Here’s how Research Director Steven Camarota puts it in his latest “Backgrounder“:

A new survey by Zogby International finds that people in Mexico think that granting legal status to illegal immigrants in the United States would encourage more illegal immigration to the United States. As the top immigrant-sending country for both legal and illegal immigrants, views on immigration in Mexico can provide insight into the likely impact of an amnesty, as well as other questions related to immigration.

But to gain some useful insight, it’s important to look at the actual question that Zogby asked the 1,004 Mexicans polled, which was: “If the U.S. gave permanent legal status to undocumented immigrants (migrantes indocumentados), do you think it would make your friends and family members more likely or less likely to go to the U.S. as indocumentados, or would it make no difference?” 56 percent of Mexicans polled said they thought it would make people they knew more likely to go.

In fact, “permanent legal status” for new illegal immigrants is not what anyone in Congress is contemplating, but that’s what this latest CIS “Backgrounder” implies. Advocates for comprehensive immigration reform have been pressing for a law that would grant legal status only to certain immigrants who have been living and working in the United States for at least several years. New immigrants would not qualify for legal status, but would have to apply through the channels provided for in any new law, which would likely be based in large part on the needs of the labor market.

“The general thing that the restrictionists do and will continue to do is try to make the case that as soon as you do this, the floodgates are going to open and life as you know it won’t ever be the same,” said Wendy Sefsaf, communications manager for the Immigration Policy Center. “That’s the argument they make every single time.” But even President Reagan’s “amnesty” program back in the 1980s required immigrants to have been in the United States for several years before they’d qualify, she noted. And the State Department would make that clear in Mexico and elsewhere when any new immigration law is passed in the United States.

It’s worth noting, too, the second question asked by the Zogby poll, and Mexicans’ answers. “If at this moment, you had the means and opportunity to go to live in the U.S., would you go?”  59.6 percent of Mexicans said “no.” Only about a third of those polled said “yes.” So it turns out that even if they were given the opportunity — which they won’t be — all those people in Mexico wouldn’t stampede across the U.S. border after all.

The report finds that although many immigrants have not committed crimes, they’re held in secure facilities designed for criminals and often in far more restrictive conditions than necessary. They also often don’t have sufficient access to medical and legal assistance while in custody.

The reforms announced today by DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano and Immigration and Customs Enforcement Assistant Secretary John Morton involve primarily centralizing control of the detention facilities under ICE headquarters’ supervision; classifying immigrant detainees according to their risk level and housing them accordingly; improving detainees’ access to medical and legal services; and increasing supervision of the facilities by federal employees rather than by private contractors.

Longtime critics of the agency’s detention practices are not completely satisfied, however, noting that DHS’s proposals fail to include a way to ensure that the agency complies with improved standards, that immigrants aren’t unnecessarily locked up, and that innocent people aren’t harassed by local authorities empowered to enforce federal immigration law.

As Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the American Civil Liberties Union Immigrants’ Rights Project, put it in a statement released yesterday, “Meaningful reform of the system must focus not only on the conditions under which immigrants are being detained, but on why they are being detained in the first place — often for prolonged periods of time — when other forms of supervised release would be sufficient to address the government’s concerns, as well as the need for basic due process.”

Linton Joaquin, general counsel for the National Immigration Law Center, called the proposal “a step in the right direction” but said that “as long as these standards are not enforceable, the rights violations faced by the men and women in these systems will persist.”

The Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC), an independent project of Sycracuse University that analyzes government data, reports today that during May 2009, DOJ reported 2,147 new prosecutions referred by Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the Department of Homeland Security. That’s an increase of 18.9 percent over the month before.

TRAC concludes that “at least through the first five months of the Obama administration there has been no let up in the increase in criminal prosecutions as a result of ICE’s enforcement activities.”

“The Republican Party’s embrace of the nativist base is probably the most self destructive” decision party leaders could make, Frank Sharry, executive director of the immigration reform group America’s Voice, told Roll Call.

Given that Latinos tend to be Catholic and socially conservative, many might have leaned Republican, Sharry notes, had the GOP not started adopting a nativist agenda. This latest anti-immigrant stance, Sharry argues, risks transforming Latino voters  from a swing group to “a reliable bloc” for Democrats.

