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History > 2006 > USA > Immigration (IV)
Editorial
The Fence Campaign
October 30, 2006
The New York Times
President Bush signed a bill to authorize a
700-mile border fence last week, thus enshrining into federal law a key part of
the Republicans’ midterm election strategy. The party of the Iraq war and family
values desperately needs you to forget about dead soldiers and randy
congressmen, and to think instead about the bad things immigrants will do to us
if we don’t wall them out. Hence the fence, and the ad campaigns around it.
Across the country, candidates are trying to stir up a voter frenzy using
immigrants for bait. They accuse their opponents of being amnesty-loving
fence-haters, and offer themselves as jut-jawed defenders of the homeland
because they want the fence. But the fence is the product of a can’t-do,
won’t-do approach to a serious national problem. And the ads are built on a
foundation of lies:
Lie No. 1: We’re building a 700-mile fence. The bill signed by Mr. Bush includes
no money for fence building. Congress has authorized $1.2 billion as a down
payment for sealing the border, but that money is also meant for roads,
electronic sensors and other security tactics preferred by the Department of
Homeland Security, which doesn’t want a 700-mile fence. Indian tribes, members
of Congress and local leaders will also have considerable say in where to put
the fence, which could cost anywhere from $2 billion to $9 billion, depending on
whose estimates you believe.
“It’s one thing to authorize. It’s another thing to actually appropriate the
money and do it,” said Senator John Cornyn, a Texas Republican. “I’m not sure
that’s the most practical use of that money.”
Lie No. 2: A fence will help. A 700-mile fence, if it works, will only drive
immigrants to other parts of the 2,000-mile border. In parts of the trackless
Southwest, building the fence will require building new roads. Who uses roads?
Immigrants and smugglers. And no fence will do anything about the roughly 40
percent of illegal immigrants who enter legally and overstay their visas.
Lie No. 3: The Senate’s alternative bill was weak, and its supporters favored
amnesty. In May, the Senate passed a bill that had a fence. Not only that, it
had money for a fence. It also included tough measures for cracking down on
illegal hiring. It demanded that illegal immigrants get right with the law by
paying fines and taxes, learning English and getting to the back of the
citizenship line. It went overboard in some ways, weakening legal protections
for immigrants and hindering judicial oversight. But it went far beyond the
fence-only approach. Its shortcomings and differences with the House bill might
have been worked out in negotiations over the summer. But instead, House
Republican leaders held months of hearings to attack the Senate bill. And all we
were left with was the fence.
Will the Republican strategy work? We’ll know next week, but we hold out hope
that hard-line candidates are misreading the electorate. Voters all over are
concerned about immigration, of course, but many polls have repeatedly shown
that they warm to reasonable solutions and not to stridency. They can recognize
the difference between the marauding army of fence-jumpers they see in
commercials and the immigrants who have become their neighbors, co-workers,
customers and friends. Citizen anger cuts both ways, and many voters, Latinos in
particular, say they are put off by the Republican hysteria.
Poll results in some races suggest that xenophobia and voter deception are not
necessarily a ticket to victory. In Arizona, Randy Graf, a Republican, is
running for Congress as a single-issue candidate focused on border security,
Minuteman-style. He has said that if his strident argument won’t fly in his
prickly border state, it might not fly anywhere. He is trailing Gabrielle
Giffords, a moderate Democrat who supports the comprehensive approach to
immigration reform endorsed by the Senate and — once upon a time — by President
Bush.
Whatever happens in November, Congress will eventually have to deal with the 12
million illegal immigrants unaffected by the fence, and the future flow of
immigrant workers. That means tackling “amnesty” directly. The sad thing is that
Democrats and moderate Republicans — and Mr. Bush — already did this, and
settled on an approach that is both tough and smart.
But now is the time for stirring up voters, and the pliant Mr. Bush has decided
to go along, adding his signature to the shortsighted politics of fear.
The
Fence Campaign, NYT, 30.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/30/opinion/30mon1.html
Bush, Signing Bill for Border Fence,
Urges
Wider Overhaul
October 27, 2006
The New York Times
By DAVID STOUT
WASHINGTON, Oct. 26 — President Bush signed
into law on Thursday a bill providing for construction of 700 miles of added
fencing along the Southwestern border, calling the legislation “an important
step toward immigration reform.”
The new law is what most House Republicans wanted. But it is not what Senate
Republicans or Mr. Bush originally envisioned, and at the signing, in the
Roosevelt Room of the White House, the president repeated his call for a far
more extensive revamping of immigration law.
A broader measure, approved by the Senate last spring, would have not only
enhanced border security but also provided for a guest worker program and the
possibility of eventual citizenship for many illegal immigrants already in the
country.
But that bill was successfully resisted by House Republicans, who feared a voter
backlash against anything that smacked of “amnesty” for illegal immigrants.
Those lawmakers portrayed the Senate bill as embracing just that, no matter what
the measure’s backers, including Mr. Bush, said to the contrary.
Eventually the president realized that a broad approach was dead for this
election year, and he bowed to political reality and embraced the House concept,
at least for the time being. On Sept. 29, just before its members headed home to
campaign, the Senate approved construction of 700 miles of fencing, which the
House had approved that month.
“I want to thank the members of Congress for their work on this important piece
of legislation,” Mr. Bush said Thursday, greeting several lawmakers by name.
“Ours is a nation of immigrants. We’re also a nation of law. Unfortunately, the
United States has not been in complete control of its borders for decades, and
therefore illegal immigration has been on the rise.”
The new law also provides for more vehicle barriers, checkpoints and advanced
technology to bolster border security. A previously enacted domestic security
spending bill provides $1.2 billion for the fence and the accompanying
technology.
The fence idea has caused friction between the United States and Mexico, as was
demonstrated again Thursday in Ottawa, where the Mexican president-elect, Felipe
Calderón, condemned it.
