1. Costs of illegal immigration
2. Report: PA contractors fight
3. Few GA co's participate
4. VT AG proposes 'Bias-Free'
5. Act may affect school policy

1.
What illegal immigration really costs us
By Mary Beth Schweigert
Lancaster Papers (PA), November 20, 2010

Some critics argue that undocumented workers hurt local economies by sending money back to their home countries instead of spending it in communities where they live and work.

"We're losing so much money in the local community, the local tax base," says Frank A. Sirianni, president of the Pennsylvania Building and Construction Trades Council. "It's wrong."

Few studies have come to significant conclusions on the true economic impact of illegal immigrants, particularly at the local level.
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A 2004 report by the Center for Immigration Studies is one of only a handful to specifically measure illegal immigrants' cost to the federal government.

The study, based on U.S. Census data, showed that households headed by illegal immigrants imposed $26.4 billion in costs and paid $16 billion in taxes in 2002. This created a net federal fiscal deficit of $10.4 billion.

The deficit is due primarily to low education levels -— and resulting low incomes and tax payments — not unwillingness to work or heavy use of most social services, the study found.

The vast majority of illegal immigrants hold jobs, and more than half work "on the books." An illegal immigrant-headed household's average income is $30,019.

Illegal immigrants can't access all government programs. The largest costs are Medicaid, treatment of the uninsured, food assistance, federal prisons and courts, and federal aid to schools.

According to the study, the average illegal immigrant-headed household paid more than $4,200 annually in all forms of federal taxes and imposed a cost of $6,950.

That means the average household created a federal deficit of $2,750.
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http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/315339

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2.
Up against the (dry)wall
By Mary Beth Schweigert
LAncaster Papers, November 20, 2010

Coming in too high on a bid is an expected part of the building business.

But when drywall company owners Reggie Fisher and Vernon Stoltzfus lost job after job to companies quoting what seemed like impossibly low prices, they suspected they were up against more than normal competition.

Fisher visited the sites of three jobs they'd lost, hoping to find out what was behind the low prices.

He approached the drywallers working on site and asked if they had immigration papers.

Most of them, he said, did not.

Fisher and Stoltzfus, owners of Cornerstone Drywall Co., Strasburg, say they have lost jobs at hundreds of houses to competitors who hire illegal immigrants willing to work for less than half of what Americans workers made before the recession hit.

To keep their company afloat, Fisher and Stoltzfus downsized their staff from 20 to 12. Their own salaries have plunged 40 percent.

"We're all in this together," Fisher says. "We're all taking cuts big time."

Inside Story interviewed 18 drywall company owners, employees and independent subcontractors who accuse competitors of hiring undocumented workers in an effort to drive down costs and finish jobs faster.

The drywallers interviewed for this story work mostly in residential construction and also do some light commercial jobs.

Lower-priced homes, Stoltzfus says, are the only way to make money in the recession. And, he says, "the way to get it cheap is to beat it out of the backs of somebody."

He and Fisher say they believe more than half of their fellow drywall contractors use illegal immigrants, mostly from Mexico or Central America.

The drywallers' accusations are difficult to prove. Most job sites are on private property. Federal authorities, who are responsible for enforcing immigration laws, have not charged any local companies with violations.

Drywallers interviewed for this story say an influx of illegal immigrants has intensified the effects of the ongoing recession, which itself has slammed the building industry especially hard.

The practice of hiring illegal immigrants exploded locally during the housing boom circa 2004, the drywallers say, when contractors struggled to keep up with off-the-charts demand. Some of the drywallers interviewed admit they also used illegal immigrants during the boom.

Now the recession has dried up demand — along with jobs and income. And winter, traditionally the leanest season for building, looms.

Industry groups estimate that unemployment for Pennsylvania construction workers has reached 20 to 35 percent — two to four times the overall national rate.

Longtime Drumore drywaller Bruce Cook, who downsized his three-man company earlier this year, calls the current situation "a disaster."

Other decades-old businesses, struggling to compete, are considering closing their doors. Drywallers once so busy they had to turn away jobs now sit without work, facing possible foreclosures on their own homes.

One local custom-home builder says he thinks most consumers see undocumented workers as a problem somewhere else. The builder asked not to be identified, because his business is already struggling and he fears potential backlash for speaking out.

"It used to always be an Arizona problem, a Florida problem, a West Coast problem," the builder says. "Now it's a Lancaster County problem."

Fisher and Stoltzfus say a lack of consequences gives contractors who use undocumented workers little to hide or fear. Some builders, they say, are reluctant to question laborers who work hard for little money.

