Thread: Research Project - Enforce the Law!

Hey everyone!

I've got a special project and I would like your participation and assistance.

Using the search features of Alipac, I would like you to look for articles in our archives that relate to how the federal government is not enforcing our immigration laws.

We will take your links and findings and construct a usable list.

Here are some of the articles we want but if you can think of any others we want those too. I ask that you look for factual information that has good sources. For instance, if you find two articles and one just rambles on please pass it up and look for others that references the numbers published by a government body or a research paper then those are the ones we prefer. Look for credible sources.

The following are examples of what we are looking for but please list other things you are aware of that clearly show the laws not being enforced.

Catch and Release Data
Number of people that fail to show up in immigration court.
The number of fines imposed on employers by year.
The number of raids by year.
(One of the SWIFT raids, people were warned the day before)
The number of deportations, arrest or convictions.
Backlogs in the immigration courts just cleared by dismissing the cases.
Background checks never preformed on immigrants/visa holders.
Number of Visa over stays.
Number of foreigners that come to America on vacation and never leave.
I've heard that they have stopped the 287(g) training for this year and do we have an article on that?

1) You can use the google search feature for alipac found in the upper right hand side of the homepage. (On the left under Main Menu - Home)
2) The forum search feature that is just below the fundraising bar.
3) The article search feature. (On the left under Main Menu - Search)


Send me a note if you need help searching.


What I would like is for you to post the link to the page and a brief description of the content.

Example:

http://www.alipac.us/modules.php?name=C ... age&pid=19
According to ___, only 700 people deported but 7,000 arrested and ordered deported in X state.

If you need any help, let me know.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Dixie

How about this one, Dixie?


NATIONAL BORDER PATROL COUNCIL
LOCAL 2544
2410 W Ruthrauff Rd, Suite 100
Tucson, Arizona 85705
Office (520) 293-6008
Facsimile (520) 293-6044
www.local2544.org


May 24, 2007

Honorable Jon Kyl
United States Senate
730 Hart Senate Office Building Washington, D.C. 20510-0304
VIA FACSIMILE @ (202) 224-2207

Dear Senator Kyl,

I am writing to inform you that we are extremely surprised and disappointed at your decision to support the latest Senate bill regarding illegal immigration. No matter how it is presented to the American people, and no matter how our elected representatives try to spin it and avoid the word “amnestyâ€

I can help this weekend sometime...(today is busy unfortunately).

I'll work on it as I can...like Phred, today's not too good!

Suddenly, we have reason to hope for a more secure America, because there is an alternative to the deceitful Senate Amnesty bill in the form of the King-Smith bill now being introduced into the U.S. House of Representatives. FSM Contributing Editor Sher Zieve has the latest information.

Military Warns Personnel Don’t Go to Mexico while Senate Pushes Open Borders

By Sher Zieve

While President Bush and US Senators continue to fiddle with their open borders amnesty policy, also known as the â€

I will help as soon as I can, got several things going on but will add you to my "needs help list" I am posting all over the place

This is an old article, but it is a good one.

http://apmp.berkeley.edu/APMP/pubs/agwo ... 20704.html

Agricultural Personnel Management Program
University of California

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

2/7/04 News Report -- National Journal

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Immigration - the endless flood
by Siobhan Gorman

The Chinese invented illegal immigration as U.S. policy makers tend to think of it today: They were the first to slip across the Mexican border in hopes of improving their lot by working in this country. Aspiring Chinese immigrants, trying to evade racist "Yellow Peril" prohibitions that in 1882 banned such laborers from entering the United States, traveled first to Mexico. There, smugglers would teach them a few words of Spanish, dress them up as Mexican farm workers, and guide them northward. The United States was then making no attempt to regulate the influx of people from Latin America -- and wouldn't begin to regulate it for more than 80 years.

Immigration policy is one of this country's longest-running experiments in social engineering. Throughout its first century, the United States left its gateways wide open, regulating the slave trade as commerce, not immigration. Congress kicked off the experimentation with immigration controls by passing the Chinese Exclusion Act in 1882, and followed up in the 1920s with the National Origins Plan, which sought to forever freeze the country's ethnic mix as it had been in 1910 -- predominantly Northern European. Then, in a 1965 bout of egalitarian idealism, Congress scuttled ethnic quotas and vowed to give virtually all immigrants a fair shot at a "green card" -- legal permanent residence -- but the new policies made legal immigration difficult for everyone, including Mexicans. Those new restrictions on Mexicans, along with the elimination of a controversial guest-worker program for farmhands, inadvertently reinvigorated illegal immigration.

