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History > 2014 > USA > Immigration (II)
Lamin F. Bojang with his son, Ebrahim Bah,
at his home in the
Bronx.
Damon Winter/The New York Times.
Influx of African Immigrants Shifting National and New York
Demographics
NYT
SEPT. 1, 2014
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/nyregion/influx-of-african-immigrants-shifting-national-and-new-york-demographics.html
Undocumented Immigrants
Line Up for Door Opened by Obama
DEC. 14, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
LOS ANGELES — They pushed strollers, tugged toddlers and streamed
into the convention center in the heart of this city on Sunday, thousands of
immigrants here illegally and anxious to find out if they could gain protection
from deportation under executive actions by President Obama.
The crowd, waiting in a long snaking line to check in, was drawn by an
information session organized by advocacy groups offering people initial
assessments to see if they meet the requirements to apply to stay in the country
and work. The day became a kind of coming-out party for about 5,000 unauthorized
immigrants, the largest gathering in the country of people who might qualify for
temporary protection since the president’s announcement last month.
President Obama told an audience at Del Sol High School in Las Vegas last month
that he had to act alone on immigration reform. Polls show his approval rating
among Hispanics has risen.
Delfina Ibarra, 40, from Mexico, was taking in information while nursing a
17-month-old, Kimberly, the newest citizen in the family. Ms. Ibarra, who has
lived in California for 23 years, said she also has a 21-year-old son who is a
citizen. She said that without documents, she has been limited to cleaning
houses and packing crates in industrial distribution centers. With a legal
deferral document and a work permit, Ms. Ibarra said, she could get a driver’s
license and go back to school.
“It’s never too late to start again,” she said, laughing and holding up her
baby.
Immigration advocates convened the information session in downtown Los Angeles
not just to give out information but to galvanize their supporters as
Republicans, angered by what they see as an illegal power grab by Mr. Obama, say
they will seek to halt the programs when they gain control of both houses of
Congress next year. Texas was joined by more than 20 other states, most led by
Republicans, in filing a lawsuit to stop the president’s actions, arguing he
exceeded his constitutional authority.
Hundreds of activist leaders also converged here for a three-day strategy
conclave to plot how to enroll a maximum number of people in order to create
momentum among immigrants and Latinos so they will defend the president’s
actions and try to stop Republicans from canceling the programs before they get
off the ground.
“We’re telling all our families to get ready to apply if they qualify, because
the more families apply, the harder it is for Republicans to take it away,” said
Angelica Salas, the executive director of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant
Rights of Los Angeles, one of the main groups organizing the event.
Mr. Obama will offer three-year deportation deferrals and work permits to at
least 3.5 million immigrants who have been living in the United States for five
years, have no serious criminal records and have a child who is an American
citizen or legal permanent resident. The president also expanded a 2012 program
for young immigrants. The federal agency in charge, Citizenship and Immigration
Services, will begin in mid-February to accept applications for the youth
program. Applications by the parents will begin in mid-May.
Many who lined up beginning at 7 a.m. and flocked into a vast hall of the Los
Angeles Convention Center said they would have no trouble proving their
histories in this country. When organizers asked how many Mexicans were in the
room, thousands of hands shot up. Two-thirds of the immigrants eligible
nationwide will be from Mexico, according to Pew Research Center.
One of them, Rigoberto Esparza, 50, said that he had been in the United States
for 22 years and that all three of his children were citizens born here.
Mr. Esparza said he worked in construction, employed by a framing and drywall
company. He added that he was not worried about declaring his status at the
meeting because he was confident he would qualify for the White House program.
“I have been so many years in this country, if they give us a chance to get
right with the law, we have to take advantage of it,” Mr. Esparza said.
He was walking on crutches, after a fall on the job left him with a broken
ankle. He said his employer helped him obtain workers’ compensation for his
medical costs, but the accident reminded him that he remained vulnerable without
documents.
The orientation slide show projected on big conference hall screens began with
unflattering photographs of Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio and of
Representative Kevin McCarthy, a Republican from California who is also in the
House leadership. It emphasized the message that Republicans were responsible
for the failure in Congress to pass a broad overhaul of immigration policy that
would have provided a permanent pathway to citizenship.
“These are the ones who keep getting in the way of immigration reform,” Ms.
Salas said from the stage.
When a photograph appeared of Mr. Obama at his Oval Office desk, the crowd
erupted in applause. It was an abrupt change for an immigrant community that has
held countless protests criticizing the president for his record on
deportations.
“Republicans have shown they are not on the side of the immigrant,” said Dany
Santos, 35, an immigrant from Guatemala who came with a double stroller for his
two American-born children, 3 and 4 years old. Still, he said he thought the
program could have been better. “The news is fifty-fifty,” he said, “good for us
but not good for so many people we know were left out” because they did not have
children born in this country.
Mr. Santos’s wife, Virginia, who is also in the United States illegally, said
she worked as a longtime babysitter for several Los Angeles families. She said
she and her employers would be relieved if she had a legal work permit.
Republicans have said Mr. Obama ignored the results of the midterm elections, in
which his party had large setbacks, taking sweeping executive actions instead of
waiting for Congress to set its path on immigration. A spending bill that
received final approval in the Senate late Saturday funds the Department of
Homeland Security only to the end of February, so the Republican-led Congress
can then revisit ways to defund or cancel Mr. Obama’s initiatives.
Joshua Hoyt, the executive director of the National Partnership for New
Americans, said groups gathered here were laying plans to sign up at least
500,000 immigrants for the president’s program. Advocates also appealed to
immigrants here illegally who cannot vote to contact people who can.
“All those children are going to be voters,” Ms. Salas said, “and those voters
are going to remember who stood with their dad and their mom.”
A version of this article appears in print on December 15, 2014, on page A12 of
the New York edition with the headline: Immigrants Line Up, Hoping to Reach Door
Opened by Obama.
Undocumented Immigrants Line Up for Door
Opened by Obama,
NYT, 14.12.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/15/us/politics/
undocumented-immigrants-line-up-for-door-opened-by-obama.html
Why Congress Can Impeach Obama
The Impeachment of Obama on Immigration
May Be Legal — But It’s Wrong
NOV. 21, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor
By PETER H. SCHUCK
NOW that President Obama has granted legal relief to as many as
five million undocumented immigrants, Republicans are thrashing about for an
effective response. Only a few hard-liners are talking about impeachment now,
but more could join them out of frustration with their other options.
Many people in both parties have tried to quell such talk by saying the
president is within his powers to issue the order. The problem is, the
pro-impeachment Republicans are right: There is a plausible case for taking that
step.
By constitutional design, impeachment for “treason, bribery, or other high
crimes and misdemeanors” is a political accusation and initiates a political
remedy, not a legal one. It is pretty much up to Congress to define and apply
“high crimes and misdemeanors,” and no court would second-guess it. The next
Congress could find that the president had violated his oath to “faithfully
execute” the laws by refusing to enforce important provisions of the Affordable
Care Act, No Child Left Behind and, now, the Immigration and Nationality Act.
The president surely has some power to withhold prosecution, but granting legal
status and work permits to millions of people most likely exceeds his
discretion. No judge can decide the precise scope of his discretion because no
one, including Congress, has legal standing to challenge his order in court.
Of course, many lawyers at the Justice Department and elsewhere disagree, noting
that prosecutorial discretion is pervasive, that there isn’t enough money to
prosecute all violators, that the president will continue to prosecute criminals
and illegal border crossers, and that earlier presidents have done the same
thing. These are serious arguments. But as an immigration and administrative law
teacher who strongly favors more legal immigration and even broader legislative
relief than Mr. Obama’s order grants (and who voted for him twice), I find them
unconvincing.
