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President Obama will visit Connecticut on Monday to keep pushing for new federal gun laws. The poster children for this campaign are just that — children.

The president has invited kids to the White House to watch him sign new executive orders on guns. And the images of the kids who died at Sandy Hook Elementary School are a constant reminder of the toll gun violence can take.

And it's not just the gun debate. Right now, children are also central to campaigns on immigration and same-sex marriage — demonstrating their effectiveness as political messengers.

A Time-Honored Tactic

In Miami in 1977, Anita Bryant started a campaign against gay rights. She gave her group a name that would resonate with parents in Florida and around the country: Save Our Children.

"Please join us in voting for the human rights of children — voting for decency," she urged during her campaign.

Kids are still a key part of this debate, but more often they show up on the other side, as part of the push for gay rights.

When the Supreme Court heard arguments on same-sex marriage last month, Justice Anthony Kennedy pointed out that California alone has some 40,000 kids living with two moms or two dads.

"They want their parents to have full recognition and full status," Kennedy said. "The voice of those children is important in this case, don't you think?"

Conservative Justice Antonin Scalia brought up kids, too, but in another context: "There's considerable disagreement among — among sociologists as to what the consequences of raising a child in a — in a single-sex family, whether that is harmful to the child or not," Scalia said during arguments. "Some states do not — do not permit adoption by same-sex couples for that reason."

On almost any issue, kids can make an argument more compelling.

"Kids are more of a blank canvas," says Elizabeth Wilner, who studies political advertising for the firm Kantar Media CMAG. "The standard prejudices and thoughts people might bring to a particular issue tend to get left by the wayside when they're watching an ad that features a kid."

People can easily pass judgment on gays and lesbians or condemn those who came to the United States illegally. It's much harder to dismiss their children.

"I think it immediately unfangs the opponent," says Mark Fitzloff, an executive at the advertising firm Wieden + Kennedy. "Because what are you going to do? You're going to attack children? I mean, it's a smart chess move to anticipate your opponent's next move and pull the power out of it."

That's one reason the DREAM Act kids have been such an effective face of the immigration debate. They came to the United States illegally through no fault of their own. And people have seen that message online more than half a million times in this video.

Thousands of supporters will descend on the U.S. Capitol Wednesday to call for legislation that creates a path to citizenship for immigrants in the country illegally.

Sound familiar?

But this time, unlike in 2007 and 2010 when immigration legislation died in Congress after similar demonstrations, proponents of an overhaul say politics has swung in inexorably toward their side.

"I've been working on this issue for more than a decade, and it feels unstoppable now," says Ana Avendano, director of immigration and community action at the AFL-CIO.

Momentum, however, has met Congress, where bipartisan "gangs" in the Senate and the House have been wrestling with writing comprehensive overhaul legislation — with some success, and a few setbacks.

The long-awaited bill from the Senate's Gang of Eight, which includes Florida Republican Sen. Marco Rubio, is now expected to be released next week at the earliest.

Senators and lobbyists continue to haggle over two of the stickiest remaining issues: Rules governing visas for foreign agricultural workers and border security thresholds Republicans like Rubio want met before citizenship paths are opened.

Rubio spokesman Alex Conant says that the senator, seen as key to a legislative deal, is not commenting on the thresholds or "triggers," or any other part of the bill while senators are negotiating.

Republican opponents of citizenship options are wary of the implications of getting behind anything that smacks of amnesty, and the border controls are seen as one element of mitigating political fallout.

But it appears that a consensus has developed among advocates for a comprehensive overhaul that a path to citizenship should trump every other legislative consideration.

Says Gustavo Torres, a Maryland-based activist and one of the rally organizers: "What we really want is legislation now. We want a path to citizenship."

The Senate gang has been considering a 13-year path to citizenship, and perhaps considerably shorter for farm workers here illegally, as well as a system that could levy fines and assess back taxes on those seeking permanent status.

"The path to citizenship is the prime directive of the civil rights community," Wade Henderson of the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights said this week.

Trip Wires

The AFL-CIO and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce have worked out a deal on one potentially polarizing element of the effort.

