Immigration being ignored in presidential campaign

A few questions for Obama and McCain from the Huffington Post:

• What is realistic and what should be done about the 12 million immigrants here in the U.S. without papers?

• What should be done with the employers who knowingly hire unauthorized workers, take advantage of them, and undercut their competitors: what should be done about them?

• Opponents of reform say anything that provides legal status to those here illegally is amnesty: how do you define amnesty? Do you support amnesty? If not, what do you support?

• How do you make sure that we actually solve the problem rather than pass reforms that perpetuate the problem and lead to another 12 million coming in illegally in the future?

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U.S. Latinos Slammed by Immigration Debate Gone Ugly
Immigration Policy Center

October 9, 2008

The current climate of undeterred public immigrant-bashing along with an immigration policy of "attrition through enforcement" has cultivated unfettered hatred and bigotry against an entire ethnic population. A recent survey by the Pew Hispanic Center shows its toll: half of all Latinos, immigrant and non-immigrant, say that their situation in this country is deteriorating and is worse now than it was a year ago. IPC has released a fact sheet and written a piece on the Huffington Post on Pew's report and its serious implications.

* U.S. Latinos Slammed by Immigration Debate Gone Ugly - (IPC Fact Sheet - October 9, 2008) Read this fact sheet to find out why the Pew Hispanic Research Center is reporting that Latinos, regardles of immigration status, are feeling anxious and discriminated against amid public immigrant-bashing and stepped-up immigration enforcement measures.

* One in Ten Latinos Asked for Papers for LWL: Living While Latino - (Huffington Post - September 24, 2008) A post by Angela Kelley on the vicious public denunciations of undocumented, brown-skinned immigrants -- once limited to hard-core white supremacists and a handful of border-state extremists -- that are increasingly percolating into the mainstream and are surely fueling the problems that Latinos are facing.

Also, check out IPC's new piece in the Huffington Post on the absence of immigration in the election debates, "Presidential Debates Ignore 12 Million Elephants in the Room."

For more information contact Andrea Nill, 202-507-7520 or Wendy Sefsaf, 202-631-0358 or email ipc@ailf.org