrest 175 Fugitives in Sweep of Southern California
Friday , June 22, 2007

SANTA ANA, Calif —

Federal authorities swept through Southern California this week and arrested 175 people for deportation, including a Mexican man wanted for murder and a convicted child molester who already had been deported once, authorities announced Friday.

The sweep was part of a massive operation aimed at capturing immigration fugitives nationwide. Teams operating in Southern California have made more than 1,600 arrests in the past nine months, said officials with the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This week agents concentrated their efforts in Orange County. Those arrested included 27 people who have criminal records and are in the country illegally and 26 fugitives who ignored deportation orders by judges, ICE said.

"Foreign nationals who violate our laws and commit crime against our citizens should be on notice that there are serious consequences for their actions," said Jim Hayes, field office director for ICE detention and removal operations in Los Angeles.

Among those arrested were 35-year-old Almarez Reveles Gonzalo in Baldwin Park on Thursday. Hours later, he was turned over to Mexican authorities who allege he ambushed and killed his 74-year-old uncle in Zacatecas nine years ago.

Jamie Pea-Martinez, 30, was arrested at his Santa Ana home. Pea-Martinez had a prior conviction for child molestation and had been deported previously, ICE officials said.

Some of those arrested could be charged with illegally re-entering the United States. They could face up to 20 years in prison if convicted of the felony.

Most of those arrested this week were Mexican nationals but some came from other countries, including India, Kenya and the Philippines, authorities said. They were subject to immediate deportation, and more than half of those arrested have already been sent out of the country, ICE said.

OMG thats scary and to think there are some that just wanna keep them all here

Originally Posted by Berkley69

So they come here illegaly to commit crimes, why, our laws are easier here? These politicians should just do something (morally) right FOR ONCE.

EXACTLY but it appears these criminals have more power with elected officials than us voters who put them where they are today

Senators ask Reid for a “free, open, and transparent amendment process”
so who’s standing in the way?
By Michelle Malkin
June 25, 2007 10:31 PM

Today, five GOP senators appealed to Harry Reid not to use a cherry-picking amendment trick and cut off debate on the Bush-Kennedy shamnesty bill.

Here’s their letter:



http://michellemalkin.com/wp/wp-cont...er2reid003.jpg

Wanna know what Reid’s response was?

Stay tuned.

This entire process has stunk to high heaven from the get-go. No matter what happens on the Senate floor tomorrow on the cloture vote on the motion to proceed, do not forget this fact. Do not forget that the Grand Schemers in the White House and in both parties in the Senate have collaborated with Ted Kennedy and the open borders to ram this fundamentally flawed package down our throats–and subvert the deliberative process.

Whatever happens tomorrow morning, there remains a critical time period between tomorrow and Thursday, when the cloture vote on the overall shamnesty takes place. This fight began a long time ago. It doesn’t end tomorrow. My Hill sources say Senate wafflers are feeling the heat. They need to feel it all week long.

Ghost of '86 failure haunts bid for immigration reform
Fri Jun 22, 12:22 AM ET

Hovering over the Senate immigration debate like a malignant ghost is the near total failure of the last attempt to bring immigration under control — a train wreck of a plan passed in 1986. Then as now, the heart of the plan was a legalization-for-enforcement trade-off. Roughly 3 million illegal immigrants were offered legal status in exchange for supposedly tough new enforcement procedures to stem the flow of undocumented immigrants.

It was a sham. The measure set up a system in which employers had to accept virtually any document a job applicant produced to prove his or her legality. The inevitable byproduct was a booming industry in phony documents — and 12 million more illegal immigrants.

Now, 21 years later, legislators are being asked to make roughly the same deal: Give those 12 million undocumented immigrants probationary legal status and a path to permanent residency and citizenship. In exchange, tough new enforcement procedures will sharply cut the flow of future illegal immigrants. To skeptics, it's Groundhog Day.

Except that it's not.

The new enforcement plan is not yet convincing and must be improved. But it is built on a credible foundation.

