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1. Obama to ease Cuba travel policy
2. Administration cancels SBINet
3. Chairman wants new border plan
4. GOP divided on illegals
5. High life expectancy in TX

1.
Obama to ease Cuba travel restrictions
The Associated Press, January 14, 2011

President Barack Obama plans to loosen Cuban travel policy to allow students and church groups to go to the communist country, the administration announced Friday.

Students seeking academic credit and churches traveling for religious purposes will be able to go to Cuba. The plan will also let any American send as much as $500 every three months to Cuban citizens who are not part of the Castro administration and are not members of the Communist Party.

Also, more airports will be allowed to offer charter service. Right now, only three airports — in Miami, Los Angeles and New York City — can offer authorized charters to Cuba. That will be expanded to any international airport with proper customs and immigration facilities as long as licensed travel agencies ask to run charters from the airport.

On Friday, one Florida airport was already taking steps to offer service to Cuba.

"This is great news from an international air service development standpoint," Tampa International Airport CEO Joe Lopano said in a news release. "We will begin meeting with air charter companies and working with the Federal Authorities to make sure we meet all requirements for these Cuba flights."

The White House press office sent out a release saying Obama had directed the changes, which do not need congressional approval. They will be put in place within two weeks.

Changes that Obama made last year already increased Cuban-Americans' ability to visit family and send money to relatives. The changes are similar to travel policies under President Bill Clinton. Critics said they will not improve the lives of Cubans.
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http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5iNSZgiit7RBTSp86YcvSTW...

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2.
Feds to use proven technology after failure of $1 billion, 53-mile high-tech border fence
By Suzanne Gamboa
The Associated Press, January 14, 2011

The Obama administration on Friday ended a high-tech border fence project that cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion but did little to improve security. Congress ordered the high-tech fence along the border with Mexico in 2006 amid a clamor over the porous border, but it yielded only 53 miles of protection.

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said the lesson of the multimillion-dollar program is there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution for border security.

Napolitano said the department's new technology strategy for securing the border is to use existing, proven technology tailored to the distinct terrain and population density of each region of the nearly 2,000-mile U.S-Mexico border. That would provide faster technology deployment, better coverage and more bang for the buck, she said.

Although it has been well known that the virtual fence project would be dumped, Napolitano officially informed key members of Congress Friday that an "independent, quantitative, science-based review made clear" the fence, known as SBInet, "cannot meet its original objective of providing a single, integrated border security technology solution."

The fence, initiated in 2005, was to be a network of cameras, ground sensors and radars that would be used to spot incursions or problems and decide where to deploy Border Patrol agents. It was supposed to be keeping watch over most of this nation's southern border with Mexico by this year.

Instead, taxpayers ended up with about 53 miles of operational "virtual fence" in Arizona for a cost of at least $15 million a mile, according to testimony in previous congressional hearings.

Sen. Joe Lieberman, chairman of the Senate's Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said the SBInet concept was unrealistic from the start. Napolitano's decision "ends a long-troubled program that spent far too much of the taxpayers' money for the results it delivered," said Lieberman, I-Conn.

The high-tech fence was developed as part of a Bush administration response to a demand for tighter border security that arose amid a heated immigration debate in Congress.

The Bush administration awarded Boeing a three-year, $67 million contract. Then-Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff said at the time the department was "looking to build a 21st century virtual fence."

But the fence had a long list of glitches and delays. Its radar system had trouble distinguishing between vegetation and people in windy weather, cameras moved too slowly and satellite communications also were slow. Although some of the concept is in use in two sections of Arizona, the security came at too high a cost.

DHS and Boeing officials have said that the project called for putting together the first of its kind "virtual fence" too quickly by combining off-the-shelf components that weren't designed to be linked

Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, top Democrat of the House Homeland Security Committee, said the committee held 11 congressional hearings on the fence project and commissioned five reports by the Government Accountability Office, which blasted the project. Thompson, who chaired the committee until Republicans took over the House this month, called the project a grave and expensive disappointment.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/wire/sns-ap-us-border-sec...

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3.
Homeland Security chairman wants plan after White House scraps border fence
By Jordy Yager
The Hill (Washington, D.C.), January 15, 2011

The chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee is calling on the White House to present Congress with a detailed timeline for its plan to secure the U.S.-Mexico border following its move to scrap a flawed $1 billion border fence initiative.

In the wake of the administration's announcement to discontinue the SBInet program, Rep. Peter T. King (R-N.Y.) said the Department of Homeland Security should speed up its plan to establish a protected border.

