Word: migrant
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ABIDJAN: Homeward Bound Fearing racial violence in Gabon, migrant workers are fleeing by ship to this Ivory Coast port. Beset by recession and unemployment, Gabon in December cracked down on its 75,000 foreign workers by introducing a nationality-based fee scale for work permits. The fees range from $1,520 for Mauritanians and $1,160 for Malians down to $95 for French or U.S. nationals. Foreigners must pay up or leave by Feb. 15. With petitions signed by thousands of unemployed Gabonese who threaten to ``kill and burn'' illegal immigrants, western and central Africans are spending their savings...
...better than it had been during slavery. Sharecropping farmers were paid according to the amount of cotton they picked. But the totting up was done by agents of the plantation owner, and cheating was common. Most blacks could not vote, and segregation was entrenched. "Mississippi was intolerable," says one migrant. "You had to go anyplace but here...
Another threat to the plan comes from Mexico, which has seemingly few intentions to cooperate. Says Fernando Estrada Samano, a National Action Party deputy: "We will not stop migrant workers from looking for a better quality of life in the U.S." Social strains are already being felt on the Mexican side of the border. In Tijuana, where much of its floating population of 15,000 migrant workers found itself stranded, petty crime has risen 10% since Operation Gatekeeper began. Thousands of workers who used to commute to jobs in El Paso to work are now without wages and have little...
...kindergartners in Lynne Wiswall's class, all Latino, had painted big American flags and attached them to wooden sticks in preparation for Veterans Day. But in her sunny classroom last week, down the road from a migrant camp where Steinbeck set his famous novel, Wiswall sadly put the red-white-and-blue banners aside. Californians had just approved a ballot initiative to deny public education and social services to illegal immigrants. How many of her Spanish-speaking five-year-olds were undocumented? Wiswall was not about to ask. But one thing she had decided: "I can't send these flags...
...Juan Rivera, who grew up in a migrant camp and now volunteers as the chamber of commerce head, could not afford to give up his state job as a prenatal-care eligibility clerk. "It tears me apart," he said, "but I will have to turn people away." Of the 60 pregnant women he sees each month, he said, about 20 are illegal aliens...