A new report finds that passing an immigration reform bill that would allow undocumented immigrants living in the United States to apply for a legal status would result in large benefits for the U.S. economy—with states reaping the biggest economic gains.

The report released Friday by the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning Washington think tank, comes on the heels of the Heritage Foundation study released May 6. The Heritage study suggested the Senate-proposed immigration reform bill would cost $6.3 trillion, but it received much criticism for failing to acknowledge the economic benefits that would result from the bill.

U.S. economy would benefit from immigration reform

In contrast to the Heritage study, the Center for American Progress report shows that the U.S. would see an economic boost if Congress approves an immigration reform bill that would legalize some of the 11 million undocumented immigrants currently living here.

Specifically, it would add $832 billion to the U.S. economy over a decade. It would also result in Americans seeing a cumulative increase of $470 billion in their personal incomes over 10 years. Furthermore, 121,100 new jobs would be created each year over a 10-year period.

The report also calculated the economic gains for 24 states where 88 percent of undocumented immigrants live. It found that the states’ economies stand to gain the most from the legalization of undocumented immigrants.

One of the states that would gain the most is Texas, where 1.6 million undocumented immigrants reside. If undocumented immigrants were able to gain a legal status, Texas would add $144.6 billion to its economy over a decade, according to the report.

“We see that at the national level as well as at the state level, there is a positive economic benefit—a significant one,” Angela Kelley, vice president for immigration policy and advocacy at the Center for American Progress, said during a call with reporters Friday.

“At a time when our economy is still struggling to make a comeback, it just makes sense to have immigration reform be in the mix as a way of making [the country] strong economically,” she added.

The authors of the Center for American Progress report are Robert Lynch, a professor of economics at Washington College, and Patrick Oakford, a research assistant at the Center for American Progress.

Undocumented immigrants would also make economic gains

Undocumented immigrants themselves would also see significant economic gains following the passage of an immigration reform bill that would allow them to gain a legal status.

Kelley said if undocumented immigrants are given the opportunity to gain a legal status, their chances of landing better paying jobs would increases. She also said they would have access to better training, become better educated and be able to compete for jobs they couldn’t compete for prior to gaining a legal status.

The Center for American Progress report lists five reasons why legalization would lead to an increase in earnings and economic benefits for undocumented immigrants. The report states that receiving legal status and citizenship encourages to invest in their education, makes it easier for them to change jobs when they desire, helps protect them against wage theft, provides them access to better jobs and facilitates entrepreneurship.

The authors of the report conclude stating that overall, undocumented immigrants “are contributing significantly less to the U.S. economy than they potentially could.”

“With legalization and citizenship, undocumented immigrants will produce and earn more, pay more in taxes, boost the American economy, increase the incomes of all Americans, and promote job growth,” the report’s authors write.

VOXXI.COM
Read more: http://www.voxxi.com/u-s-economy-gain-immigration-reform/#ixzz2TpgDsTxh

Here's a mind-blowing statistic from filmmaker Eduardo Lopez: "Approximately 500,000 Latino U.S. citizens will turn 18 every year for the next 20 years."

You don't need to be too much of a mathematician, says Lopez, to figure out the impact this has on the social and political fabric of America. The history behind this immigrant baby-boom is at the core of his feature-length documentary "Harvest of Empire: The Untold Story of Latinos in America," based on writer Juan Gonzalez's book of the same name.

Gonzalez, a New York Daily News columnist and co-host of the daily TV show "Democracy Now," says that the best way to get a grip on the present immigration debate is to track down some of the reasons people leave their home country.

"You cannot really understand the explosion of the Latino community in the U.S. over the past 50, 60 years unless you first understand what has been the United States' role in Latin America, at the end of the 19th century, but most especially in the early 20th century," Gonzalez said. "So that really, the Latino presence in the U.S., is the harvest of the American empire."

"Harvest of Empire," narrated by Gonzalez, uses archival footage, personal stories and census data to document the history of each of the major countries where Latino immigrants come from — Mexico, El Salvador, Cuba, Guatemala, Nicaragua and the Dominican Republic — and Puerto Rican migrants.

The legacy of U.S.-backed dictatorships

It's a complicated story of uneasy alliances between local governments and American industrial and foreign policy interests. This often meant supporting democracies but mostly, especially during the Cold War, propping up dictatorships. 

A clip from the film shows Mike Wallace on "60 Minutes" in 1979 saying, "To understand where Nicaragua is heading you have to know where it is come from, the young people who are in the street in insurrection regarding a family that has ruled for almost 50 years, a family installed in power by the U.S. government, following 20 years of occupation by the U.S. marines. Though their country was desperately poor, the Somozas amassed a huge personal fortune."

