Tag: south america
Arizona Republican Warns About ‘Browning Of America’ On Tape

Arizona Republican Warns About ‘Browning Of America’ On Tape

A state senator has come under fire for her comments about immigration at a recent meeting at Arizona’s Republican Party headquarters.

In audio obtained and published by the Phoenix New Times, Republican Sylvia Allen can be heard warning that the United States is “going to look like South American countries very quickly” and sounding alarms about the “browning of America.” She gave the remarks at “Mormon Political Pioneers” held at the headquarters, the Times reported.

“I said we needed to be able to control our immigration process so that we have time to assimilate people into our society and economic system. Jobs, housing, education, and health care,” she said. “Plus to be able to teach them about the American form of government. That’s all there was to it.”

She also made comments that seemed to feed into white nationalist fears about racial minorities “replacing” white people in the United States.

“The median age of a white woman is 43. The median age of a Hispanic woman is 27,” she said. “We are not reproducing ourselves, the birthrates. But here’s what I see is the issue. It’s because of immigration.”

After the remarks were published, she issued an apology.

“Let me start off by sincerely apologizing to anyone who has been hurt by my words. My intent was not to offend the residents of Arizona, but I see the effect was different and I am recognizing that. While I do apologize for the remarks, please let me clarify what I failed to articulate properly during my speech,” she said.

She said her concern about South American immigration is that “some of these countries are socialist and that we must preserve our Constitutional Republic form of government and that we have not taught the next generation the difference.”

Allen also added: “During my speech, I have referenced the presentation titled ‘The Browning of America’ by Dr. James H. Johnson who is a well-respected demographer. I want to make sure the public is aware that those are not my words.”

The Phoenix New Times suggested that Allen’s warnings don’t actually comport with Johnson’s views:

Allen’s interpretation of Johnson’s research does not align with how he presents it in public lectures. In frequent talks to business groups, Dr. Johnson describes the trend of increasing immigration from Hispanic countries as a reality that the U.S. will need to adapt to if it wants to maintain its “competitiveness in the global marketplace.”

In a 2013 lecture to the National Entrepreneur Center in Florida, Johnson disputed the notion that immigrants place a burden on society. He distinguished between the “fiscal impact” of immigrants, such as healthcare and education costs, with the “economic impact,” which factors in the spending power of immigrants and other benefits.

Watch the NowThis clip, which includes the audio of Allen’s comments, below:

 

New Exodus Of Cubans Headed To The US Is Underway Across The Americas

New Exodus Of Cubans Headed To The US Is Underway Across The Americas

By Nancy San Martin, Miami Herald (TNS)

CIUDAD HIDALGO, Mexico — They line up on the edge of the water, their silhouettes barely visible in the wee hours before the sun rises. Groups of 10 to 12 climb aboard rafts mounted with plywood and pay less than $2 to be ferried to the other side. Within the span of 20 minutes, at least 60 have crossed aboard six rafts.

All of them are Cuban migrants en route to the United States. The illegal crossing scene at the Rio Suchiate — the body of water that separates Guatemala from Mexico — is happening every day under the cover of darkness.

A new exodus of Cubans is underway at this river in Ciudad Hidalgo in the Mexican state of Chiapas. Over the past month, hundreds have come across from the border town of Tecun Uman, Guatemala, and those making the journey say many more are on the way.

“We’re leaving in droves,” said one Cuban as he rushed to get away from the river and onto a van that would drive his group to the nearest immigration center in Tapachula, about 18 miles away. “Everybody is leaving Cuba.”

“Another hundred are waiting to cross,” shouted another young man as he dismounted the raft from Guatemala and caught up with the group of new arrivals in Mexico.

The migrants are from across the island, predominantly between 20 and 40 years old. Many travel with children. Most are headed to South Florida.

The migrants are Cubans who have either spent some time in third countries such as Ecuador or who travel directly from the island to a third country as tourists and immediately proceed on their journey across South and Central America to make their way to the U.S.-Mexico border.

The migration route is not new for Cubans. But the numbers passing through over the past month have grown to the point that human rights activists in Mexico have labeled it a “migration crisis” that is adding to the already high number of Central American migrants also using Mexican land as a pathway toward America.

“A lot are coming through here,” said Sister Maria del Carmen, who helps run a Catholic migrant shelter in Tapachula. Since it opened its doors in early September, more than 500 Cubans have been served at the shelter.

“But the figure is much higher,” del Carmen said. “The immigration center is full of Cubans.”

Official data show a significant increase in the number of Cubans coming across the U.S.-Mexico border.

According to the latest figures from U.S. Customs and Border Protection, at least 27,413 Cubans have entered through the U.S.-Mexico border from Oct. 1, 2014, through Aug. 31. Another 9,056 arrived without visas at Miami International Airport during the same time frame.

The border entries are at its highest since 2005 with increases each fiscal year over the past four years: 5,316 border entries in 2011; 10,315 in 2012; 11,932 in 2013 and 17,459 in 2014.

On a recent Wednesday morning at the immigration center in Tapachula, dozens of newly arrived Cuban migrants collected their passports and waited outside to get processed and obtain “safe passage” documents that give them 20 days to leave Mexico. Many more were also inside the facility. Immigration authorities declined to comment.

Among those waiting to be processed was Guantanamo resident Angel Reyna Rojas, 30, who was traveling with his wife Yudisleidi Perez and 3-year-old son Angel Fabian.

Reyna Rojas and his wife left Cuba in August 2013 and traveled to Quito, Ecuador, on a tourist visa and began to establish roots there. Reyna Rojas returned to Guantanamo in December to pick up his son.

“We left Cuba always with the purpose of bettering our lives,” he said. “For some Cubans in Ecuador, things have gone well but not for us.”

The family tried to emigrate legally through both the Mexican and Nicaragua embassies but their petitions were denied.
“So we decided to embark on the long journey,” Reyna Rojas said.

Like many other Cubans taking the same route, the Reyna Rojas family made contact with a well-organized smuggling network, made their way to Cartagena, Colombia, and began their odyssey to the United States on Sept. 26 aboard a sailboat that took them and other Cuban migrants on a turbulent 36-hour ride to Panama.

They spent a month traveling across South and Central America, spending money on smuggling fees, bribes to border agents and police, transportation costs, visa fees and other incidentals. Along the way, they replenished dwindling dollars with wire transfers from relatives in the United States. On Thursday, after crossing seven countries and spending about $7,000, they made it to their final destination: with family in Hialeah.

“Thank God this nightmare is over,” he wrote in an email upon arrival. “I’m reborn.”

Reyna Rojas said the number of Cubans making the same journey is astounding.

In Panama, during the early part of their travels, Reyna Rojas said immigration authorities told him that by the time his family arrived, thousands of Cubans had already passed through there.
“That is not counting the great number of people who got stranded because they’d run out of money,” he said.

In Choluteca in southern Honduras, where they spent a weekend awaiting documents that would allow them to continue their journey, Reyna Rojas said the hotels in town were teeming with Cubans making the same journey.

“More than 800 Cubans were there,” he said. “All of the hotels were full. All of them.”

Those fleeing cited several reasons for abandoning the island, including economic hardships and fear that restored diplomatic ties between Washington and Havana will bring an end to the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows most Cubans who make it to U.S. soil to stay. But the primary reason cited for fleeing, migrants said, is simply because now they can.

New rules that took effect in 2013, which eased strict exit visa requirements and allows Cubans to travel more freely, has opened a new way out for those who want to abandon the island.

“So long as there is a way for people to get out of Cuba, they will continue to leave,” said Jose Angel Jordan, 30, of Havana.

He, too, made it to Miami Tuesday night on a flight from Houston after crossing the border into Texas from Matamoros, Mexico, and is staying with family.

