Two views of immigration from California

Mark Mardell | 02:00 UK time, Thursday, 5 August 2010

n the southern California countryside, Shellie Milne's children play on their two miniature ponies in their yard. She's just back from a Tea Party meeting: she's an enthusiastic organiser for the movement and she says her latest cause is immigration.

She's insistent that the organisation isn't about social conservatism but is purely about fiscal rectitude. How then does immigration fit into that?

She has six children and says her children's education is suffering directly because of illegal immigration. Many of the children don't speak English and even the children of illegal immigrants must, by law, be educated in the state system.

She adds that the health system is also over-burdened. Of course, there's no national health system here but hospitals do have to treat anyone who turns up in the emergency room. If they can't pay, the hospital foots the bill. Shellie says its like a party. If 30 people RSVP and you cater for that number and then 100 turn up, everybody goes short. It's not much of a party any more.

Her solution? Illegal immigrants should be deported or go to the back of the queue.

She says in opposing the Arizona law, President Barack Obama has behaved like a dictator, ignoring the will of the majority of people in the state and the country.

That you'd expect. But the president isn't popular with his own natural supporters either.

Angelica Salas, of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles, says she's disappointed with President Barack Obama. She tells me that she expected it to be an uphill struggle to get the positive advances they wanted, but not to be on the defensive.

She says that the Obama administration will deport 400,000 illegal immigrants this year, much higher than the figure under George W Bush. She quotes Mr Obama's campaign promised not to rip a child from its mother and says he is now doing exactly that.

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Posted by Kathy Vega

As Whitman and Brown dance toward the political center, they risk alienating their bases

By Ken McLaughlin and Steve Harmon Bay Area News Group Posted: 08/10/2010 04:02:41 PM PDT

When Meg Whitman went on the air last week with two red-meat-conservative talk show hosts, they mercilessly grilled her on what they characterized as inexcusable shifts on illegal immigration and the state's landmark global warming bill.

The drubbing was so bad that many listeners of "The John & Ken Show" pronounced that they'd never vote for such a namby-pamby candidate.

Less than three months before the general election, the Republican Whitman is experiencing the perils of what nearly every major party candidate for California governor must endure during the fall campaign: the risks associated with dancing toward the political center.

It's a necessary gamble in a state where about one-third of voters say they are "middle-of-the-road" and one in five people decline to state a political allegiance when they register to vote, political experts say.

Still, as Whitman and -- to a lesser extent her Democratic opponent, Jerry Brown -- woo voters in the middle, they are discovering just how far they can go to grab as much from the center before they start alienating their more partisan bases.

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Posted by Kathy Vega

Controversial Arizona sheriff greeted by jeers, cheers in San Diego

August 11, 2010|By Richard Marosi, Los Angeles Times

Reporting from San Diego — Arizona's Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio brought his polarizing brand of immigration politics to San Diego on Tuesday afternoon, generating cheers and jeers as he faced off with protesters and later regaled a friendly audience with details of his enforcement tactics in Phoenix.

Arpaio, controversial for his tent city lockups and law enforcement sweeps targeting illegal immigrants, came bearing a message for Californians.

"A lot of [illegal immigrants] are heading to California that we arrest, and I would hope that your governor would at least send me a little note saying thank you for grabbing these guys," Arpaio said during a speech before a conservative group at the Country Club of Rancho Bernardo.

Before the talk, Arpaio confronted a group of about 150 protesters waving "Stop the hate" and "Down with Arpaio" signs. "Why do you hate Mexicans?" one man yelled. Arpaio, protected by police, tried to speak, but was drowned out with chants of "Racist go home."

It's the kind of heated reactions he gets all over the country, he told the audience later.

"It's crazy. They're all telling me to go home. I have a right to be in San Diego. If you want to see my papers, I'll show them to all of you," Arpaio said jokingly.

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Posted by Kathy Vega.

Immigration agency working to fix visa denials to artists, others

By Teresa Watanabe, Los Angeles Times
August 10, 2010

A big increase in the denials had prompted an outcry by Hollywood, the performing arts community and research institutions.

The nation's immigration chief has launched a effort to quell the outcry from Hollywood and the performing arts community about a spike in visa denials, processing delays and requests for evidence to support their petitions to bring in leading foreign artists for U.S. performances.

In the last year, immigration attorneys across the nation have loudly complained about mounting roadblocks for performance visas from the California service center, which processes petitions for so-called O and P visas for artists and researchers of extraordinary ability.

The Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles had to cancel scheduled performances last year of an Argentine music group because California immigration officials challenged whether its fusion of Jewish klezmer music and tango met the requirement to be "culturally unique."

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[posted by Max Felipe]

The Costs of Illegal Immigration to Californians: Executive Summary

Published by FAIR.

Analysis of the latest Census data indicates that California's illegal immigrant population is costing the state's taxpayers more than $10.5 billion per year for education, medical care and incarceration. Even if the estimated tax contributions of illegal immigrant workers are subtracted, net outlays still amount to nearly $9 billion per year. The annual fiscal burden from those three areas of state expenditures amounts to about $1,183 per household headed by a native-born resident.

