|
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
|
|
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.
|
|
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.
|
|
|
|
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
|
|
|
|
|
|
IS THE BILL THE REAL DEAL?
|
|
|
|
WILL the new Immigration Reform Bill presented by the US Senate the real deal? Will it fix the decades old broken immigration system of this country? Will this solve the US’ huge need for skilled workers that will man the ramparts of its aging workforce and volatile economy? Will this answer the ife-long dreams of millions of immigrants to earn a living here legally and to bring in their families with whom they have been separated for years?
A cursory look at some editorials published by some newspapers in cities with large immigrant populations may help us understand what this new Senate immigration is all about.
“A clunky compromise, the Senate immigration bill weighs in at well over 300 pages and is more easily dealt with by sound bites (“Amnesty!”) than by analysis. There is no denying that it is full of flaws and that it would establish some rules and procedures that may not work (measures such as kicking out guest workers for a year between three two-year stints of employment and expecting them to stay out), and others that are simply mean-spirited (such as requiring illegal immigrants already here to leave the country and reenter in order to “reboot” and legalize their status).”
- Washington Post
“The immigration deal announced in the Senate last week poses an excruciating choice. It is a good plan wedded to a repugnant one. Its architects seized a once-in-a-generation opportunity to overhaul a broken system and emerged with a deeply flawed compromise. They tried to bridge the chasm between brittle hard-liners who want the country to stop absorbing so many outsiders, and those who want to give immigrants -- illegal ones, too -- a fair and realistic shot at the American dream. But the compromise was stretched so taut to contain these conflicting impulses that basic American values were uprooted, and sensible principles ignored. Many advocates for immigrants have accepted the deal anyway, thinking it can be improved this week in Senate debate, or later in conference with the House of Representatives. We both share those hopes and think they are unrealistic. The deal should be improved. If it is not, it should be rejected as worse than a bad status quo..”
- New York Times
“The Senate immigration proposal a step back for immigration reform. The proposal replaces the current family sponsorship system with a merit-based system that considers education, work experience, and English proficiency. This would leave few options for the hard-working, law-abiding, less-educated workers who fill the construction, service and agricultural industries. Like current immigration policies, the proposal contains no path for temporary workers to remain in the country, a move that would create a permanent underclass of undocumented workers.
“Some senators are appealing for patience towards an admittedly imperfect bill. But the issue is not that the bill is flawed -– it’s that it replaces one set of problems with another.”
- El Diario La Prensa
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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 Invisible Overseas Votes
|
|
|
|
CHICAGO, Illinois – Once a Filipino, always a Filipino.
Even the United States Supreme Court says that unless you renounce your original citizenship, nobody can take your original citizenship away from you.
So, overseas Filipinos, even if they already acquired the citizenship of their adopted countries for as long as they have not yet renounced their Filipino citizenship, are still Filipino citizens, who can be absentee voters in the Philippine national elections.
The last mid-term election is a sad commentary that only a minuscule of overseas Filipino voters took a few minutes of their time to fill up their absentee ballots and drop them in the mail. They did not take advantage of their privilege to join the national debate that will shape the course of the destiny of their Motherland.
If the Iglesia Ni Cristo, the El Shaddai and the Ilocos Vote cast long shadows in every national elections in the Philippines, why not the OF (Overseas Filipinos) Vote?
After all, even the Bible gives the Overseas Filipinos an edge if we reckon with Christian invocation that “you cannot be a prophet in your own homeland.” The passage from John (4:43) means that people from outside the country has more credibility in coming up with their decision because their decision is not tainted by petty partisan politics at home.
Don’t give up your right to vote
Let’s not give up our rights to vote. Let’s show the shakers and movers in the Philippines that the seven to eight million overseas Filipinos are a big voting bloc to reckon with.
If you failed to exercise your right to vote in the 2004 and 2007 national elections, it’s not yet too late to register and vote in the 2010 presidential elections, which are only less than three years away.
You can write or call your nearest consulate or embassy and ask them to send you registration form to vote. Make sure to notify the consulate or embassy of your change of address at least six months before the scheduled elections.
In the 2004 elections, less than 10 percent of overseas Filipinos turned out to vote. In the 2007 elections, about 20 percent or less of registered voters mailed in their votes. Just imagine, if 30 percent or more will mail in their votes, our politicians will surely take notice.
If you really want to give sanity and integrity to your votes, you can ask Congress to impose an early deadline for the filing and disqualification of candidates so that six months before the election, no politician can appeal their disqualification anymore and the list of candidates the commission of election sends to overseas voters can no longer be altered.
Video cam please
If overseas Filipinos cannot make it to the consulates and embassies to monitor their votes, they can ask Congress to provide video cameras during the canvassing so they know that their votes are being counted accurately.
If Congress has no funding for video cameras, Filipino community organizations can pool their resources and rent video cameras in their area for the use of the consulates or embassies.
How to vote multiple candidates
If you really want a candidate from out of multiple candidates like senatorial elections to win, you are free to vote for that one and only candidate. That will be.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
“A GOOD woman is worth more than rubies,” says a Pampango proverb. It came to mind when the junta in Burma (Myanmar) stretched, without even pretense of due process, the detention of Nobel peace laureate Aung San Suu Kyi for another year.
She won 82 percent of the vote in her country’s 1990 election. For that “felony,” Burma’s generals serially imprisoned her for over 17 years now.
“In this Orwellian state with tea shops … local people never mention Ms Suu Kyi by name,” BBC’s Kate McGeown writes. “They just call her ‘The Lady.’ [It is] a term of deference towards a woman whom many Burmese, probably the vast majority, believe is the rightful leader of their nation.”
Detained in her lakeside Yangon home, the Oxford-educated Suu Kyi has not seen sons, Kim and Alexander, for years. Fearing she’d be exiled, she didn’t attend her husband’s funeral in Britain. Her bugged telephone is disconnected. Her doctor’s visits were whittled down to once every two months. “A more accurate description … would be home solitary confinement,” the Observer notes.
Thus, she could not receive, from the European Parliament in 1990, the Sakharov Prize and the Rafto Human Rights Prize, and the Nobel Peace Prize a year later. The last time Yangon allowed a UN special representative to visit was in 2005.
Yet, the helpless “Lady” stills sends shivers up the spines of a military dictatorship that has handcuffed Burma for four decades now. The 63-year-old widow is an “outstanding example of the power of the powerless,” Nobel chair Francis Sejested noted.
Filipinos know how it is to be kicked around: by Spanish oppressors, Japanese kempetai, Ferdinand Marcos’ thugs. That seared a “preferential option” for the underdog into our psyche. And our often-blurred national memory includes that of marching behind the widow of an assassinated leader in the teeth of repression.
“Some leaders are born women.” This country has been graced with radiant leaders. Among the more prominent were Doña Aurora Quezon, war heroine Josefa Escoda, Supreme Court Justice Cecilia Muñoz Palma and graft-buster Haydee Yorac.
Equally heroic but less known, others were shown in this week’s news photos: Muslim public schoolteachers, in headscarves, guarding ballot boxes in Lanao del Sur province as did their Christian counterparts in Taysan’s burnt precinct. They resemble the “Lady” who “remains the main symbol of resistance in Burma.”
The junta, meanwhile, pressures Suu Kyi supporters by threats, like banning their children from school. All political activity is proscribed. The press is censored. Asean and the international community were conned with a “seven-stage road map to democracy.” Not a single stage has been completed.
Ms Suu Kyi’s current four-year detention petered out May 26. But Friday’s extension would make that five years. This sparked clenched-teeth fury from the international community: Association of Southeast Asian Nations (Asean) members, the European Union, the United States, even as China murmured unconvincingly about “non-interference.”
On behalf of the 27-member EU, current president Germany condemned the arrest extension. “All international appeals ... have once more gone unheard. Myanmar demonstrated persistent unwillingness to engage all political and ethnic forces of the country in a genuine dialogue to bring about true national reconciliation and establishment of democracy.” That was a pointed reference to the unimplemented road map.
Earlier Suu Kyi releases, as “in July 1995, after six years of detention and house arrest, were a sop to the outside world,” John Aglionby of the Observer wrote earlier. “In reality, it was a tactic to delay introducing meaningful democratic reform.” Now, the junta doesn’t even bother with sops. That ratchets pressure on Asean, usually circumspect about poking into internal affairs of fellow members. Blatant Burma repression forced Asean to innovate ways to tell this rogue member to shape up. Thus, the Philippines chaired the Asean Summit this year, as criticism shoved Burma out of its slot in the rotating chairmanship.
Philippine foreign undersecretary Erlinda Basilio and Indonesia’s Imron Cotan flayed continued Suu Kyi detention in a Manila meeting. But Malaysian opposition leader Lim Kit Siang went further, saying Asean’s policy of “constructive engagement” with Burma has collapsed.
Burma should not be allowed to continue as “a millstone around the neck of Asean, bringing disrepute,” he said. Asean should now “face up seriously to the option to suspend or expel Myanmar.”
At their Cebu meeting in January, the Eminent Persons Group submitted an Asean Charter draft. There’s no word “sanction” in that document, Undersecretary Basilio notes. “It enshrines duties and responsibilities.”
Burma’s continued repression, however, means it rejects Asean ideals. It is, in effect, self-expulsion. That would outpace Asean’s legal debates. Also, kicking out the junta would do justice to what the Nobel citation said: ‘Suu Kyi’s struggle is one of the most extraordinary examples of civil courage in Asia in recent decades.”
(juanlmercado@gmail.com)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
Big Surge In “Tago Ng Tago” Expected
|
|
|
|
WHAT happened on Jan. 1, 2007? In the proposed comprehensive immigration bill being debated in the US Congress, if an illegal immigrant entered the country before that date, he would qualify for a new kind of visa, the Z visa, which would start him on a path to becoming an American citizen after approximately 13 years.
However, the fate of the bill is still up in the air. Much heat is being generated in congressional debates which finds both a mix of Republicans and Democrats on both sides of the aisle. The issue involves 12 million illegals present in the US. “I don’t know any piece of legislation that touches as many people in as many ways as the bill,”Senator Bob Corker, Republican of Tennessee. Mr. Corker was quoted in the “New York Times” that he was not trying to block the bill but trying to understand it.
The Philippines is just one of the countries where a large sector of the population, numbering millions, is deeply concerned by the bill. Because of widespread poverty and economic underdevelopment, joblessness is rampant. Many Filipinos rely on getting employment in other countries. A big part of the $15 billion a year income of Overseas Filipino Workers which props up the country’s economy is sourced from the US.
Because of the Filipinos’ sensitivity to the issue of immigration, the cut-off date of Jan. 1, 2007 may cause an upsurge of tourist visa applications. The date could encourage unscrupulous businessmen to mislead their countrymen to try their luck and risk getting into the US illegally. After all, hope springs eternal.
A passing dark cloud such as the immigration problem in the US we are sure is catching a lot of attention in Manila. Disruptions in other countries that adversely affect the continuity of OFW’s employment and thus the flow of currency remittance to the homeland become a source of not merely concern but panic to the workers’ families and no doubt, the government. It never fails to be a reminder of the fragility of this national resource.
Features of the US immigration bill indicate some threats to the dollar inflow from the OFW’s. Included among these is the proposal to increase the fines for employers hiring illegals to $5,000 for the first offense up to $75,000 and even jail time for repeat offenses.
If this is approved, the TNT’s will find it perhaps impossible to survive in the US. There is also the plan to double the border patrol to 28,000 which would surely see an escalation of the number of TNT’s being apprehended and deported.
Among the Republican senators opposing the bill is David Vitter of Louisiana. Mr. Vitter is against it because he said it is pure unadulterated amnesty. “If the American people knew what was in this bill, there would be a massive outcry against it,” he said.
The bill provides for the time when the backlog of pending immigration would be finished. The Filipinos are not the only beneficiaries of the bill. The hispanic immigrants, especially from Mexico, is bigger.
When that time comes and the inflow of immigrants is drastically reduced, would the Philippines have recovered economically to absorb its millions of unemployed and underemployed within its shores?
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
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
Four offices to serve you:
LOS ANGELES:
219 North Brand Boulevard, Glendale, California 91203
Telephone: (818) 543-5800
SAN FRANCISCO:
966 Mission Street, San Francisco, California 94103 Telephone: (415) 538-7800
NEW YORK:
60 East 42nd Street, Suite 2101, New York, NY 10165 Telephone: (212) 808-0300
PHILIPPINES:
Heart Tower, Unit 701, 108 Valero Street, Salcedo Village, Makati, Philippines 1227
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
