A common refrain among anti-immigrant activists is that today’s immigrants just aren’t “assimilating” into U.S. society like the immigrants of earlier eras. However, as a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) points out, the “illusion of non-assimilation is created by looking only at newcomers who have not had time yet to assimilate as fully as earlier arrivers.” When socioeconomic advancement is tracked over time, it becomes clear that “the longer immigrants are here, the more they advance and the better they are integrated into our society.” The report, entitled Assimilation Today, was co-authored by renowned demographer Dowell Myers (a professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California) and by John Pitkin (president of Analysis and Forecasting, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts).
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In a new and fatally flawed report, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) attempts to blame immigrants for virtually any unemployment among less-educated native-born workers anywhere in the United States, in both good economic times and bad. The report, entitled From Bad to Worse, deluges the reader with data from 2007 and 2010 on employment and unemployment among native-born and foreign-born workers, and then insinuates from this—without providing any evidence—that immigrant workers simply must be taking jobs away from the native-born. Specifically, the report juxtaposes the “estimated seven to eight million illegal immigrants holding jobs” in the United States with the millions of less-educated native-born Americans who are now out of work, or who were out of work before the recession, and concludes that “if the United States were to enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to return home, we would seem to have an adequate supply of less-educated natives to replace” them.

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The ever-hysterical Tea Party is now hysterical about unauthorized immigrants. In a frenzied email blast to its members, the Tea Party Nation warns that the Obama administration wants to grant “amnesty” to the millions of unauthorized immigrants in the United States, whom the Tea Party alleges have inflicted various “horrors” upon Americans by stealing their jobs and committing unspeakable crimes. Not surprisingly, the Tea Party Nation gets its facts completely wrong. As a litany of evidence-based reports have demonstrated, most native-born workers are not in competition with immigrants for the same jobs, and immigrants are less likely than the native-born to commit serious crimes, regardless of their legal status.
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Over the weekend, the second-ranking member of the Senate Republican leadership, Senator Jon Kyl (R-AZ) joined Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) in considering a repeal of birthright citizenship laws through a constitutional amendment. Birthright citizenship, guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, is the cornerstone of American civil rights and affirms that, with very few exceptions, all persons born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens—regardless of their parents’ citizenship. Although the Supreme Court has consistently upheld birthright citizenship, year after year restrictionist groups and legislators trot out the “repeal birthright citizenship” mantra in the hopes of adding a few more immigration extremists to their dog and pony show audience.
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Conspiracy theorists hate it when no one pays attention. Witness last month’s letter to President Obama in which eight Republican Senators accused him of planning to circumvent the will of Congress through a regulatory grant of “amnesty” suggesting that plans were afoot in the Department of Homeland Security to make it happen. Despite their mock outrage, the letter barely made a ripple in the immigration debate. And just a few days after his speech on immigration, President Obama unequivocally stated that he wanted a real solution to our immigration crisis, rejecting both a free pass for all undocumented immigrants and a scorched earth, deport them all approach.
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In a new report, the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) describes the rejuvenated efforts of anti-immigrant groups to repackage themselves as environmentalists who are trying to save the United States from the supposed ecological ills of “over-population.” According to the report, entitled Greenwash: Nativists, Environmentalism & the Hypocrisy of Hate, the two-faced nature of these efforts is “astounding” given the dismal environmental records of the organizations and political candidates to whom nativist groups tend to contribute funds. Moreover, this “green-washing” of the nativist agenda also amounts to a white-washing of the anti-immigrant movement’s white-nationalist roots.
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According to an article in the Washington Post, ICE expects to deport about 400,000 people this fiscal year, which is nearly 10 percent more than the Bush administration’s 2008 total and 25 percent more than were deported in 2007. The Obama administration has also far outpaced the previous administration in terms of audits of employers who may be employing unauthorized workers. Yet even while immigrant advocates decry the administration for spending billions on immigration enforcement and deportation and for failing to move ahead on comprehensive immigration reform, immigration restrictionists continue to deny that enforcement is taking place.
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Over the weekend, former Arizona Rep. J.D. Hayworth challenged the Obama Administration’s commitment to immigration enforcement—just weeks before the Administration is set to deploy 1,200 National Guard troops to the U.S.-Mexico Border. On Monday, the Obama Administration announced that the National Guard will begin deployment on August 1, with more than 500 soldiers going to Arizona and the rest to New Mexico, California and Texas. The President has also requested that Congress appropriate $600 million in supplemental funds for “enhanced border protection and law-enforcement activities.”
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It’s the stuff of fiction. A vigilante group with a vaguely patriotic name creates a list with the help of someone—perhaps a disgruntled government-employee/mole—who is fed up with the system (think Michael Douglas in Falling Down). The list contains the names, social security numbers and other private information of hundreds of people whom the vigilantes deem “undesirable.” The list even identifies pregnant women and their due dates and recommends that they be first on the list for “elimination.” The list is delivered to a wide range of government, law enforcement and media groups, accompanied by a letter insisting action be taken to remove the undesirables.
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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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