These are some of the latest stories breaking regarding immigration reform, solutions to the problem, active immigration reforms and outrages from across the nation.

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Arkansas is the latest state planning to introduce a bill to deny benefits and services to illegal aliens.

Washington Times

Immigration-control activists announced a bill to crack down on benefits available to illegal aliens in Arkansas, the first in what is expected to be a wave of initiatives and bills following the success of a similar proposition in Arizona in November's election.

Arkansas state Sen. Jim Holt yesterday said he will sponsor a bill in the legislature this year to deny benefits and inhibit the ability of illegal immigrants to register and vote. And state resident Joe McCutchen promised to lead a grass-roots effort to support the bill.

Mr. McCutchen said he thinks it's up to citizens to take action on illegal immigration.

"If our republic's to be saved, we'd better," he said. "It's obvious the president has no intention to secure the borders, and I think this is by design. I think they're dedicated to destroying the sovereignty and heritage and culture of this nation for their own purpose, whatever that may be."

I applaud you Senator Holt! I also applaud all the grassroots organizations throughout the country taking up this issue. LoneWacko is also covering this.

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The wrong solution to the problem by the Bush Administration.

Daily Texan

This plan is similar to what Americans have seen from this office for the past four years - a quick fix to a much larger problem. The new reform plan directly counteracts the purpose of homeland security.

In a recent interview, Bush complained the border patrol was overworked and understaffed. The president's solution was to open the borders and allow immigrants to flow more freely into the country on temporary work visas. The temporary worker program does little to correct the problem of over-worked border patrols, because, in effect, it would cause greater strain on an already expanding problem.

With the new policy, border controls can expect the number of illegal immigrants trying to jump the borders to rise drastically. It also rewards those who have already broken the law by jumping the border.

Following the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in 2001, the Bush administration should be working to increase border security, not host a free-for-all for the rest of the world.

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Human Events Online reports from the RNC winter meeting in Washington.

"Last year, I did talk privately with [White House adviser] Karl Rove about the concerns our party has with illegal immigration," a Republican National Committee member who requested anonymity told me. "I later had assurances that the President would address those concerns in his [convention] speech in New York City. But two days before the speech, I learned that the references to illegal immigration were taken out. The administration apparently felt it was too sensitive for him to talk about publicly."

That pretty much summed up the general attitude about President Bush and his immigration program among the participants of the RNC winter meeting at the Ramada Renaissance Hotel in Washington this week. Many of the 165 national committee members realize the issue of illegal immigrants is of growing concern to their grass-roots activists but few wish to criticize their just-re-elected President for failing to address it. Moreover, despite a desire for tougher measures to secure the border, many RNC members tone down their feelings on the issue out of fear that the GOP might appear insensitive to Hispanic voters.

They're worried about Hispanic voters, but Proposition 200 in Arizona was approved by forty-seven percent of Hispanic voters as I reported on Nov. 19, 2005. The only group that they may offend is illegal aliens in the country.

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The Baptist Standard takes a look at illegal immigration from a religious standpoint in Texas.

Try to imagine a long-term issue as vital to the future of Texas--and, not coincidentally, the United States--as immigration. OK; health care and education. But both of those big-ticket items will be impacted in one way or another by how well we solve our immigration crisis.

... The sheer numbers seem incomprehensible: More than 1 million residents of our state--about one in 20 people--are undocumented. In the harshest language, they're illegal aliens. That term, "illegal alien," sounds more like a creature from a sci-fi movie than the person who eats at the next table in the coffee shop, the child who sits next to your son or daughter in homeroom, the fellow who mows your neighbor's yard or the believer who receives the Lord's Supper with you on Sunday morning.

1 in 20! Fix the problem already, sheesh.

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ABC News reports that immigration could spell big business. That's great, I say, as long as it is legal immigration.

The largest immigration boom in U.S. history is expected to lift earnings at companies from discount retailers to telecommunications providers, putting dollar signs in the eyes of investors looking to cash in on the wave of newcomers, mostly from Latin America and Asia.

Demographics is "one of the top five tools any macro analyst and investment manager should be following," said Robert Justich, senior managing director at Bear Stearns Asset Management. "And there has been no bigger demographic change than today's migration."

...

"The cost of communication has come down tremendously and people are communicating with their homeland like never before," said Bear Stearns' Justich, who recently released a paper about illegal immigrants and the underground labor force. "In any immigrant neighborhood, you will see vendors with calling cards and calling centers."

Obviously they are not totally focused on legal immigrants though. They are planning the future growth of their business on illegal immigration. This is one of the key reasons the Bush administration will do nothing in regards to illegal immigration and the costs that are placed on us, the taxpayers, and the potential criminals and terrorists who could pass through the border.

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Toronto Free Press (via LoneWacko) covers "Mexico's Undeclared War On America"

If a foreign country was sending more than a million of its people to illegally enter the United States every year surely that would be grounds for war. Mexico is doing that. It is no stretch of imagination to say that Mexico in engaged in an undeclared war on the United States of America.

...

President Bush doesn’t see it that way. He calls illegal Mexican aliens "undocumented workers." That is just pure sophistry. It’s spin. He calls the flood of illegal Mexicans "a problem", but it is much more than that. It is an undeclared act of war.

...

Today, the oligarchy ruling Mexico has hit upon a plan to not only regain its former territory by a de facto form of demographics, deliberately re-populating those States with Mexican citizens and seeking a series of amnesties to confer citizenship that by-passes the normal process, but it is also seeking to suck still more money out of the U.S. with an audacious plan to raid Social Security. It’s not enough that the second largest amount of money Mexico "earns" comes from funds sent home by illegal aliens estimated to number between eight and ten million.

It is an undeclared war and even though I supported Bush, this issue is one he does not understand, no matter how many times he plays the "I was governor of Texas, I understand the border" card.

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Michelle Malkin covers the bullshit reason of "any willing employer with any willing employee"

In a letter to the Los Angeles Times published this morning, Doug Ellice of Bethesda, Md., examines the implications of such a policy:

When people say, "match willing workers with willing employers, as long as American workers honestly cannot or do not want to fill the jobs," can they imagine how many people from other hemispheres might want to apply?

If anyone wants to hire hard-working poor people who, in addition, speak English, the Philippines can send 1 million or 2 million next Friday.

And if language is not required, Chinese workers can do to Mexican workers in our job market the same damage that Chinese manufacturers are doing to Mexican manufacturers in their respective factories.

As Phyllis Schlafly has noted, Bush hasn't spoken of a limit to the number of "willing employees." Can anyone doubt that she is right when she says that "up to 5 billion people in the world might want to be 'willing employees' in the United States"?

It is a flawed statement by the Bush administration. With the number of people on waiting lists to come here legally why is he proposing, in essence, a guest worker program that gives those not willing to wait a pass to the front of the line?

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The Counterterrorism Blog reports on crime, kidnapping for ransom and the uptick in criminal element along our southern border. Here's an excerpt, go read the whole thing though because this doesn't do the post justice.

... Now, however, there is an upsurge of violent crime in Mexican border cities fueled by the illegal drug trade and kidnappings for ransom that should cause US policy makers to think twice about immigration reform and give immediate focus to border security issues as they relate to terrorism.

The Washington Post ran an article on January 22 about crime in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico that should be disturbing to all Americans. For many years now, in Latin American countries like Colombia, Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, many people, including Americans, have been kidnapped and held for ransom. Some of those victims have been murdered. In recent years, those kidnappings have been occurring with increasing frequency in the Mexican interior, particularly Mexico City, often attributed to the drug trade and other organized crime. The trend has been that this violent criminal activity is heading north.

As the Washington Post article notes, the kidnapping of Americans in Mexico has now reached the Mexican-US border in a big way. According to the US Consul in Nuevo Laredo, since August of last year, 27 Americans have either been kidnapped or disappeared in that Mexican border city, and 15 are still missing. At least one victim was reported murdered.

Compare this to Iraq and the kidnapping of Americans. It's an outrage when it happens in Iraq, yet along our own border in one little town it is occurring with more frequency than over in Iraq. American Dinosaur makes several trips to Mexico a year and gives his perspective.

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San Diego Union-Tribune (via LW) reports that machinization has increased in agriculture leaving migrant workers with no jobs.

For the past century, raisins in California's Central Valley have been harvested in exactly the same way: a monthlong frenzy of hand picking that required more workers than almost any other crop.

Last season, many raisin growers turned to machines to do the work. Although they had long held out, they are now joining growers nationwide in embracing mechanization to fend off global competition.

But the switch to mechanical harvesting is taking a heavy toll on the Mexican migrants who fill most of the state's lowest-paying farm jobs. With machines picking more crops, the need for field hands is falling sharply. Where 50 men once were needed to harvest a field of raisins, five now suffice.

It's cheaper to have a machine than it is to have 50 illegal aliens, even if you pay them illegally under minimum wage. The sad part to all of this is that legal workers are being screwed by the illegal aliens now.

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Michelle Malkin reports on a plane with illegal Chinese forced down south of San Antonio. She also has a follow up post here.

The co-owner of the plane, Afzal Hameed, is president of Alpha Tango Flying Services in San Antonio, which trains pilots and mechanics.

Guess who trained at Alpha Tango Flying Services--which, by the way, caters to Saudi Arabian flight students(!!!!):

Among their clients were three Arab flight students investigated by the FBI, including Al Qaeda operative Abdul Hakim Murad , who was arrested in Manila in 1995 and later convicted in New York of plotting to blow up a dozen U.S. airliners over the Pacific, then crash a suicide plane into CIA headquarters.

The FBI has been keeping tabs on Alpha Tango since Sept. 11. So, now, a plane co-owned by Alpha Tango's president, who is incommunicado, has been forced down with a planeful of Chinese illegal aliens in the wake of a terror alert involving Chinese illegal aliens.

Curiouser and curiouser.

She has a lot more updates on the background of the flight service owners.

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Lou Dobbs (LW) takes on California Congressman Davied Dreier's recently proposed "fraud proof" Social Security card and higher penalties for employers that I covered January 16, 2005.

"The American people don't want open borders; they don't want amnesty," says Rep. Tom Tancredo, a Colorado Republican. "It's a message that is beginning to get through to the Congress. We've just got to get it through to the president."

That message has gotten through to one of the administration's most cheerful and energetic loyalists on Capitol Hill, Rep. David Dreier of California. After ignoring the realities of illegal immigration for nearly all of his long tenure in Congress, Republican [David] Dreier [R-CA] now says he will introduce legislation to stop American businesses from hiring illegal aliens, using a photo-embedded Social Security card, which employers would be required to check with a national database to determine whether the job applicant is legal or illegal.

It is unclear to me just why Dreier believes that any one of the 3 million illegal aliens who entered this country last year, or the people in businesses who hire many of them, would turn law-abiding. At this point, while we should welcome Dreier's conversion, his proposal amounts to nothing more than a diversion from the profoundly important reforms that must be enacted. We must take control of our borders, enforce our immigration laws, and ultimately take responsibility for our first line of defense in the war on terrorism, specifically our borders and ports...

I really do love Lou Dobbs for his attention to this issue, but I think he is wrong in attacking the programs presented by Dreier. Sure Dreier may have done absolutely nothing to stop illegal immigration in the past, but we have very few willing to propose anything to solve the problem. So while Lou may hate the messenger, don't hate the message.

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GOPUSA on the fallousy of the temporary worker and the battle that Bush faces against the Republican party

... in an excellent analysis in the November/December 2001 edition of Foreign Affairs Magazine, written by Professor Philip L. Martin of UC-Davis and Michael L. Teitelbaum of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the authors uncover the flaw in Bush's plan, "In many countries, under many types of government, and across many time periods, experiences with guest worker programs have led to an overwhelming and simple consensus among those who have studied the issue: there is nothing more permanent than temporary workers."

There will most certainly be a fight on this issue even with the slap in the face of the Senate leaving immigration reform off of it's top ten priorities agenda.

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Michelle Malkin has an exclusive on a man who died in the World Trade Centers being sent his green card 3 years later. She also has pictures of the notice on her website.

My latest column, which is also a special news feature in today's New York Post, is dedicated to the memory of the man pictured above. The story exposes how our behemoth, $34 billion Department of Homeland Security sent a green card approval notice on Jan. 15, 2005 to Mr. Eugueni Kniazev (pronounced Yev-GEN-nee Kuh-NEH-zev), who was murdered at the World Trade Center on that unforgettable day the towers collapsed.

That's right. The feds sent a green card approval notice less than two weeks ago to a known, deceased Sept. 11 victim.

Not only is it disgusting that they sent the notice to a man dead for 3 1/2 years, but that it took that long for him to get approved.

Others commenting on this fiasco: | SlantPoint | La Shawn Barber | PowerLine |

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World Net Daily (via LW) reports on the authorization of 2,000 new border agents, but no funding sought.

Despite his signing a bill authorizing 2,000 new border agents, President Bush will not ask Congress for enough money to fund them.

Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge told USA Today yesterday that the administration's new budget will propose "good incremental increase" in the number of agents but would not approach the 2,000 level.

This is totally smoke and mirrors immigration reform going on. They think they can get away with passing this so they can say in media interviews "I've increased the border patrol by 2,000", when in reality they have not because there has not been allocated funds.

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MichNews highlights that the Boston "dirty bomb" scare through the southern border last week should open everyone's eyes to the fact that our borders really need to be secured.

There’s a ticking time-bomb in our halls of government, and it’s called "Immigration Policy." As you may know, the news story that set off national alarm bells last week was the allegation that sixteen invaders bent on creating chaos entered our country through our perennially porous borders. According to a tip given to the FBI, these individuals came here with the intent to perpetrate terrorist acts and, furthermore, it was implied that nuclear material was going to follow them at a later date. As it turned out, we dodged a bullet; it was determined that the tip was a hoax motivated by a desire for revenge. But guess what?

It doesn’t really matter.

Nuclear material, biological agent, chemical toxin - this week, next week, next month, next year. As long as the sorry excuses for statesmen we’ve elected continue to fail, most abjectly and miserably, in the most basic and fundamental aspect of national security - securing our borders - this war against Islamic extremists is practically all for nought. Our immigration policy is an accident waiting to happen; it’s a fifty-megaton, ticking time-bomb loaded with plutonium.

If it had turned out not to be a hoax, then what?

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For more stories see Illegal Aliens And Immigration Reform Report #4 and the Diggers Realm Immigration Category

That covers this edition of Illegal Aliens And Immigration Reform Report. Make sure you bookmark Diggers Realm, we cover illegal aliens and immigration reform on a regular basis and not just in these reports.

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