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Posted on 08 February 2010
It's being reported that the Tea Party Movement has created a new political organization, Ensuring Liberty Corporation, whose mission will be to endorse, support and elect conservative candidates. The announcement came with an official platform that could help define what the multi-faceted tea party movement stands for and expects from the candidates it supports. The group's leaders plan to support candidates who stand for a set of "First Principles." Those principles are: fiscal responsibility, lower taxes, less government, states' rights and national security. Well, the Tea Party people aren't the only ones to have created a list of "principles." The National Latino Congreso (NLC), which held their fourth international gathering last week in El Paso, came up with a list of endorsements and plans of actions they feel are necessary to help progress issues important to the Latino community. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 08 February 2010
During his Jan. 27 State of the Union address to the Congress, after 6,300 words and an hour of listing numerous important policy objectives, President Barack Obama uttered the one word millions of Hispanics across the country were waiting to hear: immigration. However, when he did so, two other words key to his Hispanic audience were starkly absent: “comprehensive” and “reform.” In total, the President used 37 carefully selected words on immigration reform. “We should continue the work of fixing our broken immigration system – to secure our borders and enforce our laws, and ensure that everyone who plays by the rules can contribute to our economy and enrich our nation,” he said, avoiding any direct reference to plight of 12 million U.S. residents living in limbo. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 08 February 2010
Remember what I said about Obama missing an opportunity when he failed to link immigration reform to the economy? According to unemployment numbers that I spotted gracias to the National Institute for Latino Policy, despite some pundits saying that the economy is slowly rebounding, Latino unemployment in the U.S. remains disproportionately high. It’s being reported that last month overall unemployment dropped to 9.7 percent from 10 percent, not a whole lot really but the tiny drop looks more significant compared to the rise in Latino unemployment. The seasonally adjusted unemployment rate for Latino households in January was an estimated 12.6 percent, compared to 8.7 percent for non-Latino Whites. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 08 February 2010
In the ongoing debate on immigration, there is broad agreement among academic economists that it has a small but positive impact on the wages of native-born workers overall: although new immigrant workers add to the labor supply, they also consume goods and services, which creates more jobs. The real debate among researchers is whether a large influx of a specific type of worker (say, workers with a particular level of education or training) has the potential to have a negative impact on the wages of existing workers of that same type. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 08 February 2010
Latino groups are pressing U.S. Education Secretary Arne Duncan to withhold possibly millions in funding to Boston schools until the district complies with federal and state laws for programs aimed at students with limited English skills. Several local and national Latino groups sent a letter to Duncan this week faulting Boston for a lack of services. They want Duncan to without "Race to the Top" funds until the district complies. A state review two years ago revealed that Boston was potentially running afoul of civil rights laws by failing to provide services. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 08 February 2010
Someday, probably some five decades or so from now, these stories of people being harassed because of language are going to be funny. We’re going to look back on our current era and wonder how we could ever have been so backward as to see a threat from people who are capable of speaking the Spanish language. They will be sad, pathetic little stories that we chuckle at because of how far we come. I HAVE EVERY bit of confidence that the outcome I have stated will come about. Someday. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 08 February 2010
Decapitated bodies dumped on the streets, drug-war shootings and regular attacks on police have obscured a significant fact: A falling homicide rate means people in Mexico are less likely to die violently now than they were more than a decade ago. It also means tourists as well as locals may be safer than many believe. Mexico City's homicide rate today is about on par with Los Angeles and is less than a third of that for Washington, D.C. Yet many Americans are leery of visiting Mexico at all. Drug violence and the swine flu outbreak contributed to a 12.5 percent decline in air travel to Mexico by U.S. citizens in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Commerce, a blow to Mexico's third-largest source of foreign income. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 08 February 2010
For months, the leaders of Tancitaro had held firm against the drug lords battling for control of this central Mexican town. Then one morning, after months of threats and violence from the traffickers, they finally surrendered. Before dawn, gunmen kidnapped the elderly fathers of the town administrator and the secretary of the City Council. Within hours, both officials resigned along with the mayor, the entire seven-member City Council, two department heads, the police chief and all 60 police officers. Tancitaro had fallen to the enemy. Across Mexico, the continuing ability of traffickers to topple governments like Tancitaro's, intimidate police and keep drug shipments flowing is raising doubts about the Mexican government's 3-year-old, U.S.-backed war on the drug cartels. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 04 February 2010
In his State of the Union speech, President Obama committed his Administration to pass comprehensive immigration reform. There are those who claim that this year immigration reform is a diversion from the priority task of fixing the economy -- and also politically impossible to achieve. In fact, comprehensive immigration reform is critical for America's long term economic success and is one of the few political initiatives that could receive genuine bipartisan support in the current Congress. The immigration system is broken -- and it costs the American economy billions in lost productivity, wasted resources, underdeveloped human capital, depressed wages, and uncollected tax revenue. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 04 February 2010
The way things are shaping up, March 21 is going to be a key date this year for those people who want legitimate reform of the nation’s immigration laws. Various activist groups from across the nation are planning on showing up in Washington on that date (a Sunday) for a rally on Capitol Hill to make it known once again that this is an issue that cannot seriously be put off any longer. THEY ALSO WANT to give the image to political people who fear the Election Day retribution of the conservative-leaning Tea Party protesters that Latinos and others interested in action on immigration can put together an Election Day penalty of our own.
Continue Reading...
As a media justice activist, I was thrilled to read about this new GPS application. What it does is basically allow any phone user who has capabilities of downloading applications to download information on safe border crossings between Mexico and the U.S.. It will include information such as where water stations are, where safer crossings are, and it will even give out inspirational poems to let crossers know they aren’t alone on their crossing.
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