On the border, hundreds of miles of fence are already being built, cameras and sensors installed, and the Border Patrol is adding thousands more agents. All are steps long demanded by immigration opponents, and all will be extended.

But fences and border agents won't keep undocumented workers out if the magnet of appealing jobs constantly lures them in. Reformers joke, grimly, that the nation is sending immigrants opposing messages: There's a "Keep Out" sign at the border, but 20 feet in there's a "Help Wanted" sign.

That makes the most important piece of any enforcement regime what it does in the workplace, where more than 7 million employers have to decide every day whether job applicants are legal or not. This is where the 1986 bill most notoriously failed, and where the 2007 bill is more promising — if the promise can be realized. That's a big if.

The bill is very ambitious.

Any legal worker would be expected to have an ID that was difficult or impossible to forge, preferably with a photo or biometric ID that would prove indisputably that the person holding the card was the person on the card. That is essential, but it is a huge hurdle. For reasons unrelated to immigration, any national ID card is intensely controversial. At least six states have already rejected a plan to make driver's licenses a de facto national ID. The debate won't disappear quickly.

To further solidify the card's credibility, employers would have quick access to one or more government databases to check, for example, that a job applicant's Social Security number matched his or her name. The government's existing "Basic Pilot" program does that now, but only for the tiny fraction of the nation's employers that voluntarily participate. Penalties for repeat violations would be massive — as much as $75,000 for each illegal worker.

Again, a good idea. It might not reach every illegal immigrant working as a nanny or gardener, but if fully operational and aggressively enforced, it could close off millions of jobs at companies large and small. That would be a resounding success.

But the bill's proponents appear wildly optimistic about their ability to field such a complex system quickly. They give themselves just 18 months. By comparison, we just wrote in this space Thursday about the failure of a much smaller plan, simply requiring passports for people returning from nearby countries. That had to be delayed despite a three-year run up.

Given the difficulties and the '86 experience, the temptation is to say that the new bill's most controversial provision — offering legalized status to many of the 12 million immigrants now here illegally — should not kick in until the program is fully functional. But that makes the enforcement job exponentially harder. If the focus instead is on new arrivals, chances of success are much greater.

That would have a domino effect. If new immigration were sharply curtailed, the law would regain its lost credibility, deterring others and restoring faith in the system. Those already here could then easily be assimilated — provided they followed the bill's tough strictures, which include fines, payment of back taxes and no serious criminal record during a rigorous 13-year path to citizenship. In any case, trying to toss out millions of hard-working people and breaking up families whose children are U.S. citizens would be heartless, needless, exceedingly expensive and ultimately futile.

But all of that depends on having an enforcement system that will work.

Tne huge obstacle is money, and senators have taken an important step by adding $4.4 billion in upfront funding to the bill.

The other obstacles are will and competence. Congress can ensure that this works by writing tough accountability provisions into the bill, approving the ID cards, and following through with sustained oversight.

Critics of the bill talk as if Congress is powerless. They're running from the ghost their predecessors created in 1986. There's no reason they can't write a bill that won't haunt their successors 20 years from now.

This is the fifth in an occasional series of editorials about this year's immigration debate. View the previous editorials at blogs.usatoday.com/oped/immigration_editorial.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/200...r.uADEBA.s0NUE

We won't be fooled again
Fri Jun 22, 12:21 AM ET
By Jim DeMint

We do not need the Senate immigration bill to secure the border.

Congress has already passed laws authorizing border security, but the Homeland Security Department has failed to fully implement them. The administration already has the authority to build hundreds of miles of border fencing, hire and train 6,000 border patrol agents (bringing the total number of agents to 18,000), end catch and release, and create a national employment verification database. Essentially, all of the security benchmarks in the current Senate bill are already law.

Unfortunately, proponents of this bill would have us believe that none of these security measures can be implemented unless we pass a bill that grants amnesty to 12 million to 20 million illegal immigrants. In short, security is being held hostage in return for amnesty.

