Swiss Vote Bans Minarets on Mosques

This is truly a step backwards towards integration in Europe. And we thought the Swiss were neutral.

Via Anthony Clark Arend:

This is truly disturbing. The New York Times is reporting:

In a vote that displayed a widespread anxiety about Islam and undermined the country’s reputation for religious tolerance, the Swiss on Sunday overwhelmingly imposed a national ban on the construction of minarets, the prayer towers of mosques, in a referendum drawn up by the far right and opposed by the government.

The referendum, which passed with a clear majority of 57.5 percent of the voters and in 22 of Switzerland’s 26 cantons, was a victory for the right. The vote against was 42.5 percent. Because the ban gained a majority of votes and passed in a majority of the cantons, it will be added to the Constitution.

The Swiss Constitution guarantees freedom of religion, but the rightist Swiss People’s Party, or S.V.P., and a small religious party had proposed inserting a single sentence banning the construction of minarets, leading to the referendum.

The Swiss government said it would respect the vote and sought to reassure the Muslim population — mostly immigrants from other parts of Europe, like Kosovo and Turkey — that the minaret ban was “not a rejection of the Muslim community, religion or culture.”

Eveline Widmer-Schlumpf, the justice minister, said the result “reflects fears among the population of Islamic fundamentalist tendencies.”

While such concerns “have to be taken seriously,” she said in a statement, “The Federal Council takes the view that a ban on the construction of new minarets is not a feasible means of countering extremist tendencies.”

The government must now draft a supporting law on the ban, a process that could take at least a year and could put Switzerland in breach of international conventions on human rights.

For the record, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights provides:

Article 18

1. Everyone shall have the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. This right shall include freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice, and freedom, either individually or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in worship, observance, practice and teaching.2. No one shall be subject to coercion which would impair his freedom to have or to adopt a religion or belief of his choice.

3. Freedom to manifest one’s religion or beliefs may be subject only to such limitations as are prescribed by law and are necessary to protect public safety, order, health, or morals or the fundamental rights and freedoms of others.

4. The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.

Paragraph 3 is what is know as a “clawback clause.” Note how much discretion it seems to allow to the state to limit the exercise of the right. It is an unfortunate provision of the Convention, but one that the Swiss would likely use as a justification for the ban.

More from the BBC:
Soul Searching
Leaders Condemn
Swiss Voters

NPR

The Huffington Post

Pro Immigrant PACs on the Rise

The Associated Press reported that, "for the first time, pro-immigration forces are raising more political donations than their immigration-control counterparts." Immigrants' List and ImmigrationPAC have raised $100,000 combined this election cycle, more than the established groups that back enforcement-only policies.

Is Secure Communities really creating Secure Communities?

The new IPC report, The Secure Communities Program: Unanswered Questions and Continuing Concerns highlights that it may not indeed be living up to its name. Via Immigration Impact:

So how does Secure Communities work? When individuals are arrested and booked into jail, their fingerprints are sent to federal databases and are checked against immigration databases, in addition to the other ones that are standard following an arrest. This allows ICE to search for an individual’s criminal and immigration history. If there is a “hit,” meaning that the arrested person is matched to a record indicating an immigration violation, ICE evaluates each case to determine if enforcement action is needed and whether it has the resources to process the case. If ICE wishes to proceed, it will issue a detainer—a request from ICE that the arresting agency notify ICE before it releases the person so that ICE can transfer him/her to ICE custody.

ICE reports that as of August 31, 2009, 82,890 fingerprint submissions resulted in a database match. As a result of Secure Communities, ICE had issued 16,631 detainers.

Who are the people being identified through Secure Communities? At first the program claims to prioritize “the most dangerous criminal aliens” —those convicted of Level 1 crimes (major drug offenses and violent offenses), as compared to Level 2 (minor drug offenses and property offenses) or 3 (other offenses) convictions. However, the data ICE has released so far paints a somewhat different picture.

• Detainers are issued at the point of booking into jail—not conviction—so immigrants are being identified pre-conviction and are being deported even if the criminal charges are dropped. So they’re not all criminals.

• Since its inception, Secure Communities had identified more than 111,000 criminal aliens in local custody, of which more than 11,000 were charged or convicted with Level 1 crimes, while more than 100,000 had been charged or convicted of Level 2 and 3 crimes. So they’re not the most dangerous.

• More than four thousand of those who received “hits” are U.S. citizens. So they’re not even all immigrants.

It turns out that the vast majority of immigrants tagged have been charged or convicted of low level crimes such as traffic violations. In other words, while a few really bad guys have been captured, many more people who were simply charged with misdemeanors have been detained through Secure Communities. Local taxpayers are paying to detain them, and the federal government spends scarce federal dollars to deport them. We need to ask whether Secure Communities is really prioritizing the “worst of the worst,” or spreading too wide a net.

