Who Has the Right to Vote?

You may have read a recent New York Times article discussing permanent US residents who are being deported for fraudulent voting. The reporter points out that many of these people, including Joseph E. Joseph, who's profiled in the article,weren't aware that they couldn't vote. As a greencard holder, Mr. Joseph saw it as his civic duty to participate in the electoral process. He was registered to vote in Brooklyn, where no one asked him for proof of citizenship or told him it was required. He's voted in every presidential election since 1992.

You may be surprised to know that you didn't always have to be a US citizen in order to vote in the nation's elections. It was not until 1804 that New York required residents to be citizens in order to vote. And from 1776 to 1920, non-citizens voted in local, state, and even national elections in 22 states and federal territories, and held public offices, such as alderman, coroner, and school board member.

New York State’s original constitution of 1777 conferred suffrage rights on “every male inhabitant of full age” who met property qualifications. Between 1700 and 1804, debates over suffrage centered on contentious issues of property and race, not citizenship. The principles embodied by Revolution-era mottos like “no taxation without representation” made non-citizen voting a democratic practice tied to notions of residency.

Why did non-citizens lose the right to vote?

Many citizens came to believe that property-less non-citizens would vote irresponsibly, electing substandard governments that destabilized property rights. The massive influx of immigrants at the turn of the 20th century triggered a wave of nativist sentiment that bolstered the movement to strip non-citizens of voting rights. New York and other States gradually passed laws that required citizenship as a prerequisite for voting.

Today, some immigrant community groups are attempting to obtain the right to vote in local elections for New York City. These groups argue that, although they are not citizens, immigrants pay taxes, send their children to public schools and contribute to society in many other ways. They should therefore be able to take part in governing their own communities.

What do you think? Should non-citizens be granted the right to vote or should citizenship remain a requirement for voting?

It's Immigrant Heritage Week!

Each year, the Mayor's Office of Immigrant Affairs sponsors a week dedicated to recognizing the contributions of immigrants to our City. Different museums, cultural centers, settlement houses, dance companies, and other organizations host free or low-cost events that celebrate New York's vibrant heritage.

The Tenement Museum has been fortunate to be part of this event series since the beginning, and we've hosted a number of programs (most memorable, to me, was Crossing the BLVD).

This year, we're offering a FREE walking tour of the Lower East Side. Come by the Visitors Center & Museum Shop on Wednesday, April 21. The tour leaves at 2:30 PM, and tickets will be distributed starting at 10 AM. (Sorry, we're only able to give them out on the day of the program, and only two per person are allowed. The tour is capped at 25.)

The tour is the newest in the Museum's roster, focusing on the trends that shaped the neighborhood after 1935. So much happened here in the 20th century that we don't get into on our building tours. We'll be able to discuss gentrification and neighborhood change, immigration trends post-1966, how buildings have been changed and reused, and how urban renewal affected the Lower East Side in ways good and bad.

"Next Steps," as the tour is called, has its "soft launch" this month and next on the weekends (Saturday/Sunday at 2:30 PM), and by summer we'll be offering it daily, so feel free to come by another time if you can't make it during Immigrant Heritage Week. We also offer walking tours for private groups of 15 or more, which is a great option if you're looking for a discounted price and a personalized experience.

I'd be remiss if I didn't mention some of the other IHW events happening in the neighborhood.

• The Educational Alliance has a concert for kids featuring music from around the world. (All week)
  
• The Museum at Eldridge Street has a family scavenger hunt they're giving away if you stop by. (All week)
  
• The Museum of the Chinese in America is offering a walking tour of Chinatown. (All week, 10:30 AM)
  
• American Immigration Lawyers Association hosts a citizenship workshop for green card holders at PS 2, 122 Henry Street. (4/17, 11 AM - 3 PM)
  
• CSV Center has two plays and a film screening - a Loisaida Romeo & Juliet; a retelling of the food riots of 1917; and a documentary about those who've stayed behind while family members immigrate to the United States. (Various dates)
  
• Seward Park Library hosts the play Two Friends: Dos Amigos. (4/19, 6:30 - 7:30 PM)
  
• Italian American Museum hosts a lecture on the support Italian immigrants gave to the people of Sicily after a 1908 earthquake. (4/21, 6:30 - 7:30 PM)
  
• And last but not least, Immigrant Social Services has a photography project titled, "The Joys and Anguishes of Immigrants in the Lower East Side / Chinatown Community." (4/21, 4:00 - 6:00 PM)

We hope you'll make it out to one or more events over the next seven days and honor all those who have made, and are making their way, in New York City.

- posted by kate

More from around the web

Immigration reporter Nina Bernstein on WNYC’s Leonard Lopate show, discussing deaths in immigrant detention centers.
[WNYC]

The Museum of the American Gangster has opened on St. Mark’s! Visit during the soft launch in March and receive $10 admission.
[moagnyc.org]

The students at Cooperstown Graduate Program continue their interesting discussion on immigration.
[CRG@CGP]

Corner of Houston and Ludlow in the 1970s, where the gym and Duane Reade are now.
[Flickr]

See some other old pics of the corner, back when it housed Bunnies, a kids' store.
[Bowery Boogie]

The Irish American Heritage Center in Chicago has genealogy classes, poetry readings, and a pub.
[Irish American Heritage Center]

News from around the web

“We are more than just objects and artifacts. We’re the sum of our stories. Our museum is about making the walls talk.”
[The National Public Housing Museum’s founder on Lemons to Llamas blog]

“When asked that question - What are you? - Americans typically answer with their heritage. Why is that?”
[CRG@CGP]

“Few who pine for the pushcart days have noted that change is nothing new for the Lower East Side.”
[TM Education Associate Sarah Litvin for The Jewish Week]

Friday Immigration News

Home-schoolers win asylum in U.S.
(Washington Times, 1/28/10)
A U.S. immigration judge's decision to grant political asylum to a German family with "a well-founded fear of persecution" for home-schooling their children should send a powerful message to the German government to change its stance on home schooling, the family's attorney said Wednesday.

Haitians gain Temporary Protected Status
(Caribbean Life, 1/27/10)
Haitian nationals already in the United States when the devastating January 12 eathquakestruck at home became eligible for Temporary Protected Status, under an order signed by the Secretary of Homeland Security which took effect on January 21. Andrea Quarantillo, New York district director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) said the order will remain in effect through July 22, 2011.

NY pastor sentenced for scamming immigrants
(Associated Press via WCAX, 1/26/10)
The pastor of a New York City storefront church is going to jail for scamming more than 100 immigrants by promising to get them U.S. visas and legal status. Queens District Attorney Richard Brown says 57-year-old Gregorio Gonzalez, of Mamaroneck (muh-MAHR'-uh-nek), N.Y., was sentenced Tuesday to two to six years in prison. He pleaded guilty to grand larceny earlier this month.

Friday Immigration News

Angel Island's history offers lessons on immigration policy (Opinion)
(Los Angeles Times, 1/21/10)
One hundred years ago today, the Angel Island Immigration Station in San Francisco Bay opened its doors. From 1910 to 1940, the "Ellis Island of the West" was the gateway into America for more than half a million immigrants from 80 countries, all seeking the opportunity, freedom and fortune of the American dream. But, built to enforce laws that specifically excluded Chinese and other Asian immigrants from the country, the Angel Island Immigration Station turned away countless newcomers and deported thousands of U.S. residents who were considered risks to the nation or had entered the country with fraudulent papers. For those who were denied entry because of race and class-biased exclusion laws, Angel Island showed America at its worst as a gate-keeping nation.

Secrets of the Immigration Jails (Opinion)
(New York Times, 1/20/10)
Americans have long known that the government has been running secretive immigration prisons into which detainees have frequently disappeared, their grave illnesses and injuries untreated, their fates undisclosed until well after early and unnecessary deaths. What we did not know, until a recent article in The Times by Nina Bernstein, was how strenuously the government has tried to cover up those failings — keeping relatives and lawyers in the dark, deflecting blame, fighting rigorous quality standards, outside oversight and transparency. These deficiencies endure today.

The Catholic case for immigration reform
(EnterStageRight.com, 1/18/10)
Servant of God, Bishop Fulton Sheen, once said, "There are not more than 100 people in the world who truly hate the Catholic Church, but there are millions who hate what they perceive to be the Catholic Church." Sadly, Bishop Sheen's statement applies not only to those outside the Church, but to millions who are baptized Catholics. A case in point is the response to an initiative by the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops calling for a "humane and comprehensive solution to the problems which beset our immigration system."

