The law requires police, while enforcing other laws, to question a person’s immigration status if officers have a reasonable suspicion that the person is in the country illegally. It also makes it a state crime for immigrants to not carry immigration documents.

Supporters say the law was needed because the federal government hasn’t adequately confronted illegal immigration in Arizona, the busiest illegal gateway for immigrants into the United States. Opponents say the law would lead to racial profiling and distract from police officers’ traditional roles in combating crimes in their communities.

Since Brewer signed the measure into law on April 23, it has inspired rallies in Arizona and elsewhere by advocates on both sides of the immigration debate. Some opponents have advocated a tourism boycott of Arizona.

It also led an unknown number of illegal immigrants to leave Arizona for other American states or their home countries and prompted the Obama administration to file a lawsuit seeking to invalidate the law.

Salgado’s attorneys argue the judge should block the law before it takes effect because it would require the officer to use race as a primary factor in enforcing the law and because the state law is trumped by federal immigration law.

His lawyers also say the Phoenix Police Department is planning to enforce the new law, even though federal authorities haven’t authorized all Phoenix officers to enforce federal immigration law.

Attorneys for Brewer asked that the officer’s lawsuit be thrown out because Salgado doesn’t allege a real threat of harm from enforcing the new law and instead bases his claim on speculation. They also said the state law prohibits racial profiling and that it isn’t trumped by federal immigration law because it doesn’t attempt to regulate the conditions under which people can enter and leave the country.

The other challenges to the law were filed by the U.S. Department of Justice, civil rights organizations, clergy groups, a researcher from Washington and a Tucson police officer.

Bolton will hold similar hearings on July 22 in the lawsuits filed by the federal government and civil rights groups.

Rivera’s initiative came as leaders of United We Dream, a leading group of undocumented students, presented White House officials with a letter signed by more than 90 immigration law professors who argued that the president has “clear executive authority” to halt deportations of students who might benefit from such legislation, according to the New York Times. The Obama administration says its policy of “prosecutorial discretion” spares otherwise law-abiding young people, but student groups such as the National Immigrant Youth Alliance say the administration has broken its promises.

The students, disenchanted with Obama’s failure to secure passage of the DREAM Act in 2010, have expressed interest in Rubio and Rivera’s proposals as a way to save young people from being deported from the only country many of them have ever known. With the latest poll of Latino voters showing Mitt Romney trailing President Obama by 34 points, Hispanic Republicans have been looking to moderate the party’s hardline stance against illegal immigration. Without a change in the party’s image, said one Texas Republican this week, the growing Latino demographic may transform Texas into a Democratic bastion by 2020.

But this week Rubio took an inspection tour of the U.S. prison at Guantanamo, which seemed intended to burnish his foreign policy credentials as a possible vice presidential candidate, and left immigration to Rivera, his former ally in the House, who is under investigation for tax evasion.

Rivera said he was moved to introduce the bill by the story of a constituent, Daniela Peleaz, who came to the United States from Colombia with her family when she was four. Now Peleaz, a high school valedictorian who has been accepted to Dartmouth, faces the possibility of deportation.

The legislation authorizes the Secretary of Homeland Security to suspend the deportation of an undocumented immigrant and to grant him or her temporary non-immigrant status if he or she is 19 years of age or younger, arrived in the U.S. before age 16, has lived here for five consecutive years and has been accepted by a four-year college or university. After five years, those students who have graduated could apply for a five-year extension of non-immigrant status. After eight years of non-immigrant status, the students would be eligible to apply for permanent residence.

Rivera’s bill faces the same obstacles that have stymied Rubio: a Republican presidential candidate who is uninterested in immigration reform as a campaign issue, a party on Capitol Hill that is actively hostile to the idea of helping undocumented youth, and a Democratic president who already seems to have the Hispanic vote wrapped up.

Rivera’s initiative is even more limited than the limited approach that Rubio says he wants to take. Gaby Pacheco, a United We Dream leader, described the bill as a “¼ DREAM Act.”

“It mirrors the DREAM Act with a component for achieving permanent residency after ten years, but it has no provisions for military service, and it applies to a much smaller group,” Pacheco said. She said DREAM activists were nonetheless open to supporting the bill if it would spare any young people from deportation, but that they needed more time to study its provisions.

