RECENT ARTICLES

Hispanics Report Dissatisfaction with the Availability of Cancer Information

PBS film highlights Mexican American case for equality in Supreme Court

DHS and Immigration: Taking Stock and Correcting Course

Hispanic Health to Benefit from Stimulus Package

Unions and Upward Mobility for Latino Workers

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Hispanics Report Dissatisfaction with the Availability of Cancer Information

Eighty-three percent of Hispanic respondents to a Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) reported never seeking cancer information from any source. Those who sought cancer information experienced dissatisfaction with their search.

Hispanics reported low confidence overall in their ability to obtain cancer information.

Close to 30% of Spanish-speaking individuals had little to no confidence in their ability to obtain cancer information compared to 6% of non-Hispanics and 11.5% of English-speaking Hispanics.

Among Spanish-speaking Hispanics, 67% said their last search for cancer information took alot of effort, 55% said the information was hard to understand, and 58% had concerns about the quality of the information they found. Among English-speaking Hispanics, the information-seeking experience was slightly better; with 43% saying their last search took a lot of effort, 25% saying the information was hard to understand, and 60% having concerns about the quality of information they found.

The bottom line is, more information needs to be made available in Spanish about cancer. Acceso Hispano is attempting to address this need through our “El Cancer Nos Afecta a Todos” campaign.

Read results of HINTS survey

Learn more about Acceso Hispano’s cancer awareness campaign

View cancer resources in Spanish

PBS film highlights Mexican American case for equality in Supreme Court

AMERICAN EXPERIENCE presents A Class Apart from the award-winning producers Carlos Sandoval (Farmingville), and Peter Miller (Sacco and Vanzetti, The Internationale). The one-hour film dramatically interweaves the story of its central characters— activists and lawyers, returning veterans and ordinary citizens, murderer, and victim — within the broader story of a civil rights movement that is still very much alive today.

The film begins with the little known history of Mexican Americans in the United States. In 1848, the Mexican-American War came to an end. For the United States, the victory meant ownership of large swaths of Mexican territory. The tens of thousands of residents living on the newly annexed land were offered American citizenship as part of the treaty to end the war. But as time evolved it soon became apparent that legal citizenship for Mexican Americans was one thing, equal treatment would be quite another.

In the first 100 years after gaining U.S. citizenship, many Mexican Americans in Texas lost their land to unfamiliar American laws, or to swindlers. With the loss of their land came a loss of status, and within just two generations, many wealthy ranch owners had become farm workers. After the Civil War, increasing numbers of Southern whites moved to south Texas, bringing with them the rigid, racial social code of the Deep South, which they began to apply not just to blacks, but to Mexican Americans as well.

Widespread discrimination followed Latinos from schoolhouses and restaurants to courthouses and even to funeral parlors, many of which refused to prepare Mexican American bodies for burial. During World War II, more than 300,000 Mexican Americans served their country expecting to return home with the full citizenship rights they deserved. Instead, the returning veterans, many of them decorated war heroes, came back to face the same injustices they had experienced all their lives.

Latino lawyers and activists were making progress at state levels, but they knew that real change could only be achieved if Mexican Americans were recognized by the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution — something that could only be accomplished by bringing a case to the Supreme Court.

DHS and Immigration: Taking Stock and Correcting Course

The Migration Policy institute just released a report: Department of Homeland Security and Immigration: Taking Stock and Correcting Course. The report makes 36 recommendations for improvements that the Obama administration can make immediately, without any change in legislation, in order to improve effectiveness and implementation of current, often criticized, immigration laws and agencies. In doing so the federal goverment would build American confidence, a crucial first step to creating new mandates.

There is widespread agreement that the nation’s immigration laws and system are badly broken. However, the legislative measures that would be required to fix them would be sweeping and controversial. So the timetable for enacting reforms is uncertain.

A complete list of the recommendations can be found at: www.migrationpolicy.org. Some of the recommendations are included below:

• US Customs and Border Protection should halt construction of border technology pending a review of the effectiveness of such measures.

• ICE , in accordance with its mission, should focus its operations on the criminal enterprises that underlie large-scale illegal migration. Its investigations should be prioritized to target worksites that terrorists may attempt to infiltrate and employers who intentionally hire unauthorized workers in order to depress wages, undermine working conditions, and gain an unfair competitive advantage.

