My shattering experience with America's immigration system

It’s been my dream for years to immigrate to the United States. Originally from the United Kingdom, I was attracted to America’s embrace of freedom, capitalism, and proud traditions of liberty sorely lacking in my native country. I wanted to defend those liberties in America. Like other immigrants, I do a job that most Americans don’t want to – defend the Constitution.

Recently, however, I found out that my American Dream is over. I will shortly have to leave the land I love and return to the United Kingdom. 

What happened that put me in this position? 

The Department of Labor (DOL) ruled that the American non-profit that wanted to hire me cannot.

I was offered a staff attorney position at a Washington, D.C. non-profit committed to advancing right to work laws. I went to university here and then law school at William and Mary and have called Virginia home for years.

I will not commit fraud to get a green card through a sham marriage nor will I stay here illegally.

As part of the application for the visa, the non-profit had to show that no American was available to do my job and that I was being paid wage similar to other attorneys in the city.

The DOL compared my anticipated wage at a non-profit to what lawyers make in private practice. Of course I would have made less at a non-profit, that’s how they work, but the government did not adjust its one-size fits all way of measuring wages. 

Despite proof that my salary was going to be in line with other non-profit lawyer salaries in the city, the DOL rejected the paperwork and me along with it.

The DOL gave me no reason for why the visa application was denied. By law, they do not have to provide one. 

I have no opportunity to appeal. There is no possibility to re-file for the visa because the government grants so few every year that they ran out weeks ago.

But my experience is just a microcosm of America’s disastrous immigration system. There is no immigration line. There is no Ellis Island. I can’t go down to the local post office and apply for a green card. I have lived here legally—studying and working hard—but under the law there is no way for me to stay .

An overly complex, tortuously slow, and arbitrary immigration system at the whim of unaccountable bureaucrats rules the day.

The laws that so many of my fellow Americans want to be enforced make it impossible for me – and many others like me – from living the American Dream. These laws also hurt our country in the process, burdening employers with expensive regulations for no conceivable end, and leaving positions unfilled.

I don’t want a hand out. I’ll gladly sign a piece of paper saying that I am ineligible for welfare, Social Security, and Medicare. I’ve always paid taxes, bought insurance, and played by all of the rules. I’ve never committed a crime nor do I intend to. All I want is a chance to legally live, work, and defend the Constitution of my country.

Highly-skilled immigrants have been voiceless in the debate over immigration reform. Illegal immigrants wanting legalization, immigration enforcement hawks, and guest workers have sucked all of the air out of the room. 

I understand the concerns of all those groups and share many of them myself, but please do not forget the millions of highly skilled immigrants and potential immigrants who are trying to follow the laws.

My dearest friends have started a White House petition called “Let Sophie Stay.” I implore you, please visit it. 

I will not commit fraud to get a green card through a sham marriage nor will I stay here illegally. I will not break the law no matter how unjust I think it is.

I feel American in every way that counts but the federal government and its laws think otherwise. In our knowledge economy, we need to attract the most talented and hard-working people as high-skilled immigrants. 

This is crucial to our competitiveness and growth since it creates more jobs and provides a better quality of life for everyone. As a plea from one would-be American to the citizens of this great country, please change these immigration laws to include highly-skilled workers.

Sophie Cole is a graduate of Oxford Brookes University, the University of Westminster, and the College of William and Mary. Originally from Southampton, England, she is now a licensed attorney living and working in Washington, DC.
 

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Get the strike fighter experience in Latin America at the LAAD 2013 defense show

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  A Boeing Super Hornet in transit to Denmark in 2009, flying with the Royal Danish Air Force.The Boeing Company

Want to know what it feels like to fly a U.S. strike fighter in aerial combat? Then Rio de Janeiro is the place for you -- well, it was, anyway.

With the U.S. military suffering under sequestration, American defense giants and their fellows from around the world converged on Rio de Janeiro to win business from the ever-growing Latin American military budgets at the biannual LAAD 2013 defense show, which ran April 9 - 12.

Want to fly a U.S. strike fighter?
Boeing played it very smart and made the Super Hornet experience available to potential buyers and mere attendees of the show. A finalist in Brazil’s F-X2 fighter competition, the Super Hornet is in service with the U.S. Navy and the Royal Australian Air Force.

