Immigration, particularly what to do with millions of illegal immigrants living in the shadows, has long been a divisive issue in the United States — so it comes as little surprise that undocumented migrants are excluded from benefits under President Barack Obama’s signature drive to overhaul healthcare.
 
But legislation to reform the $2.5 trillion U.S. healthcare system to cut costs, extend coverage and regulate insurers could also exclude more than a million legal permanent residents living, working and paying taxes in this country of immigrants from core benefits, according to a study published this month.
 
The report by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute said 4.2 million lawful permanent residents in the United States are uninsured. More than 1 million of them could be excluded from Medicaid coverage or insurance subsidies outlined in the bill — five versions of which are currently on Capitol Hill — if Congress does not remove a five-year waiting period for eligibility.
 
Congress is set to debate the legislation in coming weeks, and the prospects for the overhaul are far from certain. But if legal residents are denied eligibility for Medicaid and insurance subidies, yet are nevertheless subjected to mandates requiring them to buy health insurance coverage, the study concluded, many of them would face a “significant burden.”
 
“Leaving large numbers of legal immigrants out of healthcare reform would defeat the core goal of the legislation, which is to extend coverage to the nation’s 46 million uninsured,” said MPI Senior Vice President Michael Fix, who co-authored the report.
 
The study also concluded that implementing verification systems to ensure that 12 million undocumented immigrants living and working in the United States do not receive benefits could prove expensive and may also discriminate against Americans.
 
“Document checks would be especially costly, and would have the biggest impact on U.S. citizens who cannot produce birth certificates or other forms of ID, leading to lost or delayed coverage,” said Marc Rosenblum, a co-author of the MPI study.
 
The measures denying undocumented immigrants benefits are likely to be welcomed by most Americans — one telephone survey in June found 80 percent of U.S. voters opposed providing government healthcare coverage to undocumented migrants. But activists say a bill that left many legal permanent residents in limbo would likely discourage some skilled migrants from seeking to move to the United States.
   
Aman Kapoor, the founder and president of advocacy group Immigration Voice said many high-skilled immigrants including engineers and software specialists were already wary about moving to the United States because of red tape and delays in processing applications for permanent residency.
 
“This will ring the alarm bells again around the world for the high-skilled community,” Kapoor said, adding that skilled foreign workers were “already considering other destinations like India, China and Brazil because the hassle of settling here has increased dramatically.”

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 genealogist working with The New York Times has traced Michelle Obama’s family tree back five generations to a 6-year-old slave girl named Melvinia who was valued at $475.

The White House said first lady Michelle Obama had not known many of the details of her family history and enjoyed reading it. She had declined to comment on the story for The New York Times because of the personal nature of the subject.

“I don’t believe she knew or had known all of this, but enjoyed reading about her family history,” White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said.

The slave girl Melvinia initially appears in the documentary record in 1850, the property of South Carolina landowner David Patterson, who owned 21 slaves.

After Patterson died in 1852, Melvinia was sent to a smaller 200-acre farm in Georgia, the home of Patterson’s daughter and son-in-law, Christianne and Henry Shields. She was one of only three slaves on the farm near Atlanta.

Sometime when she was a teenager, possibly as young as 15, Melvinia became pregnant by a white male. The father is unknown, possibly Henry Shields, then in his 40s, or one of his four sons, aged 19 to 24.

Melvinia gave birth around 1859 to a boy, Dolphus. She and the father of her first-born son are Michelle Obama’s great-great-great-grandparents, genealogist Megan Smolenyak says.

Three of Melvinia’s four children are listed on the 1870 census as mulatto. One was born four years after emancipation, raising the possibility that the relationship with the original father continued even after the Civil War.

After being freed, she worked on a farm adjacent to that of Charles Shields, one of Henry Shields’ sons.

In her 30s or 40s, Melvinia reconnected with former slaves she had known as a child on the Patterson estate. She moved with the couple — Mariah and Bolus Easley — to a spot near the border with Alabama.

Dolphus married one of the Easleys’ daughters, Alice. The couple are Michelle Obama’s great-great-grandparents.

Melvinia, who took Shields as her last name, died in 1938 in her 90s.

Dolphus and Alice moved to Birmingham, Alabama, where he was a co-founder of First Ebenezer Baptist Church and the Trinity Baptist Church.

Dolphus, a carpenter, thrived in Birmingham, but he split up with Alice. She moved around, working as a seamstress and a maid.

Their son, Robert Lee Shields, married Annie Lawson in 1906 and worked as a laborer and railroad porter. Robert Lee disappeared from the public record when he was about 32 years old.

He was Michelle Obama’s great-grandfather.

Robert Lee’s son, Purnell Shields, was the first lady’s grandfather, her mother Marian Robinson’s father. He moved to Chicago as part of the great migration north and worked as a painter.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit:Reuters/Larry Downing (Obama family, including Michelle Obama’s mother Marian Robinson, on White House balcony April 13.)

In Monday’s blog, I looked at McChrystal’s recommendation for a significantly stepped up effort to stabilize Afghanistan, and a major shift in strategy to win over the Afghan people.

But many people, including influential actors within the administration and several readers who left comments on Monday, are advocating a different approach: pull out, and leave Afghans to their own devices. This blog looks at Plan B.

——-

“The Russians were in Afghanistan for 10 years. The Americans have been here for seven, and we will send them home in just three more years”.

That was how Mullah Abdul Salaam Zaeef, the Taliban’s former ambassador to Pakistan, described the movement’s message to the Afghan people when I met him in a drafty and bare Kabul room in March.

Zaeef, who was imprisoned for years in Bagram and Guantanamo, says he is no longer a member of the Taliban but is now acting as a mediator between its leadership and the Afghan government.

But his comments underline one of the West’s biggest problems in trying to regain the momentum in Afghanistan.

All the talk in the West is of an exit strategy, of when troops can start to be withdrawn.

And what better time for President Barak Obama to announce a drawdown of U.S. forces than during the next presidential campaign in 2011/2012 — concidentally a decade after they first arrived in Afghanistan?

The Taliban have spotted the West’s indecision and are exploiting it, reminding wavering Afghan villagers that they, not American troops, are there for the long haul.

As U.S. Gen. Stanley McChrystal said in his stark assessment of the problem this week, there is a “crisis of confidence among Afghans”.

“Further, a perception that our resolve is uncertain makes Afghans reluctant to align with us against the insurgents”.

That makes it all the more urgent for President Barack Obama to make some extremely tough decisions soon. What choice should he be making?

Some people are beginning to ponder the previously imponderable. Should the West cut its losses and run?

Perhaps we should admit that more troops will only make things worse, that nation-building in such distant and foreign terrain is impossible, that southern and eastern Afghanistan will forever remain a Taliban stronghold.

In this scenario, the West’s goals would be more limited.

Try to bring some members of the Taliban into the political process, and train the Afghan army to fight the remainder.

At the same time, the U.S. could pin al Qaeda’s leaders down with “precision” airstrikes and keep them on the run to stop them from planning major attacks on the West.

The strategy has its fans, and its attractions. But would it work?

Once the West leaves Afghanistan and gives up on the idea of nation building, there is no going back. The opportunity to create a more stable Afghanistan will essentially have gone.

Southern and eastern Afghanistan might start to look even more like Pakistan’s tribal areas. A weak central government would essentially have given up on the idea of controlling significant swathes of its own country.

Another problem, as the experience in Pakistan has proved, is that airstrikes are never “precision”. They kill civilians, and inflame anti-Western passions even further, steadily strengthening the hands of radicals.

They may have claimed the scalp of Baitullah Mehsud, but have yet to take out al Qaeda’s top leadership.

Remote bombing is tempting in the short term, but does it work as a long-term strategy.

And nation-building might be tough, but is the West really prepared to face the consequences of an ignominious withdrawal from Afghanistan, and the morale boost that would provide for al Qaeda and its allies?

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic (U.S. Marines patrol in southern Afghanistan)

It is encouraging that the U.S. administration finally seems to be getting a handle on what went wrong in Afghanistan these past eight years.

