According to the New York Times, there are around 11.7 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, many of them driving — regardless of whether or not they are licensed. Which is a somewhat scary situation facing the rest of us out on the roads.
In response, a growing number of states (including California, Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Maryland, New Mexico, Nevada, Oregon, Rhode Island, Utah, Vermont, and Washington) have begun to issue driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants. According to the Seattle Times, as of last year all but two states — Arizona and Nebraska — had altered their laws to at least allow immigrants brought here as children to obtain driver’s licenses.
Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C., told Andrea Billups of NewsMax, “It doesn’t given them any legal status, but by giving them a government-issued ID, it helps them imbed in society.”
As for the rest of the states who haven’t given driver’s license privileges to undocumented people yet, it might make financial sense to do so. According to Hispanically Speaking News, when the Massachusetts legislature was debating this idea in March, the head of the state’s Registry of Motor Vehicles, Celia Blue, said licensing undocumented drivers “would generate nearly $15 million in state revenue through license fees and other charges, plus $7.5 million in renewal fees every five years.” Massachusetts state senator Joseph Vital said, “This isn’t to excuse the fact that they’re undocumented. But they’re on the roads. They’re driving. Many uninsured.”
When Colorado passed a law allowing for the licensing of undocumented immigrants last June, the bill’s sponsor, state Senator Jessie Ulibarri, said that law enforcement supported the legislation, according to Reuters. “Our roads will be safer when we can properly identify everyone who drives on them. We estimate that thousands more Colorado drivers will get insured because of this law.”
Sarah E. Hendricks of Drake University wrote in her April report “Living in Car Culture Without a License: The Ripple Effects of Withholding Driver’s Licenses from Unauthorized Immigrants,” published by the Immigration Policy Center, “States that do not offer driver’s licenses to unauthorized immigrants will limit the contributions that immigrant communities as a whole can potentially make, are likely to face negative economic and public safety consequences, and tend to fail in attempts to use such restrictive state-level policies to reduce the presence of unauthorized immigrants.”
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Tag: the American West
You Won’t Believe the Surprising New Uses for Old Shipping Containers
Excess shipping containers are a big problem — literally. According to Jason Blevins of the Denver Post, there are 34.5 million of them in the world. Shipping companies use each one for a decade or two, then the hulking steel boxes are destined to spend eternity in a landfill.
But more people are starting to rethink what these containers could be used for, including Rhino Cubed, founded by businesswoman Jan Burton and Sam Austin, an architect who specializes in using reclaimed materials. Launched on Earth Day in Louisville, Colorado, Rhino Cubed builds small, artful homes out of discarded shipping containers.
The company offers three models of 160-square foot shipping container homes, including a $60,000 deluxe version that contains art and metalwork and two less expensive styles with added flooring, doors, and walls. Environmentally-friendly aspects of the tiny houses include solar panels that generate energy for a refrigerator and a water tank to catch rainwater.
“We really wanted to create something that would work off-the-grid,” Burton told the Denver Post. “I like to think we can preserve Mother Nature while still living in the middle of it.”
Another Colorado project making use of old shipping containers is the 25th & Larimer building, which opened in Denver last November. The development was created out of 29 repurposed steel shipping containers, and its first tenant was Topo Designs, a company known for its rugged rucksacks and backpacks that are manufactured in the Rocky Mountain state to ensure factory worker safety. Jedd Rose of Topo Designs told Ricardo Baca of the Denver Post, “It fits within our ethos, because it’s simple. Shipping containers are already out there. You can reuse them. They’re modular. It’s such a great idea.”
With shipping container projects recently built everywhere from London to Las Vegas, it sounds like the global backlog of these steel boxes is starting to ease.
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These Girls Had Little Chance of Becoming Scientists, Until They Connected With an Innovator Who’s Improving Their Odds
Latina girls are the least likely of any group to indicate that they’re interested in pursuing a career in the STEM fields, according to a Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities report. While Latina women comprise eight percent of the U.S. population, they make up just two percent of scientists and engineers.
