I. "Making the Case for Passage of Comprehensive Immigration Reform This Year" - And our message is going global. NDN, America's Voice, NCLR, and experts from Lake Research Partners and Benenson Strategy Group teamed up last week to articulate the arguments as to why President Barack Obama and Congress need to pass immigration reform legislation (CIR)this year. Reporters from around the world were able to participate in our event via live webcast, and a prominent Mexican periodical, El Financiero, coveredour event. Click hereto check out the speakers' presentations. The full video will be on our blog this Wednesday.
II. The Deportation Era - There was ample news coverage over the week of the report published by the Migration Policy Center, demonstrating that after seeing its budget soar to $218 million last year, the federal program responsible for tracking down and finding "criminal aliens" yielded 72,000 arrests, 73% of which had no criminal record. The New York Times published an Editorialthis weekend on this pervasive inefficiency (and racial overtones) in enforcement:
Of all the noncitizen Latinos sentenced last year, the vast majority - 81 percent - were convicted for unlawfully entering or remaining in the country, neither of which is a criminal offense. The country is filling the federal courts and prisons with nonviolent offenders. It is diverting immense law-enforcement resources from pursuing serious criminals - violent thugs, financial scammers - to an immense, self-defeating campaign to hunt down ... workers.
III. Speaking of Enforcement Gone Bad - This Times Editorial also mentions the issue of severely overburdened immigration judges. As it stands, judges simply are not equipped to properly deal with this "immigration crackdown" and inaction with respect to the rest of the broken immigration system, as reportedby Jennifer Ludden.
As it stands, racial profiling is apparently encouraged as a part of "enforcement." One law proposed in Montana would apparently encourage average citizens to file claims against employers they "believed" were employing undocumenteds. Here in the D.C. area - in Baltimore - a group of ICE officers who were behind their "mandated" quotas of arrests thought it would be ok to just scout a 7-11 for Hispanics and call it a day:
New Tools and Bad Enforcement - In case you hadn't seen this, Texas sheriffs have erected a series of surveillance cameras along the Rio Grande and connected them to the Internet so that your average Joe can be a "virtual Deputy." John Burnett reports on NPR:
Thousands of people are now virtual Border Patrol agents - and they're on the lookout for drug smugglers and illegal immigrants.....Robert Fahrenkamp, a truck driver in South Texas, is one of them. After a long haul behind the wheel of a Peterbilt tractor-trailer, he comes home, sets his 6-foot-6-inch, 250-pound frame in front of his computer, pops a Red Bull, turns on some Black Sabbath or Steppenwolf, logs in to www.blueservo.net - and starts protecting his country. "This gives me a little edge feeling," Fahrenkamp says, "like I'm doing something for law enforcement as well as for our own country."
With hate crimes already rising against Hispanics at record levels, this "program" really does not help bring communities together to solve crime, or anything else. It is to be expected that this site will invite extremists to participate in virtual man-hunts. The people logging in are no "border agents," they undergo no background or criminal check, no psychological profile exams, no training. And to top it off, the website provides no detailed or intelligent information. A typical description of "what to watch for," includes: "During the day watch for subjects on foot carrying large bags. During the night time hours watch for activity involving lights." This is no description of drug traffickers, it could be a Mexican just coming home from visiting family, or crossing illegally, but let's not hide his program behind the guise of "fighting border crime". Let's call a spade a spade - this is a case of Texas sheriffs wanting help in keeping the "illegals" out, not criminals. If the intent were to keep criminal activity away, then we should begin by re-visiting Texas gun laws, the laws that allow guns to flood into Mexico and play a role in all that "border crime."
The New Political Economy of Immigration - In this interesting piece written by Tom Barry of the Americas Program, Center for International Policy (CIP), he analyzes the political and economic reasons behind the change in the narrative on immigrants and immigration since September 11. First, by being depicted as more "dangerous," second, by discussing immigration in a vacuum, rather than addressing it as the complex socio-economic issue that it is, there are market forces that have become invigorated due to the immigrant "crackdown," and he argues they have "given rise to an unregulated complex of jails, detention centers, and prisons that create profit from the immigrant crackdown."
IV. Gallup Briefing focuses on Mexico - Click hereto review Gallup's latest analysis of escalating violence in Mexico related to the drug trade and public opinion.
V. The Real Economics of Immigration Reform - Workers are workers, are workers. In case you missed it, check outthis piece by Cristina Jimenez, which breaks down the "bottom line" on how the economics of immigration should reframe the debate on the policy in this area.
VI. Obama Continues to Reach out to Hispanics - During thisinterview with El Piolin, the radio show with the most audience nationally, Obama explained his economic policy to Spanish-speaking listeners, and reiterated his commitment on other fronts, such as immigrationreform.
