Immigration Clearinghouse

Obama and members of his Domestic Policy Council met in a White House meeting with Democrat Charles E. Schumer of New York and Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina -- who have spent months trying to craft an immigration reform bill

Being in the middle of another fundraising effort,which isn’t going so well at the moment, Gheen sent out three of them this past week, meant to instill fear in the hearts and minds of his mindless lemmings, and to open their wallets so he can continue living his lifestyle.

In one, Gheen lists all of his failures over the past year or so, although he calls them successes. The truth is, as usual, he is taking credit for something his email campaigns have had little effect on the outcome.

ALIPAC promised they were going to inform millions of Americans about the illegal immigration crisis and THEY FAILED!
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ALIPAC’s Willy Gheen, following in the footsteps of that other nutjob hero of his, Frosty Wooldridge is now trying to convince American’s that undocumented immigrants are terrorists.

According to an alleged report in the Asheville Citizen Times, a North Carolina newspaper;
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Mexican immigrant worker believed lynched by border vigilantes in Arizona, February 2008. Note rope burns on neck. Violence against undocumented immigrants is on the rise, thanks to the rhetoric of right wing extremists.

An new report by the well respected and venerable Southern Poverty Law Center titled Rage on the Right: The Year in Hate and Extremism , highlights the new national pastime of “immigrant bashing.

From the report:

Hate groups stayed at record levels — almost 1,000 — despite the total collapse of the second largest neo-Nazi group in America. Furious anti-immigrant vigilante groups soared by nearly 80%, adding some 136 new groups during 2009. And, most remarkably of all, so-called “Patriot” groups — militias and other organizations that see the federal government as part of a plot to impose “one-world government” on liberty-loving Americans — came roaring back after years out of the limelight.

Two of the highest profile examples of this are  July 2008 incident where Luis Ramirez was kicked to death in Shenandoah, Pennsylvania. Eventually six people were indicted for his death—four of them police officers.

Then, just four months later in November in Suffolk, Long Island, New York, Marcelo Lucero was stabbed to death by a group of teens on the lookout for “Beaners.”

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SCHWARZENEGGER: So, there are kinds of things like this that we ought to do in immigration reform and it ought to be done now. We should not every two years say: “this is not the right time,” “it is an election year,” “I think we should postpone it until next year.” It will never get done this way and we will always live in this kind of chaos. It’s living in denial basically, like ignoring that we have this major problem and people are coming across the border.

Cross Posted from Change.org

Anti-immigrant forces love to blame California’s complex economic troubles on undocumented immigrants, prescribing mass deportation, an end to sanctuary policies, and tougher borders as the one-size-fits-all panacea to west coast troubles.

Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, an immigrant himself, hasn’t done much of late to stand up to these falsehoods about his state’s economic woes, causing an L.A. Times editorials to criticize him for wandering “between leading and scapegoating.” Recently, he decided to balance the budget at the expense of the most vulnerable, low-income legal residence immigrants — making only a small short-term dent in the massive deficient while setting CA up for larger long-term losses when immigrants have to turn to more expensive emergency services for care. (On a related note, a recent Health Affairs study looking at that the concept of the immigrant “burden” on health services found that the costs per person for non-citizens, both documented and undocumented, was only about half that of native-born citizens.)

Finally, however, the Terminator-turned-Governor has made it clear, in an interview with Fox News, that immigrants are not to blame for California’s economic downturn — the global crash that has impacted everyone is the biggest culprit, though there are other nuanced reasons regarding the state’s unsustainable tax system and provision of services. But why bother understanding economics when you can just point fingers and say, “the immigrants done it!”

Schwarzenegger also called for immediate immigration reform, saying that Congressional dickering is “living in denial basically” and not providing the solutions we need now. Changing undocumented immigrants into documented ones through a path to legalization would reap economic gains for the entire country, and California would get a chunk of that change. He particularly emphasized the need for immigration reform for students: the practice of allowing international students to come to the U.S. and get an education, then sending them back, is a brain drain out of the country we can’t afford — they should be putting their smarts to work for us here.

Well played. Now, how about standing up for the maligned little guy and not taking out your economic frustrations on legal resident immigrants by singling them out for deprivation of vital services?

ALEX DIBRANCO

And indeed, the know nothings at ALIPAC along with their peerless leader Willy Gheen, love to spew these inaccurate and totally false statistics.