1. Immigration and the Obama Admin.
2. Sen. links blames restrictionism
3. Obama's aunt to fight deportation
4. Latino vote tipped scales for Obama
5. UT Officials mull sanctions challenge
6. SC co. targets illegal immigration
7. Hospitals repatriate uninsured
8. Latino DJ encourages students
9. Illegal accused of murder in MD

1.
Immigration Reform in 2009?
The Frontera NorteSur News (New Mexico State University), November 10, 2008

Will Barack Obama’s historic election victory give new impetus to immigration reform in the United States? Analysts and political observers in the United States and Mexico have mixed assessments. Auguring against a quick fix are the economic crisis and the Iraq war, both of which the president-elect promises to prioritize early on his administration.

Speaking on the US-based Univision Spanish-language television network shortly after Obama’s victory, Chicago City Councilman Billy Ocasio said he did not think immigration reform would be possible within the first 100 days of the new administration, but he proposed the suspension of ICE raids and mass deportations until a solution to the question of illegal immigration could be further analyzed.

Gustavo Cordova Bojorquez, director of the Colegio de la Frontera Norte in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, was likewise skeptical of any swift resolution to the US immigration question.

“In this regard, (Obama) isn’t going to make any substantial changes in the short run,” Cordova contended, “since (immigration) remained discrete and stayed at the margins during the campaign and he won without making any commitments.” Cordova predicted that immigration reform will reemerge on the US political agenda during the third year of the incoming administration, at a time when President Obama is seeking reelection and will have to revisit an issue that could aid him in winning a second term.

For most of the 2008 campaign, Obama, as well as Republican rival McCain, shied away from tackling the hot potato immigration reform issue on the campaign trail. A notable exception was in the Spanish-language media, where the two candidates blamed each other for the defeat of immigration reform in 2007. In an Albuquerque speech during the final days of the campaign, Obama, who was comfortably ahead in the polls by the time, reasserted his position that a path to legalization for undocumented residents was necessary.

Calling for greater border security and crackdowns on employers who hire undocumented workers, Obama nevertheless supported citizenship for undocumented residents who pay fines and learn English. “They broke the law and we can’t excuse that, but we can’t deport 12 million people,” he said.

A likely pivotal player in a revived immigration reform push will be President-elect Obama’s named White House Chief of Staff, Illinois Democratic Congressman Rahm Emanuel. Previously a strong supporter of immigration reform, Rep. Emanuel backed away from the issue after bills failed to pass Capitol Hill last year. More recently, he has been quoted as saying immigration reform won’t happen during the new Democratic administration’s first term. Emanuel also reiterated that the economy will be the burning issue to address.

Hard numbers from the 2008 election, however, strongly suggest that the Democrats will ignore immigration reform at the risk of alienating an important and growing part of their winning coalition.

In a post-election telephone press conference with Frontera NorteSur and other media, Miami-based pollster Sergio Bendixen credited new immigrant voters, who he estimated made up 40 percent of the 10 million-plus Latino vote in 2008, for helping sweep Obama into the White House.

Based on exit polls of 2102 new immigrant voters in Los Angeles and Miami, Bendixen said that 78 percent of the voters surveyed went for Obama and 22 percent for McCain. Immigrant voters played key or decisive roles in the swing states of Indiana, Virginia, Florida, Colorado and New Mexico, according to Bendixen.

Univision proclaimed Latinos as the “new political force of the 21st century” in the United States. Overall, Latino voter turnout, immigrant and non-immigrant, exceeded many predictions and nearly doubled from 5.9 million voters in 2000 to more than 10 million in 2008.

While economic, health care and other issues were very important for Latino voters in general and new immigrant voters in particular, Bendixen said immigration was the catalytic issue that politicized the immigrant community.

The virulent tone the immigration debate assumed after the introduction of the 2005 Sensenbrenner bill that proposed criminalizing undocumented residents was perceived as an assault against the entire Latino community, immigrant and non-immigrant alike, Bendixen said, leading many Latinos to reject a Republican Party which was skewed as anti-immigrant and anti-Latino.

“I think we can conclude that the immigration issue was very important for all Hispanic voters and united them in this election,” Bendixen asserted.

“(Anti-immigrant sentiment) drove the Hispanic vote in a substantial way toward Barack Obama,” the political expert added. “It is clear that Latin American immigrants who voted, voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama.”

