One of the newspaper’s lucky recipients is an illegal alien from Honduras, Miguel Angel Guity Mejia, whose goal is to mooch a college education — and readers are urged to donate to that cause.
Mejia’s goal for his future degree is to become a sports journalist and work for Univision or Telemundo — just what America needs, another soccer reporter. Does a more socially useless occupation exist?
Meanwhile, some Americans are not doing well even in the improved economy, and less globalist charities concentrate on their needs.
Naturally, the Times’ explanatory article is even more breathless and emotional than standard sob stories from the liberal press.
]]>After a Treacherous Trip From Honduras, Aiming for an Education, New York Times, November 25, 2019
After a harrowing journey to reach New York, Miguel Angel Guity Mejia is hoping to resume his college studies and establish a secure future.
When Miguel Angel Guity Mejia was 16, he packed his Bible, a pair of shoes and some clothes in a knapsack. In the dead of night, he left home without saying goodbye to his family. They had no idea he was fleeing Corozal, the coastal village in Honduras where he grew up.
He stayed in a hotel with three friends for about a week, until the border with Guatemala was clear of immigration authorities. Then they set out for the United States, eager to escape the reach of gang members who were hanging around soccer fields and basketball courts, trying to recruit youngsters like him.
“I was getting scared,” he recalled this month, four years after his journey began.
For more than two weeks, he and his friends walked, hitchhiked, took buses and hid between train cars. When they arrived at the border between the United States and Mexico, they had to swim across a river. “That was the moment that changed my life forever,” Mr. Mejia said.
Once they reached the middle of the river, the current was so strong and the water so deep that one of Mr. Mejia’s friends started drowning. Mr. Mejia tried pulling him up by his shirt, but to no avail. He also started drowning. “God, please,” he recalled thinking. “Please save me.” Suddenly, they reached a riffle and managed to cross to the other side.
The ordeal lasted minutes, Mr. Mejia said, but it felt like a lifetime.
They eventually approached Border Patrol agents, and Mr. Mejia was placed in a shelter run by the Office of Refugee Resettlement in Texas for about four months until he moved to New York to stay with his father and stepmother.
Before then, Mr. Mejia had almost no relationship with his father, who had left the family for the United States when Mr. Mejia was an infant and eventually settled in the Bronx. About seven years ago, Mr. Mejia’s father called him unexpectedly, and Mr. Mejia memorized the phone number. When he arrived in Mexico, he reached out to his father for help.
In the Bronx, Mr. Mejia, now 20, enrolled in high school and joined the school’s soccer team (he is a die-hard Real Madrid fan) in his junior year. While he was grateful to have left Honduras, which has one of the world’s highest murder rates and where more than half the population lives in poverty, according to the Central Intelligence Agency, the adjustment was challenging. His father went from being a stranger to his caregiver, and Mr. Mejia was homesick.
In the summer of 2016, he was so down that he considered returning to Honduras. Then he joined another soccer team, at a church in East Harlem, and started attending services there. It was a transformative experience, he said, and it gave him a sense of inner peace. The resentment he had felt toward his father for leaving him when he was a baby eased, and he began to appreciate how hard his father had worked to provide for his family.
As he became more comfortable in the United States, Mr. Mejia applied for an immigration designation that would make him eligible to seek a green card. He had help from Terra Firma, a project of Catholic Charities of the Archdiocese of New York, one of the seven organizations supported by The New York Times Neediest Cases Fund. Terra Firma offers medical and legal services to unaccompanied immigrant children. Mr. Mejia’s application is still pending.
Mr. Mejia has since graduated from high school. Because of his immigration status, he is not eligible for many financial aid opportunities to attend college. After receiving a $1,000 scholarship through his high school, he enrolled at Bronx Community College in August with plans to major in media studies. The $600 that he had saved from a summer job at a carpet factory in Brooklyn ran out quickly, though, and last month, Mr. Mejia dropped out. (Continues)
Notably, many of the victims were white — did that spoil the narrative for the press, which loves the idea of a diverse state filled [...]]]>
Notably, many of the victims were white — did that spoil the narrative for the press, which loves the idea of a diverse state filled with non-white foreigners who bring their cuisines and cultures while not assimilating to American society?
