video: PBS and VBSTV

The Border Fence: "Is America's border fence working, or an utter waste? NOW travels to Texas to meet families on the U.S.-Mexico border who fear losing their property, their safety, and their way of life."

Illegal LA: "The "debate" over illegal immigration in the United States has always been dominated by hotheads—pissy, sloganeering loudmouths on either sides of the fence drawn together by their shared love of yelling crap on radio call-in shows and steering the dialogue away from anything approaching a solution. And since the 9/11 attacks (carried out by 16 legal immigrants and three on expired visas), the discussion has basically devolved into an incomprehensible jumble. Like did you ever see those supposedly pro-immigrant "A Day With No Mexicans" ads where everyone’s sad that there’s nobody to mow lawns or sell tacos? Who’d they get to write those, the KKK? Seriously, the whole thing just makes us want to shut off our brains and watch Reba or something. But then we remember the lives of some 12 million people hang in the balance of this pissing match (as well as the American economy, welfare, national security, etc), and it’s like, "[exagerated sigh] OK, [rolling up sleeves] looks like we’ll have to wrestle this away from the assholes after all."

In Illegal LA, VBS heads to Los Angeles, the US locus of Latin American migrants and a flashpoint for recent anti-immigrant tensions, in an attempt to suss out the full nature of la reconquista instead of just trying to yell “We’re all immigrants!/Speak English!” until it looks like we’re about to hemorrhage from our eyeballs. Check out the Illegal LA showpage for more information."

Companies Take Lead in Assimilation Efforts, By Pamela Constable and N.C. Aizenman (WP)

Jose Trivelli, a graying engineer from Peru, spends his days fixing Internet connections at a Tysons Corner hotel and his evenings listening to a laptop computer program with cartoon characters and a chirpy voice that helps him pronounce such phrases as, "I'd like to open an account" and "Let me call my manager."

At 52, he admits to being slightly embarrassed by the simplistic instructional program, but he says his U.S.-born children, who speak perfect English, are so enthusiastic about his efforts that they help him with difficult words and dream of the day he will be promoted to manager.

Trivelli's employer, Marriott International, has a more ambitious motive for offering thousands of foreign-born housekeepers, cooks and maintenance workers its no-cost "Thirst for Knowledge" program, which simulates conversations in banks, hospitals, shops and schools as well as in hotel kitchens and lobbies.

Marriott and another Bethesda-based company, Miller & Long Concrete Construction, are among several dozen major U.S. corporations spearheading a campaign to turn the divisive national debate about immigration in a more positive direction.

"This is a mission for us," said Andy Chaves, a human resources manager for Marriott and a member of the White House Task Force on New Americans. "When our employees become proficient in English and assimilate into our society, it benefits the company, the community and the individual. Everyone gains."

Amid increasing public hostility to immigrants and intensifying efforts by local and federal authorities to crack down on illegal immigration, these business leaders hope to counter criticism that immigrants steal jobs and burden public services by highlighting the contributions they make to the U.S. economy and improving their ability to integrate.

The initiative is supported by a bill recently introduced in Congress. Sponsored by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and three representatives from California, Florida and Texas, it would provide $350 million for immigrant family literacy programs, individual tax credits for teachers and corporate tax breaks for firms that offer educational workplace programs like "Thirst for Knowledge."

In addition to support from private firms that employ thousands of immigrants from Latin America and elsewhere, the bill is backed by the Americas Society and Council of the Americas, which recently issued a report called "U.S. Business and Hispanic Integration: Expanding the Economic Contributions of Immigrants."

The report points out that Hispanics make up more than 14 percent of the U.S. workforce, own more than 2 million businesses and have a collective purchasing power of more than $800 billion a year. It says foreign-born workers have much to offer but need more help to master English and become more invested in American society.

It concedes that many Hispanic immigrants arrive with limited educations and that the immigration wave of the past two decades has slightly depressed wages among unskilled American workers. It also argues that immigrants "complement" the overall labor force as more native-born Americans earn degrees and seek higher-level jobs.

The report also asserts that if immigrants are given more opportunities to learn, earn and engage, they will repay the investment as better workers, parents, consumers and participants in public life. Although not endorsing illegal immigration, the report accepts it as a fact of life that needs to be addressed through legislative reforms.

