"Business, labor resolve dispute on low-skill workers" March 31, 2013
WASHINGTON — Big business and labor have resolved a dispute over a low-skilled worker program that threatened to hold up agreement on a sweeping immigration bill, according to a person familiar with the negotiations.
The deal was struck in a phone call late Friday night with AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka, US Chamber of Commerce head Tom Donohue, and Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York, who has been mediating the dispute.
The person, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of a formal announcement, said the deal resolves disagreements over wages for the new workers and which industries would be included. That had led talks to break down a week ago.
The deal must still be signed off on by the seven other senators working with Schumer to negotiate a bipartisan immigration bill, and that is expected to happen....
The bipartisan Senate group is expected to introduce the bill the week of April 8, after Congress returns from a two-week recess.
The AFL-CIO and the Chamber had been fighting over wages for tens of thousands of low-skilled workers who would be brought in under the new program to fill jobs in construction, hotels and resorts, nursing homes and restaurants, and other industries....
WTF? Those are jobs Americans don't want? I would take one in a heartbeat! I never see any ads for them, though!
On Friday, officials from both sides said there was basic agreement on the wage issue, and Schumer said a final deal on the worker dispute was very close.
Under the emerging agreement between business and labor, a new ‘‘W’’ visa program would bring tens of thousands of lower-skilled workers a year to the country. The program would be capped at 200,000 a year, but the number of visas would fluctuate, depending on unemployment rates, job openings, employer demand and data collected by a new federal bureau pushed by the labor movement as an objective monitor of the market.
That's all labor got out of the deal?
The workers would be able to change jobs and could seek permanent residency. Under current temporary worker programs, personnel can’t move from employer to employer and have no path to permanent residence and citizenship....
I'll tell you one thing, there better not be any terrorist cells let in by that.
The Chamber of Commerce said workers would earn actual wages paid to American workers or the prevailing wages for the industry they’re working in, whichever is higher.
When the reason they are being brought here now is to undercut American earnings and benefits? And now they are just going to give them the jobs!
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At least they have a degree:
"Immigrants in Mass. now likely to be more educated; 80% in Mass. have high school diploma; programs at home have boosted literacy" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff, March 24, 2013
WALTHAM — The number of immigrants in this city has soared, and the latest waves of immigrants are far more educated than their forebears.....
Well, we are a sanctuary state.
The United States has actively recruited high-skilled workers and college students from countries such as China, India, and Brazil.
Umm, then WHAT are YOU GOING into DEBT FOR, kids?
Or is this all about GETTING CHEAP FOREIGN LABOR that WON'T COMPLAIN in this golden age of corporate profits, and channelling America's youth into the military (along with illegals in a deal for citizenship)?
The better educated workers are also changing the face of the economy, launching companies and creating jobs in Massachusetts and elsewhere in the United States, as well as changing the face of local schools and communities....
Literally. Not that I care about color. What I care about is the ILLEGAL part.
Alan Clayton-Matthews, Northeastern professor, said he has witnessed firsthand one of the reasons why, in Santa María Tzejá, a remote village in Guatemala that saw brutal violence during the 36-year civil war. Townsfolk fled to the mountains and refugee camps in Mexico, but then in the 1990s returned to rebuild the town.
They also built new schools, with the help of the church Clayton-Matthews attends in Needham and other supporters. The village now has a middle school. Villagers and some outside supporters are now raising money for a high school.
Look, it's not like I want the Guatamaleans to suffer or not have good schools. In fact, I wish my government hadn't supported a genocidal regime for the interests of United Fruit, nor did I wish for the system of "free trade" they have promoted that has led to native people needing to flee their land to find jobs. But the point remains: that is money and resources removed from the Massachusetts economy.
“Now a lot of the immigration to the United States from this village is from kids who have either a middle-school education or a high-school education and are coming to the US to make money to support their other siblings,” said Clayton-Matthews, an economist....
And chief economic shit-shoveler at the Globe.
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And yet you guys still end up driving cabs:
"In short, a nine-month Globe Spotlight Team investigation has found, the cab industry in Boston is a world of serial indignities that drivers, a largely immigrant workforce, endure while many cab owners walk off with huge and remarkably easy profits."
"As a Globe reporter discovered over eight nights as a licensed Boston cabbie and throughout a nine-month Spotlight Team investigation, the city’s newest taxi drivers join thousands already navigating through two Bostons: a luminous city of gleaming towers and vast opportunity whose workers and visitors they shuttle about daily, and the city’s struggling underclass. Most are immigrants, refugees, masters of many tongues, none of them English."
That must make for an interesting interaction regarding where you want to go.
"Mayor Menino orders review of taxi oversight" by Thomas Farragher and Jonathan Saltzman | Globe Staff, April 02, 2013
Mayor Thomas M. Menino ordered a sweeping review of the city’s $1 billion taxi industry Monday, a day after the Globe Spotlight Team documented a lopsided system of enforcement in an industry that routinely punishes drivers but tolerates egregious conduct by cab owners who operate with relative impunity.
Because immigrants can't complain.
“We have real problems, and I’m very concerned about it,’’ Menino said during an interview in his office. “We’re not going to tolerate this nonsense.’’
But you have, mayor.
The mayor said he hopes to hire a nationally recognized taxi industry specialist within days and seek recommendations within two or three months that could dramatically reshape how Boston taxis are regulated and managed.
Menino said he wants to revamp the Hackney Division of the Boston Police Department, the chief enforcer of those who drive and those who own city-licensed taxis.
He said he will push the Legislature to mandate higher insurance for cabs, most of which now operate with the state minimum bodily injury coverage of $20,000, less than half the required coverage for bike messenger services and much lower than taxis must carry in many other large cities.
“If we can’t get the Legislature to change it, we’ll do it administratively,’’ he said. “It’s too low. There’s no question about it.’’
And the mayor said he wants to install a civilian advisory board to, among other things, help reduce and resolve disputes between drivers and fleet owners.
The top-to-bottom review comes after a nine-month Globe investigation found that drivers are routinely forced to pay petty bribes to get keys to their cabs while owners commonly violate Police Department regulations without fear of sanction. A federal criminal investigation is under way, the Globe reported Sunday.
The Spotlight report also highlighted a Byzantine insurance system used by the city’s largest fleet owner, Edward J. Tutunjian....
See:
An empire built on ambition and a very hard line
Taxi titan’s rise began with just one cab
Why spoil an AmeriKan succe$$ story?
After the Globe’s inquiry, state Treasurer Steven Grossman said he will ask the Legislature to end the program....
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Also see:
Cab drivers want police hackney unit replaced
Boston taxi regulator faces misconduct review
Oh, another compromised and corrupt regulator? That's the rule rather than the exception in 21st-century AmeriKa.
And if you think you are coming to the land of the free, think again:
"Program to track immigrants grows, drawing scrutiny; Advocates question firm’s methods, especially its use of GPS devices" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff, March 17, 2013
BURLINGTON — In a weatherbeaten brick building downstairs from a dentist, the tenants in Suite 1A are carrying out the business of the Department of Homeland Security.
Behind a smoky-glass door, a private company called BI Incorporated monitors immigrants facing deportation with office visits, surprise home inspections, and even GPS devices attached to their ankles, making sure they show up for immigration court or their final departure.
It's a TOTAL $URVEILLANCE $OCIETY NOW, and the NEW BILL is being designed to ADVANCE IT YET AGAIN!
The program has boomed in recent years as deportations soared, and the White House has proposed expanding such monitoring because it is less expensive and more humane than immigration detention. But advocates for immigrants, who have clamored for alternatives to jail, now say the program has morphed into a profit-driven enterprise that subjects thousands of immigrants to scrutiny usually reserved for serious criminals....
That is the only reason AmeriKa does anything these days.
And btw, they are still letting out dangerous criminals. You can find those stories in the links at the end of this post.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the Homeland Security agency in charge of deportations, said the program seeks to compel immigrants to obey court and deportation orders; a decade ago, the vast majority did not. BI said in a recent report that 96 percent of participants attended their final court hearings and 77 percent showed up for deportation.
An ICE spokesman said federal immigration agents oversee the program and make key decisions, such as whether an immigrant should be supervised by BI or wear an ankle monitor.
