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1. Obama works to maintain support
2. USBP hardens position
3. Feds focus on employers
4. Border detentions down
5. Bills offer illegals coverage

1.
Big Challenge for Obama: Retain Hispanic Support
The Associated Press, November 28, 2009

Austin, TX (AP) -- Barack Obama has erased George W. Bush's inroads among Hispanics, with these influential voters consistently giving the president exceptionally strong marks and the White House employing an aggressive strategy to keep it that way.

Obama's challenge is to ensure that Hispanics pledge allegiance to the Democratic Party for the 2010 elections and keep supporting him through his own likely 2012 re-election race while he tackles the divisive issue of repairing the nation's patchy immigration system.

Hispanics are the nation's fastest-growing minority group. The government projects they will account for 30 percent of the population by 2050, doubling in size from today and boosting their political power.

If Democrats build on Obama's gains, Texas and other traditionally Republican states with huge numbers of Hispanics could be within reach in the future. That would mean deep trouble for a GOP that's already older, whiter, dwindling in numbers and lacking a standard bearer to make Hispanics a priority the way Bush did.

Yet while the latest Associated Press-GfK poll showed that a strong 68 percent of Hispanics approve of the job Obama's doing, maintaining such support is far from certain.

''Democrats speak to me, and this one in particular seems to be listening to what we need and what we want,'' said Tina Calhoun, 52, of Sacramento, Calif., who grew up in a family of Republicans but tends to vote Democratic. Still, she, like many others, isn't necessarily going to stick with Obama no matter what. ''I want to give him a little more time,'' she said.

Indeed, it's unclear whether Hispanics will back Democrats to such strong degrees next fall when Obama is not on the ballot. Minorities and young voters who turned out in droves for Obama in 2008 didn't show up this year for Democrats in the Virginia and New Jersey governors' races.

There's also a lifetime before Obama's expected re-election campaign, and he's promised to push immigration legislation before then, including an eventual path to citizenship for some 12 million people in the country illegally.

That's no easy task. The spectacular failure of such a measure in 2007 proved as much.

Immigration is a galvanizing issue on both the left and the right, with pitfalls for both parties. Republicans could alienate Hispanics if the vocal right again takes control of the debate with angry rhetoric. Democrats risk seriously disillusioning Hispanics by inaction, delay or a piecemeal approach. A fight in Congress is assured.

''Our community will judge him based on how he delivers on the promise he made to see immigration reform early in his administration,'' said Janet Murguia, president of the National Council of La Raza, suggesting the issue trumps everything else.

Much was made during the Democratic primary of Obama's perceived weakness among Hispanics but he won 67 percent of their vote in the general election to 31 percent for Republican John McCain. It was a huge jump from 2004 when Democratic nominee John Kerry won Hispanics by 53 percent to 44 percent for Bush, a Texan who focused heavily on Hispanics.

Obama didn't win Texas, hard-core GOP country for decades. But 20 percent of voters here were Hispanic, and, of those, Obama won 63 percent of their vote. Obama dominated counties that include Austin, Dallas, Houston and San Antonio, where huge numbers of Hispanics live, as well as heavily Hispanic counties along the Mexican border, where he increased Kerry's margins by double-digits -- a warning sign for Republicans.

Overall, the president has watched his job approval rating steadily decline since January; it stands at 54 percent in the latest AP-GfK poll. His support among Hispanics has largely held steady, with some surveys finding his backing among them as high as the low 70s -- a figure even Republicans call impressive.
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http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2009/11/28/us/politics/AP-US-Obama-Hispa...

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2.
On the border, a hard line
Some yearn for the old days as patrols soar near Canada
By Maria Sacchetti
The Boston Globe, November 27, 2009

Newport, VT -- The seaplane burst out of nowhere Tuesday in the skies above Lake Memphremagog, swooping low across the Canadian border and banking over a stand of bare trees.

In the past, such a flight over the still waters might have attracted little notice. But on this day, three US Border Patrol agents in a small boat spotted the plane and sprang into action, taking pictures, radioing authorities on land, and alerting specialists in California to track it on radar.

Elderly residents remember when the Border Patrol was just a handful of men. But in recent years the modern, high-tech patrol has surged in Northern New England amid rising concern that the open mountains, lakes, and hayfields are vulnerable to drug running, illegal crossings, and potential terrorists attempting to sneak in through Canada.

In the patrol’s Swanton, Vt., sector, which includes Newport, the number of agents has tripled to more than 300 since the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, increasing their visibility on backcountry roads and at highway checkpoints heading south. The agency is erecting stations and buying trucks, boats, aircraft, and snowmobiles - generating reactions that range from annoyance to gratitude.

