Higher Fees Limit Citizenship Seekers

Immigrants are getting priced out of citizenship because they can't afford higher application fees that kicked in last year, according to a report out today. Citizenship applications plummeted after the fee rose from $400 to $675 on July 30, 2007, says an analysis by the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, an immigrant advocacy group. In the first six months of this year, an average of 46,866 immigrants applied for citizenship each month — a 59% decrease from last year, when an average of 114,469 people applied monthly during the same period. The agency allows citizenship applicants to apply for waivers if they can't afford the fee and generally approves about two-thirds of the requests, Aytes says. In July, USCIS granted 1,052 fee waivers out of 1,578 requests from citizenship applicants. Application fees cover most of USCIS' operating and processing costs. The agency increased fees to cover costs and improve services.

• JJ Commentary: How does this equation work? We want to crack down on illegal immigrants but we make it harder to become a legal immigrant?

Border Fence to Cost Extra $400 Million

WASHINGTON (AP) — The Bush administration needs an extra $400 million to complete its fence along the country's southwestern border, and government investigators say that may not even be enough to finish construction by the end of this year. To complete the 670-mile fence — already half built — the administration has asked Congress to approve the use of $400 million that was set aside for surveillance technology projects along the U.S.-Mexico border. Higher costs of fuel, steel and labor has led to the $400 million shortfall. The fence is not intended to stop illegal immigration altogether, but rather make it more difficult for people to enter the country illegally, administration officials say. The entire plan for security on the southwestern border includes additional Border Patrol agents, more enforcement of immigration laws, a physical fence and a high-tech "virtual fence" with surveillance technology.

Illegal Immigration

LAUREL, Miss. (AP) — Federal immigration agents arrested some 350 suspected undocumented workers in a raid on a Mississippi electrical equipment plant Monday. Barbara Gonzalez, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman, confirmed the arrests in the raid that she said targeted Howard Industries Inc. of Laurel. Authorities said more people could be arrested.

NEWSMAX: Law officers in a D.C. suburb have found one way to cut crime drastically. Crack down on illegal immigration. Virginia’s Prince William County has turned over 875 illegal aliens for deportation since 2006, and the crime rate has dropped nearly 20%. Section 287(g) of the Immigration and Nationality Act authorizes local police to enforce immigration laws. Another jurisdiction using Section 287(g) is Maricopa County, Arizona. Sheriff Joe Arpaio says he has 160 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE)-trained officers, the most of any municipality in the country.

Fox News is reporting that streams of illegal immigrants are heading home to Mexico. In fact, the report said the exodus numbers are the highest they’ve been in decades. So far this year 1.3 million have decided the grass is greener in their homeland. And since last August, the illegal immigrant population has dropped 11 percent. So why are they leaving? As this report suggests, if the Federal government enforces existing immigration laws by taking away jobs, housing, and social benefits, illegal aliens will leave on their own.

Feds Scrap Immigrant Self-Deportation Program

SANTA ANA, Calif. (AP) — A pilot program allowing illegal immigrants to surrender to authorities and have more control over their deportation has been dubbed a failure. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement says it is ending its "Scheduled Departure" program when the three-week trial concludes Friday. Only eight people participated in the program, officials said. "Quite frankly, I think this proves the only method that works is enforcement," Jim Hayes, acting director of ICE's detention and removal operations, told The Associated Press on Thursday. ICE said it hatched the plan to give illegal immigrants more control over their departure and to quell criticism by immigrant advocates that its enforcement efforts were disruptive to families. While immigrant rights activists ridiculed the program, they're now worried its failure will embolden enforcement. Immigrant advocates said the program flopped because it offered few incentives for illegal immigrants to step forward since they would be barred from returning to the country for as long as a decade. ICE offered the program to 457,000 illegal immigrants nationwide who have ignored judicial orders to leave the country but have no criminal record. They were promised up to 90 days to plan their exit and coordinate travel with relatives.

Illegal Immigration

The illegal-immigrant population has fallen an estimated 11 percent nationwide over the past year and perhaps even more in Arizona, with stricter law enforcement a likely cause, according to a report issued Wednesday by a Washington organization that promotes less immigration. The apparent drop preceded a spike in unemployment claims, suggesting enforcement, not the nation's faltering economy, is responsible, said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies. The drop of about 1 million illegal residents happened from August to May, the report says, even as the number of legal immigrants increased. In Arizona, the number of illegal immigrants may have fallen as much as 18 percent since August, Camarota said, though the data is too spotty to say with confidence. The state, however, is among the leaders in declines, he said. "There seems to be a sense among the illegals that the enforcement law is back in business," Camarota said. Estimates before this study put the number of illegal immigrants at 12 million nationwide and 500,000 in Arizona.

