Today, “combat operations” operations in Iraq came to an official and momentous end which will be marked by a speech from the Oval Office tonight. However, for the millions of displaced Iraqis abroad, the hell is far from over. In an op-ed published in today’s New York Times, student director of the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project Saurabh Sanghvi explains that we are also “leaving behind the thousands of Iraqis who worked on behalf of the American government — and who fear their lives and families are threatened by insurgents as a result.” There are currently 15,000 available “special immigration visas” (SIV) made available to the many Iraqis who have “provided faithful and valuable service to the U.S. Government,” however, almost 13,000 have gone unused.

Sanghvi notes that the surprising low participation rates are not for lack of will or interest, but rather, red tape and bureaucratic hoops. SVI applicants must first obtain a letter of clearance from the U.S. Embassy. A mistake as minor as using the wrong letterhead can delay an application for months. Then the applicant must send the paperwork through the unreliable Iraqi postal service to Nebraska before going through two more similar approval rounds that can each takes months to complete.

The SIV program was specifically implemented to bypass the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, or “the regular refugee program,” which many displaced Iraqis other than those who worked for the U.S. qualify for. However, at this point, even senior State Department officials admit that “the refugee program administratively is just easier to navigate.”

Sanghvi offers a few recommendations that the agencies involved in determining the fate of Iraqi SVI applicants should implement:

Gather information on Iraqi employees from contractors and internal databases so that they can verify the applicants’ employment records themselves.

Allow Iraqis to submit their applications by e-mail, and then bring their original documents to a subsequent interview.

Provide rejected applicants with sufficient information about why they were denied visas and a fair, transparent process for challenging the decisions.

Retired U.S. Air Force Major Dorian de Wind wrote last week, “As a nation that bears a special responsibility for the Iraq war and for the resulting humanitarian crisis, we can still reflect the ‘character of our nation’ by, as we leave Iraq behind, not leaving behind the helpless Iraqi refugees.” Meanwhile, President Obama has already warned troops in Fort Bliss, TX that “our task in Iraq is not over yet.” And it shouldn’t be considered over until the responsibility we have to those Iraqi men and women who risked their lives to work for the U.S. is fulfilled.

Back in the fall of 2005, the Center for American Progress released a report called Strategic Redeployment, authored by Larry Korb and Brian Katulis. It argued for the redeployment of 80,000 troops from Iraq in 2006 to Afghanistan and other US bases in the Middle East and around the world. They then called for the rest of US combat forces to be withdrawn in 2007. The report concluded that:

By the end of 2007, the only US military forces in Iraq would be a small Marine contingent to protect the US embassy, a small group of military advisors to the Iraqi Government, and counterterrorist units that works closely with Iraqi security forces.

This report essentially laid a two-year timeline and while that timeline would shift up by a year in future documents, the central premise of the argument was that the US should set a date certain to prompt Iraqis to take control of their security and should withdraw its forces deliberately but responsibly in that period. It was the first Washington think tank report calling for withdrawal based on a fixed timeline.

Last year, Laura Rozen in March 2009 Laura Rozen wrote a piece for the Cable asking “Obama’s Iraq withdrawal plan: who won the think tank wars?” Rozen concluded that the centrist Center for New American Security, which came on the scene in Washington in 2007, had won the debate largely because they were getting jobs in the Gates Pentagon.

But the CNAS approach was essentially an effort to find a centrist withdrawal strategy. As a result, CNAS advocated a more watered down, or “responsible” version of CAP’s plan with an extended timeline for withdrawal, leaving a very sizeable remaining force. In March of 2008 they released a policy brief titled the “case for conditional engagement,” which held that:

A policy of conditional engagement—a nuanced middle position between “all in” or “all out”—offers a better chance of producing lasting progress in Iraq. Under this strategy, U.S. negotiators would make clear that Iraq and America share a common interest in achieving sustainable stability in Iraq, and that the United States is willing to help support the Iraqi government over the long-term, but only so long as Iraqis move toward political accommodation.

One could argue that the Administration’s plan did include an aspect emphasized in CNAS’s plan to leave behind a large amount of advisors and trainers. But overall the CNAS plan has little resemblance to the plan put forth by Obama on the campaign and the plan that his administration implemented. There is little doubt that the Obama plan to set a date certain and to withdraw more than 120,000 troops in 16 months was essentially what CAP had been arguing for since the fall of 2005. In other words, Obama went with the progressive plan on Iraq.

If one was listening to conservatives over the last half decade, this should have led to disaster. Yet chaos didn’t ensue. The world did not end. Arguments that the enemy would just “wait us out” or would be “emboldened” didn’t materialize. The only thing emboldened have been Iraq’s own security forces.

Unfortunately, the mainstream media have yawned at this achievement and have largely bought the false conservative claim that this is because of the surge. But one should remember that if conservatives were in charge and John McCain had won the presidency the explicit plan was not to withdrawal troops. There was no conservative withdrawal plan. Instead of having just over 40,000 troops, there would almost assuredly be well over 100,000 troops still in Iraq. The reason there are just over 40,000 troops, is not because of the surge, it is because Obama decided to withdraw more than 100,000 troops.

Yesterday, the Federal Reserve Bank of San Francisco released a report essentially debunking the right wing myth that immigrants steal jobs from U.S. citizen workers. In fact, the study concluded, “immigrants expand the U.S. economy’s productive capacity, stimulate investment, and promote specialization that in the long run boosts productivity.” The study conclusively states, “there is no evidence that these effects take place at the expense of jobs for workers born in the United States.”

The study produced three main findings:

Immigrants don’t “crowd out” U.S.-born workers in either the short or long run.
In other words, immigrants aren’t taking jobs from Americans. Instead, the “economy absorbs immigrants by expanding job opportunities rather than by displacing workers born in the United States.” Immigrants in the workforce have “insignificant effects in the short run” and a “significant positive effect in the long run.”

