2009 April Immigration News
Adoption of E-Verify for Validating Employment Status
April 2, 2009 - In testimony to Congress, Mike Aytes, acting Deputy
Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) detailed
the implementation of E-Verify to date. E-Verify is a web service provided
by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Its purpose is to allow
participating employers to verify the employment eligibility of newly hired staff.
The higher level goal of E-Verify, as acknowledged by Mr. Aytes, is that of
"addressing illegal immigration from the demand side."
Mr. Aytes described that currently over 117,000 employers use E-Verify, and
that participation has more than doubled each fiscal year since 2007. According
to an analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics data, cited by Mr. Aytes, over 14
percent of all nonagricultural new hires in the U.S are run though E-Verify.
Mr. Aytes also reported that approximately 96.1 percent of all cases queried
through E-Verify were automatically verified as work authorized.
2009 March Immigration News
Immigration Law Applied to Stifle Free Speech?
March 24, 2009 - the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) appeared
in a federal appeals court in New York to argue that a Muslim professor was denied
entry from Switzerland to the United States based on his political views. The ACLU
charged that the Obama Justice Department applied immigration law selectively to censor debate by a foreign scholar.
The ACLU claimed that exclusion of Professor Tariq Ramadan was motivated by his
criticism of U.S. foreign policy, not by any legitimate application of immigration law.
Jameel Jaffer, lead attorney in the case described the ACLU's postion "that the government
should not be using immigration law to limit free speech within the U.S." Mr. Jaffer
went further stating that "the Bush administration used immigration laws to skew and stifle
political debate inside the U.S" and that "The Bush administration was wrong to revive
this Cold War practice, and the Obama administration should not defend it."
Pelosi Criticizes Separation of Undocumented Parents from
Documented Children
March 7, 2009 - Speaking in the National Family Unity tour led by the
Congressional Hispanic Caucus, U.S. House of Representative's Leader Nancy
Pelosi decried immigration raids that separate undocumented parents from their
documented children, describing them simply as "un-American".
Speaker Pelosi applauded the "optimism, that hope, that courage, that determination
of immigrants... You brought with you your tradition of family values, of faith, of
community, of responsibility." She then asked "How then could America say it's OK
to send parents of children away? What value system is that? I think it's un-American."