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January 28, 2010

Mexican program to support its citizens in U.S.


The Migration Policy Institute reports that a new program by the Mexican government to support its citizens residing in the U.S. “represents one of the most significant, if overlooked, factors in US immigrant integration policy” today. As one third of all immigrants in the U.S. are Mexican, this initiative may well serve as a model for other countries with large numbers of citizens residing here.

The program even provides medical care to illegal immigrants.

The January 2010 report’s title is “Protection through Integration: The Mexican Government’s Efforts to Aid Migrants in the United States”

The report’s executive summary (further below in full): says:

“In recent years, the Mexican government has moved beyond traditional notions of consular protection by establishing a broad institutional structure, the Institute of Mexicans Abroad (Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior or IME), to deliver an array of civic, health, education, and financial services to its migrants — 95 percent of whom live in the United States.”

Also,

“While evaluations of IME’s programs remain scarce, its projects offer a number of potential best practices in areas ranging from distance learning, outreach, civic engagement, and health care. We recommend sustaining and broadening evaluation and assessment of these programs. This is especially critical as other sending countries, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay, look to Mexico as a model for providing services to its diaspora and other recipient countries look to work with sending countries to make migration work for all participants.”

The Executive Summary in full:

Mexican consular officials safeguard and protect the interests of their nationals in the United States, performing many of the same functions as any other diplomatic staff in a foreign country. As an immigrant-sending country, Mexico also offers its nationals in the United States low-cost transfer rates for remittances and programs that match migrant investment in communities of origin dollar for dollar.

In recent years, the Mexican government has moved beyond traditional notions of consular protection by establishing a broad institutional structure, the Institute of Mexicans Abroad (Instituto de los Mexicanos en el Exterior or IME), to deliver an array of civic, health, education, and financial services to its migrants — 95 percent of whom live in the United States.

The proximity and concentration of their diaspora allows Mexico to establish or coordinate programs geared towards helping Mexican migrants transition to life in the United States. By promoting services that seek to integrate its migrants in a receiving country, the Mexican government has taken on a task that has traditionally been the work of receiving-country institutions, not sending countries.

IME’s work represents one of the most significant, if overlooked, factors in US immigrant integration policy. This report does not evaluate IME programs but rather seeks to detail its activities in a first-ever attempt to map the expanding array of IME programs within the United States.

The United States and Mexico have an important stake in the success of a shared population whose demography poses several challenges to immigrant integration in the United States. Mexican immigrants disproportionately have lower educational attainment, lack English proficiency, lack access to quality health care, and are more likely to work in low-wage, unskilled occupations that do not offer health insurance but may expose many to unsafe working conditions.

In addition, the large Mexican unauthorized population and recently arrived legal immigrants remain outside the US social safety net. Mexican immigrants may be left especially vulnerable in this economy as they are concentrated in industries — including construction, manufacturing, leisure, and hospitality — that are struggling through the recession. With limited evidence of return migration, Mexican immigrants increasingly will need assistance to succeed socially and economically.

Driven in part by the opportunity and necessity of supporting a shared population of adults and children, IME has set in motion a range of immigrant integration practices to help Mexican immigrants succeed in the United States. IME’s approach is based on a belief that a better integrated immigrant — one who has access to quality K-12 or adult education, learns English, is healthy, understands his or her rights, and is politically active — benefits the individual immigrant, the sending country, and the receiving country.

In many cases, IME’s programs are binational civil- society collaborations between IME and US school districts, hospitals, universities, foundations, and community-based organizations that fill gaps in the social welfare system caused by funding shortfalls, lack of experience with migrant populations, eligibility requirements, or neglect.

These projects include:

• Creation of a unique model of binational civic engagement through the Advisory Council (Consejo Consultivo del IME), a migrant-elected, migrant-led council that focuses on the Mexican government’s policies vis-à-vis Mexicans abroad while serving the ancillary purpose of leadership development within diaspora communities.

