According to The Note, here’s what Mitt Romney had to say about immigration on Monday: “This has always been a priority for the president he chooses to do nothing about,” Romney said. “Let the immigrant community not forget that while he uses this as a political weapon, he has not taken responsibility for fixing the [...]
Immigration
This weekend, David Gregory flashed an image of my TIME cover story on the Latino vote in America. Then he held a discussion with Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer and California Gov. Jerry Brown that perfectly demonstrated the central focus of my story: The inability of Republicans to talk about immigration in a way that welcomes [...]
Today’s Washington Post notes the fixation of hard-core Republican activists with illegal immigration, a phenomenon that became clear to me this spring when I saw a Republican voter suggest to Tim Pawlenty that the government threaten to shoot immigrants crossing the southern border. That sort of anger could cause headaches for Rick Perry who, despite [...]
One of the most remarkable things to come out of Washington this week had nothing to do with debt. It was about immigration. The Obama Administration on Monday filed a legal challenge to Alabama’s new immigration law, further animating the longstanding tension between federal supremacy and states’ rights. But it is especially noteworthy, given that [...]
In 2008, Barack Obama captured more than two-thirds of the Latino vote, largely on the promise that he would make immigration reform a first-term priority. Even the President acknowledges that promise has gone largely unfulfilled, and as a result his popularity is plunging among Latinos. Can President Obama reenergize a diverse constituency for his 2012 [...]
In the coming days, the House Judiciary Committee is expected to debate a bill introduced by its chairman, Lamar Smith, a Republican from Texas, that would require all businesses to use a federal electronic system to verify their employees’ citizenship status. The new measure is the most promising attempt in the current Congress to deal [...]
The New York Times reports–again, but more prominently–that illegal immigration from Mexico has fallen off a cliff. The annual rate has dropped from 500,000 per year to less than 100,000 last year. This is yet another triumph, sort of, that the Obama Administration has refused to tout. (One wonders if the reasons are political: Latino [...]
I first met Jose Antonio Vargas on a dirt road in Iowa. We were both lost, in separate rental cars, trying to find our way to a Mike Huckabee pheasant shooting event. He had been sent out in the frozen corn fields over the Christmas holiday by the Washington Post. I knew him already from [...]
Last week, President Obama dashed out West to court donors in Silicon Valley and Hollywood. Surely, he couldn’t help but notice the throng of protesters outside the $2,500-a-plate dinner at Sony Pictures’ Culver City, Calif., studios carrying signs that read, “Stop Deporting Dreams.”
In 1924, the U.S. Congress passed a law that created a quota for the number of immigrants that could be admitted to the U.S. from any given country. The math worked out like this: Between 1924 and 1927, the annual number of immigrants from any nation could not exceed 2 percent of the number of [...]
