President Barack Obama got an unexpected present today — thousands of Latino votes –  from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who just endorsed Mitt Romney.

Before he became Kansas SOS, Kobach helped draft SB 1070, with funding from the Immigration Reform Law  Institute, which is the legal arm of the Washington non-profit Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR. Like its founder, Jon Tanton, FAIR wants a moratorium on all immigration into the United States. The Southern Poverty Law Center has compiled a  creepy dossier on FAIR.

If you want to get a sense of Kris Kobach, take a look at this video. Kobach was apparently under contract with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, and in the video he talks about what constitutes “reasonable suspicion.”

Time travel from video circa 2010 forward to now.  January, 2012.

Kobach is quoted on  Romney’s s website:

“We need a president who will finally put a stop to a problem that has plagued our country for a generation: millions of illegal aliens coming into the country and taking jobs from United States citizens and legal aliens, while consuming hundreds of billions of dollars in public benefits at taxpayer expense,” said Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach. “Illegal immigration is a nightmare for America’s economy and America’s national security. Mitt Romney is the candidate who will finally secure the borders and put a stop to the magnets, like in-state tuition, that encourage illegal aliens to remain in our country unlawfully. He is also the candidate who will stand shoulder to shoulder with the states that are fighting to restore the rule of law. I am pleased to stand with this true conservative.”

Millions of illegal aliens taking jobs from US citizens? Consuming hundreds of billions of dollars in public benefits?

Reality check: Unauthorized immigrants don’t qualify for  many public benefits, except for free k-12 public education, which economists call an asset, not an expense.

And illegal  immigration is hardly a “nightmare” these days; it is at the  lowest its been for decades, which explains why the economy trumps illegal immigration as a voter issue — except, of course, with Latinos who have seen what happened when Kris Kobach helps write immigration laws for  Alabama and Arizona.

Romney, who also said he’d veto the DREAM Act, is angling for extremist voters who tend to vote in primaries in the South.  He likely figures once he gets the nomination he’ll take a more moderate stance to attract moderate voters in the general election.

But a Kobach endorsement is something that many Americans of Latino descent, and their friends, aren’t likely to forget in the general elections.

Or forgive.

Too much has happened in Arizona. And now Alabama.

Long story short — the  Kobach endorsement  delivered many a Latino vote to Barack Obama.

And Obama, who has been working hard to mend fences with Latinos following a lackluster,  failed effort to pass the  DREAM Act and  immigration reform, needs to write a thank-you note.

To Kris Kobach.

In some Latin American countries,  “notarios” are well-respected and have a reputation for honesty. In Arizona and other parts of the United States, like Minnesota, self-described “notarios” sometimes prey on the most vulnerable immigrants,  as Minnesota reporter Gregory Pratt explains in this  Ciity  Pages story.

Today the Associated Press reports that apprehensions of unauthorized immigrants at the border declined for the fifth straight year, and are at the same rate we saw during the Nixon administration.

In the meantime, the Obama Administration continues to deport at a record clip.

And Republicans are moderating their hardline stance on immigration reform.  Republicans are historically  the party that enacts immigration reform. The last big reform was led by Ronald Reagan.

Newt is talking about a kinder, gentler policy. And so are pundits like  Bill O’Reilly.

The Republicans have a chance of winning this election if they can win over Latinos, who are disenchanted with what they see as the the Obama administration’s broken promises to enact reform.

This all leads me back to my book, which chronicled the vivid stories — and the stunning effects of a broken immigration policy — of undocumented immigrants in the Phoenix area during the Arizona immigration law controversy. In the book, Illegal, Life and Death in Arizona’s Immigration War Zone, I posited that the real problem wasn’t the right-wing frenzy over illegal immigration, because despite the heated rhetoric illegal immigration was waning significantly.

The real immigration problem centers on the unauthorized immigrants who live here  — and the  way in which our nation chooses to treat human beings.

