The Bloomberg solution to illegal immigration

From Yahoo:

Opponents of the Justice Department's lawsuit challenging the enforcement of Arizona's controversial illegal-immigration law have hit upon a strategy to highlight what they contend is a gaping inconsistency in the Justice Department's policy priorities. Why should federal attorneys be targeting the Arizona law as an alleged obstacle to coherent and centralized enforcement of federal immigration statutes, they argue, while Justice officials also have done nothing to challenge the legal status of so-called sanctuary cities, which effectively block enforcement of the same federal law?

More than 30 cities, including San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, Miami, Denver, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, have local ordinances on the books that prevent police from asking about a person’s immigration status. The Arizona law would allow officers to question a person’s immigration status and report them to federal authorities if that person is believed to be in the country illegally. The crackdown could prompt illegal immigrants to seek refuge out of Arizona and into those sanctuary cities.

A Justice Department official told the Washington Times there is nothing hypocritical about the government going after Arizona while ignoring sanctuary cities and suggested it won’t step up enforcement. Administration officials say they want to seek and deport criminal immigrants. Indeed, a recent Washington Post report found that deportation of illegal immigrants has spiked significantly under the Obama administration. But federal officials insist they don’t have the capability or resources to remove the hundreds of thousands of immigrants who haven’t had run-ins with the police.

Okay, then how about stopping them from getting in?

From the NY Times:

Federal maritime law requires that foreign-flagged vessels contact customs officials when they arrive at American ports, even if arriving from another American port. Immigration officials are permitted to board foreign-flagged vessels anytime, said Officer John F. Saleh, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. Coast Guard officials, who joined in the stop, are allowed to board any vessel at any time in American waters.

Maritime laws and their enforcement have tightened since 9/11. In the past several years, for example, the Coast Guard division on Staten Island — which patrols New York Harbor, the western half of Long Island Sound and the southern Hudson River — has stepped up its scrutiny of smaller foreign-flagged vessels, said Charles Rowe, a spokesman for the Coast Guard in New York City.

Mr. Rowe said that under the program, “Operation Small Fry,” Coast Guard officials, along with federal and local law enforcement personnel, have boarded about 750 such boats a year, to enforce customs, immigration and maritime laws.

It is frustrating for those with foreign flags, said the manager of a luxury marina in the Hamptons, who insisted on anonymity to avoid offending any of his clients. But, he added, “They really can’t complain because the reason they’re foreign-flagged is to avoid paying taxes.”

From the Wall Street Journal:

The immigration debate is reviving the explosive idea of denying citizenship to children born on U.S. soil if their parents are in the country illegally.

A U.S. senator and a state lawmaker in Arizona, both central players in the battle over immigration law, separately proposed this week that "birthright" citizenship be denied to the children of illegal immigrants. They said the change would help stem the flood of illegal border crossings.

Immigration-rights activists say citizenship isn't a significant driver of illegal immigration, because a child has to reach age 21 to petition for permanent legal residency for his or her parents.

A federal judge changed Arizona's new immigration law, just before it went into effect.

In Arizona, Republican state Sen. Russell Pearce, the architect of the immigration law that drew a legal challenge from the Obama administration, said he wanted to deny U.S. citizenship to children born in his state to illegal immigrants.

At issue is the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, enacted in 1868 to ensure that states not deny former slaves the full rights of citizenship. It states: "All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside."

Mr. Pearce, like some other proponents of the change, argued that the amendment as written doesn't apply to illegal immigrants. Because illegal immigrants aren't "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S., as the amendment requires, they fall outside its protection, these people argue. A group of House lawmakers made a similar argument when they tried to pass legislation changing the birthright principle in 2005.

Given the controversial nature of this proposal, successfully amending the Constitution would be considered a long shot. It requires a vote of two-thirds of the House and of the Senate, and must be ratified by three-fourths of state legislators.

Why would it be a long shot? Sounds like common sense that would save us billions. Oh that's right...tweeding.

Result of a porous border

From the Village Voice:

On April 27, Janet Napolitano pronounced that the border separating the United States from the Republic of Mexico is more secure than ever.

