The court’s decision, expected in June, is sure to roil an accelerating presidential campaign where immigration has already proven to be a potent issue — and possibly in unexpected ways. ”In terms of electoral politics, it’s a win-win for Obama,” says Antonio Gonzalez, president of William C. Velasquez Institute, a Latino public policy research organization. If the court throws out the law, Obama can claim vindication that immigration restrictionists have gone too far, Gonzalez says. If the court upholds the Arizona law, he can “condemn the decision and vow to fight other state laws,” a stance that is likely to be popular with Latinos who now make up 25 percent of the electorate and whose support is crucial to the president’s reelection prospects.

While upholding  the law would “give a shot in the arm to the politics of immigrant exclusion,” Gonzalez argues it would also limit Romney’s ability to expand his appeal to Latino voters, something that the candidate seems inclined to do.

During the primary season, Romney effectively blunted challenges from Texas Gov. Rick Perry and former House Speaker Newt Gingrich by portraying them as soft on illegal immigrants, the vast majority of whom are from Mexico and Central America. At the same time, polls showed Obama opening an enormous lead among Latino voters, prompting Romney to confide to supporters that his campaign was “doomed” unless he could win Latino votes. This week the Romney campaign distanced itself slightly from Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, author of the Arizona law and a Romney adviser. At the same time the candidate stumped with Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida who has said the Arizona law is “not a model” for the country.

“He’s trying to get out of the shackles” of his hard-line position, Gonzalez argues. “If law is upheld, it makes it much harder for him to do that.”

If the law is thrown out, “Romney has more of an opening to back up from his primary positions and talk about alternative plans,” says Chuck Rocha, executive director of the Latino Project, a Democratic political action committee. “If its not thrown out, he has to own it.”

Rocha says his PAC will use a decision favorable to Arizona “to appeal to Mexican-American voters who see this law as Republican overreach” in a dozen contested congressional elections from Florida to California.

Meanwhile, immigration restrictionists talk bravely that Romney will benefit among the general electorate, if not with Latinos, if the law is upheld.

“If Romney holds firm, we know there’s a broad activist base across the country that is highly motivated and that doesn’t want to see taxpayers pay for services for people who have no right to be here,” says Dan Stein of Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), which supports the Arizona law.

Stein is right that restrictionist laws are increasingly popular. Five states (Alabama, Georgia, South Carolina, Utah and Indiana) have adopted similar laws, but have been enjoined from enforcing them. FAIR says six other states are actively considering them. But they have also mobilized resistance from business interests. When Rubio served as Speaker of the Florida House, Arizona-style immigration legislation never got out of committee. Even in solidly Republican Texas and Mississippi, restrictionists could not get an Arizona-style blll approved this year.

Chris Newman, general counsel for National Day Laborer Network in Los Angeles, isn’t so sure, however, that the case will help Obama. He think a decision favorable to Arizona would “put Obama in a tough spot.” While the Obama administration has fought the states seeking to establish their own immigration policies, it has also carried out record numbers of deportations, including children.

“He’ll have to make normative arguments why Arizona law is immoral and unjust and he’ll have a hard time doing that because many parts of the law track his own policy. His signature policy has sought to sue local police as a ‘force multiplier’ for immigration enforcement. Arizona policies are a symptom of that force multiplication.”

“The administration,” he says, “has sought to benefit from the misery imposed on immigrants on Arizona.”

The political impact of the court’s decision may be most decisive in two swing states where the immigration issue is most hotly contested: Missouri, where the legislature is considering an Arizona-style bill, and Arizona itself, where the devastating effects of the law on families with undocumented members is driving so many Latinos away from the Republican Party that the Obama campaign now dreams of winning the state in November.

“The issue is not going to go away,” says Stein. “If anything its hotter and more robust than ever.”

Romney’s desire to maneuver is transparent. When he hired Ed Gillespie, former Bush White House pollster and immigration moderate, the Hill newspaper saw ” a sign the campaign will heavily court Hispanic voters — perhaps at the expense of immigration hard-liners in the party.” Then Romney allowed himself to be overheard telling supporters that “we have to get Hispanic voters to vote for our party” and warning that overwhelming Hispanic support for Obama “spells doom for us.” He also mouthed approving sounds about Marco Rubio’s pitch for a Republican version of the DREAM Act. Republican immigration advocate Tamar Jacoby pronounced herself “thrilled.”