The presence of immigrants is associated with increased output per worker.
This is a long-term effect that happens as a result of businesses taking advantage of new immigrant labor. The study estimates that an inflow of immigrants equal to 1% of employment has the effect of increasing income per worker by 0.6% to 0.9%. It may not sound like a lot, but it apparently means that total immigration to the U.S. from 1990 to 2007 was associated with a 6.6% to 9.9% increase in real income per worker, or an increase of about $5,100 in the yearly income of the average U.S. worker.

Immigration is associated with increases in the efficiency and productivity of state economies.
The increase in income mentioned above is a result of the boost in efficiency and productivity that new immigrants prompt. Once businesses adjust and expand their physical capital (equipment and structures) to take advantage of new immigrant labor, output increases.

Groups like the Center for Immigration Studies — which never find anything good to say about immigration at all — meanwhile insist that high unemployment among less-educated and younger U.S.-born workers should prompt the U.S. to kick its undocumented immigrants out and shut its doors to the world. However, the Federal Reserve Bank’s study explains that, “among less-educated workers, those born in the United States tend to have jobs in manufacturing or mining, while immigrants tend to have jobs in personal services and agriculture.” Also, U.S. citizens tend to have “relatively better English language skills” which means “they tend to specialize in communication tasks.” Immigrants usually specialize in manual labor. “This results in specialization and improved production efficiency,” states the report.

The report doesn’t distinguish between undocumented and documented immigrants, however, other studies that have uncovered similar findings have further concluded that enacting comprehensive immigration reform that puts undocumented immigrants on a path to legalization would amplify the positive effects of immigrant workers cited in this study.

With U.S. “combat operations” in Iraq — which are not to be confused with U.S. combat operations in Iraq, which will continue through next year — coming to an end today, and marked by a speech from the Oval Office tonight, the internets are alight with the war’s advocates and critics fighting to define its legacy.

While that fight will likely continue for decades, it’s worth noting that the American people are now overwhelmingly with the war’s critics. A recent CBS News poll found that 76% of Americans — including 56% of Republicans — don’t think the war was worth it, and 73% believing that the war either made them less safe (18%) or made no difference (55%) against terrorism.

But while the ultimate legacy of the U.S. intervention in Iraq is still to be determined, it is possible — and necessary, given the implications for future interventions — to attempt to tally the war’s costs and benefits to the national security of the United States. Back in May, my colleagues Brian Katulis and Peter Juul and I attempted to do this with our report, The Iraq War Ledger.

As we noted, the end of Saddam Hussein’s brutal regime represents a considerable global good, but most of the war’s other benefits very much remain in the realm of conjecture, things that won’t happen — Saddam and his sons can no longer threaten us with WMD they did not have — or things that could possibly happen, if current trends continue in a positive direction, such as a stable, democratic Iraq being a model for the region. (It’s deeply ironic, of course, that a war conceived as part of an effort to combat global Islamist extremism succeeded in delivering Iraq into the hands of Islamist parties, with the single largest bloc in the Iraqi parliament representing the most extreme and anti-American of those parties. But Iraq’s being the first Arab country in which Islamists have been permitted to both compete and govern may eventually prove to be the war’s most important contribution.)

But while a nascent democratic Iraqi republic allied with the United States could potentially yield benefits in the future, the costs of the war are very real in the here and now. The financial costs are fairly straightforward, and they are staggering (sources in report):

- Cost of Operation Iraqi Freedom: $748.2 billion
- Projected total cost of veterans’ health care and disability: $422 billion to $717 billion

The human costs, especially in terms of Iraqi casualties, are somewhat more difficult to ascertain, but even using the most conservative estimates, the numbers are deeply troubling:

- Total deaths: Between 110,663 and 119,380
- Coalition deaths: 4,712
- U.S. deaths: 4,394
- U.S. wounded: 31,768
- U.S. deaths as a percentage of coalition deaths: 93.25 percent
- Iraqi Security Force deaths: At least 9,451
- Total coalition and ISF deaths: At least 14,163
- Iraqi civilian deaths: Between 96,037 and 104,7542
- Non-Iraqi contractor deaths: At least 463
- Internally displaced persons: 2.6 million
- Refugees: 1.9 million

Least appreciated, however, are the war’s strategic costs, the implications of which the U.S. will likely be grappling with for decades: Read more

A little over a week ago, the law firm of Wildes & Weinberg announced that it had successfully helped Venezuelan Miss Universe 2009, Stefania Fernandez, obtain a greed card. Meanwhile, it appears the Mexican Miss Universe 2010, Jimena Navarrete, was seen “chatting away cozily with immigration attorney Michael Wildes. “Fernandez joins Dayana Mendoza, Miss Universe 2008, on an elite list of celebrities and tastemakers that have relied on Wildes & Weinberg, P.C. for its expert counsel,” boasts the website of Wildes & Weinber. “Stefania Fernandez, Miss Universe 2009, has been approved for a green card based on her extraordinary ability and global philanthropic efforts.”

It’s great that Fernandez will be bringing her talents, beauty, and philanthropic work to the U.S., however, what’s unfortunate is that many of her fellow Latin Americans have been waiting for decades just to get their foot in the door.

The law gives preference to categories of immigrants who are related to U.S. citizens or legal permanent residents, and immigrants who have already secured employment. With the exception of beauty queens, entertainers, and those few who possess “extraordinary abilities,” most immigrants who don’t have a job offer or family in the U.S. get the door shut in their faces. The utter lack of legal channels explains why so many migrants enter the U.S. illegally.

Even migrants who fit into family- or employment-based visas don’t have it easy. As of September 2009 there are over 4.5 million applicants who have been waiting for a U.S. green card for several years. More specifically, 4.2 million foreigners have been waiting to be reunited with their families in the U.S. and 360,000 applicants for employment-based green cards. Employment-based visa wait times start at about five years for most applicants. The Asian Pacific American Legal Center notes that for family members seeking U.S. residence, the wait can be anywhere from five to 22 years:

(Family sponsored waiting list registrants represent just over 67% of the total. Employment-based waiting list registrants represent 75% of the total).