The report lists corporations that have offered their large immigrant workforces a variety of skill-building programs. These include scholarships at Wal-Mart, English classes at United Parcel Service, financial literacy programs at Western Union and bilingual skills development at Northrop Grumman shipbuilders.

Some companies that employ immigrants have been reluctant to associate themselves with the effort, however, citing fears of public criticism and government scrutiny amid increasingly aggressive federal efforts to track down illegal immigrants and punish their employers.

"Businesses feel cowed by the rhetoric," said Christopher Sabatini, a policy director at the Americas Society and Council of the Americas. "There is a fear of being labeled as aiding and abetting undocumented immigrants." He said some companies have curtailed programs aimed at helping immigrant workers because of community disapproval.

One company that has taken a strong public stance in favor of helping immigrant workers is Miller & Long. Myles Gladstone, the firm's personnel director, said that it once hired mostly African Americans but that since the early 1990s, fewer U.S.-born workers have applied, and they have been largely replaced by immigrants. Today, the firm employs more than 2,000 Hispanics, mostly foreign-born.

Gladstone said the firm started offering safety instruction in Spanish but gradually expanded into "broader life skills" for workers and their families. Today, it offers 65 free classes, including English, Spanish literacy, job safety, lifesaving, financial skills and health promotion. He said there are plans to expand the program to help immigrants keep their children out of trouble, with seminars on gangs and substance abuse.

He noted that not all immigrants are able to learn English and that of about 500 who have taken the company's language classes, "not a lot" have become truly bilingual. He said that if construction workers are trained well and understand safety, "they don't really need to have fluency in English," although without it they cannot become foremen or crane operators.

Antonia Diaz, 42, has advanced steadily at Miller & Long since she emigrated from Honduras six years ago. She began as a laborer, earning $10 per hour and speaking almost no English. Now, after taking corporate English classes for several years, she is a construction site safety worker and earns $18.50 an hour.

"If I had known I would be talking like this, I wouldn't believe it," Diaz said yesterday in passable English as she built wooden safety barricades around a construction site in Silver Spring. Although she converses with her mostly Hispanic crew in Spanish, she said learning English had other merits. "It helps me in my personal life," she said. She said she loves her job and plans to stay with Miller & Long but added: "If I know English and I get laid off, I can find other work. I am prepared for anything."

At Marriott, where some hotels have employees from as many as 25 countries, Chairman Bill Marriott calls immigrants the backbone of his business and frequently talks about the virtues of diversity and assimilation in his personal blog.

"We would hire a native-born person any day, but in most cases they don't want to do the lower-level labor we need in our business," he said in a telephone interview this week. "Probably the most important thing we can do is offer our employees the opportunity to learn English and grow and become part of our society."

At the Tysons Corner Marriott, much behind-the-scenes work is conducted in Spanish among immigrant employees. Most who have taken the "Thirst for Knowledge" class do not speak perfect English; Trivelli still confuses "chopping" with "shopping" and tends to drop his consonants. But he and the others said they have gained something else: a stronger sense of confidence and belonging in their adopted environment.

"Until now, I was always working too hard to study," said Trivelli, who was practicing vocabulary on his laptop in a workroom filled with tools and wires. "Now my kids are so happy I am learning. They help me with my pronunciation, and they tell me if I learn enough English, I can replace my boss one day."

**Story Link
**Photo Courtesy of Michael Williamson (WP): "Jose Trivelli, a Tysons Corner Marriott repairman, works on a program to learn English, part of an effort by companies to integrate immigrant workers."

Thai slave laborers freed in El Monte become U.S. citizens, By Teresa Watanabe (LAT)

Maliwan Clinton recalls her first taste of America with a shudder. In this fabled land of the free, she was enslaved behind razor wire and around-the-clock guards in an El Monte sweatshop, where she and more than 70 other Thai laborers were forced to work 18-hour days for what amounted to less than a dollar an hour.

When she was freed, a shocked public learned of slavery in its midst and flooded the Thai laborers with American generosity: Churchgoers offered shelter, community advocates proffered English lessons and job tips, lawyers fought for work permits and legal status for the group.

Exactly 13 years to the day the Thai laborers won their freedom, Clinton's American journey came full circle Wednesday as she acquired U.S. citizenship by taking the oath of allegiance to her new nation.

"I'm an American and this is my home now!" said Clinton, 39, as she waved a miniature American flag at the Montebello ceremony, where more than 3,600 citizens were scheduled to be sworn in by day's end.

