The following is a contribution by outside blogger Gregory Sokoloff. Opinions expressed are solely those of Mr. Sokoloff.

In theory, she should be hunkered down in some dark basement, trembling like an autumn leaf at the sound of every step outside. That’s because she has no legal right of any kind even to walk the streets of this country. In reality, Lucy Allain (pronounced: Aya-in), a 20-year-old Peruvian from New York, wears her law-breaking on her sleeve.

She tells anybody who would listen about her “undocumented” status, as she likes to put it, takes part in street protests, openly makes TV appearances as an illegal alien, and has even decided to get involved in the U.S. presidential campaign.

Last week, the proud daughter of the land of Tupac Amaru rebels and Abimael Guzman, the jailed leader of local Maoist guerrillas, confronted Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney face-to-face, when he made a quick dash to New York from South Carolina to take part in a fundraiser. Ms. Allain ambushed the former Massachusetts governor after the event as he was shaking supporters’ hands and demanded an explanation about his opposition to the Dream Act, a piece of legislation that would provide a pathway to U.S. citizenship to some illegal aliens who entered the United States as children if they joined the military or took a few college classes.

The draft, described by many as an attempt at “backdoor amnesty,” failed in Congress in 2010, and Mr. Romney has promised to veto it if it ever resurfaced. According to media reports, the candidate restated his position, but the conversation apparently ended on a sour note when Ms. Allain told him about her illegal status.

“When he heard that I was illegal, he pulled his hand out as if I were a criminal,” she complained to Univision, the top Spanish-language network. “I felt bad … as if I were trash.” She also felt her rights were violated when somebody from the crowd dared shout that she should go back to her own country. And on Sunday, she was invited to Univision’s program “To the Point,” a Hispanic counterpart of “Meet the Press,” to elaborate on her outrage and tell the Hispanic community how Mr. Romney was not suitable for an America she envisioned.

“If he were elected president, our dream would be broken,” Ms. Allain warned, adding that she needed to confront Mr. Romney “so that he would stop telling lies.”

Pretty bold for an outlaw, who is not pacing a cell of a deportation center just because President Obama has decided that in the run-up to the November election, it would not be prudent to roil up the Hispanic community.

But frankly, this is not about Ms. Allain and her loudmouth buddies. We have seen this before and probably will see it again. It is more about us, our respect for our own sovereignty, laws, national pride, the political process, which, incidentally, is not an internationally-open contest, and for the presidential candidates, one of whom will eventually run this country. Here, essentially, we have a foreigner, who comes to this country, breaks the law, brazenly brags about it, and tries to lecture our politicians on what they should or should not do.

And nobody is outraged. Nobody – much less the feared ICE – moves a finger to put Ms. Allain where she belongs, and the whole event is brushed off by the big media and the punditry as an amusing episode of little relevance.

I beg to differ. It speaks volumes about our self-respect as a nation and the rule of law, a pillar of our liberty and freedom, which does not look as solid as it used to anymore. Just imagine an American sneaking illegally into Ms. Allain’s home country, confronting a local presidential candidate and trying to lecture him or her about what to do while in the presidential palace. I guarantee you a monumental scandal, with complains about infringement on sovereignty rushed to the United Nations, the International Court in The Hague and every other possible institution.

It was not that long ago that Peruvians handled with utmost efficiency the case of an American, who came to their country under the false guise of a journalist and tried to help impose on their society her leftist worldview. In 1996, New Yorker Lori Berenson was convicted by a local court of treason and sentenced to life in prison without parole, and attempts by her lawyers to arrange for her return to the United States have so far been unsuccessful.

I think, as far as defense of sovereignty is concerned, we can learn from Peruvians a thing or two.

Editor’s note: A video recording of Ms. Allain’s confrontation with Gov. Romney and an interview with the Peruvian illegal alien can be viewed on the Website of the illegal alien advocacy group, America’s Voice.

The following is a contribution by outside blogger Gregory Sokoloff. Opinions expressed are solely those of Mr. Sokoloff.

Loss of income resulting from an illegal alien’s deportation cannot be considered “extreme hardship” under a new Department of Homeland Security proposal introducing new procedures for inadmissibility waivers for migrants with unauthorized stays in the U.S. exceeding six months, according to a top immigration law expert.

The proposal, unveiled by the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Jan. 9, aims to do away with the current three-year and 10-year inadmissibility rules, if the aliens can demonstrate that their “U.S. citizen spouse or parent” would suffer “extreme hardship” if their admission to the United States were denied. Under current law, illegal aliens with “immediate relatives” who are U.S. citizens must first exit the country and be barred from re-entry, respectively, for three or 10 years if their illegal stays exceeded 180 days or 365 days.

The new proposal calls for pre-approving the aliens in the United States. After that, they would have to quickly return to their home countries, go to a U.S. consulate there and receive formal approval for green cards often during that same interview.

The immigration agency did not elaborate what could constitute “extreme hardship” that must be demonstrated along this process. But Crystal L. Williams, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association (AILA) said it cannot be just loss of income. “That doesn’t even rise to the level of hardship, much less extreme hardship,” Ms. Williams said in an interview. “Usually, there is a mental or physical disability involved on the part of a qualifying U.S. citizen of resident.”

She added that the only new element in the proposal consisted in processing of the waiver inside rather than outside of the United States, followed by a quick exit of the petitioner in case of pre-approval. Ms. Williams does not think the plan will facilitate legalization for parents of so-called “anchor babies” primarily because the “extreme hardship” requirement will still have to be met. “The child cannot qualify the parent for the waiver, though,” said the AILA executive director. “The spouse forms the basis of the hardship. The child can’t form the basis of the hardship.”

Ms. Williams acknowledged that she had heard legal experts “speculate” that the proposed changes would give a boost to fake marriages driven exclusively by the interest of legalization, but she dismissed these speculations as exaggerated. “The scrutiny level on waivers is extremely high,” she said. “Part of showing the ‘extreme hardship’ is to show that the relationship is longstanding and highly dependent on one another. And so, I do not see how somebody can get away with trying to get a waiver out of a fake marriage.” People married for only a few months or even a year have little chance of their waiver being approved, the AILA executive director explained.

The following is a contribution by outside blogger Gregory Sokoloff. Opinions expressed are solely those of Mr. Sokoloff.

It looks like our Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency is too upset to do its job. According to a statement by the Maricopa County’s Sheriff’s Office, it recently refused to take into custody illegal aliens just because it disapproved of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s work methods.

The incident occurred shortly before Christmas when sheriff’s deputies arrested 12 illegal aliens involved in human smuggling in northern Maricopa County. It turned out that six of them could not be charged with felonies under Arizona’s human smuggling laws.

According to the statement, after realizing that, the deputies contacted ICE and asked the federal agents to take the six into their custody. The response was a flat refusal. The deputies were told by ICE officials that following a “new order from Department of Homeland Security,” ICE would not pick up these illegal immigrants, the statement said.

ICE officials were directly asked by the sheriff’s deputies if this new policy only applies to the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, and the answer was, “Yes.” The deputies then contacted Casa Grande Border Patrol, which agreed to accept the illegal aliens, the statement pointed out.

The refusal prompted a sharp rebuke for the sheriff, known for his uncompromising stance on illegal immigration. “Not accepting these illegal aliens is nothing short of unannounced amnesty,” Arpaio said.

We all know that the sheriff is not on the best of terms with the federal government. In December, following a three-year investigation, the Justice Department accused the sheriff of engaging in widespread civil rights abuses, including mistreatment of Latinos and racial profiling. Arpaio has rejected the charge. But in the wake of the report, the Department of Homeland Security revoked the sheriff’s office’s authority to identify and detain illegal immigrants.

I have little appetite for sorting out the tiff between the sheriff’s office and the federal government. But in the case of ICE, it looks like politics has gotten the better of the federal agency and eclipsed its primary mission, which is to protect the border and catch illegal intruders.

Personally, I don’t care if the illegal aliens are being handed over to ICE by Fidel Castro himself or any other human rights violator of his ilk. The job of ICE is not to do political cherry-picking, but to take all the illegal aliens — regardless of where they come from — and process them as required by the law.

And if the agency decides it is too angry with somebody to do its work, maybe Congress should also get angry and cut off ICE’s funding.

The following is a contribution by outside blogger Gregory Sokoloff. Opinions expressed are solely those of Mr. Sokoloff.

It was a dramatic presentation at the top of the Wednesday night broadcast by Univision, the largest of our Spanish-speaking TV networks and a staunch defender of illegal immigrants. “Outraged by His Death,” read a banner headline splashed across the screen. Then, they dished out the victim’s legal guardian, a pudgy man probably in his 50s, who talked, teary-eyed, about “abuse” suffered by the young man. “He was sent to his death,” Reynaldo Cruz told Univision. “That’s inhuman.”

To listen to the broadcast, one would think that Quelino Ojeda Jimenez, a 21-year-old illegal immigrant from Mexico, was sent at the very least to Pol Pot’s torture chambers and we, American society, had just perpetrated another atrocity. But no, he was sent back to his hometown in Mexico, “lindo y querido” (beautiful and loved), as they like to remind us in Univision on other occasions.

So where was the “abuse?” According to published report, Mr. Ojeda came to the U.S. illegally about five years ago, leaving behind his girlfriend and their common child. Our family reunification crowd obviously did not protest this separation.

