Dramatic Increase

[Migrant Health Promotion]

MHP Immigration News Service 


February 12, 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. Immigration fraud: Time running out for duped students in US. The Economic Times. January 30, 2011.

2. Immigration report: No rush across border to give birth. Alan Gomez. USA Today. February 2, 2011.

3. 'Anchor baby' myth is pure fear-mongering. Hector Tobar. The Los Angeles Times. February 4, 2011.

4. Surge of immigrants from India baffles border officials in Texas. Richard Marosi and Andrew Becker. Los Angeles Times. February 6, 2011.

5. Arizona’s Brewer countersues federal government over illegal immigration. IB Times Staff Reporter. Business & Law. February 11, 2011.

Links and excerpts

1. Immigration fraud: Time running out for duped students in US. The Economic Times. January 30, 2011.

Excerpt: WASHINGTON: Hundreds of Indian students, duped by a California-based "sham" university, are frantically knocking at the doors of colleges begging for admission in their desperate attempt to save their academic careers and avoid deportation back home.

These students, said to be around 1,500, were studying at the California-based Tri Valley University, which was shut down by the federal authorities last week after investigation revealed that this relatively new academic institution had indulged in massive and wire fraud and helped foreign nationals illegally acquire immigration status.

Following a raid at the University building in Pleasanton, California, federal authorities swooped down on its students - 95 per cent of who are from India, mostly from Andhra Pradesh - for questioning and interrogation.

Immigration attorneys and Indian American community leaders who have been helping these students told media that scores of them have been a detained, released on bond, and many of them have been installed with Intensive Supervision Appearance Program (radio tags). "Time is fast running out for these students," said Ram Mohan Konda of the American Telugu Association .

"These students do not know where to go. They are being asked for thousands of dollars in bond and. At the same time they have to join any university as soon as possible so as to maintain their visa status and complete their studies," Konda said.

2. Immigration report: No rush across border to give birth. Alan Gomez. USA Today. February 2, 2011.

Excerpt: When announcing a plan for state legislation, a group led by Pennsylvania state Rep. Daryl Metcalfe claimed "hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens are crossing U.S. borders to give birth and exploit their child" to obtain citizenship.

Critics of those legislative efforts are pointing to a new report by the Pew Hispanic Center that found a vast majority of illegal immigrants who had children in the USA in 2010 had entered the country several years earlier.

The report found that 350,000 babies were born in the U.S. between March 2009 and March 2010 to at least one illegal immigrant parent. Of those parents, 91% arrived before 2008.

"It's real concrete data that I think destroys this notion that immigrant women are crossing the border illegally and having babies," said Angela Kelley of the Center for American Progress, a progressive think tank.

Metcalfe, who founded State Legislators for Legal Immigration, said that despite the report's findings, birthright citizenship remains a huge lure for foreigners as they consider sneaking into the country..

Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, which supports a process for some illegal immigrants to become citizens, said the notion of having a child to obtain citizenship is a myth.

He said a baby born in the United States to illegal immigrant parents must wait until they're 21 to sponsor their parents for citizenship, and the parents would then have to return to their home country for 10 years before qualifying. He said it's highly unlikely that parents would rush a pregnant woman to the United States on the hope that they could become citizens three decades down the road.

Rep. Steve King, an Iowa Republican who is sponsoring a federal bill to revise the 14th Amendment, said that even if the number of people crossing over to immediately have a child is small, it's still a problem.

"Do the open-borders people think that's all right? It isn't a big enough deal that we should fix it?" he said. "It's wrong to reward people for bad behavior."

3. 'Anchor baby' myth is pure fear-mongering. Hector Tobar. The Los Angeles Times. February 4, 2011.

Excerpt: Some bright lights in Washington have come up with another solution to the problem of illegal immigration.

This one won't ever become law, because it involves tinkering with the Constitution, and specifically with the 14th Amendment, which declares that everyone born in the U.S. is a citizen.

The 14th Amendment was written to overturn an 1857 Supreme Court decision that found U.S.-born people of African descent were not entitled to citizenship. And it's responsible for the citizenship of this columnist, the L.A.-born son of Guatemalan immigrants..

