Levittown - Marcial Morales-Maldonado left his wife and six children behind in Honduras to travel to the United States to earn enough money to provide them with money for a better life at home.
One of seven brothers, Alex Aguilar had similar dreams about earning higher wages and living better in America.
Both worked tirelessly on a Springfield horse farm in order to send the majority of their earnings to family members still living in Honduras.
Now the leader of a nonprofit social services group wants to make sure their brutal deaths don't reflect poorly on the area's large, often hidden population of Latino immigrants.
"This is a tremendous tragedy and the whole Latino community is feeling the pain," Angela Mateo Gonzalez, executive director of Servicios Latinos de Burlington County, said Wednesday.
The nonprofit group assists immigrant workers and is helping family members of the two victims raise money for their burial.
Gonzalez described the victims as hardworking immigrants who had lived and worked on the Sterling Chase Horse Farm on Highland Road for the last four to five years. Their coworkers and bunkmates, Carlos and Cesar Reyes, also had traveled to the United States from Honduras.
Carlos Reyes, 41, was charged Wednesday with two counts of murder for allegedly hacking Aguilar and Morales-Maldonado to death with a machete. Authorities said Cesar Reyes, 38, witnessed the murders and afterwards fled with his brother to Texas.
Investigators said the murders were the result of an alcohol-fueled argument between Carlos Reyes and the two victims. The subject of the argument is still undetermined, authorities said.
Gonzalez said the victims' family members aren't sure what sparked the dispute.
"All we know is that Carlos had a short temper," Gonzalez said. "They had lived together for four years, but [Carlos] didn't handle arguments very well. We're so disappointed two individuals had to die this way. It's horrible."
She said immigrants often have problems with alcohol, and getting them to seek treatment is difficult.
"Prevention is something we try to teach, but a lot of individuals develop addictions to alcohol in their home countries," Gonzalez said.
She urged Burlington County residents not to think ill of immigrant workers because of the killing.
"We're very sorry this tragedy occurred, but we do not want people to perceive [Hispanic immigrants] differently. People from all nationalities commit crimes so let's not start labeling," Gonzalez said.
She also said the men should not be condemned for being undocumented immigrants. She said immigrants like them fill unwanted jobs in America and work harder than most job holders.
"Most have family in their home countries they're trying to support. They work like nobody works," Gonzalez said.
Prosecutors said Wednesday that Springfield police had no previous contact with the four farmworkers prior to the murders.
Springfield Mayor Denis McDaniel also said he didn't think illegal immigrants posed a problem in the rural township.
"It has not been an issue, locally," McDaniel said Wednesday.
Staff writer Mark Zimmaro contributed to this story.
Comment: All of us who consider ourselves in any kind of position where we need to set an example for responsible and accountable leadership should set an real example for being sane and sober, avoid drunkenness and work on our own spiritual growth.This insane incident that led to death could of been easily avoided with the proper precautions. Stay straight!
Judge appointments are Obama's chance to shape California courts
While campaigning, he emphasized bipartisanship and vowed to name judges with 'empathy' and 'heart.' How will those promises play out?
By Carol J. Williams March 15, 2009
President Obama is preparing to name six new federal judges for California, an opportunity to put his stamp on the judiciary that has court-watchers recalling his campaign promises to make selections in a bipartisan manner and to name judges with "empathy" and "heart."
Many liberals say they are hoping Obama appoints lower-court judges and legal scholars guided by sympathy as well as the law, to begin reversing the sweeping conservative population of the federal bench executed by his predecessor.
Conservatives tend to argue that laws should be strictly applied to avoid infusing justice with a judge's personal views and values.
A president's choices for district courts are usually less controversial than his picks for circuit courts of appeal and the Supreme Court. District courts are relied on to simply apply the law at trial, while appeals court judges have more latitude to interpret a law's intent and context.
Because George W. Bush had so many appointments to three of the state's four federal district courts during his presidency, the benches are markedly conservative. Many of his picks may serve through and beyond even a two-term Obama presidency.
"This may not be typical of the rest of the country, but Obama may not be able to do much to affect the appointing-president balance in those courts," Russell Wheeler, a federal judiciary scholar with the Brookings Institution in Washington, said of the district courts for central, southern and eastern California.
