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Recent Staff Contributions Congress Rejects Key Enforcement Amendments as Part of DHS Appropriations Bill |
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October 07, 2009 Congress Rejects Key Enforcement Amendments as Part of DHS Appropriations Bill Details are beginning to emerge about the conference report for the Fiscal Year 2010 spending bill for the Department of Homeland Security. FAIR has just learned that the House-Senate conference report contains just a three-year extension of the E-Verify program, the critical enforcement tool that allows employers to confirm that new hires are legally authorized to work in the United States and are not illegal aliens. The Senate had adopted an amendment offered by Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) to enact a permanent extension of E-Verify but the conferees rejected this approach. When it comes to E-Verify, we know that 140,000 employers are already using E-Verify. In fact, 1 in 4 new hires nationwide will be verified as work eligible this year alone and 12 million queries will be run through E-Verify this year alone. These statistics should speak to how important E-Verify is to protect American jobs. Despite this, Congress has made a conscious decision to reject a permanent extension of E-Verify. Details are also emerging about other provisions that were in the Senate passed DHS bill, including another part of the Sessions amendment to codify the federal contractor rule; the DeMint amendment to ensure construction of double-layer fencing for the border fence; a Grassley amendment to codify the ability of employers to check existing employers work status with E-Verify; and the Vitter amendment related to preserving the "no-match" rule which notifies employers when employees aren't using a Social Security Number that matches their name. Our sources inside Congress are advising us that each of these provisions will NOT be part of the final bill. Accordingly, it appears that Congress is including E-Verify in attempt to do the bare minimum to fool the American people into thinking that this Congress is serious about immigration enforcement.
SJ Mercury News Columnist Doesn't Get Skilled Immigration "We are increasingly dependent on brainpower from overseas that migrates here to drive the research and discoveries we need to power economic growth," claims Chris O'Brien in a San Jose Mercury News op-ed. O'Brien says that 4 of the U.S. winners immigrated here. Not mentioned in O'Brien's story is the cautionary account of Douglas Prasher, who should have won the 2008 Nobel Prize in chemistry. Prasher. As Dr. Norman Matloff wrote last year, "Douglas Prasher, who played a key role by discovering the gene, and contributing it to Chalfie and Tsien, was snubbed for the prize. Much worse, it turns out that he is currently not in science at all, working as a shuttle bus drive for a Toyota dealership in Alabama." See this NPR report for more coverage.
Immigrants Assimilating Much Slower Than Before, Falling Behind A new report from the Manhattan Institute confirms what FAIR has maintained: mass immigration slows or halts assimilation and makes it much harder for immigrants to economically integrate into the U.S. "Economic assimilation declined even among immigrants who arrived more than a decade ago, indicating that differences between that cohort and the native-born population widened," notes Manhattan. Read their report.
FAIR on the Hill Blog FAIR president Dan Stein has a post today on The Hill newspaper site, about the DHS admitting they only control 10 percent of the border. "The Department of Homeland Security does not seem remotely concerned that it has just 894 miles of border 'under effective control'. That's 894 miles out of 8,607 miles of land and coastline that DHS is responsible for controlling." Read Dan's full post for more.
Brookings Report Calls for More Skilled Immigration, Less Nepotism The Brookings Institution released a report calling for more skilled immigration without lifting the overall (too high) level of legal immigration from around 1 million annually. The report calls for eliminating the extended family preference that has enabled chain migration for over a generation. The report also calls for a "trigger" of effective employer verification before any amnesty. But the larger flaw with the report is despite acknowledging that high-skilled immigration is more desirable than low-skilled, there is no attempt to determine what overall level of immigration would be beneficial, skilled or not. More commentary by Dan Stein in the full entry. Comment from Dan Stein - This is just a restatement of what has been proposed by numerous "commissions" over the years, and it completely ignores the political reality of the way this issue is debated in Congress. Employer sanctions are already the law, and I am just wondering what this panel's proposal would add to such sanctions. This is the same sort of reasoning that gave us the disastrous Immigration Act of 1990 - nominally designed to increase the skills-family ratio but in fact raising both while increasing avenues for fraud and abuse.
Another Benefit of Globalization: Immigration Fraud and Technology Theft The FBI arrested three Chinese nationals and charged them with illegally exporting missile technology to China. The indictment charges Zhen "Alex" Zhou Wu with "conspiring to violate U.S. export laws." Yufeng Wei aka "Annie Wei" was charged with immigration fraud in the indictment as well. Popular Mechanics had a story back in 2006 about the recurrent technology theft by Chinese companies and individuals. Technology theft by Chinese nationals was in the news last month after DuPont sued a green-card holder for stealing trade secrets in making organic-LED lights. In July, a naturalized citizen from China, Dongfan "Greg" Chung, was convicted of stealing technology from Boeing involving the Space Shuttle and rocket technology. Last June, Xiaodong Sheldon Meng, a Chinese national working in the U.S., was sentenced for stealing the "source code for military visual simulation programs to train military fighter pilots." In fact, the problem of technology theft and espionage is so severe the government is telling business executives to throw away their cell phone after visiting China.
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