The Huffington Post
Simon Rosenberg
April 30, 2009
Today in the Senate, Senator Schumer is holding an important hearing: "Comprehensive Immigration Reform in 2009, Can We Do it and How?" At NDN, we believe the answer to whether Congress can pass reform this year is "yes." Below are seven reasons why:
1) In tough economic times, we need to remove the "trap door" under the minimum wage.
One of the first acts of the new Democratic Congress back in 2007 was to raise the minimum wage, to help alleviate the downward pressure on wages we had seen throughout the decade even prior to the current Great Recession. The problem with this strategy is that the minimum wage and other worker protections required by American law do not extend to those workers here illegally. With economic times worsening here and in the home countries of the migrants, unscrupulous employers have much more leverage over, and incentive to keep, undocumented workers. With five percent of the current workforce -- amazingly, with one out of every 20 workers now undocumented, this situation creates an unacceptable race to the bottom, downward pressure on wages, at a time when we need to be doing more for those struggling to get by, not less.
Legalizing the five percent of the work force that is undocumented would create a higher wage and benefit floor than exists today for all workers, further helping, as was intended by the increase in the minimum wage two years ago, to alleviate the downward pressure on wages for those struggling the most in this tough economy.
Additionally, it needs to be understood that these undocumenteds are already here and working. If you are undocumented, you are not eligible for welfare. If you are not working, you go home. Thus, in order to remove this "trap door," we need to either kick five percent of existing American workforce out of the country -- a moral and economic impossibility -- or legalize them. There is no third way on this one. They stay and become citizens or we chase them away.
Finally, what you hear from some of the opponents of immigration reform is that by passing reform, all of these immigrants will come and take the jobs away of everyday Americans. But again, the undocumented immigrants are already here, working, having kids, supporting local businesses. Legalization does not create a flood of new immigrants -- in fact, as discussed earlier, it puts the immigrant worker on a more even playing field with legal American workers. It does the very inverse of what is being suggested -- it creates fairer competition for American workers -- not unfair competition. The status quo is what should be most unacceptable to those who claim they are advocating for the American worker.
2) In a time of tight budgets, passing immigration reform will bring more money into the federal treasury.
Putting the undocumented population on the road to citizenship will also increase tax revenue in a time of economic crisis, as the newly legal immigrants will pay fees and fines, and become fully integrated into the U.S. tax-paying system. When immigration reform legislation passed the Senate in 2006, the Congressional Budge Office estimate that accompanied the bill projected Treasury revenues would see a net increase of $44 billion over 10 years.
3) Reforming our immigration system will increasingly be seen as a critical part of any comprehensive strategy to calm the increasingly violent border region.
Tackling the growing influence of the drug cartels in Mexico is going to be hard, cost a great deal of money, and take a long time. One quick and early step toward calming the region will be to take decisive action on clearing up one piece of the problem -- the vast illegal trade in undocumented migrants. Legalization will also help give these millions of families a greater stake in the United States, which will make it less likely that they contribute to the spread of the cartels influence.
4) Fixing the immigration system will help reinforce that it is a "new day" for U.S.-Latin American relations.
To his credit, President Obama has made it clear that he wants to see a significant improvement in our relations with our Latin neighbors and very clearly communicated that message during his recent trips to Mexico and the Summit of the Americas. Just as offering a new policy toward Cuba is part of establishing that it is truly a "new day" in hemispheric relations, ending the shameful treatment of Latin migrants here in the United States will go a long way in signaling that America is taking its relations with its southern neighbors much more seriously than in the past.
5) Passing immigration reform this year clears the way for a clean census next year.
Even though the government is constitutionally required to count everyone living in the United States every 10 years, the national GOP has made it clear that it will block efforts for the Census Bureau to count undocumented immigrants. Conducting a clean and thorough census is hard in any environment. If we add a protracted legal and political battle on top -- think Norm Coleman, a politicized U.S. Attorney process, Bush v Gore -- the chance of a failed or flawed census rises dramatically. This of course would not be good for the nation.
Passing immigration reform this year would go a long way to ensuring we have a clean and effective census count next year.
6) The Administration and Congress will grow weary of what we call "immigration proxy wars," and will want the issue taken off the table.
With rising violence in Mexico, and the everyday drumbeat of clashes and conflicts over immigration in communities across America, the broken immigration system is not going to fade from public consciousness any time soon. The very vocal minority on the right -- those who put this issue on the table in the first place -- will continue to try to attach amendments to other bills ensuring that various government benefits are not conferred upon undocumenteds. We have already seen battles pop up this year on virtually every major bill Congress has taken up, including SCHIP and the stimulus. By the fall, I think leaders of both parties will grow weary of these proxy battles popping up on every issue and will want to resolve the issue once and for all. Passing immigration reform will become essential to making progress on other much needed societal goals like moving toward universal health insurance.
7) Finally, in the age of Obama, we must be vigilant to stamp out racism wherever it appears.
Passing immigration reform this year would help take the air out of the balloon of what is the most virulent form of racism in American society today -- the attacks on Hispanics and undocumented immigrants. It will be increasingly difficult for the President and his allies to somehow argue that watching Glenn Beck act out burning alive of a person on the air over immigration, "left leaning" Ed Schultz give air time to avowed racist Tom Tancredo on MSNBC or Republican ads comparing Mexican immigrants to Islamic terrorists is somehow different from the racially insensitive speech that got Rush Limbaugh kicked off Monday Night Football, or Don Imus kicked off the radio.
So for those of us who want to see this vexing national problem addressed this year, this important hearing is a critical step forward. But we still have a long way to, and a lot of work ahead of us if we are to get this done this year.
(Also check out our recently released report, Making the Case for Passing Comprehensive Immigration Reform This Year, which succinctly lays out our case for why Congress can -- and should -- pass comprehensive immigration reform this year).
4.30.2009
4.27.2009
A Family Divided by 2 Words, Legal and Illegal
The New York Times
April 26, 2009
A Family Divided by 2 Words, Legal and Illegal
By DAVID GONZALEZ
For the father, the choice was obvious: An engineer with several jobs yet little money, he saw no future for his daughter and son in their struggling country, Ecuador. Eight years ago, he paid coyotes to smuggle him into Texas, then headed to New York, where his wife and children flew in as tourists, and stayed.
But the consequences of that clear-cut decision — the immigrant’s perennial impulse to uproot for the sake of the next generation — have been anything but simple.
The daughter excelled in her Queens high school and graduated from college with honors, but at 22 is still living in this country illegally. So while her former accounting classmates hold lucrative corporate jobs and take foreign vacations, she keeps the books for a small immigrant-run business, fears venturing outside the city and cannot get a driver’s license in the country she has come to love.
Meanwhile, her 17-year-old brother, who was born in the United States during an earlier stay and is thus an American citizen, enjoys privileges his family cannot, like summers in Ecuador with his cousins. But bored and alone most afternoons, he declared last fall that he wanted to move back to the old country.
“How can he even think that?” said his mother, stunned. “We’re sacrificing ourselves so he can get a better education and a better job. After giving up everything to come here, he — the only one with papers — wants to go back?”
These four — who let a reporter and a photographer trail them only if they were not identified, for fear of being deported — are part of a growing group of what are often called mixed-status families. Nearly 2.3 million undocumented families, about three-quarters of those who are here illegally, have at least one child who is a United States citizen, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Nearly 400,000 of them have both citizen and noncitizen children.
Their ranks are fed by the unending tide of illegal immigration, and by federal laws that deny legal status to foreign-born children — who had no say in moving here — while granting citizenship to their American-born siblings.
And as their numbers rise, they are challenging the most stubborn stereotypes of 21st-century immigrants: that they fit neatly into separate groups — legal or illegal, here to stay or bent on returning home. That they are mostly men on their own, making independent choices.
In fact, most immigrants live in families, with a blend of legal statuses, opportunities and dreams. To spend time with this Queens family is to see, up close, how the growing disparities within immigrant homes are pulling their members in opposite directions and complicating efforts to plan a common future.
The four are now split between two households, and between those who expect to stay and those who would return to Ecuador — a tally that keeps shifting. The daughter, despite tireless efforts to get ahead, feels she is losing ground and worries that her brother takes his citizenship for granted. The son, despite his freedom, carries the weight of his family’s highest hopes.
Their status is also mixed in less obvious ways. The mother, 47, who gave up her fledgling career in Ecuador as a computer systems analyst and now baby-sits for a living, has not had anywhere near the same opportunities in this country as the father, also 47, who found rewarding work as a draftsman. Increasingly dissatisfied, she has tried in vain to leverage her son’s citizenship to get a green card granting her permanent residency.
Still, they are a loving family, and better off than many illegal immigrants, making a comfortable life in a city that welcomes foreigners, with or without papers. The parents are among a rising proportion of illegal immigrants with higher educations — at least one in every four are believed to have had some college — abandoning careers back home to try to vault their children into the American middle class in a single generation.
Yet as each year brings new setbacks, they hear the clock ticking and push their children harder. For all the daughter’s high ambitions, the mother never misses a chance to point out a simple solution to her career impasse: find an American husband.
One Saturday night last month, the family gathered to celebrate the daughter’s 22nd birthday in a Chinese restaurant where most of the tables were filled for a raucous wedding reception. As they waited under the swirling disco lights for dishes of pork and seafood, the parents asked the children about their plans — for school, for work, for life.
The son was characteristically vague, saying only that he wanted to attend college. The daughter, as usual, had her future worked out in fine detail: graduate school, community work, a life of service and independence.
But they could barely be heard above the dance music pounding through the restaurant. As a toast was raised to the bride and groom, the din grew louder. Dozens of guests clinked their spoons on glasses.
The mother grinned and leaned in close to the daughter. If she were to be married, “that’s how it would be,” the mother suggested. “Everybody making noise.”
The daughter looked away in silence.
A Costly Education
The girl was smart, very smart. At age 7, she was working the cash register at her parents’ small office-supply shop in Ecuador. By 9, she was absorbed in math, poring over her schoolwork long after everyone else had gone to bed.
And as she neared her 14th birthday, the father began to think the unthinkable: taking the family back to the United States to put her through college.
They had been here before. After graduating at the top of his class from the polytechnic university in Quito, he had moved to New York in 1986 — legally, on a student visa — for graduate studies in engineering at City College, intending to return home to his wife.
But when the couple learned she was pregnant with their first child, he dropped out and took a factory job — violating the terms of his visa — then arranged to have his wife and baby daughter smuggled into Texas and spirited to New York, where he felt he could best provide for them.
“I knew I was passing into illegality,” said the father, a trim, youthful man with an engineer’s matter-of-fact manner. “It was a very difficult decision to make. But I had to support them.”
In time, they moved to Miami and had the son, born an American citizen. But their hopes of a prosperous American life eluded them, and in 1992 they returned to Ambato, the agricultural hub in Ecuador where the father had grown up.
And now, as their daughter raced through Catholic school there, skipping two grades and outpacing her classmates, the father worried about the quality of schooling in Ecuador, where the economy was slipping into chaos. He resolved to give her, and her brother, the American education he never completed.
His own father — a man with a third-grade education who supported 10 children and became chief of the repair shops for Ecuador’s national railroad — blessed the move back to the United States. The old man had taught him to do whatever it took to provide for the family. “He always said you should go to bed thinking about what you were going to do tomorrow,” he said.
His wife’s father, however, had a different motto: Always keep the family together. She was crushed at the prospect of leaving hers, a close-knit clan of urban professionals who begged her to stay.
Her first American sojourn had been ego-crushing for her, a college graduate working in a mattress factory where West Indian supervisors addressed her as “muchacha.” Girl.
“Do you know what this is like?” asked the mother, a woman of quiet poise. “To be around so many uneducated people? But I had to be with my husband.”
‘I’m Going to Seattle’
They arrived in New York in 2001. The father found work with a Queens construction company owned by Chinese immigrants, taking precise measurements at work sites and turning them into computerized drawings. He makes more than he would in Ecuador, and enjoys the chance to showcase his skills and get around the city, into well-appointed offices and high rises.
The mother, meanwhile, cares for children in cramped apartments not nearly as nice as the rambling, modern house she grew up in.
The discrepancies between their lives frayed an already strained relationship; they separated four years ago. The children spend most weekdays with their father, in the narrow attic of a dark house in Elmhurst, Queens, owned by his brother, a legal resident who arrived in the 1970s. On weekends, they take the subway and a bus to the basement apartment their mother rents in another Queens neighborhood, Bayside.
All the work and shuttling around leave the family little time together. Sometimes the father takes the son to soccer games, where he and other immigrants talk about friends who have gone home or died. The mother speaks regularly with her three sisters in Ecuador by webcam, and fills her iPod with melancholy songs from her homeland. As the most adventurous of the sisters — the first to learn to drive — she feels a growing restlessness.
Coming home from a meditation class one Sunday in February, she had barely removed her coat when she jolted the children with an announcement: “I think I’m going to Seattle.” A friend in class had told her that Washington did not require a Social Security number to obtain a driver’s license.
The daughter was alarmed, fearing her mother could be arrested on the trip. But the mother pressed ahead, buying plane tickets for herself and her son. She asked the daughter to help her find a hotel.
Instead, the daughter stayed up one night talking to a friend who had gotten a Washington license, who said the mother would have to pay $3,000 for forged documents attesting to her residency and employment. First thing the next morning, the daughter called her mother. “There’s no way you can qualify,” she said. “There’s too much danger that you can be caught.”
The mother reluctantly agreed to forget the trip, and the hundreds of dollars she lost on airfare.
“My hopes are dead,” she said recently. “Right now we’re just focused on the education of the children and their future. Let them reach their goals and have their dreams.”
Firstborn, Second Class
On her days off, the daughter occasionally rewards herself with a concert or a meal out. But one afternoon in a noisy Colombian restaurant in Jackson Heights, her eyes strayed from her coffee cup to the sidewalks along Roosevelt Avenue, crowded with illegal immigrants who toil in kitchens or clean homes.
“I used to think I was different because I went to college,” said the daughter, who speaks softly and can still pass for a high school junior. “But I’m no better than anyone else. Like them, I don’t have my documents. So I’m just one among millions.”
