NEWS  BYTES

A 17-year-old boy who was working in the US without INS authorization was killed when a 200-pound metal ball fell from a crane and struck him.  According to officials, the crane was not being used in the Durango, Colorado construction project in which Luis Carlos Sotelo was involved, but workers decided to use it to move equipment they were using.  The Occupational Safety and Health Administration is investigating the accident.

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Speaking to reporters after meeting with Mexican Attorney General Rafael Macedo de la Concha, US Attorney General John Ashcroft said that the Bush administration was interested in developing a new guest worker program.  While declining to give any specifics on what the US would support, Ashcroft did say the administration sees such a program as a way to improve relations with Mexico. 

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A City Council member in Philadelphia has called upon the city to create a new office designed to recruit immigrants to move to the city.  The move comes after census reports have made clear that Philadelphia is suffering a steady population decline due in large part to the failure of the city to attract new immigrants.  During the 1990s, the city lost four percent of its population.

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Ghulam Mangal, a native of Afghanistan, was recently sentenced to four years in prison on charges of extortion, assault and fraud.  He was found guilty of forcing street vendors, most of whom were immigrants, to pay him to set their carts up in certain areas of Washington, D.C.  Mangal is said to have collected as much as ,000 from three vendors over three years.  Mangal was granted asylum in 1998.

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A recent report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, a leading civil rights organization, accused various anti-immigration groups of being linked to racist groups.  Officials of the anti-immigration groups, including Dan Stein of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, deny any connections with racist organizations.  According to the SPLC report two organizations that, along with FAIR, have been running anti-immigration advertisements on television have clear racist links.  The director of the American Immigration Control Foundation is a founding member of the League of the South, a white supremacist group.  The director of NumbersUSA is an editor for “Social Contract,” a publication that carries articles by “white nationalists.”  Stein argues that even if there are racist organizations involved in the anti-immigration movement, such ideologies are unrelated to immigration issues.

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An INS agent was arrested last week on charges of conspiracy to smuggle undocumented immigrants into the US.  Jose Flores Lopez, along with two others, faces conspiracy charges.  According to the FBI, which investigated the case, Lopez is the leader of the smuggling ring.

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Authorities last week discovered a 12-year-old Mexican girl who was being kept in slave-like conditions by her Texas employer.  The girl was discovered after neighbors heard her screams and called authorities.  She was in an advanced state of malnutrition and showed signs of having been repeatedly beaten.  Her employer, Sandra Luz Bearden, was arrested and could face life in prison.  Officials say that Bearden convinced the girl’s parents to let her employ the girl, saying that she would have a better life than she would in Mexico.  They say that at first the girl was well treated, but in March, Bearden began chaining the girl up outside the house.

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This week actress Sigourney Weaver was profiled in the New York Times.  The article focused on her efforts in lobbying Congress to end the practice of expedited removal.  In a letter to Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-UT), she referred to her experiences in the Philippines while filming a movie, writing that in an “atmosphere of political oppression, I realized how lucky I was to have America to go back to and call home.”  Since 1987, Weaver has served on the board of the Lawyers Committee for Human Rights.

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According to a recent report published in the American Journal of Public Health based on a survey of about 2,600 middle school students in Massachusetts, immigrant children are less likely than native children to use alcohol and illegal drugs.  Despite the lower usage rates, however, immigrant children reported a substantial amount of peer pressure to engage in risky behavior, and were less likely than others to seek parental support in dealing with the pressure.

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Census data released this week shows that immigration to California has had a tremendous impact on the way people in the state live.  The focus of the new data is the age of the population in living arrangements.  The average age in the state is just over 33, two years younger than the national average.  There was also an increase in the percentage of married couple families, due in large part to immigrants who hold traditional views of marriage.  The average family size in California is 3.43, nine percent larger than the national average.