Illegal Immigration Ebbing

No hard figures exist, but various surveys and anecdotes from immigrants, their advocates and consular officers in Miami suggest that more Latin Americans are voluntarily heading back home, the apparent result of the U.S. economic downturn and anxiety generated by a federal crackdown on illegal immigration. The hardest hit appear to be those in agricultural, construction, food processing and service jobs in which many immigrants work. A 2007 U.S. Department of Homeland Security report found that the number of permanent legal residents entering the country last year from South and Central America dropped by a quarter. That followed a big increase from 2005 to 2006. A recent survey of Latin-American immigrants by the Inter-American Development Bank highlights their malaise: 81 percent said it was more difficult now than a year ago to get a well-paying U.S. job. More than a quarter said they were considering going home in the next few years. And 68 percent said anti-immigration sentiment was a major problem — almost double the percentage who said so in 2001.

Border Security

After two years spent supporting the Border Patrol, performing jobs that have included surveillance, air transportation, building and fixing border fence and repairing roads, the National Guard begins pulling out Sunday, with the last of the personnel leaving in July. Their work was part of a Bush administration project dubbed Operation Jump Start, begun with the idea that the National Guard's assistance with nonenforcement jobs would allow the Border Patrol to use more of its agents for patrol while it went about boosting its staff to 18,000. As many as 6,000 guardsmen, some just back home from overseas deployment, volunteered along the southern border the first year, with about 1,200 of those in California. Their numbers were halved last year as the operation wound down.

• JJ Commentary: Just what we need – reduced border security. The bad gets even worse.

Citizenship on the Rise

ARIZONA: Immigration officials in Phoenix are churning out record numbers of new U.S. citizens, with as many as 2,000 to be sworn in this month alone. The push is part of a national effort to chip away at a mountain of backlogged applications, including many thousands from immigrants who had hoped to vote in November. Despite the increase in naturalizations, however, critics say the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services is not working fast enough, so many immigrants won't become citizens in time to vote. This month, the Phoenix CIS office plans to grant citizenship to 2,000 legal immigrants, more than twice the usual 800 for May, officials said.

Virtual is not Real

The first 28 miles of “virtual fencing” being deployed along our Southern border have failed to meet expectations, according to last month’s congressional testimony by Richard Stana, director of Homeland Security for the Government Accounting Office (GAO). Stana’s indictment of the hugely expensive, over-complicated and so far unworkable alternative to physical fencing should cause at least a pause for re-evaluation in moving forward with this “solution” to illegal immigration. Instead, the Department of Homeland Security continues to stand behind the virtual fence as a good substitute for the less artistic but repeatedly proven effective reinforced physical fencing.

In light of news that the "virtual" fence along Arizona's southern border won't be operational until 2011, Gov. Janet Napolitano has asked Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff to deploy National Guard troops there in the meantime. Those troops, stationed along the border since June 2006 as part of Operation Jump Start, are being drawn down as the operation nears its expiration July 15. At its peak, the operation brought 6,000 troops to the border states, including 2,400 to Arizona. That has been reduced by half, with roughly 1,200 troops now stationed along the Arizona border. "Now that promised improvements in border-security measures will not come to pass any time soon, the federal government has no excuse to scale back the program. Common sense dictates that the drawdown should stop and that a continued high National Guard presence should be maintained," Napolitano wrote Tuesday in a two-page letter to Chertoff.

• JJ Commentary: Yet another governmental boondoggle.

Illegal Immigration Costs Rising Fast

Illegal immigration is costing Arizona border counties millions a year for law enforcement and criminal prosecutions, diverting money from parks, libraries and other law-enforcement efforts, according to a study to be released Tuesday. The costs to the four border counties in Arizona increased 39 percent, from $19.2 million in fiscal 1999 to $26.6 million in fiscal 2006, researchers at the University of Arizona and San Diego State University found. For the nation's 24 border counties in Arizona, California, New Mexico and Texas, the costs related to illegal immigration in fiscal 2006 were $192 million, more than double the costs in 1999.

The study was commissioned by the U.S./Mexico Border Counties Coalition, a non-profit group of border-county officials who want the federal government to reimburse their county jails and prosecutors offices for legal costs. The coalition, which began looking at the impact of illegal immigration on border counties in 1999, paid for the study using a Justice Department grant. Researchers estimate the costs of illegal immigration on county law enforcement borderwide at $1.2 billion in the past eight fiscal years.

