Monday, February 6, 2017

Mexico, a Two-Faced Advocate for Immigration

By: Adriana Peralta -

Advocate for Immigration
To get to the United States on foot, immigrants must travel through México. (San Diego red)
 Immigration has determined much of our history — the quest to improve living conditions, to improve life — it is fundamental that someone should want to find a place to exist comfortably and work and raise a family.
In practice there are two types of immigrants: those who change countries with their legal status insured, and those who travel outside the law.
Because of its geographic location, Mexico is a key country. The majority of illegal immigrants to the United States need to pass through it, but then so do people looking to traffic drugs. Together, these two factors make it almost completely illegal at times to pass through to Mexico.
The history of immigration in Mexico can be defined by its constant request to the United States for more ease of access, and by Mexico’s own deportation of other immigrants who enter the country through its southern border.


Immigration Is A Human Right, But Borders Matter

By: José Azel -

Immigration Is A Human Right, But Borders Matter
The US-Mexican border near San Diego.
Over three percent of the world population — 244 million — are international immigrants, and the immigrant population in the United States is approaching 50 million.
In our hemisphere, Mexico leads the way with 12 million immigrants in the US. They come from Honduras, the murder capital of the world, Guatemala and El Salvador placing fourth and fifth respectively in homicides. Thousands continue to flee violence and poverty from their homelands. In Cuba, since 1959, nearly 18 percent of the population has escaped that tragic island in search of freedom.
The motivations to leave one’s homeland are diverse, but essentially fall into an economic or political category, or both.  Fundamentally, immigration expresses a desire for the liberty to improve one’s quality of life.


Mexico’s Own Immigration Problem Surfaces in Tourist Hotspot Cancun

By: Elena Toledo - 

Mexico's Own Immigration Problem
Immigrants from Central America and Cuba arrive to Cancun under the notion that they will work in Five Star Hotels, but they are actually hired to pick up garbage on beaches, at best. (Youtube)
Cancun is one of México‘s most touristic cities, but it is also shares a border with Central America, which has created an interesting dynamic.
Immigrants perform the most difficult jobs in the city. Their work hours start as early as seven in the morning and finish late into the day. For the base salary of 100 pesos per day (US $5), they do everything from waiting on tourists, setting up beach chairs by the seashore, cleaning and other labor-intensive duties.


The Strange Teachings of Muhammad

FrontPageMagazine.com

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Coptic priest Fr. Zakaria Botros, who al Qaeda has  called  "one of the most wanted infidels in the world," issuing a 60 million dollar bounty on his head. Popular Arabic magazines also call him "Islam's public enemy #1". He hosts a television program, “Truth Talk,” on Life TV.  His two sites are Islam-Christianity.net and FatherZakaria.net.

FP:
Fr. Zakaria Botros, welcome to Frontpage Interview.
Botros: Thank you for inviting me.
FP: Let’s begin with your own personal story, in terms of Islam and Christianity.
Botros: I am a Copt. In my early 20s, I became a priest. Of course, in predominantly Muslim Egypt, Christians—priests or otherwise—do not talk about religion with Muslims. My older brother, a passionate Christian learned that lesson too late: after preaching to Muslims, he was eventually ambushed by Muslims who cut out his tongue and murdered him. Far from being deterred or hating Muslims, I eventually felt more compelled to share the Good News with them. Naturally, this created many problems: I was constantly harassed, threatened, and eventually imprisoned and tortured for one year, simply for preaching to Muslims. Egyptian officials charged me with abetting “apostasy,” that is, for being responsible for the conversion of Muslims to Christianity.  Another time I was arrested while boarding a plane out of Egypt. Eventually, however, I managed to flee my native country and resided for a time in Australia and England. Anyway, my life-story with Christianity and Islam is very long and complicated. In fact, an entire book about it was recently published.