But the perils of the pivot emerged when Romney’s campaign tried to Etch A Sketch away the candidate’s working relationship with Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state and immigration hard-liner. It was Kobach who persuaded Romney to advocate “self-deportation” as the solution to the presence of 11 million undocumented immigrants in the country. When a campaign spokesperson told Politico on Monday that Kobach is not a campaign “advisor” but a “supporter,” Kobach responded by telling Think Progress that his relationship with the campaign has not changed. Then he upped the ante by telling WaPo’s Greg Sargent that Rubio’s idea is an unacceptable variation on amnesty and he expects Romney to reject it.

How long can Kris Kobach maintain de facto control of Romney’s immigration message? With Romney’s Latino poll numbers sinking toward single digits and Gillespie taking a larger role in the campaign, it may not be long. Restrictionist blogger Mickey Kaus thinks Romney is most likely to make a “targeted concession” such as backing a variation on the DREAM Act. Rubio, by most accounts, is planning to introduce a bill to legalize the status of high-achieving undocumented students in coming weeks with an eye toward forcing a Senate floor vote in the fall.

Both pro-and anti-immigration advocates deride Rubio’s idea as a stunt, and, depending on its language, it may be.  But the Romney campaign has no better card to play. “The dreamers,” as the students call themselves, are held in high esteem by the Latinos, nine out ten of whom  support for the DREAM Act. And fortunately for Romney, two leading student groups that have fought for the DREAM Act say they are open to Rubio’s idea.

“We definitely support the concept,” Mohammad Abdollah of DreamActivist.org told Salon. “From everything we’ve heard, it sounds like something we could support. We need relief. If it comes from a Democratic or a Republican proposal, for us it doesn’t matter.”

Gaby Pacheo of United We Dream, which is supported by the Service Employees International Union, which has endorsed Obama, was more cautious.

“We’re willing to entertain the idea,” she said. “We’re glad to see a Republican coming forward on this issue. We want to see what the bill says and who are the Republicans who will also support it. Rubio is going to need support not just in the Senate but in the House as well. Where are Mitch McConnell and John Boehner?” The message seems clear. Without Republican support in the House, Rubio’s measure cannot become law and if it can’t become law it will get no help from its putative beneficiaries.

And therein lie the limits of Romney’s ability to pivot on the immigration issue: his allies. To send Latino voters a new message in the fall, he needs the cooperation of Kris Kobach and the Republican congressional leadership, neither of whom is inclined to give it.

The anti-immigration forces say pandering to Latinos who won’t vote Republican anyway will be less effective for Romney than running hard against Obama’s economic record. This strategy has its limits too. The post-2008 downturn, it turns out, has been less severe for Latinos than for whites. A Pew Hispanic Center study found Latinos lost less than whites in the 2007-09 recession and gained more in the 2009-2011 recovery. Latinos are now gaining jobs at twice the rate of whites. So the economic issue is not as sharp as it might be. Besides, wrote Ali Noorani of National Immigration Forum in a column for Fox News, “no one is going to listen to your economic message if you want to deport their mother.”

Obama’s pitch to Latinos is an ethnically flavored variation on his general election message: I saved you from disaster and delivered benefits.

President Obama has spent the first three years of his term working to restore economic security to the middle class and Latino community. He’s kept nearly 2 million Latinos out of poverty, doubled the amount spent on Pell Grants so 150,000 more Latino students can afford their educations. And by 2014, Obamacare will provide health coverage to 9 million Latinos who are currently uninsured.

Romney’s pitch to Latinos? It’s a work in progress.

Gus from Little Green Footballs found documents showing O’Sullivan was on the board of the “Lexington Research Institute Limited,” aka the VDARE Foundation, from 2006-2010. During that time, VDARE helped found nativist site “Alternative Right” with a $35,000 grant. Alternative Right is edited by Richard B. Spencer, yet another racist/racialist white nationalist.

O’Sullivan was demoted from editorship by National Review ouster-in-chief William F. Buckley during a 1997 purge of Peter Brimelow, a virulent anti-immigration writer (and English immigrant) O’Sullivan championed who went on to found VDARE. VDARE has published a wide variety of extremist white nationalists, like Jared Taylor and Sam Francis.

O’Sullivan is still on the masthead at the National Review, and he was published defending Derbyshire at length at NRO a few days ago.

O’Sullivan says Derbyshire’s “satire” of “anti-white racism” sadly went a bit too far:

It therefore strengthens the anti-white racism it is meant to satirize which, as it happens, is a growing problem in the U.S. — not in the suburbs or backwoods but in the corporate executive suites, the media elites, the courts, the bureaucracy, and of course the entire industry of sensitivity training which used to go under the more honest title of “Political Reeducation” in the gulag.

