Politico, September 3. National Republicans look at New Mexico's Susana Martinez and would like to see the future of their party: conservative, Hispanic and the favorite to become governor of a key swing state this fall. But she is dodging the most volatile and important issue to the conservative base in the southwestern U.S.: immigration. While other Republican governors are racing to copy Arizona's toughest-in-the-country immigration law, Martinez has expressed only tepid support for it. While Republicans in Washington want to reopen debate on birthright citizenship guaranteed by the 14th Amendment, Martinez opposes changing the amendment. She insists that the Arizona law is a public safety issue and not a political one.

Associated Press, September 3. When Ruth Garcia's twins are born in two months, they'll have all the rights of U.S. citizens. They and their six brothers and sisters will be able to vote, apply for federal student loans and even run for president. Garcia is an illegal immigrant who crossed into the country about 14 years ago, and the citizenship granted to her children and millions others like them is at the center of a divisive national debate. Republicans are pushing for congressional hearings to consider changing the nation's 14th Amendment to deny such children the automatic citizenship the Constitution guarantees. They say women like Garcia are taking advantage of a constitutional amendment meant to guarantee the rights of freed slaves, and paint a picture of pregnant women rushing across the border to give birth.

HS Today, September 3. The state of Arizona filed an appeal last week with the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit to overturn a preliminary injunction against a tough new immigration law it sought to enact in July. The US Justice Department, which won the injunction against Arizona, now has until the end of September to file briefs with the Ninth Circuit on the appeal of a decision by District Court Judge Susan Bolton to stop enforcement of controversial aspects of the law, SB 1070. Bolton will still hear the full case in the future and granted the temporary injunction against the law due to a compelling federal argument that it would harm federal immigration enforcement efforts. 'She didn't decide the whole thing but she parsed it and identified the concerns at the preliminary injunction stage. It took quite a bit of pressure off federal and local law enforcement on detentions,' explained Jay Zweig, lead employment partner in the law firm of Bryan Cave in Phoenix, Ariz.

Courier-Journal.com, September 3. They were diverse in looks, dress, customs, speech and background. But on this Friday afternoon they shared the commonality of acquiring United States citizenship at the Kentucky Center. Maria Delgado was born in Mexico and has lived in the United States since 1994. She said she sought citizenship for mostly practical reasons, including being able to vote and to collect Social Security when she retires from her job at the American Printing House for the Blind. “I now have rights,” she said in an interview at Whitney Hall, where the mass naturalization ceremony kicked off the city’s annual WorldFest celebration.

Associated Press, September 2. The Justice Department sued the nation's self-proclaimed "toughest sheriff" on Thursday, calling Joe Arpaio's defiance of an investigation into his office's alleged discrimination against Hispanics "unprecedented. "It's the first time in decades a lawman has refused to cooperate in one of the agency's probes, the department said. The Arizona sheriff had been given until Aug. 17 to hand over documents the federal government first asked for 15 months ago, when it started investigating alleged discrimination, unconstitutional searches and seizures, and jail policies that discriminate against people with limited English skills. Thomas Perez, assistant attorney general for the department's civil rights division, said it's unfortunate the department had to sue to get the documents, which neither the agency nor Arpaio would describe.

Los Angeles Times, September 2. OPINION. We can already see the future of our nation if it renounces birthright citizenship for the children of undocumented immigrants, and it isn't pretty. Dragging economies, new forms of fraud, a disenfranchised underclass, children deported to places they have never even visited — countries that do not have birthright citizenship have experienced these problems and more, and have been forced to reconsider their practices. Germany, Israel and Japan are just three of those countries, and their experiences have much to teach us. The current debate about the future of the Constitution's 14th Amendment, which guarantees citizenship for all born on U.S. soil, centers on the question of individual fairness: Should these children have the right to U.S. citizenship although their birth on U.S. soil was the result of their parents' unauthorized presence here? The debate is really about what citizenship and belonging mean in the United States — profound and important issues but not ones that draw easy consensus. But if we ask what will happen to our society as a whole if we eliminate birthright citizenship, the facts become easy to see.

