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1. DOD believes cartels are 1000,000 strong
2. Hispanics fret future with Republican Party
3. Study finds Indian, Chinese repatriating
4. CA to stop detaining certain illegals
5. Latinos want Hispanic Archbishop

1.
Exclusive: 100,000 foot soldiers in cartels
By Sara A. Carter
The Washington Times, March 3, 2009

Ciudad Juarez, Mexico -- The U.S. Defense Department thinks Mexico's two most deadly drug cartels together have fielded more than 100,000 foot soldiers - an army that rivals Mexico's armed forces and threatens to turn the country into a narco-state.

"It's moving to crisis proportions," a senior U.S. defense official told The Washington Times. The official, who spoke on the condition that he not be named because of the sensitive nature of his work, said the cartels' "foot soldiers" are on a par with Mexico's army of about 130,000.

The disclosure underlines the enormity of the challenge Mexico and the United States face as they struggle to contain what is increasingly looking like a civil war or an insurgency along the U.S.-Mexico border. In the past year, about 7,000 people have died - more than 1,000 in January alone. The conflict has become increasingly brutal, with victims beheaded and bodies dissolved in vats of acid.

The death toll dwarfs that in Afghanistan, where about 200 fatalities, including 29 U.S. troops, were reported in the first two months of 2009. About 400 people, including 31 U.S. military personnel, died in Iraq during the same period.

The biggest and most violent combatants are the Sinaloa cartel, known by U.S. and Mexican federal law enforcement officials as the "Federation" or "Golden Triangle," and its main rival, "Los Zetas" or the Gulf Cartel, whose territory runs along the Laredo,Texas, borderlands.

The two cartels appear to be negotiating a truce or merger to defeat rivals and better withstand government pressure. U.S. officials say the consequences of such a pact would be grave.

"I think if they merge or decide to cooperate in a greater way, Mexico could potentially have a national security crisis," the defense official said. He said the two have amassed so many people and weapons that Mexican President Felipe Calderon is "fighting for his life" and "for the life of Mexico right now."

As a result, Mexico is behind only Pakistan and Iran as a top U.S. national security concern, ranking above Afghanistan and Iraq, the defense official added.

Other U.S. officials and Mexico specialists agreed with this assessment.

Michael V. Hayden, who left as CIA director in January, put Mexico second to Iran as a top national security threat to the United States. His successor, Leon E. Panetta, told reporters at his first news conference that the agency is "paying ... a lot of attention to" Mexico.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano told CBS' "60 Minutes" on Sunday that "the stakes are high for the safety of many, many citizens of Mexico and the stakes are high for the United States no doubt."

In a December interview with The Times, President Bush said his successor would need to deal "with these drug cartels in our own neighborhood. And the front line of the fight will be Mexico."

A State Department travel advisory last month seemed timed to caution U.S. students contemplating spring breaks south of the border.

"Some recent Mexican army and police confrontations with drug cartels have resembled small-unit combat, with cartels employing automatic weapons and grenades," the advisory said.

Independent analysts warn that narco-terrorists have infiltrated the Mexican government, creating a shadow regime that further complicates efforts to contain and destroy the cartels.

"My greatest fear is that the tentacles of the shadow government grow stronger, that the cartels have penetrated the government and that they will be able to act with impunity and that this ever stronger shadow government will effectively evolve into a narco-state," said Ted Galen Carpenter, vice president for defense and foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute in Washington.

The Mexican Embassy in Washington did not respond to a request for comment on the drug war.

Mr. Calderon, however, has adamantly denied assertions that Mexico is becoming a failed state.

The Mexican government has "not lost any part - any single part - of the Mexican territory to drug cartels," he recently told the Associated Press.

His comments run counter to the impressions of U.S. law enforcement officials and some Mexican journalists reporting in Ciudad Juarez, a city just across the border from El Paso, Texas.

On a recent morning here, the once-bustling border town of 1.3 million was more like a ghost town.

"It's empty," said a vendor of freshly baked tortillas and salsa, who asked to be identified only by her first name, Maria. "We are in a losing war against the narco-traffickers. My business is dying, and soon it will join the graveyard of businesses that have had to close down. No one comes Juarez anymore."

More than 1,800 people have been killed in the city since last year. The number continued to climb as The Times visited, with more than 20 deaths in one week.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/03/100000-foot-soldiers-in-...

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2.
Hispanics wary of future in GOP
By David R. Sands
The Washington Times, March 3, 2009

Five years after former President George W. Bush attracted nearly half of the Hispanic vote in the 2004 presidential election, Hispanic Republicans are worrying that support for the party among Latinos is in a free fall.

The mood was distinctly downbeat at times at a recent Capitol Hill gathering sponsored by the Republican National Hispanic Assembly (RHNA) on the "Future of Hispanics in the GOP." For some, the basic question was whether there was any future to discuss.

Leading Hispanic Republican strategists say the natural attraction the party should enjoy with churchgoing, socially conservative Latino voters is being overwhelmed by a single issue: the party's hard-line stance on illegal immigration.

"We know that the party will not recover its majority until we get this right," said RHNA Chairman Danny Vargas.

Conservative pundit and former Maryland Senate candidate Linda Chavez described how Ronald Reagan helped persuade her to vote Republican for the first time in 1980 and how the party's policy and rhetoric on immigration are driving her and other Hispanics away.

"I'm sitting back," she said. "I do not feel as at home with the Republican Party as I did in 1984-85, and that is a problem our party is going to have to come to terms with."