• ICE should routinely refer for criminal prosecution those who commit egregious or repeated violations of immigration law, or who commit unrelated criminal offenses. ICE should not overuse criminal charges in routine immigration-status violation circumstances.

• Supervised release programs run by ICE should be expanded for discretionary detainees who do not threaten national security or public safety, and who would not represent a flight risk while under supervision.

• The Social Security Administration’s (SSA) “no-match” program, whose purpose is to credit earnings to those who paid into the system, should not be used by DHS as an immigration enforcement tool.

• Funding for USCIS should be “right-sized” and adjudication procedures should be streamlined so that the agency can break the recurring cycle of backlogs that impedes its ability to function as a true immigration services agency.

• To encourage legal immigration for all who are eligible for benefits under current laws, USCIS should adjudicate in the United States, not at consulates abroad, “extreme hardship” waivers for persons approved for family-based visas.

Hispanic Health to Benefit from Stimulus Package

Jane L. Delgado, President and CEO of the National Alliance for Hispanic Health, the nation’s leading Hispanic health advocacy group, delivered the following statement on the signing of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act by President Obama in Denver, CO.

“In the current economic environment, millions of Hispanic families are an illness or hospital stay away from financial disaster. The President’s action today in Denver, signing into law the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, has brought a measure of peace of mind to millions struggling with their family budgets.

With one in ten Hispanics now unemployed, the ranks of the uninsured are growing daily. The President has taken decisive action to address the needs of Hispanic families. By reauthorizing the State Children’s Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) less than two weeks ago, an estimated 1.5 million currently uninsured Hispanic children are now poised to gain health insurance coverage. Today, by signing the stimulus package, the President is bringing relief to families by extending private health insurance support for the unemployed, increasing federal spending on Medicaid, and expanding the capacity of community health centers to deliver needed health care services.

The stimulus package signed by the President also makes critical investments in the future of improved health care for all Americans. Support for health information technology, including collection of information on gender and ethnicity, dramatically improves our national understanding of health. Comparative effectiveness research called for in the legislation is significantly improved by language recognizing that ‘a one-size-fits-all approach…is not the most medically appropriate’ and calling for inclusion of diverse populations in research.

New investments in prevention and training of primary care providers will refocus health care services on supporting health rather than only treating illness. Furthermore, support for science research, environmental innovation, and education of the next generation of scientists will ensure that scientific, medical, and environmental innovation continues to be an important component of the American economy.

Visit http://www.hispanichealth.org/ to learn more.

Unions and Upward Mobility for Latino Workers

Latinos are the fastest growing ethnic group in the U.S. work force. At the end of the 1970s, less than five percent of U.S. workers were Latinos; by 2007, Latinos had grown to 14 percent of the American work force.

Latinos are also the fastest growing group in the U.S. labor movement. In 1983 (the earliest year for which comparable data are available), Latinos accounted for 6 percent of unionized workers; by 2007, they were almost 12 percent of the union work force.

A recent paper published by the Center for Economic and Policy Research examines the impact of unionization on the pay and benefits of Latino workers. The most recent data suggest that even after controlling for differences between union and non-union workers –including such factors as age and education level– unionization substantially improves the pay and benefits received by Latino workers.

On average, unionization raised Latino workers’ wages 17.6 percent –or about $2.60 per hour– relative to Latino workers with similar characteristics who were not in unions. The union impact on health insurance and pension coverage was even larger. Latino workers who were in unions were about 26 percentage points more likely to have employer-provided health insurance and about 27 percentage points more likely to have a pension plan than similar non-union workers.

The benefits of unionization were also high for Latino workers in typically low-wage occupations. Latino workers in unions in otherwise low-wage occupations earned, on average, 16.6 percent more than their non-union counterparts. Unionized Latino workers in low-wage occupations were also 41percentage points more likely than comparable non-union workers to have employer-provided health insurance, and 18 percentage points more likely to have a pension plan.

The findings demonstrate that Latino workers who are able to bargain collectively earn more and are more likely to have benefits associated with good jobs. The data, therefore, suggest that better protection of workers’ right to unionize would have a substantial positive impact on the pay and benefits of Latino workers.

Read full report here

Source: The Center for Economic and Policy Research