USA > History > 2010 > Immigration (I)

Immigration Vote

Leaves Obama’s Policy in Disarray

December 18, 2010
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

The vote by the Senate on Saturday to block a bill to grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students was a painful setback to an emerging movement of immigrants and also appeared to leave the immigration policy of the Obama administration, which has supported the bill and the movement, in disarray.

The bill, known as the Dream Act, gained 55 votes in favor with 41 against, a tally short of the 60 votes needed to bring it to the floor for debate. Five Democrats broke ranks to vote against the bill, while only three Republicans voted for it. The defeat in the Senate came after the House of Representatives passed the bill last week.

The result, although not unexpected, was still a rebuff to President Obama by newly empowered Republicans in Congress on an issue he has called one of his priorities. Supporters believed that the bill — tailored to benefit only immigrants who were brought here illegally when they were children and hoped to attend college or enlist in the military — was the easiest piece to pass out of a larger overhaul of immigration laws that Mr. Obama supports.

His administration has pursued a two-sided policy, coupling tough enforcement — producing a record number of about 390,000 deportations this year — with an effort to pass the overhaul, which would open a path to legal status for an estimated 11 million illegal immigrants. Now, with less hope for any legalization measures once Republicans take over the House in January, the administration is left with just the stick.

Part of the administration’s strategy has been to ramp up border and workplace enforcement to attract Republican votes for the overhaul. The vote on Saturday made it clear that strategy has not succeeded so far.

Mr. Obama will now face growing pressure from immigrant and Latino groups to temper the crackdown and perhaps find ways to use executive powers to bring some illegal immigrants out of the shadows. Latino voters turned out in strength for the Democrats in the midterm elections, arguably saving their majority in the Senate.

The Republicans in the new Congress are especially keen on tough enforcement. The presumed incoming chairman of the House Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration is Representative Steve King of Iowa, a vigorous opponent of legalization measures, which he rejects as amnesty for lawbreakers. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, who will be chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is also an outspoken and well-versed opponent of such proposals.

Groups favoring reduced immigration cheered Saturday’s vote as a watershed victory marking the end of a period when they have been on the defensive. Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, which lobbied hard against the bill, said the new Congress “has the strongest pro-enforcement membership” in at least 15 years.

“Now, we look forward to moving aggressively to offense,” Mr. Beck said.

During the last year, administration officials considered proposals to allow immigration authorities to use administrative powers to halt deportations of illegal immigrants who might have been eligible for legal status under the student bill. They also sought ways to ease deportations for other illegal immigrants with no criminal record.

Republican lawmakers criticized those proposals as “backdoor amnesty” and pledged to stop the administration from carrying them out.

The administration’s efforts to manage its policy dilemma played out this week. Speaking on Friday before the vote, John Morton, the head of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency would continue the brisk pace of deportations, focusing on immigrants convicted of crimes. On the same day, the agency released from detention an 18-year-old Guatemalan student from Ohio, Bernard Pastor, granting him a one-year reprieve from deportation to continue his education.

Despite the defeat, Democrats who supported the bill said they would continue to push for it. “As long as these young people are determined to be part of this great nation, I am determined to fight for them to call America home,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the bill’s main champion.

Senator Robert Menendez of New Jersey, another sponsor, said Latinos would remember in the elections in 2012 how senators had voted.

“This is a vote that will not soon be forgotten by a community that is growing not just in size, but also in power and political awareness,” Mr. Menendez said.

Yet much pressure on the administration may come from immigrant organizations. Despite their illegal status, several hundred immigrant students watched the vote in the Senate gallery. Afterward, they held a somber prayer vigil in the basement of the Capitol, but moved on to a news conference that turned into a pep rally.

“They did not defeat us, they ignited our fire,” said Alina Cortes, a 19-year-old Mexican-born immigrant from Texas who lacks legal status. A self-described conservative Republican, she campaigned for the student bill, saying she hoped to join the Marine Corps.

The movement has been driven by thousands of students who “came out” to reveal that they did not have legal status, and to recount their academic achievements and the barriers they faced. Now that their status is public, they have nowhere to hide. Meanwhile, an estimated 65,000 illegal immigrants are graduating from high school each year.

“We have woken up,” said Carlos Saavedra, national coordinator of the United We Dream Network, a student group. “We are going to go around the country letting everybody know who stands with us and who stood against us.”

    Immigration Vote Leaves Obama’s Policy in Disarray, NYT, 18.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/politics/19dream.html

Senate Blocks

Bill for Young Illegal Immigrants

December 18, 2010
The New York Times
By DAVID M. HERSZENHORN

The Senate on Saturday blocked a bill that would have created a path to citizenship for certain young illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children, completed two years of college or military service and met other requirements, including passing a criminal background check.

The vote by 55-41 in favor of the bill, which is known as the Dream Act, effectively kills it for this year, and its fate is uncertain. The measure needed the support of 60 senators to cut off a filibuster and bring it to the floor.

Supporters said they were heartened that the measure won the backing of a majority of the Senate. They said they would continue to press for it, either on its own or as part of a wide immigration overhaul that some Democrats hope to undertake next year and believe could be an area of cooperation with Republicans, who will control a majority in the House

Most immediately, the measure would have helped grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students and recent graduates whose lives are severely restricted though many have lived in the United States for nearly their entire lives.

Young Hispanic men and women filled the spectator galleries of the Senate, many of them wearing graduation caps and tassels in a symbol of their support for the bill. They held hands in a prayerful gesture as the clerk called the roll and many looked stricken as its defeat was announced.

President Obama had personally lobbied lawmakers in support the bill. But Democrats were not able to hold ranks.

Five Democrats joined Republicans in opposing the bill. They were Democratic Senators Max Baucus of Montana, Kay Hagan of North Carolina, Ben Nelson of Nebraska, Mark Pryor of Arkansas and Jon Tester of Montana.

And three Republicans joined the balance of Democrats in favor of it: Robert Bennett of Utah, Richard Lugar of Indiana, and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Mr. Obama, in a statement, called the outcome “incredibly disappointing” and said that he would continue fighting to win approval of the bill.

“It is not only the right thing to do for talented young people who seek to serve a country they know as their own, it is the right thing for the United States of America,” Mr. Obama said. “Our nation is enriched by their talents and would benefit from the success of their efforts.”

“The Dream Act is important to our economic competitiveness, military readiness, and law enforcement efforts,” he said, adding, “It is disappointing that common sense did not prevail today but my administration will note give up.”

In a floor speech, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, a main champion of the Dream act, urged a yes vote. “I want to make it clear to my colleagues, you won’t get many chances in the United States Senate, in the course of your career, to face clear votes on the issue of justice,” he said.

“Thousands of children in American who live in the shadows and dream of greatness,” he said. “They are children who have been raised in this country. They stand in the classrooms and pledge allegiance to our flag. They sing our ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ as our national anthem. They believe in their heart of hearts this is home. This is the only country they have ever known.”

At a news conference after the vote, Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado and a former superintendent of the Denver school system, said he was thinking about all the students he knew there, as he cast his vote in favor of the bill.

“Please don’t have up,” Mr. Bennet said. “Don’t be disappointed because we couldn’t get our act together.”

But opponents of the measure said it was too broad and would grant amnesty to illegal immigrants.

“As part of this legislative session there has been no serious movement to do anything that would improve the grievous situation of illegality at our border,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama. “Leaders in Washington have not only tolerate lawlessness but, in fact, our policies have encouraged it.”

Mr. Sessions added, “This bill is a law that at its fundamental core is a reward for illegal activity.”

Ms. Murkowski, in a statement, chastised Democrats for bringing the bill to the floor when it was “doomed to fail” but said that she broke with most Republicans because the legislation was important.

“I support the goal of the Dream Act which is to enable children who were brought to the United States by their parents to earn citizenship through service in the armed forces or pursuit of higher education,” Ms. Murkowski said. “ I do not believe that children are to blame for the decision of their parents to enter or remain in the United States unlawfully. The reality is that many of these children regard America as the only country they ever knew. Some were not even told that they were unlawfully in the United States until it came time for them to apply for college. America should provide these young people with the opportunity to pursue the American dream. They have much to offer America if given the chance.”

Ms. Murkowski also expressed an openness to dealing with the wider immigration issue. “ I firmly believe that Congress needs to embrace the wider immigration question, starting with securing our borders, and I plan to work with my colleagues on this issue in the new Congress,” she said.

    Senate Blocks Bill for Young Illegal Immigrants, NYT, 18.12.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/19/us/politics/19immig.html

Immigration Hardball

November 14, 2010
The New York Times

Republicans will have the next two years to set the immigration agenda in the House of Representatives. If their legislation looks anything like their campaign ads, there will be no way for illegal immigrants to get right with the law and no real solution to the problem of illegal immigration. Just a national doubling-down on enforcement, with still more border fencing and immigration agents, workplaces locked down, and states and localities setting police dragnets on what always was — and still ought to be — federal turf.

That hard-line approach mocks American values. It is irresponsibly expensive. It is ineffective.

Two of its architects will be leaders in the House Judiciary Committee, where immigration legislation is drafted: the next chairman, Lamar Smith of Texas; and Steve King of Iowa, who is in line to run the immigration subcommittee. Mr. Smith was the author of a 1996 law that bulked up enforcement and drastically increased deportations by limiting legal immigrants’ access to the justice system. It greatly expanded deportable offenses, and left many immigrants unable even to have their cases reviewed by a judge.

The 1996 law and the billions subsequently thrown at border barriers and mass deportations have failed to deter illegal immigration. But this has not deterred Mr. Smith and Mr. King, who want to go further.

They support Arizona’s noxious efforts to give its law enforcement officers freer rein to demand people’s papers. Mr. King has gone so far as to defend racial profiling (which is illegal) as “legitimate law enforcement.” Both support the rapid imposition of E-Verify, an error-plagued electronic immigration database that every citizen would have to clear before being allowed to work.

Both want Congress to reinterpret the 14th Amendment to deprive children of illegal immigrants who are born on American soil of their citizenship. Hard-liners on the right derisively refer to these children as “anchor babies,” part of a plot to sponsor their parents for green cards.

Mr. King once stood in the House chamber assembling a mock-up of a border fence, with concrete wall panels and coiled wire on top, to show how simple immigration reform could be. We could electrify the wire, he said: “We do that with livestock all the time.”

It is not just Republicans like Mr. King and Mr. Smith who are set on doing far too much after years of accusing the government of doing too little on immigration. All the Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee signed a letter last month to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, accusing Immigration and Customs Enforcement of “a lax approach” for focusing more on dangerous criminals than on those with minor or no criminal records. They wondered why she hadn’t asked for more money so ICE could detain and deport every last illegal immigrant it finds, and demanded that she tell them exactly how much that might cost. (The head of ICE under President George W. Bush once gave the Senate a ballpark estimate: $94 billion. And that’s not counting the profound damage to the rule of law, democratic values and American’s already soiled reputation.)

Citizens who took this year’s Republican candidates at their word when they said they were concerned about deficits might logically ask where they plan to get these billions for border fences, detention beds and a national rollout of Arizona-style police enforcement. Or for armies of bureaucrats running a national citizenship registry. Once the 14th Amendment is overturned, a birth certificate won’t be enough to prove your baby is American.

Americans want Congress and the president to fix what’s broken and to spend less. The G.O.P.’s restrictionist immigration doctrine fails on both counts.

    Immigration Hardball, NYT, 14.11.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/15/opinion/15mon1.html

Arizona Immigration Law Divides Latinos, Too

October 30, 2010
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — Arizona’s immigration law, which politicians have debated in the Legislature, lawyers have sparred over in the courtroom and advocates have shouted about on the street, has found its way up a driveway in central Phoenix, through the front door and right onto the Sotelo family’s kitchen table.

That is where Efrain Sotelo, 49, a process server, and his wife, Shayne, 46, an elementary school teacher, sat and argued on a recent Friday night. He drank beer. She sipped wine. Like many residents across the state, they differed on State Senate Bill 1070, as the immigration law is known.

“I try not to engage in arguments with my wife,” Mr. Sotelo said, looking across at her. “When we talk about this, we both know what’s going to happen. I can’t convince her, and she can’t convince me.”

On that much, they seemed to agree. “He’s much more conservative than I am,” she said. “He can’t be changed. I can’t be changed. We both know that. But that doesn’t mean we don’t try.”

That such a divisive social issue would divide some families is not surprising. But what makes the Sotelos stand out is that they are both Latinos, he a Mexican immigrant who was born in the northern state of Chihuahua and she a descendant of Spanish immigrants who grew up in Colorado.

While polls show that a vast majority of Latinos nationwide side with Mrs. Sotelo in opposing Arizona’s law, that opposition is not uniform. “All Latinos are not opposed to this law — that’s too simplistic,” said Cecilia Menjivar, an Arizona State University sociologist. There are other Mr. Sotelos out there, including an Arizona state legislator, Representative Steve B. Montenegro, a Republican who immigrated from El Salvador and became the only Latino lawmaker to vote in favor of the bill.

Since Gov. Jan Brewer signed the legislation in April, polls have found that about 70 percent of Latinos nationwide oppose the law, which allows the police to arrest people they suspected of being illegal immigrants, a provision blocked by a federal judge at the request of the Justice Department.

Mr. Sotelo, who said he would be following Arizona’s appeal of that ruling on Monday, realizes that his views are not popular among immigrants. He was hesitant to reply when a woman in the country illegally asked him recently what he thought of the law.

“I said, ‘I don’t think you want to hear what I have to say,’ ” he recalled.

He thinks his adopted state has been unfairly maligned since the law passed. “I’m a Hispanic, and I don’t have any issues walking the streets,” he said. “They make it seem like the police or sheriff are out there checking everyone’s papers, and that’s not so.”

But his wife, who was thrilled by President Obama’s challenge to the law, has a different view of her adopted state. “It’s more of a racist state after 1070,” she said. “We are a magnet for neo-Nazis.”

Mr. Sotelo, who came here in 1972 after his father obtained a green card, is unswayed by the fierce objections of the Mexican government to the legislation. He still recalls bitterly when he was stopped at a checkpoint inside Mexico with his two children some years ago. The official was checking his paperwork and, Mr. Sotelo said, clearly angling for a bribe. Mr. Sotelo was so furious at the encounter that he turned around and crossed back home to the United States.

Mr. Sotelo does not believe that the bulk of illegal immigrants are criminals, as some advocates of the law have argued. But some percentage of them are dealing in drugs, he said, and those lawbreakers “make the rest of us look bad.”

Mrs. Sotelo scoffs at that. “It’s not a perfect world, and in all groups you’ll have people who abuse the system,” she said. “When you’re dealing with individuals, there has to be flexibility.”

Because he serves summonses for a living, owning his own business, Mr. Sotelo tends to be the law-and-order type. Because she has taught the children of illegal immigrants and sees how hard-edged policies affect real people, Mrs. Sotelo tends to be more willing to give.

“As a teacher, when the law passed, I had kids crying,” she said. “They felt they had to uproot themselves from the life they had known all their lives. I saw total pain. I couldn’t believe it was 2010. It was almost as if I were living through the civil rights era again.”

Her husband shook his head.

Back and forth they went, with Mr. Sotelo endorsing a get-tough approach to illegal immigrants and his wife talking of the need for compassion.

“Phoenix is the No. 1 city in the country for kidnappings,” he said at one point, citing the large number of illegal immigrants who have been held against their will by smugglers.

“That’s false,” she shot back.

“O.K., but there’s a lot of kidnappings in Phoenix,” he said.

“You and I are not being targeted,” she said.

“Right now, it may not be us,” he said.

Her: “I’ve never feared being kidnapped.”

Him: “I do.”

Her: “You can sincerely say you have a fear of being kidnapped?”

Him: “I do. Who knows?”

And so they continued in what was for the most part a good-natured exchange, although with a third party there to intervene when the debate heated up. There was no storming off, which is not always the case, they said.

Trying to convince Mr. Sotelo of the error of his ways can frustrate Mrs. Sotelo. The same goes for him, when he tries to convince his wife how wrong she is.

In one sense, Mrs. Sotelo has come out on top. She has won over their two children with her arguments, her husband said, leaving him with plenty of conservative company once he heads out the front door but isolated in the confines of their home.

    Arizona Immigration Law Divides Latinos, Too, NYT, 30.10.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/31/us/politics/31immig.html

Reports Say Deadline Hinders Asylum Seekers

September 30, 2010
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

A nurse in Zimbabwe who joined an opposition political party was assaulted after she tried to bring foreign medical supplies to a struggling hospital. A student from China who follows Falun Gong, a banned spiritual movement, left his country when most of the followers he knew were detained.

They both applied for political asylum after arriving in the United States, offering evidence that they risked attack or imprisonment if they returned to their home countries. But their requests were denied because they failed to meet a legal deadline requiring them to file their asylum claims within one year after coming here.

Since the filing deadline went into effect in 1998, about 21,000 refugees who would very likely have won asylum in this country were rejected because they did not meet it, according to a study published Thursday on the Social Science Research Network by law professors from Georgetown and Temple Universities.

“We have a very good asylum system,” said Philip G. Schrag, a Georgetown law professor who is an author of the study, “but Congress introduced this particularly arbitrary feature that has resulted in the rejection of thousands of cases that would otherwise have been granted.”

The law professors’ findings are confirmed in a separate report, which will also be published Thursday by Human Rights First, a nonpartisan monitoring group, which argues that the one-year filing deadline has greatly increased costs and time delays for asylum cases in the immigration courts. According to that report, the courts have become clogged with cases stemming from missed deadlines that have distracted judges from focusing on the underlying merits of the asylum claims, which often involve life-threatening persecution for asylum seekers in their home countries.

The two reports use different methods to arrive at strikingly similar conclusions. Mr. Schrag and three other authors analyzed, for the first time, data from the Department of Homeland Security covering all asylum claims between April 1998, when the deadline took effect, and June 2009. Human Rights First examined official statistics as well as asylum cases its lawyers have handled. Both reports concern the cases of foreigners who requested asylum after they arrived in this country, saying they had a “well-founded fear of persecution,” as the law requires, if they returned to their homelands.

The United States, the world’s most generous country when it comes to receiving refugees, granted asylum in more than 22,000 cases in 2009 alone. While many immigration issues have become hotly contentious, the asylum program has generally enjoyed solid bipartisan support in Congress.

Congress imposed the filing deadline as part of a 1996 overhaul of immigration law, intending it as a measure to combat fraudulent claims. But according to Professor Schrag’s study, the number of asylum-seekers who missed the one-year filing deadline appears to be far higher than Congress envisioned. Out of about 304,000 asylum applications presented during the 11 years since 1998, almost one-third, or 93,000 cases, were filed after the one-year deadline, according to the study.

In all, 54,141 people, about 18 percent of all asylum applicants, were rejected because they did not meet the deadline, the study found. By comparing those cases with asylum seekers who were accepted, the law scholars determined that at least 15,792 claims, involving more than 21,000 refugees, would have been approved if not for the missed deadline.

The Falun Gong follower from China, whose first name is Simon, said in an interview Wednesday that he was not aware that the United States offered asylum until years after he came to this country in 2001 as a student. Simon, now 35, said he became a student leader of the Falun Gong movement here, joining street protests outside Chinese consulates and at the United Nations.

“Because I attended lots of public activities here, if I go back I will definitely have problems,” said Simon, who asked that his last name not be published. He said other followers who returned to China were immediately detained. He is fighting the rejection of his asylum claim in immigration court.

Other refugees who might be eligible for asylum are hampered from filing by the trauma that caused them to flee their home country, said Eleanor Acer, director of the refugee program at Human Rights First. “The refugees that are in the most difficult and distressing circumstances are the least likely to be able to file,” Ms. Acer said.

The Georgetown study also found “enormous disparities” among asylum-seekers who were rejected because they missed the deadline, based on the country they came from. While only 17 percent of Iraqis who filed late were finally rejected by immigration officers, about 75 percent of Guatemalans who filed late were rejected, the study found.

Other authors with Mr. Schrag are Andrew I. Schoenholtz, a Georgetown law professor; James P. Dombach, a Georgetown law student; and Jaya Ramji-Nogales, a law professor at Temple University.

Since 1996, immigration officials have taken finely calibrated measures to eliminate fraud in asylum claims, including criminal investigation of suspected false claims and severe penalties for confirmed fraud.

“Officials have taken a lot of different steps to squeeze the real problem of fraud out of the system,” said James W. Ziglar, a senior fellow at the Migration Policy Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, who was head of the immigration service under President George W. Bush. The one-year deadline, he said, “has only operated to make the whole thing much more expensive and more unjust to asylum seekers.”

    Reports Say Deadline Hinders Asylum Seekers, NYT, 30.9.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/30/us/30asylum.html

Deal Would Provide Dialysis to Illegal Immigrants in Atlanta

August 31, 2010
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK and CATRIN EINHORN

ATLANTA — Thirty-eight end-stage renal patients, most of them illegal immigrants, would receive the dialysis they need to stay alive at no cost under a rough agreement brokered Tuesday among local dialysis providers and Atlanta’s safety-net hospital, Grady Memorial.

The deal, if completed, would end a yearlong impasse that has come to symbolize the health care plight of the country’s uninsured immigrants and the taxpayer-supported hospitals that end up caring for them. The problem remains unaddressed by the new health care law, which maintains the federal ban on government health insurance for illegal immigrants.

Grady, which receives direct appropriations from Fulton and DeKalb Counties, ultimately agreed on Tuesday to help pay for continuing dialysis for most of the immigrants. Others would be distributed among local dialysis providers as charity cases.

Last fall, Grady’s new management closed its money-losing outpatient dialysis clinic in a move intended to demonstrate fiscal toughness to the city’s philanthropic community. The closing displaced about 60 uninsured illegal immigrants who depended on free thrice-weekly treatments at the clinic to survive.

Illegal immigrants, and legal immigrants newly in the country, are not eligible for Medicare, the federal program that covers most dialysis costs for American citizens with end-stage renal disease.

Grady volunteered to transport the patients to other states or their home countries and pay for three months of treatment. Thirteen accepted the offer. But in response to a patient lawsuit and news media scrutiny, the hospital eventually contracted with a commercial dialysis provider to treat the others in Atlanta for one transitional year.

That contract, with Fresenius Medical Services, expired on Tuesday.

Vital details of the agreement remain to be negotiated, including precisely how the patients will be distributed, how much Grady will pay and whether the arrangement will extend for patients’ lifetimes. But all parties said after meeting Tuesday morning that they were optimistic that they would reach an understanding and that patients would see no lapse in treatment.

“That would make me feel real happy because continuing with my dialysis, I need it to live,” said Ignacio Godinez Lopez, 24, who crossed into the United States illegally as a teenager and has been treated at Grady’s expense for four years. “I’m young, and without dialysis it would be taking my life.”

The patients in Atlanta have gambled that American generosity, even at a time of hostility toward illegal immigrants, would prove a surer bet than uncertain care in their home countries. Several said that the fates of those who returned home had reinforced their fears about leaving Atlanta.

