|
History > 2015 > USA > Immigration (I)
The Scrambled States of Immigration
APRIL 1, 2015
The New York Times
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
A country that has abandoned all efforts at creating a saner
immigration policy has gotten the result it deserves: not one policy but lots of
little ones, acting at cross purposes and nullifying one another. Not unity but
cacophony, a national incoherence — one well illustrated in a recent report in
The Times on the various ways the states, forsaken by Congress, are adjusting to
the millions of unauthorized immigrants living outside the law.
Some, like Washington and California, allow such immigrants to earn driver’s
licenses, having concluded that roads are safer when drivers are tested and
insured. Other states balk at any such benefit for people they consider
undeserving. They prefer to tolerate illegal driving to make a point about
illegal immigration.
Twenty-six states have sued to block President Obama’s executive actions giving
some immigrants work permits and protection from deportation. They argue that
the actions harm them somehow, though they lack evidence, mainly because the
opposite is true. A federal district judge in Texas has sided with the
plaintiffs, blocking the Obama administration’s programs nationwide.
But 14 states and the District of Columbia have pleaded with the United States
Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to let the programs proceed. They
understand that immigrants who are working legally and paying taxes, supporting
themselves and bolstering the economy, are a benefit for all, and that the
government is far better off using its limited resources deporting criminals.
Some states, notably Arizona and Alabama, have toiled mightily to thwart
unauthorized immigrants at every turn, to make them miserable and unemployable.
Others have decided that undocumented workers and their families are an asset to
be nurtured, with benefits like more access to higher education, through
in-state tuition and financial aid. They understand the reasoning of Plyler v.
Doe, the Supreme Court decision asserting all children’s right to primary
schooling, and have chosen not to squander their costly investment in an
educated population.
California is a national leader in embracing the potential of its newcomers,
with 26 new laws benefiting the undocumented, including a driver’s license law
and one limiting local law-enforcement involvement in the federal immigration
dragnet. New York City, under Mayor Bill de Blasio and Speaker Melissa
Mark-Viverito of the City Council, has made much progress, too, with programs
like a municipal ID card. The message: We want you here.
(New York State should be a national leader in this swelling immigrant-rights
movement, but it isn’t. Modest reforms, like a bill to grant college financial
aid and scholarships to the undocumented, have languished in its underachieving
Legislature, thwarted by a Republican-led Senate and a governor, Andrew Cuomo,
who gives the issue lip service but has other priorities.)
The federal government has its own problems with coherence. It spends billions
on its prison-and-deportation pipeline, yet the Homeland Security Department is
not on the same page with itself. It is supposed to be using more discretion in
whom it deports, but it is applying the policy erratically. A man who fits no
sane definition of a threat — Max Villatoro, a Mennonite pastor in Iowa, a
father of four citizen children — was recently deported to Honduras.
Meanwhile, the leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sarah Saldaña, was
recently asked at a congressional hearing whether she supported changing the law
so that local police departments would be required to hold immigrants in custody
for possible deportation beyond the time they would normally be released.
“Amen,” she said, showing that she either didn’t know or didn’t accept that the
Homeland Security Department actually opposes mandatory detainers. She later
issued a clarification bringing her views in line with those of her boss, Jeh
Johnson, the homeland security secretary, calling mandatory detainers “a highly
counterproductive step” that would “lead to more resistance and less cooperation
in our overall efforts to promote public safety.”
Depending on how the Fifth Circuit rules on the lawsuit challenging Mr. Obama’s
executive actions, his valiant effort to repair some of the damage to the
immigration system could well be undone, and everybody, families and felons, may
get put back in the shadowy line of potential deportees. Meanwhile, the Army is
expanding and fast-tracking a program to give citizenship to unauthorized
immigrants with special language or medical skills.
Who is on the right side of this argument — the Army, Mr. Obama, Gov. Jerry
Brown of California, Mr. de Blasio? Or Texas, Alabama, Arizona and the
Republicans whose resistance to reform has left the nation in this mess? Those
die-hard opponents fail to remember that laws and policies that deny rights and
promote exclusion have been the source of shame and regret throughout American
history. Integration and assimilation are the core values of a country that is
in danger of forgetting itself.
A version of this editorial appears in print on April 2, 2015,
on page A26 of
the New York edition with the headline:
The Scrambled States of Immigration.
The Scrambled States of Immigration,
NYT,
APRIL 1, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/opinion/the-scrambled-states-of-immigration.html
A Judge’s Assault on Immigration
FEB. 17, 2015
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD
The Opinion Pages | Editorial
President Obama surely knew that his recent executive actions to
protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation would run into
trouble as soon as a 26-state lawsuit opposing the actions landed on the desk of
Federal District Judge Andrew Hanen, of Brownsville, Tex.
Judge Hanen — who last month invoked a biblical flood in describing illegal
immigration into that community — has spoken out aggressively against Mr.
Obama’s immigration policy in the past, saying it “endangers America” and is “an
open invitation to the most dangerous criminals in society.” Indeed, his earlier
opinions were the reason Republican governors and attorneys general pushed to
get their suit into his district.
As expected, the judge on Monday night temporarily blocked the first of several
programs Mr. Obama announced in November to offer work permits and a three-year
reprieve from deportation to more than four million immigrants who are parents
of American citizens and who have no criminal record.
That move — which Mr. Obama took only after years of failed efforts by Congress
to pass any immigration reform — triggered the fury of congressional
Republicans, who responded with threats of, among other things, impeachment
proceedings.
Gov. Greg Abbott of Texas was so excited at Monday’s decision that he jumped on
Twitter to say Mr. Obama’s amnesty order “has been ruled unconstitutional.”
No, it hasn’t.
What Judge Hanen did was to issue a preliminary injunction that prevents the
executive action from going into effect until he can rule on the merits of the
lawsuit itself, or until a higher court reverses him.
What he did not do was dispute the president’s broad authority to decide whom to
deport, which is exactly what the Obama administration did in prioritizing the
removal of immigrants who pose a threat to public safety or national security.
Yet the judge blocked the action, which he called “a massive change in
immigration practice.” On Tuesday, administration officials announced that they
would delay the program, which was scheduled to begin this week, while they
appealed the ruling.
To get to where he clearly wanted to go, Judge Hanen first had to find that the
26 plaintiff states have standing — that is, the legal capacity — to sue the
administration over the new policy. He ruled that at least Texas did because the
actions would force the state to spend scarce resources providing things like
driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants.
Judge Hanen said the costs were the result of the federal government’s “failure
to secure the borders,” and he noted the millions of dollars that states spend
to educate “each illegal alien child,” even though, as he knows, the
Constitution already requires states to provide that education.
He danced around the fundamental point — as the Supreme Court reiterated as
recently as 2012 — that setting immigration policy is the prerogative of the
federal government, not the states. The judge also ruled that the states are
likely to succeed on at least one of their underlying claims, which is that the
White House did not follow proper administrative procedure, which requires
certain executive actions to be preceded by a public notice and comment period.
However the appellate courts come down on the case, Mr. Obama is finding himself
once again dealing with a familiar sort of Republican intransigence. With his
humane and realistic immigration policy, he is trying to tackle a huge and
long-running national problem: what to do with more than 11 million undocumented
people who are living, working and raising families here, when the government
cannot possibly apprehend or deport all of them. To the contrary, bringing some
of these people out of the shadows of illegality would be an economic boon, as
noted by the 12 states and more than 30 cities around the country (including
Brownsville, Tex.) that are defending Mr. Obama’s actions.
On immigration, the Republicans seem to want only to savage the president’s
efforts to address a pressing nationwide crisis, just as they have on health
care reform. They are good at unleashing rage against Mr. Obama’s supposed
lawlessness, but they have no meaningful solutions of their own.
A version of this editorial appears in print on February 18, 2015, on page A20
of the New York edition with the headline: A Judge’s Assault on Immigration.
A Judge’s Assault on Immigration, NYT,
FEB. 17, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/opinion/a-judges-assault-on-immigration.html
Obama Immigration Policy
Halted by Federal Judge in Texas
FEB. 17, 2015
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON
A federal judge in Texas has ordered a halt, at least
temporarily, to President Obama’s executive actions on immigration, siding with
Texas and 25 other states that filed a lawsuit opposing the initiatives.
In an order filed on Monday, the judge, Andrew S. Hanen of Federal District
Court in Brownsville, prohibited the Obama administration from carrying out
programs the president announced in November that would offer protection from
deportation and work permits to as many as five million undocumented immigrants.
The first of those programs was scheduled to start receiving applications on
Wednesday.
Judge Hanen, an outspoken critic of the administration on immigration policy,
found that the states had satisfied the minimum legal requirements to bring
their lawsuit. He said the Obama administration had failed to comply with basic
administrative procedures for putting such a sweeping program into effect.