VII. Watch out for the Wolf in Sheep's Clothing - If you look at the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) "Morning News," it looks pretty harmless, just a series of clips from major newspapers. Is it intended to throw off those people who don't happen to know that it is a member of the hate network founded by John Tanton?
VIII. Census Offers a Look at the Make-up of the Nation's Immigrants - ThisNew York Times piece by Sam Roberts provides a broad overview of the Census findings released last week.
IX. It's All About Juan - If you've ever wondered why immigration advocates work so tirelessly on this difficult issue, just look at Juan. No, not a "Juan Perez" a real Juan - Juan is a Georgetown University student who deserves CIR. Read his story, featured in the Washington Post.
From the Lori Montgomery and Ceci Connelly in tomorrow's Washington Post:
President Obama is putting the finishing touches on an ambitious first budget that seeks to cut the federal deficit in half over the next four years, primarily by raising taxes on business and the wealthy and by slashing spending on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, administration officials said.
In addition to tackling a deficit swollen by the $787 billion stimulus package and other efforts to ease the nation's economic crisis, the budget blueprint will press aggressively for progress on the domestic agenda Obama outlined during the presidential campaign. This would include key changes to environmental policies and a major expansion of health coverage that Obama hopes to enact later this year.
A summary of Obama's budget request for the fiscal year that begins in October will be delivered to Congress on Thursday, with the complete, multi-hundred-page document to follow in April. But Obama plans to unveil his goals for scaling back record deficits and rebuilding the nation's costly and inefficient health care system Monday, when he addresses more than 100 lawmakers and budget experts at a White House summit on restoring "fiscal responsibility" to Washington.
A piece by Floyd Norris in the NY Times today reinforces why bringing our fiscal house in order matters - there is a serious question of whether global investors - all with less money in their pocket, and recently burned by their American investments - will continue to lend America the money it needs to finance its extraordinary levels of borrowing:
JUST when the United States really, really needs the money, overseas investors seem to be less willing to buy long-term American securities.
The government said this week that net purchases of those securities fell to $412.5 billion in 2008, less than half the 2007 level and the lowest annual total since 1999, when the federal government was running a budget surplus.
Money did come in, but it was diverted into the safest investment around, albeit one with almost no expectation of profit, Treasury bills. Overseas investors increased their holdings of those securities by $456 billion, an unprecedented flow.
The weekly Daily Kos poll is in. The trends continued unchanged - Obama still very popular, Democrats significantly more popular than the GOP, Congressional Dems continue to tick up a bit, Congressional Republicans continue their free fall. As of today the Congressional Republicans have an 18 percent approval rating - 18 percent! Obama 69. As DemFromCT writes
Tune in next week to see if John Boehner can make himself and his Republicans any less popular. He's -11 himself since the first poll 1/5-8, and the Congressional GOP is -12 (in contrast, Nancy Pelosi is +2 and Congressional Dems are +5.)
The net-net on the battle over the Recovery Plan? Congressional Democrats gain 5 points, the Congressional GOP, in an already catastrophic position with the public, drop 11.
It will be interesting to see how Bobby Jindal interprets these numbers in prepping for his Tuesday response to President Obama. Will he really carry the water of the wildly discredited and out of touch Washington GOP? Or distance himself from them, carving out a more constructive position in the national debate? Will be interesting to see.
Gallup just releasedthese findingsbased on polling data obtained in Mexico during the Summer of 2008 that provides some insight into public perception of the drug trade problem. I am a bit concerned about the size of the poll, which interviewed 1,000 individuals (out of a population of over 109 million), and the Gallup site does not clarify whether they interviewed people in every state, by region, or whether it concentrated all interviews in one specific region (border, Gulf, Pacific, etc), which can play a pivotal role in the results obtained. It comes as no surprise that as violence has escalated, the confidence of the general populace has diminished. Among other findings:
Nearly 6 in 10 Mexican residents (59%) said gangs are present, up from 51% in 2007.
More than 4 in 10 (43%) said drug trafficking or sales take place in their neighborhoods, up from 38% in 2007.
Forty-four percent of Mexicans expressed confidence in their local police, which is down from 50% in 2007 and roughly similar to the 42% measured in 2006 before Calderon's crackdown.
Yesterday at NDN we heard from several experts, advocates, and strategists on the issue of immigration reform. NDN President Simon Rosenberg was joined on a panel by Rick Johnson ofLake Research, Pete Brodnitz of Benenson Strategy Group, Janet Murguia of the National Council of La Raza (NCLR), and Frank Sharry of America's Voice. Andres Ramirez, Vice President, NDN Hispanic Programs, moderated the discussion.
