1. Bill drops country caps
2. AZ debate continues
3. UT Atty. Gen. criticizes
4. Critics attack AL law
5. FL activists protest
1.
Chaffetz immigration bill targeting highly skilled workers advances
By Thomas Burr
The Salt Lake Tribune, October 27, 2011
Federal law currently restricts how many highly skilled foreign workers can be hired from select countries, but that could change under legislation by Rep. Jason Chaffetz, R-Utah.
Chaffetz’s Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act, which advanced to the House floor Thursday, would drop the caps for country of origin that now limit how many workers can come from, say, India or England.
Chaffetz, who first ran for office on a platform of clamping down on illegal immigration, says his legislation fixes a problem with visas that hurts American businesses.
The bill, which passed by a voice vote in the House Judiciary Committee on Thursday, creates what he says is a fairer system that is “first come, first serve.”
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http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/politics/52799052-90/advances-american-bill...
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2.
Arizona: A Raging Debate on Immigration
The fight over immigration makes the state a 2012 puzzle. Republicans are divided, but Obama's unenacted reforms have disappointed Latinos
By Amanda J. Crawford
BusinessWeek, October 27, 2011
Kevin Sandler compares it to a scene in the 1976 film Network. He wanted to open the window of his Phoenix office and scream: “I’m as mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore!”
Instead, Sandler, chief executive officer of audio-visual design engineering firm ExhibitOne, joined executives of PetSmart, Banner Health, Intel, and dozens of other Arizona employers in signing a letter in March that helped defeat a slate of immigration bills pending in the statehouse. Business leaders said they feared the measures, which included denying state citizenship to the children of illegal migrants, would deepen Arizona’s black eye from a 2010 immigration enforcement law that sparked a 16-month national boycott and, according to one study, will cost the state more than $250 million related to lost convention business. “It became crystal clear that unless we did something, the madness was going to continue,” says Sandler, 50, who believes his company was pushed out of bidding on a California municipal court project as a result of the controversial 2010 statute. “The business community needed to say, ‘Enough.’ ”
The fight over immigration makes Arizona a puzzle heading into the 2012 election. It divides normally Republican allies, such as business and anti-immigration activists, and gives Democrats hope that this is one red state they can turn blue. Favorite son John McCain won’t be leading the Republican ticket this time around, and Latinos, who typically vote Democratic, make up 25 percent of the state’s voting-age population.
Yet the President faces difficult challenges in this Southwestern state. When he tapped Arizona’s Democratic governor, Janet Napolitano, for the Cabinet post of Homeland Security Secretary, the move elevated Secretary of State Jan Brewer, a Republican, to the governor’s office and set off a chain of events that could shape politics in the state—and ultimately immigration policy at the national level—for years to come.
Amid heightened rhetoric about border security, Brewer signed SB 1070, which requires immigrants to carry documentation proving they are in the U.S. legally. The law also mandates that police check the immigration status of anyone they suspect is in the country illegally. The Justice Dept. sued to block the statute, which only further galvanized Obama’s opponents. A handful of other states, including Georgia and Alabama, have since enacted laws modeled on Arizona’s.
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Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington says many of the 500,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona are poor, uninsured, and uneducated, taking a toll on government services and the economy. “This is why people in Arizona are frustrated,” he says.
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http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/arizona-a-raging-debate-on-immigrat...
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3.
Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff hits Republicans on immigration
By Tim Mak & Mackenzie Weinger
Politico (DC), October 27, 2011
Utah’s Republican attorney general has blistered his own party’s 2012 presidential candidates for their harsh rhetoric on immigration, which he claims has alientaed Latino voters.
“The party has lost those [Latino] voters,” Mark Shurtleff said at an immigration summit in Salt Lake City Wednesday, according to the Salt Lake Tribune. “They aren’t in danger — we’ve lost them.”
The attorney general had been working on an initiative called the Utah Compact, a declaration supported by the Mormon church and intended to set out a list of guidelines for immigration reform.
The Utah Compact has led to a set of bills passed in the state that includes both aggressive illegal immigration enforcement and a program that allows undocumented immigrants to work in the state if they register.
“The success of the Utah Compact has put the spotlight on Utah,” said Shurtleff, according to The Associated Press. “Now we have an opportunity to affect the national immigration debate in a really positive way.”
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http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1011/67014.html
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4.
Critics See ‘Chilling Effect’ in Alabama Immigration Law
By Campbell Robertson
The New York Times, October 27, 2011
ALABASTER, Ala. — The champions of Alabama’s far-reaching immigration law have said that it is intended to drive illegal immigrants from the state by making every aspect of their life difficult. But they have taken a very different tone when it comes to the part of the law concerning schools.
Alabama schools, including Valley Elementary in Pelham, collect immigration data on students.
“No child will be denied an education based on unlawful status,” the state attorney general, Luther Strange, argued in a court filing.
The man who wrote the schools provision says the same thing, that it is not meant as a deterrent — at least not yet. It is, however, a first step in a larger and long-considered strategy to topple a 29-year-old Supreme Court ruling that all children in the United States, regardless of their immigration status, are guaranteed a public education.
The provision, which is known as Section 28, requires primary and secondary schools to record the immigration status of incoming students and their parents and pass that data on to the state.
Critics say it is a simple end in itself, an attempt to circumvent settled law and to scare immigrants away from school now, not at some point in the future. Weeks of erratic school attendance figures and a spike in withdrawals show that this has worked, they argue. And indeed, a federal appeals court on Oct. 14 blocked the provision pending an appeal by the Justice Department, though the court did not rule on the merits.
Michael M. Hethmon, general counsel for the Immigration Reform Law Institute in Washington, who wrote the provision, insists that its goal is much more ambitious.
The eventual target, he said, is the 1982 Supreme Court decision Plyler v. Doe. The case concerned a Texas statute that withheld funds for the education of illegal immigrants and allowed districts to bar them from enrollment, as well as one Texas school district’s plan to charge illegal immigrants tuition.
The court ruled that this violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause, saying that the statute “imposes a lifetime hardship on a discrete class of children not accountable” for their immigration status. In the decision, the court also said that the state had not presented evidence showing it was substantially harmed by giving these children — as distinct from any other children — a free public education.
Over the ensuing decades, measures have been passed in defiance of this ruling, most notably California’s Proposition 187, but they have been repeatedly struck down in the courts. Mr. Hethmon said the problem with these challenges is that they have not taken the trouble to gather the evidence the court found missing in Plyler.
“The toughest question has been obtaining reliable — and I mean reliable for peer-reviewed research purposes — censuses of the number of illegal alien students enrolled in school districts,” he said. “That information could be compared with other sorts of performance or resource allocation issues.”
The Alabama law directs schools to ascertain the immigration status of incoming students, through a birth certificate, other official documents or an affidavit by the child’s parents (the law also directs schools to determine the immigration status of an enrolling child’s parents, but gave no mechanism by which to do so).
That information is then passed on to the State Board of Education not only to prepare an annual report with the data but also to “contract with reputable scholars and research institutions” to determine the costs, fiscal and otherwise, of educating illegal immigrants.
Because no one is actually barred from attending school and the data is not passed on to law enforcement, the provision passes constitutional muster, Mr. Hethmon said.
But it also potentially enables a fresh challenge to Plyler v. Doe, and the idea that schools are obligated to provide a free education to illegal immigrants.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/28/us/alabama-immigration-laws-critics-qu...
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5.
Demonstrators protest tougher immigration laws
The Associated Press, October 28, 2011
BRADENTON, Fla. -- Around 100 people protesting Arizona-style immigration laws met members of the local legislative delegation for a meeting in Bradenton.
The Bradenton Herald ( http://bit.ly/t9IwCI) reports that the sign-carrying protesters gathered downtown Thursday across the street from where the legislative delegation met to discuss priorities.
It was organized by a Sarasota chapter of the nonprofit activist group Unidos Now - or United Now. People testifying on their behalf told legislators that tougher immigration laws would be bad for business in southwest Florida, where thousands of Hispanic migrant workers toil in commercial fields.
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http://www.miamiherald.com/2011/10/28/2475949/demonstrators-protest-toug...