In the Immigration and Nationality Act, Congress carefully limited prosecutorial
discretion by allowing the president to waive exclusions and deportations only
under narrowly defined conditions. The act also granted the president broad
power to suspend the entry of “any class of aliens” he finds detrimental to the
national interest — but, significantly, did not give him corresponding authority
to legalize “any class” of undocumented people he thinks deserve it.
President Obama has cited several cases of suspended enforcement as precedent.
But in those cases, Congress had authorized the immigrants in question to apply
for green cards; the president merely suspended enforcement against their
closest family members until they, too, could get their own cards.
Most telling, Mr. Obama, a former constitutional law professor, once rejected
the very arguments he now embraces. Last year he said that extending amnesty
beyond the so-called Dreamers (the children of undocumented immigrants brought
here at an early age) would be “ignoring the law in a way that I think would be
very difficult to defend legally.” It is hard to think of a confession more
damning to his position in a court of law, in a congressional court of
impeachment and in the court of public opinion.
Still, does his overreaching constitute an “impeachable offense” under the
constitutional standard? History suggests that it might. In the early 1800s, two
federal judges were impeached for far less: noncriminal intoxication, indecency,
bias and other judicial improprieties.
True, the standard for impeaching presidents should be more demanding than for
judges. Even so, in 1868 President Andrew Johnson was impeached by a deeply
partisan, Radical Republican-dominated House. Johnson — a conservative Democrat
who rose from the vice presidency when Abraham Lincoln, a Republican, was
assassinated — was impeached mainly for firing a cabinet member (which he almost
certainly had the legal right to do), but also for obstructing policies that
Congress enacted. (Impeachment proceedings against Richard M. Nixon and Bill
Clinton involved criminal conduct more egregious than Mr. Obama’s policy
unilateralism.)
But even if Congress has constitutional authority to impeach the president, that
doesn’t mean it should. Quarrels between a president and Congress over the
statutory limits on his authority are common, and the precise boundaries can be
hard to discern. However truculent Mr. Obama’s defiance may be on this issue,
Congress has other ways to stymie it — for example, barring the action by
statute. Such tactics are within the normal give-and-take of interbranch
disputes. Americans, including many like me who want a legislative amnesty,
would support Congress’s use of them here.
Impeachment, moreover, would tend to normalize its use as a political weapon,
even though the framers intended that it be used only in extreme cases that
endanger the republic. Only inveterate Obama haters think that is true here.
The new Congress would accomplish nothing of consequence despite urgent national
needs and voters’ demands for cooperation. This would deepen the public’s
growing disgust with our government, a disgust that, properly directed, can spur
needed reform, but if taken too far erodes the government’s capacity to do what
only government can and must do. Perhaps most dangerous, impeachment of an
already lame-duck president would further disable him for the next two years
from defending American security and interests in a remorselessly turbulent,
perilous world. All Americans should fervently pray that it doesn’t come to
that.
Peter H. Schuck is a professor at Yale Law School and the author, most recently,
of “Why Government Fails So Often, and How It Can Do Better.”
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 22, 2014, on page A21 of
the New York edition with the headline: Why Congress Can Impeach Obama.
Why Congress Can Impeach Obama, NYT,
21.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/opinion/
the-impeachment-of-obama-on-immigration-may-be-legal-but-its-wrong.html
Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan
NOV. 21, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
President Obama’s speech Thursday night on immigration ended on a
high, hopeful note. Mr. Obama, quoting Scripture’s admonition to welcome and
protect the stranger, told millions who have lived and worked here for years,
many of them Americans in all but name: We cannot fix your situation yet, but
for now we will not expel you, because we have better hopes for you here.
A speech is not a solution, of course, and now that it is over, the hard work
begins. Efforts over the last decade to repair immigration have repeatedly ended
in failure, leaving the meanness of the broken status quo.
Now, though, there are reasons for encouragement, tempered with caution. Mr.
Obama’s plan to register and give working papers to perhaps four million to five
million people has rightly gained the most attention, but he and the Homeland
Security Secretary, Jeh Johnson, have also declared a sweeping reordering of
immigration enforcement. They are ending Secure Communities, a blighted program
that used local police to funnel arrested immigrants to Immigration and Customs
Enforcement.
In theory, this widened the dragnet for dangerous criminals. But in practice, it
terrorized the innocent, alienated immigrant neighborhoods from their police
protectors and encouraged — nationalized — Arizona-style campaigns of
indiscriminate immigration crackdowns and racial profiling.
The replacement for Secure Communities will be called the Priority Enforcement
Program, and it is meant to pursue only high-priority deportation targets. The
local police will no longer routinely be asked to detain immigrants on ICE’s
behalf — in violation of the Fourth Amendment — but asked instead simply to
notify ICE when a wanted suspect is about to be released.
This could fulfill Mr. Obama’s promise to use the deportation machinery only
against real threats. But history is littered with similar efforts at
reprioritizing that failed. It is unclear how this fixes the problems of abusive
and discriminatory policing that arise before an immigrant is jailed. Immigrant
advocates are right to greet this apparent improvement with caution.
Other worries are administrative. There is a crying need for legal
representation for immigrants, and adding an immense new program covering
millions will burden the system still more. Many gaps are filled by energetic
networks of nonprofit and low-cost legal advocates, but also by fraudsters. Not
everyone is lucky enough to live in New York, where a groundbreaking effort, the
Immigrant Justice Corps, has announced that it is doubling its outreach — with
50 lawyers and 30 community advocates — in response to the Obama plan.
Other advocacy groups nationwide are helping immigrants as they start collecting
documents and saving money for what is expected to be an expensive application
process. Executive action will be a big undertaking, and it’s reasonable to be
concerned about the ability of the administration and legal services
organizations to handle it.
But these are good worries to have. Mr. Obama’s initiative is a real gain, which
must be held against the blowback from Republicans, who are grasping for
justification to match their outrage and to block him on legal grounds.
Presidential precedent, the law and Supreme Court affirmation all favor Mr.
Obama.
The reality of the status quo is paralysis, in which nobody is ever legalized
and most people are never deported. That is another form of amnesty — the
amnesty of inaction — though none on the right who oppose reform would ever
admit it. The White House is beginning a campaign to defend its action by
stressing the economic and law enforcement benefits of bringing millions in from
outside the law. The most immediate and profound benefit is the lifting of fear
in immigrant communities, even though perhaps half of the undocumented
population will still be left out. Many parents will be excluded, and many
families will be broken. Their struggle will continue.
A version of this editorial appears in print on November 22,
2014, on page A20 of the New York edition with the headline: Mr. Obama’s Wise
Immigration Plan.
Mr. Obama’s Wise Immigration Plan, NYT,
21.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/22/opinion/mr-obamas-wise-immigration-plan.html
Immigration Enriches You and Me
NOV. 21, 2014
The New York Times
SundayReview | Op-Ed Columnist
Nicholas Kristof
A BOOK, “The Christian Examiner,” warns that “ill-clad and
destitute” immigrants are “repulsive to our habits and our tastes.”
A former mayor of New York City cautions that they bring disease, “wretchedness
and want” to America. And Harper’s Weekly despairs that these immigrants are
“steeped in ignorance” and account for a disproportionate share of criminals.
