NEWSXENOPHOBIA

Last week, the American Heritage Dictionary added an entry for the term "anchor baby" without indicating that it was a derogatory and offensive term. You might remember the term's popularity during last year's 14th Amendment debates  - when it was used by opponents of so-called "birthright citizenship" to describe - and dehumanize - immigrant children.

Outraged by the slur's "neutral" definition in the dictionary, Jennifer Chenoweth started a petition on Change.org, asking the dictionary to label the term as offensive, or to remove it entirely.

After reading a blog post by Immigration Impact that criticized the dictionary's definition - and hearing from over 80 concerned petition signers, - Steve Kleinedler, the executive editor of the dictionary, both signed and personally responded in the comments on Jennifer's petition. 

"I am the executive editor of the American Heritage Dictionary. We have already updated the website to include an Offensive label. This is an omission on our part that I acknowledge and apologize for. We are working on a revision to the definition itself. I have been in touch with Immigration Impact, and they have updated their original post on this subject. Thank you all for your opinions and feedback."

On Monday, the American Heritage dictionary officially changed the definition to reflect the offensive nature of the term. Victory!

Update: Campaign covered in San Francisco Weekly, Huffington Post, CBS local news, and Styleite. 

Imagine you want to make a personalized t-shirt for a friend's birthday. You head to the CafePress site - the self-proclaimed, "largest selection of artist-designed t-shirts, clothing, accessories, housewares and gifts." As you search through the site, you see a collection of stickers, decals and wall peels for sale. They are designed to look like a hunting permit that allows people to hunt and kill... other people. Specifically, the sticker is a hateful joke about using violence against undocumented immigrants. What do you do?

Victor Hoelscher, a veteran immigrant rights activist from Phoenix, sprung into action. After investigating the CafePress guidelines for "Prohibited Content", he found that the offensive "Illegal Alien Hunting Permit" product should be prohibited based on: "Use of marks that signify hate towards another group of people" and "Obscene and vulgar comments and offensive remarks that harass, threaten, defame or abuse others". He started a Change.org petition calling on the company's co-founder to stop the sale and distribution of the violent merchandise.

Within only four days and after recruiting hundreds of supporters t0 his cause, Victor reported that CafePress had stopped selling the offensive decals, but they still appeared on the site. He then followed up respectfully requesting the merchandise be fully removed. Victory! On Friday, Victor let us know that CafePress had officially taken down the violent product and sent an email to hundreds of petition signers to apologize, stating that the merchandise had escaped their quality control process.

[Warning: explicit language.]

"You need to pack your [expletive] up and go back to wherever it is you came from. Nobody wants you here. You are invading the legal people that are in this country and ruining this country. I hope you choke in your own vomit." This was one of the literally hundreds of voice-mails that Jorge-Mario Cabrera received on his personal cell phone after two hosts of a Los Angeles radio talk show read his phone number live on air and asked their listeners to call him in response to his support of the California DREAM Act.

The John and Ken Show is a popular Southern California talk radio show that reaches nearly 1 million listeners. While many locals had been uncomfortable with the hosts' decidedly anti-immigrant tone in the past, the threatening phone calls to Cabrera, a staff member at an LA-based non-profit organization, appear to have been the final straw. The Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles (CHIRLA) - where Cabrera works - have teamed up with the National Hispanic Media Coalition to promote a petition asking Clear Channel Radio to take the John and Ken Show's hate speech off of the air. Within a few days, the campaign had attracted hundreds of supporters, fed up with the show's incendiary rhetoric and on-air extremism.

Late last week, the fight really began to heat up when the National Hispanic Media Coalition announced that several advertisers were planning to pull out of any involvement with the show. During a protest against the show outside of its studio in Burbank, CA last Thursday, Alex Nogales, President of the National Hispanic Media Coalition, announced that AT&T and Verizon Wireless had pulled their advertising from the John and Ken Show and that Vons and Ralphs had agreed to do no future advertising with them.

Today marks a great victory on the side of civil rights. Since Arizona passed its infamous anti-immigrant law SB 1070, states such as Georgia, South Carolina, Indiana, and Utah have passed their own copycat versions.

By far, the worst law to be passed was Alabama’s HB 56. It turned everyone from teachers to landlords into immigration agents, made it a crime to give a ride or provide shelter to an undocumented immigrant, required elementary school teachers to inquire about the immigration status of students, and barred undocumented immigrants from public colleges. As with SB1070, it demanded police ask the immigration status of people stopped for traffic violations who might be “suspected” of being undocumented immigrants, a mandate that would affect Latinos, Asians, and others perceived as “foreign,” more than any other group. The law has been seen as a clear smorgasbord of civil rights violations.

Finally, just hours ago, the Department of Justice indicated that it will not let the law go unchallenged. The federal government will instead sue Alabama over its anti-immigrant law, just as it did when Arizona passed SB1070, many parts of which were blocked due to unconstitutionality. As of today, Reform Immigration for America and national and local groups had mobilized more than 13,000 people to sign a petition on Change.org asking the DOJ to step in. They listened. Victory!

On Tuesday night, Texas joined the ranks of states like Arizona that have passed anti-immigrant bills allowing police to question anyone who is stopped, including witnesses to a crime, on their immigration status. Texas’s SB 9 also bans local governments from opting out of such a policy, in a move to stomp out those mythical “sanctuary cities” in the state.

Police chiefs and sheriffs of every major city in the state opposed the bill, arguing that turning police into ICE agents fosters an environment of mistrust and ultimately ensures that less crime is reported and more criminals go free.

