The 2012 elections have created a new openness within the GOP to the possibility of comprehensive immigration reform, and increased the likelihood of a bipartisan deal. Latino USA host Maria Hinojosa talks to NPR senior political correspondent Mara Liasson and Republican political advisor, Lionel Sosa.

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Mara Liasson is the national political correspondent for NPR. Her reports can be heard regularly on NPR’s award-winning newsmagazines All Things Considered and Morning Edition. Liasson provides extensive coverage of politics and policy from Washington, DC — focusing on the White House and Congress — and also reports on political trends beyond the Beltway.

Each election year, Liasson provides key coverage of the candidates and issues in both presidential and congressional races. During her tenure she has covered five presidential elections — in 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004 and 2008. Prior to her current assignment, Liasson was NPR’s White House correspondent for all eight years of the Clinton administration. She has won the White House Correspondents Association’s Merriman Smith Award for daily news coverage in 1994, 1995, and again in 1997. From 1989-1992 Liasson was NPR’s congressional correspondent.
Liasson joined NPR in 1985 as a general assignment reporter and newscaster. From September 1988 to June 1989 she took a leave of absence from NPR to attend Columbia University in New York as a recipient of a Knight-Bagehot Fellowship in Economics and Business Journalism.

Prior to joining NPR, Liasson was a freelance radio and television reporter in San Francisco. She was also managing editor and anchor of California Edition, a California Public Radio nightly news program, and a print journalist for The Vineyard Gazette in Martha’s Vineyard, Mass.

Liasson is a graduate of Brown University where she earned a bachelor’s degree in American history.

Lionel Sosa has been media consultant for Presidents Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush. He has served on the teams of eight national presidential campaigns.

Sosa was named “One of the 25 most influential Hispanics in America” by Time Magazine in 2005 and is a member of the Texas Business Hall of Fame. He is the author of Think and Grow Rich, a Latino Choice published in 2006 by Random House, and The Americano Dream: How Latinos Can Achieve Success in Business and in Life, published in 1998 by Dutton and co-author of “El Vaquero Real- the Original American Cowboy” published by Bright Sky Press in 2008. Sosa is a contributing author of “Latinos and the Nations Future”, edited by Henry Cisneros and published by Arte Publico Press, University of Houston in 2009.

In the spring of 2001, Lionel was a Fellow at the Institute of Politics at Harvard University. He was awarded an honorary PHD in Humanities from the University of the Incarnate Word.