Thread: Uh Oh, Nominee for Labor Secretary Alex Acosta Rings Amnesty Alarm Bells

Uh Oh, Nominee for Labor Secretary Alex Acosta Rings Amnesty Alarm Bells

S. Noble

February 17, 2017


R. Alexander Acosta supports amnesty, very easy immigration, cheap labor, federal laws mandating diversity.

He became the second dean of the FIU Law in 2009. A native of Miami and first-generation lawyer, Dean Acosta earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard College and his law degree from Harvard Law School.

After serving as law clerk to Justice Samuel A. Alito, Jr., then a judge on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, Dean Acosta practiced law at the firm of Kirkland & Ellis and taught law at the George Mason School of Law.

Currently, he is the dean of the Florida International University College of Law.

Dean Acosta has served in three presidentially-appointed, senate-confirmed positions. He was a member of the National Labor Relations Board, where he participated in or authored more than 125 opinions.
He went on to be the first Hispanic to hold the rank of Assistant Attorney General. Dean Acosta served as the U.S. Attorney for Southern District of Florida, and was the longest serving U.S. Attorney in the District since the 1970s.

Dean Acosta Advocated for Amnesty, Near-Open Borders
Alexander Acosta, President Donald Trump’s replacement choice to run the Department of Labor, advocated for easier immigration and amnesty for people who previously had come to the United States illegally.
As Labor Secretary, his department would oversee workplace inspections and help set overall labor policies.

Ira Mehlman, the FAIR spokesman, said Acosta seems to view immigration through the same lens as Puzder. “He seems to also advocate for an unlimited, or virtually unlimited, flow of immigrant labor,” he said.


“He essentially advocates for amnesty for the basis for immigration reform. That kind of sounds like open borders,” Mehlman warned.

Advocates for Comprehensive Immigration Reform – Amnesty

Acosta, who served on the National Labor Relations Board in the George W. Bush administration, expressed his views at a 2012 forum sponsored by the Hispanic Leadership Network Conference. He called for “comprehensive immigration solutions” and lamented the failure of previous legislative efforts.

“Part of that means figuring out what we do with all the individuals that are already in our nation,” he said. “We need them here. They provide construction jobs. They provide agricultural jobs. We need to figure out a way to address that. We need to figure out a way to then have a pathway to further, future legal immigration. And if we don’t take it all at once, we’re not going to solve it. Because you can’t solve part of it without solving the other part.”


During the 2012 forum, Acosta told the story of a Haitian women who paid smugglers to come into the country and endured repeated rapes during the journey.

“The cost of illegal immigration is not simply exclusion, but it’s the abuse of those individuals that are looking to our nation as beacons of freedom, and so we need to take it on, we need to figure out a way to address illegal immigration and give everyone a pathway to get here legally, in a transparent way, and in a fair way,” he said.


William Gheen, founder of the Americans for Legal Immigration PAC, said the views Acosta expressed at the 2012 forum are disturbing.


“It’s very clear that this guy is from the amnesty side of the aisle,” he said. “It’s very unfortunate that someone like that would ever be considered for any position in the Trump administration.”


Under current rules, the federal government annually provides work permits to roughly 1 million contract workers and Green Cards to roughly one million immigrants each year, just as four million young Americans join the workforce. The high level of immigration has been supported by the GOP’s business wing, including President George W. Bush, Jeb Bush and Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.


Recognized by Radical Groups



The very radical MALDEF, gave Acosta its “Excellence in Government Service Award” in 2003 “for his work on language minority issues, including initiatives on language access to government-funded services”.


That’s – government-funded services.


The language “initiatives” commended by MALDEF are all tied to Clinton Executive Order 13166. E.O. 13166 requires multilingual federal services. All recipients of federal funds must function in Spanish, or any other language in the world, upon demand.


So-called “Hispanic-rights groups” see nothing wrong with making Spanish coequal with English in the United States, even if the people those groups claim to represent are busy learning English.


In 2008, MALDEF joined the George Soros-funded Media Matters and Center for American Progress in supporting the National Council of La Raza‘s “We Can Stop the Hate” campaign, which was designed to silence critics who raised alarms about mass illegal immigration into the United States and who opposed amnesty for illegal immigrants.




Acosta was endorsed in 2003 by the radical National Council of LaRaza when he was a prospective nominee for assistant attorney general for civil rights. The group, in 2003 testimony supporting Acosta’s bid to be an assistant attorney general, called him a “bridge-builder, not only with the Latino community but with other ethnic and racial groups.”

