Friday Immigration News (plus Housing & Health)

Puerto Ricans in New York Face Persistent Struggles
(WNYC, November 20, 2009) Puerto Rican leaders have made lots of news this year – from Sonia Sotomayor’s rise to the Supreme Court, to the so-called ‘three amigos’ who took power in the New York legislature. While New York’s most visible Latino leaders are Puerto Rican…some researchers are trying to call attention to a less visible reality: that almost a third of Puerto Ricans are living below the poverty line, compared to less than a fifth of all New Yorkers. And in educational and professional achievement, New York’s Puerto Ricans are doing worse than Latinos as a whole. WNYC’s Marianne McCune reports.

U.S. DHS Head Insists Immigration Reform Is Key
(Carib World News, Nov. 20, 2009)
"The need for immigration reform is so clear," insists the US Homeland Security Chief, Janet Napolitano. In remarks this week to the Center for American Progress, Napolitano insisted that President Obama is committed to this issue and "the administration does not shy away from taking on the big challenges of the 21st century, challenges that have been ignored too long and hurt our families and businesses."

Exhibit documents immigrants’ stories
(The Galviston County Daily News, Nov. 20, 2009)
The traveling exhibit Forgotten Gateway chronicles the Port of Galveston, Texas’s largely forgotten history as a major gateway to American immigration from 1845 to 1924. Forgotten Gateway builds on a growing scholarly and public interest in the history of migration patterns to America and Galveston’s place as one of the nation’s top immigrant ports in that history.

Immigration Reform: The Phone Call Heard Around the Country
(New American Media, Nov. 19, 2009) Organizers described them as immigration reform "house parties." Across the country last night, in churches, schools, immigrant support centers and private homes, backers of immigration reform gathered around telephones (the speaker phone turning the device into a de-facto radio) as Hispanic U.S. legislators laid out the strategy for pushing a reform of the immigration system in 2010.

Fire Reveals Illegal Homes Hide in Plain Sight
(New York Times, Nov. 19, 2009)
For at least two years before a fire killed three men in an illegally divided house next door, Diane Ross and her family lived in an illegal apartment at 42-38 65th Street in Woodside, Queens. Their life there — in a basement divided into one apartment and four single-room units, with six others upstairs, all crammed into a two-family house — seemed to them to be business as usual, and attracted no special notice. Neither the tenants nor their landlord, who said he charged $107 a month for each room, tried to hide it.

Sir John Crofton, Pioneer in TB Cure, Dies at 97
(New York Times, Nov. 19, 2009)
Sir John Crofton, a pioneering clinician who demonstrated that antibiotics could be safely combined to cure tuberculosis, a dread disease that once killed half the people who contracted it, died on Nov. 3 at his home in Edinburgh. He was 97.