Maybe not unprecedented like the Chicago Tribune‘s nor unexpected like Colin Powell‘s, but there were two other important endorsements for Barack Obama in the last few days.

Los Angeles’ La Opinión and New York’s El Diario/La Prensa, two of the nation’s oldest Spanish-language dailies, made public their endorsements of the Democratic candidate on Friday.

Both newspapers are owned by ImpreMedia which bills itself as, “The No. 1 Hispanic News and Information Company in the U.S. in Online and Print.” [In the interest of full disclosure, Feet in Two Worlds has worked with editors and reporters at both papers.] The two dailies carry considerable weight in the Hispanic communities in Los Angeles and New York, and beyond.

El Diario ran its endorsement on the cover, under the headline: “Necessary Change. A vote for Obama.” [The full text is available in Spanish and English.]

“Our country is perched on the edge of a cliff,” the newspaper said. “We are staring down a growing economic crisis.”

It added the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have “no end in sight,” and in the U.S., families have suffered from “stagnant wages, and the rising costs of everything from gasoline to food to health care.

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Feet in 2 Worlds journalist Aswini Anburajan joined WNYC‘s Brian Lehrer this morning to talk about John McCain’s waning prospects in the presidential election, the role of race in the campaign and other election-related issues. Here’s an excerpt of her analysis of tonight’s debate.

It’s on John McCain: what does he have to offer to the American public in terms of real, tangible solutions. It doesn’t matter anymore if someone knew a radical in the ’60s, when they were in Chicago, because this is about the fact that Citibank is pulling out of every university in this country; you cannot get students loans, it’s much harder. It’s about the fact that there are foreclosures. It’s about the fact that my parents, too, lost twenty to thirty percent on their 401k.

There are real economic hardships happening and I think that John McCain has a great opportunity tonight, because no one really thinks that Barack Obama has explained the situation that well.

The Brian Lehrer Show was broadcast live from Hofstra University on Long Island, N.Y., site of tonight’s third and final presidential debate.

To hear the first hour of the program, featuring Aswini Anburajan, Lawrence Levy, executive director of the National Center for Suburban Studies at Hofstra, and Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone political correspondent, click here.

To see more photos from Hofstra on the WNYC Flickr photostream, click here.

Answer: Immigrants and anyone interested in fixing the nation’s immigration system.

It’s now clear that immigration has replaced Social Security as the “third rail of American politics.” Touch it and you’re dead. The words “immigration” and “immigrants” were never mentioned in Tuesday night’s debate between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama at Belmont University in Nashville, Tennessee. The candidates and their campaigns are maintaining a perfect record of not addressing this subject during the debates. But, as we have reported elsewhere, both campaigns have been running Spanish-language TV ads aimed at Latino voters that criticize and distort each other’s record on immigration reform.

While the candidates’ silence on this subject was notable, what was truly striking was that none of the questions posed by voters and moderator Tom Brokaw dealt with immigration. NBC’s Brokaw began the town hall-style debate by saying that “tens of thousands” of questions had been submitted by people across the country. It’s hard to believe that none of those questions dealt with the candidates’ proposals for dealing with the estimated 11.5 million undocumented immigrants in the US. It’s only a guess, but Brokaw and the team who culled the submitted queries, must have thought that immigration isn’t important enough for even one debate question.

So Obama and McCain got off the hook, and tens of millions of immigrants –both legal and undocumented – along with their children, neighbors and, yes, their employers and co-workers are still waiting to hear the two candidates compare and contrast their views on immigration reform. This, in an election year when immigrant and ethnic voters may prove pivotal in a number of battleground states.

During the presidential primaries former Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney tried to use John McCain’s support for immigration reform as a wedge issue against the Arizona Senator. Romney’s strategy failed. But maybe he was more successful than most people believe. There is now a chill over the presidential campaign when it comes to talking openly about immigrants and immigration. Four weeks before Election Day no one – neither the candidates nor the mainstream media – seems willing to break the ice.

While immigration is barely discussed in the mainstream presidential campaign, a Spanish-language war of accusations continues to play on TV screens in “Hispanic battleground” states.

A few days ago, John McCain’s campaign launched an ad which again accused Barack Obama of sinking immigration reform in the Senate and also charged the Democrats with running “fraudulent” ads.

On Wednesday the Obama campaign will respond with this new ad in Spanish which will air in (you guessed it) Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Colorado, washingtonpost.com reports.

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As Politico’s Ben Smith notes, the new ad doesn’t go so far as to suggest that McCain and Rush Limbaugh are on the same side of the immigration fight, as the Obama campaign did in previous commercials. This time it says McCain “keeps manipulating and lying about immigration. He wants to hide the fact that he was the one who turned his back on us.”

Then a CNN clip is played (and replayed) of McCain saying at a debate between the Republican primary candidates that he would not vote for his own immigration reform bill. As we noted when the Republican campaign launched their latest ad, it was a bit surprising that the central claim in Spanish-language ads continues to be related to the failed immigration bill of 2006 — since the Obama campaign could easily do what it’s doing now: call McCain on his reversal regarding that bill.

The ad finishes by saying,

He surrendered to the anti-immigration movement and, with the Republicans, he betrayed our community. If John McCain is not willing to challenge the Republican Party, how is he going to defend us at the White House?

To underline this last point, McCain, with a big smile on his face, is shown standing next to President George W. Bush.

