Thread: Thursday WSJ article on remittances

Does anyone have access to this article on the front page of the Wall Street Journal?

Can you not find it online?? Or is it difficult to find something from another day??

It is subscription only access

That's RIGHT. I had forgotten that I have tried to access it in the past and they actually CHARGE for online access! Well, we don't need them anyway, do we???

Is this what you are looking for?


Debate Persists on Worker Amnesty

As House Lawmakers Weigh Immigration
Measure, Republicans Remain Divided on Issue
By JUNE KRONHOLZ
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
December 16, 2005; Page A4

WASHINGTON -- Amnesty: It's the unspeakable word in the immigration debate.

The immigration bill expected to pass the House of Representatives as soon as today doesn't mention it. And even supporters take pains to call it something else -- "adjustment" or "regularization" or "earned access."

"It's a red cape in front of so many bulls," says John Gay of the Essential Worker Immigration Coalition, a pro-immigration lobby.

By any name, though, amnesty is central to the debate over who should be allowed into the U.S. and on what terms. The idea of letting illegal immigrants stay in the U.S. has split the Republican Party between those eager to help business and those worried about security or national identity.

It is almost certain to figure in next year's midterm elections, where it could scuttle Republican hopes of winning Hispanic voters. And if policy makers don't find a middle ground, it could end congressional and White House plans to fix an immigration system that many see as broken.

At issue is what to do about the 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. With the country's unskilled work force shrinking, whole industries rely on illegal labor. The Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington think tank that favors restricting immigration, estimates that 24% of agriculture workers and 11% of construction workers are here illegally.

The House bill attempts to stem that tide by making it harder for employers to hire illegal workers and riskier for illegal immigrants to be here. Among other things, it would require employers to verify through Social Security and Department of Homeland Security databases that all their workers -- even those on the payroll for decades -- are eligible to hold jobs.

The bill also would make it a criminal offense for an immigrant to be in the U.S. illegally instead of the current civil violation. Illegal immigrants would have less access to federal courts before being deported. Those from countries other than Mexico would be jailed until they can be deported, and individuals such as church workers that help illegal immigrants also could face jail time.

The bill's congressional supporters say it was designed with the 2006 elections in mind. Will Adams, spokesman for Colorado Republican Tom Tancredo, the leader of an immigration-restriction faction in the House, says Republican leaders asked their members for get-tough ideas to include in the bill. "They wanted red-meat votes -- votes that appeal to the conservative base," Mr. Adams says.

But the bill touched off a furor within a strange-bedfellows alliance of service-sector unions, churches, immigrant advocates, free marketers and such Republican-leaning groups as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. They all say the bill doesn't include an avenue for illegal workers to legalize their status or for new workers to enter the country. Current immigration quotas limit the number of visas issued to low-skilled, full-time workers to 5,000 a year, even though employers say they need about 500,000 new low-skilled workers yearly to keep the economy humming.

Several bills circulating in the Senate tackle those problems in addition to proposing measures to toughen border controls and workplace laws. Bipartisan supporters of those bills agree with the House that the flow of illegal immigrants won't be stemmed until Congress makes it harder for them to get into the U.S. and harder to use false documents to get jobs. They also agree with the House that porous borders leave the U.S. vulnerable to terrorists.

But the Senate bills also try to draw illegal workers out of the underground economy by offering ways to gain legal status. Supporters of that approach -- including business and immigrant groups -- argue that legalized workers could be taxed and those with criminal backgrounds could be identified and deported. They also say that any new law must make it easier for legal immigrants to come to the U.S. for jobs that an increasingly educated and older domestic work force won't fill.

But House leaders have declined to consider any bill that deals with the illegal population until after passing tougher enforcement measures. That allows lawmakers "going home for Christmas to give the American people the message that Republicans in the House are serious about getting control of our border and enforcing the law," Mr. Adams says. "That's been a huge problem with our base, and we're trying to turn that around."

The House bill is given no chance of passing the Senate or being signed by President Bush. The president has called for a new immigration law that toughens enforcement but also supplies the economy with workers and gives workers some legal status.

But the House measure heightens the immigration debate and could sour the chances of any measure that includes amnesty. "For some people, the deal breaker is that we shouldn't reward people who have broken the law," says Audrey Singer, who studies immigration at the Brookings Institute in Washington.

