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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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Employment While in F-1 Student Status
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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)
INTERNATIONAL students who want to study in the U.S must first get an F-1 (Student) visa/status before they can enroll in an accredited U.S. school or university.
While on an F-1 status, there is no limit in the duration of stay in the U.S. provided the F-1 student is making good faith progress towards the completion of his/her academic course work and not engaged in unauthorized activities, particularly employment without authorization. Engaging in unauthorized employment will be considered a violation of the F-1 status.
To be able to work, the F-1 student must first secure an employment authorization from the school’s designated school official (DSO) or international student advisor (ISA). The employment authorization may or may not need prior United States Citizenship and Immigration Services’ (USCIS) approval depending on the type of employment. There are limited circumstances when F-1 students may be authorized to work in the U.S.
A. On Campus Employment
For on-campus employment, there is no need for a prior USCIS approval or a separate Employment Authorization Document (EAD). A notation on the student’s I-20 form by the DSO will do.
On campus employment means employment on the school’s premises, and includes employment with “on location commercial firms that provide services for students on campus, such as bookstores, or cafeterias.” It can also include work off-campus only if there is an education affiliation between the school’s curriculum and the work or contractually funded postgraduate research programs.
The employment must be integrally related to the student’s education program.
Allowable work is limited to 20 hours per week while school is in session. Full-time work (40 hours) is allowed during vacations or semestral breaks.
B. Optional Practical Training
Under the Optional Practical Training (OPT), a student in valid F-1 status may be authorized to work for a total of twelve (12) months. The F-1 student can use this 12-month period either pre-completion or post-completion of his/her academic course work.
Pre-completion OPT is available only after the first year of study provided the work is related to the F-1 student’s field of study and he/ she has filed his/her application for employment up to 90 days prior to completion of the first academic year. The F-1 student may work for 20 hours per week while school is in session or full-time during semestral breaks.
Post-completion OPT must be requested prior to completion of course requirements. The employment or training must be directly related to the student’s major area of study.
The F-1 student is allowed to work full-time after completion of his studies of graduation. However, if the F-1 student had receive prior pre-completion OPT, the time used will be deducted from the 12-month total OPT period.
To obtain OPT, the student must have the written authorization of the designated school official on his/her I-20 form.
For post-completion OPT, the student has to wait for the USCIS to issue the Employment Authorization Document (EAD) before he/she can engage in employment. All OPT must be concluded within 14 months following completion of studies.
Should the F-1 student decide to pursue further studies (i.e. from Bachelor’s to Master’s or Master’s to Ph.D.), then he/she becomes eligible for a new one-year (12 months) OPT period..
Other Off-Campus Employment
Other off-campus employment may be available to an F-1 student who is experiencing unforeseen economic hardship. To be eligible, the student must have been enrolled for at least one full-year academic study and show an unforeseen change in economic circumstances and unavailability or insufficiency of on-campus employment opportunities to meet the student’s financial needs.
It is necessary for the student to apply for an EAD card with the USCIS by filing the appropriate forms and proofs of unforeseen change or circumstances and economic hardship.
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After You, Mr. Secretary!
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WHEN the late award winning Filipino photographer Willie Vicoy was shot and killed in a crossfire during a military operation against rebel forces in Northern Philippines in the 80’s, the Vicoy family and the media did not raise a howl against the Philippine government for the death of the international photographer.
I did not know either if the Philippine government ever extended any financial help to the surviving family of the soft-spoken photographer, whose Vietnam War photo made the rare cover of both the Time magazine and the Newsweek in the 70’s.
As a true-blue journalist, Mr. Vicoy, I suppose, believed in the accepted fact of journalist’s life that “getting injured or killed comes with the territory of the profession.” Journalists would take the risks just to get the truth.
The recent advisory issued by Philippine Secretary Raul Gonzalez threatening to jail reporters who interfere in police operations during coups is unnecessary and a waste of his government time in making public his advisory.
REPORTERS ARE AHEAD OF THE COPS
Any enterprising reporter or photographer already knows about this advisory a long time ago. If they got wind of a newsworthy event, the reporter and photographer usually break towards the event, putting them ahead of the responding police operatives. By the time, police ring the crime scene with police lines, the reporters are already filing or broadcasting their stories.
When the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists suggested to Gonzalez that he "withdrew his advisory to reporters not to interfere in police operations during coups or risk getting jailed,” the top government lawyer of the Magapagal-Arroyo Administration dismissed the suggestion of the members of the New York press organization by telling them “to jump into the lake.”