– Back From The Other Side. Upon his return to Mexico after seven years in the U.S., sixteen-year-old Edgar Gutiérrez “found relatives he couldn’t remember. Kids thought he was stuck up because he had lived in the U.S. Teachers scolded him when he pronounced his name with an American accent.” He is among “a rapidly growing number of undocumented immigrants moving back to Mexico to start over,” some drawn “by a desire to return home after meeting their financial goals,” others “pushed by the faltering U.S. economy.” See: Austin American-Statesman – After life in U.S., migrant children struggle with return to Mexico.

– The New Yorker: McCain Abandoned Immigration Reform. So says the magazine in its endorsement of Barack Obama: “Since the 2004 election, however, McCain has moved remorselessly rightward in his quest for the Republican nomination. He paid obeisance to Jerry Falwell and preachers of his ilk. He abandoned immigration reform, eventually coming out against his own bill.” See: The New Yorker – The Choice.

– Undecided “Europeans” in Pennsylvania. “On Oktoberfest weekend in Wilkes-Barre, the polka dancing, pierogies and kielbasa all capture the culture of an area where European immigrants once came for jobs. But the festival wasn’t the only thing on people’s minds,” reports NPR’s David Greene. People in the area are thinking hard about whom to vote for. See: NPR – Unpredictable Political Opinions In Northeast Pa.

– A Family Divided. One day, Ricardo Guerrero kissed his family goodbye in Durham, North Carolina and flew to his native Mexico with papers a Wake County notary public had helped him prepare and a two-page letter from his American-born wife. “His optimistic plan was to return with a green card (…) But those hopes were dashed by what immigration lawyers say is a sweeping problem — notaries who are unauthorized and unlicensed to practice law overstepping their bounds and giving bad advice about immigration laws and procedures.” See: The News and Observer (Raleigh, N.C.) – Family divided between two countries.

Northern Virginia is one of the places where the immigration debate has been the most heated. In August, we reported on the effect of authorizing local law enforcement to inquire about the immigration status of people who are arrested. Due to stepped up enforcement the Latino population in the city of Manassas and Prince William County has plummeted.

There has also been a sharp increase in the number of people detained on immigration charges. Yesterday, the Washington Post -which has reported extensively on the immigration issue in the D.C. area- ran an article that provides a stark portrait of the system set up to deport those people.

Reporters Nick Miroff and Josh White write,

Illegal immigrants detained as part of the stepped-up enforcement effort in Virginia stay in the country far longer than they should because of a detention and deportation system beset by waste and dysfunction, according to lawyers, detainee accounts and observations of courtroom proceedings.

The article details the case of a legal immigrant from Paraguay who was kept in jail for 30 days “accused of lying about a two-decade-old criminal violation by federal agents who then misplaced his file.” He was then freed, but he told the newspaper he met inmates who had been at the Virginia Beach jail for five or ten months. His case was not an exception, the Post says,

During recent court proceedings before an immigration judge, in more than half the cases the government was missing detainee files, did not know where detainees were being held or failed to bring a detainee to a facility with proper videoconferencing equipment. In one instance, the government lost track of a nursing mother who had been separated from her newborn, thinking she was in a Hampton Roads jail; she was sitting in court a few feet away and wearing an electronic monitoring bracelet. In another case, Judge Wayne R. Iskra grew so frustrated over a detainee’s missing file that he berated the government prosecutor in open court, asking her, “How would you like to sit in jail for two more weeks?”

“The system is broken!” the judge said.

Even voluntary deportations –which we have written about before– have been problematic. One inmate apparently “has been waiting for eight months while his requests to be deported go unanswered.”

* * *

Another big-city paper addressed immigration on Sunday: the Los Angeles Times ran an editorial in which it commended Immigration and Customs Enforcement for the recent raids that netted some 1,700 illegal immigrants convicted of crimes or linked to criminal gangs. However, the paper said, the raids also demonstrated the need for comprehensive immigration reform, including legalization for most of the 12 million people estimated to be in the country illegally.

The arrests apparently were surgical strikes, not a carpet bombing of communities where illegal immigrants reside peacefully or work to feed their families. Certainly they bear little resemblance to the disruptive raids on meatpacking plants, garment factories and other businesses with large, undocumented workforces. Those operations, which seem motivated by a desire to prove that the government is tough on illegal immigration, disrupt the lives of the very families that would be legalized under comprehensive reform legislation.

While approving of the arrests of “gangbangers, gunmen and child molesters,” the paper warned that “under the law, even illegal immigrants without criminal records can be detained and deported.

That reality complicates efforts to combine law enforcement and immigration control. No doubt many of the young men arrested in the sweep deserve the designation of gang member, but the term “gang associate” is disturbingly vague. As long as the defining characteristic of those arrested is their illegal status, even the most carefully designed dragnet risks pulling in innocent friends or relatives of gang members.

Despite all the talk about immigration over the past several years, it’s clear that many people are still mystified about how the U.S. immigration system works.  But if you explain it with pictures maybe people will get it.  That’s the approach taken by two magazines –Reason and GOOD– who just published new graphics describing the process of immigrating to the U.S. today.

Both show how long it takes to become an American citizen, how many people are trying to do so, what it really means to “get in line,” and “why coming illegally might seem like an attractive option.”

GOOD’s graphic is on a sheet the magazine distributes for free at, of all places, Starbucks coffee shops nationwide. (Click on the image to see it in a large size on their site.)

Reason presents a flow chart showing how difficult and slow it is to immigrate legally. (Click on the image to go to their site and see it in full size.)