Where Are Qualified Citizen Teachers?

DREAMers Get ‘Teach’ Jobs

Eagle Forum.org May 26, 2015

When considering the Teach For America (TFA) program, it is common to think of those accepted to it as the best and brightest American college students, who after graduating from America’s most prestigious universities choose to teach for at least two years in urban or rural underserved communities.

But in some instances, schools are hiring TFA college graduates who have questionable immigration status. So-called “Dreamers,” illegal aliens who are temporarily free from being deported, are making inroads into the TFA program.

In Denver public schools, eleven TFA instructors hold Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) status under a program announced by President Obama on June 15, 2012. DACA, which is based on the DREAM Act that Congress refused to pass, temporarily defers deportations from the U.S. for eligible “undocumented” youth and young adults, and grants them access to renewable two-year work permits and Social Security numbers.

TFA Examined

Teach For America is a non-profit organization that receives financial support from individuals, businesses, and philanthropies. TFA has also won the U.S. Department of Education’s Investing in Innovation grant competition.

The TFA program has been criticized for sending teachers into classrooms after only five weeks of training. Teachers unions are especially critical of the program. But in some cases, TFA teachers teach where no one else will.

The 2011 acceptance rate for Teach for America applicants was 11%, making the program more competitive to get into than undergraduate admission to Duke University or the University of Pennsylvania. (Washington Post, 3-18-13)

It is unknown whether TFA employment standards are the same for those holding DACA status as for other applicants.

TFA’s hiring of teachers with DACA status grew from two last year, to 40 this year “in classrooms across the country, including Arizona, California, and New Mexico.”

Other Colorado regions are considering following Denver’s lead. Vail’s superintendent “is considering hiring teachers with DACA status. Half the district’s 6,800 public school students are Hispanic, and 40% are learning English.”

The demand for bilingual teachers is growing. The chief human resources officer for Denver Public Schools says, “In the past, we have had to do extensive recruitment internationally and nationally to try and meet this demand.” (Associated Press, 4-4-15)

Results Vary

A former TFA teacher wrote in 2013 that he understood how the program gets results from students, saying, “after all, [TFA teachers] are recruited from a pool of the country’s hardest-working college students, and good teaching is nothing if not hard work.” The former TFA teacher explains that “only 23% of teachers from traditional or less-selective certification programs graduated from a selective college or university, while 81% of TFA teachers did.”

While some research has shown TFA teachers to be less effective, a 2013 U.S. Department of Education study “showed Teach for America teachers to be more effective than other teachers at their schools.” The “study included 4,573 students at middle and high schools across the country,” with a focus on secondary math education. The conclusion was that “students with TFA teachers scored higher on end-of-year exams than their peers in non-TFA classrooms.” The difference equaled 2.6 extra months of classroom time in math. (The Atlantic, 9-10-13 and 9-23-13)

Better Teachers = More Successful Students

Attracting the best students to teaching programs and giving them the best training is key to improving student learning and performance. The nation needs bright students to choose teaching careers.

Most U.S. education majors are those who have GPAs closer to the bottom than to the top of all students. But most countries that perform well on internationally benchmarked tests have in common that their best students become teachers. In those countries, students face a highly competitive acceptance process to enter schools of education and teachers are greatly respected by students, parents, and in the community. While international standardized test results, like TIMSS, PIRLS, and PISA, are not the only valid measure of a country’s education system, they can serve as one meaningful indicator of the adequacy of instruction.

The success the Teach For America program enjoys is a result of recruiting the highest achieving college graduates. If standards were to be lowered in order to accept illegal aliens as instructors simply because they are bilingual, the move could diminish whatever good the program may currently be contributing.

IT'S ALL ABOUT JOBS!

The Real Immigration Issue Is Jobs

by Phyllis Schlafly Eagle Forum April 29, 2015

Congratulations to WorldNetDaily on its 18th Anniversary. As an author, I’m so thankful to Joseph Farah and his staff for creating such an efficient route to communicate with millions of Americans. I am especially grateful to WND for tackling conservative issues every day so effectively.

Iowa staged a big show-and-tell for nine 2016 presidential candidates last week. Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker seems to be the only one who talked about a growing issue at the grassroots: how American jobs and wages are adversely affected by Obama’s immigration policies.

