D.A. King: Enforcement works — even if Mexico doesn’t like it

By D.A. King, Marietta Daily Journal, October 27, 2011

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Summary:

This is the ongoing attrition of the illegal population through self deportation because of fear of enforcement that was fully expected when the laws were drafted.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is complaining about what he called “irrational” immigration laws in the United States.

The Associated Press recently reported on the frustration of the Mexican government that state immigration enforcement laws put in place in Arizona, Georgia, Alabama and other states are causing Mexicans to migrate home.

This is the ongoing attrition of the illegal population through self deportation because of fear of enforcement that was fully expected when the laws were drafted.

Mexican President Felipe Calderon is complaining about what he called “irrational” immigration laws in the United States. “To the extent to which they continue to put absurd curbs on migration, to the degree to which they continue to persecute migrants in the United States in an irrational way that sometimes violates their human rights…” he said.

You gotta love it.

He didn’t note that the U.S. takes in more than a million legal immigrants each year. More than any nation in the world. With Mexico sending the most immigrants. Or that unemployment here is around 10 percent and has been for years. Or that most states are suffering severe budget shortages.

He has a real point about this level of immigration being “irrational.”

At a recent immigration conference, Calderon also said the practice of dumping illegal alien criminals at the border has fueled violence in Mexico’s border areas. Golly, sorry about that El Presidente. We know just how you feel.

More from the AP: “Rafael Fernandez de Castro, of the Monterrey Technological Institute, told the conference that about 200,000 Mexicans per year are returning to their country, and that Mexican schools are facing a new problem: tens of thousands of Mexican children are coming back each year with little or no Spanish.”

“In the last couple of school years in Mexico, literally tens of thousands of children have turned up with last names like Sanchez, Fernandez, or Hinojosa and, it must be said, they don’t speak Spanish, they speak English,” Fernandez de Castro whined. “We have to ask California and Texas how they managed to integrate these Mexican children who went to the United States and didn’t speak English.” Indeed.

Maybe Calderon should consider mandating Spanish-as-second-language classes in Mexican schools, putting English translations on all official government forms and publications, adding English to the drivers license tests — and ballots — and force Mexican citizens to “Press one for Spanish” when they use the telephone. Maybe an English version of Univision.

The current complaints are all very reminiscent of the effects of the 2007 Arizona law that put mandatory E-Verify in place there. The outward migration of illegal aliens also caused some howling from the local governments on the south side of the border then. The Mexican state of Sonora even sent a delegation to complain about the law that weeds out illegal aliens from the American workplace.

The Mexican lawmakers said then that enforcement in the U.S. was having a devastating affect. The increased demand for subsidized housing, jobs and schools as illegal Mexican workers in Arizona returned to their Mexican hometowns without jobs or money was a real problem. Huh?

Around here, that kind of talk would be regarded by some Atlanta newspaper opinion page writers, La Raza and the ACLU as “meanspirited, anti-Hispanic and extreme.” At the least.

None of these inconvenient facts from Mexico can be helping the case being presented by some local governments here in Georgia through their powerful lobby that compliance with that darn HB 87, Georgia’s newest immigration related law, is just too inconvenient and costly.

Or from immigration lawyers practicing in Georgia who lament that illegals are leaving the state.

The University of Georgia School of Law held a symposium Saturday that included a discussion panel focused on HB 87. Heavily skewed to the anti-enforcement side, the panelists’ complaints were music to the ears of most Georgians. “We’re seeing people flee the state, whole families flee the state,” immigration lawyer Carolina Antonini lamented. She meant illegals who fear enforcement.

Many cities lack the resources to use the E-Verify system to check employees’ and public works contractors’ immigration status, said panelist Rusi Patel, counsel for the Georgia Municipal Association. He apparently didn’t mention that program was free to use and those requirements have been in place in Georgia since 2007.

What HB 87 did was to finally add clear penalties for officials who ignore the law.

Unsurprising prediction: The coming Gold Dome legislative session will see multiple attempts by the ACLU, the Association County Commissioners of Georgia (ACCG) and the Georgia Municipal Association (GMA) to weaken immigration law in Georgia. Again.

D.A. King is president of the Cobb-based Dustin Inman Society. He has worked closely with legislators on immigration law in Georgia.

Read more: The Marietta Daily Journal - D A King Enforcement works — even if Mexico doesn’t like it

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