Photo credit: Reuters/Jason Reed (Senator Max Baucus and Senator Olympia Snowe shake hands after Senate Finance Committee passed healthcare reform bill, October 13, 2009)

A spokesman for the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services said the agency is gearing up to handle the huge increase in applications expected if immigration reform is passed by the U.S. Congress.

"This agency has been preparing for the advent of any kind of a comprehensive immigration reform, and if that means a surge of applications and operations, we have been working toward that," USCIS spokesman Bill Wright told Reuters.

 Immigration -- particularly what to do with the almost 12 million illegal immigrants who live and work in the shadows -- is a divisive issue in the United States.

 Obama supports a comprehensive overhaul of laws to grant undocumented immigrants in good standing the chance to pay a fine and become citizens, as well as cracking down on illegal employers and tightening security on the porous Mexico border. But he faces fierce opposition from minority Republicans in Congress.

His administration, which is pushing a flagship overhaul of the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system, has indicated that it means to tackle immigration reform next year. This week, The New York Times carried an interview with USCIS director Alejandro Mayorkas.

He said Obama told immigration officials that a legalization program would be part of legislation the White House would propose. Mayorkas said the agency was trying to move quickly to receive all postal applications through secure reception points known as lockboxes -- a system that is more efficient than receiving them through local offices.

Wright told Reuters the agency had learned lessons from handling a surge in applications for citizenship last year, by applicants seeking to beat an increase in charges, and to vote in the presidential election in November. He said the agency processes between 6 million and 7 million petitions for immigration benefits each year, including requests for naturalization, work permits and permanent legal residency documents dubbed "green cards."

The number of undocumented immigrants who would apply for the program is unknown. One think tank that opposes comprehensive reform said screening a vast number of applicants in the event of a mass legalization of undocumented migrants would present a challenge to the agency.

"One of the biggest undiscussed issues that looms over ... amnesty is administrative capacity," said Steven Camarota, research director of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. "We give out a million green cards a year, and the system is overwhelmed by that work load. How can it process ten or 12 million?" 

Photo credits: REUTERS/Danny Moloshok (A man waves a Mexican flag during a May Day immigration and labor march and rally in downtown Los Angeles, May 1, 2008) REUTERS/Brian Snyder (Boston Red Sox player David Ortiz and his wife Tiffany recite the Pledge of Allegiance after Ortiz took the U.S. oath of citizenship in Boston on June 11, 2008)

The foreign born population in the United States dipped slightly last year for the first time in more than a generation, as this nation of immigrants weathered its worst recession in decades, figures released by the U.S. Census Bureau this week indicated.

The Bureau's American Community Survey showed the total foreign-born population dipped by around 99,000 people to 37.9 million in 2008, as the U.S. sank into its most extended recession since the Great Depression. It was the first recorded decline since 1970.

The Census Bureau cautioned that the dip in the foreign born, to 12.5 percent of the population in 2008 from 12.6 percent in 2007, was well within the margin of error, although analysts found it nevertheless suggestive.

"It's a modest decline when you're looking at the overall size of the foreign born population of about 38 million ....  but that said, it is the first time that there has been one," said Michelle Mittelstadt, of the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute in Washington.

"We believe it's very much tied to economic conditions in the United States and the fact particularly that immigrant flows to the United States have declined significantly during the downturn, and … illegal immigration flows in particular," added Mittelstadt, who is the co-author of a report on global migration flows and the recession published this month.

The U.S. foreign born population includes naturalized Americans, refugees and both legal and illegal immigrants, of whom there are some 12 million illegal immigrants living and working in the shadows.

One sign that immigrants have been hurt by the recession are falling remittances to Mexico, which began a decline last year for the first time on record. Cash sent back to Mexico fell 16.2 percent in the year to July to $1.83 billion, down from $2.19 billion a year earlier, according to figures released by Mexico's Central Bank earlier this month.

Whether or not migrants, legal or otherwise, were returning home in the downturn remained moot.
Mittelstadt said evidence suggested that the foreign born population was not being replenished by fresh immigration, rather than significant numbers of people leaving the United States -- although other analysts disagreed.