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors reducing both legal and illegal immigration, dismissed Rivera’s bill as a form of amnesty “that is not going to be acceptable to us or the vast majority of the American people.”

Pacheco said the DREAM Act students enlisted the law professors to pressure the Obama administration to halt deportations while Congress tries to address the issue.

“Even Republicans are saying something needs to be done,” she said. “We’ve been hearing from Celia Munoz [Obama's adviser on Latino affairs] that the president says, ‘I wish had the power’ to stop the deportations. Well he does.”

The letter from the law professors said the president has wide leeway under the law to defer deportations.

“We did not want doubt about the president’s legal authority to muddy the waters of the debate,”  Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and author of the letter, told the Times.

But with the president reluctant to be seen as protecting illegal immigrants and the inability of Republicans like Rivera and Rubio to sway their party, the political prospects of relief for undocumented students are worse than ever.

But as Romney clumsily half-courts the Hispanic vote, conditions at our southern border are growing more dire. The brutal drug-related violence that has long gripped Mexico is on the rise. Two weeks ago, 49 bodies missing their heads, hands and legs were found near Monterey, Mexico.  A message left nearby indicated the Zetas cartel was responsible. One week earlier, 18 dismembered bodies were found in Guadalajara. One week before that, 23 bodies, with indications of torture, were found hanging from a bridge in Nuevo Laredo on the U.S. border. They are casualties of an apocalyptic drug war, a thriving human smuggling trade and, more broadly, a deeply dysfunctional relationship between the U.S. and Mexico.

Both Romney’s rhetoric and this recent rise in violence belie our extraordinarily schizophrenic attitudes toward immigration and the Mexican border. But according to Steven Bender, law professor at Seattle University, those can be fixed. In his new book, “Run for the Border: Vice and Virtue in U.S.-Mexico Border Crossings,” Bender takes a historical look at the north- and southbound journeys that citizens of both countries have taken since the U.S. and Mexican boundaries were defined. He argues that much of our border policy is determined by long-held stereotypes of the Mexican crosser – the lazy immigrant coming to gouge social services, the sly immigrant coming to steal jobs, or the criminal immigrant endangering American communities – when, in fact, the vast majority of Mexican immigrants come to work for their own survival and that of their families. Bender also makes clear that Mexican workers are possibly more crucial to the American economy now than they’ve ever been.

“Run for the Border” calls for a more honest and, in Bender’s words, “compassionate” border policy that can make both the United States and Mexico safer and stronger.

So far, border policy and, to an extent, immigration reform don’t seem to have become as prominent in this election cycle as they were in 2008. Do you agree? And why do you think that is?

I think both Democrats and Republicans realize that they’re at an impasse and that there’s little political capital to be gained by pushing forth immigration reform, particularly comprehensive immigration reform. Democrats are going to resist anything that’s too restrictive, and Republicans are going to resist anything that has anything involving what they would term “amnesty,” which would include the DREAM Act.  So, even portions of immigration reform that have previously been bipartisan – such as the DREAM Act – are stymied awaiting the election.

Four years ago, on the other hand, there was an assumption that we would finally turn as a nation to resolve the problem of immigration reform. But quickly, with states like Arizona and Alabama taking their own action, the dynamics of immigration within the U.S. shifted, and then the global economic crisis hit. Traditionally, it’s very difficult to have realistic, meaningful, compassionate immigration reform in times of economic turmoil. And now that we seem to be starting to emerge from the economic distress, the onset of election season politics has further stymied reform. It’s really a matter of getting past the election and going [forward] from there.

There are enormous differences between how the U.S. deals with its Mexican and Canadian borders. Since the middle of the Bush administration, our restrictions on the Canadian border have become tighter, but they are still much more lax than those on the Mexican border, even though a fair amount of marijuana is trafficked into the U.S. from Canada.

That’s correct. And it’s interesting that in the wake of 9/11, even though none of the 9/11 terrorists had crossed the U.S.-Mexico border, we have focused so much energy on the southern border as a gateway, presumably for terrorists. There has really been only one possible terrorist link to the U.S.-Mexico border since 9/11, yet we have focused so much in terms of resources and technology and wall building on that border in the name of homeland security. It’s today’s face of immigration – the Mexican face – that explains why there is so much emphasis on walling off Mexico rather than Canada.

