According to a new report by the Sunlight Foundation, $1.5 billion has been spent by mega-corporations (seeking compliant and cheap labor) for a lobbying campaign in support of “comprehensive immigration reform” (aka amnesty) over the last five years.
If you are a “progressive” (or LOL! one of the ‘church’ federal refugee contractors) now joined at the hip with big business, doesn’t that give you just the tiniest moment of pause? In fact, doesn’t that put you in the Wall Street fat cat camp?
Catholic Charities in Boston announcing support for “comprehensive immigration reform” in 2010. Money! Money! Money!
A loose alliance of business and political groups has spent almost $1.5 billion since late 2007 to rewrite the nation’s immigration law according to a new report.
The flood of money hired 3,136 lobbyists at 678 lobbying groups to pass one or more of 987 small or large bills, said the March 25 report from the Sunlight Foundation.
“[I]n the five years (2008-2012) since the reform last died on the Senate floor, we count 6,712 quarterly lobbying reports filed by 678 lobbying organizations in 170 sectors mentioning 987 unique bills, associated with more than $1.5 billion in lobbying spending,” the Sunlight Foundation’s Lee Drutman and Alexander Furnas write.
The report corroborates lobbyists’ recent comments to The Daily Caller that business and progressive groups are spending very heavily to pass a joint “comprehensive immigration bill” this year, which could include enhanced guest worker program and some form of amnesty.
The report doesn’t even take into account the money spent in 2013!
The Sunlight Foundation’s report, however, does not focus on the 2013 fight….
Kind of amazing how much money it takes to make the American public do something it doesn’t want to do!
Senators Levin and Leahy first introducing their bill in 2010.
Before you read latest news about Senator Patrick Leahy’s bill, be sure to check out my previous post, here, about the 138 million migrants worldwide who want to get into the US.
Here is Human Rights First gushing over the Refugee Protection Act of 2013 (what about the American worker protection act?). The Human Rights gang wants this bill focused mostly on making asylum easier to obtain, to get more money for the contractors, and to become part of so-called “comprehensive immigration reform.”
Washington, D.C. – Human Rights First welcomes the introduction of the Refugee Protection Act of 2013, legislation the group notes would repair many of the most severe problems in the U.S. asylum and refugee systems and strengthen the U.S. commitment to providing refuge to victims of religious, political, ethnic and other forms of persecution. The group notes that the bill should be included in the final immigration reform package expected to emerge this year. Notably, like the president’s immigration reform principles, this bill eliminates the asylum filing deadline and makes improvements to our nation’s immigration courts.
Eleanor Acer: We have a badly damaged asylum system. Millions of vulnerable refugees can’t get into US, and need more social services when they do!
“Immigration reform offers an important opportunity to consider and enact the Refugee Protection Act. Refugee protection is an essential element of U.S. immigration policy, and despite this country’s strong tradition of protecting refugees from persecution, a barrage of laws, policies and practices have badly damaged our asylum system over the years,” said Human Rights First’s Eleanor Acer. “These flaws have led the United States to deny its protection to refugees who have fled from serious political, religious and other forms of persecution. The Refugee Protection Act would address many of these concerns and help restore our nation’s commitment to protecting vulnerable refugees.” The bill was also introduced in the 112th and 111th Congresses.
The bill to get more refugees through the screening process and to make it easier for asylum seekers to be granted asylum is sponsored by the following Senators and Members of Congress—the list is no surprise! Ms. Acer continues:
The Refugee Protection Act of 2013 is championed in the Senate by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT) and co-sponsored by Senator Carl Levin (D-MI). Representative Zoe Lofgren (D-CA) introduced a companion bill in the House that is co-sponsored by Representatives John Conyers (D-MI), Keith Ellison (D-MN), Jared Polis (D-CO), Jan Schakowsky (D-IL), Eric Swalwell (D-CA), and Peter Welch (D-VT).
Check out the 77-page bill hereand note that Section 23 would authorize more $$$ for the contractors. Yikes! After a quick scan, I recommend that everyone interested in how the refugee program is being (mis)managed better read this bill. With Congress’s penchant for creating thousand-page bills which no one reads, this could easily be incorporated into a massive “comprehensive immigration reform” bill.
When I started writing Refugee Resettlement Watch nearly six years ago (this is my 4,001st post!), rarely, except atVDARE(and the Center for Immigration Studies occasionally), would anyone utter a word about “refugees” other than in the most reverential tones. Refugees were the untouchables, but that seems to be changing. Fear of the collapse of the West due to mass migration is openly being discussed.
