1. SCOTUS to hear ID theft case
2. Hispanic Protestants swing left
3. Illegals escape election scrutiny
4. FL bishop seeks 'balance, sanity'
5. Supremacists exploit anger

1.
Supreme Court to hear case on immigrants' use of fake IDs
The justices will decide whether illegal workers can be convicted of identity theft if they didn't know their bogus cards used the Social Security number of a real person.
By David G. Savage
Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2008

Reported from Washington -- The Supreme Court said Monday that it will decide whether the government can use new identity theft laws to send illegal immigrants using fake identification cards to prison or to force them to leave the country.

The Bush administration, as part of its crackdown on workers who are here illegally, has increasingly relied on prosecutors and criminal laws to punish the offenders, rather than simply sending them into immigration courts.

"It's a bargaining chip," said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tough enforcement of the laws. The prospect of a long prison term can persuade many immigrants to accept a speedy deportation, he said.

But this legal tactic has run into trouble in some areas, including California and elsewhere on the West Coast.

Four years ago, Congress added a two-year mandatory prison term for anyone who "knowingly transfers, possesses or uses . . . identification of another person." This law clearly applies to the classic cases of identity theft, such as an individual who uses another person's private information to empty a bank account or to charge items to a credit card.

But judges have divided over whether immigrants can be punished for "knowingly" stealing the identity of another person whenever they are caught using a Social Security number that is not their own. Often, the immigrants say they thought they had bought phony ID cards, not numbers assigned to real people.

Last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the government must prove that an immigrant knew he was using a real person's number to win a conviction and the two-year prison term. Appellate judges in Boston and Washington, D.C., took the same view.

Meanwhile, three other U.S. appeals courts -- in St. Louis, Atlanta and Richmond, Va. -- agreed with the government and ruled that prosecutors must show only that the immigrant knew he was using a phony ID card. Both sides in this dispute said the Supreme Court would have to resolve the matter, and the justices said Monday that they would do so.

The court agreed to hear the case of Ignacio Flores-Figueroa, a Mexican who was here illegally and had worked at a steel plant in East Moline, Ill. Two years ago, he pleaded guilty to using a false document and entering the country illegally, and he pleaded not guilty to an extra charge of aggravated identity theft. At his trial, he testified about purchasing identity cards, but he said he did not know the Social Security numbers were those of real people. But the judge convicted Flores-Figueroa of identity theft as well and sentenced him to more than six years in prison.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/washingtondc/la-na-scotus21-2008...

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2.
Hispanic Protestants swinging back to Democrats
By Eric Gorski
The Associated Press, October 21, 2008

Greeley, CO (AP) -- On Sunday mornings, Rose Chavez volunteers to greet people at New Hope Christian Fellowship Church, a Hispanic congregation that worships in the renovated former headquarters of a meatpacking company on the outskirts of town, surrounded by fields of cabbage and corn.

Far afield, yes, but also far from ignored by the major party presidential campaigns.

Like most Hispanic evangelical and Pentecostal voters, Chavez backed George W. Bush four years ago. She believed his values lined up with hers.

Now, with two weeks to another election, the 33-year-old is part of a Hispanic Protestant defection to Democrat Barack Obama, a shift that could prove key in battleground states with large Hispanic populations such as Colorado, Nevada, Florida and New Mexico.

"A lot of people say Obama doesn't have much experience, but bringing the troops home is a big issue," said Chavez, who works at an employment staffing agency. "They don't need to be there anymore. We were tricked into believing in Bush and his ways."

As the economy and sour mood of the country conspire against Republican John McCain, analysts point to other factors hurting him with Hispanic Protestants, who accounted for about one-third of all Hispanic voters in 2004.

The list includes an unpopular war, an inability to connect on a personal level with Hispanics as Bush did, the marginalization of social issues like abortion and gay marriage and simmering anger about Republican rhetoric on immigration.

A report in late July from the Pew Hispanic Center found Obama leading McCain two-to-one among non-Catholic Hispanics who affiliate with a religion — in other words, mostly evangelicals and Pentecostals.

Other numbers suggest a closer race. Gallup daily tracking polls from Sept. 1 through Friday show Obama leading McCain 47 percent to 43 percent among non-Catholic Hispanic Christians.

In 2004, exit polls showed 63 percent of Hispanic Protestants supported Bush. In 2000, that demographic group supported Democrat Al Gore by a similar margin. Hispanic Catholics have largely remained loyal to the Democratic Party, so evangelicals and Pentecostals are swinging the Hispanic vote.

