Today’s example of extreme immigration [...]]]> Devotees of excessive immigration are not dissuaded by a mere historic economic breakdown leading to the unemployment of 14 million plus Americans, with the ensuing home foreclosures, divorces, families living in cars and general human suffering. The Census informs us that one in two Americans are now poor or low income.

Today’s example of extreme immigration enthusiasm is Democrat Senator Charles Schumer, along with cronies Leahy and Durbin, who has brewed up a visa program that would admit 10,000 Irish workers annually.

Unemployment in Ireland is high — 14.5 percent as of November — so many Irish want to avail themselves of American jobs in what they regard as their spare country.

Americans should well ask why their own elected officials are working to import thousands of foreign excess workers to compete with them in a flooded job market.

The correct number of immigrants during a jobs depression is ZERO.

Senator Charles Schumer unveils new Irish visa bill, Irish Central, December 14, 2011

If passed as is, undocumented Irish already in the U.S. may be eligible to apply for the program

New York Senator Charles Schumer introduced an immigration bill to the Senate on Tuesday which will potentially permit 10,000 Irish citizens, per year, to live and work in the U.S. on a new E-3 non-immigrant visa.

Described by Schumer as a “common sense bill,” if it is passed as it is currently written, undocumented Irish already in the U.S. may be eligible to apply for the program.

Schumer and Democratic Senate colleagues Pat Leahy and Dick Durbin co-sponsored the legislation, which was unveiled to the Senate on Tuesday afternoon.  It was introduced as an amendment to the bill that passed the House last month which would allow for better access to employment and family-based visas for natives of Mexico, the Philippines, China and India.

“We are eager to work in a bi-partisan fashion to pass this bill at the earliest opportunity,” Schumer commented on Tuesday.

“It has already passed the House with overwhelming bi-partisan support and we hope that we will find similar support in the Senate for this common sense bill that improves the fairness and efficiency of our immigration system, while also including a mutual visa exchange with Ireland, one of America’s steadfast allies.”

The Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act of 2011 would allow undocumented Irish to apply for an existing waiver of inadmissibility which exists under the current E-3 law for Australians.

“The current language enhances these waivers, although that language may not survive in the legislative process,” Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform (ILIR) lobbyist Bruce Morrison told the Irish Voice.

The move came after Schumer met with 20 Irish community leaders at his New York office last Friday.

The representatives had expressed dismay when the House passed its bill two weeks ago which excluded the Irish.

Schumer’s new immigration bill is modeled on the Australian E-3 visa program which was offered to Australia for its support of the U.S. in the Gulf War. The visa allows up to 10,000 Australian citizens and their spouses to immigrate to the U.S. once they secure a job offer. Under the current program citizens availing of the visa must be performing services in a specialty occupation and hold the minimum attainment of a bachelor’s degree.  The visa is renewable indefinitely.

During his recent May visit to New York, Irish Foreign Minister Eamon Gilmore had pledged his continued support to lobbying for the introduction of the E-3 visa.

Bart Murphy, head of the Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform flew from San Francisco last Friday, especially for the New York meeting.

“We know we have a great friend in Senator Schumer,” Murphy told the Irish Voice, “and we look forward to the introduction of the new bill. We will work with Irish organizations across the U.S. to bring pressure to bear on legislators to pass it.”

Even so, Washington continues to admit a million legal [...]]]> It’s amazing the suffering that goes on in this miserable economy, and how little attention it gets in the American press. The article posted below about middle-aged, formerly middle class people living in tents in New Jersey with cold weather coming on appeared in a British newspaper.

Even so, Washington continues to admit a million legal immigrant workers annually. Why is there no time-out on legal immigration while so many citizens are jobless and running out of savings, unemployment insurance and other resources? The best we have gotten out of the Republican House of Representatives is a flawed e-verify bill crafted to please the Chamber of Commerce.

Below, Marilyn Berenzweig lives in a New Jersey tent city, a far cry from her earlier lifestyle.

Recent CIS research (Who Benefited from Job Growth in Texas) found that “Of jobs created in Texas since 2007, 81 percent were taken by newly arrived immigrant workers (legal and illegal).”

