immigration
kkrisberg | September 12, 2017At the Huffington Post, Dave Jamieson reports that labor unions are stepping up to help protect increasingly vulnerable immigrant workers from deportation. In fact, Jamieson writes that in many instances, labor unions have become “de facto immigrants rights groups,” educating workers on their rights and teaching immigrants how to best handle encounters with immigration officials.
Jamieson’s story begins:
Yahaira Burgos was fearing the worst when her husband, Juan Vivares, reported to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement office in lower Manhattan in March. Vivares, who fled Colombia and…
gregladen | March 7, 2017The Crisis We Await
The exact way the Trump presidency ends is not clear. Anything could happen.
Trump had zero idea of what he was getting into with this president thing, and the stresses must be amazing. Clearly, he is being driven over the edge by relatively minor day to day events. Nothing has yet actually happened in this administration. If you ignore self inflicted wounds and self generated drama, and all the protesting against Trump, the world has been pretty quiet. It is as though all the bad guys, all the individuals who do the things that become major international issues or…
sastyk | March 7, 2017Four years ago we were foster parents to two wonderful children whose family was broken up by deportation.
The parents had overstayed their visas (ie, they entered the US legally), in part because their children were both born (while in the US, ie the children were citizens) with kidney disease and their homes in rural Central America had no hospitals to treat them nor adequate medical care. They left their country because they were part of a disenfranchised indigenous minority that was historically denied access to things like education - they could do better in the US. They also were a…
aardvarchaeology | February 13, 2017Aard regular Phil often expresses worry about the effects of immigration. This has reached the point where I've decided to collect a few points to explain why I am not worried. Phil recently even claimed that when I say I'm not worried, I create more support for anti-immigration movements. This makes no sense to me. I know a lot of fear-and-hate voters are poorly educated, but I don't think they're all stupid.
So here's why I don't worry about immigration.
I have lived for 21 years (and counting) on a multicultural 1970s housing estate and seen very few problems.
My first wife was a second-…
gregladen | February 10, 2017The most recent polling indicates that Donald Trump has a 43% approval and 53% disapproval rating. So he is not exactly loved by the American people, which is odd because he seems so lovable. And, he has told us that the American people love him. And his victory in the November election was unbelievably big league. But, that's how it is, according the scientific polling.
Approval and favorability are apparently slightly different, but the pattern holds. The same polling tells us that the American people have a 45% favorable attitude about the president, which would be tremendous for any…
gregladen | February 2, 2017The Dogs Still Bark in Dutch
I grew up in the old Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, now known to you as the State of New York. There, I carried out extensive archaeological and historic research, and along the way, came across that phrase, “the dogs still bark in Dutch.”
It is an idea that might occur to a denizen of Harlem, the kids off to Kindergarten, sitting on his stoop eating a cruller, or perhaps some cole slaw with a gherkin, and pondering the Dutch revival architecture down on Wall Street.
There was a war between the Dutch and the English in the 17th century, and as a result of that…
lborkowski | January 27, 2017By Jonathan Heller
President Trump’s 100 day plan includes deporting 2 million undocumented residents from the US. The plan represents a massive increase in scale and speed of deportations. Trump says he will focus on deporting undocumented people with criminal records. With fewer of them in the US now as a result of President Obama’s policies, Trump has already expanded the definition of who is a ‘criminal’ to include people who are merely charged or suspected of committing crimes. Being in the US without documents may become a ‘criminal’ act. Sensitive locations, like schools and clinics,…
oracknows | September 7, 2016Remember Vox Day?
Vox Day is the pseudonym used by a truly vile man named Theodore Beale. I first encountered him 11 years ago on the precursor to this blog, thanks to his antivaccine stylings and outright misogyny. Later, I learned the depths of his wingnuttery, such as his accepting pseudoscientific claims that vaccines cause sudden infant death syndrome, and several others. Hilariously, his anti-science rants are inevitably accompanied by smug posturing about how scientists are arrogant (pot, kettle, black) and how science is a corrupt system that is ideologically driven (talk about…
gregladen | September 2, 2016I was half expecting Trump to soften on immigration. The logic of that? His main supporters, who hate all immigrants and are a bunch of racist slobs will vote for Trump no matter what he says because the are morons. But, the fence sitters, the amoral "Good Republicans" who would vote for him because they have learned to fear Democratic economic policies (this group are also all morons) might vote for him if he was less crazy sounding.
But no, that didn't happen. Instead, he embarrassed our nation buy telling the President of Mexico, to his face, that he's going to have to pay for this wall…
kkrisberg | May 16, 2014Two years ago, domestic workers in Houston, Texas, took part in the first national survey documenting the conditions they face on the job. The experience — a process of shedding light on the often isolating and invisible world of domestic work — was so moving that Houston workers decided they didn’t want to stop there. Instead, they decided it was time to put their personal stories to paper.
The result is “We Women, One Woman!: A view of the lived experience of domestic workers,” which was officially released last month. The anthology features the stories of 15 nannies, house cleaners and…
kkrisberg | July 26, 2013With immigration at the forefront of national debate, Jim Stimpson decided it was time to do a little more digging.
