1.CIS study says enforcement working
2.GOP likely to force campaign issue
3.Both candidates back amensty
4.NYC mayor takes Spanish lessons
5.Hospitals 'deporting' illegals

1.
More going back home
Illegal-migrant numbers down
By Stephen Wall
The San Bernardino Sun (CA), August 3, 2008
http://www.sbsun.com/sanbernardino/ci_10089107

Stepped-up enforcement measures have contributed to a 11 percent decline in the number of illegal immigrants in the country over the past year, according to a new report by a nonpartisan think tank.

The illegal immigrant population fell from a peak of 12.5 million in August 2007 to 11.2 million today, according to the Washington D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies.

If current trends continue, the illegal population would be cut in half within five years, the report states.

The decline is at least seven times larger than the number of illegal immigrants removed by the government in the last 10 months. As a result, most of the drop can be attributed to illegal immigrants leaving the United States on their own, according to the report released last week.

The findings are based on monthly data collected by the Census Bureau showing a significant decrease in the number of less-educated, young Latino immigrants in the country. During the same period, the number of legal immigrants continued to increase.

"The data shows that enforcement can work as an alternative to amnesty," said Mark Krikorian, the center's executive director. "We are not faced with the false choice of legalizing everybody or arresting every single illegal alien and throwing them out."

After Congress failed to pass comprehensive immigration reform legislation last year, federal officials promised the government would do more to police the border as well as pursue employers who hire illegal immigrants.

Fencing along the border has increased significantly in the last 18 months, and the number of Border Patrol agents has more than doubled in recent years to more than 16,500, the report says.

State and local governments also have taken measures to deal with illegal immigration.

Georgia, Missouri, Arizona and Oklahoma require many employers to verify the legal status of workers in order to obtain business licenses or government contracts.

Local law enforcement agencies, including the San Bernardino County Sheriff's Department, have teamed with federal authorities to identify and deport illegal immigrants convicted of crimes.

In addition, cities such as Escondido have tried to prohibit landlords from renting homes to people in the country illegally.

"Comprehensive enforcement of immigration laws is working, and we need to keep it up," Krikorian said.

Immigrant-rights advocates agree that illegal immigrants are leaving the country. But they say it's largely because of the economic downturn, not stricter enforcement measures.

Illegal immigrants who work in the construction and service industries have seen job opportunities evaporate during the mortgage crisis.

"With the state of the economy and a lack of jobs, we do have a situation where many undocumented immigrants are going back home," said Jose Calderon, a professor of sociology and Chicano studies at Pitzer College in Claremont.

When they return to their home countries, immigrants then discourage their relatives and friends from trying to come to the United States, Calderon said.

"When the situation here gets worse than in their hometowns, they think it's better to be home," he said.

The report acknowledges that the depressed economy is partly responsible for the decline in the number of illegal immigrants.

But, Krikorian said, "the data shows the drop in the illegal population started before the uptick in the unemployment rate of those same people ... The decrease began because of enforcement. It could well be picking up because the economy."

Armando Navarro, an ethnic studies professor at UC Riverside, disputes the report's assertion that the illegal population will continue to drop as long as harsh enforcement measures are in place.

"It's only a temporary situation," Navarro said of the illegal-immigrant decline. "Once the economy picks up, you will have a restart of the so-called migrant exodus. As long as people are hungry, as long as people see there is opportunity in the United States of America, they are going to make the journey north."

Krikorian said more needs to be done to combat illegal immigration.

"Despite the success, we still have almost 90 percent of the illegal aliens who were here last year," he said. "By no means is the job finished."

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America sees decline in number of illegal aliens
By Chad Groening
OneNewsNow, August 3, 2008
http://www.onenewsnow.com/Politics/Default.aspx?id=199984

Enforcement, economy credited for fewer illegal immigrants
The Norman Transcript (OH), August 2, 2008
http://www.normantranscript.com/opinion/local_story_215190013

Report: Illegal immigration population down 11 percent
By Ken Stanford Editor
Access North Georgia, August 1, 2008
http://www.accessnorthga.com/detail.php?n=211999&c=10

Immigrant population drops
Study: Decrease due to enforcement laws and slow economy
By Ines Min
The Daily Texan (University of Texas, Austin), August 4, 2008
http://media.www.dailytexanonline.com/media/storage/paper410/news/2008/0...

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2.
GOP accused of using immigration as wedge issue
By Eunice Moscoso and Jessica Wehrman
The Cox News Service, August 3, 2008

Washington, DC -- Immigration is having an impact on congressional campaigns across the country — from Ohio to North Carolina — and more will follow, according to political analysts and experts on both sides of the immigration debate.

In Ohio, Republican Fred Dailey hopes to upend freshman Rep. Zack Space, D-Dover, by challenging him on the immigration issue.

Dailey's campaign manager, Sean Bartley, said Space ran on a platform opposing illegal immigration in 2006, but has ultimately proven soft on the issue in a series of crucial votes.

Space, whose district was carried twice by George W. Bush, states a clear position on his Web site. "He (Space) remains adamant that any proposal to address the immigration crisis should not provide a gift to immigrants who have already broken the law," it says. "Such an action would burden American taxpayers and increase competition for jobs."

Republicans like Dailey will try to use immigration as a wedge issue in 2008, predicted Frank Sharry, president of America's Voice, an immigrant advocate group that is monitoring political campaigns. "They're hoping that by talking tough and trying to define Democrats as soft (on illegal immigration), that it will mobilize more of their base and maybe even win swing voters."
. . .
http://www.middletownjournal.com/n/content/oh/story/news/local/2008/08/0...