Massive job loss is worsening as economic pundits forecast a double-dip recession, while the few jobs that are available are given to cheap and exploitable foreigners. Americans are getting hosed by open borders, and nobody will name the enemy, specifically a federal government addicted to open borders and disinterested in the well-being of American citizens.

Once prosperous New Yorkers forced to live under canvas in New Jersey woods, London Telegraph, September 25, 2011

The white picket fence and manicured flowerbeds outside 1 Paradise Lane are straight from a picture postcard of idyllic suburban American life in the 1950s.

But its walls are no more than canvas. Its porch overlooks smouldering bonfires and scrawny hens scratching at dirt. And mail never arrives in the letterbox that was hand-painted by Marilyn Berenzweig.

Mrs Berenzweig, 61, used to make $100,000 (£63,333) a year as a designer in New York’s garment district. Now she and her husband Michael are down and out in ‘Tent City’ in Lakeland, New Jersey. There is no electricity or running water and racoons steal their food. “It’s not an easy life,” she said.

She and Mr Berenzweig, a former radio producer, are two of the 27 million Americans out of work or under-employed as recession stalks the US once more.

New census figures this month showed that more than one in seven is now in poverty, surviving on less than $11,139 (£7,054) a year each or $22,314 (£14,132) for a family of four.

The couple had to leave their $2,000 (£1,266)-a-month house after Marilyn lost her job. They lived with their 40-year-old daughter and her family for four months before a row drove them out.

After reaching the 90-week limit for unemployment benefits, they now receive less than $100 (£63) per week between them in food stamps. “The nearest supermarket is 2.5 miles away,” she said. “Usually we walk”. Social security will kick in only when she is 62, and her modest pension at 65.

“I’m scared about how life is going in America,” said Mrs Berenzweig. “I hope we’ll move into an apartment again one day. But we need money.”

Clutching a pay-as-you-go mobile phone that she recharges at the library, Mrs Berenzweig said the couple dread the coming winter, their second in Tent City. “You try to dress real warm and keep active,” she said. “But the cat’s food freezes when you put it on the floor”.

Officially there are 700,000 homeless people in the US. According to the UN, America’s refusal to guarantee them access to water and sanitation, and its “criminalisation” of homelessness, is a violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That lack of safety net has seen similar tent cities sprout up in states such as Rhode Island, Colorado, Washington, California and Virginia.

The seven-acre camp in New Jersey, 50 feet down a dirt track off a state highway, was founded by Steve Brigham, a pastor and out-of-work electrical engineer, who lost his own home after a divorce and now lives among those he tries to help.

“Last year we had 40 people, this year it’s 70,” said Mr Brigham, 51. “We’re seeing people who have fallen further than before,” he said. “They were middle-class, lost their work and now they’re here. They are a prime example of America today.”

The site’s lavatory is an “old-fashioned pit in the ground” surrounded by a slim wooden frame. The kitchen is a mouldy 1970s caravan containing a greasy gas stove. Flies dart around the empty boxes of five pizzas donated by local takeaways at closing time the previous night.

For heat, some residents have log-burning stoves perched precariously inside their tents. Water for washing comes from a shack covering a crude well dug by three men from the camp. Drinking water must be bought using donated funds.

Across the path is Angelo Villanueva, a 45-year-old masonry worker who until recently earned $40,000 (£25,000) a year. “Work died out because of the recession,” he said. “It hit construction pretty big. I couldn’t afford to keep my apartment”.

Mr Villanueva stayed with his brother for six months. “But he’s married and I don’t want to encroach,” he said. His tent is penned in by a sturdy home-made fence. He practices martial arts while considering applying to train to be a physiotherapist’s assistant.

He is counting on the $450 billion (£285 billion) jobs plan recently unveiled by the US President. “Every now and then I catch fragments of news from the outside world,” he said. “I’m hoping Obama’s bill does something positive. I’m hoping it works. It’s got to stimulate something.”

