by David Bacon

Union members march in protest of mass firings of workers who lack proper documentation. ­(BY DAVID BACON Raúl)

­San Francisco, California – Federal immigration authorities have pressured one of San Francisco’s major building service companies, ABM, into firing hundreds of its own workers. Some 475 janitors have been told that unless they can show legal immigration status, they will lose their jobs in the near future.

ABM has been a union company for decades, and many of the workers have been there for years. “They’ve been working in the buildings downtown for 15, 20, some as many as 27 years,” said Olga Miranda, president of Service Employees Local 87. “They’ve built homes. They’ve provided for their families. They’ve sent their kids to college. They’re not new workers. They didn’t just get here a year ago.”

Nevertheless, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) division of the Department of Homeland Security has told ABM that they have flagged the personnel records of those workers. Weeks ago, ICE agents sifted through Social Security records and the I-9 immigration forms all workers have to fill out when they apply for jobs. They then told ABM that the company had to fire 475 workers who were accused of lacking legal immigration status.

ABM is one of the largest building service companies in the country, and it appears that union janitorial companies are the targets of the Obama administration’s immigration enforcement program. “Homeland Security is going after employers that are union,” Miranda charged. “They’re going after employers that give benefits and are paying above the average.”

Last October, 1,200 janitors working for ABM were fired in similar circumstances in Minneapolis. In November, over 100 janitors working for Seattle Building Maintenance lost their jobs. Minneapolis janitors belong to SEIU Local 26, Seattle janitors to Local 6 and San Francisco janitors to Local 87.

President Obama said sanctions enforcement targets employers “who are using illegal workers in order to drive down wages – and oftentimes mistreat those workers.” An ICE Worksite Enforcement Advisory claimed, “unscrupulous employers are likely to pay illegal workers substandard wages or force them to endure intolerable working conditions.”

Curing intolerable conditions by firing or deporting workers who endure them doesn’t help the workers or change the conditions, however. And despite Obama’s contention that sanctions enforcement will punish those employers who exploit immigrants, employers are rewarded for cooperating with ICE by being immunized from prosecution. Javier Murillo, president of SEIU Local 26, said, “The promise made during the audit is that if the company cooperates and complies, they won’t be fined.

So this kind of enforcement really only hurts workers.”

ICE Director John Morton said the agency is auditing the records of 1,654 companies nationwide. “What kind of economic recovery goes with firing thousands of workers?” Miranda asked. “Why don’t they target employers who are not paying taxes, who are not obeying safety or labor laws?”

The San Francisco janitors are now faced with an agonizing dilemma.

Should they turn themselves in to Homeland Security, which might charge them with providing a bad Social Security number to their employer, and even hold them for deportation? For workers with families, homes and deep roots in a community, it’s not possible to just walk away and disappear. “I have a lot of members who are single mothers whose children were born here,” Miranda said. “I have a member whose child has leukemia. What are they supposed to do? Leave their children here and go back to Mexico and wait? And wait for what?”

Miranda’s question reflects not just the dilemma facing individual workers, but of 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. Since 2005, successive congress members, senators and administrations have dangled the prospect of gaining legal status in front of those who lack it. In exchange, their various schemes for immigration reform have proposed huge new guest worker programs, and a big increase in exactly the kind of enforcement now directed at 475 San Francisco janitors.

While the potential criminalization of undocumented people in Arizona continues to draw headlines, the actual punishment of workers because of their immigration status has become an increasingly bitter fact of life across the country.

President Obama, condemning Arizona’s law that would make being undocumented a state crime, said it would “undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans.” But then he announced his support for legislation with guest worker programs and increased enforcement.

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­by the University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Michigan.—At the scale of the very small, physics can get peculiar. A University of Michigan biomedical engineering professor has discovered a new instance of such a nanoscale phenomenon — one that could lead to faster, less expensive portable diagnostic devices and push back frontiers in building micro-mechanical and “lab on a chip” devices.

In our macroscale world, materials called conductors effectively transmit electricity and materials called insulators or dielectrics don’t, unless they are jolted with an extremely high voltage. Under such “dielectric breakdown” circumstances, as when a bolt of lightening hits a rooftop, the dielectric (the rooftop in this example) suffers irreversible damage.

This isn’t the case at the nanoscale, according to a new discovery by Alan Hunt, an associate professor in the Department of Biomedical Engineering.

Hunt and his research team were able to get an electric current to pass nondestructively through a sliver of glass, which isn’t usually a conductor.

A paper on the research is newly published online in Nature Nanotechnology.

“This is a new, truly nanoscale physical phenomenon,” Hunt said. “At larger scales, it doesn’t work. You get extreme heating and damage.

“What matters is how steep the voltage drop is across the distance of the dielectric. When you get down to the nanoscale and you make your dielectric exceedingly thin, you can achieve the breakdown with modest voltages that batteries can provide. You don’t get the damage because you’re at such a small scale that heat dissipates extraordinarily quickly.”

These conducting nanoscale dielectric slivers are what Hunt calls liquid glass electrodes, fabricated at the U-M Center for Ultrafast Optical Science with a femtosecond laser, which emits light pulses that are only quadrillionths of a second long.

The glass electrodes are ideal for use in lab-on-a-chip devices that integrate multiple laboratory functions onto one chip just millimeters or centimeters in size. The devices could lead to instant home tests for illnesses, food contaminants and toxic gases. But most of them need a power source to operate, and right now they rely on wires to route this power. It’s often difficult for engineers to insert these wires into the tiny machines, Hunt said.

“The design of microfluidic devices is constrained because of the power problem,” Hunt said. “But we can machine electrodes right into the device.”

Instead of using wires to route electricity, Hunt’s team etches channels through which ionic fluid can transmit electricity. These channels, ten thousand times thinner than the dot of this “i,” physically dead end at their intersections with the microfluidic or nanofluidic channels in which analysis is being conducted on the lab-on a-chip. (This is important to avoid contamination.) But the electricity in the ionic channels can zip through the thin glass dead end without harming the device in the process.

This discovery is the result of an accident. Two channels in an experimental nanofludic device didn’t line up properly, Hunt said, but the researchers found that electricity did pass through the device.

“We were surprised by this, as it runs counter to accepted thinking about the behavior of non-conductive materials,” Hunt said. “Upon further study we were able to understand why this could happen, but only at the nanometer scale.”

As for electronics applications, Hunt said that the wiring necessary in integrated circuits fundamentally limits their size.

“If you could utilize reversible dielectric breakdown to work for you instead of against you, that might significantly change things,” Hunt said.

The paper is called “Liquid glass electrodes for nanofluidics.” This research is funded by the National Institutes of Health.

The university is pursuing patent protection for the intellectual property, and is seeking commercialization partners to help bring the technology to market.

­by the El Reportero’s news services

Raúl Castro

President Raúl Castro has made food sovereignty his top priority since taking office two years ago. His government has concentrated most of its liberalization efforts on the domestic agricultural sector.

To date, the results have been mixed at best, at a time when the need is urgent. In April, following disappointing first quarter results, a fresh round of ministerial shakeups was followed in short order by a new five year plan that will assign the sector more autonomy, provide production incentives and boost competition. In short, market reforms.

EU-Latam summit sidetracked by migrants

On May 18 the VI European Union-Latin America and the Caribbean Summit concluded. Somewhat surprisingly, President Cristina Fernández de Kircher from Argentina set the tone for the final day with a heartfelt plea to European governments that they should look after Latin American migrants during the current economic downturn.

Spain’s Prime Minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, immediately responded saying that the message had been received and understood.

Latin America Remembers 115 Anniversary of José Martí”s death The legacy of the Cuban Apostle José Martí, was remembered at the School Republic of Cuba, in Asuncion, with the attendance of students, teachers and members of the Paraguayan Coordinator of Solidarity with the Island.

The Adviser Minister of the Cuban Embassy in Asuncion, Ricardo Tur Novo, evoked facets of the national hero, his insurgent struggle that bega whe e was just 17 years old, his sentence to prison been a teenager, his deportation and return to his beloved island to resume the struggle.

His thougths’ dimension are and will be the guide for the new generations of Cubans, Tur Novo said.

The Cuban ambassador in Paraguay, Rolando Gomez, and Marcia Gamarra, one of the four directors of the school, placed a wreath before Jose Marti’s bust, at the entrance of the school.

In Quito, Ecuador, with a simple but moving tribute, pupils and teachers of the Fiscal Experimental Institute José Martí today paid tribute to the Apostle of the Independence of Cuba.

Similar events took place in other Latin American countries like Venezuela and Dominican Republic.

President of Ecuador Criticizes European Migration Policies

The President of Ecuador, Rafael Correa, regarded here as terrible the migration policies applied by the 27 member countries of the European Union (EU) with the Latin American emigrants in his Wednesday intervention at the EU-Latin American and Caribbean Summit.

“I find it a historical ingratitude,” Correa expressed, and wondered what effect it had caused in Europe if Latin America had used the same policies when this part of the world received the great migratory wave during the Spanish Civil War.

I don’t know how the EU will explain the future generations, at least from an ethical point of view, that while it was enabling a global world and a bigger flow of capitals and goods, criminalized the most principal of the movements, the human one, underlined the Ecuadorian leader.

He said that the policies of the Old Continent penalize the immigration more and more, something he evaluated like a monstrous inconsistency.

­by Rosalba Ruíz

Police officials from four states said that Arizona’s new immigration law, which empowers police to question the immigration status of anyone they suspect of being “unlawfully present” in the country, is a bad idea.

Members of the Law Enforcement Engagement Initiative (LEEI), an organization of police leaders advocating for immigration reform, said they would oppose similar legislation if it were proposed in their own states.

“I think this bill will have catastrophic impact on policing,” said George Gascon, San Francisco’s top cop, during a LEEI teleconference involving Hispanic Link News Service just hours before Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed the state legislation.

Law enforcement officials listed the high risk for racial profiling, a negative impact on community trust toward police and additional pressure on local police who already have limited resources as primary among reasons they oppose the law.

“(The law) does have some national ramifications,” said Richard Myers, Chief of Police in Colorado Springs, Colo., and member of LEEI. “The legislation poses yet another unfunded mission to the police that we just cannot sustain …It expects local police to engage in what is the primary mission of federal authorities.”

Myers said that one of his concerns is that other states would follow the lead.

Civil rights advocates have decried the law, citing the potential for racial profiling.

Before passage of the law, the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police voiced its position against the bill, but the Phoenix Law Enforcement Association, a police officers union, asked for the governor’s support of the bill, saying the legislation would be another tool that would assist officers “in keeping our neighborhoods safe.”

Raleigh, N. C. chief Harry Dolan, a member of LEEI, stated that while preventing crime is the role of police, solving the immigration issue is the federal government’s responsibility: “I don’t want to give a position on it. I just want to say, federal government, please step up.” Hispanic Link.

IN OTHER IMMIGRATION NEWS:

Conservative Latinos now say they support immigration legislation

by Luis Carlos López

PHOENIX, Ariz. — Just as President Obama was about to reveal his intention to scuttle pursuing immigration reform this year, several conservative Latino political activists and faith-based leaders used an April 29 telephonic news conference coordinated by author/activist Juan Hernández to spread the word that there’s plenty of support among Hispanic Republicans for a comprehensive bill to be floated in Congress this session.

While former President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Commerce Carlos Gutiérrez participated as he was waiting at an airport, ex-Florida Gov. Jeb Bush was a last-minute no-show. Hernández vaguely blamed his absence on a late “schedule change.”

Hernández read a statement by the former governor given to POLITICO the day before in which he stated that Arizona’s SB1070, signed by Gov. Jan Brewer April 23, “creates unintended consequences.” He added, “I don’t think this is a proper approach.”

Ironically, participants in the news teleconference stressed that for a reform bill to have any chance for success, President Obama must assume a much more forceful leadership role.

Stating that together they represent several hundred congregations, the half-dozen evangelical leaders were unanimous in denouncing the Arizona legislation.

Meanwhile, with the 90-day countdown beginning for Arizona’s SB1070 law to take effect, Latinos aligned with both political parties continue to call for rallies, marches, boycotts and non-violent protests nationwide on May 1 and beyond.

The law signed by Governor Brewer has already prompted two lawsuits, one coming from the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, which filed a complaint April 29 citing that the legislation was illegal because it undermined federal authority. Hispanic Link.