THE immigration legislation percolating in the Senate has been
pitched as an all-things-to-all-factions compromise. Illegal immigrants will be
regularized, but most of them will have to wait at least a decade to gain
citizenship. There will be more visas and new guest-worker programs, but also
stiffer enforcement on the border and in workplaces.
But the bill’s real priority is to accelerate existing immigration trends. The
enforcement mechanisms phase in gradually, with ambiguous prospects for success,
while the legislation’s impact on migration would be immediate: more paths to
residency for foreigners, instant legal status for the 11 million here
illegally, and the implicit promise to future border-crossers that some kind of
amnesty always comes to those who come and wait.
Today, almost 25 percent of working-age Americans are first-generation
immigrants or their children. That figure is up sharply since the 1960s, and
it’s projected to climb to 37 percent by 2050. A vote for the Senate legislation
would be a vote for that number to climb faster still.
The bill has been written this way because America’s leadership class,
Republicans as well as Democrats, assumes that continued mass immigration is
exactly what our economy needs. As America struggles to adapt to an aging
population, the bill’s supporters argue, immigrants offer youth, vitality and
tax dollars. As we try to escape economic stagnation, mass immigration promises
an extra shot of growth.
Is there any reason to be skeptical of this optimistic consensus? Actually,
there are two: the assimilation patterns for descendants of Hispanic
(particularly Mexican) immigrants and the socioeconomic disarray among the
native-born poor and working class.
Conservatives have long worried that recent immigrants from Latin America would
assimilate more slowly than previous new arrivals — because of their sheer
numbers and shared language, and because the American economy has changed in
ways that make it harder for less-educated workers to assimilate and rise.
As my colleague David Leonhardt wrote recently, those fears seem unfounded if
you look at second-generation Hispanics, who make clear progress — economic,
educational and linguistic — relative to their immigrant parents.
But there’s a substantial body of literature showing that progress stalling out,
especially for Mexican-Americans, between the second generation and the third. A
2002 study, for instance, reported that despite “improvements in human capital
and earnings” for second-generation Mexican immigrants, the third generation
still “trails the education and earnings of the average American,” and shows
little sign of catching up. In their 2009 book “Generations of Exclusion,” the
sociologists Edward Telles and Vilma Ortiz found similar stagnation and slippage
for descendants of Mexican immigrants during the second half of the 20th
century.
As National Review’s Reihan Salam points out, even a recent Pew study painting
an optimistic portrait of assimilation also shows third-generation (and higher)
Hispanics with lower household incomes than the second generation.
This past need not predict the future. Maybe things will turn out better for the
descendants of people arriving now.
But it’s pretty easy to see how the third-generation stall-out could continue,
given the trends — unemployment, family breakdown, weakening communal ties —
already working against social mobility in America.
These trends mean that we’re asking low-skilled immigrants to assimilate into a
working class that’s already in crisis. We’re hoping that our dysfunctional
educational system can prevent millions more children from assimilating downward
into what sociologists have called a “rainbow underclass.” And we’re betting
that the growing incomes of second-generation Hispanics will outweigh their
retreat from marriage and rising out-of-wedlock birthrates.
All these bets may pay off. But maybe, just maybe, we should be hedging them a
bit. If we want to regularize 11 million illegal immigrants, for instance, does
it make sense to layer bigger guest-worker programs on top of amnesty? If we
care about workplace enforcement, why not phase it in more completely before
offering legal status to the undocumented? If we want to increase immigration
over all, shouldn’t we consider tilting the balance much, much more toward
higher-skilled immigrants than the current legislation does?
On a blackboard in an economics classroom, the case for mass immigration looks
airtight. But many of America’s economic difficulties are rooted in social and
cultural problems, and a policy that just ignores those problems is a policy
that’s likely to make them worse.
In the end, the promise of American life is more than just a bigger paycheck
than foreign economies supply. It’s a promise of social equality,
intergenerational advancement and fluid lines of class. The fact that so many
people around the world still find that promise appealing is a wonderful thing.
But it’s also important to be sure, while we decide how many of them to welcome
and how fast, that we can still deliver on it.
April 22, 2013
The New York Times
By MARCELO M. SUÁREZ-OROZCO
and CAROLA SUÁREZ-OROZCO
LOS ANGELES
THE alleged involvement of two ethnic Chechen brothers in the deadly attack at
the Boston Marathon last week should prompt Americans to reflect on whether we
do an adequate job assimilating immigrants who arrive in the United States as
children or teenagers.
In 1997, we started a large-scale study of newly arrived immigrants, ages 9 to
14, in 20 public middle and high schools in Boston, Cambridge, Mass., and the
San Francisco Bay Area. Our participants came from Asia, Latin America and the
Caribbean; many fled not only poverty but also strife, in countries like
Guatemala, Nicaragua, El Salvador and Haiti. Over five years, we interviewed
more than 400 students, as well as their siblings, parents and teachers. We
gathered academic records, test scores and measures of psychological well-being.
The two brothers accused in the Boston bombings — Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, who was
killed on Friday, and his brother, Dzhokhar, 19, who was captured later that day
— were around 15 and 8, respectively, when they immigrated. Both attended
Cambridge Rindge and Latin, that city’s only public high school. They were not
part of our study, but they fit the demographic profile of the subjects of our
research: birth to families displaced by war or strife, multiple-stage
(including back-and-forth) migration, language difficulties and entry into harsh
urban environments where gangs and crime are temptations.
When asked “what do you like most about being here?” an 11-year-old Haitian boy
in Cambridge told us, “There is less killing here.” His response was notably
succinct, but not unique.
A Salvadoran 10-year-old whose family had narrowly escaped death squads
recounted intense loneliness. When a firecracker was set off in his
working-class Cambridge neighborhood, he plunged into the arms of a stunned
researcher.
A 12-year-old girl whose family had fled chaos in Guatemala for the Bay Area
similarly turned inward. She lamented being “encerrada” (locked in) because of
gang violence in her new community.
Not surprisingly, students from strife-torn areas were more likely than others
to report psychological symptoms like anxiety, depression and trouble
concentrating and sleeping.
Many newcomer students attend tough urban schools that lack solidarity and
cohesion. In too many we found no sense of shared purpose, but rather a student
body divided by race and ethnicity, between immigrants and the native born,
between newcomers and more acculturated immigrants. Only 6 percent of the
participants could name a teacher as someone they would go to with a problem;
just 3 percent could identify a teacher who was proud of them.
When asked what Americans thought about immigrants of their national origin, 65
percent of the students provided negative adjectives. “Most Americans think we
are lazy, gangsters, drug addicts, that only come to take their jobs away,” a
14-year-old boy in the Bay Area told us. We also found that many educators,
already overwhelmed by the challenges of inner-city teaching, considered
immigrant parents uninformed and uninvolved.
Having just one friend who spoke English fluently was a strong predictor of
positive academic outcomes. Yet more than a third of the students in our study
reported that they had little or no opportunity even to interact with
native-born students, much less make close friends.
Our research also confirmed that kids who arrive during their high school years,
as Tamerlan Tsarnaev did, face bad odds, especially if they experienced
interrupted schooling, family instability and traumatic dislocations back home.
According to news accounts, the younger brother, Dzhokhar, was a “smart” and
“respected” student at Rindge and Latin, where he had friends and was a
wrestling-team captain. But at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth, he
was flunking out. The sociologist Alejandro Portes of Princeton and the
educational psychologist Cynthia Garcia Coll of Brown have found declining
performance over time. Nearly two-thirds of the students in our study exhibited
such decline. Some dropped out to find work; others joined gangs.
The good news: a quarter of the students sustained high academic performance
over the five years of the study, and another 11 percent showed significant
improvement. While they experienced the same initial shock of migration, they
tended to be enrolled in supportive schools, to have caring teachers, and to
develop informal mentorships with coaches, counselors or ministers. In addition,
other researchers, like Philip Kasinitz, John H. Mollenkopf, Mary C. Waters and
Jennifer Holdaway, have found that the second generation — American-born kids of
immigrant parents — assimilate, and even excel, to a greater extent than the
“1.5 generation” (children who immigrate in or before their early teens).
Whatever motivated the Tsarnaev brothers surely is not the fault of the schools
and may never be known. Among some of the distinctive features of their case are
family estrangement, multiple relocations across countries and, possibly,
religious radicalization.
But the broad lesson — assimilating immigrant students into the fabric of
society through academic, psychological and other supports — should inform
educators and policy makers in the decades ahead, when immigrants and their
children will account for most of the nation’s population growth. One successful
model is the Internationals Network for Public Schools, where educators focus on
students’ distinct needs and develop authentic connections with their families.
Taking in what Emma Lazarus called the “wretched refuse,” including asylum
seekers like the Tsarnaev brothers, without providing a scaffold of support
undermines the promise of America.
Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco and Carola Suárez-Orozco
are the dean and a professor, respectively,
at the U.C.L.A. Graduate School of Education and Information
Studies
and the authors, with Irina Todorova,
of “Learning a New Land: Immigrant Students in American Society.”
April 20, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Much of the country was still waking up to the mayhem and
confusion outside Boston on Friday morning when Senator Charles Grassley decided
to link the hunt for terrorist bombers to immigration reform.
“How can individuals evade authorities and plan such attacks on our soil?” asked
Mr. Grassley, the Iowa Republican, at the beginning of a hearing on the Senate’s
immigration bill. “How can we beef up security checks on people who wish to
enter the U.S.?”
The country is beginning to discuss seriously the most sweeping overhaul of
immigration since 1986, with hearings in the Senate last week and this week, and
a possible vote by early summer. After years of stalemate, the mood has shifted
sharply, with bipartisan Congressional coalitions, business and labor leaders,
law-enforcement and religious groups, and a majority of the public united behind
a long-delayed overhaul of the crippled system.
Until the bombing came along, the antis were running out of arguments. They
cannot rail against “illegals,” since the bill is all about making things legal
and upright, with registration, fines and fees. They cannot argue seriously that
reform is bad for business: turning a shadow population of anonymous, underpaid
laborers into on-the-books employees and taxpayers, with papers and workplace
protections, will only help the economy grow.
About all they have left is scary aliens.
There is a long tradition of raw fear fouling the immigration debate. Lou Dobbs
ranted about superhighways from Mexico injecting Spanish speakers deep into the
heartland. Gov. Jan Brewer told lies about headless bodies in the Arizona
desert. And now Representative Louie Gohmert, a Texas Republican, is warning of
radical Islamists posing as Hispanics and infiltrating from the southern border.
But the Boston events have nothing to do with immigration reform. Even if we
stop accepting refugees and asylum seekers, stop giving out green cards and
devise a terror-profiling system that can bore into the hearts of 9-year-olds,
which seems to be Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s age when he entered the United States, we
will still face risks. And we will not have fixed immigration.
There is a better way to be safer: pass an immigration bill. If terrorists, drug
traffickers and gangbangers are sharp needles in the immigrant haystack, then
shrink the haystack. Get 11 million people on the books. Find out who they are.
The Senate bill includes no fewer than four separate background checks as
immigrants move from the shadows to citizenship. It tightens the rules on
employment verification and includes new ways to prevent misuse of Social
Security numbers. It has an entry-exit visa system to monitor traffic at borders
and ports.