Under the proposed amendment, a person born in the U.S. to immigrants would not be a citizen of this country unless "one parent of the person is an alien lawfully admitted for permanent residence in the United States...."

I called my father to ask him if I'd still be a U.S. citizen if such a provision had existed when I was born.

He told me about arriving at LAX with my mother in October 1962, on tourist visas, from Guatemala City. They moved into a one-bedroom apartment off Santa Monica Boulevard in East Hollywood.

My parents were still tourists in 1963, when I was born at Los Angeles County General Hospital. Under the Vitter-Rand amendment, therefore, I wouldn't have become a U.S. citizen.

My father said he went to the L.A. office of the immigration service and applied for a visa extension after I was born. Later, he applied for permanent residency. And by 1971, he'd managed to get U.S. citizenship for himself and my mother.

"I submitted the application and paid $25," he told me. "Now it costs more than $1,000."

This is not an uncommon story for Americans of my generation. For much of the 20th century, U.S. immigration laws were, with some notable exceptions, quite fluid and forgiving.

By now, the idea of the U.S. as a country of immigrants is so deeply ingrained that the Vitter-Rand constitutional amendment has no chance of passage. Many conservative leaders think it's a bad idea, including Mike Huckabee and Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida.

Unfortunately, the recent history of the U.S. is filled with such divisive legislative crusades, from Proposition 187 in California in 1994 to last year's SB 1070 in Arizona, both of which were defanged by federal judges.

So why stir up a national debate with proposals that have little or no chance of becoming enforceable laws?

Because it's easier to scare people and make them angry than it is to fix anything.

4. Surge of immigrants from India baffles border officials in Texas. Richard Marosi and Andrew Becker. Los Angeles Times. February 6, 2011.

Excerpt: Reporting from Harlingen, Texas — Thousands of immigrants from India have crossed into the United States illegally at the southern tip of Texas in the last year, part of a mysterious and rapidly growing human-smuggling pipeline that is backing up court dockets, filling detention centers and triggering investigations.

The immigrants, mostly young men from poor villages, say they are fleeing religious and political persecution. More than 1,600 Indians have been caught since the influx began here early last year, while an undetermined number, perhaps thousands, are believed to have sneaked through undetected, according to U.S. border authorities..

The Indian migration in some ways mirrors the journeys of previous waves of immigrants from far-flung places, such as China and Brazil, who have illegally crossed the U.S. border here. But the suddenness and still-undetermined cause of the Indian migration baffles many border authorities and judges.

The trend has caught the attention of anti-terrorism officials because of the pipeline's efficiency in delivering to America's doorstep large numbers of people from a troubled region. Authorities interview the immigrants, most of whom arrive with no documents, to ensure that people from neighboring Pakistan or Middle Eastern countries are not slipping through.

There is no evidence that terrorists are using the smuggling pipeline, FBI and Department of Homeland Security officials said.

5. Arizona’s Brewer countersues federal government over illegal immigration. IB Times Staff Reporter. International Business Times. February 11, 2011.

Excerpt: Arizona Governor Jan Brewer is suing the U.S. Federal Government, saying it has failed to protect the state's citizens from the hazards of illegal immigration.

Arizona, which recently enacted tough new immigration rules to seal its porous borders against illegal immigrants, accused the federal government of failing to maintain "operational control" of the border.

The lawsuit, which was filed on Thursday in the U.S. District Court in Phoenix, also says that the federal government has failed to uphold the 10th Amendment of the Constitution, under which powers not delegated to the United States by the constitution are reserved to the states.

Earlier, the U.S. Department of Justice had filed a suit against Arizona, questioning constitutionality of its new immigration law. Governor Brewer maintained Arizona did not want this fight and that she didn’t start the fight. "But now that we are in it, Arizona will not rest until our borders are secure," she was quoted as saying by the USA Today..

Critics have decried the law, saying it will lead to racial profiling. But Arizona has stuck to the point that the law was warranted by the federal government’s apathy to the threats posed by rampant illegal immigration.

The governor pointed out in the countersuit that about 40 percent of illegal immigrants enter the country through Arizona's borders.