U.S. Rep. Xavier Becerra has been the force behind the museum's creation.
Should there be a National Museum of the American Latino?
A while back there was a story in the Washington Post about a Latino Museumon the National Mall. Rep. Xavier Becerra (D-Calif.) introduced the bill to set up a commission to study the idea's feasibility. The museum would be based in Washington, around the National Mall and "might be under the umbrella of the Smithsonian Institution."
According to the story by Jacqueline Trescott, "This is one issue that unites our community," said Raul Yzaguirre, the president of the National Council of La Raza.
Let me be the first one to disagree and state for the record that this is one of the worst, most divisive ideas to have come out of anyone's minds in years. And I think that I am definitely part of the "community."
Why have a separate, segregated museum for Latinos? Why not get more Latinos in the existing national museums, period.
For many years, countless Americans – Latino and otherwise – believed that the mosaic portrayed in Washington’s museums was missing a few tiles. In response, the Smithsonian Institution examined itself and in the 1990s determined that the mirror it was holding up to America was indeed incomplete. In 1997, the Center for Latino Initiatives was launched as an effort to respond to the lack of representation of Latinos at the Smithsonian in staffing and exhibitions.
Over 35 million individuals attend the Smithsonian’s museums and traveling exhibits every year. As you can imagine, many are children visiting with their parents or on school trips. Among our nation’s school-age population, about every fifth student is of Latino descent. Every one child out of five born today in the United States is an American of Latino heritage.
All children who visit the nation’s capital take the lessons learned here back home to their communities. We should not allow our children to learn that Latinos are not part of America.Instead, when they visit the nation’s capital they should leave inspired by our past with faith in our future.This country has always managed to give the next generation of leaders good reason to be proud of our history and culture. We must continue that tradition.
The sign at Geno's Steaks reads: "This is America: When ordering, speak English."
Ordering a cheesesteak in Philadelphia is as easy as saying two words: "Whiz with" or "Whiz without." But when it comes to the language in which those words are spoken, the issue gets tricky.
Joey Vento vowed he would shut down Geno's Steaks rather than take down the signs he put up reading, "This is America. When ordering please speak English."
Twenty-one months of investigation. A seven-hour hearing. “Hundreds” of billable hours spent lawyering. And no evidence from what I can tell that they ever actually refused to serve anyone. Don’t celebrate too much. Here’s the relevant part of the statute at issue, the city’s Fair Practices Ordinance. The commissioners simply didn’t have a category available to them to rule the way they would have liked. But statutes can be changed and I’m guessing this one probably will be.
Calling the sign discriminatory is more than simply legally suspect; it trivializes real discrimination, which is unfortunately rampant in Philadelphia.
Too often, a black man has a tougher time finding a job, a gay couple is told that an apartment is no longer for sale, a Hispanic woman gets fired without explanation.
These are cases of real discrimination. They're the cases which the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, as their mission statement dictates, should be exposing, pursuing and rectifying.
Several new bills in the Senate would require much more of this.
A group of Republican Senators led by Jeff Sessions of Alabama introduced 15 bills this week aimed at toughening immigration enforcement. Sessions' bill would require mandatory prison sentences for immigrants convicted of illegally entering the country. Another piece of legislation would sanction countries that refuse to take their citizens back when U.S. immigration officials deport them.
"It is important that we send the message to the world that America is enforcing the rule of law," Sessions said.
Does the United States need stronger measures to discourage illegal immigration? And what should the U.S. do with more than 12 million people in the country illegally?
I heard from a Senate source a few days ago about two very promising initiatives from conservative Senate Republicans committed to comprehensive immigration enforcement. Not shamnesty. I repeat: Comprehensive immigration enforcement reform. This is good policy. Smart politics. And it’s about damned time.
That illegal immigrants living in the United States place an economic burden on schools, hospitals, prisons and other public services is undeniable, but it's also true that they contribute to our economy and our society in myriad ways. Bullying them into leaving is counterproductive and downright mean. It's also shortsighted. Many immigrant families are blended, made up of legal immigrants, illegal ones and U.S.-born citizens. Harsh laws and deportations may satisfy the popular hunger for instantaneous immigration reform, but the result will be a legacy of anguish and resentment among millions of people who aren't going anywhere.
Maria Elena Betancur, originally from Columbia, helps organize voters in her New York neighborhood.
More fuel for the immigration debate: The Pew Research Center says immigration will drive the population of the United States sharply upward between now and 2050 -- and will push whites into a minority.
What do these changes mean for our future? What will it mean for our politics?
The transformation of the United States into a country like Canada or Belgium would not necessarily be the end of the world; it would, however, be the end of the America we have known for more than three centuries. Americans should not let that change happen unless they are convinced that this new nation would be a better one.
Such a transformation would not only revolutionize the United States, but it would also have serious consequences for Hispanics, who will be in the United States but not of it.
Democrats, meanwhile, can hardly believe their luck. They predict that a swell of Hispanic support could even tip Arizona their way — and that the party's chances grow stronger with every mile of border fence pledged by the Republicans. "We've seen this movie before," says Simon Rosenberg, president of the Democratic think tank NDN. "It's Pete Wilson. Here was a Republican governor of California in the 1990s who lashed out at immigrants and made a state that had produced Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan irrevocably blue, because of the huge demographic tide that went against the party."
A big border might need a bigger fence... or better policies.
The murder Saturday of U.S. Border Patrol Agent Luis Aguilar casts a new light on the escalating violence along the Southern border. Aguilar was allegedly run over by drug smugglers as he tried to lay down a spike strip to stop them.
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff says violence along the border will likely increase this year as the administration bolsters staffing and adds more fencing and technology to secure America's borders against human traffickers, drug smugglers and would-be terrorists.
But is the federal government acting quickly enough, efficiently enough? Would a border fence reduce the violence?
Congressional Democrats, and some Republicans, gut the Secure Fence Act in the omnibus spending bill against the wishes of the American people. In a bill with 9,000 earmarks, border security takes a back seat.
But this is in a nation that won two world wars and put men on the moon. The border fence would have been farther along if we'd just given the Minutemen a federal grant in the form of a gift certificate to Home Depot. So the next time you hear candidates for any office say they support border security, give them a post-hole digger and point them toward Mexico.
Border enforcement sounds nice, but we've shown no capacity to effectively shut down the Mexican-American border, and the sort of domestic militarization an actual fence would signal is, to say the least, unsettling. Corporate enforcement is important, but ID fraud foils much of it, and the taller our fence and the more stringent our corporate crackdowns, the more sophisticated Mexican document forgery will become, which brings problems all its own, particularly if you fear terrorism.
Trying to stop the flow of immigrants when they reach our border is, in sum, a fool's game. The question is whether you stop some immigrants before they leave home.