How Silicon Valley Utopianism Brought You the Dystopian Trump Presidency


How Silicon Valley Utopianism Brought You the Dystopian Trump Presidency

Trump Holds Summit With Technology Industry Leaders
Two years ago, journalist Anand Giridharadas took the stage at the TED Conference and told the attendant techno-solutionists that they were, in fact, part of the problem. Literally, that’s what he said. Here, I’ll quote him directly:
“If you live near a Whole Foods, if no one in your family serves in the military, if you’re paid by the year, not the hour, if most people you know finished college, if no one you know uses meth, if you married once and remain married, if you’re not one of 65 million Americans with a criminal record — if any or all of these things describe you, then accept the possibility that actually, you may not know what’s going on and you may be part of the problem.”

The Silicon Valley Engineers Driving the Anti-Trump Train

The Silicon Valley Engineers Driving the Anti-Trump Train

Uber CEO Travis Kalanick.
This week, more than 2,000 Google employees walked out of work to protest President Trump’s immigration ban. Far from disciplining them for leaving their desks, CEO Sundar Pichai and co-founder Sergey Brin treated workers to impassioned speeches of support.
“Proud, moved, and touched to be at a company that boldly stands for its people,” Googler Sam Tse tweeted. The hashtag #GooglersUnite trended.
While Pichai and Brin were no doubt speaking from personal conviction—Brin’s family fled the former Soviet Union when he was a boy—they also had little choice but to back their employees. Trump’s directive cut to the heart of Silicon Valley’s treasured values of globalism and openness, values widely embraced by the workers themselves. And in Silicon Valley, where companies’ success depends so deeply on their rosters of intellectual talent, it’s the workers who have the leverage to force their bosses to respond when the president threatens those values.

Tech Giants Have the Legal Clout to Help Stop Trump’s Refugee Ban


Tech Giants Have the Legal Clout to Help Stop Trump’s Refugee Ban

Megalopolis icon in flat style isolated on white background. USA
If the #DeleteUber campaign taught the tech industry anything, it’s that trying to stay neutral on President Trump’s refugee ban can quickly turn into a marketing catastrophe.
Little wonder then that late last night, 97 tech companies—including Apple, Facebook, Google, and, yes, Uber—filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit arguing against the ban. In the face of the outcry against Trump’s executive order, such a grand gesture makes for good optics. But legal experts say the brief is about more than Silicon Valley’s public image. In this case, tech’s support could help the plaintiffs prevail against Trump.
“The tech industry has been increasingly active in recent years in cases that involve the civil rights of their customers or, like in this case, their employees,” says Neil Richards, a professor at Washington University School of Law in St. Louis. “Courts do take the views of industry seriously in these cases, particularly when those views seem broader than merely guarding the bottom line.”

Congress Wants a New Email Privacy Act—But the Next Attorney General Won’t

Congress Wants a New Email Privacy Act—But the Next Attorney General Won’t

It’s safe to say that any digital privacy bill written more than three years before the invention of the World Wide Web is probably due for an overhaul. But the Electronic Communications Privacy Act has persisted intact for more than three decades, including its anachronistic loophole that allows the warrantless collection of emails from US citizens. Now, in its second attempt in two years, Congress is poised to reform the most outdated elements of ECPA. With Trump’s incoming Justice Department, that reform seems more urgent than ever.


USA TODAY Equates Steve Bannon with Terrorist Islamic State Leader

USA TODAY Equates Steve Bannon with Terrorist Islamic State Leader

Monday’s editorial in USA Today likens White House Chief Strategist and former Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon to Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the leader of the so-called Islamic State (ISIS, or ISIL) terrorist “caliphate.”

The editorial argues that Bannon is like al-Baghdadi because both perceive a “clash of civilizations between Islam and the West.”
(The term “clash of civilizations” arises from a 1992 lecture by Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington.)
USA Today argues:


Klein: The Left’s Latest Desperate Tactic – Smear Trump As ‘Mentally Ill’

Klein: The Left’s Latest Desperate Tactic – Smear Trump As ‘Mentally Ill’

Since President Donald Trump took office on January 20, a trend has been emerging in which news media outlets have featured articles quoting health care professionals questioning the billionaire’s mental stability in a seeming bid to delegitimize the president.

