Every time you use the word ‘illegal,’ Jan Brewer wins

By: Suphatra Laviolette

“Sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can get me deported…”

That’s how that rhyme goes, right?

Words are playing a major role in America’s immigration debate. The “I” word – I mean the word “illegal” – has framed the conversation on what to do with the thousands of people that come to America every year without appropriate documentation. Their lives hang in the balance as America debates what to do about them. While some states clearly disapprove of the undocumented – such as Arizona with its SB 1070 law allowing local and state police to act as federal agents and question folks about their immigration status – some cities, like Los Angeles, are boycotting Arizona on the grounds that SB 1070 encourages racial profiling.

PHOTO: Jan Brewer is governor of Arizona, the state with the toughest immigration policy in America.

Whichever way you lean, one thing is clear: there is an overriding tone to this conversation, and the word “illegal” sums it up. That word labels a myriad of complex situations and puts them into one box, one context, one verdict: Illegal.

How can we have an honest conversation seeking a sensible and just resolution if we’ve so nicknamed our defendants Mr. Guilty and Ms. Wrong right off the bat? If you really want to see immigration reformed, let’s at least frame our discussion without the verbal mousetraps.

So I ask you, consider the “I” word. Consider dropping it.

http://colorlines.com/droptheiword/

Employed But Struggling: 1 in 3 Working Families Near Poverty

Michelle Feliz, a single mother living in Boston, can't afford day care for her one-year-old son. She can't afford new clothes for her teenage daughter. Late last year, she applied for food stamps.

Unlike many Americans increasingly seeking public assistance, Feliz, 35, is employed. Yet what she earns in her job as a secretary does not cover even her most basic needs, leaving her scrambling to keep food on her table.

In the aftermath of the worst economic downturn since the Depression, much attention has been focused on the 15 million people who are officially out of work, yet even among those who have jobs, livelihoods and living standards have been substantially downgraded. Growing numbers of employed people live in near poverty, struggling to make ends meet.

Almost a third of America's working families are now considered low-income, earning less than twice the official poverty threshold, according to a report released Tuesday by the Working Poor Families Project. The recession, which has incited layoffs and wage cuts, reversed a period of improvement: Between 2007 and 2009, as the recession set in, the percentage of U.S. working families classified as low-income grew from 28 percent to more than 30 percent.

Workers who once focused on career advancement now live paycheck to paycheck. The American middle class, in effect, is eroding.

"They're no longer working actively, with a chance to advance and gain more experience and skills," said Brandon Roberts, manager of the Working Poor Families Project and a co-author of the report. "They're just putting pieces together to stay afloat, to meet basic needs."

Last year, 45 million people, including 22 million children, lived in low-income households, according to the report. As breadwinners lost jobs or suffered pay cuts, the report notes, the number of low-income families grew to 10 million last year, an increase of almost a quarter-million from 2008. The problem is worse among minorities: 43 percent of America's working families with a minority parent are low-income, the report finds, compared to 22 percent of white working families.

Feliz, who is Latina, has a job. But she's barely scraping by.

"I had to take this job because it was the only thing I could find," Feliz said. "I was making more money than I'm making now."

Once an officer manager at Oficina Hispana, an English language education program, Feliz was laid off in 2007 when her employer didn't get a crucial grant. She collected unemployment insurance for half a year, she said. The week before the benefits expired, she got her current job as a secretary at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Her annual salary dropped from $42,000 to $37,000. And her dream of opening a shelter for female victims of domestic violence was deferred.

"Career-wise, that set me back a lot," she said.

She now struggles just to put food on the table. She applied for food stamps in November of last year, she said, but was denied because her salary was just above the cutoff. So she began clipping coupons. When her son came down with a bad fever recently, she feared she would have to make a difficult choice: stay home and risk losing her job, or take him to prohibitively expensive day care. Fortunately, her parents, who also live in Boston, were able to look after him.

"I'm afraid to stay home," Feliz said. "If I take too many days off, I could lose my job."

Feliz, who has an associate's degree from Roxbury Community College, is taking classes in human services and management at UMass Boston, and her employer agreed to help foot the bill. She hasn't given up on her dream, but her focus right now is on preserving her income.

"I'm doing at least three people's jobs," she said. "It's hard."

Her son's father, who pays child support, is similarly struggling to keep two part-time jobs, Feliz said.

The crisis extends beyond the struggling breadwinners. Children in low-income families suffer from diminished educational opportunities and compromised health care, according to the new report. Nationwide, 35 percent of children in working families are living in low-income households, the report finds, and childhood poverty tends to persist into adulthood.

"That has serious implications for children, not only today, but as they look to the future," Roberts said. "The odds are being stacked against them."

