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Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced in a Friday speech that the Obama administration is set to launch a campaign for "comprehensive immigration reform" next year.  The New York Times  reports that the package Napolitano has in mind would include

tougher enforcement laws against illegal immigrants and the people who hire them, and streamlining the system for legal immigration, but also what she called a “tough and fair pathway to earned legal status.

This news will be welcomed by a small universe of activist groups promoting such legislation.  As the Times notes - comprehensive-reform supporters outside government "had started to doubt that President Obama would keep his pledge to take on the divisive issue of illegal immigration in the first months of [the election year known as] 2010."

The Times is certainly correct that the idea of citizenship for persons here illegally is divisive. 

But a new report out of the Land of Lincoln sheds light on another ongoing source of division - the presence within pro-reform coalitions of a group widely known for links to terrorism and animus toward Jews.

The Daily Herald, a Chicago-area daily notes that

The "American-Islamic organization" in question is the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a group familiar to many Jewish activists for its well-documented links to Hamas. 

Those links led to the organization being named as an "unindicted co-conspirator" in the federal government's terror-financing case against the Holy Land Foundation.

Those links led even the extremely liberal Senator from Illinois, Dick Durbin, to raise concerns about CAIR.  Durbin, remarked during a Senate hearing that unlike other community organizations, CAIR is "unusual in its extreme rhetoric and its associations with groups that are suspect."  Those links led Durbin's fellow liberal Democrat colleague Charles Schumer of New York to describe CAIR as an organization "which we know has ties to terrorism." 

Based on such concerns, Schumer and Sen. Jon Kyl (R-AZ) successfully pressed executive branch agencies to sever all links to CAIR.  “Until we can resolve whether there continues to be a connection between CAIR or its executives and HAMAS, the FBI does not view CAIR as an appropriate liaison partner,” an FBI official told Kyl in an April letter.

Given CAIR's deeply questionable bona fides as a community organization in good standing, the leaders of the Illinois Coalition for Immigration and Refugee Rights should be grateful to the Illinois Republican Party for initiating a public discussion about the appropriateness of keeping CAIR under the their tent. 

For that matter, the National Immigration Forum, which describes itself as "the leading immigrant advocacy organization in the country" - and includes the Anti-Defamation League and some other Jewish organizations - might want to take the Illinois GOP up on the invitation to consider whether their advocacy of "divisive" legislation is aided or impeded by the inclusion of CAIR in its coalition.

Like America at large, the Jewish community encompasses individuals with a variety of views on "comprehensive immigration reform" legislation.  But we certainly ought to be able to unify behind the idea of vigilance against the intrusion of groups linked to terror and antisemitism into the coalitions and causes with which we affiliate.

Thanks to the Illinois GOP for spurring a much-needed discussion.