Immigration on The Huffington Post

Walt Staton: Man Faces Jail After Leaving Water For Illegal Immigrants In Desert

2009-12-04T22:03:11Z

TUCSON, Ariz. — A judge has threatened to sentence an Arizona man to 25 days in prison for leaving jugs of water in the desert for illegal immigrants.

A federal jury in June convicted Walt Staton of Tucson of littering in the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge. In August, a judge ordered Staton to pick up trash for 300 hours and also sentenced him to a year of unsupervised probation and banned him from the refuge for a year.

Victor Corral: Without an Inclusive Job Policy, There Will Be No Recovery

2009-12-04T13:08:52Z

If we want to ensure a real and sustainable economic recovery, we must pass inclusive, comprehensive immigration reform that legalizes immigrants in the US.

Will those at the White House Jobs Summit today be talking about this? Not likely.

While pundits, or should I say ex-pundits, like Lou Dobbs have characterized immigrants as a drain on the economy as someone who grew up along the US/Mexico border, I know better. I've always been a part of vibrant immigrant communities that not only drove the region's economic development, but in times of an economic downturn, kept it going.

That's why it didn't come as a surprise when the Fiscal Policy Institute's new report, "Immigrants and the Economy: Contribution of Immigrant Workers to the Country's 25 Largest Metropolitan Areas," found that, among other things:

1) "Immigration and economic growth of metro areas go hand in hand," and,
2) "Immigrants contribute to the economy in direct proportion to their share of the population."

Yeah, no duh.

Given my background, maybe I'm too quick to judge those who despite the countless studies about the positive economic impact of immigrants remain unconvinced that their long history of financial and social contributions merits an equitable, rational, and humane immigration policy. Yet I can't help but wonder if those that are pushing for walls, militarized borders, and inhumane detention and deportation policies today would be doing the same to their white, European ancestors a hundred years ago. Not likely. But if we look at the numbers reported by the Center for American Progress, which easily warrant a chapter in the next Freakonomics book, it would be hard to argue that their views are anything but racially motivated.

"Had immigration reform bill passed the Senate in 2006 the Congressional Budget Office estimates it would have generated66 billion in new income and payroll taxes from 2007-2016.

Deportation of about 10 million immigrants who entered illegally or who stayed after their visas expired would cost at least206 billion over five years

The Cato Institute noted that strict enforcement would actually cut U.S. household welfare by80 billion, whereas "legalization of low-skilled immigrant workers would yield significant income gains for American workers and households."

A separate study last year by The Perryman Group concluded that deportation of the undocumented workforce would damage the nation, resulting in1.8 trillion in annual lost spending,651.5 billion in annual lost output, and 8.1 million lost jobs."

So why the resistance to a smart immigration policy that allows people to contribute fully to the economy? In the US, we have a long history of xenophobia and racism that has shaped public policy to be equally xenophobic and racist and it continues to show its ugly face especially when the most pressing issues are on the table.

But as the numbers show, unless we begin to move towards a national policy of inclusion -- in immigration, education, and the economy -- large segments of the population will continue to be kept from fully contributing to society, which will undoubtedly keep us from having a fair and equitable economic recovery.

So while immigration will likely not be a part of today's Jobs Summit, we need to make sure the country has that debate when the new "Jobs Bill" is introduced early next year

Alexander Nazaryan: The Best Book Of The Decade

2009-12-04T12:16:27Z

We Tired Americans

Every decade deserves an iconic novel. The drinkers and brawlers of "The Sun Also Rises" (1926) defined the Lost Generation, just as the wanderings of the Joad family in "The Grapes of Wrath" (1939) sketch a cruel map of the Great Depression. Cynics might suggest that Twitter feeds and Facebook updates hew closest to our cultural zeitgeist. But however beleaguered the printed word may be, it will never disappear into the abyss of a Google server. Sometimes we need a book to really get it right.

No novel better captures the background dread of everyday life these days -- terrorism jitters, credit-default swaps, mutant flu strains -- than Joseph O'Neill's "Netherland". Like "The Great Gatsby" -- to which it bears obvious resemblance -- "Netherland" compresses the American experience into a critical mass, and then proceeds to pick it apart. Like Fitzgerald, O'Neill works principally with two characters: Hans van den Broek, a Dutch banker living in New York whose wife has returned to London following 9/11, and Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian immigrant with countless moneymaking schemes, the grandest of which is the New York Cricket League.

Unlike immigrants of the previous century, Chuck is emboldened enough to remake the American Dream in his own image. "I say we must claim our rightful place in this wonderful country," he tells Hans after a cricket match on Staten Island. Later, they tour a desolate stretch of Brooklyn that will be his fantasy made flesh: Bald Eagle Field. "It's got scale," Chuck says confidently, "It makes it American." He speaks with elation of the South Asians -- potential customers, all -- who have "overrun" New York and its environs. He wants to be American, but on his own terms.

Chuck's enthusiasm is tempered by Hans's malaise. "I felt, above all, tired," he says on the cusp of his wife's departure. "Tiredness: if there was a constant symptom of the disease in our lives at this time, it was tiredness. At work we were unflagging; at home the smallest gesture of liveliness was beyond us." Unable to share his wife's passion for anti-war protests, he admits to being "a political-ethical idiot." And after a dalliance with another woman, his emotions are "no more specific than a pleasant anxiousness."

"Netherland" has been called a post 9-11 novel, but that isn't quite true: it is a post-American novel, announcing the conclusion of what Time founder Henry Luce called in 1941 the American Century. His magazine revisited that claim in 1990 and suggested American dominance would continue into the new millennium. It located the reinvigoration of the American spirit in New York, whose gritiness was not yet an assset to bohemians and developers: "even in New York City, alongside the decay and decline, the irrepressible drive, the jackhammer energy, the ambition as high as the builders' cranes, the opportunities as exciting as the turbulent street scenes."

Hans refutes this argument with his bleak vision of the city. In Midtown he is "seized for the first time by a nauseating sense of America, my gleaming adapted country, under the secret actuation of unjust, indifferent powers. The rinsed taxis, hissing over fresh slush, shone like grapefruits; but if you looked down into the space...where icy matter stuck to the pipes...you saw a foul mechanical dark." By the end of his sojourn in New York, he only finds solace in traveling -- via Google Earth -- to the outer atmosphere, until "the USA as such is nowhere to be seen."

Hans leaves America disillusioned, but his fate is mild compared to Chuck's. The novel opens with his body floating in the Gowanus Canal -- a waterway that Hans' countrymen cultivated nearly 400 years ago, but which is now chocked with waste. It is a far cry from Long Island Sound, on whose shores Jay Gatsby's prevarications also end in a watery grave. As with "The Great Gatsby", the American Dream can be a comforting invention, but one is disabused of it rather roughly.

In fact, some don't bother at all. "My idea was you don't need America," says a South Asian entrepreneur after Chuck's death. "Why would you? You have the TV, Internet markets in India, in England. These days that's plenty. America? Not relevant. You put the stadium there and you're done."

None of this makes "Netherland" anti-American. But it is a novel about a different country than the one Luce imagined: still a world player still but not the undisputed star, no longer the salvation those masses yearning to breathe free. In fact, "Netherland" was one of the first novels that President Obama read when taking office. Unlike the previous president, he seems to have few illusions about where we find ourselves. And that, somehow, gives hope.

The Big Muslim Problem

2009-12-02T11:07:43Z

Malise Ruthven
The New York Review of Books

"Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West"
by Christopher Caldwell
Doubleday, 422 pp., $30.00

"What I Believe"
by Tariq Ramadan
Oxford University Press, 148 pp., $12.95

In April 1968, two weeks after the riots that devastated US cities following the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., the British Tory politician Enoch Powell (who as minister of health between 1960 and 1963 had presided over the large-scale recruitment of nursing and health staff from Britain's former colonies) predicted that a similar destiny was facing Britain. "We must be mad," he said,

literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.

Quoting a phrase of Virgil's that would resonate famously down the decades, he warned: "I seem to see 'the River Tiber foaming with much blood.'"

Though the Tory party leader Edward Heath immediately fired him from his post as opposition spokesman on defense, Powell's speech had struck a powerful chord. Within ten days he had received more than 100,000 letters of support, with only eight hundred expressing disagreement. In London more than a thousand dockworkers went on strike in protest at his dismissal. Anxiety about immigration had a significant part in the unexpected victory that restored the Conservative Party to power in 1970.

Powell, who died in 1998, has been castigated as a racist and condemned, not to say vilified, by the liberal left; but as Christopher Caldwell argues in his provocatively titled book, "Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam, and the West", his demographic predictions have proved remarkably accurate. In one of his speeches Powell shocked his audience by predicting that Britain's nonwhite population of barely a million would reach 4.5 million by 2002; according to the Office of National Statistics, the size of Britain's "ethnic minority" population actually reached 4.6 million in 2001. His predictions for the ethnic composition of major cities such as Wolverhampton, Birmingham, and Inner London were similarly on target. Britain's Commission for Racial Equality predicts that by 2011 the population of Leicester will be 50 percent nonwhite, making it the first major British city without a white majority.

This pattern is being replicated in cities throughout Western Europe. According to Caldwell, Europe is now a "continent of migrants" with more than 10 percent of its people living outside their countries of birth. The figure includes both non-European immigrants and citizens of countries belonging to the enlarged European Union who are permitted to move freely within its territory. But it also includes a substantial body of immigrants--namely Muslims--whom Caldwell regards as posing "the most acute problems" on account of their religion (an issue never mentioned by Powell in his speeches).

The statistics are highly variable since many countries do not register the religion of their citizens. However, it is generally assumed that there are now upward of 13 million Muslims, and possibly as many as 20 million (Caldwell's preferred figure), living in the European Union. The largest concentrations are in France with more than 5 million, Germany with around 3 million, Britain with 1.6 million, Spain with a million, and the Netherlands and Bulgaria with just under a million. Overall, the proportion of Muslims now residing in the European Union (including the indigenous Bulgarian Muslims) remains at 5 percent, a proportion twice that of the "nearly seven million American Muslims" mentioned by President Barack Obama in his Cairo University speech last June.

Individual cities, however, have much higher concentrations. Karoly Lorant, a Hungarian economist who wrote a paper on the subject for the European Parliament, calculates that Muslims already make up 25 percent of the population in Marseilles and Rotterdam, 20 percent in Malmö, 15 percent in Brussels and Birmingham, and 10 percent in London, Paris, and Copenhagen. If the French national figure of around 5 million were proportionately reproduced in the US, it would make for 24 million American Muslims. Moreover, given that immigrant Muslims have a higher birthrate than indigenous white Europeans or other immigrant groups such as Eastern Europeans or African-Caribbeans, that population seems set to increase, regardless of tighter controls on immigration now being imposed by governments. The US National Intelligence Council expects that by 2025 the Muslim population of Europe will have doubled.