“Humanity made a huge mistake by building the Berlin Wall, and I believe that
today the United States is committing a grave error in building the wall on our
border,” said Mr. Calderón, who was meeting with the Canadian prime minister,
Stephen Harper.
Some of the legislation’s critics say the fence — actually several separate
sections at a variety of places along the 2,000-mile border — will not keep out
people desperate to cross. A foreign policy adviser to Mr. Calderón, Arturo
Sarukhán, told Canadian reporters on Wednesday that the fence would merely allow
smugglers of illegal migrants to charge them more.
In calling for a broader immigration overhaul, Mr. Bush said again Thursday that
his approach did not amount to amnesty.
“We must reduce pressure on our border by creating a temporary worker plan,” he
said. “Willing workers ought to be matched with willing employers to do jobs
Americans are not doing for a temporary — on a temporary — basis. We must face
the reality that millions of illegal immigrants are already here. They should
not be given an automatic path to citizenship. That is amnesty. I oppose
amnesty.
“There is a rational middle ground between granting an automatic path to
citizenship for every illegal immigrant and a program of mass deportation, and I
look forward to working with Congress to find that middle ground.”
Any such search will almost surely have to await a new Congress. The chance that
it would be taken up in a lame-duck session after the elections is considered
remote.
Christopher Mason contributed reporting from Toronto.
Bush,
Signing Bill for Border Fence, Urges Wider Overhaul, NYT, 27.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/27/us/27bush.html
5 Bodies Pulled From Rio Grande in Texas
October 24, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 11:59 a.m. ET
The New York Times
McALLEN, Texas (AP) -- The bodies of four men
and a woman were found floating in the Rio Grande River in an area known as a
crossing place for illegal immigrants, authorities said.
Mexican authorities notified sheriff's deputies Monday that the bodies were in
the river near the U.S. side, Starr County Sheriff Reymundo Guerra said.
The cause of death was unknown and autopsies were planned.
The bodies, found in a rural area below a dam about 65 miles west of McAllen,
were decomposed and could have been dead for a week, said Carlos Delgado, an
investigator for the Starr County district attorney's office.
No further information was immediately released.
5
Bodies Pulled From Rio Grande in Texas, NYT, 24.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Bodies-Recovered.html
A Shorter Path to Citizenship, but Not for
All
October 23, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Beverly Lindsay, a Jamaican-born practical
nurse who has made her home in New York for 26 years, filed for citizenship in
June with the help of her union, and prepared for a long wait. After all, as
recently as a year ago, the United States government acknowledged a huge backlog
in such applications, and estimated that processing typically took almost a year
and a half in New York — triple the wait in San Antonio or Phoenix.
But a mere three months and 10 days after Ms. Lindsay applied, she was sworn in
as a citizen. “I’m proud, and I’m happy I’m going to vote in November,” said Ms.
Lindsay, 49.
Her success, however, underscores the frustration of Sophia McIntosh, another
New Yorker from Jamaica who applied for citizenship through the same health care
workers union program three years ago. Not only is she still waiting, but her
case is also now among at least 960,000 immigrant applications pending
nationwide that federal officials have simply stopped counting as part of their
backlog — a backlog they had pledged to eliminate by this month.
“It’s not fair,” said Ms. McIntosh, 34, a nursing assistant and mother of two,
who has been a legal resident of the United States since 1992. “I did all the
right things. I want to be able to have a voice in this country.”
Until recently, the glut of pending cases was so large that President Bush’s vow
in 2001 to cut the standard wait to six months or less nationwide seemed
unreachable. Now immigration officials say they have more than met that goal,
shrinking the average wait to five months for a citizenship decision. And no
district shows more dramatic improvement than New York, where the wait has
officially shrunk to 2.8 months.
But the numbers are not quite as rosy as they seem. To accomplish their mission,
officials at the United States Citizenship and Immigration Services explain,
they identified and stopped counting thousands of backlogged cases that they now
define as outside the agency’s control, mostly those delayed by unexplained lags
in standard security clearances by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
The result is a two-tier system. More applicants than ever are receiving a
decision in record time, in part because of an influx of temporary workers
working at the office and new efficiencies. But others are still falling into
the system’s black holes, joining thousands who have been waiting for years, but
are now off the map. While praising the agency’s improvements, immigrant
advocates contend that officials have manipulated the figures to declare victory
and made it harder to seek redress.
Behind the clash over the agency’s new math are anxieties heightened by the
immigration debate and looming elections, advocates and officials said. Legal
residents who lack the security of citizenship feel more vulnerable to
deportation these days and deprived when they cannot vote. And the immigration
agency is under political pressure to show that it can handle any new programs
without derailing old ones.
“Why should we be faulted for sitting on cases that we aren’t sitting on?” asked
Emilio T. Gonzalez, director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, which now
takes responsibility for fewer than 140,000 of the 1.1 million immigrant
applications that it identifies as pending for more than six months.
Mr. Gonzalez added that he would soon seek “significant” fee increases to cover
the costs of processing applications. The agency is losing many of the 1,200
temporary employees who helped speed lagging cases under a four-year
Congressional grant that ended Sept. 30.
But to Laura Burdick, a national deputy director of Catholic Legal Immigration
Network, raising the fees would only compound the inequity experienced by those
who have nothing to show for what they pay — for a citizenship application, the
cost is now almost $400. As for the change in the way cases are counted, she
added, “It makes you just question the validity of any of the information
they’re giving us.”
Data supplied by the government to The New York Times showed some unusual
fluctuations. The New York office, for example, has long had the largest pending
citizenship caseload in the nation, averaging about 100,000 through much of 2004
and 2005. The estimated wait for a decision was more than 16 months in October
2005. But a month later, it dropped to nine months, and 33,240 applications
vanished from the count of pending cases.
Christopher Bentley, a spokesman for Citizenship and Immigration Services, said
a physical inventory conducted for the first time in three years had revealed
that the agency had overcounted its backlog by more than 33,000 cases. “The
really good news is the vast majority of those cases were cases that had already
been completed,” he said.