The argument that immigrants do jobs that Americans won’t do is as phony as a three-dollar bill. As Thomas Sowell pointed out, “Virtually every kind of ‘work that Americans will not do’ is in fact work that Americans have done for generations,” and “most of the people doing that work today are Americans.”

The United States gives permanent legal resident status (called a green card, which means lifetime residency plus the option of citizenship) to about one million people a year. In addition, the U.S. gives out a half million student and exchange visas, admission tickets to tens of thousands of aliens claiming to be refugees, and 700,000 visas to temporary workers and their families.

After a speech in Cedar Rapids, Walker answered a question by saying he would make sure that our “legal immigration system is based on making our No.1 priority to protect American workers and their wages.” That’s music to the ears of the grassroots, but Walker seems to be the only candidate who gets it.

It was at least the third time this month that Walker had made the same point, using almost identical language. This time, in response to a questioner, Walker stressed, “I don’t know how anyone can argue against that.”

If you notice, the critics of Walker’s immigration remarks don’t address or try to refute his facts, but instead seem offended that he connected jobs and wages to immigration. In fact, the numbers are compelling.

According to a new report from the Congressional Research Service, the U.S. has admitted 51 million immigrants in the last eight years and, as immigration expanded, the incomes of the bottom 90 percent of Americans dropped and then went flat. Republicans will be the big losers in 2016 in the face of headlines such as: “Middle class incomes drop as immigration surges.”

Despite these numbers, the big corporations are demanding the right to bring in even more foreign labor. Just last Friday, a group of corporations invited Senators to a closed-to-the-press briefing dedicated to “improving” the H-1B program by tripling the number of visas. As Rutgers professor Hal Salzman pointed out, that would enable the tech industry to fill 100% of its job openings with people brought in from China and India.

You have to watch the language and the choice of words. “Comprehensive immigration reform” means giving citizenship to the estimated 12 million illegal aliens now living in the United States.

I think everyone admitted to the U.S. should be informed at the border that you can never become an American citizen unless you swear a solemn oath to “support and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States of America against all enemies, foreign and domestic … and that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; so help me God.

Americans not in the labor force now exceed 93 million for the first time. With a labor force participation of 62.7 percent, we are at a 37-year low, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Today we have a record 12.2 million black Americans who are not in the labor force. For black teens age 16 to 19, unemployment is a whopping 25 percent, which means that one in four black teens does not have a job and is actively seeking one.

According to former Cincinnati Mayor Ken Blackwell, Obama’s giving work permits to millions of illegal aliens is an unlawful attack on American workers at every skill level. Yet, Obama reassured the aliens: “All we’re saying is we’re not going to deport you.”

Some in Congress are starting to talk about reforming Social Security. But no one is addressing the financial burden that Obama’s 2012 executive amnesty caused the Social Security Administration to issue 541,000 Social Security numbers to illegal aliens.

White House spokesmen telephoned friendly companies and assured them his immigration policies “would make it easier for them to retain foreign workers.” But the public was fed a different line: Obama claimed foreign workers would not compete for existing jobs because they would be creating new “jobs, businesses, and industries right here in America.”

The Three Stooges At It Again

The Obama-Boehner-McConnell 'Fast Track' to a Poorer America

5/20/2015 - Terry Jeffrey Townhall.com

President Barack Obama is negotiating a multilateral trade agreement with the governments of 11 nations. These include Malaysia and Vietnam -- as well as Japan, Brunei, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, Canada, Mexico, Chile and Peru.

This so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership would govern most of the commercial relations between the nations that sign it.

"With over 20 chapters under negotiation," explains a Congressional Research Service report published in March, "the TPP partners envision the agreement to be 'comprehensive and high-standard,' in that they seek to eliminate tariffs and nontariff barriers to trade in goods, services, and agriculture, and to establish or expand rules on a wide range of issues including intellectual property rights, foreign direct investment and other trade-related issues."

The Obama administration has granted the draft of this massive deal more secrecy than a Hillary Clinton email. Documents related to it are classified, and members of Congress can review them in a secured room.

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell and House Speaker John Boehner would like to enact legislation giving Obama "Trade Promotion Authority" -- aka "fast track" power -- to enshrine this deal in U.S. law.

