Mexicans protesting burn a U.S. flag in front of a Los Angeles veterans cemetery.
Do you want their lawyers to become immigration judges?!
New York Post – April 7, 2006:
The Senate’s Democratic and Republican leaders yesterday announced a compromise on an immigration bill – with some details still to be worked out. But details that may continue from the bill passed out of the Judiciary Committee should definitely be deal-breakers.
Like that surprise hidden on page 302 – which would replace the country’s entire bench of experienced immigration judges with pro-immigration advocates.
With a few exceptions, today’s immigration judges (who serve for life) are dedicated to enforcing the law, and they do a difficult job well. This bill forces all immigration judges to step down after serving seven years – and restricts replacements to attorneys with at least five years’ experience practicing immigration law.
Virtually the only lawyers who’ll meet that requirement are attorneys who represent aliens in the immigration courts – who tend to be some of the nation’s most liberal lawyers, and who are certainly unlikely as a class to be fond of enforcing immigration laws.
It gets worse. Immigration judges are now appointed by the attorney general – whose job it is to see to it that laws are enforced. The Senate bill gives that power to a separate bureaucrat, albeit one directly appointed by the president, making immigration courts more susceptible to leftward polarization.
I personally don’t see this as a left or right issue. The left wants immigrants to get new voters. The right wants cheap labor. There’s plenty of blame to go around. Someone once said that the US citizenry should always be suspicious of their elected officials when both parties are united on controversial issue. This is certainly one of those instances.
Dude this bill died like 5 days ago. Should we be up on arms about a bill that is dead? Hey I am still pissed about the dead 1896 bill that would bring back the gold as standard for US currency.
BTW – Who said all lawyers with immigration experience are pro-immigration? Should all immigration judges be completely unqualified? This article sounds like it went through a Fox News filter.
You’re right this isn’t a left-right issue. This is a backdoor Amnesty bill.
Making a law so that the majority of immigration judges will most likely be pro-immigrant lawyers. This goes to show what idiots we have in Washington (both parties).
Now a citizen from NY can’t go to FSU without paying out of state tuition, however, if you are illegal you can go with in-state tuition? That makes sense. Each University has quotas for out of state and in state students they accept every year. So now your Johnny or Mary may be pushed aside for Juan and Maria. Another thing they aren’t telling you is that now the illegals will take away grant money and scholarships that would go to ordinary citizens. Every citizen should be concerned about this no matter what your race is.
How does an illegal prove he has been here 5 years? I hope we don’t rely on the word of someone already breaking the law. I’m sure we’ll get some more terrorists in here if we haven’t already, some Homeland Security. I guess we won’t learn until one of our cities is off limits for several thousand years.
So when will Hugo Chavez or someone like him be our President?
The bill isn’t necessarily dead. Teddy Kennedy wants to bring it back.
There are even more scary loopholes listed here.
Most immigration lawyers would tend to support immigration, I’d imagine. And, many of them would be members of the far-left AILA. In older scary news: Citizenship and Immigration Ombudsman is fmr prez of AILA chapter
This bill is dead? Looking at the April 7 date you are probably right. This immigration bill has been weakening as the days and protests go by. It will probably end up worse. Let’s see what is still to come.
I still don’t see the outrage from our congress/senate like the DP Worlds situation. The immigration problem is a lot worse than letting DP Worlds run several ports in the east, like the Chinese are doing on the west coast.
So you want to put up the “FOX” excuse. Oh yeah, that works all of the time. I suppose if it came from the LA Times it would be ok.
#2 – Nice use of “terrorism”. Nobody wants to build a wall between us and Canada. That border has even less to none security.
The author of the article is incorrect on a couple points and misleading generally.
You can see the text of the bill (I can’t copy it from the PDF because of security settings in it) here: http://www.aila.org/content/default.aspx?docid=11536
The guy is referring to Specter’s mark version. The “Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2006, as Reported out of the Senate Judiciary Committee” does not contain this provision or anything related to it.
In any case, on page 303 (not 302) of Specter’s, the text states that (typed by hand):
“The term of appointment of each immigration judge shall be 7 years from the date upon which the person was appointed and qualified. Upon expiration of a term of office, the immigration judge may continue to act until a successor has been appointed and qualified, except no immigration judge member may serve more than 14 years.”
O.K., so factually, the author already has the page number wrong (inconsiquential) and the term wrong. He writes, “This bill forces all immigration judges to step down after serving seven years”. No, they can serve up to 14 years. And given the backlog of appointments of judges at all levels of the judiciary, there’s a significant chance that the immigration judge will serve more than 7 years.
“restricts replacements to attorneys with at least five years’ experience practicing immigration law.”
