RaceWire

The Redeemed Immigrant: NY Gov. Makes Exception to Corrupt Rules

2010-03-08T14:25:24Z

After the mistakes he made as a kid nearly got him kicked out of the country, Qing Hong Wu has gotten a precious second chance. Embattled New York Governor David Paterson took a brief respite from a maelstrom of political scandal to act as the good samaritan this weekend: Paterson's pardon of Wu set in motion a legal process that will allow the 29 year-old Chinese immigrant to remain in the United States and seek citizenship.

Ironically, it was his desire to become an American citizen that landed him in the clutches of immigration officials. Under the rigid rules governing deportation of "criminal aliens," Wu was slated for removal after he came forward to apply for naturalization and revealed his record.

]]> Fifteen years ago, growing up as a working-class kid in Manhattan's Chinatown, Wu, who immigrated legally to the United States at age 5, became entangled with a dangerous crowd. He took part in several muggings with other teens and landed in a reformatory.

The New York Times ran a moving story on Wu's transformation. Inspired by some stern words from an Italian-American judge, Wu served his time, got his GED, and after his release, worked his way up to from clerk to VP at a major company. But once he came forward to secure legal status as a citizen, his past resurfaced and threatened him with a punishment he never anticipated.

His recently naturalized mother regretted not jumping through the hoops sooner in order to protect her son:

Mr. Wu’s mother, Floren Wu-Li, 57, blames herself. Interviewed in the tiny sixth-floor walkup on Spring Street where Mr. Wu lived with his fiancée, she acknowledged that he would have derived citizenship if she had secured it for herself while he was still a minor. But she was naturalized only four years ago, when she was allowed to take the test in Chinese.

“We were very poor and worked very hard and had no time to look after Qing when he was a child,” she said, weeping as her daughter translated. “I had no time to learn English back then.”

No doubt immigrant advocates will hail Wu's pardon as a victory. But the redemption story shouldn't eclipse the countless other stories that never come to public light, stories with unhappier endings. Those include immigrants who never committed an actual criminal offense, but were nabbed nonetheless in ICE dragnets. There are also many others like Wu who made some bad decisions, but unlike Wu, never had a real chance to right their course in adulthood. Then there are youth of all backgrounds shunted into the juvenile justice system as children and criminalized for life.

As Governor Paterson noted in a public statement, Wu's case exemplifies the potential for individual transformation, but it also provides "the opportunity to make a forceful statement about the harsh inequity and rigidity of the immigration laws."

Politicians and the media are always intrigued by stories of personal triumph. But the uniqueness of Wu's story isn't so much his remarkable individual struggle, but the systemic injustices that prevent individuals like him from realizing their human potential. We can try to fix immigration policy one pardon at a time. But it's much more efficient to hold the entire immigration system accountable for upholding the civil rights of all who pass through it. You could call it "amnesty." Or just call it redemption for a system that has long trespassed against the least powerful among us.

Image: Todd Heisler / The New York Times

No Place Like Home: The U.N. on America's Housing System

2010-03-06T06:48:10Z

Housing is a human right. That's not a phrase you hear often in our political discourse, even though the foreclosure crisis and recession have made shelter an increasingly precarious resource for millions across the country. On the most basic level, is it that unreasonable to think human beings have a right to a roof over their heads? From a philosophical angle, what does it mean for an individual, family, or group not to have a place to call home, and how does that kind of physical insecurity affect a community's ability to thrive?

An international perspective might help us square the hierarchy of needs. A United Nations Human Rights Council report on the U.S. housing system articulates the bleak realization now dawning on a divided America: there aren't enough affordable homes for everyone, and depending on your racial, ethnic or economic background, your right to shelter is rapidly crumbling down.

The report, presented by Special Rapporteur on housing Raquel Rolnik, identifies key housing injustices: institutionalized discrimination, poverty, a freewheeling real estate market, the bias of policymakers who fail to see the link between homelessness and building sustainable homes.

]]> While largely based on a recent tour of six cities, the study traces the history of postwar housing segregation, from the warehousing of poor Black families in rental tracts to the redlining of suburbia into a white-only zone. Today, unmet needs continue to blight the housing landscape:

In past years there were significant cuts in low-income housing assistance programmes. Budget cuts in the 1980s resulted in the gradual erosion and poor maintenance of the public housing system. Further subsequent funding cuts have also significantly affected the preservation of public housing. By the early 1990s, hundreds of thousands of public housing units had become dilapidated. Over the past decade there has been a net loss of approximately 170,000 public housing units due to deterioration and decay, and much of the current public housing stock needs substantial repairs and rehabilitation. However, annual funding for public housing fell by 25 per cent between 1999 and 2006.

When federal funding is inadequate, housing agencies reduce their own expenses. Measures have included shifting units to tenants with higher incomes (who can be charged higher rents than lower-income households but typically have less need for assistance), or cutting back in areas such as security or maintenance.

The study also notes that the Section 8 housing voucher program, despite purporting to offer residents "choice" in the housing market, is so limited that it serves only a portion of eligible low-income families, while the supply of affordable public housing evaporates.

Other problems are ingrained in the architecture of exclusion:

The link between housing and health was stressed to the Special Rapporteur throughout her visit. Poor housing conditions expose residents -- especially children -- to a number of diseases. Most residents of public housing with whom the Special Rapporteur spoke complained of asthma, attributed to mould from poor maintenance of units. A resident in Los Angeles described living in slum housing conditions with rats, cockroaches, bedbugs, deteriorated piping and lead-based paint, and as a result developing chronic asthma....

During the mission, the Special Rapporteur observed many families living in subsidized housing units in conditions of severe overcrowding. This was particularly the case amongst immigrant families in Los Angeles, and most strikingly on Pine Ridge Native American Reservation, where it was described as commonplace to have three to four families living in a three-bedroom house. The conditions in the houses on the reservation were the worst seen by the Special Rapporteur during her mission, evidence of the urgent and severe need for additional subsidized housing units there.

Housing inequality--exacerbated by the subprime crisis and its disproportionate impact communities of color--has a ripple effect on other human rights to educational and economic opportunity:

The 2008 concluding observations of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination on the report of the United States expressed deep concern that minority groups are disproportionately concentrated in poor areas characterized by substandard housing conditions. The Committee’s recommendations on this issue are firmly supported by the Special Rapporteur. The Committee also stated its concern regarding the de facto racial segregation in United States public schools. In many communities this issue is directly linked to housing, as some public school districts are funded by the property taxes of the local community, thus providing more resources to schools in wealthier neighbourhoods.

And those with no homes at all reflect the worst forms of discrimination, a racially polarized and stigmatized population that is systematically undercounted. Despite some movement toward more equitable treatment, policymakers continue to criminalize the homeless and needlessly break apart families.

More than 1.5 million children in the United States experience homelessness each year. In many cases, there are no adequate shelter facilities where parents and children can stay together and children are often removed from their parents and placed in foster care. The Family Unification Program (FUP) which aims to prevent this practice urgently needs more funds. A positive step is the resolution introduced in June 2009 by Congresswoman Maxine Waters in the House of Representatives on the right of children to adequate housing (H. Res. 582). While not yet adopted by Congress, this resolution recognizes the right of children and youth to adequate housing and states that projects that provide services to parents and other caretakers to prevent possible homelessness of youth in crisis should be created and maintained.

The report offers various recommendations for improving housing stock and developing more sustainable housing and home lending policies--such as the elimination of housing barriers facing formerly incarcerated people. One of the last suggestions is more open-ended:

Residents of public housing should have direct, active and effective participation in the planning and decision-making process affecting their access to housing. Residents should be seen as essential partners working alongside the Government in transforming public housing.

This idea embodies the core of housing as a right rather than a privilege. Underserved communities have for decades been forced to accept the policies handed down by bureaucrats who claim to know best where and how the poor should live. To make housing a truly responsive and equitable system, it requires a political framework that respects residents as central stakeholders, entitled not only to a place to call home, but to the power and responsibility of real ownership.

Image: Picture the Homeless

Anarchists Draw Heat After CA Student Walk-Outs

2010-03-05T22:58:49Z

The fallout from yesterday's massive student protests in California continues.

After a day of mostly peaceful rallies and demonstrations, the scene took a violent turn in Oakland when a group of about over a hundred protestors marched onto the Interstate and clashed with police. In total, more than 150 people were arrested.

The group, which was allegedly led by a group of white anarchists, is drawing heat from activists of color for using the protests as an opportunity to cause a ruckus at the expense of young folks of color who always end up taking the blame. Nico Dacumos wrote:

At issue here is not so much the political ideology of mostly white black bloc anarchists, but the ways that their incitement of actions here in Oakland speaks to an entitlement and privilege that makes them think it is okay to encourage people of color, mostly African American and Latino males, to engage in "violent" forms of protest when they are already groups targeted and abused by the police.
...In the end, I'm thinking about all the white kids in black I saw laughing and running down 8th Street free as shit while my friends Cooper and Puck, who went into today acting as documentation and legal observer, are sitting in jail because they wanted to support and protect the young people and people of color who were headed to the freeway behind back bloc-ers waving Syndicalist flags.

California Sobriety Checkpoints Prove Profitable for Cities While Bankrupting Immigrants

2010-03-03T19:02:47Z

A new report by the Investigative Reporting Program at UC Berkeley with California Watch found that in 2009 California's sobriety checkpoints nabbed about 3,000 drunk drivers off the road but also impounded the cars of 24,000 unlicensed drivers.

The state-aided checkpoints, which net $40 million annually in fines and seizures, are often in or near Latino neighborhoods, and vehicles seized for lack of drivers licenses mostly come from people of color -- "often illegal immigrants," according to the report.

In 1993, one year before California voters would approve Prop. 187, State Senator Elaine Alquist (D-San Jose), introduced state bill SB 976, which mandated the state stop issuing drivers license to undocumented immigrants, which Governor Pete Wilson later signed in to law. Today, while many immigrants can purchase a car and automobile insurance they cannot obtain a drivers license.

According to the report "Car seizures at DUI checkpoints prove profitable for cities", districts with large Latino population net the most car seizures. In South Gate, a Los Angeles County city where Latinos make up 92 percent of the population, police confiscated an average of 86 vehicles per operation last fiscal year and an average of 12 drivers under the influence of drugs.

But the practice continues because checkpoints are lucrative for cash-strapped cities since they're subsidized by the federal government and turn high profits from citations, towing and daily storage charges. The report also finds checkpoints are lucrative for police officers because many of them are working overtime. The Moreno Valley Police Department in Riverside County averaged 38 officers at each operation last year, six times more than federal guidelines say is required.

]]> The Investigative Reporting Program’s report did not find evidence that police departments set up checkpoints to specifically target Latino neighborhoods, but the outcome illustrates otherwise. And with budget deficits across the state, California will see an unprecedented number of checkpoints in 2010. Police are scheduling 2,500 of the operations in every region of California. Some departments have even begun to broaden the definition of sobriety checkpoints to include checking for unlicensed drivers.

For a list of things you can do to keep undocumented immigrants from losing their cars, El Reflejo provides a list of things we can do to keep people informed:

Check the Crime and Public Safety section of your local paper for checkpoints, set up a Google alert, or sign up for text message alerts on Copwatchla.org. Then, when you find out where the next checkpoint will be, let people know! Make a listserv, post a bulletin, send text messages, make announcements at church, organization meetings or any other groups. My friend’s dad even keeps a sign in his trunk to place around checkpoints so people know where they are. Be creative!

White House To Invest $850 Million For Black Colleges And Universities

2010-03-02T19:02:22Z

An 8 person drumline from Virginia State University plays in the Cross Hall of the White House before an event honoring Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

In 1980, President Jimmy Carter signed Executive Order 12232, which established a federal program "to strengthen and expand the capacity of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCU) to provide a quality education."

Last week President Obama held an HBCU event at the White House to announce his executive order strengthening Carter's initiative decades earlier. Obama says these schools have felt the pain of the recession (and his own cuts last year) the most because they enroll a higher proportion of low and middle-income students. His order includes $850 million which will ensure students can afford a college education and HBCUs can improve and expand facilities.

Beverly Daniel Tatum, president of Spelman College, the oldest historically Black college for women in the U.S. notes that HBCU are still relevant to the nation's future, even if we have a Black president.

Consider the fact that while the 105 public and private HBCUs make up only 3% of today's colleges and universities, more than 20% of all African-American college graduates attended an HBCU. Particularly in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), where Black students are woefully under-represented in most predominantly white institutions, HBCUs have demonstrated great effectiveness in fostering academic success.

The assistance comes at a perfect time. With all the hate crimes happening at public and private institutions this year we may see more applicants applying to HBCUs.

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Love, Exciting and New: Van Jones Tells Glenn Beck to Come Aboard -- We're Expecting You

2010-03-01T21:49:09Z

Van Jones shows that the work to bring racial equity to the green economy is not over, but in our hands... and in our collective hands, the work must be guided by love.

Take that Glenn.

(Listen to Glenn Beck's response after the jump.)

]]>

Start a Conversation That Says No to Racial Profiling

2010-03-01T19:11:11Z

RaceWire's parent company, the Applied Research Center, partnered with the Rights Working Group in the production of the video above.

In the aftermath of 9/11, the Rights Working Group (RWG) works to restore the “American commitment to protect civil liberties and human rights for all people in the U.S.” Last week, RWG launched the The Racial Profiling: Face the Truth campaign which will build alliances amongst directly-affected communities, coordinate advocacy efforts and field activities, and educate and mobilize broad support for legislative and policy reforms.

The timing of this effort couldn’t be better.

As police officers accused of abusing people of color continue to be routinely acquitted, as the federal government heightens airport security checks of passengers from 14 mostly Muslim nations, and as Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials and local sheriffs continue to unfairly target and inhumanely treat dark-skinned immigrants, it’s clear that racial and religious profiling continues to be standard operating procedure.

A recent USA Today poll finds that 71% of people said they were in favor of racial profiling at airports. That’s a far cry from the broad support that existed for a federal measure to end racial profiling first introduced in 2001, which quickly evaporated in the wake of the attacks of September 11, leaving the proposed legislation to languish.

]]> But efforts to jumpstart the federal bill are now underway in the current session of Congress. According to Rights Working Group, “Now is the time to have conversations and share our stories on how racial and religious profiling impacts our communities. This is the time to make a powerful public statement about the changes that need to happen - changes that will guarantee the protection of our civil liberties and human rights.”

The Face the Truth campaign has three policy objectives:

Secure passage of federal legislation to ban racial profiling - the "End Racial Profiling Act."

Revise the June 2003 Department of Justice Federal Guidance on Racial Profiling to eliminate the border and national security loophole, to include profiling based on religion and ethnic origin, and to ensure that the guidance is enforceable.

Eliminate Department of Homeland Security programs that result in racial profiling in immigration enforcement.

Please share and distribute the video widely and encourage your friends to join this campaign. The mobilizing has now begun to generate interest and recruit hosts for the growing schedule of local conversations that will be taking place over the next several months.

Join today by visiting www.nightof1000conversations.org for the conversation and campaign resources.