“All decisions regarding the level of supervision required for individuals in removal proceedings are made on a case by case basis, in order to ensure that ICE maintains sufficient resources to detain serious criminal offenders and other individuals who pose a serious or significant threat to public safety,” said ICE spokesman Ross Feinstein.
BI, which stands for Behavioral Interventions, says its program costs less than $8 a day compared with $119 a day to keep an immigrant in jail. In 2009, ICE awarded BI a five-year contract worth $372.8 million.
Related: The Illegal Immigrant Imprisonment Industry
The Boulder, Colo.-based company is a subsidiary of the Geo Group, which runs private prisons, and its reports portray the company as firm but compassionate, with bilingual staff who refer immigrants to food banks and shelters while ensuring that they comply with the law.
Just seems to me to be something wrong when PRISONS are run for PROFIT!
That means FILLING THEM UP with "CU$TOMERS," doesn't it? Now you know why this nation has so many laws.
But as BI expanded rapidly in recent years, tracking more than 35,000 immigrants in 2011, advocates and others complained that the program treated immigrants facing civil violations more harshly than criminals. And, they worried that BI had a financial incentive to encourage ICE to heighten the monitoring.
For instance, 29 percent of the 21,000 immigrants in BI’s program wear GPS monitors, while in the criminal system, such intrusive devices are used more sparingly.
That's odd. When such things are presented to me as an AmeriKan consumer I'm told their great smart apps or some such nonsense.
In the last year, federal judges ordered fewer than 1 percent of convicted criminals released on supervision to wear the monitors, according to the courts. In Massachusetts, fewer than 3 percent of criminals on probation, including sex offenders by law, and 5 percent of parolees, wear the monitors.
So most of those perverts, robbers, and violent types aren't monitored, huh? Where is all the tyranny money going, and into who$e pockets has it gone?
“It’s not appropriate to have intensive supervision and especially GPS devices for people who pose very little flight risk,” said Megan Bremer, a lawyer with Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service in Baltimore. “There are other ways.”
And yet they slap them on American citizens all the time.
Bremer and others said immigration officials could get results with phone calls, some home visits, and helping immigrants plan to leave the United States. Others also favor referring immigrants to legal aid, transportation, and other services that help them comply with the law.
Advocates for immigrants say the monitoring traumatizes immigrants and their children.
How do you think the American people feel?
Immigrants hide the blinking ankle monitors under their clothes. Winter boots cannot fit over the bulky devices, so some slog through the snow in wet sneakers.
Snow? In this age of global warming.
At night, they sleep plugged into the wall to charge the devices. Some become withdrawn, even suicidal.
Well, I hope they aren't given prescription pharmaceuticals so they can go on a gun rampage.
Ralph Isenberg, a Texas real estate developer turned immigration activist, has financed multiple lawsuits against ICE for attaching the monitors to immigrants, calling the practice “cruel and unusual punishment.” He said he is trying to get ICE to remove a GPS device from a disabled woman in Oregon.
Related: Outrageous Jewish hypocrisy and double standards on immigration
Well, yeah, but....
“These monitors are the most demeaning, shameful things that I think I’ve ever experienced,” Isenberg said. “These things are not being put on hardened criminals. They’re being put on housewives.”
Others say one solution to the complaints is to deport immigrants faster.
But then $omeone would be loosing $119 dollars a day per illegal in the cell.
“You get a lawyer and you can delay deportation for years,” said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Washington-based Federation for American Immigration Reform. “There’s absolutely no reason why anybody should feel that we need to apologize to people for keeping track of them, when we know that if you release illegal immigrants unsupervised and unmonitored, chances are you’re never going to see them again.”
But last year, a Rutgers School of Law report found that many immigrants in the alternatives-to-detention program did not even match ICE’s top priorities, which are serious criminals and other threats to public safety....
On one recent visit to BI’s office in Burlington, a few immigrants sat in the boxy waiting room and waited for an employee to slide open a glass window and call out, “Next.” Immigrants jumped up, disappeared behind a door, and then left within minutes.
The scene is familiar to scores of immigrants caught in the March 2007 immigration raid on a New Bedford defense contractor, who are still pleading their cases six years later.
Related: Sunday Globe Special: New Bedford Nightmare
I guess Americans don't want to make backpacks for the US military.
Lawyers say many immigrants fear for their lives if deported to countries such as Honduras, which federal records show now has the highest homicide rate in the world....
After Honduras was taken over in another western-sponsored coup?
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How do they get word home anyway?
"Chinese émigrés in the US flocking to ‘QQ’; Vast instant messaging system fills gap" by Maria Sacchetti | Globe Staff, March 31, 2013
China’s giant social media companies are quietly gaining a foothold in Boston, Quincy, Providence, and other US cities as thousands of immigrants transport the new technology to America....
Free speech advocates warn that the communist-ruled China is likely monitoring and even censoring posts from abroad, but immigrants say the websites are their main link to loved ones back home, where Facebook and Twitter are blocked.
I'm tired of pot-hollering kettle media, sorry.
Chinese immigrants are one of the largest immigrant groups in the United States, with an estimated 1.8 million nationwide and more than 74,000 in Massachusetts, which has the fourth-largest Chinese population in the nation, according to the Migration Policy Institute and 2011 census figures. In the past, immigrating to the United States meant leaving family and friends behind. But the newest tech-savvy arrivals have well-stocked social networks on Chinese sites such as QQ, China’s wildly popular instant messaging program, Qzone, a Facebook clone, and on Twitter-like sites called weibos.
In Massachusetts, immigrants say the Chinese sites are refuges from homesickness as they grapple with a new land, language, and culture.
One recent morning at the Boston Chinatown Neighborhood Center, adult students in an English class said the Chinese sites were indispensable....
The websites are so effective at reaching immigrants that some businesses and community groups in Massachusetts are using them to promote their work....
But others warned that the Chinese websites may seem fun and accessible — complete with a version of FarmVille, a game popular on Facebook — but they are also being watched. China has blocked access to many foreign websites in recent years, citing national security and other concerns....
Oh, so they are behaving like Amerika.
Frank Jannuzi, head of the Amnesty International USA office in Washington, said Chinese officials have jailed dozens of people in recent years for online activity.
Obviously an agenda-pushing western front since they make my intelligence operation known as a newspaper all the time. Oh, there is the odd, one-day wonder of a report regarding USrael from time-to-time, but most of the mentions are regarding official enemies.
The most famous prisoner is Nobel peace laureate Liu Xiaobo, a 57-year-old human rights advocate serving an 11-year prison sentence after helping craft a pro-democracy charter in 2008.
Must be a CIA agent.
Also see: Cutting Out the Chinese Crap
And they wonder why we don't believe official cover-story bs in the paper anymore?
“If you persist you can be thrown in jail, and you can be thrown in jail without trial for years,” Jannuzi said.
Gitmo.
Free speech advocates say much of the censorship in China is automatic, carried out by computer software programmed to delete prodemocracy keywords such as “Taiwan independence.” Government officials also monitor the sites with the help of an army of private citizens, called the “50 cent party” for their paltry wage.
Israel's Hasbara?
Eva Galperin, global policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital civil liberties organization, said posts written in the United States are unprotected because the server is located in China.
“You don’t have a right to free speech on somebody else’s network,” she said. “Your communications will still be spied upon and filtered and censored because it’s going into the Chinese network.”
Mine are going to the government via Google and Blogger. It's all right here anyway.
Many Chinese immigrants, especially recent ones, say they already know better than to discuss politics online. Many leave China to seek asylum in the United States.
“They’re monitoring. You cannot complain,” said a student in Rhode Island, who asked not to be named because he must return to China after his studies. “For me at least I won’t use any messenger like QQ and leave some proof like I said something.”
He goes to Rhode Island?
Harvard lecturer Nicco Mele, the author of the forthcoming book, “The End of Big: How the Internet Makes David the New Goliath,” said he intentionally posted inappropriate phrases on a Chinese Twitter-like site to test the censors. “They were deleted pretty quickly,” he said. “There’s no doubt that it is definitely a surveillance state.”
Here they don't listen at all.
Some are optimistic that the Internet could be a force for greater openness in China....
Many immigrants say they doubt immigrants will give up their home social networks anytime soon — for good reason....
