Illegal Immigrants

Like many other spouses of undocumented immigrants, Gina Pope constantly worries that her husband suddenly could be deported and that she would be left to raise their two children by herself. Pope, a U.S. citizen, wants to apply for him to get a green card but knows that would mean his traveling to his native Peru, with the risk of not returning for months or years. Now, after more than a decade of waiting for the immigration rules to change, Pope is cautiously optimistic that her husband, who owns a residential construction business and has a temporary work permit, may finally be able to become a legal resident.

WASHINGTON - A widow who conceived a baby from the sperm of her late husband is not automatically entitled to Social Security survivors benefits to help raise the child, the Supreme Court ruled Monday. The 9-0 decision rejected the claim that a biological child of a married couple, even one born years after the father died, always qualifies as his survivor under the Social Security Act. Instead, the justices upheld the government's multi-part definition of who deserves survivors benefits.

WASHINGTON - The Obama administration is proposing to make it easier for illegal immigrants who are immediate family members of American citizens to apply for permanent residency, a move that could affect as many as 1 million of the estimated 11 million immigrants living here illegally. The new rule, which the Department of Homeland Security will post for public comment Monday, would reduce the time illegal immigrants are separated from their American families while seeking legal status, immigration officials said.

California's agency that licenses lawyers wants to admit an illegal immigrant to practice law, an unprecedented request that the state's highest court decided Wednesday to review. The State Bar of California certified Sergio C. Garcia after he passed a written test and a moral examination, sending it to the California Supreme Court for routine approval. The bar informed the court at the time that Garcia was undocumented. In a unanimous decision, the state high court ordered the bar to explain why an illegal immigrant should be given a legal license and invited briefs from other parties, opening the door to a potentially heated debate over national immigration policy.

A small boat packed with at least 148 illegal immigrants from Africa landed on a beach in the Canary Islands, the Interior Ministry said. The flimsy fiberglass vessel landed as windsurfers were preparing to take to the sea, authorities said. The windsurfers and tourists alerted police. The Africans tried to run inland but were caught, an official said. One man, who was dehydrated and suffered hypothermia, collapsed on the beach and was taken to a hospital. The rest were treated on the scene by Red Cross mobile units.

Police in a Madrid neighborhood have been given goals for arresting illegal immigrants and told to concentrate on Moroccans, media reported. "This isn't worthy of a country governed by the rule of law. The police can't issue quotas for arresting Moroccans," said Kamal Rahmouni, president of the Assn. of Moroccan Immigrant Workers. Spain's National Police confirmed the existence of arrest objectives. Spanish TV showed what it said was an internal police document instructing officers in the Vallecas district to detain at least 35 foreigners without visas every month.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say the agency will scrap a program for illegal immigrants to turn themselves in for deportation after getting only eight volunteers during a nearly three-week trial. Jim Hayes, acting director of detention and removal operations, told the Associated Press that the offer will end today because of the low turnout. The pilot program gave illegal immigrants with court orders to leave the country up to 90 days to depart. It was offered in Santa Ana, San Diego, Phoenix, Chicago and Charlotte, N.C. Hayes said the other tactics have proven more effective.

The 2008 Republican platform says the makeup of Congress should be determined by counting only legal residents in the next census, not illegal immigrants. "The integrity of the 2010 census, proportioning congressional representation among the states, must be preserved," says the platform language. "The census," it says, "should count every person legally abiding in the United States in an actual enumeration." "Our mandate is to count all residents regardless of legal status," said Mark Tolbert of the Census Bureau.

Galvanized by Arizona's tough new law against illegal immigrants, tens of thousands of marchers took to the streets in Los Angeles on Saturday as the city led the nation in May Day turnout to press for federal immigration reform. As many as 60,000 immigrants and their supporters joined a peaceful but boisterous march through downtown Los Angeles to City Hall, waving American flags, tooting horns and holding signs that blasted the Arizona law. The legislation, which is set to take effect in midsummer, makes it a crime to be in Arizona without legal status and requires police to check for immigration papers.

