Rep. David Rivera (R-Fla.) proposed a bill this week similar to the DREAM Act but aimed only at those who serve in the military. Illegal immigrants are currently not allowed to join the military.
“If these young people are willing to die for America, then certainly they deserve a chance at life in America,” Rivera said in a statement.
Rivera’s bill, called the ARMS Act, would grant illegal immigrants who join the military the ability to apply for permanent resident status after five years.
On Wednesday, President Obama gave the State of the Union address. During his speech, President Obama discussed many key themes in immigration, including the DREAM Act for students and foreign students educated in this country to have a way to legalize their status, and a belief that he’s done enough to the secure the border. More importantly, he framed these themes in context to America’s economic recovery, innovation and growth.
In the State of the Union address, President Obama repeatedly signaled to Congress that he would sign sensible bills to reform our immigration system, big or small. But he quickly noted that partisan politics would make it all but impossible to pass comprehensive reform:
“The opponents of action are out of excuses. We should be working on comprehensive immigration reform right now. But if election-year politics keeps Congress from acting on a comprehensive plan, let’s at least agree to stop expelling responsible young people who want to staff our labs, start new businesses, and defend this country. Send me a law that gives them the chance to earn their citizenship. I will sign it right away.”
It is a sad day when a high school student is denied an opportunity to pursue his sports passion and a solid university education because of an arbitrary and capricious policy. Chester Brown is a highly recruited football player in the State of Georgia. He is also the son of Samoan immigrants. Chester committed to the University of Georgia back in July, 2011. Yesterday, Chester reluctantly announced he will not be attending as the result of a controversial immigration policy at the university. The Georgia Board of Regents Policy states that an undocumented student cannot be admitted to the school over a legal resident should there be a space limitation.
Chester would not say whether the policy forced him to make the decision, but the Atlanta Journal Constitution, cited multiple sources, indicated it was. Chester said simply it was his decision – and a painful one at that. “It was my decision to make, and I had to do it,” said Chester. “When I told the coaches they just were surprised, but they told to me do what I have to do. I don’t want anyone to think that we went out on bad terms, and I love UGA, but I had to make this decision.” Chester’s status is unclear. His parents, who immigrated to the country decades ago, said he was born in the United States. But he apparently does not have the proper documentation.
The Board of Regents rule came about following an incident involving Jessica Colotl, a Kennesaw State student who sparked a national immigration debate after she was found to be in the country illegally following a traffic stop in May of 2010. She was attending the school and paying in-state tuition at the time. Colotl was jailed and nearly deported back to Mexico but was eventually allowed to return to school; she graduated last spring.
A ruling from U.S. District Judge Richard M. Gergel, has temporarily enjoined three provisions of South Carolina Act 69 and found a fourth provision likely to be overturned in future proceedings. The ruling makes South Carolina the sixth state—after Arizona, Indiana, Georgia, Utah, and Alabama—to see major parts of a punitive immigration law blocked in federal court.
Following its enactment last June, South Carolina Act 69 was challenged in court by both the federal government and a coalition of civil rights groups. In a 42-page opinion, Judge Gergel entered temporary injunctions against the following provisions, finding each to be preempted by federal immigration law:
Section 4, which makes it a state crime to transport or harbor undocumented immigrants, or for undocumented immigrants to allow themselves to be transported or harbored.
A recent New York Times article highlights the fine line between medical care for individuals that need it and the difficulties that come because of immigration status. The story talks about an illegal immigrant from Mexico living in New York City whose kidneys are failing. His siblings are donors, but the cost of the surgery requires the need for surgery. The man was a waiter in his early 30s, a husband and father of two, so well liked at the Manhattan restaurant where he had worked for a decade that everyone from the customers to the dishwasher was donating money to help his family.
When his younger brother volunteered to donate a kidney to restore him to normal life, they encountered a health care paradox: the government would pay for a lifetime of dialysis, costing $75,000 a year, but not for the $100,000 transplant that would make it unnecessary.
For nearly two years, the brothers and their supporters have been hunting for a way to make the transplant happen. Their journey has taken them through a maze of conflicting laws, private insurance conundrums and ethical quandaries, back to the national impasse between health care and immigration policies.
Doctors sought a transplant center that would take him. Hospitals in the city receive millions of taxpayer dollars to help offset care for illegal immigrants and other uninsured patients. But at one hospital, administrators apparently overruled surgeons willing to waive their fees. At another, he was told to come back when he had legal status or $200,000.
A last resort is a return to Mexico, where the operation costs about $40,000. But to pay off the necessary loans, the and his brother, a deli worker, would have to sneak back in through the desert. If they failed, they would be cut off from their children in Brooklyn, who are United States citizens.
Bellevue performs no transplants but, as a trauma center, often supplies organs harvested, with family consent, from illegal immigrants fatally injured at work.
“Here’s the paradox: he could donate, but he can’t receive,” Dr. Manheimer said, calling the imbalance troubling. Organ registries do not record illegal status, but a study estimated that over a 20-year period noncitizens donated 2.5 percent of organs and received fewer than 1 percent.
To those focusing on immigration enforcement, however, the inequity runs the other way. “They should not get any benefit from breaking the law, especially something as expensive as organ transplants or dialysis,” said Representative Dana T. Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who contends that care for illegal immigrants is bankrupting American health care and has sought to require that emergency rooms report stabilized patients for deportation unless they prove citizenship or legal residence.
