To think there are some people who still argue that the law shouldn't categorize some offenses as hate crimes and allow for enhanced criminal penalties.
Listen closely. I'm going to say three words that you don't often hear from columnists: I was wrong. What's more, I've never been so pleased to be proven wrong.
On the prickly subject of immigration raids, the judicial branch is moving in the right direction. And the executive branch is moving in all directions.
President Obama doesn't speak Spanish. But after his trip Thursday to Mexico City to meet with President Felipe Calderon, it's clear that the two leaders speak the same language.
To think there are some people who still argue that the law shouldn't categorize some offenses as hate crimes and allow for enhanced criminal penalties.
Listen closely. I'm going to say three words that you don't often hear from columnists: I was wrong. What's more, I've never been so pleased to be proven wrong.
On the prickly subject of immigration raids, the judicial branch is moving in the right direction. And the executive branch is moving in all directions.
President Obama doesn't speak Spanish. But after his trip Thursday to Mexico City to meet with President Felipe Calderon, it's clear that the two leaders speak the same language.
The Obama administration's stance on immigration reform is like a never-ending telenovela with multiple plot twists --sometimes more than one in the same news cycle.
Here's the good news: Authorities say that fewer illegal immigrants are crossing the U.S.-Mexican border. The Los Angeles Times recently reported that arrests along the U.S.-Mexico border in the last five months are down 24 percent from the same period last year.
You may have heard the rumor that, as a result of a bloody drug war that has claimed more than 7,000 lives since January 2007, Mexico is on the verge of being declared a "failed state."
Obviously, President Obama has a lot on his plate: two wars, an ailing economy, the mortgage crisis and more. But that doesn't relieve him of the obligation to serve up his plan for immigration reform.
We have a deal. This week, House and Senate leaders agreed on a $789 billion stimulus package intended to jumpstart the economy, create millions of jobs, and alleviate some of the financial anxiety suffered by individuals and businesses.
Because of circumstance, calamity and panic, President-elect Barack Obama's first days in office probably will be unlike anything experienced by other presidents in recent memory.
If controversies were sitcoms, the ruckus over Barack Obama's decision to have the invocation at his inaugural ceremony given by Rick Warren -- bestselling author and pastor of the 20,000-member Saddleback Church in Southern California -- would be the "Seinfeld" of the bunch. After all, it's about nothing.
More than 20 years ago, I got into an argument with a college roommate over affirmative action -- one I've thought about since President-elect Barack Obama began nominating people to serve in the Cabinet and White House staff.
How's this for a paradox: Just days after Americans made history by electing the first black president, seven teenage thugs in Patchogue, New York, pulled a shameful page from history by forming what one prosecutor called a "lynch mob."
The presidential election confirmed what many of us knew: We live in a remarkable and wonderful country, and Americans are an interesting and complicated people.
For several weeks now, a friend -- who happens to be a fellow journalist with a good nose for news -- has been hounding me to be among the first columnists in the country to write about L'Affaire Edwards.
Last week, I wrote about what appears to be a ghastly hate crime in the small town of Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, where teenagers allegedly beat to death a 25-year-old illegal immigrant named Luis Ramirez after spewing racial slurs and telling him to go back to Mexico.
In a recent commentary, I spelled out what bothers many Hispanics about the immigration debate. In response, many readers demanded to know -- for all my criticisms -- how I would go about fixing our broken immigration system. I thought they'd never ask.
In a recent commentary, I wrote that, as a Mexican-American, the ugliness of the immigration debate offends me -- not as a Mexican, but as an American.
In an episode of the television show "Seinfeld," Jerry Seinfeld worries that his dentist has converted to Judaism so he can tell jokes about Jewish people. Someone asks Seinfeld, "And this offends you as a Jewish person?" No, he says, "it offends me as a comedian."
Score one for the knee-jerk naysayers. You know the type: those who find it easier to criticize proposed solutions to tough problems than to propose solutions of their own, which then could be criticized.
The wacky world of immigration reform is full of half-baked ideas, but none has the taste of having spent less time in the oven than letting local cops enforce federal immigration law.
A reader wrote in to complain about illegal immigration, not exactly a rare occurrence. He was concerned about his tax dollars paying for services for illegal immigrants.
There is nothing like coming home, and I got the chance to do that today thanks to an invitation to join in a lunch forum hosted by the Kenneth L. Maddy Institute at California State University, Fresno, which sets out to train new leaders.
I have taken my readers' advice. They're always suggesting interesting locales from which to report on the immigration issue. Like this: "Go back to Mexico!"
For more than a decade, I've written about the need to reform Social Security. And I've blamed older generations of Americans for not fixing a program they know is unsustainable into the future.
In the 1980s, San Antonio Mayor Henry Cisneros helped convene a gathering of Hispanic leaders to christen the time in which they were living: the Decade of the Hispanic.
In my travels, I'm often asked to explain who Latinos are and what their values entail. Sometimes, I have to begin by setting the record straight and correcting false impressions.
This is where we've arrived in this country: You have the constitutional right to burn an American flag, but you can get into trouble for simply flying a foreign one.
On October 12, Ruben Navarrette Jr. penned a pompous commentary for CNN.com ("Minutemen have a right to be idiotic"). His litany of name-calling and bogus accusations against The Minuteman Project membership places him solidly in the category of propagandist journalists who "spin" their stories to suit their bias -- valid facts and objectivity be damned.
Do you feel safer than you did five years ago? Republicans hope the answer is yes and that you'll give them full credit. Of course, on a related note, they also hope you've developed full-fledged amnesia. They hope you've forgotten all about immigration reform and how the White House and GOP-controlled Congress were going to fix a broken system and seal a porous border -- things that make many Americans feel less safe and less secure.
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