Anti-Immigrant Laws Result in Use of Convict Labor and New
Attacks on Latinos with Racial Profiling

1. Georgia sends criminals to replace undocumented
immigrants (Politico.com)

2. Denying the Future - Short-sighted budget cuts will
devastate Texas' emerging Latino majority.(Texas Observer)

==========

Georgia sends criminals to replace undocumented immigrants

by Reid J. Epstein 

Politico.com
June 14, 2011

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0611/56938.html

With Georgia's restrictive immigration law set to kick in,
Gov. Nathan Deal Tuesday is sending convicted criminals to
fill farm jobs vacated by undocumented immigrants fleeing
the state.

Deal, a first-term Republican, issued a statement on Tuesday
morning calling on the state's commissioners of labor,
corrections and agriculture to work together to connect
unemployed probationers with a state agriculture industry
now desperate for workers.

"I believe this would be a great partial solution to our
current status as we continue to move towards sustainable
results with the legal options available," Deal said in his
statement.

Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who wrote the Arizona
and more-restrictive Alabama immigration laws, told POLITICO
the state-level immigration battles will soon move from
conservative to swing states like Missouri and Pennsylvania.

According to Deal, Georgia has 100,000 probationers, with
8,000 in the state's heavily-agricultural southwest. A full
quarter of the probationers, he said, are unemployed.

Georgia lawmakers in April passed legislation that mirrors
Arizona's controversial 2010 measure. The Peach State will
require businesses to confirm employees' immigration status
and gives law enforcement power to check whether suspects
are in the country legally.

The governor's suggestion comes days after Georgia's
agriculture commissioner, Gary Black, delivered to Deal a
survey that found state farm owners have 11,080 jobs they
now need to fill.

The vast majority of those jobs pay $15 per hour or less and
last between one and six months, Black's survey found.

Jerry Gonzalez, the executive director of the Georgia
Association of Latino Elected Officials, said the move wont
help save farmers he said could lose $300 million because of
the loss of migrant workers.

"This points to complete out-of-touch perspective that some
of our legislators and our leadership in this state have
with regard to the current immigration crisis we are
facing," Gonzalez said. "The governor is really
shortchanging on solutions for our number one industry."

==========

Denying the Future
Short-sighted budget cuts will devastate Texas' emerging
Latino majority

by Melissa del Bosque

Texas Observer
June 15, 2011

http://www.texasobserver.org/cover-story/denying-the-future

For Texas' growing Hispanic community, the galvanizing issue
of the 82nd Legislature was the Republican push to ban so-
called "sanctuary cities." The legislation, designated by
Gov. Rick Perry as an emergency item during the regular
session, allowed law enforcement to check for citizenship
status.

Hispanics worried that the law, with its echoes of Arizona-
style policing, would open the door to widespread racial-
profiling.

During a memorable, 10-hour House debate in early May, the
passions of outnumbered Hispanic lawmakers reached a peak.
Some cried. Some shouted. Some tried to reason with Anglo
Republican legislators determined to "do something" about
illegal immigration - even if their bill was likely
unconstitutional, and despite opposition from local law
enforcement. San Antonio Democrat Trey Martinez Fischer,
chair of the Mexican American Legislative Caucus, told
reporters after the debate: "This bill is the single largest
assault on being Latino in Texas."

It was powerful rhetoric, and partly true. The bill making
sanctuary cities illegal, which ultimately failed, had
serious civil-rights implications (only to be revived during
special session, where it will most likely pass - see blog
update). But a far greater assault on Hispanic Texans came
in more pedestrian form: the state budget. Fifteen billion
dollars in cuts to public schools and health and human
services programs will dampen the dreams and impoverish the
lives of millions of Texans. The cuts will
disproportionately affect Hispanics, who make up a majority
of the state's schoolchildren and Medicaid recipients - and
who are, literally, the future of the state. As Democratic
Rep. Mike Villarreal of San Antonio told the Observer during
the final week of budget debate, "We need to be making
budget decisions that are right by our children, no matter
their ethnicity or race. That being said, the kids most
reliant on state investment are Hispanic kids because they
make up the largest share of younger Texans."

