U.S. immigration prosecutions fall steeply

WASHINGTON, March 19 (UPI) — Criminal immigration charges filed by U.S. federal prosecutors steeply declined last year, according to new figures.

During November 2006 the Department of Justice reported 2,690 new immigration prosecutions, according to a case-by-case analysis by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, or TRAC, at Syracuse University.

That figure was down nearly 2 percent from the previous month and 18 percent less than the same month in 2005, TRAC said in a statement last week.

But it was still more than twice the number filed in a typical month before Sept. 11, 2001, TRAC said about the figures, which it culled from data obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The statement said that might be because the department is counting charges brought in U.S. magistrates’ courts more effectively.

“If magistrate cases are excluded and only federal district court cases are counted, the overall increase in immigration prosecutions (since 2001) is 7.4 percent …,” the statement said.

The recent “slump” in the number of such cases “may mark the end or a slowing in the massive surge that has been recorded by the Bush Administration’s Justice Department since October of 2003,” concluded TRAC.

The figures show that, during November 2006, the Southern District of Texas continued to bring more immigration prosecutions than any other U.S. attorney’s office in the country. Arizona and the Southern District of California each moved up in their rankings from a year ago to be the second and third most active districts. New districts in the top 10 most active in November as compared with one and five years ago were Utah, Colorado, Kansas and the Eastern District of Washington.

More……

From March 15, 2007, NRO

Amnesty Follies
The false inevitability of “Comprehensive immigration reform.”
By Mark Krikorian

Center for Immigration Studies

When the Democrats won in November, there was a sense that an illegal-alien amnesty and huge increases in future immigration were inevitable. Even Rep. Tom Tancredo, the uber-hawk on immigration, was taken in: “We will fight it, we will lose,” he told the Washington Times. “It will go to the Senate, it will pass. The president will sign it. And it will happen quickly because that’s one thing they know they can pass.”

Sometimes it’s good to be wrong.

This week, even as President Bush was pledging to the Mexican people that he would pursue their interests in working for an immigration bill, the political edifice of such a bill was falling apart.

Ted Kennedy and John McCain announced this week that they were giving up on crafting a new immigration bill and would instead revive the one approved last year by the (Republican) Senate Judiciary Committee (which was different in certain ways from the Hagel-Martinez amnesty finally passed by the Senate). There’s going to be a lot more sound and fury in Congress over immigration, but, as Roll Call writes, “it still appears unlikely that comprehensive reforms will move out of the [Senate] chamber before electoral concerns kill the bill.”

It’s interesting to note that, despite all the talk of the Right-Left, odd-bedfellows coalition backing the amnesty push, it is partisan differences that are torpedoing the effort. Both the good and bad elements of each political party’s character are proving to be stumbling blocks.

On one side, there is the Republicans’ characteristic support for law and order, for enforcement, and for American sovereignty. To appeal to that sentiment in Republicans skeptical of amnesty, the Bush administration has permitted a limited increase in immigration enforcement, after many years of intentional neglect (by 2004, for instance, only three employers in the entire country had been fined for knowingly hiring illegal aliens). This has brought to the fore an unattractive aspect of the Democrats, who have been ferociously critical of all these enforcement efforts; most recently, Sen. Kennedy himself has been relentlessly lambasting the administration for having the temerity to raid a Massachusetts leather factory (that supplied the Army!) that was full of illegal aliens knowingly hired by management. Republicans are thus naturally skeptical that Democrats are sincere in their commitment to the sustained, muscular enforcement that they’ve promised in exchange for amnesty and increased immigration.

Immigration hawks need to demand that this new enforcement not only be continued, but that it be stepped up. For instance, the Justice Department should formally release a 2002 legal opinion highlighting the inherent authority of states and localities to arrest immigration violators (see a redacted version of the memo here). Congress must authorize the IRS and Social Security to share information with immigration authorities on the millions of illegal aliens they have information on. The Democratic leadership cannot be allowed to drop down the memory hole the fencing that Congress overwhelmingly approved last year. And, in general, additional measures needed to achieve attrition through enforcement must be implemented.

The rest….

Coming Up!

Sunday, April 22 3:30-5:30 pm EDT

Dustin Inman Society rally info here.

Anti-Amnesty Rally at the White House!

Who is Jeff Flake? Who is Luis Gutieierrez ?
What is amnesty for illegal aliens and illegal employers and what is its result?

Stay tuned, watch for another attempt at amnesty-again soon.

From FAIR:

March 08, 2007

People Who Violate Immigration Laws are More Likely to Violate Other Laws, Finds the Federation for American Immigration Reform

Washington DC – A recent study by the Immigration Policy Center (IPC) purported to show that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes in this country than the general population. The results of the IPC report, “The Myth of Immigrant Criminality and the Paradox of Assimilation,” are misleading because they lump legal and illegal immigrants together, finds an analysis done by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

Not surprisingly, legal immigrants, who are screened for criminal records before being admitted to the United States, tend not to engage in criminal activities once in the country. The same is not the case for illegal aliens, who constitute the fastest growing share of the foreign-born population. An examination of official data on the U.S. prison population reveals that they represent a larger share of the overall prison population than their presence in the country.

