Immigration News: April, 2005 - Volume 12

Congress, States

When the 109th Congress convened, the Republican chairs of the committees dealing with immigration announced their opposition to "amnesty." Representative Tom Tancredo (R-Colorado) heads the 71-member House Immigration Reform Caucus, which opposes both legalization and converting unauthorized workers into legal guest workers. Representative John Hostettler (R-Indiana), who chairs the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, and Representative F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. (R-Wisconsin), who chairs the overall Judiciary Committee, oppose legalization, as does Senator John Cornyn (R-Texas), who chairs the Senate's Judiciary immigration subcommittee.

Sensenbrenner argued that more enforcement must come before any kind of legalization for unauthorized foreigners, and asked the Bush administration to support a doubling of Border Patrol agents over the next five years to 20,000 and a tripling of immigration investigators to 6,000. Many commentators said that most rank-and-file Republicans oppose legalization and guest workers, and predicted that, if President Bush pushed hard for a new guest worker program, many Republicans in the House would not support him.

House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) said that he favors a guest worker program but not legalization: "What I understand as a guest-worker program is one where you apply for the guest-worker program in your country of origin, and you have a job when you apply. You cannot bring your family with you. You commit to work a certain period of time, and you go home."

The House on a 261-161 vote approved the REAL ID Act (HR 418) in February 2005, which prohibits federal agencies from accepting driver's licenses issued by the ten states that give them to unauthorized foreigners, and allows the final three miles of a 14-mile border fence on the Mexico-US border to be completed despite environmental concerns. The bill also tightens asylum procedures by giving immigration judges more discretion to deny applications.

States have various ways to deal with licenses for unauthorized foreigners. Tennessee, for example, stamps "For Driving Privileges Only - Not Valid For Identification" on licenses issued to those with Individual Tax Identification Numbers (ITINs) rather than social security numbers.

Many provisions of the USA Patriot Act, passed in Fall 2001, are scheduled to expire in Fall 2005. President Bush has made renewal of the Patriot Act one of his top legislative priorities, but many civil liberties groups are skeptical of the broad powers that the Patriot Act gave to the government to use wiretaps and secret search warrants to prevent terrorism. One provision that may not be renewed is that allowing the government to obtain library borrowing records and prevent libraries from telling the individuals whose records are provided to the government.

In 2004, the US received 52,400 asylum applications and granted asylum to 11,434 foreigners. The US Commission on International Religious Freedom reported in February 2005 that there is significant variation in whether asylum seekers are detained (almost all were detained in New Orleans, compared to almost none along the Texas-Mexican border), and noted that over 80 percent of Cubans received asylum in the US, while less than 15 percent of Haitians received asylum. The overall recognition rate of asylum seekers is about 40 percent (www.uscirf.gov/reports/ERSrpt/index.php3)

States. The Arizona group that spearheaded the successful 2004 campaign for a state initiative requiring proof of citizenship to register to vote has gone national. "Protect Arizona Now" has become "Protect America Now" and promises to put similar initiatives before voters in other states. Proposition 200, which won 56 percent of the vote, requires those registering to vote to prove US citizenship and those showing up to vote to provide identification. It also denied some state-funded benefits to illegal aliens.

Arizona in February 2005 billed the federal government for nearly $118 million in unreimbursed costs for imprisoning 3,600 criminals who were illegal immigrants. President Bush proposed ending the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program, which provided $500 million in FY00 and $305 million in FY05 to states and cities to cover the cost of incarcerating unauthorized foreigners.

Students with limited English proficiency are almost 25 percent of California's six million public school children, and the state has been testing their English proficiency since 2001. Tests in 2004 showed that 47 percent of the 1.3 million LEP students are fluent in English, but only eight percent were re-classified as fully English proficient, about the same as in previous years. Almost 85 percent of the English learners were born in the US, and 85 percent are mainly Spanish speakers.

New York City's population reached an all-time high of 8.1 million in 2000. Almost three million New York City residents, 36 percent, were born abroad; 43 percent of the New York City labor force is foreign-born. The percentage of foreign-born is higher in Miami and Los Angeles, but New York City's immigrants are more diverse. Dominicans are 13 percent of New York City immigrants; Chinese nine percent; and Jamaicans six percent. (Some immigrant groups, including Mexicans, say their number was severely underestimated.)

Some 41,000 non-US citizens were in the US Armed Forces in January 2005, including 3,600 Mexican immigrants; at least 63 immigrants are among the 1,500 Americans killed in Iraq. Immigrants who are discharged honorably receive US citizenship almost automatically, and those killed receive it posthumously.

The No Child Left Behind Act provided a small increase in federal funding for K-12 schools, but required them to test and measure the progress of all students, penalizing schools that do not raise the test scores of students. The Center on Education Policy reported in March 2005 that, in about 75 percent of states and school districts, achievement gaps between different student groups were narrowing, but that it was unrealistic to expect non-English-speaking students to perform as well as other students by 2014, which No Child Left Behind requires.

States set proficiency targets for schools and those that fail to reach them for two consecutive years are deemed to be "failing schools" whose students are allowed to transfer to non-failing schools. However, only one percent of students in failing schools took advantage of the right to transfer from schools labeled failing. Some research suggests that, as more schools "teach to the test," the gap between white and minority test scores may rise, reversing the trend reported by the CEP.