History > 2006 > USA > Immigration (V-VI)

Op-Ed Contributor

Our Founding Illegals

December 27, 2006
The New York Times
By WILLIAM HOGELAND

EVERY nation is a nation of immigrants. Go back far enough and you’ll find us all, millions of potential lives, tucked in the DNA of our African mother, Lucy. But the immigrant experience in the United States is justly celebrated, and perhaps no aspect of that experience is more quintessentially American than our long heritage of illegal immigration.

You wouldn’t know it from the immigration debate going on all year (the bipartisan immigration bill-in-progress, announced this week, is unlikely to mention it), but America’s pioneer values developed in a distinctly illegal context. In 1763, George III drew a line on a map stretching from modern-day Maine to modern-day Georgia, along the crest of the Appalachians. He declared it illegal to claim or settle land west of the line, all of which he reserved for Native Americans.

George Washington, a young colonel in the Virginia militia, instructed his land-buying agents in the many ways of getting around the law. Although Washington was not alone in acquiring forbidden tracts, few were as energetic in the illegal acquisition of western land. And Washington was a model of decorum compared to Ethan Allen, a rowdy from Connecticut who settled with his brothers in a part of the Green Mountains known as the Hampshire Grants (later known as “Vermont”). The province of New York held title to the land, but Allen asserted his own kind of claim: He threw New Yorkers out, Tony Soprano style, then offered to sell their lots to what he hoped would be a flood of fellow illegals from Connecticut.

Meanwhile, illegal pioneers began moving across the Alleghenies and into the upper Ohio Valley, violating the king’s 1763 proclamation and a few more besides. (George would today be accused of softness on immigration; he kept shifting the line westward.) Immigrants from such déclassé spots as Germany and Ireland violated the laws and settled where they pleased. The upper Ohio was rife with illegal immigrants, ancestors of people who, in country clubs today, are implying a Mayflower ancestry.

Parallels to today’s illegal immigration are striking. Then as now, it was potentially deadly to bring a family across the line. But once across, illegals had a good chance of avoiding arrest and settling in. Border patrols, in the forms of the British Army and provincial militias, were stretched thin. The 18th-century forest primeval, like a modern city, offered ample opportunities for getting lost. Complex economies thrived in the virgin backwoods, unfettered by legitimate property titles.

When conflicts developed between the first and second waves of illegals, some salient social ironies arose, too. By the early 1770’s, George Washington had amassed vast tracts to which his titles were flatly invalid. The Revolution rectified that. With British law void, Washington emerged from the war with his titles legal by default. But he acquired another problem: low-class illegals were squatting on his newly authenticated, highly valuable property.

Washington harbored no fond feeling for breakers of laws that he too had recently flouted. “It is hard upon me,” he lamented without irony, “to have property which has been fairly obtained disputed and withheld.” He went to court to have the squatters evicted, complaining that they had “not taken those necessary steps pointed out by the law.” He was appealing to righteousness from atop a high but wobbly horse.

Descendants of the great immigration experiences of the 19th and 20th centuries visit the Ellis Island Immigration Museum to learn of the tribulations of ancestors who risked much to become Americans. Those of us whose ancestors risked everything as illegal immigrants, and in the process helped found a nation, owe our forebears a debt of gratitude, too. Without their daring disregard of immigration laws, we might not be here today.

William Hogeland is the author of “The Whiskey Rebellion: George Washington, Alexander Hamilton and the Frontier Rebels Who Challenged America’s Newfound Sovereignty.”

    Our Founding Illegals, NYT, 27.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/27/opinion/27hogeland.html

Bipartisan Effort to Draft Immigration Bill

December 26, 2006
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

WASHINGTON, Dec. 25 — Counting on the support of the new Democratic majority in Congress, Democratic lawmakers and their Republican allies are working on measures that could place millions of illegal immigrants on a more direct path to citizenship than would a bill that the Senate passed in the spring.

The lawmakers are considering abandoning a requirement in the Senate bill that would compel several million illegal immigrants to leave the United States before becoming eligible to apply for citizenship.

The lawmakers are also considering denying financing for 700 miles of fencing along the border with Mexico, a law championed by Republicans that passed with significant Democratic support.

Details of the bill, which would be introduced early next year, are being drafted. The lawmakers, who hope for bipartisan support, will almost certainly face pressure to compromise on the issues from some Republicans and conservative Democrats.

Still, the proposals reflect significant shifts since the November elections, as well as critical support from the Homeland Security Department.

Proponents said the prospects for such a measure, which would include tougher border security and a guest worker plan, had markedly improved since Nov. 7.

The Senate plans to introduce its immigration bill next month with an eye toward passage in March or April, officials said. The House is expected to consider its version later. President Bush said last week that he hoped to sign an immigration bill next year.

The major lawmakers drafting the legislation include Senators Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, and John McCain, Republican of Arizona, along with Representatives Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, and Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois. The four met this month, and their staffs have begun working on a bill.

“I’m very hopeful about this, both in terms of the substance and the politics of it,” said Mr. Kennedy, the incoming chairman of the Senate Immigration, Border Security and Citizenship Subcommittee.

Mr. Kennedy acknowledged that there would be hurdles. But he and other lawmakers say Republicans and Democrats are now more likely to work together to repair a system widely considered as broken.

House Republicans blocked consideration of the bill that passed the Senate this year, saying it amounted to an amnesty for lawbreakers and voicing confidence that a tough stance would touch off a groundswell of support in the Congressional elections. The strategy largely failed.

Hispanic voters, a swing constituency that Republicans covet, abandoned the party in large numbers. Several Republican hardliners, including Representatives John Hostettler of Indiana and J. D. Hayworth of Arizona, lost their seats. After the dismal showing, House Republicans denied F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. of Wisconsin, the departing chairman of the Judiciary Committee and an architect of the House immigration approach, a senior position on any major committee in the new Congress.

Domestic security officials have voiced support for important elements of the framework under consideration. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff has repeatedly raised doubts about the effectiveness of border fencing in remote desert areas. Mr. Bush signed the fence bill this year, but Congress did not appropriate enough money for it. Officials say they would also prefer a less burdensome process than the original Senate bill outlined.

That bill divided the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants into three groups, those living here for five years or more, those here for two to five years and those here for less than two years.

All but the illegal immigrants living here for five years or more, roughly seven million, would have to leave the country briefly to be eligible for legal status. Those here for fewer than two years would have to leave the country and would not even be guaranteed a slot in a guest worker plan.

Domestic security officials said the original plan would have been enormously difficult to administer because many illegal immigrants lacked documentation to prove how long they had been in the United States.

The officials said it would have fueled a market in fraudulent documents as illegal immigrants scrambled to offer proof of residency.

The three-tiered approach would also discourage millions of illegal immigrants from registering, driving millions deeper underground.

“We do have concerns over breaking it down into that tiered system,” said a domestic security official who insisted on anonymity. “When you do that, you run the risk of people trying to create false documentation that would get them the highest benefits.”

Also expected to have prominent roles in the debate are Representatives Zoe Lofgren, the California Democrat who is likely to head the House Immigration, Border Security and Claims Subcommittee; Howard L. Berman, a California Democrat who has followed immigration issues closely for many years; and Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is set to lead the House Homeland Security Committee and has said he plans to re-evaluate the 700-mile fence.

But Mr. Flake described himself as optimistic, saying the elections had disabused many Republicans of the notion that opposing legalization and guest worker plans would win widespread support.

“That illusion is gone,” he said.

The percentage of Hispanics who voted for Republicans fell to 29 percent, from 44 percent in 2004, and some Republicans say passing immigration bills is a crucial part of the effort to win them back.

Mr. Flake warned that some Republicans might balk at proposals like broadening the number of illegal immigrants eligible for a less burdensome path to citizenship, making passage of bipartisan legislation potentially “politically more difficult.”

The prospects for a bill that contains such a proposal remain particularly uncertain in the House, where many prominent Democrats want to ensure broad bipartisan backing as part of their efforts to maintain their majority in 2008, Congressional aides said.

The House Democrats are concerned about protecting newly elected moderate and conservative Democrats, some of whom had campaigned against legalizing illegal immigrants.

It is also unclear whether Mr. Gutierrez and Mr. Flake will produce the only House legislation on immigration and whether their plan will ultimately become the basis for the bill that emerges.

In the Senate, Mr. Kennedy’s bill certainly has the backing of the Democratic leadership, Congressional aides said.

Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, argued that expanding citizenship eligibility and abandoning financing for the fence would alienate moderates in both parties. The three-tier legalization system, a hard-fought compromise, was critical for moderate Republican support for the original bill.

The plan under consideration would allow 10 million or 11 million illegal immigrants to become eligible to apply for citizenship without returning home, up from 7 million in the original Senate bill. To be granted citizenship, they would have to remain employed, pass background checks, pay fines and back taxes, and enroll in English classes.

“I think it’s a nonstarter,” said Mr. Cornyn, who opposes a path to citizenship for illegal workers, but supports a plan for temporary workers that would let foreigners work here temporarily before returning home.

Congressional aides and lawyers familiar with the proposed bills emphasize that it will be very difficult for a smaller group of illegal immigrants, those who arrived after a certain date, perhaps 2004, to become citizens. The aides said the bill might include incentives for illegal immigrants to leave the country. While they hope such elements may ease concerns, many challenges remain.

Some powerful unions, which expect to exert more leverage in the new Congress, remain deeply opposed to the temporary worker program in the Senate bill. The unions say it threatens American jobs.

Officials at the A.F.L.-C.I.O. say they can scuttle such a plan next year, even though Mr. Bush and businesses say it is critical to ensure an adequate labor force.

There is also the political clock to consider. Supporters of immigration measures acknowledge that the prospects for a bipartisan bill will dim significantly if a bill is not passed before the presidential primaries of 2008 are in full swing.

Some Congressional aides and immigrants’ advocates worry about the commitment of Mr. McCain, a likely presidential candidate in 2008.

Mr. McCain has long supported legalization that would not require illegal immigrants to leave the United States. Some advocates fear that his ambitions may lead to a shifting of that stance to avoid alienating moderate Republicans.

A spokeswoman for Mr. McCain said last week that he was not available to comment on the bill being drafted.

Many lawmakers say their hope is growing that Congress will pass an immigration bill next year.

“There are going to be hard choices that are going to be made, because we need to build a bipartisan, broad-based coalition,” said Mr. Gutierrez, who leads the House Democratic immigration group. “But I’m hopeful that in the environment in which we’re working now we can get it done.”

    Bipartisan Effort to Draft Immigration Bill, NYT, 26.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/26/washington/26immig.html?hp&ex=1167195600&en=852240d3f06e6cdf&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Immigrants Go From Farms to Jails, and a Climate of Fear Settles In

December 24, 2006
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

ELBA, N.Y. — A cold December rain gusted across fields of cabbage destined for New York City egg rolls, cole slaw and Christmas goose. Ankle-deep in mud, six immigrant farmworkers raced to harvest 120,000 pounds before nightfall, knowing that at dawn they could find immigration agents at their door.

The farmer who stopped to check their progress had lost 28 other workers in a raid in October, all illegal Mexican immigrants with false work permits at another farm here in western New York. Throughout the region, farm hands have simply disappeared by twos and threes, picked up on a Sunday as they went to church or to the laundry. Whole families have gone into hiding, like the couple who spent the night with their child in a plastic calf hutch.

As record-setting enforcement of immigration laws upends old, unspoken arrangements, a new climate of fear is sweeping through the rural communities of western and central New York.

“The farmers are just petrified at what’s happening to their workers,” said Maureen Torrey, an 11th-generation grower and a director of the Federal Reserve Bank’s Buffalo branch whose family owns this field and more than 10,000 acres of vegetable and dairy farms.

And for the first time in years, farmers are also frightened for themselves. In small towns divided over immigration, they fear that speaking out — or a disgruntled neighbor’s call to the authorities — could make them targets of the next raid and raise the threat of criminal prosecution.

Here where agriculture is the mainstay of a depressed economy, the mainstay of agriculture is largely illegal immigrant labor from Mexico. Now, more aggressive enforcement has disrupted a system of official winks, nods and paperwork that for years protected farmers from “knowingly” hiring the illegal immigrants who make up most of their work force.

“It serves as a polarizing force in communities,” said Mary Jo Dudley, who directs the Cornell Farmworker Program, which does research. “The immigrant workers themselves see anyone as a potential enemy. The growers are nervous about everyone. There’s this environment of fear and mistrust all across the board.”

In a recent case that chilled many farmers, federal agents trying to develop a criminal case detained several longtime Hispanic employees of a small dairy farm in Clifton Springs, and unsuccessfully pressed them to give evidence that the owners knew they were here illegally.

Since raids began to increase in early spring, arrests have netted dozens of Mexican farm workers on their way to milk parlors, apple orchards and vineyards, and prompted scores more to flee, affecting hundreds of farms. Some longtime employees with American children were deported too quickly for goodbyes, or remain out of reach in the federal detention center in Batavia, N.Y., where immigrants are tracked by alien registration number, not by name.

Federal officials say events here simply reflect a national commitment to more intensive enforcement of immigration laws, showcased in raids in December at Swift & Company meatpacking plants in six states.

The effort led to a record 189,924 deportations nationally during the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, up 12 percent from the year before, officials said, and 2,186 deportations from Buffalo, up 24 percent. It includes prosecuting employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants, better cooperation with state and local law enforcement, and new money from Congress for more agents, more detention beds and quicker deportations.

In small towns like Sodus, Dresden and Elba, where a welcome sign declares that the population of 2,369 is “Just Right,” some residents quietly approve of the crackdown. They are unhappy with the growing year-round presence of Mexicans they consider a drain on public services, resentful of the political clout of farmers, or concerned about the porous borders denounced nightly on CNN by Lou Dobbs. Others are torn, praising Mexican families but worried that some farmers exploit them.

Farm lenders and lobbyists warn of economic losses that will be measurable in unharvested crops, hundreds of closed farms and revenues lost in the wine tourism of the Finger Lakes. On the other side, supporters of stringent enforcement expect savings in schools and hospitals, and a boost to low wages as the labor market tightens.

The harvest of fear may be harder to chart, but it is already here. It can be felt in Sodus, where an October raid left a dozen children without either parent for days, and in vineyards near Penn Yan, where a grower of fine cabernet grapes reluctantly permits a worker to sleep in a car, hidden in the vines that he prunes. Everywhere, rumors fly about why one place was raided and not another, feeding suspicion and a fear of speaking out.

For Rodney and Debbie Brown, the dairy farmers in Clifton Springs who lost 6 of their 10 employees to immigration arrests, the experience began like an episode of “The Twilight Zone.”

