Please visit our YouTube, Twitter and Facebook pages.

1. Progress on amnesty unlikely
2. More states could follow AZ
3. Economic impact of illegals
4. VA rule complicates courts
5. AZ activists prepare to fight

1.
Bleak prospects for broad immigration reform in near future
By Mike Lillis
The Hill (Washington, D.C.), December 30, 2010

Just days after Congress killed the DREAM Act, voices on all sides of the immigration reform debate say it’s unlikely there will be much movement on the issue during the next two years.

With Republicans poised to assume House control in January, immigrant-rights advocates see scant chance that legislation granting illegal immigrants any kind of foothold in the U.S. could move through the lower chamber.

But with Democrats still holding the Senate and the White House, conservatives urging a harder line on deportations and citizenship requirements aren't terribly optimistic about those proposals either.

The likely result is an impasse of sorts on the immigration-reform front through the 112th Congress, observers say, with lawmakers stepping up oversight of the administration's enforcement efforts, but unable to enact major changes of their own.

"I would expect 'small ball' — smaller, more-targeted measures that aren't meant to remake the immigration system altogether," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a D.C.-based think tank advocating for tougher enforcement of immigration laws. "Logic would dictate … they'll be doing a lot of oversight."

ACLU Legislative Counsel Joanne Lin echoed that sentiment, noting that the House Republicans poised to chair the panels with primary jurisdiction over immigration policy — Reps. Lamar Smith (Texas) and Steve King (Iowa) — "are about as far away from supporting comprehensive immigration reform as anyone can be."

"I don't see a way forward” on comprehensive reform, Lin said.

Smith — an immigration hard-liner who will head the House Judiciary Committee next year — has said his first two immigration-related hearings will focus on work-place enforcement and E-verify, a program allowing employers to check the legal status of potential hires.

“They are what I call ‘70 percent’ issues — 70 percent or more of the American people support those efforts,” Smith told Politico last week.

Still, those efforts are tamer than proposals Smith and King have championed in the past, including a bill empowering states to become their own immigration enforcers, and another overturning the long-held interpretation of the 14th Amendment as granting citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal residents.
. . .
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/135425-near-future-looks-bleak-for-imm...

********
********

2.
States could follow Arizona on immigration
By Alan Gomez
USA Today, December 30, 2010

Because Congress was unable to pass any kind of immigration legislation this year and the prospects remain dim when the new Congress is sworn in next month, state legislatures will continue to lead the charge on immigration policy in the new year.

For many states, that could mean a crackdown on illegal immigration that mirrors the Arizona law that passed in April and reignited a national immigration debate.

After Republicans made huge gains in statehouses and governor's mansions in the November election, as many as seven states are "likely" to pass an Arizona-style law next year, according to a study by the National Immigration Forum, which opposes such legislation.

Georgia, Mississippi, Nebraska, Oklahoma, Pennsylvania, South Carolina and Tennessee all have a combination of legislators and governors supporting the law, the report found.

Arizona's law would require all of the state's law enforcement officers to determine the immigration status of people they've stopped, detained or arrested for another offense if a "reasonable suspicion" exists that they are in the country illegally.

The U.S. Department of Justice sued Arizona, arguing that immigration enforcement was solely a federal responsibility. In July, a federal judge blocked the core aspects of the law, known as S.B. 1070, and the ruling is under appeal.

Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tighter immigration controls, said many state legislators would rather wait to see how Arizona's law fares in court, a path that could end in the U.S. Supreme Court.

Krikorian said others may plow ahead to draw another Department of Justice lawsuit to test the law before a different federal judge. Such a lawsuit could help politically, he said, as some might hope to recreate Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer's rise in the polls after she signed S.B. 1070 into law.

"If you're a governor or an ambitious state senator forcing the Obama administration to come after you, then it could work," Krikorian said.
. . .
http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2010-12-30-immigration30_ST_N.htm

********
********

3.
Debate rages over impact of undocumented workers
By Mike Gorrell
The Salt Lake Tribune, December 29, 2010

American-born men and women with limited education face the greatest competition for jobs from undocumented workers.