The text says (again, typed): “Each immigration judge, including the Chief Immigration Judge, shall be an attorney in good standing of a bar of a State or the District of Columbia and shall have at least 5 years professional, legal expertise in immigration and nationality law.”
First, on every issue, there are lawyers on both sides. Imagine if this were in a criminal law context. Can you imagine somebody writing that the only people familiar with criminal law are defense attorneys and those are the only ones that will end up being judges? I’m sure there would be a lot of DAs who would disagree.
The same pattern holds true on any legal issue. There are attorneys on _both_ sides of it and are practicing in the field.
Indeed, this is a strange criticism to level: it’s better to hire people not experienced in the relevant field than to hire those with experience. The author has to ignore the idiocy of this assertion and make the erroneous generalization that all immigration attorneys are “pro-immigration.” Of course, this begs the question, what does he mean by “pro-immigration”? Is nothing short of Pat Buchanan acceptable?
The author is probably smart enough to know that if he starts to define what he means by “pro-immigration”, it’ll become clear that there are great numbers of immigration attorneys that don’t fit in his description.
Moreover, appointing judges that have experience in the particular field is not unique. For example, the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board looks to relevant IP experience when hiring.
But the following point is just silly. He writes:
“It gets worse. Immigration judges are now appointed by the attorney general – whose job it is to see to it that laws are enforced. The Senate bill gives that power to a separate bureaucrat, albeit one directly appointed by the president, making immigration courts more susceptible to leftward polarization.”
Now: The attorney general is appointed by the president. The AG appoints the judges.
Proposed: The “bureaucrat” is appointed by the president. The “bureaucrat” appoints the judges.
Yet, the latter is “more susceptible to leftward polarization”? Is this guy crazy?
Moreover, the author fails to note that the Chief Immigration Judge and all the immigration appeals judges are appointed by the president’s “bureaucrat” “in consultation with the Attorney General.” See page 295 and 303. Thus, 2 of the president’s appointees are consulting over the appeal judges and the Chief judge. And one of the appointees is working on the rest.
So, EVERY judge reviewing the immigration decisions of lower court judges will be appointed by “the Director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, in consultation with the Attorney General.”
I think the essential point to take away from all of this is that Republicans are no longer seeing their control of all branches of government for the foreseeable future. Now is the time to start trying to prevent any party (i.e., Democrats) from exerting partisan influences.
Wow, A_B, thanks a lot for your comment. I just wanted to follow up on one thing you wrote:
“First, on every issue, there are lawyers on both sides. Imagine if this were in a criminal law context. “
You don’t have a full understanding of how the law works. For every one prosecutor there are hundreds if not thousands of defense attorneys. Like in my county. There is one prosecutor with about 30 assistant prosecutors. But when you open the phone book you’ll see hundreds of attorneys doing criminal defense work.
Thus, it’s not a fair to say that there are “lawyers on both sides” as the numbers on both sides are completely unequal.
#5 Have 10 million Canadians come into our country and stayed in the last decade or so? Don’t think so. There only about 20 million of them (CAN) according to some Canadians I asked last week. I think the Canadian government would have noticed a big loss of tax revenue if that were the case. Could a terrorist come from Canada? Sure this could happen, one could also come in from the water on a boat or a jet ski, or like the 911 hijackers — on a commercial jet.
#6 Other judges who are appointed in our system don’t necessarily come under this requirement. I will admit there are some. But why change it. The problem is the current laws are not being enforced and they are not doing enough to prevent people from entering illegally.
Don’t forget we had a President who was a Democrat recently for 8 years in which he had the power to appoint people. The current President kept the Clinton appointed CIA director on…remember?… that’s the one who said it was a slam dunk that Hussein had WMDs. I won’t hesitate to say Bush has been “asleep at the wheel” on this one and that is putting it nicely.
If the Democrats want to make these illegals citizens to get votes that doesn’t make them any better, actually it makes them worse.
#7 – Thanks SN. I almost said something similar to that. I wonder how much these immigration lawyers make compared to criminal attorneys.
And another thanks for the snow you sent over to Ontario last week it was first snowfall I saw this year 🙂
So, let me get this right… we have laws, but if they’re broken we’ll just rewrite them to accommodate people that AREN’T EVEN AMERICAN. This is ridiculous; the only new law regarding immigration we need is to build the wall. THIS COUNTRY WILL NOT LAST if this wall is not built.
“You don’t have a full understanding of how the law works. For every one prosecutor there are hundreds if not thousands of defense attorneys.”
What you’re trying to say is that you don’t believe I have and understand ing of the distribution of attorneys on either side. That doesn’t really relate to “how the law works” or my understanding of the law.
