Respond to this Clamor

[Migrant Health Promotion]

MHP Immigration News Service

October 17, 2011

Immigration News Service is a project of Migrant Health Promotion. Its purpose is to educate members of the farmworker health community about trends in immigration policy and empower them to become involved in the immigration policy debate.  This bi-weekly news service features articles from mainstream, national, local, and alternative news sources and presents links and excerpts, without editorializing.

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Table of Contents

1. Feds in Las Vegas warn about 'notario' confusion. Houston Chronicle. Associated Press. October 1, 2011.
2. US appeals court temporarily blocks Alabama from checking immigration status of students. The Washington Post. Associated Press. October 14, 2011.
3. Bill against illegal immigrant workers may go to House. The Orange County Register. Cindy Carcamo. October 16, 2011.
4. New immigration law could affect us all. 10 WALB South Georgia News. Jennifer Emert. Oct 14, 2011.
5. U.S. firms urge action on skilled immigrant reform. Reuters. Laura MacInnis and Noel Randewich. October 16, 2011.
6. Even state immigration laws have to face reality. Special to CNN. Tamar Jacoby. October 17, 2011.

   
1. Feds in Las Vegas warn about 'notario' confusion. Houston Chronicle. Associated Press. October 1, 2011.

Excerpt: LAS VEGAS (AP) — Federal and local officials in southern Nevada are warning immigrants not to be victimized by scammers calling themselves "notarios" and offering bad legal advice.

The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Federal Trade Commission, Nevada attorney general's office and Las Vegas police held an event last week at Las Vegas City Hall to highlight confusion about the role of a "notary" in the U.S. and a "notario" in some Spanish-speaking countries.

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports that while notarios in other countries may be licensed legal practitioners, notary public officials in the U.S. aren't licensed to provide immigration services or legal advice.

2. US appeals court temporarily blocks Alabama from checking immigration status of students. The Washington Post. Associated Press. October 14, 2011.

Excerpt: ATLANTA — A federal appeals court on Friday blocked a key part of Alabama’s law that requires schools to check the immigration status of students, temporarily weakening what was considered the toughest immigration law in the nation.

The 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals also blocked a part of the law that allows authorities to charge immigrants who do not carry documents proving their legal status. The three-judge panel let stand a provision that allows police to detain immigrants that are suspected of being in the country illegally.

A final decision on the law won’t be made for months to allow time for more arguments.

Linton Joaquin of the National Immigration Law Center called the decision a “partial victory.”

“I think that certainly it’s a better situation today for the people of Alabama today than it was yesterday,” said Omar Jadwat, an attorney for the ACLU, which challenged the law along with the Obama administration. “Obviously we remain concerned about the remainder of the provisions, and we remain confident that we will eventually get the whole scheme blocked.”..

It’s not clear exactly how many Hispanics have fled the state. Earlier this week, many skipped work to protest the law, shuttering or scaling back operations at chicken plants, Mexican restaurants and other businesses.

Immigration has become a hot-button issue in Alabama over the past decade as the Hispanic population has grown by 145 percent to about 185,600 people, most of them of Mexican origin. The Hispanic population represents about 4 percent of the state’s 4.7 million people, but some counties in north Alabama have large Spanish-speaking communities and schools where most of the students are Hispanic.

Requiring school officials to check the immigration status of students in public schools helped make the Alabama law stricter than similar measures enacted in Arizona, Utah, Indiana and Georgia. Federal judges in those states have blocked all or parts of those laws.

3. Bill against illegal immigrant workers may go to House. The Orange County Register. Cindy Carcamo. October 16, 2011.

Excerpt: A debate is raging in Congress over whether to force every employer in the nation to use a federal program intended to weed out illegal workers.

The Legal Workforce Act – approved at a congressional committee last week – would mandate every employer to use E-Verify, a free online federal program that checks if a new employee hire is allowed to legally work in the country.

