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Today, Mitt Romney’s campaign heartily accepted the endorsement of renown anti-immigrant activist, Kris Kobach. As Mitt Romney emerges as the leading contender for the GOP nomination, he and those he affiliates with will garner closer scrutiny, making it critical for Romney’s campaign to understand who Kobach is and why his policies engender such strong emotion.

Kobach and his anti-immigrant cronies are behind much of the draconian anti-immigrant legislation wreaking havoc on the business and economies of Alabama and Arizona. They are driving an extreme ‘attrition through enforcement” immigration agenda that is bad for business and seeks to make life in America so unworkable for the foreign-born that they will pack up and leave. However, the strategy is backfiring and this experimental legislation is driving state economies deeper into recession, locking them into long and costly legal battles, and diminishing state reputations and business opportunities.

The Romney campaign needs to understand that while these anti-immigrant initiatives have served to advance Kobach politically and financially and are supported by the extreme anti-immigrant movement in America, virtually all of them have ended up being costly failures for which taxpayers ultimately foot the bill. Romney touts his pro-business bona fides, however these anti-immigrant policies are anti-business and are should be taken from the state to the federal level or allowed to take hold in other states.

Being anti-immigrant and pursing costly, anti-business policymaking does not appeal to a majority of Americans and will do nothing to repair our economy and bring our nation together.

In the world of political campaigns, the more support you get the better. But it’s important to remember that you are judged by the company you keep. The Romney campaign should carefully consider the impact of embracing extremists and what those budding relationships signal to a range of audiences who are weary of anti-immigrant posturing.

Photo by Gage Skidmore.

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Congress has been unable to pass any meaningful immigration legislation this year, but the House couldn’t miss a chance to stick it to immigrants by going after their U.S. citizen children in a recent tax bill. While Americans are debating whether taxes on millionaires should be raised, the House, at least, is planning to raise taxes on the most vulnerable of American citizens.

The tax package that is likely to pass the House and make its way to the Senate this week denies immigrant taxpayers who file their taxes using an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN) the ability to claim the Additional Child Tax Credit for their U.S. citizen children. This provision will impact 2 million families and up to 4 million U.S. citizen children and take away a tax credit designed to keep children out of poverty.

Child tax credits can only be claimed by those paying into the system and were designed to alleviate some of the burden that tax payment imposes on low-income, working families. Taking away this credit from tax-paying families could drive more than two million families closer to poverty.

Unauthorized immigrants are required to pay their taxes, just like all Americans. Many fulfill their tax payment obligations using an ITIN, but they are not eligible for the vast majority of benefits their tax dollars pay into.

According to the Treasury Department’s Inspector General, in 2010, ITIN filers reported $60 billion dollars in wages, which according to an estimate by the National Immigration Law Center means they generated an estimated $9.2 billion in payroll taxes. This revenue, which benefits us all, is ten times the amount that would be saved by stripping the child tax credit away from the children of ITIN filers.

ITIN filers are doing the right thing by paying into the tax system with little hope of collecting any future benefits for themselves. If the Senate follows suit, the only ones hurt in the process will be the children.

Photo by miuenski.

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In the past several days news reports have depicted good old American ingenuity taking on our broken and outdated immigration system. CNN ran a story last week from Georgia about a handful of educators who have taken matters into their own hands after the state’s Board of Regents passed an extreme law in 2010 banning undocumented immigrant children from attending Georgia’s top public colleges and universities—banned despite the fact that these kids pay three times the rate of other in-state students due to their immigration status.

In response, professors out of the University of Georgia launched a new institution called Freedom University, an educational institution specifically designed for college-ready kids subject to the ban. The University’s website catalogs an impressive list of academics that are supported and taught at the school. Their mission statement reads: “Freedom University defies the Regents’ ban on undocumented students, offering rigorous, college-level instruction to all academically qualified students regardless of their immigration status and without fees or tuition.” While students at Freedom University will not receive college credit, professors report that students’ remain enthusiastic and are willing to learn despite this limitation.

The next example comes from Silicon Valley, the heart of American innovation today. Artstechnica.com, a technology news site, reported that a new company called “Blueseed” is developing a creative solution for those high-tech California companies struggling to get the necessary visas to bring in the high-skilled workers they need.

Blueseed’s plan is to “bypass the political process and solve the problem directly” by purchasing a ship (yes, an actual boat) to be used as a “floating incubator anchored in international waters off the coast of California.” The ship would give high-skilled workers a place to live and work just a few miles off the coast of Silicon Valley. Artstechnica.com writes:

“If Blueseed’s audacious hack of the immigration system is successful, it will not only open up Silicon Valley to a broader range of entrepreneurs, it will also shine a spotlight on the barriers American law places in the way of immigrants seeking to start businesses in the United States.”

American innovation has long tackled our nation’s problems and often develops creative solutions that make all of our lives better. Our broken immigration system is apparently no exception. While Congress may well continue to cede its authority and responsibility to fix our immigration system, their lack of political courage certainly won’t stop groups of thoughtful, committed citizens from doing what is in their power to make America and our lives better today.

Photo by milan.boers.

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Today, the head of the legal arm of one of the most notorious restrictionist groups in the nation boldly admitted his work on Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law aims to end public education for the children of immigrants. Michael Hethmon of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), an offshoot of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), made no bones about being the author of the education provision in HB 56—which on its face requires public schools to determine the immigration status of enrolling students and their parents, but in reality chips away at children’s ability to get an education.

In fact, FAIR’s long-term vision to erode any and all rights afforded to the children of immigrants becomes increasingly clear with each new FAIR initiative—from attempts to repeal access to birth certificates at the state level through their state legislative arm (State Legislators for Legal Immigration) to IRLI’s litigation strategies in the courts that attempt to turn U.S. policy against immigrant children.

In defense of the education provision, Alabama Attorney General Luther Strange assured a judge that the provision would require nothing more than data collection and that “no child will be denied an education based on unlawful status.” However in the same New York Times article, Hethmon of IRLI admitted that HB 56’s education provision is just a first step:

The man who wrote the schools provision … that it is not meant as a deterrent — at least not yet. It is, however, a first step in a larger and long-considered strategy to topple a 29-year-old Supreme Court ruling that all children in the United States, regardless of their immigration status, are guaranteed a public education.

Hethmon then goes on to explain why this data collection provision is an important part of bigger plans and why they were careful no to go too far in HB 56:

Mr. Hethmon said the problem with these challenges is that they have not taken the trouble to gather the evidence the court found missing in Plyler.

“The toughest question has been obtaining reliable — and I mean reliable for peer-reviewed research purposes — censuses of the number of illegal alien students enrolled in school districts,” he said. “That information could be compared with other sorts of performance or resource allocation issues.

That information is then passed on to the State Board of Education not only to prepare an annual report with the data but also to “contract with reputable scholars and research institutions” to determine the costs, fiscal and otherwise, of educating illegal immigrants.

Because no one is actually barred from attending school and the data is not passed on to law enforcement, the provision passes constitutional muster, Mr. Hethmon said.

But it also potentially enables a fresh challenge to Plyler v. Doe, and the idea that schools are obligated to provide a free education to illegal immigrants.”

There is no doubt the “reputable scholars and research institutions” Hethmon refers to include FAIR’s research arm and sister group, the Center for Immigration Studies. If the Alabama Department of Education continues to collect data on the immigration status of immigrant children and makes it public, it won’t be long before FAIR and CIS produce data on the “fiscal costs of educating the children of immigrants in Alabama.”

While the New York Times article also quotes well-respected legal scholars who feel the chances of a repeal of Plyer V. Doe are highly unlikely, the damage that would be done by allowing these anti-immigrant groups access to private student data is undoubted. FAIR will exploit this information in order to wage a public relations campaign against the children of immigrants.

FAIR and company, also known as the Tanton Network, are continuing to build an elaborate infrastructure and execute a long term plan that systematically chips away at the rights of immigrant children.  It’s time Americans, beginning with Alabamians, put their collective foot down against this.

Photo by cybrarian77.

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For years, data produced by restrictionist, anti-immigrant advocacy groups have permeated politics and policy. Today is no different. What’s alarming, however, is the ease with which politicians and lawmakers are using this dishonest data to support their restrictive positions on immigration.

Take the recent passage of HB 56 in Alabama. Sponsors of the bill are using flawed data produced by the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) to defend the passage of the bill. Using FAIR’s numbers, they claim unauthorized immigrants in Alabama use public services to the tune of $280 million a year. In the media, these supporters fail (as does the media reporting on it) to cite where the numbers come from. Passing them off as “official” state data, the average person would assume that these numbers were crunched by Alabama’s own legislature or government agencies. However, this is simply not the case. In fact, Alabama legislators failed to produce a fiscal note enumerating the fiscal impacts of HB 56, so the only fiscal justification they had for this bill was flawed data from FAIR.

Strikingly, during the last few debates among GOP presidential aspirants, more than one candidate referenced data by FAIR and the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), another extreme anti-immigrant research group. Michele Bachmann recently quoted FAIR data claiming the costs of unauthorized immigration to the U.S. were $113 billion dollars per year, with $82 billion being shouldered by states. This is the same study Alabama officials pulled their state data from and passed off as official data.

Explaining the basic flaws in FAIR’s reporting is actually simple: they exaggerate the costs associated with unauthorized immigrants while vastly undercounting their contributions. What’s most appalling about their “economic” analysis is how they include the costs of educating the U.S.-born children of immigrants and never credit back the productivity of these children when they grow into contributing adult citizens. FAIR also adds unsubstantiated costs derived from unsupported assumptions about the children of unauthorized immigrants. For example, FAIR assumes all children of unauthorized immigrants are using ESL programs and free and reduced price lunch programs. Finally, to exaggerate the costs as much as possible, FAIR vastly underestimates the contributions that immigrants make as consumers, workers, and taxpayers. This formula allows FAIR to make it look as if unauthorized immigrants cost more than they contribute.

Another recent reference to restrictionist data came from Mitt Romney and his staff, who quoted a CIS study which claims almost half the jobs created in Texas under Governor Perry went to unauthorized workers. Fortunately, these numbers were challenged by FactCheck.org, which noted that the report has been debunked in the Dallas Morning News by Pia Orrenius, an economist and immigration expert at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas—and by a senior fellow at the Texas Public Policy Foundation who wrote an analysis critical of the CIS study.

No one is arguing that the drastic increase in unauthorized immigration over the past two decades is not an appropriate debate topic or that policy changes aren’t needed. However, we will never achieve real solutions unless we demand intellectual honesty, rather than pandering and platitudes, in debates on immigration. The data and research put forth by anti-immigrant groups, whose only solution is to deport them all, cannot be the basis for honest policymaking or policy discussion.

Photo by jypsygen.