Want a small taste of what would have happened if President Bush had gotten his way with his "Any Willing Worker/Any Willing Employer" plan to open every job in the country to unlimited immigration? From the AP:

Major U.S. banks sought government permission to bring thousands of foreign workers into the country for high-paying jobs even as the system was melting down last year and Americans were getting laid off, according to an Associated Press review of visa applications.

No, that's not the name of a new group, though it wouldn't surprise me. A new poll of the 2010 Senate prospects of Colorado's Democrat Gov. Bill Ritter found, among other things, that 35 percent of the state's Hispanic voters prefer immigration hawk Tom Tancredo to Ritter. Given the margins of error, that's the same share of the Hispanic vote in Colorado as McCain last year (reported as 38 percent), and Bush in 2004 (reported as 30 percent). Read more...

Good news and bad news on the E-Verify front. The House version of the "stimulus," monstrous though it is, at least retains the requirement that recipients of its funds be enrolled in E-Verify, so as to screen out illegals. On the other hand, at the request of the open-borders U.S. Read more...

It's always been obvious that immigration lobbying has been lopsided, with the bulk of the money and groups on the expansionist side. But someone's now gone and quantified it, using House and Senate lobbying reports, and it's even worse than I thought. Fully 98 percent of the organizations lobbying on immigration are pushing Congress for some combination of amnesty, loose enforcement, and higher numbers. The fact we have any immigration limits or enforcement at all is a testament to the depth and breadth of public opposition to the open-borders agenda. Read more...

From today's LA Times:

Religious and labor leaders called upon Congress and President-elect Obama to pass a comprehensive immigration package this year and said that the U.S. economy could not be restored without legalizing the nation's undocumented immigrants.

The Dems in the Senate introduced shell legislation yesterday, marked with early bill numbers, to highlight their priorities. Bill number S.1, for instance, is going to be the stimulus package, S.4 health care, S.5 climate change. Read more...

The 100,000th business has signed up for E-Verify, the free program that enables employers to check electronically whether new hires are authorized to work. Read more...

from National Review Online, January 8, 2009

As the 111th Congress convenes, Republicans need to rethink their immigration policy.

This isn’t because of the supposed lessons of last November’s elections. Despite his herculean efforts at passing Ted Kennedy’s amnesty bill, Sen. McCain’s share of the Hispanic vote was in the usual range for Republicans — though lower than the Republican share in 2004, just like among every other category of voter. He did lose, after all. And if no Hispanics at all had voted, Sen. Obama would still have won. Read more...

So now severe weather is to be added as a grounds for being declared a refugee? Unbelievable.

A new map (here in pdf) shows progress on the fence along the southern border. You need to blow it up a little to get a better look, but the fence is finished or under construction along almost all the border from the Pacific to El Paso, though in some places it's a vehicle barrier that prevents smuggling vans from crossing but not people from relatively easily hopping over. And I'm not sure if any of the places marked as completed have a "virtual fence" as opposed to an actual one. Read more...

Apologists for mass immigration have been telling us for years that immigrants worked in "segmented labor markets" and "niche occupations" — really just fancy terms for "jobs Americans won't do." Well, so much for that theory; as the Wall Street Journal points out, "U.S. Workers Crowding Out Immigrant Laborers": Read more...

The Ombudsman at U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (the portion of the old INS that does green cards and citizenship) has a new report out on improving naturalization ceremonies (in pdf here). A lot of it's administrative stuff, but there are a couple of gems about judges who sometimes administer the oath of citizenship. First this: Read more...

To get a sense of the absurdity of the bottomless industry demands for cheap labor, and the media gullibility about them, reader G.N. suggests googling "workers" and "looming shortage" and look over the 10,600 results. Read more...

Rich Lowry over at National Review Online points to this interesting fact in an NY Times story on a unionizing vote at a hog-processing plant in North Carolina:

The union won by 2,041 votes to 1,879 after two years of turmoil at the plant. As a result of a federal crackdown on illegal immigrants, more than 1,500 Hispanic workers have left the plant. Its work force is now 60 percent black, up from around 20 percent two years ago.

"Some Mexicans leaving US, planning never to return".

