What kind of American values would appreciate the plight of undocumented immigrants?

AMERICAN VALUES AND THE NEXT PRESIDENT
'The general welfare'

The eighth in a series of editorials examining American values and the candidates for president.
December 28, 2007
Los Angeles Times

Most Americans cherish an abiding conviction that we live in a land of opportunity -- for all, not just a few. We often wrap this conviction in the mantle of liberty: Because we are free, we can pursue our dreams, change our lives, change our world.

But there are prerequisites to opportunity. To live productive lives, we must enjoy health. We must have access to the knowledge we need to be successful. And we must have a sound understanding of the rules of the society we live in.

...
With this editorial, we consider the presidential candidates' positions on healthcare, education and immigration, issues that may seem unrelated but that, in starkly immediate ways, determine our ability to pursue our American values -- notably, promoting the general welfare


Immigration

The candidates may be forgiven if they seem unable to find solid footing for their views on illegal immigrants. Voters appear to be unsure themselves. They tend to oppose social services for illegal immigrants, but a majority favor a pathway to citizenship for the 12 million already here.

That's not as contradictory as it might seem. In fact, voters seem to be aware of some of the complexities surrounding illegal immigrants in this country. Undocumented workers contribute more to the nation, in the form of taxes and willingness to take low-paying, unattractive jobs, than they cost. The benefits and costs, however, are unevenly distributed. Employers and consumers gain from the low wages; federal and state governments receive the income tax paid on wages. But the burden illegal immigration places on society tends to fall at the local, not national, level.

That's why supporting comprehensive immigration reform -- the stand of most Democratic candidates as well as this page -- is a start, but only a start. Voters aren't buying simplistic solutions such as building a fence the length of the border or issuing some form of identification. In their neighborhoods, they see houses where one family used to live now sheltering several immigrant families. As a result, their schools are overcrowded. The children, whose parents often don't speak English and sometimes can't read, need extra help, and the schools are in trouble for their low test scores. Kids drop out of school, and crime rates go up. The expenses that employers avoid by not offering undocumented workers health benefits fall to local emergency rooms and community clinics.

With no certain answers, candidates must at least raise the hard questions or risk seeming hopelessly out of touch with these day-to-day realities. Only Clinton has mentioned the idea that the federal government, which has failed in its job of restricting illegal immigrants while accepting their income tax payments, might use some of that money to compensate affected communities for the related costs.

Nor have Republican candidates -- who have been tripping over each other to prove they're the hardest on illegal immigrants -- offered a more pragmatic platform. The border fence might reduce the numbers of new immigrants, but it won't stop them, especially when two of five illegal immigrants [pdf] already here entered the country legally and overstayed their visas. A lack of driver's licenses hasn't discouraged them either. It has simply put more unlicensed and uninsured drivers on the roads.

Among Republicans, only Giuliani and McCain still talk about allowing illegal immigrants to earn citizenship. The others pretend that 12 million people have been living -- most of them working -- in this country without playing an appreciable role in its economy. Even Huckabee, known for favoring state scholarships for illegal immigrants, now says the best route is to throw them all out within four months, then give them a chance to apply for return. Among the questions we'd like to see addressed: Would that be before or after they finish their college degrees?

Next: "The Blessings of Liberty" looks ahead to The Times' endorsement of a presidential candidate. The complete "American Values" series can be found at latimes.com/values08.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/la-ed-welfare28dec28,0,710619.story?coll=la-opinion-leftrail

A response to the LA Times editorial of December 28, 2007

Pide Los Angeles Times a aspirantes a presidencia abordar reforma migratoria
Agencias / La Jornada On Line
28 diciembre 2007

"Los indocumentados contribuyen más a EU (en forma fiscal y en asumir trabajos mal pagados y poco atractivos), que lo que le cuestan", consideró el diario.

San Diego. El diario Los Angeles Times pidió en su editorial de este viernes a los precandidatos presidenciales estadunidenses abordar la reforma migratoria como fórmula de bienestar para todos los estadunidenses.

"Los trabajadores indocumentados contribuyen más a la nación –en forma de impuestos y disposición para tomar trabajos mal pagados y poco atractivos-, que lo que le cuestan", declaró el rotativo.

Agregó que "los costos y beneficios" de esas aportaciones de los migrantes "están mal distribuidas. Los patrones y consumidores ganan por esos trabajos de bajos salarios, los gobiernos estatales y federal reciben los ingresos de sus impuestos".

Los Angeles Times opinó que sin una reforma migratoria las escuelas tienen que operar con programas especiales para niños que hablan idiomas distintos al inglés.

El cotidiano indicó que aunque muchos electores estadunidenses se expresan opuestos a otorgar servicios públicos a cerca de 12 millones de indocumentados, la mayoría desea una reforma migratoria que les permita la legalización y tener la ciudadanía estadunidense.

Por otra parte, los electores "no aceptan soluciones simplistas como una barda de la extensión de la frontera o que se tenga que usar alguna forma de identificación".

"Sólo (la pre candidata demócrata, Hillary) Clinton ha mencionado la idea de que el gobierno federal, que ha fallado en su trabajo de restringir la migración indocumentada y al mismo tiempo ha aceptado esos impuestos, pueda usar parte de ese dinero para compensar a las comunidades afectadas", agregó.

El periódico expresó que entre los pre candidatos republicanos hay una "competencia para probar quién es el más severo contra los migrantes indocumentados".

Añadió que sólo el ex alcalde de Nueva York, Rudolph Giuliani, y el senador de Arizona, John McCain, "siguen hablando de permitir a los indocumentados ganar la ciudadanía; los otros suponen que 12 millones de personas han vivido en el país y la mayoría trabajado sin aportar a su economía".


http://www.jornada.unam.mx/ultimas/2007/12/28/pide-los-angeles-times-a-precandidatos-presidenciales-abordar-reforma-migratoria

Stomping on the DREAM ACT: Power by Temper Tantrum

The Houston Chronicle blog "Texas on the Potomac" has a post about people's attitude towards immigration. Even though the issue is plastered all over CNN and other major news outlets, a new George Washington University Battleground Poll found:

"no surge in public concern about immigration. Indeed, the number of people concerned about immigration remained statistically unchanged -- rising from 10 percent to 11 percent -- from July to December [2007]."

If you listen to Romney and certain other candidates you would think this poll is all wrong. However, George Washington University is not Berkeley and is not anywhere close to the most liberal place in the U.S. - Poll results from GWU should be more credible to your average Republican.

If the GWU poll is correct - and I have every confidence that it is - only 11% of the U.S. voters believe immigration is the #1 problem in this country. What a surprise. Listening to Lou Dobbs you would think that immigration is everybody's obsession. If it is only 11% that means a small percentage of voters were those who inundated the Senate during the Comprehensive Immigration Reform debate. Unfortunately, Senators tallied up the number of calls, not how many people were calling... During the debate (which I watched and taped) a number of senators stated that the public had spoken - the fax machines and phones were burning up from so many Americans showing their anti-immigration opinions. I guess they were wrong.

It is sad to think that only a few people who can scream very loud kept the DREAM ACT from being passed. Of course it took a number of senators who lacked courage to accomplish this.

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Texas on the Potomac
Houston Chronicle
December 28 2007

Immigration has been the hottest issue on the presidential campaign trail in frigid Iowa, as Republicans try to outmuscle each other in their attempts to portray themselves as the toughest foes of illegal immigration.

Do voters share the candidates' passion for the issue?

The answer, according to a new George Washington University Battleground Poll, the answer is not exactly. But public attitudes are far more complex than the simplistic campaign rhetoric about sealing the borders or deporting people illegally in the U.S.

When voters are asked to identify the number one problem facing this country, 11 percent named immigration, according to a poll of 1,013 likely voters surveyed by Lake Research Partners and the Tarrance Group. Immigration placed third behind the economy and the Iraq war.

The poll finds no surge in public concern about immigration. Indeed, the number of people concerned about immigration remained statistically unchanged -- rising from 10 percent to 11 percent -- from July to December.

While immigration remained a major issue to one-tenth of the electorate, the economy and taxes doubled in importance as the Iraq war dropped as top issue from 23 percent to 13 percent.

So why all the talk in the GOP primary?

The answer: angry men. Twenty-two percent of Republican men consider immigration their top national issue. And since men are more likely than women to attend GOP primaries and caucuses, the top issue of Republican men must remain on the radar screen of would-be Republican nominees.

Democratic pollster Celinda Lake said that in an "anxiety economy," immigration could become an important issue to Americans who fear losing their jobs to foreign competition. "You do see some blue-collar voters expressing more concern about immigration," she said.

However, other voting blocs are far less interested in immigration. Only 5 percent of Democrats, 9 percent of independents and 12 percent of Republican women show concern about immigration.

Republicans also must weigh the political cost of alienating Hispanic voters, the fastest-growing demographic group in the country.

In 2006, GOP candidates across the U.S. tried to capitalize on illegal immigration but saw their share of the Latino vote cut in half. "We did poorly in handling the immigration in an effective way and that hurt us among Hispanic voters," said Republican pollster Brian Nienaber of the Tarrance Group.

If his party doesn't change its tone, there could be "angry recriminations" in 2008, Nienaber added. "I don't know if that's going to be the best thing for us in courting the Hispanic vote this fall."

Posted by Richard Dunham at December 28, 2007 12:01 AM

http://blogs.chron.com/txpotomac/2007/12/vox_populi_not_everybody_is_fi.html
cartoon: http://www.clipartof.com/images/clipart/thumbnail2/2651_angry_person_stomping_up_and_down_on_a_package.jpg

The double bind of employer enforcement

An employer "clampdown" on the hiring of undocumented immigrants in some ways is very logical - people won't come to the U.S. if there are no jobs to come to. Yet, what happens to the people that are already here? Since the loud voices that influence national politics have ordered there will be no "amnesty," millions will lose there jobs, some unfairly because of inaccuracies in the social security system. Companies will be without workers and the economy could collapse (really). Sounds like a dire prediction -

As has been mentioned many times, how many 2rd and 3rd generation Americans would want to work at a meat packing plant. If you really think there would be crowds waiting to be hired you need to visit a plant today and see how many employees are missing fingers and part of their hands.

The problem is so global. A law that regulates employment of citizens and authorized residents is only a fraction of the problem. Considering the state of the world, globalization is currently something we can't stop - as is immigration.
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Posted on Wed, Dec. 26, 2007
Bosses elude worker crackdown
Miami Herald

BY SPENCER S. HSU
In its announced clampdown on companies that hire illegal workers, the federal government has arrested in the last year nearly four times the number of people that it did two years ago, but only 2 percent of those arrests involved criminal charges against those who hired the workers, according to a year-end tally prepared by the Department of Homeland Security.
Fewer than 100 owners, supervisors or hiring officials were arrested in fiscal 2007, compared with nearly 4,900 arrests that involved illegal workers, providers of fake documents and others, the figures show. Immigration experts say the data illustrates the Bush administration's limited success at delivering on its rhetoric about stopping illegal hiring by corporate employers.

''Why is it that hundreds of bar owners can be sanctioned in Missouri every year for letting somebody with a fake ID have a beer, but we can't manage to sanction hundreds of employers for letting people use fake identities to obtain a job?'' said Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., a former state prosecutor and member of the Senate homeland security committee.

OPENING FOR DEMS?

Democratic political consultants have advised the party's lawmakers -- who already are on the defensive about immigration policy -- that the Bush administration's failure to more aggressively target powerful corporations may be a vulnerability for Republican Party candidates who are seeking to make immigration a campaign issue.

Bush administration officials have promised to strike at the job ''magnet'' luring illegal immigrants into the country, a goal supported by experts across the political spectrum. ''The days of treating employers who violate these laws by giving them the equivalent of a corporate parking ticket -- those days are gone. It's now felonies, jail time, fines and forfeitures,'' Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said at a Nov. 6 news conference.

In a year-end review this month, Chertoff added that an enforcement crackdown will ''make a down payment on credibility with the American people,'' whose ''profound public skepticism'' about government efforts to control illegal immigration helped kill a broad, White House-backed overhaul in the Senate this summer.

But even though DHS has ratcheted up its enforcement effort, this year's 92 criminal arrests of employers still amount to a drop in the bucket of a national economy that includes 6 million companies that employ more than 7 million unauthorized workers, several analysts said. Only 17 firms faced criminal fines or other forfeitures this year.

ONE GUILTY PLEA

In one October case, Richard Rosenbaum, the former president of Rosenbaum-Cunningham International, a Florida-based nationwide cleaning service, pleaded guilty to harboring illegal immigrants and conspiracy to defraud the government, agreeing to pay more than $17 million in restitution and forfeitures.

For decades, political opposition by the businesses that rely on such workers has helped water down the laws and other tools needed for a more sustained effort.

Late in the Clinton administration and early in the current administration, the number of illegal immigrants arrested in worksite cases fell -- from 2,849 in 1999 to a low of 445 in 2003 -- but there has since been a rebound. The number of criminal cases brought against employers fell from 182 to four over that time. In the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, ICE reported the 92 criminal arrests including 59 owners and 33 corporate officials, human resources workers, crew chiefs and others in the ``supervisory chain.''

Of the remaining 863 criminal arrests, nearly 9 in 10 involved workers and other people accused of identity theft or document fraud, money laundering, providing transportation or documentation to illegal workers, or other crimes. Criminal fines and other payments grew from $600,000 in 2003 to more than $30 million in 2007, but they were dominated by a few large payers.

ICE Director Julie Myers, who served as chief of staff to Chertoff when he led the Justice Department's criminal division from 2001 to 2003, wrote in response to McCaskill's criticism last fall that it takes time to build criminal cases, and that DHS' tougher, criminal enforcement approach is ''fundamentally different'' than the weak administrative fines and pin-prick raids that resulted from a congressional backlash against actions against corporations in the late 1990s.

McCaskill called such arguments an excuse for not punishing big-money business and farm interests who want cheap labor, effectively penalizing law-abiding business owners and exploiting illegal immigrant workers.

''The reality simply doesn't match their rhetoric,'' McCaskill said , who began pressing ICE to release the employer statistics in September.

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/nation/story/357096.html

The destructive nature of blaming

from web page - http://winbatlop.stumbleupon.com/tag/drawing/




OR













Photo by Armando Franca, AP

Aragonés who writes for Mexico City's slightly left wing JORNADA writes of population disasters because of anti-immigration laws. It is interesting that she presents this today. While La Jornada talks about an immigration crisis from not having "enough people" the NYT publishes one on having "too many people." Yesterday the NYT (paper copy) had an article in its Science Times "Who is to blame when societies fall?" Accompanying the article is a photo of scores of human skulls. The text next to the photo reads: "Jared Diamond says a factor in the 1994 Rwanda genocide was that the country had let its population outstrip its food supplies." Now don't you think that people will take seriously what Diamond is saying - didn't he win the Pulitzer Prize? Doesn't he have a PhD... If Diamond says that a country "let its population outstrip its food supplies." that is enough to get the Minute Men really moving... its the perfect excuse to get rid of undocumented (and documented) immigrants... may even intensify the anti-immigration hysteria.

The On-Line NYT has hidden the photo in the 2nd page of the article. Maybe the editors realized what they did. A couple of journalism lessons (if you really want to be ethical): 1. Remember that sound bite statements are generally taken seriously by most people. 2. These same people usually do not read the rest of the article that will provide a context for the statement. I'm sure the NYT already knows this, but it doesn't hurt to remind them

NYT "Who is to blame when societies fall?"
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Ana María Aragonés
amaragones@gmail.com

Estados Unidos en peligro
La Jornada -UNAM
Mexico City


Estados Unidos, líder en la economía mundial y uno de los principales países en el desarrollo de la economía del conocimiento, se encuentra en peligro. No porque estén cerca nuevos ataques terroristas, no porque Irán, Venezuela y Cuba, parte del “eje del mal”, estén yendo por caminos inaceptables sin que pueda detenerlos, no por Osama Bin Laden, sino porque algunas regiones estadunidenses se están quedando sin trabajadores, debido a que su población está envejeciendo a consecuencia de la falta de remplazo poblacional por las bajas tasas de natalidad. Ésta es una de las gravísimas realidades que vive el país vecino, y si no acepta flexibilizar sus políticas migratorias y otorgar amnistía a los indocumentados, esas comunidades van a desaparecer. El propio secretario de Comercio de Estados Unidos afirmó que “sin migrantes, simplemente no tenemos suficientes trabajadores, punto”.

Un ejemplo de esto es la situación que se vive en Dakota del Norte, estado conocido por su importantísima producción agrícola y ganadera, y sobre todo en lo que se refiere a la producción de cerdos, que ha sido reseñada en forma muy interesante en un artículo aparecido el 26 de noviembre en USA Today.

De acuerdo con el demógrafo Richard Rathge, en este estado se vive una de las más severas crisis demográficas que azotan al país. Entre 1990 y 2000 la población sólo creció en seis de los 53 condados. El problema es que mientras los granjeros se han reducido, la dimensión de las granjas ha crecido. Es decir, el promedio en 1940 era de 250 hectáreas y en la actualidad de 650 hectáreas. La consecuencia ha sido que todos los servicios que sostenían la vida de esas comunidades, iglesias, escuelas, hospitales, supermercados, restaurantes, etcétera, están desapareciendo por falta de población.

Según el Censo, el porcentaje de población de Dakota del Norte en edad de trabajar (25 a 54 años) está por debajo del promedio nacional y se situó en 40.5 por ciento para el año 2000 y la proyección para 2020 es que descenderá a 33.4 por ciento.

La alternativa para evitar que estas comunidades queden finalmente abandonadas es crear industrias y diversos proyectos productivos que generen trabajos bien pagados para atraer a la mano de obra nativa. El problema es que se trata de un estado cuyo promedio de ingreso por familias está por debajo de la media nacional, esto es, 39 mil 233 dólares al año, lo que es un obstáculo para atraer a trabajadores nativos. Por lo tanto, los pobladores temen que de llevarse a cabo esos proyectos productivos sería un imán para los migrantes hispanos, sobre todo indocumentados. Y ante esa eventualidad, que es posible, los pobladores prefieren irse muriendo poco a poco antes de “romper una barrera cultural” que podría salvarlos de desaparecer.

No hay duda de que todo el mundo sabe que los trabajos mal pagados los realizan los indocumentados, y además que resultan fundamentales para la economía de algunos estados, sobre todo ante el envejecimiento de las poblaciones. Simplemente en Dakota del Norte hay 10 mil trabajos esperando contratar mano de obra. No obstante, se ha desatado una fobia antinmigrante pocas veces vista en Estados Unidos.

Lo que habría que preguntarse es: ¿quién tiene la culpa de que se haya extendido una verdadera sicosis y una falsa percepción de los trabajadores indocumentados? En primer lugar, los propios patrones para los cuales estos trabajadores suponen enormes beneficios, y mientras más difícil les hagan la llegada, serán más vulnerables y precarios, lo que repercutirá favorablemente sobre sus ganancias invirtiendo muy poco. Por otro lado, los congresistas, quienes se deben a esos mismos empresarios, granjeros y patrones, y si quieren ser relegidos tendrán que continuar con la misma estrategia. Y por supuesto los medios hacen su trabajo apoyándolos, lamentablemente.

Que los candidatos a la Presidencia de Estados Unidos pongan en el centro del debate a la migración es simplemente buscar un chivo expiatorio sobre el cual se vayan todas las miradas y así evitar debatir en el contexto del propio sistema, mismo que ha perdido toda legalidad y por lo que ha sido severamente cuestionado por la comunidad internacional ante los últimos acontecimientos.

Se atreven a señalar a esos trabajadores indocumentados como un problema de seguridad nacional, cuando justamente la amenaza no son éstos, sino la falta de ellos. Y esto sí puede convertirse en un problema de seguridad nacional al tener que enfrentar la muerte de las comunidades.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/12/26/index.php?section=opinion&article=028a1mun

image of deserted city: http://www.geocities.jp/artofdaisuke/images/Planet_A.jpg

photo of skulls: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1

Why is there so little rational discourse on immigration?

The following article from the WP describes the current situation in Arizona. The state has joined Prince William County for having more angry people than anywhere else in the U.S. As I read the comments on the article I am continuously dismayed that people have so many facts wrong, are so angry, don't see undocumented immigrants as people.

Immigration Ground Zero
In Arizona, the fruit of Congress's failure
Wednesday, December 26, 2007; A20
Washington Post

THE NEW ground zero in the debate over illegal immigration is Arizona, where the nation's toughest and potentially most far-reaching crackdown on undocumented workers and their employers is scheduled to take effect Jan. 1. The Arizona law, passed resoundingly by the state legislature after Congress failed to enact immigration reform last summer, penalizes companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants by suspending their business licenses for up to 10 days; ; on a second offense, the business license would be revoked -- what Gov. Janet Napolitano (D) has called a corporate "death penalty." Thus the Arizona law may become a test case for how much pain a state is willing to endure, and inflict, in the name of ridding itself of a population that contributes enormously to its economic growth and prosperity.

Illegal immigrants have flocked to Arizona for years to fill jobs that native-born people don't want. While the state's unemployment rate remains low, undocumented employees comprise an estimated 9 to 12 percent of the state's 3 million workers. Companies in agriculture, construction and service industries rely heavily on illegal immigrants, and any successful attempt to drive them out will have economic repercussions that may be severe.

In construction alone, Judith Gans of the University of Arizona has estimated that a 15 percent cut in the state's immigrant workforce would result in direct losses of about 56,000 jobs and some $6.6 billion in economic output. The direct loss to state tax revenue would be approximately $270 million. The study, and others like it, including in Texas, refute the arguments that illegal immigrants are an overall burden on state economies because of the education, health care and other services they require; in fact they contribute heavily to economic growth.

That explains why so many business owners were livid in June when the U.S. Senate killed legislation to provide an eventual path to citizenship for the 12 million illegal immigrants already living in America; to create a legal mechanism to satisfy the national economy's annual appetite for hundreds of thousands of immigrant workers; and to tighten enforcement of existing sanctions against employers who hire illegal workers. That political failure has spawned hundreds of state and local attempts to deal with illegal immigration, including Arizona's.

The Arizona law illustrates the self-defeating hazard of addressing one part of the problem -- enforcement -- without also recognizing the plain reality of America's need for immigrant labor. It was enacted and is taking effect in an atmosphere of extreme emotion, ugly diatribes in the blogosphere and occasional street scuffles -- the sort of environment that defeats rational discourse. It is likely to be enforced with gusto in and around Phoenix, the nation's sixth-largest city, by an ambitious state prosecutor who is urging citizens to blow the whistle on offending companies -- anonymously if they wish -- and by a county sheriff whose stock in trade is hounding, arresting and helping to deport immigrants whose behavior or appearance suggests they may be here illegally.

Although the authorities are paying lip service to their commitment to fair enforcement, they are in fact contributing to a situation tailor-made to enable racial profiling and false, defamatory or vengeful reports by those who might harbor a grudge against an employer. Already, in the weeks before the law is to take effect, there were reports of businesses considering moving out of state or reconsidering in-state expansion plans, as well as hundreds of illegal immigrants pulling their children out of school and seeking work elsewhere.

There is little clarity about the law itself, which is being challenged in court by major business associations, Hispanic groups and the American Civil Liberties Union. The statute was sloppily drafted, and Ms. Napolitano signed it at least in part because she feared an even more draconian ballot initiative by immigrant-bashers (who are trying to organize one anyway). While Ms. Napolitano believes the law applies only to workers hired after Jan. 1, Andrew Thomas, the Maricopa County (Phoenix) prosecutor whose purview includes most of the state's population and workforce, says it applies to any employee on a firm's payroll, regardless of hiring date.

Reasonable suspicions exist that many companies will continue hiring and paying illegal workers off the books to evade the law's sanctions, which may give rise to a sizable underground economy and encourage exploitation of vulnerable workers. The system of verification that employers will be required to use to check workers' status relies on a federal database whose error rate regarding non-native-born Americans is believed to be as high as 10 percent -- and for which Congress has appropriated no funds beyond next year. All in all, a recipe for chaos and confusion.

Arizona has undergone explosive population growth in recent decades, along with sharp demographic change. At least 14 percent of the state's 6 million people are foreign-born, more than twice the percentage in 1990. Much of that growth can be explained by illegal immigration; the 620,000 (mostly undocumented) noncitizens in the state in 2004 were almost four times the number there were in 1990. The shift has contributed to a rise in nativist and outright racist sentiment, as well as to legitimate concerns about the effect of so many illegal immigrants -- most of them from one poor country, Mexico -- on neighborhoods, crime rates and municipal budgets.

In responding with this law to the popular anger and anxiety about illegal immigration, Arizona may have been within its legal rights; the courts will decide that shortly. But the price the law will exact is likely to be severe -- to the state's economy, to thousands of immigrant families and, very likely, to the civil rights of legal Hispanic residents who will come under unwarranted suspicion. Those costs may cause Arizonans to question the prudence of their state lawmakers and highlight the folly of Washington's failure to come to grips with illegal immigration.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/25/AR2007122500877.html

map: http://www.thepepper.com/map_arizona2.gif

"I'm not prejudiced toward Mexicans. It's the illegal ones who are the problem,"

A man named Dennis Barnes attended a Huckabee rally in Marshalltown, Iowa. During an interview after the rally he said "I'm not prejudiced toward Mexicans. It's the illegal ones who are the problem"

Perhaps people in the U.S. are looking at things more concretely these days... or maybe it's always been that way. But if you think undocumented people "are the problem" - you need to go back to school and take another government class. I know I have broached this subject before, but as one of my mentors used to tell me -- "sometimes you have to say something over and over again."

Barnes was talking about Mexicans. So we'll be specific.

If you look at unauthorized immigration from Mexico as a puzzle, then it needs a number of pieces.

1. At least 80% of the people in Mexico live below poverty level. There is a small middle class that is getting smaller. There rich are doing very well - especially in Nuevo Leon - I saw more big, new SUV's in Monterrey than I do in Houston. The people who work as domestic servants, or minimum wage workers (which is less per day than one hour of work in the U.S.)
can't survive - they immigrate to the U.S. because if they don't, their families could literally starve to death. If you don't believe me, ask a few people who came undocumented, and they will tell you that entire families have to live on 20 Dollars per week.

2. If a family doesn't have enough food, most parents will do anything - that also means American parents. How can people say that unauthorized immigration to the U.S. is a crime when people cross the border so they can survive. What else could drive a person to risk his/her life crossing a desert, being shot at by a Minute Man, or being placed for months in Federal detention centers.

3. Mexico was poor to start with, but things have gotten much worse for individual farmers since NAFTA was passed. They don't make any money on their produce. In addition, many thousands are losing their farms - mortgaging their properties to pay the coyote. Those that are deported once they arrive lose everything... no chance to make a living or to pay the mortgage. They literally have nothing to return to.

4. The only way the U.S. can maintain it's standard of living is by having undocumented laborers who require much less per hour than your usual American. Corporations know that- so do our Presidential candidates - but they are playing dumb in hopes of getting elected. Everything is about supply and demand - the U.S. demands low wage workers so the people keep coming.

5. Globalization- Technology - makes the world much smaller. People can go from country to country so easily - it's expected now. Don't think the U.S. is the only country that believes it has an immigration problem.

6. Due to current immigration law, very very few people can immigrate legally. U.S. immigration laws are antiquated. They are more like laws for the 1950s. If you are not a famous soccer star, the offspring of a former Mexican president, or a computer whiz with 3 college degrees you cannot come here. If you marry an American citizen, you have a chance, but these days that is getting much more difficult. For those who think all of Mexico is coming because their relatives are sponsoring immigrants - that is totally not reality. It takes from 8-10 years to immigrate when sponsored by a close relative. Plus, there is no such thing as an "anchor baby" -- the child could not sponsor his/her parents until they are 18. That's a really long wait to provide any advantage.

7. Having cheap or free labor is part of American heritage. Remember slavery? Remember share-cropping? Undocumented labor is just the latest phase of our labor history.


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Race for '08: Latino influx the talk of Iowa

Issue reverberates as GOP candidates hunt for caucus support.

By Dave Montgomery - dmontgomery@mcclatchydc.com
Published 12:00 am PST Tuesday, December 25, 2007
Sacramento Bee

First in a two-part series.

PERRY, Iowa – In 1990, this tranquil prairie town in central Iowa had 47 Latinos. But after 15 years of steady migration from Mexico and Central America, Latinos account for more than a quarter of Perry's 8,000 residents, co-existing with the descendants of the white European immigrants who settled the farm belt community in the 19th century.

The demographic upheaval in Perry and other towns in Iowa, all hundreds of miles from the Mexican border, illustrates the extent of immigration into America's heartland.

Since 1990, the number of Latinos in Iowa has increased from 32,647, which was then 1.2 percent of the state's population, to 112,987, or 3.8 percent of the current population of 2.9 million. Some demographers expect the number to triple again in just over 20 years, increasing to 335,000 by 2030.

The trend has pushed illegal immigration into the forefront of presidential politics – at least among Republicans – as Iowa prepares for its first-in-the-nation caucuses on Jan. 3.

The topic reverberates through town hall meetings and Republican debates, with candidates scrambling to outdo one another in getting tough on illegal immigrants as they compete for fed-up voters who constitute a broad and vocal chunk of the GOP political base.

"The immigration issue, just like security, is right at the top of the list," said state Republican Party Chairman Reinhold "Ray" Hoffman, adding that Iowans are "very frustrated" with what they perceive as unchecked illegal immigration to their state. "I've never been at a function when someone didn't ask about it."

'Something has to be done'

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who has moved up in the polls, came to Iowa's immigration center on Thursday to appear at a rally in Marshalltown, the site of a highly publicized roundup of illegal immigrants at a Swift meatpacking plant just over a year ago.

Former Sen. Fred Thompson of Tennessee also crossed the state in a six-day bus tour that included stops in Marshalltown and other communities with surging immigrant populations.

"I'm not prejudiced toward Mexicans. It's the illegal ones who are the problem," said Dennis Barnes, 63, of Marshalltown, after attending the Huckabee rally.

Barnes said he worked for 19 years at the Swift plant but left in the 1980s as management began hiring Mexican immigrants at $3 an hour less than he was making.

"It's a big issue and something has to be done," said Robert Ames, a 58-year-old retiree who lives near Marshalltown. "There are too many illegals in here, and if we don't do something, there is going to be a bigger problem later."

'Salsa on the Prairie'

Perry's modern-day transformation, depicted in a documentary called "A Little Salsa on the Prairie," began less than two decades ago with a change of ownership of the local plant – the current owner is Tyson's Fresh Meats – and expanded as word-of-mouth and family connections brought more Latino immigrants.

Latinos settled in then-vacant homes in various neighborhoods, rather than in one area, blending into the community. Latinos make up 40 percent of the school enrollment, and many high school graduates have gone to college and returned. Latino-oriented services are enmeshed in the community.

Renaldo Morales, 50, originally from Nicaragua, moved to Perry from San Diego with his wife and three children in 1993. He's a part-time manager at Tienda Latina, a downtown store stocked with Spanish-language videos and CDs, Latin cuisine and stocking caps with the logos of Latin soccer teams. His 22-year-old daughter attends Drake University, and a son, 21, plans to go to college next year.

A more recent transplant, who identifies himself as José Sanchez, came to the United States from El Salvador three years ago and acknowledged that he doesn't have "papers." A sister-in-law picked him up in Houston and brought him to Perry, where he works as a janitor. His wife and two teenage children have since joined him.

Eddie Diaz, director of the Community Action Agency in Perry, said there undoubtedly are illegal immigrants in the community but the exact number is impossible to determine. But, legal or illegal, he said, they all share common goals: finding work, buying homes and pursuing "all the other issues in life."

Minuteman endorsement

With Huckabee moving to the front of the GOP pack, many Iowa voters are now closely scrutinizing his immigration positions.

As Arkansas governor, Huckabee embraced legislation to grant college scholarships to illegal immigrants but, as a presidential candidate, he has toughened his tone with a recently released nine-point plan. He told Marshalltown residents that he welcomed an endorsement by Jim Gilchrist, the controversial founder of the Minuteman Project, a self-described "citizens' vigilance operation" that patrols the border. Pro-immigration groups said Huckabee's plan and the Gilchrist endorsement demolish any perception that he's a moderate on immigration.

Nearly all GOP candidates have spoken out against "amnesty" – the buzzword for unconditional legalization – although they differ on details.

State and local leaders acknowledge that social acceptance of the cultural changes varies widely across the state.

"It's a very tough issue," said former Democratic Gov. Tom Vilsack, whose administration pursued an orderly flow of immigration to avoid an economic decline. "Some communities have embraced this. Some communities are probably having a difficult time with it."

http://www.sacbee.com/111/story/590643.html
previously posted on Immigration Prof Blog

photo: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/science/25diam.html?pagewanted=2

Death on the Border

It is said that the number of deaths is much high than what the PRI Camara de Diputados is reporting


_____

Murieron este año 562 mexicanos en la frontera: PRI
Ciro Pérez Silva
La Jornanda - UNAM
24 diciembre 2007

El PRI en la Cámara de Diputados informó ayer que durante 2007 ocurrieron 562 muertes de mexicanos que intentaron cruzar la frontera con Estados Unidos y que unos 560 mil paisanos emigraron este año a ese país en busca de empleo, destaca un documento de trabajo sobre migración elaborado por esta bancada legislativa.

“Es una cifra superior incluso respecto de alguno de los años de gobierno de Vicente Fox, y eso a consecuencia de la nula generación de empleos y la ausencia de una política migratoria de protección por parte de México”, aseguró Edmundo Ramírez Martínez, del grupo de trabajo en materia migratoria de la bancada tricolor en San Lázaro.

Destacó que al finalizar 2007 el saldo para los migrantes es negativo respecto de su intento por cruzar la frontera; además, se ha incrementado el número de mexicanos que buscan el sueño americano, principalmente mujeres, jóvenes e incluso niños.

“Unos 560 mil mexicanos salieron este año hacia Estados Unidos, la mayoría arriesgando su vida y cientos encontraron la muerte”, insistió Ramírez Martínez.

En el gobierno de Felipe Calderón es evidente que poco o nada se avanzado para revertir la sentencia a muerte de 54 mexicanos que se encuentran en Estados Unidos. “Es un tema inexistente en la agenda con el vecino país”, agrega el documento.

Ramírez Martínez, coordinador de dicho grupo de trabajo, señala que además de los ya sentenciados, existen otros 118 casos de mexicanos que están en la antesala de la muerte en Estados Unidos, es decir, que sus casos pueden derivar en la pena capital.



http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/12/24/index.php?section=politica&article=010n1pol

Give up my Rolex for a DREAMER!? Part II

OR

















The idea of giving small gifts, or no gifts has been on my mind for a few days. I had to walk into Bed, Bath, and Beyond* last week and could feel the desperation as the other shoppers pushed their carts around in this store that seems to have everything. The store was prepared for that desperation, the aisles were so narrow (not normal for them) - maybe they were trying to stuff as much as they could in front of the shoppers in order to sell more.