Five of the 13 patients who left for Mexico with assistance from Grady or the Mexican government have died, according to Matt Gove, a Grady senior vice president. Most died while still receiving dialysis, although not always as regularly as recommended.

One patient, Fidelia Perez Garcia, 32, apparently succumbed in April to complications from renal failure after running out of Grady-sponsored treatments in Mexico. Patients with end-stage renal disease can die in as little as two weeks without dialysis, which filters toxins from their blood.

Ms. Perez’s mother, Graciela Garcia Padilla, said by telephone that her family was able to raise money for three additional dialysis sessions, at a cost of about $100 each. Ms. Perez then went 12 days without dialysis and persuaded a hospital to treat her only when she was close to death, Ms. Garcia said.

“They sent her to me just to die,” Ms. Garcia said. “Here, they let people die.”

At the same time, regular treatment in Atlanta has not guaranteed survival. Four of the 45 patients who were receiving dialysis at Fresenius clinics have also died, Mr. Gove said.

Nationally, about one in five dialysis patients die within a year of starting treatment, and about two in three die within five years, according to government figures.

The hospital, which has recently begun a financial turnaround after years of multimillion-dollar losses, has spent more than $2 million on repatriation and dialysis since closing its clinic, Mr. Gove said. As the expiration of Grady’s contract with Fresenius loomed, each sought to shift responsibility to the other. Larry L. Johnson, a DeKalb County commissioner who prodded and mediated the negotiations, said there was movement only when Grady agreed to contribute financially to the patients’ care.

Under the broad outlines of the agreement provided by Mr. Johnson and other participants, Fresenius, DaVita Inc. and Emory University’s health system would each treat a small number of patients — most likely three to five — as charity cases. Fresenius would care for the rest with financial assistance from Grady.

Fresenius and DaVita are the country’s largest commercial dialysis providers, with combined net income of more than $1.3 billion last year.

The agreement would not address the broader concern of how to care for illegal immigrants in the region who have developed renal disease since the Grady clinic’s closing, or those who will do so in the future. At the moment, their only option may be to wait until they are in distress and then visit hospital emergency rooms, which are required by law to provide dialysis to patients who are deemed in serious jeopardy.


Kevin Sack reported from Atlanta, and Catrin Einhorn from New York.

    Deal Would Provide Dialysis to Illegal Immigrants in Atlanta, NYT, 31.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/01/health/policy/01grady.html

Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S.

August 29, 2010
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

ROCHESTER — The Lake Shore Limited runs between Chicago and New York City without crossing the Canadian border. But when it stops at Amtrak stations in western New York State, armed Border Patrol agents routinely board the train, question passengers about their citizenship and take away noncitizens who cannot produce satisfactory immigration papers.

“Are you a U.S. citizen?” agents asked one recent morning, moving through a Rochester-bound train full of dozing passengers at a station outside Buffalo. “What country were you born in?”

When the answer came back, “the U.S.,” they moved on. But Ruth Fernandez, 60, a naturalized citizen born in Ecuador, was asked for identification. And though she was only traveling home to New York City from her sister’s in Ohio, she had made sure to carry her American passport. On earlier trips, she said, agents had photographed her, and taken away a nervous Hispanic man.

He was one of hundreds of passengers taken to detention each year from domestic trains and buses along the nation’s northern border. The little-publicized transportation checks are the result of the Border Patrol’s growth since 9/11, fueled by Congressional antiterrorism spending and an expanding definition of border jurisdiction. In the Rochester area, where the border is miles away in the middle of Lake Ontario, the patrol arrested 2,788 passengers from October 2005 through last September.

The checks are “a vital component to our overall border security efforts” to prevent terrorism and illegal entry, said Rafael Lemaitre, a spokesman for United States Customs and Border Protection. He said that the patrol had jurisdiction to enforce immigration laws within 100 miles of the border, and that one mission was preventing smugglers and human traffickers from exploiting inland transit hubs.

The patrol says that answering agents’ questions is voluntary, part of a “consensual and nonintrusive conversation” Some passengers agree, though they are not told that they can keep silent. But others, from immigration lawyers and university officials to American-born travelers startled by an agent’s flashlight in their eyes, say the practice is coercive, unconstitutional and tainted by racial profiling.

The Lake Shore Limited route is a journey across the spectrum of public attitudes toward illegal immigrants — from cities where they have been accepted and often treated as future citizens, to places where they are seen as lawbreakers the federal government is doing too little to expel.

The journey also highlights conflicting enforcement policies. Immigration authorities, vowing to concentrate resources on deporting immigrants with serious criminal convictions, have recently been halting the deportation of students who were brought to the country as children without papers — a group the Obama administration favors for legalization.

But some of the same kinds of students are being jailed by the patrol, like a Taiwan-born Ph.D. candidate who had excelled in New York City public schools since age 11. Two days after he gave a paper on Chaucer at a conference in Chicago last year, he was taken from his train seat and strip-searched at a detention center in Batavia, N.Y., facing deportation for an expired visa.

For some, the patrol’s practices evoke the same fears as a new immigration law in Arizona — that anyone, anytime, can be interrogated without cause.

The federal government is authorized to do just that at places where people enter and leave the country, and at a “reasonable distance” from the border. But as the patrol expands and tries to raise falling arrest numbers, critics say, the concept of the border is becoming more fluid, eroding Constitutional limits on search and seizure. And unlike Arizona’s law, the change is happening without public debate.

“It’s turned into a police state on the northern border,” said Cary M. Jensen, director of international services for the University of Rochester, whose foreign students, scholars and parents have been questioned and jailed, often because the patrol did not recognize their legal status. “It’s essentially become an internal document check.”

Domestic transportation checks are not mentioned in a report on the northern border strategy that Customs and Border Protection delivered last year to Congress, which has more than doubled the patrol since 2006, to 2,212 agents, with plans to double it again soon. The data available suggests that such stops account for as many as half the reported 6,000 arrests a year.

In Rochester, the Border Patrol station opened in 2004, with four agents to screen passengers of a new ferry from Toronto. The ferry went bankrupt, but the unit has since grown tenfold; its agents have one of the highest arrest rates on the northern border — 1,040 people in the 2008 fiscal year, 95 percent of them from buses and trains — though officials say numbers have fallen as word of the patrols reached immigrant communities.

“Our mission is to defend the homeland, primarily against terrorists and terrorist weapons,” said Thomas Pocorobba Jr., the agent in charge of the Rochester station, one of 55 between Washington State and Maine. “We still do our traditional mission, which is to enforce the nation’s immigration laws.”

Legal scholars say the government’s border authority, which extends to fixed checkpoints intercepting cross-border traffic, cannot be broadly applied to roving patrols in a swath of territory. But such authority is not needed to ask questions if people can refuse to answer. The patrol does not track how many people decline, Mr. Pocorobba said.

Asked if agents could question people in Times Square, which like most of the nation’s population centers is within 100 miles of international waters, Mr. Pocorobba replied, “Technically, we can, but we don’t.” He added, “Our job is strictly cross-border.”

Lawyers challenging the stops in several deportation cases questioned the rationale that they were aimed at border traffic. Government data obtained in litigation shows that at least three-quarters of those arrested since 2006 had been in the country more than a year.

Though many Americans may welcome such arrests, the patrol’s costly expansion was based on a bipartisan consensus about border security, not interior enforcement to sweep up farmworkers and students, said Nancy Morawetz, who directs the immigration rights clinic at New York University.

One case she is challenging involves a Nassau County high school graduate taken from the Lake Shore Limited in Rochester in 2007. The government says the graduate, then 21, voluntarily produced a Guatemalan passport and could not prove she was in the country legally. A database later showed she had an expired visitor’s visa.

Unlike a criminal arrest, such detentions come with few due process protections. The woman was held at a county jail, then transferred across the country while her mother, a house cleaner, and a high school teacher tried to reach her. The woman first saw an immigration judge more than three weeks after her arrest. He halved the $10,000 bail set by the patrol, and she was eventually released at night at a rural Texas gas station.

“I was shocked,” said the teacher, Susanne Marcus, who said her former student had been awarded a $2,000 college scholarship.

Another challenge is pending in the 2009 train arrest of the Taiwan-born doctoral student, who had to answer the agent after being singled out for intense questioning because of his “Asian appearance,” he said. His account was corroborated in an affidavit filed this month by another passenger.

Similar complaints have been made by others, including a Chicago couple who encountered the patrol on a train to Poughkeepsie, N.Y., for the woman’s graduation from Vassar College.

“At least in Arizona, you have to be doing something wrong to be stopped,” said the woman, a citizen of Chinese-American descent who said her Mexican boyfriend was sleeping when an agent started questioning him. “Here, you’re sitting on the train asleep and if you don’t look like a U.S. citizen, it’s ‘Wake up!’ ”

Mr. Pocorobba denied that agents used racial profiling; the proof, he said, was that those arrested had come from 96 countries. Agents say they often act on suspicion, prompted by a passenger’s demeanor. Of those detained, most were in the country illegally — including the Mexican, 24, who admitted that he had sneaked across the southern border at 16 to find his father. Others were supposed to be carrying their papers, like a Pakistani college student detained for two weeks before authorities confirmed that he was a legal resident.

Some American-born passengers welcome the patrol. “It makes me feel safe,” volunteered Katie Miller, 34, who was riding Amtrak to New York from Ohio. “I don’t mind being monitored.”

To others, it evokes travel through the old Communist bloc. “I was actually woken up with a flashlight in my face,” recalled Mike Santomauro, 27, a law student who encountered the patrol in April, at 2 a.m. on a train in Rochester.

Across the aisle, he said, six agents grilled a student with a computer who had only an electronic version of his immigration documents. Through the window, Mr. Santomauro said, he could see three black passengers, standing with arms raised beside a Border Patrol van.

“As a citizen I’m offended,” he said. But he added, “To say I didn’t want to answer didn’t seem a viable option.”

    Border Sweeps in North Reach Miles Into U.S., NYT, 29.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/30/nyregion/30border.html

Immigration Agency Ends Some Deportations

August 26, 2010
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

Immigration enforcement officials have started to cancel the deportations of thousands of immigrants they have detained, a policy they said would pare huge case backlogs in the immigration courts.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said the new approach was part of a broad shift in priorities at the agency, to focus its efforts on catching and deporting immigrants who have been convicted of crimes or pose a national security threat. The policy — announced in an Aug. 20 memorandum from John Morton, the head of the agency — drew praise from immigrant advocates, who called it a common-sense strategy, and was denounced by several Republicans as evidence that the Obama administration was weakening enforcement and making it easier for illegal immigrants to remain in the country.

The change in emphasis at the immigration agency, which represents a significant break with longstanding practices, has awakened resistance among agents and detention officers on the ground, according to officials of the agency, which is known as ICE, and of the union representing those employees.

Mr. Morton’s memorandum refers to a particular group of illegal immigrants: those who have been detained in ICE operations because they did not have legal status, but who have active applications in the system to become legal residents. The memo encourages ICE officers and lawyers to use their authority to dismiss those cases, canceling the deportation proceedings, if they determine that the immigrants have no criminal records and stand a strong chance of having their residence applications approved.

The policy is intended to address a “major inefficiency” that has led to an unnecessary pileup of cases in the immigration courts, Mr. Morton said. The courts have reported at least 17,000 cases that could be eliminated from their docket if ICE dismissed deportations of immigrants, like those married to United States citizens, who were very likely to win legal status, the memo says.

To resolve that number of deportation cases, officials will have to fix persistent breakdowns in coordination between two federal agencies that oversee the nation’s overburdened and troubled immigration system, ICE officials acknowledged. On one hand, ICE enforces immigration law. Another agency, Citizenship and Immigration Services, is in charge of approving applications for immigration documents. When ICE opens a deportation case against an immigrant, it is heard in immigration court.

The courts are swamped under a backlog that reached a record in June of 247,922 cases, according to the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a research group at Syracuse University that analyzes federal data. The average waiting time for cases in those courts was 459 days.

But immigration lawyers said they are currently waiting as long as two years to get a hearing date in some especially crowded immigration courts.

The new policy “is a pretty basic, common-sense thing to do,” said Helen Harnett, policy director for the National Immigrant Justice Center, a legal assistance group in Chicago. She said that if an immigrant’s application for legal residence was ultimately denied, ICE could reinstate the deportation.

“This is for people who do have a path to legalize their status,” said Mary Meg McCarthy, director of the justice center. “This does not create a new path to legalization for anyone.”

But Republican lawmakers said the Obama administration was moving toward a de facto legalization program by allowing some illegal immigrants to remain here despite their violations of the law.

“Actions like this demoralize ICE agents who are trying to do their job and enforce the law,” said Senator Charles E. Grassley, Republican of Iowa. “Unfortunately, it appears this is more evidence that the Obama administration would rather circumvent Congress and give a free pass to illegal immigrants who have already broken our law.”

Mr. Morton’s memorandum was first reported this week in The Houston Chronicle, which found that some immigrants in Texas had already seen their deportations canceled.

ICE officials said they arrived at the policy after conferring with immigration court officials. “This is not a backdoor amnesty,” said Beth Gibson, assistant deputy director of ICE. “It is really about efficient use of docket space and smart use of everybody’s scarce resources.”

The agency has deported a record number of 167,000 immigrants with criminal convictions in the past year, ICE officials said, an increase of about 43 percent over the previous year.

However, dissension in the ranks at ICE surfaced on June 25, when a local of the American Federation of Government Employees representing some enforcement and detention officers announced that it had taken a vote of no confidence in Mr. Morton.

The director and other senior ICE officials had “abandoned the agency’s core mission of enforcing United States immigration laws,” the local said in a news release, undertaking “reckless and misguided initiatives” while failing to alert Congress to the need for more manpower and funds for ICE.

Chris Crane, the president of the local, did not respond to an e-mail message on Thursday.

The national president of the federation, John Gage, said the union had not yet taken a position on the issues raised by the local. Mr. Gage said after several ICE locals had complained, he called a meeting next week of representatives of all of the federation’s locals that represent ICE employees.

“I really would like to get some facts,” Mr. Gage said Thursday. “Our ICE officers have real concerns, but there is conflicting information. If there is any increased risk to our people, we will be all over it,” he said.

    Immigration Agency Ends Some Deportations, NYT, 26.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/27/us/27immig.html

New Life in America No Longer Means a New Name

August 25, 2010
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS

For many 19th- and 20th-century immigrants or their children, it was a rite of passage: Arriving in America, they adopted a new identity.

Charles Steinweg, the German-born piano maker, changed his name to Steinway (in part because English instruments were deemed to be superior). Tom Lee, a Tong leader who would become the unofficial mayor of Chinatown in Manhattan, was originally Wong Ah Ling. Anne Bancroft, who was born in the Bronx, was Anna Maria Louisa Italiano.

The rationale was straightforward: adopting names that sounded more American might help immigrants speed assimilation, avoid detection, deter discrimination or just be better for the businesses they hoped to start in their new homeland.

Today, most experts agree, that traditional immigrant gambit has all but disappeared.

“For the most part, nobody changes to American names any more at all,” said Cheryl R. David, former chairwoman of the New York chapter of the American Immigration Lawyers Association.

Precise comparative statistics are hard to come by, and experts say there was most likely no one precise moment when the practice fell off. It began to decline within the last few decades, they say, and the evidence of its rarity, if not formally quantified, can be found in almost any American courthouse.

The New York Times examined the more than 500 applications for name changes in June at the Civil Court in New York, which has a greater foreign-born population than any other city in the United States. Only a half dozen or so of those applications appeared to be obviously intended to Anglicize or abbreviate the surnames that immigrants or their families arrived with from Latin America or Asia. (A few Russians and Eastern Europeans did, but about as many embraced their family’s original surnames as adopted new ones.)

The vast majority of people with clearly ethnic surnames who applied to change them did so as a result of marriage (belatedly adopting a spouse’s surname or creating a new hyphenated one) or childbirth (because they were legally identified when they were born only as a male or female child or were adopting a parent’s name).

Iyata Ishimabet Maini Valdene Archibald of Brooklyn changed her name to Ishimabet Makini Valdene Bryce. Guo Wi Chan of Forest Hills, Queens, changed his to Ryan Guowei Chan. And after Jing Qiu Wu, the Flushing, Queens, mother of 5-year-old Star Jing Garcia, divorced, she renamed her daughter Star Rain Wu, dropping her husband’s surname.

Several dropped Mohammed as a first name, adopting Najmul or Hayat instead. And one older couple changed their last name from Islam to Khan, but they said they were conforming to other younger family members rather than reacting to discrimination.

Sociologists say the United States is simply a more multicultural country today (think the Kardashian sisters or Renée Zellweger, for instance, who decades ago might have been encouraged to Anglicize their names), and they add that blending in by changing a name is not as effective for Asians and Latin Americans who, arguably, may be more easily identified by physical characteristics than some Europeans were in the 19th century and early 20th century.

Also, at least in certain circumstances, affirmative action and similar programs have transformed ethnic identity into a potential asset.

“If you are talking about 1910, the social forces on conformity were much stronger,” said Marian Smith, senior historian of the United States Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services, “whereas now an immigrant arrives with all these legal and identity documents, a driver’s license in their pocket, a passport, with one name on it. To change this is a big deal.”

Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton University sociologist, suggested that newcomers from overseas and their children no longer felt pressure to change their surnames beginning “during the 1970s and 1980s, as immigration became more a part of American life and the civil rights movement legitimated in-group pride as something to be cultivated.”

You can apply to the State Supreme Court to change your name (for $210) or to Civil Court (for $65) as long as you swear that you are not wanted for a crime and are not doing so to defraud anyone. Immigrants can simply check a box on their applications for naturalization. (The government said that in 2005 fewer than one in six did so, and for every possible reason.)

A century or so ago, some names were simplified by shipping agents as immigrants boarded ships in Europe. Others were transliterated, but rarely changed, by immigration officials at Ellis Island. Many newcomers changed their names legally, from Sapusnick to Phillips (“difficulty in pronouncing name, interferes with their business,” according to a legal notice), Laskowsky to Lake (“former name not American”) and from Katchka to Kalin (Katchka means duck in Yiddish and a particular Mr. Katchka was “subjected to ridicule and annoyance because of this”).

Most requests appear to have been granted routinely, although as recently as 1967, a Civil Court judge in Brooklyn refused to change Samuel Weinberg’s family name to Lansing “for future business reasons, such that my sons shall not bear any possible stigma.” The judge’s name was Jacob Weinberg.

During World War I, another Brooklyn judge refused the application of a Weitz to become a Weeks.

“There is no good reason why persons of German extraction should be permitted to conceal the fact by adopting through the aid of the court names of American or English origin,” the judge ruled. “It may involve some moral courage to bear German surnames or patronymics in these days, but the discomfort can best be borne by a display of genuine loyalty to this country.”

Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at Hunter College of the City University of New York, said: “Jews and Italians changed their surnames in the past so that people wouldn’t identify them as Jews or Italians, the famous cases of course being movie stars. But if you look, phenotypically, nonwhite — East Asian, for example, or black — changing your last name is not going to make a difference. Betty Joan Perske became Lauren Bacall, and most people didn’t know she was Jewish; whatever name she used, Lena Horne was black.”

Lisa Chang, whose parents came from Korea in 1976, had assumed she would marry a Korean man, but decided to retain her maiden name when she wed a Caucasian instead.

“I felt like I would lose a part of myself and my Korean heritage and like I was cheating on my family’s name,” said Ms. Chang, 28, a troubleshooter for online advertising sites. “No one actually told me I had to change my last name, but I did feel some pressure from my future in-laws.”

Marija Sajkas, 40, a health care advocate who moved from Yugoslavia seven years ago, is adopting her Bosnian husband’s surname, Tomic — partly because it is easier to pronounce. “I am fortunate,” she said, “to have a great husband who also has a pronounceable surname.”

Even these days, finding precisely the right adoptive name — one syllable or not — can be a problem. Not long ago, David M. Glauberman, a Manhattan public relations executive, grew tired of having to spell his name every time he left a telephone message. Instead, he legally changed his name to Grant. The first time he left a message, a secretary asked: “Is that Grand with a ‘d’ or Grant with a ‘t’?”


Sam Roberts’s grandfather arrived in the United States as Samuel Rabinowitz. His family first changed the name to Rubin, then to Roberts.

    New Life in America No Longer Means a New Name, NYT, 25.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/26/nyregion/26names.html

Mario Obledo, Hispanic Rights Leader, Dies at 78

August 20, 2010
The New York Times
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Mario G. Obledo, who slept on the floor with 12 siblings as the child of illegal immigrants and went on to become the founder and leader of major Hispanic-American organizations, a top state official in California and an acid critic of stereotypical treatment of Mexicans, died Wednesday in Sacramento. He was 78.

The cause was a heart attack, his wife, Keda Alcala-Obledo, said.

Mr. Obledo’s overarching accomplishment was to help usher Hispanics toward the center of the American political discussion, declaring they would no longer “take a back seat to anyone.” Known just as Mario, in the manner of his ally Jesse Jackson, he helped forge alliances with other minorities and build political power by registering hundreds of thousands of Hispanics to vote.

During the administration of Gov. Jerry Brown, he became the first Hispanic chief of a California state agency: health and welfare, the largest in both budget and workers. In 1982, he was the first Hispanic citizen to mount a serious run for governor of California.

When President Bill Clinton presented him with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1998, the citation said Mr. Obledo had “created a powerful chorus for justice and equality.” He was called the “Godfather of the Latino Movement” in the United States.

His approach was as unsubtle as it was impassioned. He created a national commotion in the 1990s by protesting the stereotypical Mexican accent of the Chihuahua in Taco Bell commercials. When someone put up a sign at the California border saying, “Illegal Immigration State,” he threatened to burn it down personally.

He ignited an explosive response in 1998 when he said in a radio interview that Hispanics were on the way to taking over all of California’s political institutions. He suggested that people who did not like it go back to Europe.

In the face of criticism that Hispanics have lagged behind blacks in creating political and civil rights institutions, he created and led many. These included the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, the Hispanic National Bar Association, the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project and the National Coalition of Hispanic Organizations.

He was president of the League of United Latin American Citizens and chairman of the National Rainbow Coalition, the leftist political organization that grew out of Mr. Jackson’s 1984 presidential campaign.

Mario Guerra Obledo was born in San Antonio on April 9, 1932, and grew up in a tiny house on an alley off a dirt street. His father died when he was 5, and he and his 12 brothers and sisters had to hustle to find chores to help supplement welfare to pay the $5-a-month rent and other expenses.

His mother hammered into him the importance of education, telling him that “teachers are second to God.” The pharmacist he started working for at 12 urged him to go to college. His four brothers were convicted of crimes like burglary, robbery and narcotics, but he himself was never jailed, he said in an interview with The New York Times in 1982.

“I was involved in everything, I guess, that everyone else was,” he said. “I just never happened to get caught in a serious situation that would embitter me to the point where I would continue in that pattern.”

Mr. Obledo entered the University of Texas at Austin in 1949, then interrupted his studies to enlist in the Navy in 1951. He specialized in radar technology and was on a ship during the Korean War. He returned to the university and graduated with a degree in pharmacy. He worked as a pharmacist while earning a law degree from St. Mary’s University in San Antonio.

One day, another young lawyer, Pete Tijerina, spotted Mr. Obledo dancing with his wife at a dinner for the League of United Latin American Citizens. Mr. Tijerina was pondering how to start a legal organization to fight for the rights of Hispanics.

“I need a guy like him,” Mr. Tijerina recalled thinking in an interview with The San Antonio Express-News in 2001.

The two war men founded the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund with $2.2 million from the Ford Foundation and guidance from the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund.

They had no trouble finding injustices. They filed a suit saying a utility discriminated against Hispanic job candidates by having a height requirement, and they won. They forced schools to desegregate, courts to reform jury selection, swimming pools to integrate and businesses to take down signs barring Mexicans from entering.

“Discrimination was so widespread, I claimed that filing a lawsuit was like picking apples off a tree,” Mr. Obledo told The Express-News.

He joined the Harvard Law School faculty as a teaching fellow for eight months in 1975. Then Governor Brown of California named him secretary of health and welfare. He held the post for seven years, and sharply increased the number of minorities working in the agency. After losing badly in his bid for California’s Democratic nomination for governor, he practiced law, consulted and kept a generally low profile.

Mr. Obledo is survived by his wife and nine brothers and sisters.

Saying he was alarmed at what he saw as rising anti-Hispanic sentiment in immigration and education, he re-emerged in the late 1990s to take on issues as diverse as the exclusion of a Latino float from a Fourth of July parade and cutbacks in bilingual education — not to mention that Taco Bell Chihuahua.

Mr. Obledo’s arguments were far from simplistic. In 1987, he wrote a letter to The Los Angeles Times protesting proposals to raise excise taxes on gasoline, liquor and cigarettes. He said such taxes disproportionately harmed the poor, because their incomes were smaller and the taxes were the same for everyone.

He accepted The Times’s editorial argument that such taxes would help limit consumption and that this was good. But he then zeroed in for the kill: “Is it our government’s intention to deny these everyday items only to the poor?”

    Mario Obledo, Hispanic Rights Leader, Dies at 78, NYT, 20.8.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/21/us/21obledo.html

‘Immigrant’ List Sets Off Fears

July 14, 2010
The New York Times
By KIRK JOHNSON

SALT LAKE CITY — A list of 1,300 Utah residents described as illegal immigrants has sown fear among some Hispanics here, and prompted an investigation into its origins and dissemination.

Each page of the list is headed with the words “Illegal Immigrants” and each entry contains details about the individuals listed — from their address and telephone number to their date of birth and, in the case of pregnant women, their due dates. The letter was received by law enforcement and media outlets on Monday and Tuesday. A spokeswoman for Gov. Gary R. Herbert said Wednesday that an investigation was under way to see if state employees might have been involved in releasing the private information.

A memorandum accompanying the list said it was from Concerned Citizens of the United States. It urged immediate deportation proceedings against the people listed, as well as publication of their names by the news media.

The memo said an earlier version of the list had been sent to federal immigration officials in April. It promised that more names would be forthcoming, and promised authorities, “We will be listening and watching.”

“We are not violent, nor do we support violence,” the letter said.

A spokeswoman for United States Customs and Immigration Enforcement confirmed that the agency had received a letter from the group, dated in early April.

The list came at a time of increased tension over illegal immigration, both in Utah and in the country, two weeks before neighboring Arizona enacts a tough new law aimed at fighting illegal immigration. The federal government has sued Arizona over the law. Here in Salt Lake City, a group of state lawmakers is drafting a bill patterned after it.

Several people on the list expressed anxiety that their personal information had been released, and said they were concerned about their safety and that of their families. Some of those on the list said the heightened pressure could force them from the country.

One Guatemalan man, who spoke only on condition that he be identified as Monzon, admitted that he was in the country illegally. He said he had tried hard to keep off lists of all sorts, essentially by being the best American he could — paying his taxes and staying out of debt.

“I have always tried to keep my record clean,” he said.

But he struck a fatalistic note that might please the letter writers: “It might just be time to reflect and think if the time has come to leave,” he said.

A woman who identified herself as Liset said she was from Mexico and in the United States illegally. She said that her 2-year-old son was born in the United States, but that she had filed papers to give him Mexican citizenship as well.

“If something were to happen he will go with me to Mexico,” she said. She said she believed her personal information on the list came from her application for Medicaid. As for what it was like having reporters call, reading from a sheaf of papers containing large and small details about her life, she said, “I find it strange that you know so many things.”

Angie Welling, a spokeswoman for Governor Herbert, a Republican, said that the release of the material was significant, but that the specificity of detail was even more troubling.

“Any release of private information of this nature, especially the depth and breadth of it, is concerning,” Ms. Welling said. “The governor wants to be sure that a state agency wasn’t involved, and if it was, to make sure it doesn’t happen again, and to get to the bottom of who was responsible.”

Improper release of information from state records is a misdemeanor. The medical information on the list, however, from the notations about pregnancies, could potentially elevate the criminal implications far beyond that, to felony charges and lengthy prison sentences, for violation of federal medical privacy laws.

Proyecto Latino de Utah, one of the most prominent immigrant advocacy organizations in the state, received many frantic calls on Wednesday. People had heard about the list, but because no major news organization has actually published its full contents, the callers mainly wanted to know one thing: Am I on it?

“Nine missed calls this morning,” said Tony Yapías, the group’s director, glancing at his cellphone in an interview in his office. Most of the callers, he said, were not on the list.

One woman said that not knowing what could unfold next was the worst thing. “What’s going to happen?” she asked.

Mr. Yapías, the former director of the state’s Office of Hispanic Affairs, said he was convinced that the list had come from the State Department of Workforce Services, an agency that combines resources for job seekers, employers and people seeking assistance like food stamps or Medicaid. The list includes information that other agencies might collect, he said, but Workforce Services’ application form includes a question that other information-laden agencies like the Division of Motor Vehicles, for example, would not ever ask: “Is anyone in your home currently pregnant?”

Ms. Welling at the governor’s office said that the state’s Department of Technology Services was leading the investigation, looking into whether a digital trail might been left behind if state computers were used to prepare the list. She said that Workforce Services, in particular, was doing its own investigation, which she called “extensive.”

She said that to her knowledge no state agency had started any investigations of individuals based on the list.

A spokesman the Department of Workforce Services, Dave Lewis, said a team of information specialists was looking for patterns — whether the computer formatting would provide clues about the document’s origin or creation and whether there had been any unusual activity in people accessing that information inside the agency.

For people who found themselves named and workers in Utah’s government alike, the result was a real-life version of the old childhood game of “Telephone.” Information had leaked out from somewhere. Where? Was it accurate? Who had compiled it? Who now had copies of the list and where might the chain of whispers go from here? Would the leakers be found?


Dabrali Jimenez and Lillian Polanco contributed reporting from New York.

    ‘Immigrant’ List Sets Off Fears, NYT, 14.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/15/us/15utah.html

Illegal Workers Swept From Jobs in ‘Silent Raids’

July 9, 2010
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

BREWSTER, Wash. — The Obama administration has replaced immigration raids at factories and farms with a quieter enforcement strategy: sending federal agents to scour companies’ records for illegal immigrant workers.

While the sweeps of the past commonly led to the deportation of such workers, the “silent raids,” as employers call the audits, usually result in the workers being fired, but in many cases they are not deported.

Over the past year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has conducted audits of employee files at more than 2,900 companies. The agency has levied a record $3 million in civil fines so far this year on businesses that hired unauthorized immigrants, according to official figures. Thousands of those workers have been fired, immigrant groups estimate.

Employers say the audits reach more companies than the work-site roundups of the administration of President George W. Bush. The audits force businesses to fire every suspected illegal immigrant on the payroll— not just those who happened to be on duty at the time of a raid — and make it much harder to hire other unauthorized workers as replacements. Auditing is “a far more effective enforcement tool,” said Mike Gempler, executive director of the Washington Growers League, which includes many worried fruit growers.

Immigration inspectors who pored over the records of one of those growers, Gebbers Farms, found evidence that more than 500 of its workers, mostly immigrants from Mexico, were in the country illegally. In December, Gebbers Farms, based in this Washington orchard town, fired the workers.

“Instead of hundreds of agents going after one company, now one agent can go after hundreds of companies,” said Mark K. Reed, president of Border Management Strategies, a consulting firm in Tucson that advises companies across the country on immigration law. “And there is no drama, no trauma, no families being torn apart, no handcuffs.”

President Obama, in a speech last week, explained a two-step immigration policy. He promised tough enforcement against illegal immigration, in workplaces and at the border, saying it would prepare the way for a legislative overhaul to give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants already in the country. White House officials say the enforcement is under way, but they acknowledge the overhaul is unlikely to happen this year.

In another shift, the immigration agency has moved away from bringing criminal charges against immigrant workers who lack legal status but have otherwise clean records.

Republican lawmakers say Mr. Obama is talking tough, but in practice is lightening up.

“Even if discovered, illegal aliens are allowed to walk free and seek employment elsewhere” said Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama, the senior Republican on the Judiciary Committee. “This lax approach is particularly troubling,” he said, “at a time when so many American citizens are struggling to find jobs.”

Employers say the Obama administration is leaving them short of labor for some low-wage work, conducting silent raids but offering no new legal immigrant laborers in occupations, like farm work, that Americans continue to shun despite the recession. Federal labor officials estimate that more than 60 percent of farm workers in the United States are illegal immigrants.

John Morton, the head of the immigration agency, known as ICE, said the goal of the audits is to create “a culture of compliance” among employers, so that verifying new hires would be as routine as paying taxes. ICE leaves it up to employers to fire workers whose documents cannot be validated. But an employer who fails to do so risks prosecution.

ICE is looking primarily for “egregious employers” who commit both labor abuses and immigration violations, Mr. Morton said, and the agency is ramping up penalties against them.

In April, Michel Malecot, the chef of a popular bakery in San Diego, was indicted on 12 criminal counts of harboring illegal immigrants. The government is seeking to seize his bakery. He has pleaded not guilty. In Maryland, the owner of two restaurants, George Anagnostou, pleaded guilty last month to criminal charges of harboring at least 24 illegal immigrants. He agreed to forfeit more than $734,000.

But the firings at Gebbers Farms shocked this village of orchard laborers (population 2,100) by the Columbia River among sere brown foothills in eastern Washington. Six months after the firings, the silence still prevails, with both the company and the illegal immigrants reluctant to discuss them.

Farm worker advocates said the family-owned company, one of the biggest apple growers in the country, did not fit Mr. Morton’s description of an exploiter.

“The general reputation for Gebbers Farms was that they were doing right by their employees,” said Matt Adams, legal director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project.

The Gebbers packing house is the center of this company town, amid more than 5,000 acres of well-tended orchards, where the lingua franca is Spanish. Officials said public school enrollment is more than 90 percent Hispanic.

Throughout last year, ICE auditors examined forms known as I-9’s, which all new hires in the country must fill out. ICE then advised Gebbers Farms of Social Security and immigration numbers that did not check out with federal databases.

Just before Christmas, managers summoned the workers in groups. In often emotional exchanges, managers immediately fired those without valid documents.

“No comment,” said Jay Johnson, a lawyer for Gebbers Farms, expressing the company’s only statement.

Many workers lived in houses they rented from the company; they were given three months to move out. In Brewster, truck payments stopped, televisions were returned, mobile homes were sold, mortgages defaulted.

Many immigrants purchased new false documents and went looking for jobs in more distant orchards, former Gebbers Farms workers said. But the word is out among growers in the region to avoid hiring immigrants from the company because ICE knows they are unauthorized.

“Many people are still crying because this is really hard,” said M. García, 41, a former Gebbers packing house worker who has been out of a job since January.

There was no wave of deportations and few families left on their own for Mexico. “They are saying, what’s going to happen to their kids?” said Mario Camacho, an administrator in the Brewster school district. “To those kids, this is their country.”

After the firings, Gebbers Farms advertised hundreds of jobs for orchard workers. But there were few takers in the state.

“Show me one American —just one — climbing a picker’s ladder,” said María Cervantes, 33, a former Gebbers Farms worker from Mexico who gave her name because she was recently approved as a legal immigrant.

After completing a federally mandated local labor search, Gebbers Farms applied to the federal guest worker program to import about 1,200 legal temporary workers — most from Mexico. The guest workers, who can stay for up to six months, also included about 300 from Jamaica.

“They are bringing people from outside,” Ms. Cervantes said, perplexed. “What will happen to those of us who are already here?”

Immigrant advocates said they are surprised and frustrated with Mr. Obama, after seeing an increase in enforcement activity since he took office. “It would be easier to fight if it was a big raid,” said Pramila Jayapal, executive director of OneAmerica, a group in Seattle. “But this is happening everywhere and often.”

    Illegal Workers Swept From Jobs in ‘Silent Raids’, NYT, 9.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/10/us/10enforce.html

The Constitution Trumps Arizona

July 7, 2010
The New York Times
 

The Obama administration has not always been completely clear about its immigration agenda, but it was forthright Tuesday when it challenged the pernicious Arizona law that allows the police to question the immigration status of people they detain for local violations. Only the federal government can set or enforce immigration policy, the government said in its lawsuit against the state, and “Arizona has crossed this constitutional line.”

There is nothing terribly complicated about this principle, which is based on several aspects of the Constitution, acts of Congress, and Supreme Court decisions over the years. A patchwork of state and local immigration policies would cause havoc.

As the Justice Department points out in its complaint, the Arizona law will divert resources from the government’s pursuit of dangerous aliens, including terrorists, spies and violent criminals. It will harass authorized immigrants, visitors and citizens who might not be carrying their papers when stopped by the police. It will ignore the country’s cherished protections of asylum and will interfere with national foreign policy interests. (Already several Mexican governors are refusing to meet with their American counterparts in Arizona, a sign of the diplomatic disarray produced by the law.)

The courts have repeatedly made these fundamental ideas clear. A federal court in 1997 struck down Proposition 187 in California, which would have denied social benefits to illegal immigrants and turned state employees into enforcement agents because it was pre-empted by federal authority. (Appeals in the case were dropped.) The Supreme Court has said federal authority can pre-empt state law when the federal interest is dominant and where there already exists a system of federal regulations. The government has done a poor job enforcing its immigration rules, to say the least, but they do exist, and clearly fall under what the Constitution calls “the supreme law of the land.”

Though private lawsuits have done so, the government’s suit does not allege any discrimination or civil rights violations in the law, in part because that case is difficult to make until the law goes into effect on July 29.

The current Supreme Court, fortunately, has not been as active in recognizing state power as was the Rehnquist court, but it is not always easy to predict its direction on a volatile issue like this one. Should the case reach the court, those justices with a constructionist bent might take note of Justice Hugo Black’s words from 1941, quoted by the Justice Department on Tuesday in support of its lawsuit: “The supremacy of the national power in the general field of foreign affairs, including power over immigration, naturalization and deportation, is made clear by the Constitution, was pointed out by authors of The Federalist in 1787, and has since been given continuous recognition by this Court.”

The court has already taken a related Arizona case for its next term. It challenges a 2007 law penalizing employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants. The administration has urged the court to strike down that law for many of the same reasons it cited on Tuesday, and we hope the court uses that case to undermine the notion that states can set their own immigration policy.

In the meantime, there are steps President Obama can take. He can deny Arizona access to federal databases of immigration status and refuse to allow the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency to cooperate with state officials in handling people detained under the law. The government should end the misguided program allowing local deputies to enforce immigration law after taking an educational course.

Most important, the president can follow through on his recent promise to end the chaos of the immigration system with a comprehensive reform bill. Stamping out unjust laws like Arizona’s is a good place to start.

    The Constitution Trumps Arizona, NYT, 7.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/08/opinion/08thu1.html

Mr. Obama’s Immigration Promise

July 1, 2010
The New York Times

President Obama’s first major speech on immigration had the eloquence and clarity we have come to expect when he engages a wrenching national debate. In declaring the welcome of strangers a core American value, in placing immigrants at the center of the nation’s success and future, Mr. Obama’s exhortation was worthy of the late Senator Edward Kennedy, whose memory he respectfully summoned on Thursday. “Anybody can help us write the next great chapter in our history,” he said, regardless of blood or birth.

Mr. Obama was just as clear on why the immigration system is failing and how to fix it. Our nation “has the right and obligation to control its borders,” he said, but sealing off that vast space with troops and fences alone is a fantasy. And no amount of security at the border does anything about the undocumented 11 million who have already crossed it. Mr. Obama called for enabling these potential Americans to “get right with the law,” and for fixing the system of legal immigration, which is too inefficient for the country’s own good.

The president took particular notice of the extremism of Arizona, where a law, to take effect on July 29, compels its police to check the papers of anyone they suspect to be an illegal immigrant. It makes a crime out of being a foreigner in the state without papers — in most cases a civil violation of federal law. This is an invitation to racial profiling, an impediment to effective policing and a usurpation of federal authority, Mr. Obama said, evoking a future where “different rules for immigration will apply in different parts of the country.”

In promising to end the chaos into which immigration has collapsed (“this administration will not just kick the can down the road,” he said), Mr. Obama has laid out an ambitious goal. He urged Congress to help him pass a bill, particularly Republicans who supported bipartisan reform under President George W. Bush but who now have a united front against reform.

But Mr. Obama’s call to action applies not just to Congress but to himself as well. He neatly defined the obstacles to a comprehensive bill: the Republican senators who have abandoned bipartisanship and taken the extreme position of opposing any immigration reform that is common-sense and practical.

But Mr. Obama has presidential powers, and he should use them. He has given the border more troops. Now he should seek to lift the burden of fear from peaceable immigrant communities. His administration is widely expected to bring a lawsuit soon challenging the deeply unjust Arizona law. Mr. Obama, a constitutional scholar, could have written the complaint himself, but his address did not mention a lawsuit.

Mr. Obama should not suspend all enforcement against illegal immigrants. But he can reset the administration’s enforcement priorities to focus on dangerous and convicted criminals and rein in the operations that his Department of Homeland Security has promoted that enable local law enforcement to engage in the racial profiling he rightly denounces.

Mr. Obama appealed to middle of the debate, to Americans who crave lawfulness but reject the cruelty symbolized by Arizona’s new law. We hope his words spur the beginning of Congressional action. But in the hot summer to come, when police officers in Arizona start pulling people over, and tension grows and other states follow its bad example, let’s hope his administration also is ready to show the determination to protect the resented newcomers whose rights and dignity he so powerfully defended on Thursday.

    Mr. Obama’s Immigration Promise, NYT, 1.7.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/02/opinion/02fri1.html

Nebraska Town Votes to Banish Illegal Immigrants

June 21, 2010
The New York Times
By MONICA DAVEY

CHICAGO — Residents of a small city in eastern Nebraska voted Monday to banish illegal immigrants from jobs and rental homes, defying an earlier decision by the city’s leaders and setting off what is all but certain to be a costly and closely watched legal challenge.

In Fremont , a meat-packing town of about 25,000 people, unofficial results from The Associated Press late Monday showed that 57 percent of voters approved a referendum barring landlords from renting to those in the country illegally, requiring renters to provide information to the police and to obtain city occupancy licenses, and obliging city businesses to use a federal database to check for illegal immigrants.

Opponents of the new law, including some business and church leaders, had argued that the City of Fremont simply could not afford the new law, which is all but certain to be challenged in court. In a flurry of television commercials and presentations by opponents in the final days before Monday’s vote, opponents said paying to defend such a local law would require a significant cut in Fremont city services or a stiff tax increase — or some combination of the two.

“There were a lot of tears in this room tonight,” said Kristin Ostrom, an opponent who gathered with others in an old V.F.W. building to await the results. “Unfortunately, people have voted for an ordinance that’s going to cost millions of dollars, and that says to the Hispanic community that the Anglo community is saying they are not welcome here. They thought they were coming to a small-town community with small-town values.”

But advocates argued that federal authorities had failed to enforce their own immigration restrictions, leaving places like Fremont — with a small but growing Hispanic population — to take care of such matters themselves. They complained that illegal immigrants were causing an increase in crime, taking jobs that would once have gone to longtime residents, and changing the character of their quiet city, some 30 miles of farm fields from Omaha.

Within minutes of the results being announced, officials from the A.C.L.U. Nebraska pledged to file a lawsuit as quickly as possible.

“If this law goes into effect, it will cause discrimination and racial profiling against Latinos and others who appear to be foreign born, including U.S. citizens,” Laurel Marsh, executive director of A.C.L.U. Nebraska , said in a statement issued late Monday. “The A.C.L.U. Nebraska has no option but to turn to the courts to stop this un-American and unconstitutional ordinance before the law goes into effect. Not only do local ordinances such as this violate federal law, they are also completely out of step with American values of fairness and equality.”

Fremont’s Hispanic population, practically nonexistent two decades ago, has grown to about 2,000 people, according to some estimates. No one knows how many illegal immigrants live in Fremont, and the estimates (depending on which side of this debate one is on) vary enormously.

Still, some in Fremont point, with worry, to other Nebraska towns — places like Schuyler and Lexington — as communities that no longer look or feel the way they once did.

In recent years, numerous towns and cities around the nation have considered adopting laws restricting illegal immigrants. But in most cases, political leaders and town councils have been the ones to pass the provisions — not the voters. And the laws have proven politically-tangled: measures in towns like Hazleton, Pa., and Farmers Branch, Tex., are still being fought in court, while some other cities (facing the prospect of drawn-out legal battles) have dropped the issue.

That almost happened in Fremont. Two years ago, a City Council member in Fremont suggested the city should pass a law on illegal immigrants. But after two emotional hearings — with what both sides said was participants from all over the state, the Council voted 4 to 4 on the proposal. The longtime mayor then voted against it, saying that he, too, was opposed to illegal immigrants but had come to believe that the question was one that had been, legally speaking, left to federal authorities, not Fremont.

Some residents were outraged by the choice, and began collecting signatures on a petition to put the question to a vote — the vote that ultimately came on Monday.

As residents of Fremont began considering what the decision would now mean, details of the new law were a new matter for debate. Some noted, with puzzlement, that the law would not apply to the area’s two biggest meatpacking plants (including Hormel, the largest employer) because they are just outside the city’s official boundaries, and that the law would also not apply to “casual labor for domestic tasks” around Fremont homes. But some said they believe the housing requirements — and new $5 occupancy license rule — might apply to people living in nursing homes.

    Nebraska Town Votes to Banish Illegal Immigrants, NYT, 21.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/22/us/22fremont.html

In Eritrea, the Young Dream of Leaving

June 19, 2010
The New York Times
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

AMMAN, Jordan — Long before he learned to dunk on warped wooden backboards, Awet Eyob nursed a dream: to play basketball in America.

He is 6-foot-8, built like an oak tree, and seems to have mastered a behind-the-back dribble and crisp passes from the corner of his eye.