While Boeing also brought unmanned systems, it was the company’s Super Hornet simulator that demonstrated both single-seat E and two-seat F model capabilities that made a big splash.

Potential buyers could jump in and hone their takeoff and landing skills not just on a runway, but also an aircraft carrier.

The simulator included a front and rear cockpit where you could even have a go at air-to-ground targeting and aerial combat.

Robots
Robots are always crowd-pleasers, and Northrop Grumman featured robots big and small at the show.

On the larger side, Northrop also brought the mid-sized vehicle CaMeL, short for Carry-all Mechanized Equipment Landrover, essentially an unmanned ground vehicle.

Capable of carrying 1,000 pound of equipment, CaMeL is used for a range of tasks from lightening a dismounted soldier’s load to mine clearing and casualty evacuations.

This clever CaMeL can also be used as a retransmission platform, a robotic weapon system or for ammo, food and water resupply.

It runs on both a battery and diesel and can travel at speeds of 5 mph over varied terrain. Power efficient, this robot can provide about 20 hours of continuous operations on 3.5 gallons of fuel.

On the other hand, the tiny, 23-inch high Titus -- one of the company’s new unmanned ground vehicles -- can be controlled with a something similar to a gaming console. Particularly handy for those hard to reach places, it can navigate narrow 16-inch pathways and move at a speed of 7.5 mph.

Location, location, location
Impossible to miss smack dab in the entry to the most bustling hall, BAE Systems secured prime real estate at LAAD 2013. It was one of the more convivial stands, which is hardly surprising given BAE’s ongoing wins with Brazilian armed forces.

Successes like the armored personnel carrier M113, acquired by the Brazilian Army, were prominently featured. Designed for rough terrain, high-speeds on roads and even amphibious operations, the M113 can carry thirteen including the driver.

A popular combat vehicle, there are more than 80,000 internationally with more than 44 countries.

Wolves, Hurricanes and more
A wide range of Israeli companies performed very well at LAAD, but it was Hatehof’s massive vehicles that were spotlight stealers.

Hatehof recently won domestic contracts with the Israeli police and Ministry of the Interior and featured a suite including the Wolf, Navigator and Hurricane.

Wolf was developed for the Israel Defense Forces for use in urban and challenging terrain missions. The 9 ton, armored four-by-four can carry up to nine soldiers.

The Navigator, a massive MRAP, weighs about 18.5 tons and carries up to 13 soldiers. It has a high level of protection of up to 14 kg for underbelly mines.

Navigator is designed to defend soldiers from IEDs and RPGs.  It has STANAG Level 3 protection and can be upgraded to Level 4.

On the lighter side at 9 tons, Hurricane is a more lightly armoured, lighter in weight vehicle with more maneuverability.

It can carry up to seven soldiers and also has a STANAG protection Level 3 with the potential to increase to Level 4.

Hatehof's Riot Control Vehicles have a pick and mix of configurations and add-ons including armored cabins, jamming systems and day and night cameras.

With these vehicles designed to defeat riots, a customer can also choose from an array of non-lethals such as water, dye, skunk, gas and foam.

Sky Nets and Battlefield Tactical Radar
Thales is dominating in Latin America sky nets - with 140 operational radars, 250 Navaids and 26 TopSky-ATC deployed in air traffic control and surveillance – they already cover more than half of the airspace.

France-based Thales has been building relationships with Latin America for more than four decades.

Focusing on combining radar and non-radar tech to optimize surveillance coverage, state of the art tech to improve safety was showcased including TopSky-Safety Nets for airspace and TopSky-Tower for the ground.

The joint-venture between Raytheon and Thales, ThalesRaytheonSystems, did a Latin reveal on their air defense tech the Ground Master 400.

The mobile long-range air defense 3-D radar with adaptable towers detects the full range of very high to very low altitudes. It is designed to track tough targets like drones, cruise missiles and aircraft flying at only several hundred feet above ground.  

With more than 600 systems in service internationally, the company says it is the world leader in battlefield tactical radars.

New to the party
Turkey and UAE are two recent additions to the largest defense exhibition in Latin America. This year UAE presence grew bringing fifteen companies at this year’s national pavilion including Tawazun, Sofia Trading, Emirates Advanced Investments Group and Advanced Integrated System.

