Justin's Political Corner
On Tuesday, the Senate Judiciary Committee advanced a comprehensive immigration reform bill that will provide a path to citizenship for the nation’s 11.1 million undocumented immigrants, passing the measure in a vote of 13 to 5. Three Republicans — Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), Jeff Flake (R-AZ), and Lindsey Graham (R-SC) — joined the Democrats on the panel to support the legislation after considering 200 amendments over five days.
The vote came following an emotional debate over a pro-LGBT provision that would have recognized, for purposes of immigration, married same-sex couples. Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D-VT) withdrew the amendement after Republican senators, including members of the so-called Gang of 8, signaled that they would abandon the underlining bill if it was included. “If you redefine marriage for immigration purposes [by the amendment], the bill would fall apart because the coalition would fall apart,” Graham said. “It would be a bridge too far.”
The full Senate is expected to debate the bill on the floor next month. Earlier on Tuesday, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pledged to “vote for the motion to proceed so we can get on the bill and see if it we’re able to pass a bill that actually moves the ball in the right direction.”
Phyllis Schlafly has been going all out in opposition to comprehensive immigration reform, warning that would be “suicide for the GOP” and that it’s all part of President Obama’s plan to “destroy our system.”
So it makes sense that this month’s “Phyllis Schlafly Report” is devoted entirely to opposing immigration reform. In particular, Schlafly is worried that immigration authorities aren’t “vetting” immigration applicants to “make sure that the applicant really wants to become an American.” This, she claims, is more necessary than in the past because “the immigrants of earlier generations, Irish, Italian, Jewish, etc., certainly did want to be Americans; like Irving Berlin, their attitude was God Bless America.”
Schlafly is concerned as well that immigrants be made to “accept the rule that disputes in our courts must be decided according to U.S. law, not any foreign law,” a nod to the Right’s bogus “Sharia law” conspiracy theory.
h/t: RWW
WASHINGTON — A bipartisan group of House lawmakers has reached an “agreement in principle” on a sweeping immigration bill that would parallel work underway in the Senate, sources said Thursday.
h/t: Los Angeles Times
When Republicans appointed Pablo Pantoja to State Director of Florida Hispanic Outreach for the Republican National Committee, they hoped he would be able to bridge the sizable gap that only expanded during the 2012 elections, when the state’s 4.7 million Hispanic voters supported Barack Obama over Mitt Romney by a 20 percent margin.
But after months of inaction by Congressional Republicans on comprehensive immigration reform and stiff resistance by Republican-leaning groups like the Heritage Foundation, Pantoja has had enough; on Monday, he announced via email that he was leaving the party and registering as a Democrat:
Friend,
Yes, I have changed my political affiliation to the Democratic Party.
It doesn’t take much to see the culture of intolerance surrounding the Republican Party today. I have wondered before about the seemingly harsh undertones about immigrants and others. Look no further; a well-known organization recently confirms the intolerance of that which seems different or strange to them.
Pantoja goes on to specifically cite last week’s revelation — that an author of Heritage’s false report on the cost of the Gang of Eight’s immigration bill wrote a dissertation in which he suggested that Hispanics are at a permanent disadvantage because they have lower IQs — as the final straw in his political evolution.
National Rifle Association board member Ted Nugent detailed a plan for immigration reform which calls for treating undocumented immigrants like “indentured servants” and requiring undocumented male immigrants to build a fence on the United States-Mexico border.
In his regular column for WND, Nugent proposed his “Nuge Immigration Plan” because “[w]e don’t need any more bloodsuckers” and promised to “apply Sherriff Joe Arpaio justice” to anyone who has been deported for committing a crime and caught trying to re-enter the country. The plan would also end birthright citizenship currently guaranteed by the Fourteenth Amendment. According to Nugent, “The anchor baby scam should be immediately rescinded. You don’t need to be a constitutional expert like our president to know that the original intent of the 14th Amendment was not to provide citizenship to illegal women or their babies who are born on American soil.”
The “NIP” would also involve ending the United States government practice of printing some documents in Spanish and other languages, which Nugent calls “the most racist thing our government does” by “encouraging people not to learn English.”
Nugent has also been a proponent of Arizona’s controversial S.B. 1070 law, which was partially invalidatedby the Supreme Court in 2012. In a 2010 Washington Times column defending the law, Nugent wrote, “You would have to be deaf, dumb and blind not to see that the grand plan of the Democrats is to entrap illegal immigrants by giving them legal status and then enslave and destroy them with numerous Fedzilla handouts and programs.”