Now, in a fit of economic and political pragmatism, President Bush is proposing to try yet another immigration experiment, one apparently sparked by his desire to attract Hispanic votes, to legitimize the flow of cheap foreign labor into the U.S. workforce, and to strengthen border controls to prevent another 9/11. And as Congress begins weighing Bush's proposal, lawmakers might find history instructive: Market forces have continually swamped whatever barricades the United States has put in the way of foreign laborers.

U.S. immigration policy can be understood as the nation's social secretary. "If you're going to throw a big party, and you throw the door open and you invite everybody, it's impossible to crash the party," explained Marian Smith, the federal government's immigration historian, who recently migrated to the Homeland Security Department. "But once you send out a limited number of engraved invitations, all of a sudden everybody else feels left out. And people crash it."

Every time Congress rewrites immigration law to send out invitations only to the "right" people, market forces eventually find a way to crash the party. While lawmakers have often factored economic needs into major changes in immigration policy, they have tended to focus much more on the societal values paramount at the time. In fact, each "reform" in U.S. immigration policy has served as a fascinating snapshot of America's sense of self at that moment, but as a poor predictor of what the next wave of immigration would actually look like.

Regardless of Congress's professed desire to limit immigration, the influx of workers has grown along with market demands ever since the end of the Great Depression. The market eventually wins out for two reasons. First, the federal government's designated gatekeepers have never had a way to lock out every unwanted immigrant or to locate and deport those who enter legally but stay beyond their lawful departure date. Second, the nation is perpetually torn over whether to vigorously enforce immigration restrictions by punishing illegal immigrants and the Americans who hire them, or to reap the economic benefits of looking the other way.

"Politicians can come up with the perfect machine, but when the market gets tired of it, the machine simply gets bypassed, and the market forces take over," says Demetrios G. Papademetriou, co-director of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit think tank that studies the "movement of people worldwide."

At the dawn of this century, the country finds itself once again in a quandary over its guest list. Post-9/11 public sentiment favors cracking down (though what that realistically would entail is unclear) on illegal immigration, in hopes of thwarting would-be terrorists and saving U.S. jobs for legal workers. Meanwhile, economic forces, and now the president, are pushing to make it easier for currently undocumented foreigners to work here legally -- but, under Bush's plan, to require them to eventually go home.

In recent years, the stream of illegal workers into this country has become such a torrent that official U.S. immigration policy no longer bears much resemblance to what is really going on. "Immigration is the toughest issue and will remain so [for] the rest of our history," predicts former Sen. Alan K. Simpson, R-Wyo., who was a key negotiator of the 1986 immigration act. "We've done open arms and closed arms. Now, it's 'throw up your arms.' "

What became known as the 1986 amnesty law began as an effort by Simpson and others to restrict immigration more tightly. To gain enough support to win passage, the sponsors sweetened the deal by legalizing longtime illegal residents. But the new law failed to stem the tide -- and some say it did the opposite. Congress, obsessed with discouraging people from living in this country without permission, denied federal social services to illegal immigrants. And still they came.

Between 1990 and 2000, an estimated 5.5 million immigrants unlawfully settled in the United States, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Although the newcomers are not all Hispanic, Bush entered the White House thinking about illegal immigration in the context of Texas's integration of Mexican workers into its economy. In early September 2001, standing with Mexican President Vicente Fox, he voiced support for granting some sort of legal status to workers who were in this country illegally. But that talk ended with the 9/11 attacks, which were widely viewed as proof that the United States must do a better job of policing its borders.

On January 7, with both his re-election campaign and several new border-security programs under way, Bush announced a plan to offer temporary work visas -- good for three years and renewable an as-yet undetermined number of times -- to foreigners who are already illegally employed in the United States or whom U.S. employers want to bring into this country. Bush also seeks to increase the number of permanent-resident green cards issued, but he has not specified by how much.

Bush's proposal would make the nation's invitation list more inclusive and, at least theoretically, better tailored to current economic needs. To counter those who want to simply shut off the flow of immigrants, he's selling his proposal primarily as a security measure to bring the illegal-immigrant underworld out of the shadows so that it can be better policed. But Bush's proposal, if passed, might usher in an era in which the U.S. desire for cheap foreign labor trumps all other concerns in crafting immigration policy. What also remains to be seen is whether the Bush proposal would actually produce a stream of guest workers in sync with market demands or would just further complicate a system that Bush described as "not working" and "not the American way."

