Irish actor Gabriel Byrne has had a long and distinguished career in television and film. In 1995, he played a memorable role in the great film The Usual Suspects. He's now starring in the HBO series In Treatment, a nightly drama about a psychotherapist and his patients. The show, based on an Israeli television series, is very unusual. Each night is simply a therapy session with Byrne (Dr. Paul Weston) and a patient who comes in once a week as well as one session with Byrne seeing his own therapist. No action, no melodrama - just actors telling their character's stories.

Wow.

Are we in America? ICE is now prosecuting people who rent apartments to unauthorized immigrants. A landlord in Lexington, Kentucky is being prosecuted on federal alien harboring charges for renting apartments to unauthorized immigrants. This is not what the harboring laws were intended for. Are we going to start arresting Greyhound executives for allowing unauthorized immigrants to ride their buses. After all, we have laws barring people from transporting unauthorized immigrants.

[Note: I've updated this from the original post after I discovered the shocking criminalization provision noted at the end. This is a pretty serious elevation of what states have been doing and it will test Governor Barbour's seriousness about defending the US Constitution if he goes along with signing the bill]

Just days after Utah passed its employer sanctions law, Mississippi now becomes the latest state to go down the path of independently enforcing immigration law. Governor Haley Barbour still needs to sign the bill, but indications are that he will do so.

The Mississippi Employment Protection Act requires ALL employers in the state to use E-Verify. The statute separately requires contractors and subcontractors to use E-Verify, though this seems redundant given the overall requirement that every employer use the system.

Employers who terminate US citizen or permanent resident employees while continuing to employ unauthorized immigrants shall be liable for unlawful discrimination. Use of E-Verify shall be a safe harbor for employers from liability under this provision.

Third party employers must document to companies to whom they send workers that the employer is registered in E-Verify.

All government agencies as well as private employers with more than 250 employees must be using E-Verify by July 1, 2008. Companies with 100 to 250 employees must use E-Verify by July 1, 2009. Companies with 30 to 100 employees must use the system by July 1, 2010. All other employers must use it by July 1, 2011.

Violating employers are subject to the cancellation of contracts with the state and a bar on contracting with the state for three years. Employers are also subject to the revocation of a business license for up to three years.

The bill contains a shocking provision that is unique in the country and which will no doubt trigger a court challenge. It reads as follows:

(c) (i) It shall be a felony for any person to accept or perform employment for compensation knowing or in reckless disregard that the person is an unauthorized alien with respect to employment during the period which the unauthorized employment occurred. Upon conviction, a violator shall be subject to imprisonment in the custody of the Department of Corrections for not less than one (1) year nor more than five (5) years, a fine of not less than One Thousand Dollars ($1,000.00) nor more than Ten Thousand Dollars ($10,000.00), or both.”

The bill would allow the state to prosecute and imprison any unauthorized immigrant found to be working, something that appears to go way beyond a state's authority with respect to regulating immigration.

Columbia University Professor Jagdish Bhagwati, an Indian-born immigrant, is one of the country's best known economists and he's written extensively on the importance of free trade. He is spending much of his energy telling the world that globalization is a good thing that makes all of us more prosperous. Professor Bhagwati has won number awards. And many of you may have read his opinion pieces in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times. Many of these articles are online at Professor Bhagwati's web site.

The Cato Institute, a well-known libertarian think tank, has issued a report expressing serious concerns with the E-Verify system that many states are now requiring be used by employers and which will eventually be required of all employers nationally. Cato expressed concern about the reliability of the system and the adverse impact that will be felt by US citizens, particularly naturalized citizens, who are identified mistakenly as unauthorized immigrants. The report also believes E-Verify will encourage identity theft as workers attempt to avoid no match hits by pretending to be someone else. The report also expressed deep concern over the need to create a national ID system as part of implementing E-Verify, something that would be extremely expensive and has privacy implications.

Hopes by some supporters of GOP presidential candidate John McCain that Republican members of Congress would tone down efforts to make immigration a wedge issue in the lead up to the November election are being dashed. McCain is hoping to avoid the defection of large numbers of Hispanic voters to the Democrats and has hoped to convince those voters that the GOP is not an anti-immigration/anti-Hispanic party. 40% of Hispanics voted for President Bush in 2004, but recent polls suggest that as few as 10% of the 18 million Hispanic voters in the country plan on voting Republican this fall, a margin large enough to change the outcome in several states with large Hispanic populations.

Congress Daily (sorry, I can't provide a link because a subscription is required) reports that House Republicans are pushing to bring up the Shuler SAVE Act, a tough immigration enforcement bill, through an unusual legislative measure - a "discharge". The bill contains no measures to fix the broken legal immigration system or to deal with the large population of unlawfully present immigrants. The bill has not been brought up for a vote in the House Immigration Subcommittee and Republicans are hoping to bypass through a discharge petition that involves collecting signatures from the majority of House members (218) to force the bill to be voted on by the entire House. GOP members hope to get 170 signatures from there own party and 48 "Blue Dog" conservative Democrats. The odds of succeeding are not great since even some of the Democratic co-sponsors of the bill say they won't sign the discharge petition. Also, many Democrats are discussing potentially adding pro-immigration provisions as amendments if the bill moves forward.

McCain campaign officials have indicated they are supportive of the discharge, but Congress Daily reports that Republican leaders are trying to reach McCain to personally weigh in.

In the Senate, a group of mostly Southern members have formed a new Border Security and Enforcement First Caucus to ratchet up the rhetoric. The group introduced a series of a dozen new bills yesterday, almost all of which focus on immigration enforcement.

The measures introduced are varied. One would punish countries that refuse to accept their deported citizens. Senator Alexander's very good bill on facilitating English language learning that was introduced as an amendment to last year's comprehensive bill is also in there. Harsher bills have been introduced by the most anti-immigration members of the Senates - DeMint (R-SC), Sessions (R-AL), Vitter (R-LA) and Coburn (R-OK). Some are English-only measures that don't have anything to do with illegal immigration. Others punish cities where police don't try and turn unlawfully present immigrants over to ICE. And others are focused on employer sanctions.