Yes, it's a way of COMMUNICATING with FAMILY!
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"Hundreds assemble in Boston for immigration reform rally" by Wesley Lowery | Globe Staff, April 07, 2013
Hundreds rallied and marched for immigrant reform in Boston Saturday, their chants bouncing off downtown’s storied brick and stone buildings as they walked from Faneuil Hall toward City Hall.
“Si se puede” shouted a trumpeter, joined at the front of the procession by a makeshift brass band, as they led a crowd of more than 700 immigrants, clergy, workers union members, and supporters through some of Boston’s busiest streets early Saturday afternoon.
The Faneuil Hall rally and march aimed to pressure Congress to pass comprehensive immigration reform, including a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million foreign-born immigrants living in the country illegally.
The rally, organized by local chapters of the Service Employees International Union, Massachusetts Jobs with Justice, and MassUniting, featured speeches from US Senator Elizabeth Warren and Representative Joseph P. Kennedy III, with both Democrats calling for the passage of immigration reform once Congress resumes session following its Easter break.
“My Spanish may not be great but it’s coming from the heart,” Warren said with a chuckle that was met with laughs and cheers from the crowds, armed with flags and signs, who packed Faneuil Hall.
“It’s far past time . . . to have common sense, comprehensive immigration reform,” Warren said. “We need a path to citizenship, we need to support our dreamers, we need to fix the visa system and, most of all, we need to help families to stay together.”
Wow. Wrong on this one, Liz.
Related:
"The legislation is expected to include a new emphasis on merit-based immigration over family ties."
But why let that get in the way of the narrative?
Moments later, Kennedy led the crowd in chants of “Si se puede” — Cesar Chavez’s motto adopted as a rallying cry by the immigration movement — before launching into a speech, in which he also jumped between English and Spanish, about the country’s need to address its broken immigration system.
Right now we have the moment, we have the opportunity to change it,” he said. “We cannot let up for a minute.”
The rally was part of the ‘‘Power Up for Citizenship,’’ a nationwide initiative launched by immigration reform advocates. One took place in Nashua on Saturday and another is planned in Providence on Sunday.
We call them controlled opposition protests here.
Without a pathway to citizenship, immigrants who are facing health problems or domestic violence are incapable of seeking help, said Dora Orellana, who said she lived with an abusive husband for six years because she feared that reporting him to authorities would lead to her deportation. “I was terrified they would take my children,” she said.
Translation: if you are against this bill you are in favor of violence against women. Never mind American women living under the same threat.
Orellana said that, despite her fear of deportation, she finally did report her husband and began counseling with REACH Beyond, a program for abused women.
“There are many other women out there dealing with domestic violence and facing the same situation,” she said. “I know there are many women out there who are afraid to speak up.”
Following the rally, the crowd made its way through Boston streets to the John F. Kennedy Federal Building, where they laid dozens of white carnations in tribute of the families broken up by deportations.
“It’s poignant that we ended up here,” said the Rev. Lara Hoke, a Unitarian minister, pointing to the federal building. “Inside there is where the deportation process starts, where fragile dreams are shattered.”
Massachusetts is home to nearly 200,000 immigrants here illegally, which costs the state roughly $2 million a year, according to a 2010 estimate by the Federation for American Immigration Reform.
A representative for Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino promised his support for their fight for immigration reform, noting that Menino is the son of Italian immigrants.
Those in attendence stressed that an immigration policy focused on deportations needlessly breaks up family units and punishes children who did not choose to come to the country. They carried signs that read “Roadmap to Citizenship NOW” and chanted “Stop deportation, reform immigration,” as they processed down the street.
And if you oppose the legislation you don't care about children, How shameless.
“It’s heartbreaking any time a family is torn apart,” said Ciara Lavery, a 33-year-old immigrant from Ireland who spent more than a decade living in the United States illegally before becoming documented.
Why did the whooooooosh, bang of a drone missile strike just come to mind?
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Obviously, an approved protest by the agenda-pushing paper.
Also see:
Release of Illegal Immigrants Linked to Sequestration
Obviously, an approved protest by the agenda-pushing paper.
Also see:
Release of Illegal Immigrants Linked to Sequestration