He found work at a construction site in Chicago, but in August 2010 fell about 20 feet and became paralyzed. Even though he had no health insurance, he was treated at Advocate Christ Medical Center in Oak Lawn, Illinois, for four months, until Dec. 22 of that year, and then sent by air ambulance to his native state of Oaxaca. The total bill, including the transportation costs, incurred by the Illinois hospital in this case topped $700,000, officials said.

But last Sunday, after staying at an Oaxaca hospital for over a year, Mr. Ojeda succumbed to a heart attack. That’s when the amnesty crowd cried bloody murder.

The main charge is that the hospital in Oaxaca was poorly equipped to treatment of patients like Mr. Ojeda and, therefore, even though he had no legal standing in the country of any kind, the United States was obligated to take care of him.

The Univision story featured a spokesman from then Mexican Consulate in Chicago, Augustin Rodriguez de la Gala, who said the consulate was “consulting with lawyers,” who were in the process of “analyzing elements” of the case. Although the diplomat shied away from the word “lawsuit,” we all know what it means, don’t we?

It has happened before. But this time, in my view, it merits attention because of the underlying philosophy behind the hubbub.

Those driving the “outrage” obviously believe that American society, because of its success and prosperity, owes a living, and apparently unlimited health care, to anyone whose native society cannot or will not provide for the basic needs of its citizens.

This philosophy is hardly new. Decades ago it was called Marxism-Leninism, later Communism. Now, in our age of political correctness, we call it “redistribution of wealth.” It was thrust to the fore quite recently by the Occupy Movement and cheered by lots of people – from the White House to the Democratic Party to the Hispanic community.

But make no mistake. We are looking into the eyes of the very same beast that made Pol Pot and Fidel Castro.

The following is a contribution by outside blogger Gregory Sokoloff. Opinions expressed are solely those of Mr. Sokoloff.

They did not make us wait long. The Iranian ayatollahs have now decided to reach out to Hispanics, including those living in the United States.

This week, the regime in Tehran launched what has been dubbed HispanTV, a 24-hour news and cultural information channel “designed to eventually reach millions of persons in Latin America, the United States and Europe,” according to a statement in Spanish posted on the new channel’s Website, www.hispantv.ir.

In its afternoon broadcast on Thursday, Miami-based Univision showed footage from the first Iranian Spanish-language broadcast, in which a female announcer — clad, as was to be expected, in a dress with long sleeves and a headscarf — greeted her audience in a perfect Madrid accent. “Look who is speaking Spanish now!” remarked Univision anchorwoman Barbara Bermudo with a smile.

What will the content of the new channel be? “Information, culture, religion …art and politics” among other subjects, stated the channel’s Website. The goal? According to the statement, it consists in “building a bridge of friendship and understanding among the peoples of Iran, the Middle East and Hispanic America in order to establish and strengthen ties based on the principles of friendship, brotherhood, solidarity and justice.” Sounds like a page from the Occupy Wall Street playbook, doesn’t it?

The channel added enigmatically that it was also looking to become “a multi-dimensional pillar of support for those who are looking for a space to share their life experiences.” Lola Garcia, a Madrid-based publicist for HispanTV, told Agence France-Presse that the channel was run by the Iranian state and had three staff in Madrid and correspondents around the world. For what it could mean, read my previous blog “We Shall Choose a Different Way” published on December 22.

I also have to give it to those folks in Tehran: I think they have a much clearer understanding of what kind of opportunities illegal immigration and the resulting growth of the undocumented Hispanic community in the United States is offering than the vast majority of our politicians right here in Washington.

The “United 4 the Dream group” has asked the Charlotte Observer to stop using the word “illegal” when referring to people in the United States illegally. They prefer the word “undocumented” since “illegal” has, they claim, a criminalizing and dehumanizing connotation.

United 4 the Dream needs to take a peek in the dictionary. Dictionary.com defines illegal as “forbidden by law or statute” and undocumented as “lacking documents required for legal immigration or residence.” An immigrant who is in this country illegally is illegally present in the U.S., as defined by American law. Changing the word “illegal” to “undocumented” doesn’t make an illegal immigrant any more legal; it merely takes the onus of responsibility off the law-breaker. We go from “He’s in this country illegally” to “Woops, he’s undocumented. He just doesn’t have the documents needed for legal residency.” “Undocumented” sounds like the person lost, forgot, or never received correct documentation through a clerical error, rather than committed the criminal act of entering our country without permission.

Changing the word doesn’t change the facts. Whether undocumented or illegal, people who trespass on our border have no legal right to be in the United States. They have broken at least one law – probably more. When an alien is given the right to enter the U.S., this involves an implied consent to respect the laws of our nation. Those who enter illegally or through fraud/misrepresentation have made no such promise to respect our laws. Laws matter.