Articles Posted in Comprehensive Immigration Reform

U.S. Representative Luis V. Gutierrez (D-IL) announced that he will spearhead a five-week national tour—visiting 14 U.S. cities—to document the harm caused to citizens across our nation in the absence of comprehensive immigration reform.

In an unprecedented nationwide campaign, Gutierrez has partnered with local communities and churches to hold rallies for thousands of U.S. citizens whose families have been or risk being torn apart by our broken immigration system. Many members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus are also holding similar events in their districts.

We wish him good luck in his efforts and hope for more signs towards an Immigration Reform soon.

A national poll suggests that President-elect Barack Obama is more popular than ever despite recent speed bumps on the road to hi s inauguration. Eighty-four percent of those surveyed say they approve of how Obama is handling the presidential transition.

There have been no specific pronouncements of President-Elect Obama’s immigration law and policy position in any major speech. One can try to glean his thought process and his bent of mind from his voting record on immigration matters. A brief summary of the immigration policy and the track record of President-Elect Obama might be encapsulated as follows.

He voted for Comprehensive Immigration Reform (CIR) in July 2007, which attempted to eliminate the labor certification system and provide relief to undocumented workers, who could get in line to become U.S. immigrants, by creating a new Z class of visas. This was not an amnesty or blanket forgiveness. It was a slow process, requiring payment of hefty fines and get behind others waiting for years to obtain permanent U.S. immigration benefits.

Senate Bill 9’s stated purpose is to strengthen the U.S. economy, provide for additional border protection and security, add additional employment enforcement and reform and make clear existing avenues for legal immigration. It simply states that legislation should be enacted to achieve these purposes. This bill does not set forth the details as to how these tasks will be accomplished. The bill does acknowledge the heritage of the United States as a nation of immigrants.

Senate Bill 9 was placed on the Senate’s calendar on January 7, 2009 and will be referred to a Senate Committee for review. This bill simply seems to be an attempt to set a pace and outline basic goals for upcoming immigration legislation. It appears to support the ongoing enforcement efforts, but is not only an enforcement-only approach. We will keep you posted on this and other up coming bills.

The Senate and House of Representatives are back in Session today. This Congress is certainly promising on Immigration reform, but we are not so optimistic as to what will happen in practice.

U.S. Congressman Bennie Thompson, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives in Washington, was among the first to urge the incoming Obama Administration to place immigration reform on the list.

According to Dr. Jorge G. Castaneda, professor of Latin American and Caribbean studies at New York University in Manhattan, Immigration reform is the sort of complex and costly project that, as a rule, presidents accomplish only at the peak of their power –when their term begins,” he wrote in an Op-Ed in a national newspaper. “If Mr. Obama decides to postpone immigration reform until later, he runs the risk of no longer possessing the leverage to convince his party’s legislators to brace the furies of the extreme right wing.”

Many of our readers ask when comprehensive immigration reform will come up before Congress, Immigration Daily has learnt that it will come to the floor early in 2009 though it is not currently planned for Mr. Obama’s first 100 days.

Sen. Menendez and Rep. Gutierrez are on the warpath for early passage of immigration reform in the 111th Congress. Sen. Menendez had the courage to singlehandedly block a five year extension of E- Verify, and will doubtless push for a significant immigration benefits downpayment before March 6th when E-Verify is set to expire. Rep. Gutierrez and the House Hispanic caucus successfully blocked immigration benefits legislation in the 110th Congress to ensure continued support for immigration reform.

“Immigrants are affected by the economy, the war. . . . But immigration reform is a defining issue,” said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “It was a threshold issue.”

The Wall Street Journal reports today about a subject that often gets less exposure on the 2008 campaign trail: Immigration. What is interesting about this speech is that Obama finally talked about Immigration reform directly. This is interesting as the issue of comprehensive immigration reform seem to have lost momentum. He said:

“This election is about the 12 million people living in the shadows, the communities taking immigration enforcement into their own hand. They are counting on us to stop the hateful rhetoric filling our airwaves, and rise above the fear, and rise above the demagoguery, and finally enact comprehensive immigration reform.”

“Well, I don’t know about you, but I think it’s time for a president who won’t walk away from comprehensive immigration reform when it becomes politically unpopular

As we are moving closer to the election, the candidates must realize that Immigration is right up there with the economy and the war in Iraq. Did you get this Palin?

White teens were charged in what officials said was a fatal beating of an illegal Mexican immigrant in a small northeast Pennsylvania coal town. Unless we educate our children to tolerate the immigrant population, we will hear of more stories like this one. There are 20 million illegal immigrants living among us.

Read the CNN story here…