Free Republic

Lawmakers working to craft a new comprehensive immigration bill have settled on a way to prevent employers from hiring illegal immigrants: a national biometric identification card all American workers would eventually be required to obtain. Under the potentially controversial plan still taking shape in the Senate, all legal U.S. workers, including citizens and immigrants, would be issued an ID card with embedded information, such as fingerprints, to tie the card to the worker. The ID card plan is one of several steps advocates of an immigration overhaul are taking to address concerns that have defeated similar bills in the past....

BENSALEM, Pa. — An alert police officer saved a damsel in distress from an attack by a fugitive illegal alien, who is now behind bars. The attack occurred Tuesday afternoon in the parking lot of the Kohl’s department store on Street Road. Police said Detective Eliot Gross arrived at the store at about 5:40 p.m. to follow up on a previous investigation. As he exited his vehicle, Gross heard the sound of a woman screaming coming from across the lot. Gross, police said, ran toward the screams and found the victim standing by her parked car, out of breath, and...

Maria Celeste interviews Lou Dobbs

Madison - The Legislature's Joint Finance Committee approved measures Friday that would let some illegal immigrants pay in-state college tuition, and provide limited legal protections to same-sex couples. Democrats who control the committee pushed through the measures over Republican objections, on party line votes of 12-4. The provisions were folded into the state budget the panel plans to send to the full Legislature. The committee also approved establishing new schools of freshwater science and public health at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. It did not provide funding. Wisconsin high schools graduate 400 to 650 illegal immigrants annually, and they must pay...

HAMDEN — Less than a week after a town woman was brutally attacked, allegedly by a co-worker, friends and strangers are coming forward to help her. Two bank accounts for her needs have been set up, and a nurse who works at Yale-New Haven Hospital said she wants employees from 65 area bars and restaurants to donate a portion of their tips May 1 to help the woman with what the nurse believes will be enormous medical bills. Eli’s on Whitney, 2392 Whitney Ave., has agreed to be the dropoff point for the one-day event. The victim, 25, was released...

A 20-year-old man died in a late Thursday night one-car collision near the Broken Arrow Expressway, said Tulsa Police Cpl. T.J. Campbell. According to police, 18-year-old Joel Jaimes was driving westbound at about 10 p.m. Thursday near 5000 E. 31st. St. with two passengers when he lost control of the vehicle. The vehicle rolled several times before hitting a light pole and coming to a stop upside down, Campbell said. One passenger riding in the front seat, a 20-year-old man, died at the scene, Campbell said. The victim was still wearing his seatbelt in the vehicle when police arrived. However,...

Fayetteville, N.C. — Cumberland County investigators arrested an illegal immigrant from Honduras in connection with the death of a 64-year-old woman Tuesday. Julio Cesar Ramos, 45, who claims to be homeless and unemployed, is charged with beating Paulette Locklear outside her house Tuesday afternoon. He was being held without bond Wednesday in the Cumberland County Detention Center. Investigators said Ramos had been deported at least a dozen times over the last 20 years but kept getting back into the U.S. Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Charlotte, could confirm only one deportation – from Houston...

The crush of illegal aliens has brought us a variety diseases. For the first time we have seen cases of Chagas disease a parasitic illness that is the leading cause of heart failure in Central and South America where as many as 18 million people are infected with this deadly sickness. Transmitted by insects, Chagas, which was unknown here ten years ago is now in 23 states. The open borders crowd from George Bush down are responsible for bring this and other diseases into our lives, because “they do the jobs Americans won’t do.” What a pile of dung! Tuberculosis...

Labor unions are poised to go after Hispanic workers in states like Arizona and sectors such as services and health care if new union rules are put in place by the Barack Obama administration and Democratic Congress next year. Unions and pro-union Democrats want Congress and Obama to pass card-check legislation. The plan would allow unions to organize in workplaces if they get a majority of workers to sign cards supporting unionization. It would scrap 73-year-old unionization laws that require secret ballots for workers to decide whether they want their work forces represented by a trade union. Card-check legislation is...

WASHINGTON -- On January 20, hundreds of thousands of people will welcome a new president and his administration as Barack Obama takes his official post in the White House. The next day-- his first full day on the job--could also be eventful. Immigration policy groups announced Tuesday that they will organize a mass mobilization of immigrant families and supporters in Washington, on Jan. 21, 2009, in part to welcome the Democratic president, but also to also ensure that humane immigration reform is at the top of his agenda. The National Capital Immigrant Coalition and the Fair Immigration Reform Movement—the two...

