History > 2007 > USA > Immigration (II)

Arizona firms

brace for immigration sanctions law

Sun Dec 30, 2007
9:41am EST
Reuters
By Tim Gaynor

PHOENIX (Reuters) - Arizona steel fabricator Sheridan Bailey has been laying off employees in recent weeks even though he has plenty of orders on the books.

His firm, Ironco Enterprises, shed around 10 percent of its 100-strong workforce to get in line with a state law going into effect on Tuesday that targets employers who hire illegal immigrants.

"We have let some people go who we came to know were not properly documented. So in that respect the law is already doing what the framers expected," he said.

The maker of steel frames for buildings is among an estimated 150,000 businesses across the desert state preparing for the measure that places Arizona at the vanguard of more than 100 U.S. states and municipalities taking on immigration enforcement.

The law, passed days after a federal immigration overhaul died in the U.S. Senate in June, punishes first-time violators who knowingly hire undocumented workers with a 10-day suspension of their business licenses.

A second offense means they lose it.

The measure also requires employers to use an online federal database, dubbed "E-Verify," to check the employment eligibility of new hires in the border state, which is home to an estimated 500,000 illegal immigrants.

Many employers like Bailey say they are pruning their workforce of illegal immigrants to avoid prosecution, or have outsourced some operations to neighboring states and even over the border to Mexico.

Other businesses have put a freeze on expansion in Arizona out of fear they will face prosecution should they inadvertently hire an illegal immigrant.

"It is too much of a risk for us," said Jason LeVecke, a franchise owner who operates a chain of 57 Carl's Jr. hamburger restaurants in the state.

He plans to expand in Texas.

BUSINESS 'DEATH PENALTY'

Immigration is the subject of a rancorous debate in the United States, where an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants live and work in the shadows.

The topic comes up frequently among Republican and Democratic hopefuls fighting to be their party's candidate in the November 2008 presidential election.

The politicians must tread a fine line between appeasing anti-immigration sentiment and trying not to anger Hispanics, who make up the fastest-growing voter bloc in the nation.

Many Arizonans support the new law. They say it takes away the lure of jobs for illegal immigrants and clamps down on employers unfairly profiting from cheap migrant labor.

"The only people who should be nervous are employers who hire illegals at cheap rates to gain unfair advantage over their competitors. They should be worrying a lot," said John Kavanagh, a Republican state lawmaker who co-sponsored the bill.

Gov. Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, signed the measure into law despite voicing concern that it was a business "death penalty."

A coalition of business groups filed suit to block the measure, arguing that it will be harmful to local businesses. A U.S. District Court threw out the challenge earlier this month, but a new suit has since been filed.

Lawyers opposed to the employer sanctions law say that it is unconstitutional and is open to abuse by people making malicious anonymous complaints. They warn that it will also make Arizona less competitive nationally.

"(Already) we have had businesses shut down, businesses that will not go ahead with acquisitions. It is going to get worse before it gets better," said Julie Pace, one of the lawyers bringing the employers' suit.

"Arizona will get bypassed economically. We will be known as tough but stupid from an economic perspective," she said.

(Editing by Mary Milliken and Xavier Briand)

Arizona firms brace for immigration sanctions law, R, 30.12.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN2946397520071230

Immigration at Record Level,

Analysis Finds

November 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Immigration over the past seven years was the highest for any seven-year period in American history, bringing 10.3 million new immigrants, more than half of them without legal status, according to an analysis of census data released today by the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington.

One in eight people living in the United States is an immigrant, the survey found, for a total of 37.9 million people — the highest level since the 1920s.

The survey was conducted by Steven A. Camarota, director of research at the center, which advocates reduced immigration.

Mr. Camarota has been active in the national immigration debate. Independent demographers disputed some of the survey’s conclusions, but not Mr. Camarota’s methods of data analysis.

A large proportion of recent immigrants, both legal and illegal, are low-skilled workers and about one-third of those have not completed high school, giving them significantly less education than Americans born in the United States, according to the study, which is based on census data as recent as March of this year.

The survey focuses on public costs associated with the new generation of immigrant workers. It does not, however, analyze contributions they make by paying taxes and taking undesirable, low-income jobs — an omission criticized by some immigration scholars.

Still, the survey provides a panorama of the effects of immigration since 2000.

About 30 percent of all immigrants and their children lack health insurance, Mr. Camarota reports, compared with 13 percent of native-born Americans. One of every three uninsured people in the country is an immigrant or a young American-born child with at least one immigrant parent, he found. Immigrant families account for almost three-quarters of the increase in the uninsured in the past 15 years, he concludes.

Immigrants are employed at higher rates than Americans, according to the survey. But because of their low educational levels, many work in low-paying, entry-level jobs that do not provide health insurance or other benefits.

“Immigrants have had an enormous impact on the lack of health insurance,” Mr. Camarota said. “If we are going to have a debate about health insurance, we should recognize that most of the growth in the uninsured comes from recently arrived immigrants and their American-born kids.”

Mr. Camarota was criticized by some immigration scholars for failing to examine the progress immigrant families make the longer they remain and work in the United States.

“This is a one-eyed portrait,” said Dowell Myers, a demographer at the University of Southern California who has studied immigrants’ use of public services. “It is a profile of immigrants’ dependency without any profile of their contributions.”

Mr. Myers said his research shows that within a decade, new immigrants in California moved up quickly to steadier jobs with more benefits, and the rates of uninsured immigrants dropped sharply.

Mr. Camarota’s analysis suggests why illegal immigration has become the source of contention in many states. The majority of immigrants arriving in recent years are from Mexico and Central America, and more than half of them are illegal.

The states that have received the largest numbers of the new immigrants are also states where immigration has been hotly debated. After five states that have been high on the immigration list for decades — California, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey and Texas — those receiving the most new immigrants included Arizona, Georgia, Maryland, Pennsylvania and Virginia.

The analysis confirms earlier estimates of about 11.3 million illegal immigrants in this country.

About 31 percent of immigrants over 25 years old, both legal and illegal, have not completed high school, according to Mr. Camarota, compared with 8.4 percent of American citizens. Among adult Hispanic immigrants, nearly 51 percent do not have high school diplomas, he reported.

Mr. Camarota found that about one-third of immigrant families receive some kind of public assistance. The services were mainly food stamps and Medicaid associated with care for their American children, he found. The majority of children in immigrant families, whether the parents are legal or illegal, were born in the United States and so are American citizens.

“The welfare system is designed to help low-income workers with children,” Mr. Camarota said. “The study shows that it is very difficult not to have these public costs if you have low-skilled immigrants in large numbers.”

Mr. Camarota did not present evidence of large scale use of public benefits by illegal immigrants themselves.

Wayne Cornelius, a political science professor at the University of California, San Diego, who has studied Mexican immigration for decades, called Mr. Camarota’s conclusions about immigrants’ use of public services “misleading.”

The census data, Mr. Cornelius said, does not allow concise estimates of use of public services by illegal immigrants.

Mr. Cornelius said his field research in San Diego County had shown that illegal immigrants under-used the health care system, given their health needs.

“They are less likely to have health insurance, but they are also less likely to seek medical attention,” Mr. Cornelius said.

He added that research in California has shown that illegal immigrants from Latin America are far less likely than American Hispanics to use emergency room services or seek public primary care.

Mr. Cornelius also faulted Mr. Camarota for focusing only on first-generation immigrants. The study “obscures the very significant progress that immigrants’ children and their grandchildren typically make,” Mr. Cornelius argued.

Mr. Camarota reported that both legal and illegal immigration have continued to grow. A study in 2005 by another demographer, Jeffrey S. Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center in Washington, found that the rate of growth of immigration peaked in 2000 and declined somewhat in the next five years.

    Immigration at Record Level, Analysis Finds, NYT, 29.11.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/11/29/us/29immig.html

Sheriff: Illegal immigrant rescues orphaned boy

23 November 2007
USA Today

PHOENIX (AP) — A 9-year-old boy looking for help after his mother crashed their van in the southern Arizona desert was rescued by a man entering the U.S. illegally, who stayed with him until help arrived the next day, an official said.

The 45-year-old woman, who eventually died while awaiting help, had been driving on a U.S. Forest Service road in a remote area just north of the Mexican border when she lost control of her van on a curve on Thanksgiving, Santa Cruz County Sheriff Tony Estrada said.

The van vaulted into a canyon and landed 300 feet from the road, he said. The woman, from Rimrock, north of Phoenix, survived the impact but was pinned inside, Estrada said.

Her son, unhurt but disoriented, crawled out to get help and was found about two hours later by Jesus Manuel Cordova, 26, of Magdalena de Kino in the northern Mexican state of Sonora. Unable to pull the mother out, he comforted the boy while they waited for help.

The woman died a short time later.

"He stayed with him, told him that everything was going to be all right," Estrada said.

As temperatures dropped, he gave him a jacket, built a bonfire and stayed with him until about 8 a.m. Friday, when hunters passed by and called authorities, Estrada said. The boy was flown to University Medical Center in Tucson as a precaution but appeared unhurt.

"We suspect that they communicated somehow, but we don't know if he knows Spanish or if the gentleman knew English," Estrada said of the boy.

"For a 9-year-old it has to be completely traumatic, being out there alone with his mother dead," Estrada said. "Fortunately for the kid, (Cordova) was there. That was his angel."

Cordova was taken into custody by Border Patrol agents, who were the first to respond to the call for help. He had been trying to walk into the U.S. when he came across the boy.

The boy and his mother were in the area camping, Estrada said. The woman's husband, the boy's father, had died only two months ago. The names of the woman and her son were not being released until relatives were notified.

Cordova likely saved the boy, Estrada said, and his actions should remind people not to quickly characterize illegal immigrants as criminals.

"They do get demonized for a lot of reasons, and they do a lot of good. Obviously this is one example of what an individual can do," he said.

    Sheriff: Illegal immigrant rescues orphaned boy, UT, 23.11.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-11-23-immigrant-rescuer_N.htm

States turning up heat on illegal immigrants

Thu Nov 1, 2007
2:00pm EDT
Reuters
By Carey Gillam

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - Minor traffic violations do not usually warrant a press release from a governor. But when state police stopped a van on a Missouri road for "following too closely" and found it was carrying 10 presumed illegal immigrants, Gov. Matt Blunt was quick to tout the incident as part of a new state program to hunt down undocumented aliens.

"We will make every effort, implement every tool, and take every step to ensure the laws against illegal immigration are enforced," declared Blunt, announcing the arrests as he pursued tough new measures to push undocumented immigrants out of the state.

Missouri's efforts are among several now being seen around the nation as state and local officials race to make their territory as unappealing as possible for the nation's estimated 12 million undocumented individuals.

The campaign has drawn the ire of religious organizations, civil rights groups and some employers, who argue the actions are unfairly harassing and intimidating both illegal and legal immigrants.

"You're starting to see this around the country. They're trying to scare people and they're saying 'We don't want you here,'" said William Sanchez, lead attorney for the National Coalition of Latino Clergy and Christian Leaders, which has filed suit to stop a new Oklahoma law that became effective Thursday.

Immigration law historically has been the role of the federal government. But Congress has deadlocked on efforts at immigration reform, frustrating those outside Washington who say illegal immigration puts a strain on schools, health care, and other community services and costs Americans jobs.

UNPRECEDENTED ACTIVITY

Forty-three states enacted 182 immigration-related laws this year, "an unprecedented level of activity," according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

More than two dozen cities and counties have also introduced measures aimed at curbing illegal immigration, though many have been turned back by legal challenges.

Measures vary widely but many focus on penalizing employers of undocumented workers, restricting public benefits, and making it hard for illegals to find places to live.

Oklahoma's new law is widely seen as the toughest in the nation, making it a felony to transport or harbor people without legal status, requires local law enforcement and businesses to enforce federal immigration restrictions, and reduces public benefits for illegal immigrants.

"Illegal aliens will not come to Oklahoma or anywhere else if there are no jobs waiting for them. They will not stay here if there is no government subsidy," said the law's sponsor, Oklahoma Rep. Randy Terrill, a Republican who believes the measure will make illegal immigrants "self deport."

Both critics and supporters said the punitive measures could prompt thousands to flee the state, a factor that has lawmakers in other states eyeing similar measures.

"We are drafting our own legislation patterned after Oklahoma," said Utah Sen. Bill Hickman. "We're developing two different groups in society - those that have to obey the law and those that don't. Society can't function very well that way."

Critics of the crackdown say local and state lawmakers have no constitutional authority to try to enforce immigration law, and the crack down is making it hard to find workers.

"Reform of immigration law should occur through Congress. It is a federal issue," said the Rev. Steve Copley, a United Methodist pastor. This week he announced the formation of the Arkansas Friendship Coalition, which opposes laws targeting immigrants. Tyson Foods Inc. and Alltel Corp. officials are among the members.

"We're a nation of immigrants and the same hopes and dreams they share are the same hopes and dreams most of us share about a good life for our families," said Copley.

In Missouri, Gov. Blunt has taken the opposite tact. Not only is he pushing state law enforcement to verify immigration status of people suspected of crimes, but also ordered audits of state contractors to ensure their employees are legal.

Over the last two months, Missouri law enforcement has arrested 85 people after immigration checks and has worked out a deal with the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to designate certain county jails to hold detainees.

"This is how we're doing business henceforth," said Missouri director of public safety Mark James. "We have 1,000 highway patrol, 100 water patrol and 30 to 40 capital police officers to work on this. If we can help that cause, then we're doing something proactive."

(Additional reporting by Ben Fenwick in Oklahoma City)

    States turning up heat on illegal immigrants, R, 1.11.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0118499720071101

Minuteman group grows amid illegal immigration fight

Thu Nov 1, 2007
2:00pm EDT
Reuters
By Carey Gillam

KANSAS CITY, Missouri (Reuters) - Retired Kansas policeman Ed Hayes lives a quiet life with his wife and pet poodles in a spacious suburban home near Kansas City, far from the main front line over illegal immigration along the U.S. border with Mexico.

But over the last 18 months the 66-year-old grandfather has been drawn into the battle nonetheless, becoming active on a second front.

He has joined many individuals, who, with state and municipal leaders, have given up waiting for federal action and are working to control illegal immigration themselves.

The issue has become a priority not only for activists like Hayes but also for state and local leaders around the United States who say illegal immigration limits job opportunities for Americans and severely strains community resources.

Hayes is a member of the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps (MCDC), a national organization that is one of several groups that have formed, including one in Oklahoma called Outraged Patriots.

"It's not about skin color, it's about breaking the law," said Hayes, who oversees Kansas and Missouri chapters of the MCDC.

Hayes hasn't yet engaged in a Minuteman border patrol, in which armed members actually search along the U.S.-Mexican border for those trying to cross illegally.

His efforts are generally restricted to joining with other like-minded Midwesterners in picketing construction sites employing undocumented workers or handing out pamphlets at carnivals and gun shows.

CONTROVERSIAL

The Minuteman group has a controversial reputation. Critics see it as a sometimes violent, racist organization of would-be vigilantes and some classify it as a hate group. But supporters say the group is non-violent and only aims to enforce the law.

"We demand border security, enforce our immigration laws, and make sure you hold people who hire illegal immigrants accountable," said MCDC national executive director Al Garza.

Minuteman membership has been growing nationally recently, with hundreds of new members added in the last three months, according to Garza.

A new chapter is starting in Colorado with a new-member meeting November 17, and the group now has some form of representation in nearly every state with a total of more than 9,000 members, Garza said.

Kansas City parks and recreation board member Frances Semler said she joined the MCDC last year because she was so frustrated with a lack of action by Congress and an increasing strain on community resources. Her membership has cost the city convention business and some have called for her dismissal.

Still, MCDC members say they see their fight against illegal immigration becoming more mainstream as states and municipalities around the country pass laws to curb illegal immigration.

Forty-three states enacted 182 immigration-related laws this year, "an unprecedented level of activity," according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

"This is not a political thing," said Hayes. "It's not a Democrat or a Republican thing. It's an American thing."

    Minuteman group grows amid illegal immigration fight, R, 1.11.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0142840020071101

Va. County OKs Immigration Crackdown

October 17, 2007
Filed at 12:12 p.m. ET
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
The New York Times

MANASSAS, Va. (AP) -- One of the nation's toughest local crackdowns on illegal immigration was unanimously approved by Prince William County lawmakers early Wednesday after a 12-hour hearing marked by emotional testimony and scuffles.

The measures would deny certain county services to illegal immigrants, including business licenses, drug counseling, housing assistance and some services for the elderly. The county Board of Supervisors also gave police some funding to help them check the immigration status of anyone accused of breaking a law if an officer suspects the person is an illegal immigrant.

A group of 22 plaintiffs has already filed a lawsuit in federal court seeking to block the measures. They claim the measures violate equal protection laws and that immigration enforcement is a federal matter.

Nearly 400 residents and immigrants spoke for and against the measures during the 12-hour session that extended past 2 a.m. Wednesday.

Supporters and opponents scuffled in the street before the meeting began Tuesday afternoon. More than 1,200 people crowded into the county government center for the emotional hearing. Some children of immigrants asked board members not to hurt their parents, and one woman ran out of the hearing in tears, saying the policy would separate her from her daughter.

The supervisors added a resolution with provisions addressing cost, fairness and public confusion on the issue. The resolution calls for the county to implement a public education campaign for immigrant communities and directs it to partner with a university or consulting group to study the fairness of the measures.

''We don't want to be the kind of community that even allows the image that racial profiling is taking place,'' said Republican Supervisor Martin E. Nohe, who said he was concerned the measure would invite discrimination.

Supporters of the measure said illegal immigrants are breaking the law.

''Where do you get off demanding services, rights and mandatory citizenship?'' said Manassas resident Robert Stephens. ''Who invited you? You cry for your rights? You have none.''

    Va. County OKs Immigration Crackdown, NYT, 17.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Illegal-Immigration.html

Fleeing to U.S., Cubans’ First Stop Is Often Mexico

October 16, 2007
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

CORTÉS, Cuba — Cubans are migrating to the United States in the greatest numbers in over a decade, and for most of them the new way to get north is first to head west — to Mexico — in a convoluted route that avoids the United States Coast Guard.

American officials say the migration, which has grown into a multimillion-dollar-a-year smuggling enterprise, has risen sharply because many Cubans have lost hope that Raúl Castro, who took over as president from his brother Fidel in 2006, will make changes that will improve their lives. Cuban authorities contend that the migration is more economic than political and is fueled by Washington’s policy of rewarding Cubans who enter the United States illegally.

In fact, unlike Mexicans, Central Americans and others heading to the southwestern border of the United States, the Cubans do not have to sneak across. They just walk right up to United States authorities at the border, benefiting from lax Mexican enforcement and relying on Washington’s “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which gives them the ability to become permanent residents if they can reach United States soil.

That is what José Luis Savater, 45, a refrigerator repairman from Havana, did in early October to reach southern Florida, which remains the goal for most migrating Cubans.

It took Mr. Savater almost four days to reach Isla Mujeres, Mexico, a coastal island, in a rickety boat made of wood, fiberglass and aluminum and powered by a jury-rigged motor used for irrigating fields. The 15 men and one woman with him took turns bailing.

“It’s extremely dangerous,” Mr. Savater said by telephone as he prepared to leave Cancún for the Mexican border. “I saw myself dead. I suffered a lot.”

But his next step was far easier: a flight to Matamoros, a border town just across from Brownsville, Tex., with the help of money wired from relatives in Florida. Some American officials are calling this new approach — Cubans’ strolling up to border stations and seeking political asylum — dusty foot.

Statistics make it clear that although the route is considerably longer, Cubans believe that traveling through Mexico from the tiny bayside village of Cortés and other new launching spots on the western side of Cuba increases their odds of reaching Miami. Almost twice as many — 11,487 — took it in fiscal 2007, which ended in September, as in fiscal 2005.

By comparison, the Coast Guard intercepted just 2,861 Cubans crossing the Florida Straits in fiscal 2007, and 4,825 others eluded American authorities, reached United States soil and, under the “wet foot, dry foot” policy, applied for residency, according to the Coast Guard.

The figures show that in fiscal 2007, migration from the island reached its highest level since 35,000 Cubans left in a mass exodus in 1994.

“The reason why people are willing to risk their lives to leave Cuba is the lack of hope and expectations,” Sean Murphy, the United States consul general in Havana, told reporters in early October.

The new route is not just diverting migrants. Smugglers are shifting too, resulting in turf battles that are believed to be behind a string of killings over the summer of Cuban nationals in the Yucatán Peninsula, where many of the migrants come ashore. That area is also crisscrossed by narcotics traffickers, and there is fear that the two businesses could merge.

The new route has attracted the attention of officials throughout the region, since Cubans sometimes go off track and land on other Caribbean islands or farther south in Central America.

Manuel Aguilera de la Paz, Cuba’s ambassador to Mexico, told reporters in early October that migration is at the top of the agenda as Mexico and Cuba seek to improve strained relations that prompted the two countries to briefly withdraw their ambassadors in 2004.

In Washington, Thomas A. Shannon Jr., the assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs, has expressed concern about both the migration and the killings in the Yucatán, which have been concentrated near the resort town of Cancún. “There is some kind of struggle going on among gangs,” he said of the violence. He called the new route “a recent phenomenon.”

The Coast Guard’s aggressive patrols in the Florida Straits prompted migrants to turn to the new route, most agree. Those patrols were increased after the 1994 exodus, which led the Clinton administration to adopt the “wet foot, dry foot” policy. The Coast Guard returns migrants who are caught at sea to Cuba, where authorities have said they will not face retribution.

“It’s practically Mission Impossible to go directly to Miami,” said an American official who is tracking the issue but did not have approval to speak on the record about it.

In Mexico, however, the coast is far more loosely patrolled and, some say, local authorities are more likely to look the other way for a bribe.

The rocky eastern shore of Isla Mujeres, a speck of an island near Cancún, is a popular landing spot. Despite the presence of a Mexican Navy post, Cuban boats land regularly.

“We’re looking for Colombian drug dealers, not Cubans,” said a Mexican Navy enlisted man who was on night watch on a bluff that is the island’s highest point.

Mexican officials said that when the navy does intercept vessels with smuggled migrants, mostly those in distress, they are escorted ashore. The smugglers are arrested and their boats seized. But migrants are in most cases fined and then released. They have 30 days to leave the country, plenty of time to find their way north.

The smuggling networks themselves have become more sophisticated. The smugglers operate out of Miami, with representatives on the coasts of Cuba and Mexico, experts say. They carry satellite telephones so the transfers of the migrants are done with military precision.

Safe houses have been set up along the Mexican coast to help the Cubans elude Mexican authorities and avoid paying the fine. One Cuban who made it to Mexico said he was impressed by how well organized it all was.

Cuban rice and beans awaited him upon arrival in Mexico. Within days, he was off to the Texas border with instructions about what he should say to quickly enter the United States. Typically, the Cuban migrants are interviewed by agents who check their stories and whatever documentation they can produce, and listen closely for distinctive Cuban accents. Then, if no criminal records are found, the Cubans are generally allowed into the country. After a year, they gain permanent resident status.

The kinds of craft being used are often a step up from the vessels previously used. The boats leaving Cuba used to be the most ramshackle imaginable: inner tubes strung together, or rusted-out vessels powered by car engines or oars or even, in at least one case, a weed trimmer.

While many, like Mr. Savater, the Havana repairman, still travel that way, for the right price Cubans nowadays can climb aboard sleek, modern boats with three 275-horsepower outboard motors hanging from the back.

“They look like they can fly,” said a fisherman on Cuba’s southwestern coast who has spotted the vessels and spoke of them with a jealous look in his eye.

The boats swoop in to a prearranged spot on the Cuban coastline, quickly load and leave, with the price for the express service exceeding $10,000 in many cases. Some people — mostly young men who know the coast well — are allowed aboard without paying the full price, according to Cubans with knowledge of the business, but they have to promise to join the smuggling network and return to pick up more migrants.

Cuban authorities rarely stop the boats in time. They have set up military checkpoints along the coast and banned local residents from fishing along some stretches of beach to get a handle on the new escape routes. But the flow continues, mostly from remote beaches on the western half of the island.

“Mexico is that way,” said a fisherman near Cortés, pulling his boat ashore in a popular smuggling spot and gesturing west. “That’s the new way out.”

When Cuban authorities see a boat leaving, they use loudspeakers to warn of the dangers of the voyage and urge everyone to come back. But the boats rarely, if ever, do. If a boat seems headed for Florida, they radio the United States Coast Guard. If it seems on course to Mexico, they throw up their arms.

“I’m on the lookout,” said a young Cuban Coast Guard recruit outside Cortés, who was on what looked like a lifeguard tower jacked up 30 feet for a better view. Though he had high-powered binoculars, the stretch of coast he had to watch was vast.

Farther west, at another migrant-smuggling center, Cabo Francés, the army has set up a base at the beach and strung a tree branch across the only entry point with a small cardboard sign declaring it a military zone. Local residents have been told not to fish there until the problem is under control.

Like so much else in United States-Cuban relations, the migration is mired in bad blood.

Havana blames Washington for the exodus, saying that allowing Cubans who arrive illegally in the United States to stay permanently provides an incentive for people to risk their lives at sea. Cuban authorities grumble as well that Washington has issued only 15,000 of the 20,000 visas it promised under a recent migration accord to allow Cubans to enter legally.

The United States has a different view. American officials say government repression is the reason people are willing to risk their lives at sea. And they say that Cuban officials have not permitted the United States Interests Section in Havana to hire enough people to handle all the paperwork for the visas.

In Mexico, there is an acceptance of the arriving Cubans among coastal residents, with a tinge of resentment. “It’s sad that a Mexican can’t enter the U.S. if they reach the border and a Cuban can,” said Alba Ríos, a resident of Isla Mujeres who has noticed significant numbers of Miami Cubans arriving on the island to aid with the migrant flow.

Some Mexicans are even getting ideas from the Cubans. A trade is developing in Cuban identity documents, and some savvy Mexican migrants are now practicing Cuban accents and rehearsing dramatic stories they intend to tell United States Border Patrol agents about the horrors they have suffered in Havana.
 

Elisabeth Malkin contributed reporting from Mexico City.

    Fleeing to U.S., Cubans’ First Stop Is Often Mexico, NYT, 16.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/16/world/americas/16cuba.html?hp

Crackdown Upends Slaughterhouse’s Work Force

October 12, 2007
The New York Times
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE

TAR HEEL, N.C. — Last November, immigration officials began a crackdown at Smithfield Foods’s giant slaughterhouse here, eventually arresting 21 illegal immigrants at the plant and rousting others from their trailers in the middle of the night.

Since then, more than 1,100 Hispanic workers have left the 5,200-employee hog-butchering plant, the world’s largest, leaving it struggling to find, train and keep replacements.

Across the country, the federal effort to flush out illegal immigrants is having major effects on workers and employers alike. Some companies have reluctantly raised wages to attract new workers following raids at their plants.

After several hundred immigrant employees at its plant in Stillmore, Ga., were arrested, Crider Poultry began recruiting Hmong workers from Minnesota, hiring men from a nearby homeless mission and providing free van transportation to many workers.

So far, Smithfield has largely replaced the Hispanics with American workers, who often leave poorly paid jobs for higher wages at the plant here. But the turnover rate for new workers — many find the work grueling and the smell awful — is twice what it was when Hispanics dominated the work force.

Making Smithfield’s recruiting challenge even harder is the fact that many local residents have worked there before and soured on the experience. As a result, Smithfield often looks far afield for new employees.

Fannie Worley, a longtime resident of Dillon, S.C., a largely African-American town of sagging trailers and ramshackle bungalows, quit her $5.25-an-hour, part-time job making beds at a Days Inn motel four months ago to take a $10.75-an-hour job at Smithfield. But Ms. Worley remains ambivalent.

“It pays a lot better,” she said. “But the trip is too long.”

Around 1 p.m. each day, C. J. Bailey, a Smithfield worker, picks up Ms. Worley and 10 other employees in his big white van. They arrive at the plant around 2:15, and he drops them back home after 1 a.m.

Several of the newly hired workers in the van — they pay $40 a week for the ride — said they were thinking of quitting, unhappy about having to commute so far and work so hard. At the plant, where the pay averages around $12 an hour, many spend hour after hour slitting hogs’ throats, hacking at shoulders and carving ribs and loins. At the end of their shifts, many workers complain that their muscles are sore and their minds are numb.

Employee turnover has long been a problem at Smithfield and other meat-processing plants, but the problem has grown worse recently. Dennis Pittman, a Smithfield spokesman, said 60 percent of the new workers quit within 90 days of being hired, compared with 25 percent to 30 percent two years ago when many new employees were illegal immigrants.

“I’ve heard officials from a couple of other meat processors say they’ve never seen such high turnover with new workers,” Mr. Pittman said.

Several Southern companies have raised wages to attract new workers after immigration raids. “But that’s not the first thing that employers are going to do,” said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies. “They’re going to try to cast their net wider before they do something that will raise costs.”

Smithfield, for example, has run a flood of television advertisements boasting that the company is a good, safe place to work. The advertisements aim to persuade Carolinians to apply for jobs and to counter arguments made by a union trying to organize the plant that Smithfield jobs are high stress and unsafe, with stingy benefits.

One of the toughest challenges, Mr. Pittman said, has been training new employees to handle the highest-skilled jobs at a plant that processes 30,000 hogs a day.

“The big problem is we lost a lot of people who were there a long time,” Mr. Pittman said. “We have been facing difficulties in hiring for a number of years, because as the economy got better, the labor market became much tighter.”

When the plant opened in 1992, the area’s jobless rate was high because tobacco was in retreat and textile mills were closing. Early on, most employees were black. That changed with an influx of Hispanic immigrants, most of them Mexicans, in the mid-1990s.

Chris Kromm, executive director of the Institute for Southern Studies, said the Hispanics should not be viewed as shoving blacks aside, because the plant had such high turnover.

“It’s not as if these jobs were stable sources of employment for creating a black middle class,” Mr. Kromm said.

The way Hector David, a longtime worker from Mexico who quit in February, sees it, Smithfield had been eager to hire Hispanics because they worked so hard. “The Americans just don’t work as well,” Mr. David said. “In Mexico, we work from the age of 5 in the corn fields. We’re used to working hard.”

The New York Times wrote about the sometimes uneasy relations between blacks and Hispanics at the Smithfield plant as part of a 2000 series that examined race relations in the United States.

Mr. Pittman said Smithfield did its best to ensure that immigrant employees had legitimate documentation. But many workers said Smithfield did not look too hard at the paperwork.

Last November, the company notified 640 employees that their identity information did not match government records. In January, federal agents arrested 21 workers at the plant, and in August, helped by information the company provided, agents arrested 28 more, many at home.

Mr. Pittman said cooperating with immigration officials “serves our goal of 100 percent compliance 100 percent of the time.” But for many families, the cooperation has come at a price.

