Frontera Nortesur, News Report, Kent Paterson, Posted: Apr 14, 2010 

A different twist was added to the turbulent immigration reform debate this week. In a conference call with reporters, a network of conservative political activists and evangelical church leaders announced a campaign to push for the legalization of millions of undocumented people in the United States.

“From reading the news, you’d think all conservatives are against the issue, but we know different,” said moderator Juan Hernandez.

A well-known pundit with a political foot on both sides of the border, Hernandez has served as an adviser to prominent political figures in both Mexico and the United States, including former Mexican President Vicente Fox and Arizona Senator John McCain. A dual citizen of the United States and Mexico, Hernandez headed up the Office of Mexicans Abroad in Fox’s cabinet.

Aug 12th 2009, 21:08 by The Economist | AUSTIN

The 2000 United States Census revealed a significant increase in the number and diversity of immigrants in New York City; more than one-third of the population is foreign born, coming from approximately 200 countries around the world. For the New York City Police Department (NYPD), building trust in communities where significant numbers of these immigrants live is a challenge, as many of these people fear the police, do not speak English, and are unfamiliar with the local justice system. The task grew even more difficult in the wake of September 11, 2001, when local law enforcement took on a new role in national counter-terrorism efforts.

New York City police are not alone in this situation, however. The United States has not seen so large an increase in immigration

By Edward Schumacher-Matos - Wall Street Journal - Thursday, October 2, 2008

Subprime mortgages are the big villains of late, but 9/11, in its way, continues to maim the American economy. As a result of indiscriminate visa policies aimed at shielding us from terrorist attack, tech companies and other American industries in need of multinational managers and workers to run multinational businesses, are being starved of talent; foreign investors and tourists are going elsewhere; and our hospitals and universities -- once magnets for the best and brightest in the world -- are losing out to foreign institutions. Hours of waiting at border-crossing points, meanwhile, disrupt cross-border businesses and continental just-in-time manufacturing.

Broken Immigration System

Michele Wucker | September 25, 2008

Editor: Emily Schwartz Greco

Foreign Policy In Focus www.fpif.org

Immigration reform advocates still disagree over the Senate’s failed 2007 attempt to push through legislation that would have provided a path to legalization for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Unions and big business had briefly allied in supporting a legalization program combined with an increase in visas. But the partnership collapsed after an ill-begotten attempt to secure the bill’s passage, which added so many noxious provisions that it lost many of its supporters while failing to win over implacable opponents.

David Bacon’s new book, Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Immigration and Criminalizes Immigrants (Beacon Press), suggests that no reform was better than the half-hearted measure that crashed and burned. His argument could improve the next round of attempts to rationalize America’s broken immigration system.

A wave of widely publicized crackdowns on employers and family homes has intensified following the Senate bill’s demise, fulfilling the worst predictions of the flawed immigration bill’s advocates. Nursing mothers were separated from their babies. Thousands of workers were seized at their jobs while their employers went largely unpunished except for a few days’ lost work. Such shameful policies have escalated in intensity, but they continue the longer, wider pattern of injustice that Bacon details.

Through vivid stories, Illegal People shows how current immigration laws hurt citizens and legal immigrants as well as the undocumented immigrants whom the laws target. “Legalization isn’t just important to migrants — it is a basic step in the preservation and extension of democratic rights for all people,” Bacon writes.

Rotten Apples

He convincingly demonstrates how the system in its current form rewards the “bad-apple” employers and hurts workers. He gives only glancing attention to the ways in which the system also hurts the employers who would hire workers with papers if the system provided a way to do so, and who understand that healthy, trained workers who do not constantly fear deportation are more productive.

Bacon’s cut-and-dried labor-good, corporate-bad message doesn’t leave room for such subtleties. This is too bad, because a legalization program with a path to citizenship depends on wide support from labor and “good” businesses with common interests to counter the small but loud nativist minority that believes in delivering death threats to members of Congress. For Bacon the game is simply employer versus worker, as evidenced in his conviction that the guest-worker plan was not merely a compromise but the employers’ intended outcome all along.

To be sure, President George W. Bush’s original proposal in 2005 envisioned a guest-worker program without a path to citizenship. But Senate draft bills in 2006 and 2007 both included provisions for access to permanent residence and citizenship as well as “portability” of work visas that would free workers from dependence on specific employers. Many businesses and their lobbies supported these reforms; they were as disappointed as was labor over the last-minute changes that re-emphasized temporary labor and threw obstacles in the way of a path to citizenship.

