1. Critics blast record of nominee
2. NC legislator to attempt bill
3. Illegal aliens repatriating
4. VA co. in new ICE arrangement
5. CO co. tax probe targets illegals
6. Illegal traffic increasing in CA
7. Economy hitting DC immigrants
8. Ex-IRA militant denied appeal

1.
Homeland Security Nominee No Border Hawk, Critics Warn
By Fred Lucas
The CNS News, December 1, 2008

Far from being a border hawk, Arizona Gov. Janet Napolitano frequently blocked efforts to curb illegal immigration, say enforcement advocates concerned about her expected nomination to be the Homeland Security secretary under President Barack Obama.

In July 2007, Napolitano signed what she called the toughest employer sanctions law in the country. During her first term, she established a state task force to curb ID fraud. She was also the first governor to call for using the National Guard on the border, though she subsequently vetoed legislation to grant funding for more Arizona National Guard troops on the border.

But Napolitano opposes a border fence, supports expanding a controversial technology visa program and favors a “stringent pathway to citizenship.”

She has also vetoed a bill requiring voter ID, vetoed a bill requiring local law enforcement to enforce immigration law, and later vetoed another proposal to allow local sheriffs to enforce immigration law.

She also vetoed a bill prohibiting Mexican consul ID cards that critics say are prone to fraud, vetoed an English-only bill, and vetoed a bill to criminalize illegal immigration.

Napolitano’s tough rhetoric on enforcing immigration laws – often chastising the Bush administration for not doing enough – was rarely matched by her record, said Arizona state Rep. Russell Pearce, a Republican, who as chairman of the state House appropriations committee, wrote numerous immigration bills that were vetoed by the governor.

“She issued in 2005 a declaration of emergency, yet she has done nothing to really secure the border,” said Pearce, who was recently elected to the state Senate.

“The governor has done everything she can to be an open borders governor. If not for a supermajority in the House and the Senate and 80 percent of the public for it, she would not have signed the employer sanctions bills,” Pearce told CNSNews.com. “She was backed into a corner. Yet people continue to give her credit.”
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The governor’s record is at best mixed, said Bob Kane, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

“The compelling thing about her running the Department of Homeland Security is that she won’t have the federal government to blame any more,” Kane told CNSNews.com. “Securing the country is the Department of Homeland Security’s mission. He has got the advantage of first-hand knowledge. I hope she will use that first-hand knowledge along with the resources of the Homeland Security Department.”

Several tough immigration measures became law in Arizona because of ballot measures. These ballot measures include denying in-state college tuition to illegal aliens, denying state benefits to illegal aliens, and denying punitive damages in lawsuits to illegal aliens.

Napolitano could be an improvement for the overall Obama administration, given the president-elect’s campaign rhetoric denouncing ICE raids, said Bryan Griffith, spokesman for the Center for Immigration Studies.

“Obama is not particularly fond of immigration raids,” Griffith told CNSNews.com. “That’s a good tool for worksite enforcement and a way to catch many illegal immigrants at once.”
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http://www.cnsnews.com/public/content/article.aspx?RsrcID=40008

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2.
Shuler to tackle immigration again next year
The Gannett News Service, November 29, 2008

Washington, DC -- Rep. Heath Shuler's immigration bill to require employers to verify new workers' legal status quietly failed this fall after receiving substantial attention and support earlier in the year.

More than a third of House lawmakers — 157 — cosponsored Shuler's bill to require immigration screening of all new workers through the Department of Homeland Security's E-Verify database. Republicans took up Shuler's bill in the spring and sought to force a vote on the House floor through a discharge petition.

But the effort fell short as congressional attention turned to high gas prices and then a faltering economy.

“The Democratic (congressional) leadership didn't want it,” said Steven Camarota, research director at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports stronger enforcement of immigration laws.

Many Democrats opposed proposals such as Shuler's that focused on workplace enforcement and strengthening border security, he said. Neither of the two major-party presidential candidates — Barack Obama nor John McCain — devoted much time to immigration, especially as the economy started stalling, Camarota said.

Shuler, D-Waynesville, said he would re-introduce his immigration bill next year, despite opposition by many Democrats.

“We're going to continue with the process,” he said. “The issue still needs to be raised.”

Currently, E-Verify is a voluntary program, but the number of employee queries to E-Verify doubled to 6.6 million in 2008 as Arizona, Mississippi and other states began to require some or all companies to check the legal status on new employees. Federal contractors also must use E-Verify on new hires after Jan. 15, 2009, for work on government contracts, the Bush administration announced earlier this month.

