Update

NATIONAL IMMIGRATION LAW CENTER | WWW.NILC.ORG

DREAM Act: Summary

The latest version of the DREAM Act, also known as the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, was introduced on May 11, 2011, in the Senate (S. 952) by Sen. Dick Durbin (D-IL) and 32 fellow senators, and in the House of Representatives (H.R. 1842) by Reps. Howard Berman (D-CA), Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), and Lucille Roybal-Allard.

The DREAM Act would enact two major changes in current law:

• The DREAM Act would permit certain immigrant students who have grown up in the U.S. to apply for temporary legal status and to eventually obtain permanent legal status and become eligible for U.S. citizenship if they go to college or serve in the U.S. military; and

• The DREAM Act would eliminate a federal provision that penalizes states that provide in- state tuition without regard to immigration status.

  If enacted, the DREAM Act would have a life-changing impact on the students who qualify, dramatically increasing their average future earnings—and consequently the amount of taxes they would pay—while significantly reducing criminal justice and social services costs to taxpayers.

  KEY FEATURES OF THE DREAM ACT OF 2011 ■ Path to legal residency: Who would qualify?

  Under the DREAM Act, most students who came to the U.S. at age 15 or younger at least five years before the date of the bill’s enactment and who have maintained good moral character since entering the U.S. would qualify for conditional permanent resident status upon acceptance to college, graduation from a U.S. high school, or being awarded a GED in the U.S. Students would not qualify for this relief if they had committed crimes, were a security risk, or were inadmissible or removable on certain other grounds. Under the Senate bill qualifying students must be under age 35, whereas under the House bill they must be under age 32.

  ■ Conditional permanent resident status

  Conditional permanent resident status would be similar to lawful permanent resident status, except that it would be awarded for a limited duration—six years under normal circumstances— instead of indefinitely.

Updated May 2011 

The DREAM Act is bipartisan legislation that addresses the tragedy of young people who grew up in the United States and have graduated from our high schools, but whose future is circumscribed by our current immigration laws. Under current law, these young people generally derive their immigration status solely from their parents, and if their parents are undocumented or in immigration limbo, most have no mechanism to obtain legal residency, even if they have lived most of their lives in the U.S. The DREAM Act would provide such a mechanism for those who are able to meet certain conditions. 

Children workers

The Harvest/La Cosecha

The Story of the Children Who Feed America.

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Every year there are more than 400,000 American children who are torn away from their friends, schools and homes to pick the food we all eat.  Zulema, Perla and Victor labor as migrant farm workers, sacrificing their own childhoods to help their families survive.  THE HARVEST/LA COSECHA profiles these three as they journey from the scorching heat of Texas’ onion fields to the winter snows of the Michigan apple orchards and back south to the humidity of Florida’s tomato fields to follow the harvest.

From the Producers of the Academy-Award® Nominated film, WAR/DANCE and Executive Producer Eva Longoria, this award-winning documentary provides an intimate glimpse into the lives of these children who struggle to dream while working 12 – 14 hours a day, 7 days a week to feed America.

Zulema Lopez, 12, thinks of nothing but working in the fields, and one of her earliest childhood memories is of her mother teaching her how to pick and clean strawberries.  Having attended 8 schools in the last 8 years, she struggles to keep up and is afraid she may not make it to high school.  When asked what her dreams are, she replies that she doesn’t have time for them.

Perla Sanchez, 14, travels with her large family to pick crops across the United States. The only benefit for Perla of continuing to migrate on the harvest with her family is that it will insulate her from the other perils inherent in being a teenage Latina with limited resources. If she stays in Texas, she is unsure if she will be able to resist the lure of gang life.  She dreams of becoming a lawyer so that she can help other migrant workers who struggle to make ends meet.

Victor Huapilla is a 16 year-old living in Florida. His family migrated to the US when he was young looking for a better life and is on the path to full citizenship. To help support his family, Victor has had to balance his time between harvesting and going to school and his education suffers.  While Victor is often in the fields, he’s glad his younger sisters are still spared the ordeal of picking up to 1500 pounds of tomatoes a day.  But the expenses of legally bringing his two older sisters to America bankrupts the family and they can’t afford to migrate for work.  Will they be able to keep the family together?

