Indigenous Triqui student from Oaxaca graduates from Alaska High School

Anchorage Daily News, 5/13/2013

Reynalda DeJesus-Martinez will graduate from East Anchorage High School on Tuesday not as a straight A student but as an average student who worked hard for the grades she got in honors classes. For her father, it feels like a miracle all the same. “I feel so happy,” said Lorenzo DeJesus. DeJesus-Martinez and her family are Triqui, the indigenous people of a mountainous swath of Oaxaca, in Southern Mexico.

The region that DeJesus-Martinez grew up in has been wracked with political violence since before her parents were born. As a young child she and her family lived with fear and violence. Each trip to a market or festival meant the chance of being ambushed on roads. When she was 6 years old, her uncle was killed by members of an opposing faction. Her grandfather was killed in political violence when her mother was a small child.

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Obama says US-Mexico stereotypes must be broken, portrays Mexico as a rising nation

Washington Post, 5/3/2013

Calling for an end to “old stereotypes,” President Barack Obama on Friday portrayed Mexico as an emerging nation that is remaking itself and said the U.S.-Mexico relationship should be defined by shared prosperity, not by threats that both countries face. “It’s time to recognize new realities,” he declared.

In a speech to a predominantly student audience, Obama conceded that the root of much violence in Mexico is the demand for drugs in the United States, and acknowledged that most guns used to commit crime in this country come from the U.S. But he said an improving economy is changing Mexico and improving its middle class.

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Showing Grass-Roots Support for Immigration Overhaul

New York Times, 5/1/2013

Tens of thousands of immigrants, Latinos and other supporters of an overhaul of the immigration system turned out on Wednesday for marches, rallies and prayer vigils, hoping to show Congress that momentum is building for a path to citizenship for 11 million immigrants in the country illegally.

Instead of concentrating on large May Day demonstrations, organizers said they had chosen to hold smaller actions in more than 100 cities nationwide to draw more local supporters.

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Mexico says it has rescued dozens of migrants abandoned at sea by smugglers

Associated Press, 4/29/13

The Mexican navy said Monday it has detected a disturbing trend of migrant smugglers abandoning boatloads of people at sea off the coast of Baja California. The Navy said that each month it has been finding an average of 10 to 12 boats, with a total of about out 150 migrants. It did not say when the discoveries began, or why the smugglers might have adopted the tactic. However, smugglers sometimes demand payment for such trips up front, leaving them little incentive to get passengers all the way to the United States.

The Navy said the boats’ captains abandoned the vessels aboard other craft, telling migrants the motors or other equipment had broken down and they would be back. The smugglers then left the migrants adrift, often in overcrowded boats without food or radios, putting their lives at risk.

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In Trek North, First Lure Is Mexico’s Other Line

The New York Times, 4/26/13

In Washington, the biggest immigration overhaul in decades would tighten border security between Mexico and the United States to stem the flow of illegal crossings. But there is another border making the task all the more challenging: Mexico’s porous boundary with Central America, where an increasing number of migrants heading to the United States cross freely into Mexico under the gaze of the Mexican authorities. So many Central Americans are fleeing the violence, crime and economic stagnation of their homes that American officials have encountered a tremendous spike in migrants making their way through Mexico to the United States.

American arrests of illegal crossers from countries other than Mexico — mostly from Honduras, Guatemala and El Salvador — more than doubled along the southwest border of the United States last year, to 94,532 from 46,997 in 2011.

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First Ladies from Mexico and Guatemala chat about child migration (Spanish)

El Universal, 4/23/2013

Mexico’s first lady Angelica Rivera de Peña hosted a meeting  with Guatemala’s first lady Rosa María Leal de Pérez at Los Pinos. The issue of concern discussed in the meeting was migration of unaccompanied children.  As concluded, both Mexico and Guatemala  will work together to provide better protection for migrant children.

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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg: Immigration and the knowledge economy

The Washington Post, 4/10/201

Earlier this year I started teaching a class on entrepreneurship at an after-school program in my community. The middle-school students put together business plans, made their products and even got an opportunity to sell them.

One day I asked my students what they thought about going to college. One of my top aspiring entrepreneurs told me he wasn’t sure that he’d be able to go to college because he’s undocumented. His family is from Mexico, and they moved here when he was a baby. Many students in my community are in the same situation; they moved to the United States so early in their lives that they have no memories of living anywhere else.

These students are smart and hardworking, and they should be part of our future

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Remittances To Mexico Drop 11 Percent In February

Fox News Latino, 4/2/2013

Mexico received $1.58 billion in remittances in February, 11.1 percent below the amount recorded in the same month of 2012, the country’s central bank said Monday. This was the eighth straight month in which remittances declined on an inter-annual basis. In the second month of 2013, the average remittance was $293.17, less than the $320.34 in February of 2012, the Bank of Mexico said in its monthly report.

In February, 5.4 million transactions were recorded, most of them electronic transfers. Remittances to Mexico totaled $22.45 billion last year, a decline of 1.57 percent from 2011. Remittances from expatriates are Mexico’s second-largest source of foreign exchange after oil exports and help cover living expenses for millions of households. Most of the money is sent from the United States, where an estimated 12 million Mexicans live, about half of them undocumented migrants.

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18 Women Who Were Sexually Exploited in Chiapas are Freed (Spanish)

Proceso, 3/22/2013

State Police forces and the National Migration Institute (INM) dismantled a prostitution network  in San Cristobal de las Casas, Chiapas, where 18 women, five Central American migrants and the rest from Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Chiapas,  were forced into prostitution.

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G.O.P. Opposition to Immigration Law Is Falling Away

The New York Times, 3/19/2013

Republican opposition to legalizing the status of millions of illegal immigrants is crumbling in the nation’s capital as leading lawmakers in the party scramble to halt eroding support among Hispanic voters — a shift that is providing strong momentum for an overhaul of immigration laws.

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, a Tea Party Republican, on Tuesday became the latest to embrace a more welcoming approach, declaring to the nation’s 11 million illegal immigrants that if they want to work in America, “then we will find a place for you.” While he never uttered the word “citizenship” and said a secure border must come first, Mr. Paul strongly implied that citizenship would eventually be available to them.

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