A Life Without Papers
New York Times - March 2, 2015, by Ehiracenia Vasquez - The birth certificates for my children, born here eight and...
New York Times - March 2, 2015, by Ehiracenia Vasquez - The birth certificates for my children, born here eight and four years ago. The receipts that prove I paid property taxes on the trailer home where we used to live. My children’s medical records. A stack of documents that show I’ve lived in Texas for more than 12 years, and that my son and daughter are United States citizens.
I keep all these papers in a drawer next to my bed, so I will have easy access to them as soon as I need them. These are the documents that were supposed to allow me to apply for a new program, Deferred Action for Parents of Americans — the documents that would protect me, for a time, from deportation, and give me some relief from the constant fear that comes with life as an undocumented immigrant.
“Why do you need those papers?” my son asks me one day in January, as he watches me search through plastic bags and backpacks I’ve kept for years on the top shelf of my closet, looking for one more bill, one more certificate, one more piece of paper that might help with applications for my husband and me.
He knows I’ve kept the television tuned to Univision ever since President Obama announced his executive action in November. I listened closely as the news anchor Jorge Ramos explained the application requirements, and realized we qualified. I was watching when, two weeks ago, a federal judge here in Texas put a temporary stop to the program. Now I am waiting to see what happens next.
My son doesn’t understand why I am so anxious. He is 8 years old. He has a Social Security number and could travel out of the country if he wanted.
So I tell him: I want to be able to travel, too. I want to take him to the Rio Grande Valley, where his grandfather lives — the grandfather he has never met, because we need to pass an immigration checkpoint to get to that part of Texas. I want him to play with his abuelo under the tall palm trees that dot the landscape of that border town.
There is more, of course. I want to drive the short distance to the grocery store without worrying that the police car in the lane of traffic behind me is going to pull me over and demand documents I don’t have. I want to be able to look for a good job so that I can help provide for my family. I want to take my kids to school in the morning without worrying whether that day will be the last one I have with them.
Their childhood here in Houston is already so different from mine.
I was born and raised in Río Bravo in the Mexican state of Tamaulipas. I was 12 when my mother told me she couldn’t send me to school anymore. She needed me at home helping her with my siblings and keeping the house clean. When I was 17, one of my older sisters, who had already moved to Houston, invited me join her. She was 20 and asked me to take care of her baby so that she could work. Knowing there was little to lose, I crossed — without documents, but with my mother’s blessing.
I quickly realized that life as an undocumented person in the United States was not what I had imagined. Without documents, school did not make sense. The only job I could find was taking care of other people’s kids, earning me a few dollars in cash at the end of each day.
Eventually, I met my husband, also an undocumented immigrant from Mexico. He found work as a mechanic. We live with my in-laws and I currently stay home with our children. We have stitched together a beautiful family. But that’s 12 years of living cautiously, on the margins.
In November, it seemed we would be able to move, however slowly, out of those margins. We would have temporary relief. I gathered my documents together and kept them safe. We were prepared.
Then the judge put it all on hold. Everything we had been working toward — a break from life in the shadows — is now on pause, in limbo, maybe never to be a reality.
I allowed myself to feel a little disappointed and a little bit sad. But I am not going to let myself feel defeated. I am still trying to organize people to go to meetings so that they can be ready when the program moves forward.
I make phone calls, trying to get them to show up. I hear a lot of doubt. Why learn about a program that may never come to be?
I tell them what I have been telling myself: that we need to be prepared for when the good news comes. I have my documents ready, in that drawer near my bed. I’m not giving up hope.
Ehiracenia Vasquez is a member of the Texas Organizing Project, a partner of the Center for Popular Democracy. This article was translated by Mary Moreno from the Spanish.
Source: The New York Times
The Heartland Wants More New Americans
In 2016, over 970,000 people applied for U.S. citizenship—the highest point point in two decades. That was 24 percent...
In 2016, over 970,000 people applied for U.S. citizenship—the highest point point in two decades. That was 24 percent higher than 2015, and 9.2 percent more than 2012, when the last presidential election was held.
Read the full article here.
U.S. lawmakers urge Yellen to diversify the Fed
U.S. lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Thursday sent...
