From: Imagine 2050

The following article is one of a series of accounts from students who recently returned from Arizona. They were part of a delegation that spent a week touring the state amid the enactment of controversial law SB 1070. The Center for New Community, a national civil rights organization based in Chicago, sponsored the trip, which included nine students from Washington D.C., New York, Chicago and Colorado.

Imagine if an imagination was all you needed: to begin, to finish, to follow through.
What if all your tomorrow consisted of was your development in thought from today?
That’s where dreams come from…
You think it in your head, you see it through your eyes, then show others through your action.
And just like that, history repeats itself.
Today is a good day to dream. If you don’t agree, try asking someone who can’t.
Success only occurs when preparation meets opportunity, but NOTHING can birth without being conceived first.
Dreams in Arizona have been swept away: not only from the undocumented, but the youth that follow.
Not because dreams were never conceived, but because they have been aborted.
What if your skin’s pigment had everything to do with your way of life?
Imagine living each day like it’s your last.
Imagine having to risk your life crossing a desert just to create one for your children.
What if your ethnicity/culture just wasn’t good enough to be considered the “American Way?”
Imagine having a racist Sheriff endorse the slaying of your people, who have committed no wrong; amnesty was null and void.
Imagine being denied your ethnic history in schools and chastised only to be underpaid.
Everything begins with just a thought. Have you thought about it?
Can you imagine? You don’t have to, all of these things are going on.
Right here in America!
Taisha Hawkins is a Howard University Accounting Major, mogul in the making, aspiring to inspire

Popularity: 2% [?]

From: Ponte Al Dia

A story lost from history books prompted an evening coffee house mix of three dozen college students and curious capital professionals — nearly all females — to listen intently as author Philippa Strum revisited the events behind Méndez v. Westminster, a California Ninth Judicial Circuit Court decision that preceded Topeka’s landmark Brown v. Board of Education by eight years.

Strum’s PowerPoint presentation was a revelation for several Latino students unaware of the Mexican-American family that ended California’s schoolhouse segregation in 1946.

Gonzalo and Felícitas Méndez were farmers who tried to enroll their children in a “white” school just over 100 miles north of the Mexican border. The children were turned away and told to attend a nearby school for Mexican Americans. As Strum describes in her book, Méndez v. Westminster: School Desegregation and Mexican-American Rights, the children were seen as “visibly darker,” as the admissions advisor noticed their last names were “all too clearly Mexican.”

Judge Paul McCormick concluded that Spanish-speaking students are unable to learn English if segregated, a paralleled opinion during the Brown case..

At Q&A time, a Latina law student rose to the mike and admitted she never heard about the case. She asked Strum if she would consider bringing the historic trial to the attention of lecturers at law schools.

Strum, national secretary of the American Civil Liberties Union and a teacher of constitutional law for 35 years in New York City, added that the case isn’t even mentioned in constitutional law books.

Strum, there to promote and sign copies of her book, published this year by the University Press of Kansas, said she discovered the case by accident.

“One day in 2007, I read an article about a postage stamp that had just been issued called Méndez v. Westminster, Having taught constitutional law for all those years, I said, ‘Something is wrong here,’ I had never heard of this case. How is this possible?”

While engaged in research, she found it “a very important part of American history.”

It set legal precedent at the California Supreme Court level by ruling segregation in California’s schools was unlawful.

California Governor Earl Warren agreed with the court’s decision that “separate but equal” wasn’t really equal. He pushed for state desegregation statutes in 1947. President Dwight Eisenhower appointed him Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1953, a year before the Brown decision.

The California case provided a test run for lawyers in the Topeka case.

Aside from legal language, Strum brought the Méndezes’ struggle to life, highlighting facts and photos that depicted their school environment and living conditions.

“I was really impressed by the vibrancy of these maltreated communities,…homes they build themselves out of wood lacked refrigeration and flush toilets…There was lots of labor organizing in Latino communities…These were not people who would be satisfied being treated as second-class citizens, and that was a wonderful thing to see.”

TeachingforChange executive director Deborah Menkart found the lecture inspiring. “When students learn from this and other cases about the role ordinary people can play, it gives them a sense they can, too,” she reacted. “They don’t have to wait for a hero to come along.”

