By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

For the second time in less than a month, an Ecuadorean immigrant was savagely attacked in New York by men shouting anti-Hispanic slurs. Once again, as with the death a month ago of Marcelo Lucero, the pain was felt among Hispanics in the United States and in faraway South America. The attack that left José Sucuzhañay brain-dead seems to confirm the rise in hate crimes pro-immigration advocates have been warning about since Lucero’s passing.

José and his brother Romel Sucuzhañay were attacked on a Brooklyn street last weekend by three men who allegedly shouted anti-Hispanic and anti-gay slurs while beating them with a bottle and a baseball bat. The brothers had been walking with their arms around each other.

José, 31, was declared brain-dead Tuesday at Elmhurst Hospital in Queens, although his family was keeping him on life support until his parents and two children arrived from Ecuador.

“Today my brother is the victim, but tomorrow it could be your brother, your mother, your father,” another sibling, Diego Sucuzhañay, said Tuesday at a press conference outside the hospital.

According to the New York Daily News,

Diego said he had been talking with his parents in Ecuador by phone, telling them Jose “was okay.” But, he said, now “it’s time to tell them the truth.”

Thousands of miles away, Mercedes Quintuña, the Sucuzhañays’ mother, also spoke to the press.

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If you were surprised when the first-ever Vietnamese American was elected to Congress a few days ago, you’re not alone.

Many Vietnamese immigrants across the U.S. were also unaware of Republican Anh “Joseph” Cao until his victory this Saturday in a special election in New Orleans. Cao defeated the tainted nine-term Democratic incumbent, William Jefferson, an African American from an overwhelmingly black congressional district.

Not even his fellow Republicans knew that much about Cao, an immigration lawyer from East New Orleans. According to The Washington Post, D.C. party aides had to look up his ads on YouTube to learn how to pronounce his last name. [Here’s one of the ads; the pronunciation is close to “gow.”]

Unknown or not, Cao’s victory seems to have earned him the right to carry the hopes and expectations of both Vietnamese-Americans and Republicans on his shoulders.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) announced Tuesday he will not be seeking reelection to a second term in 2010.

Coming after dismal results for his party among Hispanic voters both in Florida and nationwide, his decision bolsters the sense of a growing gulf between Latinos and the Republican Party.

Martinez “was seen as vulnerable in a state that has been tilting Democratic, particularly among Latinos,” The New York Times said. After decades of staunch Hispanic support for Republicans in Florida, this year 57 percent of them chose Democrat Barack Obama over John McCain.

“The GOP should find the Hispanic defection in Florida particularly troubling,” wrote Sun Sentinel columnist Kingsley Guy. “Historically, Republican presidential candidates have carried the Hispanic electorate, for years dominated by Cuban-Americans who supported the GOP’s tough-on-Castro policies. Attitudes are changing, however.” The main reason for the low level of Hispanic support, he added, was the virulent debate on immigration reform, which “soured Hispanic voters on the GOP.”

Paradoxically, despite having supported comprehensive reform of immigration laws, Martinez — a Cuban who arrived in the U.S. at age fifteen — appears to have been at least partly a victim of that souring.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

In his previous posting, as a priest in Oklahoma, Bishop Anthony B. Taylor was a fervent opponent of state laws state used to launched a crackdown on illegal immigration. Now, a few months after being named the head of the diocese of Little Rock, Ark., Taylor is again taking the lead on the issue.

In November, Taylor published his first pastoral letter since taking his new job. Titled “I Was a Stranger and You Welcomed Me: A Pastoral Letter on the Human Rights of Immigrants,” it equates the plight of undocumented immigrants to that of Joseph and Mary when they arrived in Bethlehem and asks Catholics to welcome newcomers rather than reject them. [You can download the letter here.]

“I believe that the major current issue about which American Catholics are most confused today has to do with immigration,” the bishop wrote in an introduction.

“The God of the Bible is a God of immigrants and the history of salvation unfolds largely in the context of immigration,” he added in the letter.

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It’s fitting that Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar grew up in Calexico, the California town whose name is a combination of California and Mexico.  As a leader of President-elect Barack Obama’s task force on immigration, Cuéllar can certainly use some transcultural sensitivity.

Cuéllar, a law professor at Stanford University, has been named one of the co-heads of the Obama transition’s Immigration Policy Working Group.  The transition’s web site says he is in charge of “working on a plan to implement the President-elect’s commitments to fix the immigration system through legislative and executive actions that promote prosperity, enhance our security, strengthen families, and advance the rule of law.”

Cuéllar has called the current immigration situation in the U.S. “a humanitarian crisis that we’ve ignored” and one that deserves an appropriate response, Spanish wire Agencia EFE reported.

EFE interviewed pro-immigration reform activists, who said they were satisfied with the appointment. Cuéllar, reporter María Peña wrote, “is known for his pragmatism and sensitivity toward the subject and his appointment this week confirms … that the incoming administration is committed to comprehensive immigration reform.”

Clarissa Martinez de Castro of the National Council of La Raza, told Peña:

Cuéllar is a good choice and we think that this time reason will win out over the toxic rhetoric of groups that have tried to inject fear into the electorate about immigrants. He’s very pragmatic and, although the economy is the United States’ top priority at this time, we think that in the end people will recognize that sensible immigration policy also will be good for our economy.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

(Image: IBN)

WHAT: From India’s IBN news network: Terrorists equipped with heavy machine guns, including AK-47s and grenades, strike at the city’s most high-profile targets: the Chhattrapati Shivaji Terminus (CST) rail terminus; the landmark Taj Hotel at the Gateway, and the luxury Oberoi Trident at Nariman Point. Attacks started at Cafe Leopold, a place popular with foreigners. There were other shootouts at Cama hospital and near the Metro cinema.