SB 1070 SPONSOR RUSSELL PEARCE FACES TIGHT RECALL ELECTION, THANKS IN PART TO ARIZONA UNDOCUMENTED KIDS

Arizona state senator Russell Pearce capitalized on the  (still unsolved) death of an Arizona borderlands rancher (Pearce blamed an “illegal alien” for the killing) in the spring of 2010. Pearce rode a wave of fear to push through Arizona’s controversial immigration law and was subsequently elected president of the Arizona Senate.

Now Pearce, a Republican and Mormon who just last year was  the most powerful politico in Arizona, faces a super-tight recall election in his heavily Mormon, heavily conservative district in Mesa, a suburb of Phoenix.

Pearce’s opponent, Jerry Lewis is a charter school company guy who is inexperienced politically. He’s a Mormon, just like Pearce. He’s a Republican, too. Pearce got more money.  And yet, Lewis is enjoying a slight lead, according to an ABC News-Arizona Capitol Times poll released last week.

Political observers said Pearce was so entrenched in the district no one could defeat him.

But a new breed of Arizona activists proved them wrong. They are young, energetic and tirelessly optimistic. Some are white. Some are brown.  Some are citizens.  Others are unauthorized immigrants.

***

On a recent afternoon, I followed two of these young activists as they walked on the sidewalks of east Mesa, canvassing.

 Zack  is 21, an ASU student  majoring in urban planning and minoring in Chicano and Latino studies.

Lily is 25, and was brought to the United States by her Mexican parents when she was 10. The family came to the country legally, with visas. But the visas expired. And Lilian is an unauthorized immigrant.

The two knocked on doors, asked people if they were registered to vote, and if they had their early ballots.

LILY AND ZACK

“I don’t like anything Pearce has done,” said Zack, an American citizen who has canvassed “a lot.” He told me this after he had canvassed the entire neighborhood that day.

And Lily chimed in that even though she couldn’t vote, she wanted to help. (I took their picture while they canvassed.)

 I’ll get back to Lily and Zack in a bit, but first  some background.

***

Arizona’s immigration law, SB 1070, makes it a  state crime for unauthorized immigrants to set foot in Arizona and turns all law enforcement officers in Arizona into immigration enforcers.

The law was crafted in large part by Kris Kobach, now the Kansas secretary of state, who wrote the law while working for the legal branch of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR). The  controversial non-profit was founded by alleged white nationalist John Tanton, who still sits on its board. (FAIR’s sister non-profits are Center for Immigration Studies and NumbersUSA. If you visits their websites, you’ll see they are cut from the same cloth.)

Pearce did not write the law, as he sometimes suggests. He did sponsor the law in Arizona.

But after a brief period in which Pearce enjoyed tremendous popularity, the tables turned on him.

Arizona business leaders,  stung by boycotts and employment problems that resulted from SB 1070, paired with moderate Republicans in Arizona’s senate and legislature. They  managed to kill Pearce’s immigration measures in 2011. Those measures included a bill denying Arizona birth certificates to children born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents.

In another blow to Pearce, the Mormon Church headquarters in Utah voiced its approval of  the Utah Compact, which says among other things that  immigration is a federal, not a state  problem. And privately, some Mormons in Arizona expressed deep concerns about Pearce.

What’s more, data showed that illegal immigration was simply not the problem Pearce said it was. The  most reliable measure for illegal immigration — apprehensions at the border — slipped down to a low not seen since the 1970s, according to the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan think tank in Washington.

And just a few days ago, the Department of Homeland Security announced a 40 percent decrease in the already declining numbers of unauthorized migrants  apprehended at the Arizona border.

It became clear that Pearce’s fear mongering was more political than real.

***

 I talked to a couple of Latina voters in Mesa who had already sent in their ballots. They told me that incredible as it may seem, some Hispanic voters still want to vote for Olivia Cortes, a sham candidate put up by Pearce supporters to deflect votes away from Lewis and give Pearce the edge.

Cortes is no longer running, but her name is on the ballot.

The women also told me that some Latinos don’t know Pearce is affiliated with SB 1070.

And some didn’t even know what SB 1070 was.

Could this be possible?

Yes, the two women  told me. People watch TV, but they don’t watch the news.

They don’t read. They don’t get things straight.   They don’t do their own research.

Yes, some will vote for Cortes.

***

This really is a neck-in-neck race.

After we got back to the canvassing headquarters, I asked Lily how she’d react if Pearce won.

She said she’ll just keep on. She understands what it takes to overcome obstacles.

Photo by Farmer Dodds from Flickr

Almost three years ago, on a cold night in November, two Border Patrol agents allegedly came across four “Mexican National” pot smugglers in the Arizona desert. The agents, Dario Castillo and Ramon Zuniga, forced the smugglers to take off their shoes, socks and jackets (just like drop house kidnappers) and burned them. They forced the smugglers to eat pot. Then they sent them hightailing into the desert. Now the two agents have been indicted for human rights violations by a federal grand jury in Tucson. Again, this is all alleged.  It’s too early for the BP agents to respond. But you  can read the DOJ press release below.
Border Patrol 2011-170(Castillo et al)

Braceros.

This is all you need to know.

Thank you, Eugene and Los Cenzontles.

DREAMERS, MINUTEMEN, AND TUCSON SHOOTINGS :  TERRY GREENE STERLING EXPLAINS WHY SHE QUIT BLOGGING

One night in December, just a few days before  Christmas, two groups of ASU students gathered in two very different parts of Phoenix.

The first group of kids wore college graduation gowns, and received diplomas, and were hugged by their relatives, who then bought them celebratory dinners.

Yay!

They’d finally made it through Arizona State University.

At the very time graduates were celebrating, another group of ASU  students huddled together on a sidewalk in front of the darkened office of Sen. John McCain in central Phoenix.

PHOTO BY TERRY GREENE STERLING

It was a cold night, but the students were full of warm hope. They hoped that the next day, the Dream Act would pass in the lame duck Congress. The Dream Act, introduced every year since 2001, would allow kids who are unauthorized immigrants and have lived in the United States for most of their lives, and have graduated from high school, and  have not committed crimes, temporary legal residency so they can attend college or join the military. If they accomplished these goals, the students would be given permanent legal residency, and eventually citizenship. The students had been focusing on McCain’s office because even though he had transformed from immigration reformer to immigration hardliner, they still held hope that he’d vote for the Dream Act. After all, he once supported it.

PHOTO BY TERRY GREENE STERLING

But McCain didn’t vote for the Dream Act the next day.

It was a bitter disappointment for these honor students, who watched the senate vote on their laptops as they sat on the sidewalk.

It wasn’t easy to learn English, or to succeed in school, or to get coveted private scholarships to pay their out-of-state tuition.  But they did. And after the Senate shot down the Dream Act, students like Chris wouldn’t give up.

This is Chris’s picture. To the right. Below.

The Senate shot down the Dream Act on Saturday.

On Sunday, Chris was in church, listening to words of hope.

“Help us love even those who hate us,” one of the speakers said.

Chris just sat there on the bench. He speaks three languages.  He wants to be an architect.

“We can’t put our hope in politicians, we have to put our hope in God,” another speaker said.

Chris looked at his hands. He is the only one in his family that excelled in school. And in his family, being different isn’t  always easy.

“Dreams may be deferred but dreams won’t die,” said yet another speaker.

***

I was going to blog about that evening, but I didn’t.  I wanted to take a break from writing and reporting. The holidays. Family. I’d get back to blogging, I figured, in January. Five weeks later,  Jarold Lee Loughner allegedly went on a shooting spree in front of a Tucson Safeway.  He gunned down Rep. Gabrielle Giffords, and before he was tackled by onlookers he’d killed six people, including a little girl named Christina-Taylor Green. Instead of blogging, I covered the shootings for The Daily Beast.

Here’s another shooting story. And another

***

I came home, packed fresh clothes and drove back to Tucson, where I covered the murder trial of another little girl, Brisenia Flores, who was gunned down , along with her dad, in 2009 by a man in camouflage who had painted his face black. A woman barked orders during this killing spree, which took place in a house trailer in Arivaca, Arizona.  The super comandante was a beautician. She was dressed in a military outfit too. Her name was Shawna Forde. She wanted to rob this family to fund her border surveillance activities.

I wrote four stories about Shawna Forde for The Daily Beast. I was the only reporter who talked to her.

She told me that even in jail she directed a vast militia.

Her lawyers said she suffered from narcissistic traits.  They said she was repeatedly sexually abused, abandoned and neglected.

They wanted to save her life.

But she’s on Death Row now.

***

I came home again, and made up my mind to start blogging.

Then Republicans in the Arizona Legislature, in lockstep with many of the state’s biggest businesses, voted to kill five notorious immigration bills that would have furthered the state’s  racist image. The businesses said they’d felt the sting of a national boycott, and they’d had enough of Arizona’s immigration laws. Let the feds take care of it, the businessmen said.

***

I think things are calming down in Arizona now. At least for a while. So I’ve made up my mind to start blogging again. For  updates on day-to-day events about madmen, killers, and general goings on in Arizona, please visit my Facebook page.

***

And getting back to those Dreamers, Christian is still in school.

He won’t give up.

His life is filled with hope.

VILLAGE VOICE MEDIA INVESTIGATION BY TERRY GREENE STERLING TIES “CENTRIST” THINK TANKS AND GROUPS TO WHITE NATIONALISTS, REVEALS  MISLEADING REPORTS ARE USED TO ASSAULT 14TH AMENDMENT, AND SCARE THE HELL OUT OF PENNY PINCHED AMERICANS.

Among the findings:

1. The  “cost of illegal immigration” by Federation for American Immigration Reform include cost of educating American citizen children with one or more parents who are unauthorized immigrants. Economists consider education an investment, because it pays off after the child becomes an adult and begins working, paying taxes, and consuming goods. But the economic counterbalance  is missing in the FAIR report, making the cost staggering.

2. 14th Amendment “birthright citizenship” “anchor baby” movement tied to White Nationalists.

3. FAIR and sister organizations  drive immigration debate but are  tied to White Nationalists.

4. Unauthorized immigrants are not an undue burden on the economy, most economists say.

5. A special section on White Nationalist books.

6. Ties of White Nationalists to Arizona’s immigration law hardliners.

Here is the story.

ON ELECTION DAY, SOME YOUNG LATINOS IN ARIZONA VOICED THEIR OPPOSITION TO ARIZONA’S NEW IMMIGRATION LAW, SB 1070, BY TRYING TO GET OUT THE VOTE.  HERE’S MY TAKE FOR AZCENTRAL LAST NIGHT. AZCENTRAL IS THE ONLINE SITE FOR THE BIG PHOENIX DAILY, THE ARIZONA REPUBLIC.

CELSO.

Read the rest of the post about this DREAMER here.

And here’s another post, about Fidel, a young American citizen canvassing neighborhoods.

Latino activists are still crunching the Arizona numbers.  For sure, Arizona’s immigration law helped elect positively impacted those candidates  who supported it. But this law, which aims to kick all undocumented people out of Arizona, has affected many Latino citizens personally. And I’m convinced a lot of Arizona voters don’t even understand the law.

Let me explain. In a nutshell, SB 1070 aims to boot all unauthorized immigrants out of Arizona. But a fascinating Arizona Republic poll released in July indicates that while 55 percent of Arizonans supported SB 1070, an incredible 62 percent wanted employed unauthorized immigrants without criminal records to stay in Arizona.

How can you want to kick out the very people you say you want to stay?

Long story short, über confusion rules the Arizona electorate when it comes to SB 1070.

What’s even more confusing to voters is that a federal judge in Phoenix temporarily enjoined parts of the law, so it’s not being enforced to its full extent right now. It may never pass judicial muster. But no matter. It’s already had its impact. The law propelled Jan Brewer and her Republican allies in Arizona to victory.

More important, the passage of SB 1070 deeply wounded and insulted many young Hispanic voters in Arizona. They’re the ones who are likely to get stopped and hassled. They’re the ones with undocumented grandparents and parents and siblings.

And honestly, this election is just a blip to them. They know their numbers are growing. And they will not forget SB 1070.

SUE KRENTZ, WIFE OF SLAIN BORDER RANCHER ROBERT KRENTZ, WHOSE UNSOLVED MURDER SPARKED PASSAGE OF SB 1070, ARIZONA’S IMMIGRATION LAW, WAS SERIOUSLY INJURED SATURDAY ALLEGEDLY BY A DRUNK DRIVER

Robert Krentz, a well-known borderlands rancher, was gunned down by a mysterious assailant on his ranch in late March. Although his murder has not been solved,  it was widely blamed by locals and national conservative groups on narco-smugglers in the country illegally. The murder sent a shock wave through Arizona’s legislature, and moderate Republicans who were set to vote against SB 1070, Arizona’s notorious immigration law, voted instead for its approval. Arizonans were concerned about border security in the wake of the Krentz killing, and many did not understand that not a word of SB 1070 relates to border security.  Sue Krentz, by all accounts, became a reluctant but brave spokeswoman for conservative causes, and  recently was honored with a front-row seat at the Glenn Beck rally in Washington, according to the Tucson Weekly.

She is a Catholic, and while crossing the street from the Catholic Church in Douglas on Saturday, she was hit by an allegedly drunk driver, a local named Ramon Parra Saucedo. According  to court records I looked up, he  is 69 years old. He’s had many traffic violations, including a previous DUI and a hit and run of a vehicle, the records say. He’s facing aggravated assault and DUI charges in connection with the Krentz hit-and-run.

He is an American citizen, according to press reports.

Sue Krentz was airlifted to a hospital in nearby Tucson.  Leo Banks, a personal friend of Sue Krentz, writes in the Tucson Weekly that Sue Krentz was “thrown thirty feet and suffered a broken pelvis, head and facial injuries and internal bleeding.” Banks reports that Krentz underwent  blood transfusions “and is conscious and in stable condition. “

The unsolved murder of Sue Krentz’s husband has fueled speculation on both sides. Here’s what I wrote for The Daily Beast in July.

Former State Sen. Alfredo Gutierrez says the unsolved murder probe is a case of “purposeful ignorance” and an “attempt to cover up the truth” in a prime drug- and human-smuggling corridor. Politicians talk about securing the border, he said, but they do not address the possibility that the business of Cochise County “ain’t cows, ain’t hay; it’s smuggling drugs and people.”

“Everybody knows what’s going on but nobody knows what’s going on,” said Gutierrez, one of the state’s leading Hispanic leaders.

Such a suggestion is just plain wrong, said Cochise County’s embattled sheriff, Larry Dever.

“He’s suggesting I am dirty and people I know are dirty, and if anyone can establish that, I’d invite them to give it a try,” Dever said.

Born and raised in Cochise County, the 57-year-old sheriff was a friend of Krentz’s. He said he has heard the allegations that U.S. citizens living in the area are involved in criminal activities linked with the Krentz killing, but he dismissed those claims as purely political.

Instead, Dever said, he has a suspect in Mexico and is “very, very close” to solving the case, though he said he cannot put a time frame on it.

The Krentz killing was the result of “a dog protecting his master and the master protecting dog…I think the encounter was accidental,” the sheriff theorized. “Rob was checking out his ranch. The smuggler was smuggling. They came across each other’s paths with a very good man being killed with no reason whatsoever.”

In either case, the Krentz  family has had more than its share of unexplained tragedy.