Quick Updates from SFIWJ

Day Laborer Injured

2009-07-30T11:54:00.000-07:00

I can't stop thinking about a day laborer who was injured a few days ago at work. He cut his left arm on some metal. Someone tried to stitch it for him on the jobsite but he's been in pain for days. His rent is due on Saturday and he feels desperate to work. He was back out at Home Depot today to look for work and was trying to hide the fact that he had an injury (cover the bandage). Another worker told him that perhaps he could get something with a leaf blower and just use his right arm. Many folks in this country are a paycheck away from destitution. These men are only days away.

Illegal status gives Harvard grad few options

2009-07-27T09:53:00.000-07:00

llegal status gives Harvard grad few options

By Maria Sacchetti, Globe Staff July 27, 2009

Back in the concrete suburb of Los Angeles where he grew up, they call him “Harvard.’’ He is the pride of a neighborhood of children who grew up just as he did, bouncing from one crowded apartment to the next, sleeping on sofa cushions on the floor, wired to the constant threat of violence.

Alan was not just a street-smart kid in a baseball cap but a gifted student who breezed through math problems and quoted Milton and Dante. He was a voracious reader, the high school salutatorian, and last month, he graduated from Harvard with a degree in the humanities.

But now Alan has hit a dead end, because one night 19 years ago his mother led him across the Mexican border into California, making him an illegal immigrant. His only legal employment option as a college graduate now is to return to Mexico, where he has few contacts and fewer prospects.

Alan is among a growing number of students who have climbed to the country’s highest academic echelons only to find themselves mired in the rancorous national debate over illegal immigration.

“One of the biggest ironies was that I’m going to graduate from Harvard and not be able to do anything,’’ he said, sitting in one of Harvard’s leafy courtyards, fallen quiet for the summer, wearing an engraved class ring on his right hand. “Every class is like, you’re the leaders of tomorrow. They build you up . . . and you’re like, yeah, yeah, oh wait, they’re not talking about me.’’ He spoke to the Globe on the condition that his last name not be used.

Elite private universities such as Harvard have long been a haven for illegal immigrant children, granting them generous scholarships because they are ineligible for federal financial aid and struggle to pay nonresident tuition at public schools. Now the schools are increasingly pushing for legal residency for such students, under pressure from student groups and others working on their behalf.

In May, Harvard president Drew G. Faust endorsed federal legislation known as the Dream Act, which would allow an estimated 2.5 million illegal immigrant students to apply for residency, if they meet certain conditions. Stanford president John L. Hennessy came out in support of the measure last month, and Brown president Ruth Simmons in July.

This month, the American Council on Education, on behalf of 30 groups, including the Association of American Universities, said it “strongly’’ supported the act, which has been pending since 2001.

Illegal immigrant children are entitled to a free K-12 education under a 1982 Supreme Court decision, but that protection does not extend to college. In most states, illegal immigrants can enroll in college, but they are generally required to pay the pricier nonresident tuition at public colleges and are ineligible for federal financial aid.

Some of the strongest voices in support of the Dream Act are from college students themselves, who are saying it is unfair to educate illegal immigrants and then quietly abandon them after graduation.

“These are some of the best and brightest kids in the entire country,’’ said Scott Elfenbein, who formed a Harvard student group last year to aid undocumented students after his best friend in Miami, now a student at Georgetown, was nearly deported to Colombia. “Most are people you would want running some organization.’’

But others say the private schools are wrong to admit such students.

“I think we really need to step back and say why are private institutions, or any institutions allowed to enroll illegal aliens in the first place?’’ said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington. “Essentially they’re being trained for jobs that it’s illegal for them to take.’’

From the beginning Alan, the son of Mexican laborers, loved school. He was the only child in his family who did not cry on the first day of kindergarten. He devoured books, loved math, and enrolled in a program for gifted students.

He loved computers so much that he persuaded his mother to sell his video games to buy him a bare-bones computer from a JCPenney catalog.

“For me things just like, clicked,’’ Alan said.

Though she had a sixth-grade education, his mother monitored his report cards and made sure he got A’s and B’s.

But at home, things were tense, he recalled. His mother had three more children, and they moved a lot, often bunking with another family to save money. At one point, his entire family shared a single room.

“Teachers would say go home and find a study place,’’ he said. “I was always like, ‘Yeah right.’ There was no place I could work for school.’’

Worse, his father grew violent, and would beat his mother, he said. Eventually, the two separated.

Alan did not know that he was here illegally until high school, when he wanted to apply for a job. He brought applications home to fill out and asked, “Mom, what’s a Social Security number?’’

His mother winced and shook her head.

