ACTION NEEDED, PLEASE. 

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January 22, 2022

Below you can see short explanations of three bills pending under Georgia’s Gold Dome. Powerful, well-funded lobby groups are pushing the Republican-controlled legislature to pass HB 120 and HB 932. The same forces are trying to kill HB 228. Please make your voice heard. Contact your state legislators now and often. There will be more bills analyzed here soon. We need help.

* HB 120 would give illegal alien college students living in Georgia with a deferral on deportation in Obama’s DACA program the much lower instate tuition rate in public colleges and technical schools. Americans and legal immigrants from other states who attend the same schools are not eligible for that lower rate and must pay out-of-state tuition.

For academic year 2020-2021, the average tuition & fees for colleges in Georgia was $4,739 for instate and $17,008 for out-of-state according to experts at collegetuition.com.

Last year a federal judge ruled the DACA program to be unlawful. The 11^th circuit appellate court ruled in 2019 that illegal aliens with DACA are still illegal aliens. They do not have legal status and are removable at any time. The Georgia Attorney General’s office takes a similar position. There are about 20K DACA recipients in GA.

Republican Rep. Kasey Carpenter introduced HB 120 in 2021. It puts DACA illegal aliens in front of Americans and legal immigrants. We regard that as un-American. The instate tuition for illegals concept is publicly pushed by the Georgia Chamber of Commerce because it would lower wages for Americans and raise corporate profits.The Dustin Inman Society opposes HB120.

Ask your state Rep to oppose. Then call and or email the Speaker’s office (404-656-5020) and leave a polite message with your opinion on this bill. These phone lines have voice mail so you can call on weekends and after business hours.

* HB 932 would allow refugees, foreigners here on Special Immigrant Visas (SIV) and Afghans on “humanitarian parole” to be excluded from the current state law and BOR policy that says newly arrived college students must be GA residents for 12 months before they can access the much lower instate tuition rate in Georgia’s university system. (The Special Immigrant Visa grants permanent residence to foreign nationals who claim to have helped the U.S. government abroad).

HB 932 does not cover Americans and immigrants outside the above description who move to Georgia from other states – they would still be required to pay the higher tuition rate for public colleges/tech schools for the first year of their residence.

HB 932 is sponsored by Republican Rep Wes Cantrell and has Democrat cosponsors. We regard HB 932 as un-American. The Dustin Inman Society opposes HB 932.

Ask your state Rep to oppose. Then call and or email the Speaker’s office  (404-656-5020) and leave a polite message with your opinion on this bill. These phone lines have voice mail so you can call on weekends and after business hours.

 * HB 228 (Republican Rep Charlice Byrd) addresses the fact that Georgia issues drivers licenses and ID Cards to foreigners but has no law that excludes these credentials from acceptance as “proper identification” for voting purposes. The bill fixes that loophole and adds the wording “BEARER NOT U.S. CITIZEN-NOT VOTER ID” to the front of the non-citizen drivers licenses and ID Cards. It also requires DDS to change the first two characters of the serial number of these credentials to “NC” to reflect non-U.S. citizen status for mail-in vote security. We regard this bill to be a commonsense fix to a needless gap in election integrity. The Dustin Inman supports HB 228.

Ask your state Rep to help with passage as a cosponsor. Then call and or email the Speaker’s office – (404-656-5020) and leave a polite message with your opinion on this bill. These phone lines have voice mail so you can call on weekends and after business hours.

 More information is easily accessed at ImmigrationPoliticsGA.com and NewDustinInmanSociety.org.          dak – 22 Jan 2022

*Updated, Jan 24, 2022 5:03 PM with a correction on HB 932 to “the state’s university system.”

 

 

Note the below opinion piece was written about the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. We have had enough experience in Georgia’s state Capitol to know it’s also mostly true for state chambers.

“The Chamber of Commerce exists to keep workers’ wages low”

No, we don’t need to double immigration to stop inflation

Conn Carroll

Washington Examiner

January 14, 2022

Chamber of Commerce President Suzanne Clark, who was paid over $4 million by the Chamber in 2020 , wants to double immigration to the United States, a move she said will help solve the nation’s labor shortage and inflation crisis.

“We must double the number of people legally immigrating to the U.S.,” Clark said during her State of American Business 2022 keynote address . “This workforce shortage is a crisis. It is contributing to supply chain disruptions and rising inflation. It is undermining business growth.”

It is true that there is a near record-high of 10.6 million jobs available, according to the Labor Department’s most recent report . And it is true that legal immigration is down. But legal immigration has been down since President Donald Trump took office , and the labor shortage only materialized after Biden became president .

What did change under Biden is an unprecedented fountain of money going straight to households regardless of their working status . And even President Barack Obama’s top economic advisers have said that it is this flood of money that is the driving force behind inflation. “By March of 2021, it looked very likely that the vaccinations were going to be very effective in bringing COVID down and that the economy was repairing rapidly,” Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers Chairman Jason Furman said last November . “So, that last round of checks, I thought at the time, was a mistake.”