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3.
Hard-liners say both candidates back amnesty
Will their frustration force them to turn to a third party to protest U.S. immigration policy?
By Eunice Moscoso
The Cox News Service, August 3, 2008

Washington, DC -- Groups angry about illegal immigration have one word for the top presidential contenders — frustration.

Both Sens. Barack Obama and John McCain — the presumptive Democratic and Republican nominees — support giving illegal immigrants a path to citizenship under certain requirements.

To Roy Beck, the president of NumbersUSA, that means amnesty.

"It's abjectly frustrating," he said. "Both of them are absolutely abysmal on immigration."

Beck, whose group supports lower levels of immigration, predicted that a disproportionate number of its 650,000 members would vote for third party candidates in protest, including Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin or Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr, a former congressman.

However, Beck said that the vast majority would "hold their nose" and vote for McCain or Obama because of other issues.

Steven Camarota, director of research at the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank in Washington that advocates stronger immigration controls, said people who want more enforcement are clearly disillusioned with the major party candidates.

However, he said that few have heard of Baldwin or the Constitution Party. Barr, on the other hand, has some name recognition nationally and a lot in his home state of Georgia, Camarota said.

He predicted that Barr could be a spoiler in Georgia and a few other states if enough conservatives vote for him in a tight race.
. . .
http://www.daytondailynews.com/n/content/oh/story/news/local/2008/08/02/...

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4.
Shaping a Mayor’s Spanish, Not His Ideas
By Fernanda Santos
The New York Times, August 4, 2008

The men sat at opposite ends of a coffee table speckled with a half-dozen books — on the history of New York’s municipal lawyers, on the subway system’s rich architecture. Their legs stretched out, left foot resting on the right, they were mirror images of disparate worlds: the tutor, an immigrant from Colombia, with his student, the mayor of New York, face to face for 90 minutes in an elegant chamber at City Hall.

The tutor, Luis Cardozo, wore a suit — thin white stripes slicing light gray fabric that matched his yellow tie. The student, Michael R. Bloomberg, had on a plaid buttoned shirt, casual pants and Irish-green socks.

“¿Cómo fue su viaje a Washington?” Mr. Cardozo, 46, asked of the mayor’s trip to the nation’s capital.

Mr. Bloomberg, 66, quipped: “Si tú tienes tiempo para descansar, toma un avión.” Translation: If you have time to relax, take a plane, which spurred a discussion on the travails of dealing with airport security, even for someone like the mayor, who has a private jet.

And so began Friday morning’s lesson, much like many others had begun for almost six years: a question prompted an answer that led to other questions, other subjects, their flow uninterrupted.

The mayor stumbled on a verb tense or two and forgot a few words, or spoke them out of order. “Guerra Mundial Primera,” he said at one point. Gently, Mr. Cardozo righted him: “Primera Guerra Mundial” — First World War.

“I correct his mistakes,” Mr. Cardozo said later in an interview, “not his ideas.”
. . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/04/nyregion/04spanish.html

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5.
Immigrants Facing Deportation by U.S. Hospitals
By Deborah Sontag
The New York Times, August 3, 2008

Jolomcu, Guatemala -- High in the hills of Guatemala, shut inside the one-room house where he spends day and night on a twin bed beneath a seriously outdated calendar, Luis Alberto Jiménez has no idea of the legal battle that swirls around him in the lowlands of Florida.

Shooing away flies and beaming at the tiny, toothless elderly mother who is his sole caregiver, Mr. Jiménez, a knit cap pulled tightly on his head, remains cheerily oblivious that he has come to represent the collision of two deeply flawed American systems, immigration and health care.

Eight years ago, Mr. Jiménez, 35, an illegal immigrant working as a gardener in Stuart, Fla., suffered devastating injuries in a car crash with a drunken Floridian. A community hospital saved his life, twice, and, after failing to find a rehabilitation center willing to accept an uninsured patient, kept him as a ward for years at a cost of $1.5 million.

What happened next set the stage for a continuing legal battle with nationwide repercussions: Mr. Jiménez was deported — not by the federal government but by the hospital, Martin Memorial. After winning a state court order that would later be declared invalid, Martin Memorial leased an air ambulance for $30,000 and “forcibly returned him to his home country,” as one hospital administrator described it.

Since being hoisted in his wheelchair up a steep slope to his remote home, Mr. Jiménez, who sustained a severe traumatic brain injury, has received no medical care or medication — just Alka-Seltzer and prayer, his 72-year-old mother said. Over the last year, his condition has deteriorated with routine violent seizures, each characterized by a fall, protracted convulsions, a loud gurgling, the vomiting of blood and, finally, a collapse into unconsciousness.

“Every time, he loses a little more of himself,” his mother, Petrona Gervacio Gaspar, said in Kanjobal, the Indian dialect that she speaks with an otherworldly squeak.

Mr. Jiménez’s benchmark case exposes a little-known but apparently widespread practice. Many American hospitals are taking it upon themselves to repatriate seriously injured or ill immigrants because they cannot find nursing homes willing to accept them without insurance. Medicaid does not cover long-term care for illegal immigrants, or for newly arrived legal immigrants, creating a quandary for hospitals, which are obligated by federal regulation to arrange post-hospital care for patients who need it.

American immigration authorities play no role in these private repatriations, carried out by ambulance, air ambulance and commercial plane. Most hospitals say that they do not conduct cross-border transfers until patients are medically stable and that they arrange to deliver them into a physician’s care in their homeland. But the hospitals are operating in a void, without governmental assistance or oversight, leaving ample room for legal and ethical transgressions on both sides of the border.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/03/us/03deport.html