Now, the word “refugee” is no longer sacrosanct. HereDaniel Greenfieldlast week calls the migration of the third world to the first world what it is—colonization, with no end in sight. They are coming and are not assimilating (if that’s what you have been counting on!).
The old paradigm that a country has the right to decide who enters it has been decisively overturned in Europe, it’s under siege in such first world countries as America, Canada, Australia and Israel by the creed that says it’s the human rights obligation of every nation to accept every refugee.
Given a chance a sizable portion of the third world would move to the first, a minority because of oppression and a majority because the opportunities and freebies are much better there. Even low ranked first world nations still find themselves swamped with refugees looking to move in.
International law does not assign any priority to a nation’s citizens over any person who happens to stray across the border. At the ground level that means the end of borders and the end of citizenship which is why immigration isn’t just a touchy issue in Arizona, it’s a touchy issue in Sydney, Tel Aviv and Birmingham. You can hardly open a newspaper of the liberal persuasion without being treated to another group of refugees in some troubled part of the world walled up behind fences and trying to get over to London, Sydney or New York. [Watch for it! Syrians next?—ed]
This sort of thing can’t be called immigration anymore, it’s a straightforward migration and it has no apparent limits. However many you take in, there will be more waiting and always burdening you with an unsolvable crisis.
Ann Coulter for President! says Peter Brimelow at VDARE
Coulter spoke at CPAC yesterday and probably assured herself a disinvite next year (just as happened toPamela Geller)* when Coulter declared that she was a one issue voter and would support only candidates opposing amnesty for illegal aliens.
She said with no equivocation that Ted Kennedy’s 1965 mass migration strategy will kill America. And, remember that was not about illegal aliens already in the US, but opened the doors of America to mass migration from the third world.
Check it out here at VDARE and watch her speech (in my view the most significant CPAC speech this year).
*Update! Funny! Breitbart.com organized a panel for the un-invited including Geller and Robert Spencer—watch Spencer finger Suhail Khan and Grover Norquist!
Yes, that is from the beleaguered New Jersey Senator, Robert Menendez now facing corruption charges. Could that Gang of Eight soon become the Gang of Seven?
Democrat Senator Robert Menendez, member of the Gang of Eight, under fire in NJ. Photo: Star Ledger
The story about immigrants with Temporary Protected Status wanting to become citizens (because honestly they are already permanent!) needs some clarification before you read it.
A migrant with TPS status can do anything a legal American citizen can do except vote.
Those with TPS status (El Salvador leads the pack) first got into the US illegally—they were first illegal aliens! Then as a result of something going on in their home country—a civil war, a big storm, an earthquake—the benevolent US crafted this program so that they wouldn’t be immediately returned to a country that was struggling to recover at that moment.
We understood that at some point they would go home! That is not to be, every year one or or the other of the eight nationalities gets an extension and this has gone on for decades. (You can see the eight favored groups, here). We recently added Syrians to TPS, but heck, why is Somalia still on there when we are told it’s safe to go home?
Remittances are a driving force behind keeping this program goingas we knew, but was brought home recently with comments from Maryland Delegate Ana Sol Gutierrez here at my other blog. American money sent abroad props up governments.
And, by the way, CASA de Maryland was born out of the so-called ‘sanctuary movement’ when Quakers (among other “religious” people) broke the law by bringing Salvadorans across the border in the early 1980’s here (scroll down to second half of the post, links to Betty “rainbow” Hoover no longer work).
An immigration reform bill being drafted in the Senate may offer an expedited path to citizenship to nearly 300,000 people who are currently in the U.S. under a temporary program designed to protect people who face physical danger in their own country. [Faced physical danger maybe in the past—ed]
The program in question is called Temporary Protected Status (TPS), and it allows people to live and work in the U.S. without fear of deportation if they follow the law. But the status offers no formal pathway to citizenship, and some immigrants have been here for decades without being able to apply for a green card.
Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.), a member of a bipartisan group working on a Senate immigration bill, told the Spanish-language newspaper La Opinión on Tuesday that the details still weren’t finalized, but that such a pathway should be considered as part of reform.
“I think that it’s expected that these people, that have been here under a legal avenue, should have some possibility to change their status in a quicker manner,” Menendez said. “[We] haven’t reach a final agreement in respect to that.”
The program, which was part of a large-scale immigration law passed in 1990, gives certain immigrants who are already in the U.S. a way to remain in the country if they face imminent dangers in their home country, such as a civil war or a natural disaster. Temporary Protected Status was born because existing refugee and asylum programs weren’t adequately addressing the needs of immigrants fleeing countries like El Salvador, which was enmeshed in civil war in the 1980s and early ’90s, according to Anwen Hughes, senior counsel at Human Rights First, a nonpartisan group that works on immigration issues. Two-thirds of people living in the country under TPS are Salvadorean.
