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)

By Tim Gaynor

President Barack Obama's signature battle to overhaul the United States' $2.5 trillion healthcare industry to extend coverage and lower costs for Americans has met fierce opposition from Republicans.

But a move by Democrat backers to exclude 12 million illegal immigrants from buying health coverage and restrict the participation of authorized migrants has drawn the ire of U.S. Hispanics -- a bloc that overwhelmingly turned out to vote for Obama in last year's election.

Hispanic lawmakers and activists are riled by the bill pushed in the U.S. Senate by Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, which denies illegal immigrants the option to buy health insurance and places a five-year wait period on legal immigrants before they can access health benefits.

"When we effectively bar the immigrant community from buying private insurance, we force them further into the shadows of our society, and we relegate them to emergency room care ­at the highest cost to taxpayers," Rep. Luis Gutierrez, an Illinois Democrat, told a conference call with reporters this week.

Obama has so far been popular with U.S. Hispanics. His backing for comprehensive immigration reform, which seeks to allow millions of illegal immigrants in good standing a chance to pay fines and become citizens, helped win him two-thirds of the Latino vote in last November's election.

But activists say the push to exclude undocumented workers from paying for healthcare -- even for their U.S. born children -- is testing support for Obama among Latinos, who make up 15 percent of the population and 9 percent of the electorate.

"The Latino vote was based on promises that a new administration would lead us out of the darkness and finally bring about immigration reform," said Lorena Colin of the Mexican American Coalition for Immigration Reform, a Chicago-based pro-immigrant grassroots group.

"Instead, we are seeing the administration allowing undocumented immigrants to become scapegoats and the targets of widespread derision and hate in the healthcare debate," she added.

Reverend Luis Cortés, Jr., meanwhile, the president of a prominent Hispanic evangelical network Esperanza said he was disillusioned with the Democrats, and warned that Hispanics voters would punish lawmakers who denied immigrants care in the midterm Congressional elections in 2010.

"All we can do at this point is look at each local election, one by one, and punish those individuals-regardless of their party-who deny rights to legal immigrants and children, as well as the poorest in our nation, the undocumented," he said.

For those holding out hope that healthcare reform and climate change legislation would not squeeze out efforts to overhaul the broken U.S. immigration system this year, think again.

At the “Three Amigos Summit” in Guadalajara, Mexico, President Barack Obama all but ruled out legislation passing this year, particularly since his top initiative — healthcare — has been put off until September and there still remains work to be done on climate change. And, oh yes, fixing the U.S. financial regulatory system too.

“That’s a pretty big stack of bills,” Obama told reporters alongside Mexican President Felipe Calderon and Canadian Prime Minister Stephen Harper. “I would anticipate that before the year is out, we will have draft (immigration) legislation, along with sponsors potentially in the House and the Senate who are ready to move this forward.”

“And when we come back next year, that we should be in a position to start acting,” he said, adding that it would require bipartisan cooperation — of which there has been little lately in Congress.

Obama repeated his desire for reforming the immigration system in a way that bolsters border security, creates a system to permit people into the United States and gives the 12 million illegal immigrants a way to eventually become citizens.

New York Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, who chairs the Senate immigration subcommittee, has said he would like to try to get immigration legislation done this year but has previously acknowledged it would be a tough slog to do that given everything else on the agenda.

The ranking Republican, Texas Senator John Cornyn, has pressed the administration to offer specifics about its plan for reform before Congress acts.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage.

- Photo credit: Reuters/Tomas Bravo (A U.S.-Mexico border crossing)

Michael Jackson and Farrah Fawcett may no longer be with us, but Congress is still hanging around. Good thing, too, as they’ve got plenty of work to do.

The House of Representatives is poised to vote today on one of the most significant environmental bills in history. It could be a nail-biter as Democratic leaders are still scrambling to ensure they have enough votes to pass the measure, which aims to wean industry off of carbon-emitting fuels blamed for global warming.

After that it has to clear the Senate, where Republicans will have an easier time derailing it if they so desire.

They’re still plugging away on healthcare reform. Senators say they’re closer to agreement on a $1 trillion bill that would extend coverage to nearly everyone without adding to huge budget deficits.

On top of that, President Obama wants Congress to tackle immigration and overhaul financial regulation by the end of the year. He also hopes to get Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court by September.

Something’s got to give, and that appears to be transportation spending. House Democrats have been working on a $500 billion package that would create a new fund for road repairs and increase spending on transit and rail.

That could require new gas taxes — never a popular option with voters — and Obama’s told Congress to wait until after the 2010 midterm elections to take it up.

So what’s the best metaphor for the transportation bill? Is it:

a. Stuck in traffic?

b. Derailed?

c. In a holding pattern?

photo credit: REUTERS/Nigel Roddis (A tribute to Michael Jackson in London, June 26)

For more Reuters political coverage, click here.

Even with enormously difficult to pass legislation on healthcare and climate change topping the Obama administration’s agenda, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid believes he can still muscle through a bill to overhaul U.S. immigration policies later this year.

President Barack Obama has said he wanted immigration reform done this year, although his own spokesman acknowledged on Monday that they may only be able to begin the debate on the issue.  “I can see the president’s desire for it to happen, but understanding that … currently where we sit, the math makes that more difficult than the discussion,” said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs.

But that hasn’t stopped Reid, who caught a lot of people off guard a few weeks ago when he predicted the Senate would act this year.