You'll find information on how to join or host a conversation and easily download a toolkit and everything you need to get started

Women on Cash Assistance Testify on The Hill to Change TANF Policies

2010-02-27T00:12:29Z

In D.C. these days, it’s hard for anyone to yell loudly enough to get heard over the buzz of health care reform. But in the shadow of Obama’s healthcare summit yesterday, about a hundred congressional staffers, reporters and advocates piled into a House briefing room to listen to low-income mothers talk about welfare.

Yesterday’s briefing was organized by the Women’s Economic Justice (WEJ) network, a cohort of low-income women’s community organizations. Several current and former cash assistance recipients were there to share their stories and I also spoke in my capacity as a researcher to the serious need for a reform of the Temporary Aid to Needy Families program.

The women on the first panel spoke through tears about the failures of welfare reform to help them get out poverty. In the words of one mother, “TANF was my biggest barrier to getting me and my family out of poverty.”

About halfway through the first panel, Congressman Jim McDermott, a Democrat from Washington, stepped in and spoke for a few minutes about the need to change the way we deal with poverty and re-reform welfare. He condemned TANF policies that abandon children and push women into lives of working poverty.

TANF (pronounced TAN-ef) was created in 1996 during welfare reform in the Clinton years. It instituted time limits on aid and made cash assistance tied to a person’s ability to find work. The poverty didn’t go away, but the help for families in need sure disappeared fast. In 2008, there were 1.7 million families on TANF, down from 4.8 million families in the pre-welfare reform years.

]]> “People are very worried about Haiti right now,” McDermott said, “But you can see many of the same things here.”

Diana Spatz, the director of LIFETIME and an organizer of the briefing spoke after the first panel. “We’re not looking for pity here,” she said. “These are realities that we can change by changing this policy.”

The briefing, which was conducted again later in the day for Senate staffers, called Congress to restructure TANF to substantively keep families from falling into the depths of poverty. Several women demanded that the program be adjusted to allow mothers to continue to receive cash assistance while they attend college. Others recounted stories that expose the failure of the program to support women facing domestic violence. And several women said that as long as there is no time limit on poverty, there should be no time limit on receipt of cash assistance.

Though the Obama administration has announced it will not move to reauthorize the TANF program but, rather, will extend it for a year, the WEJ groups refused to be silent about what is needed to end poverty. For them, reauthorizing TANF is as urgent as health care reform.

Check out my recent ColorLines investigation about how the TANF program has pushed families of color precariously close to the edge.

It's Official: Race May Be Factor in Police Shootings

2010-02-25T19:32:59Z

The most recent national analysis from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics shows that Blacks and Latinos were nearly three times as likely as whites to be searched by police—and Blacks were almost four times as likely as whites to be subjected to the use of force.

According to the Chicago Tribune, The Justice Department is so alarmed by these findings that they're funding research that looks at the "implicit, unconscious racial biases that may be driving such statistics and affecting police behavior."

"If in fact police have implicit biases—if they automatically associate blacks with crime—then that would be relevant to an officer in a split-second, shoot-or-don't-shoot situation," said Lorie Fridell, a criminology professor at the University of South Florida who is creating a new anti-bias police training program with funding from the Justice Department. "Is the officer more inclined to believe he sees a gun in the hand of a black person, rather than a cell phone? I think that is possible."

Image used under creative commons license via Thomas Hawk.

Varick Is Closing, But That's Not The Answer to Our Broken Detention System

2010-02-25T19:20:52Z

The Varick Federal Detention Facility is days away from closure, and this should be good news. But immigration advocates and activists gathered today in New York City to demand that ICE evaluate policies that mandate that immigrants must be held in detention without due process. The gathering coincided with the kickoff of a new campaign, "Dignity, Not Detention," organized by Detention Watch Network, a national coalition of immigrant defense groups.

The Varick street center is being closed partially because of public pressure--Varick has a well-documented track record of detainee abuse and fatal medical negligence. Just yesterday, the NYCLU released a report detailing detainees' experiences there.

The NYCLU white paper examines hundreds of Varick detainees' grievances: a man suffered from an abscessed tooth, but by the time he was granted access to a dentist, the infection had spread to seven teeth. Root canals were recommended, but treatment was denied. Sixteen months later, the man still hasn't gotten the medical attention he needs. Another man with prostate cancer pleaded for a doctor's care, but was swiftly deported before he was allowed to make an appointment.

“Do I have to die first before I see a doctor?” wrote one Varick detainee.

And so one would think now would be the time for celebration. But according to Alina Das, a supervising attorney at the NYU Law School Immigrant Rights Clinic, immigrants at Varick are being shuttled to the Hudson County Jail in New Jersey, a facility that has its own history of detainee abuse. Hudson County Jail, like many detention facilities, has no standards governing detainees’ access to legal services, recreation or visitation.

The conditions at Varick Detention Center were awful, but by no means anomalous in the detention system, and shutting down one facility doesn't address the broader system.

"ICE and DHS [the Department of Homeland Security] should be focused not on where people are detained but why they're detained at all," said Das. "Transferring people to Hudson County Jail is just transferring them from one cage to another."

]]> Das and other advocates contend that things don't have to be this way. Immigrants who are navigating the deportation, appeals and asylum process don't need to be warehoused in degrading, inhumane conditions. Many immigration detainees are actually long-time U.S. residents who pose no flight risk or danger to the community. "It's such a waste and an assault on the dignity of detainees and their families who are waiting to transfer people further away to facilities that have suffered similar problems," said Das.

Immigrant advocates feel strongly that release and other alternatives to incarceration should be the focus of ICE's efforts. Barring that, groups like the NYCLU want ICE to adopt actual standards to govern and enforce across all detention centers to ensure people's minimum safety. But in separate meetings with New York ICE Field Director Christopher Shanahan and ICE Assistant Secretary John Morton, both officials turned down groups who offered to conduct a comprehensive review for ICE to assess whether some detainees could be released to their families.

"This isn't a question of whether or not we will detain people," Morton said in an interview with the National Law Journal. "We will detain people, and we will detain them on a grand scale. It's a necessary power."

In a system that houses more than 370,000 people a year, costs taxpayers $1.7 billion annually, and is notorious for abuse and neglect and trampling on the rights and dignity of families, Morton is on the wrong side of the issue. Advocates want the Obama administration to wake up now. How many more people have to die in immigration detention before they institute real reform?

The Stimulus and Disadvantaged Communities: Trickling Down or Slipping Away?

2010-02-25T06:02:18Z

One year on, how far does the stimulus money stretch? New data on the impact of American Recovery and Reinvestment Act spending in communities of color show that by and large, the money has trickled into well-worn grooves of privilege and often further alienated the hardest-hit communities.

Federal funding for transportation--a sector with a ready supply of "shovel-ready" projects--is stuck in neutral, according to a study on federally funded initiatives in Minnesota. Charles Hallman writes in the Minnesota Spokesman-Recorder:

PolicyLink, joined ISAIAH, and Organizing Apprenticeship Project (OAP) a Minneapolis advocacy group in producing a recent analysis of ARRA transportation investments in Minnesota and their impact on low-income communities and communities of color. The study concluded that the highest levels of transit investments are not in areas with the highest poverty or unemployment rates, nor are they in areas with the highest percentage of people of color across the state of Minnesota or within the Twin Cities.

ARRA funds only reinforced existing inequities, the study added.

Jermaine Toney, lead policy analyst of the OAP says the stimulus money “is deep, deep public investment dollars, but it was not a shift in the transportation policy itself. The suburbs got more transportation projects up and running, but did it benefit the most disadvantaged: blacks and people of color? No.”

]]> Many factors could affect the flow of transportation dollars, not just advocacy groups but savvy business lobbyists as well; a community's capacity for investment and workforce development; and local political support. But the racial disparities follow a familiar pattern across the country, suggesting that even in the fiscal chaos of the stimulus roll-out, certain rules of the road hold firm.

The Kirwan Institute's progress report on ARRA provides a wide-angle view of where the stimulus dollars are trickling, and which groups face a stimulus drought:

Although consistent state level data on ARRA contracting to minority firms is not widely available, figures from federal procurement indicate very troubling and disparate contracting patterns when reviewing data on procurement to minority and women owned businesses. While Black, Latino, and Women owned businesses represent 5.2%, 6.8%, and 28.2% respectively,54 as of February 1, 2010, they had only received 1.1%, 1.6%, and 2.4% of all federally contracted ARRA funds. Of the $45 billion in direct federal contracts allocated by February 1st 2010, less than $2.4 billion (5% of the total) were allocated to Black, Latino and Women owned businesses.

On the state level, a separate study on Florida's ARRA-supported contracts shows a similar trend of state officials (despite a mandate to promote "minority procurement") sidelining firms own by people of color.

Though the data is not comprehensive, the disproportionality seems even more skewed in light of the fact that Blacks, Latinos and women are underrepresented to begin with in the small business sector. To advocates on the ground, the infusion of federal cash can't be expected to correct that, but for the stimulus to perpetuate systemic inequalities so seamlessly is unacceptable,

The Opportunity Agenda has tried to help local groups advocate for a piece of the shrinking stimulus pie, guiding them on requesting government data and matching that against obligations under civil rights statutes.

But while advocates need to mobilize to hold the government accountable, well-connected companies are wasting no time eating up what's left of the stimulus, while poor communities of color, crushed by foreclosure and joblessness, fall even farther behind. If Congress provides another stimulus or jobs bill, activists will have to act fast to get ahead of a rigged game, by both monitoring future outlays and mobilizing local groups to snag those funds, and use them responsibly, before they dry up.

Looking ahead, the Kirwan Institute recommends:

• Improve Tracking of ARRA Resources and Outcomes. Rather than scaling back job tracking efforts, there should be additional measures which consider the quality and duration of employment, as well as the race, gender, and zip code of job recipients.
• Increase Small and Minority Business Participation. Unbundle large contracts for small businesses. Breaking up large projects will allow for more small business participation in the recovery. Set and mandate specific, MBE and DBE Goals for every department.
• Ensure That Hard Hit Communities Experience Job Impact. Use targeted reinvestment in hard-hit areas, first source hiring, apprenticeship and job training. Increase employment opportunities for ex‐offenders.

But the final measure of the Recovery Act's impact will be the lasting results of those contracts: the businesses receiving federal money must also be held accountable for delivering to their communities, especially if they represent economically disenfranchised areas. Are they paying living wages, giving people viable skills, reaching out to the most disadvantaged within poor communities (including people with limited education or criminal convictions), working toward environmental sustainability, and channeling new career opportunities into their constituency?

The stimulus is a microcosm of how the government and communities could (or should) confront the institutional challenges exposed by the recession. When it comes to moving federal money equitably, from Congress to your neighbor's pocket, nobody gets a free pass.

Image: Cleveland Plain Dealer

How Do We Talk About Police Brutality When The Cops Aren't White?

2010-02-23T20:40:34Z

Yesterday, the verdict in the trial involving three New York police officers accused of abusing a young man of color was announced.

Without even knowing the particulars of the case--say, for instance, that one of the police officers in question allegedly abused a man named Michael Mineo with a baton, which led the other two cops to orchestrate a cover-up--you probably know exactly what the jury decided yesterday.

That's right, all three cops were acquitted of all charges, on the claim that there was not enough evidence to prove that Mineo had actually had a baton shoved inside of him. The news came just days after it was announced that the cops involved in the shooting death of Sean Bell will not receive federal charges.

People of color, especially young Black and Latino men, get shot at and killed by the police at disproportionately high rates. That much seems to be common enough knowledge these days. And the white cops who've shot them? They're all typically acquitted, but that is less common knowledge and more irrefutable fact.

But much of the way we talk about police brutality as a manifestation of racism rests on a classic narrative of individual white aggressors who brutalize Black and Latino men. So what happens when not all of the officers involved are white? In Michael Mineo's case, the three accused officers were white (Officer Richard Kern) and Latino (Officers Andrew Morales and Alex Cruz).

Check this graf from the NY Times :

And while the attack on Mr. Louima by a white police officer stirred longstanding complaints about the treatment of black men by the police, there was no racial component to Mr. Mineo’s case, since both he and the officers involved are white and Hispanic. It spawned neither major civil rights protests nor sweeping change to training or operations within the ranks.

Cops of color who brutalize other folks of color? It makes it all murky! How is it possible that men of color could perpetuate racism, and upon another man of color?

]]> It's possible when individuals, white and otherwise, live in a bigoted society that casts Black and Latino men as inherently criminal, as untrustworthy, as deviant, as broken. It's etched into the social fabric even if it isn't codified in law. It's an unequal system, and the individual actors within it can promote and perpetuate racism even without intending to.

I don't think it means that individual cops get to be relinquished of the responsibility they hold for their actions (and this is when I wonder whether the sheer number of acquittals of white cops intensifies or diminishes the pressure to convict Johannes Mehserle, the BART cop who shot Oscar Grant on New Year's Day 2009), but neither does it mean that men of color in positions of power don't operate within the same system.

And history has shown us that when the tables are turned, when men of color join the force, even that doesn't necessarily protect them from being shot and killed by their own colleagues. (See: Officer Omar Edwards, Detective Christopher Ridley, Desmond Robinson.) The point is that in the criminal justice system, and especially where young men of color are concerned, it's always about race.

Immigrants' Invisible Presence in Health Care Debate

2010-02-20T08:12:09Z

You might be sick of hearing about health care by now, The politics of medicine grow messier by the day, dripping with empty jargon and industry lobbyists determined to eviscerate any substantive effort toward reform. Now imagine if you've just arrived in the country, speaking little English, working off the books and paying half your income toward rent. In that case, you're likely not all that bothered by the national debate on health care; you're too busy living through the crisis to give it much thought.

Aside from the occasional use of "illegals" as an obstructionist prop--stirring up racist fears about the government caring too much about "those people"--immigrants are all but invisible in the struggle to pass reform in Washington. Well before the current meltdown in Congress, immigrants (both with and without legal status) faced a labyrinth of restrictions, including draconian waiting periods for green card holders.

]]> The exclusion of undocumented immigrants from the main legislative proposals is a clear sign that the Democrats are not willing to expend political capital on the issue of insurance for people without legal status. Immigrant-advocacy groups too are putting health care aside as they strain to keep their main issue, comprehensive immigration reform, afloat in the partisan horse trade.

With the Senate stalemate, lawmakers might want to revisit the issue of immigration and health care, and how moving forward on both issues in tandem is necessary for either to go forward. A study published by New Yorkers For Accessible Health Coverage and the New York Immigration Coalition examines barriers to health care that immigrants face and finds that even those eligible for publicly subsidized coverage may find it virtually impossible to obtain quality care. The political terror pulsing through immigrant communities is becoming a public health hazard:

• Many have been advised erroneously that receipt of public health insurance benefits could lead to their being considered a “public charge,” which would disqualify them from adjusting their status to lawful permanent resident.... inappropriate public charge findings by immigration officials have significantly compromised New York’s ability to enroll lawfully present immigrants in Medicaid, even though they are eligible for the program.

