1. Dems press for DREAM Act
2. Policy has encouraged illegals
3. Mormon paper supports illegals
4. Powell backs amnesty
5. LA shooting protests continue2

1.
Dems court Latinos with DREAM Act
By Gary Martin
San Antonio Express News, September 20, 2010
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/special/immigration/7208713.html

Chances for comprehensive immigration reform have dimmed with the upcoming mid-term elections, prompting Democrats to push a measure that would grant citizenship to illegal immigrant students as a way to energize Latino voters.

President Barack Obama said he is backing Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid's decision to attach the so-called DREAM Act to an overall defense authorization bill this week.

Latino groups are disappointed with Obama and Democrats for failing to act on a campaign pledge in 2008 to pass sweeping immigration reform in the first two years of a new administration.

And Obama recognized that frustration at an appearance before Hispanic leaders this month. But he urged Latinos not to "forget who is standing with you, and who is standing against you."

To that end, Reid, who faces a stiff re-election challenge in Nevada, said he will seek a vote on the DREAM Act as early as this week.

Senate Republicans, like Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, accuse the Democrats of playing politics with the defense bill to pander to a special interest group ahead of the Nov. 2 elections.

Cornyn said the DREAM Act should not be taken up as a defense matter, and instead be part of an overall immigration reform bill that Congress should consider later.

"The DREAM Act should be part of comprehensive immigration reform," Cornyn said. "Adding it to the defense authorization, which already contains an unwanted repeal of 'don't ask, don't tell,' is cynical and transparently political."

800,000 youths

The DREAM Act, if passed into law, would grant citizenship to roughly 800,000 illegal immigrant youths who were brought to this country between ages 5 and 16 and complete college or military service.

Although it was first filed as a bipartisan bill and still enjoys bipartisan support, its sudden inclusion as an amendment to the defense bill in a politically charged atmosphere before the election has left its passage in doubt.

Sen. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he is opposed to adding it to the defense bill. Other moderate Democrats could waver as well.

Reid said he does not know whether he has the 60 votes to cut off debate and get a Senate vote to attach the bill as an amendment to the defense legislation.

But with the prospects for a sweeping immigration reform bill unlikely, Hispanic and immigrant-rights groups are rallying to drum up congressional support for the DREAM Act legislation.

The military supports the DREAM Act, and supporters say the GOP has backed the bill in the past because it's not a radical piece of legislation.

Latino groups like the National Council of La Raza, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund and the League of United Latin American Citizens have all called for congressional action.

"The Latino community is watching this issue and watching the vote on the DREAM Act," said Angela Kelley with the left-leaning Center for American Progress.

Conservatives are rallying the base and urging lawmakers to oppose the measure.

'Send a clear message'

Dan Stein with the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which opposes the DREAM Act, said it would "send a clear message to parents that violating U.S. immigration laws will result in eventual citizenship and access to expensive taxpayer-financed benefits for their kids."

Republicans in the Senate and House appear united in their opposition.

"The DREAM Act is a nightmare for the American people. It is an assault on law-abiding, taxpaying American citizens and legal immigrants," said Rep. Lamar Smith, R-San Antonio, the ranking Republican on the House Judiciary Committee.

Members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who once argued against splitting off the DREAM Act from overall comprehensive reform to attract GOP support for a sweeping overhaul bill, say the time may now be right.

Rep. Charlie Gonzalez, D-San Antonio, said the lack of action by the Senate this year and the current political climate is forcing Democrats to act.

"This is an opportunity," Gonzalez said.

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2.
'Cynical' policy tacitly encourages illegal immigration
By Ronald Campbell
The Orange County Register, September 17, 2010

On Nov. 6, 1986, President Ronald Reagan signed the bill that was supposed to end illegal immigration.

Instead, it became one of the biggest public policy failures since Prohibition.

The Immigration Reform and Control Act legalized most of the illegal immigrants then in the United States. To keep others out, it forbade businesses from hiring undocumented workers and threatened those who did with fines.