U.S. lawmakers including Senator Elizabeth Warren and Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders on Thursday sent a letter to Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen urging more diversity at the U.S. central bank.
Ten of the Fed's 12 regional bank presidents are men; 11 of them are white, the letter noted.
"Given the critical linkage between monetary policy and the experiences of hardworking Americans, the importance of ensuring that such positions are filled by persons that reflect and represent the interests of our diverse country cannot be understated," said the letter, signed by 116 members of Congress and 11 Senators.
The Fed has come under fire in recent months from both Republicans and Democrats, including candidates for the 2016 presidential campaign, for a range of perceived failings, from its process to deciding monetary policy to its governance. Those calls have emboldened lawmakers who seek to limit the Fed's powers and are prompting some current and former Fed officials to call for steps to placate the bank's harshest critics.
A Federal Reserve Board spokesman said the U.S. central bank was committed to diversity and was already taking steps to bring more women and minorities into its leadership ranks.
Minorities now make up 24 percent of regional Fed bank boards, up from 16 percent in 2010; 46 percent of all directors are either non-white or a woman, the spokesman said, adding, "we are striving to continue that progress."
Reporting by Ann Saphir; Editing by James Dalgleish
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The dollar is ticking down
“Jerome Powell’s most important qualification is that he served with Janet Yellen. His confirmation should depend on...
“Jerome Powell’s most important qualification is that he served with Janet Yellen. His confirmation should depend on his willingness to follow in Yellen’s footsteps on both monetary and regulatory policy,” Shawn Sebastian, co-director of Fed Up, a campaign from the Center for Popular Democracy, told the Washington Post.
Advocates Rally to Eliminate ‘Sub-Minimum Wage'
Brooklyn Daily Eagle - October 23, 2014, by Matthew Taub - Hundreds of tipped and low-wage workers and advocates...
Brooklyn Daily Eagle - October 23, 2014, by Matthew Taub - Hundreds of tipped and low-wage workers and advocates, including fast food, car wash and other low-wage workers, rallied outside a Domino’s Pizza location in Harlem before marching to the second public hearing of Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s Wage Board, where they testified and called on the Wage Board to eliminate the sub-minimum wage for the 229,000 tipped workers in New York state.
“In an increasingly unaffordable city, tipped workers remain among the lowest-paid hourly workers,” said New York City Public Advocate Letitia James, who joined the workers at the rally and wage board hearing. “An hourly wage of $5 an hour is simply not sustainable for an individual or a family. Now is the time to ensure that low-wage workers receive a fair and sustainable income. I join the many voices today calling on Gov. Cuomo to help bring fair wages to these industries.”
Employers in New York are allowed to pay less than the minimum wage — just $5 an hour — to restaurant servers, delivery workers and other service workers. Employers are legally required to “top off” a tipped worker’s pay when it falls short of the regular minimum wage, but lax enforcement enables employers to routinely violate minimum wage, overtime and other wage and hour laws with minimal repercussion.
“We work very hard and deserve a raise, just like other minimum wage workers in this state,” said Juana Tenesaca, a tipped worker and member of Make the Road New York. “I have worked as a waitress for years, earning the tipped minimum wage, and it’s impossible to raise my children never knowing how much money I’ll bring home at the end of the day. My daughter had to get a job while she was still in high school to help support our family and that breaks my heart.”
A July report by the National Employment Law Project finds that eliminating the sub-minimum wage would benefit an estimated 229,000 tipped workers in New York.
“Tipped workers are employed in industries like hospitality that are among the fastest growing in today’s economy,” said Tsedeye Gebreselassie, senior staff attorney at the National Employment Law Project. “If we want to stimulate consumer spending and boost our local economies, we need to make sure that the growing number of New Yorkers relying on these jobs actually have money to spend on basic necessities at their neighborhood stores.”
“Having to live entirely off tips means the customer is always right, which means I’ve had to put up with unwanted advances and uncomfortable situations from guests,” said Ashley Ogogor, a tipped worker and member of Restaurant Opportunities Center-United. “The guest shouldn’t have to feel pressured at the end of the night to pay me a decent wage. If seven other states can require restaurant owners to pay their employees a full minimum wage, so can New York.”