“If they’re dead, I don’t have an objection to their organs being used,” Mr. Rohrabacher added. “If they’re alive, they shouldn’t be here no matter what.”
To Ruth Faden, the director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the brothers’ case, like the transplant statistics, illustrates how quickly firm principles on both sides unravel in practice. “We tie ourselves up in knots,” she said, “because we’ve accepted as a country and in international human rights law that if someone shows up in extremis in your emergency room, the nurses and doctors and technicians are morally obligated, and legally obligated, to provide that life-saving care.”
How to begin refusing care, she added, becomes a dilemma for “real people in real time.”
This dilemma shows just how personal and difficult it is where the line in providing health care for those in need gets mired by the legal situations a person is in. Balancing the humanitarian side of medicine with the rule of law has become a focal point in a discussion where those that want reform on the immigration enforcement side appear unfeeling towards the plight of illegal immigrants who’s suffering have an impact on U.S. citizen children. The other side is that those who appear soft on immigration enforcement minimize the other concerns regarding the costs that come with trying to increase the enforcement and how it is a drain of taxpayer resources.
U.S. citizens have been illegally detained throughout Los Angeles County as a result of the Secure Communities immigration enforcement program, a coalition of civil and immigrant rights groups said Wednesday.
The American Civil Liberties Union and others identified four U.S. citizens detained through the fingerprint-sharing program in the last few months, including three identified in November.
“Native-born American citizens are being illegally detained by the Secure Communities program right here in L.A. County,” Rep. Judy Chu (D-Monterey Park) said in a statement. “This is unacceptable.”
The Supreme Court on Monday agreed to decide whether Arizona may impose tough anti-immigration measures. Among them, in a law enacted last year, is a requirement that the police there question people they stop about their immigration status.
The Obama administration challenged parts of the law in court, saying that it could not be reconciled with federal immigration laws and policies under the Supremacy Clause. The United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, in San Francisco, blocked enforcement of parts of the law in April.
The administration challenged four provisions. The most prominent was a requirement that state law enforcement officials determine the immigration status of anyone they stop or arrest if officials have reason to believe that the individual might be an illegal immigrant. The provision also requires that the immigration status of people who are arrested be determined before they are released.
Today we bring an article posted on NPR from their series titled “In Limbo”. The series of articles focuses on those who are between being legal and being illegal. This article is about Dr. Alfredo Quiñones-Hinojosa. Dr. Quiñones-Hinojosagrew up in the small village of Palaco, Mexico. As a bright young man, he wanted to become a teacher. But he had to overcome many obstacles first, including hunger. “I am not talking about hungry for success; I was literally hungry for food. My stomach was empty,” he says.
Dr. Quiñones- Hinojosa was determined to put food on the table for his family, so he did the only thing he could possibly think of: he literally jumped over a fence between his native Mexico and the United States and became a farm worker in southern California. He started by picking tomatoes, corn and broccoli. Later, he operated dangerous machinery in the fields. But things changed for him after a conversation with his cousin. “The critical portion that got me out of the fields was my own cousin telling me that I was going to spend the rest of my life working as a migrant farm worker,” Dr. Quiñones- Hinojosa says.
He could not imagine that life. He left the fields and headed north. To pay for community college, he shoveled sulfur and scraped fish lard from tankers — an excruciating job that almost cost him his life. His journey then took him to University of California, Berkeley, and later Harvard Medical School. After 10 years, since first jumping over that fence into America, he became a U.S. citizen. Now, Dr. Alfredo Quiñones- Hinojosa is a respected brain surgeon who directs the Brain Tumor Program at Johns Hopkins Bayview Hospital. He says more needs to be done to help those who can follow in his footsteps. “Among people who come to the United States today — whether they come from privileged backgrounds or humble backgrounds — is our next Einstein, is our next Nobel laureate, but we just have failed to identify,” he says.
Today, the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Fairness for High-Skilled Immigrants Act (HR 3012), legislation introduced several months ago by Representative Jason Chaffetz (R-UT). The bill eliminates per-country caps on employment-based green card numbers and increases the per-country limit on family-based green cards from 7 percent to 15 percent. If enacted, the bill will reduce the green card wait times for employment-based immigrants from high-volume user countries, such as India and China.
Though the bill has been passed by the House of Representatives, it is not yet law and must still pass the U.S. Senate and be signed into law by the President. We hope this will become a reality soon. We will keep our readers posted.
There is a movement going on right now on YouTube. The Define American movement has launched a social media campaign on YouTube to open up the dialogue on immigration here in the U.S. and how we can reform the immigration system. Jose Antonio Vargas, the journalist famous for outing himself as an illegal U.S. immigrant in The New York Times, and his campaign encourages Americans all across the world to share their personal stories about “what it means to be an American” and the effects of the immigration system on their lives. Users can share their story via text, audio or in the form of a YouTube video.
The campaign follows the same formula that turned the It Gets Better campaign into a worldwide phenomenon. The goal, says Vargas and Define American co-founder Jake Brewer, is to open an honest dialogue across the country about immigration and immigration laws’ effects on families and communities.
“Only the Internet and only social media is vast enough to make room for an actual dialogue and an actual conversation,” Vargas tells Mashable.
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