Supporters of the bill say the measure would push illegal immigrants from the work force and reclaim those jobs for Americans or legal residents while evening out the playing field for businesses.

Opponents say that mandating the program would saddle already-suffering small business owners with additional burdens and put Americans out of work – pointing to incidents when the system mistakenly flagged U.S. citizens as unauthorized workers. Immigrant activists estimate that at least 770,000 U.S. and legal workers would face termination if mandatory E-verify were to come to pass because of errors in the program..

As discussion makes its way through Congress, Orange County employers are closely watching the debate.

It's been about three years since Mike Mahony signed up for E-Verify. The vice president of Dynamic Plumbing Commercial Inc. said he's trying to do his part in the fight against illegal immigration by using the program. But he feels hamstrung and frustrated because it puts him at a disadvantage. Much of his competition doesn't use the program, he said.

Mahony, who does work in Orange County, is required to use E-Verify because he has work contracts with the federal government. In addition, he said, he does jobs in Arizona, one of a handful of states where E-Verify is required by law.

In the last three months, Mahony's company hired 100 people in California and about 5 percent didn't clear E-Verify, according to Conni Zuniga, who heads the company's human resources division. Those employees were given the option to contest it, Zuniga said, but no one has come back to clear up the issue.

"And my competition goes and hires them," Mahony said. "It's frustrating. It puts huge upward pressure on payroll and increases the costs of goods and services."

That's why Mahony supports mandatory E-Verify. If he has to use it, shouldn't every other employer in the nation — including his competition — have to use the system, as well? he asked.

"Don't make me E-Verify everyone unless you have everyone E-Verify everyone. That's my perspective. You've got to make it fair."

4. New immigration law could affect us all. 10 WALB South Georgia News. Jennifer Emert. Oct 14, 2011.

Excerpt: ALBANY, GA - If you think Georgia's new immigration law doesn't affect you, you might be in for a surprise. Business and government leaders think the changes will affect us all.

Starting next year, some employers will have to use the E-verify system to ensure employees are legal workers.

Anyone applying for public benefits will also have to show secure and verifiable identification like a passport or drivers license to try to prevent illegal immigrants from getting taxpayer funded benefits.

This new law is going to affect all businesses who need to apply for a business license and it will have the biggest affect on big business first.

Questions surround Georgia's new immigration law. Big business with more than 500 employees will be hit with the new verification requirements first, so we went to one of Albany's largest employers, Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital to see how they'll handle the new requirements.

"It will put an additional step into our normal recruitment or on-boarding processes. We already fill out the I-9 form," said David Baranski, Phoebe Putney Memorial Hospital Human Resources Senior Vice President.

The law will require businesses to E-verify all new hires.

"This is an additional double check that cross references, in our electronic process it will be just one more step we will have to take to comply with Georgia law," said Baranski..

"I can see for small organizations where it could be a burden those that don't have a formal Human Resources Department of someone dedicated to doing those functions," said Baranski.

It's required in order for a business to obtain a new business license.

"Once they apply for the renewal and the new occupational tax certificate they will have to complete the affidavit," said Ava O'Neal Albany Treasury Manager.

Certifying they've completed the process. Business owners will also have to apply for licenses in person rather than online renewals in the past, promising long lines in the office.

5. U.S. firms urge action on skilled immigrant reform. Reuters. Laura MacInnis and Noel Randewich. October 16, 2011.

Excerpt: WASHINGTON/SANTA CLARA, Calif., Oct 16 (Reuters) - When U.S. restrictions on work permits barred Intel (INTC.O) from moving nearly 50 Finnish engineers to the United States this year, the microchip maker reluctantly parked them in a new research center in Finland.

U.S. and multinational firms are chafing at delays and difficulties securing visas that effectively require them to keep high-skilled workers abroad instead of expanding operations in the United States.

"Tech companies like ours follow where the action is and where the talent pools are," said Young Sohn, chief executive of the semiconductor maker Inphi.

