Phoenix Mayor Challenges Popular Sheriff’s Anti-Immigration Tactics, by Rebecca Spence (Daily Forward)

At first glance, Mayor Phil Gordon’s office in downtown Phoenix looks like that of any other mayor, replete with photos of his kids and a sweeping view of the city. In the case of Arizona’s capital, that means rolling desert hills. But in an otherwise sparsely decorated workspace, one detail stands out: a silver tray of Israeli shekels atop the coffee table.

Gordon is the first Jewish mayor of Phoenix, one of America’s fastest-growing cities. A popular leader serving his second term, Gordon has spoken out on behalf of Israel more than most local elected officials. He even penned an opinion article on the threat of Iran, in which he urged other local politicians to take a stand. But he also has taken a vocal position on an issue that is less of his choosing and more a product of his city’s circumstance: how to handle illegal immigration.

That led Gordon to travel last year to Washington to lobby for comprehensive immigration reform after an immigration reform bill co-authored by Arizona senator and presumptive Republican presidential nominee John McCain failed to pass. Gordon, a Democrat, endorsed McCain in the presidential primary, though he now says that in the general election he is remaining neutral.

Gordon’s endorsement of the senator had, by all appearances, less to do with policy than with friendship and loyalty — traits Gordon said he learned from his Jewish grandfather, a Lithuanian immigrant.

Gordon, 57, leads a city increasingly at the nexus of the debate over how to handle undocumented workers who pour across the border with Mexico. In recent months, that debate has intensified in Phoenix, as the Maricopa County sheriff, Joe Arpaio, has taken extreme measures to round up and deport illegal immigrants. Gordon, along with local Jewish groups, has made decrying the sheriff’s strong-armed tactics — which, according to news reports, have included forcing arrested illegal immigrants to wear pink underwear and eat rotten green bologna sandwiches — a top priority.

“The mayor is the only high-level politician in Arizona who stood up against the sheriff,” said Rabbi Maynard Bell, executive director of the Arizona chapter of the American Jewish Committee. “Suddenly the sheriff is no longer a sacred cow anymore, and I think it took the mayor’s courage to do that.”

Since last January, the sheriff has been conducting what he calls “crime suppression sweeps,” in which he and a posse of volunteer deputies show up in predominantly Hispanic neighborhoods, stop residents for minor traffic violations and then question them about their immigration status. A recent “sweep” here rounded up 27 Hispanics who the sheriff believes may be in the country illegally. The “sweeps” are often accompanied by rowdy anti-immigrant rallies, as well as counter-protests.

In an interview at his City Hall office, Gordon pointed to a sign that had been held at one of the rallies accompanying an Arpaio “sweep.” The sign, rendered in scrawled handwriting, read “Hooray for slaughtering of illegals, Boo to the beaners!,” with a swastika drawn at the bottom.

The mayor, a former lawyer, holds that the sheriff’s actions are tantamount to racial profiling and represent a violation of civil rights. He first spoke out against the sheriff’s tactics in late March, at the seventh annual Cesar Chavez Day luncheon here. That same week, he sent a letter to U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey asking for a federal investigation into Arpaio’s tactics. (As of yet, there has been no word on the status of that request.)

A spokesman for Arpaio did not return a call seeking comment.

Gordon’s criticism of the sheriff has not been welcome in all corners of the Phoenix Jewish community. Amy Laff, founding chairwoman of the Arizona chapter of the Republican Jewish Coalition, said in an e-mail that “the mayor should not engage in undermining legitimate enforcement efforts by the County Sheriff by, for example, requesting an FBI investigation into the Sheriff’s Department immigration enforcement activities.”

And Arpaio is a highly popular figure among the Arizona electorate. An Arizona State University poll conducted in late April showed a 59% approval rating for the Maricopa County sheriff. Gordon, on the other hand, had only a 42% approval rating.

But Gordon, who first took office in 2004 and was re-elected last September with nearly 80% of the vote, said that he spoke against Arpaio because it was the right thing to do.

“Certainly standing up to the sheriff isn’t the wisest thing to do politically, but it was the right thing to do ethically and morally,” Gordon said. “I personally regret that I didn’t do it earlier.”

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**Image Courtesy of the City of Phoenix

After Iowa Raid, Immigrants Fuel Labor Inquiries , By Julia Preston (NYT)

POSTVILLE, Iowa — When federal immigration agents raided the kosher meatpacking plant here in May and rounded up 389 illegal immigrants, they found more than 20 under-age workers, some as young as 13.

Now those young immigrants have begun to tell investigators about their jobs. Some said they worked shifts of 12 hours or more, wielding razor-edged knives and saws to slice freshly killed beef. Some worked through the night, sometimes six nights a week.

One, a Guatemalan named Elmer L. who said he was 16 when he started working on the plant’s killing floors, said he worked 17-hour shifts, six days a week. In an affidavit, he said he was constantly tired and did not have time to do anything but work and sleep. “I was very sad,” he said, “and I felt like I was a slave.”

At first, labor officials said the raid had disrupted federal and state investigations already under way at Agriprocessors Inc., the nation’s largest kosher plant. The raid has drawn criticism for what some see as harsh tactics against the immigrants, with little action taken against their employers.

But in the aftermath of the arrests, labor investigators have reaped a bounty of new evidence from the testimony of illegal immigrants, teenagers and adults, who were caught in the raid. In formal declarations, immigrants have described pervasive labor violations at the plant, testimony that could result in criminal charges for Agriprocessors executives, labor law experts said.

Out of work and facing deportation proceedings, many of the immigrants say they now have nothing to lose in speaking up about the conditions in the plant. They have told investigators that they were routinely put to work without safety training and were forced to work long shifts without overtime or rest time. Under-age workers said their bosses knew how young they were.

Because of the dangers of the work, it is illegal in Iowa for a company to employ anyone under 18 on the floor of a meatpacking plant.

In a statement, Agriprocessors said it did not employ workers under 18, and would fire any under-age worker found to have presented false documents to obtain work.

