iiiMPACT -- major conference on illegal immigration in NC, slated for Wilmington

By Verne Strickland / August 8, 2012

A landmark conference on the cost and impact of illegal immigration -- iiiMPACT -- is scheduled in Wilmington for Friday, August 10, at the New Hanover County Northeast Regional Library Auditorium, and Saturday, August 11, at the Cape Fear Community Schwartz Center.

Jude Eden, Wilmington conservative community activist who is married to a legal immigrant, is a member of the event's steering committee. She commented on the meeting for USA DOT COM:

"The event is designed to educate the public about the impact of illegal immigration to our state. It’s going to cover some of what’s going on nationwide, but we find that many may not really know what the impact of illegal immigration is to them. Actually, North Carolina is spending $2.3 billion a year on services that are paid by taxpayers to these people. They’re getting paid under the table a lot of the time, and then they can claim they are not making anything. They’re getting welfare, they’re getting social security, they’re getting educational and medical benefits. 

Schools crowded due to children of illegals. Some close.
"There are schools that are closing in our country because children of illegal immigrants, who don't have a right to be there, are siphoning off money they we can’t afford, and there’s not enough then to go around. Legal American citizens are thus being  of their rights. We know that illegal immigrants will go to the emergency room to get treated because they don’t have to pay – but we have to pay. These developments are costing us billions of dollars. 

Illegals cause of unprecedented crime waves 
"The illegal immigrants are also causing shocking crime waves that endanger us all. Obama says these are just decent, harmless working people. They don’t know really know this because there are no records on most of them except on the criminal dockets. There may be a lot of them who want a better life, but so do I. Still, I  don't have the liberty to infringe on the rights of others. Further on crime, there’s the MS12, the dangerous Mexican gang. It’s active in nearby Jacksonville, N.C., as well as right here in Wilmington. That’s a scary thought. Drug cartels are operating literally right in our own North Carolina backyards. There are huge marijuana grow operations that these criminals are prepared to protect with violence and threat. 

Most important issue at iiiMPACT -- protecting the vote

"When we got together to talk about what were the top priorities we should deal with at the iiiMPACT conference, we quickly identified that the most important thing that should be protected is our vote. Millions of votes cast by citizens who are properly registered are being nullified by illegal aliens who are not entitled to register, but are permitted to do so anyway.

In NC, legal ballots being nullified by unlawful votes

"Civitas did a powerful expose that showed that people rejected from serving on jury duty could turn right around and register to vote. That was in North Carolina. To me that’s our most important issue. If our votes are not counting and are being nullified by illegal, unlawful votes being cast by illegals. If we don’t have our votes, we don’t have our sovereignty, and our voices being crushed and distorted and muted. Voter fraud, voter ID issues and illegal immigration are right up front in this important conference set for August 10-12. Public welcome, free of charge.

Friday, August 10th   
New Hanover County Northeast Regional Library Auditorium  
Northeast Regional Library Map.  Free parking in front of building.

 6:30pm Meet & Greet                                        
7pm “They Come to America” followed by a Q&A with Dennis Michael Lynch  


Dennis Michael Lynch

We’ll dive into this educational event with a viewing of Dennis Michael Lynch’s ground-breaking documentary, “They Come to America.”  A comprehensive and in-depth look at the reality and the costs of illegal immigration in America, this movie will help to educate the public on this issue on the national level.  Step beyond the media pundits’ racially charged sound-bites into what’s really going on in our cities and along America’s border.

SATURDAY August 11 iiiMPACT Conference                                                               
Cape Fear Community College Schwartz Center 
Cape Fear Community College MAP – Click on “R” for the Schwartz Center.
                                                    
9am: registration begins                                                                                           
10am: Workshops                                                                                                          
12pm: Lunch with keynote speakers                                                                            
1pm: Town Hall Discussion                                                                                     

Saturday we’ll get local with speakers, candidates, state and local officials and citizens starting with small workshops on specific aspects affecting North Carolina and continuing on to a Town Hall style panel discussion in the afternoon.  Lunch will be provided with several keynote speakers from North Carolina.  Attendees will come away with a wealth of knowledge about the issues themselves, what their elected officials are doing, and what can be done to protect our citizens while maintaining legal immigration laws. 

Can’t attend in person?  The iiiMPACT afternoon Town Hall will be broadcast live on the web!  Live Webcast

Slow path to progress for U.S. immigrants -- 43% on welfare after 20 years

 Verne Strickland Blogmaster / August 8, 2012

LEGAL IMMIGRANTS EXPERIENCE CHRONIC STRUGGLES. HOW CAN ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS BE EXPECTED TO DO BETTER?