The administration argued that Mr. Obama was well within long-established
federal authority for a president to decide how to enforce the immigration laws.
But Texas and the other states said the executive measures were an egregious
case of government by fiat that would impose huge new costs on their budgets.
In ordering the administration to suspend the programs while he makes a final
decision on the case, Judge Hanen agreed with the states that the president’s
policies had already been costly for them.
“The court finds that the government’s failure to secure the border has
exacerbated illegal immigration into this country,” Judge Hanen wrote. “Further,
the record supports the finding that this lack of enforcement, combined with the
country’s high rate of illegal immigration, significantly drains the states’
resources.”
Ken Paxton, the attorney general of Texas, which is leading the states bringing
the lawsuit, hailed the judge’s ruling as a “victory for the rule of law in
America and a crucial first step in reining in President Obama’s lawlessness.”
He said Mr. Obama’s actions were “an affront to everyone pursuing a life of
freedom and opportunity in America the right way.”
Mr. Obama said he was using executive powers to focus enforcement agents on
deporting serious criminals and those posing threats to national security.
Three-year deportation deferrals and work permits were offered for undocumented
immigrants who have not committed serious crimes, have been here at least five
years and have children who are American citizens or legal residents.
As part of the package, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson also established
new priorities, instructing enforcement agents to concentrate on deporting the
most dangerous criminals, including terrorists and gang members, as well as
migrants caught crossing the border illegally.
In his opinion, Judge Hanen accused administration officials of being
“disingenuous” when they said the president’s initiatives did not significantly
alter existing policies. He wrote that the programs were “a massive change in
immigration practice” that would affect “the nation’s entire immigration scheme
and the states who must bear the lion’s share of its consequences.” He said the
executive actions had violated laws that the federal government must follow to
issue new rules, and he determined “the states have clearly proven a likelihood
of success on the merits.”
Since the lawsuit was filed on Dec. 3, the stark divisions over Mr. Obama’s
sweeping actions have played out in filings in the case. Three senators and 65
House members, all Republicans, signed a legal brief opposing the president that
was filed by the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative legal
action organization.
Joe Arpaio, the sheriff of Maricopa County in Arizona, who is known for
crackdowns on people living in the country illegally, also filed a brief
supporting the states’ lawsuit. In December, a federal judge in Washington
dismissed a separate lawsuit by Sheriff Arpaio seeking to stop the president’s
actions.
On the other side, Washington and 11 other states as well as the District of
Columbia weighed in supporting Mr. Obama, arguing that they would benefit from
the increased wages and taxes that would result if illegal immigrant workers
came out of the underground. The mayors of 33 cities, including New York and Los
Angeles, and the Conference of Mayors also supported Mr. Obama.
“The strong entrepreneurial spirit of immigrants to the United States has
significantly boosted local economies and local labor markets,” the mayors wrote
in their filing.
Some legal scholars said any order by Judge Hanen to halt the president’s
actions would be quickly suspended by the United States Court of Appeals for the
Fifth Circuit in New Orleans.
“Federal supremacy with respect to immigration matters makes the states a kind
of interloper in disputes between the president and Congress,” said Laurence H.
Tribe, a professor of constitutional law at Harvard. “They don’t have any right
of their own.”
The states’ lawsuit quotes Mr. Obama as saying many times in recent years that
he did not have authority to take actions as broad as those he ultimately took.
Mr. Tribe said that argument was not likely to pass muster with appeals court
judges.
“All of that is interesting political rhetoric,” he said, “but it has nothing to
do with whether the states have standing and nothing to do with the law.”
Judge Hanen, who was appointed in 2002 by President George W. Bush, has
excoriated the Obama administration’s immigration policies in several unusually
outspoken rulings. The president's supporters have said that Texas officials,
who are leading the states’ lawsuit, were venue shopping when they chose to file
in Brownsville.
But at a hearing on Jan. 15, Judge Hanen said Brownsville, which sits on the
border with Mexico, was an appropriate venue for the suit because its residents
see the impact of immigration every day. “Talking to anyone in Brownsville about
immigration is like talking to Noah about the flood,” Judge Hanen said.
In a lengthy and colorful opinion last August, Judge Hanen departed from the
issue at hand to accuse the Obama administration of adopting a deportation
policy that “endangers America” and was “an open invitation to the most
dangerous criminals in society.”
