By DAVID BACON
Counterpunch Weekend Edition
May 27 - 29, 2011
In the period since the North American Free Trade Agreement has come into effect, the economies of the United States and Mexico have become more integrated than ever. Through Plan Merida and partnerships on security, the military and the drug war, the political and economic policies pursued by the U.S. and Mexican governments are more coordinated than they've ever been.
Working people on both sides of the border are not only affected by this integration. Workers and their unions in many ways are its object. These policies seek to maximize profits and push wages and benefits to the bottom, manage the flow of people displaced as a result, roll back rights and social benefits achieved over decades, and weaken working class movements in both countries.
All this makes cooperation and solidarity across the U.S./Mexico border more important than ever. After a quarter century in which the development of solidarity relationships was interrupted during the cold war, unions and workers are once again searching out their counterparts and finding effective and appropriate ways to support each other.
This paper is not a survey of all the efforts that have taken place, especially since the NAFTA debate restarted the solidarity process in the early 1990s. Instead, it seeks to set out some questions, and invite responses and contributions from people involved in this cross border movement. Among these questions are the following:
What is the history of cross-border solidarity? How can we discard the blinders forged by the cold war, and expand our vision of what is possible?
How is the political context changing on both sides of the border? Why is solidarity a necessary response to political and economic challenges?
One of our biggest advantages is the movement of people from Mexico to the U.S. and back. What part do migrants and the struggle for their rights play in solidarity between workers of both countries?
How can we develop new ways of reaching across the border?
* * *
The working class movements of the U.S. and Mexico both began in the decades after the seizure of Mexican territory in the War of 1848, its incorporation into the territory of the U.S., and the unequal relationship cemented by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.
After the turn of the century, cross-border solidarity became an important political movement, as Mexicans began migrating to the U.S. as railroad workers, miners and farm laborers. The Flores Magon brothers, on the run from the regime of Porfirio Diaz, began organizing what became the uprising in Cananea and the Liberal Party in the communities of railroad workers in Los Angeles, St. Louis and elsewhere north of the border.
The two were active participants in the radical socialist and anarchist movements of the day, and were associated with the Industrial Workers of the World. After the Cananea rising, J. Edgar Hoover pursued them in his first campaign of organized anti-labor and anti-left repression. The brothers were caught, tried and sent to Leavenworth Federal Prison, where Ricardo died.
Today in Salina Cruz, Oaxaca, on the wall of the longshore union hall, hangs a banner dated 1906, declaring the union part of the Casa Obrera Mundial. The Casa Obrera Mundial was a Mexican group associated with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), and the banner testifies to the links that existed between workers of the two countries at that time, and their internationalist outlook. Later, members of the IWW fought in the Mexican Revolution itself.
The roots of the cross-border solidarity movement are very deep, going back more than a century. They are part of the labor culture of workers and unions, and have been almost since the beginning of our two labor movements.
During the 1930s, strong cross border relationships developed between workers on both sides. In Mexico and the U.S., their challenge was the same – to organize the vast bulk of workers in the largest enterprises, especially the basic industries.
Through the presidency of Lazaro Cardenas, Mexican labor had a government that depended on a strong, albeit politically controlled, union movement. Communists and socialists organized the Confederation of Mexican Workers (CTM), and began supporting the beginnings of labor movements in other countries through the Confederation of Workers of Latin America (CTAL), headed by Vicente Lombardo Toledano.
In the U.S., the New Deal was a product of the upsurge in labor organizing led by the left, and in turn it also created a favorable environment in which many industrial workers were able to organize.
From that period to the present, the relationships between workers in the U.S. and Mexico grew closer when the left was strong, both in terms of organized political parties, but also as a set of ideas that were supported by large numbers of workers. From the beginning, the strongest relationships have existed between industrial workers – miners, railroad workers, factory workers, farm workers, longshore workers and others.
During the period of the labor upsurge of the 1930s and 40s, most solidarity activity was organized by Mexican unions in support of workers in the U.S. In part, this was due to a point of view among those unions that saw Mexicans and Mexican-Americans, especially along the border, as part of their own constituency. They sought to protect and defend the interests of people they viewed as their own paisanos.
In 1937 5000 workers marched to the bridge in Laredo during an onion strike in the Rio Grande Valley. The major working class organizations of the border states were present – the Congreso de Trabajo, the railroad union and the Mexican Communist Party. Vicente Lombardo Toledano came from Mexico City to speak.
Together with grassroots unions organized by left-wing workers on the U.S. side, the groups cooperated in setting up the Asociacion de Jornaleros (the Agricultural Workers Union) in Laredo, Texas. In the following years, Mexican unions increased their organizing activity in Texas. The CTM held Conventions of Mexican Workers in Dallas in 1938, in San Antonio in 1940, and in Austin in 1941.
The program of these gatherings emphasized the fight for civil rights for Mexican Americans in the southwest. That battle goes on today in Arizona and other states. Other demands included stopping local authorities from dropping Mexicans from the relief rolls during times of high unemployment. Today immigrants, even with permanent residence visas, still can't get most kinds of Social Security and welfare benefits.
As the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) began to grow, Mexican unions and organizers cooperated in efforts to organize Mexican workers on the U.S. side. The CTM set up committees among Mexican workers in the southwest. After Lombardo Toledano and others established the Universidad Obrera in Mexico City, Mexicans living in the U.S. were sent for training. Emma Tenayuca, the young Communist who led the most famous strike of Mexican women of the time, the pecan strike in San Antonio, got her organizer training beforehand at the Universidad Obrera.
In U.S. copper mines 60% of the workers were Mexican or Mexican American. The Mine Mill and Smelter Workers Union, with roots in the Western Federation of Miners and the IWW, used border alliances to build union locals in mining towns. This was a logical and necessary step, since the same families worked in mines on both sides of the border. They shared a similar union history, in which the fight against the inferior Mexican wage as a central demand in both Mexican and U.S. mines, which belonged to the same companies.
On May Day in 1942 500 Mine Mill members marched with 10,000 Mexican workers in Ciudad Juarez. Humberto Silex, Mine Mill's leading organizer, established Local 509, which became the union's most important local. Silex addressed the rally. The following July 4, Toledano traveled from Mexico City to speak in El Paso's Independence Day celebration.
Solidarity went beyond speeches and conventions. CTM organizers coordinated with U.S. organizers during the first strikes by Mine Mill in El Paso, especially during the key battle to organize its giant smelter. In 1946 Mine Mill struck 14 ASARCO plants to gain national bargaining. The CTM donated money, and pledged to stop Mexicans from crossing the border to break the strike.
In Los Angeles, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union established Local 26 for southern California warehouse and light manufacturing workers. The union used Mexican organizers, including Jess Armenta and Bert Corona. Corona, a leftist born in Ciudad Juarez, became local president. Later Humberto Camacho, a Mexican organizer for the United Electrical Workers, helped establish UE Local 1421.
Corona and Camacho became the two most influential leaders of the immigrant rights movement through the 1970s, not just in Los Angeles, but nationally. Their labor and solidarity activity created a base for fighting for immigrant rights. That core of activists and their militant program called for defending the rights of undocumented workers. They made the modern immigrant rights movement possible.
Corona, Camacho, and their generation of solidarity and labor activists saw that unions in both countries had a common interest. Labor, they believed, should try to raise the standard of living in both countries, and stop the use of immigrants as a vulnerable labor supply for employers.
Immigration laws in the U.S. were constantly used against strikes by Mexican workers. From 1930 to 1935, 345,839 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. As the cold war started, deportations were used to try to break this cross-border movement. The Immigration and Naturalization Service (ICE's predecessor) arrested and tried to deport Humberto Silex. He became one of the most famous anti-deportation cases of the McCarthyite period.
Luisa Moreno, an organizer of garment workers in Los Angeles, was deported to Guatemala. Another political deportee of the cold war was Refugio Martinez, a leader of the United Packinghouse Workers in Chicago. Martinez helped build community organizations in Mexican barrios, including El Frente Popular Mexicano, the Toledano Club, and the Asociacion Nacional Mexicano Americano. Armando Davila, of the United Furniture Workers in L.A., was also deported. The government tried to deport Lucio Bernabe, a leader of the Food, Tobacco and Agricultural Workers who led organizing drives in San Jose canneries. His deportation was stopped. But Rosaura Revueltas, the Mexican movie actress, was deported after playing a role in Salt of the Earth, the movie written by blacklisted Hollywood screenwriters documenting the role of women in the strike by Mine Mill at the Empire Zinc mine.
Many of the deportations were fought by the Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, a left-wing immigrant rights organization based in Los Angeles. The deportation wave marked the rise of cold war hysteria. They were not isolated, but part of the context of the repression of Mexican immigrants generally. In the 1950s, at the height of the cold war, the combination of enforcement and bracero contract labor reached a peak. In 1954 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 braceros were brought in each year.
As a political weapon, deportations were part of a general wave of repression that included firings, and even prison for left-wing and labor activists. At the same time, the labor movements on both sides were purged of left-wing leaders. In the U.S., the CIO expelled nine unions, charged with being Communist. In Mexico, independent movements like that of the railroad workers were crushed, and its leaders, also accused of being Communists, were sent to prison.
As a result, the people who had organized the solidarity movement of the 1930s and 40s were fighting just for their survival. Unions that were its base, like the miners or farm workers, were attacked and in some cases destroyed. The labor movements in both countries became more nationalistic. In the U.S. a cold war labor leadership defended U.S. foreign policy goals, especially anti-communism. Anti-communism provided a common ground with the charro leadership of the CTM and other Mexican unions, who feared any independent movement challenging them from the left.
The American Institute for Free Labor Development, funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, had an office in Mexico City. But the office did not organize solidarity efforts to defend workers against U.S. corporations and the wars and interventions that supported them. Instead, U.S. labor/intelligence agents helped in the suppression, imprisonment and even murder of militant unionists throughout Latin America. When solidarity efforts began again years later, the distrust and suspicion engendered by that history took years to overcome, and in some areas still exists today.
Even during the worst times, however, there were still relationships among progressive activists and union locals. When miners went on strike in Cananea in the 1960s, a Mine Mill leader, Maclovio Barrajas, organized food and money for them from the U.S. side. When Mine Mill went on strike later, the Cananea miners reciprocated.
During the 60s, as the introduction of container technology transformed work on the waterfront, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) invited Mexican longshore workers to come work in the L.A. harbor and learn to drive the cranes. Today there are still retired members of the Federation of Stevedores in Mexican Pacific coast ports who remember that experience of worker-to-worker solidarity.
Corona and Camacho, and ILWU Local 26 and UE Local 1421, supported some of the first efforts in Tijuana to organize independent unions in the maquiladoras, as the industry started to mushroom. A critical strike at Solidev and Solitron in the late 1970s was supported both by Tijuana's left, including veteran Communist Blas Manriquez, and a network of activists on the U.S. side led by Camacho.
After the repression of the student movement in Tlatelolco in 1968, and especially in the years just before the Mexican Communist Party (PCM) became the Unified Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM) and eventually the Party of the Democratic Revolution (PRD), left-wing worker activists moved from Mexico City to Los Angeles to organize what had become a huge population of Mexican workers living there. Some became organizers for the UE, and eventually other unions as well, helping to spark the city's labor upsurge of the 1980s and 90s.
Corona helped build that same activist base through the Centro de Accion Social Autonoma (CASA). It single-mindedly fought for the rights for undocumented workers, urging workers to join unions, fighting to get unions to defend them, and organizing workers on its own when labor was unresponsive.
Today unions are often so busy just trying to survive that looking at the history of earlier solidarity efforts seems a luxury. But it is important to know that the movement for solidarity among workers and unions in the U.S. and Mexico didn't begin with NAFTA. Those earlier efforts are an important reservoir of experience. They show that solidarity is an integral and indispensable part of the history of the labor movement in both countries. Earlier worker activists and leaders have given unions today a rich, although little-known, store of knowledge of tactics, strategy, and above all, politics. They often paid heavily, so their contributions should not be lightly set aside or ignored.
One important conclusion of those earlier years is that solidarity has always been a two-way street. Mexican unions especially played a key role in the organization of US unions, some of which would not exist today without that early support, particularly in the southwest.
Those early efforts met success by concentrating on the key role of Mexican workers in the U.S. Today's circumstances are different, but the migration of people is just as important to solidarity today as it was eighty years ago.
Solidarity has always been a project of the left in each country. A strong left produced a base for developing common action. It popularized political ideas that helped workers understand that internationalism was necessary to confront transnational corporations and the governments and policies that supported them. Conversely, the cold war, nationalism, and anti-immigrant hysteria in the U.S., and repression on both sides of the border, were the tools used to break those bonds and proscribe those ideas. Today those threats are growing again. Ties between workers and unions in the U.S. and Mexico must grow stronger to defeat them.
David Bacon is a California writer and photojournalist. His latest book is Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants.
This is the first installment of a series on border solidarity by journalist and immigration activist David Bacon. This article and subsequent installments were originally published in the Institute for Transnational Social Change's report Building a Culture of Cross-Border Solidarity. The Institute for Transnational Social Change (ITSC) is a hub for cross-border collaboration among key worker-led organizations (independent unions, worker centers, NGOs, and academics) in Mexico and the United States. The institute seeks to address the needs of a low-wage workforce that is often hard-to-reach – migrant workers, women in the garment industry, farm workers, miners, and other workers in industries dominated by highly mobile transnational corporations — and to increase opportunities for cross-border collaboration. The present report is part of a series of publications sponsored by ITSC. For more information about the ITSC, contact Gaspar Rivera-Salgado at UCLA, grsalgado@irle.ucla.edu.
http://www.counterpunch.org/bacon05272011.html
Showing posts with label Deportation History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Deportation History. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
Thursday, April 7, 2011
Infusing the Deportation System With Restorative Justice
By Bill Ong Hing
Huffington Post
04/7/11
First of two parts on the lack of options available to federal immigration judges.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-ong-hing/infusing-the-deportation-_b_845606.html
Huffington Post
04/7/11
First of two parts on the lack of options available to federal immigration judges.
Last week marked the one-year anniversary of the Supreme Court's decision in Padilla v. Kentucky -- a deportation case involving a 40-year lawful permanent resident of the United States who was a Vietnam War veteran. About 10 years ago, José Padilla, a commercial truck driver, based on advice from his defense attorney, pleaded guilty to transporting marijuana. His attorney had told him, incorrectly, that the conviction would not affect his immigration status. In fact, the conviction led to an automatic deportation order. Because of the incompetence of his attorney, the Supreme Court set aside Padilla's conviction, and imposed a duty on criminal defense attorneys to provide competent advice to noncitizens about potential immigration consequences in all future cases.
The Padilla case is important, of course, but an underlying problem persists: after competent defense advice is given to long-time lawful permanent residents, a conviction for certain crimes -- including a couple of petty thefts -- can still lead to deportation. And if the conviction is classified as an "aggravated felony," deportation is virtually automatic. In the latter situation, federal immigration judges lack any discretion or options to ordering the person removed from the country. That means that the following facts are irrelevant: that the person has resided lawfully in the United States for decades, the effect of deportation on a citizen spouse and children, a record of long and stable employment, contributions to the community or neighborhood, or that the person is fully rehabilitated and remorseful. Furthermore, while "aggravated felony" includes some very serious crimes, it doesn't take much for a conviction to fall into the classification. Many minor drug offense and offenses that can lead to a one-year sentence is all that's necessary. I'm aware of cases that were classified as aggravated felonies that included driving without a license when the person was on parole, medical benefits fraud, and multiple counts of joy-riding. And deportation comes after the person's incarceration for the underlying conviction. In other words, deportation is not used by "aggravated felons" to escape their jail time; deportation comes after they get out of jail.
Prior to immigration legislation in 1996, a long-time lawful resident of the United States facing deportation for an aggravated felony could ask for discretionary relief from an immigration judge in a deportation hearing. The judge could hear testimony about rehabilitation, family, employment, and the person's community. If the judge was convinced that the individual deserved a second chance, the person would get to remain in the United States lawfully. If not, the person would be ordered deported, but at least the person had a chance to introduce evidence of rehabilitation. That all changed in 1996, when Congress was swept up in a pre-9/11 fervor over anti-terrorism and getting tough on crime. The pre-1996 relief was repealed.
Those who supported eliminating discretionary relief for aggravated felons in 1996 were frustrated with the way immigration judges exercised discretion; some legislators thought judges were too lenient. However, that concern was overblown; granting such relief was never automatic. Furthermore, immigration judges who granted relief routinely warned respondents that if they recidivated, they wouldn't get a third chance and deportation would be ordered. This scared most immigrants straight.
Yet the concern that opponents of discretionary relief had -- that immigration judges were too generous -- should make us wonder if some other options ought to be available to immigration judges. Under the pre-1996 framework, the judge handling the case of a long-term resident who was convicted of an aggravated felony had two choices: to deport or let the person stay here lawfully. In either scenario, the immigrant had no further contact with government officials after the order was made. One wonders whether something short of deportation could be created that would address concerns raised by both proponents and opponents of deportation -- something like placing the person on probation.
Given the special challenges faced by many refugees and other low-income immigrants, a system that adopts a rehabilitative approach to justice might be most appropriate. A relationship-building theme ought to be central to that approach, because young adults (who make up many deportees) need assistance with relationship-building in the family and with community. The goal of this relational or restorative justice notion is to avoid injustice and promote legitimacy and good relationships. This can make good sense in the deportation or removal process.
The relational or restorative approach is premised on the goal of rehabilitating the individual, sometimes using group therapy, counseling, and even job training. The framework recognizes that conventional criminal justice institutions (courts, police, probation department) are not solely responsible. Social networks including family, friends, neighbors, church, and employers must step up to make the process work.
The current removal process for aggravated felons who have grown up in the United States and lived here lawfully for most of their lives contains none of these components or values. Relief is altogether foreclosed from them. Information on their lives, their families, their community, and their rehabilitation is deemed irrelevant. The immigration laws have made deportation an extension of the criminal justice process.
Immigration judges need an alternative to deportation of long-time lawful residents who have usually made a single mistake. If Congress is afraid of outright reinstating discretionary power to judges to halt these deportations, at the very least, Congress should grant judges the power to order a probationary period for these individuals. During the probation, they can be monitored and allowed to go through restorative justice and relational-building processes with their families and neighborhoods. We can all benefit from that.
Next up: The deportation of individuals with mental disabilities.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/bill-ong-hing/infusing-the-deportation-_b_845606.html
Sunday, March 20, 2011
Utah’s New Immigration Bills: A Blast From the Past
The state laws have been called “the nation’s most liberal,” but they’re not much different from Cold War-era deportation policies.
By David Bacon
In These Times
March 19, 2011
Last week the Utah legislature passed three new laws that have been hailed in the media as a new, more reasonable, approach to immigration policy. Reasonable, that is, compared to Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which would allow police to stop anyone, demand immigration papers and hold her or him for deportation. Utah’s law was signed by Republican Governor Gary Herbert on Tuesday, March 15. Arizona’s S.B. 1070 is currently being challenged in court.
Utah’s bills were called “the anti-Arizona” by Frank Sharry, head of America’s Voice, a Washington D.C. immigration lobbying firm. According to Lee Hockstader, on the Washington Post’s editorial staff, the laws are “the nation’s most liberal—and most reality-based—policy on illegal immigration.”
The Utah laws, however, are not new. And they’re certainly not liberal, at least towards immigrants and workers. Labor supply programs for employers, with deportations and diminished rights for immigrants, have marked U.S. immigration policy for more than 100 years.
One bill would establish a state system to allow employers to bring people from the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon as “guest workers.” Under this program, workers would have to remain employed to stay in the country. They would not have the same set of labor and social rights as people living in the communities around them. Another bill would give undocumented workers now living in Utah a similar guest worker status, lasting two years. The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) says the third bill, the Arizona look-alike, “requires police to interrogate individuals and verify their immigration status in a wide array of situations, promoting harmful and costly incentives for law enforcement to racially profile.”
Utah, like most states in the west and Midwest, has been down this road before.
From 1930 to 1935, 345,839 Mexicans were deported from the United States. Last year alone, the federal government deported almost 400,000. Given the growth in population, this is about the equivalent of that Depression-era wave.
In those years, “the climate of scathing anti-Mexican sentiment created intense polarization, producing a sweeping suspicion of foreigners … which linked housing congestion, strained relief services and social ills to the large presence of Mexicans,” recounts Zaragosa Vargas, professor at the University of North Carolina. Most immigrants in Utah were farm workers, many laboring in sugar beet fields for the Mormon-backed Utah and Idaho Sugar Company. Their wages were so low that families went hungry even when they were working. When beet workers in nearby Colorado tried to organize a union and went on strike, Vargas says their communities were targeted with deportations.
Then W.W. II created a labor shortage. To supply workers to growers at low wages, the government started the bracero contract labor program, bringing immigrants first into the beet fields of Stockton, California, and then into the rest of the country in 1942.
Braceros were treated as disposable, dirty and cheap. Herminio Quezada Durán, who came to Utah from Chihuahua, says ranchers often had agreements between each other to exchange or trade braceros as necessary for work. Jose Ezequiel Acevedo Perez, who came from Jerez, Zacatecas, remembers the humiliation of physical exams that treated Mexicans as louse-ridden.
“We were stripped naked in front of everyone,” he remembers, and sprayed with DDT, now an outlawed pesticide. Men in some camps were victims of criminals and pimps. Juan Contreras, from Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, tactfully recalls that “in Utah, women often went to the camps, and they were rumored to be especially fond of Mexican men.”
Utah and Idaho Sugar first used labor from the Japanese internment camps in Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; and Heart Mountain, Wyoming. When that wasn’t enough, they brought in braceros.
At the height of the cold war, in the late 1950s, the combination of enforcement and contract labor reached a peak. In 1954, 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 braceros were brought in each year.
The Civil Rights Movement ended the bracero program, and created an alternative to the deportation regime. Chicano activists of the 1960s—Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez, Bert Corona, Dolores Huerta and others—convinced Congress in 1964 to repeal Public Law 78, the law authorizing the bracero program. Farm workers went on strike the year after in Delano, California, and the United Farm Workers was born. They also helped to convince Congress in 1965 to pass immigration legislation that established new pathways for legal immigration - the family preference system. People could reunite their families in the U.S. Migrants received permanent residency visas, allowing them to live normal lives, and enjoy basic human and labor rights. Essentially, a family- and community-oriented system replaced the old labor supply/deportation program.
The new (old) deportation regime
Today Congress, and now the states, are sliding back into those cold war ideas. That slide didn’t start in Salt Lake City. For five years Congress has debated, and almost passed, bills that would have done the same thing — vastly increased immigration enforcement and set up huge new guest worker programs. Some undocumented people might have been able to gain legal status, but most bills would have forced them into a temporary status, a la Utah.
This combination was defended by Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security under President Bush. “There’s an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work,” he said, “which is you open the front door and you shut the back door.” “Opening the front door” refers to guest worker programs, and “closing the back door” means heavy immigration enforcement.
The Council on Foreign Relations proposed the same goals when President Obama took office. “We should reform the legal immigration system,” its 2009 report advocated, “so that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately to labor market needs, and enhances U.S. competitiveness.” At the same time, “we should restore the integrity of immigration laws through an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal system.” This again couples labor at competitive, or low, wages, with an enforcement regime of raids and firings.
Sound like Utah?
Today the number of deportations is rising. Thousands of undocumented workers are being fired from their jobs as part of the same enforcement policy. And in California, for instance, where only one grower historically used the current H2-A federal guest worker program for farm workers, dozens are now using it today. What Congress couldn’t or wouldn’t pass is becoming the reality on the ground.
Utah’s guest worker bill was written by a dairy farmer. “The root of this discussion is productivity,” according to the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Bill Wright. To this conservative Republican, no one has a right to a job, immigrant or native-born. “People think because you’re born here … ‘I have a right to that job, I’m going to charge what I want for my labor even if I’m not productive.’ Wrong.”
But if those immigrants try to organize and get more expensive, or are just lazy and don’t work, he warns, they “need to go.”
The Utah bills were the product of negotiations, called the Utah Compact, between the Salt Lake Chamber, a statewide business group; and the Salt Lake City Police Department and mayor’s office. The Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints and the Catholic Church signed off on it, as did some local immigrant advocates.
An unconstitutional overreach
One thing, however, that many other anti-immigrant nativists and immigrant rights advocates agree on, for different reasons, is that Utah’s bills are unconstitutional. Dan Stein, president of the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform, says, “States do not have the constitutional authority to write their own immigration policies.” FAIR wants the Federal government to stop almost all immigration and deport the 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. It sees the Utah bills as too weak, although it supports Arizona’s SB 1070.
NILC’s Marielena Hincapie calls the Utah laws “fundamentally unconstitutional. Taken together, the laws signify an even more sweeping state takeover of federal immigration regulation.” NILC supports legislation legalizing undocumented people, and believes it must pass at a Federal level.
One prominent Washington D.C. immigration think tank, the Immigration Policy Center, supported the labor supply/enforcement/legalization bills of the last few years. It also criticizes the constitutionality of state immigration bills, but declares, “Enforcement strategies must be coupled with reform of our legal system of immigration in order to meet legitimate labor force needs.”
That declaration moves beyond states’ rights to set immigration policy, and restates a vision it believes should guide immigration reform. But is it an alternative to the Utah bills?
Some immigration reformers argue for a different system, as Chicano and Asian activists did in the 1960s, that would give immigrants a way to come to the U.S with social equality and rights. Among them are the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations in California and Oaxaca, Derechos Humanos in Tucson, Ariz., the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, and the AFL-CIO’s constituency group for Latino workers, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement. They’ve agreed on the basic principles of what they call the Dignity Campaign.
People coming to the U.S. would have access to permanent residence, rather than being forced into guest worker programs. The current wave of deportations and mass firings would be halted, while protections for labor and human rights would be strengthened. To diminish job competition in an era of high unemployment, the Federal government would establish programs guaranteeing a job for anyone wanting to work. And U.S. trade policy in countries like Mexico would stop promoting unemployment and poverty, which boost corporate profits but create the pressure for migration.
Utah’s laws are no closer to changing U.S. immigration policy than are these proposals. In reality, political movement towards immigration reform is deadlocked in Washington D.C. No legislation in Salt Lake City will change that.
But that’s not really its purpose. Utah legislators want to popularize an immigration policy that has strong corporate support and deep historical roots, in one of the most conservative, Republican statues in the country. And they are well on the road toward accomplishing that.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/7098/utahs_immigration_bills_a_blast_from_the_past
By David Bacon
In These Times
March 19, 2011
Last week the Utah legislature passed three new laws that have been hailed in the media as a new, more reasonable, approach to immigration policy. Reasonable, that is, compared to Arizona’s S.B. 1070, which would allow police to stop anyone, demand immigration papers and hold her or him for deportation. Utah’s law was signed by Republican Governor Gary Herbert on Tuesday, March 15. Arizona’s S.B. 1070 is currently being challenged in court.
Utah’s bills were called “the anti-Arizona” by Frank Sharry, head of America’s Voice, a Washington D.C. immigration lobbying firm. According to Lee Hockstader, on the Washington Post’s editorial staff, the laws are “the nation’s most liberal—and most reality-based—policy on illegal immigration.”
The Utah laws, however, are not new. And they’re certainly not liberal, at least towards immigrants and workers. Labor supply programs for employers, with deportations and diminished rights for immigrants, have marked U.S. immigration policy for more than 100 years.
One bill would establish a state system to allow employers to bring people from the Mexican state of Nuevo Leon as “guest workers.” Under this program, workers would have to remain employed to stay in the country. They would not have the same set of labor and social rights as people living in the communities around them. Another bill would give undocumented workers now living in Utah a similar guest worker status, lasting two years. The National Immigration Law Center (NILC) says the third bill, the Arizona look-alike, “requires police to interrogate individuals and verify their immigration status in a wide array of situations, promoting harmful and costly incentives for law enforcement to racially profile.”
Utah, like most states in the west and Midwest, has been down this road before.
From 1930 to 1935, 345,839 Mexicans were deported from the United States. Last year alone, the federal government deported almost 400,000. Given the growth in population, this is about the equivalent of that Depression-era wave.
In those years, “the climate of scathing anti-Mexican sentiment created intense polarization, producing a sweeping suspicion of foreigners … which linked housing congestion, strained relief services and social ills to the large presence of Mexicans,” recounts Zaragosa Vargas, professor at the University of North Carolina. Most immigrants in Utah were farm workers, many laboring in sugar beet fields for the Mormon-backed Utah and Idaho Sugar Company. Their wages were so low that families went hungry even when they were working. When beet workers in nearby Colorado tried to organize a union and went on strike, Vargas says their communities were targeted with deportations.
Then W.W. II created a labor shortage. To supply workers to growers at low wages, the government started the bracero contract labor program, bringing immigrants first into the beet fields of Stockton, California, and then into the rest of the country in 1942.
Braceros were treated as disposable, dirty and cheap. Herminio Quezada Durán, who came to Utah from Chihuahua, says ranchers often had agreements between each other to exchange or trade braceros as necessary for work. Jose Ezequiel Acevedo Perez, who came from Jerez, Zacatecas, remembers the humiliation of physical exams that treated Mexicans as louse-ridden.
“We were stripped naked in front of everyone,” he remembers, and sprayed with DDT, now an outlawed pesticide. Men in some camps were victims of criminals and pimps. Juan Contreras, from Tuxtla Gutierrez, Chiapas, tactfully recalls that “in Utah, women often went to the camps, and they were rumored to be especially fond of Mexican men.”
Utah and Idaho Sugar first used labor from the Japanese internment camps in Minidoka, Idaho; Topaz, Utah; and Heart Mountain, Wyoming. When that wasn’t enough, they brought in braceros.
At the height of the cold war, in the late 1950s, the combination of enforcement and contract labor reached a peak. In 1954, 1,075,168 Mexicans were deported from the U.S. And from 1956 to 1959, between 432,491 and 445,197 braceros were brought in each year.
The Civil Rights Movement ended the bracero program, and created an alternative to the deportation regime. Chicano activists of the 1960s—Ernesto Galarza, Cesar Chavez, Bert Corona, Dolores Huerta and others—convinced Congress in 1964 to repeal Public Law 78, the law authorizing the bracero program. Farm workers went on strike the year after in Delano, California, and the United Farm Workers was born. They also helped to convince Congress in 1965 to pass immigration legislation that established new pathways for legal immigration - the family preference system. People could reunite their families in the U.S. Migrants received permanent residency visas, allowing them to live normal lives, and enjoy basic human and labor rights. Essentially, a family- and community-oriented system replaced the old labor supply/deportation program.
The new (old) deportation regime
Today Congress, and now the states, are sliding back into those cold war ideas. That slide didn’t start in Salt Lake City. For five years Congress has debated, and almost passed, bills that would have done the same thing — vastly increased immigration enforcement and set up huge new guest worker programs. Some undocumented people might have been able to gain legal status, but most bills would have forced them into a temporary status, a la Utah.
This combination was defended by Michael Chertoff, secretary of Homeland Security under President Bush. “There’s an obvious solution to the problem of illegal work,” he said, “which is you open the front door and you shut the back door.” “Opening the front door” refers to guest worker programs, and “closing the back door” means heavy immigration enforcement.
The Council on Foreign Relations proposed the same goals when President Obama took office. “We should reform the legal immigration system,” its 2009 report advocated, “so that it operates more efficiently, responds more accurately to labor market needs, and enhances U.S. competitiveness.” At the same time, “we should restore the integrity of immigration laws through an enforcement regime that strongly discourages employers and employees from operating outside that legal system.” This again couples labor at competitive, or low, wages, with an enforcement regime of raids and firings.
Sound like Utah?
Today the number of deportations is rising. Thousands of undocumented workers are being fired from their jobs as part of the same enforcement policy. And in California, for instance, where only one grower historically used the current H2-A federal guest worker program for farm workers, dozens are now using it today. What Congress couldn’t or wouldn’t pass is becoming the reality on the ground.
Utah’s guest worker bill was written by a dairy farmer. “The root of this discussion is productivity,” according to the bill’s sponsor, State Rep. Bill Wright. To this conservative Republican, no one has a right to a job, immigrant or native-born. “People think because you’re born here … ‘I have a right to that job, I’m going to charge what I want for my labor even if I’m not productive.’ Wrong.”
But if those immigrants try to organize and get more expensive, or are just lazy and don’t work, he warns, they “need to go.”