But one big problem stood between him and his dream: his homeland, Eritrea, an isolated, secretive nation in the Horn of Africa that is refusing to let its young people leave.

Eritrea, which fought its way to independence nearly 20 years ago, is ruled by hard-as-nails former guerrilla fighters who have held firm to their revolutionary Marxist policies and who demand that all young people work for the government, sometimes until their 40s. Anyone who tries to buck this national program, according to human rights groups, is subject to cruelly inventive tortures.

So this January, in great secrecy, Mr. Awet gathered four pairs of boxers, two pairs of socks, his high school transcript, his Air Jordans and some cash to pay a gang of human traffickers (or coyotes, as he calls them).

“I remember that first call,” he said. “The coyote said: ‘Hello, this is Sunshine.’ I answered, ‘This is Thunder.’ ”

Mr. Awet, 20, who is now living in Amman, Jordan, is the embodiment of Eritrea’s lost generation. This tiny country is spawning more refugees per capita than just about anywhere else in the world, according to United Nations statistics, and most of them are young men, and often the country’s most promising ones at that.

The United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees says that hundreds of thousands of people have fled Eritrea in recent years — the total population is less than five million — and nearly every day, 100 new Eritreans risk their lives to cross into Sudan.

Some of these defections have been hard to miss. In December, more than 10 players from the Eritrean national soccer team absconded to Kenya during a tournament. In 2004, some Eritrean refugees being sent home from Libya were so desperate not to return that they hijacked the plane.

Many never make it out. One of Mr. Awet’s friends recently won a four-year, $200,000 scholarship to a prestigious American university. “He should have been sent out with a garland of flowers,” said the boy’s father, with tears in his eyes.

Instead, the boy was arrested trying to defect in time to register for classes. He was drafted into the military and deployed near Eritrea’s southern border, one of the hottest places on earth.

Mr. Awet was lucky. Dressed in an extra, extra large gallebeyah (a long flowing gown common in the Muslim world), he sneaked through Sudan and then on to Kenya and Dubai. He is now camped out in the basement of an American family’s home here, doing push-ups, working on his jump shot, playing on a Wii set with the family’s children and trying to get into an American college or prep school.

A big reason why he has gotten this far is Matthew Smith, a gregarious, athletic American diplomat who befriended Mr. Awet a couple years ago on a basketball court in Asmara, Eritrea’s capital, where Mr. Smith was working. Mr. Smith was impressed by the young man’s game, but more than that, he was moved by Mr. Awet’s burning ambition to break out of his hermetically sealed world.

“He wanted more, and I could relate to that,” said Mr. Smith, whose father was a taxi driver in Brooklyn. “Who would’ve ever thought the kid of a cabbie and nanny could be a diplomat?”

Mr. Smith matched up Mr. Awet with an American basketball coach in Amman who is now training him.

“His skills were better than I expected,” said the coach, Robert Taylor, who was sitting next to Mr. Awet on a stack of exercise mats in a high school gym. “No offense, Awet, but Eritrea isn’t exactly known for its basketball.”

If Eritrea is especially well-known for anything these days, it is for being a troublemaker in a very volatile neighborhood. The nation has been accused of invading Djibouti in 2008 and fueling chaos in Somalia by arming insurgent groups, prompting sanctions from the United Nations Security Council.

But Eritrea has a proud history, fighting a grueling 30-year guerrilla war to break away from Ethiopia.

Mr. Awet’s name, in fact, means victory. He was born at home, by candlelight, in February 1990, on the eve of independence, right after a legendary battle.

He was always big. He was selected to play for the national basketball team when he was 15, and earned the nickname King A. By Eritrean standards, he had an enviable life, with a wealthy merchant father, good grades and a touch of fame.

But Dan Franch, his high school literature teacher, could tell he was not happy.

“I knew he wanted to leave, and I didn’t blame him,” Mr. Franch said. “This place is becoming inert. You encourage students to apply to college overseas but their chances of going are one in a gazillion.”

On the surface, life for young Eritreans does not look so bad. Asmara is littered with chrome-lined Art Deco cafes where young people sip cappuccinos and munch on pizza. But many young people complain (quietly) of being chained to dead-end government jobs. By law, mandatory national service is supposed to last 18 months. In reality, it is often indefinite, and few can get permits to exit the country until they are done serving. The government justifies this because of a highly militarized, unresolved border dispute with its neighbor, Ethiopia, nearly 20 times its size.

Mr. Awet says he probably will not see his parents for years because now that he has escaped, it will be dangerous to go back home.

At night, when he cannot sleep, he takes out a tiny prayer book his mother gave him — the cover is literally the size of a postage stamp — and thinks of her. Or he stretches out on a single bed with his feet nearly dangling off, listening to rap songs on his MP3 player and nurturing his dream.

“I used to dream about the money and the cars and the girls,” he sings. “But now I see, because I’m sitting on top of the world.”

    In Eritrea, the Young Dream of Leaving, NYT, 19.6.2010,http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/world/africa/20eritrea.html

On Border Violence, Truth Pales Compared to Ideas

June 19, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

When Representative Gabrielle Giffords, Democrat of Arizona, announced that the Obama administration would send as many as 1,200 additional National Guard troops to bolster security at the Mexican border, she held up a photograph of Robert Krentz, the mild-mannered rancher who was shot to death on his vast property. The authorities suspected that the culprit was linked to smuggling.

“Robert Krentz really is the face behind the violence at the U.S.-Mexico border,” Ms. Giffords said.

It is a connection that those who support stronger enforcement of immigration laws and tighter borders often make: rising crime at the border necessitates tougher enforcement.

But the rate of violent crime at the border, and indeed across Arizona, has been declining, according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, as has illegal immigration, according to the Border Patrol. While thousands have been killed in Mexico’s drug wars, raising anxiety that the violence will spread to the United States, F.B.I. statistics show that Arizona is relatively safe.

That Mr. Krentz’s death nevertheless churned the emotionally charged immigration debate points to a fundamental truth: perception often trumps reality, sometimes affecting laws and society in the process.

Judith Gans, who studies immigration at the Udall Center for Studies in Public Policy at the University of Arizona, said that what social psychologists call self-serving perception bias seemed to be at play. Both sides in the immigration debate accept information that confirms their biases, she said, and discard, ignore or rationalize information that does not. There is no better example than the role of crime in Arizona’s tumultuous immigration debate.

“If an illegal immigrant commits a crime, this confirms our view that illegal immigrants are criminals,” Ms. Gans said. “If an illegal immigrant doesn’t commit a crime, either they just didn’t get caught or it’s a fluke of the situation.”

Ms. Gans noted that sponsors of Arizona’s controversial immigration enforcement law have made careers of promising to rid the state of illegal immigrants through tough legislation.

“Their repeated characterization of illegal immigrants as criminals — easy to do since they broke immigration laws — makes it easy for people to ignore statistics,” she said.

Moreover, crime statistics, however rosy, are abstract. It takes only one well-publicized crime, like Mr. Krentz’s shooting, to drive up fear.

It is also an election year, and crime and illegal immigration — and especially forging a link between the two — remain a potent boost for any campaign. Gov. Jan Brewer’s popularity, once in question over promoting a sales tax increase, surged after signing the immigration bill, which is known as SB 1070 but officially called the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act.

No matter that manpower and technology are at unprecedented levels at the border, it may never be secure enough in Arizona’s hothouse political climate when Congressional seats, the governor’s office and other positions are at stake in the Aug. 24 primaries.

It took the Obama administration a few weeks to bow to that political reality and go from trumpeting the border as more secure than it had ever been to ordering National Guard troops to take up position there — most of them in Arizona, Mr. Obama assured Ms. Brewer in a private meeting — because it was not secure enough.

Crime figures, in fact, present a more mixed picture, with the likes of Russell Pearce, the Republican state senator behind the immigration enforcement law, playing up the darkest side while immigrant advocacy groups like Coalición de Derechos Humanos (Human Rights Coalition), based in Tucson, circulate news reports and studies showing that crime is not as bad as it may seem.

For instance, statistics show that even as Arizona’s population swelled, buoyed in part by illegal immigrants funneling across the border, violent crime rates declined, to 447 incidents per 100,000 residents in 2008, the most recent year for which comprehensive data is available from the F.B.I. In 2000, the rate was 532 incidents per 100,000.

Nationally, the crime rate declined to 455 incidents per 100,000 people, from 507 in 2000.

But the rate for property crime, the kind that people may experience most often, increased in the state, to 4,082 per 100,000 residents in 2008 from 3,682 in 2000. Preliminary data for 2009 suggests that this rate may also be falling in the state’s biggest cities.

What is harder to pin down is how much of the crime was committed by illegal immigrants.

Phoenix’s police chief, Jack Harris, who opposes the new law, said that about 13 percent of his department’s arrests are illegal immigrants, a number close to the estimated percentage of illegal immigrants in the local population. But the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office, which runs the jail for Phoenix and surrounding cities and is headed by Joe Arpaio, a fervent supporter of the law, has said that 19 percent of its inmates are illegal immigrants.

Scott Decker, a criminologist at Arizona State University, said a battery of studies have suggested that illegal immigrants commit fewer crimes, in part because they tend to come from interior cities and villages in their home country with low crime rates and generally try to keep out of trouble to not risk being sent home.

But he understood why people’s perceptions of crime might lag behind what the statistics show. “Hard as it is to change the crime rate, it may be more difficult to change public perceptions about the crime rate, particularly when those perceptions are linked to public events,” Mr. Decker said.

He added, “There is nothing more powerful than a story about a gruesome murder or assault that leads in the local news and drives public opinion that it is not safe anywhere.”

Kris Kobach, a University of Missouri law professor who helped write the Arizona immigration law, pointed to crimes like a wave of kidnappings related to the drug and human smuggling business in Phoenix, something Ms. Brewer herself noted when she signed the law.

Although the reports have dipped in the past couple of years, the police responded to 315 such cases last year.

“That’s scary to people, and people react to that all over the state,” Mr. Kobach said. “They are concerned. ‘That might happen in my part of the city eventually.’ ”

Terry Goddard, the state attorney general, who does not support the immigration law, said the drop in violent crime rates might not reflect the continued violence, often unreported, that is associated with smuggling organizations.

Mr. Goddard said he doubted that the immigration law would put a dent in the smuggling-related crime that grabs attention in the state. For that reason, Mr. Goddard, who is running to be the Democratic nominee for governor in the primary, said he backed the deployment of National Guard troops and supports increasing manpower and spending on police and prosecutor anti-smuggling units.

Brian L. Livingston, executive director of the Arizona Police Association, said he would prefer more attention on the border, too. But until then, he said, laws like Arizona’s are necessary.

“We know the majority of people crossing across are not criminal, but unfortunately some criminal elements are embedded with them,” he said, adding, “Governor Brewer gets that.”

As Ms. Brewer put it just after signing the bill: “We cannot sacrifice our safety to the murderous greed of drug cartels. We cannot stand idly by as drop houses, kidnappings and violence compromise our quality of life.”

    On Border Violence, Truth Pales Compared to Ideas, NYT, 19.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/us/20crime.html

Justice Dept. Will Fight Arizona on Immigration

June 18, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and MARK LANDLER

The Obama administration has decided to file a lawsuit to strike down a new Arizona law aimed at deporting illegal immigrants, thrusting itself into the fierce national debate over how the United States should enforce immigration policies.

The federal government only occasionally intervenes forcefully in a state’s affairs, and it carries significant political risks. With immigration continuing to be a hot issue in political campaigns across the country, the Arizona law, which grants the local police greater authority to check the legal status of people they stop, has become a rallying cry for the Tea Party and other conservative groups.

The lawsuit, though widely anticipated, was confirmed by an unexpected source: Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, who answered a question about it from an Ecuadorean TV journalist in an interview on June 8 that went all but unnoticed until this week.

Noting that President Obama had publicly objected to the law, Mrs. Clinton said, “The Justice Department, under his direction, will be bringing a lawsuit against the act.”

A spokesman for the Justice Department said the matter was still under review, but other senior administration officials, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said a decision had indeed been made and only the details of the legal filing were still being worked out.

These officials said several government agencies were being consulted over the best approach to block the statute, which, barring any successful legal challenges, takes effect July 29. At least five lawsuits have already been filed in federal court, and civil rights groups have asked a federal judge to issue an injunction while the cases are heard.

A State Department spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, said Mrs. Clinton’s comments, made during a visit to Ecuador’s capital, Quito, were meant to answer deep qualms about the law in Mexico and other Latin American countries. “It is important to recognize that this has resonated significantly beyond our borders,” Mr. Crowley said.

Still, in focusing on Arizona, the Obama administration is making a politically risky calculation: the move could help repair America’s image south of the border but open the administration to charges that it is trampling state’s rights. And a legal battle could energize the right during an election year.

At home, polls show that a majority of Americans support the law, or at least the idea of states more rigorously enforcing immigration laws. But Latino groups and elected officials have denounced it as an affront to Hispanics. Several large demonstrations, for and against the law, have been held in Phoenix and other cities.

Legal action has been widely expected, given Mr. Obama’s repeated statements against it, as well as the concerns that Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. has voiced in interviews and news conferences.

In late May, Justice Department lawyers traveled to Phoenix to speak with lawyers from the offices of the state attorney general, Terry Goddard, and Gov. Jan Brewer about the possibility of litigation. Mr. Goddard, who is seeking the Democratic nomination for governor, and Ms. Brewer, a Republican who is running for re-election, both say a federal lawsuit is unwarranted.

In a side drama, Mr. Goddard on Friday took his office off the case, bowing to the wishes of Ms. Brewer, who had said his opposition to the law would make it difficult for him to defend it. Mr. Goddard said his decision had nothing to do with the Justice Department’s plans.

Mrs. Clinton’s disclosure — which came to light after her interview was posted by a political blog, therightscoop.com — quickly became fodder for political campaigns in Arizona. Republicans, led by Ms. Brewer, seized on the notion of a domestic policy decision’s being disclosed on foreign soil.

“This is no way to treat the people of Arizona,” the governor said in a statement. “To learn of this lawsuit through an Ecuadorean interview with the secretary of state is just outrageous. If our own government intends to sue our state to prevent illegal immigration enforcement, the least it can do is inform us before it informs the citizens of another nation.”

The federal government from time to time has successfully brought claims against laws it deemed discriminatory or infringing on voter rights. It also has a history of suing states on issues related to prison conditions and school desegregation, said Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional scholar at the law school at the University of California, Irvine.

While Arizona’s law has drawn opposition from those who worry that Hispanic-Americans and legal residents will be mistaken for illegal immigrants, legal scholars say the case will more likely to turn on whether it intrudes on federal immigration authority.

In 2007, the Bush administration successfully sued Illinois after it passed a law barring employers from using a federal electronic system to verify the immigration status of would-be employees.

Racial profiling claims may be difficult to prove. The United States Supreme Court, in a 1975 case, ruled that immigration officers can include racial or ethnic identity among factors in deciding whether to check someone’s right to be in the country.

Still, the federal government could argue that the law, in effect, gives one state more regulatory power in immigration than another and raises thorny diplomatic problems abroad, said Jack Chin, a University of Arizona law professor.

The theory of this law, he said, is that Arizona is “borrowing federal regulatory authority to help carry out federal policy.” But he said, “If the federal government comes in and says you are interfering, I think that is going to be a problem for the state.”

Though not a legal issue, administration officials said the law, passed in April, has tarnished America’s image in Latin America. They point to a new poll conducted by the Pew Research Center, which found that only 44 percent of Mexicans viewed the United States favorably after Arizona enacted the law, compared with 62 percent before that.

On a four-day trip last week to Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, Mrs. Clinton was asked about the law at every stop. When she sat down with reporters from two local TV channels in Quito last week, it was the subject of the first question from both. One reporter suggested that the law might encourage violence against those suspected of being illegal immigrants.

Mrs. Clinton said that the administration was committed to changing immigration policy and that Mr. Obama had spoken out because he felt the law infringed on federal authority. Speaking to the NTN channel, she said flatly that he would challenge it.

Administration officials traveling with Mrs. Clinton did not immediately recognize she had made news. The process was slowed further because the State Department did not publish a transcript of her remarks until June 11, two days later, because of technical glitches.

While the crossed wires left people at the Justice Department shaking their heads, Mrs. Clinton’s aides were unapologetic. The State Department had urged the Justice Department to announce the suit earlier this week, so Mrs. Clinton would not steal her colleagues’ thunder, one official said.

And, as Mr. Crowley, the spokesman, pointed out, “There is clearly an international aspect to this.”


Jennifer Steinhauer contributed reporting.

    Justice Dept. Will Fight Arizona on Immigration, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/us/politics/19arizona.html

U.S. Cracks Down on Farmers Who Hire Children

June 18, 2010
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

WHITE LAKE, N.C. — The Obama administration has opened a broad campaign of enforcement against farmers who employ children and underpay workers, hiring hundreds of investigators and raising fines for labor and wage violators.

A flurry of fines and mounting public pressure on blueberry farmers is only the opening salvo, Labor Secretary Hilda L. Solis said in an interview. Ms. Solis, the daughter of an immigrant farm worker, said she was making enforcement of farm-labor rules a priority. At the same time, Congress is considering whether to rewrite the law that still allows 12-year-olds to work on farms during the summer with almost no limits.

The blueberry crop has been drawing workers to eastern North Carolina for decades, but as the harvest got under way in late May, growers stung by bad publicity and federal fines were scrambling to clean up their act, even going beyond the current law to keep all children off the fields. The growers were also ensuring that the workers, mainly Hispanic immigrants, would make at least the minimum wage of $7.25 an hour.

“I picked blueberries last year, and my 4-year-old brother tried to, but he got stuck in the mud,” said Miguel, a 12-year-old child of migrants. “The inspectors fined the farmers, and this year no kids are allowed.”

Child and rights advocates said they were encouraged by these signs of federal resolve, but they were also waiting to see how wide and lasting the changes would be. Across the country, hundreds of thousands of children under 18 toil each year, harvesting crops from apples to onions, according to a recent report by Human Rights Watch detailing hazards to their health and schooling and criticizing the Labor Department for past inaction.

“The news from North Carolina shows the value of strong enforcement,” said Zama Coursen-Neff, a lawyer with Human Rights Watch and the report’s author. “We also need to change the law to make sure this isn’t a flash in the pan.”

Unannounced visits to several fields here by a reporter and by migrant aid groups, and interviews with workers from more than a dozen blueberry farms, indicate that the changes — for this crop and this region — are real.

Soon after dawn, the vans stream through the roads here, ferrying migrant workers from trailer camps to blueberry farms, where they pluck the fragile fruits for 10 hours or more.

“Last year, the fields were filled with children, so this is encouraging,” said Emily Drakage, North Carolina regional coordinator of the Association of Farmworker Opportunity Programs, a national network of state and private agencies.

Beyond barring children from the fields, growers here also spruced up migrants’ trailers and barracks and adopted scanners to record the buckets of berries collected by each worker.

A federal law adopted in 1938 exempts agriculture from child-labor rules that apply to other industries. It permits children 12 and up to work without limits outside of school hours, exposing them, critics say, to pesticides that may pose a special threat to growing bodies and robbing too many of childhood itself.

After years of what rights groups said was lax attention, the Labor Department this week announced a large increase in the fines that farmers can face for employing children, to as much as $11,000 per child, from around $1,000.

On May 24, the department fined a labor contractor and a farmer in Arizona more than $30,000 for employing 10- and 11-year-old children, underpaying workers and other violations.

In an interview, Ms. Solis said she had added more than 250 workplace investigators, bringing the department’s total to near 1,000, and started a campaign to educate workers about their rights. Acknowledging that officials had sometimes ignored child farm violations in the past, she added, “I am totally changing the direction of this department.”

But to make deep inroads, Congress would first have to change the law. A proposal to ban the hiring of 12- and 13-year-olds, cap working hours by 14- and 15-year-olds and keep teenagers out of hazardous jobs is gaining support in Congress. Some 91 representatives have co-sponsored the Care Act, put forth by Lucille Roybal-Allard, Democrat of California.

Senator Tom Harkin, Democrat of Iowa, said he planned to introduce a similar bill in the Senate. The American Farm Bureau, the nation’s largest farm lobbying organization, has opposed it, saying it could imperil the tradition of children working in farm communities.

This spring’s restrictions on teenagers in North Carolina were unsettling for some parents who said they counted on their earnings, and for teenage migrants, some traveling on their own.

“I need to help pay our own way,” said Edgar, 15, who has helped support two younger siblings since his mother rushed back to Mexico in 2009 for a family emergency. Last spring, he often skipped school to spend 10-hour days picking blueberries, he said. He was disappointed to be turned away by a farm on a recent Saturday and hoped that growers would let him work after the school year ended.

Migrant farm workers, many of them Mexicans who are in the country illegally, remain desperately poor, traveling across the country for sporadic stretches of backbreaking work, vulnerable to gouging by contractors and afraid to complain. Although a federal program tries to aid migrant children with their education, few finish high school.

The Migrant Head Start program aims to give parents an alternative to taking infants and toddlers into the fields. Here in Bladen County, a new Head Start center opened in 2008. It provides free day care to 138 children but still falls short of the need.

In nearby Wayne County, Celidania Diaz, who has worked there for nine years, planned to start picking when Head Start’s free bus service began in her area the following week.

“With the kids, the farms are very strict now,” she said. “It was better before, because if you didn’t have someone to take care of the kids, you could take them along.”

Her family’s situation is typical: they and a second family share an aging trailer, paying $50 a week each. The workers also pay $6 a day to a van owner to transport them to farms nearly two hours away. On good days, in fields where plump berries are still plentiful, they may earn $80 to $100, filling four buckets an hour at $2.50 a bucket to surpass the minimum wage. But when it rains, the berries are too fragile to pick and they cannot work.

Blueberry farmers here, like George Mote Jr., insist that they have never wanted children in their fields but that parents would sneak them in; rights groups say the farmers often looked the other way.

Shaken by fines imposed last August on 9 blueberry farms and 17 labor contractors in North Carolina, owners this spring played it safe by going beyond the law to bar anyone under 16 from the fields. But some farmers said that when school ended this month, they would allow younger teenagers to work, as the law allows.

Rafaela, 35, who lives in a three-bedroom trailer with her two children and six men placed there temporarily by a labor contractor, said not all parents supported strong controls on work by teenagers. “In the summertime when there’s no school, I think it’s O.K.,” said Rafaela, who did not provide her last name because she feared scrutiny by immigration officials. “But to take them out of school, that’s not right.”

    U.S. Cracks Down on Farmers Who Hire Children, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/us/19migrant.html

Plea to Obama Led to an Immigrant’s Arrest

June 18, 2010
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

The letter appealing to President Obama was written in frustration in January, by a woman who saw her family reflected in his. She was a white United States citizen married to an African man, and the couple — college-educated professionals in Manhattan — were stymied in their long legal battle to keep him in the country.

Could the president help, asked the woman, Caroline Jamieson, a marketing executive. She described the impasse that confronted her husband, Hervé Fonkou Takoulo, a citizen of Cameroon with an outstanding deportation order from a failed bid for asylum.

