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Posted on 11 March 2010
Despite all the talk about a tide of pessimism surging in our country, optimism isn't dead. It's just in hiding. The economy is struggling. The deficit is looming. Unemployment is hovering at about 10 percent. China is nipping at our heels for global economic dominance. Our housing, automotive and banking industries are on life support. The health care system is falling apart. Amid this gloom and doom, Patrick Alitt, American history professor at Emory University, wrote in an essay titled "America: The Miserable," that "the burst of utopianism that greeted Obama in 2008 has disappeared with the return of everyday politics and the slow grind of two unwinnable wars. Now everyone talks about decline, recession and aging." Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 11 March 2010
Politico is reporting that Sen. Chuck Schumer, the Senate's architect on the latest Senate version of immigration reform, is feeling "optimistic" about producing immigration legislation this year. He and his congressional colleague, Sen. Lindsey Graham, are scheduled to meet with the President tomorrow after a series of scheduled meetings had been cancelled. Advocates for immigration reform were beginning to think that there was nothing to feel optimistic about with each meeting cancellation, but, as we are learning, a meeting doesn't signify passage or introduction of the legislation. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 11 March 2010
In one sense, I can understand why President Barack Obama is not in any hurry to kick off the legislative procedures required to implement the changes in our nation’s immigration laws that are long overdue. There is the segment of our society that is determined to squash this and (coincidentally?) it is largely the same segment that is determined to cast the Obama presidency in the most negative light possible (as though they think the day will come when we will long for the era of George W. Bush). SO WHEN OBAMA and his allies finally get off their collective keisters and start the process of passing a new law (I don’t know whether it will have any resemblance to the measure that has been suggested – but not acted upon – by Rep. Luis Gutierrez, D-Ill.), there is going to be all the nasty, xenophobic rhetoric spewed. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 11 March 2010
THE WHITE HOUSE claims it wants “humane enforcement,” and then washes its hands of those hurt or killed in their detention centers. Hate groups are recruiting record numbers of members, Nativist groups are doctoring polls, and amidst the hostility and fakery, four brave undocumented students are walking over a thousand miles to make their case to Washington. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 11 March 2010
At age 79, Jaime Escalante, the legendary East Los Angeles math teacher who inspired the classic 1988 motion picture Stand and Deliver, is fighting for his life. This time “ganas” — the Spanish word he used to indoctrinate thousands of Latino students with a fierce desire to learn, may not be enough to save him. A month ago, doctors gave the Bolivian native, now in late stages of gall bladder cancer, two months to live, actor Edward James Olmos, his long-time friend, tells Hispanic Link News Service. Olmos, who earned an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Escalante, is on a mission to raise funds to assist the teacher and his family in Sacramento, Calif., in meeting mounting medical bills and to cushion his days with comfort and peace. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 11 March 2010
Nearly 350 Hispanic advocates representing more than 100 community-based organizations in 30 states traveled to Washington, D.C., the first week of March to engage their congressional representatives face-to-face over federal inaction on comprehensive immigration reform. “We came to ask them to make it a priority,” said George Díaz, a spokesperson for Phoenix-based Chicanos por la Causa. The visitors were invited by the National Council of La Raza for its 2010 Latino advocacy day. As they met with their House and Senate delegations, they shared personal stories that attached faces to the problems of migrants and their extended families. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 11 March 2010
I remember my first Tea Party invitation. The "hosts" were a group of loosely federated regional anti-illegal immigration groups, the occasion was Tax Day, and the call to action was to "protest to demand the end of taxation without representation." The particular bone of contention was Gov. Quinn's then-proposed tax increase, described thusly: "Governor Quinn says he must raise your income tax because he doesn't have enough money to pay for all the social welfare benefits demanded by the illegal alien invaders." Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 11 March 2010
The great thing about racists is they'll always take the bait. You won't get far into an immigration-reform debate, for instance, before the GOP's more zealous legislators start doing things like criminalizing priests and calling Miami a "third world country." Which is why Democrats ought to be more eager to spend 2010 debating immigration. Back in summer 2009, that looked like the plan. President Obama made a big show of brainstorming reforms, by holding a White House summit and meeting with legislators in both parties. New York Sen. Charles Schumer teamed up with South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham to work on a bipartisan bill and immigration seemed destined to get space at the top of the 2010 agenda. Continue Reading...
Featured article
Posted on 10 March 2010
While the adults charged with the responsibility to govern our country responsibly fell for the parlor tricks of radio entertainers a new generation of immigrants without documentation came of age. There are well over 1 million children in this country without documentation. These young undocumented adults hold great promise for our country’s future and yet even at this difficult time in our country when potential should be at a premium the adults in charge have discarded even the most gifted of these students because of rhetorical fear and political expediency.
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Featured article
Posted on 09 March 2010
It seems that public officials are determined to pull out all stops when it comes to making sure people understand that in about a week, they’re going to be receiving that form in the mail from the U.S. Census Bureau that asks for an accounting of who actually lives at every address in the country. We’re not talking about just the heads of households. Officials want to make sure that children get counted to. IT IS WITH that goal in mind that Census Bureau officials plan to hold an event this week to promote their “Children Count, Too!” campaign that makes sure parents understand that it does no good to just fill out the form for themselves. Continue Reading...
John Carlos Frey wants you to be angry about the U.S.-Mexico border. He wants you to feel such a deep sense of moral outrage that you'll get out of your chair and write a letter to your congressman. That's why he invited me to the border town of El Centro, to stand in Imperial County's pauper's cemetery, a dusty field dotted with about 900 concrete markers the size of bread loaves. Each was stamped with numbers or the name "John Doe." Several hundred marked the final resting place of Mexican and other Latin American migrants who've died walking across the desert or drowned trying to cross the nearby All-American Canal. Frey, a 46-year-old filmmaker, blames the U.S. government for their deaths.
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