While the U.S. media is always talking about poor, uneducated, or undocumented Latinos, they mostly ignore those who are not in these categories. Yet, there are so many around that have finished college and/or made lots of money, drive a BMW or a Lexus and (of course) have a Rolex.

It happened at my house. My Dad was really poor as a kid, started working full time when he was 9. As he became a financially successful adult it was very important for him to have lots of luxury items. It's true he worked very hard for all that he had - but the need to have a material display of this wealth was the most important part of this equation.

I learned well from him. I had a Concord watch (that I can't find anymore) and for many years I drove a fancy car with big monthly payments and lived in what my cousins would call a very fancy neighborhood.

This is all said in the past tense, but it's not about some big religious conversion. It's that reality began to dawn on me, especially since I've been working on the DREAMER project.

Most Latinos who make it to the middle (or higher) class want these fancy things (well, probably most people do). A watch or a ring will cost an inordinate amount. Instead of a new Honda Civic, it's a Lexus, or a BMW, a Navigator or (God forbid) even a Mercedes.

Well I have a proposal for all of us that can buy ourselves those fancy things.

How about next Christmas, instead of buying your wife that diamond ring, get her a more modest gift and donate a few thousand dollars so that a DREAMER can go to college? A number of DREAMERS I know never got their financial aide this year. They were told the applications were incomplete, but weren't informed of this even when they had turned them in many months before the deadline - some people are guessing the applications were stalled on purpose. In many states, there is no financial aide for DREAMERS. In 42 states of the union there is no in-state tuition.

Better yet, if you really need a new car, avoid the flash, look for better gas mileage (you will appreciate this later). If you save $10,000-20,000 - think of how many DREAMERS could go to college on that money?

I know you are going to say, you don't have that kind of cash, you pay the car in payments. Well then start a savings account "in payments" - once you get a few thousand together, find the kid that wants to go to school, is a DREAMER, has good grades, and lots of potential. If you think you can't find one, ask a few high school counselors - eventually you should find one (like David Johnston at Lee High School in Houston) that know exactly where the money could go (Lee High School has had a number of valedictorians who were DREAMERS)

If you want to give it to a charity - the NYT recommends you check charitywatch.org to see if most of the donations go to actual services or scholarships.


Merry Christmas




*Disclosure: I admit, I went to Bed, Bath, and Beyond to buy a Christmas present that was over $20.00



Rolex image: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.limitedwatches.net/IMAGES/Romanandbezles/diamonddaytona1.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.limitedwatches.net/rolexdaytonapage.html&h=682&w=475&sz=56&hl=en&start=1&sig2=DEB6sxrVANIZeK2lJ5Hjmg&um=1&tbnid=z4Y-EEJln_EtAM:&tbnh=139&tbnw=97&ei=hEtxR8G7Kp7mhQPegLmCBw&prev=/images%3Fq%3DAUTHENTIC%2BROLEX%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26sa%3DN

DREAM Act rally: http://peoplesproductionhouse.org/sites/peoplesproductionhouse.org/files/images/dream_act_rally.JPG

Give up my Rolex for a DREAMER!? Part I

Sinter Klaas













We exchanged gifts last night (Christmas Eve) at my parent's house. When my Mom and Dad were younger and more financially solvent, the gifts were big, flashy, and expensive. Now that they are older, it's little things that are exchanged; socks, candy, DVD movies. We all were just as happy this time - with the small gifts - as we were when the gifts all cost over $200 or more a piece.

On Sunday, the 23rd my daughter told me she needed to buy three more gifts. She wanted me to go with her so she "wouldn't suffer alone." We went to Target. The whole thing was strategically planned. Before we left the car we repeated to ourselves the things we had to buy: 2 movies, a scarf, and a video game. We entered the store, rushed past the people to the movies. In less than 10 minutes we had everything. Then we approached the long lines at the check out. Thank goodness Target was prepared... they were organized too, lots of registers open. We each stood in separate lines and the one who got to the register first would pay (with my money either way). We made it out of the store in less than 20 minutes. We were shocked and very happy.

The new way of gift giving at my parent's, and my last minute venture into the capitalist world two days before Christmas made me think about the whole idea of Christmas. My daughter says she no longer likes Christmas. To her it's all about buying things. I think she has a point.

The NYT has an article today about the old Saint Nicholas. During St. Nicholas' time people give gifts to those who really needed it. For example, in the late Byzantine era, "surplus" female children were often sold into slavery... It was a tradition for those with money to provide money to the families to prevent the daughter from being sold. Christmas was not about giving gifts to everyone around you. The author says he is not so happy with out modern day Santa Claus.

-----

December 25, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
St. Nick in the Big City
New York Times

By JOHN ANTHONY McGUCKIN

ST. NICHOLAS was a super-saint with an immense cult for most of the Christian past. There may be more icons surviving for Nicholas alone than for all the other saints of Christendom put together. So what happened to him? Where’s the fourth-century Anatolian bishop who presided over gift-giving to poor children? And how did we get the new icon of mass consumerism in his place?

Well, it’s a New York story.

In all innocence, the morphing began with the Dutch Christians of New Amsterdam, who remembered St. Nicholas from the old country and called him Sinte Klaas. They had kept alive an old memory — that a kindly old cleric brought little gifts to the poor in the weeks leading up to the Feast of the Nativity. While the gifts were important, they were never meant to overshadow the message of Jesus’s humble birth.

But today’s chubby Santa is not about giving to the poor. He has had his saintly garb stripped away. The filling out of the figure, the loss of the vestments, and his transformation into a beery fellow smoking a pipe combined to form a caricature of Dutch peasant culture. Eventually this Magic Santa (a suitable patron saint if there ever was one for the burgeoning capitalist machinery of the city) was of course popularized by the Manhattanite Clement Clarke Moore published in “A Visit From St. Nicholas,” in The Troy (New York) Sentinel on Dec. 23, 1823.

The newly created deity Santa soon attracted a school of iconographers: notable among them were Thomas Nast, whose 1863 image of a red-suited giant in Harper’s Weekly set the tone, and Haddon Sundblom, who drew up the archetypal image we know today on behalf of the Coca-Cola Company in the 1930s. This Santa was regularly accompanied by the flying reindeer: godlike in his majesty and presiding over the winter darkness like Odin the sky god returned.

The new Santa also acquired a host of Nordic elves to replace the small dark-skinned boy called Black Peter, who in Christian tradition so loved St. Nicholas that he traveled with him everywhere. But, some might say, wasn’t it better to lose this racially stereotyped relic? Actually, no, considering the real St. Nicholas first came into contact with Peter when he raided the slave market in his hometown and railed against the trade. The story tells us that when the slavers refused to take him seriously, he used the church’s funds to redeem Peter and gave the boy a job in the church.

And what of the throwing of the bags of gold down the chimney, where they landed in the stockings and little shoes that had been hung up to dry by the fireplace? Charming though it sounds, it reflected the deplorable custom, still prevalent in late Roman society when the Byzantine church was struggling to establish the supremacy of its values, of selling surplus daughters into bondage. This was a euphemism for sexual slavery — a trade that still blights our world.

As the tale goes, Nicholas had heard that a father in the town planned to sell his three daughters because his debts had been called in by pitiless creditors. As he did for Black Peter, Nicholas raided his church funds to secure the redemption of the girls. He dropped the gold down the chimney to save face for the impoverished father.

This tale was the origin of a whole subsequent series of efforts among the Christians who celebrated Nicholas to make some effort to redeem the lot of the poor — especially children, who always were, and still are, the world’s front-line victims. Such was the origin of Christmas almsgiving: gifts for the poor, not just gifts for our friends.

I like St. Nicholas. You can keep chubby Santa.

John Anthony McGuckin is a professor of religious history at Union Theological Seminary and Columbia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/25/opinion/25mcguckin.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin
http://www.livius.org/a/1/netherlands/gevelsteen_sinterklaas.jpg

McCain Surging - Tough Immigration Stand Not Helping Giuliani & Romney

Senator John McCain


Romney is slipping in New Hampshire - Giuliani goes to the hospital. Some would say that they are not conservative enough for their fellow Republicans. Could it be their Nazi-like stance on immigration? Who would want a President that is so hateful (haven't we already dealt with enough?).

There are other reasons they are having campaign problems. McCain is surging in the polls again... it is said he lost voters because of his immigration stance. But he is back on - maybe he is showing more ethics and compassion than the others. He remains a politician and has jumped around on the issues - but at least he is not a hate-monger and he publicly states he is against torture.


-----

He comes out swinging in the Granite State as a poll finds McCain on his heels. Huckabee is making gains in Iowa.
By Maeve Reston, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer
December 24, 2007

PETERBOROUGH, N.H. -- As recently as last week, Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney seemed to be holding a secure lead in New Hampshire, even as he was losing ground to former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee in Iowa.

But a Boston Globe survey released Sunday showed that the former Massachusetts governor's numbers were slipping in the Northeast as well: Romney, the poll said, now holds a 3 percentage point lead over Arizona Sen. John McCain in New Hampshire, down from 15 points in November.


The threat to Romney's early state strategy -- which aimed for a one-two win in Iowa on Jan. 3 and in New Hampshire on Jan. 8 -- appears serious enough that Romney has started criticizing McCain by name at a time when most campaigns are trying to stay positive.

At a Peterborough town hall Sunday, Romney tried to differentiate himself by telling voters that he wanted to make President Bush's tax cuts permanent.

"Right now, Sen. McCain and I are both battling for your support and your vote. He's a good man, but we have differing views on this," Romney said. "He voted against the Bush tax cuts, he voted against eliminating the [inheritance] tax forever. . . . I believe in pushing taxes down."

In 2001 and 2003, McCain did reject the Bush tax cuts as too tilted toward wealthy Americans but now says he would make them permanent.

McCain's senior advisor, Mark Salter, fired back that Romney's remarks stemmed from his angst over McCain's gains.

"Welcome to Mitt Romney's bizzaro world, where everyone is guilty of his sins," Salter said in a statement. ". . . Give it a rest. It's Christmas."

At an "Ask Mitt Anything" forum Friday night in Rochester, the candidate was questioned about whether his position on the Bush tax cuts had shifted. In 2003, the Boston Globe reported that he had told Massachusetts lawmakers he would neither support or oppose the Bush tax cuts.

Romney told the audience that as governor, he did not weigh in "on federal issues."

"Sen. McCain is different. He voted against tax cuts twice. I was the governor of a state, not a senator," Romney said.

McCain, who won the 2000 New Hampshire primary, was heavily favored here going into the 2008 presidential contest. But many conservatives were angered by his moderate position on immigration, and some liberal supporters were troubled by his close association with the Bush administration's Iraq war strategy.

Romney's well-organized campaign took advantage early on, going on the air with his first television ads in February.

But McCain's campaign has gained momentum of late with several newspaper endorsements, including the conservative Union Leader newspaper in Manchester, the Portsmouth Herald on the state's coast, and the Salmon Press, which publishes 11 smaller newspapers throughout the state. He also won the backing of Romney's hometown newspaper, the Boston Globe, and the Des Moines Register in Iowa.

Romney took an unusual hit Sunday in New Hampshire from the Concord Monitor newspaper, which ran an anti-endorsement editorial calling Romney a "phony" who "most surely must be stopped."

"If you followed only his tenure as governor of Massachusetts, you might imagine Romney as a pragmatic moderate with liberal positions on numerous social issues and an ability to work well with Democrats," the Monitor's editorial said. "If you followed only his campaign for president, you'd swear he was a red-meat conservative, pandering to the religious right, whatever the cost. Pay attention to both, and you're left to wonder if there's anything at all at his core."

The Romney campaign dismissed the editorial board as "a liberal one on many issues" that disagreed with a number of Romney's conservative views.

On Sunday, Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said that the "tightening at the top" was natural as election day neared and that the campaign always had predicted New Hampshire and Iowa would be "competitive."

A number of voters who turned out Sunday to see Romney said they were still undecided. Among them was Stephen Gagnon, 49, an auto body worker who decided to stop by Foodee's pizza parlor in Milford to shake Romney's hand.

Gagnon said he was deciding between Romney and former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, who "performed well under . . . the ultimate pressure" of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. But, he said, Romney may do a better job turning around the economy.

"He gets stuff done," Gagnon said. "He turned [Massachusetts] around. The state was broke. The state is traditionally known for having problems. . . . [He] cleaned it up."

After watching Romney in Peterborough, optometrist Marilynn Ezell said she was drifting back to McCain, whom she supported in 2000. She had crossed him off her list because "he went a little too far" on the immigration issue. "I've been listening to him again, because I hope maybe he's listened to the American public and understood that we don't want amnesty" for illegal immigrants, Ezell said.

"I couldn't respect anybody more than McCain."

maeve.reston@latimes.com


Times staff writer Scott Kraft in Rochester, N.H., contributed to this report.

ttp://www.latimes.com/la-na-romney24dec24,0,7262546.story?coll=la-home-center
photo: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/theblog/archive/JohnMcCain.jpg

ICE Incompetence: An Un-Constitutional Detention in New York

Holding Pattern
Another kind of 9/11 victim, Narinder Singh spent more than five years locked up for no crime at all
by Chris Thompson
The Village Voice
December 18th, 2007 6:58 PM


Along Central Avenue, in one of the more pleasant stretches of Jersey City, a small convenience store lies a block from the neighborhood cop shop. The shelves are mostly bare, with just a few jars of cold cream and nail polish, but most people only come in for smokes and lottery tickets anyway. As the elderly black and Asian customers scratch away at the cards beneath the fluorescent tubes, they shove their cash at a pleasant Indian man pushing 40, with a baseball cap, a beard, and a constant, reflexive smile on his face. None of them know that he just got out of prison.

Well, not prison, exactly. Although he was never accused of committing a crime, Narinder Singh spent years locked up in an immigration detention cell, courtesy of the federal government. He was beaten by a fellow inmate, spent time in the hole, and lived in a pod with 40 other men, deprived of sunlight, his own reading material, or much more than an hour of recreation time a day. Serving no sentence, Singh never knew when or if he would get out. Almost every day of his confinement, he called his wife and friends in Astoria and asked how this could happen to him. Suddenly, in August, the federal government let him go, and he was back on the streets, just like that. But the inevitable results of being locked up for so long continue to afflict him.

"I got my own business before," Singh says in his broken, Punjabi-inflected English. "And I have good life. And I got a good apartment there. We pay like thirteen-hundred dollar for that apartment—one bedroom. And after [detention], my wife, she not able to pay that much rent by herself. And then she move somewhere. And there is—I spend a lot of money to make up my apartment." Singh tallies up the damage: the temporary driver's license and bank account he lost; the credit-card debt; the legal bills; the furniture his wife had to sell. "Everything is gone. We lose everything. It's like we start all over again."

In the spring of 2002, in the fervid months after the 9/11 attacks, Singh flew to India, where his mother had just died. When he returned, an immigration official at JFK suspected that his marriage was a sham to gain permanent-resident status, and he began proceedings to deport Singh. Because Singh had been questioned in an airport—technically crossing a border—immigration law allowed for Singh to be detained indefinitely as his case made its way through the system. As immigration officials lost his paperwork for months, or sent his case to other jurisdictions, Singh was transferred from one facility to the next, waiting for what was always supposed to be a few more months until everything would work out. Without having committed a single crime, Singh ultimately spent five and a half years in what amounts to federal prison—one of the longest detention spells in recent history.

Singh's story emerges at a time when the nation's immigrant-detention system has been rocked with burgeoning scandals. As the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency (ICE) struggles to process 275,000 annual detainees, critics and government inspectors have deplored the unsanitary conditions and the lack of due process at detention facilities around the country. Twelve months ago, the Department of Homeland Security's Office of Inspector General issued a report that detailed the inhumane conditions, substandard medical care, vermin, and undercooked food found at five randomly sampled detention centers, including two in New Jersey. This summer, ICE officials acknowledged that 64 immigrants had died in detention since 2004, many for lack of adequate health care. Last month, an ICE agent was arrested on charges that he raped a Jamaican detainee. And in a particularly sensational case, ICE officials recently dragged a Honduran immigrant from her infant, who was still breast-feeding. The incident prompted agency head Julie Myers to order the woman's release and to issue new guidelines prohibiting the detention of new mothers if they don't represent a flight risk.

In the face of such stories, the Senate amended the 2007 Comprehensive Immigration Bill to add an Office of Detention Oversight to the Department of Homeland Security. But since the bill died in Congress this summer, nothing was ultimately accomplished. And according to Aarti Shahani, the co-founder of the New York immigrant-advocacy group Families for Freedom, the detention system is not just an overcrowded, unsanitary mess. Because detention is a civil procedure, she says, detainees have no right to legal counsel and often can't contact lawyers or their families to help them. The very nature of the system is designed to put them at a disadvantage.

"Even though it's purely civil, there's a punitive aspect to that," Shahani says. "Detention helps the government secure a win, because it ties the hand of the immigrant. You're talking about a proceeding that could result in lifetime exile, but you have no public defender. When you're locked up, it's not like you just stay in one facility that's close to home—you're tossed around the country. And you don't get to take your records with you. Figure that being an immigrant, English is your second or third language, and the stakes are very high."

With an estimated 630,000 illegal immigrants who have ignored deportation orders and are at large today, few would disagree that some sort of detention system must be in place. But thanks to a disorganized, overcrowded bureaucracy, no one knows how many detainees are improperly or arbitrarily imprisoned for years. With no effective audit of the detainee population available, there's no way to know just how many immigrants have stories like Narinder Singh's.

Singh flew to New York in 1997 to visit a few uncles, but took one look at the city and decided to take a stab at living here. Since he already had a pharmacy degree from a university in India, he enrolled at St. John's University to work towards the equivalent degree in the United States; meanwhile, he worked the counter at his uncle's deli in Queens. In 1998, Singh met and married an American citizen, but divorced after a few years. Meanwhile, he found to his dismay that college costs were high and had to drop out.

In 1999, while working at the deli, Singh met Laura Pickering, who worked at a nearby bar. "She used to come here in my store and play some Lotto and drink some beer," Singh recalls. "Talk about this and that stuff. She used to come my to apartment, and we stay two, three years, then we got married."

Andrew Thomson, a maintenance worker on Roosevelt Island, lives around the corner from Singh's old deli; his father Eddie, who died recently from a heart attack, was best man at Singh's wedding. "He met her working at the store, you know?" says Thomson, who attended the reception. "She was just a neighborhood lady; they became good friends, and they took it from there. . . . It happens, you know? People fall in love. Like I said, you don't even have to be the same color—you can be the same sex nowadays and it's all right. But he was in love with that girl, I know that."

In 2000, Singh applied for permanent-resident status based on his marriage, but the process was slow, and years went by without any progress. Meanwhile, he gave up on the deli and started driving a cab around town. He met his friend Gujral Grewal while on the job, and the two of them decided to buy a business together. "We went to Alabama to look for businesses; we looked for businesses all over. I traveled all over with him," Grewal says. "We just wanted to run a small business. None of us could buy it by ourselves. So we just pooled it together to start it that way. It's what immigrants do. We were looking at gas stations or grocery stores."

But then Singh's mother died, and he had to lay her to rest in Punjab. His friends warned him that in the wake of 9/11, it might not be the best time to be a South Asian walking around in airports. "We told him not to go during that time, because of what was happening with the government," Thomson says. "But if you were told your mother was dying and this was the last time you could see her, what would you do?" Singh got permission from the federal government to leave the country, and off he went.

On April 15, 2002, Singh flew back to JFK, where his wife was waiting to pick him up. But an immigration official began to ask Singh questions about his marriage. Hours went by, and Laura demanded to know why her husband was being detained. Over a speakerphone, he heard officials threaten her with prison for participating in a sham marriage.

ICE officials refused to comment on Singh's case because there is still an outstanding deportation case against him. "It's ICE policy not to comment on any aspect of file information for a case that is before a court," says spokesman Mark Thorn. But according to immigration-court documents, the immigration officer found numerous discrepancies between Singh's account of the marriage and his wife's. In addition, the officer called Singh's home number and reached someone named "Victor," who claimed he lived there. According to Singh, that was actually his friend Nirvail Singh, who was visiting the couple but didn't speak English very well and misunderstood the officer's questions. The officer concluded that the marriage was a fraud and ordered Singh deported. Singh says that he then spent 48 hours chained to a chair.

"I cannot use the bathroom," he says. "The next day, the officer come. . . . He say, 'OK, what you decide? You have to go back.' I say I not decide to go back. I have to see wife. I have to see my lawyer. He say OK. And he not do anything for next day, next shift. . . . I can't sleep, I can't eat anything. Forty-eight hours after that, they put me in detention center."

Singh was in lockup at Brooklyn's Wackenhut detention facility for months, waiting for his case to come before an immigration judge. Meanwhile, immigration officials conducted a more thorough Stokes interview (named, like the Miranda warning, after the case that created it, Stokes v. INS) of Singh and his wife, to determine whether their marriage was legitimate. During the appeal on October 9, the immigration judge reviewed the interview and ruled that the marriage was initially valid—however, he added, he found that the marriage was no longer viable. Since Singh's official permission to leave the country and return was based on his marriage to an American citizen, and since that marriage was now fraudulent, he had lost the right to re-enter to the country and therefore would have to be deported.

According to Singh's attorney, Sandro Paterno, his wife didn't show up for the hearing, and that was probably what moved the judge to rule against him. But Paterno says that Laura Singh was simply too afraid to attend. "After being threatened at the airport, after going through the Stokes interview, and being accused of being a liar and threatened with five years in jail. . . she didn't go to the hearing," Paterno says. Today, Laura Singh is unhappy that her husband is talking to the media and declined to comment in detail. "We've been trying to stay low, but whatever," she says. "It's a lot of work, trying to get our life back together."

Despite failing to attend the hearing, Laura worked with Singh's lawyers to appeal the decision, while Singh cooled his heels in detention for five more years.


Narinder Singh: “I had not committed any crime. . . . I have to be detained more than five years—for nothing, no reason!”
photo: Filip Kwiatkowski At least Singh had a lawyer. According to David Leopold, the national vice president of the American Immigrant Lawyers Association, countless detainees who don't have legal representation can vanish into the prison network, especially if they're transferred from New York down to county jails in the South, which are increasingly being rented out as detention centers. "People can get lost in the system, quite literally like a file," he says. "It's quite scary for somebody who doesn't have somebody on the outside like family or an attorney."

According to Judy Rabinovitz, who runs the ACLU's Immigrant Rights Project, everything changed after 1996, when the Clinton administration and a Republican Congress passed new immigration laws. "There was a whole push toward mandatory detention, so the '96 laws are much more restrictive. And since then, it's been making sure more people are locked up—and post-9/11, it's even more. . . . Right now, there are about 30,000 detention beds. In 1992, there were 6,000 detention beds."

The detention system has now become so unwieldy, Leopold says, that the case backlog has slowed the adjudication and appeals process to a glacial pace. And because detention is a civil proceeding, certain constitutional rights are not guaranteed—such as the right to a speedy trial. ICE spokeswoman Ernestine Fobbs did not return phone calls seeking comment on this issue.

Narinder Singh experienced this administrative chaos firsthand. Immediately after the immigration judge ordered his deportation, Singh's lawyer and his wife filed an appeal. Immigration officials didn't respond with an opposition brief until March 2003, more than four months later. But more than a year passed before it became obvious that Singh's appeal paperwork had simply been lost by the government, and the mistake cost him 18 months of his life.

During that time, in 2004, Singh was moved to a new detention center in Elizabeth, New Jersey, and a cell with about 40 other detainees from every corner of the world. He had cell mates from Nigeria, Cambodia, and Uzbekistan. Few of them spoke adequate English, so they had to communicate in gestures.

"It's nothing to do but sit on my back all day," he recalls. "All the time, I just pray—that's all. Most of the time, I have nothing to do over there." And the shackles and security, Singh added, left him feeling so degraded that he wouldn't let his wife or friends visit him. "If anybody try to visit me, I start crying. I say, 'I don't want to let them visit me—not anybody.' It's better I call everyday, I tell my wife. I say I can call her."

The only thing he and his father could do, Singh's friend Thomson says, was listen sympathetically. "We thought he was gonna get out right away," he says. "Like an error in the system, like a glitch. But that glitch turned into years and years. All we could do was provide an ear for him and help him stay strong. Because he was calling all the time, telling my dad, 'Eddie, I don't know what to do.' "

After years of appeals and deportation proceedings, federal officials suddenly decided to release Singh this summer. Nothing about his status had changed, but Singh's lawyer believes that a federal judge had made inquiries about why his detention had lasted so long.

And just like that, Singh was free. Paterno picked him up outside the Elizabeth detention facility and drove him back to Astoria, where his wife and friends were waiting. At a welcome-home party in a backyard in Queens, Andrew Thomson saw Singh for the first time since 2002. "At first, he didn't look the same, so nobody recognized him," Thomson recalls. Then it hit him: Singh had lost about 50 pounds. "He got caught up in that 9/11 chaos. I just don't like the way the government handled that situation. They ruined his whole life. He's not the same now."

Singh has moved back in with his wife, in a studio apartment in the same Astoria neighborhood. Four months after his release, his experience still galls him; it will probably gnaw at him forever. "Yeah, I'm very angry," he says. "Because I had no reason to be detained. I had not committed any crime. . . . There is nothing wrong with me. I have to be detained for more than five years—for nothing, for no reason!" But he says he's not going anywhere. "My wife is here," he says. "I have to stay. What can I do in [India] now? I have nothing there."

Meanwhile, Singh's deportation and permanent-resident cases continue to grind on at a glacial pace. Last month, Singh received notice from the Board of Immigration Appeals that someone had misplaced his deportation file. They'll try to find it, the letter said, but they might just have to start the entire deportation proceeding—the Stokes interview, the examination of the family's financial records—all over again.

Almost six years later, Narinder Singh's nightmare may be about to return.

http://www.villagevoice.com/generic/show_print.php?id=78685&page=&issue=0751&printcde=MzU5NDA4ODI3NQ==&refpage=L2FkbWluL2VkaXQvZWRpdC5waHA/JmNhc2U9dXBkYXRlJnNlY3Rpb249JmlkPTc4Njg1Jmlzc3VlPTA3NTEmbXNnPQ==

previously posted on Immigration Prof Blog

Beware in Scottsdale Arizona

Immigration Prof Blog Posted this information yesterday:

Scottsdale police logging immigration status
Carol Sowers
The Arizona Republic
Dec. 23, 2007 12:00 AM



With pressure mounting across the nation to crack down on illegal immigration, the Scottsdale Police Department is seeking the citizenship of every arrested suspect and holding undocumented immigrants for federal immigration officials.

Sgt. Mark Clark, a Scottsdale police spokesman, said officers are not acting as immigration officials.

But under a new policy, officers are documenting calls they make to federal Immigration and Custom Enforcement agents about suspects and logging details about their immigration status.
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"If we arrest someone and then find that we called ICE and they put a hold on them, then we know they have been deported and are back again," Clark said.

Scottsdale police didn't have that crucial information in May 2006 when they unknowingly released a 22-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant on a minor charge.

Sixteen months later, in September, Erik Jovani Martinez, shot and killed Phoenix Officer Nick Erfle. Police later killed Martinez after he stole a car and took a hostage.

Scottsdale's unknowing release in May 2006 of an illegal immigrant turned cop killer led to far-reaching policy changes.

"That caused us to look at what were asking suspects," Clark said.

Since Oct. 15, Scottsdale police are asking every arrested suspect about their citizenship and are logging calls to federal immigration officials to create a data base of possible illegal immigrants who may turn up again in Scottsdale.

In May 2006, Scottsdale police picked up Martinez for reportedly assaulting his girlfriend. But they released him on the misdemeanor charge, not knowing that he had twice been deported.

No record of status check

After the September officer killing, Scottsdale officers realized they had no record of whom they spoke to at the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in Phoenix, where they previously had inquired about Martinez's immigration status.

Councilman Jim Lane, who contacted police after Martinez killed Erfle, said he believed there was "a strong feeling among police to avoid the (immigration) issue."

But now, Lane said, "I think we have facilitated some change in response to an issue, as tragic as it was."

Mayor Mary Manross also supports the change, saying that because every suspect is questioned about citizenship, there is no whiff of racial profiling.

"I would not tolerate that," Manross said. "I think the chief has struck the right balance to do what we want to achieve."

Clark said at the time officers released Martinez in May 2006, they had no reason to suspect Martinez was an illegal immigrant, even though he wrote on his arrest sheet that he came from Mexico.

Past checks not routine

Martinez had been in the U.S. since he was 18 months old and spoke unaccented English. Clark said Scottsdale officers didn't routinely call ICE because the federal agents were shorthanded and could not respond.

Eduardo Preciado, an assistant ICE field officer in Phoenix, acknowledged that the agency was short-staffed until about a year ago when it added agents to man phones and to assist local-law enforcement agencies.

"Now we respond to every call," he said.

Clark said ICE agents come as often as Scottsdale police need them to pick up suspected illegal immigrants held temporarily in the Scottsdale jail.

3 are linked to break-ins

Last week, ICE agents picked up three suspects. They were arrested Monday, by Scottsdale police, who linked them to break-ins in Phoenix and developed information that they may be in the U.S. illegally.

"They come whenever we call them," Clark said of ICE agents.

That pleased Scottsdale Councilman Bob Littlefield, who urged beefed-up immigration enforcement by police during a speech at a recent Republican Party forum.

When he later learned that Scottsdale is holding suspected illegal immigrants for federal authorities, Littlefield said, "I can support that."

http://www.azcentral.com/arizonarepublic/local/articles/1223immigration1223.html

U.S. deports 273,289 Immigrants in 2007

La Patria - the rejecting mother

In Spanish, the word for a nation is Patria. To me it seems like a feminine word. La Patria is a mother, one's home country. Sort of like the woman represented in the Statue of Liberty. She is strong, holding a lamp, providing light for her children, those immigrants that she is (was) taking in.

America as a mother has decided to reject some of her new children. She says that it's because there are already too many in the house. But she may have a different motivation. It's like she had genetic testing on the child before birth... and these children aren't up to par... so they are ejected. They may be too dark, too poor, too uncouth. They just don't fit the image she has for her family.

She has decided to eliminate those who have been with her for years. She forgets that they have developed relationships and attachments - that such a rejection creates trauma for everyone.

Mother Patria is creating a generation of motherless children. How many of the 273,289 are mothers who left American born children behind?

-----

Divided by Deportation
Unexpected Orders to Return to Countries Leave Families in Anguish During Holidays
By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 24, 2007; B01

It was 5 a.m. when immigration agents knocked on the door of the Diaz family's neatly kept house in Baltimore County, with the twin plaid couches and the Lord's Supper woodcut over the kitchen table. Edwin, 13, and Cynthia, 8, woke up just in time to see their mother put into a van and driven away. The moment several months ago changed almost everything about their quiet, close-knit life.

"Since that day, nothing has been the same," said Miguel Diaz, 42, a construction worker and labor union representative from El Salvador. "I know my wife made a mistake all those years ago, but we have worked hard, lived decently and never caused any trouble. Shouldn't the punishment fit the crime? Her place is here with us, with her children. What kind of society is this that would suddenly take her away?"

Edwin, listening somberly on the sofa, said it was especially hard having his mother gone at Christmastime. She was not here last week to hear him sing "Jingle Bells" in the school chorus or to arrange her ceramic manger tableau of animals and wise men. "She always did it a certain way," he said. "In the end, we decided not to put it up."

Fidelia Diaz is one of thousands of illegal immigrants and longtime residents who have been deported this year -- cornered by complicated pasts that caught up with them long after they thought the overburdened immigration system had conveniently forgotten or magically forgiven them.

Many, like the 38-year-old Salvadoran woman, crossed the border illegally when they were young, single and eager to find a better life. Others came as tourists and overstayed their visas, keeping a low profile or moving frequently to avoid detection. Some were snagged in raids on factories or farms; others were tracked down by "fugitive operations teams" armed with decades-old deportation orders.

Still others committed immigration offenses, such as marriage fraud or traveling abroad without permission, that were suddenly rediscovered and disqualified them when they attempted to apply for legal status years later with help from lawyers who were not fully aware of their pasts.

According to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, 273,289 foreign-born residents have been sent back to their native countries for immigration violations in the past year.

Many had been in the United States only a few weeks, but countless others had put down roots, taken out mortgages and raised families by the time the law-- and the recently beefed-up immigration enforcement system-- came back to haunt them.

"I know this is a politically sensitive issue, an emotional issue. But we have to enforce the law, and the law is very clear," said Michael Keegan, an ICE spokesman. "It states simply that if an individual is out of status, having a U.S.-born child does not qualify the parent to gain legal status. Even if they have relatives who are U.S. citizens, the law doesn't bleed over to give them the same rights."

Immigration judges have limited discretion to consider family circumstances and homeland conditions, but if a deportation order has been issued-- no matter how long ago-- and the illegal immigrant has failed to appear for the hearing, that person is considered to have already had a "day in court" and is not eligible for special consideration.

In some cases, an immigrant's past catches up with him at an especially difficult moment. Samir Saleh, an Israeli hairdresser, came to the United States in the 1990s as a tourist and married a young American woman in what was later ruled a case of immigration fraud. He appealed the ruling but eventually divorced, remarried and settled in Cleveland.

Last April, Saleh was deported to Israel for immigration fraud, just as his second wife learned she had terminal cancer. His attorney, Philip Eichorn, said he filed for a temporary visa on humanitarian grounds so they could be together for the holidays, but it was denied last week. His wife, now bald from chemotherapy, made a decision.

"She told me, 'I am done with this country. I have a little time left, and I want to spend it with him,' " Eichorn said in a telephone interview Saturday. "They were really in love. You couldn't stage the joy on her face in their wedding photos. She left for Israel yesterday."

For illegal immigrants who commit serious crimes, deportation is both legally automatic and more efficiently enforced than in the past. Immigration officials say they are working with every federal prison and many state and local prisons to ensure such inmates are deported after serving their sentences. In 2007, about 89,000 such people were deported, Keegan said.

Sometimes, however, immigration laws end up punishing people who appear to have led exemplary lives. The case of Esperanza Ramirez, 62, who was deported to Mexico in October, has stunned the network of relatives and friends in San Diego to whom she was a quiet but indomitable role model.