Tears came to Maritza Cruz’s eyes as she described the scene when immigration agents banged on her trailer door at 3 a.m. and arrested her husband, Alejandro, who faces deportation. “Everyone is very scared, especially after they arrested people at their homes,” said Mrs. Cruz, who has four children and is on maternity leave from the plant.

The company and its employees are not the only ones affected by the crackdown.

Since the enforcement actions began, said Jazmin Gastelum, owner of a local Christian bookstore, La Tierra Prometida, business from Hispanic customers has plunged 40 percent at her store and two nearby Hispanic groceries. “A lot of people are going back to Mexico,” Ms. Gastelum said. “And a lot who haven’t moved are scared to go outside.”

As for the workers who remain at the plant, many wonder why so many new employees come from South Carolina. Gene Bruskin, the director of the unionization campaign, sees a simple explanation.

“Thousands and thousands of workers from North Carolina have come through the plant, and they left, saying, ‘No way,’ because they were injured or didn’t want to work in such an oppressive atmosphere,” Mr. Bruskin said. “This plant burned up a large number of people, and the word got around about their bad experiences.”

Mr. Pittman said Smithfield had hired many workers from South Carolina because the counties close to the plant had a low unemployment rate.

The immigration arrests have also created problems for the union, the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has spent 15 years seeking to organize the plant.

“A lot of the people who left or were detained were strong union supporters,” said Gabriel Lopez Rivera, a Smithfield worker.

Mr. Bruskin, the union official, added, “It’s extremely difficult for workers to stand up for their rights when they’re threatened with arrest or deportation.”

The Tar Heel workers voted against unionizing in 1994 and 1997, but the National Labor Relations Board ruled that Smithfield had broken the law by intimidating and firing union supporters.

The company has called for a new election, but the union instead wants Smithfield to accept unionization through a majority sign-up, a process that would give management less opportunity to pressure workers.

In recent months, union organizers have adopted a new role, rushing to the trailers of immigrant workers facing arrest to ensure that someone can care for their children.

Union officials recently organized educational forums at a Roman Catholic church in Red Springs, where immigrant workers were advised, among other things, to sign power of attorney forms designating someone to take care of their children, finances and homes if they were arrested.

“I think all this turmoil is helping unionization,” said the Rev. Carlos Arce, the priest there, “because people feel alone and unprotected, and they see that the union, along with the Catholic Church, is the only organization that is trying to help them.”

    Crackdown Upends Slaughterhouse’s Work Force, NYT, 12.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/12/us/12smithfield.html?hp

Judge Suspends Key Bush Effort in Immigration

October 11, 2007
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

A federal judge in San Francisco ordered an indefinite delay yesterday of a central measure of the Bush administration’s new strategy to curb illegal immigration.

The judge, Charles R. Breyer of the Northern District of California, said the government had failed to follow proper procedures for issuing a new rule that would have forced employers to fire workers if their Social Security numbers could not be verified within three months.

Judge Breyer chastised the Department of Homeland Security for making a policy change with “massive ramifications” for employers, without giving any legal explanation or conducting a required survey of the costs and impact for small businesses.

Under the rule issued by the department, which had been scheduled to take effect last month, employers would have to fire workers within 90 days after receiving a notice from the Social Security Administration that an employee’s identity information did not match the agency’s records. Illegal immigrants often present false Social Security information when applying for jobs.

The rule, announced with fanfare in August by Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, was the linchpin of the administration’s effort to crack down on illegal immigration by denying jobs to the immigrants. It is part of a campaign of stepped-up enforcement since broader immigration legislation favored by President Bush was rejected by Congress in June.

If allowed to take effect, the judge found, the rule could lead to the firing of many thousands of legally authorized workers, resulting in “irreparable harm to innocent workers and employers.”

The decision brought a sense of relief to the unusual coalition behind the lawsuit, including the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and the United States Chamber of Commerce, often adversaries. They had feared that the measure would bring mass layoffs in low-wage industries, sweeping up both illegal and legal workers and disrupting the labor force.

Judge Breyer’s decision was an awkward disappointment for Mr. Chertoff, a former federal judge, who was relying on the rule as an enforcement tool since Congress left him with few other options.

“We will continue to aggressively enforce our immigration laws while reviewing all legal options available to us in response to this ruling,” Mr. Chertoff said yesterday in a statement.

Mr. Chertoff said the administration was doing “as much administratively as we can, within the boundaries of existing law” to crack down on illegal immigration, but he called on Congress to revisit legislation to give legal status to illegal immigrants and to impose even tougher enforcement measures.

Some conservative lawmakers who argue for vigorous enforcement of the immigration laws as a priority said they were outraged by the judge’s ruling.

“What part of ‘illegal’ does Judge Breyer not understand?” asked Representative Brian P. Bilbray, Republican of California and chairman of the House Immigration Reform Caucus. “Using a Social Security number that does not belong to you is a felony. Judge Breyer is compromising the rule of law principles that he took an oath to uphold.”

The rule establishes steps an employer must follow after receiving a notice from the Social Security Administration, known as a no-match letter, reporting that an employee’s identity information does not match the agency’s records.

If the employee could not clarify the mismatch by providing valid information within 90 days, employers would be required to fire the worker or risk prosecution for knowingly hiring illegal immigrants.

The rule was set to take effect Sept. 14, but was held up temporarily on Aug. 31 by another judge in the San Francisco court, Maxine M. Chesney, who was sitting in for Judge Breyer at the time.

Yesterday, Judge Breyer ordered a halt to the rule until the court could reach a final decision in the case, which could take many months. He made it clear he was skeptical of many of the government’s arguments.

The decision also bars the Social Security Administration from sending out about 141,000 no-match letters, covering more than eight million employees, which include notices from the Homeland Security Department explaining the new rule.

Other groups bringing the lawsuit include the American Civil Liberties Union, the San Francisco Labor Council and several national and local small-business associations.

Judge Breyer found that the Social Security database that the rule would draw upon was laden with errors not related to a worker’s immigration status, which could result in no-match letters being sent to legally authorized workers. “There is a strong likelihood that employers may simply fire employees who are unable to resolve the discrepancy within 90 days,” even if they are legal, he wrote.

Lucas Guttentag, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union, said the government had demonstrated “a callous disregard for legal workers and citizens by adopting a rule that punished innocent workers and employers under the guise of immigration enforcement.” A.F.L.-C.I.O officials had estimated that some 600,000 of their members could receive the letters and be vulnerable to unjust dismissal.

In a December 2006 report cited in the court documents, the inspector general of the Social Security Administration estimated that 17.8 million of the agency’s 435 million individual records contained discrepancies that could result in a no-match letter being sent to a legally authorized worker. Of those records with errors, 12.7 million belonged to native-born Americans, the report found.

In a Sept. 18 letter to Mr. Chertoff, the Office of Advocacy of the Small Business Administration supported a claim in the suit that federal officials had failed to carry out a required analysis of the impact on small businesses before announcing the new rule. The office is independent from the Small Business Administration, which supported the rule.

Judge Breyer is the brother of Justice Stephen G. Breyer of the Supreme Court and was nominated by President Bill Clinton in 1997.

    Judge Suspends Key Bush Effort in Immigration, NYT, 11.10.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/11/washington/11nomatch.html?hp

Children caught in the immigration crossfire

7 October 2007
USA Today
By Kathy Kiely

On the phone, Fiorella Maza comes across as a typical American teenager. Her English is unaccented. Her best friend's name is Brittney. Her three most prized possessions are her wallet, her cellphone and, of course, her iPod.
Those were the necessities Maza, 19, took when immigration agents arrived at 6 a.m. on March 1 to deport her and her family.

The 2006 South Miami Senior High graduate and her parents now live in her grandmother's house in Lima, Peru — more than 2,600 miles from the place she had called home since she was 2. She's searching for language classes "because my Spanish is really bad," and trying to adjust to life in a land where, she says, "I feel like an outcast."

Hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants' children could suffer the same fate, according to the non-partisan Migration Policy Institute. They are the lost generation of an underground economy: Brought here illegally by parents, they grew up in American neighborhoods, attended American schools and made American friends. As they approach adulthood, most find that their illegal status is a barrier to jobs and education, and their lack of documentation puts them in line for deportation.

Now, Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., is pushing a plan that would give them a way to stay here and become Americans. The measure is triggering another bitter debate over how the nation should deal with its growing shadow population.

"The letters and e-mails I get from these young people are just heartbreaking," says Durbin, the No. 2 Democratic leader in the Senate. "They have nowhere to turn. They are without a country."

In all but 10 states, students who are not legal residents cannot qualify for in-state college tuition or student loans. They have no right to work. And there's the dread of a knock on the door such as the one that sent Maza's family packing.

It's unclear how many of the 185,431 immigrants removed from the country last year were children who had grown up here. The Department of Homeland Security does not track such statistics, spokeswoman Kelly Nantel says.

The Migration Policy Institute, however, estimates that there are 360,000 high school graduates in the USA illegally who would be eligible for conditional legal status under Durbin's bill for the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors — or the DREAM Act, as proponents call it. Another 715,000 younger students could qualify if they graduate high school.

"They talk like Americans; they think like Americans," says Bishop Thomas Wenski of Orlando, speaking for the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. "We ought to let them dream like Americans."

Durbin's bill would carve an exemption in the nation's immigration policy for undocumented immigrants who grew up in the USA.

It would protect students from deportation and qualify young adults up to age 30 for permanent legal status if they complete high school and at least two years of either post-secondary education or two years of military service.

It's one of several pieces of a sweeping proposed overhaul of the nation's immigration laws that proponents are trying to revive this fall, following the larger bill's collapse earlier this year.

The other measures, which would allow more foreign workers, have the backing of the agricultural industry and technology companies. The DREAM Act's backers have a different kind of political clout.

The Catholic bishops are among several religious groups lobbying for the bill. Democratic leaders in the House and Senate support it. So do senior Republican senators such as Arizona's John McCain and Indiana's Richard Lugar, as well as the nation's largest teachers union.

Even so, the act's passage is far from certain. Many of the groups that torpedoed the immigration bill by arguing it provided amnesty to lawbreakers are targeting the DREAM Act as a backdoor attempt to accomplish the same goal.

"It really is an amnesty plan disguised as an education initiative," says Bob Dane of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), a group lobbying to reduce legal and illegal immigration.

Dane says the bill will "encourage illegal behavior" and force Americans to compete with illegal residents for college slots and scholarships.

The bill's opponents aren't out to punish kids, Dane says: "We're merely not rewarding them for the illegal actions of their parents."

Such distinctions are lost on many of those caught in the middle of the debate. "I just want to return home where I belong," Maza writes in an e-mail.

Families split by deportation

"I'm living in limbo," says Marie Gonzalez, 21, a junior at Westminster College in Missouri.

Gonzalez, a political science major, has lived in Missouri — "Jeff City," she says, using the nickname for Jefferson City — since she was 5. She learned in 2002 she wasn't here legally when an anonymous tipster reported her father. At the time, he was working as a courier in the office of then-Missouri Gov. Bob Holden, a Democrat. Gonzalez was a sophomore in high school.

"I was scared people were going to turn their backs on us," she recalls. "We were the people they talk about on TV."

Instead, neighbors in Gonzalez's conservative community rallied around her family.

It wasn't enough to save her parents, who were deported to Costa Rica in 2005. Then 19, Gonzalez had to sell the family home and cars. She hasn't seen her parents since, because a visit would mean not being able to return.

At Durbin's request, the Department of Homeland Security twice deferred Gonzalez's deportation. However, she says that DHS officials have warned her that if the DREAM Act doesn't pass, she will be deported to Costa Rica in June.

A deportation deadline also looms for Juan Gomez, 18, and brother Alex, 20.

Earlier this summer, the two, both students at Miami Dade College in Florida, spent a week wearing orange jumpsuits at the Broward County detention center. Their crime: having arrived here at age 2 and 4, respectively, with their parents from Colombia. Their parents are to be deported this month.

In handcuffs on the ride to the detention center, Juan used his cellphone to send a text message to a friend. The result was the creation of a Facebook group that rallied more than 3,000 supporters to lobby Congress on the boys' behalf.

Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Republican from Florida, and Sen. Chris Dodd, a Democratic presidential candidate from Connecticut, introduced what is known as a "private bill," used to help individuals with immigration problems.

That move gave the brothers two more years in the USA — a courtesy extended by immigration officials to allow Congress time to consider the legislation.

"It just shows you what a democratic country we are," says Juan Gomez. "This is the country I've always considered home."

For the Gomez brothers to be able to stay, however, the DREAM Act will have to pass. Diaz-Balart says it's highly unlikely Congress will approve a private bill for the brothers because there are too many similar cases.

"We continually run into kids who are in this country because of their parents' choice," he says. Some have younger siblings who are legal. The Constitution says anyone born in the USA is automatically a citizen.

Barriers to legislation

The DREAM Act is one of several pieces of the failed immigration bill now in play in Congress.

Other measures that could be part of a year-end immigration deal: one to permit more foreign farm workers to live in the USA, and another to grant more visas for temporary workers in business ranging from high technology to restaurants.

By one measure, the DREAM Act would seem the least controversial of the three: When the Senate Judiciary Committee considered it in 2003, the vote in favor was 16-3.

The opposition this year is enough to raise doubts about whether it or any piece of the immigration act can become law in the current Congress.

"I just don't think the political wherewithal is there to do it," says Sen. Mel Martinez, R-Fla., the party's national chairman.

He supported the immigration overhaul but isn't sure he'll back relief for illegal immigrant children as a separate issue.

And though Martinez says it hasn't affected his stance, he says he received "a flood of letters and phone calls" opposing the DREAM Act when Durbin tried to add it to the defense authorization bill last month.

FAIR representatives made 24 appearances on radio talk shows over two weeks in September to oppose the DREAM Act, Dane says.

NumbersUSA, another group that favors clamping down on legal and illegal immigration, urged people on its website to call senators thought to be in favor of the bill. Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., threatened a filibuster.

That persuaded Durbin and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to drop their effort temporarily. They say they'll try again to pass the DREAM Act before Thanksgiving.

Responds Dane: "We intend to keep the heat up."

Without the DREAM Act, Tam Tran, 24, is a person without a country.

The daughter of Vietnamese boat people, Tran was born in Germany, where her parents ended up after the German Navy plucked them out of the sea. The family moved to the USA when Tran was 6.

When her parents lost their political asylum case, immigration authorities tried to deport the family to Germany, Tran says. However, the Germans refused to take them.

For now, Tran is permitted to stay — only because the United States has no repatriation treaty with Vietnam.

If the diplomatic situation changes, Tran could be deported to the country of her parents' birth, says Department of Homeland Security spokeswoman Nantel.

Tran, who has never been to Vietnam, says that "I consider myself a Southern Californian." She graduated with honors from UCLA in December. Her major: American literature and culture.

For Martine Kalaw, a graduate of Syracuse University's prestigious Maxwell School public affairs program, it took eight years and three lawyers to overturn a judge's order that would have sent her to the Congo, a country she left at age 4.

Kalaw, 26, is an orphan. Her stepfather died when she was 12. Three years later, she lost her mother.

That misfortune may have been her salvation, Kalaw says.

Unlike students who fear putting their parents at risk for deportation, she was able to take her case to the public. She first spoke out at an immigration rally where she shared a stage with McCain, and later testified before Congress.

"I was scared because I thought there would be a backlash," Kalaw says, who adds that she was treated for clinical depression during her ordeal. "I was extremely ashamed of my situation. Deportation proceedings are the most terrifying, belittling process."

On July 4, Kalaw says, her legal odyssey ended.

The Board of Immigration Appeals overturned her deportation order and awarded her permanent legal resident status, which will enable her to apply for citizenship in five years.

"Now that everything is secure, I'm looking to develop my career," she says.

"The sky's the limit."

    Children caught in the immigration crossfire, UT, 7.10.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-10-07-Dream_N.htm

New Test Asks: What Does ‘American’ Mean?

September 28, 2007
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Patrick Henry and Francis Scott Key are out, but Susan B. Anthony and Nancy Pelosi are in. The White House was cut, but New York and Sept. 11 made the list.

Federal immigration authorities yesterday unveiled 100 new questions immigrants will have to study to pass a civics test to become naturalized American citizens.

The redesign of the test, the first since it was created in 1986 as a standardized examination, follows years of criticism in which conservatives said the test was too easy and immigrant advocates said it was too hard.

The new questions did little to quell that debate among many immigrant groups, who complained that the citizenship test would become even more daunting. Conservatives seemed to be more satisfied.

Bush administration officials said the new test was part of their effort to move forward on the hotly disputed issue of immigration by focusing on the assimilation of legal immigrants who have played by the rules, leaving aside the situation of some 12 million illegal immigrants here.

Several historians said the new questions successfully incorporated more ideas about the workings of American democracy and better touched upon the diversity of the groups — including women, American Indians and African-Americans — who have influenced the country’s history.

Would-be citizens no longer have to know who said, “Give me liberty or give me death,” or who wrote “The Star-Spangled Banner.” But they do have to know what Susan B. Anthony did and who the speaker of the House of Representatives is.

Alfonso Aguilar, a senior official at Citizenship and Immigration Services, the agency that designs and administers the test, said it was not intended to be punitive.

“We don’t seek to fail anyone,” said Mr. Aguilar, an architect of the test.

Immigration officials said they sought to move away from civics trivia to emphasize basic concepts about the structure of government and American history and geography. In contrast to the old test, which some immigrants could pass without any study, the officials said the new one is intended to force even highly educated applicants to do reviewing.

“This test genuinely talks about what makes an American citizen,” said Emilio Gonzalez, the director of Citizenship and Immigration Services, speaking at a news conference in Washington.

The $6.5 million redesign was shaped over six years of discussions with historians, immigrant organizations and liberal and conservative research groups. The questions were submitted to four months of pilot testing this year with more than 6,000 immigrants who were applying for naturalization.

The agency will begin to use the revised test on Oct. 1, 2008, leaving a year for aspiring citizens to prepare and for community groups to adjust their study classes.

The overall format has not changed. Legal immigrants who are eligible to become citizens must pass the civics exam as well as a test of English proficiency in reading and writing. In a one-on-one oral examination, an immigration officer asks the applicant 10 questions of varying degrees of difficulty selected from the list of 100. To pass, the applicant must answer 6 of those 10 questions correctly. The questions released yesterday will remain public along with their answers.

Immigrants are eligible to become citizens if they have been legal permanent residents for at least five years (or three years if they are married to a citizen) and have “good moral character” and no criminal record.

In the pilot runs of the revised test, Mr. Aguilar said, the pass rates improved over the current tests, with 92 percent of participants passing on the first try, as opposed to 84 percent now. At least 15 questions were eliminated as a result of the pilot because they proved too difficult. For example, a question about the minimum wage was dropped because test takers were confused between federal and state rates, Mr. Aguilar said.

In the new test, the pilgrims have been replaced by “colonists,” and they are the subject of fewer questions, while slavery and the civil rights movement are the subject of more. A question was added asking what “major event” happened on Sept. 11, 2001.

The new test drops questions about the 49th and 50th states, but adds one about the political affiliation of the president. There are no questions about the White House. Instead, one question asks where the Statue of Liberty is.

In a statement today, the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, one of the groups consulted in shaping the new test, denounced it as “the final brick in the second wall.” The group said the test included “more abstract and irrelevant questions” that tended to stump hard-working immigrants who had little time to study.

But several historians said the test appeared to be fair.

“People who take this seriously will have a good chance of passing,” said Gary Gerstle, a professor of American history at Vanderbilt University. “Indeed, their knowledge of American history may even exceed the knowledge of millions of American-born citizens.”

John Fonte, a senior fellow at the conservative Hudson Institute, called the new test “a definite improvement.” But he said it should have included questions about the meaning of the oath of allegiance that new citizens swear. “I would like to see an even more vigorous emphasis on Americanization,” he said.

About 55 percent of the applicants who participated in the pilot test were from Latin American countries. Some Latino groups noted yesterday that no question on the new test refers to Latinos.

Mr. Aguilar said that the test was not intended to be a comprehensive review, but rather to include “landmark moments of American history that apply to every single citizen.”

Naturalizations have surged in recent years, to 702,589 last year from 537,151 in 2004, according to official figures. In July the fees to become a citizen increased sharply, to $675 from $405.

    New Test Asks: What Does ‘American’ Mean?, NYT, 28.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/28/washington/28citizen.html?hp

Towns Rethink Laws Against Illegal Immigrants

September 26, 2007
The New York Times
By KEN BELSON and JILL P. CAPUZZO

RIVERSIDE, N.J., Sept. 25 — A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.

Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.

The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.

With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.

Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.

So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.

“I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden,” said Mayor George Conard, who voted for the original ordinance. “A lot of people did not look three years out.”

In the past two years, more than 30 towns nationwide have enacted laws intended to address problems attributed to illegal immigration, from overcrowded housing and schools to overextended police forces. Most of those laws, like Riverside’s, called for fines and even jail sentences for people who knowingly rented apartments to illegal immigrants or who gave them jobs.

In some places, business owners have objected to crackdowns that have driven away immigrant customers. And in many, ordinances have come under legal assault by immigration groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.

In June, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against a housing ordinance in Farmers Branch, Tex., that would have imposed fines against landlords who rented to illegal immigrants. In July, the city of Valley Park, Mo., repealed a similar ordinance, after an earlier version was struck down by a state judge and a revision brought new challenges. A week later, a federal judge struck down ordinances in Hazleton, Pa., the first town to enact laws barring illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there.

Muzaffar A. Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit group, said Riverside’s decision to repeal its law — which was never enforced — was clearly influenced by the Hazleton ruling, and he predicted that other towns would follow suit.

“People in many towns are now weighing the social, economic and legal costs of pursuing these ordinances,” he said.

Indeed, Riverside, a town of 8,000 nestled across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has already spent $82,000 defending its ordinance, and it risked having to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees if it lost in court. The legal battle forced the town to delay road paving projects, the purchase of a dump truck and repairs to town hall, officials said. But while Riverside’s about-face may repair its budget, it may take years to mend the emotional scars that formed when the ordinance “put us on the national map in a bad way,” Mr. Conard said.

Rival advocacy groups in the immigration debate turned this otherwise sleepy town into a litmus test for their causes. As the television cameras rolled, Riverside was branded, in turns, a racist enclave and a town fighting for American values.

Some residents who backed the ban last year were reluctant to discuss their stance now, though they uniformly blamed outsiders for misrepresenting their motives. By and large, they said the ordinance was a success because it drove out illegal immigrants, even if it hurt the town’s economy.

“It changed the face of Riverside a little bit,” said Charles Hilton, the former mayor who pushed for the ordinance. (He was voted out of office last fall but said it was not because he had supported the law.)

“The business district is fairly vacant now, but it’s not the legitimate businesses that are gone,” he said. “It’s all the ones that were supporting the illegal immigrants, or, as I like to call them, the criminal aliens.”

Many businesses that remain are having a hard time. Angelina Guedes, a Brazilian-born beautician, opened A Touch From Brazil, a hair and nail salon, on Scott Street two years ago to cater to the immigrant population. At one point, she had 10 workers.

Business quickly dried up after the law against illegal immigrants. Last week, on what would usually be a busy Thursday afternoon, Ms. Guedes ate a salad and gave a friend a manicure, while the five black stylist chairs sat empty.

“Now I only have myself,” said Ms. Guedes, 41, speaking a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. “They all left. I also want to leave but it’s not possible because no one wants to buy my business.”

Numerous storefronts on Scott Street are boarded up or are empty, with For Sale by Owner signs in the windows. Business is down by half at Luis Ordonez’s River Dance Music Store, which sells Western Union wire transfers, cellphones and perfume. Next door, his restaurant, the Scott Street Family Cafe, which has a multiethnic menu in English, Spanish and Portuguese, was empty at lunchtime.

“I came here looking for an opportunity to open a business and I found it, and the people also needed the service,” said Mr. Ordonez, who is from Ecuador. “It was crowded and everybody was trying to do their best to support their families.”

Some have adapted better than others. Bruce Behmke opened the R & B Laundromat in 2003 after he saw immigrants hauling trash bags full of clothing to a laundry a mile away. Sales took off at his small shop, where want ads in Portuguese are pinned to a corkboard and copies of the Brazilian Voice sit near the door.

When sales plummeted last year, Mr. Behmke started a wash-and-fold delivery service for young professionals.

“It became a ghost town here,” he said.

Immigration is not new to Riverside. Once a summer resort for Philadelphians, the town became a magnet a century ago for European immigrants drawn to its factories, including the Philadelphia Watch Case Company, whose empty hulk still looms over town. Until the 1930s, the minutes of the school board meetings were recorded in German and English.

“There’s always got to be some scapegoats,” said Regina Collinsgru, who runs The Positive Press, a local newspaper, and whose husband was among a wave of Portuguese immigrants who came here in the 1960s. “The Germans were first, there were problems when the Italians came, then the Polish came. That’s the nature of a lot of small towns.”

Immigrants from Latin America began arriving around 2000. The majority were Brazilians attracted not only by construction jobs in the booming housing market but also by the presence of Portuguese-speaking businesses in town. Between 2000 and 2006, local business owners and officials estimate, more than 3,000 immigrants arrived. There are no authoritative figures about the number of immigrants who were — or were not — in the country legally.

Like those waves of earlier immigrants, the Brazilians and Latinos triggered conflicting reactions. Some shopkeepers loved the extra dollars spent on Scott and Pavilion Streets, the modest thoroughfares that anchor downtown. Yet some residents steered clear of stores where Portuguese and Spanish were plainly the language of choice. A few contractors benefited from the new pool of cheap labor. Others begrudged being undercut by rivals who hired undocumented workers.

On the town’s leafy side streets, some residents admired the pluck of newcomers who often worked six days a week, and a few even took up Capoeira, the Brazilian martial art. Yet many neighbors loathed the white vans with out-of-state plates and ladders on top parked in spots they had long considered their own. The Brazilian flags that flew at several houses rankled more than a few longtime residents.

It is unclear whether the Brazilian and Latino immigrants who left will now return to Riverside. With the housing market slowing, there may be little reason to come back. But if they do, some residents say they may spark new tensions.

Mr. Hilton, the former mayor, said some of the illegal immigrants have already begun filtering back into town. “It’s not the Wild West like it was,” he said, “but it may return to that.”

    Towns Rethink Laws Against Illegal Immigrants, NYT, 26.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/26/nyregion/26riverside.html?hp

At the U.S. Border, the Desert Takes a Rising Toll

September 15, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

SASABE, Ariz. — “I can’t breathe,” Felicitas Martínez Barradas gasped to her cousin as they stumbled across the border in 100-degree heat. “The sun is killing me.”

They had been walking for a day and a half through the Sonoran Desert in southern Arizona, the purgatory that countless illegal immigrants pass through on their way from Mexico to the United States.

Ms. Martínez was 29 and not fit. A smuggler handed her a can of carbonated energy drink and caffeine pills. But she only got sicker and passed out, said her cousin, Julio Díaz.

There, near a mesquite tree a little over 10 miles from the border, Ms. Martínez died, her eyes open to the starry sky, her arms across her chest and Mr. Díaz, 17, at her side.

Gone was her dream of making enough money in the United States for a house for her four young children in Mexico.

“She was very set in her ways,” said a sister in Mexico, Ely, who had tried to persuade Ms. Martínez not to leave. “Once she decided to do something, there was no stopping her.”

The Border Patrol has reported a large drop in the number of illegal immigrants apprehended at the border with Mexico this year, the consequence, the agency says, of additional agents and the presence of National Guard troops. Yet the number of migrants dying while trying to cross here in Pima County is on pace to set a record, according to the county medical examiner.

Pima County, which includes the Tucson area, is one of the busiest areas for illegal crossings along the 2,000-mile border. The medical examiner’s office handled 177 deaths of border crossers in the first eight months of this year, compared with 139 over the same period last year and 157 in 2005, the year the most such deaths were registered.

The death of Ms. Martínez in July illustrates a primary reason that immigration scholars, the Border Patrol and government officials in the United States and Mexico believe people continue dying at such high rates: As they increasingly avoid heavily patrolled urban areas, they cross with little or no knowledge of the desert, whose heat, insects, wildlife and rugged terrain make it some of the most inhospitable terrain on the planet.

Like Ms. Martínez, who had worked cleaning houses in Mexico, many crossers arrive from central and southern Mexico, which is cooler and wetter than Arizona and where people are less familiar with the desert and its perils.

Before entering the Sonoran Desert, she had completed a three-day trip to the Mexican side of the border, part of the marathon trek from her lush, verdant subtropical village of Tepetlán, a four-hour drive northeast from Mexico City in Veracruz state.

Her cousin, Mr. Díaz, said they stayed in a room at the border with 15 other crossers and were each given two cans of tuna, a bag of tortilla chips, and six liters of water — a gallon and a half — by a smuggler before setting off for the desert.

The growing death toll here in recent years follows a Border Patrol clampdown in California and Texas. The goal was to drive migrant traffic away from cities like San Diego and El Paso and into the remote desert on the assumption it would act as a deterrent. But while there is no way of knowing its overall effect, the strategy is serving at least in part as a funnel for untold numbers of migrants.

The Government Accountability Office, in a report last year that analyzed Border Patrol statistics, said the annual number of reported deaths of border crossers doubled to 472 between 1995 and 2005, with the majority of those deaths in the desert near Tucson. The report suggested the agency has undercounted deaths because of inconsistent classification.

Border Patrol officials say that as the agency continues to add agents, as recently authorized by Congress, they will be better able to patrol the toughest areas of the Sonoran Desert. It said commanders recently met to finalize better methods to count migrant deaths.

“We are well aware of the perils of crossing the desert,” said Lloyd Easterling, an agency spokesman. “That’s why we are trying to get people to places to deter people from crossing to begin with.”

At the Mexican consulate in Tucson, a map is adorned with yellow and blue pieces of tape, for females and males, marking where migrants have died. Ms. Martínez is yellow No. 114.

Jerónimo García Ceballos, a consular official, maintains the map and devotes much of his work to identifying the dead and arranging for their bodies to be returned to Mexico.

Mr. García’s office is adorned with posters with slogans like “Don’t leave your life in the desert; your family asks you not to,” an example of the public service announcements that both Mexico and the United States Border Patrol have used along known migrant trails.

Ms. Martinez had telephoned home as she hopscotched across Mexico with Mr. Díaz. They rode in a smuggler’s sport utility vehicle to Xalapa, took a bus to Mexico City and then another, three-day bus trip to Altar, a ragged town that is a major staging area for migrants 50 miles south of the border.

“I would tell her it’s not too late to come back, I would work to pay off the smuggler,” said Ms. Martínez’s father, Vicente Martínez Ortega, recalling his telephone conversations with her along the way.

From Altar, they were driven toward the border in a van, Mr. Díaz said, and once they got close, they began walking. They headed along a known smuggling route toward Route 86 in Arizona, where migrants are often picked up and eventually carried to points across the United States.