"There's a lot of rhetoric around immigrants' use of public services in general and health care specifically, and I thought with impending federal immigration reform it would be useful to have some sort of contribution about the facts of unauthorized immigrants' use of health services in the United States," said Stimpson, a professor within the University of Nebraska's School of Public Health and director of the university's Center for Health Policy.
So together with colleagues…
gregladen | May 30, 2013Elizabeth Chin has written an excellent scholarly takedown, in the form of a "letter from your thesis reader," of Jason Richwine's 2009 Harvard PhD dissertation, " IQ and Immigration."
I've not read Richwine's thesis, though I probably will at some point. And you probably haven't either. But, you'll still find Chin's post informative and compelling.
It is here: What Jason Richwine Should Have Heard from his PhD Committee
While you are on the subject have a look at this: Harvard Students Demand Investigation Into Jason Richwine's Thesis On Hispanic IQ
Hat tip: Jennifer Raff.
lborkowski | May 28, 2013Last week, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved immigration legislation that would overhaul US immigration laws. Alan Gomez reports in USA Today:
The bill was produced by a bipartisan group of senators known as the Gang of Eight. With four of those members on the committee, the bill survived 212 amendments over five lengthy hearings.
Left intact was the core of the bill, which will allow the nation's 11 million unauthorized immigrants to apply for U.S. citizenship, add significant investments in border security and fundamentally alter the legal immigration system of the future.
The…
kbonham | May 21, 2013Two weeks ago, the Heritage Foundation (a conservative think-tank) released a position paper based largely on the academic research of one Jason Richwine. The conclusion (roughly paraphrased): Hispanic people have lower IQ's than white people, so an overly permissive immigration policy will drag down the US economy.
Ethically, this conclusion is a deep affront to my liberal* sensibilities. The idea of basing our public policy on racism and bigotry is abhorrent.
Politically, this is dangerous territory. This is especially true after the 2012 election, when republican politicians were making…
cmonforton | April 17, 2013A comprehensive, bi-partisan immigration reform bill was filed today by the "gang of eight" U.S. Senators. We've written previously about the abuses endured by many workers under the existing guest worker programs (here, here, here, here) and I am particularly curious to see the remedies proposed in the bill. It will take me a few weeks to digest the 844-page bill, but I took a quick peek for provisions related to labor' rights and workplace safety. Here is some of what I read:
(1) The bill would create a new visa program (a W-visa) for low-skilled immigrant workers. (See Subtitle G at…
cmonforton | March 28, 2013According to data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), 477 individuals died along the U.S.-Mexico border in 2012 during their attempt to enter the U.S. That's an all-time high rate of 13.3 deaths per 10,000 CBP apprehensions. It compares to a rate of 8 deaths per 10,000 in 2010, and 4 per 10,000 in 2005.
The data was assembled by the National Foundation for American Policy (NFAP) in the policy brief "How many more deaths? The moral case for a temporary worker program." At a time when fewer migrants are attempting to enter the U.S. illegally, the author attributes the escalating…
lborkowski | March 11, 2013In the Washington Post, Sari Horwitz and Lena H. Sun report that President Obama will likely nominate Thomas E. Perez to be the next Secretary of Labor, following the departure of Secretary Hilda Solis. Perez is currently assistant US attorney general for civil rights.
The article mentions work by Perez on issues important to workers' health and safety. In 2005, Perez served as president of the Montgomery County (Maryland) Council, and one of the laws he pushed for was a domestic workers' "bill of rights." In 2007, Governor Martin O'Malley appointed him the state's secretary of labor, and in…
lborkowski | January 30, 2013In Wonkblog yesterday, Sarah Kliff highlighted an important aspect of immigration reform: Undocumented immigrants who gain legal status will also gain access to the Affordable Care Act’s options for getting health insurance. The Congressional Budget Office estimated that the ACA would reduce our nonelderly uninsured by 32 million, but 23 million people would remain without health insurance – and one-third of those people would be undocumented immigrants.
The ACA has two main mechanisms for offering affordable coverage to the uninsured: 1) expansion of Medicaid eligibility to all legal…
sastyk | April 26, 2010I'm just now finishing wading through the Earth Day e-waste/propaganda/inspiring educational bullshit in my in-box. After a certain point, I stopped reading. Which means I almost missed my new favorite use of Earth Day, which was sent to me by FAIR, the Federation for American Immigration Reform, the largest of our anti-immigrant groups here in the US. It turns out that FAIR is deeply, deeply concerned with the ecological impact of Brown folk, and they really want us, on Earth Day, to think hard about the impact of people who are not white (and thus, of course, are not like us real…
mikethemadbiologist | September 5, 2009He was in 1952, anyway. By way of Oliver Willis, from Glenn Hauman:
(click to embiggen)
It goes without saying that Superman is an illegal immigrant, which, no doubt, is why he's spewing all this liberal crap.