As California lawmakers struggle with a budget gap that has now grown to $26.3 billion, one of the hottest topics for many taxpayers is the cost to the state of illegal immigrants, write Anna Gorman and Teresa Watanabe.
"The question of whether taxpayers should provide services to illegal residents became a major political issue in California's last deep recession, culminating in the ballot fight over Proposition 187 in 1994. That history could repeat itself in the current downturn, as activists opposed to illegal immigration have launched a campaign for an initiative that would, among other things, cut off welfare payments to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants. Those children are eligible for welfare benefits because they are U.S. citizens. "State welfare officials estimate that cutting off payments to illegal immigrants for their U.S.-born children could save about $640 million annually if it survives legal challenges." The report also includes the following findings:
--California has roughly 2.7 million illegal residents, about 7% of the state’s population. State officials estimate that they add between $4 billion and $6 billion in costs, primarily for prisons and jails, schools and emergency rooms.
--Beyond those services, the undocumented population adds to the overall cost of other parts of local government, including police and fire protection, highway maintenance and libraries.
--On the other side of the ledger, undocumented residents pay taxes -- sales taxes on what they buy, gasoline taxes when they fuel their cars, property taxes if they own homes. How much those taxes come to is hotly debated, although most researchers agree that the short-term costs to state and local government are bigger than the revenues.
A new analysis of date from a 2008 report from the Pew Hispanic Center (which you can download here) found that about three-quarters (76%) of the unauthorized immigrants in the U.S are Hispanic and that the majority of undocumented immigrants (59%) are from Mexico. However, figures do suggest that that illegal immigration -- at least to California -- is slowing.
Read the rest of the Los Angeles Times report here.
Click here for more posts on immigration.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
 A Latino graduate went deeply into debt on student loans in hopes of improving local education. Then the recession changed the odds, writes columnist Hector Tobar.
Antonio Plascencia Jr. went into debt for California. Big time. He placed a five-figure bet on your kids and their schools. And it's a gamble he could lose.
Plascencia got into this predicament because he's a wonky 25-year-old from the barrios of East Los Angeles and El Monte. He gets angry when he thinks about those high school friends who couldn't write a coherent paragraph and the teachers who accepted this sad truth without complaint.
When he graduated from El Monte High, he was a good student with an unspectacular 3.4 grade-point average. But he worked hard at Loyola Marymount University and latched onto a dream.
He would infiltrate Southern California's ailing public school system and change it from the inside, announcing to everyone that underachievement in barrio communities would no longer be tolerated.
To do this, he needed training. So he interned, networked and fought his way into one of the best boot camps for aspiring public servants in the United States -- the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy Studies.
His plan was to come back home to California this summer and, with his newly minted master's degree, get a job and start to "make a little trouble" in the education bureaucracy.
Everything was going smoothly -- until the budget crisis hit.
Read more of Tobar's column here.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Dallas Morning News reporter Katherine Leal Unmuth wonders what happened to Elian Majano, the young son of immigrants from El Salvador who disappeared from Lively Park in Irving, Texas, three years ago. He was 2 years old when he went missing.
"From time to time, I find myself thinking about an Irving toddler who apparently disappeared while playing with his older brother in Irving's Lively Park on June 21, 2006 -- Elian Majano, then two years old. Today, close to the third anniversary of his disappearance, he should be five years old.
"His father handed the photo (pictured at the right) of brothers Alexis, then 4, and Elian to me when I visited the family's cramped apartment in South Irving -- an aging complex occupied by many immigrant families. (Elian's parents are from El Salvador). Now this little boy has joined a long list of other missing children from throughout the country, his case featured on America's Most Wanted online."
Read more about Elian Majano here.
Click here for more posts on immigration and migrant issues.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Mexican women left behind by husbands who migrate to the United States in search of work were one of the focuses of the documentary "Los Que Se Quedan," or "Those Who Remain," by Carlos Hagerman and Juan Carlos Rulfo, which we've mentioned a number of times here on La Plaza.
In response to those posts, Jared Wilkerson, one of the authors of a recent study on that subject, got in touch with us about the findings he recently made with his colleagues at Brigham Young University.
The study, called "Effects of Husbands’ Migration on Mental Health and Gender Role Ideology of Rural Mexican Women," found that those women generally have a poorer state of mental health than a comparison group. The study attributes this condition largely to the nontraditional gender roles that are forced upon the women because of their husbands' absence.
Read on »
 We need Luis Peñate, a thinker and a fighter, and others going away to college to come back to L.A. to help solve our many problems, writes Hector Tobar.
"We need Luis and all the other college-bound members of the class of 2009 to come back to Los Angeles one day. We need their brain power to sort out the messes we older generations are leaving them.
"Luis is one of those young people who was gifted to us by El Salvador, a little Central American republic that has lost too many of its brightest and most ambitious people to the United States.
"His mother, a legal U.S. resident, had spent much of her life traveling back and forth between the two countries. When she brought Luis to the United States, at age 11, he was already a precocious reader. He had just read 'The Lord of the Rings' in Spanish."