The Utah bills were the product of negotiations, called the Utah Compact, between the Salt Lake Chamber, a statewide business group; and the Salt Lake City Police Department and mayor’s office. The Mormon Church of Latter Day Saints and the Catholic Church signed off on it, as did some local immigrant advocates.
An unconstitutional overreach
One thing, however, that many other anti-immigrant nativists and immigrant rights advocates agree on, for different reasons, is that Utah’s bills are unconstitutional. Dan Stein, president of the anti-immigrant Federation for American Immigration Reform, says, “States do not have the constitutional authority to write their own immigration policies.” FAIR wants the Federal government to stop almost all immigration and deport the 12 million undocumented people living in the United States. It sees the Utah bills as too weak, although it supports Arizona’s SB 1070.
NILC’s Marielena Hincapie calls the Utah laws “fundamentally unconstitutional. Taken together, the laws signify an even more sweeping state takeover of federal immigration regulation.” NILC supports legislation legalizing undocumented people, and believes it must pass at a Federal level.
One prominent Washington D.C. immigration think tank, the Immigration Policy Center, supported the labor supply/enforcement/legalization bills of the last few years. It also criticizes the constitutionality of state immigration bills, but declares, “Enforcement strategies must be coupled with reform of our legal system of immigration in order to meet legitimate labor force needs.”
That declaration moves beyond states’ rights to set immigration policy, and restates a vision it believes should guide immigration reform. But is it an alternative to the Utah bills?
Some immigration reformers argue for a different system, as Chicano and Asian activists did in the 1960s, that would give immigrants a way to come to the U.S with social equality and rights. Among them are the Binational Front of Indigenous Organizations in California and Oaxaca, Derechos Humanos in Tucson, Ariz., the Mississippi Immigrants Rights Alliance, and the AFL-CIO’s constituency group for Latino workers, the Labor Council for Latin American Advancement. They’ve agreed on the basic principles of what they call the Dignity Campaign.
People coming to the U.S. would have access to permanent residence, rather than being forced into guest worker programs. The current wave of deportations and mass firings would be halted, while protections for labor and human rights would be strengthened. To diminish job competition in an era of high unemployment, the Federal government would establish programs guaranteeing a job for anyone wanting to work. And U.S. trade policy in countries like Mexico would stop promoting unemployment and poverty, which boost corporate profits but create the pressure for migration.
Utah’s laws are no closer to changing U.S. immigration policy than are these proposals. In reality, political movement towards immigration reform is deadlocked in Washington D.C. No legislation in Salt Lake City will change that.
But that’s not really its purpose. Utah legislators want to popularize an immigration policy that has strong corporate support and deep historical roots, in one of the most conservative, Republican statues in the country. And they are well on the road toward accomplishing that.
http://inthesetimes.com/article/7098/utahs_immigration_bills_a_blast_from_the_past
Friday, December 24, 2010
Hotel Migrante— Where Deportees Find Shelter
By David Bacon
New America Media
December 22, 2010
MEXICALI, Mexico-- Last year, almost 400,000 people were deported from the United States. That's the largest wave of deportations in U.S. history, even larger than the notorious "Operation Wetback" of the 1950s, or the mass deportations during the Great Depression.
Often the Border Patrol empties buses of deportees at the border gates of cities like Mexicali in the middle of the night, pushing people through at a time when nothing is open, and no services are available to provide them with food or shelter. Most deportees are young people. They had no money in their pockets coming to the United States, and have nothing more as they get deported back to Mexico.
These are invisible people. In the wave of anti-immigrant hysteria gripping the United States, no one asks what happens to the deportees once they're sent back to Mexico.
In Mexicali, a group of deportees and migrant rights activists have taken over an old, abandoned hotel, formerly the Hotel Centenario (the Hundred Year Hotel). They've renamed it the Hotel Migrante, or the Migrant Hotel. Just a block from the border crossing, it gives people deported from the United States a place to sleep and food to eat for a few days before they go home, or try to cross the border again. The government gives it nothing. Border Angels, the U.S.-based immigrant rights group, provides what little support the hotel gets. A cooperative of deportees cooks the food and works on fixing the building.
During the winter, about 50-60 people live there at any given time, while five or six more knock on its doors every night. Last summer, at the peak of the season when people try to cross the border looking for work, the number of deportees seeking shelter at the hotel rose to over 300.
"A lot of people get hurt trying to walk through the mountains around Mexicali," says Benjamin Campista, a cooperative member. "It's very cold there now, and when they get caught and deported, many are just wearing a T-shirt and tennis shoes. Some get sick -- those we take to the hospital. The rest stay here a few days until their family can send them money to get home, or until they decide to try to cross again."
Border Angels and the hotel collective agreed to pay the landlord 11,000 pesos a month in rent (about $900 USD), but they're already six months behind. Every day hotel residents go out to the long lines of people waiting to cross through the garita (the legal border crossing). They ask for money to support the hotel, and each person gets to keep half of what they're given. The other half goes mostly for food for the evening meal. Deportees have plenty of time to explain their situation to people standing in line, since on a recent afternoon the wait to get through the garita was two hours.
Every day Campista hears deportees tell their stories. "Three brothers stayed here last summer, before they tried to cross. A month later one came back. I saw him on the roof, crying as he looked at the mountains where the other two had died from the heat. A woman came here with her two-month-old baby. Her husband had died in the desert too."
"We're human beings!" Campista exclaims. "We're just going north to try to work. Why should we die for this? Our governments should end these violations of human rights. Then our hotel wouldn't even be necessary."
http://newamericamedia.org/2010/12/the-migrant-hotel---where-deportees-find-shelter.php
New America Media
December 22, 2010
MEXICALI, Mexico-- Last year, almost 400,000 people were deported from the United States. That's the largest wave of deportations in U.S. history, even larger than the notorious "Operation Wetback" of the 1950s, or the mass deportations during the Great Depression.
Often the Border Patrol empties buses of deportees at the border gates of cities like Mexicali in the middle of the night, pushing people through at a time when nothing is open, and no services are available to provide them with food or shelter. Most deportees are young people. They had no money in their pockets coming to the United States, and have nothing more as they get deported back to Mexico.
These are invisible people. In the wave of anti-immigrant hysteria gripping the United States, no one asks what happens to the deportees once they're sent back to Mexico.
In Mexicali, a group of deportees and migrant rights activists have taken over an old, abandoned hotel, formerly the Hotel Centenario (the Hundred Year Hotel). They've renamed it the Hotel Migrante, or the Migrant Hotel. Just a block from the border crossing, it gives people deported from the United States a place to sleep and food to eat for a few days before they go home, or try to cross the border again. The government gives it nothing. Border Angels, the U.S.-based immigrant rights group, provides what little support the hotel gets. A cooperative of deportees cooks the food and works on fixing the building.
During the winter, about 50-60 people live there at any given time, while five or six more knock on its doors every night. Last summer, at the peak of the season when people try to cross the border looking for work, the number of deportees seeking shelter at the hotel rose to over 300.
"A lot of people get hurt trying to walk through the mountains around Mexicali," says Benjamin Campista, a cooperative member. "It's very cold there now, and when they get caught and deported, many are just wearing a T-shirt and tennis shoes. Some get sick -- those we take to the hospital. The rest stay here a few days until their family can send them money to get home, or until they decide to try to cross again."
Border Angels and the hotel collective agreed to pay the landlord 11,000 pesos a month in rent (about $900 USD), but they're already six months behind. Every day hotel residents go out to the long lines of people waiting to cross through the garita (the legal border crossing). They ask for money to support the hotel, and each person gets to keep half of what they're given. The other half goes mostly for food for the evening meal. Deportees have plenty of time to explain their situation to people standing in line, since on a recent afternoon the wait to get through the garita was two hours.
Every day Campista hears deportees tell their stories. "Three brothers stayed here last summer, before they tried to cross. A month later one came back. I saw him on the roof, crying as he looked at the mountains where the other two had died from the heat. A woman came here with her two-month-old baby. Her husband had died in the desert too."
"We're human beings!" Campista exclaims. "We're just going north to try to work. Why should we die for this? Our governments should end these violations of human rights. Then our hotel wouldn't even be necessary."
http://newamericamedia.org/2010/12/the-migrant-hotel---where-deportees-find-shelter.php
Thursday, November 18, 2010
In Denial: Illegal immigration enforcers try to find a balance
By Chris Collins
The Sacramento Bee
Monday, Nov. 15, 2010
FRESNO — Brian Poulsen fought on the front lines of the war against illegal immigration for three decades. He patrolled the border near San Diego on horseback, grew a ragged beard to disguise himself as a human smuggler, arrested and deported thousands of illegal immigrants, and tracked down fake document vendors at flea markets.
His job description was clear: Do everything you can to stop illegal immigrants from coming and kick them out if they get here.
But Poulsen and other agents have discovered it's not easy to enforce immigration laws, especially those that target employers.
Aggressive crackdowns can backfire if they hurt business. A sweep of Midwestern meatpacking plants in the late 1990s, for example, prompted outrage from business and civic leaders. Immigration officials have learned to tread lightly.
Poulsen, who retired this year as the top immigration enforcement official in the central San Joaquin Valley, tried to strike a balance between stopping illegal immigration and protecting farmers' interests. His office rarely conducted audits, never issued a fine and avoided messy, high-profile raids that would permanently shut down a business and separate families.
"There's a little bit of a tightrope. I understand where the farmers are coming from," said Poulsen, who grew up harvesting potatoes in Idaho. "You don't want to see people go out of business, but at the same time, we're sworn to do a job and can't look the other way."
Things may be changing: The Obama administration has stepped up the pace of audits, which are less likely to spark a backlash than workplace raids. For example, of 16 audits conducted in the central San Joaquin Valley over the past eight years, 11 have come since late 2008.
Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties and all areas north to Oregon are covered by the San Francisco office, which has been considerably more aggressive. There have been 75 audits this year and 391 since 2004, including parts of western Nevada run out of the Reno office..
Some agriculture leaders are worried about the audits, which can hurt businesses by making them fire all the illegal workers.
But government figures show that the new effort is tame compared with the early 1990s, when immigration officials fined about 900 companies a year and audited thousands. This year, they fined 237.
Many experts say aggressively cracking down on employers will rid the nation of illegal immigrants. Because the vast majority of them come here to work, the United States would be a much less appealing destination without job opportunities.
But advocates for stricter enforcement say there is little political appetite to sever the co-dependent relationship between businesses and illegal immigrants.
And aggressive enforcement, agents have learned, can backfire.
Meat plant sweeps
In the late 1990s, in response to calls for tougher enforcement, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which later became Immigration and Customs Enforcement, blanketed Midwestern meatpacking companies with audits that identified thousands of employees suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Frightened workers left in droves, slowing slaughter-line speeds to a crawl and hurting farmers who relied on the meatpacking businesses.
"All hell broke loose," said Mark Reed, a former top INS official who was in charge of the crackdown, dubbed Operation Vanguard. "All of a sudden, these communities that wanted these people out of there realized that they needed them. They didn't realize that the kids who played on their soccer teams and the people they went to church with were going to go. They didn't realize that they were the center of their economy."
Nebraska's governor and members of Congress intervened. Operation Vanguard — which was scheduled to expand to the rest of the country — was nipped in the bud.
That's the problem with aggressive enforcement — it works too well, Reed said. The Obama administration's strategy could cause trouble, too, if it targets entire industries with audits. So far, however, ICE has focused on cases driven by leads — an approach that is more tempered than Operation Vanguard.
"They're smarter about it today," Reed said. "They're very cautiously going out and doing the audits in such a way that they won't rock the boat so much that they'll lose their authority."
But the essential problem remains: Create too much publicity about immigration enforcement and risk a backlash from politicians and business leaders. Too little, however, means businesses won't pay attention.
Roundups in the fields
The history of immigration enforcement in the Central Valley has been marked by inconsistencies and shifting policies.
Decades ago, federal agents would show up at fields in vans and helicopters to round up and deport illegal workers. Often, the workers would come right back.
David Remus, now a school librarian in Clovis, worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1970s and saw it firsthand.
"Sometimes the Border Patrol would come by and pick them up and they'd be back the next day from Mexico," he said.
In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to almost 3 million immigrants and made it a crime to hire illegal workers. Agents were required to obtain search warrants; the result was fewer raids.
Posing as smugglers
In the 1990s, the Border Patrol — which at that time wasn't restricted to the border — infiltrated human smuggling rings and tried to crack down on fake document vendors. Its agents also posed as grape growers and ranchers in the valley and asked smugglers to bring them workers.
But in 1996, the Border Patrol began withdrawing from the INS Fresno office, which covered the central San Joaquin Valley. The office was left with few resources to investigate smugglers or to document vendors or employers who hired illegal immigrants.
"We lost a lot of ground," Poulsen said. "It was very frustrating."
Acting on tips from disgruntled workers or competing businesses, agents tried to crack down on businesses that hired illegal immigrants.
But those they audited usually were able to negotiate a small fine — "a slap on the hand," Poulsen said. Agents grew tired of it and decided to focus their efforts elsewhere.
After the backlash from Operation Vanguard, INS scaled back employer enforcement efforts across the country. After the Sept. 11 attacks, INS narrowed its focus to contractors that worked at places critical to national security, such as airports and military bases. As a consequence, the number of employers fined dropped from 535 in 1998 to 13 in 2002, according to government data.
After ICE was formed in March 2003, the Fresno office began to regain its footing. But because the office had limited resources and a wide range of responsibilities, most employers escaped scrutiny, said Poul-sen, who was a supervising agent until he became the resident agent in charge of the Fresno office in 2006.
From 2003 to 2006, the office didn't audit a single company. In the past two years, following the national trend, it has audited 11. Still, it has yet to fine a single company in the central San Joaquin Valley.
The Fresno office has been even less aggressive with raids. Poulsen remembers only one, in 2004 — a boat-manufacturing business in Merced that refused to fire illegal workers. He said about a dozen illegal workers were arrested. The employer wasn't arrested or fined.
When angry employers complained to Poulsen about being audited, he told them it could be worse: "I'd say, 'Well, I'm auditing you instead of showing up with a dozen agents and shutting you down completely. I'm doing you a favor.' "
Part of the reason for his approach, he said, was that he understood the farmers' plight.
"Nobody is more empathetic to the farmworkers than I," he said. "The guys who have their grapes, they need to have their crops harvested. In our society, we think we're too good for stoop labor. There has to be somebody to do it."
During the waning years of the Bush administration, immigration agents grabbed headlines by raiding companies and deporting workers. The raids across the country drew controversy, just as Operation Vanguard did a decade earlier.
Controversy, then change
The Obama administration decided to take a different approach.
In April 2009, ICE issued a memo that downplayed the importance of raids, noting that they did little to prove that employers knowingly hired illegal immigrants.
Instead, it hired scores of auditors and directed them to build cases against businesses. If an audit shows that a business employed illegal immigrants, the owner must fire them to avoid fines of up to $3,200 for each illegal worker — or prison time.
In 2006, ICE spent just 2 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement, and not a single company was fined for hiring illegal immigrants. This year, it audited 2,196 businesses and fined 237.
Still, ICE spent only about 5 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement through April — less than a fourth of the time it spent on drug smuggling.
'Nightmare' for farmers
Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, an association of agriculture businesses in the West, said ICE audited four growers in his association last year, forcing them to fire many of their workers. He described it as a farmer's "worst nightmare."
"It was like Satan came to their door and said, 'We're taking your children because you know what? Your children sinned,' " Cunha said. "These farmers knew these workers. They were part of their community. They were part of their families. You yank them out, what does that do to that industry? To those farmers? To those workers?"
Mike Saqui, a Sacramento immigration attorney for businesses, said an audit can be destructive for businesses. One client who was audited in the middle of harvest time last year had to fire 269 of his 280 field workers.
If ICE wanted to use audits to get agriculture employers' attention, it worked. Cunha said growers worry about audits "every day now." Yet some doubt the administration's audit strategy will succeed.
Reed, the former INS official who runs an immigration consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., said ICE should take a more comprehensive strategy and audit all companies in a region in the same industry instead of its "hodgepodge" approach. Otherwise, he said, businesses will continue to hire illegal immigrants because they believe there's little risk of an audit.
Audits only 'half a loaf'?