"Fewer people are coming, and significantly more people are going home," Steven Camarota of the pro-enforcement Center for Immigration Studies think tank in Washington.

"For these numbers to look as they do, it strongly implies that it's illegal immigrants who are coming in lower numbers and going home in higher numbers," he added.

Whatever the cause, the tentative decline in the foreign born population is more likely temporary than structural - with immigration likely to trend upward with the economic recovery, Mittelstadt said.

"We believe ... this is cyclical and tied to the economy. Within the next two to five years as you see the economy take off again, you will see immigration increase," she said.

"If this ends up being a jobless recovery ... and if Americans decide to consume less and cutback on spending ... this could in turn affect migration patterns."

U.S. Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar  and Mexico’s Environment and Natural Resources Minister Juan Elvira on Tuesday announced a plan to enhance conservation in the area around Big Bend, in Texas, and El Carmen in the northern Mexican states of Chihuahua and Coahuila.

The area of adjoining parks and protected areas includes high desert, rugged mountains and plunging canyons that together form one of the borderland's most haunting natural landscapes, far from troubled cities where drug-related killings are rife.

The area includes the Rio Grande River – known as the Rio Bravo south of the border in Mexico -- and 3 million acres of parks and protected areas. It is home to more than 450 species of birds, a number of them unique to the borderlands, including the Mexican duck, the Lucifer hummingbird, the Mexican jay and the Colima warbler.

The joint announcement revives a bilateral conservation effort begun in 1944, when the presidents of the United States and Mexico exchanged letters on the creation of the Big Bend National Park in Texas, which envisaged the conservation of the shared ecosystems on both sides of the border. Mexico later established the Cañon de Santa Elena and Maderas del Carmen protected areas in Chihuahua and Coahuila.

 “Building upon our shared history of ecosystem and species conservation, the plan will develop a model of bi-national cooperation for the conservation and enjoyment of shared ecosystems for current and future generations,” Salazar said in a news release posted on the U.S. Department of the Interior web site. Salazar announced the plan in conjunction with the North American Leaders Summit in  Guadalajara , Mexico, where U.S. President Barack Obama, Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper, met on Sunday and Monday to discuss issues including trade, climate change and drug trafficking.

Salazar said that he and Elvira would develop a plan to enhance coordination in the area  and  report back to Obama and Calderon in six months’ time.

(Photo: Big Bend's 5,400 ft Casa Grande in fog, photo credit: National Park Service)

Last month the Tucson sector of the U.S. Border Patrol announced that agents had seized more than 500 tons of marijuana smuggled up from Mexico since October, a leap of about 40 percent over the same period last year.

Border Patrol spokesman Mike Scioli says seizures of marijuana – which is grown in Mexico by the country’s powerful drug cartels, and forms the backbone of their profits -- have become more frequent as security along the border tightens, with more agents and infrastructure, including miles of vehicle and pedestrian fencing.

"Smugglers used to just drive vehicles over the border, now that the fence is in place, that's prohibited them from doing that," Scioli said of the barriers, part of 670 miles (1,080 kms) of fencing under construction border wide that block or snag trucks crossing north. "They've had to change and do things differently."

Scioli said agents are seizing more marijuana walked north over the searing deserts by smugglers carrying it in backpacks, as well as bundles attached to ultralight aircraft and flown below radar surveillance -- which have appeared in recent months in Arizona.

Federal border police have also found at least 16 clandestine drug tunnels punched beneath the border city of Nogales, Arizona, since October, which investigators say were used by affiliates of Mexico’s powerful Sinaloa cartel in a bid to avoid beefed up security at the ports of entry.

The spike in seizures comes as both U.S. and Mexican authorities battle Mexico's powerful cartels, which have killed more than 13,000 people since President Felipe Calderon took office in 2006.

President Barack Obama will fly to the western Mexican city of Guadalajara for his first North American leaders’ summit with Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper on Sunday, at which the current state of the war to crush the traffickers will be high on the agenda. Meanwhile, U.S. federal police say stepped up enforcement is hurting the drug gangs.

