From: Roy Beck NumbersUSA <immigrationinfo@numbersusa.com>Date: 2007/05/01 Tue PM 12:34:40 EST
Subject: Update on drowning the marches

From: Roy Beck, President, NumbersUSA
Date: Tuesday 1MAY07 12:30 p.m. EDT


You are making some noise -- But the open borders marchers are getting louder

DEAR FRIENDS,

Just a quick update and a request that you keep phoning and faxing.

We had a technical glitch mid-morning that blocked a bunch of you from faxing. Try again.

(SEE BELOW FOR PHONE AND FAX LINKS.)

Your feedback indicates that a lot of Senators' staffs are really getting fed up with your calls. Quite a number are greeting you with an automatic, "NumbersUSA's analysis is wrong."

Well, if we are wrong that at least two-thirds of U.S. Senators are prepared to vote for an amnesty if Pres. Bush and Sen. Kennedy reach agreement, why are all the news reports and the major political leaders saying that they expect to bring the amnesty bill to the Senate floor by May 14 and have it passed by Memorial Day?

The open-borders marchers and organizers are spitting mad about our NumbersUSA Action Network's VIRTUAL COUNTER-MARCH in which all of us flood phone lines, fax lines, radio talk shows, quotes in news articles and internet blogs with the typical American citizen view against amnesty and against massive foreign labor importation.

Van Esser -- our Chief of Membership Services -- has been getting a steady stream of phone calls from pro-amnesty people who are screaming at him, cursing him and even sobbing about NumbersUSA's insensitivity to the needs of illegal aliens.

A key factor appears to be the quotes from Rosemary Jenks -- our Director of Government Relations -- in the New York Times today (see below). My, my, the things the marchers are saying about Rosemary today! All of us are doing a lot of TV, radio and newspaper interviews to explain why enforcement is not anti-family.

You might want to note that the chief purpose of immigration enforcement is to proect American citizen families from having the incomes of their wage-earners depressed and to keep from driving their heads of households out of the labor market.

I don't at all get the marchers' claims that deportations split illegal alien parents from their children. What kind of parents would leave their children behind in the U.S.? Most of these illegals are being sent back to Mexico, which just happens to be the richest country of the Third World. Yes, a lot of people are poor there. But they aren't starving. Millions of parents are raising their children in Mexico. Are the pro-amnesty marchers saying that Mexico is a country unfit for habitation?

NumbersUSA is popping up all over today. CNN's website features a column by Ruben Navarrette Jr. warning that groups like NumbersUSA actually want to limit LEGAL immigration, we well as illegal immigration. My goodness, what deep secrets will he unearth next!

The message we have to always include with all other messages is: Overall Immigration Numbers Must Be Reduced -- Both Illegal and Legal.


WHAT IF 300,000 NUMBERS USA MEMBERS SHOWED AS MUCH DETERMINATION WITH FAX AND PHONE TODAY AS A MILLION PRO-ILLEGAL MARCHERS DO ON THE STREETS?


MAKE SURE THE CONGRESSIONAL FAX MACHINES ARE HUMMING WITH IMMIGRATION REDUCTION MESSAGES TODAY:

www.NumbersUSA.com/actionbuffet

We will have new faxes to send by mid-morning. As always, you can send all faxes for free.

PLEASE PHONE THOSE CONGRESSIONAL OFFICES, AS WELL:

CONGRESS SWITCHBOARD:
202-224-3121

I know that the majority of you have never made one of these phone calls. But isn't today time to do something extra for the country? You have two Senators and one Representative. Pledge to yourself that you will call at least one of them today. A one-minute phone call is long enough if you just want to quickly identify yourself and say one thing that you most feel about the illegal marches.


SIGNS YOU ARE MAKING A DIFFERENCE


Here is a New York Times editorial that shows what a difference your pressuring has made -- especially those of you in presidential primary states.

