The defeat of a comprehensive federal immigration bill last week was met with widespread disappointment and frustration by those in Eastern Connecticut tied to the immigrant community.

The bill would have provided measures for tougher border security and workplace enforcement, along with a plan to legalize an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants and to create a temporary worker program.

Ford Desir thought lawmakers were off to a good start.

The Haitian man spent 22 years in the United States and became a citizen before recently returning to work for the Haitian government. Desir said he wanted to see expanded guest worker programs and longtime illegal immigrants become citizens.

“My first reaction is frustration because we’ve been down that road,” Provatas said.

Andrea Amato of Eastford said the immigrants she teaches English “know how important the bill is to their families who have been here for a long time and who pay taxes.”

She said she doesn’t expect any changes until the Bush administration is replaced. The bill, she said, tried to accommodate too many amendments from legislators pushing their own interests.

Bill Stover, director of migratory and supplementary programs for Connecticut’s Migratory Children’s Program, said he was just as disheartened by Gov. M. Jodi Rell’s veto of a bill allowing in-state college tuition rates for undocumented immigrant high school graduates.

“You want to see these kids go on to be productive,” he said. “It’s just very disappointing.”

Because she sees the need from local businesses, Provatas said the nation’s immigrant worker program needs to be reformed.

“We do have employers here in southeastern Connecticut who want to do it legally, but can’t get the numbers,” Provatas said.

Desir said he’d try to track the issue the next time the federal government tries to make changes.

We are by far the most generous nation on the earth when it comes to (legal) immigration and allow over one million foreign nationals a year to call this country home. Allowing another two million a year to sneak across our borders can easily lead to anarchy. We’ve already begun to see the destruction in many of our cities and the downfall of our education system, health care, language, customs, welfare, increased crime, etc. This argument is not about race, it is about following the laws that our government put in place decades ago.

Jul. 4, 2007 12:00 AM
It’s official. Arizona has declared war on the forces that fuel illegal immigration. No longer are our leaders content to blame the sum total of our ills on the poor guy who sneaks across the border to get a job.

Now, Republicans and Democrats alike are pointing squarely at the people who lure them: the employers.

Wouldn’t you love to be a fly on the wall inside Arizona’s construction and restaurant industries this week? I have a good idea what people in those industries are saying.

It’s probably a lot like what the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry is saying. For years, chamber lobbyists have fought any attempt to hold employers accountable, all the while contending that most businesses try to follow the law.

The headline on their press release Monday? “Employer-sanctions bill strikes a crippling blow to Arizona business.” I’m not sure how a bill that penalizes employers who “knowingly” hire an illegal immigrant deals a crippling blow to business when most businesses are already trying to follow the law. Draw your own conclusions.

The point remains that Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, and the GOP-controlled Legislature have now gone where the feds fear to tread.

It strikes me that the Fourth of July is a good day to ponder that fact. This is a country founded by great and courageous men, based on bedrock principles of fairness and equality.

What we seem to have today are wimps and wannabes who spend most of their time with a wet finger in the air and who are more interested in career than country.

Two hundred and thirty-one years ago, our leaders brought us the Declaration of Independence. Last week, our leaders in Congress brought us a declaration of incompetence. They can’t figure out what to do about illegal immigration so they’re punting until 2009.

Meanwhile, the Homeland Security chief says, “We don’t really have the ability to enforce the law with respect to illegal work in this country in a way that’s truly effective.”

And so it falls to the states to take the lead, in hopes that the feds will grow a spine and fix the problem. Because the solutions won’t make anyone completely happy.

No. 1: Get control of the border ASAP. Fix it so people we’ve deported stay deported.

No. 2: Once we have control, legalize those who were here before Jan. 1, 2006, and can prove it with something other than a phony affidavit. They would need a clean criminal record, pay a fine and learn English. We, in turn, would acknowledge that it’s amnesty but recognize we had a hand in their arrival. At least, our employers did.

No. 3: Create a tamperproof ID card and put employers on notice that if they’re caught with ineligible workers, they’re in big trouble. A fine equal to whatever per capita cost we can attach to illegal immigration sounds about right.

No. 4: Establish a guest-worker plan that’s fair to the American worker, who will do most jobs, I suspect, if they pay a decent wage.

And No. 5: Pass the DREAM Act now. This is America, and in America we don’t punish people for crimes they didn’t commit. So give a break to those who came as kids and have stayed out of trouble. Give them a shot at a decent education and who knows? They might actually contribute to this country, which is all they’re asking.

Many people today are cheering the death of the Senate’s immigration-reform bill. I’m one of them. It was unwieldy and unenforceable.

By JULIA PRESTON
Published: July 4, 2007

Immigration lawyers raised unusually irate protests yesterday after the State Department and the immigration service abruptly withdrew tens of thousands of job-based visas they had offered last month to foreign professionals hoping to become permanent residents in the United States.

The outcry was provoked by a terse announcement on Monday in which the State Department said it would not grant any more visas for the 2007 fiscal year to foreigners applying to become permanent residents based on their job skills. That notice reversed one the department had issued on June 13 announcing a two-month window starting July 2 for aspiring, high-skilled immigrants from around the world to present applications for visas known as green cards.

The State Department said the 60,000 visas it had expected to offer would no longer be available because of “sudden backlog reduction efforts” by Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that processes applications for the visas offered by the department.

In a statement yesterday, the American Immigration Lawyers Association accused the two agencies of perpetrating a “hoax” and a “bait and switch” against hopeful legal immigrants who played by the book.

“Here people followed the rules and did everything right, yet without warning or explanation the door was slammed in their faces,” said Kathleen Campbell Walker, the president of the association.

To apply, immigrants must undergo medical examinations and assemble documents to prove their job skills and show that a United States employer has sponsored them. Foreigners must be in the United States when they present their applications, which are processed on a first-come, first-served basis.

Because of backlogs for employment-based visas, foreigners have had to wait many years just to be allowed to file their applications.

Thousands of medical and technology professionals, including many working here on temporary visas, scrambled for weeks to get their documents together, in some cases canceling travel plans, in order to file their applications on Monday, the first day of the window. The State Department and the immigration agency closed the window without accepting a single application.

“I am concerned that such action may violate the law and could threaten the integrity of our immigration system,” Representative Zoe Lofgren, Democrat of California who is chairwoman of the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration, wrote in letters yesterday to Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state. Ms. Lofgren warned that the federal government could face costly litigation because of its change of course.

The State Department said it would begin accepting applications on Oct. 1 for 2008 visas. On July 30, the immigration agency will raise its processing fees by an average of 66 percent.

GARDEN GROVE, Calif.—Three dozen Southern California high school and college students launched a hunger strike to advocate a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrant students.

The students vowed Monday to take only water for a week.

Launching the protest at the offices of Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez in Orange County, they held signs declaring “I Want to Be a Lawyer” and “Bachelor Degree of Science in Chemistry.”

The group included graduates and students of the University of California, Los Angeles, and UC Irvine.

The protesters said they were illegally brought into the United States as children by their parents, and want Sanchez to support the stalled Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act.

The act would create a path to legality for undocumented immigrants planning to attend college or join the military and who came to the U.S. with their families before they turned 16.

Sanchez spokeswoman Paula Negrete said the congresswoman had not supported the act because she “was hoping for comprehensive immigration reform.”