More on Birthright

Earlier I have blogged about California's intent to run a ballot initaitive getting rid of birthright. Here is some more on it on a Federal level. AP reports that "U.S. Rep. Nathan Deal, a Republican candidate for governor of Georgia, has proposed changing the long-standing federal policy that automatically grants citizenship to any baby born on U.S. soil . . . ." These proposals are regularly floated in Congress and advocated by restrictionists. And, while deal may get some votes by endorsing the elimination of birhright citizenship, it is unlikely to become the law. Most legal scholars believe that its elimination would require amendment of the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

(HT: ImmigrationProf Blog)

Join the Army, Become a Citizen!

Until recently only citizens or permanent residents who carry green cards were eligible to serve. But a pilot program has changed that. The LA Times reports:

In all, the pilot program, which was launched in New York in February, seeks to enlist 1,000 military recruits with special language and medical skills, most of whom will join the Army. Response to the program has exceeded expectations, drawing applications from more than 7,000 people around the country, many of them highly educated, defense officials said.

Although the Army has been meeting or exceeding its recruiting goals, defense officials say there is a shortage of soldiers with medical, foreign language and cultural abilities needed in the war on terror and peacekeeping efforts around the world.

The Army hopes to enlist 333 healthcare professionals, including doctors, dentists, nurses and others. It is also looking for 557 people with any of 35 languages, including Arabic and Yoruba, spoken in West Africa. Spanish is not on the list. An additional 110 slots are earmarked for other services, which have not yet started taking applications for the program.

Defense officials emphasize that the program is only open to foreigners who have lived legally in the U.S. for at least two years, including students, some professionals and refugees.

Those who enlist are required to meet the same physical and conduct standards as other recruits and exceed the educational standards. They are also vetted by the Department of Homeland Security and the FBI, and they will not be granted waivers for any criminal offenses.

Foreign-born residents have a long history in the U.S. armed forces.

Under a wartime statute invoked in 2002, those who serve can apply for citizenship on the first day of active duty. Naturalization fees are waived. About 29,000 people with green cards are in the military and about 8,000 enlist each year, according to Pentagon figures.

Recruiters have already signed up 105 people with targeted languages and two medical professionals under the new program.

More than 60% of those enlisting under the pilot program have at least a bachelor's degree, compared with roughly 7% of those joining the Army through regular channels.

Their average score on a required math and verbal aptitude test is 79 out of a possible 99 points. That's compared with 62 for the average citizen or permanent resident who enlisted in the Army in the 12 months ending in September.

As word of the New York pilot program spread, many people traveled across the country to apply.

The 107 enlisted so far include 13 California residents, officials said. Less than half came from the New York area, including New Jersey.

A New Caste of Birth Certificates for Children of the Undocumented Proposed

This is the most ridiculous thing I have heard in a while. Also it seems to me to be unconstitutional:

A group of conservative activists are hoping to bring the issue of illegal immigration back to the front burner of California politics with a ballot measure that would create a new caste of birth certificates for children of the undocumented. The initiative, which proponents tout as the California Taxpayer Protection Act, is intended for the June 2010 statewide ballot. For the full story, click here.

DHS finds USCIS Lacking

A new report, released by Homeland Security Inspector General Richard Skinner, said USCIS lacked adequate baseline data to measure performance, failed to oversee or document lessons from pilot programs and other initiatives being executed by field offices, and lacked a formal agreement with the State Department to ensure timely processing of immigration benefits

$1.2 Million Citizenship Grant Program

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced that a competitive grant program is being offered through Grants.gov for a $1.2 million grant program to support citizenship preparation programs for legal permanent residents.

Serving America, gaining Citizenship: U.S Military Offers a Path to Citizenship

Because the U.S military is stretched thin in Afghanistan and Iraq, it will begin recruiting skilled immigrants (permanent residents), offering them the chance to become United States citizens in as little as six months. The New York Times reports:

Immigrants who are permanent residents, with documents commonly known as green cards, have long been eligible to enlist. But the new effort, for the first time since the Vietnam War, will open the armed forces to temporary immigrants if they have lived in the United States for a minimum of two years, according to military officials familiar with the plan.