Perhaps that’s the reason for highlighting illegal alien sob stories, as was done by the New York Times on October 17 and also on Saturday by the San Francisco Chronicle which gave unlawful foreigners front-page billing:
Interestingly, the illegal alien Mexican arrested a few days ago for arson in Sonoma County hasn’t gotten any front page attention that I have seen.
The Chron story focused on illegal alien Senor Javier, who gave no first name — all the better to avoid ICE deporters. Before the fire, he had done well in this country, having a rented house, a job and two DACA sons further mooching jobs and/or education from America. He could of course return to Honduras, where it’s likely the disastrous hurricane damage he fled two decades ago has been repaired, but that possibility is not mentioned.
The article notes that illegals aren’t eligible for federal aid. But I imagine that Gov. Jerry Brown will somehow figure out some freebies for his beloved lawbreaker base in the sanctuary state.
]]>Undocumented immigrants face challenges after Wine Country fires, San Francisco Chronicle, October 20, 2017
Javier wanted to see it with his own eyes, to confirm that the neighborhood where he’d raised his two sons, Santa Rosa’s Coffey Park, was no longer there.
Nearly two decades ago, he fled Honduras for America after a hurricane destroyed his business and livelihood. He built a life with his wife and children in the middle-class neighborhood that was rather ordinary — except, perhaps, for his lack of U.S. citizenship.
But as the 51-year-old man turned down the road leading to his rented home on Oct. 9, he wasn’t prepared for the sight of rows of flattened houses, still smoldering a day after the deadly Tubbs Fire swept through. He got out of the car and held his wife and 20-year-old son.
Moving forward from the Wine Country fires will be challenging for thousands of people who lost loves ones, homes, schools, workplaces or other things. But undocumented immigrants like Javier face special hardships due to their status, advocates said.
Javier, a service-industry worker who asked to be identified only by his first name because he is fearful of being targeted for deportation, cannot seek most traditional federal disaster aid to cope with the loss of his home and possessions. Meanwhile, some undocumented residents have lost out on work because of the fires, and cannot apply for benefits designed for this scenario.
Javier knew all this when he returned to the ruins of his home, but tried to muster an inspirational message. After all, he’d restarted his life once before, albeit as a much younger man. [. . .]
In disasters like this month’s wildfires, the Federal Emergency Management Agency provides money to citizens and certain immigrants to, among other things, obtain short-term lodging, replace essential property and rent a new home. The money — which can in some cases amount to tens of thousands of dollars — is for items not covered by individual insurance.
Undocumented residents who have a U.S. citizen in their household are granted an exception and can apply for aid. But that doesn’t apply to Javier, whose two adult children have protection under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, which President Trump is phasing out.
(Continues)
Below is a discussion [...]]]>
Below is a discussion of the budget on Fox News Tuesday morning. Helpfully, Kristin Tate, a contributor for The Hill, recited some diversity crime facts:
KRISTIN TATE: ”California is a border state so they have high rates of crimes committed by illegal immigrants. In 2014 which is the most recent year for which data is available 75 percent of criminals convicted for federal drug offenses were illegal immigrants. That same year 38 percent of murder convictions in California, Arizona, Texas, Florida and New York were illegal immigrants. All of this data is available via the Government Accountability Office.”
Keep in mind that individual California cities like Sacramento and San Francisco are directing taxpayer dollars to defend the “rights” of illegal foreigners to remain in the country they invaded.
California is definitely generous in spending the citizens’ money on unlawful residents. In 2015, the state mooched $57 million in tax dollars to subsidize illegal alien drivers’ licenses as well as covering illegal alien kiddies’ healthcare, beginning with $40 million allocated in the beginning and expanding to $132 million annually “when fully implemented” — whenever that is.
Interestingly, the Los Angeles Times article below refers to illegal aliens as “Californians” in its title. But even more outrageous is the statement that illegal alien boosters pushed for the legal aid particularly in cases where “the repercussions of deportation could lead to death.”
What about the deaths to Californians caused by the illegal aliens residing in the state!? Some that I’ve reported include Kate Steinle in San Francisco, the three members of the Bologna family in San Francisco, Marilyn Pharis of Santa Maria, Drew Rosenberg from Los Angeles, Jamiel Shaw in Los Angeles and film director Bob Clark of Pacific Palisades.
Below, Tony Bologna and his two sons were shot to death by an MS-13 gangster a short distance from their home in San Francisco as they returned from a family picnic.
