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1. Rep. says voters may abstain
2. NY candidate attacked on issue
3. Lawsuit questions program
4. NC gov. rejects English-only
5. Haitians helped in Creole

1.
Latinos seek more support for immigration reform
Illinois congressman tells L.A. protesters that he needs more votes for a reform bill.
By Teresa Watanabe
Los Angeles Times, February 1, 2010

A leading Latino lawmaker asserted Monday that Latinos, angered at President Obama for his failure to push immigration reform legislation, could stay home from the polls this year.

"People are angry and disillusioned," U.S. Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-Ill.) said in an interview.

Gutierrez criticized the Obama administration for not pushing harder for legislation that would provide an opportunity for legalization for some immigrants. But he conceded that he lacks the votes in the House to pass the bill he backs.

Aiming to revive the immigration reform effort, Gutierrez flew to Los Angeles to headline a town hall meeting Monday evening at Our Lady Queen of Angels Church, known as "La Placita," which has long declared itself a sanctuary for illegal immigrants.

With pro-reform banners and chants, hundreds of immigrants and their supporters turned out at the forum, which featured elected officials, labor leaders and Los Angeles Police Chief Charlie Beck.

The diverse slate of speakers included the Rev. Eric Lee of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, who said Latinos and African Americans share a common interest in fighting "slave wages."

One Korean illegal immigrant described his drive to excel as a graduate of UC Santa Barbara who dreams of contributing to the country as a professor.

And Beck drew cheers and a standing ovation when he declared, "A person's immigration status alone is not the business of the Los Angeles Police Department."

Earlier, Gutierrez told The Times that Obama's failure to push immigration reform was symbolized by his State of the Union address last Wednesday, when he devoted 38 of about 7,300 words to the issue.

The "throwaway line," Gutierrez said, was the final straw for many activists who have been perturbed by the continued deportations and other enforcement actions without real progress on reform legislation.

Removals of illegal immigrants have increased under the Obama administration. In fiscal 2009, they grew to 387,790 from 291,060 in 2007 under the Bush administration, government data show.

Asked to respond to Gutierrez's remarks, Department of Homeland Security spokesman Matt Chandler said in a written statement that the administration remained "committed to confronting this problem" through administrative and enforcement tools, along with working with Congress toward a solution.

Gutierrez said he was short at least 18 votes in the House to pass his legislation, which would legalize most of the nation's 12 million illegal migrants, provide more family visas, increase worker protections and offer other reforms.
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http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immig-reform2-2010feb02,0,140736...

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2.
Ford's Immigration Record Raising Eyebrows
By Jack Phillips
Epoch Times, February 1, 2009

New York - The Hispanic Federation slammed possible Democratic Senate candidate Harold Ford Jr. on Monday, alleging that his record on immigration isn't up to par for New York City. Ford is a former congressman from Kentucky who is rumored to be seeking a primary challenge against current U.S. Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.).

Ford voted yes on a 2005 bill that was mostly Republican-backed in the House and, if it was passed in the Senate, would possibly have charged all illegal immigrants in the U.S. with a felony, forcing them to be incarcerated for one year. Many civil rights, human rights, and religious groups opposed the bill when it first appeared.

The Federation says that Ford's voting record on the bill makes him unfit to be a senator in New York.

“We need a senator who can be a serious and sincere voice for immigrant rights at the national level,” said Hispanic Federation President Lillian Rodriguez Lopez. “Immigrant New Yorkers need a U.S. senator who is committed to a humane immigration policy that doesn't criminalize undocumented immigrants.”
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http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/content/view/28964/

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3.
Suit Points to Guest Worker Program Flaws
By Julia Preston
New York Times, February 1, 2010

Immigration authorities worked closely with a marine oil-rig company in Mississippi to discourage protests by temporary guest workers from India over their job conditions, including advising managers to send some workers back to India, according to new testimony in a federal lawsuit against the company, Signal International.
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Brendan Hoffman for The New York Times

A plaintiff in a federal lawsuit at a 2008 protest, holding a sign he says shows what he paid to get work in the United States.

The cooperation between the company and federal immigration agents is recounted in sworn depositions by Signal managers who were involved when tensions in its shipyard in Pascagoula, Miss., erupted into a public clash in March 2007.

Since then, hundreds of the Indian workers have brought a civil rights lawsuit against the company, claiming they were victims of human trafficking and labor abuse. Signal International is fighting the suit and has sued American and Indian recruiters who contracted with the workers in India. The company claims the recruiters misled it — and the workers — about the terms of the work visas that brought them to this country.

The Departments of Justice and Homeland Security have opened separate investigations. The federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission determined in September that there was “reasonable cause” to believe the Indian guest workers at Signal had faced discrimination and a work environment “laced with ridicule and harassment.”

The Signal case has come to represent some of the flaws and pitfalls, for immigrants and for employers, in the H-2B temporary guest worker program. As Congressional lawmakers weigh moving forward this year on an overhaul of the immigration system, they are debating whether to include an expansion of guest worker programs.

A lawyer for Signal, Erin C. Hangartner, said the company could not comment on the suit.

As it rushed to repair offshore oil rigs after Hurricane Katrina, Signal International hired about 500 skilled metalworkers from India in 2006. Numerous workers have said that they paid as much as $20,000 to Signal’s recruiters, many going into debt or selling their homes. They said recruiters had promised that their visas would soon be converted to green cards, allowing them to remain as permanent residents.

Once the workers realized they would not receive green cards, many complained of fraud and banded together to seek help from American lawyers.

In a deposition in the lawsuit, filed in Federal District Court in New Orleans, Signal’s chief operating officer, Ronald Schnoor, said he grew frustrated with Indian workers who were “chronic whiners.” In early 2007 he decided to fire several who were encouraging protests.

Those workers “were making impossible demands” for the company to secure green cards for them or to repay the high fees, Mr. Schnoor said. They were “taking workers away from their work and actually trying to get them to join some effort they were organizing,” he said.

Mr. Schnoor and Darrell Snyder, a manager in the shipyard, where the Indians were living in a labor camp, said they had consulted with agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement for “guidance” on how to fire the workers, following the rules of the H-2B program.

Mr. Schnoor said the “direction” he received from an immigration enforcement agent was this: “Don’t give them any advance notice. Take them all out of the line on the way to work; get their personal belongings; get them in a van, and get their tickets, and get them to the airport, and send them back to India.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/02/us/02immig.html

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4.
Perdue’s letter disappoints two commissioners
By Betty Mitchell Gray
The Washington Daily News (NC), February 2, 2010

Government Web sites provide important information for North Carolina residents, according to Gov. Beverly Perdue, who explained in a letter to the Beaufort County Board of Commissioners why Spanish is included on state-government Web sites.

On Monday, two county leaders said that the governor failed to understand the nature of the county’s request and the issue of illegal immigration confronting the state and its counties.

“I don’t think the governor understands the gravity of the situation,” said Commissioner Stan Deatherage in an interview Monday.

Perdue’s letter was scheduled to be discussed by the county commissioners at their meeting Monday night. It comes almost six months after the commissioners wrote Perdue, asking her to remove Spanish from state-government Web sites or explain why she would not.

“Health and safety information is essential to everyone, and the ability to understand and comply with instructions, in turn, benefits our communities. Crisis situations require immediate and collective cooperation, and therefore universal access to emergency messages facilitates help for all,” Perdue said in a letter dated Jan. 18 and addressed to County Manager Paul Spruill.

“In addition, public health is at greater risk if major populations were to have no access to information due to a language barrier. Furthermore, tourism has a major economic impact on our state, and readily accessible information encourages travelers to visit us,” the letter reads.

The county commissioners, during a meeting in July 2009, voted to adopt a resolution asking Perdue to issue an executive order removing all foreign languages from all state of North Carolina Web sites and, if she would not do so, to state her reasons. The resolution also asked Perdue to tell the commissioners why the state chooses to post material in foreign languages on its Web sites. Voting in favor of the resolution, along with Deatherage were Commissioners Hood Richardson, Jay McRoy and Al Klemm.
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http://www.wdnweb.com/articles/2010/02/02/news/doc4b676aa9dd6d5797049968...

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5.
Miami-Dade organizations offer help in Creole for Haitians
The Maiami Herald, February 2, 2010

Echoing a common theme that they wanted to help Haiti, more than 100 people gathered in Miami Saturday as part of a worldwide effort to discuss how technology might aid Haitian earthquake relief efforts.

The idea behind CrisisCamp Haiti is to bring together the tech community to assist in a variety of collaborative relief works, such as mobile applications that can serve as instant Creole translators, tweaking Twitter to help find missing people and channel information better, and developing databases that can match up volunteers with needs.

Still reeling from the enormity of the catastrophic earthquake in Haiti and the continued scarcity of news about loved ones in the nation, South Floridians turned from grim contemplation to action Wednesday.

The first airlifted victims arrived for medical treatment in Miami, including a volunteering college student whose leg was amputated at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

Efforts to organize what is sure to be a relief operation of unprecedented scale gained momentum as volunteers and government officials began gathering a massive outpouring of donations. The Catholic Archdiocese announced plans to resettle orphaned Haitian children in the United States, echoing the Pedro Pan operation that brought in 14,000 Cuban minors after the 1959 Revolution.

As desperate Haitians scrambled and sometimes fought over food and water, U.S. citizens and foreign nationals tussled to board evacuation flights out of the earthquake-shattered nation.

In one of the first large-scale aid efforts, the UN World Food Program said it planned to distribute 40,000 rations Saturday, including high-energy biscuits, water containers and water-purification tablets. U.S. military helicopters from the USS Vinson aircraft carrier dropped pallets of food and water over the Carrefour neighborhood.

Even then, relief workers said much more was needed.

Lawrence Gonzalez wants to invest his energy, sweat and time in Haiti. And he believes he has found just the way to do it: Create a corps of Haitian students in the United States to work on service projects in the Caribbean nation.
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http://www.miamiherald.com/news/southflorida/v-fullstory/story/1458213.html