The Brief

For three years, college students and scholars in California sought to open the financial and educational opportunity of jobs for undocumented students. Their effort ended on Sunday with a gubernatorial veto of Assembly Bill 2586.

It wasn’t the outcome the proposal’s supporters wanted.

“The immediate reaction was heartbreak and fear and grief,” said Jeffry Umaña Muñoz, a graduate student at California State University, Los Angeles who’s an organizer with the Undocumented Student-Led Network. They call their effort Opportunity for All.

He and members of his group have worked since 2021 to urge the University of California to change policy to open up campus jobs:

Umaña Muñoz said dozens of college students met in two Zoom meetings Sunday night to console each other after the veto.

“Before the ink even dried, lives had already changed,” he said.

His own included, he added.

Supporters of Opportunity for All stage action in Sacramento. State legislators voted to approve Assembly Bill 2586.

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Rene Canobbio

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Courtesy Undocumented Student-Led Network

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Graduate school work often includes paid research work in a student’s academic discipline. That work provides essential academic experience as well as needed funds to pay for college-related costs, such as food, rent, and transportation.

“I do not know if I will be able to afford Cal State L.A.'s tuition charge next semester, which means that I may leave my master's program after this semester,” Umaña Muñoz said.

He does not have the authorization to live in the U.S., nor does he qualify under the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program.

Umaña Muñoz and other activists are balancing the disappointment of a veto with the support they’ve received from other state elected officials from both parties, scholars, and some university administrators. They say their efforts are not over.

Why this veto?

At issue in the bill, and the Opportunity for All’s campaign, is whether state agencies have to follow the 1986 federal Immigration Reform and Control Act’s provisions that compels private employers to confirm employees’ authorization to work in the U.S.

Legal scholars at UCLA, Stanford University and other prominent law schools say there is no language in the law compelling state employers to follow that edict.

In his veto statement, Gov. Gavin Newsom said elected leaders before him had opened opportunities for undocumented students. He cited the 2001 state law that allows undocumented students to pay in-state college tuition.

But he would not go out on a limb to sign this proposal, echoing the strong opposition issued by University of California President Michael Drake earlier this year.

“Given the gravity of the potential consequences of this bill, which include potential criminal and civil liability for state employees, it is critical that the courts address the legality of such a policy and the novel legal theory behind this legislation before proceeding,” Newsom wrote.

The California Senate and Assembly had voted to open campus jobs at the University of California, California State University and the state’s community colleges to students who are undocumented.

The Undocumented Student-Led Network believed that would encourage Newsom to sign the bill.

“The moral case for supporting them is so compelling. I think they just really believed that the governor would do the right thing,” said Ahilan Arulanantham, a professor of immigration law at UCLA who’s been working with the students to demonstrate the proposal is legally sound.

“For many of them, this is their first really intensive political engagement,” Arulanantham said.

Where does the effort go from here?

According to the student activists, about 5,000 students across the state’s higher education systems took part in the campaign and about 150 organized on various campuses.

Student leaders said it’s just as important to them to change people’s minds about who has the right to work as it is to try again to pass the policy.

“Students also did express this commitment to what we were fighting for, this idea that we're fighting for a basic human right, the right to dignified labor,” Umaña Muñoz said. “I think undocumented youth are tired of being told to wait.”

The effort is not dead. Newsom suggested that University of California leaders step forward and ask state courts to weigh in on whether the proposal is legally sound, and Assemblymember David Alvarez, author of the vetoed bill, said he would re-introduce the bill.

In the city of Los Angeles, neighbors or homeowner groups who choose to fight approvals of new housing are required to pay a fee when filing an appeal.

Right now, that fee is $178 — about 1% of the amount the city says it costs to process the appeal. But that fee soon will go up.

On Wednesday, the L.A. City Council voted to increase the fee to $229 but rejected a proposal by the city administrative officer that would have raised the cost for appellants to more than $22,800, or 100% of the cost.

Some advocates for making housing easier to build argued the city should have adopted the higher fee.

“Appeals of approved projects create delays that make it harder to build housing and disincentivize future housing from being proposed,” said Jacob Pierce, a policy associate with the group Abundant Housing L.A.