The 4-year old program, started under President George W. Bush, has only established 53 miles worth of fencing along the border, and has been plagued by delays. Last year, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano ordered a complete assessment of the SBInet program.

“The Obama Administration must promptly present the people of this country with a comprehensive plan to secure our borders, incorporating the necessary staffing, fencing, and technology,” said King in a statement. “I expect the Administration, in its upcoming 2012 budget proposal, to put forward such a plan, including timelines and metrics.”

The ranking Democrat on the committee, Rep. Bennie G. Thompson (D-Miss.), also heralded the program’s ending, saying that it has been “a grave and expensive disappointment since its inception.”

“Our Committee has held 11 hearings on the project, commissioned 5 critical GAO reports, all while the program cost taxpayers nearly $1 billion for only 53 miles of coverage,” said Thompson.

“The sheer size and variations of our borders show us a one-stop solution has never been best. I applaud them for taking this critical step toward using a more tailored technologically-based approach to securing our Nation’s borders.”

Napolitano announced the discontinuation of the program on Friday. She outlined a new plan that will replace SBInet with unmanned aerial vehicles, thermal imaging cameras, and a variety of other surveillance tools.
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http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/138135-homeland-securit...

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4.
Republicans Divided on How to Handle Illegal Immigrants
By Albert R. Hunt
Bloomberg News, January 16, 2011

Republicans, riding high in Washington and in most state capitals, are sitting on a time bomb: immigration.

There’s a division coursing through the party; many Tea Party movement types and social conservatives believe the tough-on-immigration posture paid dividends in the November elections and want to ratchet up actions and pressure. Congressional leaders want to put the issue on the back burner.

Thus the new chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, plans to assail Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. over his opposition to Arizona’s anti-immigration measure and push to enact more punitive laws. Simultaneously, the speaker of the House, John A. Boehner of Ohio, made sure the chairmanship of the immigration subcommittee was denied to Representative Steve King, the virulently anti-immigration congressman from Iowa who, in calling for an electric fence to be erected on the border, likened illegal immigrants to “livestock.” Mr. King has complained that Mr. Boehner is soft on the issue.

Over the weekend, former Governor Jeb Bush of Florida and former Senator Norm Coleman of Minnesota held a conference to plan more effective Republican outreach to Latino voters. This coincides with plans by new Republican majorities in more than a dozen state capitals for Arizona-type legislation to crack down on undocumented workers.

Hispanics are the fastest-growing slice of the U.S. electorate, and they are more numerous in states that are gaining electoral votes with the changing population. Latinos are “very strategically situated,” says Paul Taylor, who directs the Washington-based Pew Hispanic Center, which surveys attitudes and looks at issues affecting Latinos.

It isn’t an issue easily put on hold. There are constant reminders of its urgency, including the tragic killings in Tucson, Arizona, this month. Although this isn’t directly connected to the killings, the federal judge who was killed had been threatened because of an immigration ruling; the local sheriff said that controversies over immigration had made his state a “Mecca for prejudice and bigotry.” And the core Republican base will make sure the issue doesn’t go away.

There has been pressure on party politicians like former Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, who attended the Bush-Coleman conference, to take a tougher line. Several months ago, he embraced changing the 14th Amendment so it would not automatically grant citizenship to children born in the United States to undocumented parents.

This Republican base insists the immigration crisis is getting worse and is being ignored by the Obama administration. Actually, the number of undocumented workers — critics prefer to call them illegal aliens — is down a little. In Arizona, the epicenter of the controversy, the number of U.S. Border Patrol agents is up, and crime is down.

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has deported more than 780,000 undocumented immigrants, an increase of more than 120,000 compared with the last two years of the Bush administration. The number of criminals deported is more than 50 percent higher.

The anti-immigration faction of the Republican Party dismisses those numbers, demanding more raids and roundups, which have been curbed. They say their success in the 2010 elections proved the party doesn’t have a Latino problem. Prominent Hispanic Republicans, like Senator Marco Rubio of Florida and Governor Susana Martinez of New Mexico, won resounding victories and, according to the exit polls, the share of the Republican vote represented by Hispanics actually rose compared with two and four years earlier.

Exit poll data, however, have been adjusted, and a number of experts express skepticism that the Republicans won 38 percent of the Latino vote, the latest projection, last November. Moreover, 2010 was a political tsunami favoring Republicans, probably not the best gauge.

