For Safari users, Stefania Rousselle’s featured vignette of immigrant life is here.
We’re likely to have a week of budget stories coming up as everyone tries to figure out how the state budget will impact the cities.
But for the moment, it’s time to re-read Stefania Rousselle’s piece on In-Home Health Services because the great Assembly attempt to save the service missed. The final budget cuts $226 million from In-Home Health Services and San Francisco is the second most affected city in California with more than 18,000 seniors receiving the services. Wages for the more than 16,000 employees who provide the services will drop by $2 an hour to $11.39 an hour and services for some of the more functional elderly will be cut entirely, according to the Sacramento Bee and the California Budget Project.
Much attention was paid to Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s plan to save money by deporting undocumented immigrants as Amanda Martinez wrote, but he’s just a year ahead of a program soon to arrive in the Bay Area. Already, the Secure Communities program run by Immigration Control and Enforcement, known as ICE, is in 70 counties according to a New York Times piece today. It will be nationwide by 2010, and the map on the home page for Secure Communities shows that much of California will be incorporated soon.
The program makes use of a national finger printing data base that scans finger prints, identifies undocumented immigrants arrested by local law enforcement officers and informs ICE once someone has been identified as a non citizen.
But not to fear, California may be broke, state employees may be furloughed and the unemployment rate may be at an all time high, but the recession is over! The Times got it first here in an interesting chart that compares the recovery of recessions back to the 1960s. Quick on its heels was Newsweek. But that news magazine–as the news itself–displays the contradictory times we are living in as their piece showing how more people are hungrier than ever.
In what others in SF are writing, SF Weekly’s Snitch has got the Mission Frowners and, it’s got The Outsider as well, a profile of the new Police Chief George Gascon who will be in town soon.