Yes, “anti-white racism” is obviously a huge and growing threat in our corporate executive suites, as any glance at the Fortune 500 will demonstrate.

Having allowed that Derbyshire’s piece was sloppy and a bit racist, O’Sullivan goes on to defend each point anyway. Sure, Derbyshire believes that black people are innately criminal and stupid, but is that really a fireable offense? He might be right!

After half-purging O’Sullivan more than a decade ago, what possible reason is there to keep him around to embarrassingly defend his more explicitly awful colleagues? Especially while he’s working with the wackos at VDARE.

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.

Here’s how it works. The EB-5 immigration program allows citizens of foreign countries who do not qualify for admission to the U.S. under any other immigration category (such as relatives of U.S. citizens or guest workers) to buy the right to live and work here by investing at least half a million dollars in the U.S. in a government-approved investment. If the investment lasts for two years, green cards authorizing legal permanent resident status are issued to the investors and their families. Up to 10,000 people a year can be admitted to the U.S. under the EB-5 program.

In a devastating new critique of this program published at the National Interest, David North, a former assistant to the U.S. secretary of labor, argues convincingly that the EB-5 inspector program is a terrible idea.

As North notes, the amount of money is an insignificant fraction of the amount of foreign investment in the U.S: “Another way to look at the scale is through the eyes of a serious venture capitalist, who would laugh at the prospect of seeking capital in tranches of half a million dollars.”

The approved investment is supposed to create at least 10 jobs, but as North observes, there is no plausible methodology for determining whether it does or not. And even if there were, federal immigration bureaucrats lack the skills or resources to determine what is a genuine investment and what is a scam designed to get an otherwise unqualified immigrant a visa.

Already the program has generated enough corruption to merit an expose in the New York Times: According to the Times, “developers and state officials [in New York] are stretching the rules to qualify projects for this foreign financing.”

These developers are often relying on gerrymandering techniques to create development zones that are supposedly in areas of high unemployment — and thus eligible for special concessions — but actually are in prosperous ones, according to federal and state records.

One of the more prominent projects is a 34-story glass tower in Manhattan that is to cost $750 million, one-fifth of which is to come from foreign investors seeking green cards. Called the International Gem Tower, it is rising near Fifth Avenue in the diamond district of Manhattan, one of the wealthiest areas in the country.

Yet through the selective use of census statistics, state officials have classified the area as one plagued by high unemployment, the federal and state records show. As a result, the developer has increased the project’s chances of attracting foreigners who will accept little, if any, return on their investment in the project if it means they can secure American visas for their families.

A cash-for-visas program that serves the interests of New York landlords, the politicians they own and foreign plutocrats who want to buy U.S. citizenship by way of green cards for themselves and their kin — as they might say in Manhattan, what’s not to like?

Allowing these “investors” and their relatives into the country reduces the number of slots for deserving immigrants whose energy and skills could offer a lot to America but don’t have half a million dollars to spare. North writes: “My sense is that the United States needs bright people more than relatively small chunks of short-term investments.”

Nobody would object to a program to encourage the kinds of immigrants who have contributed so much to the American economy in the past, including inventors like Alexander Graham Bell and Andrew Carnegie. But neither Bell nor Carnegie could have come up with the equivalent of half a million dollars when they first came to the U.S. The EB-5 is not a program for people who might make fortunes in America in the future on the basis of their own hard work and creativity. It is for foreign nationals who are already rich.

Where does the half-million dollars apiece of EB-5 investors come from, anyway? Ill-gotten wealth is not unknown in the U.S.; in large parts of the world, it is the norm. Should American visas be for sale to people who obtained their wealth abroad, not by hard individual work, but by inheritance, political connections or bribes? How does our republic benefit from giving first visas and then citizenship to Middle Eastern princelings, Latin American landlords and Russian oligarchs?

It is a sad reflection on the decline of the American republic that this squalid program for indirectly selling citizenship has bipartisan support. The Obama administration is even trying to streamline approval procedures to make it easier for foreign plutocrats to buy visas.

Here’s a project that the government ought to consider approving, as a vehicle for the EB-5 foreign investors program: removing the bronze plaque from the base of the Statue of Liberty that bears Emma Lazarus’ famous poem, “The New  Colossus.”

“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips.  “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

The torch held up by Miss Liberty could be replaced by a flashing neon sign, paid for by a Russian oilman, Mexican oligarch or Saudi prince who wants to buy a handful of green cards for himself and his family:

AMERICAN VISAS FOR SALE
$500,000 MINIMUM