She is also among an estimated 65,000 young people who graduate from American high schools each year without immigration papers, according to the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C. Like many children brought into the country illegally by their parents, she began to understand just what that meant when she approached a high school guidance counselor about college.
“She asked me for my Social Security number,” the daughter recalled. “She said she couldn’t help me with applications without one. So I went home and asked my father for it. He told me, ‘Oh, you don’t have one.’ ”
She quickly learned the other things she would not have: the scholarships her teachers had assured her she would win, the chance to attend a college out of state, or any hope of softening the consequences of her parents’ move. It is nearly impossible for an illegal immigrant child to become a legal resident without going back to the native country, then waiting a requisite 10 years to apply.
For the daughter, that is out of the question. “All my friends are here,” she said. “All I know is here. If I returned, I’d be lost.”
Scholars who study illegal immigrant families say it is usually the older children who recognize their parents’ sacrifice and work hardest to achieve. But those are the same children most likely to have been born abroad.
Luckily for the daughter, she lives in New York, one of 10 states that allow illegal immigrants to pay resident tuition rates at public universities. With $5,000 a year from her father and a baby-sitting job, she attended a highly ranked college in the City University of New York, posting a 3.8 grade point average in accounting.
But the young woman so adept with numbers still lacked the Social Security number needed just to file an application for a job or summer internship. So as her friends — many of them children of immigrants with papers — landed $70,000-a-year jobs, she scoured college bulletin boards for a small business willing to risk hiring her for half that.
“Sometimes I felt like crying or screaming,” she said. “Some of my friends knew why I didn’t apply for corporate jobs. But other people who didn’t know would criticize and judge me. They thought I was lazy or stupid not to apply.”
She was eventually hired as a bookkeeper by a small firm that provides immigrants — the dark humor is not lost on her — with information on visas and government policy. She is paid on the books, thanks to the tax identification number the federal government provides to people without Social Security numbers, and she pays taxes — $2,000 on this year’s federal return.
Though overqualified and underpaid for the job, she rarely complains. Instead, she and her boyfriend — a college student from Mexico who is also in the country illegally — spend their free time volunteering with the New York State Youth Leadership Council, an immigrant group pushing Congress to pass the Dream Act, which would grant legal status to high school graduates who were brought to the United States by their parents.
Her mother prefers a quicker solution: Dump the boyfriend and marry an American. “The ends justify the means,” the mother said. “I tell her, ‘Think about it with a clear head. If it doesn’t go well, you could always separate.’ ”
At first, the daughter was aghast at the notion of marrying for reasons other than love. But as another spring arrives with no change in immigration policy, she has begun to waver.
“I’m thinking, it might be worth giving it a try because this is so frustrating,” she said. “It’s actually getting to me.”
‘He’s a King’
Above a plastic heart dangling from the wall, two photographs in the mother’s apartment neatly sum up the passions of her children. The daughter stands, beaming, in cap and gown. The son, in shorts, goofs around with his cousins on a South American beach.
The son is tightly tied to Ecuador. As the only family member who can travel freely, he has spent three summers there, playing soccer and going to amusement parks with cousins, including two boys he has grown so close to that everyone calls the trio “Los Compadres.” Back in New York, he sends them messages constantly via e-mail and Facebook.
He seems far less emotionally connected to Queens, where he comes home after school to an empty apartment to do homework. His mother frets about him. “He needs the warmth of family,” she said.
But the family, here and in Ecuador, insists he stay in the United States. “As a citizen, all doors are open for him,” the mother said. “He knows there is a difference, that he can do what we cannot.”
Their hopes for him sometimes edge into impatience. As mother and daughter watched “Hairspray” one Saturday afternoon, the son dozed in his dark bedroom.
“He’s a king,” said the mother, who wishes he would take a part-time job, for the discipline and spending money. “In Ecuador, nobody works until they graduate from college. But we’re in the United States now, and a different society has different customs. He should work.”
“He wants to work,” the daughter insisted. “But my father won’t let him. He wants him to study.”
Indeed, the father has counseled him not to be lured by the quick money that leads other neighborhood boys to drop out of school to work at delis or construction sites for $500 a week. Concerned that the son’s grades have slipped, he closely follows his schoolwork, meeting often with teachers.
The daughter watches over him, too. In many mixed-status families, siblings clash: The older child, without papers, often has to work harder to succeed and resents the privileges the younger child enjoys as a citizen — especially if he seems not to be taking advantage of them, said Walter Barrientos, a founder of the Youth Leadership Council.
The daughter speaks of her brother with obvious affection. But as he remained out of earshot in the other room, she vented a mounting frustration.
She had taken him to meetings of the youth group, but he showed little interest in helping its campaign for the Dream Act. “He doesn’t see how difficult it is for us not having documents,” she said. “And he sees how it is for me — I can’t go back to Ecuador or get a better job. It’s unfortunate, when somebody close to his heart is suffering.”
She feared that as a high school junior, he was nearing graduation without a serious plan. “Knowing I couldn’t get a scholarship, that pushed me even more — it pushed me to work hard,” she said. “For him, he has all the possibilities, but he’s not thinking. It’s hard to understand what he’s thinking.”
In some ways, he is just a typical 17-year-old, stingy with words. His thinking has actually changed: Over the last few months, he has stopped talking about a return to Ecuador and started exploring the notion of studying architecture at an American college.
But he has also dropped hints that he feels the pressure many citizen children of illegal immigrants experience.
“Maybe they expect too much of me,” he confided. “But my family wanted me to come here. It’s better for me, and better for my sister.”
Half a world away, the sunny duplex apartment the family built during their last stay in Ambato sits vacant, though filled with their possessions — family photos, the son’s action figures, the daughter’s books — as if awaiting their return. Relatives beseech them to come back, even promising jobs to sweeten the offer.
The parents resist their pleas. They have not come this far, sacrificing their own careers and comforts, to miss seeing their children succeed in America.
If that day comes, both parents say they will gladly return to their homeland — even the father whose firm decision brought them all to the United States. Ecuador is the land he loves. New York is only the means to an end.
“I crashed a party I was not invited to, and one day I’ll be asked to leave,” he said. “I know. This is a place to work. Not to die.”
April 26, 2009
A Family Divided by 2 Words, Legal and Illegal
By DAVID GONZALEZ
For the father, the choice was obvious: An engineer with several jobs yet little money, he saw no future for his daughter and son in their struggling country, Ecuador. Eight years ago, he paid coyotes to smuggle him into Texas, then headed to New York, where his wife and children flew in as tourists, and stayed.
But the consequences of that clear-cut decision — the immigrant’s perennial impulse to uproot for the sake of the next generation — have been anything but simple.
The daughter excelled in her Queens high school and graduated from college with honors, but at 22 is still living in this country illegally. So while her former accounting classmates hold lucrative corporate jobs and take foreign vacations, she keeps the books for a small immigrant-run business, fears venturing outside the city and cannot get a driver’s license in the country she has come to love.
Meanwhile, her 17-year-old brother, who was born in the United States during an earlier stay and is thus an American citizen, enjoys privileges his family cannot, like summers in Ecuador with his cousins. But bored and alone most afternoons, he declared last fall that he wanted to move back to the old country.
“How can he even think that?” said his mother, stunned. “We’re sacrificing ourselves so he can get a better education and a better job. After giving up everything to come here, he — the only one with papers — wants to go back?”
These four — who let a reporter and a photographer trail them only if they were not identified, for fear of being deported — are part of a growing group of what are often called mixed-status families. Nearly 2.3 million undocumented families, about three-quarters of those who are here illegally, have at least one child who is a United States citizen, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Nearly 400,000 of them have both citizen and noncitizen children.
Their ranks are fed by the unending tide of illegal immigration, and by federal laws that deny legal status to foreign-born children — who had no say in moving here — while granting citizenship to their American-born siblings.
And as their numbers rise, they are challenging the most stubborn stereotypes of 21st-century immigrants: that they fit neatly into separate groups — legal or illegal, here to stay or bent on returning home. That they are mostly men on their own, making independent choices.
In fact, most immigrants live in families, with a blend of legal statuses, opportunities and dreams. To spend time with this Queens family is to see, up close, how the growing disparities within immigrant homes are pulling their members in opposite directions and complicating efforts to plan a common future.
The four are now split between two households, and between those who expect to stay and those who would return to Ecuador — a tally that keeps shifting. The daughter, despite tireless efforts to get ahead, feels she is losing ground and worries that her brother takes his citizenship for granted. The son, despite his freedom, carries the weight of his family’s highest hopes.
Their status is also mixed in less obvious ways. The mother, 47, who gave up her fledgling career in Ecuador as a computer systems analyst and now baby-sits for a living, has not had anywhere near the same opportunities in this country as the father, also 47, who found rewarding work as a draftsman. Increasingly dissatisfied, she has tried in vain to leverage her son’s citizenship to get a green card granting her permanent residency.
Still, they are a loving family, and better off than many illegal immigrants, making a comfortable life in a city that welcomes foreigners, with or without papers. The parents are among a rising proportion of illegal immigrants with higher educations — at least one in every four are believed to have had some college — abandoning careers back home to try to vault their children into the American middle class in a single generation.
Yet as each year brings new setbacks, they hear the clock ticking and push their children harder. For all the daughter’s high ambitions, the mother never misses a chance to point out a simple solution to her career impasse: find an American husband.
One Saturday night last month, the family gathered to celebrate the daughter’s 22nd birthday in a Chinese restaurant where most of the tables were filled for a raucous wedding reception. As they waited under the swirling disco lights for dishes of pork and seafood, the parents asked the children about their plans — for school, for work, for life.
The son was characteristically vague, saying only that he wanted to attend college. The daughter, as usual, had her future worked out in fine detail: graduate school, community work, a life of service and independence.
But they could barely be heard above the dance music pounding through the restaurant. As a toast was raised to the bride and groom, the din grew louder. Dozens of guests clinked their spoons on glasses.
The mother grinned and leaned in close to the daughter. If she were to be married, “that’s how it would be,” the mother suggested. “Everybody making noise.”
The daughter looked away in silence.
A Costly Education
The girl was smart, very smart. At age 7, she was working the cash register at her parents’ small office-supply shop in Ecuador. By 9, she was absorbed in math, poring over her schoolwork long after everyone else had gone to bed.
And as she neared her 14th birthday, the father began to think the unthinkable: taking the family back to the United States to put her through college.
They had been here before. After graduating at the top of his class from the polytechnic university in Quito, he had moved to New York in 1986 — legally, on a student visa — for graduate studies in engineering at City College, intending to return home to his wife.
But when the couple learned she was pregnant with their first child, he dropped out and took a factory job — violating the terms of his visa — then arranged to have his wife and baby daughter smuggled into Texas and spirited to New York, where he felt he could best provide for them.
“I knew I was passing into illegality,” said the father, a trim, youthful man with an engineer’s matter-of-fact manner. “It was a very difficult decision to make. But I had to support them.”
In time, they moved to Miami and had the son, born an American citizen. But their hopes of a prosperous American life eluded them, and in 1992 they returned to Ambato, the agricultural hub in Ecuador where the father had grown up.
And now, as their daughter raced through Catholic school there, skipping two grades and outpacing her classmates, the father worried about the quality of schooling in Ecuador, where the economy was slipping into chaos. He resolved to give her, and her brother, the American education he never completed.
His own father — a man with a third-grade education who supported 10 children and became chief of the repair shops for Ecuador’s national railroad — blessed the move back to the United States. The old man had taught him to do whatever it took to provide for the family. “He always said you should go to bed thinking about what you were going to do tomorrow,” he said.
His wife’s father, however, had a different motto: Always keep the family together. She was crushed at the prospect of leaving hers, a close-knit clan of urban professionals who begged her to stay.
Her first American sojourn had been ego-crushing for her, a college graduate working in a mattress factory where West Indian supervisors addressed her as “muchacha.” Girl.
“Do you know what this is like?” asked the mother, a woman of quiet poise. “To be around so many uneducated people? But I had to be with my husband.”
‘I’m Going to Seattle’
They arrived in New York in 2001. The father found work with a Queens construction company owned by Chinese immigrants, taking precise measurements at work sites and turning them into computerized drawings. He makes more than he would in Ecuador, and enjoys the chance to showcase his skills and get around the city, into well-appointed offices and high rises.
The mother, meanwhile, cares for children in cramped apartments not nearly as nice as the rambling, modern house she grew up in.
The discrepancies between their lives frayed an already strained relationship; they separated four years ago. The children spend most weekdays with their father, in the narrow attic of a dark house in Elmhurst, Queens, owned by his brother, a legal resident who arrived in the 1970s. On weekends, they take the subway and a bus to the basement apartment their mother rents in another Queens neighborhood, Bayside.
All the work and shuttling around leave the family little time together. Sometimes the father takes the son to soccer games, where he and other immigrants talk about friends who have gone home or died. The mother speaks regularly with her three sisters in Ecuador by webcam, and fills her iPod with melancholy songs from her homeland. As the most adventurous of the sisters — the first to learn to drive — she feels a growing restlessness.
Coming home from a meditation class one Sunday in February, she had barely removed her coat when she jolted the children with an announcement: “I think I’m going to Seattle.” A friend in class had told her that Washington did not require a Social Security number to obtain a driver’s license.
The daughter was alarmed, fearing her mother could be arrested on the trip. But the mother pressed ahead, buying plane tickets for herself and her son. She asked the daughter to help her find a hotel.
Instead, the daughter stayed up one night talking to a friend who had gotten a Washington license, who said the mother would have to pay $3,000 for forged documents attesting to her residency and employment. First thing the next morning, the daughter called her mother. “There’s no way you can qualify,” she said. “There’s too much danger that you can be caught.”
The mother reluctantly agreed to forget the trip, and the hundreds of dollars she lost on airfare.
“My hopes are dead,” she said recently. “Right now we’re just focused on the education of the children and their future. Let them reach their goals and have their dreams.”
Firstborn, Second Class
On her days off, the daughter occasionally rewards herself with a concert or a meal out. But one afternoon in a noisy Colombian restaurant in Jackson Heights, her eyes strayed from her coffee cup to the sidewalks along Roosevelt Avenue, crowded with illegal immigrants who toil in kitchens or clean homes.
“I used to think I was different because I went to college,” said the daughter, who speaks softly and can still pass for a high school junior. “But I’m no better than anyone else. Like them, I don’t have my documents. So I’m just one among millions.”