Sylvia Méndez, 74, one of the family’s daughters who was turned away from the segregated school, remembered how it marked her life.

She didn’t want to pursue college, but her mother Felícitas reminded her of significance of their struggle.

Twelve years ago, Sylvia promised her mom she would promote the story into California‘s history. Now, as she accepts speaking engagements in public schools, she notices a surprising enthusiasm, “The students — especially Latinos — are so excited, they ask, “Why don’t we know about this history? Why don’t we know it was Latinos who desegregated California?”

Sylvia introduced legislation in Sacramento to include the Méndez case into California’s school textbooks, but it was vetoed by Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. With a different governor in November, she hopes the lost story that shattered California’s segregated past will inspire all children.

Popularity: 2% [?]

From: NY Daily News

Unencumbered by any moral imperative to be truthful, some anti-immigration activists and politicians have no qualms about demonizing immigrants with half-truths and outright lies.

One of their favorite myths is that the U.S. is the only country in the world that grants citizenship to every person born here. The U.S. is outdated in providing birthright citizenship, they say, adding that no one else does it and that the 14th Amendment of the Constitution - which guarantees that right - should be revised.

Right-wing propaganda purveyors like Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly, and even politicians like South Carolina Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham - who should know better - throw around despicable terms like “anchor babies,” and feign outrage at the fact that, according to them, the 14th Amendment wrongly protects the U.S.-born children of undocumented immigrants.

Of course, it is nothing but a ruse, a gigantic myth whose only purpose is to stoke anti-immigrant fires. The truth: More than 30 countries - including Canada, Argentina and Brazil - grant birthright citizenship.

To hear this stream of lies and over-the-top rhetoric from the likes of Beck and O’Reilly is no surprise: We know who they are.

It is different when you hear it from political figures like Graham or John (Immigrants are God’s children, too) McCain (R-Ariz.), who not long ago were champions of comprehensive reform. Theirs is just a cynical vote-getting game.

Their sheer opportunism stands in stark contrast to Mayor Bloomberg’s principled defense of the right to build a cultural center and mosque near Ground Zero, his swift condemnation of the hate attack against a Muslim cabdriver and his long-standing position welcoming immigrants to the city. New York is definitely not Arizona.

“As an election nears, we always hear increasingly extreme rhetoric from the Republican Party on immigration,” said Rep. José Serrano (D-N.Y.). “But this time around, their fire has turned on the most vulnerable among us: the children.”

Fortunately, the majority of the American people do not share their extreme views.

“A number of recent polls show that public opinion clearly supports comprehensive immigration reform,” writes Anthony Weigel, a Kansas immigration attorney in the last issue of Immigration Daily. These are the polls he was referring to:

The CNN Opinion Research Poll, released July 2, shows an astounding 81% favoring the creation of a program allowing illegal immigrants to remain in the country to apply for legal status, subject to having a job and paying back taxes.

It’s interesting that the same poll also shows that while 55% favor Arizona’s SB 1070, 50% believe it will not reduce illegal immigration and 54% believe it will lead to discrimination against Hispanics.

“Finally,” Weigel writes, “Fox News’ August 13 Opinion Dynamics poll indicates that, by a margin of 68% to 27%, respondents favored giving illegal immigrants who pay taxes and obey the law a second chance and allowing them to stay in the U.S.”

The Fox News poll also indicates that 68% believe the federal government’s top priority should be to simultaneously pass new immigration legislation and secure the border, over 21% who believe in securing the border first.

No one would accuse Fox News of being sympathetic to undocumented immigrants, which makes its findings much more significant.

Whatever they may think, the news is not good for the hatemongers and demagogues who have made a career of demonizing immigrants and their children.

Just wait until the November elections.

Popularity: 2% [?]

From: NY Times

The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.

The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.

The patrol says that answering agents’ questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent. But others, from immigration lawyers and university officials to American-born travelers startled by an agent’s flashlight in their eyes, say the practice is coercive, unconstitutional and tainted by racial profiling.

The Lake Shore Limited route is a journey across the spectrum of public attitudes toward illegal immigrants — from cities where they have been accepted and often treated as future citizens, to places where they are seen as lawbreakers the federal government is doing too little to expel.

