Take Action Against Congress’ Proposal To Threaten a Lifeline for Latino Families!

Do you remember all that talk right before the holidays about Congress thinking about NOT extending unemployment benefits during this time of recession?

Well, Congress did strike a deal that extended both unemployment insurance benefits and the payroll tax cut, a benefit that allows workers to keep about $40.00 per paycheck. That deal is set to expire February 29, and Congress is renegotiating — most of the debate now is how to pay for these benefits.

The House of Representatives are proposing pay for the payroll tax extension by limiting eligibility for a program that helps low-income taxpaying families care for their children- and 80% of the the families who benefit from this program are Latino!  Seriously, Congress?!

The Child Tax Credit reduces taxes by $1,000.00 per child for taxpaying parents so that they can buy food, school supplies, and other necessities for their children. Parents who benefit from this law are taxpayers, so they pay into this program- again a program that serves as  a tax refund to assist lower-income families. The program is credited with helping 1.3 million children from falling into poverty in 2009.

Under current law, taxpayers who do not have a Social Security Number can apply to this benefit using Individual Taxpayer Identification Number (ITIN). This number is issued by the Internal Revenue Service to allow those without Social Security Numbers, like immigrants, pay taxes.

House of Representatives are proposing to limit eligibility for this program to only those with Social Security Numbers.

As National Council of La Raza explains, this proposal would disproportionately impact Latinos who are taxpayers and have very low incomes. By denying this benefit to ITIN tax-payers, 4.4 MILLION Latino children in mixed-status families would lose this benefit, affecting 1 in4 Latino children. This would be unfair to the taxpayers who pay into this program and would destabilize the health, well-being and prosperity of our most vulnerable children.

Why Congress is proposing to pay for one assistance program by cutting one that impacts poor children is beyond logic, reason and human compassion.  Low-income children are the ones who will suffer most.

We need to do better for our children. In 2007, the United States ranked 20th out of 21 countries in a UN survey of child welfare in rich nations. The Annie E. Casey Foundation has found that child poverty has increased in 38 states over the past decade with 20% of our youth now living in poverty.

And Latino children disproportionately live in poverty and are food-insecure.The Pew Research Center found that in 2010, more Latino children lived in poverty than children of any other group. NCLR’s research also shows that Latinos face the highest level of food insecurity among all racial and ethnic groups.

Unfortunately, this is not the only policy aimed at generating revenue by  destabilizing the health and well-being of poor Latino children. States like Kansas have either proposed or enacted laws that limit food stamp eligibility for the children of undocumented immigrants.

Latin@s, please show your Congressperson that you are PODEROSA and you will not stand for this attack on Latino children in this country!

Call the Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121 to reach your Representatives in Congress.

The National Council of La Raza recommends the below script:

“My name is ____.  I am a constituent calling from ____.  I urge you to oppose any changes in eligibility for the Child Tax Credit.  Children in low-income families should not be a source of revenue for the payroll tax cut.  No compromises!”

National Council of La Raza (NCLR) has excellent resources on this topic and the impact on Latinos.

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State laws taking effect in the new year restrict abortion, enforce immigration

State lawmakers were busy last year, resulting in nearly 40,000 new state laws taking effect in 2012.  Given the political climate of the past few years, it is unsurprising that many of these focus on immigration enforcement:

Alabama, with the country’s toughest immigration law, will require all employers who do business with any government entity to use a federal system known as E-Verify to check that all new employees are in the country legally.
Georgia is putting a similar law into effect requiring any business with 500 or more employees to use E-Verify to check the employment eligibility of new hires. The requirement is being phased in, with all employers with more than 10 employees to be included by July 2013.

In addition to draconian immigration measures (that are, by the way, destroying the economies of the states in which they have been passed), a parental notification law is going into effect in New Hampshire. An Arkansas law requiring facilities performing non-surgical abortions to be subject to the same Health Department inspections as facilities performing surgical abortions has also just gone into effect.

Laws going into effect this year means that people begin to be affected right away, as is the case for a 93-year-old woman in Tennessee, who will not be able to vote for the first time in decades due to her identification card not matching new voter ID requirements in the state.

It’s not all bad news however – California passed a state version of the DREAM Act, which expands eligibility to scholarships to undocumented youth in the state. California also passed a policy requiring educational curricula in the state to go into the societal contributions of LGBT persons and persons with disabilities, a much-needed recognition of the vast contributions of these communities to our movements for  social justice.

Last year was indeed busy, and this year shows no signs of slowing down – watch out, keep informed, and always stay engaged. Palante!

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Alabama On My Mind? How the We Belong Together Campaign in Georgia Highlights Problems with Alabama’s New Immigration Bill

It was by a fluke of timing that the We Belong Together delegation was in Georgia speaking out against that state’s SB 1070 copycat legislation on the same day that neighboring Alabama announced that large parts of its copycat legislation survived a legal challenge. But now that parts of Alabama’s strict immigration law have been upheld, the countdown towards implementation begins. In other words, the time has come for the wave of fear that has been building across the country to come crashing over Alabama’s growing immigrant population.

And this fear is warranted:  on its face, the law aims to lock up immigrants or drive them out of the country, or at least the state. Short of driving the immigrant population out, the law may effectively drive immigrants into the factories and the fields as it tries to ensure that they are uneducated, impoverished, and easily exploitable. As the We Belong Together delegation highlighted, Arizona’s concerns have become those of Georgia, and it is now clear that these concerns are very real in Alabama, too.

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Missing: Reproductive health services on community college campuses

In preparation for last week’s summit on community colleges, the White House asked people to submit their ideas for community college reform. Overwhelmingly the participants voted in support of the idea submitted by a former teen mom and Community College student from Arizona who asked the following:

Educate students on healthy relationships and family planning…in order to help community college students finish their education and then plan for a family when the time is right.

This raises questions about why community colleges lack a comprehensive health system, and where services like contraception and family planning are available to students.

What more than half do not have, however, is what four-year colleges and universities have offered for years: comprehensive health services, including daily clinics and nurses who provide up-to-date health information, do physical examinations and prescribe or dispense contraception.

The apparent reasoning behind this gap in services is that lack of funding for community colleges, money which often goes instead to the four-year institutions. The Obama Administration has made it clear they’d like to put more of an emphasis on community colleges, but it’s not clear that they’re looking to address the need for better on-campus health services.

According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latino undergraduates are more likely to be enrolled in a two year institution. This means that Latinas are being shorthanded when it comes to resources on family planning. By providing services to reduce unplanned pregnancies, Latinas will have a better chance in graduating from school and having the opportunity to continue on to a four-year institution.

By Stephanie Rodriguez, Policy Intern

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Latino college enrollment at record levels

By Nicole Catá, Policy Intern

The Pew Research Center has released a report entitled Minorities and the Recession-Era College Enrollment Boom that chronicles the 2008 jump in U.S. college enrollment, the highest in four decades.  First, the good news, via the Huffington Post:

The nation’s colleges are attracting record numbers of new students as more Hispanics finish high school and young adults opt to pursue a higher education rather than languish in a weak job market. […]  Almost three-quarters of the freshman increases in 2008 were minorities, of which the largest share was Hispanics.

These increases are undoubtedly good news for Latino communities.  While the Pew Center attributes some of the spike in minority enrollment to demographic change, it is encouraging to know that Latino/as represent an increasingly larger percentage of college students.  Specifically, the report notes that “freshman enrollment of Hispanics in higher education jumped by 15 percent in 2008, compared to 8 percent for blacks, 6 percent for Asians and 3 percent for whites.”

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