1. Illegals 19% of convicts in AZ co.
2. Crisis placing issue in new context
3. Illegal immigration decreasing
4. TN law working with limited success
5. MI economy unfit for Iraqi refugees
6. Critics skeptical about TPS

1.
County attorney: Illegal immigrants generating large crime numbers
By Mike Sunnucks
The Phoenix Business Journal, October 3, 2008
http://www.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2008/09/29/daily77.html

Illegal immigrants account for one-third of the drug convictions; 44 percent of forgery convictions and 20 percent of the felony DUI convictions in the Phoenix area, according to a study by Maricopa County Attorney Andrew Thomas.

Thomas said Thursday that illegal immigrants make up 19 percent of those convicted of crimes in Maricopa County and 21 percent of those in county jails.

There are an estimated 579,000 illegal immigrants in the state, making up 9 percent of Arizona’s population, according to the Center for Immigration Studies. Illegals accounted for 10 percent of sex crimes, 11 percent of murders and 13 percent of stolen cars, according to Thomas’ office, which looked at 2007 sentencing and jail statistics.

Thomas and Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio take hard-line stances on immigration. They face election-year challenges from attorney Tim Nelson and Dan Saban, who promise less strident immigration stances.

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2.
Issues: Immigration: The Jobs Factor
By Karoun Demirjian
The Congressional Quarterly (Washington, DC), October 4, 2008

Although the candidates are not acknowledging it, Washington’s immigration debate is poised to shift onto new ground. That’s because the campaign-ready mantra that emerged out of the failure of last summer’s failed congressional immigration plan — “secure the borders first” — is giving way to widespread economic anxiety.

The new policy landscape will afford the next president an opportunity to recast the immigration debate in some significant ways — even as he will have to tread carefully in assembling new coalitions in Congress and upgrading the White House’s administrative handling of immigration policies.

Both John McCain and Barack Obama endorse a broad “comprehensive” approach to overhauling the immigration system, combining an eventual path to citizenship for many of the more than 12 million workers already in the country illegally with revamped measures to monitor future influxes of foreign workers. But regardless of who wins the White House, the next president will have to jump-start the debate on immigration beyond the tentative consensus on border enforcement each candidate now touts on the stump.

In part, that will involve addressing economic tensions already emerging in today’s immigration debate. Even before the September credit meltdown, the immigration enforcement arms of the government were shifting their efforts away from the border per se and toward the “magnets” of illegal immigration — workplaces that hire undocumented workers en masse.

Without a clear path forward on the various measures in the comprehensive plan that Congress voted down last summer, the Department of Homeland Security elected to target the economic demand for immigrant labor within U.S. borders. Hence, the recent run of high-profile raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency in the slaughterhouse industry of Postville, Iowa, and at a Laurel, Miss., plant making electrical equipment.

Now, however, with the specter of a long-term economic downturn, this improvised workplace-driven consensus on immigration enforcement may not hold. As small-business credit seizes up and unemployment increases, going after businesses providing jobs — no matter how poorly paid, underground or unsafe those jobs may be — is not playing well among most constituencies, apart from hard-line immigration opponents. Indeed, lobbyists and managers in other potentially vulnerable companies — such as high-tech concerns and seasonal industries — are already contending that they need access to specialized non-U.S. workers now more than ever.

Still, if the effort to secure the border first is receding somewhat from the immigration debate, it’s far from clear what package of proposals will take shape next. Many observers suggest that some of the measures that the 110th Congress did approve could come under renewed budgetary scrutiny as their mandates expire — such as the 670-mile stretch of concrete fencing along the U.S.-Mexico border, which was supposed to be completed by the end of 2008, but now is more than $400 million over budget and just barely half-finished.

The next White House will also inherit a badly overburdened immigration court system, which is charged with processing the deportation and amnesty proceedings for the hundreds of workers swept up in the mass raids. Even comparatively noncontroversial measures such as employer verification of citizenship for recently hired workers involves close coordination of databases from such agencies as the Social Security Administration, which has created a good deal of mischief for the DHS officials administering the “Ea?`Verify” program mandated for use among all contractors with the federal government.