The journey also highlights conflicting enforcement policies. Immigration authorities, vowing to concentrate resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions, have recently been halting the deportation of students who were brought to the country as children without papers — a group the Obama administration favors for legalization.

But some of the same kinds of students are being jailed by the patrol, like a Taiwan-born Ph.D. candidate who had excelled in New York City public schools since age 11. Two days after he gave a paper on Chaucer at a conference in Chicago last year, he was taken from his train seat and strip-searched at a detention center in Batavia, N.Y., facing deportation for an expired visa.

For some, the patrol’s practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona — that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.

The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a “reasonable distance” from the border. But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure. And unlike Arizona’s law, the change is happening without public debate.

“It’s turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It’s essentially become an internal document check.”

Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon. The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.

In Rochester, the Border Patrol station opened in 2004, with four agents to screen passengers of a new ferry from Toronto. The ferry went bankrupt, but the unit has since grown tenfold; its agents have one of the highest arrest rates on the northern border — 1,040 people in the 2008 fiscal year, 95 percent of them from buses and trains — though officials say numbers have fallen as word of the patrols reached immigrant communities.

“Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons,” said Thomas Pocorobba Jr., the agent in charge of the Rochester station, one of 55 between Washington State and Maine. “We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

Legal scholars say the government’s border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.

Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nation’s population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, “Technically, we can, but we don’t.” He added, “Our job is strictly cross-border.”

Lawyers challenging the stops in several deportation cases questioned the rationale that they were aimed at border traffic. Government data obtained in litigation shows that at least three-quarters of those arrested since 2006 had been in the country more than a year.

Though many Americans may welcome such arrests, the patrol’s costly expansion was based on a bipartisan consensus about border security, not interiorenforcement to sweep up farmworkers and students, said Nancy Morawetz, who directs the immigration rights clinic at New York University.

One case she is challenging involves a Nassau County high school graduate taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester in 2007. The government says the graduate, then 21, voluntarily produced a Guatemalan passport and could not prove she was in the country legally. A database later showed she had an expired visitor’s visa.

Unlike a criminal arrest, such detentions come with few due process protections. The woman was held at a county jail, then transferred across the country while her mother, a house cleaner, and a high school teacher tried to reach her. The woman first saw an immigration judge more than three weeks after her arrest. He halved the $10,000 bail set by the patrol, and she was eventually released at night at a rural Texas gas station.

“I was shocked,” said the teacher, Susanne Marcus, who said her former student had been awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.

Another challenge is pending in the 2009 train arrest of the Taiwan-born doctoral student, who had to answer the agent after being singled out for intense questioning because of his “Asian appearance,” he said. His account was corroborated in an affidavit filed this month by another passenger.

Similar complaints have been made by others, including a Chicago couple who encountered the patrol on a train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the woman’s graduation from Vassar College.

“At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped,” said the woman, a citizen of Chinese-American descent who said her Mexican boyfriend was sleeping when an agent started questioning him. “Here, you’re sitting on the train asleep and if you don’t look like a U.S. citizen, it’s ‘Wake up!’ ”

Mr. Pocorobba denied that agents used racial profiling; the proof, he said, was that those arrested had come from 96 countries. Agents say they often act on suspicion, prompted by a passenger’s demeanor. Of those detained, most were in the country illegally — including the Mexican, 24, who admitted that he had sneaked across the southern border at 16 to find his father. Others were supposed to be carrying their papers, like a Pakistani college student detained for two weeks before authorities confirmed that he was a legal resident.

Some American-born passengers welcome the patrol. “It makes me feel safe,” volunteered Katie Miller, 34, who was riding Amtrak to New York from Ohio. “I don’t mind being monitored.”

To others, it evokes travel through the old Communist bloc. “I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,” recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester.

Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van.

“As a citizen I’m offended,” he said. But he added, “To say I didn’t want to answer didn’t seem a viable option.”

Popularity: 2% [?]

From: Huffington Post

While most analysis of immigration politics has focused on Arizona lately, both parties should take note of the results of last Tuesday’s gubernatorial primary in Florida. In states with a significant Latino presence, there is a steep price to pay for ugly immigration politics.