[Also] interesting in relation to Canada is that, in the last couple of weeks, the Canadian paper The Globe has run a series on Canada’s immigration woes. The editorial that opened the series stated that Canada needs one million immigrants, in the short-run, to handle the necessary jobs, given the aging population. That is, of course, completely opposite from the tenor of the debate in the United States, where we view immigrants as somehow coming in and stealing jobs to which they’re not entitled.

Recently we’ve learned that more than half of babies born in the U.S. are now non-white. How do you think the country’s changing demographics will affect the way we think about border policy and immigration?

Well, at the same time that Anglo births are decreasing, the Mexican birthrate is also decreasing. But rather than comparing, it’s important to note that ultimately we may be in the same position as Canada, in terms of needing more young, viable immigrant labor. And, given the contributions of immigrants to the overall birth rate (including immigrants from all countries), and in light of the pressing needs of our social security system, our need to compete in the global economy, and the needs of the housing market, we ought to celebrate the fact that we still remain viable as a country, in large part due to immigrant births.

The American military has been experimenting with drone technology on the border for years.  There are now concerns that border vigilantes – on the U.S. side – could begin to use drones, which are already being purchased by police departments. 

There’s a long history, particularly in the U.S. and on the Arizona-Mexico and Texas-Mexico borders, of vigilantes. Most recently, the Minuteman Project vigilante campaign was really the precursor to Arizona’s immigration law — SB1070. There were a number of documented instances where the Minuteman project and ranchers exceeded the U.S.’s lawful bounds. As for drones, there are some chilling comparisons to the use of drones in Asia and the European Union. Considering the possibility that the border could some day be patrolled by drones, it’s important for us to ask this question: If, as I posit in my new book, undocumented workers who are crossing the border are among the most virtuous of border crossers, how is a drone going to evaluate and assess virtue? Not at all. The drone is going to be programmed simply to keep [border crossers] out, whether they are bringing drugs or they’re coming to work in U.S. fields and factories. So, I fear that.

You argue that Americans need to reduce demand for drugs, rather than simply cracking down on the supply. How do we do that?

We’re basically the biggest drug user in the world [sitting] next to a poor supplier country, Mexico. One of the ways to reduce demand is through selective legalization. The funds that our country would accrue through that change could be used for greater intervention and treatment – which is part of the answer to your question. But I also suggest the possibility of a moral imperative for U.S. residents to take greater responsibility for the mounting death toll in Mexico from the drug wars, and, in light of that, to really re-think drug use from that perspective.

The book argues that American cultural and economic needs can converge with those of Mexico, leading to a “compassionate” border policy.   

Yes. There are a number of grounds on which the economic (and other) interests of U.S. residents converge with a border policy that expands lawful immigration. Such a policy would assist the ailing social security system, address the need for replacement laborers, [and] aid the housing market – which depends on entry-level buyers. Increased immigration is also a way of competing with emerging economies, such as China and India. Immigrants are going to be essential for remaining competitive in a global market place.

You believe that immigrant populations can have a “renaissance” effect on economically depressed U.S. cities. Where has this happened? 

I think virtually every city that’s lately experienced a boost in immigration has experienced the potential for a renaissance that they may not recognize because immigrants tend to be far more entrepreneurial than other residents, in terms of everything from starting new restaurants and stores to running other businesses. Particularly when you’re looking at an infusion of immigrants into a place where there’s otherwise been a population exodus – the Rust Belt area, for example — and notably in places that have also been regions of backlash against immigration, such as Hazleton, Pennsylvania. These areas have failed to recognize the potential renaissance in their communities [due to] immigrants.

Many American corporations take advantage of the maquiladora structure – Mexico’s largely unregulated manufacturing system. Like American illegal immigrants, workers in maquiladoras lack the legal protections that most American workers take for granted. But are they worse off than undocumented Mexican laborers in the U.S.?

