Put it all together and immigration reform looks more and more difficult.

Immigrants are no strangers to being the scapegoats of the visceral reactions that come in times of crisis.  The last 100 years have seen several instances of Americans turning inward and not only shunning but scapegoating immigrants.  To begin, there was the internment of German and Japanese immigrants during the World Wars.  Then, during the Great Depression there were the round ups and mass deportations of Mexican immigrants and citizens.  And most recently there is the racial profiling and harassment Arab-Americans have been subject to.

So in the current political context, it is perfectly normal to see why there are rumblings to seal up the borders and halt immigration.  But while the response to turn away from the immigrant may be a natural response it’s not a rational response.  The most rational response to the domestic terror attack is to push forward immigration reform—policy that makes us safer by better tracking those immigrants who are here and who are seeking to enter.

But the problem is that this type of big picture or reasoned thinking takes time to kick in.  In the wake of a crisis, emotions are in the driver’s seat.  Rational and level-headed thinking lags a bit behind the visceral.

Herein lies the rub.  In order for the rational part of our thinking to kick in, we need time.  With regards to the immigration discussion, time would allow folks to see that not going through with an immigration reform makes us less safe.  However, too much time is a thief of momentum.  And immigration reform, as any type of complex legislation, lives and dies on momentum.

What we have is a Catch-22.  Time allows cooler heads to prevail.  In the case of immigration reform that means seeing the likes of Rand Paul understand that pressing “pause” on immigration reform is counterproductive to our national security.  But time also allows for momentum to fizzle.

The question in moving forward with immigration reform is whether to proceed more slowly or charge ahead.  Neither strategy is ideal, but the charging ahead is the lesser of two evils.

If immigration reform is placed on the back burner, even for a couple of weeks, it will die.

There is only so much attention that law makers can give to any one area before their attention gets pulled elsewhere.  Also, if lawmakers do not pass immigration reform before summer recess, the emotional voices of those that think that immigration makes us less safe could overpower the debate.  The last thing immigration reform needs is the health care town hall meetings from 2009.

Time usually heals all.  But in the case of immigration reform time turns out to be more of a foe than a friend.  To see immigration reform become a reality the Gang of Eight, the White House, and immigration advocates must charge forward with their reasoned arguments highlighting the greater good of immigration reform.  Now more than ever, time is of the essence.

Dr. Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto is an NBC Latino and MSNBC contributor, Senior Analyst for Latino Decisions and Fellow at the Center for Politics and Governance at the LBJ School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas, at Austin.

ICE initially released detainees in order to save money, as the cost of keeping an immigrant in detention can run as high as $164 a night.  But the effects of the sequester kick in gradually, so it’s odd that the agency would free detainees right away (It is unclear how many detainees were let go; ICE says it was a few hundred, while the Associated Press says the number was a few thousand).  An ICE spokeswoman told Talking Points Memo that these detainees were“non-criminals and other low risk offenders who do not have serious criminal histories that would subject them to mandatory detention.”  If so, then why were they being detained?

Napolitano said that “career officials in the field” had made the decision to release detainees. “Do I wish that this all hadn’t been done all of a sudden, and so that people weren’t surprised by it?” she told ABC News.  “Of course.”  The White House was not made aware of the releases either.  So Napolitano’s regrets are not enough.  As the head of Homeland Security, she should investigate this breakdown of communication.

A bigger, ongoing problem with ICE is that the agency seems to be conflicted about its mission.  The Obama Administration says its immigration policy is focused on detaining dangerous criminals who are a threat to public safety.  Yet according to ICE memos obtained by USA Today, ICE officials made plans to go after undocumented immigrants who committed minor crimes. USA Today’s report claims officials went through driver’s license records, staked out traffic safety checkpoints, and detained low-level offenders – all to meet deportation quotas.  But Vincent Picard, ICE Public Affairs Director for the Southern region, stated that “USA Today’s story lacks context and does not present an accurate picture of ICE’s focus on criminal offenders.”  Picard also said the Atlanta field personnel were discussing possible steps on pursuing criminal offenders, and “few of the contemplated steps were ever pursued.”

