By John Solomon
How the government's punishing of the exposure of official wrongdoing can linger for years
Independent voices from the TWT Communities
The pace at which illegal immigrants are deported from the District under a federal initiative is far lower than in surrounding jurisdictions in Virginia and Maryland, even though illegal immigrants make up similar proportions of their populations.
Illegal immigrants are being deported from Washington, D.C., at a lower rate than most states and other big cities under a federal program designed to remove illegal immigrants who have committed violent crimes.
The debate is raging over whether the latest immigration bill is an amnesty for illegal immigrants, but one part is clear: The legislation would forgive businesses that have employed those immigrants illegally.
The administration has approved 99.5 percent of applications of those who have applied for legal status under President Obama's nondeportation policy for young adults, granting legal status to more than 250,000 formerly illegal immigrants.
The Obama administration has set records for deportations, but the types of immigrants it is kicking out of the country has changed dramatically over the past four years, according to numbers the Homeland Security Department has had to turn over as part of a pending court case.
Republican assertions that the GOP's only hope of winning over Hispanic voters is to legalize illegal immigrants appear to be undercut by a new study of the 2006 election that suggests Hispanics don't reward pro-immigration Republicans.
Even as President Obama travels to Las Vegas Tuesday to call for legalizing illegal immigrants, the latest numbers from the U.S. Border Patrol suggest that the flow across the nation's southwest border jumped by 9 percent last year.
After decades of steady growth, immigration-enforcement spending has dropped slightly under President Obama — though the amount is still more than the budgets of the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and all other federal law enforcement agencies combined, according to a report released Monday.
Stung by their election defeat, Republicans are eager to try to woo Hispanic voters, arguing that once their party puts immigration reform behind them, the ethnic group will be open to the GOP's conservative message.
Citing the destruction of Superstorm Sandy, the Obama administration has waived immigration laws for illegal immigrants now in the United States, arguing that the immigrants' ability to maintain their lawful immigration status or obtain other immigration benefits may have been hampered by the deadly storm.
Two-thirds of those who have found employment under President Obama are immigrants, both legal and illegal, according to an analysis that suggests immigration has soaked up a large portion of what little job growth there has been over the past three years.
More than 8,500 U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers and U.S. Immigration and Customs and Enforcement personnel face termination in January under the Obama administration's automatic spending cuts that take effect next year in a bid to attack the spiraling fiscal deficit.
Immigrants lag behind native-born Americans on most measures of economic well-being — even those who have been in the U.S. the longest, according to a report from the Center for Immigration Studies, which argues that full assimilation is a more complex task than overcoming language or cultural differences.
The fallout from the Supreme Court's split decision this week on Arizona's tough immigration law could give GOP nominee Mitt Romney and his party a fresh opportunity to reframe the immigration debate and cut into President Obama's huge lead among Hispanic voters, experts say.
