The Romney campaign then says the Republican candidate’s immigration plan is to focus on ‘family reunification’, ‘work visas’, and ‘permanent solutions for undocumented youth.’ The ad says Governor Romney and the Republicans will fight for bipartisan immigration reform that unifies families.

Read more at NBC Latino

A Los Angeles City Council committee Tuesday approved the concept after hearing from a wide array of supporters who said it was a practical way to incorporate into civic life the area’s large undocumented population.

Opposition to the so-called City Services Card is inevitable because it touches on the hot-button issue of illegal immigration, Councilman Ed Reyes said. But in the end “cooler heads will prevail and understand the humanity of the suggestion,” he said.

The committee voted unanimously to begin soliciting proposals from potential vendors who would implement the program, backed by Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and Councilman Richard Alarcon. That won’t happen, however, until a draft proposal is brought before the full council in about three weeks, officials said.

Although no one opposed to the ID cards spoke at Tuesday’s committee hearing, the Granada Hills North Neighborhood Council sent a letter stating that it had voted against the proposal.

Read more at the LA Times

Last week, NPR’s Maria Hinojosa implied there may be a lack of Hispanic input in the the closed-door meetings at companies which have decided to preserve the term “illegal immigrant.” Turns out, less than four percent of full-time journalists at The New York Times’ are Hispanic (even though New York City is almost 29 percent Hispanic) and at least one of the few Latino journalists on staff publicly expressed his disapproval of the Times’ usage of the term.

However, Mark Herring, the editor-in-chief of the North Carolina State University’s newspaper, The Technician, suggested that it may also be a generational gap that has led to the continued use of the term by legacy media. It makes sense. After all, American college campuses have a history of accepting minority rights — gay, women’s, African American — before the rest of the country catches on.

“I think that a lot of college students understand the nuances of the term in a way some [other] adults don’t,” said Herring. Because the Latino population skews young (one in five children under the age of 18 is Hispanic), he said, many more white college students have Latino peers than those in their parents’ generation. In fact, Latino college enrollment reached a record high this year, with Hispanics representing 16.5 percent of all college students between the ages 18 and 24, according to Pew Hispanic Center. This year, Herring launched a bilingual section of The Technician called “Bienvenidos” to include the growing Latino student population at his school.

Read more at ABC News

In an interview with Spanish news agency Efe, the Cuban-American Republican said the program announced by Obama in June looked like an electoral ploy and that presidential candidate Mitt Romney “wants to seek a permanent solution” for the young people known as DREAMers.

Rubio participated in a political meeting before some 200 people Wednesday, prior to the first presidential debate in Denver.

When asked about the changing stances Romney has taken on immigration reform, Rubio emphasized that President Obama has no right to criticize anyone on immigration. “His party controlled Congress for two years,” he said, “and they did absolutely nothing” to approve the DREAM Act – which would legalize undocumented students – or to move toward immigration reform.

Rubio said that when he discussed an alternative to the DREAM Act with Democratic and Republican leaders in the Senate, the White House “not only did not cooperate with us but tried to prevent” the effort from moving forward.

Read more at Fox News Latino

This report takes a close look at this economic perspective. We present an analysis to understand what would happen if the United States were to grant a pathway to legal status to an estimated 2.1 million eligible youth in our country by passing the DREAM Act. Overall, we find that the passage of the DREAM Act would add $329 billion to the U.S. economy and create 1.4 million new jobs by 2030, demonstrating the potential of the proposed law to boost economic growth and improve our nation’s fiscal health.

In making these projections we used American Community Survey data from 2006 to 2010 to calculate the number of eligible unauthorized youth that would qualify for the DREAM Act—creating the largest dataset of unauthorized immigrants to date—and then put the data into a robust model of the likely educational and job attainment potential of eligible DREAMers to estimate their likely future earnings. This model takes into account factors such as educational level, age, sex, race and ethnicity, and constitutes our estimate of the direct economic consequences of the DREAM Act. This is similar to the methodology used by education economist Luis Crouch and many of his colleagues in the field.