And if we are serious about making America safer, why not divert some of the
billions now lavished on the border to agencies fighting gangs, drugs, illegal
guns and workplace abuse? Or to community policing and English-language classes,
so immigrants can more readily cooperate with law enforcement? Why not make
immigrants feel safer and invested in their neighborhoods, so they don’t fear
and shun the police? Why not stop outsourcing immigration policing to local
sheriffs who chase traffic offenders and janitors?
As we have seen with the failure of gun control, a determined minority wielding
false arguments can kill the best ideas. The immigration debate will test the
resilience of the reform coalition in Congress. Changes so ambitious require
calm, thoughtful deliberation, and a fair amount of courage. They cannot be
allowed to come undone with irrelevant appeals to paranoia and fear.
Department of Homeland Security officials decided in recent
months not to grant an application for American citizenship by Tamerlan
Tsarnaev, one of two brothers suspected in the Boston Marathon bombings, after a
routine background check revealed that he had been interviewed in 2011 by the
F.B.I., federal officials said on Saturday.
Mr. Tsarnaev died early Friday after a shootout with the police, and officials
said that at the time of his death, his application for citizenship was still
under review and was being investigated by federal law enforcement officials.
It had been previously reported that Mr. Tsarnaev’s application might have been
held up because of a domestic abuse episode. But the officials said that it was
the record of the F.B.I. interview that threw up red flags and halted, at least
temporarily, Mr. Tsarnaev’s citizenship application. Federal law enforcement
officials reported on Friday that the F.B.I. interviewed Mr. Tsarnaev in January
2011 at the request of the Russian government, which suspected that he had ties
to Chechen terrorists.
The officials pointed to the decision to hold up that application as evidence
that his encounter with the F.B.I. did not fall through the cracks in the vast
criminal and national security databases that the Department of Homeland
Security and the F.B.I. review as a standard requirement for citizenship. The
application, which Mr. Tsarnaev presented on Sept. 5, also prompted “additional
investigation” of him this year by federal law enforcement agencies, according
to the officials. They declined to say how far that examination had progressed
or what it covered.
The handling of Mr. Tsarnaev’s application could be crucial for the Obama
administration in the Senate debate that began this week over a bipartisan bill,
which the president supports, for a sweeping immigration overhaul. Some
Republicans skeptical of the bill have said they will watch the Boston bombings
investigation to see if it reveals security lapses in the immigration system
that should be closed before Congress proceeds to other parts of the bill,
including a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants.
The record of the F.B.I. interview was enough to cause Homeland Security to hold
up Mr. Tsarnaev’s application. He presented those papers several weeks after he
returned from a six-month trip overseas, primarily to Russia, and only six days
after his brother, Dzhokhar A. Tsarnaev, 19, had his own citizenship application
approved. Dzhokhar Tsarnaev is in custody and is in serious condition in a
hospital.
Late last year, Homeland Security officials contacted the F.B.I. to learn more
about its interview with Tamerlan Tsarnaev, federal law enforcement officials
said. The F.B.I. reported its conclusion that he did not present a threat.
At that point, Homeland Security officials did not move to approve the
application nor did they deny it, but they left it open for “additional review.”
Tamerlan Tsarnaev’s record also showed that he had been involved in an episode
of domestic violence in 2009. His father, Anzor, said in an interview on Friday
in the Russian republic of Dagestan, where he lives, that Tamerlan had an
argument with a girlfriend and that he “hit her lightly.”
Under immigration law, certain domestic violence offenses can disqualify an
immigrant from becoming an American citizen, and perhaps expose him to
deportation. But the Homeland Security review found that while Mr. Tsarnaev was
arrested, he was not convicted in the episode. The law requires a serious
criminal conviction in a domestic violence case for officials to initiate
deportation, federal officials said.
Both Tsarnaev brothers came to the United States and remained here legally under
an asylum petition in 2002 by their father, who claimed he feared for his life
because of his activities in Chechnya. Both sons applied for citizenship after
they had been living here as legal permanent residents for at least five years,
as the law requires.
William K. Rashbaum and Michael S. Schmidt contributed reporting.
April 16, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Huge news from the scorched desert of immigration reform:
germination!
At last there is a bill, the product of a bipartisan group of senators who have
been working on it for months, that promises at least the hope of citizenship
for 11 million undocumented immigrants. It is complicated, full of mechanisms
and formulas meant to tackle border security, the allocation of visas, methods
of employment verification and the much-debated citizenship path.
Twitter analysts spent all day Tuesday parsing just the 17-page outline that was
unveiled ahead of the actual bill. There will be much to chew on in coming
weeks, but it is worth a moment to marvel at the bill’s mere existence, and at
the delicate balancing of competing interests that coaxed this broad set of
compromises into being.
Without, however, celebrating too much too soon. The first part of the bill is a
dreary reassertion of the doctrine that an insufficiently militarized border is
the source of all our immigration problems — as if inefficiencies in the labor
market and the ill effects of unjust laws can be fixed with more drones and
fences. It throws $6.5 billion over 10 years at the southern border, and
envisions the creation of a commission of border governors telling the Homeland
Security Department how to spend more billions on “manpower, technology and
infrastructure.”
Though foolishly costly, this border fixation will be tolerable as long as it is
not fatal to the heart and soul of the bill: legalization for 11 million. The
bill includes arbitrary benchmarks, or triggers, that have to be achieved before
legalization kicks in. These cannot be allowed to justify delay in getting
immigrants right with the law.
Here is where things get interesting. The bill gets around the “amnesty”
stalemate by turning the undocumented into Registered Provisional Immigrants —
not citizens or green-card holders, but not illegal, either. They will wait in
that anteroom for a decade at least before they can get green cards. But they
will also work, and travel freely. The importance of legalizing them, erasing
the crippling fear of deportation, cannot be overstated.
That said, a decade-plus path is too long and expensive. The fees and penalties
stack up: $500 to apply for the first six years of legal status, $500 to renew,
then a $1,000 fine. If the goal is to get people on the books and the economy
moving, then shackling them for years to fees and debt makes no sense.
The means of ejection from the legalization path, too, cannot be arbitrary and
unjust — people should not be disqualified for minor crimes or failure to meet
unfair work requirements. It should not take superhuman strength and rectitude,
plus luck and lots of money, for an immigrant to march the 10 years to a green
card.
Then there is the mere two years set aside for taking legalization applications,
which is crazy: you cannot fit 11 million people through a window that small.
The coming debate will be fierce. Lobbyists for business say there are far too
few temporary worker visas. Advocates for families will lament the loss of visas
for siblings and adult children. Environmentalists will not like giving Homeland
Security unfettered access to all federal borderlands.
While there is a lot to worry about, our quick read of a fresh bill finds other
encouraging things besides the opening of the pathway. It includes a good
version of the Dream Act, to help young people who were brought here illegally
as children speedily become citizens. It allows, amazingly, some deportees to
re-enter the country to join their spouses and young children.
The Border Security, Economic Opportunity and Immigration Modernization Act of
2013 will not win prizes for brevity or eloquence. But it exists; it is a
starting point, something to be nurtured and improved. It will be judged by how
it unlocks the potential of the immigration system, now choked by inefficiency
and illegality, with companies that scoff at the law and employees who work
outside it. The system has gears that fail to mesh — business with labor,
parents with children, the promise of America with the people who would fulfill
it. Time to start repairs.
April 1, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
Americans who are unfamiliar with the immigration justice
system might be surprised to learn how much it skimps on actual justice. The
notion of a fair day in court becomes only theoretical when immigrants lack
attorneys, as most do, when their deportation cases are not reviewed by judges,
as too often happens, and when they are locked up in prisons unable to see their
families, even though they have been accused only of civil violations — and many
have never been convicted of anything.
Then there are the times the system inflicts arbitrary cruelty. This happens
when detainees are held in solitary confinement, an extreme form of punishment
that risks causing severe mental damage. New federal data show that about 300
immigrants on any given day are held in isolation at the country’s 50 largest
detention centers overseen by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, many for 23
hours a day, sometimes in windowless cells barely bigger than bathroom stalls.
And nearly half are isolated for 15 days or more.
Why ICE resorts to such extreme punishment is unclear. It could be for rule
infractions, fighting or for detainees’ own protection, if they are seen as
vulnerable to abuse, perhaps for being gay. In any case, ICE’s detention system
— which handles about 34,000 people a day, and 400,000 a year — is not a model
of humane incarceration. It’s a ramshackle network of private and public
lockups, prone to abuses and lacking legally enforceable standards for how
detainees are treated.
For those held for civil violations, solitary confinement is wildly
inappropriate. Civil detention is imposed not as punishment, but simply to make
sure somebody shows up for a hearing. Many detainees are victims of political
oppression or human trafficking, many are only seeking better lives, some are
ill. These are people America should be sheltering, not arbitrarily brutalizing.
The homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, has promised a review of
solitary-confinement policies. If she doesn’t fix this, then Congress should
step in, and now is the perfect time. Lawmakers are preparing a sweeping
overhaul of immigration so that it meets the country’s economic needs. They
should do just as much to bring the system in line with American values.
March 24, 2013
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The momentum in Washington for immigration reform has been
growing with amazing speed in recent weeks, and it seems that the question now
is not whether Congress will try to fix the immigration system this year, but
how big and effective the repairs will be. We hope that whatever bill emerges
will continue to protect and unite families, preserving and strengthening a
bedrock value of America’s immigration system.
It might be hard to imagine that America’s long tradition of allowing immigrants
to sponsor spouses, children and siblings for visas would be threatened. But
anti-immigration groups and lawmakers have long attacked the practice, using the
slanderous and misleading term “chain migration,” which summons images of a
relentless flow of undesirables, usually from south of the border. Even as some
of the staunchest resistance to reform is crumbling — legalizing 11 million
immigrants was unthinkable for leading Republicans a few months ago, and now
even rock-ribbed Tea Partiers like Representative Rand Paul favor it —
right-wing resistance to family migration persists.
Bills are still being drafted, but some lawmakers are reportedly trying to
reduce or eliminate visas for extended family members in order to expand
employment-based immigration. Advocates are resisting this zero-sum game.
These tensions emerged at a recent hearing of the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Mazie Hirono, Democrat of Hawaii, who led the hearing, spoke movingly of her own
experience immigrating to Honolulu as a young girl, and yet joined other
witnesses in explaining how the system falls short: she noted that it treats
women unequally — many who arrive as dependent spouses are denied the right to
work legally, and face discrimination and severe obstacles to assimilation. And
Mee Moua, president of the Asian American Justice Center, explained how backlogs
kept families separated for years, if not decades. “As of November 2012,” she
said, “nearly 4.3 million close family members were waiting in the family-visa
backlogs” — with Latino and Asian-American families most affected.
But even as Ms. Moua explained how important family visas are, Senator Jeff
Sessions balked at the very concept. Using an example of two hypothetical
Hondurans, he suggested that the visas were bad because some relatives can be
underachievers. He ignored the powerful truth that family immigration is an
economic bulwark. Families incubate job-creating businesses, provide a safety
net for their members and hasten assimilation. Employment visas are important
for companies to recruit needed workers. But these workers have spouses and
children and siblings.