THE HARVEST/LA COSECHA was shot in high definition video.  Principal photography began in Minnesota and North Dakota in June 2007, and continued in Northern California, Texas, Michigan, Ohio, and Florida through the 2010 harvest.  Post-production began in Fall 2010, with the anticipated completion of the film by March 2011.  Shot with cinematic scope, revealing the drama and impact of narrative character-based storytelling and powered by the children’s determination to find hope within their hardship, THE HARVEST boasts unparalleled access to life on these farms across the nation and gives us the opportunity to connect with these children who live these unthinkable lives to feed us, and more importantly to them, to feed their families and themselves.

A  CINEMA LIBRE STUDIO RELEASE OF A SHINE GLOBAL PRESENTATION IN ASSOCIATION WITH GLOBALVISION INC. ROMANO FILM & PHOTOGRAPHY INC AND UNBELIEVABLE PRODUCTIONS INC A U. ROBERTO ROMANO FILM “THE HARVEST/LA COSECHA” ORIGINAL MUSIC WENDY BLACKSTONE EDITOR NICHOLAS CLARK DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY U. ROBERTO ROMANO ASSOCIATE DIRECTOR JULIA PEREZ ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS INGRID DURAN DAVID DAMIAN FIGUEROA CATHERINE PINO ASSOCIATE PRODUCERS BRENDAN HERMES ANDREW HERWITZ REBECCA KATZ CO-PRODUCER CHARLIE SADOFF EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS ALONZO CANTU RORY O’CONNOR RAUL PADILLA EXECUTIVE PRODUCER EVA LONGORIA EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS ALBIE HECHT AND SUSAN MACLAURY  PRODUCED BY U. ROBERTO ROMANO AND RORY O’CONNOR DIRECTED BY U. ROBERTO ROMANO

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Obama vs. Bush

Deportations Higher Under Obama Than Bush

Categories: Government, Immigration

by FRANK JAMES

Shackled illegal immigrants from Mexico are boarded onto a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement chartered deportation flight at O’Hare in Chicago, Il., May 25, 2010.

Here’s an interesting, counter-intuitive fact to bring up during your next dinner-party: deportations of illegal immigrants are higher under President Barack Obama than under George W. Bush.

The Washington Post reports:

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, nearly 10 percent above the Bush administration’s 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007. The pace of company audits has roughly quadrupled since President George W. Bush’s final year in office.

The effort is part of President Obama’s larger project “to make our national laws actually work,” as he put it in a speech this month at American University. Partly designed to entice Republicans to support comprehensive immigration reform, the mission is proving difficult and politically perilous.

 

This isn’t exactly new news. There’ve been stories for months about the trend, including in the WaPo itself.

Still there are many people who will be surprised to learn that deportations are higher under a liberal administration than a conservative one.

What’s changed has been the mix of deportations. The Bush Administration did more work-site raids with many of the illegal immigrants rounded up in those raids being deported.

The Obama Administration has focused more on deporting illegal immigrants with criminal histories, especially violent ones. The Bush administration also went after criminals illegally in the U.S. but under Obama that has been ratcheted up.

Both administrations got tough in their own ways because of the political realities.

When he pushed an immigration overhaul in 2006 and 2007 that would have included a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, Bush was rebuffed by an anti-amnesty backlash in Congress and the public.

Critics angrily demanded that the administration enforce the immigration laws first, before trying “rewarding” those who entered the country illegally with eventual citizenship. The Republican administration responded with more work-site raids.

Obama has indicated he plans to take on the challenge of an immigration overhaul before he face re-election. Like Bush, he faces the same pressures to crack down on illegal immigration if he is to have any hope of getting enough support to pass a legislative fix of the immigration laws. The increase in deportations is part of that strategy.

Deportation case-by-case

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2011/aug/18/new-dhs-rules-cancel-deportations/

Obama and Deportation

Obama Cancels Deportations

The Newest Immigration Bill

Farmers Oppose G.O.P. Bill on Immigration

Workers sorting dried apricots at George Bonacich’s farm in Patterson, Calif.