However, the immigration landscape has shifted in Washington with the election of Obama as president and larger Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., plans to take up more comprehensive immigration reform but still is working with the new Obama administration on timing, said Jon Summers, a Reid spokesman.
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http://www.citizen-times.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008811290323

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3.
Illegal immigrants going home, and local labor market at risk
By Alfonso Chardy
The Miami Herald (FL), November 30, 2008

Malaquías Gaspar left his farm village in southern Mexico when the economy soured in the mid-1990s. He headed north illegally and found the proverbial better opportunity in South Florida, where he made a decent living by picking fruit and building homes.

But the U.S. economic crisis has disrupted his life and the lives of countless other illegal immigrants who are now planning to leave or have already left.

Gaspar recently returned to Zimatlán de Alvarez in Oaxaca state, primarily to care for his ailing mother -- but also to plan for the future should the economy worsen in South Miami-Dade County, where his wife and four children remain.

''If we can't feed our children, we'll come back,'' said Gaspar, 40, as he sat at his family home -- upgraded with money he had sent from South Florida.

Gaspar is among millions of undocumented immigrants facing new challenges brought on by slim prospects for legalization, more aggressive federal enforcement and a worsening economy. Now, fewer immigrants are caught while trekking through the dangerous Sonoran Desert or risking their lives aboard makeshift boats in the Caribbean, indicating that fewer are trying. Those who make it through can find themselves on one of several daily federal charter flights that return deportees.

The ripple effects are already being felt. Communities in Latin America and the Caribbean report a reduction in remittances -- money sent home from the United States. That money is critical to the survival of families and the success of local civic projects. Border communities that once thrived as way stations for those heading north are now little more than ghost towns.

Smuggling Recedes

Even on the tiny Bahamian island of Bimini, long a hotbed of eager smugglers willing to transport human cargo to South Florida, the mood is grim.

''The large groups are not coming as much as they used to, but . . . people who want to make money nefariously still view this as an opportunity,'' said Jeff Dubel, public affairs officer for the U.S. Embassy in Nassau, the Bahamian capital.

The Center for Immigration Studies, in a report published in July, was the first to note that undocumented immigrants were leaving the United States. But the report, ''Homeward Bound,'' attributed departures to increased enforcement.

Later, the Pew Hispanic Center, a research group in Washington, suggested that fewer immigrants were arriving because of the economic slowdown and stricter enforcement. The report said that the illegal population had stopped growing and that it now stood at about 11.9 million, down by about 500,000 from a year earlier.
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http://www.miamiherald.com/news/front-page/story/792869.html

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4.
ICE Agents Will Screen Immigrants at Fairfax Jail
County Gets Video Teleconferencing Equipment, but Sheriff's Officers Won't Do Agency's Work
By Tom Jackman and Sondhya Somashekhar
The Washington Post, November 27, 2008; PW08

The Fairfax County Sheriff's Office has been rejected for training and authorization to process illegal immigrants into the federal immigration system, but a better option has emerged, Sheriff Stan G. Barry said.

Instead of training jail officers to be deputies, the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is installing video teleconferencing equipment in the Fairfax jail. ICE agents outside the jail will interview and screen illegal immigrants for possible deportation, Barry and agency officials said last week.

Last year, Barry applied to have Fairfax jail deputies trained in ICE's 287 (g) program, which would have allowed them not only to check for immigration warrants for possible illegal immigrants but also to enter newly suspected violators into the immigration system. After months of waiting, Fairfax recently learned it had been rejected for the program.

Barry told the Fairfax County Board of Supervisors that the new arrangement with ICE will be better than 287 (g) because it will not require the county to devote staff members, funding or jail space to the program.

Instead, he said, the program draws a bright line between the role of immigration authorities and county deputies. Federal authorities told Barry they will monitor the jail's population from their offices, investigating the immigration status of select inmates and promptly removing for deportation those who are determined to be in the country illegally. Barry said the jail is being wired for the new equipment necessary for the program.

"It looks like it will be a win-win situation, in that we will be able to identify illegal immigrants who commit crimes in Fairfax County and get them in the process of deportation, and it won't cost Fairfax County a dime," Barry said.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/24/AR200811...

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5.
Tax probe targets illegal workers;
A Colorado county combed thousands of records for immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers.
By DeeDee Correll
Los Angeles Times, November 29, 2008

Greeley, CO -- Amalia Cerrillo has made her living helping other people pay their taxes.

