Illegal immigrants will be eligible for Social Security, Medicare

Illegal immigrants who apply for work permits in the U.S. under President Obama’s new executive actions will be eligible for Social Security and Medicare, the White House says.
Under the sweeping actions, immigrants who are spared deportation could obtain work permits and a Social Security number, which would allow them to pay into the Social Security system through payroll taxes.
No such "lawfully present" immigrant, however, would be immediately entitled to the benefits because like all Social Security and Medicare recipients they would have to work 10 years to become eligible for retirement payments and health care. To remain qualified, either Congress or future administrations would have to extend Obama's actions so that those immigrants would still be considered lawfully present in the country.
None of the immigrants who would be spared deportation under Obama's executive actions would be able to receive federal assistance such as welfare or food stamps, or other income-based aid. They also would not be eligible to purchase health insurance in federal exchanges set up by the new health care law and they would not be able to apply for tax credits that would lower the cost of their health insurance.
Benefits for illegal immigrants steps into murky waters. The White House has said it will not grant federal assistance to the 5 million affected by Obama’s executive actions. The Obama administration first denied younger immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children access to health care exchanges and tax credits in 2012, especially disappointing immigrant advocates.
"They were specifically carved out of that, which is deeply unfortunate because it cuts directly against the spirit" of the health care law, said Avideh Moussavian, an attorney at the National Immigration Law Center. "They should have had the opportunity to buy health insurance just like anybody else."
Any immigrant who is lawfully present in the country with a Social Security number would be entitled to Social Security and Medicare upon retirement because they would have paid into the system, one official said.
Stephen Miller, a spokesman for Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, a leading Republican opponent of Obama's executive actions, said making immigrants illegally in the U.S. eligible for Social Security and Medicare "is an attack on working families."
"The amnestied illegal immigrants are largely older, lower-wage and lower-skilled and will draw billions more in benefits than they will pay in," he said.
Those seeking benefits would have needed to work for at least 10 years and be of retirement age. Immigrants would also be eligible for survivor benefits if the deceased worker had worked for 10 years and disability insurance if they had worked 5-20 years.
A report by the White House Council of Economic Advisers this week concluded that Obama's executive actions would expand the U.S. tax base because about two-thirds of immigrants illegally working in the United States don't pay taxes.
But many immigrants currently working illegally still pay into the Social Security system because they have obtained an Individual Taxpayer Identification Number. Moussavian said the number has declined because the Internal Revenue Service has made it harder to apply for the identification number.
The Social Security Administration estimates that out of about 11 immigrants who either entered the U.S. illegally or have overstayed their visas slightly more than 3 million paid payroll taxes of about $6.5 billion in 2010, with their employers contributing another $6.5 billion.
"It's one of many reasons why they would want to come forward," Moussavian said. "Many immigrants have contributed enormously through payroll taxes and income taxes and they go to programs that they can't currently access."

Reckless move: The NY Times publishes Darren Wilson’s address

Bailey comment:"This so called business should be shut down and everyone working there that was responsible for putting Darren Wilson and his family's life in danger need to be brought up on charges of attempted murder."  

The New York Times, whether consciously or not, has just endangered Darren Wilson’s life.
With tensions running high in Ferguson over the lack of an indictment for Wilson’s killing of Michael Brown, the paper has published the officer’s approximate address -- the street and town where he lives with his new wife, who also is named.
Given the racial animosity unleashed by Brown’s death, given the rioting and the looting and the stores that were set afire, how can a news organization make it easier for some crazy zealot to track down Wilson?
But there it is in the paper:
“Officer Wilson and [blank] own a home together on [blank] Lane in [blank], Mo., a St. Louis suburb about a half-hour drive from Ferguson.”
I mean, why not add a locator map?
The piece was a seemingly innocuous scooplet about Wilson, who had dropped out of sight before the grand jury decision, getting married.
As Mediaite columnist Joe Concha puts it, “Regardless of your thoughts on Wilson’s guilt or innocence, how can anyone believe providing his street and name of his wife be anything but irresponsible?”
The Times has published a correction -- but not the kind you would expect:
“An earlier version of this post included a photograph that contained information that should not have been made public. The image has been removed.”
But that was not a reference to Wilson’s address, which was in the text of the story. Rather, the paper deleted a photo of Wilson’s marriage license.
Journalism is full of close calls. This is not one of them. The Times should apologize.