Boy, those foreigners were threatening — back in the mid-1800s when those
statements were made about Irish immigrants.
Once again, the United States is split by vitriolic debates about how to handle
immigrants, following President Obama’s executive action to shield millions of
undocumented immigrants from deportation. To me, the outrage seems driven by
three myths:
Immigrants threaten our way of life.
Many Americans see foreigners moving into their towns, see signs in Spanish, and
fret about changes to the traditional fabric of society.
That’s an echo of the anxiety Theodore Roosevelt felt in 1918 when, referring to
German and other non-Anglo European immigrants, he declared, “Every immigrant
who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave
the country.” That’s an echo of the “yellow peril” scares about Chinese and
Japanese immigrants.
It’s true that undocumented immigrants may lower wages in some sectors, harming
low-skilled native-born Americans who compete with them. One study suggests that
a 10 percent increase in the size of a skill group lowers the wages of blacks in
that group by 2.5 percent.
Yet just look around. Immigration has hugely enriched our country. For starters,
unless you are a full-blooded American Indian, we have you.
Nations, like carpets, benefit from multiple kinds of threads, and Tony Blair,
the former British prime minister, was right: “It is a good rule of thumb to ask
of a country: Are people trying to get into it or out of it?”
Immigrants today are different because they’re illegals. They’re parasites.
Look, people aren’t legal or illegal, behaviors are. If an investment banker is
convicted of insider trading, he doesn’t become an illegal. So let’s refer not
to “illegal immigrants” but to “undocumented immigrants.”
They have contributed $100 billion to Social Security over a decade without any
intention of collecting benefits, thus shoring up the system, according to
Stephen C. Goss, the chief actuary for the Social Security Administration.
At the state and local level, households headed by unauthorized immigrants paid
another $11 billion in taxes in 2010 alone.
If these migrants are given work permits and brought into the system, they will
contribute $45 billion over five years in payroll taxes to the United States
economy, according to the Center for American Progress.
Parasites? No, they’re assets.
Immigration reform is an unconstitutional power grab by a dictator.
Senator Ted Cruz compared Obama’s executive action to the Catiline conspirators
seeking to overthrow the Roman Republic. House Speaker John Boehner suggested
that it was the action of an “emperor.”
Look, I’ve reported in many dictatorships (and been detained in some of them).
And Obama is no dictator.
It’s difficult for me to judge the legality of Obama’s executive action, because
I’m not an expert on legal issues like prosecutorial discretion. But neither are
critics furious at Obama. We have a broken, byzantine immigration system —
anybody who deals with it is staggered by the chaos — because politicians are
too craven to reform it. At least Obama is attempting to modernize it.
Yes, it’s troubling that Obama previously argued he didn’t have this authority.
Yes, his executive action is on a huge scale — but it is not entirely new.
Obama’s action affects 45 percent of undocumented immigrants, compared to the 40
percent affected by President George H.W. Bush’s in 1990. Let’s leave the legal
dispute for the experts to resolve.
I see a different hypocrisy in Obama’s action. He spoke eloquently Thursday
evening about the need to treat migrants humanely — and yet this is the
“deporter in chief” who has deported more immigrants than any of his
predecessors. We as taxpayers have spent vast sums breaking up families and
incarcerating honest men and women who just want to work. By a 2011 estimate,
more than 5,000 children who are United States citizens are with foster families
because their parents have been detained or deported.
We need empathy, and humility. My father, a refugee from Eastern Europe, was
preparing a fraudulent marriage to an American citizen as a route to this
country when he was sponsored, making fraud unnecessary. My wife’s grandfather
bought papers from another Chinese villager to be able to come to the United
States.
So remember: What most defines the 11 million undocumented immigrants in America
is not illegality but undaunted courage and ambition for a better life. What
separates their families from most of ours is simply the passage of time — and
the lottery of birth.
I invite you to visit my blog, On the Ground. Please also join me on Facebook
and Google+, watch my YouTube videos and follow me on Twitter.
A version of this op-ed appears in print on November 23, 2014, on page SR9 of
the National edition with the headline: Immigration Enriches You and Me.
Immigration Enriches You and Me, NYT,
21.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/23/opinion/sunday/
nicholas-kristof-immigration-enriches-you-and-m.html
Obama’s Immigration Plan
Could Grant Papers to Millions,
at Least for Now
NOV. 15, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
Changes to the immigration enforcement system that President
Obama is expected to announce as early as this week could offer legal documents
to as many as five million immigrants in the country illegally, nearly double
the number who received protection from deportation under amnesty legislation in
1986.
Unlike that law, which gave permanent-resident green cards to 2.7 million
immigrants, Mr. Obama’s executive actions will not provide any formal, lasting
immigration status, much less a pathway to citizenship.
The actions will, however, have a large and, White House officials hope, swift
impact on the daily lives of many immigrant families, removing fears that
relatives could be separated from one another by deportations. Many immigrants
will also receive work permits, which will give them Social Security numbers and
allow them to work legally under their own names and travel within the United
States, although not abroad. In some states, they will be able to get driver’s
licenses and professional certificates.
While the practical effect of the measures could therefore be broad, legally
they will be limited, providing only temporary reprieves from deportation.
Congress could change the laws that Mr. Obama will rely on for his actions, and
a future president could cancel the program, leaving immigrants out in the open
and even more exposed to removal.
Mr. Obama said he had decided to take the measures after an immigration overhaul
passed by the Senate died this year in the Republican-controlled House. His
plans to act unilaterally have infuriated Republicans newly empowered in the
midterm elections, who say they earned a chance at the polls to write their own
immigration legislation in the Congress they will control next year.
The House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio, said that Republicans would “fight
the president tooth and nail,” and that they were weighing whether to try to
cripple Mr. Obama’s plans with legal challenges or halt them by canceling their
funding.
But the White House is planning a quick start, according to officials familiar
with the plans. It is breaking eligible immigrants into staggered groups, some
of which will begin applying for deportation deferrals within a few months. If
that happens, Republicans will have to decide whether to shut down programs that
are already bringing immigrants out from underground and giving their families
relief from the constant threat of separation.
According to administration officials familiar with the plans, the president
will give deportation deferrals and work permits to people in the country
illegally whose children are American citizens or legal permanent residents, if
the parents have lived here for at least five years. As many as 3.3 million
immigrants could be eligible.
Officials are hoping that by centering the reprieve program on American citizens
and legal residents, they will blunt some Republican opposition. Americans
cannot be deported from their own country, and deportations of their parents
have left many children stranded here, often with serious consequences for their
social progress.
The White House is also considering expanding a program Mr. Obama started in
2012, called Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, which has given
similar reprieves to nearly 600,000 young immigrants who came here as children.
More than 700,000 additional young people could become eligible. Officials may
also include the parents of immigrants with DACA deferrals in the new programs.
White House officials have declined to comment about the plans. They say no
final decisions have been made on the scope of the programs or whether they will
be announced this week or in December.
Mr. Obama’s actions will not make it easier for migrants to cross the
southwestern border, like the thousands of youths without their parents who
floated on rafts across the Rio Grande into South Texas over the summer.
Foreigners caught at the border would still be on the priority list for
deportation, administration officials said, and a primary goal of Mr. Obama’s
actions will be to shift resources and agents to border security that had been
focused on removing immigrants from the interior.
Administration lawyers said they were preparing their case that enacting such
measures would be within Mr. Obama’s constitutional authority. They cited the
president’s wide latitude in enforcing the nation’s immigration laws.
Congress has provided only enough funding for the administration to carry out
about 400,000 deportations each year. Mr. Obama, to the dismay of
immigrant-rights advocates, has met that goal, removing more than two million
immigrants while in office. But with 11.3 million people in the United States
illegally, the lawyers’ argument goes, enforcement agents will never be able to
deport them all. The president, officials say, has to devise policies that allow
enforcement agents to go after convicted criminals and others who pose serious
threats to public safety and national security.
“The system that Congress has created and funded relies heavily on discretion,”
said Hiroshi Motomura, a law professor at the University of California, Los
Angeles, who studies executive powers in immigration. “The president needs to
have enforcement priorities, and he needs to apply them in a way that is
uniform, predictable and nondiscriminatory.”
Until now, Mr. Obama had kept deportation numbers high as part of a strategy to
win Republican support for a bill overhauling the immigration system, leading
angry immigrant-rights advocates to call him “the deporter in chief.” But his
approach did not win over House Republicans, and the federal authorities have
struggled to rein in the pace of enforcement. Now, the president is turning
around and offering wholesale relief to immigrants who officials say pose no
known security or criminal threat.
Republicans argue that the deportation deferrals Mr. Obama is likely to issue
were intended to be used rarely, for people with compelling needs. By offering
them to millions, they say, he is blocking immigration agents from enforcing the
law.
“This executive order would be a violation of the president’s oath of office and
a blatant abuse of power,” said Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, an
outspoken opponent of Mr. Obama’s policies. “The president has sworn an oath of
office to uphold the laws, but now he is planning to rewrite them on his own.”
The White House is gambling on a surge of support from immigrants and Latinos
that would make Republicans think carefully about how far to go to halt the
programs. Latino groups are mobilized, pressing the president to include as many
as seven million immigrants.
“The time for big, bold, unapologetic administrative relief is now,” said José
Calderón, president of the Hispanic Federation, a nonprofit advocacy group.
Despite the rebuke he received in the elections, Mr. Obama has responded
defiantly to Republicans warning him not to act on his own.
“My executive actions not only do not prevent them from passing a law that
supersedes those actions,” he said at a news conference on Nov. 5, “but they
should be a spur for them to actually try to get something done.”
A version of this news analysis appears in print on November 16, 2014, on page
A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Obama Plan Could Grant Papers to
Millions, at Least for Now.
Obama’s Immigration Plan Could Grant Papers to
Millions, at Least for Now,
NYT, 15.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/16/us/
obamas-immigration-plan-could-grant-papers-to-millions-at-least-for-now.html
The Big Money
Behind the Push
for an Immigration Overhaul
NOV. 14, 2014
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
When President Obama announces major changes to the nation’s
immigration enforcement system as early as next week, his decision will partly
be a result of a yearslong campaign of pressure by immigrant rights groups,
which have grown from a cluster of lobbying organizations into a national force.
A vital part of that expansion has involved money: major donations from some of
the nation’s wealthiest liberal foundations, including the Ford Foundation, the
Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Open Society Foundations of the financier
George Soros, and the Atlantic Philanthropies. Over the past decade those donors
have invested more than $300 million in immigrant organizations, including many
fighting for a pathway to citizenship for immigrants here illegally.
The philanthropies helped the groups rebound after setbacks and financed the
infrastructure of a network in constant motion, with marches, rallies, vigils,
fasts, bus tours and voter drives. The donors maintained their support as the
immigration issue became fiercely partisan on Capitol Hill and the activists
intensified their protests, engaging in civil disobedience and brash
confrontations with lawmakers and the police.
The donors’ strategy arose in 2007, as immigrant groups nursed wounds from a
rout after a bill pushed by President George W. Bush failed in Congress.
“For all our vaunted work, we were basically a fractious coalition that just got
our butts kicked,” said Frank Sharry, a longtime advocate who is now executive
director of America’s Voice, a core organization in the coalition.
Atlantic and several other philanthropies funded a series of soul-searching
retreats. Days and nights of arguments produced a plan that came to be known as
the four pillars. The groups agreed to redouble their local community
organizing; to expand their work into mobilizing voters; to create policy
research to underpin their pro-immigrant message; and to “turbocharge” their
communications with the news media, as Mr. Sharry put it, a task that fell to
him.
“The good news was that the funders really got the idea of building up a
movement that could press for change at all levels,” Mr. Sharry said. “We were
really talking about a movement that could win the grand prize: legislation that
puts 11 million people on a path to citizenship.”
The philanthropies focused on a dozen regional immigrant rights organizations
that make up the backbone of the movement. They also supported Latino service
organizations like NCLR, also known as the National Council of La Raza, and
legal groups like the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, or
Maldef, and the National Immigration Law Center.
“The credit for our movement goes to immigrant leaders who had the courage to
step out of the shadows,” said Deepak Bhargava, executive director of the Center
for Community Change, another core organization. “But the growth and speed of
the movement was significantly aided by a small number of visionary
philanthropies.”
The Ford Foundation already had a decades-long track record of funding nonprofit
organizations aiding immigrants. In 2003 Ford and Carnegie joined with several
other donors to create an unusual collaborative fund to augment support for
local groups. Since then, Carnegie has given about $100 million for immigration
initiatives, all in conventional charitable donations, including millions to
help legal immigrants become American citizens.
The Open Society Foundations of Mr. Soros, an immigrant born in Hungary, have
invested about $76 million in the past decade under the rubric of immigrant
rights, according to Archana Sahgal, a program officer.
The Atlantic Philanthropies were founded by Charles Feeney, an Irish-American
billionaire who built his fortune with a chain of duty-free shops. Atlantic has
given nearly $69 million in 72 immigration grants in the last decade. About half
of those grants were made in donations that allow lobbying.
Most of the philanthropies’ funds have been tax-exempt charitable donations that
cannot be used primarily to influence legislation. In 2013, when the Senate
passed a comprehensive immigration bill and the House was weighing its options,
several foundations also made multimillion-dollar “social welfare” grants that
can be used for lobbying.
“Our grantees are generally working in the direction of our long-term goal of
protecting the rights and dignity of immigrants and our belief that immigrants
should have a voice,” said Mayra Peters-Quintero, a senior program officer at
the Ford Foundation, which has donated about $80 million to immigrant groups
over the past 10 years, all in charitable funds.
“The compass that drives our work is not the political cycle of the moment,” she
said.
After setting their course in 2008, the advocacy groups expanded rapidly,
amplifying their street actions with news conferences, Twitter feeds and texting
lists.
A rally on the National Mall in March 2010 drew tens of thousands of protesters
from around the country. But internecine bickering weakened the push for the
Dream Act, a bill with a path to citizenship for immigrants who came when they
were children. It failed in the Senate in late 2010.
One organization, the National Immigration Forum, branched out beyond the main
donors and shifted its focus to recruiting conservatives, including evangelical
Christians and leaders from business and law enforcement.
Young immigrants who call themselves Dreamers agitated for faster change. With
little more than pocket money, students staged protests in 2012 that prodded Mr.
Obama to take his first major executive action on immigration, a program that
has given reprieves from deportation to more than 580,000 Dreamers.
“We did it with nothing, and we won,” said Cristina Jiménez, managing director
of United We Dream, one group that led that crusade. “It was a powerful
feeling.”
During the debate in Congress last year, the policy advocacy wing of Open
Society gave $6.2 million to several groups in donations allowing lobbying.