Mr. Díaz said they were assured it would be a day or so of walking but Border Patrol agents say from the border to Route 86 is more like a three- or four-day walk.

Ms. Martínez’s last call home came a couple of days before she died. “She said, ‘Daddy, I’ve reached the border,’ ” Mr. Martínez said.

Tepetlán, a village of 1,800 people on a high plateau in the southeastern flanks of the Sierra Madre Oriental, has shrunk in population in recent years as scores of its citizens head “al otro lado,” to the other side, as the United States is called.

Family and friends there said Ms. Martínez had chosen to believe, like many others who try to cross, that nothing ill would come to her.

Her younger brother had successfully made a similar journey eight months before and found work at a factory in Georgia, but said he had told his sister of the exhausting, broiling march in the desert and warned her not to do it.

“I told her work here is hard and sometimes there isn’t any,” her brother Vicente, 24, said in a telephone interview from Georgia, where his job helps support his parents, wife and two young children in Tepetlán. “But she thought everything would come out all right.”

Her father had crossed several years ago in San Diego, scrambling away from Border Patrol agents tracking him and his group with helicopters and floodlights. He found field work in California and Nebraska and sold ice cream pops in Chicago before tiring of the climate and intermittent work and returning home to harvest coffee in Tepetlán.

Mr. Díaz, too, had made the trek just a year before, but said he was caught by the Border Patrol and immediately deported.

The Martínez family lives modestly in a two-room house in Tepetlán. It sits on an unpaved road where rural scenes naturally unfold: men riding burros, boys playing with a captured armadillo, and fish and fruit vendors hawking wares from battered pickup trucks.

Ms. Martínez had worked cleaning houses in Veracruz and at the airport there for a year but she found it hard to make enough money to care for her children, ages 6 to 13.

Her personal life, too, had been turbulent for years. Family members describe her as somewhat rebellious and headstrong.

She had dropped out of high school at 14, was married and pregnant by 15 and had left the father of her four children last year, after several fights.

She had remarried and was looking for ways to make big money for a new house.

Ms. Martínez had heard that Mr. Díaz was planning to make another try, through a smuggler who was a distant relative, and borrowed money from a lender in town. The cost would be $3,000, half paid up front, half after a successful crossing.

But it was not. Around 11 a.m. on July 6, Border Patrol Agent Kelly Kirby got a call about a young migrant reporting his cousin possibly dead in the desert. Every time a call about a migrant in distress comes in, Agent Kirby says he hopes for the best but knows to expect the worst.

Mr. Díaz said Ms. Martínez died just before sunset the night before. He cried and was scared, he said, and built a fire, hoping to be spotted.

He set off in the morning to find help, eventually flagging down a passing Border Patrol agent.

Agent Kirby responded and with Mr. Díaz’s help quickly found Ms. Martínez.

She was wearing jeans and a blouse. Foam around her mouth was evidence of a seizure. Though she had only walked about a day and a half, her physical condition and the insufficient water and food she had consumed made her susceptible to a desert death.

“She did about as much as she could to not make it,” Agent Kirby said.

When Ms. Martínez’s body was returned to Tepetlán, the coffin was brought into the house for a wake. Her father opened the lid and looked at his daughter’s face.

“I had to look, to see her,” Mr. Martínez said.

Mr. Martínez, with the help of a friend who is a mason, is completing work on a tomb, which includes a sculpture of the town church where Ms. Martínez’s mother took her for a blessing before she left for the United States.

Watching the work on the tomb from a distance one afternoon in late August, Mr. Díaz spoke of his life since his cousin’s death and the possibility of another attempt to cross.

“Not right now,” he said, “but who knows, later on?”

    At the U.S. Border, the Desert Takes a Rising Toll, NYT, 15.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/15/us/15border.html?hp

Number of Immigrants Hits Record 37.5M

September 12, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 12:48 a.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Nearly one in five people living in the United States speaks a language at home other than English, according to new Census data that illustrate the wide-ranging effects of immigration.

The number of immigrants nationwide reached an all-time high of 37.5 million in 2006, affecting incomes and education levels in many cities across the country. But the effects have not been uniform.

In most states, immigrants have added to the number of those lacking a high-school diploma, with almost half of those from Latin America falling into that category.

However, at the other end of the education spectrum, Asian immigrants are raising average education levels in many states, with nearly half of them holding at least a bachelor's degree.

''There is no one-size-fits-all policy that you could apply for all immigrant groups,'' said Mark Mather of the Population Reference Bureau. ''I think most of the attention has been on low-skilled workers coming from Mexico. But we have 10 million immigrants from Asia, a number that's growing.''

The Census Bureau on Wednesday released a host of demographic data about the nation, including statistics on immigration, housing, education and employment.

The data come from the American Community Survey, an annual survey of 3 million households that has replaced the Census Bureau's long-form questionnaire from the once-a-decade census. It does not distinguish between illegal immigrants and those who are in the U.S. legally.

Mather analyzed the differences in education levels among immigrants from Asia and those from Latin America. Together, the groups account for about 80 percent of all immigrants.

About 48 percent of Asian immigrants held at least a bachelor's degree, compared with about 11 percent of immigrants from Latin America. Among people born in the U.S., about 27 percent were college graduates.

''Driving this are people coming from China and India,'' Mather said. ''They are either coming with a bachelor's degree, or they are coming with visas and getting degrees once they arrive.''

At the other end of the spectrum, 47 percent of adult immigrants from Latin America lacked a high school diploma, compared with 16 percent of Asian immigrants and 13 percent of people born in the U.S.

Those numbers are fueling overall increases in the number of high-school dropouts in four states: Nevada, Arizona, Colorado and Texas, said William Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution, a Washington think tank.

''It used to be the poor southern states that had low levels of education and income. Now it is the high-immigration states as well,'' Frey said. ''But that isn't to say that the second or third generation won't do better, because they will,'' he added. ''There is upward mobility.''

Among the other highlights from the 2006 data released by the Census Bureau:

--Massachusetts led all states in college graduates, with 37 percent of adults 25 and older holding at least a bachelor's degree. West Virginia came in last with 16.5 percent.

--Mississippi led all states in high-school dropouts, with 22.1 percent of adults 25 and older not graduating from high school. Minnesota was at the other end, with only 9.3 percent.

--California led the nation in immigrants, at 27 percent of the state's population, and in people who spoke a foreign language at home, at 43 percent.

--West Virginia had the smallest share of immigrants, at 1.2 percent. It also had the smallest share of people speaking a foreign language at home, at 2.3 percent.

--New York residents had the longest average commuting time to work at nearly 31 minutes, while North Dakota had the shortest, at 15.5 minutes.

--More Americans are working later in life. In 2006, 23.2 percent of people age 65 to 74 were still in the labor force --either working or looking for work -- up from 19.6 percent in 2000.

--Fewer households consist of a married couple with children -- 21.6 percent in 2006, down from 23.5 percent in 2000.

------

On The Net:

Census Bureau: http://www.census.gov

    Number of Immigrants Hits Record 37.5M, NYT, 12.9.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Census-Demographics.html

Surge Seen in Applications for Citizenship

July 5, 2007
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

The number of legal immigrants seeking to become United States citizens is surging, officials say, prompted by imminent increases in fees to process naturalization applications, citizenship drives across the country and new feelings of insecurity among immigrants.

The citizenship campaigns have tapped into the uneasiness that legal immigrants, especially Hispanics, say is a result of months of debate over an immigration bill that failed last week in the Senate. Although illegal immigrants were the center of attention in the debate, it prompted many legal immigrants who have put down roots here to seek the security of citizenship, as well as its voting power, immigrants’ advocates said.

The numbers of new naturalized citizens have steadily grown, to 702,589 last year from 463,204 in 2003. A big jump occurred this year, with the number of applications increasing every month, to 115,175 in May compared with 65,782 last December.

More than 4,000 new Americans were sworn in yesterday in tradition-steeped — and some not so traditional — Fourth of July ceremonies. About 1,000 people from 75 countries took their oaths together under the turrets of Cinderella’s Castle at Walt Disney World in Lake Buena Vista, Fla., as Gloria Estefan sang “The Star-Spangled Banner.”

In Iraq, 325 foreign-born soldiers who are fighting in the United States military took the oath of allegiance in two ceremonies.

For many legal immigrants, worry about their futures in the United States turned into action after an announcement on Jan. 31 by Citizenship and Immigration Services that it would increase application fees.

Under the new fees, which take effect on July 30, it will cost $675 to become a naturalized citizen, up 69 percent from $400.

Immigrants have also been mobilized to press naturalization applications by a television and radio campaign that Univision, the national Spanish-language network, began in January in California.

The campaign, promoted by personalities like Eduardo Sotelo, a radio host in Los Angeles known as El Piolín, or Tweety Bird, has directed immigrants to 350 workshop centers run by churches and other community organizations in 22 cities. At the centers, immigrants receive English lessons and advice on meeting requirements and filling out forms.

One radio listener was Ángel Iván Álvarez, 24, a legal immigrant from Mexico who said he had never thought of becoming a citizen until last week when the Senate bill failed.

The measure, a bipartisan compromise supported by President Bush, would have created a path to legal status for illegal immigrants, among other actions.

After it failed, Mr. Álvarez, a real estate agent from Whittier, Calif., took down information from El Piolín’s show and registered in a citizenship workshop.

“I realized that I want to be able to vote and speak up for my people, because they are not getting enough support,” Mr. Álvarez said yesterday in a telephone interview. “I want everybody to be able to come out of the shadows.”

Federico Gutiérrez, 53, a longtime legal resident of Chicago who was born in Mexico, said large protests in March 2006 in support of an immigration overhaul made him decide that it was time to engage in American politics.

When the debate turned angry, Mr. Gutiérrez said, he wanted to be able to influence lawmakers who he believed favored immigrants.

He prepared his application and brushed up on his English and American history in classes offered by the New Americans Initiative, a citizenship campaign financed by Illinois. He became a citizen in May.

“Now if I don’t like the way things are going, I can let the government know my opinion,” Mr. Gutiérrez said in a telephone interview.

Some legal immigrants, particularly Hispanics, have said they were unfairly tarred in the debate over the Senate bill, which failed in part because of vehement opposition from conservatives who said it offered blanket amnesty to illegal immigrants.

“A lot of people who are here legally are made to feel like lepers,” said Rachel Duverge, 24, a Florida resident born in the Dominican Republic who was among the new citizens sworn in yesterday at Walt Disney World.

Ms. Duverge said she became a citizen in part because she was eager to vote in the presidential election next year. President Bush, she said, “has not handled immigration well.”

To become citizens, immigrants have to be legal permanent residents who have lived continuously in the United States for five years. They cannot have a criminal record and must pass tests to show proficiency in English and a basic knowledge of American history and government.

Advocates for immigrants say the increase in fees has been a decisive incentive for working-class immigrants to take action, especially when more than one family member is eligible to be a citizen.

“Before they said, ‘I can do it anytime,’ ” said Catherine Salgado, a spokeswoman for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in Chicago. “Now it’s not anytime anymore.”

Ms. Salgado said the $675 fee was a week’s wages for many immigrants who had applied for naturalization through workshops organized by the coalition.

The immigration agency is also remaking its civics and English tests, and many immigrants say they fear that the tests will be more challenging.

The Univision campaign had greater effects than its organizers expected, especially in California, said Maryam Banikaram, chief marketing officer for the company. Ms. Banikaram said the effort was part of its regular nonpartisan public service efforts of the company.

“If you become a U.S. citizen, you have better opportunities,” she said. “We’re just giving you the tools to make that a reality.”

The campaign took off after the immigration debate became major news for Univision and Mr. Sotelo, or El Piolín, used his racy comic radio show as a soapbox to support legal status for illegal immigrants.

Other immigrants are concerned about locking in economic gains that they have made as legal residents.

“A prime motivator is security for the family and for employment,” said Javiér Angulo, director of civic education for the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund, which organized workshops in connection with the Univision campaign. “People don’t feel that being permanent residents is enough to secure their future in this country. They would just feel more secure as citizens.”

In Chicago, Mr. Gutiérrez said he started life in a corn-growing village in central Mexico and had worked in factories most of the time since entering the United States in 1979. He has two adult children who are United States citizens.

“I will always have Mexican blood,” Mr. Gutiérrez said, enjoying a day of rest on his first Fourth of July as an American citizen. “But my heart is here.”

Dennis Blank contributed reporting from Orlando, Fla.

    Surge Seen in Applications for Citizenship, NYT, 5.7.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/05/us/05citizenship.html?hp

Editorial

Gitmos Across America

June 27, 2007
The New York Times

Toughness is the watchword in immigration policy these days. When you combine the new toughness with same-old bureaucratic indolence and ineptitude, you get a situation like that described by Nina Bernstein in The Times yesterday. She wrote about how the boom in immigration detention — the nation’s fastest-growing form of incarceration — ensnares people for dubious reasons, denies them access to medicine and lawyers and sometimes holds them until they die.

Sandra M. Kenley, a legal permanent resident who had high blood pressure and a bleeding uterus, died in a rural Virginia jail after not receiving her medication. Returning home from a trip to Barbados she was locked up because of two old misdemeanor drug convictions. Abdoulai Sall, an auto mechanic, had no criminal record, but was still seized during an immigration interview. He had a severe kidney ailment and he, too, complained about not getting his medicine. He got sicker and died in another Virginia jail last December.

Sixty-two immigrants have died since 2004 while being held in a secretive detention system, a patchwork of federal centers, private prisons and local jails. Advocacy groups and lawyers say that the system not only denies detainees the most basic rights but also lacks the oversight and regulations that apply to federal prisons. Instead of fixing this broken system, the Senate bill that is lumbering toward final passage — after surviving a crucial procedural vote yesterday — is overloaded with provisions that will make it even harsher and more unfair.

One of the worst amendments comes from Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. It would impose mandatory detention of all people who overstay their visas. It’s a huge overreach that threatens to swamp the detention system, filling already-strapped prisons at great expense and inevitably leading to more abuses and deaths. And because it takes away the power of officials to decide who poses a genuine threat and who doesn’t, it would undermine efforts to catch and deport the truly dangerous.

The cells would be full of people who shouldn’t be there: asylum seekers, the elderly, pregnant women, the sick and those ensnared in paperwork mistakes. Children, like the kindergartners in inmate scrubs walking the halls of a federal detention center outside Austin, Tex. Day laborers, like those in suburban Brewster, N.Y., whose arrests were hailed by a mayor who spoke proudly of his community’s “zero tolerance” for people unlawfully playing soccer in a schoolyard.

The country already detains some 230,000 immigrants a year, at an annual cost of $1.2 billion. Under the current immigration bill, it would build tens of thousands more beds to hold detainees. And it would need many more — Guantánamo Bays across America — if Mr. Graham’s zero-tolerance vision is fully realized.

Noncitizens are subject to our laws and to being deported if they do bad things. But this doesn’t mean the country must detain or deport everybody, or relinquish basic decency or even basic sense to achieve some imagined ideal of toughness.

    Gitmos Across America, NYT, 27.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/27/opinion/27weds1.html

28-Mile Virtual Fence Is Rising Along the Border

June 26, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

SASABE, Ariz., June 21 — If the effort to catch people illegally crossing the border here in the southern Arizona desert is a cat-and-mouse struggle, the Homeland Security Department says it has a smarter cat.

It comes in the form of nine nearly 100-foot-tall towers with radar, high-definition cameras and other equipment rising from the mesquite and lava fields around this tiny town.

Known as Project 28, for the 28 miles of border that the towers will scan, the so-called virtual fence forms the backbone of the Secure Border Initiative, known as SBInet, a multibillion-dollar mix of technology, manpower and fencing intended to control illegal border crossings.

If successful, hundreds of such towers could dot the 6,000 miles of the Mexican and Canadian borders.

But glitches with the radar and cameras have forced the project to miss its June 13 starting date, just as Congress focuses anew on border security in the Senate measure to overhaul immigration law.

Officials at the Homeland Security Department insist that Boeing, which has a $67 million contract to develop the project and others, will soon put it back on track, though they are not providing a new completion date.

Boeing referred requests for comment to the department.

“We are making good progress,” the executive director of the border program, Gregory Giddens, said.

Democrats in Congress are questioning why the problems were not disclosed at a hearing on the project on June 7. It was only afterward, in communication to Congressional staff members, that the delays came to light.

“The department’s failure to be forthcoming and the repeatedly slipping project deadlines not only impede Congress’ ability to provide appropriate oversight of the SBInet program, but also undermine the department’s credibility with respect to this initiative,” Representatives Bennie G. Thompson of Mississippi, chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, and Loretta Sanchez of California, chairwoman of a border subcommittee, both Democrats, wrote in a letter on June 19 to the department.

In a report in February, the Government Accountability Office warned that Congress needed to keep a tight rein on the program, because, it said, “SBInet runs the risk of not delivering promised capabilities and benefits on time and within budget.”

Officials estimate total cost of the initiative through 2011 at $7.6 billion. The accountability office has suggested that figure is too low.

Boeing won the contract, which includes $20 million for Project 28, in September and has undertaken it with a sense of urgency, Mr. Giddens said, adding that he would prefer a delay over starting the project with malfunctioning equipment.

Rather than develop new technology, Boeing took existing cameras, sensors, radar and other equipment and bundled them into a system that although not technologically novel is unlike anything the Border Patrol now uses.

The cameras, set off by radar, are to beam high-quality images of targets miles away to field commanders and agents, making it possible to determine almost instantly whether they are watching a family outing or a group of illegal immigrants.

The information is to flow over a high-speed wireless network into laptops in dozens of Border Patrol vehicles that, in theory, would respond quicker and more efficiently to breaches than they do now.

“We are living the dividing line between the old Border Patrol and the new patrol of the future,” said David Aguilar, chief of the Border Patrol.

“It will not only detect, but identify what the incursion is,” Mr. Aguilar added, a step up from the existing ground sensors, fence cameras and footprint tracking that can lead to “false positives.”

With much of the 2,000-mile-long Mexican border a wilderness of plains, plunging ravines and soaring craggy hills, officials consider virtual fencing a pragmatic improvement to far-flung agents and physical fences — 88 miles now have primary fencing — that illegal immigrants knock down, bore through and slip over and under.

The towers are ringed with a six-foot-tall chain-link fence, and the Border Patrol can warn people away through a loudspeaker. Private guards are at the towers now.

On Thursday morning at a tower north of here, a reporter and a photographer walked right up to the tower, observing and photographing it for several minutes with no guard in sight.

Mr. Aguilar said he was not concerned about such access, speculating that no threat was discerned or the cameras were not turned on then.

Residents near the towers have raised concerns, questioning why most towers are miles from the border and whether they will allow unscrupulous agents to peer into their bedrooms.

“We don’t live in clusters,” said Roger Beal, who runs a grocery store in the isolated town of Arivaca, the site of a tower and about 10 miles from the border. “The homes here are not 10 feet apart. People value their privacy here, and we are just not used to being observed. Do it at the border. This isn’t it.”

Mr. Aguilar, the Border Patrol chief, said: “We are members of the community. We recognize their sensitivity. But we feel confident our officers are going to follow policy and common sense. Can I guarantee you nothing is going to happen? No, we are all human.”

Although the towers are in a region with heavy traffic in smuggling, Boeing chose to place them close to existing roads and away from the most rugged terrain to help captures.

Mr. Aguilar said the towers did not need to be right on the border, suggesting that traffickers would find it difficult to move their routes undetected in the rough terrain even if they figured out the locations of the towers. The expected locations have been published in a public environmental assessment.

The virtual fence is one piece of a flurry of border enforcement. The Border Patrol said it was on pace to hire thousands of agents, with the goal of a total of 18,000 by the end of 2008, up from just under 12,000 in 2006, when President Bush announced the push.

In addition, officials expect to have 370 miles of physical fencing by the end of next year. Drug seizures are increasing, and arrests for illegal immigration have dropped since last summer, when the National Guard arrived to supplement agents.

Though scholars say an array of factors, including economic and social trends in Latin America and the vagaries of the drug trade could explain the trends, Mr. Aguilar said they vindicated the stricter enforcement.

After the system is fully functioning, he said, “the net will be very, very tight.”

    28-Mile Virtual Fence Is Rising Along the Border, NYT, 26.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26fence.html

New Scrutiny as Immigrants Die in Custody

June 26, 2007
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Sandra M. Kenley was returning home from her native Barbados in 2005 when she was swept into the United States’ fastest-growing form of incarceration, immigration detention.

Seven weeks later, Ms. Kenley died in a rural Virginia jail, where she had complained of not receiving medicine for high blood pressure. She was one of 62 immigrants to die in administrative custody since 2004, according to a new tally by Immigration and Customs Enforcement that counted many more deaths than the 20 previously known.

No government body is charged with accounting for deaths in immigration detention, a patchwork of county jails, privately run prisons and federal facilities where more than 27,500 people who are not American citizens are held on any given day while the government decides whether to deport them.

Getting details about those who die in custody is a difficult undertaking left to family members, advocacy groups and lawyers.

But as the immigration detention system balloons to meet demands for stricter enforcement of immigration laws, deaths in custody — and the secrecy and confusion around them — are drawing increased scrutiny from lawmakers and from government investigators.

Spurred by bipartisan reports of abuses in detention, the Senate unanimously passed an amendment to the proposed immigration bill that would establish an office of detention oversight within the Department of Homeland Security. Detention capacity would grow by 20,000 beds, or 73 percent, under the bill, which is expected to be debated again today in the Senate.

Complaints focus on a lack of independent oversight and failures to enforce standards for medical care, suicide prevention and access to legal help.

The inspector general in the Department of Homeland Security recently announced a “special review” of two deaths, including that of a Korean woman at a privately run detention center in Albuquerque. Fellow detainees told a lawyer that the woman, Young Sook Kim, had pleaded for medical care for weeks, but received scant attention until her eyes yellowed and she stopped eating.

Ms. Kim died of pancreatic cancer in federal custody on Sept. 11, 2005, a day after she was taken to a hospital.

Some of the sharpest criticism of the troubled system has come from officials at one of the largest detention centers in the country, York County Prison in Pennsylvania.

“The Department of Homeland Security has made it difficult, if not impossible, to meet the constitutional requirements of providing adequate health care to inmates that have a serious need for that care,” the York County Prison’s warden, Thomas Hogan, wrote in a court affidavit last year.

Officials with the immigration agency say that some deaths are inevitable, and that sufficient outside scrutiny comes from local medical examiners. Detention expanded by more than 32 percent last year, and the average length of stay was cut to 35 days from 89, said Jamie Zuieback, a spokeswoman.

“We spend $98 million annually to provide medical care for people in our custody,” Ms. Zuieback said. “Anybody who violates our national immigration law is going to get the same treatment by I.C.E. regardless of their medical condition.”

She declined to release information about the 62 detention deaths since 2004, including names, dates, locations or causes.

Twenty deaths were reported over the same period in a recent briefing paper for the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights of migrants from a list compiled by civil liberties lawyers from reports by relatives, advocates and the news media.

Detention standards were adopted by the immigration agency in 2000, but are not legally enforceable, unlike rules for the treatment of criminal inmates. The Department of Homeland Security has resisted efforts by the American Bar Association to turns the standards into regulations, saying that rulemaking would reduce the agency’s flexibility.

“The deaths bring forward in the worst way the systemwide problems,” said Sunita Patel, a lawyer for Legal Aid who prepared the United Nations briefing paper.

Some advocates of curbs on immigration say the solution is quicker deportations.

“The taxpayer cannot be expected to underwrite the elaborate detention facilities that some of these organizations want,” said Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform.

In the case of Ms. Kenley, a legal permanent resident of the United States for more than 30 years, detention interrupted her medical care for high blood pressure, a fibroid tumor and uterine bleeding. An autopsy attributed her death to an enlarged heart from chronic hypertensive disease. But a report by emergency medical services said that she had fallen from a top bunk, and that a cellmate had pounded on the door for 20 minutes before guards responded.

Ms. Kenley’s sister, June Everett, said her questions had gone unanswered.

“How did my sister die?” she asked, as Ms. Kenley’s daughter, Nicole, wept. “It’s a whole set of confusion, so who knows, really? And I would like to know.”

Ms. Kenley had been traveling with her 1-year-old granddaughter when she arrived at Washington Dulles International Airport, records show, and she was ordered to return without the baby to discuss two old misdemeanor drug convictions that had surfaced in an airport database.

She obeyed. A transcript shows she admitted a conviction for drug possession in 1984 and one in 2002 for trying to buy a small amount of cocaine. She described a life derailed by drug addiction after 11 years of working in a newspaper mailroom.

“I turned my life around,” Ms. Kenley told the immigration inspector, pointing to three drug-free years after probation and treatment, completion of a nursing course, and legal custody of the granddaughter, Nakita. She also showed that she was taking blood pressure medication and was scheduled for surgery.

The inspector arrested her, invoking the law: two drug-related convictions made her subject to exclusion from the United States.

“I am barely living,” Ms. Kenley later wrote her sister from Pamunkey Regional Jail, in Hanover, Va., “trying to hold on until you get a lawyer to help me.”

She died at Hampton Roads Regional Jail in Portsmouth, Va.

Her only court appearances were by video monitor, waiting for a volunteer lawyer who never came.

Even detainees with legal counsel sometimes do not survive.

Abdoulai Sall, 50, a Guinea-born taxi cab mechanic in Washington with no criminal record, died in detention last December.

Mr. Sall, whose boss of 17 years had sponsored him for a green card, was at an immigration interview with a lawyer, Paul S. Allen, when he was unexpectedly arrested on an old deportation order — part of a legal tangle left when another lawyer abandoned his case in the 1990s, Mr. Allen said.

The case file shows that Mr. Allen’s office urged medical intervention for Mr. Sall, who had been taking medication for a serious kidney ailment at the time of his arrest. While in detention at the Piedmont Regional Jail in Farmville, Va. he complained that he was not getting his medication and that his symptoms were worsening in a barracks-style unit.

Fellow detainees described Mr. Sall huddling next to the unit dryer for warmth, barely able to walk. “The medical staff told him they don’t have what he needs because immigration don’t pay enough money,” one detainee wrote.

The accusation was denied by Lou Barlow, the jail’s superintendent, who said Mr. Sall had received good care, including a visit to the local emergency room.

“We’ve never done anything unethical, illegal or immoral,” Mr. Barlow said.

Autopsy results are still pending.

Some deaths, like Ms. Kim’s, come to light well after the fact. Ms. Kim, a cook of about 60, was swept up in a raid on a massage parlor and detained for a month at the Regional Correctional Center in Albuquerque, a county prison operated by the Cornell Companies, a publicly traded corporation.

Months after her death, a lawyer in Santa Fe, N.M., Brandt Milstein, learned about the case from other Korean detainees, since deported. Mr. Milstein said that under New Mexico law, the death should have been reviewed by the state’s medical inspector, but officials had not reported it as a death in custody.

About two weeks ago — nearly two years after Ms. Kim died — the inspector general’s office called him, Mr. Milstein said. The investigation is now under way.

    New Scrutiny as Immigrants Die in Custody, NYT, 26.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/26/us/26detain.html?hp

Bush’s Stance on Immigration Has Roots in Midland

June 24, 2007
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

MIDLAND, Tex. — Late last spring, Republicans in this West Texas oil town called for a boycott of Doña Anita’s Mexican restaurant, a retaliatory step against its owner, Luz Reyes, for closing shop and showing up at a rally against proposed new penalties for illegal immigrants.

But President Bush’s three best friends here defied the boycott and went to the restaurant, Mr. Bush’s favorite when he lived here, regardless. One of them, the president’s close confidant and former commerce secretary, Donald L. Evans, told Ms. Reyes: “Luz, you didn’t do anything wrong. We love you.”

The hometown divide helps to shed light on a broader rift, as Mr. Bush and like-minded Republicans engage in an unusually contentious fight with the rest of their party in the national debate over immigration.

Mr. Bush has pursued a goal of providing citizenship for the millions of illegal immigrants with rare attacks on his conservative supporters, who have derided his approach as tantamount to amnesty. There are various political motivations for Mr. Bush to push for his plan, including the rapid growth in the nation’s Hispanic population, a voting group that he has long considered to be potentially Republican.

But the roots of Mr. Bush’s passion lie here in Midland, now heavily Hispanic, the city where Mr. Bush spent much of his childhood, and to which he returned as a young adult after spending his high school and college years in the more genteel settings of Andover and Yale.

As a boy, and later as a young, hard-drinking oilman, his friends say, Mr. Bush developed a particular empathy for the new Mexican immigrants who worked hard on farms, in oil fields and in people’s homes, and went on to raise children who built businesses and raised families of their own, without the advantages he had as the scion of a wealthy New England family.

The symbiosis fit with the Bush family’s Northeastern, free-trade Republicanism, which took on a Mexican flair, especially after Mr. Bush’s parents hired a live-in Mexican maid in Texas who became part of the family, and his brother, Jeb, married a young woman from Mexico who initially spoke little English.

But interviews in Midland also tell another story, of how a place that Mr. Bush credits with informing his relatively liberal views on immigration has started to move away from him.

Central to the shift is the perception among some in this city of about 100,000 people that he does not understand the sense of siege that has set in about the illegal population that has grown considerably since he traded the Texas governor’s mansion for the White House seven years ago.

“There’s just a real disconnect between the folks of West Texas and the president right now,” said Mike Conaway, who was the chief financial officer for Mr. Bush’s oil exploration company here in the 1980s and now represents the area as a Republican in Congress.

The disconnect has been exacerbated by a steady increase of illegal immigrants since Mr. Bush left the state, and attending newspaper reports about the strains on social services that they have brought. It is visible on a grand scale, with Mr. Conaway and this state’s two Republican United States senators, Kay Bailey Hutchison and John Cornyn, breaking with Mr. Bush on immigration in recent months after having followed his lead with Rolex reliability for most of his term.

And it is visible in smaller, more personal terms here in Midland, with the boycott that some Republicans called against Ms. Reyes’s restaurant. The dispute put Mr. Evans and the rest of Mr. Bush’s friends — who used to join Mr. Bush and his wife there nearly every Friday night — on the opposite side of the local Republican Party, including its chairwoman, Sue Brannon.

Mr. Evans said his appearance at the restaurant after the boycott had been called was “just dinner, not a political statement” against fellow local Republicans including his close friend Ms. Brannon.

But to Ms. Reyes, who has known Mr. Bush and his wife since their twins were in baby carriers, and who recounted the encounter with Mr. Evans in an interview at her restaurant, it was an important show of support from a group she still calls “the Bush clique.”

New Beginnings

George H. W. Bush came to the Midland-Odessa area in 1948 when his son George W. was 2, hoping to make his own fortune in oil, eventually forming a drilling company, the Zapata Petroleum Corporation — named for the movie “Viva Zapata!” about the Mexican revolutionary Emiliano Zapata — and later taking as a partner Jorge Díaz Serrano, a contender for the Mexican presidency before being imprisoned for fraud.

