Nebraska Town Votes to Banish Illegal Immigrants

The New York Times reports the residents of Freemont, Nebraska are trying to pass a law banning illegal immigrants from all other jobs and even rental homes. The new law, if it passes, will try to bar landlords from renting to those in the country illegally, requiring renters to provide information of the person to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses.

Opponents say paying to defend such a local law would require a significant cut in Fremont city services or a major tax increase — or combination of the two. But advocates feel federal authorities failed to enforce immigration restrictions, forcing places like Freemont, Nebraska with a small but growing Hispanic population to take matters into their own hands.

The advocates of the law complained that illegal immigrants were causing an increase in crime, taking jobs that would once have gone to longtime residents and changing the character of their quiet city, some 30 miles of farm fields from Omaha.

Fremont’s Hispanic population, practically nonexistent two decades ago, has grown to about 2,000 people, according to some estimates. No one knows how many illegal immigrants live in Fremont, and the estimates (depending on which side of this debate one is on) vary enormously—as stated by the New York Times article.

It’s interesting to note how the new law wouldn’t apply to the area’s two largest meatpacking plants –including Hormel. They happen to be just outside official city limits.

This is what the A.CL.U. had to say in a statement about the Nebraska issue, “If this law goes into effect, it will cause discrimination and racial profiling against Latinos and others who appear to be foreign born, including U.S. citizens,” Laurel Marsh, executive director of A.C.L.U. Nebraska , said in a statement issued late Monday. “The A.C.L.U. Nebraska has no option but to turn to the courts to stop this un-American and unconstitutional ordinance before the law goes into effect. Not only do local ordinances such as this violate federal law, they are also completely out of step with American values of fairness and equality.”

Some residents were outraged by the choice, and began collecting signatures on a petition to put the question to a vote — the vote that ultimately came on Monday.

Read the the full article here. Tell me your thoughts on Facebook or @ronideutch on Twitter.

Arizona's Bill Is Bad For Business

There has been a lot of media attention placed on the effects of Arizona’s new immigration law and the impact on local residents. However, the bill also includes strict new immigration requirements for business owners. As this article from Forbes.com explains, the law is likely to make doing business in Arizona much more difficult.

SB 1070 is the most extreme anti-business law in recent history. For instance, sections 7 and 8 set out punishments for employers who knowingly or intentionally hire undocumented workers. In both cases for a first offense, the employer has to fire all undocumented workers, sign an affidavit attesting to that and promising not to repeat his mistake, and have all his business licenses suspended.

Additionally, and perhaps most gallingly, the business is then put on a three-year probation (five years for those that intentionally hire undocumented workers) and must file quarterly records to prove that it has not since broken the law again. This would amount to businesses being presumed guilty and being forced to prove their innocence. It will hurt entrepreneurship and endanger the economic recovery.

Most egregiously, if a business commits a second such offense and hires an undocumented worker, all of its business licenses are permanently revoked. Because it is illegal to operate a business without a state-sanctioned license in the state of Arizona, that amounts to the government forcibly shutting down someone's business.

Adam Smith, the father of modern economics, warned against business licensing because it is used to limit competition and entrench politically sanctioned monopolies. It accomplishes that by limiting entry or destroying businesses already in existence. A simple administration revocation of a piece of paper can be used to destroy someone's livelihood. This is not only destructive to business in the short term but sets a dangerous precedent.

Start-up Visas Can Jump-Start the Economy

We all know that companies like Google, Intel, and Yahoo are revenue-making machines in the United States. However, you may be surprised to learn that immigrants started all of the aforementioned companies. Paul Kedrosky and Brad Feld recently published an opinion piece for the Wall Street Journal explaining how start-up Visa’s may be the secret to improving the United State economy. Check out a snippet below, or you can find the full text at WJS.com.

While fast-growing companies have long been the main source of new jobs and innovation, this country makes it outrageously difficult for immigrants to launch new companies here. This doesn't make any sense. After all, Google, Pfizer, Intel, Yahoo, DuPont, eBay and Procter & Gamble are all former start-ups founded by immigrants. Where would this country be today without their world-changing innovations?

Immigrants have not only founded big, well-known companies. Foreign-born residents made up just 12.5% of the U.S. population in 2008. But nearly 40% of technology company founders and 52% of founders of companies in Silicon Valley.

Yet we don't seem to care. We send recent, foreign-born university science and engineering graduates back to their own countries after their student visas expire—unless these creative sorts are willing to spend some of the most entrepreneurial years of their lives working in a big company under an H-1B visa after they finish their studies.

For those who studied elsewhere, but who nonetheless want to bring their job-creating ideas here, American policies treat them—the job-creating, trouble-making innovators that they are—as a cross between deadbeats and queue-jumpers. Why can't they wait in line like everyone else to get a visa in five years or so? What's their hurry?

Their hurry is Joseph Schumpeter's hurry: They want to hustle out and disrupt markets when the opportunity arises.

Tax Provision May Derail Immigration Reform

The Hill reports this morning that conservative Republicans in the House have plans to derail the Senate immigration compromise based on a procedural matter. The bill includes tax policy, which according to the Constitution, has to originate in the House, and some Republicans have lined up to issue a "blue slip" stop to the legislation on that basis.

House conservatives are ready to stop the Senate immigration bill in its tracks with a procedural weapon should the contentious measure win passage in the upper chamber. The procedural weapon House conservatives may hold is a constitutional rule that revenue-related bills must originate in the House. The current Senate immigration measure requires that illegal immigrants pay back taxes before becoming citizens. This requirement opens the door to a House protest, dubbed a “blue slip”. The "blue slip" comes from the color of its paper.

House Republicans used the same back-taxes mandate for a blue-slip threat that derailed last year’s immigration conference. The new Senate bill still must survive two more weeks of voter scrutiny and contentious amendments, but several conservatives already are lying in wait for the Senate to “make the same mistake twice,” as one House GOP aide put it.

“If we get an opportunity to do it, believe me, we’ll do it,” the aide said. “I think it’s going to be a matter of who will get there first. A number of people in the House are dying to be fingered as the person who killed [the Senate bill].”

During a blogger conference call with Senator John McCain, one of the bill's architects, the conservative blogger, Captain Ed of Captain's Quarters, mentioned a Boston Globe story that reported the removal of a requirement to pay back taxes before entering either the Z-visa or Y-visa program. The White House reportedly requested that section be removed, and the blogger asked the Senator why illegal immigrants would get a pass on paying back taxes when American citizens don't get that privilege.

Senator McCain hadn't heard about the removal of the requirement. “I’d not heard that proposal on the part of the president,” McCain said, according to a transcript of the call. “I would resist that.” In fact, Senator McCain went back and reinstated the provision after the blogger conference call.

Inadvertently, Senator McCain may have provided an "out" for House Republicans to at least delay the bill's consideration. While any Representative can blue-slip a revenue-producing bill from the Senate, it takes a majority to enforce it. Given the heat from both sides of this debate, that may not be difficult to arrange, and it would require the Senate negotiators to start from Square One.

“We would certainly have the right [to a blue slip] and could exercise it,” another House GOP aide said.

Via Captain's Quarters.