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Another step towards Immigration enforcement by policee. Now in California. San Joaquin is one of the latest counties to be part of a Department of Justice and Homeland Security initiative that checks the immigration status of those booked into its jails
San Joaquin and Stanislaus now join eight other counties in California, including Solano, San Diego and Los Angeles, in running the fingerprints of everyone booked into their jails through Homeland Security immigration records, along with other routine criminal record checks.

If fingerprints match those in the Homeland Security database, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is automatically notified and can determine what actions, such as deportation, should be taken.

The goal of the system is to make sure that all those with violent criminal histories who are not naturalized citizens are not released back into the local community.

Read more….

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Sheriff Arpaio is determined to bring down illegal immigrants, even the Federal government is not a barrier anymore. It is Arpaio’s law or the highway. When the federal government stripped Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies of their power to enforce federal immigration laws on the streets, the sheriff repeatedly said nothing would change.

The sheriff said that starting today every one of his deputies will go through training to specifically target illegal immigrants. I wonder what kind of training that is?
The sheriff announced that he is ramping up the county’s fight against illegal immigration by increasing the number of trained deputies from 100 to nearly 900. Sheriff Arpaio also did not comment on when the new enforcement would start. Isn’t it time for some serious Fed action against this Sheriff to send a clear message to all the antis?
Read the article from AZ Family here

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Acoording to Haarez Magazine 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.

Read more…

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According to New America Media, Massachusetts could spell trouble for Democrats, but advocates of immigration reform say it’s not over yet.

By capturing the seat held by former Democratic Sen. Edward Kennedy who passed away last summer, Republican Scott Brown brings a different vision to the historically blue state. While Kennedy was known as a champion of health care reform and was co-author of the 2006 McCain-Kennedy immigration reform bill, Brown has spoken out against both.

But advocates of immigration reform were quick to dispel fears that the election could be the death knell for immigration reform in 2010.

“This was a race that revolved around the issue of change, and Scott Brown – in spite of having a long history of being anti-immigrant, was able to tap into that wave,” Ali Noorani, executive director of National Immigration Forum and chair of Reform Immigration FOR America, said in a telephonic press conference Wednesday. “What didn’t happen is that we did not articulate that immigration reform is part of that change agenda.”
Janet Murguía, president and CEO of National Council of La Raza, added that the campaign by Democrat Martha Coakley made a fatal error in the election in Massachusetts – It “did not engage the Latino community,” she said.

Advocates of reform also note that, while some predict that the Massachusetts Senate race could spell the end of immigration reform, “conventional wisdom” isn’t always right.

Read more…

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I recently was interviewed by the Latin America News Dispatch about our work with Mexican clients relocating to San Diego. The majority of clients are in need of immediate assistance to relocate due to the increasing violence. Our work with Business owners is to assist with obtaining an E2 visa for new investors or L1A for Mexican companies setting up Branch offices in the US. We expect this trend to continue in 2010.

Paola Reyes write:

As Mexico’s two year-old drug war intensifies, leading to greater violence and insecurity in the city of Tijuana, many families are moving across the border to San Diego.

Some are taking their businesses with them.

From 2000 to 2008 there was a 34 percent increase in the number of Hispanics living in Chula Vista, San Diego’s second largest municipality, and an 11 percent increase in those living in San Diego. Overall Hispanics comprise 51 percent of the Chula Vista population and 28 percent of the San Diego population, according to the San Diego’s Regional Planning Agency.

“People go out less at night and business [at the Tijuana location] shrank,” according to Eduardo Angulo Venenzuela, a member of the family that owns the Mexican restaurant chain Los Arcos.

People living in San Diego go less frequently to Tijuana to eat as well, he added.

In order to compensate, many Tijuana restaurants came to them. Tacos El Gordo is a popular taco shop chain in Tijuana that recently opened a San Diego location. One online reviewer on Yelp aptly explained why the San Diego location is so popular, “I know the tacos in TJ [Tijuana] are so tasty and cheap but no one wants to go down there these days because of the killings.”

Read more…

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This story was posted originally at Immigration Impact, we thought it is worth sharing today.

Today, we celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man whose dream of equality and human rights changed the course of history. His legacy will be remembered this week by people of all colors and creeds who still believe in the American dream and who continue to fight for equality, civil rights and the basic human dignity they deserve. Over the weekend, thousands of human rights activists took to the street in Phoenix, Arizona, to march for civil rights and for “long-overdue federal action on immigration.”
So what is the link between immigration and civil rights? In a recent editorial, Rev. Harvey Clemons Jr., the pastor of Pleasant Hill Baptist Church in Houston, connects Dr. King’s fight for equality with the struggle many immigrants face today.

Immigration is about human dignity and the nobility of parents of different tribes and nations facing the risk of coming to a foreign land, a land of opportunity, to work for a better tomorrow for their children…Dr. King invoked the truth, the truth being that all humans ought to be treated with a certain dignity. It would be natural for us to look to him as an example for fighting for a just cause.