She is also among an estimated 65,000 young people who graduate from American high schools each year without immigration papers, according to the Urban Institute, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, D.C. Like many children brought into the country illegally by their parents, she began to understand just what that meant when she approached a high school guidance counselor about college.
“She asked me for my Social Security number,” the daughter recalled. “She said she couldn’t help me with applications without one. So I went home and asked my father for it. He told me, ‘Oh, you don’t have one.’ ”
She quickly learned the other things she would not have: the scholarships her teachers had assured her she would win, the chance to attend a college out of state, or any hope of softening the consequences of her parents’ move. It is nearly impossible for an illegal immigrant child to become a legal resident without going back to the native country, then waiting a requisite 10 years to apply.
For the daughter, that is out of the question. “All my friends are here,” she said. “All I know is here. If I returned, I’d be lost.”
Scholars who study illegal immigrant families say it is usually the older children who recognize their parents’ sacrifice and work hardest to achieve. But those are the same children most likely to have been born abroad.
Luckily for the daughter, she lives in New York, one of 10 states that allow illegal immigrants to pay resident tuition rates at public universities. With $5,000 a year from her father and a baby-sitting job, she attended a highly ranked college in the City University of New York, posting a 3.8 grade point average in accounting.
But the young woman so adept with numbers still lacked the Social Security number needed just to file an application for a job or summer internship. So as her friends — many of them children of immigrants with papers — landed $70,000-a-year jobs, she scoured college bulletin boards for a small business willing to risk hiring her for half that.
“Sometimes I felt like crying or screaming,” she said. “Some of my friends knew why I didn’t apply for corporate jobs. But other people who didn’t know would criticize and judge me. They thought I was lazy or stupid not to apply.”
She was eventually hired as a bookkeeper by a small firm that provides immigrants — the dark humor is not lost on her — with information on visas and government policy. She is paid on the books, thanks to the tax identification number the federal government provides to people without Social Security numbers, and she pays taxes — $2,000 on this year’s federal return.
Though overqualified and underpaid for the job, she rarely complains. Instead, she and her boyfriend — a college student from Mexico who is also in the country illegally — spend their free time volunteering with the New York State Youth Leadership Council, an immigrant group pushing Congress to pass the Dream Act, which would grant legal status to high school graduates who were brought to the United States by their parents.
Her mother prefers a quicker solution: Dump the boyfriend and marry an American. “The ends justify the means,” the mother said. “I tell her, ‘Think about it with a clear head. If it doesn’t go well, you could always separate.’ ”
At first, the daughter was aghast at the notion of marrying for reasons other than love. But as another spring arrives with no change in immigration policy, she has begun to waver.
“I’m thinking, it might be worth giving it a try because this is so frustrating,” she said. “It’s actually getting to me.”
‘He’s a King’
Above a plastic heart dangling from the wall, two photographs in the mother’s apartment neatly sum up the passions of her children. The daughter stands, beaming, in cap and gown. The son, in shorts, goofs around with his cousins on a South American beach.
The son is tightly tied to Ecuador. As the only family member who can travel freely, he has spent three summers there, playing soccer and going to amusement parks with cousins, including two boys he has grown so close to that everyone calls the trio “Los Compadres.” Back in New York, he sends them messages constantly via e-mail and Facebook.
He seems far less emotionally connected to Queens, where he comes home after school to an empty apartment to do homework. His mother frets about him. “He needs the warmth of family,” she said.
But the family, here and in Ecuador, insists he stay in the United States. “As a citizen, all doors are open for him,” the mother said. “He knows there is a difference, that he can do what we cannot.”
Their hopes for him sometimes edge into impatience. As mother and daughter watched “Hairspray” one Saturday afternoon, the son dozed in his dark bedroom.
“He’s a king,” said the mother, who wishes he would take a part-time job, for the discipline and spending money. “In Ecuador, nobody works until they graduate from college. But we’re in the United States now, and a different society has different customs. He should work.”
“He wants to work,” the daughter insisted. “But my father won’t let him. He wants him to study.”
Indeed, the father has counseled him not to be lured by the quick money that leads other neighborhood boys to drop out of school to work at delis or construction sites for $500 a week. Concerned that the son’s grades have slipped, he closely follows his schoolwork, meeting often with teachers.
The daughter watches over him, too. In many mixed-status families, siblings clash: The older child, without papers, often has to work harder to succeed and resents the privileges the younger child enjoys as a citizen — especially if he seems not to be taking advantage of them, said Walter Barrientos, a founder of the Youth Leadership Council.
The daughter speaks of her brother with obvious affection. But as he remained out of earshot in the other room, she vented a mounting frustration.
She had taken him to meetings of the youth group, but he showed little interest in helping its campaign for the Dream Act. “He doesn’t see how difficult it is for us not having documents,” she said. “And he sees how it is for me — I can’t go back to Ecuador or get a better job. It’s unfortunate, when somebody close to his heart is suffering.”
She feared that as a high school junior, he was nearing graduation without a serious plan. “Knowing I couldn’t get a scholarship, that pushed me even more — it pushed me to work hard,” she said. “For him, he has all the possibilities, but he’s not thinking. It’s hard to understand what he’s thinking.”
In some ways, he is just a typical 17-year-old, stingy with words. His thinking has actually changed: Over the last few months, he has stopped talking about a return to Ecuador and started exploring the notion of studying architecture at an American college.
But he has also dropped hints that he feels the pressure many citizen children of illegal immigrants experience.
“Maybe they expect too much of me,” he confided. “But my family wanted me to come here. It’s better for me, and better for my sister.”
Half a world away, the sunny duplex apartment the family built during their last stay in Ambato sits vacant, though filled with their possessions — family photos, the son’s action figures, the daughter’s books — as if awaiting their return. Relatives beseech them to come back, even promising jobs to sweeten the offer.
The parents resist their pleas. They have not come this far, sacrificing their own careers and comforts, to miss seeing their children succeed in America.
If that day comes, both parents say they will gladly return to their homeland — even the father whose firm decision brought them all to the United States. Ecuador is the land he loves. New York is only the means to an end.
“I crashed a party I was not invited to, and one day I’ll be asked to leave,” he said. “I know. This is a place to work. Not to die.”
4.24.2009
Immigration Enforcement Shifts Focus to Employers
Immigration Enforcement Shifts Focus to Employers
Posted on April 2, 2009 by Immigration/Global Migration Group
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has tapped a hot-button immigration issue by aiming enforcement efforts at employers. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, field guidelines for the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will shift focus away from workplace raids aimed at rounding up individual undocumented workers and, instead, will go after the employers themselves. An emphasis will be placed on arresting and prosecuting employers who knowingly employ undocumented workers.
This shift is in line with a declaration made by President Barack Obama during last year’s campaign in which he claimed that past enforcement policies had failed because they focused on the individual rather than the employer. Targeting employers is a strategic attempt to reduce the supply of jobs available to undocumented workers. But with an estimated 12 million people currently living in the United States illegally, the shift raises uncertainty as to whether there is a sufficient number of willing and qualified U.S. workers to fill positions vacated when employers begin purging their workforces.
The Department of Homeland Security has made it clear that it still plans to conduct worksite enforcement raids. Still, this fundamental shift in priorities raises serious additional concerns for employers who could find themselves facing criminal charges. Even though it is difficult to prove that an employer “knowingly” employed undocumented workers—which provides a potentially large loophole for employers—the threat alone may have a significant impact on the workplace.
This entry was authored by Chad Graham.
Posted on April 2, 2009 by Immigration/Global Migration Group
Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has tapped a hot-button immigration issue by aiming enforcement efforts at employers. As reported in the Los Angeles Times, field guidelines for the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will shift focus away from workplace raids aimed at rounding up individual undocumented workers and, instead, will go after the employers themselves. An emphasis will be placed on arresting and prosecuting employers who knowingly employ undocumented workers.
This shift is in line with a declaration made by President Barack Obama during last year’s campaign in which he claimed that past enforcement policies had failed because they focused on the individual rather than the employer. Targeting employers is a strategic attempt to reduce the supply of jobs available to undocumented workers. But with an estimated 12 million people currently living in the United States illegally, the shift raises uncertainty as to whether there is a sufficient number of willing and qualified U.S. workers to fill positions vacated when employers begin purging their workforces.
The Department of Homeland Security has made it clear that it still plans to conduct worksite enforcement raids. Still, this fundamental shift in priorities raises serious additional concerns for employers who could find themselves facing criminal charges. Even though it is difficult to prove that an employer “knowingly” employed undocumented workers—which provides a potentially large loophole for employers—the threat alone may have a significant impact on the workplace.
This entry was authored by Chad Graham.
4.23.2009
After Losing Freedom, Some Immigrants Face Loss of Custody of Their Children
April 23, 2009
After Losing Freedom, Some Immigrants Face Loss of Custody of Their Children
By GINGER THOMPSON
CARTHAGE, Mo. — When immigration agents raided a poultry processing plant near here two years ago, they had no idea a little American boy named Carlos would be swept up in the operation.
One of the 136 illegal immigrants detained in the raid was Carlos’s mother, Encarnación Bail Romero, a Guatemalan. A year and a half after she went to jail, a county court terminated Ms. Bail’s rights to her child on grounds of abandonment. Carlos, now 2, was adopted by a local couple.
In his decree, Judge David C. Dally of Circuit Court in Jasper County said the couple made a comfortable living, had rearranged their lives and work schedules to provide Carlos a stable home, and had support from their extended family. By contrast, Judge Dally said, Ms. Bail had little to offer.
“The only certainties in the biological mother’s future,” he wrote, “is that she will remain incarcerated until next year, and that she will be deported thereafter.”
It is unclear how many children share Carlos’s predicament. But lawyers and advocates for immigrants say that cases like his are popping up across the country as crackdowns against illegal immigrants thrust local courts into transnational custody battles and leave thousands of children in limbo.
“The struggle in these cases is there’s no winner,” said Christopher Huck, an immigration lawyer in Washington State.
He said that in many cases, what state courts want to do “conflicts with what federal immigration agencies are supposed to do.”
“Then things spiral out of control,” Mr. Huck added, “and it ends up in these real unfortunate situations.”
Next month, the Nebraska Supreme Court is scheduled to hear an appeal by Maria Luis, a Guatemalan whose rights to her American-born son and daughter were terminated after she was detained in April 2005 on charges of falsely identifying herself to a police officer. She was later deported.
And in South Carolina, a Circuit Court judge has been working with officials in Guatemala to find a way to send the baby girl of a Guatemalan couple, Martin de Leon Perez and his wife, Lucia, detained on charges of drinking in public, to relatives in their country so the couple does not lose custody before their expected deportation.
Patricia Ravenhorst, a South Carolina lawyer who handles immigration cases, said she had tried “to get our judges not to be intimidated by the notion of crossing an international border.”
“I’ve asked them, ‘What would we do if the child had relatives in New Jersey?’ ” Ms. Ravenhorst said. “We’d coordinate with the State of New Jersey. So why can’t we do the same for a child with relatives in the highlands of Guatemala?”
Dora Schriro, an adviser to Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, said the agency was looking for ways to deal with family separations as it prepared new immigration enforcement guidelines. In visits to detention centers across the country, Ms. Schriro said, she had heard accounts of parents losing contact or custody of their children.
Child welfare laws differ from state to state. In the Missouri case, Carlos’s adoptive parents were awarded custody last year by Judge Dally after they privately petitioned the court and he terminated Ms. Bail’s rights to Carlos.
In February, immigration authorities suspended Ms. Bail’s deportation order so she could file suit to recover custody. Ms. Bail’s lawyer, John de Leon, of Miami, said his client had not been informed about the adoption proceedings in her native Spanish, and had no real legal representation until it was too late.
The lawyer for Carlos’s adoptive parents, Joseph L. Hensley, said his clients had waited more than a year for Ms. Bail to demonstrate her commitment to Carlos, but the judge found that she had made no attempt to contact the baby or send financial support for him while she was incarcerated. The couple asked not to be named to protect Carlos’s privacy.
Ms. Bail came to the United States in 2005, and Carlos was born a year later. In May 2007, she was detained in a raid on George’s Processing plant in Butterfield, near Carthage in southwestern Missouri.
Immigration authorities quickly released several workers who had small children. But authorities said Ms. Bail was ineligible to be freed because she was charged with using false identification. Such charges were part of a crackdown by the Bush administration, which punished illegal immigrants by forcing them to serve out sentences before being deported.
When Ms. Bail went to jail, Carlos, then 6 months old, was sent to stay with two aunts who remembered him as having a voracious appetite and crying constantly. But they also said he had a severe rash and had not received all of his vaccinations.
The women — each with three children of their own, no legal status, tiny apartments and little money — said the baby was too much to handle. So when a local teachers’ aide offered to find someone to take care of Carlos, the women agreed.
Then in September 2007, Ms. Bail said, the aide visited her in jail to say that an American couple was interested in adopting her son. The couple had land and a beautiful house, Ms. Bail recalled being told, and had become very fond of Carlos.
“My parents were poor, and they never gave me to anyone,” Ms. Bail recalled. “I was not going to give my son to anyone either.”
An adoption petition arrived at the jail a few weeks later. Ms. Bail, who cannot read Spanish, much less English, said she had a cellmate from Mexico translate. With the help of a guard and an English-speaking Guatemalan visitor, Ms. Bail wrote a response to the court.
“I do not want my son to be adopted by anyone,” she scrawled on a sheet of notebook paper on Oct. 28, 2007. “I would prefer that he be placed in foster care until I am not in jail any longer. I would like to have visitation with my son.”
For the next 10 months, she said, she had no communication with the court. During that time, Judge Dally appointed a lawyer for Ms. Bail, but later removed him from the case after he pleaded guilty to charges of domestic violence.
Mr. Hensley, the lawyer for Carlos’s adoptive parents, said he had sent a letter to Ms. Bail to tell her that his clients were caring for her son, as did the court, but both letters were returned unopened. “We afforded her more due process than most people get who speak English,” Mr. Hensley said.
Ms. Bail said she had asked the public defender who was representing her in the identity theft case to help her determine Carlos’s whereabouts, but the lawyer told her she handled only criminal matters. “I went to court six times, and six times I asked for help to find my son,” she said. “But no one helped me.”
