Learning.

It’s a painful thing, isn’t it?

The fact of the matter is that the debate around reproductive rights spans so widely and it rarely is told from the perspective of segregated, disenfranchised, disempowered, abused, ostracized, illiterate, poor, mentally or physically challenged, lesbians, or womyn of color. Beyond abortion, most US citizens still do not grasp the issues of reproductive justice. RR is beyond the white, middle class need for healthy and safe access to abortions.

Here is a glimpse of Charon Asetoyer, Founder and Executive Director of the Native American Women’s Health Education Resource Center. This interview is a glimpse into the disturbing comblexities lying beneath the proverbial “Choice vs. Life” debate.

According to the Center for Women Policy Studies, 640,000 women are trafficked in to the United States for forced labor and sexual exploitation.

Check out this great resource, your state’s laws, and some reports that outline the atrocities that are inflicted upon millions of girls and women in this modern day slavery.

Via Wiretap: Aaron Tang is the Co-Director of Our Education, a non-profit organization working to build a national youth movement for quality education.

Supreme court rules in favor of parents
In a rare, unanimous decision yesterday, the US Supreme Court ruled yesterday in favor of parents who wish to file lawsuits on behalf of their children for relief in accordance with the Individuals with Disabilities in Education Act (IDEA).

The issue in question was whether parents could sue a school district that they felt was not providing the educational support required by IDEA, without the representation of an attorney. Most federal laws do allow individuals to represent themselves in court, but until now most federal courts have disallowed parents from representing their children under IDEA. The basis for this practice had been the position that IDEA only confers specific rights unto disabled children and not to their parents, and since children cannot represent themselves in any federal court, they must hire an attorney to do so. But all nine justices disagreed with this position on the basis that the parents do indeed have rights guaranteed in IDEA, with Justice Kennedy writing on behalf of the court, “The parents enjoy enforceable rights at the administrative stage, and it would be inconsistent with the statutory scheme to bar them from continuing to assert these rights in federal court. It is not a novel proposition to say that parents have a recognized legal interest in the education and upbringing of their child.”

While the nine justices agreed on the rights of parents in this matter, there was some disagreement over the extent to which parents had the right to sue districts in accordance with IDEA. Though all nine found common ground on the parents’ right to represent their children directly in cases seeking redress over procedural rights and to force a local district to pay for the costs of private tuition if the public school cannot provide appropriate education, two justices–Scalia and Thomas–dissented as to whether parents should be allowed to sue school districts without an attorney on cases challenging the basic question of whether their child’s free, appropriate public education was “substantively inadequate.”

The Court’s decision is seen universally as a victory for special education advocates, particularly those parents who have disabled children but who are without the means to pay for attorneys and other advocates. In this case, the two parents in question, Jeff and Sandee Winkelman from Parma, OH, had already paid over $30,000 in legal fees without much success before seeking to represent their child directly. While there was some concern that allowing such parental representation would lead to more frivolous lawsuits and an increased burden on the courts, in the end it was found that equal access to the courts was more important.

It is an open question how much this decision will affect non-disabled children in the public education sphere. Because IDEA guarantees qualified children a free, appropriate public education, it actually secures for these children on a federal level something that other children do not possess – a substantive entitlement about the kind of educational opportunity the government must provide. Since there is no such federal right for non-disabled children, the question of whether their parents can sue without an attorney is moot. But there are state level constitutional claims which could be affected here, and I’d be eager to see whether more parents now decide to file lawsuits without attorneys challenging state governments for improved educational opportunities.

Via The Nation: Photo of the week | Students at the U. of Bogota, Colombia, protest the US and the paramilitary. Photo by Edwin Camilo Gomez Ceron.

This is great!
I JUST met Helen Zia.

I was at a conference. Being the baffoon that I am, I had not followed her or her writing. After her keynote, a writer who had gone from NO experience to establishing a critical voice in feminist journalism, I had to meet her.

She hugged me, looked at my name tag and repeated it slowly back to herself. She smiled and said, “I’ll look for you.”

Hitting close to home, reminding us that immigration problems are not limited to the Latina/o, Mexico families and loved ones.

Thanks to Reappropriate for the heads up on this article.

BAY AREA
Asians frustrated, angry over immigration plan

Tyche Hendricks, Chronicle Staff Writer

Thursday, May 24, 2007
Mahesh Pasupuleti, a software engineer from India, stands… Francisco Villacrusis sits in his San Francisco apartment…

San Francisco resident Francisco Villacrusis and his wife petitioned 13 years ago for their grown children to join them from the Philippines and keep them company in their final years.

But if Congress passes immigration changes now being proposed, Villacrusis has little chance of realizing his dream because the immigration service canceled the paperwork when his wife died because she had filed it, and the changes would invalidate any new petitions for adult children or siblings filed after April 30, 2005.

“I’m lonely. It’s very hard to live alone,” said Villacrusis, a retired sales manager and a U.S. citizen since 1999. “I have prayed for this for a long, long time.”

In the Bay Area, with a high concentration of Asians, who face some of the longest waits to immigrate, proposed changes to family-sponsored and job-specific green cards are angering Asian American community leaders. Immigrant advocates say the changes would undermine the family ties that bind most immigrant communities. They also would unfairly shut out the region’s large population of highly skilled workers here on visas from building a permanent life in the United States.