It’s monstrous that the state government does so little to provide public safety for the citizens while going out of its way to crank out freebies for illegal aliens.
]]>Gov. Brown’s budget proposal includes an extra $15 million to help Californians facing deportation, Los Angeles Times, May 14, 2017
Gov. Jerry Brown has earmarked an extra $15 million in the state’s budget to expand legal defense services for people battling deportation, a move that could be interpreted as a response to the Trump administration’s broadened immigration enforcement orders.
The one-time cash infusion would boost the state government’s financial help to those in the country illegally to $33 million. Immigrant rights groups and lawyers hailed the increased funding in Brown’s revised state budget, calling it a signal that the state is committed to protecting families from what could happen under President Trump.
But while the total funds are enough to support existing services, policy analysts said lawmakers might need almost double this amount to fund the other new legal initiatives under consideration at the state Capitol.
“We urge the Legislature to deepen its investment in programs,” said Ronald Coleman, government affairs director for the California Immigrant Policy Center. “It is going to be key given that California can be ground zero for the devastation that we would face from Donald Trump’s deportation policies.”
Improving legal defense for immigrants has been a significant part of a legislative package proposed by Democrats, in an attempt to assist more than 2 million people living in the state illegally. Among the proposals is a $14-million request to provide legal training, written materials, mentoring and technical assistance to county public defenders on the immigration consequences of criminal convictions.
Another bill seeks to create a $12-million legal defense program for immigrants facing deportation who do not have a violent felony on their records, while a third would increase legal counsel for deported veterans, depending on available funding in the annual budget.
Opponents to the programs have argued against using taxpayer money to help offenders in the face of potential funding cuts from the federal government. And debate in Sacramento has simmered over who should be served with the limited resources.
On the state Senate floor last month, Sen. Ben Hueso (D-San Diego) said he had to reduce the scope of SB 6, which would fund the $12-million legal initiative, to prioritize immigrants with children, immigrants with parents who are citizens, veterans and asylum seekers.
Proponents say the legislative proposals come as lawyers and advocates across the country have sought to increase government-funded access to counsel for immigrants. The movement has centered on showing that many immigrants would be granted relief if they had the resources to prove their cases and that for some, the repercussions of deportation could lead to death.
California’s first attempt at a statewide legal defense program came in 2014, when $3 million was spent on providing legal aid to an unprecedented number of children arriving alone at the U.S.-Mexico border from Central America.
Two years later, the state had authorized nearly $30 million for the development of “One California,” a federal assistance program to help thousands of immigrants apply for naturalization and former President Obama’s deferred action programs, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals and Deferred Action for Parents of Americans and Lawful Permanent Residents.
As of fiscal year 2015, the state Department of Social Services, which administered both legal defense initiatives, had contracted with nonprofits to serve more than 1,300 children, with an average cost per case totaling $5,000. Its second program had awarded a little over $14 million to 61 organizations and was in the midst of finalizing contracts for the 2016 fiscal year, for over $29 million to about 80 immigration and legal aid groups.
Last week’s revised budget preserves the $3 million allotment for the unaccompanied minors program and an ongoing $15 million allocation for One California. Its one-time $15 million effort would further expand legal services for people seeking naturalization services, deportation defense or assistance in receiving other legal immigration status.
Brown’s office declined to comment on funds, and any changes on the use of the dollars must be hashed out with the Legislature.
Laura Polstein, an immigration senior staff attorney at Centro Legal de la Raza, called the new money a “game changer” for immigration lawyers struggling to provide adequate representation on the ground.
Maya Ingram, a legislative advocate with the American Civil Liberties Union of California, said her organization was heartened to see California “take long overdue steps to even the playing field.”
“The federal government has tipped the scales of justice against immigrants fighting to remain in their communities, working, and contributing to our state by forcing them to navigate the legal maze of deportation proceedings alone,” she said.
You wouldn’t expect to see reportage of Americans murdered, raped or stolen from, with the perps being illegal aliens from the queen of liberal media. There’s plenty of crime committed [...]]]>
You wouldn’t expect to see reportage of Americans murdered, raped or stolen from, with the perps being illegal aliens from the queen of liberal media. There’s plenty of crime committed by border-violating foreigners, with many American victims, but the Times has a different agenda.
Besides, who would relocate to a complex, first-world nation without speaking the language at least a little?
