Results tagged “immigrant”

Life in a notoriously squalid Chinatown boarding house only got worse after the city tried to bring the building at 81 Bowery up to code, the Village Voice reports. For years, poor immigrant tenants have paid around $100 a month for tiny cubicles on the kitchen-less fourth floor of the lodging house, where they share two shower stalls, a urinal, and four toilets. But after the city evacuated tenants last year because of fire code violations, the landlord tore down the tenants' handmade partitions, which blocked the sprinklers but had given residents a slight sense of privacy.

A Mexican day laborer is hospitalized with brain damage after being attacked somewhere in Williamsburg or Bushwick by three black men shouting "wetback." Mario Vera was riding his bike back home to Bushwick with groceries from a lower Manhattan food pantry when the young men hit him in the back of his head "with something hard" while yelling anti-immigrant slurs. The assault happened on September 23rd, but wasn't reported until last Friday, because Vera is an undocumented immigrant afraid to go to the police. (NYPD policy prohibits officers from sharing law-abiding immigrants' status with the Feds, but it has been known to happen.)

The NY Times looks at recent census data that suggests an interesting trend in Chinese, Korean and Indian families in America: "If the first child was a girl, it was more likely that a second child would be a boy... If the first two children were girls, it was even more likely that a third child would be male. Demographers say the statistical deviation among Asian-American families is significant, and they believe it reflects not only a preference for male children, but a growing tendency for these families to embrace sex-selection techniques, like in vitro fertilization and sperm sorting, or abortion." CUNY's Joyce Moy says even younger immigrants have held onto the idea that "Families depend on the male child for support," while Dr. Norbert Gleicher, director of a "fertility and sex-selection clinic in New York and Chicago, said that from his experience, people were more inclined to want female children, except for Asians and Middle Easterners."

Now that U.S. Court of Appeals judge—and Bronx native—Sonia Sotomayor has been nominated to the Supreme Court, her fellow New Yorkers are rejoicing. Mayor Bloomberg issued a statement noting that he had told President Obama that "Sonia Sotomayor would be an outstanding choice for the Supreme Court, and people whose legal opinions I greatly respect speak very highly of her," and also said, "She has been an incredibly good federal judge, and having risen from humble beginnings in the Bronx, she brings a perspective that will serve the Court - and our nation - very well. Her story is a perfect example of the kind of opportunity that is available in this City - and this country - to those who devote themselves to their dreams. Judge Sotomayor was first recommended to the federal bench by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan - and of all his great legacies, she may prove to be one of the most important.”

Sorry, poor elderly, disabled and/or blind legal residents of New York State; the Court of Appeals has ruled that you're still limited to $352 a month in public aid, about half of what lower courts ruled you should get. Of course, since many of you have died since lawyers filed the class action lawsuit in 2004, Tuesday's decision might not matter much. But thousands of poor legal immigrants desperate for public assistance are shattered by the 5-2 ruling, which held that the state had no duty to fill in for a federal program that ended benefits to most disabled legal immigrants in 1996. Since the early '50s, legal NY residents who fell on hard times were entitled to a higher level of aid if they were elderly, blind or disabled, but when D.C. took over the program in the '70s, the state supplemented the benefit to reach the higher level it had set earlier. That's over now. The NY Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance applauded the ruling, saying it could save the state and local governments $100-270 million. But in a strongly worded dissent, two judges wrote that "the majority today has turned its back on the history of New York’s commitment to protect its most fragile and vulnerable populations."

Yesterday, friends, family, and others gathered for the funeral of 49-year-old Esmin Green, whose death in a Kings County Hospital emergency room was captured on surveillance video. Green, who had been waiting for almost 24 hours for medical attention, had collapsed onto the floor; though many staffers saw her on the floor, nothing was done until a nurse (who kicked her gently) realized she was unconscious an hour later.