In the first part of his book Caldwell takes some Enoch Powell-like swipes at the policies--or lack of them--that allowed this situation to develop. In the aftermath of World War II, European countries overestimated the need for immigrant labor. Instead of investing in new technology, they drove down labor costs--and undermined the power of labor unions--by importing cheap workers without regard for the social and cultural consequences. Caldwell challenges the assumptions of economists who argue that immigrants increase national wealth. With old industries such as textiles already in decline, immigrant workers merely delayed the necessary process of restructuring. In macroeconomic terms the wealth they generate is nugatory--approximately one three-hundredth of the advanced countries' output. In any case much of the supposed added value contributed by immigrant businesses that appears in economic statistics is absorbed in the costs of accommodating them in their new environment, or is sent back to their home countries. In 2003, for example, Moroccans living in Europe sent home r3.6 billion ($4.1 billion) in remissions.

The picture Caldwell paints is complex, paradoxical, and sometimes at variance with the anti-immigration thrust of his argument. While he dwells on the obvious aspects of political and cultural dystopia--the terrorist outrages in London and Madrid, the riots in the Paris banlieues, the growing Muslim prison populations, and the horrors of unreconstructed patriarchy in the form of "honor killings," systemic homophobia, and the bizarre medical "hymen repair operation" that allows young women to recover lost virginities--he acknowledges some of the positive contributions that immigrants make to society. In the case of Italy, for example, he observes that the country's agriculture, food, and its superb urban landscape--features that lie at the heart of its attractions as the center of European culture--are largely sustained by immigrants:

Italy has lately received more than half a million immigrants a year from Africa and the Middle East, mostly to work in its farms, shops, and restaurants. The market price of certain kinds of Italian produce, so Italian farmers say, is in danger of falling below the cost of bringing it to market. Under conditions of globalization, Italy's real comparative advantage may lie elsewhere than in agriculture, in some high-tech economic model that is remunerative but not particularly "Italian."...

Traditional ways of working the land may be viable only if there are immigrants there to work it. You can make similar arguments about traditional Italian restaurants, which in the present economy may be able to hold their own against soulless chains only with the help of low-paid immigrant labor. Ditto the country's lovely public parks, which have traditionally required dozens of gardeners, a level of manpower that the country's shrinking population cannot supply, except at a high price....

Some natives may feel "swamped" by the demographic change, but immigration, though not ideal, may be the most practical way of keeping Italy looking like Italy. As the novelist Giuseppe di Lampedusa once wrote, "If we want everything to stay the same, everything must change."

Caldwell does not suggest that the paradox of foreigners "keeping Italy looking like Italy" is necessarily unsustainable. His concern is that a majority of migrants belong to a religion that a skeptical, post-Enlightenment Europe cannot be expected to contain or resist. The level of Muslim immigration is unprecedented. Whereas in the past, groups of immigrants--"Jewish and Huguenot refugees, a few factory hands from Poland or Ireland or Italy"--were "big enough to enrich the lands of settlement but not so big as to threaten them," the sheer volume of Muslim immigration endangers the indigenous cultures of Europe, not least because those cultures have become precariously fragile. Political correctness, anti-racism, and multiculturalism, born of guilt about colonialism and shame about the Holocaust, are eroding national cultures, while failing to produce a coherent vision of a common European identity.

No reasonable person would deny that there are problems with some of Europe's immigrant communities, or that multiculturalism challenges traditional boundaries separating citizenship from ideas centered on loyalty, identity, and allegiance. For the late Sir Bernard Crick, George Orwell's biographer and a leading educator, "Britishness" is a legal and political structure that excludes culture: "When an immigrant says 'I am British,' he is not saying he wants to be English, Scottish or Welsh." As Caldwell comments:

This was the EU model of belonging: You are one person for your culture and another for the law. You can be an official (legal) European even if you are not a "real" (cultural) European. This disaggregation of the personal personality and the legal personality sounds tolerant and liberating, but it has its downside. Rights are attached to citizenship. As soon as your citizenship becomes a legal construction, so do your rights.

In Caldwell's view, immigrants to Europe are able to exploit their rights not just as citizens but as residents, by claiming the health and welfare benefits to which natives are entitled. "The postwar Western European welfare states provided the most generous benefits ever given to workers anywhere." Germany's job market was the archetype of the systems replicated across Western Europe, with short working hours, seven-week vacations, full health coverage, and wages for unionized workers reaching almost $50 an hour. Although--unlike some other countries--Germany's jus sanguinis denied full citizenship to immigrant workers, who were mainly from Turkey and Morocco, the economic effects were ultimately the same.

The welfare burden has impeded investment, stifling real risk-based entrepreneurship epitomized by the "small, flexible start-up companies that drove most of the innovation in recent decades," especially in the information economy. The US, by contrast, is less indulgent: here, contrary to the myth of American openness, immigrants are pressured to conform. An immigrant may maintain his ancestral culture, but "if it is a culture that prevents him from speaking English well or showing up to work promptly, he will go hungry. Then he will go home."

In Caldwell's vision Europe's welfare states have been succouring alien intruders: as the native population grows in age and declines in proportion to immigrants, so the value they add to the "social market" economy by contributing to its welfare systems is eroded by their claims on benefits. In Spain for example, the Harvard economist Martin Feldstein has predicted that the ratio of workers to retirees, currently 4.5:1, will fall to 2:1 by 2050. In Britain the Office of National Statistics predicts a population increase of ten million people--two thirds of them immigrants or their children--over the next quarter-century, with the number of people aged eighty-five and over expected to double. For Caldwell the short-term relief that immigrants bring to the welfare state is unlikely to match their longer-term claims on it:

In the extremely short run, a baby bust such as Europe has undergone can enhance living standards, because it reduces the number of dependents per worker. But in the longer run a reckoning awaits, and the longer run has arrived.

The most egregious examples of Caldwell's aliens are Muslims, because, as he sees it, they are less susceptible to European cultural influences than other immigrant groups such as Slavs, Sikhs, Hindus, non-Muslim Africans, and African-Caribbeans. He flatly ignores evidence produced by numerous scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh, Tariq Modood, Philip Lewis, and Jytte Klausen that Muslim identities are shifting to meet changing circumstances, that a majority of younger British Muslims, for example, "share many aspects of popular youth culture with their non-Muslim peers," and that their problem is not so much with the majority culture as with "traditionally-minded parents who seek, usually unsuccessfully, to limit their access to it."

Caldwell pours scorn on writers who emphasize the diversity of the Islamic traditions in Europe. "For all its pleasing glibness," he says, "this harping on diversity is misguided." His reading of Islam takes an essentialist perspective of a primordial religion impervious to change, as if he were oblivious of the way that essentialist views of religion have long been under sustained intellectual attack. No one remotely familiar with the work of scholars such as Aziz al-Azmeh (who ruminates on the diversities of "Islams" and "modernities") or the political scientist Jytte Klausen, whose brilliant work on European Muslims investigates emerging hermeneutics and epistemologies of faith, would dismiss them, as Caldwell does, as "glib." Al-Azmeh and his colleagues provide plenty of support to refute "the cliché," as al-Azmeh writes, "of a homogenous collectivity innocent of modernity, cantankerously or morosely obsessed with prayer, fasting, veiling, medieval social and penal arrangements,"[1] while Klausen has demonstrated convincingly that European Muslims are overwhelmingly hostile to extremism, support democratic processes, accept the duties of citizenship, and are evolving distinctively local styles of Muslim identities.[2]

Nor does Caldwell exhibit any familiarity with the rich literature describing the spread of Islam in peripheral cultures such as sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, where a religion originating in Arabia proved every bit as adept as Christianity in adjusting to local conditions. He has similarly failed to familiarize himself, even superficially, with the vast literature charting the encounter between Islam and modern Western society. In his review of Western attitudes toward Islam he prefers to celebrate the prejudices of writers such as Ernest Renan (in 1883) or Hilaire Belloc (in 1938) than to engage with significant Muslim thinkers such as Muhammad Iqbal, Fazlur Rahman, Muhammed Arkoun, or Abdullahi an-Naim who might challenge his essentialist assumptions. Caldwell's "Islam" owes more to tabloid headlines than to responsible research. To borrow a phrase of Philip Lewis, it exemplifies the need for greater religious literacy in the post-September 11 era.

Nevertheless, in arguing that "Europe became a multiethnic society in a fit of absence of mind," Caldwell makes some useful points. European societies have yet to find satisfactory ways of institutionalizing Islam within their national polities. This is partly due to the fragmentary and contested nature of Islamic spiritual authority, in which (with the partial exception of Shiism) no formal priesthood stands between the individual and a god who reveals himself in texts that are subject to a wide variety of interpretations.

Umbrella bodies intended to act as interlocutors with governments, such as the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) and the French Council for the Muslim Faith (CFCM), are rejected by many Muslims for being too political, or not political enough, or simply not representative of people who may be difficult to represent, or may not want to be represented as "Muslims." It is clear that as a religion formulated during an era of political ascendancy, the mainstream traditions of Islam have yet to find comfortable moorings as minorities in the contested public spaces of a secular, pluralist West.

Two thirds of the imams in France live on welfare, as do a similar number in Britain. A majority are foreign-born and trained, and have received little instruction in British culture or its values. A small minority of them have been exposed in the press as "preachers of hate." The funding of European mosques and Islamic institutions from ultraconservative countries should be a real cause for concern: in France, for example, the Union of Islamic Organizations (UIOF) --an umbrella group of doctrinaire Muslim youth organizations linked to the Muslim Brotherhood--gets a quarter of its annual budget from Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Kuwait, and other foreign donors.

The British laissez-faire model of leaving immigrant communities to manage themselves has allowed extremism to flourish in all sorts of complex ways. Missionary organizations such as the Tablighi Jamaat, known for its pietism and declared abhorrence of politics, nevertheless encourage a separatist spirit in which extremism can be incubated: most of the men convicted in September for the plot to blow up transatlantic airliners using liquid explosives smuggled in soft-drink bottles had connections with the Tablighi Jamaat, as did two of the suicide bombers who murdered fifty-two people in the London transport system in July 2005.

Paradoxically, even marriage can be an agent of radicalization: whereas the first generation of migrants' children pleased their parents by marrying cousins imported from Pakistan or Bangladesh (thereby swelling immigrant numbers), their children's insistence on marrying Muslim partners of their choice is leading to the creation of a Muslim identity that transcends the older patterns of "encapsulated" settlement based on differences of region, culture, language, and biradiri (extended family networks).