The response came on June 3, when two immigration agents stopped Mr. Takoulo, 34, in front of the couple’s East Village apartment building. He says one agent asked him, “Did you write a letter to President Obama?”

When he acknowledged that his wife had, he was handcuffed and sent to an immigration jail in New Jersey for deportation.

But on Thursday night, Mr. Takoulo was just as suddenly released, after Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials had been questioned about the case by The New York Times. Officials said they were investigating how the letter — one of thousands routinely referred to the agency by the White House to gather information for a reply — had been improperly used by the agency’s “fugitive operations” unit to find and arrest Mr. Takoulo, who has an engineering degree and no criminal record.

While Mr. Takoulo is still subject to the deportation order, immigration officials acknowledged that their actions in the case seemed to violate their standard practice of not using letters seeking help from elected officials as investigative leads. The handling of the case also conflicted with the Obama administration’s stated policy of arresting deportable immigrants only if they have criminal records.

The agency is investigating how it happened, a spokesman said, and has released Mr. Takoulo on an electronic ankle monitor while his case is reviewed.

“ICE has a zero tolerance policy for violations of civil rights,” the spokesman, Brian P. Hale, said in a statement.

Though the case is being treated as an anomaly that breached accepted procedures, a senior agency official acknowledged that there were no written guidelines on the handling of such letters, and that there was no way to know whether similar correspondence had prompted arrests and deportations. If the investigation bears out what officials have learned so far, “it also flies in the face of our stated priorities to target criminal fugitives,” said the official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the agency had not authorized further discussion of the case.

So far, it appears that Ms. Jamieson’s Jan. 10 letter to the president reached the executive secretariat of the immigration enforcement agency on March 8. The secretariat, which handles all official correspondence, sent it to the New York field office the next day, asking for help in drafting a response.

The letter explained that Ms. Jamieson, 42, had filed a petition seeking a green card for her husband on the basis of their 2005 marriage. But before they met, Mr. Takoulo, who first arrived in the country on a temporary business visa, had applied for political asylum and had been denied it by an immigration judge in Baltimore, who ordered him deported. Only if the agency’s chief counsel in Baltimore agreed to reopen the case, the letter said, could that order be suspended long enough for the couple to safely go to federal immigration headquarters in Manhattan for an interview to prove that their marriage was not a sham.

Mr. Takoulo said he had hoped the president would intervene. “He’s even said on TV that he needs engineers,” said Mr. Takoulo, who worked his way through the Stony Brook University and says he now spends his days trading stocks from the couple’s apartment because he lacks papers to accept the engineering jobs he was offered when he graduated in 2008.

Typically, officials said, the New York field office would have sent a letter like Ms. Jamieson’s back to the secretariat in Washington with a summary of the case, or would perhaps have referred the matter to Baltimore, where the old deportation case was based. Instead, someone promptly sent it to the district’s fugitive operations unit. Two agents were dispatched to the East Village to wait for Mr. Takoulo, who was stopped about 9:30 a.m. as he left home.

He said they told him, “We’re ICE and we’re here to arrest you because President Obama sent the letter for a review, and we reviewed it and we denied it.”

He was soon in shackles, on his way to the Hudson County Correctional Center in New Jersey, where he spent two weeks in a dormitory with 47 other men, mostly criminal offenders.

Ms. Jamieson campaigned for his release with help from colleagues at Digitas, a new-media advertising company. When the latest legal motion to reopen his case was denied last week, she turned to the news media. Friends and family had filled a dossier with affidavits testifying to the couple’s loving relationship, which began seven years ago at an East Village cafe where Mr. Takoulo worked.

On Thursday night, she sobbed with relief as she embraced her newly released husband outside an immigration processing jail on Varick Street. Later, they celebrated with his two nieces who are studying at New York colleges on student visas. But Ms. Jamieson veered between joy and distress.

“I’ve been feeling very confused and ashamed as an American citizen,” she said, evoking her family’s eclectic immigrant origins. Her father, an emeritus professor of East Asian languages and cultures at the University of California, Berkeley, is the son of Scottish immigrants; her mother’s family were refugees from North Korea; her stepmother is Chinese; and her sister’s husband is Egyptian.

All experienced some immigration problems, she said, but “the idea that in the year 2010 I and my family are having the worst and the most barbaric experience — it’s just shameful to me.”

Ms. Jamieson recalled that she cried when Mr. Obama said during a 2008 campaign speech, “With a mother from Kansas and a father from Kenya — ”

“I said, ‘Oh, Hervé, even the alliteration is right — with a mother from California and a father from Cameroon, our child could do the same!’ ”

But they have postponed having the baby they both want, she said, because of his precarious immigration status. One step forward: officials told him he will be granted a work permit after he reports to immigration headquarters on July 1.

“I won’t stop fighting,” Ms. Jamieson said. “He’s the love of my life.”

    Plea to Obama Led to an Immigrant’s Arrest, NYT, 18.6.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/19/nyregion/19immig.html

Side by Side, but Divided Over Immigration

The New York Times
May 11, 2010
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

ALBUQUERQUE — As the Arizona Legislature steamed ahead with the most stringent immigration enforcement bill in the country this year, this state’s House of Representatives was unanimously passing a resolution recognizing the economic benefits of illegal immigrants.

While the Arizona police will check driver’s licenses and other documents to root out illegal immigrants, New Mexico allows illegal residents to obtain driver’s licenses as a public safety measure.

And if Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona, a Republican, has become, for now, the public face of tough immigration enforcement, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, a Democrat, has told any interviewer who will listen about his effort to “to integrate immigrants that are here and make them part of society and protect the values of our Hispanic and multiethnic communities.”

They may sit side by side on the border, they may share historical ties to Mexico; they may have once even been part of the same territory, but Arizona and New Mexico have grown up like distant siblings.

People on all sides of the immigration debate have taken notice.

“If a burglar breaks into your home, do you serve him dinner? That is pretty much what they do there with illegals,” said State Representative John Kavanagh of Arizona, a Republican. Mr. Kavanagh is one of the staunchest supporters of the new law there, which will give the local police broad power to check the legal status of people they stop and suspect are in the country illegally.

But Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a liberal group in Washington that advocates reworking immigration law, offered New Mexico as a model of balancing a push for border security — Mr. Richardson once declared a state of emergency there — with coping with the illegal immigrants already in this country.

“Richardson has got it,” Mr. Sharry said.

Even supporters of Arizona’s law here — and there are some — agree that such a measure would never pass in New Mexico, given the outcry among legislators and immigrant advocates that the police in Arizona might detain and question Latinos who are legal residents and citizens but are mistaken for illegal immigrants.

Why the difference?

First, New Mexico (population two million) has the highest percentage of Hispanics of any state — 45 percent, compared with 30 percent in Arizona (population 6.5 million), and they historically have commanded far more political power than their neighbors do. The New Mexico Legislature is 44 percent Hispanic, a contrast to the 16 percent in Arizona, according to the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials.

Both were once part of Mexico and, later, the same United States territory. But since they became states in 1912, New Mexico has had five Hispanic governors (including Mr. Richardson, whose mother is Mexican), and Arizona has had one, according to the group.

New Mexico’s legislators embrace the civil rights protections in the state’s Constitution — including so-called unamendable provisions akin to a Bill of Rights that historically protected Spanish-speaking citizens of the former Mexican territory — and often mount a “protective stance” toward immigrants regardless of legal status, said Christine M. Sierra, a political science professor at the University of New Mexico.

“When the community at large feels threatened, folks close ranks and join in solidarity to protect the group,” Professor Sierra said, noting that Arizona Latinos have struggled to assume the same kind of a power in a state where a greater influx of Anglos (the general term for non-Hispanic whites) over the decades has diluted their strength.

The flow of drugs and illegal immigrants over the sparsely populated, remote border here, moreover, pales compared with that in Arizona, whose border, dotted with towns and roads facilitating trafficking, registers the highest number of drug seizures and arrests of illegal crossers of any state.

The estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona, whose population explosion of the past few decades has been a magnet for low-wage work, is more than eight times that of the estimated 55,000 here in Albuquerque, where the economy turns more on government, military and high-skill jobs.

Though concerns about immigration and the border arise, particularly in the southern “boot heel” of New Mexico, the burner setting is low.

“It’s not that there isn’t social tension between Hispanics and non-Hispanics,” said Jose Z. Garcia, a political scientist at New Mexico State University. “We just have learned to tolerate each other and get along.”

Illegal immigrants here agree. Where fear and anxiety pervade their communities in Arizona to the point that some do not venture outside or have left the state, here they live more openly and are less guarded.

“People give us food, a place to sleep,” said Samuel Duran, 35, a day laborer looking for work in a Santa Fe park. “The police bother us when they have a reason, like a fight, but in general they leave us alone.”

Marta Nebarez, who manages a grocery store in a heavily immigrant neighborhood in Albuquerque, said that newly arriving illegal immigrants had an easier time here and that word was spreading. Some customers have told her that a few families from Arizona have moved here.

“This government helps people a lot more than over there,” she said, noting several measures, including a state law enacted in 2005 that allows illegal immigrants to pay the same tuition rate as legal, in-state residents.

In an interview, Mr. Richardson promoted that measure as only fair to children who had no choice in being raised here, and said that other measures improved public health, like the Department of Health’s cooperation in a health referral service run by the Mexican Consulate for Mexican citizens.

But New Mexico’s patience could be tested, and some fear that the Arizona law will push more illegal immigrants into the state, though they typically go where the most jobs are found.

Steve Wilmeth, a cattle rancher near Las Cruces, 30 miles north of the border, said he had grown frustrated with finding illegal immigrants crossing his property and recalled a harrowing confrontation a couple of years ago with a group of 20 near a watering tank. “SB 1070,” Mr. Wilmeth said, referring to the Arizona law, which he supports, “is a desperate attempt by the people of Arizona to do something about the onslaught they face.”

Violence on the Mexican side of the border — one of the bloodiest cities, Ciudad Juárez, is an hour’s drive from Las Cruces — has heightened anxiety. So, too, has the shooting death of a rancher in southern Arizona near the New Mexico border by someone the police theorize may have been connected to smuggling.

Mr. Richardson responded by sending 35 National Guard troops to the boot-heel area and repeating a call for more help from the federal government.

Border and immigration issues have spilled into political campaigns, but the issue has not topped residents’ concerns, said Brian Sanderoff, a veteran pollster here.

One Republican running in her party’s primary for governor this year, Susana Martinez, a southern New Mexico prosecutor, has filmed a commercial promoting border security and a promise to revoke the law granting driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants and deny taxpayer-supported scholarships to illegal immigrants.

Last year, the mayor of Albuquerque, Richard J. Berry, won office after a campaign that included a vow to give the city police more discretion to check the immigration status of offenders. Five months into office, Mr. Berry has said he is still reviewing the policy.

Mr. Richardson, who believes that illegal immigrants should pay back taxes, learn English and take other steps as a condition of getting legal status, makes no apologies for seeking to integrate them, calling them a net plus for the state.

“I just have always felt that this is part of my heritage,” he said, noting his early years spent in Mexico City. “There is a decided positive in encouraging biculturalism and people working and living together instead of inciting tension. The worry I have about Arizona is it is going to spread. It arouses the nativist instinct in people.”

    Side by Side, but Divided Over Immigration, NYT, 11.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/us/12newmexico.html

Letters

The Big Picture Beyond Arizona’s Law

May 9, 2010
The New York Times
 

To the Editor:

We agree with Ross Douthat’s column (“The Borders We Deserve,” May 3) about the need to move past polarization on the immigration debate and enact national reforms to create an immigration system that welcomes legal immigrants and discourages illegal ones. So it was discouraging to see him write about how the United States needs to regain control of its southern border.

First, such calls to “regain” control of the border suffer from historical amnesia, perpetuating a common myth that it was ever actually under control. It is only in the last several decades that the United States government has made a serious effort to discourage illegal crossings on what was historically a largely unmonitored border.

Second, he claims that the federal government has not tried to control the border. In fact, since 1990 the number of Border Patrol agents has grown from fewer than 4,000 to more than 20,000, doubling in the last five years alone.

Add in the new technology and fencing, and the border with Mexico is now one of the most heavily policed borders in the world. And indeed it is precisely this border buildup that has blocked the easy routes through California and Texas and led to the enormous growth of smuggling of illegal migrants through the harsh Arizona deserts.

Mr. Douthat is right, however, that the real measures for controlling unauthorized immigration will be found away from the border. These include tough and smart workplace enforcement and employer sanctions to shut off the jobs pipeline that attracts unauthorized migrants, secure identification for everyone and policies that would welcome more legal immigrants from a wider array of countries. And for that Congress finally needs to move on immigration reform legislation.

Edward Alden
Peter Andreas
Washington, May 3, 2010

Mr. Alden is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and project director of the Independent Task Force on U.S. Immigration Policy. Mr. Andreas is associate professor of political science at Brown University.

•

To the Editor:

Ross Douthat lists some ways to regain control of our southern border, including curbing demand for illegal workers with stiff workplace enforcement and stringent penalties for hiring undocumented workers.

The fact is that American businesses, and therefore the local, state and federal governments, do not want to stop the flow of cheap, exploitable labor to America. Instead, politicians want to reap the economic benefit of illegal immigrants and, at the same time, assume a tough and patriotic posture for the angry American citizens who want to blame someone or something for the mismanagement of their beloved homeland.

Eliminate the jobs that the illegal immigrants find here all too easily and you will reduce the problem significantly. But businesses large and small and our politicians will never do that. They would rather write laws that undermine the Constitution.

Anthony Esposito
Hurley, N.Y., May 3, 2010

•

To the Editor:

The myth that Arizona was forced to crack down on illegal immigrants because the federal government has abdicated its responsibility to enforce the immigration laws bears no more relation to reality than does the myth that only racists on the far right are against immigration.

The truth is that under the administration of a left-centrist president — who, as a candidate, promised to fight against making immigrants scapegoats for all of America’s problems and to promote racial tolerance — deportations, investigations of employers who hire immigrants and arbitrary denials of applications for legal visas, especially by educated professional workers, are higher than they have been for many years.

The Arizona law is part of a wider populist movement to roll back the gains in racial tolerance that America’s immigration system has made since 1965, when an immigration law based on restrictive national origin quotas favoring Northern Europe and dating from the 1920s was abolished. A century ago, there were the Chinese exclusion laws.

Today, many immigration opponents in both parties would like to go back to the bigoted spirit of those times. It is meaningless to focus only on the Arizona law. There is a much broader issue at stake.

Roger Algase
New York, May 3, 2010

The writer is an immigration lawyer.

•

To the Editor:

In “If Only Arizona Were the Real Problem” (column, May 2), Frank Rich suggests that opposition to illegal immigration is often racially motivated. Don’t the American people have a right to their own country and their own culture, just as other nations do? The very least we can expect our government to do is enforce our laws and our borders.

But the Democrats seem perfectly willing to allow a flood of illegal immigrants into our country because they see Hispanic immigrants as providing more votes for them. The Republicans turn a blind eye to illegal immigration as well because illegals mean cheap labor for their big business buddies.

And the American people are left feeling helpless, abandoned and frustrated. If we dare to speak out and say, “Hey, this is our country; don’t we have a right to determine our own destiny as a nation?” the media label us as racists.

Donald Lyman Jr.
Wilmington, Mass., May 5, 2010

•

To the Editor:

The incendiary rage behind Arizona’s new immigration law has already spread to other issues and other states. Think of the wave of bills and laws further limiting women’s reproductive choices. Think of the enraged campaigns against same-sex marriage. Think of the laws striking down affirmative action.

Think of the recent statement by the governor of Virginia calling for the study of the Confederacy and neglecting to mention slavery. Think of the Texas textbook debates and the efforts to rewrite American history as the story of a Christian state.

These are all campaigns to dehumanize certain sectors of the population: racial or ethnic minorities, women, nonheterosexuals, those practicing “other” religions, agnostics and atheists. They mark an increasing tendency to divide society into “us” and “them.” We need to call for a stop to this now, while also seriously addressing the fears behind this anger so we can defuse it.

Lynn E. Palermo
St.-Quentin-les-Trôo, France, May 2, 2010

The writer is a professor of French at Susquehanna University.

    The Big Picture Beyond Arizona’s Law, NYT, 9.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/09/opinion/l09immig.html

Op-Ed Columnist

The Borders We Deserve

May 3, 2010
The New York Times
By ROSS DOUTHAT

Critics of Arizona’s new immigration law have not been shy about impugning the motives of its supporters. The measure, which requires police to check the immigration status of people they question or detain, has been denounced as a “Nazi” or “near-fascist” law, a “police state” intervention, an imitation of “apartheid,” a “Juan Crow” regime that only a bigot could possibly support.

Faced with this kind of hyperbole, the supposed bigots have understandably returned the favor, dismissing opponents of the Arizona measure as limousine liberals who don’t understand the grim realities of life along an often-lawless border. And so the debate has become a storm of insults rather than an argument.

On the specifics of the law, Arizona’s critics have legitimate concerns. Their hysteria has been egregious: you would never guess, amid all the heavy breathing about desert fascism, that federal law already requires legal immigrants to carry proof of their status at all times. But the measure is problematic nonetheless. The majority of police officers, already overburdened, will probably enforce it only intermittently. For an overzealous minority, it opens obvious opportunities for harassment and abuse.

Just because this is the wrong way to enforce America’s immigration laws, however, doesn’t mean they don’t need to be enforced. Illegal immigrants are far more sympathetic than your average lawbreaker: they’re risk-takers looking for a better life in the United States, something they have in common with nearly every living American’s ancestors. But by denouncing almost any crackdown on them as inherently bigoted and cruel, the “pro-immigrant” side of the debate is ultimately perpetuating a deeply unjust system.

There’s a good argument, on moral and self-interested grounds alike, that the United States should be as welcoming as possible to immigrants. But there’s no compelling reason that we should decide which immigrants to welcome based on their proximity to our border, and their ability to slip across.

It takes nothing away from Mexico or Mexicans to note that millions upon millions of people worldwide would give anything for the chance to migrate to America. Many come from nations that are poorer than our southern neighbor. Many have endured natural disasters, or suffered political or religious persecution. And many have spent years navigating our byzantine immigration bureaucracy, only to watch politicians in both parties dangle the promise of amnesty in front of people who jumped the border and the line.

As of the mid-2000s, roughly 700,000 migrants were entering the United States illegally every year. Fifty-seven percent came from Mexico, and 24 percent from the rest of Latin America. Only 13 percent came from Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and the Pacific Rim.

In a better world, the United States would welcome hundreds of thousands more legal immigrants annually, from a much wider array of countries. A more diverse immigrant population would have fewer opportunities to self-segregate and stronger incentives to assimilate. Fears of a Spanish-speaking reconquista would diminish, and so would the likelihood of backlash. And instead of being heavily skewed toward low-skilled migrants, our system could tilt toward higher-skilled applicants, making America more competitive and less stratified.

Such a system would also be fairer to the would-be immigrants themselves. America has always prided itself on attracting people from every culture, continent and creed. In a globalized world, aspiring Americans in Zimbabwe or Burma should compete on a level playing field with Mexicans and Salvadorans. The American dream should seem no more unattainable in China than in Chihuahua.

But this can only happen if America first regains control of its southern border. There is a widespread pretense that this has been tried and found to be impossible, when really it’s been found difficult and left untried.

Curbing the demand for illegal workers requires stiff workplace enforcement, stringent penalties for hiring undocumented workers, and shared sacrifice from Americans accustomed to benefiting from cheap labor. Reducing the supply requires bigger Border Patrol budgets and enforcement measures that will inevitably be criticized as draconian: some kind of tamper-proof Social Security card, most likely, and then more physical walls along our southern border, as opposed to the “virtual” wall that the Obama administration seems to be wisely abandoning.

You can see why our leaders would rather duck the problem. But when Washington doesn’t act, the people on the front lines end up taking matters into their own hands.

If you don’t like what Arizona just did, the answer isn’t to scream “fascist!” It’s to demand that the federal government do its job, so that we can have the immigration system that both Americans and immigrants deserve.

    The Borders We Deserve, NYT, 3.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/03/opinion/03douthat.html

Poll Shows Most in U.S. Want Overhaul of Immigration Laws

May 3, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and MEGAN THEE-BRENAN

LOS ANGELES — The overwhelming majority of Americans think the country’s immigration policies need to be seriously overhauled. And despite protests against Arizona’s stringent new immigration enforcement law, a majority of Americans support it, even though they say it may lead to racial profiling.

These are the findings of the latest New York Times/CBS News poll.

With the signing of the Arizona law on April 23 and reports of renewed efforts in Washington to rethink immigration, there has been an uptick in the number of Americans who describe illegal immigration as a serious problem.

But the poll — conducted April 28 through May 2 with 1,079 adults, and with a margin of sampling error of plus or minus three percentage points — suggests that Americans remain deeply divided about what to do.

The public broadly agrees, across party lines, that the United States could be doing more along its border to keep illegal immigrants out. The view was shared by 78 percent of the respondents.

That unity, however, fractures on the question of what to do with illegal immigrants who are already here and the role of states in enforcing immigration law, normally a federal responsibility.

A majority of the people polled, 57 percent, said the federal government should determine the laws addressing illegal immigration. But 51 percent said the Arizona law was “about right” in its approach to the problem. Thirty-six percent said it went too far and 9 percent said it did not go far enough.

The law has recharged the national debate over securing the border and what to do about the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in the country.

The Arizona law gives local police officers broad power to detain people they suspect are in the country illegally and check their legal status. Lawsuits have already been filed on several grounds, including the argument that it will lead to the racial profiling of legal residents and that the state has unconstitutionally intruded on federal authority.

Under a torrent of criticism, the Arizona Legislature and Gov. Jan Brewer made changes to the law on Friday that they say explicitly ban the police from racial profiling and allow officers to inquire about immigration status only of people they stop, detain or arrest in enforcing existing state law. But the new immigration law also now includes civil violations of municipal codes as grounds to check papers, and opponents were not mollified by the changes.

In follow-up interviews, poll respondents who embraced the thrust of the Arizona law still called for a national solution.

“The Arizona law is fine, but the federal government has to step in and come up with something — and they’re not doing it,” said Pat Turkos, 64, a library worker and Republican from Baltimore.

She said: “I don’t think they should be stopped just walking down the street, only if they’re stopped for speeding, for example. I believe everybody has the right to come here, but I think they have to be made legal citizens.”

Although the respondents broadly agreed that the Arizona law would result in racial profiling, overburden local and state law enforcement agencies and decrease the willingness of illegal immigrants to report crimes for fear of deportation, large majorities said it would reduce the number of illegal immigrants in the state, deter illegal border crossings and, to a lesser extent, reduce crime.

Some attitudes about immigration have remained stable among the public. Most still say illegal immigrants weaken the nation’s economy rather than strengthen it, and public opinion remains divided over how the United States should handle illegal immigrants currently in the country.

