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I get the low mordant chuckles whenever I hear Republican strategists complaining that [sniffle] it's so unfair that Democrats enjoy a significant advantage among Latino voters right now. Especially because I know that nativist wingnuts like Rep. Steve King will always be around to remind those voters exactly why they would never want to vote Republican, as he did yesterday:

Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs at a town hall meeting yesterday, telling constituents that the U.S. should pick only the best immigrants the way one chooses the “pick of the litter.”

King told the crowd in Pocahontas, Iowa, that he’s owned lots of bird dogs over the years and advised, “You want a good bird dog? You want one that’s going to be aggressive? Pick the one that’s the friskiest … not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.”

King suggested lazy immigrants should be avoided as well. “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.”

This is nothing new for King. He's previously compared Latino immigrants to cattle, as well as farming commodities like beans and corn. It's all part of his longtime record of mainstreaming hateful rhetoric and demeaning falsehoods when discussing Latino immigrants.

Of course, Mitt Romney is out there trying to mend fences with Latino voters right now, in the vain hope that they'll forget he used vicious anti-Latino rhetoric during the GOP primaries. Indeed, the whole GOP outreach to Latino voters is not going very well right now.

And it just got measurably worse.

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I think it's safe to say that a law enforcement agency has grown dangerously out of control comes when its officers begin using their powers to silence anyone who questions them or their authority. The tasing-and-beating death in 2010 of an illegal border crosser named Anastasio Hernandez Rojas near San Diego is a powerful sign that the U.S. Border Patrol has crossed that line.

Recently released footage of the man's beating makes clear that the Border Patrol's own accounts and explanations for the death are baldfaced fabrications.

Even more chilling are the revelations about how Hernandez Rojas came to be singled out by officers for a beating. It's readily apparent that he was beaten to death because he asked to file a complaint against an agent.

The beating did not occur when Hernandez Rojas was caught and arrested. When that happened, he was kicked repeatedly in a part of his ankle by an agent that had been surgically repaired, and the man had kicked him there even after being told that. As a result, once at the holding facility after the arrest, Hernandez Rojas made a request to file a complaint against that agent.

Then, as all the men with whom he was being held at the facility were taken to the border release point where they were to be returned to Mexico, Hernandez Rojas was separated out from the rest of the group and taken by himself to another gate -- surrounded by a full phalanx of Border Patrolmen armed with nightsticks and Tasers, including the agent against whom he had asked to file a complaint. It was there that, according to the Border Patrol, the man became "violent" and had to be subdued -- even though several eyewitnesses confirm that in fact Hernandez Rojas did nothing before the beating commenced.

The story was the work of reporters from the Investigative Fund of the Nation Institute, who found that this was anything but an isolated incident:

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Two funny things happened this week on Mitt Romney's way to the White House. First, the man who cried "let Detroit go bankrupt" announced "I'll take a lot of credit" for President Obama's million-job saving rescue of the American auto industry. But just as telling was the Republican's claim that, despite Obama's "Forward" campaign slogan, it was the President who was "looking backward." After all, Mitt Romney isn't merely offering an even more reactionary resurrection of George W. Bush's failed policies. As it turns out, from his charges on immigration reform and women's issues to labeling Obama an out of touch "Marie Antoinette" and so much else, Romney's strategy is call to the kettle black.

(Click a link below for the details on each.)

• "Looking Backward"
• "Fairness"
• "Out of Touch"
• "Spent Too Much Time at Harvard"
• "Hide-and-Seek Campaign"
• "Broke His Promise to Hispanics"
• "Respect Women in All Those Choices That They Make"

"Looking Backward"

In April, the RNC's Alexandra Franceschi gave away the game when she explained that even after the calamitous Bush recession which began over four years ago, the2012 GOP economic platform would be the Bush program, "just updated." As a quick glance at Mitt Romney's proposals shows, Franceschi has a gift for understatement.

Romney, after all, is promising massive tax cuts which would deliver the lion's share of their winnings to the very richest Americans, his family included. (His 20 percent across-the-board tax cut is simply a tired retread of Bob Dole's failed 1996 plan, one that nevertheless steers a third of its benefits to the wealthiest one-tenth of one percent of Americans.) He nevertheless pledges to balance the budget even while boosting defense spending. And this latest scion of a proud Republican family would like to privatize Social Security and leave Americans to fend for themselves in the private health insurance marketplace.

