NEWS

IMMIGRATION REFORM RALLY SAT., APRIL 6, 2013, at 12:00 noon

This coming Saturday, April 6, 2013, CoFiA will join with thousands of other people at Liberty State Park to show our support for common sense immigration reform.  We will be demanding reform that includes a path to citizenship, ensures family unity and provides protections for all workers.

Buses will leave from in front of the police station in Palisades Park.  For more information or to sign up call CoFiA Co-Chair Rony Coloma at 201-832-4617.

The event is sponsored by La Fuente, a Tri-State Worker and Community Fund, and other groups.  The bus is free.

Wage Theft video being planned

wage theft cmt 3.20.13001The wage theft committee of the Community of Friends in Action is beginning to plan a video documenting the experience of our friends in the jornalero community, of wage theft.  “Wage theft” is exactly what it sounds like–the stealing of wages from employees.  All over the United States unscrupulous employers are exploiting day workers–and many other workers–by hiring them for jobs and then paying them only a part of what was promised.  In our community these documented thefts have amounted to as little as $400 and as much as $20,000. The committee is hoping to create a film that will demonstrate how such theft  affects all of us.  Stay tuned!

 

Here, a committee member ponders the issue during a recent meeting.

Former Guatemalan dictator facing trial

 

According to the New York TIMES and other media, ex-military dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt is being tried for his role in attacks against indigeneous people that took more than 200,000 lives over three decades. It is justice that many people thought would never happen. Although a United Nations Truth Commission documented at least 7000 of these deaths, the report of the Commission resulted in no action. Ríos Montt was protected from prosecution because he was a legislator, and when he became president he stacked the judiciary in his favor.

 

In 2010 the Guatemalan Judiciary changed its policies and brought charges against various members of the high military command, and some were convicted. Now it is the turn of Ríos Montt. The Guatemalan Forensic Anthropology Foundation has meticulously identified thousands of victims of what is now considered a genocide.

 

Some of these atrocities are documented in the video produced by the Community of Friends in Action, “Why I Am Here/Porque Estoy Aquí.”

 

Congratulations to Maria E. Andreu!

maria andreu
maria andreuCoFiA member and former co-chair Maria Andreu has sold her young adult novel The Secret Side of Empty to Running Press publishers.  The publication date is Spring 2014.  The novel is based on her own experiences growing up undocumented in the United States.
Join us in congratulating Maria on this amazing achievement.  “Like” her page on Facebook here, and send her a note through the book’s website here.

46,486 parents of U.S.-citizen children deported in 2011

An article in “Yearning to Breathe Free,” the newsletter of the First Friends of NJ & NY Corp. “IRATE & First Friends”, points out that in the first six months of 2011, 46,486 parents of U.S.-citizens children were deported.  It also quotes the Applied Research Center (ARC) as estimating that about 5,100 children with detained or deported parents were in the public child welfare system in 2011.  Over the next five years, ARC estimates that an additional 15,000 children in the child welfare system could be at risk of permanent separation from a detained or deported parent.

These horrific statistics arise for several reasons.  The changes in U.S. immigration law in 1996 made it impossible for immigration judges to consider the harm that might be caused to a U.S.-citizen child by the removal of his or her parent or parents.  The parents are often removed suddenly, and may not be able to make any arrangements for their children while they are being held behind bars.  Further, a judge or caseworker could determine that a child who ends up in the child welfare system should be placed for adoption, rather than reunited with a deported parent or a responsible relative.

Congress must reinstate judicial discretion and eliminate “mandatory detention” laws as they relate to parents.  We must remember that the ICE practices that scoop up parents indiscriminately are heavily influenced by the motivation of private correctional corporations to keep their profitable institutions filled.

We are all complicit in these abuses of children if we do not speak out against them, and insist that our lawmakers listen–and act.

New York TIMES “Immigration Reform and Workers’ Rights” gets it right

A recent New York TIMES editorial (February 23, 2013), says that “any worthwhile overhaul has to attack systemic abuses of immigrant labor.”

We are delighted to see prominent coverage of this important issue that our friends live with every day.  The editorial points out that the need for  protection against wage theft has received only passing mention.  “Such protections, essential to any reform plan, would help rid the system of bottom-feeding employers who hire and underpay and otherwise exploit cheap immigrant labor, dragging down wages and workplace standards for everyone.”

The CoFiA Wage Theft Committee hears about these bottom-feeding employers all the time.  They are not strangers.  They live and work among us.  These bottom-feeders we have dealt with include not just construction contractors and landscapers, but Realtors, doctors, restaurateurs, and others.  As the editorial states, the abuses begin overseas, where workers pay steep fees to ‘coyotes’ and begin their lives here in deep debt.  Thus they take almost any work offered, and suffer in silence when they are exploited. Most of the people who come to us have stories of threats of deportation if they venture to complain.  The article is right when it says, “They have little opportunity to complain about unsafe working conditions, to sue for stolen wages or to assert their rights to overtime and time off.”

Changing these patterns must be part of the immigration discussion.  The editorial tells us that the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Service Employees International Union have joined forces with the U.S. Chamber of Commerce in the push for reform.  This is encouraging news for us all.