Almost a quarter-century later, the undocumented population has soared from about 500,000 after the amnesty to about 11 million today. The primary reason: the breakdown of worksite enforcement, which Reagan had called "the keystone" of the 1986 law.

"We've been running a very cynical policy for the last 15 years," said Doris Meissner, the government's top immigration cop from 1993 to 2001. "What we are saying out of one side of our mouth is, 'We will make it harder for you to cross the border. ... But there will be a job for you when you get here.'"

"The '86 Act was built around this idea of workplace enforcement," said Meissner's successor, James Ziglar, who headed the Immigration and Naturalization Service from 2001 through 2003. But when the INS tried to carry out the law, "members of Congress whose districts were affected started to complain. ... So it just didn't get funded."

Over the decades, presidents and Congresses of both parties have chosen other priorities for immigration enforcement – securing the border, deporting people already in jail for violent crimes, preventing illegal immigrants from getting jobs at nuclear plants or airports.

Despite the post-9/11 crackdown, more than 500,000 illegal immigrants entered the country each year between 2000 and 2006. The flow began to ebb only in 2007, when immigrants encountered a much more formidable foe than the Border Patrol: the Great Recession.

Federal immigration policies largely ignore the millions already here and almost entirely ignore the reason they illegally crossed the border or overstayed their visas: jobs.

The Obama administration, like the Bush and Clinton administrations before it, has focused on the border and on immigrants who break non-immigration laws.

In testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2009, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, the former governor of Arizona, said, "A scattershot approach where DHS targets any and all of the around 12 million people in the United States illegally does not amount to an approach that maximizes public safety."

These policies have contributed to California's growing dependence on immigrant labor. Some 1.75 million California workers, one of every 11, is here illegally.

"What you observe in the data is not like the weather," said Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors restrictions on immigration. "It's the result of policy choices."
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http://www.ocregister.com/news/-266490--.html

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3.
Mormon-Owned Paper Stands With Immigrants
By Jeremy W. Powers
The New York Times, September 19, 2010

Joseph A. Cannon is nobody’s liberal. His résumé reads as if it belongs to a delegate to the Republican National Convention, which, incidentally, he was in 2004.

Patricia Dark, the editor of El Observador, a Spanish-language paper.

He was an official for the Environmental Protection Agency under Ronald Reagan and chairman of the Utah Republican Party. As editor of The Deseret News, he published editorials condemning deficit spending, same-sex marriage and lenient alcohol laws.

So it was something of a head-scratcher, Mr. Cannon said, when his voice mail and e-mail started filling up with messages from people calling him a “liberal freak” for the sympathetic way his paper often writes about illegal immigrants.

“You have become a dangerous newspaper, one that I am on the verge of discontinuing,” wrote one outraged reader.

The News’s push for a more liberal embrace of undocumented immigrants has led to a collision between its editorial mission and its conservative, mostly Mormon, readers. But if this issue seems to stray from the reliably conservative politics of The News, Utah’s second-largest paper behind The Salt Lake Tribune, that may be in part because it is owned by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Hispanics are the most populous minority group in the country — and they represent a vast potential constituency for the Mormon church, which has already made considerable efforts to develop strong relations with Hispanic communities. Those efforts include, since February, a Spanish-language paper called El Observador.

“The church’s practice is to say, ‘Look, we’re not immigration agents. We care for the soul,’ ” Mr. Cannon said in an interview from his office in downtown Salt Lake City, where he can look out his window at the towering spires of the Salt Lake Temple.

Both The News and El Observador are owned by the Deseret Media Companies (pronounced DEZ-er-ET; it is named after the provisional state of Deseret founded by Mormons in the Salt Lake Valley in 1849), which also owns Utah’s largest television station, KSL, and its largest news Web site, KSL.com.

Because any editorial that appears under the Deseret Media masthead carries the unofficial imprimatur of the church in many Mormons’ eyes, Deseret editors and executives could indeed help shape opinions in the heavily Mormon state Legislature, where lawmakers are debating a zero-tolerance illegal immigration law similar to the one passed in Arizona this year.

For the time being, church leaders seem uninterested in wading into the debate by taking an official policy position, as they did by declaring support for the referendum to ban same-sex marriage in California. Rather, it has made only a benign public appeal for “careful reflection and civil discourse” on the issue. But that has hardly soothed matters.

That the main sponsor of the Arizona law, Russell Pearce, is a Mormon has not been lost on many Hispanics here. And some active Mormons said they thought that the church, through its media properties, was trying to reassure Hispanics who were suspicious that it condoned anti-immigrant attitudes.

“Some of my Latino friends have said, ‘I’m going to leave the church over this,’ ” said Tony Yapias, director of Proyecto Latino de Utah, a Latino outreach group. “My view is that this is an aggressive way for the L.D.S. church to very effectively use their media power to try to soften up the community. They’re sending a message to their members.”

Both Mr. Cannon and Deseret Media’s chief executive, Mark H. Willes, said they never sought approval from church officials on any editorial or article they ran. They said the church also never asked to see an article before it was printed, though former editors said the practice had been to fax drafts of editorials to church headquarters.

The newsroom at The Deseret News is a mix of practicing and nonpracticing Mormons and people of other religious beliefs. It is not a strictly doctrinaire environment. There is a coffee machine in the break room, despite the church’s discouragement of drinking caffeinated beverages.

But as Mr. Cannon makes clear, The Deseret News is hardly going to run something that would offend its owners.

“No one is going to write an editorial here that we thought was inconsistent with or would poke the church in the eye,” said Mr. Cannon, who this week will move on to become a special adviser to the editorial board. “That’s not going to happen.”

With a staff of three full-time reporters, El Observador typically devotes two or three articles in each edition to immigration-related topics. A major theme is the effect that deportation has on families. “Terror en familias hispanas” read one recent front-page headline.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/business/media/20deseret.html?src=busln

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4.
Powell says illegal immigrants do his home repairs
By Calvin Woodward
The Associated Press, September 20, 2010

Former Secretary of State Colin Powell says illegal immigrants do essential work in the U.S. and he has firsthand knowledge of that — because they fix his house.

Powell, a moderate Republican, urged his party Sunday to support immigration generally because it is "what's keeping this country's lifeblood moving forward."

In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press," he said a path to legal status should be offered to illegal immigrants because they "are doing things we need done in this country."

He added: "They're all over my house, doing things whenever I call for repairs, and I'm sure you've seen them at your house. We've got to find a way to bring these people out of the darkness and give them some kind of status."

Powell did not say whether he's hired illegal immigrants directly or they showed up with contractors.

Powell was President George W. Bush's first-term secretary of state and the nation's top military officer in the presidency of Bush's father and in the early months of the Clinton administration. Despite his Republican standing — he was once considered a formidable prospect for the GOP presidential or vice presidential nominations but stayed out of contention — he endorsed Democrat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.

In lamenting the party's rightward drift Sunday, he said Republicans must not become anti-immigration and spoke in support of legislation that would give certain children of illegal immigrants a way to become citizens if they pursue a college education or military service.
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5j74PX-ND_qkPj0_GySWyp6...

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5.
Los Angeles activists protest police shooting
The Associated Press, September 18, 2010

Demonstrators are dispersing after a peaceful rally that began near the spot where a Los Angeles Police officer shot a Guatemalan immigrant who was carrying a knife.

Authorities say there were no arrests and no confrontations during the march Saturday that drew about 250 people to the Rampart area west of downtown. Many carried flags from Central American countries and placards decrying the Sept. 5 shooting death of Manuel Jaminez.

Most of the protesters marched past the Rampart police station before winding their way to MacArthur Park. A smaller group took their demonstration to LAPD headquarters downtown.

Organizers had hoped for up to three thousand people to come and protest what they say was a disproportionate use of force.
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jj0B_7RimgX9ShtbpVeByi...