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The Restrictionists

Locked Up Without End: Indefinite Detention of Immigrants Will Not Make America Safer

One of the ugliest myths in the immigration debate is that immigrants are more likely to commit crime or pose a danger to society. Although studies repeatedly have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, politicians continue to exploit the public’s fear of crime to justify ever more punitive immigration measures, including the mass incarceration of immigrants for reasons that would never be permitted for U.S. citizens. A prime example of this political double standard is the “Keep Our Communities Safe Act of 2011” (H.R. 1932), introduced this past spring by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX), Chairman of the House Judiciary Committee. H.R. 1932 proposes a massive expansion of our immigration lock-up system that would waste millions of taxpayer dollars and violate our constitutional commitments to individual liberty and due process of law, while doing little to make America safer.

The vast scope of H.R. 1932 became clear during its committee mark-up, where members of the House Subcommittee on Immigration Policy and Enforcement challenged the language and intent of the legislation and sought to amend its reach. During that meeting, Rep. Smith was forced to acknowledge that the bill’s detention mandates extend to immigrants who have no criminal record whatsoever, much less focus narrowly on hard-core offenders. Since that time, however, Rep. Smith has continued to misrepresent that “the bill only specifies that a small segment of criminal immigrants may be detained for extended periods.”Read more...

Published On: Thu, Oct 06, 2011 | Download File

Dissecting the HALT Act: The Impact of Eliminating Discretion from Our Immigration System

Immigration restrictionists on Capitol Hill are attempting to move legislation through Congress that would prevent the Obama Administration from exercising the executive branch’s long-held power of prosecutorial discretion.  The “Hinder the Administration’s Legalization Temptation Act" (HALT Act) is a bill introduced by Representative Lamar Smith (R-TX) that would suspend certain discretionary forms of immigration protections and relief until January 21, 2013—the day after the first Obama administration comes to an end.  The bill would also revoke any of the specified protections and relief that are granted between the date of the bill’s introduction (July 12, 2011) and the date of its enactment.  According to a letter circulated by Rep. Smith to solicit support for the HALT Act, its purpose is to “remind the Obama Administration that the founding fathers put Congress in charge of setting the nation’s immigration policy.”  What Rep. Smith seems to forget is that the American system of justice has long granted the executive branch of government the discretion to decide how, and against whom, to enforce federal immigration laws.

The HALT Act takes aim at the following types of immigration protections and relief:

Waiver of the 3 and 10 Year Bars to Admission
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Published On: Mon, Jul 25, 2011 | Download File

Rep. Lamar Smith’s “Keep Our Community Safe Act of 2011” Creates More Problems than Solutions

One of the ugliest myths in the immigration debate involves the relationship between immigrants and crime.  While studies repeatedly have shown that immigrants are less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans, many politicians exploit the public’s fear of crime to advance a restrictive immigration agenda.  One of the latest attempts to do so is the “Keep Our Communities Safe Act of 2011,” or H.R. 1932, introduced by Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX). This bill seeks to expand the authority of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to subject certain immigrants to indefinite—that is, potentially life-long—detention, even though the Supreme Court has held that such detention raises serious constitutional concerns.    

This proposal relies on continued detention of immigrants—many of whom have never committed a crime—as a stand-in for fixing the underlying problems of our broken immigration system. The evidence suggests that this bill would increase costs, put further strain on the judicial system, and do little to keep America safe. Read more...

Published On: Wed, Jul 06, 2011 | Download File

Statistical Hot Air: FAIR’s USA Report Lacks Credibility

Many politicians who champion the deport-them-all approach to unauthorized immigrants have been relying upon a bloated and deeply distorted report issued by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in July 2010.  That report, The Fiscal Burden of Illegal Immigration on United States Taxpayers, is not a credible source of data, yet its numbers have been cited repeatedly in this year’s debates over immigration legislation in the states.  The report relies upon flawed and empirically baseless assumptions to inflate its estimate of the costs which unauthorized immigrants impose on federal, state, and local governments.  Much of what FAIR counts as the cost of unauthorized immigration is actually the cost of education and healthcare for U.S.-citizen children.  In fact, over half of FAIR’s cost estimate consists of educational and healthcare expenditures for the children of unauthorized immigrants, of whom nearly three-quarters are native-born U.S. citizens.  These native-born children are counted as a “cost” of illegal immigration if they are under 18, but as U.S. citizens if they are working, taxpaying adults.  In its rush to place a price tag on unauthorized immigrants, FAIR is unable to see that investing in children today pays off economically tomorrow.  FAIR also neglects to mention the enormous fiscal and economic costs that would be incurred by attempting to remove unauthorized immigrants from the United States.  As the negative impact of anti-immigrant legislation on the fiscal bottom-line becomes more apparent, many taxpayers may begin to see that the “costs” cited by FAIR do not tell the whole story. Read more...

Published On: Tue, Mar 29, 2011 | Download File

Eliminating Birthright Citizenship Would Not Solve the Problem of Unauthorized Immigration

There is no evidence that undocumented immigrants come to the U.S. just to give birth.

