North Carolina

North Carolina businesses are missing out on billions in revenue from minority customers, according to a set of studies presented to a Charlotte Chamber audience Wednesday.

James Johnson, the studies’ co-author and an entrepreneurship professor at UNC Chapel Hill, told a crowd of about 100 people that state and local businesses are not meeting the needs of the state’s Hispanic and black consumers, who spent $1.1 billion and $5.2 billion respectively in other states instead of in North Carolina in 2004.”*

Republican Elizabeth Dole and Democrat Kay Hagan continued their sniping Wednesday over what could become a pivotal issue in their U.S. Senate campaign: illegal immigration.

In the first TV ad of her re-election campaign, Dole touted her role in helping N.C. sheriffs crack down on illegal immigrants. It features more than a dozen sheriffs praising her efforts.

The ad came a day after Hagan, a state senator, discussed immigration with several sheriffs in Raleigh and raised questions about a program Dole has championed.”*

Several House members want to keep illegal immigrants in North Carolina’s community colleges and public universities by barring officials from asking potential students about their immigration status.

The bill filed this week by Democrats differs from two bills filed earlier by Republicans which attempt to bar admission for these immigrants by putting it in state law.”*

Durham Judge David Q. LaBarre recently ordered a second trial over whether or not a twelve-year-old Hispanic boy should be forced to travel, against his will, to Colombia, South America. The judge will decide whether or not Alejandro Ramirez will be forced to visit relatives there. Alejandro is an unconditional Lawful Permanent Resident of the U.S. He has a “green card” issued by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. He will become a full-fledged U.S. citizen a few months from now.

Alejandro’s relatives in Colombia have threatened to keep him there if he visits them. The boy has made it known in both newspaper interviews and on television that he doesn’t want to travel to Colombia because it is too dangerous for him. He has lived in the U.S. with his mother, stepfather, and grandmother for the last six years. He is a honors student at the James E. Shepard Magnet School in Durham.

There is an official U.S. State Department Travel Warning in effect for Colombia. Kidnapping, narco-terrorism and lawlessness are rampant there. Kidnappings for ransom are common in Colombia. Both guerilla armies and common criminals use kidnapping as a major source of income. The kidnappers often kill their victims and then ransom the dead bodies of their victims back to their families.

Two law enforcement experts, an FBI agent stationed in Colombia and a colonel from the Colombian army and DAS (Colombian FBI), have testified that travel to Colombia would be life-threatening for Alejandro. The case has received media attention in Colombia, making Alejandro known to the many kidnappers there. Despite this expert testimony and the official U.S. government Warning, LaBarre has ordered another trial over whether or not Alejandro should be recklessly endangered by being forced to travel to Colombia. LaBarre also ruled that the official U.S. government Warning and Alejandro’s green card are not “objective evidence.”

Last August, a very expensive and tumultuous big show trial was held in the Durham court over the issue of forced travel to Colombia. A previous judge on the case, Craig B. Brown, publicly announced his intention midway through the trial to force Alejandro out of the U.S.

Brown made his decision known before the trial was finished and without hearing all of the testimony. He made his decision public in the course of an interview published in the Durham Herald-Sun newspaper. This was the first publicity the case received. Subsequently, Brown retreated from his decision and resigned from the case. He felt the sting of mounting public criticism of his handling of the case and of his decision. He was also informed of an investigation by the NC State Bureau of Investigation that was ordered by the Judicial Standards Commission.

Alejandro’s mother, Claudia P. Krehbiel, filed suit in late April in federal court against LaBarre, Roy Cooper (NC Attorney General) and other state officials. The federal lawsuit seeks a permanent injunction prohibiting LaBarre from forcing Alejandro out of the U.S. against his will. If the permanent injunction is granted by the federal district court, it will be a landmark decision of national importance to all immigrants, particularly to those who have green cards.