Still, it’s easy to see where Bacon’s distrust of all employers is coming from, with bad-apple examples as heinous as the many that he gives. Tales of cheating and abuse–gaming scales so that workers paid by piece rate would get less money, deductions for “equipment rental,” 11-hour days with no lunch break or overtime, and wages that didn’t cover living expenses charged by the company are on a par with the kinds of practices I’ve seen in impoverished countries that are regularly accused of slavery. There’s a delicious irony when the American Civil Liberties Union and Yale Law School use the labor side accord in the North American Free Trade Agreement to file charges against the Department of Labor and U.S. immigration authorities.

Cut-Rate Corn

Speaking of apples, it’s the agricultural employers who come off looking the worst. Bacon does the movement a great service in showing the financial interests of Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) the heinous HR 4437’s lead sponsor. That bill would have penalized churches for aiding undocumented workers, in promoting restrictive immigration policies. With Sensenbrenner’s family ties to the company going back a century, the Kimberly-Clark paper conglomerate uses thousands of immigrant workers each year to convert forests into wood pulp and directly benefits when rights remain out of the reach of migrant workers. (Let’s hope that Bacon sets sight on the money trail between U.S. lawmakers and the rapidly growing immigrant detention-center industry.)

With rich-country agricultural subsidies rightly at the center of the developing world’s gripes, Bacon misses an opportunity in the chapter on the North American Free Trade Agreement. He rightly contends that U.S. corn exports under NAFTA have increased migration by driving Mexican farmers and farm workers off the land. Agricultural subsidies — courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer — allow big U.S. corporations to sell Mexico corn at prices far below the price at which Mexican farmers could break even, much less make a living. Bacon doesn’t go into anywhere near the kind of specific detail here in which he excels elsewhere in the book, and which would have been far more effective than relying on simple anti-corporate boilerplate.

When talking about policy options within the United States, however, Bacon makes an essential point that is too often lost in a political arena with little room for complexity: Political and social rights for immigrants must be an integral part of a broad agenda for change. As long as Americans are insecure about their own jobs, housing, healthcare, education, and workplace rights, they will be vulnerable to the toxic misinformation spread by the anti-immigrant right.

Neither immigrants nor Americans will be well served by a reform that provides only, or mainly, temporary visas without allowing guest workers to convert to permanent-resident and eventually citizen status. Will the intensified raids of the past two years wake Americans up to the moral, economic, and societal consequences of our poor policy choices and open the way to changes that protect all worker rights by giving migrant workers a path to legalization and citizenship? If so, then perhaps there will be a silver lining to the failure of attempts to date. Our record so far isn’t encouraging.

Michele Wucker, a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor, is the executive director of the World Policy Institute in New York City and the author of Lockout: Why America Keeps Getting Immigration Wrong When Our Prosperity Depends on Getting It Right.

 We can’t have an effective immigration reform bill without honoring everyone’s deepest interests

Issue No. 109 (July 2007) -- Mark Satin, Editor

This month, the highly touted new immigration reform bill -- product of Herculean Senate labors over the last half year -- was finally laid to rest amidst much recrimination not only by exhausted Senators but by over 300 groups that were trying to get Senators to write their positions into the bill.

The Senators tried. The so-called “Gang of 12,” supporters of the bill ranging from Sen. Kennedy (D-MA) on the left to Sen. Kyl (R-AZ) on the right, and a galaxy of the Senate’s best and brightest aides, worked virtually around the clock to make all the compromises they could stomach. But in the end, all that did was make an already jerry-built 400-page bill less acceptable to all.

Clash of positions -- or integration of interests?

The problem was not with the intelligence or good will of the players on one side or the other in the immigration reform debate.

The problem is that virtually none of the players, from the Senators on down, were willing to let go of their positions long enough to honor the interests -- even the carefully-considered and heartfelt interests -- of those who disagreed with them.

Comprehensive Immigration Reform (2005)

WHEREAS, the Hebrew Immigration Aid Society crafted the below "Interfaith Statement in Support of Comprehensive Immigration Reform;" and

WHEREAS, over 35 national organizations representing a variety of religions have endorsed the statement; and

WHEREAS, the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism supports the four legislative proposals outlined in the statement.

NOW, THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED that the United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism endorses the "Interfaith Statement in Support of Comprehensive Immigration Reform" and will sign the statement as a national organization that is concerned with immigration.

Interfaith Statement in Support of Comprehensive Immigration Reform

We, the undersigned faith-based leaders and organizations, join together to call upon President Bush and our elected officials in Congress to enact comprehensive immigration reform legislation that establishes a safe and humane immigration system consistent with our values. Our diverse faith traditions teach us to welcome our brothers and sisters with love and compassion.