But American attitudes toward the law and whether illegal immigrants already here should have a path to citizenship differed markedly across regions and parties. Westerners and Northeasterners, for example, are significantly more likely than those in other regions to say the recent law in Arizona goes too far. And Democrats are much more likely than Republicans or independents to support a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants now in the country.

Just 8 percent of Americans said the immigration system needed only minor changes. The vast majority said it needed reworking, including 44 percent who said it needed to be completely rebuilt and 45 percent who said it needed fundamental changes.

Three quarters said that, over all, illegal immigrants were a drain on the economy because they did not all pay taxes but used public services like hospitals and schools. Nearly 2 in 10 said the immigrants strengthened the economy by providing low-cost labor and buying goods and services, a chief argument among many of their advocates.

“I do think the federal government should deal with it, because illegal immigrants don’t pay taxes and don’t contribute to our government,” said Deborah Adams, 53, a Democrat from Ephrata, Pa., and a paramedic who called the Arizona law a “necessary evil.”

“They take jobs from American citizens who need to work and pay into Social Security,” Ms. Adams said.

In fact, many illegal immigrants do pay taxes into the Social Security system, but never see a return on their contributions.

At immigration rallies in several cities on Saturday, demonstrators pressed the case for overhauling immigration law.

So far no bill has been introduced in Congress. President Obama, while supportive of the idea of immigration reform, has questioned whether lawmakers have the appetite for a divisive battle over it after a year of other political fights and in the middle of a campaign.

A delegation of Arizonans opposed to the law, including Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix, plans to meet with Justice Department officials on Tuesday to urge them to step into the brewing legal battle over the law.

On Monday, one of the law’s staunchest advocates, Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County in the Phoenix area, announced that after toying with the idea, he would not run for governor.


Randal C. Archibold reported from Los Angeles, and Megan Thee-Brennan from New York. Marina Stefan contributed reporting from New York

    Poll Shows Most in U.S. Want Overhaul of Immigration Laws, NYT, 3.5.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/04/us/04poll.html

Op-Ed Contributor

Why Arizona Drew a Line

April 29, 2010
The New York Times
By KRIS W. KOBACH

Kansas City, Kan.

ON Friday, Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed a law — SB 1070 — that prohibits the harboring of illegal aliens and makes it a state crime for an alien to commit certain federal immigration crimes. It also requires police officers who, in the course of a traffic stop or other law-enforcement action, come to a “reasonable suspicion” that a person is an illegal alien verify the person’s immigration status with the federal government.

Predictably, groups that favor relaxed enforcement of immigration laws, including the American Civil Liberties Union and the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, insist the law is unconstitutional. Less predictably, President Obama declared it “misguided” and said the Justice Department would take a look.

Presumably, the government lawyers who do so will actually read the law, something its critics don’t seem to have done. The arguments we’ve heard against it either misrepresent its text or are otherwise inaccurate. As someone who helped draft the statute, I will rebut the major criticisms individually:

It is unfair to demand that aliens carry their documents with them. It is true that the Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for an alien to fail to carry certain documents. “Now, suddenly, if you don’t have your papers ... you’re going to be harassed,” the president said. “That’s not the right way to go.” But since 1940, it has been a federal crime for aliens to fail to keep such registration documents with them. The Arizona law simply adds a state penalty to what was already a federal crime. Moreover, as anyone who has traveled abroad knows, other nations have similar documentation requirements.

“Reasonable suspicion” is a meaningless term that will permit police misconduct. Over the past four decades, federal courts have issued hundreds of opinions defining those two words. The Arizona law didn’t invent the concept: Precedents list the factors that can contribute to reasonable suspicion; when several are combined, the “totality of circumstances” that results may create reasonable suspicion that a crime has been committed.

For example, the Arizona law is most likely to come into play after a traffic stop. A police officer pulls a minivan over for speeding. A dozen passengers are crammed in. None has identification. The highway is a known alien-smuggling corridor. The driver is acting evasively. Those factors combine to create reasonable suspicion that the occupants are not in the country legally.

The law will allow police to engage in racial profiling. Actually, Section 2 provides that a law enforcement official “may not solely consider race, color or national origin” in making any stops or determining immigration status. In addition, all normal Fourth Amendment protections against profiling will continue to apply. In fact, the Arizona law actually reduces the likelihood of race-based harassment by compelling police officers to contact the federal government as soon as is practicable when they suspect a person is an illegal alien, as opposed to letting them make arrests on their own assessment.

It is unfair to demand that people carry a driver’s license. Arizona’s law does not require anyone, alien or otherwise, to carry a driver’s license. Rather, it gives any alien with a license a free pass if his immigration status is in doubt. Because Arizona allows only lawful residents to obtain licenses, an officer must presume that someone who produces one is legally in the country.

State governments aren’t allowed to get involved in immigration, which is a federal matter. While it is true that Washington holds primary authority in immigration, the Supreme Court since 1976 has recognized that states may enact laws to discourage illegal immigration without being pre-empted by federal law. As long as Congress hasn’t expressly forbidden the state law in question, the statute doesn’t conflict with federal law and Congress has not displaced all state laws from the field, it is permitted. That’s why Arizona’s 2007 law making it illegal to knowingly employ unauthorized aliens was sustained by the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.

In sum, the Arizona law hardly creates a police state. It takes a measured, reasonable step to give Arizona police officers another tool when they come into contact with illegal aliens during their normal law enforcement duties.

And it’s very necessary: Arizona is the ground zero of illegal immigration. Phoenix is the hub of human smuggling and the kidnapping capital of America, with more than 240 incidents reported in 2008. It’s no surprise that Arizona’s police associations favored the bill, along with 70 percent of Arizonans.

President Obama and the Beltway crowd feel these problems can be taken care of with “comprehensive immigration reform” — meaning amnesty and a few other new laws. But we already have plenty of federal immigration laws on the books, and the typical illegal alien is guilty of breaking many of them. What we need is for the executive branch to enforce the laws that we already have.

Unfortunately, the Obama administration has scaled back work-site enforcement and otherwise shown it does not consider immigration laws to be a high priority. It is any wonder the Arizona Legislature, at the front line of the immigration issue, sees things differently?

 

Kris W. Kobach, a law professor at the University of Missouri at Kansas City, was Attorney General John Ashcroft’s chief adviser on immigration law and border security from 2001 to 2003.

    Why Arizona Drew a Line, NYT, 29.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/opinion/29kobach.html

Welcome to Arizona, Outpost of Contradictions

April 28, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD and JENNIFER STEINHAUER

PHOENIX — Arizona is well accustomed to the derision of its countrymen.

The state resisted adopting Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday years after most other states embraced it. The sheriff in its largest county forces inmates to wear pink underwear, apparently to assault their masculinity. Residents may take guns almost anywhere, but they may not cut down a cactus. The rest of the nation may scoff or grumble, but Arizona, one of the last truly independent Western outposts, carries on.

Now, after passing the nation’s toughest immigration law, one that gives the police broad power to stop people on suspicion of being here illegally, the state finds itself in perhaps the harshest spotlight in a decade.

The law drew not only the threat of a challenge by the Justice Department and a rebuke from the president, but the snickers of late-night comedians. City councils elsewhere have called for a boycott of the resort-driven state; one trade group of immigration lawyers has canceled a conference planned for Scottsdale at a time when the state is broke and desperate for business. Meanwhile, a continuous protest is taking place at the State Capitol.

Bruce D. Merrill, a polling expert here, is tired of picking up his phone. “Usually it is somebody asking me, ‘What the hell is going on in Arizona?’ ” Mr. Merrill said.

But while Arizona may have become a cartoon of intolerance to much of America, the reality is much more complex, and at times contradictory. This state is a center of both law and order and of new age om. Red-meat-loving. Red-rock-climbing.

Arizona is home to some of the toughest prison sentencing laws in the country, and one of the cleanest campaign finance laws, too. Voters overwhelmingly re-elected Janet Napolitano, a Democrat, as governor the same year they returned the conservative senator Jon Kyl to Washington. The current Republican governor signed this law, but is also pushing for a tax increase.

Further, while Arizona may seem on the fringe with its immigration law, the measure mirrors the 1994 battle in California over a voter-approved law that Gov. Pete Wilson signed barring illegal immigrants from getting health care, public education and other services. Like California then, Arizona is taking its own tack instead of waiting on the federal government to change policies.

“The political and emotional landscape is almost identical,” said Dan Schnur, director of the Jesse M. Unruh Institute of Politics at the University of Southern California, who served as an aide to Mr. Wilson. “History doesn’t repeat itself, it just moves east.”

The table was set for the passage of the new law by a confluence of factors, say residents, political scientists and businesspeople in Arizona. Those factors include shifting demographics, an embattled state economy and increased violence in Mexico, as well as the perception that the federal government has failed to act. Arizonans find that particularly irksome, given that Ms. Napolitano is now head of the Department of Homeland Security.

Hispanics make up 30 percent of the population here, up from roughly 25 percent in 2000, according to census data. As the state’s economy, largely dependent on construction and development, has slumped, hostility toward illegal immigrants has increased in recent years. “More people now seem to think Hispanics are taking jobs from Anglos,” said Mr. Merrill, the polling expert.

Further, laws like the immigration statute and another new law requiring political candidates to prove citizenship are generally written by the hard-right lawmakers who dominate the Legislature — with far-left-of-center minority members opposing them — but neither side reflects the relatively centrist political views of most residents.

More than 30 percent of registered voters here are independents, double the proportion in 2000. “People have been leaving both political parties, which leaves the remainders in the party much more ideological,” Mr. Merrill said.

Residents are unnerved by the violence in Mexico and the heavy drug trade and illegal immigrant trafficking in Arizona. Most studies have shown illegal immigrants do not commit crimes in a greater proportion than their share of the population, and Arizona’s violent crime rate has declined in recent years. But in this state any crime tied to illegal immigrants gets notice.

Half of the drugs seized along the United States-Mexico border are confiscated in Arizona, and it is a major hub for human smuggling. Last month, Robert Krentz, 58, a member of a prominent ranching family, was killed on his property 20 miles from the border, and the police said the gunman was probably connected to smuggling.

“People outside of Arizona are not living in this state and don’t understand the issue,” said Mona Stacey, a computer technician from Mesa. “Most of them coming across are mostly good, Catholic families getting over here. But you also have the drug lords and the smugglers. It makes the good guys look bad, and you don’t know who is who.”

Conversations here about the new law tend to begin or end with a reference to Ms. Napolitano, who personified the state’s blended politics. As governor, she backed the posting of National Guard troops on the border, expanded the use of the state police in antismuggling operations, and pressed Washington for an overhaul of immigration law.

When it came to the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, however — a staunch supporter of immigration enforcement and one of the highest profile figures on the issue — she took a largely hands-off approach.

Now, as Homeland Security secretary, she has played up the administration’s devotion of resources to the border, while resisting pressure to put National Guard troops there.

This, too, is an echo of California circa 1994. There, Proposition 187, the measure limiting services for illegal immigrants, was struck down by the courts (a possibility here, too, say legal experts). The Clinton administration responded with Operation Gatekeeper, an effort to strengthen the border in California. It ended up pushing trafficking east, and as a result, Arizona posts the highest number of people arrested for crossing along the 2,000-mile border.

The former director of Operation Gatekeeper has just been appointed President Obama’s Customs and Border Protection commissioner.

With more rallies opposing the law set for Thursday, Sheriff Arpaio has planned another of his controversial sweeps to net illegal immigrants.

“Arizona is the most unpredictable political patch of earth I’ve ever seen,” said Chip Scutari, a former political reporter who now runs a Phoenix public relations firm. “It’s the land of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s tough-as-nails Tent City, and super-liberal Congressman Raul Grijalva calling for a boycott of his own state. That’s Arizona.”

    Welcome to Arizona, Outpost of Contradictions, NYT, 28.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/29/us/29arizona.html

Letters

A Storm Over Arizona and Immigrants

April 27, 2010
The New York Times

To the Editor:

Re “Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration” (front page, April 24):

Arizona’s new law giving local law enforcement the power to stop and arrest anybody suspected of being in the country illegally is a direct, frustrated response to a broken system.

The State Legislature has effectively changed the political debate on immigration, making it nastier and meaner. Now it is personal.

“Arrest them all and send them home” seems to be the law’s mantra.

The law will encourage national discourse on illegal immigration, which on the surface seems to be a positive outcome, forcing the federal government to listen and take action.

But it is naïve to believe that specific groups will not be targeted in the enforcement of the new law. What constitutes probable cause to detain and question someone about his or her legal status? Would speaking Chicano English or having an accent render someone a “suspected illegal alien”? If so, our country’s commitment to diversity is at stake.

Mauricio Pantoja
Claremont, Calif., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

It is difficult for me to understand how the same political party that considers it to be anti-American meddling when the government gets involved in providing a badly needed service like health care has now pressured the governor of Arizona into signing a law that requires people (or some people) to carry identity papers.

Whenever I am abroad, I find the idea that the police can stop me at any time and demand identity papers to be very oppressive, and I am reminded to be grateful for our own freedom from such laws. I can’t believe we could let this freedom slip away so lightly.

Andrea Gara
Mount Kisco, N.Y., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

As a 20-year resident of Arizona, I am appalled and embarrassed by the new anti-immigrant law. It is the latest in a series of Arizona laws that have historical parallels with measures enacted by other societies to make life as difficult as possible for despised minorities.

As I looked at my Arizona license plate today, it occurred to me that “Arizona: The Grand Canyon State” no longer communicates what the state is about. “Arizona: The Hate State” says it better.

Len Borucki
Mesa, Ariz., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

“Come Back, John McCain” (editorial, April 23) says that Arizona’s new immigration enforcement law plays “the rancid, dangerous game of portraying Latinos as criminals.” Actually, the bill is colorblind, applying to all illegal aliens.

And, as Title 8, Section 1325(a) of the United States Code tells us, entry without inspection is a misdemeanor the first time (six months maximum incarceration) and a felony if repeated (two years). In short, illegal immigration is a crime.

Paul Nachman
Bozeman, Mont., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

Of course Arizona’s governor, Jan Brewer, signed the state’s anti-immigrant bill (front page, April 24). Why? The majority of Arizona residents wanted her to. Immigrants, undocumented and legal, are blamed for crime, unemployment, crowded emergency rooms, pet overpopulation and every other social ill that comes to mind.

It reminds me of Germany in the 1930s and how Jews were held culpable for Europe’s problems. Arizona’s Legislature shamelessly panders to the radical fringe in our state and snickers at those of us who seek common ground.

For the first time since moving here from New York City in 1997, I am ashamed to call myself an Arizonan.

Debra J. White
Tempe, Ariz., April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

When my husband and I adopted our Colombian-born daughter as a newborn in 1989 (naturalized as an American citizen in 1991), we never imagined that on the eve of her turning 21 we would ever caution her against travel to any American state. How could we now not warn her off Arizona?

Absent foresight to carry her American passport at all times, she might be detained and arrested on the basis of her appearance alone, despite Gov. Jan Brewer’s disingenuous assurances to the contrary. I am ashamed that any state governor has threatened the safety and well-being of our daughter, however indirectly, and hope that national immigration reform assumes the immediate priority it deserves.

Susan R. Bryan-Brown
New York, April 24, 2010

•

To the Editor:

The simple question is, Will the law be equally applied? Brewer, hmm, sounds Canadian, maybe British. Would you please produce proof of citizenship, ma’am? (said in the most courteous law-enforcement tone of voice).

Paul Turpin
Stockton, Calif., April 25, 2010

    A Storm Over Arizona and Immigrants, NYT, 27.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/opinion/l27arizona.html

Growing Split in Arizona Over Immigration

April 25, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

MESA, Ariz. — They stood a few miles from each other, but as far apart as heat and cold.

Clutching a copy of a Spanish-language article on the tough new law making it a state crime for illegal immigrants to be in Arizona and requiring those suspected of being violators to show proof of legal status, Eric Ramirez, 29, still waited on a corner for work. He nervously kept watch for the police and wondered what his future held.

“We were already afraid, and I was thinking of leaving for California,” Mr. Ramirez said as he waited on the corner in a heavily Latino enclave already drained of people by the recession and the fear of police harassment. “We shop in their stores, we clean their yards, but they want us out and the police will be on us.”

In a nearby neighborhood, Ron White, 52, said he felt a sense of relief that something was finally being done about “the illegals” — whom he blames for ills like congregating on the streets, breaking into homes in his neighborhood, draining tax dollars and taking jobs from Americans.

“I sure hope it does have an effect,” Mr. White said of the new law as he packed his car with groceries. “I wouldn’t want to show proof of citizenship, but I also don’t feel it is racial profiling. You are going to look different if you are an alien, and cops know.”

Immigration has always polarized residents of Arizona, a major gateway for illegal immigrants. But the new law signed by Gov. Jan Brewer on Friday has widened the chasm in a way few here can remember.

The law — barring expected legal challenges before it takes effect this summer — also gives the local police broad powers to check documentation “when practicable” of anyone they reasonably suspect is an illegal immigrant.

It has already shaken up politics in the state, and it sets the stage for a rematch on a national debate between the punitive and the practical solutions to the nation’s illegal immigration issue.

But the arguments are less abstract in Arizona, home to an estimated 450,000 illegal immigrants and to the busiest stretch of illegal crossings along the Mexican border.

While demonstrators massed at the Capitol, including a few thousand Sunday afternoon denouncing the law as unconstitutional and an open invitation for racial profiling, the undercurrents that gave rise to the bill pushed as strong as ever.

The sponsor of the bill, a state senator and retired sheriff’s deputy whose passion is to drive out the state’s illegal immigrants and deter more from coming, lives here in Mesa, a Phoenix suburb that is the state’s third-largest city.

It has landed in the cauldron of debate, with a former police chief publicly warring with the county sheriff over the merits of his “crime suppression” sweeps a couple of years ago that focused on illegal immigrants.

Mesa has grown blisteringly fast in the last few decades, to about 450,000 residents from 63,000 in 1970, with Southern California-style walled subdivisions and gated communities blanketing former farmland.

The economy soared until recently, but the blitz of development proved unsettling to some.

Illegal immigrants flowed in, too, to tend the yards, fix the roofs and commit their share of crimes, though police officials have said at no greater rate than the rest of the population.

About a fifth of the residents are Hispanic. But they live mainly in enclaves like Reed Park, a stretch of boxy apartment buildings dotted with “for rent” signs, bodegas blaring Mexican music and older homes.

This is Rosalia Miñon’s Mesa, and she fears it. Even before the new law, she and her fellow illegal immigrant neighbors did not venture out often for fear of being stopped by the police or immigration agents.

Ms. Miñon is struggling to make ends meet, because more employers than ever are asking for Social Security cards and checking their validity under a heretofore rarely enforced 2007 state law that provides penalties for employers who do not check. She prays every morning as she steps out the door, “because we go out and we do not know if we are coming back.”

Alfredo Hernández-García, 22, who is not a legal resident but is married to a woman who is, already lies low, fearing he will be deported and separated from his wife, who will soon give birth.

“This is going to tear apart families, and what good does that do?” he said, relaxing at an apartment building near a park he rarely ventures into. “What is the government here going to do if we all go and it affects the economy?”

Like others, Mr. Hernández-García said the wait for legal authorization to immigrate from Mexico runs several years, sometimes even a decade or more.

“And all the jobs are here,” he said. “There is nothing in Mexico, and now it is so violent. Who wants to go back?”

The businesses catering to Latinos are suffering. At Mi Amigos, a bodega, the manager, Rigoberto Magaña, glanced at the emptiness of the store at midday and said it was typical.

“Our business is way, way down, and so is everybody else’s here,” Mr. Magaña said. “Nobody comes out.”

Just a short drive away, a subdivision encircles a golf course.

This is Kent Lowis’s Mesa, and he fears for it.

“This law might kick some of these immigrants out,” said Mr. Lowis, 76, a retiree who has lived here for more than 30 years and does not like all the change. “They vandalize the golf course, throwing flags in the ponds. Burglaries. There are too many immigrants. I get tired of seeing all these people standing on the corner.”

Such sentiments propelled the bill through the Republican-controlled Legislature, with supporters listing well-publicized cases in which illegal immigrants committed rapes and shot and killed police officers.

The sponsor, State Senator Russell K. Pearce, a Republican, said it would give the police a tool to weed out criminals before they act and help foster a climate of toughness that would discourage more immigrants from coming.

Governor Brewer, a Republican, said as she signed the bill into law on Friday that she believed that a majority of Arizonans supported it, though there is no independent assessment of the assertion. A poll released two days before said that a majority of likely voters in Arizona supported the bill, but it used an automated telephone query that some pollsters find questionable and it was conducted before the heavy onslaught of news media coverage.

No Democrats in the Legislature supported the bill, and only one Republican voted against it.

While those opposed to the law are making the most noise, the quiet support can be found here, though some people are uneasy about being cast as anti-Hispanic and several people interviewed declined to be named out of concern they would be thought of as prejudiced.

“I don’t want people to be afraid to come,” said Pam Sutherland, who is a window manufacturer and a fan of the crime sweeps but is also concerned about the state’s image. “I just want them to do it legally.”

For many, though, support for the law comes down to a way to vent frustration that, in their view, the federal government has not done enough to control immigration — particularly in a state on the border where reports of drug busts, houses overcrowded with illegal immigrants and people dying in the desert trying to get here fill the airwaves.

“We can see Washington isn’t going to do anything,” Mr. White said. “So why not Arizona? I think Arizona is the one state with the bigger problem with it.”

    Growing Split in Arizona Over Immigration, NYT, 25.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/26/us/26immig.html

In Wake of Immigration Law, Calls for an Economic Boycott of Arizona

April 26, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

A spreading call for an economic boycott of Arizona after its adoption of a tough immigration law that opponents consider racially discriminatory worried business leaders on Monday and angered the governor.

Several immigrant advocates and civil rights groups, joined by members of the San Francisco government, said the state should pay economic consequences for the new law, which gives the police broad power to detain people they reasonably suspect are illegal immigrants and arrest them on state charges if they do not have legal status.

Critics say the law will lead to widespread ethnic and racial profiling and will be used to harass legal residents and Latino citizens.

La Opinión, the nation’s largest Spanish-language newspaper, urged a boycott in an editorial Monday, as did the Rev. Al Sharpton, and calls for such action spread to social media sites. The San Francisco city attorney and members of the Board of Supervisors said they would propose that the city not do business with the state.

They followed the lead of Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, Democrat of Arizona, who had urged conventions to skip the state, though other Democrats who oppose the law, including Mayor Phil Gordon of Phoenix, pleaded for people not to punish the entire state.

Tourism and convention managers, struggling to rebound from the recession, said it was too soon to tell if the effort would have an impact, but some businesses said people were turning away from the state.

At the Arizona Inn in Tucson, the manager, Will Conroy, said that over the weekend 12 customers canceled reservations or said they would not return to the state because of the law.

“This is a very scary situation that the police can now just come up to you for no reason and ask for papers,” Joy Mann, a prospective guest who had previously stayed at the inn, wrote him in an e-mail message. “My son is a construction worker and is very suntanned. I cannot ask him to join us there now, as I would fear for him.”