In Illinois, home of a huge immigrant population, John McCain was tagged with the anti-immigrant camp, even though the Arizona senator was once a champion of comprehensive immigration reform, said Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. The Republicans, Hoyt said, paid the price at the polls.

“The Republican brand has basically been destroyed among Latinos,” Hoyt maintained. Illinois Republicans, he added, are beginning to resemble “the limbless black knight in Monty Python’s Holy Grail.”

Although it is still too early to fully assess the impact and meaning of this year’s immigrant and Latino vote, a preliminary glance at the results indicates that such voters, many of whom voted for the first time, were crucial for not only Barack Obama’s victory, but also for the defeat of anti-undocumented immigrant Congressional candidates in Virginia, Colorado and New Mexico.
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http://www.nmsu.edu/~frontera/

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2.
Cuban American Senator Slams Anti-Immigration Rhetoric In Republican Party
Caribworldnews.com, November 10, 2008

Cuban American Senator, Mel Martinez, feels the strong anti-immigration rhetoric spewed by some members within the Republican Party contributed to their massive loss last week.

Martinez, appearing on Meet the Press on Sunday, said if those Republican members, meaning largely far right ultra conservatives, ` continue with that kind of rhetoric, anti-Hispanic rhetoric, that so much of it was heard, we're going to be relegated to minority status.`

He said `that the very divisive rhetoric of the immigration debate set a very bad tone for our brand as Republicans,` especially since he said `Hispanics are going to be a more and more vibrant part of the electorate, and the Republican Party had better figure out how to talk to them.`

`We had a very dramatic shift between what President Bush was able to do with Hispanic voters, where he won 44 percent of them, and what happened to Senator McCain,` said the Florida lawmaker.
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http://www.caribbeanworldnews.com/middle_top_news_detail.php?mid=1696

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3.
Obama's aunt to fight to stay in US
By Denise Lavoie
The Associated Press, November 7, 2008; 5:41 PM

Boston -- President-elect Obama's aunt intends to fight a deportation order and hopes to remain in the United States, her immigration lawyer said Friday.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/11/07/AR200811...

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4.
In key states, Latino vote fueled Obama's victory
By Ivan Moreno
The Associated Press, November 10, 2008

Denver (AP) -- Latinos are hailed as a key voting bloc, even though they show their power at the polls only sporadically. When they turned out in record numbers to vote for Democrat Barack Obama, they not only erased recent gains by Republicans but shattered the myth of a black-Latino divide.

Amid worries about home foreclosures and economic recession and driven by an unprecedented get-out-the-vote effort and the acidic debate over illegal immigration, Latinos helped Democrats flip the battleground states of Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Florida.

"Without the Latino vote, we would not have won those states," said Federico Pena, Denver's first Hispanic mayor and a national co-chairman of the Obama campaign.

The nonpartisan National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials estimates that between 9.6 million and 11 million Hispanics voted in the election, compared to a U.S. Census estimate of 7.6 million in 2004. Latinos comprised 9 percent of all voters this year, compared to 7 percent in 2004, according to Associated Press exit polls.

Nationwide, the AP polls suggested about two-thirds of Latino voters chose Obama over Republican John McCain. About three-fourths of Hispanics under the age of 30 supported Obama.

In Florida, where President Bush won 56 percent of the Latino vote in 2004, Obama earned 57 percent of the Hispanic vote to McCain's 42 percent. Obama won three-fourths of Latino votes in Nevada, and nearly 7 in 10 favored him in New Mexico, where he would have lost without them.

In Colorado, Hispanics supported Obama at nearly the same rate as Democrat John Kerry in 2004 — about 6 in 10 — but they made up 13 percent of the electorate this year, compared to an estimated 8 percent four years ago.

"In many respects, the Hispanic vote in this election has redrawn the electorate map," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, an immigration reform advocacy group. "Four states that went for President Bush in 2004 went for Obama in 2008, and the critical factor was the huge turnout and the huge trend by Hispanic voters to Democrats."

Gone are the significant inroads by Bush among Hispanic voters. Bush won over many in 2000 by saying he would build a solid relationship with Vicente Fox, then president of Mexico. Their relationship later soured.

In 2004, Bush won 40 percent of the Hispanic vote, assiduously courting Spanish-language news media and Hispanic small-business owners, said Maria Teresa Petersen, executive director of Voto Latino, the nonpartisan voting advocacy group co-founded by actress Rosario Dawson.

This time around, many of those small business owners have been battered by the economy, and Latinos came home to Democrats in droves.

"If you're a Republican strategist, that should make you break into a cold sweat," Sharry said.

Latinos have historically supported Democrats over Republicans, but other factors contributed to a surge for Obama that Kerry didn't have against Bush in 2004.
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http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5icqz6prRLHvMIlRPtwhwxDJb62PgD94BVEUG0

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5.
Mayors in quandry over Utah immigration law
They say they don t know how to enforce it or how to fund it
By María Villaseñor
The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City), November 9, 2008

State, county and city employees will be required to do the work of immigration agents next summer.

And several mayors worry about where they will find the money to ver­ify the legal residency of everyone who tries to use public services - from 8­year-olds signing up for Little League to seniors attending activity centers.

It's a "can of worms," said Salt Lake County Mayor Peter Corroon.

SB81, passed earlier this year with substantial margins in the House and Senate, goes into effect in July. Though Corroon and city mayors might have different views on the new statute's merits, he said they all agree they don't know how to enforce it.

He estimates the task could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars - or even millions.

"If this is going to happen, what do we need to be doing?" Corroon asked after a Thursday meeting with area mayors. Next month, he and 16 city bosses will talk with legisla­tors, and Midvale Mayor JoAnn Seghini said in an in­terview the statute will be a key topic.

"It's impossible for us to do that kind of policing," she said, adding she wants legislators to either improve and clarify the bill or extend its implementa­tion to give officials more time to prepare.

That's why lawmakers gave it a 2009 start date, said Kirk Torgensen, the attorney gen­eral's chief deputy. The delay allows them to review it dur­ing the 2009 Legislature and make any changes, "which I think clearly will happen."

But the bill's sponsor said there is little validity to the mayors' concerns, adding that the law needs no changes.

"Quite frankly, they're trying to make a very large mountain out of a very small molehill," St. George Sen. John Hickman said. "This bill is designed to protect the in­tegrity of our state borders."
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http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_10941919

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6.
County wants to fight illegal immigration
Greenville needs federal OKs, may use business ordinance to join in task
By Nan Lundeen
The Greenville News (SC), November 10, 2008

By pursuing local enforcement of federal immigration laws, Greenville County joins local governments in pockets across the country that are taking on the controversial task.

In South Carolina, only Beaufort and York counties have agreements with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, at this point.

Advocates of local enforcement, such as Greenville County Councilman Bob Taylor, say illegal immigrants are a burden on schools and health-care systems, but critics say it leads to ineffective, piecemeal enforcement and opens local government to lawsuits.

Taylor has proposed that employers who knowingly hire undocumented workers could potentially lose their right to do business in unincorporated parts of Greenville County under a ordinance requiring business registration.

Greenville County Sheriff Steve Loftis also is interested in pursuing federal programs that authorize sheriff 's deputies to enforce federal immigration laws, but, "we don't have enough manpower to make the task force part of it efficient," said spokesman Master Deputy Mike Hildebrand.

Greenville County is pursuing two programs offered by ICE, according to County Administrator Joe Kernell. The programs would work with or without a business registration ordinance, he said.

Nationwide, ICE has executed 67 memorandum of agreements with local law enforcement agencies under 287(g), a section of federal immigration law, ICE spokeswoman Barbara Gonzalez said. The section was added in 1996.

She said $56 million has been budgeted for 287(g) in 2009 but couldn't reveal the status of applications.

About half the agreements deal with identifying illegal immigrants in jails, half with task force investigations and some deal with both, according to the ICE Web site.

Taylor's proposed $15 registration fee differs from a business license, neither of which the county requires now, because it doesn't tax receipts. It would link the registration to lawful employment.

"If there was the appearance of illegal aliens working, then somebody could look at it and decide whether or not that were in fact true," Taylor said.

Under Beaufort County's ordinance, county consultants sift through businesses' federal I-9 forms, which require employee identification, according to county Administrator Gary Kubic.
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http://www.greenvilleonline.com/article/20081110/NEWS01/811100312/1001

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7.
Getting Tough
Deported in a Coma, Saved Back in U.S.
By Deborah Sontag
The New York Times, November 9, 2008

Gila Bend, AZ -- Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.

Mr. Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.

For days, Mr. Torres languished in a busy emergency room there, but his parents, Jesús and Gloria Torres, were not about to give up on him. Although many uninsured immigrants have been repatriated by American hospitals, few have seen their journey take the U-turn that the Torreses engineered for their son. They found a hospital in California willing to treat him, loaded him into a donated ambulance and drove him back into the United States as a potentially deadly infection raged through his system.