And another expert thinks ICE needs to continue workplace raids to clamp down on employers.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, said audits alone don't do enough because illegal immigrants don't have to worry about being arrested.
"What we have now is half a loaf," she said.
Philip Martin, an immigration and farm labor expert at the University of California at Davis, said one question is whether the administration will follow its strategy consistently.
"So far, it hasn't been sustained long enough for it to have a significant effect," he said. "That's the big question: Is it going to be sustained?"
Audits aren't the only thing employers worry about. Immigration officials are deporting illegal immigrants, many of them working for farmers or construction companies, at a record pace. In the 2009-10 fiscal year, they deported 393,000, almost twice as many as four years earlier.
Much of the focus has been on deporting illegal immigrants suspected or convicted of crimes. But others often are swept up in such efforts.
That is what happened in Mendota during a February 2007 raid that was criticized by some local officials. Mendota officials said it took residents about a year to recover and the local economy suffered.
Former Fresno Mayor Alan Autry criticized ICE for being "mind-boggling in its callousness."
Erik Bonnar, the deputy field office director who supervises deportations in the San Joaquin Valley, said agents couldn't ignore the fact that some residents were illegal immigrants.
"If our officers determine that they're here illegally, then they'll take them into custody," he said.
More recently, ICE started a program in 2007 called Secure Communities that has attracted growing attention. It uses fingerprints to determine whether jail inmates are illegal immigrants, which often leads to their deportation.
Fresno, Tulare and Merced counties joined the rapidly expanding program this year. Because of jail crowding, however, many illegal immigrants arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor crimes are not booked into jail. Still, ICE officials predict that Secure Communities will help the agency dramatically increase the number of deportations.
Win Eaton, a Bakersfield-based immigration attorney who represents several agriculture employers, said his clients are "running scared" because of the audits and increasing number of deportations. The worst is yet to come, he said.
"We're seeing a great deal more enforcement activity in 2010 than we ever saw under the Bush administration," Eaton said. "What I'm most concerned about is where this could lead."
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
The Sacramento Bee
Monday, Nov. 15, 2010
FRESNO — Brian Poulsen fought on the front lines of the war against illegal immigration for three decades. He patrolled the border near San Diego on horseback, grew a ragged beard to disguise himself as a human smuggler, arrested and deported thousands of illegal immigrants, and tracked down fake document vendors at flea markets.
His job description was clear: Do everything you can to stop illegal immigrants from coming and kick them out if they get here.
But Poulsen and other agents have discovered it's not easy to enforce immigration laws, especially those that target employers.
Aggressive crackdowns can backfire if they hurt business. A sweep of Midwestern meatpacking plants in the late 1990s, for example, prompted outrage from business and civic leaders. Immigration officials have learned to tread lightly.
Poulsen, who retired this year as the top immigration enforcement official in the central San Joaquin Valley, tried to strike a balance between stopping illegal immigration and protecting farmers' interests. His office rarely conducted audits, never issued a fine and avoided messy, high-profile raids that would permanently shut down a business and separate families.
"There's a little bit of a tightrope. I understand where the farmers are coming from," said Poulsen, who grew up harvesting potatoes in Idaho. "You don't want to see people go out of business, but at the same time, we're sworn to do a job and can't look the other way."
Things may be changing: The Obama administration has stepped up the pace of audits, which are less likely to spark a backlash than workplace raids. For example, of 16 audits conducted in the central San Joaquin Valley over the past eight years, 11 have come since late 2008.
Stanislaus and San Joaquin counties and all areas north to Oregon are covered by the San Francisco office, which has been considerably more aggressive. There have been 75 audits this year and 391 since 2004, including parts of western Nevada run out of the Reno office..
Some agriculture leaders are worried about the audits, which can hurt businesses by making them fire all the illegal workers.
But government figures show that the new effort is tame compared with the early 1990s, when immigration officials fined about 900 companies a year and audited thousands. This year, they fined 237.
Many experts say aggressively cracking down on employers will rid the nation of illegal immigrants. Because the vast majority of them come here to work, the United States would be a much less appealing destination without job opportunities.
But advocates for stricter enforcement say there is little political appetite to sever the co-dependent relationship between businesses and illegal immigrants.
And aggressive enforcement, agents have learned, can backfire.
Meat plant sweeps
In the late 1990s, in response to calls for tougher enforcement, the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, which later became Immigration and Customs Enforcement, blanketed Midwestern meatpacking companies with audits that identified thousands of employees suspected of being illegal immigrants.
Frightened workers left in droves, slowing slaughter-line speeds to a crawl and hurting farmers who relied on the meatpacking businesses.
"All hell broke loose," said Mark Reed, a former top INS official who was in charge of the crackdown, dubbed Operation Vanguard. "All of a sudden, these communities that wanted these people out of there realized that they needed them. They didn't realize that the kids who played on their soccer teams and the people they went to church with were going to go. They didn't realize that they were the center of their economy."
Nebraska's governor and members of Congress intervened. Operation Vanguard — which was scheduled to expand to the rest of the country — was nipped in the bud.
That's the problem with aggressive enforcement — it works too well, Reed said. The Obama administration's strategy could cause trouble, too, if it targets entire industries with audits. So far, however, ICE has focused on cases driven by leads — an approach that is more tempered than Operation Vanguard.
"They're smarter about it today," Reed said. "They're very cautiously going out and doing the audits in such a way that they won't rock the boat so much that they'll lose their authority."
But the essential problem remains: Create too much publicity about immigration enforcement and risk a backlash from politicians and business leaders. Too little, however, means businesses won't pay attention.
Roundups in the fields
The history of immigration enforcement in the Central Valley has been marked by inconsistencies and shifting policies.
Decades ago, federal agents would show up at fields in vans and helicopters to round up and deport illegal workers. Often, the workers would come right back.
David Remus, now a school librarian in Clovis, worked for the U.S. Department of Agriculture in the 1970s and saw it firsthand.
"Sometimes the Border Patrol would come by and pick them up and they'd be back the next day from Mexico," he said.
In 1986, Congress passed the Immigration Reform and Control Act, which granted amnesty to almost 3 million immigrants and made it a crime to hire illegal workers. Agents were required to obtain search warrants; the result was fewer raids.
Posing as smugglers
In the 1990s, the Border Patrol — which at that time wasn't restricted to the border — infiltrated human smuggling rings and tried to crack down on fake document vendors. Its agents also posed as grape growers and ranchers in the valley and asked smugglers to bring them workers.
But in 1996, the Border Patrol began withdrawing from the INS Fresno office, which covered the central San Joaquin Valley. The office was left with few resources to investigate smugglers or to document vendors or employers who hired illegal immigrants.
"We lost a lot of ground," Poulsen said. "It was very frustrating."
Acting on tips from disgruntled workers or competing businesses, agents tried to crack down on businesses that hired illegal immigrants.
But those they audited usually were able to negotiate a small fine — "a slap on the hand," Poulsen said. Agents grew tired of it and decided to focus their efforts elsewhere.
After the backlash from Operation Vanguard, INS scaled back employer enforcement efforts across the country. After the Sept. 11 attacks, INS narrowed its focus to contractors that worked at places critical to national security, such as airports and military bases. As a consequence, the number of employers fined dropped from 535 in 1998 to 13 in 2002, according to government data.
After ICE was formed in March 2003, the Fresno office began to regain its footing. But because the office had limited resources and a wide range of responsibilities, most employers escaped scrutiny, said Poul-sen, who was a supervising agent until he became the resident agent in charge of the Fresno office in 2006.
From 2003 to 2006, the office didn't audit a single company. In the past two years, following the national trend, it has audited 11. Still, it has yet to fine a single company in the central San Joaquin Valley.
The Fresno office has been even less aggressive with raids. Poulsen remembers only one, in 2004 — a boat-manufacturing business in Merced that refused to fire illegal workers. He said about a dozen illegal workers were arrested. The employer wasn't arrested or fined.
When angry employers complained to Poulsen about being audited, he told them it could be worse: "I'd say, 'Well, I'm auditing you instead of showing up with a dozen agents and shutting you down completely. I'm doing you a favor.' "
Part of the reason for his approach, he said, was that he understood the farmers' plight.
"Nobody is more empathetic to the farmworkers than I," he said. "The guys who have their grapes, they need to have their crops harvested. In our society, we think we're too good for stoop labor. There has to be somebody to do it."
During the waning years of the Bush administration, immigration agents grabbed headlines by raiding companies and deporting workers. The raids across the country drew controversy, just as Operation Vanguard did a decade earlier.
Controversy, then change
The Obama administration decided to take a different approach.
In April 2009, ICE issued a memo that downplayed the importance of raids, noting that they did little to prove that employers knowingly hired illegal immigrants.
Instead, it hired scores of auditors and directed them to build cases against businesses. If an audit shows that a business employed illegal immigrants, the owner must fire them to avoid fines of up to $3,200 for each illegal worker — or prison time.
In 2006, ICE spent just 2 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement, and not a single company was fined for hiring illegal immigrants. This year, it audited 2,196 businesses and fined 237.
Still, ICE spent only about 5 percent of its staff time on worksite enforcement through April — less than a fourth of the time it spent on drug smuggling.
'Nightmare' for farmers
Manuel Cunha, president of the Fresno-based Nisei Farmers League, an association of agriculture businesses in the West, said ICE audited four growers in his association last year, forcing them to fire many of their workers. He described it as a farmer's "worst nightmare."
"It was like Satan came to their door and said, 'We're taking your children because you know what? Your children sinned,' " Cunha said. "These farmers knew these workers. They were part of their community. They were part of their families. You yank them out, what does that do to that industry? To those farmers? To those workers?"
Mike Saqui, a Sacramento immigration attorney for businesses, said an audit can be destructive for businesses. One client who was audited in the middle of harvest time last year had to fire 269 of his 280 field workers.
If ICE wanted to use audits to get agriculture employers' attention, it worked. Cunha said growers worry about audits "every day now." Yet some doubt the administration's audit strategy will succeed.
Reed, the former INS official who runs an immigration consulting firm in Tucson, Ariz., said ICE should take a more comprehensive strategy and audit all companies in a region in the same industry instead of its "hodgepodge" approach. Otherwise, he said, businesses will continue to hire illegal immigrants because they believe there's little risk of an audit.
Audits only 'half a loaf'?
And another expert thinks ICE needs to continue workplace raids to clamp down on employers.
Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Immigration Studies, said audits alone don't do enough because illegal immigrants don't have to worry about being arrested.
"What we have now is half a loaf," she said.
Philip Martin, an immigration and farm labor expert at the University of California at Davis, said one question is whether the administration will follow its strategy consistently.
"So far, it hasn't been sustained long enough for it to have a significant effect," he said. "That's the big question: Is it going to be sustained?"
Audits aren't the only thing employers worry about. Immigration officials are deporting illegal immigrants, many of them working for farmers or construction companies, at a record pace. In the 2009-10 fiscal year, they deported 393,000, almost twice as many as four years earlier.
Much of the focus has been on deporting illegal immigrants suspected or convicted of crimes. But others often are swept up in such efforts.
That is what happened in Mendota during a February 2007 raid that was criticized by some local officials. Mendota officials said it took residents about a year to recover and the local economy suffered.
Former Fresno Mayor Alan Autry criticized ICE for being "mind-boggling in its callousness."
Erik Bonnar, the deputy field office director who supervises deportations in the San Joaquin Valley, said agents couldn't ignore the fact that some residents were illegal immigrants.
"If our officers determine that they're here illegally, then they'll take them into custody," he said.
More recently, ICE started a program in 2007 called Secure Communities that has attracted growing attention. It uses fingerprints to determine whether jail inmates are illegal immigrants, which often leads to their deportation.
Fresno, Tulare and Merced counties joined the rapidly expanding program this year. Because of jail crowding, however, many illegal immigrants arrested on suspicion of misdemeanor crimes are not booked into jail. Still, ICE officials predict that Secure Communities will help the agency dramatically increase the number of deportations.
Win Eaton, a Bakersfield-based immigration attorney who represents several agriculture employers, said his clients are "running scared" because of the audits and increasing number of deportations. The worst is yet to come, he said.
"We're seeing a great deal more enforcement activity in 2010 than we ever saw under the Bush administration," Eaton said. "What I'm most concerned about is where this could lead."
© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, August 31, 2010
Easy to blame `foreigners'
BY MIRTA OJITO
The Miami Herald
August 29, 2010
Last week in New York, the police arrested a 17-year-old, charging him with robbery and menacing activities as hate crimes. According to police, the youngster, wielding a knife and yelling anti-Mexican slurs, attacked a 15-year-old Mexican boy to steal his iPod.
Earlier this month, a grand jury indicted a 17-year-old on four charges of assault and robbery as hate crimes. The youngster attacked an 18-year-old to steal $10 while hurling anti-Mexican insults.
The attacks are the latest in a wave of crimes this spring and summer against Mexicans in Staten Island, one of the four boroughs of New York, the most diverse city in the nation and one that boasts of a legendary tolerance for newcomers.
After all, this is the city that served as a port of entry to thousands of immigrants -- primarily, but not exclusively, from Europe -- during the late 1800's into the early years of the 20th century. This is also the city that still beckons immigrants with its Statue of Liberty and its implicit promise that if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
It is now clear that a handful of people from here and there are tolerable for New Yorkers of a certain disposition. An exotic accent, a scarf wrapped around the head, a long tunic, or a dark skin tone add to the flavor and the myth of the city. But too many of one group makes other groups nervous, it seems. In Port Richmond, where 11 Mexican men have been attacked since April, the majority of the students at the local public school were once black. Now, the majority are Latinos; mostly Mexican.
In these times of economic uncertainty -- the stock market continues to plunge, home sales are down and unemployment remains stubbornly high -- it is easy to blame the ``other'' for all that ails the country. Neighbors of the boy most recently arrested in Staten Island told WABC reporters the attack was not motivated by racial hatred but by grim economic realities. ``I don't think it's a hate crime, it's just a recession out there.''
In America, when the pie shrinks, no one wants to cede a piece to a "foreigner'' -- be it a German, Chinese or Mexican. As early as the late 1840's, during the years of the California Gold Rush, laws were passed ordering all foreigners to vacate certain mining areas. For years, Germans were a target (Benjamin Franklin once wrote that Germans were of the "stupid sort''); then, the tide turned against Catholics in general (priests had to hide their collar to walk the streets of Maine, New York and Boston where mobs attacked them or their churches); and Italians were once considered unacceptably dark.
In the early years of the 20th century, as the country was at war and, later, battling the Great Depression, acts of violence against Latinos became almost common place. Between the years 1900-1936, there were 174 incidents of civilian violence toward Mexicans in the United States, most of them in Texas, according to Francisco Arturo Rosales's book, Pobre Raza!: Violence, Justice, and Mobilization Among Mexico Lindo Immigrants, 1900-1936.
Later, between the years of 1954 and 1959, more than 3.7 million Latinos were deported, most of them without due process. The massive round ups and deportations were based on physical appearances. If border patrol officers thought a person "looked Mexican,'' whatever that means, the person was deported to Mexico. Non-Latinos and many non-Mexicans ended up on the other side of the Rio Grande.
Thirty-five years later, the passage of Proposition 187 in California in 1994 gave rise to a 23.5 percent increase of hate crimes against Latinos in the Los Angeles area. In 2000, in Farmingville, New York, two white men stabbed and beat two Mexican day laborers after luring them to a warehouse with promises of work. Three years later, in the same town, five teenagers torched the home of five Mexican immigrants.
And the list goes on: killings or attacks have recently been reported in Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, Utah and, yes, even Florida (in September 30, 2007, Jose Gonzales, a U.S. citizen in Avon Park returned home to find his car and garage destroyed by a fire set by an arsonist who also spray-painted an obscenity against Puerto Rico on the garage walls. No arrests were made).
Lest some of us think we are safe because we are bilingual, educated, non-Mexican and legal residents or even U.S. citizens, consider the case of Pedro Corzo, a 35-year-old Cuban-born regional manager for Del Monte Fresh Produce. In January 9, 2004, Corzo was gunned down in Dateland, Ariz. The killers -- two cousins ages 16 and 24 -- were traveling through remote sections of southern Arizona with the specific intent of killing Mexicans at random.