While I don’t have figures or ratios of defense attorneys to prosecutors/DAs in front of me, I will accept that there are more of the former than the latter. However, not to the extent that you claim based on your observations.
First of all, the simple economics dictates that there couldn’t be “1000s” of defense attorneys: there isn’t enough money. The vast majority of cases are low-level criminal activity. The defendants aren’t all mobsters with high-powered attorneys and fleets of associates doing their bidding. There is simply not enough need for defense attorneys to support the “thousands” to 1 ratio you claim.
Think about ti this way. A huge caseload for a prosecutor would be 30 _active_ cases at a time. So, 1000/30 = ~34 attorneys _per_ case. This assumes, of course, that these defense attorneys are working on 1 case at a time (no chance). The legal fees for 34 attorneys on one matter would be stratospheric.
Of the defendants that actually could afford it, none would do so. I’m going to guess, that even then Enron guys don’t have legal teams that large. Enormous numbers of law firms don’t even have that many attorneys at all.
Moreover, a large number of these matters are handled by the public defenders office. So, of the available defendants, you have to cut that down by public defenders taking those cases.
What we’re left, based on your assertion is defense staffing of a hundred or so attorneys _per_ prosecutor. No way.
Secondly, taking your phone book example, while there are limited DAs per county, those defense attorneys can practice all over the state (and beyond). So, for example, in a small town, let’s say there’s only one DA and 4 ADAs. The defense attorneys working in that local court can also work in the next town, the next after that, the big city further away, etc. And they’re going to advertise in each one of those towns’ phonebooks. They’re going to advertise wherever they’re admitted to practice.
So, you’re going to see enormous listings of defense attorneys in each phone book. However, the percentage of attorneys that practice _only_ in one county will be small.
More importantly, back to the issue of appointments, that regardless of the specifics of the imbalance, a higher percentage of prosecutors are appointed to judgeships than defense attorneys or the analogous position of “pro-immigration” (however that is defined). Vastly higher. Those already part of the system are more likely to become judges in that system. Whether judges are appointed or if they’re elected, the prosecutor is going to get the job before a defense attorney. Nobody is going to vote for some guy that got a murderer off on a technicality.
While not as stark, the same “part of the system” mentality applies in the appointment of many judges, including, I imagine, immigration. The immigration judges aren’t likely to be the pro-immigration lawyers.
Here’s a link to all the Federal Courts in the United States: http://www.uscourts.gov/courtlinks/
Go to the websites and see what kinds of firms or practices these judges had. You will find in the vast majority of cases that they were either representing big companies (in big firms) or were prosecutors.
Let’s take DC, since it’s the focus of a lot of government courts:
http://www.dcd.uscourts.gov/judge-info.html
Here’s what they did before becoming a judge:
Lamberth: JAG
Kessler: Legislative Assistant for Congressman and Senator; NY Board of Education
Friedman: US Attorney’s Office
Urbina: Law School Prof./Public Defender
Sullivan: Large GP firm that sent 9 attorneys to judgeship.
Robertson: Huge GP firm
Kollar-Kotelly: attorney in the Criminal Division of the U.S. Department of Justice
Kennedy: Assistant United States Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Roberts: Chief of the Criminal Section in the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice, then Principal Assistant U.S. Attorney for the District of Columbia.
Etc., etc.
Only Urbina, out of all of them, could arguably be someone analogous to criminal defense, pro-immigration.
Judges, regardless of the field, are “part of the system” and are generally made up of their members. So, even if there isn’t a 50-50 split on the side of every issue, it hardly matters when the “little guy’s” attorney is rarely appointed.
#8 Just making sure that the use of “terrorism” as an excuse for immigration reform is shown as total crap. I think Bush has worn out doing stuff in the name of fighting “terrorism” for the next 1000 years. Bush constantly does something wrong/evil and just shruggs his shoulder and goes “terrorism” and “9-11”.
#8 – Also I like the conservatives pointing everything at Clinton:
1) Clinton appointed the CIA director
2) CIA director during Bush’s term says WMD are a slam dunk
3) Therefore it is Clinton’s fault we are in Iraq
Nice.
uhh, okay so if these immigrants are burning flags then do they not see that at all hypocritical ? hopefully this was not previoulsy stated but from a quick read through it didnt appear to be
While the appointments of the judges could be either pro or con immigration, one fact remains. They are all tasked with following decisions of higher courts. Since this is civil law, as opposed to criminal, the prosecutor has greater leeway to appeal lower court decisions.