Sometimes she showed them how to get on the tax rolls in the first place, helping clients without Social Security numbers apply for a special ID they needed to file their returns.

Some were illegal immigrants who got jobs using fake or stolen information, but that wasn't an issue for the Internal Revenue Service: Legal or not, everyone must pay their taxes.

Nor was it an issue for Cerrillo: "I'm not here to judge them. If they need to file taxes, then I help them file taxes." But Weld County authorities saw it differently.

Last month, they served a warrant to search thousands of records at Amalia's Translation and Tax Services, looking for illegal immigrants who have used Americans' Social Security numbers to file their own taxes.

"Obviously, the federal government isn't doing their job, and it's falling to local agencies to do it," Weld County Sheriff John Cooke said.

The search is the latest sign of escalating tension as local authorities seek to combat illegal immigration, traditionally a federal concern.

Weld County Dist. Atty. Ken Buck said prosecutors from throughout the Southwest have inquired about the effort.

Some people in this northern Colorado city say the operation is a witch hunt that has sent panic through a community still raw from immigration raids at a meatpacking plant two years ago.

"They are working hard and trying to comply with tax laws," Kim Baker Medina, a Fort Collins immigration attorney, said of workers. "This is an excuse to try to round up immigrants."

Operation Number Games began as a single case in August, when Weld County sheriff's detectives arrested a local man, Servando Trejo. Trejo admitted he had begun using a fake Social Security number years earlier when he slipped across the border and had used it ever since, according to a search warrant.

He told detectives he obtained a tax identification number and filed federal tax returns with the help of Cerrillo after confiding in her that he was using a fake Social Security number.

"Everyone knows to go to her for their taxes," he said, according to a search warrant.

Individual tax identification numbers were created by the Internal Revenue Service in 1996 for taxpayers who don't qualify for a Social Security number but have a tax liability. Many illegal immigrants use these tax ID numbers to file their tax returns, attaching W-2 forms with the false Social Security numbers they used to get a job.

IRS officials declined to comment but provided a statement noting that federal law requires all people with U.S. income to pay taxes.
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http://www.latimes.com/business/investing/la-na-stolen-identity29-2008no...

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6.
Border crossings shift back to California routes
The Associated Press, November 29, 2008

Tijuana, Mexico (AP) -- In a flash the two men were over the double fence and into the San Diego parking lot.

As a waiting pickup truck sped them away, the smuggler who boosted them over the 15-foot walls scrambled toward Mexico.

Border Patrol agents could only tag Juan Garcia's black sweatshirt with pepper spray bullets as he escaped back over the wall to Tijuana, red-eyed and coughing but $30 richer for a few seconds of daring labor.

It's just another night along the most heavily guarded stretch of U.S.-Mexico frontier, where Border Patrol apprehensions of illegal crossers have increased 28 percent since 2005 - even as apprehensions have dropped nearly 40 percent border-wide over the same period. While illegal crossings are impossible to count, experts look to Border Patrol apprehensions as the best indicator of migrant traffic.

The Tijuana area's surprising increase is a booming business for cut-rate daredevils like Garcia, who are willing to try almost anything to get their clients across.

"I'll get you a bicycle, and I'll throw you over the fence with the bike," said part-time smuggler Giovanni Lopez, 28, after watching Garcia climb over. "But I'll also get you a little helmet and everything, so the Border Patrol thinks you're...what's the word in English? Exercising.

"And I cross over with you until a certain point, and I come back like this," he said, brushing away his tracks with an imaginary tree branch.

The Border Patrol's San Diego Sector - which covers 60 miles of border from the Pacific Ocean through strip malls and shanty towns into a boulder-strewn desert - is no stranger to such cat-and-mouse games. But its recent growth in traffic is driven by a curious convergence of strategies by both immigrants and the U.S. officials who chase them.

Analysts say the migrants encountering ever-increasing enforcement in the Arizona desert are bouncing back to California's traditional smuggling corridors, which offer shorter, cooler treks to cities and highways. The Border Patrol, meanwhile, takes migrants caught in Arizona to San Diego for deportation, hoping to break their ties to desert smugglers and daring them to try again against the border's toughest fences and highest concentration of agents.

"We're getting the right mix of personnel, technology and infrastructure there in San Diego, which allows us to take on that kind of surge," said Border Patrol spokesman Jason Ciliberti.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement also is adding a growing number of deportees from the country's interior to the Tijuana corridor, where they quickly try to return to the lives they left up north. ICE removed a record 349,000 illegal immigrants in 2008, a 21 percent increase over last year and a 77 percent jump since 2005.

