1.     Openers

Dear Readers:

The past few weeks have been extremely eventful when it comes to immigration. It seems that immigration is the issue that refuses to be ignored no matter how dangerous politically it is for politicians. In our last issue, we mentioned the then breaking news that Arizona had passed a draconian immigration law that was sending shockwaves around the country.

We also spent a lot of time explaining the dueling immigration news – the unveiling of the Democrats’ plans for immigration reform.

The two issues are not unrelated – far from it. Many backers of the Arizona law have blamed Washington for failing to address the broken immigration system and the vacuum of leadership has led states to try and deal with the problem themselves. Thus, if Congress would just address immigration, SB1070, the Arizona law, would not be needed.

Of course, if it were it so simple, Congress would have passed immigration reform a long time ago. There currently seem to be major areas of contention preventing Congress from passing a reform bill. First, there is a major disagreement over what is the appropriate punishment for people who are seeking legalization after having broken immigration laws. The hardliners believe permanent exile is the only appropriate punishment. The moderates and those on the left believe there are other appropriate, proportionate punishments including paying fines, providing community service, paying back taxes, learning English, etc.

The other major area of disagreement is really an inside fight between two groups supporting reform – organized labor and organized business owners. The fight is over proposed changes to our legal immigration system. Creating a guest worker program and reforming existing immigration programs for workers has become a push and pull over issues like whether a commission should be created to control admission numbers and how restrictive the H-1B program should become.

That’s not to say that there are not other issues, but these two present the most serious obstacles.

Whether we’ll get reform this year has become the new parlor game amongst immigration advocates, but it seems to me that we’ve crossed a line where at least a major immigration bill will be introduced. It might be that a vote happens in the next few months or the vote will be postponed until after the election. In my opinion, it’s now less likely that reform will be postponed until next year or after the 2012 elections. This also doesn’t mean that the bill will pass – only that it will get debated and get a vote. Many political observers believe that merely getting a vote helps Democrats.

*****

In firm news, I’ve been on the radio a lot over the last week – four interviews with stations in Phoenix, Tucson, Santa Fe and on Sirius/XM Radio’s Mike Feder Show.

Also, Siskind Susser is a co-sponsor of a program on employer immigration compliance that will be held at the Brooks Museum in Memphis on May 20^th. More information can be found at http://immigrationpanel.eventbrite.com/.

*****

Readers are reminded that they are welcome to contact my law office if they would like to schedule a telephone or in person consultation with me or one of my colleagues. If you are interested, please call my office at 901-682-6455.

Regards,

Greg Siskind