by Juliana Birnbaum Fox

Exhibition at Mission Cultural Center from Aug. 31 to Sep. 28

The Bridge to Biotech program at City College of San Francisco is accepting applicants for fall semester classes through August 31. Instruction began August 15. CCSF’s Bridge to Biotech provides a rigorous and engaging introduction to biotechnology. Bridge participants are generally work-ready within a year of starting, as students learn essential laboratory skills while strengthening the math and language skills that they will need for success. Job placement assistance is provided to program graduates.

For more information about starting the Bridge to Biotech program, please visit the College’s website at www.ccsf.edu/biotech.

Dia de los Muertos Altar Contest

The Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts begins the celebration of El Dia de los Muertos with a Call for Entries for the Altar Competition. This year’s theme is Hearts and Souls, a time to honor cultural tradition as we remember those close to our hearts and important to our lives. There will be a $500 award for the Best Traditional Altar and $500 award for the Best Contemporary Altar.

We invite all members of the Community and Bay area artists to submit an entry for this year’s “Hearts & Souls” Altar Exhibition. Installation of Altars will begin on Oct. 9th until Oct. 23rd. For additional entry details and entry form please visit our website:missionculturalcenter.org.

Mission Cultural Center for Latino Art Award Reception and Fundraiser

The 30th Anniversary Gala Awards In Excellence Ceremony will honor seven individuals and one organization that have contributed to Latino arts and culture in the Bay Area. Artistic Performances will include The ArgenTango Dancers and Andanza Spanish Arts. The Fundraiser will be held on Friday, September 7th, from 7 to 11pm at the Green Room of War Memorial Performing Arts Center at 401 Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco. Make your reservations today by using the link below or by stopping by the Center’s Box Office located in the Heart of the Mission at 2868 Mission and 24th Streets. Tickets are $125 per person, or $75 for a non-profit representative. For more information call 415-821-1155, our RSVP 30th Anniversary Hotline, or emailrsvp@missionculturalcenter.org.

The 5th Annual Salsa Festival de Novato

Celebrating Hispanic Cultural Heritage Month, the 5th Annual Salsa Festival in Novato, (15 miles north of San Francisco) includes everything from salsa recipes and contests to hot salsa music and dancing. The Festival, held on Grant Avenue in downtown Novato, will be open 10 am to 6 pm. and admission and parking are FREE. Close to 75 food, craft, retail and non-profit booths will be out, local restaurants and salsa makers will dish up samples of their signature salsa recipes, and salsa lessons will be offered. For festival information call 415.456.9379 or visit www.salsafestival.org.

Leland Avenue Street Fair

Visitacion Valley will host a family-friendly street fair with music, food, and an offering of products and services from 10 – 4 on Sunday, September 9th. A children’s area with activities will be set up, and the fair will stretch from Leland Avenue to Bayshore Boulevard. The 2nd Annual Fair is part of a community initiative to strengthen the neighborhood bring more business to local merchants.

by Andy Porras

What’s next, Rudy? Selling us the Brooklyn Bridge?

GOP presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani has promised a Southern group that he will end “illegal immigration.”

We have news for him and anyone else who thinks “illegal immigration” can be stopped.

It can’t.

Could this land afford the consequences? Hey, remember that the business of the United States is business. And the business of U.S. business is profit. By whatever means necessary.

Tack on disparity in global living standards. The chief cause of immigration is economic. Where are you gonna go when our worker-well runs dry? Anywhere, baby, and everywhere.

“Disgusting.” That’s the word white folk use to describe the tasks immigrants perform daily at a typical chicken processing plant in Southern states.

Is anybody out there in white America interested in taking a calf apart after it has been slaughtered in a typical beef processing plant? Or how about mixing assorted animal manure in huge outdoor tanks for feeding the fruited plains.

Don’t throw up, not yet. Aha, but can you do without a fried chicken dinner or a tender T-bone steak? Ask Rudy or any of his former wives if they’d do the tasks President Bush describes as “jobs Americans don’t wish to perform.”

The majority of us don’t approve of tsunamis, either, but can we stop them?

When U.S. residents (of all colors) talk about immigrants stealing jobs away from citizens, you can bet your last peso they’re not referring to jobs at Tyson’s or Swift’s. Almost everything we ingest on a daily basis will have an immigrant imprint on it – from fruits and veggies to meats and dairy products.

There is mucho dinero to be made in hiring immigrants, legal or otherwise – and from several countries, not just the Spanish-speaking ones.

Immigrants have become the perfect work models for many U.S. corporations. They seldom complain, they are extremely reliable and honest, too. The fear of being deported is so great that they force themselves to brandish an unusually strong work ethic.

Frequent and lucrative best describes illegal immigration. Coming herewithout an offi cial invitation will not end.

Go to your favorite video outlet, Rudy, and check out “A Day Without Mexicans.”

The message of this simple flick is clear: End immigration today and mañana you ain’t got most of the stuff you need to make it through the day. No breakfast burritos, no Marías to take care of junior or iron your favorite button-down oxford shirt, no fresh OJ.

Oh heck, you know what we mean. Stealing our jobs?

If there’s honor among thieves, imagine the deference among immigrants?

But don’t forget the problem of magnet “illegal employers” who continue to hire unauthorized workers. In 2005, Wal-Mart agreed to pay $11 million to settle a federal investigation that found hundreds of illegal immigrants cleaning its stores.

Wal-Mart used subcontractors and claimed it was “unaware that they were employing illegal immigrants” as janitors.

In December 2006, in the largest such crackdown in U.S. history, federal immigration authorities raided Swift & Co. meat-processing plants in six states, arresting about 1,300 immigrant employees.

Because Swift uses a government Basic Pilot program to confi rm whether Social Security numbers are valid, no charges were filed against it. Company officials questioned the program’s ability to detect when two people are using the same number.

Tyson Foods has also been accused of actively importing illegal labor for its chicken-packing plants.

A jury acquitted the company after evidence was presented that Tyson went beyond mandated government requirements in demanding documentation for its employees. Tyson also used its enrollment in the Basic Pilot and EVP programs (voluntary employment eligibility screening programs) as part of its defense.

Then there is the dishonor among those hired to protect our borders, especially the Mexican frontier.

Corruption thrives along the cactus curtain.

Wikipedia notes that in September 2005, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service reported 2,500 cases of its employees facing misconduct charges involving exchanging immigration benefi ts for sex, bribery and infl uences by foreign governments, with another 50 such cases re-ported weekly.

Any way you look at it, Rudy, curbing illegal immigration is a tough row to hoe. The bridge deal is probably more doable.

(Andy Porras is pub-lisher of the Sacramento  area bilingual monthly Califas. He may be reached at califasap@yahoo.com). -c 2007

by Janet Murguía

It was hard not to notice the tone of the uproar which led to the demise of immigration reform legislation earlier this summer. Immigrants were accused of everything from crime to loose morals to bringing leprosy to our shores.

But when concerns are raised that the air was becoming ugly and dangerously anti-Latino, talk-show hosts and legislators took pains to say that their problem is with illegal immigrants, that they have nothing against those here legally or with the larger ethnic groups that they are a part of.

In short, they insisted that this is not about race but about the problem of illegality.

As the feedback we’ve received at the National Council of La Raza since that time and at our national conference last month clearly demonstrate, Latinos aren’t buying that explanation.

What started out as a debate on immigration has turned into something far larger and far uglier.

Everyone in this nation should heed what is occurring. Less than a month went by after immigration reform failed for majorities in both the House and Senate to vote for proposals that attacked not illegal immigrants, but those legally in the United States and even those who have become naturalized citizens.

The most egregious of these was an amendment offered on the Senate floor in July by Senator John Ensign (R-Nevada) which was framed as a restriction on Social Security benefits to anyone who was once undocumented; yet it would have made every foreign-born person (think Madeleine Albright, or Henry Kissinger, or every refugee from the second world war, Southeast Asia or Cuba) prove their immigration status for every moment of their work history in order to receive Social Security benefits.

If they were out of status for one single day, the fact that they paid into the system would be irrelevant. The government would keep the money they contributed over the years and, of course, they would be rendered ineligible for Social Security.

This shocking amendment received 57 votes — more than enough to pass. Fortunately, a procedural requirement prevented it from becoming law, at least for now.

This is not an isolated case. Similar amendments have already been proposed in the House and Senate affecting housing programs, food stamps and other social policies. Many have already passed. Documentation requirements recently added to the Medicaid program – aimed at immigrants but requiring paperwork from every person seeking to use the program – have resulted in delays and denial of services to elderly U.S. residents who are eligible but may not have the documents readily available to prove it.

The argument in favor of these proposals is entirely without merit. Legislators are placing restrictions on programs already off limits to undocumented immigrants. These proposals just affect legal immigrants and U.S. citizens.

The problem is even worse in local jurisdictions as the vacuum in congressional action on immigration reform is filled by state and local governments looking for ways to address the issue.

Prince William County in Virginia recently passed a law which requires local police to act as immigration agents. County officials are meeting now to determine whether to check documents of people using public libraries, parks and swimming pools. In Georgia, sheriffs’ departments regularly set up roadblocks for the sole purpose of stopping persons who look Mexican and scrutinizing their documents.

This pattern is repeating across the country at an alarming rate.

Add to this a wave of hate and mean-spiritedness on the airwaves and you begin to understand why we don’t believe the concerns have to do with illegality. Numerous verbal attacks on the radio have led to or accompanied a well-documented resurgence in hate groups and crimes.

Hispanic Americans are increasingly outraged that we are suspect everywhere we go, constantly asked to prove we belong in our own home. We see our beloved country in danger of becoming something we hardly recognize – a place so eager to hound those whose “crime” is coming to the United States to work, that the country seems to be rushing to undercut every other value we hold dear. A poll conducted last year by the Pew Hispanic Center found more than half of this country’s Latinos reporting that discrimination against them has increased because of the immigration debate.

Latinos are extremely upset at being singled out as targets, but we sense urgency. We are the canary in the coal mine, sending a warning to our country that it is teetering on something that harms us all. Those who think the rancorous immigration debate does not affect everyone are sorely mistaken. For Latinos, it is obvious that we cannot stand on the sidelines. The sooner that becomes obvious to the rest of the country, the better.

(This is the first in a series of monthly commentaries written for Hispanic Link News Service by Janet Murguía, president of the National Council of La Raza, the largest Hispanic advocacy and civil rights organization in the United States).

by Marvin J. Ramirez

Marvin J. Ramirez

The damage is done now, after greed and excessive ambition hit its highest levels. The ‘get a real estate license and become a millionaire overnight or buy a home at ridicule, illusionary price, and wait for a couple of y­ears for the price to go up,’ it’s over.

Predatory lending is to blame. Lenders got their money from the bank, and while everyone else in the business chain got their huge profits, innocent people got stuck with a debt not even five working families together could afford to pay. And all of this was done without governmental supervision and protection to consumers.

However, a California reinvestment coalition is calling upon state leaders to protect homeowners, and families from predatory lending.

“I am here out of concern for the 500,000 or more Californians who may lose their homes as a result of irresponsible lending. California has had the most foreclosures in the nation and six California cities were among the nation’s ten cities with the highest foreclosure rates in June,” said Alan Fisher, executive director of the California Reinvestment Coalition (CRC).

The statement was made on Aug. 21 at the California State Senate Banking, Finance & Insurance Committee’s informational hearing on homeownership preservation in today’s mortgage market.

“The loss of home ownership is just the first step in the economic and human impact of this crisis. If homes go vacant, neighborhoods lose value. There is a domino effect causing other homes become in danger of foreclosure as they lose value. All these homeowners become more financially stretched and retail sales drop. Cities lose revenue and employment decreases,” said the statement.

If the state doesn’t assist homeowners during this crisis, then it can be accused of being an accomplice in this crime. The Governor and the Legislature must help families, which consequently will help the economy of the state.