Gas Price Cartoon

Businesses to receive incentive for hiring illegal immigrants, report says

Businesses will have a $3,000-per-employee incentive to hire illegal immigrants or native-born workers under President Obama’s sweeping action on illegal immigration.
Because of a kink in ObamaCare, businesses will not face a penalty for not providing illegal immigrants health care, The Washington Times reports. Illegal immigrants are ineligible for public benefits such as buying insurance on ObamaCare’s health exchanges.
Congressional aides condemned the loophole saying it puts illegal immigrants ahead of Americans in the job hunt.
“If it is true that the president’s actions give employers a $3,000 incentive to hire those who came here illegally, he has added insult to injury,” Rep. Lamar Smith, Texas Republican told The Washington Times. “The president’s actions would have just moved those who came here illegally to the front of the line, ahead of unemployed and underemployed Americans.”
Fighting hecklers in Chicago Tuesday, Obama praised the contributions to the U.S. by a broad patchwork of immigrants, saying it is imperative that the U.S. act now to change its broken immigration policy. He cited studies showing that immigrants open one-fourth of all new U.S. businesses and that 40 percent of Fortune 500 companies were founded by immigrants or their children.
"Being a nation of immigrants gives us this huge entrepreneurial advantage over other nations," he said.
Obama’s executive action could make nearly 5 million immigrants eligible to avoid deportation.
At issue is the extent of Obama's executive actions. The measures would apply to parents of U.S. citizens or of legal permanent residents. The parents would have to have lived in the U.S. for at least five years. Obama also expanded a program designed to extend deportation protections to immigrants who entered the U.S. illegally as children.
But in a blow to some immigrant activists, Obama did not provide protections for parents of such young immigrants who are known as Dreamers.

Parents offended by "Nutcracker" Christmas tree

War On Christmas.

We haven’t even had time to hang the mistletoe and would you believe there are already skirmishes breaking out in the war on Christmas?
The latest yuletide battleground is Butler Elementary School in Belmont, Mass.
Over the years I’ve covered my fair share of anti-Christmas school house shenanigans. There was the dimwit who confiscated a child’s candy canes and the dunderheads who banned the colors red and green. And how can we forget about the simpletons who outlawed classroom poinsettias or the Junior League communists who rewrote the lyrics to "Silent Night"?
But those are junior varsity skirmishes compared to what happened at Butler Elementary School – where the PTA canceled a field trip to see “The Nutcracker” because there was a Christmas tree on the stage.
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I’m not making this up, folks.
Television station WHDH did a stellar job reporting this act of lunacy. They report that a group of parents were alarmed at the “questionable content” of the popular ballet.
The questionable content had nothing to do with men in tights. The parents got their tutus in a twist over "O Tannenbaum."
“In the past years, there were parent complaints as "The Nutcracker" has a religious content,” PTA co-president Barbara Bulfoni told the television station.
Well, smoke some holly and call me jolly! Heaven help the unfortunate children who gaze upon a tree decorated with ornaments and sparkly lights and tinsel.
According to the reporting of WHDH, the issue came to a boiling point during a recent PTA meeting. Parents who supported the ballet were told accused of being discriminatory.
And to make matters worse, the PTA secretly canceled the trip.
Once the parents learned the trip had been canceled – they raised a ruckus and faster than you could say “Sugar Plum Fairy” – the PTA reversed its decision.
For the record - there are no reported instances of a child spontaneously converting to the Christian faith while attending a performance of “The Nutcracker.”
I commend the PTA for coming to their senses and I raise a cup of egg nog in their honor. I may need a double.

