El Magonista | Vol. 10, No. 30 | August 5, 2022 - N.Y. court ruling BLOCKS new DACA applicants

By Andrew Moss | LA Progressive | AUG. 4, 2022 | Photo by CMSC

The federal judge’s ruling deprives 500K young people of their eligibility for the DACA program.

A gross injustice against young immigrants is slowly working its way through the courts. It centers upon a federal judge’s ruling last year that the DACA Program (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) was “unlawful,” a ruling that puts in doubt a program that has given tens of thousands of young people brought here as children a temporary, renewable reprieve from deportation. Judge Andrew Hanen’s ruling allowed existing DACA recipients to apply for two-year renewals while the court case moves through appeals, but it prohibits approval of any new applications. 

The case has moved to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals, where oral arguments were heard last month, and where a ruling by that court is expected this fall. It may well go to the U.S. Supreme Court.

When President Barack Obama created the program by executive action ten years ago, he was responding to political and moral pressure stemming from legislative failures to enact meaningful immigration reform over several decades. The last major reform, signed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, had allowed 2.9 million immigrants to advance on a path toward citizenship.

Mr. Obama’s executive action gave tens of thousands of young immigrants the opportunity to emerge from the shadows of undocumented status and pursue opportunities in education, professional careers, and civic... READ MORE

By Andrea Castillo | Los Angeles Times | AUG. 4, 2022 | Photo by Karan Singh

By Ally Mutnick | POLITICO | AUG. 4, 2022 | Photo from Getty Images

The party may be on track to increase the number of Latino Republicans in Congress by 50 percent or more in the fall.

A large and diverse group of Latino candidates will be representing the Republican Party on the November ballot this year — forming a key piece of the party’s push to win more Latino voters.

House Republicans could be on track to increase their number of Latino members in 2023 by 50 percent — or more — after concerted recruitment efforts and a slew of summer primary wins by Hispanic and Latino candidates from Oregon to Texas to Virginia. The latest victory came Tuesday night in southern Arizona from Juan Ciscomani, a first-generation American who moved from Mexico to the U.S. as a child and worked on border and trade issues as a top adviser to GOP Gov. Doug Ducey.

Now, the party has landed Hispanic nominees in more than a half dozen battleground districts — and another three are well positioned to win their primaries over the next month. It’s a diversity push that takes on added significance because the GOP has recently begun aggressively courting Latino voters since Trump’s surprising surge in heavily Hispanic areas of the country in 2020.

“The Hispanic community has felt kind of in the middle, ignored,” Ciscomani said. Democrats have taken them for granted, he noted, while Republicans have not often considered them to be persuadable voters.

“I will definitely not do either one of those,” he continued. “I spoke to them yesterday in Spanish in my acceptance victory speech — a good portion of that was devoted in Spanish to let our community know that we’re going to be reaching out... READ MORE

WASHINGTON — The Biden administration on Thursday declared the outbreak of monkeypox a national public health emergency in an effort to raise awareness and accelerate efforts to combat it.

The move comes days after several counties, including San Francisco and Los Angeles, as well as states such as California, Illinois and New York, declared emergencies.

“We’re prepared to take our response to the next level in addressing this virus, and we urge every American to take monkeypox seriously and to take responsibility to help us tackle this virus,” Xavier Becerra, secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, said during a briefing with officials and the media.

Monkeypox is a rare disease similar to smallpox, though symptoms are sometimes milder. It is largely spreading among men who have sex with men as well as transgender and nonbinary people, though health officials warn that anyone can contract the virus through direct contact with infectious sores, scabs or body fluids, or by touching clothing or bedding used by a person with the virus. At least five children and one pregnant woman in the U.S. have been infected, public health officials have reported... READ MORE

By Grace Toohey | Los Angeles Times | AUG. 2, 2022 | Photo by Luis Sinco

A child in Long Beach has contracted monkeypox, health officials said hours after Los Angeles County leaders proclaimed a local emergency amid the spreading illness.

“While news of a pediatric case may cause alarm, please remember that monkeypox is still rare, is much more difficult to get than COVID-19 and other common childhood illnesses, and is rarely dangerous,” Dr. Anissa Davis, city health officer, said in Long Beach’s announcement Tuesday. 

The child in Long Beach is the second in California to contract monkeypox and the fifth known pediatric case in the U.S.

Long Beach health officials, who said they’re waiting for additional testing from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to confirm the infection, added that the child was symptomatic but has since recovered. A spokesperson for the city confirmed the child’s infection was linked to household members but declined to disclose further information.

Earlier in the day, L.A. County Board of Supervisors Chair Holly J. Mitchell introduced a proclamation declaring a local emergency over the rising cases of monkeypox. The action, which the board unanimously ratified, is an effort to bolster the county’s response to the outbreak. The day before, California declared a state of emergency because of the virus. 

“This is a serious health issue that deserves support and swift action,” Mitchell said. “The proclamation of local emergency is to help our county do all that we can to get ahead and stay ahead of this virus.”

Monkeypox cases in L.A. County rose to 423 on Tuesday, up more than 80% from a week prior, according to the county health department’s count of confirmed and probable cases. The majority of cases have been confirmed in men who identify as part of the LGBTQ community... READ MORE

Intel’s planned microchip plant outside Columbus, Ohio, is the administration’s poster child for reviving high-tech manufacturing. But failure to allow a small number of foreign-born doctorates to stay in the U.S. could cause the effort to fizzle.

JOHNSTOWN, Ohio — Just 15 minutes outside of downtown Columbus, the suburbs abruptly evaporate. Past a bizarre mix of soybean fields, sprawling office parks and lonely clapboard churches is a field where the Biden administration — with help from one of the world’s largest tech companies — hopes to turn the U.S. into a hub of microchip manufacturing.

In his State of the Union address in March, President Joe Biden called this 1,000-acre spread of corn stalks and farmhouses a “field of dreams.” Within three years, it will house two Intel-operated chip facilities together worth $20 billion — and Intel is promising to invest $80 billion more now that Washington has sweetened the deal with subsidies. It’s all part of a nationwide effort to head off another microchip shortage, shore up the free world’s advanced industrial base in the face of a rising China and claw back thousands of high-end manufacturing jobs from Asia... READ MORE

Record-high inflation has wreaked havoc on an economy already struggling to recover from COVID-19. The Federal Reserve is aggressively hiking interest rates, but it’s too little, too late. When too much money chases too few goods, rising prices are inevitable. Since the start of the pandemic, the monetary base has risen 60 percent and the M2 money supply 40 percent, outpacing the uncertainty-induced spike in liquidity demand. If we want to tame inflation, we need to stop running the printing presses. But we also need bold supply-side reforms.

It’s time to liberalize immigration policy. Making it easier for people to come here and work increases the availability of labor. That would boost the goods supply relative to the money supply. While it’s not a panacea, immigration can ease pricing pressures. Making green cards, visas and even citizenship easier to obtain makes economic sense, and it offers humanitarian benefits as well.

In the long run, living standards depend on supply-side factors. These include the amount of labor and capital, technological progress and a supportive regulatory environment. The White House, Congress and the Federal Reserve have focused too much on the demand side. While demand stimulus can temporarily cushion falling incomes and wealth, it isn’t sustainable. Policymakers quickly run into the fundamental constraint: how much the economy can produce... READ MORE

Dr. Monica Cornejo got her PhD from UCSB and joined the junior faculty at Cornell University in the Communications Department.

Monica Cornejo was just 6 years old, and without any family by her side when she crossed the border from Mexico into the US in 2001.

21 years later, she received her PhD in just four years from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and as a newly minted doctor, she was accepted as an assistant professor at the Ivy League Cornell University, focused on interpersonal communication. Her upcoming position marks a major milestone for the first-generation college student who has seen opportunities and challenges as a member of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Pursuing a long and challenging path through the tiers of academia, Cornejo was motivated by her love of research and the light at the end of the tunnel: a tenure-track position at a prestigious university.

In addition to a job, she hoped the accepting university could petition for her green card and, eventually, citizenship. Or so she thought.

After Cornell University hired an attorney to work on her immigration case, Cornejo discovered a petition was not possible, leaving her in a continued limbo, like many DACA residents... READ MORE

Online essays and testimonials were quickly published. In television and radio interviews, acolytes hailed their pioneering work in promoting Mexican food in the United States and beyond. Pundits wondered whether there would ever be another quite like them. There was a mad rush to stockpile their products, for posterity’s sake.

Am I talking about Diana Kennedy, who died Sunday at age 99 and whose cookbooks are credited with popularizing regional Mexican food in the United States? Sure. I’m also talking about the Choco Taco, the frozen treat that parent company Klondike announced on Monday would be discontinued after 39 years.

All this week, my social media timelines have hosted nonstop tributes to the two. What amuses me is who’s saying what. The praise for Kennedy is coming mostly from food writers, chefs and people who don’t blink at dropping hundreds of dollars on dinner. 

The love for Choco Tacos? Everyone else.

And the Venn diagram of the two groups barely overlaps, if at all.

It’s cosmic justice — or at least further proof that God has a wicked sense of humor — that the deaths of Kennedy and the Choco Taco came just a day apart. They represent opposite ends of a battle that has raged for decades: what’s “authentic” and what’s not, and who gets to decide.

Proudly in the authenticista corner was Kennedy. She was a British-born woman who lived in Mexico during the 1960s and was shocked that the country’s upper classes largely dismissed its cuisine as peasant food. She went on to publicize Mexican food in the United States — first through classes in New York, then in a series of best-selling books... READ MORE