Illegal aliens do, because they figure they can mooch American jobs and benefits by residing in a language-balkanized community like LA or Miami, where English is not required in everyday use. Plus the foreigners have the media on their side, plus well-paid ethnic helpers in La Raza and such.
The basic narrative here is immigrant-victim sob stories of foreigners not immediately presented with a police officer speaking their language. But at least there are some interesting facts, e.g. nearly two million English avoiders, plus a fascinating map of language diversity in New York City.
One also notices how many of the language complainers are women who have been beaten up by their culturally misogynous husbands. And no dollar cost is given for all this attention to diversity.
]]>Language Barrier Continues to Thwart Victims of Crimes, New York Times, May 11, 2014
New York City now has more non-English speakers than ever, according to the Census Bureau: nearly two million. In response to this growing population, the city has assembled a host of programs to help it serve not just those who speak Spanish, Chinese and Russian, but also languages like Pashto, Punjabi, Uzbek and Urdu.
The New York Police Department, the largest in the country with almost 35,000 officers, has tried to stay at the forefront of the effort, and has billed its foreign language program as the world’s standard.
But having services doesn’t ensure they will be used, and some New Yorkers say that in the frantic, often frightening minutes just after a crime has occurred, their pleas for assistance in their native language have been ignored by officers. While help arrived swiftly after a call to 911, they say, officers didn’t summon a bilingual colleague, find an impartial bilingual bystander, or call the interpretation service the city uses for such situations. Domestic violence calls, already fraught with confusion and tension, have been particularly prone to language lapses, according to victim advocates. In interviews, several women said that without an interpreter, their attempts to report crimes were stifled.
A Russian-speaking woman said that after her husband accosted her in a drunken rage at his Coney Island home, she called the police. Officers ignored her requests to tell her story in her native tongue, she said. Instead, an officer scribbled the word “refused” and told her to copy it onto a report meant to contain her testimony. She followed his instructions. Embarrassed by the abuse, she agreed to be interviewed on condition of anonymity.
A Bengali-speaking woman said that after strangers punched and sexually assaulted her after a break-in at her home in Queens, officers asked her 10-year-old child to interpret. Unwilling to traumatize the child, she did not divulge the sexual attack. And a Spanish-speaking woman, Josefina Ramirez, said that after an argument with her landlord, she called 911 for protection. A pair of officers ignored her request for interpretation, she said, and rifled through her pockets, taking her keys, and then ejected her from the building.
Ms. Ramirez, 57, said she spent the night wandering the streets of Bushwick, Brooklyn. “Instead of protecting me, they hurt me,” she said. “I understood nothing of what was going on.”
Victim advocates say these encounters and others like them show that for all its efforts and intentions, the Police Department is falling short of its goals, and of a 2008 mayoral order that requires it to provide non-English speakers with “meaningful access” to its services in the city’s most frequently spoken languages.
“It’s been a consistent problem,” said Dorchen A. Leidholdt, director of legal services at Sanctuary for Families, which serves more than 10,000 domestic violence victims a year, three-quarters of whom are immigrants. “It’s a critically urgent safety issue.”
Susan A. Herman, the department’s new deputy commissioner for collaborative policing, called language access “a very high priority,” saying that she has met with many community groups in recent months to discuss this and other issues. “We’re seeking continuous input from them about what they’re seeing on the ground.”
[. . .]
New York has worked to stay out in front. Under Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, the police force became considerably more diverse. At the patrol level, about a third of the department is Hispanic. The number of officers of Asian descent has more than doubled since 2003. Since 2012 all of the department’s 50,000-plus employees, officers and civilians, have had access to a 24-hour telephone interpretation service that allows them to connect with operators fluent in more than 170 languages. At least 15,000 staff members speak a language other than English, including 8,895 who speak Spanish; about 1,260 are certified interpreters.
In the academy, cadets are briefed on the department’s language access program and once on the job they receive 20-minute refreshers three times each year. Signs advertising free interpretation are posted in every police station house and service area.
[. . .]
As Assemblyman Tim Donnelly remarked at that time, “Tuition rates have been going up, the universities have budget [...]]]>
The issue of taxpayer-funded financial aid for illegal alien students in the state has been moving along through the system, and now it is here. Jerry Brown signed the California Dream Act into law in October 2011.
