ENDING THE REPUBLICAN DRAMA ABOUT IMMIGRATION

Original Story: wsj.com

Republican presidential hopefuls always clobber one another over immigration policy. This cycle has been no exception, with Scott Walker, Jeb Bush and others carving out their own territory. The winner is the Democratic nominee, who can use immigration as a powerful weapon against the eventual Republican candidate. Hillary Clinton no doubt sees the potential. While she has commented on little else, she has already promised that if elected she would go beyond President Obama’s questionable executive order.

The GOP needs to end the family drama and resolve the policy dispute, not least because it is the right thing to do in every sense—economically, politically and morally. With a world on fire and economic growth strangled by government regulation, it would be unacceptable for Republicans to lose a critical election over immigration. A Washington DC immigration attorney is following this story closely.

This isn’t a matter of finding the “right” candidate. The question is whether Republicans can unite around a set of rational principles. Here are a few that any serious contender should be able to support.

• Sovereignty. The U.S. has the right to determine the conditions under which noncitizens can cross its borders. The next president must work with Congress to make that determination, in accordance with the Constitution, which isn’t the path the current administration has chosen.

• Border security. One of government’s primary duties is to protect citizens. Given terrorism and organized crime—drug cartels, weapons and human trafficking—the federal government must secure the borders as a first step to reform. Even candidates perceived as more open on immigration agree.

Gov. Bush said in New Hampshire last month that “we need to control our border first of all.” Sen. Marco Rubio similarly acknowledged that Americans are not going to support immigration reform “until you show them—not tell them, you better show them—that illegal immigration is under control.” A Washington DC immigration lawyer represents clients on a wide range of immigration issues, whether localized or on a global scale.

• Enforcing our laws: The U.S. is a nation of immigrants, but also a nation of laws. The federal government must enforce our laws internally, penalizing those who overstay their visas, and implementing a universal verification system so employers can be sure they are hiring employees legally.
  
• Legal immigration policies should support economic growth. If current quotas are bringing in enough talent, let’s keep them. If more immigration or less red tape will boost the economy, let’s try that. Guest-worker visas should ebb and flow with the economy. Legal immigration should focus more on what workers can contribute to the economy, as is the case in most other nations, and less on distant familial relationships.

The best way to protect American workers is to generate economic growth. This is not synonymous with aggressively restricting immigration. Most studies conclude that immigration contributes to economic growth as well as innovation, and research and development. The American Enterprise Institute found in 2011 that “temporary foreign workers—both skilled and less skilled—boost U.S. employment” and that immigrants with advanced degrees working in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields “boost employment for U.S. citizens.” Every Republican who aspires to the presidency should acknowledge that immigrants of all skill sets can benefit the economy.

• Addressing the illegal population. The next president will need to work with Congress to establish consequences for violating our laws that are harsh enough to be meaningful but also reasonable. But with some 11 million people living in the U.S. illegally, every candidate should support a path to legal status—short of citizenship—for illegal immigrants willing to accept responsibility for their actions and take the consequences. 

Such consequences could include passing a background check, paying a fine, demonstrating the ability to be independent of welfare, engaging in community or military service, learning English and taking an American civics course. Every option should be on the table, except amnesty, which forgives illegal conduct. It isn’t amnesty if immigrants admit wrongdoing and accept punishment.

• Citizenship. American citizenship is a privilege, not a right. Whether candidates support requiring people who are here illegally to return to their home countries to become citizens, or whether they propose allowing immigrants to remain in the U.S. and go through an arduous naturalization process, the privilege of citizenship is something worth protecting. A Washington DC immigration attorney provides comprehensive guidance to business clients with respect to their foreign national workforce, including short and long-term strategy and planning. 

Candidates will disagree on the best way to implement these points. This is simply an attempt to set forth unifying principles that are easily articulated and essential if Republicans have a chance at winning the next presidential election. Absent rational immigration principles, the odds of winning aren’t very good.

Increase Company Audits on Illegal Immigrants

Story first appeared on usatoday.com.