Another former slave laborer, Sukanya Chuai Ngan, was also granted citizenship Wednesday. The two women are among dozens of the El Monte workers who have acquired citizenship this year or expect to do so soon.

More than 40 of them had gathered Sunday to celebrate with the Asian Pacific American Legal Center, which successfully fought for a $4-million settlement from manufacturers and retailers for their exploitation and won an uphill battle to gain legal status for the workers.

"Because of their courage, they were able to take what was a horrific experience and emerge from it as victors," said the legal center's Julie Su, their lead attorney for 13 years. "I'm really proud of them, but I'm also proud of America because this nation opened its arms to them and showed its best ideals of freedom and human rights."

The El Monte case drew international attention, blazed new paths in immigration and labor law, led to legislation offering visas for victims of human trafficking and became the subject of an exhibit in the Smithsonian Institution.

The case marked the first time in federal court that garment workers successfully held manufacturers and retailers responsible for the actions of their labor contractor.

It was the shocking nature of modern-day slavery in such a nondescript American neighborhood that so riveted the nation, Su said.

Ultimately, law enforcement officers arrested eight operators of a Chinese Thai garment sweatshop in an early morning raid in August 1995 and freed 72 Thai immigrants, some of whom had been held captive for at least four years.

As they celebrated their journeys to citizenship Sunday with American flags and certificates as "American heroes" from the Asian legal center, the former captives reminisced, often tearfully, over their trials.

Most of them said they came from impoverished farming families and had headed to the metropolis of Bangkok to find sewing jobs. There, they met labor contractors who promised them good jobs in America and monthly pay of $1,000 -- nearly 10 times what some were earning in Thailand.

They were told they would work 8 a.m. to 6 p.m., with weekends off to see the glamorous sights of Los Angeles.

But the reality was vastly different.

Buppha Chaemchoi, 37, said she was shocked to arrive in El Monte and realize that she would sleep crammed in one bedroom on the floor with nine others. The windows had been boarded up, she said, allowing virtually no sunlight. Her captors told her that if she tried to escape, brutal U.S. police would shave her head and stamp her scalp with marks of disgrace, she said.

"It made me worry and want to stay inside and just wait for my three-year contract to end," Chaemchoi said.

Chuai Ngan, 47, who came to the U.S. in 1993, said she also was intimidated with threats that her family would be harmed and their home in Thailand burned down if she attempted to leave.

Not all captives were willing to accept their fate, however.

Win Chuai Ngan, the 51-year-old husband of Sukanya, was the first to escape from El Monte. As one of the few male laborers, he said, he was allowed to go outside to take out the trash and help move sewing machines and other heavy supplies into the complex.

One day, he said, he saw a Thai newspaper in the trash, surreptitiously tore out the phone number for a Thai temple and kept it hidden in his pocket. In November 1992, he made his move -- jumping over the fence in the middle of the night. He ran to a taxi stand and asked to be taken to the temple.

"I was so scared the owner would see me and kill me," Win Chuai Ngan said.

He said he told his story to Thai authorities and newspapers in Los Angeles, and gave them an address label for the El Monte complex that he had torn from the newspaper.

But he said he did not report it to U.S. law enforcement officials because he was scared they would deport him.

A few others also escaped, and community advocates eventually helped get the information to authorities. On Aug. 2, a multiagency task force led by the California Department of Industrial Relations raided the complex.

Some of the women were cowed by their captors' earlier descriptions of U.S. police and refused to open the door, which authorities hacked open with an ax. Others said they were overjoyed at their liberation.

"I was so happy," said Clinton, who had been held captive since April 1994. "I thought, 'Oh my God, I'm going home!' "

In the end, most of the workers decided to stay after Su and others successfully fought to win legal status for them. The workers annually celebrate Aug. 13 as their first full day of freedom, since that's when all of them were allowed to leave immigration detention facilities.

Clinton and the Chuai Ngans said that whatever travails they endured here, their American journeys have been well worth taking.

Clinton fell in love and married one of the volunteers who helped her; the couple has two sons.

She works the graveyard shift at Target stocking shelves and aims to attend community college as a steppingstone to a higher-paying job.

Her biggest dream is to sponsor her niece's immigration to the United States -- the daughter of her only sibling, who died in an auto accident.

Chuai Ngan, along with her husband, Win, have started two Thai restaurants and a massage parlor, own two North Hollywood homes and four cars, including a Mercedes-Benz.