Temporary workers were deployed to help from as far away as Texas and Nebraska,
Mr. Bentley added, and the remaining caseload in New York shrank to 33,017 by
July. New definitions deducted 10,663 more city cases as being outside the
agency’s control, which cut the estimated wait for the remaining 22,354 to less
than three months. Such calculations have puzzled Crystal Williams, deputy
director of programs for the American Immigration Lawyers Association.
“I really don’t understand why they’re doing this,” she said, “because they have
accurate good news to give: They have improved enormously. But it’s pretty
obvious to anyone who has observed this process for any amount of time that they
are playing with the numbers.”
She added, “All these cases they aren’t counting still have to be adjudicated —
it’s not like they’ve gone away.”
Thousands of applicants are being omitted from the backlog for reasons other
than security checks, usually because the agency has asked for more information,
the applicants are awaiting a second interview or a local court has not yet
scheduled an oath of allegiance.
But delays in conducting security clearances are especially frustrating for
applicants. Lorenzo Zepeda, 38, who immigrated from El Salvador at 18 and worked
his way up from pot washer to head chef at a nursing home in Woodmere, N.Y.,
applied for citizenship almost three years ago.
“We already write, like, 10 letters to them; we never get no answer back,” said
Mr. Zepeda, who is married to an American. The couple are expecting a child in
April. “I really love this country. I want to make decisions in this country.
And I’m paying my taxes like everybody else.”
Also still waiting are a number of Iraqi Kurds who arrived in the United States
a decade ago as political refugees, settled in Nashville and were interviewed by
the F.B.I. before the Iraq war as experts loyal to the United States.
One refugee, Hadi Gardi, 49, says he teaches Arabic and Kurdish to American
soldiers at an Army base in Georgia. He passed background checks for that job,
as he did for earlier ones dating to his work as a translator for Americans in
Iraq. His wife gained citizenship last October. But though he applied when she
did, he is still waiting, told only that the F.B.I. is checking his name.
“I lost so many opportunities,” he said, referring to government jobs that were
open only to citizens. He added that he had made fruitless appeals to his
congressman.
By law, applicants who are not given the citizenship oath 120 days after passing
the interview can seek a court order compelling government action. Such suits
have pushed the authorities to expedite some security name checks that had been
languishing, including cases of elderly and disabled refugees who have to
naturalize within seven years or lose government aid.
But in May, citing national security concerns, Citizenship and Immigration
Services closed off that path by ordering district offices not to hold
interviews until clearances were completed.
Last month, in court papers seeking the dismissal of a federal lawsuit brought
on behalf of stymied applicants in New York, lawyers for the government provided
a rare window into the F.B.I.’s National Name Check Program, giving insight on
why the process can take so long.
The first step involves a computerized search of the F.B.I.’s Universal Index of
94.6 million records for all mentions of a name, a close date of birth and a
Social Security number. Different permutations of the name are tried, like the
first and middle name only. Nearly a third of naturalization cases come back as
having a potential match.
Most of those are cleared up within three months through a search of computer
databases. But in 10 percent of all cases, the possible reference is in paper
records created before automation in October 1995 and in one of 265 possible
locations. F.B.I. analysts must retrieve and review records to see whether the
information actually pertains to the same individual and is derogatory.
“Common names (such as Mohammed, Singh, or Smith) may result in hundreds of
potential matches,” government lawyers wrote. “The sheer volume of the requests
has also resulted in delays.”
Immigration name checks compete not only with those needed for
counterintelligence, but also with a growing number sought by government
agencies before they bestow a privilege, like attendance at a White House
function. Demand has risen drastically, from 2.5 million requests a year before
Sept. 11, 2001, to more than 3.7 million in fiscal year 2005. Among those still
unresolved are more than 400,000 immigrant name checks dating to December 2002.
Still, more recent applications are moving so fast that the citizenship program
at the health care workers union has doubled the size of its annual celebration,
said Celeste Douglass, the coordinator. “People want the safe status of a U.S.
citizen,” she added. “That six-month turnaround is really starting to happen.
Now, how do we get those cases out of the backlog?”
Jo Craven McGinty contributed reporting.
A
Shorter Path to Citizenship, but Not for All, NYT, 23.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/23/nyregion/23citizen.html
NYT
October 18, 2006
Flow of Immigrants’ Money to Latin America Surges
NYT 19.10.2006
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/us/19migrants.html
Flow of Immigrants’
Money to Latin America Surges
October 19, 2006
The New York Times
By EDUARDO PORTER
There is a common cycle to immigration from Latin America.
Immigrants arrive in the United States and quickly find work. Several months
later — in the case of illegal migrants, as soon as they have finished paying
off the smuggler who brought them across the border — they start sending money
home.
According to a new report about immigrants’ money transfers to Latin America,
the remittances flow from almost every state. Even in states that had virtually
no Latin American immigrants only a few years ago, like Mississippi and
Pennsylvania, a growing trickle of money is making its way south to places like
Tlalchapa, Mexico, or Panajachel, in the Guatemalan highlands.
“Twenty years ago the money was coming from four or five states; now it’s coming
from every corner of the country,” said Sergio Bendixen, a Miami pollster who
surveyed some 2,500 immigrants, legal and illegal, for the survey on which the
report was based.
For the nation as a whole, the flow of money has become a torrent. According to
the study, sponsored by the Multilateral Investment Fund of the 47-nation
Inter-American Development Bank, remittances from the United States to Latin
America this year will total more than $45 billion. That is 51 percent higher
than they were only two years ago.
About three-quarters of Latino immigrants who were surveyed send money home
regularly, up from some 60 percent in a similar survey in 2004. This may largely
reflect growth in the population of illegal immigrants, who tend to send money
home more often than others. They accounted for about 40 percent of remitters in
the survey, up from a third in 2004.
