Why Californians Should Vote To Secede From The Union
Mar 22, 2017 15:01:17 #
L.A. is No. 1 U.S. pick for global real estate buyers
By international standards, property prices in the area are considered a bargain.
By Roger Vincent
Los Angeles is in a sweet spot in its real estate cycle that will make it one of the top choices in the world for buying property this year, a new report says.
The L.A. area ranked No. 1 in North America in a survey of global real estate investors who have a combined total of $1.7 trillion to spend on property in 2017. Top cities for investment in other regions were London and Sydney, Australia.
Overall, offices are the preferred category of real estate to buy, with warehouse distribution centers and multifamily residential buildings close behind. Shopping centers, hotels and industrial properties ranked lower in investor interest.
“L.A. has been waiting for this moment for a long time,” said Lew Horne, president of Southern California and Hawaii for CBRE Group Inc., the Los Angeles-based international real estate services company that conducted the survey to be released this week.
Among the participants were investment fund managers, insurance companies and operators of pension and sovereign wealth funds.
It was the second year in a row that L.A. was the top choice for investment in the Americas. In the first CBRE Global Investor Intentions Survey, conducted two years ago, San Francisco ranked No. 1 in the region.
Forty percent of investors said they intend to spend more this year than they did last year, while 16% said they would spend less. Researchers caution that while the outlook for commercial real estate investment looks more positive this year than it did in 2016, we are now in the eighth year of a global economic expansion. Property values have risen for the most part every year since 2009, which suggests that the market may be peaking.
Only 15% of respondents, however, said that property is overpriced and that bubble conditions exist. Of greater concern was the fear that interest rates could rise faster than expected (21%) or that an undefined “global economic shock” could undermine demand from renters (22%).
Los Angeles is in a more favorable point in its real estate cycle than other markets are in theirs, said Todd Tydlaska, a CBRE broker who specializes in investment property sales.
“Rents in other markets have really run up” in recent years, he said. “L.A. was late to the recovery and still has room for rents to rise.”
Property prices in Los Angeles are also considered a bit of a bargain by international standards, Tydlaska said. “L.A. is still a value compared to San Francisco.”
Even though investors remain bullish on Los Angeles, it may be hard to top the volume of money spent there last year, he said, when some enormous deals took place.
Among the biggest were the $1.34-billion purchase of four Westwood office buildings by local real estate investment trust Douglas Emmett Inc. and the Qatar Investment Authority, as well as the $511-million purchase of the Colorado Center office complex in Santa Monica by Boston real estate investment trust Boston Properties Inc. Another was the $429-million purchase of two Playa Vista office buildings by New York landlord Edward J. Minskoff Equities Inc.
All three were among the 50 largest office deals in the country last year, according to real estate software provider Yardi Systems Inc.
“Los Angeles’ office market reigns supreme as the main target for investment on the West Coast,” Yardi said in a report .
The Westside, where those and other big sales took place, is the L.A. area’s core market for investment, according to CBRE, in part because it consistently commands the highest rents in the region.
But downtown Los Angeles, which has seen billions of dollars worth of investment from Chinese and Canadian firms in recent years, is also growing in appeal to U.S. developers with experience in other cities where old neighborhoods have already been transformed, Horne said.
He expects still more investment in once-neglected blocks such as L.A.’s Arts District and Historic Core.
“The guys from New York and San Francisco have already seen this movie before,” Horne said.
roger.vincent@latimes.com
By international standards, property prices in the area are considered a bargain.
By Roger Vincent
Los Angeles is in a sweet spot in its real estate cycle that will make it one of the top choices in the world for buying property this year, a new report says.
The L.A. area ranked No. 1 in North America in a survey of global real estate investors who have a combined total of $1.7 trillion to spend on property in 2017. Top cities for investment in other regions were London and Sydney, Australia.
Overall, offices are the preferred category of real estate to buy, with warehouse distribution centers and multifamily residential buildings close behind. Shopping centers, hotels and industrial properties ranked lower in investor interest.
“L.A. has been waiting for this moment for a long time,” said Lew Horne, president of Southern California and Hawaii for CBRE Group Inc., the Los Angeles-based international real estate services company that conducted the survey to be released this week.
Among the participants were investment fund managers, insurance companies and operators of pension and sovereign wealth funds.
It was the second year in a row that L.A. was the top choice for investment in the Americas. In the first CBRE Global Investor Intentions Survey, conducted two years ago, San Francisco ranked No. 1 in the region.
Forty percent of investors said they intend to spend more this year than they did last year, while 16% said they would spend less. Researchers caution that while the outlook for commercial real estate investment looks more positive this year than it did in 2016, we are now in the eighth year of a global economic expansion. Property values have risen for the most part every year since 2009, which suggests that the market may be peaking.
Only 15% of respondents, however, said that property is overpriced and that bubble conditions exist. Of greater concern was the fear that interest rates could rise faster than expected (21%) or that an undefined “global economic shock” could undermine demand from renters (22%).
Los Angeles is in a more favorable point in its real estate cycle than other markets are in theirs, said Todd Tydlaska, a CBRE broker who specializes in investment property sales.
“Rents in other markets have really run up” in recent years, he said. “L.A. was late to the recovery and still has room for rents to rise.”
Property prices in Los Angeles are also considered a bit of a bargain by international standards, Tydlaska said. “L.A. is still a value compared to San Francisco.”
Even though investors remain bullish on Los Angeles, it may be hard to top the volume of money spent there last year, he said, when some enormous deals took place.
Among the biggest were the $1.34-billion purchase of four Westwood office buildings by local real estate investment trust Douglas Emmett Inc. and the Qatar Investment Authority, as well as the $511-million purchase of the Colorado Center office complex in Santa Monica by Boston real estate investment trust Boston Properties Inc. Another was the $429-million purchase of two Playa Vista office buildings by New York landlord Edward J. Minskoff Equities Inc.
All three were among the 50 largest office deals in the country last year, according to real estate software provider Yardi Systems Inc.
“Los Angeles’ office market reigns supreme as the main target for investment on the West Coast,” Yardi said in a report .
The Westside, where those and other big sales took place, is the L.A. area’s core market for investment, according to CBRE, in part because it consistently commands the highest rents in the region.
But downtown Los Angeles, which has seen billions of dollars worth of investment from Chinese and Canadian firms in recent years, is also growing in appeal to U.S. developers with experience in other cities where old neighborhoods have already been transformed, Horne said.
He expects still more investment in once-neglected blocks such as L.A.’s Arts District and Historic Core.
“The guys from New York and San Francisco have already seen this movie before,” Horne said.
roger.vincent@latimes.com
Mar 24, 2017 17:20:03 #
Boycott law is not a slam dunk
Under a law passed last year, California prohibits statefunded travel to states that discriminate against the LGBT community. There are currently four on the boycott list — and now South Dakota may be added. That’s because the Mount Rushmore State recently passed a lawthat allows taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies to refuse to place children with same-sex couples if doing so would violate the agencies’ religious beliefs.
Alaw like that is outrageous; such discrimination is unacceptable.
But interstate boycotts are not the solution — they’re a troublesome policy that, at least in California’s case, rarely seem to effect meaningful change. Though they are intended to put financial pressure on the targets, there are usually so many exceptions written in that the laws become meaningless gestures that can unintentionally make the boycotters look like hypocrites.
Another problem is that these laws can invite retribution in the form of tit-for-tat boycotts. How would anyone be helped if Mississippi or Tennessee chose to boycott California because it protects transgender people or because it defends gay rights? The mixed message California is sending became clear this week as UCLA’s men’s basketball team prepared to travel to Memphis to participate in the NCAA Tournament South Regional game on Friday. Tennessee is one of the no-go states, along with North Carolina, Kansas and Mississippi.
Uh-oh, an obvious violation, right? Actually, no. UCLA asserts that its athletic de-partment is not covered by the law because it doesn’t receive funding from the state’s general fund. Its revenue comes from ticket sales, sponsorships, student fees and gifts.
Apparently that reasoning has persuaded even the author of the boycott legislation.
But even if this excuse is legally defensible, it doesn’t make much sense. The athletics department is inextricably linked to the university, which does receive state funding and is specifically named in AB 1887, the legislation that created the law. Athletic department employees are UC employees, and it is reasonable to consider the money raised by the department as public money.
Besides, try explaining it to average sports fans in California and Tennessee who aren’t familiar with the complicated funding arrangement. What they see is a team representing California’s great public university traveling to a forbidden state. They might reasonably conclude that California isn’t serious about its boycott. Memphis expects the tournament to bring in more than $5 million for the local economy.
A UCLA athletics spokesman said the department will honor the boycott law by not scheduling regular season games in restricted states in the future. But it will continue to go to those states for post-season games, which the university has no role in scheduling.
The best idea would be for California to reconsider this ineffective and empty political gesture entirely. If it expands the boycott to include other states, it only increases the likelihood that the message it sends will become more confused.
Under a law passed last year, California prohibits statefunded travel to states that discriminate against the LGBT community. There are currently four on the boycott list — and now South Dakota may be added. That’s because the Mount Rushmore State recently passed a lawthat allows taxpayer-funded adoption and foster care agencies to refuse to place children with same-sex couples if doing so would violate the agencies’ religious beliefs.
Alaw like that is outrageous; such discrimination is unacceptable.
But interstate boycotts are not the solution — they’re a troublesome policy that, at least in California’s case, rarely seem to effect meaningful change. Though they are intended to put financial pressure on the targets, there are usually so many exceptions written in that the laws become meaningless gestures that can unintentionally make the boycotters look like hypocrites.
Another problem is that these laws can invite retribution in the form of tit-for-tat boycotts. How would anyone be helped if Mississippi or Tennessee chose to boycott California because it protects transgender people or because it defends gay rights? The mixed message California is sending became clear this week as UCLA’s men’s basketball team prepared to travel to Memphis to participate in the NCAA Tournament South Regional game on Friday. Tennessee is one of the no-go states, along with North Carolina, Kansas and Mississippi.
Uh-oh, an obvious violation, right? Actually, no. UCLA asserts that its athletic de-partment is not covered by the law because it doesn’t receive funding from the state’s general fund. Its revenue comes from ticket sales, sponsorships, student fees and gifts.
Apparently that reasoning has persuaded even the author of the boycott legislation.
But even if this excuse is legally defensible, it doesn’t make much sense. The athletics department is inextricably linked to the university, which does receive state funding and is specifically named in AB 1887, the legislation that created the law. Athletic department employees are UC employees, and it is reasonable to consider the money raised by the department as public money.
Besides, try explaining it to average sports fans in California and Tennessee who aren’t familiar with the complicated funding arrangement. What they see is a team representing California’s great public university traveling to a forbidden state. They might reasonably conclude that California isn’t serious about its boycott. Memphis expects the tournament to bring in more than $5 million for the local economy.
A UCLA athletics spokesman said the department will honor the boycott law by not scheduling regular season games in restricted states in the future. But it will continue to go to those states for post-season games, which the university has no role in scheduling.