Huddled masses

"Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free."

In light of our immigrant nation's ambivalent feelings about each new wave of newcomers, perhaps it's more fitting than ironic that Emma Lazarus's welcoming sonnet, "The New Colossus," was not added to the Statue of Liberty until two decades after the statue was dedicated, and it did not become a touchstone of American culture until about 40 years after that. Written in 1883 as part of a fundraising drive for construction of the pedestal for the statue that would greet new arrivals at New York City's harbor, Lazarus's poem, and the 1886 dedication of the Statue of Liberty, followed on the heels of the federal government's first real efforts to regulate the "masses" knocking on America's "golden door."

Until the 1880s, immigration policy was largely left to the states, which sometimes imposed health or financial requirements. Earlier 19th-century attempts by the xenophobic, anti-Catholic Know-Nothing Party to restrict the immigration of free people had fallen flat, because the American frontier seemed to offer boundless opportunities.

But a number of factors combined to trigger the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act, which banned Chinese laborers from immigrating and prohibited Chinese residents from becoming citizens. By then, some Americans had come to fear that the frontier would soon reach a saturation point. And the recession of the 1870s had exacerbated concerns that Chinese laborers were edging white men out of jobs. Anti-Chinese feeling ran especially high in the West, where Chinese laborers imported to build the railroads were moving into other lines of work. "There was a belief that they wouldn't understand the principles that underlie the Constitution," says Bill Ong Hing, a professor of immigration law and history at the University of California (Davis).

Of course, the widespread American perception that the country was being overrun by a "Yellow Peril" was at odds with the numerical reality. Less than one-half of 1 percent of immigrants between 1871 and 1880 were from Asia. Of the total 2.8 million immigrants during that decade, Chinese immigrants numbered just 123,201. The Exclusion Act never completely halted Chinese immigration. But in the 1880s, only 60,000 Chinese entered this country.

With the exception of the ban on Chinese laborers, U.S. immigration policy for the four decades after 1882 attempted to regulate the entry of the huddled masses by stopping short of outright exclusion based on race or ethnicity. The Treasury Department gained control over immigration in 1882 and established the first "head tax" -- 50 cents per immigrant. That year, "lunatics," "idiots," and those likely to become "public charges" were also barred from entry, joining the already excluded convicts and prostitutes.

The Immigration Service, created within Treasury in 1891, required steamship companies to post U.S. immigration laws at their overseas ports and to try to weed out excludable immigrants so that they would never reach U.S. shores. But the U.S.-Canadian border was even more porous then than it is today, and a congressional report in 1891 lamented that 50,000 immigrants had recently sneaked across.

To handle the rising tide of new arrivals, the United States established immigrant-receiving stations on Ellis Island in 1892. More-efficient assembly-line-type facilities were built in the early 1900s at smaller ports, such as Baltimore's, in cooperation with steamship companies. Disembarking passengers were funneled into a pier-side building to meet with an immigration officer. If all went well, they would board a train from the immigration port and be on their way. If rejected, they were detained upstairs. Immigrants deemed excludable were shipped back home, at the steamship company's expense.

An estimated 9 million immigrants arrived between 1901 and 1910. And among Americans, support for making the nation a more exclusive club was spreading. Chronicled most vividly by award-winning author John Higham in Strangers in the Land, the advent of "social Darwinism" offered a pseudoscientific basis for fearing that the country would be dragged down by the supposed inferiority of new arrivals crowding into many urban neighborhoods. This view earned an intellectual stamp from those, like Harvard's Nathaniel S. Shaler, who argued that the future of American democracy depended on nourishing its English and Northern European roots. Shaler claimed that "non-Aryan" immigrants -- such as the new wave of Italians -- were biologically incapable of assimilating into American society.

Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge, R-Mass., was of like mind and produced statistics that he said proved the superiority of English immigrants. On the Senate floor, he warned that without greater restrictions on immigration, America's character would be "bred out." Lodge's solution was to require immigrants to take a literacy test, a proposal he first introduced in Congress in 1896. President Cleveland vetoed it, but Lodge succeeded in getting Congress to pass the literacy requirement and other immigration restrictions over Woodrow Wilson's veto in 1917.

The literacy test -- Bible passages in the foreigner's native tongue -- was just one exclusionary component of the 1917 immigration law, which expanded the ban on Chinese workers to people from Japan and much of the rest of Asia and allowed for the deportation of legal aliens who were political radicals. Deportation was in vogue as a means of supposedly purifying American society.

At the outbreak of World War I, census officials fueled anti-immigrant fervor by reporting that one-third of America's foreign-born residents had come from "enemy" countries. Immigration policy became a wartime weapon. And the Justice Department found ways to strip "disloyal" German-Americans of their U.S. citizenship. It also unofficially deputized citizen-spy groups to investigate acts of alleged disloyalty. The department rounded up 500 suspected Communist aliens after the war. The Farmers National Congress recommended that the department "burn a brand in the hide of those fellows when you deport them so that if they ever dare return, the trademark will tell its tale and expose them."

National origins

Published in 1916, The Passing of the Great Race by Madison Grant didn't attract much attention until 1921. By 1923, it had sold an impressive 16,000 copies and enjoyed endorsements from The New York Times and The Saturday Evening Post. Inspired by the burgeoning eugenics movement, Grant argued that Northern Europeans were racially superior to everyone else. Such thinking, dovetailing with Red Scare isolationism and the rise of the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, strongly influenced immigration policy in the 1920s.

President Harding, having campaigned for a "return to normalcy," called a special session of Congress in 1921 to resurrect a bill sponsored by Sen. William P. Dillingham, R-Vt., to establish quotas for new immigrants based on their proportion of the foreign-born U.S. population in 1910. Signed in May 1921, the law authorized 200,000 immigrants from Northern and Western Europe and 155,000 from Southern and Eastern Europe. No limits were set for the Western Hemisphere. (Africans were under the quota of whatever European power controlled their country.)

The 1921 bill wasn't restrictive enough to suit Rep. Carl Vinson, D-Ga., who declared that "the real American people" -- the English, Scottish, and Welsh -- "belonged to the same branch of the Aryan race." He complained that more-recent immigrants -- those from Southern Europe -- refused to "yield their national characteristics."

Congress was deadlocked for two years on the issue. The American Federation of Labor first advocated, unsuccessfully, for total suspension of immigration, then pushed to drop the annual total of legal immigrants from 3 percent to 2 percent of the foreign-born 1890 population (or, about 165,000). The Ku Klux Klan lobbied for a similar number. But the U.S. Chamber of Commerce advocated raising the bar to 5 percent of the foreign-born 1910 census.

In 1924, Congress finally voted to reduce the quota to 2 percent of the foreign-born 1890 census, but to allow some exceptions for family reunification. The law required immigrants to obtain a visa from a U.S. consulate abroad, and it also created the Border Patrol.

A more permanent solution was enacted in 1929. What became known as the "national-origins quota system" based immigration quotas on each ethnic group's proportion of the U.S. population in the foreign-born 1920 census, and it lowered total national immigration to 153,000 a year. Immigrants from the Western Hemisphere remained free to enter the United States at will, since U.S. officials did not consider them any sort of threat.

But the national-origins quota system failed to "put the genie back in the bottle," said Jeffrey Passel, an immigration analyst with the Urban Institute. The complexion of the United States never returned to what it had been in 1920, when almost 80 percent of the white population came from Northern and Western European stock. Over the next 30 years, only 39 percent of white immigrants hailed from that corner of Europe. And the post-1929 decline in immigration was more a consequence of the Depression than of lawmakers' efforts to turn back the clock.

When the economy picked up during World War II, Congress was pressed to make it easier for foreign workers to enter. Started in 1942 as a temporary program for all foreign farm workers, the bracero -- from the Spanish word brazos, or arms -- program was codified in 1951 as a means to bring in cheap Mexican farmhands to pick grapes and tomatoes. The controversial program, which involved some 4 million Mexicans, was shut down in 1964 after an Edward R. Murrow television documentary, Harvest of Shame, brought the widespread exploitation of bracero laborers into American living rooms.

Meanwhile, Congress had gradually chipped away at the quota system. The Chinese Exclusion Act was repealed in 1943, though the ban on other Asians was kept and the Chinese annual quota was set at only 100. And the 1945 War Brides Act allowed foreign spouses and children of U.S. servicemen and -women to become citizens. That year, Congress also passed the Displaced Persons Act, which allowed 400,000 refugees to enter, over and above the official quotas. Even American woolgrowers received a special dispensation to bring in 250 nonquota Basque shepherds. In the 1950s, two-thirds of legal immigrants were outside the quotas.

Pressure was mounting to revisit the quota system, and Congress finally passed another comprehensive immigration bill in 1952. The McCarran-Walter Act largely codified the exception-riddled status quo, but it did eliminate the last vestiges of racial exclusion -- for the Japanese and other Asians. The law passed over the veto of President Truman, who had wanted to abolish the national-origins quota system.

