Portside

A Book Review of Unsettled/Desasosiego: Children in a World of Gangs, Photographs by Donna De Cesare; University of Texas Press, 2013 Donna De Cesare spent two decades taking photographs of Salvadoran young people, documenting the impact of violence on their lives. Her work is as far from media stereotype as one can get. She clearly loves the Salvadoran people whose lives have intersected her own, and her involvement with and commitment to them extends over many years.

The Great Recession may be over, but every night people are sleeping on benches or in makeshift shelters. Here are a few of their stories.

‘Lax enforcement’ is not the culprit—U.S. trade and immigration policies are. The failure of Central America's economies is largely due to the North American and Central American Free Trade Agreements and their accompanying economic changes.

Under the Fourth Amendment, the people of the United States are not supposed to be subject to random and arbitrary stops and searches. But within 100 miles of a U.S. border, these rules don't apply.

Starting around 1999, public policies that spurred development in Los Angeles' Skid Row started. Buildings that were dubbed underused were transformed in the 50-block area. Well-heeled residents have moved in. In 2014, Skid Row's streets have a vibrancy of sorts - one in which families, the homeless, the hip, the elderly and even well-treated dogs coexist in an ever-changing place.

The new film, Cesar Chavez: History is Made One Step at a Time, doesn't capture the diversity of the farmworkers' movement. "When I was a farmworker, before the strike, we lived in different worlds - the Latino world, the Filipino world, the African-American world and the Caucasian world," Eliseo Medina as interviewed by David Bacon for In These Times.

By law, a company can’t hire H-2A guest workers if it is in a labor dispute with its US workforce. But that is exactly what this Washington State berry grower is trying to do.

Malta's prime minister, Joseph Muscat, exclaimed to journalist Gwynne Dyer that "we are building a cemetery within our Mediterranean Sea.” An NGO, Fortress Europe, says 6,450 died in the channel between Sicily and North Africa between 1994 and 2012. This figure is similar to the 5,570 people found dead in the desert between Mexico and the United States from 1998 to 2012, and has earned the Mediterranean the nickname “sea of death.”

One of the most important parts of the Senate's bill, and of all the "comprehensive immigration reform" proposals, is a big increase in guestworker programs. Employers demand them as a price for supporting legalization of the undocumented. But our history tells us that this is a very high price. Especially for farmworkers, guestworker programs have been a terrible idea.

In the picking of the strawberry crops - many workers are needed and in the name of immigration reform the growers are seeing their dream - a huge cheap source of labor. Congress is debating bills that would expand the number of recruited workers many times over, possibly even reaching the 500,000 worker peak of the bracero program in the mid-1950s.