Turkey brought ten defense companies across the spectrum from shipbuilding through to ammunition.

And then there was Pakistan
Pakistan made its debut this year at LAAD.

The largest state-owned defense conglomerate, Global Industrial & Defence Solutions, brought a range of unmanned aerial vehicles or “drones.” Remote controlled or self-controlled, these drones are designed for surveillance monitoring and other purposes.

They also featured their ANZA-MK II surface to air missiles, Baktar Shikan anti-tank guided missiles.

Ballet dancer turned defense specialist Allison Barrie has traveled around the world covering the military, terrorism, weapons advancements and life on the front line. You can reach her at wargames@foxnews.com or follow her on Twitter @Allison_Barrie.

Allison Barrie

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New pope can use his real-world experience to transform the Catholic Church

I have never heard Rome so quiet.

In just a moment, the bespectacled man on the loggia, on whom countless eyes around the world were focused, managed to quell the ebullient, near-frenzied tens of thousands gathered below him in St. Peter’s Square, with a simple request: pray for me.

With those words, Jorge Mario Bergoglio – the newly minted Pope Francis -- bowed his head in submission, and the full-throated throng that seconds before had been shouting “Viva Il Papa,” fell silent, humbled, perhaps, by the new pope’s own humility.

This Argentine-born pope has an opportunity – and a platform – to tell Catholics the world over, “We’re together in this. Come help me.”

Within minutes of his first appearance as the 266th vicar of Christ, Francis’s life and career were being dissected for clues to how he would reign and where he would take the Roman Catholic Church that had just been entrusted to him. The most straightforward, and perhaps honest answer is: global.

By installing the first pope from Latin America, indeed, from what used to be known as the New World, the cardinal-electors were recognizing that theirs is the universal church. Its legitimacy rests on its ability to offer salvation to all who follow its teaching, no matter how recently their homelands were introduced to Christ’s message.

As archbishop of Buenos Aires, Bergoglio carved a reputation for himself as a self-effacing spiritual leader who cared about the misery he could plainly see around him. He reminded his fellow Latin American bishops that while the church in the region was growing, it was paying insufficient attention to the poorest of the faithful.  

Yet he was not cut from the same cloth as the left-wing Latino priests who created Liberation Theology in the 1980s and tried to bend church doctrine to their temporal political agenda.

Confronted with demands that he side with those who wanted movement on clerical celibacy, and the church’s longstanding opposition to birth control, Bergoglio stood with the traditionalists, angering not only some fellow clergy but also Argentine President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner, who bristled at the archbishop’s refusal to sanction same sex marriage.

Where change can be expected to occur during the reign of Francis is not in the church’s dogma, but its bureaucracy. His by-now famous refusal to live in the archbishop’s palace, and his insistence on cooking for himself and riding public transportation foreshadows what may be a long-overdue housecleaning in the curia, the Church’s de facto government. Petty feuds between bishops that were allowed to fester during the papacies of John Paul II and Benedict XVI may well come to an abrupt, if not gentle end.

The church cannot afford to brush aside scandals like the sexual abuse of innocent victims by its clergy. The Vatican bank cannot continue to flout the financial rules of the rest of Europe – the kind of double-bookkeeping that caused Jesus to lose his temper in the temple, the only recorded instance in the New Testament of literal divine wrath.

An outsider, despite his Italian parentage, Francis may feel no hesitance to take bold steps to quickly clean house in the Vatican’s Augean stables. If a number of sudden resignations and strategic new appointments are announced by year’s end, no one should be surprised.

Francis will also find fertile ground for his gentle message of hope and fairness. A son of working class parents, he is attuned to the needs of the impoverished, perhaps more than any of his predecessors since John XXIII. If his first addresses focus on specific topics of social justice, it may be the result of his pent-up frustration with the increasing gap between rich and poor, not just in industrialized countries, but in his native Argentina and Latin America.

Most of all, this Argentine-born pope has an opportunity – and a platform – to tell Catholics the world over, “We’re together in this. Come help me.” For those who feel that the infighting in Rome over power and policy does not affect their real lives, Francis may be just the face of real-world experience to convince them that the Church that baptized them cares about their problems after the holy water has dried.