A judge has ruled that visa-overstayers from the 1980s can apply for amnesty under the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) — you remember, that one-time amnesty that would never be repeated. The application period extends through January 2010, meaning that 24 years after the passage of IRCA, illegal aliens will still be applying for it. By that standard, in the unlikely event an Obamnesty were to pass next year, people could still be signing up in 2033.

We all got a chuckle from the story that the Secret Service let illegal aliens in to clean Chertoff's house. But the take-home point is this, from today's Washington Times editorial: "if the system can be fooled by a house cleaner, it can be fooled by a terrorist." As the original Washington Post story noted: "The Secret Service uses workers' ID information to conduct security checks, not immigration checks." But it's a PC fantasy to imagine that we can know who someone is without knowing whether or not he's an illegal alien. Read more...

No surprise here:

The state of Texas and local hospital districts spent an estimated $677 million to provide health care to illegal immigrants in a year, a new study says.

The survey, issued by the Texas Health and Human Services Commission, said that most of the money — $597 million — was spent by local hospital districts for the immigrants' care during the state's fiscal year that ended on Aug. 31, 2007.

I missed this Monday: The New York Times ran contradictory editorials, one atop the other. The one on immigration was the usual malarkey, "state of fear," "xenophobes," "immigration zealots," "frighteningly prone to abuse," "sensible reforms that allow immigrants to enter legally," blah, blah, blah. Read more...

Sen. Kennedy is leaving the Judiciary Committee, and thus his chairmanship of the immigration subcommittee. Though this doesn't preclude an amnesty extravaganza, it does make it a lot less likely. His passion for the issue has made Kennedy the single most important force in making immigration policy since the early 1960s (which is why it's so screwed up), and his staff probably knows more about it than almost anyone else on the Hill. Read more...

Tancredo has a good, point-by-point corrective to the Hispanic Panic fostered by the pro-amnesty right, most notably by last week's WSJ editorial on immigration, itself an amplification of spin from America's Voice, an open-borders group staffed by alumni of Sojourners and the Center for Community Change. Read more...

Raids could force meatpackers to raise worker pay
. . .
"I think it is a big problem, a huge issue for companies," said Lance Compa, a Cornell University professor who has studied workplace Immigration issues.

"What (the companies) are doing now is scrambling. A lot of them are turning to employer agencies to fill their workforce. But if they want a stable workforce, they'll almost certainly need to raise wages and benefits."

So 533,000 jobs were eliminated by employers last month. Guess how many new workers the federal immigration program adds to the labor market over the same period? As many as 140,000. Per month. Now I'm not one of those who thinks you can game the business cycle by admitting more immigrants during an uptick and shedding them during a slowdown — if government were capable of that sort of thing, the Soviet Union wouldn't have collapsed. Read more...

Incoming Homeland Security Czarina (and thus immigration chief) Janet Napolitano is no immigration hawk, and the next few years may well undo a good part of what's been accomplished over the past few, but still, she can't be all bad — the Village Voice hates her.

In what is described as Obama's "first major Hispanic appointment," Cecilia Munoz, one of the top people at La Raza, has been named director of intergovernmental affairs. Since her job is to oversee relations with state and local governments, there's obviously not going to be much encouragement from the White House for state and local cooperation in immigration enforcement.

A little-noticed item last week on funding for the 2010 census gives clues about what's likely to happen next year regarding immigration enforcement: Read more...

From a piece (not online) by Frontera NorteSur:

Meanwhile, many Mexican migrants are hedging their bets in the Promised Land. Taurino Castrejon Salgado, a Guerrero leader of the Union of Campesinos and Mexican Emigrants (UCEM), said the election of Barack Obama to the presidency of the United States has strengthened the decision of many migrants to remain north of the border.

"Twin Cities man committed suicide bombing in Somalia". Read more...

From a Q&A with Sen. Harry Reid:

Q: With more Democrats in the Senate and the House and a Democrat in the White House, how do you see congressional efforts playing out on such issues as health care and immigration?

I can see why Obama would ask Arizona Gov. Janet Naplitano to head Homeland Security — she's about as close as any Democratic governor can get to appearing hawkish on illegal immigration. Read more...