Ramirez, who crossed the Mexican border illegally in 1979, spent the next 27 years working as a hotel maid, avocado packer and office cleaner to put seven children through school. They earned degrees, found good jobs, got married and produced 12 grandchildren.

Along the way, her daughter Norma Chavez said in a telephone interview, the family made attempts to obtain legal immigration status for her. First they obtained a temporary work permit, which was extended repeatedly. Then they applied for legal residency three times, gathering support letters and waiting for hearings. In September, Ramirez was told to report to the U.S. consulate in Ju¿rez, Mexico, for an interview.

"I guess it should have raised a red flag, but we all thought she was going there to pick up her green card," Ch¿vez recounted. "Instead, the consulate told her the application had been denied and that she was barred from returning" to the United States for 10 years. "Just like that, she was gone," she said.

Now Ramirez is living alone in the village the rest of her family left years ago. The children call her often, and she tells them she is doing fine, but Chavez said she was sounding "a little sadder" as the holidays approached. "We always have tamales at Christmas, but she's the only one who knows how to make them," Chavez said. "Now we are trying to figure out how to do it ourselves."

Jeanne Butterfield, executive director of the American Immigration Lawyers Association, said she has seen many cases of unjust and destructive deportations. She said that although immigration enforcement is "an important priority, our laws are so broken that enforcement ends up targeting the wrong people. Families are being ripped apart, and people are being deported for decades-old conduct that they have since rectified."

For immigrant families with young U.S.-born children, the deportation of a spouse or breadwinner presents especially wrenching difficulties. Miguel Diaz said that his children miss their mother terribly but that there is no way he would send them home to be with her. In Baltimore, they are immersed in science and math, church and sports. In El Salvador, they would be surrounded by poverty, crime and gangs.

"It is no place to raise a family, with so much insecurity. Even without her, they are better off here," said Diaz, who plans to apply for U.S. citizenship so he can sponsor his wife for legal residency, which could take 10 years. "This is very hard, and very unfair, but we will get through it," he vowed. "We are a strong family, and this will make us more united."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/23/AR2007122302399.html
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~CAP/LIBERTY/wetbacks.gif

Blogging, Boundaries, and Immigration

A few days ago, in Salon.com, Andrew Leonard published an interesting piece on blogging and immigration. The analogies are so interesting, I couldn't resist. He is noting how many people (including the very important George Borjas) think the competition from blogging is destroying journalism... that bloggers are a sorry bunch who basically just express biased opinions - and can't even write well. - All this because the Net has no boundaries.

This is part of what Leonard has to say:

"To think that one can turn back the tide of competition unleashed by the Net is a lot like thinking that in a globalized world one can ameliorate the wage impact of illegal immigration by building a border fence or by passing laws imposing strict sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants."

Boundaries are a big deal to many people. Remember what happens at international borders (esp between the U.S. and Mexico) - In college departments, the boundaries between disciplines are clear and contentious. Being inter-disciplinary is sometimes considered a dangerous position - because no one knows who or what you really are.

We as human beings have an intense need to label and classify things. Unfortunately (or fortunately) the world's move towards globalization has left many of us confused. As in the case of the DREAMERS, talking about an issue regarding boundaries - who are DREAMERS? They were born on one side of the boundary, but their lives are incorporated on the other side and they have no specific category they can display - Obviously the U.S. Senate does not like that - (if you can't identify, don't let them in).

Well, to lessen the ambiguity of this blog... I am not a DREAMER - but my father would have been if the term DREAMER was used in the 1930s. I write the blog for several reasons - 1) I like to write and don't like the hassle of finding "the right thing to say" so that newspapers will publish my op-ed pieces. 2) my research experience has allowed me lots of information many people don't have access too - so I'm performing (I guess) a public service 3) As I've gotten to know DREAMERS these past couple of years I can't help but want to find a way to help out. As Leonard says, bloggers don't need a lot of money, they just need a computer and time... That I have, due to the nature of my career. The time issue works out perfectly. I'm researching a book on DREAMERS and its like I'm writing for my project when I publish a post.

A last word on blogging and objectivity. Some commentators believe that bloggers are more biased than "professional journalists." After watching CNN's lead newsman Lou Dobbs - no one can tell me that paid journalists are more objective. Don't say that Dobbs is an isolated example... no matter what anyone says, journalism can never be totally objective - nowadays - "journalists" like Dobbs are proliferating and rarely provide fair reporting.- remember the Iraq War? the media's dull complacence about George W. Bush's incompetency? the broad national interest in radio announcer Rush Linbaugh - even after it has been known that he has a serious drug addiction - how do the conservatives explain away that one?

Journalism could say that I'm sneaking over its fence, but I disagree... There is a big hole in the fence and I'm sending my message signal through that opening - Leonard could say that I'm over-focused on the DREAM ACT (as he says that Borjas is very anti-immigrant) - but that is ok.... it's all subjective anyway. Plus, like some of the commentators to Leonard's article mentioned -- if its bad writing, no one will read it.

-----
What's the difference between bloggers and illegal immigrants?

You can't build a fence to stop bloggers from tearing apart the fortress of mainstream journalism. Thank goodness
Andrew Leonard
Salon.com

Dec. 17, 2007 | Of all the bonafide economists who blog regularly, Harvard's George Borjas gets the award for Most Single-minded Focus. Borjas' issue is immigration, especially illegal immigration. If you're looking for academic support for the thesis that immigration depresses the wages of native-born American workers, he's your man. He's also concerned about the cultural impact of Mexican immigrants (legal or illegal) who he thinks are not as likely to assimilate with mainstream America as has every other previous wave of immigrants to the United States. He's very consistent -- you will have to look long and hard to hear a good word about immigration in his posts.

The current political climate provides plenty of grist for blogging on immigration-related topics so naturally "The Borjas Blog" has been hopping. But it's hard to know what to make of one recent entry comparing bloggers to illegal immigrants.

According to Borjas, there is "an important self-serving economic motive at play" when journalists decry the effect of blogging on traditional news-reporting.

It doesn't cost all that much to become a citizen journalist: a computer and your own time is about all it takes for you to start reporting your view of the world to whoever wants to read it.

The laws of supply and demand suggest that the rewards to being a Journalist would drop because anyone can now start reporting news and opinionating a la Paul Krugman or Maureen Dowd. It's as if the Journalistic profession has received its own influx of illegal immigrants -- increasing competition, lowering rewards, and creating havoc along the way.

Maybe now the Journalists will learn how those workers affected by immigration have long felt.

A a former freelance writer, reporter, editor and now blogger, I found this passage interesting for a couple of reasons. Journalists -- or at least those journalists who ever competed in the freelance market or interned at a publication for laughable pay -- have always understood the challenge posed by competition from people willing to work for low wages. No one needs a license or accreditation of any kind to be a journalist, and a distressingly large number of people are willing to work for free or close to it. Just the sight of a byline in print (or online) is compensation enough for some. One result of this is that per-word pay rates for freelance journalists have hardly budged over the decades, except for the very top tier of publications.

Even more intriguing, however, are the political implications of Borjas' analogy. I would submit that most journalists who honestly accept what the Internet means for their profession understand that there is no way to go back to the way it was before. The barriers to entry, such as they were, are gone forever. Old business models are no longer applicable. Competing successfully in this environment will require being really good at whatever one does -- whether that be blogging, investigative reporting, breaking news reporting, financial analysis or what have you. And even if done well, the financial rewards may indeed be less lucrative than in ages past.

Maybe this explains why more journalists would prefer to write about single-payer national health care than border fences.*

To think that one can turn back the tide of competition unleashed by the Net is a lot like thinking that in a globalized world one can ameliorate the wage impact of illegal immigration by building a border fence or by passing laws imposing strict sanctions against employers who hire illegal immigrants. The work forces of China and India and eastern Europe and of course Mexico have joined the world economy just like bloggers have joined the media universe. In both cases, technology has played a huge enabling role, and, unless the world experiences a truly massive and unprecedented energy crisis, that technologically-midwifed change is not going back in the bottle. In a globalized world, massive disparities between the living standards of individual nations will create more pressure than ever before for some kind of equalization, whether that means workers finding their way from the developing to the developed world, or capital headed in the other direction. The nations that are ultimately most likely to thrive in this challenging new environment will have to be really good at whatever they do. It could just be that having a national health care system and a extensive safety net might make a county better able to compete than attempting to protect the status quo by building up walls.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. Previous waves of globalization, most notably that which crested before World War I, have receded. Maybe nationalism will triumph over the technologically mediated one-worldism. I'll tell you one thing -- a relapse into trade wars and protectionism and ethnically-based Exclusion Laws will certainly keep the bloggers busy. But the weird thing about Borjas' post is that to compare bloggers to illegal immigrants is to implicitly acknowledge that fence-building is not going to work as a long run solution for ensuring economic prosperity in the United States. And we know that can't have been Borjas' intention, because his other posts have made abundantly clear that "securing our borders" is his first priority in any discussion of immigration policy.

On the Net, some of us just chuckle at such an idea. Borders? What borders?

*(I have no statistics on which to base this assertion.)

-- Andrew Leonard


http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2007/12/17/bloggers_as_illegal_immigrants/index.html?source=rss&aim=/tech/htww

More on ICE and Julie Myers

Perhaps the interviewer should have asked Myers about the current trend of ICE detaining pregnant women?

_____
http://www.latimes.com/news/printedition/asection/la-na-myers22dec22,1,144034.story?ctrack=7&cset=true
From the Los Angeles Times
Q & A

New ICE chief discusses raids, goals
Julie Myers says additional oversight and reduced expenses have helped her agency cope with an increase in arrests of employers and illegal immigrants.
By Nicole Gaouette
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 22, 2007

WASHINGTON — In the contentious arena of immigration enforcement, Julie L. Myers sits in one of the hot seats. Myers is the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the agency responsible for finding and deporting illegal immigrants. When appointed by President Bush in 2005, Myers was criticized for her relative youth (she was 36), limited experience and personal connections to the administration. She was confirmed Wednesday by the Senate after a few uncertain weeks in which critics questioned her judgment and commitment to targeting employers of illegal immigrants. Myers won confirmation with the backing of ICE employees, some of whom went to Capitol Hill to testify on her behalf. She spoke to The Times about ICE's record, its controversial immigration raids, Congress' failure to overhaul immigration laws and her goals for next year.

What has ICE accomplished in 2007 in terms of immigration enforcement?

On the work-site enforcement side, both our criminal arrests [of employers] and administrative arrests [of illegal immigrants] are up well over 100%. We have transformed detention and removal by ending "catch and release" [in which illegal border-crossers were immediately let go because of a lack of detention space]. That is essential if you're seeking to restore the integrity of the immigration system. And we have reduced the time that other-than-Mexican detainees are held. The average length of stay has gone down from 90 days to 37.5 days -- that's good for taxpayers; that's good for the aliens.

In a number of high-profile ICE raids last year, children were separated from their parents when the parents were detained and deported. Has ICE made any policy changes to address this issue?

After New Bedford [the Massachusetts city where dozens of children of illegal immigrants were stranded after their parents were arrested in a raid], we partnered with the Division of Immigration Health Services . . . to do an initial triage to ask people about sole-caregiver and medical issues. We found that sometimes in raids people were not telling us the truth when we asked if they had children, but we found they were more willing to tell DIHS the truth. We're always looking to see if we can improve, but I will say our immigration laws put people in a difficult situation sometimes -- I mean, the folks who come into our country illegally, then have a child and put that child at risk.

When you were first appointed in 2005, a lack of detention space made it hard to detain illegal immigrants caught at the border. What is the situation now?

We need to be smarter and need to look at alternatives, like the electronic travel document program. You can't send someone back to their country until you get a valid travel document from that country. In the past, it was couriered or FedExed. Now we have partnerships with countries like El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala. We provide computers and a link to share information that the alien provides, including their criminal history, and these countries can provide back to us an electronic travel document that we can use to send the person on their way. It reduces the time to get the document from several weeks to days.

Complaints about Inadequate HB1 Visas - How about a Failed DREAM Act?

The article below is by Intel CEO Craig Barrett. He is writing the familiar complaint - not enough HB1 visas - and how the U.S. is going to lag behind as a competitor in the technology sector if we don't increase the number of HB!'s.

As usual, when one of these op-ed pieces is published - there is no mention of the DREAM ACT. Hey guys, the people are already here... their English is perfect, their grades are excellent - but we told them on October 25th that they didn't count. How can we be so blind?

my comment to the Wash Post:

"Barrett has a point. The U.S. is setting itself up as a dull competitor between the H1B visa problem and the poor education being offered in schools.

One other way we are shooting ourselves in the foot - by failing to pass the DREAM Act - we are losing scores of thousands of accomplished and bright young people, educated in the United States - only because of our short sighted views (and YES, nativist) on immigration. "

A Talent Contest We're Losing
By Craig Barrett
Sunday, December 23, 2007; B07

The European Union took a step recently that the U.S. Congress can't seem to muster the courage to take. By proposing a simple change in immigration policy, E.U. politicians served notice that they are serious about competing with the United States and Asia to attract the world's top talent to live, work and innovate in Europe. With Congress gridlocked on immigration, it's clear that the next Silicon Valley will not be in the United States.

European politicians face many of the same political pressures surrounding immigration as their U.S. counterparts, and they, too, are not immune to those pressures. Nationalist and anti-immigrant factions in several Western European countries have made political gains in recent elections and are widely viewed as mainstream. Despite the hot-button nature of immigration issues, though, E.U. politicians advanced the "Blue Card" proposal in late October.

The plan is designed to attract highly educated workers by creating a temporary but renewable two-year visa. A streamlined application process would allow qualified prospective workers to navigate the system and start working in high-need jobs within one to three months.

This contrasts starkly with the byzantine system in place in the United States, which increasingly threatens America's long-term competitiveness.

The United States relies primarily on two programs to augment its workforce with highly educated, highly skilled foreign professionals. The H-1B visa is a three-year temporary visa that can be renewed once. The employment-based (EB) green card is the program for permanent residency. Both programs serve the needs of U.S. employers seeking to fill job vacancies in highly skilled professions. Extreme shortages of visas in both these programs are well documented.

H-1B visas, which are capped at 85,000 per year, are now gone in one day, with the "winners" determined by lottery.

The EB green card program has an annual allotment of 140,000 visas; these are allocated equally across all countries around the world, regardless of population. The inflexible country quotas mean that professionals from countries such as China and India are almost always at a disadvantage, finding themselves stuck in a system -- often for five to 10 years -- in which they cannot seek promotions and raises. Spouses and children count against the quota, which has not been raised since 1990. And even though they count against the quota of foreign workers allowed to come here, spouses are inexplicably forbidden to work, no matter their level of education and skill.

The U.S. system forces thousands of valuable foreign-born professionals -- including badly needed researchers, scientists, teachers and engineers -- into legal and professional limbo for years. Not surprisingly, many are considering opportunities in competitor nations -- even those who have lived in the United States for years and have graduated from American universities.

To be competitive in the global economy, U.S. companies depend on specialized talent coming out of U.S. graduate schools. These scientists and engineers are often foreign-born, as more than half of U.S. engineering master's students and PhD recipients are international students. Yet America shuts the door on many of these highly educated graduates, forcing them to look abroad for opportunities -- and our competitors are capitalizing on our failed policies.

E.U. leaders recognize that the top minds coming out of universities in the United States and other countries can help to reinvigorate European industry and enable it to create the next wave of businesses that drive innovation and economic growth.

While its Blue Card proposal still requires approval by member countries, Europe has sent a message. It intends to aggressively pursue the professional talent necessary to compete on the global stage. The United States, on the other hand, seems intent on driving away the very same talent the European Union is rolling out the red carpet to welcome.

The writer is chairman of Intel Corp., which employs about 2,000 employees with H-1B visas among its 86,000 workers worldwide.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/21/AR2007122101919_pf.html

Another Immigrant in a U.S. Detention Center Dies

SoCal immigration detainee electrocuted

Cesar Gonzales-Baeza had a green card, yet he was detained by ICE for 10 months because of a traffic violation. At the Mira Loma Detention Center, he volunteered to move fence posts. He was electrocuted with a jack hammer that struck a power line.



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Friday, December 21, 2007
San Francisco Chronicle
(12-21) 10:13 PST Los Angeles (AP) --

A Mexican immigrant fighting deportation was accidentally electrocuted at the Mira Loma Detention Center in Lancaster, authorities said.

Cesar Gonzales-Baeza, 35, was moving fence posts as part of a voluntary work crew on Dec. 5 when the jackhammer he was using struck a high-voltage power line, according to Greg Moreno, an attorney for his family. He died two days later.
Gonzales-Baeza was detained 10 months ago after being stopped for a traffic violation and had been held while appealing his immigration case, Moreno said.

The lawyer said his client had a green card.

"This shouldn't have happened," Moreno said. "This is a man who should have been bonded out. He was a hardworking man, a father of two young boys. He wasn't a threat to society or anyone else. And now he is dead."
Further details about the immigration status of Gonzales-Baeza were not immediately available from authorities.
The Sheriff's Department, which operates the Lancaster facility, and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials were investigating the death, said Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for the customs agency.


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2007/12/21/state/n101343S97.DTL&hw=immigration&sn=002&sc=573

Hugo Ortega and His Famous Restaurant

Hugo Ortega. Photo by Daniel Kramer.









In 1998 I took a friend for her birthday dinner to the Back Street Cafe on Sheperd Dr. in Houston. At that time Hugo Ortega and his wife Tracy Vaught had only been married four years. We didn't know the story about Hugo, until 2002 when he opened Hugo's Restaurant on Westheimer.

Now he is famous. This week the Houston Press published an article that describes his harrowing trek across the border.

The article also addresses the restaurant industry and immigration:

Chef Anthony Bourdain was interviewed for the article on Ortega, "...Bourdain is one of the few [even more famous] chefs who's been willing to speak frankly on the issue. He says the American restaurant industry would be in big trouble if all the illegal immigrants in this country were rounded up and deported. "The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board," Bourdain told me. "Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable...I know very few chefs who've even heard of a U.S.-born citizen coming in the door to ask for a dishwasher, night clean-up or kitchen prep job. Until that happens, let's at least try to be honest when discussing this issue."

Anthony Bourdain

















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Illegal Immigrants in the Restaurant Industry
Mexican immigrant Hugo Ortega went from washing dishes to owning Houston's best Mexican restaurant — now he has a few things to say about immigration
By Robb Walsh
Published: December 20, 2007
Houston Press


My tablemate dipped her doughnut into the cup of hot chocolate and purred while she chewed. "Is this the best thing you ever ate, or what?" she said. We were splitting an order of churros and hot chocolate, which the waiter recommended as the best dessert on the menu at Hugo's, the popular upscale Mexican restaurant on Westheimer.

A churro is a Mexican doughnut made by extruding dough through a nozzle into a deep fryer. The nozzle gives the long stick-shaped doughnut pronounced ridges, which trap the cinnamon and sugar topping. At Hugo's the kitchen doesn't fry the churros until they're ordered, so they're served piping hot. Hugo's also cuts them in three pieces, fills the inside with the caramel syrup called dulce de leche and serves them on a plate with a dainty scoop of mocha ice cream.

There are hundreds of Tex-Mex cantinas, authentic Mexican restaurants, taquerías, carnicerías, panaderías and taco trucks in Houston. But ever since it opened in 2002, Hugo's has been the best Mexican restaurant in the city. In the 2003 "Best of Houston" issue, the Houston Press named Hugo's Houston's "Best Restaurant," period.

The restaurant roasts its own cocoa beans and grinds them by hand in an old-fashioned stone mill imported from Oaxaca. The fresh-ground cocoa powder is used to make its signature mole poblano, as well as the cup of hot chocolate that comes with the doughnuts.

The churros and hot chocolate at Hugo's are sensational. Churros are a common street food snack in Mexico City, which is fitting since Hugo Ortega, the owner and head chef, grew up in one of Mexico City's worst slums. Ortega entered the United States illegally, and like an enormous number of Mexican immigrants, he found work in the restaurant industry.

The restaurant industry is the nation's largest employer of immigrants, according to the National Restaurant Association, which estimates that 1.4 million restaurant workers in the United States are foreign-born immigrants. Seventy percent of them work in the lowest-paying jobs, as dishwashers, busboys, prep cooks and cleaning help.

The National Restaurant Association lobbies on behalf of restaurant owners, and predictably, it's one of the loudest proponents of immigration reform. "While the government claims stepped-up enforcement...will discourage future illegal immigration across our nation's borders," the NRA Web site says, "in reality, all they are doing is eliminating a sizeable portion of the workforce without providing any legal avenue to hire foreign-born workers to do jobs that Americans are no longer taking."

Meanwhile, anti-immigration groups such as U.S. Border Watch, which intimidates day laborers as they wait for employers to pick them up, remain active. "It makes me sad," Ortega says about a recent confrontation in northwest Harris County. "If immigrants are selling drugs or committing crimes, then put them in jail or send them back to Mexico. But please judge immigrants as individuals and for their contributions to society."

"You only hear one side of the immigration debate, because the people who really know what's going on can't say anything," one Houston restaurant owner told me. "If you own a restaurant and you speak out about immigration, you make your business a target."

There's a weird disconnect between perception and reality for those who work in the business. Thanks to media demagogues like Lou Dobbs, much of the American public is ready to "send 'em back to Mexico." Meanwhile, Spanish is what you're most likely to hear in a restaurant kitchen.

Author and TV star Anthony Bourdain is one of the few chefs who's been willing to speak frankly on the issue. He says the American restaurant industry would be in big trouble if all the illegal immigrants in this country were rounded up and deported. "The bald fact is that the entire restaurant industry in America would close down overnight, would never recover, if current immigration laws were enforced quickly and thoroughly across the board," Bourdain told me. "Everyone in the industry knows this. It is undeniable...I know very few chefs who've even heard of a U.S.-born citizen coming in the door to ask for a dishwasher, night clean-up or kitchen prep job. Until that happens, let's at least try to be honest when discussing this issue."
_____________________

The two roasted poblanos were stuffed with shredded pork shoulder that had been slowly braised with pears, peaches and raisins, and spices. I ate some of the filling with the spiciest part of the chile, the thick flesh around the stem. There was so much going on — the sweetness of the pork, the kick of the fiery green chile and the creaminess of the thick walnut sauce, sparked with the intense tartness of pomegranate seeds that burst as I chewed — it was a baroque fugue of flavors.

"I learned the secret of the walnut sauce from a lady in Puebla," Hugo says. The secret is to buy walnuts in September when they're still white inside and then soak them in milk until the bitter skins slip off easily.

Hugo's serves chiles en nogada through the fall or as long they can get fresh pomegranates. In the summer, the menu switches over to dishes made with squash blossoms. The restaurant also serves such exotica as huitlacoche (corn fungus) and sautéed chapulines (grasshoppers) when they're available.

The chiles en nogada at Hugo's are the best I have ever eaten — even better than the supposedly definitive version I once sampled at Osteria San Domingo in Mexico City.

The dish is associated with Mexican patriotism. The green chiles, white walnut sauce and red dots of pomegranate garnish are traditionally arranged in the order of the colors of the Mexican flag. Chiles en nogada were created by the nuns of the Santa Monica convent of Puebla in 1821 to commemorate the arrival of Agustín de Iturbide, architect of Mexican independence. Iturbide's celebrity was short-lived; he was crowned emperor in 1822, deposed in 1823 and executed in 1824. So maybe the fiery chiles en nogada should also be considered symbolic of the cruel fate that befalls so many Mexicans.

It's hard to picture the soft-spoken, slender and genteel-in-his-chef's-whites Ortega climbing over a barbed-wire fence with the Border Patrol in pursuit. Like so many others, he crossed the border for little more than the promise of washing dishes and busing tables.

"My teen years were pretty awful," he says, remembering his struggle to take care of seven brothers and sisters and his decision to cross the border. "My dad was beating my mom and me. He hardly ever came home. When I was 15, I quit school and started working for Procter & Gamble in Mexico City loading boxes of soap into cartons on an assembly line. My family was going hungry. I was buying rice and beans, but that was it. There was never enough. Then my mom had twins and got sick. I was raising the kids and working. It was a bad deal."

Ortega couldn't earn enough to live, no matter how hard he was willing to work. Hope arrived in the form of a letter from a cousin named Pedro (not his real name) who had made it to Houston.

Pedro wrote about the terrible journey. The van he was riding in blew up. He had to walk across the desert with nothing but a couple of tacos to eat. But he made it. He was living in a shotgun shack between Taft and Montrose. "He said he was making $200 a week," Hugo remembers. That sounded like a lot of money."

"I was young. I wanted to do something with my life. And I wanted to help my mom and my family," he says. "What would you do?"

In April of 1983, at the age of 17, Ortega decided to go to the United States. "My mom was very sad and very concerned when I left. When I quit my job at Procter & Gamble, I got 200 pesos in back pay, which was less than $20. I bought a bus ticket to Juárez with the money."

Ortega arrived in Juárez along with an older cousin, who was 23, and three other friends. A coyote met them as soon as they got off the bus and asked if they were going across. "You have to give him a phone number of somebody in the U.S. If you don't have a phone number, they won't cross you. My cousin and I gave him Pedro's number in Houston. Pedro had to agree to pay $500 for each for us. He really stepped up to the plate."

For five days, Hugo and his group stayed in a junkyard in Juárez, sleeping in wrecked cars and eating potatoes and eggs. On the fifth day, they attempted to cross the border.

"We had to inflate a plastic boat by blowing into it. There were 35 people including little kids and fat ladies who could barely walk. We took turns going across in the boat. I was scared to death because I couldn't swim. The mosquitoes [helicopters] came with their lights, and we tried to hide in the bushes. The coyote cut a barbed wire fence, and we ran. We got to a road. It was perfectly smooth, with no potholes. I thought, 'Wow, what an amazing country.' We got caught by the Border Patrol. They tied up our hands and put us in a van, took us to the bridge and sent us back across the border. We crossed again three more times, but we kept getting caught."

'The fifth time, we all split up, and the young guys who could run fast went by themselves. We crossed two fences and got to the railroad tracks where we were supposed to wait. Someone opened the door of a railroad car and then they locked us and two coyotes in there. The coyotes told us if we coughed or made a noise, they would kill us. I believed them."

"They had a special seal so that the customs people wouldn't open the rail car. We were in there for three hours before the train moved. After awhile, we could barely breathe. We took turns putting our faces up to a crack in the floor to get air."

"When we got close to San Antonio, the coyotes had to hack through the railcar's wooden wall with a pickax so they could get the door open. One of the coyotes cut his hand open, so there was blood everywhere. We had to jump out while the train was still moving. Finally we got to a house in San Antonio. People were talking, and it was half English and half Spanish. That was the first time I ever heard English.

"They had taken the seats out of a green Impala and put blocks on the shocks. They crammed 13 people into that car. I was one of five guys in the trunk. We drove to Houston and stayed in a house until Pedro came to get us. We were so dirty and skinny, he didn't recognize us.

"I hated Houston at first. It seemed like a ghost town after Mexico City. There was nothing going on in the streets, no music, no soccer, nothing," Ortega remembers.

He took a job cleaning offices. When his cousins decided to try their luck in California, he stayed in Houston so he could keep his job. But the company he was working for relocated, and Hugo found himself unemployed and homeless. "I was broke and sleeping outside on Dunlavy Street behind where the Fiesta is now. I was really depressed."

Ortega's culinary career began by chance. Some fellow immigrants he met playing soccer offered to take him to Backstreet Café off Shepherd where they worked so he could apply for a job. Owner Tracy Vaught was impressed with Hugo's attitude and industriousness from the first day. At Backstreet, Hugo slowly worked his way up from busboy to prep cook to line cook.

Ortega says the restaurant didn't know he was illegal. "I gave them a Social Security number," he says.

Soon after they arrive, illegal immigrants buy fake IDs and Social Security cards at flea markets or on the street. As a result, of course, they're paying income tax and Social Security — and never see income tax refunds or Social Security benefits.

But Ortega says this didn't bother him. "I didn't care," he says. "I was just happy to be able to work."
_____________________

The dark brown sauce that cloaked the chicken leg quarter was dotted with sesame seeds. The version of mole poblano served at Hugo's was velvet on the tongue. The incredibly smooth texture married the rich taste of dried chiles, fresh-ground cocoa powder, toasted sesame seeds, aromatic almonds and other nutty flavors. But there was a deeper wave of flavor in this version of mole poblano, a wonderfully complex fruitiness and a shining high note of tartness that I'd never encountered before.

"Very few restaurants in Puebla serve mole poblano," Hugo Ortega says. "Because everybody's grandmother makes it better."

Ortega's mole has unusual fruit flavors. "That's the raisins and the plantains you're tasting," Hugo says. I have made a lot of moles from recipes in Mexican cookbooks, but I have never seen a mole poblano recipe that called for plantains.

American foodies make the mistake of thinking that reading Diana Kennedy or Rick Bayless's cookbooks is all it takes to master Mexican cuisine. Cookbooks only skim the surface. Native chefs like Ortega are a reminder of how deep Mexico's culinary traditions really go.

The Ortega family has mole in their blood. A relative of Hugo's makes the mole at the restaurant. "She learned from her mother, who learned from her mother and so on. [Her] mole poblano is fourth- generation. You should taste the mole that my grandmother makes back in Puebla," Hugo says with a grin.

Hugo Ortega's favorite childhood memories are of his days in Progreso in the state of Puebla. His family moved back to their ancestral village when his father became too sick to work. This period came before his father began abusing his family. Hugo was nine years old when he arrived in Progreso. He was sent to the mountains with a herd of goats to tend.

"I was scared to death at first," he remembers. But he learned how to herd goats and was happy in the country. In Puebla, he learned about Mexican cooking traditions from his grandmother. Some days he would help his aunt, who was the village baker. Other times he would assist his uncle, who lived in the mountains and made cheese.

But Ortega's childhood in the country came to an end when his father recovered and moved the family back to the slums of Mexico City.

Hugo's maternal grandmother remained in Progreso. There, she's the member of an informal club, a group of around a dozen women who travel around the countryside cooking dishes like mole poblano for weddings and other celebrations.

Hugo recently returned to Progreso to attend a family wedding. He was shocked by what he saw. "There's only women and children left in the village. All the men and boys are in the United States. It's like that all over Mexico. Things are different. The younger generation isn't picking up the old traditions. Where are the women who will go from village to village cooking mole for weddings after my grandmother and her friends are gone? I am afraid that Mexico's culinary culture is going to disappear."
_____________________

On my most recent visit to Hugo's, I sampled one of the nightly specials, a mesquite-grilled black Angus tenderloin. The steak was medium-rare and nicely charred around the edges. It sat in a luscious puddle of guajillo sauce. The rich dried-chile flavor was rounded off with butter and garlic. On the side, two mole tamales and some grilled asparagus spears sat on a bed of sautéed spinach leaves.

To go with my steak, the waiter recommended a glass of 2005 Tikal "Patriota" wine, a Malbec-Bonarda blend from Argentina. It was a big, bold red that stood up brilliantly to the dried chile sauce.

My dining companion tried another entrée from the list of specials, a thick salmon steak cooked rare in the middle and balanced on a bed of mashed Peruvian purple potatoes. The fish was garnished with mussels, and a disk of corn pudding was served on the side.

This isn't traditional regional Mexican cuisine, and it isn't supposed to be. This is modern American cuisine with a Latino spin, and it speaks well of Hugo Ortega's culinary training. "The dinner specials are different, more innovative," he says. "I learned French techniques in cooking school, and I apply them to Mexican cooking."

Hugo Ortega was issued a Temporary Resident (green) card in April of 1988 under the "Reagan Amnesty." With the help of Tracy Vaught, he enrolled in the culinary arts program at Houston Community College. He graduated in 1992 and worked as chef and executive chef at Backstreet Café and Prego before opening Hugo's in 2002. He has made two guest chef appearances at the James Beard House in New York City.

And there are a lot more Hugo Ortegas on the way, thanks to philanthropists like Kit Goldsbury, heir to the Pace Picante Sauce fortune. Last year, Goldsbury contributed $35 million to a small San Antonio cooking school called the Center for Foods of the Americas. His goal was to create a top-rank culinary academy specifically for young Latinos.

The nation's foremost culinary school, the Culinary Institute of America, became a partner in the project. The San Antonio cooking school is now known as the Culinary Institute of America's Center for Foods of the Americas. It will offer extensive financial aid to struggling Hispanic students and, for the most talented, a chance to transfer to the CIA's prestigious main campus in Hyde Park, New York.

Hugo Ortega and Tracy Vaught were married in 1994, and in February 1997 they had their first child, Sophia Elizabeth. Ortega became a naturalized American citizen in 1996. As a citizen, Hugo was entitled to bring members of his family to the United States. "I think I am more patriotic than most Americans," he says. "I love this country like my mother. When I hear the national anthem of the United States, it sometimes makes me cry."

His mother and father live in South Houston, and all of his siblings have joined Hugo here as well. Alma works for Mary Kay selling cosmetics. (One day she hopes to own a pink Cadillac.) Ruben is a pastry chef at Backstreet Café and Hugo's. Sandra works as an administrative assistant during the day and at a local restaurant at night. Rene, a graduate of Reagan High School, works as a mechanic for Admiral Linen Company. Twins Gloriela and Veronica now sell real estate in the Heights. And Jose Luis, who worked in the kitchen with Hugo, recently moved from Houston to Belize to become the chef at The Victoria House.

Hugo's nephew Antonio will graduate from South Houston High School in May of 2008. Tony has received scholarship offers from Harvard, Yale and Rice, among others. It's a difficult decision. But because he doesn't want to be too far away from his family, he's leaning toward Rice.

Hugo is working on a cookbook that will combine old family recipes from Mexico and innovative dishes he created in Texas.

robb@robbwalsh.com

http://www.houstonpress.com/2007-12-20/news/illegal-immigrants-in-the-restaurant-industry/

Directory of College Scholarships

This directory, published by the Tomas Rivera Institute lists scholarships - in addition to stating citizenship or residency requirements. Some private scholarships do not require residency.

http://www.trpi.org/PDFs/Scholarship_Directory.pdf


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Education Week
November 30, 2007

There's No 'DREAM Act,' But College Aid is Available
"Citizenship Requirements" is a field of entry in the latest directory of college scholarships for "America's Latino students," published by the Tomas Rivera Policy Institute. For each listing of a scholarship organization, the directory says whether being a U.S. citizen (or legal resident, in some cases) is a criterion for eligibility. Quite a few private scholarship programs have no requirements in this regard (publicly funded programs are another story).