Party leaders say they recognize the need to mend fences. According to exit polls, Democrats scored a net gain of 13 percent in the presidential election and 15 percent in House races between 2004 and 2008. Republican defections have been particularly severe in states where Hispanics make up at least 30 percent of the electorate, including Arizona, California, Texas and New Mexico.

President Bush received 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, compared with Sen. John Kerry's 53 percent — a record showing for a Republican candidate. In 2008, Republican nominee Sen. John McCain received just 31 percent of the national Hispanic vote, compared to Mr. Obama's 67 percent.

In 2004, Republicans held five of the nine congressional districts along the U.S.-Mexican border; in 2009, all nine seats are occupied by liberal Democrats.
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http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/03/hispanics-wary-of-future-in-...

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3.
Study: Immigrants going home to work
By Kristin Collins
The News and Observer (Raleigh, NC), March 2, 2009

A Duke University researcher says the United States may no longer be the world's only land of opportunity.

According to a study released today, immigrants from India and China are returning to their home countries for better jobs and a more luxurious standard of living.

Vivek Wadhwa, a professor in Duke's Pratt School of Engineering, co-authored the study, in which researchers interviewed 1,200 highly educated Indian and Chinese professionals who returned to their countries after living in the United States. Most returned for better job prospects and pay.

Wadhwa said the growing job market in those countries, visa backlogs and anti-immigrant sentiment in the United States are pulling immigrants back to the places they once thought they had left for good.
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http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1425430.html

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4.
State to stop imprisoning some illegal-immigration repeat offenders
Federal government should deal with those with prior convictions who unlawfully return to the U.S. after being deported, because California prisons are crowded, state corrections chief says.
By Michael Rothfeld
The Los Angeles Times, March 3, 2009

Sacramento -- California corrections officials say the state will no longer spend the estimated $10 million a year it costs to lock up undocumented immigrants with prior convictions who reenter the country illegally after being deported.

The stance refers to immigrants who had committed crimes in California and finished serving their terms.

In the past, the state kept them on parole after deportation and incarcerated them for four to eight months for violating their parole by reentering the country illegally. But California is facing an order from a panel of federal judges to reduce the population of its overcrowded prisons.

In a letter to U.S. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano on Friday and in a news conference Monday, California corrections chief Matt Cate said the federal government should prosecute illegal immigrants who return to the country after deportation because that is a crime under federal law.

Now, when illegal immigrants are released from state prison and given to federal authorities for deportation, they will automatically be discharged from parole.

"Those short prison stints are not punishment enough for these repeat offenders, yet they cost California millions every year to recycle them through our parole process, exacerbating the crowded positions in our prisons," Cate, secretary of the state Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation, said in his letter to Napolitano. "California can no longer afford this practice."

Michael Keegan, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security, said the agency had received the letter and was reviewing it.

"We...will be responding to the state of California through the proper channels as soon as we're done analyzing the information," he said.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-prisons3-2009mar03,0,1145145.story

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5.
Hoping for a Latino Archbishop, Eventually
By Paul Vitello
The New York Times, March 3, 2009

Latinos account for at least half of the Roman Catholics in New York. Their neighborhood churches are often filled to capacity. Parishes originally named for Irish saints have been renamed for Hispanic ones. Masses at St. Patrick’s Cathedral honoring the feast days of their patron saints draw crowds so large and fervent that worshipers sometimes spill out onto Fifth Avenue to pray on their knees on the sidewalk.

And when the Vatican announced last week that the next leader of the Archdiocese of New York would be Archbishop Timothy M. Dolan of Milwaukee — the 10th in an unbroken line of Irish-American archbishops to hold that job since 1842 — Latino Catholics in New York reacted as they would to news of another sunrise over the East River.

The muted response did not reflect indifference to the new archbishop, whom many people seemed to like, or to the notion that appointing a prelate with a Hispanic name instead of a Celtic one might be smart: Latinos are not only ascendant in New York, but also likely to be the majority of Catholics in the United States within a decade. The archbishop of New York, with his pulpit in the media nexus of the world, has been called the pope of America.

As Latino leaders described their reaction, it was more like accepting the limits of one’s options in the family business.

“It’s not called St. Patrick’s Cathedral for nothing,” said Richard Espinal, executive director of Centro Altagracia for Faith and Justice, a Jesuit-sponsored Latino advocacy group in Harlem. “The old guard of Irish-American priests — that’s still the church’s power base in New York. I have no problem with it. I’m just happy to read in the paper that the new archbishop can say Mass in Spanish.”

By historians’ account, Irish immigrants and their offspring essentially built the Catholic Church in America. Between 1840 and 1880, Irish immigration accounted for most of the sixfold increase in the country’s Catholic population, to 6 million. The influx fueled a boom in church and school construction, much of it with Irish labor, that culminated with the completion of St. Patrick’s in 1878.

But Latinos in New York today are almost the statistical twins of Irish New Yorkers of the late 19th century: They account for 30 percent of the city’s population and, by the archdiocese’s estimate, 40 to 50 percent of its 2.5 million Catholics — an estimate that community advocates say probably misses large numbers of undocumented immigrants.

And while the archdiocese has welcomed Latinos — rededicating churches and underwriting tuition for Hispanic students in its parochial schools — they have not inherited the vast stake in the institution that their Irish-American forbears have.

There are still far more Irish-American priests than Latino ones in New York, as in most of the country. The board of directors of the Alfred E. Smith Memorial Foundation, which sponsors the New York Archdiocese’s biggest fund-raiser of the year, a white-tie dinner that attracts the city’s political and business elite, still reflects the white Catholic population that arrived in New York a century and more ago, and is mostly Irish-American.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/03/nyregion/03bishop.html