The federal government has granted Alejandro his status as a Lawful Permanent Resident. As a Lawful Permanent Resident, Alejandro is legally entitled to remain safely in the U.S. and under the continuous protection of U.S. law. The federal lawsuit alleges that North Carolina lacks the authority to revoke or infringe Alejandro’s Lawful Permanent Resident status because federal immigration law supersedes state law. Mrs. Krehbiel said: “What good is a U.S. government green card or U.S. citizenship if a state court judge can take them away from you on a whim, without even a trial by jury?”

The lawsuit also asks for a federal injunction against anymore expensive big show trials in the state court over this issue. Mrs. Krehbiel said: “My husband and I have already had to spend everything we had saved for Alejandro’s college education defending his life and trying to keep him safely in the U.S. North Carolina, of course, has unlimited financial resources to finance its effort to railroad him off to Colombia. We hope we can avoid yet another expensive kangaroo court trial in state court.”

Even in life-threatening cases, children in North Carolina are not allowed to have their cases heard by juries. Every accused murderer, rapist and thug is entitled to a jury trial, but not mothers and their innocent children.

Alejandro’s family recently made complaints against Judge Brown to the Civil Rights Division of the U.S. Department of Justice. The complaints allege that Brown willfully violated Alejandro’s constitutional rights. The willful violation of a person’s civil rights under color of law (while acting as a government official) is a serious federal offense. Judge Brown recently resigned from office, stating his intention to retire because of stress and chronic ill health.

Mrs. Krehbiel said: “I really hope we can win the permanent injunction in federal court. It will set an important national precedent. If we do win the injunction, then it will help make it clear to everyone that us Hispanics aren’t cheap, expendable goods to be treated like dirt by North Carolina.”

The complete text of the federal lawsuit and other additional information is available at: www.savealejandro.com

Contact:
Claudia P. Krehbiel, Director
Concerned Mothers of Durham Inc.
P.O. Box 51183
Durham, NC 27717
919-302-3479
support@cmothers.com
support@cmothers.org

Sen. Elizabeth Dole (R-N.C.) launched the first advertisement for her reelection bid, which features statewide sheriffs praising her work securing federal assistance for law enforcement officials to crack down on illegal immigration.

The federal program Dole touts in the ad trains local law enforcement officials to act as immigration enforcement deputies.

“Most of us didn’t have the tools to identify and apprehend illegal immigrants who were repeatedly committing crimes. …So Sen. Dole works out a solution, a statewide partnership between federal officials and North Carolina sheriffs to give us access to the federal tools to identify and apprehend and deport these repeat criminals,” several statewide sheriffs say in the ad. “*

I would like to commend Gov. Easley for supporting our students in North Carolina who are living in our state but are without proper immigration documents. I have the privilege of working with these students every day in the high schools of Buncombe County.

In addition to being the coordinator of the Migrant Education Program, I am one of the advisors of the AIM Club. AIM stands for Action, Inspiration and Motivation. This chapter was founded in 2004 for migrant and Latino high school students with the support of the N.C. Migrant Education Program. There are many other clubs across the state that have a longer history than ours. Our stated goal is “to get students, parents and school personnel to take action that will inspire students to become motivated to stay in school and graduate.” We have also been working hard to educate these families about the importance of higher education and the process to follow to pursue a degree at a community colleges or university. We have taken trips to UNC Asheville, Appalachian State, and A-B Tech.”*

As the title implies, this show highlights South American and Latino artists whose work crosses all media and disciplines, including significant examples by Francis Alÿs, Maria Fernanda Cardoso, Enrique Chagoya, Iran do Espírito Santo, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Alfredo Jaar, Gabriel Kuri, Ana Mendieta, Vik Muniz, Gabriel Orozco, Victor Payan, Rubèn Ortiz Torres, Marcos Ramirez (ERRE) and Perry Vasquez.

