My Conversation With a Coup Plotter

I found myself wondering how someone as obviously intelligent and well-educated as Eastman could present such flimsy arguments. Was he just lying, or had rightwing ideology warped his mind to the point where he could believe what he was writing?

By David L. Wilson, CounterPunch

John C. Eastman Photo: Public Domain

December 9, 2021

Claremont Institute legal scholar John Eastman is now best known for his efforts to help Donald Trump overturn the 2020 presidential election, but in August 2015 he was still a professor at the Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law and someone whose legal opinions the New York Times considered worthy of publication.

The occasion back then was a proposal from candidate Donald Trump to end birthright citizenship. The current requirement that children born here be recognized as U.S. citizens was “the biggest magnet for illegal immigration,” he argued.[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/12/09/my-conversation-with-a-coup-plotter/

Media Don’t Factcheck Right-Wing Migration Myths

[T]his imbalance is typical of much corporate media immigration coverage. Right-wing media figures and Republican politicians get little pushback when they promote evidence-free, often absurd claims about incentives for unauthorized immigration.

By David L. Wilson, Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting

December 1, 2021

Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked a bizarre question at President Joe Biden’s November 3 press briefing. The president seemed to misunderstand the question, which referred to potential settlements of a lawsuit stemming from the Trump administration’s notorious 2017–18 family separation policy. Biden bungled his response, apparently calling reports about the settlement “garbage.”

Not surprisingly, the media ran with the story of Biden’s blunder. Doocy’s question, on the other hand, was mostly ignored or played down.[…]

Read the full article:

https://fair.org/home/media-dont-factcheck-right-wing-migration-myths/

Photo: Los Angeles Times

 

Ignore the Evidence: the “Invasion” Story, Continued

The Hype. Montage: BBC

Unauthorized immigration across the U.S.-Mexico border is now the lowest it’s been in the past 25 years, Center for Migration Studies (CMS) demographer Robert Ewing wrote in February, citing reports from the CMS and the Pew Research Center. The current undocumented population is estimated at 10.7 million, down more than a million since 2010.

We might expect this finding to appear in a few headlines, especially at a time when President Trump has declared a national emergency on the basis of a supposed security crisis at the southwestern border. Instead, the U.S. media went with headlines like “February had highest total of undocumented immigrants crossing U.S. border in 12 years.” Some of the articles did note that even with the one-month increase, border apprehensions remain dramatically lower than they were in 2000, but this was unlikely to offset the effect of the headlines.

And few noted a point made by University of Illinois at Chicago Latin American and Latino Studies professor Adam Goodman in a twitter thread: many of the undocumented immigrants were asylum seekers that government agents turned away at ports of entry, “forcing them to (a) wait in precarious conditions and in violation of domestic and international law, or (b) or cross the border without authorization.”

“By inflating apprehension statistics,” Goodman goes on, “officials simultaneously (a) create the notion of a surge or invasion at the border, (b) call attention to the need for additional funding, and (c) celebrate DHS's ‘accomplishments.’” The administration then releases the “inflated statistics with hope that mainstream media outlets will pick them up, in turn reinforcing [the administration’s] desired political narrative.” If the media take the bait, the government sends out “inflammatory email blasts citing media reports of the inflated statistics [it] circulated as evidence of a CRISIS AT THE BORDER that constitutes a national emergency.”

Unfortunately, there’s an ongoing problem with the corporate media allowing the White House to create hysteria about asylum seekers at the border—despite Trump’s routine assistance that the “fake news” media are mistreating him. In reality, Trump owes a lot to the media outlets: all the way through the 2016 they failed to push back on repeated claims by all the GOP candidates about a wave of unauthorized immigration that had actually ended in 2008.

The Reality. Graph from Center for Migration Studies

Meanwhile, Trump shows no sign of toning down his anti-immigrant hate speech even after an Australian white supremacist murdered 49 worshippers at two New Zealand mosques. The killer had justified the massacre as a way “to show the invaders that our lands will never be their lands.” At the White House the next day the U.S. president echoed this rhetoric: “People hate the word ‘invasion,’ but that’s what it is,” he said, referring to unauthorized migrants crossing the southwest border.

Trump also discounted the dangers posed by violent white supremacists. “I think it’s a small group of people,” announced the white-supremacist-in-chief.