Obama's chance to shift the balance at the appeals court level is greater, analysts say. The San Francisco-based appeals court has two vacancies now and a third opening early next year. It could see six more if Congress passes a bill seen as long-overdue relief for overwhelmed judges.
Vetting committees put together by California's two Democratic senators are already screening district court candidates, and names are being floated to the White House for the appeals court that could learn of its first new nominees next month.
Senate Republicans have already signaled their intent to challenge any Obama choices they consider too liberal by filibustering, a threat that could stall the administration's plans to quickly fill the 65 vacancies nationwide.
Some analysts see the threat as playing to the senators' conservative base more than as a genuine intention to tie up confirmations.
"Even if a larger proportion turn out to be ideological than I expect, they'll pick and choose their fights," Arthur Hellman, a University of Pittsburgh law professor and federal judiciary expert, said of the Senate Republicans, who have just a one-vote margin for stalling confirmations. "There are so many other things they care about."
Hellman points to Obama's campaign-trail call for judges with "heart" and "empathy" as an indication of the qualities he'll seek in his appointments, as well as experience handling complex cases emanating from California's leading industries.
"I think what we will see at the district court level is not ideological appointments but people with a reputation for competence and accomplishment," Hellman said, noting that judges in this state are often called upon to decide issues in entertainment, technology, biomedicine and intellectual property.
Obama has said little since his inauguration about how he'll select judges, having focused so far on quelling economic turmoil and plotting an exit from the war in Iraq.
But the courts are important to him and he'll want to appoint judges who share his ideology and values, said Peter Eliasberg of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
"Barack Obama will care about diversity and expend his political capital on judges," Eliasberg said, contrasting the new president with President Bill Clinton, who tended to back down when the Republican-controlled Congress signaled dislike for his nominees.
Wendy E. Long, legal counsel for the conservative Judicial Confirmation Network and a former law clerk to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, says Obama has sent "conflicting signals" on how he'll make his nominations.
"Empathy is a great quality and we all want to have it," Long said. "But when you walk into a courtroom and want to listen to your own heart and values, that means you're not following the law, which is what judges are supposed to do."
Sens. Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer, whom the president is required to turn to for advice and consent on California judicial nominations, used bipartisan screening committees when Bush was president to find candidates acceptable to both parties. Their decisions to retain that bipartisan approach were aimed at avoiding confirmation conflicts.
"These committees are made up of highly regarded attorneys who know their legal communities well," Feinstein said in explaining her commitment to getting input from both major parties. "I am confident that the committee members will do their utmost to help me identify the most qualified candidates."
That should help limit Republican opposition to Obama's nominees "as long as people understand that the bipartisanship is going to be in the vetting, not the appointments," said Wheeler, the Brookings analyst. "I hope nobody's got their hopes up that Obama is going to be appointing 50% Republican judges."
Obama will put a premium on diversity, judicial analysts overwhelmingly predict. Of special concern to those who want to see more women and minorities on the federal bench is the Northern District of California, where all but three of the 14 judges are white and there are no Asian Americans or Latinos despite their significant populations in the region.
"I think that is an abysmal record. I can't say enough about how outrageous that is," said Niki Solis, president-elect of the San Francisco La Raza Lawyers Assn.
While Obama's campaign rallying cry for public service is expected to prompt civic-minded lawyers and legal scholars to apply for federal judgeships, some analysts worry that the best legal minds may be discouraged by the courts' noncompetitive salaries and crushing workloads.
Federal district judges earn $169,300 a year and circuit judges $179,500, both fractions of what a top lawyer can earn in private practice.
"I don't know that the prestige and even the interesting work can compensate for the financial sacrifices judges are being asked to make," said Laurie Levenson, a former federal prosecutor who is now a professor at Loyola Law School.
A bill that died in the last Congress would have created 14 new appeals court judgeships and 50 for district benches. It has been revived in the current legislative session but faces an uphill battle amid demands for funding of jobs likely to stimulate the economy.
Court-watchers expect the bill to eventually pass due to the staggering case backlogs. The 9th Circuit, which includes California, is the slowest, taking 20 months on average to decide an appeal.
Is Citizenship Being Diluted by Globalization? by Leslie Evans
Published at UCLA
Author Leslie Evans
Sociologist Saskia Sassen proposes that international business at one end and poor immigrants at the other are shaping a new status of individual rights no longer tied to citizenship in a national state.
