1986 Amnesty Increased Illegal Immigration

New INS Report:1986 Amnesty Increased Illegal Immigration

WASHINGTON (Oct. 12, 2000) � The report on America's illegal immigration crisis by the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), released today on Capitol Hill, highlights the profound unintended consequences of illegal-alien amnesties, just as Congress is considering another such amnesty. The report also makes clear, contrary to the conventional wisdom, that legal and illegal immigration are so intimately connected as to be two sides of the same coin. (Download the report at http://wwwa.house.gov/lamarsmith/INSreport.pdf.)
The report represents a genuine effort by the INS to examine this complex problem. The new estimates are the best to date and provide valuable new information for policymakers and the public. Among the findings, and their implications:

Amnesties clearly do not solve the problem of illegal immigration. About 2.7 million people received lawful permanent residence ("green cards") in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a result of the amnesties contained in the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA) of 1986. But these new INS figures show that by the beginning of 1997 those former illegal aliens had been entirely replaced by new illegal aliens, and that the unauthorized population again stood at more than 5 million, just as before the amnesty.
In fact, the new INS estimates show that the 1986 amnesty almost certainly increased illegal immigration, as the relatives of newly legalized illegals came to the United States to join their family members. The flow of illegals grew dramatically during the years of the amnesty to more than 800,000 a year, before dropping back down to around 500,000 a year.

While it might be supposed that the increase in illegal immigration was caused only by the Special Agricultural Worker (SAW) provisions of the 1986 amnesty, the INS report indicates that this was not the case. Figures in the report itself show that illegal immigration surged more dramatically from countries other than Mexico. Since the vast majority of those amnestied under SAW were from Mexico, the increase should have been mostly Mexican if the SAW provision had been responsible for the surge.

Overall, the estimates show that nearly 500,000 illegal aliens settled here each year in the mid-1990s. This total number of new illegal settlers is offset by about 145,000 illegals who returned home on their own each year, 40,000 deportations, 20,000 deaths, and around 150,000 illegals receiving green cards as part of the normal "legal" immigration process.

The report clearly demonstrates that legal and illegal immigration are intimately linked, and not separate phenomena, as is commonly supposed. Between 1987 and 1996, the report states that 1.3 million green cards were given out to illegal aliens as part of the normal "legal" immigration process (189,000 in 1996 alone) � separate from the 2.7 million illegals who received legal status under the 1986 IRCA amnesty.

The 1.3 million green cards given out to illegals between 1987 and 1996 dwarf immigration enforcement efforts. According to the new estimates, only 335,000 illegals were deported or required to leave the country by the INS during the same period.

"The fact that these new INS figures show that the last amnesty actually attracted more illegal immigration should give serious pause to those now advocating another amnesty," said Steven A. Camarota, Director of Research at the Center for Immigration Studies. "With the government estimating that nearly half a million illegal aliens settle permanently in the United States each year, the new estimates indicate that we have not yet regained control over our nation's borders."

These numbers suggest that Congress's focus on border enforcement as almost the sole means of controlling illegal immigration is inadequate. Illegal immigration can be controlled only with a strategy that combines border enforcement with efforts to turn off the magnets that attract illegal aliens in the first place � jobs and green cards. Thus, the missing elements of our illegal immigration policy are muscular enforcement of the prohibition on hiring illegal workers and deep, permanent cuts in legal immigration.
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The Center for Immigration Studies is a non-profit, non-partisan think tank which examines and critiques the impact of immigration on the United States.

"Indication of possible ruling by Supreme Court reg SB1070"

Top Court Eases Rules For Foreigners To Try To Stay In US

Written by Lloyd Gray
Monday, 16 June 2008

The Supreme Court made it easier today for some foreigners who overstay their visas to seek to remain in the United States legally. The court ruled 5-4 that someone who is here illegally may withdraw his voluntarily agreement to depart and continue to try to get approval to remain in the United States.

The decision essentially embraced a proposed Justice Department regulation governing the treatment of similar cases in the future. Samson Dada, a Nigerian citizen, stayed beyond the expiration of his tourist visa in 1998. He married an American the following year and soon began trying to obtain a visa as an immediate relative of a citizen. But Dada and his wife apparently failed to submit some documents, causing immigration officials to deny the visa. Dada has been trying again to obtain the visa, but immigration authorities meanwhile have ordered him to leave the country. He agreed to leave voluntarily, which would allow him to try sooner to re-enter the country legally than if he had been deported. The court's task was to decide whether he could withdraw his voluntary agreement to leave the country and continue to try to adjust his status while in the United States. Immigration authorities recently ruled that Dada had entered a "sham" marriage in order to stay in the United States, but that finding was not part of the court's consideration. Justice Kennedy wrote the majority opinion, joined by his four liberal colleagues. The four conservative justice dissented. Justice Antonin Scalia said, "The court lacks the authority to impose its chosen remedy."