The best idea would be for California to reconsider this ineffective and empty political gesture entirely. If it expands the boycott to include other states, it only increases the likelihood that the message it sends will become more confused.
Mar 25, 2017 23:50:59 #
Shots fired, but where?
Use of high-tech tool to locate gunfire may expand in California under a proposed bill.
By Patrick McGreevy
SACRAMENTO — When a man celebrating the new year fired two guns into the sky from his Sacramento backyard, a high-tech system pinpointed his location in less than a minute, allowing a California Highway Patrol airplane to capture the shooting on video. Moments later, he was arrested.
The quick response was possible because of a network of sound sensors placed throughout a community to swiftly triangulate gunshots and give officers GPS coordinates for the shootings, often within 30 to 45 seconds.
Now, one state lawmaker is looking to expand the use of the technology to communities throughout the state, including small, cash-strapped cities that might not be able to afford an adequate police force or the shot-detection system. Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland are among 11 California cities that currently use the system, called ShotSpotter .
“It can curtail gun shooting incidents and it gives law enforcement precise information on where shootings occur so they can respond quickly,” said Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella), the author of the bill.
Garcia’s bill would provide state grants to law enforcement agencies to pay for gunshot detection systems and other technology to improve policing.
Garcia decided to introduce the bill after a harrowing incident last New Year’s Eve when he and his children, ages 13 and 2, were afraid to leave their Riverside County house to celebrate at midnight.
“Before we knew it, some parts of our area started to sound like a war zone, with multiple shots going up,” he said. “I told them ’We’re not going outside.’ What goes up comes down.”
There are a handful of firms that provide technology to locate gunshots. ShotSpotter, based in Newark, Calif., has been used by some 90 police agencies worldwide.
The sensors are installed 30 feet above ground on light posts and building tops and are continually operating to register gunfire. If a loud bang occurs, the sound is analyzed in ShotSpotter’s office by experts, and if they verify that it is a gunshot and not a backfiring car, notice is provided to the police department’s dispatch center, usually within 30 seconds.
That gives officers a jump on the call and creates a significant deterrent for firing guns in neighborhoods were the system is installed, said Ralph Clark, chief executive for SST Inc., which produces ShotSpotter.
“It has allowed us to get a lot of bad people and a lot of guns off the streets,” said Sacramento police Officer Brian Airoso, part of a special team dedicated to responding to ShotSpotter calls.
Officers often get notification so quickly that they can still hear gunfire as they approach a targeted address, and they have arrived to find people still holding guns with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air.
Shooters are usually “dumbfounded” by the quick response, Airoso said. He was there for the post-midnight arrest of the New Year’s Eve shooter on multiple felonies, including use of a stolen handgun.
“There were [spent bullet] casings all over the ground,” Airoso recalled.
Civil libertarians say the technology should be considered only with great care and only after consultation with the communities in which it might be installed.
“Gunshot detection technology has been questioned for its effectiveness, costs and potential privacy impact on bystanders,” said Nicole A. Ozer, a policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of California, which has not yet taken a position on the bill.
The privacy concern involves the potential that audio sensors could pick up the conversations of people walking by, activists say, noting cases where prosecutors have used comments recorded by sensors as evidence in court.
In 2010, prosecutors in Oakland won a conviction in the murder of Tyrone Lyles after his last words, recorded by ShotSpotter, were played in court.
Lyles shouted at his attacker, using a nickname, which helped police identify the killer, according to a report at the time in the San Jose Mercury News.
Clark said his firm has policies to address privacy concerns for the system, which is also in use in Chicago and New York City.
The system is designed to identify gunshots, not record conversations, he said, but sounds made right before and after a gunshot may be captured, as in the Lyles case. Copies of sound from the continuously running system are kept for 48 hours, then recorded over. Only short snippets of recordings with gunshots are kept longer, he said.
In the Oakland case, the victim screamed the words at his shooter right after the gunshot, so they were recorded, Clark said.
“That was not a conversation,” Clark said. “That was someone screaming out after they got shot.”
Even so, activists with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU have concerns about potential misuse.
“Communities considering these tools should not move forward without a thorough assessment of these questions, regardless of whether grant money is available,” Ozer said.
The Los Angeles Police Department tried the technology briefly years ago but was not satisfied with it. But officials are in discussions to possibly try the technology again, said Officer Drake Madison, an LAPD spokesman.
The technology has also been used by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in the City of Industry, Lynwood and the Willowbrook area. But it is not currently in use in part because of finances, said Lt. Cynthia Chavez of the Sheriff’s Department.
“It’s going to cost us a lot of money, and that’s something we have to address,” she said.
In the early days, the system had glitches.
“You’d catch roosters [crowing],” she said. “But they honed it in.”
Clark said the technology and the way it is used has improved in the last five years. Previously, cities had to analyze the sounds and decide which ones were gunshots, and that did not always work well. Now the company provides that service.
In 2015, more than half the cities using the system saw a reduction of more than 20% in gunfire, according to SST Inc.
The Sacramento Police Department likes the technology so much that it is expanding its use into a second area of the city, said police Sgt. Bryce Heinlein.
The capital city began using SpotShotter in July 2015 in the Del Paso Heights area, covering a three-mile radius. It used money raised from assets seized from criminals to pay the $180,000 cost of the first year of operations, as well as $155,000 for 2016.
Since it began operating, the technology has resulted in officers responding to 270 gunshot incidents, resulting in 310 arrests and the confiscation of 75 illegal firearms, Heinlein said.
“It’s very effective,” he said.
The approved expansion into another area of the city is expected to cost $200,000.
Garcia said he hasn’t decided how much money the state should provide and how many cities might get grants the first year. That is an issue for the upcoming budget deliberations, he said.
But he sees the state turning more to technology to make crime fighting more efficient and effective at a time of tight city budgets.
“In some communities it’s not just New Year’s Eve that gunshots are heard — it’s every other night, to the point where you have children, unfortunately, getting used to the sound of a gunshot down the street,” Garcia said. “That’s not normal and we should not allow it to become normal.”
patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com
Use of high-tech tool to locate gunfire may expand in California under a proposed bill.
By Patrick McGreevy
SACRAMENTO — When a man celebrating the new year fired two guns into the sky from his Sacramento backyard, a high-tech system pinpointed his location in less than a minute, allowing a California Highway Patrol airplane to capture the shooting on video. Moments later, he was arrested.
The quick response was possible because of a network of sound sensors placed throughout a community to swiftly triangulate gunshots and give officers GPS coordinates for the shootings, often within 30 to 45 seconds.
Now, one state lawmaker is looking to expand the use of the technology to communities throughout the state, including small, cash-strapped cities that might not be able to afford an adequate police force or the shot-detection system. Sacramento, San Diego, San Francisco and Oakland are among 11 California cities that currently use the system, called ShotSpotter .
“It can curtail gun shooting incidents and it gives law enforcement precise information on where shootings occur so they can respond quickly,” said Assemblyman Eduardo Garcia (D-Coachella), the author of the bill.
Garcia’s bill would provide state grants to law enforcement agencies to pay for gunshot detection systems and other technology to improve policing.
Garcia decided to introduce the bill after a harrowing incident last New Year’s Eve when he and his children, ages 13 and 2, were afraid to leave their Riverside County house to celebrate at midnight.
“Before we knew it, some parts of our area started to sound like a war zone, with multiple shots going up,” he said. “I told them ’We’re not going outside.’ What goes up comes down.”
There are a handful of firms that provide technology to locate gunshots. ShotSpotter, based in Newark, Calif., has been used by some 90 police agencies worldwide.
The sensors are installed 30 feet above ground on light posts and building tops and are continually operating to register gunfire. If a loud bang occurs, the sound is analyzed in ShotSpotter’s office by experts, and if they verify that it is a gunshot and not a backfiring car, notice is provided to the police department’s dispatch center, usually within 30 seconds.
That gives officers a jump on the call and creates a significant deterrent for firing guns in neighborhoods were the system is installed, said Ralph Clark, chief executive for SST Inc., which produces ShotSpotter.
“It has allowed us to get a lot of bad people and a lot of guns off the streets,” said Sacramento police Officer Brian Airoso, part of a special team dedicated to responding to ShotSpotter calls.
Officers often get notification so quickly that they can still hear gunfire as they approach a targeted address, and they have arrived to find people still holding guns with the smell of gunpowder lingering in the air.
Shooters are usually “dumbfounded” by the quick response, Airoso said. He was there for the post-midnight arrest of the New Year’s Eve shooter on multiple felonies, including use of a stolen handgun.
“There were [spent bullet] casings all over the ground,” Airoso recalled.
Civil libertarians say the technology should be considered only with great care and only after consultation with the communities in which it might be installed.
“Gunshot detection technology has been questioned for its effectiveness, costs and potential privacy impact on bystanders,” said Nicole A. Ozer, a policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union of California, which has not yet taken a position on the bill.
The privacy concern involves the potential that audio sensors could pick up the conversations of people walking by, activists say, noting cases where prosecutors have used comments recorded by sensors as evidence in court.
In 2010, prosecutors in Oakland won a conviction in the murder of Tyrone Lyles after his last words, recorded by ShotSpotter, were played in court.
Lyles shouted at his attacker, using a nickname, which helped police identify the killer, according to a report at the time in the San Jose Mercury News.
Clark said his firm has policies to address privacy concerns for the system, which is also in use in Chicago and New York City.
The system is designed to identify gunshots, not record conversations, he said, but sounds made right before and after a gunshot may be captured, as in the Lyles case. Copies of sound from the continuously running system are kept for 48 hours, then recorded over. Only short snippets of recordings with gunshots are kept longer, he said.
In the Oakland case, the victim screamed the words at his shooter right after the gunshot, so they were recorded, Clark said.
“That was not a conversation,” Clark said. “That was someone screaming out after they got shot.”
Even so, activists with the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU have concerns about potential misuse.
“Communities considering these tools should not move forward without a thorough assessment of these questions, regardless of whether grant money is available,” Ozer said.
The Los Angeles Police Department tried the technology briefly years ago but was not satisfied with it. But officials are in discussions to possibly try the technology again, said Officer Drake Madison, an LAPD spokesman.
The technology has also been used by the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department in the City of Industry, Lynwood and the Willowbrook area. But it is not currently in use in part because of finances, said Lt. Cynthia Chavez of the Sheriff’s Department.
“It’s going to cost us a lot of money, and that’s something we have to address,” she said.
In the early days, the system had glitches.
“You’d catch roosters [crowing],” she said. “But they honed it in.”
Clark said the technology and the way it is used has improved in the last five years. Previously, cities had to analyze the sounds and decide which ones were gunshots, and that did not always work well. Now the company provides that service.
In 2015, more than half the cities using the system saw a reduction of more than 20% in gunfire, according to SST Inc.
