A family crosses the U.S. border into Arizona; a student spends his last dime on a flight that will take him to the beginning of an education in the U.S.; an abandoned immigrant mother struggles as a maid to give her children a better life than she had - these are the immigrant stories we read, and for many of us, our hearts are filled with emotion.
My gruff-as-sandpaper neighbor just caught me in the yard to talk about riding with the Rolling Thunder motorcyclists in their annual Memorial Day parade around the National Mall. But when the parade was over, he drove on home instead of parking and walking with the thousands of others to the Vietnam Memorial.
While most of the media extolled an op-ed written this week by Tea Party Express founder, Sal Russo, calling for amnesty and increases in legal immigration, they missed the extraordinary defense of the American worker by Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.).
The Obama Administration has proposed a new rule to grant work permits to the spouses of H-1B holders who "are either the beneficiaries of an approved Immigrant Petition for Alien Worker (Form I-140) or who have been granted an extension of their authorized period of admission."
While speaking at an economic roundtable in Washington, D.C. yesterday, the CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers said he knows of 600,000 open jobs in the manufacturing field. He blamed his inability to find workers on our immigration system.
Remember all of those promises about how legalization would be exchanged for a tough, zero-tolerance policy against future illegal immigration? The Gang of Eight and President Obama forgot to run that by the pressure groups protesting the United States' immigration enforcement policies.
Within minutes of the Associated Press calling last night's North Carolina 2nd Congressional District primary for Rep. Renee Ellmers, Facebook founder Mark Zuckerburg's pro-amnesty group, FWD.us, congratulated her on both its Facebook page and on Twitter. FWD.us called the election results a "clear sign voters are ready for immigration reform" after dumping a six-figure ad buy into her district to help her win the primary. The ads, however, claimed she opposes amnesty, but FWD.us' vision of "immigration reform" clearly includes amnesty for the nation's 11-18 million illegal aliens.
Making illegal immigration a non-deportable offense has long been a goal of many anti-enforcement activists but their radical proposal is only now becoming apparent to much of the public. For most of President Obama's term, the claim of record deportations had the public and the media focused on what was happening in the interior of the country.
Congress continues to issue over 1 million green cards and approximately 700,000 temporary guest worker visas a year. The Senate immigration bill and its House counterpart would double those numbers, a fact that tends to go unnoticed in the media. I often wonder if immigration reporters and their colleagues who cover employment and the economy read each other's stories.
I'll be in Dallas at the Texas State Fairgrounds the next few days at the largest Earth Day exposition in the country, presenting our massive new study, VANISHING OPEN SPACES.