Just days before the bill passed, a YouTube video emerged of Texas Tea Party leader Rebecca Forest telling supporters at a pro-SB 9 rally in Austin that the problem with Texas is that there are “too many Hispanics” in the legislature. Though three top Republicans condemned the statement on Monday, they continued to support the bill, which Reform Immigration for Texas says in a press release “is seen by most Texans as a tool of anti-Hispanic political pandering to extremists like Forrest.”

After the passage of Arizona’s HB 2811, which banned ethnic studies from being taught in K-12 schools in the state, the Tucson Unified School District (TUSD) has been forced to either cut their ethnic studies programs or face a 10% cut in funds each month.

Faced with this prospect, TUSD has proposed cutting ethnic studies from the accredited core curriculum and reducing the classes to electives. This would essentially eliminate the program, because the high school curriculum is so heavy on required core classes that students have little room for history and literature electives. Required courses would still include AP European History but no option to study other histories and literatures.

But Tucson students and teachers are not taking the news sitting down. Save Ethnic Studies, a coalition of educators, has filed a lawsuit against Arizona Governor Jan Brewer, the State Board of Education, and State Superintendent of Public Instruction, Tom Horne, who waged the battle against ethnic studies on the heels of SB 1070 without ever stepping into one of the classes. Several supporters of ethnic studies programs have urged TUSD to join the lawsuit instead of reducing the ethnic studies program to electives.

And just a few days ago, a group of nine high school students and alumni, under the banner of a local group called UNIDOS chained themselves to chairs at a school board meeting to prevent the vote from taking place that would have turned the highly successful program into second-class electives. The action was successful and the vote was postponed for yesterday. UNIDOS Youth Coalition members then started a petition on Change.org to build on the momentum and have attracted thousands of supporters in just two days. And once more feeling enormous pressure from students and activists, the school district president declared the vote would be postponed yet again.

Watch a video of last night's events:

The ethnic studies program in Tucson has had proven results. Students enrolled in the curriculum are more likely to graduate high school than those who are not. They also have higher passing rates in reading and writing courses. The program meets all curriculum standards taught in the regular program, but with the addition of diverse historical and literature perspectives.

Stand up for ethnic studies by demanding the Tucson Unified School District governing board vote no on reducing courses to electives.

Photo credit: Swanksalot

This week, after pressure from immigrant rights activists and hundreds of Change.org members, Apple officially rejected Smuggle Truck, the offensive iPad game, from sale in the iTunes store.

In the proposed game developed by Owlchemy Labs, players load up cartoon trucks with immigrant caricatures and try to make it through the desert with as few immigrant launchings and run-overs  as possible. And all this to the tune of cheery gamer music!

Owlchemy contends that they made the game to satirize the U.S.'s faulty immigration process. Coulda fooled me.  But even assuming good intentions, the game gets it all wrong — dead wrong. I'm all for satire (Jon Stewart for President!) but the thing about satire is that it's smart — while this game is reductive, bigoted, and dumb. Worst of all is that it's dangerous, championing the notion that immigrants lives are disposable and making light of the often fatal hazards involved in crossing the border to safety.

"They can pay us to die, but they can't pay us to live" is a phrase often used to describe the plight of the forgotten Filipino veterans who fought in World War II yet were denied benefits due to their immigration status. Only now is their sacrifice for the United States starting to be remembered. The California State Assembly has taken up the fight for Filipino veterans equity with a proposed bill, AB 199, that would encourage the inclusion of the contributions of WWII Filipino veterans in the 7-12 social studies curriculum.

The Rescission Act of 1946 stripped Filipino vets of benefits, with the excuse that the official declaration of Philippine independence changed their immigration status from U.S. citizens to U.S. nationals. They were the only ethnic group to face this denial, and were forgotten by the U.S. government and in the pages of history books. AB 199, authored by Assemblymember Fiona Ma, while not a state mandate, is a step forward in keeping the memory of Filipino WWII veterans alive.

McCarthy had his “communists” and Long Island Congressman Peter King has his “radical muslims,” or as his subconscious would likely put it, “all them non-white brown people.” His proposed panel before the House Committee on Homeland Security under the guise of stopping of terrorism, “Radicalization of Muslim-Americans,” is nothing more than unbridled bigotry packaged nicely with official stamps of approval and quiet whispers of nodded agreement from the nation’s most virulent racists. This certainly isn’t King’s first attempt to spread fear of Muslim-Americans.

And, most ironically (and dangerously), it threatens to do the opposite of what it says it’s doing — those hearings will not make us a safer country or stop terrorism. They will alienate our greatest allies in the fight against radical/violent religiosity. Has Mr. King forgotten that it was a Muslim-American who thwarted a bomb attack in Times Square? That it’s Muslim-Americans who consistently work with the government to identify and weed out extremists within their communities (48 out of 120 times in fact)?

No doubt it would be useful to identify potential future-terrorists, but that’s as complicated a matter as having guessed a disturbed teenager in Tucson would obtain a firearm legally and open fire at a supermarket meet-and-greet. Mr. King would do well to turn his stereotyping of an overwhelmingly peaceful community into a complex analysis of all extremism that threatens our country … including anti-Muslim violence that has been on a rise.

Fifty-three Rohingya "boat people" have been detained in isolated Thai prisons since 2009. Their crime? Fleeing brutal persecution in their homeland of Burma. In late January, Thailand nabbed another 158 Rohingya who had survived a harrowing journey on ramshackle home-made boats. Thai officials threw them directly into prison.

Despite the known mistreatment of Rohingya in Burma, the Thai government is refusing to recognize the migrants as refugees. Worse, it is blocking the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees from visiting the detained Rohingya, thus sequestering them from any legal defense or opportunity for protection.