"Georgia Immigration" - (Google) News Sweep - 4/14/'06
"Georgia Immigration" - (Google) News Sweep - 4/14/'06
4/14/'06 - The following article(s) were found in the media. Several stories are provided ... with links to the original sources ... for your convenience:
- Coverage of illegal immigration encompasses all sides (AJC)
- Fed funds dwindle for jailing illegals (Gainsville Times)
- Let immigrants, street people make a deal (AJC)
- HBO production chronicles Latino students' 1968 protest (AJC)
- Radio stations lead the charge for Hispanics (AJC)
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http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/tuck/stories/041506.html
Coverage of illegal immigration encompasses all sides
Published on: 04/15/06
"I want you to put 'illegal' where it belongs," the caller shouted at me. Immigration and illegal immigration aren't the same things, she said, while objecting to what she sees as the newspaper's use of the terms interchangeably.
She is in her 70s, and doesn't like what she is hearing and seeing all around her. Illegal immigrants from Mexico are flooding into her Lawrenceville neighborhood, bringing a different language and a host of other problems.
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She gave me her name, but doesn't want it in the newspaper. She believes The Atlanta Journal-Constitution's stories about illegal immigration are too sympathetic to people who are breaking the law.
Her thoughts echo those I've heard repeatedly in recent months as the debate over illegal immigration has taken center stage. Conversely, some readers have rightly challenged the use of loaded words, such as illegals — a term we try to avoid.
Tuesday's front page featured coverage of an Atlanta rally where more than 40,000 people protested strict immigration laws. Thousands more protested in other cities.
The story prompted one longtime reader to send this e-mail: "I'm a moderate on immigration and I read today's front-page story on the immigration rally hoping for a well-balanced, dispassionate report. That lasted about 12 seconds, until I got to the third paragraph where the story notes that the D.C. location is the same place other 'movements' such as civil rights and anti-Vietnam were launched.
"Right off the bat, the AJC has to cloak this event in manufactured nobility. Why don't you let readers draw their own parallels rather than using subliminal marketing? Then the article continues in adoring description of the crowd in Atlanta, which it dubs not just large but 'impressive.' "
There was no hint of a tough question, said this reader, about the effects of illegal immigration on the economy.
It's true that words such as "impressive" have no place in a news story if they aren't contained in a quotation. But the comparison of Monday's rallies to other movements is appropriate because it puts the demonstrations in historical context. The sheer number of people who took part in the Atlanta march — and in marches in other cities — speaks volumes. This is their time to be heard.
Their voices are more likely to be heard on Spanish-language radio and newspapers, but it's important they be heard in mainstream publications such as the AJC. To write only about growing opposition to illegal immigration would be to ignore a huge part of the story — the people who live it each day.
While the newspaper may not have done so in Tuesday's story, reporters and editors have posed tough questions in dozens of stories in recent months. I believe this newspaper has done a fair job of hearing from people on all sides of the debate, defining the issue and explaining how new laws could play out.
Reporters who cover Atlanta's immigrant communities and those who cover business, state government and other beats have followed the issue. Brian Feagans' April 6 story about how the illegal immigration debate is playing out on Vidalia onion farms in Lyons, Ga. , showed the complexity of the debate.
The April 2 front-page primer headlined: "Why can't they just come here legally?" answered a common question by detailing the ways people can legally enter the United States.
A key point in that story is one that is often overlooked, said Sylvester Monroe, who supervises the paper's immigration coverage. "Almost none of these legal avenues are open to unskilled workers from Mexico," he said. "To do it legally is almost impossible because of the volume of people."
Next week's Atlanta & the World will feature letters from people invited to write about their experiences with immigration. "There are some really thoughtful pieces," Monroe said. "Much of what people think about this issue is based on incomplete information, half-truths and lack of context."
Monroe said it's a fair criticism that the newspaper's coverage is sometimes overly sympathetic to illegal immigrants. "It's one which we are aware of. We're trying harder to present stories from different points of view. We often tell stories about people because that's generally the easiest way to get at an issue."
• Contact Angela Tuck by e-mail at insideajc@ajc. com, by phone at 404-526-5819, by fax at 404-526-5610 or by writing P.O. Box 4689, Atlanta, Ga. 30302.
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http://www.gainesvilletimes.com/news/stories/20060414/localnews/86856.shtml
Fed funds dwindle for jailing illegals
By NIKKI YOUNG
The Times
Hall County has applied for its seventh year of federal reimbursement for housing criminal illegal immigrants in the county jail, though the payback has decreased over the years.