Living in a low-income family can take a psychological as well as financial toll. Feliz has striven to raise her children's spirits, pushing her daughter to do well in school.

"I want her to be able to get a good job," she said, "to have things I'm not able to give her."

This article was written by William Alden and appeared on the Huffington Post. All Rights Reserved to Huffington Post.

A dream come true?

The timidity of elected officials in taking a position on immigration reform has incensed voters of every stripe. But in Illinois the perennially popular Jim Edgar, who was governor of the state from 1991 to 1999, has not shied from supporting in the DREAM Act.

Edgar, a Republican, may not have the bully pulpit he used to but his name still carries weight. Now a distinguished fellow at the University of Illinois' Institute of Government and Public Affairs, here’s what he wrote in the Chicago Tribune about legal residency and 2 million of the young people who could be affected by immigration reform:

A rational approach to comprehensive immigration reform should begin with the young people who were brought here as babies, toddlers and adolescents.

Many have worked hard in school. Some want to serve in our military. All are undocumented. They live every day in fear of being caught, uprooted and sent to a country some have never known as their home.

A nation as kind as ours should not turn its back on them. Congress needs to support the sensible, humane approach embodied in legislation known as the Dream Act.

The measure charts a rigorous path that undocumented youths must negotiate to gain legal status and qualify for citizenship, and supporting it would be both good government and good politics.

Democrats want to keep faith with those who have strongly backed them in recent elections. Republicans need to make substantial inroads with Latinos and other minorities to remain competitive in many states like Illinois. Among those who grasp the merits and the politics is Sen. Richard Lugar, R-Ind., one of the most respected figures on the national scene and a co-sponsor of the legislation.

The proposal would require prospective beneficiaries to have been younger than 16 when they arrived and to have lived here for at least five years. They would need to have a high school diploma or GED or to have been accepted into a higher education institution. They must also have good moral character.

This is no amnesty bill.

A qualifying immigrant would receive a six-year conditional resident status. After that period, the immigrant could obtain a green card, government authorization to permanently live and work in the United States, if he or she has completed two years of college or two years of honorable service in the U.S. Armed Forces and maintained a clean record. Only after acquiring a green card could an individual apply for citizenship.

Some supporters of liberalizing immigration laws contend the Dream Act is too demanding. But we are a nation of laws as well as immigrants. Americans have a right to expect anyone who wants legal status in this country to earn it and display respect for our laws. Most, if not all, Americans agree our national immigration policy is a mess. It is the result of failed leadership and both political parties share the blame. They have punted this issue down the road for someone else to solve.

The Migration Policy Institute estimates about 2.1 million young immigrants could be impacted by the Dream legislation — a relatively small but important part of the undocumented population.

Enactment of the measure would constitute just one step but a significant and responsible one.

America has been a beacon of hope for vulnerable people throughout the world. Today, we should offer hope to young people already living here who want to be good citizens and serve in our military.

Refuge

His mother abandoned him at birth.

His father was murdered when he was five years old.

His grandparents beat him with electric cables and made him sleep on the curb in front of their house. He speaks an Indian language only known in the highlands of southern Mexico, and only has the most rudimentary Spanish.

When he was fourteen, an aunt sent for him. It took him five days to cross the Arizona desert.

He moved in with his aunt, and went to work washing dishes in a Chinese restaurant in a Midwestern city. He did this for three years, six days a week, ten hours a day.

No one spoke Spanish in the restaurant and no one spoke English.

The system finally caught up with him, and today, he was sitting in an immigration processing center waiting room, hoping that the same system would find a place amongst the many rules and regulations and offer him safety.

I had been visiting with him once a week during the past couple of months at a detention facility, and it seemed like a good idea to be with him when he appeared before the authorities.

The young man was sitting across from me, between his attorney and the guard from the detention facility. We all chat for a while, but he soon runs out of Spanish vocabulary and lapses into silence. I worry that he is going to have a hard time in life, if he can’t even speak Spanish.

But a Chinese family comes into the waiting room, and they begin an animated conversation. The young man, seemingly trapped by a lack of language into a life of loneliness, sits up and smiles. The attorney looks at him and says, “Entiendes el chino, verdad?” and he says, Yeah, I understand some of it. And he smiles, not as nervous now, not so alone.


This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.

Who’s unemployed and who votes – note the connection

You can’t help noticing that tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans are commanding far more political attention than the continued dirge of miserable employment figures, despite the fact that 2 million people recently faced being cut from unemployment assistance. Ezra Klein of the Washington Post offers one reason for this disconnect.