To investigate the child labor accusations, the federal Labor Department has joined with the Iowa Division of Labor Services in cooperation with the state attorney general’s office, officials for the three agencies said.

Sonia Parras Konrad, an immigration lawyer in private practice in Des Moines, is representing many of the young workers. She said she had so far identified 27 workers under 18 who were employed in the packing areas of the plant, most of them illegal immigrants from Guatemala, including some who were not arrested in the raid.

“Some of these boys don’t even shave,” Ms. Parras Konrad said. “They’re goofy. They’re teenagers.”

At a meeting here Saturday, three members of the House Hispanic Caucus — including its chairman, Representative Luis V. Gutierrez, Democrat of Illinois — heard seven immigrant minors describe working in the Agriprocessors plant.

Iowa labor officials said they rarely encounter child labor cases even though the state has many meatpacking plants.

“We don’t normally have many under-age folks working in our state,” said Gail Sheridan-Lucht, a lawyer for the state labor department, who said she could not comment specifically on the Agriprocessors investigation.

Other investigations are also under way. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission is examining accusations of sexual harassment of women at the plant. Lawyers for the immigrants are preparing a suit under the federal Fair Labor Standards Act for wage and hour violations.

Federal justice and immigration officials, speaking on Thursday at a hearing in Washington of the House Judiciary immigration subcommittee, said their investigations were continuing. A federal grand jury in Cedar Rapids is hearing evidence.

While federal prosecutors are primarily focusing on immigration charges, they may also be looking into labor violations. Search warrant documents filed in court before the raid, which was May 12, cited a report by an anonymous immigrant who was sent to work in the plant by immigration authorities as an undercover informant. The immigrant saw “a rabbi who was calling employees derogatory names and throwing meat at employees.” Jewish managers oversee the slaughtering and processing of meat at Agriprocessors to ensure kosher standards.

In another episode, the informant said a floor supervisor had blindfolded an immigrant with duct tape. “The floor supervisor then took one of the meat hooks and hit the Guatemalan with it,” the informant said, adding that the blow did not cause “serious injuries.”

So far, 297 illegal immigrants from the May raid have been convicted of document fraud and other criminal charges, and most were sentenced to five months in prison, after which they will be deported.

A spokesman for Agriprocessors, Menachem Lubinsky, said the company could not comment on an active investigation.

“The company has two objectives in mind: to restore its production to meet the demands of the kosher food market and to be in full compliance with all local, state and federal laws,” Mr. Lubinsky said. Reports of labor violations at the plant “remain allegations only, that no agency has charged the company with,” he said.

The Agriprocessors kosher plant here has been owned and operated since 1987 by Aaron Rubashkin and his family. His son Sholom was the plant’s top manager until he was removed by his father in May after the raid. The plant’s products are distributed across the country under brands including Aaron’s Best and Aaron’s Choice.

Most of the young immigrants were hired at Agriprocessors after they presented false Social Security cards or other documents saying they were older than they were.

But in an interview here, Elmer L. said he had told floor supervisors that he was under 18. He asked that his last name not be published on advice of his lawyer, Ms. Parras Konrad, because he is a minor in deportation proceedings.

“They asked me how old I was,” Elmer L. said. “They could see that sometimes I could not keep up with the work.”

Elmer L. said that he regularly worked 17 hours a day at the plant and was paid $7.25 an hour. He said he was not paid overtime consistently.

“My work was very hard, because they didn’t give me my breaks, and I wasn’t getting very much sleep,” he said. “They told us they were going to call immigration if we complained.”

Elmer L. said that he was clearing cow innards from the slaughter floor last Aug. 26 when a supervisor he described as a rabbi began yelling at him, then kicked him from behind. The blow caused a freshly-sharpened knife to fly up and cut his elbow.

He was sent to a hospital where doctors closed the laceration with eight stitches. But he said that when he returned, his elbow still stinging, to ask for some time off, his supervisor ordered him back to work.

The next day, as he was lifting a cow’s tongue, the stitches ruptured, Elmer L. said, and the wound bled again. He said he was given a bandage at the plant and sent back to work. The incident is confirmed in a worker’s injury report filed on Aug. 31, 2007, by Agriprocessors with the Iowa labor department.

Gilda O., a Guatemalan who said she was 16, said she worked the night shift plucking chickens. She said she was working to help her parents pay off debts.

Another Guatemalan, Joel R., who gave his age as 15, said he dropped out of school in Postville after the eighth grade and took a job at Agriprocessors because his mother became ill. He said he worked from 5.30 p.m. to 6.30 a.m. in a section called “quality control,” a job he described as relatively easy that he got because he speaks English.

But he said he and other workers were under constant pressure from supervisors. “They yell at us when we don’t hurry up, when we don’t work fast enough for them,” said Joel R. He and Gilda O. did not want their last names published because they are illegal immigrants and they were not arrested in the raid.

Most of the young immigrants have been released from detention but remain in deportation proceedings. Ms. Parras Konrad said she will ask immigration authorities to grant them special four-year temporary visas, known as U visas, which are offered to immigrants who assist in law enforcement investigations. Iowa labor officials are considering supporting some of those requests, Ms. Sheridan-Lucht said.

Agriprocessors executives said they had begun an overhaul of hiring and labor practices, starting with hiring a compliance officer, James G. Martin, a former United States attorney in Missouri. In an interview, Mr. Martin said the company had contracted with an outside firm, the Jacobson Staffing Company, to handle its hiring, and new safety officers, including one former federal work safety inspector.

Mark Lauritsen, a vice president for the United Food and Commercial Workers Union, which has tried to organize the plant, said he remained skeptical. “They are the poster child for how a rogue company can exploit a broken immigration system,” Mr. Lauritsen said.

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**Image Courtsey of Stephen Mally (NYT):"Gilda O. says she worked the night shift at the Agriprocessors plant, even though she is only 16."

Pushing Back on Immigration, By Spencer S. Hsu (WP)

A three-year-old enforcement campaign against employers who knowingly hire illegal immigrants is increasingly resulting in arrests and criminal convictions, using evidence gathered by phone taps, undercover agents and prisoners who agree to serve as government witnesses.

But the crackdown's relatively high costs and limited results are also fueling criticism. In an economy with more than 6 million companies and 8 million unauthorized workers, the corporate enforcement effort is still dwarfed by the high-profile raids that have sentenced thousands of illegal immigrants to prison time and deportation.

Stewart A. Baker, assistant secretary for policy at the Homeland Security Department, recently told immigration experts the disparity can be traced to ineffective policies that need to be addressed by Congress.

"Companies tell me, 'We have an immigration system that allows us to hire illegal workers, legally,' " Baker said. Asked to defend President Bush's track record, he said, "Why are employers not punished more often? Because the laws we have don't really authorize that."

In the first nine months of this fiscal year, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) made 937 criminal arrests at U.S. workplaces, more than 10 times as many as the 72 it arrested five years ago. Of those arrested this year, 99 were company supervisors, compared with 93 in 2007.

The arrests have led to several convictions, including a union official at a Swift meatpacking plant; three executives of a Florida janitorial services company; a temporary-staffing agency manager for a Del Monte Fresh Produce plant in Oregon; two supervisors of a Cargill pork plant cleaning contractor in Illinois; and seven managers of IFCO Systems North America, a pallet services company, among others.

But Baker's comments acknowledged criticism by labor union leaders, immigrant rights' groups and Democrats about the limits of employer enforcement. His remarks also illuminate why the White House, Congress and some states have scrambled recently to adopt new steps to compel companies to identify illegal workers, and why such efforts will probably remain ineffective.

Political opposition from big business, labor and immigrant and civil rights interests has diluted immigration law for two decades, according to analysts in both parties.

"If you want law enforcement, you have to have laws that are enforceable," said Doris M. Meissner, who headed the former Immigration and Naturalization Service under the Clinton administration. The 1986 law banning the hiring of illegal immigrants, she said, "has just been chronically flawed from the time it was passed."

Raids against Swift packinghouses in six states in December 2006 highlight the administration's strategy to seek criminal indictments and felony convictions against corporate violators. An earlier approach that relied on administrative fines and forfeitures was increasingly dismissed by executives as a cost of doing business.

The tactics used now are similar to law enforcement techniques honed in developing cases against mobsters and drug lords. In June 2007, federal agents wired a Mexican slaughterhouse worker who had been arrested on immigration charges and sent him to call at the home of his former boss at a meatpacking plant in Marshalltown, Iowa.

The informant, nicknamed "Memo," carried a false ID. He told Christopher Lamb, now the plant's human resources manager, that he was free pending a hearing and wanted to return to work.

Lamb, 38, coached Memo but seemed to realize he was walking into a trap, court records show. "Where's the migra?" he asked later, using the Spanish term for immigration agents.

The informant's tapes led Lamb to plead guilty in March to one charge of harboring an illegal immigrant. In a deal with prosecutors, he agreed to serve a year's probation, pay $300 in fines and cooperate against others targeted after immigration raids in 2006 against meatpacker Swift, now JBS Swift.

An undercover agent taped union official Braulio Pereyra advising new employees at an orientation speech on how to protect false identities.

"You can lie to your boss or whomever, but not to the police," Pereyra was recorded as saying. "That's a federal offense."

He was convicted in May on one charge of harboring illegal immigrants, and faces as much as five years in prison and a $250,000 fine. Pereyra's lawyer, Keith Rigg, said his client committed no crime and had a First Amendment right to give the speech. He is seeking a retrial.

Enforcement disparities were displayed vividly May 12 when ICE agents swept into an Agriprocessors Inc. kosher meatpacking plant in Postville, Iowa. They arrested 389 illegal workers; 270 were convicted within days in expedited court proceedings at a cattle fairgrounds; and many were sentenced to five months in prison, mostly on criminal document-fraud charges.

By contrast, ICE agents arrested two supervisors and issued an arrest warrant for a third man on July 3. The firm remains in operation.

Frank Sharry, executive director of America's Voice, a newly formed group that promotes citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants, said the raid shows the misdirected policy of criminalizing illegal immigration for workers while not shutting down the jobs "magnet" that lures them. Several critics, including a federal court interpreter who participated in the Agriprocessors hearings, said the government's legal tactics are coercive and threaten defendants' due process rights.

"There's no question this administration is coddling unscrupulous employers while arresting undocumented immigrants in order to make their statistics look good," Sharry said.

But he echoed Baker's frustration at politicians who seek to look tough on immigration and yet do not provide effective law enforcement tools or address the nation's labor needs and underground population. "The dysfunctional immigration system really is the fault of Congress, for failing to lead," Sharry said.

Piecemeal measures to combat illegal hiring are under way this year, but the moves remain controversial and their effects uncertain.

In March, the White House attempted to jump-start a campaign to notify 140,000 employers about workers' use of suspicious Social Security numbers, seeking to force businesses to resolve questions or fire workers within 90 days.

If companies do not respond to "no-match" letters, ICE could use that failure as evidence of illegal hiring. But the plan remains stalled by a federal lawsuit filed by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, the AFL-CIO and the American Civil Liberties Union, which allege that it will disrupt businesses and discriminate against legal U.S. workers.

Also in dispute is another effort to expand use of a voluntary online system that checks whether new hires are eligible to work in the United States. The Bush administration on June 9 ordered 60,000 federal contractors to use the government's E-Verify system, which checks workers' information against Social Security and immigration-status databases.

Still, 12 years after Congress mandated that such a tool be piloted in 1996, the change will enroll about 2 percent of U.S. companies.

Critics warn that the system has a high error rate that will exclude legal workers, cannot detect the fraudulent use of stolen Social Security numbers, and will permit some employers to harass workers.

