The treatment of migrant workers has been highlighted during the World Cup in Qatar, where many temporary foreign workers reportedly died while building the event’s infrastructure. 

Advocates for immigrant workers in the U.S. note that abuses aren’t just happening overseas.

“The fact of the matter is that migrant workers in the U.S. are struggling with many of the same issues those workers were facing in Qatar,” said Julie Taylor, executive director of the National Farm Worker Ministry, headquartered in North Carolina, speaking with VOA. 

Those issues include “being forced to work through extreme heat waves, wage theft, poor housing, lack of access to healthcare, a shortage of personal protection equipment,” Taylor said. “The tragedy in Qatar shouldn’t be tolerated, and it’s also an important opportunity to remind Americans of the tragedies happening in our own backyard.”

In some states and local jurisdictions, government agencies and advocacy organizations can point to progress for migrant workers. Last year in New York, for example, farm workers – a large proportion of whom are foreign-born, temporary laborers – won collective bargaining rights that will allow them to better advocate for higher wages and better working conditions.

And last month in New Orleans, the U.S. Department of Labor’s Wage and Hour Division renewed an agreement with the Consulate of Mexico to provide Spanish-speaking workers in Louisiana and Mississippi with information on their rights in the United States, as well as access to training, such as worker safety training.

“By partnering with the Mexican Consulate, we improve our ability to ensure both employers and workers understand their obligations and their rights,” Troy Mouton, New Orleans, Louisiana district director of the Wage and Hour Division told VOA.

The hope is the agreement will decrease wage violations against vulnerable workers toiling at the margins of society by helping those workers understand their employers’ obligation under the law to pay them.

Despite such steps, advocates insist much more needs to be done.

Essential workers

According to a 2017 study by the Pew Research Center, America has approximately 12 million migrant workers at any given time, some authorized and others not. America’s current labor shortage, with millions of jobs unfilled, would be worse without the participation of migrant and temporary workers, say labor groups.

“Migrant workers are contributing in nearly every sector in the economy,” explained Shannon Lederer, director of immigration policy for the AFL-CIO, a union federation, “and they’re also being exploited in all of them – across all industries and across all wage levels. This is a full-blown crisis.”

Mouton says temporary foreign laborers have played an indispensable role in New Orleans and across the Gulf Coast region in recent years. This, he said, underscored the need to renew an agreement with the Mexican Consulate to help to protect the rights of those workers.

“In recent history, the single most significant event that resulted in an increased migrant worker presence in Louisiana was Hurricane Katrina in 2005,” he said, recalling the infamous storm that flooded 80% of New Orleans and killed more than 1,800 people. “Most of our migrant workers came from Mexico and elsewhere in Central America, and their efforts after the storm in debris removal, demolition, and eventually reconstruction have had a huge impact on our city.”

Similar efforts took place following later hurricanes such as Laura, Delta, and last year’s Hurricane Ida, but Mouton said migrant worker contributions extend far beyond disaster recovery. 

“The majority of migrant workers in Louisiana contribute to the construction, agriculture, and seafood processing industries, all of which are important to the economy of Louisiana,” he said, adding that it is an ongoing struggle “to protect the welfare of these workers” and achieve “compliance with federal labor standards.”

Appalling conditions

Amy Liebman, chief program officer for the Migrant Clinicians Network, headquartered in Texas, believes the COVID-19 pandemic has underscored just how essential migrant workers are to America and its economy. This, she said, should make the conditions these workers endure even more appalling to the nation. 

“In a 75-mile [120-kilometer] radius from where I live, we have 10 chicken processing plants, and there are many migrant laborers doing that difficult work,” she told VOA. “During the peak part of COVID-19, it was those workers – toiling all day in tight spaces – who were getting sick and dying from the virus, and they were getting their families sick.” 

Liebman added, “But there’s a fear, and it’s a fear founded in truth, that if you complain to your boss, you’re going to not just get fired, but deported, as well.”

Immigrant advocates such as Liebman and Lederer say understanding why workers come to the United States in the first place can illuminate how desperate their situations are. It’s often “push factors” such as war, violence, political instability and natural disasters – or “pull factors” such as a demand for cheap labor in the United States – that draw people from their home country.

“When you have people who are desperate to leave home, or to come here so they can send money back home to family, you have a situation in which these workers can be exploited, and that’s exactly what is happening,” Lederer of the AFL-CIO said. 

