Illegal immigration furor spurs college board member's resignation

Illegal immigration continues to cause political waves in California.

Long Beach businessman Randal Hernandez has become the fourth member of the state community colleges board to step down in the year since the panel angered Republican lawmakers by endorsing legislation giving illegal immigrants access to student financial aid, reports Patrick McGreevy.

Just two days before Hernandez's reappointment was to be heard by the Senate Rules Committee, and having been warned by Republicans that his appointment was in trouble, Hernandez notified Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger on Monday that he was withdrawing his application to serve another term.

The 17-member California Community Colleges Board of Governors angered Republican lawmakers when it voted to support state legislation by Sen. Gil Cedillo (D-Los Angeles) that would have allowed illegal immigrants, under certain conditions, to qualify for student financial aid and community college fee waivers.

Read more about the stepping-down of Randal Hernandez here.

For more on immigration, click here.

-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City

Comments

[Terry]

To hear California's Republican governor and Democratic Legislature tell it, the Golden State's revenues are in such dire straits that the state government must raise taxes to make ends meet.

The facts tell a different story.

Just four years ago, California taxpayers filled the state's coffers with more than $74 billion. In the fiscal year that ended in June, taxpayers sent more than $96 billion to Sacramento — a $22 billion and 23 percent increase in revenues. That's three-and-a-half times the amount of the budget deficit the state is experiencing this year. Clearly, it's not revenues that are lacking. It's spending that is out of whack.

While I fully endorse cutting back on government spending, California does not have to eliminate legitimate spending to balance its budget. It needs to eliminate waste and fraud.

Eliminating waste and fraud was the promise Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger made to voters to get elected to office. But he has ignored the poster child of waste and fraud: illegal immigration. Anyone who comes here illegally to work or take advantage of our social benefits is committing fraud. Any government that allows that to happen is wasteful of its legal residents' money.

The result is an unnecessary deficit.

In 2004, the Federation for American Immigration Reform published the most recent comprehensive report on how much illegal immigration costs the state of California. That report showed an $8.8 billion net loss to the state, enough to cover this year's deficit and provide the state with a $2.8 billion surplus.

And that was four years ago. The costs — and the savings — would be much greater today.

Another study bears that out. While FAIR's study is the latest to focus exclusively on California, a December nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office report that looked at the entire United States reached a similar conclusion, and estimated the costs to California as even higher.

California, the CBO noted, incurs the highest costs from illegal immigration, ranging in the "tens of billions of dollars." Moreover, the report stated: "The tax revenues that unauthorized immigrants generate for state and local governments do not offset the total cost of services provided to those immigrants."

Illegal immigration impacts pocketbook

California is home to about 25 percent of the nation's illegal population and illegal immigrants comprise about 8 percent of California's population. Clearly, illegal immigration impacts the state's pocketbook.

Illegal immigration is not just California's problem and cracking down on illegal immigration is primarily a federal responsibility. Those laws include screening arrestees at local jails for immigration status and developing an instantaneous, much simpler and more effective, electronic-based system to check a worker's eligibility to be in the country, now called E-Verify.

No law is effective, however, if it is not enforced. After Congress made it clear there would be no expanded guest-worker programs until the administrative branch proved it would enforce immigration laws, the administration began to take its duty seriously in the past year. The results have been dramatic. From last August to May of this year, after federal laws began to be enforced, the illegal-immigration population dropped an estimated 11 percent nationwide.

Three concrete efforts

California — home to the largest illegal- immigration population — can take three concrete steps to mirror the federal effort.

1. We know that most illegal immigrants come to the United States to work. California should require every employer in the state, including state agencies and contractors, to use E-Verify to check the immigration status of employees.

2. California should prohibit sanctuary policies and require that all local and state law enforcement agencies cooperate with immigration authorities to remove criminal illegal immigrants, including screening for legal status at local jails.

3. California should end its policy of providing virtually free in-state college tuition for illegal immigrants. This is a matter of fairness as well as fiscal responsibility. Why should U.S. citizens or legal residents who have lived their whole lives in California be penalized for leaving the state for a year, when someone illegally in the country and in the state for a year gets a free ride?