“I always knew I was born in Mexico,’’ Alan said. “But I never really knew the implications of all of it.’’

In high school, he enrolled in more than a dozen Advanced Placement classes, including English, European history, and calculus.

A teacher, who confirmed the details of Alan’s life for the Globe, said she and Alan joked that he was bound for Harvard.

A year later, when he told her he was here illegally, she realized that a private college like Harvard was Alan’s only hope. California is one of few states that allow students like Alan to pay the cheaper resident tuition at public colleges, but even that he could not afford.

With his teacher’s help, Alan filled out college applications. When Harvard accepted him on scholarship, they were thrilled. They thought the Dream Act would have passed by now.

“That’s what’s frustrating as a teacher,’’ the teacher said, speaking on condition of anonymity. “He did what he was supposed to do, and we did what we were supposed to do. And what’s the end result? Everything was against him. Everything. And he rose above it all.’’

At Harvard, Alan had his own desk and room for the first time in his life. He attended lectures by world leaders, and had professors who appeared on CNN. He sat in auditoriums and watched Alan M. Dershowitz and Steven Pinker, and took a class with a leading scholar on Buddhism.

Alan kept quiet about his legal status. His mother sent him $200 every few months, and he worked cash-only jobs such as flipping burgers to pay for T passes and other expenses.

But it was clear that he was different. While his classmates studied abroad in Chile, Japan, and China, Alan stayed behind, knowing that if he left the United States he could not get back in.

When throngs of classmates in business suits hit the job fairs seeking internships or careers on Wall Street or at nonprofits, Alan made up excuses for not going.

“I would say, ‘Oh, I missed the application deadline,’ ’’ he said. “There was no point.’’

But he celebrated like any student this spring when he graduated, with a B average. His mother flew out for the ceremony.

Now Alan sees Mexico as his only option. His mother is against it: Alan barely knows his relatives there, and he has no professional connections. It is unclear whether Mexico’s elite would welcome him, even if he is a Harvard man.

A maxim he learned at Harvard often runs through his mind: To whom much is given, much is expected. He has $15,000 in loans he intends to repay.

“I should be able to take care of myself,’’ he said. “I don’t want to go home and sit on my butt and watch SportsCenter. If I do that, then these last four years have been a waste.’’

Maria Sacchetti can be reached at msacchetti@globe.com.

Florida hospital defends secretly deporting patient

2009-07-23T08:15:00.001-07:00

This is disturbing on so many levels, even just beginning with the danger that so many workers face in the workplace.

Posted on Thu, Jul. 23, 2009

Fla. hospital defends secretly deporting patient

By LAURA WIDES-MUNOZAP Hispanic Affairs Writer

All sides agree on one thing in the strange case of a South Florida hospital that secretly repatriated a seriously brain injured patient back to Guatemala.

During the early hours of a steamy July 2003 morning, Martin Memorial Medical Center chartered a private plane and sent 37-year-old Luis Jimenez back to the Central American country without telling his relatives in the U.S. or Guatemala - even as his cousin and legal guardian, Montejo Gaspar, frantically sought to stop the move.

There, things get murky. Gaspar is suing the hospital for essentially deporting Jimenez, who was an illegal immigrant. The hospital, which spent more than $1.5 million on his care over three years, says Jimenez wanted to go home.

Underlying the dispute is the broader question of what's a hospital to do with a patient who requires long-term care, is unable to pay and doesn't qualify for federal or state aid because of his immigration status. Health care and immigration experts across the country are watching the case, which could go to a jury Thursday, and which could set precedent in Florida and possibly beyond. Lawyers for Jimenez said this appears to be the first time a lawsuit has been filed in such a case.

In closing arguments Thursday, Jack Hill, Gaspar's attorney, said the hospital wanted to send Jimenez back before the case could get on track for appeals.

"The plan was designed once and for all to stop the meter from running, to stop the expenses ... to stop the case from going all the way up to the Supreme Court - because Luis Jimenez was gone," Hill said.

The case also raises the question of whether a hospital and a state court can decide on their own to deport someone.

"Regardless of the decision, it will heighten the awareness of hospitals nationwide. The next time they debate shipping a patient overseas, they're going to have to do their homework because it's going to leave them open to a lot of legal challenges and questions," said Steve Larson, an assistant dean at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Medicine and medical director of a nonprofit clinic for Latino immigrants.

But Linda Quick, president of the South Florida Hospital & Healthcare Association, says hospitals may become even more wary about providing extended care to uninsured immigrants.
Hospitals are already struggling under the staggering costs of treating the nation's roughly 47 million uninsured. Illegal immigrants make up an estimated 15 percent of this group, according to the Pew Hispanic Center.

