1. Crimes targeting Latinos on the rise
2. Report to assess impact of deportations
3. Illegals repatriating as economy sours
4. FL detention center expands capacity
5. NY murder final in spree crimes

1.
FBI finds attacks against Latinos on rise
By Sumathi Reddy
Newsday (NY), November 23, 2008

In a Pennsylvania coal mining town last July, four high school football players were accused of shouting ethnic slurs at a Mexican immigrant before a brawl erupted and Luis Ramirez, 25, was killed.

Three of the teens were charged with ethnic intimidation, and the attack became part of a growing category of crimes reported in the U.S.: hate attacks against Hispanics.

Attacks on Hispanics grew 40 percent from 2003 to 2007, outpacing the estimated 16 percent increase in the Hispanic population in the U.S., according to FBI statistics. Over the same time period, the total number of hate-crime incidents reported nationwide has remained steady.

"We do know from reports and from hate-group activity that there's a new focus on the Latino and immigrant populations," said Randy Blazak, director of the Hate Crimes Research Network at Portland State University in Oregon.

Since 2004, Blazak said, Ku Klux Klan rhetoric has take an "incredible shift from anti-black diatribes" toward hatred directed at Latinos.

Experts say the increase in violence targeting Hispanics nationally is likely even larger because hate crimes are underreported. They caution, however, that the FBI statistics are drawn from local law enforcement agencies, which have widely disparate standards for labeling crimes as hate crimes. Nassau and Suffolk counties have both reported substantial decreases in hate crimes against Hispanics in recent years.

Seven Patchogue-Medford High School students are accused in the fatal attack on Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero on Nov. 8, a death that has been classified as a bias crime. Mark Potok, head of the intelligence project at the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., a nonprofit organization that combats discrimination and bias crimes, said there also has been a sharp increase in the number of groups the organization labels as "hate groups," rising from 602 in 2000 to 888 last year.

"Our analysis is that the growth of these groups was driven almost entirely by their exploitation of the immigration issue," Potok said, referring to the contentious debate over the nation's porous borders and the number of nonresident immigrants in the United States.

The increase in hate crimes targeting Latinos, experts said, can be largely attributed to anti-immigrant rhetoric, and to the recent declining economy, which has led to fierce job competition, as well as anti-immigrant rhetoric.
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http://www.newsday.com/about/ny-lihate2412199891nov23,0,3336318.story

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2.
Study will look at how deporting parents affects Haitian children
Effect of parent deportation is research focus
By Luis F. Perez
The South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale), November 24, 2008

Since his father was detained and deported, 3-year-old Terrence Auguste has had more temper tantrums, his mother said. He started wetting the bed.

"What this country is doing is not in the best interest of their American citizen children," said Rita Altman, a West Palm Beach-based immigration attorney representing the Auguste family. "There has to be another way."

Researchers at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., have studied children in similar circumstances across the country. Now they're coming to South Florida to study how detention and deportation of parents affect children.

For the first time, they're looking at a non-Hispanic population, focusing on Haitians in Miami-Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

They estimate 5 million children in the United States have at least one parent who is an undocumented immigrant.

Researcher Rosa Maria Casteñeda met with community groups in South Florida this month and plans to come back in December to interview families. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has stepped up its efforts across the country. During the last fiscal year, the agency's Miami office deported about 13,000 immigrants — about 40 percent more than the previous year's 9,105.
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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/services/newspaper/printedition/local/sfl-fl...

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3.
Immigrant tide may be turning
Illegal aliens seem fewer as jobs dry up, law cracks down
By Kristin Collins and Lorenzo Perez
The News Observer (Raleigh), November 23, 2008

North Carolina's decade-long influx of illegal immigrants may be waning as the economy falters and law officers crack down.

Fewer migrants are crossing the nation's southern border, U.S. and Mexican officials say. And some of those who had made homes in North Carolina are returning to their home countries -- pushed by unemployment, the loss of driver's licenses or the deportation of family members.

"There is no work here," said Jose Ramirez, 40, who visited the Mexican consulate in Raleigh this week to make sure his passport was in order. He said he hasn't found a job in two months and, after four years working in construction and restaurants, most recently in Wilmington, he was planning to return to his home in Veracruz. "When I was working in restaurants, I was sometimes able to send home $800 a month," he said. "But there is no work left."

For North Carolina, there are not yet enough data to show whether the immigrant population is shrinking. Census figures that could shed more light are not yet available.

But local and national indicators strongly suggest that the rate of growth of illegal immigrants has at least slowed considerably.

In a study released this fall, the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington estimated the U.S. illegal immigrant population at 11.9 million in March 2008, down from 12.4 million in 2007. The study's authors cautioned that the dip was within the margin of error, but they said there is evidence of a sharp slowing in population growth.

Another Washington research group, the Center for Immigration Studies, found a similar decline.

The Mexican government said last week that the number of its citizens who left to live abroad this year was down more than 40 percent since 2006. The U.S. Border Patrol said it caught 18 percent fewer immigrants trying to cross the border in the fiscal year that ended in September. And money sent home by Mexicans living in the United States has dropped significantly in the past few months, Mexican officials say.

In North Carolina, sheriff's departments have helped deport more than 3,000 illegal immigrants this year. The Mexican consulate in Raleigh has seen a surge in Mexican citizens applying for passports and seeking to secure dual citizenship for U.S.-born children -- both steps that would ease a return to Mexico.

The N.C. Department of Public Instruction released figures Friday showing that the number of Hispanic students grew by less than 9,000 this year in North Carolina. For each of the past four years, Hispanic enrollment had grown by more than 13,000.
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http://www.newsobserver.com/news/story/1306223.html

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4.
Deerfield detainee facility ups capacity
Detainee facility wants to increase capacity
By Elizabeth Roberts
The South Florida Sun Sentinel (Fort Lauderdale), November 23, 2008

Until they sought to expand, hardly anyone knew they were there.

But as Warden Jon Dobre explained it, the Broward Transitional Center already detains 600 undocumented immigrants at 3900 N. Powerline Road in Deerfield Beach. It has applied for permission to increase the population by 294 detainees, to 894, all of them noncriminal men and women awaiting resolution of their cases.

Dobre said changes at a building will go unnoticed.

"It originally was approved by Broward County as a work-release center. It will have even less impact since the detainees are not leaving to go to work," said Thomas Mullin of Ruden McClosky in Fort Lauderdale, speaking for the GEO Group, which operates the facility.

"It is capped at this point," he said of a population housed in a building Immigration Customs Enforcement inherited along with the detainees from the Broward Sheriff's Office. "So we would like to move the offices to a new building and convert these rooms to what they were intended to be."
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http://www.sun-sentinel.com/community/news/deerfield_beach/sfl-flins1123...

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5.
Hate Roots Not Skin Deep
Immigration Overflow Fuels LI Tension
By Selim Algar, Kieran Crowley and Lukas I. Alpert
The New York Post (NYC), November 22, 2008

"They have tried to make this about race, but it is a lot more complicated than that."

To 15-year-old Michael McCarthy, a sophomore at Patchogue-Medford HS and schoolmate of the seven Long Island teens charged in the hate slaying of Ecuadorean immigrant Marcelo Lucero, it is impossible to pin it on simply the color of one's skin.

At first glance, the hostility does seem out of character. Students leaving the very integrated school yesterday happily bounced out of their classrooms in social cliques made up of all races, all colors. Hispanics happily mingled with blacks and whites.

But one group appeared left out of the mix: the newest arrivals, the children of migrant workers - Spanish speakers from Central America.

Authorities who have studied the community point to a very complex social mechanism as the cause for the vicious hate slaying - a volatile mix of anti-immigration fervor, economic unease and an overwhelming flood of newcomers.

"It is taxing for the community to suddenly have all these new people coming in," said Carlos Sandoval, a filmmaker whose landmark documentary, "Farmingville," illustrates anti-immigrant violence in this stretch of Long Island.

"That triggers resentment, and when that resentment flares into something else, something violent, how do you stop that? Clearly in Suffolk County, we have crossed that point."

In recent years, the new residents have come to the eastern end of Long Island in droves. In school, they do not mix easily with the rest of the students because they study in separate English-as-a-second-language classes.

To suddenly see hundreds of Hispanics lined up on street corners looking for work as day laborers only ratchets up tensions among many blue-collar Long Islanders - some of whom see the newcomers as competition for work, Sandoval said.

And what goes through the minds of the parents is quickly passed on to their children.

"I think there is clearly a phenomenon of what gets discussed at the dinner table gets passed on to the kids," he said.

It is easy to find young kids talking nostalgically about a time before the massive wave of immigrants came - long before they were even born.

"These guys, these Mexicans, everyone has a hatred for them. Downtown Patchogue used to be nice, and now they make it all dirtbaggish," said one 15-year-old. "I don't mind if people want to come work, but they don't show any respect for the people who have been here."

Stephen Steinlight, a senior policy analyst with the Center for Immigration Studies, agrees the simmering animosity is seeping into the schools.

"This is a community on the cusp of a large demographic transformation, and that is never easy," he said. "There is always fear, insecurity and occasionally - in some communities - it takes the form of violence. It creates a tremendous amount of social anxiety."
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http://www.nypost.com/seven/11222008/news/regionalnews/hate_roots_not_sk...