Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
The on-again, off-again immigration reform effort is apparently on again, with a new provision intended to regulate Americans’ access to the job market — and increase government’s access to Americans. According to The Wall Street Journal, a new plan being pushed by U.S. Sens. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., would require that all Americans get a new biometric ID card in order to work.
A person familiar with the legislative planning said the biometric data would likely be either fingerprints or a scan of the veins in the top of the hand. It would be required of all workers, including teenagers, but would be phased in, with current workers needing to obtain the card only when they next changed jobs, the person said.The card requirement also would be phased in among employers, beginning with industries that typically rely on illegal-immigrant labor.
The current immigration verification system, E-Verify, isn’t mandatory for all employers — thankfully, since it both misidentifies a number of legal workers and, unsurprisingly, fails to identify a large number of immigrants not cleared to work in the United States. But Graham and Schumer apparently consider illegal immigration such a huge problem that they want to subject every single American and legal immigrant — and their employers — to additional expenses, hassles and government surveillance in order to keep a much smaller subset of people from office-cleaning, dish-washing and fruit-picking jobs.
The federal government wants to spend hundreds of millions of dollars, and force employees and employers still suffering from a recession to do the same, to create and make accessible to every employer a national database of the fingerprints of all Americans from the time they are 14 years old. And they want to do it in order to keep an estimated 11.9 million unauthorized immigrants — less than 4 percent of the total population of the United States — from accessing the job market.
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