Sandi Zirbel has seen an influx of immigrants on dairy farms in Wisconsin firsthand.

As the co-owner of a 635-cow dairy cooperative in the town of Glenmore, Zirbel said immigrants frequently come looking for work.

As many as 19 out of 20 people who apply to work at the farm are immigrants. Two-thirds of those applications get tossed.

While Sheriff Joe Arpaio in Phoenix gets all the media attention for his crackdown on illegal immigrants, eight deputies in an unremarkable office at the Harris County Jail are posting similar numbers for deportation -- and doing so without controversy.

Working two per shift, the deputies refer roughly 1,000 suspected illegal immigrants to federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) authorities every month, helping to make the Southern District of Texas by far the busiest in the nation for illegal-immigration prosecutions.

The cold fact, however, is that this deep recession is hitting African-Americans more severely than the overall population, due largely to the staggering levels of unemployment for this segment of the population.

When October unemployment data come out Friday, the nation's seasonally adjusted rate is expected to nudge upward, close to 10 percent. But among African-Americans, the jobless rate was 15.5 percent in September. In Illinois, the black unemployment rate was closer to 18.6 percent in the third quarter, according to estimates by the Economic Policy Institute.

For black teens nationwide, the rate was 40.8 percent in September.

In his push to have the Census Bureau count the number of U.S. citizens, Sen. David Vitter, Louisiana Republican, is taking a very parochial approach with his colleagues: Your state could be the one to lose an extra seat in Congress.

Mr. Vitter is holding up one of the 2010 spending bills in the Senate, demanding a vote on his amendment to force the census to add a question about citizenship status to its 2010 questionnaire. He has written letters to the senators from nine states he says would lose seats to states with higher illegal immigrant or noncitizen populations, telling them it's in their interest to support him.

An estimated 300,000 illegal immigrants traversed Buenos Aires' 118,000 acres in 2007, leaving tons of trash, rusting abandoned cars, biologically hazardous waste and vehicle tracks that reduced parts of the landscape to a dusty wasteland.

That hurts just about every aspect of the refuge's mission, which was established in 1985 to try to preserve the endangered masked bobwhite quail, one of seven endangered species on the refuge.

For every open construction job in America, there are more than 20 people lining up to apply.

Few statistics illustrate the gravity of the U.S. recession as clearly as the yawning gap between job seekers and vacancies, highlighting the struggle President Barack Obama has had to contain job losses since he took over in January.

Research by Andrew Sum, a labor economist at Boston's Northeastern University, shows that the ratio of unemployed persons to job openings has widened in America to 5.7 to 1 in August of this year from 1.2 to 1 in December of 2000.

An organization that has criticized a government-run electronic employment verification system hailed Senate approval of a bill that would keep it operating for three more years.

Accusing the federal government of hampering local attempts to combat illegal immigration, state Sen. Russell Pearce, Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio and some of Arizona's most hawkish public figures on border security pledged on Wednesday to redouble their efforts with new legislation and a citizens initiative.

Mexican workers in the United States have lost jobs and faced a crackdown on illegal immigration but are not heading home in droves despite the worst recession in decades, officials and researchers say.

There is no record of those leaving the United States by land but anecdotal reports suggest some families have packed their belongings into trucks and crossed back into Mexico as construction, food and as farm jobs have evaporated.

Yet the fact remains that this is not an issue we can continue to ignore - both because of the presence of so many illegals and because we rely on talented immigrants to fuel our economy. We dare not close our borders to the skilled and ambitious immigrants on whom we historically have relied, as the mayors of London and New York recently emphasized.

... But E-Verify also can serve as the foundation of a grand immigration compromise, one that combines a deterrent to future illegal immigration (by extending the system and making it mandatory); gradual legalization, with conditions, for those illegals already here; and the prospect of border control that can let us give preference to high-skilled immigrants from around the world eager to work in the United States rather than having our new immigration overwhelmingly dominated (as it now is) by those from Mexico and Central America.