Freedman

With the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) policy's future in question, revisit Jonathan Freedman's prize-winning editorials on immigration in California.

Twenty-eight years after Jonathan Freedman won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Writing, an interviewer asked him how the winning work came to be.

Freedman answered:

“I was 30 years old, unemployed, freelancing in Haight-Ashbury. I went down to San Diego for a job interview at the Tribune. The editor took me to the cafeteria. ‘Jonathan, on my way to work, I saw these poor migrant workers hiding in the bushes in the rain. I’ve worked for this newspaper for 30 years. Every day we report murders and terrible things on the border. But we’ve never gone into depth on the issues underlying illegal immigration. If we did that, we could win a Pulitzer Prize.’

“I needed a job. The idea of a Pulitzer Prize was beyond my imagination. I got hired and trained as an editorial writer. Six months later, I said, ‘Mr. Bennett, do you remember what you said about the border?’ ‘Yeah, but we have no time,’ he said. ‘Write me a proposal.’ So I wrote, ‘The border between Mexico and the United States is where water flowing from the Colorado River stops, and a river of humanity flows northward from Mexico to United States.’

“So, the next day, I went to the border outpost at the extreme southwest corner of the United States and Mexico. I saw a hole in the chain-link fence. It was the size of a crouching man. Then I interviewed the border patrol agents. They told me how they’d get alerted when someone trips a wire. They’d chase them; they’d arrest them; they’d deport them. And the next day, they’d be back. I saw a holding tank for people who had been caught trying to cross the border. It was dark and dingy and someone had written on the wall mojado power, ‘wetback power.’

Easter sunrise on the border ends in trauma
By Jonathan Freedman

The night before Easter, three companeros crawled through a hole in the chain-link fence — into America. The border where they crossed is a no-man’s land. But in the spring, yellow flowers bloom waist-high beside the torn fence.

The companeros stopped to rest. Tomorrow was Domingo Santo, the holy day when the crucified Jesus rose from his tomb.

They laid a blanket under the flowers near a dirt track. They lay down and nestled together.

"Novel excerpt by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author Jonathan Freedman,"


If you have any questions regarding Freedman Novel or any other immigration topic,
Please contact LEGiTiGO

Immgrants Noble Prize Winners

Immigrants and Refugees Are Among America’s 2017 Nobel Prize Winners

The Nobel Prizes, awarded annually in recognition of extraordinary achievement in physics, chemistry, physiology or medicine, literature, and peace, have once again been won by Americans who came here as immigrants and refugees. Three out of the five Nobel Prize categories included immigrants or refugees.

Immigrants have a history of winning The Nobel Foundation’s numerous awards—33 of 85 American winners have been immigrants since 2000. In the chemistry, medicine, and physics categories respectively, foreign-born Americans have won 38 percent of chemistry and medicine prizes, as well as 40 percent of all physics prizes awarded in the last 17 years.

This year, immigrants have been awarded prizes in Peace:

The Nobel Prize in Peace was awarded to Alexander Glaser and Zia Mian, among the other members of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN) Glaser and Mian, both researchers at Princeton University and born in Germany and Pakistan respectively, work to “outlaw and eliminate all nuclear weapons” under international law through their work with ICAN. Berit Reiss-Andersen, Chair of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, remarked that the award represented “encouragement” to nuclear powers to continue negotiations around their use of weapons.

As with the winners from previous years, these immigrants and refugee have shared their talents, innovation, and energy with the nation.

Border Wall

The House Approves $10 Billion for Trump’s Border Wall

In an effort to fulfill the harsh requirements of the immigration executive order released during the Trump administration’s first week in office, the House Homeland Security Committee passed the Border Security for America Act, H.R. 3548, out of committee on a party line vote on Wednesday.

The timing of the Committee’s vote is significant—it likely represents Republicans’ willingness to use border wall funding as a bargaining chip for both the year-end government funding debate and negotiations over the fate of the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) initiative.

Though the president has said his border wall funding can be absent from the DACA deal, House Republicans want it front and center. They have threatened a government shutdown in December over the border wall funding, and may be tacking it on in exchange for a legislative fix for Dreamers.