Napolitano sounded convinced, even though she also has spoken of Mexico's 6,000 drug-related murders in 2009 alone, more than twice the total in 2008.

But Napolitano's words rang hollow to those who live at or near the border in Cochise County, a beautiful, sparsely populated expanse in southeast Arizona.

They live at ground zero in the United States for the smuggling from Mexico of marijuana, cocaine, methamphetamine, heroin — and human beings.

(The U.S. Border Patrol's Tucson sector was responsible for almost half of all illegal aliens arrested and marijuana seized along the nation's borders during fiscal 2009, which ended September 30. Try to imagine 1.2 million pounds of pot, an all-time record for any sector. The zone includes Cochise County and covers 262 miles of border).

Most people in this fabled county — home to Tombstone (the shootout at the OK Corral), Fort Huachuaca (a major U.S. Army base), funky border towns (Douglas and Naco), and almost unimaginably open spaces — agree on this:

The executive and legislative branches of the federal government have set up Cochise County for disaster by not coming up with a border policy to effectively handle what's known as "illegal immigration."

In the early 1990s, the feds tightened the leaky border around San Diego and El Paso with mega-operations called Operation Gatekeeper and Operation Hold the Line, respectively.

The result was a monumental funneling of hundreds of thousands of undocumented aliens from the steep mountains and unforgiving deserts of northern Mexico into southern Arizona.

Before then, Cochise County was not a prime point of entry for illegal aliens (the Tucson sector accounted for only 9 percent of the U.S. Border Patrol's arrests in 1993).

Then, as now, drug smugglers pretty much had free rein, with law enforcement seemingly always a step behind most of the criminals.

With the redirection of the migrants came dire ramifications, including death for untold hapless migrants ill-equipped to negotiate the desert and mountain trails in brutal summers and cold winters.

The influx also has upended the lives of many on this side of the border, especially American citizens who live anywhere in the southern portion of Cochise County.

Some of them simply are hungry and desperate. But others are of a more malevolent bent, committing robberies, burglaries, and other crimes against Americans in remote spots like Portal, Apache, and Palominas.

NY pols overstepping their bounds

From the NY Post:

It's easy for New York politicians to pronounce against Arizona's new illegal-alien law. They're 2,000 miles away from the socially corrosive consequences of a failed economy -- and a raging, narcotics-fueled border war that has already claimed some 23,000 lives.

But just imagine how sanguine they'd be if a half-million poverty-wracked economic refugees flooded the city from Canada -- or, maybe more to the point, from New Jersey.

And if the federal government refused to enforce existing immigration laws.

Not very, we imagine.

So they blithely call for anti-Arizona boycotts and divestment. And ugly allusions to South African apartheid roll from their lips.

City Council members, for starters, introduced a resolution urging New Yorkers to shun Arizona and its businesses.

City Comptroller John Liu is exploring ways to cut the city's financial ties to the beleaguered state.

Yet a Pew poll found that 59 percent of Americans back the law -- and some 73 percent are OK specifically with having cops ask for immigration documents.

They get it.

If New York's pols did, they'd push for a meaningful federal fix.

But don't expect that: After all, it might deprive them of their grandstand.

It's funny how they throw hissy fits when they feel that fellow pols stepped on their toes by holding a press conference in their territory. Yet they have the balls to introduce a resolution denouncing something happening on the other side of the country? Shouldn't they be focused on the budget right now?

The real deal on the Arizona immigration law

Since people have been asking me what I think of the Arizona law that prohibits illegal aliens, I figured I might as well do a post on it. The media has been portraying this as an anti-immigration bill. It is not. It is an anti-illegal immigration bill. There have been comments by moronic politicians, actors, activists and protesters to the effect that anyone with brown skin can be stopped by the police and asked for their immigration papers. This is not the case. These are the same people that complain that their conservative counterparts resort to fear-mongering in order to win elections. Yet this is exactly what they are partaking in by bandying about terms like "racial profiling".

