News Round Up In-Brief

AccessDenied has added this feature in order to keep our readers informed of news items and reports from around the web on unauthorized im/migration and health. If you have items you would like us to include, please email: contactaccessdenied@gmail.com.

Updates from the US:

• NPR’s Morning Edition ran a story on behind-the-scenes efforts by prison companies to draft and ultimately pass Arizona’s SB 1070 as part of a new business model to lock up illegal immigrants.

• A leading immigrant advocate insists that plenty of unauthorized migrants work hard, pay taxes and pay for their own health care.

• In the United States, only citizens are allowed to vote in national and statewide elections. And while immigrants who are granted permanent residency enjoy an array of privileges, including the right to work, they can lose them all and be expelled from the country if the authorities discover that they have even registered to vote. In some locale, undocumented immigrants contribute to campaigns in other ways because they can’t vote.

• Meanwhile, Portland, Maine residents will vote Nov. 2 on a proposal to give legal residents who are not U.S. citizens the right to vote in local elections, joining places like San Francisco and Chicago that have already loosened the rules or are considering it.

• President Barack Obama states that overhauling immigration will be harder to do if Hispanics don’t vote Nov. 2.

International updates:

• In his message for the Roman Catholic Church’s World Day of Migrants and Refugees,  the pope challenged host nations to “combine the welcome due to every human being, especially when in need, with a reckoning of what is necessary for both the local inhabitants and the new arrivals to live a dignified and peaceful life”.  He later stated that migrants have a duty to integrate, contributing to the current Europe-wide debate over the legitimate place of foreigners.

• The European Union is expected to send 200 border guards to Greece in order to combat a surge in illegal immigration across the country’s border with Turkey.

• The flow of Mexican emigrants to the United States between 1994 and 2008 constituted an export of $81 billion in human capital to the neighboring country, BBVA Bancomer bank estimated in a report released Monday.