The Sacramento Police Department likes the technology so much that it is expanding its use into a second area of the city, said police Sgt. Bryce Heinlein.
The capital city began using SpotShotter in July 2015 in the Del Paso Heights area, covering a three-mile radius. It used money raised from assets seized from criminals to pay the $180,000 cost of the first year of operations, as well as $155,000 for 2016.
Since it began operating, the technology has resulted in officers responding to 270 gunshot incidents, resulting in 310 arrests and the confiscation of 75 illegal firearms, Heinlein said.
“It’s very effective,” he said.
The approved expansion into another area of the city is expected to cost $200,000.
Garcia said he hasn’t decided how much money the state should provide and how many cities might get grants the first year. That is an issue for the upcoming budget deliberations, he said.
But he sees the state turning more to technology to make crime fighting more efficient and effective at a time of tight city budgets.
“In some communities it’s not just New Year’s Eve that gunshots are heard — it’s every other night, to the point where you have children, unfortunately, getting used to the sound of a gunshot down the street,” Garcia said. “That’s not normal and we should not allow it to become normal.”
patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com
Mar 25, 2017 23:57:48 #
That happened back in the 90's...I was in LA proper and next door some people started shooting....I took my .45 out and let off one and a police car passed by as soon as I walked back inside..the most interesting was one time in the car driving from Houston to Galveston on I-45 in a then remote section travelling south...when midnight hit.........I opened the sunroof and emptied the .45......shells still on the car.........that was then...haven't done it since.....ahhhh......the indiscretion of youth.....
Mar 26, 2017 00:20:00 #
‘Creating hope’ for state’s inmates
Education, rehab programs may allow hundreds to be freed early
UNDER new rules, inmates can cut their terms by earning a diploma or a degree, and up to a month each year by successfully completing self-help programs. (Mark Boster Los Angeles Times)
By Jazmine Ulloa
SACRAMENTO — California corrections officials on Friday unveiled new regulations that will increase the chances of early release for hundreds of state prison inmates and expand the credits they earn for demonstrating good behavior and completing rehabilitation programs behind bars.
The highly anticipated — and hotly contested — guidelines are the first major step toward overhauling the state’s prison parole system under Proposition 57, the ballot measure approved by voters last year that aims to reduce the statewide prison population by 9,500 inmates over the next four years.
In a conference call Friday, Scott Kernan, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation , echoed Gov. Jerry Brown’s words on the measure, calling the new law “a durable solution” for prison overcrowding and part of the state’s response to a federal court-ordered cap on the inmate population.
But he also emphasized the need to create opportunities that improve the chances for inmates to leave prison and keep them from coming back.
“Through rehabilitation, we are creating hope in our prisons by giving inmates the opportunity to change and acquire skills and tools to be productive members of our society once they leave prison,” he later said in a statement.
Proposition 57 gave new power to the state parole board to grant early release to prisoners whose primary sentences are for crimes not designated as “violent” under California law. It also provides new ways for those inmates to earn time credits toward their sentences if they enroll in certain programs.
The pool of inmates newly eligible for parole — about 1,200 offenders — is expected to expand by more than 500 over the next fiscal year, Kernan said Friday. Early projections show more than 1,500 inmates could be eligible for early release by 2021.
Under the regulations, inmates will be able to trim their sentences up to six months by earning a high school diploma or college degree, and up to a month each year by successfully completing self-help programs — such as substance abuse support groups, counseling and parenting or anger management classes.
They will also have the chance to earn greater “milestone” credits, awarded for achieving certain goals in certain rehabilitation programs, allowing them to potentially reduce their sentences by up to 12 weeks in a yearlong period.
But the regulations could face scrutiny from law enforcement officials and prosecutors who have opposed the measure from the start. They have argued that incentives should not be extended to sex offenders or those serving life sentences. The debate has spurred several lawmakers to introduce legislation that would expand the state’s list of violent crimes.
The regulations unveiled Friday exclude only death row inmates and those who are serving life without the possibility of parole from the credit earnings. Violent offenders could receive up to 20% of time served for good behavior, up from 15% in previous guidelines.
The rules are expected to receive final approval in the fall after a public comment period. If they win initial approval from state regulators, changes to the credit system will begin as early as May, and the parole eligibility changes will take effect in July.
Probation officials and criminal justice advocates lauded the effort Friday. In a statement, Mary Butler, president of the Chief Probation Officers of California, called the rules “fair and consistent with the mission of Prop. 57.”
“The voters spoke clearly in Prop. 57 that they want true rehabilitation in our prison system, and in order to have true rehabilitation we must ensure a balance of incentives and sanctions in any regulations that are permanently adopted,” she said.
jazmine.ulloa@latimes.com
Twitter: @jazmineulloa
Education, rehab programs may allow hundreds to be freed early
UNDER new rules, inmates can cut their terms by earning a diploma or a degree, and up to a month each year by successfully completing self-help programs. (Mark Boster Los Angeles Times)
By Jazmine Ulloa
SACRAMENTO — California corrections officials on Friday unveiled new regulations that will increase the chances of early release for hundreds of state prison inmates and expand the credits they earn for demonstrating good behavior and completing rehabilitation programs behind bars.
The highly anticipated — and hotly contested — guidelines are the first major step toward overhauling the state’s prison parole system under Proposition 57, the ballot measure approved by voters last year that aims to reduce the statewide prison population by 9,500 inmates over the next four years.
In a conference call Friday, Scott Kernan, secretary of the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation , echoed Gov. Jerry Brown’s words on the measure, calling the new law “a durable solution” for prison overcrowding and part of the state’s response to a federal court-ordered cap on the inmate population.
But he also emphasized the need to create opportunities that improve the chances for inmates to leave prison and keep them from coming back.
“Through rehabilitation, we are creating hope in our prisons by giving inmates the opportunity to change and acquire skills and tools to be productive members of our society once they leave prison,” he later said in a statement.
Proposition 57 gave new power to the state parole board to grant early release to prisoners whose primary sentences are for crimes not designated as “violent” under California law. It also provides new ways for those inmates to earn time credits toward their sentences if they enroll in certain programs.
The pool of inmates newly eligible for parole — about 1,200 offenders — is expected to expand by more than 500 over the next fiscal year, Kernan said Friday. Early projections show more than 1,500 inmates could be eligible for early release by 2021.
Under the regulations, inmates will be able to trim their sentences up to six months by earning a high school diploma or college degree, and up to a month each year by successfully completing self-help programs — such as substance abuse support groups, counseling and parenting or anger management classes.
They will also have the chance to earn greater “milestone” credits, awarded for achieving certain goals in certain rehabilitation programs, allowing them to potentially reduce their sentences by up to 12 weeks in a yearlong period.
But the regulations could face scrutiny from law enforcement officials and prosecutors who have opposed the measure from the start. They have argued that incentives should not be extended to sex offenders or those serving life sentences. The debate has spurred several lawmakers to introduce legislation that would expand the state’s list of violent crimes.
The regulations unveiled Friday exclude only death row inmates and those who are serving life without the possibility of parole from the credit earnings. Violent offenders could receive up to 20% of time served for good behavior, up from 15% in previous guidelines.
The rules are expected to receive final approval in the fall after a public comment period. If they win initial approval from state regulators, changes to the credit system will begin as early as May, and the parole eligibility changes will take effect in July.
Probation officials and criminal justice advocates lauded the effort Friday. In a statement, Mary Butler, president of the Chief Probation Officers of California, called the rules “fair and consistent with the mission of Prop. 57.”
“The voters spoke clearly in Prop. 57 that they want true rehabilitation in our prison system, and in order to have true rehabilitation we must ensure a balance of incentives and sanctions in any regulations that are permanently adopted,” she said.
jazmine.ulloa@latimes.com
Twitter: @jazmineulloa
Mar 26, 2017 00:47:07 #
Payrolls in state grow by 22,900 in Feb.
The unemployment rate drops to 5%, a 10-year low, as job market tightens.
By Natalie Kitroeff
California’s unemployment rate ticked down to 5% in February, reaching a 10-year low on eight consecutive months of job growth.
Businesses in California increased their payrolls by a net 22,900 employees, according to data released Friday by the state’s Employment Development Department.
By comparison, in February 2016, California gained 43,000 jobs. Over the last 12 months, the state has added 315,800 jobs, an increase of 1.9%. That compares to a 1.6% increase in the nation as a whole.
The 5% unemployment rate, down from a revised 5.2% in January, remained higher than the national rate of 4.7%.
California hasn’t seen a jobless rate below 5% since 2006, said Michael Bernick, who directed the Employment Development Department from 1999 to 2004 and is now an attorney at Sedgwick, a San Francisco law firm.
“We are at near-historic lows,” Bernick said.
He pointed to impressive gains in Orange and San Diego counties — which had 3.7% and 4.2% unemployment rates, respectively — as a sign that Southern California’s job market is tightening in lockstep with the Bay Area. Professional services accounted for much of the uptick in employment in those two counties, including administrative and support services, which includes temp agencies.
In San Francisco and San Mateo counties, the February unemployment rate fell to 3% and 2.8%, respectively.
Los Angeles County added a net 33,400 jobs in February, and its unemployment rate dropped to 4.8%, from a revised 4.9% in January.
The county’s strongest sector was education, which produced 12,400 new jobs. The hospitality sector, which had an uncharacteristically bad month in January, rebounded in February, adding the second-highest number of jobs in the county.
Economists have warned that California will add jobs at a slower rate this year as the job market creeps toward so-called full employment — a scenario where almost everyone looking for work has found it.
The longevity of the current growth spurt — which has lasted for 84 months, according to the EDD — is not without precedent. An expansion in the 1960s lasted 113 months, and in the 1980s and 1990s two separate periods of consistent job gains lasted more than 90 months each, Bernick said.
“We may still have some way to run,” he said.
The best-performing California industries in February were trade, transportation and utilities, and hospitality, which piled on a combined 16,700 jobs.
The manufacturing and finance sectors lagged behind, slashing payrolls by 6,200.
The education sector has seen jobs grow the fastest of any industry in the state over the last 12 months. Payrolls in education have increased 5.7% since February 2016. Employment also expanded quickly in transportation, warehousing and utilities, healthcare and the information sector, which includes tech companies in Silicon Valley and the movie industry in Los Angeles. Those three industries saw jobs increase more than 3% since February 2016.
Meanwhile, the state’s labor force — which includes people who have jobs and the unemployed — has shrunk in each of the last three months. In February, 8,200 people stopped looking for work.
natalie.kitroeff@latimes.com
The unemployment rate drops to 5%, a 10-year low, as job market tightens.
By Natalie Kitroeff
California’s unemployment rate ticked down to 5% in February, reaching a 10-year low on eight consecutive months of job growth.
Businesses in California increased their payrolls by a net 22,900 employees, according to data released Friday by the state’s Employment Development Department.
By comparison, in February 2016, California gained 43,000 jobs. Over the last 12 months, the state has added 315,800 jobs, an increase of 1.9%. That compares to a 1.6% increase in the nation as a whole.