“We are very happy because it’s not easy to get here across so many countries,” said Jordan’s cousin, Dayron Orlando Alvarez, who fled Cuba eight years ago. “It’s a little risky, but those who do it take the risk because they want to move forward and have a better life.”

Yeniset Hernandez Deschapelles, of Matanzas, who traveled with husband Rafael Pino Espinosa and their 2-year-old son Shairas Zakir Pino, left Cuba in 2014 by way of Guyana. They stayed 10 months, then went to Brazil and spent another 10 months saving money for the journey across Central America to the U.S. with help from family in Canada.

“Everybody wants to go to America,” Hernandez Deschapelles said in strained English outside the immigration center in Tapachula. “A lot of people have big problems in Cuba. … The salaries are very low so everybody wants to move to a better future, also for their children, for their family. All the people here want to help their family in Cuba.”

“That’s why people want to travel to another country like Ecuador, Panama, Colombia,” she said. “They make the big travel. … It’s a little dangerous to go to the big dream, the Cuban dream: to go to America.”

Hernandez Deschapelles said that during her journey, she also came across hundreds of other traveling Cubans, including children.

Pinar del Rio native Carmen Ordaz, 33, also was headed to Miami to join her husband Orlando Cata. He was a doctor assigned to community service in Venezuela, defected through Colombia and made the same journey about five months ago.

Ordaz followed suit, arriving by bus to Miami a little more than a week ago after crossing the U.S.-Mexico border in Reynosa, Texas.

“The fear is that the Cuban Adjustment Act will end,” Ordaz said. “So people are getting out.”

Most of those interviewed after entering Mexico said they have little hope for significant changes in Cuba under the Castro regime, despite the restored diplomatic relations and some economic openings on the island signed off by Cuban leader Raul Castro.

“Everybody who leaves Cuba knows that nothing is going to change there,” Reyna Rojas said. “And if there is going to be change, it will take 30 or 40 years. Perhaps longer.

“Now with the new relations (between the U.S. and Cuba), there might be a little more flexibility but the situation in Cuba is not going to change,” he said. “That belongs to them and they will not change. I blame them for everything we’ve been through — Fidel and Raul.”
___
(El Nuevo Herald staff writer Alfonso Chardy contributed to this report.)

Graphic: Map of route taken by Cuban migrants to the U.S. Miami Herald 2015.

Pope Francis’ Visit A Respite For Embattled Ecuadorean President

Pope Francis’ Visit A Respite For Embattled Ecuadorean President

By Pablo Jaramillo Viteri and Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

QUITO, Ecaudor — While probably not his intention, Pope Francis handed embattled Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa a much-needed political respite — a de-facto if temporary truce with the legions of opponents who had been staging daily protests against the government.

Many of those foes accused the leftist Correa of politicizing the pope’s three-day stay in Ecuador, which ended Wednesday with the pontiff’s departure to Bolivia.

To be sure, the charismatic Correa was beaming as he greeted Francis on the tarmac in Quito upon his arrival Sunday.

And what was supposed to be a brief courtesy visit by the pope to the president at his Carondolet palace on Monday ran much longer than expected when Correa escorted Francis down a winding reception line, TV cameras in tow.

And Correa again accompanied the pope to his departure flight.

The pope had not even left Ecuadorean airspace, however, when the opposition announced it would resume the demonstrations.

“With all due respect for the pope, his visit does not solve the country’s problems, because the abuses continue,” Clever Jimenez, of the indigenous Pachakutik party, told the Los Angeles Times.

“The president speaks of dialogue, but we cannot believe him.”

Correa’s foes criticize him for what they say are his efforts to stifle the independent press and destroy or co-opt most of Ecuador’s democratic institutions. His government has also been accused of rampant corruption. The most recent blow was an effort by Correa to restructure inheritance and capital-gains taxes to redistribute wealth.

He, in turn, claims his critics are trying to overthrow the government in order to preserve longtime, rapacious economic interests. His supporters point to his accomplishments in building up the country’s transportation system and expanding spending on health and education.