Read more at the Center For American Progress

The statement amounts to Romney’s most direct commitment on immigration to date. Young undocumented activists in Colorado said they were heartened by the news. Conservative advocates of strict, even punitive immigration enforcement went silent. The Obama campaign released a series of statements describing Romney’s comments as a last-ditch, nakedly strategic and potentially insincere attempt to appeal to Latino voters without specifying what type of immigration reform he would advance. And by Tuesday night, the Romney campaign team was working hard to spilt the difference. If elected, the campaign told the Boston Globe, Romney would end the Obama program but honor the reprieves and work permits Romney described earlier as “already purchased.” And he would push hard for unspecified legislative reform.

Thirty-four days before the election, both candidates are trying to find the political beat and combination of moves that will make as many voters as possible want to dance. A new CNN poll released late Tuesday points to just how hard — and essential — that work may be for Romney. The Romney campaign did not respond to requests for comment late Tuesday, but the CNN poll offers one of the most plausible, publicly available explanations for Romney’s decision to draw attention this week to his immigration policy.

Read more at the Huffington Post

AB2189 by Assemblyman Gil Cedillo, D-Los Angeles, will let the Department of Motor Vehicles issue licenses to undocumented immigrants eligible for work permits under a new Obama administration policy. The bill requires the department to accept as proof of legal residence whatever document the federal government provides to participants in its deferred action program.

Cedillo said his bill will make roads safer while letting young immigrants drive to school and to work. His reasoning drew support from several Republican lawmakers, while other Republicans argued the state should leave immigration issues to the federal government.

“It is a victory for those who were brought here through no choice of their own, played by the rules, and are only asking to be included in and contribute to American society,” Cedillo said in a statement.

He said California is the first state to grant drivers’ licenses to the group singled out under the Obama administration’s policy. Cedillo praised Brown for choosing “public safety over politics” by signing the bill.

Read more at the Huffington Post

In an eleventh hour decision, the governor said that the bill was “fatally flawed” because of the list of crimes in the bill was too narrow. The Governor pointed out that police would be barred from cooperating even when the person arrested has been convicted of certain crimes involving child abuse, drug trafficking, selling weapons and using children to sell drugs.

“I believe it is unwise to interfere with a sheriff’s discretion to comply with a detainer issued for people with these kinds of troubling criminal records,” the Democratic governor said in a signing statement.

Brown also recognized the “major” role immigrants play in California’s economy and said immigration reform — including a path to citizenship — was “long overdue.”

The decision comes amid growing national attention surrounding state efforts to enforce federal immigration law, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision to partially uphold the controversial Arizona SB 1070 immigration law.

Read more at ABC News

Lawyers for the Republican governor said the state planned to lodge an appeal with the 9th U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco to remove a block placed on the measure by a lower court judge on Sept. 5. A formal appeal has not yet been filed.

The measure, which makes it illegal to transport, shield or harbor an undocumented immigration within Arizona’s borders, was barred by U.S. District Court Judge Susan Bolton as part of a ruling allowing another key part of the law to go into effect.

Under the controversial “show-your-papers” provision of the law, which has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court, police statewide are now required to check the status of people they stop and suspect are in the country illegally.

Arizona’s immigration law is part of an attempt to crack down on the flow of undocumented immigrants streaming into the border state where an estimated 360,000 undocumented people live. Brewer signed the bill into law in April 2010, saying the federal government had failed to secure the state’s border with Mexico.

Read more at the Huffington Post

Schools and consulates have been flooded with requests for documents after President Barack Obama announced a new program allowing young undocumented immigrants to apply for two-year renewable work permits. Up to 1.7 million people may qualify, which would be the broadest stroke to bring undocumented immigrants out of the shadows in more than 25 years. Applicants – some eager to get in line before November’s presidential elections – are finding they may have to wait a few weeks longer for a prize that has eluded them for years.

The clamor for documents is an early sign that the policy is highly popular. The Obama administration said this month that it approved the first 29 applications among more than 82,000 received since it began accepting requests Aug. 15.

The Mexican consulate in Los Angeles issued 17,444 passports and consular identification cards in August, up 63 percent from the same period last year, said Consul General David Figueroa, who attributes the entire increase to the new policy. The wait for a passport appointment at the largest Mexican consulate grew from one or two days to 40 days last month, then fell to 30 days after the consulate hired five employees to handle the increased workload, opened its main office on Saturdays and extended hours at satellite offices to seven days a week from five.

Read more at NBC Latino