Read Hector Tobar's complete column.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City Photo: Luis Peñate, second from right, with sister Brenda, left, mother Sonia and father Rogelio. Credit: Irfan Khan / Los Angeles Times
 The time has come to fight hate speech against Latinos as we have against blacks, writes Los Angeles Times columnist Hector Tobar.
I struck a nerve two weeks ago when I suggested that all Americans,
Latinos especially, owe a collective thank you to black people for
their struggles for equality. Recognizing this truth, and
teaching our children that black people fighting for their own freedom
helped free all of us, I argued, can help combat intolerance in
communities where blacks and Latinos live side by side. I got
more than 300 messages [you can see some of the comments on that column here], mostly positive. Dozens of black people thanked
me for "saying what someone ... in the Latino community needed to
say." But others launched into a refrain I hear whenever I write the word "Latino." Read the rest of Tobar's column here. -- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
An anti-gang activist known nationally in the United States was arrested Wednesday on federal racketeering and conspiracy charges stemming from his alleged involvement in one of the most violent street gangs in the U.S., Scott Glover and Richard Winton report.
Alex Sanchez, executive director of Homies Unidos, a gang-intervention nonprofit with offices in Los Angeles and El Salvador, was among two dozen alleged members or associates of the Mara Salvatrucha gang, also known as MS-13, charged in a 66-page indictment that was unsealed Wednesday.
The defendants, with monikers such as Creeper, Grinch, Pain and Tears, were involved in a variety of crimes, including murder, conspiracy to commit murder, extortion and drug trafficking, over a 15-year period, the indictment alleges. Among the alleged crimes was a plot to kill a Los Angeles Police Department detective who specialized in investigating the gang, authorities said. Gang members had gone as far as choosing a handgun with which to kill Det. Frank Flores, authorities allege, but police thwarted the plot.
Read more of the report here.
Click here to see more recent posts on the Mara Salvatrucha gang.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
Photo: Alex Sanchez is executive director of Homies Unidos, a gang-intervention nonprofit group. Credit: Los Angeles Times.
 Practical dreamers are creating a diverse community -- nurturing gardens, opening a business, extending goodwill and respect, writes columnist Hector Tobar.
Jose Luna doesn't see the blight around him in his neighborhood in Historic South-Central. That old apartment building with the shuttered windows? Not a problem. The graffiti on the sidewalk? He's too busy building the home of his dreams to notice.
He's not one to brag, so I'll do it for him. Luna, a garment worker, has created a gorgeous front garden, by far the best-looking one on his block of Woodlawn Avenue.
The gnarled columns of an old cactus are the centerpiece. Rose bushes and begonias provide a flash of color. And in one corner there's a bird of paradise that has a sentimental little story attached to it.
For Luna, a 42-year-old native of Mexico, owning a home is the proudest accomplishment of three decades in the United States. I look at his home and garden and see something more.
Read on here.
Image: Garment worker Jose Luna has been in the U.S. for 30 years. He has transformed the home and property he bought in South-Central not long after the 1992 riots. Barbara Davidson / Los Angeles Times.
 Without blacks' sacrifice, Latinos would be 30 years behind in the fight for civil rights, writes Hector Tobar
Earlier this year, I attended one of those sedate conferences writers get invited to every so often. I talked for an hour or so very politely about books, until the audience rose up in rebellion and told me to stop.
I'd been invited by USC to be on a panel discussing the topic of blacks and Latinos in Los Angeles literature. But the mostly student audience didn't want a writerly chat. They wanted to talk about the reality of a divided, angry city.
"There's certain parts of Watts and Compton where blacks can't go," a young black man told us, rising up from his seat to describe Latino gang members' slurs and threats.
A high school teacher rose to his feet too, to talk about his Latino students' ignorance of African American history and the intolerance he often hears from the Spanish-speaking immigrants around him.
It hurts me deeply to hear of these things. I suppose, like a lot of people, I've been in a sort of denial about what's happening in my hometown.
You can read Tobar's full column here.
During some of America's 20th-century wars, the sight of Bob Hope rallying U.S. troops became practically as familiar a symbol of the military as Old Glory flapping in the breeze. Today, U.S. men and women of a new generation serving under arms, many of them Latinos, are being regaled by performers named Frankie J, Baby Bash and Paula DeAnda, some of whom are as likely to be singing and joking in Spanish as in English.
For the last few years, the growing presence of Latinos in the U.S. military has become a focus of Universal City-based mun2 (pronounced moon-dose), a lifestyle cable network targeted at bilingual Latinos ages 18 to 34. A mun2 news special, "For My Country: Latinos in the Military," which investigated the varied reasons why many young Latinos choose military service, won a Peabody Award in 2007.
This week, mun2 is continuing its examination of how Latinos are affecting U.S. military culture and vice versa with "Concert for the Troops," which airs at 6 p.m. today. The concert was staged live before an invited audience of U.S. Army troops, both Latinos and non-Latinos, a number of whom have done tours of combat duty, as well as some of their spouses and significant others.
Read the rest of this report by Reed Johnson through this link.
-- Deborah Bonello in Mexico City
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Chris Kraul
Mexico City:
Deborah Bonello
Ken Ellingwood
San Diego:
Richard Marosi
Washington:
Nicole Gaouette