And we need workers at all levels of the economy: As Representative Luis
Gutierrez of Illinois recently put it, “Silicon Valley engineers and
entrepreneurs would not be very productive or competitive engines of our economy
if they did not have food to eat, or people to care for their children or
parents, or a clean office and clean clothes, or a made bed in their hotel room
on a business trip.”
Immigration is more than a business relationship America has with selected
foreigners. It’s a process that renews this country; it means going all-in on
America, through binding ties of love and blood. Recruited workers enrich the
country. Reunited families do, too.
February 26, 2013
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE
Federal immigration officials have released hundreds of
detainees from detention centers around the country in recent days in a highly
unusual effort to save money as automatic budget cuts loom in Washington,
officials said Tuesday.
The government has not dropped the deportation cases against the immigrants,
however. The detainees have been freed on supervised release while their cases
continue in court, officials said.
But the decision angered many Republicans, including Representative Robert W.
Goodlatte of Virginia, who said the releases were a political gambit by the
Obama administration that undermined the continuing negotiations over
comprehensive immigration reform and jeopardized public safety.
“It’s abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities
to promote his political agenda on sequestration,” said Mr. Goodlatte, who, as
chairman of the Judiciary Committee, is running the House hearings on
immigration reform. “By releasing criminal immigrants onto the streets, the
administration is needlessly endangering American lives.”
A spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, an arm of the
Department of Homeland Security, said the detainees selected for release were
“noncriminals and other low-risk offenders who do not have serious criminal
histories.”
Officials said the releases, which began last week and continued on Tuesday,
were a response to the possibility of automatic governmentwide budget cuts,
known as sequestration, which are scheduled to take effect on Friday.
“As fiscal uncertainty remains over the continuing resolution and possible
sequestration, ICE has reviewed its detained population to ensure detention
levels stay within ICE’s current budget,” the agency’s spokeswoman, Gillian M.
Christensen, said in a statement. The agency’s budget for custody operations in
the current fiscal year is $2.05 billion, officials said, and as of Saturday,
ICE was holding 30,773 people in its detention system.
Immigration officials said Tuesday that they had no plans to release
substantially more detainees this week, though they warned that more releases
were still possible depending on the outcome of budget negotiations.
They refused to specify exactly how many detainees were released, or where the
releases took place. But immigrants’ advocates around the country have reported
that detainees were freed in several places, including Hudson County, N.J.; Polk
County, Tex.; Broward County, Fla.; New Orleans; and from centers in Alabama,
Arizona, Georgia and New York.
While immigration officials occasionally free detainees on supervised release,
immigration advocates said that the surge of recent releases — so many in such a
short span of time — was extraordinary.
Under supervised release, defendants in immigration cases have to adhere to a
strict reporting schedule that might include attending appointments at a
regional immigration office as well as wearing electronic monitoring bracelets,
officials said.
Advocacy groups, citing the cost of detaining immigrants, have for years argued
that the federal government should make greater use of less expensive
alternatives to detention for low-risk defendants being held on administrative
charges.
One such group, the National Immigration Forum, estimated last year that it cost
from $122 to $164 a day to hold a detainee in the federal immigration system. In
contrast, the organization said, alternative forms of detention could cost from
30 cents to $14 a day per immigrant.
Among those released in the past week was Anthony Orlando Williams, 52, a
Jamaican immigrant who spent nearly three years in a detention center in
Georgia. “I’m good, man,” he said. “I’m free.”
Mr. Williams, in a telephone interview from Stone Mountain, Ga., said he became
an illegal immigrant when he overstayed a visa in 1991. He was detained in 2010
by a sheriff’s deputy in Gwinnett County, Ga., when it was discovered that he
had violated probation for a conviction in 2005 of simple assault, simple
battery and child abuse, charges that sprung from a domestic dispute with his
wife at the time. He was transferred to ICE custody and has been fighting a
deportation order with the help of Families for Freedom, an immigrant support
group in New York.
Mr. Williams was released last Friday. “That was a long, long, long run,” he
said of his detention, adding that he has an appointment this Friday at an
immigration office in Atlanta at which he expects to receive the terms of his
supervised release — “a list of things I have to abide by.”
Human Rights First, another advocacy group in New York, which has been pressing
for reform of the immigration detention system, said that 96 percent of
immigrants enrolled in ICE’s alternatives-to-detention program attended their
final hearing in 2011. That figure was up from the year before, in which 93
percent attended their final court hearings, said the group, citing statistics
provided by B.I., a private contractor that provides monitoring and supervision
services to ICE.
Immigrants’ advocates applauded the releases but pressed the Obama
administration to do more, including adhering more closely to its declared
enforcement priorities and leaving alone immigrants accused of low-level crimes
and administrative immigration violations.
“It shouldn’t take a manufactured crisis in Washington to prompt our immigration
agencies to actually take steps towards using government resources wisely or
keeping families together,” said Carolina Canizales, a leader of United We
Dream, the nation’s largest group of young illegal immigrants.
But Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of Alabama, a senior member of the Senate
Judiciary Committee, which is also holding immigration hearings, said the
releases “lessened the chances” that legislators might reach a bipartisan accord
on comprehensive immigration reform.
“It is clear the administration is using the sequester as a convenient excuse to
bow to political pressure from the amnesty groups,” he said. “With this new
action, the administration has further demonstrated that it has no commitment to
enforcing the law and cannot be trusted to deliver on any future promises of
enforcement.”
Other Republicans, however, shrugged off the releases, saying they expected that
the administration would use the excuse of sequestration to take
attention-grabbing action and that they were prepared for more in the coming
days.
February 22, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR
WASHINGTON — As President Obama intensifies his campaign for a
broad overhaul of the nation’s immigration system, advocates for America’s 11
million illegal immigrants are stepping up demands that he stop what has become
one of the most aggressive and efficient efforts in decades to round up and
deport people who are in the United States unlawfully.
In four years, Mr. Obama’s administration has deported as many illegal
immigrants as the administration of George W. Bush did in his two terms, largely
by embracing, expanding and refining Bush-era programs to find people and send
them home. By the end of this year, deportations under Mr. Obama are on track to
reach two million, or nearly the same number of deportations in the United
States from 1892 to 1997.
That effort has helped Mr. Obama lay claim to being tough on illegal
immigration, giving him some added credibility with conservatives as he calls
for an overhaul of the system by the summer. But it has also left him caught
between powerful and impassioned political forces at a critical moment in the
immigration debate.
Although critics have long cited lax enforcement as a reason to oppose giving
illegal immigrants a way to become legal residents, activists say the
deportation policy has become an unfair and indiscriminate dragnet that is
forcing people out of the country at exactly the wrong moment — when the promise
of eventual United States citizenship could be around the corner.
“Enforcing a broken system aggressively right before we’re about to change it is
not just not compassionate, it’s cruel,” said Jim Wallis, the chief executive of
Sojourners, a Christian social action group. “If you are breaking up families
because of politics, we’re going to speak out against you.”
Administration officials insist that the government has worked hard over the
last four years to make deporting criminals the top priority, while allowing law
enforcement officers more discretion on deciding whom to send home. They say the
perception of a huge crackdown is erroneous and misleading.
“We focused on smart, effective enforcement that prioritizes the removal of
criminal aliens, recent border crossers and egregious immigration law
violators,” said Matthew Chandler, a spokesman for the Department of Homeland
Security.
But those claims are disputed by immigrant activists, who say that many of those
being deported have done nothing wrong except to enter the country illegally.
Since 2010, the government has deported more than 200,000 parents of children
who are United States citizens, according to a recent report.
“Our communities are being torn apart for minor offenses,” said Lorella Praeli,
the director of advocacy and policy at United We Dream, the largest network of
young immigrants here illegally. She pointed to a case last month in Arizona,
where the mother of a young immigration activist was detained and put on a bus
for deportation before an outcry on social media got her case turned around. “We
expect more leadership from the president on this issue.”
For Mr. Obama, the rising anger about deportations is an echo of what happened
last summer, when activists focused on the plight of illegal immigrants who had
come to the United States as young children. Fighting for re-election, the
president deferred the removal of the young people from the country.
Now, the same activists are pressing the president and his top advisers to
expand the deferrals to a much broader cross-section of illegal immigrants.
Representatives of several groups pushed the idea in an online chat with Mr.
Obama’s top domestic policy adviser this month. And the president was confronted
directly in two recent interviews with Spanish-language television networks and
during another online chat.
“In the spirit of your push for immigration reform, would you consider a
moratorium on deportations of noncriminals?” María Elena Salinas of Univision
asked Mr. Obama last month.
The president said he could not, reflecting a belief among top White House aides
and their allies in Washington that a large reduction in deportations would
enrage Republicans in Congress and doom any hope for a bipartisan immigration
overhaul this year.
Senator John McCain of Arizona said recently that there had been “real
improvements” in immigration enforcement efforts, including more security at the
border, and that “it helps a lot” in the fight for immigration legislation this
year. Administration officials said that kind of praise might evaporate if
deportations suddenly stopped.
In a White House meeting with immigration activists this month, Mr. Obama said a
moratorium on deportations would go beyond what he could legally do and would
undermine the legislative efforts, according to several of those present. Angela
Maria Kelley, the vice president for immigration policy at the Center for
American Progress, said some of the activists were being unrealistic.
“It feels like it’s a little bit tone-deaf to what’s going on up in Capitol
Hill,” she said. “I’m sympathetic to the feeling that people are hemorrhaging.
But at the end of the day the real cure comes from Congress.”
Officials also say there are legal burdens on the administration, which is
required to enforce the laws that Congress has passed. Much of the increase in
deportations, they say, is the result of huge increases in financing from
Congress, with orders to use the money to enforce immigration laws.
Within those constraints, administration officials said that Janet Napolitano,
the homeland security secretary, had tried to narrow the department’s focus by
giving discretion to prosecutors, stopping some raids, shifting officers to the
border and looking for illegal immigrants in jails rather than in communities.
While those efforts have not reduced the overall number of deportations,
officials argue that the steps have made them fairer, even as the mandate from
Congress to enforce the laws is fulfilled. Officials note that a recent survey
found that the president’s job approval rating among Hispanics was 73 percent,
up from 48 percent at the end of 2011.
“This enforcement equation is at a different place than it was 10 years ago,”
Cecilia Muñoz, the president’s chief domestic policy adviser, said in the online
chat this month. “That should be giving us the room to have a constructive
debate.”
The administration’s aggressive deportation policies have failed to sway some of
the president’s most vocal conservative critics, who continue to insist that Mr.
Obama is doing too little to secure the border and crack down on illegal
immigrants.
At a hearing on immigration last week, Senator Jeff Sessions, Republican of
Alabama, railed against what he called the lack of enforcement during Mr.
Obama’s tenure, even as Capitol police officers were dragging out immigration
protesters who yelled, “Stop deportations now!”
“Had this administration done a better job of enforcement, had been more
effective in moving forward with a lawful system of immigration, you would be in
a much stronger position with the American people,” Mr. Sessions said.
Ms. Napolitano defended the administration, saying that immigration and border
control agents had one of the toughest jobs in the country.