Undaunted, Romney slammed the President this week in East Lansing, Michigan:

"Looking backward won't solve the problems of today, nor will it take advantage of the opportunities of tomorrow," Romney said. "His are the policies of the past. The challenges of the present and the promise of tomorrow must be met by a new and bold vision for the future, and I will bring it."

Despite the conclusion of the nonpartisan CBO and the overwhelming consensus of economists that Obama's actions saved the U.S. from "Great Depression 2.0," Romney has insisted for months that the President "made the economy worse." Unfortunately for Mitt, "we are not stupid."

"Fairness"

Barack Obama has made "fairness" a central theme of his reelection campaign. And with good reason. After all, at a time of record income inequality and the lowest federal tax burden since 1950, Both Mitt Romney and his budgetary twin Paul Ryan would deliver a massive tax cut windfall for the rich, paying for it by gutting the social safety net each pretends to protect. Each would end Medicare as we know it with a premium support gambit that would dramatically shift health care costs to America's seniors. While increasing defense spending, the House Budget Chairman and the GOP frontrunner would repeal the Affordable Care and leave at least 30 million people without insurance. And despite their mutual pledges to end many tax loopholes and deductions to fund their gilded-class giveaway, neither Paul Ryan nor Mitt Romney has the courage to say which ones. As a result, these supposed deficit hawks would actually add trillions more in red ink to the national debt.

Nevertheless, Romney used the occasion of his Northeast primary sweep three weeks ago to portray himself as the crusader for fairness:

"We will stop the unfairness of urban children being denied access to the good schools of their choice; we will stop the unfairness of politicians giving taxpayer money to their friends' businesses; we will stop the unfairness of requiring union workers to contribute to politicians not of their choosing; we will stop the unfairness of government workers getting better pay and benefits than the taxpayers they serve; and we will stop the unfairness of one generation passing larger and larger debts on to the next."

Afterwards, The Democratic Strategist translated Romney's cynically transparent gimmick, "We will twist and distort the concept of fairness to justify bashing government workers, crushing labor unions and privatizing public schools."

"Out of Touch"

Four years ago, the campaign of John McCain - a hundred-millionaire who literally lost count of how many homes he owned - unsuccessfully tried to portray Barack Obama as an out-of-touch, arugula-eating elitist who vacationed in exotic Hawaii. Now Mitt Romney has branded President Obama a modern day Marie Antoinette, an "out of touch" occupant of the White House whose message to financially struggling Americans is "let them eat cake."

That might not be the wisest strategy.

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For years, the lame Republican excuse for blocking any and all comprehensive immigration reform has been a single, vapid phrase: "Secure the border first."

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) declared a comprehensive immigration bill dead on arrival if the government does not first do more to secure its borders.

John McCain:

"If we don't secure the borders first, we will find ourselves with another group of people who have come to this country illegally, and then we'll have to do it all over again."

Rick Santorum:

We are going to secure the border first, and that's the most important thing to do, then we'll have the discussion afterwards.

Lamar Smith (R-TX):

It is pointless to talk about any new immigration bills that grant amnesty until we secure the border, since such bills will only encourage more illegal immigration.

Mitt Romney:

“We’re going to have to secure our border first."

Well, guess what Willard? We have.

The largest wave of immigration in history from a single country to the United States has come to a standstill. After four decades that brought 12 million current immigrants—more than half of whom came illegally—the net migration flow from Mexico to the United States has stopped—and may have reversed, according to a new analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center of multiple government data sets from both countries.

The standstill appears to be the result of many factors, including the weakened U.S. job and housing construction markets, heightened border enforcement, a rise in deportations, the growing dangers associated with illegal border crossings, the long-term decline in Mexico’s birth rates and changing economic conditions in Mexico.

And look at these numbers:

Apprehensions of Mexicans trying to cross the border illegally have plummeted by more than 70% in recent years, from more than 1 million in 2005 to 286,000 in 2011—a likely indication that fewer unauthorized immigrants are trying to cross. This decline has occurred at a time when funding in the U.S. for border enforcement—including more agents and more fencing—has risen sharply.

As apprehensions at the border have declined, deportations of unauthorized Mexican immigrants—some of them picked up at work or after being arrested for other criminal violations—have risen to record levels. In 2010, nearly 400,000 unauthorized immigrants—73% of them Mexicans—were deported by U.S. authorities.

So, where will the GOP move the goalposts now?

"An Alabama Mother Speaks"

Chris Weitz, director of the popular "Twilight" movies, directed a series of videos taking on Alabama's anti-immigrant law; the strictest in the the country. The campaign, titled "Is This Alabama?" launched with four compelling videos.

