WHAT'S VISA?????

Copy of Visa picture: http://www.vietnamopentour.com/image_info/visa_approval_exemplar.jpg
http://w3.tue.nl/fileadmin/dpo/Expertiseteam/images/D_C_visum.jpg

A visa allows you to travel to the United States as far as the port of entry (airport or land border crossing) and ask the immigration officer to allow you to enter the country. Only the immigration officer has the authority to permit you to enter the United States. He or she decides how long you can stay for any particular visit (usually 6-12months). Immigration matters are the responsibility of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

Millions of foreign visitors travel to the U.S. each year. Others come to live here permanently. International visitors and immigrants add greatly to the nation's cultural, education and economic life. As a citizen of a foreign country, who wishing to enter the U.S., must first obtain a visa, either a nonimmigrant visa for temporary stay, or an immigrant visa for permanent residence. The type of visa you must have is defined by immigration law, and relates to the purpose of your travel. Yet, based on law, not everyone will receive a visa to come to the U.S.

General, in order to be eligible to apply for an immigrant visa, a foreign citizen must be sponsored by a U.S. citizen relative(s) or by a prospective employer. Unlike most other immigrant categories, Immediate Relatives are not subject to numerical limits under immigration law. Major immigrant categories are: 1) Immediate Relatives, 2) Special Immigrants, 3) Family-sponsored, and 4) Employer-sponsored.

Also U.S has 2 categories visas for : immigrant and nonimmigrant.
Immigrant visas are for people who intend to live permanently in the U.S. Nonimmigrant visas are for people with permanent residence outside the U.S. but who wish to be in the U.S. on a temporary basis. The reason can be for tourism, medical treatment, business, temporary work or study, etc.

Usually, it’s easy to get a visa but after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, U.S had made some changes in our laws governing visitor entry and exit. Now require additional application forms and security clearances. Visa applications take longer to process. For example, many applicants experienced hardship when applications got backlogged and delays became indefinite. Fortunately, U.S. has improved the visa clearance procedures. Better interagency cooperation and automated procedures have speeded up the clearance process.

sources from: http://travel.state.gov/visa/visa_1750.html

Today's USA

The U.S. Senate and House have passed widely divergent immigration bills. The Senate's legislation would put most undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship. The House bill would make illegal immigrants felons and increase penalties for hiring them..

Right now at least 30 states have passed laws or taken other steps in few year to crack down on illegal immigrants, often making it harder for undocumented workers to find jobs or receive public services. According to the National Conference of State Legislatures, among major themes of the state legislation: fining businesses that hire undocumented workers and denying such companies public contracts if they don't verify the legal status of employees.

However, luck that under the federal law, states must provide some services to illegal immigrants, including public education and emergency medical care. States do not have to provide commercial licenses, food assistance, health care, unemployment benefits or other services.

EXAMPLES ARE: 1) A Georgia bill enacted in April has a phased-in requirement that public employers and government contractors and subcontractors verify information on newly hired workers through a federal program. ( http://www.georgia.org/NR/rdonlyres/AFB3F7A4-8D02-40AC-9BDC-657405719BB9/0/quotes_fact05_ajcexpandedbu.gif)

2)A Louisiana law approved in June subjects businesses that have state contracts and more than 10 employees to fines if they don't fire workers known to be undocumented. (http://www.nwlahba.org/images/insurance.jpg)

Labor's "SAVIOR"

(Sources from my last year's History Class handout notes)
THE KNIGHT OF LABOR:
The Knight of Labor (est. 1869), unlike trade union like the American Federation of Labor, opened its membership to ALL of the workers: skill and/or unskilled, immigrant and native born, men and women, black and whites. Though its goals – eight hour work day, equal pay for equal work, etc. – where similar to other unions of the day, the Knights largely opposed strikes as a bargaining method. They advocated higher taxes o higher incomes and sought to establish “Worker Cooperatives,” business owned and operated by the workers themselves.

AMERICAN FEDERATION OF LABOR – A. F. L.
The more practical minded American Federation of Labor (est. 1886) had fewer illusions; it recognized the permanence of the working class and the increasing difficulty of escape from that status, discarded cooperative utopias for “ Pure and Simple” unionism – the immediate improvement of wages, hours, and working conditions—and willingly employed the strike weapon to enforce collective bargaining and advance the economic position of its own exclusive membership, confined as it was largely to skilled workers organized along craft lines. The A. F. L., adroitly guided by Samuel Gompers, made a business a trade unionism—and a relatively successful one at that. “The trade unions,” Gompers explained in 1906, “are the business organizations of the wage earners, to attend to the business of the wage workers.” The prevailing philosophy of American trade unionism was never more adroitly put.

Excerpt from Gompers memoirs, 70 years of Life & Labor； speaking here on the difference between A. F. L. and the Knight of Labor:
Trade unions endeavored to organize for collective responsibility persons with common trade problems. They sought economic betterment in order to place in the hands of wage-earners the means to wider opportunities.
The Knights of Labor was a social or fraternal organization….its purpose was reform. The nights of Labor prided itself upon something higher and grander than a trade union or political party….
The order admitted to membership any person, excluding only lawyers and saloon-keepers. This policy included employers…The order was a hodgepodge with no basis for solidarity…

Immigration Employers

Staring from February through April, its United States’ tax month, everyone is short on their money. It is same over the world, when you were young, you pay tax so after you get retire, and you will get your retirement pay. However, it’s hard for those immigrate to find a job, get a Social Security numbers because mostly they will get low payment, and some employer won’t help them pay taxes.
According to Doris Meissner, says that many workers might have put the wrong number on their job application[1], and its absolute true. If you fill out a word or a number or even the address wrong, you may not get the retire money back, because it doesn’t match to the government’s record. So in September 4, 2007, the federal program need to crackdown the Social Security numbers with those on file, and cracks down on employers with too many mismatches[2].
“Farmers Worry About Immigration Crackdown”[3] is also true. Since every few months, there’s always news about when and where did government search out more illegal immigrate and send then back to their home country. Because illegal immigrate always get low pay so many Chinese Restaurants and farmer will like to have them to work. (These people usually are Chinese and Spanish).
The other problems that I know are people often buy taxes or tax evasion. For the old lady and old man, whom can't work or don't have work but really needs money so they buy taxes.
But i feel very disappiont for those big business company, if you earn alots of money, why don't you pay tax, or it's a fashion to become a tax eveader???

[1] sources from:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12612074
[2] Sources from:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14149812 by Steve Inskeep and Jennifer Ludden
[3] Sources from:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=14509724

Immigratiom act for 2 century

1882 Immigration Act:
3rd of August, 1882, the US Congress passed a new Immigration Act that stated that a 50 cents tax would be levied on all aliens landing at United States ports. The money collected was to be used to defray the expenses of regulating immigration and for the care of immigrants after landing. The head tax money was also used to pay the federal immigration agents, and independent immigration agencies throughout the United States.

1907 Immigration Act
The Gentlemen's Agreement of 1907 was an informal agreement between the United States and the Empire of Japan concerning the controversial issues of immigration and racial segregation. The immediate cause of the Agreement was anti-Japanese racism in California, which had become increasingly xenophobic after the Japanese won the Russo-Japanese War. On 11 October 1906, the San Francisco, California Board of Education had passed a regulation whereby children of Japanese descent would be required to attend racially segregated separate schools. At the time, Japanese immigrants made up approximately 1% of the population of California; many of them had come under the treaty in 1894 which had assured free immigration from Japan.

1924 Immigration Act

Picture:http://content.answers.com/main/content/wp/en-commons/thumb/f/f8/180px-CalvinCoolidgeimmigration3.jpg
Also called Johnson-Reed Act, including the National Origins Act, Asian Exclusion Act, (43 Statutes-at-Large 153) was a United States federal law that limited the number of immigrants who could be admitted from any country to 2% of the number of people from that country who were already living in the United States in 1890, according to the Census of 1890. It excluded the immigration of Asians. It superseded the 1921 Emergency Quota Act. The law was aimed at further restricting the Southern and Eastern Europeans who had begun to enter the country in large numbers beginning in the 1890s, as well as East Asian and Asian Indians, who were prohibited from immigrating entirely….

Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act of 1943 src="http://teacher.scholastic.com/researchtools/researchstarters/immigration/images/baby.jpg" border=0>[Photograph of Chun Jan Yut in 1893 taken by an immigrant agency to investigate a case related to the Chinese Exclusion Acts. (National Archives) ]
It allowed Chinese immigration for the first time since the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and permitted Chinese nationals already residing in the country to become naturalized citizens. This marked the first time since the Naturalization Act of 1790 that any Asians were permitted to be naturalized.

Immigration and Nationality Act (1952)
The Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) of 1952 (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act) restricted immigration into the U.S. and is codified under Title 8 of the United States Code. The Act governs primarily immigration and citizenship in the United States. Before the INA, a variety of statutes governed immigration law but were not organized within one body of text. As a result of the September 11, 2001 attacks, the INA has undergone a major restructuring beginning in March 2003 and its provisions regarding the admissibility and removability of terrorist suspects has received much media and scholarly attention.

1965 Immigration Act
In 1965 Lyndon Baines Johnson managed to persuade Congress to pass a new Immigration Act. This is a new legislation brought to an end quotas based on national origin. Instead, the main factor of selection was the occupation of the applicant. Preference was given to those who had relatives already in the United States. Race, religion, color and national origin, was no longer factors in the selective process.

Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986:

The Act made it illegal to knowingly hire or recruit undocumented immigrants (immigrants who do not possess lawful work authorization), required employers to attest to their employees' immigration status, and granted amnesty to undocumented immigrants who entered the United States before January 1, 1982 and had resided there continuously.

Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996

Sources from: http://www.visaportal.com/keywords/keyword.asp?id=261
On September 30, 1996, the increases in criminal penalties for immigration-related offenses, authorization for increases in enforcement personnel, and enhanced enforcement authority…The 96 Act undertakes a comprehensive reorganization of the process of removal for inadmissible and deportable aliens, including a provision for the expedited removal of inadmissible aliens arriving at ports of entry. The 96 Act requires the conducting of three types of employment authorization verification pilot programs…

who are they and need what help

Europen (they the first?):
http://colonial-america.suite101.com/article.cfm/nonenglish_migration

Irish Immigration:
http://www.kinsella.org/history/histira.htm

Chinese Immigration:
http://library.thinkquest.org/20619/Chinese.html

Illegal Mexican History:
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/47978

Significant Historic Dates in U.S. Immigration:
http://www.rapidimmigration.com/usa/1_eng_immigration_history.html

Need any Help???
http://www.visa2003.com/world-immigration/us-history.
http://www.heritage.org/Research/Immigration/bg1913.cfm
http://www.immigration-usa.com/george_weissinger.html
http://www.cwrl.utexas.edu/~tonya/spring/imm/immi.html

Dreams of What???

Dragonwings, by Laurence Yep is a novel describing how immigrant’s early life in America. The novel begins in the first years of the twentieth century; an 8-year-old boy Moon Shadow leaves China, “Middle Kingdom” to join his father, Windrider, in San Francisco. Moon Shadow had never seen him in his life before but soon learns that his father was a worker in a laundry with other Chinese man in Chinatown; he’s also a master kitemaker, dreams of building and flying his own airplane. Chinese tradition and culture come vividly to life as father and son face the challenges of living in America.

They experience discrimination, but also make valued friends special with some “white demand”. In 1906, San Francisco earthquake and fire bring destruction but new opportunities for the boy and his father. In the dramatic conclusion, Moon Shadow and Windrider execute a dangerous attempt at flight.

After finishes reading this book, I had a deep feeling for Moon Shadow and Windrider. As immigrate, Windrider can easily learn their language, making friends, working with White Demand, and also to success his flying dream. Inspired by the account of a Chinese immigrant who made a flying machine in 1909, Laurence Yep's historical novel beautifully portrays the rich traditions of the Chinese community as it made its way in a hostile new world.

Another feeling was for Moon Shadow, as a fake legal immigration; (because Windrider lied to the government said he earns that laundry company and thousands of dollars so Moon Shadow can came.) he works so hard to learn the culture, language, also went to white school for education. Can you imagine a little boy who don’t know anything and arrive to a new country with out his mother but a father whom he never meets in his life before? I know how it feels; I think most of Chinese family kids right now have the same feeling as Moon shadow and I.

Usually the father came to American first, illegal or legal, work so hard to send money home, then few years later, they will registrar their family and children to come. Planning future for their children by sending them to school and so on until they all become citizen of this country...

My DREAM>>>>>>