The case involved a Salvadoran immigrant with a long criminal record whom Judge
Hanen had earlier sent to prison for five years. Instead of deporting the man
after he served his sentence, an immigration judge in Los Angeles ordered him
released, a decision Judge Hanen found “incredible.” Citing no specific
evidence, he surmised that the administration had adopted a broader policy of
releasing such criminals.
While acknowledging that he had no jurisdiction to alter policy, Judge Hanen
said he relied on his “firsthand, in-the-trenches knowledge of the border
situation” and “at least a measurable level of common sense” to reach his
conclusions about the case.
“The court has never been opposed to accommodating those who come to this
country yearning to be free, but this current policy only restricts the freedom
of those who deserve it most while giving complete freedom to criminals who
deserve it least,” he wrote.
The mayor of Brownsville, Tony Martinez, was among those who filed court papers
supporting Mr. Obama’s actions. “We see a tremendous value in families staying
together and being together,” Mr. Martinez said on a conference call on Tuesday
organized by the White House. “Eventually we hope to get all these folks out of
the shadows,” he said.
Obama Immigration Policy Halted by Federal Judge in Texas, NYT,
FEB 17, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/18/us/obama-immigration-policy-halted-by-federal-judge-in-texas.html
How
Mexicans Became Americans
JAN. 17, 2015
The New York
Times
SundayReview |
Opinion
By SAM
QUINONES
SOUTH GATE,
Calif. — A FEW weeks ago, the City Council in this suburb southeast of Los
Angeles appointed a Mexican immigrant to its advisory council. Jesus Miranda is
from Michoacán and owns a taco restaurant here. He’ll advise the council on
housing development and other issues.
Mr. Miranda’s appointment is hardly national news. But small moments like these
are signs of a historic change of heart toward America and civic engagement
among Mexican immigrants, many of whom, like Mr. Miranda, have been here for
decades. No place offers a clearer view of this change than the suburbs
southeast of Los Angeles.
South Gate (pop. 96,000) and its neighbors were mostly farmland until the 1930s,
when migrants from the Midwest and later World War II veterans moved to work in
the factories of Chrysler, G.M., Firestone and Bethlehem Steel. Subdivisions
sprouted. Towns emerged with bucolic names: Maywood, Huntington Park, Bell
Gardens. Union jobs sustained a civic ecosystem of local newspapers, Rotary
Clubs and Fourth of July parades.
Then, in the late 1970s, the factories started leaving, and so did the white
people. Their civic institutions atrophied. By 1990, towns like South Gate that
had been 90 percent white were more than 90 percent Latino.
The new residents, crucially, were not from East Los Angeles, where
Mexican-Americans had developed an activist political tradition since the 1960s.
Instead, they were Mexican, straight from the ranchos — small villages on
Mexico’s frontiers, far from the center and from government. Most came here to
work in jobs they believed, even after decades, would be temporary. They focused
their lives on returning home someday. They packed into cheap housing and spent
their savings on building homes back in Mexico.
Mexican rancho culture valued self-reliance and hard work. But rancheros also
shunned politics, and, in particular, the paternalistic embrace of the PRI, the
party that ran Mexico like Tammany Hall for 71 years. Immigrants brought that
history with them, and in the dense southeast enclaves, their attitudes didn’t
change.
This tradition of non-engagement, combined with Mexico’s proximity to
California, meant that this wave of immigrants was fundamentally different from
previous groups in other parts of the country.
Arriving in the United States, the Irish in Chicago, Italians in New York and
Cubans in Miami came for good. They wedged their way into big cities using
politics as the crowbar to more economic opportunity, and jobs in government.
They had to compete with, and learn from, established groups and elites.
This was not the case for Mexicans in the California suburbs. As the region
morphed into a service economy, they easily found work. In 1986, Congress passed
legislation granting amnesty to around 800,000 immigrants in Los Angeles County,
many of whom eventually acquired citizenship. Suddenly many residents were
voters, yet without any tradition of informed franchise or accountability.
What’s more, those who lived out in these Los Angeles suburbs had no one to show
them a way to civic engagement. Not many had the education, or English,
necessary to run a California municipality. Caring little for politics, they
avoided city hall and rarely participated in civic institutions.
In this vacuum, beginning in the mid-1990s, an astonishing cast of scoundrels
was voted into office by immigrants casting the first votes of their lives.
In South Gate, an unhinged brand of politics mutated, based on anonymous fliers.
