The Senate's four goals for immigration reform

By Erica Werner of the Associated Press, republished by Yahoo! News:

Senators reach agreement on immigration reform

WASHINGTON (AP) — A bipartisan group of leading senators has reached agreement on the principles for a sweeping overhaul of the nation's immigration laws, including a path to citizenship for the 11 million illegal immigrants already in this country.
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According to documents obtained by The Associated Press, the senators will call for accomplishing four goals:

—Creating a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants already here, contingent upon securing the border and better tracking of people here on visas.

—Reforming the legal immigration system, including awarding green cards to immigrants who obtain advanced degrees in science, math, technology or engineering from an American university.

—Creating an effective employment verification system to ensure that employers do not hire illegal immigrants in the future, including requiring prospective workers to verify legal status and identity through a non-forgeable electronic system.

—Allowing more low-skill workers into the country and allowing employers to hire immigrants if they can demonstrate they couldn't recruit a U.S. citizen; and establishing an agricultural worker program.

The principles being released Monday are outlined on just over four pages, leaving plenty of details left to fill in. What the senators do call for is similar to Obama's goals and some past efforts by Democrats and Republicans, since there's wide agreement in identifying problems with the current immigration system. The most difficult disagreement is likely to arise over how to accomplish the path to citizenship.

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I'm excited to see where this goes. I particularly like the fact that this is a bipartisan movement and the idea of awarding green cards to immigrants who obtain an advanced S.T.E.M. degree from an American university. What are your thoughts?

Washington Post summary of Obama's plan to reduce gun violence

This is the kind of thing I like to see: Within the Washington Post story "Obama unveils gun-control proposals," the writers have linked to the very documents they're reporting about. To me, it's a mark of good reporting when the journalists make their sources clearly known, and especially when they make the same sources they referenced available to the public. Unfortunately, you can't make a live interviewee available to the public in the same way, but it's always a nice touch to link to documents when you can. This transparent, reader-empowering journalism is the kind of example I want to follow. Well done, WP!

White House: Gun Violence Reduction Executive Actions: Includes a description of the documents and other related links. Check it out!

Linking to documents can be a long, painstaking process depending on the story you're working on, but personally I think it's worth the extra time. It really proves whether you've done your homework, which improves your credibility and the trust between you and the reader. I've published a couple data-driven stories myself where I purposefully took the extra time to link to or clearly cite my sources:

"A few of the oldest, longest continuous things in the LDS Church," published July 12, 2012, on the front page of section C in Salt Lake City's Deseret News.

"Relic of the past: Home of future legends," published February 18, 2011, in the double truck (meaning it was the main article of the edition) of BYU's Daily Universe. ...Back when it was a daily paper.

(If you're interested, you can check out my portfolio for more of my stuff.)

This morning's Senate-proposed bipartisan compromise

A bipartisan agreement concerning the fiscal cliff was reached and passed 89-8 in the U.S. Senate this morning and will now move on to the House.

That's only eight people who voted against the agreement. And it sounds like the Republicans conceded quite a bit (see my previous post about the disagreements between the Republicans and Democrats), but still tempered the Democrats. Both facts make me optimistic that the House may also find common ground and work things out. The Washington Post wrote a good article about the bill here:

Obama, Senate Republicans reach agreement on 'fiscal cliff'

And there's another article by the Washington Post that looks promising but I haven't read yet:

After a 'fiscal cliff' deal, what next?