• JJ Commentary: Keep in mind that these costs are only for law enforcement and criminal prosecutions. When you add emergency hospital care, education, welfare, etc. to the equation, the overall costs are humongous.

Mixed Signals on Immigration

WASHINGTON (AP) — Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff on Monday defended the construction of a fence along the southwest border, saying it's actually better for the environment than what happens when people illegally cross the U.S.-Mexico line. "Illegal migrants really degrade the environment. I've seen pictures of human waste, garbage, discarded bottles and other human artifact in pristine areas," Chertoff said in a telephone interview with the Associated Press.To curb illegal immigration, the U.S. government plans to complete 370 miles of fencing and put 200 miles of vehicle barriers on the southwest border by the end of 2008. But this has brought complaints that the fence and barriers are harmful to the environment. Chertoff said the department exceeded its goal to complete 150 miles of fencing along the Mexican border by the end of the 2007 fiscal year, Sept. 30th.

Illegal immigrants are getting driver's licenses and identification cards in cities and states that are bucking the national trend to take official documents and public benefits away from them. New Haven, Conn., began issuing municipal ID cards in July to all residents, including illegal immigrants. New York will join eight other states in giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants, starting in December. Gov. Eliot Spitzer "believes it's important to bring a significant population in New York state out of the shadows … (and) allow them to participate in the economy," Motor Vehicles Commissioner David Swarts says.

• JJ Commentary: With such mixed signals, our illegal immigration problem will never get resolved, to the delight of the New World (Dis)Order folks who want to establish the North American Union.

Amnesty Defeated

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President Bush's immigration bill suffered a crushing defeat Thursday in the Senate, when members voted against advancing the controversial legislation. The tally was 46 to 53, 14 votes shy of the 60 needed to end debate. The bill would have provided a path to citizenship for some of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. and toughens border security. Supporters and opponents of the controversial legislation said that it probably won't be resurrected until after the 2008 elections.

The controversial bill won support and derision from both sides of the political aisle. Those voting in favor included 12 Republicans. Sixteen Democrats voted against it and 18 senators switched their votes from an earlier vote on the bill on Tuesday. Bush had lobbied heavily for support for the compromise legislation, which was also crafted by Massachusetts Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy. Senators were voting against cutting off debate and referring the bill for a final vote. On Wednesday, supporters beat back a number of potentially fatal amendments.

• JJ Commentary: Praise God that this “compromise” bill (which supports all the North American Union and New World (Dis)Order goals) has been defeated.

Illegals Cost Big Bucks

Someone has finally fixed an approximate taxpayer cost of having between 12 million and 15 million illegal aliens residing in the U.S. A new study by the Heritage Foundation's Robert Rector found a household headed by an individual without a high school education, including about two-thirds of illegal aliens, costs U.S. taxpayers more than $32,000 in federal, state and local benefits. That same family contributes an average of $9,000 a year in taxes, resulting in a net tax burden of $22,449 each year. Over the course of the household's lifetime that tax burden translates to $1.1 million. If the lower figure of 12 million illegal aliens is used for estimation purposes, the total tax burden translates to $2.2 trillion.

About half of the 17.7 million households studied are illegal aliens. About two-thirds of illegal alien households are headed by someone without a high school degree. Only 10 percent of native-born Americans fit into that category.

• JJ Commentary: The argument that many of the illegal aliens perform productive jobs that Americans don’t want to do pales in comparison to the costs of having them do so. In addition, it is estimated that only 4% of them actually do so

Financial Betrayal

Dozens of major United States banking institutions led by Bank of America are implementing a nationwide amnesty program for millions of illegal immigrants by accepting as valid identification Mexico's matricula consular cards, which are just a "laminated piece of paper," critics of the plan have charged. The plan, which was outlined in a report by the Center for Immigration Studies four years ago, is gaining notoriety only now because of the Mexican government's specific goal of flying under the radar by working with local and area jurisdictions, instead of national leaders, according to the CIS report.

Headlines in the past few weeks on the issue have been dominated by plans by Bank of America to accept the consular cards to establish credit card accounts. Officials with Americans for Legal Immigration also have released a long list of American banking institutions that are moving down the same path. Worse yet, the acceptance of Mexico's card "sets a precedent, making it almost impossible to reject similar cards presented by illegal aliens from other countries, including those which have sent terrorists to the United States in the past," the report said.

• JJ Commentary: It’s not surprising that our financial institutions, motivated by greed and avarice, would undermine the illiegal immigration situation. The New World (Dis)Order has made it a point to gain control of finance and the media to further their goal of a one-world government.