MercuryNews.com, September 1. OPINION. Just in time for Labor Day, a reader critical of my views on immigration sends along some career advice: "You really need to find another line of work," he wrote. "You are not worth a (expletive) at what you are doing now. I hear they need strawberry pickers." He signed the note, "A white legal American citizen." It's interesting that the reader felt it necessary to identify himself as white. I plan to keep this letter -- and others like it -- handy for the next time someone claims that the immigration debate isn't about race. It sure sounds like it is to Mr. "white legal American citizen." Yet what was really troubling was when the reader suggested I go out and pick strawberries. This guy owes an apology -- to strawberry pickers. He thinks he's insulting me, but he's really insulting agricultural workers. I don't know whether a farmworker could do my job. But, coming from a family of farmworkers, I'm absolutely sure I could never do his. When President George W. Bush used to say that Mexican immigrants did "jobs Americans won't do," a lot of his countrymen got their pride hurt and insisted that this wasn't true.

Human Events, September 1. OPINION. An indignant President Obama complained last week, "I can't spend all of my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead." Fine. How about plastering a copy of his presidential oath of office there instead? The kowtowing commander-in-chief is in dire need of a daily reminder that his job is to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States" -- not international law or global diktats. Case in point: Last week, Obama's State Department handed in America's first-ever report to the United Nations Commissioner for Human Rights in conjunction with something called the "Universal Periodic Review." In short, the 29-page document is a self-aggrandizing report card touting the administration's far-left domestic and foreign policy initiatives for the world's approval. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Michelle Malkin is a known anti-immigrant propagandist. We only include here views here to illustrate conservative (mainly Republican) opinion.]

Immigration Impact, August 31. OPINION. In a new and fatally flawed report, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS) attempts to blame immigrants for virtually any unemployment among less-educated native-born workers anywhere in the United States, in both good economic times and bad. The report, entitled From Bad to Worse, deluges the reader with data from 2007 and 2010 on employment and unemployment among native-born and foreign-born workers, and then insinuates from this—without providing any evidence—that immigrant workers simply must be taking jobs away from the native-born. Specifically, the report juxtaposes the “estimated seven to eight million illegal immigrants holding jobs” in the United States with the millions of less-educated native-born Americans who are now out of work, or who were out of work before the recession, and concludes that “if the United States were to enforce immigration laws and encourage illegal immigrants to return home, we would seem to have an adequate supply of less-educated natives to replace” them.

Immigration Impact, August 30. OPINION. Although anti-immigrant campaign platforms might help win a primary in a state like Arizona, supporters of harsh immigrant enforcement measures must still address the resulting economic fall out. Last week, the Arizona Governor’s Task Force on Tourism and Economic Vitality hired HMA Public Relations, a Phoenix-based marketing communications and public relations firm, to the tune of $100,000 to “develop a series of needs and goals for Arizona tourism in light of the controversy created by SB 1070”—and, boy, do they have their work cut out for them. Similarly, cities like Fremont, Nebraska—where an anti-immigrant ordinance passed in June—are also being forced to run damage control. Fremont’s City Council is currently considering a property tax increase proposal to help shoulder the projected legal fees resulting from the city’s restrictive immigration ordinance.

New York Daily News, August 29. OPINION. Unencumbered by any moral imperative to be truthful, some anti-immigration activists and politicians have no qualms about demonizing immigrants with half-truths and outright lies. One of their favorite myths is that the U.S. is the only country in the world that grants citizenship to every person born here. The U.S. is outdated in providing birthright citizenship, they say, adding that no one else does it and that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution - which guarantees that right - should be revised. Right-wing propaganda purveyors like Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly, and even politicians like South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham - who should know better - throw around despicable terms like "anchor babies," and feign outrage at the fact that, according to them, the 14th Amendment wrongly protects the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants.

