HispanicTrending

Coming to the USA

July 13, 2009
By RACHEL MORGAN

Lina Cox of Leesburg knows what it's like to start all over in a new country.

In 1984, Cox, then Lina Gonzalez, moved from her native Panama to Highland County - a county with an estimated 296 residents of Hispanic origin. She moved to marry her now-husband, Joe Cox, whom she met while he was in the Army, serving in Panama.

But it wasn't all newlywed bliss. For one, Cox had to learn English.

"Perhaps it was a little scary at first," she said. "You're not sure what you are going to find - it's a different culture, different customs, different language, different everything."

Cox found her way to a sense of belonging through Saint Benignus Catholic Church in Greenfield. She also married into a Catholic family, which helped her feel more at home.

"The majority, not 100 percent, of Hispanics are Catholic," Cox said.

Cox soon found her niche at St. Benignus. She helped the late Father Frank Klamet start the Spanish mass in 2001, the first in the area.

"I think the reason (Father Klamet) wanted to offer Spanish mass was because he was a missionary in Honduras," Cox said. "He knew the cultural needs of the people."

She also worked as a translator for Sugar Creek Packing Co. in 2006.

"At the time there was a large number of Hispanics at Sugar Creek," she said. It was through working at Sugar Creek that Cox realized the area had a need for a local Spanish mass, as most of the Hispanic employees were traveling to Columbus to attend a Spanish mass.

But Cox didn't just stop at her work duties - she even took sick or injured employees to Fayette County Memorial Hospital to act as translator.

"We were trying to think of ways to help the Hispanic employees," she said.

Having a Spanish mass is invaluable to the Hispanic community, Cox said. She credits Klamet and his successor, Father Mike Paraniuk of St. Mary Catholic Church, for making the effort to deliver a religious service in the congregation's native language.

"We are Catholic and as Catholics, we will always go to Catholic Church," she said. "For a priest to give his (homily) in Spanish, this is something that is deeply appreciated. (As far as Father Mike,) he's learning Spanish just to get closer to the people. I believe this is very nice. Since the death of Father Klamet, Father Mike has been very amazing. The fact that we have another priest who's learning Spanish is amazing."

Cox acknowledges that the death of Father Klamet his the St. Benignus - and Hispanic - community hard.

"We lost a spiritual guide," she said. "A priest is someone very special, someone we respect, admire. We think the world of him."

She also credits the St. Benignus' community for making Hispanics feel a sense of belonging.

"They are very open and have never closed to church door to anyone," she said.

Cox said that probably the biggest challenge the local Hispanic population faces is the language barrier that exists between Spanish-speaking residents and their English-speaking counterparts.

She admits that learning English is not always something that comes as easily for other Hispanics as it did for her.

"This is not the case for every one of us," she said."Not everybody will want to talk in a (different) language. They are afraid to be made fun of or misunderstood."

Cox has been very involved in bridging the gap between the Hispanic community and the Anglo community - but she isn't done yet.

She hopes to set up some sort of class to teach Hispanics about American culture, the language, the customs. She currently teaches a weekly Spanish class for English-speakers at St. Benignus.

"When I came to this country, I did everything I could to learn the language," she said. "I knew that I wanted to be able to understand what people were saying and tell them what I thought, as well." Now, Cox owns her own reflexology and hypnosis spa, The Healing Choices.

Cox hopes her fellow Hispanics will take the same initiative to integrate into American society.

However, Cox hopes her American counterparts will take the same initiative and learn one big lesson.

"There are so many different Hispanic countries," she said. "And we may speak the same language, but we do have different cultures. A lot of people seem to think that if you're Hispanic, you're all the same. It's like England and the United States - you speak the same language but have different customs."

There are approximately 265,762 Hispanic Americans living in Ohio - Hispanics make up 1.8 percent of Fayette County's population - or 510 individuals.

Since 2000, Ohio's Hispanic population grew by 22.4 percent, according to the Ohio Department of Development.

Source: The Record Herald

Texas: The new face of America

Jul 9th 2009
Source: The Economist

At the age of 34, Julian Castro has pulled off a remarkable feat. On May 9th, without even the need for a run-off, the polished young lawyer won the race to become mayor of San Antonio, the largest Hispanic-majority city in America and the seventh-biggest city in the entire country. He joins Antonio Villaraigosa, the mayor of Los Angeles, as one of America’s half-dozen most prominent Hispanics.

The curious thing is that Mr Castro is only the third Hispanic mayor in San Antonio’s long history; the first, Henry Cisneros, was elected only in 1981. America’s Hispanics have a long way to go before they enjoy the influence that their numbers suggest. “We do have a history of failing to participate,” he admits. “But we have been seeing a series of big advances.”
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Things are indeed changing. At the national level voter turnout among Hispanics was 49.9% last year, up from 47.2% in 2004, though still much lower than the non-Hispanic whites’ 66.1%. The body to watch is the Mexican American Legislative Caucus (MALC), which claims 44 of the 74 Democrats in the Texas House (there is not one Hispanic Republican there, a gigantic problem for the party). Trey Martinez Fischer, who chairs MALC, is another young man in a hurry. “MALC is taking over the Democratic Party here,” he says, “and it is time for us to expand our footprint.”