"I think they'll do what's required according to physician orders," she said, "but I think they will be more pro-active and aggressive in finding a discharge plan."

Like millions of others, Jimenez came the U.S to work as a day laborer, sending money home to his wife and small children. In 2000, a drunk driver crashed into the van he was riding in, leaving the robust soccer player a paraplegic. For more than a year he lingered in a vegetative state before he began to recuperate, eventually reaching a fourth grade level in cognitive ability.

The hospital sent him to a long-term care facility for a brief stint, but eventually he was returned to the hospital for care. Armed with a letter from the Guatemalan minister of health stating the poverty-ridden country could care for him, the hospital sent him home.
Because Jimenez has diminished capacity to make decisions, Gaspar was named as his legal guardian. Gaspar appealed a judge's order approving the move. The appellate court later reversed that order, ruling a state court lacks the authority to decide immigration cases. But by then, Jimenez had been released from the Guatemalan hospital and was living with his mother in a one-room home in the mountainous state of Huehuetenango, 12 hours from the Guatemalan capital. There is no road to the house, making it nearly impossible for his mother to get help for him in an emergency.

A South Florida Roman Catholic priest described a visit to Jimenez in an e-mail to The Associated Press: "He was clean, glad of the visit and occasionally made apparently good sense comments," wrote the Rev. Frank O'Laughlin. "It seemed that he was cooperating with his caregiver and would survive, I guessed, until his first pneumonia."

O'Laughlin said he wasn't sure that Jimenez should be returned to "medical care in an alien Florida institution."

But he maintains the lawsuit is important because hospitals should not be allowed to deport people.

He and Larson also say a country that relies on cheap, immigrant labor for everything from agriculture, to clothing to construction, should factor in the cost of catastrophic injuries to those providing these essential services - whether it means requiring employers to offer coverage even for day laborers or ensuring public and nonprofit hospitals can care for them.

Carla Luggiero, a senior associate director for American Hospital Association, stressed that cases such as Jimenez's are rare. Most of the time, hospitals are able to work with the families to find alternative and acceptable care. And most of the time families don't have pro bono lawyers working for them as Jimenez does.

But she also warned the issue is serious, and it is one Congress has yet to address in its health care reform proposals.

"There is absolutely no discussion about it," Luggiero said. And yet, hospitals that receive Medicare reimbursements are required to provide emergency care to all patients and must provide an acceptable discharge plan once the patient is stabilized.

"It's a complicated, huge issue. Without repatriation, the issue of undocumented immigrants is already a hand grenade and so is health care," Larson said. "So together, you're really walking a tightrope."

© 2009 Miami Herald Media Company. All Rights Reserved.http://www.miamiherald.com

Publix Delegation this Thursday, 07-23-09

2009-07-20T12:54:00.000-07:00

We'll be kicking off the Miami-Dade Fair Food Campaign to ask Publix to fight against human rights' violations in Florida this Thursday morning when an interfaith delegation led by the Social & Economic Justice Committee of the National Association of Social Workers joins SFIWJ staff and interns to meet with the manager of a Hialeah Publix. The agricultural fields of South Florida harbor some of the most horrendous worker rights' abuses in modern day history and we hope that Publix will extend its corporate responsibility to human rights responsibility so that fair food is brought to our families' dinner tables.

Want to take a delegation to your local Publix? Just let us know and we'll send you materials & help you locate allies.

Card check and gut check

2009-07-20T11:31:00.000-07:00

Card check and gut check
BY HARDOL MEYERSON
http://www.washpost.com/

If our nation was governed by business's version of democratic choice, we would hold elections to determine the winner, but nearly half the time the incumbent would remain in power even if he lost.

In its campaign to derail the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), business has fearlessly depicted itself as the defender of elections and the secret ballot as well as the foe of the dread ''card check'' -- the process, championed by unions and included within EFCA, that would allow workers to sign union affiliation cards rather than compelling them to go through a ratification election in which harassment and firings of workers are all too common.

But the kind of democratic choice that business favors is choice without consequence -- a position made clear by its opposition to the other key component of EFCA: binding arbitration between company and union if they've been unable to agree on a contract within 120 days of a union winning the election. A study of first-contract negotiations by John-Paul Ferguson and Thomas A. Kochan of MIT's Sloan School of Management makes clear why such arbitration is needed. After surveying 22,000 unionization campaigns between 1999 and 2004, the authors found that even after a majority of workers voted for a union, they actually reached a contractual agreement with management (which is currently under no legal obligation to come to an agreement) only 56 percent of the time.

Heads, management wins. Tails, the employees lose.