They earn enough to send money home to relatives and have built a meeting hall, school lunchroom and library in their impoverished rice farming village in northeastern Thailand. The couple also sends school supplies and sports equipment to the village children.

Like countless immigrants before them, the former slave laborers expressed gratitude for the bountiful opportunities in their adopted homeland.

"American people have such big hearts," Clinton said, "and now I'm so proud to say I'm one of them."

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Gary Friedman (LAT): "GROUP HUG: Mario Mercado, left, and Nantha Jaknang, center, hug Suphaphon Khamsutthi during a ceremony at attorney Julie Su's home to celebrate the freedom of the former laborers."

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.

**Story Link
**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."

**Story Link

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

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.”

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

Tipping Point For Outrage, By Karin Brulliard (WP)

In Hampton Roads Area, '07 Deaths of Teens Fuel Policies on Immigrants

There have been no major flaps over day-labor sites here, or boiling controversies over immigrant boardinghouses or schools crowded with children who don't speak English.

But a group has formed to fight illegal immigration. Calls about the issue to the area's congresswoman have swelled. And Ray and Colette Tranchant want to sue the government over what they call its failure to enforce immigration laws.

The catalyst was a tragedy that roiled the Hampton Roads area and triggered stiffer local policies on illegal immigrants. In March 2007, the Tranchants' daughter Tessa, 16, and her best friend, Alison Kunhardt, 17, were killed in a car crash caused by a drunk driver who had a police record and was in the country illegally.

"What happened in Virginia Beach is they woke up Saturday morning and realized not only do illegal immigrants work in your town, live in your town, but they also kill people in your town," then-Del. John J. Welch III (R-Virginia Beach) told reporters at the time.

As national immigration politics increasingly become local and police reveal the legal status of more suspects, high-profile deaths caused by illegal immigrants are serving as powerful tipping points for community outrage. The tragedies often live on nationally as talking points for opponents of illegal immigration and as symbols on Web sites that list victims as if they were fallen soldiers in an invisible war.

To those activists, the cases are stark reminders of a broken immigration system. It's simple, they say: The victims would be alive if the borders were sealed.

"The people who are committing these crimes . . . they are here because the government failed to do what it was supposed to do to protect the American people," said Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which promotes restrictions on immigration.

Immigrant advocates counter that focusing on legal status brands all immigrants, illegal and those who might be assumed to be illegal, as villains, stoking misdirected tensions out of grief. In Hampton Roads, advocates say they are fielding calls from immigrants worried about deportation and discrimination.

"Each of those individual circumstances are tragic. But the effect that some of these groups are trying to achieve is to demonize," said Clarissa Martinez of the National Council of La Raza. "They're very clearly manipulating these individual cases to try to smear a whole community."

Because policies on checking the legal status of suspects vary among law enforcement agencies and Census Bureau questionnaires do not ask about it, there are no solid national statistics on crime rates among illegal immigrants.

In recent months, fatal car crashes alleged to have been caused by illegal immigrants have sparked ire in small towns in Minnesota and Iowa. Two years ago, the deaths of a Maryland Marine and his girlfriend in a collision caused by an illegal immigrant ignited debate in Annapolis over driver's licenses for unauthorized immigrants. In Pennsylvania, the mayor of Hazleton has said a 2006 slaying attributed to an illegal immigrant led to a controversial immigration ordinance. Charges against the suspect were later dropped, and the measure was struck down by a federal judge.

The stories of such victims are immortalized on Web sites such as http://immigrationshumancost.org, run by Brenda Walker, a Berkeley, Calif., writer who initially took up the immigration issue out of concern over the environmental impact of population growth.

"I was seeing all these articles in the press about 'Oh, poor Juan, he comes here and he's struggling for a better life,' " said Walker, adding that she favors limits on immigration. "But illegal immigration is not a victimless crime. That's my big headline."

The FIRE Coalition, a national group formed to combat what it calls "the largest invasion in the history of the world," goes further. As part of a project called Operation Body Count, it distributes posters featuring photos of people it says were killed by illegal immigrants.

Ray Tranchant has seen his daughter's picture on such sites. He said groups that call for measures such as mass deportations "muck up the real solution," which he said involves building a border fence, deporting criminals and giving noncriminals an earned path to legalization. But he knows the power of cases such as that of Tessa and Alison. It turned him into an activist.