April 30, 2007

Editorial
The Amnesty Sideshow

We have all seen how presidential candidates shift positions to impress primary voters. It’s usually as measured and boring as dance instruction: O.K. everyone, now dip to the right — or left — then back to center. But on the volatile topic of immigration, Republicans are lurching, falling over themselves to convince voters that where they stand is not where they stood.

The fakery is hard to watch, as it comes at a time when courage and bipartisan realism are critically important. The Iowa maunderings of two candidates in particular — Senators Sam Brownback and John McCain — have complicated the prospects of a bipartisan immigration bill that would affect millions of lives. While its fate is being decided in difficult closed-door negotiations in the Capitol, they and other G.O.P. hopefuls are on the stump, tying themselves in knots over “amnesty” and dancing farther out to the fringes of public opinion.

Mr. Brownback is a right-wing Republican whose religion teaches compassion for the stranger — immigrants, too. He was a co-sponsor of last year’s bipartisan Senate bill. But this year he bailed out of negotiations, and last week disowned his vote for last year’s bill, to the delight of conservatives who scorned him as “Amnesty Sam.”

Mitt Romney is also going through contortions. The Boston Globe posted audio clips of Mr. Romney praising, in 2005, an immigration bill sponsored by Mr. McCain and Senator Edward Kennedy as sensible and “quite different” from amnesty, then dissing it as amnesty in this year’s campaign. Mr. Romney now wallows in the support of Joe Arpaio, the showboating Phoenix sheriff famous for humiliating prisoners and pushing a round-’em-all-up approach.

Rudolph Giuliani has sharply changed his tone. Once a stout defender of immigrants, Mr. Giuliani now talks about sending people to the back of the line and installing “heat-seeking equipment” at the border. He insists that he opposes amnesty, but the “amnesty” he objects to is an “amnesty” nobody is talking about — blanket forgiveness, a free pass to a green card. Once you hear him talking about helping immigrants who pay fines and back taxes, stay out of trouble, learn English and wait in the back of the visa line, it seems clear that he belongs in the comprehensive-reform fold with Mr. Kennedy and others — whether he admits it or not.

Of all the retreats, the most disheartening may be Mr. McCain’s. This former straight talker once lent his name to the most promising immigration bill in Congress. But as Senator Kennedy has struggled to draft a compromise this year, his former partner has been trumpeting border security on the campaign trail and letting momentum for comprehensive reform stall in Washington.

Mr. McCain and his adversaries may believe that primary politics demands such behavior, but surveys of the larger populace tell a different story. Americans want the immigration issue solved, and they strongly favor “amnesty,” whether you call it that or not. An array of recent polls show powerful support for an earned path to citizenship.

“Call it a banana if you want to,” Mr. McCain said of the amnesty debate last year, in a welcome moment of lucidity. If a good bill emerges, it will be because enough lawmakers stayed focused and kept their heads. If the effort collapses, a large share of the blame must go to amnesty-fixated Republicans lost in the fog of the 2008 presidential race.

And here is today's New York Times story quoting Rosemary and getting the pro-amnesty people so upset.


May 1, 2007
As Deportation Pace Rises, Illegal Immigrants Dig In

By JULIA PRESTON

NEW BEDFORD, Mass. — The day after his wife was deported to their home country, Honduras, Lilo Mancía grieved as though she had died.

Neighbors arrived with doughnuts and juice for their two small children, while Mr. Mancía, an illegal immigrant like his wife, María Briselda Amaya, took telephone calls from relatives and tried not to break down.

“The first thing I thought of was the children,” Mr. Mancía, who is fighting his own deportation order, told the visitors gathered in his second floor walkup apartment in New Bedford a couple of weeks ago. “The future we imagined for them, it all collapsed.”

Last year on May 1, hoping to influence Congress to adopt legislation making illegal immigrants legal, hundreds of thousands of immigrants held marches and work stoppages across the country. This May 1 there will be another round of rallies and marches, but this time immigrants will also be protesting a surge in deportations.

