Daily features: July 13, 2007

• Daily video

The Department of Homeland Security is withholding border security money from Arizona. Aired on CNN, July 12, 2007.

• Friday blog round-up

• Michael Linton of the FirstThings blog talks about his daughter's experience with undocumented workers at a restaurant where she waitressed.
• The ImmigrationProf blog provides links to contacting your congressmembers if you are interested in having them support or rally against the DREAM Act. For those of you not in the know:
• "It would provide a 6-year path to permanent residence and eventual citizenship for individuals brought to the U.S. years ago as undocumented children if they graduate from high school and continue on to college or military service."

• Cartoon of the day

By Daryl Cagle, MSNBC.com.

Daily features: July 12, 2007

• Daily video

Tomás Contreras, a legal immigrant and entrepreneur, talks about his three-month stay in an immigrant detention center. He was detained on his way back from visiting family in Mexico. This video is part of Voces de la Frontera's reality tour.

• Thursday blog round-up

• 'Gandhian' visa flower protest by Indian immigrants gets noticed, and the SAJA blog compiles news links.
• The StructuralPatterns blog wonders why and how Rudy Giuliani can 'collapse' immigration and terrorism together.
• The GreenFertility blog ridicules Pat Buchanan for stating that immigrants bring disease into the country; followed by a news article that states that the unhealthy are very unlikely to immigrate at all.
  

• Cartoon of the day

By Daryl Cagle at MSNBC.com. Published July 11, 2007.

Daily features: July 10, 2007

• Daily video:
  

Kathy Kiely's master's degree project is a video of members of Congress speaking about their immigrant roots.

• Tuesday blog round-up + Soundclip:
  

• The VanishingAmerican blog takes a look at "mushy moderates" and immigration.
• Chicago Public Radio introduces us to Rose Anne, a second-generation Mexican-American as part of their ongoing Chicago Matters: Beyond Borders series.
• The BatseLine blog synthesizes the recent headlines about illegal immigration issues in Tulsa, OK.

• Cartoon of the day

By Lisa Benson, WashPostWritersGroup.

Friday blog round-up

• The BillT blog links to an article about Microsoft opening a research center in Vancouver to get around strict immigration rules in the United States.
• The National Center for Policy Analysis says that due to the declining fertility rate in Mexico, the influx of illegal immigrants to the U.S. will likely fix itself in time.

Daily video: Income inequality in Mexico and its connection to illegal immigration

Aired on CNN, July 5, 2007. (Note: Video quality is not great.)

Mexican music turns Chicano, tackles immigration issues

On a holiday-like note, we wanted to point you in the direction of a New York Times article that looks at how Mexican "corrido" music has been translated into Chicano culture here in the United States. We're sure that the lyrics and story will be of interest to readers of our blog.

Now they are putting up barriers in front of us so we don't return / but that is not going to block us from crossing into the United States / We leap them like deer, we go under them like moles

Soundbites: Post-S.1639

• Peter D. Saling, a professor at SUNY, calls for the U.S. to close the borders by using Social Security database, in a NYT op/ed.
• Robert S. Nix and Lauren A. Schwartz write in the Allentown, PA Morning Call that the failure to pass immigration reform leaves seasonable labor in 'limbo'.
• Texas Senate candidate calls the border fence a waste of money unlikely to stop illegal immigration.
  

Border crossing increasingly dangerous for patrolmen & immigrants

There's a great news-analysis piece in the Los Angeles Times today. The article by Nicholas Riccardi stems from the headline-grabbing story on how Nicholas Corbett, a U.S. Border patrolman, is now charged with murder for shooting Francisco Javier Dominguez-Rivera, who was trying to cross into Arizona from Mexico.

The article gives us a pretty good run-down of how illegal border crossing from Mexico into Arizona has become increasingly dangerous for both the side trying to keep the illegal immigrants out, and those trying to come in. Here's an excerpt:

Assaults on agents are up 10% in southeastern Arizona over last year, and though the number is holding steady nationwide, the Border Patrol says attacks have become more violent. Officers say immigrants are more likely to run and throw rocks or, as happened near Yuma, Ariz., last month, Molotov cocktails.

The Border Patrol has seized nearly twice as much cocaine this year as last. The crossing is riskier for illegal immigrants too. Deaths among crossers are up 21% over last year. Bandits watch border-crossing routes, robbing immigrants and sometimes kidnapping entire groups. (...)

Candidate tracker

A regular feature, here we track what U.S. presidential candidates have had to say about immigration-related policy in recent days.

• Democratic presidential candidates promised the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials they will continue to pursue comprehensive immigration reform. Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Bill Richardson, and Barack Obama, among others were there. Republican presidential candidates were invited, but only Rep. Duncan Hunter showed up.
• Rudy Giuliani reaffirms the U.S.' need for "secure borders" after the terrorist scare at Glasgow's airport this Saturday: "[I]f you don't end illegal immigration, almost nothing is possible, because no matter what you do, things are going to get worse."
• Mitt Romney says he doesn't want to deport the 12 million undocumented immigrants in the country but he doesn't want to give them a "special pathway" to legalization either.

U.S. built border fence into Mexican territory; it'll cost up to $3.5M to fix

We here at Re-think Immigration waver between thinking this is the funniest piece of immigration-related news in a while, to thinking it's a particularly sad one, indicative of federal inefficiency.

So it appears that the federal government built a 15-mile-long fence along New Mexico's border with Mexico back in 2000. Recently, however, they realized they'd built 1.5 miles of it about six feet into Mexican territory. From the AP article:

The Mexican government was notified and did what any landowner would do: They sent a note politely insisting that Mexico get its land back.

"Our country will continue insisting for the removal (of the fence) to be done as quickly as possible," the Foreign Relations Department said in a diplomatic missive to Washington.

When the barrier was built in 2000, the project was believed to cost about $500,000 a mile. Estimates to uproot and replace it range from $2.5 million to $3.5 million.

(This is today's last post.)

Daily video: El Cenizo, the TX border town where Spanish is the official language

Make sure to watch the discussion at the end of the news-clip—many different, very interesting opinions there.

(Aired on CNN's "Anderson Cooper 360" on June 26, 2007.)

Students walk from Mexico to go to school in Arizona every day

The Los Angeles Times published an interesting news-feature today on students who walk from Mexico to Arizona every day to attend public schools there. Nicholas Riccardi writes:

Children who are U.S. citizens or legal immigrants but live in Mexico cross every morning to get a better education for free in Arizona, breaking the law that requires them to live within the boundaries of the district. To many of their parents, who have ties in both countries, not living in the district is the educational equivalent of jaywalking.

"I pay taxes. I work over here," said a 31-year-old corrections officer who would not give his name as he walked his son from Mexico to elementary school in San Luis. "What's the difference?"

There are no hard statistics on the number of children who break the residency requirement, but some people opposed to U.S. immigration policy have seized on the issue as another example of how they say migrants exploit the U.S. They contend that most school districts do not enforce the law because they risk losing state funding, which is based on the number of enrolled students.

"The whole thing's outrageous. We're not the school district for northern Mexico," said state Rep. Russell K. Pearce.