For years, Steve Murdock, the state's demographer under Gov.
George W. Bush, had been telling anyone who would listen
that Texas was heading for ruin if the state didn't spend
the money to educate its growing Hispanic population. Texas
would become a poorer, less competitive state, he warned. He
told lawmakers over and over - at hearings, policy forums
and private meetings - about the dire consequences if they
did nothing to address the gaping education and income
divides.

He never thought they 'd make it worse.

To Murdock's dismay, that's what the Legislature has done.
The 2012-13 budget, which is still being negotiated in a
special session, relies heavily on spending cuts to close a
$23 billion shortfall. It chops $4 billion from public
schools, $1 billion from higher education and underfunds
Medicaid by $5 billion. "I'm very, very disappointed,"
Murdock says. "This is not something that Texas can afford
to do, and the risks we're taking come with very severe
consequences."

Latinos in Texas are disproportionately poor and tend to
lack access to health care. Consider these numbers: At least
40 percent of Hispanics lack health insurance. Latinos
comprise 38 percent of Texas' population, but 54 percent of
its Medicaid recipients, according to the Texas Health and
Human Services Commission. More than 53 percent of Texans
living in poverty are Hispanic. Education is the No. 1 tool
to bring them out of poverty, Murdock says. Without access
to quality education, the economic gap will grow bigger.
"The children of Texas are our future, and two out of every
three are non-Anglo," he says.

The biggest mistake lawmakers made this session, Murdock
says, was not using some of the $9 billion-plus in the Rainy
Day Fund to fund education in the 2012-13 budget. Only 72
percent of Texas high school students graduate, according to
the U.S. Department of Education. That's one of the nation's
lowest rates. It's much lower for Latinos. Hispanic students
are twice as likely as Anglos to drop out of high school.

Such a situation portends a poorly educated workforce in
Texas' future. A decade ago, Murdock estimated that by 2040,
at least 30 percent of the workforce would lack high school
diplomas if Texas did nothing to close its education gap.
With the latest round of budget cuts, that number is likely
to increase.

The outlook for higher education could actually be worse.
Partly because of Murdock's dire predictions, lawmakers
realized a decade ago that Texas needed to expand access to
college. In 2000, Hispanic college enrollment was just 3.7
percent of the Hispanic population, while 5.1 percent of
Anglos were enrolled. The disparity was mostly due to cost.
So in 2000, the state's Higher Education Coordinating Board
created the "Closing the Gaps" program to boost minority
enrollment. The goal was to enroll 5.7 percent of Texas'
Hispanic population by 2015. Last year the board reported
that it was not meeting its goals. The percentage of
Hispanics in college had increased to an encouraging 4.4
percent, but remained 263,000 students short of the target
for 2010.

In response, lawmakers made things worse. They slashed the
number of scholarships by 43,000 students, with 29,000
coming from the Texas Grants program that provides college
money to middle and low-income Texans. "It's very worrisome
to see it cut," Murdock says. "This program has really been
effective in getting students enrolled in college."

Murdock isn't the only expert sounding the alarm. In March,
Raymund Paredes, the commissioner of higher education,
testified during a legislative hearing that cuts to Texas
Grants would lead to a "lost generation" of students,
according to the San Antonio Express-News. The students most
affected  would be from low-income homes, in many cases the
first in their families to attend college. Many had already
been through college readiness courses and taken placement
exams, Paredes told the legislators. Prospective students
had already been told that scholarships were available if
they needed them. "We are shutting the door," Paredes said.
"These students are capable, bright, ambitious, but they
need help. If we don't help them, we will suffer
consequences down the road."

"Immediately, the word that comes to mind with this budget
for me is `selfishness,'" Villarreal told me in the House
chamber. It was the last week of session, and Villarreal,
recited to me the crippling cuts and losses to education,
health care and other government-subsidized programs. "Next
biennium, 43,000 less students will receive college
scholarships, they zeroed out the pre-k education program,
and Medicaid will run out of funding by late 2012," he said.

Texas could have taken a less damaging route in reckoning
with its $27 billion budget gap. In the House, Villarreal
tried to persuade the Republican supermajority to close tax
loopholes and use the Rainy Day Fund. "It's there to
stabilize basic state services - that's what it's supposed
to be used for," Villarreal said. "But my Republican
colleagues have chosen not to spend a single dime to
mitigate the cuts over the next two years. It's become a
litmus test for what it means to be a conservative."

