1. January 2010 estimate of illegals in US: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/ois_ill_pe_2010.pdf
2. Legal permanent residents 2010: http://www.dhs.gov/xlibrary/assets/statistics/publications/lpr_fr_2010.pdf
Castagnera's commentaries on immigration:
1. James Ottavio Castagnera: Immigrant Floods Are Recurrent
[Mr. Castagnera, a Philadelphia journalist and attorney, is the author of the weekly newspaper column “Attorney at Large.”]
The nation’s first “immigrant crisis” of the new century, like a pimple on the body politic, is coming to a head. The president appeared on TV last week to try to pull the two houses of Congress together on the issue, while --- just incidentally --- pumping up his own sagging popularity balloon. Mr. Bush painted a picture of National Guardsmen patrolling our southern borders, while ICE operatives presumably raid domestic workplaces. Meanwhile, Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, calling the last federal effort to control immigration a farce, offered an amendment requiring the Director of Homeland Security to certify border security before any amnesty program for current illegals could kick in.
Senator Sessions is perfectly right that the last major federal legislative initiative, exactly 20 years ago, legalized large numbers of illegals while failing to achieve enforcement measures to stem the flow. The 1986 enforcement fiasco, like the current “crisis,” was nothing new. A century ago, another Republican president, no less a light than Teddy Roosevelt, struggled with much the same problems.
In the early years of the 20 th century, a “Yellow Tide” (aka the “Yellow Peril”) was flowing primarily out of Japan, often via Hawaii. In 1907 anti-immigrant riots erupted in San Francisco. TR wrote to a Japanese official, “Nothing during my presidency has given me more concern than these troubles.” Americans placed much of the blame on the Niponese government for making exit from Japan a relatively easy process. Some war talk even ensued. More substantially, but no more successfully, the Congress enacted an Immigration Act. Like the 1986 statute, the 1907 legislation had little impact upon the influx of coolly labor on the West Coast.
In 1908, as Roosevelt sent the White Fleet into the Pacific on its famous around-the-world cruise, Secretary of State Elihu Root used this “big stick” to bully Japan into honoring a so-called “gentlemen’s agreement” to cut off coolly migration at its source. Root warned Ambassador Aoki that, unless there came “a very speedy change in the course of immigration,” the 16 th Congress was sure to pass a Japanese-exclusion act. The show of naval strength plus the threat of adverse legislation prodded the Nipon government to take action. The illegal influx decreased, though it never ceased entirely.
Then, as now, the lines were drawn between those who benefited from illegal immigration and those who felt threatened. As President Roosevelt was trying to promote legislation allowing for the naturalization of illegal Japanese living on the West Coast, the San Francisco Board of Education issued an order segregating Japanese school children. As labor unions in the “City by the Bay” agitated to repatriate the illegals, TR reminded the city’s citizens that they had happily accepted $100,000 in earthquake relief from Japan in ’06, and chided the unions that they were against the coolies “because of their efficiency as workers.” Indeed, the coolies were helping corporate America to build the West.
Today, too, as some 75% of ordinary Americans polled show little sympathy for the current crop of illegal aliens, these spiritual descendants of California’s 1906 coolies work for employers who are happy to have them. For instance, in an April cover story, Time Magazine found that 70 % of workers deboning chickens in an Arkansas plant were illegal immigrants. A recent NPR report focused on a New York employment service specializing in placing illegal aliens in bottom-feeder positions such as washing dishes for about $250 a week.
In 1886, the year the U.S. dedicated the Statue of Liberty, a Seattle mob put about half of that city’s 350 Chinese residents on a ship and sent them to San Francisco. Shipping “home” the millions of illegal immigrants living in the U.S. today is a practical impossibility, as well as a humanitarian’s nightmare. In fact, the same Time poll that discovered a lack of empathy for illegal immigrants also revealed that 78% of those queried favor citizenship opportunities for illegals already in the states, who hold jobs, speak English and pay taxes.
This time around, too, some slivers of organized labor are actually advocating for illegal immigrants. The Service Employees International Union, which recently separated itself from the AFL-CIO, leads a maverick coalition that actively organizes the bottom rung of our national workforce.
