Mediaboss Marketing

VERIFY: Illegal immigrants taking jobs

Danielle Serino , WKYC 7:12 PM. EST January 27, 2017

We couldn't go much higher than this.

"I'm working on a story about illegal immigration and its impact on jobs for American workers.

That was me, reaching out to Governor John Kasich.

"To see what's going on in our state," I said to his staff.

He wasn't available to talk, but workers have quite a lot to say on the topic

We do not need them taking our money, services and our children's time, said one protestor.

But are they really taking our money? Well, after a lot of research, we found the majority of illegal immigrants are hired for jobs that require: very little English, where they need limited tech or supervisory skills and where they have little interaction with the public.

And that will affect some of our lowest skilled workers, not only with competition for jobs... but with wages. Because the more workers that are available, the less employees have to pay them.

But they are often jobs Americans don't want according to Dr. Jooyoun Park, who specializes in International Trade at Kent State University

"They are usually small farming, food processing like slaughterhouses, chicken, all those packaging Usually jobs employers have a hard time finding workers for, she says.

According to the think tank the Urban Institute, census data confirms most illegal immigrants and Americans, aren't competing for the same jobs.

It shows that the top 3 occupations for immigrants, without a high school education, are maids or housekeepers, cooks, and agricultural workers.

For Americans without a diploma, the top jobs are cashiers, sales workers and truck drivers. Plus, janitors or building cleaners.

But even if you don't believe that data, there is no denying this: A big part of this problem comes from all the employers who hire illegals...because they're cheap labor.

Only 22 states in the country have laws requiring employers to use the Governments E-Verify system, which uses Social Security data to check whether someone is a citizen. Ohio is not one of them.

Which means... until American companies put the interests of our workers ahead of their profits, theres plenty of blame to go around.

So we'll say this is Verified.

( 2017 WKYC)

WKYC

FULL TEXT: Read Trump's presidential executive orders regarding the border wall and immigration

WKYC

Trump to propose 20% Mexican border tax to pay for wall

WKYC

Trump orders clamp down on immigrant 'sanctuary cities,' pushes border wall

Read more from the original source:

VERIFY: Are illegal immigrants taking jobs? | WKYC.com - WKYC-TV

William Xavier Andrews Published 4:00 p.m. CT Jan. 24, 2017 | Updated 4:37 p.m. CT Jan. 25, 2017

William X. Andrews is a retired college history professor who lives in Columbia.(Photo: Submitted)

Donald Trump put Mexico in his crosshairs when he declared undocumentedMexican immigrants rapists and accused Mexico of stealing American jobs.

Demagoguery requires scapegoats, and Mexico is an easy target because of proximity. If the new presidenttruly wishes to heal the wounds in a country he helped divide, he will find that such insults are not easily forgiven or forgotten.

The great irony of the illegal Mexican immigration issue is something that is almost always overlooked by those who disparage Mexico. We acquired half of Mexico by 1848 primarily because of the illegal immigration of citizens of the United States into the Mexican state of Texas in the 1820s and early 1830s.

When Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821, Texas was only thinly settled by Spanish-speaking Tejanos. When American impresarios petitioned Mexico to allow some American families to settle in Texas, they were granted permission on the condition that they become Mexican citizens, embrace the Catholic faith, and obey Mexican laws.

However, as these legal Americans arrived to take advantage of free land, thousands of illegal Americans also crossed the border. It wasnt long before the illegals outnumbered the original Tejano population.

Moreover, as Mexican law prohibited slavery, the newcomers came up with creative language to describe their human property as other than property. Officials in Mexico were aware of the problem but there was never a sufficient Mexican military presence in Texas to stem the flow of illegals or to enforce the law against slavery. Exacerbating the challenge was the fact that the Mexican Constitution of 1824 assigned to the national government insufficient powers of purse and sword.

In response to a law in 1830 prohibiting further American immigration to Texas and President Santa Annas campaign to replace the federal system with a more centralized authority, Texans rebelled in 1836 and declared the Lone Star Republic. The rebels created a constitution that legalized slavery and elected a provisional president who opposed the right of Tejanos to vote.

Some 78 percent of the volunteers flooding into Texas to fight Mexico in 1836 arrived illegally (after 1830). Heroes of the Alamo like Davy Crockett and William Traviswere illegal aliens, as was Sam Houston, whose army defeated Santa Anna at San Jacinto.

A decade later it was our annexation of Texas, a disputed border, and Mexican refusal to sell us California that prompted the Mexican War by which we acquired the northern half of Mexico.

