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1. VA gangs driven to MD
2. MD leaders want verification
3. Amnesty in spotlight
4. Activists to press on
5. Jewish, Latino leaders

1.
Montgomery Co. crime rate eclipses neighboring Fairfax
By Freeman Klopott
The Washington Examiner (DC), February 1, 2010

Montgomery and Fairfax counties are similar is size, population and demographics, but the Maryland county has seen nearly 25 percent more serious crime recently than its neighbor across the Potomac, a study found.

Murders, rapes, assaults, burglaries, and other serious crimes totaled 28,311 in Montgomery County, and 21,319 in Fairfax County in 2008, according to a report released by the Montgomery County Council last week.

The rate of violent crimes in Montgomery is 235 per 100,000 residents, in Fairfax it's 78 per 100,000 residents.

The two counties have a similar demographic breakdown. Fairfax County has a slightly larger population at 1,015,000 compared with Montgomery's 950,680. The median income in Fairfax is higher at $107,075 compared with $93,895 in Montgomery.

Officials and law enforcement policy experts attributed at least a significant part of the crime gap to the counties' treatment of gangs and youth.

In October, the Northern Virginia Gang Task Force released a report detailing its success between 2003 and 2008. The report noted that "many gang members from Northern Virginia are moving or driving to Prince George's and other Maryland counties ... to avoid dealing with police departments that are unrelenting in their efforts to keep gangs under control."

Fairfax County Supervisor Jeff McKay, D-Lee, said the favorable crime numbers in his county traced to heightened police efforts to prevent crime within younger age groups.
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Jon Feere, a legal policy analyst for the Center for Immigration Studies, noted that the Montgomery County Council report cited a 12 percent reduction in violent crime in Fairfax County from 2006 to 2008, compared with a 5 percent drop in Montgomery during the same period.

"It is possible that Virginia's statewide efforts at discouraging illegal immigration have resulted in a greater decrease in violent criminal activity, particularly when it comes to the issue of criminal alien gangs like MS-13," Feere said.
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http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/local/crime/Montgomery-Co_-crime-rate-...

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2.
E-Verify urged for Baltimore County
Federal program would keep illegal immigrants off job sites
By Mary Gail Hare
The Baltimore Sun, February 1, 2010

At the urging of construction unions, Baltimore County Council members are pushing for a new requirement that contractors working for the county verify the immigration status of their employees or risk losing county business.

The council is scheduled to take up a resolution today urging County Executive Jim Smith to encourage contractors to vet new hires with the federal E-Verify program.

"If a business knowingly hires illegal aliens on a county contract, they should lose that contract and the ability to bid on future contracts with the county," said Council Chairman John Olszewski, who introduced the measure with Councilman Kenneth N. Oliver. "These are tough times, and we want to make sure we are not taking jobs away from those who should have them."

Councilman Kevin Kamenetz added, "This policy would essentially remind vendors that they have to obey all the laws."

The resolution calls on Smith to encourage contractors to use E-Verify, an online system operated by the Department of Homeland Security and the Social Security Administration that lets employers compare details from a new hire's employment eligibility form with information from more than 500 million federal records.

A spokesman for Smith said the county's purchasing office is looking into complaints by construction unions of contractors cutting costs by hiring undocumented immigrants, and how E-Verify might help. Spokesman Don Mohler said officials want more information before changing current policy.

The Ironworkers Union is one of several that have asked the council to "take steps to secure the livelihood of [its] constituents," said Bernie Engel, the union's business manager. A third of the Ironworkers' 600 members are unemployed, Engel said. Their hourly pay rate, which includes health and retirement benefits, is about $40. Engel said workers in the United States illegally often get $12 an hour with no benefits.

"It is hard for a union guy to get a fair shake," said Jimmy Saunders Jr., an ironworker for 25 years. "These low wages make it impossible for us to compete."

Rod Easter, president of the Baltimore Building Trades Council, which represents 15 unions, called the council resolution "a step in the right direction."

"We know illegals are working around the area," he said. "No one is opposed to people who are legally in the country having opportunities to go to work. But, when you are illegally here and a contractor knowingly hires you, you are taking a job away from a law-abiding citizen, who lives here. Both the employer and illegal employee are committing a crime and should be punished."

E-Verify has its critics. Marc Rosenblum, a senior policy analyst at the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington, described it as a good tool that improves continually, but said it still needs fine-tuning.

"Because of inaccurate information in some databases, a U.S. citizen or a legal immigrant may be wrongly not confirmed and denied employment," he said. "The system also can tell an employer whether a name and Social Security number are in the database, but it is not an effective deterrent against identity theft."
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http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/baltimore-county/bal-md.co.eve...