This novel pan-Islamic identity both feeds on and contributes to the perceived hostility of the host society: the Rushdie agitation in 1989, the row over the "insult" to Islam conveyed by the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in publishing a cartoon showing Muhammad with a terrorist bomb as his turban, the marches in France protesting the headscarf ban in schools, the riots of youth in Parisian suburbs, and episodes of Islamophobia reported on al-Jazeera television or in the Muslim press all contribute to the sense of an embattled community that is also flexing its collective communitarian muscles.

Despite the legal, institutional, and cultural differences of the European host cultures in which Muslim immigrants find themselves, the narrative that Caldwell extrapolates from a complicated web of data points in an alarming direction. The bottom line is that Islam is a religion of believers. Most Europeans are not only skeptical, but--as heirs to the Enlightenment--they regard religious skepticism as essential to their outlook and identity "as part of the essence of European-ness." He writes:

A fast-shrinking population of several hundred million Europeans lives north of the Mediterranean, while a fast-growing population of several hundred million lives south of it, with a desire to take up residence in Europe that seems unshakable. What is more a certain part of it is dedicated to Europe's destruction by armed violence....

Europe's basic problem with Islam, and with immigration more generally, is that the strongest communities in Europe are, culturally speaking, not European communities at all. This problem exists in all European countries, despite a broad variety of measures taken to solve it--multiculturalism in Holland, laïcité in France, benign neglect in Britain, constitutional punctiliousness in Germany.

Clearly Europe's problem is with Islam and with immigration, and not with specific misapplications of specific means set up to manage them. Islam is a magnificent religion that has also been, at times over the centuries, a glorious and generous culture. But all cant to the contrary, it is in no sense Europe's religion and it is in no sense Europe's culture.

Impressive though he may appear in marshaling a disparate army of sources (ranging from government statistics, social surveys, and think-tank reports to novels and newspaper stories in eight or more languages), the impression he gives is spurious and not supported by real evidence. Caldwell selects a multitude of facts or quotations that support his central premise of a "believing" Islam pitted against a doubting or skeptical Europe. This conclusion, however, is not supported by surveys of actual religious behavior. While the figures--and methodologies used to arrive at them--vary considerably, the conclusion to which they point is that Muslims do not greatly differ in religious behavior from other Europeans. For example, a French study in 2001 found that only 10 percent of Muslims were religiously observant. A study by the demographer Michèle Tribalat the same year found that 60 percent of French Muslim men and 70 percent of women were "not observant," though the great majority respected "cultural attachments" by abstaining from eating pork or drinking alcohol and by fasting during Ramadan. Caldwell mentions none of this work.

The failures in this book are not limited to its flawed and biased research. A troubling example of Caldwell's method involves the misuse of translation in order to further his argument that unlike other religious traditions, Islam cannot be assimilated into European culture. In an extended critique of the work of Tariq Ramadan, the charismatic and articulate advocate of a distinctive European Islam, Caldwell argues that Ramadan's project for Muslim integration into European societies is basically asymmetrical:

The integration of Muslims into Europe will happen on Muslim terms. Or, as Ramadan puts it, "It will succeed when Muslims find in their tradition elements of agreement with the laws of the countries in which they are citizens, because that will resolve any questions of double allegiance." This is an extraordinary statement: Only when Europe's ways are understood as Islam's will Muslims obey them.

The word Ramadan uses in the original French text of this quotation is not "tradition," but "références." "References" in this context sounds slightly odd in English, but "tradition" is too comprehensive, tipping the semantic scale toward inassimilable Muslims. A better translation might be "sources." This is not splitting hairs. As Ramadan explains in "What I Believe", in which he defends himself against charges of "doublespeak," the idea of "reference" is fundamental to his approach:

Adapting one's level of speech to one's audience, or adapting the nature of one's references, is not doublespeak.... To avoid doublespeak, what matters is that the substance of the discourse does not change.

Ramadan writes that his most distinguished defender, the philosopher Charles Taylor, exonerates him from the charge of "doublespeak," arguing, as Ramadan puts it, that his "discourse is clear between two highly ambiguous universes of reference." Ramadan's aim is to "build bridges" between these two universes. As a Muslim scholar and intellectual he applies the discipline of ijtihad (interpretative reasoning); the Arabic term has the same root as jihad, "moral striving"--a word that is often translated, too restrictively, as "holy war."

Ramadan presents his new book, "What I Believe", as "a work of clarification, a deliberately accessible presentation of the basic ideas I have been defending for more than twenty years." The ground is broadly the same as that which was covered in two books of his previously reviewed in these pages.[3] There I argued that Ramadan's belief that Islam can avoid the processes of secularization that afflicted Christendom after the Reformation was flawed by his failure to accommodate the tragic narrative of Shiism and also his failure to recognize that the institutionalization of religious differences--a prerequisite for religious peace among Muslims--would ipso facto initiate a process of secularization.

In a chapter on "Interacting Crises," Ramadan addresses some of the issues that Caldwell raises in his book: the Muslim presence in the West, he says, should not just be seen and engaged as a problem of religions, values, and cultures, but as a psychological one as well. It is not just Muslims who face challenging issues of self-identification. "Western societies in general and Europeans in particular are experiencing a very deep, multidimensional identity crisis" flowing from the double effects of globalization and supranationalism. Everywhere landmarks of national identity and cultural memory are being eroded. The presence of immigrants adds to feelings of confusion.

While aging populations need immigrants to sustain their economies, the incomers threaten ideas of cultural homogeneity that are already endangered by globalization and the revolution in communications. Europeans are trapped in an irreversible logic. Economic necessities are in conflict with the cultural forces around which European identities accrue. Muslims living in the West face similar predicaments. Their identity crisis generates anxiety leading them toward attitudes of "withdrawal and self-isolation."

A "Manifesto for a New 'We,'" with which Ramadan concludes his book, urges European Muslims to have more confidence "in themselves, in their values, in their ability to live and to communicate with full serenity in Western societies." There needs to be "a revolution in trust" built on the confidence that Muslims must have in their own convictions. Their task must be "to reappropriate their heritage and to develop toward it a positive yet critical intellectual attitude." Contra Caldwell, he demands--without qualifications--that Muslims "respect the laws of the countries in which they reside and to which they must be loyal."

The tone is lofty, the language high-minded. It is the preacher, rather than the intellectual, who speaks. Ramadan does not stoop to engage directly with his critics. As he grandly writes in his introduction, "I will not waste my time here trying to defend myself." This is a pity. The charges of doublespeak against Ramadan are not just based on what he describes as "double-hearings," malicious, deliberate, or otherwise. The claims of his most trenchant critic, the French journalist Caroline Fourest,[4] are specific and detailed and documented, based on the tapes of Ramadan's lectures to youthful Muslim audiences as well as his published writings.

Fourest presents Ramadan as a fundamentalist wolf in reformist clothing, a position at variance with his declared advocacy of a "critical intellectual attitude" toward Islamic tradition. Most of her charges depend on family links he refuses to abjure--his maternal grandfather Hasan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, his Islamist father Said Ramadan, and especially his brother Hani, a more strident critic than Tariq of "Europe's atheistic materialism" who has publicly justified the stoning of adulteresses "as a punishment" that is also "a purification." Tariq, by contrast, notoriously argued in a 2003 television debate with Nicolas Sarkozy that the penalty of stoning should merely be subject to a "moratorium" while scholars debated the issue.

Other troubling details that emerge from Fourest's vigilant, even obsessive, trawl through the Ramadan canon include explicit condemnations of Kant and Pascal and fence-sitting, not to say "double-talk," on Darwinism. A work published by the Islamist publishing house with which he is closely associated explicitly denies evolution, while his audiotapes advocate creationism as a "complementary instruction" to the teaching of evolution in schools. Yet when asked in a television interview whether he accepted evolutionary theory, he "preferred to agree," rather than express his true convictions in front of the general public.

In one sense Fourest's critique can be seen as reassuring: Ramadan's teachings --on sexuality, evolution, and moral behavior generally--fall into grooves already furrowed by the Christian right. Secularists may abhor any alliance between anti-Enlightenment God-fearers from among Abraham's quarrelsome children, but any such alliance may have an important advantage: it may mask or defuse religious conflicts surrounding the contested symbolic languages that afflict the contemporary world, where ancient certainties clash with what Anthony Giddens usefully calls "the institutionalisation of doubt."

Paradoxically, as the sociologist Steve Bruce has pointed out, alliances between clashing fundamentalisms can serve to bridge sectarian divisions. For example, in the early 1970s when Mormons, conservative Jews, and Catholics collaborated over issues such as opposition to the proposed Equal Rights Amendment for women or abortion, they had to suppress their theological distaste for allies whose religions they regarded as false. While such alliances may have seemed threatening to liberals and especially to women, they marked a significant step away from fundamentalist certainties, since the different parties were forced to compartmentalize their beliefs, to separate their distinctive religious outlooks and practices from "the moral crusades which the religion has produced." Social problems such as the "binge drinking" and drug abuse that afflict European cities are obvious candidates for collaboration across religious boundaries. In Britain at least one Orthodox rabbi is working alongside a local imam on such problems.

One of the strongest statements deploring the Danish cartoons came from the Vatican, along with the World Council of Churches, Archbishop Desmond Tutu, and the Danish Evangelical Church. While such expressions of "faith solidarity" may have disturbing implications for the rights of free expression cherished by Europeans, they carry the seeds of longer-term accommodations that are likely to bring the more conservative and isolated strands of Islam into the cultural mainstream. Interdenominational collaboration on any issue is a stage in the process of secularization, pushing believers toward a recognition of religious pluralism and dethroning particular dogmas as the unique and nonnegotiable sources of truth. Ramadan can afford to be more upfront about his fundamentalist views. When defensive religiosity turns into moralizing, there is space for social engagement and constructive debate.

Malise Ruthven is the author of "Islam: A Very Short Introduction", "Islam in the World: The Divine Supermarket" (a study of Christian fundamentalism), "A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America", and "A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam".

Notes

[1]"Islam in Europe: Diversity, Identity and Influence", edited by Aziz al-Azmeh and Effie Fokas (Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 209.

[2]Jytte Klausen, "The Islamic Challenge: Politics and Religion in Western Europe" (Oxford University Press, 2005).

[3]"To Be a European Muslim" (Leicester: The Islamic Foundation, 1999) and "Western Muslims and the Fate of Islam" (Oxford University Press, 2003); see my "The Islamic Optimist," The New York Review, August 16, 2007.