A new program will allow, over five years, up to 200,000 low-skilled foreign workers to receive visas to work at jobs gone unfilled by Americans.

In its first year, the deal would allow about 20,000 workers in any industry to receive visas, says Avendano of the AFL-CIO. There would be a limit on the number allotted to construction companies.

"The agreement with the Chamber is solid," she says. "It has broad support across the country."

In a statement, Chamber CEO Thomas Donohue called the worker program "just one important component of comprehensive immigration reform," and said border security, a pathway to citizenship "under tight criteria" and an employment verification system also needed to be part of a solution.

What remains unresolved is how a new temporary, seasonal guest worker visa program would play out in the agricultural industry.

There, negotiators representing the growers and the laborers remain at loggerheads over the number of visas and minimum wage requirements under any new program.

Diana Tellefson Torres, executive director at the United Farm Workers Foundation, declined to disclose specifics of confidential negotiations underway.

But she characterized current industry proposals as potentially harmful to the wages and working conditions of agricultural workers here legally.

"We want to make sure that those who are already here are not affected adversely," Tellefson Torres says.

Legal farm workers earn an average hourly wage of $10.80, Tellefson Torres says, and of the 1.6 million farm workers in the U.S., and estimated 1 million are here illegally.

Those familiar with the negotiations say that agribusiness has advocated a program that would begin with the authorization of 200,000 guest worker visas, know as "H-2A visas," and raise or eliminate the cap going forward.

The current H-2A program since 2005 has set a cap of 85,000 visas for seasonal farm workers.

But the debate over agricultural guest worker visas may remain unresolved as the legislation moves forward, first to the Senate Judiciary Committee where Chairman Patrick Leahy, D-Vermont, has promised a full airing.

"A specific agricultural program would be good, but it's not essential," Tellefson Torres says. "Our first priority is to ensure that farm workers that are here are able to get on the path to citizenship."

The Coalition

Immigration overhaul advocates have worked to expand their reach, and diversity the face of immigrants to beyond the Hispanic community.

In a conference by rally organizers this week, Gustavo Torres of Casa de Maryland, a Latino and immigrant advocacy organization, was joined not only by union officials, but also by representatives of the LGBT community and those advocating for Filipino immigrants.

The Migration Policy Institute in a 2009 study estimated that the number of unauthorized immigrants from the Philippines had increased about 33 percent since 2000. Filipinos, however, make up just 2 percent of immigrants here illegally.

Gay and lesbian activists like Rachel Tiven have characterized the immigration issue as a "shared struggle among the overlapping LGBT and immigrant communities."

Tiven, executive director of Immigration Equality, which provides legal services to those in the LGBT community affected by U.S. immigration law, says that the gay community's recent civil rights successes should be seen as a model.

"We play to win," Tiven said this week. "We want the right to get in line, and when we get in, we want to make sure it's a line that's going to move."

In the 75 years since it was introduced, Americans have been arguing over the minimum wage.

Some say government intervention to artificially raise wages lowers demand for workers and interferes with economic freedom — preventing people who would be willing to work for less from getting jobs at all. They argue that the minimum wage especially hurts teenagers and young adults with few or no skills.

More From The Debate

Buckle up — climate change could make this a bumpy flight.

That's according to a newly published study by two British scientists who say increased levels of CO2 in the atmosphere will make "clear air turbulence" — which can't be easily spotted by pilots or satellites — more common over the North Atlantic. That means the potential for gut-wrenching flights between the U.S., Europe and points east.

According to Scientific American, researchers Paul D. Williams and Manoj M. Joshi, "used computer simulations to fast-forward to the year 2050. They fed that future climate data to 21 turbulence-predicting algorithms."

According to the BBC:

"The modelling suggested the average strength of transatlantic turbulence could increase by between 10% and 40%, and the amount of airspace likely to contain significant turbulence by between 40% and 170%, where the most likely outcome is around 100%. In other words, a doubling of the amount of airspace affected.

" 'The probability of moderate or greater turbulence increases by 10.8%,' said Dr Williams."