By summer’s end, despite the grimmest of prognoses from the hospital in Phoenix, Mr. Torres had not only survived but thrived. Newly discharged from rehabilitation in California, he was haltingly walking, talking and, hoisting his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, performing a silent, comic, effortful imitation of a marching soldier.

“In Arizona, apparently, they see us as beasts of burden that can be dumped back over the border when we have outlived our usefulness,” the elder Mr. Torres, who is 47, said in Spanish. “But we outwitted them. We were not going to let our son die. And look at him now!”

Antonio Torres’s experience sharply illustrates the haphazard way in which the American health care system handles cases involving uninsured immigrants who are gravely injured or seriously ill. Whether these patients receive sustained care in this country or are privately deported by a hospital depends on what emergency room they initially visit.

There is only limited federal financing for these fragile patients, and no governmental oversight of what happens to them. Instead, it is left to individual hospitals, many of whom see themselves as stranded at the crossroads of a failed immigration policy and a failed health care system, to cut through a thicket of financial, legal and ethical concerns.

That creates a burden. “It’s a killer,” said Brian Conway, spokesman for the Greater New York Hospital Association. But it also establishes the potential for neglectful and unethical if not illegal behavior by hospitals.

“The opportunity to turn your back is there,” said Dr. Stephen Larson, a migrant health expert and physician at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania. “You’re given an out by there not being formal regulations. The question is whether or not litigation, or prosecution, catches up and hospitals start to be held liable.”

In October, the California Medical Association, responding to an article in The New York Times about the medical deportation of a brain-injured Guatemalan, passed a resolution opposing the forced repatriation of patients. The American Medical Association is to take up the matter on Sunday at a national meeting in Orlando.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/09/us/09deport.html

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8.
Speakers implore Latino students to "break the chain"
By Matt O'Brien
The Contra Costa Times (Walnut Creek, CA), November 8, 2008

There are the statistics, and then there are the stories that defy them.

When the radio personality Edgar "ShoBoy" Sotelo walked to a podium Friday morning at the Concord campus of Cal State East Bay, an auditorium full of Latino youths raised camera phones in the air to capture his picture.

Then, their cheers quieted to rapt attention as the 26-year-old DJ shared a gripping tale of coming to the United States poor, and later battling the low expectations of a school system that did not think he could succeed.

"I'm not going to let them dictate my life, so I went out and got help, because my parents didn't understand the system," he said. "They immigrated here just to be able to survive. Now, we have to go above survival."

Hundreds of area Latino high school students spent Friday engaged in intimate conversations with local business people and professionals as part of an annual student conference sponsored by the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce of Contra Costa County.

"You can relate to the people who are speaking," said Alma Perez, 17, a senior at Mt. Diablo High School who aims to go to college next year and become a social worker. Perez participated in a round-table discussion with a local businesswoman who wove practical advice with personal experiences from her Mexican immigrant family.

In another room, local entrepreneurs were sharing the perils and potentials of opening restaurants and selling real estate.

"Being without a college education, I had to work 80 hours a week when I first opened our business," said Ramon Velasco, owner of El Tapatio restaurant in Pleasant Hill. Some of the students later came up to Velasco looking for after-school jobs. But he also implored them to focus on going to college, saying he had the opportunity to do so but didn't take it.
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http://www.contracostatimes.com/ci_10936390

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9.
Illegal immigrant shooter recently cited for carrying a concealed weapon
By Freeman Klopott
The Examiner (Washington, DC), November 10, 2008

Just weeks before police say an illegal immigrant and alleged MS-13 gang member shot and killed a 14-year-old Silver Spring boy, the 20-year-old man was charged with concealing a dangerous weapon by a Montgomery County police officer, court records show.

The citation was issued on Oct. 3, a little less than a month before police say Hector Hernandez — an El Salvadoran illegal immigrant living in Takoma Park — opened fire on a Montgomery County bus, killing Tai Lam and wounding two other teens, ages 14 and 15.

Hernandez was with four or five other alleged gang members when he got on the bus in Silver Spring, police said. Other arrests are likely.

The two groups got into an argument on the bus and, as Hernandez was exiting near Piney Branch Road and Arliss Street, he pulled out a handgun and started shooting, police said.

The limited records available on the Internet do not say if Hernandez was taken into custody for hiding the weapon on Oct. 3.
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http://www.dcexaminer.com/local/crime/Illegal_immigrant_shooter_recently...