Researchers Claim the U.S. Has 22 Million Undocumented Immigrants

Authors of a controversial population study describe their methods

An academic paper published on September 21 by the academic journal PLOS One claims that as of 2016 the unauthorized population was between 16.2 million and 29.5 million. The number, proposed by three scholars associated with the Yale School of Management, is about twice as high as the estimated range of 10.8 million to 12.1 million used by most demographers, including those at the Migration Policy Institute (MPI), the Pew Research Center, and the government’s own Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

PLOS One simultaneously published a paper by MPI researchers sharply criticizing the Yale study.

Most demographers estimate the undocumented population’s size by applying a residual method to data from the Census Bureau, DHS, and DHS’s predecessor, the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS). The data is compared to other public records to adjust for the well-known phenomenon of underreporting by undocumented immigrants. The Yale study takes a different approach: the researchers use government records and projections to estimate the inflow of unauthorized immigrants over the border and through overstays and then subtract an estimate of the immigrants’ outflow. (Some of the government’s estimates are discussed here and here.)

But as the MPI paper notes, it’s only in the past few years that DHS has been providing enough data on unauthorized inflows and outflows to justify estimates. The Yale study projects current estimates back to 1990, ignoring some of the major changes in immigration patterns that resulted from increased border enforcement over the 26 years from 1990 to 2016. The backwards projection method also means that any errors in the estimates for an earlier year are compounded in each subsequent year—in contrast to the residual method, which allows for researchers to make a fresh estimate each year.

The MPI study notes that the “residual method was put to the real-world test successfully in the 1980s,” when “estimates generated with this methodology” turned out to be “largely similar to the actual number of unauthorized immigrants who came forward to get legalized” through the 1986 amnesty. (We make the same point in the first chapter of The Politics of Immigration’s second edition.)

How Will the Right Use the New Study?

Anti-immigrant forces have been relatively silent so far—probably because of the current media attention to various crises for the Trump administration—but it seems likely they’ll be citing the Yale study in the future: anti-immigrant groups and rightwing pundits have spent years exaggerating the size of the undocumented population. For example, author and TV personality Ann Coulter regularly puts the number of undocumented immigrants at 30 million.

The rightwing position already gets a good deal of popular support because of widespread misperceptions about immigration. In 2011 Transatlantic Trends researchers asked people in the United States to estimate the proportion of immigrants here. On average, U.S. respondents thought immigrants—naturalized, documented and undocumented—made up 37.8 percent of the U.S. population at a time when the actual proportion was under 14 percent. (If we used the Yale study's estimates, the total foreign-born population would still be less than 18 percent.)

Inflated rhetoric by politicians leads to inflated numbers in people’s minds, and the media often fail to counter this with coverage of some important statistics. How do Coulter and fellow pundit Michelle Malkin get away with their claim that the 11 million figure must be wrong? Their supposed evidence is that the number hasn’t changed over the last decade. This seems convincing because the media constantly report figures on border apprehensions. So the public knows that unauthorized migrants are continuing to enter the country, and it seems like a common-sense conclusion that the undocumented population must be increasing. The media rarely note that undocumented immigrants are also leaving, at the about same rate as they’re entering.

Interestingly, one leading immigration-restrictionist organization, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), immediately rejected the Yale study. A September 22 CIS article expressed agreement with the MPI’s critique and added some additional points. For example, CIS estimates that if the Yale figure was correct, the Department of Education’s 2014 count of children enrolled in schools would have been about 1 million higher. (The Southern Poverty Law Center lists CIS as an anti-immigrant hate group; however, CIS statistics tend to be accurate, although the group’s analysis of them is often questionable.)

Who Are the Study’s Authors?

The study’s authors seemed a little defensive in a September 21 video presentation posted by Yale Insights to explain their methods The authors insisted that they had no political agenda to promote. Co-author Edward H. Kaplan pointed out that the study could be used to counter efforts to depict undocumented immigrants as criminals, since if the undocumented population was doubled, the undocumented crime rate would fall in half.

(This might actually undercut the report. Based on statistics from Texas, the Cato Institute’s Alex Nowrasteh has determined that undocumented immigrants are convicted of crimes at a lower rate than the native born but at a higher rate than immigrants with legal status, who tend to be older, more affluent and less likely to be arrested. The Yale study would have the improbable result that undocumented immigrants have same conviction rate as authorized immigrants.)