[4]"Brother Tariq: The Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan", translated by Ioana Wilder and John Atherton (Encounter, 2008).

Read more at The New York Review of Books.

Truck Carrying 18 Immigrants Falls Off Cliff In Texas (VIDEO)

2009-11-25T15:32:08Z

McALLEN, Texas (AP)— Authorities say a truck carrying illegal immigrants from Guatemala and Mexico has plummeted more than 40 feet off a cliff in southwest Texas. All 18 aboard were injured.

The pickup truck went off the road near Alice on Tuesday afternoon and fell into a gravel pit. Alice is about 40 miles west of Corpus Christi.

Jim Wallis: This Thanksgiving Remember the Immigrant, Pilgrim

2009-11-25T13:09:53Z

As I take time to reflect on what I am truly thankful for, my family certainly tops the list. I've just been out of the country for a week, so I will cherish the time sitting around the table with my kids, asking one another to share what we are most thankful for. And this year, my wife Joy will celebrate her first Thanksgiving as a U.S. citizen.

I am painfully aware that not every family is as fortunate as mine. The broken nature of America's immigration system is deeply felt during the holidays by millions in the United States who long to be reunited with their loved ones.

Long backlogs in our nation's family immigration system have kept families apart for years -- even decades, in some instances. I was also shocked to learn that over the past ten years, more than 100,000 parents of U.S. citizen children have been deported by our government. Four million U.S. citizen kids live in "mixed-status families" -- families comprised of both legal and undocumented residents who are fighting to stay together in the face of deportation and permanent separation. For us in the faith community who value and cherish families, this should not be acceptable.

In the coming months, you'll be hearing a lot more from us about the broken U.S. immigration system and how you can advocate for just and humane immigration reform that builds up families. Sign up for our Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform newsletter and we promise to keep you up to date on ways you can advocate and engage in our work.

When you gather around the table with friends, family, and loved ones this Thanksgiving, remember the immigrant. Think of the empty seats at the tables of households across this nation. And join with me in imagining what next year's Thanksgiving might look like if we are successful in reforming our nation's immigration system with strong measures that reunite families. Now that would be something to be grateful for.

Mario Solis-Marich: GOP Candidate Scott McInnis Silent On Wolf's Disgusting Billboard

2009-11-23T10:47:13Z

In the backrooms of the Colorado Republican Party Gubernatorial candidate Scott McInnis is bowing deeply to Tom Tancredo. Tancredo has threatened to run for the nomination and McInnis is working hard to avoid a party split that would ultimately doom his candidacy. I believe that Tancredo is the Democratic Party's best choice for the Republican nomination and so do many top GOPers so they are working overtime to avoid it. Tancredo has insisted that he will not run only if McInnis promises him that he will be a Tancredo in sheep's clothing; apparently McInnis is agreeing.

For those that believe that McInnis is not Tancredo in a hood of moderation, fate has given a simple test. Last week in Wheatridge a local automotive shop, Wolf Auto, put up a disgusting billboard. The sign suggests that President Obama supports jihad against America. The images used on the billboard, in Beckian tradition, are racially tinged. The billboard has created a deserved outcry throughout Colorado. A loud outcry, I should say, from most of Colorado, but so far we have had complete silence on the matter from Scott McInnis. The man who will run as a centrist Republican publicly and is making cigar room deals with the Tom Tancredo is strangely quiet.

Colorado needs to know if McInnis is indeed ready to lead a state that decidedly voted for Obama. Is Scott McInnis ready to stand for all of Colorado or just the fringe from the right? Is Scott McInnis ready to denounce the racist, inflammatory billboard in Wheatridge? Or does McInnis's courtship of Tancredo make moderation impossible?

McInnis will spend millions trying to convince Colorado that he is an old fashioned centrist Republican focused on the economy, not a neo-Tancredo/Beck fear-mongering zealot. Wolf Automotive has given McInnis a chance to launch that new image for free. A true fiscal conservative would not be able to resist the bargain.

Call the McInnis campaign and ask him to denounce the Wolf Automotive Billboard. You can reach the McInnis office at 303.352.2010.

Mario Solis-Marich is a radio talk show host who can be heard on AM 760 in Denver and world wide at www.GoToMario.com. You can find Mario on Facebook.

Frank Sharry: Latinos Poised to Shake Up 2010 Census, Politicians Beware

2009-11-18T15:53:23Z

I'm not convinced Washington has awakened to the reality yet -- but the 2010 Census is going to shake things up politically in this country, and politicians would do themselves a favor to wake up and smell the coffee in advance.

This is about raw political power -- something politicians of all stripes understand.

Here is what a new study by my organization, America’s Voice Education Fund, has to say: the 2010 Census, which will document Latino population growth, will have a profound effect on the U.S. political landscape. An astonishing number of states will owe new Congressional seats, in large part, to their new Latino constituents.

The findings provide a stunning political backdrop to the upcoming debate on comprehensive immigration reform, an issue of major consequence to Latino voters.

Since the 2000 Census, Latinos have become the largest minority group in the United States. A bipartisan firm, Election Data Services, Inc. used existing Census data to project which states are likely to gain and lose Congressional seats following the 2010 Census. Their projections show that eight states will gain at least one House seat, while eleven states will lose at least one seat in Congress. Here they are:

States gaining House seats: Texas (+4), Arizona (+2), Florida (+1), Georgia (+1), Nevada (+1), Oregon (+1), South Carolina (+1), and Utah (+1).

States losing House seats: Ohio (-2), Illinois (-1), Iowa (-1), Louisiana (-1), Massachusetts (-1), Michigan (-1), Minnesota (-1), Missouri (-1), New Jersey (-1), New York (-1), and Pennsylvania (-1).

Latinos represent 51% of population growth in the United States as a whole since 2000. Latinos have driven growth in the states poised to gain House seats following the 2010 Census, especially in those projected to gain more than one seat: Texas and Arizona. In those two states, Latinos comprise a combined 59% of population growth since 2000.

As the report indicates, Latinos are not just settling in the usual major cities.

New members of Congress in states like Georgia and South Carolina, as well as Arizona and Texas, will owe their positions, in part, to the expanding Latino population. What’s more, states that are losing Congressional representation would have fared much worse had Latinos not moved there in record numbers. While their states’ Congressional delegations are shrinking overall, Latino voters are gaining power as they expand their share of the electorate.

These population figures translate into significant new voting power, too.

Nationwide, Latino voter registration grew 54% and Latino voter turnout grew 64% between 2000 and 2008. In the eight states poised to gain seats, Latino voter registration grew 45% and Latino voter turnout expanded 50% between 2000 and 2008. In the eleven states poised to lose seats, Latino voter registration grew 50% and Latino voter turnout expanded 62% between 2000 and 2008.

So what does this mean for immigration reform?

Over the next few months, Congress will debate comprehensive immigration reform. Since 2005, when House Republicans launched an aggressive anti-immigrant agenda -- spurred by Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and then spearheaded by James Sensenbrenner (R-WI) -- the party has lost control of the House, the Senate and the White House.

This is no mere coincidence. For example, in 2008, in 20 out of 22 competitive Congressional races, the anti-immigration or enforcement-only candidate lost to a candidate who embraced a moderate immigration reform approach. Moreover, Latino voters were a major factor in helping President Obama turn the 2004 red states of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Florida into blue states in 2008.

As these demographic changes continue, immigration hardliner candidates and lawmakers are facing a new reality. Here is how the Washington Post reported on our findings yesterday:

The study's authors note that most of the gains come in traditionally red or purple states as Latinos move beyond the nation's largest cities into smaller, rural communities.

"I think it poses a real challenge for the Republican Party," said Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice. While George W. Bush ran an effective Latino outreach campaign during his 2004 reelection campaign, the increased use and support of anti-immigrant rhetoric and legislation has hurt the party's ability to attract Latino voters now moving into Red districts, he said.

"This is going to set up a very interesting dynamic, because right now, the kind of bleached districts where candidates can get away with demonizing Latino immigrants -- because they're more worried about a primary challenge than a general election loss -- may end in the next decade," Sharry said.

That “very interesting dynamic” will begin to unfold in the House and Senate early next year when the debate on immigration reform begins. President Obama, DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi have all promised to push that legislation. They’ll need to meet expectations.

As for our friends running the GOP, obstructing progress or continuing to demonize Latinos and immigrants through harsh rhetoric and unfair policies will emerge as an even greater recipe for political irrelevance come 2010.

One thing is certain: the convergence of the Census, a surging Latino population, and the upcoming immigration reform fight will make for a remarkable 2010.

Note: Cross-posted at America's Voice.

Wayne Trujillo: The End of Poverty at Home? Part I

2009-11-16T12:23:20Z

I recently blogged about Director Philippe Diaz' bold and often blistering documentary, The End of Poverty? The film premiered in theaters last Friday in New York City and opens in cities across the nation over the next few months (Denver's debut is slated for Dec. 30). An unflinching examination of today's global exploitation traced back to the European colonialists and conquistadors, The End of Poverty? is not without its critics, some of whom complain about the lopsided analysis and concentration on the sundry insults and outrages perpetuated on Third World nations by capitalism.

But the film's ambition is to inspire action rather than debate. By keeping the lens focused and mic trained on entrenched exploitation of impoverished populations by wealthy interests, Diaz attempts to explain and expose on film systemic mechanisms that grease the global economy. While the film's frames and narrative describe today's economic fiefdom as originating some 500 years ago with the exploits of Columbus and other European explorers, the imagery inspired in my mind reached past colonialists and conquistadors to Egyptian pharaohs and slaves. Metaphorical, mental flashbacks to college lectures on ancient history flashed across the screen as I watched The End of Poverty? As academicians shared the spotlight with impoverished natives, all attesting to capitalism's crimes, or at least testifying to its worst impulses, I envisioned ancient Egypt where the mighty were carried on the shoulders of the hapless and helpless whose sole purpose in life was to serve their masters. Sure, the economic domination the film describes is more sophisticated than ancient royalty kept afloat on litters. But the precept remains the same - the poor are still keeping the wealthy afloat.

Actually, there were many images and perceptions prompted by The End of Poverty? Closer to home, I was reminded of the economic principles and policies - demanding greater returns and less expenditures - that's created one of the most combustible controversies in American politics. The surge of immigrants residing and working in the United States without official documentation has engendered some of the most passionate responses by both their advocates and opponents since, well, the last immigration surge in the early 20th Century. But beyond the obvious social and immediate economic implications of this immigration upswing there is an underlying catalyst that is oft-ignored in the national uproar. Usually national discussions on illegal immigration bicker back and forth about these immigrants threatening American's safety, culture, tax revenues and jobs. Less often does the broad debate reflect on the economic impetus attracting people to abandon their homeland on a journey that is loaded with hostility, a word best describing the terrain many have to cross and much of the population they have to live among and work for in the age-old quest for a better paycheck and brighter opportunity.