White House veto threat ices plans to renew tax breaks

A plan to renew a handful of tax breaks for business and individuals looks to have been quenched by the White House after a veto threat.
The threat came before any plan was revealed to renew that tax breaks, which have said to have favored individuals over the working class.
Speculation on Capitol Hill on Tuesday focused on a potential agreement to permanently enact tax breaks on business investments in new equipment and research and development as part of a plan that would renew dozens of expired tax breaks for businesses and individuals both.
The White House immediately weighed in with a veto threat, saying Congress should also make permanent a top Obama administration priority: extending more generous tax credits for the working poor and people with children. They were left out of the potential pact and expire at the end of 2017. Democrats fear they won't be renewed if Republicans control Congress or retake the White House.
"The president would veto the proposed deal because it would provide permanent tax breaks to help well-connected corporations while neglecting working families," deputy White House press secretary Jennifer Friedman said. A senior White House official said the president was personally working the phones to try to kill the plan.
Negotiations no renewing the expired tax breaks are expected to continue.
The breaks are usually renewed annually and have a widespread political backing between Republicans and Democrats. The emerging pact would also have made permanent tax breaks for college tuition, parking and transit subsidies, and a deduction for state and local sales taxes.
"The president has consistently stated his opposition to giving hundreds of billions of dollars of tax cuts primarily geared toward corporations while leaving middle-class families and those struggling to get into the middle class behind," said Jason Furman, chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers.
The possible agreement, Democratic aides said, was being negotiated between House Republicans and top Senate Democrats like outgoing Majority Leader Harry Reid, whose state of Nevada benefits from the state and local sales tax deduction. Senate Democrats were seeking the best deal they could while retaining leverage, but the emerging outline infuriated the White House because it was so favorable to businesses.
The plan would have reached $450 million and would have been added to the $17.9 trillion national debt.
"The price tag is a result of irresponsible horse trading whereby each side got to claim its favorite tax break without paying for it," said Maya MacGuineas, president of the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, which advocates for lower deficits.

Ferguson protesters rally across US for second day

Get a Job!

Protests took place across the nation for the second straight day in wake of a grand jury declining to indict Ferguson officer Darren Wilson on charges for killing 18-year-old Michael Brown in an August shooting.
Demonstrations in Ferguson quieted down Tuesday night into early Wednesday evening. There was not as much chaos in the town as there was Monday night after the announcement.
In California, Oakland protesters vandalized police cars, smashed windows at car dealerships, restaurants and convenience stores as well as setting fire to trash in the middle of city streets.
The crowd also shut down two major freeways before police forced the crowds to disperse.
Protesters in Los Angeles crowded U.S. 101 freeway barricading lanes stopping traffic. Police cornered the protesters on an overpass, but one protester managed to toss a barricade off the overpass onto the freeway.
Thousands of people marched in Manhattan gathering in Union Square and holding up traffic on FDR Drive, Williamsburg and Manhattan bridges and the Queens Midtown Tunnel.
Commissioner William Bratton said police were giving protesters "breathing room."
"As long as they remain nonviolent, and as long as they don't engage in issues that cause fear or create vandalism, we will work with them to allow them to demonstrate," he said.
A car struck a pedestrian early Tuesday afternoon at a rally. The car then continued to burst through the pack of demonstrators. The driver called the police immediately after the incident. The woman suffered minor injuries.
Several hundred people marched down a Cleveland freeway ramp to block rush-hour traffic while protesting the Missouri developments and Saturday's fatal shooting by an officer of 12-year-old Tamir Rice of Cleveland, who had a pellet gun that looked like a real firearm.
"The system wasn't made to protect us," said one of the protesters, 17-year-old Naesha Pierce. "To get justice, the people themselves have to be justice."
Riot police arrested several demonstrators in St. Louis on Interstate 44 near the Edward Jones Dome. Protesters disrupted traffic for several hours before they were dispersed by police with pepper spray.
Several hundred people from historically black schools Morehouse College and Clark Atlanta University in Georgia held peaceful demonstrations. But as the night wore on, some groups split off and tried to block a freeway, and police said some windows were broken.
Police said 21 people were arrested, mostly for failure to disperse when asked, but one person faces a weapons charge.
In Portland, Oregon, a rally drew about 1,000 people who listened to speeches then marched through downtown. A splinter group of about 300 people kept going, marching across a Willamette River bridge. Bus and light rail traffic was disrupted, and police used pepper spray and made several arrests.

13 Facts About Ferguson the Media Will Never Tell You

According to protesters who erupted in violence after a grand jury declined to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo., this was the case of a white policeman shooting an unarmed black teenager with his hands in the air in a community plagued by racial tension
That's an account promoted by many in the mainstream media as well. But here are several facts about the case that are harder to find:

1. Surveillance video showed that shortly before the confrontation, 18-year-old Brown stole cigarillos from a convenience store and shoved a clerk who tried to stop him.

2. The autopsy report showed that Brown had marijuana in his system when he died.

3. Officer Wilson, driving to the call of a medical emergency, first encountered Brown walking in the middle of a street and told Brown and his friend to walk on the sidewalk. Brown responded with an expletive.

4. Wilson chose to confront Brown only after he saw the cigarillos in his hand and recalled the radio report of a robbery at the convenience store.