Gerald Lenoir, director of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration, also draws parallels between the struggles of African Americans and the struggles of recent immigrants:
Even some of the migration experiences of African-Americans, coming from the South, leaving conditions of economic injustice and terrorism from both legal authorities and groups like the Ku Klux Klan, we see that same kind of movement in people across borders.

Something to think about.

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Thousands of immigrant rights advocates marched in front of a county jail in Phoenix Saturday in a protest that was aimed at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s immigration efforts and was marked by a clash between a small group of protesters and police officers.

Organizers say the protest was meant to show officials in Washington that Arpaio shouldn’t handle immigration enforcement, and that Congress and the Obama administration need to come up with a way for immigrant workers to come to the country legally.

Critics have accused deputies working in Arpaio’s immigration efforts of racial profiling, which the sheriff denies. He says his deputies approach people when they have probable cause to believe they had committed crimes.

Read more here…

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For decades this city-state was known as one of the world’s most driven economies. But as Singapore recovers from recession, its residents are questioning a key part of the country’s economic model: its long-standing openness to foreigners as well as a labor force that is not always legal.

Singapore has thrown open its doors to bankers and expatriates in recent years, making it easy in many cases to establish residency and hastening the country’s emergence as an Asian version of Dubai. It also welcomed low-skilled laborers from Bangladesh and other developing countries to help man construction sites and factories.

The goal was to capture more Asian wealth and offset Singapore’s low birth rate with immigrants, spurring economic growth. But the push has also fueled discontent, turning immigration into a red-hot political issue in a country where dissent is still tightly controlled by the government.

Between 2005 and 2009, Singapore’s population surged by roughly 150,000 people a year to 5 million—among the fastest rates ever there—with 75% or more of the increase coming from foreigners. In-migration continued in 2009 despite expectations it would collapse because of the global recession.

Read more here….

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As Haiti reels from a devastating earthquake that flattened buildings and left thousands of people trapped under rubble, three Republicans from Florida are calling on President Obama to do what President Bush never did — grant temporary protected status to undocumented Haitians living in the U.S.

Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Mario Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen wrote a letter to Obama arguing that “the combined destruction from today’s catastrophic earthquake and the previous storms clearly makes forced repatriation of Haitians hazardous to their safety at this time…We strongly believe that it is for such a situation that Congress created TPS.”
Even Broward Democrat Alcee Hastings added his name to the effort, calling it “not only immoral, but irresponsible” to send the illegal Haitians back home.

The Obama administration has said that it wants to review the issue of the Haitians as part of a comprehensive approach to immigration reform. Coming to the aid of the mostly Catholic country are some advocacy groups with political punch, including the Catholic Church.

In February, Obama’s Department of Homeland Security went ahead with the deportation of 30,000 Haitians first ordered up by the Bush administration. In response, Haiti stopped issuing travel documents for them, leaving some 600 Haitians in detention centers. In June, the Washington Post did a series on substandard medical care provided to the detainees.

By July, Obama said he was “very sympathetic” to the plight of the Haitians, but by October the advocacy groups were publicly expressing their unhappiness. “I feel they are stringing us along, and we are in an awkward position,” said Randolph McGrorty, chief executive of Catholic Charities Legal Services. “Do we allow them to string us along because they are our allies or do we start calling them on the carpet for it?”
Now, given the utter destruction of the country’s already-limited infrastructure, political pressure is likely to grow even further on the administration to let the illegals stay. Already today the DHS issued a statement that will halt all deportation to Haiti as they continue to monitor the situation, further actions are expected by the government, we feel that this may a great opportunity to pass some sort of emergency legislation to allow the first wave of illegal migrants to stay in the US, maybe this is the bginning of something bigger.

For the complete LA Times story here..

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Most permanent residents think that just by having the Green Card they are safe from deportation, they should think again.

When Jose Angel Carachuri-Rosendo was just 4 years old, his family moved from Mexico to Texas as legal U.S. immigrants. As the years passed, Carachuri-Rosendo firmly planted roots in the Lone Star State with his fiancée and four children, who were all U.S. citizens. But after a series of misdemeanor offenses, he was required to leave the place he had called home for more than 20 years. In 2004, he was convicted of possessing less than two ounces of marijuana, and in 2005 he was convicted of a second drug-possession offense for having a single anti-anxiety tablet, Xanax, without a valid prescription. After the second conviction, he was deported to Mexico.

In December the U.S. Supreme Court decided to hear the case in an effort to clarify the law and help lower courts make consistent determinations. The court will specifically address whether legal immigrants convicted of repeat minor drug-possession crimes should be subject to deportation.

What do you think is it reasonable to push somebody like Jose through the system and deport him, or should the government focus on hard criminals that can actually cause harm to our society instead. Some food for thought.

Read the Newsweek story here.