Broad
outlines of Senate immigration agreement emerge [New York Times]
A
bipartisan group of senators has largely agreed on a broad immigration bill
that would require tough border measures to be in place before illegal
immigrants could take the first steps to become American citizens, according to
several people familiar with drafts of the legislation. But in a delicate
compromise worked out over weeks of negotiations, the bill does not impose any
specific measurements of border enforcement results that, if they were not met,
would stop the immigrants from proceeding toward citizenship. Instead, the bill
allows a period of 10 years for the Department of Homeland Security to make
plans and use resources to fortify enforcement at the borders and elsewhere
within the country before it sets several broader hurdles that could derail the
immigrants’ progress toward citizenship if they are not achieved….As drafted,
the legislation would provide as much as $3.5 billion for the Department of
Homeland Security to set up a five-year border security plan. Officials must
present the plan within six months, and no immigrants can gain any provisional
legal status until the plan is in place. It would include a program to finish
any border fencing that border agents deem necessary….Homeland Security
officials will also be required to expand a worker verification system, making
it mandatory nationwide for all employers within five years. Within 10 years,
they must also create an electronic exit system at all airports and seaports to
help ensure that foreigners leave when their visas expire. Also, illegal immigrants
who pass background checks and meet other requirements will have to wait in a
provisional status for at least 10 years, before they could apply for green
cards….In Orlando, Fla., farmworkers and immigrants held a picnic in front of
the offices of Mr. Rubio. In Los Angeles and Fresno, Calif., advocates rallied
outside the offices of Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat who is leading
negotiations over the agricultural provisions in the bill. Many events were
organized by the Service Employees International Union and other unions, which
have strongly supported the immigration effort.
Braceros
appeal to Sacramento's Mexican Consulate for long-lost wages [Sacramento Bee]
Some
of the last braceros - the more than 2 million Mexican laborers who toiled in
California's fields under a legal guest worker program from 1942 through 1964 -
came to the Mexican Consulate in Sacramento on Wednesday, looking for wages
they never received. Many braceros have died without ever seeing any of the 10
percent of their pay that was sent to a Mexican farm bank by their California
employers. The 10 percent was supposed to be a nest egg to help them when they
returned to Mexico. But the farm bank disappeared, and it wasn't until 2008
that the Mexican government created a new program that paid $3,000 each to
braceros who applied with their work permits and other documents, said Carlos
González Gutiérrez, Sacramento's Mexican consul general. But many braceros,
including Manuel Chavez of Stockton, had lost their papers by then.
Ag
spending would remain steady under president’s plan [Washington Post]
Wednesday’s
White House budget proposal would provide $22.6 billion in discretionary
spending to the Department of Agriculture, similar to the amount the agency
received in the 2012 budget enacted by Congress. The proposal includes a series
of cost-saving measures at the USDA in coming years, including eliminating
direct farm payments, decreasing crop insurance subsidies and targeting
conservation programs. But it also proposes new investments in renewable energy
and rural development, such as $4 billion in loans to rural electric
cooperatives and utilities to support the transition to clean energy. It also
includes increased funding for high-priority research topics such as nutrition
and obesity, food safety, sustainable agriculture and climate change.
Willits
bypass project pits CHP's enforcers against tree-sitters [Sacramento Bee]
At
the mere sight of "Warbler" fluttering along the Redwood Highway,
four California Highway Patrol cruisers swing into action. On U.S. 101 in
Mendocino County, above this town with the "Gateway to the Redwoods"
overhang and the only highway traffic lights between San Francisco and Eureka,
the officers move quickly to fortify an entry to a swath of severed oaks and
fallen pines. They are there to prevent protesters including Warbler, a
reed-thin woman who is 24 and nicknamed for the yellow birds that sip nectar
from manzanitas and sweeten the valley with song, from disrupting a major
Northern California highway extension. Before she became known as Warbler,
Amanda Senseman showed up from Fort Collins, Colo., four years ago to learn
organic farming on a residential ranch in Willits. Its owners, two retired
political science professors, dubbed the property "Green Uprising."
Now she symbolizes an uprising in the town – and its pastoral Little Lake
Valley – over a freeway project that evokes memories of the protests over
corporate logging that years ago turned California's North Coast into a
national environmental battleground….Environmentalists say the project will
devastate wetlands, foul streams for chinook and coho salmon and steelhead
trout and topple old growth oak woodlands. Farmers and ranchers complain that a
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers plan to mitigate wetlands destruction will harm
regional agriculture.
Editorial: Don't let it die on
the vine [Stockton Record]
Last
year, California exported about $74 million worth of wine to China, a healthy
18 percent increase in just one year.
But
that total is a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the state's total
wine exports of about $1.28 billion last year and even less impressive given
that China is this state's third-largest foreign export market, behind Mexico
and Canada. Increasing wine exports is important to San Joaquin County, where
grapes were valued at $287 million in 2011, roughly 13 percent of the county's
$2.2 billion farm output. Gov. Jerry Brown and about 75 California business
leaders are out to improve those export numbers. They're on a seven-day,
five-city outreach tour to China trying to convince the Chinese to import more
products from California and export more investments into California….Time will
tell if this mission, and the opening of a privately funded trade office in
Shanghai, will accomplish any of the many goals Brown envisions. But you don't
build business relationships without building and maintaining bridges. And
that's what this trip is about.
Ag
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