“They get criticized because we’re deporting too many people,” Ms. Napolitano
told Mr. Sessions, a bit of exasperation in her voice. “And as I mentioned in my
testimony, we’ve deported more people than any prior administration. Then they
get criticized for not deporting everyone who is here illegally.”
Members of Congress and President Obama have been working in
earnest to deliver on their promise to overhaul immigration this year. Mr. Obama
would clearly prefer a bipartisan bill, and last week the Senate Judiciary
Committee held its first hearing on possible changes in immigration law. News
reports last weekend suggested that the White House would fashion its own bill
should negotiations between Republican and Democratic supporters of reform
collapse.
Yet, in all the talk of providing a path to citizenship for millions of
undocumented workers while tightening border security, one important issue has,
so far, received only passing mention: stronger protections for immigrant
workers against exploitation and abuse. Such protections, essential to any
reform plan, would help rid the system of bottom-feeding employers who hire and
underpay and otherwise exploit cheap immigrant labor, dragging down wages and
workplace standards for everyone.
Such abuses are easily visited on immigrant workers by unscrupulous employers
who use the threat of deportation to force their victims into silence. This
imbalance of power harms workers who toil in the shadows. But the system that
recruits legal temporary workers is also a mess. In the event that an
immigration overhaul greatly expands the number of guest workers — even
hard-line Republicans have been talking about adding temporary visas in
agriculture and in high-tech industries — it is crucial to avoid making the mess
even bigger.
A new report by a coalition of labor, immigrant and human-rights groups has
identified and examined “disturbingly common patterns” of abuse in America’s
guest-worker programs. They are an alphabet-soup of visas with names like H-1B,
H-2A, H-2B, J-1 and A-3, all having their own rules and little in common except,
the report said, workers who are frequently victimized by “fraud,
discrimination, severe economic coercion, retaliation, blacklisting and, in some
cases, forced labor, indentured servitude, debt bondage and human trafficking.”
The abuses begin overseas, where workers pay recruiters steep fees and start
their new lives in deep debt. Unable to leave abusive employers and with little
access to the legal system, they suffer in silence. Those who do speak out are
threatened, fired, deported, blacklisted. They have little opportunity to
complain about unsafe working conditions, to sue for stolen wages or to assert
their rights to overtime and time off.
Overhauling visa programs to ensure workers’ rights should be in the thick of
the immigration discussion. For one thing, it’s a way to move past the deep
divisions that have stalled reform. Labor unions have been wary of bills that
include guest-worker programs because they don’t want the competition. But in a
promising shift, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Service Employees International Union
have joined forces with an old adversary, the Chamber of Commerce, in the
current push for reform. The unions recognize that deporting 11 million
undocumented immigrants is a delusion, and that the benefits of legalizing them
far outweigh keeping them outside the law.
And if immigrant workers are free to assert their rights without fear, to
bargain collectively and blow the whistle on bad employers, American workers can
only benefit, too.
February 17, 2013
The New York Times
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR and JULIA PRESTON
WASHINGTON — A plan by President Obama for an overhaul of the
immigration system would put illegal immigrants on a path to citizenship that
could begin after about eight years and would require them to go to the back of
the line behind legal applicants, according to a draft of the legislation that
the White House has circulated in the administration.
The draft plan says none of the 11 million illegal immigrants currently in the
country would be granted permanent resident status and given a document known as
a green card until the earlier of two dates: either eight years after the bill
is enacted or 30 days after visas have been given to everyone who applied
legally.
The plan includes a shortened path to citizenship for young illegal immigrants
who came to the United States as children, said an administration official who
agreed to discuss the details only on the condition of anonymity. In many cases,
those young people could apply for green cards as soon as two years after the
law was passed.
The disclosure of the document’s existence, by USA Today on Saturday, set off a
series of political recriminations and questions on Sunday about Mr. Obama’s
promise to allow bipartisan Congressional talks to take precedence. The furor
also offered new evidence that Republicans could use the president’s direct
involvement as a reason to reject a potential compromise.
The White House on Wednesday sent copies of the draft to officials in government
agencies that deal with immigration and border security, the administration
official said. In the face of the sharp Republican criticism, the administration
insisted this weekend that no decision had been made and that nothing had
changed. White House aides reached out to lawmakers in both parties on Saturday
night to reassure them, officials said.
Denis McDonough, the president’s top White House aide, said on Sunday that Mr.
Obama remained committed to staying on the sidelines while a group of Republican
and Democratic senators tries to reach an immigration agreement by the spring.
In his first appearances on Sunday talk shows as chief of staff, Mr. McDonough
said the administration was preparing draft legislation only as a backup.
“We’ve not proposed anything to Capitol Hill yet,” he said on the ABC program
“This Week.” “We’re going to be ready. We have developed each of these proposals
so we have them in a position so that we can succeed.”
His comments came after Republicans quickly condemned the reports of a new
administration plan, calling it “dead on arrival” and “very counterproductive.”
Senator Marco Rubio, Republican of Florida, issued a statement late Saturday
calling the president’s reported legislation “half-baked and seriously flawed.”
He said its approval “would actually make our immigration problems worse.” Mr.
Rubio has been among the leading Republicans pushing for a comprehensive
overhaul of the immigration process.
On Sunday, Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, another Republican calling
for immigration changes, said on “This Week” that the president’s efforts to
develop his own legislation would undermine efforts on Capitol Hill and were
taking “things in the wrong direction.”
Aides to Mr. Obama have been working on immigration legislation for years in
anticipation of a renewed push. Mr. McDonough did not confirm which specific
proposals would be in the president’s bill if he presented one to Congress, but
said that if lawmakers could not reach an agreement, everyone would find out.
Mr. Rubio “says it’s dead on arrival if proposed,” Mr. McDonough said. “Well,
let’s make sure that it doesn’t have to be proposed. Let’s make sure that that
group up there, the gang of eight, makes some good progress on these efforts, as
much as they say they want to, and that’s exactly what we intend to do, to work
with them.”
The back-and-forth was a blunt reminder that Mr. Obama remains a polarizing
figure as the two parties seek common ground on an emotional issue that has
defied resolution for more than two decades.
According to the White House draft, which elaborates on principles that Mr.
Obama unveiled several weeks ago, illegal immigrants would have to wait at least
eight years before they could apply for green cards, the first step on the path
to citizenship, unless the backlogs were cleared earlier. After receiving a
green card, immigrants are generally eligible to become naturalized citizens
after five years.
The plan contemplates measures that could speed up the long lines in the legal
system, opening the door to a faster path. But administration officials have
said it is highly unlikely that the lines would be eliminated before eight
years. About six million people who have followed the rules and have been
approved are waiting for green cards to be issued. Most Mexicans, for example,
must wait at least 16 years to receive their green cards after they are
approved.
Mr. Obama proposes to reduce the backlog by temporarily adding to the number of
visas available and by reconfiguring some visa categories to remove them from
numerical caps. Once those lines were eliminated, illegal immigrants who would
be given provisional legal status under Mr. Obama’s draft plan could apply for
green cards.
The length of the path to citizenship for illegal immigrants has become a highly
delicate issue in the fast-moving debate over the overhaul. Republicans who are
part of the bipartisan group of senators drafting legislation have said they are
looking for a longer path for illegal immigrants, to make it clear they are not
jumping the line or being rewarded for violating the law to come to the United
States.
Those Republicans, led by Mr. Rubio, are also insisting that the path to
citizenship must hinge on advances in border security. There is no mention of
any border enforcement trigger in the versions of the plan that the White House
circulated on Wednesday. But increased border enforcement is part of the
principles for comprehensive immigration legislation that Mr. Obama has outlined
in speeches in recent weeks.
Meanwhile, advocacy groups for Latinos and other immigrants are increasing their
pressure on Mr. Obama to shorten the path and reduce its hurdles. This month, a
broad coalition of immigrant groups called for the wait to be “years, not
decades,” and one group said immigrants should be able to become naturalized
citizens after no more than seven years. Last week, a Latino group delivered an
online petition with more than 265,000 supporters calling for an efficient
pathway.
The draft does not yet include any proposed legislation for a guest worker
program to handle future flows of immigrants for agriculture and other low-wage
industries, the administration official said. That intensely contentious issue
is the subject of parallel closed-door negotiations between labor leaders and
the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
Under the White House’s draft plan, immigrants would have to pay any back taxes,
learn English and pay fees and a penalty of probably a few hundred dollars.
Immigrants with serious criminal records would not be eligible.
January 31, 2013
The New York Times
By DAVID BROOKS
Over here in the department of punditry, we deal with a lot of
hard issues, ones on which the evidence is mixed and the options are all bad.
But the immigration issue is a blessed relief. On immigration, the evidence is
overwhelming; the best way forward is clear.
The forlorn pundit doesn’t even have to make the humanitarian case that
immigration reform would be a great victory for human dignity. The cold economic
case by itself is so strong.
Increased immigration would boost the U.S. economy. Immigrants are 30 percent
more likely to start new businesses than native-born Americans, according to a
research summary by Michael Greenstone and Adam Looney of The Hamilton Project.
They are more likely to earn patents. A quarter of new high-tech companies with
more than $1 million in sales were also founded by the foreign-born.
A study by Madeline Zavodny, an economics professor at Agnes Scott College,
found that every additional 100 foreign-born workers in science and technology
fields is associated with 262 additional jobs for U.S. natives.
Thanks to the labor of low-skill immigrants, the cost of food, homes and child
care comes down, living standards rise and more women can afford to work outside
the home.
The second clear finding is that many of the fears associated with immigration,
including illegal immigration, are overblown.
Immigrants are doing a reasonable job of assimilating. Almost all of the
children of immigrants from Africa and Asia speak English and more than 90
percent of the children of Latin-American immigrants do. New immigrants may
start out disproportionately in construction and food-service jobs, but, by
second and third generation, their occupation profiles are little different from
the native-born.
Immigrants, including illegal immigrants, are not socially disruptive. They are
much less likely to wind up in prison or in mental hospitals than the
native-born.
Immigrants, both legal and illegal, do not drain the federal budget. It’s true
that states and localities have to spend money to educate them when they are
children, but, over the course of their lives, they pay more in taxes than they
receive in benefits. Furthermore, according to the Congressional Budget Office,
giving the current illegals a path to citizenship would increase the taxes they
pay by $48 billion and increase the cost of public services they use by $23
billion, thereby producing a surplus of $25 billion.
It’s also looking more likely that immigrants don’t even lower the wages for
vulnerable, low-skill Americans. In 2007, the last time we had a big immigration
debate, economists were divided on this. One group, using one methodology, found
immigration had a negligible effect on low-skill wages. Another group, using
another methodology, found that the wages of the low-skilled were indeed hurt.
Since then, as Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute explains,
methodological advances suggest that the wages of most low-skill workers are
probably not significantly affected. It turns out that immigrant workers are not
always in direct competition with native-born workers, and, in some cases, they
push the native-born upward into jobs that require more communication skills.
Shierholz found that between 1994 and 2007 immigration increased overall
American wages by a small amount ($3.68 per week). It decreased the wages of
American male high school dropouts by a very small amount ($1.37 per week). And
it increased the wages of female high school dropouts by a larger amount ($4.19
per week).
The argument that immigration hurts the less skilled is looking less persuasive.
Because immigration is so attractive, most nations are competing to win the
global talent race. Over the past 10 years, 60 percent of nations have moved to
increase or maintain their immigrant intakes, especially for high-skilled
immigrants.
The United States is losing this competition. We think of ourselves as an
immigrant nation, but the share of our population that is foreign-born is now
roughly on par with Germany and France and far below the successful immigrant
nations Canada and Australia. Furthermore, our immigrants are much less skilled
than the ones Canada and Australia let in. As a result, the number of high-tech
immigrant start-ups has stagnated, according to the Kauffman Foundation, which
studies entrepreneurship.
The first big point from all this is that given the likely gridlock on tax
reform and fiscal reform, immigration reform is our best chance to increase
America’s economic dynamism. We should normalize the illegals who are here,
create a legal system for low-skill workers and bend the current reform
proposals so they look more like the Canadian system, which tailors the
immigrant intake to regional labor markets and favors high-skill workers.
The second big conclusion is that if we can’t pass a law this year, given the
overwhelming strength of the evidence, then we really are a pathetic basket case
of a nation.
January 29,
2013
The New York Times
By MARK LANDLER
LAS VEGAS —
Seizing an opening to rewrite the nation’s immigration laws, President Obama
challenged Congress on Tuesday to act swiftly to put 11 million illegal
immigrants living in the United States on a clear path to citizenship.
But his push for speedy action and his silence on proposals to defer the
opportunity for legal residency until the country’s borders are deemed secure
provoked criticism from a Republican leader on the issue. The response suggests
that reaching consensus on immigration law changes remained difficult despite a
new bipartisan push since the November elections.
Speaking at a high school here in a state that has seen rapid growth in its
Hispanic population, the president praised a bipartisan group of senators who
proposed their own sweeping immigration overhaul a day earlier, saying their
plan was very much in line with his own proposals.
Mr. Obama warned, however, that “the closer we get, the more emotional this
debate is going to become.” He said that if Congress did not move forward “in a
timely fashion” on its own legislation, he would send up a specific measure —
something the White House has put off for now — and demand a vote.
The president’s speech immediately exposed potential fault lines in the coming
debate. He said, for example, that there must be a path to citizenship for
illegal immigrants “from the outset,” a statement that would seem at odds with
the assertion by some senators that citizenship must be tied to tighter border
security.
Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican seen as an influential party voice
on an issue that cost Republicans in last year’s voting, said he was “concerned
by the president’s unwillingness to accept significant enforcement triggers
before current undocumented immigrants can apply for a green card.”
“Without such triggers in place,” he went on, “enforcement systems will never be
implemented, and we will be back in just a few years dealing with millions of
new undocumented people in our country.”
Although Mr. Obama did not say it in his speech, the White House is also
proposing that the United States treat same-sex couples the same as other
families, meaning that people would be able to use their relationship as a basis
to obtain a visa — another element likely to be resisted by some conservative
Republicans.
Brendan Buck, a spokesman for Speaker John A. Boehner, said in a statement that
House Republicans “hope the president is careful not to drag the debate to the
left and ultimately disrupt the difficult work that is ahead in the House and
Senate.”
A senior administration official said the speech was the start of a concerted
campaign to force Republicans to follow through on the bipartisan proposal. He
predicted that given the president’s popularity with Hispanic voters, they would
find it hard vote down a bill with his name on it.
Mr. Obama offered a familiar list of proposals: tightening security on borders,
cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants and temporarily issuing
more visas to clear the huge backlog of people applying for legal status in the
country.
His speech, on the heels of the bipartisan Senate proposal, sets the terms for
one of the year’s landmark legislative debates. These are only the opening steps
in a complicated dance, and both the politics and the policy can be treacherous
ground, as shown by the failed effort to overhaul immigration laws in the George
W. Bush administration.
But the flurry of activity underscores the powerful new momentum behind an
overhaul of the system, after an election that dramatized the vulnerability of
Republicans on the issue, with Mr. Obama piling up lopsided majorities over Mitt
Romney among Hispanic voters.
“Most Americans agree that it’s time to fix a system that’s been broken for way
too long,” Mr. Obama said to an audience of about 2,000 high school students,
many of them Hispanic. They applauded loudly when he mentioned the Dream Act,
which offers amnesty to children of immigrants who are in the United States
illegally.
In scrambling to present their blueprint on Monday, the day before Mr. Obama’s
speech, the senators stole a march on the president. But their intent appeared
less to undermine his efforts than to stake out their own role in drafting a
comprehensive bill.
“It is a fascinating Washington horse race that you don’t always see, and a
signal of the seriousness to get across the finish line,” said Angela Kelley, an
expert on immigration at the Center for American Progress, a liberal research
group.
With the senators hoping to pass legislation by this summer, the White House has
shelved, for now, plans to introduce its own immigration bill, officials said.
Indeed, after two years of feuding with Congress, Mr. Obama finds himself in
rare alignment with Democratic and Republican lawmakers on at least the need to
address a major issue.
That is what made Mr. Obama’s speech such a novelty: rather than criticize
Congress as do-nothing and obstructionist, as he did nearly every day during the
campaign, he applauded the lawmakers for racing ahead of him, at least for a
day.
Beneath the expressions of harmony, however, Ms. Kelley cautioned: “There’s so
much they don’t agree on. There’s going to be a lot of soul-searching.”
Among the main differences is whether to make the path to citizenship for
illegal immigrants contingent on stricter border controls and visa procedures.
Mr. Obama, in his remarks, emphasized that as long as immigrants registered with
the authorities and fulfilled other obligations like paying their taxes, there
should be no doubt that they would eventually obtain citizenship.
“If you’re able to meet some basic criteria,” he said, “then we’ll consider
offering you the chance to come out of the shadows.”
Mr. Obama defended his record in securing the borders, saying that illegal
border crossings had dropped 80 percent from their peak in 2000 because of
increased patrols. Six unmanned surveillance drones now fly over the southwest
border, in addition to 124 other aircraft.
Mr. Obama’s remarks differed little from the main points in his 29-page
blueprint for overhauling immigration laws, which he issued last May and used as
a plank in his re-election campaign. But his language was plainer and more
forceful — speaking of a road to citizenship for illegal immigrants, for
example, not merely to legal status.
The provision on same-sex couples was not in the blueprint, though an
administration official said the Department of Homeland Security began using it
in 2010 when deciding cases involving families.
The president’s goal, the officials said, will be less to underline differences
with the bipartisan plan than to marshal public support behind comprehensive
immigration legislation. Mr. Obama, having failed to achieve that in his first
term, has put it at the top of his agenda for his second.
The
following is the complete transcript of President Obama’s remarks on immigration
on Tuesday in Las Vegas. (Transcript courtesy of Federal News Service.)
PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Thank you. (Cheers, applause.) Thank you. Thank you so
much. Thank you. (Cheers, applause.) Thank you.
Well, it is good to be back in Las Vegas. (Cheers, applause.) And it is good to
be among so many good friends. Let -- let me start off by thanking everybody at
Del Sol High School for hosting us. (Cheers, applause.) Go, Dragons! Let me
especially thank your outstanding principal, Lisa Primas. (Cheers, applause.)
There are all kinds of notable guests here, but I just want to mention a few.
First of all, our outstanding secretary of Department of Homeland Security,
Janet Napolitano is here. (Cheers, applause.) Our wonderful secretary of the
interior, Ken Salazar. (Cheers, applause.) Former Secretary of Labor Hilda
Solis. (Cheers, applause.) Two of the outstanding members of the congressional
delegation from Nevada, Steve Horsford and Dina Titus. (Cheers, applause.) Your
own mayor, Carolyn Goodman. (Cheers, applause.)
But we also have some mayors that flew in because they know how important the
issue we’re going to talk about today is, Marie Lopez Rogers from Avondale,
Arizona -- (cheers, applause) -- Kasim Reed from Atlanta, Georgia -- (cheers,
applause) -- Greg Stanton from Phoenix, Arizona (cheers, applause) -- and Ashley
Swearengin from Fresno, California.
(Cheers, applause.)
And all of you are here -- (cheers) -- as well as some of the top labor leaders
in the country, and we are just so grateful. Some outstanding business leaders
are here as well. And of course we got wonderful students here. (Sustained
cheers, applause.) So I could not be prouder of our students.
Now, those of you who have a seat, feel free to take a seat. I don’t mind.
(Laughter.)
AUDIENCE MEMBER: I love you, (Obama ?)!
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I love you back! (Cheers.)
Now, last week -- last week I had the honor of being sworn in for a second term
as president of the United States. (Cheers, applause.) And during my inaugural
address, I talked about how making progress on the defining challenges of our
time doesn’t require us to settle every debate or ignore every difference that
we may have. But it does require us to find common ground and move forward in
common purpose. It requires us to act.
And I know that some issues will be harder to lift than others. Some debates
will be more contentious. That’s to be expected.
But the reason I came here today is because of a challenge where the differences
are dwindling, where a broad consensus is emerging and where a call for action
can now be heard coming from all across America.
I’m here today because the time has come for common-sense, comprehensive
immigration reform -- (cheers, applause) -- (inaudible). Now’s the time. Now’s
the time. (Cheers, applause.) Now’s the time. (Chanting.) Now’s the time.
I’m here because -- I’m here because most Americans agree that it’s time to fix
a system that’s been broken for way too long.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Right!
PRESIDENT OBAMA: I’m here because business leaders, faith leaders, labor
leaders, law enforcement and leaders from both parties are coming together to
say now is the time to find a better way to welcome the striving, hopeful
immigrants who still see America as the land of opportunity. Now’s the time to
do this so we can strengthen our economy and strengthen our country’s future.
Think about it. We define ourselves as a nation of immigrants. That’s who we
are, in our bones. The promise we see in those who come here from every corner
of the globe, that’s always been one of our greatest strengths. It keeps our
workforce young, it keeps our country on the cutting edge, and it’s helped build
the greatest economic engine the world has ever known.
After all, immigrants helped start businesses like Google and Yahoo. They
created entire new industries that in turn created new jobs and new prosperity
for our citizens.
In recent years 1 in 4 high-tech startups in America were founded by immigrants.
One in 4 new small-business owners were immigrants, including right here in
Nevada, folks who came here seeking opportunity and now want to share that
opportunity with other Americans.
But we all know that today we have an immigration system that’s out of date and
badly broken; a system that’s holding us back instead of helping us grow our
economy and strengthen our middle class.
Right now we have 11 million undocumented immigrants in America, 11 million men
and women from all over the world who live their lives in the shadows. Yes, they
broke the rules. They crossed the border illegally. Maybe they overstayed their
visas. Those are the facts. Nobody disputes them.
But these 11 million men and women are now here. Many of them have been here for
years. And the overwhelming majority of these individuals aren’t looking for any
trouble. They’re contributing members of the community. They’re looking out for
their families. They’re looking out for their neighbors. They’re woven into the
fabric of our lives.
Every day, like the rest of us, they go out and try to earn a living. Often they
do that in the shadow economy, a place where employers may offer them less than
the minimum wage or make them work overtime without extra pay. And when that
happens, it’s not just bad for them, it’s bad for the entire economy, because
all the businesses that are trying to do the right thing, that are hiring people
legally, paying a decent wage, following the rules -- they’re the ones who
suffer.