Showing off his mountain bike and solar-powered outdoor shower, he said the camp was “a place to regroup and re-establish myself in the workplace”.

He may have to move fast, however. Lakeland authorities have launched a legal bid to tear down the camp and evict its residents from public land. With no right to shelter, they would have to compete for the handful of motel rooms offered nightly by the county.

Mr Brigham and the tenants are fighting the case with Jeffrey Wild, a New York attorney working for free. “This is the ground zero of the financial crisis,” said Mr Wild. “These people are that worse-case scenario you always hope never happens to you”.

In fact, it can happen to anyone, said Mr Wild, whose father was raised in New York during the Great Depression and frequently “had to leave in the middle of the night when the rent was due”.

“We have commercial artists, occupational therapists, small business owners who went bankrupt,” he said. “More and more white-collar workers.” Mr Wild is preparing a class action lawsuit on behalf of all the homeless people in Lakeland, demanding the right to basic shelter.

Without it, the mentally bruised residents of Tent City seem most anxious about having to once again beg relatives. “They all have their own families to feed,” said Mrs Berenzweig. “My mother is still alive, she’s 93. She thinks I’m still living in New York. If she found out about this, she would just die.”

On Monday, the Secretary of [...]]]> In today’s terrible jobs depression in which over 14 million Americans are officially unemployed, the Obama administration is cruelly upside down in its priorities. In mid-August, the President opened up work permits for illegal aliens in his administrative amnesty program which will add thousands (millions?) to an already flooded labor pool.

On Monday, the Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis signed agreements with the governments of the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica and El Salvador to protect their workers in this country. At the same time, she emphasized her department’s concern with the well being of foreign job thieves.

Not that such a move should be a surprise. Solis has been going the extra mile for lawbreaking foreign workers for as long as she has been the Labor Secretary. (See Department of Labor against American Workers from 2010.)

Large scale hispandering appears to be a big part of the Obama re-election strategy — that grateful aliens should vote early, vote often.

Coddling Illegals, Investor’s Business Daily, August 20, 2011

Border: An administration that conducts raids looking for illegal wood rather than illegal aliens signs partnerships with foreign governments to advise these aliens of their rights. What part of “illegal” don’t they get?

Right on the heels of enacting the federal Dream Act through administrative fiat, the administration of President Obama, specifically Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, on Monday signed “partnership” agreements with ambassadors from a group of Latin American nations aiming to protect what she described as the labor rights of both legal and illegal migrants working in the U.S.

This ceremony marked the signing of partnership agreements with the Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, and El Salvador, joining Mexico, Nicaragua and Guatemala, which had signed the agreement previously.

So while the administration works closely with foreign countries to promote illegal immigration, it takes border states like Arizona to court when they try to protect their borders and enforce our immigration laws.

Partners in crime would be more like it. According to the Immigration and Nationality Act, “employers may hire only persons who may legally work in the United States (i.e., citizens and nationals of the U.S.) and aliens authorized to work in the U.S.”

The Labor Department itself on its website says the INA only protects “U.S. citizens and aliens authorized to accept employment in the U.S. from discrimination in hiring or discharge.”

Yet Solis seems to have amended the law on her own, saying at the signing ceremony, “No matter how you got here or how long you plan to stay, you have certain rights.”

Solis wants to educate all migrant workers, including those who’ve snuck past the U.S. Border Patrol, of these rights, such as “the right to a legal wage” and the right not to be abused in the workplace.

We don’t know what constitutes a legal wage for someone who is illegally employed. The best protection against the abuse of illegal workers is for them not to be here and, rather than giving illegal workers more reasons to come, to go after their potential abusers: those companies that illegally hire them.

Of more concern to the Obama administration apparently is the possibility that American guitar manufacturers might be importing illegal wood from protected trees.

On Aug. 24, the Justice Department conducted four raids on Gibson Guitar Corp. facilities in Nashville. Gibson CEO Henry Juszkiewicz, a Republican donor, surmises that the feds were looking for rosewood illegally imported from places like Madagascar, for he was not immediately told the purpose of the raid.

