BOSTON — Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick — who has advocated for immigrant needs in the past — praised the U.S. Supreme Court for striking down key provisions of Arizona's crackdown on immigrants on June 25. But Patrick wasn't entirely satisfied. He called the Supreme Court ruling a mixed bag.
 
“Most of the provisions of the Arizona law have been ruled unconstitutional. That sounds right," he said. However, "some of the things that were preserved having to do with the ability to stop and ask questions, you know, you can see how that creates a climate of fear, especially if the Supreme Court has said you can’t actually do anything with that information.”
 
Patrick has favored expanding immigrant health care options, allowing in-state UMass tuition rates and providing driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants. But some advocates said he has failed to push immigration issues strongly enough on Beacon Hill.
 
As he was leaving his office, Patrick got into a heated exchange with students demanding a stronger stance.
 
“You know you said you were going to do something for us — at least give us licenses. I’m undocumented and I've been here for 8 years, I'm putting myself through school right now, I'm paying out-of-state [tuition]," one woman said.
 
"And I can’t do what the federal government won’t let me do," Patrick responded. "I tried to do that. But there's a federal law that prohibits it."
 
"We can’t just live in the shadows!" she said.
 
"I understand that! I’m on your side," Patrick said. "I’ve said that a million times. These provisions aren’t before me yet. I’ve been as clear as possible, not just with you but with the legislature, that if they come to me, it’s over,“
 
There are measures pending in the legislature that would require new immigration status checks for employment, state housing and driver's licenses. Patrick said if they get to his desk he’ll oppose them, though he didn’t explicitly promise a veto.

 
BOSTON — The Massachusetts Senate is expected to debate a controversial amendment to the state budget that would require the Registry of Motor Vehicles to check for proof of lawful immigration status before issuing driver's licenses.
 
The amendment is sponsored by Senate Republican leader Bruce Tarr. He said its a response to the case of President Barack Obama’s uncle, Onyango Obama, who was arrested in Framingham last year on a drunk-driving charge. He was able to get his license back after a period of probation, even though he had been in the U.S. illegally since the 1990s.
 
Onyango Obama's immigration status came to light after his arrest. Federal officials then launched new efforts to deport the president's uncle, who plans to fight the deportation.
 
The RMV is not required under state law to check immigration status and officials have said that the president's uncle presented the necessary documentation to obtain a license.
 
Eva Milona of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition opposes the measure, saying the RMV doesn’t have the resources or expertise to enforce federal immigration law.
 
“This amendment, in our view, it’s not an improvement on current policy, but would instead create more confusion and creates wrongful denials of licenses to documented applicants," she said. "Our concern is that it might refuse a driver's license or learner’s permit to anyone that it would have reasonable cause to suspect has presented invalid proof of immigration status.”
 
Milona also blasted Republicans for loading up the state budget with what she called anti-immigrant amendments.
 

 
BOSTON — Sometimes the best way to find the flavor of where we live is … through a restaurant.
 
Not the fancy places people cross the region to see. The humble spots where people stop and get something to go — and in the process, have conversations across the counter that make life a little bit more human.

WGBH News' Val Wang is spending the next 6 months documenting these for her project "Planet Takeout": a look at Chinese food, our neighborhoods and ourselves.
 
Wherever you go, there they are
 
Every neighborhood in Boston has at least one. In the heart of Roxbury there’s Peking House in an old Church’s Chicken building. In Dorchester, Yum Yum stands shoulder-to-shoulder with nail salons and Irish bars. Jamaica Plain has Food Wall and Charlie Chan’s. They are among the almost 10,000 Chinese takeouts that dot the country, preparing more than 2 million meals every day.
 
Ever since I’ve lived in big American cities, first New York and now Boston, no place has fascinated me as much as the local Chinese takeout. Each is deeply a part of their neighborhood but also somewhat separate. The people who work there come from halfway around the world to serve Americanized Chinese food to people of every color. Those on both sides of the counter have to meet each other halfway, often at a bulletproof window.
 
This cultural crossroad teems with stories. I think of the humble takeout as a lens through which we can see both the tightly knit local neighborhoods of Boston and global immigration patterns to the city. And most importantly, we can see how the two fit together.
 
One restaurateur's journey
 
Tom Chen was born in Hong Kong. After a decade of working in Chinese restaurants he bought his own takeout in Chelsea, Mass., called Dragon Kitchen. He ran it for a decade.
 
Most of his customers were Latino. He said they tended to order three dishes: lobster sauce, shrimp fried rice and chicken wings. Every week, he sold 400 pounds of chicken wings. And because he had to adapt to his customers, he learned basic Spanish. Shrimp fried rice became arroz con camarones. Chicken wings, alas de pollo. And lobster sauce was salsa langosta.
 