"I do not see us going back to deeply nationalized forms of citizenship."
Is citizenship going the way of the nation-state in our new globalized world? Saskia Sassen thinks so. The University of Chicago sociologist told a UCLA audience why at a March 25 talk sponsored by the International Institute. She began by acknowledging that there have been no really dramatic changes in the laws defining the standing of citizens in recent years. But that can be misleading, she said, because the legalities of who is a citizen and who is an alien have always had rough edges that are being redefined without the need to draft new legislation. "Their very incompleteness contains the possibility of change, and they must be incomplete to retain flexibility." Professor Sassen's talk reported on the research for her forthcoming book Denationalization: Economy and Polity in a Global Digital Age to be published this year by PrincetonUniversity Press.
Sassen's central point was that legal rights that used to be given only to citizens are more and more being claimed by large groups of people who rest their claims on international rather than national law or on relatively new legal concepts such as human rights vested in individuals rather than governments. These changes, which weaken governments but are good for individuals who change states or travel internationally, are a consequence of globalization, which moves more people longer distances more often than the societies in which nation-states were first forged and their legal systems constructed.
For Sassen, the clear definition of a citizen is being eroded at the high and low end: at the top of society by growing numbers of employees of companies with a global reach, staff members of United Nations-type organizations, and people with dual citizenship. At the bottom by growing de facto legal rights of undocumented immigrants.
Microelements that Add Up to Big Changes
Sassen pointed to a number of "microelements" that collectively are weakening the institution of citizenship in national states. These included:
Dual nationality. In the last decade, she said, many major countries have begun to authorize dual citizenship. The United States, which has historically been very reluctant to recognize such status has effectively acquiesced. "This is a diminution of exclusive allegiance," Sassen pointed out, "Even ten years ago many countries said no to this status."
Human rights of the body. Until recent years most legal rights were linked to ownership of property or membership in a political entity. As concern with and legislation protecting human rights has become more central, "the body becomes the site for rights" for people who are not citizens and do not own property.
Weakening of governmental sovereignty. Sassen suggested that recent advances in the legal prerogatives of individuals has been at the expense of the previous power of the state. Here she pointed to the constitutionalizing of the right to sue the government. This has been growing in the United States through an accumulation of case law. "Elsewhere it has been written into new constitutions, as in Argentina and Brazil." She said this was almost universal in constitutions written since the mid-1990s. Governments, even if democratically elected, are not permitted to speak for their citizens in all cases but citizens as individuals can preempt the government.
Growing legal rights of the undocumented. Rights that formerly used to be restricted to citizens are being won by noncitizens as well, Sassen said. In the U.S. "these include the right to be paid for work done, protection of human rights, and the right to own property. There is an informal social contract here, unauthorized but recognized. One part of the contract is that if the illegal alien demonstrates good conduct they can raise a claim to be legalized. Though this is not written into law, France, Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States all display a tendency to grant citizenship to long-term illegal residents." These de facto rights amount, she said, to a category that she called "informal citizenship."
"The totality here," Saskia Sassen said, "is a growing distance between citizen and state."
How to Look at Immigrants
Saskia Sassen suggested that the deepening of globalization should make us look on immigration differently. Usually immigrants are regarded simply as individuals who have come to your country for personal reasons. Sassen proposed to see them as "one segment of a complex loop that may begin with corporate outsourcing or a military action." Their final move to a country they have long ties with is more a measure of global interdependencies in which elements of semicitizenship have been extended to people who do not even live in the country they eventually move to.
Despite a vocal nativist opposition to large-scale immigration, she said that falling birth rates in many developed countries increase pressure to look beyond their borders to maintain population levels. "In Europe," she said, "by 2100 there will be 75 million less people than today except for immigration. France, Italy, and Spain have already fallen below reproduction levels."
Immigration also has many faces. The word "immigrant," Sassen told her audience, "brings to mind a picture of a poorly educated low-wage worker. Immigrants are also foreign professionals, IMF and World Bank staffers, international business men and women."
At the high end of society, groups of citizens whose ties to the state are in process of being weakened are "denationalized subjects, global activists, the global financial elites, and people with transnational identities."