Customs Enforcement and U.S. Immigration has reached its highest number yet of companies audited for illegal immigrants on payrolls this past fiscal year.
Audits of employer forms increased from 250 in fiscal year 2007 to more than 3,000 in 2012. From fiscal years 2009 to 2012, the total amount of fines grew to nearly $13 million from $1 million. The number of company managers arrested has increased to 238, according to data provided by ICE.
The investigations of companies have been one of the pillars of President Obama's immigration policy.
When Obama recently spoke about addressing immigration reform in his second term, he said any measure should contain penalties for companies that purposely hire illegal immigrants. It's not a new stand, but one he will likely highlight as his administration launches efforts to revamp the U.S. immigration system.
One state that is experiencing increased enforcement of immigration laws is North Carolina; find a top Raleigh Immigration Lawyer.
Our goal is compliance and deterrence, said a special agent in charge at ICE's Seattle office. The majority of the companies we do audits on end up with no fines at all, but again it's part of the deterrence method. If companies know we're out there, looking across the board, they're more likely to bring themselves into compliance.
While the administration has used those numbers to bolster their record on immigration enforcement, advocates say the audits have pushed workers further underground by causing mass layoffs and disrupted business practices.
When the ICE audit letter arrived at Belco Forest Products, management wasn't entirely surprised. Two nearby businesses in Shelton, a small timber town on a bay off Washington state's Puget Sound, had already been investigated.
 Even Midwest states are encountering I-9, visa and immigration matters within the workplace, for help with immigration in Ohio visit Columbus Immigration Lawyer.
But the 2010 inquiry became a months-long process that cost the timber company experienced workers and money. It was fined $17,700 for technicalities on their record keeping.
What I don't like is the roll of the dice, said chief financial officer. Why do some companies get audited and some don't? Either everyone gets audited or nobody does. Level the playing field.
Belco was one of 339 companies fined in fiscal year 2011 and one of thousands audited that year.
Employers are required to have their workers fill out an I-9 form that declares them authorized to work in the country. Currently, an employer needs only to verify that identifying documents look real.
The audits, part of a $138 million worksite enforcement effort, rely on ICE officers scouring over payroll records to find names that don't match Social Security numbers and other identification databases.
The audits don't make any sense before a legalization program, an immigration policy analyst at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank. You're leaving the whole thing up to an employer's eyesight and subjective judgment, that's the failure of the law. There's no verification at all. Then you have the government making a subjective judgment about subjective judgment.
An AP review of audits that resulted in fines in fiscal year 2011 shows that the federal government is fining industries across the country reliant on manual labor and that historically have hired immigrants. The data provides a glimpse into the results of a process affecting thousands of companies and thousands of workers nationwide.
Over the years, ICE has switched back-and-forth between making names of the companies fined public or not. Lately, ICE has emphasized its criminal investigations of managers, such as a manager in Maine sentenced to home arrest for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants or a manager of an Illinois hiring firm who got 18 months in prison.
Many employers also wonder how ICE picks the companies it probes.
Geography is not a factor. The size of the company is not a factor. And the industry it's in is not a factor. We can audit any company anywhere of any size, he said. He added ICE auditors follow leads from the public, other employers, employees and do perform some random audits.
But ICE auditors hit ethnic stores, restaurants, bakeries, manufacturing companies, construction, food packaging, janitorial services, catering, dairies and farms. The aviation branch of corporate giant GE, franchises of sandwich shop Subway and a subsidiary of food product company Heinz were among some of the companies with national name recognition. GE was fined $2,000.
In fiscal year 2011, the most recent year reviewed by AP, the median fine was $11,000. The state with the most workplaces fined was Texas with 63, followed by New Jersey with 37.
The lowest fine was $90 to a Massachusetts fishing company. The highest fine was $394,944 to an employment agency in Minneapolis, according to the data released to AP through a public records request.
A Subway spokesman said the company advises franchise owners to follow the law. A Heinz spokesman declined comment.
He didn't have specifics on what percentage of fines come from companies having illegal immigrants on their payroll, as opposed to technical paperwork fines in recent years.
A former deputy director at ICE who now runs a consulting firm, said she'd like to see the burden of proving the legality of a company's workforce go from the employer to the government. She'd like to see a type of program, such as E-Verify, be implemented with the I-9 employment form. E-Verify is a voluntary and free program for private employers that checks a workers eligibility.
At the end of the day, the fine is the least of it, she said. Usually the company will spend more on legal fees. But it is a huge headache for the company to lose workers.
The agency should go after more criminal charges and focus on companies that treat workers inhumanely, she said.

Residents Against Detention Centers

Story first appeared in USA Today.

CRETE, Ill. – Amid the rose bushes in a local resident's yard is a sign with a red circle and a diagonal slash across the words "Crete detention center."

It conveys her opposition to a proposal to build a 788-bed, privately operated detention center for illegal immigrants in this village of 8,259 people, which is 30 miles south of Chicago. She doesn't like the idea of a private company running the place, fears property values would plummet and worries that if immigration laws were to change, Crete would be stuck with a vacant building.  Local residents are opposed to making a profit off other people's suffering.

Another resident, who has lived in Crete for two decades and is unemployed, shares Pennington's concern about the effects of a possible shift in immigration laws, but he does see an upside: the promise of as many as 250 jobs, most of which would be filled by area residents.
The March unemployment rate in Will County, where Crete is located, was 9.5%, compared with the national rate of 8.2% for that month.

The planned detention center, where illegal immigrants would be held until they are deported, has caused a stir in Crete that reflects national debates over immigration policies and the growing number of people being held in for-profit prisons and jails.

The share of state and federal prisoners — not including immigration detainees — in private facilities increased from 6.3% in 2000 to 8% in 2010 for a total of 128,195, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics.

The prospect of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) operating the immigration detention facility is causing much consternation.

What this is about for us is a multibillion-dollar corporation that is trying to set up shop here in Illinois to make profits off human misery.

Centralizing detention

Illinois already prohibits privately built or operated state prisons and county jails. A bill that also would ban state and local governments from hiring private companies to build or run civil detention centers has been passed by the Illinois Senate. A House committee voted last week to send it to the full House.

The Crete proposal is part of a plan announced in 2009 by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to centralize its civil detention system.

At that time, illegal immigrants were scattered in 350 facilities across the country, including county jails and other facilities meant for criminal, not civil, detention. That number has been reduced to 250, according to Raleigh Immigration Lawyers.

ICE said the Crete facility would mark another important step in the agency's long-term effort to reform the immigration detention system, emphasizing the health and safety of detainees in ICE custody.

A CCA spokesman said that the company operates more than a dozen facilities under contracts with ICE. In all, it has 67 facilities nationwide with a total of about 92,000 beds.

It should be noted that CCA has been criticized and sued for its treatment of inmates, but Owen said corrections is a highly litigious profession for public and private systems. CCA's track record shows that they do a good job of operating safe facilities. The company would spend up to $60 million to build the center, he said.

Economic development a goal
The village administrator, said the detention center proposal is being handled just as any other potential economic development project. Village officials are consulting with other communities where CCA facilities are located, researching potential liabilities and considering how the village's image might be affected.

Because the facility would be privately operated, the village would collect an estimated $236,000 in real estate taxes yearly. Before the Board of Trustees votes on the site plan and contracts with CCA and ICE, he said, public meetings would be held. Despite talk around town, it's not a done deal.


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