It's a lovely system for businesses that don't want to pay higher wages or accord their workers some rights, and they've been fighting hard to keep it that way. They've managed for now to cow some cowable Democratic senators, which is why Iowa Democrat Tom Harkin, who is trying to steer EFCA through the Senate, is negotiating with a number of his colleagues. ''It's a moving target,'' Harkin says.

That it's moving at all is the result of Arlen Specter's hop from Republican to Democratic ranks, which has compelled Specter to look to his left instead of his right to see where his next opponent is coming from. Just as the threat of defeat in next year's Republican primary concentrated Specter's mind and sped him out of the GOP, so the threat of a union-backed opponent in the Democratic primary -- spurred by Democrats' bewilderment and anger at Specter's post-conversion opposition to the president's budget, his cheering on the spectral candidacy of Minnesota Republican Norm Coleman and his opposition to card check -- has prodded Specter to find some middle ground on reforming labor law. (It takes a rare talent to alienate not just the party you're leaving but also the party you're joining, yet Specter's been up to the task.)

Labor, Harkin and his fellow liberals are willing to make changes to EFCA to win the support of their Democratic colleagues, so long as those changes don't perpetuate management's ability to avoid unionization by threatening workers and refusing to negotiate contracts. Accordingly, the scramble is under way for modifications to card check and binding arbitration that still meet labor's goals.

Rather than give the arbitrator the right to impose a contract, some senators, Specter among them, have expressed interest in a form of arbitration used in baseball to settle contract disputes. In a baseball arbitration, the union and management submit their proposed contracts to the arbitrator, who tries to get them to narrow their differences, asks for their final offers and chooses the one he finds more reasonable.

Among the suggested alternatives to card check are proposals to shorten the currently open-ended period between the request for election and the actual vote (today, management can stall a vote almost indefinitely) and to allow workers to vote by mailing their ballots to the National Labor Relations Board in Washington, which (like absentee voting) would preserve the secret ballot but enable workers to escape the regimen of threats they often encounter in the weeks preceding an election.

If, after all the negotiations, Harkin and the unions conclude that the only bill that's enactable in this congressional session is too watered down to protect workers trying to unionize, they would, understandably enough, not want it to go forward. In that case, why don't the Democrats just put the original bill -- card check, binding arbitration and all -- to a vote and see which of their members choose to go on record against protecting those workers? If Specter and his fellow waverers wish to avoid that vote and the wrath it would incur among their onetime union backers, they'd do well to support the alternative provisions that restore Americans' rights in the workplace.

Harold Meyerson is editor-at-large of American Prospect and the L.A. Weekly

Fw: Orlando Sentinel editorial urges TPS for Haitians

2009-03-12T10:22:00.000-07:00

------Original Message------
From: steveforester@aol.com
To: steveforester@aol.com
Subject: Orlando Sentinel editorial urges TPS for Haitians
Sent: Mar 12, 2009 1:10 PM

Editorial, Orlando Sentinel, March 7, 2009 http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/opinion/orl-edped062030609mar06,0,1109482.story We think: Mass deportations of Haitians isn't the answer We think: Mass deportations of Haitians isn't the answer President Obama has a lot on his plate these days. The economy alone is a whopper of a problem that will occupy his agenda for the foreseeable future. But that's no reason for the president to condone the counterproductive deportation of Haitians. Immigrant advocates have long called for the U.S. government to grant temporary protected status to Haitians, which would allow a limited number of refugees to live and work legally in the United States until their storm-battered country stabilizes. What they ask for is nothing more than what refugees from a handful of Central American countries have been granted in the aftermath of natural disasters. But such demands fell on deaf ears during George W. Bush's presidency, despite evidence of inhumane conditions in Haiti, which is still trying to recover from four hurricanes and food shortages. Now what is even more disturbing are the ongoing deportations, which the Bush administration halted in September at the request of the Haitian government, resumed in mid-December and continue under Obama's presidency. Haitian families are being torn asunder as parents are sent back to Haiti, leaving their U.S.-born children behind. This poses all sorts of problems for regions of Florida where social-service agencies, already strained by the faltering economy, must care for the children whose parents have been deported. The Haitian government, meanwhile, has announced that it will continue to stall most deportations until the Obama administration decides whether to grant protected status, which means most of the deportees are being detained at the expense of the U.S. government. Wouldn't it be better to release the parents and let them work to support their families, both here and in Haiti, like most Haitians do when given a chance? The deportations must stop now, and the Obama administration must grant protected status to Haitians. __________ Steven David Forester, 786 877 6999 Stop Deportations Now Institute for Justice & Democracy in Haiti www.HaitiJustice.org A Good Credit Score is 700 or Above. See yours in just 2 easy steps!