That’s not to suggest Miss Universe should have to wait 22 years to obtain a green card herself. If anything, the immigration system should be reformed to allow for a more flexible and expedited visa system. The U.S. certainly shouldn’t automatically grant a visa to anyone who applies, but current visa quotas are static and outdated. Whether the economy demands more or less workers, the backlogs persist. In the meantime, talented workers get frustrated and look elsewhere for opportunities, families are kept apart, and more people resort to entering the U.S. without proper documentation.

Senator Bob Corker (R-TN) — who sits on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that is due to take up a vote on the New START treaty in mid-September — wrote an op-ed over the weekend defending himself against charges that he is holding the New START treaty hostage in exchange for nuclear pork. Corker’s response was that he was holding the New START treaty hostage because we really need nuclear pork — particularly in Tennessee, which really needs a new nuclear facility. He wrote:

Before a treaty can be ratified, we must ensure there are appropriate commitments to fully invest in the rehabilitation of the warheads and their components… Tennessee is playing a critical role in this process. Planning is already underway for the construction of the Uranium Processing Facility (UPF) at Y-12 … It is my sincere hope to be able to support this treaty. To get there, we need to invest in modernization of the remaining arsenal … If these objectives are met, in conjunction with the prescribed reductions under this treaty, we will be more secure as a country.

What makes this all the more frustrating is that the Obama administration agrees with Corker! They have pledged to build this new facility in Tennessee and have therefore committed to a massive $80 billion increase in the nuclear weapons infrastructure – such that even though the US will be reducing its nuclear arsenal the US will be spending significantly more to maintain it.

Corker seems to be insisting that the Obama administration’s cost estimates for the new facility are too low. But there currently are no cost estimates for the facility. There is a cost range from $1.4 to $3.5 billion. The actual cost needed to build the facility won’t be known until the design phase for the facility is complete. But Corker, perhaps due to some new found knowledge of the architecture of nuclear weapons buildings, is demanding between $4-5 billion be spent on the facility. In other words, Corker is making a demand for a check that the Obama administration simply can’t write. Since they can’t commit to allocating 12 to 350 percent more on a facility that isn’t even designed. They can only commit to building the facility, which they have.

The question here is at what point will Corker decide that the Obama administration’s commitments to the facility are for real. One would hope he just doesn’t realize that there is little the Administration can due to meet his demands – as David Broder noted, Republicans have shown their ignorance on START already. But perhaps Corker knows that the Administration can’t make any more tangible commitments and is therefore just playing a double game.

Either way he is playing a very dangerous game. If START is not ratified, as Generals John Castellaw, Dirk Jameson, and John Adams explained in an oped this weekend, the US would be “left blind” due to the loss of intelligence and monitoring of Russia’s nuclear arsenal. Only Corker knows what game he is playing, but it is clear that it is a very dangerous one.

On Saturday, President Obama formally announced the end of the combat mission in Iraq. “On Tuesday, after more than seven years, the United States of America will end its combat mission in Iraq and take an important step forward in responsibly ending the Iraq war,” Obama said. “But the bottom line is this,” he added, “The war is ending. … And by the end of next year, all of our troops will be home.”

In 2008, President Bush signed an agreement with the Iraqis to pull out all U.S. troops by 2012. Yesterday on Fox News Sunday, Iraq war cheerleader Bill Kristol said that he wants Obama to announce that the U.S. will stay after 2011, with a permanent occupation force:

CHRIS WALLACE: Where does Iraq stand?

KRISTOL: Well, a lot depends on what we do in Iraq, as it depended on what we did in 1953 in Korea. Eisenhower said, “I’ll get — we’ll get out of Korea. We’ll end the war.” He did. Republicans were bitterly critical of Truman’s conduct in the war in Korea.

He didn’t then pull all our troops out and wash his hands of it and say, “Well, this is up to the Koreans to resolve their future.” He left enough troops there. … If you talk privately to Bush people and to Obama people, they said that could be renegotiated. If the Iraqi government wants to renegotiate that over the next year once they get their government set up in the next month, the President, I think, should signal that he would be open to that.

Kristol then went back to his old refrain. “We won the war,” he said. But just seconds later, he attacked Obama for allegedly saying the same thing. “And this rhetoric of ‘the war is over, it’s now up to the Iraqis’ is a mistake. … It’s irresponsible,” Kristol said. Watch it:

While Obama never said “the war is over,” he did say this weekend that “all” U.S. troops will withdraw from Iraq by 2012. And Gen. Ray Odierno — the commanding general in Iraq — did suggest that a small U.S. military presence “could” be possible, but nothing that amounts to what Kristol wants. “If the government of Iraq requests some technical assistance in fielding systems that allow them to continue to protect themselves, some external threats, we could be here,” he said.

But as Kristol once said before, only “sober, serious” people want tens of thousands of U.S. troops to stay in Iraq, even if it means putting more and more strain on the military, servicemembers and their families, and on the mission in Afghanistan. So even though “we won the war,” as Kristol says, the U.S. needs a large troop presence there indefinitely.

For months, conservatives have led a hateful campaign against the proposed Park 51 Islamic community center that is going to be built two blocks away from Ground Zero in New York City. High-ranking Republicans have spearheaded this campaign, with former House Speaker Newt Gingrich even going as far as to claim that Park 51 will act as a launching pad for the introduction of “Sharia law” to America.

Now, Newsweek reveals the most concrete evidence yet that this campaign is serving to bolster support for Islamic radicalism abroad. In an interview with the magazine, a Taliban operative going by the name Zabihullah said that, by “preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor.” He goes on to explain that the anti-mosque campaign is providing the Taliban with “with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” Another Taliban official expects that the anti-mosque campaign will provoke a “new wave of terrorist trainees from the West,” similar to suspected Times Square car bomber Faisal Shahzad. Zabihullah concludes, the “more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get”:

Taliban officials know it’s sacrilegious to hope a mosque will not be built, but that’s exactly what they’re wishing for: the success of the fiery campaign to block the proposed Islamic cultural center and prayer room near the site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan. “By preventing this mosque from being built, America is doing us a big favor,” Taliban operative Zabihullah tells NEWSWEEK. (Like many Afghans, he uses a single name.) “It’s providing us with more recruits, donations, and popular support.” [...]