The events are expected to be much smaller than a year ago, organizers said, as stepped-up enforcement by the authorities has made illegal immigrants wary of protesting in public and more doubtful that Congress will soon act to give them a chance at legalization.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, facing intense political pressure to toughen enforcement, removed 221,664 illegal immigrants from the country over the last year, an increase of more than 37,000 — about 20 percent — over the year before, according to the agency’s tally.

While President Bush and many Democrats have called for a path to legalize some 12 million illegal immigrants, a significant number of Republicans in Congress reject the plan because they view it as amnesty for lawbreakers. They advocate a broader campaign of deportations that would expel many illegal immigrants and, they say, drive millions more to give up and go home.

“We are not calling for I.C.E. to become the Gestapo knocking on doors in the middle of the night,” said Rosemary Jenks, director of government relations for NumbersUSA, a group in Washington that seeks to curb immigration. “But we have to increase the likelihood that if you are here illegally you will be caught.”

So far, many of the deportations have caused illegal families to hunker down and plot ways to avoid detection and resist deportation, not run voluntarily for the border, immigrant advocates said. In Massachusetts, immigration agents have been challenged by lawyers, labor unions and state officials who question their raid tactics and are fighting trench by legal trench to block deportations.

Mr. Mancía was amazed at the offers of help he received, including from the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, the state’s Department of Social Services and Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts.

Mr. Mancía has been given emergency aid to pay his bills while his deportation case proceeds, and Elizabeth Badger, a public service lawyer in Boston, was still fighting his wife’s deportation after she was on the ground in Honduras.

“I’m not going anywhere,” Mr. Mancía declared defiantly to a downstairs neighbor. “I’m going to stand my ground here until I win.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say their priority is to locate and deport fugitive immigrants with criminal records or convicts who are finishing prison sentences. Still, thousands of illegal immigrants like the Mancías with no criminal history have been caught in raids, the officials acknowledge.

Also, new expedited procedures have allowed agents greater flexibility to deport illegal immigrants caught in border areas, bypassing court hearings. Many immigrants, when caught, agree to leave voluntarily because it means they are not barred from returning legally in the future.

Seen from the working class communities like New Bedford, the deportations are a blunt instrument. Frequently the deported immigrants were not alone in the United States, but came from families with a mix of legal and illegal members who were well settled in this country.

A growing number of deportee families have children who were born here and are United States citizens. (The Mancía’s younger son, Jeffrey, was born in Texas.) More than 3.1 million American children have at least one illegal immigrant parent, said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Center.

Mr. Mancía and his wife were among 361 workers arrested on March 6 in an immigration raid at Michael Bianco Inc., a leather goods factory in this faded manufacturing town. She remained in detention while he was released to care for their boys, Jeffrey, 2, and Kevin, 5.

On April 18, Ms. Amaya was awakened at 4 a.m., driven by immigration agents to Kennedy Airport in New York and placed on a passenger flight to Honduras, Mr. Mancía said. Telephoning her husband as soon as she could place an international call, she said little, only that she was disoriented and more afraid of her home country than an American jail. She has no house, property or job in Honduras.

“She has no words right now,” Mr. Mancía said, explaining why his wife refused to be interviewed by telephone.

Mr. Mancía has been left to fight off his own deportation and face a series of difficult choices.

He must decide, he said, whether to press his case in the United States or declare defeat and take the boys to rejoin their mother in Honduras. If forced to depart, he will weigh whether to leave his sons with friends in New Bedford to get a quality of schooling he believes they will not have in Honduras. Mr. Mancía said he and his wife had decided to leave their home in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, for their safety, because criminal gangs used the streets as a combat zone. Ms. Amaya’s sister was on a public bus returning from Christmas shopping on Dec. 23, 2004, when gang gunmen shot it up, killing her and 27 other passengers, he said.

