Texas GOP Vote

You might think a proposal to force undocumented immigrants to be background checked, fingerprinted, photographed and entered into a database would be an easy sell with Republican lawmakers. But, you’d be wrong.

With time quickly running out in the legislative session, a plan to make it possible for undocumented immigrants to obtain a driver permit has stalled in legislature. The idea’s Republican champion in the House, Rep. Byron Cook of Corsicana, said the process has slowed way down but he’s still hopeful the proposal can become law. “Right now, we are pushing a big rock uphill,” he told me.   Read more »

Harris County Precinct 4 Constable Ron Hickman will speak to the Texas Tea Party Republican Women's Club (TTPRW) tomorrow night about the huge problem of human trafficking and sexual slavery that is rampant in the Houston Area. Many have called Houston the nation's capital in human trafficking.

Hickman, who was recently recognized as Constable of the Year by the National Constables' and Marshall's Association during their annual meeting in Sugar Land, Texas, will present his department's

Much to my surprise, there’s absolutely no trigger in this bill tied to border security, or any metrics, or measuring stick by which we could measure our success in securing the border. And I think it’s absolutely critical that we need both of those.

Drug smugglers and human traffickers don’t use E-verify, so we’re going to have to stop them through our border strategy. My amendment would plug multiple gaping holes in the border security provisions.   Read more »

The immigration reform bill, sponsored by U.S. Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) has sparked a lot of discussion around the country bring about the kind of national debate we have needed for a very long time. Recently, Americans for Tax Reform founder, Grover Norquist, testified before the Senate about the pending legislation and why immigration reform is needed. He opened his testimony with the statement, "People are an asset, not a liability."

Note: Join the discussion in the comments section at the bottom of this page.

This week, Norquist sat down with TexasGOPVote to expand on his thoughts on immigration reform, and I asked him about this comment and what it means in the context of immigration reform.   Read more »

Several states passed Arizona style anti-immigrant laws this year. Texas did not.  Did we sidestep a landmine of unintended consequences? To point, Alabama and Georgia passed laws cracking down on illegal immigrants and employers.  These laws are palliative at best because they don't address the root cause of our illegal immigration problem, a wide open and unsecured border.  But the worst side of these laws are the unintended consequences, which are currently negatively impacting these two states.

The following article was written by Alex Nowrasteh, an immigration policy analyst at the Cato Institute’s Center for Global Liberty and Prosperity:

In the Washington Post today, Jim DeMint and Robert Rector of the Heritage Foundation invoke the free-market pantheon in arguing their anti-immigration stance: “The economist Milton Friedman warned that the United States cannot have open borders and an extensive welfare state.”

They’re halfway right about that. What Friedman actually said was that immigration is “a good thing for the United States…so long as it’s illegal.”

VOCES Action and King Street Live teamed up last night to introduce a panel of immigration experts to discuss immigration reform and border security. The event was moderated by VOCES Action National Director and TexasGOPVote blogger Adryana Boyne and panelists included TexasGOPVote blogger and US Border Watch volunteer Bob Price, TexasGOPVote blogger and immigration attorney Linda Vega, former Texas Supreme Court Justice David Medina, founder of Cross Culture Communications Edward Retta, and

Senator Marco Rubio has launched a new ad campaign to explain and gain support for his Conservative Immigration Reform program. The ad targets what we have been saying on TexasGOPVote for quite some time, de facto amnesty, strong border security and other strict rules on immigrants who are in this country either through illegal entry or visa overstays.

Current immigration policy and our refusal to deal with the related problems have, in fact, given

By way of background, I have been a licensed attorney for almost 23 years. Of those 23 years, I spent nine years as a state prosecutor and over 2 years as a federal prosecutor. As a federal prosecutor, I prosecuted the entire gambit of border immigration cases including misdemeanor violations of border entries (8 U.S.C. § 1325), felony re-entry of a removed aliens (8 U.S.C. § 1326), and felony alien smuggling cases (8 U.S.C. § 1324).   Read more »

On April 4, 2013, The Baker Institute hosted a Conference: Immigration Reform: A system for the 21st Century. It was a forum where U.S. immigration experts, key public policy and political figures discussed the specifics of how to revamp our current broken immigration system. Discussed were specific issues that included “the changing demographics of the nation, the state