What is less encouraging is the fact there seems little political appetite around the globe to fix the mess.

Gen. Stanley McChrystal’s report is a stark and honest assessment of the war in Afghanistan.

A failure to send more troops within the next year and regain the initiative “will likely result in failure,” he said.

Everyone knows that time is running out to get Afganistan right, with political support eroding fast in the West but the Taliban dug in for the long haul and getting stronger all the time.

McChrystal is also right in saying that more troops and more resources are not enough in themselves, and pointing out many of the errors of the past eight years.

Among  them:                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                           

    - corruption and abuse of power by the Afghan government
    - Western troops, who lack an understanding of Afghan society, employing tactics which have alienated ordinary Afghans
    - and the failure of aid efforts which “too often enrich power brokers, corrupt officials or international contractors and serve only limited segments of the population”.

I was in Afghanistan as Reuters bureau chief in from early 2002 until 2004, and what is depressing is that many of those mistakes were starkly apparent right from the outset.

Airstrikes which killed innocent civilians are now being acknowledged as counterproductive, and there has been a lot of attention of the failure of the country’s central government.

But there has perhaps been too little attention on the failure of the aid effort, which Ashraf Ghani lambasted as “dysfunctional and lacking accountability” when I met him on my last visit to Kabul in March.

Ghani, an unconvincing presidential candidate but a globally recognised expert on rebuilding failed states, argued that the amount of money NATO spends every month, more than $20 billion, could educate five generations of Afghans.

What has been spent has far too often been wasted.

There has also been too much attention paid to the central government in Kabul — presidential elections were never going to solve anything — and far too little paid to improving local governance outside the capital and even bringing democracy down to the villages.

But how to fix things now?

It is not going to be easy because fixing Afghanistan will be a lot harder now than it would have been in 2002, when Western intervention and troops were largely welcomed in the country.

Perhaps the only way to turn things around is to change perceptions about who is likely to be the winning side.

There may be a parallel with the way the global economy seems to have been pulled away from the brink of depression by massive government intervention, which helped to restore confidence among ordinary people.

In a sense, the only way to change perceptions was to throw the kitchen sink at the problem, to get ahead of the curve.

In Afghanistan, the danger is the West is permanently behind the curve.

Obama’s Afghanistan-Pakistan strategy announced in March might have been enough in  2002 but looked and sounded inadequate to many people in 2009.

As McChrystal himself said: “inadequate resources will likely result in failure. However, without a new strategy, the mission should not be resourced”.

So the question is this.

Will more troops come in time to make a difference? Will they be accompanied by a massive surge in developmental resources to Afghanistan, a radical reform of the way aid is administered and delivered, by a serious effort to improve security and local governance outside Kabul and a convincing public commitment to stay the course?

Because if they aren’t, the West will always look like it is chasing the game.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Goran Tomasevic (Man looks toward Kabul from old cemetery)

Some of President Barack Obama’s more demonstrative opponents list any number of reasons why they oppose him and why they’re angry — from the bank bailout, to his plan to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system, the direction the country is heading and the ballooning U.S. deficit. But former President Jimmy Carter thinks a lot of the opposition is really about Obama’s race.

“I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man,” Carter said in an NBC interview on Tuesday.

Here’s what the Georgia Democrat had to say:
“I live in the South, and I’ve seen the South come a long way, and I’ve seen the rest of the country that share the South’s attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans. “And that racism inclination still exists. And I think it’s bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It’s an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply.”

Click here for the NBC video.

Disputes over race are not unheard of in U.S. presidential politics. Click here for a list of some of them.

Click here for more Reuters Political News.
Photo Credit: Reuters/Tami Chappell (Carter at a baseball game in Atlanta in June)

Have a hankering to visit a hospital in Hawaii?

You could win a trip to tour the hospital where President Barack Obama was born. All you have to do is to submit the winning idea on how people can help Obama change the country for the better.

Progress Now, a liberal grass roots group, launched a new program to urge people across the country to help Obama pass healthcare reform and enact his other core campaign promises.

