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The CIR Insider
The immigration reform see-saw on Capitol Hill continued this month.
President Obama's State of the Union address, the competing White House
top priorities, the mood in Congress resulting from resignations and
election jitters, and the lacking progress on a comprehensive bill all
add up to a rather bleak outlook of CIR passage this year. For the time
being, Napolitano's Department of Homeland Security continues its
enforcement-only strategy considered to be somewhat ineffective, but is the
only tangible government immigration action at the moment. However,
there are still signs of hope and efforts to keep CIR at the top of the
agenda continue.
Read full story.
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R ecent
Developments
Immigration Increases Native Wages Regardless of Education Level
The Economic Policy Institute, an independent nonprofit
nonpartisan D.C. think tank, released a new study entitled Immigration
and Wages, which reinforces the results from previous studies that
"immigration has a small but positive impact on the wages of native-born
workers overall." Overall, economist Heidi Shierholz concludes in the
study that the "effect of immigration from 1994 to 2007 raised the wages
of U.S.-born workers, relative to foreign-born workers at all levels of
education, including those with less than a high-school education."
While there is broad agreement among economists that immigration has a
small, positive effect on the average wages of native-born workers, they
remain divided over the effects of immigration on specific groups of
U.S. workers (particularly those with low levels of education).
Read full story.
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Senators Bring Immigration Reform into the Jobs Package Initiative
Senator Jeff Sessions [R-AL], David Vitter [R-LA], Tom Coburn [R-OK],
James Inhofe [R-OK], Saxby Chambliss [R-GA], Charles Grassley [R-IA],
Johnny Isakson [R-Geo], and Jim Bunning [R-KY] recently sent Senate
Majority Leader Harry Reid [D-NV] a letter urging him to include
immigration measures in the jobs package.
Read full story.
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Napolitano Issues DHS FY2011 Budget Proposal with Priority to Enforce
Immigration Laws
Last week, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary, Janet
Napolitano, released the DHS FY2011 $56.3 billion budget proposal.
Reflected in the budget, the five major goals of the DHS are: preventing
terrorism and enhancing security; securing and managing the nation's
borders; smart and effective enforcement of immigration laws;
safeguarding and securing cyberspace; and ensuring resiliency to
disasters.
The two immigration-enforcement components of DHS, Customs and Border
Protection (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) account
for 30% of the total DHS budget, while the immigration-services
component, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), has been
allotted 5% of the total budget.
Read
full story.
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The "State of Immigration"
Verdict
Since the State of the Union on January 27, 2009, we've been monitoring
the reactions of the media, IR advocates, IR opponents and Congress to
the address and the implications for immigration reform. The Immigration
Policy Institute (IPC) email that the "President Declares Ongoing
Commitment to Immigration Reform" immediately followed the State of the
Union, and clearly jumped the gun as the President declaring support for
IR is quite an overstatement. The resounding opinion has been more along
the lines of "President Obama just killed comprehensive immigration
reform" as written by Sandip Roy from the Huffington Post or "It was the
death knell of immigration reform in 2010" as quoted by Newsweek.
Read full story.
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Monthly Spotlight
Lou Dobbs: An Immigration
Advocate?
Before his resignation from CNN in November 2009, Lou Dobbs was a
prominent illegal-immigration and Latino community opponent. Since 2004,
on "Lou Dobbs Tonight" he was notorious for his conservative populist
stance and promotion of immigration misinformation - using illegal
immigrants as the scapegoat for America's problems such as crime, jobs
and diseases. Media Matters, a not-for-profit progressive research and
information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing,
and correcting conservative misinformation in the U.S. media, released a
comprehensive report detailing Dobbs' immigration coverage.
Read full story.
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Inside Immigration
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should not be relied upon as legal advice. If you believe that
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