But a closer look at the numbers is not so reassuring for the president. Much of the growth in the Latino population has occurred in California, Texas, Illinois and New York, which are not likely to be competitive come Election Day. While the Latino population is growing fast, the Latino electorate is not. Compared to other ethnic/racial groups, Latinos are more likely than whites to be under 18 years of age or to be non-citizens. "For every 100 Hispanic residents in the United States, only 44 are eligible voters aged 18 and over and U.S. citizens," notes William Frey, demographer at the Brookings Institution. "In contrast, 78 of every 100 white residents are able to vote."

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Rep. Steve King, R-Iowa, compared immigrants to dogs at a town hall meeting yesterday, telling constituents that the U.S. should pick only the best immigrants the way one chooses the “pick of the litter.”

King told the crowd in Pocahontas, Iowa, that he’s owned lots of bird dogs over the years and advised, “You want a good bird dog? You want one that’s going to be aggressive? Pick the one that’s the friskiest ... not the one that’s over there sleeping in the corner.”

King suggested lazy immigrants should be avoided as well. “You get the pick of the litter and you got yourself a pretty good bird dog. Well, we’ve got the pick of every donor civilization on the planet,” King said. “We’ve got the vigor from the planet to come to America.” The liberal research group American Bridge captured the comments:

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The presumed GOP nominee’s Wednesday speech to the Latino Coalition comes as polls show Romney way behind President Obama among Latino voters and with little hope of capturing the 44 percent of the bloc George W. Bush won in 2004, a highwater mark for the GOP.  Even New Mexico Gov. Susana Martinez (R) -- whom Romney floated as a potential vice-presidential choice -- mocked the presumed GOP’s immigration policy last week.

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That wasn't supposed to happen under a policy of "prosecutorial discretion" announced by ICE director John Morton last June. The goal of the policy, announced with much fanfare in the Spanish language media, was to spare "longtime lawful residents" from deportation and to focus on criminals.

Since then, the adminstration has deported many fewer non-criminal aliens. But non-criminals remain the vast majority of those deported. And those with no criminal record now actually comprise a slightly larger percentage of those forced to leave the country than they did before Morton's announcement.

In the three months before the policy was announced last summer ICE filed for deportation proceedings against 61,192 people of whom 15 percent had criminal records. In the first three months of 2012, ICE sought 37,659 deportations orders, 14 percent of which involved people with criminal records.

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Last month, 20-year-old Izlia Luna of Medford, Ore., was stopped by police for a traffic altercation. The judge threw out the charges. But under the mandate of the Obama administration's Secure Communities program, Luna's fingerprints had been taken. She was found to be undocumented. Luna was brought to the United States from Mexico when she was 2 years old. Instead of being released she was sent to an ICE detention facility in  Tacoma, Wash., 340 miles from her home.

"This is what immigration reform under Obama has gotten us," says Abdollahi, who traveled to Tacoma to rally public attention to Luna's case. "The right to spend up to $5,000 to get a loved one out of jail. When Obama says he isn't deporting dreamers, he's lying."

"Marco Rubio is being a lot more authentic with us," Abdollahi added.

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The rest of us may prefer to cut to the political chase. The justices will, in all likelihood, either generally uphold the constitutionality of Arizona's law -- which expands the powers of state police officers to ask about the immigration status of anyone they stop and to hold those suspected of being in the country illegally -- or they will throw out its key provisions as a usurpation of the federal government's powers. What happens then?

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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.

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The government does not sell U.S. citizenship directly — yet.  But already it sells citizenship indirectly. Rich foreigners who put up a minimal amount of money in “investments” in the U.S. are permitted to buy green cards for themselves and their families, which permit them to apply after five years for the coveted privilege of American citizenship.

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.

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Since 2006 many of the key figures in state-led border security operations and information campaigns have identified themselves as DPS employees or part of the Texas Rangers to the public, policy community and the media, disguising their true identities.

The business card he handed me during the sheriffs meeting identified Sikes as the director of the Border Security Operations Center (BSOC) – which is a type of fusion center for border-security operations in Texas. It’s a project of the Texas Rangers Division, which in turn is a branch of the Texas Department of Public Safety (DPS).

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Yet soon after Arizona's law passed, similar anti-immigrant legislation began appearing in legislatures across the nation. Partially coordinated by the American Legislative Exchange Council, a conservative advocacy group funded in part by private prisons, states from coast to coast initiated their own crackdowns.

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"If we had a true nationwide policy of self-deportation, I believe we would see our illegal alien population cut in half at a minimum very quickly," Kobach told Salon in a recent intervew. With an estimated 11 million undocumented residents in the country, Kobach is hoping to force 5.5 million people to leave the country by 2016

Kobach, elected to statewide office in Kansas in 2010, advocates "self-deportation" but says  he does not want "to do it at gunpoint." Undocumented residents, he said, "should go home on their own volition, under their own will, pick their own day, get their things in order and leave. That's a more humane way."

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By the time she gets to the tortillitas and tamales and call-and-response, the deportees -- the vast majority of them young men, a handful of them minors -- are smiling. Some of them even wink and flirt. This may well be the least exhausting part of their journey.

“Together, we’ll work to do what we can to help the country rise,” continues the greeter, a Guatemalan government employee meeting her third plane of deportees today. She’s poised with a wireless mic before a banner reading, “You’re already in your country with your people” in Spanish and Kekchi, a Mayan language.

