Posts tagged with 'Latinas'
Weekly Immigration Wire: 2009 is Make or Break Year for Immigration Reform
Filed under: 
By Nezua
Media Consortium Mediawire Blogger
The new year rushes upon us with momentum born of crisis and necessity. In every direction one looks, change is needed—and not cosmetic alteration, but deep, structural repair. The issue of immigration is no exception.
As New America Media reports in Immigration Demands Heat Up Before Obama Takes Over, Latino/a communities are not alone in speaking out.”Lawmakers, academics, immigration advocates and newspaper editorials” are making noise and “demanding that early attention to be paid to the immigration issue.” The clamor is not just about ending politicization and criminalization of an issue. It’s a matter of who we are as a nation.
There should be a plan that would first allow most of the undocumented to become legal residents, the supporters said. The next step would be eligibility for a green card and ultimately citizenship, a process that could take between seven to 10 years.
Greater emphasis is on family re-unification and less on enforcement by the Department of Homeland Security that controls immigration, and an end to the unconscionable nighttime raids conducted by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), arm of the Department of Homeland Security. [...]
Dr. Marco Mason, [a political science professor at Medgar Evers College of the City University of New York, and one of the most vocal immigration advocates in Brooklyn] couldn’t agree more. “President Obama would be telling the world that humanity has returned to U.S. immigration policies,” he said.
Poring over the Immigration Newsladder, one can make out the tensions at play as we, as a People, attempt to answer the question What kind of nation is the UNITED STATES? One approach to the immigration question is through punitive and aggressive means. On that end of the continuum are harsh laws, S.W.A.T.-style raids, mass jailings, a detention center industry, and inevitably, shattered families. The other side of the continuum offers a more humanitarian lens. This view recognizes the interconnected quality of all our struggles, hungers, and pains—and most importantly, that knows neglecting another is a detriment to the whole.
Public News Service reports on how we all benefit from understanding in New Medical Technology Helps CA Immigrants Bridge The Language Gap.
Rancho Los Amigos in Southern California is the first rehabilitation hospital in the world to implement a wireless Video Medical Interpreter system. VMI allows non-English-speaking patients to communicate with their doctors through an on-screen interpreter.
Roland Palencia, director of Community Benefit Programs with L.A. Care Health Plan, says the system improves communication, increases quality of care and reduces medical errors. [...]
“There is definitely a medical benefit to it, but also a psychological one: The patient really feels a lot more at ease that the provider actually understands what he or she is going through.”
Who doesn’t want that? Who ought to be denied such a thing? To some these answers are very clear cut, and even at a young age. Twenty-four year old Sophya Chum is one of those people. Sophya has been active in her community and working hard for change for almost half her life, and today is program coordinator for Khmer Girls in Action (KGA), “a Long Beach-based community organization for young Southeast Asian women,” as The Nation reports in Youth in Action: Sophya Chum, Immigrant Rights Activist. For Sophya, the fight is political and it is personal, and she has some very practical and uncluttered advice to those who want to do more to affect change in the world.
For people interested in advocating for the rights of immigrants and refugees, Sophya suggests starting simple. “Find a community [you're] interested in learning about and creating change in,” she says. “And begin to volunteer.”
Immigration is the quintessential American Story. And this story and its arc, ever repeating itself, is hardly limited to the Latino/a community or the Asian American community.
In Colorado playwright explores cultural conflicts of immigration, religion, the Colorado Independent tells the story of Don Fried, a respected author who began altering his book-in-progress when the Agriprocessors kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa was raided on May 12, 2008.
Fried is currently toying with the idea of having one of the play’s discontented locals, a character who has not been happy about Jewish people coming to town and building a kosher meatpacking plant there, tip off the federal authorities and spark the immigration raid.
“But then, as the town starts to crater, that person and all the others begin to wonder what has been done — they’ve killed the goose that laid the golden egg,” he said.
There’s that interconnectedness again, and this time through an economic lens.
And so these borders and boundaries, designed to separate us, also thread us together through our lived experiences interacting with them. The Latina/o community, the Jewish community, the Asian American community, the Irish community—and the Polish community, as New America Media reports in Polish Community Shocked by Treatment of Polish Citizens at U.S. Border.
This year ends with an unpleasant intervention by Poland’s diplomatic staff at the U.S. Department of State and the U.S. Embassy in Warsaw. At issue are recent cases of Poles who were denied entry to the U.S. at the New York area airports.
While no one questions the right of the U.S to bar certain individuals from entering the country, the treatment of Polish citizens was shocking to many, especially since most of those stopped at the border were older women in their 60s and 70s. Many of them were coming to visit their families and friends for Christmas, but instead ended up being interrogated by Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officers and transported in handcuffs to a detention center.
And we have to ask ourselves again, What Kind of Nation Are We? What do we lose in a situation like that? Does it balance against any measurable gain? Or is there another way to go about reaching our goal?
Are we the kind of nation that turns 12 million members of our standing society into “dangerous aliens” undeserving of common rights? Is that what kind of nation we will remain in 2009? Public News Service sounds a clear warning in Immigration Policy Blamed for Latino Deaths in NY and Nation.
Are we going to continue to be the kind of nation that makes immigrant women pay, with their bodies, for laws that deprive them of a safe and accessible avenue to rights other women possess? Feministing tells of Latinas and self-induced abortions and the growing use of the drug for self-induced abortions. “The story is the same; immigrant women choose these do-it-yourself abortions for financial reasons, or out of fear of telling their family members, over safer procedures in clinics and hospitals.”
Time and time again, wielding such a heavy hand in response to immigrant issues involves losing touch with the basic humanity a situation requires. You make things worse. Things get out of control. People suffer very real consequences.
