Immigrant Workers

Los Angeles' prosperity depends on how well it integrates its low-skilled immigrant workforce into its knowledge-based industries, according to a report to be released today. The city also must do more to attract and sustain small and medium-sized businesses, in part through improved access to affordable capital. Those are among the key findings of a yearlong, city-funded study on the Los Angeles economy by Santa Monica-based Milken Institute. Former Mayor James K.

President Bush promised Monday to step up efforts to close the border to illegal immigrants, but he insisted that the crackdown be accompanied by a guest worker program open to the millions of people who are already in the country illegally. "The American people should not have to choose between a welcoming society and a lawful society," Bush told border security personnel in Arizona who have been on the front lines of the immigration battle. "We can have both at the same time."

NO MATTER WHAT ALL the politicians and activists want, African Americans and impoverished white Cajuns will not be first in line to rebuild the Katrina-ravaged Gulf Coast and New Orleans. Latino immigrants, many of them undocumented, will. And when they're done, they're going to stay, making New Orleans look like Los Angeles. It's the federal government that will have made the transformation possible, further exposing the hollowness of the immigration debate.

Township officials in Brookhaven, N.Y., caught in an ongoing battle against extreme overcrowding of single-family houses -- apparently used as dormitories for immigrant laborers -- ordered the closing of three residences they said held as many as 90 tenants. Dozens of residents of the Long Island houses -- two in Farmingville and one in Ronkonkoma -- were homeless Saturday after the closures.

Sixty illegal immigrants employed as contract workers at industrial plants -- including refineries, power plants and an air cargo facility -- were arrested as possible threats to national security, officials said Friday. The immigrants "had access to sensitive critical infrastructure locations and therefore pose a serious homeland security threat," said Michael J. Garcia, assistant secretary for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Describing America's immigration system as broken, a bipartisan group of lawmakers introduced legislation Thursday to set up a temporary worker program that could lead to permanent resident status and would allow undocumented foreigners already here to work legally after paying sizable fines and undergoing background checks. "This is a comprehensive bill that doesn't try to solve the hemorrhaging immigration problem with a Band-Aid -- this bill is major surgery," said Rep. Jim Kolbe (R-Ariz.

President Bush vowed Sunday to push a plan that would allow undocumented immigrants to remain in the United States as guest workers even though it appears less likely to win backing in a Congress that grew more conservative in this month's elections. Bush made the commitment during a half-hour meeting with Mexican President Vicente Fox in the Chilean capital, where the two leaders are attending the annual Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation conference.

Blacks, Latinos and labor are three of the most stalwart constituencies in Democratic Party politics. But the interests of the groups have increasingly brought them into conflict. Take what happened in Los Angeles during the early 1980s. Up until that time, the janitors who cleaned offices tended to be African American, and many of those jobs were unionized.

A federal appeals court Tuesday strengthened the hand of undocumented workers who file claims against employers, making it less likely that their illegal status could be used against them. The precedent-setting opinion, closely watched by labor and immigrant rights groups, blunts the effect of a controversial 2002 U.S. Supreme Court decision that denied back pay to an illegal immigrant who was fired for union organizing.