Frankly, I welcome this trend -- which highlights a difference between legal immigrants and the border-jumping immigration criminals invading our country.

The number of naturalized citizens in the United States grew to nearly 13 million between 1995 and 2005, a historic increase that reflects the nation's changing ethnic makeup and could increase the power of immigrants to affect public policy at the ballot box, according to a study released yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center.

More than half of the nation's legal immigrants are now naturalized citizens, "the highest level in a quarter century and a 15 percent increase since 1990," when the proportion of naturalized immigrants reached historic lows, the study said. Since 1995, the average number of yearly naturalizations has surpassed 650,000, compared with 150,000 in 1970.

Maryland was one of five states where more than 70 percent of eligible immigrants became citizens. The number of naturalizations in Maryland rose to 274,000 in 2005 from 120,000 in 1995.

Sixty-five percent of Virginia's eligible immigrants were naturalized in 2005, along with 50 percent of eligible immigrants in the District.

"We've seen dramatic changes in countries across the board," said Jeffrey Passel, the Pew Hispanic Center's senior research associate. "Today's immigrants are interested in becoming U.S. citizens," he said.

Mexicans were by far the largest group to naturalize, at more than 1.5 million. The number represented a 144 percent increase over 10 years, and it could have been much higher because Mexicans are the least likely of all groups to naturalize, Passel said. Another 3 million are eligible.

Immigrants from Cuba, China and the Philippines followed Mexicans as the largest groups to naturalize, Passel said. Most settled in four states -- California, New York, Texas and Florida.

I'm an advocate of strong enforcement of our immigration laws -- but I welcome those who follow them, and am pleased to see them join us as citizens of this great country.

Posted by: Greg at 10:27 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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I'm curious -- what other violations of federal law does the New York Times want local governments to aid and abet?

In cities and suburbs across America, the confluence of homes, big-box stores and striving immigrant men has created an informal, often unruly job marketplace that has survived every effort to ban it or harass it out of existence.

This market, of Latino day laborers, is hardly the only manifestation of the shadow immigrant economy, but it is the hardest to ignore. These are the immigrants whom localities seem the most desperate to subdue, usually with laws against loitering and job solicitation. A Los Angeles suburb, Baldwin Park, is the latest of dozens to tackle the problem, with an antisoliciting bill written broadly enough to cover cookie-selling Girl Scouts but really meant for the Latino men at Home Depot.

Such crackdowns are constitutionally dubious and usually fail, and some lawmakers are having doubts about them. Last week, on Long Island, the Suffolk County Legislature defeated a bill to drive away day laborers by forbidding them to “obstruct” county roads. The majority understood that the dimly reasoned measure would have simply diverted workers and contractors’ trucks onto other roads while inviting civil-rights lawsuits. It would not have reduced the population of day laborers the least bit.

It was a good outcome for a bad bill, but the county is still stuck where it has been for years — wondering how to handle a volatile mixture of men and trucks in a suburb that wishes they would go away. A good next step for Suffolk would be to come around to a solution that other communities have tried, with generally positive results: a hiring site.

One can oppose illegal immigration and still approve of hiring sites, places where laborers can find shade, toilets and a safe place to negotiate jobs with contractors and homeowners. The most obvious reasons are crowd control and traffic safety.

But an equally compelling reason is that hiring sites impose order on free-market chaos. An unregulated day-labor bazaar wallows in the mud flats of capitalism, benefiting sleazy contractors and fostering rock-bottom wages and working conditions for all laborers, legal or not. Hiring sites that register and monitor contractors and laborers can hold them all to account. Employers who undercut competitors and rob workers will find it hard to return to a well-established hiring site, and drunks and belligerents among the laborers will be pressured to toe the line. These places are sometimes called “shape-up sites,” an apt term in more ways than one.

Some lawmakers have gotten over the notion that hiring sites are gifts to illegals, and have concluded that approaching day laborers as community members, with rights and civic responsibilities, is smarter than ranting about them as pests. It is heartening that some local officials are willing to confront the realities of a flawed immigration system and to work responsibly to lessen its troublesome side effects.

Then there are those who hold out hope that with just one more crackdown, one more ticketing blitz, the men who make our suburbs gleam will take their sweat and muscle elsewhere and leave us alone to tend our homes and hedges by ourselves. Government officials on Long Island, as elsewhere, have tried stiff-necked hostility to day laborers, and have reaped years of failure. They should consider hiring sites as the next, positive step — one that promises not only to be practical and humane, but also effective.

You know what -- I bet that government sponsored crack-sales sites would be a good idea as well. After all, it would help to regulate an unruly illegal market, and make the illegal purchase of illegal goods much easier -- as well as stop the harassment of an often unruly drug marketplace that has survived every effort to ban it or harass it out of existence

hey, it makes as much sense as the idea of government sponsored hiring sites for border-jumping immigration criminals.

Posted by: Greg at 10:36 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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Even though President Bush pandered to Latin Americans by proposing an amnesty program that most Americans (you know, the people who are citizens of THIS country) reject.

President Bush yesterday said he wants the House and Senate to pass immigration bills by August but said the U.S. will continue to send home illegal aliens caught in the meantime, disappointing his Guatemalan hosts who wanted all deportations to end.

"The United States will enforce our law. It's against the law to hire somebody who's in our country illegally, and we are a nation of law," Mr. Bush said.

He said his plan is to find a bill "most Republicans are comfortable with" in the Senate, then begin working with Democrats in the Senate, before turning to the House.

But he received an earful from Guatemalan President Oscar Berger, who said he was worried Guatemalans are being deported "without clear justification," based on a raid at a leather goods factory last week in Massachusetts.

"The Guatemalan people would have preferred a more clear and positive response no more deportations, so to say," he said, according to a translation of his remarks at a joint press conference with Mr. Bush.

I've got an idea -- if these nations object so strongly to American sovereignty and American immigration policy, they should put their money (or rather, put our money) where their mouth is and reject all American foreign aid in protest. Otherwise, if these nations continue to promote the breaking of American law and violation of American sovereignty while sucking at the American teat, we should cut them off.

Posted by: Greg at 06:08 AM | Comments (5) | Add Comment
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The non-enforcement of America's immigration laws over the last couple of decades has been a disgrace that have allowed millions of border-jumping immigration criminals to enter our country and set up housekeeping in our communities, taking jobs from American citizens. In the proces, they have started families, and some of their children are American citizens. That is why the Houston Chronicle has come out with another editorial attacking the enforcement of immigration law and advocating against border security -- because of the impact of such policies upon those children.

Somehow, though it was meant to defend taxpayers, legal workers and oppressed factory employees, last week's immigration raid in New Bedford, Mass., ended up trampling all of the above.

Worse, the raid managed to traumatize an entirely different group: the 200 children left behind when their parents were seized from the Michael Bianco Inc. leather-goods plant.

The resulting municipal crisis exposed the stunning shortsightedness of Department of Homeland Security forces, which oversaw the raid. But in the bigger picture, it showed, again, that symbolic workplace sweeps are pointless substitutes for workplace/immigration laws that function: visa quotas that match labor demands and a reliable ID system for employers who really do want to comply with the law.

Currently, the New Bedford employers walk free until their court date to determine if they abused workers and guided them to buy fraudulent documents. Meanwhile, most of the almost 350 undocumented workers —who needed jobs so badly they put up with the firm's alleged mistreatment — are behind bars. Single mothers of very young children have now been released, federal officials say. But many of the estimated 200 children who were left behind remained cut off from their parents.

The stranded children initially included nursing infants; they still include small children stuck with foster care, relatives or, frighteningly, total strangers such as landlords, after their parents didn't come home from work.

"It's been a widespread humanitarian crisis here in New Bedford," Corinn Williams, director of the Community Economic Center of Southeastern Massachusetts, told the Associated Press. Added an outraged Gov. Deval Patrick, "Latchkey kids and some adolescents as well might have gone home after school with no one to take care for them."