The most pressing issue, he reckons, remains education. “We are creating a majority population here that is limited in its skill set. It is up to us: if we don’t act, we are heading for disaster.” But it is not just education; Hispanics, he says, are poorly served when it comes to access to capital, health care and public transport. “This state”, he says, “has not yet atoned for the sins of its past.”

You only need to tour the Rio Grande valley, which stretches from Brownsville in the east up almost as far as Laredo, to see what he means. The valley includes some of Texas’s fastest-growing and most successful counties, such as Cameron County around Brownsville and Hidalgo County around McAllen; Brownsville has boomed, thanks in large part to its port, which serves Mexico’s buoyant north. McAllen has also become a favoured place for rich Mexicans to buy homes, educate their children and squirrel their money away; its mayor, the engagingly town-proud Richard Cortes, has big plans for an arts district, upmarket shopping centres, a huge public library which he says will be the fifth-largest in the country, and much else.

Down in the valley
But you can also encounter poverty on a scale hard to find anywhere else in America. More than 30% of the valley’s population still falls beneath America’s official poverty level, according to Sister Maria Sanchez of Valley Interfaith, a local charity. The poorest among them are to be found in the colonias, small settlements outside recognised towns. There are around 2,300 colonias in total, and the worst of them still have large numbers of houses without running water. In recent years state money has hugely improved some of them, such as Las Milpas, outside McAllen. Others, like Los Altos outside Laredo, are a national disgrace. “We are the richest country in the world, and we still have this,” says Jaime Arispe, of the Laredo Office of Border Affairs, as he surveys a street that looks as if it could be in Port-au-Prince.

Others echo Mr Martinez Fischer’s views, if not quite the passion with which he expresses them. Rafael Anchia, another House member, was recently tipped by Texas Monthly as the first Hispanic governor of Texas—though not until 2018. He brushes the accolade aside, but like Mr Martinez Fischer says that the state has systematically underfunded public education and insists this will have to change.

Health care is another racial issue. Texas has the worst insurance-coverage rates in America, and Hispanics, as well as blacks, fare much worse than Anglos; most Americans get their health care through their companies, but Hispanics and blacks are more likely to work for employers who provide limited benefits or none, or to be unemployed.

The flaws in the American health system are mostly a federal matter, but Texas makes them worse by failing to take up available federal dollars because of the need for co-finance by the recipient state; by providing few public clinics; and by refusing to reimburse private hospitals for the cost of emergency care for people who cannot afford to pay, forcing them to jack up prices for others. It also operates one of the least generous subsidy regimes for poor children in the country.

The reason why MALC will have to be listened to on all these counts is demographic. The Hispanic population is constantly being reinforced by the arrival of immigrants from across the Rio Grande, though economic, political and security pressures have started to make the border less permeable.

But international migration is not the main driver of Texas’s booming population. Texas’s Hispanics, on average, are younger than the Anglos, and their women have more babies. In 2007 just over 50% of the babies in Texas were born to Latinas, even though Hispanics make up only 38% of the population. Over the eight years to 2008, reckons Karl Eschbach, Texas’s official state demographer, natural increase (which favours Hispanics) accounted for just over half the 3.5m increase in the state’s population, and migration from other states for almost half of the rest.

Even if the border closed tomorrow, Hispanics would still overtake the Anglos by 2034, reckons Mr Eschbach. Recent trends suggest that this will in fact happen by 2015. More than half the children in the first grade of Texas schools are Hispanic. And in the Houston public-school district the proportion is 61%, notes Stephen Klineberg, of Rice University. (African-Americans make up another 27%.)

Nor is it only Texas that is undergoing profound demographic shifts, says Mr Klineberg. Texas today is what all of America will look like tomorrow. At the moment there are only four “minority-majority” states (that is, states where non-Hispanic whites, or Anglos, are in the minority): California, Texas, Hawaii and New Mexico. He expects the 2010 census to show as many as 10-12 states to have passed that milestone; by 2040, he thinks, America itself will be a minority-majority nation.

The geographical spread of Texas’s Hispanic population has changed in a way that will change the state’s politics. Most Latinos used to live south of the I-10, the motorway that joins San Antonio to Houston, notes Mr Anchia. But now Dallas, like Houston, has considerably more Hispanics than Anglos: a little over 40% of the population against around 30%. Mr Anchia himself represents a district that includes part of Dallas and a swathe of prosperous suburbs, including some where there have been nasty rows about illegal immigration.

Even public schools up in the once lily-white panhandle in the north of the state are seeing their classes fill up with Hispanic children; to take a random example, in tiny Stratford up on the border with Oklahoma some 54% of the children at the local high school are Hispanic. “Every single institution in this state was built by Anglos for Anglos,” says Mr Klineberg. “And they will all have to change.”

Come on in
That might be easier than it sounds. Texas has proved far better than the other border states (California, New Mexico and Arizona) at adapting to the new, peaceful reconquista. In California, Proposition 187, which cracked down hard on illegal immigration, was heartily backed by the then Republican governor and passed in a referendum in 1994, though it was later struck down by a federal court. This kind of thing has only ever been attempted in Texas at local level, and even then only very rarely.