1 killed, 5 injured as suspected smuggling boat capsizes
(Los Angeles Times, 1/17/10)
A boat packed with suspected illegal immigrants capsized early Saturday in the surf off a state beach in San Diego, leaving one migrant dead and triggering a search-and-rescue effort that lasted throughout the day, authorities said. The incident illustrates an uptick in maritime smuggling along the U.S.-Mexico border as smugglers respond to a buildup of forces and barriers at the land boundary separating San Diego from Baja California.

Thousands protest sheriff's immigration efforts
(Washington Post via Associated Press, 1/17/10)
Thousands of immigrant rights advocates marched in front of a county jail in Phoenix Saturday in a protest that was aimed at Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio's immigration efforts and was marked by a clash between a small group of protesters and police officers. Organizers say the protest was meant to show officials in Washington that Arpaio shouldn't handle immigration enforcement, and that Congress and the Obama administration need to come up with a way for immigrant workers to come to the country legally.


Schumer Seeks to Keep Immigration Detention Site in Manhattan Open
(New York Times, 1/15/10)
Senator Charles E. Schumer is urging federal officials not to close immigration detention operations at the Varick Federal Detention Facility in Manhattan, saying that their decision to transfer its roughly 300 detainees to a county jail in New Jersey “will represent a crushing blow to the due process rights of immigrants detained within the New York metropolitan area.”

Friday Immigration News

Loew's Canal Street Theater May Become Chinatown Cultural Center
(DNAinfo.com, 1/15/10)
On summer weekends, Rebecca Lepkoff remembers holding 15 cents in her hand and lining up to get into the Loew's Canal Street Theater to escape the heat of her Hester Street tenement. It was 1928, and she was just 12 years old. The enormous movie theater on Canal Street near Ludlow was the center of the neighborhood.

"It was a lovely theater. It was a beautiful theater," Lepkoff, now 93, told DNAinfo. "It was very roomy." Today, the decrepit theater, which closed down nearly four decades ago, is a warehouse. But it may get a new life — as a Chinese performing arts center — and once again become the center of an old neighborhood, now largely dominated by Chinese immigrants.

Special status will halt deportations from U.S.
(USA Today, 1/14/10)
Lawmakers and immigration groups are calling on the Obama administration to grant Haitians in the USA, including those here illegally, a special temporary legal status that would protect them from deportation and allow them to take jobs. That would be a step beyond what the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has announced: a halt in deportations "for the time being." About 30,000 Haitians now in the USA had been ordered deported.

Immigration reform advocates see inspiration in work of MLK, honored at naturalization events
(Los Angeles Times, 1/14/10)
After almost nine years, Nigerian immigrant Emakoji Ayikoye is now an American. The final step came at a naturalization ceremony, where he and about 100 others recited the citizenship oath. But Thursday's ceremony was weighted with more symbolism than usual for the 32-year-old college math teacher. It was one of several being held nationwide in honor of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. Another, on Friday in Atlanta, will feature a speech from his daughter Bernice King.

Honoring the slain civil rights leader via a naturalization ceremony makes perfect sense to Ayikoye. And around the country, immigration reform advocates also are connecting their efforts to the work of King and the civil rights movement, looking for inspiration and a way to gain support in hopes of passing legislation in 2010.

Makeshift Homes Are Leveled in Suffolk County
(1/13/10, New York Times)
Up to 30 men had called these woods home until Monday morning, when the owners of the 26.6-acre property had the men’s tents torn apart. Skinny tree branches, which the men had used as posts for their plastic tarps, were now strewn about. Some of the men, most of them illegal immigrants, had lived in the clearing for years. Its location, even in winter, was a natural: a quick-enough walk from a trailer that serves as a hiring center for day laborers, supported by the town of Huntington, in Suffolk County. But as of late, it had been a futile trip.

Weekly Immigration News

Relatives Say Photos Depict Ellis Island’s First Immigrant
(New York Times, December 28, 2009)
For more than a century, she was lost to history. Three years ago, she was rediscovered. As it turned out, the first immigrant to set foot on Ellis Island when it opened on Jan. 1, 1892, an Irish girl named Annie Moore, did not go west and die in Texas, as had long been believed, but spent her days as a poor immigrant on the Lower East Side, dying in 1924. Now, relatives have found two photographs of the woman they believe is the real Annie Moore.

