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Founded in 1986
Founding Publisher/Editor:
Lito A. Gajilan
Columnists:
Atty. Michael J. Gurfinkel
Joseph G. Lariosa
Gani P. Tolentino
Ted L. Reyes
Atty. Reuben S. Seguritan
Photographers:
Butch Gata
Sheryl Garcia
The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not reflect the opinion of the paper nor that of the publisher
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For the past 20 years, The Filipino Express has provided the Filipino American community the best news, arts and entertainment coverage from around the United States and the Philippines.
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This website includes selected articles from this week's edition of the Filipino Express. Not all the stories published in the printed version appear on this site.
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To tell us what you think about Filipino Express Online or to comment on the stories published here, E-mail us at Filexpress@aol.com
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WHEN the US Senate announced last week that it has come up with a new immigration bill that is touted as the biggest overhaul of the US immigration law in more than 40 years, many in the Filipino community thought this was the real deal.
Not so fast, though. After the initial euphoria has subsided, it is easy to see now that this new bill is nothing but an incoherent mish-mash that will solve very little.
One does not have to be an immigration lawyer to know that the US immigration system is broken. Legal channels of immigration are few and inadequate to U.S. needs. One result is a huge backlog in family visas for those seeking to join family members. The wait is routinely seven to 10 years, and in the case of Filipinos who have the longest waiting time on record, can be as long as 22 years.
Also, employment-based visas are not enough to fill the demand for workers and professionals. Microsoft’s Bill Gates has perennially lobbied the US Congress to either increase the number of employments visas available each year, or to totally scrap the cap on work-related visas.
Last year, the Senate passed a bill that addressed these underlying causes of illegal immigration. It increased family-based and employment-based visas and created a guest worker program providing a path to citizenship. The bill also dealt with the estimated 12 million illegal immigrant population, giving them a chance to earn citizenship. It addressed border security, adding fencing and vehicle barriers along the Mexican border, plus 1,000 new Border Patrol officers.
In contrast, the new bill that the Senate is debating would bar workers from coming to the United States until the government has doubled the Border Patrol from 14,000 agents to 28,000, built more fences and begun an electronic employer verification system.
The new proposal would allow temporary “guest” workers, but they’d have no path to citizenship. They’d have to leave every two years and stay out of the country for a year. They could work here a maximum of six years. Anyone bringing family would have to have income 150 percent over the poverty line and have health insurance -- effectively shutting out low-wage workers the program is supposed to address.
Under the proposal, existing undocumented immigrants who pay fines and back taxes, maintain steady employment, have a clean criminal record and learn English could apply for a green card after eight years. But they’d have to return to their home country to submit their application for a green card at an American consulate, which is pure bureaucratic nonsense.
The proposal would still allow citizens and legal immigrants to bring husband or wife, minor children and parents (and extra visas would be added over the next eight years to eliminate the current backlog). But adult children and brothers and sisters would no longer have an automatic right to immigrate. They’d have to prove that they have skills, education and speak English.
This latest proposal is unworkable and a formula for more illegal immigration.
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Skilled worker priority dates move 2 years
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Editor’s Note: REUBEN S. SEGURITAN has been practicing law for over 30 years. For further information, you may call him at 212 695 5281 or log on to his website at www.seguritan.com
THE Visa Bulletin released for June 2007 brings good news to certain Filipino workers who are waiting for their priority numbers to become current.
As of June 1, 2007, the State Department will be processing employment-based third preference (EB-3) visa applications for the Philippines with a priority date earlier than June 1, 2005 or earlier.
The EB-3 category covers professionals like accountants, architects, engineers, teachers, medical technologists, pharmacists, physical therapists, occupational therapists and computer professionals and skilled workers with at least two (2) years training or work experience.
EB-3 Projections
The June 2007 Visa Bulletin projects that “there will be additional advances during the coming months,” for many employment-based categories because the level of demand for the immigrant visa numbers was much lower than anticipated.
The State Department cautions, however, that the cut-off date movements should allow for pending adjustment of status cases to be finalized. If the demand (resulting from the adjustment of status cases) exceeds the available visa numbers, the cut-off dates may be adjusted again.
The string of good news for EB-3 workers from the Philippines began last month when the priority date moved from August 1, 2003 based on the May 2007 Visa Bulletin to June 1, 2005, making close to a 2-year leap forward from the EB-3 immigrant visa processing backlog.
Other Worker Category
The Other Worker category for the Philippines will also experience some relief this June as the priority date moves to October 1, 2001. This category covers mostly domestic workers such as nannies, general houseworker, adult companions, child monitors, personal care aides, home health aides and the like.
