Today's opinion selection comes from the NYT editorial board and is titled: "The Nativists Are Restless."

For years Americans have rejected the cruelty of enforcement-only regimes and Latino-bashing, in opinion surveys and at the polls. In House and Senate races in 2008 and 2006, “anti- amnesty” hard-liners consistently lost to candidates who proposed comprehensive reform solutions. (...)

Americans want immigration solved, and they realize that mass deportations will not do that. When you add the unprecedented engagement of growing numbers of Latino voters in 2008, it becomes clear that the nativist path is the path to permanent political irrelevance. Unless you can find a way to get rid of all the Latinos. (...)

It is easy to mock white-supremacist views as pathetic and to assume that nativism in the age of Obama is on the way out. The country has, of course, made considerable progress since the days of Know-Nothings and the Klan. But racism has a nasty habit of never going away, no matter how much we may want it to, and thus the perpetual need for vigilance.

It is all around us. Much was made of the Republican mailing of the parody song “Barack the Magic Negro,” but the same notorious CD included “The Star Spanglish Banner,” a puerile bit of Latino-baiting. It is easily found on YouTube. Google the words “Bill O’Reilly” and “white, Christian male power structure” for another YouTube taste of the Fox News host assailing the immigration views of “the far left” (including The Times) as racially traitorous.

Janet Napolitano, the new Secretary of Homeland Security issued a directive last week calling on agencies across the nation to self-regulate when it comes to certain immigration issues.

Three issues Napolitano has specifically asked that the DHS look at are:

•    the backlog for Greencard applications
•    the "widow penalty" that denies legal immigration if a US spouse dies
•    false positives in the E-Verify employment verification system, that can flag legal workers as illegal

You can read more about Napolitano’s directive here.

In the spirit of self-regulation and participatory democracy, MATT.org is asking that you be part of this!

If you, a friend, relative or neighbor have experienced these problems personally, please send your story here.  MATT will gather these personal stories and send them to Sec. Napolitano, so that she can take them into account as she examines DHS performance on immigration.

Do you have a friend who’s waited months for a green card?  Was your neighbor falsely identified as an illegal worker by E-Verify?  Keep the conversation going by sharing your stories here.

Arcadio Esquivel, La Prensa, Panamá

Arcadio Esquivel, La Prensa, Panamá

In a victory for children and immigrants across the country, President Obama signed the S-CHIP law into effect on Wednesday.

"This is good, this is good," he said before giving his prepared remarks.

The program extends health care insurance to 4 million uninsured children, including those whose parents are recently arrived legal immigrants.

More background from VOA—

Mr. Obama signed the bill Wednesday, shortly after the House of Representatives approved it in a vote of 290 to 135 earlier in the day. The Senate approved the bill last week.

President Bush twice vetoed a similar bill. Critics say the program will pay for health care for children whose families make enough money to buy private insurance. Supporters say families struggling with the poor economy and rising healthcare costs need the government's help.

The program expansion is expected to cost some $33 billion.

The law substantially raises the federal tax on tobacco products to pay for the expansion of the program. The tax on cigarettes will more than double, to $1 a pack.

A very interesting investigative report by the NYTimes was pubilshed this week on the target of ICE raids.

According to the article, while ICE said that Operation: Return to Sender and other such programs were directed at undocumented immigrants with criminal backgrounds, "the agency changed the rules, and the program increasingly went after easier targets. A vast majority of those arrested had no criminal record, and many had no deportation orders against them, either."

More, from the story—

Internal directives by immigration officials in 2006 raised arrest quotas for each team in the National Fugitive Operations Program, eliminated a requirement that 75 percent of those arrested be criminals, and then allowed the teams to include nonfugitives in their count.

In the next year, fugitives with criminal records dropped to 9 percent of those arrested, and nonfugitives picked up by chance - without a deportation order - rose to 40 percent. Many were sent to detention centers far from their homes, and deported.

The impact of the internal directives, obtained by a professor and students at Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law through a Freedom of Information lawsuit and shared with The New York Times, shows the power of administrative memos to significantly alter immigration enforcement policy without any legislative change.

The memos also help explain the pattern of arrests documented in a report, criticizing the fugitive operations program, to be released on Wednesday by the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

Analyzing more than five years of arrest data supplied to the institute last year by Julie Myers, who was then chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the report found that over all, as the program spent a total of $625 million, nearly three-quarters of the 96,000 people it apprehended had no criminal convictions.

Without consulting Congress, the report concluded, the program shifted to picking up "the easiest targets, not the most dangerous fugitives."