In April the state of Arizona enacted a now famous statute that would make it a crime for immigrants not to carry immigration documents. The proposed new law would have given the police the authority to check for such papers if an officer stopped someone for any reason, such as a traffic violation or even just suspicious behavior. Opponents have argued that it is an invitation to harassment of Latinos and ethnic profiling , which it probably is. The Obama Administration took extraordinary steps of challenging the Arizona law in court, and recently won a partial victory, undoing the law’s most controversial provisions .

In arguing its case, the Justice Department charged that the Arizona usurped federal authority to control immigration. There is no little irony here, since – with 12 million or so illegals living in the United States – the federal government is clearly not controlling immigration. Arizonans and other citizens of border states are increasingly the victims of violent drug gangs and immigrant smuggling cartels. Border state police and social services are strained to the breaking point. Does the federal government really have the right not to control our borders and keep the states from doing so?

Since Washington is not doing its job to secure the borders, shouldn’t it be the states that are suing the federal government, and not the reverse?

The name Mexico should stand for human rights violations, if not hypocrite. Mexico has a long history of causing harm to those peoples they deem are not Mexican enough: the marginalization and land rights violations against its indigenous peoples that continued after its independence from Spain; the slaughter of 303 Chinese immigrants in 1913, in the town of Torreón; and their most recent victims, immigrants from Central America who are often raped, rob, or kidnapped for ransom. Not to mention, the hundreds of American tourists that report getting robbed by the Mexican police; I have had homeboys who got their low-riders taken after refusing to pay a bribe. Despite these facts, once again, Mexico is outraged at the U.S. for its supposed human rights violations! Can someone say, Hipócritas!

Last week, Sergio Hernandez, a fifteen year old involved in illegal immigrant smuggling was shot by U.S. border patrol agents after he had been taunting and throwing rocks at them. Mexican President, Felipe Calderon, expressed fear that anti immigrant sentiment (in the U.S.) is encouraging violence against Mexicans. [How about the violence from Mexicans aimed at our men in uniform who protect our borders].He said recently of the new Arizona immigration law, that it “opens a Pandora’s Box of the worst abuses in the history of humanity.”

The media has been in an uproar over the bill. Is it racist, is not racist, is it constitutional, will it make Arizona safer?

Forget what you are seeing on TV. The whole immigration issue is about economics not the political talking points.

With the ever growing immigrant population from Latin America, the Republican Party will lose more ground to the Democratic Party unless we turn things around.

Latino in America expertly chronicles the plight of The United States’ fifty-one million Latino Americans who are now the largest minority group in America. Illustrating this fact is the growing use of the surname Garcia which is now the tenth most commonly used surname in the U.S.A.

CNN’s Latino in America airs October 21 and 22nd at 9pm (ET) and examines the issues YOU care about from family and education to immigration and the American Dream and interviews some of the most famous Latinos from Eva Longoria to George Lopez.