Mexican video artist Gustavo Artigas studies identity and social interaction in a literal way in his 2000 DVD work The Rules of the Game. The video depicts two American basketball teams and two Mexican soccer teams playing their games simultaneously on a handball court in the border town of Tijuana. In some cases, identity is explored through nostalgia and traditional images. For María Fernando Cardoso, memory and individual perception play large roles in her installation Cemetery—Vertical Garden, based largely on the Cementario Central in her native Bogotá.”*

Beaufort County in North Carolina, known for sweeping views of the Pamlico and Pungo rivers, is working toward a new distinction.

Leaders say they want to make their rural county in the eastern part of the state the toughest place in the country for illegal immigrants.

The county commissioners are meeting with a lawyer to help identify public services that can be denied to illegal immigrants. And in cases where it is not legal to exclude people, they say they may eliminate programs entirely _ including federally funded prenatal care for poor women _ in an attempt to drive illegal immigrants from the county.”*

Mecklenburg County commissioner Dan Ramirez said he promised voters he wouldn’t use his elected position to discuss personal issues.

But he broke from that stance this week to publicly criticize fellow Republican Bill James for comments made last month in which James compared illegal immigrants to prostitutes and drug dealers.

Ramirez said James managed to insult the entire immigrant community, including those in the country legally.”*

N.C. community colleges are the first statewide system to bar illegal immigrants from seeking college degrees, according to the American Association of State Colleges and Universities.

The move has shaken up the academic world by going beyond the nationwide debate over whether undocumented students should pay lower in-state tuition.

“This has really caught the attention and caused a lot of alarm,” said Dan Hurley, the association’s director of State Relations and Policy Analysis. “Charging them out-of-state tuition is one thing, but barring them entirely is another.”*

North Carolina’s community colleges will no longer admit illegal immigrants, returning to more restrictive policy on the advice of the state Attorney General’s Office.”*

Carlos Budet, executive vice president and chief operating officer of FransGlobal, said his company wants maybe 15 or more of The Taco Maker restaurants and its other concepts open in Greenville, and 60 or more throughout the state.

He said the company is looking for franchisees to operate the company’s brand here.

The company’s first South Carolina sites will open in June, thanks to a contract with Wal-Mart Stores Inc. Budet said his company would open restaurants in partnership with Wal-Marts in Gaffney and Dillon.”*

Now an agent with Keller Williams Realty in Kernersville, Peregrina has found that being bilingual has paid off, but in ways he never imagined. How many Realtors can explain fideicomiso, or escrow, in Spanish? For his Spanish-speaking clients, Peregrina has become as much of an educator as he is a real-estate agent.

“It can be a very confusing process. Like adjustable-rate mortgages really confused a lot of people, and agents had to use young children to translate during the complicated process of buying house,” Peregrina said.

He noted that in the Mexican culture most people do not go into debt to buy their homes. They start to build their houses and then stop until they get the money to complete the construction process, sometimes taking two to three years to finish.”*

Two Democrats running for the U.S. Senate say incumbent Republican Elizabeth Dole walked away from the negotiating table during a critical point of a nationwide debate about illegal immigration last year.

State Sen. Kay Hagan and Chapel Hill entrepreneur Jim Neal also say Dole’s effort to enforce federal immigration law at a local level is misguided.”*

A state governor has no control over the nation’s immigration policy. But that fact isn’t keeping North Carolina’s major-party candidates for governor from pushing a get-tough platform on illegal immigration.

Both the Republican and Democratic hopefuls believe North Carolina must become more involved with efforts to curb immigration abuses in the state’s driver’s license bureaus, in the workplace and on campus. They feel the federal government has failed to pass the immigration reform measures the state and the nation need.”*

1. North Carolina has taken small steps in recent years to make it tougher for illegal immigrants to obtain a driver’s license or get a state government job. If elected, what would changes to state law or policy would you seek in your first year as governor to address the issue of illegal immigration?

2. Sheriffs in a few North Carolina counties now participate in a federal program allowing them to help enforce federal immigration laws. Should local law enforcement officials statewide enforce federal immigration law? Will you direct the state Highway Patrol and other state law enforcement agencies to do so?