At a time when L.A.’s budget is strained, Pierce said, if someone thinks a project was wrongly approved, “They should put their money where their mouth is and pay the full fee."

The City Council unanimously approved another new fee structure put forward by the city’s Planning Department.

While fees will remain relatively low for housing project opponents, developers will have to pay $22,453 to appeal projects that previously had been denied.

A November report from the city administrative officer said setting fees higher to recover the full cost of processing would have aligned with the city’s financial policies. Generally, fees are set higher when applicants are asking for a service that benefits them alone.

“When a service or activity benefits the public at large, there is generally little to no recommended fee amount,” the report said.

Pierce said he hoped a City Council committee would reconsider the higher fee proposal next year. With the city falling far short of its goal to create nearly a half-million new homes by 2029, he said the city needs to discourage obstruction of new housing.

“Slowing down the construction of housing is expensive for all of us,” Pierce said.

Los Angeles could become the first city in the U.S. to ban ink cartridges that can be used only once.

The L.A. City Council unanimously voted Wednesday to approve the creation of an ordinance that prohibits their sale. The move comes after more than a year of debate over the terms.

Why the potential ban

This builds upon the city’s effort to reach zero waste, including phasing out single-use plastics. You’re likely familiar with some of those efforts — such as only getting plastic foodware by request and banning single-use carryout bags at stores. Multiple plastic bans have been suggested, like for single-use vapes and bag clips, but now it’s ink’s turn.

The cartridges are tough to dispose of because of the plastic, metal and chemicals inside, according to the city. They’re also classified as regulated waste in the state because they can leach toxic substances into the environment, such as volatile organic compounds and heavy metals.

That poses a problem. L.A.’s curbside recycling program can’t recycle the cartridges, and while its hazardous waste program can take them, a significant portion end up in landfills.

Major printer manufacturers and some ink retailers have take-back programs for used cartridges so they can get refilled. However, L.A. Sanitation says there are certain single-use cartridges that don’t have recovery programs. These are usually cartridges that work with a printer but aren’t name brand.

How outlawing them could work

LASAN has spent months figuring out what a ban would cover — and it hasn’t been without pushback. The city’s energy and environment committee pressed the department back in September on how effective a ban would be.

Ultimately, the committee moved it forward with a promise that LASAN would come back with more details, including environmental groups’ stance, concrete data to back up the need and a public education plan.

The department’s current recommendation is that the ordinance should prohibit retail and online establishments from selling any single-use ink cartridge, whether sold separately or with a printer, to people in the city. Retailers that don’t follow the rules would get fined.

So what does single-use mean here? The ban would affect a printer cartridge that:

• is not collected or recovered through a take-back program
• cannot be remanufactured, refilled or reused
• infringes upon intellectual property rights or violates any applicable local, state or federal law

Any cartridges that meet one of these points would fall under the ban, though you still could get them outside L.A.

The proposed ordinance will go to the committee first while LASAN works on a public education plan.

If it ends up getting approved by the full council, the ban likely would go into full effect 12 months later.

Sophie Kinsella, who wrote the massively popular Shopaholic book series, has died. The writer, whose real name was Madeleine Sophie Wickham, was 55 years old. Last year, she announced she had been diagnosed with an aggressive form of brain cancer in 2022.

Her death was announced on Instagram on Wednesday: "Despite her illness, which she bore with unimaginable courage, Sophie counted herself truly blessed — to have such wonderful family and friends and to have had the extraordinary success of her writing career. She took nothing for granted and was forever grateful for the love she received."

Kinsella's novels were a sensation; they sold tens of millions of copies and were translated into dozens of languages. The first two books in the Shopaholic series were adapted into the 2009 movie Confessions of a Shopaholic, starring Isla Fisher.

In an NPR interview from 2019, she said her novels focused on young women and their travails, even though she was herself a mother with five children.

"I just think there's something exciting about the time of life where you're on the lookout for opportunities in all directions. You're looking at your career. You're looking at finding someone to love. Everything is ahead of you," she said. "And for me, the — kind of the wide, open horizon is so exciting. There is something exhilarating about meeting a stranger in a coffee shop and thinking, 'Where's this going to go?'"

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