“We have enormous faith in the groups with which we have had longstanding
relationships, and we wanted to give them resources to pursue the best possible
legislative fix for the problems in our immigration system,” said Caroline
Chambers, deputy director of the Open Society Policy Center.
The advocates backed the bipartisan bill that passed the Senate last year. But
the Republican majority in the House rejected it. In August, the House approved
a bill to cancel the Dreamer reprieve program, an early warning to Mr. Obama
that Republicans were ready to challenge any new unilateral action.
Foundation leaders said they have not had misgivings, even as Republican
resistance to their beneficiaries’ agenda has intensified. “Name me something in
the American political debate that isn’t partisan right now,” said Stephen
McConnell, director of United States programs for the Atlantic Philanthropies.
“It’s just the nature of the beast.”
Some opponents accuse the foundations of blatant partisanship.
“The whole apparatus has become the handmaiden of the Democratic Party,” said
Dan Stein, president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, or FAIR,
which opposes legalization for unauthorized immigrants. “These foundations fund
activist organizations designed to create ethnic identity enclaves and
politically control them for partisan purposes.”
Mr. Stein’s group is funded by followers’ donations and by some large
contributions from conservative donors.
Foundation leaders said they were vigilant to ensure their donations did not
violate tax laws prohibiting them from funding partisan campaigns.
“We want to protect the interests of immigrants,” said Mr. McConnell of
Atlantic. Echoing other foundation officers, he said, “Atlantic does not in any
way support candidates or get involved in partisan politics.”
This year, as the prospects for legislation faded, foundation funding waned by
at least 50 percent, activists said, leaving them scrounging. Atlantic, a
mainstay, is winding down its operation, following Mr. Feeney’s instructions to
give away his assets during his lifetime. Atlantic will make its last donations
in 2016.
Immigrant and Latino groups carried on limited voter mobilization efforts for
the midterm elections. They no longer have funds for showy rallies. They are
frustrated that legislation with a path to citizenship seems out of reach.
But now that the White House has confirmed that Mr. Obama plans measures that
could shield as many as five million immigrants from deportation, the advocates
are mobilized and pushing him to act as broadly as his powers allow.
Last week, two days after the president held a news conference in the wake of
the midterm elections, vowing to take executive action on immigration, Gustavo
Torres, the executive director of CASA de Maryland and a coalition leader, was
protesting once again in front of the White House.
“We expect the president to be big and bold,” he said. “This is his opportunity
to make sure we are going to remember him as the president who made a difference
for Latino and immigrant communities.”
Correction: November 14, 2014
An earlier version of this article incorrectly said that the National
Immigration Forum used funds from the Open Society Foundations to reach out to
conservatives. The money for that effort came from other sources.
A version of this article appears in print on November 15, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: Cash Amplifies Call to Reshape
Immigration.
The Big Money Behind the Push for an
Immigration Overhaul, NYT, 14.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/15/us/obama-immigration-policy-changes.html
Big and Bold on Immigration
NOV. 13, 2014
The New York Times
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
President Obama is apparently ready to go big, as he promised, to
fix immigration on his own — to use his law-enforcement discretion to spare
perhaps five million unauthorized immigrants from deportation. Aides speaking
anonymously have told The Times that Mr. Obama is considering some options for
executive action that would give parents of children who are citizens or legal
residents, as well as people who were brought here illegally as children,
temporary legal status and permission to work.
Details are lacking, and praise for presidential action will have to wait until
it becomes clear whether the often-too-cautious Mr. Obama goes through with it,
and how comprehensive his order is — whether it includes those who have been
living here five years, for example, or 10 years and what other hurdles
applicants may have to meet to qualify.
Our view on executive action is: the sooner the better, and the bigger the
better, because so many have been waiting so long for the unjust immigration
system to be repaired, while vast resources have been wasted on deporting needed
workers and breaking up families instead of pursuing violent criminals and other
security threats.
In one sense, the value of presidential action can easily be measured by the
ferocity of the Republican opposition it has already provoked.
“Congress has opposed it. The American people have opposed it. And the president
persists unilaterally,” said Senator Jeff Sessions, speaking apocalyptically. He
called it “a threat to the constitutional order.”
Mr. Sessions and his Republican colleagues have it backward. For all the
protestations of presidential tyranny, Congress has more power than Mr. Obama to
make meaningful immigration changes. His adversaries won’t admit it, but they
could have — and still could — banish talk of executive action by dusting off a
bill, S.744, that has passed the Senate and contains all they have been
demanding, starting with a surge of border enforcement.
The president cannot rewrite immigration law. But he does control the
enforcement apparatus; no Republicans have complained about his using executive
authority to deport more people more quickly than all his predecessors. Using
his discretion to focus on deporting violent criminals, terrorists and other
threats is not lawlessness. It is his job.
A version of this editorial appears in print on November 14, 2014, on page A26
of the New York edition with the headline: Big and Bold on Immigration.
Big and Bold on Immigration, NYT, 13.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/opinion/big-and-bold-on-immigration.html
Obama Plan May Allow
Millions of Immigrants
to Stay and Work in U.S.
NOV. 13, 2014
The New York Times
By MICHAEL D. SHEAR,
JULIA PRESTON
and ASHLEY PARKER
WASHINGTON — President Obama will ignore angry protests from
Republicans and announce as soon as next week a broad overhaul of the nation’s
immigration enforcement system that will protect up to five million unauthorized
immigrants from the threat of deportation and provide many of them with work
permits, according to administration officials who have direct knowledge of the
plan.
Asserting his authority as president to enforce the nation’s laws with
discretion, Mr. Obama intends to order changes that will significantly refocus
the activities of the government’s 12,000 immigration agents. One key piece of
the order, officials said, will allow many parents of children who are American
citizens or legal residents to obtain legal work documents and no longer worry
about being discovered, separated from their families and sent away.
That part of Mr. Obama’s plan alone could affect as many as 3.3 million people
who have been living in the United States illegally for at least five years,
according to an analysis by the Migration Policy Institute, an immigration
research organization in Washington. But the White House is also considering a
stricter policy that would limit the benefits to people who have lived in the
country for at least 10 years, or about 2.5 million people.
Extending protections to more undocumented immigrants who came to the United
States as children, and to their parents, could affect an additional one million
or more if they are included in the final plan that the president announces.
White House officials are also still debating whether to include protections for
farm workers who have entered the country illegally but have been employed for
years in the agriculture industry, a move that could affect hundreds of
thousands of people.
Mr. Obama’s actions will also expand opportunities for legal immigrants who have
high-tech skills, shift extra security resources to the nation’s southern
border, revamp a controversial immigration enforcement program called Secure
Communities, and provide clearer guidance to the agencies that enforce
immigration laws about who should be a low priority for deportation, especially
those with strong family ties and no serious criminal history.
A new memorandum, which will direct the actions of enforcement and border agents
and immigration judges, will make clear that deportations should still proceed
for convicted criminals, foreigners who pose national security risks and recent
border crossers, officials said.
White House officials declined to comment publicly before a formal announcement
by Mr. Obama, who will return from an eight-day trip to Asia on Sunday.
Administration officials said details about the package of executive actions
were still being finished and could change. An announcement could be pushed off
until next month but will not be delayed to next year, officials said.
Announcing the actions quickly could hand critics like Senator Ted Cruz of Texas
a specific target to attack, but it would also give immigration advocates
something to defend. Waiting until later in December could allow the budget to
be approved before setting off a fight over immigration.