The story of conflicting loyalties and cultural divide is at the heart of how actress Eva Longoria describes her family history. She explains that her ancestors arrived in Texas in 1603, some 173 years before the United States existed and 243 years before the Mexican War.

We didnt cross the border, Longoria reminds us. The border crossed us.

William Xavier Andrews is a retired college history professor who lives in Columbia.

An earlier version of this op-ed hadWilliam Travis' name incorrectly spelled.

Read or Share this story: http://tnne.ws/2kpi0Xd

Go here to see the original:

When Americans were the illegal immigrants - The Tennessean

Sign Up for

Our free email newsletters

I'm a news reporter and I've been writing about Mexican immigration for many years. Recently, I covered an anti-Trump rally in Memphis, Tennessee, where I live.

At one point the protesters chanted, "Let's be loud! Let's be clear! Immigrants are welcome here!"

I tweeted the chant. Responses came back quickly.

"Legal immigrants are always welcome here," one person wrote.

Another person wrote: "The irony? No one ever suggested immigrants weren't welcome. Just follow the law."

I often hear this type of comment. Former Republican presidential candidate Sen. Ted Cruz made similar remarks on the campaign trail: "I think most Americans, when we look at immigration, follow a very basic principle: Legal good, illegal bad," he said while on a tour of the southern border.

On the surface, that seems to makes sense. But it misses an important point.

What we may think of as "illegal immigration" isn't actually illegal. At least, not very often.

Away from the borders, the federal government rarely enforces immigration law. Why? For one, businesses want a reliable, low-cost work force. But for years, immigration has been so politically explosive that Congress hasn't increased the number of legal visas.

The solution: tolerate illegal immigration. Both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations have quietly permitted the continued presence of people particularly Mexican immigrants who managed to enter illegally or overstay visas.

"If there is one constant in U.S. border policy, it is hypocrisy," Princeton University scholar Douglas Massey and colleagues wrote in their 2002 book about Mexican immigration, Beyond Smoke and Mirrors. "Throughout the 20th century the United States has arranged to import Mexican workers while pretending not to do so."

Legal scholar Eric Posner refers to the situation as an "illegal immigration system." He says it's wrong to think that unauthorized immigrants live here illegally.

"Little effort is made to stop them from working or to expel them," he wrote in a 2013 essay.

The economy's demand for low-cost labor leads to a hands-off approach. Posner compared the situation to police officers choosing not to enforce traffic laws:

"In other words, the odds of being punished for participating in the illegal immigration economy are something like the odds of being given a ticket for driving 56 mph in a 55 mph zone."

In some cases, unauthorized immigrants can even win legal status, he wrote. And the government focuses most of its attention on unauthorized immigrants who have committed crimes.

Consider the story of Rosalio Navarro, a friendly, talkative man who was 59 when I met him several years ago. If you've ever had a shot of tequila, you can thank people like him, because he grew up in the actual town of Tequila in Mexico's Jalisco state. For years, he worked in the grinding, low-paid job of harvesting and hauling the agave plants used to make the drink.

He wanted better opportunities, so he crossed the border illegally to work in the U.S. In the 1980s, he had a stroke of luck.

"That was when everything changed for me, thanks to President Ronald Reagan, who made the Simpson-Rodino law, and that's when I got my papers," he said in Spanish.

The 1986 amnesty brought him legal status and eventually, citizenship. Today he splits his time between Mexico and Memphis, where members of his family live.

Reagan wasn't the only president to protect unauthorized immigrants. Bill Clinton's administration dramatically reduced immigration raids in U.S. workplaces. George W. Bush proposed an amnesty, but couldn't get it through Congress. And former President Barack Obama signed an executive order that temporarily provided work permits to hundreds of thousands of young people brought to the country as children.

You may have heard immigration advocates refer to Obama as the "deporter-in-chief" for sending huge numbers of immigrants out of the country. But most of those deportations happened right near the border. Enforcement of immigration laws in non-border areas dropped significantly during his tenure, according to a 2014 analysis by the Los Angeles Times, and most of those deportations followed criminal convictions. The most recent statistics show deportations from the interior dropped to about 69,000 for the 2015 fiscal year (PDF). It was the lowest number in any of the past eight years.

Immigration enforcement in the interior of the country often angers people, particularly the immigrants' employers. A classic case played out in the Vidalia onion fields of Georgia in 1998. Immigration raids scared off workers and disrupted the harvest. The onion growers complained to members of Congress, who not only got the enforcement stopped, they arranged a temporary amnesty until the workers could bring in the onions.

By contrast, border enforcement generates little backlash.

The political dynamic has resulted in a combination of heavy border enforcement, light interior enforcement and occasional legalizations, like the one Navarro received. And unauthorized immigrants are staying put, rather than crossing and re-crossing the border. By 2014, an estimated 11.1 million unauthorized immigrants lived in the U.S. and they had stayed in this country for a median of nearly 14 years, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

If our government truly treated the presence of unauthorized immigrants as illegal, it's hard to imagine how so many millions of these immigrants could stay for so many years.

In my experience, unauthorized immigrants often live openly, buying houses, running small businesses, raising U.S. citizen children and sometimes paying federal income taxes under their own names; the Internal Revenue Service issues individual Tax Identification Numbers that help them do it.

But unauthorized immigrants have limited rights. Generally, they have no chance at citizenship, no right to vote, limited access to social programs, and no right to travel back to their home countries and return even when a family member is dying.

And on the relatively rare occasions that immigration law is enforced in the interior of the country, it can be severe. The law treats many immigration violations as civil offenses, not as crimes. And yet:

"Whether characterized as a matter of civil or criminal law, and whether carried out by federal, state, or local officials, every type of immigration law enforcement shares a common central feature: imprisonment," legal scholar Csar Cuauhtmoc Garca Hernndez wrote in a paper published in the California Law Review.

In an interview, he says border enforcement doesn't just affect freshly arrived immigrants it can also impact long-term immigrants who live in the border zone as well as those who are trying to return to families in the U.S. interior.

And that brings us back to Navarro. Is he a "bad" immigrant who broke the law? Or a "good" immigrant because he got the amnesty that opened the door to citizenship?

It's the wrong question to ask. Within the illegal immigration system, there's often no bright line difference between immigrants who came legally and those who broke immigration law.

That's key to understanding how we got here and a key to understanding what might happen in the Trump administration.

Decades of hands-off federal policy have allowed millions of unauthorized immigrants to put down roots. If Trump follows through with his campaign promise of large-scale deportations in the U.S. interior, it would mean casting out families that have lived here for years and disrupting the lives of their citizen children. It would represent a big shock to the economic and social order perhaps a much bigger shock than many people imagine.

Some communities would cheer the change. Others would resist.

This article originally appeared at PRI's The World.

Read the original:

What we get wrong about 'illegal immigration' - The Week Magazine

Stephanie Ramirez, WUSA 7:23 PM. EST January 26, 2017

WASHINGTON (WUSA9) - Local immigrant activists groups are planning rallies for Friday and the weekend in protest of the Presidents Executive Order, which among several things calls for more public reporting on crimes committed in sanctuary cities by those here illegally.

How? Is it legal?

Another major question now plaguing several D.C. Maryland and Virginia communities is, will our family be torn apart due to the Presidents Executive Order?

RELATED:Local Do you live in a sanctuary city? Do you live in a sanctuary city?

One Virginia man's answer to that is: at least your loved one is alive.

Ray Tranchantsaidhe lost his daughter and her best friend to an illegal immigrant in 2007. His daughters name is Tessa Tranchant. Her obituary says she was born in Arlington, Va. and then moved to Virginia Beach.

Thats where the 16-year-old and her friend Allison Kunhardt were sitting in a car at a traffic light when Tranchant says an illegal immigrant driving under the influence slammed into the back of their stopped vehicle at more than 70 mph.

"If my city had followed federal law, he, would've been incarcerated and probably deported and wouldn't have been in place to kill my daughter. I'm not God. I don't know if that is true but I just know logically it is, said Ray Tranchant over FaceTime on Thursday.

Various news reports on the case say the suspect had been arrested twice before on crimes including DUI, but was never deported. Since then, Tranchant says hes been fighting against Sanctuary Cities and applauds the Presidents Executive Order.

The group, The Remembrance Project, connected WUSA9 to Tranchant.

This VA dad supports Executive Order. Says sanctuary cities protected the illegal immigrant who killed his daughter, Tessa Tranchant @wusa9 pic.twitter.com/Js4y0ZgFPG

I think he has my priority, said Tranchant of President Trump. People who have committed crimes in America that are not American should be deported. President Obamas Executive Order prevented that from happening.

In the interview, Tranchantsaid his family came as immigrants and went through the proper channels. He feels those who did not come here legally are committing crimes.

RELATED:Cuban immigrant supports plan to build wall

Tranchant believes the number of people in the U.S. illegally or undocumented is more than 20 million and cites Ann Coulters Book, Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country into a Third World Hellhole as one of the places he derived the figure from.

Some, including Tranchant, feel former administrations dating back to President Reagan have tried to downplay the number of undocumented in the United States.