Moreover, with immigration to the United States a regular part of the life cycle
for large numbers of men and women in many parts of Latin America, sending money
back to relatives at home has developed into a moral obligation.
“If you don’t send money to your mother, you are a bad son,” Mr. Bendixen said.
“Remittances companies say this in their TV ads.”
The study’s estimates on remittances are in line with population figures from
the Census Bureau, which found last year that Latin American immigrants made up
6.6 percent of the nation’s household population (that is, excluding people in
jail, on military bases and such), more than half the total immigrant
population.
The bureau also found that 1.2 percent of the household population of
Pennsylvania was born in Latin America, as were 0.7 percent of the population of
Ohio and 2 percent of the population of Indiana. These were states with
virtually no Latino immigrants five years ago.
According to the data from the Inter-American Development Bank, money transfers
from Indiana should approach $400 million this year, with the total from
Pennsylvania above $500 million and from Ohio more than $214 million.
Indeed, the study found Latino immigrants sending money from 48 of the 50 states
— excluding only Montana and West Virginia, where, Mr. Bendixen said, he did not
survey because he expected very few remitters.
In addition to those two states, the survey suffers from very small samples in
some with the most recent immigrant populations. But Mr. Bendixen said that in
these states, the remittance figures should be off by no more than 10 percent.
The data are consistent with a known pattern in which Latino migrants move from
immigrant-heavy states like Illinois to new frontiers like Pennsylvania in
search of jobs.
“Somebody who is already here hears about a new plant opening and goes there,”
observed Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Institute. “After
a while, the word gets back to Mexico, and the migrant stream is no longer from
California to a meatpacking plant in Iowa. It’s Mexico to a plant in Iowa.”
The reconstruction of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina provides an example of
how immigrant populations coalesce around jobs. Latino immigrants have flocked
to New Orleans, where another study has found that by this summer, they
accounted for half the reconstruction force, with 54 percent of them working in
the United States illegally.
They too have begun to send money back. According to the bank’s survey,
remittances to Latin America from Louisiana should top $200 million this year, a
240 percent increase since 2004.
Flow of
Immigrants’ Money to Latin America Surges, NYT, 19.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/19/us/19migrants.html
Border fence to complicate US-Mexico ties: Calderon
Thu Oct 12, 2006 4:38 AM ET
Reuters
MEXICO CITY (Reuters) - A U.S.-Mexico border fence aimed at
keeping illegal immigrants out of the United States will "enormously complicate"
relations between the countries, Mexican president-elect Felipe Calderon said on
Wednesday.
President Bush signed a law last week that will pay for hundreds of miles of new
fences along the border, a move against illegal immigration that Republicans had
sought before next month's congressional elections.
Mexicans are livid about the plan, which is seen as a slap in the face to
efforts during President Vicente Fox's near-completed six-year term to come to
an agreement with Washington on immigration.
"It is going to be a very difficult relationship," Calderon, who takes over from
Fox on December 1, said in a television interview of U.S.-Mexico diplomacy
during his upcoming administration.
"This fence they are leaving me is going to enormously complicate relations with
the United States."
Conservative ruling party candidate Calderon's victory over leftist firebrand
Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the July 2 election was seen as a foreign
relations boost for Washington in Latin America, where anti-U.S. sentiment is
high in some countries.
Border fence to
complicate US-Mexico ties: Calderon, R, 12.10.2006,
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-10-12T083751Z_01_N12174620_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-MEXICO-CALDERON.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-3
In New York Immigration Court, Asylum Roulette
October 8, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN
Tears streaked Meizi Liu’s face in 2003 as she told an
immigration judge in New York of being forcibly sterilized in China. The judge,
Jeffrey S. Chase, had won awards as a human rights advocate before his
appointment to the bench in 1995. But now he had 1,000 pending cases, and he had
heard it all before.
He insisted that she was lying, ridiculed her story and, when she would not
recant, denied her petition for asylum.
The tables turned after appeals by Ms. Liu and others reached federal court this
year. In scathing decisions, the court rebuked Judge Chase for “pervasive bias
and hostility,” “combative and insulting language” and remarks “implying that
any asylum claim based on China’s coercive family planning policies would be
presumed incredible.”
It is always judgment day in the windowless courtrooms where immigrants plead to
stay in the United States. But these days, as never before, the nation’s 218
immigration judges are also being judged, even as they struggle to complete
350,000 cases a year amid an immigration debate that promises to send them many
more.
Appeals courts criticize some judges by name, citing abusive behavior and bad
decisions. Studies highlight stark disparities in judgment, like 90 percent of
asylum cases granted by one judge and 9 percent down the hall. Faced with
mounting criticism, Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales vowed to introduce
yearly performance evaluations of the judges, who are Justice Department
employees. The Harvard Law Review urged a campaign to turn the five worst judges
into “media villains” to motivate reform.
Yet a more complicated picture emerges in the federal building in Lower
Manhattan. There, Judge Chase, who colleagues say is chastened since being
rebuked, is one of 27 immigration judges searching for ways to handle 20,000
cases a year, driven as much by scarce resources and escalating demands as by
quirks of personality and power.
In asylum cases, the wrong decision can be a death sentence. In others,
banishment hangs in the balance, with the prospect of families split up or swept
into harm’s way. But before they can consider the merits of a case, judges must
cope with an intricate web of laws, changing conditions in distant lands, and a
mix of false and truthful testimony in 227 tongues vulnerable to an
interpreter’s mistake as small as pronouncing “rebels” like “robbers.”
As the caseload has grown, spurred in part by stepped-up enforcement, so has the
pace demanded by “case completion goals” set in Washington.
To stay afloat, New York judges schedule 30 to 70 cases at a time, hold 4
contested hearings a day and decide more than 15 cases a week, all without law
clerks, bailiffs, stenographers or enough competent lawyers.