Fast-track legislation would allow Obama to avoid presenting the 12-nation deal to the Senate as a treaty -- which, under our Constitution, would require a two-thirds vote of all senators present. Instead, it allows him to present it to both houses of Congress for a simple majority vote -- with no amendments allowed.

In our prospective "free-trade" partner, Malaysia, according to Obama's State Department, the "government restricted union and collective-bargaining activity, and government policies created vulnerabilities and worsened child labor and forced labor problems, especially for migrant workers."

Malaysian human rights problems, says Obama's State Department, include "restrictions on freedoms of speech, assembly, association, and religion; and restrictions on freedom of the press, including media bias, book banning, censorship, and the denial of printing permits."

Our prospective "free-trade" partner Vietnam, according to Obama's State Department, is "an authoritarian state ruled by a single party, the Communist Party of Vietnam."

This Obama-Malaysia-Vietnam deal that Boehner-McConnell want to fast track through Congress raises many questions. The most obvious: Is there any such thing as free trade with unfree countries?

The Congressional Research Service report politely describes socialism as "state-owned enterprises."

"In the context of the current TPP negotiations, the SOE presence in Vietnam -- estimated to represent 40 percent of output -- may warrant particular attention, although Malaysia and Singapore also have important SOE sectors," says the report.

Will Obama's multilateral trade deal with 11 nations put private-sector American manufacturers in Ohio and Michigan into unfair competition with foreign manufacturers in places like Malaysia and Vietnam?

Yes.

But it will likely do something worse than that. It will put American workers into competition with nominally American companies that move more of their capital and jobs abroad -- where they will be able to exploit cheap labor in less-than-free countries and evade the often-excessive U.S. regulation and taxation Obama himself advances.

In America, there is a sharp dividing line between private businesses. On one side are capitalist enterprises owned by families, individuals and small partnerships of individuals. On the other are big businesses -- public-stock companies -- run by professional managers in the theoretical interest of diffuse bodies of stockholders.

Families and individuals who own businesses are free to run them according to their own values. And, yes, making a profit is clearly one of those values. But a family that owns a business might sometimes decide to forego a measure of profit in favor of the well-being of their friends, neighbors and country.

They may decide that love of country and love of God trumps love of money.

But for publicly owned big businesses -- that are not controlled by the moral values of an individual or family owner -- the pursuit of ever-higher profit is the highest good. If the only bottom line governing business decisions is the financial bottom line, it might make sense to manufacture a drug or device that, say, kills an unborn child.

Or, no matter what you make, move your jobs to Vietnam or Mexico.

"Ford Motor Co. on Friday made official a $2.5 billion investment in Mexico for two new plants and an expansion of a diesel engine line that will create about 3,800 jobs," the Detroit News reported last month.

We have lost 7,231,000 manufacturing jobs since manufacturing employment peaked in America in 1979. The real median household income of Americans who completed high school but did not attend college dropped 27.8 percent from its peak in 1973 to 2013 -- falling from $56,395 to $40,701 in constant 2013 dollars.

Obama, Boehner and McConnell are on the same side of this issue. It is the wrong side.

Citizen Activism At Its Finest!

Yes! House GOP Removes Amnesty Provision from Military Funding!

Conservative Daily May 15, 2015 Fellow Conservative,

You did it! With your help, we overwhelmed Congress with tens of thousands of faxes demanding that the amnesty provision be removed from the National Defense Authorization Act.

This activism paid off. Yesterday, a divided GOP agreed to vote down the proposed language. The steadfast Conservatives held the line but we also convinced vulnerable Republicans to abandon their amnesty pursuits.

We were staring down the barrel of a gun. If the language was kept in the bill, it would have encouraged the Department of Defense to ignore the law and hire/enlist illegal aliens instead of Americans.

Not everyone is happy that illegal aliens will be denied military service. Nancy Pelosi said that it was “un-American” to deny illegal immigrants access to the military. As far as she is concerned, more American soldiers should be replaced by illegals.

Hillary Clinton came out and said that there should be more illegal aliens in the military. 

Think about that for a second...

This amnesty language was the Left’s first attempt to legitimize and codify Obama’s amnesty. But if Clinton and Pelosi’s comments are any indication, this is just the beginning.

What it comes down to is that Congress needs to stand on principle. I don’t care if Obama vetoes the legislation or if the Senate votes it down, we need to take a stand.