When Congress last overhauled immigration laws two decades ago, it offered amnesty to immigrants who could prove they were longtime, law-abiding residents. But 3.1 million immigrants came forward, twice as many as the government expected. Because the law didn't have provisions for any new workers to enter, illegal immigration continued. Amnesty quickly became a political dirty word. "Amnesty says you broke the law and we're gonna blink," says Bruce Josten, who follows immigration policy for the Chamber of Commerce and prefers the term "documentation."

But forcing illegal immigrants to leave isn't an option either. Some sympathetic lawmakers are proposing that illegal workers "earn" the right to stay in the U.S. The various Senate bills want illegal immigrants to pay a fine and back taxes, leave the country at least briefly, learn English, wait up to six years before applying for legalization and then go to the back of the paperwork queue for visas allowing residency.

The trick, says Tamar Jacoby, who studies immigration issues for the Manhattan Institute in New York, is to set a bar that is high enough to mollify voters, yet not so high that it discourages illegal immigrants from coming forward.

But earned-access proposals don't satisfy some lawmakers: Mr. Tancredo calls them "amnesty by another name." And they might not calm some voters. Playing to their fears, the House may hear amendments including a legally doubtful one that would deny citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.

The Senate is expected to tackle its own, broader immigration bill early next year. But House passage of a bill that most Democrats and even some Republicans consider extreme would make it hard for the two chambers to reach a compromise. In that case, both sides seem content to let immigration overhaul die -- and come up again in 2007.



Write to June Kronholz at june.kronholz@wsj.com1

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113469600264024118.html

OK, I think this is the one.
I was expecting another one about the billions sent to Mexico so the Phillipines threw me for a loop.


Another Notch Down for Manila
December 22, 2005

The Philippines suffered yet another indignity this week when Freedom House downgraded the country's ranking to "partly free" from "free" in its annual global index. The irony is that not much has really changed, according to local observers. And therein lies the problem.

Take political rights, one of the two broad categories that Freedom House examines. The Philippines is certainly a democracy, complete with a free press -- something some of its regional neighbors can't boast. But its democratic heritage has been smeared by two "people power" movements that have removed the head of state by extra-constitutional means. Now it's looking at a possible hat trick.

Given the history here, we're taking the latest coup rumors seriously. Gloria Macapagal Arroyo's popularity dipped considerably after she admitted a "lapse in judgment" when she phoned an election official to "check" on the voting last year. Her poll numbers have yet to recover and when she leaves the country, the army goes on high alert. Last week was particularly tense: The army claimed it uncovered an internal plot to overthrow the president and the government arrested an elderly general whom it claimed was plotting to take over military bases.

Not to worry, we're told, the coup won't happen before the new year -- after all, in such a Roman Catholic country, who would interrupt Christmas to fell a government?

Meanwhile, corruption runs rampant, particularly in the military -- no friend of democracy. A retired major general was recently convicted of illegally defrauding the state of millions of dollars while in public service. The domestic political parties routinely accuse each other of corruption. We'll go out on a limb and guess there's a lot more crime at play here than has yet been rooted out.

Ms. Arroyo is trying to quiet the chattering classes by pushing constitutional reform that would transform the government from a presidential to a parliamentary system. But switching the form doesn't change the substance. If Ms. Arroyo's current government hasn't been able to tackle corruption, why would a parliament do better? And as always, there's the irritant of left-wing coalitions such as the Struggle of the Masses and the Citizens' Action Party agitating for another revolution. If popular discontent increases, they could very well gain a base of public support.

Meanwhile, Filipinos continue to vote with their feet. Worker remittances totaled $9.5 billion last year, and are expected to increase substantially this year, according to Fitch Ratings. There's something terribly wrong with an economy when its best and brightest decide to head overseas in droves. Lucky for the Philippines, a distinctly tight-knit, family-oriented culture draws that money back home.

It's not all bad news. Government revenues have picked up, although at the cost of a new value-added tax. The domestic currency, the peso, is one of the best-performing in Asia this year. But the economic situation hinges on political stability.

Perhaps it's just that the Philippines looks increasingly backward as the rest of the world moves forward. According to Freedom House, the world showing "striking improvement" this year, compared to last year, particularly in the Middle East. Asia, meanwhile, looks distinctly less impressive. Out of the eight worst offenders (which score the lowest on ranking of political rights and civil liberties) fully half -- North Korea, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Burma -- lie in Asian time zones. China accounts for about half of the world's "not free" population. It's sad to see the Philippines slipping out of the "free" category simply because its politicians continue to show less interest in serving their nation than in serving themselves.

URL for this article:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113520070861328715.html