Ms. Bail got a Spanish-speaking lawyer, Aldo Dominguez, to represent her in the custody case only last June. By the time he reached her two months later — she had been transferred to a prison in West Virginia — it was too late to make her case to Judge Dally, Mr. Dominguez said.
“Her lifestyle, that of smuggling herself into the country illegally and committing crimes in this country, is not a lifestyle that can provide stability for a child,” the judge wrote in his decision. “A child cannot be educated in this way, always in hiding or on the run.”
4.22.2009
Alan Greenspan talks…Immigration?
Alan Greenspan talks…Immigration?
That’s right.
The former Fed Chairman, who once commanded the world’s ear when he uttered even one word, will travel to Capitol Hill next week not to talk about the economy (he’s done that), but to talk about comprehensive immigration reform.
The Obama Administration has not seemed anxious to deal with this political hot potato, at least not this year, but recently Congressional Democrats committed to trying, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, asking for a bill to be ready by September.
Greenspan will testify before the immigration subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, who took over this year from Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, tireless champion of a comprehsive reform effort that put illegals on a path to citizenship.
It’s important, no doubt, in the midst of an economic crisis, that you prove why bringing in a whole new work force would not make a bad situation worse. Who better to talk about this than someone like Greenspan, asked one aide to the subcommittee.
A Schumer aide tells Fox that the new chairman wants to see if it’s even possible to do the reform this year. Greenspan has said he supports an increase in visas for highly-skilled workers.
Also appearing before the committee, a representative from the powerful union - SEIU (Service Employees International Union), which recently announced an agreement with a coalition of liberal groups to legalize the approximately 12 million illegals currently in the U.S. Among the principles agreed to, that temporary worker programs be improved but not expanded and not made permanent.
The subcommittee will also hear from a local sherrif, a pastor in Obama’s faith-based council, and a representative from the pro-immigrant group, National Council of La Raza (the former spokeswoman is now serving in the Obama Administration).
The fate of immigration reform seems doomed, at least for this year, despite the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, D-NV, being up for re-election in a state heavily populated by Hispanics. There are conservative Democrats, like Sen. Ben Nelson, D-NE, who still do not support it, so the votes just don’t add up, especially when anything difficult needs 60 votes for passage these days (Dems only have 58 seats).
This radioactive topic always lights the Republican fires, as well, a dangerous political weapon against Democrats, with most calling it “amnesty.” And on Wednesday, one Republican who once paired up with Kennedy to support a massive overhaul of immigration laws took on a primary opponent because of his position on this issue. Chris Simcox, former head of the anti-immigration reform group Minutemen, announced he would challenge Sen. John McCain, R-AZ.
That’s right.
The former Fed Chairman, who once commanded the world’s ear when he uttered even one word, will travel to Capitol Hill next week not to talk about the economy (he’s done that), but to talk about comprehensive immigration reform.
The Obama Administration has not seemed anxious to deal with this political hot potato, at least not this year, but recently Congressional Democrats committed to trying, with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, asking for a bill to be ready by September.
Greenspan will testify before the immigration subcommittee of the Judiciary Committee, chaired by Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-NY, who took over this year from Sen. Ted Kennedy, D-MA, tireless champion of a comprehsive reform effort that put illegals on a path to citizenship.
It’s important, no doubt, in the midst of an economic crisis, that you prove why bringing in a whole new work force would not make a bad situation worse. Who better to talk about this than someone like Greenspan, asked one aide to the subcommittee.
A Schumer aide tells Fox that the new chairman wants to see if it’s even possible to do the reform this year. Greenspan has said he supports an increase in visas for highly-skilled workers.
Also appearing before the committee, a representative from the powerful union - SEIU (Service Employees International Union), which recently announced an agreement with a coalition of liberal groups to legalize the approximately 12 million illegals currently in the U.S. Among the principles agreed to, that temporary worker programs be improved but not expanded and not made permanent.
The subcommittee will also hear from a local sherrif, a pastor in Obama’s faith-based council, and a representative from the pro-immigrant group, National Council of La Raza (the former spokeswoman is now serving in the Obama Administration).
The fate of immigration reform seems doomed, at least for this year, despite the Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, D-NV, being up for re-election in a state heavily populated by Hispanics. There are conservative Democrats, like Sen. Ben Nelson, D-NE, who still do not support it, so the votes just don’t add up, especially when anything difficult needs 60 votes for passage these days (Dems only have 58 seats).
This radioactive topic always lights the Republican fires, as well, a dangerous political weapon against Democrats, with most calling it “amnesty.” And on Wednesday, one Republican who once paired up with Kennedy to support a massive overhaul of immigration laws took on a primary opponent because of his position on this issue. Chris Simcox, former head of the anti-immigration reform group Minutemen, announced he would challenge Sen. John McCain, R-AZ.
4.19.2009
Immigration Accord by Labor Boosts Obama Effort
The New York Times
April 14, 2009
Immigration Accord by Labor Boosts Obama Effort
By JULIA PRESTON and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The nation’s two major labor federations have agreed for the first time to join forces to support an overhaul of the immigration system, leaders of both organizations said on Monday. The accord could give President Obama significant support among unions as he revisits the stormy issue in the midst of the recession.
John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Joe T. Hansen, a leader of the rival Change to Win federation, will present the outlines of their new position on Tuesday in Washington. In 2007, when Congress last considered comprehensive immigration legislation, the two groups could not agree on a common approach. That legislation failed.
The accord endorses legalizing the status of illegal immigrants already in the United States and opposes any large new program for employers to bring in temporary immigrant workers, officials of both federations said.
“The labor movement will work together to make sure that the White House as well as Congress understand that we speak about immigration reform with one voice,” Mr. Sweeney said in a statement to The New York Times.
But while the compromise repaired one fissure in the coalition that has favored broad immigration legislation, it appeared to open another. An official from the United States Chamber of Commerce said Monday that the business community remained committed to a significant guest-worker program.
“If the unions think they’re going to push a bill through without the support of the business community, they’re crazy,” said Randel Johnson, the chamber’s vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits. “There’s only going to be one shot at immigration reform. As part of the trade-off for legalization, we need to expand the temporary worker program.”
The common labor position is also unlikely to convince many opponents that an immigration overhaul would not harm American workers. When Obama administration officials said last week that the president intended to push Congress this year to take up an immigration bill that would include a path to legal status for the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, critics criticized the approach as amnesty for lawbreakers.
“In our current economic crisis, Americans cannot afford to lose more jobs to illegal workers,” said Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican who sits on the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration. “American workers are depending on President Obama to protect their jobs from those in America illegally.”
The two labor federations have agreed in the past to proposals that would give legal status to illegal immigrants. But in 2007 the A.F.L.-C.I.O. parted ways with the service employees and several other unions when it did not support legislation put forth by the Bush administration because it contained provisions for an expanded guest-worker program.
In the new accord, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Change to Win have called for managing future immigration of workers through a national commission. The commission would determine how many permanent and temporary foreign workers should be admitted each year based on demand in American labor markets. Union officials are confident that the result would reduce worker immigration during times of high unemployment like the present.
Mr. Hansen, who is president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said in an interview that the joint proposal was a “building block to go forward to get immigration reform up on the agenda in Congress” sometime this year.
Thousands of immigrant farm workers and other low-wage laborers come to the United States through seasonal guest-worker programs that are subject to numerical visa limits and have been criticized by employers as rigid and inefficient. Many unions oppose the programs because the immigrants are tied to one employer and cannot change jobs no matter how abusive the conditions, so union officials say they undercut conditions for American workers. Highly skilled foreign technology engineers and medical specialists also come on temporary visas.
Advocates for immigrants said a unified labor movement could substantially bolster their position as they push for legislation to restructure the ailing immigration system.
“It shows how important the issue is to the representatives of American workers,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an advocate group.
A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials said they agreed with Change to Win leaders that, with more than seven million unauthorized immigrants already working across the nation, legalizing their status would be the most effective way to protect labor standards for all workers.
“We have developed a joint strategy with the approach framed around workers’ rights,” said Ana Avendaño, associate general counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
Labor leaders said that they would talk with other groups in coming weeks to nail down details of a common position, and that they would then would work in Congress and with the Obama administration to try to ensure that their proposal was part of any bill offered for debate.
Also supporting the compromise is Eliseo Medina, an executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, a member of Change to Win with hundreds of thousands of members who are immigrants. The Change to Win federation was formed in 2005 with seven unions that broke away from the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
The plan for a labor commission to monitor and control levels of worker immigration was developed with help from Ray Marshall, a labor secretary under President Jimmy Carter. Over the past year, Mr. Marshall, at the request of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., has been consulting between the two federations and with a variety of Hispanic organizations and advocate groups for immigrants.
“All these groups understand that one of the main reasons they lost before was that they were not together,” Mr. Marshall said.
According to a list of principles the labor leaders will present on Tuesday, they are proposing a “depoliticized,” independent commission that “can assess labor market needs on an ongoing basis and — based on a methodology to be approved by Congress — determine the number of foreign workers to be admitted for employment purposes.”
Mr. Johnson, the Chamber of Commerce official, said, “A commission doesn’t get us there.”
Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a group that organizes businesses to support comprehensive immigration legislation, agreed that employers would have many questions about the approach.
“The question is, Will the commission work?” Ms. Jacoby said. “Will it be adequately attuned to and triggered by the labor market? A system that may — or may not — supply the workers that business will need in the future after the recession will be a cause of great concern to employers.”
April 14, 2009
Immigration Accord by Labor Boosts Obama Effort
By JULIA PRESTON and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
The nation’s two major labor federations have agreed for the first time to join forces to support an overhaul of the immigration system, leaders of both organizations said on Monday. The accord could give President Obama significant support among unions as he revisits the stormy issue in the midst of the recession.
John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Joe T. Hansen, a leader of the rival Change to Win federation, will present the outlines of their new position on Tuesday in Washington. In 2007, when Congress last considered comprehensive immigration legislation, the two groups could not agree on a common approach. That legislation failed.
The accord endorses legalizing the status of illegal immigrants already in the United States and opposes any large new program for employers to bring in temporary immigrant workers, officials of both federations said.
“The labor movement will work together to make sure that the White House as well as Congress understand that we speak about immigration reform with one voice,” Mr. Sweeney said in a statement to The New York Times.
But while the compromise repaired one fissure in the coalition that has favored broad immigration legislation, it appeared to open another. An official from the United States Chamber of Commerce said Monday that the business community remained committed to a significant guest-worker program.
“If the unions think they’re going to push a bill through without the support of the business community, they’re crazy,” said Randel Johnson, the chamber’s vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits. “There’s only going to be one shot at immigration reform. As part of the trade-off for legalization, we need to expand the temporary worker program.”
The common labor position is also unlikely to convince many opponents that an immigration overhaul would not harm American workers. When Obama administration officials said last week that the president intended to push Congress this year to take up an immigration bill that would include a path to legal status for the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, critics criticized the approach as amnesty for lawbreakers.
“In our current economic crisis, Americans cannot afford to lose more jobs to illegal workers,” said Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican who sits on the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration. “American workers are depending on President Obama to protect their jobs from those in America illegally.”
The two labor federations have agreed in the past to proposals that would give legal status to illegal immigrants. But in 2007 the A.F.L.-C.I.O. parted ways with the service employees and several other unions when it did not support legislation put forth by the Bush administration because it contained provisions for an expanded guest-worker program.
In the new accord, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Change to Win have called for managing future immigration of workers through a national commission. The commission would determine how many permanent and temporary foreign workers should be admitted each year based on demand in American labor markets. Union officials are confident that the result would reduce worker immigration during times of high unemployment like the present.
Mr. Hansen, who is president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said in an interview that the joint proposal was a “building block to go forward to get immigration reform up on the agenda in Congress” sometime this year.
Thousands of immigrant farm workers and other low-wage laborers come to the United States through seasonal guest-worker programs that are subject to numerical visa limits and have been criticized by employers as rigid and inefficient. Many unions oppose the programs because the immigrants are tied to one employer and cannot change jobs no matter how abusive the conditions, so union officials say they undercut conditions for American workers. Highly skilled foreign technology engineers and medical specialists also come on temporary visas.
Advocates for immigrants said a unified labor movement could substantially bolster their position as they push for legislation to restructure the ailing immigration system.
“It shows how important the issue is to the representatives of American workers,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, an advocate group.
A.F.L.-C.I.O. officials said they agreed with Change to Win leaders that, with more than seven million unauthorized immigrants already working across the nation, legalizing their status would be the most effective way to protect labor standards for all workers.
“We have developed a joint strategy with the approach framed around workers’ rights,” said Ana Avendaño, associate general counsel of the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
Labor leaders said that they would talk with other groups in coming weeks to nail down details of a common position, and that they would then would work in Congress and with the Obama administration to try to ensure that their proposal was part of any bill offered for debate.
Also supporting the compromise is Eliseo Medina, an executive vice president of the Service Employees International Union, a member of Change to Win with hundreds of thousands of members who are immigrants. The Change to Win federation was formed in 2005 with seven unions that broke away from the A.F.L.-C.I.O.
The plan for a labor commission to monitor and control levels of worker immigration was developed with help from Ray Marshall, a labor secretary under President Jimmy Carter. Over the past year, Mr. Marshall, at the request of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., has been consulting between the two federations and with a variety of Hispanic organizations and advocate groups for immigrants.
“All these groups understand that one of the main reasons they lost before was that they were not together,” Mr. Marshall said.
According to a list of principles the labor leaders will present on Tuesday, they are proposing a “depoliticized,” independent commission that “can assess labor market needs on an ongoing basis and — based on a methodology to be approved by Congress — determine the number of foreign workers to be admitted for employment purposes.”
Mr. Johnson, the Chamber of Commerce official, said, “A commission doesn’t get us there.”
Tamar Jacoby, president of ImmigrationWorks USA, a group that organizes businesses to support comprehensive immigration legislation, agreed that employers would have many questions about the approach.
“The question is, Will the commission work?” Ms. Jacoby said. “Will it be adequately attuned to and triggered by the labor market? A system that may — or may not — supply the workers that business will need in the future after the recession will be a cause of great concern to employers.”