The House of Representatives has held dozens of votes to repeal Obamacare. They never go anywhere, but the point is that the House is acting on principle. Do you know how many votes have been held to repeal Obama’s illegal alien amnesty?

Zero. That has to change. We had to pull teeth just to get Congress to stop illegal aliens from replacing Americans in the military. What about all the other jobs out there in the private sector?

It’s not enough to just leave it up to the courts. As we learned last week, the Obama administration completely ignored Judge Hanen’s injunction and started handing out amnesty anyway. As a sovereign citizen, you must force Congress to act.

Right now they’re scared. Don’t worry… they were scared to remove the amnesty provision from the Defense Department budget too. Then you and thousands of other patriots put the fear of God into them and they relented.

Sure, they removed the amnesty language from the National Defense Authorization Act. 

That never would have happened without your help.

However, now is not the time to rest on your laurels. Now is the time to double down and demand that Obama’s amnesty be dismantled entirely!

Exporting American Jobs - Importing Foreign Goods

On a Fast Track to National Ruin

5/8/2015 - Pat Buchanan Townhall.com

In the first quarter of 2015, in the sixth year of the historic Obama recovery, the U.S. economy grew by two-tenths of 1 percent. And that probably sugarcoats it. For trade deficits subtract from the growth of GDP, and the U.S. trade deficit that just came in was a monster.

As the AP's Martin Crutsinger writes, "The U.S. trade deficit in March swelled to the highest level in more than six years, propelled by a flood of imports that may have sapped the U.S. economy of any growth in the first quarter."

The March deficit was $51.2 billion, largest of any month since 2008. In goods alone, the trade deficit hit $64 billion. As Crutsinger writes, a surge in imports to $239 billion in March, "reflected greater shipments of foreign-made industrial machinery, autos, mobile phones, clothing and furniture."

What does this flood of imports of things we once made here mean for a city like, say, Baltimore? Writes columnist Allan Brownfeld:  "Baltimore was once a city where tens of thousands of blue collar employees earned a good living in industries building cars, airplanes and making steel. ... In 1970, about a third of the labor force in Baltimore was employed in manufacturing. By 2000, only 7 percent of city residents had manufacturing jobs."

Put down blue-collar Baltimore alongside Motor City, Detroit, as another fatality of free-trade fanaticism. For as imports substitute for U.S. production and kill U.S. jobs, trade deficits reduce a nation's GDP. And since Bill Clinton took office, the U.S. trade deficits have totaled $11.2 trillion. An astronomical figure.

It translates not only into millions of manufacturing jobs lost and tens of thousands of factories closed, but also millions of manufacturing jobs that were never created, and tens of thousands of factories that did not open here, but did open in Mexico, China and other Asian countries.

In importing all those trillions in foreign-made goods, we exported the future of America's young. Our political and corporate elites sold out working- and middle-class America -- to enrich the monied class. And they sure succeeded.

Yet, remarkably, Republicans who wail over Obama's budget deficits ignore the more ruinous trade deficits that leech away the industrial base upon which America's self-reliance and military might have always depended. Last month, the U.S. trade deficit with the People's Republic of China reached $31.2 billion, the largest in history between two nations.

Over 25 years, China has amassed $4 trillion in trade surpluses at our expense. And where are the Republicans? Talking tough about building new fleets of planes and ships and carriers to defend Asia from the rising threat of China, which those same Republicans did more than anyone else to create.

Now this GOP Congress is preparing to vote for "fast track" and surrender its right to amend any Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal that Obama brings home. But consider that TPP. While the propaganda is all about a deal to cover 40 percent of world trade, what are we really talking about?

First, TPP will cover 37 percent of world trade. But 80 percent of that is trade between the U.S. and nations with which we already have trade deals. As for the last 20 percent, our new partners will be New Zealand, Malaysia, Vietnam, Brunei and Japan.

Query: Who benefits more if we get access to Vietnam's market, which is 1 percent of ours, while Hanoi gets access to a U.S. market that is 100 times the size of theirs?

The core of the TPP is the deal with Japan. But do decades of Japanese trade surpluses at our expense, achieved through the manipulation of Japan's currency and hidden restrictions on U.S. imports, justify a Congressional surrender to Barack Obama of all rights to amend any Japan deal he produces?