According to a press release, this campaign is the first part of the national launch of the ‘50 Ways You Can Help Obama Change America’ — a book by ProgressNow founder Michael Huttner.

“The campaign and book are designed to inspire more people to help — at a time when progressive values are under attack in Washington and across the nation,” Huttner said.

ProgressNow and its state partners are seeking entries on how to help Obama change America. You can enter the contest by clicking here.

The grand prize will be a trip for two to Honolulu for a private tour of the hospital where Obama was born, followed by a chance to take part in a community service project there on Jan 18.

The contest comes as Obama struggles to win enough support in Congress to pass a plan to overhaul the U.S. healthcare system amid mounting public skepticism and unified Republican opposition.

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Hugh Gentry (Obama supporter at campaign party after November election)

It’s too early to tell whether President Barack Obama’s new approach to China will be more successful than his predecessor’s. But this week’s high-level dialogue in Washington underlined how the balance of power is shifting.

The U.S. side, determined to be more respectful and less confrontational, tiptoed around the sensitive issue of China’s currency, avoiding any public appeal for an upwards revaluation in the yuan.

There was a passing reference to the rights of China’s ethnic and religious minorities, but no sign the other side would take any more notice of foreign interference in its internal affairs than it has in the past.

Not was there any evidence the Chinese and Americans were any closer on issues from climate change to how to deal with countries like North Korea and Sudan.

The Chinese, though, seemed less circumspect, more confident even in their public statements. Washington, they argued, should rein in its budget deficit and refrain from flooding the world with dollars.

They are, after all, holding more than $800 billion in U.S. Treasury debt, and don’t want to see the value of those investments fall.

And when you have such a big customer, you better listen to them, as the Wall Street Journal pointed out this morning.

Obama wants to see the two countries as partners, not rivals, for the 21st century, not always seeing eye to eye on everything but sharing common problems and common interests.

It was a beguiling vision, and China experts say his less confrontational approach may have more chance of success with a country not used to being told what to do.

But the question that must be asked is how seriously will the Chinese take American advice? Is talk of a real partnership between two countries with vastly different cultures just wishful thinking?    

For more Reuters political news, click here.

Photo credit: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (Obama speaks at opening of U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue in Washington)

The numbers are down and that’s not good for President Barack Obama’s healthcare push.

A Washington Post-ABC News poll shows public support of  Obama’s handling of healthcare reform, a centerpiece of his domestic agenda, fell below 50 percent for the first time.

That could be a big OH-OH by providing critics (some in Obama’s own Democratic party)  ammunition against the plan that is estimated to cost more than $1 trillion.

Plenty on the plate for healthcare debate watchers today.

House Energy and Commerce Committee marks up legislation and Obama attends a roundtable with health care providers and is expected to make a statement around 1 p.m. Stay tuned.

Morning shows led with the American soldier captured in Afghanistan, showing the video of his detention that was put on the Internet this weekend.

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton tells ABC’s Good Morning America that everything will be done to find and free him.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage

Photo credit: Reuters/Kevin Lamarque (Obama at healthcare forum on July 1)

After catching the national media off guard with Friday’s pre-holiday weekend bombshell that she was resigning as Alaska governor, Sarah Palin gave the television networks a chance to catch up with a round of stage-managed interviews for the morning news shows.

Television correspondents lined up to land a few minutes with Palin, decked out in overalls and wading in the surf at husband Todd’s family fishing operation. With children in tow on the fishing trip/photo op, she explained her decision to bail out of office more than a year early.

It had nothing to do with running for president in 2012, she said. She’s just unconventional. Once she had decided she was not running for re-election, she knew she could not “play the political game that most politicians do,” she told NBC.

“That is who we are as Alaskans and it’s certainly who I am,” she told CNN. “I’m not going to take that comfortable path. I’m going to take the right path for the state.”

To ABC: “I’m extremely happy. Politically speaking, if I die, I die. So be it.”

But in all the interviews, which included plenty of footage of Palin looking like the fisherwoman next door, she refused to close the door on a presidential run.

“I can’t predict what the next fish run is going to look like, much less the next few years,” she told NBC. To CNN: “All options are going to keep on being on the table.”

But she sounded like she had read some of the critical stories about her vice presidential run last year. Using a word critics sometimes use to describe her, she told NBC that having the kids work at the fishing operation “teaches these kids to work extremely hard and to not be divas.”

Palin’s round of interviews managed to top the round done by President Barack Obama, who has been talking non-stop during his visit to Moscow. In several interviews, Obama took pains to correct Vice President Joe Biden’s comment that the administration “misread” the economy.

 ”I would actually, rather than say misread — we had incomplete information,” Obama said on NBC. “In some ways you’re seeing the economic engine turn, but what we always knew was that a) this recession was going to be deep and b) it was going to last a while.”

 ”There’s nothing that we would have done differently,” he told ABC.

Obama even commented on Palin, saying he respected her comment the decision was a family matter. “She has a fairly loyal constituency in the Republican Party and the conservative movement,” he said on NBC.

As for the topic that dominated the morning news shows, singer Michael Jackson’s funeral, Obama had this to say about Jackson: “What I do believe is that black sports figures and black entertainers helped to create a comfort level with African-Americans that had an impact historically.”

For more Reuters political news, click here

Photo credits: REUTERS/Tami Chappell (Palin waves to crowd at rally in Georgia in December); REUTERS/Jim Young (Obama delivers remarks at Moscow)

U.S. first lady Michelle Obama told an audience at the U.S. mission to the United Nations that she was “thrilled” to be back in New York for the first time since her husband Barack Obama became the 44th U.S. president in January. But she said some things are even more exciting than addressing an audience of 150 U.S. diplomats, military advisers and other government officials.

“I’m thrilled to be here but I was just at ‘Sesame Street’, I’m sorry,” she said, referring to the long-running U.S. children’s television program. “I never thought I’d be on ‘Sesame Street’ with Elmo and Big Bird and I was thrilled. I’m still thrilled. I’m on a high. I think it’s probably the best thing I’ve done so far in the White House.”

One of the biggest rounds of applause during the first lady’s 20-minute appearance at the U.S. mission in midtown Manhattan came when she read a letter the son of one of the mission staffers, Scott Turner, recently sent to the president.  According to Michelle Obama, Turner’s son Jack, a first grader,  wrote to the president:

“Dear Mr. Obama - Can you move to New York? Because people like you in New York. I will help you come to New York and people are doing bad stuff in New York. I will help you get the bad people and when I catch the bad people I will put them in jail. That’s why I want you to move to  New York. From Jack.”

The first lady said she had already found a job for Jack: “Ladies and gentlemen, I think we have identified the new future New York Police Commissioner. Jack is on the case.”

Michelle Obama also thanked a group of 40 employees of the U.S. mission in the audience who have been working for the U.S. government for more than 20 years. One of them, Ivan Ferber, has been with the U.S. mission for 47 years, which she said is “longer than I’ve been alive.”

In sharp contrast to the administration of former President George W. Bush, whose officials were often dismissive and critical of the United Nations and other multilateral organizations, Michelle Obama emphasized that the new administration felt it was vitally important to work with allies.

“As the president has said, the United States is pursuing a new era of engagement when it comes to advancing America’s interests around the world,” she said. “This new policy recognizes that the fact that America’s future is intricately linked to the rest of the world, that the threats facing the global community know no borders and no single country can tackle them alone. We’ve learned this again with the recent
outbreak of the H1N1 virus.”

The first lady also spoke about the important tasks facing U.S. diplomats working with the United Nations to bring aid to the developing world. “Your work links the world to America and American ideals that are beacons of hope for millions of people,” she said.

“The young boy who’s forced to carry a rifle and become a child soldier — he’s counting on you,” she said. “The girl locked out of the schoolhouse or attacked because she had the audacity to want to learn to read or write — she’s counting on you. The mother walking hours each day to find clean water for her children — she’s counting on you. And the father who leaves his family for months or years on end in search of work — he’s counting on you as well.”

The first lady suggested that she, too, might want to get involved in working with poorer countries around the world, but she did not provide any specifics.