A previous article resulted in several questions about the diversity visa (green card) lottery. Today we are happy to announce that the State Department has finally put in place a system for entrants to check the status of their entry at: http://www.dvlottery.state.gov/ESC. You just need three pieces of information from your 2008 registration: 1) your Confirmation Number, 2) your Family Name (Last Name), and 3) your Birth Year. If you did not enter using a last name, check the box for “No Last/Family Name”.

Although we are proponents of legal, not illegal immigration, sometimes the rhetoric of the far right becomes so warped that I cannot help but shed light on their propaganda. One of their ongoing populust rants is their proposition that illegal immigrants commit an excess of crime.

Miami Herald, June 29. Sen. Bill Nelson has called for authorities to halt the deportation of a Miami man whose immigration story has inspired protests and riled up immigration activists throughout South Florida. In a letter last week addressed to a top federal immigration official, Nelson praised Walter Lara, a 23-year-old who is to be deported July 6. He called him ''exactly the type of person'' a new immigration bill is ''trying to help.'' Lara's story ''vividly illustrates'' the need for Congress to pass the DREAM Act, Nelson, a Democrat, said. The bill would grant certain immigrants who graduate from U.S. high schools conditional permanent residency.

Washington Examiner, June 28. The U.S. House of Representatives has voted to restore $400 million in funding for state and local jails to incarcerate criminal illegal immigrants, a program which would reimburse Fairfax and Prince William counties a total of $1.5 million. The Commonwealth of Virginia would also receive $1.7 million if funds for the State Criminal Alien Assistance Program provided under the measure, which was included in the Commerce, Justice, Science and Related Agencies Appropriations bill, are approved. SCAAP funding had been cut in President Barack Obama’s proposed fiscal 2010 budget.

Los Angeles Times, June 29. American Muslims have never been much of a presence in the Los Angeles Police Department, accounting for less than 1% of its nearly 10,000 officers. But now, with department leaders eager to improve relationships with local Muslims, top brass have named the force's first Islamic chaplain: a Pakistani-born spiritual leader who has spent much of the last decade trying to build bridges between law enforcement and Los Angeles County's diverse Muslim communities. Sheik Qazi Asad, 47, will serve as a reserve chaplain at the LAPD's North Hollywood station. The volunteer post requires about eight hours of service each month. But to Asad and his LAPD patrons, it represents an opportunity to expose officers to a culture and faith that many may find unfamiliar, even foreign.

Boston Globe, June 28. Hundreds of immigrants desperately seeking legal residency poured into his Boston office, waiting for hours as the line curled out the door. In the Brazilian community, word had spread from cooks to bakers to seamstresses that Dvorak was the lawyer to know. They filled out piles of paperwork, paid thousands of dollars, and waited for green cards to arrive in the mail. Now, eight years later, the US government has begun rejecting dozens of Dvorak’s clients, saying it found fraud, such as fake employment letters, in a significant number of cases, according to a copy of a rejection letter that lawyers say clients are receiving. The unexpected action is wreaking havoc from Maine to Cape Cod. Immigrants who plunked down hard-earned cash with high hopes of staying in America are now racing to other lawyers for help.

FAIRus.org, June 25. In advance of the White House summit on immigration, Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.), chairman of Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, Border Security and Refugees, issued a seven point plan for reforming America’s immigration policies. Unfortunately, Sen. Schumer’s plan is short on details and even shorter on protections of the vital interests of the American people. It also conveniently ignores the history of immigration politics and policies since 1986.

Christian Science Monitor, June 25. President Obama Thursday called for some 'heavy lifting' on immigration reform on Capitol Hill, but there’s no move there to rush into it. With energy, healthcare, and financial regulation on a fast track, there’s little running room for an issue that has baffled lawmakers for the past three years. But for president and a critical mass of interest groups heavily invested in comprehensive reform, even a symbolic stake in the ground is a start. 'The consensus is that despite our inability to get this passed over the last several years, the American people still want to see a solution,' Mr. Obama said after a bipartisan meeting with House and Senate members. 'We’ve got a responsible set of leaders sitting around the table who want to actively get something done and not put it off until a year, two years, three years, five years from now, but to start working on this thing now,' he said.

KOB News, June 25. A candidate for mayor says Albuquerque is a sanctuary city for foreign criminals because of a question police aren't allowed to ask suspects. Richard 'RJ' Berry says if he is elected mayor, things will change. 'I will get rid of the so-called sanctuary city policy that Mayor Chavez has put in place that prohibits officers from asking suspects in crimes about their immigration status,' he said Wednesday. At least two suspected gangster gunmen in the deadly Denny's robbery spent some time in the Bernalillo County jail in recent months.

USA Today, June 24. Construction company CEO David Dominguez no longer worries about inadvertently hiring workers who are in this country illegally. That's because he uses E-Verify, the federal program that allows him to quickly check the legal status of potential employees. Dominguez, who builds residential interiors in Arizona and California, said that as word gets around about the program, job applicants without legal status avoid businesses such as his, Andrew Lauren Co., which use E-Verify. 'The system works,' Dominguez said. His San Diego-based company has been using E-Verify for several years in hiring office workers and laborers. The voluntary federal program has seen a rapid growth in use this year, Department of Homeland Security records show. More than 1,000 employers are signing up each week on average, and employment checks are approaching 200,000 a week.

Politico, June 24. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) still believes he has the votes to pass comprehensive immigration reform. The only problem is finding floor time — and the political will in the Senate — to dig in on a heated issue that blew up in the Senate two summers ago. 'What is impeding comprehensive immigration reform is any floor time to do it,' Reid told reporters. 'I think we have the floor votes to do it.' President Barack Obama has expressed his commitment to comprehensive immigration reform, and on Thursday he will host a group of House members and senators to discuss how to move a bill forward. But, with a full schedule of health care reform, a climate change bill and a Supreme Court nomination already crowding the agenda, Republicans are skeptical that an immigration bill would be coming in the near future.