The laws between the United States and Mexico – considering the flashpoints of environmental protections and labor laws – are fairly similar, but in practice they’re quite different. Through corruption and through lack of resources for enforcement, environmental and labor protections that we take for granted in the United States are easily subverted in Mexico. And so the workers in [Mexico's] factories and the citizens in surrounding communities face worse environmental hazards and receive lower real wages, particularly in the borderlands communities where the cost of living is not much lower than across the border in the United States. Those workers have a very difficult time making ends meet. And that’s what prompts the allure of making a few dollars an hour vs. a few dollars a day; and that’s what has prompted, over recent years, particularly since NAFTA, a very strong push of immigrants across the border looking for jobs in the United States. The maquiladoras also benefit Mexico in particular ways. Certainly they provide, and have provided, a number of jobs that pay better than many other jobs in Mexico. At the same time, they have contributed to the uprooting of families from the interior of the country. They have been sites of labor abuses, and they’ve contributed to environmental degradation in the communities they’re found in.

They may also be to blame for the huge amount of murders of civilian women in Juarez. Some have noted that the poor treatment of women has been so institutionalized, through the factories, that murder somehow becomes acceptable. 

Yes. It’s the idea that was suggested by a law professor, Elvia Arriola, who has extensively studied the impact of the maquiladoras on women, particularly on the hundreds of unsolved murders – what is a femicide in Juarez over the years. She contends that the culture of subordination of workers, particularly that of female workers – who are desired by the employers because, among other things, they are perceived as less likely to object to the miserable working conditions – has contributed to a subordination of women in the broader community and to a local culture that does not value their lives and is not concerned with solving these mass deaths.

Many U.S. citizens go to Mexico to retire, which, as you discuss, has a complicated effect on the Mexican economy. There are benefits to an influx of relatively wealthy people, but there are also very specific ways that it harms the Mexican economy.  

Yes. Like the maquiladora experience in Mexico, the influx of U.S. residents as retirees, or even as buyers of second homes and vacation homes, really leaves a conflicted economic record. Certainly there’s a boost to the local economy, with the initial building of these retirement and other homes, but that tends to be a fleeting economic presence, and if anything it drives up prices and really excludes Mexican residents from the prime real estate. You have this dichotomy then between the sort of walled-in southern-California-type oasis that’s inhabited by the retirees and the working-class housing of the laborers on the other side of the walled-in community. And that’s a dichotomy that we find in the United States as well, but it’s a particularly stark contrast in these Mexican retirement havens.

A running theme of the book seems to be that the Mexican government has tended to make border policy decisions that are rational in terms of economic self-interest, while the U.S. government has behaved in its own self-interest, with an added slice of irrationality based on stereotypes and fears. How do you think race plays into the decisions of our government?  

One of the main ways it plays out here is in how we undervalue immigrant labor. The Mexican face has become the face of immigration, and we simply don’t see virtue in Mexican border crossers, whether they’re coming for jobs (which is most often the case) or for other purposes. We tend to view their entrance in a derogatory way: that they are coming to either commit crime through drug dealing or to wrest public services away from more deserving populations. That’s the lens through which we view immigration proposals, and that’s why there have been such stymied efforts to pass comprehensive immigration reform. It’s because of the Mexican face of immigration and how racialized that debate has become.

There is a dynamic that has emerged in the immigration debate in which, while it might be improper in some civilized settings to make overt racialized attacks on Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, by couching the attack as against “undocumented immigrants,” anything goes.  Anything can be said with impunity about “undocumented immigrants” because they’re being discussed as a group that is apparently not racialized. But in fact we all know that the things that are said about immigrants are being said about Mexicans.

The war on drugs has narrowed down the cartels to the most efficient and brutal groups, and violence against civilians in Mexico is increasing. What can be done?

The Mexican government needs to return to its long-standing policy – what is unfortunately a policy of corruption, but a less bloody solution – of treating the drug cartels more as businessmen, similar to how the United States treats the alcohol industry. I don’t suggest that lightly, but with the mounting death toll, that’s a reasonable compromise that makes more sense and that better serves Mexico.

Wouldn’t such a policy would allow for greater competition and decreased profits for the few cartels currently in power? 

I think what the drug cartels would be most opposed to would be selective decriminalization or legalization of drugs in the United States, particularly of marijuana, which might alone account for 60 percent of cartel profits in Mexico. That is what would scare the cartels to death: If we on the other side of the border finally tackled the elephant in the room of decriminalization and legalization beyond medicinal marijuana.

As for decreased criminalization within Mexico, I believe the cartels prefer whatever leads to more chaos. If lives are viewed as expendable, then there is potential for profit in great chaos.  So, I think that some of the cartels would, I agree, be opposed to increased legality within Mexico because they would lose that advantage of profit and the chaos that ensues today.

