Immigration: The New Dream Isn’t American | Newsweek National News

ENVIRONMENT
Parry and Thrust
Andrew Murr 4/4/2008 12:00:00 AM
The reaction was swift and angry. After Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff announced Tuesday that he would speed up construction of the wall along the U.S.-Mexican border by sidestepping three dozen federal environmental laws, House Homeland Security Committee chair Bennie Thompson denounced the move as "an extreme abuse of authority." Defenders of Wildlife president Rodger Schlickeisen lamented that "laws protecting wildlife, land, rivers, streams … (were) just a bother to the Bush administration." The Sierra Club's Carl Pope broadly suggested that rushing the fence to keep out illegal aliens might spell environmental disaster, even "the destruction of the borderlands region."
FOREIGN POLICY
The Candidates on Immigration
1/3/2008 12:00:00 AM
The rise of globalization, combined with growing concerns over security and terrorism, has transformed immigration into an issue with significant foreign policy implications. In the 2006 midterm elections, immigration emerged as a significant issue in a number of campaigns, although it is not clear how decisive a role it played. The importance of a reformed immigration policy in a broader homeland security strategy has made it a major subject of debate in the 2008 presidential election. This debate escalated recently surrounding the controversial immigration reform legislation that would have granted temporary guest status to millions of illegal immigrants. That bill stalled in the Senate June 7, 2007 after a cloture motion was rejected, although nearly all of the presidential candidates currently serving as senators voted for that motion.
A Great Wall?
Jamie Reno 10/12/2006 12:00:00 AM
BORDER POLITICS
Brownsville’s Bad Lie
Arian Campo-Flores
For five generations, the Benavidez family has lived on a seven-acre plot of serene farmland near the U.S.-Mexico border west of Brownsville, Texas. They've harvested cotton and squash and raised goats and pigs. They've helped sculpt the levee that snakes across the rear of the property. They've given birth there, married there and died there. Their connection to the land runs so deep that they can't imagine parting with even a piece of it. So two weeks ago, when federal employees arrived asking to purchase a rectangular slice abutting the levee for $4,100 to make way for a border fence aimed at deterring illegal immigrants, they refused. "I don't want to scare you," Idalia Benavidez, 77, says one of the employees told her, "but whether you agree or not, the government's going to make the fence." If the Feds get their way, an 18-foot-high barrier will soon traverse the Benavidez property, cutting off their cows from a pasture south of the fence's proposed path. "It's going to be ugly," says Benavidez. Worse still, she predicts, "it's not going to work."
A Bang-Up Business in Illegals
Bush's Spanish Lessons