Sassen described global activists as people who go to other countries to take part in political activities normally reserved for citizens of those countries. "This is a new element of globalization," she said, "tourists going to do citizens' work, cutting across borders."
Unbundling Citizenship
Citizenship, Saskia Sassen summarized, was really only formalized in the early nineteenth century as modern states developed the record-keeping ability to adequately track those who lived within their borders. Today, she argued, the sharp distinction between citizen and alien is breaking down due to the growth in the number of transnational citizens with a foot in more than one country and the steady extension of more and more legal rights to noncitizens, including outright illegal immigrants.
These tendencies are most apparent in the forty or so global cities like New York, London, Tokyo, or Los Angeles, which she called "strategic sites for new types of political practices." In these cities with their large noncitizen populations "you can join in politics while not a citizen." Lacking only the rights to vote or sue the government, the noncitizens lobby for their positions and take part in many kinds of political activity including street demonstrations. The new tendencies are least evident in rural towns or in suburbs dominated by a single ethnicity or class.
Saskia Sassen concluded by saying "I do not see us going back to deeply nationalized forms of citizenship."
Every night on CNN, Lou Dobbs bashes immigrants.No matter what the subject, he manages to turn it into a horror story about the evils of people he calls "illegal aliens."They steal; they cheat; they use drugs; they murder innocent people; they transmit diseases; they have filthy habits; they take jobs from decent hardworking American; they cost the taxpayers billions of dollars each year; they get perks ordinary citizens can only dream of, such as free healthcare and college tuition.Dobbs' attacks are mirrored day and night on radio talk shows, in newspaper editorials and guest columns, and in the halls of Congress and every state capitol.
What these hatemongers say resonates with many of my fellow citizens.I have heard them say so.But especially in these hard economic times, when scapegoating of one group or another might become virulent and lead to vicious and divisive actions and politics, it might be a good idea to get a handle on some facts.
The first thing we need to understand is that immigrants come to the United States not out of choice but because changed circumstances, brought about often enough by business-supported political actions taken here in the United States, have forced them to do so.
Consider the story of a typical immigrant, a composite of millions of others who could tell the same tale.Let us call her Elena.Elena worked in a garment factory in a free trade zone in El Salvador.The factory is a subcontractor for a large clothing chain in the United States.The free trade zone itself is the product of an agreement made between the government of El Salvador and the International Monetary Fund.The government is right-wing, dominated by the rich rural families that have run the country for many decades.It has been waging a war against left-wing insurgents, aided by money and military advisors from the United States, which, in support of U.S. coffee companies and other businesses with interests in El Salvador,has been deeply embedded in Salvadoran affairs .The government's budget is strained because of the war and because the rich are too powerful to be taxed and the poor have no money.In the countryside adults must subsist on about 1,200 calories per day.To pay its bills, the government goes to the IMF for a loan.The IMF, itself dominated by the United States, grants the loan but imposes strict conditions on the Salvadoran budget.One of these is that exports must be stimulated by offering foreign firms tax incentives.So the government establishes a free trade zone, a space in the capital city of San Salvador where businesses can set up shop in publically-financed buildings and operate tax-free.There is plenty of labor available, mostly women who have migrated to the city to escape the civil war in the countryside.
Elena gets a job in the garment factory.She is so desperate for work, with young children to support and no husband (he was killed in the fighting), that she ignores the long hours and horrendous working conditions.Wages are pitifully low but they keep her family fed.A year passes and Elena makes friends among her coworkers, all of whom have their own tales of woe.As the women become habituated to industrial labor and as they talk among themselves, they begin to think about things: about how hard it will be to work at such a rapid pace as they get older; about how the bosses abuse them physically and sometimes sexually; about how the clothes they make sell for a lot of money in the United States, enriching the owners on the backs of their starvation wages.One of the women is from a village once controlled by the rebels and has attended a peoples' school, where she learned something of her country's sordidly violent and oppressive history and of the global forces that have made it impossible for her and her family to ever improve their lot in life.She tells them that only when the ordinary people have gotten together and fought for a better life did things ever change.The archbishop of the city ash been saying the same things and demanded that the government do something to alleviate the misery of the masses.As this woman speaks, Elena and the others feel something stirring inside themselves.If they banded together, perhaps they could win better pay, hours, and conditions.Maybe they could get the employer to provide daycare facilities so that they could bring their children with them each day.
The women contact a union organizer and they begin to try to get their coworkers to join.The organizer knows activists in the United States who will support and publicize what the women are doing.All goes well for awhile, but soon the boss begins a systematic campaign of torment of union supporters.The woman from the rebel village receives phone calls threatening death to her and her young daughters.When the workers and supporters put up a picket line to protest their treatment, police and paramilitary thugs descend on them with clubs and tear gas.A week later, Elena is fired.She begins to work out of the union headquarters to keep the union going, but she notices strangers following her home, and her phone starts ringing in the middle of the night.When she picks up the receiver, she hears screams that sound like someone being tortured. The day after the archbishop is murdered, she decides that she must leave the country with her kids.Through a friend, she contacts a man who, for a fee, transports refugees into Mexico or the United States.Elena uses her entire savings and begins a long, difficult, and dangerous journey to El Norte, ending up in northern Virginia, with a letter to show to a priest.Through him, she finds a place to live until she geta a job.. She meets many other refugees, some for El Salvador, and they take comfort from one another.And they begin again to build a community.She gets work at a hotel as a room attendant, using an identification card she gets from a friend.Her kids start school, and they help her with her English.
Why would anyone consider Elena to be an evil person.How is she responsible for her fate?What would you have done if you were her?Aren't the actions of the United States, its government andits corporations, root causes of what has happened to her?
The second fact we need to grasp is that, more so than perhaps any other country, employers in the United States have relied upon, and indeed actively encouraged, periodic waves of immigration to provide them with easily exploited pools of cheap labor. For the past three decades, millions of immigrants, primarily from Mexico, Latin America, and East Asia, have come to this country seeking work, in what Kim Moody, in his book U.S. Labor in Trouble and Transition calls our third historical influx of immigrants. While some of the new arrivals are highly educated, with technical skills that give them access to special visas, most are poor men (men typically come first and their families follow) displaced by both political upheavals aided and abetted by U.S. foreign policy and the deregulated international trade and capital flows that have made it impossible for them to make a living as peasant farmers. In 2007, the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimated 15.7 percent of the U.S. labor force—about twenty-four million people—to be foreign-born. Not all of these workers have proper immigration documents, although we do not know precisely how many. There are probably, at least, twelve million undocumented persons in the United States today, but not all of these are in the labor force.The PewHispanicCenter estimates that undocumented workers make up about 5 percent of the labor force, so if this is true, there are about 7.6 million undocumented workers here or a little less than one-third of all foreign-born workers. The number of immigrant laborers, both with and without documents, has risen dramatically (though unevenly), especially since the early 1990s. In 1970, foreign-born workers comprised only 5.2 percent of the labor force; in 1990, the figure was 8.8 percent.
By far, the largest group of recent arrivals has come from Mexico. In 2005, a little under one-third of all immigrant workers were from Mexico. Given that most of these have limited formal education and given the near impossibility of poorly educated and unskilled persons entering the United States legally, there is no doubt that a significant proportion of Mexican workers are here without documents.Other countries that have sent significant numbers of immigrants are the Philippines, India, China, Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador.
Michael Yates is a writer, editor, and educator.Among his books are Cheap Motels and a Hotplate: an Economist=s Travelogue (Monthly Review Press, 2007), Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy (Monthly Review Press, 2002), Why Unions Matter (Monthly Review Press, 1998), Longer Hours, Fewer Jobs (Monthly Review Press, 1994), and Power on the Job (South End Press, 1994). He has also published more than 150 articles and reviews in a wide variety of journals, magazines, and newspapers.His works have been translated into seventeen languages. He is currently Associate Editor of Monthly Review magazine and Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press.He taught economics and labor relations at the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown from 1969 until his retirement in 2001.He won the Chancellor=s Distinguished Teaching Award in 1984.He taught courses for workers from 1980 until 2008, at a number of colleges, including PennState, the University of Indiana, CornellUniversity, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.Yates also worked in the Research Office of the United Farm Workers Union and served as a labor arbitrator with the Pennsylvania Bureau of Mediation.Yates grew up in Ford City, Pennsylvania.He is married to Karen Korenoski of Dunlo, Pennsylvania.They have four adult children.