The case is Dada v. Mukasey, 06-1181.
Last Updated ( Monday, 16 June 2008 )

SOURCE: http://www.immigrateusa.us/content/view/1591/69/

"Brewer admits SB 1070 doesn't secure the border, and mangles the English language along the way". Kyrsten Sinema D-15 AZ State Rep.

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer (R) conceded Thursday that she is "not quite sure" her state's immigration bill would help secure the border if implemented.
"Senate Bill 1070 is just another tool in our tool box in regards to trying to address the issues that we're facing here," Brewer said during an interview on CNN's "John King USA." of the bill she signed.
Asked if she actually believes the bill would improve the security situation at the border, Brewer responded: "Well, you know, I'm not quite sure about that."
"I think — well, not along the border," she continued. "I think it would help in telling people that it is illegal to come into the state of Arizona, which it already is, but it's just not being enforced. And so if they use it, the states themselves were going to enforce it, that certainly would maybe give people pause before they came running and crossed the border."
Despite her uncertainty on the bill’s impact, the Arizona governor filed an appeal on Thursday in hopes that the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals will reinstate a provision requiring police to check the citizenship of anyone they arrest or detain, which a federal district court judge blocked on Wednesday.
Brewer swore that she will be "relentless" in pursuing an appeal.
"I'm going to do what those of America wants us to do and hopefully we will proceed through the court system and we will be victorious," she said. "But the people of America, I really truly believe, come election time they're going to react in an interesting manner in regards to the federal government not behaving and not upholding their responsibility that is bestowed upon them as our federal government. They have let us all down."

SOURCE: http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0710/40436.html#ixzz0v9h71Ix9

The GOP Plot to Screw the Economy and the Middle Class

Bob Cesca

Host of the Bob and Elvis Show

Posted: July 28, 2010 06:31 PM

We're only three months away from the midterm election when a shockingly large number of American voters will inexplicably vote for Republican candidates. I have no idea if this will mean a Republican takeover of the House or Senate or both, but there will definitely be enough voter support for Republicans to significantly reduce the Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.

Why? Because too many voters tend to be low-information, knee-jerk Springfield-from-The-Simpsons types, and the Republicans have lashed their crazy trains to this new wave of inchoate roid-rage to help sweep them into more congressional seats.

Here are a few of the ongoing economic conditions facing a vast majority of Americans, many of whom are all revved up to vote Republican in November. According to Michael Snyder of the Business Insider:

• 61 percent of Americans "always or usually" live paycheck to paycheck, which was up from 49 percent in 2008 and 43 percent in 2007.
• 66 percent of the income growth between 2001 and 2007 went to the top 1 percent of all Americans.
• Over 1.4 million Americans filed for personal bankruptcy in 2009, which represented a 32 percent increase over 2008.
• The bottom 50 percent of income earners in the United States now collectively own less than 1 percent of the nation's wealth.
• In America today, the average time needed to find a job has risen to a record 35.2 weeks.
• More than 40 percent of Americans who actually are employed are now working in service jobs, which are often very low paying.
• Despite the financial crisis, the number of millionaires in the United States rose a whopping 16 percent to 7.8 million in 2009.

Oh, and I should add, the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that wages for the highest 20 percent of earners rose by nearly 300 percent since 1979, while wages for the bottom and middle 20 percent increased only by 41 percent -- combined. Plotted on a graph, middle and working class wages have flatlined for 30 years. Roll all of these tragic figures into a slow growth recovery and here we are. Most of us in the middle class are screwed.

And thanks to an alliance between the Republicans (which includes the tea party), the increasingly dominant far-right media, a traditional "old media" that panders to the far-right, and right-of-center "conservadems" who pander to the Republicans, too many voters have decided that the Republican Party might be better suited to turn all of this around.

The big lie here is that if Congress stops spending, cuts the deficit and makes permanent the Bush tax cuts, especially the tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans, our problems will be solved -- even though each of these concepts is in direct conflict with the others. Not surprising given the ever-lengthening Republican syllabus of contradictions.

Here's how this new batch of contradictions plays out.

According to Republicans and their conservadem enablers, we have to cut the deficit and pay for every program Congress passes or else we're all doomed. This has manifested itself in Republican filibusters of both unemployment benefits ($34 billion) and a new jobs bill ($33 billion over ten years). A Republican filibuster killed the jobs bill, and, after many failed cloture votes, the filibuster of the unemployment benefits was finally defeated and the Senate Democrats passed the extensions. Throughout the past year and a half, it's been the same story. Any effort made by the Democrats to stimulate the economy has been filibustered by the Republicans. They say it's because of the deficit and debt.

And yet they want to make the Bush tax cuts permanent, which would cost $678 billion dollars without paying for them -- and that's just the cost of the tax cuts going to the top two percent of earners. In other words, the Republicans want to spend $678 billion in further giveaways for the wealthiest two percent, and they don't care whether it increases the deficit.

By the way, the Republicans also recently voted against and defeated an amendment to strip Big Oil of its $25 billion in subsidies. Just thought I'd pass that along. Put another way, $678 billion in tax cuts for the wealthy? No problem. Deficit-shmeficit! But $34 billion in unemployment benefits for an out-of-work middle class at a time when companies aren't hiring (say nothing of the aforementioned bullet-points)? Evil! Instead, the Republicans want to give almost as much money to Big Oil in the form of corporate welfare during the worst oil spill in American history while telling unemployed middle class families to piss off.

Do we have a clear picture in terms of who and what the Republicans care about?

It surely isn't fiscal discipline or the deficit. And it surely isn't the middle class. The Bush tax cuts, if extended, would add $2 trillion to debt, so it's not that either. Throw in another policy started by the Republicans -- the war spending (more of which was passed yesterday without any worries about CBO scoring or making sure it's deficit neutral) -- and there's the vast majority of your deficit and debt for the next ten years. Not the stimulus or the bailouts. The long term budget impact of the wars and the Bush tax cuts literally dwarf the stimulus. The CBPP evidence in colorful graph form:

That big blue chunk represents the Bush tax cut portion of the deficit. The yellow represents the wars. The light blue is the tax revenue lost to the recession. And those really narrow tan and red strata are TARP and the stimulus. Clearly we need to elect more Republicans so they can make permanent the big thick deficit hogs and kill that thin section for the stimulus.

Now, if you're a Republican, you might be clinging to the idea that extending the Bush tax cuts would have a stimulative effect on the economy -- somehow, even though this hasn't been the case for the last ten years other than for the wealthiest Americans who have once again disproved the trickle-down theories at the heart of Reaganomics by pocketing their share of the trickle instead of reinvesting in jobs and wages for the middle class.

That won't work.

According to Moody's Analytics (hardly a left-wing apparatchik), for every dollar of government money spent on extending the Bush tax cuts, there's only a 32-cent return on investment in terms of economic stimulus. Not a solid investment. How about cutting the corporate tax rate? Also a 32-cent return in economic stimulus. Capital gains tax cuts? 37-cents. And, lumped together, there's your Republican plan for recovering the economy. Dumb investments. Goldman Sachs would short these policies. I'm not sure they haven't, actually.

But what about the Democratic spending? For every dollar spent on unemployment benefits, there's a $1.61 return in economic stimulus. Good investment! How about infrastructure spending? $1.57 return. Aid to the states? $1.41. Temporary increase in food stamps? $1.74. Even the Obama tax credits for the middle class, $288 billion of the Recovery Act, account for up to $1.30.

Meanwhile, the Obama administration is working with a deficit commission which will focus on trimming the deficit after (we hope) the economy and jobs are back on track. The Republicans, of course, voted against forming a deficit commission.

Given the choice between deficit spending that significantly stimulates economic growth and deficit spending that barely makes a dent, which choice are the Republicans trying to sell? The really stupid deficit spending that barely makes a dent. That's the Republican plan.

Also, contrary to popular far-right myths, it's worth noting that the Democrats and the White House have no intention of allowing the tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000 to expire. Those tax cuts will be renewed this year. As for the top tax brackets, you find me a multi-millionaire who pays the actual marginal rate every April and I'll show you a very rich moron. Most of these guys, after deductions and loopholes, pay an effective tax rate that's much lower than the middle class tax brackets. So don't tell me that millionaire Glenn Beck and millionaire Paris Hilton will be financially burdened by a 2.6 percent bump in their margin tax rate next year. Sorry, no. They won't be. And why do middle class Republican voters give a rip about Paris Hilton's tax rate? Because they believe they'll be as wealthy as Paris some day. But read those bullet-points again. It's not happening.

Unless there's some sort of mass epiphany, or unless the Democrats actually speak up and take the discourse by the horns and fight, middle class American voters in November will augment the number of Republicans (and conservadems) in Congress mostly because they've been suckered into endorsing these insane Republican economic policies. Subsequently, the Republicans will balloon the deficit and undermine the economic recovery in order to give more handouts to the super rich. And the middle class will continue to be an accomplice in its own slow-roasted homicide.

