Citizenship on hold for many immigrants

[onehandle]

Source: AP

WASHINGTON - President Bush is asking Congress to spend money to help businesses root out illegal workers but he did not request additional funds to help legal immigrants become American citizens more quickly.

In his budget proposal issued this week, Bush asked for $100 million to expand E-Verify, the system employers use to check whether they are hiring documented workers. He didn't ask Congress to allocate money to chip away at millions of citizenship and other immigration applications that flooded the government last summer, before an increase in the agency's filing fees.

Instead, Citizenship and Immigration Services will rely on $468 million in fees to pay for reducing the backlog by 2010. Those funds are a portion of the total fees that came in with the applications this summer.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said the summer's fee increases will give the agency the money it needs to get back on track.

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20080209/ap_on_go_pr_wh/immigration_backlogs

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It's official. They are abandoning the Latino vote this year.

[struggle4progress]

1. The noncitizen-worker system here looks more and more like a version of apartheid

Corporate American replaces citizen-workers by noncitizen workers, then relies on the government to enhance employer control of workers by controlling the immigration documents of noncitizen-workers : just simply deport those uppity looking-after-their-rights folk

All workers thus lose power. But corporate media encourages citizen-workers to blame noncitizen-workers for their plight

[Acadia Blue]

2. If the corps did not have the illegals, they would have to raise the

wages of the Americans. They are using the illegals and mistreating them and destroying us at the same time.
They know how to play the game. We have to unite against them: the corporations. But the F... media is helping the corops and the government and the democrats and republicans are helping the corporations. NO one gives a damn about Americans losing money, jobs, and the future of their children. Mexico is a depotic oligarchy and uses the USA to prevent its own citizens from rebelling. We are like an overflow valve to them.

I feel sorry for the illegals, but want Americans to have leverage against the corporations and if the corporations don't have the extra cheap labor they have to pay real Americans decent wages.

Its sad for the Mexicans and its sad for the Americans too.

[lovuian]

3. Immigrant issue is going to get ugly when Americans jobless

increases... then their wages will still be suppressed

if Americans don't have wages to buy then the Depression will deepen

We are the only country in the world that had a large wealthy middle class

I agree its just like apartheid and shipping in immigrants to keep wages low was their aim

They used immigrants to keep corporate profits high

Capitalism is taking its last gasp