Getting a copy of the directory in the mail reminded me that the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, or "DREAM Act," was introduced but did not proceed in the U.S. Congress this fall. While for years, versions of the DREAM Act introduced into Congress contained a provision clarifying that states could provide in-state tuition rates to undocumented students who would benefit from the act, that provision was dropped from the version of the act filed in Congress in September. That September version did, however, give undocumented students who met certain criteria a path to legalization. But the proposal stalled in Congress.

Since then, the idea that anyone might provide any kind of break for undocumented students has become a hot issue among politicians running for president, as my Education Week colleague Michele McNeil has been noting on her blog. See here and here.

In publishing its directory on college aid, I believe the Los Angeles-based Tomas Rivera Policy Institute wants Latinos to know that they shouldn't give up on getting a college education in the United States, regardless of their immigration status. Why else would the institute spell out for Latinos the college-aid organizations that care about the students' legal status in this country and the ones that don't?

http://blogs.edweek.org/edweek/learning-the-language/2007/11/theres_no_dream_act_but_colleg.html

ICE Enters School in Oakland: Detains Student's Mother

Immigration agents detain mom at school
Other parents outraged by incident in Oakland
By Katy Murphy , STAFF WRITER
Article Last Updated: 12/19/2007 02:34:43 AM PST
Oakland Tribune

OAKLAND — Immigration agents detained a pregnant mother Tuesday morning at an East Oakland elementary school. The woman's frightened 6-year-old daughter was told to go to class as her mother was led away for questioning, according to staff at Melrose Bridges Academy.

"She walked out, sobbing, down the hall," said Suki Mozenter, an English-language coach who witnessed the event.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the agents wanted to talk with Maria Ramirez about her husband's small business. Her husband, Jose De Jesus Guzman-Baez, faces federal charges of knowingly employing illegal immigrants. He has been in custody since November and faces deportation.

Ramirez was released before noon on Tuesday, but she could be ordered to return to Mexico. During questioning, Kice said, it became clear that she was in the country illegally.

Kice, who originally was told the agents had detained Ramirez on her way out of Melrose Bridges after she dropped off her daughter, later said the officers accompanied her into the school.

They did so for her child's sake, she said. "The officers wanted to ensure that the child was not left unattended," Kice said.
But Tuesday afternoon after school, dozens of parents, teachers and students came together to decry the event.
Moyra Contreras, principal of nearby Melrose Leadership Academy, helped organize Tuesday's demonstration. In the last month, Contreras said, three parents have been detained or placed in detention.

"The fact that parents and children don't know if they're going to see each other at the end of the day is very difficult, psychologically, for our kids," Contreras said. She added, "We want our students and our families to come to the schools without fearing arrest."

Mozenter said she first saw the two immigration agents walking outside the school as she arrived in the morning. Minutes later, when she was picking up her keys in the main office, she saw them walk inside with Ramirez and her young daughter.
The girl was crying, Mozenter recalled.

Mozenter said the men explained that they needed to talk to Ramirez and that she was in the country illegally. When Ramirez asked to call her attorney before leaving the school, Mozenter said, the agents said they didn't want to have to take her away in handcuffs in front of the other parents.

Ramirez left with them. When she returned, just before noon, she gave her daughter a hug and told her to go to lunch with her friends. Her daughter didn't want to let go, Mozenter said.

Ramirez said to her in Spanish, "They're not going to take me away."

Reporter Barbara Grady contributed to this story. Contact Katy Murphy at kmurphy@oaklandtribune.com. Read her Oakland schools blog at http://www.ibabuzz.com/education.

http://www.insidebayarea.com/search/ci_7758273

Elvira Arellano Continues Advocacy in Mexico

Critica Elvira Arellano debilidad del gobierno federal para proteger a connacionales

En 2008, promoverá PRD-DF instalar casas del migrante en Estados Unidos
Servirán para defender sus derechos y atender denuncias de vejaciones, explica

Rocío González Alvarado
La Jornada
Mexico

El secretario general del PRD capitalino, Carlos Reyes Gámiz, anunció que a partir de 2008 el partido promoverá la instalación de seis casas del migrante en los estados del vecino país del norte donde exista el mayor número de connacionales, para convertirlas en espacios de defensa de sus derechos y de atención a las denuncias de vejaciones que ahí tienen lugar.

Frente a la embajada de Estados Unidos, donde encabezó un acto de apoyo y solidaridad con la activista mexicana Elvira Arellano y su lucha en defensa de los derechos de los indocumentados, el perredista acotó que estas instancias serán independientes de las que comprometió el gobierno del Distrito Federal.

“El PRD como tal tiene una presencia anterior en el territorio de Estados Unidos, en donde se ha mantenido una relación muy estrecha con organismos de defensa de los derechos humanos, y de lo que se trata es de compartir esa agenda de trabajo, sobre todo en esta época en la que la xenofobia y el racismo tienen un mayor fervor en aquel país”, refirió.

“Vemos con tristeza que, a pesar de que todos los días nos llegan noticias de vejaciones y ataques en contra de pasianos indocumentados, el gobierno mexicano asume una actitud de docilidad frente al estadunidense”, expresó, al señalar que en el contexto de las elecciones venideras en Estados Unidos el movimiento en defensa de los derechos de los migrantes debe cobrar mayor auge.

Firmas contra las deportaciones

En su oportunidad, Elvira Arellano convocó a la ciudadanía a participar en la campaña de recolección de firmas que se entregarán el primero de mayo en Washington, cuando se registrarán movilizaciones en todo Estados Unidos para exigir un alto a las redadas y la deportación de indocumentados.

“Si aquí el gobierno se está viendo débil y no está haciendo su trabajo para defender a nuestros connacionales en Estados Unidos, el pueblo de México debe hacer sentir su apoyo. Cada uno tiene un familiar o un amigo indocumentado, no podemos ignorar sus voces de auxilio”, argumentó.

http://www.jornada.unam.mx/2007/12/21/index.php?section=capital&article=031n1cap

Resources for Immigrants in the United States

from La Jornada, Mexico City

Directorio del migrante en Estados Unidos
Lista de consulados de México en Estados Unidos
www.sre.gob.mx/acerca/directorio/consulados/dirconsulados.htm
Organizaciones estatales
California
Centro de Entrenamiento para el Trabajo (CET)
426 Street Spring St., Los Angeles, California, 90013
Tel: (213) 687 9350.

Comité de los Amigos Americanos
San Diego, California.
Tel: (619) 233 4114.

Ocexcelsior
www.ocexcelsior.com
Portal de la comunidad latina en el condado de Orange, California, donde ofrecen noticias, información sobre trámites migratorios y una lista de los sitios de apoyo a migrantes.

Nueva York
Commission on the Dignity of Immigrants
http://www.nycclc.org/immigration.asp

Texas
Border Network for Human Rights
611 S. Kansas, El Paso, Texas, 79901.
Te:l (915) 577-0724.
Correo electrónico: bordernet2001@yahoo.com

Comité de los Amigos Americanos
Houston, Texas.
Tel: (713) 926 2799.

Diócesis de El Paso
http://www.elpasodiocese.org/
Servicios Diocesanos del Migrante y Refugiados (DMRS), cl�nica legal no lucrativa, que provee servicios legales de inmigración gratuitos o a un bajo precio para la población de la diócesis de El Paso, Texas, y áreas circunvecinas.
1117 N Stanton Street, El Paso, y a partir de enero de 2004 en 2400 E. Yandell.
Tel: (915) 532-3975; fax: (915) 532-4071.
Correo electrónico: dmrs@whc.net


http://www.jornada.unam.mx/migracion/?seccion=directorio-eu

Being Positive Amid Immigration Hysteria

The Pew Hispanic Center is telling us that:

" despite the range of negative effects from the current immigration hysteria, including discrimination in jobs and housing and anxiety over new enforcement measures, Hispanics are generally content with their lives and upbeat about the prospects for their children. About seven in 10 describe their quality of life as excellent or good and nearly eight in 10 say they are either very confident (45 percent) or somewhat confident (33 percent) that Hispanic children growing up now will have better jobs and more money than they have."

If you ignore the fact that most Hispanic people are not immigrants, this survey by the Pew center is interesting. If the center is talking about undocumented people, well yes, it's pretty remarkable to be positive when you know that at any moment someone could pick you up and separate you from your children.

Merry Christmas



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The Wisdom of Being Optimistic
By Marcela Sanchez
Special to washingtonpost.com
Friday, December 21, 2007; 12:00 AM

WASHINGTON -- Angelica Vivar sat in the waiting room of a clinic outside Washington this month, eager to share her positive outlook on life.

Never mind that she suffers from gastritis, that she just lost one of her jobs because her employer went out of business, that some days she doesn't have enough food on the table, or that she is about to mark 20 years being in the country illegally. "I may be wrong," she told me, but "I think everything is going to be fine."

Her optimism is particularly remarkable since she lives in Prince William County, Va., not the most welcoming of places in the United States to illegal immigrants. But Vivar's attitude may be nothing more than commonplace among immigrants.

In a report released last week, the Pew Hispanic Center disclosed that despite the range of negative effects from the current immigration hysteria, including discrimination in jobs and housing and anxiety over new enforcement measures, Hispanics are generally content with their lives and upbeat about the prospects for their children. About seven in 10 describe their quality of life as excellent or good and nearly eight in 10 say they are either very confident (45 percent) or somewhat confident (33 percent) that Hispanic children growing up now will have better jobs and more money than they have.

Another poll also released last week, by the nonprofit group New America Media, found that immigrants are generally much more optimistic about achieving the American dream than are African-Americans. New America Media also reported that Hispanic adults -- almost half of them immigrants -- are nearly twice as likely as African-Americans to believe that everyone in the United States has an equal opportunity to succeed.

Of course, perspective plays a big role. Latin American immigrants hail from a region with the worst income inequality in the world and where upward mobility is unimaginable for many. Once in this country, most Latin American immigrants start making a lot more money than they ever could have back home.

"The American economy provides a huge boost to the mobility of first-generation immigrants," writes Ron Haskins, immigration expert with the Economic Mobility Project, a bipartisan research effort of the Pew Charitable Trusts that examines the state of the American dream.

Some economists estimate that Mexican immigrants who have finished high school, for instance, earn seven times as much as they would if they had stayed in Mexico.

Moreover, the upward trajectory continues for the next generation. Ever since 1940, wages of the children of immigrants have exceeded their parents' and, strikingly, exceeded those of workers whose ancestors came earlier to the United States.

Still, one has to wonder if the optimism of Vivar and other newcomers is wholly warranted considering some important facts. While it is true that children of immigrants have had higher wages relative to the average population, the percentage of increase has diminished over more than a half-century. In 1940, it was 17.8 percent; in 1970, 14.6 percent, and in 2000, it went down to 6.3 percent.

In an interview, Haskins also that the behavior of many children of recent immigrants makes them less likely to improve their lot. While their parents are hard workers and often married -- "the ultimate Americans," as he called them -- their U.S.-born children tend to work less, and more often have children out of wedlock, two factors that directly contribute to lower incomes.

Still, immigrants continue to believe their children will do much better. At the very least, their optimism bucks the growing anxiety among Americans who, according to John Morton, director of the Economic Mobility Project, sense that "their best days are behind them." And it is hard to blame them when, as Morton explained, there is an "increased necessity of dual-income families" in order to achieve the American dream.

This anxiety has played out in the immigration debate, sadly exploited by those who would distract us from the more probable causes of our anguish -- war, terrorism and the economy.

Yet despite the growing unfriendliness toward them, immigrants soldier on and remain positive. And that's a good thing. As Carol Graham, senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution, put it, "happier people earn more money and are healthier." Indeed, optimism is good for the optimistic and probably good for those around them.

However you come down on immigration, my wish for all of us this holiday season is that we take a lesson from immigrants and subscribe to a more optimistic outlook. And in this way, we can increase our likelihood of helping keep this country strong.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122001641.html
image: http://www.sewterific.com/images/PatrioticBaskets/American_Dream.JPG

What! No Border Guards!

---
After being grilled at Bush Intercontinental about my citizenship, it's strange to think that a person can travel from the west coast of Portugal to the edge of Russia without being asked for a passport.

A couple of years ago I was returning to the United States and was asked about what neighborhood I lived in and how I liked it. Was the officer wanting to see if I had an accent? Was he trying to see if I really knew my neighborhood? It made me think that I should carry around the hospital records of when I was born (St. Joseph Hospital in Houston, obstetrician Dr. Baldwin).

More recently, a close family friend from Argentina was flying from Buenos Aires to NY. She had her Argentinian passport and had in fact been going back and forth between Buenos Aires and NY for several years while she was in school at NYU. This last time she was detained for 2 hours. ICE officers decided that her name was now on some type of list, even though her travel visa and all her documents were in order.

The U.S. media has reported that tourism to the U.S. has dropped significantly due to this unwelcome attitude at our international check points. The recent changes at European borders make us look all the more ridiculous.

As for the photo, I realize its an "altered" image, but at the same time, it feels so real when I think of all the times I've crossed a U.S. border check point. When it comes to the southern border and crossing in a car... I've told the border agents, it seems like a war zone.

In Europe, Opening Night at the Border
9 More Nations Drop Checkpoints, a 'Monumental Event' in One Hemmed-In Locale
By Craig Whitlock
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, December 21, 2007; A32

HRADEK NAD NISOU, Czech Republic -- For more than 60 years, this remote stretch of bottomland was one of the most closely guarded sectors of Central Europe.

The borders of three countries -- Germany, Poland and the Czech Republic -- intersect here along the Neisse River. For as long as anyone can remember, the rhythms of life on all sides have been regulated by a dense network of security depots, road barriers and immigration checkpoints that were originally designed to keep people out and prevent others from leaving.

On Friday, however, each of the crossings will finally go dark as borders are thrown open here and along frontiers that had separated Eastern and Western Europe since the end of World War II. The last vestiges of the Iron Curtain will disappear.

With fireworks and speeches, the switch began shortly after midnight Friday at multiple crossing points up and down the long frontier, as people crossed from country to country freely, no questions asked. At the frontier between Austria and Slovakia, leaders of the two nations ceremonially hand-sawed through a red and white border barrier.

For the first time, travelers have the freedom to drive east from the Algarve coast of Portugal all the way to the edge of Russia without encountering a border guard demanding proof of identification.

"It will be a monumental event," said Martin Puta, mayor of Hradek nad Nisou, a town of about 7,500 people. "It will not only mean the end of border controls, but also the end of a psychological barrier."

Europe's border-free zone has been expanding gradually since 1985, when Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg agreed to allow one another's citizens free passage into and out of their territories.

The catalyst for the latest extension was the 2004 admission of 10 countries -- mostly from Eastern Europe -- to the European Union. Preparations have been underway ever since to dismantle the checkpoints but also to standardize policing and immigration rules for the new members.

Not all European countries have signed up for borderless travel. Britain and Ireland decided not to join, and most of the Balkan countries have been kept out. Switzerland, Liechtenstein, Romania, Bulgaria and Cyprus will be phased in over the next four years.

The ease of travel between Eastern and Western Europe had already eased significantly in recent years. Czechs, Poles and Germans in this area, known as the Little Triangle, had to flash only a driver's license when crossing the border. Pedestrians walking over the many international footbridges and hiking paths here could do so without breaking stride.

Merchants advertising cut-rate fuel, cigarettes and liquor have become a border staple. It's hard to find a gas station these days in Zittau, Germany; residents can save the equivalent of about 80 cents a gallon by driving a half-mile to Porajow, Poland, to take advantage of lower fuel taxes there.

Andre Matthausch, 35, owner of a popular Zittau bar and restaurant, already crosses into Poland and the Czech Republic to shop five times a week. He's signed up to take Czech language classes in January, in part because he has friends there but also because he's seen an increase in Czech customers at his bar.

His grandfather used to tell stories about how he'd drive across the Czech border to go dancing before the Cold War put a stop to it. "Now he can go dancing again," Matthausch said with a laugh.

Others, however, fret that the new freedoms will bring problems. In particular, many Germans worry that criminals from their less prosperous neighbors will see the open borders as an invitation to come steal cars and rob houses.

Some German police officials have criticized politicians for rushing to eliminate the border controls. Konrad Freiberg, director of Germany's national police union, said German police lack digital radios to communicate with their Czech and Polish counterparts, who are better equipped. He also said there is confusion among officers over how much leeway they have to chase crooks into other countries.

"There will be more crime in the border regions, more break-ins, more human trafficking, whether of immigrants or prostitutes or whomever, because criminals will know that we are limited in our powers of pursuing them across the borders," Freiberg said. "They will simply cross back and forth and be relatively safe."

But many residents of the tri-border area here say the increased convenience will outweigh any risks.

Peter Peuber, 43, owns a pizzeria in Hradek nad Nisou. Every morning, he and his wife drive their boys, Peter and Paul, to elementary school in Zittau. The trip is only about two miles, but they must first cross a checkpoint into Polish territory and then, 500 yards later, another one into Germany. "You never know how much time it might take to get across," he said.

In practical terms, he figures the end of the checkpoints means that his kids will be able to sleep an extra 10 or 15 minutes each morning and get a later start for school. But he also predicted that it will take a long time for residents to get used to the idea that they can cross the border whenever they want, wherever they want, and that nobody will care.

"For many people, it will be strange, and they'll probably stop at the border anyway to try to make sure that somebody has seen them go by," he said. "As long as the border huts are still standing, people will stop."

In Bogatynia, a town of about 20,000 people that serves as the Polish anchor of the Little Triangle, the deputy mayor, Jerzy Stachyra, echoed the sentiment that the concept of borders will take longer to disappear in people's minds. He recalled growing up behind the Iron Curtain and said it could be extraordinarily difficult to gain permission to visit what were then East Germany and Czechoslovakia, even though both were also communist members of the Warsaw Pact.

"From where I lived, I could see the houses of Germany and the Germans walking along the river," he recalled. "But if you had told me 20 years ago that you could one day cross the border like nothing was there, I would never have believed it."

Special correspondent Shannon Smiley contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002283.html

photo: http://images.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://rwor.org/a/030/graphics/alito-poster.jpg&imgrefurl=http://rwor.org/a/030/alito-border-checkpoint.htm&h=335&w=525&sz=52&hl=en&start=1&sig2=LAT7Zw02gFiI4Ykf_SqaSg&um=1&tbnid=V3MUmGCHmzq5VM:&tbnh=84&tbnw=132&ei=ErJrR5xoi4Z6hZ3FSA&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dborder%2Bcheckpoints%2BU.S.%26svnum%3D10%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Dactive%26client%3Dsafari%26rls%3Den-us%26sa%3DN

Thank Goodness - Tancredo Gave Up Presidential Campaign

Of course, some would say that another candidate will take up Tancredo's role of extremist - but either way, its a good thing that he has decided to bark at something else these next few months.

-----
Hasta La Vista
By Dana Milbank
Friday, December 21, 2007; A02
Washington Post

DES MOINES, Iowa

Tom Tancredo is an angry man.

We know this because he has proposed dropping bombs on Mecca. We know this because he sang "Dixie" at a South Carolina gathering full of Confederate flags and white supremacists. And we know this because he wants to expel 12 million people now living in the United States.

Now, the Republican congressman from Colorado has a new reason to be angry: The voters of Iowa, inexplicably, do not want him to be their president.

"I know I cannot win," he confessed at a lightly attended news conference in the Marriott hotel here, where a balky sound system -- made in China! -- marred the announcement that he was quitting the presidential race. Thus, just two weeks before the Iowa caucuses, Tancredo determined that "it was best for the cause that I step down."

A grand total of 18 staff members and supporters -- some wearing pins proclaiming "Proud member of Tom's Army Against Amnesty" -- stood to the side and fought back tears. Adding to the pain, the Marriott restaurant, just steps from the meeting room where Tancredo quit the race, was serving a "South of the Border Thursday" lunch buffet.

The supporters passed by the restaurant and went upstairs to a hotel room to mourn their candidate's departure from the race. Conveniently, all the Tancredo supporters were able to fit in one elevator.

This week's Washington Post-ABC News poll put Tancredo's support at 2 percent in Iowa, down from 5 percent in the summer. While that's still double Rep. Duncan Hunter's haul, Tancredo could accurately conclude from that poll that 98 percent of Iowa Republicans are against him.

And while some say his deport-'em-all illegal immigration proposal is irrational, there was no disputing Tancredo's analysis of the race Thursday: "Somebody's going to be the president of the United States. It's not going to be me."

But that's when Tancredo's logic broke down and his anger crept in. In response to questions, he admitted he was pulling out to help defeat somebody he dislikes more than an undocumented Mexican in the desert: former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee, the new Republican front-runner here with what Tancredo called an "abysmal" record of "inviting" illegal immigrants. "It was important in making this decision -- you bet your life it was," Tancredo said.

Never mind that Huckabee was tough enough on immigration to win the support of the border-vigilante Minuteman Project. Tancredo said he is throwing his support behind former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, a man who has twice entrusted his landscaping to illegal immigrants and who only two years ago described as "reasonable" efforts by Sen. John McCain to let illegal immigrants become legal. Back then, Romney disputed Tancredo's characterization of the McCain plan as the dreaded "amnesty."

Tancredo's blind rage against Huckabee seemed to have gotten the better of his judgment, for he embraced Romney as a true believer in the immigrant crackdown. "This morning, I met with Governor Mitt Romney," Tancredo said, and "I am convinced he is committed to the principles I've outlined." Specifically, Romney "will require those who are presently here illegally to return home."

Oh? "The governor has stated he doesn't believe it's practical to deport 12 million illegal immigrants," Romney spokesman Kevin Madden said Thursday. Romney, though campaigning in Iowa himself, couldn't be troubled to join Tancredo at the endorsement event, and his staff issued a tepid thank-you: "While we don't agree on every issue, we agree on the need to keep America strong."

Understandably, Romney might wish to keep some distance between himself and Tancredo, who boycotted a Spanish-language GOP presidential debate this month, calling it "Univision's Illegal Immigrant Debate." Tancredo instead released a video featuring a scantily clad woman singing in Spanish while other GOP candidates were superimposed riding on a truck with Hispanic farm workers, wearing sombreros and watching a cockfight. Romney was superimposed loitering outside a "carniceria."

It might be tempting to conclude that Tancredo's failure meant that voters had rejected such immigrant-baiting. But in the angry mind of Tancredo, his was a triumphant campaign.

"Hello, everyone! Why so dour?" he chirped as he entered the room for his announcement.

"It's beyond anybody's wildest expectations that we have been able to, with the help of America, really, get our national leaders to pay attention to the issue," declared Candidate Two Percent.

He boasted, with some validity, that his candidacy helped lead "nearly every Republican presidential candidate to commit themselves to an immigration plan that calls for securing our borders." It's true: As his rivals coopted his nativist positions -- even if just rhetorically -- Tancredo became a victim of his own success.

"I am, indeed, pleased as to how this issue has ripened," he continued. "If you think about it, it's enormous the amount of progress we have made -- something, I must admit to you, that stuns even me at this time."

Standing before the TV cameras, in front of a "Team Tancredo" backdrop (made in the U.S.A.!) the former candidate looked about as content as an angry man can get.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002278.html

cartoon: http://davies.lohudblogs.com/files/2007/08/davies082207.jpg

Not a Crime: Undocumented Immigration is a Civil Offense

Just a reminder, although this has been mentioned before. Coming to the U.S. without approved documents is a civil offense... not very different from running a red light. It is not a crime.

It becomes a crime when people are deported and then return again without documents. Unfortunately, for the 30,000 who are detained at the moment, most have not had hearings and remain in limbo for months or years behind bars - clearly actions against the U.S. Constitution.

For those that say "illegal is illegal" --- if you take a closer look at the study of the English language, the same word will have different meanings for different situations.

The illegality of robbing a bank is a thousand times worse than what many people say is illegal immigration.

With the current anti-immigration sentiment, a number of very vocal Americans are morphing the word illegal into something consistently horrible.

Think about the small illegalities we all commit--

how many times have you jaywalked?

how many times have you sent a personal email at work?

how many times have you received too much change for a transaction at a register and didn't say anything?

when you were a child, did you take a candy without paying for it at the store?

have you ever "fudged just a little" on your income tax - was that trip you took last summer really for your work?

have you ever run a yellow light that turned red?

have you ever not made a complete stop at a stop sign?

have you ever driven over the speed limit (even 1 mile over)?

have you ever driven your car with the inspection sticker or registration expired?

have you ever taken a pen or pencil home that belongs to your employer?


all of these behaviors are considered illegal If you can say yes to any of these questions, does that mean you are illegal?

Promoting "Black Face" is OK for ICE

ICE in a bag










Apparently the U.S. Senate thinks it is ok for ICE to have a director that approves of white people appearing in black face at company parties... It must be easy for them to forget all the times that Myers has said that ICE is performs its job with compassion - Remember the Bedford MA ICE raid? Or the prison-like atmosphere of Hutto detention center in Texas? Myers has had excuses for any number of atrocities. Each time I have seen her on television or read about absurd statements (that ICE is doing a great job) in the newspaper I just want to cringe. It's a wonder that our senators could so easily forgive this.

A shade of nepotism? Perhaps it is because Myers is so well connected.. Her uncle is the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, her husband is the U.S. Attorney in Kansas City, MO (a recent appointment, did he replace on of the U.S. attorneys that was driven away by Gonzalez' illegal directives?)

Lastly, for all the African Americans that are developing a hate for immigrants... they should take note of Myer's actions. She is no friend of immigrants or blacks. You might want to check out this article that appeared in the December 19, 2007 edition of the Huffington Post: "The Racist Roots of the Anti-Immigration Movement." http://www.blackagendareport.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=475&Itemid=1

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Senate OKs Myers for Immigration Job
By EILEEN SULLIVAN
The Associated Press
Thursday, December 20, 2007; 12:01 AM

WASHINGTON -- The Senate on Wednesday confirmed Julie L. Myers as director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, two years after President Bush appointed her to the position amid questions about her qualifications to lead the government's second-largest law enforcement agency.

Myers was among more than 30 people whose appointments were approved by a voice vote of the Senate as it concluded its session.

Bush had used a recess appointment in 2005 to put Myers, then 36, in charge of ICE, the branch of the Homeland Security Department that enforces immigration laws, when the Senate appeared unlikely to confirm her. Although she was a former Treasury official and assistant U.S. attorney, lawmakers debated whether she had enough experience to lead the agency.

Critics also noted her personal connections within the Bush administration. She was engaged _ and is now married _ to John F. Wood, who was chief of staff to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and is now the U.S. attorney in Kansas City, Mo. Ret. Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, is her uncle.

Myers herself was Chertoff's chief of staff when he led the Justice Department's criminal division. However, her appointment in 2005 came after Hurricane Katrina, which brought criticism over the experience of those handling the federal response to the disaster.

Her appointment ran into trouble again this fall when she gave the "most original" costume award to a white employee who came to the agency's Halloween party dressed as an escaped prisoner with dreadlocks and darkened skin. The incident drew complaints of racial insensitivity and elicited an apology from Myers.

Sen. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., the Senate's most vocal opponent of Myers' permanent appointment as head of ICE, placed a hold on her nomination after the Halloween incident. The senator's spokeswoman, Adrianne Marsh, said McCaskill "still believes Julie Myers isn't focused enough on employer enforcement and she's not the right pick, but there simply were not enough votes to oppose her nomination."

Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke said the Senate's approval validates Myers' hard work and accomplishments.

ICE was formed after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when parts of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Customs agencies were merged.

___

Associated Press writer Sam Hananel contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/20/AR2007122002805.html
photo: http://www.dkimages.com/discover/previews/783/470544.JPG

How to Keep Immigrants at Home

For those of you who can read Spanish, the article below is about something people have been discussing in the United States regarding immigration. While Gaddafi is not my favorite national leader, the idea is novel. How often have U.S. policymakers said that Mexico should improve its own economy so that its workers can stay at home. Gaddafi is proposing this for Africa, saying that if there are more jobs in their home countries, there will be less people immigrating to Europe.

If only it could be so easy.

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Gaddafi ofrece Libia como plataforma para invertir en otros países africanos
El líder libio anima a las empresas a crear riqueza para reducir la inmigración
MIGUEL ÁNGEL NOCEDA - Madrid - 19 diciembre 2007
El Pais


Muammar el Gaddafi se despidió ayer de España dejando una fórmula para acabar con los problemas de la inmigración. El líder libio, que se dejó fotografiar en grupo con los empresarios españoles que le visitaron en El Pardo, ofreció la posibilidad de aprovechar Libia como plataforma para establecer inversiones y negocios en otros países de África. Así, según Gaddafi, se pueden "desarrollar proyectos a todos los niveles, crear empleos y reducir la pobreza". Sabedor de que la inmigración subsahariana es uno de los graves problemas en España y Europa, no dudó en utilizar ese mensaje para ejercer el papel de caudillo continental.

Gaddafi, que no pudo recibir a la delegación empresarial en su jaima por la lluvia, aseguró a los empresarios que Libia ofrece la seguridad jurídica necesaria para garantizar las inversiones. La verdad es que el bocado que ha destapado en este viaje resulta muy apetitoso. El dinero que reporta el petróleo le permite abordar grandes proyectos "para modernizar el país" y al que difícilmente las empresas pueden dar la espalda. De ahí, la expectación empresarial y el entusiasmo gubernamental. Que se lo digan, si no, a Sacyr, que ha firmado un acuerdo para participar en el desarrollo de las infraestructuras en las que Libia invertirá 50.000 millones de euros en tres años. O al grupo petrolero Repsol, que es la primera empresa privada de Libia después de 20 años de presencia. O a Abengoa, que desde hace 19 tiende cableado eléctrico y trabaja en las traídas de aguas. O a Indra, que está haciendo el nuevo sistema de tráfico aéreo del país, o a Conservas Calvo, o a Mantas Mora... Ahora toca afianzar la posición y lograr nuevos contratos.

Pero Gaddafi quiere más. Ayer se mostró especialmente interesado en que estas empresas sirvan de enganche para que también acudan pequeñas y medianas empresas a su país. El presidente de las Cámaras de Comercio, Javier Gómez Navarro, alabó el crecimiento de Libia y tomó el testigo con un abanico de ofertas en turismo, construcción, textil, electrónica, defensa, además de los hidrocarburos o las infraestructuras. Ganas no faltan y experiencia, tampoco.

También puso condiciones. Pidió que se alcance "cuanto antes" un acuerdo para a evitar la doble imposición (que las empresas que invierten no tributen en los dos países), que ya existe en Francia o Alemania. Gómez Navarro se comprometió a interceder ante el Gobierno. Fuentes consultadas manifestaron que está muy avanzado. Además, se ha llevado cuatro acuerdos: el Acuerdo para la Protección Recíproca de Inversiones, que se ha renovado, y otros, con Exteriores, Defensa e Industria.

photo: http://asapblogs.typepad.com/photos/uncategorized/2007/10/19/immigrants2.jpg

article: http://www.elpais.com/articulo/espana/Gaddafi/ofrece/Libia/plataforma/invertir/otros/paises/africanos/elpepiesp/20071219elpepinac_19/Tes

21st Century Slave Labor in Florida

In the late 1990s when I was doing research for a book I wrote on northern Mexico, I made some good friends who became almost family. I learned so much from them, I don't think I would have a clue to what Mexico is like if it wouldn't have been for their help.

In 2006 they told me the story of a family member who had immigrated to the United States and ended up in a farm where he was held against his will. There were Mexicans and Salvadorian immigrants at this farm. When some of the Salvadorian men tried to rape the young man, he escaped, found help in a nearby town and was able to move on to a more normal type of job.

More recently, the Texas Observer published an article on the same subject "Buy Some Stuff - Enslave Somebody" http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2654.

Why is it that only the Texas Observer and the London Independent are making noise about this problem? I'd be curious who owns the farms that have turned immigrant labor into slave labor.

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Slave labour that shames America
Migrant workers chained beaten and forced into debt, exposing the human cost of producing cheap food

By Leonard Doyle in Immokalee, Florida
London Independent
Published: 19 December 2007


Three Florida fruit-pickers, held captive and brutalised by their employer for more than a year, finally broke free of their bonds by punching their way through the ventilator hatch of the van in which they were imprisoned. Once outside, they dashed for freedom.

When they found sanctuary one recent Sunday morning, all bore the marks of heavy beatings to the head and body. One of the pickers had a nasty, untreated knife wound on his arm. Police would learn later that another man had his hands chained behind his back every night to prevent him escaping, leaving his wrists swollen.

The migrants were not only forced to work in sub-human conditions but mistreated and forced into debt. They were locked up at night and had to pay for sub-standard food. If they took a shower with a garden hose or bucket, it cost them $5.

Their story of slavery and abuse in the fruit fields of sub-tropical Florida threatens to lift the lid on some appalling human rights abuses in America today.

Between December and May, Florida produces virtually the entire US crop of field-grown fresh tomatoes. Fruit picked here in the winter months ends up on the shelves of supermarkets and is also served in the country's top restaurants and in tens of thousands of fast-food outlets.

But conditions in the state's fruit-picking industry range from straightforward exploitation to forced labour. Tens of thousands of men, women and children – excluded from the protection of America's employment laws and banned from unionising – work their fingers to the bone for rates of pay which have hardly budged in 30 years.

Until now, even appeals from the former president Jimmy Carter to help raise the wages of fruit-pickers have gone unheeded. However, with Florida looming as a key battleground during the the next presidential election, there is hope that their cause will be raised by the Democratic candidates Barack Obama and John Edwards.

Fruit-pickers, who typically earn about $200 (£100) a week, are part of an unregulated system designed to keep food prices low and the plates of America's overweight families piled high. The migrants, largely Hispanic and with many of them from Mexico, are the last wretched link in a long chain of exploitation and abuse. They are paid 45 cents (22p) for every 32-pound bucket of tomatoes collected. A worker has to pick nearly two-and-a-half tons of tomatoes – a near impossibility – in order to reach minimum wage. So bad are their working and living conditions that the US Department of Labour, which is not known for its sympathy to the underdog, has called it "a labour force in considerable distress".

A week after the escapees managed to emerge from the van in which they had been locked up for the night, police discovered that a forced labour operation was supplying fruit-pickers to local growers. Court papers describe how migrant workers were forced into debt and beaten into going to work on farms in Florida, as well as in North and South Carolina. Detectives found another 11 men who were being kept against their will in the grounds of a Florida house shaded by palm trees. The bungalow stood abandoned this week, a Cadillac in the driveway alongside a black and chrome pick-up truck with a cowboy hat on the dashboard. The entire operation was being run by the Navarettes, a family well known in the area.

Also near by was the removals van from which Mariano Lucas, one of the first to escape, punched his way through a ventilation hatch to freedom in the early hours of 18 November. With him were Jose Velasquez, who had bruises on his face and ribs and a cut forearm, and Jose Hari. The men told police they had to relieve themselves inside the van. Other migrant workers were kept in other vehicles and sheds scattered around the garden.