Chen said he didn't know much Spanish beyond what he needed for the job, “but I try to make a living. So everybody will adjust yourself.”
 
It wasn’t easy running a takeout: mastering simple Spanish, learning the names of his regular customers and, on two life-threatening occasions, getting held up at gunpoint. But it was a big step up from bartending, his previous job. 
While most restaurant profits hover around 40 percent, Chen said Dragon Kitchen cleared 60 percent.
 
“The takeout restaurant basically is work hard, long hours. You can make a better income. Buy materials by myself, then we cook it, we prepare. Just four people, work close together. I see co-workers more than my wife. The kids, I never saw my kids. The kids go to school at 7 o’clock, get back at 9, we’re still working,” said Chen.

He sold his takeout 10 years ago and bought a more upscale sit-down restaurant in Needham called Mandarin Cuisine.
 
A tight-knit world
 
Talking to Chen may seem easy, but in my experience, it’s difficult to walk in the front door of a takeout asking to interview workers and customers. He only opened up because I met him through Helen Chin Schlichte — or "Auntie Helen," as everyone in the Chinese immigrant community calls her. A native of Charlestown, she is very active both in Chinatown and in the city at large. Auntie Helen immediately understood my predicament.
 
“Even though you’re very Chinese and you can speak fluent Mandarin, they’re not quite sure if you’re from the IRS, or from Homeland Security," she said. "There are all kinds of reasons that they might be a little wary until somebody comes along to say, ‘Okay, this is a great project. This is one that would be terrific for you to participate in and for you to be a part of this larger community of takeout restaurants, and it’s okay to talk to her."
 
I asked Chen what he would have said if I’d come in the door of his old Chelsea takeout asking to interview him. “No,” he responded simply. “I say, ‘Nope, you kidding me?’ Eighty percent, or 90 percent, close the door for you. I already know that. First thing, they don’t know you" — and if they don't know you, they don't know why they'd do you a favor.
 
Furthermore, Chen said, "Most Chinese people don’t like [to] talk in public. They need to close everything in their mind. They’re not open. Even your father, your mother, won’t open anything for you, right?"
 
When asked for his explanation of that dynamic, Chen responded, "That’s the way we brought up. Like, why we eat rice?”
 
I started to wonder about the underlying social structures that hold the community together — and keep outsiders at a distance. So I called Baruch College professor Ken Guest, an anthropologist who studies Chinese immigrant communities living in New York.
 
“The Chinese restaurants are deeply embedded in an ethnic economy. And there is a sense of ethnic solidarity that people draw on to make a go of it. There’s a way in which that economic framework also shapes some of their notions of how they are in American culture, where they fit. It frames a lot of their business and social networks,” he said.
 
Getting connected
 
Networks were the key word here.
 
“Get somebody know somebody," Chen summarized. "From the back, not from the front. You walk in the front, you don’t get any answer. They will tell you they’re busy. No. Thank you. That’s it. Get somebody behind the owner. If you not Helen Chin introduce you, you won’t be sitting here. I tell the truth.”
 
It’s good advice. I found I had to work through existing networks — social service agencies, civic groups, food suppliers, menu printers, academics, filmmakers, hoping someone could introduce me to someone else who could get me in that proverbial back door.

But the project also needs the other half of the story: your half.
 
I found Philip Lodge, 17, at Yum Yum in Dorchester after school, waiting for his takeout order.
 
“Well, I got hungry after I left school, so I just had to eat a little meal before I go home," he explained. "A $2 plate of rice and ribs and I added crab Rangoon, fried shrimp and chicken teriyaki."
 
And it's not a rare visit. "I come like three times a week. My mom told me that their food was good so I started ordering my own plates, and I liked it," he said.
 
I bet you’ve probably been to a Chinese takeout before — you might even be a regular at one. Or maybe you went to one with your family growing up. If so, I want to hear your story.
 
If you have a story about a Chinese takeout, give Val and Planet Takeout a call at 617 477-8688. It's a free call in the Boston area, and the recording will explain what to do. You can also leave a story, upload photos or listen to others' stories at planettakeout.org.

BOSTON — Thursday is the first installment of Planet Takeout, Val Wang's exploration into Boston Chinese takeout joints as a nexus of community. She talks to Bob Seay about how she got the idea for the project. To share your experiences with Chinese takeout, visit planettakeout.org.

Planet Takeout is produced by Val Wang and brought to you by WGBH 89.7 and Localore, a national initiative of the Association for Independents in Radio.