The State Criminal Alien Assistance Program partially reimburses state and local governments for incarcerating illegal immigrants who have committed a felony or two misdemeanors and are jailed at least four days. Violations of federal immigration law are not included.
"We're usually one of the largest counties in the state to get this," said Phil Sutton, assistant county administrator.
In 2005, Hall spent $645,968 to house 131 inmates, who spent a total of 13,744 days in jail, Sutton said.
In the same year, the federal government awarded Hall $36,833, though the county was the third largest in Georgia to receive the grant. It was the lowest amount yet since Hall first sought the funds in 2000.
Hall received $185,523 in 2002 and claimed the most criminal illegal immigrants in Georgia. Two years later and still with the most illegal immigrants, Hall received only $71,524.
The number of Georgia counties to receive the grant has more than doubled since 2001, from 10 to 21 counties, but federal funding has decreased.
Meanwhile, the number of criminal illegal immigrants in Hall's jail shows no signs of slacking off. "Our number is going up every year," Sutton said.
The feds put slightly more money into the program nationwide in 2006, $376 million, up from $301 million in 2005. The Bureau of Justice Assistance in the U.S. Department of Justice administers the funds.
But the program lacks White House support and is losing money, Sutton said.
Earlier this year, a U.S. Office of Management and Budget evaluation recommended ending the program because it is not getting proven results. No action has been taken.
The funds are disbursed at the discretion of the county commission and are not restricted for use at the Hall County Detention Center, said Maj. Jim Ash, who is in charge of sheriff's services.
This is a major flaw in the program, however, because the funds do not necessarily get used for their intended purpose, according to the Office of Management and Budget.
The evaluation is listed at www.expectmore.gov, a government site that posts evaluations of the effectiveness of federal programs.
The report also stated that it is difficult to determine the immigration status of inmates. Only 30 percent of the inmates submitted for the program by local governments nationwide are actually proven to be illegal. About 50 percent are of unknown status, and the other 20 percent submitted were citizens.
Contact: nyoung@gainesvilletimes.com; (770) 718-3428
Originally published Friday, April 14, 2006-------------------------------------
http://www.ajc.com/opinion/content/opinion/stories/0414edlee.html
Let immigrants, street people make a deal
By DWIGHT R. LEE
Published on: 04/14/06
America faces an increasingly divisive controversy over immigration. Our cities are plagued with chronic homelessness and panhandlers. I have a modest policy proposal for reducing both problems. Instead of relying entirely on politically determined quotas to address immigration and public or private compassion to help the homeless and panhandlers, why not rely more on market incentives and individual freedom?
The first thing to recognize is that the homeless and panhandlers (who are often different people—some homeless don't panhandle and some panhandlers aren't homeless) are quite wealthy. Almost all own an asset worth several hundred thousand dollars. The problem is that they are denied the right to sell that asset, which is their United States citizenship.
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| Dwight R. Lee is a professor of economics and private enterprise at the University of Georgia. |
A U.S. citizenship is a highly valuable asset because of its potential productivity. The owner has the right to take full advantage of the enormous opportunities in America to combine his or her ambition, ingenuity and labor with talented people and an unparalleled capital base to produce wealth. The homeless and panhandlers are clearly not using their U.S citizenships as productively as many non-U.S citizens could, and would, if they became citizens. This is where freedom and markets are relevant. When people are free to buy and sell, markets do an impressive job motivating voluntary exchanges that direct assets to those who will make the most valuable use of them.
So my suggestion is straightforward: Give Americans the right to sell their citizenships to non-Americans.
Those who choose to sell would be required to leave the country. But with several hundred thousand dollars they would have no problem getting permission to settle in another country with a much lower cost of living than America's. Those foreigners who can buy a U.S. citizenship (likely through borrowing with their citizenship as collateral) will typically be far more educated, ambitious and productive than those who sold it to them.
I understand that some restrictions should be imposed on a market in U.S citizenships. For example, I would not be permitted to sell my citizenship to Osama bin Laden or anyone else who is considered a terrorist threat to America.
One might object that many panhandlers and the homeless are mentally ill and not competent to exercise the freedom to sell their citizenships. This is no doubt true in some cases, but the burden of proof should be on those who are quick to conclude that others aren't smart enough to make their own decisions without the guidance of some government bureaucracy. If someone is too mentally incapacitated to make a free choice in a market for citizenships, should she be considered competent enough to choose a life on the street or should she be institutionalized?
