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[FYI --
1. Securing the Blessings of Liberty: Congress Should Consider Expanding Grounds for Exclusion and Deportation to Include Radical Beliefs (Memorandum)
2. Is the U.S. Immigration Debate Going in the Right Direction? (Op-ed)
3. Obama is transforming America through immigration (Op-ed)
4. Hearing on Immigration Issues Facing Colorado (Testimony)
5. Large Group Nabbed Right Where SBInet Is Operational (Blog)
6. Texas-Sized Jihadi Plot Foiled (Blog)
7. Too Much Immigration Staff Time Is Spent on Low-Priority Matters (Blog)
8. Indicting Hezbollah in Mexico (Blog)
9. John Lennon, a Marine General, and the Twisted Language of Immigration (Blog)
10. 'The Beast' and the Mexican Justice System (Blog)
-- Mark Krikorian]
1.
Securing the Blessings of Liberty: Congress Should Consider Expanding Grounds for Exclusion and Deportation to Include Radical Beliefs
By James R. Edwards Jr.
CIS Memorandum, February 27, 2011
http://cis.org/securing-liberty
Excerpt:Congress has recently debated the extension of expiring provisions of the USA PATRIOT Act. Though none of those measures directly involve immigration, this occasion provides a good time to consider security-related immigration issues.
America has excluded or ejected aliens from colonial times until the present. The reasons have ranged from their poverty to their radical political beliefs. This Memorandum briefly reviews the main U.S. laws barring entry to, or causing removal of, certain aliens on grounds related to national security. Next, it identifies several areas of concern that pose a threat to the United States but fall outside the present grounds for exclusion and deportation.
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2.
Is the U.S. Immigration Debate Going in the Right Direction?
By Mark Krikorian
CIS Op-ed, February 22, 2011
http://cis.org/node/2616
Excerpt: Q: New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez, a Republican who became the state's first Latina governor after the November elections, rescinded an executive order by former Gov. Bill Richardson that prohibited law enforcement officials from asking people about their immigration status for the sole purpose of determining if the individual had violated immigration laws. Opponents have likened the bill to Arizona's SB1070 and claim the order will lead to racial profiling. Will other states follow suit and enact similar legislation? Is comprehensive immigration reform likely to be addressed this year and, if so, what would that consist of?
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3.
Obama is transforming America through immigration
By Mark Krikorian
CIS Op-ed, February 23, 2011
http://cis.org/node/2620
Excerpt: In 2008, President Obama described his goal as 'fundamentally transforming the United States of America.' This is as true for immigration as it is for health care and other issues.
President Obama's support for what advocates call 'comprehensive immigration reform' -- amnesty, loose enforcement and increased legal immigration -- which he reiterated in his State of the Union address, is not just another item on a laundry list.
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4.
Hearing on Immigration Issues Facing Colorado
By Jessica Vaughan
CIS Testimony, November 2010
http://cis.org/node/2603
Excerpt: Good morning. Thank you for convening this hearing and for inviting me to testify. I have had the pleasure of working with a number of you and your staff in years past on immigration-related legislation. For the last several years, Colorado, and especially its legislature, has been a leader and a model for many other states in developing practical and effective programs to address the problem of illegal immigration, and I look forward to watching the discussions and proposals unfold in the new year. This morning, I will speak on the recent history of U.S. immigration trends and policies, and what they suggest for possible policy initiatives in Colorado. This afternoon, I will give you an update on the E-Verify system.
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5.
Large Group Nabbed Right Where SBInet Is Operational
By Janice Kephart
CIS Blog,February 25, 2011
http://cis.org/kephart/large-group-nabbed
Excerpt: On February 18, 2010, the Border Patrol arrested an abnormally large group of illegal immigrants – 128 of them, to be exact – crossing right through the middle of one of the 'virtual fence' surveillance areas. Most of them have already been returned to Mexico. According to the Associated Press story, the area where the 'Border Patrol surveillance video operators spotted a group of more than 100 people walking just north of the Mexico border' was 'about 15 miles west of Lukeville, Arizona.' Strangely, right in this area's proximity are the large surveillance and communications towers built as part of the now-cancelled SBInet (Secure Border Initiative), otherwise referred to as the 'virtual fence'. In fact, SBInet's Ajo-1 portion covers 30 miles of border here, with Lukeville at the base of Highway 85, running north on the map below.