When no workers showed up at 6:30 a.m. on Aug. 28 to help milk 580 waiting cows, Mr. Brown went to the farmhouse where most of their Hispanic employees lived, only to find it eerily empty. Some of the workers had been with the Browns for more than seven years.

“All of a sudden they were all gone,” Mrs. Brown said. “It was very scary.”

Later, the Browns learned that agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement had been waiting for the workers in their driveway at dawn with state troopers, and had whisked them to the 450-bed detention center in Batavia, where there were 3,094 admissions this year. Like an estimated 650,000 immigrants in New York State and some 11 million nationally, the employees were in the United States illegally; the permits and Social Security cards they had shown to the Browns were fake.

What prompts such raids is rarely disclosed. But federal officials have said that they pursue tips from the public, adding to uneasy speculation about private vendettas or political retaliation. Such talk abounded in Sodus, for example, after an October raid at Marshall Farms, a large breeder of ferrets and dogs for pharmaceutical companies. The consensus, several residents said, was that a disgruntled American employee had called in the complaint.

More than 18 workers, many of them longtime employees with children in Sodus schools or day care, were summoned by name to the office from their jobs cleaning animal cages, and taken away — the men to Batavia, the women to unspecified county jails.

“A lot of the employees down there were very heartbroken to see the women walk out with shackles around their feet and handcuffs chained around their waists, crying,” said Cliff DeMay, a large private labor contractor who supplies agricultural businesses in seven states with workers, and accepts their papers at face value — part of a system that has allowed deniability to everyone but the illegal worker.

“The I.C.E., they’ve always picked up people on complaints,” he added. “It’s not the Border Patrol or I.C.E.’s fault. It’s the fault of our damn politicians.”

But Mr. DeMay also echoed a widespread view that those who criticized the raids were asking for trouble.

Others, including the Farm Bureau, pointed to the unusual intensification of the dairy investigation after Mr. Brown was quoted in a Sept. 11 Associated Press account. Michael W. Gilhooly, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, responded that raids were “carefully planned” and “result from investigative leads and intelligence.”

Mrs. Brown, 46, said she was summoned to the federal building in Rochester and questioned for an hour and a half by immigration agents who threatened to subpoena her phone records. Federal prosecutors then brought felony charges against the workers for using fake Social Security numbers to get their milking jobs.

But rather than turn against their former employers in exchange for leniency, as prosecutors wanted, the Mexican men pleaded guilty to felonies and accepted deportation, said Michael Bersani and Anne Doebler, lawyers who represented them in immigration court. Government lawyers would not discuss the case.

Neighboring farmers, who helped the Browns milk, seemed shaken. “A lot of them say, ‘We should write letters to the editor, but we don’t want to draw attention to ourselves,’ ” Mrs. Brown said. “Everyone is very panicky.”

Some have a different perspective. Ray Woodhams, 58, a Sodus resident who works at a Rochester hospital that was sued by Hispanic employees who were barred from speaking Spanish, said he was glad to read of the arrests.

“The farmers have got their view, but they’re shortsighted — they’re not looking at the country as a whole,” said Mr. Woodhams, who notes that he is a registered Democrat and the son of a Dutch immigrant farmer. “The farmers say they can’t get labor. Well, if they paid a decent wage, maybe they could.” The Browns, echoing many farmers, counter that they have found no one steady to fill the vacant jobs.

Many labor advocates, after years of fighting farmers for wage and hour protections, find themselves in an uneasy alliance with their old foes.

“Suddenly everybody’s interest is the same: Save the lives of the migrants,” said John Ghertner, who is on the board of Rural and Migrant Ministry, an interfaith advocacy group. “From the farmers’ perspective, so they have labor. From our point of view, human rights.”

The smaller the farm and the more settled the work force, the more wrenching the arrests. Or so it seemed as friends gathered around the wife of a vineyard worker arrested in Yates County four days earlier, on his way to prune vines he had tended for a decade. His three children, 14, 11 and 2, are all American-born.

His wife, weeping, described how the agents who had taken him and two others into custody on the road circled back to the house to try to take her, too. As the agents banged at the door and tried to open it, she hid in the bedroom with the 2-year-old, she said, and put her hand over his mouth when he started to cry.

Victor Feria Reyes, the state-licensed labor contractor who had dispatched the father and the others to the vineyard, said that throughout the Finger Lakes, his crews were down by half. “A lot of people hate us,” he said as his daughter Elenita, 8, leaned close. “They just say, ‘Take them away.’ ”

The owner of the vineyard, who had lost three of his five workers to immigration arrests, called them “part of my family,” but begged not to be named. “I’m afraid of retaliation,” he said.

    Immigrants Go From Farms to Jails, and a Climate of Fear Settles In, NYT, 24.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/24/nyregion/24migrant.html?hp&ex=1167022800&en=9f5faf8e26d2da35&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Traditional Round Trip for Workers Is Becoming a One-Way Migration North

December 21, 2006
The New York Times
By MIREYA NAVARRO

In the crossings at the United States’ southern border, tens of thousands of illegal Mexican immigrants head each year in the direction of Mexico. While no statistics are kept on this reverse migration, researchers in both countries suggest that the numbers have declined as border controls have tightened.

Returning Mexicans, researchers say, have generally been divided between “sojourners,” those with temporary or seasonal jobs in the United States who cross once or more a year, and “settlers,” those who move to the United States for an extended period but at some point choose to return home.

“The Mexican migration was always round trip,” said Jorge Durand, director of the Mexican Migration Project at the University of Guadalajara, a research program in conjunction with the Office of Population Research at Princeton. “It was a migration of workers, not immigrants.”

But several factors are causing more illegal immigrants to stay in the United States. Increasingly, immigrants are finding jobs away from the agricultural sector, meaning they have more stable employment that is not subject to seasonal ups and downs, researchers say. More immigrants have also moved to destinations beyond the border states of the Southwest, making the journey back home longer, more expensive and less convenient.

Most important, some researchers say, increased vigilance along the border has led to higher costs and risks associated with crossing back into the United States, disrupting what had been the traditional circular movement of the migrants. Border enforcement began to tighten in the mid-1980s, but has become much more vigorous since the Sept. 11 attacks.

“Having run the gantlet of enforcement resources at the border, migrants grew reluctant to repeat the experience and hunkered down to stay, causing rates of return migration to fall sharply,” said Douglas S. Massey, a sociologist who directs the Mexican Migration Project at Princeton.

Demetrios Papademetriou, president of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, said that “the primary effect of hardening the border has been one of locking people in.”

The 2005 census in Mexico counted 242,000 Mexicans who said they had lived in the United States and had returned to Mexico from 2000 to 2005. By comparison, a 1992 survey counted 955,000 people who said they had returned in the previous five years.

The average probability of return for illegal immigrants was 47 percent during 1979-84 but fell to 27 percent during 1997-2003, Mr. Massey said.

Such probability diminishes the longer the stay, researchers found.

Even sojourners, who are mostly young and male, have been extending their stay in the United States, from an average of 5½ months in the mid-’90s to more than 12 months now, according to some research in Mexico.

Those immigrants most likely to return home, some studies suggest, have strong family ties in Mexico or property and other investments. Some studies have found the return rates are higher among men, the elderly and those with little education.

Anecdotal evidence indicates that most go back to reunite with their families, to invest savings and set up businesses, to retire or because they just gave up, says Rodolfo Tuirán Gutiérrez, a demographer and sociologist who served as secretary general of the National Population Council, a government agency in Mexico.

He said that unlike those making the journey north, Mexicans returning home face no hurdles, easily flying, driving or even walking across the border.

Dr. Tuirán Gutiérrez said those who returned often had to deal with negative consequences of their migration, like split families and the lack of pensions or Social Security benefits in Mexico because they did not work there. He and other researchers said the decision to return usually came after migrants weighed the costs of living in the United States against the benefits, not all of them material.

At some point, for example, Mr. Durand said, making $8 an hour does not seem worth the discrimination many face in the United States, or the stress of trying to speak English.

“The moment comes when they say, ‘What am I doing here?’ ” Mr. Durand said. “They look at quality of life and say, ‘I’m better off in my homeland than in the United States.’ ”

    Traditional Round Trip for Workers Is Becoming a One-Way Migration North, NYT, 21.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/us/21irmaside.html

Three Sisters

For Divided Family, Border Is Sorrowful Barrier

December 21, 2006
The New York Times
By MIREYA NAVARRO

MONTERREY, Mexico — She tells her story from a windowless bedroom in a cinderblock house carved into four apartments that share two showers and two toilet stalls outside. Her kitchen has no refrigerator or sink. To cook, she buys perishables on the same day. To wash dishes, she fills buckets from a faucet in the front yard.

“Look how I live,” Irma tells a visitor. “I was used to something else.”

Not so long ago, Irma, 44, had achieved her own modest version of the American dream about 300 miles from here in San Antonio, where she lived illegally for more than six years. She had left Mexico with three of her four daughters, escaping financial turmoil and marriage to a man so violent that she considered suicide, twice slipping a rope over a beam to hang herself.

In Texas, she had learned how to drive and owned not one but two cars. She held two jobs and, after years of sharing homes with her older sister, Raquel Rodríguez, the family’s only legal resident, and other relatives and friends, moved with her daughters into a small rented house furnished from flea markets.

“My daughters were in peace,” Irma recalled, proud in that accomplishment, her last name and those of some relatives not being disclosed here because they have been illegal immigrants. “No one bothered us.”

Then one night over dinner, three years ago, her daughter Mayra, a high school senior, stunned her with the news that she was pregnant and intended to marry her boyfriend. Another daughter, Barbie, not yet 16, was adamant that said she, too, was getting married and moving out.

“I was so depressed,” Irma said. “All I wanted was to pick up my stuff and leave.”

Disillusioned and feeling abandoned, she attended her daughters’ courthouse weddings on a Wednesday but did not stick around for the weekend parties. She made a quick round of goodbyes to her sister Raquel and another sister, Verónica, who was also living illegally in San Antonio.

By Friday she was on her way back to Mexico with her youngest daughter, passengers in a pickup truck that joined the exodus of immigrants who at some point cross in the opposite direction to go back home. Even with the benefit of having sisters nearby, the kind of support that many immigrants cannot do without, Irma felt she could not stay without Mayra to give her a hand with the driving, child care and other needs that can become particularly daunting for a single mother.

She left one daughter her dining room set, washing machine and refrigerator; the other got her living room set, king-size bed and two dressers.

“I doled out everything,” Irma said. “I cried so much because it took so much sacrifice to avail myself of things and I had to get rid of them.”

Now all she has to show for her migration to the United States, she said, is the heartache of separation.

Her youngest daughter, Lupita, and another daughter, who is married and has three children, now live together just a few blocks from her. But the other two are still in Texas, still illegally, now with one American-born child each.

The border is now a barrier between the Mexican and American sides of her family, and now Irma feels the pull of her absent daughters. The older one has faced her own marital troubles, and both of their families recently moved into an uncle’s house to share expenses. If some illness or emergency befell her girls, Irma worries, she could not be there to help them.

“I still feel that I should be with them, supporting them,” Irma said. “They’re still children.”

Back to the Old Neighborhood

In sweltering heat one evening, with an ear out for “Duel of Passions,” the telenovela on the television in the bedroom, Irma performed a culinary magic trick. She transformed $5 in groceries into a meal of rice with corn, fried potatoes and steamed nopales, cactus, with vegetables to feed two daughters, three grandchildren and two visitors, and still have enough waiting for Gilberto, a tractor-truck mechanic she fell in love with upon her return to Monterrey.

“I always got my daughters used to the food from over here,” she said, perspiring heavily despite the gusts from a stand-up fan. “They’re 100 percent Mexican. None of that pizza.”

Irma has taken up once again in her old neighborhood, a cluster of lower-middle-class and poor homes at the foot of a mountain called Cerro de la Silla, or Saddle Mountain, in this industrial city of 1.1 million.

The streets in Irma’s insular world are lined with ficus trees, and the homes are in varying stages of completion, giving the area the character of a work in progress. Residents buy the land and then build their houses over time, evolving at the pace of their means. Floors are still without tile and zinc roofs have yet to be replaced with cement, though gang graffiti spreads faster than kudzu on the exterior walls.

Irma works part time as a bar waitress and lives in the sparsely furnished home she shares with Gilberto, 35, who makes $120 a week and foots most of the couple’s household expenses, including the $150 monthly rent. The house where she lived before meeting Gilberto is still in disrepair, with partly exposed rooms, missing walls and open sections of the roof. Her daughters still live there, their clothes hanging from bare walls moist from the recent rains and the sofas and light fixtures worn out or broken.

At first she stayed in her sister Raquel’s second home, a large corner property with an empty swimming pool and rental units, known as La Quinta, that her family in Monterrey — Irma’s mother, a sister and four brothers — used for celebrations.

Then she set out to rehabilitate her old five-room house — which she said her estranged husband had been using “as his little hotel” for trysts with women — and bring her family back under one roof. But like a recurring nightmare, her husband, whom she said she could not afford to divorce, still harassed her when he came to visit his daughters.

More and more, her days here are filled with daydreaming about crossing back. A six-hour drive is all that separates her from her daughters in San Antonio. But Irma said she was stuck, with no money to pay for an illegal crossing and no prospects for a tourist visa because she did not own property, hold a full-time job or offer any evidence that she had ties to Mexico that would compel her to return after a visit.

For now, the telephone must do. Twice-a-week calls from San Antonio are her only connection to the life she once had. One morning in October, one of her daughters, Mayra, called and Irma savored each word, careful to shield her own emotions.

“It’s been raining. Every day?” she asked. To her delight, Mayra stayed on the phone for more than two hours when her younger sister Lupita got on the line.

Adjusting to Mexico has been even tougher for Lupita, who turns 16 in December and wears her blond hair waist-long and favors outfits that expose her midriff. A drop earring cascades from her navel. She changed schools five times before she dropped out and took a job in customer service and billing with a cellphone company. Lupita hated the schedule of afternoon-only classes, and resented having to pay for her textbooks, something unheard of in Texas.

“It makes me quite sad that she’s not in high school,” Irma said. “I tell my daughters, ‘You don’t have to struggle like me.’ If I had studied, I’d be in an office, not a bar.”

‘Over There’

Fanning herself with bare hands in the midday heat, Irma walks around a flea market, casting a disdainful eye over the secondhand shoes, clothes and trinkets spread out on blankets and tables, and sometimes in piles over the dirt of the soccer field. She settles on a pair of bright yellow beach thongs for $1 for herself and two pairs of jeans for Lupita.