Building on the great work by these organizations over the last few years, and the creation of the Immigration08 campaign, the meeting consisted of a vibrant - and very timely - discussion during which the panelists reiterated the reasons why our economy and American values require passage of comprehensive legislation to fix the broken immigration system this year.
Video of the event will be posted next week. For additional information, please refer to the final slide in thispresentation, which will take you important work completed by each of the participating organizations.
As NDN mentioned during the event, we are making the speakers' presentations available below. Presentations in order of appearance:
I am excited to be announce that on Tuesday March 10 we will be holding a special event here at NDN - a luncheon conversation with Joe Rospars, the new media director of the Obama Presidential Campaign and founder of Blue State Digital, one of the nation's leading new media consulting firms.
There is little argument now that the way the 2008 Obama campaign used new media and the internet has changed politics here, and around the world, forever. Joe was the director of this historic effort, and I am very pleased he will be taking the time to reflect on their remarkable campaign, and offer some thoughts on what we might expect in this space in the years to come.
We will be making a more formal announcement on this in a few days, but in the meantime mark your calendar for this midday discussion with Joe Rospars. For those not able to attend the event here in our offices be sure to watch it live on our new high-end webcasting system.
President Barack Obama today announced a plan to cut foreclosures and reboot new mortgage financings, at least when the economy shows signs of new life. The fact of offering a plan is an advance, given that Bush and his people did nothing and proposed nothing, even as the crisis reached critical mass. As we have written here since the crisis first broke, keeping people in their homes is fundamental to solving the larger economic problem. Again, it’s the fast-rising foreclosures and mortgage delinquencies that are eroding and destroying the value of hundreds of billions of dollars in mortgage-backed securities and the credit default swaps that “back them up” (sic). And it’s the falling value of those securities and swaps, in turn, which has led to the effective bankruptcy of financial institutions that had leveraged themselves to their eyeballs to buy them or issued them and then kept them (and how dumb was that?).
While the act of proposing anything serious puts the Obama Administration ahead of its predecessor, passing such a low threshold is hardly very meaningful -- especially since the problems continue to worsen. More than nine percent of mortgages today are either in foreclosure or delinquent, two to three times the numbers from just two years earlier; and if everything continues to unravel, those numbers could double in another year. If that happens, there won’t be many large, U.S. banks left standing. Many of the homeowners now in trouble could manage, if they just could refinance at current rates. But banks quite naturally see someone in financial trouble as a poor credit risk for a new loan, which is what refinancing is. And the fall in housing prices means tens of millions of those people can’t qualify to refinance. That’s because refinancing is available today only if you owe no more than 80 percent of the original mortgage’s value. The catch for millions of families is that as the value of their home goes down, their existing mortgage (the one being refinanced) accounts for a greater percentage of the value being refinanced. In the worst cases, people just walk away from a $200,000 home with a $300,000 mortgage -- and who would refinance one of those? In millions of other, less extreme cases, the falling prices simply disqualify people for refinancing.
The Administration wants to address this precise part of the problem, by providing $75 billion in subsidies to banks to defray half of the cost of refinancing for several million homeowners at risk of losing their homes. Mortgages owned by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are also eligible here, and they’re the ones most likely to actually see their interest rates reset, since the government owns Fannie and Freddie and can direct them to do it. It will be harder to convince bankers already staring at enormous losses already on their books or soon to be there, especially if they’re worried that their bondholders could sue them for resetting loans. The plan also has some $100 billion for the Treasury to keep buying more of Fannie and Freddie’s failing mortgage-backed securities since, as we also have said repeatedly, until foreclosure rates return to normal, the biggest bank bailout in the world won’t prevent more banking losses.
There are more direct ways to address foreclosures. We could provide direct loans to tide over those in trouble, or Fannie and Freddie could reset the loans of everyone in trouble. The problem is that anyone advancing such a common sense approach would become a very large political target -- and not just for reflexively-critical House Republicans.
How could the president or his advisors explain to those who work hard and spend less, so they can keep their mortgage payments up to date, why they don’t qualify for a lower interest rate from the government, when their neighbor who spent more or just had harder luck does qualify? More plainly, how does the government choose who would qualify for such direct help without enraging most of those who wouldn’t? In effect, the Administration plan finesses this problem by letting banks choose, without compelling them to do so. But what if the economy continues to worsen and the plan doesn’t work, which is a very real possibility? Indeed, don’t be surprised to see the Administration revisit it six months from now with a much less “voluntary” approach.
After President Obama's discourse today on how to help working Americans through this crisis, I thought it appropriate to reiterate points we have made on the economic arguments for immigration reform. And I highly recommend this piece in the American Prospect on "The Real Economics of Immigration," by Cristina Jimenez:
...Immigration reform is a tougher sell in a recession. That's the blunt observation Wall Street Journal
columnist Gerald Seib recently offered: "Pushing any kind of
immigration reform, particularly one that includes a path toward
legalization, is a lot harder in an environment in which Americans are
losing jobs."
