March 30, 2009 by Bradley Maged.

According to an article on usatoday.com:  “The nation’s immigration courts are now so clogged that nearly 90,000 people accused of being in the United States illegally waited at least two years for a judge to decide whether they must leave, one of the last bottlenecks in a push to more strictly enforce immigration laws.”

This relates to the previous post.  There are estimated to be as many as 20 million undocumented aliens in the country.  If continuous workplace raids of cooks and janitors are what the government chooses to do, of course backlogs will follow.  A comprehensive immigration solution that allows undocumented aliens to learn English, pay a fine, pay taxes and go to the back of the green card line in order to legalize their status is worth considering.  We tried “deporting all the janitors” and it has not been too effective.  The poor economic conditions have probably been far more effective in getting the undocumented to leave the US than the high-profile, costly, inefficient raids have been.  In these times, taxpayer funds should not be wasted on raids of low-level factory workers.  There are much bigger fish to fry.       

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March 30, 2009 by Bradley Maged.

According to an article on washingtonpost.com:  “Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has delayed a series of proposed immigration raids and other enforcement actions at U.S. workplaces in recent weeks, asking agents in her department to apply more scrutiny to the selection and investigation of targets as well as the timing of raids, federal officials said.”

This is a step in the right direction for the Obama Administration.  Arresting undocumented cooks and janitors should not be the number one priority of agents whose time would be better spent focusing on true criminals who pose a threat to the nation.  

A policy shift in relation to immigration is underway and time will tell if it succeeds.  The Bush immigration mess was years in the making and it takes time for government agencies to make major policy shifts from the “anti-immigration” trend we have seen to a sensible system that works.

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