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Remarks of Tom Saenz, search President and General Counsel of MALDEF at AFL-CIO Headquarters during United States Student Association’s March 22, 2010 press conference in support of the DREAM ACT.
By MARTIN ESPINOZA
THE PRESS DEMOCRAT
Pastor John Schmidt knew “cielo azul” meant blue sky, but it was welcome news to him that cielo also meant heaven.
“That’s very fitting,” he said as he walked toward a 1½-acre plot on the west side of Santa Rosa Alliance Church property.
The triangular plot will be the site of Cielo Azul Farm, a community garden that brings together the efforts of Alliance Church, St. Joseph Health System and Fulton Road day laborers.
The garden will provide about a dozen Fulton Day laborers and their families with extra wages during these tough economic times, said Leticia Romero, a community organizer for St. Joseph Health System.
For several years, Romero has worked with day laborers who gather near the corner of Fulton and River roads. The St. Joseph organizer quickly established a table and hiring system that guaranteed a minimum of $12 an hour for those workers who participated in an orderly hiring process.
Day laborers were informed of workers’ rights and how to go about getting unpaid wages from unscrupulous employers. Workers were also given free medical screenings, courtesy of St. Joseph Health system.
Then the economy crashed. Construction work, home improvement and frequent yard work all began to dry up. About a year ago, the group found a solution.
“Because of the economy, jobs were scarce,” Romero said. “There was a lot more competition amongst the men who were there. Again, over and over, they would say, ‘We need to work, we need to work?’ “
Romero brought in an expert on cooperatives from the Insight Center for Community Economic Development in Oakland. Workers were trained during evening courses and a small project began to take root.
Then, someone mentioned that the pastor at Santa Rosa Alliance Church, located at the corner of Occidental and Fulton roads, was looking for ways to do more for the community.
Romero said Schmidt reacted with excitement to the project, and that when he said he could make 1½ acres available, it quickly grew in scope.
“That’s when we realized that it could be a farm and it became a three-fold project,” she said. “It could generate income for the men and women involved, families could have access to fresh healthy vegetables and it could give back to the community.”
The garden will compete at local farmers’ markets, but Cielo Azul is also building relationships with local community clinics that will allow them to sell their produce at the health centers.
The community garden, which will grow chiles, tomatoes, radishes, onion, egg plant, beets, lettuce and cucumber, also will provide periodic donations to the Redwood Empire Food Bank.
Schmidt said the workers came up with the name, which is posted on a sign near the church’s Occidental Road entrance.
They called it Cielo Azul Farm, using the English “farm” rather than the Spanish “granja,” because they wanted to reach out to the English-speaking population.
“I think that just by having the interaction with folks in different populations allows us to learn from one and other and, you know, kindly inquire about each other,” she said.
The groundbreaking celebration will be held today between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m.
You can reach Staff Writer Martin Espinoza at 521-5213 or martin.espinoza@pressdemocrat.com
Source: The Press Democrat
CAMBRIDGE, MASSACHUSETTS — On a deck in Boston, seven friends recently gathered for dinner. At the table was a white American man; his wife, an Italian woman he met in Switzerland; a Swiss citizen raised in Kenya; a German of Korean origin; a woman with Haitian, Chinese and European ancestry; the son of a black American and a German Jew; and an American with Indian blood.
It took a while to get through the where-are-you-fromming, as it often can these days.
There is a modern myth that globalization is new. But the world has integrated before, disintegrated in war, and integrated fitfully again. Goods and people have swirled for a long time, and in the 17th, 18th or 19th century you might have found on any ship a crew and passengers made up of slaves, traders, cooks, officers, colonizers and pilgrims more diverse than our dinner table.
What is arguably new is the influence of the placeless and the elevation of placelessness, in some quarters at least, to a virtue.
The placeless are no longer just the flotsam and jetsam of empires and colonies. They are the president of the United States now; they are among our leading thinkers and bankers, philanthropists and public servants.