“The court is a stepchild of the whole immigration system,” said Sandra Coleman,
who spent years on the immigration bench in Miami. “They want to make the judges
the villains, and there are judges who are villains, I don’t deny that. But the
problem is the system.”
Many federal judges agree. “I fail to see how immigration judges can be expected
to make thorough and competent findings of fact and conclusions of law under
these circumstances,” John M. Walker Jr., chief judge of the United States Court
of Appeals for the Second Circuit, told the Senate Judiciary Committee in April,
urging that the number of immigration judges be doubled.
With one of the largest caseloads among the nation’s 53 immigration courts, and
with nearly half its cases concerning asylum, New York illustrates the crunch
that judges face in many big cities where complicated matters crowd the docket.
Caseloads exploded in the 1990’s. In 2000, an unpublished report by a Justice
Department evaluation team warned that New York judges were “reaching the point
of exhaustion and burnout.”
The report urged a slower pace and an increase in the staff-judge ratio to three
to one from two to one. Instead, an evaluation last year found that the ratio
had slipped even lower.
Justice Department rules do not allow immigration judges to speak to reporters.
But weeks of observation, court records and interviews with lawyers, clerks,
interpreters and immigrants show that the judges are coping in very different
ways, with far-reaching consequences.
Patricia Rohan, who keeps a twinkling Statue of Liberty lamp in her chambers, is
recognized after 24 years on the bench as a model of soft-spoken fairness and
efficiency.
On a recent weekday, with 575 cases pending, she patiently took notes as a man
who shells fish explained why deportation to Gambia would put his Bronx-born
daughters at risk of genital mutilation. She gently questioned an Ecuadorean
cleaning woman of 55 who avowed that love, not a green card, had prompted her
marriage to an American 15 years after she immigrated illegally. Teasing out
supporting evidence in both cases, Judge Rohan dictated favorable decisions into
an aging tape recorder.
Other judges have a different approach. Sandy K. Hom, appointed in 1993, is also
invariably polite, but so quick and predictable in his denials of asylum — 91
percent in recent years, compared with Judge Rohan’s 25 percent — that lawyers
regularly advise people assigned to him to move to another state.
Given his speed, he has the fewest pending cases, about 345. But many of his
decisions have been rejected on appeal, including one in which he denied asylum
to a widowed Armenian Christian and her children and ordered them deported to
Iraq, arguing that since Saddam Hussein’s ouster, they had no reason to fear
religious persecution.
In another case, records show, he mixed up the medical documents presented by
Janeta Kutina, a 69-year-old Latvian woman of Jewish heritage, confusing the
deaths of her father and her husband, both victims of anti-Semitic violence.
Then, the appeals court found, he cited his own mistake as evidence that her
account was inconsistent.
Down the hall and at the other end of the spectrum, Margaret McManus grants
asylum at the highest rate in the country — 90 percent — but at the price of
what Kevin Kerr, president of the clerks’ and interpreters’ union local,
complains is a chaotic calendar with 931 pending cases. She typically
reschedules cases until petitioners can secure supporting documents, pursue
other avenues or find lawyers.
A judge’s fact-finding is much harder without a lawyer to speak for those facing
deportation, who are not entitled to court-appointed counsel. Many get what the
2000 Justice Department report called “the high-volume, low-margin, piecework
approach” practiced by “an unsavory subculture” of “travel agency” lawyers. Nor
do government lawyers know each case.
Judge Chase’s trajectory illustrates why those judges unable to come to terms
with the system’s deficiencies may risk losing their judicial bearings.
As a young immigration lawyer, he joined rallies on behalf of Chinese
asylum-seekers and gave other lawyers videotaped lessons on asylum.
“Some of the judges will have their minds made up before they enter the
courtroom, depending on the country an immigrant is from,” Mr. Chase, whose wife
immigrated from Iran, told a Newsday reporter in 1995. “A judge needs to start
each case with a clean slate and listen to the lawyer and the applicant. Rather
than have that look on his face of ‘Why are you wasting my time?’ ”
But before long, incredulous tirades became his trademark in many Chinese asylum
cases, according to court records and interviews with a dozen lawyers. Openly
frustrated with a pattern of boilerplate claims that he suspected had been
concocted by smugglers, he applied his own tests of honesty.
In September 1999, at the first court appearance of Guo-Le Huang, who said his
wife had been forced to have an abortion in her last month of pregnancy, Judge
Chase rejected the man’s assertion that he was not working because he lacked
papers.
“That is the most ridiculous thing I have ever heard,” Judge Chase said, setting
the tone he would take with Mr. Huang over two years. “I’m not going to waste my
court time on this case.” He questioned why Mr. Huang lived in a Hispanic
neighborhood, interrupted an account of persecution with sarcasm and berated him
for giving up his firstborn for adoption because she was a girl, calling the act
“sexist” and “inhumane.”
In the harried world of immigration court, many lawyers seemed to accept his
tactics as an idiosyncratic tool, not unlike the long wooden claw that another
judge, lacking a clerk, uses to hand down documents. And, statistics show, Judge
Chase granted 42 percent of the 2,729 asylum requests he heard through 2004,
including 250 of 943 from China.
“He’s trying very hard to get to the truth,” said one lawyer, Robert Murtha. “A
lot of these people, if you look behind the foolish lies they’re telling, they
really do have a case. But the lawyer that they go to adapts their story to
conform with the pattern, and it does drive him crazy.”
Another lawyer, Peter Lobel, described Judge Chase as a “deeply caring man,”
whose approach was “ ‘I don’t care what your claim is, just be honest with me.’
” But he added, “He got so it was like an interrogation.”
Several lawyers credited Judge Chase with unusual generosity to petitioners who
admitted to falsehoods — no help to those who maintained they were telling the
truth. Ms. Liu, now 39, the asylum-seeker who told of being forcibly sterilized,
testified that family-planning cadres in China subjected her to painful uterine
surgery when her second child was a baby. She fled in 2000, leaving her children
in hopes of reunion in America.
