Immigration

By Reshma Shamasunder
New America Media

Yesterday was the last day to register to vote in the June 5th election in California. Even though voter registration deadlines come and go each year, for immigrant communities in California this one is critical because there’s probably more at stake this election year for immigrants and their families than ever.

Yesterday hundreds of immigrants from across California converged on Sacramento to urge policy-makers to pass legislation that supports immigrant workers and their families. Immigrants in California have a reason to be hopeful. In 2011, the state passed landmark legislation benefiting immigrant communities, ranging from providing undocumented students financial assistance to changes in car impoundment policies. This show of civic engagement at the state level is important to our state as our national election nears.

By Elena Shore
New America Media

A new report by the Pew Hispanic Center documents a trend that reporters have been covering anecdotally for several years: we are now seeing net-zero immigration from Mexico to the United States.

The factors that may have contributed to this change – high U.S. unemployment, a Mexican economy that is recovering more rapidly, a low Mexican birthrate, and increased immigration enforcement – all point in one direction: The number of people moving to Mexico from the United States is equal to -- or greater than -- the number of people coming into the country from Mexico.

But with a record number of state and local laws cracking down on undocumented immigrants, this hardly means an end to the anti-immigrant sentiment that has taken root in America.

By Diane Lefer
LA Progressive

According to US Secretary of Labor Hilda Solis, more people die in the American workplace in a single year than have been lost in nine years of war in Iraq. “Each day in America, twelve people go to work and never go home,” she told the audience at the Action Summit for Worker Safety and Health held at East Los Angeles Community College on April 26, one of many events leading up to Workers Memorial Day, April 28, an annual date of remembrance for those killed, injured, or sickened on the job.

María Elena Durazo, Executive-Secretary-Treasurer of the Los Angeles County Federation of Labor, AFL-CIO, reported there were 500 work-related deaths in 2011 in California and “Workers are still being fired for speaking out in order to avoid death.”

This loss of life and countless serious injuries, continue to occur although the Occupational Safety and Health Act (OSHA), intended to protect workers, was signed by Richard Nixon 41 years ago.

By Peter Schrag

University of Southern California demographer Dowell Myers has spent much of the past ten years trying to show his fellow Californians how much their future depends on immigrants and their children.

At the heart of that message is the simple fact that as the boomer generation retires in the next couple of decades, the majority of the labor force will be first or second generation immigrants. There is no one else to fill the jobs, pay for the Social Security and Medicare of those retirees, no one to buy their homes.

By Sugriel Reyes
New America Media

She sits in her room, absorbed in a book of homemade natural remedies. Her petite frame is lost in a wooden twin-size bed that sits amid a monstrous pile of clothes, books, shoes, blankets, pillows, towels and makeup her teenage niece refers to as her side of the room.

Reading is what Claudia spends most of her time doing. Living on the outskirts of Los Angeles and without a car, it is hard to get around. She takes the bus to work, a small clothing boutique in Pasadena that gives her 10 hours a week. The little money she makes, she saves, in hopes of one day affording her own apartment.

By Andrew Lam
New America Media

Recently, in front a packed crowd at Duke University, former Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice regretted the failure of passing the comprehensive immigration reform act and the shift in Americans’ attitude toward immigrants.

Accepting and welcoming immigrants “has been at the core of our strength,” she said. “I don’t know when immigrants became the enemy.”

These days it is refreshing, if rare, to hear someone of Rice’s stature to speak on behalf of immigrants. Over the last few years the public discourse has been shrill and, if anything, media coverage seems to stoke anxiety to an unprecedented level.

Instead of a larger narrative on immigration—from culture to economics, from identity to history— what we have now is a public mindset of us versus them, and an overall anti immigrant climate that is both troubling and morally reprehensible.

America’s Difficult Love Story

By Elena Shore
New America Media

2011 saw a record number of laws restricting abortion in U.S. states. It also saw a record number of state anti-immigrant laws. Coincidence?

Maybe not.

In 2011, U.S. states enacted 135 new reproductive health provisions, 92 of them seeking to restrict abortion.

In 2000, 13 states were considered “hostile” to reproductive rights; by 2011, that number had doubled to 26 states, according to the Guttmacher Institute. Last year, more than half of women of reproductive age (15-44) were living in states that were hostile to abortion, up from less than one-third in 2000.

By Ruby Perez
New America Media

Raul Rodriguez and Alberto Ledesma live parallel lives. Both proudly claim UC Berkeley as their alma mater. Both have worked hard academically. And both have published personal essays about the stigma of being an undocumented student.

But that’s where their lives diverge. Ledesma was fortunate enough to gain amnesty via the Immigration Reform and Control Act (IRCA), federal legislation that granted amnesty to immigrants who entered the U.S. before 1986. Rodriguez, on the other hand, remains undocumented because legislation like IRCA no longer exists.

“At any point, I felt that I could be deported,” recalls Ledesma. But his anxiety dissipated after the passage of IRCA in 1986. “I went from being a B- student to being an A+ student because once that stress (of being deported) is removed [and] you have that sense of freedom, almost like you get high from it, it makes you a different person.”

By Dick Meister
Author, Journalist

The birth date of Cesar Chavez, the late farm workers' leader, will be celebrated next month, and rightly so.  But it's well past time we also celebrated the life of probably the most important of the other leaders who played a major role in winning union rights for farm workers and otherwise helping them combat serious exploitation.

That's Larry Itliong. He died 35 years ago this month at age 63. Itliong got involved in the farm workers' struggle very early in life, not long after he arrived as a 15-year-old immigrant from the Philippine Islands. He was among some 31,000 Filipino men who came to California in the late 1920s.

By Andrew Lam
New America Media

Each time Uncle Sam ventures abroad he leaves an unfinished story, and nowhere is it most unfinished than the story of Iraq, where despite flowery speeches regarding freedom and sovereignty by the Obama administration, despite assurances that tyranny has been "cast aside," the tragedy caused by the United States invasion, occupation and inevitable abandonment is on an epic proportion.

Never mind that sectarian violence continues unabated and much of the populace remains mired in poverty, and that there's a distinct possibility that the country is on its way to becoming a failed state if the Sunnis and Shiites cannot find a way to collectively govern.