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Fifteen Luzerne County municipalities increasing real estate taxes in 2019

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Baker urges delay of proposed rule change in medical liability cases

<p>DALLAS TWP. &#8212; The timing probably couldn&#8217;t be better, as the record-long federal government shutdown ended Friday with a three-week truce in the battle for a southern border wall.</p><p>It&#8217;s a debate Harvard professor J. Wesley Boyd believes needs a dose of data and first-hand experience, something he hopes to bring to his presentation Monday at Misericordia University.</p><p>&#8220;There is a lot of misinformation being bandied about regarding the level of dangerous immigrants and the extent to which they may be hurting the workforce in the United States,&#8221; the psychiatrist and associate professor of psychiatry said in a phone interview.</p><p>&#8220;I have zero chance of fixing that, but if there is even a small percentage of the audience willing to hear the data and hear some stories about individuals I&#8217;ve seen, that helps.&#8221;</p><p>Raised in the outskirts of pre-Disney Orlando &#8212; his homestead sat near orange groves and he describes his family as poor at the time &#8212; Boyd now works extensively in a public hospital in Massachusetts, seeing a high number of undocumented immigrants. Those experiences will be part of his keynote speech 7 p.m. to cap the second annual Pledge to Preserve Human Dignity ceremony at Misericordia.</p><p>He said data and his own contact with immigrants paint a different picture from what&#8217;s often being pitched. They commit fewer crimes than those born in the country, and they &#8220;are definitely not taxing our health system by siphoning off resources, because immigrants are younger and healthier than native born Americans. They often pay more into Medicare than they take out, and into private insurance as well.&#8221;</p><p>There are likely multiple reasons for that, he said. The aging native population is more prone to physical problems. But the immigrants, even when they are here legally, may seek health care services less often out of fear of crossing paths with immigration officials, he said.</p><p>The people he&#8217;s seen in his practice, and their stories, also defy popular lore of immigrants, and not just those coming over the southern boarder. He recounted meeting a woman from Eastern Europe who was &#8220;physically and sexually assaulted&#8221; in her home country, spent five days in the hospital and vowed she would migrate. Within weeks, she made it to the United States.</p><p>&#8220;With no money, she realized she would need to lose her accent and get a college degree if she was going to be taken seriously. I saw her three years after arrival applying for asylum. She had so little accent if you told me she was a native speaker I would have believed it.&#8221; Realizing she could only afford college by working at one, she landed a job and took classes at the same place, earning a reputation as a hard worker that got her other jobs.</p><p>Boyd said it&#8217;s important to appreciate why so many people are risking their lives on the long trek to the U.S. &#8220;The gangs run those countries,&#8221; he said. Young people are told to sell drugs or sell their bodies, &#8220;and if you don&#8217;t you will be killed. With that backdrop , one woman came to us who had walked across Mexico with two surviving children because two years ago an adolescent daughter who said no to the gangs repeatedly was dismembered in front of her house. A year later, a second daughter was murdered for the same thing.&#8221;</p><p>The fact that up to 80 percent of women making such a journey are sexually assaulted &#8212; he noted many insist they fought off the assault &#8212; reinforces how bad things are in their home countries. &#8220;If the journey is that amazingly treacherous, you know what they are fleeing has to be dramatically bad. Ninety percent of those I&#8217;ve seen will be killed if forced to return home.&#8221;</p><p>Boyd will speak in the Lemmond Theater in Walsh Hall. The event is free and open to the public.</p><style>
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<div class="neCaption">Boyd </div></div><div class="metaInfo"><photo0>https://www.timesleader.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/web1_BoydJonWesley-copy-1.jpg</photo0><caption0>Boyd </caption0><photoCredit0></photoCredit0></div></div>
<div class="metaInfo"><bylineMeta><p>By Mark Guydish</p><p>mguydish@www.timesleader.com</p></bylineMeta></div><div class="metaInfo"><shirttailMeta><p>Reach Mark Guydish at 570-991-6112 or on Twitter @TLMarkGuydish</p></shirttailMeta></div>

Harvard prof brings hard data to immigration debate for Misericordia program