Flu Prevention Outreach Includes Immigrants: The California Report | The California Report
Posted using ShareThis
Thursday, October 22, 2009
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
San Francisco Alters When Police Must Report Immigrants
SAN FRANCISCO — The San Francisco board of supervisors voted Tuesday to overturn a city policy that has been at the center of a national debate over offering illegal immigrants sanctuary.
The policy, ordered by Mayor Gavin Newsom last summer, requires the police to contact Immigration and Customs Enforcement whenever they arrest a juvenile on felony charges who they suspect is in the United States illegally. Since the policy took effect last summer, more than 100 undocumented minors have been turned over to federal immigration authorities.
Mr. Newsom has said the ordinance is necessary to prevent young criminals from using the city’s so-called sanctuary policy, which prevents the use of city money for immigration enforcement.
“Sanctuary city was never designed to protect people who commit crimes,” said Nathan Ballard, a spokesman for Mr. Newsom.
But under the changes approved Tuesday, referrals would be required only after juveniles were convicted of crimes, instead of after their arrest. Immigration advocates say that referrals upon arrest have resulted in the deportation of innocent youths, the breakup of families and a fear among immigrants of contacting the police when they are the victims of crime.
“We recognize that there’s a need to do some reporting” of illegal juveniles, said David Campos, the supervisor who sponsored the new ordinance. “But we’re trying to strike a balance.”
Tuesday’s meeting was filled to capacity, with hundreds of supporters of Mr. Campos’s bill filling the board’s chambers and two overflow rooms. Simultaneous translation of supervisors’ comments were offered in Mandarin and Spanish, and when the bill was passed, by 8 to 2 with one absentee, cheers erupted in the chambers, with chants of “Yes We Can” in English and Spanish echoing through the ornate City Hall.
Supporters continued chanting as they filed out past a bust of Harvey Milk, the trailblazing San Francisco supervisor and gay rights advocate whose name was invoked by supporters of Mr. Campos’s bill.
The vote was a sharp rebuke to Mr. Newsom, a Democrat who is running for governor and who has promised to veto it, though supporters seem to have enough votes to overturn that.
San Francisco adopted its sanctuary policy in 1989, and has long refused to refer minors in police custody to the federal authorities, although adults accused of felonies have always been referred. Some of these minors were later flown to their home countries at taxpayer expense rather than being turned over to immigration authorities. Mr. Newsom learned of those flights last May and ordered them stopped.
Mr. Newsom’s policy was also a response to a series of embarrassing revelations in The San Francisco Chronicle, including that the city, rather than turning a group of young Honduran crack dealers over to ICE, sent them to a group home in Southern California, from which they walked away.
The city was also shocked by a June 2008 triple murder, which prosecutors say was committed by Edwin Ramos, a suspected gang member and an illegal immigrant from El Salvador who had been picked up as a juvenile by the San Francisco police but not referred to immigration authorities.
The fate of the sanctuary policy may well be decided in court.
An August memorandum from the office of the city attorney, Dennis Herrera, to Mr. Newsom said that while federal and state law concerning sanctuary cities was “not settled,” the ordinance that passed Tuesday could also “adversely affect” the city’s position in several pending cases concerning its sanctuary policy, including a criminal investigation by the United States attorney’s office in San Francisco.
Mr. Ballard, Mr. Newsom’s spokesman, echoed this, saying the supervisors’ vote, which will be formalized at a final reading of the bill next week, could invite a federal legal challenge to the entire sanctuary city policy.
“The supervisors did a foolish thing today by passing this bill that moves one step closer to imperiling the entire sanctuary city ordinance,” Mr. Ballard said.
But Mr. Campos, the supervisor and a naturalized citizen who emigrated — illegally — from his native Guatemala when he was 14, said the vote to change Mr. Newsom’s policy was necessary to maintain the city’s reputation as a safe haven for illegal residents.
“We went from being one of the most enlightened cities,” Mr. Campos said, “to be a place many steps backward to where the rest of the country is.”_ http://tiny.cc/ggNGn
Tuesday, October 20, 2009
Senate Measure Gives Rights to Widows of Citizens
By KIRK SEMPLE
The Senate approved a measure on Tuesday that would end what has become known as the “widow penalty” — the government’s practice of annulling foreigners’ applications for permanent residency when their American spouses die before the marriage is two years old.
The measure, which passed 79-19, was contained in a conference report that accompanied an appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security. The House of Representatives passed the conference report last week. President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.
While the foreign spouse of a United States citizen may be eligible for residency under American law, the government has argued that the spouse’s death before the two-year mark ends the marriage, canceling the foreigner’s right to be considered for residency and opening the door to deportation.
The new provision does not directly address the government’s definition of marriage, but it allows foreigners married to Americans for less than two years to submit their own petition for residency within two years of the spouse’s death, as long as they have not remarried and can prove a good-faith marriage.
The law is also retroactive; any immigrant whose citizen spouse died less than two years after they wed, no matter how long ago, would have two years from the law’s enactment to petition for residency.
Lawyers and other advocates who have been lobbying for years to abolish the government’s two-year marriage requirement celebrated the vote.
“I feel an indescribable calm right now; it’s a little unreal,” said Brent Renison, a lawyer in Portland, Ore., and the pro bono counsel for Surviving Spouses Against Deportation, a nonprofit advocacy group. “It rights an injustice that has sorely needed to be corrected for a long time.”
The measure would provide relief to a few hundred aggrieved immigrants who entered the country legally, followed the rules and have been subject to deportation because their spouses died, Mr. Renison said.
Among them is Osserritta Robinson, a Jamaican immigrant whose husband of eight months died in the Staten Island ferry crash on Oct. 15, 2003. Her application for residency was tossed out because of the death, so she sued the Department of Homeland Security. The case has wound its way through the court system, and last summer, her lawyer filed an appeal with the United States Supreme Court.
The bill approved Tuesday would appear to moot Ms. Robinson’s case, along with about a dozen similar court cases around the country that are challenging the widow penalty.
Ms. Robinson’s lawyer, Jeffrey Feinbloom, said Tuesday that it remained unclear exactly how his client’s case would be resolved, though a settlement “in some capacity” seemed likely.
“The good news is that one way or another, Osserritta should be able to legalize her status,” he said.
The measure was championed by four Democratic senators: Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, Bill Nelson of Florida and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont.
http://tiny.cc/okp8g
The Senate approved a measure on Tuesday that would end what has become known as the “widow penalty” — the government’s practice of annulling foreigners’ applications for permanent residency when their American spouses die before the marriage is two years old.
The measure, which passed 79-19, was contained in a conference report that accompanied an appropriations bill for the Department of Homeland Security. The House of Representatives passed the conference report last week. President Obama is expected to sign the bill into law.
While the foreign spouse of a United States citizen may be eligible for residency under American law, the government has argued that the spouse’s death before the two-year mark ends the marriage, canceling the foreigner’s right to be considered for residency and opening the door to deportation.
The new provision does not directly address the government’s definition of marriage, but it allows foreigners married to Americans for less than two years to submit their own petition for residency within two years of the spouse’s death, as long as they have not remarried and can prove a good-faith marriage.
The law is also retroactive; any immigrant whose citizen spouse died less than two years after they wed, no matter how long ago, would have two years from the law’s enactment to petition for residency.
Lawyers and other advocates who have been lobbying for years to abolish the government’s two-year marriage requirement celebrated the vote.
“I feel an indescribable calm right now; it’s a little unreal,” said Brent Renison, a lawyer in Portland, Ore., and the pro bono counsel for Surviving Spouses Against Deportation, a nonprofit advocacy group. “It rights an injustice that has sorely needed to be corrected for a long time.”
The measure would provide relief to a few hundred aggrieved immigrants who entered the country legally, followed the rules and have been subject to deportation because their spouses died, Mr. Renison said.
Among them is Osserritta Robinson, a Jamaican immigrant whose husband of eight months died in the Staten Island ferry crash on Oct. 15, 2003. Her application for residency was tossed out because of the death, so she sued the Department of Homeland Security. The case has wound its way through the court system, and last summer, her lawyer filed an appeal with the United States Supreme Court.
The bill approved Tuesday would appear to moot Ms. Robinson’s case, along with about a dozen similar court cases around the country that are challenging the widow penalty.
Ms. Robinson’s lawyer, Jeffrey Feinbloom, said Tuesday that it remained unclear exactly how his client’s case would be resolved, though a settlement “in some capacity” seemed likely.
“The good news is that one way or another, Osserritta should be able to legalize her status,” he said.
The measure was championed by four Democratic senators: Robert Menendez of New Jersey, Kirsten E. Gillibrand of New York, Bill Nelson of Florida and Patrick J. Leahy of Vermont.
http://tiny.cc/okp8g
Immigrant Scientists Create Jobs and Win Nobels
It's crazy to drive away talented young scholars.
By Susan Hockfield
Of the nine people who shared this year's Nobel Prizes in chemistry, physics and medicine, eight are American citizens, a testament to this country's support for pioneering research. But those numbers disguise a more important story. Four of the American winners were born outside of the United States and only came here as graduate or post-doctoral students or as scientists. They came because our system of higher education and advanced research has been a magnet for creative talent.
Unfortunately, we cannot count on that magnetism to last. Culturally, we remain a very open society. But that openness stands in sharp contrast to arcane U.S. immigration policies that discourage young scholars from settling in the U.S.
Those policies come at a high price. Graduate and postgraduate student immigrants are essential to creating new, well-paid jobs in our economy. Of the 35 young innovators recognized this year by Technology Review magazine for their exceptional new ideas, only six went to high school in the United States. From MIT alone, foreign graduates have founded an estimated 2,340 active U.S. companies that employ over 100,000 people.
Amazingly, if as incoming students they had told U.S. immigration authorities that they hoped to stay on as entrepreneurs after graduation, they would have been turned back at the border. Our immigration laws specifically require that students return to their home countries after earning their degrees and then apply for a visa if they want to return and work in the U.S. It would be hard to invent a policy more counterproductive to our national interest.
If the U.S. was the only country in the world that offered scholars scientific freedom, a cumbersome immigration process might not be that harmful. But the world today is teeming with well-funded opportunities to do first-class science. To be competitive, the U.S. needs to send the unmistakable message that we want scholars to stay.
To do that we need the kind of broad new immigration policy that would allow foreign students who earn advanced degrees in science, technology, engineering and math to easily become legal permanent residents. President Barack Obama and many others are already calling for such a policy.
We also need to aggressively develop more homegrown talent. A recent report from the Organization of Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) shows that we have lost our lead in education. In the 1960s, the U.S. had the highest high-school completion rate in the developed world; by 2005, we ranked 21st. In college completion, as recently as 1995 we ranked second. In 2005, we ranked 15th.
The OECD's report explains that we slipped in the rankings "not because U.S. college graduation rates declined, but because they rose so much faster" elsewhere. The U.S. now trails more than 16 nations in Europe and Asia in the proportion of 24-year-olds with bachelor's degrees in the natural sciences and engineering.
What we need is not just college graduates. We also need Ph.D.s in the sciences. Unfortunately, in the fields that spawn world-changing research and innovation, American graduate output has stagnated. From 1989 to 2003, despite a growing population, the number of American science and engineering Ph.D.s remained constant: an average of 26,600 a year. Over the same period and in the same fields, Ph.D.s awarded in China shot up to 12,000 from just 1,000.
In education, the world is accelerating while we are standing still, which is why Mr. Obama is pressing to revive our Sputnik-era commitment to science and math education.
Today, discovery and innovation increasingly spring from a creative network of the finest talent everywhere across the globe. From new advances in medicine to scientific breakthroughs that spawn new industries and sustainable jobs, the work of science and engineering is being done by individuals who can live almost anywhere.
To be part of that global creative network we must inspire more young Americans to pursue scientific careers, and we must rapidly reform U.S. immigration policies that drive away talented young scholars who would otherwise decide to live, work and innovate here. We should be proud of our Nobel Prize winners. But we should also craft policies that make it more likely that future Nobel laureates will do their work inside the U.S.
Ms. Hockfield is president of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Monday, October 19, 2009
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)