Placelessness — variously defined, at varying levels of privilege — might even be seen as becoming the center of gravity of the human condition. Millions now live in one country and work in another, some crossing a border on foot each day, others putting on fake accents and telemarketers’ headsets, migrating by pretense. Millions are pouring out of their villages and into deracinating cities, with human civilization recently becoming urban in majority for the first time. Millions are being raised in a language their ancestors never spoke.
And yet the placeless still find themselves colliding with a place-bound world.
For the placeless person of privilege, it may be no worse than wrestling with the question “Where are you from?” You wonder every time: Do they want the five-second pick-one-identity answer, or the 30-second geography-biography, or the five-minute story?
But for the more vulnerable, the stakes are higher. Mexican laborers are encouraged to work in the United States but chased away by armed vigilantes. In India, northern migrants to coastal, cosmopolitan Mumbai are beaten by armed cadres of a sons-of-the-soil political movement. In China, untold millions of rural dwellers have been drawn to the city to make the roads and buildings to fuel the country’s boom. But, under the reigning hukou system of residency permits, they find themselves without the rights of locals in the big city, without guaranteed access to education and medical care, vulnerable at any time to being sent back to the village.
Officialdom struggles to process people without a place. Census forms don’t understand them. Commercial television and cinema create few characters in their image. Tax collectors insist that they choose one of their many countries as the real one. Politicians represent particular places, not ideas or industries or genders, and so if you are a Somalian-born American working in Paris for Nissan, you live in a democracy but without meaningful representation, with no public servants driven to take up your battles.
But the problem is not just external. The placeless often also suffer a gnawing tension within, a love-hate relationship with roots.
They find that their connections can run worldwide but only an inch deep. They may find it easier to ask friends in five countries for a favor than to ask a neighbor for sugar. They may know something of the foods of every continent but be unable to cook expertly in any one cuisine. They may have visited a greater fraction of the 10 largest cities in the world than of the neighborhoods of their own city.
Placeless souls of means have a way out. They find ways of splitting the difference, living rootlessly and yet making space for roots. They travel far from home to study, but then major in the study of their own race or culture or language. Or, in the case of someone like the artist Youngjoo Cho, a native of South Korea who studied in Paris and divides her time between Berlin and Seoul, they use art to soothe the unease of not belonging.
In a mixed-media piece of hers called “Motherland Visiting,” the detritus of a visit to her native country is springing out of a suitcase after the trip. The work is meant to suggest “the relationship of the placeless to localness,” her Web site says, “a relationship that is becoming more complex in an increasingly mobile world.”
Barack Obama, that politician of so many places, has shown a similar interest in roots. A child of many homes, with parents from different races and continents, he has built an adult life more rooted. He traveled in search of his African roots, wrote a book about his quest, worked at the grass roots of community organizing in Chicago, married a woman long rooted there, and built the kind of grounded family that his own childhood had lacked. Indeed, for many placeless people, it is romantic partnership more than a specific patch of earth that gives roots.
These days, it is often placeless people who flock to restaurants peddling their rootedness in place: restaurants like Blue Hill in New York, whose Web site talks of “local food” and “nearby farms” and “producers who respect artisanal techniques.” It is the placeless who seem most to loathe the McDonald’s vision of food that scholars have called the “placeless foodscape.”
In a recent lecture at Princeton University, Sudhir Kakar, a prominent Indian psychoanalyst and cultural writer, suggested that this longing for place can be buried or denied or suppressed in the placeless, but that it will never truly go away.
The postmodern notion of “multiple identities” has become fashionable, he said, with its notion that “migration is an opportunity to reinvent one’s identity.” But this vision, though liberating, denies the role of place in forming consciousness, particularly in childhood, he argued.
The placeless dream has the “danger of underplaying if not denying the psychic pain of the migration process and the persistence of the past in the present,” said Mr. Kakar. “The emphasis on multiplicity can divert attention from what is enduring in the person.”
Source: New York Times
Local police in Arizona may soon have the ability to arrest illegal immigrants on trespassing charges for simply being in the state.
The new provision, called a first in the nation by both opponents and proponents, was given preliminary approval by Arizona legislature the New York Times reported Tuesday.