In fact, ICE set another record in 2012 for deportations, removing 409,849 undocumented immigrants from the U.S.  Forty-five percent of these deportees had no criminal records whatsoever.  Of the 55 percent classified as “criminals,” most were convicted of low-level crimes and immigration violations – not violent crimes, drug offenses, or DUIs.  As one advocacy group point out, ICE is deporting the same undocumented immigrants that President Obama wants to put on a path to citizenship.

ICE has internal problems as well.  The president of the ICE employees union, Chris Crane,recently told the House Judiciary Committee that the agency ranked 279^th out of 291 federal agencies for employee job satisfaction.  “Outside influences have in large part eroded the order, stability, and effectiveness of the agency,” he said, “creating confusion among ICE employees.”  It has also led to open dissent; a group of ICE agents is suing the Obama Administration over the Deferred Action policy, which they contend prevents them from doing their job.

Yes, ICE is the agency everyone loves to hate.  Conservative critics say ICE is not keeping the country safe from illegal immigration, while immigrant groups accuse it of tearing apart families.  Precisely because the agency is subjected to such scrutiny, Napolitano must make it as transparent as possible.  She has been an important supporter of immigration reform, but her credibility is at stake here. If Napolitano does not get ICE in order, it will provide ammunition for opponents of comprehensive reform.  Napolitano must accept responsibility for the detainee releases, and ensure that her agency is committed to appropriate enforcement goals.  Just as the public can no longer tolerate a broken immigration system, we can no longer tolerate a broken immigration agency.

Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.

The report also found that in more than two out of three (77.4 percent) detainers issued, the individual identified had no criminal record. Of the remaining 22.6 percent who had a criminal record, only 8.6 percent were classified as a Level 1 offense, though some records show some of those Level 1 offenders had committed traffic violations or illegal entry and not serious crimes.

Responding to the report’s release, Pablo Alvarado, executive director of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network (NDLON), stated, “The Obama Administration’s policy of using police as immigration ‘force multipliers’ through programs like Secure Communities has violated civil rights, imperiled public safety, and compounded injustice.”

But ICE deputy press secretary Gillian Christensen stated: “As the TRAC report itself notes, its conclusions are based on data that dates back four years, prior to many of ICE’s enforcement reforms including the new detainer guidance issued by the agency on Dec. 21.” The new guidelines, Christensen added, restrict ICE detentions for minor traffic violations or misdemeanors, and attempt to focus on more serious crimes.Immigration authorities can issue detainers if they suspect someone may be in the country illegally, and there are guidelines on how long a person can be held and under what circumstances.

The TRAC report does not have information on how many detainers were lifted or how many people were eventually deported.  It is illegal for authorities to detain U.S. citizens. The report found almost 3,500 facilities received one or more ICE detainers.

The NDLON says it is calling on the Senate to hold hearings on the use of detainers.

For the first time, an official response to the president’s State of the Union Speech was made in English and in Spanish. Senator Marco Rubio of Florida was tagged by party leadership to be the face of the GOP, and it seems as though the tail isn’t wagging the dog so much in the Republican Party lately when it comes to Latinos.

Yet, the other day, Representative Xavier Becerra said that the Democrats have “moved on” from a Dreamer-only pathway to citizenship. Are the Democrats going to insist on citizenship over legalization to the detriment of a compromise when many immigrants do not necessarily want citizenship to begin with?

Carlos Mora is an American citizen who wants his dad back, yet in the president’s speech Mr. Obama once again boasted about his immigration policy that has systematically ripped families like Carlos’ apart for reasons no Republican president has tried to justify since President Eisenhower.

In the meantime, Republicans who can count to 52 million are lining up behind a pathway to citizenship for Dreamers and the Party leadership seems intent on supporting Latino Republicans, like Governor Brian Sandoval of Nevada and Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico, to recruit more Latinos into the GOP.