The administration had already implemented a backdoor amnesty program when Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano recently sent letters to Congress saying she had the authority on a case-by-case basis to ignore the nation’s immigration laws and halt the deportation of illegal aliens not perceived to be a criminal threat as long as they meet certain criteria set by the administration.

Starting in 2009, the Labor Department has worked in conjunction with 50 Mexican consulates across the nation to bring U.S. labor law education to migrant workers. This wasn’t an American initiative, by the way. It came at the request of the Mexican consulate in Los Angeles — that is, Mexico’s government.

Nothing wrong with that, as long as these workers are here legally. But now, says Solis, it no longer matters how they got here — or whether they belong here. They have rights, even if the right to stay is not among them.

We have an administration that can’t create jobs for its citizens but worries about the rights of its illegal competitors for what jobs exist.

It works more closely with foreign consulates than it does with American border sheriffs.

And instead of focusing on enforcing existing immigration laws and securing our national borders, it’s currying favor with labor unions and Hispanics in the run-up to the 2012 election.

His NYT piece was the usual formulaic sob story of the American Dream thwarted by the mean [...]]]> The anti-borders media and bloggers have been in a tizzy over an illegal alien journalist, Jose Antonio Vargas, who recently outed himself with details on enabling editors in the New York Times Magazine (My Life as an Undocumented Immigrant).

His NYT piece was the usual formulaic sob story of the American Dream thwarted by the mean government and its annoying laws. The various reactions have had the interesting aspect of media honchos tippy-toeing over the obvious ramifications regarding immigration law. Vargas’ big tear-jerker was refused by the Washington Post, which seemed fearful of being being prosecuted, as reported by Politico: Why did Post kill Jose Vargas story?

The article could be problematic for the Post, because it not only reveals that the paper broke the law by employing an illegal immigrant, but that Vargas told a mentor, Post assistant managing editor Peter Perl, about his immigration status. It is not clear whether Perl told anyone else at the paper.

Of course, scooting the article off to another newspaper won’t get the Post off the legal hook. Names were named, which was surely a strategy of Vargas to rope in the editors who hired him and force them to get on board like the good liberals they are. Vargas mentioned another newspaper that employed him, the San Francisco Chronicle, and Editor Phil Bronstein explained at length how he had been “duped” — probably as instructed by company lawyers.

Bronstein tried to play the aggrieved party in a rambling essay on his Chronicle blog, while still sounding sympathetic to his illegal alien scribbler. He worried about the “millions of people out there floating in terrifying limbo” but did not mention the citizens displaced by liars like Vargas in college slots and employment. The Chronicle is famously left-wing on border and immigration issues.

How many unemployed journalists, let go by newsroom downsizing over the past decade, are upset by this flouting of the law? Unlike most illegal alien articles created by the liberal press, this one affects the people who crank out the tiresome sob stories. But we are unlikely to hear any changes of heart about law and borders at least in public, since job-seeking reporters wouldn’t want to hurt their chances in one of the most liberal professions. Still, it would be interesting to hear some bar talk among journalists on this one.

Plus, someone should ask Bronstein whether he would support a new visa category for journalists to increase the diversity of the newsroom. How would that go over with reporters? It might make the media debate of immigration more interesting if practitioners had some skin in the game.

I was duped by Jose Vargas, illegal immigrant, By Phil Bronstein, Chronicle Blog, June 23, 2011

I was duped. I once hired an illegal immigrant to be a reporter for the Chronicle.
“I don’t think I’m a criminal,” Jose Antonio Vargas told me when we met last week, right before he announced his status to the world. “Don’t make me seem guiltier than I am.”

Jose lied to me and everyone else he worked for, and that’s not kosher, especially in a profession where facts and, more elusively, the truth are considered valuable commodities. In 2003 he wrote a story for us about illegals getting fake drivers’ licenses in the Mission when he’d used phony documents to get his own. He told me last week that he decided then that was a serious conflict of interest and wouldn’t cover immigration any more. But he later wrote on the topic for the Post.

Even though I didn’t know he was a lawbreaker when he worked for me, and he left the paper in 2004, his story lands me a little more directly in the atrociously rudderless but vicious debate on immigration reform.