3. Should the University of North Carolina system adopt a policy - similar to that of the state community college system - allowing illegal immigrants to enroll?”*

to read the responses follow the link below

A Mecklenburg County commissioner issues some strong statements about illegal immigrants.

Tonight, some in the Latino community say he has gone too far.

Mecklenburg County Commissioner Bill James says he’s not backing down after what he said about immigrants last week.”*

The funds are provided by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Physician Faculty Scholars Program.

Dr. Michael Dulin, the grant recipient, is director of research and evidence-based medicine in the CMC Department of Family Medicine. He also is the director of the Mecklenburg Area Partnership for Primary Care Research and a co-founder of a statewide primary-care research consortium.”*

ESPN Radio has expanded in the Fayetteville market, but the change has cost Hispanics the only Spanish-language station in town.

On April 17, WFAY (1230 AM) started simulcasting the sports programming heard on ESPN Radio-affiliate WCIE (1450 AM) in Spring Lake. Together, these stations have formed what’s being promoted as the Fayetteville ESPN Sports Network.

With the change, WFAY dropped the Spanish-language format introduced less than two years ago when the Norsan Group of Tucker, Ga., bought the station for $850,000 from the Colonial Radio Group. Before then, WFAY carried ESPN Radio, so this on-air programming merger marks a return to sports talk.”*

Among those whose lives are afflicted by sexual abuse, there is a victim population likely suffering in silence and largely unaccounted for because they fear that reporting the crime would lead to another tragic demise: deportation.

Karen Arias, Latina victims advocate for the 30th Judicial District Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault Alliance, said 72 immigrant victims reported domestic violence and sexual assault between July 2007 and March 2008. Of those, 48 victims were women, 24 were men. “*

*From: http://www.themountaineer.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

The housing market crash and the ensuing troubles in credit markets in the past year have caused home values to plummet, forced mortgage foreclosures, slowed the economy and put many businesses in financial peril.

First-time, low-income home buyers have been particularly hard hit as lenders are increasingly reluctant to take chances on them.

Latino newcomers have been especially impacted as North Carolina has experienced an influx of immigration, said Paul Stock, executive vice president of the N.C. Bankers Association.”*

*From: http://media.www.dailytarheel.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

The mayor of Charlotte has been “quite an ambassador” to the city’s Latinos, says Nolo Martinez.

But the candidate for governor from Charlotte, said Martinez, head of UNC-Greensboro’s Center for New North Carolinians, has been “the most anti-immigrant candidate in the mix.”

The fact that both are the same man, according to Martinez, says as much about the political process in North Carolina as it does about Pat McCrory.

“That in itself proves the point that when it comes to immigration issues, our candidates have a political agenda,” said Martinez, former director of Hispanic-Latino affairs in the Hunt and Easley administrations. “The dialogue is so bad, it’s as if we’re having a schoolyard fight.””*

*From: http://www.citizen-times.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

One day after members of the morning show on Raleigh radio station WDCG made derogatory remarks about American Indians, the “Bob and the Showgram” crew took aim at Hispanics and the area’s Mexican consulate.

For a segment on the April 2 “Showgram” program, crew member John Clark wore a T-shirt with “INS” taped to it while approaching people in line at the consulate on Six Forks Road in Raleigh. Bob Dumas, the principal host of the highly rated show, insulted some Spanish-speaking citizens when he said: “It made me a little mad when I saw the giant Mexican flag” outside the consulate.”*

*From: http://www.fayobserver.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

José Cordoba, a maker of fine women’s shoes, walked hundreds of miles across Mexico in 1990 in order to find a job in the United States. Today, he is a U.S. citizen with a home in West Asheville, and his daughter, July, is about to graduate from the nursing program at Western Carolina University.