• Some lawfully residing immigrants believe that their ability to sponsor relatives for admission to the United States would be adversely affected by their own public insurance enrollment. Others who are themselves sponsored by relatives refuse to enroll in government insurance because they have been deterred by the prospect that their sponsors could be asked to repay the government for care they receive. ...

• Some noncitizens who lack authorization to reside in the U.S. fear that enrollment in a government sponsored health insurance poses risks of disclosure and reporting of their presence and status to immigration authorities. To the extent that individuals are uncertain about their legal status, or the status of their family members, the fear of reporting engenders more reluctance to enroll, especially among children, who are eligible for affordable health insurance in New York regardless of their immigration status.

• Some noncitizens do not enroll because cultural, linguistic, and navigational barriers prevent them from understanding or overcoming obstacles to the insurance system. Particular obstacles are immigrants not knowing their rights to enroll or being unable to successfully complete what can be a confusing if not bewildering enrollment process, even for native-born New Yorkers.

The groups' recommendations should factor into any vision of universal coverage: remove the five-year ban on federal benefits for many categories immigrants; provide statewide universal access to care and ensure that critical services are targeted to non-English speakers and underserved communities.

A health care overhaul that works for immigrants may be off the table in Congress for now, but the report at least helps counter the mythology of the parasitic foreigner, hell bent on draining the social service system while stealing jobs and lowering property values.

Even people with legal status can end up shut out of the system, falling through bureaucratic cracks produced by human error or outright prejudice. Fear of law enforcement alone may be enough to turn people away; you're willing to take a chance on your health when you feel like you face even higher odds of exposing a loved one to immigration authorities at the doctor's office.

One interviewee's comment in the report reflects the risk calculation that drives people to forgo benefits:

I used to have Medicaid, but terminated it when someone told me that I shouldn’t use such public benefits. It made sense, later when I go in for an [immigration] interview, such record wouldn’t work in my favor. I even have diabetes, and need more than $150 just to pay for my medications. When I had Medicaid, I only had to pay $5. Now, $150, month after month…

How many U.S.-born citizens could imagine giving up their health insurance for fear of provoking the disapproval of a bureaucrat? If we start with the premise that health care is a human right, immigrants are one group that typifies how pitifully the country fails that principle. Health is an afterthought as they wade through a legal fog in which asking for any kind of help, even legally entitled services, could expose them to fatal risks. The immigration crisis and health care crisis are lethally interlocked--two national maladies, each one a symptom and cause of the other.

Image: Migrant mobile clinic (John Moore/Getty Images)

Blacks and Latinos Were Targeted with Subprime Mortgages, Keep Getting Shut Out of Recovery

2010-02-19T23:52:51Z

Today, President Obama announced a new plan to help five states fight through the ongoing impacts of the foreclosure crisis. I'm going to hold off on judging this new initiative, but the help has never been more urgent.

Obama's announcement comes on the heels of an important new study from our friends at the California Reinvestment Coalition, "Foreclosure to Re-Redlining: How America’s largest financial institutions devastated California communities," details some troubling findings about the hurdles Californians are facing as folks try to dig themselves out of the recession. California has turned out to be an especially compelling place to study the mortgage crisis and recovery because of the state's special distinction as being the #1 foreclosure state in the U.S. in 2009. That's 632,573 foreclosure notices that were sent last year. And, surprise surprise, it was communities of color that were disproportionately affected by these foreclosures.

I got particularly stuck on this finding:

At the city level, high-cost loans by Big Bank Lenders (Bank of America, Citibank, Indymac/OneWest, JP Morgan Chase, US Bank, and Wells Fargo, and their affiliates) were concentrated in neighborhoods of color, as well. In Oakland, the Big Bank Lenders made 70% of all of their high-cost loans in neighborhoods predominantly of color. At the same time, the Big Bank Lenders made just over 40% of their lower-cost prime loans in these same neighborhoods.

But not only were communities of color targeted with high cost subprime loans, a fact that cannot be repeated enough, this set up the conditions that allowed for a high concentration of foreclosures in communities of color.

And when it came time for the recovery that was supposed to take place, communities of color got shut out again because banks refused to cooperate to modify loans or restructure mortgages to help families stay in their homes. (ColorLines has also reported in the past on subprime mortgages and their targeted effect on women of color.) And it seems that every opportunity thereafter the banks and financial institutions have had to lift everyday Americans out of the recession has been squandered.

]]> From the report:

Several industry and government initiatives, including the Obama Administration’s Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP) and the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), have done little to induce banks to halt foreclosures or make new loans. And these policy initiatives have failed to impose any meaningful consequences on banks for their failure to do as they have committed to President Obama.

CRC recommends several policy changes that include strengthening the Community Reinvestment Act and the Consumer Protection Financial Agency. Download the report by clicking here.

It's important studies like this that hardens my anger at the corporate entities and policies that enabled and encouraged this mess to unfold across the country. And, I must say that this report is one of the most digestible works of research literature I've come across in a long time. It's definitely a great read if you're looking to get educated on the economic mess communities of color are mired in right now and what it will take to get us out.