And all of these measures will cost money — hundreds of millions of dollars, by the most conservative estimates — at a time when federal revenue will be contracting on a significant scale. That makes it, in turn, all the more incumbent on either McCain or Obama to forge a renewed political consensus behind such a plan.
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For their part, enforcement-first advocates worry that their constituencies could be too easily appeased by tough talk and overtures toward crackdowns they see as largely symbolic.

“The stepped-up enforcement of the past year may peel off some enforcement-first voters and congressmen who are willing to be persuaded that the enforcement is now happening, and is adequate, to move ahead with the amnesty,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which promotes enforcement-first policies. The Bush White House, he added, “sees this enforcement push as building credibility for the next administration to have an amnesty.”

But backers of a comprehensive plan aren’t banking on any smooth wins, even with a new White House in their corner. The challenge, they say, is for lawmakers to keep the big picture in view amid much economic volatility.

“It’s a very, very tough sell, for the same reason any immigration reform is a tough sell,” said Randel K. Johnson, vice president at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. “People see those visas, incorrectly, as enabling immigrant workers to compete with American workers. We’d like to see an administration move forward. Congress is always reactive, instead of looking down the pike, and looking at the demographics of our country. When the economy comes back, we’re going to need these workers even more.”
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http://www.cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=3&docID=weeklyreport-0000029...

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3.
Economic downturn more effective than border fence
By Gred Grimm
The Miami Herald (FL), October 5, 2008

B runo Ferretti, peering out through inch-thick, bullet-proof glass, could see this coming months ago.

Two national studies on immigration only put numbers to what Ferretti already knew in his gut. ``I saw it. Definitely. I told my friends. They didn't want to hear it.''

It wasn't who he saw, from his walk-up window at SAFE-$-Transfer.

It was who he didn't see.

Steady customers, old friends and familiar faces disappeared. So many of the regulars who had transformed an unremarkable Pompano Beach shopping center into a Brazilian village were gone.

The informal labor pool across the way, near the Madaria Brasil Bakery, where men would gather in the pre-dawn darkness to catch a day job with a construction crew, faded away. The bosses stopped coming. The workers gave up.

The number of weary men lined up at SAFE-$-Transfer to wire a portion of their paychecks home dwindled by two-thirds over the last year. ''They can't find work. They can't afford to live here. They're going back to home,'' he said.

Poor, Here or There

By home, Ferretti meant Brazil, where he was born 20 years ago. Departing immigrants, headed back to Latin America and the Caribbean, have become a national phenomenon. The Pew Hispanic Center released findings Thursday that the once steady increase of undocumented immigrants into the United States has lurched to a stop.

Last month, a study by the Center for Immigration Studies claimed that 1.3 million undocumented immigrants have returned to their home countries.
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http://www.miamiherald.com/news/5min/story/713537.html

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4.
Law nets no illegal workers
Complaints often lack enough information
BY Janell Ross
The Tennessean (Nashville), October 5, 2008

Gary Armstrong spotted a crew of Hispanic men cutting brush in Roane County. He didn't talk to them. He couldn't check their IDs.

But to Armstrong, the situation seemed clear.

"When you see about 30 young Hispanic males working in a group, I think the probability is extremely high some of them are illegal," he said.

And in Tennessee, anyone with those kinds of suspicions can take them to a public official who, in turn, can log the concerns with the state Department of Labor and Workforce Development. If investigators catch a business knowingly employing illegal immigrants twice in a three-year period, the business could lose its licenses to operate for up to one year.

But with seven complaints closed since the Illegal Alien Employment Act went into effect Jan. 1, not one license has been pulled. That includes Armstrong's complaint against Brewster's Turf and Tree Management, filed with the state in July.

Eight other cases remain open and thus shielded from the public. Some of those may result in public hearings because there's considerable evidence against the businesses, said Dan Bailey, the Labor Department's general counsel. And it's going to take direct knowledge of employment violations to move cases forward, Bailey said, not just reports of different-looking workers.

Still, those numbers aren't convincing the man who wrote the law that the state is taking it seriously or that it's working as written.

"It appears I need to look deeper into this and see what corrective action we could take, because you can't tell me that everybody here is legal," said Sen. Bill Ketron, R-Murfreesboro.

An estimated 100,000 to 150,000 illegal immigrants lived in Tennessee in 2005, the latest figures from the Pew Center for Hispanic Research. The center is a Washington-based, nonpartisan organization that examines trends shaping the country.
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Advocates for tighter immigration policy, including the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies, said the lack of successful cases show Tennessee's law isn't working.

"It just doesn't have any teeth," said Jessica Vaughan, a CIS senior policy analyst. "If the goal was to reduce illegal employment, then what's needed is something to compel every employer to participate in E-verify."
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http://www.tennessean.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081005/NEWS02/810...

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5.
Michigan no longer land of promise for Iraqi refugees
By Gregg Krupa
The Detroit News (MI), October 3, 2008

Michigan's economy is so bad that State Department is sending fewer Iraqi refugees to the area because of concerns that their future would not be bright.

After a request by relief workers, the policy of bringing Iraqis to Metro Detroit if relatives or friends live in the area was changed to allow only those with immediate family to settle here, according to the State Department.

"The State Department has taken the measure of things and decided it would be better to send them somewhere else, where they might be self-sufficient, instead of coming to Michigan, because the economy is very bad here and we have the highest unemployment in the country," Belmin Pinjic of Lutheran Social Services of Michigan said Thursday. The agency is one of several designated by the federal government to provide relief to the refugees.

The war in Iraq has displaced 4.4 million people, according to the United Nations. Two million have left Iraq. The Christian population of the country is under intense pressure, as extremists root them out from villages and homes, officials say. But Muslims, especially those who have been employed by the United States in Iraq, also are seeking refuge in the United States.

About 3,000 of the 13,000 Iraqi refugees resettled in the country in the last year arrived in Metro Detroit, which is the home to about one-third of all of the Iraqi-born residents in the United States, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

State Department officials said the policy change was implemented in late June partly because relief workers were having difficulty finding the refugees jobs. The officials, who declined to be quoted by name, citing department policy, said relief workers in Metro Detroit were becoming overwhelmed by the numbers.

"We made the change because people from the agencies were expressing concerns," said an official, who asked not to be named.

Despite requests, he said, the policy change will not be reviewed, because the department does not want to spur a significant new flow of Iraqis to Metro Detroit, he said.

Michigan is home to 35 percent of all Iraqi-born residents of the United States, according the Census Bureau. The vast majority of them live in Metro Detroit, where the Iraqi Muslim community numbers perhaps 12,000 and there are about 90,000 to 105,000 Chaldeans -- Iraqi Catholics -- according to sources in those communities.
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http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20081003/METRO/810030395

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6.
Critics cry amnesty as extensions for immigrants sought
Advocates want Haitians to get protected status in the wake of Ike, other storms
By Luis F. Perez
The Houston Chronicle, October 4, 2008

Fort Lauderdale -- Even though he came here illegally, after Hurricane Mitch devastated his homeland, the United States gave Rijoberto Ayala permission to stay temporarily.

That was 1999.

Last week, about 70,000 Hondurans — including Ayala — got their eighth extension of their “temporary protected status.”

Now, as immigrant advocates push the government to grant the same status to Haitians, critics point to Honduran, Nicaraguan and El Salvadoran nationals who have been allowed to stay for years after natural disasters struck their countries. The government estimates more than 300,000 immigrants from those countries are eligible for the extension.

“You have to ask how temporary is temporary protected status,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates more restrictive immigration policies. “It’s really used simply as way to grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.”

Temporary protected status would give Haitians in this country permission to stay and work legally. It was granted to Hondurans and Nicaraguans after Mitch and to Salvadorans after a series of earthquakes in 2001. Four storms this year have raked Haiti, leaving destruction in their wake and hundreds dead.
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http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6040116.html