1. OK bill on 14th unlikely
2. Atlanta jail joins Sec Comm.
3. 'Take Our Jobs' stalls
4. LA co. welfare goes to illegals
5. DOJ sues AZ schools

1.
OK of bill to restrict birthright unlikely
By Fran Daniel
Winston-Salem Journal, September 7, 2010

A Republican proposal to change the U.S. Constitution to deny automatic citizenship to immigrant children isn't likely to pass, and at least two of North Carolina's delegates to Congress say that is fine with them.

Proponents of the bill say that immigrants are taking advantage of the 14th Amendment, which was meant to guarantee the rights of freed slaves. They paint a picture of pregnant women rushing across the border to give birth.

Under their proposal, if both parents are illegal immigrants, citizenship for their children would not be automatic.

The plan doesn't have broad support, even among fellow Republicans.

"Our first priorities need to be border security and common-sense immigration reform," Sen. Richard Burr, R-N.C., said in a statement. "I don't believe we need to repeal part of the Constitution in order to address shortcomings in our nation's immigration system."

Aaron Groen, a spokesman for the office of Rep. Virginia Foxx, R-5th, said that Foxx believes that there is a legislative fix to the problem, and cautions against tinkering with the Constitution.

The Rev. Fermin Bocanegra, the pastor of Iglesia Cristiana Wesleyana in Kernersville, said he is aware that some pregnant women cross the U.S. border because they want their children to be born in this country.

"If a mother is looking for a better future with her children, they will do things like that," Bocanegra said. "If we were in their shoes, I wonder if we would do the same thing?"

Still, he said he believes that only a small group is doing that to gain U.S. citizenship.

He does not understand why some people are pushing for a change in the 14th Amendment.

"Other than the fact that it's just pure politics," Bocanegra said. "They want to make a big deal so they can get elected."

Republicans point to a Pew Hispanic Center study showing that 8 percent of the 4.3 million babies born in the United States in 2008 had at least one illegal parent.

A closer examination of the issue shows that the trend is not as dramatic as some immigration opponents have claimed.

Most children of illegal immigrants are born to parents who have made the United States their home for years.

Out of 340,000 babies born to illegal immigrants in the United States in 2008, 85 percent of the parents had been in the country for more than a year, and more than half for at least five years, said Jeffrey Passel, a senior demographer for Pew.

And immigration experts say that it's extraordinarily rare for immigrants to come to the U.S. just so their children can get citizenship. In most cases, they come to the U.S. for economic reasons and better hospitals, and end up staying and raising families.
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http://www2.journalnow.com/content/2010/sep/04/ok-of-bill-to-restrict-bi...

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2.
Starting today, Cobb, Fulton jail inmates to be checked for immigration status
By Jeremy Redmon
The Atlanta-Journal Constitution, September 6, 2010

Starting Tuesday, law enforcement officials will start screening everyone fingerprinted and booked into jails in Cobb and Fulton counties against an additional national database to see whether they are in the country legally.

Called “Secure Communities,” the $200 million federal program aimed at deporting violent criminal immigrants started during the Bush administration in 2008. It has been adding local jurisdictions since and has a goal of nationwide screening in the next four years. Clayton, DeKalb and Gwinnett counties already participate.

Local jailers don’t have to do anything differently to take part. They already transmit fingerprints to state and federal crime databases to confirm identities and check for outstanding arrest warrants and criminal histories. But now those fingerprints also will be checked automatically against millions of other prints held by the federal Department of Homeland Security.

That federal agency collects fingerprints from a variety of people, including those who apply for visas and those caught crossing the border illegally.

Jailers say checking fingerprints against the database helps prevent illegal immigrants from deceiving them with aliases and other false information. Federal immigration officials tell local jailers whether they find matches in their system. And if these federal officials find matches, they could seek to deport the local inmates. But that is done only after their criminal charges have been adjudicated and after they have completed sentences for any crimes they committed in the U.S.