They’ve got to compete against companies that are breaking the rules. And the
wages and working conditions of American workers are threatened too.
So if we’re truly committed to strengthening our middle class and providing more
ladders of opportunity to those who are willing to work hard to make it in the
middle class, we’ve got to fix the system. We have to make sure that every
business and every worker in America is playing by the same set of rules. We
have to bring this shadow economy into the light so that everybody is held
accountable, businesses for who they hire and immigrants for getting on the
right side of the law. That’s common sense, and that’s why we need comprehensive
immigration reform.
And -- (cheers, applause) -- now, there’s another economic reason why we need
reform. It’s not just about the folks who come here illegally and have the
effect they have on our economy; it’s also about the folks who try to come here
legally but have a hard time doing so and the effect that has on our economy.
Right now there are brilliant students from all over the world sitting in
classrooms at our top universities. They’re earning degrees in the fields of the
future, like engineering and computer science. But once they finish school, once
they earn that diploma, there’s a good chance they’ll have to leave our country.
Now, think about that. Intel was started with the help of an immigrant who
studied here and then stayed here. Instagram was started with the help of an
immigrant who studied here and then stayed here. Right now in one of those
classrooms, there’s a student wrestling with how to turn their big idea, their
Intel or Instagram, into a big business.
We’re giving them all the skills they need to figure that out, but then we’re
going to turn around and tell them to start that business and create those jobs
in China or India or Mexico or someplace else. That’s not how you grow new
industries in America. That’s how you give new industries to our competitors.
That’s why we need comprehensive immigration reform.
Now -- (cheers, applause) -- now, during my first term, we took steps to try and
patch up some of the worst cracks in the system. First, we strengthened security
at the borders so that we could finally stem the tide of illegal immigrants. We
put more boots on the ground on the southern border than at any time in our
history. And today, illegal crossings are down nearly 80 percent from their peak
in 2000. (Applause.)
Second, we focused our enforcement efforts on criminals who are here illegally
and who endanger our communities. And today, deportations of criminals --
(applause) -- is at its highest level ever.
And third, we took up the cause of the dreamers, the young people who were
brought to this country as children -- (cheers, applause) -- young people who
have grown up here, built their lives here, have futures here. We said that if
you’re able to meet some basic criteria, like pursuing an education, then we’ll
consider offering you the chance to come out of the shadows so that you can live
here and work here legally, so that you can finally have the dignity of knowing
you belong.
But because this change isn’t permanent, we need Congress to act, and not just
on the DREAM Act.
We need Congress to act on a comprehensive approach that finally deals with the
11 million undocumented immigrants who are in the country right now. That’s what
we need. (Cheers, applause.)
Now, the good news is that for the first time in many years Republicans and
Democrats seem ready to tackle this problem together. (Cheers, applause.)
Members of both parties in both chambers are actively working on a solution.
Yesterday a bipartisan group of senators announced their principles for
comprehensive immigration reform, which are very much in line with the
principles I’ve proposed and campaigned on for the last few years. So at this
moment it looks like there’s a genuine desire to get this done soon. And that’s
very encouraging.
But this time action must follow. We can’t allow -- (applause) -- immigration
reform to get bogged down in an endless debate. We’ve been debating this a very
long time. So it’s not as if we don’t know technically what needs to get done.
As a consequence, to help move this process along, today I’m laying out my ideas
for immigration reform. And my hope is that this provides some key markers to
members of Congress as they craft a bill, because the ideas that I’m proposing
have traditionally been supported by both Democrats like Ted Kennedy and
Republicans like President George W. Bush. You don’t get that matchup very
often. (Laughter.) So -- so we know where the consensus should be.
Now of course, there will be rigorous debate about many of the details. And
every stakeholder should engage in real give and take in the process. But it’s
important for us to recognize that the foundation for bipartisan action is
already in place. And if Congress is unable to move forward in a timely fashion,
I will send up a bill based on my proposal and insist that they vote on it right
away.
AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Yes! (Cheers, applause.)
PRESIDENT OBAMA: So -- so the principles are pretty straightforward. There are a
lot of details behind it. We’re going to hand out a bunch of paper so everybody
will know exactly what we’re talking about. But the principles are pretty
straightforward.
First, I believe we need to stay focused on enforcement. That means continuing
to strengthen security at our borders.
It means cracking down more forcefully on businesses that knowingly hire
undocumented workers. To be fair, most businesses want to do the right thing,
but a lot of them have a hard time figuring out who’s here legally, who’s not.
So we need to implement a national system that allows businesses to quickly and
accurately verify someone’s employment status. And if they still knowingly hire
undocumented workers, then we need to ramp up the penalties.
Second, we have to deal with the 11 million individuals who are here illegally.
Now, we all agree that these men and women should have to earn their way to
citizenship. But for comprehensive immigration reform to work, it must be clear
from the outset that there is a pathway to citizenship. (Cheers, applause.)
We’ve got to -- we’ve got to lay out a path, a process that includes passing a
background check, paying taxes, paying a penalty, learning English, and then
going to the back of the line behind all the folks who are trying to come here
legally, that’s only fair. (Cheers, applause.) All right? So that means it won’t
be a quick process, but it will be a fair process and it will lift these
individuals out of the shadows and give them a chance to earn their way to green
card and, eventually, to citizenship. (Cheers, applause.)
And the third principle is we’ve got to bring our legal immigration system into
the 21st century because it no longer reflects the realities of our time.
(Cheers, applause.) For example, if you are a citizen, you shouldn’t have to
wait years before your family is able to join you in America. (Cheers,
applause.) You shouldn’t have to wait years.
If you’re a foreign student who wants to pursue a career in science or
technology or a foreign entrepreneur who wants to start a business with the
backing of American investors, we should help you do that here because if you
succeed you’ll create American businesses and American jobs, You’ll help us grow
our economy, you’ll help us strengthen our middle class.
So that’s what comprehensive immigration reform looks like -- smarter
enforcement, a pathway to earn citizenship, improvements in the legal
immigration system so that we continue to be a magnet for the best and the
brightest all around the world.
It’s pretty straightforward.
The question now is simple. Do we have the resolve as a people, as a country, as
a government to finally put this issue behind us? I believe that we do.
(Applause.) I believe that we do. I believe we are finally at a moment where
comprehensive immigration reform is within our grasp. But I promise you this.
The closer we get, the more emotional this debate is going to become.
Immigration’s always been an issue that inflames passions. That’s not
surprising. You know, there are few things that are more important to us as a
society than who gets to come here and call our country home, who gets the
privilege of becoming a citizen of the Untied States of America. That’s a big
deal. When we talk about that in the abstract, it’s easy sometimes for the
discussion to take on a feeling of us versus them. And when that happens, a lot
of folks forget that most of us used to be them. (Cheers, applause.) We forget
that.
And it’s really important for us to remember our history. You know, unless
you’re one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from someplace
else. (Cheers, applause.) Somebody brought you.
You know, Ken Salazar -- he’s of, you know, Mexican-American descent, but he --
he points out that his family’s been living where -- where he lives for 400
years.
(Cheers.) So he didn’t -- he didn’t immigrate anywhere. (Laughter.)
The Irish, who left behind a land of famine; the Germans, who fled persecution;
the Scandinavians, who arrived eager to pioneer out west; the Polish; the
Russians; the Italians; the Chinese; the Japanese; the West Indians; the huddled
masses who came through Ellis Island on one coast and Angel Island on the other
-- (cheers, applause) -- you know, all those folks, before they were us, they
were them. (Laughter.)
And when each new wave of immigrants arrived, they faced resistance from those
who were already here. They faced hardship. They faced racism. They faced
ridicule. But over time, as they went about their daily lives, as they earned a
living, as they raised a family, as they built a community, as their kids went
to school here, they did their part to build the nation. They were the Einsteins
and the Carnegies, but they were also the millions of women and men whose names
history may not remember but whose actions helped make us who we are, who built
this country hand by hand, brick by brick. (Cheers, applause.)
They all came here knowing that what makes somebody an American is not just
blood or birth but allegiance to our founding principles and the faith in the
idea that anyone from anywhere can write the next great chapter of our story.
And that’s still true today. Just ask Alan Aleman. Alan’s here this afternoon.
Where’s Alan? He -- he -- he’s around here. There he is right here. (Cheers,
applause.) Now, Alan was born in Mexico. (Cheers, applause.) He was brought to
this country by his parents when he was a child. Growing up, Alan went to an
American school, pledged allegiance to the American flag, felt American in every
way. And he was, except for one -- on paper. In high school, Alan watched his
friends come of age, driving around town with their new licenses, earning some
extra cash from their summer jobs at the mall. He knew he couldn’t do those
things. But it didn’t matter that much; what mattered to Alan was earning an
education so that he could live up to his God-given potential.
Last year, when Alan heard the news that we were going to offer a chance for
folks like him to emerge from the shadows, even if it’s just for two years at a
time, he was one of the first to sign up. And a few months ago he was one -- one
of the first people in Nevada to get approved. (Cheers, applause.) In that
moment Alan said, I felt the fear vanish. I felt accepted.
So today Alan’s in his second year at the College of Southern Nevada. (Cheers,
applause.) Alan’s studying to become a doctor. (Cheers, applause.) He hopes to
join the Air Force. (Cheers, applause.) He’s working hard every single day to
build a better life for himself and his family. And all he wants is the
opportunity to do his part to build a better America. (Applause.)
So -- so in the coming weeks, as the idea of reform becomes more real and the
debate becomes more heated and there are folks who are trying to pull this thing
apart, remember Alan and all those who share the same hopes and the same dreams.
Remember that this is not just a debate about policy. It’s about people. It’s
about men and women and young people who want nothing more than the chance to
earn their way into the American story.
And throughout our history, that’s only made our nation stronger. And it’s how
we will make sure that this century is the same as the last, an American
century, welcoming of everybody who aspires to do something more, who’s willing
to work hard to do it, and is willing to pledge that allegiance to our flag.
Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America. (Cheers,
applause.)
January 25,
2013
The New York Times
By ASHLEY PARKER
WASHINGTON
— President Obama and a bipartisan group of senators will begin separate but
simultaneous efforts next week to build support for an overhaul of immigration
laws, an effort that had long stalled in Washington but was pushed to the
forefront again during the 2012 presidential campaign.
The group of at least six senators with a long-held interest in immigration
issues is preparing to release a detailed set of principles next Friday, laying
the legislative foundation for what they hope will become a comprehensive
immigration bill. Their initiative coincides with a similar push by the White
House. On Friday, the president met with members of the Congressional Hispanic
Caucus, calling the issue “a top legislative priority,” and on Tuesday he is set
to give an immigration-focused speech in Nevada, where Hispanic voters are
growing in numbers.
The Senate proposal will probably include four main elements: border
enforcement, employer enforcement, handling the future flow of legal immigration
(including temporary agriculture workers and high-skilled engineers) and a
pathway to citizenship for those who entered the nation illegally. Mr. Obama’s
approach will largely echo his 2011 immigration “blueprint,” which he first
outlined in a speech in El Paso, and calls for a pathway to citizenship for the
more than 11 million illegal immigrants already in the country.