These last couple of data points suggest that perhaps things, while despairingly the same in so many respects, may differ from a century ago on at least some important points. If so, we may hope that this time around the result of the current national debate will be a balanced, effective immigration policy that secures the borders while also securing the civil rights and liberties of all who are already within our borders.
2. Education — Civil Rights of the 21st Century
By James Castagnera
From John McCain’s acceptance speech, the line that stuck out for me was, “Education is the civil rights issue of the 21st century.”
He went on to explain that for him that meant offering parents and students a choice among public, private and charter schools. That choice, of course, only has meaning if parents and students have a variety of schools from which to choose and the financial ability to buy into their schools of choice. More broadly, while the GOP presidential candidate is right about education’s central significance in the new century, his simplistic solution hardly scratches the surface.
In many major cities, high school graduation rates hover around 50%. In a few they dip below the .500 mark. This dismal fact ensures the perpetuation of what Karl Marx called the lumpenproletariat, which is to say, the ragged or rabble lower class. And this, in its turn, ensures perpetuation of the drug wars, gang wars and random killings that characterize our inner cities.
Meanwhile out in the land of suburban sprawl, teen obesity, drug and alcohol abuse, and the random shootings that periodically plague our schools all suggest that affluence alone does not ensure successful students. Taken in this context, the issue of education expands to include family issues, such as divorce rates.
Labor policy, likewise, must be included in the mix. One of the great ironies of our new century is that, while millionaire professional athletes have strong labor unions, workers on the bottom rungs of our economy are often as exploited as their 19th century counterparts. Labor organizations, such as the Service Employees International Union, have a hard time organizing these folks, given the lopsided way in which our National Labor Relations Act is interpreted by the federal courts and bureaucrats. Union prevention and union busting are only another cost of doing business for many major corporations, which also outsource what were once the better-paying positions to Asian and Latin American sweatshops.
Immigration policy also must be addressed in any comprehensive approach to American education. The Supreme Court has said that the children of illegal aliens are entitled to attend public schools. The law remains unsettled as to whether or not such students are also entitled to attend public colleges and universities and, if so, whether they are also entitled to in-state residents’ tuition breaks.
More broadly, are immigrants filling jobs that Americans don’t want to do? Or are Americans declining those jobs because of the low wages, lack of benefits, and miserable working conditions? The use of immigrant labor, legal and illegal, at the bottom of the economic barrel perpetuates the conditions that make these jobs unattractive to anyone but immigrant and migrant workers.
Last but not least is the rising cost of a college education. Too many of our young people are graduating with “mortgages” on their diplomas. Inefficiencies plague the higher education industry. Despite being the only major sector of the economy that can call on its past customers —- its alumni—to continue supporting its operations, and despite substantial gifts and grants from donors and foundations, higher education’s tuition rates continue to outpace inflation significantly. Thus, the proliferation of large student-loan debts.
Yes, Sen. McCain (and Sen. Obama), “Education IS the civil rights issue of the 2ist century.” And it is a complex issue, entangled with equally complex and challenging issues of family, labor, and immigration policy.
3.Huge Throng of Illegal Immigrants in NJ Wait Word on New Laws
Millennium Radio ^ | Wednesday, March 29, 2006 | By: David Matthau
Posted on March 29, 2006 8:16:45 AM EST by Calpernia
Debate is heating up in Washington over proposed immigration reform.
Some federal lawmakers favor rounding up all illegal aliens and deporting them as felons, but there is growing support for legislation that would legalize the nations 11 million illegal immigrants - including an estimated 250 to 4 hundred thousand right here in Jersey- and ultimately allow them to become U.S. citizens.
Rider University Ethnic Studies expert Dr. James Castagnera says legalizing illegal immigrants in Jersey might provide a big financial shot in the arm, because "the likelihood that they would work on the books, rather than off the books- and therefore pay into the payroll taxes, the unemployment tax, the disability tax- I think increases dramatically."
He adds that most illegal immigrants in the Garden State are working - in low level, dirty, back breaking jobs no one else wants - "so I don't see that any jobs that might be held by citizen or legal immigrants in New Jersey are going to be lost."