Taliban officials say they’re looking forward to a new wave of terrorist trainees from the West like this year’s Times Square car bomber. “I expect we will soon be receiving more American Muslims like Faisal Shahzad who are looking for help in how to express their rage,” says a Taliban official who was a senior minister when the group ruled Afghanistan and who remains active in the insurgency. As an indication of the anger that is growing among some Muslims in the West, this official, who requested anonymity for security reasons, mentions the arrest of three Canadian Muslims in Ontario last week on charges of plotting to build and detonate improvised explosive devices. (A fourth individual was arrested in Ottawa last Friday in connection with the case.) The Ground Zero furor will likely add to that anger. “The more mosques you stop, the more jihadis we will get,” Zabihullah predicts.

As ThinkProgress previously noted, researchers at Duke University and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill concluded in a study earlier this year that contemporary mosques in the United States serve as a deterrent to Islamic radicalism. It now appears that the relationship works both ways. As the majority of tolerant and progressive Muslim Americans — like those heading Park 51 and other mosques — are prevented from peacefully practicing their own faith, the more likely it is that Muslims across the world will be radicalized and turned violent.

For months, conservatives have led a hateful campaign against the expansion of a local Islamic center in Murfreesboro, Tennessee. This campaign has been endorsed by high-ranking Republicans such as the state’s Lt. Governor, Ron Ramsey, who last month, speaking to a group of Republicans in opposition to the mosque, wondered aloud whether Islam was a religion or a “cult” and fearmongered about the mosque trying to bring “Sharia law” to America. Earlier this year, Lou Ann Zelenik, a GOP congressional candidate in Tennessee, campaigned against the Murfreesboro mosque, arguing that it posed a threat to that state’s “moral and political foundation.”

Now, the local press reports that the police are investigating a case of arson that occurred at the construction site of the mosque Friday night:

Federal agents have been called in after someone poured flammable liquid on four pieces of construction equipment early today at the site of a planned new Islamic center and mosque just outside Murfreesboro. A CBS television affiliate is reporting that it is being investigated as arson. [...]

The center is planned offer a new place of prayer to replace the office suite that 250 local Muslim families have been using in a nearby office building.

Nashville CBS affiliate WTVF reports that police are investigating the arson as a hate crime. Members of the Muslim community are so paralyzed by fear, said spokeswoman Camie Ayash, that they are not joining the congregation at the local mosque during the current month of Ramadan. Watch it:

“Everyone in our community no longer feels safe,” Ayash said. “To set a fire that could have blown up equipment and, God forbid, spread and caused damage to the neighbors there. … We really feel like this is something that we and the neighbors don’t deserve.”

A local religious freedom group, Middle Tennesseans for Religious Freedom, plans to hold a “candlelight vigil in front of the Rutherford County Courthouse on Monday in response to the fire. “We simply cannot allow the actions of a few destructive individuals to go overlooked by Rutherford County residents,” said Claire Rogers, a spokesman for the group. “It’s truly a shame that we have reached this point, but it is up to us to ensure the intimidation goes no further.”

The incident at Murfreesboro should not be viewed in isolation. Among other recent Islamophobic hate incidents: a pipe bomb was set off at a Jacksonville mosque; a playground at an Arlington, Texas mosque was torched; a brick was thrown through a mosque window in Madera, California; a Nashville mosque was vandalized, among many others.

I had to read Fred Barnes’ new Weekly Standard piece “In Defense of Settlers” a few times to be sure that Fred wasn’t actually putting us on. It appears he isn’t.

Things go awry beginning with the very first paragraph, in which Barnes writes, “When direct talks begin next week between Israelis and Palestinians, the fate of Jewish settlers in the West Bank — tens of thousands of them — will be a major issue in the negotiations. But the settlers themselves won’t be part of the discussion.”

Given that Netanyahu is still in the process of choosing his negotiating team, it remains to be seen whether actual settlers will be part of the discussion. But here’s an interesting fact: Israel’s Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman is himself a settler, living in the settlement of Nokdim, south of Bethlehem. While it’s highly unlikely that Lieberman will himself participate in the negotiations (Netanyahu wisely does his best to keep his racist former chief of staff away from decent society as much as possible), given the extreme rightist, pro-settlement orientation of Netanyahu’s governing coalition, it’s safe to say “the settlers” will very much be at the table.

Barnes goes on to channel the usual settler claims — which mirror Hamas’ claims — of a right to all of historic Palestine, as well as the canard that the West Bank is not “occupied” but rather “disputed,” which is a neat way of saying that, having lost 75% of their homeland, the Palestinians should now have to negotiate over the “disputed” remaining 25%.

Barnes notes that “a Jewish settlement has been established in the heart of Hebron.” He does not note, however, that Palestinians in Hebron are literally forced to live in cages to avoid harassment and violence by radical settlers, who live under the protection of Israeli troops and police. Nor does he note the extent to which that violence is underwritten by American “charities” like the Hebron Fund.

Things take a darker turn, however, when settler spokesman Dani Dayyan, commenting on the prospect of a Palestinian state, “raises the long-discarded idea that Jordan might become that state”:

Though its population is predominantly Palestinian, Jordan is a Hashemite kingdom. But if Hashemite rule were ended, “that would open a new horizon of possible solutions that don’t exist today,” Dayyan says. “That’s a thought for the future.” But not one that’s on the table in the Israeli-Palestinian talks to begin next week.

