The Ellis Island Immigration Museum is broadening its scope beyond the years when the site was an immigrant gateway, from 1892 to 1954. Immigration before and after those years will be part of the “Peopling of America Center.” The $20 million center is slated to open in 2011.

It will touch on the modern illegal immigration issue but won’t dwell too closely on it, according to the New York Times. New exhibits will allow you to view the successive waves of immigrants in individual American towns, and see the movements of people around the globe over time.

An announcement of the expansion was celebrated last week during a naturalization ceremony. Among those who took the oath of citizenship was U.S. Army Specialist Franck Dorval, a New Rochelle resident originally from Haiti.

(Photo: Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation)

As of Oct. 1, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, will be offering a new version of the citizenship test. The aim of the redesigned naturalization test is to offer a more uniform, standarized experience nationwide and to allow applicants to demonstrate their knowledge of U.S. history and civics.

The  biggest change to the test is the civics portion that will include new questions focusing on geography, Native Americans and women. Applicants, like before, must correctly answer six out of ten questions taken from a list of 100. The test has not undergone any substantive changes since 1986.

The Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan think tank, examined the revamped test in a report that can be viewed here.

To view the types of questions that are asked in the current test, go here. To view the questions—and answers—of the new test, check them out here.

I wanted to follow up here on Andrew Berends, who has been speaking out on his 10-day detention in Nigeria. He was there filming of his documentary about the Niger Delta, and became the latest journalist to be detained by government security forces and eventually deported. The Hastings High School grad is back home in Brooklyn …

… and hopes to finish his documentary, “Delta Boys,” for broadcast next spring. As he told the Committee to Protect Journalists,

“I want Americans to see in places like the Niger Delta what’s the real cost of the oil that we want to get cheaply. And not just the cost in money but the cost in human suffering.”

I spoke to another filmmaker, Sandy Cioffi, about her detention and the story that both she and Berends are trying to get out. Below are that story and another by my colleague Barbara Livingston Nackman about Berends’ detention.

(Photo: Seth Harrison/The Journal News) Read more of this entry »

Prepaid calling cards, a staple commodity in a lot of immigrant neighborhoods, are notorious for deceptive labeling about what they offer and what they charge.

The House of Representatives yesterday passed Rep. Eliot Engel’s bill requiring companies to clearly explain the terms, conditions and fees in their advertising.

“The measure is designed to protect our consumers, specifically our poorest ones, who are most often targets of this type of fraud,” Engel said. His district covers parts of the Bronx, Westchester and Rockland counties.

Among the problem practices: Companies deduct minutes even if the call is not connected; cut off calls in order to trigger another connection charge, and round up the minutes used in 4-minute increments, his office said. Engel pointed to Hispanic Institute study that found callers received only 60 percent of the minutes they were promised, on average.

“An egregious example shows one company advertising in Spanish but keeping the fine print in English,” he said, citing a BusinessWeek article. “Their ‘but we’re in America’ excuse doesn’t forgive them for targeting immigrants to make an easy buck.”

The bill is known as the Calling Card Consumer Protection Act, H.R.-3402. The companion bill being considered in the Senate is S-2998.

Barack Obama earned his first “pants on fire” rating from PolitiFact.com, home of the Truth-O-Meter, and the topic is immigration.

The site calls out Obama for likening John McCain to Rush Limbaugh. Here’s the Spanish-language ad in question. It says McCain and his Republican friends have two faces on immigration.

McCain has already earned the “pants on fire” prize for his claims on pigs with lipstick and sex ed for kindergartners. You can hear more in a recording of today’s Brian Lehrer Show.

The attorneys in the Port Chester voting rights case are done talking, and now a federal judge will decide how to reform Port Chester’s village board election system. His job is to choose a system that will allow Hispanic voters to participate fully and that will fix the problems he found in his January ruling.

Judge Stephen Robinson has found that Latinos are at a big disadvantage in a system where the trustees run in village-wide races for two open seats each year. The court found that if trustees ran in separate districts, one of which had a Hispanic majority, then Latinos would have a means to gain representation in their local government.