It seems unlikely that anti-immigration sentiment can be changed through policy alone, and that we may need vigorous public re-education before we can manage to get legislators to change policy in the first place.  

I agree. I think that to begin to address the derogatory image of the immigrant, before there can be anything along the order of compassionate immigration reform, we need to re-learn who these migrants are.  And I think that happens in face-to-face local settings, where people begin to hear the stories of these workers, begin to realize the compelling human interests that are driving them, and begin to recognize, really, the desperation that comes with poverty and that the immigrant’s search is really a search for the American dream. I think that when those dialogues occur, one-to-one, person-to-person, face-to-face, the image of the migrant can change into one of a virtuous contributor to the U.S. economy.

But given that xenophobic sentiment seems to be on the rise in some parts of the country, this seems difficult. In Arizona, people are going to have interactions with immigrants regardless of whether they wish to or not, but plenty of people who strongly oppose immigration live far from the border or immigrant populations – they could be in Appalachian Ohio, for example. They might not have any of these interactions. 

I actually think that the long-term is going to demand leadership from political leaders, community leaders, and civic leaders. And it’s going to need to happen in what I could call bastions of hate, which include parts of Arizona and places such as Hazleton, Pennsylvania, Farmer’s Branch, Texas, and parts of the South. That’s where these dialogues are going to have to take effect, and unfortunately it’s not an overnight thing.  In the meantime, people are dying crossing the border, and people are dying in the drug war. And while my book calls for, in the first instance, an immediate halt to the bloodshed while policies are transformed, realistically the blood is going to continue to flow while we hold these crucial debates and while we rethink what it means to be an American.

With those words, Martinez inflicted multiple wounds on whatever slender chance she had to join the national ticket. First, she indicated support for the immigration agenda that President Obama promises to pursue if he defeats Romney in November. Second, the reforms the 43-year-old first-term Republican favors are opposed by every Republican member of the Senate (even those like John McCain, who used to support it) and a solid majority in the House. (In case there was any doubt, the same day Martinez’s interview appeared, Politico reported that the Romney campaign was seeking a “boring white guy” as a running mate.)

Martinez had previously said she wasn’t interested in a place on the Republican ticket. Her comments certainly indicate she isn’t interested in the public posturing necessary to achieve it.

On immigration reform, Martinez said she favors:

an approach “with multiple levels”: increased border security; deportation for criminals; a guest-worker program for people who want “to go freely back and forth across the border to work”; a DREAM Act-style pathway to citizenship, through the military or college, for children brought here illegally by their parents; and a visa (coupled with a “penalty” or a “tagback”) that allows rest of the illegal population to remain in the U.S. while they follow standard naturalization procedures.

In conversation, Martinez slagged Romney’s advocacy of “self-deportation” for the estimated 11 million undocumented people living in the United States.

“‘Self-deport?’ What the heck does that mean?” she snapped.

Martinez is not the only person asking. As articulated by Romney during the primary season,”self-deportation” means making life so miserable for the undocumented that they will “voluntarily” leave the country. Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and Romney advisor, told me he thought the United States could remove 5.5 million “illegal aliens” by the end of the first Romney administration.

As John McCain and others have pointed out, a GOP campaign promise to forcibly evict millions of Americans from their homes is neither attractive nor practical as an appeal to Latino voters, the fastest-growing group in the American electorate.

Martinez suggested Romney needed a more attractive message.

“I have no doubt Hispanics have been alienated during this campaign,” she said. “But now there’s an opportunity for Governor Romney to have a sincere conversation about what we can do and why.”

Impolitic to the end, Martinez expressed skepticism about Sen. Marco Rubio’s much-hyped but still vague idea of GOP variation on the DREAM Act. Rubio, with Romney’s tacit blessing, is seeking to moderate the Republicans’ reputation on immigration by developing a DREAM Act-style measure that would protect undocumented young people from deportation without giving them citizenship.

Politicians, Martinez said, cannot “fix [immigration] by saying, ‘Here’s the DREAM Act and we’re done.’ It has to be part of a larger plan.”

In other words, the New Mexico governor is that now-rare national Republican figure who favors comprehensive immigration reform, otherwise known as amnesty. Martinez would open the illegal immigrant’s path to citizenship that Marco Rubio avoids and that most Republicans seek to block. She probably won’t be Mitt Romney’s running mate. But Susana Martinez will be heard.

