Beautiful Horizons

No racial profiling in Arizona

After passage of a law requiring suspicious types to prove their citizenship to local police and another putting an end to ethnic studies programs, Arizona goes into the "you can't make this stuff up" zone.  From the Arizona Republic:

A group of artists has been asked to lighten the faces of children depicted in a giant public mural at a Prescott school.

The project's leader says he was ordered to lighten the skin tone after complaints about the children's ethnicity. But the school's principal says the request was only to fix shading and had nothing to do with political pressure.

The "Go on Green" mural, which covers two walls outside Miller Valley Elementary School, was designed to advertise a campaign for environmentally friendly transportation. It features portraits of four children, with a Hispanic boy as the dominant figure.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott's Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town's most prominent intersections.

"We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars," Wall said. "We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics)."

Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children's faces appear happier and brighter.

"It is being lightened because of the controversy," Wall said, adding that "they want it to look like the children are coming into light."

Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. "We asked them to fix the shading on the children's faces," he said. "We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race."

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.

In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: "To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?"...

Faces in the mural were drawn from photographs of children enrolled at Miller Valley, a K-5 school with 380 students and the highest ethnic mix of any school in Prescott. Wall said thousands of town residents volunteered or donated to the project, the fourth in a series of community murals painted by a group of artists known as the "Mural Mice."

The public art, funded by a $5,000 state grant through the Prescott Alternative Transportation Center, was selected by school students and faculty.

"The parents and children love it," Lane said.

167 Tongues

One of the many reasons why I love my neighborhood, here.

Idiocy

Mercia and I were planning a trip to see several of the National Parks in Arizona next year, but considering this idiotic law in Arizona, I have to reconsider. It's not merely because of the odious nature of the law, but my wife is a naturalized US citizen who is Latina and speaks English with an accent. If I wanted her to be subjected to a police state, I'd like to think I wouldn't have to do so in my own country and I'd like to think my own country was not becoming Apartheid-Era South Africa.

Don't take my word for it.

A Sensible View From the Right

Greg Weeks tips me to this article in The American Conservative. Unlike much of the hysteria from the right, his comments are sensible, fact-based with extensive documentation and worth a read. As Greg notes, here's the major takeaway from the article:

The evidence presented here powerfully refutes the widespread popular belief that America’s Hispanics have high crime rates. Instead, their criminality seems to fall near the center of the white national distribution, being somewhat higher than white New Englanders but somewhat lower than white Southerners. Taken as a whole, the mass of statistical evidence constitutes strong support for the “null hypothesis,” namely that Hispanics have approximately the same crime rates as whites of the same age.

This part resonated with me:

Prior to moving back to my native California, I lived for five years in Jackson Heights, Queens, one of the most heavily immigrant and ethnically diverse parts of New York City. There as well, white Europeans were a small minority and immigrants from various Latin American countries were the largest ethnic group, close to an absolute majority of the local population. On a typical afternoon or evening, probably 80 percent of the people walking the streets of my neighborhood were non-white, and on dozens of occasions I returned home from Manhattan on a late-night train, the only white face in the subway car. Yet in all my years of living there, I never encountered a hostile or menacing situation, let alone suffered an actual criminal attack. Hardly what one would expect from television images, let alone the wild claims made by conservative magazines or talk radio.

I have lived in Jackson Heights for nearly nine years and in my experience it is the safest place in which I have lived in New York. I urge you to read the article. While there are probably many things I wouldn't agree with Unz about, I do respect the care and intelligence with which he wrote the article.

More Stories Like This Please

When one bothers to see the world from someone else's point of view, one gains insight and one gains knowledge. That's precisely why this article in the Christian Science Monitor about a program in which American farmers journey to Mexico to learn about the lives of their migrant farm workers. Here's one of the shining examples

For two years, Walter Laumb, a herdsman from Minnesota, has patiently taught his new Mexican personnel all the facets of mechanized milking on his dairy farm in Minnesota.      

But on a recent day, it is Mr. Laumb who is learning an unfamiliar task in a foreign land – as his workers' wives and sisters show him how to make corn tortillas from scratch.      

"When you first come, you realize immediately why they left," says Mr. Laumb. "And then 10 minutes later you realize why they all want to come home."

Not just more stories like this, but more programs like this.

Migrating From Miserably Poor to Desperately Poor

I've written about Haitians and the Dominican Republic before here and here, but Thursday's New York Times article about the migration of Haitians to the Dominican Republic and the migration of others from one developing nation to another, should be must reading for anyone who cares the slightest about the issue. Had a bad day? It can't be much worse than every day for this man:

But hundreds of Haitian migrants have risked their lives to come here and work the surrounding fields, and they are part of a global trend: migrants who move to poor countries from even poorer ones.

Among them is Anes Moises, 45, a dark-skinned man with flecks of gray hair, who has worked the Dominican banana fields for more than a decade, always illegally. Farm bosses pay him $5 a day and tell him that Haitians stink. Soldiers have called him a dark-skinned “devil” and deported him four times.

Still, with the average income in the Dominican Republic six times as much as in Haiti, Mr. Moises has answered each expulsion by hiring a smuggler to bribe the border guards and guide him back in.

“We are forced to come back here — not because we like it, but because we are poor,” he said. “When we cross the border, we are a little better off. We are able to buy shoes and maybe a chicken.” [my emphasis]

Of course this is not isolated to the island of Hispaniola. Spain has signed repatriation agreements with several countries in Africa in an effort to discourage African migrants from making the dangerous passage across the Straits of Gibraltar or from Senegal or Mauritania to the Canary Islands in flimsy boats. The net effect has been to strand some migrants from countries such as Guinea in countries such as Morocco or Senegal.

There's no easy solution to this, but learning about the issue can only help.

Brazilian Immigrants Returning Home

Tuesday's New York Times has this article about Brazilians returning to Brazil from the US. While it is interesting, it is also unsurprising; not just because of the issues mentioned in the article, but because most Brazilians who have immigrated here in my experience - and in the experience of Maxine Margolis, the foremost chronicler of Brazilian immigrants in the US - most Brazilians come to the US not for the purpose of settling permanently.

As the article also notes, many of them come from middle class backgrounds and have a decent education. They work very hard and have transformed many of their communities such as the Ironbound section of Newark and Somerville, Massachusetts. This is probably the most telling comment:

In Massachusetts, where there is more public transportation, a spate of high-profile immigration raids, coupled with home foreclosures, have played a key role in the exodus, said community leaders like Mr. da Rocha, a legal resident who came in 1989. “I believe we lost 5,000 Brazilians only this year,” he said. “The landlords are going to face a crisis soon.”

They've been a boon to their communities.let's see how the communities do without them.

A Hero - His Nationality is Irrelevant

The story Lou Dobbs must have missed. This is Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes.

This what he did:

An illegal immigrant who gave up his long walk into the U.S. to help a boy whose mother was killed in a van crash in the desert said Wednesday that he never thought of leaving the child.

"I am a father of four children. For that, I stayed," Manuel Jesus Cordova Soberanes said in Spanish from his home in the Mexican state of Sonora. "I never could have left him. Never."

The feelings that unite so many of us. More sensible comments here and here.

Ecuadorean Immigrants and the Siren Call in New York

Sunday's New York Times has this article about Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa's Plan Retorno, an effort to encourage Ecuadorean immigrants around the world to return to Ecuador. As the article indicates, it isn't gaining much traction here in my neighborhood, Jackson Heights, NY.

While I applaud the efforts of Correa to encourage Ecuadorans to return to Ecuador, his consul general here in New York, Jorge Lopez Amaya, is dead wrong about this:

He added that the money that expatriates send home to their relatives does not improve the country. “They don’t save it, they spend it,” Mr. Amaya said. “We want people to come back to Ecuador and start producing wealth, which is different and is much better for the economy.”

I can assure Mr. Amaya that if money is being spent in Ecuador from remittances, then it is helping the economy. Entire neighborhoods in my wife's hometown in Brazil have been built with money from remittances from the US. Yes, it would be better for Ecuador if wealth was being generated in Ecuador, but if the conditions were good for that, the level of emigration from Ecuador to the US would not be taking place.

By the way, I find it compelling that some leaders on the left (AMLO and Correa) seem far more concerned with encouraging their citizens to return and some of those on the right (Calderon) seem far more concerned with easing immigration into the US.

Off the Bus Post

My newest Off the Bus post is up here. Check it out.