Between them the Yale authors have expertise in statistics, management, economics and engineering, but none seem especially knowledgeable about demography or immigration issues. Publications by Kaplan and Jonathan S. Feinstein include studies on terrorism and counter-terrorism. Kaplan seems especially interested in the subject. One article “presents staffing models for covert counterterrorism agencies such as the New York City Police Department, the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, Britain's Security Service or the Israeli Shin Bet,” according to its abstract.

Humans, “Aliens,” and “Shithole Countries”

There is no evidence that Donald Trump has ever in his life performed a single selfless act, let alone any act of heroism. Probably he wouldn’t be able even to imagine the nobility of character I witnessed among Port-au-Prince residents after the earthquake, and among “alien” activists like Ravi and Jean here in New York.

By David L. Wilson, MR Online

January 14, 2018

Exactly eight years ago, on January 12, 2010, I happened to be in Port-au-Prince when a major earthquake struck southern Haiti, killing tens or hundreds of thousands of people.

That night and in the five days that followed I saw a few Haitians acting selfishly, but mostly I watched and interviewed people trying to help each other, many of them digging through rubble with hand tools or bare fingers, sometimes endangering themselves in attempts to rescue friends, neighbors, and even complete strangers.[…]

Read the full article:

https://mronline.org/2018/01/14/humans-aliens-and-shithole-countries/

Miami commemoration of the 2010 earthquake. Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

DACA Update #3: Will There Be a Deal, and What Would It Look Like?

DACA supporters march in San Francisco. Photo: David Bacon

President Trump had dinner with Democratic Congressional leaders Senator Chuck Schumer (NY) and Representative Nancy Pelosi (CA) the evening of September 13. Afterwards the two Democrats issued a statement saying they’d made a deal with Trump to protect the nearly 800,000 young immigrants currently enrolled in President Obama’s Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which the Trump administration is terminating as of next March. “We agreed to enshrine the protections of DACA into law quickly, and to work out a package of border security, excluding the wall, that’s acceptable to both sides,” Schumer and Pelosi wrote.

As has been usual with this administration, the next day the president contradicted himself several times, but in the end it appeared that Trump and the Democrats had at least made, as Republican senator John Cornyn (TX) put it, “a deal to make a deal.” So passage of a new law to protect young undocumented immigrants is possible, although far from certain.

What Would Be Traded Off?

To steer such a law through Congress the Democrats would need to make compromises in order to get enough Republicans legislators on board.

On September 14 the National Review published an article outlining a mainstream Republican negotiating position for possible talks. The author, National Review deputy managing editor Robert VerBruggen, isn’t especially interested in increased border security. Instead, he wants Republicans to push for an expansion of the E-Verify program, through which employers use an online connection to government data bases to check the legal status of new hires. Making E-Verify mandatory for all private employers should be non-negotiable, VerBruggen writes. And he insists that if DACA recipients are given access to legal status or citizenship, they should be barred from applying for green cards for their parents. Finally, he wants changes to legal immigration, moving away from the current priority for family unification toward greater emphasis on bringing in highly skilled workers. (Although he doesn’t mention it, this would not only add valuable technical workers to the U.S. work pool—it would also lure them away from other countries that might be economic rivals.)

How much of this would the Democrats accept? Many of them already back mandatory E-Verify. It’s true that Chuck Schumer has objections to the program—but only because he wants something tougher. In a 2010 Washington Post op-ed, he and Republican senator Lindsey Graham (SC) called for a biometric Social Security card. “Prospective employers would be responsible for swiping the cards through a machine to confirm a person's identity and immigration status,” Schumer and Graham explained. “Employers who refused to swipe the card or who otherwise knowingly hired unauthorized workers would face stiff fines and, for repeat offenses, prison sentences.”

Will the Democrats Cave?

The Democrats don’t actually have a good record on helping youthful immigrants like the DACA recipients.

Proposals to legislate legalization for childhood arrivals began with the bipartisan DREAM Act in 2001, but the bill stalled in Congress for years. From 2009 to 2011 the Democrats controlled both houses of Congress and the presidency; they could have passed the bill then, but didn’t. Pressed by the “Dreamers”—young immigrant activists supporting the DREAM Act—in June 2010, Schumer claimed that passing the bill would hurt the chances for passing comprehensive immigration reform later. The Democrats finally brought the DREAM Act up for a vote in December 2010. It passed the House, but the Senate never voted. Supporters couldn’t come up with the 60 votes necessary to block a filibuster by opponents. Three Republicans backed the bill, but it was opposed by five Democrats: Max Baucus and John Tester (MT), Kay Hagan (NC), Ben Nelson (NE), and Mark Pryor of (AR).