There are good reasons that this idea has been long discarded. Among them: The Palestinians don’t want it. The Jordanians don’t want it. There’s also the small detail that, in addition to being enormously difficult to carry out, involuntary population transfer is a crime against humanity. So don’t let’s think about it for the future, but let’s do let it be instructive as to how some Israelis (and Americans) think. Read more

Yesterday, I predicted that it was only a “matter of time” before an opportunistic lawmaker points to the tragic massacre of 72 Central and South American migrants on their way to the U.S. as yet another reason to “seal the border” and delay immigration reform. Unsurprisingly, Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) stepped up to the plate on Fox News’ On the Record with Greta Van Susteren. However, McCain didn’t just use it as an opportunity to start fear-mongering about violence in Mexico hypothetically “spilling over,” he also called immigration and human rights activists “oblivious” for suggesting that “our border is more secure than ever”:

When they — this is the most cruel and brutal things that have happened in our hemisphere. And what I don’t get, Greta, is where are the immigration activists and the human rights activists and others that wouldn’t conclude that the way you stop this terrible situation — one of the ways is to secure our borders? Then this human trafficking dries up and people come to this country legally. But they don’t seem to get that. Where are the human rights activists with these terrible abuse taking place as we speak? [...]

And then [they] turn around and say, “Don’t worry, our border is more secure than ever,” is completely oblivious to what’s happening on the other side of the border and continues to happen in our own state. And the majority of the American people have it figured out. But frankly, apparently, some of these immigration groups, pro-immigration groups haven’t figured it out yet. Secure the border. Then we can address some of the other issues.

Watch it:

However, immigration activists aren’t just speculating when they suggest that the U.S. side of the border is safer than it’s been in years. The claim is actually based on hard data from the FBI and interviews with law enforcement officials. The FBI crime statistics show that as undocumented immigration has increased, crime in Arizona and other border states has gone down. Data from the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) additionally shows that the violent crime rate in Arizona has been declining since 2006 and in 2008 and is at the lowest level since 1973. Even property crime has plummeted in Arizona since 2002 and in 2008 and is at its lowest point since 1966. Clarence Dupnik, the border sheriff of Arizona’s Pima County, has stated, “I hear politicians on TV saying the border has gotten worse. Well, the fact of the matter is that the border has never been more secure.”

Finally, immigration and human rights activists are very aware that human smuggling is a “human rights crisis.” Long before the bodies of 72 murdered migrants were found, Amnesty International decried “the alarming levels of abuse faced by the tens of thousands of Central American irregular migrants that every year attempt to reach the US by crossing Mexico.” On the ground, non-profit groups such as Border Angels and the Border Action Network work to provide relief to migrants and the border towns they pass through.

Meanwhile, in Washington, DC, immigration groups continue to fight for immigration reform that would have the effect of shuttering the human smuggling business by providing economic migrants with more opportunities to legally enter the U.S. when there are jobs available for them. Meanwhile, as Wonk Room noted yesterday, the enforcement-only approach that McCain pushes exacerbates the problems and hardships migrants face. The harder it is to cross the border, the more profitable the human smuggling business becomes. And as profits rise, so does violence in Latin America. McCain, however, insisted last night that he believes the border can be made airtight, citing Israel’s impeccable border security record — underestimating the persistent ingenuity of human smugglers and ignoring both the focus of Israeli border security efforts and the human rights violations associated with them.

Surely, McCain has access to all the information cited in this post — which means either he is the one who is oblivious or he is willfully deceiving the American public.

Immigration advocates and anti-immigrant zealots alike have been scratching their heads ever since Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) went from working with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-NY) on crafting an immigration reform bill to walking away from negotiations and suggesting that the 14th amendment should be amended to deny the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants from automatically becoming citizens upon birth. In an interview with Politico on who might be the “Republican standard-bearer for immigration reform” after the fall elections, GOP political consultant Ana Navarro suggests that there could be a method to Graham’s 14th amendment madness:

While many believe McCain is a lost cause on reform, GOP strategist Ana Navarro hasn’t written off one of the senator’s closest allies, Graham, who rolled out a reform proposal with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) in March that included a path to citizenship for the nation’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. [...]

“There is a logic to his madness,” said Navarro, who fled Nicaragua at age 8 during the Sandinista revolution. “What he was trying to do is put something in the pot, to sweeten the pot so he could attract some of the right wing to reach a compromise on comprehensive immigration reform.”

Meanwhile, Graham’s spokesperson neither confirmed nor denied Navarro’s speculations:

Graham spokesman Kevin Bishop said border security remains the senator’s No. 1 concern but that other issues — including employment verification, a guest worker program, birthright citizenship and a plan to deal with the illegal immigrants already in the country — also need to be looked at.

If Navarro is right, it would make the task of achieving effective and humane immigration reform that both sides can agree on pretty difficult. While immigration reform that includes a path to legalization together with an updated visa system would go a long way in eliminating most undocumented immigration, it’s hard to say whether the phenomena would disappear altogether. If not, changing the 14th amendment would cause a manageable problem to grow larger and larger in size every time an undocumented mother gives birth in the U.S.

It’s unclear that “sweetening the pot” by changing the Constitution would be enough to bring right-wingers to the table without causing pro-immigrant lawmakers to walk away from it. It didn’t work very well last time. In 2007 lawmakers crafted a bipartisan piece of legislation that was the last immigration reform bill that made it to the Senate floor. Though the legislation included a legalization program, it also contained a provision that replaced the green card system with a problematic “point system” that ignored labor needs and would’ve essentially changed the demographics of future immigration by prioritizing high-skilled immigrants over lower-skilled ones. Labor unions abandoned the bill when a temporary worker program was added without any path to permanent residence. At the time, The Council on Foreign Relations wrote, “the current bill will address the presence of millions of undocumented workers — no small feat. Yet without consideration of these underlying structural issues, the fundamental goals of immigration reform will remain elusive.” The bill didn’t make it past cloture.

It’s far too early to speculate as to what Graham would want in his immigration bill or if he’s even willing to work on one again. However, if his current 14th amendment politics are any indication, the compromise reached in 2007 would pale in comparison to what Graham has in mind now.

On Sunday, Frank Rich posted a column on the Park 51 controversy in which he argued “The prime movers in the campaign against the ground zero mosque’ just happen to be among the last cheerleaders for America’s nine-year war in Afghanistan”:

The wrecking ball they’re wielding is not merely pounding Park51, as the project is known, but is demolishing America’s already frail support for that war, which is dedicated to nation-building in a nation whose most conspicuous asset besides opium is actual mosques.