Luckily, engineer Luz Rivas is aiming to change that with her DIY Girls after school program in her home neighborhood of Pacoima in Los Angeles.
Rivas grew up poor in L.A. with her sister and single mother, often sleeping in other people’s garages because they had no permanent home of their own. In fifth grade, Rivas used a computer at school and immediately fell in love. “I felt like I had a real skill. I always liked things that had a real answer,” she told Erica L Sánchez of NBC News. From then on, she took every science class she could and applied to MIT just to see if she could get in. She did. After overcoming initial fears about leaving L.A., she went to MIT, even though “It felt like it was another country,” she told Sánchez. “I had never met so many students who had parents who were college-educated. It was shocking to see kids whose parents were guiding them. I didn’t have that.”
Now Rivas is stepping in to guide other girls who don’t have role models in STEM fields. After grad school and various engineering jobs, Rivas moved back to Los Angeles in 2013 to start DIY Girls. Most of the fifth grade girls in the DIY Girls after school program are Latina and qualify for free or reduced lunch. Rivas teaches them how to use 3D printers, write computer code, make wearable electronics, build toys, and more.
According to its website, DIY Girls aims to provide “a continuous pathway of support to a technical career” for these girls all the way through high school. Rivas works to develop the girls’ confidence, so that they keep raising their hands and asking questions right on through middle school, when many girls clam up due to peer pressure. DIY Girls expanded its program to a second public school this year.
DIY Girls gets moms involved too, with meetups for women who want to learn technical skills including coding, woodworking, and electronics. Rivas said that many of the girls’ parents work in construction, and become interested in what their daughters are learning. “People in our community are not engineers, but they know how to make things. They know how to make everything,” she told Sánchez. And soon there will be a new generation of women in this neighborhood who can make anything they want to, as well.
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Meet the People Who Want to Make Their Hometown the Most Vet-Friendly in America
Montrose is a pretty little town with 19,000 citizens, nestled in the mountains of southern Colorado, where people come to raft along the Uncompahgre River and enjoy the outdoor beauty.
But Melanie Kline thinks she can make Montrose even better by becoming the most vet-friendly town in America. Kline is the founder of Welcome Home Montrose, a nonprofit that strives to make veterans feel valued and cared for in all aspects of their lives.
One of the nonprofit’s initiatives is the Dream Job program, through which wounded veterans live in Montrose for six months for an internship with a “dream job” and are provided free housing. The first participants included former Marines Joshua Heck, who wants to work in horticulture and Edward J. Lyons III, who wants to be a high school teacher. Buckhorn Gardens and the Montrose School District mentored them in their chosen fields, while citizen of Montrose sponsored their housing. Heck stayed on after his internship, and works in a plant nursery.
So far 560 veterans have registered for services through Montrose’s Warrior Resource Center, which provides them with information about adaptive sports, applying for benefits, suicide prevention, higher education, job training and placement, financial assistance, counseling, social activities, wellness and alternative healing resources and more.
“This place is a lifesaver,” Army National Guard Spec. Tim Kenney, who suffers from PTSD, told Nancy Lofholm of the Denver Post. “It’s just a safe place to go. I drop in pretty often.” The center serves veterans from every war and conflict, from World War II to Afghanistan. Last summer, Welcome Home Montrose sponsored 20 veterans to visit for its Mission No Barriers week, during which volunteers kept vets busy with outdoor activities and community potlucks.
The entire town is involved in this mission, including the 33 businesses who’ve joined a veteran discount program, a military widow who stops by the Warrior Resource Center with baked goods every week, and an anonymous donor who pays for Executive Director Emily Smith’s salary and benefits. So far, the center mostly serves veterans who were already living in Montrose, but one day Kline hopes the town’s welcoming attitude will attract veterans from across the country to move there. Representatives of sixty communities have asked Welcome Home Montrose for information about how they can adapt this program for their own towns. Meanwhile, the residents of Montrose are making veterans feel more welcome than ever.
