The stars continue to align for comprehensive immigration reform.  The President continues to call for movement this year, Congress is beginning the legislative process, and DHS is realigning their priorities to focus on the root causes of undocumented immigration.

FIRST, at yesterday’s press conference marking the end of his first 100 days, President Obama stated:

“we want to move this process.  We can’t continue with a broken immigration system. It’s not good for anybody. It’s not good for American workers. It’s dangerous for Mexican would-be workers who are trying to cross a dangerous border.”

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At a news conference commemorating his 100th day in office, President Obama indicated that his administration is planning on moving “full steam ahead on all fronts” on immigration reform. Obama told Telemundo reporter, Lori Montenegro, that he hopes to convene working groups to start building a framework for how immigration legislation might be shaped. Obama once again stated the need for comprehensive immigration reform that brings undocumented workers out of the shadows. He also emphasized that Janet Napolitano, Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, is working on making sure that the U.S. border is secured to show Americans that the government is competent in getting results in respect to the systems which are already in place. When asked when Obama hopes to see immigration reform legislation introduced, he replied “I’d like to see the process move this year.”

Photo by Dr Craig.

Nativist commentators and activists have wasted no time in pinning the blame for the current outbreak of swine flu in the United States on the same target they usually choose when assigning responsibility for any social, economic, political, or natural disaster: immigrants—especially undocumented immigrants. Following in the footsteps of Lou Dobbs, who in 2007 made the ludicrous claim that undocumented immigrants were importing leprosy into the country, anti-immigrant commentators such as Michelle Malkin and Glenn Beck are now claiming without a shred of evidence that undocumented immigrants from Mexico are importing swine flu.

Even Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Arizona is getting in on the act. Having turned his police department into a local immigration-enforcement agency devoted more to tracking down undocumented workers than actually fighting crime, Arpaio is now portraying himself as a defender of public health; readying his jail for a “potential outbreak” of swine flu, and outfitting his deputies with “hundreds of protective gear kits” in the event they encounter an undocumented swine-flu carrier in the desert.
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Photo by ShellyS.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) ran an editorial yesterday, “We Need an Immigration Stimulus,” in which former WSJ publisher and Dow Jones VP, L. Gordon Crovitz, makes the case that protectionism doesn’t bolster U.S. economic growth and that, in our current economic downturn, immigration reform and economic growth are closely tied together:

An economic downturn is the right time to move on immigration, one of the few policy tools that could clearly boost growth. The pace of lower-skilled migration has slowed due to higher unemployment. This could make it less contentious to ease the path to legalization for the 12 million undocumented workers and their families in the U.S. It’s also a good time to ask why we turn away skilled workers, including the ones earning 60% of the advanced degrees in engineering at U.S. universities.

It is worth pointing out the demographic shortfall: Immigrants are a smaller proportion of the U.S. population than in periods such as the late 1890s and 1910s, when immigrants gave the economy a jolt of growth.

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Photo by Jam Adams.

Conservative guru Richard Nadler is willing to make a couple bets.  He’s willing to put money on the fact that in less than one year’s time, new members of Congress will be sporting an immigrant-friendly platform, beating out candidates who promote restrictionist policies. Most recently, Nadler announced that he is also willing to bet that, over time, states with the highest percentage of undocumented immigrants will recover from the economic recession more quickly than other states with smaller immigrant populations.

Nadler’s analysis applies to Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Maryland, Nevada, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Utah — as well as the District of Columbia — all of which are currently under some sort of budget constraint.  According to Nadler:
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Photo by Random Factor.

As the reactionary Michelle Malkins of the conservative blogosphere foam at the mouth over Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano’s comment on CNN’s John King’s State of the Union about the “criminality” of crossing the border, Napolitano is busy with real work laying out five areas of focus for the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).

Numerous ill-informed, “gotcha-style” bloggers continue to misinterpret Secretary Napolitano’s Sunday morning comments in which she asserted that DHS needs to target real criminals and judiciously use law enforcements’ time and resources:

What we have to do is target the real evil-doers in this business, the employers who consistently hire illegal labor, the human traffickers who are exploiting human misery. And yes, when we find illegal workers, yes, appropriate action, some of which is criminal, most of that is civil, because crossing the border is not a crime per se. It is civil. But anyway, going after those as well.

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Photo by Night Owl City.

Just as the Obama administration has signaled that they hope to tackle immigration reform in the coming months, the College Board’s trustees unanimously voted to support legislation which would provide undocumented youths a path to citizenship through college or the military.

More specifically, the College Board expressed its support of the DREAM Act, a piece of legislation sponsored by Senators Richard Durbin (D-IL) and Richard Lugar (R-IN) that would give some young immigrants who have stayed out of trouble, graduated from high school, and either finished two years of college or two years of military service the opportunity to become permanent residents.  Ultimately, it aims at giving hard-working undocumented children who have always considered America “home” the opportunity to fix their status and contribute to our economy and their communities.
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Photo from SPLC.

Today the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) released a new report entitled “Under Siege:  Life for Low-Income Latinos in the South.”  SLPC report adds to the mounting evidence pointing to the harmful impact that the absence of a functioning immigration system is having on Latinos and immigrant communities.

SPLC investigators interviewed and surveyed 500 low-income Latinos — including U.S. citizens, legal residents, and undocumented immigrants — in the South and found a population “under siege and living in fear — fear of the police, fear of the government and fear of criminals who prey on immigrants because of their vulnerability.”
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You’d think America’s self-proclaimed “toughest sheriff,” Joe Arpaio, would’ve been in his hometown of Phoenix, Arizona to attend yesterday’s U.S. Senate hearing on border violence.  Instead, while a panel of U.S. Senators lead by John McCain traveled to Arizona, Sheriff Arpaio was well on his way to appear on Stephen Colbert’s comedy show, The Colbert Report, taped in New York City.

Arpaio is known for transforming Arizona’s Maricopa County Police Department into an immigration-enforcement agency, taking the pursuit of undocumented immigrants to “unconstitutional extremes” and gaining international notoriety and a Department of Justice investigation in the process.  Yet, if all his extreme tactics are in the name of protecting his community, why did Arpaio miss a hearing on one of the biggest threats to Maricopa County’s public safety hosted in his own town hall?  The truth is Arpaio’s appetite for publicity is so insatiable that it overrides any sense of duty, rationality, or morality.
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Photo from whitehouse.gov

This past weekend, at the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago, President Barack Obama reaffirmed his commitment to reforming the broken U.S. immigration system.  Obama met with the Central American Integration System (Sistema de la Integración Centroamericana), and was “especially receptive” to the requests coming from the presidents of Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Panama, Costa Rica, El Salvador and Belize for a workable immigration system that advances the economic and humanitarian interests of both sending and receiving nations.

According to the Latin American Herald Tribune:

On the immigration issue, which completely dominated the meeting, the leaders also discussed matters like the possibilities for ensuring family reunification, quotas for agricultural jobs and the fight against drug trafficking, all within a friendly atmosphere amid which the leaders agreed in general terms on almost everything they talked about.

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