Repeal of Nebraska Tuition Bill Draws Support
(ABC News, December 28, 2009)
Nebraska lawmakers are set to again consider repealing a law that offers tuition breaks to some illegal immigrants, and the looming debate is already drawing support. A majority of lawmakers participating in an Associated Press pre-session survey say they support rescinding the offer made after lawmakers fought to override Gov. Dave Heineman's veto to pass the law in 2006.

Book review of From Every End of This Earth by Steven Roberts
(Washington Post, December 27, 2009)
Steven V. Roberts begins his new book, From Every End of This Earth, by describing Bao and Tuyen Pham's escape from Vietnam following the fall of Saigon. The Phams are one of 13 families Roberts profiles in this homage to the "sacrifice generation" and the children for which they make that sacrifice. His goal, he says, is not to "capture the entirety" of the immigrant experience, but to write a book that explores the parts and "resembles the mosaics I used to see in the ruins of ancient Greece," where he was based for a time as a reporter for the New York Times.

Decision to let ferry widow stay a 'Christmas blessing,' McMahon says
(Staten Island Advance, December 23, 2009)
Hailing it as a “Christmas blessing,” Rep. Michael McMahon today applauded the government’s decision to grant permanent residency to a Jamaican immigrant whose husband died in the 2003 Staten Island Ferry crash. The government yesterday overturned the deportation of former Elm Park resident Osserritta Robinson. Mrs. Robinson and Louis Robinson had been married for eight months when he was killed in the crash of the ferryboat Andrew J. Barberi.

Weekly Immigration News

African immigrant seeks alliance with Chicago's Mexicans
(Chicago Tribune, 12/6/09)
A few months after arriving from Sierra Leone, Alie Kabba learned the dynamics of Chicago immigrant life when he found a pickup soccer game near his Rogers Park apartment. All of the players were Mexicans.

"I didn't have enough for my own team," he recalled. "They had the numbers."

Now head of the United African Organization, Kabba is pursuing an intriguing and complicated experiment: to see whether Africans can forge a political alliance with the Mexicans, who make up the largest share of immigrants in Chicago.


Census Finds Rise in Foreign Workers
(New York Times, 12/7/09)
Nearly one in six American workers is foreign-born, the highest proportion since the 1920s, according to a census analysis released Monday.

Because of government barriers to immigration, the share of foreign-born workers dipped from a 20th-century high of 21 percent in 1910 to barely 5 percent in 1970, but has been rising since then, to the current 16 percent.


Population shifts could boost Calif, NY in census
(Associated Press, 12/9/09)
A steady flow of new immigrants is providing a late-decade population boost to major metropolitan areas such as Chicago, Miami, New York and Los Angeles, whose states are seeking to stem declines before the 2010 census.

Even with a recent dip in immigration, the addition of foreign migrants into those major cities most attractive to them has cushioned substantial population losses from native-born Americans who had migrated to interior parts of the U.S. in search of jobs, wider spaces and affordable housing before the recession.

Weekly Immigration News

Visit to Ellis, Liberty islands brings immigration experience to life
(Ft. Worth Star-Telegram, 12/3/09)
More than a decade ago, I began tracing my family roots, a pastime that has grown so popular in the United States that the country now has more than 250,000 genealogical societies. After years of poring over vital records, collecting family photos and documenting relatives’ stories, I knew it wasn’t enough. I still felt disconnected.
That’s what makes the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island so invaluable as historical monuments. They stand not only as testaments to the country’s past but also as a piece of family history for millions of Americans. They offer us a chance to walk in the footsteps of our ancestors.


Immigrant Detention Doubles Since 1999
(The Washington Independent, 12/2/09)

The number of immigrants in detention in the United States has more than doubled since 1999, according to a new report from a government data research organization released Wednesday. The report, based primarily on information obtained through the Freedom of Information Act from the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, also finds that ICE has increasingly transferred detainees more often and to facilities farther from where they were apprehended, disrupting contact with family members and attorneys attempting to represent them in their deportation cases.

Editorial: The boon of immigration: Newcomers to America more than pull their economic weight
(New York Daily News, 11/30/09)
The need for combining secure borders with a rational policy for admitting newcomers is as pressing today as it was when the last attempted remake went down in flames under President George W. Bush, victim largely of the myth that immigration is a drain on the economy and a threat to native-born workers.

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.