Recruiters expect that the temporary immigrants will have more education, foreign language skills and professional expertise than many Americans who enlist, helping the military to fill shortages in medical care, language interpretation and field intelligence analysis.

The program will begin small — limited to 1,000 enlistees nationwide in its first year, most for the Army and some for other branches. If the pilot program succeeds as Pentagon officials anticipate, it will expand for all branches of the military. For the Army, it could eventually provide as many as 14,000 volunteers a year, or about one in six recruits.

The Army’s one-year pilot program will begin in New York City to recruit about 550 temporary immigrants who speak one or more of 35 languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Hindi, Igbo (a tongue spoken in Nigeria), Kurdish, Nepalese, Pashto, Russian and Tamil. Spanish speakers are not eligible. The Army’s program will also include about 300 medical professionals to be recruited nationwide. Recruiting will start after DHS officials update an immigration rule in coming days.

About 8,000 permanent immigrants with green cards join the armed forces annually, the Pentagon reports, and about 29,000 foreign-born people currently serving are not American citizens.

But, there is much resistance from the veterans who expressed concern that some foreigners might have divided loyalties or be terrorists seeking to infiltrate the US armed services.

Federal Courts Holding up Naturalization Ceremonies

The Washington Post reported that at least 2,000 new citizens had their swearing-in ceremonies delayed by the Federal court system this year, denying them the ability to vote in this November’s election:

Federal judges in some parts of the United States are delaying the swearing-in of new citizens, apparently so that courts can keep millions of dollars in naturalization fees paid by immigrants, according to a new government report and immigration analysts.

In one of the nation’s busiest courts, a judge’s delay caused nearly 2,000 people to not receive the oath in time to register for November’s general election, according to the ombudsman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, Michael Dougherty, in a 13-page report posted on his office’s internet site.

Judges to Rule on Citizenship Checks of Voters in Georgia

Voting rights groups again tried to stop Georgia election officials from using Social Security numbers and driver’s license data to check voters’ immigration status. The advocacy groups told a federal three-judge panel that using the data to verify whether voters are citizens amounts to a “systematic purging” of voting rolls that must be approved by the Justice Department. Georgia is one of several states that needs federal approval before changing election policy because of a history of discriminatory voting practices. The judges said they would rule as soon as possible. The fight centers on Jose Morales, a college student who became an American citizen in November 2007 and registered to vote last month. He has twice received letters that warn him that his name could be removed from the rolls if he does not verify his citizenship. The voting rights groups say the letters are a form of intimidation.

New Citizenship Test set for October 1, 2008

USCIS will have a newly redesigned naturalization test on October 1, 2008. If you filed a N-400, Application for Naturalization, before October 1, 2008, and your interview is before October 1, 2008, you will take the current test. However, if you file before October 1, 2008 and your interview is scheduled on or after October 1, 2008, you will have the choice to take either the current test or the newly redesigned test. Finally if you filed a N-400 after October 1, 2008 or your interview is scheduled after October 1, 2009, you will HAVE to take the newly redesigned test.

However, it should be noted that thousands of aliens have been sidelined from the Naturalization process by the Bush Administration. The Daily News reports:

[F]ees have gone up by 610% in the last 10 years while the federal minimum wage has only increased by 27%. In New York State the number of applications fell 40% during the first four months of this year compared with the same period in 2007. Yet this is better than the national average, which is down 50% since the 2007 fee increases.”

New German Citizenship Test

A new test for German citizenship went into effect on Monday. The Interior Ministry has published a catalog of 300 multiple-choice questions on topics like life in a democracy, history and responsibility, and human beings and society. An additional 10 questions are related to the applicant’s German state. Applicants will be tested on 33 of the 300 questions and, to qualify for citizenship, must answer 17 correctly within an hour.

How to Become an American

Check out this new diagram by the Reason Foundation

Obama the intergenerational candidate

Peter Levine gives an eloquent defense of Obama's popularity among youth after reports of 'Obama's Age Problem.'

Peter Levine on Service Learning

Peter Levine on why study Service Learning:

1. Because studying young people who are asked to work on a community problem or issue is a great opportunity to investigate large issues about human development, the reproduction or reform of institutions and cultures, learning, deliberation, racial conflict, and many other issues. In other words, service-learning is an opportunity for social science.

2. Because service-learning is common--present in about half of American high schools--yet the quality is very uneven. Research can identify what aspects of service-learning generate good results in various contexts. Once we know that makes service-learning succeed, we can inform future teachers in their education courses, explain the criteria in program guidelines, and so on.

3. Because there is an opening for new policies that involve service. Senators McCain and Obama both favor service-learning, and there is an effective nonpartisan advocacy campaign for national and community service programs. It is fairly straightforward to design new policies for Americorps. But it's not so easy to say what a good service-learning policy should be for k-12 schools. Policies cannot automatically create high-quality educational experiences. They always operate through rather crude incentives or rules--for instance, grant opportunities, mandates, course requirements, standards, or state-sponsored exams. We need research about the likely impact of policies before we can tell friendly politicians which policies they should promote.
Note that even a friendly politician must make choices--must decide how much resources to put into service-learning compared to other activities, including other forms of experiential civic education. Responsible advice to policymakers thus depends upon careful and rigorous comparative research. It's not enough to say that service-learning is good; we have to know whether each marginal dollar is better spent on it or something else.

4. Because a lot of adults are involved in a field called service-learning, and it's a good group--diverse in goals and ideologies but idealistic and fairly coherent. To use an over-used term, it's a "community." Communities can deserve loyalty even if one doesn't believe that they are objectively better or more important than other communities. I'm not sure that I believe service-learning is a better, or even a more promising, intervention than some others. I am sure that the community that supports it is a good one. According to the great work of Albert O. Hirschman, when one wants to change a group, the two choices are "exit" and "voice." Exit is the main mechanism in a market, and it is a good one. We use "voice" when we cannot exit a group (e.g., a family or a nation), or when we are loyal. I think the service-learning world merits some loyalty, and that means using our voice to improve it. For those of us who are scholars, the best form of voice is research.

Also, see ServeNext

Biharis to be Granted Bangladeshi Citizenship

The Bangladeshi High Court ruled that the children of Urdu-speaking "Bihari" Muslims awaiting repatriation to Pakistan for over 37 years would be granted Bangladeshi citizenship.

"The children who were minor in 1971 or born after the independence of Bangladesh are citizens of Bangladesh," the High Court said in a ruling, over a petition by a group of Bihari Muslims pleading for Bangladeshi citizenship. With the ruling140,000 of them who were either born in Bangladesh or have expressed loyalty to the country would be granted citizenship.

The nearly 300,000 Bihirais in Bangladesh have been stateless since the 1971 civic war. They migrated to former East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) from India following the partition of the subcontinent in 1947 but sided with the Pakistan army during Bangladesh's 1971 war of independence.

Pakistan has avoided the issue over decades despite repeated requests by Bangladesh, leaving the Biharis in crammed, squalid camps in Dhaka and other towns, run by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees and the Bangladeshi government.

But the new generation Biharis, who say they do not belong to Pakistan nor want to go there, have for years urged the Dhaka government to accept them as Bangladeshis -- despite objections from their parents and grandparents.

New Report links Civic Engagement and Service Learning to Lower High School Drop Out Rates

Civic Enterprises, "a public policy firm that helps corporations, nonprofits, foundations, universities and governments develop and spearhead innovative public policies to strengthen our communities and country" recently published a report "Engaged for Success" stating that service-learning emerges as an essential tool in fighting high school dropout. Also see America's Promise Alliance.