Thanks to all who read it and to fellow bloggers who keep adding interesting things to the virtual conversations of the net!

I put together an audio slide show on the subject which you can watch by clicking this link.

Martin Rodriguez arrived in New York two decades ago and by now his brow is permanently furrowed from his years of heavy work.

He’s done much physical labor, the kind that is abundant and underpaid, but has frequently moved to new jobs, always searching for a way to improve the situation for himself and his family, as each of his now five children were born.

Four years ago, shifted occupational gears once again. This time, he and his family traded city life for a return to their roots as farmers, on land a couple of hours north of New York City.

Rodriguez had a particular vision of what he wanted to do as a farmer: grow herbs and vegetables from his home country to bring the flavors of home to the Mexican population here.

Now RodriMex Farms sets up its booth six days a week, rotating among several farmers markets across the city. Rodriguez does his best business in the immigrant neighborhoods in Queens, Brooklyn, and the Bronx.

On Tuesdays, customers crowd around the RodriMex booth all morning. Martin and his wife, Gaudencia, hustle to attend to shoppers rushing to get to work or drop kids off at school. Strollers and shopping carts jostle for space as people stock up on cilantro, tomatillos, verdolagas and chilaca chilies.

Customers say the produce is much fresher that what they find in supermarkets (almost all of it is harvested the night before the market), and that the Rodriguez’s sell herbs that are impossible to find anywhere else.

Some of the shoppers say they left their towns in Puebla or Guerrero more than 15 years ago, while others have only recently arrived to New York. Either way, they are eager to prepare foods with the flavor of home.

The University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston is considering shutting out undocumented immigrants in need of cancer treatment because resources are limited, the Houston Chronicle reported.

The medical school, unable to meet the demand for cancer care by indigent patients with limited state funds, is considering a policy that would require patients to prove they’re here legally to qualify for financial assistance. That would save the hospital system money but contradict its mission of providing care for the poor.

Hospital officials are quoted saying it’s a “gut-wrenching” decision, that will be made in January.

It looks like undocumented immigrants are the easiest group to target.

The anti-immigrant organization, Center for Immigration Studies, is quoted in the article:

“Every dollar the state of Texas or Harris County and the city of Houston spends on health care for people who aren’t supposed to be in the country is a dollar they can’t spend on citizens and legal immigrants,” said Steven Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies.

But even CIR could barely muster up the specter of overuse by these immigrants.

About 21 percent of the uninsured population in Texas are illegal immigrants, according to a study released last month by Camarota’s group, the Center for Immigration Studies.

That number represents the uninsured overall. That means 79 percent of the uninsured are either legal immigrants or U.S. citizens.

So what percentage of those seeking cancer treatment are undocumented immigrants? How much money is the hospital really going to save? The article gives no indication.

If implemented, this policy sets a dangerous precedent for the medical profession. It would represent the further erosion of the ethical principals that have guided medicine in our society–that regardless of poverty, race, religion, etc., a person with an illness is entitled to treatment (not to mention compassion).

First the executive.

Phoenix Mayor Phil Gordon has reversed his position and now says police should act as federal agents and inquire about immigration status, as reported in the New York Times.

Mr. Gordon said the (federal) government had not done enough to patrol the border and to enact changes to immigration law to slow the pace.

He said he now advocated giving the police the authority to check the immigration status of anyone accused of breaking the law, though he recommended it be done in a way that did not lead to racial or ethnic profiling.

The Times reports that he reversed his position after coming under attack from anti-immigrant groups in his city, as well as Judicial Watch, a conservative group that is suing Los Angeles over its police policy to not act as federal agents.

Second, the judicial.

Also coming from Phoenix, the 500th person has been prosecuted under an anti-smuggling law, as reported by the AP and published in The Arizona Daily Star.

Working with county prosecutors, the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office arrests illegal immigrants who have worked with “coyotes” to unlawfully enter the United States.

The county attorney claims the prosecutions have helped break up smuggling operations. But, instead of nabbing traffickers, advocates argue deputies are arresting the people who are immigrating via coyote escort, rather than coyotes themselves.