Immigration Impact, August 26. The Republican Party primaries in Arizona may be over, but the anti-immigrant demagoguery upon which the winning candidates built their campaigns is unlikely to fade away anytime soon. Governor Jan Brewer and Senator John McCain both managed to reverse their declining political fortunes in large part by raising the phantom specter of immigrant violence—a cynical tactic they are likely to repeat in the midterm elections. For instance, both trumpeted the discredited claim that Phoenix is the number two kidnapping capital of the world after Mexico City, and portrayed their various and sundry proposals to “get tough” on unauthorized immigrants as sincere efforts to save Arizonans from kidnappers and other violent criminals.

CBS News, August 26. CBS News Poll analysis by the CBS News Polling Unit: Sarah Dutton, Jennifer De Pinto, Fred Backus and Anthony Salvanto. Concerns about illegal immigration have spurred some Republicans to call for a debate over the 14th Amendment, which provides a constitutional guarantee of citizenship for anyone born in the United States. The American public is almost evenly divided as to whether current law should be changed so that children of illegal immigrants born in the United States do not automatically become citizens, a new CBS News poll finds. Forty-nine percent say the law should be kept as is, while 47 percent say it should be changed.

Associated Press, August 26. Gov. Jan Brewer's lawyers have filed the first brief in their appeal of a ruling that put the most controversial elements of Arizona's new immigration law on hold. Brewer on Thursday asked the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco to reverse the ruling U.S. District Judge Susan Bolton made last month. The governor's lawyers say the federal government hasn't effectively enforced immigration law at the border and in the state's interior and that the state's intent in passing the law was to assist federal authorities, as Congress has encouraged. They also say Bolton erred by accepting the federal government's speculation that the law might burden legal immigrants.

Indo Asian News Agency, August 26. The hike in the US visa fee for foreign skilled workers could impact the wide-ranging bilateral economic relationship with India, parliament was informed on Thursday. 'The government has expressed its strong concerns at the legislation, stating that such steps by the US government adversely affect the Indian software industry's interest in the USA and impact the broader bilateral economic relationship,' external affairs minister S.M. Krishna told the Rajya Sabha in a written reply. He admitted that while the provision is not country-specific, it would disproportionately 'affect Indian software companies adversely as a large number of H1B and L visas are availed by them'.

Huffington Post, August 25. Congress after congress, president after president, and year after year, the immigration status quo has continued to persist, and a broken, inhuman and often irrational immigration system has been allowed to fester. And every time an opponent of immigration reform engages in a campaign of fear and misinformation, that's just another win for the dangerous status quo. We at Immigrants' List -- a bipartisan political action committee dedicated to electing lawmakers who are pro-immigration -- decided to shine a light on those individuals who have presented the greatest obstacles to repairing our country's immigration system. We unveiled this week our Hall of Shame, ten of the biggest obstructionists to immigration reform who are running or have run for office this year.

Immigration Impact, August 24. Today, Senator John McCain (R-AZ) faces former Rep. J.D. Hayworth in what has been a hard-fought primary battle for the Republican nomination for Senate. Perhaps the central issue in the campaign has been immigration, with both candidates staggering as far to the right as possible. So far to the right, in fact, that David Catanese of Politico called the campaign “likely to leave a lasting and unsightly stain” on McCain’s legacy. As Catanese narrates: Once the sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform with the late Sen. Ted Kennedy — a stance that hurt him with conservatives — McCain moved in a different direction this year. He switched his emphasis this summer to border security, embraced Arizona’s controversial hard-line immigration law and, in an ad, called on the federal government to “complete the danged fence” — three years after dismissing the notion of a border fence in a Vanity Fair article titled “Prisoner of Conscience.”

Capitol Media Services, August 20. Arizona National Guard troops will arrive at the border by the end of the month. Lt. Valentine Castillo said the first batch of soldiers started training Monday with Customs and Border Protection to be members of 'entry identification teams,' watching the border area for unusual activity and reporting what they find to federal agents. He figures the first group going through the training being conducted by Customs and Border Protection will be ready to take their posts by Aug. 31. Castillo would not provide specific numbers, but he said a new group will start training Monday, with successive multiday classes each week until everyone within the program is ready, which he estimated will be by Oct. 1.