Dr. Castagnera says Jersey continues to attract a huge number of illegal immigrants because we're an ethnic melting pot, and "we're a coastal state, we're an urban state, we're a state with a fairly high number of employment opportunities." http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1605287/posts
4. Men Without a Country
by James Ottavio Castagnera, October 22, 2004
A 19th-century writer, Edward Everett Hale, once published a story called “The Man without a Country.” The protagonist is Philip Nolan, a young U.S. Army officer who unwisely deserted to join the ill-fated effort of Aaron Burr to establish an independent empire west of the Mississippi. In Hale’s yarn, during his court martial for treason Nolan shouts, “Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!” The shocked presiding judge obliges, handing down the following sentence on September 23, 1807: “Prisoner, hear the sentence of the Court! The Court decides, subject to the approval of the President, that you never hear the name of the United States again.” And for the next half century Nolan lives out his life on board one U.S. Navy ship or another, never permitted to read an American newspaper or see his native soil — the man without a country.
Two hundred years later, life is emulating art. Last week the U.S. Supreme Court heard the appeal of Daniel Benitez, a 45-year-old Cuban immigrant, who has been held in federal custody since 2001. Benitez, a Cuban national, was among the thousands of “Mariel boat people” who sailed from that Cuban port in 1980, when Fidel Castro temporarily opened his island fiefdom to emigration.
Granted an immigration parole shortly after landing on a South Florida beach, Benitez was convicted of second-degree grand theft in 1983. When he was released from prison he applied for permanent residence in the United States. The Immigration and Naturalization Service denied his application on grounds of moral turpitude, citing the 1983 conviction. Benitez remained in migrant limbo until 1993, when he pled guilty in another Florida courtroom to a laundry list of felonies, including armed burglary and illegal possession of a firearm. The plea brought a 20-year sentence down on him.
This time around the INS ruled that continuation of Benitez’s immigration parole was “against the public interest.” And so the agency revoked it. In 2001 he was released into federal custody. The agency’s Cuban Review Panel at first found him releasable, when a suitable halfway house could sponsor him. But in 2003, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service, a successor to the INS under the Department of Homeland Security, revoked the Notice of Releaseability, on the basis of an allegation of a planned escape from jail. USCIS reached this decision without a hearing. Bottom line: Benitez is an inadmissible alien so far as the United States is concerned.
Now here’s the catch: although Benitez is a native Cuban and still technically a Cuban citizen, Cuba, like Uncle Sam, wants no part of him. The Cuban government will not take him back. He is, quite literally, a man without a country.
Daniel Benitez is not the only immigrant enduring indefinite U.S. incarceration. The immigrant-advocacy group Human Rights First estimates that more than 2,000 “Philip Nolans” from around the world are in the same spot. And the federal courts are divided about how all these cases should be handled. Consequently, the Supreme Court consolidated two such cases from federal courts of appeals into Benitez v. Wallis. In an amicus curiae brief, Human Rights First, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch wrote,
No misuse of government power is more clearly established as a violation of international law than the practice of prolonged arbitrary detention. The right not to be unjustly detained, so central to our concept of ordered liberty, is articulated in the earliest documents on personal liberty as well as in the declarations, covenants, treaties, and constitutions that embody modern international law and the laws of free states. Indeed, the right is universally recognized among the democratic nations and among the international bodies that represent the nations of the world.
Nobody is suggesting that Daniel Benitez is a martyr or a saint. Like Hale’s Philip Nolan, he is a criminal whose ill-considered words and deeds made him deserving of punishment. But once having paid his debt to our society, should he languish in prison for another 20 or 30 years — at our expense, fellow taxpayers — because neither America nor Cuba wants him walking the streets?
In the overcrowded, underdeveloped world in which most members of our species struggle to survive, America remains what Thomas Jefferson called our country — the last, best hope of the world. Since 9/11, we are much more reluctant to play that role. But it’s one which we should not avoid. Benitez v. Wallis well may be a litmus test of how history will remember us. Will ours be the era in which America’s dedication to liberty, due process, and the rule of law were relegated to history’s dustbin for the sake of an illusory sense of security?
I hope not.
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