“You have recruiters in the United States who are finding workers in other countries and demanding payment from them for the right to work in the U.S.,” Lederer continued. “So now those laborers are in debt when they arrive, making them more desperate for their job. And their visa is tied to one employer, so if they complain about subpar overcrowded housing, or if they say something about not getting paid on time, their employer can fire them and they’ll be sent back to their home country.”

21st century challenges and a need for comprehensive solutions

Liebman said a warming climate is adding to migrant workers’ woes, as they often toil outdoors in increasingly hot, dangerous conditions. This can add to health problems and compound the struggles many face.

“Getting good healthcare as an immigrant is already challenging, but now add in the migratory nature of their work,” Liebman explained. “Every time you move somewhere new you have to take the time to relearn everything. Who will take care of you and your family? Where is the community health center? How will you get there? How will you pay? In areas with large migrant worker populations, community health centers are often pushed beyond their capacity, so what then?”

While immigrant advocates hail incremental progress in some jurisdictions, they say federal action is needed to meaningfully improve conditions for migrant workers. 

“This is an emergency, and we need to get serious about finding real solutions,” Lederer said, adding that comprehensive reform of America’s immigration system would be a good start. “If we’re going to create a welcoming country for the labor our economy needs, the focus should be on longer term solutions that allow immigrants to come to this country permanently and with the ability to change jobs once they’re here.”
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Newly empowered U.S. Republican lawmakers set to take leadership roles in the House of Representatives in January promised Sunday that Congress would continue to support Ukraine militarily in its nine-month fight against Russia but said there would be more scrutiny of the aid before it is shipped to Kyiv’s forces.

Congressmen Michael McCaul of Texas and Mike Turner of Ohio, likely key officials overseeing new Ukraine aid packages, told ABC’s “This Week” show there would be continued bipartisan Republican and Democratic support for Ukraine as Republicans assume a narrow House majority, even though some opposition from both parties has emerged.

Turner, likely the new chairperson of the House Intelligence Committee, said, “We’re going to make sure they get what they need. We will have bipartisan support.”

McCaul, the likely head of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “If we give them what they need, they win.”

But McCaul said there would be a difference in considering Ukraine aid from the outgoing Democratic control of the House when Republicans take over.

“The fact is, we are going to provide more oversight, transparency and accountability,” he said. “We’re not going to write a blank check.”

On the battlefield, Russia struck several areas in eastern and southern Ukraine overnight Saturday, Ukrainian officials said, as utility crews tried to restore power, water and heating following devastating attacks on infrastructure in recent weeks. Some Ukrainians only have a few hours of electricity a day, if any.

But Ukrenergo, the state power grid operator, said Sunday that electricity producers are now supplying about 80% of demand, up slightly from Saturday’s 75% figure.

In its daily report, the British Defense Ministry said both Russia and Ukraine have committed “significant forces” to the area around the Ukrainian towns of Pavlivka and Vuhledar in the south-central Donetsk province.

The agency said in an intelligence update posted on Twitter Sunday that the area “has been the scene of intense combat over the last two weeks, though little territory has changed hands.”

The area will likely remain “heavily contested,” the ministry said, because “Russia assesses the area has potential as a launch point for a future major advance north to capture the remainder of Ukrainian-held Donetsk Oblast.”

However, the ministry said the odds of Russia realizing that goal are slim because “Russia is unlikely to be able to concentrate sufficient quality forces to achieve an operational breakthrough.”

On Saturday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hosted a summit in Kyiv to mark the 90th anniversary of Holodomor, or the Great Famine, and to promote the Grain from Ukraine initiative to send grain to countries most afflicted by famine and drought.

The Holodomor was a manufactured famine engineered by Soviet dictator Josef Stalin in the winter of 1932-1933, during which as many as 8 million Ukrainians died.

Zelenskyy used the anniversary to reiterate Ukraine’s commitment to export grain and other foodstuffs to the global market. These are “not just empty words,” he said.

“In general, under the Grain from Ukraine program, by the end of next spring, we plan to send at least 60 vessels from our ports — at least 10 per month — to countries at risk of famine and drought,” he said. “This is Ethiopia, these are Sudan, South Sudan, Somalia, Yemen, Congo, Kenya, Nigeria.”

The initiative is in addition to the U.N.-brokered deal that allows shipments of Ukrainian grain through the Black Sea. The Kremlin has said those Ukraine exports have not been reaching the most vulnerable countries.

Zelenskyy said Kyiv had raised around $150 million from more than 20 countries and the European Union to export grain to at-risk countries.

Ukrainian Prime Minister Denys Shmyhal said Ukraine — despite its own financial straits — has allocated $24 million to purchase corn for countries in need.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty contributed to this report. Some material for this report came from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse.
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Before Election Day, anxiety mounted over potential chaos at the polls.

Election officials warned about poll watchers who had been steeped in conspiracy theories falsely claiming that then-President Donald Trump did not actually lose the 2020 election. Democrats and voting rights groups worried about the effects of new election laws, in some Republican-controlled states, that President Joe Biden decried as “Jim Crow 2.0.” Law enforcement agencies were monitoring possible threats at the polls.

Yet Election Day, and the weeks of early voting before it, went fairly smoothly. There were some reports of unruly poll watchers disrupting voting, but they were scattered. Groups of armed vigilantes began watching over a handful of ballot drop boxes in Arizona until a judge ordered them to stay far away to ensure they would not intimidate voters. And while it might take months to figure out their full impact, GOP-backed voting laws enacted after the 2020 election did not appear to cause major disruptions the way they did during the March primary in Texas.

“The entire ecosystem in a lot of ways has become more resilient in the aftermath of 2020,” said Amber McReynolds, a former Denver elections director who advises a number of voting rights organizations. “There’s been a lot of effort on ensuring things went well.”

Even though some voting experts’ worst fears didn’t materialize, some voters still experienced the types of routine foul-ups that happen on a small scale in every election. Many of those fell disproportionately on Black and Hispanic voters.

“Things went better than expected,” said Amir Badat of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. “But we have to say that with a caveat: Our expectations are low.”

Badat said his organization recorded long lines at various polling places from South Carolina to Texas.

There were particular problems in Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston. Shortages of paper ballots and at least one polling location opening late led to long lines and triggered an investigation of the predominantly Democratic county by the state’s Republican authorities.

The investigation is partly a reflection of how certain voting snafus on Election Day are increasingly falling on Republican voters, who have been discouraged from using mailed ballots or using early in-person voting by Trump and his allies. But it’s a very different problem from what Texas had during its March primary.

Then, a controversial new voting law that increased the requirements on mail ballots led to about 13% of all such ballots being rejected, much higher compared with other elections. It was an ominous sign for a wave of new laws, passed after Trump’s loss to Biden and false claims about mail voting, but there have been no problems of that scale reported for the general election.

Texas changed the design of its mail ballots, which solved many of the problems voters had putting identifying information in the proper place. Other states that added regulations on voting didn’t appear to have widespread problems, though voting rights groups and analysts say it will take weeks of combing through data to find out the laws’ impacts.

The Brennan Center for Justice at the NYU School of Law is compiling data to determine whether new voting laws in states such as Georgia contributed to a drop in turnout among Black and Hispanic voters.

Preliminary figures show turnout was lower this year than in the last midterm election four years ago in Florida, Georgia, Iowa and Texas — four states that passed significant voting restrictions since the 2020 election — although there could be a number of reasons why.

“It’s difficult to judge, empirically, the kind of effect these laws have on turnout because so many factors go into turnout,” said Rick Hasen, an election law expert at the University of California, Los Angeles law school. “You also have plenty of exaggeration on the Democratic side that any kind of change in voting laws are going to cause some major effect on the election, which has been proven not to be the case.”

In Georgia, for example, Republicans made it more complicated to apply for mailed ballots after the 2020 election — among other things, requiring voters to include their driver’s license number or some other form of identification rather than a signature. That may be one reason why early in-person voting soared in popularity in the state this year, and turnout there dipped only slightly from 2018.

Jason Snead, executive director of the conservative Honest Elections Project, which advocates for tighter voting laws, said the fairly robust turnout in the midterm elections shows that fears of the new voting regulations were overblown.

“We are on the back end of an election that was supposed to be the end of democracy, and it very much was not,” Snead said.

Poll watchers were a significant concern of voting rights groups and election officials heading into Election Day. The representatives of the two major political parties are a key part of any secure election process, credentialed observers who can object to perceived violations of rules.

But this year, groups aligned with conspiracy theorists who challenged Biden’s 2020 victory recruited poll watchers heavily, and some states reported that aggressive volunteers caused disruptions during the primary. But there were fewer issues in November.

In North Carolina, where several counties had reported problems with poll watchers in the May primary, the state elections board reported 21 incidents of misbehavior at the polls in the general election, most during the early, in-person voting period and by members of campaigns rather than poll watchers. The observers were responsible for eight of the incidents.

Voting experts were pleasantly surprised there weren’t more problems with poll watchers, marking the second general election in a row when a feared threat of aggressive Republican observers did not materialize.