Photo: National Immigrant Youth Alliance/The Dream Is Now

Will Trump’s Base Desert Him?

Schumer and Pelosi's claim that Trump was making a deal with them stirred outrage among some of Trump’s loudest supporters. “Breitbart News called the president ‘Amnesty Don,’” Politico reported. “Commentator Ann Coulter mused about impeaching Trump. And hard-line immigration hawks in Congress like Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) called the contours of the deal an ‘irreparable’ betrayal of Trump's base.”

But it’s not clear that the far right was really breaking with Trump. It seems more likely that people like Coulter are temporarily distancing themselves from the president while stirring up their backers to help push for strong anti-immigrant measures in any potential legislative compromise. A New York Times op-ed by Eric Cantor, a former House majority leader for the Republicans, suggests the latter course. “It is well past time for Republicans to stand up to those on the right who are quick to denounce any sensible solution as amnesty,” he wrote, “and for Democrats to stand up to those on the left who rail against any meaningful steps toward border security and immigration enforcement.”

In other words, the Republicans can hold back the Breitbart types if the Democrats agree to hold back pro-immigrant activists.

(People might wonder why Cantor and Breitbart News see “amnesty” as a pejorative term. This is a reference to the last major legalization of undocumented immigrants, in 1986, which was widely referred to as an "amnesty." Ever since then the right has claimed that the 1986 legalization caused the sharp increase in unauthorized immigration during the 1990s. But there’s no evidence for the claim. Asked to produce evidence, rightwingers generally refuse to answer; an effort to cite the argument in a 2015 lawsuit was laughed out of court. So “amnesty” as used by Cantor and Breitbart is simply a far-right fantasy like “death panels” and the threat of Sharia law. Nevertheless, media like the New York Times still let it be employed in this sense.)

What Do the Dreamers Say?
While reporting extensively on the reactions of pundits and politicians, the media haven’t said much about the views of the people actually affected—the DACA recipients themselves.

One exception was NPR’s Morning Edition on September 15. NPR correspondent Richard Gonzales reported on interviews with Dreamers:  “[T]hey don't want a deal that would, let’s say, implement the E-Verify system, which requires employers to check the legal status of people they hire. To the Dreamers, that’s just another way of increasing the threat of deportation to their undocumented parents. And they also don’t want a deal in which their DACA status is a tradeoff for enhanced border security. That, they say, would further what they consider the militarization of the border.” (Even in this otherwise excellent report, Morning Edition host Mary Louise Kelly persisted in using in the far right’s sense of “amnesty” as a pejorative term.)

Could the DACA Threat Set Off a Big Immigration Fight in September?

February protest in Seattle. Photo: Ted S. Warren AP

A threatened lawsuit by anti-immigrant hardliners could put DACA on hold or even end it completely unless Congress takes action or the Trump administration decides to defend the deferred action program. The hardliners set the deadline for a response on September 5, the day Congress resumes, so it’s clearly an effort to spark a showdown on immigration policy the Congress within the administration.

What’s less clear is how immigrant rights activists are going to respond. Democrats in Congress are apparently looking for a compromise. McClatchy reports that Chuck Schumer, the Democrats’ Senate leader, is “asking if [immigrant] advocates will give in on any other parts of the immigration fight in order to save DACA.” Others are wondering why we would need to "give in to save DACA" when a poll last November found that the public already opposes efforts to repeal the program by a margin of more than two to one. –TPOI editor

The future of DACA suddenly looks very shaky

If Trump makes 780,000 young immigrants vulnerable to deportation again, all hell might break loose.

By Dara Lind, Vox

July 14, 2017

President Trump looks like he might be gearing up to touch the third rail of immigration policy in 2017: ending the Obama-era Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which allowed young unauthorized immigrants to work legally and protected them from deportation.

Democrats are bracing for a second wave of an immigration crackdown this fall: White House adviser Stephen Miller is reportedly working with members of Congress on a bill to curb legal immigration, while Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly refused to assure members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus about the future of some immigrants currently protected from deportation.

But it’s DACA that could open the floodgates.[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2017/7/14/15966356/daca-dreamers-trump-amnesty

Democratic leaders to secretly huddle over strategy to save DACA

By Franco Ordoñez, McClatchy DC

July 11, 2017

Senate Democratic leaders will huddle secretly with immigration advocates Wednesday to find out what measures they will — and won’t —support as the clock ticks down on immigration issues that must be decided in the next 50 to 90 days, including the Obama-era policy that grants temporary legal status to immigrants brought into the country illegally as children.

