First, some immigrant activists proposed a boycott of the 2010 Census to show displeasure with immigration policies centered on enforcement and to demand comprehensive reform. Now, a U.S. senator is calling for the Census Bureau to not count undocumented immigrants.

The move by Sen. David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, comes as the Bureau has been reaching out to ethnic media and immigrant communities for months to ensure that the nation’s population is counted as accurately as possible, in fulfillment of its mandate.

Vitter’s office announced in a press release that he introduced an amendment to an appropriations bill “that would require questions in the census regarding citizenship and immigration status.”

The amendment “would also prevent states from counting illegal aliens for the purposes of determining population levels and other data associated with the census.”

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E-Verify, the often-criticized electronic system for checking workers’ immigration status, is apparently here to stay. President Obama’s chief of Citizenship and Immigration Services defended the system this week as the government continues to expand its use.

Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of USCIS, “defended the accuracy” of E-Verify during a talk with reporters who cover immigration, The Washington Times reported. This goes against what many business organizations and pro-immigrant advocates have said: that the system makes many mistakes that can leave legal residents jobless.

Mayorkas also said “the agency is continuing to improve the system and get it ready in case Congress mandates it for all U.S. businesses as part of an eventual immigration overhaul,” the Times Stephen Dinan wrote.

Just last week, the administration made it mandatory for federal contractors to use the system to check their workers’ status.

Mayorkas’ statement comes as the Obama administration apparently is attempting to advance immigration reform without alienating those who favor tougher restrictions on unauthorized immigration. E-Verify is a key piece of this strategy, along with other Bush-era enforcement measures that the Obama White House has embraced. This tougher-than-expected approach has irked many in the pro-immigration camp, who don’t see an equal zeal for advancing a reform bill or in making the immigrant detention system more humane.

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Over 45 of “America’s finest radio hosts,” according to organizers, have converged on Washington D.C. to hold a conservative event Tuesday and Wednesday in opposition to President Obama’s health care proposal and the possibility of immigration reform.

But the event’s organizer, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, is being denounced by America’s Voice, one of the leading pro-immigration lobbying organizations, as a hate group.

While both groups have long disagreed, and maintain widely divergent views on immigration, seldom have their attacks been so direct.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

It’s probably not what President Barack Obama expected, but the highlight of his speech on health care reform to a joint session of Congress seemed to be his being heckled by South Carolina Republican Congressman Joe Wilson. The now infamous “You Lie!” scream came after Obama refuted the Republican claim that undocumented immigrants will receive health care under his initiative.

Several organizations went back to the bill once more Thursday to try to establish for certain who’s actually telling the truth on this one.

The main source in this review is Treatment of Noncitizens in H.R. 3200, an 11-page analysis by the Congressional Research Service, which you can download here.

The report seems to debunk the main claim by the bill’s opponents: that the lack of an explicit verification system to check whether applicants are legally in the U.S. means the undocumented would be able to purchase health coverage with the same government credits citizens would get under the proposal. CRS says that spelling out how the verification system will work will fall to the new Health Choices Commissioner.

“Thus, it appears, absent of a provision in the bill specifying the verification procedure, that the Commissioner would be responsible for determining a mechanism to verify the eligibility of noncitizens for the credits.”

[ See report, page 6 ]

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The summit of the “Three Amigos” (the presidents of the U.S., Mexico and Canada) in Guadalajara brought no good news for Mexicans on the immigration front. The headline in Monday’s Mexico City newspaper El Universal summed it up: “Neither immigration reform nor does Canada eliminate visas.” At a press conference at the summit President Obama said that Congressional action on immigration reform will have to wait until next year.

With a raging drug war south of the border, trade controversies and the U.S. Congress occupied with other matters, Mexican President Felipe Calderón apparently did not even intend to push the issue of immigration with his American counterpart, Barack Obama, in their private meeting on Sunday.

Also at the summit, Canada, which recently started requiring all Mexican visitors to obtain a visa, said it has no intention of going back on that decision, which has incensed Mexicans, already sensitive on the issue.

According to El Universal, Obama told Calderón that the White House has a full plate right now, which makes it impossible to deal with an immigration reform bill.

The Mexican ambassador to the U.S., Arturo Sarukhán, narrated the encounter, saying Obama told Calderón that “if the rest of the legislative agenda in the U.S., in Congress, moves in the right direction, space could open up between November and March. But evidently, right now, the immigration reform bill is not ready at this time to be introduced in Congress.” (more…)

Another Friday afternoon statement from the White House means another bit of bad news for immigration reform advocates. This time, President Barack Obama met with correspondents from Hispanic media outlets and said he expects Congress to deal with immigration early next year.

The new statement pushes Obama farther away from his commitment to deal with the issue during his first year in office — a promise he made to Latino voters he badly needed to carry some swing states in the 2008 election.

On Friday, Obama met with a group of 10 reporters including representatives of wire services Notimex (Mexico), Reuters and EFE, and from Los Angeles newspaper La Opinión. Although he said he didn’t know if the bill would get enough votes, he said he expects Congress to deal with immigration reform by “early next year.”

For this, Obama said a bill should be drafted by the end of 2009.

“Now, will we be able to mobilize the votes to pass something? That I can’t predict,” he said, according to Notimex.

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