The people of Montrose “have the appreciation and the heart for what these veterans have done,” Smith says. “They just didn’t know before what to do for them.”
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This Special-Needs Teen Gave Herself and Her Favorite Charity the Birthday Gift of a Lifetime
Gabi Ury of Boulder, Colorado had it rough from the very beginning.
She was born with VATER Syndrome, a condition that causes a cluster of birth defects in the vertebrae, anus, trachea, esophagus and kidneys. Since birth, Ury has endured 14 surgeries to correct the effects of the syndrome, which left her with missing vertebrae and calf muscles. But her peppy spirit has remained intact despite all the time she’s spent in the hospital, and when she turned 16 on April 17, she wanted to give herself an incredible birthday present by attempting to break the Guinness World Record for the longest-held plank by a female.
Gabi has tried to break records before by constructing the longest hopscotch course and trying to put the most-ever socks on one foot. She fell short both times, but then she figured out she was a plank prodigy during tryouts for the volleyball at the Dawson School in Lafayette. She couldn’t run a mile with the other volleyball hopefuls, so volleyball coach Holly Novak suggested she spend the time performing an equally grueling exercise: planking, in which a person assumes a push-up position and holds it while resting on the forearms. The first time she tried, Gabi held a plank for 12 minutes. “I was astonished the first time she did it,” Novak told Kate Gibson of the Denver Post. “I have to give all the credit to Gabi on this. I have supplied some workouts, but she has really gone after the record.”
Twelve minutes was only the beginning for Gabi. She began practicing holding a plank for 40 minutes or more. “Boredom is a problem and distraction helps a lot,” Gabi told Gibson. She planks while watching ‘Grey’s Anatomy,’ reading a book, and enjoying the company of her dog. She was aiming to break the record for a 40 minute, 1 second plank held by Boise’s Eva Bulzomi, and to raise money for Children’s Hospital Colorado while doing so.
Gabi made her attempt on April 19 at the East Boulder Rec center, and as you can see in this video, she held the plank for an incredible one hour and 20 minutes. Now she just needs to wait for the people at Guinness to verify her accomplishment. In the process, she has raised more than $17,000 for Children’s Hospital. Now that’s what we call a sweet sixteen year old.
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These Seniors Needed Affordable Housing, and These Kids Needed Love. Together, They’re Beautifully Solving Both Problems
In Portland, Ore., there’s an idea so innovative that it has managed to bring together two sets of people with different problems — and solve them for both.
Welcome to the Bridge Meadows housing development, which helps elders and kids by providing a supportive environment for families that adopt foster kids alongside 27 units of affordable housing for seniors who agree to pitch in for 10 hours a week to help out with the kids. It’s a solution to a problem you don’t hear about often on the news: According to the PBS News Hour, 15 percent of seniors in America live below the poverty line, which often makes them struggle to find affordable housing. Meanwhile, families who adopt foster children face their own difficulties, as they are pressed for time, money and support.
Jackie Lynn, 60, is in the process of adopting her niece’s children because both of their drug-addicted parents are in jail. She works full time and felt she wasn’t able to give the kids the attention they needed until they moved to Bridge Meadows. Her family is partnered with neighbors Jim and Joy Corcoran, the “elders” who volunteer to spend time with the kids. “They are the reason that we thrive,” Lynn told Cat Wise of the PBS NewsHour. “Jim takes the boys every Sunday morning for about three hours. And they come home excited, with all these wonderful stories. You see children running up to them and giving them hugs. It’s just incredible to watch it.”