As Assemblyman Tim Donnelly remarked at that time, “Tuition rates have been going up, the universities have budget cuts of $1.2 billion and there are lotteries for classes – but if someone is here illegally, we roll out the red carpet.”
The photo shows cheerful UC Berkeley freshman Jose Lopez, an illegal alien. Look closely and you can see he wore his Aztlan t-shirt, apparently as an extra screw-you statement to stupid-generous America.
Of course, 20,000 illegal aliens students means that number of citizen kids have been displaced, not to mention the unwelcome costs for taxpayers. Early in the debate over the bill, supporters claimed it wouldn’t cost much, maybe $13 million, but now we see that in three years the price tag will be $65 million.
Meanwhile, Sacramexico has closed 70 state parks to save a piddly $11 million while squandering far more on the education of illegal alien foreigners.
Interestingly, a September Field Poll found that 61 percent of California voters did not think illegal aliens should get the same tuition break as citizen kids, and the survey didn’t even ask about additional financial aid on top of subsidized tuition.
]]>California Dream Act: 20,000 illegal immigrant students apply for state financial aid for the first time, Contra Costa Times, March 7, 2013
More than 20,000 college-bound students are seeking state financial aid for the first time under California’s new Dream Act laws that allow them to get the help despite their immigration status.
While far from a complete picture, that number is the best indicator yet of how many students hope to benefit from a pair of laws that could radically change the college experience for a generation of students whose parents brought them to the U.S. illegally when they were young — the same group that has taken center stage in the national immigration reform debate.
“For many of them, it’s a game-changer,” said Meng So, who coordinates UC Berkeley’s months-old Undocumented Student Program.
As college-bound high school graduates await word of their state financial aid — Cal Grants — other kinds of help have begun to flow for students already enrolled in public colleges and universities.
In January, UC Berkeley freshman Jesus Lopez was one of many college students who under the same Dream Act began to receive campus grants or fee waivers based on need — help previously limited to legal residents.
The aid made a big difference in his studies: This semester, the business major from San Jose moved from a crowded apartment 1¿1/2 miles from his classes to within walking distance. He joined clubs, signed up to volunteer and stays up late studying in Moffitt Library.
“Now I pretty much do the stuff a regular student does, because in a way, I am a regular student,” said Lopez, whose family moved from Mexico to the United States when he was 7.
California was one of the first states to offer in-state tuition to illegal immigrants who attended one of its high schools. Now, roughly a dozen do so. Only two other states — Texas and New Mexico — give financial aid to this group of students, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Oklahoma passed a similar law but reversed it.
Opponents, led by Assemblyman Tim Donnelly, R-Hesperia, tried to repeal the California Dream Act last year, arguing the state can’t afford to support its legal residents, let alone those who entered illegally. The campaign didn’t gather enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.
It will cost the state about $65 million a year by 2016-17 to extend the benefits to illegal immigrants and those granted temporary legality under the federal Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, the nonpartisan Legislative Analyst’s Office predicts. The estimate does not include campus aid administered by CSU and UC, grants funded mainly through tuition.
Thousands of college students could be already benefiting from campus grants and waivers.
For example, San Jose State has given grants this term to 83 students because of the state’s Dream Act, CSU East Bay has awarded 40 and De Anza College in Cupertino waived fees for 139 students.
In addition, the California Student Aid Commission expects later this year to award Cal Grants to about 6,000 students through the state Dream Act — about one-third of those who submitted a complete application.
The commission expects to award $19.5 million in Cal Grants this year to the newly eligible Dream Act students, about 1.1 percent of the $1.7 billion total. The inclusion of illegal residents hasn’t made it harder for legal residents to get tuition help, as the Cal Grant is given to anyone who qualifies, and the state budgeted for the grants expected this year.
The number of students receiving campus grants under the Dream Act is so small that the effect on resident students is negligible, said Rhonda Johnson, CSU East Bay’s financial aid director. “It would be really hard for a student to argue that ‘I would have gotten it had you not given it to those Dream Act students,'” she said.
Johnson said she looks forward to the university’s Welcome Day this spring. Until now, when students told her about their legal status and asked about financial aid, she had to turn them away.
“It’s very difficult to see the disappointment on a student’s face when I have to say, ‘I’m sorry, unfortunately you don’t qualify,'” she said. “And so now I can say, ‘You do.'”