Gov. Jerry Brown on Saturday granted illegal immigrants access to state financial aid at public universities and community colleges, putting California once again in the center of the nation's immigration debate. But he vetoed a measure that would have allowed state universities to consider applicants' race, gender and income to ensure diversity in their student populations. Deciding the fate of 50 education-related bills, the governor also rejected an effort to make it more difficult to establish charter schools.

The political climate in Congress is so noxious these days that even a law that originally passed with overwhelming bipartisan support because it provided much-needed help to abused women is now a partisan issue. That's shameful. Republicans in the House should drop their attempts to undermine the Violence Against Women Act and instead move swiftly to reauthorize and strengthen the existing program, as the Senate has already done. First enacted in 1994, the law has been renewed twice without a fight.

A restaurant workers' group and a Los Angeles community clinic have launched a unique cooperative to provide health coverage to a group of people excluded from federal healthcare reform — illegal immigrants. The pilot program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, offers preventive and primary care to low-wage, uninsured workers in the restaurant industry. Legal immigrants and other restaurant workers who don't meet the criteria or cannot afford coverage under the healthcare law are also eligible.

The number of immigrants coming illegally to the United States has been declining for several years. Demographers have repeatedly said as much, and now a report by the Pew Hispanic Center confirms it - illegal migration from Mexico is virtually at a standstill. Last year, about 6.1 million Mexicans were illegally in the country, down from a high of 7 million in 2007. What accounts for the change after decades of steady increases? A declining birth rate and solid economic growth in Mexico have led fewer people to leave home.

TUCSON - Two years after Arizona's crackdown on illegal immigration was signed into law, putting the state front and center in the debate over one of the nation's most controversial issues, the firestorm over illegal immigration has subsided a bit. The sputtering economy, a push by business leaders to avoid controversy and a sense of fatigue by some over the charged issue combined to push illegal immigration out of the spotlight, though it...

WASHINGTON - U.S. Supreme Court justices strongly suggested they would uphold a provision in Arizona's tough immigration law that tells police to check whether people they stop for some other reason are in this country legally. But several justices also suggested they were troubled by parts of the law that would make it a state crime for illegal immigrants to seek work or not to carry immigration documents. The hourlong oral arguments Wednesday pointed toward a possible split decision: a partial victory for Arizona that would revive its first-in-the-nation state crackdown on illegal immigrants but weaken the impact of its law. The Obama administration won lower court rulings that blocked Arizona's law on the grounds that it conflicted with the federal government's control over immigration.

As my colleague David Savage reports, the Supreme Court wasn't very hospitable to the Obama administration's argument that Arizona's infamous Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act unconstitutionally infringed on federal authority over immigration. Worse than that, Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. inadvertently (we hope) provided opponents of illegal immigration with a snazzy sound bite. Section 2(B) of the Arizona law provides that “[f]or any lawful stop, detention or arrest made” by Arizona law enforcement, “where reasonable suspicion exists that the person is an alien and is unlawfully present in the United States, a reasonable attempt shall be made, when practicable, to determine the immigration status of the person.” It also states that “[t]

Alabama set a new national standard for get-tough immigration policy Thursday with Gov. Robert J. Bentley's signing of a law that surpasses Arizona's SB 1070, with provisions affecting law enforcement, transportation, apartment rentals, employment and education. The new law, combined with legislation passed in May by neighboring Georgia, has arguably made this swath of the Deep South the nation's hottest immigration battleground, with the region's troubled racial history fueling the fire.

Illegal immigrants who graduated from state high schools can continue to receive lower, in-state tuition at California's public universities and colleges, the California Supreme Court decided unanimously Monday. The ruling is the first of its kind in the nation. California is one of 10 states that permit undocumented immigrants to receive in-state tuition, which can save them $23,000 a year at the University of California. "Throughout the country, the California court decision will have reverberations," said Daniel J. Hurley, director of state relations and policy analysis for the American Assn.

Net migration from Mexico to the United States has come to a statistical standstill, stalling one of the most significant demographic trends of the last four decades. Amid an economic downturn and increased enforcement at the U.S.-Mexico border, the number of Mexicans coming to the United States dropped significantly, while the number of those returning home increased sharply over the last several years, according to a report by the Pew Hispanic Center. "The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill," the report says.