Obviously, some who sell their citizenships will spend their money in ways that most of us consider wasteful. But that objection applies to giving the mentally impaired on the streets the freedom to spend their money on lottery tickets, and to spend any winning they receive as they choose. That much of the money from lottery sales ends up in the pockets of teachers and professors, but almost none of the money from citizenship sales would, should be an irrelevant consideration.
Except for those who find something distasteful about consenting adults engaging in capitalistic acts, who would lose from a market for citizenships? Those who are so poor that they are resorting to panhandling and living on the streets are unlikely to object to receiving several hundred thousand dollars and the possibility of affluence in another country. The ambitious and talented from other countries who are willing to buy a U.S. citizenship to enter America legally would clearly see the advantage in doing so. And the rest of us will benefit from more productive Americans working hard at increasing their wealth and ours, and from fewer panhandlers pestering us on the streets.
A market for citizenships would not eliminate all the problems with immigration, homelessness and panhandling. But it would do more to solve these problems than what we have been doing.
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http://www.ajc.com/wednesday/content/epaper/editions/wednesday/atlanta_world_44c3038f801e614600bb.html
HBO production chronicles Latino students' 1968 protest
Teresa Borden - Staff
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
The recent Latino protests across the country clamoring for immigration reform have given "life-imitates-art" relevancy to Edward James Olmos' newest movie, "Walkout," an HBO production about Latino students in Los Angeles who walked out of their classrooms and into the streets to protest discrimination in 1968.
"It was a civil rights story that allowed us to experience the empowerment of young people during a time period that was most crucial in the development of our country," Olmos said at a recent opening for the movie in Atlanta. "1968 was one of the most crucial years we've ever had."
As two major figures, Robert Kennedy and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were assassinated that year, labor leader Cesar Chavez fasted for immigrant workers' rights and, in Mexico, young protesters against a dictatorial regime were mowed down by soldiers and police.
The movie, directed by Olmos on a script by Mexican-American writer Victor Villasenor, will next show on HBO2 on Friday at 6 p.m., on April 19 at 11:15 p.m., April 24 at 9:30 a.m. and April 27 at 3:30 p.m. It stars Michael Pena, who starred in this year's Oscar-winning "Crash," and Alexa Vega of "Spy Kids" fame.
Olmos is no stranger to the L.A. classroom. He was an Academy Award nominee for his 1988 portrayal of Jaime Escalante, the calculus teacher at Garfield High School who in the early 1980s inspired dropout candidates to instead focus on higher math. Escalante did such a good job with them that they were later accused of cheating.
The story of the students in "Walkout" takes place more than a decade earlier, and Olmos said it's American Latino history that had heretofore remained untold.
"This is ground that's never been touched," he said. "We didn't know about this ground. ... This film is a part of history that nobody knows about, and everybody should."
He said what really happened during the walkouts had been hidden in footage in the vaults of the three major networks who covered the movement and wasn't discovered until three filmmakers who were chronicling the Chicano civil rights movement of the early 1970s in a documentary went in and found it. From there, the search for the former students who took part in the walkout began.
Those students, who staged walkouts over their teachers' and administrators' refusal to let them use school bathrooms or speak Spanish in school, among other things, and who were later arrested for their protests, are widely believed to have inspired the movement. One of them, Moctezuma Esparza, became executive producer of the movie.
Another was Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. Just weeks ago, Villaraigosa found himself at the front of another Latino march in Los Angeles, this time by immigrants and their American citizen children, who again walked out of the schools to press for immigration reform and protest punitive measures now in Congress that could put their parents in jail.
Olmos said "Walkout's" release is just in time for another Latino awakening.
"The awareness is strong," he said. "That's what has to be done. That's where the 'Walkout' is."
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http://www.ajc.com/wednesday/content/epaper/editions/wednesday/atlanta_world_44c303cf801ea1f100fb.html
Radio stations lead the charge for Hispanics
Shelia M. Poole - Staff
Wednesday, April 12, 2006
For Teodoro Maus, there are two heroes from Monday's successful march to protest immigration legislation under consideration in Congress: the Latino community and Hispanic radio.
Maus, one of the organizers of the rally and last month's protest --- when Latinos were asked to stay home from work and not spend any money --- said neither event would have been successful without the electronic grapevine.
"We would never have been able to achieve --- they're saying up to 60,000 people came --- without the media in general, but especially radio," said Maus, the former Mexican consul general in Atlanta. "There was no way we could have gotten the message out to so many people. They [Hispanic radio] were definitely there."
Indeed, in recent weeks the power and reach of Hispanic media --- radio in particular --- has become especially clear. Last month in Los Angeles, for example, an estimated 500,000 people in white T-shirts turned out to protest the proposed federal crackdown on illegal immigration.
That was followed on Monday by nearly 200,000 people in Washington and between 30,000 to 60,000 people in Atlanta, who joined thousands of others across the country in an unprecedented, coordinated demonstration on a controversial issue that has dominated Congress, the Georgia Legislature, the Internet and talk radio chatter.
In all these demonstrations, Hispanic radio was credited with mobilizing the masses.
"It was done right," said Ricardo Villalona, general manager of the hugely popular Viva (105.7 FM) in Atlanta. "We told people to do it with dignity." Since the debate over illegal immigration has heated up in recent months, Villalona said his station, which was launched in September 2004 and is owned by Clear Channel, has been inundated with calls. "People are calling like crazy."
He said people feel comfortable talking with some of the station's on-air personalities, who speak the same language and understand the culture.
"We are there for them," he said of Viva's listeners." We let them know what's going on on a daily basis."
Just ask Sergio Acosta, a Norcross construction worker.
Though he is fluent in English and Spanish, Acosta said he prefers to get his news from Hispanic radio. He listens to Viva in the morning and another Hispanic station in the afternoon.
Acosta said Spanish-language radio brings him more news from his native Mexico, which he left 16 years ago, and also keeps him informed about the Latino community.
For instance, Acosta said he first learned the details of Monday's rally from the radio. "They know everything that's happening," said Acosta.
Speaking through an interpreter, Rosa Cardona, who works in a bakery, said she listens to Spanish-language radio throughout the day. "It's very important," said Cardona, who lives in Norcross but moved here 10 years ago from Mexico. "Sometimes I'm very busy, but the radio will tell me what's going on."
Intense competition
Competition is intense. Sammy Zamarron, program director for La Favorita (1600-AM in Atlanta, 1460-AM in Gwinnett County and 1130-AM in Gainesville) said his station has "been the medium where people can express their concerns and their point of view" about the immigration legislation.
The morning show has fielded calls from business owners talking about their concerns, non-Latinos and Latino workers, people who are here illegally and legally.
"The No. 1 issue for Hispanics here has always been immigration," Zamarron said. "It's always been a hot topic, even before these bills came up. People have always been concerned. People are trying to speak up now."
He sees his role as giving people an opportunity to express their opinions, the same way mainstream media does for its audience.
"I don't consider myself to be an advocate," he said. "I consider myself just a communicator. There are a lot of things at stake here. Our job is to really inform people what is going on and to basically hear them out. I know English radio is not going to do that."
Maritza Alfaro, vice president of the Christian-based Radio Vida (1100-AM in Atlanta and 1040-AM in North Georgia), said that as the debate grew, so did listener calls.
Latino media coordinated the message:
"Show up," Alfaro said. "Wear white T-shirts and bring the American flag. . . . White because white means peace, and we want to go in peace."
Ethnic media preferred
According to a recent survey sponsored by New America Media and conducted by Bendixen & Associates, 45 percent of African- American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American and Arab-American adults prefer ethnic media over their mainstream counterparts.
"The reach of Spanish-langauge media is almost universal" among Latinos, the survey said. Eighty-seven percent of Latino adults use Spanish-language television, radio or newspapers on a regular basis.
The significant role Hispanic media, radio in particular, played in helping organize and spread the word about marches and boycotts across the country is not unlike that of the black press in the 1960s and 1970s.
The black press
"The black press played a pivotal role," said Chuck Stone, the Walter Spearman Professor Emeritus at the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of North Carolina --- Chapel Hill and the former editor at several black publications, including The Chicago Defender and the Washington Afro American.
"You got news from around the county. The mainstream press didn't really cover it fully. You would just get a scattering of news."
That's not lost on individuals and groups who want to reach the rapidly growing Latino population.
A second generation Mexican-American, born in the Midwest, Tisha Tallman regularly listens to Spanish-language radio. And she turns to it even more in her work as the regional counsel for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), a leading Latino civil rights organization.
"I listen to it for the music, but I also find that on the Viva commentaries in the morning, people say what's on their minds," Tallman said. Hispanic radio has really "risen to the occasion of bringing information to the people."
Staff writer Yolanda Rodriguez contributed to this article.
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Erik Voss
erik@ICAtlanta.org
404-457-5901 Direct
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