What's worse is that backers of this bill are hoping Americans have a short memory.

In 1986, the government was trying to figure out how to deal with a porous southern border and roughly 3 million illegal aliens who resided in America as a result.

It was decided that granting amnesty was acceptable as long as the border was made secure and immigration laws on the books were enforced.

Looking back, we see that amnesty was granted, but the border was never secured.

Now here we are, more than two decades later, with a new generation of Washington politicians pushing a similar proposal but expecting different results. Only this time, the illegal population has skyrocketed and unsecured borders pose a far graver national security threat in an age of terrorism.

This is a completely backward approach. Common sense demands that we put first things first. That means shelving amnesty proposals and making national security our first priority. Before we address the problem of the illegal population, we need to prove to the American people that we will keep our word.

Those who support this bill tell us we must pass it because the status quo is unacceptable. True. Millions of illegal aliens and a dysfunctional immigration system have created huge problems for our nation. But the most pervasive problem now is the 20-plus years of broken promises to secure the border and enforce our immigration laws. Americans agree this status quo must be rejected, and we must enforce our laws.

It is time for our government to do right by America. It's past time to right the wrong of 1986. Only then will we have the credibility to address the problem of the current illegal population.

As the saying goes, fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice

http://news.yahoo.com/s/usatoday/200...i3Vi2RKISs0NUE

http://www.kdqn.net/News_page.htm

Fake identifications rented for $800 6/24/07


Don’t like your name, you can rent a new one for just $800 long enough to get a job. A Mexican man was able to live in the U.S. illegally by renting a birth certificate for $800, at least long enough to get a job at a Pilgrim's Pride plant in De Queen. That was six years ago. Joel Garibay-Urbina became a supervisor at the plant under the name Juan Jose Rodriguez. He also bought a gun and was paying mortgage on his home in De Queen, where he was living with his family, before he was busted this year by police on a domestic battery complaint. That's when police discovered the phony ID.

A report from the inspector general's office for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services says cases of birth certificate fraud are rarely pursued. The report from 2000 says birth certificate fraud sometimes is prosecuted if it can be linked to large dollar losses or other punishable crimes.

A lawyer for Garibay-Urbina says his client "indicated it wasn't that difficult" to find someone to rent the birth certificate from. Prosecutors and immigration officials have no idea how many times the fake ID was used. A spokesperson for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said there were not estimates on how widespread the problem is. Arkansas’ Hispanic population is growing at one of the fastest rates in the Nation and De Queen’s is growing at one of the fastest rates in the state. Since 1990, De Queen’s population climbed from 4,600 to 5,700 and the number of Hispanics has climbed from 509 or 11% to more than 2,200 or 39%.

Garibay-Urbina is to be deported after serving a 1-year-prison term on a domestic battery conviction.



I can't find any info about his wife that he beat, last I heard she was air lifted to little rock BUT since the morons that took over the paper here ONLY puts a paper out once a week rather than daily now we NEVER get any news unless it comes off the radio station and I can't find the story there either now

Lead Weight or Gold Mine: What Are the True Costs of Immigration?
Karl Zinsmeister and Edward Lazear
Mon Jun 25, 2:30 PM ET

Over the last generation, not only the U.S. but also other high-immigration countries like the U.K., Canada, and Australia have experienced financial booms amidst strong immigration. Yet gloomy conclusions about the economic effects of immigration continue to surface. For example, a recent paper from the Heritage Foundation suggests that immigrant households in the U.S. cost federal, state, and local governments almost $20,000 per year (benefits paid out minus taxes received).

This claim is far out of line with other research--and with the immigration reform pending in the Senate. Today's bill would leave both future arrivals and the current undocumented ineligible for welfare benefits, Food Stamps, and Medicaid (except for emergency services). Under the new blueprint, one can qualify for those kinds of government transfers only the old-fashioned way: by becoming a citizen (or a Lawful Permanent Resident and then waiting five additional years). And, contrary to popular mythology, those will be demanding processes, taking a minimum of 13-18 years of effort (on either path).