She is starting over, from scratch. But she was not thrilled with today’s finds. “Over there you pay less and it’s new,” she said with authority about Texas.

She says it again and again. “Over there” — that world that taught her what she is missing. Irma knew only poverty when she went to San Antonio.

She left school at 12 to start work cleaning houses. At 17 she learned to sew and worked in a factory. At 20, after three years of courtship, she married a neighbor and began a new cycle of deprivation. It was the untenable marriage, more than economic hardship, that compelled her to follow in the footsteps of her sister Raquel, the first in her family to immigrate north and who remains the family’s mainstay in San Antonio.

A fading wedding picture in the living room of the home where her daughters live shows the couple in posed embrace, with a darker-haired Irma in white gown and long train and her mustachioed husband holding her by the waist. Irma said the newlywed bliss lasted only two years. Her husband soon started cheating and beating her, once even breaking her nose, she said.

At one point she left with the girls, staying with siblings and moving from house to house. The husband would not give her economic support. Things got so bad, she said, that twice she planned her suicide, but changed her mind when she heard her daughters coming into the house.

“I was tired and desperate,” she said of her marital situation. “That wasn’t a life.”

Her daughter Mayra left for Texas first. The girl was driven across the border with false identification papers. She went to live with her Aunt Raquel in San Antonio and attended middle school there. Irma followed later, leaving her other daughters in Monterrey.

“It went badly for me,” she said of that first and toughest year in the north. “I wasn’t happy here or there. I had Mayra, who was my solace.”

Irma eventually found work as a seamstress, making military uniforms in a maquiladora in San Antonio, a job that paid, by the piece, $400 to $500 in a good week, and enabled her to send $200 to $300 home weekly. But when her family sent word that her husband, a welder, had suffered a severe leg injury at work and was dying and asking for her forgiveness, she returned to Monterrey. A month later, he had recovered and she was back in San Antonio and at Raquel’s, this time with two more daughters in tow.

The maquiladora jobs had vanished, so she went to work cleaning and washing dishes at a Mexican restaurant. She had been promoted to cook and substitute restaurant manager, making $5.75 an hour, by the time the two daughters announced their wedding plans.

A Chance Meeting

Despite her sad eyes and unsmiling face, Irma presents a youthful exterior — brown eyes under tattooed eyebrows, short honey-colored hair pinned back with girlish barrettes, form-fitting tops over tight jeans, tattoos on her lower back and left leg and upper arm. A victim of domestic violence by both her father and husband, she said she had long stopped looking for a man.

Then last year, at a girlfriend’s birthday party, she met Gilberto.

“We danced and we were giggling and all of a sudden we were kissing,” she said. Gilberto has kind eyes and a calm demeanor, but he also had a drinking problem. Irma became his confidante, a supportive friend, but did not agree to live with him, she said, until last summer, when she was convinced he had dealt with his own demons.

Irma’s days are now split between Gilberto, her work, her daughters, her grandchildren and, increasingly, her longing for “over there.”

She first found work cleaning in a factory for $80 a week. Last March she got a better position as a waitress at a pool hall three days a week for $90. She works Thursday through Saturday, the 3 p.m. to 2 a.m. shift, also getting up at 5 a.m. on weekdays to cook Gilberto’s breakfast and pack him a lunch of rice soup or potatoes with chorizo. She watches the news and then walks two blocks to play with her grandchildren.

“The family-oriented lifestyle has not changed for me,” said Irma, who prefers a quiet home life after work, with the occasional outing to a karaoke bar or the public swimming pool.

One afternoon, she walked her 6-year-old granddaughter, Briseiry, to school for the United Nations World Food Day. Dressed as a strawberry, Briseiry performed two dance numbers in the school yard, with classmates in grape and potato costumes. Irma and her daughter Mireya laughed and clapped from the sidelines.

From the produce ranks, Briseiry flashed her grandmother a toothless smile, and Irma smiled back with tenderness. But even in this revelry, she pointed out the school’s flaws — the chairs without desks and bathrooms that lacked doors and toilet lids.

“The differences are many,” she said, comparing Monterrey with San Antonio.

Another American Grandchild

Her brush with American life has made Irma less tolerant of the poverty, quick to find fault with her surroundings. The urge to start over in Texas is the strongest it has been since she returned. Her daughter Barbie gave birth to a second child in December. Once again, Irma missed out on welcoming a new grandchild. And as usual, Irma will wait for one of her sister Raquel’s visits to see pictures of her growing American family.

She has her fantasy return planned out. She would take Lupita and Gilberto with her, get a higher-paying job at a restaurant, or cleaning houses, that would allow her to help her daughters in Texas and send money to Mireya in Monterrey to get a tourist visa.

Getting through the border, Irma noted, is not as daunting as coming up with the $2,000 she said she would need to pay for fake identification papers and a coyote to drive her through as his wife or sister. When she first crossed by car in the late 1990s, as the coyote’s “wife,” she paid only $500.

“Imagine that, together we’d need $4,000,” Irma told Gilberto one night.

It would be easier to buy a car, he replied.

Another hope is that Irma’s daughters in San Antonio, or maybe her sister Raquel, would become citizens and sponsor her for permanent residency. But that would be years away.

Sometimes Irma looks so melancholic that Gilberto asks if she has misgivings about having returned. She tells him no, because she wouldn’t have met him.

“I don’t regret having come because, after so many years of being alone, I found Gilberto, who treats me well, who loves me and takes care of me,” she says.

But that is only half the truth.

One Thursday afternoon, Irma left home shortly before 3 p.m. for her job at the billiard hall, a short walk through a busy commercial area with restaurants, tortillerias, clothing stores and auto repair shops.

A burly man yelled from across the avenue that he had the reconditioned refrigerator she had been looking for. When she signaled “how much?” he held up five fingers to signal 500 pesos, or about $50.

The rent was due, she said, so the purchase had to wait.

“That’s why you don’t get ahead here,” Irma said of the low salaries. “What you make here in a week, over there you collect daily, even just cleaning up yards.”

Irma’s workplace is a bar with six pool tables and wall décor that ranges from pictures of Pancho Villa to a calendar featuring topless women.

Three television sets are tuned to Animal Planet.

That night about a dozen men in their 20s and 30s focused on their game and $2 bets. Irma, in jeans and a sweater, moved about at a relaxed pace serving beer and picking up empties from tables.

Most customers summoned her with an “Irma, cerveza!” Many greeted her with a kiss. On busy nights, Irma and another waitress serve up to 200 patrons at a time. No one tips like in Texas, where Irma sometimes ended the night at the restaurant with an extra $40. She has to wait until Saturday to get paid for the three days.

And it is, after all, a bar. “The bad thing here is that people drink until they crawl,” she said. “Over there, if they see you drunk, they don’t sell to you.”

During a break, sitting in a plastic chair and sipping a beer sent over by a customer, she fought back tears as she pondered her future. A customer was grilling meat over firewood in one corner for Irma and his friends. A childhood friend, Antonio Flores, walked in and kissed her on the cheek.

“She was very good and very beautiful,” Mr. Flores said, reminiscing of Irma as a teenager.

Irma smiled in appreciation, but on this night, her cocoon in Monterrey felt like a prison.

“If I had the money I’d leave today,” she repeated, barely audible over the ranchera playing on the jukebox.

    For Divided Family, Border Is Sorrowful Barrier, NYT, 21.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/21/us/21irma.html?hp&ex=1166763600&en=8389042afb4edcb6&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Three Sisters

Fear and Hope in Immigrant’s Furtive Existence

December 20, 2006
The New York Times
By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

SAN ANTONIO — Verónica keeps her foot steady on the pedal. She turns onto a side street, where trouble is easier to avoid. A yellow traffic light flashes and she stops; running it is not an option.

Verónica, 31, does not take chances. In her mind, she already took the biggest chance of her life by moving here illegally from Monterrey, Mexico, with a husband and three young children. Now she has too much to lose.

Border Patrol agents routinely monitor the main roads near her house on the outskirts of this sprawling city in south-central Texas, so Verónica and her friends and relatives have informal alert networks in place. “My husband just called to tell me he saw them right now on the street,” she said, clicking shut her cellphone, before leaving the house.

Spanish-language radio also does its part; “limones verdes” — or green limes — “are sprouting” near the highway, an announcer warns over the radio, using shorthand for the agents’ green uniforms.

“We’re careful,” Verónica said.

And why not. After six years in America, her list of accomplishments would be the envy of most everyone in the ramshackle neighborhood where she grew up.

There is the little house, stone and stucco, with a browning yard, a battered trampoline and rusty plumbing. The family’s two used cars (a minivan and a Ford Focus) sit in the driveway.

Her common-law husband, José, has a job other immigrants covet, $15 an hour working for a boss who offers no benefits but gives generous presents: a refrigerator, a washing machine, tickets to SeaWorld. Her children speak to each other in English and bring home mostly A’s and B’s. Her eighth grader is in the National Honor Society, and a son was recently rewarded with a GameCube for doing well in school.

It may not seem like much, Verónica says, but in Monterrey’s working-class “colonias” she lived in houses with cardboard walls and zinc roofs. Growing up, she shared a single damp box spring with eight siblings and coffee cans. The cans were there to catch the rain. And Verónica was the lucky one of the bunch, she said: she made it to eighth grade, with the help of her siblings’ wages, and, as the baby of the family, escaped her father’s beatings.

Two of her sisters, Raquel Rodríguez and Irma, and one of her brothers have also ventured to San Antonio for better lives. (The last names of Verónica and other family members who have immigrated illegally are not being published here.)

Though separated by years, distance and degrees of success, their journeys have crisscrossed time and again, an up-close version of the broader immigrant experience that has Mexicans, legal and illegal, shuttling between hope and despair, between leaning on friends and relatives and going it alone.

Even before Verónica’s arrival here, Raquel’s green card, her legal residency document, cast a special glow on the whole family. Raquel was the fixer, the one who made it possible even to imagine a path out of the thicket of poverty, the one who offered up a relatively soft landing in America, at least for a few months.

“Raquel was already here, and she got us so enthusiastic,” Verónica said, remembering her sister’s pitch about jobs and a better life during her visits home. “She kept at us. We thought no, no. Then we said, ‘Let’s make a go of it.’ Raquel did it. She helped us.”

Irma, who had no green card, also took advantage of Mrs. Rodríguez’s welcome but later gave up on America, returning three years ago to Monterrey to a dreary cinderblock house with an outdoor bathroom; Mrs. Rodríguez still lives here about 10 miles away, but her world is also far removed from Verónica’s: Mrs. Rodríguez has a steady job with benefits and can move about without fear of getting caught for being here illegally.

Like millions of other illegal immigrants, Verónica and José first entered the United States on tourist visas, which they were able to get from the American consulate in Monterrey. Verónica had secured hers as a child and was able to extend it. The family was waved in at the checkpoint in Laredo, except for her two daughters from her earlier marriage who hid under a blanket in the back seat.

Verónica’s visa is still good, for five more years, but there are conditions. She can stay only for six months at a time and cannot work. Verónica has violated both rules, making her an illegal immigrant, or in the Mexican vernacular, someone “sin papeles,” without papers.

Neighborhood Safety Zones

In a country of dedicated spotlight seekers, Verónica makes a habit of kicking attention away like a stray ball. She prefers to shrink into the background of her modest neighborhood and operate within its safety zones, an area of about five square miles where people don’t ask her to flash cards she doesn’t have. Insurance card. Social Security card. Credit card. Green card.

Caution corrals her hopes and expectations. She doesn’t dare drive the 200 miles to Houston to visit a close cousin. The road, so open and busy, is pockmarked with risk. That popular little taco restaurant on the road about a mile away? Verónica heard it was a favorite refueling stop for Border Patrol agents.

This summer, when word filtered down that “la migra” — immigration — was staking out Wal-Mart and the flea market, Verónica stayed away. “Now no more Wal-Mart, and in Wal-Mart they gave you layaway,” she lamented.

In the garbled game of immigrant telephone — where messages trundle past cultural miscues and language hurdles — bad information gets passed along like extra coupons. It took her five years to get a driver’s license because she heard it was not safe for someone “sin papeles” to apply. She also heard she had to take a test on a computer and she had never used a computer before.

“I said, ‘God, you are my Social Security card and my driver’s license,’” Verónica said. “We were afraid to go and get it. But then you meet people who have done it, and you figure out it’s O.K.”

Her social life is just as constrained. As Verónica walks out of her house, she spies a neighbor across the street and gives her a quick wave. She doesn’t know her name. She doesn’t want to know. People on her block learn to avert their eyes.

“You never know,” Verónica said. “There are bad people in the world. We could have a problem with immigration. There is a lot of envy in the world, so we are careful.”

She has one constant friend, Belinda, a sweet Mexican woman who recently had a job earning $3.50 an hour making tacos. Belinda lives in a dusty trailer park nearby with her two daughters and an American husband who charges her to use the family car. Being with Belinda reminds Verónica that her life, however difficult, is blessed.

An Exercise in Humiliation

No rules are too small for Verónica, and she tries hard to live as a lawful illegal immigrant, an oxymoron she shrugs off.

Her husband, a shy, handsome man who works 50 hours a week as a machinist, relaxes after work by fixing up old cars. One day not long ago, a code enforcement officer told him that broken-down cars had to be kept off driveways. Verónica panicked. José now fixes the cars in the backyard.

One mistake, Verónica explained, and it’s back to Monterrey, back to borrowing money for diapers.

Even in her daily routine, Verónica said, it is hard to forget that she is illegal, and sometimes unwelcome.

A few months ago, she and José ventured into a big-box store to return a faulty microwave oven. It was an exercise in humiliation, she said. The employee refused to take it back.

“I told them we are paying customers,” Veronica said. “We are not asking for things for free.”

Finally, José’s boss called the store and the microwave was swapped.

Mexican-American cashiers have pretended not to understand Spanish when Verónica, who can’t speak English, asks a question. It is a power play among Spanish speakers designed to haze and embarrass the newest immigrants.

“Sometimes they call you mojados to your face,” said Verónica, using the Spanish word for “wetback.”

But then, she said, there is the flip side. Santa Claus visits their house every Christmas, courtesy of a local charity. The nurses and doctors at the hospital where she had her fourth child, a girl, also saved her elementary school boy after his appendix burst. “They treat you better here than in Mexico,” Verónica said. “Living here without papers is still better than living there.”

She worked for a while, when José was still pounding out car dents and hustling odd jobs for $200 a week. The underground network led her to a man who sold fake Social Security cards and to a job at a factory, making cots for the military for $5.15 an hour. Her boss was kind and gave her extra shift work.