The bill has received criticism from several police chiefs and sheriffs. According to the Times, the bill was called burdensome, impractical, and a tactic that will scare immigrants out of cooperating with investigations and reporting crime.
Source: It’s Moving Forward: Arizona’s Tough Illegal Immigrant Bill | NBC San Diego
LOS ANGELES — The Arizona Legislature gave preliminary approval Tuesday to a proposal that would allow the police to arrest illegal immigrants on trespassing charges simply for being in the state.
The provision, see which opponents and proponents call a first in the nation, is part of a wide-ranging bill whose sponsors say they hope will make life tougher for illegal immigrants.
The House bill must be reconciled with a version passed by the Senate, something that may be done within the next week or two. Both include measures to outlaw the hiring of day laborers off the street; prohibit anyone from knowingly transporting an illegal immigrant, even a relative, anywhere in the state; and compel local police to check the status of people they reasonably suspect are in the country illegally.
Immigrant advocates call the bill some of the harshest legislation they have seen in a state where battles over immigration are particularly sharp edged.
Its sponsors said Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican facing a primary competition from conservatives, has indicated her support, though her spokesman said she would not take a position until the final bill reaches her desk.
State Senator Russell Pearce, a Republican and the chief sponsor of the legislation, brushed aside concerns raised by civil libertarians that the law would open the door to racial profiling. The local office of the American Civil Liberties Union says the bill is unconstitutional.
Mr. Pearce said the bill gives the police another tool and compensates for lax enforcement of immigration law by the federal authorities. The police, he said, do not have to arrest every illegal immigrant on trespassing charges, but it gives them that discretion.
“American citizens have a constitutional right to expect their rights and laws to be enforced,” he said in an interview.
Several police chiefs and sheriffs have criticized the bill, calling it burdensome and impractical and a tactic that will scare immigrants out of cooperating with investigations and reporting crime.
Source: New York Times
WASHINGTON — On a recent Saturday morning, a group of Latino men wearing paint-spattered jeans and grim expressions strode through a Washington neighborhood in search of the contractor who had cheated them. He’d hired them to remodel a wine in November and December but paid a fraction of what he had promised before disappearing. Now they were hoping the owner could offer clues as to the contractor’s whereabouts.
Luis Colli, 33, a day laborer from Mexico, said he was owed more than $2,000 after more than a month’s work. His wife back in Mexico urged him to “let this go,” Colli said in Spanish, sighing wearily as the group reached the wine . “But I told her: ‘If I let it go, then it means I’ve been intimidated. If I let it go, it means there’s no justice.’ “
Mackenzie Baris, lead organizer with D.C. Jobs With Justice, nodded encouragingly. The morning’s mission was among the first steps in a new effort the nonprofit group has launched to fight what appears to be a growing trend of employers skipping out on wages.
There are signs that the recession has prompted more employers to shortchange their workers, either by failing to pay the promised amount or by offering less than minimum wage in the first place. Construction, restaurant and janitorial workers appear particularly vulnerable, especially if they are immigrants who don’t speak English or lack legal status.
At the District of Columbia’s Office of Wage-Hour, the number of workers seeking help to recover stolen wages rose to 523 last year, an increase of more than 20 percent from 2008.
Jobs With Justice, a national campaign for workers’ rights, and allied groups have responded by training low-skilled workers to help one another gather information needed to mount legal cases. Failing that, they plan to try more creative tactics: picketing recalcitrant contractors in hopes of shaming them or asking larger companies or government entities that employ bad bosses to pressure them to pay up.
“The capacity of volunteers and nonprofit staff to be able to follow through on these cases is going to be limited given how big the problem is,” Baris said. “Having workers themselves be at the front line is the best way to be effective.”
The magnitude of the challenge was evident as soon as she and the workers entered the wine . Colli began a hesitant explanation of the purpose of their visit, which another organizer translated into English. To Colli’s relief, the owner of the wine responded with a sympathetic smile. The contractor had cheated him as well, he said, charging $35,000 above the initial bid before leaving the job unfinished.
