At a House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration hearing today, a panel of conservative religious leaders made the case for common sense solutions to our immigration problems—comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) that secures our borders, follows the rule of law and provides a pathway to citizenship for the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living in the U.S. While the hearing, The Ethical Imperative for Reform of Our Immigration System, started off with ethical and biblical arguments supporting and opposing reform, it later evolved into what most immigration debates eventually boil down to—fairness, justice and the punitive aspects of a reform effort.
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Today in Politico, hard right, conservative Gary Bauer continues the restrictionist tradition of blaming immigrants for everything from pot holes to climate change. In his editorial, Bauer cites a 2008 report by the restrictionist group Center for Immigration Studies and seeks to link climate change legislation and immigration reform legislation (and a half dozen other ideas for which he advocates) to make the wholly unclear point the immigrants are once again to blame for our environmental problems.
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Today, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a report which attacks the decision of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) to designate the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) a “hate group,” and thereby impugn the reputation of two FAIR spin-offs: CIS and NumbersUSA. The report offers a defense of FAIR and its founder, John Tanton (a man who has expressed sympathy for eugenics—that is, selective human breeding), and attacks SPLC and its work with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and other organizations belonging to the “Stop the Hate” campaign. Leaving aside SPLC’s rebuttal of the report, or the question raised by the report of why it took so long for FAIR’s (hateful) past to catch up with it, the fact remains that FAIR, CIS, and NumbersUSA have engaged in an intellectually dishonest analysis of immigration that sometimes devolves into name-calling.
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The Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has made the rather un-astounding discovery that unemployment in the recession-plagued U.S. economy is high, especially among less-educated workers. In a new report, entitled A Huge Pool of Potential Workers, CIS dissects the latest Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers on unemployment and underemployment among the native-born, and notes that there are between seven and eight million unauthorized immigrants currently working in the United States. The report then makes the casual claim that “if the United States were to enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to return to their home countries, we would seem to have an adequate supply of less-educated natives to replace these workers.” What the CIS report fails to mention is that the costly and destructive measures which have been proposed to “encourage” unauthorized workers to leave the country have yet to work and adversely affect native-born workers; that many unemployed natives would have to travel half way across the country to reach the low-wage jobs formerly held by unauthorized immigrants; that removing unauthorized workers from the country also means removing unauthorized consumers and the jobs they support through their purchasing power; and that none of this would aid the nation’s long-term economic recovery.
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In October, the restrictionist group Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released another report singing the praises of the 287(g) program. In The 287(g) Program: Protecting Home Towns and Homeland, the authors ignore the evidence and arguments put forward by law enforcement experts—such as the Police Foundation, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, and the International Association of Chiefs of Police—and dismisses them as “national advocacy organizations.” In doing so, CIS puts itself forward as apparent “law enforcement experts,” adding to their impressive resume that includes biblical scholar and environmental expert.
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Any serious researcher would probably tell you that trying to use a single public-opinion poll to gauge the likely impact of a policy initiative as complex as immigration reform is about as reliable as consulting a psychic. Yet that is precisely what some opponents of comprehensive immigration reform are now attempting to do. For instance, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) is trumpeting the results of a poll conducted in Mexico to suggest that creating a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants currently living in the United States would trigger a tsunami of illegal immigration from south of the border. CIS completely ignores the fact that the last legalization program in 1986 did not spur an increase in unauthorized immigration (it actually reduced it in the short run). Instead, CIS acts as if popular beliefs and attitudes about immigration among Mexican citizens are a means of predicting the future. But popular perceptions are no substitute for hard data—and the data is not on CIS’s side.
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For many years now, religious leaders and diverse faith groups have contributed much to the ongoing immigration debate. Grounded in faith and good works, the faith community has been and continues to be steadfast in their outreach to immigrants through a myriad of support and service programs, faith rallies and support of those in need. That being said, there are restrictionist groups who would rather sully the debate by co-opting faith-based terminology and tease anti-immigrant agendas out of Scripture.

Yesterday, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) held such a panel discussion on the immigration debate from a faith-based perspective. CIS Fellow, James R. Edwards Jr., an apparent biblical scholar, was on hand to discuss his recently released report, A Biblical Perspective on Immigration Policy—the latest in a series of CIS publications on faith which writes off “compassion” as the practice of “religious elites” and attempts to speak for the majority of “rank-and-file” Christian laity who apparently “oppose legalization and support enforcement of immigration laws.” Edwards’ report attempts to examine the biblical role of civil government.
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Photo by thatlegalguy.

Once again, opponents of immigration reform have actually made a strong case for comprehensive immigration reform. At an event this morning sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), various speakers argued that ID theft by unauthorized immigrants is a problem that needs to be solved. While they seemed unwilling to offer any real solutions, the issues raised in the discussion clearly point toward the need for comprehensive immigration reform—including a legalization program for current undocumented immigrants—which would be a large and important step toward curbing the use of fraudulent documents by unauthorized immigrants.
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Photo by def101.

Today, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) released a new fact sheet about immigrants and the health care system. At a public event, CIS made it clear that while immigrants may not be to blame for all the problems with the U.S. health care system, they certainly are part of the problem, and the only solution is to step up immigration enforcement and reduce future immigration. Hmmm, isn’t that their solution to everything?

While stating that free health care for “illegals” is a problem (even though the bills in Congress explicitly deny coverage to undocumented immigrants), CIS focused on health care benefits for legal immigrants, implying that legal immigrants should be denied affordable health care and that comprehensive immigration reform would destroy the health care system. This is simply the latest attempt to silence any constructive discussion about important issues and scare the American public by using immigrants as a handy scapegoat.
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Photo by timlewisnm.

In a pair of new reports released yesterday, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) presents an array of demographic and employment data from the U.S. Census Bureau to obliquely suggest that the recession-plagued U.S. economy doesn’t really “need” immigrant workers. Although both of these reports are surprisingly nuanced in their analysis compared to many previous CIS efforts, they nevertheless present a portrait of immigration and the U.S. economy that is over-simplified and off the mark. In gauging the potential impact of immigrant workers on native-born workers, for instance, CIS fails to fully account for the many differences between immigrants and natives in terms of where in the country they live, how much education they have, what occupations they’ve worked in, and how long they’ve been in the labor market. In contrast, an IPC report that was also released yesterday explores all of these variables.
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