• Transcript analysis and diagnostic assessments in Spanish for US school districts that need assistance determining the appropriate grade placement of Mexican migrant children to promote graduation and reduce dropouts.

• Provision of low-cost culturally and linguistically appropriate distance-learning instruction for Mexican immigrant adults that is aligned with instruction received in the home country.

• Establishment of in-consulate medical stations (Ventanillas de Salud) where unauthorized immigrants and their families can receive basic medical information.

• Provision of financial literacy workshops that encourage the use of formal banking institutions in order to build sufficient credit history in the United States to qualify for a home or car loan.

In some cases, IME serves as the implementing agency for the program, but in other cases it serves a coordinating role between appropriate government agencies.
IME’s policies and practices underscore a shift in the Mexican approach to its migrants, from relatively limited engagement with their diaspora to the creation of an institution that cultivates a formal relationship between Mexico and its migrants in the United States. This shift can be seen in the evolution of its consular offices as they become important service delivery sites and coordinating entities for immigrant integration. This development coincides with an increase in the number of Mexican immigrants in the United States and the expansion of Mexican consular offices in the United States over the last decade to meet their needs.

While evaluations of IME’s programs remain scarce, its projects offer a number of potential best practices in areas ranging from distance learning, outreach, civic engagement, and health care. We recommend sustaining and broadening evaluation and assessment of these programs. This is especially critical as other sending countries, such as Ecuador, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Paraguay, look to Mexico as a model for providing services to its diaspora and other recipient countries look to work with sending countries to make migration work for all participants.

January 27, 2010

Illegal worker awarded workers comp benefits in legal twist

Work injuries sustained by an illegal worker often lead into a legal labyrinth ending up, usually, with the worker being granted some or all the benefits allowed by a state’s workers compensation system. This Florida case fits the mold.

As reported by WorkCompCentral (subscription required) Angel Miranda was injured in July 2008. His employer paid him under the table for his disability.

When the employer stopped its payments, he filed a workers compensation claim. Only problem: he had no formal record of having earned a wage, presumably he had been paid in cash, and to award disability benefits a worker has to show evidence of what he was paid. Miranda tried to remedy the situation by filing in April 2009 a tax return for 2008. A workers compensation judge awarded Miranda disability benefits; the decision was upheld of appeal.

Whether he was later deported or not the news article did not say.

The article:

Illegal Alien's Tax Return Entitled Him to Benefits:

An illegal alien's filing of a tax return with the Internal Revenue Service entitled him to workers' compensation benefits, Florida's 1st District Court of Appeal ruled.

Case: JBD Brother's and Masonry Inc., et al. v. Miranda, No. 1D09-3402, 1/25/10, published.

Facts: Angel Miranda was an illegal alien from Mexico who has lived in the United States since 2000. In 2008, he began working as a forklift driver and laborer for JBD Brother's and Masonry. Miranda was injured in July 2008, when he fell from a scaffold at the employer's job site in Miami.

The employer failed to immediately report the accident to its workers' compensation carrier, and instead, agreed to make "under the table" payments for Miranda's medical care and lost time until he recuperated. When the employer halted the payments in September 2008, Miranda retained an attorney and filed a petition for benefits.

The employer responded by reporting the accident to its carrier, which accepted the accident and injury as compensable. However, the carrier denied indemnity benefits because there was no record of Miranda ever having reported his wages to the Internal Revenue Service.

In April 2009, Miranda and his attorney filed forms reporting his 2008 income to the IRS, and seeking an individual taxpayer identification number.

Procedural History: The parties stipulated that Miranda's reported income equated to an average weekly wage of $480. However, the employer argued that because Miranda failed to file the correct forms with complete information to the IRS, he failed to properly report his income and therefore failed to establish his wages for purposes of calculating an AWW.

The judge of compensation claims rejected this argument, and awarded temporary total disability benefits.

