The New York Times reports that the Massachusetts supreme court ruled that the state cannot bar immigrants from its state health care program. "The ruling said that a 2009 state budget that dropped about 29,000 legal immigrants who had lived in the United States for less than five years from Commonwealth Care, a subsidized health insurance program central to this state’s 2006 health care overhaul, violated the State Constitution."

The New York Times runs an interesting piece on how internal migration is affecting smaller Mexican towns. "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 significant pause or the end of an era." People interested in this phenomenon should check out Marcelo Suárez-Orozco's work on internal migration in China.

The New York Times reports an explosion in the number of books in languages other than English at libraries in Queens. "The surge in immigrants patronizing the Queens system has spurred its branches to offer books, DVDs and CDs in 59 languages, more than double the total a decade ago. So important has acquiring foreign-language books become to the Queens Library’s mission that Radames Suarez, who supervises the Spanish collection, travels every year to the largest Spanish book fair in the world, in Guadalajara, Mexico. The Queens Library even has a staff demographer" That's a responsive system.

The New York Times runs an interesting article on refugee Hmong children who are now adults and writing about their experiences. The article sums up issues faced by many immigrants and their children: "In the United States, traumatic memories of wartime atrocities are often compounded by language issues, poverty and social isolation. The writers’ parents grew up not only without a written language, but without much knowledge of the outside world.""