And now some Democratic politicians – and at least one Republican – are calling for Trump to be subjected to a psychiatric examination to determine whether he is fit for office. Some commentators have even suggested invoking the 25th Amendment of the Constitution, which allows for the commander-in-chief’s removal from office if the “president is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”


‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams to Stop Donating to Alma Mater UC Berkeley

‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams to Stop Donating to Alma Mater UC Berkeley

Dilbert creator Scott Adams announced in a blog post that he will stop donating to this alma mater, UC Berkeley, in the aftermath of the riots that erupted on campus last week in response to a scheduled event featuring Breitbart editor MILO.

Adams, who earned an MBA degree at UC Berkeley, announced that he is terminating his support of the public institution over concerns that he wouldn’t “feel safe or welcome on campus.”

Brexit Into Trumpland

Philippe Legrain, a former economic adviser to the president of the European Commission, is a visiting senior fellow at the London School of Economics’ European Institute and the author of European Spring: Why Our Economies and Politics are in a Mess – and How to Put Them Right.
LONDON – British Prime Minister Theresa May is leading the United Kingdom toward a very “hard” Brexit in 2019 – and potentially off a cliff, if the UK leaves the European Union without an exit or trade deal. In her January 17 speech, May outlined her objectives for negotiating with the EU, and made it clear that she will prioritize hardline Brexiteers’ demands over the country’s economic interests.
It isn’t surprising that May would choose a Brexit variant whereby Britain leaves both the EU’s single market and its customs union: she knows little, and cares even less, about economics. Her ultimate objective is to survive as Prime Minister, and she believes that controlling immigration – a longtime personal obsession – will endear her to “Leave” voters, and that ending the European Court of Justice’s jurisdiction in Britain will pacify the nationalists in her Conservative Party.

Trump’s Alternative Ethical Universe

Lucy P. Marcus, founder and CEO of Marcus Venture Consulting, Ltd., is Professor of Leadership and Governance at IE Business School and a non-executive board director of Atlantia SpA.
LONDON – From the moment Donald Trump entered the US presidential race, the potential for an unprecedented array of ethics violations, stemming from his global business interests, has been a ticking time bomb, set to detonate on January 20, 2017.
Boom.
Plenty of other liberal democracies have experienced elements of authoritarian leadership, including nepotism, limits on freedom of speech or of the press, overtly discriminatory policies, and the abuse of public office for personal gain. But the United States has mostly avoided these traps, owing largely to term limits and a reliable system of checks and balances. 

Trump’s First Victims

Peter Singer is Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the University of Melbourne. His books include Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics, The Ethics of What We Eat (with Jim Mason), Rethinking Life and Death, The Point of View of the Universe, co-authored with Kata… read more
 
PRINCETON – When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I did not join those who took to the streets in protest. I thought it important to respect the democratic process, no matter how dismaying its outcome may be, and wait until the Trump administration had given us something to protest about.
It didn’t take long. Eight days after Trump took office, the first identifiable victims of his presidency were on all the major news outlets. Trump’s executive order suspending resettlement of Syrian refugees, temporarily barring new refugees regardless of where they are from, and banning all immigration from Iran, Iraq, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, Syria, and Yemen caused immediate harm to people already on their way to the US. The order has also prevented many more people from leaving for the US.

Trump’s Chaos Theory of Government

Jacek Rostowski was Poland’s Minister of Finance and Deputy Prime Minister from 2007 to 2013.
 
WARSAW – In the weeks since Donald Trump’s inauguration as President of the United States, it has become clear that he intends to roll back the progressive-egalitarian agenda that is commonly associated with “political correctness” to the starting block – not just in the United States, but globally. Stephen Bannon, Trump’s White House Svengali and former CEO of the extreme right Breitbart News, has long pursued this ideological project, and we now know that what he or Trump says must be taken both seriously and literally.
Trump’s transition was initially reassuring, because he nominated many undeniably serious (if also seriously well-heeled) people to his cabinet. But, after the inauguration, all hell broke loose as Trump and Bannon began to implement their project in earnest.

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