Thursday, July 18, 2013

IMMIGRATION BILL RIDDLED WITH PORK

Lobbyists for resorts, au pair agencies, and the seafood industry successfully slipped special-interest perks into the Senate immigration bill, reports USA Today. And Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) successfully fought to include in the bill a $1.5 billion taxpayer-funded set aside for youth jobs programs.

The revelations are just the latest in what is shaping up to be a pork-laden immigration bill, says Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX).

“You're left with a bill that's chockfull of de facto earmarks, pork-barrel spending and special interest sweeteners, a bill that increase the on-budget deficit, but fails to guarantee a border that's secure and offers only promises, which historically Congress has been very, very, very, very bad about keeping,” said Cornyn on Wednesday.

USA Today says the resort and au pair agency language will be a boon to these businesses:  The changes to the bill follow aggressive lobbying by resorts, au pair agencies and other industries that rely on the J-1 cultural-exchange visa program, which allows foreigners to enter the USA through 14 categories, ranging from interns to visiting scholars. The largest number, nearly 92,000 last year, entered as part of the summer-work travel category, federal records show. An additional 18,000 worked as camp counselors and nearly 14,000 as au pairs.

Businesses that hire these visa holders save money because they don't have to pay unemployment taxes, Medicare or Social Security. Participants must also have their own health insurance, another cost savings.

Cornyn also blasted what he calls the “Alaska seafood special”—language slipped into the bill by Sens. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) and Mark Begich (D-AK) that will allow seafood processors to hire young foreign workers through a summer work travel program.

Cornyn is not alone in decrying the immigration bill’s taxpayer-funded crony giveaways to favored industries. Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-VT) said the bill is so riddled with corporate concessions that it “reads like a Christmas wish list for Haliburton.”

Breitbart News reporter Matthew Boyle also reported on the bill’s inclusion of a crony capitalism casino kickback to Las Vegas casinos. Sens. Harry Reid (D-NV) and Dean Heller (R-NV) successfully inserted the language

Article by Wynton Hall originally appearing on breitbart.com

Ben Ferro


benferro@insideins.com

Monday, July 15, 2013

Former Border Patrol Agents Call Senate’s Immigration Plan ‘a huge waste of resources’

Deploying 20,000 more U.S. Border Patrol agents along the southwestern border as proposed in an immigration reform bill passed by the Senate would be “a huge waste of resources,” according to former border agents, who say that money should be used to track down dangerous criminal aliens nationwide.

Criminal aliens pose a “clear and present danger” to the American people and anything resembling amnesty or a path to citizenship at this point in time “will ensure further endangerment of the American family unit,” according to the National Association of Former Border Patrol Officers (NAFBPO), a group that includes several former Border Patrol sector chiefs and former U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service regional directors.

“We believe there are a sufficient number of Border Patrol agents on the border,” said NAFBPO Chairman Zack Taylor, a retired Border Patrol agent and supervisor who spent 26 years patrolling the Mexican border in Texas and Arizona. “Real border security must begin with effective interior enforcement in every jurisdiction in all 50 states.”

The “real question” facing Congress is how many U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will need to be trained and put into place to handle the sheer number of criminal aliens in the U.S. Mr. Taylor said the 20,000 additional border agents would do nothing to solve the problem of illegal immigration. The Senate voted last month to add the 20,000 agents to the southwestern border and require a total of 700 miles of fencing within a decade. Currently, 21,394 Border Patrol agents are deployed along the nation’s borders, compared with 8,597 in fiscal 2000 and 3,496 in fiscal 1993.

In a 67-27 vote, 15 Republicans joined Democrats in backing the manpower and infrastructure, but other Senate Republicans balked, saying the enhancements were chimerical and should not be used to cover over what they argued was a bad bill that does not do enough to enforce the laws and stop another wave of illegal immigration. The Senate measure would cost more than $46 billion to pay for the additional agents and the fencing, drones, helicopters and sensors it requires.

To win GOP votes on the Senate floor, the “Gang of Eight” senators who wrote the immigration bill accepted an amendment from Sen. Bob Corker, Tennessee Republican, and Sen. John Hoeven, North Dakota Republican, to add the agents and fencing.

Sen. Lindsey Graham, South Carolina Republican and a Gang of Eight member, said the spending alone is good enough, because there is no way it can fail to end in security.“I've been working on this for almost a decade with Sen. [John] McCain. I can look anybody in the eye and tell them that if you put 20,000 Border Patrol agents on the border in addition to the 20,000 we've already got — that’s one every 1,000 feet — that will work,” Mr. Graham said. “If you build the fence, that all helps. So I don’t need any more than just getting it in place.”