Acosta joined a bar association panel called the Commission on Hispanic Legal Rights & Responsibilities, which included the heads of the ACLU and of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund. The commission then produced a report which condemned public opposition to illegal immigration, saying:


The role of elected officials in furthering a discourse of antipathy towards immigrants, including out-of-status immigrants, often underlies these state legislative efforts, and arguably provides legitimacy to the increased hostility towards Latinos, and the marginalization of Latino communities. Apparent public support for these legislative efforts have made Latinos feel vulnerable and has also significantly impacted Latinos’ perceptions of fairness … the [2012 DACA mini-amnesty] policy does not grant any substantive right, and does not provide a long-term solution to the immigration system problems, which can only be addressed through appropriate immigration reform.


The report was titled “Latinos in the United States: Overcoming Legal Obstacles, Engaging in Civic Life.” The report cited support from several Latino radicals, including the president of the National Council of La Raza ethnic advocacy group. Acosta currently chairs the 11-member panel, which also includes the president of LatinoJustice PRLDEF, a Latino advocacy group.


Acosta Supported Feds Ordering Pro-Diversity Laws


From 2003 to 2005, he was Assistant Attorney General for the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice, where he supported lawsuits that imposed social diversity on cohesive American communities. His wins include a court decision ending a schoolroom ban on Islamic hijabs, and an anti-discrimination case which forced a community to permit housing for imported contract workers. His resume, posted at Harvard, explains.


In 2016, he advocated for cops to give Miranda warnings in the home languages of immigrant suspects who don’t speak English. He told NPR in August that there are many ways it can be done, such as through apps on iPhones, carry various translation cards and so on.
In 2011, he testified at a Senate hearing for policies that would treat Islam as if it were a religion which separates church and state, as does Christiniary and Judaism. He also defended Bush’s sympathetic outreach to Islamist political groups in the United States, Breitbart reported.


http://www.independentsentinel.com/u...y-alarm-bells/

Yep and he'll sail through the Senate with a very high confirmation vote, probably 100-0 which says far more about our Senate than it does Acosta. I don't know if there's anything we can do to stop the confirmation.

Just because Acosta wants amnesty does not mean Trump and Sessions want it.

Waiting for the bomb to drop on this. And I hope they blow this OUT of the water.

That's right Beezer. The US Department of Labor has very little to do with illegal immigration, amnesty or anything else. What they do have some impact on is claims made by illegal aliens who feel they were cheated by employers in our country. They have more impact on legal immigration because they review the requests for foreign labor that require verification of labor shortage or unavailable skills to get foreign visas issued for the company to hire them through a visa, such as H1B visas and others.

The Department could be more active and assigned greater roles in controlling this problem as well as the illegal immigration problem, which is what Andy Puzder and Trump were going to work on. I'd say all those new things the department could have become involved with are dead now with the Acosta nomination. And that's a shame.

If "illegal aliens" feel cheated by employers in our Country...then FINE the employers and shut them down! And deport those who have the nerve to complain.

93 million American's out of work is NO labor shortage.

Too many Mexicans complaining that Americans are lazy do jobs what they are usually do....agriculture, construction, services...etc....
I know...here's half true....another one...lower payable jobs, we don't like too...
ITs true, we have too many people out of work...someone lazy, someone not....just saying.....Kick them out of Welfare and put them over construction,agriculture, services...?
....Here's thousands of jobs what Mexicans do, question is, the Americans could replace them...? How can the Government push to people get the job, if they don't want too...? NO welfare, no food stams..? Like socialism....? NO free goods, if you don't want to work..or don't have money to survive....how can we replace the Mexicans? I should I can, but I don't need to...but people out of work...?

Judy wrote (excerpt):

The US Department of Labor has very little to do with illegal immigration, amnesty or anything else. What they do have some impact on is claims made by illegal aliens who feel they were cheated by employers in our country.

I find your comment to be a little contradictory. Besides that, I think the Department of Labor has an important role on the illegal immigration front. Under the Obama administration the illegal immigrant almost always walks away with full pockets and disappears back into the shadows. In the real world of 'law and order' the illegal should, at the completion of the case, be reported to ICE for deportation. Of course this doesn't happen. With this new nominee I suspect the old way of doing business will continue because his mindset on protecting illegals is no different than Obama's SOL.

As for having nothing to do with amnesty. Of course the SOL has nothing to do with giving someone an amnesty. However, the SOL does turn a blind eye to the illegal status of a worker, which means they're able to continue their illegal status. Couldn't that be considered a de facto amnesty? If the Department of Labor respected our immigration law the illegal alien would be deported once the issue with the employer was resolved. It just doesn't make sense for one government agency to protect illegals while another is pursing and deporting them.

I don't think Trump should be appointing cabinet members that have a mentality that directly conflicts with his own position on the issue. Furthermore, surrounding himself with folks like that can't be considered a good thing because all cabinet members can potentially have an influence over the President.