The Irish president meets with Boston mayor Thomas Menino on May 4. (Isabel Leon, Mayor's Office)

 
BOSTON — Each year Ireland chooses one American city to help commemorate the Great Potato Famine. This year, Boston received that honor … and President Michael Higgins of Ireland visited the weekend of May 4 to observe the event. WGBH's Jordan Weinstein talked with Higgins during his Boston trip.
 
The famine led to the emigration of millions of Irish — many of whom came to the Bay State. In 1850, the Irish made up a quarter of the city's population. "Boston is particularly important, of course, because such a very large wave of Irish came in different periods," Higgins said.

He noted that those different waves of emigration represented "different Irishnesses." The arrivals of 1848 were "poor Catholics that have nothing. They are in fact poor, ragged, they're carrying disease," Higgins said — and that caused some tensions.
 

 
MARSHFIELD, Mass. — Kong Xin Chen walked up to a table in his tiny Marshfield restaurant.
 
“How are you?” asked a customer.
 
“Good. Good. So happy,” replied Chen.
 
He’s happy to be back at work four months after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials, better known as ICE, came knocking on the morning of Dec. 6, 2011.
 
“They told me, 'You have a deportation order and this is the final. You need to go with me,’” said Chen, 38. “First of all I think about my family, my future.”
 
How it came to this

The arrest came as a shock to Chen, not because he’s here legally — he’s not — but because he’s spent the past two decades living life as if he were.
 
“I file taxes every year — never stop. And I never tried to hide my address,” he said.
 
Chen emigrated, illegally, from his native China 19 years ago. He said he was seeking political asylum in the U.S. but that a miscommunication with his immigration lawyer caused him to miss a citizenship hearing. A deportation notice quickly followed. Except ….
 
“I didn’t get any notice. And at the time, we didn’t have cell phone. And I believe the agent tried to contact me a couple of times, but there’s no way to contact me,” said Chen.
 
Oblivious to the deportation mandate, Chen went on with life. He got married, had two kids and opened the Mandarin Tokyo Restaurant in Marshfield, which brings us back to December. The agents allowed Chen to call his wife, he said, "and they took me off in the next 10 minutes."

Chen in detention
 
First he went to a Plymouth jail. Then he was transferred to an Alabama jail. In total, Chen was detained for 86 days. His wife Ping said the arrest wreaked havoc on the entire family.
 
“When my son got back from school, he asked 'Where’s my father?' I tell him a little bit,” said Ping. “He cry, because every day, usually, my husband take care of my son. He’s a really good father. And he’s crying, crying.”
 
A representative from Homeland Security confirmed that Chen was arrested in December and gave this statement when asked about Chen’s case:
 
“This Administration has implemented a smart and effective approach to immigration enforcement. This approach includes comprehensive reform of the detention system and the establishment of clear enforcement priorities, targeting criminal aliens and those who put public safety at risk, as well as those who threaten border security and the integrity of the immigration system.”
 
Patrons rise up in support

As news spread of Chen’s arrest and pending deportation, long-time patrons of Mandarin Tokyo rallied to the defense of the popular restaurateur.
 
“Anyone who walks through the door, he will donate a gift certificate for a raffle or something going on in the community. He’s donated down to the local elementary school. He’s shared his food,” said five-year patron Lynne Ann Habel-Murphy.
 
She’s spearheading the “Free Kong Now” campaign. Members have written letters, petitioned politicians and raised more than $17,000 to help with Chen’s legal fees.
 
“He started with less than nothing and has created an incredible life — taking jobs from no one. He’s providing jobs for people in this community,” said Habel-Murphy. "We look at Kong and think, he’s just the American Dream.”
 
And now?

But that American dream is now on hold as Kong tries to get his case reopened. His lawyer Joshua Goldstein said it won’t be easy and even under the best circumstances Kong will have to go back to China and apply for a visa.
 
"It could take years. His wife is a U.S. citizen. She filed a visa petition form. In order for him to get a green card, he’s going to have to do something extraordinary. He’s going to have to go outside the U.S. and seek a waiver to overcome the obstacles that stand in the way," Goldstein said.
 
And even then, there’s no guarantee that Kong will be allowed back into the U.S. However, Goldstein said, the Obama administration is trying to change that: "They’ve proposed to change the rules and allow people to apply for discretionary waivers while they’re inside the United States. And there’s lot of open questions about whether that is really going to be a fundamental change or whether it will be business as usual."
 
Kong said he’s scared to go back to China — not for his own safety, but for the stress it will cause his wife.
  
"My wife, she’s so worried. Too much pressure for her. She lost a lot of weight," he said.
 