But she noticed her son, at the time her only child not in school, had grown listless. A few questions revealed that the woman who watched him for $60 a week secluded him in one room and fed him scraps to save money. He became anemic, and that ended Verónica’s job. Now she works some weekends cleaning her husband’s boss’s offices.

Mostly she labors at home. She mops the green linoleum floors every day, cooks two meals for her husband and feeds her children in the evening. She brings order to the bedrooms, even the makeshift ones with hanging sheets as doors and dividers, each with a bed, queen or twin. Her children all share beds. The youngest daughter, a 4-year-old born in San Antonio, proudly brings forth her toys: a book, a doll’s head, a plastic dollhouse.

Bargain hunting is a second job. She drives around the neighborhood Fridays and Saturdays with her friend Belinda looking for “garajes,” garage sales. Verónica is assiduous in her bargaining.

“Cuánto?” she asks, holding a set of sheets in someone’s driveway.

“Cuatro dolares,” the seller says. Four dollars.

“Te lo compro por dos,” Verónica says, bringing her down to $2.

For $6, Verónica walks away with strappy sandals, two pairs of pants, towels and the sheets.

Working Off the Books

Verónica is grateful to be here, even as a shadow. But she earns her keep. “I get angry when you hear on television that we don’t pay for things and don’t pay taxes,” Verónica said.

She yanks her property tax bill out of a file. It is more than $1,800. Here is her home insurance bill, $713 a year. Social Security is deducted from her husband’s paycheck even though he bought his Social Security card on the black market.

Verónica works off the books so does not pay taxes on her wages; her sister Raquel, the legal resident, got her a cellphone, which also required a Social Security number.

Verónica and José have learned to navigate the underground economy to get ahead. At first they shied from opening up a bank account, but the fees at the check-cashing place ($1 for every $100 cashed) drove them to it. All it required was a tourist visa and a taxpayer identification number, which allows workers to pay tax to the federal government.

She pulled out her $1,000 bill from the hospital for her son’s appendectomy. She is paying it bit by bit. That was all she was charged, she said, because she didn’t have enough money to pay the whole bill. The hospital told her the government would pay the rest.

Buying their house was tricky. Without a credit trail, Verónica said she didn’t even think about a mortgage, so they took another route, one without lawyers and credit reports. They met with the owners of the house and the four of them signed a piece of paper, banking on nothing but trust that in about 15 years the house would be theirs. Verónica goes to the bank every month and deposits $537, which includes 10 percent interest. That money pays off the owners’ mortgage.

Verónica frets that the house could be snatched away from them, by the government, by the owner. When that happens, she prays. She pushes the negative thoughts out and takes a leap of faith.

“The owner is a nice person,” she said. “But who knows? It is in God’s hands.”

Uncertainty and Longing

Verónica speaks about God with the passion of a new convert. It is her way of fending off the uncertainty at home and the longing she feels for her family in Monterrey. When her days seem too tenuous, Verónica prays, usually alone in her bedroom with her Bible.

She asks God to protect her family from harm, to keep her strong, to help her relatives in Mexico buy a hot water heater. She asks that her husband’s boss stay faithful to him. She prays that her children stay far from drugs and sex. Some of her 17-year-old girl’s schoolmates are already pregnant.

She talks to God about helping her go home to visit her mother and brothers, and her sister Irma, who left San Antonio three years ago. But her deepest prayers center on legitimacy, on getting a green card. She has heard on television about the election last month, and she is hopeful the changes in Washington might make it easier for her to stay here.

Verónica found God the usual way; she stumbled across him when she needed him most, in her case during an emergency room visit for pain in her uterus that wouldn’t let up. The pain in her heart, Verónica said, cut just as deeply. She was depressed. José picked up a pamphlet on a table; it was an invitation to an evangelical church.

Now the tiny church nearby — no more than a converted garage in the back of a house where she prays to Jesus in Spanish — is her solace. It is one of the few places she visits regularly without fear.

“Since then, I have not been sick,” Verónica said of her churchgoing. “It’s the prayers. I feel so much better. Thank God.”

“God has his plan,” Verónica added. “None of it is coincidence. Because of him, we are better off.”

On her knees, with her hands raised high as the youth choir sings and jams, Verónica finds that she fits in perfectly with the 50 or so other members, all of them Latino, many of them also one slip from misfortune. Her children sit with her, singing, studying. This is her community and she dresses up for it, with highlights in her hair, a long, tight-fitting skirt and an elegant black top. Her face is subtly lit by makeup. Despite her hardships, Verónica manages to look her age.

“We praise you Lord,” the choir leader, a teenage girl, says over and over as the guitar player riffs. “Te alabamos Señor. Te alabamos Señor.”

Struggles With English

Back home, sitting down on her imitation leather sofa, Verónica watches as her 4-year-old daughter fixates on “Dora the Explorer” beaming from their large-screen television set, the family’s most prized possession.

Verónica has just finished cleaning her pots and pans. She had made chicken mole for José’s boss and his workers earlier that day. She cooks once in a while to say thank you, whether he decides to pay her or not.

The other children come home and do their homework. Verónica knows she should learn English. She can’t check the homework — the older children must help the younger ones — and she can’t understand what they say to each other, which makes her both nervous and proud. But finding a good English class requires more money, time and confidence than she has.

“I went to some free classes and learned a bit,” she said, smiling, acknowledging that the classes offered up more gossip than English. “I can say hello, order some hamburgers.”

Photographs of Verónica’s family in Mexico are all over the house. Most people don’t give their photos a second glance. Verónica looks at them repeatedly, hungrily. The telephone is expensive. The Internet is not an option. Her family in Mexico is not wired, and her own secondhand computer crashed this summer.

When a new pile of photographs arrives, Verónica scoops them up. “Look, it’s Shakira,” Verónica said, poking sweet fun at her niece Lupita, Irma’s daughter, who had dyed her hair light, like the singer’s.

A Father’s Funeral Missed

Of all the hardships she has faced — grueling jobs, mice-infested apartments, illness, insults — the worst, Verónica said, is not being able to hug her mother or idly chit-chat with her brothers and sisters.

When José’s father died, he could not go home for the funeral. He would not risk getting stranded in Mexico.

“To not go and put flowers on his father’s grave, that is hard,” Verónica said. “He still cries about it.”

Her husband, a gentle, strapping man who does not drink, spends most weekends working and has not taken a vacation in two years. Nothing like her first husband, who beat her. In Mexico, José had his own machine shop, and still they could not pay the bills.

“And it was not because my husband was not a good worker,” Verónica said.

Verónica, despairing, lost her willpower three years ago and went back to Mexico for a visit. At the border on her return to San Antonio, inside a car with a legal resident, she was questioned. The agent had found her Texas identification card in the computer database, a giveaway that she was not a tourist.

Her heart racing, Verónica concocted a story on the fly. She had applied for the card for a visit to Las Vegas, she told the agent. Somehow it was convincing enough; he waved her through.

“It was too big a scare,” Verónica said, vowing never to try such a journey again. “I won’t risk the future of my children.”

    Fear and Hope in Immigrant’s Furtive Existence, NYT, 20.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/20/us/20veronica.html?hp&ex=1166677200&en=e9be2f8580c85b6c&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Three Sisters

Making a Life in the U.S., but Feeling Mexico’s Tug

December 19, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

SAN ANTONIO — It is the fourth quarter, with South San Antonio High School holding a narrow lead over its archrival in the biggest football game of the year, and most everyone in the bleachers is standing and hollering. But not Raquel Rodríguez.

Her son, Jaime, a second-string defensive back, paces the sideline, anxious for a chance to play. Mrs. Rodríguez, shivering in a vinyl car coat and sling-back heels, hardly notices the game, obsessing instead over her family’s cellphone bills unfolded across her lap.

She calculates when her cash flow might allow her to pay them, just under $180 in all, and worries she will end up late. She hopes that Jaime will not be sent onto the field, fretting out loud that her health insurance might not cover him if he were injured.

“I can’t stand to see them hitting my son,” she sighed, confessing that 11 years after moving here from Mexico, she still does not understand the game of football or feel part of the larger American way of life that her son so embraces.

That Mrs. Rodríguez, 46, was in the bleachers at all was a testament to her many achievements as an immigrant. The eldest of nine brothers and sisters from Monterrey, an industrial city in northern Mexico, Mrs. Rodríguez is the only one in her family who has papers to live legally in the United States.

Reporters and a photographer from The New York Times spent a week in October following Mrs. Rodríguez and two of her sisters, Verónica and Irma, all of whom speak primarily Spanish, to chronicle the American immigration experience through the turbulent, intertwined lives of one family from Mexico.

Mrs. Rodríguez’s legal immigration status has been both a privilege and a burden. Like countless others from Mexico, the largest source of newcomers to this country, Mrs. Rodríguez has secured a stable, decent life in the United States with her husband and two children, far better than anything she could have hoped for where she was born.

But she does not feel settled here, and remains endlessly embroiled in the struggle to raise up her brothers and sisters as well.

Immigration is often a family affair, and a messy one at that. Mrs. Rodríguez’s siblings — whose last names are not being published here because they have immigrated illegally — grew up under the same leaky roof, with the same abusive father and in the same poverty that had them sometimes begging for food.

Many years later, they have made economic gains, but the temptations and frustrations of immigration have separated the family, leaving none of them completely satisfied that they have taken the right course.

Verónica, Mrs. Rodríguez’s youngest sister, lives across town with her husband and children, an illegal resident haunted by fear that her family’s progress could be undone in a moment by the immigration authorities. Irma, Mrs. Rodríguez’s eldest sister, gave up on San Antonio after trying to survive here for seven years and now whiles away her days in Monterrey regretting that decision.

Still, Mrs. Rodríguez’s home remains a strategic beachhead for them and her other siblings. They seek her out for a warm meal, a ride or a cash advance as they navigate her adopted country. Those in Mexico rely on her charity too, which she delivers piled high in the back of her pickup in the form of second-hand clothes, toys and household supplies.

“She was like Santa,” said Verónica, who received gifts of dolls, pants and underwear in Monterrey from her big sister and later slept on her floor when first getting established in San Antonio.

At times, the family bond is strained by resentment. Quarrels erupt, social graces are ignored and feelings hurt. After Mrs. Rodríguez shared her home for months with Verónica’s family, the crowding irritated everyone and she asked them to leave. Both sisters felt bruised in Verónica’s hasty departure.

But Mrs. Rodríguez does not complain. She has an obligation, she says, almost an obsession, to use her Texas foothold to lift her whole clan.

“My family is always first,” she says fiercely. “Always.”

Despite her tenacity, Mrs. Rodriguez’s family is not as close as she wants. Dinnertime comes and her husband is working late, her son is at team practice. Her daughter, Gabriela, 22, has a family of her own. Mrs. Rodríguez sits on her blue corduroy couch, yawning with fatigue. Half of her torn heart remains in Mexico.

Running From the Past

As Mrs. Rodríguez tells it, she was never drawn to Texas by an American dream. She was driven to leave Mexico by the pain of the past.

“I’m going to work hard, Ma, so I can have something,” she told her mother when she decided to move to the United States. “So we won’t have to ask anybody for anything, like we did when we were children.”

Although Monterrey is only 150 miles from the Texas border, when Raquel was growing up it could have been a different continent. Her mother and the children lived in one room under a tin roof between four cinder-block walls. They all slept on one box spring, pressed together “like little chickens,” Mrs. Rodríguez says, placing coffee cans between them to catch leaks when it rained.

Her father was a drinker, Mrs. Rodríguez says, mean and violent when he had too much. He walked out early in the marriage but would visit his wife once or twice a year, drunk and demanding sexual satisfaction. By the time his visits ceased, his wife had nine children.

Mrs. Rodríguez, normally guarded, comes quickly to tears when she speaks of her father. Her eyes have permanent injuries from his blows, she says.

When she was 14, he tried to evict the family and take the hovel where they lived for himself and a new girlfriend. Mrs. Rodríguez quit school and went to work as a cook for a Christian mission to earn money to buy out her father. Every Saturday for several years, she recalled, he arrived at her workplace to collect her wages.

Though still a girl, Mrs. Rodríguez took on the role of head of her teeming household. She shielded the smaller children from her father’s fists. She barked and badgered to make sure they went to school.

Although several of her siblings grew up to be evangelical Christians, Mrs. Rodríguez, a Roman Catholic, says her hatred for her father prevents her from converting to their faith.

“They say you have to forgive first,” she says. “But my rancor is still fresh. I have wounds that will never heal.”

Her life began to change when she was 18 and she met Jaime Rodríguez Ramírez at a Monterrey roller-skating rink. Athletic and industrious, Mr. Rodríguez had also gone to work as a child, learning the greasy art of transmission repair.

They married in 1982. After a few years, Mrs. Rodríguez said, her husband began to frequent the corner cantina, and she feared he might become like her father. So when he suggested they try living for a year near a sister of his in San Antonio, she agreed. America was a way to get her husband away from the bar.

Gaining Legal Status and Jobs

Her opportunity to immigrate legally came through simple luck. Her husband’s sister married an American citizen. Once that sister-in-law became a naturalized citizen, she applied for residency for Jaime, Raquel and their daughter, Gabriela. Jaime Jr. was an American citizen, having been born in Texas during an exploratory sojourn by the couple.

Mr. Rodríguez went to work right away at JV Transmissions, the garage of his sister’s husband. Mrs. Rodríguez was hired as a waitress at Dos Pedros restaurant, a homey Mexican hangout with black velvet mariachi hats on the walls. She spoke no English, but rarely had a customer with no Spanish. At times she worked two shifts, sleeping only two hours a night.

Even though they were both legal immigrants, the Rodríguezes lived for years like refugees. They shared a one-bedroom apartment with Mr. Rodríguez’s parents. Her in-laws slept on the only bed, Mrs. Rodríguez said, while she and her family slept on the floor.

Her responsibilities to her clan in Mexico persisted. Various siblings began asking her to help them make a start in Texas, and she felt compelled to oblige.

“I had nothing once,” she says. “Now I can’t bear to see them have nothing.”

A Sibling Crosses the River

The first to come was her brother, Gutberto, the sixth of her siblings, and she insisted he stay with her. He forded the Rio Grande, and soon the one-bedroom apartment of her in-laws in San Antonio housed nine people. Mrs. Rodríguez’s in-laws still slept in the bed, while Gutberto and his wife and one child joined Mrs. Rodríguez’s family on mattresses on the floor.

Eventually Mrs. Rodríguez and her husband moved out, but their new apartment remained cramped.