So virulent is the Islamophobic hysteria of the neocon and Fox News right — abetted by the useful idiocy of the Anti-Defamation League, Harry Reid and other cowed Democrats — that it has also rendered Gen. David Petraeus’s last-ditch counterinsurgency strategy for fighting the war inoperative. How do you win Muslim hearts and minds in Kandahar when you are calling Muslims every filthy name in the book in New York?

While I think Rich is correct to note the bigotry and cynicism that underlies the most virulent opposition to Park 51, and the cowardice that underlies most of the rest of it, I think we should be careful not suggest that, by engaging in free speech, however ugly and false that speech may be, critics of Park 51 are undermining the U.S.-led effort in Afghanistan, or national security more broadly.

We saw similar arguments leveled against critics of the Iraq war — first that, by questioning the case for war, they were “objectively pro-Saddam,” and later that, by continuing to criticize the war as it went worse and worse, they were emboldening insurgents.

But the idea that success or failure in Afghanistan will be determined by whatever stupid things Newt Gingrich or Glenn Beck say about Muslims is just daft, just as was the idea that those who criticized the Iraq war bear responsibility for the Bush administration’s disastrous incompetence.

None of this is to say that the controversy over Park 51 has no bearing on U.S. national security, I think it clearly does. Just as apartheid in the American South provided our Cold War adversaries with fodder for their anti-American propaganda, so it’s becoming clear that the anti-Muslim hysteria emanating from the anti-Park 51 protests is, as the New York Times reported, “playing into the hands of extremists by bolstering their claims that the United States is hostile to Islam.”

Does the Park 51 controversy make achieving the U.S.’s goals vis a vis the “Muslim world” more difficult? It may. The appropriate response to this, however, is not to attempt to chill speech by claiming it helps our enemies, but to engage in the debate more vigorously and honestly in order to ensure that American values of tolerance and religious freedom aren’t cast aside, either as a sop to bigotry or to political expediency, and let that be the rejoinder to our enemies’ propaganda.

Over the past year, amidst the heated immigration debate, immigration hawks have pointed to the violence taking place on the Mexican side of the border to argue that the U.S. isn’t ready for comprehensive immigration reform and should instead pursue a single-minded focus on border security. It’s probably only a matter of time before anti-immigrant lawmakers start pointing at the recent “massacre” of 72 Central and South American suspected migrants who were brutally tortured and killed by human smugglers in Mexico on their way to the U.S. as yet another reason to pour billions of dollars into immigration enforcement.

However, it’s actually the absence of immigration reform that contributed to their deaths and has helped propel the violence on the other side of the border. Just as the “insatiable demand” for illicit drugs in the U.S. fuels the bloody drug war in Latin America, heavy demand for and a steady supply of immigrant workers together with an outdated visa system that shuts most migrants out of the U.S. has fueled the profitable and violent human smuggling business.

Despite the poor state of the economy, the Global Consortium on Security Transformation wrote in May 2010 that “[t]he U.S. labor market has seen chronic shortages in some sectors for decades. As a result, “[i]t is no secret that much of the U.S. food processing and agricultural industries depend heavily on foreign-born (often illegal) workers for harvesting fruits and vegetables.” An aging population, low fertility rates, and rising education attainments and employment aspirations are amongst the factors that the study cites as contributing to the labor shortage in those sectors.

Meanwhile, few economic opportunities across Latin America creates an ample supply of workers who are more than willing to fill many of those jobs. However, irrespective of “good” or “bad” economic conditions, they can’t. The decades-old U.S. visa system that allows immigrants to enter and work in the country legally consists of static quotas that don’t respond to economic fluctuations.

Meanwhile, a focus on border security has made it increasingly difficult for migrants to enter the U.S. illegally. Yet it hasn’t stopped them from coming. Instead, it has increased the profitability of the human smuggling business and strengthened its ties with organized crime. In 2008, the San Francisco Chronicle reported, “[a]s U.S. border security has tightened, Mexican drug cartels have moved in on coyotes…the traffickers now use their expertise in gathering intelligence on border patrols, logistics and communication devices to get around ever tighter controls.”

Carlos Vélez-Ibáñez, chair of the department of transborder Chicana/o and Latina/o studies at Arizona State University, explains, “[n]ow, because of the so-called security needs of the border, what’s been created is this structure of smuggling in the hands of really nasty people who only treat the migrant as a commodity.” Along the way, migrants face rape, theft, physical and emotional abuse, and even kidnapping, torture, and death. Their own smugglers view them as exploitable cargo. If they make it to the U.S., they are cheap labor or trespassing “criminals,” depending on who you ask. Migrants like the 72 who were brutally killed in Mexico risk everything to attain the American Dream, but, somewhere along the line the humanity of their journey is lost.

Watch Amnesty International’s video on the risks migrants to the U.S. face:

Some well-meaning, free market thinkers would argue that an open border that allows for the free flow of labor is the answer. However, besides running the risk of being an economic and national security nightmare, it’s also politically impossible. Fixing the broken immigration system by creating a flexible number of opportunities for economic migrants to work in the U.S. without sacrificing border security is a much more practical and realistic solution. Replacing old visa quotas with a system that responds to economic supply and demand would devastate the lucrative human smuggling business by allowing more economic migrants to enter the U.S. legally, rather than paying someone to smuggle them through. It might even significantly dent the illegal drug trade by freeing up resources that are currently being indiscriminately used to pursue non-violent economic migrants and dangerous drug cartel operatives alike. In the meantime, more border security means more human smuggling profits, more violence, more exploitation, and more migrant deaths on both sides of the border.

Following last night’s surprising election results in Florida, several Latino Republicans are arguing that gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum (R-FL) lost his bid for governor largely as a result of his recent introduction of a tough, Arizona-style immigration bill. The Miami Herald reports:

GOP lobbyist and fundraiser Ana Navarro, who dropped her support for McCollum after he proposed a law “tougher” than the controversial immigration bill in Arizona, said McCollum’s stance lowered his margin of victory in Miami-Dade — and kept many Hispanic voters from going to the polls.