Continue reading the main story
“Before the end of the year, we’re going to take whatever lawful actions that I
can take that I believe will improve the functioning of our immigration system,”
Mr. Obama said during a news conference a day after last week’s midterm
elections. “What I’m not going to do is just wait.”
The decision to move forward sets in motion a political confrontation between
Mr. Obama and his Republican adversaries that is likely to affect budget
negotiations and the debate over Loretta E. Lynch, the president’s nominee to be
attorney general, during the lame-duck session of Congress that began this week.
Speaker John A. Boehner said Thursday afternoon that if Mr. Obama went forward
on his own, House Republicans would “fight the president tooth and nail.”
Mr. Boehner is considering suing Mr. Obama over immigration — as Republicans
have said they might do on the president’s health care law — and on Thursday he
refused to rule out a government shutdown, despite saying that was not his goal.
“We are looking at all options, and they’re on the table,” Mr. Boehner said.
In the Senate, a group of Republicans — led by Mr. Cruz, Senator Mike Lee of
Utah and Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama — is already planning to thwart any
executive action on immigration. The senators are hoping to rally their fellow
Republicans to oppose efforts to pass a budget next month unless it prohibits
the president from enacting what they call “executive amnesty” for people in the
country illegally.
“If the president wants to change the legal structure, he should go through
Congress rather than acting on his own,” Mr. Lee said Thursday. “I think it’s
very important for us to do what we can to prevent it.”
But the president and his top aides have concluded that acting unilaterally is
in the interest of the country and the only way to increase political pressure
on Republicans to eventually support a legislative overhaul that could put
millions of illegal immigrants on a path to legal status and perhaps
citizenship. Mr. Obama has told lawmakers privately and publicly that he will
reverse his executive orders if they pass a comprehensive bill that he agrees to
sign.
White House officials reject as overblown the dire warnings from some in
Congress who predict that such a sweeping use of presidential power will
undermine any possibility for cooperation in Washington with the newly empowered
Republican majority.
“I think it will create a backlash in the country that could actually set the
cause back and inflame our politics in a way that I don’t think will be
conducive to solving the problem,” said Senator Angus King of Maine, an
independent who caucuses with the Democrats and supports an immigration
overhaul.
Although a Republican president could reverse Mr. Obama’s overhaul of the system
after he leaves office in January 2017, the president’s action for now will
remove the threat of deportation for millions of people in Latino and other
immigrant communities. Officials said lawyers had been working for months to
make sure the president’s proposal would be “legally unassailable” when he
presented it.
The major elements of the president’s plan are based on longstanding legal
precedents that give the executive branch the right to exercise “prosecutorial
discretion” in how it enforces the laws. Those precedents are also the basis of
a 2012 decision to protect from deportation the so-called Dreamers, who came to
the United States as young children.
“I’m confident that what the president will do will be consistent with our
laws,” Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. said Thursday.
The White House expects a chorus of outside legal experts to back the
administration’s legal assessment once Mr. Obama makes the plan official.
In several “listening sessions” at the White House over the last year,
immigration activists came armed with legal briefs, and White House officials
believe those arguments will form the basis of the public defense of his
actions.
Many pro-immigration groups and advocates — as well as the Hispanic voters who
could be crucial for Democrats’ hopes of winning the White House in 2016 — are
expecting bold action, having grown increasingly frustrated after watching a
sweeping bipartisan immigration bill fall prey to a gridlocked Congress last
year.
“This is his last chance to make good on his promise to fix the system,” said
Kevin Appleby, the director of migration policy at the United States Conference
of Catholic Bishops. “If he delays again, the immigration activists would — just
politically speaking — jump the White House fence.”
Michael D. Shear and Ashley Parker reported from Washington, and Julia Preston
from New York.
A version of this article appears in print on November 14, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: MILLIONS MAY STAY AND WORK IN U.S. IN
OBAMA’S PLAN.
Obama Plan May Allow Millions of Immigrants to
Stay and Work in U.S.,
NYT, 13.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/14/us/obama-immigration.html
Arizona Law
on Immigrant Smuggling
Is Struck Down
NOV. 8, 2014
The New York Times
By RICK ROJAS
PHOENIX — A federal judge here has struck down a state law
against smuggling immigrants into the United States, the latest state-enacted
measure against illegal immigration in Arizona to be thwarted in court.
In the ruling, which was issued Friday, Judge Susan Bolton of Federal District
Court agreed with Justice Department lawyers who argued that the law conflicted
with federal authority to control immigration.
The law — signed in 2005 by Gov. Janet Napolitano, who would become President
Obama’s secretary of homeland security — empowered local law enforcement
authorities to prosecute smugglers who brought people across the Arizona border,
and carried stiff penalties for traffickers who coerced immigrants into labor or
prostitution.
It was altered slightly with the enactment of S.B. 1070, which contained
measures on illegal immigration approved by Gov. Jan Brewer in 2010 that were
considered the nation’s toughest but have been scaled back dramatically by the
courts.
S.B. 1070 was designed to identify, prosecute and deport illegal immigrants.
Among its provisions, the legislation made it a crime to fail to carry
documentation of the right to be in the United States and gave local law
enforcement broad authority to detain people suspected of being in the country
illegally.
Mr. Obama has been a sharp critic of the law from the outset.
In July, Justice Department lawyers filed a motion seeking to take on the final
piece of the Obama administration’s larger challenge of S.B. 1070, claiming that
the smuggling law largely overlapped with federal laws that should pre-empt
local authority.
Nicole Navas, a spokesman for the Justice Department, said that federal
officials were “pleased with the judge’s ruling.”
The law came as part of a wave of legislation here meant to address immigration,
an issue considered the province of federal officials. Supporters of the laws
argued that the measures were not intended to supplant federal law enforcement,
but rather to bolster them as the state dealt with immigrants illegally crossing
the border with Mexico.
Lawyers for Ms. Brewer raised a similar argument in their defense of the law,
pointing to the efforts of federal officials to “target and dismantle human
smuggling operations across the southwest border,” according to court documents.
“Yet the U.S. government in this matter is seeking to prevent Arizona from
cooperatively assisting in this effort by enforcing a state law that prohibits
the smuggling of human beings for profit or commercial purpose,” the lawyers
wrote.
“Arizona’s law enforcement officials have served as a critical force multiplier
in combating human smuggling,” they added.
Representatives for Ms. Brewer did not return messages seeking comment on
Friday’s ruling.
A version of this article appears in print on November 9, 2014,
on page A23 of the New York edition with the headline: Immigrant Smuggling Law
in Arizona Is Struck Down.
Arizona Law on Immigrant Smuggling Is Struck
Down, NYT, 8.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/09/us/
immigrant-smuggling-law-in-arizona-is-struck-down.html
Decision Time on Immigration
NOV. 6, 2014
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
President Obama said on Wednesday that he would act on his own by
the end of the year to “improve” the immigration system, presumably by giving
many — perhaps millions — of the country’s unauthorized immigrants temporary
protection from deportation and permission to work. He has said this before,
only to back off in deference to election-year politics.
Now the election is over, and the only thing to say to the president is: Do it.
Take executive action. Make it big.
He must not give in to calls to wait. Six fruitless years is time enough for
anyone to realize that waiting for Congress to help fix immigration is
delusional. Senator Mitch McConnell and Representative John Boehner have warned
Mr. Obama that executive action would destroy any chance of future legislation.
But Republicans have had many, many opportunities to move on immigration, and
never have. They killed bipartisan reform in 2006 and 2007, and again this year.
