Hispanics reached a new milestone for the first time this year, making up the majority all federal felony offenders sentenced in the first nine months of fiscal year 2011, according to the U.S. Sentencing Commission.

Hispanics comprised 50.3 percent of all people sentenced in that time period, blacks 19.7 percent and whites 26.4 percent.

In comparison, last year Hispanics made up just 16 percent of the whole U.S. population.

The commission’s statistics also reveal that sentences for felony immigration crimes — which include illegal crossing and other crimes such as alien smuggling — were responsible for most of the increase in the number of Hispanics sent to prison over the last decade.

The reason that a majority of new federal prisoners are Hispanic is because the offenses which the federal government is most involved in policing are disproportionately enforced against Hispanics and other minorities, said Marc Mauer, executive director of the Sentencing Project, a group that works towards reform of the criminal justice system.

“A lot of it is a function of policy and practice,” Mauer told The American Independent. “Both immigration cases and drug cases are fairly discretionary in terms of enforcement. If there’s a bank robbery or a murder it doesn’t really matter where it happens, there will be a serious attempt at enforcement. When it comes to immigration and drug-related offenses, there will be a decision as far as how much enforcement there should be.”

In the case of drug laws, Mauer said, although it’s been shown that drug use is fairly evenly spread throughout the population, enforcement is much more likely to impact “low-income communities of color.”

As for immigration, the past decade has seen an unprecedented amount of federal enforcement of immigration-related offenses, resulting in both record numbers of deportations and a backlog of cases in immigration courts. Huge racial disparities in federal prisons and detention centers have followed as a result.

The lawsuit challenges the law on the grounds that the federal government did not have the authority to require certain states to obtain U.S. Justice Department approval before changing their electoral laws.

As ThinkProgress’ Ian Millhiser notes, the lawsuit comes two years after the Supreme Court ruled that the municipalities whose voting laws need to be “precleared” under Section 5 of the Act would have the option to “bail out” of the law by demonstrating that they had stopped racially discriminating and would not do so again in the future.

Nevertheless, Horne said in a statement at the time of filing the lawsuit that the provisions of the Act requiring preclearance “are either archaic, not based in fact, or subject to completely subjective enforcement based on the whim of federal authorities.”

Horne argued that Arizona’s burden under the law is arbitrary, based partly on the fact that Arizona was only included in the list of states requiring preclearance because of a 1975 amendment to the Act protecting “language minorities.” Arizona, with its large Hispanic population, did not have bilingual ballots until 1974, and so was considered at risk of violating the new requirement.

All the other states that need preclearance are Southern, although some municipalities in non-Southern states are also required to seek preclearance.

In a statement, U.S. Attorney General Erc Holder said, “The Voting Rights Act plays a vital role in our society by ensuring that every American has the right to vote and to have that vote counted… the Department of Justice will vigorously defend the constitutionality of the Voting Rights Act in this case, as it has done successfully in the past.”

Arizona’s lawsuit against the Voting Rights Act, the first ever by a state government, comes as a slew of Republican-controlled legislatures face the hurdle of Justice Department preclearance for newly passed electoral reforms.

In South Carolina, the ACLU and other groups have asked Holder to deny preclearance for a new voter I.D. law. The groups argue that the law discriminates against African-Americans because they are less likely to have the forms of identification required under the law when exercising their voting rights. Kansas, a state that passed a similar law this year, was not required to seek preclearance because it is not one of the original states deemed at risk of racially discriminating.

This year’s post-Census redistricting efforts are also increasing the salience of Section 5. One example is Texas, which is facing multiple federal court challenges alleging minority underrepresentation in its new redistricting maps.

Poor households, possessing zero or negative net worth, were also found to be disproportionately black or Hispanic: About a third of black and Hispanic households had nothing or less than nothing, compared to 15 percent of white households.

One of the main causes of the high disparity was that minority households suffered much more from the housing crisis and recession than white households did: “From 2005 to 2009, inflation-adjusted median wealth fell by 66% among Hispanic households and 53% among black households, compared with just 16% among white households,” states the report. In this four-year period, the disparity between white households and black and Hispanic households doubled, primarily because these minority groups lost much more in net worth than whites did.

One reason for the sharp post-2005 decline is that black and Hispanic households were much more likely to have invested in the housing market. Another is the sustained high levels of unemployment: African-Americans and Hispanics have much higher levels of unemployment than whites do. Declining income during the recession also disproportionately affected minority households.