“I’ve said right here that we have to finish healthcare.  We have to do energy before we get to immigration reform.  But being third on the list is pretty good,” Reid told reporters on Tuesday. He denied that rising unemployment, expected to top 10 percent amid a deep recession, would slow reform efforts.

“What is impacting doing comprehensive immigration reform is getting floor time to do it.  I think the votes are there to do it,” he said.

On Thursday, Obama will host a closed-door meeting with key lawmakers to discuss the issue and Democratic Senator Charles Schumer, chairman of the Senate Immigration Subcommittee, plans on Wednesday to outline his principles for legislation he will offer.

Click here for more Reuters political coverage

- Photo credit: Reuters/Henry Romero (protesters outside the U.S. embassy in Mexico)

NEW PARIS, Penn. - What is the biggest competition for an apple orchard owner in rural Pennsylvania?
 
Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin thought she knew the answer when talking to Matthew Boyer of Boyer Orchards.
 
“So is your competition imports from China?” Palin asked Boyer, as she stood in a barn in front of bushels of all different kinds of freshly picked apples at the family-owned orchard.
 
Not quite.
 
While it’s true that China is a huge apple producer and the United States’ share of world exports continues to decline, competition from China wasn’t Boyer’s biggest concern.
 
Boyer told Palin he was more worried about apples from Washington state, which produces some 60 percent of the apples grown in the United States.
 
In fact, the issue on Boyer’s mind was immigration.
 
Boyer employs migrants to pick his apples, and it is becoming harder to find people willing and able to do the work.
 
“We need workers. We can’t get any local person for it. It’s hard work,” he said.
 
“It’s increasingly difficult to find legal help. People don’t understand this immigration issue.”
 
Palin quickly turned the conversation to one of her preferred topics — the need to cut taxes, especially for small business owners.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Immigration has been absent from the presidential campaign for months, but it came to the front again this week in a controversial television spot for Barack Obama.

The Democratic presidential candidate sought to cast Republican rival John McCain as an anti-Hispanic hard-liner and link him to talk radio host Rush Limbaugh.

The Spanish language TV ad — dubbed “Dos Caras,” or “Two Faces” — aired on Wednesday. It courted Hispanic voters who make up 9 percent of the electorate and who could help swing the outcome in battleground states in the U.S. southwest as well as in Florida on Nov. 4. 

The 30-second spot begins with a voice-over attacking the Republicans: “They want us to forget the insults we’ve put up with, the intolerance … they made us feel marginalized in the country that we love so much.” The screen then shows two quotes from widely syndicated radio host Limbaugh, one reads “stupid and unskilled Mexicans,” the other, “You shut your mouth or you get out!”

The paid spot then says: “John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote … and another, even worse, that continues the policies of George Bush, which puts special interests ahead of working families.” It closes with the line “more of the same Republican lies.”

The advertisement is a stretch. McCain was the co-author of a bi-partisan bill that sought a path to citizenship for millions of mostly Hispanic illegal immigrants living in the United States. It was backed by President George W. Bush, but was ultimately killed by Senate Republicans last year.

His support for the measure brought McCain the ire of many immigration hard-liners in his own party, and met with scorn from cigar-chomping Limbaugh, who was outspoken in his opposition to the veteran Arizona senator during the primary election process.The McCain campaign shot back on Thursday with a rebuttal of the television spot. Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Florida Republican, calling the immigration ad “offensive and dishonest.”

“Instead of making false ads with baseless attacks, Barack Obama should be apologizing to the Latino community,” he said.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo Credit: Reuters/David Allio (Obama speaks in Las Vegas Sept. 17)

CHICAGO - New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has said he’s not running for president, but on Wednesday night he revved up to full campaigning mode when accepting an award from CME Group, the big futures exchanges.  

“We are desperately in need of leadership to deal with a much more competitive world,” said Bloomberg, stopping just short of announcing his candidacy for — anything.  
        
Riffing on the theme of “innovation as the essence of leadership” upon receiving CME’s Fred Arditti Innovation Award, Bloomberg electrified the well-heeled audience at the swanky Peninsula Hotel with a call for action on everything from climate change to education to immigration reform.  
    
“Choices made now will determine what kind of future our children will have. At a national level we’re working as hard as we can to stop innovation,” the Democrat-turned Republican-turned Independent said.  

Energy independence and efficiency led Bloomberg’s list of underfunded programs. “We spend one-third on that of what members of Congress spend on earmarks every year. It’s up to all of us to hold our elected officials’ feet to the fire,” Bloomberg said.  
    
Restrictions on H-1B work visas mean the United States risks losing out in a much more competitive world, Bloomberg said, adding that American capitalist success stories like Sun Microsystems, Yahoo and Google were all founded in part by immigrants.  
    
“Medicine is going overseas. Science is going overseas. We are exporting our intellectual capital, and we can’t keep doing it,” Bloomberg said “If we don’t find ways to get around that, then we really are in trouble.”  
    
Bloomberg, whose term as New York mayor ends on Dec 31, 2009, also hailed the concept of term limits — raising a few eyebrows within an audience that included Chicago’s “Mayor for Life” Richard M. Daley. 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

- Photo credit: Reuters/Shannon Stapleton (Bloomberg earlier this month with Republican presumptive presidential nominee Sen. John McCain.)