immigrant - Taryn . on Diigo

Saul Bellow’s Chicago Neighborhood - Where the Words Take Shape

Tags: writer, urban, immigrant, short_story, chicago on 2008-11-07 -All Annotations (0) -About

Greg Laden's Blog : When Do Immigrants Learn English? Likely, not when you think.

This is 1981, and everybody in this neighborhood speaks Italian, because they are Italian. Second and third generation, yes, but Italian is the language of the home and the workplace. This is a neighborhood with zero unemployment, zero unorganized crime, and that serves the city in which it is ensconced as a major international tourist destination. And it is pretty much true that the Italian immigrants that moved to this neighborhood starting more than a century ago are still working on the English Only thing. (and another fine example of why I despise commentary)

Tags: italy, siciliy, boston, germany, wisconsin, immigrant, community, language, culture on 2008-10-21 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Podcast: Our Dutch Heritage - City Room - Metro - New York Times Blog

Tags: new_york, new_york_city, hudson_river, history, immigrant, event on 2008-10-04 -All Annotations (0) -About

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From New York Soil, a Taste of Mexico at a Farmers Market - NYTimes.com

Tags: agriculture, farming, new_york_city, new_york, staten_island, mexico, immigrant, food on 2008-09-23 -All Annotations (5) -About

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Mr. Juárez and a handful of other Hispanic farmers sell sought-after Mexican produce and spices at greenmarkets in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on 175th Street in Washington Heights and on Staten Island
In recent years, the island’s Mexicans have built up the long-shuttered and drug-ridden Port Richmond Avenue, one of the North Shore’s main shopping strips, and have transformed the faded commercial center into a bustling thoroughfare.
life’s possessions: filing cabinets filled with clothes; free weights that he uses to keep in shape during the winter; a bed; a small dining table; a television to watch telenovelas; and a coffeemaker perched atop a crate, where he makes the first of the 10 cups he drinks daily. A beaded cross decorates a forest green wall.
New Farmer Development Project, an eight-year-old nonprofit training program that helps immigrant farmers ply their trade in the New York region. Mr. Juárez was one of the first participants, and he is one of 18 who still farm today. His plot is part of the Staten Island Historical Society’s 11-acre Decker Farm, tucked between the Staten Island Mall and a golf course in historic Richmond Town.
Monday is his day off from cooking at a local Italian restaurant, where he labors 60 hours a week in a small, poorly ventilated kitchen. “Only work, work and work,” Mr. Juárez said as he stood sipping his hot and sour soup.
He spends an additional 20 hours on the farm each week

On The Edge: The Femicide in Ciudad Juarez

On The Edge is a documentary covering the brutal murders of hundreds of poor young women in the border town of Ciudad Juárez, Mexico

Tags: film, mexico, women, drugs, organized_crime, crime, corruption, homeland_security, border, immigrant on 2008-08-19 -All Annotations (0) -About

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As Border Efforts Grow, Corruption Is on the Rise

Tags: border, united_states, mexico, corruption, organized_crime, homeland_security, drugs, guns, immigrant on 2008-07-18 -All Annotations (0) -About

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To create a truly sustainable food system, we'll have to confront the farm-labor crisis

New York would seem a particularly ripe state for a midsized farm renaissance. It boasts a bustling metropolis -- the nation's largest -- with a strong and growing locavore scene. Combined with population centers like Albany and Rochester, the vast organism that is greater New York City might be expected to provide a robust market for the midsized farms that dot the state's landscape.

Tags: food, farming, agriculture, new_york, locavore, labor, mexico, immigrant on 2008-06-01 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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Book relates immigrant story of leaving behind 'la via vecchia' - The Boston Globe

Tags: immigrant, book_review, history, boston, italy on 2008-04-21 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The Immigration Charade - The New York Review of Books

Tags: economy, labor, patriotism, immigrant on 2008-04-14 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About