Frustrated by the stalemate, Arizona, Missouri and South Carolina since January have passed laws or have begun requiring businesses to use E-Verify under certain conditions. But Illinois has gone the opposite direction, barring companies from participating until the government proves that E-Verify is 99 percent error-free.

The conflicting moves show how opposition has frustrated enforcement of the ban on hiring illegal immigrants. In 1986, Congress required law enforcement agencies to show that an employer knowingly violated the law, but provided few tools, agents or dollars to do so.

Under the law, employers need only to verify that a new hire present at least one "facially valid" form of identification. The overhaul simply created a huge fake-ID industry, while granting unscrupulous employers a ready defense since the government had no system to validate a document's authenticity. At the same time, employers face discrimination complaints if they unduly scrutinize new hires.

Few expect the situation to change soon with this fall's elections looming. Some GOP congressional campaigns are talking tough, but the party is wary of further alienating its traditional business base. Democrats in turn rely on labor and immigrant support, leading the House to propose a $40 billion DHS budget bill that would require ICE to prioritize $800 million in enforcement funding next year to deporting illegal immigrants with criminal records, not workers.

At a Georgetown Law School conference in May, Baker of DHS described a sense among voters that "both parties owed their base a kind of collusion of pretend enforcement of the immigration laws." He added, "I can't say that was completely misplaced skepticism."

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Pushing Back on Immigration, By (NYT)

There is nothing good about the country’s ever more merciless campaign of immigration enforcement. But at least there are emerging signs of resistance, from one of the most important, yet curiously disengaged, players in the debate: employers.

States and cities complain about the broken immigration system, but they can’t create the intricate web of policies needed to fix it — that’s up to Congress. All they can do is try to crack down locally on illegal immigrants and the businesses that hire them. The result has been haphazard enforcement without reform, which only makes the problem worse.

States have passed overly punitive laws to revoke the licenses of businesses caught hiring the undocumented and to force employers to participate in E-Verify, the deeply flawed federal system for checking workers’ documents. More than 175 bills relating to immigrant employment have been introduced by states this year.

As Julia Preston reported in The Times, business has begun pushing back. In Arizona, home to some of the most rabidly anti-immigrant politicians and advocates, a business group had huge success gathering signatures for a ballot initiative that would soften some of the most stringent employer punishments enacted last year.

In other states, business groups have helped to kill tough immigration bills. They argue that they need workers, that it is too hard to avoid hiring undocumented ones, and that ill-conceived laws go overboard in punishing well-meaning companies and their legal employees. They are also pushing measures to bring in more legal workers and to fix the error-plagued federal system for verifying documents of new employees.

Workplace raids by federal agents have vividly exposed the widespread hiring of illegal workers, but many employers counter that they are not all scofflaws. Antidiscrimination laws bar them from looking too closely at employees’ identity papers, or checking their immigration status after they are hired. “The system is just as broken for employers as it is for immigrants,” a lawyer for two California companies told Ms. Preston.

As with anything in the immigration debate, there are complicated truths at work here. Many companies have operated with impunity in hiring and abusing undocumented low-wage workers, people who are all the more compliant because they are illegal. Like immigrants, good employers need a path to get right and stay right with the law. Current immigration law — with far too few visas and no path to legalization for the undocumented — does not provide one, and misguided state and local enforcement efforts simply layer on the confusion. They impose undue hardships on by-the-books businesses and reward the exploiters.

If the country is ever going to emerge from the immigration chaos that Congress bequeathed it last year, it will be because business interests — largely seen as AWOL in the bitter debate — finally joined the fight.

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AG now says college OK for illegals, by Kristin Collins (New Observer)

The state Attorney General's Office says it's legal for the N.C. Community College System to admit illegal immigrants.
That advice, given to the colleges Thursday and made public today, represents a reversal for the office of Attorney General Roy Cooper, which advised the colleges in May to bar illegal immigrants from degree programs. The colleges took that advice and issued a new policy prohibiting illegal immigrants from enrolling, even at out-of-state tuition rates. Cooper's office said at the time that post-secondary education might qualify as a public benefit to which illegal immigrants are not entitled under federal law.

But on Monday, Cooper's office got a letter from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in response to a request for clarification of the law. The letter, from former Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph, who now works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that admission to colleges is not considered a public benefit under federal law.

Federal officials made the same statement to the News & Observer in May, but officials with the community colleges and the Attorney General's Office said they wanted to wait for a formal letter.

J.B. Kelly, general counsel, advised the colleges in a letter Thursday that it is up to them to decide whether to admit illegal immigrants.

Community College System President Scott Ralls was not immediately available for comment on whether he would lift the ban on illegal immigrants.

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A Hispanic Population in Decline, By Nick Miroff (WP)

The family that planted corn in the front yard of their $500,000 home is gone from Carrie Oliver's street. So are the neighbors who drilled holes into the trees to string up a hammock.

Oliver's list goes on: The loud music. The beer bottles. The littered diapers. All gone. When she and her husband, Ron, went for walks in their Manassas area neighborhood, she would take a trash bag and he would carry a handgun. No more. "So much has changed," she said in a gush of relief, standing with her husband on a warm summer evening recently outside a Costco store.

A short distance away, across the river of retail commerce that is Sudley Road, Norman Gonzalez spoke of change not as renewal, but as a kind of collapse.

Business at his restaurant, Cuna del Sol, has declined 50 percent. Worse still, his extended family's slow, steady relocation from the Guatemalan town of Jutiapa to the bustling Prince William suburbs has imploded. "A year ago, I had the biggest family in all of Manassas, maybe 100 relatives," he said.

Now, Gonzalez, a legal U.S. resident, has his own list: Langley Park, Chantilly, Fairfax City. That is where his brothers have scattered, and they will not visit him. "There's too much fear here," Gonzalez said.

Since the day one year ago when Prince William County supervisors launched their crackdown on illegal immigration, the gulf between the Olivers' relief and Gonzalez's dejection has narrowed little, and possibly widened.