The appellate judges concluded that Miranda was entitled to workers' compensation benefits despite the allegation that his tax return may have had some technical flaws. The court based this upon another Jan. 25, 2010, decision, which is named Rene Stone Work Corp. v. Gonzalez.

In that decision, the court concluded that an employee simply needs to report his or her income to the IRS to become entitled to benefits, and rejected arguments that the tax return needs to be technically precise.

Source: WorkCompCentral

January 23, 2010

A new book on immigrant entrepreneurs

“Immigrant, Inc.” is a new book profiling how immigrants are creating new jobs, products and services by their entrepreneurship. Congratulations to the co-authors for highlighting this aspect of immigration. We see once again why we call America a country of immigrants. For a quick introduction to the book, click on this Youtube site:
http://www.youtube.com/user/Immigrantinc2010

January 12, 2010

Expose of criminal behavior by immigration detention officials


Shocking, but not surprising, news about immigrant detention centers: officials have covered up deaths. The New York Times published an article which can only be called angry – angry at officials who had lied to its reporters in the past, even as these officials conspired to cover up the causes of death. “officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.”

I hope this leads to $100 million in payments to grieving family survivors.

The article in full:

Officials Hid Truth About Immigrant Deaths in Jail
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.

“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”

That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.

Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.

Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.

According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.

“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”

In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.

A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled

January 9, 2010

Poor labor protections for low wage labor in Los Angeles


I posted in December on a survey conducted on low wage (about $8 an hour) immigration and native American labor in several cities. This article in the LA Times addresses the findings in that area. “The study found that almost nine out of 10 low-wage workers surveyed in Los Angeles County had recently experienced some form of pay-related workplace violation, or "wage theft." Almost one in three reported being paid less than the minimum wage and nearly 80% said they had not received legally mandated overtime.”

“Only 4.3% of Los Angeles respondents who had experienced a serious on-the-job injury during the previous three years had filed a workers' compensation claim to pay for medical care or missed days of work, the study found.”

The article in full:
By Patrick J. McDonnell

January 6, 2010

Low-wage workers in the Los Angeles area are even more likely than their counterparts in New York and Chicago to suffer violations of minimum wage, overtime and other labor laws, according to a new UCLA study being released today.

The study found that almost nine out of 10 low-wage workers surveyed in Los Angeles County had recently experienced some form of pay-related workplace violation, or "wage theft." Almost one in three reported being paid less than the minimum wage and nearly 80% said they had not received legally mandated overtime.

"We knew these violations were happening, but we never really imagined it was as prevalent as this study demonstrates," said Ruth Milkman, a sociologist and principal author of the study, conducted by UCLA's Institute for Research on Labor and Employment.

The authors described the study as a ground-breaking effort to quantify the plight of a vulnerable, largely immigrant population that is often missed in standard surveys.

Los Angeles employees also reported working off the clock, not receiving proper meal and rest breaks, being forced to work despite injuries and facing retaliation from employers for complaining or trying to start a union. Almost one in five Los Angeles restaurant employees and others receiving tips reported that employers or supervisors illegally pocketed all or part of their tips.

The study found that small and large employers across a broad swath of industries in Los Angeles County regularly violated labor laws. "These problems are not limited to the underground economy or to a few bad apples," the report said.

Gary Toebben, president of the Los Angeles Area Chamber of Commerce, said he had not seen the study, but that the vast majority of area employers comply with all state and federal labor laws. "We do not condone any employers who do not comply with the law," Toebben said.

The report is part of a larger study, released last year, that examined the predicament of low-wage workers in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York. The new report focuses on Los Angeles County, home of the nation's largest population of undocumented workers.

"In nearly every case," the study stated, "the violation rates are higher in Los Angeles than in New York and Chicago."

The reason for the pervasiveness of abuses here, the authors said, is that certain sectors of the Los Angeles economy, including garment manufacturing and residential construction, have embraced business strategies that involve widespread violation of labor laws. Although all three cities have large immigrant populations, few low-wage workers in Los Angeles have union representation, and many work in service industries or in apparel manufacturing. But proponents of immigration restrictions argue that the very presence of so many illegal immigrants creates a climate of exploitation.