Mentioned only intermittently are the businesses benefiting from these immigrants. Without legal papers or permission to work, these immigrants also lack legal recourse for workforce infringements and basic employee rights. The End of Poverty? documents capitalistic exploitation of impoverished workers in underdeveloped countries, but there is ample exploitation of this same class of people here. Does anyone really believe that a widespread concern and compassion motivated the immigration boom of the last decade-plus? Basically, economics spurred this tide of immigration, both legal and illegal. And the same motivation described in the film that spurs businesses to seek economic opportunity abroad is reflected at home. Whether exporting and outsourcing jobs or importing cheap labor, the bottom line is enhanced profit.

Even people who disagree on immigration reform (and nearly everything else) agree on the economic undercurrents. A few years ago, as editor of a Latino lifestyles magazine; in an attempt to report all opinions and angles, I interviewed Jim Gilchrist, founder of the Minutemen Project. While we disagreed on almost everything, including a resolution to the immigration stalemate, there came a brief moment of mutual accord. I summarized my interpretation of the economic impulses and circumstances driving immigration and asked Gilchrist if he thought it fair to state the reason and responsibility behind the immigration explosion - whether one believes it to be good or bad - as stemming from and belonging to businesses seeking cheap and pliant labor. He paused, stammered a second and then stated, "Wayne, you took the words out of my mouth."

Other instances portrayed in The End of Poverty? hit home. Governor Dick Lamm's recent post on this site reminded me how, in our global economy, the message central to the film isn't strictly defined, balanced or bordered by the historical North/South axiom.

The population growth issue in America is a matter of immigration. With our natural birthrate we will stabilize the population of the U.S., with current levels of mass immigration we will double and double again. Sustainability requires us to confront the painful issues of immigration and consumption.

The assorted burdens created by global economic disparity and disproportionate consumption of resources have arrived home. While Governor Lamm largely discussed immigration and sustainability within America as opposed to the film's broader view, he and Diaz both noted the impossibility of the planet supporting worldwide consumption at the rate and level Americans enjoy at present. However, the broader consequences that The End of Poverty? addresses go beyond one issue or nation. Limiting or curtailing immigration to the United States isn't going to solve the economic circumstances that surround it. Nor will containing immigration replenish or sustain the world's limited and vanishing resources. Much like with global warming, we all share one earth; many of our current problems can't be checked at the border. Governor Lamm wrote, "We are living on the shoulders of some awesome geometric curves." Diaz would claim that we are living on the shoulders of the impoverished. Or, to reference my earlier metaphorical image, the shoulders of Egyptian slaves - different people but same story.

Regardless of personal opinions or politics, an immutable fact confronts us. The old paradigm of power and privilege can't immunize or isolate people and nations from global problems and poverty. While I wrote a generally enthusiastic review of The End of Poverty?, perhaps the best line to summarize our national predicament comes from Lauren Wissot's review (not entirely favorable) of the film. "The chickens always come home to roost..."

John Lundberg: Newsweek Ed's Poem Skewers Lou Dobbs

2009-11-15T07:12:35Z

Lou Dobbs resigned from CNN on Wednesday night, and rumor has it that the immigration-obsessed nightly news anchor will be following the Glenn Beck plan: if your shtick appeals to the fringe, why not head for a network with no qualms about stoking some far right-wing rage and cashing in on it? Don't be surprised if we soon see Dobbs broadcasting live from the border with a flag in one hand and a rifle in the other.

On Thursday, Newsweek's longtime senior editor Jerry Adler published a poem in honor of the occasion entitled "Goodbye, Mr. Dobbs."

So wily Lou has picked the locks
That kept him in his padded box
And tiptoed off, in just his socks.
Or should we say, weighed anchor?

So now we wonder where he docks
To whom he'll lead his rabid flocks:
The Pop that loves his famous Vox
And adores his rancor.

A network just for frat-boy jocks?
Where aliens are put in stocks
And viewers pelt them with big rocks
Before each half-time show?

Could it be UPN, or Cox?
They'd have to open up Fort Knox
We know Lou's crazy, like a Fox.
I'd really love to know.

As far as light verse goes, the poem is quite good--if only for the image of the stately anchor tiptoeing off "in just his socks." The form is suitable and the rhythm is on point. And it's no mistake that "Fox" is capitalized in the penultimate line. Adler is hinting at Dobbs' likely future employer--which would make Lou the second Fox News anchor to be effectively skewered in verse.

The hyperbolic portrait of a "frat-boy" network that Adler conjures up in the third stanza drew the ire of Scott Whitlock at the right-wing watchdog site News Busters. Whitlock fired back by dredging up an old Adler quote on the murdering Menendez brothers (remember them?) and asking the rather bizarre question "So, Adler is tougher on Dobbs than he is on two murderers?" Ok then. It's safe to say that we can count on Mr. Whitlock to follow Dobbs to wherever he drops that expensive anchor of his.

In the meantime, Adler's poem is crying out for more verses. Feel free to add yours in the comments.

Immigration Bill Could Be Introduced By December

2009-11-14T15:35:21Z

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano called Friday for Congress to consider an overhaul of immigration law early next year, a move that could rekindle a divisive debate during an election year.

Ms. Napolitano said the immigration landscape has changed sharply since 2007, when attempts at a comprehensive overhaul failed because many members of Congress lacked confidence in the government's ability to enforce existing laws, she said.

Benedict Moran: Queens Frets Over Census Participation

2009-11-13T12:34:49Z

Omar Ulffe, a 37-year-old immigrant from Peru, approached the pulpit at St. Leon's Catholic church in mid-Mass - something he does every week, at different churches, he said - and told the congregation about the importance of next year's national census. Ulffe has been canvassing Hispanic populations in neighborhoods like Elmhurst since early summer.

"Our senior citizens, our children, or health, education, transportation - basically, every service is done or planned choosing data from the census," he told the crowd on a Saturday evening. "So please, on March 31, 2010, we are all going to receive the questionnaire. Fill it out, and return it. It is very easy, it is safe, it is important, and the information is protected."

A few dozen people looked up impassively. Ulffe returned to his seat looking optimistic, nonetheless ready to shake hands with anyone willing to listen. But after the Mass, only a handful approached him. Over coffee afterward, he explained the challenges he faces. "Some of them oppose being counted based on past, bad memories back in their countries," he said. People were jailed or fined in Peru, he explained, if they didn't participate in a census - and this makes people fearful of the US Census Bureau.

Five months ahead of the next year's national population count, the Census Bureau is undertaking a massive outreach campaign across the country. It hopes to counter a predicted low participation rate brought on by unprecedented foreclosures, privacy concerns over government surveillance powers, and increased fear by national lawmakers over immigration.

Ulffe, one of the Bureau's 200 New York employees, is working to reverse a trend in immigrant-heavy regions such as Corona and Elmhurst, where mistrust of the government runs high and previous population counts have been lower than the true figure. Queens, like many areas that were undercounted in the previous census, is especially tricky due to its high number of undocumented workers who are scared of deportation.

Yet, much hinges on getting a correct count so that these working-class neighborhoods receive a fair share of government funds and political representation. Low participation in the national census could result in reduced health care and education here, despite the estimated increase of 65,000 residents.

"Queens sets an important model for the country," said Stacey Cumberbatch, a coordinator for New York City's 2010 Census, speaking at Queens Borough Hall.

The Constitution mandates a count of all inhabitants, regardless of legal status, every ten years. Census numbers are used to apportion the 435 seats in the House of Representatives and more than $400 billion in federal funds to state, local, and tribal governments. It is a massive undertaking; up to 1.2 million people will be temporarily hired to take part in the $14 billion program, according to the Census Bureau.

But national participation in next year's census - the nation's 22nd since 1790 - is likely to reach only 64 percent, according to a bureau spokesperson. That's three percentage points lower than in 2000. In Queens, where only 54 percent of residents participated in the previous count, the Bureau is trying to make five to 10 percent more people return the questionnaire. Even that target is unlikely, however.

"A whole lot of things are adding up in 2010 that [are] simply going to make it more difficult," said Kenneth Prewitt, the former director of the 2000 national census and currently a professor of public policy at Columbia University.

Along with the heightened fear of undocumented immigration in Congress, Prewitt said that the previous high participation rate was helped by the "unspoken understanding" with the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency that it would refrain from immigration raids during the four-month count.

Such an agreement, he said, has not yet been made for next year. A spokesperson for ICE only stated that consultations between the two agencies would take place in order to make the census "the most efficient and accurate as possible."

Ulffe, the Census worker, says that many undocumented workers fear that mailing back the information could lead to deportation. "The immigrant community - they are the real challenge for us, because they fear the government will share the information with immigration [officials]," he said. "They are afraid of the questionnaire, and they don't return it."

Then there are those who feel they have nothing to gain from it. "The government, the police, I don't like them," said Luca, a 38-year-old Mexican immigrant who lives in Corona. He wished to withhold his last name because he is undocumented.

"I won't participate [in the census]. It's not worth participating - it doesn't help the poor, it only helps the rich," he added.

In order to reach out to these immigrants, the Census Bureau announced in September the creation of what Advertising Age magazine called the largest advertising campaign in US government history. Over $300 million in advertisements and other education material will be distributed in 28 languages. Over $43 million of that amount will be directed to 'hard-to-count' areas such as Queens.

Children in elementary school are being targeted as way to get the message to their parents. Many schools are encouraging them to play an online counting game and learn about the reasons for the census.

On the bureau's web site, an animated song plays, "I count, you count, your family counts too. The census counts people, make sure it counts you!"

Next year's form will also be much simpler. The 2008 National Community Survey replaced the need for the time-consuming long survey that was distributed in 2000. Now, there will be only 10 questions, and it should take about 10 minutes to complete, according to the Census Bureau.

Furthermore, the census will be offered in six languages: English, Spanish, Chinese, Korean, Russian and Vietnamese. Language guides will also be available in 59 additional languages, including Navajo, Amharic and Swahili.

But despite these efforts, community activists in Queens are afraid that low participation will further cut services in the borough next decade.

Haydee Zembrana, the director of Latin Women in Action, a nonprofit community advocacy organization in Corona, said that many immigrants will hide from any advance by the government and will likely avoid census workers.

"They don't want to know about it," she said. "If you can tell a young lady who is in love that she has to stop loving that person - it's the same concept."

