Reform bill to double immigration
The immigration reform bill that the Senate takes up today would more than double the flow of legal immigration into the United States each year and dramatically lower the skill level of those immigrants.
…Currently, a little less than 60 percent of the 140,000 work visas granted each year are reserved for professors, engineers, doctors and others with “extraordinary abilities.” Fewer than 10 percent are set aside for unskilled laborers. The idea has always been to draw the best and the brightest to America.
Under the Senate proposal, those priorities would be flipped.
The percentage of work visas that would go to the highly educated or highly skilled would be cut in half to about 30 percent. The percentage of work visas that go to unskilled laborers would more than triple. In hard numbers for those categories, the highest skilled workers would be granted 135,000 visas annually, while the unskilled would be granted 150,000 annually.
What’s more, the Hagel-Martinez bill would make it considerably easier for unskilled workers to remain here permanently while keeping hurdles in place for skilled workers. It would still require highly skilled workers who are here on a temporary basis to find an employer to “petition” for their permanent residency but it would allow unskilled laborers to “self-petition,” meaning their employer would not have to guarantee their employment as a condition on staying.
washingtontimes.com
Bill permits 193 million more aliens by 2026
The Senate immigration reform bill would allow for up to 193 million new legal immigrants — a number greater than 60 percent of the current U.S. population — in the next 20 years, according to a study released yesterday.
“The magnitude of changes that are entailed in this bill — and are largely unknown — rival the impact of the creation of Social Security or the creation of the Medicare program,” said Robert Rector, senior policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation who conducted the study.
Latinos enlisting in record numbers
Despite opposition to the Iraq war, pride motivates many to sign up for military duty
…According to the Department of Defense, in 2004, the most recent year of confirmed data, Latinos made up 13 percent of new recruits. This is an all-time high, nearly twice the percentage of 10 years earlier.
Latinos’ presence in the military still does not match their 17 percent share of the overall population ages 18 to 24. And African Americans continue to be overrepresented in the military, making up about 18 percent of active duty personnel but only 13 percent of the U.S. population. Nonetheless, the absolute number of Latinos entering the armed forces continues to grow.