“This seems to be an increase over 2020. Is it a small increase? Yes,” said Michael McDonald, a political scientist at the University of Florida. “It’s still a dry run for 2024, and we can’t quite let down our guard.”

One of the main organizers of the poll watcher effort was Cleta Mitchell, a veteran Republican election lawyer who joined Trump on a Jan. 2, 2020, call to Georgia’s top election official when the president asked that the state “find” enough votes to declare him the winner. Mitchell then launched an organization to train volunteers who wanted to keep an eye on election officials, which was seen as the driver of the poll watcher surge.

Mitchell said the relatively quiet election is vindication that groups like hers were simply concerned with election integrity rather than causing disruptions.

“Every training conducted by those of us doing such training included instruction about behavior, and that they must be ‘Peaceful, Lawful, Honest,'” Mitchell wrote in the conservative online publication The Federalist. “Yet, without evidence, the closer we got to Election Day, the more hysterical the headlines became, warning of violence at the polls resulting from too many observers watching the process. It didn’t happen.”

Voting rights groups say they’re relieved their fears didn’t materialize, but they say threats to democracy remain on the horizon for 2024 — especially with Trump announcing that he’s running again. Wendy Weiser, a voting and elections expert at the Brennan Center, agreed that things overall went smoother than expected.

“By and large, sabotage didn’t happen,” Weiser said. “I don’t think that means we’re in the clear.”
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Oscar, Golden Globe and two-time Grammy winning singer-actress Irene Cara, who starred and sang the title cut from the 1980 hit movie “Fame” and then belted out the era-defining hit “Flashdance … What a Feeling” from 1983’s “Flashdance,” has died. She was 63.

Her publicist, Judith A. Moose, announced the news on social media, writing that a cause of death was “currently unknown.” Moose also confirmed the death to a reporter for The Associated Press Saturday. Cara died at her home in Florida. The exact day of her death was not disclosed.

“Irene’s family has requested privacy as they process their grief,” Moose wrote. “She was a beautifully gifted soul whose legacy will live forever through her music and films.”

During her career, Cara had three Top 10 hits on the Billboard Hot 100, including “Breakdance,” “Out Here On My Own,” “Fame” and “Flashdance … What A Feeling,” which spent six weeks at No. 1. She was behind some of the most joyful, high-energy pop anthems of the early ’80s.

Tributes poured in Saturday on social media, including from Deborah Cox, who called Cara an inspiration, and Holly Robinson Peete, who recalled seeing Cara perform: “The insane combination of talent and beauty was overwhelming to me. This hurts my heart so much.”

Movie fame started with the movie ‘Fame’

Cara first came to prominence among the young actors playing performing arts high schoolers in Alan Parker’s “Fame,” with co-stars Debbie Allen, Paul McCrane and Anne Mear. Cara played Coco Hernandez, a striving dancer who endures all manner of deprivations, including a creepy nude photo shoot.

“How bright our spirits go shooting out into space, depends on how much we contributed to the earthly brilliance of this world. And I mean to be a major contributor!” she says in the movie.

Cara sang on the soaring title song with the chorus — “Remember my name/I’m gonna live forever/I’m gonna learn how to fly/I feel it coming together/People will see me and cry” — which would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award for best original song. She also sang on “Out Here on My Own,” “Hot Lunch Jam” and “I Sing the Body Electric.”

Three years later, she and the songwriting team of “Flashdance” — music by Giorgio Moroder, lyrics by Keith Forsey and Cara — accepted the Oscar for best original song for “Flashdance … What a Feeling.”

The movie starred Jennifer Beals as a steel-town girl who dances in a bar at night and hopes to attend a prestigious dance conservatory. It included the hit song “Maniac,” featuring Beals’ character leaping, spinning, stomping her feet and the slow-burning theme song.

“There aren’t enough words to express my love and my gratitude,” Cara told the Oscar crowd in her thanks. “And last but not least, a very special gentlemen who I guess started it all for me many years ago. To Alan Parker, wherever you may be tonight, I thank him.”

Career started on Broadway

The New York-born Cara began her career on Broadway, with small parts in short-lived shows, although a musical called “The Me Nobody Knows” ran over 300 performances. She toured in the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” as Mary Magdalene in the mid-1990s and a tour of the musical “Flashdance” toured 2012-14 with her songs.

She also created the all-female band Irene Cara Presents Hot Caramel and put out a double CD with the single “How Can I Make You Luv Me.” Her movie credits include “Sparkle” and “D.C. Cab.”
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