But until that time comes, Chen said he’ll do what he’s been doing for the past 20 years: working hard to make a better life for his family.

 
BOSTON — Three years after Massachusetts’ health care reform was signed, the state pulled back some of its universal coverage. And among the ones who felt it the most were immigrants who were here legally, but were not U.S. citizens or green card holders for more than 5 years.

Up and down on the health insurance wave

Eugenio Hernandez was one of them. He’s lived in Boston since 1993 and experienced the ups and downs of health care in the state.

The first part: He had no health insurance.

The next part: He was covered as a result of Massachusetts health care reform by Commonwealth Care.

The next: The state reduced his coverage to save money.

“It made me feel more like a foreigner. More isolated. I thought I was forgotten. They forgot my rights. The rights I could have here because I was here for a long time, and I was working, paying my taxes,” Hernandez said through a translator.

A bridge … and a gap

Hernandez was among 26,000 immigrants who went from Commonwealth Care to what’s called the Commonwealth Care Bridge program in 2009. It meant higher co-pays and less coverage.

“What bothered me most was the reduction of services. When they changed the coverage to the Bridge, it didn’t cover certain things like eye exams," said Hernandez.

But eye care wasn’t his biggest issue. In 2007, MassHealth care was available but the individual mandate had not been put in effect. Hernandez had no insurance. While being treated at a local hospital for a high fever, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He turned to the advocacy group Health Care for All, which helped him secure medical coverage through Commonwealth Care.
 
But when that plan’s benefits were reduced by the state, Hernandez worried how he’d pay for care should his cancer return.

“It affected me very much," he said. "This is a very hard illness. I thought, ‘What am I going to do now?’ I could say that Massachusetts let me down. I came here to work, to pay taxes and I felt that Massachusetts was not responding to my efforts and sacrifices.”

Advocating for complete coverage

Health Care for All saw it as a huge problem. They were flooded with frantic calls to their helpline. Health Law Advocates filed suit on behalf of the immigrants against the Health Connector, the state agency that runs Commonwealth Care.

One of the lawyers working on the case was Wendy Parmet. “I believe that universality won’t survive if you pull at the thread of an unpopular group. And this case was an important step to showing that we’re all in this together and our universal health care survives because we offer it to every group, even the most vulnerable,” she said.

This January, the Supreme Judicial Court ruled in favor of these legal immigrants, finding the Bridge program in violation of the Massachusetts Constitution. As a result, Hernandez and thousands of others were reinstated to Commonwealth Care coverage this month.

“Having the insurance, I feel happy. My life has changed. I was always worried before,” Hernandez said.

The financial impact on the state

What started as a way for the state to cut costs now returns to money. Massachusetts needs to find $150 million to implement the court’s ruling.

State Sen. Stephen Brewer is chairman of the Ways and Means Committee and is working on a budget proposal for the next fiscal year right now.

“Service and rate cuts are going to have to be found in other areas of the budget," he said. He pointed to certain possibilities in Gov. Deval Patrick's plan: "The governor had a budget that’s including $250 million in newer and enhanced revenues and $70 million of that was from the expansion of the tobacco taxes, and certain forms of smokeless tobacco were earmarked for Commonwealth Care program.”

Insurance and independence
 
Which gets us back to this week’s Supreme Court hearings and the debate over universal coverage. What is the government’s responsibility and a person’s rights when it comes to health care?

Parmet thought our cherished cultural obsession with independence belied the true relationship between the individual and health care.

“When it comes to health care and health insurance and how we pay for insurance, people often overlook or don’t recognize the degree to which they are not self-sufficient," she said. "People think, 'Oh, I’m paying for my own health care.' But in fact, their employers are paying for it and the taxpayers are helping to subsidize it because it’s a work benefit that’s not being counted as income."

And, said Parmet, when people get sick, no one can truly stand alone.

"None of us are independent when it comes to health care, and that’s just assuming we’re talking about people who are typically healthy. And anyone of course is one tragic accident or one unfortunate diagnosis away from being far more dependent than they realize,” she said.

While we don’t want to discover the various shades of independence that way, perhaps one thing that Massachusetts can teach us is that health care and independence don’t have to be mutually exclusive.
 

Internist Danielle Ofri tells the stories of her immigrant patients and what they say about the state of health care. WATCH: WGBH Forum Network's health care reform series.

 
"We now have about 400 families who have taken up that challenge," he said.
 
Take, for example, Betty Jimenez and her daughter Thalia Pliego, who work side by side at the same café in downtown Boston. Jimenez heard about FUEL through a friend and decided the support would help her provide her daughter a different life than the one she had in her hometown of Medellín, Colombia.
 