Across town, the Census Bureau is working with the Centro Civico Colombiano, to reach that community in Corona.

"If we count every person - that's more education, more health, more services for the community," said Adolfo Sanchez, the center's general secretary.

"We tell them, if you don't send in the papers, you don't count!" he said.

Catie Lazarus: Top 10 Reasons This Woman Can't Write for Late Night Comedy Shows

2009-11-12T20:07:00Z

In the New York Times, Bill Carter writes ,"very few women make it inside the writing rooms for late-night television hosts, despite that women make up a larger proportion of their audience than men. There are no female writers on the new “The Jay Leno Show,” none on “Late Show with David Letterman,” none on “The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.”"

Based on his article and Nell Scovell's personal account in Vanity Fair, I have come to understand why the odds are stacked against my wedging my paw in the door. I still have hope (also known as delusion).

The Top 10 Reasons This Woman Can't Write for Late Night Comedy Variety Shows

10) I will be overcome by desire for my male comedy writing peers
and superiors, who are known for their off-white, pasty skin and muscle tonus
minimus, akin to albino, soft shell turtles.

9) My lady sensibility is limited to menstruation
(hilarious), babies (adorable), and unicorns mating
(adorably hilarious).

8) Due to my genetic make-up, I am physically incapable to
handle the job, considering the heavy manual labor required in touch typing.

7) The number one rule of comedy is fitting in and I sometimes buck the uniform of orthopedic New Balance sneakers,
hoodies, jeans, and t-shirts, with ironic catchphrases like, "Pro-Cashmere. Pro-Cotton.
Pro-Choice."

6) The only requests I get as
a female comedy writer are to discuss sexism in comedy, instead of political satire about how Sarah Palin is so sick she
gives swine flu or scripts like Crones:
The Musical! or commercials, maybe, Femedy: A bubble gum
birth control for tweens who don't want to ovulate. Period.

5) Late-night comedy requires a male point-of-view, and girls,
even ones closer to menopause than teething, can only express themselves in
glittery pink (which, fyi, typing in does
not fund cancer research).

4) As a lady, I automatically cost less, and in a business where money talks, how will I be taken seriously? I mean funnily.

3) I didn't graduate from Harvard so I lack the cultural capital to craft the erudite, intellectual fodder
typical of late-night comedies, like the masturbating bear or gift
wrapped genitalia.

2) Hollywood would have to make major changes to catch up with
medicine, law, even engineering, in its hiring practices, and we all know how open television is to change. It only took 30 years (and millions of dollars) before CNN let Native
American Lou Dobbs quit. (I mean, leave to spend time with his family.)

1) I'd have to be funny and learn
how to play Dungeons and Dragons.

Mark Morford: Lou Dobbs Sex Tape Shocker!

2009-11-12T14:41:58Z

The former CNN anchor calls a sex tape he made several years ago "the biggest mistake of my life."

"I swear to all of you reading this right now, when I made that tape I must've been completely drunk on some crazy illegal Mexican hoo-ha, high on some premium Colombian flake, or totally overstimulated by the thought that I might get shot at any minute by dangerous illegal aliens who have it in for me and know where I live, and now I fear for my life every single day because I am just one Terribly Important Person who says Dangerously Important Things," the controversial and widely disliked news anchor did not announce, in a bizarre, rambling letter on his personal blog, DobbsKnobs.com, which does not actually exist, but should.

"I would never make such an immoral thing today. I mean, who has the time? And the appropriate farm animals?"

Oddly echoing semi-famous Christian homophobe/former Miss California Carrie Prejean's words when she herself recently confessed to making a touching sex tape for a boyfriend, a tape allegedly involving nine stuffed pink bunnies, a frozen banana, and Pat Benatar's "Love is a Battlefield," Dobbs went on to add, "[The tape] was for private use, meant only for the eyes of my personal armada of Mexican chambermaids, Chinese manservants, Indian website coders and the two or three Czech bodybuilders I keep around just so I can watch them lift heavy things and glisten in the sun.

"But does that justify what I did? No it does not. I am ashamed," he did not add, sweatily.

"Except for the thing with the frozen enchilada and the monkey. That was pretty awesome. Who knew monkeys were so dexterous? Skip to 14.33 if you want to see it. Damn, was I ever hammered! Woo!"

Gov. Dick Lamm: Do We Really Know How Much It Costs to Shoe a Horse?

2009-11-12T10:05:58Z

I often wonder, of late, if we really know how much it costs to shoe a horse. I refer to the old high school mathematics riddle of the man who goes to a blacksmith to get his horse shod and asks how much. "Not very much," replies the blacksmith, "One penny for the first nail, double for the second, double that for the third, and so on." The tickler, of course, is that while it doesn't sound like much, the total comes to more money than in the whole town, more than in the whole state. The example dramatically shows the law of exponential growth -- the law of large numbers.

One new challenge to American public policy must be to look at the issue of the growth and environment with new eyes. Our globe is under new dramatic environmental pressure: our globe is warming, our ice caps melting, our glaciers receding, our coral is dying, our soils are eroding, our water tables falling, our fisheries are being depleted, our remaining rainforests shrinking. Something is very, very wrong with our eco-system. The environment issue is hydra-headed and complicated, but it is of immense importance that we understand how fast the world is changing. We are seeing a decade of 1970s-type change every year, and it is accelerating.

The geometry of change is relentless. Population and environmental stress are compounding. The first census (in 1790) found less than 4 million Europeans in America. Two-hundred years later (in 1990) we had approximately 260 million Americans. That means we had six doublings of the original European population (4, 8, 16, 32, 64, 128, 256). Please note that two more doublings give us over a billion people sharing America. Projected to happen in the lives of our grandchildren. Why?

The same geometry applies to our standard of living. Our growth model of living standards cannot be duplicated around the world nor could/should it blindly be continued here. If we would have the entire world with an American standard of living, the world would have to find over 1600 times the energy and resources that the world now consumes. The growth model is not sustainable. We need some new models of living, some new visions of lifestyles and goals of humans.

There are a number of people who postulate that our current population of 300 million Americans is not itself sustainable, let alone 420 million (2050) or a billion (2100). Sustainability looks at the long term: Will our resources allow 300 million Americans to live a satisfying life at a reasonable standard of living? Will our children inherit a livable America?

We have not only put this question off limits, we have made it taboo! The population growth issue in America is a matter of immigration. With our natural birthrate we will stabilize the population of the U.S., with current levels of mass immigration we will double and double again. Sustainability requires us to confront the painful issues of immigration and consumption. Difficult issues intellectually, and almost impossible politically.

What possible public policy advantage would there be to an America of 500 million? Do we lack for people? Do we have too much open space? Do we have too much parkland and recreation? What will 500 million Americans mean to our environment? There are similar non-environmental questions. Do we need a larger military? Are our schools unpopulated? Do we not have enough diversity? Will we live better lives if our cities double in size? Does immigration help our health care system? Will doubling our population help us build a more fair and just America? Do you want an America of one billion people? These questions seem to answer themselves.

I do not believe you can have infinite population or economic growth in a finite world. We are living on the shoulders of some awesome geometric curves. The 2000 Census revealed how rapidly immigration is causing our population to skyrocket. The equivalent of another California has been added to the nation -- 34 million people since 1990. Demographers calculate that immigration is now the determining factor in causing America's rapid population growth -- immigrants and their U.S.-born children accounted for more than two-thirds of population growth in the last decade, and will continue to account for approximately two-thirds of future growth.

Humankind has been a brilliant problem-solving animal, but has been a failure at anticipatory planning. Schweitzer warned, "we have lost the ability to foresee and forestall, we shall end by destroying the earth." We shall have to recognize, sooner or later, how fast change is taking place today and what an obligation of foresight that poses to decision makers. We are awash with change, and need people to recognize exponential growth; to recognize how much it really costs to shoe a horse.

Beau Friedlander: Veteran Moulitsas Versus Tom Tancredo as Moral Tale

2009-11-11T06:34:51Z

New media progressives were giddy this weekend after a segment about health care reform aired on The Ed Show this Friday. Air America joined the celebration, too. No new ground was covered. Yet here I am writing about it five days later. Why? Because while the dust-up may have made good theater, it was bad for progressive politics.

David Shuster hosted the discussion between Daily Kos founder Markos Moulitsas and the former representative from Colorado's 6th District, and sometime presidential candidate, hate-monger extraordinaire, Tom Tancredo. The conversation got hot a few times, and then boiled over when the three discussed veteran health care. It was the political media equivalent of pro-wrestling, Fox News painted blue: unintelligent, argumentative, and pointless.

The trouble started when Shuster asked Tancredo if the Veterans Administration--a single-payer system--is "a threat to our freedom." A loaded question for sure, given that the service members affected by the shooting at Fort Hood (the day before) had all received care there. Tancredo claimed that he had never met a service member who didn't think that the Veterans Administration was "a bureaucratically run program that didn't meet their needs." He went on to say they would all prefer a voucher system.

Okay. It was a laughable statement. So, on cue, Moulitsas laughed in that gleeful, "OMG you're so dumb" way that only he can muster. Fair enough. That stupid, ideological lament, tawdry little nothing of a lie that Tancredo was trying to sell the audience was after all a joke.

Fast-forward. Markos said something that bears saying often in the hothouse of tea-baggers, Astro-Turf activism, and race-baiting populism that emerged after President Obama was sworn in.

People want a more effective VA. That's more money....This is a threat to Republicans. They've built an entire ideology predicated on telling people that government does not work. They are terrified of government programs that work, because then people will realize that government is not the enemy, and they're going to vote Democratic because Democrats are the party who realize that people need help, and government can sometimes offer solutions.

It was a good thing to say, and Markos said it well, between the barks of an unhinged political manqué, but it did not merit FireDogLake's proclamation that, "Markos Moulitsas Destroys Tom Tancredo on MSNBC." We missed something when I fast-forwarded to the above statement. Tom Tancredo did not leave the set because big government works. So, what did Moulitsas say?

He said: "I'm a veteran."

Fair enough. You might expect him next to say that he has been the recipient of fantastic medical care at the Veterans Administration, but he doesn't say this at all. He does not cite a single instance of the VA in action. Instead, he defames with an ugly air of superiority that undoes whatever persuasion might have worked its way into the minds of the conservatives (and independents) who were "out there" eavesdropping on those liberal crazies over at MSNBC.

Tom. I am a veteran. I did not get a deferment because I was too depressed to fight in a war that I supported in Vietnam. I'm a veteran.