Meanwhile, the Corcorans experienced financial trouble after Jim lost his construction job, but now they live comfortably at Bridge Meadows with a $500 monthly rent payment. Joy Corcoran told Wise, “It was really difficult to find any decent housing that we could afford in any regard. And so when we had the opportunity to move here, it was just a godsend. It was like a huge relief.”
Bridge Meadows is funded by rents and donations from corporations and the community, and it provides a myriad of ways for kids and elders to interact every week. Elders lead story times, teach music lessons, tutor kids in school subjects, give them lifts to school and more. Derenda Schubert, the executive director of Bridge Meadows, said that there have been a few families who moved in and found the togetherness a bit too much, but for most of them it’s a perfect fit, and several seniors reported that their health improved through so much interaction. “Connections across the generations is critical, absolutely critical for aging well,” Jim Corcoran told Wise.
Plenty of people agree with Jim — which is why another intergenerational housing development like Bridge Meadows is currently under construction in Portland. But there’s good news for those who don’t live in Oregon, too: The staff of Bridge Meadows is consulting with people across the country who want to start their own such housing projects.
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Meet a Former Big-City Police Chief Who Wants to Turn American Law Enforcement on Its Head
Past behavior doesn’t always predict future behavior. Norm Stamper is a case in point. Stamper was the Seattle Police Chief in 1999, when hundreds of people protested the World Trade Organization meeting. Under Stamper’s direction the police opted to disperse the protesters with tear gas. The tactics resulted in Stamper’s resignation and prompted him to begin a period of “very painful learning,” he told Sarah Stuteville of Seattle Globalist. He told her that using chemical agents to disperse the protesters was “the worst decision” of his career. Ever since, Stamper has been studying law enforcement in other countries to find techniques and ideas that could be effective for the American justice system.
In his book Breaking Rank, Stamper advocates some controversial law-enforcement ideas, including legalizing drugs, abolishing the death penalty, and relying more on citizens for enforcement than police. He told Stuteville that the drug war has incarcerated far too many people, especially minority men. “We’ve got the drug war raging since 1971 and pitting police against low-level, nonviolent drug offenders, creating natural animosity and tension between police and the community—in particular young people, poor people and people of color,” he says, pointing to Portugal, which decriminalized drugs in 2001, resulting in a decrease in drug use and overdose deaths.
Stamper says we can learn from communities in the Middle East and Southeast Asia, where women gather to bang pots and pans outside the homes of men who abuse women, creating a ruckus to publicly shame the men and raise awareness of the problem. “I think we should return to the earliest days of primitive law enforcement,” he told Stuteville, believing that America can “have citizens that are attuned to, and actually carrying out, a public safety role.”
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Remembering A World War II Vet Who Gave 3,000 Fellow Vets a Final Salute
World War II Veteran Kenny Smith believed in honoring his fellow vets — whether he knew them or not. In fact, his extraordinary commitment led him to assist with more than 3,000 funerals at the Idaho State Veterans Cemetery in Eagle, Idaho between 2004 and 2014. Not only that, but he also wrote down the names of each veteran whose funeral he attended in a log book and kept photographs and other mementos of these vets.
At the age of 86, Smith died just three days after the last funeral he attended on April 4.
Smith, who was the head volunteer at the cemetery, lost both of his legs to frostbite after serving in the Pacific with the Navy during World War II. He bought an all-terrain-vehicle to help him get around the cemetery. He would greet families in his ATV, and then rise on his prosthetic legs to salute the flag during the funeral services. Cemetery director James Earp told Matt Standal of KTVB, “Kenny was here watching the construction of the cemetery unfold, and it was a point of pride for him to understand it. He felt very much a part of this, and we all agree that Kenny is a big part of this cemetery.”
Before each funeral he volunteered at, Smith also took time to visit the resting place of his wife, who died in 2003. His daughter Sandy McCary told Standal, “He felt like could speak with her there. [He’d] communicate back and forth, and try not to miss her so much that way.”