If the government wants to restrict firearm ownership, it should start with immigrants. After all, the period between getting a green card and becoming a citizen is meant to be a try-out period, where if the newbie behaves himself, then he gets to join the club. Why should any non-citizen be permitted to own guns anyway? They should made to wait so they will appreciate the true joy of buying guns as a full-tilt American citizen.
One example revealing the policy’s deep flaws is the case of Seung Hui Cho (pictured), the mass murderer of Virginia Tech. He was a legal permanent resident who legally purchased firearms despite his college history of psychiatric difficulties and harassing women students. Sensible gun restrictions on immigrants, particularly those with mental health problems, would be beneficial for public safety.
But why should Obama learn from the past when he can insult traditional Americans and their values?
]]>Obama, Holder Push to Loosen Gun Sale Restrictions — for Legal Immigrants, Breitbart.com, December 24, 2012
While the shooting at Connecticut’s Sandy Hook Elementary School has prompted a national gun control debate, President Barack Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder will still push to allow immigrants to purchase firearms more easily.
Normally, the Department of Justice’s Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) requires legal aliens to live in a state for 90 days before buying a gun. The ATF does this through a rule attached to the Gun Control Act of 1968.
In June, Holder’s DOJ proposed to eliminate that 90-day residency requirement rule.
“This rule would finalize the interim final rule published on June 7, 2012 by removing the 90-day State residency requirement for aliens lawfully present in the United States to purchase or acquire a firearm,” the proposal to eliminate that requirement reads in part. “The Department has determined that the Gun Control Act does not permit ATF to impose a regulatory requirement that aliens lawfully present in the United States are subject to a 90-day State residency requirement when such a requirement is not applicable to U.S. citizens.”
The move to allow aliens easier access to firearms is now in its final stages.
The new rule is expected to reach its final stages in April 2013. That means it will either pass or be discarded.
The mass shootings nationwide over the past year, including the one at Sandy Hook elementary school, have not stopped Holder and Obama from pushing to make it easier for aliens to get guns.
While the administration makes it easier for legal aliens to get guns, Obama, Holder, and congressional Democrats have expressed a desire to restrict gun sales to American citizens.
In the wake of the Sandy Hook shooting, Obama has called for the reinstatement of the “Assault Weapons Ban” that President Bill Clinton’s administration passed in the 1990s. The “Assault Weapons Ban” expired during President George W. Bush’s administration.
“Like the majority of Americans, I believe that the Second Amendment guarantees an individual right to bear arms,” Obama said last week. “It’s encouraging that many gun owners have stepped up this week to say there are steps we can take to prevent more tragedies like the one in Newtown.”
“Here’s what I think we should do,” Obama added. “This week I called on Congress to take up and pass common-sense legislation that has the support of the majority of the American people, including banning the sale of military-style assault weapons and high-capacity ammunition clips, and making sure criminals can’t take advantage of legal loopholes to get their hands on a gun.”
The New York Times has noticed the trend nationwide (posted below), [...]]]>
Here in perennially broke Mexifornia, it’s old news that state universities are admitting more foreign students paying full tuition to offset some of the bills. (See California Universities Abandon State Students.) As a result, UC Berkeley campus can sound more like Chinatown than California.
The New York Times has noticed the trend nationwide (posted below), but doesn’t mention how citizen young people get shafted as a result. Every slot taken by a rich Red Chinese national is a space not available for a citizen kid, whose parents have paid a lifetime of taxes to fund America’s educational infrastructure.
Another aspect is the widespread cheating of Chinese applicants to gain acceptance to American universities. One may assume that since universities regard foreign students as walking checkbooks, the schools will be loath to flunk out kiddies who can’t speak English, for example. So the expensive educations will be less worth the cost for Americans and the dumbing down will decrease the value of the degree.
In addition, certain Presidential candidates think that “stapling green cards to diplomas” is a fine idea. Perhaps Mr. Romney, Gingrich et al haven’t thought the policy through, since it plays havoc with limiting H-1b visas to promote citizen employment in tech and engineering fields. And given the fondness of business for a diverse-appearing workforce, white Americans will be at a disadvantage in competing with foreign graduates.
]]>Taking More Seats on Campus, Foreigners Also Pay the Freight, New York Times, Feb 4, 2012
SEATTLE — This is the University of Washington’s new math: 18 percent of its freshmen come from abroad, most from China. Each pays tuition of $28,059, about three times as much as students from Washington State. And that, according to the dean of admissions, is how low-income Washingtonians — more than a quarter of the class — get a free ride.