5. Wilson said when he tried to open his car door, Brown slammed it back shut, then punched Wilson in the face.

6. Fearing another punch could knock him out, Wilson drew his gun, he told the grand jury, and Brown grabbed the gun, saying "you are too much of a pussy to shoot me."

7. An African-American witness confirmed that Brown and Wilson appeared to be "arm-wrestling" by the car.

8. Another witness saw Brown leaning through the car's window and said "some sort of confrontation was taking place."

9. After Wilson fired a shot that struck Brown's hand, Brown fled and Wilson gave chase. Brown suddenly stopped. An unidentified witness told the grand jury that 6-foot-4, 292-pound Brown charged at Wilson with his head down. Wilson said Brown put his hand under the waistband of his pants as he continued toward Wilson. That's when Wilson fired.

10. A witness testified that Brown never raised his hands.

11. Gunpowder found on the wound on Brown's hand indicated his hand was close to the gun when it fired. According to a report, the hand wound showed foreign matter "consistent with products that are discharged from the barrel of a firearm."

12. Judy Melinek, a forensic pathologist who reviewed the autopsy for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, said the gunpowder "supports the fact that this guy is reaching for the gun, if he has particulate matter in the wound."

13. Wilson said Brown was physically uncontrollable and "for lack of a better word, crazy." He said that during the confrontation, he was thinking: "He's gonna kill me. How do I survive?" Legal experts say police officers typically have wide latitude to use deadly force when they feel their safety is threatened.

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Ferguson Agitators Cartoon

Dreamers pushed the boundaries on immigration reform – and now seem to control the narrative

They were criticized for being too provocative and too critical in demanding immigration reform.
When some of them arranged for youths who had been deported to try to come back across the Mexican border, setting up a showdown with the Obama administration over whether they would be allowed to return to the U.S., even the most enthusiastic immigration activists balked at their strategy.
And when these group of young activists, undocumented youths who had grown up in the United States and are known as Dreamers, locked horns with even some Democrats who were leading the push for immigration reform – particularly President Barack Obama himself – immigration activists grew frustrated, claiming it was wrong to direct criticism at the president, someone who sympathized with their cause.
The so-called Dreamers, however, did not back down – in fact, they pushed back harder when immigration reform failed to materialize.
And so when Obama delivered his prime-time speech last Thursday, announcing that he was issuing an executive order that would suspend deportation for up to 5 million undocumented immigrants, the Dreamers felt vindicated.
It was their single biggest victory so far – the largest change in immigration in many years. And with that, they recaptured the driver’s seat in the fight for comprehensive immigration reform.
“We got a lot of backlash for going after Obama,” said Erika Andiola, one of the most prominent Dreamers pushing for immigration reform, to Fox News Latino. “But he is the president of the United States, he said he supported immigrants, but Dreamers were saying he was getting them and their families deported.”
“At the end of the day, it was that pressure that created a moral crisis” and played a part in pushing the president to issue the executive order.

“[President Obama]’s leaving in two years, and he’d done nothing [about immigration]. This is historic, and it’s the result of our lobbying, going to Congress, holding vigils, civil disobedience. We took risks to make sure our stories were heard, we tried to put them in our shoes.

