Economic suicide over immigration hysteria

On Tuesday, Charlie Thompson of The Patriot News' capitol press team interviewed me about the slate of anti-immigrant bills currently before the state House and the House State Government Committee. That package, which is more appropriately called the "Sabotaging Our Economy Begins at the State Capitol" package, includes a mandate for all employers to use the E-Verify national ID system, a mandate for all local police to enforce federal immigration law, and second-class birth certificates for American-born children of undocumented parents.

Here's the front page story that Thompson wrote.

Of course, a reporter can't write everything his subjects tell him, and I'd like to expand a bit more on what I told him that did not end up in the article.

The first question Thompson asked was, what are your concerns, broadly, about this package of bills? (That's not an exact quote, but that was the essence of his question.) My answer? Supporters of these bills are using misinformation and stereotypes about immigrants to advance their cause. For example:

• Legitimate academic research shows that immigrants, including undocumented immigrants, commit crime at lower rates than natural born citizens. And yet the primary pusher of this legislation makes wild claims about rapes and murders by "illegal aliens."
• Supporters of bills to make English the "official language" of Pennsylvania claim that today's immigrants aren't assimilating. (Note that this is the same complaint that Benjamin Franklin had about the German immigrants of colonial Pennsylvania.) They never cite any research, and in fact, legit studies have shown that today's immigrants are learning English as quickly as ever, and that previous generations of immigrants didn't necessarily assimilate quickly.
• Supporters make certain statements about protecting jobs, but states that have passed punitive anti-immigrant laws have found that the economic results have been disastrous.
  

Oh, those pesky facts.

Pennsylvania's rate of growth is one-third the national average. Our K-12 enrollment is the same as it was 20 years ago. Without immigration, the commonwealth would not have gained in population in real numbers at all over the last ten years. Philadelphia grew for the first time in several decades, thanks to its new immigrant population.

Economically, we cannot afford to do anything that scares people away from our state, as argued by Daniel Griswold of the Cato Institute.

Supporters of these punitive bills don't understand that the lines they rhetorically draw around undocumented immigrants and those with authorization disappear the minute these types of bills are enacted. When states like Georgia and Alabama and Arizona pass laws to turn our local police into federal immigration agents and to mandate the E-Verify national ID system with severe penalties, it impacts all immigrants. Why would authorized immigrants stick around in a state where they will be increasingly harassed by the police and discriminated against in the workplace? Why would any immigrant stay in a state in which the leaders of state government use ugly stereotypes about crime, unemployment, and assimilation?

Greetings from Harrisburg! Illegal alien invasion edition

After two days of committee hearings at the state capitol on Pennsylvania's "illegal alien problem," Lobbyist Andy sat down with Dan Griswold of the Cato Institute to discuss the economics of immigration.

The written testimony that the ACLU of PA submitted to the committee is available at our legislative webpage.

Please note that by playing this clip YouTube and Google will place a long-term cookie on your computer. Please see YouTube's privacy statement on their website and Google's privacy statement on theirs to learn more. To view the ACLU of PA's privacy statement, click here.

Queremos due process y fair treatment

That's my Spanglish in the headline. Of course, I relied on Google Language Tools for "queremos" ("we want"), which I thought was "quieremos". Ay, dios mios.

Working in immigration, we learn to take the good with the bad. Over the last week, there's been some good and some bad.

On Monday, as the result of a Freedom Of Information Act lawsuit by the ACLU, the Department of Homeland Security released new information on the deaths of people who were in the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). DHS revealed additional deaths that had not previously been reported, including the death of Felix Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, bringing the total number of deaths of people in ICE custody to 104 since 2003. Felix died of testicular cancer in 2007 after the staff at a privately-run detention center gave him minimal treatment, and his story is chronicled in today's New York Times.

And these are the people that the Pennsylvania State Police and the city of Philadelphia think they can work with. A few weeks ago, the city began its participation in ICE's Secure Communities program, which the state will implement in all 67 counties over the next four years. PPD will send the fingerprints of arrestees to PSP, who will then send them along to ICE to check their status. Supposedly, only prints from those charged with serious crimes will be sent through the pipeline. But we're suspicious since that's what ICE's 287(g) program was also supposed to do but instead has been deporting people picked up on minor crimes or even no crimes.

In January, the U.S. Government Accountability Office issued a scathing report on a different ICE initiative, the 287(g) program, which has trained over 60 state and local police departments to enforce immigration laws within their jurisdictions. The report concludes that this program lacks "internal control standards."Rather than targeting immigrants suspected of serious criminal behavior, as is its mission, 287(g) has largely netted immigrants caught committing minor offenses like traffic violations. (It is perhaps not a coincidence that many local police departments enrolled in 287(g) are facing accusations of and lawsuits about racial profiling.) Some might believe this is a desirable outcome. But it's not what the program aspires to do, and it has lead to a glut of deportation proceedings that are clogging and bankrupting prisons.

Regan Cooper, executive director of the Pennsylvania Immigration & Citizenship Coalition (PICC), believes the same thing will happen with the program Philly has enrolled in. "The stated goal of 287(g) is to screen people with serious offenses throughout the system," she says. "Everyone likes that. But the stated goal is different from what actually happens. We're worried that the same will be true of Secure Communities."

As a result, immigrants don't trust their local police, and victims and witnesses will not cooperate with investigations.

Finally, our legislative department, which is me, had to get into the action and released a statement on Monday on several recent reports on immigration. The Cato Institute- not exactly a liberal commune- released a study (pdf) on August 13 showing that an enforcement-only policy toward persons without papers would actually decrease Americans' household income.

I had to get this out there, along with a report (pdf) from late-July by the Immigration Policy Center, because at the end of July FAIR, an anti-immigrant group with connections to hate groups, put out a report claiming that persons without papers cost PA taxpayers blah-blah-blah millions of dollars.

One problem: unFAIR didn't consider the economic impact that these folks put back into the economy of Pennsylvania. And unFAIR failed to mention that 91 percent of the costs of this particular group of immigrants comes from the education of children, 73 percent of whom are US citizens. All of this was pointed out brilliantly by IPC.

This had to get out there because state legislators throw unFAIR's numbers around, and the media, including some in the capitol press corps, uncritically report them.

FAIR's numbers are bogus. We can have a reasonable discussion about immigration and even disagree at times. But legislators fail our democracy when they poison the debate with fraudulent facts.

Andy in Harrisburg