According to The Kansas City Star, Kansas’ third district Republican candidate for US Congress, Kris Kobach, has run into a slippery debate centering around immigration at our border and national security.

Kobach has run his campaign with the idea that militarizing the borders with thousands of troops and strictly limiting immigration will help curb the potential of terrorist coming into the country.  Kobach’s militarizing policy looks toward placing 20,000 National Guard troops on the borders of the United States to prevent terrorism.

Many groups have rallied support in response to Kobach’s ideas immigration policies, many that Democratic opponent U.S. Rep. Dennis Moore says have “extremist views on immigration and race” in order to protect American culture and prosperity. 

Those opposing Kobach policy idea state that immigrations problems are not solved by simply lining up thousands from the National Guard on the border and that these policies have taken too much of a tone of extremist agendas.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, Democratic candidate for the California 76th Assembly District seat, Lori Saldana, has been criticized by her opponent Republican,  Tricia Hunter, for being to lenient with immigration into the United States.

Saldana, a community college professor has called for driver’s licenses for undocumented immigrants, banning border fences and having free education for people of all immigration statuses at community colleges. 

Hunter in return says that the issue of immigration has once again returned to the forefront of debate with the possibility that terrorist could sneak across the border and therefore should be taken more seriously.

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Republicans are turning voter’s attention to the issue of illegal immigration, according to The Raleigh (NC) News and Observer. Republicans have employed this strategy in the senatorial and gubernatorial races in North Carolina, the state with the nation's second fastest growing Latino population, continues the report. In North Carolina rural areas, a persistently bleak economic outlook has fueled the perception that illegal immigrants are competing with natives for scarce jobs.

Democratic Governor Mike Easley called the Republicans’ focus on the immigration issue “pernicious.”  He also states that the tactic could backfire if voters are turned off by what some describe as its divisive nature. Advocacy groups are also accusing Republicans of playing to voters' fears and continuing in the tradition of the “white hands” ad – used by Jesse Helms in 1990 to stir fears about white workers losing jobs because of affirmative action.

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Rep. Tom Tancredo said Monday that if the war in Iraq were to suddenly end today, he'd call President Bush's decision to topple Saddam Hussein's regime a “mistake.” The Rocky Mountain News reports that the three-term congressman made his remarks during a taping of a 6th Congressional District debate. Sixth District Libertarian candidate Jack Woehr called the United States the world's newest empire, arguing that the country has gotten itself into a quagmire in Iraq.

The race’s Democratic candidate, Joanna Conti, accused Tancredo of fixating on the issue of illegal immigration. “I don't think we can solve the problem of illegal immigration with troops on the border,” she said. Woehr added the strict border control Tancredo favors doesn't address the fundamental issues of inequality between Americans and Mexicans. However, Tancredo said he has been outspoken on border issues because no one else in Congress was willing to embrace the subject describing his stance on illegal immigration as setting “the goalposts all the way down the field” in the national debate.

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According to an October 15th New York Times article, The New York Immigration Coalition reported that in New York City nearly 63,000 immigrants are waiting for processing for their citizenship applications have lost the chance to vote due to delays by the Department of Homeland Security.  Many other key battleground states in the elections are reported to having very similar problems.

President Bush set the national standard for citizenship application processing time at six months but many states have backlogs up to as much as 21 months, eliminating the first chance these potential new citizens would have to vote in a presidential election. 

Reasons for the backlogs, the coalition declared, lie in the requirement for each applicant to pass three layers of security checks and the shortage of staff members to process these checks in a timely manner.  The three layer security checks include inspection from the Interagency Border Information System database, FBI fingerprinting and the FBI name check, with the FBI responsible for many times for the delays.  In 2003, the accumulation of applications could also be attributed to the fact that many agents set to process naturalization application were temporarily reassigned to a ‘special registration’ program that proved to be useless in finding terrorists.

In the mean time, US Citizenship and Immigration Services acknowledges the backlog and says they are fully committed to eliminating it by 2006.  However, waiting until 2006 to clear to reservoir of application waiting to be processed leaves 25,000 immigrants in Florida, about 12,000 immigrants in New Jersey and around 6,500 immigrants in Arizona shut out of next weeks elections whose applications should have met the six month deadline.

Even some immigrants whose applications have just been processed and who have recently taken the citizenship oath were informed that their move to citizenship status was too late to meet the voter registration deadline.  However, the New York Times later reported in an October 16 article that in the case of the newest American citizens in New York State there is a loophole.  Those immigrants that were sworn in after the October 8th registration deadline are permitted to register in person at the Board of Elections headquarters in their county until 10 days before the election.