All in the Family President Kennedy had a long-standing interest in immigration. He had knocked Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., the elder Lodge's grandson, out of his Senate seat in 1952 and later had written A Nation of Immigrants, which advocated eliminating the national-origins system. Edward Kennedy assumed his brother's Senate seat in 1962, and in 1965, the then-junior senator from Massachusetts championed immigration reform in the name of his martyred brother.

The Kennedy bill had first been proposed in 1962 by lobbyists for the Italian immigrant community, to boost the quota for Southern and Eastern Europe. Italian immigrants and their offspring had become an increasingly important voting bloc that leaned Democratic, but immigration reform took on enormous symbolic importance after JFK's assassination when supporters cast it as a way to pay tribute to the late president's vision for the nation.

After months of contentious debate, Edward Kennedy, strongly backed by his surviving brother, Sen. Robert Kennedy of New York, successfully sold the bill to 75 Senate colleagues as part of JFK's legacy. "If there is one guiding principle to this bill, it is that we are going to treat all men and women who want to come to this country as individuals, equal in the eyes of the law," Edward Kennedy declared. "We will only ask, in the words of President Kennedy, what they can do for this, their new country."

Advertised as egalitarian, the bill slightly increased annual immigration from the Eastern Hemisphere to 170,000 and limited immigration from any single country to 20,000. It capped immigration from the Western Hemisphere for the first time -- at 120,000 a year. And within those quotas, the law gave a strong preference to people with close relatives in the United States.

Edward Kennedy had promised that "this legislation opens no floodgate." But economic and demographic pressures didn't cooperate. And the tools that the law put into place -- slightly larger quotas with a preference for family members -- were ill-equipped to counter those pressures, which generated an unanticipated new wave of immigrants.

The Kennedy bill was designed to broaden the welcome mat for Italians and others from Southern or Eastern Europe. Yet by the time the law took effect in 1968, its targeted beneficiaries were generally finding work nearer home. Thanks to the decline of border restrictions within Europe, 1.5 million Italians, for example, had gotten foreign jobs without crossing the Atlantic. Europeans were just over 10 percent of the new wave of immigration to the United States in the 1970s.

But instead of Italians and Greeks, an unexpected set of guests did accept the new U.S. invitation. Between 1960 and 1980, the U.S. foreign-born Asian population quintupled, and the U.S. foreign-born Mexican population quadrupled. In addition to the new law's dramatically higher quotas for Asians -- whose annual national quotas had been in the hundreds -- the United States began taking refugees from Vietnam and elsewhere in Asia. And after the first big waves of Asian and Mexican immigrants arrived legally, their relatives could take advantage of "family-reunification" preferences. So the new populations continued to swell.

"I don't think any person, including the lobbyists for Asian-American groups, had any notion of what would happen with this law. I didn't," said Roger Daniels, a history professor at the University of Cincinnati, whose most recent book is Guarding the Golden Door. "If you could have convinced any significant number of people in Congress that by passing this law, hundreds of thousands of Asians and hundreds of thousands of Mexicans and Central Americans would come legally to the United States, I'm convinced it would not have passed."

Why had Mexican immigration exploded? In the 1950s, plummeting mortality rates in Mexico had begun to increase the population so rapidly that by the mid-1960s, there simply were not enough jobs to go around. In greater numbers than ever before, Mexican workers looked to the United States for economic relief -- right at the time the United States imposed immigration quotas for the first time on the Western Hemisphere.

With too few invitations to go around, immigrants from Mexico were bound to crash the party. "That seems to me how we ended up with illegal immigration," says the Urban Institute's Passel.

The 1965 law also coincided with the rise of affordable air travel. Millions of foreigners discovered that they could fly to the United States for a "vacation" and never leave. Possibly 30 to 40 percent of the 8 million to 10 million illegal residents now in this country are people who entered lawfully but stayed beyond the expiration date of their visas. But over-stayers are difficult to find and deport. Federal agents find it much easier to spot a Mexican slipping across the Rio Grande illegally than to figure out which Irish bartender or Nigerian cabdriver no longer has a valid visa.

Two decades after the Kennedy law's limits helped to create illegal Mexican immigration, the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act granted asylum to illegal immigrants who could prove they had lived in the United States for at least four years. Three million Hispanic immigrants, from Mexico and farther south, signed up for legalization, making their relatives eligible for family-reunification preferences.