With state financing slashed by more than half in the last three years, university officials decided to pull back on admissions offers to Washington residents, and increase them to students overseas.
That has rankled some local politicians and parents, a few of whom have even asked Michael K. Young, the university president, whether their children could get in if they paid nonresident tuition. “It does appeal to me a little,” he said.
There is a widespread belief in Washington that internationalization is the key to the future, and Mr. Young said he was not at all bothered that there were now more students from other countries than from other states. (Out-of-state students pay the same tuition as foreign students.)
“Is there any advantage to our taking a kid from California versus a kid from China?” he said. “You’d have to convince me, because the world isn’t divided the way it used to be.”
If the university’s reliance on full-freight Chinese students to balance the budget echoes the nation’s dependence on China as the largest holder of American debt, well, said the dean of admissions, Philip A. Ballinger, “this is a way of getting some of that money back.”
By the reckoning of the Institute of International Education, foreign students in the United States contribute about $21 billion a year to the national economy, including $463 million here in Washington State. But the influx affects more than just the bottom line — campus culture, too, is changing.
While the University of Washington’s demographic shifts have been sharper and faster — international students were 2 percent of the freshmen in 2006 — similar changes are under way at flagship public universities across the nation: Illinois, Indiana, Iowa and University of California campuses in Berkeley and Los Angeles all had at least 10 percent foreign freshmen this academic year, more than twice that of five years ago. And at top private schools including Columbia University, Boston University and the University of Pennsylvania, at least 15 percent of this year’s freshmen are from other countries.
All told, the number of undergraduates from China alone has soared to 57,000 from 10,000 five years ago. At the University of Washington, 11 percent of the nearly 5,800 freshmen are from China.
A few places have begun to charge international students additional fees besides tuition: at Purdue University, it was $1,000 this year and will double next year; engineering undergraduates at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had to pay a $2,500 surcharge this year.
“We’re in something akin to the gold rush, a frontier-style environment where colleges and universities, like prospectors in the 1800s, realize that there is gold out there,” said David Hawkins, the director of public policy at the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “While it’s the admissions offices butting up against the issues most right now, every department after them, every faculty member who comes into contact with international students, is going to have to recalibrate as institutions become more international. I see a cascading list of challenges.”
They have already begun here at Washington’s flagship university, where orientation leaders last fall had to explain, repeatedly, the rigorous campus recycling practices, reinforce no-smoking rules and, at the make-your-own-sundae bar, help people get the hang of the whipped-cream cans.
But there are deeper issues, like how much latitude professors should give in written assignments.
“We recognize that people from other countries often speak with an accent,” said John Webster, director of writing at the university’s College of Arts and Science. “If we’re truly going to be a global university, which I think is a terrific thing, we have to recognize that they may write with an accent as well.”
For example, because Mandarin has one word for “he,” “she” and “it” and nothing like “a” or “the,” many Chinese speakers struggle with pronouns and articles. And English verb forms, like past participles, gerunds and infinitives, can be difficult to master, since Chinese verbs are unchanging.
Given that Chinese students’ writing will be “accented” for years, Mr. Webster believes that professors should focus less on trying to make their English technically correct and more on making their essays understandable and interesting. But he knows this could be a controversial issue, reminiscent of the Ebonics debate decades ago.
The international influx is likely to keep growing, in part because of the booming recruiting industry that has sprung up overseas. That includes the use of commissioned agents, who help students through the admissions process — and sometimes write their application essays. Amid controversy over such agents, Mr. Hawkins’s group has named a commission, to meet for the first time next month, to formulate a policy regarding recruiters.
Nationwide, higher education financing has undergone a profound shift in recent years, with many public institutions that used to get most of their financing from state governments now relying on tuition for more than half their budgets. But legislators and taxpayers still feel deep ownership of the state institutions created to serve homegrown students — and worry that something is awry when local high achievers, even valedictorians, are rejected by the campuses they have grown up aspiring to.
“My constituents want a slot for their kid,” said Reuven Carlyle, a Democrat state representative from Seattle. “I hear it at the grocery store every day, and I’ve got four young kids myself, so I get it.