  • Unauthorized immigrants come to the U.S. to work and to join family members.  Immigrants tend to be of child-bearing age and have children while they are in the U.S.  They do not come specifically to give birth.
  • Stories about “birth tourism” point to small numbers of foreigners who come to the U.S. legally to give birth to their children.  It would be ridiculous to change the U.S. Constitution and impact every single American just to punish a few individuals.
  • “Anchor babies” are a myth.
  • U.S.-citizen children do not protect their parents from deportation.  Every year the U.S. deports thousands of parents of U.S. citizens. 
  • U.S.-born children cannot petition for legal status for their parents until they turn 21 years old.  In most cases, if the petition is granted the parents would still have to leave the U.S. and then be barred from re-entering for at least 10 years.  That’s a total of 31 years.  Undocumented immigrants do not come to the U.S. to give birth as part of a 31-year plan.

Eliminating birthright citizenship would INCREASE the undocumented population.Read more...

Published On: Tue, Jan 04, 2011 | Download File

Papers Please: Eliminating Birthright Citizenship Would Affect Everyone

Attacks on birthright citizenship at the federal and state level are bound to take many forms—from outright repeal of the Fourteenth Amendment to refusal by states to issue birth certificates to children of undocumented immigrants.  Whatever the tactic, attacks on birthright citizenship hurt everyone. Read more...

Published On: Tue, Jan 04, 2011 | Download File

The Unwanted: Immigration and Nativism in America

It’s hardly news that the complaints of our latter-day nativists and immigration restrictionists—from Sam Huntington to Rush Limbaugh, from FAIR to V-DARE—resonate with the nativist arguments of some three centuries of American history.  Often, as most of us should know, the immigrants who were demeaned by one generation were the parents and grandparents of the successes of the next generation.  Perhaps, not paradoxically, many of them, or their children and grandchildren, later joined those who attacked and disparaged the next arrivals, or would-be arrivals, with the same vehemence that had been leveled against them or their forebears.

Similarly, the sweeps and detentions of immigrants during the early decades of the last century were not terribly different from the heavy-handed federal, state, and local raids of recent years to round up, deport, and occasionally imprison illegal immigrants, and sometimes legal residents and U.S. citizens along with them.  But it’s also well to remember that nativism, xenophobia, and racism are hardly uniquely American phenomena.  What makes them significant in America is that they run counter to the nation’s founding ideals.  At least since the enshrinement of Enlightenment ideas of equality and inclusiveness in the founding documents of the new nation, to be a nativist in this country was to be in conflict with its fundamental tenets.Read more...

Published On: Mon, Sep 13, 2010 | Download File

Defending the Fourteenth Amendment: A Resource Page

Restrictionist groups and legislators have persisted in their attempts to restrict or repeal birthright citizenship in State Houses and the U.S. Congress. Over the years, several bills have been introduced that would deny U.S. citizenship to children whose parents are in the U.S. illegally or on temporary visas.  The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution—the cornerstone of American civil rights—affirms that, with very few exceptions, all persons born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens, regardless of their parents' citizenship. Following the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, the Fourteenth Amendment restated the longstanding principle of birthright citizenship, which had been temporarily erased by the Supreme Court's "Dred Scott" decision which denied birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of slaves. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld birthright citizenship over the years. The following IPC resources present a strong case for maintaining and celebrating our tradition of birthright citizenship—a tradition which is intimately tied to our heritage of civil rights.

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Published On: Mon, Aug 02, 2010 | Download File

IPC Responds to FAIR Report

This week, Fox News is reporting on data provided to them by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) which amounts to a highly misleading fiscal snapshot of the costs allegedly imposed on U.S. taxpayers by unauthorized immigrants.  However, in its rush to portray unauthorized immigrants as nothing more than a drain on the public treasury, FAIR completely discounts the economic contributions of unauthorized workers and consumers.  Moreover, FAIR inflates their cost estimate by indiscriminately lumping together native-born, U.S.-citizen children with their unauthorized parents.

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Published On: Thu, Jul 08, 2010 | Download File

Ending Birthright Citizenship Would Not Stop Illegal Immigration

Ending Birthright Citizenship Would Be Unconstitutional, Impractical, Expensive, Complicated and Would Not Stop Illegal Immigration

Anti-immigrant groups and legislators have persisted in their attempts to restrict or repeal birthright citizenship in State Houses and the U.S. Congress. Several bills have been introduced that would deny U.S. citizenship to children whose parents are in the U.S. illegally or on temporary visas.  The Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution - the cornerstone of American civil rights - affirms that, with very few exceptions, all persons born in the U.S. are U.S. citizens, regardless of the immigration status of their parents. Following the Civil War and the emancipation of the slaves, the Fourteenth Amendment restated the longstanding principle of birthright citizenship, which had been temporarily erased by the Supreme Court's "Dred Scott" decision which denied birthright citizenship to the U.S.-born children of slaves. The Supreme Court has consistently upheld birthright citizenship over the years. The following fact sheet is adapted from the Immigration Policy Center’s Made in America: Myths and Facts About Birthright Citizenship. 

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Published On: Tue, Jun 15, 2010 | Download File