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Fear still haunts the Arab and Muslim communities of Southern


office because the document granting his temporary stay will expire
explained that his application for permanent residency is pending,
the governor's new antiterror restrictions, didn't understand the

Colorado to Delaware, have passed or are considering restrictions on
issuing driver's licenses to noncitizens. Some, like Georgia, Minnesota
Florida's Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles now sends
would authorize DMV staff to contact federal authorities if there is
Johnson, associate director of the American Immigration Lawyers
the country any safer."

South Carolina Attorney General Charlie Condon introduced legislation to
have local cops enforce federal immigration laws. Florida is working
with the Immigration and Naturalization Service on a groundbreaking plan
legal hook to justify their profiling and will prevent illegal
immigrants from reporting crimes against them," says Dan Kesselbrenner,
director of the National Immigration Project of the National Lawyers

Heightening surveillance of foreign students, bills pending in
colleges to report noncitizens to the INS if they repeatedly miss class
or withdraw. An Oklahoma measure would prevent noncitizens from
research assistant for South Carolina's House of Representatives,
describing a bill to restrict university enrollment of students who come

Oklahoma's Joint Homeland Security Task Force even brought up blocking
foreign students from certain courses. Representative Bill Paulk, a task
force member, said legislators are particularly worried about nuclear
courses you would not want foreigners to take."

For more than a century, a recognizable pattern existed among those
newcomers quickly helped build larger communities, they began to occupy
distinct places in the mental and physical geography of the city.

severely complicates the demographic pattern to which most New Yorkers
to 275,000 between 1990 and 2000, are indeed coming in significant
Mexican equivalent of the Puerto Rican neighborhoods of the Bronx, or
the Dominican enclave in Washington Heights. That the vast majority of
those who come across the Rio Grande are undocumented also suggests that
either politically or via organized labor, in city affairs.

audiences most recently for his intro to Spike Lee's Summer of
with some groups, particularly Mexicans, establishing a transnational
impossible even to identify a single unified process of Latino
the American dream.

Sweet Dream of Eduardo Guti&eacute;rrez
. Guti&eacute;rrez, an undocumented Mexican
laborer, died in a 1999 construction accident in the Hasidic
neighborhood of the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. For Breslin,
migrants face in coming north but shows how harsh the working conditions
provided only loneliness and a gruesome but entirely preventable death
in a cement foundation.

origins of what would otherwise have been yet another mostly forgotten
Matias (near Puebla), to recapture Eduardo's life and surroundings
before arriving in Brooklyn. In the process, Breslin accomplishes twin
goals: to show how Mexican migrants are increasingly making their way
well beyond the Southwest, steadily transforming the demographics of
Midwestern and Northeastern cities; and, more dramatically, he
illustrates how that migration probably has more in common with the
Middle Passage than with any of the heroism now accorded to the
immigrant journey through Ellis Island.

Breslin opens with a series of outsider's observations of life in
impoverished San Matias. Ninety percent of Mexican children will never
result of stories told by relatives and others within their community,
observes, soon become the young adults who are migrating along with
counterparts from India, China and elsewhere to become New York City's
new majority, by which he essentially means people of color.

what unionized American workers receive, Eduardo was tempted to go
then vividly re-creates both journeys, supplementing the two stories
with documentation of parallel dangers that Mexican migrants experience
delivered COD by a coyote on a flight from Los Angeles.

endure such hardship in coming north, there are still some troubling
dimensions to Breslin's account, particularly in his somewhat simplistic
as the subject of his sentences that one begins to fear Buchananesque
Breslin also far too simplistically refers on many occasions to how

Once away from the airport, Eduardo enters a frighteningly impersonal
city, and here Breslin emphasizes the changing meaning of the
contemporary immigrant experience: "Once, they came in dreadful old
ships, from Magilligan in Northern Ireland, from Cobh in southern
subsequent nonwhite migrations, particularly those of Puerto Ricans and
Dominicans, are missing from Breslin's litany, which illustrates the
degree to which the traditional mythology of immigration into New York
is skewing more than a few familiar demographic patterns.

