Unz Goes To Boston

Californian expands fight on bilingual education
Ron Unz, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur and education reformer who led successful initiatives to end bilingual education in California and Arizona, is putting his energy, support and growing political clout behind two new ballot drives in Massachusetts and Colorado. In June, Mr. Unz, who heads the Palo Alto, Calif.-based English for the Children organization, helped kick off a ballot petition drive in Colorado geared at ending bilingual education programs in the state in 2002. On Tuesday, Mr. Unz was in Boston, where he joined supporters who have pledged to change Massachusetts' 30-year-old bilingual education law by placing the issue before voters next year.

New York Times Forum

Issue of the Week: Legalizing Illegal Immigrants
Members of President Bush's cabinet recently endorsed a limited plan allowing some of the estimated three million Mexicans living in the U.S. illegally to apply for permanent legal status. Critics pointed out that the plan would exclude millions of other illegal immigrants from equal treatment and that in singling out Mexicans, Mr. Bush was is strongly influenced by his re- election campaign in 2004. Following that, Mr. Bush seemed to suggest that illegal immigrants from countries other than Mexico might also be able to earn permanent legal status over time. Any plan would have to be approved by congress. Share your thoughts [free registration required].

Pandering Galore

Suddenly, politicians are embracing immigrants
Immigrant bashing, which not so long ago was all the political rage from California to Washington, has been replaced by immigrant embracing as politicians from both parties vie to demonstrate their foreigner- friendly credentials. -- At the center of the sea change in immigration politics is President Bush, the Texan who speaks Spanish, seeks to anchor his foreign policy in Mexico, and wants to make a home for Latinos in his Republican Party. The Bush administration and Democratic congressional leaders are developing ambitious programs that would give broad new rights to the country's 6 million to 8 million undocumented immigrants..........

Topeka, KS

Republicans court Hispanic support
Two Wichitans are leading an effort to recruit Hispanics to run for political offices as Republicans. They say President Bush's appeal to some Hispanic voters has opened the door to expand their influence in the Kansas Republican Party. "If most Hispanics would look at the Republican platform, I think that's what they would identify with," said Rick Macias, a Wichita lawyer who is chairman of the new Kansas Republican Hispanic Council. State Rep. Carlos Mayans is vice chairman of the council, which had its first meeting last week.

Special Report - Pueblo Chieftan

High Hispanic teen pregnancy rate not surprising, given demographics
Researchers last month hailed as a significant U.S. milestone a record 19 percent drop in teen pregnancy rates from the all-time high in 1991. The nation has a lot of catching up to do, however. The United States still has the highest teen pregnancy rate of any industrialized nation. And for Hispanics, in particular, the reduction has been lower than for other ethnic groups. -- Of Pueblo's 140 teens who gave birth in 1999, three out of four births were to Hispanic girls.

Mexico City

Dispensing Their Form of Justice - Mexican villages turn to lynchings
They tied him to an iron railing, with rope around his neck, his arms, his legs. Carlos Pacheco Beltran had tried to steal from the neighborhood church, and now 400 faithful were going to see him pay. Men beat him with fists, women and children kicked him. -- The mob took its revenge for two hours, until the thief was dead, hanging limp in the glow of neon- lit crucifixes. -- "I grabbed the megaphone and yelled, 'Be quiet! The person you beat is dead,' " said Lorenzo Arroyo Vargas, a Roman Catholic priest who had pleaded with his parishioners to stop the attack recently. [Related article]

Rampant Migration

Hispanic Indians spur state growth
In the past 10 years, California's American Indian population grew so fast the state displaced Oklahoma as home to the most Indians. That remarkable growth comes not from an upswing in Americans proudly claiming Indian heritage or even from last year's more accurate census count, but from a more unlikely source: Indians immigrating in vast numbers from Mexico. The American Indian population in California grew by 38 percent and nationwide by 26 percent, according to the 2000 U.S. census. In California, all of that increase came from the influx of Hispanic American Indians, as the census calls them. Nationwide, about half did.

Douglas, AZ

Mayor's concerns fall on 'deaf' ears
Mayor Ray Borane is frustrated with President George Bush and the reaction his administration displayed in addressing the border problems described by Borane in a letter to Bush. It appears Bush and his White House staff simply dismissed Borane's letter explaining the problems facing his community and Southeastern Arizona as thousands of would-be illegal immigrants try to cross the U.S.- Mexico border through the back yards, streets and ranching and farming areas in and around Douglas. The letter sent to Bush in May apparently ended up in a bureaucratic blackhole.....