In June 2011 Alabama enacted H.B. 56—the most extreme state-level anti-immigrant bill passed to date—which went into effect in September. Now Hollywood director Chris Weitz has turned the camera on Alabama and is asking “Is This Alabama?”

In addition to the videos, the website also features resources on learning more about the bill and why it is even worse that Arizona's SB 1070:

Alabama’s law, H.B. 56, similar to Arizona’s infamous S.B. 1070, is intended to make every facet of life so difficult and uncomfortable for undocumented immigrants and their families that they leave the state.

In schools: H.B. 56 requires schools to check and report the immigration status of their students and bars undocumented students from public state colleges and universities.

On the street: H.B. 56 requires police to demand proof of citizenship or valid immigration status from anyone they suspect of being in the country illegally, even on a routine traffic stop or roadblock.

At home: H.B. 56 invalidates any contract knowingly entered into with an illegal alien, including such routine agreements as rental contracts, and makes it a felony for an unauthorized immigrant to enter into a contract with a government entity.

In Alabama: H.B. 56 effectively makes it a crime to be undocumented in the state.

More videos below the fold

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On Saturday morning Lidiane Carmo woke up in Florida, where she was attending a church conference with her father, mother, and sister. Carmo was the youngest in her family, and they had traveled to Florida with her pastor father, her aunt, uncle and cousins as well as several other other church members.

On Sunday morning, Lidiane woke up in a Florida hospital with broken bones and internal injuries after the van they were traveling in was involved in Sunday's horrendous highway pileup on I-75 near Gainesville, Florida. Her father, mother, sister, uncle, aunt and cousin were killed. She is the sole survivor in her immediate family.

Lidiane's parents came to the United States from Brazil 12 years ago, bringing five-year old Letiticia and three-year old Lidiane with them. They had legal visas which have since expired.

Lidiane is now an orphan. She has no health insurance. She has no legal status to remain in this country. And she has no family beyond those remaining members of her father's church. She is the sole survivor.

If we had a DREAM Act in place, Lidiane could petition for citizenship here since she entered the country legally. But we don't, and because of Republicans' insane need to pander to bigots and racists, we're unlikely to see it without a completely different Congress.

I'm writing about Lidiane because she puts a very human face on what they're doing when they block the DREAM Act. I wonder if any of these crazy Republican candidates could gaze into her frightened, hurting eyes, and tell her she has to go back to a country she doesn't even know. I think they could, and that should concern us all.

Congress forced a clause into the Affordable Care Act which excluded undocumented immigrants from coverage. The exclusion wasn't simply from federal funds for subsidies. They are barred from purchasing insurance on the state-based exchanges and the national exchange. Barred. Even if they pay with their own funds. Barred.

Today a 15-year old child is in a hospital in Florida, suffering from severe injuries, bereft of her family, in Rick Scott's state. What will become of her?

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Scott Douglas, Executive Director of Greater Birmingham Ministries, nailed it on the Colbert Report, Monday night not only in diction but also in tone, as he made his case against HB 56. Sometimes people try to go on Colbert and be funny, but it's hard to outfunny Colbert. It's better to just play it serious and let Colbert be the comedian, and Scott Douglas did that ">just as he said he would. More important, were his profound words which were almost always applauded by Colbert's audience.

Here are Colbert's questions and Douglas's responses which elicited applause from the audience:

STEPHEN COLBERT: We don't want the feds marching into Alabama. They did that 150 years ago. It didn't work out too well.

SCOTT DOUGLAS: The point is that Alabama should not be joining one of those states that has its own state immigrant law. We don't need 50 immigrant laws across the United States of America. We need one comprehensive law that's just and fair for everyone. (APPLAUSE)

[...]

COLBERT: But why as an African-American would you be fighting for the Latinos? Because they didn't fight for you guys.

DOUGLAS: This is Martin Luther King's birthday celebration and he famously says, "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere." And HB 56 is a threat to me and all Americans. (APPLAUSE)

[...]

COLBERT: Are things so good for black people in Alabama that you can turn your focus to Latinos?