CNS News, August 20. Even as Congress increased overall federal spending from a then-record $2.6 trillion in fiscal 2006 to $3.6 trillion in fiscal 2010, it only appropriated enough funds for the Department of Homeland Security to provide a fraction of the additional 40,000 detention spaces for illegal aliens that had been authorized by an immigration law approved in 2004. Because it lacked adequate detention space, DHS says it was forced over the last three years to release hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens it had caught and were being processed for deportation. Among these, as CNSNews.com recently reported, were 481 illegal aliens from state sponsors of terror and other 'countries of interest' that DHS caught and released in fiscal years 2007-2009 and who are now fugitives whose wherabouts are unknown.

Immigration Impact, August 19. Last weekend, hundreds of well-informed tea party activists rallied around a border fence in Hereford, Arizona. Many participants, fearing danger at the border, brought weapons. Luckily, the more level-headed organizers convinced them that they would be ok if they left the side-arms in their vehicles. Many voiced concerns were comical at best, with a local radio host claiming that while he was used to finding bugs in his bed, now he was worried that “home invaders” would be there. These strange fears ignore some basic facts:

Politico, August 19. The recent call by Senate Republicans to hold hearings on revising the 14th Amendment seemed to introduce a new wrinkle in the polarizing debate over illegal immigration. Or did it? In the mid-1990s, House Judiciary Committee panels held two separate hearings on birthright citizenship, the policy protected under the 14th Amendment that automatically grants citizenship to people born in the United States. What's striking is that the hearings on GOP-sponsored bills and resolutions then featured many of the same arguments as now, when some Republicans are calling for denying citizenship to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants.

NPR News, August 19. When Republican Sen. John McCain recently paused for a reporter’s questions in an Arizona parking lot, he blurted out a sentiment that detractors have been using against him throughout his bitter primary battle with former GOP Rep. J.D. Hayworth. Why, he was asked by a Politics Daily correspondent, are you spending so much money? Because, the four-term senator replied, 'I've always done whatever's necessary to win.' On that, the man who was the Republican Party's 2008 presidential nominee and introduced the nation to surprise running mate Sarah Palin would get little argument. Though McCain's spending (so far, nearly $20 million to the more conservative Hayworth’s $2.6 million or so) and political gymnastics — including tacking hard right on immigration, currently Arizona's top issue — may have prompted derision among some former fans, his strategy has as much as ensured victory next Tuesday.

Politico, August 19. Arizona Democratic Senate candidate Randy Parraz is no fan of Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, the conservative poster boy for the state’s new immigration law. And now, Parraz is suing him. Parraz, a former union official seeking his party’s nomination for Senate, delivered a lawsuit to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday for a wrongful arrest in 2008. The suit seeks damages for abuse of process, malicious prosecution, among other charges, according to a copy of the complaint obtained by POLITICO. It was originally filed on Aug. 5, then refiled Monday to reflect several technical changes, said Parraz campaign manager Michael Trujillo. The suit comes in response to a 2008 incident in which Parraz, protesting Arpaio’s actions outside a Maricopa County Supervisors’ meeting, was arrested.

CNS News, August 19. The United States cannot deport all 12 million illegal aliens in the United States and should stop trying, a spokeswoman for the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) told CNSNews.com last week. 'We have to recognize that our immigration system has been broken for 20 years and there are now 12 million people living and working and praying among us who are here without documents. Many have spouses who are citizens or children fighting for our country,' NCLR Immigration Field Coordinator A. Elena Lacayo said in an e-mail response to a question from CNSNews.com. 'Deporting 12 million people is not a realistic solution,' she wrote. 'It’s time we create a rational immigration system, take these people out of the shadows and restore the rule of law.'

Bloomberg News, August 19. As many as 340,000 of the 4.3 million babies born in the U.S. in 2008 had at least one parent who was an illegal immigrant, according to a Pew Hispanic Center study of Census Bureau data. Unauthorized immigrants, who make up a little more than 4 percent of the population, are for the most part young and have high birth rates, according to the Pew study. Their children make up 8 percent of the newborn population and 7 percent of those under 18. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., is leading an effort to change the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which guarantees U.S. citizenship to anyone born in the country. 'We just can't have people swimming across the river having children here,' he told Fox News.