Charlotte Mayor and candidate for Governor Pat McCrory with former NC House candidate Dr. Nalin Mehta. Photo by deritastudio.

NOTE: This post originally appeared in the Huffington Post.

Last week, North Carolina’s candidate for governor, Pat McCrory, potentially isolated upwards of 83,000 New American voters in his state when his emails viciously attacking immigrants were leaked online.

According to the Daily Kos, McCrory–citing the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR)–a fiercely anti-immigrant hate group that is known for its direct ties to John Tanton, a pioneer of the anti-immigrant movement and avid supporter of eugenics–wrote,

How would you like to be one of these kids who doesn’t get pregnant, works hard in school, doesn’t join a gang, goes to church on Sunday, but when they go down to the fast food restaurant, they are told we can’t hire you because we need bi-lingual employees.

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In window of American Apparel, Washington, DC. Photo by afagen.

American Apparel–the U.S.’ biggest garment manufacturer–is sick of losing good workers to a broken immigration system. That’s why the company is raging its “Legalize LA” campaign and standing up for the legalization of the hard-working, but undocumented immigrants living in our country today.

Most recently, American Apparel released a memo as part of a voter registration drive challenging the silence of Barack Obama and John McCain on the issue of immigration stating, “It is essential that we do not idly stand by in this next election.”

Like many businesses, American Apparel is arguing that there is a definite economic benefit to immigrant labor that could be amplified by comprehensive immigration reform. Currently, federal regulations easily ensnare employers who unwittingly find themselves with undocumented workers, despite their best attempts to comply with confusing and often contradictory rules.
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Photo by Jim Frazier.

At a time when the financial markets are in crisis, unemployment rates are rising, Americans are losing their homes, and the future of small businesses is uncertain, the federal government persists in pushing for implementation of the DHS no-match rule—another nail in the U.S. economy’s coffin.

While this new rule cannot be immediately implemented because it has been blocked by a court injunction, the government continues its efforts to dissolve the court order and move forward. However, in their rush to implement before their term expires, they are ignoring the fact that U.S. citizens and other lawful workers could lose their jobs due to database errors and employer mistakes and misuse. Last year the New York Times called this program “A Foolish Immigration Purge” and an economic analysis by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce estimates that the new rule could result in 165,000 lawful U.S. workers possibly losing their jobs, at a cost to employers of about $1 billion per year.
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Photo by Shapeshift.

Immigration reform, along with education, taxes, health care, and “values” make up the list of priorities identified by one of the nation’s new and powerful political blocs:  Latinas.

The Washington Post reports:

• Latina McCain supporters give the Republican candidate enduring credit for being a champion of immigration reform, even if lately he has somewhat backed away from his former position.

• Meanwhile, Latina Obama supporters question McCain’s continued commitment to immigration reform and see Obama as representing the sort of change that would spearhead the comprehensive immigration reform that the country needs.

• Latinas were also said to view immigration as a moral issue:  “Yes, we’re not for abortion, but immigration is a deal-breaker,” Roxana Cazares Olivas of Latinas por Obama tells the Washington Post.

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Johnston County Sheriff Steve Bizzell cruises through the Selma Mobile Home Park in Selma, N.C., remarking “”All they do is work and make love”" as he watches kids play. Photo by: AP/The News & Observer, Robert Willett

It’s no surprise that half of all Latinos, immigrant and non-immigrant, are saying that their situation in this country is deteriorating when highly-regarded and powerful officials like Sheriff Steve Bizzell of Johnston County in North Carolina say such denegrating things as “Mexicans are trashy” and that “All they do is work and make love.”

Jennifer Rudinger of the ACLU told the Associated Press:

“[Bizzell's comments] go from simply stating opinion to constituting illegal racial profiling if these opinions are reflected in practice…It’s one thing to think something and say something. It’s another to have that kind of bias carried out and enforced.”

North Carolina has put into action a federal program known as the ill-fated 287(g) program which gives specially trained police officers to enforce federal immigration law.  The program has had a startling price tag–both financial and social–in communities like Maricopa County, Arizona where the The Sheriff’s Office created a $1.3 million deficit in just three months as a result of its 287(g) agreement.
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Photo by Barack Obama on flickr.