4.16.2009
Obama: Immigration reform key
Politico
Obama: Immigration reform key
By: Carol E. Lee
April 16, 2009 12:03 PM EST
MEXICO CITY — President Obama said immigration reform will be part of his administration’s efforts to tackle issues plaguing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Immigration reform has to be part of a broader strategy to deal with our border issues,” Obama said in an interview with CNN en Español.
“I've already met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and committed to working with them to try to shape an agenda that can move through Congress.”
Obama’s remarks come in advance of his arrival in Mexico City today, where a number of pro-immigration protests are planned as he meets with President Felipe Calderon. Obama praised Calderon for his “outstanding and heroic job” handling violence along the border.
But he dodged the question of how he will deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas.
“He’ll be one of many people that I will have the opportunity to meet,” Obama said. “We want to listen and learn, as well as talk. And that approach, I think, of mutual respect and finding common interests is one that ultimately will serve everybody.”
As for those leaders who plan to make Cuba an issue at the summit in Trinidad and Tobago, “I have no problem with them bringing up Cuba as an issue,” Obama said, noting his policy change this week that lifted restrictions on Americans’ travel and money sent back to relatives in Cuba.
“But Cuba has to take some steps,” Obama added, such as releasing political prisoners, allowing Cubans to travel and “speak their minds” more freely.
“And if there's some sense of movement on those fronts in Cuba, then I think that we can see a further thawing of relations and further changes.”
Then Obama showed off his minimal Spanish.
“Muchas gracias,” interviewer Juan Carlos Lopez said.
“De nada,” Obama replied.
Obama: Immigration reform key
By: Carol E. Lee
April 16, 2009 12:03 PM EST
MEXICO CITY — President Obama said immigration reform will be part of his administration’s efforts to tackle issues plaguing the U.S.-Mexico border.
“Immigration reform has to be part of a broader strategy to deal with our border issues,” Obama said in an interview with CNN en Español.
“I've already met with the Congressional Hispanic Caucus and committed to working with them to try to shape an agenda that can move through Congress.”
Obama’s remarks come in advance of his arrival in Mexico City today, where a number of pro-immigration protests are planned as he meets with President Felipe Calderon. Obama praised Calderon for his “outstanding and heroic job” handling violence along the border.
But he dodged the question of how he will deal with Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez at the Summit of the Americas.
“He’ll be one of many people that I will have the opportunity to meet,” Obama said. “We want to listen and learn, as well as talk. And that approach, I think, of mutual respect and finding common interests is one that ultimately will serve everybody.”
As for those leaders who plan to make Cuba an issue at the summit in Trinidad and Tobago, “I have no problem with them bringing up Cuba as an issue,” Obama said, noting his policy change this week that lifted restrictions on Americans’ travel and money sent back to relatives in Cuba.
“But Cuba has to take some steps,” Obama added, such as releasing political prisoners, allowing Cubans to travel and “speak their minds” more freely.
“And if there's some sense of movement on those fronts in Cuba, then I think that we can see a further thawing of relations and further changes.”
Then Obama showed off his minimal Spanish.
“Muchas gracias,” interviewer Juan Carlos Lopez said.
“De nada,” Obama replied.
4.15.2009
Immigration Accord by Labor Boosts Obama Effort
Immigration Accord by Labor Boosts Obama Effort
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: April 13, 2009
The nation’s two major labor federations have agreed for the first time to join forces to support an overhaul of the immigration system, leaders of both organizations said on Monday. The accord could give President Obama significant support among unions as he revisits the stormy issue in the midst of the recession.
John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Joe T. Hansen, a leader of the rival Change to Win federation, will present the outlines of their new position on Tuesday in Washington. In 2007, when Congress last considered comprehensive immigration legislation, the two groups could not agree on a common approach. That legislation failed.
The accord endorses legalizing the status of illegal immigrants already in the United States and opposes any large new program for employers to bring in temporary immigrant workers, officials of both federations said.
“The labor movement will work together to make sure that the White House as well as Congress understand that we speak about immigration reform with one voice,” Mr. Sweeney said in a statement to The New York Times.
But while the compromise repaired one fissure in the coalition that has favored broad immigration legislation, it appeared to open another. An official from the United States Chamber of Commerce said Monday that the business community remained committed to a significant guest-worker program.
“If the unions think they’re going to push a bill through without the support of the business community, they’re crazy,” said Randel Johnson, the chamber’s vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits. “There’s only going to be one shot at immigration reform. As part of the trade-off for legalization, we need to expand the temporary worker program.”
The common labor position is also unlikely to convince many opponents that an immigration overhaul would not harm American workers. When Obama administration officials said last week that the president intended to push Congress this year to take up an immigration bill that would include a path to legal status for the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, critics criticized the approach as amnesty for lawbreakers.
“In our current economic crisis, Americans cannot afford to lose more jobs to illegal workers,” said Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican who sits on the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration. “American workers are depending on President Obama to protect their jobs from those in America illegally.”
The two labor federations have agreed in the past to proposals that would give legal status to illegal immigrants. But in 2007 the A.F.L.-C.I.O. parted ways with the service employees and several other unions when it did not support legislation put forth by the Bush administration because it contained provisions for an expanded guest-worker program.
In the new accord, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Change to Win have called for managing future immigration of workers through a national commission. The commission would determine how many permanent and temporary foreign workers should be admitted each year based on demand in American labor markets. Union officials are confident that the result would reduce worker immigration during times of high unemployment like the present.
Mr. Hansen, who is president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said in an interview that the joint proposal was a “building block to go forward to get immigration reform up on the agenda in Congress” sometime this year.
Thousands of immigrant farm workers and other low-wage laborers come to the United States through seasonal guest-worker programs that are subject to numerical visa limits and have been criticized by employers as rigid and inefficient. Many unions oppose the programs because the immigrants are tied to one employer and cannot change jobs no matter how abusive the conditions, so union officials say they undercut conditions for American workers. Highly skilled foreign technology engineers and medical specialists also come on temporary visas.
Advocates for immigrants said a unified labor movement could substantially bolster their position as they push for legislation to restructure the ailing immigration system.
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON and STEVEN GREENHOUSE
Published: April 13, 2009
The nation’s two major labor federations have agreed for the first time to join forces to support an overhaul of the immigration system, leaders of both organizations said on Monday. The accord could give President Obama significant support among unions as he revisits the stormy issue in the midst of the recession.
John Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Joe T. Hansen, a leader of the rival Change to Win federation, will present the outlines of their new position on Tuesday in Washington. In 2007, when Congress last considered comprehensive immigration legislation, the two groups could not agree on a common approach. That legislation failed.
The accord endorses legalizing the status of illegal immigrants already in the United States and opposes any large new program for employers to bring in temporary immigrant workers, officials of both federations said.
“The labor movement will work together to make sure that the White House as well as Congress understand that we speak about immigration reform with one voice,” Mr. Sweeney said in a statement to The New York Times.
But while the compromise repaired one fissure in the coalition that has favored broad immigration legislation, it appeared to open another. An official from the United States Chamber of Commerce said Monday that the business community remained committed to a significant guest-worker program.
“If the unions think they’re going to push a bill through without the support of the business community, they’re crazy,” said Randel Johnson, the chamber’s vice president of labor, immigration and employee benefits. “There’s only going to be one shot at immigration reform. As part of the trade-off for legalization, we need to expand the temporary worker program.”
The common labor position is also unlikely to convince many opponents that an immigration overhaul would not harm American workers. When Obama administration officials said last week that the president intended to push Congress this year to take up an immigration bill that would include a path to legal status for the country’s estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, critics criticized the approach as amnesty for lawbreakers.
“In our current economic crisis, Americans cannot afford to lose more jobs to illegal workers,” said Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican who sits on the House Judiciary subcommittee on immigration. “American workers are depending on President Obama to protect their jobs from those in America illegally.”
The two labor federations have agreed in the past to proposals that would give legal status to illegal immigrants. But in 2007 the A.F.L.-C.I.O. parted ways with the service employees and several other unions when it did not support legislation put forth by the Bush administration because it contained provisions for an expanded guest-worker program.
In the new accord, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. and Change to Win have called for managing future immigration of workers through a national commission. The commission would determine how many permanent and temporary foreign workers should be admitted each year based on demand in American labor markets. Union officials are confident that the result would reduce worker immigration during times of high unemployment like the present.
Mr. Hansen, who is president of the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, said in an interview that the joint proposal was a “building block to go forward to get immigration reform up on the agenda in Congress” sometime this year.
Thousands of immigrant farm workers and other low-wage laborers come to the United States through seasonal guest-worker programs that are subject to numerical visa limits and have been criticized by employers as rigid and inefficient. Many unions oppose the programs because the immigrants are tied to one employer and cannot change jobs no matter how abusive the conditions, so union officials say they undercut conditions for American workers. Highly skilled foreign technology engineers and medical specialists also come on temporary visas.
Advocates for immigrants said a unified labor movement could substantially bolster their position as they push for legislation to restructure the ailing immigration system.
4.14.2009
The Nation: Nafta Should Have Stopped Illegal Immigration, Right?
By LOUIS UCHITELLE
Published: February 18, 2007
THE North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted by Congress 14 years ago, held out an alluring promise: the agreement would reduce illegal immigration from Mexico. Mexicans, the argument went, would enjoy the prosperity and employment that the trade agreement would undoubtedly generate — and not feel the need to cross the border into the United States.
Not Exactly What They Had in Mind But today the number of illegal migrants has only continued to rise. Why didn’t Nafta curb this immigration? The answer is complicated, of course. But a major factor lies in the assumptions made in drafting the trade agreement, assumptions about the way governments would behave (that is, rationally) and the way markets would respond (rationally, as well).
Neither happened, yet Nafta remains the model for trade agreements with developing Latin countries, including the Central American Free Trade Agreement, passed by Congress in 2005. Three more Nafta-like agreements are now pending in Congress — with Panama, Columbia and Peru.
When Nafta finally became a reality, on Jan. 1, 1994, American investment flooded into Mexico, mostly to finance factories that manufacture automobiles, appliances, TV sets, apparel and the like. The expectation was that the Mexican government would do its part by investing billions of dollars in roads, schooling, sanitation, housing and other needs to accommodate the new factories as they spread through the country.
It was more than an expectation. Many Mexican officials in the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari assured the Clinton administration that the investment would take place, and believed it themselves, said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington who campaigned for Nafta in the early 1990s.
“It just did not happen,” he said.
Absent that investment, foreign factories congregated in the north, within 300 miles of the American border, where some infrastructure already existed. “Monterrey is quite good,” Mr. Hufbauer said, “but in a lot of other cities the infrastructure is terrible, not even enough running water or electricity in poor neighborhoods. People get temporary jobs, but that is all.”
Meanwhile, Mexican manufacturers, once protected by tariffs on a host of products, were driven out of business as less expensive, higher quality merchandise flowed into the country. Later, China, with its even-cheaper labor, added to the pressure, luring away manufacturers and jobs.
Indeed, despite the influx of foreign-owned factories, total manufacturing employment in Mexico declined to 3.5 million by 2004 from a high of 4.1 million in 2000, according to a calculation of Robert A. Blecker, an American University economist.
As relatively well-paying jobs disappeared, Mexico’s average wage for production workers, already low, fell further behind the average hourly pay of production workers in the United States, and Mexicans responded by migrating.
“The main thing that would have stemmed the flow of people across the border was a rapid increase in wages in Mexico,” said Dani Rodrik, an economist and trade specialist at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “And that certainly has not happened.”
Something similar occurred in agriculture. The assumption was that tens of thousands of farmers who cultivated corn would act “rationally” and continue farming, even as less expensive corn imported from the United States flooded the market. The farmers, it was assumed, would switch to growing strawberries and vegetables — with some help from foreign investment — and then export these crops to the United States. Instead, the farmers exported themselves, partly because the Mexican government decided to reduce tariffs on corn even faster than Nafta required, according to Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis.
“We understood that the transition from corn to strawberries would not be smooth,” Professor Martin said. “But we did not think there would be almost no transition.”
A financial crisis also dashed expectations. One expectation was that the Mexican economy, driven by Nafta, would grow rapidly, generating jobs and keeping Mexicans home. The peso crisis of 1994-95, however, provoked a steep recession, and while there was some big growth later, the average annual growth rate over Nafta’s lifetime has been less than 3 percent.
The financial crisis struck just months after Nafta came into existence, undermining, early on, the Mexican government’s ability to spend money on roads, education and other necessary government functions.
“We underestimated Mexico’s deficits in physical and human infrastructure,” said J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Treasury official in the Clinton administration.
But, he says, without Nafta the migration would have been even greater. For instance, he says, there would not have been as much investment in the north of the country.
Finally, the steady flow of Mexicans to the United States has produced a momentum of its own — what Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Institute, calls a “network effect,” in which young Mexicans travel to the United States in growing numbers to join the growing number of family members already here.
The upshot is that Mexican migration to the United States has risen to 500,000 a year from less than 400,000 in the early 1990s, before Nafta, Mr. Passel estimates. Roughly 80 percent to 85 percent of immigrants are here illegally, he says.
The peso crisis, recession, the network effect — their impact may have been beyond anyone’s control, but not the assumptions about how the market and the government would act.
“We have indeed had one disappointment after another on this score,” Mr. Rodrik said, noting that the same assumption about government spending is part and parcel of the agreements, now before Congress, with Columbia, Peru and Panama.
While there is opposition to these proposals, it is mainly from Democrats who want a better safety net for American workers who might be hurt.
The European Union, in contrast, assumes little about government spending on the part of economically weaker nations joining it. The union itself has hugely subsidized the improved services needed by entering countries like Portugal, Spain, Greece and Poland, rather than leave financing to the relatively meager resources of entering countries.
The money is used not only for public investment, Mr. Rodrik noted, but also to subsidize companies setting up operations in the new countries and to support government budgets.
“I am not saying Nafta was a bad agreement,” Mr. Rodrik said. “But more than a trade agreement is required for countries to converge economically. And Nafta has been viewed as a shortcut to convergence without having to do all the other stuff.”
Published: February 18, 2007
THE North American Free Trade Agreement, enacted by Congress 14 years ago, held out an alluring promise: the agreement would reduce illegal immigration from Mexico. Mexicans, the argument went, would enjoy the prosperity and employment that the trade agreement would undoubtedly generate — and not feel the need to cross the border into the United States.