These fingerprint screenings already take place in 574 jurisdictions in 30 states, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. ICE officials say Muscogee County near Columbus is also joining the program Tuesday.

Law enforcement officials in Cobb and Fulton counties said they wanted the screenings because illegal immigrants are committing crimes in their communities and repeatedly returning to their jails. In Roswell, for example, police said they had already processed more than 1,100 foreign-born inmates in the city jail by May 11 this year. For years, Roswell Police Chief Ed Williams has sent immigration officials a daily list of inmates suspected of being in the country illegally.

“I believe Secure Communities will be helpful identifying those in this country illegally much more accurately and rapidly,” Williams said. “I won't have to fax arrest information to ICE anymore.”
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http://www.ajc.com/news/starting-today-cobb-fulton-607750.html

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3.
POLL ‘Take our Jobs’ effort to replace illegals with legal workers starts slowly here
By Elysa Batista
Naples Daily News, September 5, 2010

It was the nationwide challenge accepted by the creator of “Truthiness” himself, Stephen Colbert.

But is the United Farm Workers of America’s “Take Our Jobs” campaign, which is aimed at training U.S. citizens and legal residents who wish to replace farm workers in the field, coming to Southwest Florida, too?

Not quite yet.

Giev Kashkooli, United Farm Workers national vice president, said the idea for the initiative arose during an immigration reform meeting held by the organization’s board.

After giving an update on the stagnation of immigration reform on Capitol Hill, Kashkooli said in jest that two United Farm Workers members suggested that if it’s just a small group of people opposing reform: “Why don’t we ask them to come do our jobs?”

“It got some laughter and then everyone realized this was a possibility,” Kashkooli said.

The idea took off after the United Farm Workers sent letters to several members of Congress and caught the eye of the Colbert Report.

United Farm Workers President Arturo S. Rodriguez even got some on-screen time with Colbert and an on-air promise from the Emmy-winning Comedy Central host to take on the challenge.

“It’s had a great effect,” Kashkooli said, adding that unemployment is one of the biggest issues facing the country. “Sometimes it takes humor to get people talking.”

The cable spot resulted in more than 2 million hits to the takeourjobs.org website and numerous news media interviews.

On Friday, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics announced that the national unemployment rate for August was 9.6 percent. In Florida, the Florida Agency for Workforce Innovation’s Labor Market Statistics Center listed the state’s unemployment rate as 11.5 percent in July.

Meanwhile, according to a report released Wednesday by the Washington D.C.-based Pew Hispanic Center, illegal immigration in the United States has dropped nearly 8 percent nationally, which means a change from 12 million in 2007 to 11.1 million this year. In Florida, the change was far more dramatic: A nearly 27 percent drop from 1.05 million undocumented immigrants to 675,000.

Yet only 16 of the 8,601 people have actually moved into farm jobs. None of those 16 were in Southwest Florida.

“In Florida the campaign has been slow,” Farmworkers of Florida general coordinator Tierso Moreno said.

Nevertheless, Moreno said the program is a creative way of hitting back against attacks on immigrants.

“It’s a response to the crisis,” Moreno said. “They (the jobs) aren’t well-paid and are very dangerous, but they are necessary.”

However, that’s an argument that Center for Immigration Studies Executive Director Mark Krikorian just doesn’t buy.

Krikorian said the premise of the campaign relies on the belief that the United States farm industry cannot live without the influx of labor from abroad.

“And that’s economic gibberish,” Krikorian said. “The fact is, with better immigration enforcement or any significant immigration enforcement, what you would have is not the disappearance of the illegal alien farm workers _ who make up something like half of the farm labor force _ but rather a reduction of their numbers. It would shrink over time.”

He said more enforcement would mean fewer new illegal farm workers would come in, while some who are here would be identified and removed.

Others, Krikorian said, would find better jobs and leave the fields, which would shrink the pool of farm workers available.

