Today the White House stepped up its attack on Fox News, announcing that the network would no longer be able to conduct interviews with officials as a member of the Press Pool. The Pool is a five-member group consisting of ABC, CBS, CNN, Fox News and NBC organized by the White House Correspondents Association. Its membership is not subject to oversight by the government.

Fortunately, the rest of the press pool stood up to Hugo Chavez, er, Barack Obama, and said that would not work. So, as Doug points out, the reporters were limited to a two minute interview each, instead of the standard whine, in a (typical) petulant act. Regardless of what one thinks of Fox News, this is the behavior of a dictator in waiting.

On to the good

ICE has launched a new initiative to audit hiring records and I-9s — the form every new hire fills out to verify identity and employment eligibility – of current and past employees.

Last year, 503 companies nationwide received inspection notices. This year, Homeland Security notified 652 companies in one day.

“It is one of those things causing indigestion among the employment community,” said George Ports with Capital Associated Industries Inc., an employer association in North Carolina with approximately 1,000 members.

I have to give the Obama administration kudos for this. We could probably dig in to their motives, but, regardless, this is something that opponents of illegal immigration have been yammering about for a long time: if you want to stop most of the illegals, you have to go after the companies who hire them, and make it painful to the offenders.

Tony Asion, director of the statewide advocacy group El Pueblo, says he’s already hearing of unintended consequences.

“What (companies) do is deny the job (to a Latino), and it could very well be to a legal U.S.-born Latino who is here,” he said.

It could be a legal immigrant, able to work. Perhaps if people like Asion would stop backing the “rights” of illegals, there wouldn’t be so much bias.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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On the website of the Service Employees International Union (SEIU) a press release from Obama’s U.S. Census Bureau Director, Robert Groves, can be found. That press release appears to make obvious that the Bureau plans to count illegal aliens in our census. The press release was issued to America’s Hispanic organizations to urge them to help with the coming census.

In that press release, Groves says the following (my bold):

We have the enormous challenge of convincing everyone in the country to participate in the national count – regardless of race, ethnicity or citizenship status. To reach the Latino community, we are counting on community-based initiatives like ya es hora to partner with us in spreading the word that the 2010 Census is easy, important and safe,” said U.S. Census Bureau Director Robert Groves.

Notice that Graves says “regardless of citizenship status.” With this comment it is clear that Graves intends to count illegals in our census.

The Census Bureau intends to work closely with groups that cater to illegals in this country to calculate the national count. The Census Bureau hopes to have success by launching a campaign that will “enhance the Bureau’s efforts to count Latinos through a sustained and aggressive community education initiative to mobilize hundreds of local organizations.”

Why is this such a big deal? Because this will add to the federal funds that will flow to areas that now have officially counted, lower income people, federal funds that will naturally flow into the coffers of Democrats and their cohorts.

Worse, it will add false numbers to our national count and will be one more step toward legalizing people that have broken our laws to get here. Once these people become instant American citizens they will, of course, largely vote Democrat and we will have millions more voters that will be amenable to voting for programs of federal giveaways and freebies to themselves. The Democrat’s power will grow exponentially and our country will be lowered even further as a result.

Illegal aliens should not be counted in the census. Their presence here is illegal and must not be used to direct federal dollars to the areas in which they serve as illegal squatters. Unfortunately, it looks like Obama’s Census Bureau intends to illicitly count illegal aliens as American citizens.

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An Arizona sheriff known for aggressively cracking down on illegal immigration has been stripped of some of his special power to enforce federal immigration law, and he claims the Obama administration is taking away his authority for political reasons. Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, whose office faces racial profiling allegations over crime and immigration sweeps in some heavily Latino areas of metro Phoenix, said officials from Washington won’t let him renew a deal that let his deputies make federal immigration arrests.

“Let them all go brag that they took away the sheriff’s authority. Let them all do that. That doesn’t bother me. I don’t have an ego. I will continue doing the same thing,” the Republican sheriff said, noting he can still enforce state immigration laws. “What has changed, other than the politics and the perception emanating from Washington?”

The U.S. government, which does most of the nation’s immigration enforcement, is changing its rules for allowing local police to enforce more expansive federal immigration laws. Nationally, more than 1,000 local police and jail officers have been granted the power since 2002 to make immigration requests and speed up deportations. Arpaio has more officers with the special powers than any other local police agency in the country. For more than two years, 100 of his deputies have made immigration arrests and another 60 jail officers have identified inmates who are illegal immigrants.

Even though federal officials declined to let the sheriff keep making immigration arrests, Arpaio last week renewed a deal that will let his jail officers determine inmates’ immigration status. Arpaio said federal officials offered no explanation of why his powers were cut in half. Vinnie Picard, a spokesman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which grants the special powers, declined to comment on the curtailment of Arpaio’s powers or whether any of the other 62 participating local agencies across the country have been denied renewals.

The agencies face an Oct. 14 deadline to renew their agreements. So far, at least three agencies have dropped out of the program.

Giving federal powers to local police helps supplement the small staff of federal agents who enforce immigration laws in the country’s interior, said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tougher immigration enforcement. He said it’s hard to tell whether the limits on Arpaio’s authority will extend to other agencies and would hamper the movement for local police to confront illegal immigration. “I suspect there is some effort there to send a warning to other police departments: Don’t get too aggressive with this, because we will yank it out from under you,” Mehlman said.

Joan Friedland, immigration policy director for the National Immigration Law Center, said the federal government wasn’t making a serious attempt to rein in Arpaio, because his jail officers still have the power to question jailed people about their immigration status. “All he has to do is get people to the jail, rather than being able to question them about their immigration status on the street,” said Friedland, whose group advocates for low-income immigrants.

For his part, Arpaio said he plans to continue cracking down illegal immigration by enforcing state laws that prohibit immigrant smuggling and ban employers from knowingly hiring illegal immigrants. Arpaio said his deputies can still detain suspected illegal immigrants who haven’t committed state crimes, as long as his officers call Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents to pick them up.

Critics say some of Arpaio’s deputies racially profiled people during immigration sweeps. Arpaio maintains that people pulled over in the sweeps were approached because deputies had probable cause to believe they had committed crimes. His office is being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice over allegations of discrimination and unconstitutional searches and seizures.

Arpaio’s approach to immigration has frustrated other public officials. The mayor of Mesa complained in 2008 that Arpaio didn’t warn his city of raids by deputies who were looking for illegal immigrants working at his city’s library and City Hall. And as Arpaio’s sweeps began to draw heavy criticism in 2008, then-Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, cut off immigration enforcement dollars to his office.

Napolitano, who as the country’s homeland security secretary now oversees the federal government’s immigration agencies, had said it wasn’t an attempt to change Arpaio’s approach to cracking down on illegal immigration. Rather, she said the funding was reallocated to try to clear a backlog of thousands of outstanding felony warrants across the state. [And who believes that?]

SOURCE

Posted by John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.). For a daily critique of Leftist activities, see DISSECTING LEFTISM. To keep up with attacks on free speech see TONGUE-TIED. Also, don’t forget your daily roundup of pro-environment but anti-Greenie news and commentary at GREENIE WATCH . Email me here

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Immigration raids yield jobs for legal workers

It seems the illegal alien hordes — which have been driving hospitals out of business and bankrupting California — aren’t just doing the work Americans won’t do.

When federal agents descended on six meatpacking plants owned by Swift & Co. in December 2006, they rounded up nearly 1,300 suspected illegal immigrants that made up about 10% of the labor force at the plants.

But the raids by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents did not cripple the company or the plants. In fact, they were back up and running at full staff within months by replacing those removed with a significant number of native-born Americans, according to a report by the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS).

That was the most extreme example of what has become an increasingly common result of the raids: “They were very beneficial to American workers,” according to Vanderbilt University professor Carol Swain.

