The state of Nevada is in some serious trouble. The legislature and the notoriously anti-tax Republican governor are in a bind as every possible avenue for a tax increase is a dead-end. Already facing a $2.2 billion budget shortfall, the question of whether to raise taxes in a state that is consistently in the bottom five out of 50 states in tax burden on residents (6.6 percent of total income, versus a 9.7 percent national average) is a burning one.

The Bureau of Land Management currently has over 60 pending applications for proposed solar projects in California.  With vast open land and ample sunlight, combined with recent tax incentives, energy companies are rushing to apply for federal land.  Though the idea of solar farms in the desert seems intuitive, one obstacle is the amount of water solar projects require to operate.  The BLM acknowledges the water needs for each project and considers those requirements before granting the application. 

"We are well aware it's a problem," said Ashley Conrad-Saydan, Renewable Program Manager for the BLM.  "It could be a determining factor," she said of the application process.

For each solar project, the proposal needs to contain a plan to get water to the solar field to wash the panels as well as spray the ground to keep dust from kicking up.  All of this is an effort to make the solar panels work efficiently, Conrad-Saydan explained.

Dave Grubb from the Sierra Club says more people need to be aware of how much water solar projects need to operate. 

"You might need to use local wells which local people are not going to be happy with," Grubb said.

One project that is currently under review at the BLM is the Ivanpah Solar Electric Generating System.  The 400MW project has applied for 6,720 acres of BLM land in the Ivanpah Valley, located in the Mojave National Preserve. 

According to the application, the project will be installing two new underground wells for both the construction and maintenance. However Conrad-Saydan said this is one project that does not have an acceptable plan to funnel water to the site.

"They will have to completely redo the design. It could stop the project," she said.

The Ivanpah project will use 214,000 heliostats, or mirrors.  Those mirrors must be washed approxiametly every two weeks and use 535,000 gallons each washing. 

"That could really change the flow of water," said Conrad-Saydan of the needed amount.

One of the projects that satisfies the BLM requirements for water usage is Stirling Energy, the solar project connected to the Sunrise Powerlink near San Diego.  Despite the environmental concerns with the placement of transmission lines and solar fields, Conrad-Saydan said the project is a good example of using waste water.

"That is actually a really good project," Conrad-Saydan said.  The project, "can use waste water from a few thousand people locally to fuel the water supply."


 

Meals at the Joy Luck Noodle Bar will certainly come with chopsticks and loose-leaf Chinese tea. (Image from Harrah's Reno Web site)


You should never tap on a Chinese customer's shoulder to get his attention when he is busy gambling. According to superstition, even a light tap will cause his good luck to evaporate.

All drinks servers at Harrah's Reno know this. They also know that Chinese customers prefer to be addressed by their last name, brought chopsticks at meals, and poured loose-leaf Chinese tea. None of the teabag stuff.

That's because the casino's floor staff received a crash course in Asian cultural awareness when they were hired.

"With the Asian customers, you want to be very cautious about what's good for them," said Anne Chen, director of marketing for Harrah's Reno. "You need to understand what to say and what not to say, to make them feel comfortable and welcome."

A Chinese immigrant herself, Chen conceived of the idea for the 30-minute-long course four years ago when she was head of the Asian marketing team. She then sat down and wrote it herself. Since then, the course has been rolled out across Harrah's properties, and adopted as mandatory for all new employees in some locations.

The cultural lessons were based on feedback from Asian customers, as well as little things that she observed.

To be polite, casino hosts should present their business card with both hands, for example.

"It's the little details that go a long way," said Chen.

Harrah's Reno's draws most of its visitors from the nearby Bay Area. According to tracked play, about a fifth of its customers are Asian American.

But don't rely on these numbers too much, cautioned Chen. Some Asian players feel that it's unlucky to use the card.

In contrast to its sister properties in Las Vegas, which attract a very international clientele, Harrah's Reno focuses on the domestic Asian American market. Its typical Asian customers are between the ages of 40 and 60, immigrated from Hong Kong or China many years ago, and make a trip to Harrah's as often as twice a month. They like to attend the casino's special events -- concerts, dinners and giveaways -- with their families. But for those making the trip alone, the casino provides daily VIP bus service from San Francisco.   