<p>MCMINNVILLE, Tenn. (AP) -- Authorities in Warren County have issued arrest warrants for a man who fled to Atlanta after he was allegedly involved in a double fatality wreck.</p> <p>Sheriff Jackie Matheny said 21-year-old Herlin "Gato" Alvarez of La Vergne is an illegal immigrant and being sought on a charge of leaving the scene of the Sept. 30 accident near Centertown.</p>

NEW HAVEN — Mayor John DeStefano Jr. and supporters lashed back at the Community Watchdog Project, an anti-illegal immigration group, releasing e-mails Thursday sent to city staff members from across the country in opposition to a Mexican flag flying on the Green flagpole. "We do not tolerate hate," DeStefano said, standing in front of the flagpole and backed by representatives of the Irish, Polish and Italian communities, as well as the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League. "A lot of people have cultural amnesia. They forget they were the sons and daughters of immigrants, and they criticize the next group that...

In L.A. County, 75% of inmates who reenter the U.S. engage in more criminal activity within a year. The rate is less for illegal immigrants who have never been ordered to leave. Illegal immigrants who have been deported at least once from the United States are far more likely than other immigrants to repeatedly commit crimes, according to a study by the nonprofit Rand Corp. The data indicated that illegal immigrants, overall, were not a greater crime risk, according to the study, which looked at all inmates released from Los Angeles County Jail for a month in 2002. But among...

Agriprocessors, the Brooklyn-based company that is the nation’s largest kosher meat producer, is well known for the labor troubles at its meatpacking plant in Iowa — federal agents detained 389 of its workers as illegal immigrants in May, and labor officials in Iowa have accused it of employing 57 under-age workers. But Agriprocessors is also having labor troubles closer to home, with the company asking the United States Supreme Court to overturn a vote to unionize at its distribution center along the Brooklyn waterfront. If successful, the company’s appeal could have repercussions at companies across the country: it is trying...

[Phoenix] - John McCain made it clear who his daddy was Monday morning. Daddy Yankee, the hip-hop star from Puerto Rico, endorsed the Republican candidate Monday morning. Wearing black aviator shades in the library of Central High School here, Daddy Yankee said, “I believe in his ideals and his proposals to lead this nation…He’s been a fighter for the Hispanic community.”

A predominantly Latino audience trickled into the half-filled venue as Jorge Hernandez, “El Guero (Blondie),” took the stage just after 7 p.m. Sunday at the Nebraska State Fair. In contrast, people had packed around the fence surrounding the Open-Air Auditorium Friday before country musician Miranda Lambert had played her first note. A capacity crowd of 6,200 had filled the benches on Friday, and 5,800 came Saturday to hear two other country artists. Theories on why Sunday’s crowd was smaller and slower to form ranged from fear of immigration officials to the different cultural tradition of Latinos. Hernandez, the performer, speculated...

We all heard about the person who sat next to traffic and pointed a hair dryer at oncoming cars to see their reactions.I tried it with illegal aliens and a throw away camera. I went to the local gathering places, Circle K, Home Depot, wherever they gather waiting for an early morning pick-up. The minute they saw the camera, they dispersed. Some ran, some wandered away, but the outcome was undeniable. They left!I decided to expand the experiment and took the camera to Wal-Mart. It worked there too! The illegals got out of the store and walked away. Some around...

Hartford Mayor Eddie A. Perez signed an ordinance Monday that stops police from arresting or detaining anyone solely because of their immigration status. The ordinance, passed last week by the city council, also prohibits other city employees from asking anyone seeking services about their immigration status. Perez was previously lukewarm to the idea, maintaining that an order issued by Hartford Police Chief Daryl K. Roberts in March was adequate. It said that city police would not make immigration arrests unless there was also a criminal investigation. In a letter to the city council, Perez also expressed concern about "codifying standards...

National security trumps an immigrant's right to a speedy naturalization process, a Manhattan federal judge ruled yesterday......a group of New Yorkers who hoped to vote in this fall's election sued to force approval of backlogged citizenship applications in time for Election Day. Judge Lawrence McKenna dismissed the lawsuit, filed by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund; the Judge said he couldn't authorize the FBI to hurry "name checks" - a comprehensive vetting process expanded after 9/11.

Dissatisfied with teaching in Spanish 85 percent of the time, a North Carolina superintendent is pushing for a $10 million budget that includes a plan for a school where only Spanish is spoken. Superintendent Peter Gorman pitched his proposal to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school board today, with provisions to turn Collinswood Elementary into a Spanish program. Nora Carr, chief communications officer for Charlotte-Mecklenburg School District, told WND the facility will help to preserve Hispanic culture. We find that a lot of kids who go there have parents who might be English-speaking immigrants, and they might be very successful," she said. "They...