The U.S. Hispanic population has continued to surge, and so has illegal immigration, because federal sanctions against employers who hire illegals are rarely enforced, and because the 1986 law created the expectation that asylum will eventually be granted to anyone who settles in the United States.

Today, 10 million Mexican immigrants are living in the United States. Half are here illegally. Every year, 150,000 to 200,000 Mexicans arrive legally, and Passel estimates that at least that many enter illegally. Tighter border controls since 9/11 seem not to have stanched the flow but have shifted more of the traffic to dangerous routes. In fiscal 2003, more than 150 would-be immigrants perished in the Arizona desert.

Bush's turn

When President Bush unveiled his immigration proposal, he followed the historical pattern by describing his plan as the way to fulfill Americans' shared vision of what our nation is and should be. "By tradition and conviction, our country is a welcoming society," he said. "America is a stronger and better nation because of the hard work, and the faith, and entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants.... Every generation of immigrants has reaffirmed our ability to assimilate newcomers, which is one of the defining strengths of our country."

But America isn't actually feeling so welcoming these days. A Gallup Poll taken shortly after Bush's announcement found that 74 percent of Americans think the United States should not make it easier for illegal immigrants to become citizens. (Sixty-seven percent felt that way in August 2001.) Asked specifically about Bush's plan, 55 percent were opposed.

Alan Simpson said he worries that any immigration legislation passed in an election year will pander too much to Hispanic voters. But he also asserts that it's virtually impossible for Congress to ever deal rationally with immigration. "Every time you get to a sensible provision," he said, "it is overcome by emotion, fear, guilt, or racism."

And Simpson is dubious about a cornerstone of Bush's plan -- the premise that millions of foreign workers can be persuaded to eventually go home. "There's no such thing in immigration law as 'temporary,' " Simpson said. "When you come here under 'temporary' status, you put in a root. You may marry. You may have children. When someone comes to deport you, that's the headline in the local paper."

Some analysts, including Hing of the University of California, question how our nation's melting-pot history fits with asking millions of guest workers to labor in this country but to not become emotionally invested in making this their permanent home. But former Immigration and Naturalization Service Commissioner James Ziglar, a Bush appointee, sees promise in the president's proposal. He says a large-scale temporary-worker program is probably no more than "a first step." He contends that significantly boosting the number of green cards might help reduce illegal immigration, especially if today's illegal immigrants could earn points toward permanent legal residence for what they offer this country -- education, specific skills, or family ties.

The Bush proposal has already spurred activity on the Hill. Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle, D-S.D., joined with Sen. Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to introduce an alternative that would offer illegal immigrants a faster route to citizenship. House Democrats have also offered an alternative, which is a more-vigorous effort to legalize undocumented immigrants.

And still, insiders say Bush's proposal is unlikely to get far in this election year. "I don't think you're going to see the White House pushing hard to get it done this year," Ziglar said. "However, I do think there's enough momentum for this to see activity in the early stages of the next Bush administration, if there is one." He says there is bipartisan agreement that something needs to be done fairly soon to stem the tide of illegal immigration.

Whatever its details, a temporary-worker program involving as many as 8 million foreigners would reshape American society in unpredictable ways. For if immigration history teaches anything, it's that U.S. policy makers are no good at forecasting the demographic changes that will flow from rewriting immigration law.

A wide-open temporary-worker plan is likely to make the future stream of immigrants more diverse, predicts Michael LeMay, a political science professor at California State University (San Bernardino) and author of The Perennial Struggle, a history of U.S. immigration policy. People in, say, Africa or Central Asia may discover that their skills are suddenly marketable in the United States, he says. And an influx of people from the far corners of the globe could only accelerate current trends toward America's multiracial, global society. "We don't know how [Bush's plan] will affect how we see ourselves as a people, but it will," LeMay says. "We don't know how it will affect who our Miss America is 20 years from now, but it will."

So, while many critics dismiss Bush's proposal as merely election-year politics and complain that it's not "comprehensive," anyone would be foolish to underestimate the program's potential impact. Should it become law, Bush's vision of America's national guest list will influence who is invited here, and who stays, for generations to come.

!996
American Patrol Reference Archive

Federal Immigration and Nationality Act
Section 8 USC 1324(a)(1)(A)(iv)(b)(iii)

"Any person who . . . encourages or induces an alien to . . . reside . . . knowing or in reckless disregard of the fact that such . . . residence is . . . in violation of law, shall be punished as provided . . . for each alien in respect to whom such a violation occurs . . . fined under title 18 . . . imprisoned not more than 5 years, or both."

