Joe Wilson's war

If you didn't know Joe Wilson before, you probably do now.

U.S. Rep. Joe Wilson is the talk of the nation today after yelling "You Lie" at President Barack Obama during his speech to congress last night. Wilson was responding to the president’s statement that illegal immigrants will not receive coverage under the proposed healthcare plan.

The S.C. Republican is getting reviled on the left. The reactions on the right vary from withering criticism to high fives. One conservative blogger questioned why "Joe Wilson didn’t throw a shoe at Obama."

Wilson apologized for letting “my emotions get the best of me,” but said he disagreed with the president’s remarks regarding the coverage of illegal immigrants in the healthcare bill.

Democrats and some Republicans took the congressman to task for disrespecting the President while speaking in the hallowed halls of Congress.

"I've never seen anything like that before," said Rep. Earl Pomeroy, D-N.D., "We do not invite the president of the United States into the House of Representatives and hurl insults."

Wilson's website crashed last night. At 11:30 a.m. this morning, it was still down from excessive traffic.

Conservative bloggers have hailed Wilson as a hero, calling on supporters to send him thank you notes, money, and push their representatives to act more like him.

“President Obama tried to lie to the whole nation tonight and a brave Congressman by the name of Joe Wilson called him on it,” Alipac wrote on its website.

Conservatives continue to raise questions about whether illegal immigrants could benefit from healthcare reform. The House version of the bill prohibits spending federal money to help illegal immigrants get coverage. They would likely be able to continue to receive emergency room treatment as they do now.

Photo: Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Controlling illegal immigration: What a state can do

A new report says states – the "laboratories of democracy" – must do more to help the federal government combat illegal immigration.

The Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, found that states and localities can take more actions to control their jurisdictions. Congress should help them, not by legalizing immigrants here without authorization, but by amending the statutory provisions that limit the actions they can take and by increasing the legal avenues for foreigners to come to the United States to work.

"The only way to end or significantly slow illegal immigration in America is to create a mosaic of laws across the country that increase the cost of illegal immigration to a point that the supply dwindles to a trickle as the demand is filled by legal workers."

Read the report here.

The Heritage report says the federal government can’t combat illegal immigration alone. Six thousand U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents are not enough to address the 12 million illegal immigrants estimated to be in the United States.

Photo: steakpinball

Can immigration enforcement protect workers?

A new report raises concerns of exploitation of Latino workers by egregious employers taking advantage of our broken immigration system.

The report was conducted by the immigrant rights advocacy group National Council of La Raza and cites data from academic studies, the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Census and others. It finds, among other things, that the Latino occupation fatality rate was 21.1 percent higher than white workers and 17.9 percent higher than black workers in 2007.

You can read the NCLR study here.

We touched on some of these same findings in our series, Cruelest Cuts, and how the poultry industry ignored injured workers at its plants to help boost profits. Many of the victims were illegal immigrants too afraid to complain.

Anyone familiar with this blog knows that the NCLR is a staunch advocate for comprehensive immigration reform. So it should come as no surprise that the group maintains that many of these problems would not be as great if many of these workers could be legalized and therefore unfraid to join unions built to protect them, and feel safe to speak out against exploitation.

It’s an argument many advocates are making.

But there is also an argument that increased enforcement of our nation’s immigration laws would produce similar results.

In January 2007, Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents raided the Smithfield Pork plant in Tarheel. Months later ICE followed up with additional arrests of workers and many others fled.

According to a report by the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies, written by former Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Jerry Kammer, the raid turned out to be a key factor in the December 2008 vote to unionize the plant.

You can read the CIS study here.

Similar working conditions criticized by the NCLR study had been being reported for years at the Tarheel plant, the world’s largest pork plant. Yet, for 16 years, organizers were unsuccessful in starting a union.

Unions are not the savior, however. Some of the plants we reported on in Cruelest Cuts are also unionized. In plants with many illegal immigrant workers, union membership is down and therefore so is the union's influence and ability to demand better working conditions.

Advocates like NCLR, as well as many economists, say America needs more additional immigrant workers. But that argument is going to be difficult to make in today's economy with so many Americans out of work.

Photo: JOHN D. SIMMONS - jsimmons@charlotteobserver.com

Massachusetts cuts health care for legal immigrants

Here's a twist.

Gov. Deval Patrick stepped right over the controversy of offering healthcare to illegal immigrants and announced Massachusetts was cutting back state-subsidized health insurance for 31,000 legal immigrants.

The governor announced that legal immigrants would no longer receive coverage for dental, hospice or skilled nursing under the new plan. In a conference call with reporters, Patrick said his administration struggled to find a solution “that preserves the promise of health care reform” after the state legislature cut most of the $130 million it had previously allotted to immigrant health care, to help close a budget deficit, according to the New York Times.

Photo: Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick speaks to reporters at the Statehouse in Boston.

Immigrant rights groups honor Ted Kennedy

I've been getting a lot of email messages from advocates who have been expressing their sadness over the passing of Sen. Edward Kennedy. I thought I’d share some of them with you.

We reported today about his mixed reputation in the South. Liberals loved him for championing education, health care and civil rights. Conservatives saw him as the definition of liberalism, big government and an advocate for entitlement programs.

Among immigrant rights’ groups, he was a national hero.

Here are excerpts from what they had to say:

If your American family began its journey in this country with the arrival in the last four decades of a single refugee or immigrant striving for a better life, you owe a special debt of gratitude to Senator Kennedy. The way to give back is to personally commit yourself to fighting for the justice, civil rights, and basic American decency that Senator Kennedy fought for throughout his life.
- Rich Stolz, Campaign Manager for the Reform Immigration for America campaign.

The great-grandson of eight immigrants to America, the brother of two of America's most visionary leaders on fighting for a fair and just immigration system, Senator Kennedy was in his own right the architect of the modern struggle to honor America's legacy as nation built by, populated by, and defined by immigrants from around the world.
--Ali Noorani, Executive Director of the National Immigration Forum, a non-partisan, non-profit pro-immigrant advocacy organization in Washington.

Senator Kennedy worked tirelessly for the past five decades to make the U.S. immigration system one that is color-blind, more just, and a safe haven for people fleeing persecution and upheaval around the world. In so doing, Senator Kennedy helped change the character of the immigration system, and indeed the country, bringing the United States a step closer to its founding ideals of fairness and opportunity for all.
-- Doris Meissner, who heads Migration Policy Institute’s U.S. Immigration Policy Program and served as INS Commissioner during the Clinton administration.

Former migrant worker heads to space

A former migrant worker is scheduled to lift off for space this week. Jose Hernandez, a NASA astronaut, once toiled in California’s farm fields with his Mexican parents.

Hernandez didn't learn English until he was 12, according to the Associated Press.

California-born Hernandez is actually one of two Mexican-Americans who will be on board space shuttle Discovery when it launches this week. (Thunderstorms prevented Discovery from blasting off early Tuesday.)

Hernandez, 47, recalls his early years sweating in the fields. After a long day of work picking cucumbers and tomatoes back in the 1960s and 1970s, he said his father would turn to him and his brothers and sister and say, “Remember this feeling because if you guys don't do well in school, this is your future.”

Now a national hero in Mexico, Hernandez received a call this weekend from Mexican President Felipe Calderon, according to the Los Angeles Times. Calderon wished him “an enormous congratulation, with all our admiration, all our affection and all our pride.”

Calderon invited Hernandez down to the presidential palace once he’s returned from outer space.

Hernandez’s parents, Salvador and Julia, migrated to northern California in the 1950s in search of work. They later became U.S. citizens and raised four children.

As a kid, Hernandez continued to visit his parents’ old neighborhood in Michoacán, where cousins and aunts and uncles were being interviewed this week by the Mexican press.

For those of you interested in learning more about Hernandez, you can follow him on his Twitter feed. Hernandez has been posting updates his preparations for take-off and developments in both English and Spanish. Here is his Twitter page.

Photo: Jose Hernandez from his Twitter Page.

California could gain 9 House seats because of illegal immigrants

North Carolina could lose a seat if illegal immigrants are not counted. Is all this right?

Critics of the Census’s practice not to ask about residency status say “no.”

John Baker, a constitutional law professor at Louisiana State University, and Elliott Stonecipher, a Louisiana pollster and demographic analyst, charge that the census has drifted from its constitutional roots and that the 2010 Census count will result in a unfair redistribution of Congress.

Since 1790(except following the census of 1920), the Census has been used to determine the apportionment of members of the U.S. House of Representatives among the states.

Baker and Stonecipher write in a recent Op-Ed for the Wall Street Journal that California could get nine House seats “it doesn’t deserve” because illegal immigrants will be counted in the 2010 Census.

They charge that several states, such as Iowa, Louisiana, and Michigan, will likely lose one seat in the 2010 reapportionment because of this.

For a story on illegal immigrants threatening to boycott the Census, we reported in May that North Carolina could lose its coveted 14th seat in the House of Representatives.

North Carolina and Utah battled after the 2000 Census when in 2002 after North Carolina won the last available U.S. House district seat over Utah. Critics said North Carolina won the seat because of the state’s growing illegal immigrant population.

Nine states in all, including South Carolina, could gain a seat based on population gains, according to a recent study by Election Data Services, a political consulting firm.

Photo: The threatened boycott of the upcoming Census by illegal immigrants is a frequent topic for Charlotte radio host Jorge Medina. T.ORTEGA GAINES – ogaines@charlotteobserver.com