Hispanics, an ethnic group which grew faster than any other in the United States from 2000 to 2009, also suffered the most from the housing crash, with the median level of home equity declining by half from $99,983 to $49,145 in the 2005-2009 period. Immigration to a particular area can lead to increases in local housing prices. Many of the states which suffered the most from the housing crisis — Arizona, California, Florida and Nevada — also had the highest levels of immigration in the 1990s and early 2000s.

The report also argues that whites may also have recovered more in the 2005-2009 period because they are much more likely to invest more of their wealth in the stock market, which has recovered faster than the housing market has. And while white households lost more in an absolute sense after 2005 than black or Hispanic households, they did so because the typical white household had much more to begin with. The median white household had $134,992 in 2005, and the median black and Hispanic households had $12,124 and $18,359, respectively

Extremely high racial disparities in household wealth could be one explanation for recent political trends. Last week, Pew released an analysis of survey data which revealed that the Republican Party has been increasing in popularity among white voters while black and Hispanic voters have remained strongly Democratic. Groups where the GOP has traditionally been weaker, including young and lower-income people, have since 2008 grown more likely to identify as Republican if they are white.

Obama also defended his record on Hispanic-related issues, in particular on increasing access to a college education and on appointments. The appointments of U.S. Dept. of Labor Sec. Hilda Solis (the first Hispanic woman to serve on the Cabinet) and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor were both referenced multiple times in Obama’s speech.

Calling immigrants “[j]ob creators who came here to seek opportunity and now seek to share opportunity,” Obama argued that the current U.S. immigration system tolerates those who break the rules — undocumented immigrants and businesses that employ them — while punishing legal immigrants.

He defended himself on what Hispanic leaders say is a broken campaign pledge, “La Promesa,” to get comprehensive immigration reform on the congressional agenda. Obama said he supported the DREAM Act — a bill providing a path to citizenship to undocumented youth provided they go to college or serve in the military — and was disappointed when Senate Republicans voted against it in 2010.

“Many of the folks who walked away had previously been sponsors [of the DREAM Act],” Obama pointed out, referring to Republican U.S. senators like Lindsey Graham (S.C.) and Richard Lugar (Ind.) who worked with Democrats on immigration legislation in the past but now refuse to support legalization efforts because they say immigration has been politicized by the White House.

However, when Obama stated that he could not use the power of the executive branch alone to prevent people who qualify for the DREAM Act from being deported, the crowd broke into loud cries of “Yes you can! Yes you can.” Many have taken a recent memofrom Immigration and Customs Enforcement director John Morton urging prosecutorial discretion on immigration cases to be a sign that the administration was seeking immigration reform without going through Congress.

But Obama appeared to reject executive-driven immigration reform, telling the chanting conference attendees that he had to follow the laws as written by Congress.

“Feel free to keep the heat on me, and keep the heat on Democrats, but here’s the thing to remember: The Democrats and your president are with you. Remember who it is that we need to move in order to change the laws,” he said.

Earlier in the speech Obama also said he supported putting laid-off construction workers to work building infrastructure and schools, adding that the burden was on Congress to produce such legislation so that he could sign it. He also spent a portion of the speech discussing ongoing deficit talks, restating his belief that new revenue should accompany meaningful spending cuts.

The magazine’s editorial voice is unmistakably conservative. It refers to “same-sex marriage” in scare quotes. Its op-eds deal with subjects like “secular Christmas” and the national debt. A story about the election of ousted President Manuel Zelaya’s successor in Honduras reads a bit like an official ruling party press release:

Washington rightly shifted position this month and stood up for freeedom (sic) when it said that it was likely to recognize the election results.

The de facto government has finally convinced Hondurans and the international community that the elections are legitimate.

All of that is combined with lifestyle interviews of Hispanic businesspeople, including questions like “How have you seen the growth of Marketing and Development here in the U.S. and in Latin America from the time you started in Omnicom in 1986 through now in your current position as President of Latin America at Diversified Agency Services, a division of Omnicom?”

Estrada “never had this day,” Graham told Sotomayor, adding, “We would not have nominated you. We would have nominated him.”

Still, he acknowledged, in a rare moment of political reality in this morning’s hearing: “Unless you have a complete meltdown you’re going to be confirmed.”