Friends of the current president have recalled how they occasionally saw Mexican workers in his father’s oil fields, part of a steady trickle of new immigrants from the other side of Southern border who also took jobs as ranch hands, maids and groundskeepers.

Randall Roden, one of Mr. Bush’s close childhood friends, recalled an upbringing that included “being aware that there were people who were poor and hard-working, and just looking for better opportunity, and a chance to do just about anything.”

Joe O’Neill, another friend from the time who remains close with Mr. Bush to this day, and who helped introduce Mr. Bush to the first lady, said of the newcomers, “They were hard-working and they were usually very close families — there was generally a father and a mother at home; you noticed it.”

Mr. Bush’s closest boyhood contact with anyone of Hispanic descent seems to have been in Houston, where the Bushes moved when George W. Bush was in middle school, two years before he went to boarding school at Andover in Massachusetts. His mother sought household help in the local paper, and answered an advertisement for a Mexican woman who was seeking sponsorship in return for housekeeping services. The woman, Paula Rendon, moved in and has stayed on with the Bush family for decades, following George H.W. and Barbara Bush to the White House and back home.

The current president has mentioned her only rarely, but he has described her as “a second mother.” Mr. Bush declined several interview requests. But in a brief e-mail exchange, Mr. Bush’s younger brother Jeb said of Ms. Rendon, “I adore her,” and added, “I got pretty good at Spanish thanks to her.” But, he said, he became fluent through his wife, Columba, with whom he has three children whom George H. W. Bush once famously, and affectionately, called “the little brown ones.”

The Son Returns

Mr. Bush returned to Midland in 1975 to find a much more Hispanic town than the one he left behind, because of an influx of Mexicans who went there to cash in on the 1970s oil boom just as Mr. Bush did.

“When the president and I came here we saw more and more Hispanics moving into the oil fields, working on well-servicing rigs — 12-hours-a-day kind of stuff,” said Mr. Evans, who arrived in Midland around the same time and married one of Mr. Bush’s grammar school friends. “So we saw a lot of Hispanics coming into that sector of our economy here, and of course, migrating their way into the community, and the schools.”

Mr. Bush became a man about the small city, drawn to its Mexican restaurants and the entrepreneurs behind them feeding on the boom times.

“The sky was the limit and who we were mattered less than where we were going,” said one of his friends from the time, José Cuevas, a third-generation Mexican American who established a fast-food burrito chain with a few thousand dollars.

Mr. O’Neill said, “He had a great deal of admiration for someone like José who started with a lot less and built it up.”

Another Hispanic friend from the time, George Veloz, recalled playing basketball at the Y.M.C.A. with Mr. Bush and sometimes “sharing a few cold ones.”

Mr. Bush’s parents had eaten at the small Mexican restaurant Mr. Veloz’s parents started after immigrating from Mexico, and which Mr. Veloz went on to build into a statewide chain. “As important as that family is, he didn’t treat me any different than any of the friends he grew up with,” Mr. Veloz said.

El Defender

In a telephone interview, Ms. Brannon, the local party chairwoman who has known Mr. Bush for decades, said he did not understand the new realities of illegal immigration. She said the friends he made in the Hispanic community when he lived in Midland were “not here illegally and taking freebies.”

“I love George and Laura dearly, and I respect him,” she said, “but this immigration thing is going to ruin our country.”

In winning election as governor in 1994, and winning re-election in 1998, Mr. Bush succeeded in drawing an unexpectedly high level of support from Hispanic voters.

He did so in part by speaking out against efforts by Pete Wilson, then the governor of California, to push initiatives intended to cut off services for illegal immigrants in his state.

Mr. Bush also spoke out against anti-trade sentiment at the time in an Op-Ed article in The New York Times that had as its headline, “No Cheap Shots at Mexico, Please.”

In a state that had for the most part reacted negatively to the amnesty provisions enacted under Ronald Reagan in 1986, Governor Bush found Texas to be largely receptive to his push to provide a bilingual education program for the children of Hispanic immigrants.

In the current climate, that seems like a distant memory, a casualty of what Mr. Bush’s longtime political adviser, Karl Rove, a Texan, said reflected how “the feelings about immigration have waxed and waned over the years” in Texas. In the 1990s, Mr. Rove said, Texans felt as if the immigration problem was relatively under control — an assessment of that time that even Ms. Brannon shared. But now, she said, “there’s just more and more coming in.”

    Bush’s Stance on Immigration Has Roots in Midland, NYT, 23.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/24/washington/24immig.html?hp

Toddler in Limbo Over U.S. Immigration

June 13, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:55 a.m. ET
The New York Times

HERNDON, Va. (AP) -- It never occurred to Abdeloihab Boujrad that the U.S. government may be confusing his 3-year-old son with the former leader of an Islamic militant group.

But that's exactly what a civil rights group believes is blocking Boujrad, a U.S. citizen, from bringing the toddler from Morocco to live with him and his wife, a legal permanent resident.

Boujrad has fought unsuccessfully for more than two years to have his son join him, and the U.S. government has never explained why it has not taken action on his son's immigration application.

The boy's first name, Ahmedyassine, resembles the name of Sheik Ahmed Yassin, the founder of the militant Palestinian group Hamas, who was assassinated by Israel in 2004.

Morris Days, a legal director for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said many Muslims have faced unexplained delays and denials on immigration and citizenship applications since the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Confusion over names is not uncommon.

But the delays in processing the application for a toddler to join his parents are unfathomable unless one assumes that Ahmedyassine's name is tripping alarms, Days said.

''He's been advised that the case is currently undergoing administrative review,'' he said. ''What kind of administrative review can they subject a baby to?''

Boujrad, 38, of Alexandria won an immigration lottery to come to the U.S. in 1997 and obtained citizenship in 2005. During that time, he traveled to Morocco a few months a year to be with his wife, Leila, to whom he has been married since 1999 and engaged since 1997 when he won the immigration lottery.

Leila did not get her green card until 2005, after her husband became a citizen. Ahmedyassine was born May 24, 2004. When Leila Boujrad's visa allowing her to travel to the United States was about to expire in 2005, she reluctantly decided to leave the boy with her sister while the immigration issues were sorted out.

''It was a bad experience. She was crying for three days straight and sick for weeks about leaving her son,'' Boujrad said.

Boujrad said he did not even know who Sheik Ahmed Yassin was until a few weeks ago, when it was suggested to him that the name similarity might be causing the delays. He said the boy's name was a compromise between his father, who liked the name Ahmed, and himself, who preferred Yassine.

Even in the absence of any other explanation, Boujrad said he still can't comprehend the confusion.

''He cannot do anything. He can't hurt nobody,'' the soft-spoken Boujrad said. ''He's doing good, but he's 3 years old now, and this is the time that they start learning everything and knowing everything. He's feeling like he's apart from us and it hurts him.''

Boujrad's eyes welled up as he described the frequent phone calls and video Internet hookup he and his wife use to stay in contact with their boy. As he spoke he clutched a thick blue folder documenting his innumerable conversations with immigration bureaucrats.

Dan Kane, a spokesman for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, said Wednesday that the agency is looking into the matter.

Boujrad cannot appeal to immigration court because no decision has been made, Days said. His only option would be to sue in federal court to compel action on his application. Days said that is a possibility but he's hoping to deal with it on an administrative level.

Boujrad and his wife have considered returning to Morocco for good. But they hold out hope.

''Each day I open my mailbox, I think maybe today is the day that I will get my letter from immigration,'' he said. ''But not yet.''

    Toddler in Limbo Over U.S. Immigration, NYT, 13.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Toddler.html

Arrests of 31 in U.S. Sweep Bring Fear in New Haven

June 8, 2007
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

NEW HAVEN, June 7 — Over the last several years, this city has gone to great lengths to turn itself into a kind of haven, quite literally, for illegal immigrants. It was not that new immigrants were pouring in, but that there were thousands already living here, and the officials who have long run the city wanted to bring them out of the shadows.

The police adopted a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy for dealing with immigrants, and the mayor backed a plan for municipal identification cards. Within the borders of this liberal college town, there was hardly a whiff of opposition.

But starting at 6 a.m. Wednesday, two days after the Board of Aldermen overwhelmingly approved the identity card plan, federal agents swept into the largely Hispanic Fair Haven community and arrested some 31 people suspected of being illegal immigrants, many in their homes.

Within hours, any sense of sanctuary that the city and advocates for immigrants advocates had developed over the years was turned upside down, replaced with fear.

“There is truly no safe haven for fugitive aliens,” said Marc Raimondi, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that conducted the raid.

Afterward, local officials’ cellphones lighted up with dozens of frantic phone calls from residents and community leaders saying that people were missing. There were rumors of a mass arrest at a supermarket. Fair Haven resembled a ghost town, with residents huddling inside their houses, afraid that they, too, could be arrested at any moment.

“At 10 in the morning, the streets were just empty,” said John Lugo, an organizer for Unidad Latina en Acción, an advocacy group. “People were really very afraid all of the sudden. They still are. They think it will happen again.”

On Wednesday, Mr. Lugo and others passed out hundreds of fliers outlining immigrants’ rights, instructing them not to give federal authorities any information without a lawyer present and advising them to not answer their doors.

Mayor John DeStefano and other city leaders angrily accused the federal government of “terrorizing” the immigrant community. Many of them speculated that the mass arrests — the first of their kind in recent memory here — were retaliation for the acceptance of municipal identification cards and other immigrant-friendly city policies.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials emphatically denied that charge, saying that the arrests had been planned since April. (The identity-card program, believed to be the first of its kind in the nation, was first suggested by Mr. DeStefano in 2005.)

The details of the arrests are still somewhat unclear. Federal officials said that they were “targeting fugitives,” not conducting a widespread sweep. Twenty nine men and two women — most of them from Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Guinea and Ecuador — were arrested. City officials said on Thursday that of the 16 arrest warrants the federal agents had, only four were executed, meaning that most of the 31 arrested were swept up in what they called a dragnet, and that 12 people the federal officials were looking for remained at large.

Lawyers and advocates for immigrants who interviewed several relatives of those who were arrested said that in most cases, the immigration officials knocked on their doors and demanded to speak with every adult in the house, then asked for identification.

In several instances, they said, the agents separated the men from the women and asked which of the women had children. Those who did were left behind, while those who did not were taken into custody, the advocates said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials have conducted hundreds of similar sweeps in the last year. In 2006, a spokesman said, they deported more than 221,000 illegal immigrants, many of them after proceedings that began with such arrests. Last fall, an operation in Danbury led to the arrest of 11 men who worked at a local factory.

Immigration advocates in Connecticut were fond of referring to Danbury and New Haven as two poles on the spectrum — the same immigrants who were shunned in the former were welcomed in the latter.

Like many other local leaders, Mayor DeStefano said he had to deal with the practical reality of illegal immigrants, rather than spend his time worrying about proposals to revamp the federal immigration system. But while some mayors were cracking down on housing codes and loitering laws to discourage illegal immigrants from getting too comfortable, Mr. DeStefano said he was more concerned about public safety for the 10,000 of them estimated to live in his city of 125,000.

That was how the identification cards were supposed to help: by giving immigrants an official document that could be used in banks, rather than having to carry hundreds of dollars in cash, which made them targets for theft.

Above all, Mr. DeStefano said, immigrants should feel comfortable contacting the police and receiving basic city services. And when the city’s aldermen approved the plan on Monday night, advocates hailed it as a model for other municipalities.

“We’ve gotten to the point where the community trusts the city and trusts the police,” said Kica Matos, the city’s community services administrator, who spearheaded the identification card plan.

The arrests on Wednesday, she said, have the potential to reverse much of that.

The city still plans to begin issuing the identification cards early next month. Several community leaders said that the immigrants’ arrests had outraged many residents, and that more would be likely to obtain the cards as a sign of solidarity.

But what about immigrants themselves?

“I don’t know the answer to that question,” Mr. DeStefano said in an interview Thursday. “But we cannot get to a point where people are driven underground.”

As his thoughts turned to the current immigration debate in Congress, Mr. DeStefano sounded a bit resigned.

“They’ll do whatever they are going to do, but my job is to deal with the situation here,” he said.

“People aren’t going to come here for a piece of plastic, they are going to come here for jobs and because the federal government lets them come here. The law is only enforced episodically. Yesterday was our day.”

    Arrests of 31 in U.S. Sweep Bring Fear in New Haven, NYT, 8.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/nyregion/08haven.html

Immigrant Bill, Short 15 Votes, Stalls in Senate

June 8, 2007
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE and ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, June 7 —The sweeping immigration overhaul endorsed by President Bush crumbled in the Senate on Thursday night, leaving the future of one of the administration’s chief domestic priorities in serious doubt.

After a day of tension and fruitless maneuvering, senators rejected a Democratic call to move toward a final vote on the compromise legislation after Republicans complained that they had not been given enough opportunity to reshape the sprawling bill. Supporters of cutting off debate got only 45 of the 60 votes they needed; 50 senators opposed the cutoff.

“We are finished with this for the time being,” said Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada and the majority leader, as he turned the Senate to work on energy legislation.

Mr. Reid did, however, leave the door open to revisiting the immigration issue later this year and said he would continue to explore ways to advance a plan. “We all have to work, the president included, to find a way to get this bill passed,” he said.

The outcome, which followed an outpouring of criticism of the measure from core Republican voters and from liberal Democrats as well, was a significant setback for the president. It came mainly at the hands of members of his own party after he championed the proposal in the hope of claiming it as a major domestic policy achievement in the last months of his administration.

The collapse of the measure came as Mr. Bush was in Europe for an international economic summit, and it was not immediately clear how hard he would fight to resurrect the bill upon his return next week.

Scott Stanzel, a White House spokesman, said the White House still held hope that a bill could be passed.

“We are encouraged that the leadership of both parties in the United States Senate indicated that they would bring this legislation back up for consideration,” Mr. Stanzel said. “And we will continue to work with members of the United States Senate to make sure this process moves forward.”

The defeat was also crushing for a bipartisan group of about a dozen senators who met privately for three months to broker a compromise that tried to balance a call for stricter border enforcement with a way for many of the 12 million people who are illegally in the country to qualify for citizenship eventually.

“The vote was obviously a big disappointment, but it makes no sense to fold our tent, and I certainly don’t intend to,” said Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and a chief author of the bill. “Doing nothing is totally unacceptable”

Other proponents said they still saw life in the legislation despite the blow in the Senate.

“This matter is on life support, but it is not dead,” said Senator Arlen Specter, Republican of Pennsylvania and another central architect of the plan.

Senate conservatives fought the legislation from the start, saying it rewarded those who broke the law by entering the country illegally. After winning a few important changes in the measure, Republican critics demanded more time and drew support for their calls for more opportunity to fight it out on the Senate floor.

“I simply do not understand why some of my colleagues want to jam this legislation through the Congress without a serious and thorough examination of its consequences,” said Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas.

Senator Jeff Sessions, an Alabama Republican who was another leading opponent, said he believed lawmakers responded to constituent complaints about the flaws in the measure. “I was not going to support a piece of legislation that will not work,” Mr. Sessions said.

Mr. Reid said the critics were simply stalling and would never be satisfied. Noting the Senate had considered more than 40 amendments and held 28 roll call votes, he attributed the failure of the bill to Republican recalcitrance.

In the end, 38 Republicans, 11 Democrats and one independent voted not to shut off debate; 37 Democrats, 7 Republicans and one independent voted to bring the issue to a head.

Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican leader, said he believed Republicans would have eventually relented had they been given more time to work out an agreement on what amendments would be considered. “I think we are giving up on this bill too soon,” Mr. McConnell said.

The vote was the second attempt of the day to cut off a debate that had gone on for nearly two weeks, interrupted by the Memorial Day recess. On the initial showdown in the morning, the Senate fell 27 votes short of the 60 required; every Republican and 15 Democrats opposed the move.

The morning vote sent Senate leaders and backers of the legislation scrambling, trying to reach an agreement to salvage the measure with the help of administration officials. Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was also consulted by phone.

The progress of negotiations was uncertain throughout the day. As late as 6:30 p.m., Mr. Kennedy was still uncertain where many senators stood on the call to force an end to the debate. “It’s touch and go,” Mr. Kennedy said. “It’s extremely close at this time. Republicans have held their cards.”

The compromise legislation was announced on May 17 by authors who hailed it as a “grand bargain.” It held together through much of the debate because the negotiators — embodied on the right by Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, a Republican, and on the left by Mr. Kennedy — agreed to block proposals they thought would sink the measure. That led to such odd moments as when Mr. Kyl on Wednesday opposed an amendment he had helped write for last year’s unsuccessful immigration measure.

But the legislation began running into problems late Wednesday night and early Thursday morning as the Senate approved a Democratic proposal to limit a guest-worker program sought by business interests and backed by Republicans. Backers of the bill hoped to reverse that result if the measure moved forward.

“It is indispensable to have a guest-worker program to take care of the needs of the economy,” said Mr. Specter. “If we don’t, we will just encounter more people coming over illegally.”

At the same time, some Democrats were growing increasingly uneasy.

Senator Robert Menendez, Democrat of New Jersey, said the bill had become “more punitive and more onerous” because of amendments adopted in the last few days. Mr. Menendez pointed, for example, to one that denied the earned-income tax credit to illegal immigrants who gain legal status under the bill.

Cecilia Muñoz, a vice president of the National Council of La Raza, the Hispanic rights group, said she had similar concerns. Changes approved by the Senate this week make the bill “not only more punitive, but also less workable,” Ms. Muñoz said.

Trying to bolster Democratic support, the Service Employees International Union urged senators Thursday to vote for a limit to the debate. In a letter to the Senate, Anna Burger, secretary-treasurer of the union, listed many serious objections to the bill, but said, “The time to move forward is now.”

The Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of civil rights groups, also backed cloture, saying, “A small handful of immigration restrictionists’ in the Senate should not be allowed to prolong the debate indefinitely.”

In addition to the limit on the guest worker program, supporters of the bill said they would also try to change an amendment that gives law enforcement and intelligence agencies access to certain information in unsuccessful applications filed by illegal immigrants seeking legal status. Despite the strong Republican vote against ending debate, party leaders said throughout the day they wanted to reach some accommodation. Senator Trent Lott of Mississippi, the No. 2 Republican, urged his colleagues to stiffen their spines and try to resolve one of the nation’s most pressing problems.

“Are we men and women or mice?” Mr. Lott asked. “Are we going to slither away from this issue and hope for some epiphany to happen? No. Let’s legislate. Let’s vote.”

Jim Rutenberg contributed reporting from Midland, Tex.

    Immigrant Bill, Short 15 Votes, Stalls in Senate, NYT, 8.6.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/06/08/washington/08immig.html?hp

Bush Takes On Conservatives Over Immigration

May 30, 2007
The New York Times
By JIM RUTENBERG

GLYNCO, Ga., May 29 — President Bush took on parts of his conservative base on Tuesday by accusing opponents of his proposed immigration measure of fear-mongering to defeat its passage in Congress.

“If you want to scare the American people, what you say is the bill’s an amnesty bill,” Mr. Bush said at a training center for customs protection agents and other federal agents here in southeastern Georgia. “That’s empty political rhetoric trying to frighten our citizens.”

It was some of Mr. Bush’s toughest language as he started an intensified effort to build support for the compromise bill in the Senate.

The measure hews to Mr. Bush’s long-sought goal of a new system with a path to citizenship for 12 million illegal immigrants, a guest-worker program for noncitizens and tighter borders.

The compromise, which leaders of both parties struck almost two weeks ago, has met stiff resistance from the left and right of both parties. Liberals tend to oppose the section that would add emphasis on admitting immigrants with education and job skills and less on family reunification. Conservatives tend to dismiss the plan as an amnesty bill.

It was the conservative opponents to whom Mr. Bush seemed to speak most forcefully here.

“If you want to kill the bill,” he said, “if you don’t want to do what’s right for America, you can pick one little aspect out of it. You can use it to frighten people.”

A senior official said later, “In no way was he questioning anyone’s patriotism or desire to do what’s right.”

It was a rare case of the president’s taking on the coalition that helped him win and keep the Oval Office, the same conservative radio hosts, bloggers, writers and members of Congress who contributed significantly to the defeat of immigration measures last year.

Mr. Bush spoke at a critical time, as lawmakers return home to hear from constituents on a 10-day break.

In the late spring recess last year, grass-roots opponents of an immigration bill barraged their representatives with complaints that it would amount to amnesty for lawbreakers, effectively killing its chance for passage.

Unlike the circumstances last year, when the White House was willing to put party unity above a controversial presidential initiative in an election year, Mr. Bush is determined to head off a similar result this time.

Lawmakers already saw echoes of last year. In California, two conservative talk show hosts urged listeners to bombard the telephone lines of Senator Dianne Feinstein, a Democrat, to register their opposition.

In South Carolina, Senator Jim DeMint, a Republican critic of the proposal, said that on a walk in downtown Spartanburg and lunch with more than 100 people at Wade’s restaurant on Tuesday he was hard pressed to find anyone who backed the Senate plan. Concern centered on whether promised enforcement would materialize, Mr. DeMint said.

“This is not playing well in South Carolina,” he said.

But like the president, business groups, advocates for immigrants, and religious and civil rights organizations urged Congress to keep working to shape a comprehensive immigration bill.

In Phoenix, the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry praised the bill and said it “provides the proper framework for restructuring the flawed U.S. immigration system.”

The chief Republican architect of the bill, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, has been criticized by some in his state party who object to offering legal status to illegal immigrants.

Glenn E. Hamer, president of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce, praised Mr. Kyl as “demonstrating tremendous leadership on this critical issue.”

Mr. Hamer said a spokesman for his organization conveyed this message on Spanish-language radio and television stations: “The Senate bill has all the necessary ingredients. It’s a huge step forward.”

An umbrella group, the Coalition for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, reached out this week to members of Congress in 23 states and urged them to act on the question.

“Congress has a historic opportunity to fix our immigration system and must not waste it,” said Clarissa Martinez, campaign manager of the coalition, which is holding rallies and vigils, making telephone calls and sending letters and postcards to lawmakers.

Ms. Martinez said her group, whose 43 members include the Center for Community Change, the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, the National Council of La Raza and the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, sought substantial changes in the Senate bill to promote the reunification of families and to change the guest worker program so that temporary workers would not have to leave for 12 months between two-year stays.

Mr. Bush’s visit to the training center here was primarily meant to demonstrate that he has imposed strong measures to improve border security lapses, a problem that conservatives have loudly complained about.

Now, he said, it is time to relieve pressure on the border by creating a “rationalized” system.

“People in Congress need the courage to go back to their districts and explain exactly what this bill is all about,” Mr. Bush said. “The fundamental question is will elected officials have the courage necessary to put a comprehensive immigration plan in place that makes it more likely we can enforce our border and, at the same time, uphold the great traditions of immigrant traditions of the United States of America?”

The address, given under a blazing sun before several hundred trainees and instructors, was his most direct attempt to brush back critics from both sides who the administration says have distorted the details of the bill.

The appearance followed nearly two weeks in which officials have given dozens of interviews to radio hosts, editorial pages and newspapers pushing for the plan.

Mr. Bush and his allies have faced an important rhetorical disadvantage, particularly from the right. Conservative opponents can use one word, amnesty, against the bill.

Supporters, the president included, are forced into the complex weeds of policy and the nuances of legislative language. Mr. Bush tried to offset the difference by discrediting the amnesty accusation.

“Amnesty is forgiveness for being here without any penalties,” Mr. Bush said. “That’s what amnesty is. I oppose it. The authors, many of the authors, of this bill oppose it. This bill is not an amnesty bill.”

Under the Senate bill, illegal immigrants who want to become citizens would have to pay back taxes and pay thousands of dollars in fines.

Carl Hulse and Robert Pear contributed reporting from Washington.

    Bush Takes On Conservatives Over Immigration, NYT, 30.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/30/washington/30immig.html?hp

New Routes and New Risk, as More Haitians Flee

May 19, 2007
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PROVIDENCIALES, Turks and Caicos, May 16 — There is no conceivable way to get from this island to Miami by bus. But the traffickers who ply Haiti’s northern coastline in search of those willing to risk their bleak lives for better ones abroad tell some tall tales to fill their rickety boats.

They describe this island chain, 150 miles off Haiti’s northern coast, as being an easy hop to Miami, the ultimate goal of most migrating Haitians. Sometimes they tell migrants from Haiti’s interior that the United States is a bus ride away as they talk of the big paychecks and full stomachs that await them.

The reality is different, of course, as was made clear when an overloaded Haitian sloop capsized off the coast of Turks and Caicos recently. As many as 90 migrants may have died in that episode, which passengers on the vessel blamed on the aggressive tactics of the local police.

They were part of a swelling number of Haitians abandoning their country this year, apparently disillusioned with the slow pace of change coming from Haiti’s year-old government. But with patrols along the Florida coastline making it increasingly difficult to land there, desperate Haitians are “island hopping,” as the United States Coast Guard calls it, looking for alternative routes and badly straining relations with their neighbors.

Turks and Caicos is hop No. 1, and it is not altogether happy about it. Local Haitians charge that authorities’ efforts to combat illegal migrants have become so aggressive that they believe accusations that a police boat may have caused the capsizing of the Haitian vessel on May 4, despite official denials.

Haitians now make up a huge percentage of the population here, exceeding the number of other residents, according to government estimates. With migrant boats landing regularly, authorities here and across the Caribbean are struggling to contain them.

“It’s a tremendous strain on the government, and we’d appreciate international assistance,” said Lee Penn, who runs the detention center for illegal migrants in Providenciales, the financial capital of Turks and Caicos. “We’re feeding them and housing them and repatriating them — and it’s costing us.”

What exactly happened at sea on May 4 remains uncertain, and is still under investigation by maritime authorities from Britain, which administers the territory.

But it is clear that the voyage was hellish. After a day and a half packed together in a tiny craft, with nothing but water all around, the migrants finally saw lights on the horizon as they approached Turks and Caicos. Excitement grew, and then dreams turned to nightmares.

With a police boat on the scene in rough waters, the Haitian boat went over on its side. Screams filled the air and bodies hit the water. In all, 61 dead Haitians were plucked from the sea, some of them with shark bites. Twenty or so others were never found.

“The closest thing I could compare it to was Katrina, with that many people floating in the water,” said Lt. Cmdr. Jennifer Arko, a Coast Guard helicopter pilot who responded to the scene and who had done search-and-rescue work over post-hurricane New Orleans.

Of the 69 men and nine women who survived, none would succeed in escaping their desperate lives back home. All were flown back to Cap Haitien, a city on Haiti’s northern coast and a major departure point for migrants.

Inspector Hilton Duncan of the Royal Turks and Caicos Islands Police Force said it was a fierce storm, not the police, that forced the Haitian sloop to capsize. He acknowledged that the crowded boat was being towed to shore by the police when it went over. Immediately, he said, a rescue effort ensued, involving the police, other government boats, good Samaritans and the Coast Guard.

“For five officers on a boat, at that time of morning, with that type of weather, rescuing 78 people ought to bring a commendation,” said Inspector Duncan. “But people don’t see it that way.”

But before they were returned home, the surviving Haitian migrants charged that the Turks and Caicos police boat had not responded to their capsized vessel, as the police originally said.

The migrants charged that the police had rammed them in the rough waters and that the overloaded sloop went over when it was being hauled farther out to sea by the police boat.

“We fell into the water and many people drowned,” Marcelin Charles, 37, one of the passengers, told The Associated Press. “I was swimming past dead bodies left and right.”

The tragedy focused attention on the growing exodus of Haitians in recent months and the increasing enforcement efforts to thwart them. In April alone, the United States Coast Guard picked up 704 Haitians at sea, almost as many as the 769 migrants interdicted during all of last year.

President René Préval took office last May amid high expectations that he would end a long bout of violence and economic stagnation. But reversing course has proved challenging: after a spike in kidnappings at the end of 2006 that terrorized residents of Port-au-Prince, Haiti’s capital, the United Nations peacekeeping force in Haiti has only recently begun to make headway in controlling the insecurity there. Meanwhile, hunger and joblessness linger.

The Haitian migrants follow the wind to the Bahamas, to Bermuda, or here in Turks and Caicos, any place that might offer a way to make a living or might take them closer to the United States.

It is a pattern similar to that of other Caribbean migrants. Cubans, for instance, are trying alternative routes to escape that island. The emerging route: west to the Mexican coast and then overland to the United States border.

But Haitians have it harder than others. They are not allowed to stay if they reach American soil, like the Cubans. They are not granted temporary protected status while their countries recover from war and natural disasters, like those who have fled Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador.

And if they make it ashore on Turks and Caicos, their efforts at escape have just begun.

Immigration agents are on the lookout for illegal Haitians throughout the eight inhabited islands that make up Turks and Caicos, demanding proof of legal residency from everyone they stop.

“We’re a small country, and if these people are continuing to come, it causes problems for us,” Mr. Penn said. “We’ve become a stepping stone.”

Residents here speak of the need to maintain their identity. A British territory, the islands have a governor appointed by Queen Elizabeth as well as a local premier. One government survey estimated the population at 33,000, only a third of whom are longtime residents. Haitians make up the bulk of the foreigners.

In recent months, immigration agents in search of illegal Haitians have waited outside Haitian churches on the island to grab parishioners without papers. In one case, they barged inside All Saints Baptist Church and took five migrants out. Legal Haitians who hire or house a migrant — or even allow one into their homes — face legal jeopardy, local Haitians say.

Residents recall that back in 1998 another boatload of escaping Haitians died off the shore here, after the police fired at the boat. Authorities say they were firing warning shots and did not cause that vessel to capsize.

“We’re still human and ought to be treated that way,” said James Prosper, a Haitian-born pastor who has lived in Turks and Caicos for 24 years and who complained to the government recently about the rough treatment endured by those caught without papers.

“If a Haitian is mistreated, I feel it, because it’s in my blood,” said Ronald Gardiner, a Haitian-born businessman who is now a “Belonger,” as citizens of Turks and Caicos are called.

On Turks and Caicos, Haitians pick up trash and sweep the streets. They make the hotel beds and pour the concrete.

The tourism industry here is booming, a far cry from the 1990s when a Gallup poll found the islands had the lowest name recognition in the world. Now, Hollywood stars vacation in hidden bungalows. Other well-heeled sun worshipers fly in on tickets that can cost less than the several thousand dollars some Haitians pay to get a spot on a sloop.

The police here say some migrants smuggle drugs and guns, which means every sloop is considered a security threat. In fact, the recent deaths revived a call among local officials to create a defense force to better patrol the surrounding waters.

“These are poor people seeking a better life but among them are criminals,” Inspector Duncan said in an interview. “We believe some of them may be former members of the Tontons Macoute,” a reference to the armed thugs who ruled the Haitian countryside during the long years of the Duvalier dictatorships.

The Haitian authorities hope the tragedy may help keep more Haitians home. They are considering using photos of the latest overturned vessel and the resulting bodies thrown into the sea as part of a public education campaign to discourage others from making the trip.

“The answer to migration is economic development and, as you know, that won’t happen overnight,” said Louis Joseph, who is Haiti’s ambassador to the Bahamas. “When you don’t have money to eat or to send your children to school, you don’t know what to do. So you leave — or you try, like these people did.”

    New Routes and New Risk, as More Haitians Flee, NYT, 19.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/world/americas/19haiti.html?hp

3 Months of Tense Talks Led to Immigration Deal

May 19, 2007
The New York Times
By CARL HULSE and ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, May 18 — Hours before a bipartisan deal on immigration policy was to be announced Thursday, a tenuous compromise was threatening to unravel, and tempers flared once again.

Just off the Senate floor, Senators John McCain of Arizona and John Cornyn of Texas, both Republicans, exchanged sharp words, with Mr. McCain accusing his colleague of raising arcane legal issues to scuttle the deal. Mr. Cornyn retorted that he was entitled to his view and noted that Mr. McCain had spent more time campaigning for president than negotiating in recent weeks.

The senatorial dust-up, described by witnesses, was just one of the tense moments in remarkable negotiations over the last three months that resulted in this week’s accord. Senator Arlen Specter, the Pennsylvania Republican who oversaw the talks, compared them to a floating craps game, with a changing cast of characters and shifting sites.

Lawmakers and staff members who participated said passions occasionally ran high in the dozens of meetings, with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, sometimes using his temper as a negotiating tactic. Senators who had spent hours anguishing over the smallest details had little patience for colleagues who made brief appearances to offer their views.

“New people came in and wanted to revisit the whole deal,” Mr. Specter said. “That happened all the time. It was very frustrating.”

In the end, negotiators overcame political divisions and some level of distrust to produce the agreement that will be debated in the Senate beginning next week. Lawmakers said they forged bonds partly through the telling of personal stories about their own family roots, as well as long hours spent together and the prospect that the bill might be a last chance at reaching consensus on a major national problem.

“It was like waiting for a baby to be born,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, about the negotiations. “On occasion, it was like being in mediation with a divorced couple. It was like being at camp with your buddies. It was feeling like a part of history.”

As difficult as the negotiations were, they might ultimately seem tame compared with the fight the authors of the plan now face. Before the language of the bill was even published, the proposal — a major domestic objective of the Bush administration — was under attack from the right for allowing illegal immigrants to earn citizenship and from the left for dividing families. The offices of the negotiators were under siege from critics who had the phones ringing endlessly.

“It is real easy to demagogue this thing, and some people probably won’t be able to help themselves,” said Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida and another key participant in the talks. “We are going to have to stick together on the fundamentals of this agreement.”

The talks had their genesis in last year’s failure on immigration after House Republicans essentially chose to ignore a bill passed by the Senate that conservatives derided as amnesty since it would have allowed some of the 12 million illegal immigrants in the United States to remain and eventually qualify to be citizens.

President Bush helped plant the seeds of this year’s negotiations on Jan. 8, at a White House event celebrating the fifth anniversary of the No Child Left Behind Act. Mr. Bush pulled aside Senator Kennedy, and they went into a room off the Oval Office to talk about immigration.

A month later, Senator Jon Kyl, a conservative Republican from Arizona who would become an important figure in striking the deal, began meeting with other Republicans and administration officials to explore ways to find a legislative response to an issue with potent political and humanitarian ramifications.

When those talks progressed far enough, the Republicans on March 28 invited in Democrats like Mr. Kennedy, a longtime advocate of immigration changes, and Senators Ken Salazar of Colorado and Robert Menendez of New Jersey. What followed was a series of meetings around the Capitol, typically on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday nights, as the lawmakers, staff members, White House officials and two or three cabinet secretaries immersed themselves in immigration rules as part of unusually direct high-level negotiations.

“To take an issue and basically start from scratch and write it from the bottom up is something I haven’t seen done in a really long time,” said Candida Wolff, chief of Congressional relations for the White House.

The first big hurdle was cleared a few weeks ago when the negotiators settled on what they called the grand bargain, the main outlines of the issues they were going to address. Major elements included border security improvements and other measures that would have to be undertaken before new citizenship programs were put in place; potential legal status for millions of illegal immigrants; new visas for hundreds of thousands of temporary workers; and clearing a backlog of family applicants for residency.

Republicans also won support for a new “merit-based system of immigration,” which would give more weight to job skills and education and less to family ties. The negotiators decided to adopt a point system to evaluate the qualifications of foreign citizens seeking permission to immigrate to the United States.

No question was too small for the senators. They asked: How many points should be awarded to a refrigerator mechanic with a certificate from a community college?

The negotiations were a roller coaster ride that continued until the deal was announced Thursday, with negotiators expressing despair one day and optimism the next.

“Wednesday evening was one of the most important moments,” Mr. Kennedy said in an interview. “The mood and the atmosphere were good. You got a feeling that maybe this would all be possible. But on Thursday morning, it suddenly deteriorated again.” He told his colleagues that “it’s imperative that we announce an agreement” on Thursday afternoon, or else they could lose momentum. The announcement was made.

In some respects, the lawmakers benefited from the Congressional focus on the Iraq war as they were able to negotiate below the radar, avoiding the disclosure of every twist and turn in the talks and pressure from influential interest groups. Those involved also said the deep participation of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff was vital.

The senators who put together the bill say they have their own reservations about aspects of it. And some of the regular participants, including Senators Cornyn and Menendez, have backed away from endorsing it. But those who have embraced the bill say they intend to see it through.

“We made a pact,” said Mr. Specter, who was referred to as Mr. Chairman even though Democrats control Congress. “We will stick together even on provisions we don’t like. We are a long way from home in getting this through the Senate.”

    3 Months of Tense Talks Led to Immigration Deal, NYT, 19.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/19/washington/19immig.html

Voters in Dallas Suburb Back Limit on Renting to Illegal Immigrants

May 13, 2007
The New York Times
By GRETEL C. KOVACH

DALLAS, May 12 — Voters in a Dallas suburb approved a contentious proposal Saturday to ban landlords from renting apartments to most illegal immigrants.

Just under 6,000 residents of the suburb, Farmers Branch, cast ballots, with 68 percent in favor of the ban.

In January, the city council unanimously approved the measure, Ordinance 2903, after rewriting an earlier version to allow for some families with mixed residency and citizenship status.

Hoping to overturn the ordinance, opponents forced the citywide vote. Now, the ordinance is scheduled to take effect May 22, but it must also clear several court challenges before it can be enforced.

“We will take this all the way to the Supreme Court, if that’s what we have to do,” the city councilman who introduced the resolution, Tim O’Hare, told a local television station, even as opponents vowed to do the same.

Farmers Branch, with about 27,000 residents, would be the first city in Texas to adopt such a ban, modeled after similar provisions in Hazleton, Pa., and other cities.

In other voting Saturday, balloting in the most expensive Dallas mayor’s race in history appeared to be concluding as expected: with none of the 11 candidates likely to win a majority of the vote, making a runoff election necessary.

On June 16, voters will be asked to choose between a former construction executive, Tom Leppert, and a City Council member, Ed Oakley. With most of the city’s precincts counted Saturday night, Mr. Leppert had 27 percent of the vote and Mr. Oakley 21 percent.

Mayor Pro Tem Don Hill was in third, despite an F.B.I. investigation into City Hall corruption that was initiated two years ago. Mr. Hill has denied wrongdoing.

The decision by the mayor of Dallas, Laura Miller, not to seek re-election after five turbulent years in office set off a scramble to lead the country’s ninth-biggest city.

In Farmers Branch, Mr. O’Hare said when he introduced the rental measure in November that residents were complaining that illegal immigrants were a strain on schools and city services.

A study by two University of North Texas professors that was commissioned by a group opposed to the measure, Let the Voters Decide, reported that enforcing the ordinance would reduce the city’s tax base, strain community relations and leave Farmers Branch vulnerable to lawsuits.

Farmers Branch is one of 88 municipalities in 27 states that have tried to pass rental bans or English-only provisions aimed at illegal immigrants since 2006, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. After months of emotional debate over the issue and accusations of racism from both sides, the Farmers Branch mayor, Bob Phelps, publicly expressed his opposition for the first time last week. Mr. Phelps said it was a waste of city tax dollars on what should be a federal issue.

Afterward, his house was vandalized.

    Voters in Dallas Suburb Back Limit on Renting to Illegal Immigrants, NYT, 13.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/13/us/13dallas.html

Okla. Gov. Signs Immigration Reform Bill

May 9, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:49 a.m. ET
The New York Times

OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) -- Gov. Brad Henry signed an immigration bill Tuesday that tightens employment standards to prevent illegal immigrants from finding work.

Henry called the legislation, passed overwhelmingly by the House and Senate, a stopgap measure to deal with an illegal immigration problem that is the responsibility of the federal government.

''States can take some actions on their own, but until the U.S. Congress enacts a comprehensive, national immigration policy, citizens will see little progress on this issue,'' he said.

The measure requires state and local agencies to verify the citizenship and immigration status of applicants for state or local benefits.

It also requires public agencies starting Nov. 1 to use a program to screen Social Security numbers to make sure they are real and match up with the job applicant's name. Private companies must comply by July 1, 2008.

The measure would not affect emergency medical and humanitarian services, such as visits to hospital emergency rooms and enrollment in public schools, that are required by federal law.

More than 100,000 illegal immigrants are estimated to live in Oklahoma.

Immigrant groups said the measure is was a vain attempt to stop illegal immigration and can lead to discriminatory barriers to housing and jobs.

The groups are considering a challenge to the new law's constitutionality, saying that immigration policy is the domain of the federal government, not the state.

''It's going to take us back,'' said Ray Madrid, state director of the League of United Latin American Citizens. ''I'm sure there's going to be neighbors turning neighbors in.''

    Okla. Gov. Signs Immigration Reform Bill, NYT, 9.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Oklahoma.html

New Coalition of Christians Seeks Changes at Borders

May 8, 2007
The New York Times
By NEELA BANERJEE

WASHINGTON, May 7 — A new coalition of more than 100 largely evangelical Christian leaders and organizations asked Congress on Monday to pass bills to strengthen border controls but also give illegal immigrants ways to gain legal residency.

The announcement spotlights evangelical leaders’ increasingly visible efforts to push for what they say is a more humane policy in keeping with biblical injunctions to show compassion for their neighbors, the weak and the alien.

The new group, Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform, includes members like the Mennonite Church U.S.A. and the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, which represents Latino evangelicals.

It includes individuals like Dr. Joel C. Hunter, pastor of Northland, a megachurch in Longwood, Fla., and Sammy Mah, president of World Relief, an aid group affiliated with the National Association of Evangelicals.

The concerns of the coalition mirror those of many evangelical leaders who have often staked out conservative positions on other social issues or who have avoided politics entirely.

In late March, Dr. Richard Land, the conservative president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stood with Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, in supporting routes to legalization for illegal immigrants.

The Rev. Joel Osteen, whose television ministry reaches millions but who steers clear of politics, has also spoken out for compassionate changes.

Immigration “for us is a religious issue, a biblical issue,” said the Rev. Jim Wallis, president of a liberal evangelical group, Call to Renewal, and a member of the coalition. “We call it welcoming the stranger.”

Christians for Comprehensive Immigration Reform does not back particular measures, said Katie Barge, a spokeswoman for Faith in Public Life, the organizers of a news conference about the group.

Rather, the coalition calls for bills that would push for border enforcement while improving guest worker programs and offering chances for illegal immigrants to obtain legal status, an approach similar to bills that Congress is considering.

The group advertised in newspapers like Roll Call here on Monday and plans to expand to other papers and radio. It is also trying to present at least 200,000 letters to Congress and the White House on immigration, the first 50,000 of which arrived at the news conference.

The group plans to focus its initial efforts on the news media and church members in Arizona, Florida, Kansas, Ohio and Pennsylvania, because of the high visibility of the immigration debate in some of those states and the pivotal role some of their members of Congress have in the debate.

Evangelical leaders have a delicate balance to strike among their rank and file. A poll in March 2006 by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life found that white evangelicals favored a more conservative policy toward immigrants than other Americans. That position is largely based on concerns that immigrants threaten the American way of life, rather than economic worries, the survey said.

Immigrants, many of them illegal, have flocked to evangelical congregations, and evangelical pastors understand that immigration changes increasingly affect their congregants directly.

The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution last year calling for improved border protection and financial and language tests for legalization along with ministry to immigrants, a position most heartily backed, Dr. Land said, by Hispanic Baptists.

John Green, senior fellow with the Pew Forum, said: “There are risks coming out with any positions for evangelical leaders. They risk taking a position that many in their pews don’t agree with.”

But given the great efforts that evangelicals have been making to reach out to Asians and Hispanic immigrants, Mr. Green added, “if they remain silent, there are great risks as well.”

    New Coalition of Christians Seeks Changes at Borders, NYT, 8.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/08/washington/08immigration.html

Texas Officials Criticize Fence Plan

May 2, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 9:01 a.m. ET
The New York Times

McALLEN, Texas (AP) -- A new map showing President Bush's planned border fence has riled Rio Grande Valley officials, who say the proposed barrier reneges on assurances that the river would remain accessible to farmers, wildlife and recreation.

City officials in the heavily populated valley had anticipated a ''virtual'' fence of surveillance cameras and border patrols.

Instead, a Customs and Border Protection map depicts a structure running piecemeal along a 600-mile stretch of Texas from Presidio to Brownsville, a border region where daily life is binational.

''We were given the impression that they were not going to be building walls, that there would be more cameras, surveillance, boots on the ground,'' said Mike Allen, head of McAllen Economic Development Corp.

''This is going to seriously affect the farmers,'' he said. ''They will not have access to water. It's just going to create bedlam.''

The map, obtained by The Associated Press, was attached to a memo addressed to ''Dear Texas Homeland Security Partner.'' It outlines a plan to build 370 miles of fence and 200 miles of vehicle barriers, such as concrete barriers, by the end of 2008.

Of the 370 miles of fence, Texas is to have 153, Arizona 129, California 76, and New Mexico 12. Most of the vehicle barriers will be in Arizona and New Mexico.

Russ Knocke, a spokesman for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, said that the so-called virtual fence won't work in urban areas and that the federal government has delivered a consistent message to local officials.

''We are utilizing traditional fencing at the border generally in those areas including metropolitan areas where it is easier for an alien ... to conceal themselves in a home or a business,'' he said.

Agents would use technology including sensors, radar and aerial drones in remote border areas, Knocke said.

Environmentalists fear the fence will block Rio Grande water access to endangered cats such as ocelots and jaguarundi and ruin key feeding and resting areas for migratory birds.

Environmental assessments are being conducted, but border security outweighs such concerns, Knocke said.

''For more than two decades this has been a problem that has been bubbling up,'' he said. ''There's an expectation by the American people that we secure our borders.''

Chertoff has already waived requirements to get permits in environmentally sensitive areas in order to expedite construction, Knocke said.

Hidalgo County Judge J.D. Salinas said the fence would damage the regional economy, which thrives on cross-border commerce.

Mexicans cross daily to make bank deposits, buy real estate, shop and work -- activities Salinas said would be threatened by the ill feelings generated in Mexico by the fence.

''Irrigation, that's one concern,'' Salinas said. ''The other is the indirect message you're sending to you neighbor to the south.''

President Bush called for 700 miles of fence during his national address last May on immigration reform, and Congress approved it. Of the $1.2 billion Congress approved, at least $400 million has been released.

The new Democratic majority in Congress could modify the law or withhold funding, Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar said.

''It's going to be difficult, but we're sure going to do everything we can,'' he said.

Texas' senators, both Republicans, said they expected federal officials to heed local concerns.

''I would be very concerned if they are not being listened to,'' said Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison. ''We should have local input, and private property rights should be taken into account.''

Sen. John Cornyn said he would ''insist that local officials, property owners and stakeholders have a voice in how we ultimately secure the border.''

Cornyn said he and Hutchison had tried to require local input in legislation authorizing the fence but failed.

McAllen Mayor Richard Cortez doubts a fence would be effective. He said he has seen people forming human ladders and jumping off international bridges into the United States in full daylight and within view of agents.

''No physical wall is going to keep people from coming in,'' he said. ''The core of the problem is an economic issue. We have integrated all of the markets in North America, but we have failed to integrate the labor market. It's the market forces that are bringing people here to work.''

Officials said Chertoff had assured them they would be consulted before any fence went up.

''We met with Secretary Chertoff and we were given a commitment that he would talk to the locals before building a wall, so we're surprised that this is happening,'' Salinas said. ''We feel there is already a structure there, which is the Rio Grande river.''

    Texas Officials Criticize Fence Plan, NYT, 2.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Border-Fence.html

Protesters Press for Path to Citizenship

May 1, 2007
The New York Times
By JOHN HOLUSHA

Immigrants and their supporters rallied across the country today seeking a reduction in deportations and legalization for the estimated 12 million people said to be living and working in this country without proper documentation.

Tens of thousands of people gathered in a park in Chicago for a march later in the day. In contrast to a year ago, when many demonstrators carried Mexican flags, to the annoyance of some who said it showed a lack of loyalty to their adopted country, the vast majority of the flags waved this year were American.

In Denver, about 1,000 people marched about 3.5 miles through downtown, protesting a recent spate of raids in immigrant neighborhoods and calling for legislative reforms.

“I’m here to support my mother and my husband, who are both immigrants from Mexico,” said Alba Burciaga, who its 18 years old. “This is very emotional for us.”

“We need rights,” said Arieo Tovar, 13, who said he was marching to show solidarity with immigrants. “We come here for jobs and we shouldn’t have to be afraid of the military.”

In Los Angeles, city officials prepared for large crowds, but the turnout was expected to be smaller than at last year’s march because religious and civic leaders have advised people this year to stay on the job or in school and work toward citizenship.

In Phoenix, several thousand people, many of them wearing white t-shirts to demonstrate solidarity, marched three miles from the state fairgrounds to the capitol building. It was a noisy event with bells and drums and car horns honking, and many of the marchers shouting in Spanish, “The people together can advance farther.”

They carried American flags and signs with slogans reading “Today we march, tomorrow we vote” and “America was built by immigrants.” A few Mexican flags were also seen further back in the crowd, which spread to fill six-lane city streets from curb to curb and stretched more than a mile in length.

    Protesters Press for Path to Citizenship, NYT, 1.5.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/01/us/01cnd-immig.html?hp

Bush Asks Florida Graduates to Back Immigration Change

April 29, 2007
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

MIAMI, April 28 — President Bush used a speech to mostly Hispanic graduates of Miami Dade College on Saturday to press for an overhaul of immigration law, calling for changes that “resolve the status of those who are already here without amnesty, and without animosity.”

Mr. Bush urged the 1,500 students, many of whom were born in other countries, to join the national debate on immigration policy, saying they “see every day the values of hard work and family and faith that immigrants bring” and so should make their voices heard.

Nearly 80 percent of graduates at the college’s campus in Kendall, where Mr. Bush spoke, are Hispanic; many are Cuban-American. Mr. Bush got a standing ovation and fervent applause, even as hundreds of protesters waved signs along the perimeter of the suburban campus opposing the war and calling for the president’s impeachment.

Mr. Bush’s younger brother, former Gov. Jeb Bush, came to hear him speak, along with Senator Mel Martinez, Republican of Florida, and several Cuban-American members of the state’s Congressional delegation.

Earlier in the day, Mr. Bush discussed immigration in his weekly radio address, calling on Congress to reach agreement on the “critical challenge” of improving immigration laws. Administration officials estimate that 12 million illegal immigrants are in the United States, and that the number has been growing by an average of 400,000 a year.

Mr. Bush is trying to bring both parties together on immigration legislation, even as he is fighting with Democrats over Iraq. He wants to create a temporary worker program and a way for some illegal immigrants already here to legalize their status, while stepping up border patrol.

“We need a system where our laws are respected,” Mr. Bush told the graduates. “We need a system that meets the legitimate needs of our economy. And we need a system that treats people with dignity and helps newcomers assimilate into our society.

“We must address all elements of this problem together, or none of them will be solved at all. And we must do it in a way that learns from the mistakes that caused previous reforms to fail.”

Miami Dade is the largest community college in the nation, and only the second community college where a sitting president has given a commencement address. Christopher Miles, president of the student government association at the Kendall campus, told Mr. Bush the school was nicknamed “Democracy’s College,” and said more than half the graduates were the first in their families to enter higher education.

Though Mr. Bush received the warmest of welcomes, some faculty members wore green and white ribbons on their robes to advocate an end to the war.

Before Mr. Bush spoke, the names of every nation that the graduates hailed from were announced, with Cuba, Colombia, Nicaragua and Venezuela drawing some of the heartiest cheers.

As he has often done when visiting Miami, Mr. Bush criticized Cuba, where he said “the opportunity to participate in an open debate does not exist.” He also alluded to Fidel Castro’s recent illness, saying the day is nearing when “the light of liberty will shine” on Cuba.

“The reign of every tyrant comes to an end,” Mr. Bush said.

    Bush Asks Florida Graduates to Back Immigration Change, NYT, 29.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/washington/29bush.html

Borders Spell Trouble for Arab-American

April 29, 2007
The New York Times
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR

Abe Dabdoub calls the day he was sworn in as an American citizen last year the proudest moment of his life, little suspecting that his new identity would set off a bureaucratic nightmare at the hands of the Department of Homeland Security.

Most of his family members live in Canada, and on each of Mr. Dabdoub’s 14 trips to visit them since last August, on his way back across the Ambassador Bridge into Michigan, the Customs and Border Patrol agents have sent him through a security gantlet, he says.

He has been fingerprinted 14 times, his body searched 9 times, been handcuffed 4 times and isolated in a separate detention room 13 times. On the fourth trip, the border patrol agents started subjecting his wife to similar scrutiny.

Two months ago, he sought relief through a new online system that the Department of Homeland Security trumpets as a one-stop shop for travelers who think they have been wronged, the Traveler Redress Inquiry Program, or TRIP. But the problem continues unabated and, typical of such cases, no one in the federal government nor his elected representatives will tell him why he is being singled out.

“I’ve always believed that in America if there is some type of injustice going on, that if you make it known to the right people, it will get taken care of,” said Mr. Dabdoub, 39, who was born in Saudi Arabia to Palestinian parents. They moved to Canada when he was 5.

“This time I’ve lost faith in the system; it’s either indifferent or inefficient or both,” Mr. Dabdoub, an engineer and manager of a plant in Cleveland that provides steel to automobile companies, added, in a telephone interview.

Arab-American and civil rights organizations say experiences like Mr. Dabdoub’s are common enough that they suspect the federal security agency is profiling Arabs and Muslims, an accusation the department denies.

Various Arab-American organizations and the American Civil Liberties Union are holding a conference in Cleveland today to highlight cases like Mr. Dabdoub’s. They want increased Congressional oversight of the terrorist watch list system to insure that the security agency is not abusing the basic civil rights of United States citizens at the borders.

“Their primary job is to make sure the right people are identified on those lists,” said Kareem Shora, executive director of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, one of the organizers. “If innocent people are being identified in that process, the manner with which that can be rectified is very, very limited.”

A Government Accountability Office report issued last September said that just 31 individuals whose names were mistakenly on the watch list had them taken off in 2005. Thousands of such redress queries have been submitted, most of them from people who are misidentified. But their names cannot be removed because they are not the person on the list, the report said.

At least two legal cases prompted by border problems are working their way through the courts, including one filed in Federal District Court in Chicago last year by the A.C.L.U. against the Department of Homeland Security and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

More recent episodes that provoked concern include one in which border agents reportedly Googled the name of an Ohio man and then questioned him about a letter to the editor he had written to The Toledo Blade regarding events in the Middle East.

In Chicago, the government is trying to get the A.C.L.U. case dismissed on the grounds that such stops are “routine,” said Harvey Grossman, the legal director for the Illinois branch.

Documents the court forced the government to release in February indicate that the Customs and Border Patrol agency has received more than 11,000 queries about border issues since Sept. 11, 2001, he said, while Immigration and Customs Enforcement has received 4,855.

The government maintains that it cannot identify how many of the complaints stem from border detentions, which underscores its “cavalier attitude about the treatment of citizens,” Mr. Grossman said.

The homeland security response is that its basic job is to identify “bad guys,” and that this generates some greater inconvenience that affects a fraction of the millions of Americans traveling.

Since the TRIP system was inaugurated in February, it has received 600 to 800 complaints a week, said Russ Knocke, the spokesman for the department, and it takes time to process them through all of the federal agencies who can contribute to the terrorism watch list.

He would not comment on Mr. Dabdoub’s case, noting only that the department was aware of it, and emphasized that seeking redress was no guarantee against extra scrutiny.

Mr. Dabdoub said no one he contacted in the government helped him. After the first incident, on Aug. 6, he wrote his two United States senators, George V. Voinovich and Mike DeWine, who was defeated last November.

He received a joint form letter saying they would look into the problem and get back to him. He never heard from either one again. He got no response at all to two letters he sent to Marcy Kaptur, his congresswoman.

Homeland security officials took five months to answer a first letter, and suggested he complain to the border supervisor.

Drawing a little extra scrutiny because of his Middle Eastern origins is one thing, he said, but being singled out on every crossing is abusive, and he carefully logs each incident on a spreadsheet. He said he faced no problems on his repeated border crossings from 2001 until 2006, when he lived in the United States as a Canadian with a green card, he said.

Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, a privacy rights group, said, “A big reason that these watch list systems don’t work is because the agencies are allowed to compile all this information that basically goes unchallenged.”

Mr. Rotenberg noted that oversight groups including the White House Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, which issued a report this month saying it would review the amount of transparency possible, all ignored the Privacy Act.

For any government agency to say, “We have got something on you but we can’t tell you what it is, really goes to the heart of what the Privacy Act tried to prevent,” Mr. Rotenberg said.

    Borders Spell Trouble for Arab-American, NYT, 29.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/29/us/29border.html?hp

Immigration - Related Cases Clog Courts

April 27, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 1:02 p.m. ET
The New York Times

WASHINGTON (AP) -- Immigration-related felony cases are swamping federal courts along the Southwest border, forcing judges to handle hundreds more cases than their peers elsewhere.

Judges in the five, mostly rural judicial districts on the border carry the heaviest felony caseloads in the nation. Each judge in New Mexico, which ranked first, handled an average of 397 felony cases last year, compared with the national average of 84.

Federal judges in those five districts -- Southern and Western Texas, New Mexico, Arizona and Southern California -- handled one-third of all the felonies prosecuted in the nation's 94 federal judicial districts in 2005, according to federal court statistics.

While Congress has increased the number of border patrol officers, the pace of the law enforcement has eclipsed the resources for the court system.

Judges say they are stretched to the limit with cases involving drug trafficking or illegal immigrants who have also committed serious crimes. Judges say they need help.

''The need is really dire. You cannot keep increasing the number of Border Patrol agents but not increasing the number of judges,'' said Chief Judge John M. Roll of the District of Arizona.

A bill by Sen. Pete Domenici, R-N.M., and co-sponsored by Sen. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., and Texas Republican Sens. John Cornyn and Kay Bailey Hutchison, would add 10 permanent and temporary judges in Arizona, New Mexico, and Southern and Western Texas. This proposal, and others like it, have gone nowhere in the past two years.

''I can't even tell you how much we need that,'' Roll said.

The entire federal court system is affected, from U.S. marshals to magistrate judges. The bottleneck has even derailed enforcement efforts.

During a push to crack down on illegal immigration last fall, Customs and Border Protection floated a plan for New Mexico that would have suspended the practice of sending home hundreds of illegal immigrants caught near the border with Mexico. Instead, these people would be sent to court.

The idea, called ''Operation Streamline,'' was to make it clear that people caught illegally in the U.S. would be prosecuted.

Then New Mexico's federal judges reminded the Border Patrol that they lacked the resources to handle the hundreds of new defendants who would stream into the court system every day.

''We said, 'Do you realize that the second week into this we're going to run out of (jail) space?''' Martha Vazquez, chief judge for the District of New Mexico, recalled telling Border Patrol chief David Aguilar.

''We were obviously alarmed because where would we put our bank robbers? Our rapists? Those who violate probation?'' she said.

Border Patrol eventually dropped the idea. Officials said they could not get all the necessary agencies to agree to it.

It is estimated more than 1 million people sneak across the southwestern U.S. border and illegally enter the country every year. In Arizona, the busiest entry point for illegal immigration, state officials believe almost 4,000 people attempted to enter every day in 2006.

Many lawmakers, advocates and President Bush favor overhauling guest worker programs and rules for businesses that hire illegal immigrants. The intent is to eliminate the incentive for workers to sneak into the country. Bush promoted his latest proposal for new worker visas this month in the border community of Yuma, Ariz.

In recent years, however, Congress has focused on increased enforcement.

The Border Patrol has almost 2,800 more agents than the 9,821 it had in September of 2001. An additional 6,000 National Guard troops have provided logistical support to the Border Patrol since last May.

Congress has made available more than $1.2 billion for reinforcements, including fences, vehicle barriers, cameras and other security equipment.

Homeland Security officials say the increased security is working. In Yuma, Bush said that the number of people apprehended for illegally crossing the southern border into the U.S. has declined by nearly 30 percent this year.

Court officials, however, say they are in crisis mode trying to deal with all the defendants.

Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., a staunch opponent of illegal immigration, has urged U.S. attorneys and courts to prosecute more illegal immigrants and pushed for more resources for both. But he has discovered that while his colleagues who do not represent a border district are eager to add Border Patrol officers, many do not realize the effect that will have on the court system, his spokesman said.

Even lawmakers from border states say they cannot justify adding judgeships in one district when other districts also need them.

California Democratic Sen. Dianne Feinstein, says her state needs 12 judges, not just help on the border.

''I'd be happy to support any bill that gives California its fair share,'' Feinstein said in a statement. ''And I will seek to amend any bill that does not.''

Court officials say they have had to be creative just to try the cases they have. Visiting judges help out in some districts. In Arizona, magistrates hold sessions on the weekends and have seen as many as 150 defendants in a day.

In New Mexico, Vazquez, the chief judge, and former U.S. Attorney David Iglesias went on a Spanish-language radio station broadcast in Mexico this winter to warn people about the penalties for illegally entering the country.

Court administrators have trouble keeping employees, such as interpreters, because of the grind. Judges' staffs struggle with burnout. Everyone fights to keep up morale as they hear countless sad stories from migrants who broke the law searching for a better life in the United States.

''It'd be swell to have another judge or two,'' said Judge George Kazen, who is based on the border in Laredo, in the Southern District of Texas. ''It would mean a little more time to spend on civil stuff, and a little more time to reflect. We have to make quick calls and move on.''

    Immigration - Related Cases Clog Courts, NYT, 27.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Crowded-Courts.html

Immigrants Seek Mental Health Outreach

April 25, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 4:50 a.m. ET
The New York Times

ANNANDALE, Va. (AP) -- The video manifesto Seung-Hui Cho mailed midway through his rampage at Virginia Tech revealed a bitter, vengeful and violent young man -- and raised questions about why he hadn't received counseling or treatment that might have averted the massacre that left 32 students and teachers dead last week.

But church officials in Cho's hometown in northern Virginia say the 23-year-old gunman's family tried for years to get him counseling. And experts say his parents, emigres from South Korea, may have been unsure what to make of Cho's disquieting isolation and held back by the stigma mental illness carries in their culture.

Cho, 8 when his family emigrated to the U.S., was already showing signs that worried his family in Korea: He was unresponsive, nearly mute and distant, relatives say. Cho struggled to fit in, but ''we never could have envisioned that he was capable of so much violence,'' his sister said in a statement Friday.

Gov. Timothy M. Kaine met Tuesday with Korean Americans and promised to reevaluate mental health outreach to immigrants after community leaders pleaded with him for more funding and resources.

Although mental health problems still carry a stigma in many cultures, they can be especially hard to identify in immigrant populations where people may not know if problems are internal or related to the stresses of adjusting to a new country.

Theodore Kim, of the Korean American Association of Greater Washington, said Korean Americans were rendered ''completely speechless'' by news that the gunman was from their community.

''Unfortunately, our diligence and helping hand failed to reach Seung-Hui Cho,'' he said tearfully. ''How could this happen?''

In the video sent to NBC, Cho exhibits clear signs of a serious mental disorder, said Dr. Damian Kim, a New York City psychiatrist and psychoanalyst. ''The main culprit here is mental disease -- schizophrenia, the paranoid type,'' he said.

Kim, who specializes in mental health among immigrants, acknowledged that there is no way to know Cho's true condition without having evaluated him. But he said Cho's sense of persecution and reports he had imaginary friends suggest schizophrenia.

''When it becomes chronic, they have a knack for hiding their pathology,'' he said, ''so the family may not have thought there was anything seriously wrong.''

The Rev. Dihan Lee of the Open Door Presbyterian Church in Herndon says many parents are unsure when their children are merely adjusting to U.S. life -- or need outside help.

''If you come to this country and your child has to deal with learning the language, fitting into the culture, and they show behavior problems or are socially awkward, you chalk it up to just trying to fit in,'' he said.

Even if the parents suspect a serious problem, they may hesitate to seek help, said Kim. ''Saving face'' is paramount to Koreans, who are fiercely proud and protective of their family name and reputation. The shame of one is shared by all, he said.

Church is the backbone of many Korean communities in the U.S., serving not only as a place of worship but also as a community center. But mental health is rarely addressed there.

''Koreans wouldn't want people to know their child is mentally unstable. Who would want that stigma to follow him?'' said Henry Pak, 32, of Rockville, Md.

One pastor said Cho's mother went from church to church looking for someone to counsel her troubled son.

''They went around seeking help for their son ever since he stopped talking 10 years ago,'' said Bong-han Kim, an assistant pastor at the One Mind Church of Washington in Springfield.

News that the gunman was Korean set off a torrent of discussion -- and reflection -- among Korean Americans, who debated whether pressures within the community may have contributed to Cho's isolation.

For many, the burden of fulfilling the ''American dream'' can be immense, said Josephine Kim, a Harvard lecturer who specializes in mental health issues among Asian Americans.

She cited a study showing that 76 percent of Asian Americans treated in emergency rooms for attempted suicide cite intergenerational conflicts with their parents.

''The pressure is unreal. Korean parents view their children as extensions of themselves, so if the children fail, they fail,'' she said.

John Lee, 22, a senior at George Mason University, said many of his Korean-American friends chafe under the pressure their parents place on them to get into a top-tier college.

''It's noble that they came all the way over here for our sake, and I really do appreciate it, but sometimes I wish they understood better that it's a different world -- and we have different sets of values and goals,'' he said.

It's hard to see any similarity between Lee -- outgoing, articulate and ambitious -- and Cho, a loner with few friends.

But John's father, Jonathan Lee, recalls a time when his son wasn't so well-adjusted. He was distant during middle school, and his grades dropped.

A psychologist assured him his son was fine -- and was only being teased at school. They eventually turned to a pastor for counseling.

Lee said he could've turned out angry like Cho, so he launched his own rampage, a ''love rampage.''

''I made sure I gave everybody around me an extra dose of goodness,'' he said. ''There is too much hate in this world... and I wanted to spread a message of peace and love.''

------

On the Net:

Open Door Presbyterian Church, http://www.opendoorpc.org

Korean American Family Counseling Center, http://www.kafcc.org

Korean Community Service Center of Greater Washington, www.kcscgw.org 

    Immigrants Seek Mental Health Outreach, NYT, 25.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Virginia-Tech-Shooting-Mental-Health.html

U.S. Raid on an Immigrant Household Deepens Anger and Mistrust

April 10, 2007
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

EAST HAMPTON, N.Y. — Awakened by banging on the front door and the shouts of strangers inside her family’s sprawling suburban home, Erica Leon, 12, thought at first that the house was on fire.

Then her bedroom door burst open, she said, and armed men in blue bulletproof vests pushed in, demanding to know if she was hiding someone. They pressed on to the room where 4-year-old Carson was asleep with their mother, and pulled off the covers.

“They started screaming at my mom real bad,” Erica said. “I wasn’t crying, but I was, like, terrified. Like, who are you guys?”

They were federal immigration agents hunting for an illegal immigrant — Erica’s long-absent father, Patrizio Wilson Garcia, who was ordered deported after his 2003 divorce from Erica’s mother, Adriana, and has not lived in the house since. But they had entered a three-generation immigrant household where everyone was an American citizen by naturalization or birth.

To the Leon family, Hispanics who have owned their house here on Copeces Lane for seven years, the early-morning raid on Feb. 20 seemed like the ultimate indignity in a history of hostile scrutiny. But to some residents, it was an overdue response by federal authorities to long-simmering concerns about illegal immigration on Long Island’s East End.

Since 2000, neighbors’ complaints about the family’s volleyball games, their many cars, their living arrangements, even the fallen tree limbs in their yard, have prompted more than 18 inspections by town code enforcers and repeated surveillance by the town police, records show. Often officials found nothing to cite; occasionally they issued notices of violations that ended in court fines. Typically, the Leons complied with official demands, only to face fresh complaints.

Federal immigration officials would not say what had prompted the raid, which swept into four other East Hampton houses and rounded up three dozen illegal immigrants. But the operation had nothing to do with town code enforcement, the officials said, or with Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, who has won national attention by vowing to move against illegal immigrants the federal government ignores.

They also said Erica’s grandmother let them in, providing consent for a search that others in the household could not legally stop.

Residents on both sides see the raid — the first in recent memory in this wealthy beachfront community — as the latest escalation in a wave of crackdowns driven by complaints against immigrants at every level of government. And it points to a sense of frustration in both camps that is making Suffolk County one of the hotbeds of the nation’s immigration debate.

“People here are fed up,” said Richard Herrlin, a neighbor of the Leons’ who welcomed the raid and described himself as a builder of $20 million mansions. “It’s possible the feds showed up because the town officials have done nothing for years, because the town is terrified of being accused of racial insensitivity.”

For him and some others in the neighborhood, where large wooded lots and winding roads bring to mind rural New England, irritation over what they described as the Leons’ noise, trash and traffic has fed on deeper anger over an influx of Hispanic illegal immigrants on the East End. There are festering grievances about taxes, schools crowded with Spanish speakers and homes turned into rooming houses.

For the Leons and other immigrant families, meanwhile, confusion over what civil rights, if any, apply in such raids heightens new feelings of vulnerability.

“Your house is supposed to be where you’re safe, right?” said Andres Leon, 22, Erica’s uncle. “When you see police, you’re supposed to feel protected. But the way they acted, we don’t feel protected; we feel violated.”

Ms. Leon, now remarried, had even obtained an order of protection against Mr. Garcia before their divorce ended his temporary legal status and led to the deportation order.

In a strange twist, that became the legal basis for a Fugitive Operations team of seven agents to bang on the Leons’ door at 5 a.m.

Like the family’s American life, the house, on 3.8 acres in a middle-class section, is still a work in progress. But it is now valued at about $1 million, nearly four times what the Leons paid for it in 2000, before they added 70 percent more finished space, step by step, with earnings from housecleaning, carpentry and a home beauty salon.

The first to arrive in the United States, more than 25 years ago, was Ramon Leon, who works as a cabinetmaker for Central Kitchen Corporation in Southampton. It took him years to win permanent residency under the 1986 immigration amnesty, and years more to bring his wife, Elena, and three children — Adriana, Jazmin and Andres — to join him legally. Erica and her little sister had to be left behind in Ecuador for seven years and joined their mother only three years ago. The household now comprises six adults and five children.

By the spring of 2002, neighbors were complaining that two volleyball courts built by the Leons had become the site of large, sometimes raucous sporting events that drew dozens of people.

All over East Hampton, such games were a flashpoint between longtime residents and Latino immigrants, whose numbers were soaring. And the clashes fueled resentments that helped elect local politicians who promised to crack down on illegal immigrants or “quality of life” violations.

Despite complaints and petitions, officials were unable to shut down the games. At the Leons’, for example, the East Hampton police reported no violations after surveillance over a three-day weekend in 2002 found 15 to 40 people, most of them playing volleyball; 20 vehicles “all registered and legally parked”; and “very little noise.”

But the games had stopped by 2004, after Adriana, 30, married Norman Aguilar, who took over his father-in-law’s share of the mortgage. “I don’t want any problems,” said Mr. Aguilar, who was born in Costa Rica and is a manager at a newspaper distribution company, as well as an agent for a financial services company, Primerica. “I just want to live in peace.”

By then, however, neighborhood complaints seemed to have a life of their own. When Jazmin Leon opened her one-chair home beauty salon — allowed under the residential code — neighbors tried to shut it down over the scissors sign seen through the picture window. When Mr. Aguilar painted a rock white, a neighbor produced town surveys to show that it jutted over his property line by three or four inches.

“My wife wanted to sell the house,” Mr. Aguilar said. “I told her no, anywhere you go, you’ll have the same problems. I feel like for us it’s, like, getting harder in this town. The laws that they’re putting on us, it’s, like, against Hispanic people.”

Some residents say the town does not enforce codes the same way against city people in time shares, or houses crowded with Irish summer workers.

“Profiling is not about who you raid, it’s who you don’t raid — who gets the winks and who gets the handcuffs,” said Amado Ortiz, 60, an American-born architect who joined the board of OLA, a Latino immigrant advocacy group, after being “radicalized,” he said, by an increasingly anti-Hispanic climate.

William E. McGintee, the town supervisor, dismissed such complaints of bias as “nonsense.”

“We don’t have a large influx of illegal immigrants from Russia,” he said. “We have Ecuadoreans, we have Peruvians, we have Mexicans. We don’t know who is living in those houses; we get complaints, and it’s complaint-driven.”

But the limited effect of such complaints only heightens the frustration of residents like Lucinda Murphy, a registered nurse who volunteered that she and her husband, Sean, a television news producer, had often called the police about cars parked at the Leons’.

Ms. Murphy, who has three children, voiced larger misgivings about illegal immigrants with children in the local school. She called them “freeloaders.”

“I’m paying taxes, they’re not,” she said. “Yet their kids still get to go to school with the privileges of my kids. I resent it.”

City dwellers with weekend houses on Copeces Lane have also complained about the Leons, upset that property values could be hurt by the less-upscale Latinos, said Richard Dunn, 65, an East Hampton teacher.

“This is a town that’s driven by money and real estate,” he said. “People who are so concerned about Latinos feel they’re being driven out.”

His own house is cleaned by Adriana Leon and her mother. “I have nothing but good feelings for them,” he said.

On the morning of the raid, Mr. Aguilar, 40, had already left for work. He returned to find the shaken family reading the Bible together in the kitchen.

For a time, the house became a gathering place for immigrants rounded up at other houses that morning, who were mostly released with notices to appear at deportation proceedings. Their accounts of the raids galvanized a group of local clergy, Hispanic activists and even a religious organization based in Costa Rica that flew in counselors.

“It would appear that in the war against terrorism, agents of our nation are now acting in the role of terrorizers,” the group of local clergy, East End Clergy Concerned, wrote their congressman in a letter asking for an investigation.

Mr. Aguilar tried to file a complaint about the raid with the town police but was rebuffed. “We don’t conduct investigations on another law enforcement agency,” Todd Sarris, the chief of police, explained.

Nor was the raid a mistake, said Christopher Shanahan, director of deportation and removal for Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the New York region.

“We would like to find fugitive aliens at 100 percent of the locations we go to, but it’s not an exact science,” he said.

No records are kept to show how often the teams find the fugitives they are seeking. And the rules for the searches are murky.

Unlike a criminal search warrant, which requires a judge to review the evidence and find probable cause for a search, the “administrative warrant” used by immigration agents is approved only by the team’s supervisor — and is valid only with the consent of the occupants, Mr. Shanahan said.

But in what he described as standard practice, that consent bears little resemblance to what laymen or constitutional scholars expect. Once Erica’s grandmother let agents over the threshold, Mr. Shanahan said, there was no turning back.

“Due to officer safety needs, they can look into other areas, to clear rooms,” he said. But he added: “If officers did something to humiliate people, I want to know about it. We are very adamant that we want our officers to be professional.”

On a recent afternoon, back from a seventh-grade civics lesson on the separation of powers, Erica spoke about what had changed since the raid.

“My mom wanted me to sleep in her room so I wouldn’t be scared,” she said. “Sometimes, we have heard, they take parents away from the children, or they take children from the parents.”

When the agents left, she remembered, “they said they might come back.”

    U.S. Raid on an Immigrant Household Deepens Anger and Mistrust, NYT, 10.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/nyregion/10suffolk.html

Bush Ties Drop in Illegal Immigration to His Policies

April 10, 2007
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

YUMA, Ariz., April 9 — President Bush said Monday that tougher enforcement and a new fence at the Mexican border had sharply reduced the influx of illegal immigrants, and he pressed Congress to pass a sweeping revision of the nation’s immigration laws.

“It’s amazing progress that’s been made,” Mr. Bush said on a return visit to a section of the border that he inspected 11 months ago.

In the last six months, the White House said, Border Patrol reports showed that apprehensions of illegal immigrants along the Mexican border fell by 30 percent, to 418,184, from 594,142 in the comparable period a year earlier. In the Yuma sector, which spans parts of Arizona and California, apprehensions fell by 68 percent, to 25,217, from 79,131 in the comparable period a year earlier.

There are now 13,000 Border Patrol agents, up from 9,000 a year earlier. The number will reach 18,000 by the end of next year, Mr. Bush said.

The White House interprets the decline in apprehensions as a sign that the tighter security is working.

“When you’re apprehending fewer people, it means fewer are trying to come across,” Mr. Bush said. “And fewer are trying to come across because we’re deterring people from attempting illegal border crossings in the first place.”

While Border Patrol commanders have expressed cautious optimism that a corner is being turned, immigration experts note that apprehension figures swing erratically over the years. The numbers can be driven by a variety of factors aside from enforcement, including weather, Latin American economics and decisions by illegal immigrants to make fewer trips back and forth between the United States and Mexico.

At the dedication of a new Border Patrol station here, Mr. Bush said he hoped to strike a deal with Congress on immigration this year. Along with border control, he said, the essential elements of any bill are a temporary-worker program, a crackdown on employers of illegal immigrants and a procedure that would allow some illegal immigrants to legalize their status.

The politics of immigration have shifted noticeably since the Senate passed a bipartisan bill by a vote of 62 to 36 last May. When Democrats took control of Congress three months ago, many people predicted that it would be easier to pass a comprehensive bill with the major ingredients sought by Mr. Bush.

But the outlook is now uncertain. Republicans and some moderate Democrats in Congress say they could not vote for any measure granting legal status to illegal immigrants.

Presidential politics appear to have pushed Republicans, including Senator John McCain of Arizona, to the right. Some conservatives, who are influential in selecting a Republican presidential nominee, say that illegal immigrants have taken jobs from Americans and should not be rewarded for their illegal behavior.

Speaking to dozens of Border Patrol agents, gathered here under a bright sun, Mr. Bush said: “We’ve got to resolve the status of millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. People who entered the country illegally should not be given amnesty. Amnesty is the forgiveness of an offense without penalty. I oppose amnesty, and I think most people in the United States Congress oppose amnesty.”

Mr. Bush, a former governor of Texas, said he was “working closely with Republicans and Democrats to find a practical answer that lies between granting automatic citizenship to every illegal immigrant and deporting every illegal immigrant.”

Under his proposal, Mr. Bush said, “illegal immigrants who have roots in our country and want to stay” could do so in some circumstances, if they paid fines and back taxes, learned English and showed they had worked here for a number of years.

Illegal immigrants could apply for citizenship. “Approval would not be automatic,” Mr. Bush said. “They would have to wait in line behind those who played by the rules and followed the law.”

Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at the Cornell Law School, said if illegal immigrants had to wait their turn in this way, it might “take decades” for them to become citizens.

Administration officials estimate that 12 million illegal immigrants are in the United States and say the number has been growing by an average of 400,000 a year.

A White House draft proposal, circulated on Capitol Hill in the last two weeks, has angered many advocates of immigrants’ rights, who assert that it would require illegal immigrants to pay exorbitant fines and fees. The draft says the Bush administration would “bring illegal workers out of the shadows” by offering them a new type of document known as Z visas. These visas would last three years and would be “indefinitely renewable,” but would cost $3,500 each time.

The White House proposal would not establish a “special path to citizenship.” An illegal immigrant would have to return to his original country, file an application with a United States embassy or consulate and pay a fine — perhaps $10,000 — to become a lawful permanent resident.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts and a co-author of the immigration bill passed by the Senate last year, said no measure would be approved this year unless it had “strong Republican support.” Democrats said they were counting on the White House to deliver at least 25 Republican votes for the bill in the Senate and 70 in the House.

In response, Mr. Bush said Monday, “I’ve been working to bring Republicans and Democrats together to resolve outstanding issues so that Congress can pass a comprehensive bill and I can sign it into law this year.”

    Bush Ties Drop in Illegal Immigration to His Policies, NYT, 10.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/washington/10bush.html

DNA Tests Offer Immigrants Hope or Despair

April 10, 2007
The New York Times
By RACHEL L. SWARNS

MINNEAPOLIS — For 14 years, Isaac Owusu’s faraway boys have tugged at his heart. They sent report cards from his hometown in Ghana and painstaking letters in fledgling English while he scrimped and saved to bring them here one day.

So when he became an American citizen and officials suggested taking a DNA test to prove his relationship to his four sons, he embraced the notion. Imagine, he marveled as a lab technician rubbed the inside of his cheek, a tiny swab of cotton would reunite his family.

But modern-day science often unearths secrets long buried. When the DNA results landed on Isaac Owusu’s dinner table here last year, they showed that only one of the four boys — the oldest — was his biological child.

Federal officials are increasingly turning to genetic testing to verify the biological bonds between new citizens and the overseas relatives they hope to bring here, particularly those from war-torn or developing countries where identity documents can be scarce or doctored.

But while the tests often lead to joyful reunions among immigrant families, they are forcing others to confront unexpected and sometimes unbearable truths.

For Isaac Owusu, a widower, the revelation has forced him to rethink nearly everything he had taken for granted about his life and his family.

It has left him struggling to accept what was once unthinkable: that his deceased wife had long been unfaithful; that the children he loves are not his own; and that his long efforts to reunite his family in this country may have been in vain.

The State Department let his oldest son, now 23, come to the United States last fall, but said the others — a 19-year-old and 17-year-old twins — could not come because they are not biologically related to him.

Isaac Owusu, who asked that only his first and middle names be published because he would like to keep his family’s pain private, is still hoping the government will allow the teenagers to join him, arguing that he has been a devoted stepfather, if not a biological parent.

But in recent months, he says, he has simply unraveled.

“Sometime when I get in bed, I don’t sleep,” said Isaac Owusu, 51, who works for an electrical equipment distributor and an auto supply shop.

“I say to myself, ‘Why this one happen to me?’ ” he asked, his eyes wet with tears. “Oh, mighty God, why this one happen to me?”

A similar sense of shock is reverberating through other families across the country as genetic testing becomes more common. State Department and Homeland Security Department officials do not keep statistics on the number of DNA tests taken by new citizens or permanent residents, who are allowed to bring some close relatives to the United States if they can document their family ties.

But Mary K. Mount, a DNA testing expert for the A.A.B.B. — formerly known as the American Association of Blood Banks — estimates that about 75,000 of the 390,000 DNA cases that involved families in 2004 were immigration cases. Of those, she estimates, 15 percent to 20 percent do not produce a match.

Negative results can suggest an effort to bring in illegal immigrants or distant relatives, officials say, though they note that requests for DNA tests deter illicit activities. An official, who spoke anonymously because he was not authorized to discuss the cases, found no indication of wrongdoing by the families interviewed for this article.

Such genuinely unexpected results hit immigrant families particularly hard because DNA testing sometimes provides the best chance of reuniting with loved ones abroad.

“Sometimes these are complicated families,” said Tony Edson, a deputy assistant secretary of state. “People are learning things that they never knew about themselves.”

In California, for example, a Mexican-American family splintered after a DNA test showed that a young woman, a new citizen, was not related to the man she considered her father. The man, who was living in the United States, was ordered back to Mexico because his visitor’s visa had expired.

In Maryland, a man from Sierra Leone discovered that his baby back home was the product of a hidden trauma. His wife, who was separated from him during their country’s civil war, had been raped by rebels. In her shame, she had never revealed the truth.

New citizens and permanent residents are asked — not required — to take the tests if they lack documentation of ties to relatives overseas. Physicians designated by the State Department typically collect samples from relatives abroad and send them to this country for testing.

A negative result does not eliminate the possibility of reunification. New citizens can adopt children under 16 and bring them to the United States, officials say. They can also petition for stepchildren or stepparents in certain circumstances.

But immigrants say officials rarely notify them of such alternatives. Meanwhile, lawyers say the government’s growing reliance on DNA testing burdens immigrants who often pay $450 or more to test parent and child.

Officials counter that the process helps reunify families who might otherwise remain divided because they lack adequate documents. But they acknowledge that genetic testing can carry an emotional toll.

Tamara Gonzalez, a new citizen from Jamaica, said her test result has forced her to question her very identity.

She and her father, who lives in Jamaica, took the tests last year after she applied to bring him to the United States. When she learned they were not related, she confronted her mother, who said the result must be a mistake.

Mrs. Gonzalez, who works at a day care center in Brooklyn, said she would like to believe her mother. But she said her faith in her family bonds had been shaken. “It changes my sense of who I am,” said Mrs. Gonzalez, who is 31. “And it has changed things between me and my mother.”

“I wonder now if there’s something she’s hiding or not saying,” she said. “I start to wonder: Who is my father? Am I ever going to know?”

Clevy Muir, the man she knows as her father, says he is still trying to sort out their options.

“I’m not going to give up my daughter, you understand?” he said. “But where can I turn?”

Balfour Francis, a 44-year-old Jamaican-born welder in Brooklyn, had even set aside a bedroom for the teenager he considers his daughter. She was born to a woman he had never married, but he had never doubted that she was his baby girl.

Then came last year’s DNA results. Now, he said, the bedroom is used for storage while he struggles to get immigration officials to tell him what he can do next.

“I will not let anybody dictate who is my child,” said Mr. Francis, who is a permanent resident and has a wife and children in New York. “I try to assure her I am who I will always be.”

Meanwhile, Isaac Owusu cannot keep the faces of his boys in Ghana out of his mind.

They call him collect on weekends, begging him to explain why he left them behind. At night, he sees them in his dreams with those big brown eyes that everyone used to say resembled his own.

“They ask me, ‘Why? Why? Why?’ ” he said. “ ‘You come and pick up our senior brother. What about us?’ ”

He blames the bureaucracy for the delay because he cannot bear to tell the truth. They are already motherless, he said. How can he tell them they are fatherless now, too?

Over the years, while his sister cared for the boys, he has sent money for tuition and uniforms, doctors and food. He has saved their letters. (“Father, in Ghana we are in the rainy season so I need two thing,” one son wrote, “rain coat and rain boot.”) He has pored over their report cards (“Obedient and respectful,” one teacher wrote), urging them to study harder so they could succeed here.

He moved, with a new wife, from an apartment to a house to make room for them all, and became a citizen in 2002. But last year’s DNA tests dashed his hopes for a speedy reunion.

After months of inquiries, Elizabeth M. Streefland, his immigration lawyer, finally determined that he could petition for the teenagers as their stepfather. He must prove that the boys are the children of his deceased wife. Isaac Owusu hopes that a DNA test of one of his wife’s siblings, which could be compared with that of the teenagers, would provide that proof.

That will cost more money. But he says he simply cannot give up on his boys. “I tell them, ‘Daddy still loves you,’ ” he said. “ ‘Anything it takes, I will do to get you over here.’ ”

    DNA Tests Offer Immigrants Hope or Despair, NYT, 10.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/us/10dna.html?hp

Immigrants march against Bush in L.A.

7.4.2007
AP
USA Today

LOS ANGELES (AP) — Thousands of people marched through downtown on Saturday, demanding a way for the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to become citizens and condemning President Bush's latest proposal.

Carrying signs saying "Amnesty Now!" and "Love Thy Neighbor, Don't Deport Him," about 15,000 people danced to Mexican ranchera music, chanted "Si, se puede!" or "It can be done!" and passed large American flags over the crowd.

Many were angry about a White House plan that would grant illegal immigrants work visas but require them to return home to apply for U.S. residency and pay a $10,000 fine.

"Charging that much, Bush is going to be even more expensive than the coyotes," said protester Armando Garcia, 50, referring to smugglers who transport people across the Mexican border.

Immigrant rights advocates say many of the area's illegal immigrants feel betrayed by President Bush, who they had long considered an ally. While illegal immigrants and advocates have long focused their ire at conservative Republicans and Congress, many had seen Bush as an advocate of immigration reform because he had repeatedly said he favors giving many illegal immigrants a path to citizenship.

The White House's draft plan, leaked last week, calls for a new "Z" visa that would allow illegal immigrant workers to apply for three-year work permits. They would be renewable indefinitely, but would cost $3,500 each time.

Then to become legal permanent residents, illegal immigrants would have to return to their home country, apply at a U.S. embassy or consulate to re-enter legally and pay a $10,000 fine.

The proposal has been sharply criticized by Hispanic advocacy groups, Democrats, the Roman Catholic Church and unions that have many immigrants in their ranks. They argue the cost of work permits and the green card application — which could total more than $20,000 — are prohibitive for low-wage earners.

"For my wife and I it would cost about $30,000," said Francisco Gomez, 41, who along with his wife is in the country illegally. "Multiply that by all the illegal immigrants here ... It's obvious Bush just wants to fund his Iraq war with our money."

The plan is far more conservative than the one passed by the Senate last year with bipartisan backing and support from President Bush. That plan would have allowed many of the country's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to stay in the United States, work and apply to become legal residents after learning English, pay small fines and back taxes and clear a background check.

Many Senate conservatives opposed that plan, and it failed to gain traction in the then Republican-controlled House, which at the end of 2005 passed the punitive immigration reform bill that angered immigrant communities and led to massive protests.

"Last year, we were fighting for legalization, and this year we are fighting for legalization and against all these raids," said Maria Lopez, 50, an illegal immigrant who works as a seamstress and sends $200 a month home to family members in Mexico.

"We have no way to come up with that much money, and Bush knows that," she said. "He is doing this on purpose so we don't ever become legal residents."

    Immigrants march against Bush in L.A., UT, 7.4.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-04-07-immigrants-protest_N.htm

Deported Immigrants' Kids Face Dilemma

April 4, 2007
By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Filed at 10:43 a.m. ET
The New York Times

PALO ALTO, Calif. (AP) -- Twelve-year-old Adrian Ramirez huddled with his two sisters on a bench and tried to find the words to describe his feelings about their mother's pending deportation to Mexico.

''I want my family to be together,'' he said, wiping away tears as Yadira, 10, and Adriana, 6, stared at their shoes. ''I want them to stop these laws. I don't know what life would be like in Mexico. My home is in Palo Alto.''

Adrian's lament is becoming increasingly familiar as immigration officials step up efforts to seize illegal immigrants. Many of the 18,000 men and women deported under Operation Return to Sender since June were raising families -- including children born in the United States.

Adrian's father, Pedro Ramirez, who had worked at an Albertson's supermarket, was deported in February. His mother, Isabel Aguirre, was arrested and ordered deported at the same time but given a monitoring ankle bracelet and some time to make arrangements for the children and to purchase a ticket home.

In cases like this, the U.S.-born children can stay with friends or relatives, or they leave with their deported parents.

Ramirez and Aguirre had evaded deportation orders and notices to appear in court since 1997, immigration officials said. They said the couple ignored the law and consequently were arrested.

''We've been working with these people for years,'' said U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Lori Haley. ''Now it's up to the parents what they want to do. They can take the children with them, or leave them with relatives or people they can entrust them to.''

But the predicament of deported parents is tearing many families apart, said clergy and immigrant advocates.

''Is it really a choice? Staying in foster care, or leaving with their parents?'' asked Samina F. Sundas, the founder of American Muslim Voice, which is trying to help the Ramirez family.

For the youngest Ramirez children, the choice was clear: They want to live with their parents. But they said they're sad about leaving their friends, and worried about enrolling in a school in Mexico and having to write in Spanish, which they haven't learned.

Their 15-year-old brother, Pedro, a sophomore at Gunn High School, struggled with the decision, trying to keep up with school but breaking into tears at times, said his math teacher, Chris Schulz.

''He wants to stay. He has a life, aspirations here,'' Schulz said. ''But he's decided to go, to support his mother and his family.''

A group of nearly two dozen clergy issued a statement Tuesday calling for an end to immigration sweeps. The religious leaders, from such communities as New Bedford, Mass., Greeley, Colo., and Richmond, Calif. -- all heavily impacted by Operation Return to Sender -- protested what they say is the government's disregard for immigrant families.

A raid at a small leather factory in New Bedford netted 361 undocumented workers, among them the wife of Lilo Mancia, who has been detained since March 6. Neither Mancia nor his boys, ages 2 and 5, have been able to see her since. The younger child was born in the United States.

The Mancia children miss their mother, who is awaiting immigration hearings that will determine when she'll have to return to Honduras, Mancia said in Spanish.

''I'm illegal, I can't ask. It's sad,'' he said. ''They call her, 'mom, mom,' especially at night.''

Priests who are helping the families, such as Father Richard Wilson of Our Lady of Guadalupe Parish in New Bedford, signed the religious leaders' statement against such raids.

''God calls on us to protect the weak, especially children,'' Wilson said in a statement. ''Instead we are ripping apart the fabric of the community and leaving children behind.''

California religious leaders who are familiar with the Ramirez family's plight agreed.

