OC Immigration Attorney

The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether an aggressive Arizona statute targeting illegal immigrants interferes with federal law, entering another high-profile dispute between the Obama administration and conservative state governments.

Among other provisions intended to drive illegal immigrants from the state, the 2010 Arizona measure, known as SB 1070, requires police to arrest people they stop whom they suspect of being foreigners without authorization to reside in the U.S. Federal courts have blocked much of the Arizona measure from taking effect, agreeing with the Justice Department that it undermines federal authority over immigration.

The U.S. Supreme Court is likely to hear the case by April and issue a decision before July. That is the same time it is expected to rule on the president’s 2010 health-care overhaul, which conservative activists and Republican leaders from 26 states contend exceeds federal authority.

The scheduling positions both cases for a significant role in next year’s presidential and congressional elections—and could make the Supreme Court, certain to be criticized by the losers in each case, itself an issue. Four of the nine justices are in their 70s, suggesting the next president could have at least one vacancy to fill on the closely divided court.

Arizona has become the center stage of the immigration debate over the last few years. Many other states have followed Arizona’s aggressive approach towards illegal immigration.

Topeka — A legislator said Monday it might be a good idea to control illegal immigration the way the feral hog population has been controlled: with gunmen shooting from helicopters.

Rep. Virgil Peck, R-Tyro, said he was just joking, but that his comment did reflect frustration with the problem of illegal immigration. After one of the committee members talked about a program that uses hunters in helicopters to shoot wild swine, Peck suggested that may be a way to control illegal immigration.

Appropriations Chairman Marc Rhoades, R-Newton, said Peck’s comment was inappropriate. Asked about his comment, Peck was unapologetic. “I was just speaking like a southeast Kansas person,” he said.

He said most of his constituents are upset with illegal immigration and the state and federal government response. He said he didn’t expect any further controversy over his comment. “I think it’s over,” he said.

Last month, another state legislator, Rep. Connie O’Brien, R-Tonganoxie, apologized after referring to a college student as an illegal immigrant because of her “olive complexion.”

(One more reason I’m glad I don’t live in Kansas.)

According to U.S. documentary “The Fence”, Washington’s plan to build a fence on the border with Mexico has cost $3 billion and has not deterred illegal immigrants or drug traffickers from entering the country.

The documentary argues that illegal immigrants and smugglers can easily climb over, dig under and even drive over the wall, which is only a few feet high in parts, has no razor wire, and abruptly ends in the desert.

The director and narrator, Rory Kennedy – who is a daughter of the late U.S. Senator Robert Kennedy-, spent weeks traveling along the border from California to Texas as the fence was being built in 2009. It is expected to be completed by the end of this year.

Moreover, up to 500 people die every year crossing the U.S.-Mexican border, according to U.S. immigration experts and the Mexican government, a sharp jump from a decade ago. Tougher border security and the fence’s construction have forced migrants to take more dangerous, remote routes into the United States.

Some 650 miles of the 670-mile wall called for under the Secure Fence Act and signed into law by U.S. President George W. Bush in October 2006 have been built. It contains 120,000 tones of metal and materials, ranging from railroad ties to concrete and chain link fencing.

But it remains a magnet for Republicans keen to show their get-tough credentials in the run-up to the November U.S. elections. Arizona Republican John McCain, facing his toughest re-election battle in years for the Senate, demanded that the government in May to “complete the danged fence.”

U.S. Border Patrol agents say the wall and virtual fencing cut the number of people caught trying to cross into the United States by a quarter in the fiscal year 2009.

Immigration experts counter that the deep U.S. recession in 2008-2009 and the resulting lack of jobs in the world’s biggest economy was a bigger factor behind the drop.

But critics also are questioning the wisdom of spending billions on the fence during hard economic times.

Future U.S. administrations are likely to spend $6.5 billion on maintenance of the fence over the next 20 years, the United States Government Accountability Office says, although researchers at the U.S. Congress say it could be more.

The documentary airs on U.S. cable television.

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio now wants to commission a posse whose only job will be to enforce illegal immigration and human smuggling laws.
Arpaio says the posse will be devoted solely to illegal immigration. He claimed he wanted a little specialized unit.

Details are sparse but, like the sheriff’s other posses, this one will be made up of armed volunteers who will patrol rural areas looking for border crossers and human smugglers. According to Arpaio, he wants to concentrate more in the desert before they get to Phoenix. In response, Latino activist Salvador Reza says volunteer posse members who do not have full police training will likely make mistakes.

