News Update - April 23, 2011

By Alan Lee, Esq.

President Hosts White House Meeting on Immigration Reform on April 19, 2011

President Obama convened a meeting of politicians and business leaders on April 19, 2011, in a show of pro-immigration reform bravado promising to continue working to build a bipartisan consensus around immigration and to lead a civil debate on the issue in the months ahead.  Invitees included not only administration officials, but former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg, police chiefs of New York and Philadelphia, the president of the National Association of Evangelicals, and the bishop of the archdiocese of Salt Lake City.  Although Republicans are opposed to comprehensive immigration reform, this writer believes that they should wake up and smell the roses in 2011.  They should think about who cares more about the immigration issue, heartland Americans or American Hispanics and other minorities, and remember that at voting time, the immigration issue in the past has meant little to most heartland Americans and much to American Hispanics and other minorities.  If President Obama is perceived hereon to have made strong, sincere efforts to promote immigration reform only to be thwarted by the Republicans, the 2012 elections may be a repeat of 2008.

 


The author is a 30+ year practitioner of immigration law based in New York City. He was awarded the Sidney A. Levine prize for best legal writing at the Cleveland-Marshall College of Law in 1977 and has written extensively on immigration over the past years for the ethnic newspapers, World Journal, Sing Tao, Pakistan Calling, Muhasha and OCS. He has testified as an expert on immigration in civil court proceedings and was recognized by the Taiwan government in 1985 for his work protecting human rights. His article, "The Bush Temporary Worker Proposal and Comparative Pending Legislation: an Analysis" was Interpreter Releases' cover display article at the American Immigration Lawyers Association annual conference in 2004, and his victory in the Second Circuit Court of Appeals in a case of first impression nationwide, Firstland International v. INS, successfully challenged INS' policy of over 40 years of revoking approved immigrant visa petitions under a nebulous standard of proof. Its value as precedent, however, was short-lived as it was specifically targeted by the Administration in the Intelligence Reform Act of 2004.

This article © 2011 Alan Lee, Esq.

 

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