Despite claims to the contrary, immigrants are net contributors to Social Security. The only immigrants able to collect benefits here will be those who contribute to the program under their own Social Security number for at least ten years. And many immigrants return to their home countries before they qualify for retirement, making no claim on our system despite their payments. Since seven out of ten immigrants fall into prime working ages (versus only half of the native population), those who stay will generally have FICA taxes taken out of their paychecks for decades. The bottom line, according to Social Security data, is that immigrants improve the solvency of our retirement system.

The Heritage authors focus entirely on immigrants without a high school degree, rather than the typical immigrant. They are correct in pointing out that people with that level of education often end up costing the government more in benefits than they pay in taxes. The larger reality is that many Americans receive government benefits paid for by those higher up the income ladder (97% of income taxes are paid by the top half of all earners). Low-skill immigrants are actually comparatively self-sufficient compared to low-skill native householders, because they are more likely to be working (67% vs. 37%) and married (66% vs. 45%).

The classic study on the costs and benefits of immigration was produced by a team of prominent economists and demographers for the National Research Council. Those researchers concluded that the long-run cost to all government treasuries of an immigrant with less than a high school degree is around $17,000 (in 2006 dollars). Meanwhile, an immigrant with more than a high school degree produces a surplus of $253,000, and the average for all immigrants was $102,000 more in taxes paid than benefits received.

The reform now before Congress will sharply improve these figures. It's reasonable to criticize the current immigration system as too focused on family connections, and not as selective as it should be to keep the U.S. competitive in science, technology, and economic growth. Presently, about half of all illegal immigrants and a quarter of all legal immigrants arrive with less than a full high school education--not ideal preparation for life in an advanced industrial society.

The new immigration rules backed by President Bush, however, will create a merit system alongside existing family preferences. Individuals chosen through the point system will almost always have a high school degree, with a great many possessing college or graduate training, or certified vocational skills. In addition to stoking U.S. business output, these new high-productivity immigrants will have a very positive effect on treasuries at all levels of government.

But the central point overlooked by many critics is that an immigrant's effect on government treasuries doesn't adequately capture his contribution to the U.S. economy. The private sector, not the government fisc, is what powers our nation. To evaluate the real effect of immigrants, we must look at overall economic activity.

Some indicative research at the state level hints at these larger influences. A 2006 report from the UNC-Chapel Hill business school found that Hispanics in North Carolina contributed more than $9 billion to their state economy as a whole. Another 2006 study, by the Texas comptroller, concluded that 1.4 million immigrants living in Texas increased the size of that state's economy by $18 billion. The benefits from this growth go to the native-born population as well as to the immigrants themselves.

Immigrants enrich our private economy in a variety of ways. Their contributions make viable certain businesses that would otherwise move overseas. They have a stimulative effect as consumers--in a typical county today, 28% of population growth comes from immigration. They increase productivity by adding labor that is mostly complementary to native workers. This is why a recent study of California by U.C.-Davis economist Giovanni Peri found that immigration between 1990 and 2004 "induced a 4% real wage increase for the average native worker."

The National Research Council study attempted to cumulate some of these economic benefits. Updating their approach to 2007 suggests that immigrants to America now increase the total income of their fellow citizens by over $30 billion annually.

When accounting for the costs and benefits of immigrants, it's also necessary to consider the economic contributions of their offspring. The largest immigration-related expense to government is the cost of schooling the new arrivals' children. But this next generation is not just some dead weight--it is, typically, the real payoff from immigration.

Evidence shows that the children of immigrants exceed their parents in income, achievement, and social success at very high rates. Second-generation Americans are 12% more likely to obtain a college degree than other natives, and their median annual earnings are close to $2,000 higher. Those striving successors are immigration's final gift to the United States.

http://news.yahoo.com/s/realclearpol...QYHw7cDyv9wxIF