Tag: immigrants (page 2)

Another example of why "one size fits all" justice is no justice at all.

A 9-year-old boy looking for help after his mother crashed her van off a cliff in southern Arizona on Thanksgiving Day was rescued by an illegal immigrant who stayed with him until help arrived the next day.

His mother was pinned inside the car.

Her son, who was unhurt but disoriented, crawled out to get help and was found about two hours later by Jesus Manuel Cordova, 26.... Unable to pull the mother out, Cordova comforted the boy while they waited for help. The woman died a short time later.

"He stayed with him, told him that everything was going to be all right," Estrada said. As temperatures dropped, he gave him a jacket, built a bonfire and stayed with him until about 8 a.m. Friday, when a group of hunters passed by and called authorities, Estrada said. The boy was flown to University Medical Center in Tucson as a precaution but appeared unhurt.

Mr. Cordova's reward?

Cordova, meanwhile, was taken into custody by Border Patrol agents who were the first to respond to the call for help. He had been trying to walk into the U.S. when he came across the boy.

As Santa Cruz County, AZ Sheriff Sheriff Tony Estrada says:

Cordova likely saved the boy and his actions should remind people not to quickly characterize all illegal immigrants as criminals.

Bump and Update: An online petition to help the Servanos is here. If you are from Pennsylvania, or neighboring area, please go on over and sign. Also, here's their lawyers' letter (pdf) to Homeland Security.

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Original Post: 11/17/07

Meet Pedro and Salvacion Servano, a married Filipino couple who have been in the U.S. for 25 years.

Pedro Servano, 54, is a prominent family doctor in an underserved area of central Pennsylvania. His 51-year-old wife runs a grocery store and bakery..... Pedro Servano works at Geisinger Medical Group in Selinsgrove, where he has about 2,000 patients.

Two of their four children graduated from Temple University, while one is in high school and another is in middle school. Several years ago, the Servanos bought and renovated two properties in nearby Sunbury. Salvacion Servano recently opened a small grocery store there, selling Asian goods and baked items.

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Bump and Update: Perhaps Spitzer should have reviewed the success of New Mexico in granting licenses to the undocumented before he pulled the plug.

In 2003, New Mexico began offering driver’s licenses and identification cards to undocumented immigrants....Before the change, New Mexico had the highest rate of uninsured motorists in the nation – one in every three drivers. Now, New Mexico’s uninsured motorist rate is 10.8 percent, well below the national average of 14 percent.

Many undocumented immigrants living in New Mexico drove before the law changed. Some caused accidents. Their status as uninsured motorists put a financial burden on drivers who were legal citizens and insured.....Licensing undocumented immigrants to drive allows them to obtain insurance and helps protect New Mexicans.

This also highlights the difference between Gov. Bill Richardson and Gov. Spitzer. Richardson has a backbone.

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Original Post

New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, who two weeks ago capitulated to the feds and weakened his drivers' license proposal for undocumented residents, has now bowed to public pressure and rescinded the plan entirely.

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New York Governor Eliot Spitzer has given in to the feds and agreed to water down his plan to grant drivers' licenses to undocumented immigrants.

Now, there will be a three-tier system with the undocumented getting licenses that make them prime targets for state and local law enforcment officials who want to turn them over to ICE for removal.

The licenses for the undocumented are the equivalent of a scarlet letter.

“What a huge political flip,” said Chung-Wha Hong, executive director of the New York Immigration Coalition. “He’s now embracing and letting his good name be used to promote something that has been widely known in the immigrant community as one of the most anti-immigrant pieces of legislation to come out of Congress,” Ms. Hong said.

She said having separate licenses would amount to a scarlet letter for illegal immigrants. ....”The separate licenses could also serve as an invitation for law enforcement to arrest anyone carrying one on immigration charges, said Donna Lieberman, executive director of the New York Civil Liberties Union. She added that the new proposal could send illegal immigrants further into the shadows, compelling them to drive with forged or no licenses and without insurance.

Wasn't it just last month that Spitzer said: "The D.M.V. is not the I.N.S."?

Via Think Progress:

Democrats were planning to hold a press conference today featuring three college students whose parents came to the United States illegally in order to promote the DREAM Act. But the event was postponed after anti-immigrant Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-CO) called on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to arrest the three students:

“I call on the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency to detain any illegal aliens at this press conference,” said Tancredo, who claims to have alerted federal authorities about the well publicized press confrence. “Just because these illegal aliens are being used for political gain doesn’t mean they get immunity from the law. If we can’t enforce our laws inside the building where American laws are made, where can we enforce them?”

The DREAM (Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors) Act would allow undocumented students to become permanent citizens after several years provided they complete two years of college, trade school or military service. Details of the bill are here (pdf). The requirements are below:

Tom Tancredo didn't do too well in the fundraising department this quarter. His contributions totaled 764,188.87. His operating expenses were 1,192,933.01. In his home state of Colorado, he raised only 47,274.00.

Maybe that's why he's getting this desperate:

Republican presidential candidate Tom Tancredo wants foreigners seeking visas to join relatives in the U.S. to provide DNA samples to prove their family ties.

The Colorado congressman introduced a bill Tuesday in the House to require the tests, saying documents provided by immigrants to show they are related to U.S. citizens or permanent residents are sometimes sketchy and unreliable.

I thought Republicans were supposed to be the party offering less bureaucracy. I guess not if it makes a good soundbite or you're losing.

Compassionate conservatism at work again. The Bush Administration is telling New York health officials not to approve chemotherapy for undocumented residents because it's not a medical emergency.

The change comes amid a fierce national debate on providing medical care to immigrants, with New York State officials and critics saying this latest move is one more indication of the Bush administration’s efforts to exclude the uninsured from public health services.

Under a limited provision of Medicaid, the national health program for the poor, the federal government permits emergency coverage for illegal immigrants and other noncitizens. But the Bush administration has been more closely scrutinizing and increasingly denying state claims for federal payment for some emergency services, Medicaid experts said.

While states differ on what is or is not a medical emergency, it should be obvious that the states that define it as "any condition that could become an emergency or lead to death without treatment" is the proper one.

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New York Governor Eliot Spitzer deserves praise today for announcing a new policy: Drivers' licenses will be granted to all residents without regard to immigration status.

Under the new rules, the Department of Motor Vehicles will accept a current foreign passport as proof of identity without also requiring a valid yearlong visa or other evidence of legal immigration.

The policy, which does not require legislative approval, will be phased in starting in December.

His reasoning: [More...]

In 2004, Bush proclaimed himself to be a "compassionate conservative." Where's the compassion here?

Jacqueline Coats' husband drowned after he dove into a fierce Pacific Ocean riptide to rescue two boys. Now the immigrant from Kenya might be forced to leave the United States because he died before filing her residency application.

She is among more than 80 foreign-born widows across the nation who face possible deportation because their husbands died before immigration paperwork was approved.

A class-action suit for the women was filed yesterday. I hope they prevail. Also check out the website, Suriving Spouses Against Deportation.

I have an op-ed in today's Washington Examiner newspaper reproduced here...There is No Immigrant Crime Wave.

Politicians will do anything to get elected, including using random, unrelated high-profile crimes to mislead the public, generating fear and hysteria.

Using government statistics that show just 4% of our 2.25 million federal and state inmate population are non-citizens and that young foreign-born men are five times less likely to be incarcerated than those born in the U.S, I argue:

Immigration does not breed crime. Our prisons are not overflowing because of crimes by the undocumented. They are overflowing because of our failed criminal justice policies and over reliance on incarceration versus treatment and rehabilitation with respect to our nonviolent homegrown offenders.

There is nothing wrong with having a debate about immigration. But it is deplorable to falsely stereotype and malign millions of law-abiding people because of one’s desire for a particular outcome in that debate.

Hope you'll read the whole thing. It will make the xenophobic anti-immgrants out there see red.

Our unitary executive is at it again. Even though Congress refused to pass comprehensive immigration reform, he's taken it upon himself to issue new regulations that will crack down on immigrants, toughen border enforcement and increase the use of felony charges against those in violation.

At a news conference in Washington yesterday, Michael Chertoff, the secretary of homeland security, and Carlos M. Gutierrez, the secretary of commerce, formally unveiled the measures, which had been disclosed in general terms earlier, to reinforce border security and drive illegal immigrants out of the labor force.

....Mr. Chertoff said the “real hammer” would be more frequent use by the immigration authorities of criminal felony charges against employers and illegal immigrant workers. He said the authorities had made 742 criminal arrests so far this year in illegal employment cases, compared with 716 such arrests in all of last year, which was a record.

If you had any doubt this is a payback, consider this:

A Pennsylvania judge has declared unconstitutional the Hazleton law banning the undocumented from living or working within city limits.

The decision, by Judge James M. Munley of Federal District Court, presents a new roadblock to local officials who want to take action against illegal immigration after broad federal legislation to address the issue failed in the Senate last month.

Judge Munley ruled that ordinances first passed last July by the Hazleton City Council interfered with federal law, which regulates immigration, and violated the due process rights of employers, landlords and illegal immigrants.

Many cities since either adopted the Hazleton law or declared their intention to do if it was upheld.

The judge emphasized that illegal immigrants had the same civil rights as legal immigrants and citizens.

“Hazleton, in its zeal to control the presence of a group deemed undesirable, violated the rights of such people, as well as others within the community,” he wrote.

The ACLU weighs in here.

More like this please.