Once they arrive, they will hopefully find a staff versed in their cultural language -- thanks to Chen -- and feel right at home.

It makes her staff feel good too, Chen said.

"Employees really appreciate it then they know what's good and what's bad," said Chen. "It helps them provide a better service."

"The new second generation holds the key to what will happen to their respective ethnic groups and, to a large extent, to the cities where they cluster."

- Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation by Alejandro Portes and and Ruben G. Rumbaut (University of California Press, 2001) 

Immigration, today, is beginning to look very different than it did a decade or so ago. The flow across the border is slowing and, as authors Portes and Rumbaut emphasised in their 2001 book Legacies, the "immigrant stock" is growing up American.

This presents an entirely new set of challenges for cities, like Los Angeles, that experienced the greatest immigrant influx in the 1990s and are now home to a swelling second generation population. Unlike their parents, these U.S.-born children have both the security of legal citizenship and the natural assimilation of the English language. But, the authors explain, social upward mobility -- the movement toward higher levels of educational attainment and financial status -- is not necessarily guaranteed. 

"Some of the ethnic groups being created by the new immigration are in a clearly upward path, moving into society's mainstream in record time and enriching it in the process with their culture and energies. Others, on the contrary, seem poised for a path of blocked aspirations and downward mobility, reproducing the plight of today's impoverished domestic minorities. The size of the problems of American cities may increase concomitantly, the only difference being that the participants may come from new ethnic quarters. Were this outcome to become dominant among the second generation, a new rainbow underclass would be the prospect facing urban America by the middle of the next century."

Portes and Rumbaut present 12 stories that illustrate the varying experiences of second generation immigrants in America, arguing that, in some cases, a "peculiar paradox" occurs. While a first generation immigrant is driven to seek a better life by escaping the hardship and struggle of his or her homeland, the incentive to succeed differs for the U.S.-born, second generation immigrant. In some cases, the authors state, "greater family economic achievement and security sometimes lead to lower aspirations among secure and acculturated children." By comparison, "legal insecurity and a precarious economic situation spur their ambition."

While comfort is not always necessarily an impediment to aspiration, and struggle not always an incentive for success, the second generation undoubtedly carries the burden of their parents' struggle to find a better life for themselves and their children.

In some cases, this added pressure can be overwhelming. At Crenshaw High School in South Los Angeles, one ninth-grade student with Mexican parents says that his own goals are disputed by his parents who want him to aim higher and work harder in school. He is pushed to achieve high grades, he says, often suffering harsh penalties including physical beatings from his father. Portes and Rumbaut describe the pressure exerted by immigrant parents as a form of "psychological leverage." The children of immigrants are pushed to feel a "sense of obligation" to their parents for the struggles that were overcome in order to afford them life in the United States.

Yet, at the same time, these children also have their own struggles to contend with. In the case of this particular ninth-grader, he is not only a child of the second generation immigrant stock, but he is also trapped in a school system affected by poverty, crime and minimal resources. The opportunity to experience one-on-one learning in classes where his grades continue to slide, such as algebra, is nonexistent. Although his parents dealt with the struggles of traversing across the border, making a new life in a different country in the hope of ensuring security for their child, he now faces his own forms of confinement.

The barriers to social upward mobility still exist, but in a different form.   

In the worst case scenario, parental pressure mingled with the personal stresses of acculturation can lead to embarrassment and rebellion. Self-esteem may plummet, encouraging children to find solace in unsavory social locations, such as gangs, crime or drugs. The opportunities for generational discord are also widened, since the children of immigrants are essentially growing up in an entirely different culture from their parents.

Additionally, social upward mobility for the second generation and their immigrant parents is greatly impacted by political and cultural resistance from outside. As Portes and Rumbaut stress in their concluding chapter, "hostile governmental and societal reception" of immigrants and their children only serves to widen cultural divides, increasing the fear of and from the immigrant stock and their surroundings and impeding academic achievements and aspirations. The immigrant stock then becomes "more pre-occupied with issues of ethnic identity and reassertiveness than with the achievement of high goals through individual effort."

