Four immigration Victories in the Senate!!!

In last week’s newsletter, I wrote about how quiet things were with Congress out of town for the Fourth of July recess. But how things can change in just one week! Four immigration-reduction amendments to the Homeland Security spending bill were offered on the floor of the Senate this week, and thanks to you, we won all four! Things were a bit crazy at NumbersUSA’s two Washington-area offices on Wednesday and Thursday. The tech staff was hard at work making sure our website could handle our second busiest day of the year in terms of visitors, while the web content team in the Arlington, Va. office kept up-to-the-minute information on our front page to keep you informed to everything that was happening. (We even have the video of Sen. Jeff Sessions’ floor speech defending E-Verify on our front page). Our legislative team in our Capitol Hill office coordinated all our advocacy efforts, informing us to who NumbersUSA members should be directing their phone calls. Both Wednesday and Thursday were late nights for every member of our staff, but it was well worth it to witness four victories! However, we need you to keep the pressure on because, as you’ll read in Roy’s new blog above, we need to make sure the amendments aren’t stripped out of the spending bill during a secret, backroom conference committee between House and Senate leaders. This may be our only chance this year. Also be sure to click on our Vote Trackers in the upper right of this email. That is where we present you with how each Senator voted on each important immigration issue. Your website team tries to provide these Vote Trackers within an hour of the official votes becoming available. Being able to hold each elected official immediately accountable is one of our most important functions. As always, there will be several new faxes appearing on your Action Buffet throughout the upcoming days. So make sure you thank the Senators that voted for these four amendments and blast the ones that didn’t. And thank you for all your phone calls into Washington and for making Wednesday our second busiest day of the year in visitors to our website. Thanks, http://www.numbersusa.com/content/

And the other side of the coin.....Why CALIFORNIA?

Risking Israel’s ire, US takes 1,350 Palestinian refugees

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0708/p02s04-usgn.html

July 7, 2009 - The State Department confirmed today that as many as 1,350 Iraqi Palestinians – once the well-treated guests of Saddam Hussein and now at outs with much of Iraqi society – will be resettled in the US, mostly in southern California, starting this fall.

It will be the largest-ever resettlement of Palestinian refugees into the US – and welcome news to the Palestinians who fled to Iraq after 1948 but who have had a tough time since Mr. Hussein was deposed in 2003. Targeted by Iraqi Shiites, the mostly-Sunni Palestinians have spent recent years in one of the region’s roughest refugee camps, Al Waleed, near Iraq’s border with Syria.

“Really for the first time, the United States is recognizing a Palestinian refugee population that could be admitted to the US as part of a resettlement program,” says Bill Frelick, refugee policy director at Human Rights Watch in Washington.

Given the US’s past reluctance to resettle Palestinians – it accepted just seven Palestinians in 2007 and nine in 2008 – the effort could ruffle some diplomatic feathers.[snip]

Revised Immigration Plan Limits Officers’ Powers
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The Department of Homeland Security said it was revising a program that authorized local police to enforce federal immigration law - a controversial aspect of U.S. border policy.

Opponents said the program, known as 287g, was intended to identify criminal aliens but instead has led to racial profiling; it allowed local police to identify and arrest illegal immigrants for such minor infractions as a broken tail light. Program supporters said it has been an effective tool for combating illegal immigration.

The new guidelines sharply reduce the ability of local law enforcement to arrest and screen suspected illegal immigrants. They are intended to prevent sheriff and police departments from arresting people “for minor offenses as a guise to initiate removal proceedings,” according to Homeland Security. The program will instead focus on more serious criminals.

“In a world of limited resources, our view is that we need to focus first and foremost on people committing crimes in our community who should not be here,” said John Morton, Assistant Secretary of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Morton said his agency would sign new contracts with local law enforcement that would bolster federal oversight.

In the past two years, more than 120,000 suspected illegal immigrants were identified through the program, and most ended up in deportation proceedings. By comparison, ICE removed 356,739 illegal immigrants from the U.S. during the fiscal year ended Sept. 30, 2008 - a 23.5% increase over the 2007 total.

The most active local enforcer has been Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Arizona’s Maricopa County. He said Friday he would continue pursuing illegal immigrants, arguing that state laws allow neighborhood crime sweeps and worksite raids.

“If I’m told not to enforce immigration law except if the alien is a violent criminal, my answer to that is we are still going to do the same thing, 287g or not,” said Arpaio. His deputies have identified in jail or picked up on the streets more than 30,000 illegal immigrants in the Phoenix area. “We have been very successful,” said the five-term sheriff.

The Department of Justice is investigating whether Arpaio’s deputies have used skin color as a pretense to stop Latinos suspected of being illegal immigrants.

Obama’s policy change is expected to bolster his standing with Latinos and some Democratic legislators. The administration is seeking to set the stage for a sweeping overhaul of immigration legislation that could put millions of illegal workers on the path to U.S. citizenship.
http://foxnews.mobi/content.html?contentId=42889&currentPage=0

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