He paired the unemployment of high school and college graduates with their voting rates in the most recent election and found this:


In short: People with a high school diploma or less are struggling with massive rates of unemployment, but they don't turn out to vote in nearly the numbers as those with a college education. On the flip-side, though a quarter of Americans have college diplomas, they made up 51 percent of the electorate in 2010. And in that group, the unemployment rate is only about 5 percent. So if you believe that politicians actually answer to those who vote, their current obsessions may make a little more sense.

A Tree Grows in Santa Ana

Just when you thought no one cared about the voices of children, seniors or low-income families, California's parks department offers a glimmer of hope.

The state agency has awarded Latino Health Access -- which organized hundreds of residents to lobby city officials for more some green space -- a grant of $3.5 million to build the only park and community center in the 92701 zip code of Santa Ana.

Until now, kids in Santa Ana have often made make-shift playgrounds around back-alley Dumpsters.

The park and community center represent the collective action of public agencies and engaged residents to open safe, green spaces in Santa Ana, said Ana Carrichi, policy director for the organization.

State bureaucrats said they found the participation of children an "especially heartwarming" aspect of the Latino Health Access pitch for more green space.

Ruth Colement, director of California State Parks said her agency received 475 pitches from community groups vying for 62 grants. The outpouring, she added, "clearly shows the extent of recreation needs throughout California."

Can You Fix It? The U.S. Budget, That Is.

If you could close the government's budget gaps, how would you do it?

For once, you can actually try. The New York Times has created an interactive tool that lets you choose what you would like to chop off the American budget. Your choices would help save the American people from projected shortfalls of $418 billion (in 2015) and $1,345 billion (in 2030). All you have to do is choose what to cut. Will you decrease war troops? Increase the age for social security? Tax millionaires? Tax carbon? Just check the box next to the initiative and watch the New York Times’ graph fulfill the budget gaps.

Sounds easy, right?

Link to budget puzzle:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2010/11/13/weekinreview/deficits-graphic.html?hp

"The impossible will take a little while"

"The difficult I'll do right now..
The impossible will take a little while. . ."
from Crazy He Calls Me,
by Carl Sigman and Bob Russell

Candidates' Forum, McAllen

We began on a hot day in May, talking and planning an area-wide effort to get out the vote. The goals were clear; the task daunting. We would choose ten precincts in the area which had high-voter registration, but low voter turnout. And they would be places where poor families lived. In the last midterm elections (2006), only 17.5 per cent of registered voters participated in the election: half of what happened in the rest of the state.

"We" were the Rio Grande Valley Equal Voice Network, a group of community-based organizations located in this corner of the US/Mexico border.

Over the years, I have heard no end of reasons for the low turnout here along the border, everything from ”poor people don’t vote; they aren’t stupid, you know” to “people from Mexico don’t trust the voting process, because it was so corrupt over there.”

I have also heard, over and again, that the Rio Grande Valley is a sleeping giant, and, that if it ever woke up, Texas’ state politics would be turned on its head.

Impossible, that.

Our goals

So we began with the difficult: finding volunteers to go door to door, not once or twice, but three times or more. And other volunteers to make phone calls. And yet others to track down those who could vote and those who would vote, to creating reams of paper so that we could track folks over time. This was not a one time project. We decided, as a group, as the Equal Voice Network, to adopt these ten precincts for a long time.

And increase turnout, in this election, by at least 10 per cent.

Which, in May, when we began this project, seemed like a lot. It would be harder than ever to find reasons for people to vote--the 2008 elections had a huge turn out from the Latino community. People were voting for hope, then, and there was tremendous energy.

But by October of 2010, the Obama administration had deported nearly 500,000 people. While some claimed that these were “criminal aliens”, it turns out that they are mostly not.

In any case, each deported person is someone’s brother or cousin or uncle.

There was “increased security at the border” but there was no immigration reform. “Immigration reform” was the very first request of the 25,000 families in our network.

So, we began with the difficult. And we preached the importance of standing up and being counted. Of speaking, so as to be heard. “Mi voto es mi voz.” And of knocking on doors, and knocking on more doors.

Early voting began on this past Monday. By Wednesday, papers statewide were reporting an astonishment--voting in the Valley was up over 200%. Two hundred per cent more people were voting this year.

We were stunned, we were excited, but mostly we kept on working. There is still another couple of weeks to go.

Perhaps this turnout is driven by some heated local races; perhaps it is up because of angry voters. I of course like to think that it is up because people were responding to someone asking them to give a damn, and to vote.

In the meantime, the large old grandfather clock in charge of marking out history tick-tocks once more towards the moment when the impossible becomes real, something that should happen in just a little while.

This post was written by Michael Seifert from his blog, Musings From Alongside the Border.