Section 274 felonies under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, INA 274A(a)(1)(A):

A person (including a group of persons, business, organization, or local government) commits a federal felony when she or he:

* assists an alien s/he should reasonably know is illegally in the U.S. or who lacks employment authorization, by transporting, sheltering, or assisting him or her to obtain employment, or

* encourages that alien to remain in the U.S. by referring him or her to an employer or by acting as employer or agent for an employer in any way, or

* knowingly assists illegal aliens due to personal convictions.

Penalties upon conviction include criminal fines, imprisonment, and forfeiture of vehicles and real property used to commit the crime. Anyone employing or contracting with an illegal alien without verifying his or her work authorization status is guilty of a misdemeanor. Aliens and employers violating immigration laws are subject to arrest, detention, and seizure of their vehicles or property. In addition, individuals or entities who engage in racketeering enterprises that commit (or conspire to commit) immigration-related felonies are subject to private civil suits for treble damages and injunctive relief.

Recruitment and Employment of Illegal Aliens

It is unlawful to hire an alien, to recruit an alien, or to refer an alien for a fee, knowing the alien is unauthorized to work in the United States. It is equally unlawful to continue to employ an alien knowing that the alien is unauthorized to work. Employers may give preference in recruitment and hiring to a U.S. citizen over an alien with work authorization only where the U.S. citizen is equally or better qualified. It is unlawful to hire an individual for employment in the United States without complying with employment eligibility verification requirements. Requirements include examination of identity documents and completion of Form I-9 for every employee hired. Employers must retain all I-9s, and, with three days' advance notice, the forms must be made available for inspection. Employment includes any service or labor performed for any type of remuneration within the United States, with the exception of sporadic domestic service by an individual in a private home. Day laborers or other casual workers engaged in any compensated activity (with the above exception) are employees for purposes of immigration law. An employer includes an agent or anyone acting directly or indirectly in the interest of the employer. For purposes of verfication of authorization to work, employer also means an independent contractor, or a contractor other than the person using the alien labor. The use of temporary or short-term contracts cannot be used to circumvent the employment authorization verification requirements. If employment is to be for less than the usual three days allowed for completing the I-9 Form requirement, the form must be completed immediately at the time of hire.

An employer has constructive knowledge that an employee is an illegal unauthorized worker if a reasonable person would infer it from the facts. Constructive knowledge constituting a violation of federal law has been found where (1) the I-9 employment eligibility form has not been properly completed, including supporting documentation, (2) the employer has learned from other individuals, media reports, or any source of information available to the employer that the alien is unauthorized to work, or (3) the employer acts with reckless disregard for the legal consequences of permitting a third party to provide or introduce an illegal alien into the employer's work force. Knowledge cannot be inferred solely on the basis of an individual's accent or foreign appearance.

Actual specific knowledge is not required. For example, a newspaper article stating that ballrooms depend on an illegal alien work force of dance hostesses was held by the courts to be a reasonable ground for suspicion that unlawful conduct had occurred.

IT IS ILLEGAL FOR NONPROFIT OR RELIGIOUS ORGANIZATIONS to knowingly assist an employer to violate employment sanctions, REGARDLESS OF CLAIMS THAT THEIR CONVICTIONS REQUIRE THEM TO ASSIST ALIENS. Harboring or aiding illegal aliens is not protected by the First Amendment. It is a felony to establish a commercial enterprise for the purpose of evading any provision of federal immigration law. Violators may be fined or imprisoned for up to five years.

Encouraging and Harboring Illegal Aliens

It is a violation of law for any person to conceal, harbor, or shield from detection in any place, including any building or means of transportation, any alien who is in the United States in violation of law. HARBORING MEANS ANY CONDUCT THAT TENDS TO SUBSTANTIALLY FACILITATE AN ALIEN TO REMAIN IN THE U.S. ILLEGALLY. The sheltering need not be clandestine, and harboring covers aliens arrested outdoors, as well as in a building. This provision includes harboring an alien who entered the U.S. legally but has since lost his legal status.

An employer can be convicted of the felony of harboring illegal aliens who are his employees if he takes actions in reckless disregard of their illegal status, such as ordering them to obtain false documents, altering records, obstructing INS inspections, or taking other actions that facilitate the alien's illegal employment. Any person who within any 12-month period hires ten or more individuals with actual knowledge that they are illegal aliens or unauthorized workers is guilty of felony harboring. It is also a felony to encourage or induce an alien to come to or reside in the U.S. knowing or recklessly disregarding the fact that the alien's entry or residence is in violation of the law. This crime applies to any person, rather than just employers of illegal aliens. Courts have ruled that "encouraging" includes counseling illegal aliens to continue working in the U.S. or assisting them to complete applications with false statements or obvious errors. The fact that the alien is a refugee fleeing persecution is not a defense to this felony, since U.S. law and the UN Protocol on Refugees both require that a refugee must report to immigration authorities without delay upon entry to the U.S.