“I think he can blame [immigration],” Navarro said. “I think if you speak frankly with McCollum himself, he would admit it was a mistake.”

It was McCollum’s sudden support of an Arizona-style immigration bill — after originally distancing himself from that kind of legislation — that hurt him, said Carlos Curbelo, Republican in a runoff for a Miami-Dade School Board seat.

“That change took away much of McCollum’s credibility,” he said, while adding that Scott, who has attacked McCollum’s immigration proposal, faces a difficult task ahead in trying to woo Florida Hispanics.

It’s hard to say whether enough Republican Latinos stayed home yesterday to make up for the 40,000 votes that McCollum’s opponent, Rick Scott (R-FL) was able to capture over him. However, it is pretty clear his immigration bill didn’t help him nearly as much as he had hoped — if at all. A Mason-Dixon survey conducted on August 9th and 11th put McCollum at a slight 34 to 30 percent lead over Scott. On August 11th McCollum unveiled the “Florida Immigration Enforcement Act” and began campaigning on it. However, a couple weeks later, not much had changed in the polls. Quinnipiac University released a survey this Monday showing McCollum’s lead at 39 to 35 percent against Scott.

Perhaps more significantly, most Florida voters cite the economy as a top concern, not immigration enforcement. At the very least, McCollum’s bill was a distraction that cost him time, effort, and money that could’ve been directed towards convincing voters that he could address Florida’s economic woes. While 86 percent of Florida Republicans support bringing the Arizona law to their state, that doesn’t mean it’s the only thing on their mind when they enter the voting booth.

Finally, it is certainly possible that a drop in Latino Republican support may have contributed to his loss as some Latino Republicans are suggesting. A majority of the 1,600 Latino voters surveyed in four states, including Florida, said they would be likely to vote against a candidate if they disagreed with the candidate’s stance on immigration — and the majority of Latinos nationwide oppose Arizona’s approach to immigration. In Florida, 54 percent of Latino GOP voters support the Arizona law, but 36 percent oppose it — enough to make a difference in a tight race.

Ultimately, Latino sentiments will likely have a much bigger impact in Florida’s general election this fall. The same survey also found that a majority of Latinos in those states identify as Democrats, echoing reports over the past couple years that Florida’s Republican Latino electorate is shrinking. Meanwhile, Scott and McCollum shared pretty similar immigration platforms — something which will likely haunt Scott in November, but didn’t present angry Latino GOP voters with a chance yesterday to flex their political muscles (other than staying home). As far as the primary goes, as of August 14th, McCollum still had 57 percent support from Latino Republicans, compared with 21 percent for Scott. And while several notable Latino Republicans such as Reps. Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL) sharply criticized McCollum’s move on immigration, other than Navarro, few went as far as to send a strong message to the Latino community by pulling their endorsement.

Today’s news from Iraq that “bombers and gunmen launched an apparently coordinated string of attacks against Iraqi government forces on Wednesday,” killing at least 50 people across 13 towns, provides an opportunity to reflect on one of the most dubious and, frankly, profane justifications for the Iraq war: “Taking the fight to the terrorists” — fighting them over there so we don’t have to fight them here.

George W. Bush explained in 2005, while describing Iraq as “the latest battlefield in this war“:

Many terrorists who kill innocent men, women and children on the streets of Baghdad are followers of the same murderous ideology that took the lives of our citizens in New York and Washington and Pennsylvania. There is only one course of action against them: to defeat them abroad before they attack us at home.

This after-the-fact justification for the war — necessary in the embarrassing absence of either WMD or any substantive Saddam-Al Qaeda relationship — eventually became known as “Flypaper Theory.” The basic idea was that a U.S. presence in Iraq would distract extremists from trying to attack America. Because, presumably, a bus ticket to Baghdad is less expensive that a plane ticket to New York. But while it’s probably true that at least some of the extremists drawn to Iraq would have attacked elsewhere, the evidence is overwhelming that, for the majority of foreign fighters in Iraq (who, in any case, represented a small minority of insurgents), the U.S. occupation of Iraq itself was the decisive factor in their radicalization and mobilization.

While it’s generally believed that Al Qaeda in Iraq no longer has the capacity to seriously threaten to collapse the government, or to elicit the level of reprisals that led to Iraq’s 2006-7 sectarian civil war, they still retain the ability, as the last few weeks have horrifically demonstrated, to launch multiple coordinated deadly attacks, reaching what General Ray Odierno referred to as an “irreducible minimum,” beyond which it’s very difficult to degrade a committed group of terrorists.

Obviously, the continued presence of a group like Al Qaeda is a really tragic state of affairs for Iraqis, who, like most people, don’t tend to enjoy it when they, their friends, or their relatives get maimed in terrorist attacks, or living in constant fear that such a thing could happen. It’s important to remember, though — especially when tempted to wax indignant over views of the effects of American policy that hurt our feelings — that luring terrorists to Iraq to blow themselves up in markets and mosques and police recruiting stations wasn’t some tragic side-effect of the Iraq war, it was in fact a stated goal of the war, one with which Iraqis will tragically have to contend for some time to come. This, as much as anything, is George W. Bush’s legacy in Iraq.

NY1 reports today of a likely hate crime in New York City, which has been the site of an ugly, emotional debate over the proposed Park 51 Islamic community center near the site of Ground Zero. The news station reports that a cab driver was attacked by a young man who appears to have assaulted him due to his Islamic faith. The man reportedly asked the driver if he was Muslim, and when he confirmed that he was, the young man attacked the driver, slashing him “in the throat, arm and lip” with a knife:

A city cab driver is in the hospital after being stabbed by a passenger who allegedly asked if he was Muslim, police tell NY1. Investigators with the New York City Police Department say it all began Monday night when a 21-year-old man hailed a cab at 24th Street and Second Avenue in Manhattan.

Police say the passenger asked the driver, “Are you Muslim?” When the driver said yes the passenger pulled a knife and slashed him in the throat, arm and lip.

Both the driver and the alleged attacker are currently hospitalized in Bellevue Hospital. The first casualty of the “Ground Zero mosque.”