That much is clear.

What’s not? Whether this competition actually ends up taking jobs away from native-born people with high school degrees or less, and the degree to which immigrants drive down the value of their wages.

Those issues have divided scholars into two broad camps.

On one side, there are people such as George Borjas, a professor of economics and social policy at Harvard, and Steven Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., who see a direct correlation between an influx of immigrants and negative consequences for Americans with lower skill levels.

But there are also learned academicians such as David Card from the University of California, Berkeley, and Giovanni Peri, a University of California, Davis, professor, who believe immigration unquestionably benefits the economy in the long term, even if working-class people take a small hit during tough economic times.

Pam Perlich, a senior research economist in the University of Utah’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research, puts more credence in the latter perspective.

“Everyone agrees there has been negative compression on wages. The debate is about the extent of the compression,” Perlich said, noting that in this intellectual debate, the estimates of impact range between 3 percent and 9 percent during down times. “Those are not large numbers.”

In prosperous periods, she added, if immigrant labor wasn’t available, “We would have had bottlenecks in labor markets and would not have been able to complete many construction projects and staff many operations.”

But in times of job constriction, Perlich said, “immigrants become an easy scapegoat” for the economic woes of people left adrift in the collapses of the housing bubble and the financial system.

Her thinking is in line with Peri, whose report on The Effect of Immigrants on U.S. Employment and Productivity was published this fall by the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco.

In this and other reports, Peri argues that the economy routinely makes adjustments as employers reorganize their production to take advantage of lower-cost immigrant labor, and all workers — both natives and immigrants — move toward occupations that fit their skills.
. . .
http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/50845210-78/jobs-workers-immigrants-na...

********
********

4.
Immigration dispute erupts in Va. courts
By Tom Jackman
The Washington Post, December 30, 2010

A recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling that noncitizens in criminal cases must be advised of the possible consequences of a conviction has sparked a flurry of appeals by defendants who claim that they didn't know that conviction would lead to deportation.

But in Virginia, a similar battle has emerged over whether judges can revisit and reopen old cases or even summarily revise the sentences to avoid a convict's removal from the country.

A Loudoun County General District Court judge recently reopened four cases involving defendants who say they would not have pleaded guilty if they had known that they would be deported. In one instance this month, Loudoun prosecutors sought a court order to stop the judge from reopening such cases, but a Circuit Court judge refused.

"Virginia law should not be construed to permit a 'do-over,' just because someone has now figured out that committing a crime may have collateral consequences," said James P. Fisher, chief deputy commonwealth's attorney for Loudoun.

In another example, an Alexandria judge reopened a 12-year-old case, reducing the defendant's sentence so that deportation was no longer required. "To allow the desire for finality to trump the need for justice in this case would be a travesty," Alexandria Circuit Court Judge Donald M. Haddock wrote in an order last year in revisiting the 1997 case of Emmanuel Morris.

Morris's case and a similar one from Virginia Beach were argued before the Virginia Supreme Court last month. Rulings in both are expected early next year. Prosecutors hope the state's high court shuts the door on the use of an obscure writ to reopen old cases in a manner that not all judges allow. Immigration lawyers want the door to stay open to stave off deportations of their clients, many of whom are in the country legally.

Effective counsel

Judges and lawyers across the country have scrambled to deal with the ramifications of the U.S. Supreme Court's March ruling in Padilla v. Kentucky, which clarified a defendant's Sixth Amendment right to counsel.

The Supreme Court previously ruled that the right to counsel is the right to effective counsel. An ineffective attorney is grounds for an appeal and, possibly, a new trial, the court said. Jose Padilla, a Honduran native who had been in the country legally for nearly 40 years, was advised by a lawyer that he didn't have to worry about deportation when he pleaded guilty to smuggling marijuana.