“We can’t take the chance that the footprints we see are somebody coming here to live the American dream or somebody coming here to destroy the American dream,’’ said Fernando Beltran, the agent in charge of the office in Newport, a town of 5,000 on the lake, which straddles the international border. “We can’t be wrong once.’’

Across the entire 4,000-mile northern border, the number of agents has soared from 300 eight years ago to more than 1,800 today, still a small percentage of the more than 20,000 agents nationwide. Most are assigned to the US-Mexico border.

But in Vermont, the shift has been dramatic. Green-uniformed agents zip across Lake Memphremagog on new Jet Skis, surprising sunbathers whose boats drift over the watery border.

They stop traffic nearly 100 miles south of the border at the checkpoints, where they ask travelers about their citizenship status. This month, they are sealing off two streets in the nearby border town of Derby Line, dividing a neighborhood to prevent illegal crossings.

The patrol’s presence is transforming this section of the northern border, which receives far less public attention than the southern border, where bloody drug-related violence and illegal crossings from Mexico are common. But for US authorities, policing the Canadian border presents challenges of its own, such as below-freezing temperatures and running into deer hunters as they patrol the thick woods.

Some townsfolk embrace the Border Patrol, saying it has increased security and invested in a struggling area by buying land and creating jobs. Others are glad the patrols prevent illegal workers from slipping across the border and taking jobs.

“I’m glad they’re doing something about it,’’ said Jeff Shelton, a 27-year-old unemployed asbestos-removal worker, as he lingered on Main Street in Newport, hoping to ask a local contractor for a job. “There ain’t no work around here.’’
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http://www.boston.com/news/local/vermont/articles/2009/11/27/on_the_bord...

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3.
Immigration audits take place of raids on places of employment
By Daniel Connolly
The Commercial Appeal (Memphis, TN), November 29, 2009

In August 2008, federal agents arrested about 600 suspected illegal immigrants at Howard Industries Inc., a maker of electrical transformers in Laurel, Miss.

Today, the government might take a different approach.

Instead of making mass arrests, the government is reviewing employment records at hundreds of companies nationwide in an effort to keep illegal immigrants out of the workplace. The actions mean unauthorized workers are more likely to face job loss than prison and deportation.

The policy change may already be affecting companies and workers in Memphis, though the agency in charge, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, wouldn't confirm that.

The situation is the latest twist in a decades-old struggle over immigration policy. It's very difficult for low-skilled workers from Latin America to enter the United States legally. Yet there has historically been tremendous business demand for their labor, and the government has often tolerated their illegal employment.

Enforcement picked up in the last years of the Bush administration, but it's still not consistent.

For instance, current law says employers have to ask job applicants for ID, but don't have to confirm it's real, and fraud is common. And the Internal Revenue Service encourages illegal immigrants to pay income taxes without fear of punishment.

President Barack Obama supports an overhaul of immigration law that would give illegal immigrants a shot at legal status, but such a measure might never get through Congress.

In the meantime, ICE is pursuing its audits. It announced earlier this month that it will review employment records at 1,000 companies nationwide to determine if employers are properly checking identification and filling out the form I-9, a document meant to ensure that only people with work authorizations get jobs.

The government says it's using investigative leads to target companies that have a connection to "critical infrastructure," such as airports and utilities.

An employer who hires someone not authorized to work in the United States is breaking the law, "whether they do it by mistake or knowingly," ICE spokesman Ivan L. Ortiz-Delgado said. Audits can lead to fines or even criminal charges for employers.

He wouldn't name the companies targeted in the audits or say if any are in Memphis. But he did say there are seven in Tennessee, seven in Arkansas, and two in Mississippi.

Earlier this year, the agency said it was auditing more than 650 other companies. It's imposed fines in 45 cases so far and may do so in others.

The audits come as the nation's unemployment rate has risen to 10.2 percent, the highest since 1983.

Mark Krikorian, a critic of illegal immigration, said he'd like to see the illegal immigrants arrested, not simply fired and allowed to find another job.

"On the other hand, this kind of policy can do some good if it's widespread enough and sustained for a long time," said Krikorian, executive director of the Washington-based Center for Immigration Studies. Illegal immigrants might decide to go home, and others might not come at all, he said. And employers might work harder to screen employees, for instance, by enrolling in the government's E-Verify program, he said.
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http://www.commercialappeal.com/news/2009/nov/29/policy-affects-illegal-...

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4.
Detentions at Border Are Down
By Julia Preston
The New York Times, November 25, 2009

Detentions of migrants trying to cross the border illegally dropped to 556,000 in the 2009 fiscal year, a decline of 23 percent over 2008 and the lowest number since the early 1970s, according to official figures released this week.

