Legal Status

Mexico is offering to grant legal status to thousands of undocumented Central American migrant workers, a senior official said Thursday, just as it is asking the United States to do for Mexican immigrants. Felipe de Jesus Preciado, the director of migration in President Vicente Fox's government, said the "regularization program" is expected to grant amnesty to about 10,000 migrants, nearly all of them from Central America.

For sponsors of Proposition 187, the issue is simple: Illegal immigrants, by definition lawbreakers, should be denied public services and promptly turned in to authorities. Those who do not volunteer to leave should be swiftly deported. "Illegal aliens have no right to be here," said Ron Prince, chairman of the Proposition 187 campaign. But for Dora Figueroa and many of the other estimated 1.7 million unlawful immigrants in California, the situation is much more complicated.

WASHINGTON - Latino voters' decisive tilt toward Democrats in the presidential election has given new life to proposals that would clear a path to legal status for the estimated 11 million people in the U.S. unlawfully. For the first time in five years, some soul-searching Republicans are calling on the GOP to change its tone and embrace ways to ease the law to keep families together while intensifying efforts to tighten the borders. "For too long, both parties have used immigration as a political wedge issue," Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.)

Deportations of illegal immigrants have reached new heights for two years running under President Obama, statistics show, but Republicans say they'll use their new majority in the House to press for more aggressive enforcement without any path to legal status. Republican lawmakers called on the Obama administration to return to the era of workplace raids to arrest illegal employees, an approach that contrasts sharply with the president's continued push to create a path to citizenship for "responsible young people" and deport only those illegal immigrants charged with serious crimes.

President Obama defended his deportation policies and said Republicans remain an obstacle to overhauling the immigration system to give illegal immigrants a pathway to legal status. Speaking at a conference of Latino leaders Monday, Obama said that he and fellow Democrats are working to enact laws that would resolve the status of about 11 million immigrants living in the U.S. illegally. Obama's comments seemed aimed at defusing criticism that he has not done enough to change immigration law. When he ran for office in 2008, Obama said he would deal with the issue in his first year.

Just about any way they look at it, Meg Whitman comes off badly to the moms I met at the Brentwood Country Mart. Most of them are lifelong professionals like Whitman, with kids grown up and in college. And, like her, they've lived many years with Spanish-speaking immigrant women working in their homes. They don't quite believe Whitman when she says she didn't know that her longtime domestic, Nicandra Diaz Santillan, was an undocumented immigrant. And if the billionaire and GOP candidate for governor is being honest ?

President Obama and Latino lawmakers agreed Tuesday that chances are dimming for passage of an immigration overhaul that would provide a path to legal status for millions of illegal residents, according to people familiar with the private session. Instead, the president and members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus concurred that, until after the 2012 election, a more realistic goal would be to stave off legislation targeting illegal immigrants. That said, Obama told the group, he was not giving up on an immigration overhaul, which he promised to accomplish during his 2008 presidential campaign.

On the plaza of Dolores Mission Church, long a sanctuary for illegal immigrants, a Roman Catholic priest asked the question that has hovered in the minds of so many of the city's migrants since Charlie Beck was appointed Los Angeles police chief. Flanked by parishioners holding flickering votive candles in the cool evening air, Father Scott Santarosa asked Beck whether he could assure community members that they will not be asked about their immigration status if they report a crime. " Sí," Beck said, drawing laughs and applause from the crowd.

Early one morning in March, two Chicago-area brothers were dozing on an Amtrak train when it stopped in Buffalo, N.Y. A pair of uniformed Border Patrol agents made their way through the car, asking passengers if they were U.S. citizens. No, the vacationing siblings answered honestly, with flat, Midwestern inflections: We're citizens of Mexico. And so it was that college students Carlos Robles, 20, and his brother Rafael, 19 — both former captains of their high school varsity tennis team — found themselves in jail, facing deportation.

The majority of children of illegal immigrants from Mexico in the Southland fail to graduate from high school, completing an average of two fewer years of schooling than their peers with legal immigrant parents, a new study has found. The study by UC Irvine professor Frank Bean and three other researchers documented the persistent educational disadvantages for such children — who number 3.8 million, with about 80% born in the United States. The study's authors said their findings highlighted the need to help such families gain legal status and a more secure future, arguing that deporting all of them was unrealistic.