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Roman Totenberg

Professor Emeritus of Music at Boston University

Across the continents and the span of seven decades, violinist Roman Totenberg has been singled out by critics as an outstanding violinist, a sensitive musician and a brilliant teacher. Roman Totenberg was born in Poland in 1911 and made his debut with the Warsaw Philharmonic when he was 11 years old. Soon after his Berlin debut, he was performing with every major European orchestra, making recordings and eventually playing with major orchestras in the United States, at the White House and the Library of Congress. His work as a chamber music performer was widely acclaimed when he played regularly with the New Friends of Music in New York and in 1940 when he became Director of live chamber music concerts for New York radio station WQXR. As a young artist he toured South America with Arthur Rubinstein and met composer Darius Milhaud after Totenberg's Paris debut which Milhaud had reviewed. More than two decades later, Totenberg, with the composer conducting, would play a premiere performance of Milhaud's 2nd Violin Concerto in Aspen, Colorado and in Berlin with the Berlin Philharmonic. These concerts were among a number of first performances of composers' works that Totenberg would play over the years.

Totenberg continues performing as a soloist with orchestra in recital and in chamber music concerts. As his reputation for concert performances has grown, so too has his reputation for fine teaching and musical expertise. In 1983, he was named Artist Teacher of the Year by the American String Teachers Association. Currently teaching at Boston University, he headed the String Department there from 1961 to 1978. He taught at the Mannes School of Music in New York, headed the string department of the Peabody Conservatory of Music, Baltimore, and the Longy School of Music which he was the Director from 1978 to 1985.Read more...

Prejudice replaces fact in debate over US immigration

Published on Wed, May 12, 2010

Sir, David Pinsen’s unfounded and inaccurate accusations against Mexican and unskilled immigrants should not be allowed to go unanswered (Letters, May 10). Contrary to the myth that unskilled immigrants consume more in government resources than they pay in taxes, an April 21 study by the Immigration Policy Center shows that Arizona’s immigrant workers contributed $2.4bn in state tax revenue in 2004. One can assume that not many of these workers had PhDs.

The same study shows that Latinos and Asians in that state wield nearly $37bn in consumer purchasing power, the businesses they own had sales of $12.2bn and employed nearly 65,000 people. Studies by the same organisation of many other states show similar results. For every study by an anti-immigrant group alleging that Mexicans cannot assimilate, there is a more objective study.

Published in the Financial Times

Hiroshi Motomura

Hiroshi Motomura, Susan Westerberg Prager Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law, is the co‐author of two immigration‐related casebooks: Immigration and Citizenship: Process and Policy (Seventh Edition 2012), and Forced Migration: Law and Policy, published in 2007. The substance of this report is drawn from Hiroshi Motomura, “The Discretion That Matters: Federal Immigration Enforcement, State and Local Arrests, and the Civil–Criminal Line,” UCLA Law Review 58 (2011): 1819‐1858, which cites the relevant sources.

 

Think Immigration

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Take part in our "People's Mark-up" of the new Senate immigration bill.

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Mary Giovagnoli: The TT Interview

Published on Thu, Nov 15, 2012

IPC's director, Mary Giovagnoli, was interviewed by Julián Aguilar of The Texas Tribune.  Read the interview below to learn more about immigration politics and reform: Read more...

Published in the The Texas Tribune

Pew Report Sheds Little Light on Birthright Citizenship

Released on Wed, Aug 11, 2010

Washington D.C. - Over the last several weeks, a handful of elected officials have re-ignited a call for the repeal of birthright citizenship. Claiming that countless unauthorized and temporary immigrants are coming to the United States solely to give birth, some are suggesting changing the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, thereby forcing the U.S. government to individually determine the citizenship of every single child born in the country.

A new report from the Pew Hispanic Center is intended to provide data on the numbers of children born to unauthorized immigrants each year. However, the report offers no real clarity on the question of birthright citizenship. Limitations in the Census data upon which the report is based make it impossible to determine how many children are born into families in which both parents are unauthorized or temporarily in the United States. As a result, the report is only able estimate that 340,000 of the 4.3 million children born in the United States in 2008 had at least one unauthorized parent. In other words, this figure includes families in which one parent is unauthorized and the other a U.S. citizen or legal immigrant, so we still have no idea how many children would be affected by a change to the Fourteenth Amendment. If anything, the Pew report highlights how complicated this issue is given that so many unauthorized immigrants live in "mixed status" families that also include U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.Read more...

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DREAM Act Could be First Step to Reform

Published on Thu, Sep 16, 2010

Meanwhile, the anti-immigrant movement is starting to lose steam, as more localities are outright rejecting popular anti-immigrant measures. They fear inviting costly lawsuits and garnering unwanted attention from the federal government. AlterNet's Seth Hoy reports that Tomball, Texas and Fremont, Nebraska are the latest cities to opt against strict anti-immigrant enforcement ordinances. Similarly wary of attracting exorbitant lawsuits, legislators in Ohio and Idaho are feverishly revising their own, once-embraced versions of Arizona's SB 1070.

Published in the The Huffington Post

Senate Legislative Process Must Maintain Spirit of Compromise

The Process Must Adhere to Certain Principles to Ensure A Workable System

Released on Thu, May 09, 2013

Washington D.C. - Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee begins “mark-up” of S. 744, the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act. In an unprecedented move by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy and Ranking Member Charles Grassley, all amendments have been made publicly available in order to make the process more transparent and inclusive. Although nearly 300 amendments have been filed, the Committee will only take up a limited number over the course of the mark-up. It’s important that the amendments considered are those that really seek to improve and perfect the bill, rather than attempt to undermine it.

The point of a committee mark-up process is to expose a bill to careful scrutiny and debate. It is not the place for political grandstanding. Now more than ever, the Senate Judiciary Committee must use its authority to ensure that the immigration bill is workable, fair, and practical.

The United States needs a workable, efficient, and flexible immigration system that responds to the rapidly changing demands of a 21st century economy, technologies, and migration patterns. People live and work and create in ways that are different than they were twenty years ago, and yet our immigration system continues to operate on a series of static quotas and rigid requirements that ignore advances in every sector of our economy and the way we live today.

Additionally, we cannot wall ourselves away from the world. Many of the amendments that will be offered today will deal with border security and revisit the oft-repeated attempts to build a wall around this country—either through border fencing or by adding layers of national security screenings. We need to do what is smart, secure, and effective for immigration policy, but we should not revert back to the period of fear and suspicion that dominated immigration reform in the last decade. To be clear:
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Immigrant voters: On with the new

Published on Tue, Nov 02, 2010

Recently, the Immigration Policy Center in Washington, D.C. released a report showing that those Americans - especially Latinos and Asians - are making up a growing share of the U.S. electorate.

It defines New American voters as naturalized U.S. citizens and children born to immigrants since 1965, when the current wave of immigration from Latin America and Asia began.

Published in the Florida Times Union