Under this bill, DHS would receive $10 billion for a border wall. That amount of funding is far below any projection that currently exists, however. The Migration Policy Institute estimates the cost of the remaining border wall segments is between $15 and $25 billion, with each mile of fencing costing $16 million.

The bill does not stop at the border wall funding, however. The additional agents included in the bill would represent a 25 percent increase at a time when border apprehensions continue to go down, a slide that began and has remained fairly steady for the past 17 years. The bill would also make hiring these agents far easier by lessening requirements for agency employment. Border apprehensions are now running at less than 25 percent of the level they reached in 2000. The DHS Office of Immigration Statistics concluded in a report out just last month, “that the southwest land border is more difficult to illegally cross today than ever before.”

DACA Tips

DACA Application Tips

Tips for Form 821-D:
•You DO NOT need to complete the whole application if you’re only applying for renewal. You only have to complete the sections that are for renewal applicants. Look at the section headings to see which sections renewal applicants must complete.
•Your “Alien Number” is an 8 or 9 digit number that begins with the letter A. You can find it on your work permit, as well as your receipt and notices from USCIS. On your work permit it is the number labeled: “USCIS #”  (Part I, Question 6)
•Just like your first DACA application, there is a section which asks for a list of your previous addresses. As a renewal applicant, you only need to list of all address you have had and dates you moved since you submitted a DACA application 2 years ago. You do not need to list out all your addresses again, just those you’ve had since you last applied. (Part II, Questions 2-5)

Tips for form 1-795:
•To find which “USCIS Office” processed your initial application, look at your work permit where it says “Card #. There will be a 3 letter code followed by a series of numbers.

•Look at the 3 letters and then follow:  (Question 11)

•EAC- Vermont Service Center
•LIN – Nebraska Service Center
•SRC – Texas Service Center
•WAC- California Service Center

•You can also look at your work permit approval notice.  The name of the USCIS Service Center appears at the bottom of the notice.
•For the date, put the date on which your work authorization began, it will be on your work permit above the expiration date.
•For Results, put “Granted” this means that your initial DACA application was approved, which it was!

•As a renewal applicant, you current immigration status is “DACA renewal applicant”. (question 15)
•Your eligibility category is C33. (question 16)

Social Media Accounts

Earlier this week, Gizmodo reported that the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was tracking the social media accounts of immigrants to the US, including green card holders and naturalized citizens. DHS says that nothing about the policy is new.

There are still a number of questions that remain but DHS insists that the policy, which was just announced in the Federal Register last week, actually dates back to 2012. The agency did not explain why the policy was just being published now, only saying that it was necessary under the Privacy Act.


In an email from DHS:

The notice did not announce a new policy. The notice simply reiterated existing DHS policy regarding the use of social media. In particular, USCIS follows DHS Directive 110-01 for the Operational Use of Social Media. This policy is available on DHS’s public website and was signed on 6/8/2012.

This policy permits a small cadre of specifically trained USCIS officers to access publicly available social media as an aid in determining whether an individual is eligible for an immigration benefit.

The notice does not authorize USCIS to search the Internet history of these individuals. Furthermore, the notice does not authorize USCIS to search the social media accounts of naturalized citizens; rather, it simply restates USCIS’ authority to search publicly available social media information of individuals applying for naturalization and informs the public that this publicly available information will be stored in the applicant’s alien file.

One of the most alarming things about the policy published in the Federal Register was the notice that it applied to not only new immigrants, but also to existing Green Card holders, as well as naturalized citizens. But if you believe DHS, (and that’s admittedly hard to do with President Trump in charge), naturalized citizens who went through the process before 2012 won’t have their social media accounts actively monitored by US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS).

People are justifiably concerned about the treatment of immigrants to the US right now. The Trump regime has shown time and again that it’s hostile to immigration, even of the completely legal kind. For instance, Trump is set to announce a policy that would cap America’s acceptance of refugees at just 45,000 people next year, the lowest in many years.