Popularity: 10% [?]

GILA BEND, Ariz. — Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico.

Mr. Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.

For days, Mr. Torres languished in a busy emergency room there, but his parents, Jesús and Gloria Torres, were not about to give up on him. Although many uninsured immigrants have been repatriated by American hospitals, few have seen their journey take the U-turn that the Torreses engineered for their son. They found a hospital in California willing to treat him, loaded him into a donated ambulance and drove him back into the United States as a potentially deadly infection raged through his system.

By summer’s end, despite the grimmest of prognoses from the hospital in Phoenix, Mr. Torres had not only survived but thrived. Newly discharged from rehabilitation in California, he was haltingly walking, talking and, hoisting his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, performing a silent, comic, effortful imitation of a marching soldier.

‘In Arizona, apparently, they see us as beasts of burden that can be dumped back over the border when we have outlived our usefulness,’ the elder Mr. Torres, who is 47, said in Spanish. ‘But we outwitted them. We were not going to let our son die. And look at him now!’ — [READ MORE]

———————————————————-

MILTON, Fla. — Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more “law-abiding, emptier and whiter.”

Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here — the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police — the losses are especially profound.

‘It was very hard because the community is very small, and to see people who came to eat here all the time then come and close the business,’ said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees. — [MORE]

———————————————————-

Behind The Veil: America’s Anti-Immigration Network — Video details the common origins of many of the country’s leading anti-immigration groups and their ties to White supremacists.

Lou Dobbs and Codewords Of Hate — A study by the Anti-Defamation League on the use of hate rhetoric in the immigration debate

Popularity: 9% [?]