Not Exactly What They Had in Mind But today the number of illegal migrants has only continued to rise. Why didn’t Nafta curb this immigration? The answer is complicated, of course. But a major factor lies in the assumptions made in drafting the trade agreement, assumptions about the way governments would behave (that is, rationally) and the way markets would respond (rationally, as well).
Neither happened, yet Nafta remains the model for trade agreements with developing Latin countries, including the Central American Free Trade Agreement, passed by Congress in 2005. Three more Nafta-like agreements are now pending in Congress — with Panama, Columbia and Peru.
When Nafta finally became a reality, on Jan. 1, 1994, American investment flooded into Mexico, mostly to finance factories that manufacture automobiles, appliances, TV sets, apparel and the like. The expectation was that the Mexican government would do its part by investing billions of dollars in roads, schooling, sanitation, housing and other needs to accommodate the new factories as they spread through the country.
It was more than an expectation. Many Mexican officials in the government of President Carlos Salinas de Gortari assured the Clinton administration that the investment would take place, and believed it themselves, said Gary Hufbauer, a senior fellow at the Peter G. Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington who campaigned for Nafta in the early 1990s.
“It just did not happen,” he said.
Absent that investment, foreign factories congregated in the north, within 300 miles of the American border, where some infrastructure already existed. “Monterrey is quite good,” Mr. Hufbauer said, “but in a lot of other cities the infrastructure is terrible, not even enough running water or electricity in poor neighborhoods. People get temporary jobs, but that is all.”
Meanwhile, Mexican manufacturers, once protected by tariffs on a host of products, were driven out of business as less expensive, higher quality merchandise flowed into the country. Later, China, with its even-cheaper labor, added to the pressure, luring away manufacturers and jobs.
Indeed, despite the influx of foreign-owned factories, total manufacturing employment in Mexico declined to 3.5 million by 2004 from a high of 4.1 million in 2000, according to a calculation of Robert A. Blecker, an American University economist.
As relatively well-paying jobs disappeared, Mexico’s average wage for production workers, already low, fell further behind the average hourly pay of production workers in the United States, and Mexicans responded by migrating.
“The main thing that would have stemmed the flow of people across the border was a rapid increase in wages in Mexico,” said Dani Rodrik, an economist and trade specialist at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government. “And that certainly has not happened.”
Something similar occurred in agriculture. The assumption was that tens of thousands of farmers who cultivated corn would act “rationally” and continue farming, even as less expensive corn imported from the United States flooded the market. The farmers, it was assumed, would switch to growing strawberries and vegetables — with some help from foreign investment — and then export these crops to the United States. Instead, the farmers exported themselves, partly because the Mexican government decided to reduce tariffs on corn even faster than Nafta required, according to Philip Martin, an agricultural economist at the University of California, Davis.
“We understood that the transition from corn to strawberries would not be smooth,” Professor Martin said. “But we did not think there would be almost no transition.”
A financial crisis also dashed expectations. One expectation was that the Mexican economy, driven by Nafta, would grow rapidly, generating jobs and keeping Mexicans home. The peso crisis of 1994-95, however, provoked a steep recession, and while there was some big growth later, the average annual growth rate over Nafta’s lifetime has been less than 3 percent.
The financial crisis struck just months after Nafta came into existence, undermining, early on, the Mexican government’s ability to spend money on roads, education and other necessary government functions.
“We underestimated Mexico’s deficits in physical and human infrastructure,” said J. Bradford DeLong, an economist at the University of California, Berkeley, and a Treasury official in the Clinton administration.
But, he says, without Nafta the migration would have been even greater. For instance, he says, there would not have been as much investment in the north of the country.
Finally, the steady flow of Mexicans to the United States has produced a momentum of its own — what Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the Pew Hispanic Institute, calls a “network effect,” in which young Mexicans travel to the United States in growing numbers to join the growing number of family members already here.
The upshot is that Mexican migration to the United States has risen to 500,000 a year from less than 400,000 in the early 1990s, before Nafta, Mr. Passel estimates. Roughly 80 percent to 85 percent of immigrants are here illegally, he says.
The peso crisis, recession, the network effect — their impact may have been beyond anyone’s control, but not the assumptions about how the market and the government would act.
“We have indeed had one disappointment after another on this score,” Mr. Rodrik said, noting that the same assumption about government spending is part and parcel of the agreements, now before Congress, with Columbia, Peru and Panama.
While there is opposition to these proposals, it is mainly from Democrats who want a better safety net for American workers who might be hurt.
The European Union, in contrast, assumes little about government spending on the part of economically weaker nations joining it. The union itself has hugely subsidized the improved services needed by entering countries like Portugal, Spain, Greece and Poland, rather than leave financing to the relatively meager resources of entering countries.
The money is used not only for public investment, Mr. Rodrik noted, but also to subsidize companies setting up operations in the new countries and to support government budgets.
“I am not saying Nafta was a bad agreement,” Mr. Rodrik said. “But more than a trade agreement is required for countries to converge economically. And Nafta has been viewed as a shortcut to convergence without having to do all the other stuff.”
4.10.2009
Blog response to Glenn Beck
I don't get the "taking jobs away" argument. Based on what I see, it seems that many illegal immigrants are in 2 camps: 1) they're already working, or 2) they're standing on a street corner soliciting work.
If Americans think they are taking their jobs - why aren't they standing out there on the street corners with the immigrant bunch, waiting for a construction foreman to pick them up?
Several times this past week, I have had "normal" looking anglos walk up to me in parking lots of grocery stores, etc asking if my company was hiring (I was wearing my suit). It was sad to see. And even sadder to tell them we aren't hiring and I wish them luck. These weren't bums asking for money - they were looking for jobs any way they could.
I don't see the difference between this group of people looking for office work, and the group of Mexicans looking for yard work. It's just different kinds of work. I can't imagine an immigrant in a flannel shirt and dirty jeans asking for clerical work on a street corner anymore than I can see an office worker asking to to dig holes.
I will tell you this -- I am that "normal anglo" and when I lost my job last year, I DID stand on the corner and get manual labor work. No, I don't speak Spanish - you don't need to to dig holes. Yes, I was hired to build stockade fences in the Heights. I was the only gringo there. I needed the work - I couldn't find the work I really wanted - I did what the Mexicans were doing - I got work - I paid my rent - I fed my family.
What's the big deal??
If Americans think they are taking their jobs - why aren't they standing out there on the street corners with the immigrant bunch, waiting for a construction foreman to pick them up?
Several times this past week, I have had "normal" looking anglos walk up to me in parking lots of grocery stores, etc asking if my company was hiring (I was wearing my suit). It was sad to see. And even sadder to tell them we aren't hiring and I wish them luck. These weren't bums asking for money - they were looking for jobs any way they could.
I don't see the difference between this group of people looking for office work, and the group of Mexicans looking for yard work. It's just different kinds of work. I can't imagine an immigrant in a flannel shirt and dirty jeans asking for clerical work on a street corner anymore than I can see an office worker asking to to dig holes.
I will tell you this -- I am that "normal anglo" and when I lost my job last year, I DID stand on the corner and get manual labor work. No, I don't speak Spanish - you don't need to to dig holes. Yes, I was hired to build stockade fences in the Heights. I was the only gringo there. I needed the work - I couldn't find the work I really wanted - I did what the Mexicans were doing - I got work - I paid my rent - I fed my family.
What's the big deal??
THE AGENDA • IMMIGRATIONTHE AGENDA
THE AGENDA • IMMIGRATIONTHE AGENDA
IMMIGRATION
"The time to fix our broken immigration system is now… We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace… But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America… Where we can reunite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should."
-- Barack Obama, Statement on U.S. Senate Floor
May 23, 2007
For too long, politicians in Washington have exploited the immigration issue to divide the nation rather than find real solutions. Our broken immigration system can only be fixed by putting politics aside and offering a complete solution that secures our border, enforces our laws, and reaffirms our heritage as a nation of immigrants.
Create Secure Borders: Protect the integrity of our borders. Support additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.
Improve Our Immigration System: Fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.
Remove Incentives to Enter Illegally: Remove incentives to enter the country illegally by cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants.
Bring People Out of the Shadows: Support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.
Work with Mexico: Promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration.
IMMIGRATION
"The time to fix our broken immigration system is now… We need stronger enforcement on the border and at the workplace… But for reform to work, we also must respond to what pulls people to America… Where we can reunite families, we should. Where we can bring in more foreign-born workers with the skills our economy needs, we should."
-- Barack Obama, Statement on U.S. Senate Floor
May 23, 2007
For too long, politicians in Washington have exploited the immigration issue to divide the nation rather than find real solutions. Our broken immigration system can only be fixed by putting politics aside and offering a complete solution that secures our border, enforces our laws, and reaffirms our heritage as a nation of immigrants.
Create Secure Borders: Protect the integrity of our borders. Support additional personnel, infrastructure and technology on the border and at our ports of entry.
Improve Our Immigration System: Fix the dysfunctional immigration bureaucracy and increase the number of legal immigrants to keep families together and meet the demand for jobs that employers cannot fill.
Remove Incentives to Enter Illegally: Remove incentives to enter the country illegally by cracking down on employers who hire undocumented immigrants.
Bring People Out of the Shadows: Support a system that allows undocumented immigrants who are in good standing to pay a fine, learn English, and go to the back of the line for the opportunity to become citizens.
Work with Mexico: Promote economic development in Mexico to decrease illegal immigration.
4.09.2009
Eleanor Roosevelt’s nightly prayer
Our Father, who has set a restlessness in our hearts and made us all seekers after that which we can never fully find, forbid us to be satisfied with what we make of life. Draw us from base content and set our eyes on far-off goals. Keep us at tasks too hard for us that we may be driven to Thee for strength. Deliver us from fretfulness and self-pitying; make us sure of the good we cannot see and of the hidden good in the world. Open our eyes to simple beauty all around us and our hearts to the loveliness men hide from us because we do not try to understand them. Save us from ourselves and show us a vision of a world made new.
– Eleanor Roosevelt’s nightly prayer
– Eleanor Roosevelt’s nightly prayer
There. Is. No. Line.
There. Is. No. Line.
By David Bennion on March 2, 2008 11:54 PM
"Do not try to bend the spoon; that's impossible. Instead only try to realize the truth: There is no spoon." --The bald kid from the Matrix.
Symsess, who has been lately gracing this blog with daily immigration round-ups, made a good point over at American Humanity.
Two things that I hear in the immigration reform rhetoric trouble me a little and they are “pay a significant fine” and “go to the back of the line.” What ‘line’ are they talking about. As far as I know there is no line of people from many countries south of the border because they are excluded from the immigration lottery each year. I’m sure I don’t know enough about the ins and outs of this process, but I’d certainly like clarification on what “back of the line” means.
This article quotes Obama:
“We have to require that undocumented workers, who are provided a pathway to citizenship, not only learn English, pay back taxes and pay a significant fine, but also that they’re going to the back of the line,” he said.
I hear this “line” referred to in two contexts. One is the context I think Obama is talking about, where some future version of comprehensive immigration reform would provide a path to citizenship for the millions of undocumented immigrants now here in the U.S. He seems to be saying that these people would have to wait some period of time before they could become citizens.
On its face, this is a reasonable requirement. But symsess is right to ask what this means. Permanent residents currently have to wait five years to become citizens, in most cases. Applicants for permanent residency through family members or employers have to wait anywhere from a few months to over a decade for their green cards under existing law. For instance, the sibling of a U.S. citizen currently has to wait over fifteen years from first petition to eventual citizenship. Does the back of the line start there, at fifteen years? That doesn’t seem reasonable. This issue must be clarified.
But there is another “line” that restrictionists talk about. This is the mythical line that law-abiding immigrants are supposed to wait in OUTSIDE the country (in the parlance of caps-loving restrictionists) until it’s THEIR TURN to enter and partake of the bounty we call America. This is the “line” I’ll discuss in the rest of this post, the one that is supposed to already exist under current immigration law.
How can I explain this: For most undocumented immigrants, there is no line. There. Is. No. Line.
If you don’t have permanent resident or U.S. citizen family members or an employer willing to undergo the expense and bureaucratic hassle of sponsoring you, there is no line in which to wait. It simply doesn’t exist.
Symsess mentioned the visa lottery. The visa lottery is just that—a lottery which does not lead to a visa for the great majority of applicants. Roughly 50,000 visas are issued through the program per year, which is a drop in the bucket of total immigration to the U.S. Countries overrepresented in the makeup of immigrants to the U.S. get fewer visa lottery visas—countries like China, Mexico, and the Philippines. Even if you are lucky enough to win the visa lottery, if you are here as an undocumented immigrant, chances are you will not be eligible to make use of the visa anyway.
Immigrants eager to apply for employment-based green cards often find themselves in a Catch 22. There is typically a wait of three to five years for an employment-based green card for a worker with a college degree or two years of experience. But the worker must remain in status or leave the country during that waiting period and, unless he/she has an H-1B visa or qualifies under Section 245(i) of the INA, usually cannot continue to work for the employer in the U.S. and still get a green card at the end of the wait. Most employers don’t want to sponsor someone who can’t work for them for the next three to five years. This means that many immigrants who are qualified to work in the U.S. and have an employer willing to sponsor them still find themselves unable to work lawfully.
If you are poor and unskilled, it is usually much more simple: there is no line whatsoever. Duke from Migra Matters had a good run-down a while back of the miniscule number of green cards made available in 2006 for unskilled workers: 147. The great majority of immigrants from Mexico and Central America fall into this group. Almost none of them can get a visa to come here lawfully in the first place, and they certainly can't get one if they leave the country after having violated U.S. immigration laws.
This idea of "get in line with everybody else" is a fabrication dreamt up by restrictionists to make their odious ideas palatable to an unknowing public. It makes sense that there should be a line, and we hear stories about family members waiting for ten years or more to reunite here in the U.S. So people assume there actually is a line where people can apply and eventually come into the country if they are patient and stay out of trouble.
There isn't! It's a fantasy. In a reasonable world there would be such a line, but in this world there’s not.
Even high-skill workers struggle to immigrate to the U.S. There is a cap of 65,000 H-1B visas each year—these are temporary nonimmigrant visas for people with at least a college degree filling a job that requires skill and education in a professional occupation. Last year, the cap was exhausted on the first day that applications were accepted, when more than twice as many applicants applied as there were visas. The tech community is desperately lobbying an unresponsive Congress to remedy the situation. (I'm sure the Democrats would if they could, but "third rail" and all that. America's high-tech community thanks you, Rahm, for framing the issue so effectively.)
Also, under current law, undocumented immigrants who have been here more than one year who then leave the country will not be able to return legally for ten years. There are any number of ways to be disqualified from future immigration benefits, including having certain misdemeanor convictions (even those from decades ago), falling out of student status and not getting reinstated, or, in many cases, working without employment authorization. Longtime permanent residents learn about some of these obscure laws the hard way when they leave the country for a wedding or funeral and find themselves in removal proceedings when they return. Telling an undocumented immigrant to leave the U.S. and go to the end of the line is a cruel joke once you realize that first, there is no line, and second, leaving will likely mean exclusion from the country for ten years or more.
This complicated minefield we call our immigration system seems designed to ensnare immigrants and find an excuse—any excuse—to deport them and keep them from coming back. Anyone familiar with the way the system works will soon realize that the attributes we associate with “rule of law”—predictability, consistent enforcement, and fairness—are often absent from immigration law.
This is why I have a hard time taking seriously anyone who repeats the mantras “rule of law” or “go to the end of the line” with respect to the immigration system. These words are calculated to obscure and mislead, and any progressive who uses these words should be asked to explain what they mean.
(Note: I’ll provide my first legal disclaimer here, which is this: If you are in need of legal immigration advice, seek the counsel of a competent immigration attorney—preferably one who won’t rip you off—and don’t necessarily rely on this post for guidance on specific legal scenarios, which can vary widely depending on individual circumstances.)
Obama to Push Immigration Bill as One Priority
April 9, 2009
Obama to Push Immigration Bill as One Priority
By JULIA PRESTON
While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.
Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.
Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.
Some White House officials said that immigration would not take precedence over the health care and energy proposals that Mr. Obama has identified as priorities. But the timetable is consistent with pledges Mr. Obama made to Hispanic groups in last year’s campaign.
He said then that comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in his first year in office. Latino voters turned out strongly for Mr. Obama in the election.
“He intends to start the debate this year,” Ms. Muñoz said.
But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said that immigration could become a polarizing issue for Mr. Obama in a year when he has many other major battles to fight.
Opponents, mainly Republicans, say they will seek to mobilize popular outrage against any effort to legalize unauthorized immigrant workers while so many Americans are out of jobs.
Democratic legislative aides said that opening a full-fledged debate this year on immigration, particularly with health care as a looming priority, could weigh down the president’s domestic agenda.
Debate is still under way among administration officials about the precise timing and strategy. For example, it is unclear who will take up the Obama initiative in Congress.
No serious legislative talks on the issue are expected until after some of Mr. Obama’s other priorities have been debated, Congressional aides said.
Just last month, Mr. Obama openly recognized that immigration is a potential minefield.
"I know this is an emotional issue; I know it’s a controversial issue,” he told an audience at a town meeting on March 18 in Costa Mesa, Calif. “I know that the people get real riled up politically about this."
But, he said, immigrants who are long-time residents but lack legal status “have to have some mechanism over time to get out of the shadows.”
The White House is calculating that public support for fixing the immigration system, which is widely acknowledged to be broken, will outweigh opposition from voters who argue that immigrants take jobs from Americans. A groundswell among voters opposed to legal status for illegal immigrants led to the defeat in 2007 of a bipartisan immigration bill that was strongly supported by President George W. Bush.
Administration officials said that Mr. Obama’s plan would not add new workers to the American work force, but that it would recognize millions of illegal immigrants who have already been working here. Despite the deep recession, there is no evidence of any wholesale exodus of illegal immigrant workers, independent studies of census data show.
Opponents of legalization legislation were incredulous at the idea that Mr. Obama would take on immigration when economic pain for Americans is so widespread.
“It just doesn’t seem rational that any political leader would say, let’s give millions of foreign workers permanent access to U.S. jobs when we have millions of Americans looking for jobs,” said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration. Mr. Beck predicted that Mr. Obama would face “an explosion” if he proceeded this year.
“It’s going to be, ‘You’re letting them keep that job, when I could have that job,’ ” he said.
In broad outlines, officials said, the Obama administration favors legislation that would bring illegal immigrants into the legal system by recognizing that they violated the law, and imposing fines and other penalties to fit the offense. The legislation would seek to prevent future illegal immigration by strengthening border enforcement and cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, while creating a national system for verifying the legal immigration status of new workers.
But administration officials emphasized that many details remained to be debated.
Opponents of a legalization effort said that if the Obama administration maintained the enforcement pressure initiated by Mr. Bush, the recession would force many illegal immigrants to return home. Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said it would be “politically disastrous” for Mr. Obama to begin an immigration initiative at this time.
Anticipating opposition, Mr. Obama has sought to shift some of the political burden to advocates for immigrants, by encouraging them to build support among voters for when his proposal goes to Congress.
That is why Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, a Democrat from Mr. Obama’s hometown, Chicago, has been on the road most weekends since last December, traveling far outside his district to meetings in Hispanic churches, hoping to generate something like a civil rights movement in favor of broad immigration legislation.
Mr. Gutierrez was in Philadelphia on Saturday at the Iglesia Internacional, a big Hispanic evangelical church in a former warehouse, the 17th meeting in a tour that has included cities as far flung as Providence, R.I.; Atlanta; Miami; and San Francisco. Greeted with cheers and amens by a full house of about 350 people, Mr. Gutierrez, shifting fluidly between Spanish and English, called for immigration policies to preserve family unity, the strategic theme of his campaign.
At each meeting, speakers from the community, mainly citizens, tell stories of loved ones who were deported or of delays and setbacks in the immigration system. Illegal immigrants have not been invited to speak.
Mr. Gutierrez’s meetings have all been held in churches, both evangelical and Roman Catholic, with clergy members from various denominations, including in several places Muslim imams. At one meeting in Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, officiated.
One speaker on Saturday, Jill Flores, said that her husband, Felix, an immigrant from Mexico who crossed the border illegally, had applied for legal status five years ago but had not been able to gain it even though she is an American citizen, as are their two children. Now, Ms. Flores said, she fears that her husband will have to leave for Mexico and will not be permitted to return for many years.
In an interview, Mr. Gutierrez rejected the idea that the timing is bad for an immigration debate. “There is never a wrong time for us,” he said. “Families are being divided and destroyed, and they need help now.”
Obama to Push Immigration Bill as One Priority
By JULIA PRESTON
While acknowledging that the recession makes the political battle more difficult, President Obama plans to begin addressing the country’s immigration system this year, including looking for a path for illegal immigrants to become legal, a senior administration official said on Wednesday.
Mr. Obama will frame the new effort — likely to rouse passions on all sides of the highly divisive issue — as “policy reform that controls immigration and makes it an orderly system,” said the official, Cecilia Muñoz, deputy assistant to the president and director of intergovernmental affairs in the White House.
Mr. Obama plans to speak publicly about the issue in May, administration officials said, and over the summer he will convene working groups, including lawmakers from both parties and a range of immigration groups, to begin discussing possible legislation for as early as this fall.
Some White House officials said that immigration would not take precedence over the health care and energy proposals that Mr. Obama has identified as priorities. But the timetable is consistent with pledges Mr. Obama made to Hispanic groups in last year’s campaign.
He said then that comprehensive immigration legislation, including a plan to make legal status possible for an estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, would be a priority in his first year in office. Latino voters turned out strongly for Mr. Obama in the election.
“He intends to start the debate this year,” Ms. Muñoz said.
But with the economy seriously ailing, advocates on different sides of the debate said that immigration could become a polarizing issue for Mr. Obama in a year when he has many other major battles to fight.
Opponents, mainly Republicans, say they will seek to mobilize popular outrage against any effort to legalize unauthorized immigrant workers while so many Americans are out of jobs.
Democratic legislative aides said that opening a full-fledged debate this year on immigration, particularly with health care as a looming priority, could weigh down the president’s domestic agenda.
Debate is still under way among administration officials about the precise timing and strategy. For example, it is unclear who will take up the Obama initiative in Congress.
No serious legislative talks on the issue are expected until after some of Mr. Obama’s other priorities have been debated, Congressional aides said.
Just last month, Mr. Obama openly recognized that immigration is a potential minefield.
"I know this is an emotional issue; I know it’s a controversial issue,” he told an audience at a town meeting on March 18 in Costa Mesa, Calif. “I know that the people get real riled up politically about this."
But, he said, immigrants who are long-time residents but lack legal status “have to have some mechanism over time to get out of the shadows.”
The White House is calculating that public support for fixing the immigration system, which is widely acknowledged to be broken, will outweigh opposition from voters who argue that immigrants take jobs from Americans. A groundswell among voters opposed to legal status for illegal immigrants led to the defeat in 2007 of a bipartisan immigration bill that was strongly supported by President George W. Bush.
Administration officials said that Mr. Obama’s plan would not add new workers to the American work force, but that it would recognize millions of illegal immigrants who have already been working here. Despite the deep recession, there is no evidence of any wholesale exodus of illegal immigrant workers, independent studies of census data show.
Opponents of legalization legislation were incredulous at the idea that Mr. Obama would take on immigration when economic pain for Americans is so widespread.
“It just doesn’t seem rational that any political leader would say, let’s give millions of foreign workers permanent access to U.S. jobs when we have millions of Americans looking for jobs,” said Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, a group that favors reduced immigration. Mr. Beck predicted that Mr. Obama would face “an explosion” if he proceeded this year.
“It’s going to be, ‘You’re letting them keep that job, when I could have that job,’ ” he said.
In broad outlines, officials said, the Obama administration favors legislation that would bring illegal immigrants into the legal system by recognizing that they violated the law, and imposing fines and other penalties to fit the offense. The legislation would seek to prevent future illegal immigration by strengthening border enforcement and cracking down on employers who hire illegal immigrants, while creating a national system for verifying the legal immigration status of new workers.
But administration officials emphasized that many details remained to be debated.
Opponents of a legalization effort said that if the Obama administration maintained the enforcement pressure initiated by Mr. Bush, the recession would force many illegal immigrants to return home. Dan Stein, the president of the Federation for American Immigration Reform, said it would be “politically disastrous” for Mr. Obama to begin an immigration initiative at this time.
Anticipating opposition, Mr. Obama has sought to shift some of the political burden to advocates for immigrants, by encouraging them to build support among voters for when his proposal goes to Congress.
That is why Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, a Democrat from Mr. Obama’s hometown, Chicago, has been on the road most weekends since last December, traveling far outside his district to meetings in Hispanic churches, hoping to generate something like a civil rights movement in favor of broad immigration legislation.
Mr. Gutierrez was in Philadelphia on Saturday at the Iglesia Internacional, a big Hispanic evangelical church in a former warehouse, the 17th meeting in a tour that has included cities as far flung as Providence, R.I.; Atlanta; Miami; and San Francisco. Greeted with cheers and amens by a full house of about 350 people, Mr. Gutierrez, shifting fluidly between Spanish and English, called for immigration policies to preserve family unity, the strategic theme of his campaign.
At each meeting, speakers from the community, mainly citizens, tell stories of loved ones who were deported or of delays and setbacks in the immigration system. Illegal immigrants have not been invited to speak.
Mr. Gutierrez’s meetings have all been held in churches, both evangelical and Roman Catholic, with clergy members from various denominations, including in several places Muslim imams. At one meeting in Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, president of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, officiated.
One speaker on Saturday, Jill Flores, said that her husband, Felix, an immigrant from Mexico who crossed the border illegally, had applied for legal status five years ago but had not been able to gain it even though she is an American citizen, as are their two children. Now, Ms. Flores said, she fears that her husband will have to leave for Mexico and will not be permitted to return for many years.
In an interview, Mr. Gutierrez rejected the idea that the timing is bad for an immigration debate. “There is never a wrong time for us,” he said. “Families are being divided and destroyed, and they need help now.”
Why the border fence fails
Why the border fence fails
By: Gebe Martinez
April 3, 2009 04:42 AM EST
DEL RIO, Texas-Black steel bars rise from the dry, hard-packed dirt, 16 feet up toward a sky that has no borders.
Though shiny and new, the barrier on the Texas side of the Rio Grande is an ugly symbol of the border wars on the ground.
Congress — responding to voters who are angered by the rising immigrant population in their neighborhoods — ordered the border fence. Now, as the depressed international economies and increased drug cartel violence weaken this nation and Mexico, the barrier is taking on added significance as a shield against Americans’ greatest fears.
That is not how I view it.
As I approached the international bridge that connects Del Rio to Ciudad Acuna, Coahuila, I saw a structure that has pierced the friendliness and innocence of the town where I was born.
What the tall barrier has done is create a false sense of security for immigration hard-liners while adding to the fears of law-abiding residents along the border.
In Del Rio, where a historic partnership with Acuna includes daily commerce, construction of an international dam and meetings between presidents of both countries, there are stories of legal residents who are reluctant to cross into Mexico to see their families or to shop, out of fear they will lose their legal right to return.
The poor on both sides are the ones who will be mostly hurt by the 670-mile fence along the Texas-Mexico border, according to University of Texas researchers. The structure will not even touch the most expensive and revenue-rich parcels of land, according to the human rights study.
The cold, harsh look of the new fence underscores the mission undertaken by Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) to put a “human face” on the immigration crisis and, thus, pressure President Barack Obama to act this year to reform immigration laws.
In a series of “family unity” events being held at churches in 20 cities across the country — from Rhode Island to California and Texas — Gutierrez and local religious and community leaders are gathering testimony from citizens and visa-holders whose families have been upended by what they see as overly aggressive immigration enforcement.
Though Obama campaigned for president with an immigration plan that would include border enforcement, tougher employer rules and earned legalization for illegal immigrants, Gutierrez worries the president’s promise may falter because of the deepening economic recession.
“It seemed to members of the [Congressional Hispanic Caucus] that there was a vacuum; how do you continue to build and galvanize the support for comprehensive immigration reform while the White House is silent?” Gutierrez said. “How do you create support and let the president know there’s a community out there that’s still very committed and vigorous?”