Columnist Robert Samuelson writes that a TPP failure "could produce a historic watershed. ... rejection could mean the end of an era. ... So, when opponents criticize the Trans-Pacific Partnership, they need to answer a simple question: Compared to what?" Valid points, and a fair question.

And yes, an era is ending, a post-Cold War era where the United States threw open her markets to nations all over the world, as they sheltered their own. The end of an era where America volunteered to defend nations and fight wars having nothing to do with her own vital interests or national security.

The bankruptcy of a U.S. trade and foreign policy, which has led to the transparent decline of the United States and the astonishing rise of China, is apparent now virtually everywhere. And America is not immune to the rising tide of nationalism.

Though, like the alcoholic who does not realize his condition until he is lying face down in the gutter, it may be a while before we get out of the empire business and start looking out again, as our fathers did, for the American Republic first. But that day is coming.

Call Your Senators - Extremely Important!

Let's Get On a Pro-American Track

5/12/2015 - Phyllis Schlafly Townhall.com

Congress, led by Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY) and Speaker John Boehner (R-OH), is preparing to betray American workers, and the grassroots should rise up and say, "No, you don't." The secretive underhanded deal is called Fast Track, and that's an appropriate title because, indeed, it puts Americans on a fast track to lower wages and fewer available jobs.

Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), one of the few members of Congress who have actually read and studied Fast Track plus its companion trade bill called Trans-Pacific Partnership, has compiled a list of objections to it that are downright frightening. They should be read by all who care about their own future and the future of our once-prosperous nation. Here are some of the ways that Fast Track and TPP will betray us.

The text of TPP emphasizes that it is a "living agreement." Translated out of bureaucratese code language, that means the text of TPP can be changed in major and minor ways by executive action after Congress passes the document. Congress can, for example, add additional countries such as Communist China, which for years has been cheating America coming and going.

TPP will facilitate the expanded movement of foreign workers into the United States. TPP opens the door to more waves of illegal immigrants and allows Obama to make future changes without any congressional oversight or expiration date.

Kevin L. Kearns of the U.S. Business and Industry Council calls this "another power grab" that will let Obama and his employees rule by executive action. By the device of not calling TPP a treaty (even though it involves 12 countries on three continents), the globalists induce the Senate to abandon the 67-vote threshold for treaty ratification and even the 60-vote threshold for important legislation.

Fast Track consolidates power in the executive branch and eliminates Congress' constitutional power to amend or even debate trade legislation. Fast Track allows only a specified up-or-down vote on this momentous international agreement without any public oversight or ability to amend it or filibuster it.

Fast Track will increase our trade deficits, which reduce economic growth. Economists have estimated that the last trade deal, which we made with South Korea and which is the template for TPP, wiped out 50,000 American jobs.

Sen. Sessions called on Obama to rewrite the deal. Sessions said, "We don't need a Fast Track but a regular track" so we can evaluate the false promises.

Fast Track turns over some of our authority as a sovereign nation to international authorities, which is a major longtime goal of the internationalists, the so-called kingmakers and big business lobbyists. The code language that hides this in TPP is the statement that calls it a "living agreement."

This means Obama and his executive-branch pals can take all kinds of actions that Article I of the U.S. Constitution reserves to the legislative branch, such as ratifying or changing a treaty and controlling immigration.

Why should we trust the Obama administration and its foreign partners to rewrite international agreements without congressional approval? Is Congress simply giving away its constitutional authority to global busybodies?

Is Congress using secret agreements to cede our once-remarkable American prosperity to Asia? As former Nucor Steel Chairman Daniel DiMicco said, free trade is really "unilateral trade disarmament and enablement of foreign mercantilism."

Most presidential candidates are trying to avoid this issue, but Mike Huckabee was blunt, warning of "dire consequences if we let Obama have this victory." Huckabee said he opposes trade agreements that push wages "lower than the Dead Sea."

Huckabee also reminded us that, "the last time we really fast-tracked something was Obamacare. Why do we want to believe that the government fast-tracking something without thoroughly understanding the implications is the best way to go?"

Another possible presidential candidate, Donald Trump, who literally wrote the book on "The Art of the Deal," tweeted that TPP is a "bad, bad deal" in part because it fails to address Japan's outrageous currency manipulation, which has caused many U.S. steel plants to shut down this year, idling thousands of American steelmakers. Yet Japan's prime minister was recently honored with the rare privilege of addressing a joint meeting of Congress (at which he openly lobbied for the TPP) and entertained at a White House State Dinner.