This analysis looks specifically at the costs to the state for education, health care and incarceration resulting from illegal immigration. These three are the largest cost areas, and they are the same three areas analyzed in a 1994 study conducted by the Urban Institute, which provides a useful baseline for comparison ten years later. Other studies have been conducted in the interim, showing trends that support the conclusions of this report.

To read more, click here.

[Posted by Emma Mederos]

Undocumented Family Flees Arizona, Now Here. From The Shadows of Arizona to the Shadows of the Bay Area

By DAMIAN TRUJILLO

I asked the father of the family of four what he feels when he hears the name of Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio.

"Terror. Fear," said the father in Spanish.

The family asked we not identify them.

They sat in front of our cameras with the lights off to hide their identities.

They spoke with NBC Bay Area a few weeks after arriving in the Bay Area.

The family left Arizona after the state passed SB1070, the new immigration law, and after numerous raids by the sheriff on suspected undocumented immigrants.

"There's no liberty to go out with the family, to the park", said the father. "We prefer to stay inside our home because at least we felt protected there."

The family left everything behind in Arizona, jobs, friends, and family.

"It was a difficult decision," said the father.

His tearful wife would prefer to return to Mexico.

But she knows that is not possible any more.

There's violence in her home state, a state the family left 10 years ago.

And her children, now 12 and 18 years old, are doing well in this country.

The children say they feel like any other American kids.

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[Posted by Emma Mederos]

Reality Check: An analysis of campaign ads

By Ken McLaughlin

Charging Whitman with deceiving Latinos is not quite accurate

What's the claim? A new Spanish-language ad by Working Californians, a Democratic independent expenditure committee, claims GOP gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman says "one thing in Spanish -- and the opposite when she speaks in English.''

Is it true? The charge isn't accurate, because though Whitman is being selective about what she says in Spanish-language ads versus English-language ads, she's not saying the "opposite."

During the GOP primary campaign, Whitman was attacked by opponent Steve Poizner for being too soft on immigration. So her campaign chairman, former Gov. Pete Wilson, did an ad saying Whitman would be "tough as nails on illegal immigration."

Immediately after she won the primary, Whitman ran Spanish-language ads telling the Latino community she was against Proposition 187, which would have denied most services to illegal immigrants, and also opposed to the new Arizona law requiring immigrants to show their residency papers when stopped by police.

Whitman obviously didn't point out in those ads that Wilson, the champion of Proposition 187, was chairman of her campaign. Nor did she acknowledge that she's in favor of denying all undocumented children access to state-funded colleges and universities.

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[Posted by Emma Mederos]

ACLU suit: Mentally incompetent arbitrarily held

By SUE MANNING Associated Press Writer

LOS ANGELES—Six mentally incompetent immigrants facing deportation have been trapped in an arbitrary limbo for months and even years because there is no way to identify them or get them legal help for detention and deportation hearings, according to a lawsuit filed Monday.

"We think those things are basic constitutional requirements," said Ahilan Arulanantham, director of immigrant rights and national security for the ACLU of Southern California.

The six indigent, mentally ill plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Jose Antonio Franco-Gonzalez, 29, who has moderate mental retardation and is unable to represent himself, who was held by the Department of Homeland Security for five years because his case was put on hold by those who questioned his mental abilities.

He and Guillermo Gomez Sanchez, 48, were released in March, three days after the ACLU filed the original complaint in this case.

In petitions for the release of the two men, attorneys said their cases exposed a "black hole" allowing authorities to hold mentally ill immigrants for years without having to explain themselves to a judge or anyone else.

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[Posted by Emma Mederos]

Birthright citizenship??!!

Birthright citizenship: The big Republican issue for 2010 elections?

Don't be surprised if you hear the phrase "birthright citizenship" a whole bunch of times before the November election.

The U.S. rule that all persons born in this country automatically become citizens is becoming a major front for Republicans in the immigration debate.

On Sunday, Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona, the second-ranking Republican senator, expressed support for hearings on the issue. Last week, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, generally considered a moderate on immigration, said he may introduce a constitutional amendment so children of illegal immigrants did not become citizens.

For full story, click here.

[Posted by Prof. Montejano]

Meg Whitman Flip-flopping?

Has California Republican Meg Whitman, the former eBay CEO who says she'll bring a fresh approach to state government, become precisely what she insists she is not - a calculating politician who changes positions and straddles the issues depending on the audience?

Some examples that have both conservatives and liberals buzzing in recent weeks:

-- Whitman just spent millions on California Spanish-language media to advertise her view on the nation's most controversial immigration bill: "NO to the Arizona law." But on Wednesday, she said in an interview with the conservative Talk Radio Network's "America's Morning News" that she would "let the Arizona law stand."

For full story, click here.

[Posted by Prof. Montejano]