To try to locate them and other children who fell through the cracks, Massachusetts has established a hotline. What a pitiful coda to a massive federal action that was weeks, maybe months, in the planning.

I'm curious -- what other group of criminals should not be arrested, and what other laws should not be enforced, because of the impact upon children? I noticed that the Chronicle didn't speak out on behalf of the children of the Enron defendnts or those charged with any other crime -- only on behalf of the children of foreigners guilty of breaking and entering into the united states illegally.

I'll reiterate my position on the question of children of illegal immigrants. Those who are not US citizens need to be shipped back to their country of origin along with their parents. Those who are US citizens need to be placed in foster care pending the revocation of the parental rights of their criminal parents -- or those parents need to permanently and irrevocably renounce the US citizenship of their offspring and take them back to their homeland. Just as we do not allow other criminals to benefit from the proceeds of their crimes, so, too, we need to ensure that border-jumping immigration criminals do not benefit from having had the opportunity to reproduce during the time they were violating US law. Oh, yeah -- and we also need to amend the constitution to end birthright citizenship for the chldren of illegal immigrants.

Is my position harsh? You bet -- but it strikes me as the only way to take away the incentive of having anchor babies.

Posted by: Greg at 01:34 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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After all, just because they are violent gang-bangers already under arrest doesn't mean they should be looked at for additional offenses.

Or at least that is the position taken by advocates for border-jumping immigration criminals.

A spot check by federal agents has identified 59 street gang members in Southern California jails who are illegal immigrants subject to deportation, sparking a debate about the role of border enforcement in the region's battle against violent gangs.

The initial identification of deportable gang members came during a first-of-its-kind screening of a portion of jail inmates last month.

The review will continue, and officials expect during the first year to identify 700 to 800 gang members who are illegal immigrants, according to Jim Hayes, director of the Los Angeles field office for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

The results so far have some officials convinced that border enforcement needs to be a big part of combating the gang problem.

"We play a vital role with respect to foreign nationals who are in gangs here," Hayes said.

Of course, LA's Special Order 40 effectively provides sanctuary for criminal border-jumpers by preventing LA cops from inquiring about immigration status. Only when they comply with federal law and allow federal officials to check on immigration status does the magnitude of the problem become clear. And while different numbers relatd top different populations are cited in the article, it is not unreasonable to conclude that anywhere from 10% to 25% of those arrested in LA are eligible for deportation -- but the city is aiding and abetting their illegal residence in this country with this policy.

I'm not for random stops of people on the stree demanding proof of citizenship -- that is absurd. But a citizenship/immigration status check following arrest is hardly intrusive -- and makes good sense from a public policy standpoint.

Posted by: Greg at 12:50 PM | No Comments | Add Comment
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So much for the notion that border-jumping immigration criminals are “doing the jobs Americans won’t do.”

Last summer, 40 or 50 carpenters from Local 1305, the Fall River chapter of the New England Council of Carpenters, didn't work at all.

Ron Rheaume, the business manager for the union, said that means about 10 percent of the union's 500-strong work force couldn't find any jobs for the first time in recent memory.

The biggest reason, he believes, is the influx of illegal immigrants who have begun to work in the New England construction industry over the past four to five years.

"It's blatant and it's everywhere," he said. "It's happening in prevailing wage jobs and it's happening in state projects. It's happening all over the place."

John O'Connor, a senior organizer with the carpenter's union, said the employment situation in Massachusetts has been so changed by illegal labor that it is even becoming impossible for high school students to find such traditional part-time positions as bus boys, landscapers or painters.

And it's not just a problem of the immigrants undercutting high wages by working cheap, he said.

"They're taking the lower-wage jobs from Americans who work in lower-wage jobs."

Round ‘em up! Ship ‘em back! Rawhide!

Posted by: Greg at 09:47 AM | No Comments | Add Comment
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