Though all members of the Senate group agree that some pathway to legal
residency must be a part of the final proposal, they are still divided on what
exactly that route should be. Republican lawmakers are urging that border
security be tied to a pathway to citizenship and other requirements like having
those who entered illegally go to the back of the line behind immigrants already
waiting to enter the country legally, paying fines and back-taxes, and learning
English.
“You’ve got border security, you’ve got employer verification and you’ve got a
temporary worker program that addresses the magnet, so those three things have
to go together to address operational control over your border,” said Senator
Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina, one of the senators mapping out
the legislation. “Then you go to the next big thing — the 12 million. How do you
deal with the 12 million in a firm, fair way, realizing you can’t put them all
in jail and they’re not all going to self-deport?”
The bipartisan group, which has been meeting regularly since the November
election, includes Mr. Graham, the Democratic Senators Richard J. Durbin of
Illinois, Robert Menendez of New Jersey and Charles E. Schumer of New York, and
the Republican Senators John McCain of Arizona and Marco Rubio of Florida.
Senator Michael Bennet, Democrat of Colorado, and the Republican Senators Jeff
Flake of Arizona and Mike Lee of Utah have also taken part in the discussions.
“It’s going far better than any of us expected,” Mr. Schumer said in an
interview. “On both sides, there is a spirit that everyone is going to have to
meet somewhere in the middle, and we’re very close to coming out with a detailed
list of principles.”
Aides said that the group hoped to have legislation ready by the end of March
and was aiming for a vote in the Senate before the August recess. Though
Republicans talked about handling immigration reform in steps, the senators are
aiming for a comprehensive bill.
Mr. Rubio, who has been publicly promoting his own set of principles, was
approached by the group in December, said a Republican close to the senator.
However, it was unclear until recently whether he would join the bipartisan team
or offer his own proposal.
In 2010, Mr. Graham and Mr. Schumer outlined a framework for overhauling
immigration in a Washington Post op-ed. Their proposal similarly called for four
central elements and “a tough but fair path to legalization for those already
here,” but it did not advance. It is now being used as a starting point for the
group’s efforts.
The 2012 election, in which Mr. Obama beat Mitt Romney with the help of 71
percent of the Hispanic vote, has also proved a galvanizing force for
Republicans. “Because of the mood of the country that it’s time to move forward
on this issue, it’s different than it was some years ago,” Mr. McCain said. “The
election results always have an effect on that.”
Both Democratic and Republican advocates for immigration changes are hoping that
the White House will delay releasing any specific plan of its own to allow a
bipartisan bill to emerge from the Senate. While Republicans have previously
called upon Mr. Obama to take the lead, they say the timing, now that compromise
in the Senate is under way, is inauspicious.
Dolores Prida, Columnist and Playwright, Dies at 69
January 23,
2013
The New York Times
By BRUCE WEBER
Dolores
Prida, a Cuban-born journalist and playwright who wrote candidly and wittily
about local and national politics, romance and other personal matters, and the
joys and vexations of the Hispanic experience in America, died early Sunday in
Manhattan. She was 69.
Ms. Prida was returning to her home in Spanish Harlem from a Saturday night
party celebrating the 20th anniversary of a women’s group she belonged to when
she began feeling ill, her sister Lourdes Diharce said. Ms. Diharce accompanied
her to Mount Sinai Hospital, where she died. An autopsy was performed on
Tuesday, but Ms. Diharce said she had not yet been informed of the cause of
death.
Ms. Prida wrote several plays and the book for “4 Guys named José... and Una
Mujer Named María!” a high-spirited musical that appeared off Broadway in 2000.
But she was more prominent as a journalist. She wrote a monthly column in
English for The Daily News in New York from 2005 until 2012; at her death she
had been writing a weekly column for El Diario/La Prensa, the New York
Spanish-language daily, since 2009 and translating it into English for the Web
site VoicesofNY.org, which is affiliated with the City University of New York
school of journalism.
In addition, for more than a dozen years she wrote the column “Dolores Dice” —
Spanish for “Dolores Says” — for Latina magazine, dispensing romantic advice,
mediating family disputes and counseling mutual respect among factions in the
Hispanic world.
A self-confessed media hound who devoured newspaper and television news reports
across the political spectrum, Ms. Prida was frustrated by the lack of coverage
of Hispanic Americans by mainstream news outlets.
“She was always perplexed at the idea that there was so little news about
Latinos, this incredible sector of the U.S., and that what there was so often
negative,” said Maite Junco, a former editor of Viva New York, a section of The
Daily News aimed at Latino readers, and now the editor of VoicesofNY.org. “She’d
say, ‘If I have to see the video one more time of people jumping the fence in
Mexico when they’re talking about immigration ...’ ”
Her newspaper work was aimed at correcting that gap. Her subjects — gun control,
immigration, parenting, education — were approached from a Hispanic perspective.
A recent column about censorship and freedom of speech focused on a Puerto Rican
television show featuring a gossiping puppet known as La Comay with a penchant
for homosexual slurs.
“The type of humor represented by La Comay and those mental adolescents of
Spanish-language radio morning shows are repugnant to me, and worse yet, they
don’t make me laugh,” Ms. Prida wrote. “But since I have the freedom to move my
radio dial, I never listen to them.
“That is the only type of censorship I can tolerate.”
Dolores Obdulia Prida was born in Caibarién, Cuba, on Sept. 5, 1943. Her father,
Manuel, who ran a clothing business, fled the island by boat shortly after the
revolution led by Fidel Castro; his wife, the former Dolores Prieto, and their
three daughters joined him two years later, in 1961, settling in New York City,
where young Dolores attended Hunter College and worked at a bakery. During the
1970s and 1980s, Ms. Prida worked for the Spanish-language daily newspaper El
Tiempo and a short-lived English-language monthly, Nuestro.
In addition to “4 Guys Named José,” a genial revue of popular Latin songs with a
plot concocted by Ms. Prida about four men putting on a show in Omaha, Ms.
Prida’s plays include “The Beggar’s Soap Opera,” a musical satire with a score
by Paul Radelat that sets a tweaked version of the Brecht-Weill “Threepenny
Opera” in the South Bronx of the 1970s; “Botanica,” about cultural and
generational conflicts in East Harlem among an old Puerto Rican woman, her
daughter and her granddaughter who has just graduated from an Ivy League
university; and “Casa Propria” (“A House of Her Own”), a comedy set in motion
when a woman realizes her life’s wish and buys a house in East Harlem, much to
the displeasure of her lazy, philandering husband.
In addition to her sister Lourdes, Ms. Prida is survived by another sister,
Maria Aristizabal.
The women’s group Ms. Prida was celebrating with on the night of her death was
formed 20 years ago by Latina journalists and other professionals; Sonia
Sotomayor, the newest Supreme Court justice, has attended their gatherings over
the years, including the one Saturday night.
“Dolores was a treasured friend,” Justice Sotomayor wrote in an e-mail on
Tuesday night, “a pioneer in championing the cultural identity of Latinos in the
United States. I saw and hugged her hours before she died.”
The group itself is known informally as LIPS, though it was originally LIP, for
Latinas in Power, Ms. Junco said. It was Ms. Prida who added the “S” — for “Sort
of.”
President
Obama and lawmakers of both parties have begun laying the groundwork for
something that is supposed to be unachievable in Washington today: a bipartisan
deal to solve a bitterly contentious, complicated problem in a big way.
The talk is of immigration reform, a once-in-a-generation overhaul of an
outdated system that turns away too many skilled and eager workers, separates
too many families and keeps too many millions of undocumented people at the
edges of society, unable to get right with the law.
The outlines of reform have long been clear: more visas, a more secure border,
better-regulated workplaces, more protections for workers’ rights and — the key
to everything — legalization and eventual citizenship for 11 million
unauthorized immigrants living in limbo. The only thing missing is a deal.
Expecting Congress to overcome its paralysis is never a good bet these days. But
optimists will note that on immigration, at least, leaders in both parties are
taking great pains to say that they want to get something done. Mr. Obama has
recently been repeating his broken promise to win reform. Senators are huddling
and floating proposals; some Republicans, like Marco Rubio of Florida, are
positioning themselves as reformers with vague but positive-sounding statements.
Senator Rubio has been out shopping his ideas: more visas for high-technology,
professional and temporary agricultural workers, a national work-eligibility
verification program and provisional legalization for the 11 million
undocumented, who would not be granted permanent status until all other legal
immigrants got their green cards.
Some of the 11 million could presumably become citizens one day, though Mr.
Rubio has not said how that would work. If you force millions of people to wait
at the end of a visa line that for some countries is already decades long, is
that really a path to citizenship? Still, he rejects the mass-deportation,
Arizona-style lunacy recently embraced by Republican leaders like Mitt Romney.
For a party so prone to vilifying and criminalizing immigrants, that’s progress.
The hard-core immigration resisters, meanwhile, don’t seem to be as numerous or
as loud, though there has been grumbling from some lawmakers who have said all
along that legalizing 11 million can never happen until the border is secure.
Well, the border is secure. The nonpartisan Migration Policy Institute recently
found that immigration enforcement, especially after 9/11, has had a significant
effect in curbing the illegal border flow to essentially zero. This makes sense,
since the institute’s report shows that the federal government now spends more
to enforce immigration laws than on all its other criminal law-enforcement
agencies combined.
Though the Republicans may have lost a talking point on border security, they
have won the enforcement argument. Even Mr. Obama agrees with their approach,
having greatly expanded his predecessors’ aggressive enforcement programs and
pushed deportations to record levels.
So now it’s time for the other parts of the equation — a smoother, smarter
immigration flow, and legalization with citizenship. Some Republicans are urging
a piecemeal approach, adding layers of enforcement and some new visa programs,
but that is merely a way of putting off solving the problem of the 11 million.
We hope the G.O.P. leaders will move away from that dead-end.
Evangelical leaders, business groups, labor unions and the well-organized young
advocates known as Dreamers are ready to urge on deal makers in Congress. Hope
is running high. Our big fear is that Mr. Obama and the Republicans are merely
getting ready to blame each other if a deal blows up, setting back reform
several more years.
But some things argue against pessimism: the resounding election message,
pressure from Americans who want the immigration system fixed, and the
possibility that enough Congressional Republicans want to begin winning back the
Latino vote that so many in their party have been working so hard to drive way.
January 16,
2013
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS
GILA BEND,
Ariz. — Dennis Donowick is a retired truck driver who refused to spend the rest
of his days “drinking beer and doing nothing,” as he put it. Four years ago, he
packed his guns and his urge “to give back to the community” and joined Sheriff
Joe Arpaio’s volunteer posse, a group best known for its supporting role in the
sheriff’s immigration raids.
Last week, the posse, now 3,000 strong, added the task of safeguarding dozens of
public schools to its portfolio.
Putting more armed guards in schools has been proposed by the National Rifle
Association and others as a way to crack down on school shootings. Sheriff
Arpaio put his own twist on it by simply ordering his posse to keep an eye on
school grounds.
He rolled out the program less than a month after the massacre at Sandy Hook
Elementary School in Connecticut, where a gunman carrying pistols and
semiautomatic rifles killed 26 people, 20 of them children. The program was, he
explained, “to protect our schools from the same type of violence,” though some
people are questioning the risks of placing this responsibility in the hands of
armed volunteers when it is taxpayers who would foot the bill for their
mistakes.