The non-partisan group, The Migration Policy Institute, studies migration and has a much smaller number. Randy Capps says according to their studies, MPI finds there are around 11-12 million unauthorized people in the U.S. Of that group, an estimated 820,000 people are categorized as criminals living in the U.S. illegally. The number also equates to around 7% of the unauthorized population.

Capps notes the Presidents Executive Order does not separate misdemeanor crimes from violent offenses, going after criminals living here illegally.

This doesnt take into account that a large majority of that population has been in the United States for a long time. Many are home owners, a lot of them have families with children with U.S. Citizenship. Seven million to eight million unauthorized citizens are working and theyre contributing economically and culturally to the United States, said Capps.

He also went on to say, the tone and purpose of the executive orders is in some ways more troubling than the substance because it suggests that the Trump administration views this entire problem as unauthorized immigration as a security and public safety problem when in reality there's a lot more going on."

When asked about the undocumented citizens who have not committed any violent crimes, Tranchant says hes a Christian man and doesnt have the answer to that. He feels Congress needs to address immigration, something both sides may be able to agree on.

Still, he does not support Sanctuary Cities.

I can name 10 people right now who were killed by criminals who have records who the sanctuary cities protected, said Tranchant.

He also points out some of the DMVs issues, which include MS13 gang activity. Other DMV high-profile cases on the topic include the deaths of Vanessa Pham and Sister Denise Mosier.

On Wednesday, WUSA9 spoke with one undocumented person who says, to no fault of his own, has been stuck in court fighting for U.S. citizenship. Hes one of the hundreds of thousands now concerned about what could happen to him.

Immigrant activists are saying the part of the Executive Order that details withholding Federal funds from Sanctuary Cities is illegal. Others want to know how another part of that Executive Order, demanding a weekly list of crimes committed by undocumented immigrants in sanctuary cities, is going to be collected.

DC Mayor Bowser doubled down on her promise to keep the District a Sanctuary City.

WUSA9 did check in with our areas police departments. Some do not ask legal status at arrest, its not policy to do so. Others do, but whether they ask or not, jurisdictions like Montgomery and Prince William Counties say they provide arrest information to the Department of Homeland Security's Immigration and Customs Enforcement division.

Were told its up to ICE, and not the local police department, to verify someone's status and act when necessary.

( 2017 WUSA)

View original post here:

Executive Order and Illegal Immigration: The fight continues - WUSA9.com

President Trumps plan to enlist local police and sheriffs departments in immigration enforcement has set the stage for a pitched battle with California officials who have long prioritized building ties with immigrant communities.

Trumps plan, which was issued Wednesdayas part of a pair of executive orders, seeks to broaden the reach of federal immigration authorities into county jails.

It alsocalls for empowering police officers and deputiesto act as immigration enforcers, leaving open the possibility that theywould be required to inquire about the immigration status of the people they encounter on the streets.

Such a regime could conflict with the Los Angeles Police Departments decades-old policy that prohibits officers from initiating contact with a person solely to ask about whether he or she is in the country legally.

Local governments that defy the Trump administrations immigration policies by acting as sanctuary cities could be denied federal funding, one of the executive orders states.

More than 400 jurisdictions across the country, including Los Angeles, San Francisco and about 40 others in California, have such policies protecting immigrants.

California state officials have signaled that they will put up a fight. The California Legislature has selected former U.S. Atty. Gen. Eric H. Holder Jr. to serve as outside counsel on the states legal strategy for dealing with the incoming administration.

The states new attorney general, former congressman Xavier Becerra, said at his swearing-in on Tuesday that he will form a united front with officials from other states to defend their policies against any federal challenges.

Hours after Trump signed theexecutive orders, Los Angeles leaders suggested they would mount a legal challenge if funding is taken away.

Mayor Eric Garcetti told reporters Wednesday thathe doesnt believe the federal government can cut off funding toLos Angeles, citingthe 10th Amendment, which addresses the powers of state and federal governments.

We feel very strong the legal case is clear, Garcetti said.

The particulars of Trumps orders are still being dissected by Los Angeles leaders. But City Council President Herb Wesson told reporters that the city is going to continue to operate the way it operates.

Los Angeles will receive about $500 million this fiscal year from the federal government to pay for an array of services, includingport security, anti-gang programs and services for senior citizens.

Thatdoesnt include federal funding that flows to entities such as theLos Angeles Unified School District or Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority.

It would be folly for any administration to take away funds to protect Americas port, Garcetti said.Or take away vouchers that help get veterans who have fought for our country off the street.