Here’s what happened: Attorney General Bill McCollum was the favorite in the GOP gubernatorial primary, with a moderate record on immigration and strong support from Latino Republicans. His opponent Rick Scott, a political newcomer and self-funded multi-millionaire, decided to make a name for himself by riding the wave of anti-immigrant sentiment so popular with a segment of the Republican base. He emphasized his strong support for an Arizona-like immigration law in Florida and painted McCollum as soft on illegal immigration. Still, once McCollum started attacking Scott as a shady businessman, he regained the lead and was expected to win.

In what proved to be the fatal move of his campaign, McCollum introduced his own version of an Arizona-type law less than two weeks before the primary. McCollum called on the Florida state legislature to enact it in September and bragged that the bill was tougher than Arizona’s.

Turns out, McCollum’s strategy of trying to outflank Scott on immigrant bashing backfired. McCollum rapidly lost support from Latino leaders, and faced a backlash in the press. On Tuesday, many Latinos in Miami-Dade County stayed home. Turnout in what was expected to be a McCollum stronghold was less than 17%, while statewide turnout was 21%. Scott raced over the finish line and pulled off the come-from-behind upset.

The organization I head, America’s Voice, hosted a post-election conference call to hear from a bipartisan panel of political pros as they analyzed what happened in Florida.

GOP consultant Ana Navarro, who had been an advisor to McCollum until he pandered on immigration, explained what derailed the campaign:

“It’s not what (Hispanics) did against Bill McCollum; it’s what they didn’t do for Bill McCollum,” Ana Navarro said of the veteran pol’s loss to mega-wealthy newcomer Rick Scott.

Navarro who has advised leading Republicans such as former Florida governor Jeb Bush and Sen. John McCain, said McCollum alienated many of his key Hispanic supporters when he hustled out proposed legislation that would crack down on illegal immigration two weeks before the election.

“He antagonized some of his top Hispanic advisers, his Hispanic voters and his Hispanic surrogates,” she said, “And the backlash was perhaps much larger than what he envisioned.”

As reported in the Miami Herald’s blog, Naked Politics Florida pollster Fernand Amandi said this:

“You look at a three point loss and the county with the biggest number of Hispanic Republicans being Miami-Dade underperformed,” Amandi said. “Several factors were in play but how could one of them not have been the 11th hour move on immigration…which alienated a significant amount of his Hispanic Republican supporters.”

Arturo Vargas of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) Education Fund made it clear that immigrant bashing was not only a bad strategy for McCollum in the primary, but that it could hurt Scott in the general.

With Latinos comprising over 15 percent of the state’s voting population in 2008, as well as almost 50 percent of the recent population growth, it is dangerous and even fatal to underestimate the power of this growing voting bloc. According to a NALEO’s recent poll 55% of Florida Latinos said that the current immigration debate made them more likely to vote in the November 2010 elections and 60% of Florida Latinos said they were certain, very likely, or somewhat likely to vote against a political party or candidate who took a disagreeable position on immigration, even if they agreed with that candidate/party on most other issues.

As the 2010 primary season wraps up, Republican candidates who tacked hard right on immigration during the primaries are struggling to figure out how to come back to the center in the general election, so they can compete for Latino and other swing voters. Meg Whitman in California is Exhibit A, and Bill McCollum would have been Exhibit B, if he didn’t lose his shirt over the issue in the primary.

The impact of Latino voters on 2010 races will be a major storyline this cycle, as documented in an America’s Voice polling shows that many Latinos are disillusioned by the failure to move forward on comprehensive immigration reform in Congress (something that should worry the Democrats in charge of Congress and the White House), the recent controversies over the Arizona SB1070 immigration law and the way that some candidates have embraced punitive immigration policies have also re-energized many Latino voters (something that should worry the Republicans this fall and beyond).

Amandi summed up the dangers for Republican candidates during our call:

While a harsh immigration position may be a benefit in some Republican primaries in the short term, it’s bad politics for general elections and a scorched-earth strategy for the long-term.

Navarro made the stakes crystal clear when a reporter asked “What will the Sunshine State’s Hispanic Republicans do in the fall campaign?”

“I have no idea,” Navarro said. “A lot of us on the Republican side are asking ourselves, ‘What now?’”

Popularity: 2% [?]

From: Latina Lista

Cyberspace has been blazing with news of bad-girl-socialite Paris Hilton’s felony charge for being found with .8 grams of cocaine in her purse in Las Vegas over the weekend.

