Earlier this week, the Denver Westward News Blog reported that Tom Tancredo got the idea for requiring voters to pass a civics literacy test from “a black guy” driving a limo in Detroit who was studying for his citizenship test. Now, Yeh Ling-Ling, an ethnically Chinese, Vietnam-born, Cambodian-raised, France and Taiwan educated, naturalized U.S. citizen has publicly endorsed Tancredo’s proposal. In an email exchange with reporter Michael Roberts, Yeh wrote:

I believe that in order to be granted U.S. citizenship, immigrants must have a good knowledge of spoken and written English, without any exception. Literacy tests should be given to all U.S. voters — native-born and naturalized citizens alike, so that their votes can accurately reflect their will.

I head a national tax-exempt non-profit organization whose leaders and supporters are racially and politically diverse, including minority immigrants. We do not and may not endorse or oppose political candidates or parties. We believe that some sort of immigration moratorium will be needed so that we can put American job seekers, welfare recipients and non-violent prison inmates to work.

Though the majority of foreign-born U.S. citizens support immigrant-friendly policies, there are always those who would prefer to shut the door behind them. Yeh’s organization believes the U.S. should block further immigration in order to deal with everything from traffic congestion and air pollution to an overall “deteriorating quality of life.” Despite the fact that 89% of Latinos support an earned path to legalization for undocumented immigrants, a small group of Latinos have also started an organization called “You Don’t Speak For Me” in protest of undocumented immigration.

While everyone is entitled to their opinion, it’s troubling that these groups are so quick to ally themselves with individuals and organizations that have repeatedly denigrated their communities and who are transparently exploiting their alliance in order to skirt valid accusations of bigotry and nativism. When it comes to immigration, Tancredo isn’t as concerned about traffic jams and air pollution as he is about “the fate of western civilization.” You Don’t Speak For Me’s official spokesperson isn’t a Latino, it’s Ira Mehlman — a white man who is also curiously the spokesperson for Choose Black America (CBA), a coalition of black leaders opposed to undocumented immigration, and the mostly-white designated hate group, Federation for American Immigration Reform.

The Center for New Community describes these organizations as nothing more than front groups propped by institutions with relatively clear cut anti-immigrant agendas. Ultimately, their peculiar association raises the question of whether these groups are really speaking for themselves. And, if not, then who is?

There is a new conventional wisdom developing that Obama’s engagement policy has failed. Stories on Iran in the mainstream press frequently assert that engagement has failed and the right gleefully boasts that engagement was naïve in the first place. These claims are wrong on two accounts. One of which the Administration argues, in noting that engagement has opened the possibility for international sanctions, something that was impossible during the Bush administration. The other argument however has not really been made, yet it is the most important: the policy of engagement played a critical part in the development of the Green Movement.

This may sound like an argument that is just shrilling for the Obama administration, but without the shift to engagement from Obama it is highly doubtful that such a movement would have materialized. With the Bush administration in office, the United States was not seen as a potential partner. While Iranians may have still supported the concept of engagement with the West during the Bush administration, reformists could hardly motivate large crowds on behalf of engaging with the Bush administration. The bluster-based policy of the Bush administration which described Iran as evil, threatened to bomb them, and invaded both of their neighbors, made it quite easy for the Iranian regime to demonize the United States as the Great Satan and argue plausibly that the obstacle to better relations with the west was a crazy United States not the regime. Being despised matters for US foreign policy.

However, Obama’s election and his calls for engagement, deprived the regime of this argument by making it clear that the United States was not the obstacle to better relations. Obama’s election was met with tremendous hope and optimism globally, including Iran. The President’s outreach to Iran with the address on Iran’s new years and his repeated calls for engagement in his first six months in office, gave momentum to reformists. It sent the signal that a new relationship between Iran and the West was possible.

During the Iranian election there were clear calls to embrace this change, as the Moussavi campaign was filled with slogans and imagery that drew from Obama’s own presidential campaign. Moussavi during the campaign expressed an eagerness “to push for Iran to embrace President Barack Obama’s offer of dialogue after a nearly 30-year diplomatic freeze.” Moussavi noted that “the taboo in this country (Iran) about talking to America has been broken.” During the election, there were numerous reports of Iranians saying they were voting against Ahmadinejad because they wanted better relations with the outside world. For example the LA Times quoted a school teacher saying, “I’m not coming here to vote for anyone. I’m voting against someone. I want a change in the situation. I want better relations with the outside world.” Nick Burns, who served in the State Department under the Bush administration said that engagement put Ahmadinejad “on the defensive” during the election.

After the fraudulent election, the Green Movement became a new force, a force that has had little to do with the actions of the Obama administration. However, what engagement as a policy did in the first six months of 2009 was raise expectations among reform-minded Iranians that there was a chance for a new direction in US-Iranian relations. These raised expectations combined with the fraudulent elections proved a combustible combination.

Hence, US policy of engagement has not failed at all. As Judah Grunstein at World Politics Review argued, “Iran failed, not engagement.” Engagement has made clear to Iranians that it is not the United States, the once Great Satan, keeping them down, but their own regime. Shifting the spotlight from the actions of the US to the actions of the regime may in fact be Obama’s biggest foreign policy accomplishment to date.