Negative stereotyping then becomes a form of "self-fulfilling prophesy." The new immigrant stock is kept at the bottom of the social ladder, and the progression of social upward mobility is significantly slowed, and perhaps even stunted. 

 

Granted, it's always important to remember who's telling me what, where.

But when the deacon told me the majority of congregants was now Guatemalan, I was all ears (of course, seeing as I had sought him out, I was all ears already, but well).

Little by little, folks ambled in, some older, others with very young children, taking a seat on the pews and listening to the enthusiastic (heartfelt) sounds of a religious crooner.

I hadn't expected the central Seven Day Adventist church on Pico and Hoover to be semi-bustling on a Wednesday night at 7:30 p.m. Shows how much I know about Seven Day Adventists.

When I flagged down a tiny, ancient woman, asking her what the make-up of the congregation seemed to be, she explained the church attracted a predominantly Central American group and if I wanted to know more details, I'd be better served speaking to a deacon.

She introduced me to her son-in-law, Monico, who had been a deacon at the church for years. A Mexican himself, he clarified that the church was changing.

"In the last year alone," he said. "Our congregation has grown to about 1700 people. I would say 70 percent of that number is Guatemalan."

I asked him "why so many Guatemalans in particular," knowing that an answer would likely be couched in terms most favorable to the church.

"They have a curiosity," he said. "They are smart and are willing to see other ways."

He explained those from El Salvador made up the second largest majority in the church as well as that Central American exodus to his congregation and to the other Adventist churches within the county had been at their height this past year.

The deacon emphasized the open nature of the church and its tolerance toward everyone--Catholics, Jews and others. He invited me to return that Saturday in order to meet other congregants and deacons on their holiest of worshipping days (a la Judaism) and on the afternoon before their day of rest.

I agreed and prepared to come back a week and a half later.

Anyone under the age of 18 who is induced by force, fraud, or coercion to engage in a commercial sex act is a victim of sex trafficking.  Such prostitution comes in various forms, such as escort and massage services and erotic dancing.  The U.S. Department of Justice has few figures on the presence of the sex trafficking of minors in the country, but offers the rather loose estimate that some 300,000 youth are "at-risk" of being victims of child prostitution. 

In Las Vegas alone, however, more than 400 prostituted children were identified in a May 2007 street count by Shared Hope International (SHI).  Further, from January 1994 to July 2007, 1,496 DMST victims from 40 states were identified in Las Vegas.  

"Vegas is obviously a hub," said Melissa Mayor, who works at SHI, a non-profit anti-sex-trafficking organization. 

According to SHI, easy access to alcohol and drugs, 24/7 gaming and the hyper-sexualized entertainment industry combined with the large, growing juvenile population contribute to the occurrence of Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking (DMST) in Las Vegas. 

But to Mayor, it's not just the culture of Sin City that make the location ripe for the existence of child prostitution.

"It's so much more than that.  It's built into the cab drivers, the hotel concierges," she said.  It is widely accepted, for example, that cab drivers collect money -- a "referral fee" -- from strip clubs for diverting customers to the establishments.

The U.S. Department of Justice reports that the majority of sex-trafficked youth in America are female, with the average age of entry into prostitution occurring when the victim is 12-to-14 years old.  Further, the department estimates that 75 percent of minors exploited through prostitution are controlled by a pimp. 

In June 2008, hundreds of people were arrested and 21 children rescued during a five-day roundup of networks of pimps who forced children into prostitution.  The 16-city sting -- which included Las Vegas -- was part of "Operation Cross Country" (perhaps an ode to the infamous viral video that documents the exploits of modern-day pimps, "Cross Country Pimping").  Of the 345 people who were arrested, 290 were adult prostitutes. 

During a news conference at the FBI headquarters in Washington after the nation-wide raid, FBI Director Robert Mueller said that 308 pimps and adult prostitutes had been convicted in state and federal courts of forcing youngsters into prostitution.  He also said that 433 child victims had been rescued.

