Editor's Note: Tune in Sunday at 10a.m. or 1p.m. ET for Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN.

By Fareed Zakaria, CNN

This past week, the Supreme Court deliberated over a controversial Arizona immigration law. It comes amidst a climate of hostility. Just look at what candidates said during the Republican primaries:

"Mitt Romney will complete construction of a high-tech fence," the candidate announced on his campaign website. Michele Bachmann promised to "build a double-walled fence." And Herman Cain said: "We're going to have a fence; it's going to be 20 feet high; it's going to have barbed wire on the top."

The fence in question guards a third of America's 2,000 mile-long border with Mexico. Supporters of harsher laws argue that 3 out of every 5 illegal immigrants are from Mexico. But just as American hostility is reaching a crescendo, the problem might be disappearing.

FULL POST

Editor’s Note: Shannon O’Neil is Douglas Dillon Fellow for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, and publishes the blog, Latin America’s Moment on cfr.org. Follow her on twitter @latintelligence.

By Shannon O’Neil – Special to CNN

As the country begins to turn to the general election next November, immigration remains a difficult issue for both political parties. During the early Republican primary debates, candidates talked enthusiastically about mass deportations and expanding, doubling, and even electrifying the U.S. southern border fence to keep people out. As the field has narrowed, the leading contenders have continued with a hard-line. Romney in particular, though widely seen as a centrist candidate, has taken an unyielding stance on immigration, supporting Arizona’s and Alabama’s restrictive laws and aligning himself with their architect - well-known anti-immigrant official Kris Kobach.

The tone got so strident in the lead up to the Florida primary on January 31 that Florida Senator Marco Rubio (who many say is a potential candidate for Vice President) chastised the Republican candidates for “harsh and intolerable and inexcusable” anti-immigrant rhetoric. FULL POST

The GOP presidential candidates sparred Tuesday night on national security, but there was at least one point of agreement among them, or at least between Newt Gingrich and Mitt Romney.

“I think that we ought to have an H-1 visa that goes with every graduate degree in math, science and engineering so that people stay here,” said Gingrich.

“I'd staple a green card to the diploma of anybody who's got a degree of math, science, a Masters degree, Ph.D,” said Romney.

The candidates explained that keeping foreign-born students who study science, technology, engineering or math in the U.S. was an important step in creating new technologies, new industries and new jobs.

The U.S. Census Bureau recently released a report on foreign-born bachelor’s degree holders living in the U.S. The numbers give some sense of how U.S. universities remain magnets for those seeking to study science, math or engineering. There are now 4.2 million foreign-born science and engineering bachelor's degree holders in the U.S., a number double the population of Houston, Texas, for comparison.

FULL POST

Editor's Note: Dr. James M. Lindsay is a Senior Vice President at the Council on Foreign Relations and co-author of America Unbound: The Bush Revolution in Foreign Policy. Visit his blog here and follow him on Twitter. 

By James M. Lindsay, CFR.org

Mitt Romney has taken exception to Rick Perry’s comment over the weekend that he would consider sending American troops into Mexico to help end the drug war raging there. Romney told the New Hampshire Union Leader that Perry’s suggestion is “a bad idea:”

Let’s build a fence first, and let’s have sufficient border patrol agents to protect it. And if the Mexican government wants us to help it with logistics, intelligence, satellite images, I’m sure we can provide the sort of support we provided in Colombia.

You can expect to hear more about Mexico at next Tuesday’s GOP debate. If Romney makes the Colombia comparison again, he probably should explain what the United States did there. Most people don’t know. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Every week, the Global Public Square brings you some must-read editorials from around the world addressed to America and Americans. The series is called Listen up, America!

Will Americans leave the U.S. for better jobs?

“[C]ould America, that great nation of immigrants, become in harder times a nation of emigrants?” asks Anand Giridharadas in the Dubai-based Khaleej Times. “Could the metropolises of China one day have Americatowns?”

““[I]f Americans ever became willing to leave en masse, one could imagine them owning foreign Burger King franchises or opening small restaurants to take their cuisine to the world, bringing sorely needed upgrades to the authenticity of barbecue ribs and coleslaw from Mumbai to Buenos Aires.”

“Laid-off American factory workers might make terrific foremen in China and India, where entry-level labour is plentiful but the pool of potential managers is woefully thin.” FULL POST

By Sarah Childress, GlobalPost

A new analysis by the Arizona Republic suggests that the phenomenon of “birth tourism” — non U.S. citizens who come to the U.S. to give birth so that their children will be born Americans—may not be the widespread phenomenon that some U.S. politicians suggest.

Less than 2 percent of babies born last year in the border state of Arizona had non-resident mothers, the story said. Those numbers don’t distinguish between women who were living in other U.S. states and those who came from other countries.  FULL POST

By Tim Lister, CNN

The far right in Europe has enjoyed a renaissance over the past 30 years, driven by resentment of the growing powers of the European Union and by rejection of the "multiculturalism" that has accompanied rapid immigration from the developing world.

Political parties opposing immigration and integration have done well in elections in recent years - and beyond them, neo-fascist and "national socialist" groups have become well-established across the continent, including in Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Italy, Scandinavia, Hungary and the United Kingdom.

Most of those belonging to such groups would not contemplate the sort of carnage that occurred in Norway on Friday, but they would probably sympathize with what appears to have been the manifesto of the alleged assailant, Anders Behring Breivik. FULL POST

Editor's Note: Douglas S. Massey is the Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs at Princeton University

By Douglas S. Massey – Special to CNN

For years, conservatives and many liberals have stated their unwillingness to consider comprehensive immigration reform until “America regained control of its borders.”  That moment has arrived.

According to estimates from the Mexican Migration Project, which I co-direct, the rate of new undocumented migration from Mexico dropped to zero in 2008 for the first time in 50 years.

This remarkable event partly reflects the drop in labor demand in the context of a deep economic recession, but it also stems from a massive increase in border enforcement.  Since 1990, the size of the Border Patrol has increased by a factor of five and its budget by a factor of 13.  FULL POST

Editor’s Note: Demetrios G. Papademetriou is President and Co-Founder of the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington-based think tank dedicated exclusively to the study of international migration. He also serves as Chair of the World Economic Forum's Global Agenda Council on Migration.

By Demetrios G. Papademetriou – Special to CNN

Substantive immigration reform continues to elude America. Politicians are mired in disagreement over the future of the nation’s unauthorized immigrant population.

This is not surprising. The United States has the largest unauthorized immigrant population of any industrialized economy – by far.

But while the reform debate remains stalled, the competitive forces shaping global economies continue to operate. In recent years, the United States has watched other countries fashion more nimble immigration policies allowing them to fill gaps in their workforces.

In many ways, the policy questions regarding future immigrant flows will prove more crucial – and harder to resolve – than the illegal immigration conundrum. FULL POST