Law Professor Tino Cuellar [Email him] was named head of BHO's transition team for immigration. Anyone who is praised by MALDEF is terrible, by definition.

"He's brilliant beyond his years," said John Trasvi?±a, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, who met Cu?©llar when he was a law student at Yale and encouraged him to go to work in Washington.

At 36, Cu?©llar already has an impressive resume. Raised on the U.S.-Mexico border in Calexico (Imperial County), he earned his bachelor's degree at Harvard University before going to Yale Law School and finishing up with a doctorate in political science from Stanford, where he's now a full professor specializing in administrative law.

Along the way, he spent two years at the U.S. Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton, where he worked on fighting money-laundering operations.

Cu?©llar has been described as a close adviser to Obama on immigration, and the American Bar Association recently suggested he could be on the short list to head the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency. [Stanford professor leads Obama immigration team, By Tyche Hendricks, San Francico Chronicle, November 22, 2008]

BHO's immigration team is full-bore anti-sovereignty. Here's an open borders blog gloating "Obama Has A Pro-Migrant Transition Team".

On Tina Cuellar (Source: The National Journal, March 2008)

He believes that comprehensive immigration reform must go beyond addressing border security and the status of the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants to confronting the current system's bureaucratic failings, providing job opportunities for American workers, promoting economic development in Latin America, and determining "how our immigration policy reflects our values and needs as Americans. "Having grown up near the Mexican border — first in Brownsville, Texas, and later in California's Imperial Valley — the Mexican-American Cuellar opposes the controversial southern border fence, which Obama has voted to construct. Cuellar, who joined the Obama campaign in April 2007, brings expertise on the regulatory side of immigration and international security, as well as what he calls a "passion" for refugee policy.

T Alexander Aleinikoff in a paper (Source: The Salon, 2006):

"It is time to think seriously about a future when travel within North America is largely unrestricted. For some, such a plan appears unthinkable. Removing the border patrol from our southwest border, they will say, will flood the United States with unskilled workers, overburden the infrastructure of localities, and wreak havoc on our welfare system. But in years ahead what is now viewed as a threat will be viewed as a benefit: because the U.S. population is aging and the ratio of workers to retired persons is decreasing, new immigrant workers will likely be the key to the economic growth necessary to sustain social security systems and our standard of living."

See the Stanford Law page of Mariano-Florentino [Tino] Cuellar.