The May 2007 Visa Bulletin reported that visas for this group was unavailable, which meant no immigrant visa applications for them could be processed because of oversubscription.
The State Department points out, however, that the reason for the relief from the unavailability of Other Worker immigrant visa numbers was due to the return of unused numbers from April 2007. Unfortunately, the visa numbers for Other Worker category will be unavailable again by July 2007 and will remain so through September 30, 2007.
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CHICAGO, Illinois – Public service as a life long career must be one of the more challenging jobs in the world. You have to be a visionary so that what you are doing today will not become a scandal of the future.
This appears to be the situation facing President Gloria Arroyo and Sen. Charles E. Schumer of New York in the case of the 26 Filipino nurses and one physical therapist.
When Sen. Schumer wrote President Arroyo to help Sentosa Recruiting Agency untangle its mess with “Sentosa 27,” Mr. Schumer knows that Mrs. Arroyo will be expecting him to return the favor. And vice versa. It becomes vicious cycle until somebody breaks it.
Mind you, Arroyo and Schumer are just doing their jobs. They just want to help. However, if government officials, like Arroyo and Schumer, notice their mistakes, they should promptly rectify them and stop being defensive.
Based on my sources, it appears that a relative of the owner of Sentosa must have been so forward looking when Sentosa business was just starting some years ago that she contributed money to the Senator Schumer’s campaign. When Sentosa wanted the help of the New York senator, this relative might have invoked her contribution to his campaign.
Meanwhile, Senator Schumer must have found a soft spot in the hearts of the Filipinos and Filipino Americans, when he got wind of the Filipino Veterans Equity Act of 2007 (S. 57.IS), pending before the U.S. Senate. So, the Senator did not hesitate when some Filipino and Filipino American veteran lobbbyists talked him into adding his name as co-sponsor to the Equity Bill.
Ally of Fil Ams
Now, that there is sector in the Filipino American community that owes Mr. Schumer a favor, the good Senator can say that he is an ally of the Filipino American community.
So, when Mr. Schumer wrote Mrs. Arroyo a letter, seeking help on behalf of the Sentosa, the Philippine president cannot just say no the New York senator. After all, Arroyo knows that somewhere or someday, she could ask the Senator a favor to put some good words on her behalf before his colleagues in the U.S. Senate.
So, even if Mrs. Arroyo would like to ask Mr. Schumer to lay his hands off Sentosa case, she cannot do it. And even if she tells him, the Senator would not be able to accommodate her request because he is just returning a favor to his campaign contributor.
Such is the reality of the life of an elected official. Sometimes, a public official is helpless if his transactions that look very innocent at the start would start to unravel.
It is very much like the case of Senator Barack Obama, who acquired his $1.65 million home with the help of a political fund-raiser. When the fund raiser was indicted, Mr. Obama was criticized for his poor judgment in associating with the fund-raiser. Now, Mr. Obama is distancing himself from the fund-raiser.
Like Mr. Obama, I suggest, Mr. Schumer should also distance himself from the Sentosa if the nurses can prove that the mess was rooted from a breach of contract committed by Sentosa towards the Filipino nurses and let the court cases in New York and the labor case in the Philippines filed by the nurses against Sentosa run their natural courses.
Not the nurses’ undoing
Atty. Salvador Tuy, one of the lawyers of the nurses, told this columnist that before the nurses came to the United States, they were assured of getting paid the prevailing rates in the area (in New York) by their sponsoring employer.But when they arrived in New York, they were given a different employer, lower rates of pay and reduced work hours that prevented them from working overtime.
This tactic is akin to “bait and switch,” a sales practice in which a bargain-priced item is used to attract customers who are then encouraged to purchase a more expensive similar item.
Naturally, the nurses wanted to opt out of their predicament by leaving their jobs. But they were slapped with criminal and civil charges for allegedly abandoning their patients.
Now, the Filipino nurses don’t want to be punished for something that is not their undoing.
The nurses want the government of Arroyo to put pressure on the Sentosa office in the Philippines to stop their operation so it can no longer victimize more Filipino nurses they are recruiting.
The nurses also want Senator Schumer to just let justice take its course by being neutral on the matter.
I would suggest the good Senator return the campaign contribution by Sentosa relative and distance himself from the Sentosa management so that he will be more objective in treating this controversy.
In that way, his help towards the Filipino community, like his co-sponsorship of Filipino Equity Bill, will go a long way.
(lariosa_jos@sbcglobal.net)
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DO you hear the children crying, o my brothers / ‘Ere sorrows come with the years”. – Elizabeth Barret Browning.
The answer is no. Many turn deaf ears to whimpers from the growing number of kids who take to the streets to beatpoverty, hunger, and sometimes abuse, in their hovels.
“For most street children, the situation is desperate,” writes Judith Pomm of Germany’s Rhur University Bochum. Penury and strained family life shove many into streets that can be like “war zones”. But those “bright lights” offer their only alternative.
Physically visible but mostly unnoticed, ang mga bata sa kalsada ply sidewalks, hang around malls – begging, collecting garbage, selling “sometimes even their little bodies”, she says in a study titled: “At The Margins: Street and Working Children in Cebu City.”
But it’s implications ripple out to other Philippine cities where the problem first “emerged in the economic recession of the 1980s.” The Marcos kleptocracy, by then, had bankrupted the country.
Mga anghel na walang langit ( “Angels without a heaven” ) is how a soap opera dubbed this issue. In Colombia, they call it “gamines”. Prickly scientists use the ponderous phrase.
No term captures “this silent slow motion emergency – silent because nobody is surprised and cries out”, she notes. But the kids’ resilience and coping mechanisms do not outweigh vulnerability “Some children prove strong enough to find their way out, sometimes through institutional help. The majority do not.”
So, how many kids roam the streets of this city?
Who knows?. These semi-nomads spend intermittent periods with their families. Some abscond from institutions. Others drift from one street to another, even to other provinces.
Family crises, jobs, police arrest or rival gangs drive their meanderings.
In 1988, the first surveys “suggested the number of street children could range from two to three percent of the child and youth population of a city.” Nationwide, that’d have come up to quarter of a million kids then.Some surveys claim the numbers have dwindled. Really?
The Philippines cobbled an extensive legal and program framework over the years: from the Child and Youth Welfare Code of 1974, to the “Special Protection of Filipino Children Acts” ( RA 7610 and 7658) in 1992, the Child and Family Courts Act in 1996 to the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child. But “law enforcement ( here ) is often a matter of contacts and money and thus the privilege of a minority,” the study notes. The UN convention “has the weakest base in practice because law enforcement mechanisms are largely underdeveloped”
Lack of hard data and monitoring makes evaluation of many programs difficult. Unofficial estimates peg implementation and quality at20 percent to 40 percent. So, the problem persists. “Poor desperate street children spoil the illusion of a well-managed city.” So, officials forcibly shove kids into “houses of safety”. They stress their criminal potential, e.g. “they scratch parked cars”.
Structural injustices are ignored. “Homelesness gets confused with delinquency and seems to provide automatic grounds for arrest. Tacitly counting on public approval, two main justifications are offered: the first is vagrancy; the second mendicancy…” These arbitrary interventions are cloaked with terms like “Operation Love.”
This anchors into ‘ubiquitous Catholic and domestic family ideals”: that family is secure, a place of love and care; the kalye are sites of danger and dirt. “( But these ) ideals have little to do with the real life situation of poor families whose children roam the streets.” Discourse is whittled down to either “normal children in homes or deviant bata sa kadalanan stereotypes.
Such reaction “does not address root causes that shove them into the streets in the first place… After custodial sentences, children return to the streets.” The need is for early intervention and more prevention. “Once children settle down into street life, it is extremely difficult to bring them back”.
Mothers must be supported to make their own choices and gain access to social services. Agencies include street children in planning but exclude them in practice. Immunizations don’t reach footloose street children. They rarely know about vocational training workshops and tend to drop out. Barriers like birth certificates, school records, parental signatures, etc must be dismantled, if kids are to get services.
Rights of children are encoded in laws blind to constraints that children face in real life. Child labor is illegal to protect them from exploitation. But it “impedes their finding a living in a legally secured way. They are further impoverished and endangered into being sucked by illicit activities”…
Officials pretend that clearing streets of begging children “protects them”…(This ) hides the fact that society actually wants to be protected from these children….” the study asserts. These are different ways people detach themselves, socially and emotionally, from the children’s reality… “Demonizing them supports the justification that one does not have to bother with them,” it adds Indifference, disgust or pity, “appears the most common reaction” of ordinary citizens.
An Ibanag proverb sums it all up: “He who is indifferent to the cry of he helpless will, in the future, shed tears and no one will listen.”
(E-mail: juan_mercado@pacific.net.ph )
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Michael J. Gurfinkel has been an attorney for over 26 years, and is an active member of the State Bar of California and New York, as well as the American Immigration Lawyers Association and the Immigration Section of the Los Angeles County Bar Association. He has always excelled in school:
Valedictorian in High School; Cum Laude at UCLA; and Law Degree Honors and academic scholar at Loyola Law School, which is one of the top law schools in California.
WEBSITE: www.gurfinkel.com
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