Dear Readers:  

Last week saw the demise of the campaign of the last anti-immigration candidate running for President. While John McCain has certainly altered his positions since beginning his campaign, he has not given up his support for eventually legalizing the millions of people in the country without legal status. Democrats Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have virtually the same position and the key difference between McCain and the Democrats is that McCain now wants to have a policy of implementing enforcement provisions in comprehensive immigration reform before any legalization provisions. That’s a far cry from the deeply anti-immigration positions advocated by Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo and the failure – again – of candidates to successfully campaign on an anti-immigration platform should be a serious warning to those who think the issue is a winner.  

Unfortunately, that message has not gotten through to many on Capitol Hill. This week, a group of mostly Republican Senators got together to launch a new anti-immigration caucus in the Senate and followed suit with the introduction of a number of harsh immigration bills, one more restrictive than the next. The move is sure to embarrass Republican nominee McCain who is trying to undo the hemorrhaging of Hispanic voters that has been occurring over the last four years. President Bush received an estimated 44% of the Hispanic vote in 2004. Republicans only received 26% of the Hispanic vote in 2006. And this year, that number could dip much lower than that.  

Speaking of politics, this past week I was in Washington twice for two very different purposes. Early in the week, I attended a board meeting for HIAS, the nation’s oldest refugee and immigrant resettlement agency (it was started in 1880). I’ve been on the board for over ten years and once a year board members gather in DC to meet with lawmakers and others involved in regulating the migration process. Our board met with officials from the White House, Congress, the United Nations High Commission on Refugees as well as with Emilio Gonzalez, the Director of USCIS. We discussed a number of important issues including the current policy of jailing all people who apply for asylum at US ports of entry, the slow process of approving material support waivers for refugee populations, the impending expiration of the religious worker green card category and refugee processing problems in various places around the world. We also expressed concerns about the SAVE Bill currently being considered in the US House of Representatives.  

HIAS has a strong reputation in Washington for its advocacy on these and many other issues. You can learn more about the organization’s policy positions at http://www.hias.org/advocacy.  

Later in the week I returned to Washington where I was a guest speaker at the annual meeting of the DC Chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. I presented on a panel discussion on legal ethics. I was charged with reviewing issues that arise for lawyers who maintain blogs and I also discussed new ethics issues arising in connection with all of the state immigration laws popping up around the US . At the meeting’s lunch, I had the privilege of sitting next to Tamar Jacoby, the head of ImmigrationWorks USA . ImmigrationWorksUSA is a new federation of state business immigration advocacy coalitions. These are the folks working on presenting small business owners’ views on immigration measures being taken up in state legislatures and in Congress. I’ve recently gotten involved with this very worthy group and recommend folks take a look at their web site to learn more. They can be found at http://www.ImmigrationWorksUSA.org.  

This week I’m off to the ABA Techshow in Chicago where I’ll be presenting on two panels relating to lawyers and the Internet. One will be dedicated to blogging and the other will be another ethics panel with Will Hornsby, the nation’s foremost expert on the subject. I’ll also be helping promote the new edition of my ABA book The Lawyers Guide to Marketing on the Internet. If any readers will be attending Techshow, come by and say hello. Techshow, by the way, is really the premiere law office technology program in the country and has been presented for many years. You can learn more http://www.techshow.com.

Finally, as always, if you are interested in becoming a Siskind Susser Bland client, please feel welcome to email me at gsiskind@visalaw.com or contact us at 800-748-3819 to arrange for a telephone or in person consultation with one of our lawyers.

Regards,