DOUGLAS: African-Americans can never forget how hard we toiled to gain the rights we now have, and how far we've got to toil to gain even more. We know the path we had to trod and we're trying to be in solidarity with these people as they face this stage of this abuse. (APPLAUSE)

The Colbert Report (16 January 2012)

That last question was especially difficult to answer, much less in such a succinct fashion, and I hope folks in the pro-migrant movement will join me in thanking Douglas for his courage and eloquence. Douglas' interview builds nicely on my comments, on MLK day. As an African-American and the leader of a historic civil rights organization, in an area with a lot of civil rights history, he's one of the few that can make the connection between MLK and the civil rights movement and the pro-migrant movement. I would also recommend reading Alfredo Gutierrez, former state senator in Arizona, who eloquently describes the differences between civil disobedience during the civil rights era, and the current pro-migrant iterations of civil disobedience.

The only very small qualm I had with both Scott Douglas and Stephen Colbert is that they suggested that unauthorized migration is a crime, when the vast majority of unauthorized migration is prosecuted by the federal government as a civil violation. This is an important distinction to make because there are nativists who want to make unauthorized migration a crime, which would be a disaster for public safety. Furthermore calling unauthorized immigration a "crime" and unauthorized migrants "illegal immigrants" effectively denies unauthorized migrants commit crimes at lesser rates than the native population.

I pray my herman@s in Alabama keep up the good work and are ultimately successful in repealing HB 56. If you haven't signed the Presente.org petition against HB 56 please do so.

Kyle de Beausset is a pro-migrant blogger at Citizen Orange.

For months, likely Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney has made Barack Obama's supposed "failure of leadership" a centerpiece of his campaign. But like his ill-advised comparison of President Obama to Marie Antoinette, Romney's sound bite could well boomerang. After all, when Multiple Choice Mitt isn't comically reversing his stands, he's too afraid to take any at all.

That cowardice starts with his tax returns. While John Kerry and John McCain at least presented a summary of their (and their well-to-do wives') payments to Uncle Sam, the $250 million Mitt has so far refused to do so. Despite his famous demand in the 1994 Senate race that Ted Kennedy release his tax returns to show he has "nothing to hide," Romney reiterated his own paperwork would not be forthcoming. "We don't have any current plans to release tax returns, but never say never," Romney said, adding:

"I can tell you we follow the tax laws, and if there's an opportunity to save taxes, we like anybody else in this country will follow that opportunity."

Or as he put it to CNN's Wolf Blitzer last week (at around the 6:40 mark):

"I don't put out which tooth paste I use either. It's not that I have something to hide."

That's one interpretation. Another is that Mitt Romney is desperate to avoid the horrible political optics his tax returns would inevitably produce. After all, because Romney's continuing millions in annual income from Bain Capital (a company the Los Angeles Times recently explained "often maximized profits in part by firing workers") are taxed at the 15 percent capital gains rate, Mitt already pays a much lower share to Uncle Sam than most middle class families.

Romney's pusillanimity extends to his own tax proposals as well. Unlike virtually all of his GOP rivals, Romney has held back on endorsing either a flat-tax or the complete elimination of the capital gains tax. As he seemed to suggest to the Wall Street Journal, discretion is the better part of valor when it comes to telling voters about the massive windfall the Romneys would reap under the tax policies that dare not speak their name:

What about his reform principles? Mr. Romney talks only in general terms. "Moving to a consumption-based system is something which is very attractive to me philosophically, but I've not been able to sufficiently model it out to jump on board a consumption-based tax. A flat tax, a true flat tax is also attractive to me. What I like--I mean, I like the simplification of a flat tax. I also like removing the distortion in our tax code for certain classes of investment. And the advantage of a flat tax is getting rid of some of those distortions"...

Amid such generalities, it's hard not to conclude that the candidate is trying to avoid offering any details that might become a political target. And he all but admits as much. "I happen to also recognize," he says, "that if you go out with a tax proposal which conforms to your philosophy but it hasn't been thoroughly analyzed, vetted, put through models and calculated in detail, that you're gonna get hit by the demagogues in the general election."

Mitt Romney's fear of getting hit was also on display during the debt ceiling debate this summer. As the GOP's brinksmanship over defaulting on the U.S. debt reached its climax in late July, Romney turned his tail and fled. As MSNBC reported at the time:

NBC's Garrett Haake reported that Mitt Romney told reporters in Ohio yesterday that he would not comment on the debt negotiations in Washington. And so far, he has refused to either endorse Boehner's legislation (as Huntsman has done) or oppose it (as Pawlenty and Bachman have done). Our question: How does someone who wants to be the leader of the Republican Party not have a position on one of the biggest issues facing Washington, especially after the dueling primetime speeches by Obama and Boehner? It's actually quite surprising; this isn't just another Washington fight. Is the lack of a position proof of how fragile Team Romney believes its front-runner status is right now?

