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Rasmussen Reports
Tuesday, May 11, 2021
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 66% of Likely U.S. Voters believe the current situation with migrants at the U.S.-Mexico border is a crisis. Twenty percent (20%) say it’s not a crisis, and 13% are not sure. (To see survey question wording, click here.)
Entire story here.
May 10, 2021
Re: HB 34, HB 268, HB 395 – interstate compacts on professional licensing
Dear Georgia Republican state legislators,
The professional licensing compacts you voted for in the 2021 General Assembly are apparently now something of “an issue”. We hope our work from here is connected to your increased interest in and investigation of these bills and how they may effect illegal immigration in Georgia.
Interstate compacts are new to us. But along with other illegal immigration-related code sections I helped create, improve and defend, I have been working on OCGA 50-36 -1 since 2006.
I first noticed HB 34 on the morning of Feb 25 – just hours before it passed the House. After a quick but careful read of the lengthy bill, I sent out emails to several House members alerting them to possible problems the proposed compact may create with the existing eligibility verification system for public benefits. I also called and emailed the Speaker’s office. I confirmed receipt of my email.
I pasted the text of my original Feb. 25 email into the first blog post done on HB 34. I hope you have seen examples of my time consuming write-ups on these bills. I assure you this was not done out of boredom.
A House member who I have known for years followed up on my concerns in February. “…I went to legislative counsel on HB 34 and you were right, D.A…..” I wanted to be wrong.
I also became aware of HB 268 and shortly afterwards, HB395. I knew the Georgia Chamber of Commerce was pushing the compacts contained in this legislation and that these agreements could effect illegal immigration. There are no examples of the GA Chamber advocating on the side of immigration enforcement available to send you.
After the House passed all three of the bills, I sent notes to several members of the senate – including the Senate Majority Leader – asking for line numbers on language that would eliminate my fears that the interstate compacts would reduce security on immigration verification. The only response I received was from my own senator. There was no citation of language that would alleviate my fears. I also personally asked several interested Georgians to ask for the same information from their own senators. I have not talked to anyone who even received a reply.
I also learned about the GORRC and the involvement of the Georgia Secretary of State office in the council’s procedure in consideration of the compact legislation. I continued to pursue the hope that somebody in power would cite language I may have overlooked in the bills to remove my concerns that illegal aliens could access the professional licenses covered in the measures. I spoke to an official in the SoS office, sent a request for comment and information – and again asked for citation of a line number to language that would remove my fears. There was no response other than confirmation of receipt.
I now see a May 6, 2021 opinion letter from legislative counsel to a House member who apparently asked the same question another House member asked about HB 34 in February. This time the opinion is that the sentence “nothing herein prevents the enforcement of any other law of any member state that is not inconsistent with the Compact” represents language that preserves the current system of immigration verification.
I read the cited sentence several times in my review of the bills. I do not agree that it will automatically result in use of verification system – including the affidavit process – in processing applications for professional licenses from applicants with existing credentials from other states. But it is my fervent hope that the most recent opinion reflects how the new laws will actually be implemented.
I need to add that knowledge gained from nearly twenty years of studying illegal immigration and according to retired ICE agents, retired Border Patrol Agents and several Georgia sheriffs, a background check by law enforcement does not reveal illegal immigration status unless the alien has already been arrested and fingerprinted. And that hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens have valid Social Security numbers.
My interest in the bills also led me to legislation that put Georgia in an interstate compact on nursing licenses in 2017. (SB 109). I was not aware of that legislation at that time. We will soon know if if the verification system required in OCGA 50-36-1 has been followed in the reciprocal process of licensing nurses from other states since that law was put in place in 2017.
In closing, I respectfully extend my sincere thanks to Rep Chuck Martin for taking the time this month to investigate the effects the legislation may have on illegal immigration and the law requiring verification of ‘lawful presence’ for applicants for professional licenses.
In the recent past an expert on the issue who is willing to help legislators fight illegal immigration in Georgia was not automatically regarded with suspicion.
I respectfully put forth the hope that moving forward, Republican lawmakers ask how legislation may effect illegal immigration before they vote.
So there is no confusion on my message, two opposite opinions on this matter have come out of legislative counsel. I have seen Gov. Kemp’s *signing statements on the three bills.