Texas has always been a strong supporter of immigration reform that would offer illegal immigrants (of whom Texas has close to 2m, about 7% of its population) a path to citizenship. It has also always favoured NAFTA. Perhaps that is because Texas was itself Mexican until 1836. For centuries the border, demarcated by the Rio Grande, was entirely porous, and its very length meant that much of Texas felt joined to Mexico—a cultural affinity evidenced in the fact that the margarita and the fajita were both invented in Texas.

Only recently, at the behest of distant authorities in Washington, DC, has this sense of propinquity seemed to weaken. Driven by anger elsewhere in America, immigration officials raid businesses looking for workers with false Social-Security numbers. Driven by post-2001 fears, the number of Border Patrol officers is being increased from 6,000 in 1996 to 20,000.

Texans don’t like this much. In April Jeff Moseley, president and CEO of the Greater Houston Partnership, the city’s chamber of commerce, made a powerful speech to a Senate hearing in Washington in which he rebutted the notion that undocumented workers are a drain on America’s resources. According to a study he presented, they are more likely to be net contributors in fiscal terms. He argued that they mostly complement rather than compete with domestic workers, and that they are less likely to commit crimes than the native population. And he pointed out that cracking down on illegals has had a perverse effect, ending a pattern of seasonal or circular migration that has served Texas well for many decades. Instead, it has encouraged the use of people-smugglers bringing across whole families who then tend to stay. It has fenced people in, not out.

Mr Moseley used the word “fence” calculatedly. Down in southern Texas there is no five-letter word more likely to provoke anger. The way Texans see it, the fence that is being built along a third of America’s 2,000-mile long southern border is an expensive waste of time. It sends an appalling signal to a friendly neighbour; it is easy to climb over, with or without a ladder; it is easy to circumvent; it is bad for the environment, because it cuts off animals from their water sources; and it tramples on the rights of landowners, since it has to be built well back from the riverside so as not to interfere with flood channels.

But if the fence itself is likely to have little effect on illegal immigration, the fear of terror that gave rise to it, coupled with the recession on both sides of the border and Mexico’s murderous struggle with the drug lords in its border cities, are certainly affecting both the legal and the illegal sort of crossing. Everyone along the valley of the Rio Grande seems to believe that the border is slowly closing.

At the extreme eastern end of the border, Jude Benavides, an ecologist at the University of Texas at Brownsville, laments how life has changed. “Three of my four grandparents are from Mexico,” he says. “We used to cross over the bridge to Matamoros just for lunch or dinner. Now we don’t go. We are scared of the violence, and it can sometimes take as long as two hours in line to get back across.”

The economy, too, is a powerful reason why people are crossing less often. The Mexican peso has fallen by 18% against the dollar since the beginning of 2008. That has hit retailers on the American side hard. Mexicans in the northern border provinces have been hurt by the collapse of America’s car industry. Many of the maquiladoras, factories set up just on the Mexican side of the border to benefit from lower wages and land costs, have specialised in making parts for Detroit. One of Texas’s main assets is a bit distressed just now.

Don’t mess with Texas
So Texas has a huge challenge to cope with. But it seems wrong to end on a pessimistic note. Texans above all are optimists, and few of them seem to doubt that Mexico’s proximity is a huge long-term source of strength for the Lone Star state. That optimism, rooted in a profound sense of local pride that can sometimes jar with outsiders, is Texas’s dominant characteristic.

It is the reason why the wildcatter, the independent oilman whose test drillings might come up dry 20 times before gushing in the end, is an enduring Texas symbol. And it explains why risk-taking is admired and failure no disgrace. Most of the Enron executives who lost their jobs when the firm went bust in 2001 quickly found new ones. The company’s offices in Houston were swiftly re-let. Enron Field baseball stadium became Minute Maid Park. “Don’t mess with Texas” was once a slogan for a wildly successful anti-litter campaign. It is now the state’s unofficial motto.

To visit America in the midst of the worst recession for decades can be a disheartening experience, but a tour of Texas is quite the reverse. Since suffering that big shock in the 1980s, it has become a well-diversified, fiscally sensible state; one where the great racial realignment that will affect all of America is already far advanced; and one whose politics is gradually finding the centre. It welcomes and assimilates all new arrivals. No wonder so many people are making a beeline for it.

Enrique's Journey - A Teenager's Quest from Honduras to the US

July 13, 2009
Via Literanista

Every once in awhile, as a writer, you read a book that raises that bar in your own mind about what is possible in your profession. Enrique's Journey is such a book.

In it, Pulitzer Prize winner Sonia Nazario, follows the journey of a 17-year-old boy from Honduras as he tries to make his way to America to be reunited with his mother--who left when he was a small boy to pursue the American dream. As he rides on top of trains, tries to avoid gangsters and police, begs for food, sleeps in graveyards and abandon homes, struggles with drug addiction etc., I got the most lucid, gripping portrait into the journey of the child immigrant that I've ever been exposed to.