As part of last year’s legislative deal to increase New York’s minimum wage to $9 an hour by Dec. 31, 2015, the sub-minimum wage for tipped workers was set to automatically rise in proportion to the full minimum wage whenever the latter is raised with one exception: workers in the hospitality industry. The final deal froze these workers’ wages at $5 an hour and instructed Gov. Cuomo’s Department of Labor to convene a “wage board” to determine whether these workers will get a raise, and if so, by how much.
“We call on Gov. Cuomo and the wage board to do whatever it takes to lift up working families in the Empire State,” said Tony Perlstein, campaigns co-director for the Center for Popular Democracy. “Wealthy restaurant employers shouldn’t receive special treatment that allows them to pay poverty wages to working New Yorkers, including the women who make up more than two-thirds of the tipped wage workforce. Seven states have already eliminated their sub-minimum wages, and more are seriously considering it. Their restaurant sectors are not suffering for it, and in fact are thriving.”
The wage board, consisting of Timothy Grippen, Retired Broome county executive; Heather C. Briccetti, president and CEO of the Business Council; and Peter Ward, president of the New York Hotel Trade Council, heard hours of testimony detailing how New York’s tipped subminimum wage fuels unstable paychecks and poverty for thousands of workers, particularly women, across the state.
“People want to work hard at a place where they feel valued,” said Amado Rosa, a tipped worker at a Thai restaurant and a member of Make the Road New York. “Being paid $4 or $5 an hour does not make a worker feel validated and does not generate enough income to support a single person or a family. I have faced many hardships over the years, and my anxiety stemmed from not knowing what my take-home pay would be in a given week.”
The poverty rate among New York’s tipped workers is more than double that of the regular workforce. Seven states across the country have adopted policies requiring employers to pay tipped workers the full minimum wage and have shown that eliminating the sub-minimum wage reduces poverty without slowing job growth. In fact, according to projections by the National Restaurant Association in their 2014 Industry Forecast, all of the states that require employers to directly pay the full minimum wage to tipped workers are expected to have greater restaurant job growth than New York in the next decade — in most cases, much greater. Tipped workers are already being paid $9 or more in California, Washington and Oregon, and will soon be getting raises to over $9 in Minnesota, Hawaii and Alaska.
“More than 3 million New Yorkers work low-wage jobs, and they need our state government officials on their side,” said Michael Kink of the Strong Economy for All Coalition. “New York needs a one-two punch for good jobs: a big increase in the minimum wage, and elimination of the second-class sub-minimum wage for tipped workers. This combination could boost the paychecks of millions of workers and help revive the New York economy from the ground up — the Wage Board should take direct action to provide one fair wage to a quarter-million tipped workers to get us moving now.”
Advocates who testified at today’s hearing are members of Raise Up NY, fighting for #1FairWage, a coalition comprised of tipped workers, the National Employment Law Project, Make the Road New York, the Center for Popular Democracy, Fast Food Forward, New York Labor-Religion Coalition, New York Communities for Change, ROC-NY, ROC-NY affiliate of Restaurant Opportunities Centers (ROC) United, Strong for All, United New York, Citizen Action New York, Tompkins County Workers Center, Worker Center of Central New York, Metro Justice, Coalition for Economic Justice, Alliance of Communities Transforming Syracuse (ACTS) and other community groups and advocates around New York State calling for the elimination of New York’s sub-minimum wage for tipped workers.
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Williams picked as next president of New York Fed
Williams picked as next president of New York Fed
But Shawn Sebastian, director of the Fed Up Coalition, a collection of liberal groups, said the New York Fed search...
But Shawn Sebastian, director of the Fed Up Coalition, a collection of liberal groups, said the New York Fed search process had failed in its job to offer diverse candidates. "The New York Fed's claims that there are no qualified candidates who are women or people of color working in the public interest who would take this job are untrue," he said in a statement.
Read the full article here.
La campaña anti-Trump señala a empresas que apoyan su política
La protesta popular contra las políticas antiinmigrantes y antitrabajadores de Donald Trump se amplía y desde ayer ha...