The 5% unemployment rate, down from a revised 5.2% in January, remained higher than the national rate of 4.7%.
California hasn’t seen a jobless rate below 5% since 2006, said Michael Bernick, who directed the Employment Development Department from 1999 to 2004 and is now an attorney at Sedgwick, a San Francisco law firm.
“We are at near-historic lows,” Bernick said.
He pointed to impressive gains in Orange and San Diego counties — which had 3.7% and 4.2% unemployment rates, respectively — as a sign that Southern California’s job market is tightening in lockstep with the Bay Area. Professional services accounted for much of the uptick in employment in those two counties, including administrative and support services, which includes temp agencies.
In San Francisco and San Mateo counties, the February unemployment rate fell to 3% and 2.8%, respectively.
Los Angeles County added a net 33,400 jobs in February, and its unemployment rate dropped to 4.8%, from a revised 4.9% in January.
The county’s strongest sector was education, which produced 12,400 new jobs. The hospitality sector, which had an uncharacteristically bad month in January, rebounded in February, adding the second-highest number of jobs in the county.
Economists have warned that California will add jobs at a slower rate this year as the job market creeps toward so-called full employment — a scenario where almost everyone looking for work has found it.
The longevity of the current growth spurt — which has lasted for 84 months, according to the EDD — is not without precedent. An expansion in the 1960s lasted 113 months, and in the 1980s and 1990s two separate periods of consistent job gains lasted more than 90 months each, Bernick said.
“We may still have some way to run,” he said.
The best-performing California industries in February were trade, transportation and utilities, and hospitality, which piled on a combined 16,700 jobs.
The manufacturing and finance sectors lagged behind, slashing payrolls by 6,200.
The education sector has seen jobs grow the fastest of any industry in the state over the last 12 months. Payrolls in education have increased 5.7% since February 2016. Employment also expanded quickly in transportation, warehousing and utilities, healthcare and the information sector, which includes tech companies in Silicon Valley and the movie industry in Los Angeles. Those three industries saw jobs increase more than 3% since February 2016.
Meanwhile, the state’s labor force — which includes people who have jobs and the unemployed — has shrunk in each of the last three months. In February, 8,200 people stopped looking for work.
natalie.kitroeff@latimes.com
Mar 26, 2017 15:45:34 #
POLITICAL ROAD MAP
Here’s the rub: Tax breaks cost money
JOHN MYERS
Everyone loves paying less in taxes. And politicians certainly enjoy making their constituents happy, which means that proposals for creating new tax breaks are a perennial favorite in Sacramento.
There’s just one hitch: Tax breaks cost money, in the form of lower government revenues.
That tradeoff only really gets revealed when tax time rolls around. Once the state’s billions of dollars in tax revenues are counted, it’s up to Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers to divvy up the cash for California’s many needs, including schools, law enforcement and environmental protection.
But there would be a lot more money if not for the state’s hundreds of small and large tax breaks. How much more? A 2015 report by the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office concluded the total value of those breaks is around $55 billion, almost half the size of the state’s general fund.
That number could rise next year, if lawmakers have their way. A review of bills now pending in the Legislature shows a variety of new tax breaks being proposed. One eye-catching proposal, Senate Bill 807, would offer tax credits for anyone who earns teaching credentials. For those who go on to become teachers, it would exempt their entire salary from state income tax. The bill is slated to be heard in committee next month, and legislative staffers are still analyzing the fiscal impact.
Other ideas are smaller, but the kinds of tax breaks that add up over time. One legislative plan would increase the size of an existing tax credit for renters. Another bill would offer a credit of up to $2,000 for veterinary expenses. A third would reduce taxes on farmers who flood their rice fields in the winter.
The most obvious challenge is to determine whether these are good ideas or whether they take too much tax revenue off the table. The winnowing of bills begins at the state Capitol in the next several weeks, with major decisions to be made this summer.
The most popular tax breaks are also the most costly. Top of the list in the most recent annual review by the California Dept. of Finance was the tax-free status of employer health benefits. The report concludes that alone is worth $5.8 billion. Other popular but costly laws exempt home mortgage interest and Social Security benefits from taxation.
No one is talking about canceling those breaks. But they’re also not talking about any of the hundreds of others that are on the books. The problem is that there’s often very little data on which tax credits are effective and which are not.
The 2015 analyst’s report concluded that it’s hard to assess whether most tax breaks “are effective and cost-efficient in achieving their objectives.”
Perhaps the biggest reason, though, that California tax incentives never get scrapped is because of what could best be called a case of legislative asymmetry. Simply put, tax incentives can be approved in the Legislature by a simple majority — 41 votes in the Assembly, 21 votes in the Senate.
But scrapping a tax break? Well, that’s considered a tax increase . Under the provisions of the landmark 1978 initiative, Proposition 13, a tax increase requires a supermajority vote in each house.
In the end, very few tax credits are ever rescinded. Their value and effectiveness are often trumped by politics. The perception of raising a tax, even back to its original level, is simply too high for many legislators.
john.myers@latimes.com
Twitter: @johnmyers
Here’s the rub: Tax breaks cost money
JOHN MYERS
Everyone loves paying less in taxes. And politicians certainly enjoy making their constituents happy, which means that proposals for creating new tax breaks are a perennial favorite in Sacramento.
There’s just one hitch: Tax breaks cost money, in the form of lower government revenues.
That tradeoff only really gets revealed when tax time rolls around. Once the state’s billions of dollars in tax revenues are counted, it’s up to Gov. Jerry Brown and lawmakers to divvy up the cash for California’s many needs, including schools, law enforcement and environmental protection.
But there would be a lot more money if not for the state’s hundreds of small and large tax breaks. How much more? A 2015 report by the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office concluded the total value of those breaks is around $55 billion, almost half the size of the state’s general fund.
That number could rise next year, if lawmakers have their way. A review of bills now pending in the Legislature shows a variety of new tax breaks being proposed. One eye-catching proposal, Senate Bill 807, would offer tax credits for anyone who earns teaching credentials. For those who go on to become teachers, it would exempt their entire salary from state income tax. The bill is slated to be heard in committee next month, and legislative staffers are still analyzing the fiscal impact.
Other ideas are smaller, but the kinds of tax breaks that add up over time. One legislative plan would increase the size of an existing tax credit for renters. Another bill would offer a credit of up to $2,000 for veterinary expenses. A third would reduce taxes on farmers who flood their rice fields in the winter.
The most obvious challenge is to determine whether these are good ideas or whether they take too much tax revenue off the table. The winnowing of bills begins at the state Capitol in the next several weeks, with major decisions to be made this summer.
The most popular tax breaks are also the most costly. Top of the list in the most recent annual review by the California Dept. of Finance was the tax-free status of employer health benefits. The report concludes that alone is worth $5.8 billion. Other popular but costly laws exempt home mortgage interest and Social Security benefits from taxation.
No one is talking about canceling those breaks. But they’re also not talking about any of the hundreds of others that are on the books. The problem is that there’s often very little data on which tax credits are effective and which are not.
The 2015 analyst’s report concluded that it’s hard to assess whether most tax breaks “are effective and cost-efficient in achieving their objectives.”
Perhaps the biggest reason, though, that California tax incentives never get scrapped is because of what could best be called a case of legislative asymmetry. Simply put, tax incentives can be approved in the Legislature by a simple majority — 41 votes in the Assembly, 21 votes in the Senate.
But scrapping a tax break? Well, that’s considered a tax increase . Under the provisions of the landmark 1978 initiative, Proposition 13, a tax increase requires a supermajority vote in each house.
In the end, very few tax credits are ever rescinded. Their value and effectiveness are often trumped by politics. The perception of raising a tax, even back to its original level, is simply too high for many legislators.
john.myers@latimes.com
Twitter: @johnmyers
Mar 26, 2017 16:00:51 #
STATE ATTORNEY GENERAL
Becerra backs challenge of Trump sanctuary order
State Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra on Wednesday filed a brief in support of a Santa Clara County lawsuit challenging President Trump’s executive order targeting “sanctuary” cities that refuse to help federal authorities enforce immigration laws.
The amicus brief cites Trump’s threat to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities as well as the state’s interest in protecting its policies that promote public safety and protect residents’ constitutional rights, Becerra said.
— Patrick McGreevy
Becerra backs challenge of Trump sanctuary order
State Atty. Gen. Xavier Becerra on Wednesday filed a brief in support of a Santa Clara County lawsuit challenging President Trump’s executive order targeting “sanctuary” cities that refuse to help federal authorities enforce immigration laws.
The amicus brief cites Trump’s threat to withhold federal funds from sanctuary cities as well as the state’s interest in protecting its policies that promote public safety and protect residents’ constitutional rights, Becerra said.
— Patrick McGreevy
Mar 26, 2017 16:15:20 #
K
pafret wrote:
Then leave, the rest of the nation is tired of you fruit cakes exporting your lunacy everywhere. Be sure to keep Hollyweird and all of its actors.
Mar 27, 2017 15:41:13 #
‘You never feel at home in either place’
For Latina Muslims, the hijab can be an invisibility cloak hiding their ethnicity — from other Latinos
LEZETH ESTRADA, 15, of Anaheim celebrates World Hijab Day at the Islamic Society of Orange County mosque in Garden Grove in February. There are an estimated 200,000 Latino Muslims in the U.S. (Photographs byFrancine Orr Los Angeles Times) TIJUANA-BORN Magdalena Al Omari says that over time people “were seeing me as Arab.” ()
By Cindy Carcamo
Magdalena Al Omari, a Mexican American convert to Islam, slipped on the hijab and braced for whatever may come.
It happened a few months later, in the checkout line of a grocery store in Santa Ana.
“¿No tiene calor en esa cosa?” one woman asked another. Isn’t she hot in that thing?
Al Omari shot back, in perfect Spanish, that yes, it was quite a hot day in general. Aren’t you hot, she asked.
The Garden Grove resident had prepared herself for the suspicious looks and glares that would accompany her hijab — a powerful, conspicuous symbol of the Muslim faith. But Al Omari was surprised by another, unexpected consequence of wearing the headscarf: It had essentially erased her Mexican American identity for other Latinos.
“As time went on, people were not seeing me as being Latina,” the Tijuana-born Al Omari said. “They were seeing me as Arab.”
As a Latina Muslim, she’s among the fastest-growing ethnic group in Islam and at the intersection of three demographics spurned during President Trump’s nascent administration: women, Muslims and Mexicans.
“It’s a heavy dance. You are never really in one place. It’s like you never feel at home in either place,” said Eren Cervantes-Altamirano, a Toronto-based blogger and writer who has researched and studied the intersection of being Latin American, indigenous and Muslim in the U.S. and Canada. “You have to play it day by day.”
Though the exact number of Latino Muslims in the U.S. is difficult to gauge, some experts estimate there are 200,000 and about 90% of them are converts, according to a report authored by Stephanie Londono, a Florida International University professor and researcher who has studied the trend of Latinas converting to Islam.