UPDATE: I have also seen the letter from Reps Belton and Werkheiser to the House Republican caucus asking for help in convincing the governor to sign the bills.
* Compact bills letter to Caucus 2
We will follow up to see actual practice.
To be clear, I am not in the camp that trusts Gov. Kemp on illegal immigration statements.
D.A. King
Part 2.
In Georgia the Secretary of State Office administers professional licenses.
Conservative voters should be asking why Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger’s office joined in a recommendation that at least three anti-enforcement bills “pass as written”
We asked last week if Gov. Brian Kemp will sign several GOP bills that dismantle the system in place to verify ‘lawful presence’ of foreign nationals who apply for professional licenses. We now have more information.
The story so far
The short version is that 2006 state law requires that applicants for public benefits – including professional licenses – go through a verification process intended to prevent illegal aliens from accessing those benefits. Three bills (that we know of) were passed in the 2021 General Assembly that put Georgia in inter-state compacts that contain standardized, reciprocal licensing practices that seem to remove the verification process from Georgia’s system. We asked senior legislative management to dispute our analysis. Nobody did.
Washington’s prestigious Center for Immigration Studies has picked up the story
The bills we know about and their respective professions (and corresponding Gold Dome lobbyists) are HB 34: audiologist and speech language pathologists, HB 268: occupational therapists and HB 395: professional counselors. All Republican sponsored. Our original post has the details.
We have heard sneering criticism of our opposition to dismantling the verification system that include the dismissive rhetorical question “just how many illegal aliens will be filling these positions…?” The answer is we don’t know. And that’s kind of the point.
We do know that if the current law is left in place and actually enforced the answer will be “zero.”
According to the anti-enforcement Georgia Budget and Policy Institute Georgia is home to more illegal aliens than green card holders.
We also know that if the usual suspects are allowed to put this legislation in place that next year there will be other bills passed that quietly expand the list of “it’s OK if they are here illegally” professions.
We have learned that these three bills went through a review process by the obscure ‘Georgia Occupational Regulation Review Council’ and that the recommendation from the GORRC was to pass the bills as written. It is important to make it clear again that the Georgia Chamber of Commerce urged passage of this legislation as well.
According to the recommendation from the council on each bill “there is a recognizable potential for harm to Georgians by not entering into the (inter-state compact)…” We do not agree. The harm comes from allowing illegal aliens to obtain professional licenses in Georgia because they have already done so in other states.
The recommendation also makes it clear that “during the course of the review, Council staff obtained information from the applicant group… and the Secretary of State Office while also conducting internal research.”
Who sits on the council? Here is a screenshot from the GORRC.
We sent two questions to the SoS office and confirmed receipt but have not received a reply.
Gov Brian Kemp should veto these bills. His office number is 404-656-1776
Part 1, here
There will be a part 3 to this story as we now see that a similar bill that got past us became state law in 2017 regarding nurses. More later, but all concerned need to know that an illegal alien-free Georgia is not part of most Republican legislator’s agenda.
“California is going to become a Hispanic state and if anyone doesn’t like it they should leave. They ought to go back to Europe.” — Mario Guerra Obledo, co-founder of MALDEF, on the Tom Likus radio show, 1998
The 2021 Republican-controlled Georgia House passed a privileged resolution “recognizing and commending” Jerry Gonzalez. It’s a real head-shaker. And it is lazy lack of attention to official business and another example of timid and misplaced GOP trust in the deceitful Democrats.
Gonzalez is a former lobbyist for the above-mentioned MALDEF mob. He has been leader of Atlanta’s far-left and innocuously named Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials (GALEO) Corporation since 2003.
Privileged resolutions are passed as a group after the House Clerk reads part of each out loud if no member objects. This reading includes the name of the recipient. If no member objects to any part of the bundle presented they all pass. If there is objection, members can have the opportunity to vote on singular resolutions. Put another way, when the clerk read the words “recognizing and commending Jerry Gonzalez…” any house member could have spoken up when the Speaker asked if there were any objections to the adoption of the privileged resolutions…” Nobody did.