NOTE: this story first appeared in the Huffington Post.

What do the economy, health care, and foreign policy have in common?

They are all topics that are related to a critical issue that was not discussed in the election 2008 debates: immigration. Everyone from the Latino community to immigration advocates to probing journalists have been eagerly awaiting to hear more about what the two candidates plan to do about the 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. To date, they’ve heard very little.

Our immigration problem isn’t going to disappear just by not talking about it. As Barack Obama and John McCain were preparing for their debate last night, 300 workers were rounded up in an immigration raid at a chicken processing plant in South Carolina. In fact, as the two candidates were taking shots at one another, we can guess about 100 children in South Carolina–both citizens and non-citizens–were still left stranded, not knowing where their parents were or when they would see them again.
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Photo by Jayanth Sharma.

After two presidential debates and one vice-presidential showdown, the American public is still waiting to hear what John McCain and Barack Obama have to say about the elephant in the room: immigration.

Everyone from the Latino community to immigration advocates to probing journalists have been eagerly awaiting the immigration topic to be addressed by both candidates.

Obama and McCain have been more than willing to address immigration in their conflicting Spanish-language ad campaigns. The debate is an opportunity for both candidates to set their records straight once and for all, including:

• Who really was responsible for the fall of 2007’s immigration bill?
• What should be done about the 12 million immigrants here in the U.S. without papers?
• How will Obama and McCain address the problem of unscrupulous employers who hire workers, take advantage of them, and undercut their competitors?
• Opponents to a path to citizenship say anything that provides legal status to those here illegally is amnesty: how do Obama and McCain define amnesty?  Do they support amnesty?  If not, what do they support?
• How can Obama and McCain promise they will actually fix our immigration system rather than pass reforms that perpetuate the problem and lead to another 12 million coming in illegally in the future?

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Photo by rednuht.

Several reports including the Pew Hispanic Research Center’s new study have come out over the past few months showing that the undocumented population is shrinking. However, while some restrictionists continue to hold on to the notion that the decrease in immigration is primarily due to remarkably harsh stepped-up enforcement measures, Jeffrey Passel of Pew told the New York Times that “the trend was the result of a combination of factors, led primarily by a weakening economy and rising rates of unemployment in the construction and service industries, which rely heavily on immigrant labor.”

Most researchers agree:

“The drop reflects the weakness of the economy, particularly the sectors that employ undocumented workers like construction,” said Harley Shaiken, a professor at UC Berkeley specializing in labor issues. Shaiken also said that there are a number of powerful forces reducing the numbers of undocumented immigrants. “People are less likely to risk everything to get here if they can’t get a job.”

“They don’t migrate if they are not assured a job when they get to the United States,” said Wayne Cornelius, Director of the Center for Comparative Immigration Studies at the University of California at San Diego. “For unattached males with no economic base in the U.S. and no prospects for stable employment, it may make sense to go home and try their luck again when the U.S. economy improves,” he added.

USA Today reported: “William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a centrist think tank in Washington, warns against giving too much credit to enforcement. He believes fewer illegal immigrants are coming because jobs are disappearing in fields such as construction.”

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Photo by respres.

As the U.S. rumbles through a recession, some restrictionists are exploiting the current economic crisis to mislead Americans into thinking that immigrants — not the utter lack of financial market government oversight or the irresponsible behavior of brokerage firms — are to blame for the current state of our economy.

The Center for American Progress recently published a report highlighting comments made by ultra-Conservative journalist Michele Malkin claiming that “The Mother of All Bailouts has many fathers…But there’s one giant paternal elephant in the room that has slipped notice: how illegal immigration, crime-enabling banks, and open-borders Bush policies fueled the mortgage crisis.”

Yet Malkin’s arguemnent is based on a loose and virtually non-existent connection. First she makes the claim that half of all mortgage loans to Latinos are subprime loans and then proceeds to draw her conclusion by tying in an unrelated and incorrect statistic that 25% of subprime loans are in default (the figure is actually about 19%).
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Video by MALDEF’s Truth In Immigration.

Truth in Immigration, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund’s (MALDEF) online blog, recently posted part two of their analysis of several distortions Lou Dobbs made on his September 10th edition of Lou Dobbs Tonight, at a rally by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.