The penalty for felony harboring is a fine and imprisonment for up to five years. The penalty for felony alien smuggling is a fine and up to ten years' imprisonment. Where the crime causes serious bodily injury or places the life of any person in jeopardy, the penalty is a fine and up to twenty years' imprisonment. If the criminal smuggling or harboring results in the death of any person, the penalty can include life imprisonment. Convictions for aiding, abetting, or conspiracy to commit alien smuggling or harboring, carry the same penalties. Courts can impose consecutive prison sentences for each alien smuggled or harbored. A court may order a convicted smuggler to pay restitution if the alien smuggled qualifies as a victim under the Victim and Witness Protection Act. Conspiracy to commit crimes of sheltering, harboring, or employing illegal aliens is a separate federal offense punishable by a fine of up to $10,000 or five years' imprisonment.

Enforcement

A person or entity having knowledge of a violation or potential violation of employer sanctions provisions may submit a signed written complaint to the INS office with jurisdiction over the business or residence of the potential violator, whether an employer, employee, or agent. The complaint must include the names and addresses of both the complainant and the violator, and detailed factual allegations, including date, time, and place of the potential violation, and the specific conduct alleged to be a violation of employer sanctions. By regulation, the INS will only investigate third-party complaints that have a reasonable probability of validity. Designated INS officers and employees, and all other officers whose duty it is to enforce criminal laws, may make an arrest for violation of smuggling or harboring illegal aliens.

State and local law enforcement officials have the general power to investigate and arrest violators of federal immigration statutes without prior INS knowledge or approval, as long as they are authorized to do so by state law. There is no extant federal limitation on this authority. The 1996 immigration control legislation passed by Congress was intended to encourage states and local agencies to participate in the process of enforcing federal immigration laws. Immigration officers and local law enforcement officers may detain an individual for a brief warrantless interrogation where circumstances create a reasonable suspicion that the individual is illegally present in the U.S. Specific facts constituting a reasonable suspicion include evasive, nervous, or erratic behavior; dress or speech indicating foreign citizenship; and presence in an area known to contain a concentration of illegal aliens. Hispanic appearance alone is not sufficient. Immigration officers and police must have a valid warrant or valid employer's consent to enter workplaces or residences. Any vehicle used to transport or harbor illegal aliens, or used as a substantial part of an activity that encourages illegal aliens to come to or reside in the U.S. may be seized by an immigration officer and is subject to forfeiture. The forfeiture power covers any conveyances used within the U.S.

RICO -- Citizen Recourse

Private persons and entities may initiate civil suits to obtain injunctions and treble damages against enterprises that conspire to or actually violate federal alien smuggling, harboring, or document fraud statutes, under the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO). The pattern of racketeering activity is defined as commission of two or more of the listed crimes. A RICO enterprise can be any individual legal entity, or a group of individuals who are not a legal entity but are associated in fact, AND CAN INCLUDE NONPROFIT ASSOCIATIONS.

Tax Crimes

Employers who aid or abet the preparation of false tax returns by failing to pay income or Social Security taxes for illegal alien employees, or who knowingly make payments using false names or Social Security numbers, are subject to IRS criminal and civil sanctions. U.S. nationals who have suffered intentional discrimination because of citizenship or national origin by an employer with more than three employees may file a complaint within 180 days of the discriminatory act with the Special Counsel for Immigration-Related Unfair Employment Practices, U.S. Department of Justice. In additon to the federal statutes summarized, state laws and local ordinances controlling fair labor practices, workers compensation, zoning, safe housing and rental property, nuisance, licensing, street vending, and solicitations by contractors may also apply to activities that involve illegal aliens.

http://www.americanpatrol.com/REFERENCE ... C1324.html

Unless the laws of 1996 have been changed, this document says state and local police can question illegal aliens with little evidence. And it says the church who is harboring Elvira should be in deep do-do with the law. This entire article is very enlightening.

Thanks everyone for your help! Keep up the good work.

Don't forget to include links. We can't use it if we don't know the source.

Also, we don't need the complete article, just the link and a brief description of what is in the article. One or two sentences.

Dixie