Cuba

Please join NDN next Wednesday, June 10 for a timely and forthright conversation with Joe Garcia on the future of Cuba. As someone who has been intimately involved with the recent progress toward Cuba's opening, Joe will be sharing reflections on the events of the past few months and discussing where this new day in Cuban-American relations is headed.

Wednesday, June 10, 12 p.m.
NDN: 729 15th St. NW, First Floor
A live webcast will begin at 12:15 p.m. ET
RSVP  :  Watch webcast

Joe Garcia was the Director of NDN's Hispanic Programs for more than three years, and was Executive Director of the Cuban America National Foundation before that.  He has been a lifelong advocate for a more just and free Cuba.

Lunch will be served at this event, beginning at 12 p.m.  The program and live webcast will begin at 12:15 p.m. ET. Please RSVP early, as we expect this event to fill up quickly. Please feel free to pass this invitation along to your colleagues and friends.

Today in the Senate, Senator Schumer is holding an important hearing: "Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2009, Can We Do it and How?" Here at NDN, we believe the answer to whether Congress can pass reform this year is "yes." Below are seven reasons why:

1) In tough economic times, we need to remove the "trap door" under the minimum wage.

One of the first acts of the new Democratic Congress back in 2007 was to raise the minimum wage, to help alleviate the downward pressure on wages we had seen throughout the decade even prior to the current Great Recession. The problem with this strategy is that the minimum wage and other worker protections required by American law do not extend to those workers here illegally. With economic times worsening here and in the home countries of the migrants, unscrupulous employers have much more leverage over, and incentive to keep, undocumented workers. With five percent of the current workforce -- amazingly, with one out of every 20 workers now undocumented, this situation creates an unacceptable race to the bottom, downward pressure on wages, at a time when we need to be doing more for those struggling to get by, not less.   

Legalizing the five percent of the work force that is undocumented would create a higher wage and benefit floor than exists today for all workers, further helping, as was intended by the increase in the minimum wage two years ago, to alleviate the downward pressure on wages for those struggling the most in this tough economy.  

Additionally, it needs to be understood that these undocumenteds are already here and working.  If you are undocumented, you are not eligible for welfare. If you are not working, you go home. Thus, in order to remove this "trap door," we need to either kick five percent of existing American workforce out of the country -- a moral and economic impossibility -- or legalize them. There is no third way on this one. They stay and become citizens or we chase them away. 

Finally, what you hear from some of the opponents of immigration reform is that by passing reform, all of these immigrants will come and take the jobs away of everyday Americans. But again, the undocumented immigrants are already here, working, having kids, supporting local businesses. Legalization does not create a flood of new immigrants -- in fact, as discussed earlier, it puts the immigrant worker on a more even playing field with legal American workers. It does the very inverse of what is being suggested -- it creates fairer competition for American workers -- not unfair competition. The status quo is what should be most unacceptable to those who claim they are advocating for the American worker.  

2) In a time of tight budgets, passing immigration reform will bring more money into the federal treasury.  

Putting the undocumented population on the road to citizenship will also increase tax revenue in a time of economic crisis, as the newly legal immigrants will pay fees and fines, and become fully integrated into the U.S. tax-paying system. When immigration reform legislation passed the Senate in 2006, the Congressional Budge Office estimate that accompanied the bill projected Treasury revenues would see a net increase of $44 billion over 10 years. 

3) Reforming our immigration system will increasingly be seen as a critical part of any comprehensive strategy to calm the increasingly violent border region. 

Tackling the growing influence of the drug cartels in Mexico is going to be hard, cost a great deal of money, and take a long time. One quick and early step toward calming the region will be to take decisive action on clearing up one piece of the problem -- the vast illegal trade in undocumented migrants. Legalization will also help give these millions of families a greater stake in the United States, which will make it less likely that they contribute to the spread of the cartels influence.  

4) Fixing the immigration system will help reinforce that it is a "new day" for U.S.-Latin American relations.     

To his credit, President Obama has made it clear that he wants to see a significant improvement in our relations with our Latin neighbors and very clearly communicated that message during his recent trips to Mexico and the Summit of the Americas. Just as offering a new policy toward Cuba is part of establishing that it is truly a "new day" in hemispheric relations, ending the shameful treatment of Latin migrants here in the United States will go a long way in signaling that America is taking its relations with its southern neighbors much more seriously than in the past.  