[…..]
Some conservative critics have said that the program is problematic because it isn’t actually temporary. Salvadorans, for example, were re-authorized for TPS after a series of earthquakes in 2001, and have been eligible for the status ever since. At this point, many Salvadorans with TPS have established roots in the U.S., so if that status was suddenly revoked, it could mean expelling residents who have been living and working in the country for decades.
Type ‘temporary protected status’into our search function to learn more about this racket.
They are at the Gates of Vienna and they are at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany demanding they be allowed to stay. Some, as this gushy piece in the International Herald Tribune (appropriately titled: Barbarians at the Gate) tells us, are “asylum shoppers” meaning they have been turned down for refugee status in another western country and now are camping on public streets in Germany demanding stuff.
Hereis writer Lucian Kim making sure the reader hears the warm and fuzzy side of the nice folks just yearning for a better life! And, it’s all about how Germans don’t like outsiders, don’t you know! (emphasis below is mine)
BERLIN — There’s a refugee camp in the center of the German capital filled with people who have fled conflicts around the world. They sleep in tents and eat donated food. Almost all of them are breaking German law just by being here.
For more than four months, about 50 asylum seekers and their supporters have been braving the elements on a square in Berlin’s bohemian Kreuzberg neighborhood. The Occupy-style camp appeared in October after a group of refugees marched from Bavaria to Berlin to protest Germany’s restrictive asylum law. Some even held a hunger strike at the Brandenburg Gate.
Refugees shout slogans during a protest by asylum seekers calling for fairer treatment from authorities, as they pass through Brandenburg Gate in Berlin October 13, 2012. Credit: REUTERS
Their main demand: the abolition of the so-called “Residenzpflicht,” or residence requirement, which limits asylum seekers’ freedom of movement while their applications are pending. Critics contend [pdf] that Germany is the only country in the European Union with such a restriction, and that the regulation’s real purpose is to isolate and intimidate refugees.
When I visited the camp on Monday, laundry hung over unmade beds and worn couches inside one of the tents. Two gas heaters gasped against the cold seeping up through the pallets that raised the floor from the ground. A photographer’s lamp provided the only light.
This is where Waleed Mohamed Adam lives. The soft-spoken 28-year-old said he had fled his home in Darfur in 2007, reaching Europe via Libya. He has lost all contact with his family.
And he has no documents. As Adam put it, “My fingerprints are in the Netherlands.” Because his asylum application there was denied, he can’t get a second hearing in Germany and faces deportation. [The EU doesn’t allow “shopping” for another country if you’ve been previously denied, so you can bet there is much more to Adam’s story—ed]
Gee, could that be “soft spoken” Waleed Mohamed Adam with his fist raised in that photofrom October?
The squatters were given the equivalent of $300 a month to live on, but demanded and got $500 from that foreigner-hating German government!
Kim continues:
Without any legal status, the refugees aren’t treated much better than criminals. They find themselves in a trap: Dependent on meager state handouts because they are restricted from working or studying, they are under constant suspicion of milking the social welfare system.
This contemptuous treatment was confirmed by Germany’s Constitutional Court in July, when it ruled that the $300 monthly allowance for refugees — which hadn’t been adjusted in 19 years — must be raised to the minimum social benefits granted to Germans, about $500.
[…..]
Germany’s harsh asylum law reveals its lingering discomfort with “ausländer,” or foreigners — even as an aging, shrinking indigenous population is projected to lose its standard of living unless it welcomes immigrants. [Does Kim actually believe that opening a western country to mass immigration—to colonizers—from the third world will improve the living standards of westerners!—ed]
Kim tells us there is one woman in the camp and she speaks fluent English. I suspect she is the Commie agitator in this group. This is about flooding the West with needy third-worlders to bring instability and chaos and to ultimately bring down capitalism. They have advanced pretty far don’t you think!
….. The only woman in the camp, Napuli Paul Langa is a born leader. Although she had to break off her schooling in her native South Sudan, she speaks fluent English. She said she had to flee because of her human rights activism. [If she really cared about human rights she would stay and fight for her own country! How can anyone fall for this propaganda!—ed]
She didn’t expect to have to carry on that struggle in Germany. In November, Langa was one of the refugees’ delegates at a meeting with members of Parliament that turned out to be fruitless.
“This is the fighting place, the political place,” she said of the camp. “We’re staying here. We’re going to protest in the streets until they meet our demands.”
They are squatting and demanding all over Europe, here in the Netherlands and then there is poor Greece. You can bet this is all a coordinated strategy.
