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California is a mess, but I love it all the same--especially the Bay Area, where I lived for 15 years. I went to Berkeley in 1962--a refugee from Amherst College, which at that time was dominated by frat boys with high SAT scores. I didn't go to Berkeley to go to school, but to be a bus ride away from North Beach and the Jazz Workshop. In a broader sense, I went to California for the same reason that other émigrés had been going since the 1840s. I was knocking on the Golden Door. Immigrants from Europe had come to...

President Barack Obama said he would be okay with illegal immigrants being treated in emergency rooms in some situations under his health care plan.

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Take a look at what shows up at a stock tank in dry weather. For those of you that have never hunted in South Texas, sometimes they post motion detector cameras at their feeders/tanks to see what is going on. Check out this sequence at a water tank

Less money in the pockets of Americans means fewer highway deaths. As the economy slid deeper into recession and gas prices reached $4 a gallon last year, the number of people killed in auto accidents hit its lowest level in five decades. In addition to fewer miles logged by drivers worried about expenses, experts also cited record-high seat-belt use, tighter enforcement of drunken driving laws and the work of advocacy groups that encourage safer driving habits. Preliminary figures released by the government Monday show that 37,313 people died in motor vehicle traffic crashes last year. That's 9.1 percent lower than...

PHOENIX - For day laborers seeking work in a sun-baked parking lot on Thursday, defeat of President Bush's plans for an immigration overhaul has set back their dreams of a normal life. The bill, which sought to give legal status to many of the 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, failed to get enough support in a make-or-break vote. Workers standing around in searing heat outside a building materials store in Phoenix said hopes of an aboveboard life in this country of immigrants had crashed following news of the morning vote. "Bush wanted to do something good,...

U.S. Border Patrol agents seeking to secure the nation's border in some of the country's most pristine national forests are being targeted by illegal aliens, who are using intentionally set fires to burn agents out of observation posts and patrol routes. The wildfires also have resulted in the destruction of valuable natural and cultural resources in the National Forest System and pose an ongoing threat to visitors, residents and responding firefighters, according to federal law enforcement authorities and others. In the Coronado National Forest in Arizona, with 60 miles of land along the U.S.-Mexico border, U.S. Forest Service firefighters sent...

"There was a lot of frustration that politics got in the way of sound, necessary public policy," said Jerry Gonzalez of the Georgia Association of Latino Elected Officials, a statewide organization whose 4,000 members are calling their senators seeking reforms. "The time is now. They need to act. They have to." A caravan departed Wednesday from Los Angeles after a prayer from Roman Catholic Cardinal Roger Mahony, a longtime supporter of immigrant rights. Renan "El Cucuy" Almendarez Coello, a popular Spanish-language radio host, also was on hand to send off the "Dreams Across America" caravan. "We have all come for...

Immigrants try to revive stalled bill By JULIANA BARBASSA -- Associated Press Writer (Published: June 13, 2007) SAN FRANCISCO (AP) As President Bush pressed lawmakers to get immigration reform back on track, immigrants across the country were marching, praying, writing lawmakers and hitting the road for Washington in a desperate push to revive the stalled measure. Before the bill collapsed in the Senate last week, most immigrants agreed it was flawed. But seeing a rare opportunity for change slipping away - and recognizing it may not come again for years - many insisted they wouldn't let it go without a...

Cook Rosa Maria Salazar's eyes dart anxiously to the door as customers file into the Salvadoran cafe in a heavily Hispanic neighborhood near downtown Los Angeles. "We're terrified. The police could come for us at any time and deport us," she said in Spanish earlier this week as diners fingered maize tortillas stuffed with beans and pork scratchings and chatted softly. break "We hadn't seen anything like this here before, and it came as a shock," said Antonio Bernabe, a community worker who runs a day labor program at the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles. "The police...

Fanning out from the mammoth ports of Long Beach and Los Angeles, 16,000 drivers, nearly all of them Latino, crisscross Southern California's congested highways, carrying freight that will make its way to every part of the country. But a number of the drivers are undocumented immigrants, and they could soon find themselves out of work and freight ould begin backing up across the country. That's because the federal government, in its drive to boost port security, is on the verge of issuing guidelines for checking identities of the nation's 750,000 port workers, including 110,000 or so who work as haulers....

ELBA, N.Y. — A cold December rain gusted across fields of cabbage destined for New York City egg rolls, cole slaw and Christmas goose. Ankle-deep in mud, six immigrant farmworkers raced to harvest 120,000 pounds before nightfall, knowing that at dawn they could find immigration agents at their door. The farmer who stopped to check their progress had lost 28 other workers in a raid in October, all illegal Mexican immigrants with false work permits at another farm here in western New York. Throughout the region, farm hands have simply disappeared by twos and threes, picked up on a Sunday...

BRIDGEPORT -- A Waterbury woman who worked as an examiner for state Department of Motor Vehicles has been convicted of participating in a scheme to sell hundreds of driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and felons. Janette Rodriguez-Roman, 34, of 56 Diane Terrace in Waterbury, collapsed into sobs as the verdict was announced Thursday in Bridgeport Superior Court. "Oh my God! Oh my God, my children, my children," she cried as marshals handcuffed her and led her away. Her lawyer said she has "four or five" children and was in process of adopting another. Rodriguez-Roman was convicted of 38 counts, including...

According to a Des Moines Register news story, "In a blunt and stinging letter, the governor and the top officer of the Iowa National Guard on Tuesday called federal immigration officials' actions in the Swift raids "completely unacceptable," saying agents undermined the public's trust in government, potentially jeopardized the safety of law enforcement personnel in Iowa and could have compromised undercover operations." For the full story, see here.

Police say a wave of graffiti hit two north Charlotte apartment complexes Wednesday night. The graffiti includes gang tags that investigators say contains a hidden message: a violent, notorious gang may be moving in. The tags bear the name Sur 13, a violent Latin gang police say is responsible for robberies, break ins, and trafficking drugs. “By putting signs like that, they are trying to tell people that this is our area, stay away from it,” Officer Rene Quiles said. Two buildings at the Maple Run apartments, a fence, and the back of a building at the North Point apartments...

Wayne Brown gave up $40,000 in income to move from the Bay Area to Kansas. And he feels great. It got to be too much last year for the college information-technology officer: the commute to downtown San Francisco that sometimes took two hours, the housing-price spiral and the high-wire borrowing that paid for it. ``I would find myself sitting in traffic,'' Brown recalled, ``screaming at people.'' When the Kansas job came up in early 2005, Brown and his wife, Teresa, sold two Bay Area homes and happily settled in a suburb of Kansas City. They have never looked back. The...

It's time to call things what they are with the illegal immigration issue, and the Prescott City Council should approve the resolution it unveiled at this week's study session. The draft resolution: • Urges the federal government to seal the borders against entry of "illegal immigrants, criminals and terrorists." • Opposes amnesty for illegal aliens currently in the United States. • Urges the federal government and state to secure that state border and the city borders against illegals and to let the state and city enforce existing laws on illegal immigration, Social Security and related federal benefits fraud and laws...

U.S. Customs and Border Protection officers working at the port of entry here apprehended a Mexican national wanted in California on sex charges. Israel Rosales-Garcia, 33, was held Tuesday after being refused entry into Canada at the adjacent Canadian port of Coutts, Customs and Border Protection said in a news release. The agency said Rosales-Garcia presented fake identification to U.S. border officers at Sweetgrass, and they determined his true identity through an automated fingerprint identification system. Rosales-Garcia is wanted by the San Mateo County Sheriff's Office in California on charges of kidnapping a child under the age of 14; lewd/lascivious...

Whatever happened to investigative journalism? As a young White House staffer in 1974, I saw it bring down a president. In the past month, our lazy journalistic watchdogs couldn't even sniff out the main story between two would-be governors. Granted, Bill Ritter's victory over Bob Beauprez was so broad and deep that no great difference ultimately resulted from the October storm over plea bargains and leaks. Still, that episode is worth reviewing, not as a rehash of the campaign, but as a case study in media attitudes. You remember the endless stories about a federal agent with the Bureau of...

President Bush yesterday said he will team up with Democrats to pass an immigration bill with a guest-worker program that his own party blocked this year, and his Republican opponents predicted a bloody intraparty fight but said they cannot stop such a bill from passing. "We will fight it, we will lose. It will go to the Senate, it will pass. The president will sign it. And it will happen quickly because that's one thing they know they can pass," said Rep. Tom Tancredo, Colorado Republican and chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus, who had led the opposition to...