Yet the political difficulty predates the Wall Street collapse and
job-loss figures. For years, there has been little analysis of how a
path toward legalization would increase the positive economic
contributions of undocumented immigrants. Instead, conservative critics
have found willing partners in the media and government to turn
immigration reform into a zero-sum game, a war of us-versus-them in
which every job performed by an "illegal" must have been stolen from a
more deserving American.
The politics won't change until the real economics of immigration reframe the debate.
Here's a reality check: Consigning undocumented workers to a
precarious existence undermines all who aspire to a middle-class
standard of living........
By complying with tax law, many immigrants have made it clear that they
are willing to help build a new middle class through cooperation.
Contra the myth of immigrants as economic parasites, tax dollars from
undocumented immigrants are an integral part of our national economy,
funding programs like unemployment benefits that support a large number
of Americans in a time of economic crisis. This money is more
indispensable than ever. The Internal Revenue Service estimates that
undocumented immigrants contributed nearly $50 billion in federal taxes
between 1996 and 2003. Ironically, it's easy for undocumented
immigrants to document their earnings; a passport and proof of address
are all they need for a tax-identification number.....
The Small Business Administration finds that immigrants are nearly 30
percent more likely to start a business than non-immigrants and that
they represent 16.7 percent of all new business owners. In New York
City, the borough of Queens -- the most diverse county in the nation --
remains the leading source of job creation in the city. According to
the Center for an Urban Future, three zip codes in Queens had
employment growth of more than 80 percent in the past decade, adding
66,000 immigrants from 2000 to 2005....
Nancy and Carlos live with the constant threat of deportation,
surviving between hope and trepidation as best they can. "We need to
hide like criminals, and we go to work in fear, hoping that God brings
us back home. You know, we will do any work to survive," Nancy
insisted. Some jobs that paid $10 an hour just a few months ago now pay
only $4 an hour.
Yet Carlos sounded unfazed by the recession. "We have our savings;
the difficult times have taught us that we need to save for
emergencies," he told me. "We pay our taxes; our son makes online
monthly payments to the IRS because we get paid cash."
A path to legalization for millions of people like Carlos and Nancy
is a cost-effective path to short-term stimulus and long-term recovery.
We cannot afford to ignore it any longer.
NDN applauds President Obama's demonstrated commitment to reaching out to Latinos. President Obama began reaching out to Hispanics during the 2008 campaign through his record amount of Spanish language paid advertisements, by issuing all communications in English and Spanish, and by working to get into the living rooms of Hispanics by appearing on several of the most popular Spanish language programs. NDN congratulates the President on the continuation of his bilingual press strategy throughout the transition, and now as part of the White House Media Affairs Office. He gets, it - candidates and public officials need to address Spanish language media and speak in Spanish.
Yesterday, the President fulfilled his promise to grant an interview to El Piolin, during which he discussed recent achievements, the economic stimulus package and immigration reform. El Piolin, or Eddie Sotelo, is one of the most televised radio personalities in the nation. His show, Piolin por La Mañana, is the top ranking for morning shows in Los Angeles (regardless of language) and its 50 syndicated markets. Its growing scope makes it the #1 Radio Show in the country. Studies indicate that Hispanics are suffering disproportionately in this economic crisis, and Obama's appearance on this show indicates his desire to to reach them directly and let them know he is working on solving this economic crisis.
More evidence of how unprecedented this moment is. From the NY Times:
The state of California - its deficits ballooning, its lawmakers intransigent and its governor apparently free of allies or influence - appears headed off the fiscal rails.
Since the fall, when lawmakers began trying to attack the gaps in the $143 billion budget that their earlier plan had not addressed, the state has fallen into deeper financial straits, with more bad news coming daily from Sacramento. The state, nearly out of cash, has laid off scores of workers and put hundreds more on unpaid furloughs. It has stopped paying counties and issuing income tax refunds and halted thousands of infrastructure projects.
After negotiating nonstop from Saturday afternoon until late Sunday night on a series of budget bills that would have closed a projected $41 billion deficit, state lawmakers failed to get enough votes to close the deal and adjourned. They returned to the capital late Monday morning only to adjourn until the afternoon, though it was far from clear whether they would be able to reach a deal.
California has also lost access to much of the credit markets, nearly unheard of among state municipal bond issuers. Recently, Standard & Poor's downgraded the state's bond rating to the lowest in the nation.
California's woes will almost certainly leave a jagged fiscal scar on the nation's most populous state, an outgrowth of the financial triptych of above-average unemployment, high foreclosure rates and plummeting tax revenues, and the state's unusual budgeting practices.
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