Jessica Flores

A CALL FOR AMNESTY DIVIDES IMMIGRANT RIGHTS ACTIVISTS

By Jessica Flores

Barack Obama had a message for Latinos when he spoke to the National Council of La Raza in the months leading up to his the presidential election.

He outlined guidelines to get undocumented immigrants on a path to citizenship saying, "We have to finally bring those 12 million people out of the shadows." Obama's declaration pleased many immigrant rights groups. But now leading immigrant rights activists agree that he hasn't lived up to his promise and several Southern California activists want Obama to know their continued support is contingent upon comprehensive immigration reform.

Where the activists don't agree, however, is on the tactics used to send their message to the White House.

Prominent amnesty proponent, Nativo Lopez, is campaigning for immigration refrom by trying to convince immigrants to boycott the 2010 census. If amnesty is pushed through before the April census return deadline, Lopez says he'll stop campaigning for the boycott. He believes the threat of a boycott from Latino's, a group that is estimated to make up nearly 15 percent of the U.S. population, will force the federal government to push through an amnesty bill as to not forfeit an accurate count of the population.

"It's an instrument of political leverage. It's something that the immigrant community observes the government wants something from them, now the immigrant community turns it on it's face and says we want something from you."

But the boycott has yet to carry any viable support from immigrant rights groups. Other than Lopez's organizations, no immigrant rights groups or immigration services groups have supported the idea of a boycott. 

"We all think this is a step back on what we've earned as a community. So I think that they are pretty much alone in this," says Raul Murillo, Director of Hermandad Mexicana Nacional. 

The federal government uses the Census data to determine where federal funds will go, how to draw congressional districts, and where to send resources in cases of a natural disaster. It is the most accurate count of people in the United States.

Because the Census Bureau's goal to simply count the population is, perhaps, not political in nature, many activists who have worked closely with Lopez in the past are now questioning his logic and motives.

"We've been struggling for so many years to have equal rights in this country. We've been struggling to get more funding, especially federal funding, for security and for our children. Boycotting is like taking a step behind. We're working for more recognition in this country. We're encouraging our community, our members to participate," says Murillo who now directs the organization Lopez once ran.

Juan Jose Gutierrez, president of the immigration services non-profit of Vamos Unidos, says the political climate has gotten increasingly worse for the immigrants he serves. However, he says boycotting the census will strip immigrant rich communities from federal dollars that go to support roads, schools, and even senior centers.

"You know the president of 'change we can believe in' is leaving a lot to be desired and he needs to be called on that. Now, that doesn't mean that you move from a situation of great concern to doing those things that are going to be make a bad situation worse like boycotting the U.S. census; that's why we're against that."

The boycott campaign has not had the national momentum needed to garner the several million boycotters Lopez calls for. Still, Lopez has attended immigrant rights rallies giving out hundreds of boycott banners and signs.

Asked where he received money to fund the boycott campaign, Lopez' said his organization's more than one million dollars reported in the 2007 taxes came from small contributions from his immigration services work.

Gutierrez is skeptical about Lopez's motives, because he says some conservatives also don't want illegal immigrants to be counted.

"You have to start thinking that he and someone like Nativo are being used, I don't think manipulated, because I think they would be quite aware of what political role they are playing by the conservative wing of the party to confuse and drive a wedge between people."

Lopez has several months to bolster his campaign, but Southern California organizations say the biggest hurdle in getting undocumented immigrants to return the census is not a matter of convincing them out of the boycott. It is, instead, a matter of convincing undocumented immigrants that the information they submit in the Census will not be shared with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The census asks for addresses and birthdays, information many undocumented immigrants fear can be used to deport them.

The Census Bureau ensures that the data will not be shared with any other organization, and that's the message groups against the boycott hope trickles down to the undocumented immigrants across the country.

Anthony Rosario was the kind of guy who enjoyed helping people in the quietest ways. Never looking for praise or recognition...he just did it anyway.

At McDonalds he saw a mother trying to split a few meals among all her children.  He overheard the mother explain to her still-hungry kids she didn't have enough money to buy more. So what did Anthony do? He quietly slipped a five-dollar bill to the eldest, 13-year-old boy. "Go get yourselves something," he said.

Another time he took a walk with his sibling when a hubcap fell off a car and hit his sister's leg. Their brother laughed. But not Anthony. He hoisted his little sister on his back and carried her the three miles home.

That was Anthony: a helper, a mender, someone who was ready to fix a problem at hand.

At his funeral friends and family filled a large cardboard poster with different memories. One friend wrote about the first time she met Anthony. She cried by herself as fellow high school students passed her in the halls, simply ignoring her. But not Anthony.  He knelt down and comforted her.

They didn't know each other but that didn't matter. Because that was Anthony. 

When people needed their car fixed, he fixed it. He loved cars and motorcycles and spent the last two years selling cars at a Toyota dealership. When people needed a hair cut, he cut it. When his mother needed something from the grocery store, he bought it. And he never complained.

Anthony died July 30, 2009 of the swine flu at age 28, a week before his August birthday. His mother says he had asthma as a child, but was healthy before he was admitted to the Providence Holy Cross Medical Center. He stayed in the hospital three weeks after being admitted with 103-degree temperature. The hospital struggled to keep his temperature down and could not figure out exactly what ailed him. While doctors tested him for a series of different sickness, including the swine flu, they also gave him a long antibiotics treatment. The death certificate says he died of adult respiratory distress syndrome and H1N1 virus.

After his death Anthony's brother found a poem saved on Anthony's computer. The family reprinted the poem on key chains and t-shirts, which they sported together for the funeral. The poem seemed to describe the way he lived his life, "The good you do today, will often be forgotten. Do good anyway.  Give the best you have, and it will never be enough. Give your best anyway."

Our assignment this week is to upload pictures from a community we visited. I was going to share some pictures of a community that I have become increasingly fascinated with, the dog community in Los Angeles County. I've been taking my family's yellow lab to dog parks ever since I moved back to LA this summer and I had some lovely pictures from an adventure my dog Nala and I had this weekend to Schabarum Park. Unfortunately, I can't find the cord that connects my camera to my computer at the moment, so I am going to share pictures from another community I am even more fascinated with . . . it's the community that gets to work in the White House everyday.


My trip to the White House gave me a sense of what it means to be part of the White house press corps. It means access. It means fast paced questioning and reporting. It means reporting on the grounds where at any time a county's president can drive up in their limousine right in front of you, which is what happened with me. I was standing in the driveway taking pictures, and the President of the Philippines pulled up 15 feet in front of me. Just a normal day at the White House. That's my kind of normal. That's my kind of community.

Young 20-something year-old journalists who have been facebooking since 2004 and online even before that, now are frantically sanitizing their online persona. Must be professional. Must be non-partisan. Must not look drunk. These are just a sample of thoughts that may go through our heads as we de-tag pictures of ourselves, call our friends to take down that picture of us hot-tubing, and "leave" ridiculous and/or political Facebook groups. But, are we over-obsessing?

As I thought about this question, I wanted to see what kind of digital footprint a journalist I greatly admire carries. I look up "Suzanne Malveaux" and after sifting through several Google pages, I'm oddly disappointed I didn't come across ANYTHING scandalous and hardly anything very personal. Wikipedia tells me she has two sisters and a brother and that's about as personal as it gets. Perhaps her online self is primarily of her professional self because Malveaux was born in 1966, long before you could thoughtlessly tweet your political affiliation or unknowingly make FB friendships public with future controversial figures. She is probably acutely aware of anything she does that could be sent online and compromise her role as a journalist.

Perhaps Malveaux follows the CNN business partner, CareerBuilder.com's, advice about using social networking sites.  CareerBuilder.com suggests it is not enough to be professional in the work place; your online self must also exude professionalism.  Again the thoughts cross my mind: Must look professional. 

But is this advice really fair for us young-guns who started to stomp in the online world far before we knew what we wanted to do with our lives, and now our digital footprint is perhaps too vast to shrink?

This reminds me of a recent political campaign, where one from my own generation attempted to break into a world controlled by older generations.

In the race to fill Hilda Solis' vacated 32^nd congressional district seat, candidate Gil Cedillo attempted to disparage political newcomer 26 year-old Emanuel Pleitez by sending mailers with Facebook pictures of Pleitez partying.

The ads didn't show Pleitez doing anything illegal. Sure, Pleitez was partying, but what college kid doesn't? 

Cedillo attempted to dig into Pleitez's digital footprint to expose someone who didn't fit the put-together erudite business-savvy persona that Pleitez aimed to put forward in his campaign. Did Cedillo do that? Sure. Did young people in the 32^nd district really care? Probably not.

That's because most people (I can't quantify this, but going off my gut) who have social networking profiles probably have a picture of themselves having fun . . .dare I say even drinking or even drunk (gasp!). My generation understands embarrassing and silly pictures found online are so widespread and common, that unless there is something truly scandalous or illegal of a public figure online, it doesn't reach our internal news radar. And in this case, that political mailer didn't spark enough engines to get either one of the candidates the votes to win. Judy Chu won that race. 

As public figures, journalists will face our digital demon- ourselves. We will have to make some serious choices about how we present our personal lives to the public and whether or not we will even proactively put forth personal information on social networking sites. Some of us may choose to purge our personal pictures from the online world, while some will meticulously "Google" their name to catch anything that tarnishes their online brand. 

I think monitoring your online brand is important as is appearing non-partisan. However, de-tagging "unprofessional" pictures of having fun, looking silly, and even drinking is beyond what I think news organizations should require. 

Perhaps I am naive, but I can hardly imagine the public viewing pictures of a reporter partying and then tweeting: "OMG, check this out, I found a picture of this reporter in a bikini, with a beer in hand, yeah I'm definitely not going to trust her reports anymore!!"

And those of the public who do see unprofessional and/or personal pictures and information as a breach of journalistic standards, are quickly dwindling (and our probably not online in the first place to find those pictures). Our public is increasingly younger, technologically savvy, and beyond the line of thinking that unprofessional photos represent how one behaves in their profession. This is not to say that I haven't de-tagged that picture of me in the hot tub drinking. I'll take that photo down because it's just embarrassing, albeit, not discrediting. I am a journalist and a young woman who has fun, and to the extent that the later doesn't infringe on the former, I'm going to be both, online and off.

I will take a huge liberty and speak for all my generation when I say, we think Twitter is cool and useful, but not the revolutionary or fascinating tool it is made out to be from those who remember the days before the Internet. You see, we don't really remember those days. For us, Twitter is just the next iteration of communication platforms that makes it easier for us to connect with friends and those with similar interests. 

Of course, there are those revolutionary anecdotes that underscore Twitter technology power. We cannot overlook Twitter's role in allowing the Iran community to rapidly gather and virtually protest. While these stories are powerful and prove that communication tools are empowering voices like never before, most people aren't using Twitter to stage protests. In fact, most people aren't on Twitter and most Twitter users rarely even tweet.  According to a Harvard Business School study this summer, more than half of Twitter users only tweet once every 74 days--that's less than once every two moths!

I'll admit I'm one of those Twitter users who tweets only a few times every month or two. When I do, it has proven moderately effective at getting a few dozen people to care about stories I'm working on.  There's only been a few times that I've used it to search for buzz around news stories.  Today I tested the twitter waters to understand how illuminating it can be to follow stories and updates on twitter. I wanted to follow the Gov. Paterson story. 

I search Paterson, and instantly have access to what hundreds of people are thinking about the story. In theory, that is awesome, revolutionary. Most people, at least on the first page of results, are pointing to news articles.  

I am overwhelmed: which one do I choose? How do I know which one is most relevant? Since Twitter doesn't use a sophisticated algorithm to determine page rank (they pull the most recent tweets to the top), I don't really get the most qualified or useful tweets first. In fact most the tweets just reiterated what I already know, Paterson would seek reelection, even though Obama asked him not to. The comments were really not useful in this case.

Twitter is just a tool that is employed by people that want their voices heard and I'm certain the next generation of tools will do this even better. Engineers are probably developing the next generation of tools with a few goals in mind: utility, speed and reach, while journalists continue to play with the tools and theorize about their revolutionary effects. Journalists instead should be challenged to design tools that are useful, intuitive, and that also engage the public in news. It isn't revolutionary, its just news and the public wants to be part of it. Journalism students should be asked to develop business plans and design platforms that best can engage the public in news, not play with tools they already use.  We are ready for the next tool, and we should be the developing it and profiting from it.