In 2009, let’s be a nation of those who help each other; who learn from each other; who stop tearing at our own roots so we can grow together.
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration, or follow us on Twitter. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium, a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and was created by NewsLadder.
Weekly Immigration Wire: Connecting People and Policies—From Mumbai to Arizona
It was immediately obvious this week that the Mumbai attacks would be the source of much loss and pain in India. As the US is a land of immigrants, it is always worth remembering how connected to any world event some segment of our population will be in these moments. So is the case now, and Rupa Dev of New America Media presents us with insights gleaned from interviews with a collection of young South Asian Americans in Mumbai Attacks Hit Home For Young South Asian Americans.
Living here in the United States, do you feel detached from violence in India?
Urvi Nagrani, 21, Student, UCSB, Santa Barbara, CA
Maybe I’d be able to feel detached if I lacked personal ties to the situation, but I’ve been to all of the sites that were attacked, I have family members who live very close to all the sites. I was unable to enjoy the luxury of apathy.
For those who have immigrated to the United States, this makes for a powerful overlap in causes and a unified struggle for rights here in the land we now share, as is touched upon in Asian Americans Reluctant to Stand Up for Immigration Issues.
According to The World Journal, a survey of 412 Asian Americans [showed that] 80 percent of [those polled] were “very concerned” or “concerned” about immigration. The study shows that 58 percent of Asians are sympathetic to undocumented immigrants and 52 percent of them are supportive of the idea of legalizing undocumented immigrants. About 33 percent of the Asian Americans surveyed said they would become involved in collecting signatures on petitions for immigration issues, but only nine percent said they were willing to do anything further, such as participating in public protests.
The headine positions the data as revealing a failure among Asian Americans to “stand up” for Immigration Issues, but why? Thirty-three percent of a community willing to collect signatures seems not a bad amount to this writer! Do you agree that the only way to “stand up” for rights is to “protest”?
Regardless, there is a tension in the national dialogue, there is no denying that. And if this conflict is represented in the Asian American community, that is not surprising. We see the dichotomy in many places, also represented in the discussion taking place around Barack Obama’s choice of Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano as the President-elect’s choice of Homeland Security Secretary. Roberto Lovato explores this in Immigration Reform Trapped in Political Dualism.
[N]ews of Obama’s likely appointment of Arizona Governor and former Clinton-U.S. Attorney appointee, Janet Napolitano, to lead the Department of Homeland Security only reinforced the belief that political dualism may define the Obama legacy on immigration; Napolitano has enthusiastically supported “emergency measures” like militarizing the border to “fight” the “threat” posed by immigrant gardeners, meatpackers and maids like my cousin, Maria; But she has also vetoed at least a few of the more than 75 anti-immigrant measures introduced in Arizona home to the infamous Sheriff, Joe Arpaio.
And so the political football game of immigration reform goes on, and has yet to coalesce into action which solves problems like this:
A report published recently by the Mexican Congress indicates that 90,000 children were deported from the United States to Mexico during the first seven months of 2008. Of these, 15 percent, or about 13,500 children, were abandoned on the Mexican side of the border without any governmental protection.
As noted, these are not abstract events to the communities from which these children (and others) belong. They are very real and very painful and dire. In In These Times’ The Crisis of Wage Theft, by Kim Bobo, we learn that “[b]illions dollars in wages are being illegally stolen from millions of workers each and every year.” And New America Media reminds us that adolescent Latinas have the highest rate of “attempted suicides among groups of teenagers in the nation,” and also tells of a new program aimed at helping.
Also aiming for a positive solution to much of the Latina/o community’s current needs is an article by Jessica Gonzales-Rojas called The Power of the Latina Vote. Gonzales-Rojas talks about organizing around issues important to the community because “[i]t is undeniable that the Latino vote had a tremendous impact on the election.” She goes on to inform us how much of that impact was brought about by mujeres (women), and what should be next.
Now that we have new leadership in place, we advocates, activists and organizers must rise to the occasion. We must take the momentum of this election to our everyday organizing and activism, placing women’s ability to care and provide for their families at the center of our platform. [...] What does this new era mean? What do we want for our families and communities? What does a Latina agenda for reproductive justice and immigrant rights look like?
Because the fact is, “[t]he great transformational politics of ‘hope’ and ‘change’ do not translate to tangible benefits for new immigrants. In fact, many health and career services for immigrants are cut back or all together shut down due to lack of federal and state funds.” So Diana Jou writes in the personal and fun essay Coming to America. And as David Bacon makes clear in a post on The Nation called Change Immigrants and Labor Can Believe In, “[a] new administration that has raised such high expectations should look for new ideas in the areas of immigration reform and trade policy, not recycle the bad ones of the last few years. The constituency that won the election will support a change in direction, and in fact is demanding it.”
But there is tension in the dialogue. John Riley of The Dallas Morning News covers the same ground but muses that “Mr. Obama is focused on the economic crisis and may not make immigration legislation a priority early in his administration.” However, Riley begins his article with the recognition that “huge increases in Latino voter turnout” are coupled with “credit for helping to propel Barack Obama into the White House” in the minds of Immigrant Rights groups.
Let’s hope for the nation’s sake that some of the recently-trumpeted change makes its way to the communities now in dire need of it.
______________________________
This post features links to the best independent, progressive reporting about immigration. Visit Immigration.NewsLadder.net for a complete list of articles on immigration. And for the best progressive reporting on critical economy and health issues, check out Economy.NewsLadder.net and Healthcare.NewsLadder.net. This is a project of The Media Consortium , a network of 50 leading independent media outlets, and created by NewsLadder.