In 1999, one council candidate was accused, in a fake newspaper article
reprinted in an anonymous flier, of molesting two boys. In 2001, anonymous
fliers mailed to voters falsely claimed that two councilmen had fathered
children they later abandoned. Tapping immigrants’ deep connection to Mexico,
fliers, in Spanish and English, accused candidates of being related to Carlos
Salinas de Gortari, the disgraced ex-president of Mexico, and of belonging to
the PRI.
These fliers seem clownish, but immigrant voters believed them.
The council majority that won power paid voters back with classic PRI-style
giveaways: free hot dogs and sodas at first, and then toys one Christmas. Once
in power, it was police badges to cronies and millions of dollars to law firms.
Eventually, enough voters woke up. Ashamed they’d been duped, they recalled the
treasurer and his cronies in 2003. The treasurer was later prosecuted and sent
to federal prison. South Gate, however, was on the brink of bankruptcy.
Most southeast towns, stripped of their civic girdings, have gone through
similarly toxic municipal episodes.
María Chacón, an immigrant from Chihuahua who ran Bell Gardens (pop. 42,000)
like a Mexican cacique, or political boss, was convicted of conflict of interest
for engineering her appointment as city manager.
The town of Cudahy hired a former janitor as city manager, and an opposing
candidate had a Molotov cocktail thrown at his house.
In Bell (pop. 36,000), the city manager voted himself and others annual salaries
well above that earned by the president of the United States. He and his former
assistant are now in prison. Five southeast suburbs, in fact, had at least one
elected official go to prison in the last dozen years.
But each boil of corruption, once lanced, left its respective town a little
cleaner, more chastened.
Today, a virtually secured border has significantly slowed the flow of new
immigrants who kept ranchero political culture alive. Mexico’s recent medieval
violence has also terrified many of those who are already here into staying put.
As a result, many Mexican immigrants no longer cling to the dream of returning
home one day. This change is happening across the United States — from Idaho to
North Carolina — but it is most palpable in these Mexican immigrant enclaves of
Los Angeles County.
“I get the sense that folks now see this as home,” said Jorge Morales, a South
Gate city councilman and son of Mexican immigrants. “My parents always talked
about going back to Mexico. Now it’s a place they’ll visit, but this is home.”
Last summer, a shopping center opened in South Gate. It was to be called El
Portal (The Gateway), but a market survey found that people in an area that is
more than 90 percent Latino wanted no Latino theme to the center. “What people
wanted was something like they saw on the West Side” of Los Angeles, which is
predominately white, said Councilman Morales.
The Azalea Regional Shopping Center, as it was named instead, held a
Christmas-tree-lighting ceremony last month, at which members of South Gate’s
Girl Scout Troop 16325, Latinas all, sang “Jingle Bells” and “Rudolph the
Red-Nosed Reindeer.”
No Girl Scout troop had existed in South Gate for some three decades. But two
years ago, a local mother got fed up with driving her daughter two towns over
and formed her own troop. “People are getting involved, coming out of their
shells,” Daisy Prieto, the volunteer troop leader, and daughter of Mexican
immigrants, told me.
St. Helen Catholic Church for years held toy drives for orphanages in Tijuana.
This year, the drive benefited needy kids in South Gate.
MEANWHILE,
immigrants like Mr. Miranda have learned to use city hall, and local government
has become significantly more professional since the days of rancid fliers and
giveaways. At a recent meeting, the City Council took up mundane but essential
municipal issues: purchasing a diesel flatbed truck, zoning for emergency
homeless shelters and appointments to its advisory council. The town’s advisory
councils are populated by a healthy mix of white and black, as well as Latino.
South Gate’s experience stands as a template for hundreds of small towns in
Tennessee, the Carolinas, Kansas and elsewhere — towns that have been
rejuvenated by new Mexican workers, who now form their essential working
classes, yet remain civically absent.
When I started reporting on the southeast suburbs in the 1990s, they felt to me
like one enormous Mexican rancho — the way the Lower East Side of Manhattan must
have once seemed a big shtetl. Today, they feel like an iceberg finally
separating and floating away from mother Mexico. People are more focused on how
things run where they raise children than in villages they’ll never return to.
It’s taken a long time. But it is a good thing for Mexican immigrants and for
the small American towns where so many have landed.
How Mexicans
Became Americans,
NYT,
JAN 17, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/18/opinion/sunday/how-mexicans-became-americans.html
|