Knowing that the deferred action program known as DACA — Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals — could be eliminated if it ends up in court, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and other leaders are expected to hold a conversation with advocates on the realities of the political fight, pressing for unity and asking if the advocates will give in on any other parts of the immigration fight in order to save DACA.

“Schumer is a good person to be meeting with right now because he has to hold his guys together to block some of this stuff that is coming from the House,” said a congressional staffer who could not speak publicly about Democratic strategy.[…]

Read the full article:

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/news/politics-government/white-house/article160805234.html

Correction, July 18: The posting has been corrected to reflect the fact that the lawsuit against DACA  is threatened, not actually in progress.

'Anti-Sharia' Marchers Met With Counter-Protests Around The Country

Despite all the media attention the Islamophobes get, their "anti-Sharia" rallies turned out to be pathetic little affairs overshadowed by counter-protests.--TPOI editor

Seattle counter-protest. Photo:Ted S. Warren/AP

By James Doubek, NPR

June 11, 2017

Protesters who gathered on Saturday to denounce Islamic law were met across the country with equally sized or larger counter-protests.

Organizers called the "March Against Sharia" rallies to protest what they say is the threat to U.S. society posed by the set of traditional Muslim practices, which they say includes oppression of women, honor killings, homophobic violence, female genital mutilation and other abuses.

But reports and pictures show large counter-protests around the country, with activists accusing the "anti-sharia" marchers of racism and Islamophobia.[...]

Read the full article:

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/06/11/532454216/anti-sharia-marchers-met-with-counter-protests-around-the-country

‘We were used, abused and exploited’

Trump With Stolen Lives Families. Photo: AP

Victims of immigrant crime say they were taken advantage of by Trump and a non-profit group backing him.

By Kenneth P. Vogel, Politico

June 1, 2017

More than a dozen families involved in the Houston-based Remembrance Project — including two who spoke at the Republican National Convention and several more who spoke at Trump’s rallies or were featured in his campaign ads — have parted ways with the organization, according to people familiar with the situation, including six of the families.

Several of the families say they feel let down partly because the charity has done nothing to help them financially, despite suggesting that the money it raised — including $52,000 or more raised with Trump’s help — would be used to assist victims’ families. A handful of the families are planning a new group through which they intend to provide such assistance. Several others have demanded that the Remembrance Project refrain from using their names and likenesses — as well as those of their deceased loved ones — in its marketing materials, and some discussed legal action to force the group to comply.

“We were used, abused and exploited, and what’s worse is that my son was used abused and exploited and is still being used, abused and exploited,” said Brenda Sparks, a former Remembrance Project participant.[...]

Read the full article:

http://www.politico.com/story/2017/06/01/trump-immigrants-abuse-campaign-239006

Congressional Rightwingers Push Anti-Immigrant Wish List

Tea Partier Labrador. (Kyle Mills/Lewiston Tribune)

From the Immigration Action Bulletin

Number 15    May 19, 2017

Welcome to the “Anti-Immigrant Wish List” edition of the Bulletin.

Last week, with the country's attention distracted by presidential chaos, Republicans in the U.S.

House of Representatives moved forward on the most sweeping package of federal anti-immigrant legislation in decades.

The heart of this cruel and costly legislation is the Davis-Oliver Act (HR 2431), a $23-billion dollar anti-immigrant wish list introduced by Idaho Tea Partier Raul Labrador. It is flanked by two supporting bills (HR 2406 and 2407) and championed by every prominent nativist organization in the county.  

In its current form, the 185-page, 616-section bill contains just about every extreme right wing immigration enforcement proposal you can imagine--and more. [...]

Read this issue of the bulletin:

http://us15.campaign-archive1.com/?u=a27b0fff1c5942310a69d1aab&id=145e0c3d5e

Subscribe to the bulletin or read other issues:

http://us15.campaign-archive2.com/home/?u=a27b0fff1c5942310a69d1aab&id=c9bed72129

Who Is a ‘Criminal’?

Exile from one’s home is historically considered one of the worst punishments the state could employ; it was, after all, one of the traditional Greek and Roman punishments for murder, their alternative to the death penalty.