From India Times: Terrorists struck in at least ten places. They took hostages at the Oberoi Trident, the Taj Mahal Palace and Tower Hotel, and Nariman House.

WHEN: The attacks started around 9.30 pm Wednesday in Mumbai, Wednesday shortly after noon New York time. Twenty-four hours later, as of Thursday evening in Mumbai, (11 am in New York) fighting continued, and explosions were reported at the Oberoi and Taj Hotel.

WHO: An unknown group, the Deccan Mujahideen, has claimed responsibility. India’s Prime Minister Manmohan Singh said, “It is evident that the group which carried out these attacks, based outside the country, had come with single-minded determination to create havoc in the commercial capital of the country.”

CASUALTIES: As of Thursday 11 am New York time, authorities were reporting 125 dead and 327 injured.

SCALE: From the International Herald Tribune: “Even by the standards of terrorism in India, which has suffered a rising number of attacks this year, the assaults were particularly brazen in scale, coordination and execution. The attackers moved against their targets after arriving at the Nariman Point district on boats.”

IMPACT: IBN says: “26/11/2008 will go down as one of the darkest days in the history of Mumbai and India. Life in the country’s financial capital remains paralysed as terrorists hold the city under siege. In a heinous terror attack that the country has seen in recent times, Mumbai came under an unprecedented night attack.”

LINKS: From The Associated Press: “Westerners in India’s financial center were targeted in the spectacular attack comprised of multiple, simultaneous assaults — a signature of past al-Qaida actions including the Sept. 11 attacks. But the Indian attack was carried out by gunmen and not the suicide bombers frequently employed by al-Qaida and its affiliates.”

From The Guardian: Linking the attacks to al-Qaida “was an immediate, simplistic — and probably misleading — response to the attacks on big hotels, seen as western targets, in Mumbai. Certainly, the terrorists appeared to be Muslim extremists. Although they must have assumed they were going to be killed even though they took hostages, the attackers were not suicide bombers, overt martyrs of the kind we have witnessed elsewhere — in London, Iraq, and now in Afghanistan — since the 9/11 attacks on the U.S.”

A FIRST-PERSON ACCOUNT: From India Uncut blog:

…we headed to All Stir Fry, the restaurant in the Gordon House Hotel in a lane down from there. They told us we’d have to wait 20 minutes. We stepped out again, and as we did so, we heard gunshots, and saw people running towards us from the left side.

One of the hotel employees rushed out and told us to get back in. “There must have been an encounter,” he said. “Get back in, you’ll be safe inside.”

We followed him in. We waited in the lounge-bar upstairs for a while. The big screen there was showing cricket. India won. Then someone changed the channel.

That’s when we realised that this was much more than a random police encounter, or a couple of gunshots. We heard that terrorists with AK-47s had opened fire outside Leopold’s, the pub down the road. We heard there was firing elsewhere in the city as well, including in the Taj. We watched transfixed, and as the apparent scale of the incidents grew, we realised we couldn’t go home. We asked if they had a room vacant; they did, so we settled in, switched on the TV, and watched in horror.

By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

Manassas and other parts of Virginia have seen a heated debate on immigration. Photo: NY·DF/Flickr

This year’s elections showed that the use of immigration as a campaign issue apparently backfired for enforcement-only, hardline candidates. Now the results are starting to have an impact on policy: Virginia, where immigration laws are among the toughest in the nation, seems poised to radically alter its approach towards immigrants.

The Washington Post reported this week that the Virginia Commission on Immigration is about to send Gov. Timothy M. Kaine a set of recommendations, “most of which would help immigrants instead of penalizing them.”

Virginia was one of several traditionally-red states that swung Democratic this year. Latino voters there have been credited with helping President-elect Barack Obama win the state.

Now, “backlash at the voting booth” is cited as one reason for the new attitude towards immigrants, together with a lack of interest in the issue due to the economic crisis and “a clearer understanding of the state’s limitations on a largely federal issue,” The Post‘s Anita Kumar wrote.

Recommendations include shortening the Medicaid residency requirements for certain qualified immigrants, offering in-state tuition to immigrants who meet specific criteria and creating an immigration assistance office.

The commission considered but did not adopt proposals to force immigrants to carry special identification cards, allow hospitals to fingerprint patients who do not pay their bills and require proof of legal residence to be eligible for public assistance.

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By Diego Graglia, FI2W web editor

In a little-noticed interview last week, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) renewed pro-immigrant advocates’ hopes for comprehensive reform of the nation’s immigrations laws under the next administration.

Talking to the Gannett News Service, Reid said immigration reform will be passed because President-elect Barack Obama and his former rival Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) agree on the matter.

“On immigration, there’s been an agreement between Obama and McCain to move forward on that. …We’ll do that,” Reid said.

The reporter then asked whether there will be “as much of a fight on immigration as last time” in Congress. Reid answered,

We’ve got McCain and we’ve got a few others. I don’t expect much of a fight at all. Now health care is going to be difficult. That’s a very complicated issue. We debated at great length immigration. People understand the issues very well. We have not debated health care, so that’s going to take a lot more time to do.

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