La protesta popular contra las políticas antiinmigrantes y antitrabajadores de Donald Trump se amplía y desde ayer ha empezado a tener en su objetivo a empresas que hacen posible su agenda con sus inversiones o alineándose con la Administración.
El Center for Popular Democracy y Make the Road New York han lanzado una campaña contra nueve empresas entre las que están JP Morgan Chase, Wells Fargo, Disney, Goldman Sachs, IBM, Uber, Blackstone y Boeing. Algunas están en la lista por hacer donaciones a la inauguración de la actual presidencia o estrechar relaciones con la Administración. Otras por ser inversores en las empresas que construyen y operan cárceles privadas para inmigrantes.
Lea el artículo completo aquí.
The Refugees in New York’s Hotel Rooms
On Sept. 20, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, turning my life upside down. At the time, my two daughters and I were...
On Sept. 20, Hurricane Maria hit Puerto Rico, turning my life upside down. At the time, my two daughters and I were living in Carolina, a town on the northeastern side of the island. In just a day, my clothes were turned to rags, my home was destroyed, and I lost the few belongings I had.
My mother lived in the same town but her house was still standing. For two months, we slept on a couch in her living room. But we couldn’t stay there forever. In December, the Federal Emergency Management Agency moved us to New York City. Since then, we’ve been staying in hotels provided by FEMA in the Bronx and Brooklyn, like hundreds of other families who were moved to New York after the storm. Read more here.
Charter School Cheats: New Report On Charter Industry Exposes $100 million In Taxpayer Funds Meant For Children Instead Lost To Fraud, Waste & Abuse
ProgressOhio - May 16, 2014 - A new report released today reveals that fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are...
ProgressOhio - May 16, 2014 - A new report released today reveals that fraudulent charter operators in 15 states are responsible for losing, misusing or wasting over $100 million in taxpayer money.
“Charter School Vulnerabilities to Waste, Fraud And Abuse,” authored by the Center for Popular Democracy and Integrity in Education, echoes a warning from the U.S. Department of Education’s Office of the Inspector General. The report draws upon news reports, criminal complaints and more to detail how, in just 15 of the 42 states that have charter schools, charter operators have used school funds illegally to buy personal luxuries for themselves, support their other businesses, and more.
The report also includes recommendations for policymakers on how they can address the problem of rampant fraud, waste and abuse in the charter school industry. Both organizations recommend pausing charter expansion until these problems are addressed.
“We expected to find a fair amount of fraud when we began this project, but we did not expect to find over $100 million in taxpayer dollars lost. That’s just in 15 states. And that figure fails to capture the real harm to children. Clearly, we should hit the pause button on charter expansion until there is a better oversight system in place to protect our children and our communities,” said Kyle Serrette, the Director of Education Justice at the Center for Popular Democracy.”
“Our school system exists to serve students and enrich communities,” added Sabrina Stevens, Executive Director of Integrity in Education. “School funding is too scarce as it is; we can hardly afford to waste the resources we do have on people who would prioritize exotic vacations over school supplies or food for children. We also can’t continue to rely on the media or isolated whistleblowers to identify these problems. We need to have rules in place that can systematically weed out incompetent or unscrupulous charter operators before they pose a risk to students and taxpayers.”
You can read the report by going to www.integrityineducation.org or www.populardemocracy.org.
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Liberals Turn to Cities to Pass Laws and Spread Ideas
If Congress won’t focus on a new policy idea, and if state legislatures are indifferent or hostile, why not skip them...
If Congress won’t focus on a new policy idea, and if state legislatures are indifferent or hostile, why not skip them both and start at the city level?
That’s the approach with a proposed law in San Francisco to require businesses there to pay for employees’ parental leaves.
It might seem like a progressive pipe dream, the kind of liberal policy that could happen only in a place like San Francisco. But Scott Wiener, the city and county supervisor who proposed the policy, sees it differently.
“The more local jurisdictions that tackle these issues, the more momentum there is for statewide and eventually national action,” he said.