And third, the legislative.

An initiative has been filed in Tucson that would deny citizenship to babies born in the United States to undocumented immigrant parents.

Though it is still far from becoming law, the Tucson Citizen reports that if the initiative successfully gathers 150,000 signatures, it could appear on the November ballot. Alternately, Republican Russell Pearce, a state representative is drafting a similar proposal to present to the legislature.

The proposal would ban the issuance of birth certificates to non-citizens.

The initiative also would require that hospitals submit “certified documentation of the parents’ United States legal status” to local registrars with birth certificates for newborns.

Man Eegee says he would support the initiative (read this as tongue in cheek completely serious) “as long as it’s made retroactive to the 1787 ratification date of the U.S. Constitution.”

These three examples show how hostility to immigrants is escalating as communities become more polarized. The environment for immigrants (and their children) to engage in civic participation (even just reporting a crime) becomes more dangerous.

At Immigration Law Daily, a new report found that per capita, immigrants use health care services far less than native-born Americans.

In 1998, per capita health care expenditures were 55 percent lower for immigrants than for natives. Although immigrants comprised 10 percent of the U.S. population, they accounted for only 8 percent of U.S. health care costs.

In 1998, immigrants received about $1,139 per capita in health care, compared to $2,546 for native-born residents.

Despite the fact that all immigrants are eligible for emergency medical services, they had lower expenditures for emergency room visits, as well as doctor’s office visits, outpatient hospital visits, inpatient hospital visits, and prescription drugs.

At Latina Lista, Marisa Trevino tagged the above study as well as one by the Immigration Policy Center that compiled data from different federal and state sources all concluding that immigrants contribute more in taxes than they take through accessing public benefits.

The policy center looks at info published by the White House saying:

According to the 2005 Economic Report of the President, undocumented immigrants working “‘on the books’…contribute to the tax rolls but are ineligible for almost all Federal public assistance programs and most major Federal-state programs.” The report also notes that immigrants in general “contribute money to public coffers by paying sales and property taxes (the latter are implicit in apartment rents).”

And a third report, researched by the California Immigrant Policy Institute, looked at whether immigrants were behind the slow-motion collapse of the U.S. health care system.

74 percent of the uninsured (over 46 million people) are U.S. citizens, the report said. It also says that in California, lack of health coverage has a disproportionate impact on low-income families, even when they are participating in the work force. Three out of four uninsured individuals are in working families, according to the report.

Unfortunately, there is no evidence that any of this research will help elevate the debate at a national level, now dominated by get-tough posturing by presidential candidates from both parties.

Instead, both Democrats and Republicans are pushing each other further to the right and focusing on hot-button topics like licenses and landscapers rather than dealing with the really hard questions of overhauling the entire immigration system to be more just and rational.

The reporter, Gabriela Reardon, is a friend of mine and NYU graduate. She has long been deeply involved with the topic of underage immigrants and the legal limbo where they often are left floating.

Daniel is among a growing number of Salvadoran, Honduran and Guatemalan youth – many of them minors – running from gangs and seeking asylum in the United States, a noticeable trend that’s developed over the past three years, according to attorneys and researchers. Such claims pose new challenges for federal asylum law and are compelling judges to consider the petitioners’ official status as children.

The arrival of these asylum seekers is one way the disastrous U.S. gang-deportation policy is coming home to roost. As Reardon writes in the article, in the 1990s the U.S. aggressively expelled gang affiliates from Los Angeles, sending them to Central America under a policy that has backfired with tragic consequences.

The deportation policy was steeped in irony even in its infancy, since many gang members were the children of refugees of Central America’s bloody civil wars (underwritten by the U.S. government) that had been welcomed into this country.

And rather than shrinking the problem of LA’s gangs, the policy was incredibly effective at internationalizing the Mara Salvatrucha and the 18th Street Gang. The groups have built powerful criminal organizations in Central America, while maintaining contacts in the U.S. and building new chapters cities beyond LA.