Of course, one can’t expect this to be appreciated by partisan Latinos who are doing what they can to ignore the president’s policy of forced removal and salivating at the prospect of using immigration to leverage the GOP out of existence. I asked some of these folks when was the last time the official Democrat response to the State of the Union was in English and Spanish? And I remind them that it was a Republican, President Bush, who conducted the first radio address in Spanish more than ten years ago.

That was before the War on Terror, which brought renewed strength to our xenophobic impulses, but it’s time we move forward. While the losing fight by the cultural purists within the Republican Party continues, it is time to confront these racist forces within the GOP so that the party can finally pose a challenge to Democrats who are all too willing to use Latino suffering for electoral gains.

And the Marco Rubios of the GOP may soon have more help in doing so. Gabriel Gomez, the son of Colombian immigrants who is a former Navy SEAL recently announced his candidacy for Senate in Massachusetts. The GOP would be wise to put some serious effort behind his campaign and find more like him throughout the country.

Erika Andiola is a nationally-recognized leader of Dreamers and she was asked by Google to participate in a Google Hangout to ask the president questions about immigration after the State of the Union, but once they discovered that Ms. Andiola’s mother and brother were recently victims of the president’s dragnet, they rescinded the invitation.

Perhaps they were afraid that the Republicans would point out the obvious hypocrisy of putting folks like Ms. Andiola on display when the president’s policies have been targeting her family. Maybe they were also afraid Ms. Andiola would refuse to give the president a pass in questioning his policies, as so many other Latinos have. But without a viable alternative to the Democrats, that’s exactly what we are doing.

Stephen A. Nuño, Ph.D., NBC Latino contributor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He is currently writing a book on Republican outreach into the Latino Community.

Perhaps it was the thousands of children who will go to sleep tonight without a parent thanks to the President’s overzealous enforcement program. Maybe it was the tens of thousands of detainees sitting in prison-like conditions in makeshift camps without any legal representation. I failed to see what there was to cheer about other than this is an issue that will surely bloody the nose of the Republican Party no matter how much they compromise on the issue.

That’s quite a tempting opportunity, and I hope the 1.5 million deportations was worth it to the Latino Democrats present at the pep rally in Las Vegas yesterday, but the President did nothing to mitigate the pain going on in the Latino community yesterday thanks to his policies.

And yet, the President essentially said that the deportations would continue and the militarization of our border will be stepped up.

So the argument goes, Latino’s have had to pay this danegeld to give the President the leverage he needed to confront the Republican argument that the federal government was ignoring its duty to enforce our immigration laws. Yet as President Obama went through his splendid list of accomplishments in enforcement, its was largely inconsequential to the political reality facing the Republican Party that they need to take the contentious issue of immigration off the table sooner rather than later.

Marco Rubio essentially answered the right-wing talking points in one segment of the Rush Limbaugh show in a way no amount of deportations by the Obama Administration ever could. And despite Rubio’s genuine effort to bridge the interests between right and left on this issue over the last year, the President seems more intent on undermining him than he does putting a halt to the pain.

There is no doubt immigration is a both gold mine and mine field, and the President’s victory seems to have emboldened him to the point that the suffering among immigrants is but another chip in the game for him. I suppose it’s a good thing that the continued ICE raids and intransigence among the President’s own officers ignoring his directives to prioritize deportations among dangerous criminals is creating a focused anger against the GOP, but maybe Latino Democrats shouldn’t show too much excitement and ask some relevant questions.

Of course, it’s always nice to see the incessant anti-immigrant whining by the truly committed right-wing zealots. They can essentially reprint their boilerplate screeds accusing sensible Republicans of supporting amnesty, economy and reality be damned. It is them who have put the GOP in this spot in the first place and it was the weak leadership of folks like Mitt Romney and John McCain who failed to educate their voters and chose instead to placate them.

Given the recent history of this debate, it’s clear the GOP will need to go through a ritualistic beating over immigration, and rightfully so. Elections have consequences, and the Republicans have been on the wrong side of history for decades now. The other day, the anti-immigrant politician, Tom Tancredo of Colorado, said with a straight face that 40 percent of Latinos voted for Mitt Romney in Arizona and that immigration has nothing to do with the GOP’s problem among Latinos.

This is incredible enough given the facts, but aside from the only sensible person in the room questioning the GOPs misguided tactic of isolating Latinos, the rest of the audience was quite comfortable with Tancredo’s ridiculous assertion.

And so long as the Republican base continues to confuse these asses for lions, Latinos will continue to take part in these awkward jubilees.

Stephen A. Nuño, Ph.D., NBC Latino contributor and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Politics and International Affairs at Northern Arizona University. He is currently writing a book on Republican outreach into the Latino Community.

Although the president couldn’t deliver on his promise of comprehensive reform during his first term, the stars may be aligning for it to happen during his second.  The White House has a sound strategy already mapped out.  The U.S. is meeting its immigration enforcement goals, and prominent Republicans and a majority of voters support a path to citizenship for the undocumented.  Now it’s up to Obama to sell lawmakers and the public on his proposal.

Obama’s plan will likely include a guest worker program, employment verification mechanisms, and a path to citizenship for the undocumented.  According to The New York Times, the president plans to seek an overhaul of our immigration system in “one fast push.” This ambitious goal is better than a piecemeal approach, which could be dragged out or whittled away.  A bold plan will avoid endless negotiations over a series of smaller measures, and show that the president is committed to action.

Overlooking record levels of deportations, conservatives like Senator John Cornyn (R-TX), maintain that the U.S. needs to secure the border before we tackle comprehensive reform.  But Obama can make the case that immigration enforcement is at an all-time high.  A new report by the nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute notes that the U.S. spends roughly $18 billion on federal immigration enforcement, more than it spends on all other law enforcement efforts combined.  Nearly all of the border security benchmarks set by Republicans during the 2007 immigration debate have been met.

The president can count on public support for his plan.  A poll released this month by bipartisan polling groups finds that a majority of Americans support immigration reform that includes a pathway to citizenship.  An NBC/Wall Street Journal poll found similar results.  These findings prove that reform is a politically viable idea.

Consider how circumstances have changed since 2007, when the U.S. last attempted immigration reform.  Since then, the Pew Center says that illegal immigration has fallen to “net zero.”  Leading Republicans are in favor of a pathway to citizenship for the undocumented.  While there will always be conservatives vehemently opposed to “amnesty,” these days unions, church groups, and business leaders are united in support of comprehensive reform.

Still, the president may face competition from Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL), who is working on an immigration plan of his own.  While the framework of their proposals is quite similar, Rubio wants undocumented immigrants to “go to the back of the line” before they can apply for citizenship.  However, the average wait time for a legal Mexican immigrant is 15 to 20 years.  Under Rubio’s plan, undocumented immigrants could possibly wait a couple of decades for citizenship.

President Obama has the better plan, a true mandate, and popular support.  He must ride the momentum of the elections, and act swiftly and decisively on immigration.

In 2012, Latinos showed up at the polls in record numbers to make Obama’s dream of a second term a reality.  There’s every reason for him to return the favor.  It’s time he delivered on his promises – and on our dreams.

Raul A. Reyes is an attorney and member of the USA Today Board of Contributors.

No doubt the president felt the need to reiterate this well-worn pledge after two weeks of holiday-related news coverage detailing the impact that his administration’s unprecedented deportations have had on immigrant communities across the country. Those news features were kicked off by the Department of Homeland Security’s announcement that a record 409,849 individuals were deported in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

Those with only a passing interest in the issue might be forgiven for assuming that immigrants who were shown the door were the kind of people who pose a threat to our communities and our nation’s security.

Unfortunately, this was not exactly true. And the subtle misrepresentation about the types of people who are being expelled calls into question how these latest statistics will be used to either hammer the president for not doing more to keep undocumented immigrants in the country or to again raise the specter that his immigration books are cooked just as compromises on reforms are being negotiated.

