New Strategy for Immigration Reform

While details of new initiatives for comprehensive reform has not yet come up in Congress, immigration-reform advocates have nonetheless been active behind the scenes. Some, like the National Immigration Forum, have been talking with labor unions which were lukewarm at best for the Kennedy-McCain Bill because of the provisions to admit temporary workers. Now that the political landscape has changed and the deepening recession threatens jobs, the Los Angeles Times reports, immigrant advocates seem ready to split the temporary worker provisions from the reform package to gain stronger labor support for legalization and family unification. Congress may take up reform in late spring or the summer, though some think is won't come up this year.

CLINTON SOOTHS MEXICO WHILE NEW RUMOR UNNERVES IT
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has taken pains to assure Mexico the U.S. does not consider it a "failed state" or without control of all its territory. Such soothing talk didn't work, because rumor out of Washington is that President Barack Obama seems to favor Carlos Pascual of the Brookings Institute to be new ambassador to Mexico. His speciality when previously in the State Department was in -- you guess it -- "failed states". (See New York Times article.)