Hispanics have a wild card to play

July 6, 2009
By Jack Dunning

Did you know that Hispanics are less impacted by the recession, and their overall outlook about the condition of our economy is more optimistic? They are also more avid shoppers and have a tendency to react better to TV advertising than the general population. The Hispanic consumer is able to rebound quicker to trends than their non-Hispanic counterparts. In other words, they are prime prospects in today’s troubled marketplace.Hispanic Shoppers

Years ago in junk mail, we discovered that many Spanish-speaking potential customers wanted to be contacted in their native language, so linguists were hired in the copy-writing field to translate junk mail offers into Spanish. It worked gangbusters, and the concept has once again been confirmed by a study done on Hispanics for Univision Communications, the premier Spanish-language media company in the U.S.

Here are some figures you probably did not know. Just 45 percent of Hispanics carry credit cards compared to 71 percent for non-Hispanics. And even a lesser amount take out loans, only 34 percent versus 53 percent for non-Hispanics. They shop more frequently than non-Hispanics, take more brand prescriptions, and pay more attention to advertising. Univision says that marketers have determined recently that Hispanic sales have outdone non-Hispanic sales.

The buying power of the Hispanic community is growing at a rate 50 percent faster than non-Hispanic, and Univision predicts it will hit $1 trillion by 2010. Some of the reasons might be that Hispanics are more optimistic about their finances by almost 10 percentage points, the same margin being optimistic about the economy. About twice as many Hispanics rent their home compared to non-Hispanic, therefore, less are affected by the wave of foreclosures.

On the surface, it looks like Hispanics are better able to manage their finances, and more prominent in the marketplace as shoppers than non-Hispanics. So why isn’t the Hispanic community using this buying power to negotiate better rights for their families and friends? They made a good start in the 2008 Presidential election as they got out the vote that gave Barack Obama a margin of 56 percent over John McCain’s 41 percent in Arizona. Nationwide it was 67 percent Obama, 31 percent McCain.

Hispanics cast 9.7 million votes in 2008 (7.3%) out of 132.6 million voters nationally. There were 19.5 million eligible Hispanic voters in 2008, and less than 50 percent of those registered to vote actually went to the polls. You’ll have to do better than that, Hispanic Demonstrationeven though the total turnout was only 56.8 percent. You’ll have to beat the general population if you want to make your point and convince this Congress that you are serious about your rights. In Arizona, Hispanics represent 13 percent of the vote.

On July 2, I did an article on why Republican dominance is on its way out in Arizona, “The elephant has left the room Arizona so you’d better get used to it,” that emphasized the new Independent voter impact—more Democrat, more moderate—as well as the increase in the Hispanic vote. Washington, D.C. think Tank, NDN, believes Hispanic voters could turn Arizona into a Blue state.

A comment from the above article asked me to define a “fair” immigration law, and inquired why I skirted the word amnesty. Maybe the day has come for Hispanic activists to join together and “define” exactly what they would consider a “fair” immigration bill and take their thoughts to Congress as a unified group that represents all Hispanics. The current situation is not one we will be able to contain much longer.

Source: Examiner.com

President Obama makes serious commitment to immigration reform

July 5th 2009,
By Albor Ruiz

If there were any doubts about his commitment to immigration reform, President Obama dispelled them at a bipartisan White House meeting with members of Congress on June 25.

"The President wants a comprehensive reform done this year or, at the latest, at the beginning of next year," said Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-Brooklyn, Queens), who attended the meeting.

"He half-jokingly told us that he was willing to use 'any political capital he has left' for this purpose," added Weiner.

New York was well represented at the gathering, with Sen. Chuck Schumer (D-New York) and Representatives Nydia Velázquez (D-Brooklyn) and Joe Crowley (D-Queens) also in attendance.

Weiner believes the road to a new comprehensive immigration law is sure to be bumpy, but not impossible, to travel - especially with Obama's leadership.

"If we learned something in previous elections it's that immigration was not the toxic issue many thought it was," Weiner said referring to the slew of anti-immigration candidates rejected by voters in recent elections.

Actually, opinion polls show time and time again that the majority of the American people favor a fair and compassionate immigration reform law with a path to citizenship.

Recent polling conducted by the Benenson Strategy Group shows that - despite conventional wisdom to the contrary - even Republican voters overwhelmingly support comprehensive reform, reject enforcement-only approaches and believe reform will help the economy.

"As the Republican Party wrestles with how to repair its brand image with Latino voters and independents, it's instructive that most self-identified Republican voters want the same policy fix as all Americans," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a pro-immigration reform group.

"Whether it's Republican voters or others," Sharry said, "the small but vocal minority of anti-immigration die-hards is overwhelmed by the number of people wanting a practical solution."

Count the nation's chiefs of police among the practical solution proponents. At a July 1 meeting in Miami, they called on Washington to fix the broken immigration system for reasons of public safety and asked that their perspective be included in reform discussions. The chiefs came out strongly against using local police to enforce immigration laws.

As Congress and the President prepare to tackle comprehensive reform, former NYPD First Deputy Commissioner - and current Miami chief of police - John Timoney; Austin, Tex., Police Chief Art Acevedo, and former Sacramento Police Chief Art Venegas reiterated that when immigrant members of the community fear contact with law enforcement, their ability to do their job is jeopardized, along with the safety of the community.

"Immigrant victims and witnesses of violent crimes will not come forward if they fear their 'local police' will deport them," Timoney said. "This affects everyone as it hampers law enforcement efforts to thwart criminal activity in our neighborhoods."

Weiner thinks that a comprehensive, compassionate and practical immigration reform law is within reach. And that it must be passed this year.

But he is well-aware that Republican votes will be needed, both in the Senate and the House, to pass it. And while says there is an internal "battle for the soul of the party" going on, he thinks enough Republicans will say yes to a comprehensive bill. How could they not?

After all, according to Weiner, alienating immigrant voters - especially Hispanics - would make the Republicans the minority party for the next 10 years. And you can bet they will do whatever it takes to try to avoid such a fate.

Source: NY Daily News

Arriving Without an Invitation: New Book Offers Unique Perspective on the Life of an Illegal Immigrant

July 3, 2009
By John Rudolph

“The route is full of dangers. In summer there are usually soldiers guarding the footpaths who arrest anyone trying to get through illegally. There are just as many armed bandits lurking too, waiting to pounce and rob the illegal migrant of what little he owns. Whoever refuses to empty his pockets gets the thrashing of his life. In winter there are fewer soldiers, fewer bandits. Instead it’s a toss-up between dying in the snow or being eaten by wolves.”

Change a few details, and this could easily be a description of the perils facing undocumented immigrants as they cross from Mexico into the U.S. But the writer is Albanian, and the route he describes is his own passage from his native country to neighboring Greece, which he entered illegally in 1991.

In the current debate over immigration reform it is easy for Americans to loose sight of the universality of human migration. Around the world, national borders are constantly being crossed, both with and without governmental approval, as people facing difficult –sometimes desperate– circumstances search for safety, economic security and opportunities they can’t find at home.

“A Short Border Handbook” (published in the U.K. by Portobello Books), a new book by journalist Gazmend Kapllani, reminds us that the experiences often associated with undocumented immigrants in the U.S. are endemic to all who leave their homeland and show up in a new country “uninvited.” Using a blunt style and, at times, dark humor, Kapllani’s short book tells the story of walking to Greece in 1991 after the government of Albania opened its borders following the fall of the country’s totalitarian Communist regime.

The parallels are striking between Kapllani’s experiences and those of Latino immigrants in the U.S. today.

“The fact that you arrived uninvited makes you feel uncomfortable, and deeply guilty, and you may never get over that feeling. Because apart from everything else, they won’t let you forget it. This is your original sin,” he writes.

Across the country Latinos have taken center stage, both as lightning rods for anti-immigrant sentiment and as leaders of the movement to change the nation’s immigration laws.

To be sure, Latinos are the country’s biggest new immigrant group, and make up the majority of the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the U.S. But characterizing immigration reform as a Latino issue –or the issue of any one ethnic group– makes it easier for both sides in the debate to get sidetracked by racial politics. As a consequence it becomes harder to fix the broken immigration system.

Kapllani entered Greece illegally along with thousands of other Albanians who for years had been barred by their own government not just from crossing the border, but even from going near it. Once in Greece he found a life that was different than the one he left behind, but not necessarily easier. The borders that had confined him for most of his life were replaced by new barriers.

    You tell them you want to be legalized, that it’s unbearable trembling every time you see a Black Maria (slang for a police van that carries prisoners) and anyway, who wants to feel like a scared mouse all the time because he hasn’t got the right papers in his pocket?

    I may have arrived without an invitation but I work just like the rest of you do, and most importantly, my boss, or rather my bosses, need me. Yes, I do realize that you are feeding me, but let me tell you that I more than repay it.

    Yes, I am dependent on you for my survival, but you depend on me for your wealth. That’s life. Give and take. I have started to build a new life here, I have got used to this city, and who knows, this city might eventually get used to me. So why am I illegal and worse than a stray dog?

    The city is deaf to your defence. The city is deaf. And on the news, the journalists give voice to the vox pop and want to make sure that you never manage to shake off your nickname, your name, your label: illegal immigrant, illegal life, illegal.

It’s easy to picture an undocumented Mexican day laborer in Los Angeles or a Chinese immigrant without papers working in a New York restaurant experiencing the same kinds of feelings. It’s hard to imagine that all immigrants in the U.S. –whether legal or undocumented– will reach the same level of success Kapllani has achieved in his adoptive homeland. His first jobs in Greece were as a cook and construction worker. He now writes for Greece’s largest circulation daily and has his own radio show.

Kapplani writes about a time almost two decades ago and a place half a world away from the U.S.-Mexico border. But by pointing out that the impulse to migrate and the challenges of illegal immigration are not just felt in North America, and are truly global, perhaps this book can contribute to finding a new way to view –and ultimately untangle– the incredibly complex immigration situation here at home.

Source: Feet in 2 Worlds

Immigrants fighting hard to stay in U.S.

June. 29, 2009
By Helen A.S. Popkin and Tim Vandenack

Angel Rodriguez stood on the front lawn, cradling his infant son, surrounded by porcelain figures, a playpen, a couch, shoes — the familiar ephemera accumulated in better times.

Losing his job with a supplier in the boat manufacturing industry forced Rodriguez and his family to trade their trailer in Milford, Ind., for a single bedroom in the one-bathroom, one-story dwelling they share with eight others some 20 miles north, in Elkhart. It also meant shedding belongings to compensate for the lost space, as well as lost income. So Rodriguez was having a yard sale.

"When I lived in Milford, I lived alone with my kids. I didn’t need anybody’s help," said the husband and father of two. "Now I have to sell my things."

A dozen people living in a single house is not ideal, but it's the price Rodriguez must pay to stay in the United States. Like other Mexican immigrants hit by the recession, it gives his family a way of dealing with the loss of income without having to return to his native country.

"Us illegals, we don’t have unemployment," said Rodriguez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico City. "If I had unemployment, I wouldn’t have had to give up the trailer."

Hispanic immigrants, chiefly those here illegally, are particularly vulnerable as the recession lingers. Without proper documentation, those out of work can’t access unemployment and other government benefits, increasing the pressure to pull up stakes and look for opportunity elsewhere. Still, many who came to the United States looking to improve their life — make money, open up opportunities for their children, help support family still in Mexico —  are hardly eager to return.

Mexico "is a Third World country," said Rodriguez, who knows several who have already gone back. It’s a last resort he’s not willing to consider.

"How’s that going to be? It’s going to be worse."

Thus, Rodriguez and his family make do, exchanging privacy for a shared home and a cheaper lifestyle.

Many immigrants, like Rodriguez, are fighting hard to stay. Some, however, have already trickled back. Whether to stay or leave seems to be a question on everybody's mind.

"Many people are making these decisions," said Ignacio Chagoya, who works with the needy, including some immigrants, at Elkhart's St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church. "Do I go to another state? Do I go to Mexico?"

Still, the pressure is strong.

Chagoya, a legal U.S. resident originally from Mexico, lost his factory job here last December and is considering a move to find work, notwithstanding the 23 years he has lived in Elkhart. It's tough, especially since he'd leave behind his two daughters, who live here with their mother, his ex-wife.

At least he has his U.S. residency card, and, thus, a better shot at securing work, precluding a forced or premature return to Mexico. Some he knows who have gone back to Mexico — almost exclusively undocumented immigrants — have done so because they have no other option, their resources whittled to zero.

"The idea was to return with assets," said Chagoya, alluding to the dream some immigrants harbor of making it big here and returning to Mexico with a pocketful of money. "But they're leaving defeated, sad."

To stay or go
At WKAM, the phone calls are frequent: those on the other end will ask about job leads, fret about the economy and sound off about the notion of moving back to Mexico.
"The No. 1 worry is unemployment," said Nacho Zepeda, general manager and disc jockey at the Spanish-language AM radio station, better known as La Mejor.

Spanish-language radio serves as a cultural lifeline in many Hispanic immigrant communities. Such stations are virtual town squares for the immigrant community, and it’s no different at La Mejor.

Recently, in response to Zepeda’s query to listeners about how they’re weathering the tough times, the calls to the Elkhart County station, based in Goshen, started coming in.

One man, an out-of-work caller originally from Mexico, expressed skepticism about the American Dream — the idea that you can come to the United States, get a job and live happily ever after. Still, he and his wife are hanging on, helped by his brother. No way are they going to leave Elkhart County and return to Mexico.

"What am I going to do in Mexico?" he wondered, repeating a common refrain. "It’s worse."

Hope for a better life brought many from Mexico to the United States. When the Mexican immigration boom began in the 1970s, many settled in border towns in places like California and Texas. But in the early 1990s, ample job opportunities for both documented and undocumented immigrants drew growing numbers to the Midwest. Here in Elkhart County, the once-booming recreational vehicle manufacturing industry was the draw, quadrupling the immigrant population in a decade.

The Hispanic community in Elkhart and across the country is growing. In Elkhart, Hispanics make up 14 percent of Elkhart's roughly 200,000 residents and are the largest minority group in the county. In 1990, they were just 2 percent of the population. Nationally, Hispanics make up 15 percent of the overall population and have accounted for half the U.S. population growth since 2000.

Now comes the economic downturn, a slowdown in immigration for the first time in decades and increasing uncertainty among the immigrants already here. A recent Pew report notes that the slowdown in U.S. economic growth "has had a disproportionate impact on foreign-born Latino workers" who experienced layoffs in a larger percentage than U.S.-born workers.

Another caller to La Mejor explained that she has been jobless for six months and scrapes by selling tamales she makes at home. At least if she were back in her native Mexico she could venture into the countryside and snag something free to eat, like nopales, the edible pads of the prickly pear cactus.

"I’m thinking if it doesn’t get better, I’ll go back," she said, sobbing. "If you don’t have money you don’t have food."

But there’s a catch to consider. With tightening border security and the increasing difficulty of making a clandestine crossing from Mexico into the United States, a return south of the border may not be easy to reverse should things improve. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement reported a 20 percent increase in deportations over the last fiscal year.

Then there are the kids to contend with. More than half of the 16 million Hispanic children in the United States have at least one foreign-born parent, according to Pew. Yet children of immigrants with little to no first-hand experience with their parents’ home country may resist a move.

"They have American friends. They speak English. They consider themselves American," said Vera LeCount, coordinator of the English as a Second Language program at the Elkhart Area Career Center, operated by the Elkhart school district. "I don’t think they could consider what it would be like to live there."