By Jason Stanley, New York Times

May 1, 2017

It was the spring of 1936. My grandmother, Ilse Stanley, had just returned from a theater tour that had kept her away from Berlin for almost the whole winter, only to discover a city in which “more and more friends were missing.” Soon after, a cousin arrived at her home. The Gestapo, her cousin told her, had taken her husband away to a concentration camp. In her 1957 book, “The Unforgotten,” my grandmother describes asking her cousin about the reasons for her husband’s arrest. Her answer:

“Because he was a criminal with a record. He had paid two fines in court: one for speeding and one for some other traffic fine. They said they finally wanted to do what the court had missed doing all these years: to get rid of all Jews with criminal records. A traffic fine — a criminal record!”[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/01/opinion/who-is-a-criminal.html

Sessions, Feere and Kirchner: The Rightwing Fringe Now Directs Immigration Policy

While the media remain focused on Syria and Russia, the Trump administration is signaling its intention to step up the repression of immigrants—and maybe their supporters as well.

Yesterday Attorney General Jeff Sessions called on federal prosecutors to increase the use of felony charges against people who entered without authorization, and to crack down on people “harboring” undocumented immigrants. Meanwhile, two former staffers from far-right anti-immigrant groups have now been given influential positions in immigration enforcement: the Center for Immigration Studies’ Jon Feere has been named adviser to the acting ICE director, while FAIR’s Julie Kirchner will be Feere’s counterpart at CBP. (Previous reports indicated that Kirchner would be chief of staff at CBP.) FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies were both founded by “white nationalist” John Tanton.—TPOI editor

“F-ing Horrifying”: Sessions Outlines Immigration Crackdown in “Trump Era”

“The things they want us to do are so horrifying—they want to do harboring cases of three or more people,” the prosecutor continued. “So if you're illegal and you bring your family over, then you're harboring your kid and your wife, and you can go to jail.”

By Deirdre Fulton, Common Dreams

April 12, 2017

In “the Trump era,” as Attorney General Jeff Sessions called it on Tuesday, immigration officials will undertake a harsh crackdown on undocumented migrants—a campaign one veteran federal prosecutor described as “fucking horrifying.”

In his speech at a border port of entry in Nogales, Arizona, “[t]he nation's top law enforcement official outlined a series of changes that he said mark the start of a new push to rid American cities and the border of what he described as ‘filth’ brought on by drug cartels and criminal organizations,” the Associated Press reported.

“This is a new era,” the immigration hardliner told Customs and Border Protection personnel. “This is the Trump era. The lawlessness, the abdication of the duty to enforce our immigration laws, and the catch-and-release practices of old are over.”[…]

Read the full article:

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2017/04/12/f-ing-horrifying-sessions-outlines-immigration-crackdown-trump-era

Hard-line anti-illegal immigration advocates hired at 2 federal agencies

Jon Feere. Photo: C-SPAN

By Maria Santana, CNN

April 12, 2017

(CNN)Two hard-line opponents of illegal immigration have obtained high-level advisory jobs at federal immigration agencies in the Department of Homeland Security.

Jon Feere, a former legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, or CIS, has been hired as an adviser to Thomas D. Homan, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, according to Homeland Security spokesman David Lapan.

Julie Kirchner. Photo: Twitter

At Customs and Border Protection, Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR, has been hired as an adviser to Customs and Border Protection acting Commissioner Kevin McAleenan, said Lapan.

The hiring of Feere and Kirchner at the federal agencies has alarmed immigrants' rights activists.[…]

Read the full article:

http://www.cnn.com/2017/04/11/politics/trump-administration-immigration-advisers/index.html

Former Executive Director of Anti-Immigrant Hate Group FAIR Joins Trump Administration

By Stephen Piggott, Southern Poverty Law Center
January 23, 2017

Julie Kirchner, the former executive director of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), has been named chief of staff at U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), the largest federal law enforcement agency of the United States Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Kirchner worked at America’s most influential anti-immigrant organization for almost ten years before leaving in 2015 to become an immigration advisor to the Trump campaign.

The appointment, reported by multiple sources, suggests that President Trump intends to follow through with his promises to anti-immigrant advocates. Throughout his campaign, Trump worked closely with nativist leaders and has appointed individuals such as U.S. Sen. Jeff Sessions (Attorney General) and Mike Pompeo (Director of the Central Intelligence Agency) who maintain cozy relationships with America’s anti-immigrant movement.[...]

