Healthcare and Immigration, Labor Abuse, and Detention Reform in NYS

The New York Times spotlights the role health care reform has played in bringing undocumented immigration back to the center of national debate. Tellingly, four days after the editorial, at a public speech to Congress, Representative Joe Wilson of South Carolina shouted "You lie!" as Obama explained that health care reform would not expand coverage to undocumented immigrants. A recent blog post by the Immigration Policy Center succinctly summarizes misconceptions of while the NYT tackles the issue from a different perspective, citing experts who say that excluding undocumented immigrants from medicare may not be the most prudent solution for a number of reasons.

The Center for Urban Economic Development has produced a new report entitled "Broken Laws, Unprotected Workers," on exploitation of low-wage workers, most of whom are undocumented. Commenting on the report, The Washington Post calls these violations of employment and labor law "a national shame visited upon society's most vulnerable and least educated." The report recalls ethnographic and legal research conducted by Nick de Genova on undocumented workers in Chicago, in his book Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and "Illegality" in Mexican Chicago, which provides a comprehensive analysis of the intersection of racism, nationalism, and political economy.

In local news, the departure of Dora Schriro from to the New York Department of Corrections may be bad news for national immigration reform efforts, but could bode well for detention reform within New York State, according to an article in the New York Times.