It’s part of a broader movement, mostly led by liberal policy makers, to take on not just the duties that make cities run — like road maintenance and recycling — but also bigger political issues. Think soda taxes, universal health care, calorie counts on menus, mandatory composting and bans on smoking indoors.
The federal government is too gridlocked to make anything happen, these policy makers say. So they are turning to cities, hoping they can act as incubators for ideas and pave the way for state and federal governments to follow.
Conservatives used the strategy in the 1960s and 1970s, often for anti-regulatory policies. On the liberal side, Baltimore helped inspire others by passing a living wage law in 1994. The method has grown more popular in recent years, said Margaret Weir, a professor at Brown University who studies urban politics.
“Historically, especially for groups that want more government action and more generous social and economic policies, they could go to the federal government and achieve those things,” Ms. Weir said. “That has become more difficult. It’s a reflection of the loss of power at the federal level.”
Opponents have frequently responded by trying to limit the legislative power of cities. Many states have passed so-called pre-emption laws, which block cities from making their own laws on certain issues, including gun control, plastic bag bans, paid leave, fracking, union membership and the minimum wage. It’s a strategy pioneered by the tobacco lobby and later much used by the National Rifle Association. In all but seven states, state laws pre-empt local gun laws.
The pro-business American Legislative Exchange Council, known as ALEC, has pushed for many of the pre-emption laws. More recently, however, it has adopted the methods of its opponents. It has helped policy makers in local government make laws to reduce the size of government, for instance, even when states decline to do so.
One division of ALEC, called the American City County Exchange, has most notably pushed for local right-to-work laws to allow workers who are members of a union to opt out of paying dues. Yet in other cases, it has drafted legislation to prevent cities from coming up with their own laws, including on issues like plastic bag bans and containers for composting.
“Sometimes cities and counties overstep the powers they’ve been given,” said Jon Russell, director of the exchange and a town councilman in Culpeper, Va. “There are certain times states and cities are going to disagree, but for the most part, we’re going to figure out ways to resolve certain regulatory issues while staying in our lanes.”
The demographics of big urban centers — often more liberal and diverse than other parts of the country, and more likely to be governed by a single party — foster more progressive policy-making than elsewhere.
And that policy-making does seem to bubble upward to the national level. Workers’ rights are one of the main focuses of today’s urban politics, and several such city policies are now getting state and national attention, including in the presidential campaign. Paid sick leave is an example. The first city to require it was San Francisco in 2006. It is now the law in 23 cities and states, and President Obama last fall required federal contractorsto provide it. (Meanwhile, more than a dozen states have pre-emption laws to stop cities from requiring paid sick leave.)
Minimum wage is another example. SeaTac, Wash., passed a $15 minimum wage in 2013. Nearby Seattle followed, and then so did San Francisco, Los Angeles, Mountain View, Calif., and Emeryville, Calif.
Fourteen states have since changed their minimum wage laws, two bills in Congress would do the same nationally, and all three Democratic presidential contenders have said they would raise the federal minimum wage.
“It’s all due to victories at the city level,” said Ady Barkan, co-director of Local Progress, a network of local progressive elected officials. “They actually did it and showed it was possible politically and as a policy matter.”
But many of these policies have not caught on widely. Take soda taxes: Berkeley, Calif., is the only city to have passed one. Similar laws have failed in San Francisco and New York state.
Other city legislation that could eventually be passed at the state or federal level includes those related to drones, ride-hailing and home-sharing.
San Francisco’s paid parental leave policy, which would be the first such law in the nation, would apply to all businesses with at least 20 employees, some of whom work at least some of the time in the city, including national chains that do not offer paid leave to workers elsewhere.
Californians already receive paid parental leave from the state. It is one of three states to offer it; the state’s temporary disability fund pays 55 percent of workers’ salaries, up to a maximum salary of $105,000. In San Francisco, companies would pay the remainder for six weeks of “bonding leave” for all new parents, including fathers, same-sex parents and adoptive parents.
The city’s board of supervisors, which will vote on the policy, has not a single Republican. It would be a much harder sell almost anywhere else.
From Mr. Wiener’s point of view, that gives the board a responsibility: “To push the envelope on these issues, because we can.”
Source: New York Times
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