At least there is one thing partisans on both sides agree on: Hispanic immigrants are leaving Prince William. Whether their departure has improved the county's quality of life, or pushed its already strained economy further downward, is the new topic of contention driven largely by views of whether the presence of immigrants was a good thing in the first place.

Anecdotes of the trend outstrip hard statistical evidence, yet there are clear signs that the county's Latino population has reversed its pace of rapid growth. County officials said there are 4,000 to 7,000 vacant homes in the county. Trustee notices fill the classified section of area newspapers, chronicling the steady, staggering forfeiture of properties by homeowners with Hispanic surnames such as Mendez, Lozano, Medina and Rodriguez.

Last month, there were 776 foreclosure recordings in the Prince William County, Manassas, Manassas Park area, court records show, up from 244 in June 2007 and 19 in June 2006.

Would those homeowners have been foreclosed upon anyway, for economic reasons having nothing to do with the county's illegal immigration policies? That, too, is disputed.

"You can't attribute all of what might be negative about the economy in Prince William County to the crackdown," said economist Stephen Fuller, director of George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis. "But it certainly hasn't helped. Neighborhoods that have been weakened because of migration of the Hispanic community out of the county have economic consequences that show up as decreases in retail spending, rental income and potential decreases in the valuation of some housing."

That decrease -- home prices in some areas have fallen by half -- is well worth the improvement in quality of life, according to the most ardent supporters of the county's get-tough approach.

"We have far less residential overcrowding, and that was driving people crazy," said Greg Letiecq, a blogger and president of Help Save Manassas. He helped write the county's policy and has been its most vocal champion. "We'd much rather live next door to a vacant house," he said, speaking for his members at a recent Help Save Manassas meeting.

"With an empty house, there's hope that the house is going to have somebody move into it that's going to be a good neighbor, rather than an overcrowded house that is a neighbor from hell," Letiecq said, adding that his Manassas area home has dropped $100,000 in value in the past year.

The numbers suggest that tensions over crowding have subsided: Complaints about residential overcrowding dropped to 30 last month from 79 in July 2007, according to the county's Neighborhood Services Division.

While some Hispanic immigrants have walked away from their homes, others have left the county in the custody of federal agents. County jail officials have turned over 757 illegal immigrant inmates to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the past year through an agreement that county supervisors approved as part of the crackdown.

Police have referred more than 300 additional suspects to the immigration and customs branch since March, when the county's patrol officers began screening for residency status.

Catching illegal immigrants has made Prince William safer, said Corey A. Stewart (R-At-Large), chairman of the board of county supervisors said. Stewart also said the county's policies have led to "a plummeting of the crime rate." Police statistics show that the county's crime rate has been declining since 2004, even as the population increased.

More importantly, Stewart said, Prince William has become a model for other jurisdictions hoping to act against illegal immigration. "We've started a wildfire in terms of other localities and states adopting similar tactics," said Stewart, who discussed the county's immigration enforcement success Tuesday with the House Republican Policy Committee on Capitol Hill.

While critics say ethnic tensions in Prince William have worsened in the past year, Stewart said he believes the debate over illegal immigration has empowered residents to speak up after "stewing" in frustration for years. "It's allowed people to discuss their feelings," Stewart said, citing a new level of public interest in local government. The board's chambers have been packed with hundreds of residents on several occasions over the past year.

"It's better for people to feel free to speak out about something they care about rather than holding it inside, and in that sense, the controversy has been good for the county as well as the country," Steward said.

Paying for the crackdown has been an ongoing source of tension, and supporters have long maintained that the county would save money through a decreased need for English classes for students who speak another language at home. After years of steady increases, the percentage of students enrolled in English as a Second Language classes appears to have peaked.

In September, the number of students with limited English proficiency, not all of whom were Hispanic, was a record 13,404 in the county school system. By the end of the school year, the total had fallen 4.7 percent, to 12,775.

Then there are the many smaller, symbolic signs that the county has changed in the past year. Rodeo-themed Latino festivals at the county fairgrounds, once a summer staple, have been canceled without explanation by organizers. The El Primero Mercado supermarket on Centreville Road is now a Shoppers International store. And several county services, including drug-treatment programs and in-home care for seniors, now require proof of citizenship.

Starting this month, for example, a county-funded house-cleaning service for the elderly will make sure all recipients are legal U.S. residents.

Such restrictions may not keep illegal immigrants out of Prince William if the steep decline in housing prices eventually lures legal and illegal immigrants back to the county. And advocates said Latinos have learned "clear political lessons" in the past year.

"The community has learned that votes matter," said Mauricio Vivero, director of the Ayuda Business Coalition, which has lobbied legislators and has run commercials on CNN warning other municipalities of the economic consequences in following Prince William's lead.

Vivero said that fewer than half of the Latinos in Prince William who were registered to vote in 2004 did so. In November, he predicted, "there will be a much bigger turnout in Northern Virginia, and [Prince William's crackdown] has helped push it."

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of By Carol Guzy (WP): "At a meeting last year, immigrants ask questions about the crackdown. Since then, the Latino population has declined and foreclosures are up."

Employers Fight Tough Measures on Immigration, By Julie Preston (NYT)

Under pressure from the toughest crackdown on illegal immigration in two decades, employers across the country are fighting back in state legislatures, the federal courts and city halls.

Business groups have resisted measures that would revoke the licenses of employers of illegal immigrants. They are proposing alternatives that would revise federal rules for verifying the identity documents of new hires and would expand programs to bring legal immigrant laborers.

Though the pushback is coming from both Democrats and Republicans, in many places it is reopening the rift over immigration that troubled the Republican Party last year. Businesses, generally Republican stalwarts, are standing up to others within the party who accuse them of undercutting border enforcement and jeopardizing American jobs by hiring illegal immigrants as cheap labor.

Employers in Arizona were stung by a law passed last year by the Republican-controlled Legislature that revokes the licenses of businesses caught twice with illegal immigrants. They won approval in this year’s session of a narrowing of that law making clear that it did not apply to workers hired before this year.