Shortly after Trumps election, LAPD Chief Charlie Beck announcedthat he would not work with federal authorities on deportation efforts.

We have built relationships by effective law enforcement that doesnt focus on where a person was born or the color of their skin. And we dont intend to change that, Beck said Wednesday.

Trumps plan for local jails involves reinstating a program called Secure Communities, whichasks jail officials to hand inmates over to federal immigration authorities up to 48 hours past when the inmate would otherwise have been released. Federal authorities can ask for inmates who have committed only immigration violations, in addition to those with serious criminal records.

In 2013, California passed the Trust Act, which limited jail officials ability to cooperate with federal immigration requests to only those inmates who have been convicted of serious or violent crimes.

In 2014, after a federal court held an Oregon county liable for damages for holding an inmate beyond her release date at the request of immigration authorities, hundreds of cities and counties around the country stopped complying with many immigration hold requests.

Later that year, then-President Obama ended the Secure Communities program, creating a new jail program that focused only on inmates convicted of significant criminal offensesor who posed a danger to public safety.

The return of Secure Communities could mean that California sheriffs would have to choose between state law and federal law.

Los Angeles and Orange County sheriffs officials said Wednesday that the presidents executive order likely wont have any immediate impact on how they do business.

Federal immigration agentsare inside the Los Angeles County jailsalmost on a daily basis, said Assistant Sheriff Kelly Harrington, head of the Sheriffs Departments custody division, speaking to the county Board of Supervisorsearlier this month.

If the agents wantaccess to an inmate, sheriffs officialsvet the name to ensure that the person has been charged or convicted of a serious or violent crime, in accordance with the Trust Act, Harrington said.

Sheriff Jim McDonnell said in astatement Wednesday that Trumps order would not change the mission of his department, which he said would continue to follow the Trust Act and other state immigration law.

Our department policy clearly states that our deputies do not ask for ones immigration status, he said. Immigration enforcement remains a federal responsibility.

At the Orange County Sheriffs Department, officials are conferring with attorneys to figure out the new landscape.

What the future looks like a few weeks out, we will talk to county counsel about. But today, nothing is changing, said Lt. Mark Stichter, public information officer forthe Orange County Sheriffs Department.

Neither the Los Angeles nor Orange County sheriffs departments permit their deputies to initiate contact with anyone solely on the basis of a suspected immigration violation. Deputies cannot question a suspect about immigration status even if the person was stopped foranother reason, officials from both agencies said.

We do not conduct or participate in any immigration enforcement, Stichter said.

Kern County SheriffDonnyYoungblood,a critic of the Trust Act who once vowed to defy the law,said in an interview Wednesday that he was still reviewing the administrations orders and that it would take some time to sort out the implications. But he is concerned about a possible clash between the state and federal governments over immigration enforcement.

When state and federal laws arent in sync, he said, law enforcement is in the crosshairs.

Were trying to avoid being in the middle, he said.

Youngblood, who worked around limits on immigration holds by letting federal immigration agents into hisjails and giving them access to arrest records,said his deputies are not immigration agents and are not in the business of immigration. They do not ask about immigration status after an arrest.

Hiroshi Motomura, an expert in immigration law at UCLA, said that despite the tough rhetoric in Wednesdays White House announcement, there are constitutional and other legal limits on how much the federal government can punish states and cities that dont go along with its priorities.

The federal government cant take over state and local governments, Motomura said. You have a lot of federal vehicles to facilitate cooperation by state and local governments. But there are limits on the federal governments ability to force cooperation.

Chris Newman, an attorney for the National Day Laborer Organizing Network, was involved in legal challenges to oppose Secure Communities under the Obama administration.

He said the policies announced by Trump sounded eerily similar to those enactedin the first years of Obamas presidency. Those policies, he said, led to a backlash in many communities in California, which eventually adopted the Trust Act.

Newman predictsasimilar backlash in response to Trumps crackdown on illegal immigration.

The idea of a return to Secure Communities combined with Trumps racist rhetoric will likely inspire more sanctuary policies, he said.

Times staff writers Dakota Smith and Ruben Vives contributed to this report.

cindy.chang@latimes.com

paloma.esquivel@latimes.com

maya.lau@latimes.com

For more Southern California news, follow us on Twitter: @cindychangLA, @palomaesquivel and @mayalau

ALSO

Analysis: The Trump versus California feud turns from rhetorical to real

Immigration orders will boost deportations; the wall's impact is less certain

The Doomsday Clock is about to be updated for the first time since Trump started talking about nuclear weapons

See the article here:

California police see dangers in Trump's illegal immigration crackdown - Los Angeles Times