The Londoner

President Obama’s action to shield millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation and grant them work permits opens a new front in the decades-long debate over the scope of presidential authority. Although Mr. Obama is not breaking new ground by using executive powers to carve out a quasi-legal status for certain categories of unauthorized immigrants — the Republican Presidents  Dwight D. Eisenhower ,  Ronald Reagan  and  George H. W. Bush  all did so — his decision will affect as many as five million immigrants, far more than the actions of those presidents. Mr. Obama’s action is also a far more extensive reshaping of the nation’s immigration system. “The magnitude and the formality of it is arguably unprecedented,” said Peter J. Spiro, a Temple University law professor. “It’s fair to say that we have never seen anything quite like this before in terms of the scale.” Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE Obama, Daring Con...

President Barack Obama won reelection with overwhelming support from Hispanics — and now Latino megadonors aligned with the White House are trying to mobilize that community behind his second-term agenda. They’re working feverishly behind the scenes to launch an organization that will focus on passing comprehensive immigration reform — the latest attempt to create a new group to assist an administration that often prefers to deal with its allies instead of entrenched, inside-the-Beltway organizations. Led by a trio of top fundraisers that includes actress Eva Longoria, the effort comes out of The Futuro Fund, a national initiative of Latino leaders who helped reelect Obama. Organizers are aiming to marshal the support of the thousands of Hispanics it galvanized during the campaign to create a robust online and social media presence that can pressure Congress into acting on immigration reform. But it could cause friction with more traditional Hispanic civil rights gr...

WASHINGTON -- Nearly 600 would-be Dream Act beneficiaries and their allies, who helped in a successful push earlier this year for relief for undocumented young people, gathered in Kansas City, Mo., this weekend to determine their path forward. They settled on a new priority: comprehensive immigration reform that would help the entire undocumented population, not just those who came to the United States as children. It's something of a shift for the network, United We Dream, which is made up of smaller groups of undocumented young people nationwide. Although the network has always supported comprehensive reform, its primary focus has been on so-called Dreamers, who came to the United States as children and would be eligible for the Dream Act, a decade-old bill to give lega...

Tomorrow, the House of Representatives will vote on Republicans’ first post-election attempt at pro-immigration reform. But their bill, the STEM Jobs Act ( H.R. 6429 ), sponsored by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, eliminates as many visas as it creates. Worse, it uses the illusion of immigration reform to actually decrease immigration. If the GOP wants to rehabilitate its immigration image, it should not begin by creating winners and losers — and this bill creates many more losers than winners. The bill grants 55,000 green cards to college graduates of U.S. universities with degrees in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics — the STEM fields. But it simultaneously eliminates the same number of green cards under the Diversity Visa Program, which awards visas mainly to low-skilled immigrants from underrepresented countries — mostly in Africa. If this bill passes, it would create a dangerous precedent that GOP-sponsored immigration reform means eliminating visas for ...

An immigration stance that Mitt Romney took with little fanfare this month has created turmoil for many young immigrants living in the country illegally, lawyers and immigrant advocates say. Mr. Romney said that if elected president, he would end the program that offers hundreds of thousands of those immigrants two-year reprieves from deportation, which the Obama administration began in August. Mr. Romney’s statements have prompted many young people to hold back from applying, worried that if he won the presidency, those who applied and were not approved by the time he took office could be pursued by immigration authorities. His position “has created a lot of confusion and a lot of anxiety,” said Cheryl Little, the executive director of Americans for Immigrant Justice, a legal aid group based in Miami that has assisted hundreds of young immigrants applying for reprieves. Mr. Romney has said that he would honor any reprieves already app...

  VIVEK WADHWA’S new book, “The Immigrant Exodus”, is admirably short, yet he packs it with righteous fury. America, he points out, has one of the greatest assets a nation can have: people yearn to live there. Chinese students, Indian doctors, British actors and French financiers flock to its shores. What is more, America is very welcoming and always has been. Its universities brim with foreign brains. Its zippiest companies are powered by immigrants. Some stay for ever. Others work for a while and return home, where they often continue to swap ideas and do business with their American friends. A nation that can attract the cleverest people in the world can innovate and prosper indefinitely. Unless it does what America has done since September 11th 2001, which is to make the immigration process so slow, unpredictable and unpleasant that migrants stay away. Consider the story of Puneet Arora, who came to America in 1996 to study medicine...

