The State of Opportunity

Court Upholds LAPD's Policy of Not Asking Immigration Status

Last Thursday, June 26^th a California Superior court upheld the LAPD’s 29-year-old policy of neither arresting people based on immigration status nor asking about immigration status during interviews. This policy, described by Police Chief William Bratton as “an essential crime-fighting tool for us,” is meant to avoid discouraging the undocumented population in many LA communities from communicating with police officers and reporting crimes. Proponents of the policy’s abandonment, who filed suit in April 2007, argue that it conflicts with federal and state law. While under the policy officers do alert immigration officials in the case of a suspect who has either previously been deported or is arrested for a felony/multiple misdemeanors, plaintiffs argue that illegal immigrants are repeatedly arrested rather than appropriately deported.

The judge’s decision affirms that immigration law is to be applied on the federal, and not the local level. Local law enforcement officials cannot and will not be asked to act as federal immigration agents. The defendants argued, and the court agreed, that this conflation of positions is not warranted on legal grounds and is detrimental to the goals of local law enforcement.

The overturning of this lawsuit averts several troubling implications that elimination the disputed policy would have had. The role of a local police officer and that of an federal immigration agent have vastly different objectives; while the former exists “to protect and serve” residents, the latter aims to “effectively enforce our immigration and customs laws… by targeting illegal immigrants.” In an area with a significant undocumented population, these roles are often at odds with each other. To ask that police officers assume the duties of immigration agents is to cast them into a confused role that ineffectively pursues conflicting goals. Furthermore, incorporating these duties into local law enforcement greatly increases the risk of racial profiling in pursuit of undocumented residents.

The court’s decision to uphold the LAPD’s longstanding policy marks a victory for security in these communities. As one of its six core values, the Opportunity Agenda holds security to be vital to our human dignity. Without safe and healthy living conditions, it becomes overwhelmingly difficult for residents to access any of the other opportunity that society has to offer. To put local police officers in a position that undermines their ability to serve their communities as a whole would be to betray a fundamental commitment to equality, security, and community. With its policy on immigrants intact, the LAPD can go forth in its goal to “build safer communities throughout the City of Los Angeles.”

Supreme Court Decision Offers Mixed Results for Immigration Reform

In a victory for immigrants’ rights, the Supreme Court handed down a decision allowing immigrants to file motions without fear of being deported for not voluntarily departing within a specific time period.  The case, Dada v. Mukasey addressed two conflicting sections of the Immigration and Nationality Act.  Section 1229c allows judges to grant immigrants who are told to deport the country permission to leave voluntarily within a specific period of time.  However, Section 1229a allows individuals to challenge a deportation order (in the event of any changed circumstances) but requires them to remain in the country while legal motions are pending.

The petitioner, Samson T. Dada, an immigrant from Nigeria, was married to an American citizen in 1999.  However, without adequate proof of marriage, the Department of Homeland Security alleged that he had overstayed his temporary immigrant visa and ordered his deportation.  An Immigration Judge granted Dada’s request to voluntarily leave the country within 30 days, a decision that the Board of Immigration Appeals (BIA) affirmed.  However, two days before he was supposed to leave, Dada found conclusive proof of his marriage, withdrew his request for voluntary departure and filed a motion to reopen his removal proceedings.  The BIA denied his request, claiming that Dada had failed to depart the U.S. within the allotted time period (while ignoring Dada’s withdrawal of his request to voluntarily leave).  The Fifth Circuit affirmed the BIA’s decision.

Monday Health Blog Roundup

•    An Associated Press story that appeared in numerous publications last week discussed the American Medical Association’s position on a tobacco bill currently before Congress.  The bill would, among other things, ban flavors in cigarettes.  Marketing campaigns for flavored cigarettes (such as mint, clove and vanilla cigarettes) usually target young people, and by banning the use of these flavors, Congress hopes to decrease smoking among youths.  However, the AMA is supporting the menthol exemption that the tobacco industry pushed.  African-American smokers typically prefer menthol-flavored cigarettes, and menthol cigarette advertising campaigns have traditionally targeted black communities.  The AMA has been criticized for supporting the exemption, since it leaves African-American smokers subject to manipulative marketing strategies:

Menthol cigarettes such as Kool were marketed during the 1960s in advertising campaigns targeting urban blacks, according to the National African American Tobacco Prevention Network. That group withdrew its support from the tobacco control bill last month over the menthol exemption and found allies in the former health secretaries.

The exemption harms the black community, said Robert McCaffree of the American College of Chest Physicians, the group that introduced the AMA proposal.

•    A recent posting on DMI Blog addresses the importance of making health equity a central focus of health care reform, particularly in the 2008 Presidential election.  If political leaders do not pay attention to the equality element of health care reform, the disparities in health care access and quality will not be dealt with:

It's a painful fact: people of color in the United States live sicker and die quicker--from the premature cradle to the early grave. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (DHHS), African Americans can still expect to live 6-10 fewer years than their white counterparts, and they have the highest rates of death due to diabetes; heart disease; and breast, lung, and colon cancer than any other ethnic group. The numbers are similarly grim for Latinos and other minority groups.

•    Yesterday’s posting on The Health Care Blog brings up the similarities between the U.S. health care system and the Dutch health care system, and the notion that the U.S. could learn from the Dutch in its health care reform efforts.

•    Another posting on The Health Care Blog mentions The Talking Cure, the “Healthy Conversations” project that the research organization Demos has launched.  The project is designed to engage stakeholders in and outside of the National Health Service and discuss how to improve health care in the UK.

•    Thursday’s New York Times had a story on a government proposal to facilitate improved access to prescription drugs for low-income Medicare beneficiaries.  The Bush Administration introduced the proposal as part of the settlement in a national class action lawsuit brought by people who are unable to get access to the drugs they need:

Under the proposed settlement, filed Thursday with the United States District Court in San Francisco, federal Medicare officials promised to speed up the process of providing extra help to low-income people, who now could qualify within days, rather than weeks or months.

Six Years Later, Health Disparities by Race and Ethnicity Persist

Amidst the energy and momentum for health care reform in the United States, it is important to remember that getting an insurance card into everyone's wallet is not the same as guaranteeing equal access to quality health care.  Recent studies have shown that, in America, health is not just about having insurance or paying bills: it's also, unfortunately, about the color of your skin.

The Lancet, a journal of global medicine, published an article this last Saturday (free registration required) on persisting racial and ethnic disparities in health, six years following the groundbreaking Institute of Medicine study, Unequal Treatment: Confronting Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Health Care.  The Opportunity Agenda Research Director and primary editor of the 2002 IOM study, Brian Smedley, is quoted in the Lancet article:

“As the report's study director, I was pleased to see that Unequal Treatment prompted a sober discussion in health policy, academic, and political circles”, Brian Smedley, former senior programme officer at the US Institute of Medicine, wrote in a blog to mark the latest issue of the journal Health Affairs, which includes research on health disparities. “But ultimately the report failed to prompt passage of significant new federal legislation or spur the Department of Health and Human Services to adopt its core recommendations. As a result, little has been done, in my view, to systematically address the problem.”

Citing some of the papers in the latest issue of Health Affairs, called Disparities: Expanding the Focus [paid subscription required], he said that some of the most shocking health care gaps that were not documented when Unequal Treatment was published, were found in mental and oral health care. Meanwhile, the biggest gains in life expectancy occurred among the best-educated Americans.

Because of the failure of HHS to adopt recommendations to reduce disparities, and the stalling of major legislation in Congress to address disparities, many of the inequities identified half a dozen years ago are still prevalent.  In very real terms, this means that communities that often have the most need for quality health care are the ones that receive the least of such care. 

"Brave New Laws" by Alan Jenkins at OurFuture.org

Check out The Opportunity Agenda Executive Director Alan Jenkins' new column, "Brave New Laws," at the Campaign for America's Future blog, Blog for Our Future.  Jenkins discusses the need for new, proactive laws that recognize what technological advances and scientific research have clearly demonstrated--that many Americans are still at risk of discrimination:

A growing body of research shows that, while old fashioned bigotry has declined, subconscious stereotypes and implicit biases continue to pose daunting barriers to equal treatment in health care, education, and the criminal justice system, among other sectors. Particularly compelling is the work of Harvard’s Project Implicit (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/), which shows that we all carry around subconscious biases based on race, gender, religion, and other human characteristics that often influence our decisionmaking. The Institute of Medicine at the National Academies, among others, has found that such biases can influence health care and other decisions, including by professionals who have no conscious intention to discriminate.

Despite this established research, the courts have interpreted the Constitution’s Equal Protection Clause, as well as Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which bars racial discrimination in federally funded programs), to address only intentional efforts to harm people of a particular group. Because that reading fails to respond to the realities of modern exclusion, Congress should amend Title VI, and the next Administration should advocate a reading of the Constitution that embodies the Framers’ intention to eradicate discrimination, in its evolving forms, from our nation’s institutions.

Read the full column here.

Disappearing Food

Rising rents are not only displacing New York residents but their food as well.  As the New York Times reports, the city of eight million now has just over 550 moderately sized supermarkets, defined as at least 10,000 square feet.

The dearth of easily available fresh food isn't confined to poor communities but these areas are disproportionately affected.  A Health Department study from last year specifically compared the Upper East Side with Harlem finding a vast disparity in access to healthy foods.  Harlem has twice as many bodegas, or corner stores, than the Upper East Side but these stores typically offer less healthy food.  Only three percent of Harlem bodegas even sell leafy green vegetables.  Expanding to other food options, 16 percent of Harlem restaurants serve fast food compared to only four percent on the Upper East Side.

Predictably, the result is Harlem residents are three to four times as likely to be obese or have diabetes.  Yesterday's NYT article features an excellent citywide map (see below) showing the correlation of low supermarket density and incidences of diabetes.  Pay particular attention to the Bronx and the intersection of Queens and Brooklyn.

Baking More Pie

With a tongue-in-cheek ad declaring “Our prices are insane!,” last week’s Education Week section of the New York Times ran a cover story entitled “The Low Cost of College.”  Inside, an article by David Leonhardt describes a surprising trend among elite American universities.  They are actually reducing tuition and increasing aid for low-income and middle classed students.

Beginning next fall, schools including Dartmouth, Haverford, and Rice will offer grants instead of loans to lower income students.  They are following the lead of schools like Harvard, which announced in 2006 that parents making less than $60,000 would not have to pay anything toward their kids’ education.  And many schools are reaching out to middle class families too—Harvard announced in December that it would also offer significant financial aid to families making less than $180,000.

Leonhardt’s article points out that these efforts are extremely modest compared to the substantial decrease in low-income students at elite schools over the last two decades.  As we reported in The State of Opportunity in America, “since 1983…the increase in tuition costs at both public and private four-year institutions has greatly outpaced the increase in median family income.”

As Leonhardt’s piece correctly notes, increases in the federal Pell grant—which typically goes to families making less than $40,000—would accomplish far greater positive change, as would reforms that transcend these elite schools, like “preparing more low- and middle-income children to attend college, lifting the graduation rates at community colleges and large four-year colleges, and simplifying and expanding federal financial aid.”

The article falls short, though, when it comes to discussing the reasons why any of these changes are worth making in the first place.  Explaining that “there are several arguments for increasing economic diversity at elite colleges,” the article says (1) “it makes the universities more consistent with their self-image as meritocracies;” (2) these colleges “have come to play arguably a larger role in American society;” and (3) “recent research also suggests that lower-income students benefit more from an elite education than other students do.”

Is that really it?  Those reasons, it seems to me, are both cynical and narrow.  They are out of touch with the promise of opportunity that a quality college education represents for successive generations of Americans.  What about these reasons:

➢    A fundamental value in our society is mobility—the notion that where you start out in life should not determine where you end up—with access to college serving as a primary rung on the upward ladder of opportunity.  If the country’s most prestigious schools are effectively open only to the rich, the mobility ideal is thwarted, and these institutions’ public mission must be called into question.

➢    Economic diversity is crucial within institutions like these that train so large a share of our nation’s leaders.  Not only should those leaders hail from the breadth of our population, but their education should include learning from and with people from different backgrounds.

➢    It’s in our national interest to ensure that opportunity is available to everyone in our society.  Taping the genius of kids and communities that have traditionally been shut out of the American Dream will generate untold societal benefits—cures to deadly diseases, new technologies, economic and social advances—that we can barely conceive of today.

➢    With manufacturing jobs disappearing, empowering working class families to make the leap to a globalized, information economy through a top-notch education is critical to our success as a nation.

Why do the reasons matter?  Because if opening elite schools to low-income families is just about making Ivy League bureaucrats proud of themselves, or because poor kids may get an incrementally greater value than rich kids, then it's about others, not about all of us. 

Just as important, connecting financial aid polices to our national values and interests leads to other, more profound questions.  Like so many articles about higher education, the piece fails to ask how we can go beyond ways of dividing up the existing educational pie, and actually bake more pie.   Clearly, the future of our nation depends not only on achieving a mix of students from different backgrounds, but also on expanding educational opportunities so that every kid who can do the work has access to a school that taps her or his full potential.  Expanding opportunity and, therefore, shared prosperity, is where we should set our sights as a nation.

Lakota Secede from the US, Claiming Human Rights Violations

• The Unapologetic Mexican has posted on the decision of the Lakota to secede from the United States. The Lakota Nation, which includes portions of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming, has informed the State Department that it is withdrawing from all thirty-three treaties it has signed with the federal government, which it claims the US has not honored.  According to an article on The Raw Story:

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies -- less than 44 years -- in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.

The Lakota were active leaders in the process of the UN's adoption of a declaration on the rights of indigenous people this past September.

• Yesterday's protests outside New Orleans city hall saw residents attacked by the police with pepper spray -- and the council voted unanimously to demolish 4500 affordable housing units in spite of public opinion to the contrary.  Feministe and Too Sense have both reported on the day's events.

• A family in California made a recent decision to take their seventeen-year-old daughter off of life support after CIGNA health insurance refused to pay for a liver transplant, claiming it was an experimental procedure.  A protest outside of CIGNA's office caused the insurance company to relent at the last minute, but the window of opportunity had already passed for Natalee Sarkisian and her health deteriorated further, impelling her family to let go.  Stories like Natalee's illustrate how imperative it is that we replace our broken health care system with an equitable system that will support the community rather than capital gain.

• Tennessee Guerilla Women also linked to a story about a young Icelandic woman who was detained and imprisoned while entering the US on a recent vacation with friends.  Immigration agents claimed that Eva Ósk Arnardóttir had overstayed a visa by three weeks on her last visit to the US in 1995. Agents detained and then imprisoned her without sleep or food, denied her contact with the outside world, and shuttled her around chained up in public before finally sending her back to Iceland.

• And wrapping up, the upcoming holiday has inspired a few interesting pieces that contrast the Christmas spirit with modern immigration crackdowns.  Immigration News Daily has posted 'Three Wise Men' Interrogated by CIA, deported as well as Santa Claus in legal trouble?, which begins:

To begin with, because of the recent increase in border security, he will not be able to land anywhere in the U.S. unless he would comply with the Department of Homeland Security rule on advance passenger manifests for flying private airplanes (and sleighs) (72 FR 53394, 9/18/07). Next, he will have to declare the value of all the gifts that he is giving to the kids on the "nice list." That is in addition to the strict search and X-ray of the bags in which he is carrying the gifts. Because of the holidays, it may take U.S. Customs and Border Protection a while to do all of this, so he can expect a few days before getting the gifts back to be able to deliver them. Santa will have to obtain a visa before entry into the U.S. Because we do not have a consular post at the North Pole, he will have to go to a third country post for his visa. He will have to have a valid passport before he can apply for a visa. At the consulate he will be fingerprinted and photographed. Then he will need to go through a security background check, which may take a long time, sometimes up to a few years, to clear.

A Debate on Housing, Live from the New Orleans City Council

• Louisiana news station WDSU is offering a live video feed from the New Orleans City Council meeting on the impending demolition of public housing.  In addition to those speaking at the meeting, hundreds of people are standing outside City Hall in protest of the lack of affordable housing in the region since the destruction caused by Hurricane Katrina two years ago. Present-day inequities in New Orleans are often framed with respect to human rights; the demand for affordable housing is just one aspect of ensuring that residents have the social and economic security needed to provide for their families with dignity.

• Bloggernista has reported that Congress has lifted a nine-year ban on using public funding to support needle exchange programs in Washington, DC.  Despite the fact that syringe exchange programs have proven effective in reducing the spread of HIV/AIDS, this ban had held firm while the capital city has the developed the highest rate of HIV infection in the nation, a true modern epidemic noted for its immense racial disparities.

• The Real Cost of Prisons Weblog reposted an Associated Press article entitled 'State supreme court rules counties are liable for inmates' care,' including conditions that existed prior to imprisonment. It's great to see a court ruling in favor of the responsibility of the community to provide a basis level of health care for those in custody without other options -- this is a good step towards the recognition that all Americans deserve access to health care.
  

Justices voted 8-0 on Tuesday in favor of HCA Health Services of Oklahoma, the parent company of OU Medical Center. The hospital sued Oklahoma County commissioners and Sheriff John Whetsel over $2.2 million in medical payments for treating prisoners in the jail from February 2003 through September 2006.

The county's argument was that much of the expense was to treat conditions that predated the prisoners' arrests, Justice Marian Opala wrote in the court opinion.

• The DMI Blog analyzed a recent New York Times editorial on Arizona's new law intended to crack down on undocumented immigrants, offering praise for what it refers to as an 'example of smart immigration policy.' Author Suman Raghunathan expounds:

I am, in fact, waxing poetic on a stellar editorial in yesterday’s  Times.  This gem of a piece outlines in plain, centrist-liberal-speak why going after employers who employ undocumented immigrants instead of enforcing existing labor law makes for poor immigration policy.

What’s more, Arizona’s law (and believe me, there are many more in the works across the country) will do nothing to address our nation’s desperate need for smart and fair policies that welcome immigrant contributions into our economy. Worse yet, it does nothing to bring undocumented workers out of the shadows with a legalization program to level the playing field on wages and labor conditions for all workers – documented and undocumented, green card holders and US citizens.

Meanwhile, the Presidential election campaigns continue to work themselves into a fevered state, trying to say as little as possible on immigration policy (pick a party, any party) while sounding tough on undocumented immigrants (again, pick a punching bag, any punching bag). 

Here’s to hoping those high-falutin’ political operatives take a page from the Times’ editorial board’s playbook when they think about immigration. 

The Return of Redemption

• Alan Jenkins' newest opinion piece is live on TomPaine.com. Entitled 'The Return of Redemption,' the piece contextualizes the recent crack sentencing ruling as well as the end of the death penalty in New Jersey as part of a larger shift in American values:

Together, these decisions reflect decades of difficult lessons: about the folly of locking away people convicted of low-level, non-violent offenses for decades; about how seemingly neutral policies can have gravely discriminatory effects; and about the ineffectual, discriminatory and dangerously inaccurate nature of the death penalty.

But information alone rarely leads to policy change, especially when it comes to criminal justice policy. That political leaders could even consider these changes in an election year speaks to a shift in public values as well as public understanding. Each reform reflects a return to the values of redemption and equality that are essential to a fair and effective criminal justice system, and that polls and politics show are on the rise in our country.

• RaceWire has shared a LA Times article on California's new plan for universal health care, a measure negotiated by Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and Assembly Speaker Fabian Nuñez (D-Los Angeles). On Monday the state Assembly approved the first phase of a $14.4-billion plan to extend medical insurance to nearly all residents by 2010. The legislation will provide subsidies and tax credits for people who have trouble paying their health insurance premiums.

• Pam's House Blend has posted about a student at Southern Utah University who was denied housing because he is transgender. The university, which offers separate housing for men and women, demanded that Kourt Osborn provide the following in order to live in male housing:

• a letter from the doctor that monitors his hormone treatment;
• a letter from his therapist saying that he has gender identity disorder, or gender dysphoria; and
• official documentation that he has had sexual reassignment surgery.

Like many transgender people, Osborn isn't interested in surgery or a clinical diagnosis of his 'disorder.' The post compares Osborn's situation with that of people of mixed racial backgrounds in decades past:

"When people do not fit into a structured, discriminatory and binary system, the chances of discrimination against that person goes up."

Such is the case with Kourt. He is a person who does not fit into society’s tidy binary system on gender. Because he has transgressed society’s gender rules, the discrimination he faces on a daily basis — including the denial of housing at a public university — is very real and hardly ever subtle.

• Finally, Firedoglake published a piece on media reporting (or lack thereof) on torture  in the United States. Blogger PhoenixWoman received a story in her email entitled CIA photos 'show UK Guantanamo detainee was tortured' from Britain's The Independent, which details the existence of photographic evidence proving that British citizen Binyam Mohammed has been abused while in American custody.  Mohammed's lawyers in the UK have expressed their worry that the photos will be destroyed, given the CIA's recent destruction of "hundreds of hours of videotapes showing the torture of detainees held by the US." Interestingly, while US-based CommonDreams.org has also picked up this story, Google News did not provide any matches for the article.