A long journey out of ‘darkness’

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According to the Fiscal Policy Institute, the order will benefit the economy by increasing immigrant workers’ wages 5 to 10 percent, and it could lead to a $152 million increase in New York state tax revenues.

The order, Pablo said, “would help keep families together, but governments, they twist things. People do not understand why we are here.”

U.S. Rep. Peter King, a Republican from Seaford, voted with the House majority to block the Obama’s order, although he has called repeatedly for comprehensive immigration reform.

The Democratically controlled U.S. Senate passed the Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of 2013, but the House never considered it.

Sen. Charles Schumer, a Democrat from New York, who authored the bill with Sen. John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, said, “This bill is the way to solve our broken immigration system. It would secure the borders, prevent employers from hiring people who cross the border illegally and require those who are here illegally to register, pay back taxes, admit wrongdoing and pay a significant fine.”

Poverty forces immigration
Erika Patricia Guerra Escalante, a migrant rights defender with Witness for Peace, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit human-rights group, said government oppression, gang violence, environmental degradation and disasters, and even U.S. free trade policies and corporate practices have led to Latin America’s high poverty rates. “In Honduras, 500 people leave each day for the U.S.,” said Guerra.

Guerra spoke last month at the CoLoKi Workers Trailer, a hiring site for low-wage day laborers in an industrial section of Freeport. Poverty drives millions from across Latin America to leave their homes and their families and seek better lives in the U.S. Many, if not most, send money home to loved ones left behind, enabling them to survive amid squalor.

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