Phoenix

When migrants die, blame is misplaced
...The death toll nationwide between October 1997 and June 2001: 1,013, including the 14 migrants dead in May whom you have read about all summer long in Arizona. While this number cannot be tolerated, it can also mislead: Researchers at the University of Houston told the INS that the figure is actually comparable to previous years. The only difference: the method of death. Again, 1,000 bodies aren't acceptable. But neither is the resultant political game, the more- popular- than- Monopoly extravaganza we can call "Let's Blame the Border Cops." (AZ Republic - Free Reg.)

Houston Chronicle

Group expands immigrant health care complaint
Less than a week after seeking a criminal investigation of Harris County public hospitals providing non-emergency care to illegal immigrants, the Young Conservatives of Texas filed similar complaints in Dallas, Bexar and El Paso counties. The group's vice chairman, Marc Levin, said these counties are also violating a 1996 federal law that bars public health systems such as the Harris County Hospital District from providing many forms of free preventive care to illegal immigrants. "We would like the district attorneys to enforce the law," Levin said Saturday. "Our organization strongly opposes illegal immigration, and this is a huge burden on taxpayers."

Dallas

Dallas' Cesar Chavez holiday draws some unexpected critics-- his family
....Since an additional paid day off for city workers would have cost Dallas $1 million, then-City Councilman Steve Salazar proposed a cost-saving compromise: Make Cesar Chavez Day fall on the same day as an existing city holiday, Presidents Day. Most council members didn't foresee any controversy. -- One arose anyway when race-baiting KLIF shock jock Tom Kamb, who reportedly called Chavez an "illegal immigrant," coordinated a fusillade of 600 to 800 patriotism- touting e-mails to council members that protested the plan to tack another honoree onto the day set aside to honor Washington and Lincoln with furniture and appliance sales.

Omaha World-Herald/L.A. Times

Mexican Immigrants: Boon or Burden to U.S.?
A controversial new study by a Washington group favoring reduced levels of immigration draws a grim picture of the economic and social consequences of large- scale immigration from Mexico. The influx of poor settlers from Mexico provides marginal economic benefits while burdening public services and schools and creating generations of poverty, according to the report. "If you step back and look at the interests of the United States as a whole, unskilled Mexican immigration doesn't look like such a great deal," said the author, Steven Camarota... [There is a message board on this site]

Houston Chronicle

Dual nationality returns identity to immigrants
Since March 20, 1998, when a new Mexican law enabled immigrants to recapture the nationality that U.S. law forced them to renounce when they were naturalized, 3,700 Houston-area residents have done so. Montiel was one of the first. That includes 160 U.S.-born Hispanics whose father or mother was born in Mexico and who can now reclaim their parent's birthright. Internationally, Mexico's Ministry of Foreign Affairs reports 35,000 documents have been issued to Mexicans recapturing the nationality they had to abandon, or to the children of Mexican-born parents.

A Day of Truth in Farmingville

'Threatening the Union'
A coalition of immigration control groups warned yesterday that illegal immigration is hurting America's environment, overcrowding its schools, lowering workers' wages and threatening the country's sovereignty. -- "We're concerned today about the preservation of the Union," said Glenn Spencer, head of Los Angeles- based American Patrol. "Immigration is threatening the bonds of our Union." Spencer repeated one of his main contentions, that Mexicans are trying to take over the United States - the reconquista, he calls it - at a meeting organized by the Sachem Quality of Life Organization in Farmingville. Sachem has been at the forefront in the battle over an influx of undocumented immigrants....

Harold W. Andersen

Mexicans or Mexican- Americans?
The new attention the Mexican government is paying to Mexican immigrants in this country seems to me to help bring into focus a basic question: Are the Mexican immigrants interested in becoming simply Mexicans living and working in America, or are they interested in becoming Mexican- Americans; i.e., American citizens with their primary interests in this country rather than Mexicans enjoying the relative economic benefits of residence here while still thinking of themselves as Mexicans whose primary loyalty remains south of the border? -- Consider the message which Juan Hernandez took home with him after a busy visit to Nebraska and Iowa. [There is a message board on this site]