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INTERNATIONAL EDITION
SATURDAY, JANUARY 7, 2012
109TH YEAR I ©2012 THE MIAMI HERALD
U.S. economy adds 200,000 new jobs BY CHRISTOPHER S. RUGABER Associated Press
PHOTOS BY RODRIGO CRUZ/NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE
Workers place electric power poles for a new residential settlement, below, in Santa Maria Atzompa, Oaxaca, Mexico.
MOBILE AND RESTLESS MIGRANTS’ NEW PATHS RESHAPING LATIN AMERICA BY DAMIEN CAVE
New York Times Service
SANTA MARIA ATZOMPA, Mexico — When the old-timers here look around their town, all they see are new arrivals: young Mexican men working construction and driving down wages; the children of laborers flooding crowded schools; even new businesses — stores, restaurants and strip clubs — springing up on roads that used to be dark and quiet. The shock might seem familiar enough in countless U.S. towns wrestling with immigration, but this is a precolonial Mexican village outside Oaxaca City, filling up with fellow Mexicans. Still, grimaces about the influx are as common as smiles. “Before all these people came, everything was tranquil,” said Marcelino Juarez, 61, an artisan at the local ceramics market. “They bring complications. They don’t bring benefits.” Throughout Mexico and much of Latin America, the old migra-
New York Times Service
Obama tests two-tier strategy for reelection New York Times Service
Easier route to green card to be proposed for some BY JULIA PRESTON
WASHINGTON — The United States added 200,000 jobs in December in a burst of hiring that drove the unemployment rate to its lowest in almost three years. The figures raised hopes that the economy might finally be healthy enough to power an even stronger job market. Four long years after the start of a Great Recession that wiped out 8.7 million jobs, a Labor Department report Friday showed that the past six months have been the strongest for job creation in the United States since 2006. The December gains, spread in industries throughout the economy and far better than economists had expected, sent the unemployment rate to 8.5 percent, the lowest since February 2009. It has fallen four months in a row. “There is more horsepower to this economy than most believe,” said Sung Won Sohn, an econom- • TURN TO ECONOMY, 2A
BY HELENE COOPER
tory patterns are changing. The mobile and restless are now casting themselves across a wider range of cities and countries in the region, pitting old residents against new, increasing pressure to create jobs and prompting nations to rewrite their immigration laws, sometimes to encourage the trend.
posing appears small, immigration lawyers and advocates for immigrants say it will make a great difference for countless U.S. citizens. Many thousands of citizens will no longer be separated from loved ones, they said, and the change could also encourage many — perhaps hundreds of thousands — of U.S. citizens to come forward to apply to bring illegal immigrant family members into the legal system. Illegal immigrants who are married to or are children of U.S. citizens are generally allowed under the law to become legal residents with a visa known as a green card. But the law requires most immigrants who are here illegally to
Obama administration officials say they will propose a fix to a notorious snag in immigration law that will spare hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens from prolonged separations from immigrant spouses and children. The change that immigration officials are offering would benefit U.S. citizens who are married to or have children who are illegal immigrants. It would correct a bureaucratic Catch-22 that those U.S. citizens now confront when their spouses or children apply to become legal permanent residents. Although the tweak that officials of the Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services are pro- • TURN TO GREEN CARD, 2A
A federal employee fingerprints Sabine Bond of Sweden in order to renew her green card.
The United States is simply not the magnet it once was. Arrests at the United States’ southwest border in 2011 fell to their lowest level since 1972, confirming that illegal immigration, especially from Mexico, has reached what experts now describe as either a • TURN TO MIGRATION, 4A
ics professor at California State University, Channel Islands. “The stars are aligned right for a meaningful economic recovery.” If economics textbooks and the best hopes of millions of unemployed U.S. citizens are confirmed, the economy may be at the start of what is known as the virtuous cycle — a self-sustaining, steadily improving pattern of hiring and spending. When more people are hired, they have more money to spend. And when more money courses through the economy, businesses can justify hiring more people. That leads to more jobs and more demand. Another pattern, known as the vicious cycle, took hold to devastating effect during the Great Recession. People lost jobs and spent less money, so businesses rang up less sales and were forced to lay off more people.
tion official said on Thursday. “We know we’ll run against a person.” But insofar as Obama has decided to target Republicans in Congress — a body with historically low approval ratings after a year of jousting with the president — he will also be seeking to twin his opponent, to any extent he can, with the 112th Congress. Upon the president’s return from Hawaii, the Obama campaign this week unleashed a carefully scripted and deliberately aggressive strategy that showed a White House in combative reelection mode as the president and his advisors sought to ensure that the Republicans did not get all the political limelight. Obama inserted himself into the media blitz of what was supposed to be an all-Republican show, the
WASHINGTON — Just three hours after U.S. President Barack Obama announced that he was defying congressional Republicans to fill a high-level regulatory position while lawmakers were out of town, Mitt Romney sent out the obligatory news release ripping the president. “Chicago-style politics at its worst,” Romney fumed, accusing the president of “circumventing Congress.” The statement was just what the White House wanted. It put the Republican presidential front-runner squarely on the side of the Republicans in Congress, a group with toxic poll numbers that the president’s campaign hopes will hurt his rivals for the White House. “Our presidential election campaign is not a campaign against Congress,” a senior administra- • TURN TO REELECTION, 2A
U.S. restricts more antibiotics for livestock BY GARDINER HARRIS
New York Times Service
WASHINGTON — Federal drug regulators have announced that farmers and ranchers must restrict their use of a critical class of antibiotics in cattle, pigs, chickens and turkeys because such practices may have contributed to the growing threat in people of bacterial infections that are resistant to treatment. The medicines are known as cephalosporins and include brands like Cefzil and Keflex. They are among the most common antibiotics prescribed to treat pneumonia, strep throat, and skin and urinary tract infections. Surgeons also often use them before surgery, and they are particularly popular among pediatricians. The drugs’ use in agriculture has, according to many microbiologists, led to the development of bacteria that are resistant to their effects, a development that many doctors say has cost thousands of lives. Antibiotics were the wonder drugs of the 20th century, and their initial uses in both humans and animals were indiscriminate. Farmers became so enamored of the miraculous effects of penicillin and tetracycline on the robustness of cattle, chickens and pigs that the drugs were added in bulk to feed and water, with no need for prescriptions or any sign of sickness in the animals. • TURN TO ANTIBIOTICS, 2A
A baby chick feeds at a chicken house in Willards, Md. THE MIAMI HERALD
IRS SAYS AUDIT RATES IN U.S. HAVE GROWN FOR THE WEALTHY, 3A
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BOMBING IN SYRIAN CAPITAL KILLS 25, 6A
VERONICA LUKASOVA/NEW YORK TIMES SERVICE
EUROPE TOUGHENS STANCE ON AIRLINE EMISSIONS, BUSINESS FRONT
CURIOSITIES ABOUND IN NFL’S FIRST ROUND PLAYOFF, SPORTS FRONT
INDEX THE AMERICAS ............4A U.S. NEWS.....................5A OPINION........................7A COMICS & PUZZLES ...6B
1/7/2012 3:55:40 AM
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