Scott Provanzo, vice president of Heartland Builders, Lancaster, says many local builders do recognize the problem but can do little in the absence of clear federal guidelines.

"I think everybody in the industry is in agreement that we have this issue," Provanzo says. "We're not in Nazi Germany, where you can go around and check everybody's papers. What happens if they are an American citizen?"

Frustrated by their lack of options to attack the problem, Fisher and Stoltzfus founded Contractors Against Undocumented Service Employees/Subcontractors (CAUSE) earlier this month.

Now they're taking the case against what they call unfair competition to fellow tradesmen — and the public.

"We need to be playing on the same field, with the same rules," says Bob Smoker, a partner in Smoker & Sons Drywall, Manheim. "That's just not happening. There are people that are cheating, flat out."

From boom to bust

An estimated 31,000 to 32,000 Pennsylvania construction workers do not have documents that allow them to work legally in the U.S., according to the Center for Immigration Studies, an independent research organization that favors limits to immigration.

Those numbers have surged in recent years.
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http://articles.lancasteronline.com/local/4/315335

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3.
Georgia low on list for ID check
By Jeremy Redmon
The Atlanta Journal Constitution, November 20, 2010

In September, Hawaii’s Big Island and Maui joined Oahu in a federal fingerprint-sharing program aimed at deporting violent illegal immigrants. The rest of Hawaii is expected to get hooked up to the “Secure Communities” system before October.

But here in Georgia, which has far more violent crime and is estimated to have hundreds of thousands more illegal immigrants than Hawaii, the program is operating in only a fraction of the state’s 159 counties. In Georgia, the screenings are happening in Cherokee, Cobb, Clayton, Fulton, DeKalb, Gwinnett, Hall, Muscogee and Whitfield counties.

The program won’t go statewide here until sometime between 2012 and 2013, federal records show.

Hawaii is one of more than two dozen states that have fewer illegal immigrants than Georgia but are still getting plugged into the $200 million program, some at a faster pace. More than half of those states have lower violent crime rates than Georgia, including Virginia and West Virginia, which now have the fingerprint checks happening in all of their counties.

Local jailers already transmit fingerprints to state and federal crime databases to confirm identities and check for outstanding arrest warrants and criminal histories, but with the Secure Communities programs, those fingerprints are checked automatically against millions of other prints held by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, including those of people caught crossing the U.S. border illegally.

Without the program, law enforcement officials could unwittingly release illegal immigrants back into their communities after they have completed sentences for any crimes they have committed in the U.S.

That possibility bothers Forsyth County Sheriff Ted Paxton, who said his jail is scheduled to start participating in the program next month. He estimated that a fifth of his county’s 400 jail inmates are foreign-born immigrants, who could be in the country legally or not.

“As we saw the program being integrated across the country, it was kind of bewildering where they were targeting their first initiatives,” Paxton said. “You would certainly think the federal government would look and say, ‘Where are our problem areas? Let’s hit those first.’ ”

Federal officials started the fingerprint-sharing program during the Bush administration two years ago and plan to expand it nationwide by 2013. Citing limited resources, they said they have been rolling it out incrementally, focusing first on higher-crime areas with criminal illegal immigrants.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said they are basing their decisions on a mix of U.S. Census data, FBI crime statistics and some of their own records. ICE declined The Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s request for copies of its records, saying they contain sensitive law enforcement information.

“As you can imagine, we are able to identify many more criminal aliens once we begin using the capability, and we want to be sure that ICE has the resources to respond to those individuals identified through the capability,” ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said.

“Additionally, prior to using the capability in a jurisdiction, we conduct outreach. Conducting outreach to all 159 jurisdictions in Georgia takes time.” Gonzalez said that outreach involves meeting with local officials and explaining the program to them.

Under the program, all inmates booked into local jails have their fingerprints checked against a U.S. Homeland Security Department database.

When ICE officials find fingerprint matches in their system, they can seek to deport people held in local jails. 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 United States.

As of Sept. 30, 64,072 people have been deported through the program nationwide, including immigrants who have been convicted of murder, rape, robbery and other crimes. Of that national total, 1,064 were deported from Georgia.

Meanwhile, records show Georgia has far more illegal immigrants and a bigger violent crime rate than 15 other states where the fingerprint checks are being done. In 2009, Georgia had about 426 incidents of violent crime for every 100,000 residents, including murder, rape, robbery and aggravated assault, according to FBI statistics. In comparison, Hawaii had a rate of 274.8.

Also last year, Georgia was estimated to have 425,000 illegal immigrants, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, a Washington-based nonpartisan research organization that uses U.S. census data for its estimates. Hawaii was home to fewer than 10,000 then.

Gonzalez said such statistics don’t tell the whole story.

“Our first priority is not all illegal aliens,” she said. “It’s those who pose a threat to public safety, such as ... aliens convicted of a crime.”

One observer suggested ICE doesn’t have the manpower and prison space it would need to handle all of the illegal immigrants it would identify in Georgia jails if the program was expanded statewide.

“They just don’t have the resources in Georgia,” said Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that advocates for tighter immigration controls. “Georgia is a place that needs that kind of buildup to get the illegal aliens who are in jails out of the country. But that is going to take time. And it would take resources. And they are focused elsewhere.”
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http://www.ajc.com/news/georgia-low-on-list-748169.html

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4.
Vt. AG proposes bias-free policing policy
The Associated Press, November 19, 2010

Police should take a "don't ask, don't tell" approach about the immigration status of migrant farmworkers and others unless they're suspected of a crime or wanted by federal authorities, Vermont Attorney General William Sorrell said Friday.

Unveiling a proposed "Bias-Free Policing" policy that also covers racial profiling, the state's chief law enforcement officer said that barring suspicion of terrorism, human trafficking or hate crimes or a history of violence or gang activity, Vermont police officers should only inquire about immigration status in limited circumstances — not when a person has been the victim of a crime or a witness to one.

"What we're trying to see here is that if you're otherwise law-abiding, you're here in Vermont, you're not a threat to homeland security, you're not wanted for criminal behavior here or elsewhere ... then the priority for Vermont law enforcement is to investigate violations of Vermont criminal laws," Sorrell said.

The proposal will be distributed to every law enforcement agency in the state, but it's up to each to decide whether to adopt it.

Vermont has an estimated 2,000 migrant farmworkers — from Mexico mostly — without whom agriculture officials say the state's dairy industry could barely survive. Not all are in the country legally.

Some communities, including Middlebury, have taken a "don't ask, don't tell" approach, under the theory that if illegal immigrants are afraid of being deported, they're less likely to report crime or help police investigating it.

"Guest workers are an extremely important part of our work force on farms and in agriculture in Vermont," state Agriculture Secretary Roger Allbee said. "They have been for many years and they continue to be. People need to be able to work and not be afraid that they can't make their views known and their concerns available to anyone."

Sorrell said police officers investigating state crimes by illegal immigrants would have the discretion to report violations to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as they see fit.

Not everyone thinks that approach is the right one.

"The policy itself is pretty toothless, but the problem I see is that it's pretty clearly an attempt on the part of the Attorney General to discourage Vermont law enforcement agencies from cooperating with ICE, to help ICE do its job enforcing immigration and people who've committed crimes and who are foreign nationals," said Jessica Vaughan, a policy analyst for the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates for tougher immigration laws.

"If local law enforcement were to get the idea that they're not to ask questions or report people to ICE, that could have some serious public safety implications," Vaughan said.
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http://www.necn.com/11/19/10/Vt-AG-proposes-bias-free-policing-policy/la...

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5.
DREAM Act could affect local school policy
By Andy Arnold
Examiner.com, November 19, 2010

November second’s election results were hugely encouraging for the cause of immigration control and national sovereignty, according to Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies. But unless the new Republican House uses its power to reduce future immigration levels — through both better enforcement and changes to legal-immigration rules such as ending family chain migration — the news will simply be a rest stop on the road to serfdom, he says.

This might explain why the Central American Solidarity Association (CASA) of Maryland recently declared war on the Republican Party in an attempt at raising funds. But I digress; there will be more about the local scene later.

Pew Hispanic Center polling found that immigration ranked fifth in importance out of seven issues among Hispanic registered voters. Exit polling shows that in House races nationwide, Hispanic support for Republicans increased to 34 percent of the vote, up from 29 percent in 2008 Exit polling conducted by FAIR shows that, overwhelmingly, voters believe “President Obama has not been aggressive enough in enforcing immigration laws” and protecting the interests of the American people, compared with just 27 percent who think he’s doing enough. The same poll shows that 53 percent of voters want their state governments to enact laws similar to the one approved by Arizona.

The 111th Congress has returned to Washington and the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act is expected to see another vote. It was already blocked in the Senate. A vote should sail through the House and President Obama says he will sign it. The proposal is seen by supporters as a path to legal status for young illegal immigrants who complete a college degree program or undertake two years of U.S. military service for a green card. However, candidates are required to show “good moral character,” in order to be eligible. The fact these people are in the country illegally, speaks to their moral character, according to critics.
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http://www.examiner.com/immigration-in-washington-dc/dream-act-could-aff...