On Saturday I covered a very lively, very interesting talk by an author from Tarrytown, Frederick Douglass Opie, who researched the origins of soul food. The African-American “comfort food” is the result of a surprising variety of cultural influences, he said.

Opie heads African diaspora studies at Marist College. In his talk at the Warner Library (which I wrote about in The Journal News), he took the story back to the Portuguese who brought New World products to Africa, including corn. Even in slavery, Africans managed to bring their stews, rice dishes and other cooking traditions to America.

Opie drew connections between soul food in America and the cuisines of other places where enslaved Africans were brought to work on plantations, from the Caribbean to coastal Peru to Brazil.

The author is currently working on a book about black and Latino relations in New York. He did a lot of his research for both projects in Tarrytown.

One person he interviewed about soul food was Alyce Coqueran, an 82-year-old woman whose parents came from St. Lucia. (In the photo is Opie with Alyce’s daughter, Arnelle Ullrich.)

Coqueran was at the event, and told me how she adopted soul food. “My parents didn’t know a lot of the American cooking when they came here,” she said. “I learned to make the best sweet potato pie, so much so that I don’t eat anybody else’s sweet potato pie but mine. I learned that from a neighbor of ours who was from Virginia .. and I tweaked it a little bit.”

Business reporter Julie Moran Alterio had a story this week that sounded like an Onion-like spoof (see the Onion’s ”$700 Billion Bailout Celebrated With Lavish $800 Billion Executive Party”): IBM is offering its laid-off workers a crack at jobs at IBM units in India, China, Brazil and other countries: Slovenia, Romania, Nigeria, the Czech Republic, South Africa and the United Arab Emirates.

Click here for her story about the relocate-abroad program known as “Project Match.” You can also hear Julie describe the program on this NPR segment.

So, would you do it?

The “fugitive operations” teams that have conducted an increasing number of raids (recall the one at an apartment building in Mount Kisco) are sweeping up mostly people without criminal backgrounds, according to a report from the Migration Policy Institute. The original mission was to focus on dangerous fugitives, but the results show something different, according to MPI.

Those who had criminal convictions accounted for “just 9 percent of total arrests in 2007, down from 32 percent in 2003, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s own estimates,” says MPI. Related documents are linked here.

Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s new positions on immigration have been emerging in the last few days.

She no longer wants to punish cities for confidentiality policies or enlist local police to enforce immigration, reports The New York Times and NY1.

She is in favor of the DREAM Act, comprehensive reform (instead of strictly enforcement), a moratorium on raids and more funding for ESL, the New York Immigration Coalition said in a news conference today, after meeting with her for an hour yesterday. She was noncommittal on E-Verify and Real ID, the coalition said.

Michael Powell of the Times looks curiously at this “evolution” in views between her House and Senate tenure. NY1 has an interesting quote from the senator, suggesting that upstate officials don’t get the full story about the immigration issue:

We didn’t have the kind of advocacy outreach we have here. Where an elected person can become informed and understand something. I didn’t have the benefit of any of it.

But the senator also stood against the Farm Bureau on whether to legalize farm workers through the AgJobs bill, reports the Watertown Daily Times. She declined to back that bill despite Republican support for it, the paper says. But her position on the Agriculture committee could put her in a position to advance the bill now.

Researchers are not finding hard evidence of a “return migration” in these recessionary days, but that doesn’t mean you won’t hear stories like Wanda Dos Santos’. I met her as she was packing up for Brazil after 12 years living in Mount Vernon and working as a house cleaner. Below is my article in The Journal News.

Jan. 30, 2009

The Journal News

MOUNT VERNON—Wanda Dos Santos wrestled a series of giant suitcases down a narrow flight of stairs, with hands manicured in red, white and blue.

Her daughter and three grandchildren, visiting from Brazil, took turns sitting on an overstuffed case to try to zip it shut. Then they piled into two cars bound for John F. Kennedy International Airport, accompanying Dos Santos back to Sao Paulo after her 12-year stay.

Dos Santos left the United States this month with only limited English, but she explained her situation in one clear phrase: “No more cleaning lady.”

Housecleaning jobs in the New York suburbs once brought her $1,000 a week, but her income fell to $300 in recent months, she said. Customers started scaling back in January 2008 or stopped hiring altogether.

Stories abound of immigrants departing for home as the jobs dry up. And experts are searching for a pattern: Is the economic downturn causing a reverse migration?

Intriguing as the idea may be, there’s no hard evidence, concludes a report released earlier this month by the Migration Policy Institute.

Researchers do see evidence that the growth in the undocumented population has come to a sudden halt. But they have no data showing that people are returning to their home countries in any great numbers.

There are reasons illegal immigrants may stay put in the United States despite a recession, said researchers from the institute, a think tank based in Washington. They might not want to risk paying more to get back into the United States down the road. In the case of Mexico and Central America, rising crime has been a deterrent.

But above all, the decisions depend on economic conditions back home and how the local currency stacks up against the U.S. dollar. Those circumstances have more to do with immigration than the circumstances in the United States, according to MPI’s research.

“If it’s hard here, it’s worse over there,” said Frances Glick, who sells airline tickets and money transfers from an office in Suffern to a mostly Mexican clientele. She’s heard many customers say that they’re leaving for good, but she’s seen some of those same people return after a few months.

Those who stay in the United States, with no access to safety-net programs, may take desperate measures to find work, the MPI study warned.

Dos Santos, 62, didn’t leave before trying a last-ditch strategy she had previously used as a newbie. She paid $4,000 to another Brazilian woman, who “sold” her the opportunity to clean four additional houses. The buying and selling of jobs is not unheard of in the Brazilian community, even if homeowners are oblivious. This time, though, the jobs never materialized, Dos Santos said. The woman left town with the money.

In Brazil, the economic news has been mixed. The nation’s economy is on the rise, but its currency dropped 33 percent against the dollar in the past year, MPI noted.

Jobs are still hard to find in Brazil, despite the improving economy, said Marisa Francischini, 50, who immigrated 19 years ago and became friends with Dos Santos in Mount Vernon. She said she received her green card through the lottery process, allowing her to travel between the U.S. and Brazil.

“I always make my money. I have no problem,” Francischini said. Her current business is selling outfits and accessories to nightclub dancers – a profession apparently unharmed by the recession.

But she said it made sense for her friend, Dos Santos, to return to Brazil.

“I feel happy for her. She’s here by herself. She needs to see her grandsons growing, you know, because she’s going to miss everything,” she said.

Historically, economic conditions do not seem to match up neatly with immigration patterns. There was a dip in immigration during the Great Depression, but that might be explained by the quotas imposed during the 1920s. There is no historical parallel to the global financial crisis happening today, the MPI study said.

But immigrants are working in sectors that are most vulnerable to the current downturn, including construction, hospitality and personal services, and illegal immigrants are clearly being affected. Research by the Pew Hispanic Center identified just two periods during this decade when illegal immigration did not increase, and both came during recessions: one in 2001-02 and another in 2007-08.

Dos Santos said she came to the United States after her husband died and was able to send money back to family members in Brazil. She came as a tourist, overstayed the visa and never tried to seek legal status, she said. Without family members in the United States or a steady employer, she had no one to sponsor her.

Her plan now is to retire, with income from her late husband’s pension.

“When I came, I came happy, with the dream that I always dreamed,” she said in Portuguese. “Everything I could do, I did.”

(Photos: Angela Gaul/The Journal News)