"Harvest of Empire" follows similar patterns of political disruption and turmoil in Nicaragua, El Salvador, Cuba and Guatemala, where the U.S.-backed military dictator Efrain Rios Mont was just sentenced for genocide and crimes against humanity and for almost decimating the indigenous Maya population.

So, says filmmaker Eduardo Lopez, tens of thousands of people fled their countries escaping political violence, persecution, poverty, and social and economic instability, and headed to the United States. Once here, says Lopez, himself an immigrant from war-torn El Salvador, many chose not to tell their American-born children how they arrived. He saw their now-grown kids respond to the film.

"They had no idea," Lopez said. "And especially when they see the very difficult images of the war at the time and how it was fought, basically from an army against unarmed civilian population, they're really shocked, because they understand 'This is what my parents actually lived through, and I didn't know it.'"

Human stories, handed down

In the film, celebrated novelist Pico Ayer remembers how his family emigrated from the Dominican Republic in the mid-'70s to escape the Leonidas Trujillo dictatorship.

"I thought we were going up the road to some mystical place," Ayer said. "When I finally saw a map in kindergarten, how far we would go, I was not only astonished but terrified. When I emigrated to New Jersey in 1974, a few months before the fall of Saigon, this was not a place that was very welcoming. I experienced a tremendous amount of racism, not only from white Americans but also from black Americans and Latinos."

Puerto Rico, because it's part of the United States, and Mexico, because it's the largest source of immigrants, occupy a prominent place in the film. There are more than 30 million Mexican immigrants in the U.S.

"More legal Mexican immigrants have come to this country since the 1920s than the Irish, the German, the French — than any other population," Gonzalez said.

Gonzalez says this film is not a story of statistics but of people, a way to provide an historic backdrop for the current immigration debate.

"There's this sense of those who have already settled into and become a part of the fabric of this society, that these newcomers are threats, rather that seeing that the debates really are over what kind of nation are we going to be," he said. "This current debate in Congress is not about immigration reform but about what will be the composition of America in the 21st century. It's not a unique debate, this may be the third or fourth major debate in U.S. history".

"Harvest of Empire" will continue to tour in commercial movie houses, festivals and universities for the next year.

NEWSWORKS.ORG

http://www.newsworks.org/index.php/homepage-feature/item/54892-documentary-recounts-latino-immigration-history-as-harvest-of-american-empire?Itemid=4&linktype=hp_topstory

Leaving cool water in the blazing desert for migrants desperate to risk their lives to enter the United States without the proper paperwork is not a new act of kindness.

Yet, for an aid organization to start a crowdfunding campaign to help them leave water in the desert is new. La Cruz Roja (Red Cross) of Mexico is doing just that. The campaign, dubbed Agua en el desierto, is more than just leaving water in the desert — it’s about leaving coolers.

La Cruz Roja Mexicana wants to raise enough money to build 20 portable coolers that operate without electricity. The units would be left at strategic locations in the deserts of Sonora and Chihuahua. Each portable fridge holds up to 80 chilled bottles of water.

Unlike the U.S. side of the border where similar efforts have only targeted undocumented immigrants, the Mexican project also hopes to help the Tarahumaras Indians whose lands have been severely affected by drought in recent years and who also cross the deserts as part of their lifestyle.

La Cruz Roja Mexicana wants to install the coolers as a way to transform the heat of the desert into a sustainable method of keeping the water cool and accessible to the vulnerable communities that trek through the area.

The campaign’s goal is $68,168. As of this writing, a little over 50 percent of the money has been reached. The campaign ends on May 28, 2013.

LATINALISTA.COM

http://latinalista.com/2013/05/mexicos-red-cross-creates-crowdfunding-campaign-to-build-desert-cooling-stations-for-u-s-bound-migrants

Washington (CNN) –President Barack Obama comes out of what was arguably the worst week of his presidency with his approval rating holding steady, according to a new national poll.

But a CNN/ORC International survey released Sunday morning also indicates that congressional Republicans are not overplaying their hand when it comes to their reaction to the three controversies that have consumed the nation's capital over the past week and a half. And the poll finds that a majority of Americans take all three issues seriously.
According to the survey, which was conducted Friday and Saturday, 53% of Americans say they approve of the job the president is doing, with 45% saying they disapprove. The president's approval rating was at 51% in CNN's last poll, which was conducted in early April.

"That two-point difference is well within the poll's sampling error, so it is a mistake to characterize it as a gain for the president," says CNN Polling Director Keating Holland. "Nonetheless, an approval rating that has not dropped and remains over 50% will probably be taken as good news by Democrats after the events of the last week."