Another likely presidential candidate is Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal, who declared, "I'm for free trade, but I am not for giving more authority to a president who ignores the Constitution, the separation of powers and will of the American people."

"This particular president must not be given any more power to do anything else to harm this country," Jindal continued. "He cannot be trusted."

TPP is NAFTA On Steroids

Trade Deal Opens Immigration Floodgates

Daniel Halper May 3, 2015 WeeklyStandard.com

In a memo raising concerns about the Trade Promotion Authority (TPA), Alabama senator Jeff Sessions worries that the trade deal would open immigration floodgates.

"There are numerous ways TPA could facilitate immigration increases above current law—and precious few ways anyone in Congress could stop its happening. For instance: language could be included or added into the TPP, as well as any future trade deal submitted for fast-track consideration in the next 6 years, with the clear intent to facilitate or enable the movement of foreign workers and employees into the United States (including intracompany transfers), and there would be no capacity for lawmakers to strike the offending provision. 

The Administration could also simply act on its own to negotiate foreign worker increases with foreign trading partners without ever advertising those plans to Congress. In 2011, the United States entered into an agreement with South Korea—never brought before Congress—to increase the duration of L-1 visas (a visa that affords no protections for U.S. workers)," reads part of the memo from Sessions's office.

"Every year, tens of thousands of foreign guest workers come to the U.S. as part of past trade deals. However, because there is little transparency, estimating an exact figure is difficult. The plain language of TPA provides avenues for the Administration and its trading partners to facilitate the expanded movement of foreign workers into the U.S.— including visitor visas that are used as worker visas. The TPA reads:

“The principal negotiating objective of the United States regarding trade in services is to expand competitive market opportunities for United States services and to obtain fairer and more open conditions of trade, including through utilization of global value chains, by reducing or eliminating barriers to international trade in services... Recognizing that expansion of trade in services generates benefits for all sectors of the economy and facilitates trade."

"This language, and other language in TPA, offers an obvious way for the Administration to expand the number and duration of foreign worker entries under the concept that the movement of foreign workers into U.S. jobs constitutes 'trade in services.'

"Stating that 'TPP contains no change to immigration law' is a semantic rather than a factual argument. Language already present in both TPA and TPP provide the basis for admitting more foreign workers, and for longer periods of time, and language could later be added to TPP or any future trade deal to further increase such admissions.

"The President has already subjected American workers to profound wage loss through executive-ordered foreign worker increases on top of existing record immigration levels. Yet, despite these extraordinary actions, the Administration will casually assert that is has merely modernized, clarified, improved, streamlined, and updated immigration rules. Thus, at any point during the 6-year life of TPA, the Administration could send Congress a trade deal—or issue an executive action subsequent to a trade deal as part of its implementation—that increased foreign worker entry into the U.S., all while claiming it has never changed immigration law.

"The President has circumvented Congress on immigration with serial regularity. But the TPA would yield new power to the executive to alter admissions while subtracting congressional checks against those actions. This runs contrary to our Founders’ belief, as stated in the Constitution, that immigration should be in the hands of Congress. The Supreme Court has consistently held that the Constitution grants Congress plenary authority over immigration policy. 

For instance, the Court ruled in Galvan v. Press, 347 U.S. 522, 531 (1954), that 'the formulation of policies [pertaining to the entry of immigrants and their right to remain here] is entrusted exclusively to Congress... [This principle] has become about as firmly imbedded in the legislative and judicial issues of our body politic as any aspect of our government.' Granting the President TPA could enable controversial changes or increases to a wide variety of visas—such as the H-1B, B-1, E-1, and L-1—including visas that confer foreign nationals with a pathway to a green card and thus citizenship.

"Future trade deals could also have the possible effect of preventing Congress from reforming abuses in our guest worker programs, as countries could complain that limitations on foreign worker travel constituted a trade barrier requiring adjudication by an international body.

"The TPP also includes an entire chapter on 'Temporary Entry' that applies to all parties and that affects U.S. immigration law. Additionally, the Temporary Entry chapter creates a separate negotiating group, explicitly contemplating that the parties to the TPP will revisit temporary entry at some point in the future for the specific purpose of making changes to this chapter—after Congress would have already approved the TPP. This possibility grows more acute given that TPP is a 'living agreement' that can be altered without Congress.