Last week, an Arizona employers’ group submitted more than 284,000 signatures — far more than needed — for a November ballot initiative that would make the 2007 law even friendlier to employers.

Also in recent months, immigration bills were defeated in Indiana and Kentucky — states where control of the legislatures is split between Democrats and Republicans — due in part to warnings from business groups that the measures could hurt the economy.

In Oklahoma, chambers of commerce went to federal court and last month won an order suspending sections of a 2007 state law that would require employers to use a federal database to check the immigration status of new hires. In California, businesses have turned to elected officials, including the Democratic mayor of Los Angeles, to lobby federal immigration authorities against raiding long-established companies.

While much of the employer activity has been at the grass-roots level, a national federation has been created to bring together the local and state business groups that have sprung up over the last year.

“These employers are now starting to realize that nobody is in a better position than they are to make the case that they do need the workers and they do want to be on the right side of the law,” said Tamar Jacoby, president of the new federation, ImmigrationWorks USA.

After years of laissez-faire enforcement, federal immigration agents have been conducting raids at a brisk pace, with 4,940 arrests in workplaces last year. Although immigration has long been a federal issue, more than 175 bills were introduced in states this year concerning the employment of immigrants, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.

State lawmakers said they had acted against businesses, often in response to fervent demands from voters, to curb job incentives that were attracting shadow populations of illegal immigrants.

“Illegal immigration is a threat to the safety of Missouri families and the security of their jobs,” Gov. Matt Blunt, a Republican, said after the Missouri Legislature passed a crackdown law in May. “I am pleased that lawmakers heeded my call to continue the fight where Washington has failed to act.”

But because of the mobilization of businesses, the state proposals this year have increasingly reflected their concerns. State lawmakers “are starting to be more responsive to the employer community because of its engagement in the issue,” said Ann Morse, who monitors immigration for the national legislature conference.

The offensive by businesses has been spurred by the federal enforcement crackdown, by inaction in Congress on immigration legislation and by a rush of punitive state measures last year that created a checkerboard of conflicting requirements. Many employers found themselves on the political defensive as they grappled, even in an economic downturn, with shortages of low-wage labor.

Mike Gilsdorf, the owner of a 37-year-old landscaping nursery in Littleton, Colo., saw the need for action by businesses last winter when he advertised with the Labor Department, as he does every year, for 40 seasonal workers at market-rate wages to plant, prune and carry his shrubs in the summer heat. Only one local worker responded to the notice, he said, and then did not show up for the job.

Mr. Gilsdorf was able to fill his labor force with legal immigrants from Mexico through a federal guest worker program. But that program has a tight annual cap, and Mr. Gilsdorf realized that he might not be so lucky next year. His business could fail, he said, and then even his American workers would lose their jobs.

“We’re not hiring illegals, we’re not paying under the table,” Mr. Gilsdorf said. “But if we don’t get in under the cap and nobody is answering our ads, we don’t have employees.” His group, Colorado Employers for Immigration Reform, is pressing Congress for a much larger and more flexible guest worker program.

Unhappy California businesses won the support of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa of Los Angeles, who wrote a letter in March to Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff criticizing immigration agents for aiming raids at “established, responsible employers” in the city and urging him to focus on those with a record of labor violations.

In Virginia, an employers’ coalition headed off bills that would have closed businesses that hire illegal immigrants and would have required all employers to participate in the federal system to check the working papers of new hires, which is known as E-Verify. Business groups nationwide oppose mandatory use of the system, which is now voluntary, because they say the Social Security Administration database it draws upon is full of errors that could lead to job denials for American citizens and legal immigrants and bureaucratic overload for the agency.

Virginia employers said they learned a lesson last year after the broad immigration bill they supported failed in Congress.

“The silent masses of businesses out there should have been on the phone with their Congressional representatives calling for rational reform,” said Hobey Bauhan, president of the Virginia Poultry Federation, whose members include some of the biggest low-wage employers in the state. Virginia lawmakers ultimately adopted verification rules aimed at employers who systematically hire illegal immigrants.

In this legislative session, Arizona businesses rallied behind a bill to create what would have been the first state guest worker program in the country. Their advertising campaign used the slogan “What part of legal don’t you understand?” — a tweak of the battle cry of their opponents, who use the same phrase with the word “illegal.”

Arizona employers said they knew that passage would be difficult for the bill, because only the federal government can issue visas to immigrant workers.

Although the bill never came to a vote, employers said the debate helped make their views known in Washington.

“It’s a message to the federal government,” said Joe Sigg, director of government relations for the Arizona Farm Bureau, “that we need a legal and reliable means to recruit workers.”

Employers’ groups have not succeeded everywhere. Under a bill passed this year, Mississippi is the first state to make it a felony for an illegal immigrant to work. The measure also allows terminated employees to sue their employer if they were replaced by an illegal immigrant.

President Bush on June 9 ordered all federal contractors to check new workers with E-Verify. The administration is pressing forward with a rule that would pressure employers to fire within 90 days any worker whose identity information does not match the records of the Social Security Administration, as frequently happens with illegal immigrants. The first version of the rule was held up last year by a federal court injunction.

While many businesses have come forward, they say they speak for many others with immigrant workers that are lying low after finding that the crackdown has left them in a perilous legal bind. While raids and sanctions are increasing, employers with low-wage immigrant workers are barred by antidiscrimination rules from examining identity documents of new hires too closely or checking the immigration status of employees after they have been hired.

“The problem for business is that despite their complete compliance with the law, it is inevitable for employers with large numbers of immigrant workers that a certain percentage will be unauthorized workers using false documents,” said Peter Schey, a lawyer who represents two California companies facing scrutiny by federal immigration agents. “The system is just as broken for employers as it is for immigrants.”

One employer facing this problem is the chief executive of a $20 million company on the outskirts of Los Angeles that assembles electronic parts. She said she had come to fear that her company — including its legal workers — is at risk of being crippled by an immigration raid.

The executive spoke on the condition that neither she nor her company be identified by name, for fear of attracting immigration authorities.