A shorter explanation of the process is that lawmakers vote “yes” by remaining silent. Part of this House legislative process can be seen here in a two-minute video.
Jerry Gonzalez (Gerardo Eleazar Gonzalez) is widely known for his contempt for all things conservative and for marching in the streets of Atlanta demanding an end to immigration enforcement. He has proudly lobbied under the Gold Dome against voter ID, use of E-Verify, official English for government, honoring immigration holds in Georgia jails, and for personally escorting self-described illegal aliens into the Georgia Capitol.
In a classic example of why he is tagged “Angry Jerry” the Rome News reported on a 2015 experience diminutive state Rep Katie Dempsey had with Gonzalez when he was removed from an event for screaming at her for supporting immigration enforcement.
From the House Resolution commending and congratulating GALEO’s Jerry Gonzalez (HR 305):
“WHEREAS, Jerry’s significant organizational and leadership talents, remarkable patience and diplomacy, keen sense of vision, and sensitivity to the needs of the citizens of this state have earned him the respect and admiration of his colleagues and associates; and WHEREAS, he is a person of magnanimous strengths with and unimpeachable reputation for integrity, intelligence, fairness, and kindness;…”
The House clerk’s office tells me the recipients of these resolution commendations receive a framed print of the entire document – “with a nice ribbon” for display on their walls. More here.
More than a million illegal aliens could arrive at the United States-Mexico border this year, according to projection analysis.
Princeton Policy Advisor Steven Kopits projects that federal immigration officials could encounter about 1.2 million illegal aliens by the end of 2021 if current illegal immigration levels continue as a result of President Joe Biden’s policies.
“At the current pace, apprehensions for calendar year 2021 could be forecast at 1.2 million, following the precedents of 2005 and 2006,” Kopits writes:
As a result, barring a major modification of Biden administration policy, we might expect a level of illegal immigration this year not seen since the Great Recession. The situation is fairly described as a border crisis and a rolling policy disaster. [Emphasis added]
More here from Breitbart News
Breitbart News
Neil Munro
14 april, 2021
President Joe Biden’s deputies have awarded contracts worth up to $1.6 billion dollars to help foreign children and teenagers settle in the United States.
The one-year contracts signed by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) include a contract worth up to $530 million to Family Endeavors Inc. starting March 17, a contract worth up to $719 million with Deployed Resources Inc. starting March 19, and a contract worth up to $198 million to Rapid Deployment Inc.
A Breitbart search on a government database produced more hits, such as a $13.6 million contract for Southwest Key Programs Inc. Another contract worth up to $103 million went to General Dynamics Information Technology Inc.
The Department of Homeland Security is also spending heavily to record and process the younger migrants, as well as the wave of adults who bring young children.
Both agencies may spend less than the maximum per contract — but can also sign more contracts during Biden’s four years in office.
In contrast, President Donald Trump turned away most migrants, so forcing more U.S. government attention on the interests of Americans.
The HHS contracts are being used to operate shelters where migrant teenagers and children are identified, enrolled in asylum lawsuits, and then handed over to so-called “sponsors” who promise to take care of them until they eventually face asylum judges. In reality, most of the migrant teenagers and children are looking for U.S. jobs or joining illegal-migrant parents and relatives who are already living in the United States.
For example, the Family Endeavors contract includes $86 million in taxpayers’ funds to rent hotel rooms for six months for approximately 1,200 families who cross the southern border.
The child-migration process is being used by progressives, business groups, illegal migrants, coyotes, cartels, and pro-migration media to widen the small asylum side-door in the nation’s immigration laws.
The post-1990 immigration laws normally accept roughly 1 million legal immigrants per year. That huge inflow delivers roughly 1 new migrant for every four Americans who turn 18. But Biden’s deputies want to dramatically raise the overall migration levels by adding more people via side doors, including the side doors for asylum seekers and refugees.
Business groups want the extra immigration because the arrivals serve as wage-capping workers, profit-boosting consumers, and high-occupancy urban renters. For example, the meatpacking industry prefers hiring migrants to invest in labor-saving machinery.
The relay process ensures the U.S. government is providing free subcontracting services to the coyotes and cartels. For example, without the $1.6 billion in spending, the illegal migrant parents would have to fund the extra expense and legal risk of transporting their migrant children to new homes throughout the United States. “We’re complicit as a nation in human trafficking,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said at a March 26 press conference in Texas with 17 other GOP Senators.
The $1.5 billion in shelter contracts are merely the up-front costs of sheltering the many young migrants coming from Central America. Once admitted, the children and teenagers are expected to spur additional spending via welfare and education agencies.
State and local governments spend almost $60 billion per year helping to settle and support immigrants, according to a 2016 report by the National Academies of Sciences. Much of the extra spending flows to companies via contracts and consumer purchases…. More here from Breitbart News.
Topic may be worthy of consideration at upcoming Republican conventions
Pro-enforcement Georgians are watching to see if Gov. Brian Kemp signs several Republican bills that apparently quietly begin to dismantle the system that verifies lawful presence of applicants for public benefits. Examples are HB 395, HB 268 and HB 34 .
The Georgia Chamber of Commerce pushed these measures with letters requesting support placed on legislators’ Chamber desks. Two of those letters are posted on the Dustin Inman Society website.
Related: Georgia Chamber distributing letters…
State law implemented in 2006 was an effort to prevent illegal aliens from accessing public benefits. The goal was to make Georgia less hospitable to illegal immigration. Professional licenses are public benefits under that law. When he was state senator the governor voted for the legislation that created the verification mandate.
Georgia code (OCGA 50-36-1) requires that an applicant for public benefits swear on a notarized affidavit that he is either a U.S. citizen or a “lawfully present” and eligible foreign national. The applicant is required to present verifiable document to prove that eligibility. The foreign national’s ‘lawful presence’ is then verified using a federal database known as ‘SAVE.’
The legislation in question puts Georgia in interstate “compacts” that essentially require reciprocity in licensing and issuance procedures. “Interstate compacts are contracts that are negotiated between states. The US Supreme Court has held that the term “compact” should be understood to refer to a “contract” according to the Library of Congress.
Georgia would be joining compacts that honor the professional license of covered occupations for people who relocate from one participating state to another. If another state in the compact has issued a professional license to a resident for one of the covered professions the idea is to issue a license for the same job here without most of the current processing if that person migrates to Georgia.
The bills include provisions for quicker licensing for spouses of active duty military personnel.
If Kemp signs the bills new law will eliminate the step of verifying the “lawful presence” of the covered applicant. The abbreviated licensing process would result in quicker participation in the workforce – and a more hospitable experience for illegal aliens.
The Georgia Chamber says this will make Georgia “a better state for business.”
Including the Speaker’s office and the Senate Majority Leader, the Dustin Inman Society alerted individual legislators in both the House and senate about the result of the bills becoming law. We also asked several state senators for citation of line numbers in the legislation containing language that would dispute our analysis of these bills. The sole response came from Senator Kay Kirkpatrick (R- Marietta) who replied, “…these bills are important to the military and passed the Senate unanimously. Compact language cannot be changed.” We are grateful to Sen. Kirkpatrick.
It appears the legislative choice was between compliance with the dictates of the business lobby or the preservation of procedures put in place to make Georgia less attractive to illegal immigration. The business lobby won out. Again.
Georgia is home to more illegal aliens than is Arizona, according to the U.S. Dept. of Homeland Security.
Absence of media coverage or Republican resistance
We note the past press attention and the brutal fight to implement the verification law in question and the unsurprising absence of liberal media coverage on the decision to further the process of dismantling the law.
Between the three bills, there was only one “no” vote in the House and Senate. It came from Rep Matt Dollar (R- Marietta) who voted against HB 34.
We repeat: then-Senator and Public Safety Committee Chairman Brian Kemp voted in favor of the 2006 ‘Georgia Security and Immigration Compliance Act’ (SB529) that put the verification of lawful presence for public benefits in place (senate vote # 1037).
“Georgians are “fed up” with illegal immigration,” Kemp told the AJC newspaper then. They still are. But as Governor, Kemp is conspicuously silent on the entire crisis.
As can be seen by a recent letter written by an angry retired federal immigration agent, and the Dustin Inman Society’s Brian Kemp page, most conservatives are not willing to overlook that silence.
The phone number at Gov. Kemp’s Capitol office is 404-656-1776
This story continues here.
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From Alan Tonelson in ImPolitic
If you want to start a (hopefully verbal only) fight about American politics, one good way is to tell a Democrat that his or her party – and especially its powerful progressive wing – has been abandoning the country’s private sector working class in favor of what New York Times columnist Ross Douthat just called “the winners of globalization, from wealthy suburbanites to Wall Street and Silicon Valley elites….” (Here’s some polling evidence for this proposition.)
So it’s more than a little interesting that if you take this position, you’ve recently gotten some devastating ammunition from no less than one of progressivism’s leading intellectual lights – economist Stephanie Kelton.
Kelton has achieved renown for her pioneering “Modern Monetary Theory” take on economic policy. As she has explained, it holds that “Governments in nations that maintain control of their own currencies — like Japan, Britain and the United States, and unlike Greece, Spain and Italy — can increase spending without needing to raise taxes or borrow currency from other countries or investors.”
Naturally, Democrats of most stripes have seized on this argument to varying extents to justify running much bigger federal budget deficits to deal much more ambitiously with a whole host of national problems – to engineering an adequate recovery from the CCP Virus-induced recession to remedying major social and economic ills that they believe dangerously plagued the economy before the pandemic.
One aspect of Kelton’s views, though, has been widely ignored, and it’s this stance that led her last week to support explicitly measures with proven records of harming domestic U.S. private sector workers but with which the increasingly elitist Democratic Party has grown increasingly comfortable over the last decade or so – on trade and especially immigration policy.
The ignored Kelton stance: on inflation. As she has specified (in the column linked above), “Politics aside, the only economic constraints currency-issuing states face are inflation and the availability of labor and other material resources in the real economy.” And in the author’s latest column, she argues that it’s precisely the appearance of these threats today that require the Biden administration to embrace unfettered trade and mass immigration policies.
Read more of this essay here.
A topic worthy of discussion
Posted 12:00 PM.
Finally! Jorge Ramos has come out for immigration restriction in a recent New York Times opinion piece (The Perpetual Crisis at the Border — and What We Can Do About It ). The Univision star has gone public on an annual, numerical limit to “authorized immigrants.”
“…the United States should start accepting between one and a half and two million authorized immigrants every year” wrote Ramos in his April 2, 2021 Times OPED.
The high end of the ‘Ramos Plan’ essentially doubles the current annual flow.
“Today, all along the U.S.-Mexico border, the aspirations of new immigrants are colliding with a country reluctant to revamp its way of welcoming and absorbing newcomers. The struggle is real, but we know how it has to end, with more legal immigration. As they say in Mexico, “No hay de otra” — There is no other way.”
Let’s save Ramos’ past demands for total amnesty for “the 11 million” victims of borders for later.
And for now let’s set aside his 2014 idea presented to Time magazine that we open the borders in North America to the free flow of people to match the flow of goods and services. But let’s not forget it.
“The taboo issue of an open border should be tackled. Not now. Politically it is impossible even to discuss that,” he said. “But I don’t see why we can’t have in North America the same immigration system that they have within the European Union” Ramos told Time then.
All concerned in the immigration debate should recognize that the latest ‘Ramos Plan’ of numerically restricting immigration to two million souls a year must come with an enforcement mechanism. It will need procedure that would create full control of our borders and enforced visa departures. A system that would prevent “authorized immigrant” number two million from scratching his head wondering why unauthorized immigrant number one and his family are marching in the streets of America demanding amnesty ten years from implementation of the ‘Ramos Plan.’
We cannot honor the immigrants who obey the law unless we enforce that law – so, the ‘Ramos Plan’ should be considered.
I know and like Jorge Ramos. We have had on-air discussions on immigration and amnesty in the past. I enjoyed it very much. So did he. I am happy to see that Jorge has apparently come around to a more sensible outlook on the issue. I would enjoy the opportunity to discuss the ‘Ramos Plan’ further on his Univision show again.
What about it, Jorge? Besides, I still want a rematch on the Univision ping-pong table. And some guidance on voter integrity using the Mexican system would be a great help for me to pass on to Georgia state legislators. They don’t seem to listen to me on that one.