Here it is in a nutshell, paraphrased from City Journal:

The law, SB 1070, empowers local police officers to check the immigration status of individuals whom they have encountered during a “lawful stop, detention or arrest,” if an officer reasonably suspects the person stopped of being in the country illegally, and if an inquiry into the person’s status is “practicable.” The officer may not base his suspicion of illegality “on race, color or national origin.” The law also requires aliens to carry their immigration documents, mirroring an identical federal requirement.

The law gives an officer the discretion, when practicable, to determine someone’s immigration status only after the officer has otherwise made a lawful stop, detention, or arrest. It does not allow, much less require, fishing expeditions for illegal aliens. But if, say, after having stopped someone for running a red light, an officer discovers that the driver does not have a driver’s license, does not speak English, and has no other government identification on him, the officer may, if practicable, send an inquiry to his dispatcher to check the driver’s status with a federal immigration clearinghouse.

An officer must have a lawful, independent basis for a stop; he can only ask to see papers if he has “reasonable suspicion” to believe that the person is in the country illegally. “Reasonable suspicion” is a legal concept of long-standing validity, rooted in the Constitution’s prohibition of “unreasonable searches and seizures.” It meaningfully constrains police activity; officers are trained in its contours, which have evolved through common-law precedents, as a matter of course.

So do I support the Arizona bill?

HELL YES. People are dying unnecessarily at the hands of gangbangers, drug cartels and murderers who should never have been here in the U.S. to begin with. Don't we have enough home grown criminals to fill our prisons? Do we need more strain on our health care and schools? Do we really want to support people who sneak in and don't pay taxes? Once again, we already have plenty of our own to take care of.

Not to mention that in a post-9/11 world, it's national suicide to allow porous borders, lax enforcement of immigration laws and a total lack of knowledge of who the hell is in our country. But I guess in some people's minds, compromising national security is acceptable so long as the practice might reward them with more votes.

We are a nation of immigrants. Legal immigrants. Not tax evading fence jumpers. If we don't enforce our national security standards, then why enforce any law at all? This former police officer and current Arizona lawmaker (originally from Middle Village) seems to get it. Wake up, people.

Lackluster participation in census affects Congressional representation

From NBC 4:

Five states — New York, California, Texas, Arizona and Florida — are perilously close to losing out on congressional seats because of lackluster participation in the U.S. census.

The five were average or below average in mailing back 10-question census forms when compared to other states, trailing by as many as 5 percentage points, according to the final census mail-in tally released Wednesday.

Based on recent population trends, New York, California and Texas had been estimated to fall just above the cutoff for the last House seats when they are redistributed next year. Waiting behind them in hopes of picking up additional seats are Arizona and Florida, which are already expected to gain one seat apiece.

Responses from these states also raise a red flag because of their higher shares of residents who are Latinos. The Census Bureau has said one of its main concerns is whether tensions over immigration will discourage Latinos, and particularly illegal immigrants, from participating in the government count. That issue returned to the forefront after Arizona passed a tough immigration enforcement bill.

Latino residents represent a predominant share of the population growth in New York, California, Texas, Arizona and Florida, making up more than 50 percent of total growth since 2000. As a result, those states could face big losses if there isn't full cooperation when the Census Bureau on Saturday begins knocking on the doors of those who did not respond by mail.

Of the five states on the cusp, the biggest potential losers are California and New York, which could have a net loss of one and two House seats, respectively. Texas may end up gaining just three House seats instead of four.

Bloomberg on immigration

From the Daily News, quoting Bloomberg:

"This country is committing national suicide. We just passed a health care bill to give coverage to millions of people, tens of millions of people and we don’t have doctors and we’re not allowing people who want to come here and be doctors to come here. This is just craziness. People are developing new drugs in India, rather than here. They’re going to win the next Nobel prize in China or in Europe, not here. If we want to have a future, we need to have more immigrants here and we should get control of our borders and we should decide who we want, what languages, what skills we need; people who work with their hands and people who work with their minds and we have to get real about the 12 million undocumented here. We’re not going to deport them. Give them permanent status. Don’t make them citizens unless they can qualify, but give them permanent status and let’s get on with this.”