“I’m trying to find him, too,” he said. But he had little additional information to offer: a bank account number and the name and phone number of the contractor’s accountant.
“OK. It’s something,” Baris said. “Possibly the police can use this information to find him.”
Organizers at Jobs With Justice have decided to pursue alternative options when possible, inspired by similar efforts by groups in San Francisco and Austin, Texas. Since late fall, they have trained 11 workers from an independent association of day laborers called the Union de Trabajadores to act as the intake staff of a walk-in wage-theft work. At a recent session, the cases included that of Oscar Martinez, 54, of Guatemala. He had been working for a small refuse pickup company for three years when the owner announced that, because of a slowdown in business, he would have to cut Martinez’s pay slightly. Martinez accepted, but shortly afterward, the boss disappeared without paying him for the last two weeks.
“He used to pick me up at this McDonald’s. But he just stopped showing up,” Martinez said in Spanish. “I’ve been calling him and calling him, but he never answers.”
March 2, 2010 | Susan Valot | KPCC (89.3 KPCC/Southern California Public Radio)
(Image Credit: Susan Valot/KPCC) Day laborers and supporters hold signs while they chant and sing outside Costa Mesa City Hall. Civil rights groups have filed a lawsuit on their behalf against the city's enforcement of an anti-solicitation ordinance.
Costa Mesa has stopped enforcing its anti-solicitation ordinance that bars day laborers from looking for work on sidewalks and public land. The halt comes after the ACLU and other groups sued the city.
Last month, day laborers marched to Costa Mesa City Hall to mark the filing of the lawsuit.
They say the city singled them out under its ordinance that bans soliciting business on sidewalks or public property. The lawsuit claims the law violates free speech rights.
Costa Mesa officials decided to temporarily stop enforcing the ordinance until the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rules on a similar case in Redondo Beach.
That case has been working its way through the courts for several years, since a federal judge four years ago decided that Redondo Beach had violated free speech law by cracking down on day laborers with the anti-solicitation ordinance.
DANBURY — A federal judge has ruled that the men known as the Danbury 11 not be required to divulge their immigration status as part of their civil rights lawsuit against the city.
While attorneys for the city claimed the status was “at the heart of the case,” the judge cited previous case law when she ruled that handing over the information would have a “chilling” effect on other immigrants seeking to enforce their civil rights.
“We are gratified, but not surprised, because this order follows a long line of cases saying the courts should be open to everyone,” said Rebecca Heller, a law student with the Jerome N. Frank Legal Services organization at Yale Law School, which is representing the immigrants.
“People should not have to face harassment and deportation in order to vindicate their civil rights in federal court,” Heller said.
The Danbury 11 is a group of day laborers who were arrested in Danbury and turned over to immigration agents in September 2006 during a sting operation involving local police officers.
The lawsuit filed by the day laborers claims that local police don’t have the authority to enforce federal immigration law and that the officers used racial profiling when a local undercover officer picked them up at Kennedy Park.
“The judge magistrate’s decision seems correct to me, because it’s obvious what the defendants were doing that got them into court in the first place was unlawful,” said John Williams, a prominent civil rights lawyer in the state.
“The judge has said they (the city) can’t throw up a smokescreen and try to divert the jury from that reality,” he said. “The judge saw through the frivolous nature of this defense and will make the defendants act like adults instead of politicians.”
U.S. Magistrate Judge Donna Martinez said in her March 19 decision that the day laborers’ immigration status is not relevant to whether the city is allowed to enforce federal law.
She also noted that whether the local police officers “had a lawful basis for the detention and or arrest of the (day laborers) depends on what the officers knew at the time they detained” the immigrants.
Martinez said the day laborers’ immigration status is not relevant to whether officers had probable cause.
Wilson Hernandez, a former president of the Ecuadorian Civic Center in Danbury who has been closely following the case, said the judge’s decision sends a message to other immigrants who believe their rights are being violated.
“They can feel confident that they can go to the authorities if they feel their rights have been violated,” Hernandez said. “Otherwise, they would feel too intimidated to report anything.”