By JESSE McKINLEY and JULIA PRESTON

Published: July 30, 2011

PATTERSON, Calif. — Farmers across the country are rallying to fight a Republican-sponsored bill that would force them and all other employers to verify the legal immigration status of their workers, a move some say could imperil not only future harvests but also the agricultural community’s traditional support for conservative candidates.

The bill was proposed by Representative Lamar Smith, a Texas Republican who is the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. It would require farmers — who have long relied on a labor force of immigrants, a majority here without legal documents — to check all new hires through E-Verify, a federal database run by the Department of Homeland Security devised to ferret out illegal immigrants.

Farm laborers, required like other workers to show that they are authorized to take jobs in the United States, often present Social Security numbers and some form of picture ID. Employers, many of them labor contractors providing crews to farms, have not been required to check the information and are discouraged by antidiscrimination laws from looking at it too closely. But it is an open secret that many farmworkers’ documents are false.

Supporters of E-Verify, an electronic system that is currently mandatory for most federal contractors but voluntary for other employers, argue that it would eliminate any doubt about workers’ legal status. But farmers say it could cripple a $390 billion industry that relies on hundreds of thousands of willing, low-wage immigrant workers to pick, sort and package everything from avocados to zucchini.

“This would be an emergency, a dire, dire situation,” said Nancy Foster, president of the U.S. Apple Association, adding that the prospect of an E-Verify check would most likely mean that many immigrant workers would simply not show up. “We will end up closing down.”

That sentiment is echoed by growers like George Bonacich, an 81-year-old apricot farmer who has been working the same patch of land in Patterson, 80 miles east of San Francisco, since 1969.

This year, Mr. Bonacich employed up to 100 farmhands to pick a total of 50 to 100 tons each day, often in triple-digit heat. He speaks passionately about his employees — “They’re good people, hard-working,” he said — and plainly about what would happen if E-Verify were to become the law of the farmland.

“If we don’t have enough labor at peak time, the fruit goes on the ground,” he said. “The fruit will only stay on the tree so long.”

While Mr. Smith’s bill seems to have a good chance of passing the House, the Senate, controlled by Democrats, appears more skeptical. Democrats have said they will point to a Congressional Budget Office report on a similar bill that concluded it would cost the federal government $22 billion over a decade, from lost tax revenues now collected from the paychecks of illegal immigrants ineligible for services.

In a May letter to the members of the Judiciary Committee, Bob Stallman, the president of the American Farm Bureau, cited a Labor Department survey placing the percentage of illegal workers in the fields at more than 50 percent. Other groups say the figure is closer to 70 percent. Denying farmers that labor supply, Mr. Stallman wrote, would cost them $5 billion to $9 billion annually.

Mr. Smith’s bill has attracted more solid support from nonagricultural business leaders, opening a divide between them and agricultural interests. Many nonfarm businesses have concluded that some form of employee verification is inevitable.

National organizations of restaurant owners and home builders gave their backing. The San Antonio Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, which unites Latino businesses in Mr. Smith’s district that have often been at odds with him, is leaning toward endorsing the bill, said Ramiro A. Cavazos, the president of the chamber.

Still, Mr. Smith, whose district includes parts of suburban San Antonio and Austin as well as a large part of the nearby Hill Country, recently acknowledged the surge of worry in rural areas. He said he would soon introduce a separate bill to “address the needs of the agriculture industry,” either proposing changes to the current federal temporary farm worker program, known as H-2A, or offering a new guest worker program.

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Boy killed

I cannot get over this case. I lived in Borough Park for many years, and felt always very safe. It is a very tight community with its own rules, and I never should have thought that something like this would happened. Not because Jews are “better” people, but because people know each others there, and many of them related. Well, the community can protect themselves from others, however not from their own people. What happened there is just so disturbing… Leiby was the only child for his parents. As a mother of two I CANNOT imagine what his parents are going through. 

8 Year Old Brooklyn Boy’s Body Has Been Found Cut To Pieces

BROOKLYN – Brooklyn police found the body of 8 year old Hasidic Jew, Leiby Kletzky cut to pieces.

