Welcome To America: The Immigration Backlash
UnpublishedNovember/December
1995
Volume:
29
Number:
3
Article
Ernie McCray
Despite the passage of Proposition 187, my dispo- sition remains the same. I will not, in any way, play a role in willfully hurting another person.
Howard Jordan
The immigration issue is not only a contentious one for Puerto Ricans. It has also divided the African-American community, with one part of the leadership clearly suspicious of the merits of pro- moting immigrant rights.
Carlos Monsivais
In relation to what was left behind, Mexican barrios in the United States are ghettos of prosperity. Mexican immigrants have the basics and a little bit more. It is in the little-bit-more that the roots of exile lie.
Rubén Martínez
While the small Latino youth movement takes to the streets, community-based organizations are focusing on political empowerment through more traditional channels. Political passions are inflamed (literally) at the Peace and Justice Center, a quasi-underground youth hangout just west of downtown Los Angeles.
Howard Jordan
Immigration has divided the Puerto Rican community. While some see the defense of immigrant rights as part of the broader struggle for social justice and Latino empowerment, others view immigrants as unfair competition for scarce jobs.
Argentine Election Results T he July/August issue of the magazine contains a "news- brief' from Notisur on the May 1995 Argentine elections that un- critically describes the first-round victory of Carlos Satil Menem. This account does nothing to dispute the standard neoliberal interpretation of Menem's re-election as a demo- cratic mandate for IMF-style eco- nomic stabilization and reform policies.
GROWING EVIDENCE OF SAMPER'S LINKS WITH CALI CARTEL BOGOTA, OCTOBER 1, 1995 Government raids in August that led to the arrests of top leaders of the Cali cartel yielded further evidence linking contri- butions from the cartel to Ernesto Samper's presidential campaign. While Samper point- ed to the arrests as proof of his will to fight the country's drug lords, documents found in the raid revealed that his campaign treasurer Santiago Medina had accepted a $50,000 check from a company known to be a front for the Cali cartel.
Raúl Hinojosa & Peter Schey
Proposition 187 prohibits public schools from admitting and allow- ing the attendance of children who are not citizens or lawfully admitted residents. Starting on January 1, 1995, each school district must verify the legal status of each child enrolling in the district for the first time.
Raúl Hinojosa & Peter Schey
The drafters of Proposition 187 were not oblivious to its constitu- tional problems. in fact, they looked forward to having another tive Supreme Court.
iAdelante Mujeres! Mexican- American/Chicana Women National Women's History Project, 7738 Bell Road, Windsor, CA 95492, 1992, 30 mins., $10 (preview); $49.
Doug Tsuruoka
Suriname, the most densely forested country in the world, has attracted the interest of huge Southeast Asian logging companies. The country's lax forestry regulations put the rainforest-and the indigenous groups that live in it-at extreme risk.
DM
The Private Saviors of Chile's Forests Over the past four years, Esprit clothing mogul- turned-ecophilanthropist Douglas Tompkins quietly pursued his ambition of creating a vast pri- vate park in southern Chile to be named Pumalin (the Spanish diminutive of puma). Without telling anyone what he was doing or why, he acquired property piece by piece until he had in his possession 670,000 acres of pristine rainforest that stretched from the Pacific Ocean to Argentina.
Mario Benedetti
The terrifying revelations made by a navy captain of the "death flights" carried out during Argentina's dirty war show that memory will always fight to come to the surface. Consigning it to oblivion is pointless, hypocritical and perverse.
Raul Hinojosa and Peter Schey
By calculating how much Mexico spends on the schooling and health care of Mexicans who migrate north for their prime working years, it becomes clear that California is indebted to Mexico–not the reverse.
Mike Davis
Proposition 187 first attained critical mass in the great suburban valleys of southern California. The referendum exemplifies that area's special destiny for transmuting middle-class anxieties into terrifying political firestorms.
Linda Ocasio
Even accounting for the United States' historical ambivalence towards its immigrant population, the current backlash in Washington is stunning. Lawmakers are sweeping up legal immigrants in the same net of legislation that seeks to expel and keep out the undocumented.
California's Proposition 187 was the tinderbox that set off the most recent anti-immigrant explosion in the United States. In that state's distinctive brand of right-wing populism, over four and a half million Californians-59% of the electorate- voted to deprive undocumented immigrants of the right to medical care and education.