12/07/12 When Republicans in the North Carolina House of Representatives put together a special committee on immigration last year, the expectation was that we’d see ugly legislative recommendations along the lines of Arizona’s SB 1070 and Alabama’s HB 56 recommendations. But, a funny thing happened along the way – probably something to do with the intense [...]
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12/07/12 Since the 2012 election results rolled in, it’s been hard to keep track of all the momentum behind real immigration reform.  The immediate post-election developments included supportive comments from Republican Senators for real reform, such as Sens. Lindsey Graham (SC) and Rand Paul (KY), and the surprising backing of earned citizenship from Fox News television [...]
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12/07/12 Florida GOP Senator Marco Rubio has been talking about immigration lately. But, he’s not making himself very clear. This week, he told an inside-the-beltway breakfast hosted by Politico that he we need comprehensive reform, but can’t do it comprehensively — or something like that. The headline of the post at the San Francisco Chronicle sums [...]
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12/05/12 In an interview with CQ yesterday, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) reiterated his support for comprehensive immigration reform and even “suggested that he could support citizenship…with preconditions, including an emphasis on granting citizenship first to immigrants who are currently waiting to receive it,” writes CQ reporter, John Gramlich.  Said Graham, “I don’t like the European model [...]
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12/05/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos: In the wake of the 2012 presidential election, the Latino vote in states like Colorado has been held up as a critical and influential factor.  Latino voters turned out in record high numbers and their 75% vote for President Obama nationally set a new high [...]
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12/05/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos:  A month seems like an appropriate time to reflect on the outcome of Colorado’s 2012 general election and the role of Latino voters in both the Presidential and state-level contests.  In many respects, the election reflected a continuation of the state politics apparent in 2008 [...]
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12/04/12 A panel featuring pollster Ruy Teixeira and Obama for America organizer Jeremy Bird at the Center for American Progress today underscored the impact of the minority vote in last month’s election, and highlighted just how instrumental record numbers of minority voters were to President Obama’s reelection effort. As Ruy Teixeira said in a PowerPoint presentation [...]
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12/04/12 Since the election last month, when Mitt Romney lost the Latino vote to President Obama by more than a 3-1 margin, Republicans who acknowledge that the party must do better with immigration and Latino voters have mainly fallen into two camps. There is the camp of the token proposal, which has pushed out legislation like [...]
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12/04/12 Matt Rhoades, Mitt Romney’s campaign manager, has added his voice to the ranks of other Republicans lamenting choices the Party made on immigration.  At a forum hosted by the Harvard University Institute of Politics and reported on yesterday, Rhoades admitted that the campaign’s decision to move to the hard right on immigration during the GOP [...]
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11/28/12 Yesterday, outgoing Republican Senators Kay Bailey Hutchison (TX) and Jon Kyl (AZ) held a press conference to announce the Achieve Act, a scaled-down version of the DREAM Act which offers legal status to young undocumented immigrants but not necessarily citizenship. The Achieve Act would cover DREAMers who are currently younger than 28 (or younger than 32 [...]
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11/28/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos: The results of the 2012 election have awakened the Republican Party to their impending demographic disaster. Substantial growth in the size and power of the Latino vote—and an overwhelming tilt in that vote against their nominee—paints a bleak future for Republican electability. Coupled with startling [...]
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11/27/12 Editor’s Note: We’ve updated our House and Senate Races to Watch reports! Please check them out here: House Races Post-Election Scorecard Senate Races Post-Election Scorecard In the lead up to November 6th, America’s Voice tracked a range of competitive House and Senate races where Latino, Asian, and naturalized citizen voters could prove decisive.  A new post-election scorecard from America’s Voice documents [...]
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11/26/12 When Rahm Emanuel served in Congress, he was also the head of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He was not particularly helpful when it came to immigration reform–in fact, he was often hostile. Here’s what then-Congressman Emanuel said about the issue back in October of 2007: For the American people, and therefore all of us, [...]
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11/21/12 Last weekend, Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC)  criticized Mitt Romney’s post-election “gift” comments and offered advice to the Republican Party regarding its lurch to the right on immigration policy and its thumping by Latino voters: “When you’re in a hole, stop digging.  He [Romney] keeps digging.” Added Senator Graham, “The Hispanic community, 71 percent voted for [...]
