Now we can't even kick illegal aliens, convicted of drug or theft charges, out of the country, according to the Supreme Court.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday increased the chances for some immigrants to remain in the United States if they have been convicted of drug possession under state laws.
The justices' 8-1 ruling came on the same day the court heard arguments in another immigrant case in which a man in California is trying to avoid deportation after pleading guilty to a theft charge.
WTF? It's not enough that they committed a Felony by just being here illegally? Now they can steal cars and use drugs without fear of deportation?
Unbelievable.
As long as we're on the subject, here's more good news, from Reuters:
One in seven Mexican workers have left their country and are working in the United States, an immigration study said on Tuesday.
There were more than 7 million workers from Mexico in the U.S. labor force this year, 2 million more than six years ago, said the report's author, Jeanne Batalova of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank.
[...]
Up to 9.4 percent of the all persons born in Mexico were living in the United States in 2005, according to the report. In the same year, 14 percent of Mexican workers had jobs on U.S. soil, compared to 2.5 percent of Canadians.
It's a good thing Congress is working diligently to address this problem, right?
Here's a fun look into the Mexican legal system, courtesy of KNBC:
Duane "Dog'' Chapman is waiting to hear whether a Mexican federal court will set him free or order his pending extradition and criminal case to proceed. The 53-year-old TV bounty hunter is charged under Mexican law with "deprivation of liberty'' for his June 2003 capture of fugitive convicted rapist Andrew Luster, the Max Factor heir, in Puerto Vallarta.
"Deprivation of Liberty" for arresting a non-Mexican, non-resident serial rapist that Mexico refused to arrest and extradite? A rich one, no less. Nice.
Chapman said that he was approached before the extradition by a lawyer in Mexico who arranged his release and was asked for more than $250,000 as a payment. Chapman said he was told by the lawyer that things "would not go well" if the payment wasn't made.
Now that sounds like lawyers on both sides of the border.
More fun facts, from south o' the border. From the SF Gate:
Birds from Latin America — not from the north — are most likely to bring deadly bird flu to the main U.S., researchers said Monday, suggesting the government might miss the H5N1 virus because biologists have been looking in the wrong direction.
The United States' $29 million bird flu surveillance program has focused heavily on migratory birds flying from Asia to Alaska, where researchers this year collected tens of thousands of samples from wild birds nesting on frozen tundra before making their way south.
Those birds present a much lower risk than migratory birds that make their way north from South America through Central America and Mexico, where controls on imported poultry are not as tough as in the U.S. and Canada, according to findings in the latest Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Nations south of the U.S. import hundreds of thousands of chickens a year from countries where bird flu has turned up in migratory birds or poultry, said A. Marm Kilpatrick, lead author of the study.
"The risk is actually higher from the poultry trade to the Americas than from migratory birds," said Kilpatrick, of the Consortium for Conservation Medicine in New York. Other researchers on the study came from the Smithsonian Institution.
If bird flu arrives in Mexico or somewhere farther south, it could be a matter of time before a migratory bird carries the virus to the United States, Kilpatrick said.
"It's not just a matter of worrying about who you trade with, but it's a matter of thinking about who do your neighbors trade with, and who do your trading partners trade with," Kilpatrick said. "We need to be looking both south and north."
Suddenly, colonizing the moon seems like a pretty good idea.
Clearly, they are working on the immigration issue. The question is, will it improve? It does not appear that it will.
Posted by: Eric | December 07, 2006 at 03:45 AM