El Magonista | Apr. 29, 2024 | Vol. 12, No. 11

Peter Schey, who championed the rights of immigrants over decades as a Los Angeles attorney and led the case that overturned Proposition 187, the controversial initiative to deny government services to undocumented immigrants, died of complications from lymphoma Tuesday at age 77.
Schey, the founder and executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, led class-action cases on behalf of immigrants involving access to public education, medical care and the welfare of unaccompanied minors.

Born in South Africa to parents who fled Germany — his father was a Jewish anti-Nazi agitator — Schey moved to San Francisco as a teenager with his parents when they packed up during apartheid. He attended UC Berkeley and the California Western School of Law in San Diego.

After obtaining his law degree, Schey represented low-income immigrants at the Legal Aid Society of San Diego. In 1978, he founded the first national support center dedicated to protecting immigrant rights, now known as the National Immigration Law Center. Read More.

Around 80 percent of the nearly 120,000 undocumented students who graduated high school in 2023 don’t qualify for DACA.

At age 15, Luis came to the United States from Veracruz, Mexico. Today, he’s a 22-year-old senior at Rice University, studying math and planning to go to graduate school next fall.

His grandparents are US citizens, and his mom has applied for a green card. Since Luis was brought into the US as a minor, you might think he qualifies for Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which shields young adults who arrived in the US as children from being deported, offering them work authorization along with temporary and renewable legal status. “I checked all the boxes, except for one,” said Luis, “which is that you have to have been here since 2007.”

Around 80 percent of the nearly 120,000 undocumented students who graduated high school in 2023 do not qualify for DACA, and even fewer undocumented high school graduates will qualify this spring. Yet nearly three-fourths of Americans are in favor of “granting permanent legal status to immigrants who came to the US illegally as children.” Despite its popularity, when Obama tried to update the program to include those who had been present in the US since 2010, it was challenged in court by Texas and 25 other states, arguing that it was an overstep of presidential authority. In 2016, the Supreme Court upheld this view, leading to the Obama administration rescinding the update. Read More.

The ninth annual survey of DACA recipients illustrates DACA’s role in empowering individuals and communities while strengthening the U.S. economy and highlights the need for a pathway to citizenship.

Since 2012, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) has served as a beacon of hope for more than 835,000 undocumented immigrants who call the United States home. DACA has transformed their lives, instilling in them a newfound sense of security and possibility. It has empowered recipients to live without fear of deportation, to work with dignity, and to pursue their dreams while making significant contributions to their local economies and the broader U.S. economy. Despite these benefits, however, DACA remains under relentless legal and political threat. And it currently faces its biggest challenge yet: a continuing legal battle over its existence, as Republican attorneys general from Texas, Alabama, Arkansas, Kansas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Nebraska, South Carolina, and West Virginia sue the federal government seeking DACA’s end, plunging recipients into uncertainty and legal limbo.

From October 1, 2023, to January 3, 2024, Tom K. Wong of the U.S. Immigration Policy Center at the University of California, San Diego, partnered with United We Dream, the National Immigration Law Center, and the Center for American Progress to field a national survey to analyze the experiences of DACA recipients. This is the ninth consecutive year that these organizations have conducted this survey, which includes responses from 560 recipients across 43 states and Washington, D.C. Read More.

Según el análisis, latinos están reescribiendo el sueño americano, no sólo por la derrama económica, sino por el potencial motor de empleo en los últimos años.
 

La Iniciativa de Emprendimiento Latino de Stanford (SLEI) y la Red de Acción Empresarial Latina (LBAN) publicaron el noveno Informe anual sobre el estado del emprendimiento latino, señalándolo como el segmento de más rápido crecimiento de la población empresarial de los Estados Unidos.

Según los resultados, cerca de uno de cada cuatro nuevos negocios es de dueños latinos y existen casi 5 millones de negocios de dueños latinos en los Estados Unidos.

Además, señala que las empresas de propiedad latina (LOB) son un gigante que genera  $3.2 billones en impacto económico y emplea a millones de personas.

De forma general, el informe explora el crecimiento explosivo de las LOB destaca avances significativos en varios aspectos del emprendimiento latino en Estados Unidos, en particular en crecimiento, innovación y diversidad. La contribución económica sustancial de la comunidad latina y el panorama empresarial en expansión subrayan su papel vital en la economía nacional.

No obstante, asegura que persisten desafíos, particularmente para las empresas propiedad de latinas, las empresas centradas en la tecnología y los propietarios de empresas inmigrantes, que enfrentan problemas como menores ingresos, dificultades financieras y barreras a los mercados gubernamentales y corporativos. Read More.

Government soon will view Latino as a race, not an ethnicity. Same for Middle Eastern and North African and South Asian. Data suggests our region could be affected more than anyplace in the country.

It’ll be just one short answer on one government form, a few jots that figure to have only a limited impact on any individual’s day-to-day life.

But for Neda Sasani, 44, merely having the chance to respond to one of the new race options on the 2030 census is life-altering.

“I’m a lot of things,” Sasani said before rapidly clicking off several personal traits – a mother of two, an operating room nurse, an Iranian-American, a resident of Pasadena, a new and “very enthusiastic” pickleball player.

“But I’m not White.”

Nope. And the next census won’t force her to say she is.

The Office of Management and Budget, which runs the U.S. Census Bureau, announced in March that for the first time in 27 years it will make some fundamental changes in the way Americans can identify their racial and ethnic identities.

Specifically, the 2030 Census (and census-related surveys leading up to it) will include seven broad categories for race: White, Black or African American, Hispanic or Latino, Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Middle Eastern or North African, and Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander. That’s up from five categories offered in previous censuses. Read More.