“We are struggling with capacity, access and affordability,” he said. “But international engagement is part of our state’s DNA. We have a special economic and social relationship with China, and I am happy to have so many Chinese students at the university.”
Still, Jim Allen, a counselor at Inglemoor High School in Kenmore, Wash., an affluent suburb north of Seattle, said: “Families are frustrated. There aren’t as many private colleges here as in the East, and a lot of families expect their children to go to U.W.”
Unlike many other state universities, the University of Washington did no overseas recruiting before this academic year, when it staged recruiting tours in several countries. So the rapid growth in international applications — to more than 6,000 this year from 1,541 in 2007, with China by far the largest source — was something of a surprise. Last spring, another surprise was the percentage who accepted offers of admission: 42 percent decided to enroll, up from 35 percent the previous year.
“As best I can make out, it’s just word of mouth,” said Mr. Ballinger, the admissions dean. “We’re well known in China, we’re highly rated on the Shanghai rankings, and we have a lot of contacts.”
Applications from abroad present some special challenges. Because the SAT is not given in mainland China, the university does not require international students to take it. Although it does not pay recruiting agents, Mr. Ballinger said he knew many applicants hired them, so the university does not consider Chinese applicants’ personal essays or recommendations. (Yes, he also knows that some affluent applicants in the United States get extensive help from paid private counselors.)
Some in-state students said they had trouble knowing what to make of the fact that international students, on the one hand, help underwrite financial aid, and on the other, take up seats that might have gone to their high school classmates.
“Morally, I feel the university should accept in-state students first, then other American students, then international students,” said Farheen Siddiqui, a freshman from Renton, Wash., just south of Seattle. “When I saw all the stories about U.W. taking more international students, I thought, ‘Damn, I’m a minority now for being in-state.’ ”
Actually, nearly two-thirds of Ms. Siddiqui’s classmates are from Washington, but her inaccurate sense of the population was echoed by all of the three dozen freshmen interviewed — including those from other states and from China. Most, like Ms. Siddiqui, estimated that half to two-thirds of the class was international.
Ms. Siddiqui cited a psychology class in which the professor asked the 600-plus students about the nature of the families they grew up in. With clickers recording the responses, Ms. Siddiqui said, about 60 percent said their families were “collectivist,” rather than “individualist,” something she perceived as more Asian than American.
Alison Luo, who grew up in Chongqing, a major city in southwest China, had mixed feelings about the trend that she is part of.“Before I came, I saw the online chatting in China, with hundreds of people coming to the University of Washington,” Ms. Luo said. “I was kind of worried about that. I paid to study abroad, and it was almost like I was studying in China.”
It’s out of control and must be fixed. America must remain a monolingual society. So-called bilingualism (aka foreigner language [...]]]>
It’s out of control and must be fixed. America must remain a monolingual society. So-called bilingualism (aka foreigner language rules prevail) will balkanize this country faster than anything else.
The current employment depression and unfairness of the new paradigm indicate the wisdom of an immigration moratorium for several decades, at least.
No Spanish, No Job Says Conroe Woman: MyFoxHOUSTON.com
]]>No Spanish, No Job Says Conroe Woman, Fox Houston, By Greg Groogan, October 6, 2011
HOUSTON – These days Becky Cusak spends a lot of time around the house. Too much time.
“I was born and raised here in Texas and I’ve never had a problem finding a job before,” Cusak said.
Laid off more than a year ago from a construction company front office job, her ongoing effort to get back on a pay-roll has run into a barrier: a language barrier.
“I know what I’m doing. I can go and run your entire office with no problems at all, its just nobody wants somebody who can’t speak Spanish now,” she explained.
Fourteen months of job search futility has left this married mother of a teenage son with a sense of intense frustration.
“You have to be bilingual because they have customers who only speak Spanish,” she said.
Lots of customers.
Of the more than 1 million Hispanic adults in the greater Houston area, research indicates more than half speak little or no English and more than 60 percent were born outside the US.
While in no way anti-immigrant, Cusak believes their sheer numbers have succeeded in forcing their language on others.
“This is America. We speak English. It’s not fair to have a requirement that you have to speak another language to be able to work here,” she insisted.
With fairness in pretty short supply these days, she says she would jump at the chance of learning a new language if it would just guarantee a job.
“If someone gave me the opportunity, I would take it in a heartbeat and I know a few other people who would take it too,” she said with a smile.