Most Islamic converts are women, Londono said.
“It’s a fluid identity for these women, especially Latina immigrants,” she said. “They are creating their own category and creating their own story by mixing these two elements: Islam, a religion that is very visible, and being Latina — especially when they wear the hijab.”
While being a Latina Muslim may be a growing trend, it certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise, said Cervantes-Altamirano, who converted to Islam 10 years ago and writes extensively on the challenges experienced by women who become Muslim.
“That is the nature of living in a society that is more diverse,” she said.
In Orange County, the Latino-majority city of Santa Ana is neighbors with Anaheim, home to Little Arabia.
Spurred by a sense that both were in the political crosshairs of the Trump administration, the communities created the Muslim-Latino Collaborative in Anaheim.
Some Latinas have converted to Islam as a result of a relationship with a Muslim partner, according to Londono’s study.
Although a Latino who converts to Islam can go about his life inconspicuously, women who choose to wear the hijab find that hard to do.
Lucy Silva, a Garden Grove resident, was born in Mexico and grew up Catholic, but she converted to Islam after meeting her husband, who is Muslim.
Silva converted to Islam three years before making the choice to permanently wear a headscarf. That was two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“It represented a lot of challenges,” she said. “But it was not out of coercion. It’s based on my Islamic faith. I decided on my own to do it.”
Wearing a Mexican-inspired flower-embroidered white shirt and her headscarf, Silva spoke about her decision before 400 people in a cramped room at the Islamic Society of Orange County mosque in Garden Grove during a World Hijab Day event.
Like Al Omari, Silva said most people don’t perceive her as Latina because she covers her head.
“We always have to defend our Latino heritage when it comes to communicating with other Latinos so we don’t lose that identity just because we are Muslim. With Mexicans, we have to prove we are still Latino,” she said. “With Muslims, we have to prove ourselves as Muslim through our faith. As Americans, we have to prove to Americans we are also American.”
In the beginning — even before wearing the hijab — Silva said she had to reassure her parents, who believed she was going to give up her identity after converting.
“Look, Mom, I’m still Mexican, OK?” she once told her mother.
Still, some find that converting to Islam can strain relations with family members who are not Muslim.
Jose Moreno, Al Omari’s brother, said he and his sister are trying to repair their relationship — meeting at least once a year — after growing distant for some time.
Though Moreno doesn’t blame his sister’s conversion entirely for their drifting apart, he said it did play a role.
“Her religion doesn’t bother me,” he said. “My parents, on the other hand … they still, to this day, they still don’t like it.”
That friction was one of the reasons the family drifted, Moreno said.
“Her life revolved mostly around her Muslim community, as I see it,” he said. “It didn’t really involve us a lot. It was very minimal.”
Silva and Al Omari belong to a group of Muslim Latinas in Orange County who guide others — many Latina — going through the conversion process.
What do you say if you cover your head and your Catholic father doesn’t like it?
“You have to explain that nuns also cover and Mary covered,” Silva responds.
Like many Muslim women, a large number of Latina converts do not wear the hijab.
Dina Bdaiwi, whose Mexican mother converted to Islam, first wore the hijab during her senior year in high school and into her first year in college. But the 22-year-old from Irvine — who describes herself as shy — felt as if it attracted too much attention.
She also sensed the headscarf distanced her from the Latino, non-Muslim side of her family. It’s not that they ever said anything, she said. It was just a feeling.
“I felt like they knew me a certain way, and that was without the hijab. I wanted to feel close with my family again,” said Bdaiwi, a senior at UC Irvine. “I just wanted things to be the same as they were.”
After a year, she took it off.
Marya Ayloush, a 21-year-old whose father is Arab and whose Mexican mother also converted to Islam, sees the hijab as part of her identity.
Seven years ago, she launched Austere Attire, a Los Angeles-based online clothing store that sells headscarves — many of them modern and hip, targeting millennials.
Though Ayloush was always drawn to her Arabic identity, she recently reconnected with her Mexican heritage, she said. A UCLA student, she’s majoring in Chicano studies.
In late January, Ayloush joined thousands of protesters who converged at Los Angeles International Airport to condemn Trump’s travel restrictions on certain predominantly Muslim countries.
She carried a sign she made. It read: “I am a Mexican, Arab, Muslim, Woman. Trump’s Boogey Man.”
cindy.carcamo@latimes.com
Twitter: @thecindycarcamo
For Latina Muslims, the hijab can be an invisibility cloak hiding their ethnicity — from other Latinos
LEZETH ESTRADA, 15, of Anaheim celebrates World Hijab Day at the Islamic Society of Orange County mosque in Garden Grove in February. There are an estimated 200,000 Latino Muslims in the U.S. (Photographs byFrancine Orr Los Angeles Times) TIJUANA-BORN Magdalena Al Omari says that over time people “were seeing me as Arab.” ()
By Cindy Carcamo
Magdalena Al Omari, a Mexican American convert to Islam, slipped on the hijab and braced for whatever may come.
It happened a few months later, in the checkout line of a grocery store in Santa Ana.
“¿No tiene calor en esa cosa?” one woman asked another. Isn’t she hot in that thing?
Al Omari shot back, in perfect Spanish, that yes, it was quite a hot day in general. Aren’t you hot, she asked.
The Garden Grove resident had prepared herself for the suspicious looks and glares that would accompany her hijab — a powerful, conspicuous symbol of the Muslim faith. But Al Omari was surprised by another, unexpected consequence of wearing the headscarf: It had essentially erased her Mexican American identity for other Latinos.
“As time went on, people were not seeing me as being Latina,” the Tijuana-born Al Omari said. “They were seeing me as Arab.”
As a Latina Muslim, she’s among the fastest-growing ethnic group in Islam and at the intersection of three demographics spurned during President Trump’s nascent administration: women, Muslims and Mexicans.
“It’s a heavy dance. You are never really in one place. It’s like you never feel at home in either place,” said Eren Cervantes-Altamirano, a Toronto-based blogger and writer who has researched and studied the intersection of being Latin American, indigenous and Muslim in the U.S. and Canada. “You have to play it day by day.”
Though the exact number of Latino Muslims in the U.S. is difficult to gauge, some experts estimate there are 200,000 and about 90% of them are converts, according to a report authored by Stephanie Londono, a Florida International University professor and researcher who has studied the trend of Latinas converting to Islam.
Most Islamic converts are women, Londono said.
“It’s a fluid identity for these women, especially Latina immigrants,” she said. “They are creating their own category and creating their own story by mixing these two elements: Islam, a religion that is very visible, and being Latina — especially when they wear the hijab.”
While being a Latina Muslim may be a growing trend, it certainly shouldn’t come as a surprise, said Cervantes-Altamirano, who converted to Islam 10 years ago and writes extensively on the challenges experienced by women who become Muslim.
“That is the nature of living in a society that is more diverse,” she said.
In Orange County, the Latino-majority city of Santa Ana is neighbors with Anaheim, home to Little Arabia.
Spurred by a sense that both were in the political crosshairs of the Trump administration, the communities created the Muslim-Latino Collaborative in Anaheim.
Some Latinas have converted to Islam as a result of a relationship with a Muslim partner, according to Londono’s study.
Although a Latino who converts to Islam can go about his life inconspicuously, women who choose to wear the hijab find that hard to do.
Lucy Silva, a Garden Grove resident, was born in Mexico and grew up Catholic, but she converted to Islam after meeting her husband, who is Muslim.
Silva converted to Islam three years before making the choice to permanently wear a headscarf. That was two weeks before the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
“It represented a lot of challenges,” she said. “But it was not out of coercion. It’s based on my Islamic faith. I decided on my own to do it.”
Wearing a Mexican-inspired flower-embroidered white shirt and her headscarf, Silva spoke about her decision before 400 people in a cramped room at the Islamic Society of Orange County mosque in Garden Grove during a World Hijab Day event.
Like Al Omari, Silva said most people don’t perceive her as Latina because she covers her head.
“We always have to defend our Latino heritage when it comes to communicating with other Latinos so we don’t lose that identity just because we are Muslim. With Mexicans, we have to prove we are still Latino,” she said. “With Muslims, we have to prove ourselves as Muslim through our faith. As Americans, we have to prove to Americans we are also American.”
In the beginning — even before wearing the hijab — Silva said she had to reassure her parents, who believed she was going to give up her identity after converting.
“Look, Mom, I’m still Mexican, OK?” she once told her mother.
Still, some find that converting to Islam can strain relations with family members who are not Muslim.
Jose Moreno, Al Omari’s brother, said he and his sister are trying to repair their relationship — meeting at least once a year — after growing distant for some time.
Though Moreno doesn’t blame his sister’s conversion entirely for their drifting apart, he said it did play a role.
“Her religion doesn’t bother me,” he said. “My parents, on the other hand … they still, to this day, they still don’t like it.”
That friction was one of the reasons the family drifted, Moreno said.
“Her life revolved mostly around her Muslim community, as I see it,” he said. “It didn’t really involve us a lot. It was very minimal.”
Silva and Al Omari belong to a group of Muslim Latinas in Orange County who guide others — many Latina — going through the conversion process.
What do you say if you cover your head and your Catholic father doesn’t like it?
“You have to explain that nuns also cover and Mary covered,” Silva responds.
Like many Muslim women, a large number of Latina converts do not wear the hijab.
Dina Bdaiwi, whose Mexican mother converted to Islam, first wore the hijab during her senior year in high school and into her first year in college. But the 22-year-old from Irvine — who describes herself as shy — felt as if it attracted too much attention.
She also sensed the headscarf distanced her from the Latino, non-Muslim side of her family. It’s not that they ever said anything, she said. It was just a feeling.
“I felt like they knew me a certain way, and that was without the hijab. I wanted to feel close with my family again,” said Bdaiwi, a senior at UC Irvine. “I just wanted things to be the same as they were.”
After a year, she took it off.
Marya Ayloush, a 21-year-old whose father is Arab and whose Mexican mother also converted to Islam, sees the hijab as part of her identity.
Seven years ago, she launched Austere Attire, a Los Angeles-based online clothing store that sells headscarves — many of them modern and hip, targeting millennials.
Though Ayloush was always drawn to her Arabic identity, she recently reconnected with her Mexican heritage, she said. A UCLA student, she’s majoring in Chicano studies.
In late January, Ayloush joined thousands of protesters who converged at Los Angeles International Airport to condemn Trump’s travel restrictions on certain predominantly Muslim countries.
She carried a sign she made. It read: “I am a Mexican, Arab, Muslim, Woman. Trump’s Boogey Man.”
cindy.carcamo@latimes.com
Twitter: @thecindycarcamo
Mar 27, 2017 21:05:54 #
Record number of voters registered in California
Report shows unusual post-election surge to bring state’s total on rolls to 19.43 million.