The leadership had rejected closing tax loopholes to put
some money back into education or health budgets. Earlier in
the session, Villarreal had convened a hearing to consider
doing away with a $1.2 billion-a-year tax exemption for
natural gas producers. The purpose was to close the loophole
for large energy companies to mitigate public school cuts.
"It's a tax exemption that we can no longer afford,"
Villarreal says. "So I gave my colleagues an opportunity to
decide whether the priority was education, but they chose to
preserve the tax loophole, and the consequence is deeper
cuts to education."

The cut that especially galled Villarreal was the zeroing-
out of the pre-kindergarten Early Start Grant program for
public schools. The program prepares preschoolers who speak
English as a second language for kindergarten. It also helps
preschoolers who are homeless, foster children, military
kids and those who come from backgrounds of extreme economic
hardship. From 2010 to 2011, more than 101,000 pre-k
students participated in the program, according to the Texas
Education Agency. Now many schools will cut pre-k programs.
The majority of the students affected will be Latino.

"It's a terrible and crazy thing," Villarreal says, shaking
his head. "All of the research tells us the earlier you
invest in education, the less you have to spend later." This
session's budget was a "failure and a betrayal to our Texas
school children and basic Texas values," he says. It was
ironic, Villarreal points out, that many House members had
benefited from the same government-subsidized schools they
were destroying. "We benefited from prior generations
providing for our public schools and universities," he says.
"All that was asked of us was that we do the same, but this
session we dropped the torch."

The unfairness didn't stop with education. Legislators cut
health and human service programs by 17 percent from the
previous budget cycle. Some of the steepest cuts were to
family planning, which had its budget reduced from $111
million to $38 million. More than 284,000 women could lose
family planning services, resulting in more unplanned
pregnancies that will affect Hispanic families
disproportionately. Young Latinas in Texas accounted for 62
percent of the births to teen mothers in 2006, the most
current year reported by the National Center for Health
Statistics.

Medicaid also took huge cuts. Underfunded by nearly $5
billion, Medicaid is used more by Hispanics than other
Texans. Hispanic patients along the Texas-Mexico border were
preparing for a double whammy, says Rep. Veronica Gonzales,
a Democrat from McAllen. In addition to the $5 billion
reduction, a new, state-mandated Medicaid HMO will be rolled
out in Hidalgo County, where her district is located.
Gonzales worries that medicaid cuts will force much-needed
health-care providers out of the Rio Grande Valley. Her
district is 85 percent Hispanic, and more than 80 percent of
patients in the region qualify for Medicaid. State lawmakers
who supported the legislation said they hoped to save an
estimated $400 million, but creating the HMO district could
have numerous unintended consequences that will affect the
quality of life for Hispanic patients, Gonzales says.

"At the minimum, we're going to see delays in care and the
denial of certain tests," she says. "We have a high rate of
diabetes, heart and kidney disease - so if care is delayed,
it's going to have a real impact on people's lives."

Gonzales says she found it strange that the Legislature
seemed so hostile toward the state's fastest-growing
demographic. "There seems to be a push-back due to the
growth of Latinos in Texas," she says.

The takeaway message for Hispanics from the wreckage of the
82nd legislative session and its ruinous budget is voter
participation, Gonzales says. If Hispanic families want the
Legislature to reflect more of their values, they need to
participate in the electoral process. "Hispanics need to
realize the impact of legislation. If you want to have a
voice, you have to vote," she says, "because if you don't
vote, you 're giving people permission to pass legislation
that might be against your best interests."

[Melissa del Bosque has a Masters in Journalism from U.T.
Austin and a M.P.H. from the Texas A&M School of Rural
Public Health.  She spent five years in the Texas Senate as
a communications director. Her work has been published in
Time magazine and the NACLA Report on the Americas.]

==========

___________________________________________

Portside aims to provide material of interest to people
on the left that will help them to interpret the world
and to change it.

Submit via email: [log in to unmask]

Submit via the Web: http://portside.org/submittous3

Frequently asked questions: http://portside.org/faq

Sub/Unsub: http://portside.org/subscribe-and-unsubscribe

Search Portside archives: http://portside.org/archive

Contribute to Portside: https://portside.org/donate