The case is complicated and easily misunderstood. Basically, the Department of Justice proved a set of problems with the old system. The voting pattern in Port Chester has been racially polarized, and candidates supported by the entire Hispanic electorate routinely lost. There was also the matter of a racist flier in 2007 and a lack of language assistance at the voting booths. No Latino, incidentally, has won office in a village that is nearly half Hispanic.

One of the details mentioned in the final day of arguments yesterday was a bit ironic. (I didn’t have room for it in today’s Journal News article, attached below.) Cesar Ruiz, at right, the unsuccessful board candidate who sparked the case and became a plaintiff, doesn’t live within the proposed Hispanic-majority district. His attorney, Randolph McLaughlin, proposed that candidates in each new district not be subject to a residency rule.

There was also an intriguing discussion about how non-U.S. citizens figure into all this. I’ll get to that later.

(Top photo: Carucha L. Meuse/ The Journal News)

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At a Sept. 17 morning meeting on Yonkers Avenue where hundreds of day laborers congregate, Yonkers police officials warned day laborers not to accept jobs with contractors who are going to Rye. Roger Jara, a day laborer leader in Yonkers, said today that police warned them not to go to Rye because police in that community are collaborating with immigration enforcement officials and detaining illegal immigrants. Yonkers police met with day laborers on Sept. 17 to discuss residents’ complaints about day laborers harassing young women and workers’ complaints that some contractors have not paid them their wages.

Nearly 10 percent of the Hispanic adults in a survey by the Pew Hispanic Center say they have been stopped by police or other authorities who asked them about their immigration status. The Pew Hispanic Center released results yesterday of its recent survey of 2,015 Hispanic adults. About eight percent of respondents who are U.S. citizens and 10 percent of Hispanic immigrant respondents said they have been stopped and asked about their immigration status by police or other authorities. Other survey responses indicated that half of respondents said that the situation of Hispanics in the United States is worse now than it was a year ago and 57 percent worry that they or a family member or friend will be deported. Click here to see the full report.

For the past few days I’ve been covering the death of a Guatemalan man whose body was found early Tuesday morning in his backyard. Police confirmed the identification of Emilio DeJesus Ramirez-Buezo yesterday.

We already knew the name on Tuesday after I interviewed Buezo’s brother, Alvaro Buezo. Buezo was nervous about talking to me because he said that police did not want him talking to anyone since it may impede the investigation. I still managed to get some details from Buezo about his older brother’s life and death.

Alvaro said he observed Emilio the morning he was found—before police were called—and noticed bruises and blood coming from his mouth. He also said that his brother was wearing  shorts, T-shirt and one sock. Other people we spoke with yesterday said Emilio was actually wearing boxer shorts.  Either way, Alvaro was hesitant to say whether he thought his brother had been killed, because he said he didn’t know what people looked like when they died.

The cops yesterday explained the bruising as postmortem lividity. The term means discoloration of the skin after death. The chief of police also said it was “his understanding” that there was no blood coming from Emilio’s mouth. The explanations came after Mount Kisco police released a statement saying that an autopsy on Emilio conducted by the Westchester County Medical Examiner showed no evidence of foul play as the cause of his death. A call to the Westchester ME for confirmation was referred back to the Mount Kisco Police Department.

The case remains open. A cause of death has not been determined on the 37-year-old man. We did hear from community members that he was a heavy drinker. Maybe he drank too much that night? Maybe he choked on his own vomit? I would think though that the ME would have noted the latter.

I guess we will have to wait for toxicology reports for a clearer picture of what may have happened that night. For more on this story, check it out here.

A local food and clothing drive is under way for Haiti, and the organizers are hoping to fill up a C-5 cargo plane with supplies by the end of the month. There are a number of dropoff points around Rockland County, including Konbit Neg Lakay in Spring Valley.

For more information call Konbit Neg Lakay, (845) 425-4623.

Below is a story about the effort by reporter Suzan Clarke.

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