Lawsuit Sheds Light on Guestworkers in Hostile Terrain

2010-02-18T06:24:57Z

"We felt like we were imprisoned, held captive. What else did he need, a whip?"
—Vincente Vera Martínez, migrant forestry worker, from the Sacramento Bee series, “The Pineros”

In the popular imagination, America's forests serve as a sanctuary of nature, sheltered from the tumult of society. But those pristine landscapes are riven with the sweat of invisible labor. A recent multi-million-dollar legal settlement has shed light on a hidden underclass that toils under the legal shade of a federal guestworker program known as H2B.

The lawsuit against Superior Forestry Services was brought on behalf of 2,200 guestworkers, who were recruited from Mexico and Central America to plant pine trees in the Southeast—a grueling job run by managers who treated the guestworkers as a disposable resource.

The groups leading the litigation, the Southern Poverty Law Center, Farmworker Justice, and the Legal Aid Justice Center, have campaigned to hold both employers and the government accountable for the systematic degradation of this technically legal yet criminally neglected migrant workforce.

]]> Superior Forestry Services has finally agreed to cough up $2.75 million to address unpaid wages and pledge compliance with the Migrant and Seasonal Agricultural Worker Protection Act and Fair Labor Standards Act.

The settlement award is unprecedented, but back wages don't begin to cover the cost H2B workers have suffered for a spot at the bottom of the workforce. The H2B program, which has expanded dramatically since the mid-1990s, is akin to the H2A visa system for farmworkers (also notoriously exploitative but now slated for reform). However, H2B covers low-paying non-farm sectors ranging from seafood processing to housekeeping services. H2B workers also lack some of the crucial safeguards afforded to farm guestworkers, such as guaranteed minimum work and wage protections.

A 2005 investigation by the Sacramento Bee by Tom Knudson described the struggle of Latino guestworkers known as Pineros (“Men of the Pines”) to navigate a labor structure premised on exploitation:

...Alvarez strapped a bulging sack of seedlings to his hips and trudged across a gray, crumbly slope just below the snow line. Every few feet, he would stop, lift a silver-gray digging tool called a "hoedad" high into the air and slam it to the ground. Stooping over, he would take a seedling from his bag, plant it, tamp the dirt and move on.

Lift, slam, stoop, plant. Alvarez worked his way through puddles of shade and sun. Lift, slam, stoop, plant. A metallic clinking filled the air - the sound of hoedads striking rocks. Thirsty, Alvarez bent down and sipped from a snowmelt creek. The work was tough. But a Forest Service inspector watching the crew was making it tougher.

"She would just start yelling at us," Alvarez recounted during an interview in his home near Fresno. "Sometimes we'd pull a tree out of our bag—and accidentally drop one—and she would start yelling at us."

The presence, and the complicity, of the Forest Service agent in this scene betrayed the collusion between government and industry. Despite occupational safety regulations on the books, many guestworkers were exposed to the most hostile elements of both the environment and human nature:

Most wore no eye or face protection, no earplugs. Several struggled for solid footing in the cheap boots they brought with them from Mexico. On slopes steep enough for skiing, they slipped. They slid. They stumbled.

"This company is not taking safety equipment seriously," said Gustavo Ferman Domínguez, one of the workers. "We have to buy our own gloves. They don't give us goggles for the chain saws. They don't give us boots."

Employers might whittle down paychecks by skimming off deductions for housing, tools and other basic expenses. One worker said that after his boss had chewed through his wages, the net earnings amounted to just pennies an hour.

The consequences of trying to quit might sting even more. The Southern Poverty Law Center's investigative report on guestworker programs quoted Otto Rafael Boton-Gonzalez, a Guatemalan H2B forestry worker:

When the supervisor would see that a person was ready to leave the job because the pay was so bad, he would take our papers from us. He would rip up our visa and say, 'You don't want to work? Get out of here then. You don't want to work? Right now I will call immigration to take your papers and deport you.'

The racket extends all the way to the courtroom. According to a contempt order filed in the Superior Forestry suit, a crew leader tried to frighten employees out of participating in the suit, “telling them that the workers who joined the lawsuit were run out of the company and 'kicked in the butts.'” Spanish-speaking workers reportedly never received essential legal notices about the case in their language.

While the immigration debate has revolved around how to “legalize” undocumented immigrants, the legal gray area occupied by guestworkers may be a case study in how reform could ultimately miss the forest for the trees. Some support the expansion of guestworker programs as a way to standardize and control the flow of labor across borders. But the history of such programs in the agricultural sector, from the Braceros to today's Florida tomato-pickers, suggest a long tradition of government-sponsored exploitation.

Recently, H2B workers have been organizing to challenge systemic abuses. H2B immigrants from India, brought to the post-Katrina Gulf Coast to work on oil rigs, have launched a direct-action campaign and filed a lawsuit accusing their former employer of using the visa system as a conduit for abuse, fraud and forced labor.

For the migrants toiling silently in the wilderness, the “legal” path into the economy has, perversely, left them even more trapped than some undocumented workers. H2B connected them to a job, but only by tethering them with a legal ball-and-chain, forged by the country's most powerful human trafficker: Washington.

Crossposted at Working In These Times

Image: Southern Poverty Law Center