The CNN poll is in-line with Gallup, which also indicated a very slight rise in Obama's approval rating over the same time period. And Gallup's daily tracking poll also indicated a slight upward movement of Obama's approval rating over the past week. But as with the CNN poll, it was within that survey's sampling error.

More than seven in 10 in the CNN poll say that the targeting by the Internal Revenue Service of tea party and other conservative groups that were applying for tax exempt status was unacceptable. While the White House and both parties in Congress are criticizing the IRS actions, congressional Republicans are depicting the controversy as a case of the federal government gone wild.

But more than six in 10 say that the president's statements about the IRS scandal are completely or mostly true, with 35% not agreeing with Obama's characterizations. And 55% say that IRS acted on its own, with 37% saying that White House ordered the IRS to target tea party and other conservative groups.

Only 42% of the public is satisfied with how the Obama administration has handled the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, which left the U.S ambassador to that country and three other Americans dead. Fifty-three percent say they are dissatisfied. But those numbers are virtually unchanged from November.

Republicans have ripped the administration for not providing adequate security for the Benghazi mission, botching the response to it, and misleading the public for political gain with the attack coming less than two months before last November's presidential election.

According to the poll, 44% say statements made by the Obama administration soon after the attack were an attempt to intentionally mislead the public. Half of those questioned say those statements reflected what the Obama administration believed, at the time, had occurred.

But 59% now say that the U.S government could have prevented the attack in Benghazi, up 11 points from last November. And only 37% say that congressional Republicans are overreacting in their handling of the matter, with 59% saying they've reacted appropriately.

It's the same story on the IRS controversy, with 54% saying the GOP in Congress has not overplayed its hand.

The White House has also been criticized by Congress for the Justice Department's secret collection of phone records from the Associated Press as part of a government investigation into classified leaks. According to the poll, 52% say the Justice Department's actions were unacceptable, with 43% saying they disagree.

Americans appear to be taking all three controversies very seriously, with 55% saying the IRS and Benghazi matters are very important to the nation and 53% saying the same thing about the AP case.

"More Republicans than Democrats or Independents say these three issues are very important to the nation, but even among Democrats, nearly half say the matters are very serious," Holland adds.

Are Americans’ trust in the government shaken?

Only 43% say they have a great deal or some confidence in the people who run the federal government. But 56% say they have a great deal or some confidence in the system of government.

The CNN poll was conducted by ORC International between May 17-18, with 923 adults nationwide questioned by telephone. The survey's sampling error is plus or minus three percentage points.

– CNN Political Editor Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.

CNN.COM

http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2013/05/19/have-new-controversies-hurt-obama-has-gop-overreacted/?hpt=hp_t1

For all the times that I write commentaries here about people ganging up on the growing Latino population in this country, I worry at times that I’m spewing conspiracy theories. Then, I read pieces such as one written recently by Patrick Buchanan, and it makes me think that, if anything, I’m going soft on the criticism of the ideologues who spew their nativist tripe.

THE GIST OF the thoughts that Buchanan (himself a former presidential candidate who has run unsuccessful bids for office that tried to appeal to all the people who have hang-ups about ‘all those Mexicans’) expressed on the WND.com website is that he doesn’t think much of efforts to appeal to Latino or black or Asian or any other ethnic-sort of voter.

He sees the modern-day Republican Party as the one that has an overwhelming composition of white people, and should probably focus its attention on turning out as many of them as possible come future Election Days in order to achieve electoral victory.

Buchanan reminds the readers of the “Southern Strategy” – the campaign tactic of 1968 in which Republican Richard M. Nixon appealed to those southerners who were disgusted with the Democratic Party for going so hard in favor of civil rights.

His strategy was to make Republican voters of them by making it clear he wouldn’t hold it against them that they had their objections to civil rights for all.

SO IS BUCHANAN hoping to get all the people who have a hang-up about immigration reform united against the Democratic Party to the point where they will vote Republican?

All too believable.

Yet also all too foolish. Because even by Buchanan’s own admission, the number of white people who cast ballots for president dropped between 2008 and 2012 – a trend that is only going to continue in future years.

After all, President Barack Obama only got 39 percent of the white vote in last year’s elections. A record low, but he still won re-election by an overwhelming margin.

BUCHANAN CALLS IT, “the crisis of the Grand Old Party.” I, and the real majority of our society, call it the coming of the 21^st Century.

The sooner that he, and all the ideologues, accept that reality, the sooner they can become a part of the solution to the problems that afflict our society.

http://www.southchicagoan.blogspot.com/