After reflecting on Obama’s 2008 Democratic convention speech, Gutierrez came up with an answer: to focus on family separations.
In his single reference to immigration as he accepted the presidential nomination, Obama said, “I don’t know anyone who benefits when a mother is separated from her infant child or an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers.”
At an event in San Francisco, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi referred to the federal immigration raids that break up families, calling them “un-American,” and demanded they be stopped.
Immigration restrictionists mocked Pelosi’s comments. Immigration control groups also sponsored an expensive, weeks-long television ad against Gutierrez, contending his efforts are costing Americans jobs.
But Gutierrez’s work seems to be paying off.
Pelosi’s comments reaffirmed her support for broad immigration legislation, once the White House takes the lead.
And in March, Obama strategized with all 24 members of the Hispanic Caucus after receiving from Gutierrez 5,500 signatures gathered at the rallies.
The president pledged to hold a White House event on immigration by the end of May.
Obama also will travel to Mexico this month to meet with Mexico President Felipe Calderon to discuss the drug war, immigration and trade.
Meanwhile, Gutierrez and the Hispanic Caucus have the backing of the Congressional Black Caucus, which agrees this is a civil rights issue. Rep. Mike Honda (D-Calif.), head of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, will join Gutierrez at a rally in California. Republican Cuban-American lawmakers from Florida also encouraged constituents to attend the Orlando meeting.
No doubt, Obama will continue to hear opposition from immigration hard-liners who demanded the American version of the Berlin Wall.
But not until laws are changed to effectively control illegal immigration — and end the exploitation of workers and the separation of families — can the face of the nation seem more just and not so ugly.
Gebe Martinez is a longtime journalist in Washington and a frequent lecturer and commentator on the policy and politics of Capitol Hill.
It's back: Immigration heats up
It's back: Immigration heats up
By: Josh Gerstein and Nia-Malika Henderson
April 3, 2009 04:35 AM EST
Since taking office, President Barack Obama has seemed intent on keeping the politically explosive issue of immigration on the back burner.
He won’t be able to do that for long.
Latino leaders are pressuring the White House to set a goal of signing a major immigration reform bill by the end of the year. Friction between immigrant communities and local police seeking to enforce federal law is increasing, prompting hearings on Capitol Hill and scrutiny from the Justice Department.
And in less than two weeks, Obama will be in Mexico for a presidential summit in which immigration issues will be on the agenda.
“I think, politically, [Obama] is in a tough spot, and he recognizes that the public isn’t where he is on immigration,” said Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which bills itself as a “low immigration” think tank. “If you are Obama, it’s a no-win situation, and there is no reason to bring this issue up right now from a political view. You can give a few speeches to the right groups and then say, ‘What else is on the agenda?’”
With everything on his plate — from the economy to health care to two wars — it’s easy to see why Obama is hoping to steer clear of the issue. Immigration reform inspired furious debate in Congress when President George W. Bush tried to push through a “comprehensive” approach that would have allowed most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to stay in the United States.
See also
Inside Obama's polling operation
Budgets fall short of Obama's mandate
Congress backs off AIG crackdown
Conservatives beat back Bush’s effort in a bitter fight that split the GOP. Even some of Obama’s Democratic allies in the labor movement have resisted immigration reform.
Obama dealt with the immigration issue briefly at the White House on March 18 when the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met privately with the president. Lawmakers said he promised a high-profile event on immigration in the next month or two — but said he did not agree to commit to getting immigration reform passed this year. Instead, he said he’ll support efforts to have Congress take up the issue this fall.
“He didn’t make a commitment to sign it before the end of the year,” a senior administration official involved in the discussions said. “Presumably, if you’re launching the legislative debate in the fall, that’d be a pretty tall order. His commitment is to get this started.”
The official, who asked not to be named, said Obama proposed a process similar to that used on health care. He suggested “some kind of public event followed by a lot of conversations with stakeholders on the issue to get the policy right and the strategy right,” the aide said. The White House plans “close consultations” with the Hill on legislation but does not intend to offer up an Obama-branded proposal, the official said.
Obama also committed to assign a White House point person on the immigration issue but has not yet done so, the aide said.
Bush’s approach called for a “path to citizenship” that would have allowed immigrants already here to apply to stay, as long as they paid any penalties and fines and stayed out of trouble with the law. Obama endorsed a broadly similar approach during the campaign.
Even as Latino groups and others seek to bring the issue back into the spotlight, the political reality is that the economic downturn might make this a particularly difficult time to clear the way for immigrants to stay in the United States.
The recession and rising unemployment rates are likely to undercut the already shaky public support for legalization of illegal immigrants. Business leaders are diverted by more immediate issues of corporate survival. And a surge in drug-related killings and assassinations in Mexico could stoke public fears that any immigration-related measure might cause that violence to migrate north, even though advocates insist reform would make Americans safer.
Asked whether the ailing economy would increase public resistance to immigration reform, the administration official said, “You might be right if the debate is about generosity versus being harsh to immigrants. ... It’s not about whether we’re nice to immigrants or not. It’s about whether we’re doing a smart thing for the economy.”
While Obama aides insist the immigration issue is a priority, it has not been part of the “education, health care and energy” mantra that has dominated the president’s rhetoric since he offered up his budget plan in February. Latino officials were delighted last month when, in response to a question at a town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., Obama gave a lengthy and detailed statement in support of comprehensive immigration reform. However, he ignored the part of the question about when he planned to move on the issue.
The emotion the immigration debate inspires was on clear display on Capitol Hill on Thursday as two House subcommittees conducted a hearing on local efforts to detain illegal immigrants. One very high-profile drive, conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., with help from a cooperation agreement with the federal government, is now the target of a Justice Department investigation into possible civil rights violations.
Julio Cesar Mora, a 19-year-old Arizona man who is a U.S. citizen, complained that he and his father, who holds a green card, were pulled over and detained for three hours during one of the sheriff’s immigration raids. “They patted us down and tied our hands together with zip ties like we were criminals,” Mora complained.
Another witness, Ray Tranchant of Virginia, described the death of his 16-year-old daughter and a friend in a car accident caused by an illegal immigrant who was driving drunk and had been arrested before. “Instead of being deported, he stayed on the streets of Virginia Beach to drink and drive and subsequently killed these two beautiful girls,” Tranchant said.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told the Latino witnesses their plight paled in comparison to what had happened to Tranchant. “I don’t know how to impress to you what looks like an inconvenience to you compared to the very sacred life of this man’s daughter,” King said.
However, Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) insisted the enforcement efforts were actually leading to more crime.
“Those drunkards and those rapists and those murderers do most of their drunkenness, their murdering and their raping in the very immigrant community in which they reside. And you know who wants to get rid of them? The very immigrant community that lives there, but they cannot call the police,” he said, insisting that comprehensive immigration reform was the only real solution.
By: Josh Gerstein and Nia-Malika Henderson
April 3, 2009 04:35 AM EST
Since taking office, President Barack Obama has seemed intent on keeping the politically explosive issue of immigration on the back burner.
He won’t be able to do that for long.
Latino leaders are pressuring the White House to set a goal of signing a major immigration reform bill by the end of the year. Friction between immigrant communities and local police seeking to enforce federal law is increasing, prompting hearings on Capitol Hill and scrutiny from the Justice Department.
And in less than two weeks, Obama will be in Mexico for a presidential summit in which immigration issues will be on the agenda.
“I think, politically, [Obama] is in a tough spot, and he recognizes that the public isn’t where he is on immigration,” said Steven Camarota of the Center for Immigration Studies, which bills itself as a “low immigration” think tank. “If you are Obama, it’s a no-win situation, and there is no reason to bring this issue up right now from a political view. You can give a few speeches to the right groups and then say, ‘What else is on the agenda?’”
With everything on his plate — from the economy to health care to two wars — it’s easy to see why Obama is hoping to steer clear of the issue. Immigration reform inspired furious debate in Congress when President George W. Bush tried to push through a “comprehensive” approach that would have allowed most of the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants to stay in the United States.
See also
Inside Obama's polling operation
Budgets fall short of Obama's mandate
Congress backs off AIG crackdown
Conservatives beat back Bush’s effort in a bitter fight that split the GOP. Even some of Obama’s Democratic allies in the labor movement have resisted immigration reform.
Obama dealt with the immigration issue briefly at the White House on March 18 when the Congressional Hispanic Caucus met privately with the president. Lawmakers said he promised a high-profile event on immigration in the next month or two — but said he did not agree to commit to getting immigration reform passed this year. Instead, he said he’ll support efforts to have Congress take up the issue this fall.
“He didn’t make a commitment to sign it before the end of the year,” a senior administration official involved in the discussions said. “Presumably, if you’re launching the legislative debate in the fall, that’d be a pretty tall order. His commitment is to get this started.”
The official, who asked not to be named, said Obama proposed a process similar to that used on health care. He suggested “some kind of public event followed by a lot of conversations with stakeholders on the issue to get the policy right and the strategy right,” the aide said. The White House plans “close consultations” with the Hill on legislation but does not intend to offer up an Obama-branded proposal, the official said.
Obama also committed to assign a White House point person on the immigration issue but has not yet done so, the aide said.
Bush’s approach called for a “path to citizenship” that would have allowed immigrants already here to apply to stay, as long as they paid any penalties and fines and stayed out of trouble with the law. Obama endorsed a broadly similar approach during the campaign.
Even as Latino groups and others seek to bring the issue back into the spotlight, the political reality is that the economic downturn might make this a particularly difficult time to clear the way for immigrants to stay in the United States.
The recession and rising unemployment rates are likely to undercut the already shaky public support for legalization of illegal immigrants. Business leaders are diverted by more immediate issues of corporate survival. And a surge in drug-related killings and assassinations in Mexico could stoke public fears that any immigration-related measure might cause that violence to migrate north, even though advocates insist reform would make Americans safer.
Asked whether the ailing economy would increase public resistance to immigration reform, the administration official said, “You might be right if the debate is about generosity versus being harsh to immigrants. ... It’s not about whether we’re nice to immigrants or not. It’s about whether we’re doing a smart thing for the economy.”
While Obama aides insist the immigration issue is a priority, it has not been part of the “education, health care and energy” mantra that has dominated the president’s rhetoric since he offered up his budget plan in February. Latino officials were delighted last month when, in response to a question at a town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., Obama gave a lengthy and detailed statement in support of comprehensive immigration reform. However, he ignored the part of the question about when he planned to move on the issue.
The emotion the immigration debate inspires was on clear display on Capitol Hill on Thursday as two House subcommittees conducted a hearing on local efforts to detain illegal immigrants. One very high-profile drive, conducted by Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Ariz., with help from a cooperation agreement with the federal government, is now the target of a Justice Department investigation into possible civil rights violations.
Julio Cesar Mora, a 19-year-old Arizona man who is a U.S. citizen, complained that he and his father, who holds a green card, were pulled over and detained for three hours during one of the sheriff’s immigration raids. “They patted us down and tied our hands together with zip ties like we were criminals,” Mora complained.
Another witness, Ray Tranchant of Virginia, described the death of his 16-year-old daughter and a friend in a car accident caused by an illegal immigrant who was driving drunk and had been arrested before. “Instead of being deported, he stayed on the streets of Virginia Beach to drink and drive and subsequently killed these two beautiful girls,” Tranchant said.
Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told the Latino witnesses their plight paled in comparison to what had happened to Tranchant. “I don’t know how to impress to you what looks like an inconvenience to you compared to the very sacred life of this man’s daughter,” King said.
However, Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.) insisted the enforcement efforts were actually leading to more crime.
“Those drunkards and those rapists and those murderers do most of their drunkenness, their murdering and their raping in the very immigrant community in which they reside. And you know who wants to get rid of them? The very immigrant community that lives there, but they cannot call the police,” he said, insisting that comprehensive immigration reform was the only real solution.
4.04.2009
Message from Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey
Dear Mrs. Rios:
Thank you for contacting me about immigration. I appreciate the time you have taken to share your thoughts and concerns with me.
Immigration is a complicated and emotional issue, but we can no longer ignore the need for immigration reform in this country. We need orderly, legal avenues for immigration, pathways to citizenship, and a better approach to knowing who is coming in and out of our country. It's essential that we provide adequate funds directed towards improving the safety and security of our ports, our airlines, and our nation. It is also vital that we offer workers a fair wage, which will help all entry-level employees, and boost their impact on the economy. Equally important is providing worker protections and an education system that helps bring all families into our communities.
As you may know, any effort at immigration reform must pass both the House and the Senate, and the Senate has tried several times and failed to pass an immigration reform bill. As we address immigration reform we must look beyond ineffective enforcement-only responses to the nearly 12 million undocumented workers here already. We must keep in mind that immigration continues to be an asset to this country and to California by respecting the work and the worker. You can be sure I will keep your thoughts in mind as I work for a sensible solution to illegal immigration.
Again, it's good to hear from you. The people of Marin and Sonoma counties are the most important voices I listen to as I serve in Congress.
Sincerely, Lynn Woolsey
Member of Congress
Thank you for contacting me about immigration. I appreciate the time you have taken to share your thoughts and concerns with me.
Immigration is a complicated and emotional issue, but we can no longer ignore the need for immigration reform in this country. We need orderly, legal avenues for immigration, pathways to citizenship, and a better approach to knowing who is coming in and out of our country. It's essential that we provide adequate funds directed towards improving the safety and security of our ports, our airlines, and our nation. It is also vital that we offer workers a fair wage, which will help all entry-level employees, and boost their impact on the economy. Equally important is providing worker protections and an education system that helps bring all families into our communities.
As you may know, any effort at immigration reform must pass both the House and the Senate, and the Senate has tried several times and failed to pass an immigration reform bill. As we address immigration reform we must look beyond ineffective enforcement-only responses to the nearly 12 million undocumented workers here already. We must keep in mind that immigration continues to be an asset to this country and to California by respecting the work and the worker. You can be sure I will keep your thoughts in mind as I work for a sensible solution to illegal immigration.
Again, it's good to hear from you. The people of Marin and Sonoma counties are the most important voices I listen to as I serve in Congress.
Sincerely, Lynn Woolsey
Member of Congress
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