“The only way you are going to improve the lot for farm workers is by having fewer of them,” he said. “So that each one of them is in the driver’s seat and they get to pick among employers, instead of the way it is now where there is a whole crowd of them and employers get to pick among them and treat them like dirt.”
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http://www.naplesnews.com/news/2010/sep/05/take-our-jobs-illegal-legal-w...

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4.
L.A. County welfare to children of illegal immigrants grows
By Teresa Watanabe
Los Angeles Times, September 5, 2010

Welfare payments to children of illegal immigrants in Los Angeles County increased in July to $52 million, prompting renewed calls from one county supervisor to rein in public benefits to such families.

The payments, made to illegal immigrants for their U.S. citizen children, included $30 million in food stamps and $22 million from the CalWorks welfare program, according to county figures released Friday by Supervisor Michael D. Antonovich.

The new figure represents an increase of $3.7 million from July 2009 and makes up 23% of all county welfare and food stamp assistance, according to county records.

Last year, welfare and food stamp issuances totaled nearly $570 million, and the amount is projected to exceed $600 million this year. In addition, county taxpayers spend $550 million in public safety — mostly for jail costs — and nearly $500 million for healthcare for illegal immigrants, Antonovich said.
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Amid continued economic gloom, debate has intensified over the public cost of providing benefits to illegal immigrants and their U.S. citizen children. In recent months, calls have grown for a constitutional amendment that would effectively deny citizenship to the children of illegal immigrants, whose numbers increased from 2.7 million in 2003 to 4 million in 2008, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

Currently, U.S. citizenship is automatically granted to children born on U.S. soil. Last month, U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) announced that he might introduce a constitutional amendment to deny citizenship to children of illegal immigrants. Antonovich and several legal scholars, however, argue that a federal statute would be sufficient to change the law.

But even some immigration hawks are wary of such a move. Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based research organization that supports immigration restrictions, said ending birthright citizenship would harm children for their parents' misdeeds, require new federal registration systems and create other problems. The solution, he said, is to continue driving down illegal immigration with tough enforcement.
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http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/05/local/la-me-illegal-welfare-2010...

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5.
Arizona colleges accused of immigrant discrimination
By David G. Savage
Los Angeles Times, September 4, 2010

Employers who hire illegal immigrants can be fined, but the Obama administration warned this week that they also can be fined for asking legal immigrants to show their green cards before hiring them.

The Justice Department's civil rights division sued the Maricopa County Community Colleges in Arizona, seeking damages from schools for having "intentionally committed document abuse discrimination."

Prior to this year, the local colleges in the Phoenix area asked job applicants who were not U.S. citizens to show a driver's license, a Social Security card and their permanent resident card, commonly called a green card.

The Justice Department said a valid driver's license and a Social Security card are usually sufficient to show that a person is authorized to work. Requesting a green card amounts to "immigration-related employment discrimination," said Thomas E. Perez, the assistant attorney general for civil rights.

Federal law forbids treating "authorized workers differently during the hiring process based on their citizenship status," Perez said. He said the department's Office of Special Counsel would bring legal actions against employers who impose "unnecessary and discriminatory hurdles to employment for work-authorized noncitizens."

Amid the fierce controversy over immigration, the Obama administration has launched three lawsuits this summer to protect the rights of Latinos and legal immigrants — all three targeting Arizona.

In July, the administration successfully blocked Arizona's law that authorized state and local police to check the immigration status of persons who were arrested. On Thursday, it sued Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio seeking documents that could show he has illegally targeted Latinos in the course of his immigration sweeps.

The suit against the Maricopa community colleges, announced Monday, and could affect employers across the nation.

"Employers are getting very mixed messages from the government," said Jessica Vaughan, a policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies.

On one hand, employers have been told they need to do more to verify that their workers are legal and authorized to work in the United States. Federal immigration law says hiring "an unauthorized alien" can result in fines of up to $3,000 per worker. However, another provision of the same law bars employers from requesting "more or different documents" than are needed to prove a noncitizen's legal status.
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http://articles.latimes.com/2010/sep/04/nation/la-na-immigration-employe...