Please visit our YouTube and Facebook pages.

1. White House to test political climate
2. Gov't reports drop in H-1B applications
3. Critics blast MA pol's plan for suffrage
4. Issues features heavily in Chicago race
5. Group trys to silence analyst

1.
Obama to Push Immigration Bill as One Priority
By Julia Preston
The New York Times, April 8, 2009

While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.

Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.

Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.

Some White House officials said that immigration would not take precedence over the health care and energy proposals that Mr. Obama has identified as priorities. But the timetable is consistent with pledges Mr. Obama made to Hispanic groups in last year’s campaign.

He said then that comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in his first year in office. Latino voters turned out strongly for Mr. Obama in the election.

“He intends to start the debate this year,” Ms. Muñoz said.

But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said that immigration could become a polarizing issue for Mr. Obama in a year when he has many other major battles to fight.

Opponents, mainly Republicans, say they will seek to mobilize popular outrage against any effort to legalize unauthorized immigrant workers while so many Americans are out of jobs.

Democratic legislative aides said that opening a full-fledged debate this year on immigration, particularly with health care as a looming priority, could weigh down the president’s domestic agenda.
. . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/us/politics/09immig.html

********
********

2.
Applications for Foreign Worker Visas Are Down
By Kirk Semple
The New York Times, April 8, 2009

Federal immigration authorities said Wednesday that they were still accepting petitions by employers for temporary visas for foreign scientists and technology engineers for the next fiscal year, reflecting a sharp drop in applications over last year.

The announcement came as a surprise to some employers, researchers and immigration advocates, who had predicted that in spite of the recession and other factors, the quotas for petitions for the so-called H-1B visa would most likely be reached within the initial five-day period, which began on April 1.

The State Department issues up to 85,000 H-1B visas, including 65,000 for applicants with a bachelor’s degree or similar training and 20,000 for those with a master’s degree or higher from an American university.

Some analysts have attributed the decline to the economic downturn and to new restrictions on financial companies that received emergency federal aid.
. . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/us/09visa.html?ref=global-home

********
********

3.
Critics say illegal immigrants voting degrades citizenship
By Liz Mineo
The MetroWest Daily News (Framingham, MA), April 9, 2009

Framinham, MA -- Advocates praised state Rep. Pam Richardson's idea to give illegal immigrants voting rights in local elections, while critics say it rewards lawbreakers with a right that should only be available to U.S. citizens.

"It degrades the citizenship process and the meaning of citizenship," said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies for the Center for Immigration Studies, a group that favors limits on immigration.

"The right to vote is so precious and is one of the few remaining privileges for U.S. citizens," said Vaughan. "You become a U.S. citizen if you're born here or if you take an oath of allegiance to the United States and renounce your ties to your old country."

In most of the country, only U.S. citizens are allowed to vote in local elections, but there have been proposals in a handful of cities to grant non-citizens the right to vote in local elections.

On the practical level, many illegal immigrants may not actually vote, said Vaughan, citing a report by her group on the low turnout among illegal immigrants.

The study includes turnout numbers from past elections in Takoma Park, Md., where non-citizens have been allowed to vote in local elections since 1992. The report said in a 2007 local election, of 455 non-citizens registered to vote, only 10 did.
. . .
http://www.metrowestdailynews.com/news/x430403178/Critics-say-illegal-im...

********
********

4.
Immigration at Issue in Suburban Chicago Race
By Lori Rotenberk
The New York Times, April 9, 2009

Chicago -- The mayor-elect of a North Shore suburb said Wednesday that he would drop many restrictions against illegal immigrants imposed by his predecessor.

“The current mayor was not open to listening to what the community really needed,” said Robert Sabonjian, who on Tuesday defeated the incumbent mayor of Waukegan, Richard H. Hyde, a Democrat. “The community was put in fear by the ordinances put in place.”

Among the regulations Mr. Hyde, 81, imposed in his two terms in office was one that allowed the police to arrest people exclusively on immigration charges, most often charges of being in the United States illegally.

Before the election, a grass-roots Hispanic organization in Waukegan, a blue-collar community of about 91,000 residents, canvassed the town, urging Hispanic residents to support Mr. Sabonjian, an independent who won 52 percent of the vote to Mr. Hyde’s 43 percent.

The group, the New Waukegan, estimated that 31 percent of the roughly 7,000 votes cast were by Hispanic voters. The population is about 50 percent Hispanic.
. . .
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/09/us/09waukegan.html

********
********

5.
Immigration Critic Cries ‘McCarthyism’
By Anthony Weiss
The Jewish Daily Forward, April 8, 2009

The Jewish community’s most vocal proponent of stricter immigration policies is accusing a national Jewish group of leading a “McCarthyite effort” to silence him.

Stephen Steinlight, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, leveled the charge upon discovering that the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society had e-mailed Jewish newspapers alleging that his organization has ties to a “white nationalist.” HIAS sent the e-mails after it learned that Steinlight was working on an opinion article attacking Progress by Pesach, a campaign by a coalition of Jewish groups to push for immigration reform. Around the same time, the women’s Zionist organization Hadassah — which, like most national Jewish groups, takes a liberal stance on immigration — canceled a talk Steinlight was scheduled to give to a local chapter.

Steinlight fired back in an opinion article published in the online magazine Jewcy, accusing HIAS of trying to shut down dissenting voices on immigration.

“Will the Jewish community be an open forum for competing ideas, or will we surrender to a new McCarthyism?” wrote Steinlight, a former American Jewish Committee official who has since carved out a niche as the Jewish community’s most outspoken advocate for more restrictive national immigration policies.

HIAS responded that it was simply trying to make sure that newspapers knew about the ties of Steinlight’s employer.

“HIAS is clear about who it is,” Roberta Elliott, HIAS’s vice president for media and communications, told the Forward. “When we have a debating partner who debates the opposite, we think that person owes the discussion and the audience an honest account of who and what he represents.”

The controversy began March 12 when Elliott sent an e-mail to a number of Jewish newspapers, including the Forward, warning that they might soon receive an opinion article submission from either the Federation for American Immigration Reform or CIS. The e-mail, which was marked “not for publication,” was subsequently posted on Jewcy by blogger David Kelsey.

In her e-mail, Elliott wrote that these groups “were founded and are funded by an individual in Michigan who is a white nationalist and foments nativist groups.” The e-mail included a link to a report by the Southern Poverty Law Center on FAIR, CIS and a third group called NumbersUSA, all of which support tighter restrictions on legal immigration and a tougher line on illegal immigration. The SPLC said the three “were part of a network of groups created by a man who has been at the heart of the white nationalist movement for decades,” referring to John Tanton, FAIR’s founder and a current FAIR board member. Tanton, in turn, has called the SPLC “smear merchants.”

CIS’s executive director, Mark Krikorian, said CIS was founded under the auspices of FAIR in the 1980s, though the two organizations separated shortly thereafter. But he said that aside from the occasional small donation, Tanton has played no role with CIS.

A HIAS press release from February that accompanied the e-mails said that these groups’ “penetration in the Jewish community has been primarily through appearances before Jewish groups by Steven [sic] Steinlight, senior policy analyst at CIS, and opinion pieces and interviews in the Jewish press. His legitimacy is enhanced because he previously worked for a Jewish organization.”

Steinlight has worked for the United States Holocaust Memorial Council, the National Conference of Christians and Jews and then for seven years at the AJCommittee as its national affairs director and then as a senior fellow, leaving the organization in 2001.
. . .
http://www.forward.com/articles/104679/