Much of the opposition to Correa, like Jimenez’s party, espouses the same leftist ideology as the president. Indigenous groups accuse him of being in league with profit-churning mining companies that are destroying their land. They plan a national strike for early August.

The political heat on Correa has been so intense that the Ecuadorean army last week found it necessary to deny rumors of a military coup — always a sign that trouble may be brewing. His poll ratings, while still quite high, are at their lowest point in his more than eight years of governing.

While Correa apparently hoped to use Francis as an endorsement (and his associates claimed as much), and the opposition wanted Francis to advocate on its behalf, the pope was subtle in any scolding that can be gleaned from his words.

His admonishments seemed aimed at all sides of the political disputes here.

“Dialogue is needed and is fundamental for arriving at the truth,” the pope said in his final and most overtly political speech in Quito.

“In a participatory democracy, each social group, indigenous peoples, Afro-Ecuadoreans, women, civic associations and those engaged in public service, are all indispensable participants in this dialogue.”

Susana Gonzalez, a City Council member in Guayaquil, Ecuador’s largest city and a center of much of the opposition to Correa, said that despite the country’s deep Catholicism and admiration for the pope, the president’s critics aren’t going to abandon their struggle based on Francis’ visit.

“The Ecuadorean people are Catholic and noble,” she said in an interview. “But this is also a people that fights for its rights.”

Whether or not Correa scored political points, his supporters sought to portray the pope’s visit in those terms.

Pamela Falconi, a congresswoman from his Alianza Pais political movement, said the pope had “defined the important points for the country,” such as family, solidarity and respect, which should govern any future talks with the opposition.

“We want to dialogue, but there are radical sectors of the opposition that seek to agitate the streets instead of generating proposals,” she said.

Ecuador’s Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities, one of the civil society groups chosen to meet with the pope on Tuesday and a staunch opponent of Correa, wrote the pontiff asking for his help in protecting their “mother earth.”

It is not clear whether they got through to him, but in a speech that day he said: “We cannot keep turning our back on our reality, on our brothers, on our mother, the Earth.”

(Special correspondent Viteri reported from Quito and Times staff writer Wilkinson from Mexico City.)

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

AFP Photo/Filippo Monteforte

Pope Begins Trip To South America

Pope Begins Trip To South America

By Tracy Wilkinson and Pablo Jaramillo Viteri, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

QUITO, Ecuador — Pope Francis launched the first of two summertime trips to the Americas on Sunday, arriving in Ecuador on a mission to reach and energize some of the hemisphere’s poorest, most marginalized — and most Catholic — populations.

Francis, the first pope born in the Americas, intends for his now-familiar theme of expanding a “church for the poor” to be made real on his native continent.

“I thank God for having allowed me to return to Latin America to be here with you today,” Francis said after stepping off the Alitalia jet that brought him from Rome, becoming the first pope in 30 years to set foot in the dramatically beautiful but politically troubled Andean country of Ecuador.

He said he hoped the Gospel would lead the way to “meeting contemporary challenges,” while respecting differences, dialogue and broad participation, so that growth and progress can benefit “everyone, with particular concern for the most vulnerable of our brothers and sisters.”

Departing from his prepared remarks, he said that concern for the most vulnerable “is a debt that all of Latin America has.”

Francis was greeted with a hug on the heavily guarded tarmac by Ecuador’s leftist president, Rafael Correa. A gust of wind knocked the pope’s white cap from his head as he walked off the plane.

The pope noted that Ecuador was home to the point on Earth “closest to the sun,” the peak of the Chimborazo volcano.

Francis sounded tired as he spoke, his voice somewhat strained.

After Ecuador, he will travel to Bolivia and Paraguay over the next eight days.

By choosing impoverished and geopolitically insignificant countries, Francis drives home his belief in preaching “from the periphery,” as he and others have put it.

Similarly, he elected to visit Albania and Bosnia-Herzegovina in Europe before larger, wealthier countries such as France and Germany, noted Austen Ivereigh, an expert on the church and author of a biography, The Great Reformer: Francis and the Making of a Radical Pope.

“The point he wants to make … is his conviction that often those on the margins are the most receptive to the church, and he wants to give voice to those on the margins,” Ivereigh, founder of the Catholic Voices website, said in a telephone interview from England.

It is an attitude Francis solidified when he cleared the way this year for the beatification of slain Archbishop Oscar Romero of El Salvador, who was revered in much of Latin America and widely seen as a champion for the poor and downtrodden.

Expectations are high for this papal pilgrimage, with predictions that millions will turn out to see Francis, who is extremely popular, even among many non-Catholics.

Alex Guerrero, a doctor who traveled with his family for two hours to Quito to see the pope on Sunday, said that not coming was not an option. “We had to know someone whose message was so positive, so in favor of the poor,” he said.

The Argentine-born pontiff will be in his element, speaking his native Spanish and evangelizing among people he knows well. As a Jesuit priest in Buenos Aires, he often preached in that city’s shantytowns, which were heavily populated by Paraguayan, Ecuadorean and Bolivian immigrants.

As he did during his first trip to Latin America in Brazil in 2013, the pope also hopes to revitalize a church that has lost ground to Protestant groups, secularism and indigenous movements.

“The big question is: Will the wild popularity of Pope Francis translate into numbers for the church?” Andrew Chesnut, a church studies professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, said in a recent broadcast of Latin Pulse. “If it doesn’t, the Catholic Church will continue to be in trouble.”

That question is less of an issue in the countries of this voyage, three of the most Catholic nations in South America, according to a recent survey by the Pew Research Center. In Paraguay, 89 percent of residents identify themselves as Roman Catholic, and attendance at Mass is particularly high.

The pope also is expected to make a special appeal to the indigenous, sprinkling his sermons with native languages such as Guarani, Aymara and Quechua _ in part to counter a movement in South America to recover pre-Columbian concepts, but that has sometimes taken on anti-colonial, and anti-clerical, tones, Ivereigh said.

Whether he gets mired in national politics or uses the themes he shares with leftist leaders to navigate the minefields will test Francis’ considerable diplomatic skills. He would find common cause, for example, on climate change and other environmental ills that he blames in part on Western consumerism, as outlined in his recent encyclical on the subject.

In Bolivia, church-state relations were soured after the 2005 election of leftist President Evo Morales and his push to change the constitution, declaring Bolivia a secular state.

“The church had been a privileged institution and Bolivia opted to become a lay state,” said the Rev. Steve Judd, an American missionary priest in the Bolivian city of Cochabamba. “That caused some mutual suspicion, where the church would go.”

But Morales quickly embraced Francis and even traveled to Brazil and Rome to meet with him.

“Some people consider the pope coming to the country as perhaps a favor or a way to improve relations with the current government, or because of the friendship (Morales) has with the pope,” said Jose Luis Aguirre, spokesman for the papal trip’s organizing committee in La Paz, the Bolivian capital.

Francis plans to spend just four hours in La Paz and its sprawling neighbor El Alto because of their nearly 12,000-foot altitude _ potentially problematic for a pope with one lung. He will then travel to Santa Cruz, in Bolivia’s lowlands.

In Quito, meanwhile, in the days leading up to the pope’s arrival, thousands of anti-government demonstrators have taken to the streets to protest tax hikes, turning raucous at the end of last week and inviting an angry rebuke from Correa on Saturday. He accused his foes of attempting to politicize the pope’s visit.

“Enough of so much violence, so much cowardice,” Correa said in a weekly, four-hour television address. “How sad we have to talk about this before the pope’s arrival.”

In response, opposition leaders criticized Correa’s government for cherry-picking papal statements to support its own issues, such as the need for redistribution of wealth, and plastering them on fences across the capital.

(Special correspondent Jaramillo Viteri reported from Quito and staff writer Wilkinson from Mexico City. Special correspondent David Agren in Mexico City contributed to this report.)

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

AFP Photo/Andreas Solaro