The Heritage Foundation’s analysis of the economic consequences of immigration reform uses absurd methodology to come to conclusions entirely at odds with the organization’s own findings in 2006. Perhaps one explanation for this incoherence is that one of the paper’s coauthors, a new hire, opposes Hispanic immigration because he thinks Latinos are stupid.
Jason Richwine joined Heritage in 2010, after finishing his PhD in Public Policy in 2009. The Washington Post’s Dylan Matthews dug up Richwine’s dissertation, which was titled “IQ And Immigration.” In it, Richwine argues that Hispanics have and will always have lower IQs than whites. Matthewssummarizes:
Richwine’s dissertation asserts that there are deep-set differentials in intelligence between races. While it’s clear he thinks it is partly due to genetics — ‘the totality of the evidence suggests a genetic component to group differences in IQ’ — he argues the most important thing is that the differences in group IQs are persistent, for whatever reason. He writes, ‘No one knows whether Hispanics will ever reach IQ parity with whites, but the prediction that new Hispanic immigrants will have low-IQ children and grandchildren is difficult to argue against.‘
Richwine concludes from this that American immigration policy should encourage high IQ individuals to immigrate, but limit low IQ immigration: as he puts it, “I believe there is a strong case for IQ selection, since it is theoretically a win-win for the U.S. and potential immigrants.” Since this eugenic language is politically toxic, Richwine advocates dressing it up in the language of “high skill” and “low skill” immigration. As Matthews details, the Heritage report does exactly that.
Richwine is not the only author of the Heritage report with questionable views. Robert Rector, the paper’s lead author, was the source for then candidate Romney’s racially charged attack on President Obama’s welfare policy, and has spent his career dismissing the idea that poverty hurts people. On Tuesday, Rector admitted he hadn’t read the whole immigration bill before coauthoring his analysis of it with Richwine.
Following other far-right attacks on comprehensive immigration reform, True the Vote, a Tea Party group purporting to combat voter fraud, is now rallying against the Senate’s immigration bill. In a fundraising email to supporters, True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht warned that the bill presents a “golden opportunity” to allow “millions of newly legalized immigrants” to “undermine our electoral system.”
In reality, immigrants who become legal under the bill would have to wait 14 years to gain citizenship and the accompanying right to vote. However, True the Vote’s unfounded suspicion that minorities voting is inherently illegal is nothing new. Despite the group’s stated intention of fighting in-person voter fraud, an exceedingly rare phenomenon, the legislation they advocate for, such as voter ID, limited voter registration, and voter purges, has been found time and again to target minorities’ voting rights. In the last election cycle alone, the Justice Department blocked 4 supposedly anti-voter fraud laws in 3 states because they would clearly make it harder for minorities to vote. Florida and Colorado also threatened to purge suspected non-citizens — most of whom were Latino — from their voter rolls if the individuals could not prove their citizenship in time. Florida found a single non-citizen voter from Canada, and Colorado ultimately gave up after confirming citizenship for the vast majority of suspected non-citizens.
Even though citizens have the right to vote regardless of origin or language, anti-immigrant lawmakers have also pushed for legislation targeting non-English speaking voters.
h/t: Aviva Shen at Think Progress Immigration
Jim Geraghty wrote an article
And named “most Democrats’ view on immigration reform,” and then linked to Twitter.
Which takes you to…
Jim Geraghty’s Twitter.
(via angryblacklady)
Eagle Forum wants its members to know that the Christian conservative groups backing comprehensive immigration reform are reading their Bibles wrong. In an email to members today, Phyllis Schlafly’s group states in bold print, “Scripture is clear on many things, but a sovereign nation’s immigration policy is not one of them. There is no biblical mandate for mass Amnesty for illegal aliens.”
Biblical prescriptions for “kindness and compassion to ‘strangers’ or ‘sojourners’” are meant only for people who are “in a foreign land temporarily,” the group clarifies. In addition, this is “not a command to the government.”
The email goes on to assure readers that “it is not racist, isolationist, nativist, or xenophobic” to oppose immigration reform.
h/t: Right Wing Watch
The bipartisan House immigration bill taking shape may soon make all undocumented immigrants plead before a judge for breaking U.S. criminal law. In a move certain to appease Republican lawmakers but anger immigration advocates, House group members have proposed that legal status and an eventual pathway to citizenship can be conferred once a federal judge places undocumented immigrants on “probation.” In a joint proposal meant to assuage conservative critics of “amnesty,” undocumented immigrants would have to serve out a minimum five year probation sentence before they can get on a path to citizenship.