Eduardo's experiences in Brooklyn illustrate some of the unique features
of contemporary Mexican migration. He settles with a handful of others
identity grew rapidly with the influx of Russian and Ukrainian
ongoing research of John Mollenkopf and others demonstrates, even though
their ranks are growing rapidly, Mexican migrants are tending to favor
heterogeneous ethnic neighborhoods rather than grouping together.
necessity for those who stay to form distinct neighborhoods of their

Those working here as undocumented laborers also face conditions hardly
conducive to sticking around. Despite repeated building-code violations
elsewhere in the neighborhood, a slumlord named Eugene Ostreicher was
able to continue building in South Williamsburg, using undocumented
Mexican laborers like Eduardo. While working for Ostreicher in November
supported by only three flimsy, improperly fastened beams; the structure
soon collapsed, and Eduardo drowned in cement three floors below.
Teitelbaum, ex-Mayor Rudolph Giuliani's liaison to the Hasidic
city's Department of Buildings, a bastion of frightening corruption and
But there is no doubting Breslin's crusading spirit, and he's always
to meet girlfriends."

As the book closes, with Eduardo dead and Ostreicher facing minimal
punishment at best, the meaning of the former's sweet dream is
increasingly transient, unregulated and brutal. Still, despite the
Jimmy Breslin has successfully helped open the door.

A camera system in the nation's capital is making civil libertarians

State officials rush to declare their own versions of the "war on

In anticipation of the Second Coming, evangelicals leap to Israel's

A recent front-page story in the Boston Globe proclaimed that New
England leads the nation in Ritalin prescription levels. Somewhat to my
surprise, the prevalence of Ritalin ingestion was generally hailed as a
good thing--as indeed it may be in cases of children with ADHD. But to
me the most startling aspect of the Globe's analysis was the
seeming embrace in many places of Ritalin as a "performance enhancer."
Prescription rates are highest in wealthy suburbs.

While the reasons for such a statistical skewing need more exploration
than this article revealed, what I found particularly interesting was
the speculation that New Englanders have a greater investment in
academic achievement: "'Our income is higher than in other states, and
we value education,' said Gene E. Harkless, director of the family
nurse-practitioner program at the University of New Hampshire. 'We have
families that are seeking above-average children.'"

Aren't we all. (And by "all," I mean all--wouldn't it be nice if
everyone understood that those decades of lawsuits over affirmative
action and school integration meant that poor and inner-city families
also "value education" and are "seeking above- average children"?) But
Ritalin, after all, works on the body as the pharmacological equivalent
of cocaine or amphetamines. It does seem a little ironic that poor
inner-city African-Americans, who from time to time do tend to get a
little down about the mouth despite the joys of welfare reform, are so
much more likely than richer suburban whites to be incarcerated for
self-medicating with home-brewed, nonprescription cocaine derivatives.
If in white neighborhoods Ritalin is being prescribed as a psychological
"fix" no different from reading glasses or hearing aids, it's no wonder
the property values are higher. Clearly the way up for ghettos is to
sweep those drugs off the street and into the hands of drug companies
that can scientifically ladle the stuff into underprivileged young black
children. I'll bet that within a single generation, the number of
African-Americans taking Ritalin--to say nothing of Prozac and
Viagra--will equal rates among whites. Income and property values will
rise accordingly. Dopamine for the masses!

Another potential reason for the disparity is, of course, the matter of
access to medical care. Prescriptions for just about anything are likely
to be higher where people can afford to see doctors on a regular
basis--or where access to doctors is relatively greater: New England has
one of the highest concentrations of doctors in the country. But access
isn't everything. Dr. Sally Satel, a fellow at the American Enterprise
Institute, says that when she prescribes Prozac to her lucky
African-American patients, "I start at a lower dose, 5 or 10 milligrams
instead of the usual 10-to-20-milligram dose" because "blacks metabolize
antidepressants more slowly than Caucasians and Asians." Her bottom line
is that the practice of medicine should not be "colorblind" and that
race is a rough guide to "the reality" of biological differences.
Indeed, her book, PC, M.D.: How Political Correctness Is Corrupting
, is filled with broad assertions like "Asians tend to have
a greater sensitivity to narcotics" and "Caucasians are far more likely
to carry the gene mutations that cause multiple sclerosis and cystic
fibrosis." Unfortunately for her patients, Dr. Satel confuses a shifting
political designation with a biological one. Take, for example, her
statement that "many human genetic variations tend to cluster by racial
geographic region." But what we call race does not reflect geographic
ancestry with any kind of medical accuracy. While "black" or "white" may
have sociological, economic and political consequence as reflected in
how someone "looks" in the job market or "appears" while driving or
"seems" when trying to rent an apartment, race is not a biological
category. Color may have very real social significance, in other words,
but it is not the same as demographic epidemiology.

It is one thing to acknowledge that people from certain regions of
Central Europe may have a predisposition to Tay-Sachs, particularly
Ashkenazi (but not Sephardic or Middle Eastern) Jews. This is a reality
that reflects extended kinship resulting from geographic or social
isolation, not racial difference. It reflects a difference at the
mitochondrial level, yes, but certainly not a difference that can be
detected by looking at someone when they come into the examining room.
For that matter, the very term "Caucasian"--at least as Americans use
it, i.e., to mean "white"--is ridiculously unscientific. Any given one
of Dr. Satel's "Asian" patients could probably more reliably claim
affinity with the peoples of the Caucasus mountains than the English-,
Irish- and Scandinavian-descended population of which the gene pool of
"white" Americans is largely composed. In any event, a group's
predisposition to a given disease or lack of it can mislead in making
individual diagnoses--as a black friend of mine found out to his
detriment when his doctor put off doing a biopsy on a mole because
"blacks aren't prone to skin cancer."

To be fair, Dr. Satel admits that "a black American may have dark
Africa, Europe and Asia." Still, she insists that racial profiling is of
use because "an imprecise clue is better than no clue at all." But let
us consider a parallel truth: A white American may have light skin, but
Europe and Asia. Given the complexly libidinous history of the United
States of America, I worry that unless doctors take the time to talk to
their patients, to ask, to develop nuanced family histories or, if
circumstances warrant, to perform detailed genomic analyses, it would be
safer if they assumed that, as a matter of fact, they haven't a clue.

We live in a world where race is so buried in our language and habits of
thought that unconscious prejudgments too easily channel us into
empirical inconsistency; it is time we ceased allowing anyone, even
scientists, to rationalize that consistent inconsistency as

Although former Vice President Quayle's legacy may not be one for the
television's Murphy Brown.

potential candidate for the Democratic
presidential nomination, Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich has been quite
military buildup and the vague and apparently horizonless "war on
right liberal positions. Michael Moore, who likes to rib progressives

proportions. He supported Bush's reinstatement of the gag rule for
recipients of US family planning funds abroad. He supported the Child
Custody Protection Act, which prohibits anyone but a parent from taking
health exception. He even voted against contraception coverage in health
Where reasonable constitutional objections could be raised--the lack of
, as the Supreme Court ruled in Stenberg v.
--Kucinich did not raise them; where competing principles
versus 10 percent from Planned Parenthood and 0 percent from NARAL.

providing women with more social supports and better healthcare, by
abortions for poor women with nonfederal dollars and against
permitting female soldiers and military dependents to have an abortion
in overseas military facilities even if they paid for it themselves.
Similarly, although Kucinich told me he was not in favor of

education before he cast a vote barring funds for abortions for
As a progressive, Kucinich has to understand that denying abortion
kind of healthcare.

for progressivism, the subject of hagiographic profiles in The
and elsewhere, speaks volumes about the low priority of
have seemed pragmatic; trying to make him President would be political
women do.

* * *

Once again, the Bosnian Initiative Frankfurt, a German human rights
group, is organizing summer camps on the Adriatic for displaced Bosnian
and Kosovar children of all ethnicities. For several years now,
Nation readers have contributed generously to the BIF and have



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July 9, 2014

Why the corporate media keep lending the far-right legitimacy. 

July 8, 2014