Italy is gripped by crisis and unemployment and with democracy in danger, but is not the only nation in Western Europe in these conditions. Greece experience a similar situation in many respects. Even though recently there the Socialist Party won the election, still isn't ended the social unrest that followed the death of a 15 years old student, killed by police on 6 December 2008. New clashes between students and the Greek police took place on November 17. http://www.inaltreparole.net/en/world/grecia191109.htmlItaly is gripped by crisis and unemployment and with democracy in danger, but is not... more
president of the uua rev.peter morales and other religous leader are lobbying to support immigration reformpresident of the uua rev.peter morales and other religous leader are lobbying to... more
Some people seem to think illegal immigration isn't a problem, not to sound like a bitch but you wouldn't if you or your parents were illegals and if they weren't your grandparents. And what's with everyone saying that this country was built on the backs of immigrates, i didn't know slaves migrated to this country it was built on slavery and free labor that's the truth. Wanting a better life is great but it's hard to say i want better life and can't get to where i come from and then claim you deserve to be a citizen because all you want to do is work and have a life for your family and kids. What about the guy who's family knows nothing else besides America and also wants a better life but can't achieve that because someone says i'll do the work cheaper and longer with no health coverage and no benefits, cash only.
In no other country can illegal immigrates demand anything, only in the great USA, so i say give them their citizenship, you want to claim to be true American citizen then pay taxes, you believe you have a right to the same health care and rights then you should pay for it. If we registered every illegal immigrate and then taxed them out the ass, set in place laws that had harsher penalties like actual jail time instead of a free trip home, i bet you people would think twice about running across the border or coming to America for vacation and staying. I'm just wondering why people feel if you say "you don't deserve shit and the fact you get taken advantage of is your own fault", their a racist and that America and should be open for any and everyone.
But it is your fault you get paid low wages and have no health care and get taken advantage of, since when is anything in this world for free..? why do you think that what you go through in your country gives you a right to come to another and make it hard on another man. Mexico's president even stated to the world "that illegals take the jobs that not even blacks want"
and he's damn right we've worked them since 1506 for FREE and the little bit of minimum wage blacks fought and died for won't go up cause someone with no papers will work for anything. Rules are set in place for a reason, they might suck but you can't make a change if your willing to be happy eating shit all you do is make it stink for the rest of us.
Not only would it help us out with our hugh debt, create jobs and force us to over haul the entire system cause you know someones gonna get mad and swear a great injustice but wheres the justice for us actual tax paying, social security card carrying citizens...?
i love George Lopez but he's an idiot to think that illegal immigration only upsets white people as if AMERICANS don't need a job. He represents his country to the fullest yet we as Americans don't have the same right?. If we flooded his country and under cut his fellow men,push them out of jobs then tell them you really don't want to work this job let me do it as well as stressed the medical system and basically did what we wanted in Mexico they claim the capitalist Americanos were destroying his homeland and we'd just continue to be the big mean super power.
i think any time people think it's OK for any group of people to break the law to better your self, at the expense of others.....your the true capitalist, liar, cheat and thiefSome people seem to think illegal immigration isn't a problem, not to sound like a... more
The Obama administration will insist on measures to give legal status to an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants as it pushes early next year for legislation to overhaul the immigration system, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said on Friday.
In her first major speech on the overhaul, Ms. Napolitano dispelled any suggestion that the administration — with health care, energy and other major issues crowding its agenda — would postpone the most contentious piece of immigration legislation until after midterm elections next November.
Laying out the administration’s bottom line, Ms. Napolitano said officials would argue for a “three-legged stool” that includes tougher enforcement laws against illegal immigrants and employers who hire them and a streamlined system for legal immigration, as well as a “tough and fair pathway to earned legal status.”
Speaking at the Center for American Progress, a liberal policy group in Washington, Ms. Napolitano unveiled a double-barrel argument for a legalization program, saying it would enhance national security and, as the economy climbs out of recession, protect American workers from unfair competition from lower-paid, easily exploited illegal immigrants.