Parents, too, may be reluctant to pull their kids out of school here, mindful of the limited educational offerings back in the home country and broader opportunities here. That seemed to be the case with another caller to Zepeda’s radio show, a woman originally from Mexico. She said she and her husband are determined to stay in Elkhart County, in part to see their U.S.-born son graduate from college here.

"I’m proud of my American son and I’m not going to leave," she said. "I’m not leaving because I’ve built a family here."

Source: MSNBC

Obama Set for First Step on Immigration Reform

June 25, 2009
By GINGER THOMPSON and DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

President Obama is expected to meet with Congressional leaders of both parties on Thursday to begin laying the political groundwork for sweeping immigration legislation, even though its passage this year is considered very unlikely.

With lawmakers already immersed in health care, financial regulation and energy policy, and with the Senate set to hold hearings soon on Judge Sonia Sotomayor’s nomination to the Supreme Court, administration officials and many in Congress say it is improbable that they will be able to add anything as challenging as an immigration overhaul.

And the clock is not the only obstacle. While there is a consensus that the immigration system is broken, Republicans and Democrats, politically burned over the issue in the recent past, remain divided even within their own parties over how to fix it.

The unemployment rate is expected to stay high, making Democrats who are wavering on immigration reform leery of supporting it. And while polls show that Hispanic voters care deeply about changing the system — many of them are related to or at least know someone who is living in this country illegally — even they see it as a lower priority than the economy and health care.

Then there is the question of whether it is Congress or the White House that will take the lead.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and a longtime proponent of expanded guest worker programs and legal status for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants currently in the country, has been succeeded as chairman of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on immigration by Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York. In that role, Mr. Schumer would take the point in pushing for passage of a new bill.

But Republicans have refused to put their political capital at risk without some assurances that Mr. Obama will spend some of his own. Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the senior Republican on Mr. Schumer’s subcommittee, said: “So far what we have seen from the White House, frankly, is a lot of photo-ops and not a lot of rolling up your sleeves and doing the hard work. And this is an issue that is going to take a lot of hard work.”

Aides to Mr. Obama say he does not intend to get out in front of any proposal until there is a strong bipartisan commitment to pass it. That stance has the potential to paralyze the process, since lawmakers are looking to him to use his bully pulpit, and high approval ratings, to help them fend off any political backlash among their constituents.

“His position is very clear: he thinks we need comprehensive immigration reform,” David Axelrod, a senior adviser to the president, said in an interview. “But that’s not something that’s going to happen simply on his volition.”

“Obviously work needs to be done,” Mr. Axelrod added, “and not just from our end, but from the proponents in Congress, to bring it to the point where it can get passed.”

How to move Congress to that point is likely to be the focus of Thursday’s meeting at the White House, lawmakers and presidential aides say.

In recent days, the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, has said he believes there are enough votes to pass a comprehensive bill this year. And in a speech here Wednesday before the Migration Policy Institute, Mr. Schumer agreed, though he said the key to assuaging opponents was to show that any new immigration legislation would not only legalize the status of illegal immigrants already in the country but also include tough measures to prevent new waves from entering.

Public sentiment about the proposed immigration overhaul that failed in the Senate two years ago was that it “was too soft on illegal immigrants,” Mr. Schumer said, adding, “Unless we can convince Americans we’re going to be really tough, then this is not going to work.”

If the outlook is unclear in the Senate, it is even more so in the House, where at least 40 Democrats represent conservative districts. Among them is Representative Heath Shuler of North Carolina, who says he supports enforcing current immigration laws at the border and in the workplace before considering comprehensive immigration reform.

“Congress is spending hundreds of billions of dollars to create new jobs, which should go to legal U.S. workers,” Mr. Shuler said. “Americans have demanded that Congress do something about illegal immigration, and enforcing existing laws is a good first step.”

White House officials do not rule out the possibility of an immigration overhaul before midterm Congressional campaigns are in full swing next year. Some officials, however, say passage will more likely come in 2011, when Mr. Obama hopes to tap his broad support among Hispanic voters as he begins his run for re-election.

On the other hand, Robert Menendez of New Jersey, the only Hispanic among Senate Democrats, says it ought to be this year. “I think it is one of those issues that if you don’t pass this year, it slips several years away,” Mr. Menendez said.

In the five months since Mr. Obama took office, he has used his administrative authority to reverse several Bush administration policies widely criticized as doing little to stem illegal immigration while wreaking havoc on immigrant families already here.

At the Migration Policy Institute meeting Wednesday, John T. Morton, assistant secretary of homeland security, talked about some of those changes, including new guidelines that make employers, rather than workers, the target of workplace raids, as well as expanded humanitarian-release rules to keep parents detained on immigration charges from being separated from small children.

Immigration advocates say that administrative changes are not enough and that Hispanics, a crucial voting bloc, are holding Mr. Obama to his commitment to winning a comprehensive overhaul.

Representative Jason Altmire, a Democrat whose district includes the economically hard-hit Pittsburgh suburbs, says his constituents are holding him to a different commitment.

“By definition,” Mr. Altmire said, “illegal immigrants are people who broke the law to get here. So any effort to reward them with legal status and work permits would not be supported by the people who elected me.”