 

By Stephen Dinan   The Washington Times

Wednesday, August 8, 2012

Immigrants lag behind native-born Americans on most measures of economic well-being — even those who have been in the U.S. the longest, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies, which argues that full assimilation is a more complex task than overcoming language or cultural differences.

The study, which covers all immigrants, legal and illegal, and their U.S.-born children younger than 18, found that immigrants tend to make economic progress by most measures the longer they live in the U.S. but lag well behind native-born Americans on factors such as poverty, health insurance coverage and homeownership.

The study, based on 2010 and 2011 census data, found that 43 percent of immigrants who have been in the U.S. at least 20 years were using welfare benefits, a rate that is nearly twice as high as native-born Americans and nearly 50 percent higher than recent immigrants.

The report was released at a time when both major presidential candidates have backed policies that would make it easier to immigrate legally and would boost the numbers of people coming to the U.S.
Steven A. Camarota, the center’s research director and author of the 96-page study, said it shows that questions about the pros and cons of immigration extend well beyond the sheer numbers and touch on the broader consequences of assimilating a population defined by tougher socioeconomic challenges.

“Look, we know a lot of these folks are going to be poor, we get it. But don’t tell the public it’s all going great, which is the story line I think a lot of people want to sell,” Mr. Camarota said. “There is progress over time. Every measure shows improvement over time, but still, the situation does not look like we’d like it to look, particularly for the less-educated. They lag well behind natives even when they’ve been here for two decades, and that is very disconcerting.”

Federal law requires that the government deny immigrant visas to potential immigrants who are likely to be unable to support themselves and thereby become public charges.

On Tuesday, a handful of Republican senators wrote to the Homeland Security and State departments asking them to explain why they don’t consider whether potential immigrants would use many of the nearly 80 federal welfare programs when they evaluate visa applications.

Neither department responded to messages Tuesday seeking a response to the senators’ letter.
Expanding legal immigration is a contentious issue for voters, the vast majority of whom tell pollsters that they want the levels either retained or decreased.But most politicians want legal immigration expanded.

During his time in the U.S. Senate, Barack Obama backed bills that would have dramatically boosted legal immigration, potentially by hundreds of thousands a year. As president, he has called for the same thing.

“We need to provide our farms a legal way to hire workers that they rely on, and a path for those workers to earn legal status. And our laws should respect families following the rules — reuniting them more quickly instead of splitting them apart,” Mr. Obama said in a major speech on the subject in El Paso, Texas, in 2011.

His presumed Republican challenger, Mitt Romney, in June called for increasing legal immigration for students who study in high-tech fields and admitting unlimited family members of those who hold green cards.

“Our immigration system should help promote strong families as well — not keep them apart. Our nation benefits when moms and dads and their kids are all living together under the same roof,” Mr. Romney told the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Mr. Camarota’s report took a broad look at the immigrant population and found that immigrants are contributing to major changes in American society, including that one-fourth of public school students now speak languages other than English at home.

It also found that immigrants as a population lead complex economic lives that aren’t easily put into one category or another.

Immigrants made up more than half of all farmworkers, 41 percent of taxi drivers and 48 percent of maids and housecleaners, but they also represented about one-third of all computer programmers and 27 percent of doctors.

The statistics varied greatly by geography. In Massachusetts, native-led households averaged $89,000 in income while immigrant households averaged $66,000.

In Virginia, immigrant-led households averaged $93,000 in income, far outstripping native households’ $80,000 average. Likewise, immigrant families averaged a larger tax burden in Virginia — though they also had higher rates of use of welfare or Medicaid.

The center found that use of public benefits varied dramatically based on where immigrants originated.
Mexicans were most likely to use means-tested benefit programs, with 57 percent, while 6 percent of those from the United Kingdom did. The rate for native-born Americans is 23 percent.

Mr. Camarota said a key dividing line is educational attainment. Immigrants who have been in the U.S. 20 years and who have bachelor’s degrees or higher make slightly more than the average native-born American. But immigrants with only high school educations make less no matter how long they have been in the U.S.
“The fact is the less-educated in particular — they don’t do well over time,” he said. “It’s not reasonable to expect an immigrant who comes to America with only a high school education to close the gap with the native-born.”

Scholars debate whether the current wave of immigrants will assimilate differently from those in the 1800s and at the start of the 20th century.

George Borjas, a Harvard University professor, has argued that second-generation Americans — the children of today’s immigrants — will fall behind in wages by about 10 percent by 2030.

But in “Assimilation Tomorrow,” a report released in November, Dowell Myers and John Pitkin said immigrants of the 1990s eventually will attain high rates of homeownership and 71 percent will become U.S. citizens by 2030.

Those authors said immigrants were set back by the recent recession but were still on track to follow the same assimilation path as previous waves of immigrants.

They also said a program to legalize the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants in the U.S. would be critical to helping assimilation.

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Networks that fawned over Obama's world tour mock Romney's 'blunders'

Verne Strickland Blogmaster / August 6, 2012

Mitt Romney gives a speech Tuesday at the University of Warsaw.
Photo Janek Skarzynski/AFP/Getty Images.

By Scott Whitlock | August 02, 2012 | 11:42  927  407 Reddit40  161

A  A

Mitt Romney's week-long international trip resulted in unrelentingly negative coverage from the big three broadcast networks, a stark change from the glowing press awarded to then-candidate Barack Obama's world tour in 2008. While Obama was treated like a rock star (from the Associated Press: "It's not only Obama's youth, eloquence and energy that have stolen hearts across the Atlantic...."), Romney endured a focus on gaffes and the trivial.

MRC analysts examined all 21 ABC, CBS and NBC evening news stories about Romney's trip to London, Israel and Poland between July 25 and July 31. Virtually all of these stories (18, or 86%) emphasized Romney's "diplomatic blunders," from his "golden gaffe" at the Olympic games to "missteps" that offended the Palestinians.

The first of these "gaffes" was the former GOP governor asserting that security problems in London are not "encouraging." (This unsurprising point had previously been made by many in the media.)

Journalists pounced. On July 26, guest World News guest anchor Josh Elliott mocked, "Now to the war of words underway tonight in London, what's being called Mitt Romney's golden gaffe."

The comments came from an interview with NBC anchor Brian Williams. Initially, Nightly News didn't report the relatively innocuous remark, excluding it from a taped interview that ran on July 25.  However, by July 26, Williams had caught up with a British tabloid press angry at "Mitt the Twit." The anchor opened the show by trumpeting, "[Romney's statement] erupted today in public and now the question is, how did a Romney campaign overseas trip end up offending so many people here in London?"

That same night, CBS Evening News anchor Scott Pelley also led with Romney's comments about the Olympic games. He insisted, after just one day of a week-long tour, that the trip was getting attention "for all the wrong reasons" and deemed the former governor's remarks "a diplomatic blunder."

As the trip continued, so did the negative spin from the evening newscasts. Despite pressing economic and foreign policy problems facing the world, both ABC and CBS on July 27 highlighted trifling details such as Romney's motorcade in London getting stuck in traffic. (A snafu that partially validated the candidate's warning about the Olympics.) On CBS, Mark Phillips cast this as "another bad moment."

On July 29, Evening News correspondent Jeff Glor joined the pig pile: "After a rough first stop on his seven-day overseas trip, Mitt Romney was hoping Israel would go better than Britain. The day was not error-free." The "error" amounted to focusing on just how strong the Republican's language would be on Israel's defense against Iran.

Over seven days, Romney netted 53 minutes worth of stories from the three networks. In comparison, Obama's 2008 tour through the Middle East and Europe resulted in 92 minutes for eight days. (The tour resulted in news segments that encompassed full reports and anchor briefs.)

In July of 2008, Barack Obama's international tour took him to Israel where, in an attempt to show toughness over Iran, the then-senator incorrectly told reporters that he was a member of the Senate Banking committee. (Obama erroneously referred to "his" committee's calls for divestment from Iran.) There was no outcry and no reporting of "errors" or "gaffes," at least on the three broadcast evening newscasts.

Obama's 2008 foreign tour, unlike Romney's 2012 version, received glowing coverage.

When the Democrat arrived in Berlin to speak, Brian Williams could hardly contain himself. On the July 24, 2008 Nightly News, he trumpeted, "...The man from Chicago, Illinois, the first ever African-American running as presumptive nominee of the Democratic Party, brought throngs of people into the center of Berlin, streaming into this city, surging to get close to him, to hear his message."

On the same program, Andrea Mitchell was beside herself, marveling at the large crowds: "It's hard to figure out what the comparison is. What do you compare this with?"

Then-CBS Evening News anchor Katie Couric couched the visit in the most favorable terms, hyping, "Barack Obama extends the hand of friendship to Europe."

At the end of Romney's tour, Brian Williams summed up the week as concluding "with controversy, some hurt feelings, and some raw tempers." NBC reporter Peter Alexander highlighted a Romney aide who swore at journalists for screaming questions just after the candidate left the Polish Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

Alexander lectured that the trip was "at times marred by missteps" and that "Romney offend[ed] his Olympic hosts and Palestinian leaders."

While Romney's trip resulted in his most substantial coverage since wrapping up the Republican primary, the stories were overwhelmingly negative. Contrasted with the fawning coverage Barack Obama received four years ago, the network's rough coverage of Romney's trip stands as yet another reminder of the media's double standard when it comes to Barack Obama and any conservative candidate who might get in his way.
[Thanks to MRC intern Jeffrey Meyer for assistance.]