“The judge said, ‘You have been lying all day, but if you admit to lying, I will
grant your case,’ ” Ms. Liu recalled through an interpreter. “I was very angry,
because everything I said was true.”
In 2003, she appealed his denial to the Board of Immigration Appeals, the
internal review body. But a year earlier, its reviews had been sharply curtailed
when John Ashcroft, then attorney general, cut board membership to 11 from 23
and set tight deadlines to reduce a large backlog. Single board members issued
50 decisions a day, typically one-sentence rulings affirming denials.
Like Ms. Liu, many of those who received such decisions turned to federal court.
Second Circuit filings jumped 53 percent; it is finding merit in 20 percent of
the immigration appeals, returning them for revision.
Ms. Liu’s case was remanded in February, and lawyers say Judge Chase tried to
change. But in July, the 2001 Huang case caught up with him, in a blistering
Second Circuit decision prominently published in The New York Law Journal.
Mr. Lobel described the judge as devastated and braced for more: “He said, ‘I
learned my lesson, but some of these cases are still in the pipeline.’ ”
Ms. Liu is still waiting, too, and worrying about which judge will decide her
family’s fate.
In New York
Immigration Court, Asylum Roulette, NYT, 8.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/08/nyregion/08immigration.html?hp&ex=1160366400&en=c7e37797967e85fc&ei=5094&partner=homepage
Bush signs bill paying for new border fence
Wed Oct 4, 2006 10:55 PM ET
Reuters
By Steve Holland
SCOTTSDALE, Arizona (Reuters) - President George W. Bush
signed a law on Wednesday that will pay for hundreds of miles of new fences
along the U.S.-Mexico border, a move against illegal immigration that
Republicans had sought before next month's congressional elections.
Bush had hoped to address the illegal immigration issue in a comprehensive way
that would have brought beefed-up border security as well as a temporary
guest-worker program allowing immigrants to work legally in the United States.
He spent months advancing the idea but failed to overcome doubts from many
Republicans on Capitol Hill who derided the guest-worker program as an "amnesty"
that would give illegal immigrants a route to citizenship.
Under the legislation, about $1.2 billion would be spent during the fiscal year
that began October 1 for southwest border fencing and other barriers. The money
is part of a $33.8 billion package for domestic security programs that are being
bolstered following the September 11 attacks.
An estimated 12 million illegal immigrants live in the United States, many of
whom entered through the porous border with Mexico.
Mexico had strongly objected to the fence, which it saw as a slap in the face to
efforts during President Vicente Fox's nearly completed six-year term to
negotiate an agreement with Washington on immigration.
Mexico's Foreign Minister Luis Ernesto Derbez said the fences hurt bilateral
relations. "Just the idea of a wall, a fence ... is an insult to good
neighbors," he told a news conference on Wednesday.
President-elect Felipe Calderon said fences were not the solution to the illegal
immigration.
"It does not resolve the problem and, I insist, it will make many Latin
Americans take bigger risks, probably causing deaths," Calderon said on a visit
to Colombia.
Republicans, hoping to hang on to control of the U.S. Congress in November 7
elections, have been pushing border security in reaction to anger by voters, who
say in some places immigrants are taking away jobs and swamping health and
education services.
In a signing ceremony in Arizona, where illegal immigration is a grave concern,
Bush said he still wanted a guest worker program to relieve pressure on the
border with Mexico.
"The funds that Congress has appropriated are critical to our efforts to secure
this border and enforce our laws. Yet we must also recognize that enforcement
alone is not going to work. We need comprehensive reform that provides a legal
way for people to work here on a temporary basis," Bush said.
The legislation will also fund increased nuclear-detection equipment at U.S.
ports and raise security standards at chemical plants.
(Additional reporting by Tabassum Zakaria and Tomas Sarmineto in Mexico
City)
Bush signs bill
paying for new border fence, R, 4.10.2006,
http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=politicsNews&storyID=2006-10-05T025528Z_01_N04413066_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-IMMIGRATION-BUSH.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-politicsNews-2
Shelter From the Storm
October 1, 2006
The New York Times
By JOHNNY DWYER
SHORTLY after 1 a.m. on a drizzly July night, Hadrick and
Abraham Julu, two trim brothers from Liberia, stared at the door of Room 214 of
the Westway Motel in East Elmhurst, Queens, and then at each other. Hadrick, who
held the room’s key card in one hand and the skinny forearm of their ailing
father in the other, jiggled the door’s handle, but it would not budge. The
brothers had never seen a door that worked this way. But they kept trying,
mindful that eight of their siblings, the youngest of them 12, were waiting
slumped and exhausted on benches in the lobby.
Eventually, the Julus managed to enter their rooms, and they did so with great
relief. Twenty-five hours had elapsed between their departure from a refugee
camp in Ghana and their arrival at the Westway Motel, a pair of low-rise,
khaki-colored buildings just west of La Guardia Airport.
The Julus’ journey had been full of dazzling, sometimes disturbing firsts: the
family’s first airplane flight, their first moments in America, the first time
they ate three meals in a single day. Most important, the trip was the first
time that the family, which had fled war-torn Liberia in 1989, had moved from
one country to the next without being in danger.
But for the Westway, the Julus’ arrival represented business as usual. For 21
years, the 122-room motel has been the initial stop in a new life for that most
desperate category of immigrant: the refugee fleeing war or persecution. The
Westway, where refugees stay overnight before beginning the next leg of their
journey to safety, is one of only eight motels nationwide that serve this role,
and the only one in New York. For these motels, the most important day of the
year comes in early autumn, when the president sets the exact number of refugees
that will be admitted to the United States in the following 12 months.
This year, the day is imminent. On Wednesday, a State Department official
testified before a Senate subcommittee that President Bush had proposed a 2007
ceiling of 70,000 refugees, the same number authorized for the 2006 fiscal year.
On Friday, a spokesman for the State Department, Peter Eisenhauer, said that the
final proposal had just been forwarded to the White House for the president’s
signature.
For the countless refugees worldwide clamoring for entry to America, this number
is critical. But it does not even hint at the deep joy felt by the individual
refugee who, after long trial and tribulation, has finally found a haven in
America.
“When the flight landed,” said Hadrick, 20, weary but smiling broadly on that
night in Room 214, “I was like, ‘Wow!’ ”
Later, he added, “Every breath is a beginning.”
Ellis Island on the Grand Central
A modest red sign along the Grand Central Parkway reads “Westway Motel,” and it
may be the only beacon to this singular institution. The motel, which abuts the
parkway and sits opposite St. Michael’s Cemetery, is easy to miss. Its small
buildings are only three stories high, barely registering among the private
homes and apartment complexes in a working-class, ethnically mixed neighborhood.
Guests trickle into the Westway throughout the day. Not all are refugees. Among
them are delayed travelers, weary truckers, and couples whose baggage consists
of little more than a six-pack and a shared look of expectation. A room rents
for $111 for the night, though what the motel tactfully describes as “short
stays” are available for less.
The Westway, which was built to serve airport business, opened in the early
1960’s, but only in 1985, at the request of the International Organization for
Migration, did it begin to house refugees. That agency, created in 1951 by the
United States and some allies to cope with refugees from World War II, arranged
for the motel to furnish rooms for people needing a way station en route to more
permanent settlement.
“The Westway is like the Ellis Island of years ago,” said Barbara Letizia, a
desk clerk who began working at the motel a few years before the first refugees
checked in. But unlike arrivals at Ellis Island, the immigrants entering the
Westway are exclusively refugees — although Westway staff members refer to them
as “I.O.M.’s,” after the agency that handles their travel arrangements. Between
1990 and this past July, an estimated 170,000 refugees, nearly one-quarter of
the 700,000 refugees who passed through Kennedy Airport during that time, have
spent a night at the Westway.
At first glance, the lobby looks like that of any motel slightly past its prime.
Two pay phones and four vending machines line the walls. On the window of the
desk clerk’s office is a gold-lettered placard that reads, “Cigarettes for
Sale.” But below that notice is a less familiar sign: it tells guests where they
should leave their bags — in Cyrillic letters. That is not surprising; most of
the refugees at the Westway do not speak English.
In many respects, the Westway lobby is a time machine, where political
cataclysms from decades long past still reverberate. The Julus’ journey, for
example, began with the brutal civil and tribal wars that raged in West Africa
during the late 1980’s and the early 90’s; other recent arrivals were uprooted
by the disintegration of the Soviet Union around the same time.
“I’ve had the Vietnamese boat people, Armenians, the Polish, Iranians, the
Russian Jews, the Africans,” said Alex Beskrownyj, the I.O.M. operations manager
at Kennedy Airport for 25 years. “And of course, after they opened the borders
for the Soviet Union, we started getting the Ukrainians.”
By the time a family of refugees have passed through the motel’s glass doors,
they have typically reached the end of a long bureaucratic road. Not only must
they pass rigorous screenings by the Department of Homeland Security and the
Department of State, but the resettlements they seek are pretty much a last
resort.
“We’re trying very hard to bring in people who have a real need, that they’ve
been enduring a situation that seems to have no solution,” said Theresa Rusch,
admissions director of the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and
Migration.
The preferred solution for refugees is repatriation, but often that is
impossible for one of two reasons. Some, like the Hmong people of Laos, are
stateless; no country recognizes them as citizens. For others, like the Julus, a
homeland still exists, but to return would bring danger, possibly death.
“Some people are afraid to go back to Liberia because, one, they don’t have
anything; two, they are being hunted,” Hadrick Julu said. “Like in our case,
those who drove us out of our country, they are still alive.”
Even those who clearly qualify as refugees are lucky to make it to America. The
United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees estimates that there are 9.2
million refugees worldwide, meaning that the number of admissions proposed by
the Bush administration for 2007 is comparatively minuscule. Moreover, because
of heightened security policies and limited funds since 9/11, fewer refugees
have been admitted than even the low ceilings have allowed. In the 2005 fiscal
year, for example, though the official ceiling was 70,000, the State Department
could afford to accommodate only 54,000 arrivals, and in the fiscal year that
ended yesterday, the number of arrivals was only about 41,000. Nonetheless, the
United States’ resettlement program is the largest of any country.
The Westway, Dusk to Dawn
A day at the Westway begins, and ends, with refugees on the move. In the
afternoon, flights arrive from places like Nairobi, Riyadh and Moscow, and
within an hour or two the I.O.M. has delivered some of those passengers to the
motel door. Early the next morning, those same guests depart, on their way to
new homes in Oklahoma City, Minneapolis, Boston — wherever.
“This is their first lifeline,” said Ms. Letizia, the desk clerk. “They come
here. They eat. They sleep. Then the next morning, they just disperse all over
the country.”
On a slow day, only a single refugee family might arrive at the Westway, but in
an average week, more than 200 refugees will check in. Mohammad Rasouly, an
I.O.M. employee who has been squiring refugees in and out of the Westway for 15
years, does not need a log-in sheet to count the arrivals. “I know who is a
refugee,” he said. “I can separate them from a regular person. By face. By
bags.”
The evening the Julus checked in, Mr. Rasouly sat in the motel’s lobby awaiting
more of the day’s arrivals. A 48-year-old Afghani, Mr. Rasouly usually greets
guests wearing a vest sporting his agency’s logo — a soft blue globe framing a
man, a woman and a child. The logo is seen all over the Westway, on things like
the name tags the refugees wear and the small plastic bags in which they carry
their travel documents.
To Ms. Letizia, sitting at the front desk, the refugees look confused, tired and
disheveled. But not always.
“We did have one family that stands out — they had 13 children,” said Ms.
