Report

THIS REPORT, THE FIRST OF TWO ON LATINO and Caribbean communities in the United States, focuses on immigration, and on the deep ambivalence of U.S.

Article

Readers are invited to address letters to The Editors, Report on the Americas, 475 Riverside Drive, Suite 454, New York, NY 10115. Letters may be edited for length and clarity.
Sarah J. Mahler
Attracted by an informal network of friends and family, and by a reasonable number of jobs no one else seems to want, many immigrants are heading straight for the suburbs.
Bill Frelick
The U.S. embassy in Haiti confirms "credible reports of indiscriminate killings, police harassment, illegal searches...and detention of persons without charges..." Yet Haitian refugees are turned away.
Debbie Nathan
"DON'T USE MY NAME," SAYS A WOMAN whom I'll call Perla. "I already have enough prob- term.
Jo-Marie Burt
Some observers of the ApnI 5 auto- aftertwo years hadconsolidated an iron day of the autogo/pe to deliver a list of go/pc have suggested that Fujimori is a grip over the intelligence servi ces and some 120 corrupt officert, some have mere puppet of the military, a civilian through them, over the army's top suggested that Fujimori may have been facade who, like Uruguay's Juan Maria echelon..
Robert Smith
The transnational community which has evolved from migration between Mexico's Mixteca Sur and New York dollarized a remote rural economy and may soon put a taco on every Manhattan corner.
Jo-Marie Burt
After Congress thwarted his attempts to legislate authoritarianism, Fujimori decided it had to be all or nothing.
Richard Mines & Beatriz Boccalandro & Susan Gabbard
About 70% of U.S. farmworkers are Latinos. Over half were born in Mexico. The steady influx of immigrants seems to encourage scandalously low pay and poor working conditions.
Saskia Sassen
UNITED STATES POLICIES HAVE fONSIS- abusestemming fromtheernployersanctions program, w hile tently failed to limit or regulate immigration in the undocumented immigration continues to grow. intended way.
Saskia Sassen
ANNUAL LEGAL ENTRIFS OP IMMIGRANTS TO With the single exception of Italy, all of the countries sending the United States increased from 1965 on, reaching more than 100,00(1 i mmigrants each year were either in the 373,000 in 1970. 531.
Diane Bartz
Three years ago, the 100-year-old Organization of American States (OAS) seemed on the brink of extinction. Many powerful Latin American nations dismissed it as a colonialist tool of the United States considered it inactive and ineffective. Few nations were paying their bills, forcing the regional organization to cut staffing to the bone.
Joseph Ricciardi
Popular support for the February coup attempt evinced the depth of public disenchantment with a corrupt and self-serving political elite.
María Jiménez
A multi-agency U.S. government presence has turned the U.S.- Mexico border into a war zone, where the rights if immigrants and residents suffer daily "collateral damage."
Cathi Tactaquin
Undocumented immigrants, a permanent feature of the U.S. underclass, are the most powerless group of workers in the U.S. Yet a spirited movement to defend their rights is emerging.
Saskia Sassen
Years of work and ardous debate went into the writing of the 1986 Immigration Reform and Control Act, a vast revamping of the law aimed above all at stemming the flow of undocumented immigrants. Yet the flood of unauthorized entries continued to grow unabated. A new law signed in November, 1990 allowed increasing numbers of immigrants with a flexible cap of about 700,000. Yet 1991 entries reached over one million. What is it about immigration policy that makes it so ineffective?