Weekly Immigration News

 New resting place for mass grave immigrants in New York
(Irish Times, October 19, 2009)
IN THE mid-19th century, newly arrived Irish immigrants wandered Staten Island, penniless and disoriented, scrounging for food, waiting for children, spouses, siblings or parents interned in the quarantine hospital to die or be discharged. They were remembered here this weekend, at a moving ceremony that united those who left Ireland and those who stayed, forever linked by what Edward Cardinal Egan called “the immense suffering” of the emigrants.

In Chinatown, Sound of the Future Is Mandarin
(New York Times, October 21, 2009)
He grew up playing in the narrow, crowded streets of Manhattan’s Chinatown. He has lived and worked there for all his 61 years. But as Wee Wong walks the neighborhood these days, he cannot understand half the Chinese conversations he hears.Cantonese, a dialect from southern China that has dominated the Chinatowns of North America for decades, is being rapidly swept aside by Mandarin, the national language of China and the lingua franca of most of the latest Chinese immigrants.

(Belated) Weekly Immigration News

Immigrants embrace Southern living
(Charlotte Observer, 9/20/09)
Carola Cárdenas left her native Venezuela twice to live in the United States. Both times she moved to cities that have long attracted large numbers of immigrants, first to Los Angeles, then New York. But after four years living in the shadow of Manhattan in nearby New Jersey, Cárdenas, 36, and her husband decided to plant some roots elsewhere. They chose Charlotte - far away from any traditional immigrant gateway.


Bhutan Refugees Find a Toehold in the Bronx
(New York Times, 9/24/09)
Nearly every immigrant group in New York City has a neighborhood, or at least a street, to call its own. But for refugees from the tiny South Asian nation of Bhutan, the closest thing to a home base is a single building in the Bronx — a red-brick five-story walk-up, with a weed-choked front courtyard and grimy staircases.

Constitution center sponsors teen video debate on immigration
(Philadelphia Inquirer, 9/26/09)
Alternating between giddiness and focused attention, a cross-section of American youth debated immigration reform yesterday in an innovative videoconference centered in Philadelphia and sponsored by the National Constitution Center. Challenged by the prompt, "Should the United States reduce immigration?" the selected students from several high schools in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, New York, and California were linked via closed-circuit TV and watched one another on large, subdivided video monitors.

Latinos bank on bilingual census form to aid count
(Assocaited Press, 9/28/09)
For the first time, the decennial census will be distributed in the two languages to 13.5 million households in predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. Latino advocates hope the forms will lead to a more accurate count by winning over the trust of immigrants who are often wary of government and may be even more fearful after the recent surge in immigration raids and deportations.

Weekly Immigration News

New S.F. high school nurtures immigrant youth
(San Francisco Chronicle, September 14, 2009)
Educating recent immigrants is one of the hardest jobs in the public school system. They often lag academically behind their American peers and don't have a grasp of English. "These kids have a triple job: They have to learn English; they have to learn (high school) content; they have to learn a new culture," said the network's executive director, Claire Sylvan. The success "comes from very hard work," she said.

Ask About the Gentrification of Chinatown
(New York Times "City Room" blog, September 14, 2009)
This week, Peter Kwong, a Hunter College professor and author of several books on Chinatown, is responding to readers’ questions about the decline of New York’s Chinatown as a viable living, working and shopping area for new immigrants because of job loss and gentrification since the late 1990s.

Weekly Immigration News

Undocumented Immigrants and the Health Care Debate
(New York Times "Perscriptions" blog, September 10, 2009)
The health care legislation is still being developed, and many of the details could change, so it is impossible to know at this point exactly how immigrants (both those here legally and those without papers) will fare if a health care overhaul is achieved.

As detention center shuts down in Texas, advocates worry about future for immigrant families
(Associated Press, September 9, 2009)
While advocates hail the Obama administration's announcement this month to stop sending men, women and children to the much disparaged Hutto facility, they also wonder how the government will decide which families to detain, when to release them, how they will be transported and whether they'll fare better elsewhere.

Literacy tutor of the year can empathize with her students
(The Island Packet / Beaufort Gazette, September 8, 2009)
When Susan Boyd began looking for place where volunteering would make the biggest difference, she chose Literacy Volunteers of the Lowcountry, an organization that works to teach Beaufort County, South Carolina adults how to read, write, speak English. Boyd was recently recognized as Tutor of the Year, and she thinks her status as daughter of immigrants helps her understand her students and be a better teacher. "My parents met in a class learning how to speak English," Boyd said. "My father did not speak French and my mother did not speak German, so their only common language was English." Boyd said she empathizes with those learning a new language because she's tried to learn Latin, French, German and Spanish and can't speak any of them.

Indian Americans Thriving In Connecticut
(Chicago Tribune via Hartford Courant, August 22, 2009)
The typical immigrant story in Connecticut starts with empty pockets and high hopes, segues into years on a factory floor, a rise to the propertied class and a better life for the second generation. Indian Americans, among the state's latest arrivals, have changed that story. Starting in the 1960s, they came already equipped with college degrees and the ability to speak English. In a relatively short time, these South Asians leap-frogged the struggles of their European counterparts, establishing themselves in the middle and upper reaches of the socioeconomic spectrum.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum takes no opinion on these articles but rather encourages open dialogue on topics surrounding immigration.

This Week's Immigration News

American Apparel to dismiss 1,500 factory workers
(Los Angeles Times, September 3, 2009)
The employees couldn't prove their immigration status or had problems with their employment records, says the Los Angeles clothing manufacturer and retailer.


Report: Anti-Immigrant Climate Fueling Violence Against Latinos in N.Y. County
(Southern Poverty Law Center, September 2, 2009)
A new report by the Southern Poverty Law Center — Climate of Fear: Latino Immigrants in Suffolk County, N.Y. — documents racially motivated violence against Latinos in the community. SPLC researchers spent months interviewing Latino immigrants, local religious leaders and small business owners for the report.


LoHud Malayalees celebrate the harvest festival, Onam
(LoHud.com, September 2, 2009)
Malayalees in India celebrate Onam over 10 days with family gatherings, traditional dances, new clothes, processions, games, feasts, and colorful snake boat races. The Malayalee diaspora, which includes several thousand living in the Lower Hudson Valley, celebrate it with just as much enthusiasm.


Massachusetts Cuts Back Immigrants’ Health Care
(New York Times, August 31, 2009)
State-subsidized health insurance for 31,000 legal immigrants here will no longer cover dental, hospice or skilled-nursing care under a scaled-back plan that Gov. Deval Patrick announced Monday.

The Lower East Side Tenement Museum takes no opinion on these articles but rather encourages open dialogue on topics surrounding immigration.

This Week's Immigration News

Answers About Immigrants & Housing (New York Times City Room blog)
Emily Rosenbaum, professor of sociology at Fordham University and co-author of The Housing Divide: How Generations of Immigrants Fare in New York’s Housing Market, responds to readers’ questions about how race influences immigrants’ housing options, and what this may mean for the future prospects of some immigrant groups.

Hurdles Shown in Detention Reform (New York Times)
The case of Felix Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, an unauthorized immigrant from Ecuador who died in a immigration detention center in early 2007, illustrates some of the challenges of detention reform. Mr. Rodriguez was detained in a private immigration jail, a part of the Corrections Corporation of America, where he failed to receive adequate treatment for testicular cancer. Though the Obama administration wants to increase oversight of these prisons, some have said that legal consequences - not just oversight - are necessary to improve prison conditions. Mr. Rodriguez was among several detainees whose deaths spurred inquiries about detainee welfare.

Immigration Judge Clears Egyptian Student Previously Acquitted in Terrorism Case (New York Times)
Youssef Megahed, a former engineering student from Egypt and a legal resident of the United States, was acquitted on terrorism-related charges by a federal immigration judge last Friday. The government intends to appeal the decision. Mr. Megahed was scrutinized for his relationship with Ahmed Mohamed, who pleaded guilty to providing support for terrorists by posting a YouTube video showing how to convert a remote-controlled toy into a bomb. The two were arrested on explosives charges on a road trip in 2007 after the police found model rocket propellants in the car’s trunk. However, Mr. Megahed's lawyer argued that the case was an effort to prove guilt by association.

Stranded vagabond from U.S. can't prove citizenship (Seattle Times)
Michael Koch is not what most people think of as a typical undocumented immigrant. Born in the United States, he lived illegally in Canada for 20 years, before being deported in fall 2008 for an old DUI conviction. Now, Koch finds himself unable to prove that he is an American because he has no identification. Koch, who is described as an eccentric hippie, says, "I'm what you might call an undocumented American...Or maybe you can call me a CanAmerican. Whatever."

-Posted by Penny King