July 29th, 2010 at 07:39am
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This is IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English.
One of Barack Obama’s campaign promises was to reform immigration policies. On Thursday he gave his first major speech on the issue as president.
BARACK OBAMA: “In sum, the system is broken. And everybody knows it.”
One reason for the speech was the state of Arizona’s recent passage of its own law against illegal immigration. That law has led to protests around the country. However, in public opinion surveys a majority of Americans support it. Mr. Obama criticized the law, but said such laws are the understandable result of inaction at the federal level.
After his speech, religious leaders demonstrated to call for Congress to act this year. Rabbi Michael Feingold works with immigrant and low-wage workers in New York.
MICHAEL FEINGOLD: “The way the system is now works for no one. It doesn’t work for the immigrants themselves, it doesn’t work for the government and it doesn’t even work for some employers.”
The president said reform must be comprehensive, dealing not just with future immigrants but also those here now. An estimated eleven million are undocumented.
BARACK OBAMA: “They must be required to admit that they broke the law. They should be required to register, pay their taxes, pay a fine and learn English. They must get right with the law before they can get in line and earn their citizenship.”
ASSOCIATED PRESS
President Obama speaking on immigration at American University in Washington
In his speech the president did not announce any new proposals. Even after his appeal, Congress may consider the issue too divisive to deal with before the November elections.
In Arizona, officers are now being trained in the new law set to take effect July twenty-ninth. It requires police to confirm the immigration status of a person they meet during a lawful stop. That is only if the police have “reasonable suspicion” that the person is in the country illegally.
The law bars police from detaining anyone based on ethnic or racial appearance. But Hispanics and others say it could still lead to racial profiling. They say people, including legal residents and American citizens, could be unfairly targeted. Police say one thing that makes discussion of this law difficult is that many critics have not read the law.
Tucson police Sergeant Fabian Pacheco also notes that forty percent of officers in his city are Hispanic. Still, he says he worries that more people will avoid cooperating with the police, and that officers will have less time to fight more serious crimes.
Some also worry that officers could be sued under the law by people who accuse them of not doing enough enforcement. At the same time, civil rights activists could accuse them of being too aggressive.
The Obama administration and some Arizona cities hope to persuade a judge to block the new law.
AP
A woman waits for officials in Nogales, Mexico, after being expelled from the United States
Arizona has become the point of entry for more than forty percent of illegal entrants from Mexico. The numbers grew after the federal government increased border controls in California and Texas.
Some Arizona officials blame smugglers for a serious problem with kidnappings in the Phoenix area. Drug groups control much of the human smuggling. Some border crossers are victims of violence. Others die crossing the desert. An Arizona rancher was also killed this year — probably, officials say, by a Mexican drug smuggler.
And that’s IN THE NEWS in VOA Special English. I’m Steve Ember.
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Reported by Kent Klein, Greg Flakus and Mike O’Sullivan.
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July 21st, 2010 at 07:28am
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AA: I’m Avi Arditti with Rosanne Skirble, and this week on WORDMASTER: What do you call a lawsuit that appears to be intended to suppress public speech?
RS: To critics it’s a SLAPP — a strategic lawsuit against public participation. University of Denver law professor George Pring, co-author of the book “SLAPPs: Getting Sued For Speaking Out,” explains.
GEORGE PRING: “The First Amendment of the United States Constitution, like most of the constitutions around the world, or the majority, guarantees its people a right of free speech or freedom of expression. The one thing that the United States Constitution does, that many other countries’ do not do, is to guarantee your right to speak your views to your government officials.”
RS: “Could you give us an example?”
GEORGE PRING: “A very common example is people will go to a city council zoning hearing and speak out against a new development. People will go to a school board meeting and criticize a bad teacher. People will write a letter to the mayor, to the governor reporting graft and corruption.”
AA: “What gets people sued for doing that?”
GEORGE PRING: “What we discovered in the nineteen eighties was that people were suddenly getting sued for millions of dollars. So that the opponents — whether it’s the real estate developer or the bad teacher or the person accused of graft and corruption, instead of meeting them in that same public forum, instead tries to suppress that communication to government by filing a very scary, big multi-million dollar lawsuit, which we found has no chance of winning. But what doesn’t win in court often wins in the real world.”
RS: “Well, what are their grounds for this lawsuit?”
AA: “Or is it based on accusations of, what, of slander, defamation?”
GEORGE PRING: “Thirty-five to forty percent of SLAPPs — strategic lawsuits against public participation in government — are filed based on defamation, libel, slander. A generic, you know, personal injury claim. Another big group of them are filed for so-called business interference, interference with a contract.
“The average running time to get these cases dismissed, we found, was three years. About the only way SLAPP victims lose is by giving up, ultimately. Almost all of the cases, ninety-five, ninety-some percent of them are dismissed at least at the first trial level or at the next appeals level.”
RS: “Well, what remedies do you suggest that would bring both parties to the table to agree to stop these kinds of lawsuits?”
GEORGE PRING: “Kick them out of court quickly. More than half of the states in the United States since we published our book on SLAPPs in nineteen ninety-six, more than half of the states have adopted anti-SLAPP laws along the lines of our model that we put in the book. And right now the United States Congress is considering an anti-SLAPP bill that probably will pass within a year or so.”
AA: Law professor George Pring estimates that hundreds of thousands of SLAPPs have been filed in the last forty years. He can’t be sure. “SLAPPers don’t file their lawsuits under S,” he says. The lawsuits are camouflaged.
RS: Nor can he say just how successful state laws designed to identify SLAPPs have been in reducing them.
GEORGE PRING: “New York State has adopted one of the weakest, least protective SLAPP laws — and New York attorneys tell us SLAPPs have gone way down. California has adopted one of the strongest, most protective anti-SLAPP laws. As far as we can tell there are more SLAPPs filed in California now. They get dismissed quicker.
“But what we do know is that with this sudden, huge change in the way Americans communicate, with all of the social networking ways to express yourself, oftentimes they get sued now in a SLAPP-type way because of what they put online.
RS: And that will be our topic next time with University of Denver law professor George Pring. That’s WORDMASTER for this week. With Avi Arditti, I’m Rosanne Skirble.
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