Tancredo is best known for being a xenophobic hater of people of color--or at least someone who abhors their presence in the United States of America. (People like Moulitsas, whose family hails from Ecuador.) He was lauded in the past by white power folks for keeping America safe from illegal immigrants even if it cost the nation $200 billion. He even called out Sonia Sotomayor for being a member of the National Council of La Raza, which he dubbed "a Latino KKK without the hoods or the nooses."

Tom Tancredo is not a difficult person to debate. As a matter of fact, you merely need to let him talk to defeat him. So why on earth, in a conversation about health care, would you deride a man for not serving his country because of a debilitating illness that, by the way, affects 8 to 12 percent of the population? Would he also attack people with schizophrenia? Partial blindness?

For a person with as much pull in influential circles as Markos Moulitsas to engage in a pissing match, and a petty one at that, with a man who does not deserve a minute of his time is to belittle the importance of the work that actually needs to be accomplished, or to vastly underestimate his potential influence on debates that matter, such as the one around health care reform.

When Crashing the Gate was published however many years ago, I remember thinking that Jerome Armstrong and Moulitsas were 100% correct in their assessment of what ailed the Democratic Party. There was no cohesion of message and purpose. No unity. No sense of mission and professionalism. Single-payer could get no traction because there wasn't a committee in Washington that could have had a civil conversation about its merits. That's a sign of a sick party.

Getting back to Moulitsas and Tancredo on The Ed Show, they did not have a civil conversation because they were not supposed to have one. That's a media problem as well as a message problem. But the fact remains, there is victory in dignity, and it is time we started lauding instances of the bad guys getting short-circuited not by a public drubbing, but by a sound argument. We can behave like the gold standard for logic has changed, but it hasn't. The slap fight anti-intellectualism of essentially South Park-like discourse is great at a cocktail party--and it has a place in the realm of politics--but it cannot safely replace thoughtful debate, or we will see the completion of Roger Ailes' political vision: the country club edition of The Lord of the Flies. It's a dangerous world where childish memes and raw bullying can change the law.

First things first. An expanded Medicare will do for now. And while the Stupak amendment is a sharp slap in the face for what most of us on the left deem an acceptable outcome, there is the fact that we're seeing legislative movement for the first time in years on the issue of health care reform in America. And Tom Tancredo can say whatever he wants about vouchers. I'm still hearing, "Latino KKK."

When people think about Markos Moulitsas, it would be great if they thought about what he had to say regarding government programs and the GOP, but they won't, because you could barely hear him over Tancredo's cross-talking. What most people will remember is the second quote where he stoops to conquer and winds up sounding just as mean and derisive as a Republican. Maybe that's necessary. Maybe we need a few more Carvilles running around being fast and furious with the truth, but we also need to cut through the noise and hysteria sometimes.

Markos Moulitsas is a million times better than that. We're better than that. The below video isn't the best example of something better, but it's recent and one of many.

First published by Air America

John Feffer: A Migration Summit To Address Shrinking Birth Rates

2009-11-10T18:57:50Z

Russia is disappearing. So is Japan. Europe is next to go.

It's not the rising waters of global warming that threaten these parts of the world. The problem is more basic. The Russians and Japanese, as well as large numbers of Europeans, are not having enough children to replace themselves. The birth rates across a large swath of Eurasia are considerably below the replacement rate of 2.1 babies.

To prevent further shrinkage, many of these countries have instituted policies that encourage reproduction, such as more generous family leave and better child care. While such policies are essential regardless of a country's fertility rate, they are not going to solve the disappearing country problem. Birth rates continue to remain very low in Taiwan (1.14), South Korea (1.21), Japan (1.21), Ukraine (1.26), Poland (1.28), and Italy (1.31). In the 1970s, only 24 countries had birth rates of 2.1 or less. Today, over 70 countries fall into this category.

Pushing for another baby boom is also globally irresponsible. At a time of climate and energy crises, the earth simply can't take on too many more passengers. Women bearing children in the industrialized world, in particular, have an enormous impact on global warming: American women having babies generate seven times the carbon output of Chinese women having babies.

The solution lies not in the greater production of people but in their more equitable distribution. The answer to the disappearing country problem is immigration.Birth dearth countries already rely heavily on foreign workers to meet their labor shortage. Their remittances, although reduced by the current global economic crisis, have helped in a modest way to bridge the wealth gap between the developing and developed world.

But foreign workers only temporarily address a symptom of the deeper problem. Only by lowering the barriers to citizenship -- as Germany did in 2000 -- can shrinking countries revive their economies and become more dynamic international players.

It won't be easy to persuade Russians to welcome large numbers of Chinese into Siberia or Italy to embrace more Nigerians. The rancorous immigration debate in America demonstrates that fear and xenophobia can overwhelm practical considerations even in immigration nations.Demography, however, is destiny. The pull of economic need and the push of population pressures in the global south are already creating the next great migration.

Rather than watch these patterns unfold, world leaders should act preemptively. We've had global summits on population, racism, and the environment. We urgently need a migration summit to coordinate immigration policies, improve the integration of migrants, and address the inevitable xenophobic backlash.

President Obama, the son of an immigrant, should spearhead the initiative. By pushing for a migration summit, he can demonstrate that the United States is finally ready to play well with others. Such a Statue of Liberty play would be a fitting way for the president to spend the political capital of his Nobel Prize and secure his legacy as a global leader.

Cross-posted from Foreign Policy In Focus, where you can read the full post. To subscribe to FPIF's e-zine World Beat, click here.

Neo-Nazi Immigration Rallies (VIDEO): Events Attract Larger Counter-Protests

2009-11-09T09:06:46Z

Anti-immigration rallies held by neo-Nazi groups in Arizona and Minnesota this weekend drew large counter-protests sometimes outnumbered the original protest. The counter-protests drew large numbers of residents who felt the need to confront the neo-Nazis:

I've never done anything like this before, but there's just so much racial tension in Phoenix lately," Wilcox said, as he held a sign that read "Nazis stay out of PHX." "I don't want it to seem like (they are) welcome here." [. . .]

The opposing rallies in Minnesota were shadowed by police officers and firemen on guard to quickly quell any disturbance. Three counter-protesters were arrested last month during a previous confrontation between the two groups.

Watch footage from the rally in Arizona below.

Easter Island Indigenous Population Considers Travel Restrictions On Immigrants

2009-11-06T14:27:10Z

SANTIAGO, Chile -- They are the face of Chilean guidebooks: giant statues made of volcanic rock scattered across Easter Island.

Constructed centuries ago, the figures are thought to represent ancestors or chiefs of the indigenous Polynesian population. It is their descendants who now inhabit the tiny triangular island nearly 2,000 miles off the Chilean coast.

Tom Watson: Remembering Marcelo Lucero: One Year Later

2009-11-05T19:18:55Z

A year ago Sunday, a group of teens left Marcelo Lucero bleeding and dying on a street in Patchogue, New York - with a knife wound to the chest. Lucero, 37, was an immigrant from Ecuador whose death has become a national symbol of civil rights and humanity in a country that too often abandons its founding ideals.

As Americans remember the tragic murder on Long Island, real immigration reform is currently on the slow track in Washington, even though 100 House Democrats sent a letter to President Obama urging action this Congressional session. Yet this week's election results have some ominous signs: Republican gubernatorial candidates who promised more hardline immigration stances - fueled by pure hatred - won races in Virginia and New Jersey.

The lessons from the Lucero killing are stark and clear. Lucero's attackers told police that they would routinely go "beaner jumping" -- which meant they would hunt down and assault Latinos. In announcing indictments last year, Suffolk District Attorney Thomas Spota said the seven students charged in the attack admitted they regularly beat Hispanics for fun. He said one of the accused attackers, Anthony Hartford, 17, of Medford, told police “I don’t go out doing this very often, maybe once a week.” Said Spota: “To them, it was a sport.”
Today, one of the defendants in the case - Nicholas Hausch, 18, of Medford, NY - pleaded guilty to four felony charges and will cooperate with authorities in prosecuting the other accused Long Island teens. According to Newsday:

Before coming across Lucero, Hausch said the group pursued another man. "I got out of the car and I chased him. We were yelling at him," calling him a derogatory name, he said.
Authorities say the group surrounded Lucero, 37, and a companion at about 11:50 p.m. near the Long Island Rail Road Station, shouting and pummeling him before he was knocked to the ground. They say Jeffrey Conroy, of Medford, fatally stabbed him. Conroy faces murder and manslaughter charges as a hate crime.
Hausch said as the group left, he told Conroy to throw the knife away. Conroy said, "No, I washed it in a puddle," according to Hausch.
While they were leaving, Hausch told the group, 'We're not getting away with it,' " he told prosecutors.

Lucero's death was a human tragedy, yet it also brought the increased light of scrutiny upon anti-immigrant violence in this country. I was taken with the remembrance penned by Pat Young, a colleague at Long Island Wins, the campaign working for immigration reform and fairness on Long Island. Pat's words hit home:

I thought of this working man, this churchgoer, this loving son and brother, on his way to relax at the end of a long work week. Thousands of miles from home in a place that had become increasingly hostile to people like him.

Tired, hoping for the reward of rest in front of a TV, in the company of a friend, he was set upon by young men who heard from parents and politicians that immigrants were "invaders" and "low-level terrorists". Marcelo Lucero's companion was able to escape. But Marcelo, being hit by the type of young men who only fight when the odds are overwhelmingly in their favor, took off his belt to avoid the humiliation of submission, to fend off the fists and kicks of youths with nothing better to do, on what to Marcelo was a work day, than drink and hunt humans.

Latinos have learned the lesson of Marcelo Lucero. He died a lonely death amid the taunts of those who killed him. He may have called out for his mother in his last moment, but he heard in reply not her soothing voice but the rude curses of ignorant teenagers.
A horrible fate. But was it a meaningless death after all?

Let's make sure it wasn't. Marcelo Lucero's family will hold a vigil in his memory on Saturday near the train station where he lost his life. The vigil will start at 6pm on Saturday, November 7, and be followed by a 7:30pm religious service at the Congregational Church of Patchogue on Main St.
During the vigil, the family will collect donations for the Marcelo Lucero Scholarship fund, which raises money for students at Patchogue-Medford High School. You can also contribute to the fund by mail, making your check payable to Marcelo Lucero Scholarship, and sending it directly to Patchogue-Medford High School (181 Buffalo Ave., Medford, New York 11763).

Or join the blog campaign and remember Lucero.

UPDATE:

Bloggers all over the net are remembering Lucero this weekend. Some highlights -

A tribute from Nezua at The Unapologetic Mexican:

"Marcelo Lucero’s is one of those stories that haunts
you...I shudder to think of what it means to die in such a
way...Mexican, Guatemalan, Cuban…they don’t care what kind of spic you
are. “Beaner” is good enough."