These are simple steps that would have a big impact on California's budget. Rather than raise taxes on law-abiding Californians, Gov. Schwarzenegger and the Legislature should make it untenable for illegal immigrants to drain California's resources.

Unless California wants to attract even more illegal immigrants and waste even more resources by continuing to provide a safe haven in sanctuary cities for them to work and live, it needs to crack down.

BTW, when congress and one of the two presidential winners ram amnesty down our throats next year, the feds will have legalized millions of illegal aliens making them all eligible for state benefits.. The income tax generated from these newly unwanted guests will be non-exsistant. Most, because of the low income. will get a refund from the state. Minumum wage earners do not pay income tax.

[Pete Murphy]

Rampant population growth threatens our economy and quality of life. Immigration, both legal and illegal, are fueling this growth.

I'm not talking just about the obvious problems that we see in the news - growing dependence on foreign oil, carbon emissions, soaring commodity prices, environmental degradation, etc. I'm talking about the effect upon rising unemployment and poverty in America.

I should introduce myself. I am the author of a book titled "Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America." To make a long story short, my theory is that, as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption of products begins to decline out of the need to conserve space. People who live in crowded conditions simply don’t have enough space to use and store many products. This declining per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty.

This theory has huge implications for U.S. policy toward population management, especially immigration policy. Our policies of encouraging high rates of immigration are rooted in the belief of economists that population growth is a good thing, fueling economic growth. Through most of human history, the interests of the common good and business (corporations) were both well-served by continuing population growth. For the common good, we needed more workers to man our factories, producing the goods needed for a high standard of living. This population growth translated into sales volume growth for corporations. Both were happy.

But, once an optimum population density is breached, their interests diverge. It is in the best interest of the common good to stabilize the population, avoiding an erosion of our quality of life through high unemployment and poverty. However, it is still in the interest of corporations to fuel population growth because, even though per capita consumption goes into decline, total consumption still increases. We now find ourselves in the position of having corporations and economists influencing public policy in a direction that is not in the best interest of the common good.

The U.N. ranks the U.S. with eight other countries - India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia and China - as accounting for fully half of the world’s population growth by 2050. The U.S. is the only developed country still experiencing third world-like population growth, most of which is due to immigration. It's absolutely imperative that our population be stabilized, and that's impossible without dramatically reining in immigration, both legal and illegal.

If you’re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, I invite you to visit my web site at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com where you can read the preface for free, join in my blog discussion and, of course, purchase the book if you like. (It's also available at Amazon.com.)

Please forgive the somewhat spammish nature of the previous paragraph. I just don't know how else to inject this new perspective into the immigration debate without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.

Pete Murphy
Author, "Five Short Blasts"

[Rebecca Claire Teensma]

If we are that 'wealthy' that we can open financial aid to illegal aliens, then there is enough money not to raise taxes, to pay nurses more, support transportation infrastructure and finance more cops.

[M A Andrews]

He can now join Cedillo and Peralta in spending
more time with his family.

nunbersusa
alipac
saveourstate
ccir
capsweb

[Brittanicus]

There should be no excuse for violations of any Immigration law, or any law. That includes Section 274 felonies under the federal Immigration and Nationality Act, INA 274A(a)(1)(A): they broke Federal law. It states, "..a person (including a group of persons, business, organization, or local government) When a citizen or permanent resident breaks a law, if caught we immediately end up in front of a judge. I have been reading more and more the lenient sentences illegal aliens get or even a slap on the hand. Obama, McCain, Governors, Mayors, Councilors, City managers take notice! 80 percent of the American people are watching!

Not just Postville, Iowa meatpacking facility were in violation of the law. How many more nefarious companies out their, violating safety and immigration laws.

When ICE knocks on the door eventually--as they will, under the Federal SAVE ACT (H.R.4088). NUMBERSUSA has all the answers to the pestilence called OVERPOPULATION