Before Smith died, Idaho’s governor C.L. “Butch” Otter had honored him for more than 6,500 hours of volunteer service at the cemetery. Smith will be laid to rest with a military flag line on April 21. Let’s hold a moment of silence for this honorable American.
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Read About the Nonprofit That Grows Not Just Food, But a Community, Too
What activity can decrease a low-income family’s dependence on food assistance, promote health, reduce crime, and bring people of different income and education levels together? Gardening can accomplish all this and more.
Since botanist and garden enthusiast Larry Stebbins responded to the lack of community gardens in Colorado Springs, Colorado by starting the nonprofit Pikes Peak Urban Gardens (PPUG) in 2007, hundreds of volunteers have become involved in creating plots in low-income neighborhoods and educating their new owners on how to tend them. “By teaching others how to [garden], you empower them to be more in control of their food supply,” Stebbins told J. Adrian Stanley of the Colorado Springs Independent.
Case in point: Stebbins said that one low-income family participating in the PPUG expanded the garden volunteers had helped them plant and were able to reduce using food stamps by 70 percent during the summer months when tomatoes, zucchinis, and other produce was abundant.
Another benefit to gardening? The nonprofit has learned over the years that when the plots are physically close together in proximity, not only is a feeling of community created, but also an atmosphere in which gardeners learn from and share with each other. Now it plants “pods” of gardens, such as the nine clustered gardens they established in a low-income neighborhood this year with the help of a $3,000 grant from the Colorado Home and Garden Show.
In addition to helping people plant their own gardens, Pikes Peak Urban Gardens has established two urban farms that grow produce for charities; some of the homeless people that benefit from the produce pitch in to tend those crops, alongside volunteers from all walks of life. Stebbins told Stanley that one year, a doctor and a man who lived in subsidized housing struck up a garden-based friendship. “People come in their dungarees,” he said. “You don’t know if they’re rich, poor or whatever. And it’s a great equalizer, and it’s a great way for people to come together.” After all, we’re all united in our quest for that perfect tomato.
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Their Daughter Died When She Didn’t Buckle Up. Now They’re Working to Save Other Children From the Same Danger
According to the U.S. Department of Transportation National Highway Traffic Safety Commission, more than 33,000 people were killed in car crashes in 2009. Of those fatalities, more than half were not wearing their seatbelt. Last year, Alexa Johnson, a 19-year-old Colorado resident, was one such victim.
Johnson died when she lost control of her pickup truck in rural Weld County, Colorado and was ejected through the driver’s side window. She wasn’t wearing a seatbelt.
Colorado highway officials note that many drivers on rural roads fail to wear safety restraints. In fact, 59 percent of the unbuckled fatalities in Colorado last year occurred on rural roadways. Alexa’s father, Tad Johnson, told Monte Whaley of the Denver Post, “The first thing I felt was anger and then I wanted to blame someone. And then I had an ‘aha’ moment and I said, ‘Alexa, what are we going to do about this?'”
Tad and his wife Jona launched a social media campaign to raise awareness about the problem of young adults in rural areas driving without seatbelts. He looked at the photos on Alexa’s Facebook page and said, “We saw that in all those photos, hardly ever was Alexa and her friends using seat belts. It’s something that we just had to deal with.”
The Johnsons took to Facebook with their message about buckling up for safety, and then began to sew inch-wide Velcro ribbons that wrap around seat belts to remind drivers to use them. The ribbons are called Alexa’s Hugs, and since last year, the Johnsons have produced thousands of them, which now come in a variety of designs.
Alexa’s Hugs have already saved at least one life. Alexa’s friend, Kole Kilcrease told Whaley he was driving near the same stretch of highway where Alexa died when he hit ice and lost control, rolling his pickup two-and-a-half times. Both Kilcrease and his passenger survived because they were buckled in. Kilcrease said, “I never really buckled up because it just seemed like an inconvenience. You have a busy day, and you have other things on your mind. I don’t think that anymore.”
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