Read the full article:
https://www.splcenter.org/hatewatch/2017/01/23/former-executive-director-anti-immigrant-hate-group-fair-joins-trump-administration#

The Suspected Quebec City Mosque Attacker Was a Right-Wing Troll and Trump Fan

But Fox News and the White House quickly pointed toward Islamic terrorism.

By Mark Follman, Mother Jones
January 30, 2017

Late Monday, Canadian authorities charged Alexandre Bissonnette, a white 27-year-old university student, with multiple counts of murder for an attack on a mosque in Quebec City that left six dead and many others injured. According to a report in the Globe and Mail, the 27-year-old Bissonnette "was known in the city's activist circles as a right-wing troll who frequently took anti-foreigner and anti-feminist positions and stood up for U.S. President Donald Trump." He also reportedly became a fan of far-right French leader Marine Le Pen after she visited Quebec City last March; a childhood friend and fellow student told the Globe and Mail that Bissonnette had become a xenophobe and was "enthralled" by racist nationalism.

With every mass shooting, the initial news is almost always riddled with inaccuracies—misidentification is common, and rarely is there more than one attacker. By now this is very well-known in newsrooms. Earlier on Monday, an additional suspect was reportedly in custody: a man of Moroccan origin. Sure enough, Quebec officials soon clarified that this second person was considered a witness, not a suspect in the attack.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.motherjones.com/politics/2017/01/fox-news-quebec-city-mosque-attack-right-wing-shooter

After Trump win, New Yorkers volunteer to aid fearful commuters

Anti-Trump Protesters in New York. Photo: Marty Goodman

By Alexandra King, CNN
November 13, 2016

(CNN)After President-elect Donald Trump's election win, and amid fears of heightened bigotry and hate crimes, a Brooklyn woman has set up an online form where citizens can volunteer to accompany vulnerable commuters who are worried about being harassed on their way to school or work.

Kayla Santosuosso, the deputy director of the Arab American Association of New York, created the online signup sheet on Thursday evening, after being contacted about a Muslim woman in Harlem who, in the two days since the election, had twice been harassed and threatened on her train journey to college.

"I got a direct message from someone in my network asking me if I knew somebody who could help accompany her," Santosuosso said.

"She had notified the police but she was still facing the prospect of having to go to school in the morning on her own and she was scared."

Santosuosso immediately wrote a public Facebook post to see if anyone was available to help.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.cnn.com/2016/11/13/us/new-york-commuter-volunteers/index.html

Harvard. Debate Briefs on Immigration. 1898-1908

[This blog posting shows how little the immigration "debate" has changed in the last century.--TPOI]

By Irwin Collier, Economics in the Rearview Mirror
September 1, 2016

A few posts ago I provided a short selection from Harvard Professor Thomas Nixon Carver’s autobiography that reminded me of the current Republican U.S. Presidential candidate’s immigration policy. I must still have had Donald Trump on the mind when I stumbled upon a book of model debate briefs for issues of the late 19th/early 20th century. One might want to first watch the speech Donald Trump gave on immigration policy last night (August 31, 2016) in Phoenix, Arizona and then examine the debate briefs below for the following three resolutions:

Resolved, That immigration should be further restricted by law.

Resolved, That a high tax should be laid on all immigrants to the United States.

Resolved, That the policy excluding Chinese laborers from the United States should be maintained and rigorously enforced.

Zombie ideas are everywhere.

Briefs for Debate on Current Political, Economic, and Social Topics.

Edited by
W. Du Bois Brookings, A.B. of the Harvard Law School
And
Ralph Curtis Ringwalt, A.B.
Assistant in Rhetoric in Columbia University

With an introduction by Albert Bushnell Hart, Ph.D.
Professor of Harvard University.

(1908)

[From the Preface:]

“The basis of the work has been a collection of some two hundred briefs prepared during the past ten years by students in Harvard University, under the direction of instructors. Of these briefs the most useful and interesting have been selected; the material has been carefully worked over, and the bibliographies enlarged and verified….

…” the brief is a steady training in the most difficult part of reasoning; in putting together things that belong together; in discovering connections and relations; in subordinating the less important matters. The making of a brief is an intellectual exercise like the study of a disease by a physician, of a case by a lawyer, of a sermon by a minister, of a financial report by a president of a corporation. It is a bit of the practical work of life.[...]