Letizia, recalling a young Russian mother. “She had another one on the way. She
had a little tribe. They were all in line, in order, clean, well dressed. It was
amazing. They were like steps: one blond, blue-eyed after the other.”
Sometimes the refugees arrive strikingly unprepared. “During the winter there
have been people that come in here with barely anything on them for winter
clothes,” said Renee Weinberg, the motel’s manager. “So we’ve gone out to stores
to get them socks and jackets, and given them stuff that we had from other
donations.”
Ms. Letizia recalled a young boy who simply did not want to live in the United
States. “When the van stopped, he ran away,” she said. “But when we got him
back, he ate his food, then the next day it was over and done with.”
With old people, the solutions are more elusive. “The sad reality is, they wait
for forever to get here, and they bring their elderly parents,” Ms. Letizia
said. “And some of them are in their 90’s. They’re going to die here and not at
home. You can see the sadness in them.”
Ms. Letizia’s grandfather emigrated from Italy around World War I and built the
home in Queens that her parents still live in.
“I come from here and I struggle,” she said. “I don’t know how they do it.”
Family Without a Country
Shortly after 5 p.m. on the day the Julus arrived, a van carrying three other
families pulled into the motel parking lot. All were Meskhetian Turks, an ethnic
group that Stalin had deported from Georgia to Uzbekistan more than a half
century ago.
Mr. Rasouly, the I.O.M. official, strode out to meet them, instructing the men,
in Russian, to wait for their luggage, and then leading the women into the
lobby.
A half-hour later, one of the three families, the Ibragimovs, rested in a room
overlooking the motel’s parking lot. Makhamad Ibragimov, the father, finished
off the Styrofoam container of chicken and rice that a Westway porter had
brought to him; the mother, Aziza, did not touch her food. Their three sons,
ranging from 12 to 21 years old, sat and listened intently as their father
recounted the details of their journey.
Unlike the Julus, the Ibragimovs are stateless. As Mr. Ibragimov describes their
situation, he and his wife were born in Uzbekistan and were citizens of the
Soviet Union, but after its dissolution in 1991, they fled to Russia to escape
violence against Meskhetian Turks. Then, because Russia denied citizenship to
their ethnic group, the family moved to Belgrade. A decade later, the family
returned to a region in southern Russia called Krasnodar, but since they were
not Russian citizens, they were unable to work. And so they became refugees.
After dinner, Mr. Ibragimov’s sons drifted out into the motel parking lot. As
traffic streamed by on the Grand Central, a banana yellow Ford Mustang
convertible turned into the entrance, and the driver raised the car’s top. The
brothers smiled. They were in America.
The next morning, the family would travel to Charlottesville, Va., where they
would be reunited with Mrs. Ibragimov’s parents and sister, and begin their new
lives.
“We know why we choose America,” Mr. Ibragimov said. “We lived in a Muslim
country. We were Muslim, but they were Muslim, too, and they didn’t let us to
live there. But we know how many nationalities, how many different religions,
live in America.”
Palm Butter and Prayer
Room 214, where three members of the Julu family spent their first night in
America, was a tidy, spare space with off-white walls and floral comforters on
the two queen beds. On the outlets were childproof plastic plugs, a precaution
for guests unfamiliar with electricity. By comparison, at the family’s previous
home, the Buduburam Refugee Settlement in Ghana, the floors were dirt, the beds
mats, the only light came from a single kerosene lamp, and the bush served as
the bathroom.
But not all the changes were for the better. “Especially on the flight, the
food,” said Hadrick, referring to the rich meals of chicken and fruit juice. “I
wanted to vomit.”
Their father, Kporkwehyea, though only 53, is gaunt and frail and suffers from
congestive heart failure. “He took the sickness during the war,” Hadrick said.
“He was stabbed with a knife. By rebels.”
The war in Liberia had torn into the Julu family, leaving two uncles and an aunt
dead, and sending the father and sons into the bush and a 16-year exile.
Although they sought refuge in the Ivory Coast, the war quickly followed them
there. In 1995, they arrived at Buduburam, a sprawling camp that was home to
42,000 refugees. There, by gardening and making bricks, they survived on barely
$2 a day.
Last December, the family applied for resettlement in the United States. Because
another brother and sister had been resettled in Boston previously, the
remaining relatives were eligible for resettlement under the principle of
“family reunification.”
The family’s departure was set for July 27. On their last night in the camp,
they had a celebratory meal of cassava leaves, palm butter and fufu, a
traditional West African dumpling. “During that little gathering,” Hadrick said,
“we pray because we are Christians.”
Prayers were the one constant on their journey to America. Before dawn on the
day of their flight, the Julus prayed with friends and relatives in the refugee
camp parking lot. They prayed as their plane taxied down the runway at the
airport in Ghana, and as it pushed through the clouds approaching New York.
After putting their father to bed that night at the Westway, Abraham and Hadrick
Julu knelt before their bed in Room 214, and prayed again.
•By late September, the Julus had been settled in a Boston suburb. The father,
who had been hospitalized, had been released and was on the mend.
But the fears that haunt refugees followed Hadrick north. He had heard about the
Big Dig, Boston’s troubled highway tunnel construction project, and about the
recent collapse of part of its roof. When he rides in a car, he worries about
something happening. “Each time when I was traveling through tunnels,” he said,
“I feel so afraid.”
The family now lives in a four-room apartment in the town of Malden, Mass. The
younger children have entered high school; the older ones are looking for jobs.
The Julus have found a nearby church, the Church of the Nazarene in Malden,
where they can worship.
Hadrick is exploring his chances of attending Bunker Hill Community College in
Boston. In speaking with college officials, he is learning about “student loans”
and “financial aid” — new words for his new life in America.
Shelter From the
Storm, NYT, 1.10.2006,
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/10/01/nyregion/thecity/01west.html?hp&ex=1159761600&en=01da4dcf3c22d047&ei=5094&partner=homepage
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