Free Republic

Evicted four months ago from their Highland Park apartment, Louis Morales and his 18-year-old stepson, Arthur Valenzuela, live half-hidden by brush along the nearby Arroyo Seco riverbed. Morales, 49, keeps a framed bible verse and a stuffed monkey in his tent. Water hauled by bike from a park heats up on the camp stove. Next door, their friend Johnny Salazar fixes bikes and shattered computer screens on the cheap for people who live in the neighborhood. A brother and sister Morales has known for years live up the river, and three couples stay down by the bridge. "Everybody here is...

The Gang of Eight’s immigration bill could make illegal immigrants eligible for state and local welfare benefits almost immediately after it is passed, according to Senator Jeff Sessions (R., Ala.), one of the proposal’s leading critics. Further, he contends, some particular categories of amnestied immigrants and their relatives would be eligible for federal benefits long before the 13-year waiting period usually cited by the bill’s advocates, such as Senator Jeff Flake (R., Ariz.), who challenged Sessions’s argument in a press release on Tuesday. These are just a couple of reasons why Sessions and others are calling on the Gang of...

In 2008, Mark Krikorian published an important new book arguing against permissive immigration. The book's central idea: what has changed since Ellis Island days is not the immigrants; it's the society they are immigrating to. In 1913, a Sicilian who migrated to New York City to do manual labor would discover a society willing to pay a high wage for his effort. In 2013 … not so. Yesterday's New York Times reports on a new study confirming Krikorian's insight. People of Mexican descent in New York City are far more likely to be living in poor or near-poor households than...

California is in the middle of a far-reaching demographic shift: Hispanics, who already constitute a majority of the state’s schoolchildren, will be a majority of its workforce and of its population in a few decades. This is an even more momentous development than it seems. Unless Hispanics’ upward mobility improves, the state risks becoming more polarized economically and more reliant on a large government safety net. And as California goes, so goes the nation, whose own Hispanic population shift is just a generation or two behind.

For several years, Mexico has been solving their own unemployment problem by sending their jobless citizens to the United States. The result has been a low, steady rate of unemployment in Mexico since 2000. Of course, the unimpeded flow of cheap labor headed north, has had a disastrous effect on U.S. workers. Consider the following facts: -Between 1991-1999, Mexico had an average unemployment rate of 3.7 percent. Now, as economies around the world are falling apart and experiencing record joblessness, Mexico still has a relatively low unemployment rate of 5.5 percent (July 2010). -While the U.S. currently has an anemic...

YAKIMA, Wash--Just before 5 in the morning 39-year-old Rafaela Hernandez gets a ride to work. Like many campesinas, farm workers, she's in the fields by 5:30. This week she's picking pears. She heads home around noon. Sometimes the schedule changes or there's no work at all depending on the crops, but for the most part, from June until November, this is her life seven days a week. She says its pesado, duro, hard and heavy, work. But as she sees it, it could be worse. "Here at least we have work, food, en Mexico there isn't any", said Hernandez. 10...

A dingy floral print peels from the walls, and sheets of plastic are taped over some of the windows. But for Harka Rai, the sagging trailer home he bought in rural Oregon is his piece of the American dream. Rai, who is married with a 4-year-old son and another child on the way, was just a boy when new citizenship laws forced his ethnic Nepalese family out of Bhutan. For 18 years, they waited in a refugee camp in Nepal, hoping to return home. "We built a bamboo house," he said. "The dust comes inside. The rain comes inside. And...

...But Obama did nothing to move the debate forward beyond drawing greater public attention to it. Among the things he didn't say: Obama did not announce a public White House meeting that would include key Republicans, Democrats, and representatives of civic and business groups who would try to seek a compromise on immigration reform ...He did not use the occasion to formally announce a Justice Department challenge to the Arizona state law...Obama did not emphasize enough the economic case for fixing America's immigration system to help the United States be more competitive in the global economy. He did not mention...

A new report from the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) has found that California has the least-educated labor force of any state in the United States, and this may be due to the high levels of immigration in recent decades. According to the study, 9 percent of California’s population was comprised of immigrants in 1970, but by 2008 it was 27 percent. Forty years ago, the state had the 7th most educated workforce of all U.S. states in terms of the share of workers who had completed high school, but by 2008 it ranked 50th. The researchers now estimate that...

The St. Patrick’s Day festivities meant something much different for the couple in their 80s from Minneapolis than for the other revelers at the local American Legion Post... Within days the couple would be returning home to a Minnesota suburb now changed forever by the huge influx of Somali immigrants whose behavior had forced them to move... “They are taught how to flush,” Marie (not her real name) said. She began to describe how the émigrés are taught how to use and flush a toilet, how to turn on kitchen faucets to get hot and cold water and how to...

WASHINGTON, March 23 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- As President Obama and the congressional leadership revive efforts to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens living in the U.S., a new report from the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) concludes that such policies would severely undermine the interests of American workers. Amnesty and the American Worker also finds that record levels of immigration during the 2000s – both illegal and government mandated – have added new workers to our labor force faster than our economy has been able to create new jobs. At a time when some 25 million Americans are either...

It was a deathtrap. The Brooklyn building where five people died in an arson was illegally divided - and the partitions made it impossible for several victims to escape, officials said Friday. The Buildings Department issued three violations against the Bensonhurst building's landlord, who could also soon become the target of a criminal probe, according to law enforcement sources. Three illegal walls were installed on the 86th St. building's overcrowded third floor, where up to 15 people lived, officials said. Those walls created only one way out for many of those residents - the stairwell that was filled from smoke...

Zogby Poll: DC Lobbyists Often Out of Step with Constituencies WASHINGTON (February 3, 2010) - A new Zogby poll of senior executives, business owners, and members of union households finds that each of these groups thinks the best way to deal with illegal immigrants in the country is to enforce the law and cause them to return home. This is in stark contrast to lobbyists for large companies, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which argue for legalization. The findings of the survey are consistent with surveys done by the National Federation of Independent Business, which represents small enterprises,...

New Jersey is expecting a "surge" of refugees from the devastating Jan. 12 earthquake in Haiti, which would create a humanitarian crisis and put new pressure on a state treasury already in peril, according to confidential documents obtained by The Star-Ledger.

About 271,000 Mexican immigrants have slipped into poverty in the US, Spanish banking giant BBVA said in a report. It said between the fourth quarter of 2008 and the same period last year, 'the number of workers of Mexican origin with jobs decreased by approximately 560,000'. For that reason, the number of workers of Mexican origin who are currently unemployed increased to about 1.8 million, 'of whom around 51 percent are immigrants', according to the report Saturday. The bank said 60 percent of the jobs lost in the US last year were from the construction and commerce sectors, while in...

THE American government is to resettle 5,800 refugees from Nakivale refugee camp in Isingiro district to the United States, Prosy Katura, the UN refugee agency (UNHCR) protection officer, has revealed. Katura said a team has already been sent to Nakivale to scrutinise the refugees to ensure they have no links with al-Qaeda, an extremist group. The American taskforce at the camp will also study files of individual refugees since they arrived in Uganda. During a meeting with the Germany ambassador to Uganda, Reinhard Buchholz, who visited the camp on Friday, Katura said the exercise under the “expedited Somali resettlement programme”...

The Brazilian U.N. peacekeepers used pepper spray to control a frenzied crowd of thousands of Haitians seeking food at a makeshift camp on the grounds of the palace. "They're not violent, just desperate. They just want to eat," Brazilian Army Colonel Fernando Soares said. "The problem is, there is not enough food for everyone."

For the second time to three days, the Washington Post has an op-ed calling on us to help Haiti by reducing the number of Haitians living there. Elliott Abrams' piece, which I critiqued here on Friday, was wrongheaded in calling for substantial increases in Haitian immigration but at least it didn't reject American sovereignty. On the other hand, this most recent piece, by tranzi economist Michael Clemens at the Center for Global Development, is remarkable as an example of forthright post-Americanism. For instance: "We do know, however, why many individual Haitians are poor. For a large number, there is a...

Miami — More than 100 Haitians crammed inside a Catholic church Tuesday to ask questions about a federal government designation that will allow possibly hundreds of thousands of illegal Haitian immigrants to work in the U.S. and send money home during the next 18 months. Citizenship and Immigration Services Director Alejandro Mayorkas said Haitians will be able to start filing their applications for the Temporary Protected Status on Thursday, the day official notice of the program is expected to be published in the Federal Register. Only those in the U.S. before the earthquake hit their Caribbean homeland a week ago...

For years, many Americans have dismissed the battle between Mexico's government and drug cartels. * * * But this problem, funded largely by U.S. drug users, has rapidly transformed into a battle against a terrorist insurgency, and victory is every bit as important to Mexico's security as is America's battle against al-Qaeda. Defeat for Mexico means nothing less than a descent into chaos. This might sound alarmist, but the tactics being employed by Mexico's drug gangs, not to mention their spread into U.S. border cities, is truly cause for alarm. * * * Drug gangs are challenging the government for...