Read the full blog post:
http://www.irwincollier.com/harvard-debate-briefs-on-immigration-1898-1908/

No Need to Build The Donald's Wall, It’s Built

Trump’s America Already Exists on the Border

By Todd Miller, TomDispatch
August 23, 2016

At the federal courthouse, Ignacio Sarabia asks the magistrate judge, Jacqueline Rateau, if he can explain why he crossed the international boundary between the two countries without authorization. He has already pleaded guilty to the federal misdemeanor commonly known as “illegal entry” and is about to receive a prison sentence. On either side of him are eight men in the same predicament, all still sunburned, all in the same ripped, soiled clothes they were wearing when arrested in the Arizona desert by agents of the U.S. Border Patrol.

Once again, the zero tolerance border enforcement program known as Operation Streamline has unfolded just as it always does here in Tucson, Arizona. Close to 60 people have already approached the judge in groups of seven or eight, their heads bowed submissively, their bodies weighed down by shackles and chains around wrists, waists, and ankles. The judge has handed out the requisite prison sentences in quick succession -- 180 days, 60 days, 90 days, 30 days.

On and on it goes, day-in, day-out. Like so many meals served in fast-food restaurants, 750,000 prison sentences of this sort have been handed down since Operation Streamline was launched in 2005.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176179/tomgram:_todd_miller,_the_great_mexican_wall_deception/

Texas, facing a lawsuit, makes it easier for U.S.-born children of immigrants to get birth certificates

By Molly Hennessy-Fiske, Los Angeles Times
June 25, 2016

Last year, a group of Central American and Mexican immigrant parents sued Texas in federal court, claiming that the state had denied their children birth certificates and access to vital services.

Now, Texas officials have agreed to expand the list of documents that allow immigrant parents who entered the country illegally to obtain birth certificates for their U.S.-born children. The parents’ lawsuit has now been stayed pending enforcement of the new policy during the next nine months.

“It is a victory absolutely for all of the U.S. citizen children who are born here in Texas to undocumented parents. I think they are going to get all their benefits to which they are entitled,” said lead attorney Jennifer Harbury of Texas RioGrande Legal Aid Inc., which represented the children. “We have a great deal of work to do in the transition state. But I think in the end, we’re going to get a better system out of it.”[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-texas-birth-certificates-20160725-snap-story.html

For related articles:
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/2015/08/texas-attempting-to-block-us-born.html
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/2015/10/us-and-dominican-immigration-policies.html
http://thepoliticsofimmigration.blogspot.com/2016/02/petition-stop-denying-our-children.html

Undocumented in the age of Donald Trump

The shrill campaign trail populism of Donald Trump has revived the issue of illegal immigration. Lars Gesing reports from Denver, Colorado, how understanding life as an undocumented could help fix the issue.

By Lars Gesing, Deutsche Welle
July 19, 2016

With every step little Cristian Solano took, a flash of light interrupted the old sewer canal's damp darkness. At age three, Cristian was just little enough to be the only one walking among the group of Mexican emigres who crawled behind him. The shoes shone a light on the path to what they were sure would be a bright future in the United States of America.

I met Cristian, now 24, in Denver in early May, almost a year after a man named Donald Trump escalatored onto the Republican presidential primary stage with tirades against undocumented immigrants particularly from Mexico as well as obscure plans to build a 2000-mile (3219-kilometer) wall along the southern border.

The consensus is that neither the Great Wall of Trump nor rounding up and deporting the roughly 11 million undocumented immigrants - of which only about half are from Mexico - is practically or fiscally feasible. Deporting 11 million people alone, so the conservative projection goes, will cost taxpayers $400 billion (362 billion euros). And 72 percent of Americans actually favor a right to stay for the undocumented.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.dw.com/en/undocumented-in-the-age-of-donald-trump/a-19408242

'Minutemen' co-founder Simcox convicted of child molestation

By David Schwartz, Reuters, via Tucson Sentinel
June 8, 2016

An Arizona jury on Wednesday convicted the co-founder of a border militia group of molesting a 5-year-old girl but acquitted him of more serious sex charges, court officials said.

Christopher Allen Simcox, who co-founded the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps in 2005, was found guilty of two felony counts of child molestation and one felony count of providing obscene material to a minor by the Maricopa County Superior Court jury.

Simcox, 55, was cleared of three felony counts of sexual conduct with a 6-year-old girl, charges that carried mandatory sentences of life in prison.[...]

Read the full article:
http://www.tucsonsentinel.com/local/report/060816_simcox/minutemen-co-founder-simcox-convicted-child-molestation/