While others are likening Arpaio’s latest posse to a vigilante patrol group much like the one lead by neo-Nazis that made headlines earlier this summer, Arpaio says his men are trained.

According to MCSO documents, posse members are required to get at least 16 hours of training in addition to firearms training.

The sheriff says that they do give posse training on law enforcement and they do have authority to make arrest when they are operating under supervision. Additionally, the sheriff says the new posse will be mobilized within three weeks outfitted with appropriate hardware and gear, but it is still not clear what exactly that will entail.

This week, the Senate will consider amendments to the Emergency Supplemental Appropriations Bill that would add thousands of additional personnel along the border (including the National Guard), as well as provide millions of dollars for detention beds, technology, and resources.  Yesterday, bowing to pressure, President Obama announced that he would send 1,200 National Guard troops to the border and request $500 million for additional resources.  All of this attention on resources for the border ignores the fact that border enforcement alone is not going to resolve the underlying problems with our broken immigration system.

For more than two decades, the U.S. government has tried without success to stamp out unauthorized immigration through enforcement efforts at the border and in the interior of the country, but without fundamentally reforming the broken immigration system that spurs unauthorized immigration in the first place.  While billions upon billions of dollars have been poured into enforcement, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the United States has increased dramatically.

The only way to stop illegal immigration is to punish the employers who hire unauthorized workers. The best way to stop employers from hiring illegally is by offering lawful permanent residence to illegal immigrants that cooperate with federal authorities in prosecuting the employers that hire them. If an employer hires an unauthorized worker and the worker reports the hiring to the federal government and cooperates with the prosecution, the worker should be granted lawful permanent residence. This would stop employers from continue the practice of hiring undocumented workers. If the US government was serious about stopping illegal immigration, they would start with the source of the problem, which is the pull effect of illegal employment in the US.

A coalition of groups that want to limit immigration, legal and illegal, has an ad claiming that illegal immigrants steal jobs from Americans. That’s a popular talking point among the build-the-fence, seal-the border types, but it’s just not so.

The truth is that immigrants don’t take American jobs, according to most economists and others who have studied the issue.

Policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute, Madeleine Sumption, claims that Immigrant workers create almost as many jobs as they occupy. Additionally Sumption added that Immigrant workers often create the jobs they work in and they also buy things making the economy bigger.

As she and a co-author wrote in a report last year for a group created by the British government:

Somerville and Sumption: The impact of Immigration on a nation’s economy remains small, for several reasons. Immigrants are not competitive in many types of jobs, and hence are not direct substitutes for natives. Local employers increase demand for low-skilled labor in areas that receive low-skilled immigrant inflows. Immigrants contribute to demand for goods and services that they consume, in turn increasing the demand for labor. And immigrants contribute to labor market efficiency and long-term economic growth.

Of course, none of that matters to the folks who don’t live in the reality-based universe.

President Obama will dispatch 1,200 National Guard troops to the Southwest border and seek increased spending on law enforcement to combat drug smuggling after demands from Republican and Democratic lawmakers that border security be tightened.

The decision was disclosed by a Democratic lawmaker and confirmed by administration officials after President Obama met on Tuesday with Republican senators, several of whom have demanded that troops be placed at the border. The lawmakers learned of the plan after the meeting.

But the move also reflected political pressure in the president’s own party with midterm election campaigns under way and with what is expected to be a tumultuous debate on overhauling immigration law coming up on Capitol Hill.

The issue has pushed Janet Napolitano, the secretary of homeland security, into a corner. As governor of Arizona, she demanded that Guard troops be put on the border. But since joining the Obama administration, she has remained noncommittal about the idea, saying as recently as a month ago that other efforts by the President had made the border “as secure now as it has ever been.”

The troops will be stationed in the four border states for a year, White House officials said. It is not certain when they will arrive, the officials said.

The American Civil Liberties Union and a coalition of civil rights groups filed a class action lawsuit today in the U.S. District Court for the District of Arizona challenging Arizona’s new law which authorizes police to demand “papers” from people who they suspect are not legally in the U.S.

The coalition filing the lawsuit includes the ACLU, MALDEF, National Immigration Law Center (NILC), and the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), ACLU of Arizona, National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON) and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (APALC) – a member of the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice.

The lawsuit charges that the Arizona law unlawfully interferes with federal power and authority over immigration matters in violation of the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution; invites racial profiling against people of color by law enforcement in violation of the equal protection guarantee and prohibition on unreasonable seizures under the 14th and Fourth Amendments; and infringes on the free speech rights of day laborers and others in Arizona.

One of the individuals the coalition is representing in the case, Jim Shee, who is a U.S.-born 70-year-old American citizen of Spanish and Chinese descent. Shee asserts that he will be vulnerable to racial profiling under the law, and that, although the law has not yet gone into effect, he has already been stopped twice by local law enforcement officers in Arizona and asked to produce his “papers” to proof his legal presence in the U.S.

Another plaintiff, Jesus Cuauhtémoc Villa, is a resident of the state of New Mexico who is currently attending Arizona State University. The state of New Mexico does not require proof of U.S. citizenship or immigration status to obtain a driver’s license. Villa does not have a U.S. passport and does not want to risk losing his birth certificate by carrying it with him. He worries about traveling in Arizona without a valid form of identification that would prove his citizenship to police if he is pulled over. If he cannot supply proof upon demand, Arizona law enforcement is required to arrest and detain him.

Several prominent law enforcement groups, including the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police, oppose the law because the law sends a clear message to communities of color that the authorities are not to be trusted, making them less likely to come forward as victims of or witnesses to crime.

The lawsuit was filed on behalf of labor, domestic violence, day laborer, human services and social justice organizations, including Friendly House, Service Employees International Union (SEIU), SEIU Local 5, United Food and Commercial Workers International (UFCW), Arizona South Asians for Safe Families (ASAFSF), Southside Presbyterian Church, Arizona Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, Asian Chamber of Commerce of Arizona, Border Action Network, Tonatierra Community Development Institute, Muslim American Society, Japanese American Citizens League, Valle del Sol, Inc., Coalicíon De Derechos Humanos, and individual named plaintiffs who will be subject to harassment or arrest under the law and a class of similarly situated persons.

According to Pablo Alvarado, Executive Director of NDLON day laborers have repeatedly defended their First Amendment rights in federal courts and successfully established their undeniable right to seek work in public areas. Moreover, Alvarado believes that Arizona’s effort to criminalize day laborers and migrants is an affront to the Constitution and threatens to disrupt national unity, and they are confident that federal courts will intervene to ensure the protection of their bedrock civil rights.”

Even prior to the passage of the statute, local enforcement of federal immigration law has already caused an increase on racial profiling of Latinos in Arizona. The ACLU, MALDEF and other members of the coalition have several pending lawsuits against government officials in Arizona because of civil rights abuses of U.S. citizens and immigrants.

Despite the fact that we are a nation of immigrants, immigration continues to be one of America’s most contentious topics. The new law in Arizona, where police are now ordered to arrest illegal immigrants, has set off a bitter debate across the United States. However, as in the past, much of the debate is founded on mythology. Here are 5 myths that have clouded the immigration debate taken from the Washington Post:

1.    Immigrants take jobs from American workers.

Although immigrants account for 12.5% of the U.S. population, they make up about 15% of the workforce. The reason they are overrepresented largely among workers, is because the rest of our population is aging. Additionally, low U.S. fertility rates and the upcoming retirement of the baby boomers; mean that immigration is likely to be the only source of growth in the workforce in the decades ahead. As record numbers of retirees begin drawing Social Security checks, younger immigrant workers will be paying taxes, somewhat easing the financial pressures on the system.

Moreover, immigrants tend to be concentrated in high- and low-skilled occupations that complement — rather than compete with — jobs held by native workers. And the foreign-born workers who fill lower-paying jobs are typically first-hired/first-fired employees, allowing employers to expand and contract their workforces rapidly. As a result, immigrants experience higher employment than natives during booms — but they suffer higher job losses during downturns, including the current one.

Immigration also stimulates growth by creating new consumers, entrepreneurs and investors. As a result of this growth, economists estimate that wages for the vast majority of American workers are slightly higher than they would be without immigration. U.S. workers without a high school degree experience wage declines as a result of competition from immigrants, but these losses are modest, at just over 1%. Economists also estimate that for each job an immigrant fills, an additional job is created.