“IPC, which is part of the network of advocacy groups lobbying for an illegal alien amnesty, is clearly fudging the facts to advance their political objectives,” said Dan Stein, president of FAIR. “Local law enforcement authorities are correct to be concerned about growing populations of illegal residents because, on average, they are more likely to commit crimes. A new study we are releasing today shows that deportable aliens nationwide were more than half-again as likely to be incarcerated for crimes as their share of the population.”

The findings of the IPC report, which gained widespread media attention, are belied by mounting evidence that illegal immigration is directly linked to violent crime in this country. Federal and local law enforcement agencies have announced urgent new initiatives to deal with growing gang violence, perpetrated by transnational criminals. Among the illegal alien criminals are possible terrorists, drug and human traffickers, child predators, drunk and hit-and-run drivers, murderers, and all classes of other felons.

“Our failure to control illegal immigration poses a real and documentable risk to the security of the American people,” Stein asserted. “Innocent Americans are often victims of personal and property crimes committed by illegal aliens. The American public is not paranoid and they are not misperceiving reality. Illegal aliens are more prone to criminal activity than the rest of the population, a fact that points up the urgent need for Congress and the Bush Administration to regain control of our borders and enforce laws against illegal immigration.”

Read the full report

From CNN: Meatpacker’s wages are going down because of illegal immigration.

“The meat packers are confirming what we know,” says University of Maryland economics professor Peter Morici, “and that is that this large group of illegal aliens in the United States is lowering the wage rate of semiskilled workers, people who are high school dropouts or high school graduates with minimal training.”

In fact, a meat-packing job paid $19 an hour in 1980, but today that same job pays closer to $9 an hour, according to the Labor Department. That’s entirely consistent with what we’ve been reporting — that illegal aliens depress wages for U.S. workers by as much as $200 billion a year in addition to placing a tremendous burden on hospitals, schools and other social services.

Stats and figures on some costs of translation taken from the Atlanta Journal Constitution

Critical time for translation
Metro has growing need for language interpreters
By Anna Varela
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Published on: 01/07/07

Atlanta’s Grady hospital spends about $800,000 a year on services for people who speak limited English, according to Sandra Sanchez, director of the Department of Multicultural Affairs.

Metro Atlanta has more than 300,000 people who speak English less than “very well,” according to 2005 Census Bureau estimates, up from an estimated 242,198 in 2002, the first year the census asked the question. A little more than two-thirds are native Spanish-speakers.

In 2002, the Office of Management and Budget attempted to put a price tag on such efforts nationwide. The OMB estimated the cost of interpretation for doctor and dentist appointments, hospital stays and emergency room visits at roughly $268 million a year.

The report, which did not attempt to tally the cost to all agencies, also estimated that foreign language services related to the Food Stamp program are roughly $25 million a year.

Cobb County schools spent close to $1.2 million last year on services for families who don’t speak English. That includes contracted services plus salary and benefits for 64 staff interpreters —- called “facilitators”. The bill has nearly tripled in just five years. In the 2001 budget year, the school system spent nearly $343,000 and had just eight in-house interpreters.

Gwinnett County spent nearly $539,000 in 2005 to provide interpreters in the courts. That’s more than double the amount the county spent in 2000, when it paid close to $215,400 for interpreters, who are hired as needed for specific cases.

Assistant District Attorney Stephen Fern says the need has grown “exponentially” in recent years. “We can’t get through a calendar anymore without an interpreter,” Fern said.

The state Division of Family and Children Services estimates that it spent about $346,000 in 2006 for interpretation services in the area that includes metro Atlanta.

“I get calls every day for translators,” said Annette G. Cash, Director of the Translation and Interpretation Program at Georgia State University. “The Spanish program is just flourishing because of the need.”

Click here.

Then here.

Then here.

Bush promises Mexico: “I’ll work as hard as I possibly can” for amnesty!

President Bush, working to rebuild strained U.S.-Mexico relations, promised Tuesday he would do his best to get a deeply divided U.S. Congress to change American immigration policies that are hated south of the border.“My pledge to you and your government, but more important to the people of Mexico, is I’ll work as hard as I possibly can to pass comprehensive immigration reform,” Bush said during a sun-splashed arrival ceremony that opened two days of meetings with Mexican President Felipe Calderón in this Yucatan Peninsula tourist haven.

READ MORE What an outrage! Bush should promise the American people that he will secure our borders!

A friend, Steve Merrill, a retired Border Patrol Agent in Oklahoma City, ends most of his e-mails with these thoughts included at the bottom, I thought I would share them here.

Illegal immigration should have stopped on September 12, 2001.

Remember, if you are serious about doing something about illegal immigration, for God’s sake, at the very least start by staying informed.

If the government of the United States was serious about illegal immigration, they would do more about it.

If you do not think this is an invasion, then try and stop it.

We have room for but one flag, the American Flag. We have room for but one language, the English langauge, and we have room for but one sole loyalty, and that is a loyalty to the American people. — President Theodore Roosevelt.

Turn in an illegal alien ( note from D.A. – and an illegal employer ) today. ICE Phone Number: (866) 347-2423. Toll free and you do not have to give your name. Just all the information you can think of.