''No matter how we feel about immigration reform, leaving children abandoned and violating a person's constitutional rights are wrong,'' said Rev. Anna B. Lange-Soto of El Buen Pastor Episcopal Church in Redwood City.

Lange-Soto stood by Isabel Aguirre on Tuesday as she presented tickets to immigration authorities showing she will leave the country by Friday. If attorneys aren't able to find a way for her to stay, she will fly to Michoacan, Mexico, with her children. Because the couple was here illegally, they are barred from returning for 10 years.

Their children try to imagine life in Mexico.

''I don't know what that will be like,'' Yadira said quietly. ''I don't think I remember anything from there.''

    Deported Immigrants' Kids Face Dilemma, NYT, 4.4.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/us/AP-Immigration-Raids-Children.html

Local police confront illegal immigrants

29.3.2007
USA TODAY
By Oren Dorell and William M. Welch

More than 60 law enforcement agencies across the country are teaming up with the federal government to have the power to arrest illegal immigrants, a move that could add hundreds of new officers to the effort.

At least 14 police and sheriff's departments have already received training from U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

IN BALTIMORE: Dozens arrested in immigration raid

Many of the 50 new departments looking into training are from smaller cities and suburbs that have seen a wave of illegal immigrants looking for work.

"It's something that is expanding," says Marcy Forman, director of ICE's office of investigations. "It's certainly been a success."

Forman says the training will expand enforcement of federal immigration laws well beyond the 5,600 special agents with ICE.

Some major cities have spurned the federal government's offer, saying their officers don't have time to look for illegal immigrants and worry about the effect, according to the Major Cities Chiefs Association.

Some communities want only the authority to check the status of prisoners who can then be handed over for possible deportation. Others want their police to check the status of people suspected of crimes or even traffic violations.

In Arizona, the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office this week is graduating the first of 100 patrol deputies and 60 detention officers scheduled to get the training — the biggest group yet.

"The people of Maricopa County want me to do something," Sheriff Joe Arpaio says. "They want me to lock up illegals."

In Southern California, two counties using ICE training to screen inmates in their jails report finding large numbers who appear to be in the country illegally.

During the first three months of this year, Los Angeles County sheriff's spokesman Steve Whitmore says 1,422 prisoners were held over for federal immigration authorities — more than half the 2,685 foreign nationals who were screened in the county's jails.

"The real reason for my request is so we can pursue people who are violating federal law as far as hiring practices," says Mayor Donald Cresitello of Morristown, N.J., which wants training for 10 of its 60 officers.

Morristown, where an estimated 1,500 illegal immigrants live among 19,000 residents, is looking for ways to deal with day labor sites that have become a nuisance, Cresitello says.

Morristown Police Chief Peter Demnitz has concerns. Victims of crime and witnesses who are illegal immigrants might not cooperate with police, he says.

"Morristown is very diverse," Demnitz says. "We have forged relationships, and I am concerned that this will have an impact on our relationships."

    Local police confront illegal immigrants, UT, 29.3.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-29-illegal-immigration_N.htm

Immigrants Becoming U.S. Citizens at High Rate

March 29, 2007
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Legal immigrants in the United States have opted to become American citizens in historically high numbers in the last decade, according to a study published yesterday by the Pew Hispanic Center.

The number of naturalized citizens in the United States population in 2005 was 12.8 million, a record high, the study found. The number reflected not only a growing number of legal immigrants coming to the United States, but also a growing eagerness among them to adopt American citizenship, the study reported.

Of all the immigrants now living legally in the United States, 52 percent are naturalized citizens, while others are permanent residents or have some other immigration status. The last time that citizens made up more than half of all legal immigrants was in 1980, the study found.

The research, which is based primarily on census data, was done by Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer at the Pew center, a nonpartisan organization based in Washington.

“It is clear that today’s legal immigrants are signing on to a closer relationship with the U.S. than was the case a decade or two ago,” Mr. Passel concluded.

For the first time, European immigrants are no longer the largest group of those who choose to become citizens, according to the study. Over the past decade, they were outnumbered by new citizens who came originally from Latin America or Asia. In the decade before 2005 (the last date when figures were available), nearly 2.4 million immigrants from Latin America became citizens, more than from any other region, the study found.

The willingness of recent immigrants to integrate into American society has been hotly debated as Congress has grappled with changes to the immigration system. To become citizens, legal immigrants must be over 18 and show they have lived continuously in the United States for five years. They have to pass background and health checks, as well as tests to show that they speak basic English and have a minimum knowledge of American laws and history.

There is no limit on the number of eligible immigrants who can become citizens, gaining the right to vote and ensuring they can never be deported. Illegal immigrants, estimated to number about 12 million people, are not eligible to apply for citizenship.

While the number of legal immigrants in the United States increased by 30 percent in the decade after 1995, the study found, the number of naturalized American citizens climbed by 73 percent.

“Ultimately people do want to become full members of the society, and these numbers show that it is happening,” said Doris Meissner, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan center in Washington. Ms. Meissner was commissioner of what was then the Immigration and Naturalization Service for seven years in the Clinton administration.

Mexicans showed the biggest increase in naturalizations over the decade, with the number of Mexican immigrants who became citizens increasing by 144 percent. But Mexicans are still less likely to become citizens than many other immigrant groups, the study found.

The report does not explain why naturalization rates have increased. Ms. Meissner said the intensifying political debate, in which many groups have called for deporting illegal immigrants, was a factor. “We know that when immigrants feel threatened, and they feel they might be in danger of losing rights of one kind or another, they are more likely to pursue citizenship,” she said.

    Immigrants Becoming U.S. Citizens at High Rate, NYT, 29.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/29/us/29citizen.html

Illegal Worker, Troubled Citizen and Stolen Name

March 22, 2007
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

MARSHALLTOWN, Iowa — The two women named Violeta Blanco have never met. But for a long time they shared not only a name, but the same birth date and the same Social Security number.

One is an illegal immigrant from Mexico who went to work slicing pork in a meat-packing plant here after her husband left her with three children. The other is a single American mother in California who has never held a job, struggles with drug addiction and is fighting to keep the state from taking her children.

With little in common but their shared identity, the two women are unwittingly linked by an illicit trade that is the focus of a new federal crackdown on illegal immigration. Detained in a recent raid on the Iowa plant, the Mexican worker admitted that she had used the California woman’s identity to get her job. Now she is in jail on felony charges of identity theft, her trial set to begin in Des Moines on Monday.

Immigration raids at six Swift & Company meat-packing plants in six states in December, as well as more recent sweeps in Michigan, Florida and Arizona, have exposed an expanding front in the underground business that caters to illegal immigrants looking for work, officials say.

As the authorities have aggressively prosecuted employers for hiring undocumented workers, companies are examining applicants more carefully, and fake documents no longer pass inspection as easily as they did. Illegal immigrants have turned increasingly to bona fide documents, stolen or bought by traffickers from actual Americans.

With scrutiny tightening, illegal immigrants “invest more effort and money into getting better documents,” said Julie L. Myers, the top official at Immigration and Customs Enforcement. “More and more, that includes taking on the identities of U.S. citizens and legal immigrants.”

The case of Violeta Blanco, 31, of Bakersfield, Calif., and the woman in Iowa who used her name, Eloisa Nuñez Galeana, 32, provides a rare view of the new identity trade through hard lives on both ends.

On one side is an immigrant who is eager to work and who says she never thought she could be stealing from a real person; on the other is an American down on her luck who says she does not know how her personal information came to be exchanged on the black market.

Interviewed in jail in Des Moines, Ms. Nuñez said she used Ms. Blanco’s documents — which she had purchased from a woman she did not know — in 2003 to apply for her job at Swift, but that she never used them again.

She had hoped to work at the plant for many years, she said, perhaps long enough to see her children, who range in age from 2 to 15, graduate from high school (two were born in Iowa and are American citizens).

“I was innocent when I came from Mexico,” said Ms. Nuñez, a petite, round-faced woman who said she was devastated to find herself in a criminal lock-up. “But they don’t give you a job so easily anymore. To get honest work, you need good documents.”

While Ms. Nuñez worked at the Swift plant pushing sides of pork into a saw that sliced off the fat, Ms. Blanco was in her hometown of Bakersfield leading a life teeming with trouble. She had been in rehabilitation to shake an addiction to the drug known as PCP. She had lost custody of her children to the state child welfare authorities, and then had regained it.

As a result, Ms. Blanco said she was distracted and paid little attention to letters three years ago from the Social Security Administration ordering her to report the employment income showing up under her number. She had never been close to taking a job.

“I don’t know the person, but I’m upset,” Ms. Blanco said of Ms. Nuñez. “I think she could get more benefit from me, from my identity, than I could from her. ”

A Market for Authenticity

Of 1,282 illegal immigrants detained in the Swift raids, the majority were charged with civil immigration violations and quickly deported. But federal prosecutors brought identity-theft charges against 148 of the workers.

Court papers show that the accused did not use stolen documents to loot bank accounts or credit cards, the primary crimes that identity-theft laws seek to attack. Instead, they used the birth certificates and Social Security cards to get jobs.

Still, Matthew C. Allen, the senior investigations official at Immigration and Custom Enforcement, said that 326 Americans had reported financial complications and tax liabilities from having their identities used at Swift. “The victims have suffered very real consequences,” Mr. Allen said.

At Swift, the workers had Social Security contributions and other taxes deducted from their paychecks, but they did not file tax returns. The Social Security taxes accumulated in the accounts of the real owners. Because the documents were real, Swift managers were not alerted to any irregularities by the Social Security Administration, and no charges were brought against the company in connection with the raids.

Traffickers have devised several ways to meet the demand for authentic documents. Along the Mexican border, immigration officials said, muggers and pickpockets have learned that selling stolen documents to black market vendors can be less risky than a shopping spree with a stolen credit card.

Some Americans willingly sell their documents.

In Corpus Christi, Tex., this month, seven people pleaded guilty to selling their birth certificates and Social Security cards for as little as $100 for both. In another recent case, immigration officials said, an employee of a Michigan state employment bureau sold confidential identity information from state records to illegal immigrants seeking jobs.

A significant number of documents purchased by the immigrants here belonged to Americans, like Ms. Blanco, who were born and lived in Bakersfield, 115 miles north of Los Angeles. A number of those Americans lived at one time within blocks of each other in the same Latino neighborhood in Bakersfield, though at this point there is no explanation as to how their documents wound up on the black market.

Traffickers apparently sold and resold the documents in several places. Many of the identities found in Marshalltown, including Ms. Blanco’s, had also been used by immigrant workers in Green Forest, Ark., and Milwaukee, Wis. Neither Ms. Nuñez nor Ms. Blanco has ever been to either place, they said.

Ms. Nuñez said she was reluctant to use identity documents that did not belong to her, but she said she did not know that she could be committing a federal offense, since buying documents was routine among illegal immigrants here.

Real Documents for $800

She said she first came to Iowa a decade ago, joining a sister and brother who were both longtime legal residents married to United States citizens. Despite her family ties, no legal work visa was available for Ms. Nuñez, or for many other Mexican and Central American immigrants who flocked to Marshalltown in recent years, drawn by the jobs at Swift.

Ms. Nuñez said that after her third child was born, her husband, who was also Mexican, abandoned the family. She put out the word that she needed a steady job. Friends told her that fake documents would not be good enough to apply at Swift because the company’s vetting was thorough.

Before long, a Mexican woman she did not know knocked on her door. Ms. Nuñez said she paid the woman $800 for official copies of Ms. Blanco’s birth certificate and Social Security card.

The Marshalltown Swift plant, which employs 2,220, was always hiring, and Ms. Nuñez went to work at the standard starting wage of $11.50 an hour. The work was wearing, she said, but the pay was good.

“The line moves fast, and they want the work well done,” said Ms. Nuñez, speaking Spanish (she does not speak English). “After a while, I was on top of it. I did it because I had to.”

The immigration agents who raided the plant on Dec. 12 released many of the illegal immigrants who were single parents. Ms. Nuñez was among the exceptions.

María Barajas, Ms. Nuñez’s sister who lives 20 miles from the plant, said Ms. Nuñez called her from jail, “nervous, crying, her voice was shaking.”

Mrs. Barajas, who has two sons of her own, has been taking care of Ms. Nuñez’s children. The two oldest have grown up attending Marshalltown public schools; the youngest is 2. To support them, Mrs. Barajas said she had taken a job at Swift.

At the mention of her children during an interview in Des Moines, Ms. Nuñez, hunched in a gray-and-white striped jail uniform, began to cry.

“I risked everything so they could grow up in the United States,” she said. “I’m only asking for permission to do honest work.”

Ms. Nuñez and several other immigrant women detained in the Iowa raid who have children who are American citizens say they have resolved to fight the charges against them rather than make a deal with prosecutors that would lead to their deportation with no chance of legal return.

“She’s a mother who cut my pork chops and gave Social Security a lot of money,” said Michael H. Said, a lawyer representing Ms. Nuñez. “She deserves a medal, not an indictment.”

In a similar the case, a Des Moines jury this month disagreed. Lorena Andrade Rodríguez, 34, an illegal Mexican immigrant working at Swift, was convicted of identity theft on March 7. Ms. Andrade is appealing the verdict.

“I’m not a bad person,” she said. “My record is clean. My only mistake was to do hard work in someone else’s name.”

Tracing a Name to Its Source

In Bakersfield, Ms. Blanco cast a glance around her disheveled bungalow, clogged with crates of toys and clothes, and admitted there were many ways her documents could have slipped away. She said she did not sell them.

“I mean, I’m not organized,” said Ms. Blanco, who lives on Social Security payments for a psychological disability. “I just throw stuff here, throw stuff there. Or I’m not here, stuff has been stolen. Or I moved. Most of it was that stuff got lost when I moved around.”

Ms. Blanco also said her purse had been stolen several times by one of her sons. Iowa court records show that replacements for Ms. Blanco’s Social Security card were ordered 20 times over the last decade. Ms. Blanco said she could not remember requesting all the new cards.

She said that her father was a convicted cocaine dealer and one of her sons was arrested for assault when he was 9, and now, three years later, lives in a juvenile home. She has been arrested for petty theft, assault and drug use, and was once sentenced to three months in jail.

Waving a file of wrinkled papers that she keeps in a cellophane bag, she said that Ms. Nuñez’s employment under her name was only a small part of problems she attributed to identity theft.

She said she had difficulty renewing her driver’s license because someone else using her identity had taken out a license in Arkansas. A bank where she tried to open an account told her that it already had one in her name in another state — not Iowa.

“I know that when I get ready, I’m going to get everything all filed up, and I’m going to try to take care of it,” Ms. Blanco said. “I don’t know how, but I’m going to try.”

Margot Williams contributed reporting from New York.

    Illegal Worker, Troubled Citizen and Stolen Name, NYT, 22.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/22/us/22raids.html?hp

Editorial

Immigration Misery

March 15, 2007
The New York Times

A screaming baby girl has been forcibly weaned from breast milk and taken, dehydrated, to an emergency room, so that the nation’s borders will be secure. Her mother and more than 300 other workers in a leather-goods factory in New Bedford, Mass., have been terrorized — subdued by guns and dogs, their children stranded at school — so that the country will notice that the Bush administration is serious about enforcing immigration laws. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of poor Americans, lacking the right citizenship papers, have been denied a doctor’s care so that not a penny of Medicaid will go to a sick illegal immigrant.

As the country waits for Congress and the president to enact immigration reform, the indecency of existing policies is becoming intolerable. The immigrant underclass is in a growing state of misery and fear. States and localities have rushed to fill the vacuum of Congressional inaction with a jumble of enforcement regimes. Farmers are worrying about crops rotting as their immigrant workers retreat further into the shadows. Officials in Colorado have settled on one solution: replacing those workers with prison chain gangs.

Senator Edward Kennedy, infuriated after visiting a New Bedford church basement and hearing tales of separated families and sick children, has given up on drafting a new immigration bill. He has decided instead to get Congress moving quickly by reintroducing a bill passed last year by the Senate Judiciary Committee. That bill — sponsored by Senator Arlen Specter, then the committee’s chairman — was seriously flawed to start and further distorted by harsh Republican amendments.

Mr. Kennedy clearly believes that the urgent priority is to get the bipartisan coalition for immigration reform back on the bus and to fix problems while the bus is moving. His frustrations are understandable, but he will have to work hard to make sure that he and the bill do not compromise too much. And there is a lot in the Specter bill to be concerned about. Parts of it were cut and pasted from a cruel immigration bill that passed the House, including draconian measures to speed immigrants’ deportation and deny them protection in the courts. It came with an arbitrary cutoff date, leaving anyone who arrived here illegally after 2004 in the cold.

What is urgently needed is decency, proportionality and bipartisanship to resolve this festering debate. Whenever and however the Senate revisits immigration, the bottom line must be the same: a bill that combines border security and workplace enforcement with diligent protection of workers’ rights and a path to citizenship for immigrants who work for it. The alternative, the blundering and punitive status quo, is a path of misery.

    Immigration Misery, NYT, 15.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/15/opinion/15thu1.html

City’s Immigration Restrictions Go on Trial

March 13, 2007
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

SCRANTON, Pa., March 12 — In a test case about the power of cities to crack down on illegal immigration, a federal trial opened here Monday in which municipal restrictions in Hazleton, Pa., are being challenged as discriminatory and overreaching.

City officials in Hazleton were the first in the country to adopt ordinances intended to drive away illegal immigrants by punishing local landlords for renting to them and employers for giving them jobs. The restrictions, which have yet to take effect, have been imitated by at least 80 towns and cities.

“The city has responded rationally to a very real threat,” Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, said in the opening statement on behalf of Hazleton. Mr. Kobach described a surge in violent crime and gang warfare since 2005 that city officials attribute to a growing population of illegal immigrants.

The trial, before Judge James M. Munley of Federal District Court, is the result of a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund. It is the first challenge to the municipal ordinances across the country to be heard in a federal trial.

The rights groups say the ordinances encourage discrimination against Hispanic residents, violate federal and state housing laws, and overstep the powers of a local government to deal with immigration, which has been almost exclusively a federal matter.

Witold Walczak, the legal director for the Pennsylvania A.C.L.U., said Hazleton did not have the authority to inquire into its residents’ immigration status. “Law regarding immigration can and must be passed only by Congress,” Mr. Walczak said in an opening statement, warning that the ordinances could unleash racial vendettas in which neighbors would make complaints about Hispanic residents based on their appearance.

Judge Munley’s ruling could be a major marker of how far local governments can go to limit illegal immigration. In another closely watched case, a state court judge in St. Louis on Monday struck down similar employment and housing laws adopted by Valley Park, Mo., a suburb of St. Louis.

In that case, the blunt ruling by the judge, Barbara W. Wallace, means that “as a matter of state law, no city in Missouri should be doing this,” said Linda M. Martínez, one of the lawyers who brought the challenge.

Most of the ordinances that followed Hazleton’s have faced state and federal challenges. So far, not one of the tougher measures has gone into effect, according to a roster compiled by the Puerto Rican rights group.

After first adopting the ordinances last July, Hazleton revised them several times in response to questions raised by opponents. City officials announced another revision on Monday, saying they would eliminate two words that appeared to leave open the possibility that complaints could be brought against tenants solely on racial grounds.

Hazleton’s mayor, Louis J. Barletta, the driving force behind the laws, said his basic purpose remained the same: to make Hazleton hostile territory for illegal immigrants.

“Illegal is illegal,” Mr. Barletta said in an interview. “There is no race in illegal.”

Mr. Barletta said he was spurred to action last year by the daytime shooting death of a Hazleton man, Derek Kichline, in which two illegal immigrants have been accused.

One ordinance withholds business licenses from employers who knowingly hire illegal workers. Another requires all tenants to register with City Hall, presenting proof of identification that the authorities can check against federal databases.

Mr. Barletta said that some Hispanic businesses had complained of losing customers and that some immigrants had moved away.

“We witnessed many people leaving in the dark of night,” he said. “We have to assume they were illegal aliens.”

Testifying against Hazleton, José Luis Lechuga, a legal Mexican immigrant who said he had lived in the city for 16 years, recounted how his grocery specializing in tortillas and chorizo and his restaurant with home-cooked tacos had failed in recent months. “Many people did not want to come to Hazleton anymore because they did not feel safe,” Mr. Lechuga testified. Hazleton residents “look at us as enemies now.”

Under cross-examination by a Hazleton lawyer, Harry G. Mahoney, Mr. Lechuga confirmed that his financial troubles had started well before the ordinances were passed, and he acknowledged that many of his customers might have been illegal immigrants.

Still, the court testimony left an impression of a harsh social change in Hazleton for some Hispanic residents.

“I saw a lot of fear” after the laws were adopted, said one resident, Agapito López, a retired ophthalmologist. “It was hurting my people. Latinos are a family.”

Judge Munley ruled Friday that the illegal immigrants who were plaintiffs in the case did not have to appear in court but could present their depositions as evidence, meaning they would not face cross-examination.

Last year, Hazleton also adopted an ordinance making English the city’s official language. That law is the subject of a temporary restraining order issued by Judge Munley, but it is not at issue in this trial.

    City’s Immigration Restrictions Go on Trial, NYT, 13.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/13/us/13hazleton.html

Citizens Who Lack Papers Lose Medicaid

March 12, 2007
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON, March 11 — A new federal rule intended to keep illegal immigrants from receiving Medicaid has instead shut out tens of thousands of United States citizens who have had difficulty complying with requirements to show birth certificates and other documents proving their citizenship, state officials say.

Florida, Iowa, Kansas, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia have all reported declines in enrollment and traced them to the new federal requirement, which comes just as state officials around the country are striving to expand coverage through Medicaid and other means.

Under a 2006 federal law, the Deficit Reduction Act, most people who say they are United States citizens and want Medicaid must provide “satisfactory documentary evidence of citizenship,” which could include a passport or the combination of a birth certificate and a driver’s license.

Some state officials say the Bush administration went beyond the law in some ways, for example, by requiring people to submit original documents or copies certified by the issuing agency.

“The largest adverse effect of this policy has been on people who are American citizens,” said Kevin W. Concannon, director of the Department of Human Services in Iowa, where the number of Medicaid recipients dropped by 5,700 in the second half of 2006, to 92,880, after rising for five years. “We have not turned up many undocumented immigrants receiving Medicaid in Waterloo, Dubuque or anywhere else in Iowa,” Mr. Concannon said.

Jeff Nelligan, a spokesman for the federal Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, said the new rule was “intended to ensure that Medicaid beneficiaries are citizens without imposing undue burdens on them” or on states. “We are not aware of any data that shows there are significant barriers to enrollment,” he said. “But if states are experiencing difficulties, they should bring them to our attention.”

In Florida, the number of children on Medicaid declined by 63,000, to 1.2 million, from July 2006 to January of this year.

“We’ve seen an increase in the number of people who don’t qualify for Medicaid because they cannot produce proof of citizenship,” said Albert A. Zimmerman, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Children and Families. “Nearly all of these people are American citizens.”

Since Ohio began enforcing the document requirement in September, the number of children and parents on Medicaid has declined by 39,000, to 1.3 million, and state officials attribute most of the decline to the new requirement. Jon Allen, a spokesman for the Ohio Department of Job and Family Services, said the state had not seen a drop of that magnitude in 10 years.

The numbers alone do not prove that the decline in enrollment was caused by the new federal policy. But state officials see a cause-and-effect relationship. They say the decline began soon after they started enforcing the new rule. Moreover, they say, they have not seen a decline in enrollment among people who are exempt from the documentation requirement — for example, people who have qualified for Medicare and are also eligible for Medicaid.

Wisconsin keeps detailed records listing reasons for the denial or termination of benefits. “From August 2006 to February of this year, we terminated benefits for an average of 868 people a month for failure to document citizenship or identity,” said James D. Jones, the eligibility director of the Medicaid program in Wisconsin. “More than 600 of those actions were for failure to prove identity.” In the same period, Mr. Jones said, the state denied an average of 1,758 applications a month for failure to document citizenship or identity. In 1,100 of those cases, applicants did not provide acceptable proof of identity.

“Congress wanted to crack down on illegal immigrants who got Medicaid benefits by pretending to be U.S. citizens,” Mr. Jones said. “But the law is hurting U.S. citizens, throwing up roadblocks to people who need care, at a time when we in Wisconsin are trying to increase access to health care.”

Medicaid officials across the country report that some pregnant women are going without prenatal care and some parents are postponing checkups for their children while they hunt down birth certificates and other documents.

Rhiannon M. Noth, 28, of Cincinnati applied for Medicaid in early December. When her 3-year-old son, Landen, had heart surgery on Feb. 22, she said, “he did not have any insurance” because she had been unable to obtain the necessary documents. For the same reason, she said, she paid out of pocket for his medications, and eye surgery was delayed for her 2-year-old daughter, Adrianna.

The children eventually got Medicaid, but the process took 78 days, rather than the 30 specified in Ohio Medicaid rules.

Dr. Martin C. Michaels, a pediatrician in Dalton, Ga., who has been monitoring effects of the federal rule, said: “Georgia now has 100,000 newly uninsured U.S. citizen children of low-income families. Many of these children have missed immunizations and preventive health visits. And they have been admitted to hospitals and intensive care units for conditions that normally would have been treated in a doctor’s office.”

Dr. Michaels, who is president of the Georgia chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics, said that some children with asthma had lost their Medicaid coverage and could not afford the medications they had been taking daily to prevent wheezing. “Some of these children had asthma attacks and had to be admitted to hospitals,” he said.

In Kansas, R. Andrew Allison, the state Medicaid director, said: “The federal requirement has had a tremendous impact. Many kids have lost coverage or have not been able to obtain coverage.” Since the new rule took effect in July, enrollment in Kansas has declined by 20,000 people, to 245,000, and three-fourths of the people dropped from the rolls were children.

Megan J. Ingmire, a spokeswoman for the Kansas Health Policy Authority, which runs the state Medicaid program, said the waiting time for applicants had increased because of a “huge backlog” of applications. “Applicants need more time to collect the necessary documents, and it takes us longer to review the applications,” Ms. Ingmire said.

The principal authors of the 2006 law were Representatives Charlie Norwood and Nathan Deal, both Georgia Republicans. Mr. Norwood died last month.

Chris Riley, the chief of staff for Mr. Deal, said the new requirement did encounter “some bumps in the road” last year. But, he said, Mr. Deal believes that the requirement “has saved taxpayers money.” The congressman “will vigorously fight repeal of that provision” and will, in fact, try to extend it to the Children’s Health Insurance Program, Mr. Riley said. He added that the rule could be applied flexibly so it did not cause hardship for citizens.

In general, Medicaid is available only to United States citizens and certain “qualified aliens.” Until 2006, states had some discretion in deciding how to verify citizenship. Applicants had to declare in writing, under penalty of perjury, whether they were citizens. Most states required documents, like birth certificates, only if other evidence suggested that a person was falsely claiming to be a United States citizen.

In Virginia, health insurance for children has been a top priority for state officials, and the number of children on Medicaid increased steadily for several years. But since July, the number has declined by 13,300, to 373,800, according to Cindi B. Jones, chief deputy director of the Virginia Medicaid program.

“The federal rule closed the door on our ability to enroll people over the telephone and the Internet, wiping out a full year of progress in covering kids,” Ms. Jones said.

State and local agencies have adopted new procedures to handle and copy valuable documents. J. Ruth Kennedy, deputy director of the Medicaid program in Louisiana, said her agency had received hundreds of original driver’s licenses and passports in the mail.

Barry E. Nangle, the state registrar of vital statistics in Utah, said, “The new federal requirement has created a big demand for birth certificates by a group of people who are not exactly well placed to pay our fees.” States typically charge $10 to $30 for a certificate.

    Citizens Who Lack Papers Lose Medicaid, NYT, 12.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/12/us/12medicaid.html?hp

Between Black and Immigrant Muslims, an Uneasy Alliance

March 11, 2007
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

Under the glistening dome of a mosque on Long Island, hundreds of men sat cross-legged on the floor. Many were doctors and engineers born in Pakistan and India. Dressed in khakis, polo shirts and the odd silk tunic, they fidgeted and whispered.

One thing stood between them and dinner: A visitor from Harlem was coming to ask for money.

A towering black man with a gray-flecked beard finally swept into the room, his bodyguard trailing him. Wearing a long, embroidered robe and matching hat, he took the microphone and began talking about a different group of Muslims, the thousands of African-Americans who have found Islam in prison.

“We are all brothers and sisters,” said the visitor, known as Imam Talib.

The men stared. To some of them, it seemed, he was from another planet. As the imam returned their gaze, he had a similar sensation. “They live in another world,” he later said.

Only 28 miles separate Imam Talib’s mosque in Harlem from the Islamic Center of Long Island. The congregations they each serve — African-Americans at the city mosque and immigrants of South Asian and Arab descent in the suburbs — represent the largest Muslim populations in the United States. Yet a vast gulf divides them, one marked by race and class, culture and history.

For many African-American converts, Islam is an experience both spiritual and political, an expression of empowerment in a country they feel is dominated by a white elite. For many immigrant Muslims, Islam is an inherited identity, and America a place of assimilation and prosperity.

For decades, these two Muslim worlds remained largely separate. But last fall, Imam Talib hoped to cross that distance in a venture that has become increasingly common since Sept. 11. Black Muslims have begun advising immigrants on how to mount a civil rights campaign. Foreign-born Muslims are giving African-Americans roles of leadership in some of their largest organizations. The two groups have joined forces politically, forming coalitions and backing the same candidates.

It is a tentative and uneasy union, seen more typically among leaders at the pulpit than along the prayer line. But it is critical, a growing number of Muslims believe, to surviving a hostile new era.

“Muslims will not be successful in America until there is a marriage between the indigenous and immigrant communities,” said Siraj Wahhaj, an African-American imam in New York with a rare national following among immigrant Muslims. “There has to be a marriage.”

The divide between black and immigrant Muslims reflects a unique struggle facing Islam in America. Perhaps nowhere else in the world are Muslims from so many racial, cultural and theological backgrounds trying their hands at coexistence. Only in Mecca, during the obligatory hajj, or pilgrimage, does such diversity in the faith come to life, between black and white, rich and poor, Sunni and Shiite.

“This is a new experiment in the history of Islam,” said Ali S. Asani, a professor of Islamic studies at Harvard University.

That evening in October, Imam Al-Hajj Talib ‘Abdur-Rashid drove to Westbury, on Long Island, with a task he would have found unthinkable years ago.

He would ask for donations from the immigrant community he refers to, somewhat bitterly, as the “Muslim elite.”

But he needed funds, and the doors of immigrant mosques seemed to be opening. Imam Talib and other African-American leaders had formed a national “indigenous Muslim” organization, and he knew that during the holy month of Ramadan, the Islamic Center of Long Island could raise thousands of dollars in an evening.

It is a place where BMWs and Mercedes-Benzes fill the parking lot, and Coach purses are perched along prayer lines.

