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Wednesday, September 17, 2008
Obama ties McCain to Rush Limbaugh in immigration ads
Sen. Barack Obama released a Spanish-language radio and TV ad Tuesday that ties Sen. John McCain to talk show host Rush Limbaugh and immigration hard liners in his party.
The ad will air in Florida, Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico, Obama campaign officials said.
The ad says that McCain and “his Republican friends” have “two faces” when it comes to Latinos.
The ad shows a picture of Limbaugh with a quote underneath which says, “Mexicans — stupid and unqualified.” A narrator says that McCain wants Latinos to forget “the insults” and “the intolerance.”
Hessy Fernandez, McCain’s spokesperson for Hispanic media, denounced the ad as “hypocritical and desperate.”
“Sen. McCain never used that kind of rhetoric,” she said. “Sen. McCain took a lot of heat, at great political risk, for this issue.”
See the ad here, as featured on the Washington Post web site:
The Obama ad is a reaction to a McCain Spanish language ad that blames Obama for the demise of an immigration bill last year. Obama’s campaign said Tuesday the ad was untruthful. Here it is:
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Obama: Immigration raids are a publicity stunt
Salinas asked Obama whether he supports a moratorium on immigration raids.
Here is his answer: “Raids are a publicity stunt, they are a tactic to push people away from focusing on the failures of the immigration system as a whole. What we have to do is to have a comprehensive immigration plan that has strong border security; that cracks down on employers who are taking advantage of undocumented workers…We’ve got to crack down on them, and we’ve got to provide a pathway to citizenship for undocumented workers, making sure that they over time are able to earn their position here in the United States of America.”
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Half of California students have at least one foreign-born parent
The U.S. Census Bureau released some interesting stats on students in the United States, including:
— Half of school kids in California have at least one foreign-born parent, the highest percentage in the nation. In Nevada, 36 percent have at least one foreign-born parent and in New York, its 33 percent.
— West Virginia and Mississippi have the lowest rate of students with at least one foriegn born parent — 2.5 percent.
— In California, Texas and New Mexico, one-third or more of students enrolled in kindergarten through 12th grade spoke a language other than English at home.
An earlier analysis by the Pew Hispanic Center found that the number of Hispanic students in the nation’s public schools is increasing rapidly, and nearly one-fifth have difficulty speaking English.
Richard Fry, a senior researcher at the Pew Hispanic Center and co-author of the study, said that an increasing number of Hispanic students are bilingual — speaking English and Spanish proficiently.
Read more here.