After Jose’s essay was published on the New York Times website yesterday, detailing his deception in getting heady jobs here, at the Washington Post and the Huffington Post – and snagging exclusive access to Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg for a New Yorker profile – I have to wonder:

Am I a dupe? A felon – at least according to a tough new Alabama law that might find me guilty of “harboring” Jose when he was in my office the other day (I also bought him coffee)? Or have I unwittingly supported a potentially powerful new movement in the push for immigration reform?

There’s no way to tell for sure when immigration laws themselves are a hopeless jumble of unenforced, unenforceable or just plain unaddressed issues covering 11 million people. The most visible are Latino day laborers, but the Vargas confession may also open those gnarly closet doors for high-achieving white collar professionals.

“This is going to come off as a vanity act, but it’s not,” Jose told me last Tuesday, just before he left San Francisco for New York on what might be his last allowable U.S. domestic flight with his doctored-up I.D. “I tell stories for a living and this is the one I’ve been afraid to tell. I’m one of many like me. There have got to be undocumented workers out there even more successful than I am.”

Jose’s narrative of arriving in the Bay Area at age 12, discovering his illegal status at 16 and driving himself thereafter to somehow earn citizenship with the help of friends and family, has created a cat-in-a-blender bloodstorm, particularly among his fellow journalists. The Times has gloated on its blogs about bagging the story while the Post, which rejected it, is a little dour.

General public pro- and anti- sentiment has been raucous.

“He’s taken a huge personal risk” one immigration lawyer said about Jose. He could get deported back to his native Philippines any time. But the evocatively-named ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency) is sensitive to bad publicity. So much for equal treatment. And Barack Obama’s most recent tepid and indecisive immigration speech in El Paso two weeks ago could help. Illegals “have to admit they broke the law,” the President said, “pay their taxes, pay a fine and learn English.”

So, except for the fine, I guess Jose has passed the Potus sniff test. The head of ICE himself, John Morton, issued a memo in June telling his agents to use “discretion” in going after illegals, considering factors including whether they had come here as children. Hello, Jose.

Then there’s Jose, the person. I’ve stayed in touch, been on panels with him and as recently as January recommended him for an important job at the Hearst newspaper division in New York. I feel silly for it, but not felonious.

Last month, he went to dinner at the home of a local big time businessman and philanthropist, seated among digital media gurus, and was being considered there for a job at a prestigious journalism institution back East.

During that period he was quietly and carefully lawyering up and basting his plans for coming out and starting a new organization – Define American – to get the DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act passed and raise awareness that the illegal population is also upscale as much as it involves day laborers and house cleaners. Though most of the latter don’t have media handlers and legal teams.

While publicity and good lawyers may save his residency, the most likely road kill in the Jose conflagration could be Peter Perl, a Post training editor who knew the secret and kept it. The Post said ominously that what he did “was wrong.” It’s the knowing that sideswiped careers of people like Meg Whitman and failed federal job candidates Zoe Baird and Bernard Kerik.

Post executive editor Marcus Brauchli told me “what Jose did was wrong. It’s a compelling and interesting story” and Jose is a “talented and imaginative guy.” But Brauchli seems to feel duped.

No so much former Post managing editor – now managing editor at Frontline, Phil Bennett. “I’m torn,” Bennett said when I spoke with him a few days ago. “Honesty matters. But what Jose has done is courageous and I admire him for it.”Jose is a hustler, what one friend called “a classic self-promoter” who wisely identified those who could and would help him. He had to be to maintain the life he did. He refers to the “underground railroad” of secret allies and assistance, but his was like a posh lounge car, not a grape field.

He says he’s flabbergasted to be the story instead of reporting it. “The irony is that I had to come out to be unemployed,” he says, now that he won’t be able to get a legitimate job; his only financial support comes from his new organization’s backers. Coming out as gay in high school wasn’t “nearly as dangerous.” While close friends knew his sexual orientation, they didn’t know he was here illegally.

