Photo by radiobread.

At a recent conference, Bill Gates shared his ideas about U.S. Immigration policy, noting that there should be more “exceptions for smart people.” While not the most eloquently phrased statement, it does pose an interesting question in the immigration reform debate. Are we turning away skilled workers? Or are they leaving on their own, thanks to a complicated system of paperwork and jumping through hoops and lack of job advancement opportunities?
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BY GREGORY CHEN, LUTHERAN IMMIGRATION AND REFUGEE SERVICES

Senators Robert Menendez (D-NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), and Edward Kennedy (D-MA) took action today to reform the Department of Homeland Security’s ever-growing immigration detention system. The need for reform could not be any more clear: several recent reports have documented both the poor conditions in detention facilities and violations of detainees’ due process rights. A delegation from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights called conditions “unacceptable” after visiting facilities in Florida and Texas. The National Immigration Law Center, the ACLU of Southern California, and Holland & Knight law firm published a system-wide report on the federal government’s compliance with its own minimum standards, finding “fundamental violations of basic human rights and notions of dignity” and calling for a halt to any further expansion of the current detention system.
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Next week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) will begin a “Quadrennial Homeland Security Review” (QHSR) billed as a 21st century version of the town hall meeting: an online, interactive discussion that is promoted as an opportunity to shape the future priorities of DHS. The QHSR is a Congressionally mandated strategic planning analysis that is intended to evaluate and shape Department priorities. The topics under discussion this year include:

• Counter-terrorism and domestic security management
• Securing our borders
• Smart and tough enforcement of immigration laws
• Preparing for, responding to, and recovering from disasters
• Homeland Security National Risk Assessment
• Homeland Security Planning and Capabilities

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The Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)—an anti-immigrant hate group based in Washington, DC—claims in a new report that “Pennsylvania’s illegal immigrant population costs the state’s taxpayers about $728 million per year for education, medical care and incarceration.” However, the statistical contortions in which FAIR engages to produce this number render it virtually meaningless. FAIR dramatically exaggerates the fiscal “costs” imposed by unauthorized immigrants by including the schooling of their native-born, U.S.-citizen children in its estimate, and completely discounts the economic role that unauthorized workers play as consumers who help support Pennsylvania businesses.
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Photo by Richard Vallejo.

Last week the Immigration Justice Clinic of the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York published a disturbing study that documents ICE’s home raid operations. Constitution on ICE: A Report on Immigration Home Raid Operations found that over the last several years, ICE has increasingly conducted home raids, meaning that they gone to private homes to arrest people rather than doing it in public settings. The report finds a pattern of constitutional violations occurring during home raids including agents kicking in doors and forcing their way into private residences during pre-dawn hours without warrants or other legal authority. ICE agents also seize non-target residents, or “collaterals” from their homes, even if there is no legal authority to take that individual into custody. According to the report, these arrests are based on racial or ethnic profiling. Finally, the authors also found that ICE was illegally searching homes.

The stories speak for themselves…
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This week the National Institute on Money in State Politics released a study on funding spent supporting and opposing immigration-related ballot measures. Immigration Measures: Support on Both Sides of the Fence examined 2008 ballot initiatives in Oregon and Arizona and found that money raised by both sides of the issue totaled more than $17.5 million.

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Unabashed promoters of E-verify have had a busy week, moving from hearings in the Senate and House to Rep. Heath Shuler’s (D-NC) pep rally for the 2009 version of his fatally flawed SAVE Act—a bill that continues to promote the deportation-only version of immigration reform.

Step back from all this activity, however, and two things are clear: 1) serious problems continue to plague a wide-scale implementation of an electronic employment verification system (EEVS); and 2) those problems won’t be tackled except in the context of comprehensive immigration reform.
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The July 20th issue of The New Yorker paints a detailed portrait of Maricopa County, Arizona’s Sheriff Joe Arpaio—and it is not a pretty picture. The profile of “Sheriff Joe” that emerges from the story by journalist William Finnegan is that of a man obsessed with publicity and self-promotion, who has a deep streak of sadism and little regard for the U.S. Constitution, civil rights, actual crime-fighting, or protecting the safety of the public he ostensibly serves. While Arpaio persists in his personal crusade against unauthorized immigrants, serious crimes go unsolved, emergency-response times climb, and the rights of native-born Americans and immigrants alike are routinely trampled in the process. The most remarkable aspect of this story is that Arpaio is still legally permitted to carry a badge and a gun after more than a decade and a half of egregiously abusing his power.
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Today the Senate Immigration Subcommittee held a hearing addressing electronic employment verification. While today’s hearing acknowledged that employment verification is an important element of comprehensive immigration reform, serious questions remain about how a mandatory employment verification system should be designed. Today’s momentum building must be paired with serious analysis of the many serious issues involved with a large, mandatory employment verification system.

While employment verification is viewed as an immigration enforcement tool, it is a program that affects every person working in the U.S.—including U.S. citizens. Before moving forward, several things must be addressed:
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Today, the U.S. Census Bureau published new data, Voting and Registration in the Election of 2008, which tracks demographic characteristics of the 131 million U.S. citizens who reported that they voted in the 2008 presidential election. The Census Bureau’s new data set shows a significant increase of about 5 million voters from the 2004 presidential election—including 2 million more Latino voters and 600,000 more Asian voters. Relative to the presidential election of 2004, the voting rates for blacks, Asians, and Latinos each increased by about 4 percentage points. The voting rate for non-Latino whites decreased by 1 percentage point.
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