I don't know if this Department of Labor will be run exactly like Obama's was, but I'm hopeful it won't.

Labor Dept. Helps Illegal Alien Workers

APRIL 06, 2010
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The Department of Labor has launched a special program to assist and protect illegal immigrant workers in the U.S., referred to as “vulnerable” and “underpaid” by the presidential cabinet member who heads the agency.

Hundreds of new field investigators have been deployed to reach out to Latino laborers in areas with large numbers of illegal alien employees. Their message, in Spanish, is “we can help” bring workplace protections to the nation’s most vulnerable and underpaid workers, including those who have no legal right to live in the Untied States.

Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, a former California congresswoman with close ties to the influential La Raza movement, announced the “We Can Help”project with great fanfare a few days ago. A total of 1,000 investigators from her agency will focus on enforcing labor and wage laws in industries that typically hire lots of illegal aliens without reporting anyone to federal immigration authorities.

Solis told Latino workers that “your president, your secretary of labor and this department will not allow anyone to be denied his or her rightful pay, especially when so many in our nation are working long, hard and often dangerous hours.” She assured illegal immigrants that “if you work in this country, you are protected by our laws.”

The same day Solis publicly announced the Obama Administration’s new project, a Labor Department investigator visited a day laborer center in northern California to promote it. The federal employee actually chatted warmly with the illegal immigrants about how to find jobs without being exploited, according to a local newspaper report. “We’re the feds but the good ones,” he told the day laborers in Spanish. “We’re here to help workers.”

The agency has also launched a Spanish television advertising campaign to spread the word and created a web site. Workers in industries from construction to food service are urged to contact the Labor Department of wage and hour violations. An investigator may be deployed to the work site or the employer may be taken to court.

http://www.judicialwatch.org/blog/20...alien-workers/

That's right Beezer. The US Department of Labor has very little to do with illegal immigration, amnesty or anything else. What they do have some impact on is claims made by illegal aliens who feel they were cheated by employers in our country. They have more impact on legal immigration because they review the requests for foreign labor that require verification of labor shortage or unavailable skills to get foreign visas issued for the company to hire them through a visa, such as H1B visas and others.

The Department could be more active and assigned greater roles in controlling this problem as well as the illegal immigration problem, which is what Andy Puzder and Trump were going to work on. I'd say all those new things the department could have become involved with are dead now with the Acosta nomination. And that's a shame.

The Department of Labor has a lot to do with illegal immigration and has in the past actually protected illegal immigrants. I don't know if these practices will continue or not, but I'd say, in view of the new nominee, it's possible.

POLITICS

Labor Department Agreements Protect Illegal Workers



By Shannon Bream
Published August 31, 2011



Labor Secretary Hilda Solis has overseen a number of signed agreements between U.S. agencies and foreign officials pledging to give migrant workers the full protections of U.S. workplace laws -- regardless of their legal status -- and she says her department will uphold them.

"No matter how you got here or how long you plan to stay, you have certain rights," Solis said at an event unveiling the latest agreements on Monday in Washington.

Solis says foreign workers need to know their rights, so that they can lodge complaints without fear that they will be fired or deported. She believes the signed agreements with countries like El Salvador and Mexico will serve to "remove those fears."

Critics of the move say the policy flies in the face of U.S. laws on both immigration and labor, and find the pledges especially worrisome in a time of high unemployment.

"Obviously everyone wants workers protected in the workplace, that's not the issue," said Phil Kent, national spokesman for Americans for Immigration Control. "The problem is the bending over backwards to help and promote black market labor."

Solis defends the agreements, saying that current U.S. law protects all workers.

"Previous administrations, both Republican and Democrat, have held to that, so I'm not doing anything different," she said.

But critics argue that regardless of which party advocates for the written agreements, the policy is wrong. They also note that the Labor Department’s own website states that businesses may only hire workers who are U.S. citizens or those who are in the country legally.

Kent says it's also a slap in the face to immigrants who try to go through proper legal channels for naturalization, saying they must ask themselves whether it’s worth it to immigrate legally.
"Why did I bother to go through six, seven years of this to become a citizen when you have people like Secretary Solis and the Obama administration just thumbing their nose at the law -- and the American worker?" Kent said, describing how legal immigrants may respond.

In addition to the agreements already signed with countries in Central America, Solis says there are also plans to enter into similar partnerships with governments in Southeast Asia and the Caribbean.

http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2011...l-workers.html

That doesn't exactly say "The US Department of Labor has very little to do with illegal immigration" to me.

Sounds "little" to me. These cases are few and far between from what I can tell. You only read about one if there's an ICE raid of an employer who was for some reason abusing their illegal aliens. There was a case in Iowa against a Kosher chicken company, maybe 5 years ago, and that's the last one I've heard of that was big enough to make the news.