Chordeleg, Ecuador — Cordoba’s home — had been a thriving town in the 1970s, famous for its Incan archaeology and handmade crafts. But then, according to Cordoba, political corruption and rampant inflation made it impossible for him to support his family. Stores that bought his goods paid him with checks that bounced. Cordoba consigned himself to a dangerous journey.

He flew to Guatemala and joined a group of about 60 who followed a guide, in secretive and scattered fashion, across mountains and desert.”*

*From: http://citizen-times.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

Information Technology, Inc. (ITI), a business unit of Fiserv, Inc. (NASDAQ:FISV), a leading provider of information management systems and services, has partnered with Nuestro Banco, a de novo financial institution with a business plan dedicated to serving the Hispanic consumer and small business segments. The bank opened in September 2007, and has joined forces with Fiserv ITI to deploy the powerful Premier® core system as they pursue the expanding market from their headquarters in the Raleigh, North Carolina area.

“The Hispanic population is growing at 20 percent per year in North Carolina,” explained David Flores, president and chief executive officer of Nuestro Banco, “and the group’s purchasing power is actually growing faster than the population growth rate. The Census Bureau estimates that by 2050, one fourth of the nation’s population will be of Hispanic origin, yet today, the Latino populace as a whole is severely underbanked,” said Flores. “The key to capturing their business will be to design new ways to bank – ways that accommodate the Hispanic culture, habits and way of thinking. We understand these factors, and so does Fiserv.”

The bank looked at several core providers over a three-month period before deciding on ITI’s Premier® and outsourced processing services through the Fiserv ITI data center in Atlanta. Usability and an array of features were pivotal to Nuestro Banco’s choice, but they said that even more important than the software products were the professionals behind them.

“We wanted a software partner who not only understood the dynamics of the Hispanic banking market as it stands today, but one who could see the long-term direction the financial industry will take in response to its expansion. We wanted to partner with a company who can take us to the forefront, and Fiserv ITI was the only one who stood up and said, ‘We can do that,’” said Flores.

Available for either outsourced or in-house account processing, the Premier software suite offers highly scalable products for virtually every function, including core accounting, branch and Internet banking, business intelligence, risk and compliance, remote capture and transaction management, enterprise business process and content management – all available on the industry’s most popular hardware platforms for financial institutions of all types and sizes.

Among the technology partners serving the nation’s community banks, Fiserv ITI is recognized as a thought leader in Hispanic banking, offering an array of solutions including Spanish-language Internet and telephone banking software, online branding services, and a popular Hispanic Banking Toolkit that provides insight into cultural differences and common barriers to banking for Hispanics, as well as product and service recommendations, marketing strategies, best-practice tips and more.

“We were very impressed with Fiserv’s comprehension of the Hispanic culture,” said Flores. Nuestro Banco is particularly looking forward to implementing Premier’s workflows and processes that accommodate commercial lending, because of the potential offered by the growing number of small businesses owned by Latinos in North Carolina. Flores added ITI’s flexible, integrated software will enable Nuestro Banco to capture a vital portion of the Hispanic lending market by providing entrepreneurs the services they need to grow their businesses.

Scalability was also a factor in Nuestro Banco’s decision to work with Fiserv ITI. The bank has an aggressive growth plan that includes two branch openings a year for the next several years and it hopes this plan will leave them in a position to dominate the Hispanic banking sector throughout the southeastern U.S.

“The ability of ITI’s Premier software to grow with us and respond to our needs, and our customers’ needs, will allow us to succeed and thrive as the Hispanic market evolves,” said Flores.

“It’s estimated the Hispanic population will account for 50 percent of all U.S. retail banking growth by 2015, and yet this market remains largely untapped by banks and credit unions,” according to Mike Young, president, Fiserv Bank & Thrift Division. “Fiserv has and will continue to develop the products and services required for Hispanic banking but it’s really our commitment to this market, and the dedicated team we’ve assembled to aid development and implementation, that makes Fiserv stand out from the competition.””*

*From: http://www.businesswire.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish