OUR next president faces a formidable task. He will be forced to deal with two difficult wars, an economic downturn, higher energy prices and a bankrupt federal immigration policy.
To some, immigration pales in comparison with the wars and the economy. But for others, especially police departments in border states like mine, it is all-consuming. The first priority of the next president should be legislation that addresses the legitimate concerns of both the people who believe our borders are out of control and those who want equal protection for everyone living in this country.
Immigration issues are tearing apart communities. Demagoguery and misinformation are shaping public opinion and in some cases public policy. In the absence of a clear federal policy on immigration, states and cities are enacting draconian and constitutionally questionable laws.
This patchwork of conflicting local immigration laws is creating an untenable situation for police officials who face demands to crack down on immigrants — demands that contradict policing practices that have led to significant declines in crime.
For police officials, refusing to carry out policies that may violate the Constitution can be career-threatening. Both sides in the immigration debate accuse police departments of misconduct in dealing with immigrants. In this politically charged environment, some chiefs are making decisions based on bad politics instead of sound policing. In many cases, police officers are making illegal arrests with the acquiescence and sometimes explicit approval of their superiors.
Here in Arizona, a wedge is being driven between the local police and some immigrant groups. Some law enforcement agencies are wasting limited resources in operations to appease the public’s thirst for action against illegal immigration regardless of the legal or social consequences.
America’s 500,000 police officers are sworn to enforce the law. But we are increasingly unable to do so. Those who want to restrict immigration criticize us for not arresting immigrants for entering the country illegally. Yet others rightly wonder how we can do our job if some residents are afraid to report crimes or otherwise cooperate with the police for fear of deportation.
Without a national immigration policy, a new culture of lawlessness will increasingly permeate our society. In cities, politicians will pressure police departments to reduce immigration by using racial profiling and harassment. At the same time, immigrants who fear that the police will help deport them will rely less on their local officers and instead give thugs control of their neighborhoods.
Many top law enforcement officials were part of the community policing revolution of the 1980s and ’90s. We have a deep concern for constitutional rights and social justice. We believe that effective policing requires residents, regardless of immigration status, to trust the police.
We are also students of the mistakes of our predecessors. Past police practices helped lead to the civil unrest of the 1960s, which tore our nation apart along racial and political lines. We do not want to repeat those mistakes.
If we become a nation in which the local police are the default enforcers of a failing federal immigration policy, the years of trust that police departments have built up in immigrant communities will vanish. Some minority groups may once again view police officers as armed instruments of government oppression.
A wink and a nod will no longer suffice as an immigration policy. Effective border control is a critical step. But so is ensuring that otherwise law-abiding undocumented immigrants have the same protections as everyone else in a modern, free society.
Presidential candidates need to specify the measures on immigration they would present to Congress after Inauguration Day. No doubt, the advisers to John McCain and Barack Obama are counseling them to be vague. That’s the wrong advice.
America’s police officers deserve thoughtful federal leadership so that we can continue doing our best to provide our country with the security that defines a civilized society.
George Gascón, a former assistant chief in the Los Angeles Police Department, is a lawyer and the chief of the police department in Mesa, Ariz.
**Story Link
Showing posts with label editorial. Show all posts
Showing posts with label editorial. Show all posts
8/4/08
Some thoughts about Latino immigrants and class, By Miriam (Feministing)
Jack has a great post up at AngryBrownButch (and Feministe) about a new Demos report on the instability of the Black and Latino middle class. Jack shares some really interesting insights from childhood, and it inspired me to share some of my own thoughts.
From the report:
Some immigrants come to the US to flee poverty, others are forced to leave behind relative wealth in their home countries seeking safety in the US. My family left because of communism, and their inability to maintain ownership over their respective businesses. While my paternal grandfather was a wealthy businessowner in Cuba, my maternal grandfather owned a small modest cornerstore. Neither side was able to regain similar class positions after coming to the US. Money was really tight when they first came over (people were not allowed to bring any of their things, including money, with them when they left) and my paternal grandfather (who had been relatively wealthy in Cuba) never rose above lower middle class status (my best estimation, it's hard to really know) in the United States. This was partially because he held onto the dream of returning to Cuba (as so many Cuban exiles did). For most of his life in the US he sold used cars for a living, and my grandmother (who had never worked before) worked as a secretary in a local school in Miami.
My parents and their siblings have all dealt with class in different ways. My mother's sisters became really wealthy, by marriage and entrepreneurship. Business and wealth are really important to them, and as someone who works in non-profits it's a struggle to relate to my cousins on that side. My parents took the education route, and are both college professors. They each have very different financial situations (now divorced) but we never had to deal with the fear of real poverty because of the security and stability that tenure and academia afford. They have always had trouble relating to their parents and siblings, who don't understand what they do and look down on them as simply "teachers."
It still remains to be seen how these things will affect my generation in my family, the first generation US citizens. We are all learning really different lessons about class from our parents and society in general.
**Artcile Link
From the report:
African-American and Latino families have more difficulty moving into the middle class, and families that do enter the middle class are less secure and at higher risk than the middle class as a whole. Overall, more African-American and Latino middle-class families are at risk of falling out of the middle class than are secure. This is in sharp contrast to the overall middle class, in which 31 percent are secure and 21 percent are at risk.
My parents are Cuban exiles, who immigrated here in the 60s shortly after Fidel Castro took power in Cuba. The reason why class has such different implications for immigrant families in the US is because they bring their class histories with them from their countries of origin.
Some immigrants come to the US to flee poverty, others are forced to leave behind relative wealth in their home countries seeking safety in the US. My family left because of communism, and their inability to maintain ownership over their respective businesses. While my paternal grandfather was a wealthy businessowner in Cuba, my maternal grandfather owned a small modest cornerstore. Neither side was able to regain similar class positions after coming to the US. Money was really tight when they first came over (people were not allowed to bring any of their things, including money, with them when they left) and my paternal grandfather (who had been relatively wealthy in Cuba) never rose above lower middle class status (my best estimation, it's hard to really know) in the United States. This was partially because he held onto the dream of returning to Cuba (as so many Cuban exiles did). For most of his life in the US he sold used cars for a living, and my grandmother (who had never worked before) worked as a secretary in a local school in Miami.
My parents and their siblings have all dealt with class in different ways. My mother's sisters became really wealthy, by marriage and entrepreneurship. Business and wealth are really important to them, and as someone who works in non-profits it's a struggle to relate to my cousins on that side. My parents took the education route, and are both college professors. They each have very different financial situations (now divorced) but we never had to deal with the fear of real poverty because of the security and stability that tenure and academia afford. They have always had trouble relating to their parents and siblings, who don't understand what they do and look down on them as simply "teachers."
It still remains to be seen how these things will affect my generation in my family, the first generation US citizens. We are all learning really different lessons about class from our parents and society in general.
**Artcile Link
7/27/08
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.
**Story Link
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.
**Story Link
6/26/08
On the Morality of Immigration, By Andrew Leonard (Slate)
Some statistics on population density:
Germany -- 600 per square mile
United Kingdom -- 600 per square mile
Japan -- 830 per square mile
Netherlands -- 1200 per square mile
Bangladesh -- 2600 per square mile
The United States -- 80 per square mile.
Based on these figures, Mathias Risse, a professor of public policy and philosophy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, concludes in "On the Morality of Immigration," published in the March issue of Ethics & International Affairs, that "the United States is severely underusing its chunk of three-dimensional, commonly owned space." From which it follows, argues Risse, that it is unfair for the U.S. to restrict immigration, legal or illegal, across its borders.
This is a perspective one is unlikely to hear espoused by presidential candidates in the U.S., no matter how liberal their views on immigration are. For one thing, it requires that one think about the world as if it was collectively owned by all of humanity, rather than divided into nasty little nation-states dedicated to protecting their most cherished NIMBY values with armed forces, fences and elaborate visa regulations. It is hopelessly utopian to imagine that national politicians would ever make decisions on topics as explosive as immigration policy on the basis of what would be best for the world.
But even as one shakes one's head at the uber-ivory-tower-ness of it all, one can still admire the sheer courage of such a stance. Risse argues that "as long as a country underuses its resources and refuses to permit more immigration in response, illegal immigration cannot be morally condemned."
Indeed, he turns the whole concept of fairness, as it is normally applied to the question of illegal immigration, completely on its head.
To speak of the United States specifically, one might also argue that the opposition to illegal immigration is based on commonly accepted notions of fairness -- including the notion of due process -- which loom large in the American psyche. For example, searches on Google using the keywords "wrong," "illegal," and "immigration" delivered a number of American Web sites on which the unfairness of illegal immigration was emphasized. Illegal immigration makes a mockery of those who abide by the rules, so this argument goes. To pardon illegal immigrants would be unfair because it lets them get away with their offense on the basis that they have succeeded thus far. This standpoint, however, presupposes that immigration is indeed a matter for the respective country alone to sort out, and that the "insiders" are entitled to determine how many and exactly who enters their country. But the argument offered here implies that this is not so. If would-be immigrants are being illegitimately excluded, one cannot complain that they are violating due process if they come anyway.
I'm going to amuse myself right now by imagining the sight of Lou Dobbs' head exploding after reading that last paragraph. Of course, the right to decide "how many and exactly who" enters their country is one of the foundational benefits of having a nation-state in the first place. Maybe someday this will no longer be so. Maybe the challenges of climate change and the constraints of finding enough food and water and clean air for nine billion people will force the world to deal with all its problems in a fashion that puts collective welfare above the interests of any isolated community. But we've got a ways to go before we get there. And is that John Lennon on the piano I hear in the distance?
**Story Link
Germany -- 600 per square mile
United Kingdom -- 600 per square mile
Japan -- 830 per square mile
Netherlands -- 1200 per square mile
Bangladesh -- 2600 per square mile
The United States -- 80 per square mile.
Based on these figures, Mathias Risse, a professor of public policy and philosophy at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, concludes in "On the Morality of Immigration," published in the March issue of Ethics & International Affairs, that "the United States is severely underusing its chunk of three-dimensional, commonly owned space." From which it follows, argues Risse, that it is unfair for the U.S. to restrict immigration, legal or illegal, across its borders.
This is a perspective one is unlikely to hear espoused by presidential candidates in the U.S., no matter how liberal their views on immigration are. For one thing, it requires that one think about the world as if it was collectively owned by all of humanity, rather than divided into nasty little nation-states dedicated to protecting their most cherished NIMBY values with armed forces, fences and elaborate visa regulations. It is hopelessly utopian to imagine that national politicians would ever make decisions on topics as explosive as immigration policy on the basis of what would be best for the world.
But even as one shakes one's head at the uber-ivory-tower-ness of it all, one can still admire the sheer courage of such a stance. Risse argues that "as long as a country underuses its resources and refuses to permit more immigration in response, illegal immigration cannot be morally condemned."
Indeed, he turns the whole concept of fairness, as it is normally applied to the question of illegal immigration, completely on its head.
To speak of the United States specifically, one might also argue that the opposition to illegal immigration is based on commonly accepted notions of fairness -- including the notion of due process -- which loom large in the American psyche. For example, searches on Google using the keywords "wrong," "illegal," and "immigration" delivered a number of American Web sites on which the unfairness of illegal immigration was emphasized. Illegal immigration makes a mockery of those who abide by the rules, so this argument goes. To pardon illegal immigrants would be unfair because it lets them get away with their offense on the basis that they have succeeded thus far. This standpoint, however, presupposes that immigration is indeed a matter for the respective country alone to sort out, and that the "insiders" are entitled to determine how many and exactly who enters their country. But the argument offered here implies that this is not so. If would-be immigrants are being illegitimately excluded, one cannot complain that they are violating due process if they come anyway.
I'm going to amuse myself right now by imagining the sight of Lou Dobbs' head exploding after reading that last paragraph. Of course, the right to decide "how many and exactly who" enters their country is one of the foundational benefits of having a nation-state in the first place. Maybe someday this will no longer be so. Maybe the challenges of climate change and the constraints of finding enough food and water and clean air for nine billion people will force the world to deal with all its problems in a fashion that puts collective welfare above the interests of any isolated community. But we've got a ways to go before we get there. And is that John Lennon on the piano I hear in the distance?
**Story Link
3/3/08
Nativism's Electoral Flop: Bashers of illegal immigration are failing at the polls (WP)
IN THE AFTERMATH of last summer's national debate over immigration reform, elected officials of all stripes were stunned by the popular passion and fury unleashed by the failed effort in Congress to provide an eventual path to citizenship for illegal immigrants. Many Republicans concluded hopefully -- and many Democrats reckoned fretfully -- that immigration would be the premier wedge issue of the 2008 campaign. But with the presidential primaries in their homestretch, it now appears that both the hopes and the fears were overstated.
On the Republican side, what's striking is that the talk-show tantrums of the anti-immigrant ranters, despite having riled up a vocal minority, have had little impact on the outcome of primaries. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who styled himself as the nativists' champion, dropped out of the presidential contest after never registering more than a blip in the polls. Former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts took his turn at strident rhetoric against undocumented immigrants, to no discernible effect. Rudy Giuliani all but repudiated what had been his constructive, tolerant record on immigration as mayor of New York and then got shellacked in Hispanic-heavy Florida. Former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas took the most rabid line of all, promising to drive all 12 million illegal immigrants from the country in four months; he seems destined to be an also-ran, barring unforeseen miracles.
Granted, hard-liners remain apoplectic about Arizona Sen. John McCain's erstwhile role as a champion of what they regard as amnesty for illegal immigrants; their ire may yet erode the Republican base in the general election. And many Republican congressional candidates will surely try to exploit the residual fervor on the issue in this fall's elections. But the fact remains that Mr. McCain is the presumptive GOP nominee, despite what amounts to only a mild shift in emphasis in his longstanding position. (He now talks about the primacy of border security but continues to express compassion for illegal immigrants, who, he notes, "are God's children.") Perhaps the more interesting fallout from the immigration debate has been in the Democratic primaries, which have been marked by a major surge of Hispanic voters in some states. In California, 29 percent of Democratic voters on Super Tuesday were Hispanic, almost twice the share they represented in 2004. In Connecticut, their share of the party's primary electorate leaped to 7 percent from just 2 percent four years ago. In Missouri, where the Latino vote was negligible in 2004, Hispanics accounted for 5 percent of Democratic primary voters this year.
Those jumps go well beyond Hispanics' increasing share of the overall population. And while Hispanics constitute a diverse electorate, concerned with jobs, education, health care, crime and other issues, it's a safe bet that the nativist rancor of last year's debate has motivated and mobilized many of them. This is bad news for a Republican Party that has aligned itself with the most noxious anti-immigrant voices.
No doubt, the unrealistic and irresponsible advocates of harassment, roundups and deportations will show up at the polls this November, if only to cast ballots against candidates who would embrace workable reforms. The hope here is that their electoral clout will be outweighed by a backlash among fired-up and fed-up Latino voters.
**Story Link
On the Republican side, what's striking is that the talk-show tantrums of the anti-immigrant ranters, despite having riled up a vocal minority, have had little impact on the outcome of primaries. Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Colo.), who styled himself as the nativists' champion, dropped out of the presidential contest after never registering more than a blip in the polls. Former governor Mitt Romney of Massachusetts took his turn at strident rhetoric against undocumented immigrants, to no discernible effect. Rudy Giuliani all but repudiated what had been his constructive, tolerant record on immigration as mayor of New York and then got shellacked in Hispanic-heavy Florida. Former governor Mike Huckabee of Arkansas took the most rabid line of all, promising to drive all 12 million illegal immigrants from the country in four months; he seems destined to be an also-ran, barring unforeseen miracles.
Granted, hard-liners remain apoplectic about Arizona Sen. John McCain's erstwhile role as a champion of what they regard as amnesty for illegal immigrants; their ire may yet erode the Republican base in the general election. And many Republican congressional candidates will surely try to exploit the residual fervor on the issue in this fall's elections. But the fact remains that Mr. McCain is the presumptive GOP nominee, despite what amounts to only a mild shift in emphasis in his longstanding position. (He now talks about the primacy of border security but continues to express compassion for illegal immigrants, who, he notes, "are God's children.") Perhaps the more interesting fallout from the immigration debate has been in the Democratic primaries, which have been marked by a major surge of Hispanic voters in some states. In California, 29 percent of Democratic voters on Super Tuesday were Hispanic, almost twice the share they represented in 2004. In Connecticut, their share of the party's primary electorate leaped to 7 percent from just 2 percent four years ago. In Missouri, where the Latino vote was negligible in 2004, Hispanics accounted for 5 percent of Democratic primary voters this year.
Those jumps go well beyond Hispanics' increasing share of the overall population. And while Hispanics constitute a diverse electorate, concerned with jobs, education, health care, crime and other issues, it's a safe bet that the nativist rancor of last year's debate has motivated and mobilized many of them. This is bad news for a Republican Party that has aligned itself with the most noxious anti-immigrant voices.
No doubt, the unrealistic and irresponsible advocates of harassment, roundups and deportations will show up at the polls this November, if only to cast ballots against candidates who would embrace workable reforms. The hope here is that their electoral clout will be outweighed by a backlash among fired-up and fed-up Latino voters.
**Story Link
1/2/08
Blazing Arizona (NYT)
On Jan. 1, Arizona intends to become the first state to try to muscle its way out of its immigration problems on its own. That is when, barring a last-minute setback in court, it is to begin enforcing a new state law that harshly punishes businesses that knowingly hire undocumented immigrants. It is a two-strike law, suspending a business’s license on the first offense and revoking it on the second. It is the strictest workplace-enforcement law in the country.
We have always said that workplace laws should be enforced vigorously — as part of a comprehensive, nationwide immigration system that doesn’t just punish, but tries to actually solve the problems that foster and sustain the breaking of immigration laws. The boosters of the Arizona law, including the Minutemen border vigilantes who have made “January First!” an anti-immigrant rallying cry, have a much narrower goal: the biggest purge of illegal immigrants in the Southwest since the federal government’s Operation Wetback in 1954.
If that happens, the immigrants will take a big chunk of Arizona’s growth and economic vitality with them — and not necessarily back across the international border. The collateral damage will be severe as citizens and legal immigrants are also thrown out of work, as businesses struggle to find workers in a state with a 3.3 percent unemployment rate and as sleazy employers move more workers off the books, the better to abuse and exploit them. And the national problem of undocumented immigration will be no closer to a solution.
There are many compassion-and-common-sense criticisms of Arizona’s Fair and Legal Employment Act: stories about families torn apart, breadwinners deported and citizen children on public assistance. They make little headway with the law-and-order crowd. Nor does the fact that many hard-line defenders of workplace enforcement show a lopsided devotion to federal laws; they seldom complain when employers abuse undocumented immigrants and steal their wages, even though those violations worsen job conditions and pay for American workers, too.
For now, let’s just point out that Arizona’s plunge into enforcement-only immigration policy highlights the folly and inadequacy of that approach, particularly when it is left to a crazy quilt of state laws. America is a country where millions of illegal immigrants have entered for years all but invited and mostly not pursued. They have become integral to our economy, although now — thanks to harsher enforcement and the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress — most have no way to become legal, no options except slipping back into destitution on the other side of the border.
There is no way for Arizona or any other state to get businesses back on a legal footing without exacting a great economic and human toll.
It could be that Arizona’s enforcement of the law will be calm and measured. But we worry about Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and two-thirds of the state’s population. Maricopa’s county attorney, Andrew Thomas, and county sheriff, Joe Arpaio, are prone to media-driven stunts. Sheriff Arpaio makes a show of his meanness, hounding and humiliating prisoners and forming his deputies into squads that check people’s clothes and accents before demanding their papers.
Arizona is home to many moderate politicians, like Gov. Janet Napolitano, who were all too aware of the bill’s problems, and yet it became law. Many say the Minutemen and their allies had offered an ultimatum: approve this bill or face a citizen’s initiative on the 2008 ballot that would be even harsher and blunter, and all but impossible to repair. That promise was reneged on; petitions for the Minutemen’s initiative are being collected now.
As Arizona exacts its punishment on the undocumented workers who have made it so prosperous, it runs the risk of proving itself tough but not smart.
**Story Link
We have always said that workplace laws should be enforced vigorously — as part of a comprehensive, nationwide immigration system that doesn’t just punish, but tries to actually solve the problems that foster and sustain the breaking of immigration laws. The boosters of the Arizona law, including the Minutemen border vigilantes who have made “January First!” an anti-immigrant rallying cry, have a much narrower goal: the biggest purge of illegal immigrants in the Southwest since the federal government’s Operation Wetback in 1954.
If that happens, the immigrants will take a big chunk of Arizona’s growth and economic vitality with them — and not necessarily back across the international border. The collateral damage will be severe as citizens and legal immigrants are also thrown out of work, as businesses struggle to find workers in a state with a 3.3 percent unemployment rate and as sleazy employers move more workers off the books, the better to abuse and exploit them. And the national problem of undocumented immigration will be no closer to a solution.
There are many compassion-and-common-sense criticisms of Arizona’s Fair and Legal Employment Act: stories about families torn apart, breadwinners deported and citizen children on public assistance. They make little headway with the law-and-order crowd. Nor does the fact that many hard-line defenders of workplace enforcement show a lopsided devotion to federal laws; they seldom complain when employers abuse undocumented immigrants and steal their wages, even though those violations worsen job conditions and pay for American workers, too.
For now, let’s just point out that Arizona’s plunge into enforcement-only immigration policy highlights the folly and inadequacy of that approach, particularly when it is left to a crazy quilt of state laws. America is a country where millions of illegal immigrants have entered for years all but invited and mostly not pursued. They have become integral to our economy, although now — thanks to harsher enforcement and the defeat of comprehensive immigration reform in Congress — most have no way to become legal, no options except slipping back into destitution on the other side of the border.
There is no way for Arizona or any other state to get businesses back on a legal footing without exacting a great economic and human toll.
It could be that Arizona’s enforcement of the law will be calm and measured. But we worry about Maricopa County, which includes Phoenix and two-thirds of the state’s population. Maricopa’s county attorney, Andrew Thomas, and county sheriff, Joe Arpaio, are prone to media-driven stunts. Sheriff Arpaio makes a show of his meanness, hounding and humiliating prisoners and forming his deputies into squads that check people’s clothes and accents before demanding their papers.
Arizona is home to many moderate politicians, like Gov. Janet Napolitano, who were all too aware of the bill’s problems, and yet it became law. Many say the Minutemen and their allies had offered an ultimatum: approve this bill or face a citizen’s initiative on the 2008 ballot that would be even harsher and blunter, and all but impossible to repair. That promise was reneged on; petitions for the Minutemen’s initiative are being collected now.
As Arizona exacts its punishment on the undocumented workers who have made it so prosperous, it runs the risk of proving itself tough but not smart.
**Story Link
9/18/07
Tower of Scrabble, BY Tom Miller (WP)
One of the vexing questions in the immigration debate is about language. Should everyone speak English? What's wrong with Spanish? Why can't we rise up to be a bilingual nation?
The debate can get nasty at times. A few months ago, former House speaker Newt Gingrich equated Spanish with "the language of living in a ghetto." California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested that Latinos simply turn off Spanish-language television.
Well, I have a solution to the tortured linguistic dilemma for Newt, the governor, ghetto-dwellers and the rest of us, one that could simultaneously unify, educate and amuse us all: bilingual Scrabble.
Here's how it's done: Get a Spanish-language Scrabble set -- they're available at lots of game stores and online. Then play the usual way, with a twist: Any word can be either English or Spanish.
For example, if you have the Spanish word for rum-- R-O-N on the board -- sandwich it between an F and a T and you get "front." Add E-R-A at the end, and there's the Spanish word for border, frontera .
Or this: You start with "ant," someone else stretches it slightly to "rant." The next player earns more points with M-I-G at the beginning -- migrant. Then it's back to you. You use two E's, one at the beginning and one at the end, and presto! You have emigrante, Spanish for emigrant.
Okay, here's a little trick with . . . your A-B-Cs. Your Spanish set has a double L, a double R, and an ? -- that's the "n" with a squiggly line, called a tilde, on top.
When my family plays bilingual Scrabble -- we're a mix of native English and Spanish speakers -- we're allowed to use the Spanish letters for English words, so the word "hello" might only use four tiles, H-E-LL-O. But you could use the same double L to begin the Spanish word llorona, a weeping woman.
Or, one player uses the double R in the middle of "terror," for example, and the next player uses the same double R for "arrestar," the verb "to arrest."
There are slightly more letters in the Spanish Scrabble set, and more possible points because of that.
In case you have a sabelotodo playing -- that's a know-it-all -- always keep a bilingual dictionary handy.
The best word we've come up with so far is jarroncillos -- little vases -- which has a J, a double R and a double L for 30 points in all. And that's before any double or triple squares.
Bilingual Scrabble is great home entertainment. It increases your ability and agility in both tongues, and it allows you to learn and have fun with a language without making fun of those who speak it.
We're thinking of inviting Lou Dobbs over for our next game night.
**Story Link
**Photo Courtesy of Shot A Day
9/4/07
Immigrants’ Labors Lost, By Mark Lange (NYT)
Imagine we wanted to create a huge Latino underclass in this country. We would induce more than 500,000 illegal immigrants to enter annually. We would see Latinos account for half of America’s population growth. We would turn a hardened eye toward all 44 million Latinos, because 12 million jumped our borders to meet our labor demand.
We would financially motivate but morally deplore illegal immigrants’ determination to break our laws and risk their lives to work for us. We would let nativist, xenophobic amnesiacs pillory the roughly 25 percent of Latinos who were here illegally, at the expense of the 75 percent who were legal. CNN and Fox News would reduce Latinos to fodder for fear-mongering, and the documentariat would make them objects of pity, when they wanted and warranted neither.
We would know that if we paid them, they would come, but we would offer no legitimate employment. We would adopt a let’s-pretend labor policy in our fields, yards, factories and restaurants, and for child care, construction and cleaning, with a wage fakery worthy of the Soviet Union. There, the joke was “we pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.” Here they would work, hard — and we would pay them, sort of, but pretend not to, denying ourselves the future tax revenue needed to pay for services we faulted them for needing.
We would ensure that the education system failed them, lamenting a dropout rate more than twice that of blacks and four times that of whites. Keeping incomes impossibly low, we would sanction Mexican-American welfare receipts twice those of natives. We would let the states launch loads of legislative half-fixes. We would have the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Homeland Security Department start an “even tougher” and more futile paper chase. We would see desperate workers fake new Social Security numbers or go underground for the next boss seeking this shabby labor discount.
We do all of this — and let it cost us more as a country — because it is a little cheaper for us as individuals and employers. And whether we knew it or not, we are deliberately fencing in our own economy.
It is in our self-interest to support labor mobility, development and advancement. Growth in productivity, fundamentally, is how we raise everyone’s standard of living. It starts with the first rung.
This month, Congress can avert a replay of the 1986 amnesty debacle by reserving permanent residency and citizenship for those who get in line and play by existing rules. Let nobody’s status be “adjusted” or “granted.” Instead, have employers sponsor anyone on their shadow payrolls to apply for a tamper-proof holographic guest worker card. Deport, adequately south of the border, anyone not sponsored. That won’t mean all 12 million. In 1954, when illegal Latino immigration was twice what it is now, a manageable number of deportations motivated the majority to repatriate.
To enforce sanctions against employers, grant the states (who bear the social costs) federal transfer payments for every undocumented worker they find, which will keep Congress and future administrations honest about paying for enforcement. If agriculture needs a lower minimum wage, negotiate and legislate it. To address the supply side, in the next trade agreement insist that Mexico adequately ensure its workers’ right to organize — to support wages and worker retention there, and a fairer fight for American exports.
The strength of an abstraction like “the economy” comes from the hands and minds of motivated and prepared people. Whether or not the left is committed to social equity — or the right, to equality of opportunity — we have at least 12 million pragmatic reasons to turn a potentially permanent underclass into a productive asset. Rather than fencing aspiring contributors out, comprehensive reform means Congress getting serious about entry-level job training and midcareer education programs for all workers. They deliver better economic returns than border patrols do.
The guy with the leaf-blower not only can learn English, he — like the unemployed steelworker — should have a chance to learn auto repair or programming. He’ll start with the jobs “ordinary Americans” won’t do. But we impair our economic future if we leave him there, imagining that’s all he or his children will ever do.
**Image Courtesy of Candace Beck
**Story Link
8/10/07
M.I.A. from the Immigration Debate, Creating Economic Opportunity in Mexico, By James Ridgeway (MJ)
Washington Dispatch: Could an influx of foreign aid to Mexico solve America's immigration problem?
For all the talk about immigration reform on the Hill, there has been notably little discussion about what is driving Mexican immigrants to pour over the border into the U.S., let alone any debate about measures that might go to the root of the problem. According to Laura Carlsen, the director of the International Relations Center's Americas Program, the reason behind the "massive out-migration" is fairly clear. Put simply, she wrote not long ago, "Mexico is not producing enough decent jobs for its people—and the United States is hiring." It would seem, then, that one potential answer to the United States' so-called immigration problem would be an effective development policy toward Mexico (whose citizens make up 56 percent of America's undocumented population, according to the Pew Hispanic Center), including both private investment and foreign aid. As it stands, Mexico receives the bulk of its aid not from the U.S. government or corporations but from immigrants themselves.
Despite having incomes well below the national average, many Mexican immigrants regularly send a portion of their earnings home to support their families and sometimes entire communities. Remittances from immigrant workers now stand approximately equal to oil revenues as one of the two largest sources of foreign income in Mexico. According to Guillermo Ortíz, head of Mexico's central bank, they totaled $23.54 billion in 2006.
These remittances – the vast majority sent from the United States, primarily in payments of $100 to $200 -- exponentially exceed foreign aid to Mexico. According to the Century Foundation, for every dollar in official foreign aid that goes to Mexico, immigrants send home $150. The bottom line is that these remittances have become a substitute—and a poor one at that—for effective development policies aimed at generating employment and stimulating rural production.
While the United States frequently grouses to the Mexican government that it ought to provide economic opportunities at home that will keep its citizens from teeming over our border, we've been less quick to provide Mexico with much help in doing so. To the contrary, the U.S. continues to exploit Mexico's resources for its own needs. Those resources, of course, include the very undocumented workers we complain about, which, like the illicit drugs we likewise condemn, would soon cease to flow north across the border if there were no demand for them here.
The 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) was supposed to be a tremendous boon for Mexico, as well as for the United States and Canada, creating the beginnings of a common market for the benefit of all. More than 13 years later, though, the relationship still smacks of colonialism. Howard Zinn, the author of A People's History of the United States who has documented the history of U.S. colonialism in Latin America, says of the current immigration debate, "Why should capital go freely across borders while people cannot? These are human beings trying to make a better life, for god's sake. Why is the wall on the Mexican border more acceptable than the Berlin Wall?"
Contrast all this to what's happened in the European Union, which was formed just two years prior to NAFTA, in 1992. Through the post-war years and well into the 1980s, most of the huge number of foreign guest workers in then-richer nations like Britain, Germany, France, and Switzerland came not from the so-called Third World, but from current European Union member-countries like Italy, Spain, Portugal, Greece, and Ireland. Instead of just employing foreign workers, though, the wealthier European nations also jumpstarted the economies of their poorer neighbors with billions of dollars in investments. As Douglas Massey, a Princeton University sociologist and co-director of the school's Mexican Migration Project, told the San Francisco Chronicle last year, if "the United States had approached Mexico and its integration into the North American economy in the same way that the European Union approached Spain and Portugal in 1986, we wouldn't have an immigration problem now."
