Elections
Conservatives Who Support Immigration Reform Need to Rethink Border Security
The elections have produced nothing short of an immigration epiphany among some conservative commentators and politicians. Spurred by the electoral beating that Republican candidates suffered at the hands of Latino voters, pundits and lawmakers who once advocated an enforcement-only solution to the problem of unauthorized immigration are now talking about a pathway to legalization. While this new-found pro-legalization stance is highly commendable, it is being coupled with distinctly old-fashioned notions of border security. Legalization programs are being proposed along with border walls as the solution for our border-security weaknesses. However, walls which try (and fail) to keep people out of the country won’t make us safer. The real target of border-security measures should be the cartels that smuggle immigrants, money, drugs, and guns across the border—not the immigrants, money, drugs, and guns themselves. Read More
Understanding the Important Symbolism of the Maryland DREAM Act Victory
While much of last week’s energy was focused on Latino voter turnout in the Presidential race— and the subsequent recognition that immigration reform was all but inevitable—there was another major victory for immigration policy that came out of Maryland. Voters in the state supported through referendum their legislature’s decision to provide in-state tuition to undocumented students. This was the first vote of its kind in the nation and one where African-American voters were an important voting bloc in support of the measure. Read More
Election Results Reignite Conservatives’ Interest in Immigration Reform
Recognizing the inevitable, Speaker of the House John Boehner endorsed comprehensive immigration reform on Thursday noting “I think a comprehensive approach is long overdue, and I’m confident that the president, myself, others, can find the common ground to take care of this issue once and for all.” Read More
In Presidential Election, “Self-Deportation” Goes Down to Defeat
It did not become certain until late Tuesday night that President Obama would win re-election. But for Mitt Romney, the campaign may have been lost during the Republican primary, when he cited “self-deportation” as the solution to our nation’s immigration problems. With the post-election dust now settled, it has become increasingly clear that supporting the idea is not only bad as a matter of policy, but also a losing political strategy. Read More
Elections Demand a New Way Forward on Immigration
Even before the election was called for President Obama last night, pundits and pollsters were remarking on the fact that immigration—or more specifically, anti-immigrant policies—were a death knell for Mitt Romney. Today, the analysis of whether and how the Republican party recovers from its devastatingly poor showing among Latinos—the key demographic group of the 21st century—is also focusing on immigration. CNN’s David Gergen noted that immigration reform would become a reality because Democrats want it and Republicans need it; even Fox news commentators grumpily acknowledged that immigration reform has got to be on the table now. Read More
A Long Journey to the Voting Booth
For some people, this year’s journey to the voting booth started years ago, in El Salvador or China or Cameroon, when it became clear that they had to leave their country and start over in America. For those people, (whom U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services calls “Americans by choice,”) the journey to the polls has involved hardship, struggle, hundreds of hours learning English and civics, and studying for the naturalization test. They bring not only their vote to the polls, but a reminder to all of us that our precious democracy can only succeed when we believe in this country enough to take the time to vote. Read More
Drilling Down on Latino Voter Engagement
Project Vote predicts that the number of Latinos who are eligible to vote in this year’s Presidential campaign has increased by 21 percent over 2008. In 2012, nearly 24 million Latinos will be eligible to vote. The growth of this voting bloc is important to track, and much attention is paid to its growth each election season. Read More
A Growing Consensus on Supporting Immigration Reform
Immigration reform is not a “liberal” cause; it is a common-sense cause that appeals to people from a variety of political persuasions. More than a few conservative intellectuals, commentators, politicians, religious leaders, and law-enforcement officials favor revamping the U.S. immigration system to make it more responsive to the economic demands, social realities, and security concerns of the 21st century. This stance represents not only compassion, but enlightened self-interest. A growing body of evidence has quantified the enormous contributions that immigrants make to the U.S. economy through their labor, entrepreneurship, buying power, and innovation. Moreover, demographic trends point clearly to the growing electoral power of naturalized immigrants and to the native-born children of immigrants. In other words, being anti-immigrant in this day and age is self-destructive from both an economic and a political standpoint. Read More
Immigration (Finally) Takes the Stage at a Presidential Debate
George W. Bush made several appearances in last night’s presidential debate, but perhaps nowhere with greater effect than when President Obama contrasted Governor Mitt Romney’s position on immigration reform. Where President Bush supported comprehensive immigration reform, declared President Obama, Governor Romney supports “self-deportation” and Arizona style anti-immigrant laws. Moderator Candy Crowley then segued into a direct immigration question from an undecided voter about Romney’s plans for dealing with the 11 million undocumented immigrants living in our nation. The next few minutes revealed a great deal about both candidates’ positions on the immigration question, but perhaps more importantly, the points where the candidates challenged each other suggest that both parties recognize they must begin talking about immigration in new ways. Read More
Pace of DACA Approvals Quickens, but Will it be Fast Enough?
For the first time since immigration authorities officially launched Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals in mid-August, the federal government released statistics last Friday indicating that thousands of requests have been officially granted. But while the figures themselves are an encouraging sign, other evidence suggests that most applicants will not have their requests considered until after the next presidential inauguration in January, if at all. Read More
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