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Archive for immigrants and healthcare
January 10, 2010 at 8:55 pm · Filed under immigrants and healthcare, immigrants in detention
Emmanuel Owusu arrived in the U.S. from Ghana on a student visa in 1972. He spent most of his next 33 years in Chicago and was a legal permanent resident.
But U.S. immigration officials picked him up in 2006 because of a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft, according to a story in Sunday’s New York Times.
The ailing 62-year-old barber lived the next two years in Arizona in a government facility ran by a private contractor. There he died of a heart ailment, battling deportation to the end.
”I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix (Immigration) field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. ”Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago,”’ the Times reported.
“In response,” the Times reported, “a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s ”lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.”
What raises this story to such high level are the powerful and compelling details.
The Times acquired previously unreleased government reports that, in many cases, gave the full story or another story than the one offered at the time by federal officials. The American Civil Liberties took part in the Times’ effort to gain the documents.
One government document, for example, said that “unbearable, untreated pain” had been a significant factor in an immigrant’s suicide.
Where do you take this story now?
You check with local immigrant and immigrants groups, such as the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights for the names of persons who may have suffered inadequate care in an immigration detention facility.
You find out from the ACLU what immigrants’ stories might be linked back to Chicago.
You look for legal and other experts here and across the country who have tracked the conditions in these facilities, and again, you focus in on details about immigrants with roots or ties to Chicago.
On your own, you check the records of U.S. immigration offices for deaths and serious injuries suffered by immigrants from the Chicago area in these detention facilities. You check with the major consulates that serve Chicago’s immigrant communities.
If you are short on time and support, you look for help elsewhere. Can you link up with a radio station, a magazine, an immigrant publication elsewhere and share the work?
Can you find an academic expert or an advocacy group that can walk you through the process? If you have any relatives, friends, neighbors who can recall instances, you build your reporting from there.
Those are my suggestions. What else can you do? Let’s share some thoughts, some experiences, some contacts here.
Here is the New York Times story:
http://tinyurl.com/ybgcoqc
Steve
October 14, 2009 at 3:28 pm · Filed under Reporting on ethnic communities, immigrants and healthcare
Here’s a blog from a Cleveland reporter that gets me thinking about some figures he points to dealing with infant mortality. As he notes, there are federal figures for most counties and so I wonder how we are doing here in the Chicago area. His reporting approach might also be a guide. So, too, his frustration about what hasn’t happened yet.
Sustaining the Outrage: Revisiting America’s Most At-Risk Residents – Our Children
Our children shouldn’t live this way.
They shouldn’t have to play at contaminated abandoned industrial sites because their neighborhoods have no green space. They shouldn’t be at risk of dying before their first birthday because the color or their skin makes getting health care difficult. They shouldn’t go to schools where there is no learning and where their parents’ greatest hope is that they don’t join a gang or get attacked.
They shouldn’t be well on their way to becoming hardened criminals by age 11, or be forced to drop out of high school because they got pregnant.
Our Children shouldn’t live this way. But they do, especially in big cities like Cleveland. And it seems we have grown accustomed to it.
A few years back, Joan Mazzolini and I and a group of Plain Dealer reporters took an exhaustive look at our nation’s most at-risk citizens – the half million children who call greater Cleveland home.
We set out to precisely assess the problems children in Cleveland face.
For example, we found that half a million Ohio children live next door to a toxic waste site. We visited the neighborhoods with the most dangerous sites and found youngsters playing in abandoned factories.
We found that nearly 1 million children in Ohio live in what we defined as poor housing, putting them at greater risk for fires, accidents and environmental health hazards such as lead poisoning and asthma.
We found that babies born to teenage mothers are much more likely to be premature, and that those babies had cost Ohio roughly $161 million in five years. We found that in some inner-city neighborhoods infants are dying at rates that rival Third World countries like Guatemala.
And we found that children of color were most in danger.
and the blog picks up here:
http://tinyurl.com/y9a79zq
Stephen
August 11, 2009 at 2:47 pm · Filed under immigrants and healthcare
What is it that immigrants desire once they arrive here, and what is it that they are lacking? In many cases, it is health care.
In its recent survey of immigrant women, New America Media found that 30 percent of all immigrant women and 40 percent of all Latinas did not have any form of health care coverage.
This is a story that the ethnic news media cannot run out of imagination to explain what is happening.
In an excellent piece today on the health dilemmas facing immigrant children here illegally, Chicago Tribune reporter Antonio Olivo touched on one angle.
But there are others.
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/chi-immigrant-health-transplantaug11,0,3342811.story
As states and communities cut back, how have immigrants and refugees suffered?
How have communities dealt with the health issues of refugees who have lived for years in desperate conditions in camps awaiting their chances to come here?
How do working-poor immigrants cope with unemployment, no health care and their health care bills? Do they live off of underground doctors and uncontrolled, underground medicines? Do they work sick and get so sick they cannot work?
Do elderly immigrants get the health care they are entitled to?
Do immigrants crowed into Chicago’s weary and much used housing get sick more often and more seriously, and from what?
So many stories to tell and so many who would benefit from hearing them.
Here is a link to a website that offers tips, resources and good story examples on reporting on health:
http://reportingonhealth.org/
And from my colleague Curtis Black, I’d like to point out this:
Latino Women Organize as “Health Promoters”
Newstip Date: 10-17-2002
In addition to barriers of language and income, new immigrants are often denied access to health services on the basis of legal status. Five years ago a group of Latino women in South Chicago began organizing to marshal resources to meet their community’s health needs. They went on to found the Centro Communitario Juan Diego, where a grassroots “health promoters” program continues to bring free services and train women in health issues — and develop leadership skills. For two years the health promoters have been part of the center’s HIV program.
“They are an amazing group of women,” said Oswaldo Lopez, a volunteer with American Red Cross who works on HIV outreach to Latinos. “They’ve faced so many barriers working in the Latino community, and they’ve overcome them all.” Coordinator Rosio Nazimek says “a lot of taboos are broken” talking about safe sex and handing out free condoms. In addition to HIV issues, the six-week health promoters training covers breast cancer, asthma and diabetes, as well as domestic violence and human rights; advanced trainings are also offered. Graduates “become HIV activists,” Nazimek said, working at clinics or hospitals or with the center doing outreach to at-risk youth.
A graduation ceremony for the current health promoters class will be held in mid-November; a health fair is planned for Nov. 22 at St. Kevin’s Church, 10509 S. Torrence. Centro Communitario Juan Diego is dedicated to serving “the poorest of the poor” and promoting social change, with trainings in human rights and immigration rights, and tutoring and after-school programs, especially for Spanish-speaking children in English-language schools.
More Info:
- Rosio Nazimek at Centro Communitario Juan Diego, 773-731-0109 ext 26
- Oswaldo Lopez at American Red Cross of Greater Chicago, 773-383-4695