Her sister Irma sent her oldest daughter to live with Mrs. Rodríguez so the girl could attend middle school in Texas. Later Irma herself came, bringing two more of her daughters to stay with Mrs. Rodríguez as well.

At one point when Verónica brought her family, the population in the Rodríguez apartment peaked at 10. Tempers were strained and doors were slammed.

But if Mrs. Rodríguez thought her siblings were imposing, she does not speak of it now. She accuses only her in-laws, whom she does not regard as core family, of callousness.

She still fumes when recalling that her mother-in-law barred Gutberto from their house when Mrs. Rodríguez was not there, and refused to feed his children when they came home from school.

Throughout it all, Mrs. Rodríguez has been investing on both sides of the border. Eight years ago she landed a school cafeteria job, a step up from waitressing because it provides health insurance.

Before long, she and her husband paid $69,000 for a sienna-toned two-story ranch house on a calm San Antonio cul-de-sac. In the same period, she built a modest house for her mother in the Monterrey neighborhood where she grew up. Just down the street, she is also gradually improving a larger house, with a swimming pool that mostly stays empty.

The pull of Mexico remains strong, like a spell. She goes back at Easter and during the school breaks. At Christmas she leaves her husband and children in San Antonio, preferring to celebrate with her mother and siblings in Monterrey.

When her daughter, Gabriela, turned 15, Mrs. Rodríguez spent $12,000, more than a year of hoarded waitress tips and cafeteria wages, on a quinceañera birthday party, held in Monterrey. Four hundred guests were served whiskey and received color photographs of Gabriela in her queenly gown. Mrs. Rodríguez paid $1,200 for a laminated, four-foot-high enlargement of that portrait. It crowns her living room in San Antonio.

Worries About Endurance

Mrs. Rodríguez expected to work hard in the United States, and she has. When the doors of the cafeteria at the Roy P. Benavidez Elementary School swing open at 10:30 in the morning, hundreds of hungry children rush toward the serving line, and she has to be ready.

She must be sure that 300 enchiladas are covered with the right amount of tomato sauce and that dozens of sandwiches are prepared with three slices of turkey and two of cheese. Potatoes must be baked and cookies cooled.

By noon Mrs. Rodríguez is bounding between ovens and freezers. She stirs soups, hoists trays and wheels carts, maintaining the flow of food to the servers out front on the cafeteria line. Her limited English is no handicap in the cafeteria. Most of “las ladies,” as the eight women of the kitchen crew are unofficially known, are Mexican.

She likes her job because after eight years she knows she does it well. “When you know how to do your job, nobody yells at you,” she explains.

But she has started to worry about her endurance. She makes $8.43 an hour, taking home less than $12,000 a year. She moves constantly between the walk-in freezer and the heat wave by the stove. One hip aches and her knuckles, frequently dipped in dishwashing water, are bulging with arthritis.

Her list of ailments is growing. She has had a hysterectomy, a cyst removed from her breast and multiple surgeries on her battered eyes. (Unable to apply makeup with her injured vision, she had black lines tattooed around her eyes and lips.) She has asthma and diverticulitis.

“It would be nice,” she muses, “to have a job where I could sit down.”

Blunt Words From a Friend

Dropping by one afternoon in Ms. Rodríguez’s living room, Blandina Sanchez, a neighbor who is one of her closest friends in San Antonio, puts it more bluntly.

“Get it through your head, Rachel,” Mrs. Sanchez says, “you are not going to want to do that job all your life.” Mrs. Sanchez, an American, wants her friend to accept Texas as home. She calls her Rachel instead of Raquel and speaks to her in English.

“Rachel, you need to go back to school!” Mrs. Sanchez says, urging her to get her high school equivalency diploma. Mrs. Rodríguez can never rise to kitchen supervisor at the elementary school without English, her friend insists.

Mrs. Rodríguez knows that is right, but she just sinks down on her blue corduroy couch, yawning but still tense. Even in her own living room, she does not unwind. She runs financial calculations in her head and plans trips to Mexico. She keeps the lights off well into dusk, sitting in dimness to cut her costs.

On Saturdays, she admits, she likes to drink beer, sometimes too much beer. Her worries force her to think about where she belongs. She has always been guided by her family, but now it is diverging.

Her husband has done well in Texas. He has worked hard, stayed straight and been a fine father, raising both his children to play sports and keep out of trouble.

Gabriela married a legal Mexican immigrant, a construction contractor whose business is booming. Their toddler, Hanna, is an American. Gabriela plays in a women’s soccer league in San Antonio.

No Question of Identity

Jaime Jr., at 18, is even more absorbed in American life. Not only a varsity football player, he is a solid student with plans to move to Phoenix to attend a technical college next year, an educational leap for a family that only recently, with Gabriela’s graduation, celebrated its first high school diploma.

A hefty young man with a square jaw, Jaime exudes self-confidence. Slipping easily between English and Spanish, he favors English, even knowing his mother cannot always understand him.

When asked to describe his identity, Jaime, born and raised in the United States, answers immediately, in plain English.

“I’m Mexican, yes.”

His high school friends all call themselves Mexicans. During middle school, he says, there was friction, with some “popular people” taunting them, calling them wetbacks. But now he is a senior on the football team.

“Now no one really makes fun of me or anything because I talk to everyone, and I play football,” he says. “Everyone just keeps it cool now.”

He is proud of his roots in Mexico. But that does not mean he wants to live there.

Mrs. Rodríguez is not sure where she wants to be. She has many friends in San Antonio, and her church, St. Bonaventure, is just down the street. Because of her work discipline and legal immigration status, Mrs. Rodríguez’s economic advance has been steady. She has never wanted for a job and has been able to obtain credit cards, car loans and a home mortgage. She drove to her son’s football game in a double-cabin pickup truck with polished chrome wheels, a recent purchase.

But she rarely sees her brother Gutberto and her sister Verónica, though they remain in Texas. She perceives terrible hints that some of her siblings resent her success.

“They don’t know how I am killing myself at work,” Mrs. Rodríguez says, in a moment of anguish.

So, although she is eligible to become a United States citizen, any move to do so would be purely practical. It would, ironically, be a way to help reunite her Mexican family because as a citizen she could apply for residency papers for her siblings. “I would do it to help my brothers and sisters,” she said of citizenship.

In the stands at the football game, Mrs. Rodríguez’s pensive mood changed when Gabriela arrived with baby Hanna to watch her brother’s big game. Mrs. Rodríguez seized her granddaughter in her arms. It was family again, and she let herself relax.

“I have a job,” she said. “My husband has a job. I have good children. I’m happy.”

But there was more. “I am also sad. I don’t have my whole family with me.”

    Making a Life in the U.S., but Feeling Mexico’s Tug, NYT, 19.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/19/us/19raquel.html

Editorial

Swift Raids

December 18, 2006
The New York Times

When federal immigration officials raided six plants owned by Swift & Company, the world’s second largest beef and pork processor, last Tuesday, they brought Spanish translators. They knew exactly what kind of worker is found in low-paying, strenuous jobs in this country: recent Latino arrivals with limited skills and, in many cases, no legal papers. Nearly 1,300 people — almost 10 percent of Swift’s work force — were taken away in what the government said was the largest but not the last assault on the underground immigrant economy.

The raids have led some people to heap scorn on Swift and, of course, on the illegal immigrants, particularly the dozens of detainees who have been charged with identity theft and other crimes. But doing so misses the bigger picture. Swift and its workers are merely Exhibit A in an immigration system that is failing in all of its parts.

It is a system that rewards illegality and pays lip service to lawfulness and order.

Swift insists that it is a model corporate citizen. It obeyed the rules, which require it to check workers’ identity papers and file so-called I-9 forms attesting to that. And it went further, participating in the federal Basic Pilot program, a system of checking Social Security numbers that President Bush has touted as a way to crack down on immigration fraud. The company says that prying any more aggressively into workers’ legal status would leave it open to civil rights lawsuits.

The Swift raids are powerful evidence that I-9’s and Basic Pilot are ineffective and disingenuous, a nod to by-the-books technical lawfulness that allows a far vaster world of illegality to flourish. Swift and other large-scale employers of immigrants, like farms and hotels, may insist that they never knowingly hire people illegally. But as long as the jobs they offer are the kinds whose pay and conditions consistently fail to attract native-born Americans, their protests will ring hollow. This system is brilliantly efficient at bringing lots of cheap products and services to market, which is great unless you mind its essential lawlessness, anonymity and reliance on an enormous work force of silent, compliant, frightened people whose bitter choice is to stay here illegally or go home and be desperately poor.

Swift, by its lights, was doing the right thing. The federal government was doing the right thing, waking up, belatedly, to workplace enforcement. And yet it’s impossible to see how this will work over the long term. Immigration reform built on piecemeal enforcement — factory raids and border walls — won’t solve the problem of the 12 million illegal immigrants already here. The American economy wouldn’t stand the shock if the Swift raids were multiplied to levels beyond the merely symbolic.

The system needs what Mr. Bush and Congress have refused to give it: a way to end the sham. Comprehensive immigration reform is good for the economy, giving companies access to a secure and stable work force. It is good for national security, allowing law enforcement to go after real criminals and leave honest working people alone. And it is good for the immigrant workers across the country, terrorized by Tuesday’s raids, who just want to keep doing their jobs, no matter how hard and distasteful.

    Swift Raids, NYT, 18.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/18/opinion/18mon1.html

Immigrants’ Families Figuring Out What to Do After Federal Raids

December 16, 2006
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Immigrant families scrambled yesterday to find detained relatives, arrange care for children of deported parents and recover from the loss of work as a result of raids this week by immigration authorities at meat-packing plants in six states.

The raids, part of a federal operation against identity theft, had stunning effects on the surrounding towns, residents said. In all, 1,282 legal and illegal immigrants were arrested, and in most cases the plants, all operated by Swift & Company of Greeley, Colo., were the largest employer around.

“Many people are still very frightened,” Mayor Luis Aguilar of Cactus, Tex., said.

In Cactus, 275 employees were arrested.

In Worthington, Minn., with 230 arrests, residents said dozens of immigrants had gone into hiding.

“I’ve never seen anything like it, the sadness, the emptiness, the fear,” a schoolteacher, Barbara Kremer, said. Ms. Kremer said she had provided shelter in her house since the raid for 24 immigrants who were afraid to return to their homes.

The raids, by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, netted dozens of immigrants who were legal residents but did not have their papers with them at work. Others arrested were illegal who have to leave the country or face deportation.

Many have children or spouses who are legal residents or Americans, and they have to decide whether the families will stay here or return to their home countries.

Veronica Rodriguez Perez, 20, an American who is works on a production line at the Swift beef-processing plant in Greeley, Colo., said she had not been able to talk with her husband, a Guatemalan, since he was arrested on Tuesday. Mrs. Perez said immigration agents separated during the raid from her husband, Roberto Pérez García.

“They made him and myself seem like criminals,” she said. “He tried to give me a kiss on the forehead, but they would not let us talk to each other.”

Mr. Pérez worked in the slaughterhouse side of the plant, she said. They have an 11-month-old son who was born in Colorado. Mr. Pérez, who was in the United States illegally, had not applied for residency because of the legal costs, she said.

Many of the arrested immigrants were taken to Camp Dodge in Johnston, Iowa, a National Guard base. Others were bussed to an immigration detention center in Atlanta for deportation proceedings.

The chief executive officer of Swift, Sam Rovit, said that production was slightly slowed at the plants, but that the losses in replacing the workers could be in the millions.

Swift executives said they had sought to work with immigration officials to pre-empt the raids. In March, the immigration agency subpoenaed the work documents of every Swift employee. After reviewing the papers, the agency retained them for many employees, including 665 at a plant in Marshalltown, Iowa, on suspicion that they were fake or stolen, Donald F. Wiseman, the Swift general counsel, said.

Swift began to interview its employees. About 400 left the company after the interviews, with many acknowledging that their documents were not legal, Mr. Wiseman said. He added that the immigration agency later ordered the company to stop the interviews.

On Nov. 28, Swift sought an injunction against the raids in Federal court in Amarillo, Tex. Judge Mary Lou Robinson denied the request.

Mr. Rovit said Swift, third largest meatpacker in the nation, paid good wages by industry standards, twice the minimum wage, with health benefits. With tight profit margins, he added, Swift would be hard-pressed to replace the workers for work, which is demanding and has historically attracted immigrants, including immigrants without proper documents.

“Nobody wants to have illegal immigrants,” Mr. Rovit said.

He said a continued crackdown would bring “a shrinking in the industry, because there is not enough labor to go around.”

Prosecutors in several states began filing criminal charges against accused suppliers of the illegal documents. In Salt Lake City, officials unsealed a complaint against Veronica Carrillo, a Mexican immigrant accused of selling real United States birth certificates to Swift employees.

Martin Forstenzer contributed reporting from Greeley, Colo.

    Immigrants’ Families Figuring Out What to Do After Federal Raids, NYT, 16.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/16/washington/16immig.html

Administration to Drop Effort to Track if Visitors Leave

December 15, 2006
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS and ERIC LIPTON

WASHINGTON, Dec. 14 — In a major blow to the Bush administration’s efforts to secure borders, domestic security officials have for now given up on plans to develop a facial or fingerprint recognition system to determine whether a vast majority of foreign visitors leave the country, officials say.

Domestic security officials had described the system, known as U.S. Visit, as critical to security and important in efforts to curb illegal immigration. Similarly, one-third of the overall total of illegal immigrants are believed to have overstayed their visas, a Congressional report says.

Tracking visitors took on particular urgency after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, when it became clear that some of the hijackers had remained in the country after their visas had expired.

But in recent days, officials at the Homeland Security Department have conceded that they lack the financing and technology to meet their deadline to have exit-monitoring systems at the 50 busiest land border crossings by next December. A vast majority of foreign visitors enter and exit by land from Mexico and Canada, and the policy shift means that officials will remain unable to track the departures.

A report released on Thursday by the Government Accountability Office, the nonpartisan investigative arm of Congress, restated those findings, reporting that the administration believes that it will take 5 to 10 years to develop technology that might allow for a cost-effective departure system.

Domestic security officials, who have allocated $1.7 billion since the 2003 fiscal year to track arrivals and departures, argue that creating the program with the existing technology would be prohibitively expensive.

They say it would require additional employees, new buildings and roads at border crossings, and would probably hamper the vital flow of commerce across those borders.

Congress ordered the creation of such a system in 1996.

In an interview last week, the assistant secretary for homeland security policy, Stewart A. Baker, estimated that an exit system at the land borders would cost “tens of billions of dollars” and said the department had concluded that such a program was not feasible, at least for the time being.

“It is a pretty daunting set of costs, both for the U.S. government and the economy,” Mr. Stewart said. “Congress has said, ‘We want you to do it.’ We are not going to ignore what Congress has said. But the costs here are daunting.

“There are a lot of good ideas and things that would make the country safer. But when you have to sit down and compare all the good ideas people have developed against each other, with a limited budget, you have to make choices that are much harder.”

The news sent alarms to Congress, where some Republicans and Democrats warned that suspending the monitoring plan would leave the United States vulnerable.

Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is a departing subcommittee chairman on the House International Relations Committee, said the administration could not say it was protecting domestic security without creating a viable exit monitoring system.

“There will not be border security in this country until we have a knowledge of both entry and exit,” Mr. Rohrabacher said. “We have to make a choice. Do we want to act and control our borders or do we want to have tens of millions of illegals continuing to pour into our country?”

Representative Bennie Thompson, the Mississippi Democrat who is set to lead the Homeland Security Committee, also expressed concern.

“It is imperative that Congress work in partnership with the department to develop a comprehensive border security system that ensures we know who is entering and exiting this country and one that cannot be defeated by imposters, criminals and terrorists,” Mr. Thompson said in a statement Thursday.

In January 2004, domestic security officials began fingerprint scanning for arriving visitors. The program has screened more than 64 million travelers and prevented more than 1,300 criminals and immigration violators from entering, officials said.

Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and other officials often call the program a singular achievement in making the country safer. U.S. Visit fingerprints and photographs 2 percent of the people entering the country, because Americans and most Canadians and Mexicans are exempt.

Efforts to determine whether visitors actually leave have faltered. Departure monitoring would help officials hunt for foreigners who have not left, if necessary. Domestic security officials say, however, it would be too expensive to conduct fingerprint or facial recognition scans for land departures. Officials have experimented with less costly technologies, including a system that would monitor by radio data embedded in a travel form carried by foreigners as they depart by foot or in vehicles.

Tests of that technology, Radio Frequency Identification, found a high failure rate. At one border point, the system correctly identified 14 percent of the 166 vehicles carrying the embedded documents, the General Accountability Office reported.

The Congressional investigators noted the “numerous performance and reliability problems” with the technology and said it remained unclear how domestic security officials would be able to meet their legal obligation to create an exit program.

Some immigration analysts said stepping away from the program raised questions again about the commitment to enforce border security and immigration laws.

A senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, Jessica Vaughn, said the government had long been too deferential to big businesses and travel groups that raised concerns that exit technology might disrupt travel and trade.

“I worry that the issue of cost is an excuse for not doing anything,” said Ms. Vaughn, whose group advocates curbing immigration. Domestic security officials said they still hoped to find a way to create an exit system at land borders. “We would to do more testing,” a spokesman for the department, Jarrod Agen, said. “We are evaluating the initial tests to determine how to move forward.”

    Administration to Drop Effort to Track if Visitors Leave, NYT, 15.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/15/washington/15exit.html?hp&ex=1166245200&en=d5d67c6a0f8dd057&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Prison Rape Commission Meets in L.A.

December 14, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

LOS ANGELES (AP) -- Suffering years of violence and harassment as a transsexual in Mexico, Mayra Soto sought asylum in what she hoped would be a more tolerant U.S.

But the trauma continued here.

She was detained in an immigrant detention center in Los Angeles and forced by a guard to perform oral sex on him with the threat of violence, she said.

Soto's story, relayed tearfully to a bipartisan federal panel Wednesday, was one of many allegations of guards taking advantage of immigrant detainees.

The guard in Soto's case eventually pleaded guilty to sexual assault and served a six-month sentence. But Soto told The National Prison Rape Elimination Commission -- whose eight members include presidential and congressional appointees -- that her punishment was much worse: Guards moved her to a cell with accused murderers and rapists, she claimed.

''I took this as another form of retaliation,'' said Soto, 33, sobbing. ''I still don't know how they could justify placing someone as feminine as me in the same unit as murders and rapists.''

The two-day hearing in a federal courtroom is the sixth held by the commission nationwide, but the first to focus on sexual abuse of immigrants held in federal detention facilities.

The panel, led by a federal judge and made up of business leaders, academics and human rights workers, was formed by Congress in 2003 to find ways of deterring prison rape -- a crime that has claimed an estimated 1 million victims in 20 years, according to the commission.

Unaware of their rights, unable to speak English and afraid that speaking out could hurt their chance at freedom, immigrant detainees are one of the populations most vulnerable to abuse by guards, immigrant advocates testified.

Nationwide, some 23,000 undocumented immigrants are held in the facilities -- some for years at a time -- awaiting word on their right to stay in the U.S.

Hearings by the commission in five other cities have focused on juvenile victims, what corrections officials can do to prevent prison assaults, and how to streamline the reporting, investigation and prosecution of crimes. The committee is expected to report its findings to the president and Congress by early 2008.

A Florida advocate for immigrants' rights detailed allegations of more than a decade of sexual abuse of Haitian immigrants detained in a Miami facility by guards. Cheryl Little testified that anyone who complained was deported or transferred to remote facilities away from lawyers, family and friends.

''Anyone who wore a uniform had free access to women,'' said Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, quoting a detainee.

Also testifying was a children's rights advocate from San Francisco, who said a female guard was allowed to make repeated advances on a 17-year-old immigrant detained in a youth facility, even after he complained to authorities.

The teen eventually returned to his home country in January to avoid further time in the facility.

The most dramatic testimony came from Soto, the only victim to speak at Wednesday's hearing.

Outside the courtroom, the Orange County hairdresser -- who has been granted a temporary right to stay and work in the U.S. -- said she hoped the pain of recalling her horror in public would lead officials to make changes.

''It's very painful for me, it brings back the fear, the trauma, the pain,'' Soto said. ''But I think they need to know what is happening.''

    Prison Rape Commission Meets in L.A., NYT, 14.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Prison-Rape.html

Massachusetts Set for Its Officers to Enforce Immigration Law

December 13, 2006
The New York Times
By KATIE ZEZIMA

BOSTON, Dec. 12 — Gov. Mitt Romney will sign an agreement with the federal government Wednesday that gives the Massachusetts state police the authority to detain illegal immigrants and charge them with violating immigration law, his office said Tuesday.

The agreement will give 30 state troopers the power to interrogate people whom they determine, during the course of criminal investigations, to be illegal immigrants. The suspects can then be arrested without a warrant on the immigration charge alone. Illegal immigrants about to be released from state prison can also be detained.

Mr. Romney, a Republican who has been burnishing his conservative credentials as he considers running for president, announced earlier this year that he intended to enter the program. But although the agreement takes effect Wednesday, the officers do not begin five weeks of specialized training until next month, perhaps after he leaves office on Jan. 4.

And the governor’s successor, Deval L. Patrick, a Democrat, has expressed doubts about the program, saying at a news conference last week that it was a “bad idea” to give troopers, who have “enough to do,” the additional responsibility of enforcing immigration laws. Mr. Patrick’s spokesman, Richard Chacon, said Tuesday that the governor-elect wanted to study the agreement before making a decision on whether to rescind it.

“He’s not convinced that this is the right use of state police resources, and for that reason he thinks it’s a bad idea,” Mr. Chacon said. “His primary concern is for sound public policy, and he will base whatever his final decision is on that principle.”

Eric Fehrnstrom, a spokesman for Mr. Romney, said: “Governor Romney believes that empowering state police to detain immigration violators is an effective homeland security strategy. It’s really another tool for law enforcement to use in their investigations into criminal activity or suspicious behavior.”

Massachusetts would become the ninth jurisdiction to train its officers to enforce federal immigration law. Alabama and Florida have agreements with the federal government involving their state police, and Arizona has an agreement involving corrections officers. Counties in California and North Carolina are also participating in the program, which was created by the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996.

“The goal of the partnership is to seek out those who both break our nation’s immigration laws and the laws of Massachusetts by engaging in criminal activity,” said Julie L. Myers, assistant homeland security secretary in charge of Immigrations and Customs Enforcement.

The agreement has angered local immigrant advocacy groups. Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said he hoped Mr. Patrick would rescind the accord, which, he maintains, is a waste of law enforcement’s time and money.

“He is mismanaging public safety,” Mr. Noorani said of Mr. Romney. “Unfortunately, on his way out the door he’s taking one final punch at the most disenfranchised, powerless community we have.”

    Massachusetts Set for Its Officers to Enforce Immigration Law, NYT, 13.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/13/us/13romney.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Infant Kidnapped at Knifepoint in Fla.

December 10, 2006
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:28 a.m. ET
The New York Times

FORT MYERS, Fla. (AP) -- A missing month-old boy kidnapped at knifepoint was taken as payment because his parents failed to pay human smugglers, police said Saturday.

Bryan Dos Santos Gomes' parents were brought into the United States illegally from Brazil, but failed to pay the smugglers' entire fee, Fort Myers Police Chief Hilton Daniels said.

Bryan has been missing since Dec. 1 when he and his mother, Maria Fatima Ramos Dos Santos, as well as another woman and a baby, were approached by a woman driving a black sports utility vehicle. The women, who did not know the driver, agreed to give directions and entered the SUV with their children, police said.

The driver later forced one mother and child out of the car, and made off with Ramos and her baby, police said. Ramos was released south of Fort Myers shortly afterward, but the woman in the SUV kept her baby.

''We are still looking for this woman, but it is not a woman who desperately needed a baby,'' police spokeswoman Shelly Flynn said in a story posted on the News-Press Web site. ''Now we are looking for a group of people.''

Police initially reported the baby's name as Brayn. A spokesman for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement did not have any additional information about the case Saturday.

Local churches have posted a $21,000 reward for Bryan's return.

    Infant Kidnapped at Knifepoint in Fla., NYT, 10.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Florida-Abduction.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Court Rejects Interpretation of Immigration Drug Law

December 6, 2006
The New York Times
By LINDA GREENHOUSE

WASHINGTON, Dec. 5 — The Supreme Court rejected the government’s interpretation of immigration law on Tuesday, ruling that a noncitizen is not subject to mandatory deportation for a drug crime that, while a felony in the state where the crime was prosecuted, is only a misdemeanor under federal law.

The 8-to-1 decision restored to one category of immigrants, caught in the nearly impenetrable maze where immigration law and criminal law meet, the ability to avoid automatic deportation and the other dire consequences of being guilty of an “aggravated felony.”

The category is made up of immigrants convicted of simple drug possession in states that treat those offenses as felonies. Federal law treats possession in most instances as a misdemeanor. But in the government’s view, possession when deemed a felony under state law became a “drug trafficking crime,” which under federal immigration law is an “aggravated felony” that strips an immigrant of the right to seek relief from automatic deportation, to seek asylum, or ever to return legally to the United States.

Writing for the majority on Tuesday, Justice David H. Souter said the government’s interpretation was based on a strained and implausible reading of the definition of “drug trafficking crime” in the federal criminal code.

Thousands of immigrants every year might benefit from the ruling, according to Jayashri Srikantiah, a law professor who heads the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at Stanford Law School and who filed a brief on behalf of Jose Antonio Lopez, the immigrant whose Supreme Court appeal led to the decision, Lopez v. Gonzales, No. 05-547.

In an interview, Ms. Srikantiah said the decision was informed by “a sense of proportionality” and of the “real world consequences” of subjecting legal residents convicted of minor offenses to automatic deportation.

The Immigration and Nationality Act contains a list of aggravated felonies that includes “a drug trafficking crime.” This phrase, in turn, is defined not in the immigration law, but in the criminal code as “any felony punishable under the Controlled Substances Act,” the basic federal narcotics law.

The government’s position was that “any felony” meant any crime that was considered a felony either under federal law or in the state where the prosecution took place. In this way, a conviction for simple possession could become a drug trafficking offense and hence an aggravated felony, which is what happened to Mr. Lopez.

A Mexican who was a permanent legal resident of the United States, Mr. Lopez pleaded guilty in a South Dakota state court to aiding and abetting another person’s possession of cocaine. That crime is a felony in South Dakota, although the analogous offense is a misdemeanor under federal law.

Mr. Lopez served 15 months in state prison and was then placed in federal deportation proceedings as an aggravated felon. After unsuccessfully contesting the designation before the immigration service and the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit, in St. Louis, he was deported to Mexico.

The Supreme Court’s decision makes Mr. Lopez eligible to apply for the administrative relief from deportation known as “cancellation of removal,” an option that was foreclosed by his designation as an aggravated felon.

In analyzing the government’s position that any offense “punishable” under the Controlled Substances Act therefore became a “drug trafficking” felony, Justice Souter said that “there are a few things wrong with this argument, the first being its incoherence.” While “trafficking” ordinarily meant “some sort of commercial dealing,” he said, “commerce, however, was no part of Lopez’s South Dakota offense of helping someone else to possess.”

Justice Souter continued that while the government’s argument appeared implausible, that was “not to deny that the government might still be right; Humpty Dumpty used a word to mean ‘just what he chose it to mean — neither more nor less,’ and legislatures, too, are free to be unorthodox.”

But in this instance, he said, if Congress meant to define drug trafficking in such an “unexpected” way, “Congress would need to tell us so, and there are good reasons to think it was doing no such thing here.”

Justice Souter said that under the government’s interpretation, a central part of federal immigration law, deportation, would depend not on a federal judgment about the seriousness of an offense, but on “varying state criminal classifications.” He added, “We cannot imagine that Congress took the trouble to incorporate its own statutory scheme of felonies and misdemeanors if it meant courts to ignore it whenever a state chose to punish a given act more heavily.”

The court’s conclusion was that “a state offense constitutes a ‘felony punishable under the Controlled Substances Act’ only if it proscribes conduct punishable as a felony under that federal law.”

Justice Clarence Thomas was the lone dissenter, observing in his opinion that “without doubt, Congress could have written the definition with this limitation, but it did not.”

This was not the first time the Supreme Court has resisted a categorical interpretation of immigration law by the executive branch. In a unanimous opinion two years ago, the court ruled that contrary to the government’s view, driving under the influence of alcohol was not a “crime of violence” for which an immigrant could be subjected to automatic deportation.

    Court Rejects Interpretation of Immigration Drug Law, NYT, 6.12.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/06/washington/06scotus.html

Editorial

Day Laborers’ Rights

November 24, 2006
The New York Times

You cannot abuse people through selective enforcement of the law. You cannot single people out for special punishment without cause. You cannot instruct the police to harass people for being Latino and poor. Cities and towns across the country have overlooked these basics in their eagerness to punish those they presume to have violated federal immigration laws. But thankfully for all of us, the Constitution still has the final say.

On Monday, a federal judge ruled that Mamaroneck, a village in suburban Westchester County, N.Y., had waged a discriminatory campaign of ticketing and harassment to drive Latino day laborers out of town.

In Freehold, N.J., last week, advocates for immigrants hailed the settlement of a three-year-old lawsuit sparked by similar mistreatment. Day laborers there will no longer be ticketed for soliciting work in public places, and building inspectors and police officers will stop entering homes without residents’ consent in what the advocates said was a selective crackdown on Latinos in rental housing.

That followed a heartening ruling issued last May, when a federal judge ordered the city of Redondo Beach, Calif., to stop arresting day laborers for violating a local ordinance against soliciting work in public.

Together these victories send an important message about basic rights and promise to help stem a tide of local vigilantism. The underlying problem, however, remains. The righteous ardor of the Mamaronecks and Freeholds of this world has risen in direct proportion to the federal paralysis on immigration. It underscores the urgent need for Congress and the president to step up to the perennially difficult task of determining who may cross our borders and how, and of creating a fair and viable path out of the shadows for deserving immigrants who are living and working here illegally.

And while the courts have upheld the basic rights of an abused minority, they have not made day laborers any more welcome in their communities or helped local governments find ways to treat them with dignity while upholding residents’ desires for a reasonable amount of order. The judge who assailed Mamaroneck, saying it was beyond doubt “that the village acted with malicious or bad-faith intent to injure the day laborers,” added that she had also found no law that would compel it to create a hiring site for them.

That would be the practical and decent approach, the one most respectful of civic order and common sense. But you can’t impose common sense from the bench.

    Day Laborers’ Rights, NYT, 24.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/opinion/24fri1.html

A Border Watcher Finds Himself Under Scrutiny

November 24, 2006
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

For years, Roger Barnett has holstered a pistol to his hip, tucked an assault rifle in his truck and set out over the scrub brush on his thousands of acres of ranchland near the Mexican border in southeastern Arizona to hunt.

Hunt illegal immigrants, that is, often chronicled in the news.

“They’re flooding across, invading the place,” Mr. Barnett told the ABC program “Nightline” this spring. “They’re going to bring their families, their wives, and they’re going to bring their kids. We don’t need them.”

But now, after boasting of having captured 12,000 illegal crossers on land he owns or leases from the state and emerging as one of the earliest and most prominent of the self-appointed border watchers, Mr. Barnett finds himself the prey.

Immigrant rights groups have filed lawsuits, accusing him of harassing and unlawfully imprisoning people he has confronted on his ranch near Douglas. One suit pending in federal court accuses him, his wife and his brother of pointing guns at 16 illegal immigrants they intercepted, threatening them with dogs and kicking one woman in the group.

Another suit, accusing Mr. Barnett of threatening two Mexican-American hunters and three young children with an assault rifle and insulting them with racial epithets, ended Wednesday night in Bisbee with a jury awarding the hunters $98,750 in damages.

The court actions are the latest example of attempts by immigrant rights groups to curb armed border-monitoring groups by going after their money, if not their guns. They have won civil judgments in Texas, and this year two illegal Salvadoran immigrants who had been held against their will took possession of a 70-acre ranch in southern Arizona after winning a case last year.

The Salvadorans had accused the property owner, Casey Nethercott, a former leader of the Ranch Rescue group, of menacing them with a gun in 2003. Mr. Nethercott was convicted of illegal gun possession; the Salvadorans plan to sell the property, their lawyer has said.

But Mr. Barnett, known for dressing in military garb and caps with insignia resembling the United States Border Patrol’s, represents a special prize to the immigrant rights groups. He is ubiquitous on Web sites, mailings and brochures put out by groups monitoring the Mexican border and, with family members, was an inspiration for efforts like the Minutemen civilian border patrols.

“The Barnetts, probably more than any people in this country, are responsible for the vigilante movement as it now exists,” said Mark Potok, legal director of the Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks the groups. “They were the recipients of so much press coverage and they kept boasting, and it was out of those boasts that the modern vigilante movement sprang up.”

Jesus Romo Vejar, the lawyer for the hunting party, said their court victory Wednesday would serve notice that mistreating immigrants would not pass unpunished. Although the hunters were not in the United States illegally, they contended that Mr. Barnett’s treatment of them reflected his attitude and practices toward Latinos crossing his land, no matter what their legal status.

“We have really, truly breached their defense,” Mr. Vejar said, “and this opens up the Barnetts to other attorneys to come in and sue him whenever he does some wrong with people.”

Mr. Vejar said he would ask the state attorney general and the county attorney, who had cited a lack of evidence in declining to prosecute Mr. Barnett, to take another look at the case. He also said he would ask the state to revoke Mr. Barnett’s leases on its land.

Mr. Barnett had denied threatening anyone. He left the courtroom after the verdict without commenting, and his lawyer, John Kelliher, would not comment either.

In a brief interview during a court break last week, Mr. Barnett denied harming anyone and said that the legal action would not deter his efforts. He said that the number of illegal immigrants crossing his land had declined recently but that he thought it was only a temporary trend.

“For your children, for our future, that’s why we need to stop them,” Mr. Barnett said. “If we don’t step in for your children, I don’t know who is expected to step in.”

Mr. Barnett prevailed in a suit in the summer when a jury ruled against a fellow rancher who had sued, accusing him of trespassing on his property as he pursued immigrants. Another suit last year was dropped when the plaintiff, who had returned to Mexico, decided not to return to press the case.

Still, the threat of liability has discouraged ranchers from allowing the more militant civilian patrol groups on their land, and accusations of abuse seem to be on the wane, said Jennifer Allen of the Border Action Network, an immigrant rights group.

But David H. Urias, a lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund who is representing the 16 immigrants suing Mr. Barnett, said fewer complaints did not necessarily mean less activity. Immigrants from Mexico are returned to their country often within hours and often under the impression that their deportation — and chance to try to return again — will go quicker without their complaints.

“It took us months to find these 16 people,” Mr. Urias said.

People who tend ranches on the border said that even if they did not agree with Mr. Barnett’s tactics they sympathized with his rationale, and that putting him out of business would not resolve the problems they believe the crossers cause.

“The illegals think they have carte blanche on his ranch,” said Al Garza, the executive director of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps in Arizona, a civilian patrol group that, Mr. Garza says, does not detain illegal immigrants but calls in their movements to the Border Patrol. “The man has had it.”

Mr. Barnett, a retired Cochise County sheriff’s deputy and the owner of a towing business, acquired his ranch in the mid-1990s, buying or leasing from the state more than 22,000 acres.

Almost from the start he took up a campaign against the people crossing the border from Mexico, sometimes detaining large groups and radioing for the Border Patrol to pick them up.

Chuy Rodriguez, a spokesman for the agency’s Tucson office, said the Border Patrol maintained no formal relationship with Mr. Barnett or other civilian groups. Agency commanders, concerned about potential altercations, have warned the groups not to take the law into their hands.

“If they see something, we ask them to call us, like we would ask of any citizen,” Mr. Rodriguez said.

Mr. Barnett’s lawyers have suggested he has acted out of a right to protect his property.

“A lease holder doesn’t have the right to protect his cattle?” Mr. Kelliher asked one of the men in the hunting party, Arturo Morales, at the trial.

“I guess so, maybe,” Mr. Morales replied.

Mr. Barnett has had several encounters with local law enforcement officials over detaining illegal immigrants, some of whom complained that he pointed guns at them. The local authorities have declined to prosecute him, citing a lack of evidence or ambiguity about whether he had violated any laws.

A few years ago, however, the Border Action Network and its allied groups began collecting testimony from illegal immigrants and others who had had confrontations with Mr. Barnett.

They included the hunters, who sued Mr. Barnett for unlawful detention, emotional distress and other claims, and sought at least $200,000. Ronald Morales; his father, Arturo; Ronald Morales’s two daughters, ages 9 and 11; and an 11-year-old friend said Mr. Barnett, his brother Donald and his wife, Barbara, confronted them Oct. 30, 2004.

Ronald Morales testified that Mr. Barnett used expletives and ethnically derogatory remarks as he sought to kick them off state-owned property he leases. Then, Mr. Morales said, Mr. Barnett pulled an AR-15 assault rifle from his truck and pointed it at them as they drove off, traumatizing the girls.

Mr. Kelliher conceded that there was a heated confrontation. But he denied that Mr. Barnett used slurs and said Ronald Morales was as much an instigator. He said Morales family members had previously trespassed on Mr. Barnett’s land and knew that Mr. Barnett required written permission to hunt there.

Even as the trial proceeded, the Border Patrol reported a 45 percent drop in arrests in the Douglas area in the last year. The agency credits scores of new agents, the National Guard deployment there this summer and improved technology in detecting crossers.

But Ms. Allen of the Border Action Network and other immigrant rights supporters suspect that people are simply crossing elsewhere.

    A Border Watcher Finds Himself Under Scrutiny, NYT, 24.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/24/us/24border.html?hp&ex=1164430800&en=0459abd701a54289&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Immigrants in limbo 5 years after 9/11

Posted 11/18/2006 10:39 PM ET
By Cristian Salazar, Associated Press
USA Today

NEW YORK — In a small meeting room with a view of ground zero, 40 stories below, the woman from Ecuador sat with her attorney, holding a crumpled white napkin that she used to dab her eyes.

She is a Sept. 11 widow. Her husband worked at the Windows on the World restaurant and died that day.

As an illegal immigrant — one of about 25 identified as having lost a family member when the World Trade Center came crashing down — she could face deportation at any time. So could her 17-year-old son, whom she implores to carry around his father's death certificate, in case someone asks him why he is in the U.S.

"I can't get a driver's license. I can't go to apply for a job. I can't work. I can't study. I can't fly. I can't do anything," the 38-year-old woman said in accented English this week as she described how her life in the U.S. is constrained by her illegal status. She spoke on condition that her name not be used, for fear she might be deported.

A New York City group is urging Congress to pass legislation that would grant permanent residence status to the illegal immigrants who lost family members on Sept. 11.

The bill, called the September 11th Family Humanitarian Relief and Patriotism Act, is attached as an amendment to the immigration reform package that is tied up in the lame-duck Congress.

Bill Fugazy Jr., vice chair of the National Ethnic Coalition of Organizations, said the bill should be pulled out of the immigration package and given a vote on its own merits.

"It's an easy thing for Congress to do," he said, pointing out that the bill has bipartisan support. "Give them green cards so they have status here, so they can buy the homes that they would want to, and so they are not in the shadows of society."

Eleven illegal immigrant victims were identified under the federal Sept. 11 Victim Compensation Fund, which gave financial support to survivors of the attack and paid an average of $2.1 million to the families.

Fugazy's organization has launched a letter-writing campaign directed at the chairmen of both congressional committees charged with immigration issues, Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pa., and Rep. James Sensenbrenner, R-Wis.

E-mails and voice messages left at their Washington offices Saturday were not immediately returned.

"We are building marble monuments for the dead. Can't we make room for their families?" said attorney Debra Brown Steinberg, who helped write the bill and has represented five undocumented victims' families.

The legislation could face some opposition.

Jack Martin, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said the families of undocumented immigrant victims of Sept. 11 are legitimate subjects of compassion, but he said they should not be treated any differently than those who lost a breadwinner as a result of any other accident.

"Those people have come into the country in violation of the laws," Martin said. "We don't think that the fact that they have suffered a loss of this type should be grounds for awarding them the permanent residence they would have tried to maintain illegally in this country, without that event having happened."

Martin said his organization has been focused on the overall immigration reform package rather than the amendment, but if it were to become a stand-alone bill the group would register its concern with lawmakers.

However, with only a few weeks left in the current Congress, even if the measure became a stand-alone bill it would not be taken up until the next Congress meets in the spring.

If the bill doesn't pass, the Ecuadorean widow and others will have to decide whether to return home or to continue to live here in fear of being deported. "This country became part of my life," she said.

The woman, whose husband worked at the Trade Center's Windows on the World restaurant, said she is fulfilling some of the dreams that she and her husband had for their family. Her son will graduate from a private high school next spring and is applying to colleges. They have their own apartment.

"But we are missing somebody," she said. "It's just the two of us. My husband is not with us."

    Immigrants in limbo 5 years after 9/11, UT, 18.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-18-sept-11-immigrants_x.htm

Texas Lawmakers Put New Focus on Illegal Immigration

November 16, 2006
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

HOUSTON, Nov. 15 — In a sign of rising passions over immigration issues, Texas lawmakers prepared for the 2007 session this week by filing a flurry of bills that would deny public assistance and other benefits to the children of illegal immigrants, tax money transfers to Mexico and the rest of Latin America and sue the federal government for the costs of state border control.

At the same time, a Dallas suburb, Farmers Branch, became the first Texas municipality to enact measures fining landlords who rent to illegal immigrants, authorizing the police to seek certification to act on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security and declaring English the city’s official language.

Many of the bills are unlikely to become law, but, combined with the Farmers Branch action, they have raised questions about whether Texas, where almost a third of the population was listed as Hispanic in the 2000 census, is about to get caught up in the kinds of legal fights about illegal immigration that have occurred elsewhere.

“It’s awful,” said Brent A. Wilkes, the national executive director of the League of United Latin American Citizens, the nation’s largest and oldest Hispanic rights group. “Texas for a long time has avoided this anti-immigrant hysteria.”

But some Texas officials said the time had come for the state to crack down on illegal immigration because the federal government had chosen not to do so.

“Want to know what it’s all about?” asked State Representative Burt R. Solomons, a Republican from Carrollton, outside Dallas, who introduced a bill to deny state licenses to people without proof of legal residence. “Absolute frustration.”

“If they get a license or permit, they ought to be here legally,” Mr. Solomons said. “What’s wrong with that? I don’t think it’s draconian.”

Mr. Solomons also filed a resolution to put the House on record, as he put it, as “demanding the federal government do what they’re supposed to” to control the border with Mexico and to authorize the state attorney general to sue Washington to recoup the state’s costs.

Monday was the first day members of the Texas House and Senate, who convene every two years, could file bills for the coming session. At least 9 of the first 325 or so bills, as posted on the legislative Web site, dealt with immigration.

Perhaps the most sweeping, proposed by Representative Leo Berman, a Republican from Tyler, would deny state benefits, including welfare payments, food stamps, disability payments and public housing and unemployment assistance to the children of illegal immigrants. The children, if born in the United States, are American citizens.

An earlier version of the bill would also have denied the children schooling and health care, rights affirmed as basic constitutional guarantees by a divided United States Supreme Court in 1969. Mr. Berman said he removed those provisions to gain passage of the measure in Texas with the goal of leading to another Supreme Court review.

“We want to see if that law is still applicable today,” he said. “The environment is totally changed.”

Mr. Berman also proposed a bill that would impose an 8 percent tax on electronic money transfers from immigrant workers in the state to people in Mexico and Central and South America, although it is not clear whether federal law would allow it.

Another Republican representative, Dianne White Delisi, from Temple, introduced a bill to require state agencies to report the cost of services like hospital care provided to illegal immigrants. Ms. Delisi said some figures suggested a rise of 77 percent in unpaid hospital care in Harris County, which includes Houston, over the last three years. But, she said, “the bottom line in Texas is we don’t know.”

The housing ordinance in Farmers Branch, adopted on a 5-to-0 vote by the City Council, requires landlords to demand proof of legal residency from all renters, with violations punishable by fines of $500 per tenant for each day of violation. The preamble says the action was taken “in response to the widespread concern of future terrorist attacks following the events of Sept. 11, 2001.”

It prompted quick opposition from landlords who protested that they were ill-equipped to police the immigration status of their tenants, and from Hispanic activists who said they would challenge the measure in court.

On Tuesday, two other towns, Taneytown in central Maryland and Pahrump in southern Nevada, passed measures declaring English the official language. Hazleton, Pa., enacted a similar ordinance in July, but it has been held off pending a court challenge.

    Texas Lawmakers Put New Focus on Illegal Immigration, NYT, 16.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/16/us/16immig.html

29 immigrants arrested for visa fraud

Posted 11/15/2006 10:31 PM ET
USA Today
By Donna Leinwand

Federal agents on Wednesday arrested 29 people, mostly Pakistanis, who allegedly posed as Muslim religious workers to obtain special visas to enter the USA.

The immigrants, arrested in Boston, New York City, Buffalo, Hartford, Atlanta, St. Paul, Newark, Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Harrisburg, Va., face civil immigration charges and could be deported if they are found to have violated federal law, said Marc Raimondi, spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Agents involved in the investigation also arrested eight people on other immigration charges, he said.

The arrests were part of a probe into several organizations that posed as legitimate religious groups and filed false visa applications for the immigrants under the Religious Worker Program, ICE spokesman Dean Boyd said.

The immigrants paid fees, sometimes several thousand dollars, for the fraudulent paperwork, Boyd said. He said he could not release the groups' names because the investigation was continuing.

The Religious Worker Program allows churches, synagogues, mosques, temples and other religious organizations in the USA to sponsor visa applications for immigrants with specific religious training and experience. The visas allow a legal visitor to work only in a religion-related job for a limited time, generally no more than three years.

The immigrants arrested Wednesday worked at non-religious jobs, Raimondi said. Among them: gas station attendant, truck driver and factory worker.

"If these allegations are true, it is sad to see people misuse the religious-worker visa program in an attempt to gain fraudulent immigration status in the United States," said Arsalan Iftikhar, national legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations. "In a time where increased dialogue is needed between people of all faiths, it is imperative that initiatives like the religious-worker visa program continue to bring credible religious workers of all faiths to America."

As Congress has wrestled with immigration policy since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, ICE has increased enforcement efforts against document fraud, fugitive aliens convicted of violent crimes and workplaces that employ illegal workers.

In a report released in July, the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services said the religious-worker classification was "historically considered to have a high fraud rate."

The agency said it examined a sample of religious-worker immigration petitions submitted over a six-month period and found fraud in one-third of the cases.

    29 immigrants arrested for visa fraud, UT, 15.11.2006, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2006-11-15-visas_x.htm

Immigrant Protection Rules Draw Fire

November 12, 2006
The New York Times
By JESSE McKINLEY

SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 9 — Dr. Stephen B. Turner built a profitable business here by providing low-cost “immigrant medical exams,” including immunizations and blood tests, to hundreds of newcomers to America. Many of his clients did not speak English, but they paid in cash, spending a total of nearly $250,000 at Dr. Turner’s practice from 2003 to 2005.

It was only later, after a tip from a suspicious client, that the San Francisco police and the district attorney’s office learned the truth: Dr. Turner had been throwing out his clients’ blood samples and injecting them with “inoculations” of saline.

Kamala D. Harris, the San Francisco district attorney, said the case, which led to a seven-year prison term for Dr. Turner, was one of many her office had been able to pursue under San Francisco’s so-called sanctuary policy, which forbids police and city officials from asking people they encounter in the course of an investigation about their immigration status. It is a protection Ms. Harris says has made immigrants — legal and illegal — more willing to come to forward about crimes.

With immigration continuing to flare and frustrate as a national political issue, sanctuary cities like San Francisco may soon be the next battlefront. Critics argue that sanctuary policies discourage the police from enforcing laws, though about 50 cities and counties have enacted variations on sanctuary, according to the National Immigration Law Center. They include Detroit, Los Angeles, New York and Washington. A handful of states have similar policies, including Alaska, Maine and Oregon.

Conservative legal groups and politicians have begun to challenge such policies. Yet on the other side, cities like Chicago have announced they will avoid involving their police in issues that smack of federal immigration enforcement. And while a federal proposal to punish sanctuary cities recently failed to become law, some states have passed laws discouraging sanctuary policies.

“To say to a law enforcement official, if you encounter a foreign national who is in this country illegally and you believe that information would be of use and benefit to federal authorities, that you can’t call them, that’s just wrong,” said Representative John Campbell, Republican of California, who authored a provision in the federal Homeland Security bill that would have denied federal antiterrorism money to cities with sanctuary policies. The provision passed the House, but was not part of the bill eventually signed by President Bush.

But even with Democrats in control of Congress, immigration hard-liners say the issue is here to stay.

“It’s mind-blowing for us to see taxpayer dollars spent to subsidize criminal activity — that’s the end result,” said Christopher J. Farrell, director of research for Judicial Watch, a conservative legal group that is suing the Los Angeles Police Department over its sanctuary rule.

Some states have also taken up the issue. In Colorado, a law signed by the governor in May prevents localities from passing ordinances that stop officials or police from communicating or cooperating with federal officials on immigration.

Other states have taken up larger immigration issues involving local cooperation with the federal authorities. A Georgia law enacted in April authorizes the state to enter into an agreement with federal officials to train and certify state law enforcement officials to enforce immigration. The Georgia law also requires the police to make a “reasonable effort” to determine the legal status of those they arrest for felonies or drunken driving.

Both the Colorado and Georgia laws include some protections against and stiffer penalties for exploitation of illegal immigrants.

In September, a sanctuary debate erupted in Houston after an illegal immigrant was accused of killing a police officer. Shelley Sekula-Gibbs, a Republican city councilwoman who ran for Congress as an unsuccessful write-in candidate in place of former Representative Tom DeLay, called on the mayor to declare the city off-limits to illegal immigrants.

“Terrorists, drug runners and cartel members could be among us, and police officers are not allowed to check their identities,” Ms. Sekula-Gibbs wrote in an e-mail message to supporters. “Why? Because some politicians fear that asking people who have no ID about their legal status might intimidate all illegals into not reporting crimes. This policy of appeasement must be stopped.”

Craig E. Ferrell Jr., general counsel for the Houston Police Department, said the city did not have a formal sanctuary policy. But he said a tangle of laws — police codes and legal decisions, including those involving racial profiling and the Fourth Amendment guarantee against unlawful search and seizure — required caution by police officers.

“We’re not just trying to be obstructionist or not trying to help,” Mr. Ferrell said. “What we’re against is the federal government mandating that local enforcement be initiated without addressing these issues.”

Sanctuary supporters have pushed back. In San Francisco, Supervisor Gerardo C. Sandoval — who authored a resolution affirming the city’s policy, which dates to 1989 — said the federal government was simply trying to pass the buck for failing to secure federal borders.

“If they want to enforce the law,” Mr. Sandoval said, “they should put troops on the ground to do that.”

Lt. Paul Vernon, a spokesman for the Los Angeles Police Department, which has operated under sanctuary guidelines since 1979, said, “We didn’t want people to fear cooperating with police.” Lieutenant Vernon added, “And the local police department job is not to enforce the federal immigration law.”

An organization of police chiefs, the Major Cities Chiefs Association, said that requiring the local police to enforce immigration policy did not “take into full account the realities of local law enforcement dealing with this issue on the ground.” The association said its concerns included a lack of authority, training, and resources, as well as risks of liability.

Advocates for illegal immigrants, meanwhile, said they feared that getting rid of sanctuary rules would encourage immigrant communities not to report crime, including human and drug trafficking, prostitution, domestic violence, and even terrorism.

“Once the police are seen as agents of the immigration service, it discourages and deters immigrant communities from going to the police,” said Lucas Guttentag, the director of the Immigrants’ Rights Project of the American Civil Liberties Union. “There’s a whole mixture of people in these communities — some recent, some illegal — and its going to cause the entire community to fear going to the police if they feel going to the local cop is essentially going to the immigration service.”

But opponents say localities should be forced to participate in solving some of the problems that accompany illegal immigration.

“You can’t have it both ways,” said Ira Mehlman, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which lobbies for stronger immigration enforcement. “If you want to harbor people who are in the country illegally, you can’t expect to have federal funds for issues that arise from having illegal people in your community.”

Sanctuary policies are often less sweeping than opponents make them out to be. In San Francisco, for example, where resources cannot be used in immigration investigations, the police can inquire about immigration status in felony or drug cases.

Joan Friedland, an immigration lawyer for the National Immigration Law Center, said the concept of sanctuary cities was often misunderstood and that it gave the impression that such cities were lawless havens for illegal immigrants.

“It’s not like people, if they are charged with a crime, they just escape immigration,” Ms. Friedland said. “Even the cities that have ordinances limiting inquiries about immigration status cooperate and are in touch with the Department of Homeland Security when a serious crime is involved.”

    Immigrant Protection Rules Draw Fire, NYT, 12.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/12/us/12sanctuary.html?hp&ex=1163394000&en=3b5a24db1a0cf444&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Medicaid Wants Citizenship Proof for Infant Care

November 3, 2006
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, Nov. 2 — Under a new federal policy, children born in the United States to illegal immigrants with low incomes will no longer be automatically entitled to health insurance through Medicaid, Bush administration officials said Thursday.

Doctors and hospitals said the policy change would make it more difficult for such infants, who are United States citizens, to obtain health care needed in the first year of life.

Illegal immigrants are generally barred from Medicaid but can get coverage for treatment of emergency medical conditions, including labor and delivery.

In the past, once a woman received emergency care under Medicaid for the birth of a baby, the child was deemed eligible for coverage as well, and states had to cover the children for one year from the date of birth.

Under the new policy, an application must be filed for the child, and the parents must provide documents to prove the child’s citizenship.

The documentation requirements took effect in July, but some states have been slow to enforce them, and many doctors are only now becoming aware of the effects on newborns.

Obtaining a birth certificate can take weeks in some states, doctors said. Moreover, they said, illegal immigrant parents may be reluctant to go to a state welfare office to file applications because they fear contact with government agencies that could report their presence to immigration authorities.

Administration officials said the change was necessary under their reading of a new law, the Deficit Reduction Act, signed by President Bush in February. The law did not mention newborns, but generally tightened documentation requirements because some lawmakers were concerned that immigrants were fraudulently claiming United States citizenship to get Medicaid.

Marilyn E. Wilson, a spokeswoman for the Tennessee Medicaid program, said: “The federal government told us we have no latitude. All states must change their policies and practices. We will not be able to cover any services for the newborn until a Medicaid application is filed. That could be days, weeks or months after the child is born.”

About four million babies are born in the United States each year, and Medicaid pays for more than one-third of all births. The number involving illegal immigrant parents is unknown but is likely to be in the tens of thousands, health experts said.

Doctors and hospitals denounced the policy change and denied that it was required by the new law. Dr. Jay E. Berkelhamer, president of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said the policy “punishes babies who, according to the Constitution, are citizens because they were born here.”

Dr. Martin C. Michaels, a pediatrician in Dalton, Ga., said that continuous coverage in the first year of life was important because “newborns need care right from the start.”

“Some Americans may want to grant amnesty to undocumented immigrants, and others may want to send them home,” Dr. Michaels said. “But the children who are born here had no say in that debate.”

Under a 1984 law, infants born to pregnant women on Medicaid are in most cases deemed eligible for Medicaid for one year.

In an interview on Thursday, Leslie V. Norwalk, acting administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the new policy “reflects what the new law says in terms of eligibility.”

“When emergency Medicaid pays for a birth,” Ms. Norwalk said, “the child is not automatically deemed eligible. But the child could apply and could qualify for Medicaid because of the family’s poverty status. If anyone knows about a child being denied care, we want to know about it. Please step up and tell us.”

Under federal law, hospitals generally have to examine and treat patients who need emergency care, regardless of their ability to pay. So the new policy is most likely to affect access to other types of care, including preventive services and treatment for infections and chronic conditions, doctors said.

Representative Charlie Norwood, Republican of Georgia, was a principal architect of the new law.

“Charlie’s intent was that every person receiving Medicaid needs to provide documentation,” said John E. Stone, a spokesman for Mr. Norwood, who is a dentist and has been active on health care issues. “With newborns, there should be no problem. All you have to do is provide a birth certificate or hospital records verifying birth.”

But Dr. Berkelhamer disagreed. Even when the children are eligible for Medicaid, he said, illegal immigrants may be afraid to apply because of “the threat of deportation.”

The new policy “will cost the health care system more in the long run,” Dr. Berkelhamer added, because children of illegal immigrants may go without immunizations, preventive care and treatments needed in the first year of life.

Doctors, children’s hospitals and advocacy groups have been urging states to preserve the old policy on Medicaid eligibility for children born to illegal immigrants.

Sara Rosenbaum, a professor of health law at George Washington University, said: “The new policy reflects a tortured reading of the new law and is contrary to the language of the 1984 statute, which Congress did not change. The whole purpose of the earlier law, passed with bipartisan support, was to make sure that a baby would not have a single day’s break in coverage from the date of birth through the first year of life.”

California has objected to the new policy. S. Kimberly Belshé, secretary of the California Health and Human Services Agency, said: “By virtue of being born in the United States, a child is a U.S. citizen. What more proof does the federal government need?”

    Medicaid Wants Citizenship Proof for Infant Care, NYT, 3.11.2006, http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/03/washington/03medicaid.html?hp&ex=1162616400&en=4917802b9471b620&ei=5094&partner=homepage