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One of the nation's largest Latino advocacy and civil rights organizations plans to meet in Los Angeles this weekend to instruct people how to mobilize and vote out those who fail to back generous new immigration laws. The National Council of La Raza will highlight immigration at its annual conference beginning today, featuring a bipartisan lineup of such high-profile speakers as former President Clinton, Republican presidential political strategist Karl Rove, Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. The conference comes as the two chambers of Congress hold competing summer hearings on the issue, with the House stressing stronger...

No Time for Statesmanship National Review Online David Frum As the congressional session zooms to its close, the bargaining intensifies - including the bargaining to produce an immigration "compromise." Into this high-pressure, highly dynamic situation, Congressman Mike Pence has tossed a new proposal: let the private sector do it! Pence's plan, to simplify more than a little, would offer working papers in the United States to any illegal who returned to his or her country of residency and asked for them. The job of processing these applications would be handled by private-sector firms who (it is presumed) would work...

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Without much fanfare, the House of Representatives last week voted to give members of Congress yet another pay raise, as it has done almost every year for nearly a decade. For some reason, our elected officials decided against holding a news conference. Maybe that's because they didn't want to draw attention to the fact that they raise their own salaries almost every year while refusing to raise the pay of our lowest-paid workers.

The House and Senate will soon start hammering out the stark differences between their immigration reform proposals. The Senate bill would put undocumented workers in the United States on a path toward citizenship. But the House version, firmly supported by the Republican leadership, omits such a plan, which many in the GOP call "amnesty." It stresses enforcement. Rep. James Sensenbrenner, a Wisconsin Republican, introduced the original House bill. As Judiciary Committee chair, he is expected to be the House's lead negotiator on the immigration bill. He spoke with U.S. News about how this is going to be a difficult bargaining...

After months of declining job-approval poll results, George W. Bush seems to be turning around his presidency with the help of good news. Less than five months before the midterm elections, several key events have joined to lift Mr. Bush's approval polls to nearly 40 percent (up from 31 percent in May) and fewer Americans now think his decision to go into Iraq was a mistake. The Gallup Poll says 48 percent now believe the U.S. will win the war in Iraq, up from 39 percent in April. Among these linchpin developments: