Unlike Mexican border states where drug-fueled violence has been on the upswing, violent crime rates in U.S. states bordering Mexico have been decreasing for the last several years. El Paso and San Diego are rated among the safest cities in the United States. Since 9-11, no terrorist has been detected crossing from Mexico. Even detentions of border-crossers are way down, up to 90 percent in the New Mexico corridor alone, according to media reports.
Of the many undesirable effects of the ongoing — and increasingly policy-induced — recession in Europe, has received relatively less public attention: the resurgence of racist and xenophobic attitudes. This was already something of a problem, especially in Western Europe in the past decade, when right-wing political forces demanded major restrictions on immigration and sporadic episodes of violence broke out against migrant and Roma groups.
Summer is always hot in Arizona, but the summer of 2010 may be hotter than any in recent memory.
Democratic Party leaders recently introduced their latest proposal to reform U.S. immigration policy. The proposal, which is given little chance of passage in a polarized election year, offers carrots and sticks in an attempt to bring some semblance of order to a broken and outdated policy that has left nearly 12 million people in the United States without legal documents.
The global economic crisis has devastated workers around the world, none more than migrants whose daily wages are dependent on the whims of global financiers. Witness Dubai. Even before the meltdown of Dubai World, migrants whose labor literally built Dubai from the ground up suffered serious job losses with the onset of the global recession in 2008.
EU Green Card Lottery: Registration Office, installation view, exhibition “The Embassy / Apocalypse Now”, Paris, 2007
Immigration reform advocates still disagree over the Senate’s failed 2007 attempt to push through legislation that would have provided a path to legalization for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States. Unions and big business had briefly allied in supporting a legalization program combined with an increase in visas. But the partnership collapsed after an ill-begotten attempt to secure the bill’s passage, which added so many noxious provisions that it lost many of its supporters while failing to win over implacable opponents.
FPIF’s E. Ethelbert Miller talks with Edwidge Danticat about her new memoir, U.S. immigration law, and U.S.-Haitian relations.
Yania Marcelino was a six-year-old girl in the Dominican Republic when her mother left their family to find work in another country. She went first to Puerto Rico, then later to New York City to work as a seamstress. There she began sending money back to Marcelino and her three siblings and four cousins. The children often had to travel 15 or 20 kilometers to get to the wire transfer agency, and sometimes the money sent was lost.