A human resources manager who worked for the company a decade ago hired a number of workers without conducting an extra check of their documents with the Social Security Administration, the executive said. Now she has received notices from the agency of mismatches in the identity documents of 20 workers who were hired 10 years ago, out of 90 workers on the assembly floor today.

Because of the antidiscrimination rules, the executive cannot check to be certain that the 20 workers, mainly Hispanic women, are illegal. Moreover, they have advanced through training, she said, and excel at their jobs, which require the repetitive assembly of tiny parts by hand, often under microscopes.

“I can’t replace those people,” the executive said. She said that despite offering competitive wages from $9 to $17 an hour, the company had failed over the years in repeated efforts to attract nonimmigrant workers because of the state’s tight technology labor market and because of the nature of the work, exacting and tedious. If the workers were fired or arrested, she said, she could fail to meet her contracts.

“If we have to terminate 20 people, that’s going to jeopardize 100 other jobs of people who are legal, Americans, people who are making a good living,” she said.

Angelo Paparelli, an immigration lawyer who represents the company, said: “This is not an employer who wants to turn a blind eye to lawbreaking. She is facing a tightening of the enforcement vise that does not take into account Congress’s failure to create a workable system.”

California employers were shocked by the raid earlier this year at Micro Solutions Enterprises, an established manufacturer of printer cartridges that is based in Los Angeles and has more than 800 workers. Officials said 138 workers were arrested. In a message to his customers, Avi Wazana, the Micro Solutions owner, said the company had been verifying the legal status of all new hires through federal programs for nearly a year.

Bush administration officials said the crackdown was the price employers must pay to persuade voters to agree to open the gates to immigrant workers. In an interview, Mr. Chertoff, the homeland security secretary, said, “We are not going to be able to satisfy the American people on a legal temporary worker program until they are convinced that we will have a stick as well as a carrot.”

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**Image Courtesy of Monica Almeida (NYT): "An electronics plant in Southern California. The chief executive worries that an immigration raid could cripple the company."

Law Students Rush to Meet Needs In Booming Field of Immigration, By Karin Brulliard (WP)

Ann Kim made monthly trips this year to a Richmond area immigrant detention center, trying to free a mentally ill Honduran man. He ended up being deported, but Kim got something out of it: more experience in the burgeoning field of immigration law.

"Immigration is becoming more and more complex, and it's going against immigrants rather than for them," said Kim, 27, a second-generation Korean American who took the Honduran's case as part of her immigration law clinic at American University's Washington College of Law. "There's a great need for lawyers."

A subject that three decades ago was a secondary, technical field delegated to adjunct professors is booming at law schools nationwide. Elective immigration law courses taught by tenured specialists are filling lecture halls, immigration clinics are expanding and student groups devoted to the subject are mushrooming.

The momentum is partly driven by a high-profile, rancorous immigration debate. But it is also the result of an era of mass immigration that has fueled demand from foreigners and businesses seeking help navigating U.S. immigration statutes and has created a generation of law students intimately familiar with the issue, often because they are children of immigrants or immigrants themselves.

"Immigration is just one part of a much broader story about globalization, of movement of goods and movement of people and movement of ideas, and what used to be a backwater of the law has become mainstream," said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, dean of Georgetown University Law School, who co-authored the first major immigration law casebook in 1985. "This is certainly a very, very hot topic."

Unlike undergraduates, law students do not pick majors, so there are no statistics on the number studying immigration law. But professors say there is no question about the explosion in interest.

When AU created an immigration division within its well-known human rights clinic three years ago, administrators struggled to fill it; now, as many as 32 students vie each year for 16 slots. "We have to beat them away with a stick," said Richard Wilson, a professor. Two years ago, the school added two more sections of a basic immigration law course.

At least 50 law schools offer immigration clinics, which usually give students the chance to represent indigent immigrants who have no right to court-appointed lawyers. More sprout each year: This year, clinics have been launched at the University of La Verne and Southwestern Law School in Southern California, as well as at schools in areas that have seen recent influxes in immigration, such as Penn State and the University of Arkansas, where students circulated a petition in support of the idea.

Student teams can debate the finer points of the immigration code each year at the nation's first moot court competition, begun by New York University two years ago. The University of California at Davis started a second contest this year.

In the past three years, students at the University of Maryland, George Mason University and Harvard University have founded immigration law groups. At AU, an Immigrants' Rights Coalition formed by law students in 2005 has 50 members and has hosted a conference on a new visa category and panels of day laborers and refugees.

"We're a country of immigrants, and yet we're putting immigrants out," said the group's co-chairman, Amalia Greenberg, 29, who emigrated from Venezuela at age 6. "It's a continuation of the civil rights movement, and it feels like it's in our hands to do something about it."

Professors say the immigration law boom is part of a broader explosion of interest in human rights and international law, spurred by today's globally minded students. Immigration is by no means the hottest law school topic -- criminal law and litigation remain hugely popular, and environmental law is a new favorite.

And although practitioners' ranks are growing -- membership in the American Immigration Lawyers Association has nearly doubled since 2003, to more than 11,000, 15 percent of whom passed the bar exam within the past three years -- the majority of students in immigration law classes will not become immigration lawyers, professors said. Many students said they might specialize in another area and do pro bono immigration cases on the side.

But there is a growing realization, students and professors said, that policies on issues such as asylum and due process are evolving as never before, particularly since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. A growing immigrant population also means that legal status often complicates what might have once been simple criminal or labor cases.

"It's not just that people think immigration is important, but they're seeing that it affects everything," said Hiroshi Motomura, an immigration law professor who will join UCLA in the fall.

Many students said their studies had underscored how thorny immigration is. Jennifer Khouri recently graduated from George Washington University Law School. As a student, she successfully argued at Arlington Immigration Court that an illegal immigrant from Colombia should be allowed to stay in the United States with her young son, a U.S. citizen. As proud as Khouri is of that victory, she is starting a job this fall as a U.S. Department of Justice attorney representing the government in immigration court.