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35 year old Levi Aron has confessed to murdering the child and admitted to cutting up the boy’s body after the announcement of a massive manhunt for the boy’s murderer scared him. Aron said, the cut off feet of Leiby are still in his freezer in his apartment.

Levi Aron admitted to putting the boy’s body pieces in a red trunk and dumping it in a garbage container about 1.5 miles down the road from the murder scene.

Leiby Letzky was murdered by Levi Aron (insert). His body was found chopped to piece in a red trunk

According to Brooklyn police, Aron said he did not know Leiby Kletzky or his family and had tried on a previous occasion to grab a youngster. That attempt failed because he was stopped by police for public urination.

Levi is originally from Memphis Tennessee but went to Brooklyn New York in 2009. Police say he does not have a prior criminal record and is not known as a pedophile. Police does not know if Aron sexually assaulted Leiby before killing him.

Reportedly, Aron choked his victim with a handkerchief before cutting up his body. Police found three butcher knives in Levi’s apartment. Aron confessed his crime and helped police find the boy’s mutilated body.

Co-workers of Aron say they did not notice anything suspicious about Aron on Tuesday, the day after Leiby went missing.

Reportedly, Kletzky walked home alone for the first time from the play yard at Borough Park on Monday. He had begged his parents to let him do that and they eventually permitted it. Allegedly, Leiby got lost on his way home and followed a man in a busy street, not knowing where he was going.

Immediately after the boy’s disappearance was announced, Brooklyn police instigated an all out man hunt to find Kletzky and his kidnapper.

Sadly, they found the boy 2 days later, murdered, his body cut to pieces, placed in a red trunk that was dumped in a garbage can.

The Hasidic community expressed sadness and disillusion with the senseless, brutal murder of one of their young children.

Helping immigrants

Wanted: Ideas to stoke immigrant-owned biz

NYC competition offers up to $100,000 to winning business plans that help improve immigrant entrepreneurs’ access to credit and face other challenges.

Called the Competition to Help Reach Immigrant Ventures and Entrepreneurs, or Competition THRIVE, the contest is a joint partnership of the EDC, Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation and the City University of New York’s Baruch College. It’s one of three new initiatives, along with a series of bilingual business solutions courses and a business expo, that Mayor Michael Bloomberg announced in March to support the city’s immigrant small business owners.

“Competition THRIVE is a key part of our ongoing commitment to support immigrant-owned businesses across the city,” said Seth Pinsky, president of the Economic Development Corp., in a statement. “This competition will generate new ideas and create business plans to assist this growing community, and ultimately help to ensure the city’s economic success for the future.”

Gary Hattem, president of Deutsche Bank Americas Foundation, called New York’s immigrant entrepreneurs “a vital part of our city’s economy,” adding that Deutsche Bank was “proud to support this initiative as an important step towards triggering new levels of growth and job creation in New York.”

New York, which has seen its immigrant population double to 3 million since 1970, is uniquely dependent upon its foreign-born population, according to the mayor’s office. Immigrants constitute close to 40% of the city’s total population and approximately 43% of its work force. In the arena of entrepreneurship, immigrants make up 49% of all small business owners, a figure which far exceeds the 12% they represent nationally.

The Lawrence N. Field Center for Entrepreneurship at Baruch College was selected by the Economic Development Corp. and Deutsche Bank Americas to serve as the official base of operations for Competition THRIVE. “Baruch College is honored to be playing an important role in supporting [New York’s] immigrant entrepreneurs,” said Monica Dean, administrative director of the Field Center, in the statement.

Submissions for Competition THRIVE will be accepted through Aug. 31. A panel of judges will select five finalists who will each receive seed money of $25,000 to pilot their ideas. The initiative judged to be the “most scalable” and sustainable after a six-month pilot period will then be awarded an additional $100,000 to expand on their project.

“Immigrant communities throughout the five boroughs are a great source of innovation and an essential part of the city’s economy,” said City Councilwoman Diana Reyna, chairwoman of the Committee on Small Business, in the statement. “As a daughter of an immigrant entrepreneur, I am excited that my colleagues working with the administration have developed a plan to foster and encourage entrepreneurship—reaching out to community groups.”

Honesty, please!

http://www.nj.com/business/index.ssf/2011/06/nj_immigration_services_scam.html

Election & Immigration

States Take Steps on Immigration amid Obama’s Calls for Reform

Roque Planas
May 17, 2011

Georgia Governor Nathan Dale signs an immigration law that cracks down on undocumented workers as state legislator and bill co-sponsor Matt Ramsey looks on. (AP Photo)

When U.S. President Barack Obama delivered a speech calling for comprehensive immigration reform in El Paso on May 10, he framed the issue as a moral imperative that makes economic sense. “Look at Intel and Google and Yahoo and eBay—these are great American companies that have created countless jobs and helped us lead the world in high-tech industries. Every one was founded by an immigrant,”Obama said in the speech. The outlines of his proposal—ramping up border security, creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants already here, reforming the legal immigration system to attract immigrants with education and skills, and punishing business that exploit the undocumented—are not new. Obama said as much several times this week, calling for immigration reform at a meeting with high profile stakeholders April 19, another one with Hispanic celebrities and journalists on April 28, and at the commencement speech of Miami Dade Community College. But despite Obama’s high-profile moves, exasperated state governments continue to take immigration policy into their own hands.

Many question how hard Obama will really push for immigration reform. An editorial published in The Boston Globe argued that Obama needs to accompany his meetings and speeches with legislation and lobbying. “Simply asking Americans to ‘add your voices to the debate’ won’t get the job done,” The Globe’s editorial board wrote. “The president needs to lead Congress and the country by proposing legislation and then fighting for it.” Some view Obama as having passed the buck, opening the door for reform opponents to say he is more interested in mobilizing the Hispanic vote than fixingwhat he refers to as the “broken immigration system.” “It’s disappointing that the only time border security and immigration reform get President Obama’s attention is when he is campaigning,” Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) said in statement released in anticipation of Obama’s El Paso speech.  

The day after Obama’s immigration speech, Senate Democrats reintroduced the DREAM Act, a law that would grant a path to citizenship for qualified undocumented youth who serve in the military or attend college. The DREAM Act has a slim chance of passing—the legislation failed last year during the lame-duck session, when Democrats controlled both Houses of Congress. To make it palatable to legislators more interested in immigration enforcement than reform, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) suggested last week attaching the DREAM Act as a rider to a bill requiring employers to use E-Verify to confirm that employees are allowed to work in the United States. But some DREAM Act supporters have questioned the political motives behind giving that law another go just as campaigning for the 2012 election is winding up.  

In the absence of comprehensive immigration reform, states are taking the lead. Georgia’s Governor Nathan Deal signed a law on Friday modeled partly on Arizona’s controversial SB 1070. The Georgia law gives state police more authority to question the suspects police detain about their immigration status and obligates large agribusinesses to use E-Verify. Several other states have considered implementing laws similar to Arizona’s, but they face resistance from the federal government and business groups who say the laws will incur heavy legal and economic costs. In July 2010, a federal judge slapped an injunction on the most controversial provisions of the Arizona law and, in April, the decision was upheld by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. Arizona Governor Jan Brewer says she will appeal the case to the Supreme Court. A law passed last week by Utah’s legislature would require police to check the immigration status of those who commit felonies faced a federal challenge within 14 hours. A similar bill aimed at cracking down on illegal immigration failed in the Florida legislature on May 6, after the session expired without reaching an agreement.  

By the same token, some states are passing legislation aimed at providing relief for undocumented immigrants in the absence of reform at the federal level. Maryland’s state legislature, for example, just approved a law on May 10 allowing undocumented students to pay in-state tuition at public colleges. The Connecticut House just passed asimilar law. Governor Pat Quinn told Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) last week that the state would opt out of Secure Communities—a federal program that requires local law enforcement to check fingerprints of those they arrest against an ICE database. The purpose behind the program is to target undocumented immigrants who have committed serious crimes for deportation, but Quinn said that over a third of those deported from his state under Secure Communities were never convicted of a crime.