Though John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, stated that 55 percent of those deported were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors — about twice the number of people in such categories deported in fiscal year 2008 — the immigrants in question are not overwhelmingly murderers, gang-bangers or drug pushers we’d normally assume them to be.

According to Bryan Johnson, an immigration attorney and blogger in New York, the only reason that ICE is breaking deportation records is because Border Patrol apprehensions are also counted. When these individuals are caught a second time crossing the border, they are then prosecuted for illegal re-entry, a federal felony.

Johnson told me he thinks DHS and the administration “want to make it look like they’re prioritizing their efforts, but I think they’re intentionally shifting numbers so that they look like they’re deporting more and more criminals when in fact they’re not — they’re simply destroying more families.”

While the distinction may not mean much to those who want to send all illegal immigrants packing, it actually causes two harms. First, it contributes to the incorrect, though popular, belief that simply being present in this country without the proper documentation is a criminal offense — it’s usually only a civil offense, most often for overstaying a visa.

Second, it creates the illusion that limited resources are being spent getting hardened, dangerous criminals out of our communities, when it is not quite the case.

Mary Giovagnoli, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Immigration Policy Center, agrees that whether because of purposeful intent to paint deportation statistics in the best possible light — or simply because the quirks of government reporting produce un-nuanced, aggregate numbers that don’t tell the whole story — it’s important for those interested in our immigration policy to understand what the numbers really mean.

A soon-to-be released report from her organization will detail how these intricacies reflect an increasingly sweeping and punitive U.S. immigration enforcement environment.

“During the course of the Bush and Obama administrations, DHS and ICE have tried to show they’re tough on enforcement to try to soften the ground a little bit for eventual immigration reforms,” Giovagnoli said in an interview. “But ever since 2005 when Operation Streamline ordered federal criminal charges for every person crossing the border illegally, the system is on auto-pilot to criminalize immigrants, subjecting them to the most vigorous enforcement with few mechanisms for getting out of the system.

“Ironically, these large numbers can be used to say that we’re at a tipping point and that the administration should find ways to bring the system back into balance by providing more opportunities for relief.”

As immigration returns to the national discourse, President Obama would surely benefit from clearing up rampant misperceptions surrounding his administration’s deportation numbers — and championing policy changes that will ensure that enforcement measures focus on the most serious threats to our nation’s safety.

Esther Cepeda is syndicated columnist and an NBC Latino Contributor.

As the prevailing narrative goes, the GOP will soon be extinct since President Obama has promised yet again to lead Hispanics to long-awaited comprehensive immigration reform.

RELATED: Latino Republicans to GOP – Shut up and listen

The view from the president’s hometown is slightly different, however. In the last few days, several of Chicago’s Hispanic leaders have publicly criticized Obama for again being all talk and no action on immigration.

Last Friday, despite a Los Angeles Times article citing unnamed White House sources predicting an immigration push in mid-January, Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill., told The Hill newspaper that the president has gone AWOL when it comes to immigration reform discussions.

“When senators from both parties and members of the House are talking, when you have the Senate majority leader and [House] Speaker [John] Boehner both saying that this is an important priority, who’s the one missing? The president,” said Gutierrez. With no election-year party unity restraining him, look to Gutierrez to become one of Obama’s loudest critics should the president even appear to slack on his campaign promise.

Gutierrez isn’t the only one wondering why raids on homes and workplaces by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and continued deportations of undocumented workers — the tally for 2012 stood at 366,292 through Aug. 25 — rarely merit news coverage amid all the stories of how the president and the Democrats are immigrants’ true allies.

Even faith leaders are showing disbelief in the president’s ability to deliver what he promised. Last week a coalition of them told reporters at a news conference that Obama has 92 days after the inauguration to introduce a reform plan.

The Rev. Jose Landaverde, a Chicago-based priest and immigration-reform activist, laughed that notion off when I spoke with him. Landaverde, who heads Our Lady of Guadalupe Anglican Catholic Church in Little Village, the city’s largest enclave of Mexican immigrants, spent last week sending out impassioned press releases criticizing the president for letting ICE unleash “a post-election surge of raids to randomly pick up undocumented workers” even as Obama promises Latinos relief from family separation.

“The president lies to us. These raids go against his call for prosecutorial discretion for immigrants with no criminal records, but every week I have families whose members are picked up and sent away to detention centers where no one can find them,” Landaverde said. “That certainly was not the mandate he received in the recent election. That’s not what he promised.”

Living at ground zero of the strife that the current immigration laws breed, Landaverde said he’s fed up with Obama’s double-talk — some of which is well-received in the Latino community because it’s delivered in Spanish. Plus, he said, he is sick of the Democrats’ continued assurances that their party is the true champion of immigrants and tired of the “empty promises” from large immigrant advocacy organizations such as the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights or the National Council of La Raza. Landaverde says such groups are actually more focused on amassing their own political power than on the people who stand to benefit from real reform.

The priest said it’s time to send a message to the people he thinks could make the most difference in this impasse: Republicans.
Echoing others who have called on the GOP to open a meaningful dialogue with Latino voters through grass-roots community outreach, Landaverde said, “I want the Republicans to come talk to the real people who are affected daily by this lack of reform.

“Forget the Democrats, forget the big advocacy groups — let them come talk to the leaders at the churches and the neighborhood coalitions and the people in the community.

“I can’t guarantee that if a reform passes with Republican help that Latinos will automatically vote for them, but if anyone really wants to cut through the hypocrisy of the Democrats who speak to us in our language but never seem to get anything done, come talk to us. We will listen to anyone who is willing to talk about answering a plea for human dignity.”

The GOP really should take Landaverde’s advice and consider now the ideal moment to lead a revival of compassionate conservatism.

Esther Cepeda is a syndicated columnist and an NBC Latino contributor.  

The last time Ecuador, the small Andean country probably best known for being the world’s leading banana exporter, made a wave in the news was in April, when it agreed to close a number of its failing garage and storefront universities.

Before that, in January, there was the bizarre story of how an Internet campaign succeeded in shutting down hundreds of torture clinics where gay patients were starved and beaten in an effort to make them “straight.”

Ecuador always seems to be in the background. Lacking the glittering pomp of Brazil’s nouveau riche, the outsized violence of neighboring Colombia, or the clout of mass émigrés like Mexicans in the U.S. — there are only about 600,000 Ecuadoreans, or descendants living in this country, according to the Pew Hispanic Center – Ecuador is most often only an afterthought.

Then there’s Rafael Correa, the young, photogenic president, who has made his mark on a weary Ecuadorean populace by appealing to the indigenous population with his basic skills in their native language, Quechua, and with his programs to uplift the poor. He’s made an impression on everyone else by getting the country’s constitution amended so he could hold on to his presidency for as long as possible, by bullying the media with crackdowns and lawsuits, and, most recently, by boycotting the Summit of the Americas to protest Cuba’s continuing exclusion.

Now Correa, who earned his masters and Ph.D. in economics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, may be trying to burnish his, and Ecuador’s, image on the international stage by considering harboring WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. The boyish, silver-haired whistle-blower caused an international incident last week by entering the Ecuadorean Embassy in London seeking protective asylum from the U.S. and Swedish governments. Both are after him over his publication of military and diplomatic secrets and allegations of rape and sexual abuse of two women dating back to 2010.

Apparently Assange got tight with the president after hosting Correa on his England-based talk show, which he broadcast while under house arrest last April. After 75 minutes of bantering with Correa about their mutual appreciation for each other and disdain for the U.S. — they commiserated about being “persecuted” and Assange bid Correa farewell by saying “don’t get assassinated” — they must have felt enough of a bond that Assange picked Ecuador over Cuba or Russia to evade the authorities.

Talk about a gold mine of an opportunity for Correa to step into the limelight. By publicly supporting Assange, he takes a step toward filling the shoes of Latin America’s current — and fading — political characters, the ailing Fidel Castro, whose constant death rumors have become old hat, and Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, whose antics have taken a back seat to news of his battle with cancer.