Enslaved by the Navarettes for more than a year, the men had been working in blisteringly hot conditions, sometimes for seven days a week. Despite their hard work, they were mired in debt because of the punitive charges imposed by their employer, who is being held on minor charges while a grand jury investigates his alleged involvement in human trafficking.

The men had to pay to live in the back of vans and for food. Their entire pay cheques went to the Navarettes and they were still in debt. They slept in decrepit sheds and vehicles in a yard littered with rubbish. When one man did not want to go to work because he was sick, he was allegedly pushed and kicked by the Navarettes. "They physically loaded him in the van and made him go to work that day. Cesar, Geovanni and Martin Navarette beat him up and as a result he was bleeding in his mouth," a grand jury was told.

The complaint reveals that the men were forced to pay rent of $20 (£10) a week to sleep in a locked furniture van where they had no option but to urinate and defecate in a corner. They had to pay $50 a week for meals – mostly rice and beans with meat perhaps twice a week if they were lucky. The fruit-pickers' caravans, which they share with up to 15 other men, rent for $2,400 a month – more per square foot than a New York apartment – and are less than 10 minutes' walk from the hiring fair where the men show up before sunrise. At least half those who come looking for work are not taken on.

Florida has a long history of exploiting migrant workers. Farm labourers have no protection under US law and can be fired at will. Conditions have barely changed since 1960 when the journalist Edward R Murrow shocked Americans with Harvest Of Shame, a television broadcast about the bleak and underpaid lives of the workers who put food on their tables. "We used to own our slaves but now we just rent them," Murrow said, in a phrase that still resonates in Immokalee today.

For several years, a campaign has been under way to improve the workers' conditions. After years of talks, a scheme to pay the tomato pickers a penny extra per pound has been signed off by McDonald's, the world's biggest restaurant chain, and by Yum!, which owns 35,000 restaurants including KFC, Pizza Hut and Taco Bell. But Burger King, which also buys its tomatoes in Immokalee, has so far refused to participate, threatening the entire scheme.

"We see no legal way of paying these workers," said Steve Grover, the vice-president of Burger King. He complained that a local human rights group, the Coalition of Immokalee Workers "has gone after us because we are a known brand". But he added: "At the end of the day, we don't employ the farmworkers so how can we pay them?"

Burger King will not pay the extra penny a pound that the tomato-pickers are demanding he said. "If we agreed to the penny per pound, Burger King would pay about $250,000 annually, or $100 per worker. How does that solve exploitation and poverty?" he asked.

Burger King is not the only buyer digging in its heels. Whole Foods Market, which recently expanded into Britain with a store in London's upmarket suburb of Kensington, has been discovered stocking tomatoes from one of the most notorious Florida sweatshop producers. Whole Foods ignored an appeal by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers to pay an extra penny a pound for its tomatoes.

In a statement Whole Foods said it was "committed to supporting and promoting economically, environmentally, and socially sustainable agriculture" and supports "the right of all workers to be treated fairly and humanely."

The Democratic candidates for the presidency do not often talk about exploited migrant workers, but there are hints that Barack Obama will visit the Immokalee fruit pickers sometime before Florida's primary election on 5 February.

Jimmy Carter recently joined the campaign to improve the lot of fruit-pickers, appealing to Burger King and the growers "to restore the dignity of Florida's tomato industry". His appeal fell on deaf ears but 100 church groups, including the Catholic bishop of Miami, joined him.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/americas/article3263500.ece
photo: http://polisnyc.files.wordpress.com/2007/01/wholefoods.JPG

Arizona's Irrational Obsession

Why is Arizona's obsession about controlling undocumented immigrants letting it destroy it's economy? Where will all the workers go when their employers have to lay them off due to new Arizona immigration laws that take effect with the new year?

Maybe Texas and New Mexico will be lucky enough to receive these employees who have a better work ethic than most of us U.S. born Americans.

_____

December 18, 2007
EDITORIAL
Blazing Arizona
New York Times

On Jan. 1, Arizona intends to become the first state to try to muscle its way out of its immigration problems on its own. That is when, barring a last-minute setback in court, it is to begin enforcing a new state law that harshly punishes businesses that knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. It is a two-strike law, suspending a business’s license on the first offense and revoking it on the second. It is the strictest workplace-enforcement law in the country.

We have always said that workplace laws should be enforced vigorously — as part of a comprehensive, nationwide immigration system that doesn’t just punish, but tries to actually solve the problems that foster and sustain the breaking of immigration laws. The boosters of the Arizona law, including the Minutemen border vigilantes who have made “January First!” an anti-immigrant rallying cry, have a much narrower goal: the biggest purge of illegal immigrants in the Southwest since the federal government’s Operation Wetback in 1954.

If that happens, the immigrants will take a big chunk of Arizona’s growth and economic vitality with them — and not necessarily back across the international border. The collateral damage will be severe as citizens and legal immigrants are also thrown out of work, as businesses struggle to find workers in a state with a 3.3 percent unemployment rate and as sleazy employers move more workers off the books, the better to abuse and exploit them. And the national problem of undocumented immigration will be no closer to a solution.

There are many compassion-and-common-sense criticisms of Arizona’s Fair and Legal Employment Act: stories about families torn apart, breadwinners deported and citizen children on public assistance. They make little headway with the law-and-order crowd. Nor does the fact that many hard-line defenders of workplace enforcement show a lopsided devotion to federal laws; they seldom complain when employers abuse undocumented immigrants and steal their wages, even though those violations worsen job conditions and pay for American workers, too.

For now, let’s just point out that Arizona’s plunge into enforcement-only immigration policy highlights the folly and inadequacy of that approach, particularly when it is left to a crazy quilt of state laws. America is a country where millions of illegal immigrants have entered for years all but invited and mostly not pursued. They have become integral to our economy, although now — thanks to harsher enforcement and the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress — most have no way to become legal, no options except slipping back into destitution on the other side of the border.

There is no way for Arizona or any other state to get businesses back on a legal footing without exacting a great economic and human toll.

It could be that Arizona’s enforcement of the law will be calm and measured. But we worry about Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and two-thirds of the state’s population. Maricopa’s county attorney, Andrew Thomas, and county sheriff, Joe Arpaio, are prone to media-driven stunts. Sheriff Arpaio makes a show of his meanness, hounding and humiliating prisoners and forming his deputies into squads that check people’s clothes and accents before demanding their papers.

Arizona is home to many moderate politicians, like Gov. Janet Napolitano, who were all too aware of the bill’s problems, and yet it became law. Many say the Minutemen and their allies had offered an ultimatum: approve this bill or face a citizen’s initiative on the 2008 ballot that would be even harsher and blunter, and all but impossible to repair. That promise was reneged on; petitions for the Minutemen’s initiative are being collected now.

As Arizona exacts its punishment on the undocumented workers who have made it so prosperous, it runs the risk of proving itself tough but not smart.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/18/opinion/18tue1.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Rechazo a migrantes trae tensión innecesaria: FCH

Mexican President Calderón calls the demonization of immigrants in the United States a war. That is defintely a first... what can the Mexican government do for the many immigrants on this side?
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Rechazo a migrantes trae tensión innecesaria: FCH
Sergio Jiménez
El Universal

Martes 18 de diciembre de 2007

La intolerancia debilita el desarrollo de América del Norte, afirma el Presidente


sergio.jimenez@eluniversal.com.mx

TIJUANA, BC.— El ambiente de encono e intolerancia en Estados Unidos contra los inmigrantes mexicanos, por considerarlos un problema económico y de seguridad, sólo “genera tensiones innecesarias en la relación bilateral”, advirtió el presidente Felipe Calderón.



“Nada más falso que esta percepción; no sólo es errónea porque genera tensiones innecesarias en la relación bilateral, sino porque debilita el desarrollo de América del Norte en su conjunto” , señaló el mandatario.


“Se equivocan quienes por ignorancia, por mala fe, por interés político o económico buscan presentar a los migrantes o incluso a los mexicanos en general como enemigos de Estados Unidos”, indicó el Presidente.


Durante la conmemoración del Día Internacional del Migrante, y acompañado por el gobernador José Guadalupe Osuna y los secretarios de Gobernación, Francisco Ramírez, y de Seguridad Pública, Genaro García Luna, el Presidente exhortó a todos los sectores a demostrar con hechos que los migrantes mexicanos no son un problema, sino una solución para Estados Unidos.


Calderón aprovechó para anunciar la creación de un programa denominado Repatriación Humana, que entrará en vigor en 2008 y con el que se pretende dar un trato humanitario a quienes son repatriados de EU a México.


Calderón explicó que se busca ofrecer un trato digno a los más de medio millón de mexicanos que son deportados, y consiste en una estrategia de los tres órdenes de gobierno y la sociedad civil.


En 2008 se pondrá en marcha el proyecto piloto en esta ciudad, en donde se proporcionará comida, cobijo, atención médica y se buscará que acrediten su conocimiento en la materia que dominen, además se les ofrecerá trabajo temporal, y formas de comunicación con su familia.


El subsecretario de Población, Fronteras y Asuntos Migratorios de Gobernación, Florencio Salazar, comparó a la migración con la humedad, la cual, dijo, se puede detener temporalmente, pero ésta llegará a su destino con el tiempo.


Cecilia Romero, Comisionada del Instituto Nacional de Migración, dijo que se trabaja para una gestión eficaz y apegada a derecho con el fin de terminar “con la leyenda negra” que hay del maltrato que se le da a migrantes en México.


El presidente Calderón puso en marcha el programa Paisano.


Urge a aprobar reforma penal


Calderón Hinojosa también urgió al Congreso de la Unión a aprobar las reformas constitucionales en materia de seguridad y justicia, para garantizar la convivencia pacífica el país.


Resguardado por un fuerte dispositivo de vigilancia, en la presentación del Programa Integral de Seguridad Pública Estatal y Convivencia Social, Calderón sostuvo que los legisladores ya han podido llegar a acuerdos legislativos, y por ello pidió se considere la reforma de seguridad.

“No quiero dejar de expresar el sentido de urgencia” de la aprobación de las reformas para hacer frente a esta guerra, porque se requieren de instrumentos, manifestó el mandatario.

http://www.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion/156565.html

Ethics in the Campaign

Is it considered bad ethics to demonize people? It is hard for us as a nation to know what is right, ever since our President began using the phrase "axis of evil" to describe certain regimes he does not like. If our governmental leaders are our beacons, then we are in bad shape. These past 7 years our presidential administration has taught us that lying, mis-representation, coercion, torture, and the denial of civil liberties to people living in our country - are considered ethical behaviors.

At least one group in Miami is attempting to counter this wave of hatred. Focusing on the presidential campaign, they are attempting to encourage candidates not to demonize immigrants... At this point, it would be something really significant if they could accomplish this.

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Posted on Tue, Dec. 18, 2007
Clerics: Don't demonize immigrants
Miami Herald

BY LESLEY CLARK
Alarmed by what they called a ''hateful tenor,'' a group of religious leaders, including the former pastor at Miami's Notre Dame D'Haiti Catholic Church, on Monday called on presidential hopefuls to stop demonizing undocumented immigrants.
The call came as immigration emerges as one of the most contentious issues in the presidential race and as Republican candidates, in particular, seek to outflank each other by appearing tough on immigration.

DIVISIVENESS CITED

''Unfortunately, the presidential candidates are allowing themselves to be co-opted into divisiveness rather than offering leadership,'' said Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, a former Miami pastor who now chairs the committee on international policy for the U.S. Catholic bishops.

The Rev. Luis Cortés, the founder of Esperanza USA, a group of Christian Hispanic leaders influential in President Bush's Hispanic outreach efforts, warned that the GOP risks alienating Hispanics -- the fastest growing voting block in the country.

''They're moving away from a Republican position that they previously held as a party of family values,'' said Cortés, who appeared on the call organized by Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform. He suggested Mitt Romney, who has been the most aggressive candidate on illegal immigration, has influenced the other candidates to follow suit.

''It seems Romney put his presidential bid on it, and was able to move Giuliani,'' Cortés said. But he said evangelicals are most ''surprised'' by former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, whom he said ``started with a Biblical position and the minute he moved up in polls, took a step to the right.''

As governor of Arkansas, Huckabee assailed the federal raid of a poultry plant, but earlier this month called for deporting undocumented immigrants who don't return to their home country and fining employers who hire them. His campaign didn't immediately respond to a telephone call or e-mail seeking comment.

A spokeswoman for Romney's campaign said the former Massachusetts governor believes ``legal immigration is a great source of strength for America, but it cannot remain so if we as a nation do not stop illegal immigration.

''This has been the guiding principle he has campaigned on, and it's one that the American people expect from their next president,'' spokesman Kristy Campbell said.

CLOSING BORDER

Giuliani's camp steered a reporter to the former New York mayor's remarks at a Spanish language debate earlier this month in Miami in which he suggested that focusing on closing the border would benefit many immigrants as well as the United States.

''It's no picnic to be living as an illegal immigrant,'' he said at the debate. ``It's a terrible way to live. And even promoting that from the point of view of the illegal immigrant makes no sense.''

But Cortés called the answers at the debate ''hypocrisy,'' noting that the candidates had softened their immigration stances before a largely Hispanic audience.

Wenski suggested the candidates' ire should be directed at Congress, which has failed to pass a comprehensive immigration reform.

Arizona Sen. John McCain backed the measure that failed in the Senate earlier this year.

http://www.miamiherald.com/campaign08/story/348597.html

The Pinocchio Factor: Huckabee and the Arkansas DREAMERS

Huckabee is denying that he endorsed scholarships for DREAMERS as governor of Arkansas. He had been looking like a more humane human being than most of his rivals, but unfortunately, he has decided to join the pack. His nose is growing by the minute.

Even so, at the moment, there is no way he can beat Giuliani or Romney, whose noses are so long they could be used as bridges from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

The GOP in general must think that the American voter is either blind or totally stupid. This type of attitude will bring drastic consequences at the end of the campaign season.

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A Tuition Deal For Immigrants?
Tuesday, December 18, 2007; A04
Washington Post

Now that he has become a front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination, Mike Huckabee is feeling the heat from other Republican candidates, who are scrutinizing his record as governor of Arkansas for evidence of "liberal" or "Democratic" inclinations. One leading rival, Fred D. Thompson, has accused Huckabee of having "championed" an effort to permit illegal immigrants to benefit from in-state tuition rates at state universities. Huckabee has denied the charge, saying that his support was limited to a much more restrictive scholarship program.

Huckabee's denials fly in the face of the record.

THE FACTS
During his annual State of the State address to the Arkansas legislature in January 2005, Huckabee proposed making "any student graduating from a high school in Arkansas" eligible for state financial aid. He said it was "terribly unjust" to deny such aid solely on the basis of a student's immigration status, "a status that he had no decision in and no control over."

"Huckabee plan would aid illegal aliens," the state's leading newspaper, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, reported the following day.

The wording of the governor's proposal was a little vague. A Democratic state legislator, Joyce Elliott, had already proposed legislation granting in-state tuition status to undocumented immigrants. During talks with the governor's staff, Elliott agreed to include a scholarship provision in her bill, which became known as House Bill 1525. She says both parts of the bill were fully supported by Huckabee. "I never had the slightest indication that he wanted any changes," Elliott, who no longer serves in the legislature, said. "He clearly supported the entire bill, and I never heard anything different from them."

Huckabee defended the bill in conversations with reporters and expressed disappointment when the measure failed to pass the Arkansas Senate by two votes. "I don't understand the opposition to it, I just honestly don't," he said, according to an April 14, 2005, Associated Press report. "It hurts me on a personal as well as a policy level to think that we are still debating issues that I kind of hoped we had put aside in the 1960s."

Asked about the measure during the Nov. 28 CNN-YouTube debate, Huckabee said his proposal applied to students who had been in Arkansas schools from the time they were "5 or 6 years old" and were "A-plus" students, "drug and alcohol free," and in the process of "applying for citizenship." He implied that his support was limited to these students, a point reiterated by his spokeswoman Kirsten Fedewa.

"He did not support in-state tuition," Fedewa said in an e-mail. "He supported scholarships for students who qualified."

THE PINOCCHIO TEST
The distinction that Huckabee is attempting to draw is an artificial one. His original State of the State address talked about making all Arkansas high school graduates eligible for state financial aid, not just A-plus students applying for citizenship. Huckabee was particularly interested in the scholarship part of the bill. But it is untrue to claim that he did not support in-state tuition for illegal immigrants. Three Pinocchios.

ONE PINOCCHIO: Some shading of the facts.
TWO PINOCCHIOS: Significant omissions or exaggerations.
THREE PINOCCHIOS: Significant factual errors.
FOUR PINOCCHIOS: Real whoppers.
THE GEPPETTO CHECK MARK: Statements and claims contain the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

article and small pinocchios: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/17/AR2007121702098.html

photo of large pinocchio: http://www1.istockphoto.com/file_thumbview_approve/3517105/2/istockphoto_3517105_pinocchio_superliar.jpg

High School Senior Detained in Roswell, NM

Photo by Mark Wilson




Maybe this is one of those situations that NM Governor Bill Richardson could help. This will show if he is really behind what he says.

Saturday, December 08, 2007

RHS senior deported; parents concerned

Richard Jacques
Staff Writer
Roswell Record
Saturday, December 08, 2007

Angry parents gather outside Roswell High School Friday to protest the deportation of Karina Acosta, a pregnant 18-year-old, to Mexico by U.S. immigration officials Thursday. (Daily Record/Mark Wilson)
U.S. immigration officials deported a pregnant Roswell High School senior after she was pulled from class Wednesday by a local police officer regarding a traffic ticket issued days before.

According to Roswell Police Chief John Balderston, Karina Acosta, 18, was given several days to provide proper identification after being cited for a parking violation and driving without a license on Nov. 29 but failed to do so.

RHS Student Resource Officer Charlie Corn, a 10-year RPD veteran, removed Acosta from class Dec. 5 regarding the traffic violation and detained her at the school before notifying U.S. immigration officials of her illegal status, according to Balderston.

Acosta, who is five months pregnant, was transported to the Chaves County Detention Center, put on hold by the INS and later deported to Mexico, according to Balderston.

"In the course of an investigation, if we determine that someone is not here legally, we will contact INS and tell them what their status is," he said.

Worried about the deportation of the girl and the future security of other illegal immigrant students at RHS, Acosta's mother and nearly 50 members of the Hispanic community gathered at the RHS Little Theater, and later the Roswell Police Department, to voice their concerns.

"The kids are scared now because this thing happened, so we need your help," said Maria Rodriguez to Balderston during a meeting in an RPD conference room Friday afternoon.

At the meeting, Balderston listened to complaints about Corn, including allegations he targets Hispanics. Balderston agreed to meet further with representatives from the Hispanic community and Corn in an effort to ease relations and eliminate any problems or misconceptions that might exist.

"If you don't trust us then we need to do some more work here," said Balderston, who will retire Jan. 4.

Roswell Independent School District Assistant Superintendent Mike Kakuska said the RISD has officially protested Acosta's arrest with the INS and the Mexican Consulate.

"We are very, very concerned as a public school as to what happened the other day," said Kakuska, addressing a group of about 50 parents who gathered at RHS Friday morning. "The police officer, without our knowledge, had this young lady brought into his office here at school and the detain orders were issued through him, not the Roswell schools."

In the lengthy open meeting that lasted more than one hour, Kakuska and other school officials, including RHS Principal Brian Shea, answered questions and notified those in attendance that Corn has been removed as an SRO.

"The Roswell Independent School system did not support the decision of this officer to have this young lady arrested," said Kakuska.

In a joint decision by the RPD and RISD, all SROs have been removed from RISD schools. Both Balderston and Kakuska maintain that despite the incident, no contention exists between the RISD and the RPD.

"We're going to work through this and I wish I can say that it's not going to happen again, but I can't. The officers are going to enforce the law," said Balderston.

School officials said Acosta was on course to graduate in the spring.

http://roswell-record.com/main.asp?FromHome=1&TypeID=1&ArticleID=19403&SectionID=49&SubSectionID=112

9 Things Every DREAMER Should Know

If you are undocumented please read the following information:

If you do not have legal immigration status in the United States, you are at risk. Keep these points in mind:

1. If approached by immigration authorities, do not sign any papers and do not talk to them unless you check with a lawyer first.

2. Stay out of trouble with the law. This means don't speed (especially in school zones), do not run yellow lights, be sure to halt completely at stop signs. DRIVE DEFENSIVELY - it has been known that some DREAMERS who are involved in auto accidents that are not their fault have still been deported. In some places, police will hand your name over to immigration authorities. In many places, the police will not do that – but if you commit a crime, that will make it harder to get legal status in the future.

3. If you are charged with a crime, make sure your lawyer knows your immigration status. That will allow them to best help you.

4. Don’t cross the border. Once you leave the country, you can’t legally re-enter the U.S.

5. If you are working illegally, you should still pay taxes. This will improve your chances of getting legal papers in the future.

6. If you’re male, register for the “Selective Service” when you turn 18. The immigration police will NOT see your information. Like paying taxes, this will make it easier to get legal papers in the future.

7. If at all possible, try to become a legal resident.

8. Having a child will not help you become legal. Some people believe this, but it is not true. A child can only help its parent get papers if the child is over 21 years old.

9. Do not lie and say you are a U.S. citizen when you are not. This could hurt your chances of ever getting a green card or get you deported.


http://www.scribd.com/doc/862294/Youth-Handbook

The New Yorker and the Nativist: Part III

Lindsay Graham: "There’s a fine line between being upset about violating the law and appearing to be upset about someone’s last name.”

Graham has it right, or almost so. The line between immigration law and racism has been blurred. Since when is it ok to lash out at children, call people names (publicly) and tell everyone the apocalypse is coming because all the Mexicans are here? The United States is ill with a virus that is spreading so quickly, we can't tell who is ill and who is not anymore. Some immigrants who have been here a while are saying nasty things about more recent immigrants (see post "The Righteous Immigrant") - the caustic atmosphere is just about everywhere. There is no vaccination that can stop the epidemic. Almost all of us have been contaminated with hatred. What is even more unfortunate is that we are not even aware this has happened. We think it's about the law, limited resources, and national cohesion - but it's really about the fear of darker skinned people and what they might do to (what we perceive as) our pristine country. If this would not be true, the undocumented Irish would be rounded up in hoards...

The Political Scene
Return of the Nativist
Behind the Republicans’ anti-immigration frenzy.
by Ryan Lizza December 17, 2007
The New Yorker


Continued


Besides McCain, who was the original Republican sponsor of the comprehensive immigration bill, South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham is the Republican most associated with the legislation. Graham negotiated the details of the final version of the bill, which went down to defeat, and as a consequence he has become a target of ridicule on the talk-radio right. On the afternoon of the YouTube debate, Buddy Witherspoon, a Republican National Committeeman, was finishing a two-day tour of South Carolina, announcing his campaign to run against Graham in the June Republican primary. Witherspoon’s sole issue is immigration. After watching McCain’s testy forum at Clemson, I travelled a hundred and twenty miles to see Witherspoon in Aiken, a town of about thirty thousand. I found him setting up for his speech in front of a government office building at the end of an alley that abutted a shopping thoroughfare where tourists occasionally passed in a horse-and-buggy, casting curious glances. Exactly thirteen people were there to listen to him, including a ten-year-old who had accompanied his grandmother.

Dean Allen, a plump and friendly fellow sporting an American-flag tie, told me that he runs something called Spirit of Liberty; he’s also helping Witherspoon’s campaign. “Some of these people may be coming in here to get jobs washing dishes, but some of them are coming in here to hijack airplanes,” he explained. “If you’re down there trying to look at the people coming across the border, maybe a lot of them are just motivated by economics, and they want a job washing dishes or cutting grass. But I can’t tell Jose Cuervo from the Al Qaeda operatives by looking at them, because they cut their beard off. It’s like trying to get fly manure out of pepper without your glasses on, you know? I mean, not a racist thing, but they’re all brown with black hair and they don’t speak English and I don’t speak Arabic or Spanish, so if they don’t belong here and they don’t come here legally, I want to know who’s here.” He echoed McCain’s observation that the anti-immigrant feeling is strongest in states with new Hispanic populations. “The illegal Hispanic population, it’s definitely growing,” he said. “I can tell you just from how many you see when you walk in Wal-Mart, and you drive down the street and you see buildings now with writing in Spanish that says ‘tienda,’ which is Mexican for ‘store.’ You didn’t see that even a year or two ago.”

After speaking for forty-five minutes, Witherspoon walked across the street with me to Tako Sushi and we sat outside, where heat lamps warmed us. Witherspoon is tall and bald, and he spoke quickly, like a man full of opinions he’s been eager to vent. In his speech, he had run through many of the issues that have been festering on the right: the Law of the Sea treaty; an alleged plan to combine Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a super-state; the Patriot Act. But he was most exercised about immigration and about Lindsey Graham’s betrayal on that issue. “There’s a lot of unrest in South Carolina,” he told me gravely. “And people are concerned that the Senator no longer represents the views of mainstream South Carolinians in a lot of ways. Immigration is the No. 1 issue, no question there. We’re concerned about illegal immigrants coming in here and—well, under the Bush Administration, it’s now seven years into his term, and he hasn’t done a lot about it.” He was not impressed by Bush’s big-tent philosophy of courting Hispanics as the future of the Republican Party. “The big tent is great. But that doesn’t mean ’cause it’s a big tent you should include everything under the tent.”

When I talked to Graham a couple of days later, he did not sound alarmed by the Witherspoon challenge. With more than four million dollars in his campaign account, he can afford to be somewhat, but perhaps not entirely, relaxed. His pollster, Whit Ayres, has been monitoring the issue closely, and Graham was eager to share the results. His role in the immigration debate has indeed hurt him. “What’s happened for me is my negatives have gone up about ten points,” he told me. “My approval rating has come down about eight or nine points. That’s the consequence to me.”

But the numbers told another story, too. Graham read me one of the questions that his pollster asked about immigration. The poll tested voters’ opinion of three different proposals to deal with illegal immigrants: “arrest and deport”; “allow them to be temporary workers, as long as they have a job”; “fine them and allow them to become citizens only if they learn English and get to the back of the line.” In two separate polls, the majority supported the third option. The average for the first option was only twenty-six per cent.

“What it tells me is that the emotion of the twenty-six per cent is real, somewhat understandable, but if not contained could destroy our ability to grow the Party,” he said. “And I don’t think you need to be a rocket scientist to figure out that if you’re going to win a general election you have to do well with Hispanic voters as a Republican.” He continued, “My concern is that we’re going to have an honest but overly emotional debate about immigration, and we’ll say things for the moment, in the primary chase, that will make it very difficult for us to win in November. There’s a fine line between being upset about violating the law and appearing to be upset about someone’s last name.”

Graham, who is one of McCain’s staunchest supporters, had not yet seen a new poll by the Pew Hispanic Center, which reported that the gains made among Hispanic voters during the Bush era have now been erased. Nevertheless, he had a warning for Republicans: “Those politicians that are able to craft a message tailored to the moment but understanding of the long-term consequences to the country and to the Party are the ones that are a blessing. And the ones who live for the moment and don’t think about long-term consequences, demographic changes, over time have proven to have been more of a liability than an asset.” He added, “Be careful of chasing the rabbit down a hole here.” ♦

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/17/071217fa_fact_lizz

The New Yorker and the Nativist: Part II

The Political Scene
Return of the Nativist
Behind the Republicans’ anti-immigration frenzy.
by Ryan Lizza December 17, 2007
The New Yorker


Continued

Another catalyst was the peculiar dynamics of this year’s Republican Presidential campaign. In 1999, when Bush made his initial foray into Presidential politics, he already had credibility with conservatives, largely based on his tax-cut promises and his religious convictions. It gave him latitude to be heretical on other issues. By contrast, the 2008 Presidential campaign features five leading Republican candidates, each of whom is viewed with suspicion by at least part of the so-called base. Unlike Bush in 1999 and 2000, Romney, Giuliani, Huckabee, McCain, and Thompson have spent most of the campaign trying to establish their bona fides with conservatives. The effect has been to push the field farther to the right, especially on immigration.

Anti-immigrant passion also owes much to the disproportionate influence of a few small states in the nominating process. National polls show that, as an issue, immigration is far behind the Iraq war, terrorism, the economy, and health care as a concern to most Americans; a recent Pew poll shows that, nationally, only six per cent of voters offer immigration as the most important issue facing the country. But in Iowa and South Carolina, two of the three most important early states, it is a top concern for the Republicans who are most likely to vote. “It’s the influx of illegals into places where they’ve never seen a Hispanic influence before,” McCain told me. “You probably see more emotion in Iowa than you do in Arizona on this issue. I was in a town in Iowa, and twenty years ago there were no Hispanics in the town. Then a meatpacking facility was opened up. Now twenty per cent of their population is Hispanic. There were senior citizens there who were—‘concerned’ is not the word. They see this as an assault on their culture, what they view as an impact on what have been their traditions in Iowa, in the small towns in Iowa. So you get questions like ‘Why do I have to punch 1 for English?’ ‘Why can’t they speak English?’ It’s become larger than just the fact that we need to enforce our borders.”

Mike Huckabee is the latest victim of the Republican shift on the immigration issue. We talked on what should have been a happy day for Huckabee. According to at least one poll, he had taken the lead from Romney in Iowa, and was enjoying a sustained burst of positive media coverage. “Oh, man, it’s been unbelievable,” he said in his winning, Gomer Pyle-like voice. “We’re up in New Hampshire and I’ve got more press coming to the events than I’ve got people. I’m not kidding. It’s unbelievable. We have so many people coming we can’t fit them in the places.” But Huckabee’s excitement was tempered by Romney’s persistent attacks on his immigration record as governor of Arkansas, and he seemed to be grappling with the intensity of the question among Republicans. “It does appear to be the issue out here wherever we are,” he told me. “Nobody’s asked about Iraq—doesn’t ever come up. The first question out of the box, everywhere I go—Iowa, New Hampshire, South Carolina, Florida, Texas, it doesn’t matter—is immigration. It’s just red hot, and I don’t fully understand it.”

Romney has not been similarly reflective in trying to discern the source of the issue’s power. Rather, he has quickly and easily adopted the negative code words of the anti-immigration movement—“sanctuary cities,” “amnesty”—and has tried to attach them to Giuliani and Huckabee. In doing so, he became the first top-tier candidate to seize the Tancredo mantle. My own sense, from talking to Huckabee, a Southern populist, and McCain, a border-state senator, is that they are genuinely appalled by Romney’s tactics, not only because of the damage to their campaigns but also because of the damage they believe he’s doing to the Party’s image. Romney’s communications director, Matt Rhoades, said, “Both Senator McCain and Governor Huckabee have decided that to win in 2008, Republicans need to be more like the Democrats when it comes to illegal immigration. That’s the wrong course. McCain-Kennedy”—Edward Kennedy was a sponsor of the initial legislation—“was the wrong course. Governor Huckabee’s plan to give tuition breaks to illegal immigrants was the wrong course. America doesn’t need two politicians with records on illegal immigration that are in tune with Senator Clinton.”

“He’s clearly distorted my record as well as my position,” Huckabee told me. “But I’m not interested in getting in a war with him to see which of us can be the meanest son of a gun running for President.” He went on, “My experience has been—not just in politics but in any realm of life—when people keep saying something over and over, and louder and louder, it’s to compensate that they don’t want you to know that’s really never what they believed.” Nevertheless, last week, Huckabee, too, found his inner Tancredo: he announced the Secure America Plan, which included tough language about enforcement and pressuring illegal immigrants to return home. This leaves McCain as the only Republican candidate who hasn’t folded in the face of Romney’s attacks. At the press lunch in Virginia, after McCain had discussed his warm relations with several candidates, a reporter asked about Romney. “I’ve never known him,” McCain said icily. “I’ve never had a relationship with him.”

Barack Obama, during a recent interview with the editorial board of the Boston Globe, predicted that the Republicans will run next fall on two issues: terrorism and immigration. When I asked a leading Republican strategist and former Bush lieutenant if he agreed, he said merely, “I hope not.” He argued that it was incorrect to think that immigration was the second most important challenge facing the United States. “We need to address other issues, like the economy, health care, and education,” he said. When I asked Tancredo if he was leading his party “over a cliff” or “to the promised land,” he laughed and said, “I see manna out there.”

The evidence so far, though, points to a cliff. In several election contests in the past two years, Republicans tried and failed to deploy immigration as a campaign weapon. This November, Republicans in Virginia and New York who ran on the issue were defeated. Not even Eliot Spitzer’s misbegotten plan to issue driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants, which was thought to be ruinous for Democrats, has damaged the Democratic Party; rather, the Party increased its numbers in local races around the state. McCain says that last year he saw how toothless the issue was in Arizona. “Congressman J. D. Hayworth had a pretty good opponent,” he said of the former Republican from Arizona, who lost his seat in the 2006 midterm election. “J.D. ran just on the issue of immigration, in a moderate but Republican district. Arizona State University is there, in Phoenix. And J.D. got beat by four points in the general election. There was a guy who was going to take Jim Kolbe’s seat”—an Arizona congressman who retired last year. “Jim was there twenty years, and had always carried the district well. The Republican candidate was another one where immigrant, immigration, anti-illegal immigration was his theme. He lost by twelve points. So I think there is a lesson in some of those elections when people use anti-immigration as a major part of their campaign. But I also know that it galvanizes a certain part of the Republican Party.”

Far from fearing the immigration issue, some Democratic strategists are quietly cheering how the subject has played out. Simon Rosenberg, a Democratic strategist who has closely studied the politics of the issue, says simply, “The Bush strategy—enlightened on race, smart on immigration, developed in Texas and Florida with Jeb Bush—has been replaced by the Tancredo-Romney strategy, which is demonizing and scapegoating immigrants, and that is a catastrophic event for the Republican Party...”

Continued in "The New Yorker and the Nativist: Part III"





http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/17/071217fa_fact_lizz

The New Yorker and the Nativist: Part I

Perhaps this cartoon should read "The GOP read books beyond it's capacity; and this was the result." Will the GOP be smashed for mis-reading the U.S. Constitution?

The Political Scene
Return of the Nativist
Behind the Republicans’ anti-immigration frenzy.
by Ryan Lizza December 17, 2007
The New Yorker

Once upon a time, John McCain was favored to win the Republican nomination. His straight-talking appeal and his cultivation of the Republican Party’s right wing put him first—at least in the early conventional wisdom. Then, last summer, his campaign seemed to spontaneously combust in a puff of fund-raising troubles and staff intrigue. But McCain has slowly made his way back into contention. The usual line is that he has done it by being “the old McCain,” the one that New Hampshire voters (and many journalists) fell for during his 2000 Presidential run. Unlike Mitt Romney, the former Massachusetts governor, or Rudy Giuliani, the former New York mayor, two of his chief competitors, he holds a press conference after nearly every campaign event. Just before a recent trip to South Carolina, he invited a dozen reporters for lunch at his Arlington, Virginia, campaign headquarters (on the thirteenth floor, naturally).