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3.
Immigration Reform Again Coming into National Focus
By Matt O'Brien
The Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, CA), January 31, 2010

Berkeley, CA -- Patricia Hernandez has the unenviable job of cleaning up the mess left by undergraduates at UC Berkeley.

"Whatever they break, we fix it," she said, sitting on a dormitory couch during her morning break. "Change light bulbs, fix furniture, fix toilets, unclog toilets, replace toilets."

Hernandez, 48, is not complaining, just describing. She is proud of the job she has held for 18 years and the financial security it brings. She loves that her brother is a cook at a nearby campus cafeteria and that her daughter works as a pharmacy technician a few blocks away.

She loves it because 40 years ago, she was living in a Mexican orphanage. Twenty-five years ago, she was living in a car in Southern California and struggling to find work because she was an illegal immigrant.

"Like everybody else, I jumped the border," she said. Then, about 23 years ago, she got lucky.

For Hernandez and thousands of other Bay Area residents 1987 marked the end of a life of hiding and the beginning of life as an American.

It was the year the Immigration Reform and Control Act, approved by Congress in 1986 and signed by President Ronald Reagan, went into effect. In a matter of months, Hernandez went from being undocumented to having a green card, and years later she was able to obtain citizenship. She sighs today as she imagines how life would be different without it.

"I would have never had this opportunity to have this job," she said. "You continue in the shadows, never have the
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opportunity to buy a house, or drive. I don't know what kind of job I'd be doing."

President Barack Obama made little mention of immigration during his State of the Union address on Wednesday, leading some analysts to believe he might back off on his pursuit of a "pathway to citizenship" for illegal immigrants who pay a fine and learn English. Still, as his administration and members of Congress continue to push for some kind of immigration reform this year, supporters and opponents of legalization are looking back at 1986 for guidance on what to do and what to avoid.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has called Obama's reform proposals a "three-legged stool" that would mix humane treatment of immigrants already here with improved enforcement of existing laws. In doing so, she has echoed the language of the Reagan administration, which argued for a "three-pronged" approach when it negotiated the 1986 act that legalized illegal immigrants, made it illegal for employers to hire them in the future and set up a penalty system for employers who broke the law.

Yet scholars say very little is known about how roughly 2.7 million immigrants who earned an unprecedented path to citizenship in the late 1980s have fared since then, or how their legalization -- commonly called amnesty -- affected the economy or society as a whole.

The legalized immigrants have joined the ranks of other Americans, raising children and welcoming grandchildren, and the once-a-decade national census does not differentiate them from their neighbors. Some stuck with their pre-amnesty occupations or moved up the career ladder. Some have retired or will soon. More than half -- about 1.6 million -- lived in California when they won their green cards, but researchers believe thousands eventually dispersed to other states that offered new opportunities.

Many mastered English, often with the help of their citizenship classes, though others never did and still struggle with the language their children speak fluently.

Some, such as Cynthia Alvarez of San Francisco, attended the country's top academic institutions.

"Is the country better off because somebody like me got her papers? Yes," said Alvarez, who works in property management. "If I had never legalized, I probably wouldn't have graduated high school. I would have not gone to college. I would not have gone on to Stanford (graduate school) on a full scholarship, for sure."

A flurry of academic studies commissioned in recent months by pro-immigrant advocates suggests that another mass legalization will be an economic boon to the United States, both because of the fees applicants must pay, the tax rolls they will join and the money they will spend. Legalizing unauthorized immigrants would contribute $1.5 trillion to the gross domestic product over the next decade, wrote UCLA professor Raul Hinojosa-Ojeda in a report released this month.

Opposing studies say another amnesty will be a drain on the nation's resources and a hardship for the native-born workers with whom immigrants compete for lower-wage jobs. Illegal immigrants' risk of deportation and vulnerability to exploitation are artificial barriers to upward mobility that disappear once legalization happens, wrote Hinojosa in his UCLA report.

It is hard for anyone to say for sure what economic impacts resulted from the country's first and only amnesty program, argues economist David Card, a UC Berkeley professor who works a few blocks away from Unit 3, the six-building dormitory complex where Hernandez is the lead maintenance worker.

"Various people have tried studies of the effect of (the 1986 legislation) on wages locally, but never found anything," Card said. "It would be pretty unlikely there would be a big effect. Many, many people have tried to find one and no one's come up with one."

He said, however, that there is little evidence to assert that wages dropped, a common concern at the time -- and again today -- from those worried a glut of newly legal workers would have disastrous effects.

"The research has been pretty much uniform in finding that areas that got more immigration in the 1990s did not have any lower wage growth over the '90s or even the 2000s," he said.