State Representative Chad Campbell, the Democratic minority leader in the House,
said the idea of arming volunteers to patrol the schools was “ludicrous.” In a
column on Tuesday, E. J. Montini of The Arizona Republic wrote that the posse
patrols were a feel-good program that did not do any good.
But Sheriff Arpaio said: “There’s a lot of talking out there. This sheriff does
not talk. I take action.”
If a school finds itself under threat, the job of the volunteer posse is to
“eliminate the target,” said Mr. Donowick, 58, using the military language for
shoot to kill.
Every morning, the volunteers go out in cars and uniforms just like those used
by the Maricopa County deputies under Sheriff Arpaio’s command; there is no way
to tell them apart. They roll by, scrutinize the people around the schools,
looking for someone they feel does not belong, like “a guy in trench coat in the
middle of summer” or a driver sitting in a parked car too long, Mr. Donowick
said.
On patrol one morning, he carried a 9-millimeter Glock in his holster. In the
trunk of his marked Chevy Caprice, he had an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle similar
to the one used in Connecticut. Posse members bring their own weapons and buy
their uniforms. They receive nine months of training before hitting the streets,
and those who are armed — Sheriff Arpaio said there were about 500 of them —
must be recertified every year.
“I’m prepared,” Mr. Donowick said.
As he pulled outside Kiser Elementary School here, across from alfalfa fields
and next to Interstate 8, he smiled and waved to a teacher and her students as
they made their way to class. He talked about the “halo effect” of a marked
sheriff’s car, which can deter some criminal mischief simply by its presence.
“Prevention,” he said as he drove off, heading west to another school.
Sheriff Arpaio created the posse in 1993 to patrol malls during the holiday
season, when thefts in parking lots are common. Since then, the volunteers have
gone on to take detainees to the county’s jails, escort dignitaries and help
deputies serve warrants and support them during raids. It has retirees,
including former police officers and military veterans, like Mr. Donowick, who
served in Vietnam. An investigation by a local CBS affiliate, KPHO-TV, revealed
that several of them also have criminal records — for assault, drug possession,
disorderly conduct and other offenses.
Sheriff Arpaio said that they are “disciplined accordingly” and that he has
“faith in them, faith in the posse.”
It began patrolling 59 schools in unincorporated communities in Maricopa County
last week. They are mostly small, rural places where the sheriff’s office was
already providing policing services, so he did not need to seek additional
permission to add the school visits to his posse’s agenda. He did not contact
the schools ahead of time and he did not need money to finance the program
because the members of the posse do not get paid for their work.
They are, however, insured by Maricopa County while on the job. Mr. Campbell,
who has his own plan to protect schools and toughen the state’s gun laws, said
of the posses that he was “not sure how effective” their officers would be by
simply driving around the schools without being on school grounds or interacting
with teachers and administrators.
On Monday, in her State of the State speech, Gov. Jan Brewer proposed adding
more financing to a program that puts armed police officers inside schools, an
idea that has strong support among Republicans and Democrats but still needs
legislative approval. She also expressed opposition to arming teachers, a
suggestion by the state’s attorney general, Tom Horne, in the days after the
shootings at Sandy Hook.
In an interview on Tuesday, Timothy Ogle, executive director of the Arizona
School Boards Association, said, in a nod to the punishing rounds of state
budget cuts school districts have had to endure for several years, that
“politicians are talking about more money for school resource officers, but they
have yet to fund the basic needs of our children.” He added that he would rather
see the districts work with local police departments to figure out the best way
to protect their schools.
Mr. Donowick, a lieutenant commander in the posse who coordinates the patrols in
24 schools, steered clear of the politics of school safety, saying he was “out
here being constructive.” His job, he went on, is an antidote of sorts.
“I’m the good guy who is armed looking for the bad guy who is armed,” he said.
January 11,
2013
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS
PHOENIX —
Immigration agents arrested the mother and brother of a prominent activist
during a raid at her home here late Thursday, unleashing a vigorous response on
social media and focusing new attention on one of the most controversial aspects
of the Obama administration’s policies on deportation.
The agents knocked on Erika Andiola’s door shortly after 9 p.m., asking for her
mother, Maria Arreola.
Ms. Arreola had been stopped by the police in nearby Mesa last year and detained
for driving without a license. Her fingerprints were sent to federal immigration
officials as part of a controversial program called Secure Communities, which
the Obama administration has been trying to expand nationwide.
That routine check revealed that Ms. Arreola had been returned to Mexico in 1998
after she was caught trying to illegally cross the border into Arizona with
Erika and two of her siblings in tow. As a result, she was placed on a priority
list for deportation.
After being seized on Thursday, she could have been sent back to Mexico in a
matter of hours, but Obama administration officials moved quickly to undo the
arrests. Officials had been pressured by the robust response from advocates —
through phone calls, e-mails and online petitions, but primarily on Twitter,
where they mobilized support for Ms. Andiola, a well-known advocate for young
illegal immigrants, under the hashtag #WeAreAndiola.
The reaction offered the Obama administration a taste of what it might expect
when it gets into the thick of the debate over an immigration overhaul, which
Congress is expected to tackle this year. President Obama has already been under
harsh criticism for the number of illegal immigrants deported since he took
office — roughly 400,000 each year, a record unmatched since the 1950s.
Ms. Andiola, 25, posted a tearful video on YouTube shortly after her mother and
brother were handcuffed and driven away. “I need everybody to stop pretending
that nothing is wrong,” she said in the video, “stop pretending that we’re all
just living normal lives, because we’re not. This could happen to any of us
anytime.”
She is the co-founder of the Arizona Dream Act Coalition, one of the groups
pushing for a reprieve for immigrants brought illegally to the United States as
children, as she was. She has been arrested while camped in front of Senator
John McCain’s office here, protested outside the United States Capitol, and
appeared on the cover of Time magazine in June under the headline, “We are
Americans — just not legally.”
In November, Ms. Andiola got a work permit under a program begun by the Obama
administration last year that gives certain young illegal immigrants temporary
reprieve from deportation. She graduated from Arizona State University in 2009.
On Friday afternoon, her mother returned home from a detention center in
Florence, 70 miles southeast of Phoenix and usually the last stop for certain
illegal immigrants before they are deported. Her brother, Heriberto Andiola
Arreola, 36, who had been kept in Phoenix, was let go earlier, at 6 a.m.
Their swift releases underline the power of the youth-immigrant movement and
their social media activism, which was critical in spreading Ms. Andiola’s story
overnight.
In a statement, Barbara Gonzalez, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs
Enforcement, said a preliminary review of the case revealed that it contains
some of the elements outlined in the agency’s “prosecutorial discretion policy”
and would “merit an exercise of discretion.” Advocates have long argued that the
policy has done little to keep families from being broken apart by deportations.
Ms. Andiola said in an interview that she told her mother to go to her room
before opening the door Thursday night; she suspected the men standing outside
worked for immigration. By the time the men came in, her brother, who was
outside talking to a neighbor, was already in handcuffs, she said.
“Where’s Maria?” the men asked her, she recalled.
Ms. Arreola walked out of the room and, in Spanish, the men asked her to
accompany them outside, where they placed her under arrest.
Though she and her son are free, their future is uncertain, as they could be
arrested again while their cases are under review or deported should the
eventual ruling go against them, said Marielena Hincapié, executive director of
the National Immigration Law Center, one of the groups helping the family.
Stories like this, Ms. Hincapié went on, “happen every day, in every state,”
outside of the media spotlight. What made it different this time is that Ms.
Andiola had connections and wasted no time mobilizing them. There are others,
she said, whom “you never hear about.”
Julia Preston
contributed reporting from New York.
January 2,
2013
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
Obama
administration officials unveiled rules on Wednesday that will allow many
American citizens — perhaps hundreds of thousands — to avoid long separations
from immediate family members who are illegal immigrants as they apply to become
legal residents.
The rules, announced by Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, create a
waiver that bypasses an arcane Catch-22 in immigration law. It had presented
Americans with the prospect of being separated for up to a decade from immigrant
spouses, children or parents who were applying for the legal documents known as
green cards.
Until now, the risks for those immigrants of leaving the United States to return
to their native countries to pick up their visas, even ones that were already
approved, had been so great that countless families decided not to apply, adding
to the numbers of immigrants living illegally in this country.
The immigration authorities will begin accepting applications for the waivers on
March 3. Administration officials first announced the policy change a year ago,
but they have been receiving public comments and making revisions before
publishing the final rules.
It is generally straightforward for American citizens to obtain green cards for
foreign-born spouses or minor children, and in some cases for parents. But if
the immigrants entered the United States illegally, they must return to their
native countries to receive their visas from American consulates there. However,
under a 1996 statute, once illegal immigrants leave this country, they are
barred automatically from returning for at least three and as many as 10 years.
Even immigrants who did not incur any bars to re-entry were often stranded
overseas for many months while consulates completed their applications.
With the new rules, Americans’ family members can apply in the United States for
a waiver from the bars to re-entry, before they leave to pick up their visas.
Officials estimated the time immigrants would have to spend out of the country
would be reduced to “a matter of weeks.”
“One of the critical benefits is that the individual will not be separated from
the United States citizen family member during the application process,” said
Alejandro Mayorkas, the director of United States Citizenship and Immigration
Services, the agency that issues green cards.
For immigrants, officials said, having an approved waiver in hand before leaving
the country would also eliminate many doubts about whether they would ultimately
receive their visas.
“This rule is leaps and bounds better than what we have now,” said Laura
Lichter, president of the American Immigration Lawyers Association. “For
families that were sitting on the fence, unwilling to subject their loved ones
to the uncertainty, now they don’t have to wait.”
Ms. Lichter said many families would still face a hurdle in coming up with the
$585 application fee for the waiver.
One American who was heartened by the new rule is Erika Torres, 30. She has been
married for six years to a Mexican man who was brought illegally to the United
States 24 years ago, when he was 8. Ms. Torres, speaking by telephone on
Wednesday, said she and her husband, who have known each other since they were
children, now own a home and a winemaking business in Cambria, Calif.
Like many Americans, Ms. Torres said she expected no difficulty gaining legal
documents for her husband once they were married. But after learning about the
convoluted visa process, she said, “We have waited because we were just
terrified of the separation.”
Ms. Torres said her husband would probably have to collect his visa from the
American Consulate in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, a city racked by drug trafficking
violence. “He would be a prime target for kidnappers,” she said.
“We are a team,” Ms. Torres said, adding that she feared she would not be able
to sustain their business without her husband’s help. She said they would apply
for a waiver as soon as they became available.
The rules do not give any legal status to illegal immigrants or shortcut the
underlying application. In order to receive green cards, immigrants must still
show that it would cause “extreme hardship” to an American citizen if they were
deported.
“It is a limited change, but a definitely a good step forward in the right
direction,” said Randall Emery, president of American Families United, an
organization of thousands of Americans with family members who are illegal
immigrants.
Ms. Lichter called on Congress to change the law to eliminate the snag created
by the automatic bars. “This is a great solution to a problem that should never
have existed in the first place,” she said.