Tourism officials said such accounts were not widespread, but they were concerned that the rancor was tarnishing the state’s image and were mindful of the boycott in the 1980s that led to Arizona’s officially observing Martin Luther King’s Birthday after initially rejecting it as a holiday.

“Arizona tourism is currently in a very fragile state of recovery, and the negative perceptions surrounding this legislation are tarnishing Arizona’s image and could easily have a devastating effect on visitation to our state,” the Valley Hotel and Resort Association in Phoenix said in a statement.

Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, signed the bill on Friday, calling it an important step toward public safety that would help control immigration and give the police a tool to root out criminals.

She criticized opponents for not offering more solutions to problems related to illegal immigration and called the idea of a boycott “disappointing and unfortunate” at a time when the state is reeling from the recession and suffering from border-related crime that “continues to harm our economy and stifle trade.”

    In Wake of Immigration Law, Calls for an Economic Boycott of Arizona, NYT, 26.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/us/27arizona.html

Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration

April 23, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PHOENIX — Gov. Jan Brewer of Arizona signed the nation’s toughest bill on illegal immigration into law on Friday. Its aim is to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants.

The move unleashed immediate protests and reignited the divisive battle over immigration reform nationally.

Even before she signed the bill at an afternoon news conference here, President Obama strongly criticized it.

Speaking at a naturalization ceremony for 24 active-duty service members in the Rose Garden, he called for a federal overhaul of immigration laws, which Congressional leaders signaled they were preparing to take up soon, to avoid “irresponsibility by others.”

The Arizona law, he added, threatened “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

The law, which proponents and critics alike said was the broadest and strictest immigration measure in generations, would make the failure to carry immigration documents a crime and give the police broad power to detain anyone suspected of being in the country illegally. Opponents have called it an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.

The political debate leading up to Ms. Brewer’s decision, and Mr. Obama’s criticism of the law — presidents very rarely weigh in on state legislation — underscored the power of the immigration debate in states along the Mexican border. It presaged the polarizing arguments that await the president and Congress as they take up the issue nationally.

Mexico’s Foreign Ministry said in a statement that it was worried about the rights of its citizens and relations with Arizona. Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles said the authorities’ ability to demand documents was like “Nazism.”

As hundreds of demonstrators massed, mostly peacefully, at the capitol plaza, the governor, speaking at a state building a few miles away, said the law “represents another tool for our state to use as we work to solve a crisis we did not create and the federal government has refused to fix.”

The law was to take effect 90 days after the legislative session ends, meaning by August. Court challenges were expected immediately.

Hispanics, in particular, who were not long ago courted by the Republican Party as a swing voting bloc, railed against the law as a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling. “Governor Brewer caved to the radical fringe,” a statement by the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund said, predicting that the law would create “a spiral of pervasive fear, community distrust, increased crime and costly litigation, with nationwide repercussions.”

While police demands of documents are common on subways, highways and in public places in some countries, including France, Arizona is the first state to demand that immigrants meet federal requirements to carry identity documents legitimizing their presence on American soil.

Ms. Brewer acknowledged critics’ concerns, saying she would work to ensure that the police have proper training to carry out the law. But she sided with arguments by the law’s sponsors that it provides an indispensable tool for the police in a border state that is a leading magnet of illegal immigration. She said racial profiling would not be tolerated, adding, “We have to trust our law enforcement.”

Ms. Brewer and other elected leaders have come under intense political pressure here, made worse by the killing of a rancher in southern Arizona by a suspected smuggler a couple of weeks before the State Legislature voted on the bill. His death was invoked Thursday by Ms. Brewer herself, as she announced a plan urging the federal government to post National Guard troops at the border.

President George W. Bush had attempted comprehensive reform but failed when his own party split over the issue. Once again, Republicans facing primary challenges from the right, including Ms. Brewer and Senator John McCain, have come under tremendous pressure to support the Arizona law, known as SB 1070.

Mr. McCain, locked in a primary with a challenger campaigning on immigration, only came out in support of the law hours before the State Senate passed it Monday afternoon.

Governor Brewer, even after the Senate passed the bill, had been silent on whether she would sign it. Though she was widely expected to, given her primary challenge, she refused to state her position even at a dinner on Thursday for a Hispanic social service organization, Chicanos Por La Causa, where several audience members called out “Veto!”

Among other things, the Arizona measure is an extraordinary rebuke to former Gov. Janet Napolitano, who had vetoed similar legislation repeatedly as a Democratic governor of the state before being appointed Homeland Security secretary by Mr. Obama.

The law opens a deep fissure in Arizona, with a majority of the thousands of callers to the governor’s office urging her to reject it.

In the days leading up to Ms. Brewer’s decision, Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat, called for a convention boycott of his state.

The bill, sponsored by Russell Pearce, a state senator and a firebrand on immigration issues, has several provisions.

It requires police officers, “when practicable,” to detain people they reasonably suspect are in the country without authorization and to verify their status with federal officials, unless doing so would hinder an investigation or emergency medical treatment.

It also makes it a state crime — a misdemeanor — to not carry immigration papers. In addition, it allows people to sue local government or agencies if they believe federal or state immigration law is not being enforced.

States across the country have proposed or enacted hundreds of bills addressing immigration since 2007, the last time a federal effort to reform immigration law collapsed. Last year, there were a record number of laws enacted (222) and resolutions (131) in 48 states, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

The prospect of plunging into a national immigration debate is being increasingly talked about on Capitol Hill, spurred in part by recent statements by Senator Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, the majority leader, that he intends to bring legislation to the Senate floor after Memorial Day.

But while an immigration debate could help energize Hispanic voters and provide political benefits to embattled Democrats seeking re-election in November — like Mr. Reid — it could also energize conservative voters.

It could also take time from other Democratic priorities, including an energy measure that Speaker Nancy Pelosi has described as her flagship issue.

Mr. Reid declined Thursday to say that immigration would take precedence over an energy measure. But he called it an imperative: “The system is broken,” he said.

Ms. Pelosi and Representative Steny H. Hoyer, Democrat of Maryland and the majority leader, have said that the House would be willing to take up immigration policy only if the Senate produces a bill first.


Helene Cooper and Carl Hulse contributed reporting from Washington.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: April 23, 2010

A earlier version of this article misspelled the last name of the Arizona state senator who sponsored several provisions of the bill. He is Russell Pearce, not Pierce.

    Arizona Enacts Stringent Law on Immigration, NYT, 23.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/24/us/politics/24immig.html

Guilty Verdict in Long Island Race Killing

April 19, 2010
The New York Times
By MANNY FERNANDEZ

RIVERHEAD, N.Y. — The Long Island teenager accused of stabbing and killing an Ecuadorean immigrant in a racially motivated attack was convicted on Monday of manslaughter as a hate crime, a less serious crime than the initial murder charge — saving him from spending the rest of his life behind bars.

Seventeen months after the stabbing in 2008 and 24 miles from the parking lot in Patchogue where the victim left a 370-foot trail of blood, the jury forewoman rose in State Supreme Court here to read the verdict, ending four days of deliberations. The teenager, Jeffrey Conroy, was found guilty of first-degree manslaughter as a hate crime and gang assault in connection with the death of the immigrant, Marcelo Lucero, and guilty of attempted assaults on three other Hispanic men. He was acquitted of the most serious of the 20 charges against him, second-degree murder as a hate crime.

On the manslaughter charge alone, Mr. Conroy, 19, faces a minimum of eight years and a maximum of 25 years when he is sentenced on May 26. As the verdict was read, the courtroom was virtually silent. When Mr. Conroy sat down, he bowed his head for a few moments.

Mr. Lucero’s death had become a symbol of the anti-Hispanic harassment and assaults that Latinos on eastern Long Island said they had been victims of for years, and it helped spark an ongoing federal investigation into the Suffolk County Police Department’s handling of reports of racially motivated attacks against Hispanics. The Lucero family and their supporters, including a representative of the Ecuadorean government’s National Department of the Migrants, had expressed confidence in recent days that the prosecution had indeed proven that Mr. Conroy was guilty of murder.

The verdict came 11 days after Mr. Conroy took the stand to proclaim his innocence and blame the stabbing on another teenager, the most dramatic and puzzling moment in a trial that began nearly seven weeks ago with jury selection on March 2. Mr. Conroy said that moments after the stabbing, the other teenager, Christopher Overton, told him that he was the one who stabbed Mr. Lucero and had asked him to take the knife.

At the time, Mr. Overton was out on bail awaiting sentencing on a felony conviction for a 2007 home-invasion burglary in which the homeowner was shot and killed. Mr. Conroy said Mr. Overton told him, “I’ll be screwed if I get caught.”

Mr. Conroy testified that his five-page written confession to the police, in which he admitted stabbing Mr. Lucero as part of an attack he carried out with six friends, was a lie. He said in court that he lied to protect Mr. Overton, whom he had met for the first time earlier that evening, and because he did not realize at the time he was being questioned by the police that Mr. Lucero had died.

The 12-member jury was made up of seven men and five women. One was black, one was Hispanic and the rest were white.

The jury’s manslaughter verdict meant that they had agreed with one of the arguments made by Mr. Conroy’s lawyer – that his client did not intend to kill Mr. Lucero – and discounted the prosecution’s allegation that Mr. Conroy stabbed him in the chest seeking not to injure but to kill. To convict Mr. Conroy of second-degree murder, the jury had to have found that he intended to kill Mr. Lucero, and to convict on first-degree manslaughter, they needed to find that Mr. Conroy caused Mr. Lucero’s death while intending to cause only serious physical injury, not death.

Mr. Lucero was stabbed once in the chest, and the knife did not penetrate the chest cavity, did not strike any major organs and ran parallel to the skin, cutting his right axillary artery and an adjacent large vein.

In his closing argument, Mr. Conroy’s lawyer, William Keahon, told the jury that if Mr. Conroy had intended to kill Mr. Lucero, then there should have been multiple stab wounds, and Mr. Lucero would not have been allowed to walk away as the altercation ended, as he did, though the lead detective in the case described it earlier in the trial not as walking but as staggering away. In her summation, the Suffolk County assistant district attorney prosecuting the case, Megan O’Donnell, said that Mr. Conroy’s intent to kill was evident, because the entire blade went into Mr. Lucero’s chest area and was stopped only by the handle, and because the knife went in, came partially out and went back in, in two separate thrusts.

Prosecutors said Mr. Lucero, a 37-year-old worker at a dry cleaning shop from Gualaceo, Ecuador, was surrounded and attacked by Mr. Conroy and six other teenagers in a parking lot of the Long Island Rail Road train station in Patchogue shortly before midnight on Nov. 8, 2008. Mr. Lucero and his friend were walking to another friend’s house. Mr. Conroy and his six friends were out walking, too, on the hunt, prosecutors said, for Hispanic men to beat up, a frequent activity that they referred to as “Mexican hopping” and “beaner hopping.”

Mr. Lucero took off his belt and began swinging it after one of the seven teenagers punched him in the face. Mr. Conroy said in his written statement to the police that the belt struck him on the head, and, as Ms. O’Donnell said, Mr. Conroy lunged at Mr. Lucero with a knife because he was angry and because Mr. Lucero had the audacity to fight back. Mr. Lucero died of a stab wound to the chest about an hour later.

    Guilty Verdict in Long Island Race Killing, NYT, 19.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/20/nyregion/20patchogue.html

White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S.

April 18, 2010
The New York Times
By ANDREA ELLIOTT

When President Obama took the stage in Cairo last June, promising a new relationship with the Islamic world, Muslims in America wondered only half-jokingly whether the overture included them. After all, Mr. Obama had kept his distance during the campaign, never visiting an American mosque and describing the false claim that he was Muslim as a “smear” on his Web site.

Nearly a year later, Mr. Obama has yet to set foot in an American mosque. And he still has not met with Muslim and Arab-American leaders. But less publicly, his administration has reached out to this politically isolated constituency in a sustained and widening effort that has left even skeptics surprised.

Muslim and Arab-American advocates have participated in policy discussions and received briefings from top White House aides and other officials on health care legislation, foreign policy, the economy, immigration and national security. They have met privately with a senior White House adviser, Valerie Jarrett, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano and Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. to discuss civil liberties concerns and counterterrorism strategy.

The impact of this continuing dialogue is difficult to measure, but White House officials cited several recent government actions that were influenced, in part, by the discussions. The meeting with Ms. Napolitano was among many factors that contributed to the government’s decision this month to end a policy subjecting passengers from 14 countries, most of them Muslim, to additional scrutiny at airports, the officials said.

That emergency directive, enacted after a failed Dec. 25 bombing plot, has been replaced with a new set of intelligence-based protocols that law enforcement officials consider more effective.

Also this month, Tariq Ramadan, a prominent Muslim academic, visited the United States for the first time in six years after Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton reversed a decision by the Bush administration, which had barred Mr. Ramadan from entering the country, initially citing the U.S.A. Patriot Act. Mrs. Clinton also cleared the way for another well-known Muslim professor, Adam Habib, who had been denied entry under similar circumstances.

Arab-American and Muslim leaders said they had yet to see substantive changes on a variety of issues, including what they describe as excessive airport screening, policies that have chilled Muslim charitable giving and invasive F.B.I. surveillance guidelines. But they are encouraged by the extent of their consultation by the White House and governmental agencies.

“For the first time in eight years, we have the opportunity to meet, engage, discuss, disagree, but have an impact on policy,” said James Zogby, president of the Arab American Institute in Washington. “We’re being made to feel a part of that process and that there is somebody listening.”

In the post-9/11 era, Muslims and Arab-Americans have posed something of a conundrum for the government: they are seen as a political liability but also, increasingly, as an important partner in countering the threat of homegrown terrorism. Under President George W. Bush, leaders of these groups met with government representatives from time to time, but said they had limited interaction with senior officials. While Mr. Obama has yet to hold the kind of high-profile meeting that Muslims and Arab-Americans seek, there is a consensus among his policymakers that engagement is no longer optional.

The administration’s approach has been understated. Many meetings have been private; others were publicized only after the fact. A visit to New York University in February by John O. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s chief counterterrorism adviser, drew little news coverage, but caused a stir among Muslims around the country. Speaking to Muslim students, activists and others, Mr. Brennan acknowledged many of their grievances, including “surveillance that has been excessive,” “overinclusive no-fly lists” and “an unhelpful atmosphere around many Muslim charities.”

“These are challenges we face together as Americans,” said Mr. Brennan, who momentarily showed off his Arabic to hearty applause. He and other officials have made a point of disassociating Islam from terrorism in public comments, using the phrase “violent extremism” in place of words like “jihad” and “Islamic terrorism.”

While the administration’s solicitation of Muslims and Arab-Americans has drawn little fanfare, it has not escaped criticism. A small but vocal group of research analysts, bloggers and others complain that the government is reaching out to Muslim leaders and organizations with an Islamist agenda or ties to extremist groups abroad.

They point out that Ms. Jarrett gave the keynote address at the annual convention for the Islamic Society of North America. The group was listed as an unindicted co-conspirator in a federal case against the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development, a Texas-based charity whose leaders were convicted in 2008 of funneling money to Hamas. The society denies any links to terrorism.

“I think dialogue is good, but it has to be with genuine moderates,” said Steven Emerson, a terrorism analyst who advises government officials. “These are the wrong groups to legitimize.” Mr. Emerson and others have also objected to the political appointments of several American Muslims, including Rashad Hussain.

In February, the president chose Mr. Hussain, a 31-year-old White House lawyer, to become the United States’ special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. The position, a kind of ambassador at large to Muslim countries, was created by Mr. Bush. In a video address, Mr. Obama highlighted Mr. Hussain’s status as a “close and trusted member of my White House staff” and “a hafiz,” a person who has memorized the Koran.

Within days of the announcement, news reports surfaced about comments Mr. Hussain had made on a panel in 2004, while he was a student at Yale Law School, in which he referred to several domestic terrorism prosecutions as “politically motivated.” Among the cases he criticized was that of Sami Al-Arian, a former computer-science professor in Florida who pleaded guilty to aiding members of a Palestinian terrorist group.

At first, the White House said Mr. Hussain did not recall making the comments, which had been removed from the Web version of a 2004 article published by a small Washington magazine. When Politico obtained a recording of the panel, Mr. Hussain acknowledged criticizing the prosecutions but said he believed the magazine quoted him inaccurately, prompting him to ask its editor to remove the comments. On Feb. 22, The Washington Examiner ran an editorial with the headline “Obama Selects a Voice of Radical Islam.”

Muslim leaders watched carefully as the story migrated to Fox News. They had grown accustomed to close scrutiny, many said in interviews, but were nonetheless surprised. In 2008, Mr. Hussain had co-authored a paper for the Brookings Institution arguing that the government should use the peaceful teachings of Islam to fight terrorism.

“Rashad Hussain is about as squeaky clean as you get,” said Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who is Muslim. Mr. Ellison and others wondered whether the administration would buckle under the pressure and were relieved when the White House press secretary, Robert Gibbs, defended Mr. Hussain.

“The fact that the president and the administration have appointed Muslims to positions and have stood by them when they’ve been attacked is the best we can hope for,” said Ingrid Mattson, president of the Islamic Society of North America.

It was notably different during Mr. Obama’s run for office. In June 2008, volunteers of his campaign barred two Muslim women in headscarves from appearing behind Mr. Obama at a rally in Detroit, eliciting widespread criticism. The campaign promptly recruited Mazen Asbahi, a 36-year-old corporate lawyer and popular Muslim activist from Chicago, to become its liaison to Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Bloggers began researching Mr. Asbahi’s background. For a brief time in 2000, he had sat on the board of an Islamic investment fund, along with Sheikh Jamal Said, a Chicago imam who was later named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land case. Mr. Asbahi said in an interview that he had left the board after three weeks because he wanted no association with the imam.

Shortly after his appointment to the Obama campaign, Mr. Asbahi said, a Wall Street Journal reporter began asking questions about his connection to the imam. Campaign officials became concerned that news coverage would give critics ammunition to link the imam to Mr. Obama, Mr. Asbahi recalled. On their recommendation, Mr. Asbahi agreed to resign from the campaign, he said.

He is still unsettled by the power of his detractors. “To be in the midst of this campaign of change and hope and to have it stripped away over nothing,” he said. “It hurts.”

From the moment Mr. Obama took office, he seemed eager to change the tenor of America’s relationship with Muslims worldwide. He gave his first interview to Al Arabiya, the Arabic-language television station based in Dubai. Muslims cautiously welcomed his ban on torture and his pledge to close Guantánamo within a year.

In his Cairo address, he laid out his vision for “a new beginning” with Muslims: while America would continue to fight terrorism, he said, terrorism would no longer define America’s approach to Muslims.

Back at home, Muslim and Arab-American leaders remained skeptical. But they took note when, a few weeks later, Mohamed Magid, a prominent imam from Sterling, Va., and Rami Nashashibi, a Muslim activist from Chicago, joined the president at a White-House meeting about fatherhood. Also that month, Dr. Faisal Qazi, a board member of American Muslim Health Professionals, began meeting with administration officials to discuss health care reform.

The invitations were aimed at expanding the government’s relationship with Muslims and Arab-Americans to areas beyond security, said Mr. Hussain, the White House’s special envoy. Mr. Hussain began advising the president on issues related to Islam after joining the White House counsel’s office in January 2009. He helped draft Mr. Obama’s Cairo speech and accompanied him on the trip. “The president realizes that you cannot engage one-fourth of the world’s population based on the erroneous beliefs of a fringe few,” Mr. Hussain said.

Other government offices followed the lead of the White House. In October, Commerce Secretary Gary Locke met with Arab-Americans and Muslims in Dearborn, Mich., to discuss challenges facing small-business owners. Also last fall, Farah Pandith was sworn in as the State Department’s first special representative to Muslim communities. While Ms. Pandith works mostly with Muslims abroad, she said she had also consulted with American Muslims because Mrs. Clinton believes “they can add value overseas.”

Despite this, American actions abroad — including civilian deaths from drone strikes in Pakistan and the failure to close Guantánamo — have drawn the anger of Muslims and Arab-Americans.

Even though their involvement with the administration has broadened, they remain most concerned about security-related policies. In January, when the Department of Homeland Security hosted a two-day meeting with Muslim, Arab-American, South Asian and Sikh leaders, the group expressed concern about the emergency directive subjecting passengers from a group of Muslim countries to additional screening.

Farhana Khera, executive director of Muslim Advocates, pointed out that the policy would never have caught the attempted shoe bomber Richard Reid, who is British. “It almost sends the signal that the government is going to treat nationals of powerless countries differently from countries that are powerful,” Ms. Khera recalled saying as community leaders around the table nodded their heads.

Ms. Napolitano, who sat with the group for more than an hour, committed to meeting with them more frequently. Ms. Khera said she left feeling somewhat hopeful.

“I think our message is finally starting to get through,” she said.

    White House Quietly Courts Muslims in U.S., NYT, 18.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/19/us/politics/19muslim.html

Immigrants in Work Force: Study Belies Image

April 15, 2010
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

ST. LOUIS — After a career as a corporate executive with her name in brass on the office door, Amparo Kollman-Moore, an immigrant from Colombia, likes to drive a Jaguar and shop at Saks. “It was a good life,” she said, “a really good ride.”

As a member of this city’s economic elite, Ms. Kollman-Moore is not unusual among immigrants who live in St. Louis. According to a new analysis of census data, more than half of the working immigrants in this metropolitan area hold higher-paying white-collar jobs — as professionals, technicians or administrators — rather than lower-paying blue-collar and service jobs.

Among American cities, St. Louis is not an exception, the data show. In 14 of the 25 largest metropolitan areas, including Boston, New York and San Francisco, more immigrants are employed in white-collar occupations than in lower-wage work like construction, manufacturing or cleaning.

The data belie a common perception in the nation’s hard-fought debate over immigration — articulated by lawmakers, pundits and advocates on all sides of the issue — that the surge in immigration in the last two decades has overwhelmed the United States with low-wage foreign laborers.

Over all, the analysis showed, the 25 million immigrants who live in the country’s largest metropolitan areas (about two-thirds of all immigrants in the country) are nearly evenly distributed across the job and income spectrum.

“The United States is getting a more varied and economically important flow of immigrants than the public seems to realize,” said David Dyssegaard Kallick, director for immigration research at the Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan group in New York that conducted the data analysis for The New York Times.

The findings are significant because Americans’ views of immigration are based largely on the work immigrants do, new research shows.

“Americans, whether they are rich or poor, are much more in favor of high-skilled immigrants,” said Jens Hainmueller, a political scientist at M.I.T. and co-author of a survey of attitudes toward immigration with Michael J. Hiscox, professor of government at Harvard. The survey of 1,600 adults, which examined the reasons for anti-immigration sentiment in the United States, was published in February in American Political Science Review, a peer-reviewed journal.

Americans are inclined to welcome upper-tier immigrants — like Ms. Kollman-Moore — believing they contribute to economic growth without burdening public services, the study found. More than 60 percent of Americans are opposed to allowing more low-skilled foreign laborers, regarding them as more likely to be a drag on the economy.

