Illegal Immigration, SEC Porn and Financial Reform
Arizona’s new immigration bill has brought immigration reform to the forefront of national debate.
The blogosphere is abuzz with the news that employees of the Securities Exchange Commission spent many hours looking at pornography on agency computers.
The financial regulation bill fails to achieve cloture in the Senate.
1. IMMIGRATION
Arizona’s new immigration bill has brought immigration reform to the forefront of national debate.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Policy Analyst Alex Nowrasteh on how we can really solve the illegal immigration problem.
“Clearly the Department of Labor is taking the wrong approach. What’s the right approach to dismantling the black market? Liberalization. The immigration black market only exists is because the government has made the legal market as cumbersome as it can. True immigration reform makes legal channels more appealing, not less. That means lightening the paperwork and the regulatory burden, and eliminating quotas. The more unattractive legality becomes, the more attractive illegality looks in comparison.”
2. FINANCE
The blogosphere is abuzz with the news that employees of the Securities Exchange Commission spent many hours looking at pornography on agency computers.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Senior Counsel Hans Bader on why the porn story is a distraction from the real problems with financial reform.
“While the media, including the New York Times, has reported on the porn, it has largely ignored substantive criticism of the financial ‘reform’ bill, which is a Trojan horse that would reinforce risky practices that led to the housing bubble, while ignoring needed reforms, harming insurance policyholders, and giving executive branch officials arbitrary power to bail out or take over banks and financial institutions.”
3. POLITICS
The financial regulation bill fails to achieve cloture in the Senate.
CEI Expert Available to Comment: Director of the Center for Investors and Entrepreneurs John Berlau on the coalition letter he signed to oppose the bill’s bailouts, taxes, and overregulation.
“The letter, included below, highlights what it calls a ‘by-no-means exclusive’ list of major concerns with the bill. These include the bill’s broad definition of ‘nonbank financial company’ that would mean that many ‘Main Street non-financial businesses would be hit with taxation, regulation, and possible nationalization by the Federal Reserve’; the proxy-access mandates that would usurp state incorporation law and ‘empower union pension funds and other progressives by forcing companies to fund their Saul Alinsky–style campaigns for a company’s board of directors’; and the lack of any reforms in the bill of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the two government-created mortgage giants that were ‘primary causes of the crisis.’”