There are also concerns that police officers working in areas that have Secure Communities in their local jails have an incentive, or at least the ability, to make arrests based on race or ethnicity, or to make pretextual arrests of persons they suspect to be in violation of immigration laws, in order to have them run through immigration databases once they are jailed. Experience with the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), a similar jail-based program, has shown that arrests of Hispanics for traffic offenses increased dramatically after CAP was implemented. Is this really what ICE has in mind?

And if immigrants are afraid to report crimes to the police because they know there’s an ICE presence in the local jail, the community is not made any safer.

The Administration has big plans for Secure Communities, which is currently operating in 81 jurisdictions across nine states. ICE plans to have a Secure Communities presence in every state by 2011, and plans to implement the program in each of the 3,100 state and local jails across the country by 2013. The FY2010 DHS appropriations bill contains $1.5 billion for identifying and removing criminal aliens, including $200 million for Secure Communities.

Improving Access to Counsel for Immigrants

Via Immigration Impact:

The Department of Justice now has an opportunity to develop a new framework that meaningfully protects the right to counsel. Soon after coming into office, Attorney General Holder vacated a decision issued by former Attorney General Mukasey that would have made it more difficult for immigrants to obtain a remedy when their lawyer was incompetent. Attorney General Holder directed the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR)—the agency within the Department of Justice that houses the immigration courts and the Board of Immigration Appeals—to initiate rulemaking procedures to evaluate and possibly modify the current framework for evaluating ineffective assistance of counsel claims.

This month, the American Immigration Council (formerly the American Immigration Law Foundation) and the American Immigration Lawyers Association sent a letter to EOIR recommending steps the agency can take to better protect victims of ineffective assistance of counsel and help ensure that all immigrants in removal proceedings are afforded a fair hearing. The letter recommends that EOIR’s new framework strive to achieve the following:

• Ensure that all noncitizens in removal proceeding have a fair opportunity to be heard

• Promote quality representation and ensure that the immigration bar meets ethical and professional standards

• Reduce the need for litigation and promote judicial efficiency.

Language and cultural barriers and lack of knowledge about the immigration system mean that immigrants must have access to competent counsel. However, these realities also mean that immigrants are susceptible to fraudulent practices. Victims of ineffective assistance of counsel may not immediately realize that their lawyer did something wrong, and they may not be equipped to bring appropriate claims to the immigration agencies. EOIR’s new framework must reflect these realities and the challenges that immigrants in removal proceedings face.

Detaining 'Unadjusted Refugees'

Great Analysis of the DHS's policy on detaining "unadjusted refugees" via Immigration Impact:

Despite [President Obama's] commitment to helping refugees resettle in the U.S. permanently, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agency, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), have adopted a policy of incarcerating refugees who have not adjusted to permanent resident status after one year of residency in the U.S. (“unadjusted refugees”). Often ICE comes in contact with unadjusted refugees who have had some contact with local law enforcement; however ICE also has detained refugees who have no criminal charges pending against them. In recent months, advocates have alerted DHS and ICE about such detained refugees in regions including Minneapolis, MN; Florence, AZ; Eloy, AZ; York, PA; Atlanta, GA; Los Angeles, CA.

ICE defends this detention policy by citing section 209(a) of the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) which states that refugees who have not acquired permanent resident status after one year “shall return or be returned to the custody of the Department of Homeland Security for inspection and examination for admission.” ICE says “return to custody” means that refugees who have not applied for permanent resident status after one year may be detained and held while they complete their adjustment application and while ICE’s sister organization, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS), adjudicates it. This interpretation is particularly unfair since the law prohibits refugees from applying for permanent residence until one year after they have been admitted to the U.S. as refugees. In essence, ICE detains refugees for not doing what the law bars them from doing.

ICE’s interpretation of the law has particularly harsh consequences for refugees. First, the refugee is not in removal proceedings, so he or she cannot request bond before an Immigration Judge. Without an opportunity to be released, the refugee must complete the adjustment application process in detention—for example, he or she must appear for the required USCIS interview and obtain vaccinations while detained. In some cases, the process can take over a year.

Second, even if USCIS denies the refugee’s application for adjustment and he or she is placed in removal proceedings, ICE has charged the refugee as an “arriving alien.” Under the relevant law, “arriving aliens” may not ask an Immigration Judge for a bond hearing and are entirely dependant on ICE—the prosecutor in the case—for release from detention. The interpretation of refugees as “arriving aliens” is incorrect because refugees have already been admitted to the U.S. as a refugee. Despite this, when the agency charges them as “arriving aliens,” refugees are unable to seek release from detention from a neutral decision-maker—neither during the pendency of the adjustment application, nor during removal proceedings.