"They are finding more resistance from both Mexican and U.S. law enforcement," said Ramona Sanchez, a special agent with the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration's Phoenix division. "Nowadays the stakes are too high, nowadays they cannot afford to lose a load" of narcotics.

But while authorities make security gains, the multi-ton quantities of marijuana seized by border police in Arizona are but a tiny fraction of the total grown by Mexican cartels and smuggled north to meet the demands of an estimated 25 million Americans who smoke the drug.

A recent drug threat assessment published by the U.S. government's National Drug Intelligence Center pegged Mexican marijuana production at a massive 15,500 tons in 2007, the most recent year on record.

Furthermore, it noted that the powerful cartels have moved much of their drug-farming operations to remote areas of the Western Sierra Madre Mountains, away from the Pacific coast states of Guerrero, Michoacan, and Nayarit, which had been the heart of eradication programs.

The report also highlighted the resilient cartels’ savvy in relocating production, which also sought "to reduce transportation costs to the southwest border and gain more direct access to drug markets in the United States."

For more Reuters coverage of the drug war click here.

(Photos: Reuters and U.S. Customs and Border Protection)

CHRISTIAN AGUILAR, 19, Mexican construction worker

In the boom years, Mexican illegal immigrant Christian Aguilar thrived decorating homes in new subdivisions across the sprawling Phoenix valley.

"I was never without work. I earned enough to live, pay the rent and the bills, and even save a little," said Aguilar, 19, who is from the troubled border city of Ciudad Juarez, south of El Paso, Texas.

But when the economy slid deeper into recession last year, he and his gang of decorators started to have their hours cut, and then they were gradually let go.

"They laid me off for two weeks, then that stretched out to a month, now I haven't worked since last August," said Aguilar, who earned $12 an hour under the table.

Almost 12 million undocumented immigrants live and work in the United States, many like Aguilar in low-skilled jobs that have evaporated in the recession.

He now touts for work at a day labor center in Phoenix -- a fallback for many undocumented migrants -- and counts himself lucky if he's hired one or two days a week.

"The most difficult thing is that you are worrying that you will be turned out of your house if you can't pay the rent," said Aguilar, who lives with his parents.

With the economy still in decline, he and his family are thinking of leaving Arizona to try and find work elsewhere in the United States.

"If we leave, it will be for another state like Colorado, New Mexico or Utah, but not Mexico," he said.

"Where I come from, they're going through a very difficult time at the moment, with violence and drug trafficking."

Internet firm gooseGrade.com estimates that there are at least 60 million pages on the Internet containing a misspelling of Barack Obama's first name.

"Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of bloggers and other online authors who misspell Barack Obama's name in their writing will miss out on the tidal wave of online search traffic being generated this week around Obama's inauguration," said the firm's CEO, John Brooks Pounders. "Not to mention, it's a bit embarrassing."

Obama, who was sworn into office on Tuesday, is the son of a Kenyan father and an American mother. He was named after his father and his first name means “blessed” according to the Web site babynames.com.

The most common snafu among bloggers and online authors, according to gooseGrade.com,  is "Barak", followed closely by "Barrak", and finally "Barrack". 

Part of the confusion may stem from the fact that the Israeli Defense Minister and former prime minister spells his name "Barak" in English; the word is Hebrew for "lightning."

In the biblical Book of Judges, Barak is an Israelite military leader who wins a great victory over the Canaanites.

Computer spellcheckers are often little help. Many software applications from the pre-Obama era correct Barack to “Barrack,” and render Obama as “Omaha” -- the more familiar name of the largest city in the U.S. state of Nebraska.

With less than a week to go until the Nov. 4 election, the poll by Arizona State University showed McCain leading Obama 46 points to 44, a slender advantage that was within the three-point margin of error.

“John McCain’s support in Arizona has slipped to the point where, at least in our poll, it’s a statistical dead heat,” said Tara Blanc, the assistant director of the survey carried out by ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and Channel 8 /KAET.

“At this point it’s anybody’s race. It will frankly come down to who goes to the polls on election day,” Blanc told Reuters by telephone.