In the eyes of the new nativists, we are all Mexicans.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/29/1795773/easy-to-blame foreigners.html#ixzz0y0ANVDla
The Miami Herald
August 29, 2010
Last week in New York, the police arrested a 17-year-old, charging him with robbery and menacing activities as hate crimes. According to police, the youngster, wielding a knife and yelling anti-Mexican slurs, attacked a 15-year-old Mexican boy to steal his iPod.
Earlier this month, a grand jury indicted a 17-year-old on four charges of assault and robbery as hate crimes. The youngster attacked an 18-year-old to steal $10 while hurling anti-Mexican insults.
The attacks are the latest in a wave of crimes this spring and summer against Mexicans in Staten Island, one of the four boroughs of New York, the most diverse city in the nation and one that boasts of a legendary tolerance for newcomers.
After all, this is the city that served as a port of entry to thousands of immigrants -- primarily, but not exclusively, from Europe -- during the late 1800's into the early years of the 20th century. This is also the city that still beckons immigrants with its Statue of Liberty and its implicit promise that if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere.
It is now clear that a handful of people from here and there are tolerable for New Yorkers of a certain disposition. An exotic accent, a scarf wrapped around the head, a long tunic, or a dark skin tone add to the flavor and the myth of the city. But too many of one group makes other groups nervous, it seems. In Port Richmond, where 11 Mexican men have been attacked since April, the majority of the students at the local public school were once black. Now, the majority are Latinos; mostly Mexican.
In these times of economic uncertainty -- the stock market continues to plunge, home sales are down and unemployment remains stubbornly high -- it is easy to blame the ``other'' for all that ails the country. Neighbors of the boy most recently arrested in Staten Island told WABC reporters the attack was not motivated by racial hatred but by grim economic realities. ``I don't think it's a hate crime, it's just a recession out there.''
In America, when the pie shrinks, no one wants to cede a piece to a "foreigner'' -- be it a German, Chinese or Mexican. As early as the late 1840's, during the years of the California Gold Rush, laws were passed ordering all foreigners to vacate certain mining areas. For years, Germans were a target (Benjamin Franklin once wrote that Germans were of the "stupid sort''); then, the tide turned against Catholics in general (priests had to hide their collar to walk the streets of Maine, New York and Boston where mobs attacked them or their churches); and Italians were once considered unacceptably dark.
In the early years of the 20th century, as the country was at war and, later, battling the Great Depression, acts of violence against Latinos became almost common place. Between the years 1900-1936, there were 174 incidents of civilian violence toward Mexicans in the United States, most of them in Texas, according to Francisco Arturo Rosales's book, Pobre Raza!: Violence, Justice, and Mobilization Among Mexico Lindo Immigrants, 1900-1936.
Later, between the years of 1954 and 1959, more than 3.7 million Latinos were deported, most of them without due process. The massive round ups and deportations were based on physical appearances. If border patrol officers thought a person "looked Mexican,'' whatever that means, the person was deported to Mexico. Non-Latinos and many non-Mexicans ended up on the other side of the Rio Grande.
Thirty-five years later, the passage of Proposition 187 in California in 1994 gave rise to a 23.5 percent increase of hate crimes against Latinos in the Los Angeles area. In 2000, in Farmingville, New York, two white men stabbed and beat two Mexican day laborers after luring them to a warehouse with promises of work. Three years later, in the same town, five teenagers torched the home of five Mexican immigrants.
And the list goes on: killings or attacks have recently been reported in Arizona, New York, New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, Utah and, yes, even Florida (in September 30, 2007, Jose Gonzales, a U.S. citizen in Avon Park returned home to find his car and garage destroyed by a fire set by an arsonist who also spray-painted an obscenity against Puerto Rico on the garage walls. No arrests were made).
Lest some of us think we are safe because we are bilingual, educated, non-Mexican and legal residents or even U.S. citizens, consider the case of Pedro Corzo, a 35-year-old Cuban-born regional manager for Del Monte Fresh Produce. In January 9, 2004, Corzo was gunned down in Dateland, Ariz. The killers -- two cousins ages 16 and 24 -- were traveling through remote sections of southern Arizona with the specific intent of killing Mexicans at random.
In the eyes of the new nativists, we are all Mexicans.
http://www.miamiherald.com/2010/08/29/1795773/easy-to-blame foreigners.html#ixzz0y0ANVDla
Monday, March 29, 2010
Jeffrey Kaye: What if the immigrants just 'keep on coming'?
If history is any guide, it depends entirely on whether the economy is growing.
By JEFFREY KAYE
The Star Tribune (MN)
The Obama administration has set a record for deportations of illegal immigrants, much to the dismay of advocates who had hoped the president would reverse the enforcement policies of his predecessor.
In fiscal year 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 387,790 people, a 5 percent increase over the previous year.
President Obama may have made immigrant-friendly promises during the campaign, but in the context of history, the deportations were practically inevitable. Immigrants have always been welcomed during good economic times, only to be vilified when times get tough.
In the latter 19th century, nearly 250,000 migrants from China, many recruited by U.S. companies, crossed the Pacific Ocean to work in America's fields and mines and on the railroads. But after the boom went bust, hatred -- motivated by racism and fear that Chinese workers were depressing wages -- rippled through national politics. In an effort to bring a halt to most legal immigration from China, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It was the first time federal law had been used to limit migration by nationality.
During World War I, agribusinesses, worried about a labor shortage, prevailed on Herbert Hoover, then head of the U.S. Food Administration, to pressure Washington to allow in more Mexican farm workers. But with the onset of the Depression, Americans showed little tolerance for the migrants so recently courted. Hoover, now president, initiated a mass deportation program that continued into the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The cycle continued in the decades that followed. By 1981, as unemployment climbed, Attorney General William French Smith sounded the alarm: "We have lost control of our borders," and the Reagan administration unveiled an immigration reform plan to combine increased enforcement with legalization.
The reforms did little to stop illegal immigration, which ticked upward in the early 1990s as the service economy created a need for low-skilled workers. The combination of continued migration and economic uncertainty made for a volatile brew. In 1994, activists campaigned for a California ballot initiative designed to eliminate public social services for illegal migrants. Politicians seized on an emotional issue.
"They keep on coming!" an announcer ominously intoned in a campaign commercial, over black-and-white video of Mexicans rushing across the border.
Stepped-up enforcement was hardly a partisan issue. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both continued the militarization of the border.
In the face of declining congressional prospects for his own reform package, Obama is using executive powers to step up immigration enforcement. In doing so, he is following a long tradition: As goes the economy, so goes immigration policy.
Jeffrey Kaye is the author of "Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration," to be published in April. He wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/89183102.html?page=1&c=y
By JEFFREY KAYE
The Star Tribune (MN)
The Obama administration has set a record for deportations of illegal immigrants, much to the dismay of advocates who had hoped the president would reverse the enforcement policies of his predecessor.
In fiscal year 2009, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement deported 387,790 people, a 5 percent increase over the previous year.
President Obama may have made immigrant-friendly promises during the campaign, but in the context of history, the deportations were practically inevitable. Immigrants have always been welcomed during good economic times, only to be vilified when times get tough.
In the latter 19th century, nearly 250,000 migrants from China, many recruited by U.S. companies, crossed the Pacific Ocean to work in America's fields and mines and on the railroads. But after the boom went bust, hatred -- motivated by racism and fear that Chinese workers were depressing wages -- rippled through national politics. In an effort to bring a halt to most legal immigration from China, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. It was the first time federal law had been used to limit migration by nationality.
During World War I, agribusinesses, worried about a labor shortage, prevailed on Herbert Hoover, then head of the U.S. Food Administration, to pressure Washington to allow in more Mexican farm workers. But with the onset of the Depression, Americans showed little tolerance for the migrants so recently courted. Hoover, now president, initiated a mass deportation program that continued into the administration of President Franklin D. Roosevelt.
The cycle continued in the decades that followed. By 1981, as unemployment climbed, Attorney General William French Smith sounded the alarm: "We have lost control of our borders," and the Reagan administration unveiled an immigration reform plan to combine increased enforcement with legalization.
The reforms did little to stop illegal immigration, which ticked upward in the early 1990s as the service economy created a need for low-skilled workers. The combination of continued migration and economic uncertainty made for a volatile brew. In 1994, activists campaigned for a California ballot initiative designed to eliminate public social services for illegal migrants. Politicians seized on an emotional issue.
"They keep on coming!" an announcer ominously intoned in a campaign commercial, over black-and-white video of Mexicans rushing across the border.
Stepped-up enforcement was hardly a partisan issue. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush both continued the militarization of the border.
In the face of declining congressional prospects for his own reform package, Obama is using executive powers to step up immigration enforcement. In doing so, he is following a long tradition: As goes the economy, so goes immigration policy.
Jeffrey Kaye is the author of "Moving Millions: How Coyote Capitalism Fuels Global Immigration," to be published in April. He wrote this article for the Los Angeles Times.
http://www.startribune.com/opinion/commentary/89183102.html?page=1&c=y
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
U.S. deportations double over 10 years
by Kyung Jin Lee
Medill Reports
Feb 23, 2010
The United States almost doubled the deportation rate of foreign nationals over a 10-year span, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s statistical yearbook.
Chicago immigration attorney Salvador Cicero said in recent years he has seen a greater number of immigrants stopped by local police for frivolous reasons, like obstruction of view in a car because of a crucifix hanging on the rearview mirror.
“And through this mechanism [the police] would stop people, and many times they would illegally search [immigrants’] cars and thereafter ask them for their legal status and detain them,” Cicero said. “And then they would end up in immigration custody.”
In 2008, the last year for which Homeland Security has released figures, more than 90 percent of the almost 359,000 total deportees were sent to either North or Central America.
Mexican nationals have had the highest rate of removals throughout the decade, making up more than 80 percent of total deportations in 1999. However, this share dropped to about 70 percent in 2008, with other nationalities making up more of the total.
Other countries that led in receiving U.S. deportees throughout the past decade include: Honduras, Guatemala, Dominican Republic and Colombia. In 2008, U.S. sent 17 percent of all deportees to Honduras, more than an eight-fold increase since 1999. Comparatively, the percentage of deportations to Guatemala increased 300 percent during the same time period whereas forced repatriation to Colombia and Dominican Republic dropped by half.
Cicero pointed out that a 2008 immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, resulted in the arrest of about 400 migrant workers, most of whom were Guatemalan. He speculated immigration officials might have chosen the site because Guatemalans are not as savvy as Mexicans on how to deal with the immigration system.
The Mexican government has been spending a lot of resources disseminating information on the rights of their citizens for many years, Cicero said.
“That has a direct effect on why people might choose voluntary departure versus fighting deportation,” he said.
Gail Montenegro, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Chicago, said her agency does not target potential deportees by nationality.
“We target by evidence and intelligence, based on long-term criminal investigations,” Montenegro said. She said ICE has initiatives to target criminal immigrants, including street gangs.
Among deported immigrants in 2008, almost one-third of the cases were due to criminal activity. “The most common categories of crime committed by aliens removed … included illegal drug activity, immigration violation and assault,” according to an annual report issued by the Office of Immigration Statistics. These activities accounted for almost two-thirds of all deportations based on criminal charges.
For the two-thirds of immigrants deported without having committed a crime, Anita Maddali, staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Chicago, said there are numerous ways undocumented immigrants could get deported.
“For instance, if somebody goes through asylum proceedings, loses their asylum case and loses the appeal, then they would be deported back to their home countries,” Maddali said. Other noncriminal ways immigrants can get deported include: workplace raids, applying for and being denied certain immigration benefits, and/or air travel, where they are subject to identification verification.
Brazil and Jamaica both appear on the top-10 list of deportees nine years out of 10, while Canada and Ecuador appear seven times. Nicaragua, Haiti and Peru have also made occasional showings. In 2004, China ranked No. 10, making it the only country from neither North nor South America to make the list. These eight countries have small numbers and combined make up less than three percent of the total.
The combined budgets of the agencies charged with enforcing deportations have risen substantially over a seven-year span, according to the Homeland Security’s Budget-in-Brief reports. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection budgets nearly doubled to almost $14.5 billion from $7.5 billion between 2002 and 2008.
Despite their efforts, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has not declined over the past 10 years. The Department of Homeland Security and the Pew Hispanic Center estimate this segment of society has increased by more than 3 million since 2000.
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=157904
Medill Reports
Feb 23, 2010
The United States almost doubled the deportation rate of foreign nationals over a 10-year span, according to the Department of Homeland Security’s statistical yearbook.
Chicago immigration attorney Salvador Cicero said in recent years he has seen a greater number of immigrants stopped by local police for frivolous reasons, like obstruction of view in a car because of a crucifix hanging on the rearview mirror.
“And through this mechanism [the police] would stop people, and many times they would illegally search [immigrants’] cars and thereafter ask them for their legal status and detain them,” Cicero said. “And then they would end up in immigration custody.”
In 2008, the last year for which Homeland Security has released figures, more than 90 percent of the almost 359,000 total deportees were sent to either North or Central America.
Mexican nationals have had the highest rate of removals throughout the decade, making up more than 80 percent of total deportations in 1999. However, this share dropped to about 70 percent in 2008, with other nationalities making up more of the total.
Other countries that led in receiving U.S. deportees throughout the past decade include: Honduras, Guatemala, Dominican Republic and Colombia. In 2008, U.S. sent 17 percent of all deportees to Honduras, more than an eight-fold increase since 1999. Comparatively, the percentage of deportations to Guatemala increased 300 percent during the same time period whereas forced repatriation to Colombia and Dominican Republic dropped by half.
Cicero pointed out that a 2008 immigration raid in Postville, Iowa, resulted in the arrest of about 400 migrant workers, most of whom were Guatemalan. He speculated immigration officials might have chosen the site because Guatemalans are not as savvy as Mexicans on how to deal with the immigration system.
The Mexican government has been spending a lot of resources disseminating information on the rights of their citizens for many years, Cicero said.
“That has a direct effect on why people might choose voluntary departure versus fighting deportation,” he said.
Gail Montenegro, spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Chicago, said her agency does not target potential deportees by nationality.
“We target by evidence and intelligence, based on long-term criminal investigations,” Montenegro said. She said ICE has initiatives to target criminal immigrants, including street gangs.
Among deported immigrants in 2008, almost one-third of the cases were due to criminal activity. “The most common categories of crime committed by aliens removed … included illegal drug activity, immigration violation and assault,” according to an annual report issued by the Office of Immigration Statistics. These activities accounted for almost two-thirds of all deportations based on criminal charges.
For the two-thirds of immigrants deported without having committed a crime, Anita Maddali, staff attorney for the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Chicago, said there are numerous ways undocumented immigrants could get deported.
“For instance, if somebody goes through asylum proceedings, loses their asylum case and loses the appeal, then they would be deported back to their home countries,” Maddali said. Other noncriminal ways immigrants can get deported include: workplace raids, applying for and being denied certain immigration benefits, and/or air travel, where they are subject to identification verification.
Brazil and Jamaica both appear on the top-10 list of deportees nine years out of 10, while Canada and Ecuador appear seven times. Nicaragua, Haiti and Peru have also made occasional showings. In 2004, China ranked No. 10, making it the only country from neither North nor South America to make the list. These eight countries have small numbers and combined make up less than three percent of the total.
The combined budgets of the agencies charged with enforcing deportations have risen substantially over a seven-year span, according to the Homeland Security’s Budget-in-Brief reports. The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the U.S. Customs and Border Protection budgets nearly doubled to almost $14.5 billion from $7.5 billion between 2002 and 2008.
Despite their efforts, the number of undocumented immigrants in the U.S. has not declined over the past 10 years. The Department of Homeland Security and the Pew Hispanic Center estimate this segment of society has increased by more than 3 million since 2000.
http://news.medill.northwestern.edu/chicago/news.aspx?id=157904
Wednesday, February 17, 2010
Poll: Majority doesn't favor deportation
By Peggy Fikac
San Antonio Express-News
February 15, 2010
AUSTIN — More Texas voters think unauthorized immigrants should be allowed to stay in the U.S., through either a path to citizenship or work visas, than favor deporting them, according to a new San Antonio Express-News-Houston Chronicle poll.
But the poll showed division on the issue, with 38 percent of respondents favoring deportation. Of the three possibilities offered, that was the answer that got the most support.
Twenty-nine percent favored a way for unauthorized immigrants to attain citizenship, and 23 percent supported work visas.
Pollster Mickey Blum attributed some of the responses to the structure of the question: “Two of them involved staying; one seemed a little bit like a middle road. ... Some people could have grabbed that so they didn't have to say either deport them or give them a path to citizenship.”
There was a partisan split on the answers, with 45 percent of Republicans supporting deportation, compared with 28.4 percent of Democrats.
“The young seem to see this as kind of, ‘Yes, just let them have the path to citizenship,'” Blum said. A total of 42.3 percent of those under 30 supported that option, compared to 27 percent of those over 30.
She also noted that African Americans gave the most support to a pathway to citizenship: 39.6 percent, compared with 26.7 percent of Anglos and 32.1 percent of Hispanics.
“There have been times when people have thought that minorities would be in competition with each other or would not be supportive of each other,” Blum said. African Americans “were clearly supportive of that (path to citizenship). They were not looking to say, ‘Oh, wait, that's competition for us and send 'em back.' ... The groups that are in favor of deportation are whites and Republicans.”
Among Anglo voters, 43.5 percent favor deportation.
In Bexar County, 28.1 percent favored deportation, 31.5 percent favored a path to citizenship and 33.8 percent chose work visas.
In the Houston area, 37.3 percent favor deportation, 33.7 percent a path to citizenship and 19.1 percent work visas.
The question was among several asked on issues in advance of the primary elections. The poll of Texas voters was conducted for a consortium of Texas newspapers by Blum & Weprin Associates Inc. from Feb. 2 to 10. Among other findings:
• Given a menu of options to balance the state budget, 41 percent picked cuts in highway funding, 20 percent chose higher state taxes and fees, 11 percent would cut health care for the poor and 7 percent would cut education.
• To pay for more needed highway construction, the most popular choice was to increase toll roads, at 21 percent, followed by borrowing money using state bonds at 17 percent, increasing the state gasoline tax at 16 percent, taking money from other programs at 15 percent and allowing “local option” gas taxes in metro areas at 10 percent.
• Three out of four respondents favored a term limit on the time someone can serve as governor.
• Likely GOP primary voters said state issues that the governor has to deal with are more important to their votes than sending a message to Washington, 71 percent to 25 percent.
• Jobs and the economy were the most important issues to those who plan to vote in the GOP primary, followed by the budget and taxes.
The issue of immigration also was polled in Texas by Blum & Weprin four years ago. Then, when asked whether unauthorized immigrants hurt or help the U.S. economy, 56 percent said hurt and 33 percent said help. Also, 47 percent opposed a proposal to build a 2,000-mile security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border; 44 percent favored the idea.
In the new poll, Rice University political science Professor Mark Jones said, the results seem a bit high on deportation. But he said there's more support for deportation in Texas than in the country as a whole.
Nationally, he said, 67 percent generally support a path to citizenship, depending on how the question is posed and whether qualifiers are put on the idea, such as granting such status to those who don't have criminal records and who pay a fine.
Jones also said the issue isn't as simple as a percentage.
“The intensity varies on those two sides,” he said. It's a “very intense and salient” issue for those who favor deportation, while those who favor a path to citizenship might not have the same strength of feeling.
The issue plays into a potential November matchup between GOP Gov. Rick Perry and former Houston Mayor Bill White, who is vying for the Democratic nod for governor, and into the future of the Republican Party overall, Jones said.
“The Republicans have had the luxury over the past dozen years of essentially not worrying about the Latino voters. George W. Bush did quite well with Latino voters, but since then you've seen a policy more by the Republican Party that, if anything, it alienates Latino voters here in Texas,” he said.
Lawmakers of opposing parties mentioned the political ramifications.
“Why would Democrats not want to give 20 million illegal aliens amnesty with a pathway to citizenship? Because if they do ... they will create 20 million instant voters with a tendency to vote for Democrats, because they will continue to need health care and free education in the United States, and the Democrats are more than willing to give it to them,” said Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, who has pushed bills targeting unauthorized immigrants.
The Homeland Security Department has estimated that the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. was 10.8 million in January 2009.
State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, said, “From a Democratic standpoint, it behooves the Democratic Party to have Republicans like Leo Berman spew their hateful rhetoric. That's (creating) the next generation of Hispanics that will never vote Republican.”
The poll's questions were asked by phone of a random sample of 1,508 registered voters. Of them, 464 were likely Republican primary voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for registered voters and plus or minus 4.5 percentage points for likely GOP primary voters.
http://www.sacultura.com/Poll_Majority_doesnt_favor_deportation.html
San Antonio Express-News
February 15, 2010
AUSTIN — More Texas voters think unauthorized immigrants should be allowed to stay in the U.S., through either a path to citizenship or work visas, than favor deporting them, according to a new San Antonio Express-News-Houston Chronicle poll.
But the poll showed division on the issue, with 38 percent of respondents favoring deportation. Of the three possibilities offered, that was the answer that got the most support.
Twenty-nine percent favored a way for unauthorized immigrants to attain citizenship, and 23 percent supported work visas.
Pollster Mickey Blum attributed some of the responses to the structure of the question: “Two of them involved staying; one seemed a little bit like a middle road. ... Some people could have grabbed that so they didn't have to say either deport them or give them a path to citizenship.”
There was a partisan split on the answers, with 45 percent of Republicans supporting deportation, compared with 28.4 percent of Democrats.
“The young seem to see this as kind of, ‘Yes, just let them have the path to citizenship,'” Blum said. A total of 42.3 percent of those under 30 supported that option, compared to 27 percent of those over 30.
She also noted that African Americans gave the most support to a pathway to citizenship: 39.6 percent, compared with 26.7 percent of Anglos and 32.1 percent of Hispanics.
“There have been times when people have thought that minorities would be in competition with each other or would not be supportive of each other,” Blum said. African Americans “were clearly supportive of that (path to citizenship). They were not looking to say, ‘Oh, wait, that's competition for us and send 'em back.' ... The groups that are in favor of deportation are whites and Republicans.”
Among Anglo voters, 43.5 percent favor deportation.
In Bexar County, 28.1 percent favored deportation, 31.5 percent favored a path to citizenship and 33.8 percent chose work visas.
In the Houston area, 37.3 percent favor deportation, 33.7 percent a path to citizenship and 19.1 percent work visas.
The question was among several asked on issues in advance of the primary elections. The poll of Texas voters was conducted for a consortium of Texas newspapers by Blum & Weprin Associates Inc. from Feb. 2 to 10. Among other findings:
• Given a menu of options to balance the state budget, 41 percent picked cuts in highway funding, 20 percent chose higher state taxes and fees, 11 percent would cut health care for the poor and 7 percent would cut education.
• To pay for more needed highway construction, the most popular choice was to increase toll roads, at 21 percent, followed by borrowing money using state bonds at 17 percent, increasing the state gasoline tax at 16 percent, taking money from other programs at 15 percent and allowing “local option” gas taxes in metro areas at 10 percent.
• Three out of four respondents favored a term limit on the time someone can serve as governor.
• Likely GOP primary voters said state issues that the governor has to deal with are more important to their votes than sending a message to Washington, 71 percent to 25 percent.
• Jobs and the economy were the most important issues to those who plan to vote in the GOP primary, followed by the budget and taxes.
The issue of immigration also was polled in Texas by Blum & Weprin four years ago. Then, when asked whether unauthorized immigrants hurt or help the U.S. economy, 56 percent said hurt and 33 percent said help. Also, 47 percent opposed a proposal to build a 2,000-mile security fence along the U.S.-Mexico border; 44 percent favored the idea.
In the new poll, Rice University political science Professor Mark Jones said, the results seem a bit high on deportation. But he said there's more support for deportation in Texas than in the country as a whole.
Nationally, he said, 67 percent generally support a path to citizenship, depending on how the question is posed and whether qualifiers are put on the idea, such as granting such status to those who don't have criminal records and who pay a fine.
Jones also said the issue isn't as simple as a percentage.
“The intensity varies on those two sides,” he said. It's a “very intense and salient” issue for those who favor deportation, while those who favor a path to citizenship might not have the same strength of feeling.
The issue plays into a potential November matchup between GOP Gov. Rick Perry and former Houston Mayor Bill White, who is vying for the Democratic nod for governor, and into the future of the Republican Party overall, Jones said.
“The Republicans have had the luxury over the past dozen years of essentially not worrying about the Latino voters. George W. Bush did quite well with Latino voters, but since then you've seen a policy more by the Republican Party that, if anything, it alienates Latino voters here in Texas,” he said.
Lawmakers of opposing parties mentioned the political ramifications.
“Why would Democrats not want to give 20 million illegal aliens amnesty with a pathway to citizenship? Because if they do ... they will create 20 million instant voters with a tendency to vote for Democrats, because they will continue to need health care and free education in the United States, and the Democrats are more than willing to give it to them,” said Rep. Leo Berman, R-Tyler, who has pushed bills targeting unauthorized immigrants.
The Homeland Security Department has estimated that the number of unauthorized immigrants in the U.S. was 10.8 million in January 2009.
State Sen. Leticia Van de Putte, D-San Antonio, said, “From a Democratic standpoint, it behooves the Democratic Party to have Republicans like Leo Berman spew their hateful rhetoric. That's (creating) the next generation of Hispanics that will never vote Republican.”
The poll's questions were asked by phone of a random sample of 1,508 registered voters. Of them, 464 were likely Republican primary voters. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.5 percentage points for registered voters and plus or minus 4.5 percentage points for likely GOP primary voters.
http://www.sacultura.com/Poll_Majority_doesnt_favor_deportation.html
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
U.S. citizens wrongly detained, deported by ICE
Tyche Hendricks
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, July 27, 2009
(07-26) 18:37 PDT -- The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona prison for 13 months.
Veloz had to prove his citizenship from behind bars. An aunt helped him track down his father's birth certificate and his own, his parents' marriage certificate, his father's school, military and Social Security records.
After nine months, a judge determined that he was a citizen, but immigration authorities appealed the decision. He was detained for five more months before he found legal help and a judge ordered his case dropped.
"It was a nightmare," said Veloz, 37, a Los Angeles air conditioning installer.
Veloz is one of hundreds of U.S. citizens who have landed in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and struggled to prove they don't belong there, according to advocacy groups and legal scholars, who have tracked such cases around the country. Some citizens have been deported.
By law, immigration authorities have jurisdiction only over noncitizens. Citizens, whether native-born or naturalized, cannot be deported.
As ICE increased its collaboration with state and local police and prisons under changes to immigration laws and policies in recent years, some detainees who have had a run-in with the law drop through a trapdoor from the criminal justice system into deportation proceedings.
In immigration detention it falls to the detainees to prove their citizenship. But detainees don't have the constitutional protections, such as the right to legal counsel, that would help them prove their case.
And many of those who wind up in immigration custody are frequently those who might have the most difficulty proving their citizenship. Many were born abroad and acquired citizenship through a U.S.-born parent, like Veloz, or a parent who became a naturalized citizen. Some have mental health problems. And frequently they are poor, as those who can afford a lawyer get out more quickly.
"These are people who are the most vulnerable," said Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project. "People are being locked up without bond hearings, often for long periods."
A growing chorus of legal experts says these detentions are unconstitutional.
"The constitution is the same that applies to U.S.-born citizens as to naturalized citizens," said Sin Yen Ling, an attorney at San Francisco's Asian Law Caucus. "Detaining these folks is creating a third category of people with a different set of rights."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials insist they would never knowingly detain or deport a U.S. citizen.
Asked about citizens winding up in immigration detention, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversees ICE, told The Chronicle: "We're always concerned about that. If there's an error made, we want to rectify it as soon as possible."
In April, after The Chronicle reported on a Modesto man in immigration detention, ICE released him and dropped its deportation case against him. Douglas Centeno was born in Nicaragua but derived citizenship when his father naturalized while he was a boy. He was jailed for four months.
A lack of rights
People charged in the criminal justice system have a range of constitutional rights, including the right to a speedy and public trial before an impartial jury and the right to legal counsel even if they can't afford to hire a lawyer. Criminal detainees have the right to a telephone call, to be brought before a judge, usually within 48 hours, and to be told of the charges against them.
Immigration matters, however, are civil, not criminal, so those protections do not apply. Still, the U.S. Constitution is designed to protect citizens from detention without due process. But citizens in immigration detention are not being afforded that due process, advocates say.
Immigration detainees are routinely shipped to remote jails where free legal aid is unavailable, their families are not notified of their whereabouts, and they are often denied access to telephones, mail and even medical care, according to a March report by Amnesty International and several federal audits.
"Throwing people into a system where they're sitting 3,000 miles away without a lawyer and trying to prove they're a citizen - they're making people make their arguments with two hands tied behind their back," said Nancy Morawetz, a professor at New York University School of Law and an expert on deportation law.
In January, Napolitano ordered a full review of ICE detention and removal operations. ICE spokeswoman Cori Bassett said she did not know when the review would be completed or whether its findings would be made public.
Immigration officials must balance civil liberties against security concerns, some observers say, and wrongful detentions are rare.
"ICE is not going to pursue anyone unless they can really justify the cause for it," said Janice Kephart, national security director at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.
Fighting the system
That's not what happened to Hector Veloz.
Before his birth, Veloz's U.S.-born father was sent to Vietnam, so his pregnant mother stayed with relatives in Mexico and Veloz was born there. Months later, the family returned to the United States and has lived here since.
Veloz was automatically a citizen at birth, though his parents never obtained his certificate of citizenship.
In 2006, Veloz was convicted of receiving stolen property after purchasing a car that had been stolen. He served eight months and was about to be released from prison when he was turned over to ICE.
"I said, 'I'm a U.S. citizen, why am I being put through deportation?' " he recalled.
At the ICE prison in Arizona, the paperwork stated that he had entered the country illegally and that his father was a Mexican citizen.
"It was all incorrect information," Veloz said.
Immigration lawyers say locking up Veloz and others like him violates the 1971 Non-Detention Act, which says the U.S. government cannot detain citizens without an act of Congress.
ICE's presumption that everyone in immigration custody is an alien undermines the act, said Holly Cooper, a professor of immigration law at UC Davis.
"The system is set up so even if they believe you, you have to prove it in court. It could take six months to five years to prove it and you're detained in the meantime," said Cooper, who helped Veloz win his freedom on appeal. "You give up your citizenship at the prison door."
Tough to prove
A person who is born abroad to U.S. parents, as Veloz was, is a citizen at birth. And a foreign-born child automatically derives citizenship when a parent naturalizes, though they may not realize it. Without documentation at hand, or an attorney's help, however, it can be tough to prove.
"I don't carry my birth certificate around with me and I bet you don't," NYU's Morawetz said. "ICE ought to know the law. Individuals might not, but the government is supposed to. They're the experts."
ICE's Bassett said that officials work hard to ensure that they deport only aliens. In rare instances, she said, the government might detain an actual U.S. citizen because that person claimed to be an alien.
"With somebody who misrepresents their true identity and makes a false statement to an ICE officer, it creates a problem for the government and for themselves," she said.
The number of people in detention has tripled over the past dozen years. Immigration authorities now detain more than 400,000 people a year. Analysts say that is leading to more citizens wrongly detained by ICE.
A study by the nonprofit Vera Institute, conducted for the U.S. Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review, found more than 700 people at several detention facilities between 2006 and 2008 who said they planned to pursue claims of U.S. citizenship.
Jacqueline Stevens, a UC Santa Barbara professor of law and society, said she had identified 160 cases of people in Arizona and California whom she believed had credible claims to citizenship. And several immigrant legal aid groups have helped free dozens of other citizens in recent years.
In addition to U.S. citizens, there are other inmates in immigration detention who may not be deportable, legal analysts say. They include lawful permanent residents who have committed crimes that are not grave enough for deportation, and asylum seekers locked up until their cases are decided.
The fact that citizens are imprisoned in a system designed to deport them points to potential problems for these other detainees, said Chuck Roth, litigation director for the National Immigration Justice Center in Chicago.
"If it can happen to U.S. citizens, you can imagine how few procedural protections are available to everybody else."
Deportation sagas: Citizens tell their harrowing stories of detention and deportation by ICE. A9
Stories of detention, deportation by ICE
Mistake on form
When Brian Lyttle got word on April 22 from the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala that his brother Mark had been deported to Mexico and bumped around Central America for three months, he was floored.
The family had been searching for 31-year-old Mark and feared he was lost or dead.
Mark Lyttle was born in Rowan County, N.C., and had never left the United States. He speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican ancestry.
But Mark Lyttle suffers from mental illness. He has bipolar disorder, which requires medication, and is also mentally disabled.
He had been living in a group home when he got into trouble for inappropriately touching an employee, said Neil Rambana, an immigration lawyer helping the family. Lyttle pled guilty to a misdemeanor and served 85 days in jail. Instead of being released, he was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement because a jail form listed his place of birth as Mexico.
ICE did not investigate his citizenship. He spent two months at an Atlanta detention center just miles from his mother, who didn't know where he was.
At one point Lyttle signed an ICE document saying he was a Mexican citizen, but two days later he signed another stating that he was born in the United States. He went before a judge in December 2008 as part of a group hearing and accepted "expedited removal," an uncontested deportation.
Brian Lyttle, who serves in the U.S. Army along with his other brother, Tommy, is furious.
"(We're) an all-American family with two soldiers and a family member who happens to be handicapped," he said. "It's like spitting on my uniform that you would do that to my brother."
Suspicious accent
Houston chef Leonard Robert Parrish, 52, wasn't locked up by ICE or deported, but he did run afoul of a law intended for illegal immigrants.
The Brooklyn-born Parrish went down to the Harris County Sheriff's Office in September to clear up a problem over a couple of bounced checks. He wound up in jail on immigration charges. He was strip-searched and spent 12 hours in custody.
"The deputy told me I had a foreign accent," Parrish recalled. "I told him I had an East Coast accent. He said, 'It sounds like a foreign accent to me.' "
A 2008 Texas law required a person's citizenship status be linked to his driver's license. A sheriff's deputy told Parrish he was detained because when they ran his driver's license information through their computer, it said that his citizenship status was "unknown."
"I served on a murder jury in Texas and they can't find out I'm a citizen?" asked Parrish. "I'm still fighting. ... Nobody wants to take responsibility for locking me up for no reason."
Sent to Honduras
According to her birth certificate, Diane Williams was born in Metairie, La., on Aug. 23, 1974.
So Williams was shocked on Jan. 18 when, hours after she was released from a Houston jail on prostitution charges, immigration agents showed up at her apartment and arrested her, saying she was a deportable alien.
"I had a copy of my birth certificate, but they said they didn't know if it was real or not," she said.
Williams, who has bipolar disorder, was denied medication during her three weeks in ICE detention, according to her Houston lawyer, Lawrence Rushton.
She at first refused to sign a deportation order waiving her right to court review, but did so after agents threatened that she would be jailed for years and deported anyway, Williams said.
On Feb. 9, she was deported to Honduras, where she spent nearly two months, Rushton said.
Eventually, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa issued Williams a temporary passport, after her mother sent documents proving her identity. On March 31, she flew back to New Orleans.
"I've had citizens who end up being detained," Rushton said, "but this is the first case where I've seen someone deported who's clearly and obviously a U.S. citizen."
Protecting rights
A bill introduced earlier this year by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Los Angeles, seeks to ensure fair and humane treatment of people in immigration detention.
It would codify the policies governing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention standards and would encourage the agency to make wider use of alternatives to detention, such as releasing a person on bond or with an electronic ankle bracelet to track his movements.
The bill would also guarantee that detainees have access to telephones and medical care; require that detainees who do have legal counsel not be transferred to jails far from their lawyers; and that all detainees get legal orientation from an outside group.
In the Senate, New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez plans to introduce a bill later this summer intended to protect citizens from winding up in ICE detention.
That bill would require that detainees are screened to identify people with citizenship claims and notify them of free nonprofit legal services; encourage the use of alternatives to detention for people who don't pose a flight risk or a danger to public safety or national security; and create an ICE ombudsman to investigate complaints.
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/27/MNGQ17C8GC.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
San Francisco Chronicle Staff Writer
Monday, July 27, 2009
(07-26) 18:37 PDT -- The son of a decorated Vietnam veteran, Hector Veloz is a U.S. citizen, but in 2007 immigration officials mistook him for an illegal immigrant and locked him in an Arizona prison for 13 months.
Veloz had to prove his citizenship from behind bars. An aunt helped him track down his father's birth certificate and his own, his parents' marriage certificate, his father's school, military and Social Security records.
After nine months, a judge determined that he was a citizen, but immigration authorities appealed the decision. He was detained for five more months before he found legal help and a judge ordered his case dropped.
"It was a nightmare," said Veloz, 37, a Los Angeles air conditioning installer.
Veloz is one of hundreds of U.S. citizens who have landed in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and struggled to prove they don't belong there, according to advocacy groups and legal scholars, who have tracked such cases around the country. Some citizens have been deported.
By law, immigration authorities have jurisdiction only over noncitizens. Citizens, whether native-born or naturalized, cannot be deported.
As ICE increased its collaboration with state and local police and prisons under changes to immigration laws and policies in recent years, some detainees who have had a run-in with the law drop through a trapdoor from the criminal justice system into deportation proceedings.
In immigration detention it falls to the detainees to prove their citizenship. But detainees don't have the constitutional protections, such as the right to legal counsel, that would help them prove their case.
And many of those who wind up in immigration custody are frequently those who might have the most difficulty proving their citizenship. Many were born abroad and acquired citizenship through a U.S.-born parent, like Veloz, or a parent who became a naturalized citizen. Some have mental health problems. And frequently they are poor, as those who can afford a lawyer get out more quickly.
"These are people who are the most vulnerable," said Judy Rabinovitz, deputy director of the ACLU Immigrants Rights Project. "People are being locked up without bond hearings, often for long periods."
A growing chorus of legal experts says these detentions are unconstitutional.
"The constitution is the same that applies to U.S.-born citizens as to naturalized citizens," said Sin Yen Ling, an attorney at San Francisco's Asian Law Caucus. "Detaining these folks is creating a third category of people with a different set of rights."
Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials insist they would never knowingly detain or deport a U.S. citizen.
Asked about citizens winding up in immigration detention, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, who oversees ICE, told The Chronicle: "We're always concerned about that. If there's an error made, we want to rectify it as soon as possible."
In April, after The Chronicle reported on a Modesto man in immigration detention, ICE released him and dropped its deportation case against him. Douglas Centeno was born in Nicaragua but derived citizenship when his father naturalized while he was a boy. He was jailed for four months.
A lack of rights
People charged in the criminal justice system have a range of constitutional rights, including the right to a speedy and public trial before an impartial jury and the right to legal counsel even if they can't afford to hire a lawyer. Criminal detainees have the right to a telephone call, to be brought before a judge, usually within 48 hours, and to be told of the charges against them.
Immigration matters, however, are civil, not criminal, so those protections do not apply. Still, the U.S. Constitution is designed to protect citizens from detention without due process. But citizens in immigration detention are not being afforded that due process, advocates say.
Immigration detainees are routinely shipped to remote jails where free legal aid is unavailable, their families are not notified of their whereabouts, and they are often denied access to telephones, mail and even medical care, according to a March report by Amnesty International and several federal audits.
"Throwing people into a system where they're sitting 3,000 miles away without a lawyer and trying to prove they're a citizen - they're making people make their arguments with two hands tied behind their back," said Nancy Morawetz, a professor at New York University School of Law and an expert on deportation law.
In January, Napolitano ordered a full review of ICE detention and removal operations. ICE spokeswoman Cori Bassett said she did not know when the review would be completed or whether its findings would be made public.
Immigration officials must balance civil liberties against security concerns, some observers say, and wrongful detentions are rare.
"ICE is not going to pursue anyone unless they can really justify the cause for it," said Janice Kephart, national security director at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, D.C.
Fighting the system
That's not what happened to Hector Veloz.
Before his birth, Veloz's U.S.-born father was sent to Vietnam, so his pregnant mother stayed with relatives in Mexico and Veloz was born there. Months later, the family returned to the United States and has lived here since.
Veloz was automatically a citizen at birth, though his parents never obtained his certificate of citizenship.
In 2006, Veloz was convicted of receiving stolen property after purchasing a car that had been stolen. He served eight months and was about to be released from prison when he was turned over to ICE.
"I said, 'I'm a U.S. citizen, why am I being put through deportation?' " he recalled.
At the ICE prison in Arizona, the paperwork stated that he had entered the country illegally and that his father was a Mexican citizen.
"It was all incorrect information," Veloz said.
Immigration lawyers say locking up Veloz and others like him violates the 1971 Non-Detention Act, which says the U.S. government cannot detain citizens without an act of Congress.
ICE's presumption that everyone in immigration custody is an alien undermines the act, said Holly Cooper, a professor of immigration law at UC Davis.
"The system is set up so even if they believe you, you have to prove it in court. It could take six months to five years to prove it and you're detained in the meantime," said Cooper, who helped Veloz win his freedom on appeal. "You give up your citizenship at the prison door."
Tough to prove
A person who is born abroad to U.S. parents, as Veloz was, is a citizen at birth. And a foreign-born child automatically derives citizenship when a parent naturalizes, though they may not realize it. Without documentation at hand, or an attorney's help, however, it can be tough to prove.
"I don't carry my birth certificate around with me and I bet you don't," NYU's Morawetz said. "ICE ought to know the law. Individuals might not, but the government is supposed to. They're the experts."
ICE's Bassett said that officials work hard to ensure that they deport only aliens. In rare instances, she said, the government might detain an actual U.S. citizen because that person claimed to be an alien.
"With somebody who misrepresents their true identity and makes a false statement to an ICE officer, it creates a problem for the government and for themselves," she said.
The number of people in detention has tripled over the past dozen years. Immigration authorities now detain more than 400,000 people a year. Analysts say that is leading to more citizens wrongly detained by ICE.
A study by the nonprofit Vera Institute, conducted for the U.S. Justice Department's Executive Office of Immigration Review, found more than 700 people at several detention facilities between 2006 and 2008 who said they planned to pursue claims of U.S. citizenship.
Jacqueline Stevens, a UC Santa Barbara professor of law and society, said she had identified 160 cases of people in Arizona and California whom she believed had credible claims to citizenship. And several immigrant legal aid groups have helped free dozens of other citizens in recent years.
In addition to U.S. citizens, there are other inmates in immigration detention who may not be deportable, legal analysts say. They include lawful permanent residents who have committed crimes that are not grave enough for deportation, and asylum seekers locked up until their cases are decided.
The fact that citizens are imprisoned in a system designed to deport them points to potential problems for these other detainees, said Chuck Roth, litigation director for the National Immigration Justice Center in Chicago.
"If it can happen to U.S. citizens, you can imagine how few procedural protections are available to everybody else."
Deportation sagas: Citizens tell their harrowing stories of detention and deportation by ICE. A9
Stories of detention, deportation by ICE
Mistake on form
When Brian Lyttle got word on April 22 from the U.S. Embassy in Guatemala that his brother Mark had been deported to Mexico and bumped around Central America for three months, he was floored.
The family had been searching for 31-year-old Mark and feared he was lost or dead.
Mark Lyttle was born in Rowan County, N.C., and had never left the United States. He speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican ancestry.
But Mark Lyttle suffers from mental illness. He has bipolar disorder, which requires medication, and is also mentally disabled.
He had been living in a group home when he got into trouble for inappropriately touching an employee, said Neil Rambana, an immigration lawyer helping the family. Lyttle pled guilty to a misdemeanor and served 85 days in jail. Instead of being released, he was turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement because a jail form listed his place of birth as Mexico.
ICE did not investigate his citizenship. He spent two months at an Atlanta detention center just miles from his mother, who didn't know where he was.
At one point Lyttle signed an ICE document saying he was a Mexican citizen, but two days later he signed another stating that he was born in the United States. He went before a judge in December 2008 as part of a group hearing and accepted "expedited removal," an uncontested deportation.
Brian Lyttle, who serves in the U.S. Army along with his other brother, Tommy, is furious.
"(We're) an all-American family with two soldiers and a family member who happens to be handicapped," he said. "It's like spitting on my uniform that you would do that to my brother."
Suspicious accent
Houston chef Leonard Robert Parrish, 52, wasn't locked up by ICE or deported, but he did run afoul of a law intended for illegal immigrants.
The Brooklyn-born Parrish went down to the Harris County Sheriff's Office in September to clear up a problem over a couple of bounced checks. He wound up in jail on immigration charges. He was strip-searched and spent 12 hours in custody.
"The deputy told me I had a foreign accent," Parrish recalled. "I told him I had an East Coast accent. He said, 'It sounds like a foreign accent to me.' "
A 2008 Texas law required a person's citizenship status be linked to his driver's license. A sheriff's deputy told Parrish he was detained because when they ran his driver's license information through their computer, it said that his citizenship status was "unknown."
"I served on a murder jury in Texas and they can't find out I'm a citizen?" asked Parrish. "I'm still fighting. ... Nobody wants to take responsibility for locking me up for no reason."
Sent to Honduras
According to her birth certificate, Diane Williams was born in Metairie, La., on Aug. 23, 1974.
So Williams was shocked on Jan. 18 when, hours after she was released from a Houston jail on prostitution charges, immigration agents showed up at her apartment and arrested her, saying she was a deportable alien.
"I had a copy of my birth certificate, but they said they didn't know if it was real or not," she said.
Williams, who has bipolar disorder, was denied medication during her three weeks in ICE detention, according to her Houston lawyer, Lawrence Rushton.
She at first refused to sign a deportation order waiving her right to court review, but did so after agents threatened that she would be jailed for years and deported anyway, Williams said.
On Feb. 9, she was deported to Honduras, where she spent nearly two months, Rushton said.
Eventually, the U.S. Embassy in Tegucigalpa issued Williams a temporary passport, after her mother sent documents proving her identity. On March 31, she flew back to New Orleans.
"I've had citizens who end up being detained," Rushton said, "but this is the first case where I've seen someone deported who's clearly and obviously a U.S. citizen."
Protecting rights
A bill introduced earlier this year by Rep. Lucille Roybal-Allard, D-Los Angeles, seeks to ensure fair and humane treatment of people in immigration detention.
It would codify the policies governing U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention standards and would encourage the agency to make wider use of alternatives to detention, such as releasing a person on bond or with an electronic ankle bracelet to track his movements.
The bill would also guarantee that detainees have access to telephones and medical care; require that detainees who do have legal counsel not be transferred to jails far from their lawyers; and that all detainees get legal orientation from an outside group.
In the Senate, New Jersey Democrat Robert Menendez plans to introduce a bill later this summer intended to protect citizens from winding up in ICE detention.
That bill would require that detainees are screened to identify people with citizenship claims and notify them of free nonprofit legal services; encourage the use of alternatives to detention for people who don't pose a flight risk or a danger to public safety or national security; and create an ICE ombudsman to investigate complaints.
E-mail Tyche Hendricks at thendricks@sfchronicle.com.
http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/07/27/MNGQ17C8GC.DTL
This article appeared on page A - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
Saturday, March 7, 2009
Deportation may become mandatory lesson
Deportation may become mandatory lesson
Kevin Lee
03/06/2009
The Times (Illinois)
A controversial part of American history neglected by Illinois' public schools could become part of standard curriculum as early as next year.
During the 1930s, the federal government deported between 500,000 and 2 million Hispanic people following public outcry about the scarcity of jobs during the Great Depression.
But according to a Chicago lawmaker, the story of the deportees, many of them citizens, hasn't been told in Illinois' public schools.
State Sen. William Delgado, D-Chicago, whose bill would require lessons on the deportations at both the grade and high school level, said the idea was brought to him by Spanish-language television news anchor Vincente Serrano from Telemundo, whose aunt and uncle were part of the mass deportations.
"If America had a piece of its conscience back in its place, and we were able to put this in our schools, it would serve as a tremendous reference," Delgado said.
Opponents are concerned that if the bill passes, it would create a mandate — a state law that requires local school districts to change policy or alter curriculum.
"We seem to be spending all of our time figuring out ways to make it tougher for schools to take care of what they're supposed to do, then we don't provide funding or anything else," said state Sen. Gary Dahl, R-Granville.
Mandates force administrators to either squeeze new information into an already crowded curriculum or take time out of existing programs.
The Legislature handed down 17 mandates last year, including requirements for teaching sexual assault awareness and the basics of purchasing a home.
Administrators expressed frustration over what they view as interference by state lawmakers in the local education process and the cost of mandates, both in time and money.
"Can we squeeze one more in there? Unfunded and overused mandates put stress on schools," said Egan Colbrese, principal of Northwest Elementary School in La Salle. "I understand it's hard to say 'no' to this particular one — it's extremely important. But you can only ask so much and have to look at what you can do."
State Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Chenoa, echoed the sentiments of district officials who prefer local control, saying these decisions should be left to locally elected school boards.
"What makes them think the 59 men and women here can make a better decision?" Rutherford said.
Colbrese is concerned the teaching quality may suffer if teachers have to teach more material in the same amount of time.
"You either add something, or cut the quality of it," he said. "Now, you can probably knock this out in a lesson. But it's the accumulation of all the things you're asking of us. Introducing it doesn't mean you're learning it."
http://mywebtimes.com/archives/ottawa/display.php?id=376441
Kevin Lee
03/06/2009
The Times (Illinois)
A controversial part of American history neglected by Illinois' public schools could become part of standard curriculum as early as next year.
During the 1930s, the federal government deported between 500,000 and 2 million Hispanic people following public outcry about the scarcity of jobs during the Great Depression.
But according to a Chicago lawmaker, the story of the deportees, many of them citizens, hasn't been told in Illinois' public schools.
State Sen. William Delgado, D-Chicago, whose bill would require lessons on the deportations at both the grade and high school level, said the idea was brought to him by Spanish-language television news anchor Vincente Serrano from Telemundo, whose aunt and uncle were part of the mass deportations.
"If America had a piece of its conscience back in its place, and we were able to put this in our schools, it would serve as a tremendous reference," Delgado said.
Opponents are concerned that if the bill passes, it would create a mandate — a state law that requires local school districts to change policy or alter curriculum.
"We seem to be spending all of our time figuring out ways to make it tougher for schools to take care of what they're supposed to do, then we don't provide funding or anything else," said state Sen. Gary Dahl, R-Granville.
Mandates force administrators to either squeeze new information into an already crowded curriculum or take time out of existing programs.
The Legislature handed down 17 mandates last year, including requirements for teaching sexual assault awareness and the basics of purchasing a home.
Administrators expressed frustration over what they view as interference by state lawmakers in the local education process and the cost of mandates, both in time and money.
"Can we squeeze one more in there? Unfunded and overused mandates put stress on schools," said Egan Colbrese, principal of Northwest Elementary School in La Salle. "I understand it's hard to say 'no' to this particular one — it's extremely important. But you can only ask so much and have to look at what you can do."
State Sen. Dan Rutherford, R-Chenoa, echoed the sentiments of district officials who prefer local control, saying these decisions should be left to locally elected school boards.
"What makes them think the 59 men and women here can make a better decision?" Rutherford said.
Colbrese is concerned the teaching quality may suffer if teachers have to teach more material in the same amount of time.
"You either add something, or cut the quality of it," he said. "Now, you can probably knock this out in a lesson. But it's the accumulation of all the things you're asking of us. Introducing it doesn't mean you're learning it."
http://mywebtimes.com/archives/ottawa/display.php?id=376441
Sunday, February 15, 2009
The New Political Economy of Immigration
The New Political Economy of Immigration
By Tom Barry
Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice
January/February 2009
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 drastically altered the traditional political economy of immigration. The millions of undocumented immigrants—those who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas—who were living and working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow population or as surplus cheap labor. In the public and policy debate, immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security. Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s flailing immigration law-enforcement and border- control operations a new unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward.
Responsibility for immigration law-enforcement and border control passed from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In Congress Democrats and Republicans alike readily supported a vast expansion of the country’s immigration control apparatus—doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and authorizing a tripling of immigrant prison beds.
Today, after the shift in the immigration debate, the $15 billion-plus DHS budget for immigration affairs has fueled an immigrant-crackdown economy that has greatly boosted the already-bloated prison industry. Even now, with the economy imploding, immigrants are currently behind one of the country’s most profitable industries: they are the nation’s fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population.
Across the country new prisons are hurriedly being constructed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught each year. State and local governments are vying with each other to attract new immigrant prisons as the foundation of their rural “economic development” plans.
While DHS is driving immigrants from their jobs and homes, U.S. firms in the business of providing prison beds are raking in record profits from the immigrant crackdown. Although only one piece of the broader story of immigration, it’s all a part of the new political economy of immigration.
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0109barry.html
By Tom Barry
Dollars & Sense: The Magazine of Economic Justice
January/February 2009
The terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 drastically altered the traditional political economy of immigration. The millions of undocumented immigrants—those who crossed the border illegally or overstayed their visas—who were living and working in the United States were no longer simply regarded as a shadow population or as surplus cheap labor. In the public and policy debate, immigrants were increasingly defined as threats to the nation’s security. Categorizing immigrants as national security threats gave the government’s flailing immigration law-enforcement and border- control operations a new unifying logic that has propelled the immigrant crackdown forward.
Responsibility for immigration law-enforcement and border control passed from the Justice Department to the new Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In Congress Democrats and Republicans alike readily supported a vast expansion of the country’s immigration control apparatus—doubling the number of Border Patrol agents and authorizing a tripling of immigrant prison beds.
Today, after the shift in the immigration debate, the $15 billion-plus DHS budget for immigration affairs has fueled an immigrant-crackdown economy that has greatly boosted the already-bloated prison industry. Even now, with the economy imploding, immigrants are currently behind one of the country’s most profitable industries: they are the nation’s fastest growing sector of the U.S. prison population.
Across the country new prisons are hurriedly being constructed to house the hundreds of thousands of immigrants caught each year. State and local governments are vying with each other to attract new immigrant prisons as the foundation of their rural “economic development” plans.
While DHS is driving immigrants from their jobs and homes, U.S. firms in the business of providing prison beds are raking in record profits from the immigrant crackdown. Although only one piece of the broader story of immigration, it’s all a part of the new political economy of immigration.
http://www.dollarsandsense.org/archives/2009/0109barry.html
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Speech on immigration raids wins college's annual peace oratorical contest
Speech on immigration raids wins college's annual peace oratorical contest
Monday, February 9, 2009
Goshen College Online
GOSHEN, Ind. – Analisa Gerig-Sickles, a Goshen College senior elementary education major from West Branch, Iowa, won first place with her speech "No Mas Redadas" during the college's annual C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest on Feb. 3. She was one of six Goshen College students from a variety of disciplines who spoke about peace and justice issues during the competition.
By winning the contest, Gerig-Sickles received $150 and the opportunity to compete in the U.S./Canada Mennonite Central Committee-sponsored C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest. The runner-up was Isaac Yoder-Schrock, a first-year physics major from Moundridge, Kan., who received $100 for his speech "National Healthcare, Caring for Others."
In her speech, Gerig-Sickles talked about the impact of work raids on illegal immigrants. She used stories from her experience last summer working with St. Bridget's Catholic Church in Postville, Iowa, the site of one of the largest work raids in U.S. history. About 400 workers from the Agriprocessors meat-packing factory were arrested by about 1,000 government agents. At St. Bridget's, she helped people affected by the raids with financial, physical, spiritual, legal and emotional support.
Gerig-Sickles told vivid stories that people affected had told her to convey the inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants by government officials. "During the raid many people were maltreated. One woman who was hiding under a pile of boxes was yanked out and slapped across the face," she said. "Hundreds of workers suspected to be illegal immigrants ... were loaded in vans and taken to the National Cattle Congress facility, a place normally used to exhibit cows."
By putting a face on the immigration issue, Gerig-Sickles hoped to encourage people to speak out against raids. "No matter how you feel about immigration and how our country deals with it politically or socially, I hope that you can feel compassion for the people and families affected by this raid," Gerig-Sickles said. "I encourage you to contact your senators and representatives and to spread the word that you do not support raids."
http://www.goshen.edu/news/pressarchive/02-09-09-smith-winner222.html
Monday, February 9, 2009
Goshen College Online
GOSHEN, Ind. – Analisa Gerig-Sickles, a Goshen College senior elementary education major from West Branch, Iowa, won first place with her speech "No Mas Redadas" during the college's annual C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest on Feb. 3. She was one of six Goshen College students from a variety of disciplines who spoke about peace and justice issues during the competition.
By winning the contest, Gerig-Sickles received $150 and the opportunity to compete in the U.S./Canada Mennonite Central Committee-sponsored C. Henry Smith Peace Oratorical Contest. The runner-up was Isaac Yoder-Schrock, a first-year physics major from Moundridge, Kan., who received $100 for his speech "National Healthcare, Caring for Others."
In her speech, Gerig-Sickles talked about the impact of work raids on illegal immigrants. She used stories from her experience last summer working with St. Bridget's Catholic Church in Postville, Iowa, the site of one of the largest work raids in U.S. history. About 400 workers from the Agriprocessors meat-packing factory were arrested by about 1,000 government agents. At St. Bridget's, she helped people affected by the raids with financial, physical, spiritual, legal and emotional support.
Gerig-Sickles told vivid stories that people affected had told her to convey the inhumane treatment of illegal immigrants by government officials. "During the raid many people were maltreated. One woman who was hiding under a pile of boxes was yanked out and slapped across the face," she said. "Hundreds of workers suspected to be illegal immigrants ... were loaded in vans and taken to the National Cattle Congress facility, a place normally used to exhibit cows."
By putting a face on the immigration issue, Gerig-Sickles hoped to encourage people to speak out against raids. "No matter how you feel about immigration and how our country deals with it politically or socially, I hope that you can feel compassion for the people and families affected by this raid," Gerig-Sickles said. "I encourage you to contact your senators and representatives and to spread the word that you do not support raids."
http://www.goshen.edu/news/pressarchive/02-09-09-smith-winner222.html
Tuesday, January 20, 2009
Commentary: Obama, Immigration and the Hispanic Vote
Commentary: Obama, Immigration and the Hispanic Vote
By Rene Martinez
KERA; DALLAS, TX
January 19, 2009
Our recent Presidential election demonstrated that the emerging Hispanic population has translated into an emerging voting power in the United States, supporting President Barack Obama by over 70% of the Latino vote. Critical battleground states such as Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, and Colorado were direct examples of this political emergence. The Republican Party, in its continued immigrant-bashing, basically ignored and/or took the Hispanic vote for granted. One must remember the Mega Marches of 2006 which resulted in millions of Hispanics demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the failed congressional efforts to bring about reform. These manifestations resulted in extensive voter registration efforts, citizenship initiation projects and then the dramatic voter turnout in November.
Comprehensive Immigration Reform is now the most important issue among Hispanics other than the economy. Immigration reform is in the minds of millions of Hispanics that have been affected by ICE raids, fear of deportation and discriminate arrests, dividing families, loss of jobs and income, a sense of family security, and more importantly, living without fear and in shadow of hate and recrimination. The Hispanic community is expecting President Obama to address this major issue with post haste and political savvy. His Cabinet appointees in Janet Napolitano, Gilda Solis, and Ken Salazar , will be some of the critical players in this process along with additional advisers that are being selected from Stanford and Georgetown Law Schools, providing extensive research and data that will produce a body of evidence that may shape the Comprehensive Reform Package. Once it is developed, the President must muster enough votes from both aisles of the House and Senate to create a bi-partisan base for its passage. It will not be easy and true bi-partisan support will be critical if and when Senators John McCain and John Cornyn demonstrate true leadership and not turn their backs on the Hispanic vote. Organized Labor, chambers of commerce, the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, and all the major Latino organizations will need to forge significant alliances to support a consensus for this reform package. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who is planning to run for Governor of Texas will be expected to support this effort. Hutchison will not make the same mistakes that the Republican Party has made. She needs the Hispanic vote and she is already on board with the Dream Act. Expect her to do the right thing.
Critical strands in Immigration Reform will be debated and chosen as parts of the final plan: border enforcement, reunification of families, a pathway to citizenship, fees and fines to be paid for those applying for visas, the Dream Act, tighter employer sanctions and possibly a revised guest worker plan. It is not unlikely that more marches and manifestations of support for immigration reform will take place in 2009 by the Hispanic community. ICE raids will diminish, yet immigrant-bashing rhetoric of Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly, and Pat Buchanan will continue. They'll exaggerate the truth with unsubstantiated facts and inflated data about immigration, and use hateful tirades to play on fear, racism, and a false sense of patriotism. Already in Austin, anti-immigrant legislation is being proposed, so the need for Congressional action is urgent in order to override much of this unconstitutional paper rhetoric that will be debated this month in the state Legislature.
This all brings us back to review several factors from the Presidential election: we have a new dynamic and sensitive President-elect; he is developing a "brain storage" with new leaders advising him on critical issues; a new and young Hispanic electorate that is energized and will be keenly observant of future actions by the new Administration and Congress. Comprehensive Immigration Reform will once and for all bring millions of immigrants out of an environment and climate of fear, hostility, and harassment. I expect President elect Obama, who understands immigration reform from a personal level will do the right thing for all Americans and truly define change for this country.
http://publicbroadcasting.net/kera/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1458651§ionID=1
By Rene Martinez
KERA; DALLAS, TX
January 19, 2009
Our recent Presidential election demonstrated that the emerging Hispanic population has translated into an emerging voting power in the United States, supporting President Barack Obama by over 70% of the Latino vote. Critical battleground states such as Nevada, New Mexico, Florida, and Colorado were direct examples of this political emergence. The Republican Party, in its continued immigrant-bashing, basically ignored and/or took the Hispanic vote for granted. One must remember the Mega Marches of 2006 which resulted in millions of Hispanics demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the failed congressional efforts to bring about reform. These manifestations resulted in extensive voter registration efforts, citizenship initiation projects and then the dramatic voter turnout in November.
Comprehensive Immigration Reform is now the most important issue among Hispanics other than the economy. Immigration reform is in the minds of millions of Hispanics that have been affected by ICE raids, fear of deportation and discriminate arrests, dividing families, loss of jobs and income, a sense of family security, and more importantly, living without fear and in shadow of hate and recrimination. The Hispanic community is expecting President Obama to address this major issue with post haste and political savvy. His Cabinet appointees in Janet Napolitano, Gilda Solis, and Ken Salazar , will be some of the critical players in this process along with additional advisers that are being selected from Stanford and Georgetown Law Schools, providing extensive research and data that will produce a body of evidence that may shape the Comprehensive Reform Package. Once it is developed, the President must muster enough votes from both aisles of the House and Senate to create a bi-partisan base for its passage. It will not be easy and true bi-partisan support will be critical if and when Senators John McCain and John Cornyn demonstrate true leadership and not turn their backs on the Hispanic vote. Organized Labor, chambers of commerce, the Hispanic Congressional Caucus, and all the major Latino organizations will need to forge significant alliances to support a consensus for this reform package. Senator Kay Bailey Hutchinson, who is planning to run for Governor of Texas will be expected to support this effort. Hutchison will not make the same mistakes that the Republican Party has made. She needs the Hispanic vote and she is already on board with the Dream Act. Expect her to do the right thing.
Critical strands in Immigration Reform will be debated and chosen as parts of the final plan: border enforcement, reunification of families, a pathway to citizenship, fees and fines to be paid for those applying for visas, the Dream Act, tighter employer sanctions and possibly a revised guest worker plan. It is not unlikely that more marches and manifestations of support for immigration reform will take place in 2009 by the Hispanic community. ICE raids will diminish, yet immigrant-bashing rhetoric of Lou Dobbs, Bill O'Reilly, and Pat Buchanan will continue. They'll exaggerate the truth with unsubstantiated facts and inflated data about immigration, and use hateful tirades to play on fear, racism, and a false sense of patriotism. Already in Austin, anti-immigrant legislation is being proposed, so the need for Congressional action is urgent in order to override much of this unconstitutional paper rhetoric that will be debated this month in the state Legislature.
This all brings us back to review several factors from the Presidential election: we have a new dynamic and sensitive President-elect; he is developing a "brain storage" with new leaders advising him on critical issues; a new and young Hispanic electorate that is energized and will be keenly observant of future actions by the new Administration and Congress. Comprehensive Immigration Reform will once and for all bring millions of immigrants out of an environment and climate of fear, hostility, and harassment. I expect President elect Obama, who understands immigration reform from a personal level will do the right thing for all Americans and truly define change for this country.
http://publicbroadcasting.net/kera/news.newsmain?action=article&ARTICLE_ID=1458651§ionID=1
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