Articles from Immigration Daily

Immigration Daily (www.ilw.com) ran two intersting articles today:

1. Five Years After 9/11 – Hype And Hope

During the Battle of the Bulge, when German divisions had broken through Allied lines, and the battle front was ill-defined, there were wild rumors that some German soldiers in American uniforms would try to infiltrate into key Allied locations to sabotage and kill. As a result, and without orders, security was tightened up throughout the war zone, by American units setting up informal check-points where all passing through were stopped and questioned. Caught in this large dragnet were a number of senior American commanders who could not convince their GI captors that they were who they said they were. One of those caught was Omar Bradley, the second-highest ranking American general in Europe. He was harrangued by his GI captors, since he could not remember the names of the players in a particular baseball team that they queried him about. No German infiltrator was caught in this large informal dragnet that lasted several days. In the 5 years after 9/11, what has happened in the US resembles the above, except on a much larger scale, and in being formal instead of informal. The TSA routinely harrasses Americans at airports across the country – we are not aware of a single al-Qaeda terrorist that the TSA claims to have arrested as a result of screening, or a single terrorist incident averted by screening passengers. To be sure, our country has done many things to diminish the al-Qaeda threat – the invasion of their Afghanistan sanctuary, the cooperation with foreign intelligence agencies leading to the capture of many senior al-Qaeda leaders, the infiltration into al-Qaeda’s networks by British intelligence which averted the British attacks recently, etc – but what we have done domestically is simply to institutionalize federal harrassment of travellers on a large scale.

Click here for the full story.  Isn’t this exactly right?  Do you/we feel safer today now that we cannot carry tooth paste on airplanes?

2.   The Growth And Reach Of Immigration: New Census Bureau Data Underscore Importance Of Immigrants In The US Labor Force

New data from the 2005 American Community Survey (ACS), released by the Census Bureau on August 15, 2006, underscore the extent to which immigration continues to fuel the expansion of the U.S. labor force. The foreign-born population of the United States increased by 4.9 million between 2000 and 2005; raising the total foreign-born population to 35.7 million, or 12.4 percent of the 288.4 million people in the country. The foreign-born population includes legal immigrants who come here on permanent and temporary visas for work, study, and family reunification, as well as an estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants who come for the same reasons but are generally precluded from obtaining visas by shortcomings in the U.S. immigration system.

Click here for the entire story.  CBS ran a news story last night about farmers allowing crops to rot because of the inability to find workers.  What would happen to our economy without immigrant labor?  Shouldn’t we reward and fairly treat workers who are so valuable to our economy — not punish them?

KJ