During flush times, illegal aliens at least supply needed labor. During a recession, they take jobs from Americans who need them desperately. Also, as even a policy analyst for pro-illegal La Raza admits:

If you’ve got a segment of the workforce that’s afraid to speak out against violations of their labor rights, then that drags down wages and working conditions for all workers.

Of course, La Raza’s solution would be the same as Comrade Obama’s: amnesty — which will hardly make it easier for Americans to find jobs.

There is an entity that actually benefits from our policy of leaving the border wide open for uncontrolled immigration: Big Government. The more illiterate peasants from Third World backwaters wind up on welfare, the faster the cancer metastasizing out of Washington will grow.

On a tip from J. Cross-posted at Moonbattery.

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Here is just another example of why the State of California is in a budget crisis: The Cash Assistance Program for Immigrants (CAPI).

What is this program, who qualifies? Well, it does no less than give free government money to any illegal immigrant that is either over 65 years of age or is disabled or blind and does not qualify for Supplemental Security Income (Social Security) due to their immigration status.

Why is California just giving money away to elderly illegals?

Your guess is as good as mine.

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A coalition of Latino groups, liberal activists and labor unions have written President Barack Obama asking him to scrap agreements between the federal government and local police departments that allow them [to] arrest illegal immigrants.

The groups — which include the American Civil Liberties Union, National Council of La Raza and United Methodist Church — asked Obama to nix 287(g) agreements with local law enforcement agencies. That includes an agreement with Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who has used that authority to raid businesses suspected of employing undocumented workers, make arrests and pick up suspected illegal immigrants on crime sweeps.

U.S. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said earlier this summer the Obama administration plans to rework the 287(g) agreements to focus on picking up fugitive criminals.

Arpaio argues that change would weaken their effectiveness.

The ACLU and other critics say the sheriff uses the power to unfairly target and arrest Hispanics, which takes away resources from other policing arenas. The ACLU filed a federal lawsuit accusing the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office of racial profiling.

The ACLU are against enforcing laws and for enabling criminals. It isn’t surprising at all.

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After early pledges by President Obama that he would moderate the Bush administration’s tough policy on immigration enforcement, his administration is pursuing an aggressive strategy for an illegal-immigration crackdown that relies significantly on programs started by his predecessor.

A recent blitz of measures has antagonized immigrant groups and many of Mr. Obama’s Hispanic supporters, who have opened a national campaign against them, including small street protests in New York and Los Angeles last week.

The administration recently undertook audits of employee paperwork at hundreds of businesses, expanded a program to verify worker immigration status that has been widely criticized as flawed, bolstered a program of cooperation between federal and local law enforcement agencies, and rejected proposals for legally binding rules governing conditions in immigration detention centers.

Fantastic. Another case of George W. Obama annoying more of the brain dead zombies who voted for him. Of course, every pledge/promise from Dear Leader has an expiration date. Apparently, those who wanted illegals legalized didn’t get the memo.

But, what could be causing this?

“We are expanding enforcement, but I think in the right way,” Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, said in an interview.

Ms. Napolitano and other administration officials argue that no-nonsense immigration enforcement is necessary to persuade American voters to accept legislation that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants, a measure they say Mr. Obama still hopes to advance late this year or early next.

So, first of all, we learn that what Bush was doing was the right way to do it, since the Obama verwaltung is doing the same thing Bush did. Bush is vindicated yet again!

Second, I suspect that Ms. Napolitano may meet the White House woodshed shortly for letting the cat out of the bag regarding why the Bush era illegals policies are not only being kept in place, but expanded. Somehow, though, I suspect the American population will not say “hey, the policies are working great to stop the illegals. Let’s make the rest American citizens.” Instead, I expect the conversation to go something like “awesome! Barry is continuing to get rid of the illegals. Let’s expand the program and send as many as possible back to their home countries.”

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The Obama administration launched investigations of hundreds of businesses around the country Wednesday as part of its strategy to focus immigration enforcement on the employers who hire illegal workers.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement has begun notifying businesses of plans to audit their I-9 forms — employment eligibility documents that employers fill out for every worker — the agency told members of Congress in an e-mail Wednesday.