2.     Immigration is at an all-time high, and most new immigrants came illegally.

Today, about two-thirds of immigrants are here legally, either as naturalized citizens or as lawful permanent residents, more commonly known as green card holders. And of the approximately 10.8 million immigrants who are in the country illegally, about 40% arrived legally but overstayed their visas.

Mexicans are also the largest group of lawful immigrants. As for the flow of illegal immigrants, apprehensions along the U.S.-Mexico border have declined by more than 50% over the past four years, while increases in the size of the illegal population, which had been growing by about 500,000 a year for more than a decade, have stopped. This decline is largely due to the recession, but stepped-up border enforcement is playing a part.

3.        Today’s immigrants are not integrating into American life like past waves did.

Today, as before, immigrant integration takes a generation or two. Learning English is one key driver of this process; the education and upward mobility of immigrants’ children is the other. On the first count, today’s immigrants consistently seek English instruction in such large numbers that adult-education programs cannot meet the demand, especially in places such as California. On the second count, the No Child Left Behind Act has played a critical role in helping educate immigrant children because it holds schools newly accountable for teaching them English.

However, the unauthorized status of millions of foreign-born immigrants can slow integration in crucial ways. For example, illegal immigrants are ineligible for in-state tuition at most public colleges and universities, putting higher education effectively out of their reach. And laws prohibiting unauthorized immigrants from getting driver’s licenses or various professional credentials can leave them stuck in jobs with a high density of other immigrants and unable to advance.

4.    Cracking down on illegal border crossings will make us safer.

Since Sept. 11, 2001, we have dramatically strengthened our borders through the use of biometrics at ports of entry, secure cargo-shipment systems, intelligence gathering, integrated databases and increased international cooperation. The Border Patrol has nearly doubled in size in the past five years, to more than 20,000 agents. The Department of Homeland Security says it is on schedule to meet congressional mandates for southwestern border enforcement, including fence-building. And cooperation with the Mexican government has improved significantly.

5.       Immigration reform cannot happen in an election year.

All the significant immigration bills enacted in recent decades were passed in election years, often at the last minute and after fractious debates.

This list dates back to the Refugee Act of 1980, which established our system for humanitarian protection and refugee and asylum admissions. Next came the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which made it illegal to hire unauthorized immigrants and provided amnesty for 2.7 million illegal immigrants. The Immigration Act of 1990 increased the number of visas allotted to highly skilled workers. And the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act charged immigration agencies with implementing significant new law enforcement mandates.

Ruling out immigration reform, whether because Congress has other priorities or because it’s an election year, would be a mistake. The outline for immigration legislation that Sen. Charles Schumer (N.Y.) and his Democratic colleagues unveiled last week, together with the uproar over the Arizona law, may help convince lawmakers that there’s no time like the present.

If you support comprehensive immigration reform, contact your congressperson and make your voice heard. Click here to find out which member of the House of Representatives serves you.

After Robert Krentz , an Arizona rancher, was killed near the border of Mexico, about 1,000 people lined up at a memorial service concerned with their safety.  Authorities speculate, Krentz was killed by drug smugglers. Apparently, drug smugglers are now using the open range and rocky area as corridors for crossing illegal immigrants who can’t afford to pay a guide. While the illegal immigrants carry the load for the smugglers, the smugglers pays for the trip over the border.

A local rancher claims that “those guys are pretty innocent, but out in front of them is a guide. One usually in front and usually in back, however many of them are armed.” His kitchen window has a view to the border fence where Border Patrol doesn’t keep a constant presence, facilitating illegal immigrants to get across by using ladders or screwdrivers stuck on to the fence mesh. In the past three weeks, he has counted 47 groups crossing onto his land – more than 300 people. Additionally, the local rancher also mentions “the Mexican ranchers right along the border have a worse trouble than [the U.S. ranchers] by a long shot.” Smugglers terrorize the Mexican ranchers on the other side of the border.
U.S. policy since the mid 1990s has been to push illegal crossers out of cities where there are more voters to complain and where crossers can blend into the population — into rural areas where the Border Patrol has days to chase and maybe track them down.
Ranchers near the border in Arizona believe there will be more killings if things don’t change. They are demanding more safety and Border Patrol. Ultimately, it comes back to controlling who comes across.

As one rancher, who didn’t want to be identified for fear of reprisal from the cartels, believes it’s better to let everyone who wants a job into the country legally, and shoot the rest.
With the murder of Krentz, the implicit end to that sentence is “before they shoot us.”