If Clark wants to start filling those 10.6 million job openings, the businesses that pay her $4 million salary should start offering to pay their workers more. Just 61.9% of working-age people are in the American labor force. To bring those 10.6 million job openings down to zero, the labor force participation rate would only have to rise to 65.9%, a level last reached in 2008…. please read the rest here.

 

Stories like this about #GARepublicans will not be seen on @BreitbartNews because of political genius of @mboyle1 . SMH #Georgiafornia https://t.co/O4Z3GbLJAD

— D.A. King #LivesInGeorgiafornia (@DAKDIS) January 15, 2022

When President Biden entered office in January, with Democratic control of the Senate and House, there was a great deal of hope from left-wing immigration activists that 2021 would be the year in which a broad pathway to citizenship for millions of illegal immigrants would be created and signed into law — but as the year ends, those hopes have so far been dashed as multiple efforts have hit the rocks.

The Biden administration released a proposal on Inauguration Day, which eventually became the U.S. Citizenship Act of 2021, and was headlined by an 8-year path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the country.

TOP DEM ADMITS PASSING BIDEN IMMIGRATION BILL A ‘HERCULEAN’ TASK AMID GOP OPPOSITION

It would also grant farmworkers, along with Temporary Protected Status (TPS) and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), immediate green card eligibility. They would then be eligible for citizenship three years later.

While there was a smattering of security provisions, it was significantly less than seen in past immigration reform efforts — provisions that were key in getting Republican support. The bill also envisioned processing centers set up in Central America, more immigration judges — and avenues for legal immigration, including a mass “recapturing” of family and works visas from previous years.

However, with a 50-50 Senate, Democrats recognized that it would need Republican support to gain the 60 votes to overcome the threat of a filibuster. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., admitted that it would be a “Herculean” task to pass the reform effort.

Sure enough, with minimal border security measures in the legislation and a brewing crisis at the southern border, even Republicans who had supported reform efforts in the past balked — with Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla., calling it a nonstarter.

“There are many issues I think we can work cooperatively with President-elect Biden, but a blanket amnesty for people who are here unlawfully isn’t going to be one of them,” Rubio said.

MARCO RUBIO REJECTS BIDEN IMMIGRATION BILL, CALLS IT ‘BLANKET AMNESTY’

As the bill stalled in Congress, the White House expressed openness to breaking the legislation up into individual pieces that might be able to gain Republican support, with some Republicans having expressed willingness to grant permanent status to DACA recipients.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki told reporters that “Congress will have to work through what it looks like moving forward, and what components will be included here and what components could be dealt with separately.”

But as the border surge of 2021 grew over spring and summer, with more than 200,000 encounters a month at one point, there was little sign of a broader Republican appetite for immigration measures that didn’t include border security. And so Democrats tried a different approach.

Build Back Better/budget reconciliation

As Democrats looked for ways to pass sweeping parts of President Biden’s agenda on issues like climate change, family policy and immigration, they eventually zoned in on the budget reconciliation process in order to bypass the Republican filibuster. The budget reconciliation process requires only 50 votes in the Senate, and therefore if all Democrats in the chamber voted in favor, with Vice President Kamala Harris casting a vote as a tiebreaker, legislation would pass the chamber.

In outlines for the bill were a variety of proposals for amnesty or protections for illegal immigrants, in addition to sweeping changes to legal immigration. The first of those plans would grant a pathway to citizenship for DACA and TPS recipients, farmworkers and those deemed “essential workers.” However, that… more here.

 DACA illegal aliens in GA whould pay less college tuition than U.S. citizens and legal immigrants from other states

Candidate for Lt. Governor and current President Pro Tem of the state senate, Sen. Butch Miller Miller, has come out in support of giving the illegal aliens with DACA a lower tuition rate in public colleges than U.S. citizens and legal immigrants from other states.

Thanks to a Twitter post from an elated  former GALEOstaffer and illegal alien DACA recipient, Jaime Rangel, who lobbies for FWD.us under the Gold Dome (yes, really) we see a January 7 report from the liberal Gainesville Times with that policy nugget.

The Georgia Chamber of Commerce is also pushing hardf or that action.

Boiled down for those new to the issue, there are about twenty thousand illegal aliens living in Georgia with a deferral on deportation proceedings because they came to the U.S. as “children.” That number could soon zoom up because of Biden’s “ya’ll come!” policy on our southern border.

Currently the University System of Georgia (and the Technical College System of Georgia – TCSG) offers essentially two levels of tuition rates – instate and out of state. For academic year 2020-2021, the average tuition & fees for colleges in Georgia was $4,739 for instate and $17,008 for out-of-state according to experts at collegetuition.com. It’s pretty simple: Georgia residents pay less to attend Georgia’s public universities and Tech colleges than a student from Michigan or Arizona, for example.

The news of Miller’s support comes in the Gainesville Times report “5 issues to watch to watch from Hall County legislators in 2022 session.”… read the rest here.