But any enthusiasm transmitted to the deported, who then shuffle out the door carrying their earthly belongings in thin, transparent plastic bags, is often temporary.

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GOProud, the gay Republican group that was founded because the Log Cabin Republicans were considered too concerned about gay civil rights and not sufficiently focused on "fiscal issues," is not invited this year, because they are too "aggressive" about being gay, which made Jim DeMint uncomfortable.

CPAC also uninvited the John Birch Society, which had made a triumphant return to mainstream conservative acceptance in 2010, when they co-sponsored the conference.

But! While the Birchers and the open homosexualists are no longer welcome, there is still room for multiple outspoken white nationalists!

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A tip for McCain, front-runner Mitt Romney and other Republicans: drop the “the” in front of references to Hispanics. Use of the definite article sounds a bit too much like the cringe-worthy “that one” line McCain dropped on Barack Obama during their October 2008 presidential debate in Nashville, and smacks of the sort of “these/those people” phrases that only turn away the groups described. This week, Romney smartly released his first Spanish-language campaign ad, a positive sign. But language is only a small part of the GOP’s problems with minorities, and Latino voters in particular.

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Longtime Republican operative Charlie Black, who was a top aide to the John McCain campaign in 2008, has joined Romney’s “circle of informal advisers,” the New York Times reported this week. After McCain lost, Black rejoined as chairman the high-powered bipartisan lobbying firm he founded in the 1980s, which is now called Prime Policy Group.

Disclosure records show that in early 2011, Black, personally lobbied for Wal-Mart on the issue of the DREAM Act, which would extend permanent resident status to illegal immigrants who were brought to the U.S. as children and meet various achievement requirements. Wal-Mart has been a prominent voice in favor of comprehensive immigration reform. Prime Policy Group was paid $60,000 by Wal-Mart in the first quarter of 2011 for lobbing on immigration and other issues.

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Despite the stereotypes and prejudices that may still linger around the gay community, I always found comfort in my gay identity -- a comfort I often struggled with living as an undocumented immigrant.

When I come out to people as gay, I don’t have to wait for the questions, “How did you get here?” or “Why can’t you just fix your status?” No, I usually get, “Oh, OK, I just wasn’t sure,” or my favorite, “Of course you’re gay! Why would a hot guy like you be straight?” That one usually makes me blush and laugh.

But just like being gay, being undocumented wasn’t a choice for me. It was something I discovered as I grew up.

I am originally from Lima, Peru. My dad was a pediatrician and my mother a teacher before we moved to the United States.

Growing up I always knew that there was something different about me; I just wasn’t sure what. I just knew I had an attraction toward guys, ever since I was about 9 years old and had a crush on a fifth grader during summer school.

I was 17 years old when I discovered I was undocumented. My dad broke the news to me that I wouldn’t be able to get a driver’s license because we were “different” from everyone else. His words were subtle but I understood.

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That investigation culminated Thursday when the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice released its long-awaited report, which found a "chronic culture of disregard for basic legal and constitutional obligations" in Arpaio's office. Drawing from tens of thousands of documents and over 400 interviews with sheriff's department personnel, inmates and experts, the report documented "a widespread pattern or practice of law enforcement and jail activities that discriminate against Latinos,"  resulting in gross violations of  constitutional rights.

Assistant Attorney General Thomas Perez threw down the gauntlet for Arpaio at Thursday's press conference, giving him until Jan. 4, 2012,  to accept DOJ's measures to take "clear steps toward reaching an agreement with the Division to correct these violations in the next 60 days," or face a lawsuit.  Perez expressed DOJ's willingness "to roll up our sleeves and build a comprehensive blueprint for reform of MCSO," adding, "if the will exists" on Arpaio's end.

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If you met me after I moved to America, you would likely notice a few things. I'm tall. I wear a lot of flannel. I have questionable taste in shoes. And I sound absolutely adorable. I know this because I have been told it over and over since I moved from Canada five years ago. "You sound adorable," said a neighbor in my East Village walk-up during my first week in New York. "Adorable," said a classmate at grad school orientation, right before he told me that Canadians all seemed dreadfully boring.

I had no idea I even had an accent, let alone that I sounded adorable, before I moved here. But in learning about the way I spoke, I ended up learning a lot about my adopted country -- and about myself.

For most Americans, it's almost impossible to tell a Canadian accent from a Midwestern one. And to be fair, the differences are pretty subtle. We pronounce some of our vowels like the British (something linguists call "Canadian shift"), and raise our diphthongs before voiceless consonants (called "Canadian raising"). But most people identify us by our different ways of pronouncing "au" sounds -- which, to some people, sounds like "oot" and "aboot" -- and our tendency to say things like "eh" and "heh" at the end of tentatively declarative sentences.

To make it more confusing, most Canadian celebrities seem to lose their accents as soon as they become even mildly famous. You'd never think that Rachel McAdams or Jim Carrey both hail from Ontario by listening to them. The Canadian of the moment, Ryan Gosling, has famously shifted from a Cornwall, Ontario. accent to a butch Brooklyn truck driver accent over the course of his career. There are even companies that specialize in teaching Canadian actors to start talking like Americans.

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