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1. Feds tightening restrictions
2. Feds reigning in employers
3. Study: court interpretation lacking
4. Veteran researcher retires
5. Illegal labor is not cheap

1.
New realities eroding border double standard
Security, migrant issues give Northern states 'wake-up call'
By Erin Kelly
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix), July 6, 2009

Washington, DC -- At a recent meeting of the Senate Judiciary Committee, lawmakers implored Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano to make sure new passport requirements don't get in the way of French-Canadian grandparents crossing the U.S.-Canadian border to visit their grandchildren.

There was no mention of how those new rules might hurt Mexican grandparents trying to cross the U.S.-Mexican border to visit their grandkids in Arizona, California, New Mexico or Texas.

"There's been very much a double standard in dealing with the two borders," said Jim Kolbe, the former Republican congressman who represented the Tucson border area for more than 20 years and is considered an expert on immigration issues. He said Northern border residents would be "aghast" if the federal government erected the kind of fences and barricades there that line the Southwestern border.

That double standard could come into play as President Barack Obama and Congress look to take on immigration reform this year or early next.

Experts say the different treatment stems in part from economic reality. Canadians, unlike Mexicans, have not endured the kind of poverty that drives immigrants to cross the Southwestern border illegally in search of jobs. Last year, officials apprehended 723,840 people trying to enter the country illegally. Nearly 662,000 were from Mexico; 610 were from Canada.

But there also has been a perception, refuted by Homeland Security officials, that nothing bad is going to come across our border with Canada, where the lifestyles and appearance of the residents often mirror those of middle-class Ameri- cans.

In truth, there is growing drug-related violence in Vancouver near the U.S.-Canadian border, where drug-dealing gangs caught up in a turf war have killed several high-school students this year and gunned down a 23-year-old mother as she was driving. Her 4-year-old son was in the car.

But that violence has not garnered the same attention as the drug-cartel killings along the U.S.-Mexican border.

"Every time I mention that there is a gun and a drug problem along the Canadian border, people are incredulous," said Rick Van Schoik, director of the North American Center for Transborder Studies at Arizona State University. "They don't believe me."

This year, Northern border residents are being forced to think of their border as "a real border" for the first time because of federal efforts to beef up security to keep out terrorists. That realization, which Napolitano called a big "culture change" for the North, is spurring lawmakers far from Arizona to take a new interest in border issues just as Congress is trying to tackle comprehensive immigration reform.

"I think the Northern border members have had a wake-up call," Van Schoik said. They are now beginning to realize how much border security and immigration legislation can affect them and are taking a bigger interest in the debate, he said.
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http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/news/articles/2009/07/06/200907...

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2.
U.S. Shifts Strategy on Illicit Work by Immigrants
By Julia Preston
The New York Times, July 3, 2009

Immigration authorities had bad news this week for American Apparel, the T-shirt maker based in downtown Los Angeles: About 1,800 of its employees appeared to be illegal immigrantsnot authorized to work in the United States.

But in contrast to the high-profile raids that marked the enforcement approach of the Bush administration, no federal agents with criminal warrants stormed the company’s factories and rounded up employees. Instead, the federal immigration agency sent American Apparel a written notice that it faced civil fines and would have to fire any workers confirmed to be unauthorized.

The treatment of American Apparel, which has more than 5,600 factory employees in Los Angeles alone, is the most prominent demonstration of a new strategy by the Obama administration to curb the employment of illegal immigrants by focusing on employers who hire them — and doing so in a less confrontational manner than in years past.

Unlike the approach of the Bush administration, which brought criminal charges in its final two years against many illegal immigrant workers, the new effort makes broader use of fines and other civil sanctions, federal officials said Thursday.

Federal agents will concentrate on businesses employing large numbers of workers suspected of being illegal immigrants, the officials said, and will reserve tough criminal charges mostly for employers who serially hire illegal immigrants and engage in wage and labor violations.

“These actions underscore our commitment to targeting employers that cultivate illegal work forces by knowingly hiring and exploiting illegal workers,” said Matt Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security.

On Wednesday, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency known as ICE, said it had sent notices announcing audits of hiring records, like the one it conducted at American Apparel, to 652 other companies across the country. Officials said they were picking up the pace of such audits, after performing 503 of them in 2008.

The names of other companies that received notices have not been made public. American Apparel became a window into the new enforcement tactics because, as a publicly traded company, it issued a required notice on Wednesday about the hiring audit.

The Obama administration’s new approach, unveiled in April, seems to be moving away from the raids that advocates for immigrants said had split families, disrupted businesses and traumatized communities. But the outcome will still be difficult for illegal workers, who will lose their jobs and could face deportation, the advocates said.

Immigration officials have not made clear how they intend to deal with workers who are unable to prove their legal immigration status in the course of inspections, but they said there was no moratorium on deportations.

Executives at American Apparel were both relieved and dismayed after receiving the warning from the immigration agency of discrepancies in the hiring documents of about one-third of its Los Angeles work force. The company has 30 days to dispute the agency’s claims and give immigrant employees time to prove that they are authorized to work in the United States, immigration officials said. If they cannot, the company must fire them, probably within two months.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/03/us/03immig.html

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3.
Study Finds Gaps in Aid for Non-English Speakers in State Civil Courts
By John Schwartz
The New York Times, July 4, 2009

When Maythe Ramirez went to Superior Court in Contra Costa, Calif., for a child custody hearing in 2006, she wanted to tell the judge that her husband beat her and should not be allowed broad visitation rights. The court did not provide an interpreter for her, however, and Ms. Ramirez, who speaks almost no English, could not follow the arcane proceeding, much less participate.

“It is really as if you are doing nothing in court,” she said in Spanish through an interpreter, “standing still and not being able to explain what’s really happening.”