Justice John Paul Stevens wrote in the decision that "counsel must inform her client whether his plea carries a risk of deportation. . . . Deportation is an integral part - indeed, sometimes the most important part - of the penalty that may be imposed on noncitizen defendants who plead guilty to specified crimes."

A similar case involving a 2006 burglary conviction from Harford County was argued before the Maryland Supreme Court this month. Defense attorneys invoked the Padilla case, hoping that a guilty plea could be withdrawn.

State and federal courts are revising their guilty plea forms - which must be signed by defendants - to indicate that the defendant has been advised of the possible immigration ramifications of a conviction. And defense lawyers are studying immigration law to understand what crimes or sentences might lead to deportation.

In Virginia, reopening cases, as a rule, has been hard, especially after a guilty plea. State rules require that most post-trial actions occur within 21 days or that they be handled as part of an appeal. And few criminal defense lawyers are familiar with immigration law.

Even immigrants with green cards are subject to deportation if they commit a felony or misdemeanor that results in a year or more of prison time. Crimes of "moral turpitude" involving fraud or theft and crimes involving guns, drugs or domestic abuse are also grounds for deportation. Immigrants sometimes agree to plea deals because their attorneys fail to "take that into account when they negotiated with the prosecution," said Rob Robertson, a Fairfax lawyer who practices immigration and criminal law.

Immigration lawyers generally enter the fray after the criminal case is long over. "These are people that don't deserve to be banished from the U.S. for a crime they've already served the punishment for," Robertson said.

Even before Padilla, Virginia lawyers were trying to reopen such cases using an English common law writ called "coram vobis," which the courts interpret to mean "the error before us." Virginia law allows the writ to be used "for any clerical error or error in fact for which a judgment may be reversed or corrected."

Some judges allow it in cases affecting immigration status. Some don't. In Arlington County in 2006, Circuit Court Judge William T. Newman Jr. reduced a 2001 sentence to less than a year, the standard for deportation. Newman wrote, "If this Court had been made aware of the fact that the defendant's "single criminal conviction could result in deportation without the possibility of discretionary relief, an alternative sentence may have been reached."
. . .
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/12/29/AR201012...

********
********

5.
Arizona Activists Fight Anti-Immigrant Sentiment
EFE, December 30, 2010

Arizona's controversial immigration law may have it in the crosshairs of some political and immigration groups, but that doesn't mean the state doesn't have its own organizations fighting anti-immigrant sentiment.

A new group of activists intends to combat the sentiment in Arizona given the fear that in 2011 it will increase with bills like the ones being prepared by Republican state lawmaker Russell Pearce.

"We're a group of citizens concerned about the stance that Pearce could take starting in January now that he's the leader of the majority in the state senate," Randy Parraz, the organizer for Citizens for a Better Arizona, told Efe on Wednesday.

Parraz, a well-known activist, said he feels that Pearce should focus on the problems affecting the state and not on illegal immigration as he has been doing in recent years.

Pearce, 63, has been the driving force behind several of the harshest state laws against illegal immigration.

The most controversial of those laws has been SB1070, the first in the United States to criminalize the presence in the country of people "without papers."

SB1070, which went into effect last July 29, polarized the groups defending the rights of immigrants and those who support more severe laws against illegal immigration.

Currently, a decision is being awaited by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on an appeal filed by the state of Arizona requesting the immediate entry into force of the SB1070 clauses blocked by a federal judge, among them one that obligates local law enforcement agencies to verify the immigration status of people suspected of being undocumented.

Pearce also has been the main impetus behind several state laws like the one that prohibits granting driver's licenses to people who do not have a Social Security Number and another that denies public assistance to undocumented people along with the right to bail when arrested, among others.

The lawmaker said that as soon as the next legislative session begins in January he will present a state bill that seeks to reform the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, which grants U.S. citizenship to any person born in U.S. territory without regard to the immigration status of his or her parents.
. . .
http://latino.foxnews.com/latino/politics/2010/12/30/arizona-activists-f...