"I find it powerfully refreshing, enforcing the reality that we're not going to be the white evangelical community," said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference. "We're not the Christian right. We will not be the extension of one political party and we won't be exploited and used for victory and then ignored."
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http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5iED6HTRhIpahTZ2qgy5Optqf-adwD93UO3DO0

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3.
Once a hot issue, immigrants overlooked by campaigns
By Dave Marcus
Newsday (NY), October 21, 2008

They are everywhere on Long Island - cashing checks in Hempstead, sharing multifamily houses in Brentwood, trimming hedges in Southampton.

And yet they are nowhere in this year's presidential campaign. Undocumented immigrants - the subject of so much discussion just a year ago - have been forgotten in the rush to discuss America's economic woes.

Immigrants flocked to Long Island during the boom of the 1990s and for a few years after. The Island is now home to at least 100,000 undocumented workers - although those figures, like almost everything having to do with the undocumented, are disputed.

Under current law, those immigrants have almost no chance of becoming citizens, so they live at the margins of society. Two years ago, two high-profile senators, John McCain and Ted Kennedy, sponsored legislation to help put undocumented workers on the path to citizenship.

"It would be impossible to identify and round up all 10 to 11 million of the current undocumented, and if we did, it would ground our nation's economy to a halt," McCain said.

That legislation sputtered, and by the time McCain was in the Republican primaries last year, he was emphasizing border security.

McCain and Sen. Barack Obama both voted for a fence on the Mexican border that will cost roughly $2.2 billion, or about $3.2 million per mile. Experts on Long Island deride that project.

"You're not going to secure the borders," said Lauris Wren, who directs the Political Asylum Clinic at Hofstra Law School. "The question is how we deal with people who are already in the country."
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http://www.newsday.com/news/printedition/longisland/ny-liimmi215892389oc...

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4.
Bishop Wenski seeks balanced, humane immigration policy in 2008
The Catholic News Service, October 20, 2008

Washington, DC -- Lamenting that illegal immigration has been largely unaddressed during the presidential campaign, Bishop Thomas G. Wenski of Orlando, Fla., said the new White House administration and Congress must confront the issue and develop a consistent, effective and humane policy that bridges political divisions.

Writing in The Washington Post Oct. 20, Bishop Wenski, chairman of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops' Committee on International Justice and Peace and a consultant to the conference's Committee on Migration, said the current enforcement-only approach to illegal immigration is ineffective and contrary to national interests.

"In truth, intermittent work-site raids, increased local law enforcement involvement and the creation of a wall along parts of our southern border, among other efforts, have done little to address the challenges presented by illegal immigration," Bishop Wenski wrote in an opinion piece in the daily newspaper.

While high-profile, lightning-fast work-site raids across the country "meet the political need to show government's law enforcement's capabilities," they have had a minimal impact on the number of undocumented workers in the country, he said.

Such efforts have done little more than cause what Bishop Wenski termed "dislocation and disruption in immigrant communities" while victimizing permanent U.S. residents and citizens, including children.

In addition, he said the involvement of local law enforcement officers in immigration enforcement has diminished the trust between the immigrant community and local authorities.

With a lack of trust among immigrants comes fear and damage to long-term relationships, the bishop added.
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http://www.catholicnews.com/data/stories/cns/0805345.htm

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5.
White supremacists target middle America
By Marisol Bello
USA Today, October 21, 2008

The white-power movement is changing its marketing strategy to broaden its appeal.

The USA's largest neo-Nazi group is ditching its trademark brown Nazi uniform with swastika armband for a more muted look in black fatigues.

In Pennsylvania, the Keystone State Skinheads is changing its name to Keystone United to attract members.

The nation's largest white-power website, Stormfront, has a new feature that lets members create social-networking pages. The site has had as many as 42,700 unique visitors in a 24-hour period this month, a steady rise since it started in 1995.

Supremacist groups are on the rise as they market themselves to middle America, according to leaders of the groups and organizations that monitor them. They are fueled by the debate over illegal immigration and a struggling economy.

"Many white supremacist groups are going more mainstream," says Jack Levin, a Northeastern University criminologist who studies hate crime. "They are eliminating the sheets and armbands. … The groups realize if they want to be attractive to middle-class types, they need to look middle-class."

Levin estimates fewer than 50,000 people are members of white supremacist groups, but he says their influence is growing with a more sophisticated approach.
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http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2008-10-20-hategroups_N.htm