Earlier today, the Huffington Post’s Amanda Terkel reported that Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele “distanced the Republican Party from SB-1070″ in an interview with Univision. Steele attempted to reassure Latino viewers that Arizona’s new immigration law is not “a reflection of an entire country, nor is it a reflection of an entire political party.” Over the past week, at least two other Republicans have appeared on Spanish-language television echoing Steele’s remarks: Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) and Florida senatorial candidate Marco Rubio (R).

Rubio took to the Spanish-language airwaves to unambiguously affirm that he does not support gubernatorial candidate Bill McCollum’s (R-FL) efforts to bring SB-1070 to the state of Florida. Rubio stated that though he thinks the law is okay for Arizona, he does not think other states should “imitate it,” particularly, Florida.

In English, Rubio has been less outspoken on the topic. A couple weeks ago, he declined to even take a stance on it. A spokesman for Rubio simply told Politico, “He believes the best approach is for the federal government to deal with border security and immigration, and he hopes state efforts like Arizona are a wake-up call for Congress to get its act together.”

Meanwhile, this weekend, Diaz-Balart also frowned on McCollum’s Arizona copycat bill in an interview with Al Punto’s Jorge Ramos. However, Diaz-Balart insisted that such efforts have “bipartisan support.” More specifically, Diaz-Balart was attempting to justify why he still supports McCollum’s bid for governor. According to Diaz-Balart, it’s because “there is no difference” between Florida’s Democratic gubernatorial candidate Alex Sink and the two other Republican gubernatorial candidates on the issue of Arizona’s immigration law. Diaz-Balart stated outright that Sink has said she is in favor of SB-1070 and, that as governor, she and McCollum would be pretty similar on the issue.

However, Wonk Room could only find evidence that suggests otherwise. Shortly after SB-1070 was signed into law, Sink stated that it “unfairly discriminates against U.S. citizens, residents and lawful visitors.” Sink also has affirmed that she opposes bringing Arizona’s immigration law to Florida, saying, “I don’t think that the Arizona law is right for Florida, given the potential economic losses and the need for our local law enforcement to focus on fighting violent crime.” According to Sink, it would be very, very bad for Florida.”

Watch this week’s Spanish-language interviews:

The Omaha World Herald reports that the Fremont City Council in Nebraska will consider a 2011 budget that includes property tax hikes to help pay for the defense of the city’s recently voted-approved anti-immigrant law which imposes a ban on hiring or renting property to undocumented immigrants in the small community of 25,000 people. Both the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF) sued on the basis that the ordinance is discriminatory. Officials have estimated that the cost of implementation, including defending it in court, will average $1 million per year. As a result, Fremont taxpayers are now facing a potential 18 percent increase in property taxes:

A proposed property tax hike to defend Fremont’s controversial immigration law is heading to the City Council. The council at its Aug. 31 meeting will consider a 2011 budget that includes $750,000 to help pay the projected annual cost of defending the voter-approved ordinance. The public will have an opportunity to comment. [...]

City Administrator Robert Hartwig said the council most likely will not vote on the proposed 18 percent increase in the city’s portion of the property tax rate until Sept. 14. If approved, the owner of a $200,000 house would pay about $116 more in taxes next year.

Fremont’s controversial ordinance was written and will be defended by the same lawyer who wrote Arizona’s tough immigration law, Kris Kobach of the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI) — the legal arm of a designated hate group. Besides fluffing Kobach’s pay check, the city of Fremont will be expected to cover his travel and lodging fees, as well as outside assistance such as expert witnesses and support personnel.

Kobach, who is also running for Kansas Secretary of State, touts the role he has played in fighting ACLU lawsuits in Hazleton, PA and Farmers Branch, TX on his campaign website. However, what he doesn’t mention is the profit he has made off of the exorbitant costs associated with defending the legally questionable legislation he credits himself with writing. Farmers Branch, a small town of 30,000 people, has spent $3.2 million to repeal a federal district judge decision which deemed the town’s rental ban ordinance unconstitutional and may have to spend an additional $623,000 this year. It appears Hazleton will also be on the hook for the $2.4 million it has acquired in attorneys fees. A federal judge struck down Hazleton’s law and the city’s mayor, who “has no regrets,” predicts that costs could rise at least another $2 million if it loses at the federal appeals court level.

Right-wing anti-Islam activist David Horowitz’s Frontpage website has a post attacking conservative activist Grover Norquist for, among other things, having a Muslim wife, possibly being Muslim himself, as well as for distributing a letter calling on Republicans to resist engaging in anti-Muslim rhetoric or risk “alienating millions of Arab American and Muslim American voters who believe, as we do, in the principles of our party — individual liberty, traditional values, and the rule of law.”

While Norquist himself did not sign the letter, Frontpage notes that “another signatory of the letter is Suhail Khan, a long-time associate of Norquist’s,” and levels this charge:

Frank Gaffney, President of the Center for Security Policy, told me that an FBI Special Agent involved in terrorism investigations informed him that Khan is indeed a member of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Contacted for comment, Khan, who is currently the Senior Fellow for Christian-Muslim Understanding at the Institute for Global Engagement, laughed, “If that’s true, they haven’t sent me my membership card.” More seriously, Khan said “This is a ridiculous claim, I’ve never been a member of that organization. Gaffney has been caught in lie after lie over the years, and this is just one of many.”

Khan recently appeared on the Rachel Maddow show, talking to guest host Chris Hayes about the Park 51 controversy and the upsurge in anti-Muslim rhetoric from conservatives.

Given Frank Gaffney’s record of demonstrably false assertions, goggle-eyed fear-mongering and outright conspiracy theories — he once wrote that President Obama “may still be a Muslim,” and recently claimed that “Hezbollah is training on the US-Mexico border” — it’s not hard to decide who to believe here.

Still, it’s a serious charge. And it’s worth asking why an unnamed “FBI Special Agent involved in terrorism investigations” would possibly share information with the likes of Frank Gaffney. I’ve contacted the FBI for comment, will update when they respond.