"On both sides, the reaction is too emotional. . . . There's not enough actually looking at the numbers, empirical evidence about how immigrants are affecting the country," said Khouri, 27, the daughter of a Lebanese immigrant father and Cuban immigrant mother. "The reason I want to work for the government is because I want to push for the middle."

The topic's ultra-political nature frustrates some. Asha Allam, who recently took GW's immigration clinic, said the experience made her decide against the field because she thought the immigration system was unfair, in part because of documented disparities of approval and denial rates among immigration judges. Stalled federal immigration legislation also means lawyers can offer little aid to illegal immigrants, she said.

"Lawyers are telling a lot of their clients, 'There's nothing we can do for you right now,' " said Allam, 23, who plans to work in global trade in hopes that someday people will not have to migrate for opportunities. "That's not really legal advice," she said.

The challenges have only energized Karlie Dunsky, a GW law student. Unlike many of her peers, she had little experience with immigrants while growing up in Ohio. But she's set on a career in refugee and asylum law.

"I'm going to have to get used to my clients' claims being denied, but the first one is always hard," said Dunsky, 24. But, she said, "what makes immigration so compelling is that it's a human issue. . . . It's not some vague entity that doesn't have a face. It really motivates you."

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Illegal immigrants face threat of no college, By Mary Beth Marklein (USA TODAY)

Some states are making it harder for illegal immigrants to attend college by denying in-state tuition benefits or banning undocumented students.
In the past two years, Arizona, Colorado, Georgia and Oklahoma have refused in-state tuition benefits to students who entered the USA illegally with their parents but grew up and went to school in the state. That represents a reversal from earlier this decade, when 10 states passed laws allowing in-state rates for such students.

This summer, South Carolina became the first state to bar undocumented students from all public colleges and universities.

North Carolina's community colleges in May ordered its 58 campuses to stop enrolling undocumented students after the state attorney general said admitting them may violate federal law.

"The new trend is to kick illegal aliens out of college altogether," says William Gheen of Americans for Legal Immigration Political Action Committee, which opposes taxpayer subsidies for undocumented immigrants.

Josh Bernstein of the National Immigration Law Center, an illegal-immigrants advocate, says sweeping anti-immigration bills are "a very serious threat" to the overall illegal population.


BLOG: Illegal immigration and college: Is there a middle ground?
Georgia, which barred undocumented students from in-state tuition rates in 2006, enacted laws in May preventing them from receiving state scholarships and certain student loans.

This fall, the University of Arkansas will require students to submit Social Security numbers and proof of residency. In May, Arkansas Department of Higher Education Director Jim Purcell warned that students without documentation "will not be considered as legally enrolled students" when determining an institution's state funding.

Opponents say students shouldn't be penalized for their parents' actions. Helping them is "the right thing to do even if it's unpopular," says North Carolina state Rep. Pricey Harrison, a Democrat who introduced a bill that would prevent state institutions from asking about students' immigration status.

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**Image Courtesy of Gary Kazanjian, AP: "Matias Bernal, an illegal immigrant from Mexico City, holds a folder from a visit to his favorite school, UCLA, in July 2006. Bernal was wait-listed at Princeton, but without access to financial aid and most scholarships, he had to prepare to attend California State University in Fresno, Calif., so he could live at home and pay tuition with money from jobs he's not supposed to have."

Immigrant groups launching countrywide push to sign up voters, By By Antonio Olivo and Deborah Horan (Chicago Tribune

In a sustained push to win greater influence during the next presidential administration, immigrant groups across the country are launching a major door-knocking campaign to register hundreds of thousands of new voters.

The local effort is scheduled to begin Saturday at Foreman High School on the West Side, where organizers also will help immigrants fill out U.S. citizenship applications, while volunteers from 14 states kick off a six-day "boot camp" in Chicago geared toward getting out the vote in the fall.

That will coalesce with the work of more than 300 unions, churches and grass-roots organizations that plan to register new voters over the next several months, under a national Campaign for Community Values advocating Immigration reform, better health care and workers' rights, organizers said.

With voter turnout at record levels, a strong immigrant showing could help re-energize federal discussions about legalization, school funding, neighborhood safety and other issues, said Juan Salgado, president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which is helping coordinate the effort.

"The level of participation is going to be important to determine what gets done and when," Salgado said. Advocates are pushing federal Immigration officials to clear a backlog of some 900,000 U.S. citizenship applications, fearing they may not be processed in time for those immigrants to vote in November. Prompted by the Immigration debate and an impending increase in application fees that has since been implemented, a record 3 million citizenship applications were filed last year.

Since October, nearly 1,900 lawsuits have been filed on behalf of immigrants whose applications have been held up, according to federal statistics.

Esperanza Vargas, 71, is worried her application won't go through in time for her to vote. The Little Village resident who arrived from Mexico 49 years ago said she was inspired to become a citizen and vote by the Immigration marches in Chicago.

"I saw so many undocumented people not allowed to work who have families to feed," Vargas said.

A coalition of unions, immigrant advocacy groups and other organizations called the We Are America Alliance has registered about 120,000 new voters since February, most of them immigrants, said Marissa Graciosa, a spokeswoman.

In 2004, 52.1 percent of all eligible Latino immigrants cast a ballot, compared with 49.6 percent during the 2000 election, a report this year by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials showed. For non-Latino immigrants, the turnout increased to 54.3 percent in 2004 from 51 percent four years earlier.

At Foreman High on Saturday, Venezuelan immigrants Maria Martinez and her father, Ernesto, plan to encourage others to make their voices heard. After she turns 18 in October, Maria Martinez, who became a U.S. citizen this year, will be eligible to vote. Ernesto Martinez, 45, became a citizen in 2005 after nine years in the country.

During the primary elections in their Northwest Side apartment, they found themselves arguing policy in front of the TV, bonding in the process. "I love this election!" Maria Martinez said. "The fact that all my friends are into this has kept me so energized."

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