“We walked over dead bodies in Honduras,” Mr. Mancía said. “The children see that and they don’t grow up well.”

He was the first to come to the United States, crossing at night at Laredo, Texas. In January 2005 Ms. Amaya took the same route, carrying Kevin, then a toddler. Caught by the Border Patrol, she applied for political asylum and was released temporarily. After Jeffrey was born in Houston, they came to New Bedford. Her asylum petition was eventually denied.

Stitching military backpacks in the Bianco factory at $7.00 an hour, the couple achieved stability that felt almost like prosperity. They bought a white aluminum kitchen set and a microwave oven. Kevin was content in kindergarten, reciting his ABC’s and chattering in English, which neither parent speaks.

Soon they had a family cluster in New Bedford, as three other relatives from Honduras, drawn by word of jobs at Bianco, came to work there as well.

“We knew it would be hard to get legal papers,” Mr. Mancía said. “Since so many people were in the same situation, we learned to live like the rest.”

After the March 6 raid, immigration lawyers appealed Ms. Amaya’s asylum case and she became optimistic. But she remained in immigration detention in the Bristol County jail, unable to receive visits from the children.

“He is refusing to eat and needs to be coaxed to take sustenance,” Arthur Dutra, a teacher at the John Hannigan School, wrote in a March 15 letter about Kevin’s condition. “He asks for his mother repeatedly.”

A nurse at the Greater New Bedford Community Health Center, Jacqueline Arieta, wrote in a separate letter that Jeffrey was having recurring earaches and losing his appetite due to “acute sadness.”

A gaunt man with a mild voice, Mr. Mancía said he did not mind cooking for the boys or washing their clothes at the Laundromat. He said he and his wife, balancing two factory jobs, had learned they both had to do housework.

The help he has received in fighting his deportation has allowed him to believe that he might avoid his wife’s fate, even though he has no papers, no job skill to offer other than hard work and very limited legal avenues to pursue. Although Jeffrey is an American citizen, he would not be able to petition for his parents to be admitted to the country legally until he was 21.

Mr. Mancía said he was preparing for any outcome, even the prospect of a separation from one or both sons so they could remain at least temporarily in the United States.

“My son is an American,” Mr. Mancía said “He needs to be educated in American schools, to speak English. He needs this country.”

Ms. Jenks, of NumbersUSA , said the responsibility for the impact on children of the deportations rests with their parents.

“If parents are going to come here illegally, unfortunately the child faces the consequences as well,” she said.


DEMOCRATIC SENATORS ESPECIALLY NEED TO HEAR FROM YOU -- THEY SAY THEIR CALLS ARE RUNNING IN FAVOR OF AMNESTY


Some people are reporting that Democratic Senators' offices are saying that the bulk of their phone calls are coming from people who want illegal aliens to have U.S. citizenship.

We should never stop letting them know how much their constituents hate their position. At the very least, we need to deny them the ability to honestly say that the majority of their constituents seem to favor an amnesty.

You will find phone notes on your Action Buffet corkboard that will give you talking points and provide local phone numbers for your Members of Congress.

You may want to point out to the Democratic offices that:


For every illegal alien worker yelling for an amnesty, there are three lower skilled Americans who do NOT have a job.


There are about 7 million illegal foreign workers with jobs.


We have 23 million Americans with no more than a high school education (aged 18-64) who do NOT have a job. If we pushed the illegal aliens to go home, there are easily enough Americans who could replace them after wages and working conditions improved for the vacated jobs.


Although White Americans are the most numerous of the victims of illegal immigration, the harm is disproportionately bad for Black American men, 40% of whom do NOT have a job.


Why would any Democrat vote to keep illegal aliens in this country to take American jobs instead of opening those jobs in construction, tourism, service and hospitality to jobless Americans?
Seven Democratic Senators should stand with us and on the side of the American worker:

Byrd (D-WVa)
Dorgan (D-ND)
McCaskill (D-MO)
Nelson (D-Neb)
Stabenow (D-MI)
Tester (D-Montana)
Webb (D-VA)

Byrd, Dorgan and Nelson sincerely oppose illegal immigration and are champions of American workers. They voted against the Democrats' S. 2611 amnesty last year.