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Quoting scripture, invoking the “love thy neighbor” religious command and noting the nomination of the first Hispanic to be a justice on the Supreme Court, Obama declared that “upholding America’s tradition as a nation of laws and a nation of immigrants” is not contradictory, but “complementary.”

“That’s why I’m committed to passing comprehensive immigration reform,” he said.

Of course, Obama’s been saying that for a while now, but he has yet to propose or back a comprehensive immigration reform plan. In April, the White House said that the president would speak publicly about immigration reform in May, but he still hasn’t made any particularly notable public speeches on the issue, other than to relatively small audiences of Hispanic groups.  This morning’s prayer breakfast was attended by no more than 200 people.

That may be because the president has a lot of other priorities on his plate — the economy, two wars and health care reform, to name a few. But it also may be that the administration is afraid to push what immigration restrictionists call “amnesty” for illegal immigrants that many Americans fear are just going to take their jobs.

Although he and Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano have said they support the DREAM Act, which would legalize some children of undocumented immigrants, Obama has also said that should be part of a larger bill  Democrats in Congress apparently agree, because they haven’t put it up separately for a vote.

Obama is scheduled to meet with members of Congress next week to discuss comprehensive immigration reform. When he does that and he finally speaks to a larger audience about the idea, he’ll need to make the very logical case that legalizing undocumented immigrant workers will actually be good for the economy — by increasing tax revenue, boosting wages and increasing demand — as former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan testified in April, and a broad range of economic studies have shown.

It’s still not clear, though, how much political capital the president is willing to spend to make that case.

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Should Democratic senators or their allies on the Left accuse Sotomayor’s critics of being anti-Hispanic, the accusers can be made to look foolish simply by reminding them that they vigorously opposed and successfully filibustered George W. Bush’s nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit. Democratic Judiciary Committee memos revealed that opposition to Estrada was based on concern that he would eventually become the first Hispanic Supreme Court Justice.

It’s hard to overstate how bitter conservatives are about the 2001-2003 filibuster of Estrada, who if elevated to the Supreme Court in 2005 would have been only 44 years old. How much do voters remember this? It’s an open question, but it’s doubtful they remember the situation enough to give, say, Sen. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) a pass on blocking the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice. The lesson of Estrada was how difficult it would be to oppose the first Hispanic nominee, and Republicans know it.

So writes Mickey Kaus at Slate citing MSNBC, Mark Krikorian at National Review, and Jan Greenberg at ABC News. Frank Sharry quickly denounces the idea at The Huffington Post. If that was part of Obama’s goal, he says, it won’t work.

In truth, while there’s no denying that choosing Sotomayor wins Obama some political points with Hispanics, her elevation to the high court really has nothing to do with whether 12 million undocumented immigrants working in this country get to become legal and pay taxes and earn minimum wages, or whether the administration is going to try to deport them all. And anyone who cares about that issue isn’t going to be appeased because one Puertorriqueña gets a powerful seat in Washington that’s basically irrelevant to the immigration issue.

If, deprived of their context, these statements sound controversial, in the context of her lecture, titled “A Latina Judge’s Voice,” they made perfect sense.

Sotomayor’s view that judges are influenced by their background and experiences is backed up by studies that show that women judges, for example, tend to rule in a way that’s more sympathetic to plaintiffs in employment discrimination cases than male judges do — probably because, having experienced discrimination themselves as they struggled to advance in a male-dominated profession, they’re more attuned to its signs.

A recent study by political scientists and law professors Christina Boyd, Lee Epstein and Andrew Martin, for example, found that “female judges are approximately 10 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party bringing the discrimination claim,” as two of the authors wrote recently in The Washington Post. What’s more, they wrote, “[w]e also found that the presence of a female judge causes male judges to vote differently. When male and female judges serve together to decide a sex discrimination case, the male judges are nearly 15 percent more likely to rule in favor of the party alleging discrimination than when they sit with male judges only.”

Sotomayor, in her 2002 lecture, similarly noted that “The Judicature Journal has at least two excellent studies on how women on the courts of appeal and state supreme courts have tended to vote more often than their male counterpart to uphold women’s claims in sex discrimination cases and criminal defendants’ claims in search and seizure cases.”

“As recognized by legal scholars,” she continued, “whatever the reason, not one woman or person of color in any one position but as a group we will have an effect on the development of the law and on judging.”

While Sotomayor’s comments, taken out of context, provide fodder for her right-wing critics, it’s worth noting that the judge has the evidence on her side.

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