Lagging Scores of English Language Learners Partly Explained By Their Concentration in Low-Performing Schools

A Pew Hispanic Center report released today, June 26, 2008, examines the role of schools in the achievement gap of the nation's four million English language learner public school students. The Role of Schools in the English Language Learner Achievement Gap, analyzes newly available standardized test data, and finds that students designated as English language learners (ELL) tend to go to public schools with low standardized test scores. However, these low levels of assessed proficiency are not solely attributable to poor achievement by ELL students. These same schools report poor achievement by other major student groups as well, and have a set of characteristics associated generally with poor standardized test performance-such as high student-teacher ratios, high student enrollments and high levels of students who live in poverty or near poverty. When ELL students are not isolated in these low-achieving schools, their gap in test score results is considerably narrower.

READ THE FULL REPORT

Immigrant Latino Workers Hit Hard by Economic Slowdown

The Pew Hispanic Center today released Latino Labor Report, 2008: Construction Reverses Job Growth for Latinos. Using data through the first quarter of 2008, the report finds the economic downturn having a disproportionate impact on Hispanic workers. From an historic low in late 2006, the unemployment rate for Latinos rose sharply in 2007 and currently stands well above the rate for non-Latinos.

Immigrant Hispanics, especially Mexican immigrants and recent arrivals, have been hurt the most by the slump in the construction industry. Weekly earnings for most groups of Hispanic workers, particularly construction workers, also slipped backward in the past year. There are no signs Latino immigrants are leaving the U.S. labor market but they now play a smaller role in the growth of the Hispanic workforce than in recent years. The report is available at the Pew Hispanic Center's website, www.pewhispanic.org.

The Pew Hispanic Center, a project of the Pew Research Center, is a non-partisan, non-advocacy research organization based in Washington, D.C. and funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

Erecting Its Own Tombstone: Arizona’s Mandatory Basic Pilot/E-Verify Law

According to a report prepared by the National Immigration Law Center entitled Erecting Its Own Tombstone: Arizona's Mandatory Basic Pilot/E-Verify Law, Arizona's requirement that employers verify workers' employment eligibility via Basic Pilot/E-Verify has yielded negative results for the state, its businesses, and its workers, and recommends other states considering similar measures would do well to pay attention to these results.

Read the FULL REPORT

Report: "And Injustice for All: Workers’ Lives in the Reconstruction of New Orleans"

Released by the Advancement Project, the National Immigration Law Center, and The New Orleans Workers' Center for Racial Justice, the report entitled "And Injustice for All: Workers’ Lives in the Reconstruction of New Orleans" is the most comprehensive on race and labor after Katrina, based on interviews with over 1,000 workers.

In December of 2005, when the floodwaters of Katrina devastated the New Orleans community, the New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition came together as a gathering of local and national organizers, experts and groups to address the problems that they were seeing among new workers arriving to help rebuild, as well as survivors who were suddenly facing huge barriers to employment. The coalition mobilized 200 law school students to gather the stories of over 1000 workers, and authored the report.

READ THE FULL REPORT

Forcing Our Blues Into Gray Areas, Local Police and Federal Immigration Enforcement

The Nebraska-based non-profit, non-partisan law project Appleseed Network released a report titled "Forcing Our Blues Into Gray Areas, Local Police and Federal Immigration Enforcement", analyzing whether local law enforcement should be enforcing federal immigration law. Appleseed's report outlines the legal history behind the enforcement of federal immigration laws by local agencies, and points out the reasons why an increase in this type of collaboration is a "bad public policy" decision. Many police departments, local governments, and organizations around the country are opposing increased local police involvement in federal immigration laws, but cities like Phoenix, Arizona and its Police Department have expanded their role to report undocumented individuals to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The report outlines the following factors:

• The law is unclear regarding the authority of state and local police to enforce federal immigration law.
• There is a good legal argument to be made that state and local police do not have the authority to enforce immigration law.
• At a minimum, even if state and local police do have the legal authority to enforce immigration law, it is optional, which ultimately makes this a policy decision.
• Increasing the role of state and local police in immigration enforcement is bad policy, and there are very strong reasons for law enforcement and others to reject it.

Read the FULL REPORT

HISI Releases DVD Documentary: Immigration Operation

The Arizona-based Hispanic Institute of Social Issues announces its most recent production, "Operation Immigration - Arrests, Protests and Turmoil in Maricopa County", a raw-footage documentary of the highly controversial immigration sweeps conducted by the Maricopa County Sheriff Office in the heart of Arizona. A revealing visual testimony of a Sheriff -Joe Arpaio- determined to fight undocumented immigration, and the struggle of human rights advocates and people decided to stop him. This DVD shows unquestionable evidence of the crude and volatile social atmosphere prevailing in one of the fastest-growing counties in the United States.

Lenght: 47 minutes
EAN: 0979781469
Price: $20.00

Learn More or Purchase directly on AMAZON.COM

Report: U.S. Immigration Laws and Enforcement Destroy the Rights of Immigrants

Over-Raided, Under Siege: U.S. Immigration Laws and Enforcement Destroy the Rights of Immigrants provides a critical overview and analysis of the trends and patterns of human rights violations being perpetrated against immigrant and refugee communities by the U.S. government, local, county and state governments, employers and private citizen groups. It is the fourth report issued by the National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights (NNIRR) on immigration enforcement.

Over-Raided, Under Siege, produced under the auspices of the Human Rights Immigrant Community Action Network (HURRICANE) a new initiative of NNIRR, documents over 100 stories of human rights violations from across the country between 2006 and 2007. They range from immigration raids and migrant deaths at the U.S.-Mexico border tomounting detentions and deportations. The report identifies fivemajor trends of rights violations in immigration services and enforcement based on some 100 stories of abuse and 206 incidents of raids tracked through extensive documentation from newspaper articles, scholarly journals, reports, and interviews with affected persons and reporting by community groups. The report also provides a political and historical context to the stories.

READ FULL REPORT