#12 – No but after 911 it became very hard to get on an airplane. Why? terrorism. We also didn’t want terrorists to enter the US. When you go to fight a war in a foreign country and leave your backdoor wide open (our borders) you are asking for trouble. Terrorists have been caught on both sides of our border. What about the ones that weren’t caught? Should we just leave it open for the possibility of more to come in, whether it be illegal aliens or terrorists? Actually I was jumping on our current President for not standing up to his promise of securing the nation/borders. I don’t think that is conservative or liberal.
Actually it is one of the main jobs of the Federal Government in our Constitution.
#13 – I just wanted to point out that not just Bush appointees made mistakes. You seem to be from the left. This is a problem in this country everyone wants to blame one party or the other. I always thought we would have the same common goal in securing our nation of illegal entry of any kind. In case you don’t remember some of the people involved in bombing of the World Trade Center in the 90’s were given 30 days to appear before an immigration court. Doesn’t this bother you?
13 Don’t forget, it was Clinton the built the torture chambers in Gitmo, payed for the flight training of the hijackers on 9/11, bombed weddings in Iraq, and held Americans in jail indefinatly.
…In case you don’t remember some of the people involved in bombing of the World Trade Center in the 90’s were given 30 days to appear before an immigration court. Doesn’t this bother you? …
Yes, immensly. Why? Because there are simply not enough jails to hold just the ones being deported, let alone all the illegal aliens waiting for their court cases. In case you haven’t noticed, the jails are overflowing with all those three strikes offenders, minor drug offences, and extremely long sentences. Getting tough on crime is fine, but the Republican Congress wouldn’t allocate enough money to accomodate all the extra inmates. In fairness, most states didn’t either.
#13 and #17 – I see some of you have tried to steer away from the topic. Like a true politician. Run for political office you might win.
#!5 – This isn’t civil law it is criminal law. Entering a country illegally is a crime.
“but the Republican Congress wouldn’t allocate enough money to accomodate all the extra inmates.”
Did any Democrats request allocation of extra money to accomadate any extra inmates?
#16 – Do you really think if Gore was elected we would be in Iraq? Do you think Gore would have made the same choices Bush made with the same information? Uh No.
This isn’t a Bush, Gore, Clinton or anyone else as President issue.
This a complete failure on the part of of our goverement….ALL of it for 20 years to secure the borders.
When Reagan gave amnesty in 1986….there were an estimated 3 to 4 million illegals in this country. The rate of entry was about 100 thousand or less a year. Amnesty was given, but no measures were taken to secure the borders against more illegals coming in.
With -in 2 years the rate of entry was running at 250 thousand, at present the goverment will admit that it’s at 500 thousand a year, but state goverments say it’s much closer to 1.5 million a year.
All of these rates of entry had about a 40% return rate….meaning that 60% are still here. We can’t asorb that many illegals on a yearly basis.
Except for making it a felony…..I like the house bill…..except for the time frame, I like the modified Kennedy/McCain bill.
The house bill recognises something very important…..until we stop the flow of entry, there is no sense in giving 11 million people a chance to be citizens, because with-in another 10 years, it will be another 10 million illegals here.
Build the wall…..use whatever means is available to block the border. Then start working on doing something about the 11 million already here.
The shame of all this is the fact that most South American countries have almost no LEGAL means to get here, because of the huge flow of illegals we have almost stopped all legal immigration from Mexico and other countries from the south. The Senate bill restores the balance by allowing 400 thousand a year to come up legally from Mexico alone.
I won’t argue the pro’s and con’s of if they pay their way here. I don’t believe they do. They no longer take just the low level jobs that Americans supposedly won’t do.
What bothers me I guess is the fact that in many states, we now have almost seperate cultures running side by side. The influx of so many people who are not integrating into society is having a very bad effect on the society as a whole. In the past, legal immigrents would meld, by the second generation they were almost indistingushable from any other group that came here. This isn’t happening on the same scale with the Hispanics. Instead, they want services in their own language, and expect us to adjust to them, not the other way around. And we do, and the net effect is that it causes resentment amoung other groups, including legal Mexicans and whites as well as blacks, and the Hispanic illegals are not assimilating. We have a 2 tiered country, and one of those tier’s isn’t tied to our culture or traditions.
We have a big problem….but it’s not as bad as Europe is having, and thats partly because we are a nation of immigrants and the Europeans aren’t, we try to accomadate the influx. But the numbers are just getting out of hand.
#22 – Joshua you make some good points. We’ll have to wait and see what the final bill is, what passes as law, and what teeth the new law will have as far as enforcement. Of course there is the usual — what other bills are attached to it.
#19…axe…..entering the U.S. illegally is NOT acriminal offense….it’s a CIVIL offense. No jail, just fines and/or deportation.
#23…rus….your right there. As we all should know by now, what actually comes out of congress rarely resembles anything we heard about in advance.