Rather than trying to woo religious conservatives, an awkward alliance at best, McCain is focussing more on his natural base of independents (in New Hampshire) and veterans (in South Carolina). Instead of trying to run a by-the-numbers conservative campaign, he is emphasizing issues on which he has taken what he believes to be principled but unpopular positions. He is the only one in the Republican field who seems eager to talk about Iraq. “My friends, here’s the news,” he told a small crowd in Seneca, South Carolina, a few days after returning from Thanksgiving with the troops. “We are winning in Iraq. We are winning in Iraq. We are winning in Iraq.”

Over lunch in Arlington, McCain had given the stock explanation for what caused last summer’s difficulties. “The problem, which was my problem, was that our fiscal expectations weren’t met by reality,” he said—in other words, he couldn’t raise enough money. But the next day, as I travelled with McCain around South Carolina, he told me that his campaign’s brush with death had less to do with fund-raising than with his role in championing the ambitious immigration-reform bill, supported by the White House, that died in Congress this year. “It wasn’t the budgetary problems. That was an inside-the-Beltway thing,” he said, referring to press coverage of his campaign’s setbacks. McCain gets animated whenever he discusses the immigration issue. After a town-hall meeting in Anderson, South Carolina, he recalled how the Irish were discriminated against in America. As he quoted a placard that hangs on the wall of an aide’s office (“Help Wanted—No Irish Need Apply”), he jabbed his finger in the air with such emphasis that he knocked my voice recorder to the ground and erased our conversation. “It was immigration” that hurt his campaign, he said when he continued, after a series of apologies on both sides. “I understand that. I was told by one of the pollsters, ‘We see real bleeding.’ ”

There were two major factions in the immigration debate in Congress. A bipartisan coalition wanted a bill that included tough border-security measures, which everyone favored, as well as more controversial provisions concerning temporary-worker permits for undocumented aliens and a way for them to attain citizenship. Conservatives, led by Tom Tancredo, a Colorado congressman and Presidential candidate, demanded a bill that dealt only with security. McCain seems torn by how to address the issue, and he makes a small but telling concession to the Tancredo faction when he argues that security legislation must indeed come first. “You’ve got to do what’s right, O.K.?” he told me. “But, if you want to succeed, you have to adjust to the American people’s desires and priorities.”

During another conversation, when I asked McCain what he had learned from the arguments about immigration, he said, “I think the main lesson is that Americans had no trust or confidence in the government. So when we said, as part of this comprehensive solution, we need to secure the borders, add temporary workers, and address the twelve million people here, they just didn’t believe us, O.K.?” He argued that the mismanaged response after Hurricane Katrina, the Washington corruption scandals such as those involving the lobbyist Jack Abramoff, and unchecked government spending had undermined public confidence. “So what you have to do is prove to them that you’re going to secure the borders. And then I think that at least most of them—except for the Tancredos, who want to stop all immigration—would say, ‘O.K., I’m going to address these other issues.’ ”

McCain’s standard answer to immigration questions is that he “got the message.” But every so often this practical McCain, bending to the mood of the primary electorate, gets shoved aside by the quixotic McCain, the one who never seems happier than when he’s championing a lost cause. At one stop in South Carolina, at Clemson University, a student engaged McCain in an argument about whether his plan rewarded illegal immigrants for breaking the law. McCain was by then in a combative mood. Minutes earlier, a professor had asked about a piece of Internet-crime legislation that he argued would group terrorism researchers with actual terrorists. “Am I a terrorist?” the professor asked, his querulous tone suggesting that McCain hadn’t answered the original question. The questioner was wearing tennis shoes, jeans, a pink polo shirt, and a gray blazer, and McCain looked at him carefully. “With those sneakers, you’re not a snappy dresser,” McCain replied after a pause, as audience members gasped and laughed. “That doesn’t mean you’re a terrorist. Though you terrorize the senses.” To the student with the immigration question, McCain patiently explained that some illegal immigrants had faced unusual circumstances, and he mentioned a woman who has lived in the United States for decades and has a son and a grandson serving in Iraq. When the student said that he wanted to see punishment meted out to anyone who has broken the law, McCain stopped trying to find common ground. “If you’re prepared to send an eighty-year-old grandmother who’s been here seventy years back to some country, then frankly you’re not quite as compassionate as maybe I am,” he said. Next question.

McCain could stop discussing the controversial parts of his immigration plan or he could drop his support for them altogether, admitting that he was simply wrong, as Romney has done with abortion and other issues. I asked McCain about Romney, who had once expressed support for the comprehensive legislation backed by the Bush Administration—it sounded “reasonable,” he’d said—but now rails against it as “amnesty.” McCain said, “Both he and Rudy had the same position I did. In fact, Rudy was even more liberal. But, look, if that—” He paused and shrugged. “I don’t want to be President that bad.”

Later that night, at the CNN/YouTube debate in St. Petersburg, Florida, immigration declared itself the dominant and obsessive issue of the Republican primaries, and the issue also clarified some essential differences among the candidates. The two formerly moderate Northeasterners, Romney and Giuliani, taunted each other about who was tougher on illegal immigrants. On the other side were McCain and Mike Huckabee, the former Arkansas governor, who told their opponents that illegal immigrants “need some of our love and compassion” (McCain) and that “we are a better country than to punish children for what their parents did” (Huckabee). The Romney-Giuliani exchange prompted Tancredo, whose platform calls for restrictions even on legal immigration, to giddily declare that his opponents were trying to “out-Tancredo Tancredo.”

The emergence of Trancredoism as an ideological touchstone for two Republican front-runners is a stunning development, another indication of the Party’s rejection of nearly everything associated with the approach taken by George W. Bush. As a border-state governor, Bush boasted of his relationship with Vicente Fox, who became the President of Mexico, and he and his political adviser Karl Rove later argued that Republicans needed a pro-Latino vision for immigration reform. His strategy of cultivating immigrants as integral to the future of the Party seemed to work, and Bush did surprisingly well with Latino voters: in 2004, he won some forty per cent of their vote—double what Bob Dole achieved just eight years earlier.

In the late nineteen-nineties, when the Republican Party began embracing Bush’s pro-immigrant message, Tom Tancredo was a relatively anonymous backbencher. “When I first started on this, when I came to Congress, nine years ago, I found that I could get few, if anyone, to pay attention to the issue,” Tancredo told me as he was being ferried between campaign events in New Hampshire. “I remember going into a Republican conference meeting and asking if I could show a video that a night-vision camera had taken of people coming across the border in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument, in Arizona. You had all of these campers parked, people sleeping, and in between were probably hundreds and hundreds of people, most of them carrying guns. And I was showing this and it was two hundred and twenty-two members of the Republican conference, and there were four left at the end of it. And it was a three-minute video. They walked out murmuring things, you know”—he made a mumbling sound—“ ‘immigration, immigration, immigration.’ ”

When I asked Tancredo about Bush’s argument that Republicans risked losing a generation of Hispanic voters if they adopted an immigration policy that many regard as nativist, he laughed and said, “It doesn’t seem to be holding its own very well, considering what happened the other night at the debate. If you think for a moment that Romney, Giuliani, and Thompson”—Fred Thompson, the former Tennessee senator—“haven’t polled the heck out of this thing, you’re wrong. They have. And they are there now because the polls tell them this is where they should be.”

The rise of Tancredoism has been aided and abetted by a number of factors, including an absence of strong leadership in the Republican Party and the greatly diminished power and popularity of the President, whose approval ratings fell as the war in Iraq went wrong and the government failed to act effectively after Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf Coast. In December, 2005, the nativist wing of the G.O.P. in the House—marginalized by Bush’s semi-successful rebranding of his party as progressive on immigration—passed legislation requiring seven hundred miles of fence along the Mexican border, and reclassified as felons illegal immigrants. (The bill set off huge immigrants’-rights protests in dozens of cities in 2006.) The post-Bush, pre-Tancredo era of the Republican Party had begun...

Continued in "The New Yorker and the Nativist: Part II"

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/12/17/071217fa_fact_lizza?printable=true

cartoon: http://www.law.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/impeach/Cartoon-Constit.jpg

The Man Who Saved Texas HB 1403 is Running for U.S. Senate

This blog is not so much about endorsing candidates, however I can't help but want to support Noriega for Senate after he has done so much for DREAMERS in Texas.

The world of Texas politics was more in-tune with it's varied population in the time of Ralph Yarborough... but as many have said, most blue dog Democrats ran to the the suburbs once they saw their party embrace civil rights.

Noriega is just one guy, but maybe, if he is elected it could start a national trend. Wouldn't it be something if more than 2 or 3 U.S. Senators actually had some compassion - after the negative vote on SCHIP and the DREAM ACT, I really wonder where their hearts are (or if they have a heart).

I have it from reliable sources that Noriega has always been a good guy. While he is still a politician, he is ethical and compassionate - a rarity on the beltway.

_____

Boots on the Ground

VETERAN RICK NORIEGA STANDS UP TO BUSH, CORNYN, AND THE IRAQ WAR.

Jan Reid | December 14, 2007 | Features
Texas Observer


Rick Noriega, the Democratic Houston legislator and candidate for U.S. Senate, is tall, trim, handsome, and bald. The National Guard lieutenant colonel, 49, was working a small crowd of San Antonio Democrats and donors this past September with both the habitual shoulders-back posture of a career soldier and the fluid ease of a onetime junior college infielder. “I’m nobody’s Don Quixote,” he told me in a later interview, acknowledging the odds against his turning out Texas’ incumbent junior senator, Republican John Cornyn. “I’m too old to go off tilting at windmills. But I’m fed up.”

Though Noriega addresses many issues, the heart of his campaign is the mess that George W. Bush, neocon ideologues, and apologists like Cornyn have made of the war in Iraq. The challenger’s campaign logo, and metaphor, is a dusty pair of Army combat boots—a pointed distinction between himself and Cornyn. On seeing American hostages humiliated in Tehran by Iranian militants in 1979, when he was 21, Noriega joined the Guard as a private in a burst of conviction that he had to do something. He was a corporal when he won an ROTC scholarship at the University of Houston. Nearing 30, after a decade of work for the Texas Insurance Commission, he was accepted by the John F. Kennedy School of Public Affairs at Harvard. After graduate school, he came back to Houston, ran a losing race for the state House of Representatives at 32, worked as an aide of Houston state Sen. John Whitmire, got a job lobbying the Legislature for a public utilities firm, then ran again for the House and won in 1998. After 9/11, by then a major, Noriega was called up in 2004 and sent to Afghanistan to command an infantry unit with a lineage that goes back to the Alamo.


Democrats know why they want to vote politicians like Cornyn out of office. But not since Ann Richards have Texas Democrats fielded a major candidate who inspired them to weather a long, uphill fight and in the end turn out to vote. Could this great-grandson of Mexican immigrants be the one? Noriega has a compelling story. But can he get it told to hundreds of thousands of people, including the necessary independents and crossover Republicans?

Cornyn, whom Bush nicknamed “Corndog” when Bush was Texas’ governor, barks at anyone, including GOP Senate colleagues, who dares criticize the president’s rationale and conduct of his self-proclaimed War on Terror. Cornyn has toed the administration lines on Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, and torture. But Cornyn, a 55-year-old native of San Antonio, was too young to have to make any personal decisions about service in Vietnam, and in the post-draft era he plunged into law school and a practice defending against medical malpractice suits, setting his sights on a district court seat that became his springboard to a GOP career. He was elected attorney general in 1998 and U.S. senator in 2002, pulled along in both races by Bush’s popularity in Texas and the guidance and grooming of Karl Rove. For all his hawkish bluster, Cornyn has never had to risk his neck under fire or even stand for a military inspection.

Since Noriega wears fatigues and boots as a reserve member of the Army, he cannot afford to overstate his rebukes of his commander-in-chief. He doesn’t have to. Today Bush has little support for his vision and execution of the war outside stalwarts of the Republican Party. Noriega’s chance at winning his race for the Senate depends on cultivating widespread disgust with this administration, even in the GOP bastion of Texas, and convincing voters that Cornyn, in the interest of his own survival, has careened even further than Bush toward extremism and bile.

On Capitol Hill, Cornyn has won (or been awarded) committee assignments on armed services, the budget, ethics, and the judiciary. Those forums offer a wealth of free exposure on national television. As Bush’s partisan, he has argued like some magisterial, lantern-jawed prelate in the Inquisition. On his home turf, he hasn’t projected the stature of Kay Bailey Hutchison, much less a Lyndon Johnson or Ralph Yarborough. His negatives are high for an incumbent, his name recognition low. In acknowledgment of the fast-approaching day when this presidency is history, Cornyn has lately broken not only with Bush, but with his Senate mentor John McCain by seizing on the issue that ultraconservative Republicans believe can turn back the tide begun by the 2006 elections—resentment and fear of illegal Mexican immigrants. The nativism is a strategy of short-term gain that will come back to haunt the Republican Party when a majority of Texans are of Latino heritage. For now, Cornyn heads into his race with nightly snarls of agreement from pundits like Pat Buchanan and Lou Dobbs, and a campaign war chest of $6.6 million provided by a who’s who of corporate interests. And white males have a history of being the voters most inclined to participate in Texas general elections.


As Noriega worked the room of La Margarita Restaurant that noontime in September, his fundraising total since joining the race three months earlier had reached only $531,000. He could not be certain he would even get the chance to oppose Cornyn in the 2008 election. First he had to overcome an amiable San Antonio trial lawyer named Mikal Watts, who had put $7.5 million of his own money into a Democratic primary race and had raised over a million more from donors. For the San Antonio fundraiser, Noriega’s team had circulated invitations with an A-list of local Democratic sponsors—chief among them Henry and Mary Alice Cisneros. “This is a very impressive list,” noted a crusty partisan who asked a longtime friend seated at our table if she would pass on a crumpled pair of $100 bills to the candidate. “But they’re not here.”
I was acquainted with the woman who’d been asked to pass on her friend’s $200. She had been at the forefront of the city’s progressive battles for many years. I poked a chip at salsa and mildly asked her what she thought of the San Antonio lawyer in the race. Given her knowledge of politics and its players, her reply mystified me. “I don’t know anybody who’d ever heard of him.”

The Democrats who were curious about Noriega had taken seats in a crescent around the back of the room. Carla Vela, who chairs the Bexar County Democratic Party, stood and complimented Noriega but stressed that their position in the primary had to be firmly neutral. After the introductions, Noriega quit the podium and microphone because the distance between himself and his audience would have been a fair throw to first base for the shortstop he once was at Alvin Community College. The National Guard battalion that Noriega commands is headquartered in San Antonio; a number of members had come downtown in support. Noriega began, “We live in the most wonderful nation in the history of the Earth.” A few people clapped, doing no damage to their hands.

Noriega said he wanted to share the story of a woman who in 1916 was an economic refugee of Mexico. “She crossed through Eagle Pass, Texas, and found her way with her son to Houston. Her son died, and she raised her grandchildren. One of her grandchildren went off to the Army, joined the 82nd Airborne. He came back to Houston and fell in love with a girl from Magnolia Park. They married and had three children. Neither of the parents graduated from high school, but they dedicated their lives to those three children, and all three of them graduated from college. The middle child went off to the East Coast and got a master’s degree at Harvard. He also followed his father’s footsteps into military service. He enlisted as a private, and over the years he rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel. And he has the opportunity to stand before you today and say that he is a candidate for the United States Senate.”

Just then, a loud cell phone went off at the table of the Bexar County Democrats. Vela announced “an emergency at the office,” they all clambered to their feet, and in odd concert they bolted for the stairs. “Leave a check at the door,” Noriega called after them, laughing gamely.

Lurching back on message, he introduced a Mexican-American firefighter in the audience and said they’d been sharing memories. The man is a first sergeant in the battalion Noriega commands. In 2005 they were training Afghan soldiers outside Kabul, and because of that country’s long war against the Soviet Union, those austere plains are some of the most heavily mined terrain on Earth. One day some soldiers who lived in the next tent over from Noriega’s were scouting for new training sites and set off one of those old Russian mines. Noriega had been in telephone or e-mail contact with his wife almost daily, but combat fatalities impose on their units a 72-hour blackout of all communication back home, so the victims’ next of kin can be properly notified. Melissa Noriega, who served in her husband’s legislative seat while he was overseas and is now a popular Houston City Council member, saw the crawl of newsprint across the CNN screen that four American soldiers had been killed on a training mission outside Kabul. She knew it had to be her husband’s battalion.


“This man,” Noriega said of John Cornyn, “does not understand what it’s like for families when a heart sinks every time the phone or doorbell rings, when a wife and mother is cleaning the house because she doesn’t know if all at once their relatives might be coming for a funeral.” The room got very quiet. “I’m running,” Noriega went on, “because this senator has never had to walk the walk. I’m proud of the people I served with over there. Some went straight from peacekeeping in Kosovo to an all-out fight in Anbar. Many have been back over there two or three times, and it’s my responsibility to make sure the ones in my command are trained and ready to go back in the breach in about 36 months. Because if my soldiers are not properly trained and something bad happens to them, I’m the one responsible. If something bad happens ...” Noriega again spoke the name of the firefighter and first sergeant, then left a very long pause. People set down glasses of water and tea and gave the politician a closer look. His eyes gleamed; the tears were real. Then he regained his composure and finished off with trite clichés of what they could all accomplish together in this campaign.

That day Noriega acknowledged Mikal Watts only with an indirect remark that a checkbook is not a qualification. The woman at my table had never heard of Watts because, it turns out, the state’s political press corps might have more accurately described him as a San Antonio newcomer who made his mark and fortune as a Corpus Christi lawyer. In Nueces County politics, he won special Democratic favor in 2006 by pouring contributions into the winning race for the Legislature of Juan Garcia, who as a Harvard law student was a roommate of Barack Obama. Also in 2006, Watts raised over $1 million for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. New York’s junior senator, Charles Schumer, was among those who encouraged the lawyer to think about making the race. But over the summer the Houston Chronicle produced a copy of a 2001 letter in which Watts had advised a legal adversary to settle a personal injury lawsuit because Watts’ firm had made “heavy” donations to pertinent appellate judges, “all of whom are good Democrats.” Then Watts found himself ensnared in a Corpus Christi imbroglio involving a flamboyant, Ferrari-driving plaintiffs’ advocate named Mauricio Celis. Celis claimed to be a licensed attorney in Mexico, but suddenly was indicted on multiple felony counts of aggravated perjury and practicing law in Texas without any kind of license. A state grand jury also indicted him for flashing a Duval County deputy’s badge—impersonating a peace officer—when Corpus Christi police showed up in response to reports that a woman had run naked down the street from Celis’ mansion. Watts, who has been close to Celis, explained in an abrupt announcement that he was withdrawing from the race so he could spend more time with his family. In just over a month, his free-spending campaign went from cocky ascent to a pelican’s plunk in the Gulf of Mexico.
Conventional wisdom has since emerged that Watts’ exit from the race was a calamity for Noriega, not a godsend. People who vote in Democratic primaries were perceived to be moving toward the Hispanic legislator already. Unlike some other ethnic Democrats, in the statehouse Noriega has spurned the tradeoffs offered by Speaker Tom Craddick. He supports women’s right to choose, while Watts had been booed for making anti-abortion remarks. Noriega was getting a lot of media that he didn’t have to pay for. If he had beaten Watts head to head, his campaign team and the press might have cast him in the race against Cornyn as a first-round giant-killer who prevailed despite the trial lawyer’s wealth. Now, this spinning goes, Noriega is a virtually certain nominee (he has gained one opponent, Ray McMurrey, a schoolteacher from Corpus Christi whose issue is public financing of campaigns). No longer in the news, Noriega is looking at month after anonymous month of scrabbling for Democrats’ hundred-dollar bills while Cornyn salts away more millions and feasts on the free TV exposure that his committee assignments in Washington send his way.

At least on a couple of levels, the Watts implosion may have been a lucky break for Noriega. Apart from the overwhelming advantage in resources, Watts and his team of strategists thought he could win by casting Noriega as a utility lobbyist who valued that industry’s pollution and profiteering more than an average families’ ability to pay the bills and protect their health, especially as regards air quality. Since 2000 Noriega has also accepted $9,500 in contributions from Houston GOP financier Bob Perry, who helped fund the “swiftboat” ads against John Kerry. Yet it’s hard to believe Bob Perry would support and fund Noriega against Cornyn. (A Perry spokesman declined to comment.) And on the candidate’s past as a lobbyist and now marketing manager-on-leave from his job with CenterPoint Energy Inc., at least one government ethicist gives Noriega high marks. “The word that comes to mind for me is ‘integrity,’” said Tom Smith, the veteran Austin director of the watchdog group Public Citizen (and not a man inclined to lavish such language on Texas politicians). “Since Rick’s been in the Legislature, when I tried to bring him around to our positions on utilities, he’d say, ‘Look, sorry, I’m recusing myself. I’m not going to mix policymaking with my business.’ And he’s gotten after me for not being aggressive enough on some environmental issues—especially toxics in the Ship Channel.”

Soon after Noriega returned from Afghanistan in 2005, Houston Mayor Bill White enlisted him to coordinate assistance and shelter of evacuees from the Katrina and Rita hurricanes—an item on the candidate’s resumé that doubtless wins him more respect than his seat in the Legislature. White is now a strong supporter of Noriega’s Senate campaign. Other Harris County heavyweights in Noriega’s corner include former Lt. Gov. Bill Hobby and his son Paul Hobby. “If we’re going to win,” Noriega told me, “we have to carry Harris County.”
The Houston and Dallas metropolitan areas now account for half of the electorate in Texas. Noriega’s campaign consultant, James Aldrete, said the key is running well in suburbs like those in Fort Bend County, where Tom DeLay used to reign, and Collin and Denton counties in the Dallas media market. “Democrats in recent races have been almost afraid to raise their heads there,” Aldrete said. “It won’t be that way with Rick.”


But, I asked, how does an understaffed and money-strapped campaign also hold the recent Democratic base—Austin, San Antonio, and the border? He was silent for a moment, then quipped, “Bush is the base.”

Aldrete was referring to polls that suggest Democrats—in their fury over Bush, Cheney, Rove, the war in Iraq, DeLay, and GOP bungling of government in general—are by several percentage points more motivated to turn out in 2008 than Republicans. But the question remains: How can Noriega hope to overtake an opponent who starts out with an advantage of $12 to his $1?

In November Noriega was a featured guest at the Democratic presidential debates in Las Vegas. He was auditioning for help that the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee will deal out this summer. Noriega made a good impression with his friendly grin and soldier-athlete bearing. But Texas is a huge state with multiple media markets and not one Democrat holding a statewide office. Noriega will have to spend about $11 million to campaign from now to November and air TV and radio ads in the crucial last month of the race. To get help from the national party, Noriega must convince their strategists that he can raise most of the money from individual donors, who in federal races are limited to a maximum gift of $2,300. If he fails, they will say it’s a shame and invest in the race of a candidate in a smaller state where the odds are better and Senate races are not so expensive.

“There are four kinds of candidates these days,” Noriega told me. “One is rich and can just pay for it. Another is a celebrity who can wow voters into going along. A third is knowledgeable and works hard, but the experts say, ‘Ah, that one can’t raise the money,’ and it becomes a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. Texas Democrats haven’t seen the fourth kind since Ann Richards ran for governor in 1990—a candidate that people get behind because they know this is a good person and the outcome matters, and winning is something they’re determined to bring about. That’s the model for the race I’m running.”

Then there is the issue of ethnicity. In 2006, when Bush ordered National Guard troops to provide logistical and surveillance support to the Border Patrol in a gambit called Operation Jump Start, Noriega volunteered and was soon driving his pickup toward the Rio Grande, where he commanded the Laredo sector. “Yes, we need border security,” he said of that experience, but he told me that Operation Jump Start was driven by politics, not policy. He said that along with his grim view of the administration’s execution of the wars in the Middle East, the border experience tipped the balance toward his challenging Cornyn.

“Some people are just anti-immigration,” he said with distaste. “After 9/11, this outlook disguised itself and tucked itself inside the fear factor and national security. These people got inside a Trojan horse. They really don’t want to reach a national consensus on immigration because they see it as a wedge issue.” He accused Cornyn of grandstanding and playing to those fears. “Our government can’t even meet the demand for passports. He wants to send several million people back where they came from and then bureaucratically process them back here as workers. How’s he going to do that? In buses? Boxcars? Nobody who lives on the border wants the wall that Republicans are so determined to build. Everybody knows it won’t work. There are issues of farmers’ and ranchers’ access to water. And the symbolism of that wall and a militarized border is all wrong. It’s not what we ought to be doing in America.”

I observed to Noriega that when Cornyn first ran for the Senate, in 2002, his polished Democratic opponent, former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk, got $4.5 million in help from the national party. Kirk actually outspent Cornyn—but he still lost by 8 percentage points. The same year, John Sharp talked Laredo banker Tony Sanchez into making a self-financed run for governor, under the theory that the resulting flood of Hispanic turnout in support of a native son would raise the boats of all Democrats. Hispanics didn’t turn out, Rick Perry creamed Sanchez, and that election was the peak of Republican domineering in Texas.

Noriega left another long pause, then said, “I think in Texas we’re in a totally different circumstance now than we were in 2002. For one thing, Bush was very popular then. This will be the first time in 28 years that Bush or his father haven’t been on the ballot or holding high political office. I know,” he said, turning back to Cornyn, “that some people are not going to vote for me because of my name, because I’m a Democrat, because I’m bald. But real folks are subject to periodic job performance reviews. Do we rehire someone who voted against providing children with health insurance? Do we rehire someone who claims we’re winning the war in Iraq? Do we rehire someone who voted against allowing the government to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry so that we can have cheaper medicines? I don’t mean to personally disparage John Cornyn. But has he done a good job? If you believe he has, then he’s your Huckleberry.

“A lot of people are saying we can do better than this, that we have to change. I think I can go into East and West Texas and appeal to people’s common sense and judgment. And, frankly, I believe I can do a better job. I know this contest is David against Goliath. But like Wilt Chamberlain used to say, nobody really likes Goliath. I can assure you I’m going to get after it. We’ll find out next November what Texas is ready for. I know I’m ready.”

The Austin-based writer Jan Reid is the author of 10 widely varied books. They include The Improbable Rise of Redneck Rock (University of Texas Press), The Bullet Meant for Me (University of Texas Press), and, with coauthor and former Observer editor Lou Dubose, The Hammer (PublicAffairs), the definitive investigation of the rise, fall, and disgrace of Tom DeLay.

Article and Photo: http://www.texasobserver.org/article.php?aid=2647

The Righteous Immigrant: What Makes a Good American?

U.S. & Mexican Flags






After a few weeks of being away from home, I looked forward to sitting in front of my computer and taking my time writing something about immigration - and my new perspective after having been in Spain a few weeks. The first thing I found, in the Washington Post was a group of essays on the 9500 Liberty Project - which was heartening. What a good way to let people know what the leadership of Prince William County is really saying.

Then I saw what I call the WP's apology post. It's an opinion piece by a Yale law professor who as a child immigrated from China. While she says she is pro-immigrant, her message belies her stated position. Her comments are disturbing. I decided not to mention her article in the blog. But after a night of thinking about what she wrote, I decided it would be best to deal with her ambivalence directly.

Her main thesis is that nation-states have to have a significant amount of cohesion and self-identity to survive. According to her, too many languages and different cultures are dangerous for a country - and cites what happened in Rome when the barbarians took over. While she denies Huntington's proposal that Latino immigrants are not becoming American enough, her response has an ambiguity that is easy to see.

Perhaps Rome came down because it was too geographically scattered and its populations were too different. Yet, how can she judge the life of a nation-state in 2007, with its overwhelming technological advances and globalization using the criteria that destroyed Rome a milennia ago? Even then, history has told us that populations generally revolt when there is gross inequality - what were the Romans doing to the barbarians?

As for Latino immigrants not being loyal to the U.S., why do so many serve in the armed forces? If they (we) don't identify ourselves as Americans quickly enough, how come the children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants all speak fluent English? How can she imagine that the immigrants of the late 20th century and early 21st century do not want to be part of our nation? What makes her feel she is correct in her observations?

Her position is made clear when she tells of her mother being horrified that her daughter was making the dutiful visits that Girl Scouts make to soup kitchens. She must not know that we all did that as Girl Scouts. If her mother was aghast at this it was already her inherent concern that Chau not be exposed to the lower classes.

As for my own experience, being on a different continent for a few weeks was a great way to remind me that I am an American... never mind that my father was born in Mexico, that I actually like the Mexican flag, and love mariachi music. America has a solid grip on my identity - as I'm sure it does to all immigrants and their children. If not, we wouldn't be here.



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The Right Road to America?
By Amy Chua
Sunday, December 16, 2007; B01

If you don't speak Spanish, Miami really can feel like a foreign country. In any restaurant, the conversation at the next table is more likely to be Spanish than English. And Miami's population is only 65 percent Hispanic. El Paso is 76 percent Latino. Flushing, N.Y., is 60 percent immigrant, mainly Chinese.

Chinatowns and Little Italys have long been part of America's urban landscape, but would it be all right to have entire U.S. cities where most people spoke and did business in Chinese, Spanish or even Arabic? Are too many Third World, non-English-speaking immigrants destroying our national identity?

For some Americans, even asking such questions is racist. At the other end of the spectrum, the conservative talk show host Bill O'Reilly fulminates against floods of immigrants who threaten to change America's "complexion" and replace what he calls the "white Christian male power structure."

But for the large majority in between, Democrats and Republicans alike, these questions are painful, with no easy answers. At some level, most of us cherish our legacy as a nation of immigrants. But are all immigrants really equally likely to make good Americans? Are we, as the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington warns, in danger of losing our core values and devolving "into a loose confederation of ethnic, racial, cultural, and political groups, with little or nothing in common apart from their location in the territory of what had been the United States of America"?

My parents arrived in the United States in 1961, so poor that they couldn't afford heat their first winter. I grew up speaking only Chinese at home (for every English word accidentally uttered, my sister and I got one whack of the chopsticks). Today, my father is a professor at Berkeley, and I'm a professor at Yale Law School. As the daughter of immigrants, a grateful beneficiary of America's tolerance and opportunity, I could not be more pro-immigrant.

Nevertheless, I think Huntington has a point.

Around the world today, nations face violence and instability as a result of their increasing pluralism and diversity. Across Europe, immigration has resulted in unassimilated, largely Muslim enclaves that are hotbeds of unrest and even terrorism. The riots in France last month were just the latest manifestation. With Muslims poised to become a majority in Amsterdam and elsewhere within a decade, major West European cities could undergo a profound transformation. Not surprisingly, virulent anti-immigration parties are on the rise.

Not long ago, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union disintegrated when their national identities proved too weak to bind together diverse peoples. Iraq is the latest example of how crucial national identity is. So far, it has found no overarching identity strong enough to unite its Kurds, Shiites and Sunnis.

The United States is in no danger of imminent disintegration. But this is because it has been so successful, at least since the Civil War, in forging a national identity strong enough to hold together its widely divergent communities. We should not take this unifying identity for granted.

The greatest empire in history, ancient Rome, collapsed when its cultural and political glue dissolved, and peoples who had long thought of themselves as Romans turned against the empire. In part, this fragmentation occurred because of a massive influx of immigrants from a very different culture. The "barbarians" who sacked Rome were Germanic immigrants who never fully assimilated.

Does this mean that it's time for the United States to shut its borders and reassert its "white, Christian" identity and what Huntington calls its Anglo-Saxon, Protestant "core values"?

No. The anti-immigration camp makes at least two critical mistakes.

First, it neglects the indispensable role that immigrants have played in building American wealth and power. In the 19th century, the United States would never have become an industrial and agricultural powerhouse without the millions of poor Irish, Polish, Italian and other newcomers who mined coal, laid rail and milled steel. European immigrants led to the United States' winning the race for the atomic bomb. Today, American leadership in the Digital Revolution -- so central to our military and economic preeminence -- owes an enormous debt to immigrant contributions. Andrew Grove (cofounder of Intel), Vinod Khosla (Sun Microsystems) and Sergey Brin (Google) are immigrants. Between 1995 and 2005, 52 percent of Silicon Valley start-ups had one key immigrant founder. And Vikram S. Pundit's appointment to the helm of CitiGroup last Tuesday means that 14 chief executives of Fortune 100 companies are foreign-born.

The United States is in a fierce global competition to attract the world's best high-tech scientists and engineers -- most of whom are not white Christians. Just this past summer, Microsoft opened a large new software development center in Canada, in part because of the difficulty of obtaining U.S. visas for foreign engineers.

Second, anti-immigration talking heads forget that their own scapegoating vitriol will, if anything, drive immigrants farther from the U.S. mainstream. One reason we don't have Europe's enclaves is our unique success in forging an ethnically and religiously neutral national identity, uniting individuals of all backgrounds. This is America's glue, and people like Huntington and O'Reilly unwittingly imperil it.

Nevertheless, immigration naysayers also have a point.

America's glue can be subverted by too much tolerance. Immigration advocates are too often guilty of an uncritical political correctness that avoids hard questions about national identity and imposes no obligations on immigrants. For these well-meaning idealists, there is no such thing as too much diversity.

The right thing for the United States to do -- and the best way to keep Americans in favor of immigration -- is to take national identity seriously while maintaining our heritage as a land of opportunity. U.S. immigration policy should be tolerant but also tough. Here are five suggestions:


¿ Overhaul admission priorities. Since 1965, the chief admission criterion has been family reunification. This was a welcome replacement for the ethnically discriminatory quota system that preceded it. But once the brothers and sisters of a current U.S. resident get in, they can sponsor their own extended families. In 2006, more than 800,000 immigrants were admitted on this basis. By contrast, only about 70,000 immigrants were admitted on the basis of employment skills, with an additional 65,000 temporary visas granted to highly skilled workers.

This is backwards. Apart from nuclear families (spouse, minor children, possibly parents), the special preference for family members should be drastically reduced. As soon as my father got citizenship, his relatives in the Philippines asked him to sponsor them. Soon, his mother, brother, sister and sister-in-law were also U.S. citizens or permanent residents. This was nice for my family, but frankly there was nothing especially fair about it. Instead, the immigration system should reward ability and be keyed to the country's labor needs -- skilled or unskilled, technological or agricultural. In particular, we should significantly increase the number of visas for highly skilled workers, putting them on a fast track for citizenship.


¿ Make English the official national language. A common language is critical to cohesion and national identity in an ethnically diverse society. Americans of all backgrounds should be encouraged to speak more languages -- I've forced my own daughters to learn Mandarin (minus the threat of chopsticks) -- but offering Spanish-language public education to Spanish-speaking children is the wrong kind of indulgence. "Native language education" should be overhauled, and more stringent English proficiency requirements for citizenship should be set up.


¿ Immigrants must embrace the nation's civic virtues. It took my parents years to see the importance of participating in the larger community. When I was in third grade, my mother signed me up for Girl Scouts. I think she liked the uniforms and merit badges, but when I told her that I was picking up trash and visiting soup kitchens, she was horrified.

For many immigrants, only family matters. Even when immigrants get involved in politics, they tend to focus on protecting their own and protesting discrimination. That they can do so is one of the great virtues of U.S. democracy. But a mindset based solely on taking care of your own factionalizes our society.

Like all Americans, immigrants have a responsibility to contribute to the social fabric. It's up to each immigrant community to fight off an enclave mentality and give back to their new country. It's not healthy for Chinese to hire only Chinese, or Koreans only Koreans. By contrast, the free health clinic set up by Muslim Americans in Los Angeles -- serving the entire poor community -- is a model to emulate. Immigrants are integrated at the moment when they realize that their success is inextricably intertwined with everyone else's.


¿ Enforce the law. Illegal immigration, along with terrorism, is the chief cause of today's anti-immigration backlash. It is also inconsistent with the rule of law, which, as any immigrant from a developing country will tell you, is a critical aspect of U.S. national identity. But if we're serious about this problem, we need to enforce the law against not only illegal aliens, but also those who hire them. It's the worst of all worlds to allow U.S. employers who hire illegal aliens -- thus keeping the flow of illegal workers coming -- to break the law while demonizing the aliens as lawbreakers. An Arizona law set to take effect on Jan. 1 will tighten the screws on employers who hire undocumented workers, but this issue can't be left up to a single state.


¿ Make the United States an equal-opportunity immigration magnet. That the 11 million to 20 million illegal immigrants are 80 percent Mexican and Central American is itself a problem. This is emphatically not for the reason Huntington gives -- that Hispanics supposedly don't share America's core values. But if the U.S. immigration system is to reflect and further our ethnically neutral identity, it must itself be ethnically neutral, offering equal opportunity to Sudanese, Estonians, Burmese and so on. The starkly disproportionate ratio of Latinos -- reflecting geographical fortuity and a large measure of law-breaking -- is inconsistent with this principle.

Immigrants who turn their backs on American values don't deserve to be here. But those of us who turn our backs on immigrants misunderstand the secret of America's success and what it means to be American.

amy.chua@yale.edu

Amy Chua, a professor at Yale Law School, is the author of "Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance -- And Why They Fall."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401333.html?hpid=opinionsbox1

Eric Byler on Irrationality in Prince William County Virginia

Eric Byler

My Heart is Where the Bottles Shatter
By Eric Byler
Sunday, December 16, 2007; Page B04
Washington Post

The most powerful elected official in Prince William County is introduced to a standing ovation. The first time I see him is through a camera lens, entering like the hero of a movie I am watching rather than making.

My team and I are the only people of color in a large auditorium at Stonewall Middle School in Manassas. "People who come to this country illegally are illegal!" Board of County Supervisors Chairman Corey A. Stewart thunders, jabbing his finger in the air.

The lens is a glass wall. I am focused but detached. I hear a woman cackling with joy as an officer from a group called Help Save Manassas takes credit for Latino parents' being afraid to send their children to school, for Latino families' abandoning their mortgages and fleeing the county. "This is our territory," he boasts. "And we're gonna take it back."

More clapping, more cheers. I process these moments like a child observing a bully from a distance. The victim is over there, not here, and I am just a witness. Zoom in. Zoom out.

Weeks later, it is a beautiful September afternoon. A canvas sign is tethered to the last remaining wall of the house at 9500 Liberty St. "When our brothers & sons are fighting & dying in Iraq you are separating our families," part of the giant sign says. These and other words have enraged many of the town's Caucasian residents, but these Latino families are proud to stand in its shadow. They feel they are standing up to bullies.

Known as Liberty Wall, this sign has become the expression of protest for many in Prince William County. Even non-ethnic citizens are concerned about a new law that could lead to the racial profiling of people who "look illegal." The families around the wall look American to me, but maybe I'm not a proper judge. My mother is Chinese American and my father is white. I grew up in Virginia, in a time when Asians and Latinos were less common than Cowboys fans, but since then I've frequented more cosmopolitan places such as Los Angeles, Honolulu and New York, places like Virginia is becoming.



My headphones pick up a stray voice. I turn and see a man standing at the fence enclosing Liberty Wall. He screams at everyone he sees, accusing them of being "illegal," even though they are documented Americans. He points at a 12-year-old boy, suggesting that he is destined for "one of those gangs," and looms over the boy's younger sister, who defiantly says, "I speak English fine." Both children hold their ground, hardened perhaps by epithets, eggs and bottles that have been thrown at them, or by "messages" left on their property, riddled with profanity, obscene drawings and racial slurs, telling their community to "go home" and reminding them that America's founders were white.

The next night, a vandal tries to burn down Liberty Wall. Soon after, another will succeed in destroying the sign, ripping it to shreds.

These are the questions facing our society. Who is American? And who gets to speak? I am reintroduced to the Chinese American boy I was in 1981 at Kings Park Elementary. I hear the word "chink." I see my classmates tugging at their eyes.

The bullies are not as distant as I remembered them. I may see the world through a lens, but my eyes are open, and my heart is where the bottles shatter, on the Liberty side of the fence.

eric@9500liberty.com


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401326.html
photo: http://a722.ac-images.myspacecdn.com/00795/12/71/795921721_m.jpg

http://www.youtube.com/9500Liberty : The Real World of Prince William County

An Immigration Flashpoint, Through Our Lens
Sunday, December 16, 2007; Page B04
Opinions
Washington Post

How did Prince William County, one of the richest, most diverse counties in the nation, become a flashpoint in America's battle over immigration? What led to threats of racial violence during public meetings and grown men screaming at children on the streets? And how did a team of Asian American documentary filmmakers end up in the middle, with both pro-immigration and anti-immigration forces demanding that they take sides?

On Oct. 9, Eric Byler and Annabel Park began posting short video clips on a YouTube channel they created called "9500Liberty" at http://www.youtube.com/9500Liberty. The "interactive documentary" project took its name from a street address in Old Town Manassas where a sign had been posted, reading: "Prince William Co. Stop Your Racism to Hispanics!" The sign -- on what was known as "Liberty Wall" -- protested a county policy that requires police to check immigration status during routine traffic stops and denies some services to undocumented immigrants. The county, like many places across the nation, is in the middle of a demographic transformation: Since 1990, its Hispanic population has quadrupled; today one in five of the county's 360,000 residents is Hispanic; and the number of Asians has more than doubled.

Since it started, "9500Liberty" has been viewed more than 270,000 times and garnered comments from all over the globe, including hate mail and death threats. On Friday, Byler testified before the U.S. Civil Rights Commission.

In the following two articles and a video essay, the filmmakers turn the camera on themselves and reflect on their experiences.

Annabel Park: I Can Relate to America's Identity Crisis.

Eric Byler: My Heart is Where the Bottles Shatter.

A Comment on Immigration From 9500 Liberty Project Filmmaker

Annabel Park, Filmmaker, 9500 Liberty Project













For those of you in Houston, did you know that the name of country station KIKK is a spin off from the acronym of the Ku Klux Klan? Annabel Park, who lived in Houston in the 1980s tells us there is more than country music in the station's name.

I Can Relate to America's Identity Crisis
By Annabel Park
Sunday, December 16, 2007; Page B04
Washington Post

When I was growing up in Korea, being told that you were going to America was like being told that you were going to heaven. In 1978, my family applied to immigrate to the United States from South Korea. After only a six-month wait, the application was approved, and as if by magic, the five of us were transported to Houston to live with my aunt's family. I was 9 years old.

My parents were not skilled. But within a matter of weeks, they were selling tacos and burgers to mostly Mexican workers living and working in downtown Houston.

Neither my parents nor their customers could speak English. Somehow they found a way of communicating their basic needs: exchanging money, feeding and being fed. The Mexicans loved our tacos, and my parents succeeded in their first U.S. business venture.

I was in awe of America and wanted desperately to fit in, but I was constantly reminded that I was a foreigner, told to go home, ordered to learn English and called racial slurs. I didn't understand the significance at the time, but I remember large billboards along the highways that seemed to read, "You're in KKK Land." When you got closer, you could see a little "i" that looked like a cowboy boot between the first and second K's; the billboard was actually advertising a country-music radio station, KIKK.

My insecurity about being foreign, not fitting in, not really being perceived as American, has been a constant in my search for my identity. But alongside these insecurities sits my childhood romance with America, which my friends who had the privilege of being born here don't quite understand.

Since Eric and I began documenting the fight over immigration in Prince William County, I've been forced to reflect on my own immigration experience and about what America is.



Once, a white man approached us while we were filming a group of Latino people in front of a pro-immigration sign. A chain-link fence separated him from us, but I reached across to shake his hand and introduce myself. His grip was so tight that it frightened me. He squeezed my hand while denouncing "these people" for "raping the land," as opposed to the Vietnamese and Koreans, who had learned to speak English and assimilated.

Eric captured this scene and put it up for the world to see on YouTube. Many people watching the video see a white racist; I see a man suffering from an identity crisis, feeling displaced in his neighborhood. He is nervous, anxious, the flip side of my own insecurity as an immigrant, and I feel a lot of compassion for him.

I want to say to the man at the fence, and to the immigrants gathered at Liberty Wall: We're in this together. Much as my parents found a way to communicate with their customers at their Houston carryout, so too can we overcome any differences in language and values -- and find a way to live and work together.

But people did not come together in Prince William County. The county supervisors passed the illegal-immigration resolution. I believe the process was not democratic. One organized interest group dominated it by bullying, spreading misinformation and inciting intolerance.

America is not just a country, not just a particular place in space and time, but a promise to live according to our highest ideals. If we succumb to intolerance and fear now, at this critical time in America's story, we will all have failed.

annabel@9500liberty.com

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/14/AR2007121401330.html
photo: http://www.koamco.org/images/annabel2_shb9.png

Speaking of Racial Profiling

A suit filed in federal court is accusing the Maricopa Sheriff's dept. of "overstepping their authority" and "racial profiling."
This reminds me of a comment made by one of the administrators from Prince William County Virginia... Someone asked him how would an officer know the difference between someone undocumented and a U.S. citizen if they were both Latino. The official responded by saying that officers would get special training.

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NATIONAL BRIEFING | SOUTHWEST
Arizona: Sheriff Sued Over Possible Profiling
New York Times
By AP
Published: December 14, 2007

A Mexican citizen legally in the United States has sued the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, claiming its aggressive immigration enforcement has led to ethnic profiling. The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in federal court, outlines several instances where Sheriff Joe Arpaio and his deputies are accused of overstepping their authority. Sheriff Arpaio called the suit frivolous and said it was an effort to intimidate him before his office begins enforcing a new law on Jan. 1 that threatens employers with penalties if they hire illegal workers. The suit seeks a judgment that Sheriff Arpaio’s actions are unconstitutional and the disbanding of the Illegal Immigration Interdiction unit. The suit is based on the claims of Manuel de Jesus Ortega Melendres, a retired teacher, who was stopped by deputies on Sept. 26 in suburban Cave Creek.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/us/14brfs-arizona.html





http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/14/us/14brfs-arizona.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

When Being An American Citizen Doesn't Count

The Pew Hispanic Center has released more statistics on the immigration debate. They said that over half of 2000 Hispanic respondents "worried that they or a close friend or family member might be deported." The Pew Center must have missed a lot of people. There is a huge population of Latinos who hardly have contact with any undocumented people. Some of them are even people I know well.

Besides the accuracy of these statistics, there is the issue of "feeling anxious" about ICE taking one of "us" (Latinos) away -regardless of our residency status.

There is reason for Latinos to be concerned. People like Romney, Guiliani, Sessions, Tancredo etc. lump everyone together, and seem to conveniently forget the the very large Latino population that are citizens, U.S. born.

It seems that ICE does too. There have been consistent reports of U.S. citizens being detained. There have been so many that no one at the Department of Homeland Security could convince me its not racial profiling.

_____

Hispanics Feeling Heat Of Immigration Debate
Survey Finds Majority Feel Vulnerable
By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, December 14, 2007; A22

Regardless of their immigration status, Hispanics across the United States are feeling anxious and discriminated against amid the intensifying debate over immigration and stepped-up enforcement by authorities, according to a study of the nation's largest minority group released yesterday.

More than half of the 2,003 Hispanic adults surveyed by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center said they worry that they or a close friend or family member might be deported, and nearly two-thirds believed that Congress's failure to pass a bill restructuring immigration law this year has made life more difficult for all Latinos.

"What we have here is a portrait of a population that is feeling vulnerable in the current political and policy climate," said Paul Taylor, acting director of the Pew Hispanic Center. "And what's interesting is that it's not just true of the foreign born but of the native born, including many people who have been here for generations."

Though the federal government has substantially increased enforcement actions such as workplace raids over the past five years, the numbers arrested through such actions remain infinitesimal compared to the almost 8 million undocumented immigrants in the workforce.

Nonetheless, noted Taylor, "as part of tried and true enforcement policy, a number of raids in the last year or so have been very high profile. . . . So in some ways, the actual numbers [arrested] may underestimate the changed reality as it is perceived by people in the Latino community."

The poll also found significant differences between Latinos' and non-Latinos' opinions on the recent crackdown, including efforts by state and local governments.

For instance, 20 percent of Hispanics approved of workplace raids, compared with 51 percent of non-Hispanics; 14 percent of Hispanics approved of local police taking an active role in immigration enforcement, while non-Hispanics were evenly divided on the issue; and 40 percent of Hispanics approved of states checking immigration status before issuing driver's licenses, compared with 85 percent of non-Hispanics.

Latinos, who number 44 million and account for 15 percent of the U.S. population, are a diverse group: Almost half of adults are U.S.-born, less than a third are foreign-born but in the country legally, and about a quarter are illegal immigrants.

Though less substantial than the difference in views between Latinos and non-Latinos, the study revealed significant gaps within the Hispanic community on a range of topics.

For example, 82 percent of foreign-born Hispanics believed that illegal immigrants help the economy, compared with 64 percent of native-born Hispanics. Still, that is up from five years ago, when 54 percent of native-born Hispanics said the impact of illegal immigrants was positive. It is also substantially higher than the 40 percent of non-Hispanics with a favorable view of illegal immigrants' effect on the economy.

Similarly, noncitizen Latinos -- who account for 39 percent of the adult Hispanic population -- were twice as likely as Latinos who are U.S. citizens to worry about deportation and to feel a negative personal impact from the heightened attention.

Among the Latinos who reported experiencing discrimination, which is about half overall, 12 percent said they have had more trouble getting or keeping a job; 15 percent said they have had increased difficulty finding or keeping housing; 19 percent said they have been asked to produce documents to prove their immigration status more often than in the past; 22 percent said they are less likely to use government services; and 24 percent said they are less likely to travel abroad.

More than half of Latinos surveyed said that discrimination is a major problem keeping them from succeeding in the United States -- up from 44 percent in 2002, though slightly down from 58 percent in 2006. But there was no clear consensus on whether their overall situation in the United States has gotten better or worse over the past year.

Despite their anxieties over immigration, Latinos surveyed said they are generally content with their lives and upbeat about the future.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/13/AR2007121301733.html

Sex on the Plaza

Tomorrow I leave Madrid. Its been a few weeks of (mostly) boring work. A colleague of mine came into town last week... today she told me the strangest story.

In broad daylight today (a Wednesday) she was walking through a neighborhood plaza in downtown Madrid and saw 2 people having sex - right there, with scores of people around. She said that people all around were watching. Two men were taking pictures with their cell phones, some men were laughing...

The two people involved appeared to be homeless and native born Spaniards. The incident was disturbing and surprising. Yet, what surprises me even more is that the whole 16 days I have been here I have heard constant complaints about immigrants flooding the city, esp. Romanians and Africans. That these people bring problems, violence, crime, unsanitary conditions.

Yet, as I just mentioned, the most outrageous act was performed by two Spàniards.

Negative Stereotypes in American Society are Nothing New

In fact, seems like the whole idea of stereotypes has been around since man became social. The following article says that ¨relations between minorities are tense¨-- but so are relations between whites and any ethnic group, and even more dramatically between whites and immigrants (esp undocumented immigrants).

Maybe all societies are this way. But since DREAMERS live in the U.S., its probably worth the effort to talk about stereotypes in the U.S. Its not a new thing, but what I can say for the moment is that it seems that many Americans think that people from öutside groups¨are really bad... that there are not enough resources to go around... afraid of their own government but take it out on people in the U.S. that basically have no civil rights.

---

Poll: Relations Between Minorities Tense, But Core Values Shared

By Pamela Constable
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, December 12, 2007; 4:26 PM



Relations among African Americans, Hispanics and Asian Americans are fraught with tension and negative stereotypes, but all three groups share core values and a desire to get along better with each other, according to a poll released in Washington today by the nonprofit group New America Media.

The survey found that many members of all three groups felt "more comfortable" doing business with whites than with each other, and that an overwhelming majority of each group viewed racial tension as a "very important problem" for the United States.

It also found that immigrants generally have much more optimism about achieving the American dream than do African Americans, and that far fewer African Americans than either Asians or Hispanics believe that every American has an "equal opportunity to succeed."

Underscoring what survey officials called "unfair and ugly stereotypes" among American ethnic and minority groups, more than 40 percent of Hispanics and Asians said they were "generally afraid" of African Americans and associated them with crime.

A similarly high proportion of Hispanics and African Americans said most Asian business owners "do not treat us with respect," while one-third of Asians and half of African Americans said Latin American immigrants are "taking away jobs" and other benefits from the black community.

On the other hand, the telephone poll of 1,105 people in all 50 states, evenly divided among the three groups, found that they had a great deal in common, including strong feelings of patriotism and religious belief. Most significantly, more than 85 percent of responders from all three groups said they should "put aside their differences" and work together to help their communities.

Sergio Bendixen, who presented the poll results at the National Press Club, said the fact that the three groups live in relative isolation from one another has contributed to the tensions and stereotypes, and that more personal and social interaction would do much to reduce the problem.

"If you share an afternoon of baseball and a barbecue, you are less likely to be afraid of people or think they came to steal your job," Bendixen said. He said the issue of inter-ethnic tensions in the United States was something "everyone knows about but everyone wants to sweep under the rug."

Richard Rodriguez, a California writer who spoke at the presentation, said he was glad to see that at a time of strong emotion and controversy about immigrants in the United States, immigrants responding to the survey expressed strong civic values and enthusiasm about succeeding in America.

"Americans have forgotten how much the immigrant brings to this country -- a basic optimism about the possibilities of changing and improving your life, as well as a noticeable patriotism," Rodriguez said.

Bendixen, commenting on the much lower degree of optimism and hope expressed by African Americans, said it could stem from their "more realistic" assessment of long-term prospects, and was also linked to their concerns about Hispanic newcomers. "If you are unhappy at home, you are less likely to like new neighbors coming in," he said.

Among the survey's more revealing findings was the high degree of social segregation that persists among immigrant groups as well as African Americans. A large proportion of all three groups said most of their friends were from their own ethnic or racial group.

Even larger percentages of Hispanics and African Americans said people in their church or school were from their group.

Dating patterns followed a similar path. More than 70 percent of Hispanics and Asians and 61 percent of African Americans said they had never dated someone outside their own group. That national finding contrasted sharply with a 2006 poll of California young people, also conducted by New America Media, where 65 percent of respondents said they had dated someone from a different race.

Still, despite their isolation and prejudices, the poll also found that the three groups had some positive opinions about each other. More than 58 percent of both African Americans and Asians said that Hispanic culture and values had "enriched the quality of life for all Americans."

And although a majority of responders in all three groups said there was "a lot of discrimination" against their community, more than 65 percent of Hispanics and Asians said that African Americans had helped all ethnic and racial groups by "leading the fight for civil rights and against discrimination."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/12/12/AR2007121201543.html?hpid%3Dtopnews&sub=AR

The Evolution of Our Consciousness

Ways of Seeing by John Berger








This post is in reference to December 9, 2007 "Survival of the Richest"

The NYT decided to run an image with an article on a book about the "evolution of economics" (so to speak). It shows the evolution of man, in terms of his/her financial wealth. Unfortunately, they chose to make the images black, and half looked like apes (see the post below)

I have questions about the NYT publishing black images of man´s evolution... the cave man walk really stands out. The NYT would probably deny any subtle meaning to the image. Yet, the "black/white" polemic continues. Don't the people who decide what images go into the NYT know which are offensive and which are not? Well, they may say it wasn't a conscious decision to choose a figure of a black man looking like an ape... but I can't imagine that the most important newspaper in the world has people that know so little about the interpretation of images.

The evolution of our consciousness is about people becoming aware of what their statements and behaviors represent. Some people call this "looking too deep" - yet, could that be an excuse from not having to think about what you say and do?

When I was studying photography, one of my professors (Carol Vuchetich) used to say that it was really important to think about the symbolism of the image. Photographers (and editors) are often drawn to an image that is striking and will catch the eye. For a certain type of photography, especially journalism, this is very important... yet she said it was just as necessary to portray any persons in the image in a respectful way --- not saying ideal, saying realistic- an image that does not enhance negative stereotypes. This is because whatever image we choose (modernist or conceptual) will send a message. The image sent with the NYT article is the long time assumption that blacks are primitive, or "like animals." This was recently emphasized when Noble Prize winner James Watson said that whites are on a higher scale of evolution than blacks. It doesn't help when an "expert" says something totally wrong. Since we have a tendency to follow the experts (i.e. whoever shows up on Larry King, or worse, the anti-Christ who represents the anti-immigration movement, expert Lou Dobbs).

John Berger's book titled Ways of Seeingis agreat place to learn about the power and influence of images. If you are not into reading, there is also a BBC documentary on John Berger and the book.

-----

Carol Vuchetich and George Krause were my photography professors. You can see a few of my photographs at mythologyandreality.blogspot.com






http://images.google.com/images?client=safari&rls=en-us&q=%22john+berger%22+way+of+seeing&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&um=1&sa=N&tab=wi

Survival of the Richest

Does having money really make a difference? Maybe a better question is, what does ¨having money¨ mean? Does it mean being middle class, a cell phone, a DVD player, and cable tv? Or does it mean that you can afford a ticket to the US Open and plan to take your daughter there ¨to meet the right people.¨

There are quirks in these definitions. I was just thinking that there is a group in America that have all these things... the cell phone, their own home, a DVD player, cable or satellite tv.. but, they are undocumented... so does that keep them from being middle class?

The article below talks about the Calvinist ideal of working hard and being ¨successful.¨ the protestant work ethic. Most Americans may be surprised to know that most undocumented immigrants have a better ¨protestant work ethic¨ than u.s. born residents (even white ones)

There is a lot more to say about Gregory Clark´s book - and how the NY Times presented the review.

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A FAREWELL TO ALMS

A Brief Economic History of the World.

By Gregory Clark.

Illustrated. 420 pp. Princeton University Press. $29.95.
Every story has to begin somewhere. Do we think technological progress was responsible for the Industrial Revolution and the astonishing increase in living standards in some countries but not others since then? Fine, but what brought about the new technology? Maybe social and political institutions — democracy, tolerance, the rule of law — played a role in when and where living standards increased. But where did they come from?

After decades of banishment to the realm of sociology and other such disciplines, the idea that a society’s “culture” matters has recently reappeared in economics. David Landes, an economic historian and a living national treasure if there ever was one, began this movement nearly 10 years ago when he looked in part to culture to explain “why some are so rich and some so poor” (the subtitle of his classic overview of world history).

But why not go one step further: If culture is responsible, where does it come from? Why do some countries have an economically helpful culture while others don’t? And, since no society got very far in economic terms before the Industrial Revolution, what caused the culture of the recently successful ones to change?

In “A Farewell to Alms,” Gregory Clark, an economic historian at the University of California, Davis, suggests an intriguing, even startling answer: natural selection. Focusing on England, where the Industrial Revolution began, Clark argues that persistently different rates of childbearing and survival, across differently situated families, changed human nature in ways that finally allowed human beings to escape from the Malthusian trap in which they had been locked since the dawn of settled agriculture, 10,000 years before. Specifically, the families that propagated themselves were the rich, while those that died out were the poor. Over time, the “survival of the richest” propagated within the population the traits that had allowed these people to be more economically successful in the first place: rational thought, frugality, a capacity for hard work — in short the familiar list of Calvinist, bourgeois virtues. The greater prevalence of those traits in turn made possible the Industrial Revolution and all that it has brought. (A lacuna in the argument is that Clark never says just how prevalent this Darwinian process made the traits he has in mind. Would an increase from, say 0.05 percent of the population to 0.50 percent have mattered much?)

Clark’s book is delightfully written, offering a profusion of detail on such seeming arcana as technology in Polynesia and Tasmania before contact with the West,

Sharia-consistent banking practices in the Ottoman Empire and bathing habits (actually, the lack thereof) in 17th-century England. But Clark’s eye is fixed steadily on the idea he’s pushing; the details are fascinating, but they are there because they help make his central argument. Clark is also marvelously adept at drawing out the relevance of many facets of his historical inquiry for present-day concerns. For example: “We think of the Industrial Revolution as practically synonymous with mechanization, with the replacement of human labor by machine labor. Why in high-income economies is there still a robust demand for unskilled labor? Why do unskilled immigrants with little command of English still walk across the deserts of the U.S. Southwest to get to the major urban labor markets to reap enormous rewards for their labor, even as undocumented workers?”

The heart of Clark’s analysis consists of a detailed examination of births, deaths, income and wealth in England between 1250 and 1800, as evidenced primarily by wills. Although the records are scant, he finds that on average richer people were more likely to marry than poorer people, they married at earlier ages, they lived longer once they were married, they bore more children per year of marriage, and their children were more likely to survive and to bear children themselves. The result was centuries of downward mobility, in which the offspring of richer families continually moved into the lower rungs of society. Along the way, their behavioral traits and attitudes became ever more dominant.

Clark’s hypothesis is interesting for at least two reasons. First, it provides an internal mechanism to explain the Industrial Revolution. No deus ex machina, like James Watt’s improving the steam engine, or the Whigs’ overthrow of James II leading to England’s Glorious Revolution, is necessary. Given the conditions at work in England nearly a millennium ago, changes naturally occurred that made an industrial revolution probable, if not inevitable.

Second, Darwinian evolution is usually seen as a process that works over very long periods of time, with consequences for humans that we can observe only by looking far into the past. By contrast, Clark’s explanation for the Industrial Revolution is a change in “our very nature — our desires, our aspirations, our interactions” — that occurred within recorded history, indeed within the last half-dozen centuries. His idea also stands in contrast to the entire orientation of Enlightenment thinking, including Adam Smith’s, toward accepting human nature as it is and asking what social institutions would allow humankind with that nature to flourish (as Rousseau put it, “men as they are and laws as they should be”).

One frustrating aspect of Clark’s argument is that while he insists on the “biological basis” of the mechanism by which the survival of the richest fostered new human attributes and insists on the Darwinian nature of this process, he repeatedly shies away from saying whether the changes he has in mind are actually genetic. “Just as people were shaping economies,” he writes in a typical formulation, “the economy of the preindustrial era was shaping people, at least culturally and perhaps also genetically” (emphasis added). Nor does he introduce any evidence, of the kind that normally lies at the core of such debates, that traits like the capacity for hard work are heritable in the sense in which biologists use the term.

The issue here is not merely a matter of too often writing “perhaps” or “maybe.” If the traits to which Clark assigns primary importance in bringing about the Industrial Revolution are acquired traits, rather than inherited ones, there are many non-Darwinian mechanisms by which a society can impart them, ranging from schools and churches to legal institutions and informal social practices. But if the traits on which his story hinges are genetic, his account of differential childbearing and survival is necessarily central. (Experts on medieval demography may also raise questions about Clark’s reliance on wills, rather than parish records of births and deaths, but that is a different issue.)

Another troubling aspect of Clark’s book is the tension between his portrayal of the Industrial Revolution as a gradual development, as it would have to have been if it were the consequence of an evolutionary process — “the suddenness of the Industrial Revolution in England was more appearance than reality,” he claims — and his emphasis in early chapters on the iron grip of the Malthusian economy from which the Industrial Revolution finally allowed humanity to break free. Clark is thorough in explaining the perverse mechanics of the Malthusian world, in which food production and therefore population are strictly limited, together with the perverse implications that follow. (Catastrophes like the Black Death or failed harvests make people — those who survived, that is — better off by reducing the numbers competing for limited resources; improvements like sanitation or new medicines, or even charity, make everyone miserable.) And he repeatedly insists that this was the world in which humans, everywhere, lived for eons: “Living standards in 1800, even in England,” he writes, “were likely no higher than for our ancestors of the African savannah.” After this prelude, however, discovering that the Industrial Revolution is consistent with a Darwinian explanation because it occurred so gradually comes as something of a surprise.


Clark’s hypothesis also raises a troubling question about the future, albeit one he doesn’t mention. If the key to economic progress in the past was the survival of the richest, what is in store now that the richest no longer outbreed everyone else? As he notes in passing, in most high-

income countries today family income bears no systematic relation to the number of children produced. Further, the populations of some rich countries in Europe are shrinking, apart from immigration, and the United Nations Population Division projects that 97 to 98 percent of the entire increase in the world’s population between now and 2050 will be in the developing world.

Right or wrong, or perhaps somewhere in between, Clark’s is about as stimulating an account of world economic history as one is likely to find. Let’s hope that the human traits to which he attributes economic progress are acquired, not genetic, and that the countries that grow in population over the next 50 years turn out to be good at imparting them. Alternatively, we can simply hope he’s wrong.

Benjamin M. Friedman is an economics professor at Harvard. His most recent book is “The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth.¨

article:http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/Friedman-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
image: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/09/books/review/Friedman-t.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Youth Immigrant Guide- Please Share

http://www.scribd.com/doc/862294/Youth-Handbook

Texas Legislature and Immigration: Planning for 2009

Considering what a rough time DREAMERS had with the Texas Legislature last spring, it might be good to start planning some type of strategy for the next session. Apparently House Speaker Tom Craddick is already thinking about it.

In-state tuition was almost lost - thank goodness this did not happen due to a technical error on the part of what I call the ¨nativists.¨

Texas has never been known for its equanimity - or for being much of a civil society. Things could change however, if the Latino vote gets moving.

As for DREAMERS, if you each encourage at least five people to register to vote, and ask each of them to ask another five to register... something really big could actually happen.

Craddick looks at immigration issues for next session
By Brandi Grissom / Austin Bureau
Article Launched: 11/30/2007 05:44:53 PM MST


AUSTIN -- During the next year, lawmakers will look for ways to encourage local police to become authorized immigration enforcement agents.

House Speaker Tom Craddick today finished publishing a list of issues he wants legislators to study ahead of the 2009 legislative session. Among several border security and immigration issues to be studied is a federal program referred to as 287g.

Under that program, local departments sign an agreement with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement that allows officers to receive training and become authorized to enforce federal immigration laws.

The charge from Craddick calls on the House State Affairs Committee to "make recommendations to encourage" local governments to sign the agreements.

During the legislative session this year, lawmakers hotly debated border security and immigration measures, though few were passed.

State Rep. David Swinford, chairman of the State Affairs Committee, lead many of the immigration discussions this year.

The Republican from Dumas said he doesn't plan to promote 287g agreements. Local governments, he said, should decide if they want to take on the immigration issue.

But he said he wants to ensure officers get the appropriate training before trying to enforce federal immigration laws.

Some local police and city leaders, he said, have been enforcing immigration laws without the training or authority to do so.

"We have a lot of cities that are doing really stupid stuff out there," Swinford
said.

Carl Rusnok, ICE spokesman, said local officers do not have authority to enforce federal immigration laws unless they first receive training.

Currently, he said, no Texas agencies have signed 287g agreements with ICE. Nationwide, 34 local agencies have fewer than 600 officers trained to enforce immigration laws, Rusnok said.

El Paso Police Chief Richard Wiles said having local officers enforce immigration laws is a bad idea on many levels.

It would break the trust immigrants, both legal and illegal, have in local police, he said. It would be expensive to have officers get the training. It would raise questions about racial profiling. And, Wiles said, it would take officers away from their primary duty of protecting the community from crime.

"It's a federal responsibility," Wiles said. "It's their job. We don't have the resources to do it, and the taxpayers of El Paso should not have to pay to have their police department doing the federal government's job."

Brandi Grissom can be reached at bgrissom@elpasotimes.com; (512) 479-6606.

http://www.elpasotimes.com//ci_7603398?IADID=Search-www.elpasotimes.com-www.elpasotimes.com

Pew Poll on Latino Vote -- Back to the Democrats

The Democratic Party has a big chance now. They can take care of this vote or let it go away.

Posted on Thu, Dec. 06, 2007
Hispanics shift back toward Democrats
BY ALAN FRAM
Hispanics are returning to the Democratic Party after several years of drifting toward the Republicans, with many saying Bush administration policies have been harmful to their community, a poll showed Thursday.
By 57 percent to 23 percent, more Hispanic registered voters say they favor Democrats than Republicans, according to a survey by the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center.

That 34-percentage-point Democratic edge -- which includes people who said they lean toward either party -- has grown since July 2006, when a Pew poll measured a 21-point difference. Then, 49 percent of registered Hispanic voters said they favored Democrats and 28 percent chose Republicans.

In 1999 before President Bush's election, more Hispanics favored Democrats than Republicans by 58 percent to 25 percent -- about the same margin as in the current poll.

When the former Texas governor became president in 2001, Republicans saw an opportunity to woo Hispanics to the GOP. But as the 2008 presidential campaign has heated up, immigration has become a major issue and GOP candidates have competed over who could concoct the toughest plan for cracking down on illegal immigration.

The survey found that among Hispanic registered voters:

• Forty-one percent said Bush administration policies have been harmful to Hispanics, 16 percent said they have been helpful and 33 percent said they have not had much impact.

• Forty-four percent said Democrats have more concern for Hispanics, 8 percent chose Republicans and another 41 percent said there is no difference.

• Forty-one percent said Democrats do a better job of handling illegal immigration, 14 percent named the GOP and 26 percent said neither.

Younger Hispanics are slightly more inclined than older ones to be Democrats, while those with higher incomes lean more toward the GOP than those with lower earnings, the poll showed.

Using September 2007 Census Bureau data and projecting from 2004 voting behavior, Pew estimated there would be 8.6 million Hispanic voters next year -- 1 million more than in 2004.

While that would be a small portion of the overall expected vote, Pew estimated that Hispanics comprise a large enough share of eligible voters to affect the outcome in four states where Bush prevailed in 2004 by 5 percentage points or fewer: New Mexico, Florida, Colorado and Nevada.

Among Hispanics who are registered Democrats, 59 percent said they want Hillary Clinton to be their party's presidential candidate, followed by 15 percent who prefer Barack Obama. Among Hispanic Republicans, Rudy Giuliani leads Fred Thompson, 35 percent to 13 percent.

The survey involved telephone interviews with 2,003 randomly chosen Hispanics conducted from Oct. 3 through Nov. 9. It had a margin of sampling error of plus or minus 2.7 percentage points. It included 843 Hispanic registered voters, for whom the margin of sampling error was plus or minus 4 percentage points.

http://www.miamiherald.com/campaign08/story/334605.html

Bloomberg Poll: 60% of Americans Favor Immigrants a Path to Citizenship

Amid comments that the CNN/youtube debate was directed towards the argument on immigration, the LATimes is working on provoking more pain.

Why in the world would the LATimes put in the article´s title ¨1 in 3 would deny illegal immigrants social services¨ when in the next sentence says that most voters would favor a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrations (who pass certain requirements)

1 in 3 is not close to any type of majority. Why mention the negative when the positive of 60% is much more significant.

Or could it be a little political pandering estilo Lou Dobbs? -- publish something that appeals to the nativist - not to your average American.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/

la-na-immigpoll6dec06,1,5649115.story?ctrack=2&cset=true

From the Los Angeles Times
THE TIMES/BLOOMBERG POLL
1 in 3 would deny illegal immigrants social services
But many voters favor a route to let non-criminals become citizens. The situation is a tricky one for candidates.
By Janet Hook
Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

December 6, 2007

WASHINGTON — One-third of Americans want to deny social services, including public schooling and emergency room healthcare, to illegal immigrants, a Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll has found.

Still, in a sign of ambivalence among voters about the emotionally charged issue, a strong bipartisan majority -- 60% -- favors allowing illegal immigrants who have not committed crimes to become citizens if they pay fines, learn English and meet other requirements.

Those crosscurrents create treacherous political waters for the major presidential candidates, many of whom have tended to avoid spotlighting the issue. But all have been forced to address the issue under repeated questioning at campaign events and candidate forums.

During Tuesday's radio debate among Democrats, the candidates were asked if citizens should turn in someone they know to be an illegal immigrant. Most said no. In other settings, however, several have been talking a tough line on issues such as denying driver's licenses to illegal immigrants.

Some poll respondents, in follow-up interviews, expressed frustration that the candidates had not been more forthright in addressing immigration-related issues.

"I don't know what the answer is, but I don't think the candidates know what the answer is either," said Lodie Lambright, a retired state government worker in Rhode Island.

The survey, conducted under the supervision of Times Poll Director Susan Pinkus, was based on interviews conducted Friday through Monday with 1,245 registered voters. The margin of sampling error was plus or minus 3 percentage points.

The poll indicates that while most of those surveyed viewed illegal immigration as a key concern, it was not the most important issue on their minds.

Asked to pick from a list of issues what was a top priority for presidential candidates, 15% said illegal immigration -- the fifth-most mentioned topic behind the Iraq war, the economy, protecting the country from terrorist attacks and healthcare. Asked how much of a problem illegal immigration is, 81% of respondents said they considered it important, including 27% who said it was one of the country's most pressing problems.

The poll also makes clear that respondents make a distinction between legal and illegal immigrants. Asked if illegal immigrants had made a positive or negative contribution to their community, 36% said negative, whereas 21% said positive and 29% said the effect was not discernible.

When the same question was asked about legal immigrants, 12% said their contribution was negative, compared with 46% who said positive and 31% who saw no discernible effect.

"I don't mind immigration, but I do think they need to learn the English language and should become an American citizen," said Patricia Buckner, a Florida retiree.

When those who said immigrants -- whether legal or illegal -- had made a negative contribution, they were asked in what way. The reasons most often cited were the loss of American jobs (35%), increased crime (30%) and increased cost of social services (19%).

The survey, which allowed respondents to name as many as five social services they would allow, showed a disparity: Far more people would allow access to emergency room care and schooling than other benefits, such as food stamps and driver's licenses.

About 46% of respondents said that immigrants should be able to get emergency medical treatment, and 40% said they should have access to public schools.

But 22% of those surveyed said that illegal immigrants should be able to get limited driver's licenses -- a question that has put the Democratic presidential candidates on the spot recently.

The finding underscores the political climate that caused many leading Democrats to oppose licenses for illegal immigrants when it was proposed in New York this year by Gov. Eliot Spitzer, a Democrat, who eventually backed down.

When Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) was asked about the proposal in a debate in late October, she praised Spitzer but stopped short of backing his plan. In a debate a few weeks later, she said she opposed driver's licenses for illegal immigrants.

Some of those resisting the idea of providing a range of services to illegal immigrants say that it drains resources from U.S. citizens and legal immigrants who are in need.

"It seems like our money in this country is going out faster than it is coming in, and [the spending is] helping the people who are not U.S. citizens," said Buckner, who described herself as a liberal Democrat.

The poll also found stiff resistance to allowing illegal immigrants to pay discounted in-state tuition at public colleges: 12% of those surveyed -- including 20% of Democrats and 6% of Republicans -- supported that idea.

That illuminates why GOP presidential candidate Mike Huckabee has taken flak from his party for supporting, while he was governor of Arkansas, a college subsidy for the children of illegal immigrants.

However, some of those polled saw a humanitarian need to provide emergency healthcare, education and other basic services to illegal immigrants, especially to their children.

"You don't want to see a child go hungry or go ill," said Beverly Taylor, a retired postal worker in Indiana.

Respondents were divided about the best solution to the problem, but a strong majority expressed support for a proposal discussed in Congress -- part of a package backed by President Bush -- that would create a pathway to citizenship for illegal immigrants already in the United States.

The plan, under which illegal immigrants could become citizens if they have no criminal record, register with the Department of Homeland Security, pay a fine, learn English and meet other requirements, was supported by 64% of Democrats and 62% of Republicans.

However, that plan died in Congress under withering fire from critics who called for the nation to tighten border security before considering more liberalized treatment of illegal immigrants.

And the plan has been little discussed by candidates on the presidential campaign trail -- even by Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), who was one of its leading proponents.

The poll suggests that neither party heads into the 2008 election with a decisive advantage on the issue, with Democrats having lost an edge they once enjoyed.

Those surveyed were evenly split on which of the two major parties would do a better job handling immigration: 31% chose Republicans and 30% picked Democrats. By contrast, a poll in June 2006 showed 34% preferred Democrats and 23% preferred Republicans.

janet.hook@latimes.com

Associate polling director Jill Darling contributed to this report.

Homeland Security - the New Inquisition

I am sitting in the Biblioteca Nacional in Madrid, looking through 400 year old reports on civil unrest in the Americas. Between the years of 1640 and 1650 the Inquisition in Mexico took on the role of Homeland Security. There were many political factors but the main result was that by 1649 the Jewish population in New Spain was decimated. There was a time in the first half of the 1600s that Jewish people could actually practice their faith openly in Mexico. Scholar Seymour Liebman wrote in his book on Jews in Mexico that before 1640 there were at least 10 synagogues in Mexico City.

The whole "cleansing movement" was directly related to Portugal separating from Spain in 1640. Every Portuguese person was seen as a suspicious character (sound familiar) and assumed to be Jewish. Even if you were a practicing Christian, if your grandmother had been Jewish you would be under scrutiny. There were certain religious orders that had laws again conversos (people who converted from Judaism or their descendants). If you recall from World History class, the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 just after Columbus said he found America (interesting timing - just as the world was going global).

Anyway, my project has a lot to do with that time period and the history that has been produced from those stories. Someone told me that the Inquisition had nothing to do with the current nativism movement in the U.S. Well, they weren't exactly the same, but there were interesting similarities:

1. People were constantly "telling on each other." Remember the policeman who was a DREAMER - got into the police force with his cousin's I.D. - someone told on him.

2. DREAMERS are children of undocumented immigrants who are also "tainted" according to Lou Dobbs and our Senate.

3. A certain hysteria took over the population.

4. Some people made a lot of money.

5. The people in question were "different."

Well thank goodness no one is getting burned at the stake these days -- but the way we are going... what would it take to be genocide? As it is we are holding people in jail indefinitely without charges; taking nursing babies from their mothers (I understand the baby didn't eat for 3 days), keeping kids out of college (sounds like pre 60s segregation), raiding people's homes without warrants, going into malls (and fast food places) to take people... among other things.

I apologize for being so morose, but looking at these old manuscripts just reminds me that somethings don't change.

image: http://www.hungersbrides.com/images/inq_dunce_cap_left.jpg

The Full Protection of the Law

Just as New Jersey is announcing that immigrant arrests have doubled, a NYC prosecutor is taking a different approach. D.A. Robert Morgenthau is creating a unit that deals specifically with immigrants... a unit that will not check resident status.

Let's hope it doesn't get shot down like the driver's license thing in NY.

He mentions that everyone in the U.S. should have the "full protection of the law." I wish he was right.

December 5, 2007
NYC Prosecutor Creates Immigrant Unit

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:29 a.m. ET

NEW YORK (AP) -- Illegal immigrants living in Manhattan who have been victimized by crimes or who are aware of crimes can now report the incidents without fearing arrest and deportation, officials said.

District Attorney Robert Morgenthau announced Tuesday that he has created a unit to address issues that confront immigrants, regardless of their status, and to prosecute people who prey on them without reporting their immigration status.

''New York is a city of immigrants, and the United States is a country of immigrants,'' he said. ''Everyone who comes here is entitled to the full protection of the law.''

Morgenthau said his office handles 110,000 cases a year and one-third of them involve people who don't speak English.

Mayor Edward Koch issued ordered city employees not to report immigrants' legal status to federal officials in 1989, and Mayor Rudy Giuliani continued that policy, but the federal Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 voided cities' rules against their workers reporting anyone's immigration status to federal authorities.

Giuliani challenged the law and lost, and New York has since adopted what amounts to a don't-ask-don't-tell policy.

Giuliani has had to defend his stand in the current race for the GOP presidential nomination. Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said sanctuary cities encourage illegal immigration and should be denied federal money. Romney called New York ''the poster child for sanctuary cities.''

Morgenthau's new unit is the only one in the city's five boroughs.

Morgenthau's position on immigrants' legal status is consistent with stances taken by several other cities, including San Francisco and Miami, that have adopted sanctuary policies for immigrants, but not with recent federal law.

http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigrants-Criminal-Justice.html

The Anger is Not Really About Immigration

Anwer Sher writes in the Post Global WP blog that it isn't immigration that causes all the problems, it's people's attitudes
towards other people that produce the most harm.

He brings up a point I have mentioned many times:

"you cannot argue for free trade and then put up controls on people who want to immigrate."


If you think of the logic in this.... you might wonder what is wrong with all the people that are screaming their nativism full blast. How can you (a country) want globalization while simultaneously controlling the immigration you need so you can achieve global significance?


I don't want to make it very simplistic, but it does seem that much of the problem revolves around nativists' fear of the dark-skinned people that are now surrounding them. As long as their numbers are kept to a controlled minimum, and they are basically out of site except for certain situations... then they are ok... but it's the whole idea of being "surrounded" that creates the fear that creates the anger.

-----

ANWER SHER
Dubai, UAE
Washington Post
Post Global Blog
December 4, 2007

Originally from Pakistan, Anwer Sher is based in Dubai and writes for Gulf News, Khaleej Times and Emirates Today. His varied career experience includes banking, consulting, and real estate development. He has a Masters degree in International Relations.


Immigration Disruptive Only to Some

Is immigration disruptive? The answer all depends on your individual perspective. From my view, you cannot argue for free trade and then put up controls on people who want to immigrate. You cannot use a lack of integration as an excuse to discriminate against immigrants; after all, most colonizers did not integrate into the countries they colonized. Societies prosper when they open their doors, and despite how much the Americans, the British or the French complain about non-Caucasian minorities, they also need to see how much immigrant doctors, engineers and professionals have contributed to their society. Every American who is not a Native American is an immigrant, and one should never forget that no land belongs to anybody in the true historical sense.

This is an interesting question given the recent riots in France, protests in Malaysia by Malaysians of Indian origin, and with human migration generally becoming a more critical subject. Immigration has always been an integral part of the human saga of development, and under various names the phenomenon of people seeking new opportunities in new lands has always been there: in America, in Australia, and so on. In the modern world it has become more of an issue and more 'disruptive,' as nationalist sentiments make one question the rationale of allowing 'other people' into a society. In a number of former colonizing societies – Great Britain, France, The Netherlands – the 'import' of cheaper labor in the post-colonial era resulted in large migrations of people, particularly in England. With higher birth rates and the tendency of such immigrants not to assimilate, one can are England is now facing 'reverse colonialism'; who would have though 50 years ago two members of the House of Lords will be Asian descent.

In the overall scheme of human settlement, the disruptive element of immigration has been nominal. While riots may seem to suggest a catastrophe waiting to happen, the reality is less troublesome. In France it is the French youth who are being hooligans; they happen to be of African or Moroccan descent, but make no mistake: they are born and bred Frenchmen. Immigration is not the issue - our attitude towards people is.

http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/postglobal/anwer_sher/2007/12/immigration_disruptive_only_to.html

The Banlieue

The suburbs of Paris: One of the young men who died last week in an auto accident with a police officer had a blog known as chamo6. In his blog he wrote:

You may laugh at me because I am different. But I laugh at you because you are all the same.

I wonder if Andres Oppenheimer has read the article below, and if he has... what is he thinking.

for those of you who can read Spanish:

REPORTAJE: VIVIR EN LA BANLIEUE
Arden los guetos
La escasez de empleos y de equipamientos para el ocio lleva a los jóvenes de los suburbios de París a la exclusión y la violencia.
JOAQUÍN PRIETO 02/12/2007
El Pais Madrid


Vota Resultado 32 votos
P ara nosotros no hay futuro. No contamos para nada". Desde las revueltas de 2005, la desesperanza sigue siendo la misma entre grupos de jóvenes en determinados municipios de la periferia de París, de esa banlieue que en la cultura ciudadana francesa quiere decir lo que está más allá, los suburbios de las ciudades.

La noticia en otros webs
webs en español
en otros idiomas
No sólo viven familias de inmigrantes en esas zonas, pero su presencia es muy fuerte. Los padres o los abuelos llegaron a Francia en los años sesenta y setenta, cuando la construcción de 600.000 viviendas anuales y la industria del país requerían de mucha mano de obra. Trajeron a sus familias cuando pudieron o formaron otras nuevas; hasta que las crisis de la construcción y de la industria hicieron innecesarios tantos brazos. Allí permanecen, confinados en barrios donde el paro alcanza hasta al 30%, el triple de la media nacional. Con sus hijos o nietos escolarizados, sí, pero claros candidatos al fracaso escolar y sometidos a discriminaciones a la hora de acceder a los empleos disponibles. Porque entre François y Mohamed, el francés de cepa opta casi siempre por François.

Alojados en barrios construidos por instituciones públicas, que subvencionan el alquiler de las casas, las poblaciones de los barrios sensibles pueden subsistir, pero no romper el destino incierto de la joven generación. Viven en barrios de estructura laberíntica, a menudo rodeados de zonas verdes, que contribuyen a dar un aspecto apacible a zonas cargadas de tensión, con pocos equipamientos culturales y deportivos, en los que grupos de jóvenes matan el tiempo en la calle. La policía atribuye al trapicheo de drogas y otros objetos la exhibición de motos, aparatos electrónicos de tecnología avanzada o ropa de marca en chicos de barrios degradados. Odian a la policía, a Nicolas Sarkozy -el hombre fuerte de Francia, que hace dos años les trató de "escoria"-; queman los coches de los vecinos, alguna escuela, de vez en cuando una tienda. El año pasado se contabilizaron 40.000 coches incendiados en Francia, tres veces más que hace diez años.

Los disturbios de esta semana en Villiers-le-Bel no han sido más que otro chispazo en el proceso de degradación. Con una diferencia: en el pasado, las bandas dedicadas al culto del fuego sólo destrozaban bienes materiales; ahora se producen también ataques a personas con cócteles molotov e incluso con armas de fuego. "Cierto número de jóvenes, extremadamente minoritario, ha basculado hacia el odio y la violencia física", admite François Pupponi, alcalde socialista de Sarcelles, municipio limítrofe con el de las violencias de la semana pasada, ambos próximos al aeropuerto Charles de Gaulle. En todo caso, las revueltas arrabaleras son anónimas y apolíticas, sin objetivo claro; nada que ver con movimientos al estilo de Mayo del 68.

Los últimos incidentes han afectado al distrito electoral de Dominique Strauss-Kahn, el nuevo director general del Fondo Monetario Internacional (FMI). Precisamente están convocadas las elecciones para sustituirle como diputado del Parlamento francés, pero ¿quién puede ocuparse de una campaña electoral, cuando la prioridad es restablecer la calma?

La política no consigue poner fin a la crisis social, pese a la ambición de los planes diseñados para conseguirlo. Existe un macroproyecto estatal para invertir 42.000 millones de euros en 750 barrios sensibles de Francia, y que implica la demolición de 250.000 viviendas degradadas. Sin embargo, la ejecución de tan vasto plan es muy lenta, y los guetos viven pendientes del despliegue de la policía antidisturbios. "Estamos en la violencia anárquica, conducida por una minoría que lanza el oprobio sobre la mayoría", ha argumentado Fadela Amara, ex presidenta de Ni Putas Ni Sumisas, la asociación que condujo una fuerte campaña contra la violencia machista en esos mismos barrios sensibles, elevada ahora al rango de miembro del Gobierno de Sarkozy.

Al presidente de SOS-Racismo, Dominique Sopo, le parece grave haber suprimido la "policía de proximidad" desde que la izquierda perdió el poder. Porque eso ha significado "la desaparición de policías reconocidos y respetados en tal o tal barrio, pero igualmente ha implicado el abandono por el Estado de territorios urbanos cuyas poblaciones han sido reducidas al papel de malvados en una obra de teatro político representada con una bella regularidad en el telediario de las ocho de la tarde y titulada 'Francia tiene miedo", ha escrito en el diario Le Monde. A la tolerancia cero, el gran lema de la derecha en el poder, le sucede el balance cero, contraargumenta el líder de SOS Racismo.

Un hecho indiscutible: tanto los dos muchachos que se mataron esta semana, cuando su moto chocó contra un coche patrulla, como los que murieron electrocutados hace dos años -huyendo de una persecución policial- eran de familias llegadas desde muy lejos: Marruecos, Turquía, Senegal. Pero todos murieron a poco más de una veintena de kilómetros unos de otros. Y todos en la periferia de París, la capital del lujo y de la racionalidad.

La blogosfera alimenta la tristeza por los adolescentes muertos y adoba la cólera que sienten sus colegas. Moshin, uno de los chicos fallecidos en el choque contra un coche policial, había creado un blog en el que se hacía llamar "chamo6". Al abrir la página aparece una foto de Moshin detrás de una nube de humo, acompañada de aforismos como éste: "Os reís de mí porque soy diferente, pero yo me río de vosotros porque sois todos parecidos". -

http://www.elpais.com/articulo/reportajes/Arden/guetos/elpepusocdmg/20071202elpdmgrep_3/Tes

Eclipsed by a Fevered Minority

To the World:

Most Americans are not like Tancredo, Giuliani, and Romney!

·····

As I move around Madrid, go to stores, libraries etc. I am still surprised at the rudeness of many Spaniard. No! they aren´t all like this, but it happens often enough to leave me a little shaken.

It may be a cultural thing, but then I wonder, maybe they are angry at us because of Iraq... since the Madrid subway bombing was related to the IRAQ war that we started. Maybe they think all Americans are jerks who think they own the world (like our presidential administration?)

Well, it has been said many times, but I´m saying it again. A large percentage of Americans DID NOT want the IRAQ war, and did not vote for Bush-Cheney in either election. In fact many think the elections were stolen.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Scare tactics on the border


Most Americans back citizenship for illegal migrants, but are eclipsed by a fevered minority

Michael Tomasky in Washington
Monday December 3, 2007
The Guardian (London)


It may not look like it much of the time, but we Americans are a fairly reasonable people. The rugged individualist streak inherited from the frontier culture cohabits in the collective soul with a civic and communal strain that started in New England and spread from there. The strong hatred of government you hear so much about is balanced by an affection (in many cases stronger than the hatred) for many of the outcomes the government makes possible, such as the delivery of a social security cheque.

However, we're living through an age when this commonsensical balance tends to get overshadowed by a very vocal and fevered minority. On no issue is this truer than on immigration, which figures to emerge as the leading rightwing scare issue for next year's voting.
Earlier this year, Congress was, remarkably, fairly close to passing major immigration reform legislation, something that hasn't happened in Washington in 20 years. The bill's chief adherents, who had spent years working on it, were a Democrat and a Republican, Ted Kennedy and John McCain respectively. For the right, it strengthened the Mexico border with more secure fencing to keep new illegal migrants out; for the left, it offered the 12 million or so undocumented people already in the US a shot at working their way toward citizenship.

Solid majorities of my reasonable compatriots supported the bill's main provisions. According to a New York Times poll in May, for example, 67% supported renewable visas for illegal migrants, and 62% backed the more controversial notion that those in the States for at least two years should be allowed to seek legal status.

Well, the bill died. Liberals disliked certain provisions that changed a key premise of immigration policy from family reunification to employer need. But what really did the bill in was the tsunami of anger that swept across rightwing America. This, the nativists thundered, was an amnesty bill for law-breakers. It was not - amnesty means amnesty, as in all is forgiven, while the bill's provisions for securing citizenship were in fact fairly onerous.

It was a minority view - 33% in that Times poll felt that illegal migrants here for two years should be deported, as opposed to the 62% who backed a citizenship process. But it happens to be a minority that is in possession of: 1) overrepresentation in the Republican party and in Congress, which because of the way individual districts are drawn skews more conservative than the country as a whole; 2) an apoplectic propaganda network on various talk radio stations that reaches at least 25 million Americans every day; and 3) Lou Dobbs, the CNN host who is to immigration in America what, say, Peter Hitchens is to "Britishness", except that Dobbs has the more prominent pulpit of a nightly cable show from which to launch his artillery shells, and does so every single night.

And so the immigration debate as presented in the media is not about how three out of five people think a path to citizenship is an acceptable idea that is preferable to deportation; that may be true, but it's boring and lacks good visuals. So it is instead about how furious "everyone" is, which isn't necessarily true but makes far better television.

Into this maelstrom arrive our presidential candidates. The Democrats strive to represent that safe and poll-tested 62%, with the added fillip that, because of their Latino constituencies, they try to brush past any discussion of fences.

But the ground isn't always safe there. Not long ago, Hillary Clinton strolled into the propellers during a Democratic debate by taking no position (or two positions) on the question of whether illegal migrants should be able to get drivers' licences in her "home" state of New York, where the governor had proposed it. It should be noted that several other states already grant such permission, without overwhelming discord. She has since come out against such a plan. Interestingly, and perhaps riskily, Barack Obama stood by (or, based on the way he answered the question, sort of hunched by) his support for it.

On the Republican side, the two leading candidates, Rudy Giuliani and Mitt Romney, are men with humane track records on immigration now running as far and fast as they can from those records. Their sparring in last Thursday night's debate about who could be tougher on illegal immigrants was as distasteful a display of pandering as we've seen all year. Mike Huckabee, the current belle of the Republican ball, has had compassionate words to say about the children of illegal migrants, though not the migrants themselves.

In sum, the Democrats represent views held by a larger percentage of the population, while the Republicans by and large are pandering to the same 33% they usually pander to. And yet, it is assumed with near unanimity here in Washington that the issue will help the Republicans next autumn, for the reasons cited above and because of the minority's intensity of feeling.

Campaigns usually win by controlling the day-to-day issue agenda. If, next November, American voters are thinking about healthcare and jobs and not seeming insane to the rest of the world, the Democrat should win. But, of course, Republicans know this. They will want Americans to be thinking about terrorism and our porous borders - preferably in tandem. Next year's Willie Horton will not be black, but brown. I hope my fellow Americans stay reasonable when he appears.

· Michael Tomasky is editor of Guardian America michael.tomasky@guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2220788,00.html

Passing

A few days ago I posted an article about racism (November 2007) connected to social class. After some thinking on this I thought it might be worth visiting the topic again.

The idea of passing is something that is often discussed in African American culture. Several of Thomas Jefferson’s children, who were white (one had red hair and looked just like his father) left the plantation and disappeared into white society. More recently, the daughter of New Yorker writer, Anatole Broyard published a memoir about her father’s passing from black to white.

The idea that passing exists tells us that it is a combination of social class and color that sets the divide. If you can’t pass for white, then you are limited to behavior and money, which is often not enough. Think of all the stories of well-dressed black men not being able to catch a cab in Manhattan.

Human beings use visual markers. It can be clothing, but the most obvious is skin color. Even when there is no specific reason to make an “evaluation” (if there is no social contact or transaction between two people) human beings look at each other and think about whom that other person is. Color defines that decision.

This comes about because (especially in the U.S.) in a capitalistic society, worth (in terms of money) increases the lighter the person’s skin. Even when this is not the case, forces of American society project certain assumptions.

In newspaper articles that post certain statistics you will often find the results broken down into race and ethnicity. These are generally income, education, health issues, political involvement, rate of marriage, abortion, rate of illegitimate births, etc.


Generally, the newspaper does not have the space or the time to discuss issues of over or under reporting, biased statistics, unethical scientists (yes that happens too), institutional racism, which may be subtle but still very powerful.

UK Immigration: Fear, Mis-Information, and Nativism

The saying about learning a lot when you travel is true - at least for me. In the kind of work that I do, I have to travel fairly often. The last few years I have been working on a research project in Europe - Immigration is something you are faced with constantly if you are visiting the European Union and either watch TV news or read the papers.

As I am riding the subway to the archives or to conduct an interview with another scholar, I see people from many countries, and I think about immigration.

As soon as I walk out of the apartment I’m staying at, I see four restaurants – from Turkey, India, Pakistan, and Spain. I go to an internet café and a young man asks me if I’ll speak English to him – He has immigrated here from Southeast Asia. I see a hand painted poster that says “Pakistan’s Disaster.”

There is talk (mostly on TV) that this neighborhood is full of people who lack good hygiene (that they urinate and defecate in the street). I assume this is true; I do smell urine, kind of like what I smell when I walk around Lower East Side in Manhattan. The place has a gritty feel while it is also chic - in some ways Madrid is so New York.

There are people here from all over the world. All different colors and languages. Yet the only out of control drunks I have seen are local people (not immigrants).

There is a neighborhood initiative to clean things up - stop the crime, not use the sidewalks as restrooms, not leaving trash and beer cans around the plaza. Today I started seeing small black and white posters that are trying to discourage these behaviors.

This neighborhood initiative for safety and cleanliness brings to mind when I moved into the East End Neighborhood in Houston. People from the other side of town would ask me why would I want to live there. Some (so-called) friends made faces when they drove up to my house. My mother wanted me to build a 9 foot fence that encompassed my yard. Everyone got me so paranoid I even stopped a police officer once and asked his opinion on the barrio’s safety. He said it has some problems, but was basically ok.

The paranoia I was experiencing was not new. I believed the negative descriptions of the neighborhood that I would see on TV. It was like a dark continent for me. When I first moved there I would go to the stores and marvel at how everyone spoke Spanish all the time. It seemed so foreign.

But the decision to move there was very logical for me. The mortgage was very affordable, it was in center of the city and It was 1.4 miles to my job. I was tired of commuting. I wanted to live somewhere that I could walk to work if I needed to. People thought that was impossible in Houston – unless you are so rich you can live anywhere.

So, I found a white house with a big front porch. It had some type of artificial siding over clapboard. The deed says it was built in 1920. I think it is older.

And yes, on Sunday afternoons (and many weekend nights) there is very loud music – banda, mariachi, salsa… anything in Spanish. I got some noise reduction head phones for the days its really really loud.

Lots of people walk by everyday. I actually know many of my neighbors. We talk all the time. The gangs don’t bother me – I hear they usually only harm each other. I did get a big black Lab mix., she is a nice dog, but sometimes scares the kids when they walk home from school. One thing I did as soon as I bought the house was put a fence all around the property. I found that people respect fences, even if gates aren’t locked (the chain link fence is only 4 feet tall - most anyone can jump over it, even me). The neighbors say that a fence and a big dog make people respect your property – its a way to "mark your territory" - the boundary can be easily crossed, but that's not the point. It's about respect --- so most everybody’s house has a fence and a dog.

Nothing has been stolen from our yard. The cars haven’t been broken into. The house has remained safe. The neighborhood residents have a real sense of community. They call me "the teacher." The only people that I’m wary of are the skinny white guys who don’t work and seem to be on drugs. The immigrants basically work all the time. Their entertainment is to play loud music while they barbeque and have a beer in the back yard.

The narratives about danger and filth were imaginary… is what they say about this immigrant neighborhood in Madrid the same?

The phantom hordes
Beware scare stories of UK overpopulation: in future we may need all the people we can get

Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah
Thursday November 29, 2007
The Guardian (London)

Having already experienced unprecedented immigration in recent years, the UK should, apparently, be bracing itself for millions more in coming decades. Almost all of the coverage of the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) projections has focused on how more immigration could lead to a doubling of the UK population by 2081. But this frenzy is unwarranted and could distract us from far more fundamental challenges.

For a start, there has been little coverage of the huge range in the projections. Look carefully and the total population could be anywhere between 64 and 108 million by 2081, depending on how many children we have, how long we live and how much immigration exceeds emigration. Dig deeper, and you'll see the population could actually fall to 50 million, with no net immigration and no improvements in life expectancy.

We have no reliable way of knowing where in this range we will be in seven decades' time. In 1965, the ONS's predecessor predicted a UK population of 75 million by 2000. Given how far off this proved, we should instead be talking about how to respond to the drivers that will shape population change.

One key factor is an ageing population. The UK-born workforce actually fell last year; this year we will see more pensioners than children in the UK. If we are not careful, there will come a time where there will not be enough British workers doing British jobs to pay for public services and pensions. Even in a full-employment scenario, migrants will need to complement the domestic workforce. It is the composition, not the size, of the population that matters.

The oft-evoked image of hordes of hungry migrants clambering to get into the UK also misunderstands the future drivers of migration. The patterns show that future migrants are more likely be besuited bankers than famished farmers. Indeed, far from trying to limit immigration, there is a good chance the UK will have to compete hard with other developed countries to attract the best and brightest from around the world.

Other potential drivers - global economic inequalities, climate change and war - are unlikely to result in vast numbers coming to the UK. Instead, if improvements in border controls and technology continue, the impacts of such displacement will be felt more by the neighbours of war-torn, poor or environmentally-devastated countries. Uganda will bear the brunt of problems in Rwanda; India will pay the price of flooding in Bangladesh. The developed world, now home to only around one in five of the world's refugees, is unlikely to provide shelter.

The debate about overpopulation also ignores perhaps the most important migration trend in the UK: emigration. Last year, IPPR estimated that there were around 5.5 million British nationals living abroad - more than there are foreigners here. Countries like Australia, home to more than a million Brits, actively scour the world for new migrants. Meanwhile, many in the UK seem not to want to accept this reality.

Perhaps the most worrying assumption is that future migrants will behave like past migrants. While many of those who came to the UK in the 1960s stayed permanently, this is unlikely for today's Poles, in the vanguard of a new generation of circular migrants. In an increasingly mobile world, projections based on old assumptions may be little short of useless.

The more we obsess about how many more people will be crammed into these islands, the greater the risk of us ending up with far fewer people: lonely souls struggling to cope in a brave new world.

· Dhananjayan Sriskandarajah is director of research policy at the Institute for Public Policy Research

ippr.org

http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2218600,00.html

CNN: A Corrupt Voice for America

Here is an excellent blog post about CNN by Law Professor Kevin Johnson from UC DAVIS

"CNN: Corrupt News Network"?

We covered the fireworks of the Republican Presidential debate earlier in the week. And Lou Dobbs,who cannot be racist because his wife is Mexican-American and who we seemingly cannot avoid seeing on television at any airport in the country, has been a popular piñata for these blogsters. Tim Rutten of the L.A. Times has a very critical -- and especially refreshing because it came from a major news daily -- column linking the debates, CNN, and Lou Dobbs. In "CNN: Corrupt News Network: A self-serving agenda was set for the Republican presidential debates," he writes:

" Selecting a president is, more than ever, a life and death business, and a news organization that consciously injects itself into the process, as CNN did by hosting Wednesday's debate, incurs a special responsibility to conduct itself in a dispassionate and, most of all, disinterested fashion. When one considers CNN's performance, however, the adjectives that leap to mind are corrupt and incompetent.

Corruption is a strong word. But consider these facts: The gimmick behind Wednesday's debate was that the questions would be selected from those that ordinary Americans submitted to the video sharing Internet website YouTube, which is owned by Google. According to CNN, its staff culled through 5,000 submissions to select the handful that were put to the candidates. That process essentially puts the lie to the vox populi aura the association with YouTube was meant to create. When producers exercise that level of selectivity, the questions -- whoever initially formulated and recorded them -- actually are theirs.

That's where things begin to get troubling, because CNN chose to devote the first 35 minutes of this critical debate to a single issue -- immigration. Now, if that leaves you scratching your head, it's probably because you're included in the 96% of Americans who do not think immigration is the most important issue confronting this country. . . .

****
So, why did CNN make immigration the keystone of this debate? What standard dictated the decision to give that much time to an issue so remote from the majority of voters' concerns? The answer is that CNN's most popular news-oriented personality, Lou Dobbs, has made opposition to illegal immigration and free trade the centerpiece of his neonativist/neopopulist platform. In fact, Dobbs led into Wednesday's debate with a good solid dose of immigrant bashing. His network is in a desperate ratings battle with Fox News and, in a critical prime-time slot, with MSNBC's Keith Olbermann. So, what's good for Dobbs is good for CNN. In other words, CNN intentionally directed the Republicans' debate to advance its own interests. Make immigration a bigger issue and you've made a bigger audience for Dobbs.

That's corrup