Precious Knowledge: PBS documentary of Ethnic Studies

Click to watch the trailer

Please join Dos Vatos Productions and UA’s Hanson Film Institute for the FREE gala premiere of Precious Knowledge, the unforgettable story of student activism in Tucson.

Precious Knowledge premieres this month!

Precious Knowledge is the gripping, current-headlines account of Tucson High School students and teachers forming the front line of an epic civil rights battle to save their Mexican American Studies classes. It also features a soundtrack by acclaimed musician Naim Amor.

Trailer at You tube

Save Ethnic Studies Website

Produced by Dos Vatos

Utah’s New Immigration Bills: A Blast From the Past -- In These Times

Mar 15

In These Times Magazine

The state laws have been called “the nation’s most liberal,” but they’re not much different from Cold War-era deportation policies.

By David Bacon

Labor supply programs for employers, with deportations and diminished rights for immigrants, have marked U.S. immigration policy for more than 100 years.SHARE THIS ARTICLE | Last week the Utah legislature passed three new laws that have been hailed in the media as a new, more reasonable, approach to immigration policy. Reasonable, that is, compared to Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which would allow police to stop anyone, demand immigration papers and hold her or him for deportation. Arizona’s law, signed by Republican Governor Gary Herbert on Tuesday, March 15, is currently being challenged in court.

Utah’s bills were called “the anti-Arizona” by Frank Sharry, head of America’s Voice, a Washington D.C. immigration lobbying firm. According to Lee Hockstader, on the Washington Post’s editorial staff, the laws are “the nation’s most liberal—and most reality-based—policy on illegal immigration.”

The Utah laws, however, are not new. And they’re certainly not liberal, at least towards immigrants and workers. Labor supply programs for employers, with deportations and diminished rights for immigrants, have marked U.S. immigration policy for more than 100 years.

One bill would establish a state system to allow employers to bring people from the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon as “guest workers.” Under this program, workers would have to remain employed to stay in the country. They would not have the same set of labor and social rights as people living in the communities around them. Another bill would give undocumented workers now living in Utah a similar guest worker status, lasting two years. The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) says the third bill, the Arizona look-alike, “requires police to interrogate individuals and verify their immigration status in a wide array of situations, promoting harmful and costly incentives for law enforcement to racially profile.”

Utah, like most states in the west and Midwest, has been down this road before.

No Bond, No Bars: Federal Court Rejects the Prolonged Detention of Immigrants Without a Hearing

Mar 9, 2011

ACLU

On Monday, a federal appeals court ruled that the government cannot lock up immigration detainees for prolonged periods of time without providing them a basic form of due process — a bond hearing where the government must show that their detention is justified.

The ACLU, ACLU of Southern California, and Stanford Law School Immigrants' Rights Clinic brought the case on behalf of Amadou Lamine Diouf, a man held in detention for nearly two years while fighting his immigration case even though he posed no danger or flight risk. During this time, Diouf never received his day in court, but only an administrative custody review that rubber-stamped his continued imprisonment. In a unanimous decision, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals held that a person who has been subjected to prolonged immigration detention is entitled to release unless the government can show that he poses a risk of flight or a danger to the community at a bond hearing before an immigration judge.

Diouf's story makes clear why detention must be limited by these basic procedures. He first came to the United States from Senegal when he was 21 years old to study information systems at California State University. After he graduated, he overstayed his student visa and married a U.S. citizen. Although he was eligible for a green card based on his marriage, the government detained him after his former immigration attorney failed to file important legal papers.

Utah Enacts Anti-Immigrant Bill

Mar 16, 2011
Democracy Now

In Utah, Republican Gov. Gary Herbert has signed into a law a new package of measures similar to last year’s anti-immigrant crackdown in Arizona. Utah’s Republican-controlled legislature approved the laws earlier this month. Immigrant rights activists are expected to challenge provisions that force law enforcement officers to check the immigration status of people stopped for violations.

Promulga Utah leyes migratorias que abren nueva vía a inmigración

Mar 15, 2011

Ir a nota

Notimex Dallas Mar Mar 15 2011 19:02:50

Utah promulgó este Martes una ley estatal que suspende la persecución de indocumentados y les da permisos para vivir y residir en la entidad, y abre un nuevo camino para el problema de la inmigración ilegal en este país, alejado del enfoque de Arizona.

La legislación forma parte de un paquete de cuatro iniciativas que fueron firmadas y promulgadas como leyes por el gobernador republicano de Utah, Gary Herbert, en una ceremonia en el Capitolio Estatal en Salt Lake City.

El conjunto de nuevas leyes frena por un lado, el acoso a los inmigrantes sin papeles y les autoriza a vivir y residir en la entidad, pero por otro, ordena a policías locales verificar el estatus migratorio de personas detenidas por algún delito.

El paquete de legislaciones coloca a Utah a la vanguardia de las demás entidades estadunidenses, al abrir con ello un nuevo camino al tratamiento de la inmigración ilegal en este país, alejado de medidas controversiales como las aplicadas en Arizona.

Una de las nuevas leyes, firmadas este martes por Herbert, ordena crear el primer programa estatal de “trabajadores huéspedes”, en el cual el estado otorgará permisos a inmigrantes indocumentados para continuar viviendo y trabajando en esa entidad.

La ley, emanada de la iniciativa HB116, autoriza al gobierno de Utah a emitir permisos a indocumentados residentes que pasen una revisión de historial delictivo, paguen una multa de dos mil 500 dólares y se comprometan a aprender el inglés.

Los permisos, que serían por dos años, permitirán a los inmigrantes sin papeles salir de las sombras de la ilegalidad para residir y trabajar en forma legal. La medida podría beneficiar a unos 110 mil inmigrantes indocumentados que se estima residen ya en Utah.

Bills Modeled After Arizona’s SB 1070 Spread Through States

Mar 2011

ColorLines Go to note

UPDATE @ 6:55 ET: North Carolina just became the 16th state* to introduce an SB 1070 copycat bill. Unlike Arizona’s law, the North Carolina bill states that only a “law enforcement officer who is authorized by the federal government to verify or ascertain a person’s immigration status” may enforce the new law. The effect, as I discuss below in the context of other states, is a blurring of the lines between state and federal immigration enforcement programs.

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In Arizona’s state legislature, racial profiling is so 2010. It introduced a set of anti-immigrant billslast week that make last year’s SB 1070 look a bit like a passing nuisance. But outside the Grand Canyon State, SB 1070 is far from last year’s news. A round of similarly crafted and in many cases more extreme bills are now spreading all over the country.

At least 16 state legislatures* have introduced SB 1070 copycat bills in the current legislative session. They are undeterred by the suite of lawsuits that have thus far kept Arizona from implementing the most controversial elements of its law.

Arizona’s SB 1070, signed into law last year, made it a misdemeanor for non-citizens to be in the state without documentation. The law also made it a crime to shelter, hire or transport undocumented immigrants and required cops to check the immigration status of anyone suspected of being undocumented. A federal judge has blocked the bulk of the law while courts weigh legal challenges. The Justice Department says the law unconstitutionally preempts federal authority to regulate immigration; civil rights advocates add that it legislates racial profiling.

The SB 1070 copycat laws now introduced across the country all look similar, though most have been tweaked to make them even more draconian. In four states—Indiana, Utah, Mississippi and Kentucky—at least one chamber of the legislature has passed an SB 1070-style bill. In 11 states considering bills—California, Georgia, Illinois, Florida, Maine, Michigan, Nebraska, South Carolina, Tennessee and Texas—the legislation is still in the committee process.

Who Will Pass the Next Bill?

Cuatro de cada 10 migrantes son adolescentes y jóvenes: Inegi

14 de marzo

Ir a nota

Susana González Gutiérrez

Periódico La Jornada

Lunes 14 de marzo de 2011, p. 24

Un promedio de 609 mexicanos por día dejaron el país durante los últimos cinco años para irse hacia Estados Unidos, principalmente, pero también a otras naciones. De ellos, 250 eran adolescentes y jóvenes de entre 15 y 24 años de edad, indica el Censo de Población y Vivienda 2010.

Las cifran implican que cuatro de cada diez migrantes tenían menos de 24 años y en total sumaron 455 mil 587 mexicanos. Casi la misma proporción (38.7 por ciento) de quienes se fueron eran originarios de las localidades y pueblos más pequeños del país, los que no superan los 2 mil 500 habitantes.

Por edad, adolescentes y jóvenes de ese rango son el principal grupo que emigra, e incluso superan en número a las 299 mil 757 personas que tenían entre 25 y 34 años cuando se fueron y que concentraron 27 por ciento del total.

Once estados se ubicaron por encima del porcentaje nacional de 40.96 por ciento de migración joven y adolescente, y tres de ellos, Chiapas, Oaxaca y Guerrero, rebasaron 50 por ciento.

Stop Corrections Corporation of America Private Prison in San Diego

Dec 2010

Go to Jim Moreno note

Campaign targeting the President of the United States, The U.S. Senate, and The U.S. House of Representatives

Started by: Poet Jim Moreno

OVERVIEW

Francisco Castaneda is dead from medical neglect of Corrections Corporation of America (CCA) in their temporary prison in the Otay Mesa area of South San Diego County. Mr. Castaneda's family, with the help of the San Diego ACLU, won a lawsuit against CCA for his wrongful death.

CCA lost a second lawsuit for triple-celling human beings in two man cells. The third human being had to sleep on a mat by the toilet.

We don't need immigration policy that creates human rights abuses and death. We need immigration policy that promotes and expands human dignity and freedom; that doesn't build prisons.

Say no to Corrections Corporation's Private Prison in San Diego.



Problems With Private Prisons 



First Visible Sign of CCA Presence in Otay Mesa



Imagine going into Family Court, Superior Court, Civil Court or Federal Court and you see the letters CCA underneath. You don't know that CCA means Corrections Corporation of America.