Yet with all the recent attention paid to child sex trafficking and its perpetrators, it's still  incredibly easy to locate a pimp who prostitutes women, and adults seeking sexual relationships with minors.

The second hit after googling "pimpin cross country" (I was looking up "Cross Country Pimping" and had the title wrong...) is the publicly-listed MySpace page for Pimpin' Snooky.  Donning a blue suit and toothy grin in his profile picture, Pimpin' Snooky, 42, writes that he is  a "pimp, street hustler, motivational speaker, and black community leader."  He lists his location as Las Vegas, proclaims to work his "hoes" on the Strip, posts pictures of women he prostitutes, and discuses his illegal activities openly in a video on the site.  His last login date is 4/8/2009.
 

Baccarat rules in Chinese.  Photo used with permission via smartbaccarat's Flickr.


Source: Nevada Gaming Revenue Report.

Baccarat, which draws almost exclusively Asian players, is the second highest grossing table game in Nevada after Blackjack for the fifth year in a row, according to the Nevada State Gaming Control Board.

Nevada casinos rake in more and more revenues from baccarat every year. In 2008, the casinos won $773 million from baccarat tables, compared to $497 million in 2004. By comparison, blackjack tables collected $1.3 billion in 2008, a slight increase from $1.2 billion in 2004.

The state's casinos nearly doubled their baccarat tables in the last five years, from 104 to 194, while the number of blackjack tables declined slightly from 3,260 to 3,044.

Although there is a lack of hospitality and gaming data by ethnicity available to the public, rapidly increasing baccarat play can be viewed as a general indicator of a growing population of Asian gamblers in Nevada, according to William R. Eadington, director of the Institute for the Study of Gambling & Commercial Gaming at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Casinos are tight-lipped about their marketing stats, especially in this extremely competitive economic environment.

On the hotel side, most casinos have established units dedicated to marketing to Asians and taking care of high rollers and tour groups alike.

"Their casino hosts are staffed by Asians who may not speak English at all," said hospitality marketing professor Billy Bai of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Casinos often look to the University of Nevada, Las Vegas to hire Asian language translators, according to Bobbie Barnes, director of career services at the university's Harrah Hotel College. 

"Especially around Chinese New Year, they look for temporary help with translation," said Barnes.

But Barnes hasn't yet seen very aggressive recruiting of the Asian student population and said that the school's large international student population have many immigration issues to deal with before they can be hired full-time.

The college is the country's largest hospitality program, with a student body numbering approximately 3,000, a quarter of whom are international students mostly from Asian countries.

"The Asian economy is very promising," said Bai. "More disposable income that can be spent freely -- coupled with a benign political environment -- has led to people traveling overseas more freely of their own leisure, which all contributed to booming market."

Marta* didn't go to pre-school. She says that her mother, a native Mexican, didn't speak enough English to arrange it. She says that, in fact, her mother didn't speak any English at all. She didn't complete high school, and no-one in her family has ever attended college. Because of the lack of education in her family, Marta, a ninth-grade honor-roll student at Crenshaw High School, says that she had more catching up to do than most kids. "When I started Kindergarten, I couldn't even write my own name," she says. "I didn't know a lot of stuff. I was just blank."

Now, Marta plans to be a first-generation college student and become a social worker. "I want to help students understand that education is important to make their future better than their parents," she said. "I'm really proud of myself for being on the honor roll. I thought that I would never come this far, to high school. I was thinking that I would be a failure."

Luis*, who sits opposite Marta in class, doesn't think that his education will continue beyond the high school exit exam. "My dad says that I'm not allowed to go to college," he says. "We can't afford it." Instead, Luis hopes to follow in his father's footsteps and become a custom car mechanic. Eventually, he'd also like to be a NASCAR driver. "I'd like to be able to go fast, without the cops chasing me," he says. During the summer, Luis works at his dad's shop, learning the custom car trade. But he has yet to get behind the wheel. First, his dad says, he's got to improve his grades. College may be out of the question, but graduating high school is essential.

How far does the apple fall from the tree?  

Children of immigrants, like Marta and Luis, are a growing population in California. Rather than being newcomers to the state, like their parents were, they are a "homegrown population." They are U.S.-born, and California-bred. Their lives and experiences differ from that of the traditional "immigrant."

"Immigration experts have a special term for homegrown children, calling them second generation residents," reads a report released this week by USC's School of Policy, Planning and Development. "Born in California, or the U.S., these children are U.S. citizens, fluent English speakers, and beneficiaries of California schools."

That being so, the report continues, "recent evidence suggests they are poised for much greater economic success than their parents."

But "economic success" inevitably depends on adequate education levels, and both Marta and Luis attend a school with a drop-out rate of 50 percent. The Los Angeles Unified School District at large, which has a student population made up of more than 75 percent Hispanic children, has been battling severe drop-out rates and low test scores for decades. District-wide, 32 percent of Hispanic children drop out of LAUSD high schools every year, compared to 21 percent across the entire state. And as these children move through the school system, their educational levels actually fall. In second grade, just 18 percent of Hispanic children are considered "below basic" in their English language skills. By tenth grade, that figure has jumped to 66 percent.

The lack of proficiency in vital subject areas like English and math is also significantly higher for students coming from economically disadvantaged households. Although the poverty rate for U.S.-born children and those with legal immigrant parents is practically the same, children of unauthorized immigrant parents are twice as likely to be living in poverty.      

 

*Names have been changed to protect the students and their families.

Roy Shackleton* was fired from his trucking job ostensibly for not having the proper labels on cargo leaving the Los Angeles and Long Beach port complex. The cargo never reached the buyer.

"I said I had nothing to do with placing the place cards," he said. "If the ports release the container, that means the place cards were properly placed. All three checkpoints I went through were checked out."

For a long time, Shackleton said, drivers worked overtime without pay and driven overweight trucks with hazardous materials. They were at-will employees, but they couldn't continue to operate under these conditions, he said. The trucking company solicited employee input into operations, but the practices went unchanged.

Employees began to speak amongst themselves about bringing in the Teamsters. Management caught wind soon after.

"When they got word we were talking to the Teamsters, they [employers] wanted information 'who was the leaders, who's creating this,'" Shackleton said. "Being the type of person I am, they know I was involved."

Employers held one-on-one meetings with employees to disabuse them of unionization, which labor leaders say is typical before an election. Union leaders typically cite this as a major advantage employers hold in that when face with union efforts. Employers can threaten layoffs, plant closings or peer-pressure-packed meetings.

Under current labor law, employers enjoy tremendous advantage controlling the workplace. They have unlimited access to employees and wield tremendous sway should employees trigger an effort to unionize. An election takes place when enough employees decide they want a union, and like in any election, the run up to voting is marked by hostility and retaliation.

What's the solution?

"I think it [EFCA] is something that should've been implemented years ago because of the way employers treat their employees and just out of the fear tactics and the repercussions and the appraisals," he said. "They'll have be responsible for what they're doing. In these companies, they're not trying to be responsible for these issues. The union is actually the body of these franchise of employees who are being treated wrong, or unfair wages, all these issues is what unions are for."

Yet EFCA as it stands faces large obstacles. SEIU chief Andy Stern may have opened the door to compromise with remarks to the Washington Post editorial board. Stern noted additional ways to level the playing field without circumventing the election process., such as shortening the time between elections and stiffer penalties for employer violations.

"No matter what you do, you have to change the election process," Stern said. "Whether it's majority sign up or not, workers have to have a choice about having an election. The bill has to address ... fast elections, eliminating employer behavior and what happens if there are employer violations."

Advocates of labor law reform, be they officials or labor rank-and-file agree that situations like Shackleton's, in his words, "could've been avoided."

Shackleton is working with a labor lawyer seeking putative damages and representatives from Councilwoman's Janice Hahn's office for reinstatement.

*Name was changed. Interview originally conducted by this reporter on assignment with the Daily Breeze.