- Lucy Allain, immigrant activist

Since 2009, the Dreamers have taken a fledgling campaign that was focused on getting a law that would provide young undocumented immigrants with a chance to live and work in the United States, and turned it into the engine of immigration advocacy that has broadened to include legalization for many groups of people who are here illegally.
Obama’s executive action in large part echoes what the Dreamers – often to the chagrin of older, long-established immigration activists and advocacy groups who had preferred a more cautious, diplomatic approach – have been demanding to one degree or another for years.
Obama said he was expanding a 2012 initiative, which originally gave a two-year reprieve from deportation to immigrants who had come to the United States illegally before they were 16, who were no older than 31, had no criminal record, and met other criteria. The new executive order lifts the age cap of 31, and extends the deportation relief, as well as the accompanying eligibility to get a work permit, to many other undocumented immigrants, including parents of U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents.
“When I heard the announcement, I was watching TV, and many people were saying ‘Thank God Obama finally did this, he finally realized it needed to be done,’” said Lucy Allain, a leader in the Dreamer movement who gained national attention when she confronted then-presidential candidate Mitt Romney at a campaign event in New York City about his hard-line stance on immigration.
“It wasn’t that he finally realized it on his own. The [Dreamer] community doesn’t get appreciated. The whole executive action would not have been possible if there had not been a big push [by activists] for him to do it,” she said. “…This is historic, and it’s the result of our lobbying, going to Congress, holding vigils, civil disobedience. We took risks to make sure our stories were heard, we tried to put them in our shoes.”
The Dreamers are named after a congressional measure – the Dream Act – that calls for providing undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children a path to legal status. It has been introduced several times, but has failed to pass.
To be sure, many advocates of all ages have worked diligently to push for an overhaul of immigration laws that would give opportunities to many of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States to legalize their status.
“Let's be clear,” wrote immigration attorney Marty Rosenbluth wrote on a Facebook page for human rights activists, “We shouldn't just be thanking Obama. We should be thanking the tens of thousands of immigrants and others who picketed, protested, laid down in the streets, wrote letters, and drove time and time again to D.C. and to other cities to get their voices heard.”
“Yup, he finally did it,” Rosenbluth said. “But this is a victory for mass organizing, not for politics as usual.”
In an interview with Fox News Latino, Rosenbluth said Obama responded to pressure. He said the executive order – which Obama had threatened to issue multiple times over the last several years, citing a lack of will by Republicans in the House to move forward an immigration reform bill – capped a sweeping and persistent grassroots effort by undocumented immigrants, their U.S. citizen and legal permanent resident relatives, and other supporters.
Obama, after all, he said, presided over the largest number of deportations – more than 2 million people since he’s been in office – of any administration.
“We have to see this as not that Obama kept his promise” to reform immigration, Rosenbluth said, “but that the immigrant community kept him to his promise. They made him keep his promise.”
But the Dreamers, arguably, maintained an energy and remained vocal and visible, even when many other activists seemed to grow weary. Often, when hope for immigration reform or executive action dimmed, and activists grew exasperated and stopped to evaluate their strategies, the Dreamers got bolder, and pushed boundaries.
In one case that drew criticism from some of the older immigrant advocates, one group of dreamers even coordinated with deported immigrants in Mexico to try to cross back into the United States; they did, approaching Border Patrol agents, who arrested and detained them. Some got released and are awaiting hearings on their political asylum claims, others were deported.
Andiola, a 27-year-old from Arizona who got a two-year reprieve from Obama’s 2012 initiative, has frequently pushed the boundaries to bring attention to the plight of undocumented immigrants.
This summer, she and Cesar Vargas, another undocumented immigrant and activist, went up to Republican lawmakers Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky and Rep. Steve King of Iowa at a fundraiser in Iowa and introduced themselves as beneficiaries of the 2012 program, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA.
King, who has one of the most hardline views on immigration in Congress, has been a vocal opponent of DACA and any other kind of break given to undocumented immigrants.
Andiola reminded King of a notorious comment he had made about how Dreamers smuggle drugs.
King suggested that perhaps Andiola had not understood his comment.
“I spoke of drug smugglers,” he said in the encounter, which was videotaped. “Now, you’re not going to tell me you’re one of them are you?”
Andiola didn’t miss a beat and responded: “Do I look like a drug smuggler to you?”
“For many years, others spoke for us,” Andiola said. “The big non-profits spoke for us. We decided to come out of the shadows, to speak for ourselves, to tell our story directly, to come out of the shadows.”
The Dreamers made it part of their modus operandi to publicize and humanize the story of people facing deportation. They put faces in front of cameras, they gave their full names, they wore shirts that said “Undocumented and Unafraid.”
“We were called all kinds of things,” she recalled. “But the more we spoke out, the more we controlled the narrative, and the more we saw people were connecting with us. We also started seeing we could stop deportations, publicizing someone’s story actually protected them rather than hurt them.”
Adds Allain, “We took risks to get our point across. Our story is powerful, people can relate to it.”
The Dreamers say they are glad the president finally fulfilled a part of his promise to take action on immigration unilaterally because Congress has failed to bring a reform bill for a vote.
But they say they want deportations suspended for more people, they say too many people are still being left in the shadows, too many families are being separated after an undocumented relative is put in deportation after a traffic stop, or a raid by immigration officials.
“We need to move forward, we need to keep fighting, for the people who have been left out of this executive action,” said Andiola, whose home immigration agents raided. “We celebrate wins like DACA and the executive order, but we also know that our Mom or Dad didn’t qualify.”