Pasadena, California celebrated an important birthday today. The Pasadena Community Job Center completed fourteen years of connecting ready, reliable workers with area homeowners and contractors and serving as a community hub for education and cultural exchange.
Is the President’s nominee to lead the Department of Homeland Security anti-immigrant? The truth is that nobody knows. Nobody has bothered to ask. Here’s what we do know: Jeh Johnson comes from the Pentagon; he has little experience with the issue of immigration; and he favors legislative (as opposed to administrative) changes to the immigration…
The nomination of Jeh Johnson to be the next Secretary of Homeland Security and the controversial departure of his predecessor open the door for pivotal questions about the future of the government’s largest agency, especially related to its approach to immigration.
Below are several essential questions for Mr. Johnson to answer before his appointment is accepted.
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Day laborers sit inside Bay Parkway Community Job Center on September 28, __fg_link_1__ 2013 in the Brooklyn borough of New York City. John Moore/Getty Images[/caption]Hurricane Sandy struck fast and furious, and when the waters receded it became clear just how much money and people power it would take to put New York City back together.
As the cleanup began, another reality became clear. Immigrant construction workers, especially day laborers, who became first responders after the hurricane were operating as an underclass in an under-regulated construction industry.
Perhaps never before has there been such a broad coalition and well-formed consensus on the need for inclusion of those who are undocumented in our country. Years of struggle, cheap sacrifice, ask and unprecedented organizing have built momentum to force immigration onto the national agenda and Congress’ docket. Yet, even though legalization is inevitable, the…
When disgraced ex-Congressman turned mayoral candidate Anthony Weiner needed an alias to carry on his explicit online chats, he needed something that said: OK, so I’m a cartoon…but I’m a bad boycartoon. And so was born, Carlos Danger.
Last week, Univision’s Satcho Pretto had the unrepentant Weiner on her Despierta América morning show. Ten minutes into the interview, she finally asked what her viewers really wanted to know. “You picked the pseudo name Carlos Danger,” she said. “Why did you pick a Hispanic name?”
Then, working hard to keep from laughing, Pretto continued, “…and how dangerous were you really?”
It’s a question that’s asked regularly of the U.S.-Mexico border. Just how dangerous is it really?
Back in March, a few weeks before the Senate’s Gang of Eight filed their bill, Senator John McCain invited three of the other Senators to join him for a visit to the border. This sub-Gang of four was admiring the border fence separating Nogales, Arizona from Nogales, Sonora when a woman clamored over the top and made a run for it. Sen. McCain sent out a tweet about the exciting international event.
The reactions to the woman climbing up and over the 18-foot high galvanized steel fence varied. They were:
1. That danged fence isn’t high enough. We need to invest more money, on a double fence patrolled by megalodons.
2. See? Fences don’t work. Stop wasting money on a border fence that’s nothing more than a symbol.
3. I really need to get back to the gym.
Mag-Net hosted a call on media and cultural strategies within the immigrant rights movement. Listen to the discussion:
May 1st marks May Day, also known as International Workers Day. On May 1st, 1886, nearly a half a million immigrants went on a general strike to fight for a 8-hour workday. Over a hundred years later, starting in 2006, again millions of immigrant workers and supporters participated in May Day protests against H.R. 4437, a draconian anti-immigrant bill. Even today, the majority of May Day protests are led by immigrants.
To understand Operation Streamline, it helps to visit the Judge Roy Bean Saloon & Museum, 60 miles north of Del Rio. This corner of Texas needed a local justice of the peace in the 1880s and Roy Bean took the job. Bean deemed his saloon a courthouse and dispensed what the state’s tourism department now describes as “his own brand of justice … with strange, but expedient decisions.”
Efficiency was king. Judge Bean had a saloon to run, after all. When he needed a jury, he called one from among his customers. Whatever fines he imposed, he pocketed.
Once, when an Irishman killed a Chinese railroad worker and was sent to Judge Bean to be tried for manslaughter, a mob of 200 white people demanded the Irishman’s immediate release. Judge Bean set the Irishman free, holding that while homicide was the killing of a human being, there was no law against killing a Chinaman.
For the 44, 000 people expected to be expelled from the country during Congress’ August recess, here immigration reform won’t come soon enough and executive action is already overdue.
While the end result of the immigration debate in Congress is uncertain when in session, we know that nothing will move while legislators are on vacation. Nothing, that is, other than the gears on the deportation machine that has been assembled and placed on overdrive under the Obama administration.