“Let me emphasize this: we will never have fully effective law enforcement or national security as long as so many millions remain in the shadows,” she said, adding that the recovering economy would be strengthened “as these immigrants become full-paying taxpayers.”
Under the administration’s plan, illegal immigrants who hope to gain legal status would have to register, pay fines and all taxes they owe, pass a criminal background check and learn English.
San Nicola Varco is a place in Eboli, near Salerno, where there is a farmers market built in the 80s and never came into operation. The structure had become, for many years, the lodging of hundreds of North African immigrants, mainly Moroccans, day laborers in local fields. Most of them had arrived in Italy regularly, with a contract of employment. But once here, the contract turned out to be a scam. http://www.inaltreparole.net/en/news/sannicolavarco111109.htmlSan Nicola Varco is a place in Eboli, near Salerno, where there is a farmers market... more
Courage comes in many different forms. For Esmeralda a transgender asylum seeker from Mexico who faced horrific circumstances in immigration detention, it came in the form of seeking justice. Kept in a segregated cell with other transgender detainees, Esmeralda never realized that her experience in detention would match the trauma of discrimination she had faced back home. But her story is also one of hope for change.Courage comes in many different forms. For Esmeralda a transgender asylum seeker from... more
(11-10) 20:36 PST SAN FRANCISCO -- The San Francisco Board of Supervisors on Tuesday was successful in overriding Mayor Gavin Newsom's veto of legislation changing the sanctuary city ordinance.
Newsom, who said the ordinance conflicts with federal law, said through his spokesman that he would ignore the legislation - prompting the legislation's author to threaten a legal challenge to the mayor. The new law takes effect in 30 days, and Supervisor David Campos said the board may fight the mayor in court if no compromise can be struck.
Campos' ordinance - which garnered eight votes Tuesday - requires that undocumented juveniles be turned over to federal authorities for possible deportation only after they're convicted of a felony. Currently, under a policy enacted by Newsom last year, youth are turned over upon arrest.
"The law is pretty clear that when you have legislation that is duly enacted, the job of the executive is to implement and enforce that legislation unless there is a finding by the court the legislation is illegal," Campos said. "In this case, there isn't."
Viewed through the lens of the immigration issue, the overall results of yesterday’s elections might be called a mixed bag. Republican gubernatorial candidates who promised more hardline immigration stances won races in Virginia and New Jersey.
read the rest at www.NewAmericaMedia.orgViewed through the lens of the immigration issue, the overall results of yesterday’s... more
The Dutch marked the fifth anniversary Monday of the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Muslim fanatic, a brutal killing that continues to shape politics in the Netherlands.
Van Gogh, a distant relative of the famous painter, was shot and stabbed on an Amsterdam street Nov. 2, 2004, setting off a spate of mosque burnings in a country once renowned for its tolerance.
His killer Mohammed Bouyeri, a Dutch-born man of Moroccan descent, said he did it because Van Gogh insulted Islam in his films. Bouyeri is serving a life sentence for the killing, which was ruled a terrorist act.
The effects of the murder were far-reaching, and Dutch debate about the integration of Muslims — who make up 5 percent of the 16 million population — continues into the present.
The murder aided the rise of Geert Wilders, an anti-immigrant politician whose party leads in recent polls.
Television stations were running documentaries and films Monday about the killing, and politicians, fans and members of Van Gogh's family were to gather later at a monument in a park near the spot where he was killed.
"We learned from it," Amsterdam mayor Job Cohen said of the murder on NOS radio Monday.
He compared its effect on the Netherlands to that of the Sept. 11 attacks on the United States — noting that while the scale of destruction was different, the attackers' ideology was the same.
A dozen members of Bouyeri's circle were arrested later for terrorism-related crimes such as throwing explosives at police or plotting attacks on landmarks.
Cohen said his role has been to "just try to hold things together" in a diverse city where tensions between various groups continue to run high. "Every day it's a new challenge all over again," he said.
In the aftermath of the killing the government ordered citizenship tests for resident aliens and language tests for would-be immigrants. The latter was one of several measures intended to make it difficult for Muslim men to marry foreign brides.
The government made it a crime to not carry an ID card, and authorized police to stop people not suspected of any wrongdoing on the street and frisk them. Prosecutors and intelligence agencies were also given greater powers.
In some ways the anti-immigrant politician Wilders has tried to assume Van Gogh's mantle, creating his own provocative film, "Fitna" which linked Islam and violence.
Van Gogh fans say Wilders lacks the filmmaker's sense of irony.
There have been some positive developments in race relations in the Netherlands since 2004, not least because no new terrorist attacks have taken place.
Many Dutch are weary of debates over Islam, and other issues sometimes force immigration and terrorism off the front page — notably the financial crisis.
Still, public interest in any crime escalates if it involves ethnic Moroccans or Turks. And immigration issues dominate politics.The Dutch marked the fifth anniversary Monday of the murder of filmmaker Theo van Gogh... more
Barack Obama said that a US travel ban against people infected with the HIV virus will be overturned early next year.
The order will be completed on Monday, Obama said, finishing a process begun during the administration of George Bush.
The United States is one of about a dozen countries that bar entry to travellers based on their HIV status. The ban has been in place for more than 20 years. Obama said it will be lifted just after the new year, after a waiting period of about 60 days.
"If we want to be a global leader in combating HIV/Aids, we need to act like it," Obama said at the White House before signing a bill to extend the Ryan White HIV/Aids programme. Begun in 1990, the program provides medical care, medication and support services to about half a million Americans with HIV or Aids, mostly low-income people.
The bill is named for an teenager who contracted Aids through a blood transfusion at age 13. Ryan White went on to fight Aids-related discrimination against him and others like him in the late 1980s and to help educate Americans about the disease. He died in April 1990 aged 18.
His mother, Jeanne White-Ginder, attended the signing ceremony, as did several members of Congress and HIV/Aids activists.
In 1987, at a time of widespread fear and ignorance about HIV, the department of health and human services added the disease to the list of communicable diseases that disqualified a person from entering the United States.
The department tried in 1991 to reverse its decision but was opposed by Congress, which in 1993 went the other way and made HIV infection the only medical condition explicitly listed under immigration law as grounds for inadmissibility to the country.
The law effectively has kept out thousands of students, tourists and refugees and complicated the adoption of children with HIV. No major international Aids conference has been held in the United States since 1993 because HIV-positive activists or researchers could not enter the country.
Obama said lifting the ban "is a step that will save lives" by encouraging people to get tested and to get treatment.
Among the silence of the press and taking advantage of the ignorance of most of the population Western governments are doing something that will one day be seen by our descendants in the same way we now see the slave trade. A shame without justification. Western governments imprison thousands of people who haven't committed any crime. Hundreds of others are left to die at sea and in deserts. http://inaltreparole.net/en/resistance/illegalimmigrants281009.htmlAmong the silence of the press and taking advantage of the ignorance of most of the... more
This is a article from the blog Racialicious that goes into detail over the Latino community's outrage over CNN's continued involvement with Lou Dobbs - despite his crusade to brand illegal immigrant situation is far-sweeping, and a greater threat to the United States.
WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) -- For weeks, Nathaniel Cunningham and his boyfriend secretly lived together in rural Jamaica. They showed no affection in public and rarely spoke to neighbors.
Then one morning, Cunningham picked up a local newspaper with a front-page story under the headline, "Homosexual Prostitutes Move into Residential Neighborhood." His address was listed below.
For days afterward, Cunningham said an angry mob gathered on his lawn hurling rocks and bricks and calling them "batty boys" - a Jamaican slang term for gay. Eventually, the pair grabbed what they could and fled on foot. Cunningham said neither he nor his boyfriend were prostitutes - the slur was just another example of the abuse gay men faced in Jamaica.