The Church maintains its structure and rigid positions on important issues not because it cannot see the world changing, but because change alone is no reason to abandon principle. The cleansing difference that Francis may be able to bring is his years of working with, and for, the poor around him, and molding his church’s strength onto the framework of their suffering.

“Pray for me,” said the new pope. “Lead us,” say the world’s 1.2 billion Roman Catholics. To borrow from the world of commerce – sounds like a deal.

John Moody is Executive Vice President, Executive Editor at Fox News. A former Vatican correspondent and Rome bureau chief for Time magazine, he is the author of four books, including "Pope John Paul II : Biography."

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Without entitlement reform, America could experience a permanent sequester

Parks are closing. Government workers are being furloughed. The Department of Defense is issuing warnings about compromised military readiness. The Department of Homeland Security is making similar claims about border security.

Everywhere you look there is talk about the consequences of the recently imposed automatic federal spending cuts. Although most of these are really cuts in the Washington sense of the word—a slower rate of spending increase—sequestration is designed to make deficit reduction choices on auto pilot when federal lawmakers are unable to make them in real life.

The effected programs are being squeezed because mandatory spending on entitlements was largely taken off the table. This resulted in bigger cuts in everything from military spending to transportation infrastructure investments to national parks. But the sad fact is that this is the fiscal path the country was already embarking upon, with sequestration being just one small part of the problem.

Reforming entitlements before it’s too late would keep Americans from living in a permanent state of sequestration.

That’s because as the Baby Boomers retire, entitlement spending and interest payments will gobble up the entire federal budget, leaving little room for anything else. 

Ten years from now, automatically growing programs like Social Security and Medicare will make up 62 percent of annual spending. The Pentagon budget will be just 12 percent. We’re just seven years away from interest payments on the national debt outpacing defense.

According to an estimate by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, interest payments and entitlements will consume the entire federal budget by 2025. That means no funds left over for the programs hit by sequestration without substantial additional borrowing.

Conservatives will rightfully be concerned about putting defense on a starvation diet. But many liberal priorities will be hurt too. 

The group Third Way published a paper titled “Collision Course: Why Democrats Must Back Entitlement Reform,” arguing, “as the cost of entitlement programs like Medicare and Social Security has skyrocketed, we’ve spent less and less of our budget educating kids, building roads, and curing disease.

"That means no money for national defense. No money for homeland security. No money to fix the nation’s crumbling bridges and roads. No money for medical research to find a cure for cancer or Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s diseases," Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) concurred in a March 2012 House floor speech.

The nonpartisan fact-checkers at PolitiFact Virginia rated Wolf’s statement as “true.”

While optimists hope that faster economic growth or reduced health care costs could improve this bleak budget outlook, there is also the potential for things to get worse.

If interest rates rise significantly above their current lows, so will the cost of borrowing. The U.S. government could also face further credit downgrades, such as when Standard & Poor’s stripped Uncle Sam of his AAA bond rating in 2011.

Social Security and Medicare are currently projected to face their own cash crunches soon enough. That means that even as they consume more federal tax revenues, these programs may see a decline in quality as the government struggles to pay for the promises it has made to the nation’s seniors.

By one estimate, nearly one-third of doctors nationwide refuse to accept new Medicaid patients because the government health care program for the poor doesn’t pay enough to cover the costs of treating them. This hasn’t just hurt doctors, who received from Medicaid just 58 percent of what private insurance paid in 2008, but also people covered under the program, as their health care options have dwindled.

If Medicare has to cut its payments to doctors as well, there may be a similar decline in quality health care for senior citizens too. “If caring for Medicare patients is too costly, doctors will simply opt out and care for the disabled and those over 65 will become hard to find,” writes the physician Peter Lipson.”

At a time when the country is changing, spending commitments that were made in a very different bygone era are actually handcuffing politicians and limiting the next generation’s choices.

Reforming entitlements before it’s too late—and before current beneficiaries would be impacted—would keep Americans from living in a permanent state of sequestration.

Sometimes, less is more.

W. James Antle III is editor of the Daily Caller News Foundation and author of the forthcoming book "Devouring Freedom: Can Big Government Ever Be Stopped? Regnery Publishing (March 19, 2013)"

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