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When the same interviewers asked the same respondents what should happen to "illegal immigrants who have lived and worked in the United States for at least two years" and offered respondents a specific alternative to deportation, only 33 percent said such people should be deported while 62 percent said "they should be given a chance to keep their jobs and eventually apply for legal status."
If support for legalizing illegal immigrants can run as high as 78 percent, it seems fair to conclude that intense opposition to such a step is confined to a small minority. But if support for deporting illegal immigrants can run as high as 69 percent when no alternative is offered, effective organizing can easily make the anti-amnesty vote look much larger.
once IRCA passed, the amnesty was implemented while the crackdown never occurred. As a result, the number of illegal immigrants kept growing. This history has sent out a worldwide message: if you are an unskilled worker who dreams of living in America, your best bet is to find a way into the United States, get a job, and wait for a new amnesty.
The Border Patrol now estimates that it catches about a third of the people who try to cross the Mexican Border illegally. It sends almost everyone it catches back to Mexico, where they are free to try again. Those who keep trying are thus almost certain to get across eventually. Building more fences and hiring more Border Patrol agents will probably increase the fraction of illegal immigrants who are caught, but modest increases are unlikely to have a big effect on the number of people who eventually make it across. In order to do that, the penalty for getting caught would have to be increased.
A better long-term solution would be for the SSA to replace today's Social Security card with a tamper-proof card that included both a photo and information on whether the person was a citizen, a permanent resident authorized to work here, or a temporary resident with permission to work here until some specified date. The employer could then determine the legal status of all job applicants before making an offer. Moreover, courts could assume that employers who hired undocumented workers knew what they were doing. Civil libertarians have traditionally opposed such an identification system, but 86 percent of Americans now support the idea.
Employers also say that foreign-born workers tend to work harder, be more reliable, and complain less than the natives they can hire at the same wage. This is not surprising. Unskilled immigrants have seldom finished secondary school, but they have overcome all kinds of obstacles both to get here and to stay here. Native-born high school dropouts often lack that kind of ambition and perseverance, and surveys invariably show that they have more than their share of problems with alcohol, drugs, impulsiveness, unreliability, and crime. No employer wants to deal with such problems if there is a cheaper alternative. But allowing employers to hire immigrants almost guarantees that unskilled natives will have more trouble finding steady work.
This pattern suggests that what is good for employers may not be so good for the country.
Buchanan recognizes this fact, observing:

The parents may work hard, attend church, and still carry with them the conservative and Catholic values with which they were raised in the Latin America and Mexico of yesterday. But these good people are not changing our culture. Our polluted culture is capturing and changing their children.

I can see why Buchanan might view contemporary American culture as polluted, but that makes it hard to understand why he is so worried about immigrants not assimilating. What really seems to worry him is that immigrants are not making America more like the country he thinks it once was. That is asking a lot.

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‘I’m Nobody or I’m a Nation’

Tags: writer, writing, junot_diaz, fiction, literature, immigrant, caribbean on 2008-04-09 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Profiles: The Humbling of Eliot Spitzer: Reporting & Essays: The New Yorker

Tags: eliot_spitzer, government, new_york, progressive, reform, immigrant on 2007-12-11 -All Annotations (0) -About