**Photo Courtesy of Mother Jones
**Story Link
8/9/07
Congress needs to fix legal immigration first, By Bruce A. Morrison (SFC)
The resounding defeat of the Senate immigration reform bill was a relief to true friends of American immigration. No more urging a "yes" vote just "to move the process forward." Let's speak the truth - the Senate bill was not merely imperfect, it would have made many things worse.
"Comprehensive Immigration Reform" sounded good, but it reflects a flawed strategy.
Immigration opponents put illegal and legal immigration into the same bucket because they want to convince Americans that there's just one problem - too many immigrants. When immigration supporters make coming or staying illegally seem like just another immigration option, they invite the same wrongheaded conclusion - that cutting all immigration is the answer.
The Senate bill was the inevitable result. To secure support for legalization (which opponents will always call amnesty regardless of the technicalities), both family and employment immigration would have been cut and crippled by broadly unpopular, ideologically driven changes demanded by restrictionists. Employers all around the Bay Area and in Silicon Valley, who have created thousands of American jobs with the help of key immigrant employees, would have been hurt by these changes. Yet all the Senate's concessions produced no additional support in the end.
But to drop immigration reform from our national agenda until after the 2008 election would be wrong. Delivering what the American people are for - legal immigration based on America's needs and enforcement that prevents illegal presence - are the first steps to fixing immigration policy as a whole.
So now is the time for the House to go a better way: "Fix Legal Immigration and Prevent Illegal Immigration First." It is two Northern California representatives - Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-San Francisco, and Immigration Subcommittee Chair Zoe Lofgren, D-San Jose - who can play a leading role.
Who gets to immigrate should be driven by our national interest, not our failures. Congress must make certain that the family members and employees we need and want have enough visas and get them promptly. Right now, they don't. So without legal immigration reform, enforcement strategies fail.
Besides, preventing a problem is better than enforcement after it occurs.
Prevention depends on removing the magnet of illegal employment. Today's system is a joke. It is impossible for employers to tell who is legal from the documents they are allowed to see. The pilot electronic system is a good idea, but it lacks capacity to defeat identity theft. Employers need an easy-to-use electronic system with minimal paperwork that gives a clear and dependable "yes" or "no" whether a prospective employee is legal. Let's use private sector competition to build an effective system and enlist law-abiding employers as partners in preventing illegal employment so we can focus enforcement on employers who choose to be scofflaws by avoiding or misusing the system.
Had we spent the last decade with a legal immigration system that delivered what we want and deterred what we don't, we would have many fewer people here illegally today. The silver lining of the Senate bill's collapse is that it provides the opportunity to do these two things we need most.
The longer we wait to do first things first - provide enough visas for legal immigration and remove the magnet for illegal entries created by unauthorized employment - the larger the numbers of those who will be here illegally and the less the public will trust Congress to fix the problem.
It is folly to ask Americans to accept new promises for effective immigration control when the record is so dismal. We know what to do - keep up pressure at the border and remove the jobs magnet - and unauthorized entries will plummet, especially if realistic numbers of visas are available for jobs going unfilled by Americans.
Some of that was in the Senate bill, but not without other baggage and not in a form that anyone could believe would be implemented anytime soon.
Some object that fixing legal immigration first leaves millions who are here illegally without a path to legalization. But so does the political impasse demonstrated by the Senate bill. The difference is that fixing legal immigration and stopping illegal immigration first moves toward a solution that can attract broad support, because it says "watch us" not "trust us" to the American people.
A few advocates even argue that only by holding prevention hostage can Congress be persuaded to respond humanely and sensibly to the 12 million already here. The Senate result shows that they have it backward. Most Americans will be far more open to dealing generously and wisely with residents here illegally after the federal government has shown that legalization is about curing a past mistake, not another step to millions more entering illegally in the future.
No doubt, the Senate will be slow to return to these issues. But that presents Pelosi and Lofgren with a historic opportunity to take the lead: fix legal immigration and prevent illegal immigration first.
Bruce A. Morrison, a former Democratic congressman from Connecticut, was chairman of the House Immigration subcommittee during passage of the Immigration Act of 1990 and a member of the bipartisan U.S. Commission on Immigration Reform.
**Photo Courtesy of Jacquelyn Martin
**Story Link
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