He’s now freed from the fear that cut into his pleasure over his many successes – a documentary screened at the Tribeca festival, the Zuckerberg get. But the future is, as they say on TV news, uncertain. He complains about his Times mug shot but revels a little in their proposed magazine headline: “OUTLAW.” He’s just barely 30.

For me, despite the subterfuge, he’s done what he intended: given a surprising, articulate and human face to an important issue for at least some of those millions of people out there floating in terrifying limbo. For me, it’s the face of a friend

Like many successful young people blessed with talent and brains, Jose has a healthy dose of hubris. He’ll have to watch that as much as he will the approaching footsteps of ICE enforcers.

But if he can come out, the force of his story – both good reaction and bad – and his project just might lubricate the politically tarred-up wheels of government and help craft sane immigration policy. If it has that effect, we should forgive him his lies.

Roy used the occasion to emphasize how Congress’ policy of open borders has deeply harmed American workers, something [...]]]> It’s good to see Roy Beck, of NumbersUSA, appear on C-SPAN’s morning call-in show. C-SPAN has not been fair over the years to the friends of borders and sovereignty, so their welcoming Roy Beck is a nice change.

Roy used the occasion to emphasize how Congress’ policy of open borders has deeply harmed American workers, something you don’t hear on the media even in this terrible economy.

The [...]]]> That hopey-changey thing offered by candidate Obama has not worked out so well in actual practice for black Americans. The President feels sure of their loyalty to him no matter what, so he confidently continues to work for a mass amnesty of illegal aliens which would enormously increase an already flooded pool of legal workers.

The article below doesn’t mention immigration, but adding 125,000 additional workers monthly via legal immigration is a stab in the back to all unemployed Americans.

When the economy was booming and business said it needed more foreign worker bees, Congress complied with additional visas of various categories. But now, with over 20 million Americans underemployed or out of work entirely, there is no parallel response in Washington. In fact, the President’s amnesty scheme would worsen the pain of unemployed citizens by increasing the number of workers competing for each available job.

Amnesty boosters live in a different universe where actual facts do not matter and political tom-foolery is spun up out of fables like America’s need for workers in some dim future. Mainstream economic prognosticators say some of the long-term unemployed may never work again. Even so, amnesty cheerleaders think America should stock up on millions of spare immigrants just in case.

America doesn’t need millions more excess workers, either from legal immigration or a massive amnesty for foreign lawbreakers.

Employment rate for black men at record low, Yahoo News, May 10, 2011

If the election of America’s first African-American president was expected to give blacks an economic boost, it hasn’t emerged yet. Indeed, the percentage of African-American men with a job has dropped to its lowest level since records began in 1972, according to the government’s monthly jobs report released last week.

Even as the economy added a better-than-expected 244,000 jobs, the percentage of black males over 20 who are currently employed dropped slightly to 56.9, the Labor Department’s April report shows. For whites, the equivalent figure is 68.1 percent.

Before this recession, the percentage of black adult men with a job had never dropped below 60 percent, according to Labor Department statistics.

And among blacks, it’s not just men who are suffering. Just 51.5 percent of African-Americans across the board–compared to 59.5 percent of whites–have a job, the numbers show. That’s the lowest level for blacks since 1984. (That group includes 16- to 19-year-olds, who are employed at a far lower rate than their elders.)

These employment rates are calculated differently from the top-line unemployment rate, which includes only those actively looking for work, and inched back up last month to 9 percent.

Heather Boushey, an economist with the liberal Center for American Progress, told The Lookout it’s not just African-Americans who have been hit particularly hard.  It’s also other traditionally struggling groups, such as ex-offenders and those without a college degree.

“Anyone who would be last on an employer’s list to get a job is really in bad shape” in the current downturn, Boushey said.

And employers’ hiring practices may be making the problem worse. As we’ve reported, online job listings telling the unemployed not to apply have proliferated in recent years. The federal government is currently probing whether such listings illegally discriminate against African Americans, who are disproportionately likely to be among the jobless.

Nonetheless, much of the media has focused on the travails of educated white men–still a comparatively flourishing group–during the downturn.