President Obama came out Wednesday in opposition to Rep. Lamar Smith's (R-Texas) STEM Act, which would increase the number of visas available to highly skilled immigrants while reducing the visas available to people coming from countries with low rates of immigration to the United States. The bill would add 55,000 visas to masters and doctoral degree holders in science, technology, engineering and mathematics and it would eliminate all of the so-called "diversity" visas.

Citizen4Me: Where DREAMers Can Find U.S. Citizens to Marry is a cross-post from VOXXI, by Griselda Nevarez. 

Are you a DREAMer looking to marry a U.S. citizen who will petition for you to become a citizen? The Facebook group Citizen4Me is the perfect place to start.

The group lists profiles of eligible bachelors and bachelorettes who are U.S. citizens and are willing to marry DREAMers to help them fix their immigration status. It also lists profiles of DREAMers who are seeking a U.S. citizen to marry.

This is an excerpt of the AFL-CIO Solidarity Center's Human Trafficking Thrives Under Worker Exploitation. 

Human trafficking thrives in an environment of worker exploitation and engenders forced labor, debt bondage and other egregious labor abuse. The most effective way to address this scourge, says Neha Misra, Solidarity Center senior specialist on migration and human trafficking, is by empowering workers to have a voice in their workplace and supporting their right to organize and join unions.  

UNITE HERE sends us this report from Arizona. 

After more than a week of protests that brought national attention to what Rachel Maddow called “Arizona’s Broken Electoral System,” Arizona Secretary of State Ken Bennett told the Associated Press over the weekend that he will seek an overhaul of Arizona’s ballot-counting process.

Bennett’s announcement comes just days after his initial insistence that, while not perfect, Arizona’s counting this year was customary and that protests were unnecessary.

Think Progress reports DREAMers with work permits in Massachusetts will now be eligible for in-state tuition in state schools. 

DREAMers are aspiring citizens who're eligible for work permits under President Obama's deferred action program.

Sarah Burris of UNITE HERE sends us this update from Arizona. Burris works in online media. 

I've been on the ground this week in Arizona to help a campaign UNITE HERE invested in this year called Adios Arpaio. Adios Arpaio was a massive voter-registration campaign, aimed at voting out the notoriously anti-immigrant Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio, that was led by 2,000 high school students, many of them the children of immigrants. We registered 35,000 new voters, and 70% of them are Latino. I've spent some time here before and many, many weeks since helping with everything I could. 

At more than 15% of the American population, Latinos are being courted by candidates from the presidential race down to state and local races, which is why yesterday the AFL-CIO teamed up with the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and Univision as part of Latino Heritage Month to host a panel discussing what’s at stake in this election for Latino voters.

In case you missed the live webcast yesterday, watch the panel in the post or here: www.aflcio.org/latinovote.

Adela de la Torre, communications manager at the National Immigration Law Center, sends us this. 

The civil rights issues at the heart of S.B. 1070, Arizona’s notorious racial profiling law, finally had their day in court Tuesday. After more than two years of legal challenges mounted by our civil rights coalition and the federal government, we, along with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), MALDEF and others, presented evidence of what we all already know: S.B. 1070 was written with the intent to discriminate against Latinos and other people of color. This evidence was introduced as part of a request that the district court consider additional legal grounds that were not before the U.S. Supreme Court when it determined that section 2B of S.B. 1070, which forces police officers to demand “papers” of those they suspect are in the country without proper authorization, should be allowed to go into effect.

Immigrant-owned new businesses are critical to jump-starting the U.S. economy and creating jobs, according to a recent report by
the Partnership for a New American Economy.

Immigrant-owned businesses now employ one out of every 10 U.S. workers at privately owned companies and add more than $775 billion of revenue to the U.S. gross domestic product.

Donna Gratehouse, who blogs at Democratic Diva and elsewhere on all things Arizona, sends us this.

Hundreds of activists gathered at the state Capitol Thursday morning in Phoenix to denounce Gov. Jan Brewer for the appalling executive order she issued on Wednesday, which was the day the Obama administration's Deferred Action on Childhood Arrivals went into effect. The federal policy change allows the young people known as "DREAM Act kids" or "DREAMers" to stay in the country and apply for work permits provided they meet certain conditions. An estimated 80,000 Arizonans who were brought into the country illegally as children may be eligible for the program, and many have been excitedly lining up at federal immigration offices around the state to get the forms and instructions.