New America Foundation

Executive Summary

President Obama has expressed support for Congressional action on immigration reform this year.  Fixing America's broken immigration system will require difficult and controversial reforms, including a path to citizenship for most of the 12 million or more illegal immigrants residing in the U.S., strict enforcement of immigration laws against scofflaw employers and future would-be illegal immigrants, and curtailment of indentured servitude in the form of exploitative "guest worker" programs. 

The most important reform should be changing the basis of America's immigration sy

Summary

The Congress of the United States is currently deliberating a variety of legislative initiatives that would reform our policy toward Cuba. One striking aspect of that policy, as House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman has pointed out, stands out because it has more to do with us than with Cuba:  the longstanding prohibition on travel by Americans to the island. The travel ban is the only aspect of the broader embargo that infringes on the fundamental rights of U.S. citizens.  It should be ended.

This presentation was given at the 2010 College Savings Foundation conference in Miami, FL. To view the presentation, please see "Related Files" on the right side of this page.

Executive Summary

I’m very honored to be here today to talk about the situation we find ourselves in more than 2 years into a very deep and seemingly never-ending recession, through two lenses—policy in Washington, and community banking and community development finance. And I’ll try, without being presumptuous, to bring it home to Maine.

1) We Don't All Agree on What a “Smart Grid” is – or What it will Accomplish.

Rather than a physical entity, the “Smart Grid” is really a concept. The term refers to a host of digital technologies, in various stages of development, intended to enable real-time coordination along the Nation’s electric grid.

As the Senate takes up a greatly scaled down $15 billion jobs bill stripped of all infrastructure spending, the nation should consider the compelling case for public infrastructure investment offered by Governors Arnold Schwarzenegger (R-CA) and Ed Rendell (D-PA). Appearing on ABC’s "This Week" on Sunday, the bipartisan Co-Chairs of Building America's Future explained why rebuilding America’s infr

The bomber, a Jordanian doctor linked to al Qaeda, detonated his explosives on December 30, 2009, at an American base in Khost in eastern Afghanistan, killing himself and seven CIA officers and contractors who were operating at the heart of the covert program overseeing U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan’s volatile northwestern tribal regions.

In 2006, the Pakistani militant group Lashkar-e-Taiba entered the Afghan theater, necessitating its increased presence in Pakistan’s North-West Frontier Province and Federally Administered Tribal Areas. The group is often mentioned during discussions of the Punjabi Taliban, militants from Punjabi jihadi groups, who arrived in large numbers at approximately the same time. But these militants follow the Deobandi school of Islam and are close to the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban.