Recently in Massachusetts Category

The Boston Globe reports on the latest Border Patrol recruiting drive here in Massachusetts.  While everyone else gets laid off there's no shortage of jobs that further militarize the U.S. 

It's funny, nativists don't want 'Mericans speaking Spanish, but it looks as though fluency in Spanish is a must for the Border Patrol.  Here's another interesting statistic:

About 53 percent of agents are Hispanic, about 45 percent are white, and about 1 percent are African-American, officials said.

Rachana Rhatti - Boston Globe (3 August 2008)

It seems the Latinos that nativists frequently target are not only dying for them in Iraq, but they're also doing the work for them protecting the border.

(Full Disclosure: I am a consultant for the online component of the Welcoming Massachusetts campaign)

The Boston Globe did a good piece on the Welcoming Massachusetts campaign, today.  My favorite part of the article is the picture that went with it, taken by Globe photographer David I. Ryan:



The article also got some good messages out there.

If you opened your newspapers in Massachusetts today, you read that Governor Deval Patrick revived the in-state tuition debate in Massachusetts again through his sweeping education reform.  Predictably, the Boston Herald jumped all over it and published not one, but two heavily slanted articles, publishing lies that I've addressed in an earlier post.

I wish I could be writing this post praising Deval Patrick for expending political capital on what he himself has said is a matter of "simple justice":

"It makes good sense for us economically, and for me it's just a matter of simple justice," Patrick said during a lunch with reporters yesterday. "We don't say to these kids they can't go to state colleges and universities; they can go. What we say to them is that they have to pay a different rate from the kid who sat across the aisle from them all through middle school and high school."

Lindsey Parietti - Daily News Transcript (25 June 2008)

But then I read the fine print of The Patrick Administration Education Agenda, and though I still have questions, I'm fairly sure, at least using the language in the report, that the newspapers were wrong.

This post was originally written for MTV's Choose Or Lose Street Team '08.

Picture: Gov. Deval Patrick celebrates the defeat of the proposal to ban marriage equality in Massachusetts (14 June 2007)

Katherine Patrick, the daughter of Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick, is a courageous youth.  In the last year she has come out as a lesbian to her friends and family, and last week she came out to the whole world.  18-year-old Katherine Patrick did a sit down interview with Bay Windows, "New England's largest GLBT newspaper", to make the announcement, and the news has since been written about by the Boston Herald, the Boston Globe, the Associated Press, and countless other news outlets that reach across the globe.

I've been away for a while doing work for the pro-migrant community and work that will get more exposure for this blog and all of its amazing writers.  Something that's been taking up a lot of time is videos for MTV, but I finally made my first decent one and had it featured on the front page of the Choose Or Lose website.  Click here to see it.

When anti-migrant organizations talk about "Attrition Through Enforcement", keep in mind that this is what they mean.  For everyone that advocates enforcing unreasonable and broken laws, for everyone that says, "what part of illegal don't you understand?" realize that this is the sort of country you are creating.

I've written about this trend before but it has gotten worse. Immigrant communities in the Boston area are in a heightened state of fear as people impersonating law enforcement officials barge into their homes and extort money from them.  The Boston Herald documents several reports of this oppression.  The latest suspects are pictured in this post:

One of the last anti-migrant politicians that had a chance at winning the presidency will suspend his campaign, according to CNN.  I hope I don't need to remind people of Mitt Romney's contradictory deportation-only approach to undocumented migration that he made a centerpiece of his campaign.

See the introductory post I put up just as the polls opened for more information.

I don't see how the federal government is expected to do anything about the millions of U.S. migrants living in fear when the press does a miserable job of informing the public.  Over the past few days, I've seen the Associated Press blast the comments of Governor Deval Patrick across the nation and fail to accurately inform readers about the context surrounding those comments.

I encourage everyone to write a letter to the editor and leave comments on the websites of the Boston Globe, the Boston Herald, the Houston Chronicle, The New Bedford Standard-Times, the Worcester Telegram, and the Berkshire Eagle.  It is especially important that people write letters to the editors of these papers to counter the inevitable firestorm that will play out in the editorial sections.

Everything makes sense when I go back to Guatemala.  I've gotten increasingly interested in local politics here in Massachusetts, but going back to Guatemala puts everything in perspective.  While I still have yet to be able to fully articulate it, I think I'm finally starting to get a feel for what matters for the billions of people that inhabit the earth. 

When I put it that way it might seem simple.  But in the world of new media, where it's theoretically possible to make an impact anywhere in the globe, at any time, prioritizing makes the difference between change and keeping things the same. 

It's never been enough to say, "do good", because almost everyone, at least in their mind, feels they are a good person at heart.  It's certainly not enough to say all each of us needs to do is help a few other people, because those with the privilege to do so are too few and those that need help and support are too many.  The question has always been when and how to better the world, and the answers certainly aren't always and however.  That leads to burnout. 

I think my mind is finally grasping the necessary nuance that has always allowed me to prioritize between issues like Boston's rat problem or a "virus of potholes", and malnourished children in Guatemala.