The Congressional Budget Office “has reaffirmed that immigration reform reduces the debt and grows the economy,” said Sen. Charles E. Schumer, New York Democrat and chief sponsor of the bill. “It also shows the Corker-Hoeven amendment further substantially reduces the flow of illegal immigrants, even using a methodology that underestimates how effective immigration reform will be in reducing that flow.”House Republicans have not been as receptive. Rep. Michael T. McCaul of Texas, chairman of the Committee on Homeland Security, told CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that the Senate bill was “a bunch of, you know, candy thrown down there — a bunch of assets thrown down there to gain votes — but without a methodical, smart border approach.”

In a separate statement, Mr. McCaul described the Senate’s “border surge” as a “textbook example of government waste,” adding that it arbitrarily throws resources at the border without a long-term national strategy or required outcomes. He said the Department of Homeland Security has never developed a comprehensive plan to achieve operational control of the border, which is why the government continues to see illegal border crossings shift. “Unless we require a nationwide, results-based plan, we will inevitably spend countless taxpayer dollars only to repeat this debate a decade from now,” he said.

Mr. McCaul has introduced the Border Security Results Act, one of several immigration reform packages pending in the House, that mandates a border security plan that is evaluated by outside specialists and compels Homeland Security to develop a comprehensive outcome-based strategy — defined as stopping 90 percent of illegal border crossers. The nonpartisan CBO said the McCaul bill, known as HR 1417, would require Homeland Security to measure the effectiveness of the department’s border security strategy at U.S. ports of entry and along U.S. borders. The CBO also said the bill would direct the inspector general's office at Homeland Security to carry out covert testing of security at ports of entry and report the results to the Congress.Based on information from the affected agencies and the costs of similar activities, the CBO estimated that implementing HR 1417 would cost about $5 million from appropriated funds over the 2014-18 period, and that enacting the legislation would not affect direct spending or revenue and would impose no costs on state, local or tribal governments.

Earlier this month, the CBO said the Senate bill would keep tens of thousands of additional illegal immigrants from crossing the border each year, but would still stop only between a third and half of future illegal immigration. The agency’s analysis, which takes into account the 20,000 additional Border Patrol agents and 350 miles of new pedestrian fencing, said the bill would close the border to about 1.3 million people over the next decade but about 4 million more illegal immigrants still would get through.

Mr. Taylor said achieving real border security requires aggressive expansion of the government’s 287(g) authority, which allows state and local law enforcement agencies to enter into a partnership with ICE, under a joint memorandum of understanding, to receive delegated authority for immigration enforcement within their jurisdictions.He said border security also depends on the government’s ability to close down sanctuary cities, fair and universal employer sanctions, and the denial of other benefits such as welfare, public housing and the granting of identification — such as driver’s licenses — that “enable the criminal element to continue concealing their presence in our communities.”

“For years, the illegal aliens being apprehended by percentages ranging from 17 to 30 percent already have criminal records inside the United States,” he said. “A significant percentage of these illegal aliens are violent criminals and the number requiring further prosecution prior to removal may exceed 3 million.”

He said the illegal drug and alien situation has spread to more than 2,000 U.S. cities and those engaged in both of these criminal activities are “virtually inseparable.”“This threat to public safety must be addressed first and in that process there is a reasonable likelihood that potential terrorists will also be identified and removed or incarcerated,” he said. “They live among us.”

Article by By Jerry Seper-The Washington Times (7/11/2013)

Ben Ferro
benferro@insideins.com


Thursday, July 4, 2013

Senate Passes Comprehensive Immigration Bill

On June 27, 2013, the US Senate passed a broad and far reaching comprehensive immigration reform bill. This bill is a complicated mix of new immigration benefits for illegal aliens and new border security measures. A fairly comprehensive breakdown of the 1,200 page bill appears below (click on the image to increase size):

With the passing of this legislation, the immigration reform battle shifts to the House of Representatives. If the House passes an immigration bill, it is expected that it will contain more border security and interior enforcement measures than the current Senate version.




ICE Union Critical of Senate Immigration Bill

The National Immigration and Customs Enforcement Counsel of the American Federation of Government Employees is the labor union which represents ICE employees. On June 11, 2013, that Union sent a letter to Senators Rubio and Cornyn criticizing the direction of the comprehensive immigration reform bill which was being debated in the Senate for not sufficiently addressing interior enforcement concerns. That letter appears below.