In Harlem, many of Imam Talib’s congregants get to the mosque by bus or subway, and warm themselves with space heaters in a drafty, brick building.

Before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, Imam Talib had only a distant connection to the Islamic Center of Long Island. In passing, he had met Faroque Khan, an Indian-born doctor who helped found the mosque, but the two had little in common.

Imam Talib, 56, is a thundering prison chaplain whose mosque traces its roots to Malcolm X. He is a first-generation Muslim.

Dr. Khan, 64, is a mild-mannered pulmonologist who collects Chinese antiques and learned to ski on the slopes of Vermont. He is a first-generation American.

But in the turmoil that followed Sept. 11, the imam and the doctor found themselves unexpectedly allied.

“The more separate we stay, the more targeted we become,” Dr. Khan said.

Each man recognizes what the other has to offer. African-Americans possess a cultural and historical fluency that immigrants lack, said Dr. Khan; they hold an unassailable place in America from which to defend their faith.

For Imam Talib, immigrants provide a crucial link to the Muslim world and its tradition of scholarship, as well as the wisdom that comes with an “unshattered Islamic heritage.”

Both groups have their practical virtues, too. African-Americans know better how to mobilize in America, both men say, and immigrants tend to have deeper pockets.

Still, it is one thing to talk about unity, Imam Talib said, and another to give it life. Before his visit to Long Island last fall, he had never asked Dr. Khan and his mosque to match their rhetoric with money.

“You have to have a litmus test,” he said.

One Faith, Many Histories

Imam Talib and Dr. Khan did not warm to each other when they met in May 2000, at a gathering in Chicago of Muslim leaders.

The imam found the silver-haired doctor faintly smug and paternalistic. It was an attitude he had often whiffed from well-to-do immigrant Muslims. Dr. Khan found Imam Talib straightforward to the point of bluntness.

The uneasy introduction was, for both men, emblematic of the strained relationship between their communities.

Imam Talib and other black Muslims trace their American roots to the arrival of Muslims from West Africa as slaves in the South. That historical link gave rise to Islam-inspired movements in the 20th century, the most significant of which was the Nation of Islam.

The man who founded the Nation in 1930, W. D. Fard, spread the message that American blacks belonged to a lost Muslim tribe and were superior to the “white, blue-eyed devils” in their midst. Under Mr. Fard’s successor, Elijah Muhammad, the Nation flourished in the 1960s amid the civil rights struggle and the emergence of a black-separatist movement.

Overseas, Islamic scholars found the group’s teachings on race antithetical to the faith. The schism narrowed after 1975, when Mr. Muhammad’s son Warith Deen Mohammed took over the Nation, bringing it in line with orthodox Sunni Islam. Louis Farrakhan parted ways with Mr. Mohammed — taking the Nation’s name and traditional teachings with him — but the majority of African-American adherents came to embrace the same Sunni practice that dominates the Muslim world.

Still, divisions between African-American and immigrant Muslims remained pronounced long after the first large waves of South Asians and Arabs arrived in the United States in the 1960s.

Today, of the estimated six million Muslims who live in the United States, about 25 percent are African-American, 34 percent are South Asian and 26 percent are Arab, said John Zogby, a pollster who has studied the American Muslim population.

“Given the extreme from which we came, I would say that the immigrant Muslims have been brotherly toward us,” Warith Deen Mohammed, who has the largest following of African-American Muslims, said in an interview. “But I think they’re more skeptical than they admit they are. I think they feel more comfortable with their own than they feel with us.”

For many African-Americans, conversion to Islam has meant parting with mainstream culture, while Muslim immigrants have tended toward assimilation. Black converts often take Arabic names, only to find foreign-born Muslims introducing themselves as “Moe” instead of “Mohammed.”

The tensions are also economic. Like Dr. Khan, many Muslim immigrants came to the United States with advanced degrees and quickly prospered, settling in the suburbs. For decades, African-Americans watched with frustration as immigrants sent donations to causes overseas, largely ignoring the problems of poor Muslims in the United States.

Imam Talib found it impossible to generate interest at immigrant mosques in the 1999 police shooting of Amadou Diallo, who was Muslim. “What we’ve found is when domestic issues jump up, like police brutality, all the sudden we’re by ourselves,” he said.

Some foreign-born Muslims say they are put off by the racial politics of many black converts. They struggle to understand why African-American Muslims have been reluctant to meet with law enforcement officials in the wake of Sept. 11. For their part, black Muslim leaders complain that immigrants have failed to learn their history, which includes a pattern of F.B.I. surveillance dating back to the roots of the Nation of Islam.

The ironies are, at times, stinging.

“From the immigrant community, I hear that African-Americans have to learn how to work in the system,” said Nihad Awad, the executive director of the Council on American Islamic Relations, adding that this was not his personal opinion.

At the heart of the conflict is a question of leadership. Much to the ire of African-Americans, many immigrants see themselves as the rightful leaders of the faith in America by virtue of their Islamic schooling and fluency in Arabic, the original language of the Koran.

“What does knowing Arabic have to do with the quality of your prayer, your fast, your relationship with God?” asked Ihsan Bagby, an associate professor of Islamic studies at the University of Kentucky in Lexington. “But African-Americans have to ask themselves why have they not learned more in these years.”

Every year in Chicago, the two largest Muslim conventions in the country — one sponsored by an immigrant organization and the other by Mr. Mohammed’s — take place on the same weekend, in separate parts of the city.

The long-simmering tension boiled over into a public rift with the 2000 presidential elections. That year, a powerful coalition of immigrant Muslims endorsed George W. Bush (because of a promise to stop the profiling of Arabs).

The nation’s most prominent African-American Muslims complained that they were never consulted. The following summer, when Imam Talib vented his frustration at a meeting with immigrant leaders in Washington, a South Asian man turned to him, he recalled, and said, “I don’t understand why all of you African-American Muslims are always so angry about everything.”

Imam Talib searched for an answer he thought the man could understand.

“African-Americans are like the Palestinians of this land,” he finally said. “We’re not just some angry black people. We’re legitimately outraged and angry.”

The room fell silent.

Soon after, black leaders announced the creation of the Muslim Alliance in North America, their first national “indigenous” organization.

But the fallout over the elections was soon eclipsed by Sept. 11, when Muslim immigrants found themselves under intense public scrutiny. They began complaining about “profiling” and “flying while brown,” appropriating language that had been largely the domain of African-Americans.

It was around this time that Dr. Khan became, as he put it, enlightened. A few weeks before the terrorist attacks, he read the book “Black Rage,” by William H. Grier and Price M. Cobbs. The book, published in 1968, explores the psychological woes of African-Americans, and how the impact of racism is carried through generations.

“It helped me understand that even before you’re born, things that happened a hundred years ago can affect you,” Dr. Khan said. “That was a big change in my thinking.”

He sent an e-mail message to fellow Muslims, including Imam Talib, sharing what he had learned.

The Harlem imam was pleased, if not yet convinced.

“I just encouraged the brother to keep going,” Imam Talib said.

An Oasis in Harlem

One windswept night in Harlem, cars rolled past the corner of West 113th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue. A police siren blared as men huddled by a neon-lit Laundromat.

Across the street stood a brown brick building, lifeless from the outside. But upstairs, in a cozy carpeted room, rows of men and women chanted.

“Ya Hakim. Ya Allah.” O wise one. O God.

Imam Talib led the chant, swathed in a black satin robe. It was Ramadan’s holiest evening, the Night of Power. As the voices died down, he spotted his bodyguard swaying.

“Take it easy there, Captain,” Imam Talib said. “As long as you don’t jump and shout it’s all right.”

Laughter trickled through the mosque, where a translucent curtain separated men in skullcaps from women in African-print gowns.

“We’re just trying to be ourselves, you know?” Imam Talib said. “Within the tradition.”

“That’s right,” said one woman.

The imam continued: “And we can’t let other people, from other cultures, come and try to make us clones of them. We came here as Muslims.”

He was feeling drained. He had just returned from the Manhattan Detention Complex, where he works as a chaplain. Some of the mosque’s men were back in jail.

“We need power,” he said quietly. “Without that, we’ll destroy ourselves.”

Since its birth in 1964, the Mosque of Islamic Brotherhood has been a fortress of stubborn faith, persevering through the crack wars, welfare, AIDS, gangs, unemployment, diabetes, broken families and gentrification.

The mosque was founded in a Brooklyn apartment by Shaykh-‘Allama Al-Hajj K. Ahmad Tawfiq, a follower of Malcolm X. The Sunni congregation boomed in the 1970s, starting a newspaper and opening a school and a health food store.

With city loans, it bought its current building. Fourteen families moved in, creating a bold Muslim oasis in a landscape of storefront churches and liquor stores. The mosque claimed its corner by drenching the sidewalk in dark green paint, the color associated with Islam.

The paint has since faded. The school is closed. Many of the mosque’s members can no longer afford to live in a neighborhood where brownstones sell for millions of dollars.

But an aura of dignity prevails. The women normally pray one floor below the men, in a scrubbed, tidy room scented with incense. Their bathroom is a shrine of gold curtains and lavender soaps. A basket of nylon roses hides a hole in the wall.

Most of the mosque’s 160 members belong to the working class, and up to a third of the men are former convicts.

Some congregants are entrepreneurs, professors, writers and musicians. Mos Def and Q-Tip have visited with Imam Talib, who carries the nickname “hip-hop imam.”

Mosque celebrations are a blend of Islam and Harlem. In October, at the end of Ramadan, families feasted on curried chicken and collard greens, grilled fish and candied yams.

Just before the afternoon prayer, a lean man in a black turtleneck rose to give the call. He was Yusef Salaam, whose conviction in the Central Park jogger case was later overturned.

Many of the mosque’s members embraced Islam in search of black empowerment, not black separatism. They describe racial equality as a central tenet of their faith. Yet for some, the promise of Islam has been at odds with the reality of Muslims.

One member, Aqilah Mu’Min, lives in the Parkchester section of the Bronx, a heavily Bangladeshi neighborhood. Whenever she passes women in head scarves, she offers the requisite Muslim greeting. Rarely is it returned. “We have a theory that says Islam is perfect, human beings are not,” said Ms. Mu’Min, a city fraud investigator.

It was the simplicity of Islam that drew Imam Talib.

Raised a Christian, he spent the first part of his youth in segregated North Carolina. As a teenager, he read “The Autobiography of Malcolm X” twice. He began educating himself about the faith at age 19, when as an aspiring actor he was cast in a play about a man who had left the Nation of Islam.

But his conversion was more spiritual than political, he said.

“I’d like to think that even if I was a white man, I’d still be a Muslim because that’s the orientation of my soul,” the imam said.

He has learned some Arabic, and traveled once to the Middle East, for hajj. Yet he feels more comfortable with the Senegalese and Guinean Muslims who have settled in Harlem than with many Arabs and South Asians.

He is trying to reach out, but is often disappointed.

In November, he accepted a last-minute invitation to meet with hundreds of immigrants at the Islamic Cultural Center of New York, an opulent mosque on East 96th Street.

The group, the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays, was trying to persuade the city to recognize two Muslim holidays on the school calendar. The effort, Imam Talib learned, had been nearly a year in the making, and no African-American leaders had been consulted.

He was stunned. After all, he had led a similar campaign in the 1980s, resulting in the suspension of alternate-side parking for the same holidays.

“They are unaware of the foundations upon which they are standing,” he said.

Backlash in the Suburbs

Brush Hollow Road winds through a quiet stretch of Long Island, past churches and diners and leafy cul-de-sacs. In this tranquil tableau, the Islamic Center of Long Island announces itself proudly, a Moorish structure of white concrete topped by a graceful dome.

Sleek sedans and S.U.V.’s circle the property as girls with Barbie backpacks hop out and scurry to the Islamic classes they call “Sunday school.”

It is a testament to America’s influence on the mosque that its liveliest time of the week is not Friday, Islam’s holy day, but Sunday.

Boys in hooded sweatshirts smack basketballs along the pavement by a sign that reads “No pray, no play.” Young mothers in Burberry coats exchange kisses and chatter.

For members of the mosque — many of whom work in Manhattan and cannot make the Friday prayer — Sunday is the day to reflect and connect.

The treasurer, Rizwan Qureshi, frantically greeted drivers one Sunday morning with a flier advertising a fund-raiser.

“We’re trying to get Barack Obama,” Mr. Qureshi, a banker born in Karachi, told a woman in a gold-hued BMW.

“We need some real money,” he called out to another driver.

The mosque began with a group of doctors, engineers and other professionals from Pakistan and India who settled in Nassau County in the early 1970s.

“Our kids would come home from school and say, ‘Where is my Christmas tree, my Hanukkah lights?’ ” recalled Dr. Khan, who lives in nearby Jericho. “We didn’t want them to grow up unsure of who they are.”

Since opening in 1993, the mosque has thrived, with assets now valued at more than $3 million. Hundreds of people pray there weekly, and thousands come on Muslim holidays.

The mosque has an unusually modern, democratic air. Men and women worship with no partition between them. A different scholar delivers the Friday sermon every week, in English.

Perhaps most striking, a majority of female worshipers do not cover their heads outside the mosque.

“I think it’s important to find the fine line between the religion and the age in which we live,” said Nasreen Wasti, 43, a contract analyst for Lufthansa. “I’m sure I will have to answer to God for not covering myself. But I’m also satisfied by many of the good deeds I am doing.”

She and other members use words like “progressive” to describe their congregation. But after Sept. 11, a different image took hold.

In October 2001, a Newsday article quoted a member of the mosque as asking “who really benefits from such a horrible tragedy that is blamed on Muslims and Arabs?” A co-president of the mosque was also quoted saying that Israel “would benefit from this tragedy.”

Conspiracy theories about Sept. 11 have long circulated among Muslims, and Dr. Khan had heard discussion among congregants. Such talk, he said, was the product of two forces: a deep mistrust of America’s motives in the Middle East and a refusal, among many Muslims, to engage in self-criticism.

“You blame the other guy for your own shortcomings,” said Dr. Khan.

He visited synagogues and churches after the article ran, reassuring audiences that the comments did not reflect the official position of the mosque, which condemned the attacks.

But to Congressman Peter T. King, whose district is near the mosque, that condemnation fell short. He began publicly criticizing Dr. Khan, asserting that he had failed to fully denounce the statements made by the men.

“He’s definitely a radical,” Mr. King said of Dr. Khan in an interview. “You cannot, in the context of Sept. 11, allow those statements to be made and not be a radical.”

When asked about Mr. King’s comments, Dr. Khan replied proudly, “I thought we had freedom of speech.”

It hardly seems possible that Mr. King and Dr. Khan were once friends.

Mr. King used to dine at Dr. Khan’s home. He attended the wedding of Dr. Khan’s son, Arif, in 1995. At the mosque’s opening, it was Mr. King who cut the ribbon.

After Sept. 11, the mosque experienced the sort of social backlash felt by Muslims around the country. Anonymous callers left threatening messages, and rocks were hurled at children from passing cars.

The attention waned over time. But Mr. King cast a new light on the mosque in 2004 with the release of his novel “Vale of Tears.”

In the novel, terrorists affiliated with a Long Island mosque demolish several buildings, killing hundreds of people. One of the central characters is a Pakistani heart surgeon whose friendship with a congressman has grown tense.

“By inference, it’s me,” Dr. Khan said of the Pakistani character. (Mr. King said it was a “composite character” based on several Muslims he knows.)

For Dr. Khan, his difficulties after Sept. 11 come as proof that Muslims cannot stay fragmented. “It’s a challenge for the whole Muslim community — not just for me,” he said. “United we stand, divided we fall.”

The Litmus Test

Imam Talib and his bodyguard set off to Westbury before dusk on Oct. 14. They passed a fork on the Long Island Expressway, and the imam peered out the window. None of the signs were familiar.

He checked his watch and saw that he was late, adding to his unease. He had visited the mosque a few times before, but never felt entirely at home.

“I’m conscious of being a guest,” he said. “They treat me kindly and nicely. But I know where I am.”

At the Islamic Center of Long Island, Dr. Khan was also getting nervous. Hundreds of congregants had gathered after fasting all day for Ramadan. The scent of curry drifted mercilessly through the mosque.

Dr. Khan sprang to his feet and took the microphone. He improvised.

“All of us need to learn from and understand the contributions of the Muslim indigenous community,” he said. “Starting with Malcolm X.”

It had been six years since Imam Talib and Dr. Khan first encountered each other in Chicago. Back then, Imam Talib rarely visited immigrant mosques, and Dr. Khan had only a peripheral connection to African-American Muslims.

In the 1980s, the doctor had become aware of the high number of Muslim inmates while working as the chief of medicine for a hospital in Nassau County that oversaw health care at the county prison. His mosque began donating prayer rugs, Korans and skullcaps to prisoners around the country. But his interaction with black Muslim leaders was limited until Sept. 11.

After Dr. Khan read the book “Black Rage,” he and Imam Talib began serving together on the board of a new political task force. Finally, in 2005, Dr. Khan invited the imam to his mosque to give the Friday sermon.

That February, Imam Talib rose before the Long Island congregation. Blending verses in the Koran with passages from recent American history, he urged the audience to learn from the civil rights movement.

Dr. Khan listened raptly. Afterward, over sandwiches, he asked Imam Talib for advice. He wanted to thaw the relationship between his mosque and African-American mosques on Long Island. The conversation continued for hours.

“The real searching for an answer, searching for a solution, was coming from Dr. Khan,” said Imam Talib. “I could just feel it.”

Dr. Khan began inviting more African-American leaders to speak at his mosque, and welcomed Imam Talib there last October to give a fund-raising pitch for his organization, the Muslim Alliance in North America. The group had recently announced a “domestic agenda,” with programs to help ex-convicts find housing and jobs and to standardize premarital counseling for Muslims in America.

After the imam arrived that evening and spoke, he sat on the floor next to a blazer-clad Dr. Khan. As they feasted on kebabs, the doctor made a pitch of his own: The teenagers of his mosque could spend a day at Imam Talib’s mosque, as the start of a youth exchange program. The imam nodded slowly.

Minutes later, the mosque’s president, Habeeb Ahmed, hurried over. The congregants had so far pledged $10,000.

“Alhamdulillah,” the imam said. Praise be to God.

It was the most Imam Talib had raised for his group in one evening.

As the dinner drew to a close, the imam looked for his bodyguard. They had a long drive home and he did not want to lose his way again.

Dr. Khan asked Imam Talib how he had gotten lost.

“Inner city versus the suburbs,” the imam replied a bit testily.

Then he smiled.

“The only thing it proves,” he said, “is that I need to come by here more often.”

    Between Black and Immigrant Muslims, an Uneasy Alliance, NYT, 11.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/nyregion/11muslim.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin

Editorial

Shutting Out Terrorism’s Victims

March 9, 2007
The New York Times

Terrorists terrorize people. That’s no surprise. What is shocking, and scandalous, is that American law currently bars the entry to the United States of some of terrorism’s most abused victims: refugees who have been forced, often at gunpoint, to provide so-called material assistance.

Among those excluded by these provisions are a 13-year-old Ugandan girl taken away by the Lord’s Resistance Army and forced to gather food and cook for her abductors, and a Sri Lankan fisherman kidnapped by Tamil Tiger rebels and forced to pay a ransom for his freedom. Some who fought as irregulars alongside American troops in Indochina also now find themselves excluded because they have been wrongly classed as terrorists. Watching all that, Iraqis may well ask why they should now risk their lives in support of American policies if this is what they can expect if they ever have to seek refuge in the United States.

Just about everyone, including Bush administration officials, agrees that these rules need to be fixed. But the remedy that the Homeland Security Department has recently proposed — chiefly a promise of discretionary waivers — does not go nearly far enough. Unless the administration comes up with an acceptable solution soon, Congress will have to.

The problem begins with a sloppy definition of terrorism written into a 1990 immigration law. It was compounded after the 9/11 terrorist attacks by the Bush administration’s overly aggressive and rigid interpretation of what constitutes material support for terrorism. Standard legal definitions of terrorism characterize it as planning or committing unlawful, violent acts aimed at killing, injuring or intimidating innocent civilians. But the 1990 law defined it in a way that could encompass virtually any illegal civilian use of weapons — even to resist a violent dictatorship or to fight alongside American troops.

The Bush administration, using the Patriot Act and other tools, turned this into a much bigger problem by pumping up the number of groups — and individuals — officially labeled as terrorist and aggressively enforcing the concept of material support.

In response to complaints from both parties in Congress and from religious and human rights groups, the administration recently agreed to consider selective waivers of the material support ban. But the waivers would apply only if the groups doing the intimidating were not on any of the State Department’s lists of terrorist organizations. That is a cruel and irrelevant distinction. Duress is duress, no matter which group coerced the cooperation.

Unless the administration is prepared to make waivers available to all who deserve them, Congress needs to rewrite the underlying legislation so that no one who was coerced into providing material support to any group will be automatically excluded. Congress also needs to tighten the 1990 immigration law’s overly broad interpretation of terrorism, bringing it into line with definitions in other statutes.

And as with so many other excesses of the Bush administration, officials need to stop, think and exercise sense rather than zealotry when they define who is a terrorist and what constitutes providing support to terrorism. In the name of keeping out terrorists, Washington should not slam the door on terrorism’s victims.

    Shutting Out Terrorism’s Victims, NYT, 9.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/09/opinion/09fri1.html

Pennsylvania trial

is first test of local immigration law

Thu Mar 8, 2007 5:01PM EST
Reuters
By Jon Hurdle

PHILADELPHIA (Reuters) - A Pennsylvania town's efforts to crack down on illegal immigration will be challenged by civil rights campaigners in a landmark federal trial beginning on Monday that could signal whether such local laws across the country can stand up to legal challenge.

Hazleton, a community of about 30,000, set the tone for dozens of other towns across the United States when it passed a law last year imposing penalties on businesses that hire undocumented aliens, and fining landlords who rent to them. The city council also declared English the official language.

Opponents of the law -- which has not been implemented because of a court injunction -- say it discriminates against anyone who appears to be foreign or who speaks no English. They say it has created a climate of fear where immigrants, whether legal or illegal, have been harassed, businesses have closed, and some people have left town.

Backers of such laws say the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants drive down wages, burden social services, increase crime and fail to assimilate into U.S. society.

About a third of Hazleton's residents are immigrants, mostly from central America. Around a quarter of the immigrant population is thought to be illegal, according to civil rights campaigners.

The trial is the first to test a local immigration law in a U.S. federal court, said Kristina Campbell, a staff attorney with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, which is following the case.

WIDELY WATCHED CASE

Amid stalled efforts by Congress and urging by the White House to enact comprehensive immigration reform, similar measures have been passed or are being considered by around 70 other communities, the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund, a plaintiff in the Hazleton suit says.

Cesar Perales, chief counsel of the PRLDEF, said the trial is being watched by many such communities for guidance on whether their laws will survive a court challenge.

"Unless we strike down this type of ordinance, there will be others," Perales told reporters on a conference call.

Other plaintiffs include the American Civil Liberties Union, the Hazleton Hispanic Business Association, and a number of anonymous plaintiffs who say they have lost business or been harassed because of the law.

Kris Kobach, lead attorney for the City of Hazleton, denied the law is discriminatory. He said the law requires officials to reject any claim of illegality based on national origin, race or ethnicity.

Hazleton Mayor Lou Barletta, who led the campaign for the Illegal Immigration Relief Act Ordinance and has become a national figurehead for anti-illegal immigrant campaigners, said as much as half the town's Hispanic population has left since the law was first passed in July 2006.

"The town has become quieter, there seems to be a calm across the city," Barletta said. He denied that the local economy has been hurt by the exodus.

Kimberly Lopez, a former Hazleton resident, said she and her husband closed their Hispanic grocery store in the town after business halved in response to the law.

"They were running scared," she told Reuters. "A lot of our customers said they were going somewhere else."

The trial takes place in the U.S. District Court for the Middle District of Pennsylvania in Scranton, Pennsylvania before Judge James Munley.

(Additional reporting by Tim Gaynor in Phoenix)

    Pennsylvania trial is first test of local immigration law, R, 8.3.2007, http://www.reuters.com/article/domesticNews/idUSN0823236320070308

New Haven Welcomes

a Booming Population of Immigrants,

Legal or Not

March 5, 2007
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

NEW HAVEN, March 1 — The people have been arriving here for years from Mexico, Guatemala, Jamaica and Ecuador, some staying just a few months, but more settling in for years.

The way Mayor John DeStefano saw it, there were basically two choices: City officials could look the other way, as if the change were not happening, or they could embrace the transformation, doing whatever was possible to welcome the newcomers.

For now, this city is marching steadily toward becoming a safe haven for immigrants — whether they are in the country legally or not.

The Police Department has adopted a sort of “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding citizenship status. City Hall is sponsoring workshops to help illegal immigrants file federal income taxes. And this summer, New Haven plans to allow illegal immigrants to apply for municipal identification cards, in what immigration advocates describe as the first program of its type in the nation.

City officials and immigrant-rights advocates hope these and other initiatives will make immigrants feel more comfortable dealing with life’s bureaucratic necessities — and make them less wary of the police. Officials say the decisions are more pragmatic than ideological, even in this overwhelmingly liberal city of 125,000, where advocates estimate that 3,000 to 5,000 illegal immigrants live in Fair Haven, New Haven’s predominantly Latino neighborhood.

“It stems from a simple central fact that when you’ve got a lot of people living in one place, you have to have certain rules for stability,” Mr. DeStefano said. “You have this population that works hard and lives among us as neighbors; we ought to know who they are. The last thing you want is them not to talk to City Hall because they are afraid of us.”

New Haven’s welcoming policies have, in many ways, trickled down from larger cities like New York, Los Angeles and Houston, but stand in sharp contrast to the expanding crackdown on immigrants announced last week in Suffolk County on Long Island.

Saying that illegal immigrants were hurting Long Island’s economy and quality of life, Steve Levy, the Suffolk County executive, called for antiloitering legislation to clear day laborers off the streets; vowed to enforce a county law penalizing businesses for hiring illegal immigrants; and welcomed federal immigration officials into the local jail to speed deportation of those who are arrested.

At the same time, immigrant groups in New Jersey are working with Hackensack, Paterson and other places to pass resolutions prohibiting the police or other city officials from questioning residents about their immigration status, joining Newark and Trenton in becoming so-called sanctuary cities.

As more immigrants have bypassed larger cities in favor of smaller cities and towns on the outer rings of urban areas, local governments are increasingly torn by questions like how building inspectors should handle overcrowded apartments and whether garbage collection and other services can be denied based on immigration status.

The issue seems less fraught with tension in New Haven, the home of Yale University and long a hub of liberal social movements. When Mayor DeStefano floated the idea of municipal ID cards here in late 2005, the news ricocheted on conservative talk radio shows, but there were no protests on the steps of City Hall or major outcries from residents.

Indeed, the city had been under pressure to formalize a longstanding policy that police officers would not ask for the immigration status of a person who reported a crime.

Police and city officials have long worried that immigrants had become targets for robbery because they often get paid in cash and carry large sums of money; some said that immigrants were viewed as “walking A.T.M.’s” because they were easy victims who probably would not report crimes for fear of deportation. Indeed, there were several instances in which robbery victims went to community centers for help rather than risk calling the police.

Even if confrontations with the police are isolated exceptions, reports and rumors of them ripple quickly through the immigrant community, which is centered in the Fair Haven neighborhood north of downtown.

“It’s simple. There are some police who want to help, who just want to get the criminals, and there are others who want to cause trouble and scare us,” Pedro Martinez, who has lived in Fair Haven for three years, said in Spanish. “We try to tell each other where it’s safe to walk, which are the good officers, but it’s not always right.”

Mr. Martinez said that he and his friends knew about the Police Department’s new policy, but that it was too soon to tell how much of a difference it would make.

Still, there were signs of reluctance in some quarters. When the Police Department moved to put its longstanding policy into writing, police union officials worried they could be held liable by the federal government. After the city had an immigration lawyer assure them that they were not legally obliged to go after civil law violations, the union said it would back the policy, but some doubters remain.

“Everybody is looking at this as if we were just one big happy family or as if we live in ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,’ but that’s not the case,” said Louis Cavalier, the police union president. “These are people who are breaking the law; when they find them they should put them in the car and ship them back home. Instead, you have people calling their relatives and saying, ‘Hey, come here, where it’s safe.’ ”

Immigration experts doubt a city’s policies could affect an immigrant’s destination more than, say, where relatives live or jobs can be found, but there is at least tacit acknowledgment here that there is political will to try things in New Haven that would be shunned in more conservative communities.

City officials essentially shelved plans for municipal identification cards while Mr. DeStefano was running as the Democratic candidate for governor, though he said he rarely heard complaints about them while campaigning.

Late last year, he hired Kica Matos, the former director of Junta for Progressive Action, an immigration advocacy and community center, as community affairs director at City Hall, and Ms. Matos plans to put several immigrant-friendly policies into effect, including the identification cards.

Like most states, Connecticut requires proof of legal citizenship or residency for driver’s licenses, making it nearly impossible for most illegal immigrants to have an official identification card to use in banks, bars or when dealing with the police.

Though other cities have long distributed identification cards for particular city services, like borrowing books from the library, this would be the first to be issued for general use.

There are still several kinks to be ironed out, including how to encourage legal residents to get the card so that it does not become a de facto scarlet letter for those here illegally. But officials are optimistic that children, Yale students and supportive New Haven residents will sign up; they have also considered asking local businesses to offer some kind of discount for those with the card.

“We know that there is interest from the immigrant community for something like this and that the need for an ID outweighs the potential nervousness about not wanting anyone to know who you are,” said Michael Wishnie, a law professor at Yale who has lobbied the city for immigrant-friendly policies.

For example, Professor Wishnie said, thousands of illegal immigrants have signed up for an individual taxpayer identification number with the Internal Revenue Service, which allows them to pay federal taxes. Many immigrants believe that filing taxes will allow them to prove that they have been working, law-abiding residents if they are eventually considered for citizenship.

This year, for the first time, the city used several workers to recruit immigrants to its low-income tax counseling program. Junta, the primary community agency running the program, has had dozens of applicants come through its doors in the last month.

Maria, who asked that her last name not be used, was fairly typical of the applicants. She said she had lived in the United States for eight years and had always had a job — sometimes for cash, sometimes for a check. As she sat down with a Junta tax counselor, she pulled out W-2 forms for each of the last five years, detailing how much money she had made in her job at a laundry.

“Can I pay for all of these years?” Maria asked, seemingly eager to send the government any money she might owe.

When the counselor replied that she would do the 2006 forms first, and then could do the last three years, Maria looked down at the stack of papers.

“See, this is what I hope,” she said a few minutes later, motioning to her young son sitting next to her. “That if I pay, I can do what they want me to do and become a citizen like my children.”

New Haven Welcomes a Booming Population of Immigrants, Legal or Not, NYT, 5.3.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/05/nyregion/05haven.html