The number of detentions of illegal border crossers has been falling since 2000, when it reached a peak of 1.6 million. But the especially sharp decline in the 2009 fiscal year, which ended Sept. 30, was a sign of a steep decrease in the flow of migrant workers from Mexico and Central America, immigration officials and researchers said.

Migrants have been discouraged from coming by soaring unemployment among immigrants in the United States and tighter enforcement along the Southwest border, officials and scholars said.

Obama administration officials have pointed to the decreasing flow as evidence that they have achieved a major improvement in border security. In a speech this month laying out immigration strategy, Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, argued that a “major shift” in enforcement at the Mexican border had created conditions for Congress to embark on an overhaul of immigration policy, including giving legal status to more than 11 million illegal immigrants.

Ms. Napolitano said that heightened enforcement meant that such a program would not unleash a new flood of illegal migrants across the Southwest border.

Republican lawmakers said they were skeptical, because hundreds of miles of the rugged 2,000-mile-long border are still thinly patrolled and have no fencing. As a backup to border enforcement, they called for worker verification measures to block American employers from hiring illegal workers.

“We think it’s a combination of increased border patrol and the economy,” Fritz Chaleff, a spokesman for Representative Brian P. Bilbray, Republican of California, said of the low numbers. “But we need measures to make sure that the jobs that are available go to the workers who are authorized to take them.”

The Border Patrol hired 2,600 agents in the past year, official figures show, bringing the total to more than 20,000.

But the main factor in the slowing movement of immigrants is the country’s deep recession, which has hit immigrants particularly hard — especially illegal ones, researchers say. By the first months of this year, unemployment among immigrant workers was significantly greater than that of native-born American workers, reversing a trend during the boom years, according to a study by the Migration Policy Institute, a research group in Washington.

Some researchers cautioned that border enforcement would not prevent Latino immigrants from returning if the economy picked up.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/26/us/26border.html

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5.
Health bills fail to block illegals from coverage
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times, November 30, 2009

Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants could receive health care coverage from their employers under the bills winding their way through Congress, despite President Obama's explicit pledge that illegal immigrants would not benefit.

The House bill mandates, and the Senate bill strongly encourages, businesses to extend health care coverage to all employees. But the bills do not have exemptions to screen out illegal immigrants, who usually obtain jobs by using false identities and are indistinguishable from legal workers.

A rough estimate by the Center for Immigration Studies suggests that the practical effect of the mandates would be that about 1 million illegal immigrants could obtain health insurance coverage through their employers.

Democrats who wrote the House bill said that employer coverage for illegal immigrants is not intentional, but rather the outcome of people breaking the law.

"It's possible an employee could deceive an employer with a fraudulent document, just as under current law, to gain employment, just as it's possible for all sorts of criminal activity to occur, and why we have law enforcement," said Nadeam Elshami, a spokesman for House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, who wrote the final House bill.

Republicans said that loopholes in the bill could allow coverage to just about any illegal immigrant who wants to cheat the system.

"This is a complete cover-all-the-gaps federal health insurance for illegals, whether it be under Medicaid, the refundable tax credit or whether it be under their employers who would not be able to verify their employers unless we fix E-Verify," said Rep. Steve King of Iowa, the top Republican on the House Judiciary Committee's immigration subcommittee.

How to deal with immigrants, both legal and illegal, remains one of the thorniest issues in the health care debate. In his address to a joint session of Congress in September, Mr. Obama specifically challenged Republicans who said his plans would extend coverage to illegal immigrants.

"This, too, is false -- the reforms I'm proposing would not apply to those who are here illegally," Mr. Obama said.

That statement elicited an outburst of "You lie" from Rep. Joe Wilson, South Carolina Republican.

Most of the focus has been on whether the bills in the House and Senate go far enough to screen out illegal immigrants applying for public benefits. The Senate bill is generally considered to have stronger provisions than the House version to exclude participation by illegal immigrants.

The employer mandate could play a major role in coverage for illegal immigrants, but the effect has not been widely understood.

Steven A. Camarota, research director for the Center for Immigration Studies, said about 6.5 million illegal immigrants work in the United States, though nearly half do so off the books and wouldn't be counted for purposes of employer-sponsored health insurance.

Of those who work on the books, about 2.3 million already have insurance through their employers. That leaves at least 1 million who would need insurance and could obtain it from an employer under the proposed mandates.

"It's definitely significant," Mr. Camarota said.
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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/nov/30/health-bills-fail-to-blo...