By Phil Willon
SACRAMENTO — After the hotly contested 2016 presidential election, California has set a new voter registration record, with 19.43 million residents now signed up to vote.
More than 20,000 voters were added to the rolls from Oct. 24 to Feb. 10, an unusual increase after a presidential election, according to Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who released the new voter registration numbers Wednesday.
The state saw a net gain of more than 1.7 million voters since the same report was released with February 2015 statistics, and a record 14.6 million California voters cast ballots in the November elections.
Party registration trends are holding steady, according to the new numbers.
Republicans trailed Democrats in registration by more than 18 percentage points as of Feb. 10, according to the California Secretary of State’s report. Of Californians registered to vote, Democrats accounted for 44.8% and Republicans 25.9%.
Unaffiliated voters, known in California as those who have “no party preference,” were a close third and made up more than 24.5% of statewide registration.
Over the last decade, Democratic voter registration has remained relatively the same percentage-wise, increasing by just over 2 percentage points since February 2007.
Republican voter registration has continued to slide, dropping by more than 8 percentage points during that time.
As of Feb. 10, an estimated 77.9% of Californians who were eligible to vote had registered, according to the report.
phil.willon@latimes.com
Twitter: @philwillon
Report shows unusual post-election surge to bring state’s total on rolls to 19.43 million.
By Phil Willon
SACRAMENTO — After the hotly contested 2016 presidential election, California has set a new voter registration record, with 19.43 million residents now signed up to vote.
More than 20,000 voters were added to the rolls from Oct. 24 to Feb. 10, an unusual increase after a presidential election, according to Secretary of State Alex Padilla, who released the new voter registration numbers Wednesday.
The state saw a net gain of more than 1.7 million voters since the same report was released with February 2015 statistics, and a record 14.6 million California voters cast ballots in the November elections.
Party registration trends are holding steady, according to the new numbers.
Republicans trailed Democrats in registration by more than 18 percentage points as of Feb. 10, according to the California Secretary of State’s report. Of Californians registered to vote, Democrats accounted for 44.8% and Republicans 25.9%.
Unaffiliated voters, known in California as those who have “no party preference,” were a close third and made up more than 24.5% of statewide registration.
Over the last decade, Democratic voter registration has remained relatively the same percentage-wise, increasing by just over 2 percentage points since February 2007.
Republican voter registration has continued to slide, dropping by more than 8 percentage points during that time.
As of Feb. 10, an estimated 77.9% of Californians who were eligible to vote had registered, according to the report.
phil.willon@latimes.com
Twitter: @philwillon
Apr 19, 2017 13:27:20 #
SACRAMENTO WATCH
Billion-dollar Tax Day boon
April is expected to reap a huge surge of income tax revenue to bolster state budget.
BRENDA GIPSON sorts California income tax returns at the Franchise Tax Board office in Sacramento on Tuesday, the filing deadline. (Rich Pedroncelli Associated Press)
JOHN MYERS
SACRAMENTO — As Californians rush to file their personal income taxes before a midnight deadline, budget writers in Sacramento were expecting more than $1 billion in payments on Tuesday to help balance the state’s books.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget team has projected a total of $14 billion in income tax revenues this month, a slight uptick from actual returns in April of last year. An analysis by the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office shows that total collections for the month are running about 10% above the same time last year.
The final totals as of April 30 are crucial to crafting both Brown’s revised budget plan, which will be presented to the Legislature next month, and the final plan lawmakers must put in place by June 30.
Tax revenues for the current fiscal year — combining sales and corporate taxes along with those paid by individuals — were about $780 million higher than the governor’s estimates through the end of March, the analyst’s office report said. Lawmakers and Brown often spar over whose tax revenue predictions to use when crafting a spending plan, a debate the governor has consistently won since returning to office in 2011.
Data from the state controller’s office show that on Tax Day i 2016, the state collected $1.5 billion in income taxes. Although taxes collected in other months are also important in building state budgets — notably June and September as quarterly taxes are paid — April remains perhaps the best indicator of the fiscal road ahead.
Brown’s January budget plan projected a $1.6-billion deficit, with proposals to resolve the shortfall including the cancellation of some 2016 spending plans and slower funding growth for California schools.
john.myers@latimes.com
Billion-dollar Tax Day boon
April is expected to reap a huge surge of income tax revenue to bolster state budget.
BRENDA GIPSON sorts California income tax returns at the Franchise Tax Board office in Sacramento on Tuesday, the filing deadline. (Rich Pedroncelli Associated Press)
JOHN MYERS
SACRAMENTO — As Californians rush to file their personal income taxes before a midnight deadline, budget writers in Sacramento were expecting more than $1 billion in payments on Tuesday to help balance the state’s books.
Gov. Jerry Brown’s budget team has projected a total of $14 billion in income tax revenues this month, a slight uptick from actual returns in April of last year. An analysis by the independent Legislative Analyst’s Office shows that total collections for the month are running about 10% above the same time last year.
The final totals as of April 30 are crucial to crafting both Brown’s revised budget plan, which will be presented to the Legislature next month, and the final plan lawmakers must put in place by June 30.
Tax revenues for the current fiscal year — combining sales and corporate taxes along with those paid by individuals — were about $780 million higher than the governor’s estimates through the end of March, the analyst’s office report said. Lawmakers and Brown often spar over whose tax revenue predictions to use when crafting a spending plan, a debate the governor has consistently won since returning to office in 2011.
Data from the state controller’s office show that on Tax Day i 2016, the state collected $1.5 billion in income taxes. Although taxes collected in other months are also important in building state budgets — notably June and September as quarterly taxes are paid — April remains perhaps the best indicator of the fiscal road ahead.
Brown’s January budget plan projected a $1.6-billion deficit, with proposals to resolve the shortfall including the cancellation of some 2016 spending plans and slower funding growth for California schools.
john.myers@latimes.com
Apr 24, 2017 19:39:20 #
For this California town, the border is just a line to cross
Travel between Calexico and its ‘twin’ is a daily routine for many
AT THE END of the day, uniformed students from Calexico Mission School cross the border back to Mexicali, Mexico, where they live. To many here, the 16-foot-tall fence is neither fully a bulwark against invasion nor a foreboding stop sign to immigrants’ hopes. (Photographs by Genaro Molina Los Angeles Times) SIXTH-GRADER Francisco Zapata, 13, studies at Calexico Mission School. It was built 80 years ago by a group of Seventh-day Adventists who saw the border as a mission field for doing God’s work. ()
By Hailey Branson-Potts
CALEXICO, Calif. — The schoolyard at Calexico Mission School is quiet, save for a stray giggle here and there. Third-graders huddle for reading time: the girls lying beneath a shade tree, the boys under a blazing pink bougainvillea.
Just beyond the school’s white picket fence looms the rusted 16-foot-tall steel fence that separates this farm town from the sprawling city of Mexicali, Mexico. The school sits about 50 feet from the fence — closer than a major league pitcher from home plate.
Through the steel mesh of the fence, children can see the ever-present line of cars on Avenida Cristóbal Colón waiting to cross the port of entry into the United States and hear the chatter from their Spanish-language radio stations.
When a Border Patrol agent pedals by on a bicycle, none of the students — virtually all of them Mexican children who cross the border every day — glance up.
In the era of Donald Trump and his talk of building an impenetrable — and “beautiful” — wall to beat back illegal immigration, the border has become a hardening line in America’s cultural wars.
But to many of the people here, the fence that separates the two countries is neither fully a bulwark against invasion nor a foreboding stop sign to immigrants’ hopes. It is a mundane part of the environment that must be crossed every day to live, work and study.
The border that divides Calexico in California and Mexicali in Mexico has for generations been more of a marker than a barrier.
In some ways, Calexico — a dusty, mostly Latino desert city of 40,000 — is today a suburb of Mexicali, which has become an industrial powerhouse and now has a population of around 700,000.
People have family on both sides. Calexico recently built an outlet mall next to the border fence to draw Mexican shoppers. And Mexicali has long drawn Calexicans to its nightlife, Chinese restaurants and cheaper medical care.
It’s one of several sets of “twin cities” along the border — such as San Diego and Tijuana and El Paso and Juarez — where deep economic, social, political and family ties belie the idea that the border should be a fortress.
“I love living on the border,” said Ailani Mares, 11, a Calexico Mission student from Mexicali. “Right now, I can say, ‘Oh, my mom and dad, they’re in Mexico, and I’m in the United States!’ It’s the best school ever.”
More than 8 million private vehicles and 4.5 million pedestrians cross through the cities’ two ports of entry into California annually, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Federal officials plan to spend $370 million to expand the Calexico West Port of Entry, building new pedestrian and vehicle lanes to cut down on long wait times.
“The border is something that keeps us apart in a way, but not really,” said Yolanda Johnston, a high school history instructor who’s been teaching at Calexico Mission for 44 years. “We just have to go through the line.”
In March, the Imperial County Board of Supervisors sent a letter to members of Congress, saying taxpayer money would be better spent modernizing the aging port than building Trump’s wall.
The port “is really vital to this area,” said David Salazar, Customs and Border Protection’s director of the Calexico ports of entry. “The local communities work together to keep business alive.
“There are very few people doing something wrong. Most of the people crossing are good, honest people.”
Calexico — a so-called melt-zone where homes and shops are just a quick dash from the border — was a hotbed for illegal crossings in the late 1990s and early 2000s after a high-profile San Diego crackdown called Operation Gatekeeper shifted immigration flows east toward the Imperial Valley.
The steel fence was built in 1999, replacing a chain-link fence, and hundreds more Border Patrol agents were added in recent years. Illegal crossings in the Imperial Valley have since plummeted — from 238,126 people in fiscal year 2000 to 19,448 in the 2016 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, said Jonathan Pacheco, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector.
For most Calexico Mission pupils, who have student visas to make the crossing, the day starts in Mexicali. They wake up early, sit in traffic with their parents or in a carpool van and are dropped off at the port of entry.
They hustle along the scuffed pink-and-white tile in the port’s pedestrian tunnel, passing pharmacies, newspaper stands and tables laden with tamales and pan dulce before joining the long line next to a sign that warns of guard dogs on duty. From there, they walk a quarter-mile to school, in desert heat that can hit 120 degrees in the summer.
Mariann Mendoza, an 11-year-old with shiny silver braces on her teeth, said she wakes at 5:15 a.m. and sometimes sneaks to bed wearing her school uniform so she can get a few more minutes of sleep. Her American classmate Yasmin Corral, 11, from Calexico, giggled and said she felt kind of guilty because she can sleep in until 7:20.
The school was built 80 years ago by a group of Seventh-day Adventists who saw the border as a mission field for doing God’s work. Its logo includes both the U.S. and Mexican flags.
Of the Christian school’s roughly 300 students, about 85% are Mexican citizens. For many parents, the cost of the private school’s tuition — between $355 and $644 a month for different grade levels — is a worthy investment for an American education and the ability to attend an English-immersion school.
The school’s first-year principal, Oscar Olivarria, was once one of those students making the trek from Mexicali.