It's impossible to divine the split in Tijuana-area traffic among new arrivals choosing California over Arizona, apprehended migrants transferred between the two and deported illegal residents now trying to get back.

The Border Patrol declined to release numbers of migrant detainees moved from Arizona to Tijuana since it started relocating them in May, and ICE does not release its deportation statistics by repatriation point.

But other indicators are much clearer. In Arizona, increased enforcement and Operation Streamline - which slaps illegal crossers with criminal charges and possible jail time - have proven to be a sharp deterrent in the Border Patrol's Tucson and Yuma Sectors.

Yuma has seen apprehensions drop from 118,000 in 2006 to only 8,000 in 2008. Tucson apprehensions have fallen 20 percent in the same period.

Whatever the balance among factors, their combined effect is clear: San Diego Sector agents apprehended 162,000 illegal immigrants in the 12-month period that ended Sept. 30, up from 127,000 in 2005. Border-wide, the 723,000 apprehensions this year were down sharply from 1.2 million in 2005.

Statistics from Mexico's National Migration Institute show Tijuana has received more than 40 percent of all Mexicans deported from the U.S. this year, or 50,000 more displaced migrants on its streets than last year. Indeed, the San Diego Sector traffic remains far below its peak of more than 500,000 apprehensions in 1993, the year before the U.S. launched Operation Gatekeeper, which erected fences to stop crowds from rushing across the open border nearly every night.

The current surge "is a function of the most flagrant problems having been addressed in San Diego first," said Mark Krikorian, director of the Center for Immigration Studies which advocates stricter immigration control. "Once the migration flow moved to Arizona, then enforcement efforts moved to Arizona, and some aliens and smugglers thought they would try their luck back in San Diego."
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http://www.sacbee.com/114/story/1436023.html

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7.
For Immigrants, a Ripple Effect;
Tough Times Trickle Down Through Newcomers' Networks
By N.C. Aizenman
The Washington Post, November 28, 2008

While the economy's tailspin is spreading pain across the Washington region, it has hit many of the area's close-knit immigrant communities with particular speed and force. The dependence on one another that has contributed so much to their economic success has now created a domino effect in which the misfortune of one segment of the group almost immediately affects the rest.

Ethiopian cabdrivers suffering from a drop-off in customers have cut back drastically on lunches at the District's Ethiopian restaurants, which, in turn, are now grappling with how to survive.

Korean construction contractors and real estate investors reeling from the housing crisis are having trouble affording tuition at the area's hagwons -- the private, after-school academies to which Korean parents traditionally send their children. At least one has closed, and another, Best Academy, with branches in Springfield and Sterling as well as Ellicott City, has slashed its prices by almost 40 percent.

The consequences reach beyond the financial, altering local immigrant culture in small but significant ways. Economic pressures are straining some cherished customs and strengthening others. Many immigrants are stepping outside their comfort zones to participate more in the broader economy.

The shifts are particularly evident among the District's hundreds of Ethiopian cabdrivers, whose distress over losing customers is compounded by the city's recent introduction of a meter system that cabbies contend charges some of the lowest rates in the country.

Negussie Gugsa, who has been driving a cab since he sought political asylum in the United States 10 years ago, said business is so bad that the association of Ethiopian air force veterans to which he belongs recently decided to cut its monthly dues from $20 to $10. The money is mainly used to help new arrivals get on their feet, he said, and is part of a tradition of communal obligation at the core of Ethiopian identity.

"When I came, they paid three months of my rent and all my food. . . . I didn't have anything, so it would have been very tough without them," he said on a recent morning on a break from his second job as a mechanic in Northeast Washington. "I have always been committed to do the same for the next person, and I feel so bad that we don't have the chance to do that now."
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/27/AR200811...

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8.
Judge denies former IRA detainee's request to stay
By Christopher Sherman
The Associated Press, November 28, 2008

Houston (AP) -- A former IRA militant living in the United States for nearly 25 years has been denied the right to remain in the country.

Pol (PAUL) Brennan's attorney was notified of the decision Friday. A spokeswoman for the immigration courts says the order was issued Wednesday.

The 55-year-old was taken into custody in Texas this January after the Border Patrol noticed he had an expired work permit.
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http://www3.signonsandiego.com/stories/2008/nov/28/ira-detainee-112808/?...