Integration
New Census Data Underscores Growing Entrepreneurial Power of Latinos
New data released this week by the U.S. Census Bureau highlights the rapidly growing economic power of Latino-owned businesses in the United States. According to the Bureau’s 2007 Survey of Business Owners, there were 2.3 million Latino-owned businesses in the country as of 2007, which generated $345.2 billion in sales and employed 1.9 million people. Moreover, the number of Latino-owned businesses grew by 43.7 percent between 2002 and 2007, which was more than twice the national average. In other words, the Latino community tends to be highly entrepreneurial, and the businesses which Latinos create sustain large numbers of jobs. Read More
Congressional Leaders Announce Forthcoming Immigration Bill, Support for DREAM and a White House Meeting
At a forum today in Washington, D.C., faith, civic, community and Congressional leaders gathered to rally the immigration reform faithful, endorse Sen. Reid’s (D-NV) DREAM Act amendment, announce the introduction of a forthcoming immigration overhaul bill in the U.S. Senate and a meeting with President Obama this week on immigration. Senator Robert Menendez (D-NJ) announced that he will introduce a comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) bill—one that addresses the nation’s economic and security needs— presumably during the lame duck session while Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-NY) revealed a meeting between herself, President Obama, Sen. Menendez, and Rep. Gutierrez to discuss immigration, deportations and the DREAM Act. The forum also highlighted personal stories from legal permanent residents (LPRs)—military veterans, mothers, families—and the complications of being caught up in a broken immigration system. Read More
New Report Demonstrates the Successful Integration of Immigrants into U.S. Society
A common refrain among anti-immigrant activists is that today’s immigrants just aren’t “assimilating” into U.S. society like the immigrants of earlier eras. However, as a new report from the Center for American Progress (CAP) points out, the “illusion of non-assimilation is created by looking only at newcomers who have not had time yet to assimilate as fully as earlier arrivers.” When socioeconomic advancement is tracked over time, it becomes clear that “the longer immigrants are here, the more they advance and the better they are integrated into our society.” The report, entitled Assimilation Today, was co-authored by renowned demographer Dowell Myers (a professor in the School of Policy, Planning, and Development at the University of Southern California) and by John Pitkin (president of Analysis and Forecasting, Inc., in Cambridge, Massachusetts). Read More
An Anti-Immigrant Franchise Coming to a State Near You
Americans are frustrated by a lot of things these days and immigration is no exception. What specifically annoys people about immigration is different depending on their vantage point. Those who are caught up in the labyrinth of immigration processing and the complicated inner-workings of the immigration agency are frustrated. Those who can’t even get their foot in the agencies door because they have no way to legalize are stuck in limbo. Then there are those who may have no personal connection to immigration and have never dealt with the difficult process of legalization, but are concerned about the all too common stories about the havoc born from our broken immigration system. So it isn’t at all surprising that many Americans are looking high and low for solutions. Read More
New Report Reveals Devastating Effects of Deportation on U.S. Citizen Children
Everyone’s heard stories about how deportation rips apart families—or they will if Arizona’s new law is enforced. Most people think of undocumented workers when they think about deportation, but legal immigrants are often deported too. Most of these immigrants—legal and undocumented—have families, and many of those families include U.S. citizen children. When their parents are deported, it is devastating for the children. A new report by the law schools at UC Berkeley and UC Davis, In the Child’s Best Interest, looks at the deportation of legal permanent residents (LPRs or green card holders) and the impact on their kids. Read More
The Lasting Impact of Mendez v. Westminster in the Struggle for Desegregation
Years before the U.S. Supreme Court ended racial segregation in U.S. schools with Brown v. Board of Education, a federal circuit court in California ruled that segregation of school children was unconstitutional—except this case involved the segregation of Mexican American school children. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reached this historic decision in the case of Mendez v. Westminster in 1947—seven years before Brown. Historic in its own right, Mendez was critical to the strategic choices and legal analysis used in arguing Brown and in shaping the ideas of a young NAACP attorney, Thurgood Marshall. Moreover, the Mendez case—which originated with LULAC but benefited from the participation of the NAACP—also symbolized the important crossover between different ethnic and racial groups who came together to argue in favor of desegregation. From a legal perspective, Mendez v. Westminster was the first case to hold that school segregation itself is unconstitutional and violates the 14th Amendment. Prior to the Mendez decision, some courts, in cases mainly filed by the NAACP, held that segregated schools attended by African American children violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal Protection Clause because they were inferior in resources and quality, not because they were segregated. Read More
How Remittances Can Help Haiti Recover and Strengthen the U.S. Economy
Each year, millions of immigrants in the U.S. send billions of dollars in remittances to friends and family members in their home countries. It is easy to mistakenly assume that this represents a huge loss for the U.S. and in this economy, why are we allowing billions of dollars to be sent abroad? Like all things immigration-related, however, the relationship between remittances and the U.S. economy is much more complex than meets the eye. While it’s true that remittances are an important source of income for immigrant-sending countries, remittances are also a huge boost to U.S. exports and the U.S. economy. Read More
Got Faith? A Closer Look at the Religious Movement for Immigration Reform
Today, hundreds of Evangelical leaders from around the country will join hands to raise awareness for comprehensive immigration reform during a National Day of Prayer. Like many faith groups, Evangelicals are the most recent to sign onto the national religious effort to “act on the Biblical mandate of compassion and justice toward immigrants” and call for reform of our broken immigration system. Some restrictionist groups, however, continue to criticize the role of religion and faith in the immigration reform movement—some even using the Bible as a weapon to condemn immigrants as law-breakers and sinners. Read More
What Does Scott Brown’s Victory Mean for Immigration Reform?
The election of Republican Senate candidate Scott Brown in Massachusetts provides an interesting twist in 2010 electoral politics. While some may argue that this loss is essentially a referendum on the current Administration and its agenda, the less dramatic but more likely conclusion is that the results were more about the candidates themselves. Democratic candidate Martha Coakley’s well-documented gaffes in the media made for entertaining fodder during a news cycle dominated by depressing news from Haiti. Her loss, while bad news for the Democrats in Congress who prefer having a filibuster proof majority in the Senate, does not necessarily derail the President’s agenda. To make wholesale assumptions that Republican Senator-Elect Scott Brown is going to automatically derail all of the President’s upcoming initiatives is not only pre-mature but impossible to determine. Read More
New Report Estimates Economic Benefit of Legalizing Unauthorized Immigrants in California
A new report from researchers at the University of Southern California (USC) provides further evidence that immigration reform which includes the creation of a pathway to legal status for unauthorized immigrants already in the United States would yield tangible economic benefits. The report, The Economic Benefits of Immigrant Authorization in California, by Dr. Manuel Pastor and co-authors at USC’s Center for the Study of Immigrant Integration (CSII), estimates that “unauthorized Latino immigrants in California…missed out on approximately $2.2 billion in wages and salary income last year alone due solely to their legal status, and the state lost out on the multiplied impacts of that potential income and spending, suggesting a total potential gain of $3.25 billion annually from authorization.” Read More
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