If you own or work for a business that employs, or wants to employ, individuals who have Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), there are steps that you may be able to take to help some of your DACA employees secure their immigration status.

This guide outlines five ways to support current and potential employees with DACA, like sponsoring them for a visa or helping them access immigration services. We strongly suggest that all DACA recipients receive a legal consultation to determine the best path for them to move forward and how their employer may be able to support them.

For more than a decade, DACA has provided temporary protection from deportation and authorization to work to hundreds of thousands of Dreamers, undocumented immigrants who came to the United States at a young age. However, DACA faces dire legal threats that could lead the Supreme Court to strip DACA recipients of their protections and work authorizations within the next two years. If DACA ends, the 580,000 current DACA recipients will be forced out of their jobs and be exposed to the threat of deportation.

DACA recipients need your help now. As an employer, you are in a unique position to support your DACA employees. Read More.

El funcionario federal, hijo de inmigrantes mexicanos podría dejar el gabinete del presidente Biden para competir por el máximo cargo

Como ya se veía venir, el secretario de salud y servicios humanos, Xavier Becerra podría competir para gobernador de California en el 2027. Esta semana, varios medios incluso internacionales revelaron que el nativo de Sacramento podría dejar su cargo en Washington después de la elección de noviembre y unirse a la repleta cartelera para suceder al gobernador Gavin Newsom en dos años.

La entrada a la contienda de Becerra, de 66 años, le pondría el ingrediente latino a la contienda en un estado como California, con casi 40% de la población latina.

Hasta este momento, van apuntados la vicegobernadora Eleni Kounalakis, el superintendente de educación, Tony Thurmond, la excontralora Betty Yee, y se presume que Rob Bonta, el fiscal está a punto también de lanzarse tras la gubernatura.

Becerra ha sido asambleísta, congresista, fiscal de California y el primer latino secretario de salud y recursos humanos; y mantiene una trayectoria lo suficiente buena como para poder ganar; es más, tiene una experiencia superior a todos los que ya anunciaron que quieren ser gobernador, aún sobre el propio fiscal de California. Read More.

The exhibit features photos by John A. Taboada which chronicle the work of the East Long Beach Neighborhood Center, or Centro de la Raza, during the 1970s and 80s.

The Long Beach Historical Society has opened a new exhibit, dubbed “Centro de la Raza,” to honor and memorialize the city’s Chicano heritage.

Centro de la Raza, otherwise known as the East Long Beach Neighborhood Center, opened in 1969 after the city’s Mexican American/Chicano population saw a 400% percent increase during the decade prior.

The Center, along with its founding members — dubbed the Chicano Six — played a crucial role in galvanizing Long Beach’s Chicano movement and advocating for the community.

The Historical Society’s exhibit will tell the story of Centro de la Raza and the Chicano Six through the work of photographer John Taboada. Read More

The black and white photographs hanging inside of the Historical Society of Long Beach are snippets of Chicano life in the late 60s and early 70s.

Moments that professor Armando Vazquez-Ramos lived as an organizer — fighting for a community who faced economic and educational disadvantages.

Professor Armando is an original founder of “El Centro De La Raza” — a neighborhood center that started in 1969 and had major impacts on improving the lives of the booming Latino population.

A time captured by the lens of the late teacher, artist and photographer John A. Taboada. Historic photos that lived tucked away in boxes for years that are now on display for the very first time for everyone to see.

The exhibit is entirely free and is open all year long at the Historical Society of Long Beach. For more information, you can visit www.hsolb.org.

The former student activist and mayor of Mexico City is poised to make history with an ambitious platform on education, clean energy, and combatting violence against women.

In the center of the photograph is a young woman wearing a kerchief.  Alongside a small group of protesters, she holds up a sign that reads, in English, “Fair Trade and Democracy Now.” The protest—the only expression of dissent during Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s triumphal tour of California—took place in September 1991 at Stanford University, where the Mexican president was invited to give a speech. Salinas was at the height of his power. Thirteen months later, he and his fellow North American leaders, US President George H.W. Bush and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, would sign the North American Free Trade Agreement into law.

Translated from the Spanish by Nicholas Allen.

At that moment, Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo, the young woman in the photograph, was driving from her home in Palo Alto, California, to the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, where she was doing research as part of her doctoral studies in energy engineering at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM). When one of Sheinbaum’s old friends sent me the photo recently, I texted it to her. She wrote back, “Heh, heh. I have the original,” referring to the story published in The Stanford Daily.

Barring unforeseen disaster or a major electoral upset, Sheinbaum, who was born in Mexico City in 1962, will be elected the next president of Mexico on June 2. In 2022 and 2023, I conducted several interviews with her—whenever her schedule as mayor of Mexico City, one of the largest cities in the world, would permit—for my book, Claudia Sheinbaum: Presidenta. On March 1, she launched her presidential campaign and announced her basic platform. But knowing her history, her family, and the roots of her political positions is essential to understanding who she is and how she reached this point—and how she might use her power as president. Sheinbaum’s principal opponent is Xóchitl Gálvez, who represents a coalition made up of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), the National Action Party (PAN), and the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD). Read More.

She is included in the list of multi-member migrant candidates by the Morena party to go to the Senate

Karina Ruiz, a 39-year-old dreamer grandmother, became the first beneficiary of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program to be a candidate for migrant senator in Mexico.

“It is a very great honor and a huge responsibility to bring the voice of the immigrant community to Mexico, specifically that of the Mexicans who live here and there, where there are many transition migrants and we have to see the treatment they are given,” said Karina, executive director of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition Inc in an interview with La Opinión after learning that she is number 12 on the list of senators through the multi-member route (proportional representation) of the ruling Morena party.

This means that she is one step away from being the first Dreamer to be part of the Mexican Senate in the legislature that begins in September. Read More