His wife, Tanya — who is of Russian descent and learned Spanish after growing up in East Los Angeles — teaches sixth grade at the school. Their children, Yakov and Vika, whose first and last names reflect their parents’ Russian and Mexican cultures, are students there.
About a third of the school’s students are on scholarship. Though many hail from upper- and middle-class families, their primary concerns center not on immigration but the economy.
“We have a population that is earning pesos and spending dollars, and when you factor in that exchange rate, it all of a sudden makes it very hard for those families to have their kids here,” Olivarria, 38, said. “Obviously, this is a priority for them and that’s why they make the sacrifice.”
The peso, which was sensitive to polls during the U.S. presidential campaign, plunged after Trump’s November victory. When the Calexico Mission school year started in late August, the local exchange rate was around 18 pesos per dollar. By January the peso, which has made a recovery recently, had depreciated to about 22.
Families questioned, month to month, whether they’d be able to keep their children in school, Olivarria said.
“As a school, we didn’t change our rates, but it’s as if we had,” he said.
Students can rattle off the exchange rate, which flashes on electronic signs when they cross back into Mexicali.
“We prayed for the dollar to go down, and it started going down,” said Ailani Mares, a sixth-grader. Her father is a doctor, and they do fine financially, she said, but it has been a scary few months for her class.
Just before the U.S. election, the sixth-grade class held a mock election of its own. Trump won.
Every day, the students said, they stand in border lines made longer by Mexicali youths who are illegally attending free, public Calexico schools. They pray aloud that the line will get shorter.
And that explained Trump’s victory as much as anything else.
Their experiences are distinct from those of children in America without legal status — who worry that they or their parents might be deported. But many of the students were also anxious about Trump’s win.
Tanya Olivarria’s students — and many parents — worried that if Trump won, they wouldn’t be able to cross the border anymore and would have to leave the school. Olivarria reminded them their visas were all legal and that they would not be taken away. If there was a wall, she told them, they would still be able to go back and forth.
“I told them God is in control, regardless if Trump or Hillary wins,” she said.
On a recent March morning, the students were far less concerned with border politics than that day’s election of the sixth-grade class officers, which was steeped in the steady influence of American pop culture.
Emilio Peña, from Mexicali, was running for class president and showed up in a suave black suit. He kept repeating his campaign slogan: “Vote for Peñas Care,” a riff on Obamacare.
A diminutive boy from Calexico, Miguel Felix, said his own slogan was “Short people matter.” Declared the new vice president, he celebrated by putting gold star stickers all over his face.
Yolanda Johnston was just out of college when she started at the school in 1973. Back then, people seemed to always be jumping the rickety chain-link border fence. They would duck into her classroom, knowing Border Patrol agents wouldn’t follow them inside. Students were unfazed. They would hand the person a book so he or she would blend in and move on with their studies without saying a word.
With so many Border Patrol agents on guard just feet from the school — and the big fence — that doesn’t happen anymore, she said. Occasionally, someone will still scale the fence with a ladder and sprint across the schoolyard, but, Johnston said, she feels safe.
At the end of a recent school day, a Calexico Mission student walking through the port to Mexicali bumped into a Mexican woman and apologized in English. The woman was surprised. The teenage girl laughed as she walked away with her friends, saying, “ Se me salio!”
It just came out — referring to the English she accidentally blurted out.
Salvador Chacon, a wiry sophomore, waited for his mother to pick him up in the slow-moving parent traffic circle that forms every day in Mexicali by the port of entry, near Hotel del Norte.
This is his first year at Calexico Mission after attending school in Mexicali. His three older sisters are college-educated, and he knows his parents — who never graduated from high school — are sacrificing for him.
“My parents have no education,” he said. “That’s something that should limit them from doing things for us, but it doesn’t. I take that as motivation to strive in life.”
Once he started having to wait in line at the port each day, he gained a whole new respect for the farmers and laborers who do it too.
In the port of entry traffic circle the next day, Brenda Gallardo pulled up in a silver Suburban, and her three children — Jorge Noriega, 17, Ana Noriega, 11, and Patricia Noriega, 9 — piled inside.
Gallardo is a doctor with a bustling clinic that connects to the family’s two-story Mexicali home, a few blocks south of the border fence. She and her father — who grew up poor in rural Sinaloa — attended medical school at the same time, and he has a clinic next to hers.
She was horrified when the peso plummeted. Between her three children, it meant an extra 5,000 pesos a month in tuition. But she knew she would work as hard as she could to keep them in school.
“Education is the only way that we have to fight poverty, to fight corruption, to fight all the limitations that this country has,” Gallardo said.
“The easiest thing for me to do would be to send them to the public school a few blocks from here. I wouldn’t be paying all this money. But I want better things for them than we in Mexico usually have.”
hailey.branson@latimes.com
Twitter: @haileybranson
Travel between Calexico and its ‘twin’ is a daily routine for many
AT THE END of the day, uniformed students from Calexico Mission School cross the border back to Mexicali, Mexico, where they live. To many here, the 16-foot-tall fence is neither fully a bulwark against invasion nor a foreboding stop sign to immigrants’ hopes. (Photographs by Genaro Molina Los Angeles Times) SIXTH-GRADER Francisco Zapata, 13, studies at Calexico Mission School. It was built 80 years ago by a group of Seventh-day Adventists who saw the border as a mission field for doing God’s work. ()
By Hailey Branson-Potts
CALEXICO, Calif. — The schoolyard at Calexico Mission School is quiet, save for a stray giggle here and there. Third-graders huddle for reading time: the girls lying beneath a shade tree, the boys under a blazing pink bougainvillea.
Just beyond the school’s white picket fence looms the rusted 16-foot-tall steel fence that separates this farm town from the sprawling city of Mexicali, Mexico. The school sits about 50 feet from the fence — closer than a major league pitcher from home plate.
Through the steel mesh of the fence, children can see the ever-present line of cars on Avenida Cristóbal Colón waiting to cross the port of entry into the United States and hear the chatter from their Spanish-language radio stations.
When a Border Patrol agent pedals by on a bicycle, none of the students — virtually all of them Mexican children who cross the border every day — glance up.
In the era of Donald Trump and his talk of building an impenetrable — and “beautiful” — wall to beat back illegal immigration, the border has become a hardening line in America’s cultural wars.
But to many of the people here, the fence that separates the two countries is neither fully a bulwark against invasion nor a foreboding stop sign to immigrants’ hopes. It is a mundane part of the environment that must be crossed every day to live, work and study.
The border that divides Calexico in California and Mexicali in Mexico has for generations been more of a marker than a barrier.
In some ways, Calexico — a dusty, mostly Latino desert city of 40,000 — is today a suburb of Mexicali, which has become an industrial powerhouse and now has a population of around 700,000.
People have family on both sides. Calexico recently built an outlet mall next to the border fence to draw Mexican shoppers. And Mexicali has long drawn Calexicans to its nightlife, Chinese restaurants and cheaper medical care.
It’s one of several sets of “twin cities” along the border — such as San Diego and Tijuana and El Paso and Juarez — where deep economic, social, political and family ties belie the idea that the border should be a fortress.
“I love living on the border,” said Ailani Mares, 11, a Calexico Mission student from Mexicali. “Right now, I can say, ‘Oh, my mom and dad, they’re in Mexico, and I’m in the United States!’ It’s the best school ever.”
More than 8 million private vehicles and 4.5 million pedestrians cross through the cities’ two ports of entry into California annually, according to U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Federal officials plan to spend $370 million to expand the Calexico West Port of Entry, building new pedestrian and vehicle lanes to cut down on long wait times.
“The border is something that keeps us apart in a way, but not really,” said Yolanda Johnston, a high school history instructor who’s been teaching at Calexico Mission for 44 years. “We just have to go through the line.”
In March, the Imperial County Board of Supervisors sent a letter to members of Congress, saying taxpayer money would be better spent modernizing the aging port than building Trump’s wall.
The port “is really vital to this area,” said David Salazar, Customs and Border Protection’s director of the Calexico ports of entry. “The local communities work together to keep business alive.
“There are very few people doing something wrong. Most of the people crossing are good, honest people.”
Calexico — a so-called melt-zone where homes and shops are just a quick dash from the border — was a hotbed for illegal crossings in the late 1990s and early 2000s after a high-profile San Diego crackdown called Operation Gatekeeper shifted immigration flows east toward the Imperial Valley.
The steel fence was built in 1999, replacing a chain-link fence, and hundreds more Border Patrol agents were added in recent years. Illegal crossings in the Imperial Valley have since plummeted — from 238,126 people in fiscal year 2000 to 19,448 in the 2016 fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, said Jonathan Pacheco, a spokesman for the Border Patrol’s El Centro Sector.
For most Calexico Mission pupils, who have student visas to make the crossing, the day starts in Mexicali. They wake up early, sit in traffic with their parents or in a carpool van and are dropped off at the port of entry.
They hustle along the scuffed pink-and-white tile in the port’s pedestrian tunnel, passing pharmacies, newspaper stands and tables laden with tamales and pan dulce before joining the long line next to a sign that warns of guard dogs on duty. From there, they walk a quarter-mile to school, in desert heat that can hit 120 degrees in the summer.
Mariann Mendoza, an 11-year-old with shiny silver braces on her teeth, said she wakes at 5:15 a.m. and sometimes sneaks to bed wearing her school uniform so she can get a few more minutes of sleep. Her American classmate Yasmin Corral, 11, from Calexico, giggled and said she felt kind of guilty because she can sleep in until 7:20.
The school was built 80 years ago by a group of Seventh-day Adventists who saw the border as a mission field for doing God’s work. Its logo includes both the U.S. and Mexican flags.
Of the Christian school’s roughly 300 students, about 85% are Mexican citizens. For many parents, the cost of the private school’s tuition — between $355 and $644 a month for different grade levels — is a worthy investment for an American education and the ability to attend an English-immersion school.
The school’s first-year principal, Oscar Olivarria, was once one of those students making the trek from Mexicali.
His wife, Tanya — who is of Russian descent and learned Spanish after growing up in East Los Angeles — teaches sixth grade at the school. Their children, Yakov and Vika, whose first and last names reflect their parents’ Russian and Mexican cultures, are students there.
About a third of the school’s students are on scholarship. Though many hail from upper- and middle-class families, their primary concerns center not on immigration but the economy.
“We have a population that is earning pesos and spending dollars, and when you factor in that exchange rate, it all of a sudden makes it very hard for those families to have their kids here,” Olivarria, 38, said. “Obviously, this is a priority for them and that’s why they make the sacrifice.”
The peso, which was sensitive to polls during the U.S. presidential campaign, plunged after Trump’s November victory. When the Calexico Mission school year started in late August, the local exchange rate was around 18 pesos per dollar. By January the peso, which has made a recovery recently, had depreciated to about 22.
Families questioned, month to month, whether they’d be able to keep their children in school, Olivarria said.
“As a school, we didn’t change our rates, but it’s as if we had,” he said.
Students can rattle off the exchange rate, which flashes on electronic signs when they cross back into Mexicali.
“We prayed for the dollar to go down, and it started going down,” said Ailani Mares, a sixth-grader. Her father is a doctor, and they do fine financially, she said, but it has been a scary few months for her class.
Just before the U.S. election, the sixth-grade class held a mock election of its own. Trump won.
Every day, the students said, they stand in border lines made longer by Mexicali youths who are illegally attending free, public Calexico schools. They pray aloud that the line will get shorter.
And that explained Trump’s victory as much as anything else.
Their experiences are distinct from those of children in America without legal status — who worry that they or their parents might be deported. But many of the students were also anxious about Trump’s win.
Tanya Olivarria’s students — and many parents — worried that if Trump won, they wouldn’t be able to cross the border anymore and would have to leave the school. Olivarria reminded them their visas were all legal and that they would not be taken away. If there was a wall, she told them, they would still be able to go back and forth.
“I told them God is in control, regardless if Trump or Hillary wins,” she said.
On a recent March morning, the students were far less concerned with border politics than that day’s election of the sixth-grade class officers, which was steeped in the steady influence of American pop culture.
Emilio Peña, from Mexicali, was running for class president and showed up in a suave black suit. He kept repeating his campaign slogan: “Vote for Peñas Care,” a riff on Obamacare.
A diminutive boy from Calexico, Miguel Felix, said his own slogan was “Short people matter.” Declared the new vice president, he celebrated by putting gold star stickers all over his face.
Yolanda Johnston was just out of college when she started at the school in 1973. Back then, people seemed to always be jumping the rickety chain-link border fence. They would duck into her classroom, knowing Border Patrol agents wouldn’t follow them inside. Students were unfazed. They would hand the person a book so he or she would blend in and move on with their studies without saying a word.
With so many Border Patrol agents on guard just feet from the school — and the big fence — that doesn’t happen anymore, she said. Occasionally, someone will still scale the fence with a ladder and sprint across the schoolyard, but, Johnston said, she feels safe.
At the end of a recent school day, a Calexico Mission student walking through the port to Mexicali bumped into a Mexican woman and apologized in English. The woman was surprised. The teenage girl laughed as she walked away with her friends, saying, “ Se me salio!”
It just came out — referring to the English she accidentally blurted out.
Salvador Chacon, a wiry sophomore, waited for his mother to pick him up in the slow-moving parent traffic circle that forms every day in Mexicali by the port of entry, near Hotel del Norte.
This is his first year at Calexico Mission after attending school in Mexicali. His three older sisters are college-educated, and he knows his parents — who never graduated from high school — are sacrificing for him.
“My parents have no education,” he said. “That’s something that should limit them from doing things for us, but it doesn’t. I take that as motivation to strive in life.”
Once he started having to wait in line at the port each day, he gained a whole new respect for the farmers and laborers who do it too.
In the port of entry traffic circle the next day, Brenda Gallardo pulled up in a silver Suburban, and her three children — Jorge Noriega, 17, Ana Noriega, 11, and Patricia Noriega, 9 — piled inside.
Gallardo is a doctor with a bustling clinic that connects to the family’s two-story Mexicali home, a few blocks south of the border fence. She and her father — who grew up poor in rural Sinaloa — attended medical school at the same time, and he has a clinic next to hers.
She was horrified when the peso plummeted. Between her three children, it meant an extra 5,000 pesos a month in tuition. But she knew she would work as hard as she could to keep them in school.
“Education is the only way that we have to fight poverty, to fight corruption, to fight all the limitations that this country has,” Gallardo said.
“The easiest thing for me to do would be to send them to the public school a few blocks from here. I wouldn’t be paying all this money. But I want better things for them than we in Mexico usually have.”
hailey.branson@latimes.com
Twitter: @haileybranson
May 5, 2017 13:54:28 #
POPULATION WATCH
4 million people — and counting
L.A. hits a milestone in its long history of growth, but housing becomes bigger worry.
THE DOWNTOWN L.A. skyline has changed constantly since it began to grow more vertical with the rise of skyscrapers in the 1960s. (Photographs by Luis Sinco Los Angeles Times) BY 1970, A FREEWAY system connected Southern California in dramatic ways, contributing to the growth of Los Angeles’ population — and its traffic woes.
SHELBY GRAD
Los Angeles gained 42,470 people from 2016 to 2017.
That might not seem like a lot, but it was enough to push the city’s population over the 4-million mark — to 4,041,707, according to a new state report.
The milestone isn’t much of a surprise, given that other studies already put the city’s population at 4 million. But it’s a mark that underscores Los Angeles’ place as the dominant population center in California.
The rest of the Top 10:
• San Diego: 1,406,318
• San Jose: 1,046,079
• San Francisco: 874,228
• Fresno: 525,832
• Sacramento: 493,025
• Long Beach: 480,173
• Oakland: 426,074
• Bakersfield: 383,512
• Anaheim: 358,546
Here’s a look at L.A.’s path to 4 million people:
1950
Population: 1.9 million
California was in the midst of post-World War II suburbanization. Much of the city was developed before the war, but the 1950s saw vast housing tracts going up in the San Fernando Valley.
Milestones: Los Angeles came out of World War II poised to become an economic powerhouse, thanks in part to defense spending.
1960
Population: 2.4 million
As the move to more suburban neighborhoods continued, the city’s population surged. Signs of decline in the central city, however, were becoming apparent.
Milestones : Disneyland opened in Anaheim, while the Cold War fueled defense spending in Southern California.
1970
Population: 2.8 million
By 1970, downtown L.A. had started to look more vertical, with the rise of skyscrapers the decade before.
Milestones: A freeway system connected Southern California in dramatic ways, and the Manson “family” murders shocked the world.
1980
Population: 2.9 million
The 1980 census found whites made up less than half of the city’s residents, making L.A. a majority-minority city. While the shift had been predicted, it was notable.
A Times story on the findings noted that “Hispanics” — already 28% of the population — were projected to become the largest single ethnic group in the city by 1984.
Milestones: A new skyline began to form in downtown L.A. and other areas, notably Century City; Tom Bradley was elected the city’s first black mayor.
1990
Population: 3.4 million
The 1980s saw a boom that took many experts by surprise. It was fueled by rising Latino and Asian populations, both through immigration and births. By 1991, Latinos were the majority group in L.A.
Milestones: Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1984, and the city was riveted by the Lakers’ “Showtime” era. L.A. got a gleaming skyline, while income and racial disparities became more evident.
2000
Population: 3.6 million
Growth slowed again in the 1990s, as the region was hit by a severe recession, riots and the Northridge earthquake.
Milestones: Defense downsizing and corporate consolidation sent the city into a tailspin that was worsened by riots and natural disasters.
2010
Population: 3.7 million
The most recent full census found modest population growth marked by continued increases in L.A.’s diversity.
Milestones: Gentrification began to take hold in downtown and other areas. Downtown’s rebirth is symbolized by the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall.
2017
Population: 4 million
The region’s population has continued to increase, but a lack of housing is becoming a bigger issue. While L.A. is adding more and denser housing, experts say it’s not keeping pace with demand.
Milestones: Downtown’s skyline is being reshaped by new skyscrapers, and the L.A. River has become a destination, with restoration and parkland additions.
shelby.grad@latimes.com
Twitter: @shelbygrad
4 million people — and counting
L.A. hits a milestone in its long history of growth, but housing becomes bigger worry.
THE DOWNTOWN L.A. skyline has changed constantly since it began to grow more vertical with the rise of skyscrapers in the 1960s. (Photographs by Luis Sinco Los Angeles Times) BY 1970, A FREEWAY system connected Southern California in dramatic ways, contributing to the growth of Los Angeles’ population — and its traffic woes.
SHELBY GRAD
Los Angeles gained 42,470 people from 2016 to 2017.
That might not seem like a lot, but it was enough to push the city’s population over the 4-million mark — to 4,041,707, according to a new state report.
The milestone isn’t much of a surprise, given that other studies already put the city’s population at 4 million. But it’s a mark that underscores Los Angeles’ place as the dominant population center in California.
The rest of the Top 10:
• San Diego: 1,406,318
• San Jose: 1,046,079
• San Francisco: 874,228
• Fresno: 525,832
• Sacramento: 493,025
• Long Beach: 480,173
• Oakland: 426,074
• Bakersfield: 383,512
• Anaheim: 358,546
Here’s a look at L.A.’s path to 4 million people:
1950
Population: 1.9 million
California was in the midst of post-World War II suburbanization. Much of the city was developed before the war, but the 1950s saw vast housing tracts going up in the San Fernando Valley.
Milestones: Los Angeles came out of World War II poised to become an economic powerhouse, thanks in part to defense spending.
1960
Population: 2.4 million
As the move to more suburban neighborhoods continued, the city’s population surged. Signs of decline in the central city, however, were becoming apparent.
Milestones : Disneyland opened in Anaheim, while the Cold War fueled defense spending in Southern California.
1970
Population: 2.8 million
By 1970, downtown L.A. had started to look more vertical, with the rise of skyscrapers the decade before.
Milestones: A freeway system connected Southern California in dramatic ways, and the Manson “family” murders shocked the world.
1980
Population: 2.9 million
The 1980 census found whites made up less than half of the city’s residents, making L.A. a majority-minority city. While the shift had been predicted, it was notable.
A Times story on the findings noted that “Hispanics” — already 28% of the population — were projected to become the largest single ethnic group in the city by 1984.
Milestones: A new skyline began to form in downtown L.A. and other areas, notably Century City; Tom Bradley was elected the city’s first black mayor.
1990
Population: 3.4 million
The 1980s saw a boom that took many experts by surprise. It was fueled by rising Latino and Asian populations, both through immigration and births. By 1991, Latinos were the majority group in L.A.
Milestones: Los Angeles hosted the Olympics in 1984, and the city was riveted by the Lakers’ “Showtime” era. L.A. got a gleaming skyline, while income and racial disparities became more evident.
2000
Population: 3.6 million
Growth slowed again in the 1990s, as the region was hit by a severe recession, riots and the Northridge earthquake.
Milestones: Defense downsizing and corporate consolidation sent the city into a tailspin that was worsened by riots and natural disasters.
2010
Population: 3.7 million
The most recent full census found modest population growth marked by continued increases in L.A.’s diversity.
Milestones: Gentrification began to take hold in downtown and other areas. Downtown’s rebirth is symbolized by the opening of Walt Disney Concert Hall.
2017
Population: 4 million
The region’s population has continued to increase, but a lack of housing is becoming a bigger issue. While L.A. is adding more and denser housing, experts say it’s not keeping pace with demand.
Milestones: Downtown’s skyline is being reshaped by new skyscrapers, and the L.A. River has become a destination, with restoration and parkland additions.
shelby.grad@latimes.com
Twitter: @shelbygrad
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