“I feel frustrated, angry, deceived,” said Mahesh Pasupuleti, a software engineer in Emeryville who came from India eight years ago on an H-1B visa and has applied, with his employer’s sponsorship, for a green card. Under the changes, he wouldn’t be able to stay longer than six years, even if he were in line to receive a green card.

“There are half a million people like me,” said Pasupuleti, who is a member of Immigration Voice, a group that lobbies to ease the path to permanent residence for highly skilled temporary workers. “If anybody gets special treatment, it should be us, because we’ve been playing by the rules and contributing to this economy.”

Much of the debate over the Senate bill has so far focused on legalizing an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants and creating a temporary program for low-skilled workers, elements that tend to affect immigrants from Mexico and other parts of Latin America, who make up about two-thirds of the nation’s illegal immigrants.

Foreign-born Asians — who make up 40 to 63 percent of immigrants in the Bay Area’s five largest counties, compared to 27 percent of the nation’s foreign-born population, according to 2005 census estimates — are more likely than immigrants from Latin America to naturalize.

Immigrants from China, India and the Philippines in particular must wait longer than most other immigrants to bring in family members because their countrymen have tended to fill the annual immigration quotas for their countries more quickly than immigrants from other countries.

The current “family reunification” system — the system that required Villacrusis’ children to wait 15 years, but at least allowed him to apply for them to immigrate — would be replaced by a point system. New weight would be given to a prospective immigrant’s education, job skills, English ability and other measures, and the importance of kinship ties would decline dramatically.

“It’s the only part of the bill that would affect U.S. citizens and the only part that’s retroactive,” said Joren Lyons, a staff attorney at San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus, who is assisting Villacrusis with his case.

Lyons and other leaders in the Bay Area Asian community spoke out Wednesday to denounce the scaling back of family-based immigration, which has been central to U.S. immigration law since 1965.

“The point system is discriminatory because it works against low-income, limited-English speakers,” said Christina Wong, a staff member for Chinese for Affirmative Action, at a press conference in San Francisco. “We deserve a system that truly eliminates backlogs, that respects our communities and that looks at the contributions we’ve provided this country.”

Other immigration analysts said it is time to eliminate the “chain migration” that arises when immigrants can sponsor their relatives. Instead, the United States should focus on attracting immigrants who can make the greatest contributions to the national interest.

“The rationale, and I think that was sound reasoning, was that (family-based immigration) didn’t seem like a good idea economically,” said Steve Camarota, director of research for the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., which favors reducing immigration. “So many of these people are unskilled, they create a fiscal problem and seemed to be overburdening the bureaucracy.”

Hans Johnson, a demographer at the Public Policy Institute of California, said many immigrants who come on family reunification visas actually are highly skilled. But he said the point system could bring a different flow of well-educated immigrants to the Bay Area.

“This proposal would favor people with high skills but not necessarily those with family here,” he said. “It could lead to more migration from Asia, but not necessarily family members of people who are already here.”

Nam Vo, a 25-year-old immigrant from Vietnam sponsored by his mother, was sworn in as a U.S. citizen Wednesday in San Jose. An electrical engineer and a graduate of UC Berkeley, Vo said the current immigration system allowed his family members to reunite and put their talents to work in their adopted country.

“I think it’s terrible,” Vo said, of the proposal to eliminate some family preference visas. “I feel bad for all the families whose brothers and sisters could not come. If they cannot come here, they lose their parents.”
KEY PROVISIONS OF
PROPOSED CHANGES:

Illegal immigrants: Anyone in the country illegally before January could receive probationary legal status, a four-year “Z visa,” renewable once, if they come forward immediately. To adjust their status to lawful permanent residence, they must also pay $5,000 in fees, and the head of each household must temporarily return to the home country.

Green cards: None would be processed for Z visa holders until border security and workplace enforcement goals have been met and an existing backlog of green card applications is cleared (an estimated eight-year process).

Point system: 380,000 immigrant visas would be awarded annually (with 50 percent of weight for employment criteria, 25 percent for education, 15 percent for English proficiency, 10 percent for family ties). This system would replace 226,000 family-preference green cards, 140,000 employer-sponsored green cards and 50,000 other green cards currently awarded annually.

Family ties: Spouses and minor children of U.S. citizens and permanent residents would continue to be eligible for green cards, but adult children and siblings would not. Visas for parents of U.S. citizens would be capped at 40,000 annually and those for spouses and children at 87,000 a year.

Source: Associated Press; Comprehensive Immigration Reform Act of 2007 (Senate Bill 1348); U.S. State Department.
BAY AREA IMMIGRANTS,
2005

— Alameda County: 30 percent foreign-born (including 30 percent Latin American, 57 percent Asian)

— Contra Costa County: 23 percent foreign-born (43 percent Latin American, 40 percent Asian)

— San Francisco: 36 percent foreign-born (20 percent Latin American, 63 percent Asian)

— San Mateo County: 35 percent foreign-born (34 percent Latin American, 49 percent Asian)

— Santa Clara County: 36 percent foreign-born (28 percent Latin American, 60 percent Asian)

— United States: 12 percent foreign-born (53 percent Latin American, 27 percent Asian)

Source: U.S. Census Bureau estimates for 2005 (available only for geographies with more than 1 million residents).

E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2007/05/24/BAGI7Q0MVO1.DTL

This article appeared on page B – 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle