Illustration by Anne Park In his January 25, 2011 State of the Union address, President Barack Obama identified the unsolved issue of illegal immigration as an obstacle to winning the future. Referring to the recently blocked DREAM Act, which would have offered children of undocumented immigrants the opportunity to attain legal status, he called for an end to the expulsion of “talented, responsible young people… who could be further enric...
Illustration by Nicci Yin In March 2010, Angel Francisco Castro Torres was riding his bike down a municipal road in Smyrna, Georgia, when he was pulled over by two police officers. They claimed the incident was nothing but a routine traffic stop procedure, but the stop was anything but ordinary. The officers demanded that Torres – a Mexican-American immigrant – show proof of his immigration status. When Torres failed to immediately produce adeq...
...nited States, but the hiring of workers without proper work authorizations remained illegal. While a subsequent Immigration Act that passed four years later increased and established a more flexible cap on the number of legal immigrants allowed into the United States, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996 lead to massive federally-imposed deportations by requiring those who had unlawfully immigrated to the United...
...ion in the Orient.” Enter Thilo Sarrazin, a former member of the German central bank and the author of the 2010 “Deutschland schafft sich ab” (Germany Does Away With Itself). His book, replete with “facts” showing how Turkish immigrants are destroying the fabric of German society and “statistics” proving their intellectual inferiority, is just one striking example of a phenomenon that has swept across Western Europe: the spectacular resurgence of...
...r colleagues in the biology department of the University of Alabama in Huntsville bore sad witness to the continuing power of gun crimes to captivate national attention, as did Jiverly Voong’s April 2009, shooting spree at an immigrant center in Binghamton, New York, and US Army Major Nidal M. Hasan’s armed assault on Fort Hood in Texas last November. Can it be that, in spite of these isolated tragedies, the issue of gun control has been largely...
...significantly diminished Espaillat’s chance to successfully run for Rangel’s Congressional seat. Linares received the endorsements of Congressman Rangel and Mayor Bloomberg, for whom he served as New York City Commissioner of Immigrant Affairs. Espaillat’s bid was endorsed by Governor Cuomo. Linares’ strong endorsements highlighted his chance to defeat Espaillat, who had promised not to run for reelection should he lose the congressional primar...
by Mikhail Klimentov Out of the exponential growth of the European extreme right has emerged a new archetype – the intractable and furious Islamophobe. The Islamophobe cares about one issue only: immigration. Afraid of economic competition and cultural dilution, the Islamophobe reacts with violence, hatred, and bigotry. In the press this individual becomes “anti-immigrant,” “anti-Muslim,” a “right-wing racist,” or merely someone who is “scared”...
...ighting movement for universal healthcare from the ground up, starting with local struggles such as the fight for single-payer in Vermont and the successful struggle that won life-saving liver transplants for two undocumented immigrants in Chicago. Only through these kinds of struggles can we expose the crooked priorities of the for-profit health care industry and push for the sane solution, affordable healthcare for all....
...of it is because those of us in government haven’t recognized that the true DNA of New York is not only finance and insurance and real estate, but also the energy, innovation, and creativity of the outer boroughs, and the new immigrant communities, and the artist and cultural communities of our city. We spend a lot of time fixating on office towers in Manhattan and very often we lose sight of the fact that there’s an exciting city out there and w...
I was heading out the door after making a speech in Defiance, Ohio — a quaint, charming town deep in the state’s northwest corner — when a middle-aged man in faded jeans and a hunting jacket stopped me and extended his hand. “Excuse me, Ms. Brown,” he said. “I just wanted to let you know that I’m a registered Republican.” Given that my father, Sherrod Brown, is a longtime Ohio politician and a longer-time Democrat, such an introduction usually d...
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