And now the whole mess is coming full circle, with a new generation now escaping violence Central America, but this time because they are evading gang recruiters.

But even as the arrival of these youth represents the ricochet of flawed policies, their chances of winning asylum are small. Reardon writes that minors are not afforded special accommodation under asylum regulations, and that impermeable judicial discretion turns the system into something of a crap shoot.

government lawyers vigorously challenge (gang-related) claims for fear of opening the floodgates to hundreds of Central Americans with similar stories.

It seems likely that the tragically symbiotic relationship of violence between the U.S. and Central America will spawn ever more cases.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents were heavily criticized by Nassau County police officials (not to mention community members), who accused the agency of acting with a cowboy mentality and sweeping imprecision in their arrests, which picked up mostly peripheral figures unrelated to the gang sweep that allegedly motivated the raids.

The rarity of such open internecine feuding between law enforcement agencies kept the story in the news for a couple of weeks. But as with most news, the raids ceased to generate new material for the media to work with and therefore fell out of the public eye.

Today’s New York Times revives the story with a lengthy piece by Nina Bernstein who takes a deeper look at the community response in the aftermath of the raids.

In Greenport, NY, where 11 arrests were made, Bernstein found that many of the immigrants biggest advocates turned out to be the people they work for.

When they suddenly vanished into the far-flung immigration detention system, six of their employers hired lawyers to try to find and free them. Some went further, like Dan and Tina Finne, who agreed to take care of the 3-year-old American-born daughter of a Guatemalan carpenter who was swept up in the raid, if her mother was detained, too.

“This is un-American,” said Ms. Finne, 41, a Greenport native, echoing other citizens who condemned the home raids in public meetings and letters to The Suffolk Times, a weekly newspaper. “We need to do something about immigration, but not this.”

The Times found that many of those detained are still in jail. Others were deported and a few have been released on $10,000 posted by their employers awaiting court proceedings.

The examples of employers fighting to bring back workers may not be typical, but they illustrate the surprising ways that immigrant workers become integrated into communities, even when they are undocumented.

This week, Mr. Gay Vaquero 2007 was crowned in a downtown Oakland club after a month-long pageant.

The Oakland Tribune wrote about the final stage of the contest, which has been organized for the last seven years by Bench and Bar, a popular gay Latino club that draws large numbers of immigrants, mainly Mexican.

The pageant aims to continue the rodeo spirit through cultural traditions such as ballet folklorico and cow-roping that originate from the rural Mexican states of Jalisco and Michoacan, said Munoz. It is unique, however, because Mr. Gay Vaquero contestants are free to serenade their boyfriends and have drag queens do backup as well.

In the interest of full disclosure, I am predisposed to love just about anything coming out of Oakland, having lived there for many years. I knew Bench and Bar as a place immigrant friends of mine discovered as a safe space for them to be “out” whether or not they were out in other areas of their lives (i.e. at work or with family).

Tribune reporter Alison Satake found the same thing:

“Antonio Rios is 24,” said the worker from the avocado orchards of Michoacan, Mexico, who is actually 21. He assumes this fake identity when he goes to gay clubs.

“I don’t like using my personal name because my family and straight friends don’t know I’m gay. And, people might come looking for me at work too.”

…

As the only gay Mexican cowboy pageant in the Bay Area, the club’s owner, Alex Loera, said of the contestants, “(It) helps them be who they want to be.”

Here’s a link to Bench and Bar’s website for more information.

Here’s a local story that captures that dual reality. The Queens Chronicle ran this story yesterday on the connection between the popularity of botanicas (folk medicine shops) and lack of health insurance.

Jackson Heights is an area known for its rich cultural diversity, so the popularity of ethnic folk medicine comes as no surprise.

It also has the highest rate of uninsured residents in New York City and this has further increased the popularity of ethnic folk medicines.

According to a 2006 community profile report released by the city Department of Health, Western Queens residents are 60 percent more likely to be uninsured than in the rest of New York City and Queens and are more likely to rely on the emergency room for medical care and information.

Western medicine has many flaws, not least of which is its astronomical cost!