"I graduated from high school. [But] I didn’t have the opportunity to continue my studies because I didn’t have the resources and now FUEL is a resource for my daughter," Jimenez said in Spanish.
 
Families such as the Jimenezes often "lack the tools to get their kids into college," Hildreth said, so FUEL brings them together once a month for a "Savings Circle" for support.
 
Pliego now does have the opportunity to go to college. With the support of her mother and money from FUEL, she attends Bunker Hill Community college on a scholarship. She feels part of her mission is to fight against stereotypes of Latinos.
 
"We’re not hard-working, supposedly, although I wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning to go to work and all I ever see on the bus is Latinos," she said. "You don’t catch your business people in there. The suit type of people, yeah, you don’t see those guys on the bus."
 
Jimenez added, "Some might say that if a person is from somewhere else, they aren’t worth anything, but we all have the same value."
 
Hildreth’s FUEL program has helped finance the education of more than 400 students — to a dollar amount, Hildreth estimated, in the millions.  
 
Jimenez had this message for him:
 
"I am thankful to you for all the opportunities you give the students, especially those who come from other countries, and especially since my children are in your program. So thank you on behalf of all of us and all those you help in your life," she said.
 

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. — On a rainy weekday afternoon, a tall, slender, dark-haired woman named Maria Schaedler-Luera waited in the lobby of Harvard’s Sackler Art Museum for four new students. They weren’t undergraduates, though. Schaedler-Luera works in the education department at the museum and uses art to teach English. Her work prepares immigrants to take the exam to become U.S. citizens.
 
When the adult students arrived, they introduced themselves. Wilman was from Honduras; Milagro, Marvin and Oscar from El Salvador. They all worked for Harvard University and were part of an education and training program there. They came to the museum to practice their English.
 
Schaedler-Luera has designed the session to align with her students' language lessons in the classroom. “Two of the things they’re working on right now are adjectives — identifying parts of speech — and they started working on past tense, so I will find ways to incorporate that,” she said.
 
More than a fun day at the museum

Her supervisor, Ray Williams, is the director of education at the Harvard Art Museums. He said that part of the citizenship exam is giving oral responses to questions in English.
 
“We knew that working on language skills was going to be important,” Williams said.
 
The Engaging New Americans project started as a pilot and grew with a $75,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and the hiring of Schaedler-Luera.
 
Williams said he was motivated to design the program because of “the ugly political rhetoric around immigration and how ungenerous it seems.” It made him think about “what an art museum might do to send an explicitly welcoming message to people who had chosen to relocate.”
 
Schaedler-Luera, a native of Brazil, said she understood what her students were going through.
 
“I’ve been here for almost eight years,” she said. “My first year here I also didn’t speak English very well… [and] I know we are not necessarily invited to participate in society or mainstream culture institutions.”
 
"Red" is an adjective

In the lobby of the Sackler, Schaedler-Luera strove to make her new student guests feel welcome. After introductions, she handed each of them a laminated, construction paper heart. She called it a “token” and brought the students into the modern contemporary art gallery on the first floor.
 
“I want you to look around and choose one work that is going to be your favorite, and once you choose your favorite work of art, you are going to place the paper heart on the floor in front of the art,” Schaedler-Luera instructed.
 
One by one, the students dropped the hearts on the floor signifying the artworks they liked the best, and then a discussion started. Schaedler-Luera asked Milagro to explain her choice.
 
Milagro had placed her heart in front of an abstract painting by the famous American artist Georgia O’Keeffe (see the painting). First in Spanish, and then in English, Milagro explained that she liked the colors red and pink, which fill the canvas. Responding, Schaedler-Luera made the point that colors are adjectives.
 
Enlightenment in language and experience

After all the students had had their turns, the group headed to the second floor of the art museum, where they stood in front of a large, light-gray sandstone statue of a seated Buddha (see the sculpture) from eighth-century China.  
 
It was time, Schaedler-Luera said, to tell a story. “Maybe you can use your paper to write down some verbs that you recognize as I tell you the story of Buddha’s birth,” she suggested. When she was done, the students read some of the past-tense verbs they heard and slowly repeated parts of the story, moving on to a long conversation about the meaning of the word “enlightenment.”
 
At the end of the class, Schaedler-Luera urged the students to come back again soon — a request that was met with vocal thanks. But the thank-you Schaedler-Luera has cherished the most came in an email from an English language instructor.
 
“She said, ‘It was so lovely to bring them somewhere new at Harvard where they don’t have to clean anything or wash any dishes and they were treated with such respect,’” said Schaedler-Luera.
 
Schaedler-Luera and her colleagues hope that the Engaging New Americans project will be a model for other art museums.