The story was one of many that Cunningham, now 32 and living in Worcester, recently shared with a federal immigration judge in his successful bid to win asylum in the United States. And it's similar to other stories cited by a small but growing number of other gay, lesbian and transgender asylum seekers who are using U.S. immigration courts to argue that their sexual orientation makes it too dangerous for them to return home.
Since 1994, sexual orientation has been grounds for asylum in the United States. That's when former U.S. Attorney General Janet Reno ruled in a case that persecution based on sexual orientation could be potential grounds for asylum.
Until recently, those grounds have been rarely used and such cases represent only a fraction of all asylum cases.
But now immigrant and gay activists say more asylum seekers from the Middle East, Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean are citing sexual orientation as reasons for seeking asylum. Activists say the asylum seekers are escaping rape, persecution, violence, and threats of death from places where homosexuality is either outlawed or strongly, socially shunned.
Federal immigration law allows individuals asylum if they can prove a well-founded fear of persecution in their country of origin based upon race, religion, nationality, political opinion or membership in a particular social group. Those applying for asylum are already in the United States, legally or illegally.
No one knows for sure just how many have sought asylum on sexual orientation grounds. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services doesn't keep data on asylum cases won on that basis.
Still, last year Immigration Equality, a New York-based nonprofit group that helps gay clients with immigration cases, successfully won 55 asylum cases using sexual orientation as grounds, a record for the organization, said the group's legal director Victoria Neilson. That's up from 30 wins in 2007 and 27 in 2006, Neilson said.
And a Worcester, Mass.-based nonprofit group, Lutheran Social Services, has recently won five cases and is looking to help others.
However, not all cases for asylum based on sexual orientation have been successful. For example, a gay Brazilian man who was married in Massachusetts and whose American husband remains in the state was recently denied asylum by the Obama administration on humanitarian grounds, despite pleas from Sen. John Kerry. Genesio "Junior" Januario Oliveira had originally requested asylum because he was raped as a teenager, but an immigration judge denied the application, saying Oliveira repeatedly said in the hearing that he "was never physically harmed" by anyone in Brazil.
He was forced to return to Brazil in 2007.
Cunningham said he decided to file for asylum after working for a few years in the United States on a work visa. He conducted research online but couldn't find an immigration group to help him with the case. "One group said my case clashed with their Christian values," Cunningham said.
Cunningham won asylum in January 2008.
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parts of this article have been removed due to space allocated...please click link to read in its entirety...WORCESTER, Mass. (AP) -- For weeks, Nathaniel Cunningham and his boyfriend secretly... more
Nightmare of a Dream Student
New America Media
Commentary, Roberto Dr. Cintli Rodriguez,
Oct 26, 2009
I’ll refer to her as Leticia X.
She is undocumented, but has been in this country since the age of three and is a top student at her high school. Yet, unless the law changes soon, she will be unable to continue with her studies. She tells my students at the University of Arizona that it is wrong that she will not be able to attend college next year: “I consider myself a U.S. citizen. It’s the only country I’ve ever known.”
Her symbolic mother is Leticia A -- a student who set the legal precedent in 1982 in Plyler v. Doe in Texas, permitting undocumented students to be able to attend public K-12 schools, without having to pay exorbitant out-of-state tuition.
Today, Leticia X struggles to change this policy to include K-16 students. If out-of-state fees are exorbitant for out of state K-12 students, the rates are stratospheric for out-of-state college students, generally costing tens of thousands of dollars yearly.
President Barack Obama on Friday stood behind Stephanie Villafuerte, his nominee for Colorado U.S. attorney, while state Republicans called for her to either withdraw her nomination or answer questions about whether she may have acted inappropriately during the 2006 gubernatorial campaign.