Ms. Ramirez, who came to the United States from Mexico, later divorced her husband and had the visitation rules modified with the help of a lawyer from Bay Area Legal Aid, who got her interpreters for other hearings.

The court system can be a bewildering place for anyone, but it can be terrifying for those who do not understand English. Federal law requires civil and criminal courts that receive federal financing to provide free interpreters for those with limited proficiency in English. But while interpreters are commonly offered in criminal cases, many states do not require the services in all civil cases. The state of California, where Ms. Ramirez’s case was heard, provides interpreters in some civil cases and not others.

A new study of civil courts, from the Brennan Center for Justice at the New York University law school, examined the 35 states with the highest immigrant populations and found that interpreter services are not always provided, or not provided well, and are not keeping up with growing demand. Of those states, 46 percent do not require that interpreters be provided in all cases, and 80 percent fail to guarantee that the courts will pay for the interpreter, as the Department of Justice’s view of the law requires.

Thirty-seven percent of those states do not require that the interpreters have proper credentials. The result is a national patchwork of varying rights from state to state.

“This must change,” the report concluded. “Federal law, principles of fundamental fairness, and our need for equal access to the justice system all demand it.”
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Such figures gall those who oppose permissive immigration policies. “We accommodate for language too much, and that sends a very clear message that it’s O.K. not to learn English,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, a nonprofit group that seeks to limit immigration. “This is an inevitable cost of massive immigration that is never taken into account when making policy.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/04/us/04interpret.html

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4.
Pioneer researcher retires
UC San Diego's Wayne Cornelius steps down from CCIS
By Edward Sifuentes
The North County Times (Escondido, CA), July 4, 2009

La Jolla, CA -- During his more than 40-year career as a researcher, professor Wayne Cornelius did what few politicians and policy-makers do when it comes to undocumented immigrants: He spoke to them to find out why they come here.

For decades, Cornelius has been a leading expert on Mexican migration to the United States. He retired last week as the director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies, an immigration research organization at UC San Diego.

Using detailed surveys, Cornelius and his students asked illegal immigrants here, and their families back home, why they migrated to the United States. The work has yielded volumes of information on the immigrants and the government policies that affected them.

A frequent critic of the federal government's strict border enforcement policies, Cornelius said few in Congress were willing to listen to what the research says.

"Many politicians have concluded that this is a lose-lose issue and whatever they support is going to offend some significant segment of their constituency," Cornelius said.

Cornelius, 64, began conducting field research in Mexico in 1962. His early work focused on Mexicans living in rural areas who migrated to large urban areas for work, he said.

In the mid-1970s, he began to study a rural community, Los Altos, Mexico, about 300 miles west of Mexico City. He noticed that many people in the community were migrating to the United States, and that is when he began studying Mexican migration patterns to the U.S.

Gordon Hanson, an economist at UCSD whose work also focuses on immigrants, called Cornelius a "pioneer" in immigration studies.
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Speaking on what was officially his last day at work, Cornelius said politicians rarely take the time to understand the problem and are in search of a "quick fix," such as building a border fence or creating new ID cards.

Illegal immigration critics such as Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, an organization that advocates for stricter immigration polices, say border enforcement efforts can work if coupled with tough interior enforcement, such as at work sites.

The aim is "to make it as difficult and unpleasant as possible to live here illegally" and make illegal immigrants go home on their own, Krikorian wrote in a report. This way, the number of illegal immigrants will be reduced to "a manageable nuisance, rather than today's crisis."
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http://www.nctimes.com/articles/2009/07/04/news/sandiego/z4a9a84fd9a1af7...

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5.
Illegal work force can generate taxes but also has costs
Opponents: Cheap labor is no bargain
By Paula J. Owen
The Telegram (Worcester, MA), July 5, 2009

Leominster -- It seems incongruous to some that immigrants living illegally in this country can get work permits, find jobs and even pay taxes without being deported.

Bob Dane, spokesman for the Washington, D.C.-based Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the problem is unscrupulous employers who provide illegal immigrants with jobs.

“Cheap labor isn’t a bargain,” he said. “Employers’ costs are transferred to Americans. In Massachusetts, $580 million is spent annually to subsidize immigration.”

FAIR estimates there are 11.6 million illegal immigrants in the United States. The organization doesn’t align itself with the camp that contends mass deportation of 12 million illegal immigrants is the answer, but it doesn’t believe mass amnesty makes much sense, either. More border patrol agents and interior enforcement are needed, Mr. Dane said, along with increasing document verification — “so we know who is who.”

“For all we know, 20 people could be using your Social Security number right now,” he said.

Even when an immigrant pays taxes, it costs Americans more than the immigrant contributes into the system, according to Mr. Dane.

“We’re not soft-hearted on illegals if they pay taxes,” he said. “It’s a down payment on the enormous cost they have on the U.S.”

The largest cost of illegals is K-12 education, totaling $28.6 billion annually, Mr. Dane said. Of that, $12 billion is spent annually to educate illegal alien students and the remainder is to educate U.S.-born children of illegal aliens, who are considered U.S. citizens.

Alicia J. Alvez of Leominster came to the United States illegally 20 years ago. Like many illegal immigrants, she pays taxes with a tax identification number that she obtained from the Internal Revenue Service.

Many illegal immigrants work two or three jobs to survive, Ms. Alvez said. “You have to work double because they pay you less.”

She, like many others, contends that the United States needs illegal immigrants. “We are a large part of the work force.”

But according to a report compiled by the Center for Immigration Studies, the number of unemployed Americans with a high school education or less — those who compete for employment with illegal immigrants — has increased significantly over the past 10 years.
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http://www.telegram.com/article/20090705/NEWS/907050397/1052