Tag: immigration policy

Alabama immigration law — Trumpkin politicians guarantee rotting crops

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❝ Brian Cash can put a figure to the cost of Alabama’s new immigration law: at least $100,000. That’s the value of the tomatoes he has personally ripening out in his fields and that are going unpicked because his Hispanic workforce vanished literally overnight.

❝ For generations, Cash’s family have farmed 125 acres atop the Chandler mountain, a plateau in the north of the state about nine miles long and two miles wide. It’s perfect tomato-growing country – the soil is sandy and rich, and the elevation provides a breeze that keeps frost at bay and allows early planting.

For four months every year he employs almost exclusively Hispanic male workers to pick the harvest. This year he had 64 men out in the fields…Then HB56 came into effect, the new law that makes it a crime not to carry valid immigration documents and forces the police to check on anyone they suspect may be in the country illegally.

The provisions – the toughest of any state in America – were enforced on 28 September. By the next day Cash’s workforce had dwindled to 11…

❝ Cash says that losing his pickers is much more than a commercial disaster. “Many of these people are friends and like family to us. They have been working for my family for years.”

The crew leader for Cash’s fields has been working for his family for 17 years. “He’s my age and we pretty much grew up together,” he says.

Cash has sponsored him in his application for American naturalisation – a process that the immigration authorities have said will take up to nine years and cost up to $17,000.

❝ The crew leader already has permanent residency status and his two children are US citizens, but because his wife is undocumented he was fearful of the new law and left abruptly along with the others the minute the provisions came in.

RTFA. Take the time to step past the lies and propaganda conservative and bigoted Congress-critters, state and local scum-suckers blather to pass laws like this. Itinerant foreign migrant labor is nothing new in my life. For decades migrant farm crews returned to the Connecticut River valley to follow the harvest season south until it was time to return home. In those days, mostly back to the Caribbean.

Obama Administration policy on illegal immigrants Is challenged by Rahm Emanuel

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Just weeks after the Supreme Court largely reaffirmed the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement powers in its legal battle with Arizona, federal officials are facing a new, politically tricky clash with local authorities over immigration, this time in Chicago.

At a news conference on Tuesday, Mayor Rahm Emanuel said he would propose an ordinance that would bar police officers from turning over illegal immigrants to federal agents if the immigrants do not have serious criminal convictions or outstanding criminal warrants.

In contrast to the Obama administration’s long-running confrontation with officials in Arizona, who are mostly Republicans, the latest challenge to the president’s immigration policies comes from Mr. Emanuel, his former chief of staff, and from other Democratic allies in President Obama’s hometown.

“If you have no criminal record, being part of a community is not a problem for you,” Mr. Emanuel said, speaking at a high school library in Little Village, a Latino neighborhood. “We want to welcome you to the city of Chicago.”

The mayor said the proposal was part of his goal to make Chicago the “most immigrant-friendly city in the country…”

Chicago is governed separately from Cook County. The city’s ordinance would give its police department more power to decide which immigrants to turn over to federal agents, but it would not curtail most cooperation as Cook County has done…

Mr. Emanuel did not pose his initiative as a challenge to Mr. Obama. Rather he laid blame on Congress for inaction on immigration. The City Council will consider the ordinance this month.

All these chickens are coming home to roost to pay for decades of diminished responsibility by liberals – coupled with several flavors of activist bigotry from conservatives in both parties.

Over the decades of diminished access to the United States – especially aimed at barring Hispanic immigrants from Mexico and Central America – I wonder how many undocumentados would have arrived here legally? Seems to me that a significant majority of those now here would have had little problem passing through the system if standards were kept to the designs of those who originally formulated our nation’s immigration policy.