Henry Fernandez, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, agreed.

“Immigration is a constant theme,” he told Roll Call. “It’s red meat for foot soldiers who are willing to hold up signs at town halls,” adding that the anti-immigrant rhetoric encourages the participation of “dangerous people in our public discourse.”

As I reported last week, protesters at town hall meetings are increasingly railing against lawmakers for seeking to provide health care to illegal immigrants, although the pending House bill not only denies benefits to illegal immigrants but severely restricts benefits to legal immigrants as well. Still, the anger fomented by anti-health care reform groups has spilled over into nativist death threats.

Last week outside President Obama’s town hall meeting in New Hampshire, one protester shouted, “We don’t need illegals,” adding, “Send ‘em back with a bullet in the head.”

The CIS report released today concludes that, contrary to the common refrain that immigrants only do work that native-born Americans don’t want to do, in fact, native-born United States citizens dominate many of the low-paying industries in the labor market. CIS concludes that immigrants are therefore posing significant competition to native U.S. workers.

Another way of looking at it is that immigrants could actually be a much smaller percentage of the labor force than previously thought.

For example, CIS finds that across the United States, 55 percent of maids and housekeepers are native-born; 58 percent of taxi drivers and chauffeurs are native-born; 63 percent of butchers and meat processors are native born; 65 percent of construction workers are native born; and 65 percent of grounds maintenance workers are native-born.

Another report released today from CIS finds that while the official unemployment rate for native-born Americans is 9.7 percent, a broader measure that includes people who have given up looking for work or are involuntarily working less than full-time, is 16.3 percent.

“The data presented here make clear that the often-made argument that immigrants only take jobs Americans don’t want is simply wrong,” concludes the report, written by CIS researchers Steven Camarota and Karen Jensenius. “To talk about the labor market as if there were jobs done entirely or almost entirely by immigrants is not helpful to understanding the potential impact of immigration on American workers. It gives the false impression that the job market is segmented between jobs that are done almost exclusively by immigrants and jobs that are exclusively native. This is clearly not the case.”

CIS has long made the case that recent immigrants pose a major threat to U.S. workers, and this study is an attempt to boost that argument. Immigrants’ advocates counter, however, that such studies underscore the fact that U.S.-born workers still dominate most industries and don’t face a major threat from new immigrants. “What they’re saying essentially is, immigrants are a very small percentage of the labor force, and that’s true,” said Wendy Sefsaf, spokeperson for the Immigration Policy Center.

Indeed, a report issued by that center in May based on recent U.S. Census data finds that “there is little apparent relationship between recent immigration and unemployment rates at the regional, state, or county level.” Areas with high unemployment don’t necessarily have large numbers of recent immigrants, and vice versa — areas with many recent immigrants don’t necessarily have higher unemployment rates.

While that suggests that recent immigrants flock to areas with high employment rates because that’s where the jobs are, it does not suggest that they’re edging out native-born workers.

Current U.S. law requires the homeowner to be convicted of a smuggling-related crime before federal agents can seize the house, and ICE agents have complained this makes seizure too difficult.

Schumer’s idea, which is reportedly supported by the Obama administration, is nothing new. Back in July 2005, the Government Accountability Office suggested giving federal agents this civil forfeiture authority, which it already has to confiscate things like boats used to smuggle drugs.

The problem with the proposal, though, as the GAO noted in its report and testimony to Congress, is that most of these houses are rented by smugglers, who themselves often take off before the feds can arrest them, and they become fugitives. It’s not clear what good seizing the house does at that point. Moreover, it’s often not clear whether the owner of the home even knows how it’s being used by its tenants. Presumably that’s why the current law only allows the government to seize the house after proving the homeowner knowingly facilitated the smuggling operation.

“This policy needs to be fixed right away,” Schumer told The Associated Press on Wednesday after a meeting with Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. “It can put a serious dent in the operations of the Mexican cartels that deal in human trafficking.”

It could also put a dent in the Southwestern rental market, particularly for Mexican renters.