I think the vast majority of Americans understand that if you were four years old when you were brought here, you grew up in this country your whole life, and you’re now a valedictorian of a high school or are a high-achieving academic person, and have much to contribute to our future, I think most Americans, the vast majority of Americans find that compelling and want to accommodate that.

It was a signal that the first-term Cuban-American lawmaker wants to modify the party’s “enforcement first” orthodoxy on illegal immigrants to the United States. Rubio also distanced himself, every so slightly, from Arizona’s controversial law targeting illegal immigrants that Romney has endorsed. Rubio told Juan Williams the measure “is not a model for our country.”

For Democrats, Rubio’s statements were just so much eyewash. Maddow blogger Steven Benen dismissed the proposal as a “DREAM Act without the dream,” but Capitol Hill Democrats cared enough about  the initiative to have Majority Leader Harry Reid rip the idea (without mentioning its sponsor) in a Sunday Op-Ed for Rubio’s hometown Miami Herald.

For pro-immigration Republicans, Rubio’s gambit is a long shot. In the race for Romney’s ear, Rubio starts out far behind the current front-runner, Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state who is the most effective immigration restrictionist in American politics today. The author of the Arizona law and a similar one in Alabama,  Kobach endorsed Romney in January and signed on to the campaign as an advisor. He is the foremost exponent of Romney’s avowed policy of “self-deportation” for illegal immigrants. Kobach told Salon in February that he believed aggressive enforcement of existing immigration laws could persuade 5.5 million people to leave the country “voluntarily” by the end of Romney’s first term in 2016. If that unprecedented exodus occurs, most of the people coerced into leaving will be Hispanic.

Rubio’s only advantage is that Kobach’s approach has helped drive the standing of the Republican Party among Latino voters to an all-time low and thoroughly spooked some Republican strategists. A Fox News poll earlier this month showed Obama winning 70 percent support among Latino voters, compared to just 14 percent for Romney. At the same time, the Latino vote has surged upward from 2008 levels in the swing states of New Mexico (14 percent), Colorado (15 percent), Arizona (23.2 percent), and Florida (34.5 percent), according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. Those numbers, Politico reported last month, have several leading Republican senators including Jon Kyl of Arizona, Kay Bailey Hutchison of Texas, and Saxby Chambliss of Georgia fearing a “Latino revolt” against the party on Election Day.

“Rubio is one of the folks who are trying to moderate the GOP position on immigration,” says Roberto Suro, a professor at the University of Southern California. “They’ve managed to get everybody in the party scared and they have a point. The latest poll numbers are amazing.”

In November, nearly 22 million Hispanics will be eligible to vote, an increase of more than 2 million from 2008, Suro notes. In 2008  Sen. John McCain won about 31 percent of the Hispanic vote and lost badly to Obama. In 2004, George W. Bush won 40 percent to 44 percent of Hispanic voters and was reelected.

“If Romney is at 20 to 30 percent among Latinos, Obama’s chances of holding the White House are much, much better,” says Suro.

“Romney is going to start pivoting on the issue,” he predicted. “Rubio speaks for a group of people who are hoping they can push the party more toward the center. But how much can Romney move? A lot of people are going to be watching.”

For immigration restrictionists, Rubio’s proposal amounts to another variation on “amnesty,” says Ira Mehlman, spokesman for Federation for American Immigration Reform. “Republicans are looking back nostalgically to the time when they got 40 percent of the Latino vote. It’s not likely to happen,” he said.

What Rubio lacks, compared to Kobach, is substance. In talking to Newsmax Rubio tried to cast his position in terms of conservative ideology.  ”People from Latin America come here to get away from the failed economic government policies of places like Venezuela and Cuba. They come here because big government doesn’t work.”

This may work in the blogosphere but it seems detached from the reality of most immigrants’ lives.  The vast majority of legal and illegal immigrants come from Mexico, whose neoliberal economic policies have been praised by Presidents Obama and Bush. Venezuela does not even rank in the top 10 countries of origin for Latino immigrants in the U.S. It is true that socialist Cuba ranks fourth on that list with 1.67 million immigrants in the U.S. — right behind impeccably capitalistic El Salvador, which has sent 1.7 million people here. The fact is that most people who come to the United States seek opportunity for themselves and their children and most people who want them to leave don’t care about their motivation in coming.

Rubio sounded more convincing when he told Juan Williams, “We used to brag about being a nation of immigration; now we fight about it.”

Can Rubio succeed? His first foray on the issue illuminates his opportunities and his obstacles. With a substantive policy agenda that signals a new Republican approach to immigration, Rubio could be an asset to Romney’s increasingly uphill battle against Obama, whether or not he’s on the ticket. Without a substantive agenda, he’s no competition for Kris Kobach.

In an email, Kobach said he had not seen any details of Rubio’s Republican DREAM Act, “so I really can’t comment.” Kobach also said he has not had any discussions about the proposal with the Romney campaign.

In short, Marco Rubio hasn’t won Romney’s ear yet.

With Washington unlikely to take up immigration reform any time soon, some immigrants, like activists in the Occupy and LGBT movements, are turning to more confrontational tactics. Young undocumented immigrants across the country have come out as “undocumented and unafraid” in the most conspicuous of places: in front of the Alabama Capitol; in Maricopa County, Ariz., home of Sheriff Joe Arpaio; in front of federal immigration courts; and even inside ICE offices, processing centers, and detention centers. While they sometimes have specific causes, such as Orellana’s release, they also had a larger demand: that the civil and human rights of all undocumented immigrants be recognized and respected.

This is a marked change in goals and tactics from just one or two years ago, when the DREAM Act, which would have given some young undocumented immigrants a path to securing legal status, was the main immigration issue. Young activists, including many potential beneficiaries who are known as DREAMers, organized, rallied, held sit-ins, and undertook hunger strikes. A small group even marched from Florida to Washington, D.C., to press for its enactment. But it failed in Congress. Since then, students like Chairez and Lee are dreaming bigger and bolder. They aren’t just arguing that DREAMers like themselves — college students with clean records whose parents brought them to the U.S. when they were children — should be given a path to citizenship. They are helping to break down the artificial divisions — including those made by people who consider themselves immigrant advocates — between “model” immigrants (i.e., DREAMers) and others. Activists are forcing ICE to live up to its word that it is focusing its efforts on deporting “dangerous” criminals and not DREAMers. “We believe that regardless of [Miguel’s] immigration status, he should be treated as a human being,” Chairez shouted into a megaphone while seated in the street during the demonstration. “We have human rights.”

Youth-led immigrants-rights groups have organized in support of such efforts. The National Immigrant Youth Alliance has published an online “Coming Out Guide” and sponsored a “Coming Out of the Shadows” week this month. The movement has caught the attention of traditional immigrants-rights groups. National Council of La Raza is cautiously on board, stressing that coming out is an individual choice. “For many of the students this is their way of moving their advocacy forward,” says Laura Vazquez, a legislative analyst at NCLR. “We think it has been tremendously helpful for individual students who take that choice and make that decision.” However, some groups, like the American Immigration Council, see the tactic as too dangerous. “[The AIC] would never recommend to anyone that they put themselves at risk,” says communications director Wendy Sefsaf.

Yet, increasingly, young undocumented immigrants are doing just that and insisting that they will no longer remain silent. So far, according to activists, none of the recent acts of civil disobedience have resulted in deportation, but the threat remains very real as the Obama administration continues to deport young undocumented immigrants, including those whose cases have received considerable publicity. Young activists are well aware that any kind of legislative reform in the short-term, and especially before this fall’s elections, is highly unlikely. 

They’re using their actions, however, to raise awareness and funding in support of their cause. In Philadelphia, within hours of Chairez and Lee’s arrest other DREAMers kicked off a well-orchestrated publicity campaign. Emails were sent from Chairez and Lee’s accounts stating, “If you are reading this email I have been arrested in a planned act of civil disobedience.” Dream Activist Pennsylvania, an organization of which both are members, sent out messages to followers on Twitter and posted videos of their arrest, as well as video messages Chairez and Lee recorded prior to the action. The organization also sent out messages soliciting donations for their bail. News of the arrests spread via television, radio and English- and Spanish-language print media outlets.

By engaging in direct confrontations and being more open about their undocumented status, these activists hope to pave the way for broader changes than the ones the DREAM Act would have achieved.