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11/20/12 Rep. Brian Bilbray (R-CA) has long been a leading anti-immigrant Member of Congress.  Rep. Bilbray currently chairs the extremist House Immigration Reform Caucus and is a former lobbyist for the Federation for Immigration Reform (FAIR), which the Southern Poverty Law Center designates as a hate group.  Yet after California redrew its congressional districts last year to reflect continued demographic change, [...]
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11/19/12 During the fall, we wrote several times about the race between the race between Republican incumbent Rep. Mary Bono Mack (CA) and Democrat Raul Ruiz. America’s Voice included this match-up in our spotlight of fifteen competitive House races important to Latino and Asian voters — and all those who care about common-sense immigration reform. Ruiz won. Today, [...]
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11/14/12 At the Center for American Progress this afternoon, Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) discussed what he believes immigration reform should look like and called it the “civil rights issue of our time.”  After host Neera Tanden, the President of the Center for American Progress, called Latino voters “THE story of the 2012 elections,” Menendez said that [...]
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11/14/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos:  Gary Segura recently provided a discussion of how exit polls often misrepresent Latino voters (Badly!), pointing out that exit polls often rely on small samples of Latino likely voters, rarely utilize fully bilingual interviews, and utilize samples that are not reflective of the Hispanic/Latino population in [...]
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11/14/12 Momentum keeps building on behalf of immigration reform with a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants. According to Frank Sharry, Executive Director of America’s Voice: From the President to conservative leaders to the American people themselves, the stampede towards broad immigration reform that will put 11 million new Americans on the road to citizenship is [...]
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11/14/12 Over the past week, there’s been an avalanche of punditry and discussion about the new, post-election politics of immigration reform. Much of the focus has been on the Republican Party’s serious problems on the issue, caused by chronic catering to its anti-immigrant nativist wing, led by the likes of Rep. Steve King (R-IA), Rep. Lamar [...]
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11/13/12 Immigration reform has rocketed to the top of the national agenda in the past week, after Latino turnout and overwhelming support for President Obama and his party were key to holding the White House and Senate for the Democrats and gaining slightly in the House. Today, Lake Research and The Tarrance Group released a new [...]
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11/13/12 Last week, we reported on the alarming number of provisional ballots left over from last week’s election that still to be counted in Arizona.  Here’s a quick recap from the Arizona chapter of the ACLU: According to the Arizona Secretary of State, as of November 8 there were more than 630,000 ballots yet to be [...]
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11/13/12 A week out from the 2012 elections, it’s clear that Latino voters’ decisive role in the electorate has boosted the prospects and accelerated the timetable for passing immigration reform legislation.  Here are two key reasons why: 1. Without a significantly improved performance among Latino voters, the Republican Party’s future as a nationally competitive political party [...]
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11/13/12 If one thing is clear coming out of the election, it’s this: the movement demanding citizenship for 11 million new Americans have triumphed over the anti-immigrant crowd. Mitt Romney embraced the anti-immigrant policy of “self-deportation,” thinking we would let it slide. He was wrong. In fact, many analysts have concluded it was Mitt Romney’s anti-immigrant policies [...]
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11/13/12 Cross-posted at Latino Decisions, Latino Vote Matters, and Daily Kos: In his 1996 re-election President Bill Clinton attained 72 percent of the Latino vote, the highest level of Latino support of any presidential candidate—before this year. In 2012, President Obama set a new record, winning his second term in office with the support of 75 [...]
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11/12/12 From John Boehner to Sean Hannity, from Eric Cantor to Charles Krauthammer, Republicans of all stripes have spent the last week coming to terms with how they must moderate their positions on immigration in order to win the Latino vote—or eventually face irrelevance as a party.  Here are even more quotes from over the weekend [...]
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11/12/12 Are House Republicans really about to install another anti-immigrant extremist as chairman of the House Judiciary Committee–now, when they clearly need to reconsider their standing on immigration and the Latino vote? For the past two years, the House Republicans’ immigration policy has been set by anti-immigrant hardliners like chair of the House Judiciary Committee Lamar Smith, [...]
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