Stabenow also voted against last year's amnesty, but she was protecting herself from a backlash in the fall elections. Now that she has another six years, will she stick with the beleaguered Michigan workers or will she join the Democratic leadership's preference for foreign workers?

McCaskill, Tester and Webb all ran successful challenges to throw out Republican incumbents while pledging to oppose all amnesties.

When you call these seven Democrats, thank them for their past actions and promises and let them know how much you are counting on them to stop President Bush from forcing all American workers to compete for wages at global market averages.

Brown (D-OH), Casey (D-Penn) and Whitehouse (D-RI) are new Senators but campaigned in favor of amnesty.

All the rest of the Democrats voted for a massive amnesty last year. Give all of them as much heat as you want for standing on the side of the illegal aliens in the streets instead of on the side of the jobless Americans.


REPUBLICAN SENATORS NEED YOUR ATTENTION, TOO


As we warned you, many of you are hearing Republican staffers use "trick" language.

They are saying things like, "The Senators says he will never support an amnesty" or "never support an immediate path to citizenship.'

When you hear phrases like that, you can be sure that that Senator is negotiating right now to pass an amnesty. It doesn't mean that Senator will end up voting for an amnesty. In fact, many of these probably hope they won't vote for one. But they are keeping their options open in case the White House sweetens the offer enough or puts enough pressure. But the fact is that they are NOT ruling out voting for some kind of an amnesty if they are not willing to say that they oppose legalizing illegal aliens to work and live in the United States and, instead, use their "trick" language.


When Republicans say they are "OPPOSED TO ANY AMNESTY," don't trust them. Nearly every amnesty supporter has persuaded him/herself that the rewards they are granting illegal aliens do not amount to an amnesty. They have come up with all kinds of tortured definitions in which almost nothing could be called amnesty. Remember that Pres. Bush continues to say he opposes amnesty as he throws as much political capital as he has left at getting citizenship for nearly all illegal aliens.


When Republicans say they are "OPPOSED TO A BLANKET AMNESTY," that just means that they are opposed to an amnesty that would fail to weed out criminals and that wouldn't charge people a fine. But almost anybody who uses that term is supporting an amnesty for 95% of the illegal aliens.


If they say they are "OPPOSED TO ANY IMMEDIATE PATH TO CITIZENSHIP," that means they are supporting the President's new amnesty that would start with Z Visas and might take 17 years before an illegal alien gets citizenship. But they would immediately be legalized for work and residence and almost none would ever have to leave, under the new Bush plan.


If they say they are "OPPOSED TO ANY PATH TO CITIZENSHIP," this is better. But we know for a fact that many of the Senators using this language are reserving the possiblity that they will support legislation that would allow illegal aliens to live and work here legally for the rest of their lives -- just without the chance for citizenship.
You may want to re-read Rosemary Jenks' recent congressional testimony that notes that anything that allows a person to keep what they came to steal (legal residency and a job) is amnesty.

You will want to ask these questions of the Senators' staffs, if you are to learn whether they are truly pledging not to support an amnesty:


Do you oppose giving illegal aliens the legal right to remain in this country and to work legally?


Do you support taking away the jobs magnet for illegal immigration and fully enforcing the immigration laws already on the books so that the illegal population will voluntarily go home over time? (ATTRITION THROUGH ENFORCEMENT & SELF-DEPORTATION)
It is also very important that these staffers hear this very clear statement:

"What the country needs is immigration REDUCTIONS. I'm opposed to any effort that would increase immigration."

THANKS,

--ROY

www.numbersUSA.com

NumbersUSA - relies upon individuals like you to reach its goal of an environmentally sustainable and economically just America.