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6.
Texas-Sized Jihadi Plot Foiled
By James R. Edwards Jr.
CIS Blog,February 25, 2011
http://cis.org/edwards/texas-sized-jihadi-plot
Excerpt: A 20-year-old Saudi Arabian has been arrested and charged with planning an Islamist bomb plot. The scary thing is that Khalid Ali-M Aldawsari, a student visa holder studying business at South Plains College in Texas, was in the country perfectly legally. Originally, he enrolled at Texas Tech to study chemical engineering.
The foreign student bought chemicals used in explosives from several chemical supply companies. One reported his purchases. He'd already bought concentrated nitric acid and concentrated sulfuric acid. The order that aroused suspicions was for phenol, which goes in trinitrophenol, or TNP. Officials say Aldawsari planned to put explosives in baby dolls and detonate them at dams, nuclear plants, former President George W. Bush's Dallas home, and the homes of Americans who formerly served in the military at the Abu Ghraib prison.
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7.
Too Much Immigration Staff Time Is Spent on Low-Priority Matters
By David North
CIS Blog,February 24, 2011
http://cis.org/north/low-priority-matters
Excerpt: I suggested in a previous blog that the Department of Homeland Security should spend more staff time making high-priority immigration decisions, and less time on lower-priority ones.
The general notion being that the removal of aliens and decisions about migrants admitted outside of numerical limits should get more attention than admission decisions within numerically-limited classes, as the last-named set of judgments have no bearing on the size of the U.S. population, while the former two are crucial to that metric. Similarly, I noted that there is often an enormous amount of bureaucratic energy spent on very small, innocuous populations.
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8.
Indicting Hezbollah in Mexico
By Janice Kephart
CIS Blog,February 23, 2011
http://cis.org/Kephart/HezbollahinMexico
Excerpt:A few months, the United States issued an extraterritorial indictment against Jamal Yousef, a senior agent of Hezbollah, an Iranian-sponsored and U.S.-designated terrorist organization. The agent was conducting a business deal to provide thousands of new U.S. arms stolen from American forces in Iraq that had been shipped and stored in Mexico and were to be sold to the Colombian FARC (another designated terrorist organization) in exchange for drugs that were to be couriered into the U.S. by Mexican cartels. The stolen U.S. arms consisted of automatic rifles, M-60 machine guns, rocket propelled grenades, hand grenades, anti-tank munitions, and C-4 explosives.
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9.
John Lennon, a Marine General, and the Twisted Language of Immigration
By David North
CIS Blog,February 23, 2011
http://cis.org/north/nonpriority-deferred-action
Excerpt: This is a story about how a rich and famous alien made a major impact on America's deportation policies, and how a prominent Marine general sought to unwrinkle part of the very wrinkled verbiage used in the immigration business.
The alien was John Lennon, the Beatle and British political activist; the Nixon administration tried to deport him for stirring up opposition to the war in Vietnam.
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10.
'The Beast' and the Mexican Justice System
By Jerry Kammer
CIS Blog,February 23, 2011
http://cis.org/kammer/the-beast
Excerpt: In recent months, the Mexican press has been drawing attention to the violence and abuses inflicted upon illegal immigrants from Central America as they head toward the U.S. border. Particularly scandalous is the inability of Mexican authorities to stop the predators who work the confined – and therefore controllable – space of the rail line that runs from the border state of Chiapas through Veracruz and on to Mexico City. The train that travels that route is known both as 'The Beast' and 'The Train of Death.'