Now news reports are saying that she probably won’t even see any jail time. Forget the officer could smell marijuana from the car and that Hilton was trying to shut the window when she saw the officer.

Forget that this comes on the heels of her South African bust for possessing marijuana, though the charges were later dropped. Forget that in her purse, aside from the cocaine, there were Zig Zag wrappers used to roll marijuana joints and a half of a tab of Albuterol — two items that she actually claimed were her’s and not some friend she supposedly lent her purse to.

All in all, it’s pretty amazing, or not, that this repeat offender can rest on the strong possibility that she won’t ever serve time though she had enough drugs and paraphernalia that shows she was doing something illegal that night.

Unfortunately, Ramsey Muñiz didn’t have Paris Hilton’s blond locks, fame or beauty to keep him from serving a sentence that his supporters say was staged to silence one Latino activist who was a thorn in some peoples’ sides.

Ramiro “Ramsey” Muñiz is 67-years-old. If things had gone the way they were supposed to, Muñiz should be enjoying retirement and spending time with his familia.

Instead, he finds himself sitting in the Beaumont Federal Correctional Institution in Beaumont, TX — going on 17 years in a life-without-parole sentence on drug charges that his supporters, of which he has many, say are bogus.

Ramsey Muñiz, from Corpus Christi, Texas, was an up-and-coming Latino lawyer in the early 70s. His childhood of being active in school student councils and fighting for more inclusion of Latinos on all levels hinted at what he would accomplish in his adult life:

“(He) changed the face of politics in Texas,” said Houston attorney Dick DeGuerin (who represented Muniz). “He gave power of inclusion to Hispanic Americans. He particularly changed the face of political offices in South Texas. There has been a lot of resentment from the Establishment because of that. A lot of people would like to see him fall because of who he is and what he did.”

And that’s what happened. From 1976-1994, Muñiz found himself on the receiving end of various drug charges that his supporters claimed were staged to discredit him and the work he was doing at the time in Texas Latino politics.

The last charge stuck. In 1994, he was arrested in a sting operation.

On a business trip, he was arrested on March 11, 1994 in Lewisville, TX, events unfolding as follows:
On March 10, DEA Agent Kimberly Elliott tracked Muniz to the Lewisville Ramada Inn, checked his telephone toll calls, and recorded his license plate number in the parking lot. The following day, he was entrapped after agreeing to return a prospective client’s car (in fact, a government agent) to a rental company. It was a sting, 39 kilograms of cocaine planted in the trunk, uncovered by drug-sniffing dogs when he was confronted.

Prosecutors prevailed by withholding key information from the defense, intimidating jurors to convict, and getting right wing justice to go along. As a result, during proceedings, the court ruled that Agents had probable cause to stop and search regarding a suspected drug deal, though no plausible reason connected Muniz to an $800,000 one with a perfect stranger.

During proceedings, prosecutors claimed he checked into his motel under a false name to hide his identity. In fact, Ramada records proved otherwise. He was also accused of making suspicious phone calls from the lobby. In fact, all phone records confirmed they were for legitimate business. Another false claim was that motel employees alerted DEA agents about him. When interviewed, they denied it. The entire case was fabricated to convict, prosecutors doing it by lying, their usual strategy against political activists opposed to systemic injustice.
Unfortunately, the state of Texas has a horrendous record when it comes to railroading and framing people of color for drug busts.

Because of the past events in his life, Ramsey still has not lost the focus of his life-long fight:

“Even now as I find myself confined in the darkness of this oppressive political system, I firmly believe with my life and heart that we, as a people, as a race, as a nation within a nation, will never be totally liberated, until we formulate and establish our ‘own’ political power in America.”

Was arresting and charging Ramsey a way to put this outspoken Latino leader in “his place?”

Since being in prison, Ramsey has been nothing less than a model prisoner still claiming his innocence.

How sad that a guilty socialite gets more attention than an innocent man whose only crime was fighting for justice for Latinos.

Now, it’s time to get justice for Ramsey.

This month, Ramsey’s wife, Irma, sent a letter to President Obama asking the President for Executive Clemency for Ramsey. Given all the particulars of Ramsey’s case, it certainly is one that warrants a review from the Justice Department — and one not to be forgotten by the Latino community.

Who knows if through Ramsey’s efforts the Sleeping Giant would have woken sooner?

Popularity: 2% [?]

From: Ponte Al Dia

In the throes of electoral politics, conservatives are suggesting we change the U.S. Constitution to deny citizenship to babies born in this country to undocumented women. This cynical strategy explicitly targets the Latino community to get rid of these new voters rather than do the hard work of cultivating them.

It is fueled by sexism and racism, tapping into a long history of population control — government efforts to curb growth among disfavored populations. During slavery, the children slave owners sired with their slaves were deemed slaves themselves. They could be sold as chattel, increasing the wealth of the owners rather than the size of their families.

Chinese women in the 1800s were labeled prostitutes and denied visas to join their husbands who labored on our railroads. And black women, Native American women, and Latinas were routinely sterilized without their knowledge or consent as recently as the 1970s.

Conservatives’ rhetoric is particularly insulting, likening the human birthing process to that of farm animals.

“They come here to drop a child. It’s called ‘drop and leave,’” says Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC). Graham’s comments are especially shocking given his past leading role as a sponsor of comprehensive immigration reform legislation aimed at uniting, not dividing, families. His comments buoyed the push to end birthright citizenship, creating an echo on Capitol Hill where conservative leaders called for hearings on the issue.

Obstetrician-turned-Congressman Phil Gingrey (R-GA) calls the product of “that dropping situation” an “anchor baby.”

Arizona State Senator Russell Pearce (R-Mesa), the architect of SB1070, the state’s anti-immigrant law now being challenged in court, has conceded that his support for changing the Constitution is gender based. He circulated an email by a former Minuteman official that reads, “If we are going to have an effect on the anchor baby racket, we need to target the mother. Call it sexist, but that’s the way nature made it. Men don’t drop anchor babies, illegal-alien mothers do.”

That type of ethnic profiling against pregnant women already occurred in Utah, even without any sanctioning legislation. Two state government workers sent the names of 1,300 people to law enforcement and the news media because they suspected them of being undocumented. The list included the due dates of pregnant women, a disturbing invitation for harassment and a likely violation of federal health privacy laws.

Ironically, many of the same politicians who have jumped on the citizenship-denial bandwagon also claim to be “pro-life” and “pro-family.” Yet they have no hesitation about splitting up families through harsh deportation policies or dehumanizing immigrant women and their children with their hateful rhetoric.

By portraying immigrant women as animals who “drop” their offspring, immigration opponents stir up fears that foreigners specifically come here to have children in order to derive citizenship from their children, or claim government benefits. Or, as Rep. Louie Gohmert (R-TX) has suggested, to “raise and coddle” future terrorists.

The fact is that most immigrant women come to the United States to work, not give birth. A child cannot even petition for his or her parents to become citizens until the child is 21. What’s more, undocumented immigrants have never been eligible for welfare benefits, and new legal U.S. immigrants became ineligible in the 1996 welfare reform law President Bill Clinton signed. Not coincidentally, two Congressional subcommittees held a joint hearing on seven bills or resolutions to limit birthright citizenship a few months earlier.

Cooler heads must prevail. Senator John McCain (R-AZ), who is in a tough primary election this month, originally didn’t object to birthright citizenship hearings but later opposed changing this part of the Constitution. And the top GOP candidates in California — both women —have also come out against denying birthright citizenship rights.

But conservatives keep pushing fringe schemes such as denying pregnant foreigners permission to enter the United States.

So what do they suggest? Administering pregnancy tests to all women at the border? Political satirist Stephen Colbert rightly lampooned its absurdity, mockingly calling for a 2,000-mile latex border fence coated with spermicidal jelly.

While ludicrous. this politically manufactured issue is no laughing matter. We must remind the public that the only “anchors” in this debate are the dead weights that refuse to act responsibly and fix our broken immigration system by enacting comprehensive immigration reform. Targeting women and children instead is a cowardly way out.

Popularity: 4% [?]

From: Latin American Herald Tribune

Opponents of California’s landmark Proposition 19 fear the worst. Surely, they say, decriminalizing the use, production and sale of marijuana is an invitation for trouble and neither an estimated $1.4 billion in new tax revenue for strained state coffers nor millions saved in incarceration costs justifies its passage in November’s elections. Among their top concerns: It will create more crime.

