Canal Alliance

Few groups were hit harder by the recession than young men, like Cody Preston and Justin Randol, 25-year-old high-school buddies who didn't go to college.

The unemployment rate for males between 25 and 34 years old with high-school diplomas is 14.4%—up from 6.1% before the downturn four years ago and far above today's 9% national rate. The picture is even more bleak for slightly younger men: 22.4% for high-school graduates 20 to 24 years old. That's up from 10.4% four years ago.

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Today, in response to Governor Jerry Brown's signing of AB 131 (Cedillo), the second half of the California DREAM Act, the California Immigrant Policy Center issued the following statement:

We heartily applaud Governor Brown's historic decision to sign AB 131. We agree with the Governor that "...The Dream Act benefits us all by giving top students a chance to improve their lives and the lives of all of us."

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DUI checkpoints are intended to get drunken drivers off the road. This is a worthy goal that most people support; however across the state the intention has changed with the addition of driver's license checks that directly or indirectly target immigrant communities.

It works like this: A large percentage of the population, 2.6 million people, are ineligible to get a driver's licenses in California.

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Our Executive Director, Tom Wilson, wrote an article for the Marin Independent Journal about Obama's approach to immigration.  Take a look:

SO-CALLED Secure Communities, the brainchild of the Bush administration, and continued by President Barack Obama, requires local law enforcement to share fingerprints with the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement to deport tens of thousands of people each year.

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Some people say that immigrants do not contribute to the economy.  Some say that immigrants do not pay taxes. Nothing could be farther from the truth.

Did you know?

On average, immigrants pay $539 more taxes per household than U.S.-born households (a total of $5.2 billion in state taxes in 2009)

Immigrants comprise more than one-third of California’s labor force (34 percent)

Immigrants contribute 32 percent of the state’s Gross Domestic Product, particularly in core industries such as farming, fishing, forestry and textile production.

Immigrants are more than one and a half times more likely to be self- employed.

More than half of California’s 10.3 million immigrants became homeowners after 18 years of residence in the United States.

Tom Wilson

Sources

*Looking Forward: Immigrant Contributions to the Golden State, California Immigrant Policy Center, 2, http://www.caimmigrant.org/ publications.html.
 
*Dowell Myers and John Pitkin, Assimilation Today: New Evidence Shows the Latest Immigrants to America are Following in Our History’s Footsteps, Center for American Progress, 6, Sept. 1, 2010, http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2010/09/immigration_assimilation. html.