1986 in the Bay Area

When the federal Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) told millions of illegal immigrants that they could begin applying for amnesty in May 1987, the agency's offices in Oakland, San Francisco and San Jose were ready to accommodate them.

Alan Nelson, an Oakland native and Republican, was tasked with the complicated job of implementing the law Congress had passed with the president's encouragement. Reagan had hired the Lafayette resident and former Alameda County prosecutor as the nation's immigration commissioner in 1981.

The debate over immigration was no less contentious in the 1980s than it is today. Forty-six percent of Americans surveyed in spring 1985 said they thought illegal immigrants who had been living in the country for several years should be deported, not legalized, according to a poll by The Associated Press.

But amnesty was just one of three prongs of the law. The law that Nelson touted also made it illegal for employers to knowingly hire unauthorized workers and set up a system of penalties for employers who broke the law.

"(Nelson) made a very major effort to get this right and spent a lot of time and energy working on it," said immigration analyst David North, one of a group of scholars who met with the INS commissioner before the law was implemented. "I'm not sure he would have designed the program this way but once Congress voted for it, he sort of felt that as a good soldier, he should go out and make it work."

North, who now works as a researcher for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., which advocates restricting immigration, is critical of amnesty programs. He says they have the potential to be rife with fraud and hurt native-born workers, especially those he describes as the "American grunts" who do not have college degrees and work in trades ranging from construction to hospitality

"There was kind of a grand bargain," North said of the Reagan administration effort. "We will legalize the more senior of the illegal aliens who have been here for a while, who had clean records, and at the same time we will bring about employer sanctions, which had not existed before 1986."

The government, however, never actively followed through on the employer sanctions, North said. Even amnesty backer Nelson, who died in 1997, became heavily critical of the failure to control immigration, co-authoring California's Proposition 187, which tried to exclude illegal immigrants from schools and other state services.

"The (1986 law) was going to clean things up, but the problem was the legalization program charged ahead and the enforcement never took place," North said. "It was a big, complicated, messy program and if they do it again it will be a bigger, more complicated, messy program."

An estimated 12 million illegal immigrants live in the U.S. today.
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http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_14287885?nclick_check=1

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4.
Chances are dim, but advocates will still push for immigration reform
By Spencer S. Hsu
The Washington Post, February 1, 2010

As President Obama vows to refocus Democrats' attention on jobs and the economy, advocates for overhauling the nation's immigration laws say they are still gearing up for a battle in the Senate in coming weeks, despite fading hopes for victory.

Washington's drawn-out health-care debate badly damaged prospects for an immigration bill this winter. It ate up weeks of the Senate's time, sapped progressive lawmakers' energy and, most recently, stoked a populist backlash that cost Democrats the seat of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy (Mass.), the chamber's most prominent champion of liberal health-care and immigration policies.

With time running out before lawmakers want to start focusing on the November elections, "immigration is deader than a doornail," one veteran Senate lobbyist put it. Advocates' frustration peaked last week when Obama devoted a single sentence in his 71-minute State of the Union address to a topic he ranked as a top legislative priority last summer, after health care and an energy bill.

"We should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system," Obama said, offering no specific remedy or timing, ". . . and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation."

Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), who has introduced a House bill favored by immigrant groups, said there was "disillusionment" among advocates across the country.

"There's almost universal consensus that the president -- it was too little," Gutierrez said, noting that by contrast, Obama pledged in the speech to repeal the military's ban on service by openly gay people this year. "He was very weak on immigration, lackadaisical," Gutierrez added.

"I had very low expectations, but he [the president] surprised even me with how little he said," added Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice. He and other advocates are pushing to legalize many of an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, strengthen enforcement of immigration laws and provide a mechanism to control the flow of immigrant workers.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) and Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), who has taken the lead in drafting a Senate bill, rushed to reassure immigrant advocates and Latino groups that they were still working with Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) to find Republican backers for a bipartisan bill, while shying away from setting a timetable.

"It's something we're committed to do, and we'll do it as soon as we can," Reid told reporters.

A White House official said Obama's mention of the issue implicitly made it part of his agenda for the year: "What he said in the speech was that we should move the process and legislation forward this year."

Nevertheless, backers say they will have to thread a needle to move a bill to the Senate floor by a springtime deadline, after which they fear midterm election politics will take hold.

Several stakeholders said a breakthrough is possible only if Schumer strikes a deal with at least two Republican cosponsors, Democrats hold firm and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) wants a bipartisan accomplishment to show voters this fall.

Opponents of increased immigration say they see little political will in Congress to help illegal immigrants at a time when unemployment is near 10 percent.

"The chances that potentially vulnerable congressmen and senators will want to vote on legalizing illegal aliens is now zero," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks reduced immigration.

In a poll last month by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, the public rated the importance of immigration near the bottom of a list of issues.
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http://www.contracostatimes.com/news/ci_14287885?nclick_check=1

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5.
Immigration Debate Prompts Growing Jewish-Latino Ties
By Nathan Guttman
The Forward, January 27, 2010

Washington, DC -- Even as health care reform twists in the wind, immigration policy looms as the next big political debate — and Hispanics and Jews are moving to the forefront in a burgeoning political alliance.

The next three months are seen as critical in the fight for immigration reform, but the weakening of the Democrats’ grip on Congress with the recent loss of a key Massachusetts Senate seat does not bode well for the passage of reform legislation.

The Jewish-Latino alliance on immigration issues builds on the heritage and experience of the Jewish community and on the enthusiasm and urgent needs of the Hispanic community, which has a strong interest in issues of family unification and the status of the some 12 million illegal immigrants, most of them from Latin America.

But Jewish activists also see the joint work as an opening for cooperation with the Hispanic community on other issues, such as Israel.

“If we want to engage with the Latino community on issues that are of concern for us, including Israel, we need to engage on issues that bother their community,” said Gideon Aronoff, president and CEO of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. “We want to create growing bonds with the Latino community, and we cannot create these bonds if we are indifferent to the issues that are of concern to them.”
Alliance: Luis Gutierrez (left) and Charles Schumer are trying to drive reform through Congress.

Some advocates view the ethnic backgrounds of the two key lawmakers leading the drive for immigration reform as symbolic of the growing alliance on the issue. In the House, the main immigration reform bill was presented Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, and in the Senate it is expected that New York’s Senator Charles Schumer will soon present his version of immigration reform legislation.

The Gutierrez bill has been praised by advocates for immigrants as providing answers to most of the concerns of the Hispanic community, but so far it has failed to gain any Republican support.

Schumer’s bill, now in the making, is expected to have more bipartisan appeal, by taking a nuanced approach to the thorny issue of providing a path to legalization for millions of illegal immigrants.

While Democratic-backed health care reform legislation was uniformly opposed by Republicans and now seems to be stuck in Congress, advocates agree that immigration reform stands no chance of passage without bipartisan support.

But immigration advocates believe that the blow suffered by health care reform supporters following the Massachusetts Senate election does not necessarily dictate the same fate for immigration reform. Indeed, said HIAS’s Aronoff, it might even help the cause, due to increased pressure on lawmakers to show progress on key issues. “All Americans have seen the gridlock in Washington and are very frustrated with it,” he said. “Now the president and Congress need to show that they can solve problems for Americans.”

But with the political clock ticking, supporters of reform fear that major legislation is becoming harder to pass, and so they set the first half of 2010 as a desired deadline for passing legislation. “Every day we get closer to the elections, the harder it becomes,” said Richard Foltin, director of national and legislative affairs at the American Jewish Committee, referring to upcoming congressional elections.

Jewish communal support for immigration reform is organized around several principles, including the need for a path to legalization for illegal immigrants; a mechanism for dealing with future immigration waves; speeding up work on family unification; integrating new immigrants into American society; and finding, as Jewish immigration advocates put it, an “effective and humane” way of enforcing immigration laws and border control.

This last point seems to be a growing concern within the Jewish community, said Jane Ramsey, executive director of the Jewish Council on Urban Affairs based in Chicago. Ramsey, whose organization has been working closely with Hispanic groups, stressed that while both communities strongly support immigration reform, there is still a need to instill in members of the Jewish community the importance of the issue, which for most Jews carries a symbolic, not personal, importance.

“Our community is one step removed,” she said, “and therefore it is very important to make it real for people by interacting with the Latino community.”

While the Jewish organizational world is essentially united on this issue, some have argued that the Jewish rank-and-file is not on entirely the same page as communal leaders.

The supposed divide between religious leaders of various stripes and their rank-and-file was the focus of a recent survey, sponsored by the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington-based group that opposes granting illegal immigrants a path to legalization and instead argues that many will return to their home countries if immigration laws are better enforced. That poll, which was conducted online by Zogby International in December, found that Jews were roughly equally divided between those who prefer a stepped-up enforcement approach and those who prefer granting legal status with a path to citizenship.

Jewish immigration advocates have questioned the survey’s methodology, but they agree that there are diverse opinions within the community. Yet the CIS poll also found that Jews were still considerably more likely than members of other religious groups to support granting legal status to illegal immigrants, a finding that immigration advocates say rings true.
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http://www.forward.com/articles/124478/