If the ailing and elderly Cabinet secretary will nudge me to “jump into the lake,” I will gladly tell him, “After you, Mr. Secretary.”
Using the familiar martial law refrain of the late Filipino journalist, Doroy Valencia, Gonzalez asked, “Why are we so happy that a foreign group is meddling with us? These are like the parachute journalists who come (to the Philippines) for two days and then go back (to their origins as) experts about the Philippines. I will not withdraw (the advisory), only the President can tell me to withdraw that.” Gonzalez said.
NOTHING WRONG WITH “PARACHUTE” JOURNALISTS
What’s wrong with being a “parachute journalist,” Mr. Secretary? It is better to be a parachute journalist because you are able to get the truth and see it for yourself than get the story second hand or hearsay.
When the late Doroy Valencia was using this discredited argument in his column, Mr. Valencia was currying favor to the government of Marcos, who was moving heaven and earth to bury the dirt of his rotten martial law regime.
Valencia was just dancing with the music of the ruthless government that could not tell between right from wrong and fact from fiction. Unless, Gonzalez will admit that Arroyo’s government is not only patterned after Marcos but is worse than Marcos,’ then he should not arguments that propped up the Marcos regime.
If reporters are ahead of the police line, why remove them? Is the government trying to hide something?
If they catch reporters committing a crime, then, by all means, the police can arrest them. After all, no one is above the law. But if the reporters are ahead on the pack, covering an unfolding event, the arriving police can only tell the reporters to get the facts or photos and let the late-arriving police take over the scene if they wanted to preserve the crime scene or prevent further loss of life or property.
If a fugitive, like renegade Marine Capt. Nicanor Faeldon, was able to escape from the police line during the coup attempt at the Manila Peninsula hotel several weeks ago, why blame the poor coordination between the intelligence and operation arms of the police on reporters, who happened to be on the scene?
During unfolding events, the police should lay their eyes on the “prize,” like Captain Faeldon or other coup plotters, not the reporters. If the police saw reporters assisting Faeldon into escaping, they should have stopped them on their tracks.
Faeldon was one of the junior officers who joined Sen. Antonio Trillanes IV in a walk out from a rebellion hearing against him, Senator Trillanes and several others at a Makati city court. They marched to the Peninsula hotel in a bid to rekindle a people power revolution.
The police should be on their toes the next time there is another coup that will take place.
If reporters are caught in a crossfire, that’s the risk they have to take. Just like what happened to Mr. Willie Vicoy, who was felled by a bullet, reporters could be injured or be killed.
Handcuffing all the reporters after the siege of the Peninsula hotel was an overreaction by the police. It was tantamount to witch-hunting.
As to Gonzalez’ advisory ? It is nothing new. Reporters need not be reminded of it – reporters already know the risk they are taking if they break the law or the police line. (lariosa_jos@ sbcglobal.net)
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DID the 14th President of the Philippines mimic the 13th (and booted-out) President?
That question stems from the firestorm President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo set off by prescribing, for national reconciliation, a hefty dose of amnesia. “Forget Edsa Two," she urged. Induced loss of memory would “heal wounds.”
Was the lady being even original?
Play back the September 1999 Latin American state visit by her predecessor. When Joseph Estrada touched down in Santiago,. people here marked the 13th anniversary of Esda One . In a Chile, grappling with remnants of caudillo dictatorship, the press published reports on Filipino “People Power”.
“Why do we commemorate ‘dark spots” in our history?”, Erap snapped “Dapat, ang mga pangit at nakalapis (ugly parts of our past), like martial law, ought to be forgotten.” Why dwadle over the unpleasant. “We should move on”--- now repeated by President Arroyo..
Come to think of it.. Isn’t this the same tune communists here play when asked about their purges of the late 80s?
Over 1,400 were slaughtered in these paranoid pogroms : from ‘Cadena de Amor’, in Bicol-Quezon zone, in 1982 to “Olympia” in Metro Manila in 1989. .
A “Cannibal Revolution” devoured it’s own children, noted Inquirer’s Jan. 2, 2004 editorial. Innocent “comrades” were killed without pretense of trials. Their remains molder today in unmarked graves, reminiscent as of Poland’s Katyn forest and Cambodia’s “killing fields. Some executioners today are button-down bourgeois executives in air-conditioned Metro Manila offices
“Why remember the CCP purges?” groused the Communist Party of the Philippines in an article published in Inquirer’s Opinion Page ( Feb. 1, 2004 ) “The Party already condemned the abuses,” wrote Anne Buenaventura of the party’s information bureau. It “rectified” this mistake.
But the party shredded names of the victims and location of their graves. They didn’t bother to notify us, answered relatives in an Inquirer open letter: “We should not stop remembering and reminding.”
“All of us must remember… and open our hearts to human memory,” Nobel Laureate Elie Weisel insisted at memorial rites in the Gestapo death camp: Auschwitz- Birkeneau where he had been imprisoned. “I do not want my past to become the future…of our children’s generation.”
Filipinos have “a very special problem” in recalling, Ateneo University president Bienvenido Nebres SJ observes.
“It is not just wrong memories. It is the lack of a national memory…The consequence is we tend to live in a perpetual present. We have little collective memory of the past and thus we can not see well into the future ….”.
In his novel “1984”, George Orwell depicted a country where citizens thrust into a “memory hole” anything that crossed the whim of rulers. As “memory holes” shredded remembrance, wrong became right. Lies replaced truth. And freedom turned into slavery.
Like malign genies, blotted-out memories don’t stay bottled up. They deform daily life Thus, Imelda insists : the Marcos dictatorship was the “most democratic period in our history.” The communists claim that “majority of (pogrom) victims decided to continue their work”, even praising the carnage..
Erap? Well, some days, he can’t recall if his name is Jose Velarde. Pampanga Governor Eduardo Panlilio revealed a Malacanang staffer thrust P500,000 into his hands. Officials who attended the same meeting couldn’t recollect anything – or return a handbag.
Induced amnesia institutionalizes injustice. It results in the “ultimate perversion”: evil is called good. Spinmmiesters muscle aside historians as guardians of memory. And history’s falsification invites repeated abuse, clotting reconciliation..
In a Cebu Dauly News column “Speak Memory”, Simeon Dumdum recalls that the historian Milan Hublas stressed : “The first step in liquidating a people is to erase it’s memory.” (Look at how the Marcoses support projects to rewrite the history of People Power).
“Tyrants fear memory,” wrote Dumdum, now a judge. ”For as long as people remember their abasement at the hands of tyrants, there is little chance of tyranny reappearing.”
Thus, we ignore, at our peril, forgetfulness that stems from senility of the spirit.
Indeed, “The Philippines seems caught in a long nightmare between remembering and forgetting”, Alfred Mc-Coy told the Ateneo-Wisconsion Universities conference on “Memory, Truth-Tellling and the Pursuit of Justice”. The country locked itself into a state of denial by obliterating memories.
This enabled “torturers of Marcos era to rise within police and intelligence agencies, allowing the pervasive brutality of martial law to persist. Under impunity, culture and politics are recasting the past, turning cronies into statesmen, torturers into legislators and killers into generals”, he wrote..
“Beneath the surface of a restored democracy, the Philippines still suffers… from the collective trauma of martial law and an ingrained institutional habit of human rights abuse”.
Today’s increasing resort to the writ of amparo is a consequence. Arroyo and Estrada urge us to flush Edsa down memory hole. “They’re twins,” Inquirer’s Randy David explains.
But it’s result in giving up “the quest for accountable governance”. Is that why the 14th President of the Philippines sounds exactly like the 13th ( and booted-out ) President?
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Massive Fund Movements -- World Power Realignment?
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THE world investment and financial markets have been agog in the past few weeks. Even veteran market observers were awed at the massive movement of funds not only in the US but in all the capital markets of the world including Asia and the Middle East.
The magnitude of the funds are indicated by the fact that the movers and shakers are governments. The general influx of the money is into the US but other world financial capitals are also involved. And these government controlled funds are rushing to buy up stakes in Citicorp, Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and other like institutions. Earlier, the market was discussing problems in some Citicorp companies.
The big question is do they know something that we don't?
For sure, the massive movement must mean something. Not the routine business cycles. What's cooking? Anything to do with the movement for globalization?
Remember the recent spell of market turbulence in the last several months? At that time, it's possible China, the growing economic power in Asia may have made a slip. The country invested heavily in the Blackstone group. Judging by the fall of Blackstone shares, did China overlook something?
Many observers concluded that politics was behind the movements among the sovereign wealth funds. If globalization is involved, we could be witnessing a realignment of emerging coins of international powers.
Watching international investor Warren Buffet, an observer said that the massive fund flow is not one he would get involved in. He must have something up his sleeve. Why would a country like Kuwait follow his lead? In fact the countries involved in the fund shifts are new in this game. What then is their objective?
To fall back on the usual complication in addition to the rate of return -- politics? If so, the massive fund movements must be building up to something -- much more than ordinary international politics. A very major realignment of world powers. Even a new world order. How will it affect us small ants? Abangan.
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