Source: New York Times

Latinos also divided over immigrant rights

Jun. 22, 2009
By Franco Ordoñez

As the immigration debate heats up across the country, a new study shows Latinos in Charlotte-Mecklenburg are as divided over immigration reform as any other group — and possibly more so.

The Crossroads Social Capital study, which measured social ties in the community, found almost six out of 10 Latinos (58 percent) in Charlotte-Mecklenburg feel immigrants are “too demanding in their push for equal rights.”

“I'm upset at some of the demands I hear some parts of the illegal community making,” said Ricardo Mata, a Venezuelan native who has lived in the country for two decades. “Sometimes, I get fed up at the double standards I see.”

Mata, a Charlotte businessman who was not interviewed in the study, said he's frustrated by what he sees as increasing demands by some immigrants and fewer examples of how the undocumented will contribute to society if legalized. He supports legalizing some undocumented immigrants but feels less than half have demonstrated they really want to be part of America.

Critics of the study's findings say they reflect only a small segment of the community and not the majority of Latinos who do support immigration reform.

“I think the people who were surveyed were mostly established Latinos who are not having to face this issue,” said Angeles Ortega-Moore, executive director of the Latin-American Coalition.

One hundred seven people who identified themselves as Hispanic or Latino participated in the Crossroads study. The full study's margin of error was plus or minus 3.24 percentage points.

While the findings don't appear to track national trends, they do seem to follow economic and generational lines. The longer and more successful Latinos have been in Charlotte-Mecklenburg, the more likely they are to think newly arrived immigrants are too pushy.

The study also shows that Latinos are not monolithic thinkers and that some disagree with parts of the immigrant rights movement.

Latinos are diverse

For most of the 20th century, there were few Latinos in Charlotte. By 1990, about 7,000 lived here.

Today, it's the fastest-growing minority community in the state. Latinos make up 10 percent of the Charlotte-Mecklenburg population, 7 percent of the state's.

Nearly half of the county's 80,000 Latinos have Mexican roots, but thousands come from all over Central and South America.

Victor Guzman, a business owner and television producer from Puerto Rico, said it's sometimes a fight to clarify that not all Latinos are from Mexico and poor.

Many are businesspeople, doctors and lawyers from Argentina, Colombia and Venezuela. Some have multiple degrees — and money.

They are Democrats, Republicans and Independents with wide-ranging views and backgrounds.

“It's not all the same mindset,” Guzman said. “It's like going to the end of Charlotte to Ballantyne and asking questions and then going to West Boulevard and asking the same questions. You're going to get different answers.”

Even in one household, opinions can vary dramatically.

Maria Petrea, whose family is from Panama, doesn't think immigrants are asking too much, but her mother does.

“My mother is now 88,” said Petrea, who is principal of the Collinswood Language Academy, which is 60 percent Latino. “She came to the country when she was 22. She feels immigrants are too demanding. She would tell you they need to become Americanized and at the same time value their own culture. But don't expect people everywhere to speak for them or interpret for them.”

Eric Caratao, a research specialist at the UNC Charlotte Urban Institute who authored the Crossroads study, said about half of the Latinos surveyed were longtime residents.

In his 2009 study on Latino views on immigration reform, Latino studies professor Louis DeSipio of University of California, Irvine found opinions depended on several socioeconomic factors.

Support was strongest among immigrants, poor Latinos and Mexican descendants while conservatives, long-term residents, and U.S.-born Latinos were more likely to back restrictions.

Class structure

The middle class is small in Latin America compared with U.S. standards. Wide gaps exist between the upper and lower economic classes. Many Latinos in America live with the same social structures.

Violeta Moser, a research consultant from Peru, said immigrants are more demanding because they're suffering greater levels of discrimination and human-rights violations. But she said some more-established Latinos may not understand the plight poorer immigrants face and others resent being “pulled into the illegal immigrant issue.”

Former Mecklenburg County commissioner Dan Ramirez, who is from Colombia, says that most Latinos support immigration reform but that some don't want illegal immigrants to “force the issue” so much.

Ortega-Moore of the Latin American Coalition, called it “immigration fatigue.”

“It's such a divisive issue and it's really full of emotion,” she said. “One of the fears is the individual, who is here established and legally in the country, is saying ‘I don't want to be compared with those people who are undocumented.'”

When Victor Guzman was more involved with local advocacy in the 1990s, he said the immigrant-rights movement focused more on human rights. But he now feels some groups, particularly on the West Coast, have gone “overboard.”

He questions demands for health benefits for the undocumented or that schools teach in Spanish.

“You sit there and think, ‘Wait a minute, hold on,'” Guzman said. “You want them treated humanely, but then when they go beyond that and want more and more. And the more radical they get, the more they cast a negative light on the whole situation.”

Source: The Charlotte Observer

Fewest Illegal Immigrants Arrested in 36 Years

Jun 20, 2009
Source: New America Media

Recent statistics from the federal Department of Homeland Security indicate that 724,000 undocumented immigrants were arrested along U.S. borders last year, the lowest number in 36 years. According to the World Journal, the department said the low number is a reflection of the economic recession and stricter border control. Of the 724,000 people arrested, 97 percent were detained at the U.S.–Mexico border and 61,773, or 91.4 percent, were Mexicans. Chinese migrants were the ninth largest group on the list, with 836 arrested.