Villafuerte, currently Gov. Bill Ritter's deputy chief of staff, has refused to explain what types of conversations she had with representatives from the Denver district attorney's office in the days before and after a restricted federal database was accessed, perhaps for political purposes.President Barack Obama on Friday stood behind Stephanie Villafuerte, his nominee for... more
Imagine that you are a cosseted member of the French elite. One child is doing the khâgne, aiming for rue d'Ulm. Another is now a politechnicien. You are very comfortable, working for the state. You and your spouse are journalists, or writers, or one of that vast tribe of people conducting "recherches" and life is comfortable, good, the way it should be. Yes, you do notice more and more Muslims about you as you walk, no longer in the banlieues, but in the center of Paris, or Toulouse, or Lyon. And you remember how uneasy you felt, four years ago, when you happened to be walking on the Cannebière in Marseille. You decided, then and there, that you would not return.
And you have friends who live in the south. And they tell you that the beurs - some call them maghrébins -- make life hell for everyone. They attack French children on the way to school. They vandalize cars. They threaten, and do more than threaten, anyone who is still foolish enough to walk out wearing a kippah or a cross. Whole areas of cities in the south, as in the north, and east, and west, have become off-limits to non-Muslims. In the schools, the teachers have lost authority. They cannot even cover the subjects of World War II, the Resistance, and the murders of the Jews as the state prescribes; they fear, with reason, the violent reaction of the Muslim students.
And as the schools become more and more dangerous for non-Muslim students and teachers, with more time and resources devoted to discipline rather than to learning, French parents and would-be parents are now silently factoring into their childbearing plans the present value of the future cost of what, they see, will now have to be added: private school tuition. And that means, of course, that those French people will plan on smaller families. And they will also be factoring in the growing cost, paid by them, those French taxpayers, for the whole expanding edifice of security, the guards in the schools, the guards at the train stations and métro stations and airports and at government buildings everywhere, the costs of keeping the gravestones from being vandalized, the costs of protecting the synagogues and the churches, the costs for all those tapped phones and agents in mosques, and subsidies to lawyers and judges to hear charges and try cases against Muslims, and the costs of monitoring da'wa in the prisons (more than 50% Muslim).
But the Muslims are indifferent to expenses incurred by the French state. France is part of the world; the world belongs to Allah, and to his Believers. That doctrine has remained immutable for 1400 years. Imam Bouziane, the one they keep trying to deport, had 16 children by two wives, all living on the French state: a representative Muslim man. Over time, the difference between average family size of Muslims and non-Muslims steadily increases. And, over time, the education system continues to disintegrate. Right now, perhaps, you cannot see it. Your children go to the best schools, followed by the best lycées. You vacation in Normandy, or Brittany, or the Ile de Ré. And you do not take the metro often enough, or walk in the right districts, or work in the right factories or offices, to understand what tens of millions of your fellow Frenchmen now have to endure. You, for the moment, are still immune, still willfully unaware. You have spent the last few decades learning about the Muslim world from Eric Rouleau, and his epigones (after they silenced Peroncel-Hugoz, the one journalist who reported the truth) in Le Monde. You are deeply-versed in the constantly reported-upon, endlessly dilated-upon, perfidy of the mighty empire of Israel. You know what we have all had dinned into us: that the Arab Muslims are reasonable people, with clearly-justified grievances, grievances so reasonable and so limited in scope, that justice demands they be satisfied.Imagine that you are a cosseted member of the French elite. One child is doing the... more
Memorandum of Agreements between Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and state and local law enforcement agencies in 23 states, the only agency to lose its authority under the 287(g) program to operate task forces that can enforce federal immigration laws is the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office.
We must admit that Italian politics has made some real miracles. Berlusconi certainly didn't keep his historic promise to create one million jobs, now Italy just lost at least one million, but he did a miracle for sure. He manages to stay in power for years with the sole purpose of defending his private interests, doing absolutely nothing useful for the country. Even the Italian left has made its miracle.We must admit that Italian politics has made some real miracles. Berlusconi certainly... more