It’s actually a depressing turn because outsized personalities are pretty much the only thing that keeps Latin America in the U.S. public eye. Now that migration from Mexico has slowed dramatically, Latin America is ignored even more. When President Obama goes south of the border, he seems to precede it by dropping some domestic bomb that keeps attention firmly on America’s political reactions to it. What did you hear more about, Obama’s trip to Mexico for the G-20 summit or his plan to waive deportations for hundreds of thousands of young illegal immigrants?

But is Correa cut out to become Latin America’s newest defiant provocateur? Forgive me for saying so, but he doesn’t have the chops. He may have the personality to play the role of strongman, but not the bombastic persona to ascend to chief anti-imperialist status.

As a relatively steady hand, Correa is well-regarded by the residents of a country that has always been skeptical of its revolving door of elected leaders — his approval ratings are at about 80 percent — but he’s not an icon by any stretch of the imagination. Even his Twitter feed is kind of a bore.

I can’t imagine Correa ever holding court in a loud tracksuit like El Comandante, or getting American movie stars to fawn over him like Chavez, himself a popular TV show host, does. And that’s a real shame because the U.S. only pays attention to Latin America when there’s telenovela-like intrigue and drama involved.

Esther Cepeda is syndicated columnist and an NBC Latino Contributor.

You can reach her at estherjcepeda@washpost.com. 

(c) 2012, Washington Post Writers Group

Does the Governor realize that the legal battle will only increase in intensity, the second Arizona incorrectly arrests a legal immigrant or citizen? In an election year Arizona voters should be asking themselves this: other than further infamy and economic hardship, what do the citizens of Arizona actually gain in going along with Governor Brewer on her Ahab like quest to solve a problem that no longer exists? The reality is even if she wins, Arizona loses.

Governor Brewer has said that SB1070 is necessary in order to defend the U.S. from an “invasion of illegals.”  As Simon Rosenberg, president of NDN a center left think tank notes, deportations of criminal immigrants are at historic high levels. There is currently unprecedented cooperation between federal immigration law enforcement officials and local law enforcement officials across the country to prioritize the deportation of criminal immigrants. The Obama administration has deported nearly 1.06 million undocumented immigrants, by contrast former President George W.  Bush’s in two full presidential terms only deported 1.57 million.

The Obama Administration has also enhanced interior immigration enforcement by transitioning from large-scale workplace arrests of undocumented workers to a far more effective electronic I-9 audit system. Cases against employers are up sharply: Immigration and Customs Enforcement quadrupled the number of employer audits after Obama took office, businesses were fined $6.9 million in fiscal 2010, up from $675,000 in 2008.

The border region in Arizona has never been safer. In 2000, there were 23 rapes, robberies and murders in Nogales, Ariz. Despite nearly a decade of population growth, there were 19 such crimes. Aggravated assaults actually dropped by one-third. Overall net migration of undocumented immigrants from Mexico is stagnant.  The number of immigrants currently entering the country through Arizona is also down.Border Patrol apprehensions, an indicator of the number of immigrants crossing the border, are down 41 percent compared with the previous year.

If Alabama is any indication, Arizona is looking to invite even more lawsuits.

In Alabama where enforcement of their state immigration law actually occurred, local police officers had arrested two legal immigrants who also happened to be car executives visiting plants in the State.  If the Supreme Court finds parts of Sb1070 constitutional based on a lack of consensus on the federal pre-emption argument and it is actually enforced, if anything close to what happened in Alabama occurs in Arizona, there will be so many civil rights lawsuits filled, Governor Brewers head will spin.

Bottom line even though the Supreme Court upheld the papers please provision, this fight is far from over and will continue at great fiscal cost to the people of Arizona. Which brings us back to Governor Brewer, it is increasingly unlikely that she will ever be able enforce the law for a sustained amount of time, again in an election year Arizona voters should be asking themselves this is Governor Brewer leading Arizona off of a cliff to solve a problem that no longer exists.