The party, whose hard-core members tried to stoke national panic at the border
this summer, shrieking about migrant children, Ebola and the Islamic State, is
not ready to be reasoned with.
The arguments for protecting a broad swath of immigrants through executive
action, meanwhile, are firmly on Mr. Obama’s side.
IT HONORS THE LAW Mr. Obama should direct the Department of Homeland Security to
focus its limited enforcement resources on removing violent criminals,
terrorists and other public-safety threats — and not people who have deep roots
in this country and pose no threat. This use of discretion is customary and
entirely legal.
IT HELPS THE COUNTRY Having such a large immigrant population living here
outside the law also undermines the law. Ever more stringent crackdowns waste
resources by chasing down people who pose no threat. Allowing unauthorized
immigrants to live and work without fear, and keeping families together, will
boost the economy, undercut labor exploitation and ease the strain on law
enforcement. This has been the goal of a comprehensive immigration overhaul. A
deportation reprieve would not be permanent, but it would have many of the same
benefits as legislative reform.
IT CUTS TO THE HEART OF THE DEBATE For years the immigration discussion focused
obsessively on border security and avoided the question of what do with 11
million immigrants already living here. If Mr. Obama acts, he will be declaring
that this population has a stake in our country’s future. That is starkly
opposed to the view espoused by Republican hard-liners like Senators Ted Cruz
and Jeff Sessions, Representatives Lamar Smith and Steve King, who take their
cues from anti-immigration pressure groups that embody the country’s old strains
of nativism. Millions of Americans-in-waiting need an answer. It should be a
welcoming one.
There is reason to worry that Mr. Obama’s as-yet-unannounced plan for executive
action will be too cautious, small and narrow. He has not said how big a group
might qualify for protection. He should start with those who would have
qualified for legalization under the bill that passed in the Senate in 2013 but
died in the House.
That bill, a serious attempt at a once-in-a-generation overhaul, would have
given millions with clean records a shot at legalization if they paid fines and
back taxes and went to the back of the citizenship line, among other things. Mr.
Obama strongly endorsed the bill. His executive action should be just as broad.
There will surely be intense debate when Mr. Obama draws the lines that decide
who might qualify for protection. Some simple questions should be his guide: Do
the people he could help have strong bonds to the United States? Does deporting
them serve the national interest? If it doesn’t, they should have a chance to
stay.
A version of this editorial appears in print on November 7, 2014, on page A30 of
the New York edition with the headline: Decision Time on Immigration.
Decision Time on Immigration, NYT, 6.11.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/07/opinion/
mr-obamas-moment-on-immigration.html
In Rickety Boats,
Cuban Migrants Again Flee to U.S.
OCT. 9, 2014
The New York Times
By FRANCES ROBLES
MIAMI — In an unexpected echo of the refugee crisis from two
decades ago, a rising tide of Cubans in rickety, cobbled-together boats is
fleeing the island and showing up in the waters off Florida.
Leonardo Heredia, a 24-year-old Cuban baker, for example, tried and failed to
reach the shores of Florida eight times.
Last week, he and 21 friends from his Havana neighborhood gathered the combined
know-how from their respective botched migrations and made a boat using a Toyota
motor, scrap stainless steel and plastic foam. Guided by a pocket-size Garmin
GPS, they finally made it to Florida on Mr. Heredia’s ninth attempt.
“Things that were bad in Cuba are now worse,” Mr. Heredia said. “If there was
more money in Cuba to pay for the trips, everyone would go.”
Mr. Heredia is one of about 25,000 Cubans who arrived by land and sea in the
United States without travel visas in the fiscal year that ended on Sept. 30,
according to government figures. He, like many others, is also an unexpected
throwback to a time that experts thought had long passed: the era when Cubans
boarded homemade vessels built from old car parts and inner tubes, hoping for
calm seas and favorable winds. As the number of Cubans attempting the voyage
nearly doubled in the past two years, the number of vessels unfit for the
dangerous 90-mile crossing also climbed.
Not since the rafter crisis of 1994 has the United States received so many Cuban
migrants. The increase highlights the consequences of a United States
immigration policy that gives preferential treatment to Cubans and recent
reforms on the island that loosened travel restrictions, and it puts a harsh
spotlight on the growing frustration of a post-Fidel Castro Cuba.
More Cubans took to the sea last year than in any year since 2008, when Raúl
Castro officially took power and the nation hummed with anticipation. Some
experts fear that the recent spike in migration could be a harbinger of a mass
exodus, and they caution that the unseaworthy vessels have already left a trail
of deaths.
“I believe there is a silent massive exodus,” said Ramón Saúl Sánchez, an exile
leader in Miami who has helped families of those who died at sea. “We are back
to those times, like in 1994, when people built little floating devices and took
to the ocean, whether they had relatives here or not.”
Although the number migrating by sea hardly compares with the summer of 1994,
Mr. Sánchez said the number of illegal and legal Cuban immigrants combined has
now surpassed the number of those who arrived during the crisis 20 years ago.
The United States Coast Guard spotted 3,722 Cubans in the past year, almost
double the number who were intercepted in 2012. Under the migration accord
signed after the 1994 crisis, those captured at sea are sent back to Cuba. Those
who reach land get to stay, which the Cuban government has long argued draws
many people into making the dangerous voyage.
For the past 10 years, sophisticated smuggling networks were responsible for the
vast majority of Cuban migration. A crackdown by the American authorities and a
lack of financing available to Cubans on the island have shifted the migration
method back to what it was two decades ago, when images of desperate people
aboard floating wooden planks gave Cuban migrants the “rafters” moniker.
“We have seen vessels made out of Styrofoam and some made out of inner tubes,”
said Cmdr. Timothy Cronin, deputy chief of enforcement for the Coast Guard’s
Miami district. “These vessels have no navigation equipment, no lifesaving
equipment. They rarely have life jackets with them. They are really unsafe.”
About 20 percent of the vessels used in 2008 were homemade, but this past year,
87 percent of the migrants spotted at sea were riding rustic boats that the
passengers had built themselves, Coast Guard statistics show.
Julio Sánchez, 38, a welder from Havana who traveled with Mr. Heredia, said most
Cubans do not have the money to pay smugglers, and are instead forced to spend
months gathering supplies for their journey.
“In our group, some people gave ideas, some gave money and some gave labor,” Mr.
Sánchez said. The trip from a port east of Havana to an obscure Florida key cost
them a total of $5,000, a fraction of the $200,000 or more that smugglers would
have charged such a large group.
Experts said the recession cut the flow of financing for such journeys, because
it was Miami relatives who made the payments. Many of the people arriving now —
like those in Mr. Sánchez’s group — have no family in the United States to help
pay.
“If I had to save $10,000 with my monthly salary of $17, I would not get here
until I was 80 or 90 years old,” said Yannio La O, 31, an elementary school
wrestling coach who arrived in Miami last week after a shipwreck landed him in
Mexico.
He and 31 others departed from Manzanillo, in southern Cuba, in late August on a
boat they built over the course of three months. They ran into engine trouble,
and the food they brought was contaminated by a sealant they carried aboard to
patch holes in the hull. They spent 24 days lost at sea.
“Every day at 6 a.m. or 6 p.m., somebody died,” Mr. La O said.
Nine people, including a pregnant woman, died and were thrown overboard, and six
more got on inner tubes and disappeared before the Mexican Navy rescued the
survivors, Mr. Sánchez said. Two more died at shore. Mr. La O said he survived
by drinking urine and spearing fish.