Most experts say the party, as of today, is poised to capture no more than one-third of the Latino vote in the next national election, and Latinos could make up between 9 percent and 10 percent of the electorate, up from 7.4 percent in 2008. That could spell trouble for Republicans in swing states like Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada.
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/17/us/17iht-letter17.html

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5.
On the Border, Long Lives Despite Dismal Statistics
By Emily Ramshaw
The Texas Tribune, January 15, 2011

Many of the longest lives in Texas are lived in an unlikely place: along the state’s impoverished border with Mexico. Despite conditions that often have the opposite consequences — desperately low incomes, a widespread lack of health insurance and poor rates of high school graduation — the predominantly Hispanic residents of Hidalgo County live on average to be 80, two years longer than the United States or Texas averages.

Residents of other Texas border counties live similarly long lives, according to a preliminary county-by-county analysis by the University of Washington Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

This would appear to go against common thinking, when you consider some of the border region’s other superlatives: sky-high rates of obesity, diabetes and kidney disease. The hypotheses to explain this so-called Hispanic paradox are numerous, including theories about cultural differences in the diet, religious faith and family values of first-generation South Texans and suggestions that natural selection is at play because of immigration patterns.

And even if the life span numbers are spot-on — which some researchers argue is improbable, considering how transient many South Texas immigrants are, and how dire conditions are in the border’s colonias — the region’s health care providers argue that a long life should not be mistaken for a healthy life.

Though many of these people are living lengthy lives now, they argue, other border residents will not be for long because of sharp changes in the lifestyles of second- and third-generation Texans.

“Our youth are increasingly obese, increasingly diabetic, and we’re seeing complications earlier and earlier,” said Dr. Carlos Cardenas, a practicing physician and chairman of the board at Doctors Hospital at Renaissance in Edinburg, in the lower Rio Grande Valley. “It will ultimately decrease life expectancy, or the quality of that life. It’s devastating to watch and, to a great degree, preventable.”

A Cultural Argument

When Paula S. Gomez reads the obituaries in her local newspaper, one fact never fails to amaze her.

“People here routinely die at 103, 99, 97, 90,” said Ms. Gomez, the executive director of the Brownsville Community Health Center, a safety-net organization that provides primary care to those with nowhere else to get it. “I’m talking 90 percent of the people who are dying are in that age group.”

Many experts, from sociologists to nutritionists, offer a cultural explanation.

Some say it is the immigrant diet of low-cost, low-fat Mexican food, as opposed to the greasy Tex-Mex variety. At A&V Lopez Supermarket in Brownsville, generations of Hispanic families shop in aisles stocked with fresh produce and protein: chili-drenched oranges, pineapples and mangos; whole-roasted chickens; tubs of black beans.

“People here are so poor that we grow a lot of our own food, that we buy only what we need,” Ms. Gomez said. “In many cases, fast food has really not been introduced.”

Others suggest it is the physically demanding jobs many immigrants have on construction sites and farms that keep them fit, as opposed to the sedentary office jobs that lend themselves to expanding waistlines.

And although they may not have health insurance, many South Texans cross the border into Mexico to see doctors and get prescriptions filled for a small fraction of the cost in the United States. (In a recent study of border residents, roughly half of the sample population reported crossing the border for health care — though this number is dropping because of drug violence in Mexico.)

“The presence of Mexican care is a good thing for those who have no health insurance in this area,” said Dejun Su, director of the South Texas Border Health Disparities Center at the University of Texas-Pan American. “It’s an advantage people living in poverty in big metropolitan areas in the U.S. don’t have.”

South Texas Hispanics also take a different approach to caring for their elders, experts and observers say — one steeped in religious faith and family tradition. They rarely put their parents or grandparents into nursing homes, instead caring for them in the ever-expanding family home. Being in the presence of a nurturing family prevents loneliness and creates a will to live, health care experts say, that is not present in most end-of-life care.

Some South Texans wonder if a religious element is also at play — namely, that highly Roman Catholic Latinos are less likely to suggest hospice or pulling the plug when long-shot, life-extending interventions are available.

“The sentiment here is that you’re abandoning them if you put them in a nursing home — you’re saying, ‘I’m done with you,’ ” said Armando Lopez, director of the Lower Rio Grande Valley Area Health Education Center in Harlingen, whose grandparents are 88 and 84. “It’s a burden that God’s given you, to take care of them — and take care of them well — in their old age.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/16/us/16ttexpectancy.html?src=twrhp