Those kinds of views, in turn, have informed recent efforts by Congress to remake the immigration system. A measure unveiled last month by Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, and Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, aims to reshape the legal system to give priority to high-skilled, high-earning immigrants, offering narrower channels for low-wage workers. (A bill in 2007 by the Bush administration tilted even more sharply toward upper-tier immigrants; it failed in Congress.)

Yet while visa bottlenecks persist for high-skilled immigrants, on the whole, the census data show, the current system has brought a range of foreign workers across skill and income levels. The analysis suggests, moreover, that the immigrants played a central role in the cycle of the economic growth of cities over the last two decades.

Cities with thriving immigrant populations — with high-earning and lower-wage workers — tended to be those that prospered the most.

“Economic growth in urban areas has been clearly connected with an increase in immigrants’ share of the local labor force,” Mr. Kallick said.

Surprisingly, the analysis showed, the growing cities were not the ones, like St. Louis, that drew primarily high-earning foreigners. In fact, the St. Louis area had one of the slowest growing economies.

Rather, the fastest economic growth between 1990 and 2008 was in cities like Atlanta, Denver and Phoenix that received large influxes of immigrants with a mix of occupations — including many in lower-paid service and blue-collar jobs.

In metropolitan Denver, where the economy doubled between 1990 and 2008, 63 percent of immigrants worked in jobs on the lower end of the pay scale.

Denver “did a great job of attracting people from other places in the world,” said Rich Jones, director of policy and research at the Bell Policy Center, a nonpartisan group in that city that focuses on the impact of economic and fiscal policies in Colorado. “They are coming with a variety of skills,” Mr. Jones said. “They created demand for goods, services and housing that began a dynamic.”

The figures on jobs and earnings of immigrants in American cities are based on an analysis by the Fiscal Policy Institute of census data for the 25 largest metropolitan areas from 1990 to 2008. The data from 2008 are the most current in-depth census statistics on immigrants’ places of residence and earnings; they also include the first year of the severe recession. The analysis includes legal and illegal immigrants and naturalized citizens.

St. Louis is a good vantage point to observe the census analysis play out on the ground — both in the past and, possibly, the future.

Here, a pattern of stalled growth and low immigration prevailed for decades. But more recently a new pattern is emerging: even in the recession, some corners of the metropolitan area are sputtering to life, and new immigrants with a mix of skills are playing a conspicuous part.

“If you look at what feeds the core of many American cities, it’s the arrival of the immigrant groups,” said Anna Crosslin, president of the International Institute of St. Louis, a refugee resettlement and immigrant aid agency here. “Then one generation moves out, and they’re replaced by another generation. We didn’t have that here in St. Louis.”

In its heyday as a commerce hub in the 1950s, St. Louis was one of the nation’s premier cities. Since then, business has stagnated, the population of the city proper declined by more than half, and immigration to the area has been slow. Today, in the St. Louis metropolitan area, only 111,000 residents are foreign-born, out of 2.3 million total, according to the census data.

Many immigrants who were drawn here were doctors, researchers and business executives, attracted by the city’s corporate headquarters, universities and medical centers.

Ms. Kollman-Moore, 60, came to St. Louis in the 1970s and rose through the ranks at Mallinckrodt, a medical supply company, to become president of the Latin American division, a $100 million business. She retired when the company was sold in 2000 and is now a consultant and business school professor. She planted a grove of tropical shade trees in the center of the living room in her home on a posh suburban cul-de-sac, a literal reminder of her roots.

“I made a wonderful career out of understanding the cultures of Latin America and the culture of the United States and how to do business in both,” said Ms. Kollman-Moore, a naturalized American.

During the 1990s, a wider variety of foreigners began to settle in the metropolitan area. Bosnians fleeing the Balkan wars have now made this city their largest community in the United States. Sukrija Dzidzovic, 52, publisher of the Bosnian weekly newspaper SabaH, moved the paper here from New York in 2006 to be closer to the core of his readers.

Bosnians run the gamut, from truckers and bakery workers to lawyers and engineers. Many Bosnians hit the ground running here because they came from Europe with savings they had stashed away, Mr. Dzidzovic said. At one time, Bosnians opened so many businesses on blighted streets that hostile rumors spread that they were receiving secret subsidies from the federal government.

Now, appreciative city officials make a point of attending Bosnian celebrations, Mr. Dzidzovic said.

Immigrants from China have also prospered here as entrepreneurs, creating jobs for other immigrants. Sandy Tsai, 59, said she and her husband chose St. Louis to start a business because they noticed it was in the middle of the country. Now their company, Baily, makes egg rolls, noodles and fortune cookies in three local factories that distribute to thousands of Chinese restaurants nationwide. Ms. Tsai said her employees ranged from egg-roll makers earning $8 an hour to laboratory researchers with advanced degrees in food science.

“It’s a good group, a good combination,” Ms. Tsai said. But despite the long hard times in St. Louis, low-wage workers have not always been easy to find, she said, and her business expansion was slowed because of it.

Now, those workers have started to arrive in larger numbers. Raúl Rico, 31, said he came here 14 years ago from the Mexican state of Querétaro, the first in his family to settle in St. Louis. Today, between parents, siblings, cousins and their offspring, his local clan numbers 56.

“Every year our community is growing with all kinds of people, more workers are coming, more people are coming to invest in businesses and open stores,” said Mr. Rico, a carpenter.

Ms. Crosslin, of the International Institute of St. Louis, said the emerging pattern was changing the face, and possibly the fortunes, of the city.

“We have turned the corner slightly,” she said. “And one of the factors is the newcomers who are starting to arrive again.”

    Immigrants in Work Force: Study Belies Image, NYT, 15.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/16skilled.html

Immigration Raids Focus on Shuttle Vans

April 15, 2010
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

PHOENIX — With sweeps on both sides of the border Thursday, American and Mexican authorities delivered what they called their most serious blow toward dismantling human smuggling organizations that have brought thousands of illegal immigrants to the United States.

The investigation, which used 800 law enforcement officers, the largest deployment in a human smuggling investigation, focused on what the authorities said were suspicious companies running shuttle vans that provide a crucial link in the transportation chain that moves illegal immigrants from the border to cities across the United States.

But the sweep was also the biggest example of what immigration agency officials said was a heightened effort to curb illegal immigration by focusing more on breaking up the criminal organizations that transport people and the businesses that facilitate these networks than on simply making large-scale arrests of illegal immigrants and deporting them.

“What we are trying to do is rip this thing out by the roots,” John Morton, the director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said in an interview here. “We are taking out the whole industry and giving such a shock to individuals that they won’t recover as they have in the past.”

While some 47 people were arrested Thursday, including some in Mexico in what officials called exceptional cooperation with officers there, only about 17 were illegal immigrants being smuggled, and some of them will be granted permission to remain in the United States to serve as witnesses in the case, Mr. Morton said. A similar raid in Houston in February included the arrest of 80 illegal immigrants found when the businesses were raided.

Mr. Morton acknowledged that the arrests would not end smuggling. That would be an ambitious goal: more people are ferried across the border here than in any other state. But Mr. Morton predicted the raid would disrupt a pipeline that has accounted for a “significant amount” of the illegal immigrants traveling deeper into the United States.

The announcement of the arrests, which focused on four shuttle van businesses in Tucson and one in Phoenix, comes at a time when the federal government has been under fire over its role and performance in immigration enforcement.

Two weeks ago, a rancher near the border was killed, and the police suspect he encountered a smuggler. An outcry has risen over whether the federal government is doing enough to secure the border. This week, the Arizona Legislature moved closer to adopting what is widely believed to be the most stringent immigration enforcement bill among the states, giving local police agencies broad powers to check people’s legal status.

Immigrant advocacy groups on Thursday denounced what they called a climate of fear and criticized the ICE operation for coming at the same time as the legislation. A handful of protesters outside the United States attorney’s office here chanted, “We are going to beat back John Morton’s attack.”

In response to their concerns, Mr. Morton said the agency’s activity often generated “rumors and wild conjecture” but that no intimidation was intended.

Mr. Morton said the crackdown on the shuttle-service industry stretched back more than a year and was not related to the legislation or the anger over the rancher’s killing.

But he reiterated the Obama administration promise to take up an overhaul of immigration law and said the arrests represented an effort to attack smuggling organizations by going after the leaders.

“That is what this is all about, border security,” Mr. Morton said.

For nearly a decade, federal immigration authorities have been stymied by a fleet of shuttle vans, similar to those that carry people to airports and the like, that they say have operated under a veil of legitimacy.

When stopped, even if the passengers were found to be illegal immigrants, drivers would profess not to know the legal status of their passengers, and prosecutors doubted a charge would succeed.

“That has been a very hard defense to overcome,” said Matthew Allen, who directs immigration and customs in Arizona. “Now, we have been able to get past that and show they do know.”

Smugglers would guide people, typically on foot, across the border. A car or sport utility vehicle would pick them up and take them to Tucson, where in “very quick handoffs,” an immigration official said, the immigrants would board the shuttle vans to Phoenix. From there, after having paid fees of several thousand dollars — $75,000 in the case of some Chinese immigrants — to be taken into the United States, they would transfer to private cars and head to destinations across the United States.

Mr. Allen said that agents had made extensive use of surveillance, technology and leads from people in the United States and Mexico to build the case, which began about a year ago.

He said agents had recovered extensive records, including fake tickets the passengers would show law enforcement officers in case the van was stopped for an immigration check. In those situations, it has been difficult to prosecute the drivers because it was nearly impossible to prove they were aware their passengers were in the country illegally.

Agents on Thursday morning searched the offices of Sergio’s Shuttle on a busy street lined with mechanic shops, bodegas and small businesses. Two vans, with a tiger emblem on the side, sat in front of an office that advertised a schedule to several cities on both sides of the border.

No one answered the phone number listed on the side of the van or the office.

Alfonso Quintero, who owns a muffler repair shop nearby, said he often saw people coming and going from the vans at all hours but nothing raised his suspicions.

“I didn’t see anything illegal,” Mr. Quintero said. “Looked like they just wanted a ride.”

    Immigration Raids Focus on Shuttle Vans, NYT, 15.4.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/16/us/16raid.html

Immigrants Claim Wal-Mart Fired Them to Provide Jobs for Local Residents

February 9, 2010
The New York Times
By DAN FROSCH

SILVERTHORNE, Colo. — A small group of West African men who came to the Rockies in search of economic opportunity are embroiled in a dispute with Wal-Mart, accusing it of a raft of discriminatory actions. Most say they were dismissed because supervisors wanted to give their jobs to local people in need of work.

Wal-Mart, which has a history of discrimination and labor complaints but has increased efforts to promote diversity at its stores, denies the accusations.

A spokesman, Greg Rossiter, said most of the men who had filed the complaints were part of a larger group of 90 employees of all different backgrounds dismissed last year after a management change at a store in Avon, Colo.

“These allegations just don’t accurately reflect the working environment at these stores,” Mr. Rossiter said. “We have a diverse group of associates, including many from West Africa, who are finding good career opportunities.”

In complaints filed with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the 10 men said they had all worked for Wal-Mart for a few years, mostly without incident, at a variety of jobs at three stores in Avon, Glenwood Springs and Rifle.

But things changed in 2008 and 2009, when new managers took over the stores, according to the complaints as well as interviews here with four of the men, who continue to gather weekly at a cramped apartment and talk of their hopes of getting new jobs.

In January 2009, six complainants said, a new manager at the Avon store called a meeting of workers — virtually all West African — and said: “I don’t like some of the faces I see here. There are people in Eagle County who need jobs.”

Three other men, who worked at the Glenwood Springs store, said in the complaint that an assistant manager there, also new, had made a similar comment at a meeting of mostly West African workers.

One of them, Mamadou Sy, said in his complaint: “Directing himself towards the West Africans present, he said, ‘Wow, there are a lot of Africans, and I don’t like some of the faces I see here.’ We felt as if he was threatening us.”

Most of the employees said they had been repeatedly disciplined for not meeting production requirements. Eventually, they were fired. Most of the workers had never been reprimanded before, and non-African workers were not subject to the same criticism, they said,

Mr. Sy, 61, said he was fired in September after his supervisors told him he had to greatly increase the number of boxes he was stocking. He was not physically able to do so, he said.

“I worked here for more than three years and never had any complaints about my job,” he said. “Now, we have all been getting fired. We felt it was racism.”

Ophelia Hinojosa, a former assistant night manager at the Wal-Mart in Avon, said her supervisors had pressured her to discipline the men for not working fast enough, even though she believed they performed well.

“They were trying to get most of the Africans out,” said Ms. Hinojosa, who quit in April because, she said, her job had become too stressful. “A lot of them had been there for a long time. They weren’t being treated right.”

Idrissa Tall said that last summer, after nearly three years of employment, he was suddenly fired for not stocking shelves fast enough.

“We saw a lot hard changes,” Mr. Tall said. “It hurt us; it shocked us. Everybody that got fired got fired for the same reason — because we are African.”

Mr. Rossiter, the Wal-Mart spokesman, denied that the West Africans had been singled out for discipline and said many other workers at the Avon store had been laid off as well.

“Since that time, the Avon store has continued to hire and promote West African associates,” he said. Three West Africans were promoted to supervisory positions last year, he said.

All 10 complaints also stated that West African workers, who are Muslim, were refused short prayer breaks. White and Hispanic workers, they said, were permitted unscheduled cigarette breaks.

Wal-Mart denied the accusation, and Mr. Rossiter said the company followed the law with respect to requests for religious accommodation. The law requires employers to reasonably accommodate employees’ religious beliefs.

The employees who filed the complaints are seeking back pay. An employment commission spokesman, David Grinberg, said that federal law prohibited the commission from commenting and that it could take months to investigate a complaint.

Since the mid-1990s, the commission has filed about 60 employment-discrimination lawsuits against Wal-Mart.

Last year, the company agreed to pay $17.5 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that accused it of discriminating against African-Americans applying for jobs as truck drivers. And it is now facing the largest employment-discrimination class-action suit in American history, a sex-discrimination suit brought on behalf of more than 1.5 million women who are current or former employees.

But in the last six years, Wal-Mart has tried to recast its image — tying bonuses of corporate officers to minority hiring and mentoring, putting employees through diversity training and using suppliers owned by minorities and women.

“We have an extraordinarily diverse base of customers and an extraordinarily diverse base of associates.” Mr. Rossiter said. “We understand and embrace that commitment.”

    Immigrants Claim Wal-Mart Fired Them to Provide Jobs for Local Residents, NYT, 9.2.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/us/09walmart.html

Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail

January 10, 2010
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.

“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”

That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.

Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.

Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.

According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.

“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”

In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.

A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.

    Officials Hid Truth of Immigrant Deaths in Jail, NYT, 10.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/10/us/10detain.html

The Breaking Point

Reprieve Eases Medical Crisis for Illegal Immigrants

January 6, 2010
The New York Times
By KEVIN SACK

ATLANTA — After a largely sleepless night, Cruz Constancia got up Tuesday morning wondering whether this would be the day that she finally stopped receiving dialysis without charge.

It was not. When Ms. Constancia, an illegal immigrant from El Salvador, arrived at her dialysis clinic at 6 a.m., she was escorted promptly to her recliner. “I thanked God,” she said after concluding the three-hour session, “because he is really the only one that can allow us to continue our treatments.”

More immediately, it was Grady Memorial Hospital that allowed it on Tuesday.

In early October, when Grady, Atlanta’s public hospital, closed its outpatient dialysis unit for budgetary reasons, it agreed to pay for three months of dialysis at private clinics for about 50 dislocated patients. The patients, mostly illegal immigrants with no access to insurance, signed documents stating they understood that Grady’s payments would end on Jan. 3. Until then, the hospital would help them relocate to their home countries or other states.

But only a few immigrants left, and many of those who remain acknowledge that they have done little to explore what they regard as untenable options at home. Nonetheless, Grady officials announced this week that they would extend the deadline to Feb. 3, and continue to pay for dialysis and relocation services until then.

“We think it’s the right thing to do,” said Matt Gove, a senior vice president at Grady, “to help give patients more time to make long-term arrangements.”

The one-month reprieve prolongs a standoff that has become emblematic of the medical crisis facing illegal immigrants. An estimated 7 million of the country’s 11 million illegal immigrants have no health coverage and are not eligible for government insurance programs like Medicare and Medicaid.

Ms. Constancia, 44, heard the news about the extension Tuesday from a nurse with Fresenius Medical Services, which operates her dialysis clinic in an Atlanta office park. “To think that today was my last day, and then hear that I’ve got another one makes me happy,” she said. “Obviously, I was scared because my life depends on this.”

When serious illness strikes, many immigrants have few options beyond presenting themselves at charity hospitals like Grady. Supported by direct appropriations from Fulton and DeKalb Counties, as well as insurance payments subsidized by state and federal taxpayers, the hospital accepts patients regardless of their insurance or immigration status.

But caring for uninsured immigrants has imposed a heavy financial burden, particularly for public hospitals with broad missions to care for the indigent. At Grady, where thrice-weekly dialysis treatments cost about $50,000 a year, the outpatient clinic ran a deficit of $3.5 million in 2008. That was one-tenth of the hospital’s loss that year, although the clinic served only about 90 patients.

The hospital’s recently reconfigured board, eager to demonstrate its newfound discipline, announced last summer that it would close the clinic. The offer to provide three months of transitional dialysis came later, in unsuccessful negotiations to end a lawsuit filed by patients. A state court judge has twice dismissed the case, but on Tuesday the patients’ lawyer filed a notice of appeal to the Georgia Supreme Court.

To a degree, Grady’s extension of its deadline may be beside the point. For reasons that Mr. Gove has not explained, the hospital made its contract with Fresenius for a year, locking in a payment rate of $280 per session. While Grady had said it would cut off assistance after Jan. 3, Fresenius officials consider the contract to require treatment — at Grady’s expense — until Sept. 1.

“Our understanding of the contract is that we will treat the Grady patients that are referred to us for a period of one year, and we expect to be reimbursed,” said Terry L. Morris, a spokeswoman for Fresenius.

Mr. Gove said the hospital would consider assisting patients beyond Feb. 3 case by case. He declined to say whether it might pay for some until September.

“It should be clear to the patients that there’s a responsibility on their side to continue trying to find a long-term plan because at some point this care won’t be available,” Mr. Gove said.

He said that he did not know how much Grady had spent on the patients since the clinic’s closing, but that a rough calculation put the figure at close to $700,000.

In interviews Monday and Tuesday, some patients said they had not made detailed investigations of options for dialysis in their own countries. They said that they were convinced it would not be economically viable and that the quality of care would be poor. Several mentioned that two Grady dialysis patients who returned to Mexico had died (as has one who stayed in Atlanta).

Most of the seven patients interviewed said their plan was to stay put until Grady stopped paying, and then to present themselves at emergency rooms if necessary. Federal law requires that emergency rooms treat anyone in serious jeopardy. Going without dialysis can be fatal in as little as two weeks.

“I’m going to stay here until there’s really not a hope of getting it any more,” said Jesús Neave, 32, who crossed illegally from his native Mexico in 1992 and was diagnosed with kidney disease four years later.

Like the others, Mr. Neave, a maintenance worker, said he would not be able to make enough in Mexico to afford regular dialysis. “Mexico is my country,” he said, “but over there if you don’t have money, the doctors won’t treat you.”

Ms. Constancia said the same of El Salvador: “People die very fast. The way it works down there is that if you do not have money, they don’t put medicine in your machine.”

Several of the patients said the nearest dialysis provider would be a four-or-five-hour drive from their towns. Many said their families and support systems were all in the United States.

While recognizing that Grady is providing care they would not receive at home, some said it had been unfair to withdraw it. “If somebody holds your hand to support you and then stops, you’re going to fall,” said Bineet Kaur, an Indian who said she had had overstayed a visa by three years.

“They don’t have the obligation, but they have a moral duty to help us,” said Rosa Lira, 78, a legal immigrant from Mexico. “They cannot let us die.”

Many of the immigrants said they simply had no plan for when Grady stopped paying the bills.

“The only thing that came to my mind is if they don’t treat me I would go to the emergency room,” said Adolfo Sánchez, 31, an illegal immigrant from Mexico. “At Grady.”

    Reprieve Eases Medical Crisis for Illegal Immigrants, NYT, 6.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/us/06grady.html

Editorial

Immigration’s New Year

January 6, 2010
The New York Times

The quest for overhauling immigration received two very welcome lifts on New Year’s Day.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg of New York City, at his inauguration, pledged to help the Obama administration pass immigration reform. Mr. Bloomberg is a force to reckon with, as he proved with his national campaign against illegal guns. On the same day, four young people in Miami, current or former students at Miami Dade College, began their own determined march to Washington in an effort to bring pressure from the grass roots.

Three of the four were brought to this country illegally as children. Like thousands of other young people, they bear no blame for their status, and they are frustrated that their hard work and bright promise lead to a brick wall. Their protest for a chance to become Americans is courageous because it exposes them to possible arrest and deportation. “We are risking our future because our present is unbearable,” one of them, Felipe Matos, told The Times.

The Obama administration has vowed to press ahead with reform this year. Given the hard economic times, the politics may be bleaker even than in 2007 when reform was scuttled in an ugly battle. The need is just as real — for the undocumented and for the country.

America needs to shut the path to illegal entry and employment while opening smoother and more rational routes to legal immigration. Opponents of reform say the downturn is a terrible time to fix the system, but they are wrong. When the recovery comes, the country will need a functioning system more than ever — one that encourages legal entry and bolsters all workers’ rights.

To do this, the country needs to bring its huge undocumented underclass into the light. This means putting 12 million people on a path to being assimilated. It is not a question of adding new people to the work force; they are here, many helping keep the economy afloat while tolerating low pay and abuse from lawbreaking employers who prefer them to American workers.

Representative Luis Gutierrez, a Democrat of Illinois, already has offered a sensible bill that legalizes immigrants who show that they have been employed, pay a $500 fine, learn English and undergo a criminal background check, among other things.

Opponents will try their best to scuttle reform by claiming to be open to compromise while they insist on prohibitive fees, penalties and requirements that turn the path into a fiction — not a wait of months but of decades or never. That is not reform. And it won’t solve the problem.

After years of tightening the screws, the system is hopelessly frozen. Those who want to fix it will have to shut out the choruses of no-amnestys and over-my-dead-bodys, sidestep the false arguments and press into the headwinds while holding firm to the core of the better solution. To legalize the undocumented, collect their unpaid taxes, free them to earn more and spend more, to get the immigrant escalator to the middle class moving again. The country needs it; the economy needs it; the immigrants need and deserve it.

“No city on earth has been more rewarded by immigrant labor, more renewed by immigrant ideas, more revitalized by immigrant culture,” Mr. Bloomberg said of New York City last week. Substitute “country” in that sentence, as in America, and it is every bit as true.

    Immigration’s New Year, NYT, 6.1.2010, http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/06/opinion/06wed1.html