5) Passing immigration reform this year clears the way for a clean census next year.  

Even though the government is constitutionally required to count everyone living in the United States every 10 years, the national GOP has made it clear that it will block efforts for the Census Bureau to count undocumented immigrants. Conducting a clean and thorough census is hard in any environment. If we add a protracted legal and political battle on top -- think Norm Coleman, a politicized U.S. Attorney process, Bush v Gore -- the chance of a failed or flawed census rises dramatically. This of course would not be good for the nation.  

Passing immigration reform this year would go a long way to ensuring we have a clean and effective census count next year. 

6) The Administration and Congress will grow weary of what we call  "immigration proxy wars," and will want the issue taken off the table.  

With rising violence in Mexico, and the everyday drumbeat of clashes and conflicts over immigration in communities across America, the broken immigration system is not going to fade from public consciousness any time soon. The very vocal minority on the right -- those who put this issue on the table in the first place -- will continue to try to attach amendments to other bills ensuring that various government benefits are not conferred upon undocumenteds. We have already seen battles pop up this year on virtually every major bill Congress has taken up, including SCHIP and the stimulus. By the fall, I think leaders of both parties will grow weary of these proxy battles popping up on every issue and will want to resolve the issue once and for all. Passing immigration reform will become essential to making progress on other much needed societal goals like moving toward universal health insurance. 

7) Finally, in the age of Obama, we must be vigilant to stamp out racism wherever it appears. 

Passing immigration reform this year would help take the air out of the balloon of what is the most virulent form of racism in American society today -- the attacks on Hispanics and undocumented immigrants. It will be increasingly difficult for the President and his allies to somehow argue that watching Glenn Beck act out burning alive of a person on the air over immigration, "left leaning" Ed Schultz give air time to avowed racist Tom Tancredo on MSNBC or Republican ads comparing Mexican immigrants to Islamic terrorists is somehow different from the racially insensitive speech that got Rush Limbaugh kicked off Monday Night Football, or Don Imus kicked off the radio.   

So for those of us who want to see this vexing national problem addressed this year, this important hearing is a critical step forward.  But we still have a long way to, and a lot of work ahead of us if we are to get this done this year.

(Also check out our recently released report, Making the Case for Passing Comprehensive Immigration Reform This Year, which succinctly lays out our case for why Congress can -- and should -- pass comprehensive immigration reform this year).

This week was an important week for NDN in the policy and legislative arenas as a top Democrat in the U.S. House of Representatives introduced legislation based on one of NDN's key initiatives, a proposal by NDN Globalization Initiative Chair Rob Shapiro to use the nation's infrastructure of community colleges to provide free computer training to all comers wishing to improve their IT skills. The proposal is targeted toward improving the computer skillls of U.S. workers in the increasingly globalized economy.

U.S. Rep. John Larson (CT-01), Chairman of the House Democratic Caucus, today introduced the legislation, H.R. 2060, on Thursday at a news conference with Shapiro.

The Community College Technology Access Act of 2009 is based on a paper Shapiro wrote in 2007, Tapping the Resources of America’s Community Colleges: A Modest Proposal to Provide Universal Computer Training. During the presidential campaign, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama endorsed the idea as part of his platform.

National Journal's Tech Daily Dose previewed the news conference and a good write-up in Community College Times.

On Wednesday, Nelson Cunningham, newly named Chair of NDN's Latin American Policy Initiative, made a splash in the Chicago Tribune with a major essay focused on President Obama's recent trip to the Summit of the Americas. Look for more commentary for Nelson, widely seen as one of the foremost experts on U.S.-Latin American relations in the United States.

Earlier in the week, President Barack Obama signed into law the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which dramatically expands the national service corps. NDN Fellows and Millennial Makover co-authors, Morley Winograd and Mike Hais, wrote a special essay to mark the occasion and did several interviews. Check out this fantastic piece by Susan Milligan in the Boston Globe, Kennedy's hometown paper, which quotes Morley and Mike, who finished the East Coast leg of their book tour last week. 

Their essay -- which also was cross posted by FutureMajority -- focused on the Millennials Generation's desire to serve and its identity as a "civic" generation. Morley and Mike also received a prominent mentioned on pollster.com.

NDN is always the place to go to talk new tools and media. When San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom announced his gubernatorial run last week via all new media, Carla Marinucci from the San Franciso Chronicle asked Simon to weigh in:

"The way that Gavin Newsom announced will become standard practice in the post-Obama era of politics," said Simon Rosenberg, who heads NDN, which studies Democratic policy issues. "We're seeing a reinventing of politics ... and in a state as wired as California, and a campaign as expensive as this one will be, the candidates who can figure out how to tap into the power and passion of their supporters will have an advantage."

And Morley and Mike talked to the Providence (RI) Phoenix about the Internet and new media. The take-away: while Rhode Island still has many older, non-Internet users, Ocean State politicians who ignore new tools and media do so at their own peril.

Dan has written extensively about Twitter in his weekly Thursday New Tools feature. From talking to friends or colleagues, my sense is that you either love Twitter or you hate it. There doesn't seem to be a lot of inbetweet.

Last night, I happened upon this recent New York Times article on Twitter, "Putting Twitter's World to Use."  

My first reaction to Twitter was lukewarm: I'm not so interested in a 140-character verbal tweet about what someone is eating for breakfast.

But like many new tools and media, Twitter is evolving. To wit:

According to the article:

Companies like Starbucks, Whole Foods and Dell can see what their customers are thinking as they use a product, and the companies can adapt their marketing accordingly. Last week in Moldova, protesters used Twitter as a rallying tool while outsiders peered at their tweets to help them understand what was happening in that little-known country.

And over the weekend, Amazon.com learned how important it was to respond to the Twitter audience. After one author noticed that Amazon had reclassified books with gay and lesbian themes as “adult” and removed them from the main search and sales rankings, a protest broke out on blogs and Twitter. The company felt compelled to respond despite the Easter holiday, initially saying the problem was due to a “glitch in our system” but later blaming a “ham-fisted cataloging error” that affected more than 57,000 books dealing with health and sex.

Soon, machines could twitter as much as people. Corey Menscher, a graduate student at New York University, developed the Kickbee, an elastic band with vibration sensors that his pregnant wife wore to alert Twitter each time the baby kicked: “I kicked Mommy at 08:52 PM on Fri, Jan 2!” Mr. Menscher is now considering selling the product.

Pairing sensors with Twitter leads some to think Twitter could be used to send home security alerts or tell doctors when a patient’s blood sugar or heart rate climbs too high. In the aggregate, such real-time data streams could aid medical researchers.

Already doctors use Twitter to ask for help and share information about procedures. At Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit, surgeons and residents twittered throughout a recent operation to remove a brain tumor from a 47-year-old man who has seizures.

And more:

Indeed, the news-gathering promise of Twitter was most evident during the terrorist attacks in Mumbai last November and when a jetliner landed in the Hudson River in January. People were twittering from the scenes before reporters arrived.

...Even small businesses find Twitter useful. For example, Mary F. Jenn, of True Massage and Wellness in San Francisco, twitters when masseuses have same-day openings in their schedules and offers discounts. The spa is often fully booked within several hours.

But Twitter’s most productive use has been for businesses that want to peer into the minds of their customers, reading their immediate reactions to a product. Dell noticed customers complaining on Twitter that the apostrophe and return keys were too close together on the Dell Mini 9 laptop. So Dell fixed the problem on the Dell Mini 10.

New technologies are fascinating often because of the way people learn to adapt them across so many situations -- twittering in Moldova to come to a protest, Facebooking to organize in Egypt, avoiding crushing fees when sending money home to another contient by doing it on a cell phone. As Simon wrote this morning, the Obama Administration is using mobile technology as it seeks to advance democracy and an open society in Cuba.

And as Tom Kalil wrote for NDN affiliate the New Policy Institute in an enormously compelling paper last year, "...the explosive growth of mobile communications can be a powerful tool for addressing some of the most critical challenges of the 21st century, such as promoting vibrant democracies, fostering inclusive economic growth, and reducing the huge inequities in life expectancy between rich and poor nations."