(Ultimately, Romney used Facebook to announce his support of the Boehner bill, but only after it passed the GOP House.)

As it turns out, Ohio was the scene of another of Mitt Romney's moments in cowardice.

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How can it be that a runaway teenager is deported to Colombia without even a cross-check of her identity? Here's how it happened, via WFAA.com:

News 8 learned that Jakadrien somehow ended up in Houston, where she was arrested by Houston police for theft. She gave Houston police a fake name. When police in Houston ran that name, it belonged to a 22-year-old illegal immigrant from Colombia, who had warrants for her arrest.

So ICE officials stepped in.

News 8 has learned ICE took the girl's fingerprints, but somehow didn't confirm her identity and deported her to Colombia, where the Colombian government gave her a work card and released her.

"She talked about how they had her working in this big house cleaning all day, and how tired she was," Turner said.

Through her granddaughter’s Facebook messages, Turner says she tracked Jakadrian down.

There's really no excuse for this. I don't care how much of a priority it is to enforce immigration laws. They should be enforced with accuracy, not expediency. And to require her to pay for the ticket home? Ridiculous.

Now she is pregnant, being held in a detention facility in Bogotá. God knows what has happened to that child after she was deported and now, but whatever it is, it shouldn't ever have happened. ICE likes to brag about their numbers and say they're deporting criminals and repeat offenders, but it seems that they're a bit sloppy about how they're doing it. They fingerprinted this child, for heavens' sake! How hard would it have been to compare her fingerprints to those of the person whose name she used before sending her out of the country? I wonder if they ever thought the absence of a Columbian accent would have been a clue? Evidently not.

Even if the Houston police screwed up, and I believe they did, the responsibility and ultimate screwup sits firmly with this administration's immigration authorities. An apology and restitution is the least they should do.

Step up, DHS. Get this girl home. Now.

Update: CNN just ran this report at 9 AM this morning. Note how the entire story is being twisted now to blame the victim. It's HER fault she's in Colombia. Somehow she plotted to use someone's name who was never in the ICE system? According to CNN, she jacked the whole system to get from Texas to Colombia. They can't imagine why, of course, but it's clearly this 14-year old (now 15) African-American teenager's fault that she is being held in the system in Colombia after being deported from this country.

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Why should we care about Marco Rubio embellishing the tale of his parent's immigration? Because it really does matter. It carries a great deal of significance not only in the Cuban communities in Florida, but across the nation.

Rubio has presented himself as an exile for very specific reasons. He wants the narrative that he fled political oppression to come to this country and make something of himself without bootstraps. He has painted his family as political refugees, when in fact, they're economic refugees just like 99.9 percent of the other immigrants in this country.

A simple embellishment for political gain. After all, how could Rubio be anti-immigrant if he descends from an immigrant family? How could Rubio possibly identify with Latino immigrants as a conservative without changing his own history? Just a little date change and he becomes part of something he and his family never were.

Rubio's response when the story hit the airwaves was to push back with this:

I now know that they entered the U.S. legally on an immigration visa in May of 1956. Not, as some have said before, as part of some special privilege reserved only for Cubans. They came because they wanted to achieve things they could not achieve in their native land.

That paragraph summarizes the essence of why many have come to this country, including Mexican immigrants who have literally risked their lives to enter this country. There is only one difference between the children of Rubio's parents and the children of Latino immigrants all around this country, and it's a significant one. Those immigrants are being threatened, demonized, tossed into privatized prison systems and deported because our immigration policy is practically non-existent. No family from Mexico could present themselves at an immigration office, apply for a visa and declare their intent to stay permanently simply because they wanted opportunity. Political exiles might have a chance, but not those who were simply choosing to immigrate.

By claiming this...

I am the son of immigrants and exiles, raised by people who know all too well that you can lose your country. By people who know firsthand that America is a very special place.

...Rubio flatly lied. His parents came to this country in 1956 looking for economic opportunity. They declared at that time they intended to stay permanently. The fact that Castro came to power in 1959 makes a nice excuse to claim his parents were exiles, but it's simply not true. They came here looking for opportunity and assumed they'd be able to return to Cuba for visits whenever they could. Castro complicated the latter, but didn't change the former.

Marco Rubio is just like every immigrant family -- Latino, Irish, Italian, Pakistani or otherwise -- who comes to this country seeking opportunity and a better life. The only difference is that Marco Rubio has allied with political forces who don't want the same for anyone else. He altered his family history to fit a politically expedient narrative and has ridden it farther than he should have.

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