Presidential candidates can usually count on winning in their home states. A notable exception was Democrat Al Gore, who lost Tennessee when he was running against then Texas Gov. George W. Bush in 2000.

Several polls indicate that McCain’s lead over Obama has tightened in Arizona in the past month, which has been marked by fallout from the global economic crisis.

A similar poll by ASU in late September gave McCain a 7 point lead. A Rasmussen poll out this week showed McCain’s lead in the desert state had slipped to 5 points, down from 21 points late last month.

The Democratic party in Arizona – a state that McCain has represented in the U.S. Senate since 1986 – not surprisingly seized on the results of the latest survey.

“According to the Cronkite poll …. John McCain is in danger of losing Arizona,” Don Bivens, the chairman of the Arizona Democratic Party told a conference call with reporters, adding that it showed that “Senator Obama is closing the gap.”

The McCain campaign, meanwhile, were dismissive. Politico.com reported McCain spokesman Jeff Sadosky saying: "John McCain has never lost an election in Arizona, and this one will be no different, regardless of Obama's attempt to buy the election with millions of dollars in advertising."

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain in the battleground state of Florida)

But the New York Times reported on Sunday that the real Mavericks - a storied south Texas family with a long tradition in progressive politics - are not too happy about what they say is the misappropriation of their family name.

"I'm just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick," the Times reported Terrellita Maverick, 82, saying. The San Antonio resident is the scion of a family which has been outspoken about liberal causes for generations, and has otherwise bucked conventions.

The family's name crept into the language for Samuel Augustus Maverick, a rancher who became known for not branding his cattle in the 1800s. Any unbranded cows found out on the range were simply known as "Maverick's."

Ranching aside, the Times reported that members of the Maverick family also have a long history championing often unpopular civil libertarian causes -- from the rights of indentured servants in long ago New England to defending the cause of "draft resisters, atheists and others scorned by society" more recently in Texas. 

Aside from an unbranded calf, the word maverick has come to mean a lone dissenter who takes an independent stand from his or her associates - a label handy for McCain, who has tried to distance his campaign from eight years of rule by the increasingly unpopular President George W. Bush. Nevertheless, the veteran Republican Arizona senator's appropriation of the word still grates on the original Mavericks.

He "is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase," the Times reported Terrellitta, 82, as saying.

"It's just incredible - the nerve! - to suggest that he's not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.' "

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage

Photo credit: REUTERS/Brian Snyder (McCain greets people in Sedona, Arizona)

The 60-second spot argued that, while the veteran Arizona senator sought to rein in excesses by troubled mortgage titans Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac - which were rescued by the government earlier this month -- Obama, an Illinois senator, did nothing.

"John McCain fought to rein in Fannie and Freddie," a voiceover says. It then quotes The Washington Post saying McCain "pushed for stronger regulation ... while Mr. Obama was notably silent."

"But Democrats blocked the reforms. Loans soared. Then, the bubble burst. And taxpayers are on the hook for billions."

The salvo laying blame and charging inaction over the crisis comes a day after the U.S. House of Representatives voted down a bailout plan backed by President George W. Bush that sought to buy up $700 billion in troubled bank assets.

The surprise 228-205 House defeat sent markets tumbling around the world and unleashed a sharp blame game in Washington.

House Republicans, a majority of whom voted against the bill, blamed the failure on a "partisan" speech given before the vote by House speaker Nancy Pelosi, a Democrat, in which she chided Republicans for what she said was their "budgetary recklessness" and an "anything goes mentality" that led to the crisis.

The ad aired by the McCain camp also seeks to heap blame for the financial debacle on former President Clinton.

"Bill Clinton knows who is responsible," the voiceover intoned, before cutting to a clip of the former president saying: "I think the responsibility that the Democrats have may rest more in resisting any efforts by Republicans in the Congress or by me when I was President to put some standards and tighten up a little on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac."

It concluded: ‘You're right, Mr. President. It didn't have to happen."

(Photo credit: REUTERS/Jim Bourg, Sept 26, 2008, USA)