New tools, new technologies, new opportunities.

There is much to celebrate in the President's new Cuba policy this morning.  NDN was among the first organizations in the nation to argue that the right first step towards a new day with our Cuban neighbors would be to relax the Bush era travel and remittance policy, which had done so much to tear Cuban and their American relatives apart in recent years.   So we are pleased with this announcement, and believe deeply that these first steps will initiate a process over the next five to ten years - or perhaps longer - which helps Cuba modernize, and transition to a more open and democratic society. 

But the announcement also contained provisions about telecommunications which deserve a little more consideration this morning.  Note this exchange between Dan Restrepo and a reporter at yesterday's announcement: 

Q If you guys could just explain a little bit more about the part of today's announcement that deals with telecommunications firms being allowed to - I mean, what

MR. RESTREPO: Certainly. We want to increase the flow of information among Cubans, and between Cubans and the outside world. And one of the ways we can do that under U.S. -- existing United States law, back to the Cuban Democracy Act, is to allow U.S. telecommunications companies to seek to provide services on the island. The licensing process has never -- never really went forward. We're allowing that process -- the President is directing that that licensing process go forward, and directing that the regulations system be put into place to allow U.S. persons to pay for cell coverage that already exists on the island -- again, so Cubans can talk to Cubans, and Cubans can talk to the outside world without having to go through the filter that is the Cuban government.

Q So just cell phones is what this is talking about?

MR. RESTREPO: This is cell phones, satellite television, satellite radio. This is forms of -- modern forms of telecommunication to increase the flow of information to the Cuban people so that if anyone is standing in the way of the Cuban people getting information it is the Cuban government, and it is not some outside technical problem that can be pointed to.

Taking away those excuses and putting -- and trying to create the conditions where greater information flows among the Cuban people, and to and from the Cuban people.

Q To follow up on that, if I may. So if this happens as it's intended to happen, is the idea that a U.S. company would be providing sort of U.S. television programming on -- beaming it in -- onto the island, is that the idea?

MR. RESTREPO: The idea is to increase the flow of information, be it what we see here in the United States -- the global marketplace of television and radio, to make that a possibility for the Cuban people and to ensure that the United States government is not standing in the way of that; to make clear that more -- we stand on the side of having more information rather than less information reach the Cuban people, and for them to be able to communicate among themselves.

This is an early articulation of what could become an important part of any future Obama Doctrine - the idea that connectivity and access to modern media and technology tools have become indespensible elements of free and open societies in the 21st century.   This idea has also been a central part of NDN's arguments these past few years, whether it has been in the reporting and papers we've produced in our affiliate, the New Politics Institute, or in our more traditional policy work.  From a paper I co-authored in 2007 with Alec Ross, A Laptop in Every Backpack: 

A single global communications network, composed of Internet, mobile, SMS, cable and satellite technology, is rapidly tying the world's people together as never before. The core premise of this paper is that the emergence of this network is one of the seminal events of the early 21st century. Increasingly, the world's commerce, finance, communications,media and information are flowing through this network. Half of the world's 6 billion people are now connected to this network, many through powerful and inexpensive mobile phones. Each year more of the world's people become connected to the network, its bandwidth increases, and its use becomes more integrated into all that we do.

Connectivity to this network, and the ability to master it once on, has become an essential part of life in the 21st century, and a key to opportunity, success and fulfillment for the people of the world.

We believe it should be a core priority of the United States to ensure that all the world's people have access to this global network and have the tools to use it for their own life success. There is no way any longer to imagine free societies without the freedom of commerce, expression, and community, which this global network can bring. Bringing this network to all, keeping it free and open and helping people master its use must be one of the highest priorities of those in power in the coming years.

And we took an ever deeper look at how mobile devices are becoming core to development work across the world in this recent paper by Tom Kalil, Harnessing the Mobile Revolution.

This new high-tech foreign policy is a logical extension of the deep understanding of the power of these tools the President took away from his own wildly successful Presidential campaign, and is one more example of how the politics of the bottom up is going increasingly global.  Very exciting indeed. 

Congratulations to the President and his whole team for taking these smart and important first steps towards a new day for our relations with our Cuban neighbors.