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“Eliot wants to transform the government. But it’s hard to encapsulate this in a sound bite or to see the results immediately. It’s hard to explain to people how competence affects their lives.” Spitzer’s progressivism, distilled a certain way, is a will to competence, which raises the question of whether competence can be willed.
The political system in Albany favors stasis. The name of the game, of course, is the preservation of power, which means that whoever has it will rig the game to keep it. Bruno and Sheldon Silver, the speaker of the Assembly, wield immense power over their conferences; they effectively decide if and when a bill comes to the floor and then tell everyone how to vote. They dole out what are known as “lulus,” or payments to legislators for extra duties that can be, let’s say, undemanding. They also disburse their party’s campaign funds, seeing to it that incumbents win more than ninety-five per cent of their races.
Spitzer sought to hasten things. He or his staff made overtures to several Republican legislators, offering them jobs in his administration, which would come with higher salaries and better pensions, if they gave up their seats. One Long Island Republican signed on to be his homeland-security chief, and Spitzer successfully campaigned for a Democrat to replace him. This narrowed the Republican majority—and Bruno’s hold on power—to two seats.
We’re going to get all kinds of productive and constructive things done. Shelly Silver’s a problem; he’s not my kind of guy. I’ll deal with Shelly.’ ” Bruno, who called Silver “the biggest wimp on this earth” (Silver has adopted a sticks-and-stones approach to Bruno’s provocations)
“Maligning Albany is a very old game,” the novelist William Kennedy wrote in the introduction to “O Albany!” his 1983 book of essays about his home town. Nonetheless, he does not refrain from playing it. Calling the town “a pinnacle of porkhead bossism,” he writes, “Wickedness has been our lot for more years than any man alive can remember.”
“Here’s the reality: reform is a messy process. I went up to Albany with the avowed purpose of changing the way things were done. Some of the folks there don’t want us to do that. They’re pushing back, holding on for power,” Spitzer said. “But you know what? It takes time, and there’s enormous pushback. And so anybody who thought it was going to be pretty—and I’ll say something now that I probably shouldn’t. It’s not because I’ve had two sips of wine. Editorial boards desperately want reform but yet desperately don’t want the discomfort of seeing people fighting. And so there is a sort of a schizophrenia. They see us fighting and they say, ‘Can’t you guys get along?’ Well, the answer is, you know, maybe not.”

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Short on Labor, Farmers in U.S. Shift to Mexico - New York Times

Tags: agribusiness, agriculture, farming, labor, mexico, immigrant on 2007-09-06 -All Annotations (0) -About

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How globalization is smothering U.S. fruit and vegetable farms

Tags: agribusiness, agriculture, farming, food, globalization, hudson_valley, labor, immigrant on 2007-09-02 -All Annotations (0) -About

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The end of Europe?

Tags: europe, fertility, malthus, population, society, alarmism, immigrant on 2007-08-25 -All Annotations (0) -About

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Political pessimists have a habit of getting things wrong. Those who espouse pessimistic views of the future present themselves as brave messengers prepared to say what others are too afraid even to think. But in reality the pessimists tend to blame others for the failures of their own way of life, and there is little brave about that.
Spengler attributed what he considered to be the inexorable decline of the West to the rise of the uncultured masses.
Instead of raising tough questions about the European elites’ own responsibility for their societies’ loss of direction, many critics focus myopically on the behaviour and cultural habits of the non-European immigrant.
Like Malthus, Heinsohn is not simply concerned with alarming growth rates of the ‘wrong people’. Malthus’ concern about population growth was informed by his opposition to welfare measures designed to help the poor; today, Heinsohn is equally critical of foreign aid.
the West’s attempts to tackle unrest in the Third World through aid designed to alleviate hunger and provide employment are likely to have the perverse effect of encouraging violent reactions amongst the world’s poorest people.
In keeping with today’s consciousness of natural limits, the crisis in Europe is discussed in naturalistic, fertility-related terms rather than as a political problem – and the solutions put forward to deal with it tend to be naturalistic, too: whether it’s a demand for population control amongst the ‘wrong’ people or for raising awareness about the benefits of having large families amongst the ‘right’ people.
Heinsohn blames the welfare state both for encouraging immigrants to look for an easy life and for discouraging them from integrating into society and adopting a more productive lifestyle.
In our hi-tech era, societies are less dependent on the size of their populations than they have ever been.
Instead of worrying about the size of the population, we should interrogate the capacity of societies to make the most of their people’s potential to create and to innovate.
If there is a problem in Europe today, then it has little to do with immigrant communities and much more to do with the failure of European societies to socialise and integrate these communities.
the real problem lies, not with the separatism of the immigrant, but with the confusion amongst host societies about what it is that people should be integrated in to.
European political elites lack a clear project. They no longer have a mission to perform; they do not possess a clearly defined or distinct outlook that might inform their day-to-day decision-making processes. That is why so many European politicians find it hard to answer the question: what does it mean to be a European?
celebration of diversity is the clearest expression of their evasive strategy. Celebrating the many is a largely meaningless act; it simply says: ‘We are not all the same.’ ‘Diversity’ is only a statement of fact – and to turn a fact into an ideal is to avoid coming up with real ideals altogether.