Immigration officers served “Notices of Inspection” to 652 businesses, the Homeland Security Department said. By comparison, 503 such notices were issued to businesses last year, the agency said. Businesses were chosen for inspections based on leads and other investigative work, Immigration and Customs Enforcement said.

While I certainly think that companies that hire illegals should still be raided(and the people in charge should be fined heavily along with dragging off illegals and immediately deporting them) I also believe heavily that one of the ways to reduce illegal immigration is to go after the companies. If they won’t hire them, than there will be little need to raid companies and work sites. If the jobs aren’t available, a good chunk of illegals will leave, and others will not come, meaning law enforcement can focus more on the illegals who are bad people, as well as protecting American citizens, rather than being distracted.

I do disagree vehemently with Obama wanting amnesty; something which many elected Republicans wanted also, in all fairness, but, I have to give him props for this program. Heck, I have heard Ann Coulter say many times that the path to stopping a large portion of illegal immigration is to go after the companies who hire them. I also have no problem with Obama looking for an expanded guest worker program. Said program must have much better oversight and monitoring of the guest workers, since approximately one third of all illegals are people who have overstayed their visas.

Anyway, good job, President Obama. The article points out that you might have a cynical reason for doing this, but, keep doing it.

Crossed at Pirate’s Cove

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White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel bluntly admitted Thursday that “the votes aren’t there” to win comprehensive immigration legislation — even as President Barack Obama met with a bipartisan group of lawmakers in an attempt to jump-start stalled reform efforts.

Calling it one of the most critical issues facing the nation, Obama told the lawmakers, including Texas Republican Sen. John Cornyn and Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, that the U.S. immigration system is “broken and needs fixing.”

Everything seems to be critical, and of crisis proportion, in ObamaLand.

But Obama and Emanuel signaled that political obstacles are likely to make it difficult to reach consensus on sticking points such as guest workers and the legal status for 12 million immigrants here illegally.

“It’s going to require some heavy lifting, it’s going to require a victory of practicality and common sense and good policy-making over short-term politics,” Obama said.

It’s going to require lots of arm twisting, blackmail, pay offs, and ignoring the Will of the People. Like with Cap and Tax. Fortunately, I do not think this one will go anywhere. Especially since the Democrats and Obama might be over-reaching after hosing the people with the cap and tax bill, and with the coming showdown on ObamaCare.

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Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger says he’s “happy” illegal immigrants get state services and says they’re not to blame for California’s $24.3 billion budget gap.

Schwarzenegger, an immigrant himself, says the estimated $4 billion to $5 billion the state spends on illegal immigrants annually is a “small percentage” of the deficit.

Apparently, Arnold fails to understand that he came here legally, and did it all the right way. And imagine what California could do with $4-$5 billion for their own legal citizens. Get ready for your massive tax increases, Caly folks!

Speaking of taxes, here’s how it works

House Democrats working to fill a budget hole of more than $4 billion said Friday that spending cuts are so deep and severe that higher taxes might be the only way to alleviate some of the pain.

Saying that cuts without taxes will be too devastating, House Finance Committee Chairwoman Rep. Jennifer Weiss, D-Wake, said Friday that House leaders are in discussions about ways to raise revenue.

Republican consultant Carter Wrenn said he has seen a similar pattern by Democrats. He said that in the past they have insisted only on budget cuts but then, because of a public outcry, have agreed to new taxes.

The most recent entry on his blog is entitled “The Big Scam.” Wrenn thinks the budget crisis is very real but he believes enough waste and pet projects can be eliminated from the budget without sacrificing services.

“I think we’ve never had the debate on waste,” Wrenn said. “Instead, we had a debate on cutting some things that people really need, and given that choice, the reaction was, ‘OK, let’s raise taxes.’”

Come on, Democrat voters, pony up! You wanted this, so, you should be sending lots of your money to the government to pay for it. You have no problem with that, right?

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