Latino Immigrants

John McCain, angling to win a bigger share of the fast-growing Latino vote, is taking the risky step of placing an immigration overhaul at the center of his appeal. The presumed Republican presidential nominee, who trails Barack Obama among Latinos, had been focused on assuring conservatives that securing the U.S. border with Mexico would be his immigration priority. But McCain has adopted a message that gives equal weight to helping employers and immigrant workers and their families.

Unemployment among Latinos -- particularly immigrants -- jumped in the last year, wiping out many of their economic gains, according to a report released Wednesday by the Pew Hispanic Center. The report comes amid an extended housing market and construction slump that has claimed hundreds of thousands of jobs in the U.S.

Outside the Home Depot on Ponce de Leon Avenue, no one engages in theoretical debates about whether illegal immigrants are competing for jobs with Americans. Here, the competition unfolds whenever a truck pulls into the parking lot, its driver looking for day laborers. On any given day, about half of the 30 or so men waiting to pounce on those trucks are Latinos, many of them undocumented. But the rest are African American men like Sam Gibbs.

Home is a shabby apartment building on the outskirts of town. Work is the late shift at a meatpacking plant. This is Degmo Ali's life. And it seems to have been misplaced in this rural town: Dressed in ornate African garb, the graceful 24-year-old is hard to picture on a slaughterhouse floor in Nebraska. "I want to go back" to Somalia, she says.

Watching the GOP presidential debate last week, it was easy to conclude that the greatest threat facing the U.S. is an influx of undocumented immigrants. Most of the candidates were, as arch-nativist Tom Tancredo put it, trying to out-Tancredo Tancredo. And every time they did, they seemed to get raucous applause from the audience.

Manuel Pereda, 57, spent years studying English during the day and working as a dishwasher at night. His wife, Rosa, 54, practiced common phrases and constantly looked up words in an Spanish-English dictionary. The more English the couple learned, they assumed, the better jobs they could get and the more money they could send home to their families in Mexico.

The Kentucky Judicial Conduct Commission suspended District Judge Sue Carol Browning without pay for 15 days for jailing 17 Latino immigrants for traffic infractions and then denying them bail. Some of the 17 were held as long as three weeks before another judge freed them. Circuit Judge Tyler Gill ruled in October that the men were "jailed without reason."

Re "The brown and the gray," Current, Feb. 4 David E. Hayes-Bautista's call to invest more in educating Latino immigrants is misguided. Money cannot buy a culture of academic achievement. But, in "La Nueva California: Latinos in the Golden State," Hayes-Bautista makes clear what I see around me, which is that Latino immigrants are working their way to middle-class status via blue-collar jobs. The only people elitists like Gregory Rodriguez regard as successful are people with master's degrees and media jobs.

With each generation in the United States, adolescents from Asian immigrant families improved their health habits, while their Latino counterparts either showed no improvement or developed worse habits, according to a Rand Corp. study released Tuesday. The study, which looked at diet, exercise, television viewing and other practices among at least three generations of youths aged 12 to 17, could help explain rising rates of obesity and diabetes among Latinos.

I teach citizenship and English classes to mostly Latino immigrants. Your article ["The Cross-Back-Over Success of Shakira," Oct. 29] demonstrates that despite the misconception that one has to "sell out" in order to assimilate and become part of the great American fabric, this is not necessary. Shakira is a great example of how to be real and adopt another culture. Being able to compete in the mainstream will only benefit our community. People like Shakira are helping us more than any novella or local Spanish newscast.