Lou Dobbs Considering Running for President?

After leaving CNN, Lou Dobbs has said he has not dimissed a run for the presidency. But, his hateful speech toward immigrants is something he has had to confront since leaving. In his latest political maneuvre, he talks to Telemundo’s María Celeste.




Wait....all of sudden he is for legalization? A Clear attempt to position himself "as a champion of that fast-growing ethnic bloc." I think the people are smarter than you, Lou. No one is going to fall for this lame attempt at reconciliation.

Higher Immigration = Lower Crime?

Via CATO:

Yes, you read that right. The story is more complicated than a short headline can covey, but that is the gist of an article of mine in the just-out December issue of Commentary magazine. [Subscription needed.]

The past 15 years have witnessed two undeniable trends: dramatically rising levels of immigration, both low-skilled and high-skilled, and an equally dramatic plunge in crime rates nationally. I don’t argue that increased immigration in the past 15 years is the primary cause of falling crime rates, but I do argue that the evidence punches a gaping hole in the Lou-Dobbs contention that immigrants have clogged our prisons and unleashed a new wave of crime.

In the Commentary article, and in an earlier Cato Free Trade Bulletin, I cite Census data that show that incarceration rates for immigrants are significantly lower than for native-born Americans. The contrast is especially sharp between immigrants without a high-school diploma and their native-born counterparts. Along with their lower propensity to commit crimes, immigrants are also more likely to be employed than similarly educated Americans.

Or as the subhead of the magazine article nicely puts it, “Today’s ‘underclass’ of newcomers seeks a day’s work, not a drug deal.”

Climate Change News

Two articles from BBC outline some dangerous effects of climate change.
'Climate' is a Major cause of conflict in Africa:

Climate has been a major driver of armed conflict in Africa, research shows- and future warming is likely to increase the number of deaths from war. US researchers found that across the continent, conflict was about 50% more likely in unusually warm years. Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), they suggest strife arises when the food supply is scarce in warm conditions.

The researchers used databases of temperatures across sub-Saharan Africa for the period between 1981 and 2002, and looked for correlations between above average warmth and civil conflict in the same country that left at least 1,000 people dead.

If temperatures rise across the continent as computer models project, future conflicts are likely to become more common, researchers suggest. Their study shows an increase of about 50% over the next 20 years.

"Our findings provide strong impetus to ramp up investments in African adaptation to climate change by such steps as developing crop varieties less sensitive to extreme heat and promoting insurance plans to help protect farmers from adverse effects of the hotter climate," said Dr Burke.

Nana Poku, Professor of African Studies at the UK's Bradford University, suggested that it also pointed up the need to improve mechanisms for avoiding and resolving conflict in the continent.

The effect of climate change on children written by Lord David Putnam:

What price today's decision makers will place on the well-being of future generations when carving out their response to climate change? A new paper released by Unicef UK - Climate Change, Child's Rights and Intergenerational Justice - makes it clear that their responsibility is huge, particularly when it comes to protecting the rights and future well-being of children.

With the potential rise of up to 160,000 child deaths a year in sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia directly resulting from climate change, it is children, the most vulnerable children, who will be caught at the centre of the storm.

They will unquestionably carry the greatest burden - both as children and as future adults - and yet they are the least culpable for its damage.

So what exactly does this mean? It means that the implications of climate change for children must be at the top of the agenda at Copenhagen, and that the voices and opinions of children and young people are heard, respected and represented - a key right as outlined in the CRC.

The youth delegates being granted official recognition in Copenhagen are a welcome and crucial step forward in ensuring this happens, but more needs to be done to embed children into the core of the outcome of negotiations.

Where the Public Stands on Immigration Reform?

A Pew Research Center article says that immigration is a middle-tier issue of importance to most Americans. According to Pew numbers, immigration rates below such issues as the economy, jobs, and the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.But, numbers indicate a majority of people favor a "path to citizenship" for undocumented immigrants.

Men Married to Smart Women Live Longer

Encouraging to know that I will make my spouse, whoever he may be, live longer :)
From the Times Online:

There is a lingering suspicion among girls (as the unpopularity of science subjects demonstrates) that boys don’t value cleverness as an essential quality in a life partner. Given a choice between gorgeous or brainy, there is no guarantee they’ll do the right thing, because men think they’re clever enough for two. Well, it turns out they’re wrong. Swedish scientists have discovered that long life and good health have nothing to do with a man’s education and everything to do with his wife’s. Men married to smart women live longer — simple.

I do have a few questions about this article though. What about gay couples, lesbian couples, transexual couples? Also, it struck me as a little arbitrary about how "smart" was defined in the article. In all its possible that the article has a gender bias, which should not be overlooked.

(HT: Jacques of All Trades)

The Perils of Migrating through Mexico

While the US- Mexican border is a dangerous place more migrants, more and more, traveling through Mexico to get to the border has become an even more perilous journey. NPR reports:

Despite the downturn in the U.S. economy and tough new security measures along the southern border, migrants continue to try to get to the United States. And each year, tens of thousands of them are robbed, kidnapped and even killed attempting to cross Mexico.

Sanchez says that in the past she rarely heard of anyone trying to kidnap migrants, but now it is common. Los Zetas, the enforcement arm of one of the Mexican drug cartels, charges fees for migrants to pass, and they abduct others.

In a report issued earlier this year, Mexico's Human Rights Commission said roughly 1,500 migrants get kidnapped each month trying to cross Mexico.

Goodman, 37, says he was deported four months ago to El Salvador for driving without a license. The last time he made the journey from El Salvador to the U.S. he was 14. He is not worried about crossing from Tijuana back into San Diego; he says that will be easy. Right now, his big concern is getting from Mexico's southern tip to its northernmost city.

If you are not convinced, just watch the movie "Sin Nombre"

Immigrant Children and Integration

Via ImmigrationProf Blog:

There are 16 million children in immigrant families in the United States, one of the fastest-growing segments of the population. It’s an old American story made new in the age of globalization, when waves of human displacement in recent decades have led to immigration on a scale not seen since Ellis Island. But a country that has been so good for so long at integrating new Americans is stumbling under the challenge.

That is the conclusion of Professors Marcelo and Carola Suárez-Orozco, fellows at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton and co-directors of immigration studies at New York University. They have done basic research in immigration for more than 20 years, five of them studying 400 children from China, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Central America and Mexico.a country that has been so good for so long at integrating new Americans is stumbling under the challenge. The results of their research, released this month, show the stark effects of what Marcelo Suárez-Orozco calls “the age of global vertigo.” Dislocation breeds a host of difficulties, starting with family separation. Nearly half of the children in their sample had at some point lost contact with one or both parents, either through migration directly or through divorce or death. The absent parent was most often the father for long stretches or permanently. For 49 percent of the Central American children, separations lasted more than five years. Click here for the rest of the piece.

Civic Engagement Games on the Internet

Peter Levine points out several online civic engagement games:

• Impact Inc. where you can try your hand at running a non profit
  
• Redistricting the Nation where you can try redistricting different parts of the country
• Do I have a Right? where you run a law firm and must give advice to clients using the Constitution and Bill or Rights
  
• Supreme Decision where you can try to be on the US Supreme Court

I would just add one more

• Publi.us or Fantasy Congress
  

Obama Administration Sends Mixed Messages around Immigration Reform

Last Friday , Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano made a detailed statement on immigration reform to the Center for American Progress. Among other things, the Secretary stated:

"Let me be clear: when I talk about `immigration reform,' I’m referring to what I call the `three-legged stool' that includes a commitment to serious and effective enforcement, improved legal flows for families and workers, and a firm but fair way to deal with those who are already here. That’s the way that this problem has to be solved, because we need all three aspects to build a successful system. This approach has at its heart the conviction that we must demand responsibility and accountability from everyone involved in the system: immigrants, employers and government. And that begins with fair, reliable enforcement."

But on Sunday David Axelrod, the top political advisor to President Obama, refused to make any such commitment when he appeared on the State of the Union this past Sunday with John King:

KING: The secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, says you will, early next year, come forward with a plan for comprehensive immigration reform that would have a plan in it, a path in it for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in this country to have a pathway to status -- to legal status. Will you make the political commitment that no matter what the politics of January and February, the administration will go forward with this early next year?

AXELROD: John, what the president has said is, and he said it to both Republicans and Democratic members of Congress who have worked on this issue is, come to him, let's come together around something that both parties, or at least elements of both parties say they can agree on, so we don't reach the same impasse we've reached before and then he'll be willing to go forward on it.

Women to Suffer Most from Climate Change

According to a new study by the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), women in developing countries will be the most vulnerable to climate change. The BBC reports:

Women do most of the agricultural work, and are therefore affected by weather-related natural disasters impacting on food, energy and water, it said. The report suggested family planning, reproductive healthcare and "gender relations" could influence how the world adapts to rising seas, worsening storms and severe droughts.

Describing "a cycle of deprivation", the report said that women in developing countries did a larger share of farming and had less access to income-earning opportunities. They also managed households and cared for families, which limited their chances of moving around and increased "their vulnerability to sudden weather-related natural disasters".

I cant help but wonder, if while women are 'the most vulnerable to climate change' are they also not the most resilient to climate change? In other words, would they not be the key to finding particular and unique coping mechanisms to climate induced problems?