The “decriminalization breeds crime” argument is not new to the drug policy debate. Back in 1999, U.S. drug czar General Barry McCaffrey stated that liberalized drug policies in the Netherlands were behind a murder rate twice as large as that in the United States. That the statistic McCaffrey cited included both murders and attempted murders in the Netherlands proved a convenient gloss over the fact that the United States had a murder rate four times higher.

Gil Kerlikowske, the current drug czar, used a similar argument this month in reaction to high-level talks of legalization within Mexico, where drug violence has killed more than 28,000 people in the last three and a half years.

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Kerlikowske warned that the cartels would continue to engage in illicit activities such as extortion and kidnapping. “They’re not going to suddenly turn around and apply to IBM or Microsoft because they lost one part of their criminal enterprise,” he said.

If history is any indication, though, Kerlikowske is only half right.

Daniel Okrent, author of “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,” said in an interview that while some of the bootleggers who made their fortunes selling illegal alcohol went into other forms of organized crime once Prohibition ended, many tried to legitimize themselves through legal businesses, primarily in the gambling industry in Las Vegas. After Prohibition, Okrent said, the crime rate “went way down.”

Nations from Portugal and Germany to Australia and Brazil are experimenting with the liberalization of marijuana consumption. When a once criminal behavior no longer warrants prosecution or prison time, an easing of consumption related crimes is to be expected in these nations.

But decriminalizing use is no panacea against crime. Crime continues to thrive in other facets of the drug trade and may even grow in some unexpected ways.

The Netherlands, perhaps the most famous proving ground for decriminalization efforts, has actually generated opportunities for those involved in the supply, production and distribution of drugs.

“The reality is,” Martin Jelsma, international drug policies expert at the Transnational Institute in Amsterdam, said in an interview “that there is significant crime in the cannabis market in the Netherlands because only sales in small quantities is allowed. Everything else is criminalized as everywhere else.” In other words, the supply is handled by criminals.

The intrinsic contradiction of free consumption and illegal supply complicated the job of law enforcement and led to an initial laxity among authorities toward those involved in the drug trade. As a result, “criminal groups grew stronger in the Netherlands” and even began to export their wares. Police forces now must make daily raids to “suppress production to the level that is supported by domestic consumption,” he added.

This juggling act has many politicians in Holland, Switzerland and other countries considering the next logical step — legalizing the entire cannabis market. The big deterrent, beside some internal resistance, is that such a move would violate United Nations drug treaties.

To alter those treaties would require the type of global consensus that has long proved elusive when it comes to illegal drugs. Many leaders believe that legalization amounts to capitulation. “Since I can’t defeat them, I give up,” Peruvian President Alan Garcia said in a recent interview, parodying what he considers a defeatist approach.

That attitude has been challenged unsuccessfully for years. Colombia’s newly inaugurated President Juan Manuel Santos has shown support for reconsidering these treaties. In a letter to the UN Secretary General in 1998, he and others warned that “too often those who call for open debate, rigorous analysis of current policies, and serious consideration of alternatives are accused of ‘surrendering.’ The true surrender is when fear and inertia combine to shut off debate, suppress critical analysis, and dismiss all alternatives to current policies.”

Twelve years later, drug crime and violence has only increased its purview and turned ever more vicious. For anyone who has seen the violent effects of illegal drugs — decapitated bodies, drive-by shootings, car bombs — a thorough and honest exploration of alternatives is long overdue.

Popularity: 2% [?]

From: Southern Poverty Law Center

Record-breaking high temperatures have been the norm this summer in the United States and other countries. But for Latinos, it’s been even hotter than the thermometer suggests, with one after another targeted for hate crimes around the country. Here’s a sampling of recent incidents:

Early last Saturday in Baltimore, Martin Rayez, 51, was beaten to death with a piece of wood. The man arrested for the crime, Jermaine Holley, 19, allegedly confessed and told police that he “hated Hispanics.” He has been treated in the past for schizophrenia. The killing occurred in East Baltimore, the scene of other recent attacks on Latinos.
Since April, there have been 11 assaults on Mexicans in the Staten Island city of Port Richmond, which has a burgeoning Latino population. All but one of the attacks is considered a bias-motivated crime carried out by blacks attacking Mexicans. There have been 26 suspected hate crimes on Staten Island this year, compared to 11 by this time last year, according to a story in The Los Angeles Times. For all of New York City, the numbers are 222 and 125, respectively.
An Auburn, Wash. man was charged with violating the state’s hate crimes law last month after he allegedly pointed a gun at three Latino neighbors and threatened to shoot them. A police report stated that after his arrest, Thomas Hanson, 63, complained that his neighbors “were disrespecting him in his own country.” (They had asked him to turn down the volume on his music.) Hanson also sent U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell (D-Wash.) 238 E-mails, many of them ranting about illegal immigration and immigrants from Mexico.
In June, the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office in Phoenix said that the murder of a Mexican-American man a month earlier was a hate crime. Gary Thomas Kelley is charged with second-degree murder in the killing of Juan Varela. He also is charged with menacing Varela’s brother with a gun. “Hurry up and go back to Mexico or you’re gonna die,” Kelley shouted at Varela before shooting him in the neck, police said. The dead man was a third-generation, native-born American.
These incidents and others appear to be part of a general trend that has been in the making for several years. Anti-Latino crimes increased in each of the four years from 2003 through 2007, before dropping back slightly in 2008, according to FBI national hate crime statistics (2009 figures have not yet been compiled). In recent months, politicians and others have made statements that demonize Latinos and likely contribute to the atmosphere of violence. Two of the most outrageous recent examples: Texas Republican Congressmen Louie Gohmert and Debbie Riddle both claimed that pregnant terrorists plan to sneak into America to give birth to future terrorists who will automatically become U.S. citizens and eventually “help destroy our way of life,” as Gohmert put it. Both representatives claimed that former FBI officials divulged the terrorist baby threat to them. CNN asked Tom Fuentes, who served as the FBI’s assistant director in the office of international operations from 2004 to 2008 about the claims by Gohmert and Riddle. “There was never a credible report — or any report, for that matter … to indicate that there was such a plan for these terror babies to be born,” he said.

Debunking myths like these about Hispanic immigrants won’t likely deter new ones from cropping up like stubborn weeds. And in today’s overheated immigration climate, it’s a good bet more Hispanics will be beaten, even killed, as the debate — if it can be called that — rages on.

Popularity: 4% [?]

From: NY Post

Forget about “Jon & Kate Plus 8″ — get ready for “Victor y Digna Más 6″!
The nation’s first-ever Hispanic sextuplets — born to a couple from Whitestone, Queens — will be giving the Gosselins a run for their dinero this fall when they star in their own reality show on TLC.
“Sextuplets Take New York” — an eight-part series from the producers who brought the world the Gosselin saga plus “19 and Counting” — will follow the super-sized challenges faced by Victor and Digna Carpio and their 22-month-old sextuplets (four boys and two girls) plus big brother Juancarlos, 9.

“We used to watch all the shows [about multiple-birth families], and we never thought we were going to be in the same position,” said Victor Carpio, 36, who makes about $18 an hour as a groundskeeper.
“For us, it’s much different than what you see on TV. Other people have help and items [donated to them] to take care of the children. I work eight hours a day, and I come home and I still have to work.”
Victor and wife Digna, 32, who was a bank teller before becoming “SextoMom,” say they hope the exposure they gain from the show will lead to food and diaper donations.
“We aren’t trying to be big stars,” said Digna Carpio, inside her modest three-bedroom house in Whitestone, “but we’re trying to survive and provide a good education for our kids.”
Adorable little Danelia, Genesis, Jaden, Jezreel, Joel and Justin came into the world three months prematurely on Oct. 6, 2008, at Mount Sinai Medical Center, with each weighing in at less than 2 pounds.
The Carpios — who are naturalized US citizens from Ecuador — say the kids are “good eaters,” and all of them have progressed nicely in the last 18 months.
“I hope by the time they are 3, they are all walking and talking and running,” said the kids’ proud mother, who says the children will be raised bilingual.
So far, Victor says the kids have learned to say “papa” and “agua.”
He also says the camera crew has been following them for about eight months now (”mostly on weekends, at doctor’s appointments, at the park”), and that he’s eager to see how people react.

Popularity: 5% [?]