"Proponents of TPA should be required to answer this question: if you are confident that TPA would not enable any immigration actions between now and its 2021 expiration, why not include ironclad enforcement language to reverse any such presidential action?"

The Office of New Americans in Action

Shocker: California's New Immigration Policies Are A Mess

4/23/2015 - Matt Vespa Townhall.com

Earlier this week, California Democrats said they’re preparing to give illegal immigrants a host of new rights and privileges, one of which flies in the face of federal law. It’s a feel good moment with zero foresight–and it does a disservice to immigrants, according to Ruben Navarrette, Jr’s. article in the Daily Beast. 

The Golden State has already passed measures, like granting illegals the ability to have driver’s licenses, but this goodie bag seeks to create a new state position–the Office of New Americans within the governor’s office–provide them with subsidized health care, and restrict businesses using E-Verify during their employment processes. Yes, this proposal is a train wreck waiting to happen, especially with the health care and E-Verify provisions [emphasis mine]:

At a news conference in Sacramento, a group of Democratic legislators—switching back and forth between English and Spanish—recently unveiled a package of 10 bills that would, among other things: create an Office of New Americans in the governor’s office to better serve the undocumented; provide illegal aliens with subsidized health care by extending Medi-Cal coverage to all Californians, regardless of immigration status; limit use of “E-Verify” (the government-run database that employers use to check if prospective hires are legally eligible to work) and prevent “abuse” by employers; and ban businesses from discriminating against residents based on their immigration status, citizenship, or language.

That last one is a beauty. If it extends to hiring, it flies in the face of federal law, namely the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act that made it a federal crime to knowingly hire an illegal alien. Now California wants to make it a state crime to not hire one? Employers can now pick their poison: They can violate one law or the other.

The health care provision is the most expensive item on the menu, with a tab that was originally set at $1.3 billion. Yet no one will say where the money is supposed to come from in cash-strapped California.

Navarrette did mention that one of the bills protects immigrants from being taken advantage of by lawyers, and provides them with a toll-free number to report fraud to state bar. I agree with him that keeping predatory lawyers accountable isn’t a bad thing, but he also noted the many problems with these Democratic initiatives:

First, the undocumented never asked for these things. I’ve interviewed dozens of illegal aliens over the years, and they always say they want three things and only three things from this country—a work permit, a driver’s license, and the ability to travel back and forth across borders to visit the families they left behind. The rest is just window dressing whipped up by politicians to serve their agendas, not those of immigrants.

Second, these kinds of legislative giveaways serve to legitimize unlawful behavior. It’s still a crime—correction, a civil infraction—to enter the United States illegally or overstay a visa and we shouldn’t be embarrassed about saying so. Every time we chip away at the infraction of trampling our borders—whether it’s by pressuring media companies to stop using the phrase “illegal immigrant,” or showering the undocumented with things they didn’t even ask for, we make it more socially acceptable to be an illegal alien.

How is that in the national interest? And what incentive does it provide others to come to this country legally? For that matter, what incentive does it give the undocumented to attempt to change their status if there ever is anything resembling comprehensive immigration reform? Why bother if, thanks to well-intentioned but misguided Democratic legislators in California, you’re already comfortable the way you are?

As Erika Johnsen wrote on Hot Air, California was nowhere near a balanced budget in early 2014. Moreover, we know immigrants come to America for work, not to vote. Nevertheless, it’s probably safe to assume that California Democrats want some political dividends from these initiatives. Yet, if there is no incentive to assimilate, apply for legal status, or become citizens–how will Democrats accomplish that end goal?

Then again, let’s also not marginalize the fact that illegal aliens have broken federal law. They may pay property, sales, and even income taxes in some cases through Tax Identification Numbers, but the point that Navarette makes about how this only diminishes the offense for folks who arrive illegally by “trampling our borders” is disconcerting in the extreme.

One of the many functions of a nation is to protect its territorial integrity–and it seems Washington has moved sluggishly in defending that principle. And that goes for both parties. Nevertheless, save for the common sense provision that protects people from slimy lawyers, these proposals are just detached from reality.