Being undocumented is a civil infraction, not a criminal one. But as one GOP congressional aide described the process to Roll Call, it would be “similar to how judges handle small drug crimes, in which offenders are sentenced to probation, rather than jail, because it forces them to acknowledge that they broke the law but saves taxpayers the expense of incarceration.”
Comparing a large spectrum of undocumented immigrants (including so-called Dreamers who were brought to this country as children) to drug dealers serves as a reminder of how steadfastly disconnected the House Republicans remain in their widely condemned approach to immigration reform.
The probation sentence furthermore exemplifies the House Republican belief that punishment is the only sensible immigration reform solution.
Eagle Forum founder Phyllis Schlafly dropped by the Steve Malzberg Show on NewsMax TV recently to discuss the bipartisan Gang of Eight’s efforts on comprehensive immigration reform. Schlafly told Malzberg that creating a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants would be “suicide for the Republican Party because they’re going to vote Democratic.” Schlafly predicts that immigrants will vote for Democrats “because they come from a country where there’s no tradition or expectation of limited government” and “think government should be there to give orders and solve their problems and give them a handout when they need it.”
H/T: RWW
Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) on Wednesday suggested that, given the attack on Boston carried out by two immigrants, he would consider barring young foreign Muslims from getting student visas to come the United States.
Prompted by host Neil Cavuto to address how the attack by the Tsarnaev brothers — neither of whom came to the country on student visas — had influenced immigration reform, Rubio said that he was willing to consider Fox News Host Bob Beckel’s suggestion that anyone who observes Islam should not get a student visa:
CAVUTO: Senator, there are some getting leery of all the Muslim students in America. Bob Beckel is among those saying stop grants visas, others speaking about slowing down the number getting into the country. What do you think?
RUBIO: We need to be open to changes that provide more security. I don’t like profiling anybody or singling or generally leading, on the other hand student visas are something this country does because it’s in our national interest but you don’t have a right to a student visa. I’m not prepared to take a firm position on restriction. I want to learn about what might have worked to prevent past attacks.
Islamophobia has been pervasive in the responses to last week’s attack on Boston. Somemembers of Congress, along with conservative political spokespeople, have said the attack underlines that Islam is a religion of violence, or that Muslim communities have influenced violent jihad. In fact, Tamerlan Tsarnaev was kicked out of his mosque for using violent rhetoric, and the Muslim community in Toronto recently worked with authorities to help stop a terrorist attack.
Within the past five years, more than 600 undocumented immigrants have been sent back to their native country while seeking care in American hospitals, according to a report from the Center for Social Justice. Undocumented patients are generally ineligible for public health insurance and unable to afford private health insurance. For some undocumented patients with insurance coverage, they still face deportation orders not by the U.S. government, but by hospitals seeking to avoid the costs of long-term care.
Hospitals are obligated to treat patients regardless of immigration status until their conditions stabilize. At that point, patients are transferred to long term care facilities such as rehabilitation centers. But in some cases the Center for Social Justice uncovered that immigrants were deported while unconscious, waking up in Mexico after undergoing extensive surgery for injuries sustained in a car accident. In another extreme case, a 20-year-old worker became nearly quadriplegic after a construction injury. When the hospital refused to prolong his care on a ventilator, he was deported and died in Mexico. Cases like these have become increasingly common in hospitals where medical repatriation occurs because hospital personnel believe that patients will be unable to pay their bills.
Meanwhile, anti-immigration voices even believe that there is nothing wrong with enforcing immigration checks before patients can be admitted to hospitals.
More reasons to support immigration reform.
H/T: Think Progress
Eagle Forum founder and Joseph McCarthy admirer Phyllis Schlafly is using the Boston Marathon bombings as an excuse to push for the reinstatement of the notorious House Committee on Un-American Activities.
“It would be useful to reinstate the House Committee on Un-American Activities,” Schlafly wrote in a column yesterday, “so we can have a look at those in our midst who may be jihadists, dupes of violent Muslim indoctrination, or (in old Communist lingo) fellow travelers or useful idiots.”
In her column, which she titled, “Are You American 1st or Muslim 1st?,” Schlafly further argues that while it is okay to be a Christian first and American second, Muslims who put faith first should not be allowed in the country.
H/T: Right Wing Watch
Gun Owners of America may soon join fellow conservatives in opposing comprehensive immigration reform, warning that a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants would lead to an increase in “anti-gun voters.”
Not only does the group oppose comprehensive legislation for clear partisan reasons, GOA spokesman Mike Hammond told the American Family Association’s news service the group may also work to defeat such bills if they include biometric identification or background checks for jobs.
h/t: Right Wing Watch