Their deaths came as the United States Coast Guard found four bodies floating in
the water 23 miles east of Hollywood, Fla. Their relatives in Miami identified
their corpses by their tattoos and scars.
Mr. La O became one of the more than 22,500 Cubans who arrived in the United
States by land last fiscal year — most of them in Texas. That is nearly double
the number who did so in 2012.
Some of those migrants flew to Mexico and then requested entry at the Texas
border. Relaxed travel rules in Cuba now allow people to exit the country more
freely, a change that experts say plays a part in the surge in Southwest border
arrivals. Other people, like Mr. La O, made the first leg of the journey by sea
to Central America or Mexico.
Ted Henken, a Cuba scholar at Baruch College in New York, said Washington should
be worried about the increase in migration, because it demonstrates that Cuba’s
recent economic reforms have failed to help the majority of Cubans, making the
nation vulnerable to a catastrophic event.
“If some triggering event or series of events were to happen, like with the
Venezuela aid or major unrest, or a hurricane, we could have another ‘balsero’
crisis or Mariel,” Mr. Henken said, using the Spanish word for “rafter” and
noting the 1980 boatlift.
A spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington did not respond to a
request for comment.
Michael Flanagan, the deputy chief patrol agent for the United States Border
Patrol’s Miami sector, said good weather, particularly the lack of hurricanes in
recent years, has played a part in facilitating travel. Although the 91 percent
increase in Cuban landings was “significant and it has our attention,” he said,
it was not “remarkable.”
“Even if half the people who leave from Cuba do not survive, that means half of
them did,” Mr. La O said, speaking from his grandmother’s house in Miami, where
he arrived last week. “I would tell anyone in Cuba to come. It’s better to die
on your feet than live on your knees.”
A version of this article appears in print on October 10, 2014, on page A1 of
the New York edition with the headline: In Rickety Boats, Cuban Migrants Again
Flee to U.S. .
In Rickety Boats, Cuban Migrants Again Flee to
U.S., NYT, 9.10.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/10/us/
sharp-rise-in-cuban-migration-stirs-worries-of-a-mass-exodus.html
Influx of African Immigrants
Shifting National and New York
Demographics
SEPT. 1, 2014
The New York Times
By SAM ROBERTS
Threatened with arrest in 2009, Lamin F. Bojang fled Gambia after
publicly contradicting its president’s claims that he could cure AIDS. Now 31,
Mr. Bojang lives in Concourse Village in the Bronx with his wife and 2-year-old
son and works as a receptionist at Kingsbrook Jewish Medical Center in Brooklyn,
while working toward a bachelor’s degree in political science at City College.
With educational and professional opportunities in Gambia scarce for his
generation, “the rest will have to find ways of leaving,” he said, “and African
migrants here, just as previous migrants, are likely not going to return to
their countries of origin.”
Niat Amare, 28, graduated from law school in Ethiopia where she grew up, she
recalled, “watching the media portray the U.S. as the land of opportunities.”
She arrived here in 2010, lives in Harlem and said she felt welcome in New York.
“Anyone would find one’s countryman here, which eases the strange feeling we all
have the first time we leave home,” said Ms. Amare, a legal advocate for the
African Services Committee, a nonprofit organization that assists new
immigrants.
While the migration of black Africans is not new, the number of sub-Saharan
immigrants has grown swiftly, an influx that is shifting the demographic
landscape across the country, including in New York City.
Between 2000 and 2010, the number of legal black African immigrants in the
United States about doubled, to around one million. During that single decade,
according to the most reliable estimates, more black Africans arrived in this
country on their own than were imported directly to North America during the
more than three centuries of the slave trade.
And while New York State is home to the largest proportion and many have
gravitated to ethnic enclaves like Little Senegal in West Harlem or the
Concourse Village section of the West Bronx, to live among fellow Ghanaians,
black immigrants from Africa have tended to disperse more widely across the
country — to California, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Maryland, Texas and
Virginia — than Caribbean-born blacks.
About a third of black New Yorkers were born abroad, mostly in the Caribbean.
Africans constitute about 4 percent of the city’s foreign-born population, but
as much as 10 percent in the Bronx. At last count, according to an analysis of
census estimates by the Department of City Planning, from 2000 to 2011 the
African-born population increased 39 percent to 128,000, although other
estimates suggest that many more are living here without legal residency.
“They’ve been doubling every 10 years since 1980,” said Kim Nichols, an
executive director of the African Services Committee, which is based in Harlem.
“There’s a more established family and community network here to come to.”
Some come as refugees, some with work visas or special skills, many to stay and
others to hone their talents and eventually apply them back home.
The yearly flow can be affected by wars and epidemics.
“They’re a self-selected population,” Ms. Nichols said. “They have to be the
most ambitious and have the means to get here — at least one plane ticket — and
a fearlessness about coming to a new place.”
She recalled a boy who was 13 and fluent only in Soninke when he arrived alone
from Mali after his family had finally scraped together enough money to pay for
his airfare. The young man, now 18, just got his green card.
“His parents saved everything for years to buy a plane ticket,” Ms. Nichols
said. “They have this dream. They’re dirt poor and the only way their kids are
going to get ahead is to get them here by hook or crook.”
An analysis of the Census Bureau’s latest American Community Survey, which ended
in 2012, found that 30 percent of African-born blacks in the city had a college
degree, compared with 22 percent of native-born blacks, 18 percent of
Caribbean-born blacks and 19 percent of the nonblack foreign born.
Immigrants like Mr. Bojang and Ms. Amare say they still identify more as African
than as black or African-American.
“Many black immigrants do not identify with the historical experiences of
discrimination encountered by blacks in the United States,” said Kevin D. Brown,
a law professor at Indiana University’s Maurer School of Law.
Two generations removed from colonialism and legal segregation, said Dr. Khalil
Gibran Muhammad, director of the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for
Research in Black Culture, “the younger African immigrants tend to be less
consciously ‘black’ and are somewhat reticent to link their fates with the
history and contemporary protest traditions of African-Americans.”
“Selma doesn’t exactly cut it for them,” he said.
Kobina Aidoo, director of “The Neo-African-Americans,” a documentary, said,
“I’ve heard people refer to themselves as everything from ‘African
African-American’ to ‘Halfrican American’ to ‘White African-American’ to ‘Real
African-American’ to ‘American African” to ‘Just black.’ ”
Dr. Muhammad, recalling the shooting by the police of Amadou Diallo, an unarmed
immigrant from Guinea in the Bronx in 1999, and of Michael Brown, an unarmed
teenager in Ferguson, Mo., last month, said color still trumped place of origin.
“Diversity among African-descended communities remains a black box and a mystery
to most Americans,” he said. “Where public safety is concerned, black is all
that matters.”
Mr. Bojang, who hopes to study law here after graduating from City College, said
it might seem paradoxical that young Africans, who centuries ago arrived in
chains, now dream of coming to America — but largely because the educational and
economic opportunities are so much better than back home.
“So, if you look at the factors in place and contrast that with the conditions
of the continuous struggle of the African-Americans for economic and social
justice, it will be an error in judgment to say that the U.S. is becoming the
Mecca for Africans.
“After all,” he said, “we are all Africans.”
A version of this article appears in print on September 2, 2014, on page A17 of
the New York edition with the headline:
Influx of African Immigrants Shifting National and New York Demographics.
Influx of African Immigrants Shifting National
and New York Demographics,
NYT, 1.9.2014,
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/02/nyregion/
influx-of-african-immigrants-shifting-national-and-new-york-demographics.html
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