"Obviously, the fact that so many of these workers are in the country illegally does provide unscrupulous employers the opportunity to take advantage," said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

The study also suggests that low-wage workers in Los Angeles County seldom benefit from the legally mandated workers' compensation system for employees who become sick or injured on the job.

Only 4.3% of Los Angeles respondents who had experienced a serious on-the-job injury during the previous three years had filed a workers' compensation claim to pay for medical care or missed days of work, the study found. Whether this is because employers didn't have the mandated coverage, didn't inform employees or pressured workers not to file was unclear, Milkman said.

The study, which took five years, involved detailed interviews in 2008 with 1,815 workers in Los Angeles County, all from low-wage professions, where average salaries were close to $8 an hour. Those surveyed included garment workers, domestics, restaurant employees, janitors and construction workers.

The surveyed population is representative of about 17% of all workers in Los Angeles County, or almost 750,000 people, the study said. More than half of the participants (56.4%) were undocumented immigrants -- a fact that created a vulnerability exploited by employers, the study said. The great majority, almost 75%, were Latino. Almost 60% said they had less than a high school education.

patrick.mcdonnell@latimes.com

January 6, 2010

NY Times editorial on immigration reform


The New York Times started off the 2010 season of campaigning for immigration reform in an editorial. Nothing substantively new from 2009, when the reform issue seemed buried six feet under. I don’t hold out much hope for much constructive action this year.


Immigration’s New Year

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, at his inauguration, pledged to help the Obama administration pass immigration reform. Mr. Bloomberg is a force to reckon with, as he proved with his national campaign against illegal guns. On the same day, four young people in Miami, current or former students at Miami Dade College, began their own determined march to Washington in an effort to bring pressure from the grass roots.

Three of the four were brought to this country illegally as children. Like thousands of other young people, they bear no blame for their status, and they are frustrated that their hard work and bright promise lead to a brick wall. Their protest for a chance to become Americans is courageous because it exposes them to possible arrest and deportation. “We are risking our future because our present is unbearable,” one of them, Felipe Matos, told The Times.

The Obama administration has vowed to press ahead with reform this year. Given the hard economic times, the politics may be bleaker even than in 2007 when reform was scuttled in an ugly battle. The need is just as real — for the undocumented and for the country.

America needs to shut the path to illegal entry and employment while opening smoother and more rational routes to legal immigration. Opponents of reform say the downturn is a terrible time to fix the system, but they are wrong. When the recovery comes, the country will need a functioning system more than ever — one that encourages legal entry and bolsters all workers’ rights.

To do this, the country needs to bring its huge undocumented underclass into the light. This means putting 12 million people on a path to being assimilated. It is not a question of adding new people to the work force; they are here, many helping keep the economy afloat while tolerating low pay and abuse from lawbreaking employers who prefer them to American workers.

Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat of Illinois, already has offered a sensible bill that legalizes immigrants who show that they have been employed, pay a $500 fine, learn English and undergo a criminal background check, among other things.

Opponents will try their best to scuttle reform by claiming to be open to compromise while they insist on prohibitive fees, penalties and requirements that turn the path into a fiction — not a wait of months but of decades or never. That is not reform. And it won’t solve the problem.

After years of tightening the screws, the system is hopelessly frozen. Those who want to fix it will have to shut out the choruses of no-amnestys and over-my-dead-bodys, sidestep the false arguments and press into the headwinds while holding firm to the core of the better solution. To legalize the undocumented, collect their unpaid taxes, free them to earn more and spend more, to get the immigrant escalator to the middle class moving again. The country needs it; the economy needs it; the immigrants need and deserve it.

“No city on earth has been more rewarded by immigrant labor, more renewed by immigrant ideas, more revitalized by immigrant culture,” Mr. Bloomberg said of New York City last week. Substitute “country” in that sentence, as in America, and it is every bit as true.