That trend puts pressure on President Barack Obama to set aside his plan for a "comprehensive" overhaul of U.S. immigration policies -- at the risk of angering key Hispanic voters -- and fix the system of work permits and green cards for the likes of engineers and programmers.

"America can't afford to let high-skilled immigration reform remain attached to the controversies that surround comprehensive immigration reform more broadly," executives advising Obama on jobs and competitiveness said this week.

"Given the challenges our economy now faces in a global age, we all need to rethink," the chief executives from GE, Boeing, DuPont and other firms said.

The U.S. Chamber of Commerce also wants quick action on skilled workers because of Capitol Hill's resistance to the sweeping deal sought by Obama that would address undocumented workers and border security at the same time.

"I'm not sure you can do this whole thing in one great big bunch," Chamber President Thomas Donohue said. "We might have to do it a piece at a time. And this is the piece that we really ought to be able to get done in a big hurry."..

Labor unions have expressed concern that U.S. companies hire foreign workers because they can do so at a lower salary than Americans would accept.

But proponents of more skills-based immigration say the salary differential is overstated. They say immigrants tend to create jobs because they are twice as likely as U.S.-born people to start their own companies and can help improve access to foreign export markets.

Obama is likely to tread carefully on the issue of foreign workers because of his preoccupation with reducing the U.S. jobless rate as part of his 2012 re-election campaign.

Turning away from his "comprehensive" immigration approach could also alienate the Democrat from Hispanic voters who want to see help for the estimated 11 million undocumented workers and their families now in the United States.

Cecilia Munoz, the top immigration policy official at the White House, said the prospects for immigration reform depended on Republicans in Congress, who supported a comprehensive fix under the Bush administration but have since cooled to it.

"The challenge for anything in the immigration arena, including the broader immigration reform as a whole or any of these individual pieces, is the lack of bipartisan support," she said in a recent interview.

Scott Corley, head of the Compete America alliance of companies that includes Google, Wal-Mart and Cisco, said there was potential for piecemeal action on skilled immigration before the election.

A bill introduced in the House of Representatives to eliminate green card nationality quotas may be able to clear Congress as a first step, Corley said.

"It's a technical fix that we could do today," he said of the bill from Republican Representative Jason Chaffetz.

6. Even state immigration laws have to face reality. Special to CNN. Tamar Jacoby. October 17, 2011.

Excerpt: (CNN) -- Change is never pretty. And the change that results when 50 states step in to take on a job Washington has tried and failed to do can be especially messy. This is what's happening -- with a vengeance -- on immigration. In the past five years, there has been a virtual revolution in immigration lawmaking. And the result is not just chaos -- it's a lot of bad policy.

States from Arizona to Virginia to Idaho have enacted laws cracking down on illegal immigration. Some go after the immigrants; some target the businesses that hire them. Some rely on local police to do the job; others require that employers use the federal E-Verify system that employers can use to check the immigration status of employees. Many of these statutes have been challenged in court, and the decisions that have been handed down are all over the map..

An immigration reform advocate who went to sleep five years ago when Congress last tried and failed to pass immigration reform wouldn't recognize the landscape today. The notion that immigration policy is a federal responsibility -- once widely accepted by both parties -- has been shattered, probably forever.

Far from finding state immigration laws unconstitutional -- as many legal experts once insisted -- the Supreme Court's May ruling in the Whiting v. U.S. Chamber of Commerce case endorsed the principle that states can and should play a significant role in controlling illegal immigration. And policies once unthinkable to many are now commonplace. A full one-third of the states now require some or all employers to use the federal E-Verify system to check the immigration status of new hires. Four states have enacted measures modeled on Arizona's controversial policing law.

Of course, it's understandable that states are stepping in to grapple with immigration: The system is dysfunctional, and voters want something done. The problem is that most state lawmakers respond to this clamor by intensifying state enforcement.

But critical as enforcement is, enforcement alone won't solve the problem.