Prerna Lal at Change.org:

"Have you spoken out against hatred? What have you done
since Marcelo was killed to make sure that these atrocities do not
happen in your neighborhood and on your watch?"

Marisa Trevino at Latina Lista:

"As an immigration reform bill takes shape, the rhetoric
against non-citizen immigrants will only increase, as will the
animosity towards them. Chaos is bound to follow because people who
feel empowered and justified will implement their own definition of
justice as those boys did with Marcelo."

Diego Graglia from Feet in 2 Worlds quoted an email from me:

“From what we’ve seen, Levy has looked at the Lucero murder
as more of a public relations problem than a genuine crisis, with
frequent insensitive comments about immigrants that have led us to
question whether he’s acting in good faith.”

Ecuadorian-American blogger Sarbelia Bermeo at A Latina's Thought:

"Regardless of the assumption made by Suffolk County’s
Executive Steve Levy, his death was not a “One Day Story”. Instead it
has opened a Pandora’s Box which can no longer be ignored."

At VivirLatino,
Maegan La Mamita Mala, recalled how Lucero's murder came shortly after
the election of President Obama. Just as people often ask if you
remember where you were when the president got elected, Maegan asks,
"Where were you when Marcelo Lucero was killed?"

Stephen Piggott at Imagine 2050
responded to Maegan's question, detailing a soccer game he was watching
at the time, and how insignificant the loss was in comparison to what
the Lucero family lost.

The Arizona-based Terry Greene Sterling, who blogs at White Woman in the Barrio,
compared the outrage over the Lucero killing to anger felt by Arizona
police after they were shot by an undocumented immigrant.

The point is," Sterling wrote. "Undocumented immigrants, like cops, shouldn’t be slaughtered on the streets."

Defiant Sri Lanken Asylum Seekers To Stay On Australian Ship Oceanic Viking

2009-11-05T11:16:57Z

The 78 Sri Lankans aboard the Oceanic Viking in port in Indonesia have declared that their "final decision" is to remain on the Australian ship.

Adam Luna: Speaking for God and for America's Top Cops - the Center for Immigration Studies

2009-11-04T12:43:37Z

America’s top religious and law enforcement leaders are taking a strong stance in favor of sensible immigration reform and it’s made the anti-immigrant crowd very nervous.

In response, the Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), the anti-immigrant lobby’s “think tank,” released two reports, written by the same author, claiming that Los Angeles police chief William Bratton and Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Archbishop Emeritus of Washington, don't know what they're talking about.

An offshoot of the Federation for American Immigration Reform – designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center – CIS’ role is to halt the anti-immigrant movement's dwindling credibility. They do this by releasing reports written by their "experts” to counter the views of actual auathorities in their fields.

CIS’ credibility took a hit earlier this year with a report blaming immigrants for
global warming and another when CIS director Mark Krikorian
called on Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor to pronounce her name in a less ethnic-sounding way. But the widening chasm between actual experts and the CIS peanut gallery has become almost laughable.

Let's meet one of the Center's "experts": James R. Edwards, a principal of the MITA ("Man in the Action") Group. Despite not having a badge or a collar, Edwards is a CIS “expert” on law enforcement, the Bible and a number of other issues.

Here's how the Center for Immigration Studies and Edwards defend America's broken immigration policies:

Step One: Law enforcement experts discuss changes to our ineffective immigration enforcement policies – July 22, 2009.

Step Two: CIS releases a report claiming to be the real law enforcement experts - October 27, 2009.

On July 22, over one hundred leading law enforcement officials gathered in Phoenix for the National Summit on Local Immigration Policies. According to the Arizona Republic:

Police administrators were especially critical of the government's "287(g)" program, which provides for state and local police to enforce immigration law.

This view was articulated most recently by Los Angeles Police Chief William Bratton and throughout the year by many other chiefs including Jeff Hadley of Kalamazoo, MI; the Washington State Sheriffs’ Association; J. Thomas Manger of Montgomery County, MD; Hubert Williams, President of the Police Foundation and chief of Newark, NJ; and many others.

On October 27th, CIS released a report basically claiming that the chiefs don’t know what they’re talking about. Trouble is, Edwards and Jessica Vaughn, the authors of the report, have absolutely no real law enforcement experience.

Step One: Religious leaders pray for immigration reform – September 15th, 2009.

Step Two: CIS releases a report claiming to be the real Biblical experts – October 6, 2009.

On September 15th, 2009 - Bishop John Wester of the Diocese of Salt Lake City, Bishop Prince Singh of the Episcopal Diocese of Rochester, Bishop Minerva Carcaño of the Desert SW Conference of the United Methodist Church, and Dale Schwartz of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society and other leaders came to the US Capitol to pray for comprehensive immigration reform, and for Congress to resist the hateful rhetoric of the anti-immigrant movement. A similar call was made later by the National Association of Evangelicals and reflects the official positions of every major religious denomination in America. Throughout 2009, hundreds of events on immigration reform have been organized by religious communities across the nation.

Then, on October 6th, the Center for Immigration Studies' biblical "expert," Robert Edwards, released a report essentially claiming that nearly all major religious leaders in America are misreading the bible.

CIS or the Pope? CIS or the top cops in America? When it comes time for a real debate on immigration reform, we don't think Congress will have to think twice about the choice.

Cross-Posted at the America's Voice and the Daily Kos.

Crucifix Banned From Italy's Schools By New EU Court Ruling

2009-11-03T15:16:30Z

ROME — The Vatican on Tuesday denounced a ruling by the European court of human rights that said the display of crucifixes in Italian public schools violates religious and education freedoms.

In a decision that could force a review of the use of religious symbols in government-run schools across Europe, the court ordered Italy to pay a euro5,000 ($7,390) fine to a mother in northern Italy who fought for eight years to have crucifixes removed from her children's public school classrooms. The Italian government said it would appeal.

Daniel Cubias: The Strange Bedfellows of the Census Boycott

2009-10-31T12:27:06Z

One of the wonders of modern society is how even minor controversies can snowball into intense political and sociological debates where, apparently, the future of the country hangs in the balance. Really, even Halloween costumes are enough to create verbal fisticuffs.

That's why I'm not surprised that the 2010 census has people tossing around accusations of nefarious intentions, with counter-accusations of idiocy flying back. The fear and hatred of this tedious government exercise has a long history. And with the loathing of the current administration so potent among right-wingers, it's no wonder that the tinfoil-hat crowd insists that filling out the form will somehow end up with you in a government-run gulag.

But I expected the neocons to get upset over the census. What surprised me is that some Latino groups have joined people like noted nutjob Congresswoman Michele Bachmann in calling for a boycott.

The thinking among some Hispanic organizations is that skipping the census is a great way to protest the lack of immigration reform. The Rev. Miguel Rivera, head of the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, says that his group has talked 2.5 million Hispanics into refusing to be counted. Rivera hopes that some states will lose representation in Congress due to the undercounting. He believes that, "If politicians don't see the need for immigration reform, then we don't need those politicians anyway."

I can't be the only one who sees the ineffectiveness of this take-my-ball-and-go-home approach. The census only reapportions congressional delegation. It doesn't add or eliminate anything. So I don't see how giving, say, Kansas more votes at the expense of California is going to speed up immigration reform. If anything, this strategy increases the odds of a spectacular backfire.

Then there are those who don't necessarily want to boycott the census, just alter it beyond recognition. A Republican-sponsored proposal calls for a freeze on Census Bureau funds if it doesn't reprint its forms to ask respondents if they are citizens. I, for one, can't imagine who they are targeting or attempting to intimidate with such a question.

We'll ignore the fact that the party of fiscal responsibility is demanding that the government throw away the 400 million forms that have already been printed and start over, at no small expense. Instead, let me point out that presidential administrations of both parties have repeatedly agreed to count everybody, not just citizens. It's pretty much settled law.

I'm also wondering about those conservatives who supposedly want government off our collective backs, and think it's unconstitutional for the census to ask how many bathrooms you have. But it is OK for the bureau to throw in a last-second intrusive question designed specifically to frighten people. I see; it all makes sense now.

In the interest of full disclosure, let me admit that I was once one of those dreaded Census workers (it was a temp job on my summer break from college). I spent three months going door to door in the most wretched parts of my hometown, asking bored or annoyed residents how many people lived in their crumbling shanty of an apartment.

It was a pretty miserable experience, but it paid better than fast food. At no point did I swell with pride that I was helping continue the vital work of Jefferson, Madison, Franklin, etc. Neither did I worry if I was assisting the government with its final preparations for the mass arrest of citizens. It was all rather dull.

I miss those days.

Gautam Dutta: A Hypocrite Bashes Immigrants

2009-10-30T19:02:55Z

Remember David Vitter, the Louisiana pol who cavorted with prostitutes while proclaiming his strong family values? Well, it appears the Janus-faced Senator has returned to what he does best: bashing immigrants.

Vitter just introduced a bill that would ban millions of immigrants from being counted in the census. How? By only allowing US citizens to be counted in the 2010 Census (via NY Times):

Mr. Vitter's proposal, which would generally benefit non-urban areas where Republicans tend to dominate, could also affect reapportionment within each state.

"If Congressional and other redistricting was done in this manner, it would mean that regions of states that had fewer immigrants, such as upstate New York, would gain, while those with many immigrants would lose," said Andrew A. Beveridge, a Queens College sociologist who analyzed the census data. "This is going to disempower immigrants massively."

As we all know, it can take years to become a US citizen. At any given time, millions of Asian Americans and Latinos are waiting to become naturalized.

So Vitter's scheme is rather simple: if immigrants aren't counted in the Census, the states where they live will suffer in two critical ways. First, they could lose representation in Congress. What's more, they'll be deprived of their fair share of federal funding -- which is based on the census.

To her credit, Louisiana's other Senator, Mary Landrieu, rejected Vitter's ploy as an unconstitutional "political stunt".

Disappointingly, Anh "Joseph" Cao, the first Vietnamese American elected to Congress, tried to have it both ways -- but not before selling out the rights of immigrants:

Princella Smith, Cao's spokeswoman, said he is "emphatically against noncitizens being used in counting population numbers."

"However, as an immigrant, Congressman Cao understands that it is a priority that minorities and non-English speaking citizens participate in the census," Smith said.

Eh? Methinks Rep. Cao lacks some serious spine.

Vitter's bill is undemocratic, unconstitutional, and un-American. Please call your two Senators and tell them to reject Vitter's odious plan.

Update: Yesterday I called Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal's office (225.342.0991) to ask whether he supports Sen. Vitter's plan to disempower immigrants. To date, I have received no response.