Immigrant entrepreneurs have always had a significant impact on U.S. culture and economy, and that continues to be true today. Immigrants started 28% of all new U.S. businesses in 2011, despite accounting for just 12.9% of the U.S. population, according to “ Open For Business : How Immigrants Are Driving Small Business Creation In The United States”, a report published in August by The Partnership for a New American Economy. Our own ranking of America’s wealthiest makes the point as well: 29 members of The Forbes 400 (full list below) are immigrants including four new entrants. Pakistan-born Shahid Khan , for instance, came to the U.S. at age 16, with $500 that his father had scrimped together, to study engineering. He is now CEO of auto parts manufacturer Flex-N-Gate and the new owner of the Jacksonville , Jaguars. “You can do anything you want to do (in America),” Khan told Forbes earlier this year. “You have to work hard, you have to create your own luck, and you have...

NEW YORK -- One of the cleanest shots Mitt Romney scored on Barack Obama on Tuesday night was over the president's promise, made during the 2008 campaign, to have an immigration bill introduced in his first year in office. "He said in his first year he'd put out an immigration plan that would deal with our immigration challenges," Romney pointed out. "Didn't even file it." That charge is true . Obama didn't even come close to introducing an immigration bill in his first year. Only this year, under pressure from frustrated activists , did he make the much smaller step of taking administrative action to defer the deportation of younger undocumented immigrants. But the history of what has happened with comprehensive immigration reform since 2008 should give voters pause if they believe Romney's promise that he will fix immigration. Obama has run into many obstacles placed by a right wing ...

An Alabama man today goes on trial on marriage fraud charges, and the state’s controversial immigration law may play an indirect role. Prosecutors want to introduce evidence that defendant Andreas Andresean Jr.’s wife, Katerina Petrasova, arranged a sham marriage between her boyfriend and another woman. Petrasova, according to a court filing by prosecutors, was concerned that her boyfriend would be deported because of the tough immigration law passed the state Legislature last year. Before testimony in the case against Andresean begins, U.S. District Judge Ginny Granade will have to decide whether to allow the evidence regarding Petrasova’s attempt to arrange a fraudulent marriage between fellow Czech Republic native Dan Cejka and an American woman named Sharon Hope Farrow. Petrasova already has pleaded guilty to marriage fraud and conspiracy charges, admitting that she arranged to marry Andresean so that she could stay in the United States after the expiration of her v...

HEMPSTEAD, N.Y. — Amid the attacks and countercharges in Tuesday’s debate, Mitt Romney appeared to make some news in saying he will seek to create ways to grant a path to citizenship to younger illegal immigrants brought here as children. “The kids of those that came here illegally, those kids I think should have a pathway to become a permanent resident of the United States,” he said. “And military service, for instance, is one way they would have that kind of pathway to become a permanent resident.” The Republican presidential nominee had previously listed the military service option, but had said that was the only exception he was willing to carve out. His comments in the debate, though, suggested a much broader policy that could apply to all illegal immigrant youths, known as Dreamers because they would have qualified for stalled legislation known as the Dream Act. Immigration has been a thorny issue for both candidates, particularly since Hispanic vo...

Prince William officials blasted federal immigration authorities Tuesday over a move to change the way illegal immigrants are investigated and detained in the county. After this year, county law enforcement authorities would no longer be able to investigate the immigration status of people they arrest. Instead, they would only be able to check those arrested against a federal immigration database that contains the names of anyone who has come into contact with federal immigration authorities. - Corey A. Stewart, the chairman of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors. As a result of the change, county officials said that their efforts to root out illegal immigrants who commit crimes would be severely undermined. “We have a duty to protect our citizens and to make our community safe,” said Corey A. Stewart, the chairman of the Prince William Board of County Superv...

Fourteen arrests were made following an operation to crack down on illegal working in the heart of London's Chinatown on Wednesday 27 June. Acting on intelligence, officers targeted New World Restaurant, Gerrard Place at around 16:30. Immigration checks were carried out on individuals to see if they were entitled to live and work in the UK. Fourteen Chinese nationals including 6 men, aged between 20 and 44, and 8 women, aged between 23 and 44, were arrested. They were all detained for a variety of immigration offences, including overstaying their visas and leave to entering the UK without leave to do so. Three of the men and 1 woman remain in immigration detention awaiting removal from the country whilst the others have been released on immigration bail. Steve Fisher, from the UK Border Agency, said: 'We carry out hundreds of operations like this every year across London, and where we find people who are in the UK illegally we will seek to remove them. ...