SOURCE:http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bob-cesca/the-gop-plot-to-screw-the_b_662953.html

Cancer patient loses coverage over a penny

Jonathan Berr
Jul 13th 2010 at 11:00AM

It seems like the Mother of all health care horror stories: an unemployed single mom suffering from leukemia almost lost her health insurance because she underpaid her COBRA premium by a penny. It's made the national media, including MSNBC's "Countdown with Keith Olbermann" and the Huffington Post. But there's more to the story than meets the eye.

Larosa Carrington of Colorado Springs, Colo. was treated shabbily by Discovery Benefits, the administrator of her COBRA benefits. Since she never received a bill, the laid-off college admissions counselor was forced to calculate how much she owed on her own. By Carrington's reckoning, she figured that $165.15 was the correct amount and sent the payment to North Dakota-based Discovery Benefits. In response, the company sent her a badly written, legalistic letter saying that "the amount of your payment was not enough to satisfy your initial premium payment ... so your coverage has not been reinstated with your insurance carrier."

The 52-year-old telephoned Discovery Benefits to find out and was stunned when the Discovery representative told her she owed $165.16 and wanted her to send a payment for 1 cent. Carrington says that the representative insisted she pay the shortfall with either a check or money order and there was no way that it could be overlooked. Carrington was incredulous.

"I actually called them from my hospital room, [lying] in my hospital bed," she says. "At that particular moment, I wanted to know how much I was short ... Of course, I was in disbelief when I found out" that the amount due was a single penny.

Carrington says she tried "everything" she could think of, including "ridiculing them and shaming them," to no avail. Her argument was that she could not send a payment because she was undergoing chemotherapy. Another problem Carrington pointed out was that her bank might not cash her check, thinking it was a "mistake." A supervisor was more sympathetic, but still could not help.

"The best she could do for me was keep a 'special eye' out for my payment," she says. "I kept hearing 'that's not our policy.'"

Frustrated with Discovery's stubbornness, Carrington mentioned to the supervisor who called herself "Gina" that she was considering telling her story to the media. Later that day, Gina phoned back to say she had come up with the figure of $161.1545. Carrington had rounded down while the company had rounded up. Discovery then corrected its error and reinstated her coverage. Carrington was so mad that she told her story to the media anyway.

The whole Kafkaesque exercise lasted three hours and was pointless, since the cost of processing a 1-cent check probably would be far more than the value of the payment. If Discovery really wanted that penny, it would have made more sense just to ask for it in the next payment. Technically, Carrington was without insurance and would have received sufficient coverage if she made her payment before the grace period. That's no excuse, though, for how she was treated.

Discovery President John Biewer admits the company made a mistake, which it rectified as soon as it could and has taken steps to prevent it from happening again.

"The letter should not have gone out for only a penny," he says, adding that it was spit out by a software program run by a third-party vendor that has been fixed. Its cold, bureaucratic language was mandated by state insurance laws.

Carrington was inconvenienced for a few hours by the snafu, which gave her -- understandably -- a headache. Media reports also have failed to note that Discovery only collects payments and has no say over who gets insurance and who does not. Carrington says she was not aware of the exact role the company plays and only confronted them because she knew of no other place to go.

"Our motivation is to keep her insured," Biewer says, adding that the company does not make money otherwise. "We're not the evil people everyone thinks we are. We do not pay medical claims. We are just in shock in how this is being portrayed."

Indeed, Olbermann declared Biewer "The Worst Person in the World" on July 7, saying of Discovery, "They'll let you die for one hundredth of a dollar." That refers to the discrepancy between Carrington's and the company's initial calculations. Carrington's story has gone viral, resulting in the morphing of a regrettable error into an evil plot to deny a sick woman life-saving health care.

"They turned our world upside down in 12 hours," Biewer says, adding that he doesn't even know the name of Carrington's insurer. "We are getting a ton of nasty e-mails ... [some] are unsettling but not enough for the police to do anything about them."

After her story appeared in the press, Carrington says she was contacted by many people who battled their insurance companies over trivial amounts of money. "There need to be clear guidelines for people to understand," she says.

Her story has a happy ending. A fund has been set up to help her out. Occasionally, people recognize her as the "penny lady."

Carrington's story, she says, has a simple morale that patients should remember when taking on insurance companies: "Use your voice."

SOURCE: http://www.walletpop.com/blog/2010/07/13/cancer-patient-loses-coverage-over-a-penny/