WBUR News, June 24. Schools, welfare and taxes. Those are the big concerns some people have about immigrants’ impact on public spending. UMass Boston economist Alan Clayton-Matthews actually tried to quantify these impacts using the most recent census data from 2007. “Immigrants tend to have larger households with more children and therefore make a higher use of the public education system than do natives,” Clayton-Matthews said. His study shows that immigrant-headed families sent about 179,000 students to public schools across the state. Those children make up about 19 percent of school children, even though they are 15.5 percent of the state’s population. That costs the state about $300 million to $440 million a year. But that’s not the whole picture. “Fewer immigrants are incarcerated in proportion to their population,” Clayton-Matthews said. And, “since immigrants tend to be younger, there are fewer elderly immigrants who are institutionalized in nursing or long-term care facilities.”

Orange County Register, June 23. It's 'graduation day' for students who are in the country illegally and who say they want a pathway to residency and a chance for a better life. Up to 100 illegal immigrant college students in Orange County will join the expected hundreds of others across the country scheduled to walk in mock graduation ceremonies today, organizers say. 'It's in solidarity to support the plight of undocumented students,' said Alexis Nava, a member of the Orange County Dream Team, who helped coordinate today's ceremony. 'It's a mock graduation to be symbolic, recognition of what students face once they graduate.' The 6 p.m. ceremony in Orange is intended to support the DREAM Act, which would allow undocumented students to apply for legal permanent resident status, protect them from deportation and make them eligible for student loans and federal work-study programs.

Forbes Magazine, June 22. Harvard brain trust predicts 'strong' demographics will drive housing recovery, but immigration is a wild card. A perceived strain on government resources has caused some Americans to begrudge the country's immigrant population. But Harvard researchers, in a new white paper released Monday, are saying that a slowdown in immigration could hurt the long-term real estate market. In the 2009 State of the Nation's Housing Report, Harvard economists say real estate remains under considerable strain due to rising unemployment, falling home prices and tighter lending standards. 'The best that can be said of the market is that house-price corrections and steep cuts in housing production are creating the conditions that will lead to an eventual recovery,' says Eric S. Belsky, executive director of the Joint Center for Housing.

ThOnline.com, June 22. Argaw Oremo won the lottery -- but it's not the lottery worth millions of dollars; it's the lottery for a chance at a new life in the United States. Oremo's name was drawn from the Diversity Immigrant Visa Program, a computerized lottery that randomly selects 50,000 people out of a pool of 9.1 million applicants from countries with low rates of immigration to obtain a "Green Card." It allows them to be permanent residents of the United States.

Associated Press, June 22. FBI name checks on people seeking to work, live or become citizens of the United States are getting completed more quickly, winding down a backlog that had left some petitions pending for more than a year, immigration officials announced Monday. The delays have come during the FBI's routine checks for possible criminal backgrounds and national security questions. But now, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services officials say, nearly all name check requests submitted to the FBI are now being answered within 30 days. The remaining 2 percent within 90 days.

Business Week, June 21. For more than a decade, the U.S. has faced a shortage of nurses to staff hospitals and nursing homes. While the current recession has encouraged some who had left the profession to return, about 100,000 positions remain unfilled. Experts say that if more is not done to entice people to enter the field—and to expand the U.S.'s nurse-training capacity—that number could triple or quadruple by 2025. President Barack Obama's goal of expanding health coverage to millions of the uninsured could also face additional hurdles if the supply of nurses can't meet the demand. Some lawmakers are looking to the immigration pipeline as one means to raise staffing levels. In May, Representative Robert Wexler (D-Fla.) introduced a bill that would allow 20,000 additional nurses to enter the U.S. each year for the next three years as a temporary measure to fill the gap.

Orange County Register, June 19. Readers overwhelmingly oppose a bill that would provide students who are in the country illegally a pathway to residency among other rights that are now granted to resident students. More than 75 percent of readers responding said no to the following question: 'Do you think college students who are in the country illegally should be given a path to residency, protected from deportation and eligible for student loans and federal work study programs?, according to an Orange County Register poll. Only 21 percent of 1,631 respondents said they supported the idea, which is part of the DREAM Act, or Development, Relief and Education for Minor Aliens. About 1 percent said they didn't know how they felt about the measure.

News Observer, June 21. Ronald Bilbao will remember his 21st birthday not for gifts that he received, but for one that he gave. This year on his birthday, Bilbao, a rising senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, sponsored his parents for legal residency in the United States -- 25 years after they left their native Venezuela for Miami. His parents had been among this nation's estimated 12million illegal immigrants, with no way to rectify their immigration status, since 1984. But several years ago, they discovered that they were among a small group of illegal immigrants who have a path to citizenship. In the nation's complex web of immigration laws, there is a provision that allows people who entered the country on legal visas and remained after the visas expired to apply for permanent residency -- but only if they have an immediate family member who is a U.S. citizen and at least 21 years old. Ronald, a U.S. citizen born in Florida, was their ticket.

San Diego Union Tribune, June 17, OPINION. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has been taking a beating from the public for recent comments intended to force Californians to stop blaming illegal immigrants for the state's budget crisis. Schwarzenegger is not backing down. In fact, he's ratcheting up the rhetoric. In the process, he's comforting the afflicted and afflicting the comfortable. There's more of that on the way. During a recent meeting with The San Diego Union-Tribune editorial board, Schwarzenegger compared the tendency of Californians to treat Latino immigrants as scapegoats for the state's economic crisis to how Jews were blamed by the Nazis for Germany's economic difficulties following World War I.