It’s out of fear of being deported, Hernandez said, that more than three-quarters of immigrants fail to report cases of abuse.
“They are afraid they won’t get the help they need or will be punished for going to the authorities if someone is taking advantage of them,” he said.
Local immigration attorney Michael Boyle said the city’s attempts to gain access to the day laborers’ immigration status amounts to a fishing expedition and a scare tactic that is often used in hope the plaintiffs will drop their case.
He added that, in general, most federal judges don’t like to encourage such fishing expeditions.
“It’s a very positive decision,” Boyle said. “But I think for the city of Danbury it astounds me that this case continues to go on forever.”
Mayor Mark Boughton, a five-term Republican seeking his party’s nomination in the gubernatorial race, has made national headlines in the past concerning immigration issues. He declined to comment specifically on this case because the matter remains pending.
Dan Casagranda, the local attorney handling the case for the city, could not be reached for comment in several attempts Wednesday.
Contact Dirk Perrefort
at dperrefort@newstimes.com
or 203-731-3358.
To rally with immigrant advocates on the National Mall on Sunday, El Salvadoran factory worker Saul Linares said, he walked more than 250 miles–a greater distance than he had to walk to enter the United States illegally a decade ago. His trek from Long Island took eight days. The dozen jornaleros, or day laborers, who began the journey with him didn’t even get as far as New Jersey. Linares slept at churches along the way, and at one of them convinced Ramiro Huinil, a Guatemalan construction worker, to keep him company for the rest of the journey. The two men traveled to the rally on foot “to demonstrate how we suffer,” said Linares, now a legal resident of the United States. “I didn’t have to walk for long to come to America, but a lot of people do. They walk for long long days to come to the US. It’s very difficult to get visas to come legally.”
Though most physically got there by less dramatic means, the tens of thousands of other immigrants and their advocates who rallied in Washington, DC, this weekend were engaging in an exercise similar to Linares’s. Despite the political odds against them, they were making an impassioned gesture–one that may end up being entirely symbolic, because of the political odds against them.
The effort to legalize the country’s 11 million undocumented immigrants inspired massive street demonstrations by supporters as well as a nasty, often racially charged backlash when it was last in the spotlight, three years ago. It seems unlikely that lawmakers would want to revisit that now, with unemployment at 10 percent, mid-term elections on the horizon and the long, bruising battle over healthcare climaxing the very day of the rally less than a mile away at the US Capitol. The only Republican backing a Senate blueprint to legalize undocumented workers–Senator Lindsey Graham, co-architect of that blueprint–has said that bipartisan support for it could not be achieved this year if healthcare passed.
The demonstrators seemed to know what will be required to tackle the issue: Change Takes Courage,” their signs read. It was an acknowledgement of the political challenges they face, as well as a moral call to action. They chanted: “¡Obama, Escucha! ¡Estamos en la lucha!” (literally: “Listen, Obama! We’re in the battle!”). The “battle” in their message to the president carried two connotations: that of their determination to fight for legalization, as well as their daily struggle, living in constant fear of deportation and subject to exploitation by employers.
Elizabeth Rodas, a lab technician from New Jersey and a US citizen, traveled to the rally with her undocumented husband, a construction worker from Ecuador, and their 15-month-old daughter. She said that recent immigration raids in Elizabeth, where they live, have left her terrified of losing her husband. “Any day they could take him away, and what would I do?” she said. “What would I do without my husband?”
Emma Moreno, director of the Spanish caucus for Teamsters Local 743 in Chicago, said that without an overhaul to the country’s immigration laws, employers would continue to abuse undocumented workers. “They say they don’t want undocumented workers,” she said, “but they hire them [anyway] through temporary agencies, and they pay them less than minimum wage. These immigrants have made a big contribution to this country.” Legalizing them “is something that morally the country has to do for them.”
If nothing changes, advocates say, a second-generation will be subject to low wages, no benefits and the lack of workplace protection. About a million young people entered the United States illegally with their parents when they were children, but were raised and educated as almost-Americans, with the same expectations as their peers. Many go to college, but emerge with degrees they can’t put to use because they have no legal right to work here. The rally included a large contingent of these students and their supporters, including Izzy, a 20-year-old studying fashion design at Dominican University outside Chicago. Her father is a forklift driver, and her mother works in a factory. They brought her across the US-Mexico border when she was 3 years old, imagining prospects for her better than their own. But she doesn’t know if she can fulfill their dream without immigration reform: “I’m just hoping that something will happen,” she said. “All I can do is wait.”
Advocates, angry that deportations have increased by 5 percent since Obama took office, emphasized at every turn at the rally that Latinos could do more than wait. They could also vote. And they had voted, two-thirds of them for Obama. “The immigrant community came out hard in a swing state and voted for change in large numbers,” said Subhash Kateel, an organizer with the Florida Immigrant Coalition. “They haven’t seen the change.”
Since their rallies in 2006, advocates have pushed hard to naturalize and register more immigrants. “There are more and more voters who care about this issue as one of their top issues,” said Regan Cooper, director of the Pennsylvania Immigration and Citizenship Coalition, which helped sign up 12,000 new citizens in that state. Organizers also highlighted how their coalition has broadened to include evangelical churches and African-American groups not present in large numbers in 2006. The speakers included the Reverend Jesse Jackson and NAACP head Ben Jealous, for instance.
In a video address broadcast on giant screens at the rally, President Obama reiterated his promise to “fix our broken immigration system.” Despite the warnings of reprisals at the polls, advocates were keen to count that restatement of his commitment–following his swift endorsement of an immigration reform plan unveiled last week by Senator Graham and Senator Charles Schumer–as proof that they had brought pressure effectively to bear.
The vote for healthcare by Representative Luis Gutierrez of Chicago, a staunch ally of immigration reform advocates, likely played a role in those last-minute affirmations of support. As such, instead of seeing themselves as out of the shadows but overshadowed by healthcare, some advocates believe they now have some leverage on account of it. “It’s a glimmer of hope,” said Domingo Garcia, president of the Dallas chapter of the Latino advocacy group LULAC, who shepherded 400 people to the rally. As for the Republican support that President Obama has said he needs, he and other Latino leaders are already strategizing; they believe they might be able to sway Texas Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, whose loss to Governor Rick Perry in the primary means she does not have to worry about a backlash at the polls in November.
Juan Hernandez, who directed Hispanic outreach for John McCain’s presidential campaign, said he is also hopeful that other Republicans can be brought on board, no matter the rancor over healthcare. “We can’t continue saying mañana, mañana, mañana,” he said, before taking the stage at the rally. “We have 12 million good people, who are not a security problem, who are the gasoline of the nation, and people of faith and conservatives are marching here” in support of them.
By Eloisa España, EGP Staff Writer
The Day Laborers of the Inland Empire took the “Yo Si Cuento” (I Do Count) trophy home on Sunday — and will keep it for the next 10 years.
Census workers gave all they could but were unable to defeat the jornaleros in the first game of Sunday’s tournament. (EGP Photo by Eloisa España)
U.S. Census Bureau workers and Spanish language media reps took on the day laborers (jornaleros in Spanish) at a soccer tournament to symbolize that they, jornaleros, do count in the Census.
Agustin Duran, Partnership Spet of the Los Angeles Regional Census Center said they chose the city of Bell Gardens to host the tournament because it is in the East L.A. region; the second hardest to count area in the nation.
“We decided to play with the jornaleros because it is one of the hardest to count groups in the Latino community,” he said.
The jornaleros took an early lead in the tournament, winning the first game 3-0. They would go on to win the tournament by defeating ESPN Spanish radio, 5-3.
The tournament, which was free to attend, was put on with “cooperation from the city, the Census and also from NALEO and other community organizations,” said Duran, sharing that this is the first time an event like this has taken place in Bell Gardens.
Spectators who turned out to watch the soccer competition, were also able to take advantage of the Census Questionnaire Assistance Center set up to help people in need of assistance filling out their Census form.
Census workers now have ten years to prepare for the next tournament, and a chance to win back the trophy.