"Tessa shouldn't have died," said Tranchant, 53, a Tidewater Community College administrator. "The bottom line is someone ended up in a place that caused deaths. How did he get here? Track it back: Lax here, lax there."

Tranchant, who is a member of a state task force on "alien criminals," said he is angry only at authorities. He wants to sue the city, state and national governments for wrongful death, saying their negligence led to the crash that killed Tessa. Tranchant said he does not want money but change, so that criminal illegal immigrants are kept out of the country.

In recent years, the Hampton Roads area's construction, tourism and farming industries have drawn a growing immigrant population, many from Mexico. Still, immigrants make up less than 6 percent of the area's 1.65 million residents.

Tranchant, a former Navy pilot, said he used to worry about illegal immigration mostly as a terrorism issue.

That changed March 30, 2007. Alison and Tessa were waiting at the light when Alfredo Ramos, drunk and speeding, slammed into their car, killing both. Soon police revealed that Ramos, 22, had been convicted of drunken driving in neighboring Chesapeake and public intoxication in Virginia Beach but never questioned about his immigration status.

Virginia Beach police were prohibited from asking suspects charged with misdemeanors about their status; Chesapeake had no policy. Ramos was sentenced to serve 24 years in prison.

Fox News's Bill O'Reilly seized upon the crash. He accused Virginia Beach officials of operating a "sanctuary city." Local newspapers and online chats filled with furious exchanges.

The uproar led Virginia Beach to require that police check the immigration status of all arrested. Virginia Beach and Chesapeake passed measures requiring that companies doing business with the cities pledge not to hire illegal immigrants.

The state task force was formed by three congressional representatives, including Thelma Drake (R), who said the crash brought her constituents' numerous calls over illegal immigration "to another level."

Help Save Hampton Roads, an offshoot of Northern Virginia groups fighting illegal immigration, formed after Tessa and Alison's deaths.

"Nobody knew this situation was out there until this catalyzed it," said Brian Kirwin, a Virginia Beach representative for the statewide group Save the Old Dominion, which counts the Hampton Roads area as its second-largest base after Northern Virginia. "It didn't have a name and a face."

But the turmoil and policy changes also sparked "instantaneous" fright among the region's Latino immigrants, said Dan Curran, a real estate agent and immigrant advocate who said he and his wife were quickly besieged by calls from people expecting widespread raids.

Beatriz Amberman, a Virginia Beach resident who is vice chairman of the Virginia Coalition of Latino Organizations, has indefinitely called off a fall Hispanic festival she has hosted for six years. She said Latinos have felt "scapegoated" and were too wary to attend.

At a Hispanic grocery, a mother and daughter from Mexico nodded knowingly when asked about the crash, which they said had caused legal and illegal Latinos to walk rather than drive and to avoid beachfront discos because police patrol them.

"For one person, everyone pays," said Josefina, 50, an illegal immigrant who did not want her last name published.

"It bothers us, too," said Paula, 25, of the crash. "How did he dare to drive like that?"

On a recent sunny afternoon, as Colette Tranchant, 49, drove to the cemetery where the graves of her daughter and Alison lie under the watchful gaze of a statue of an angel, she said the spotlight the crash cast on illegal immigration was a good thing.

"This was so preventable," she said. "If my daughter died, at least it wasn't in vain."

**Story Link

States Take New Tack on Illegal Immigration, By Damien Cave

MILTON, Fla. — Three months after the local police inspected more than a dozen businesses searching for illegal immigrants using stolen Social Security numbers, this community in the Florida Panhandle has become more law-abiding, emptier and whiter.

Many of the Hispanic immigrants who came in 2004 to help rebuild after Hurricane Ivan have either fled or gone into hiding. Churches with services in Spanish are half-empty. Businesses are struggling to find workers. And for Hispanic citizens with roots here — the foremen and entrepreneurs who received visits from the police — the losses are especially profound.

“It was very hard because the community is very small, and to see people who came to eat here all the time then come and close the business,” said Geronimo Barragan, who owns two branches of La Hacienda, Mexican restaurants where the police arrested 10 employees.

“I don’t blame them,” Mr. Barragan added. “It’s just that it hurts.”

Sheriff Wendell Hall of Santa Rosa County, who led the effort, said the arrests were for violations of state identity theft laws. But he also seemed proud to have found a way around rules allowing only the federal government to enforce immigration laws. In his office, the sheriff displayed a framed editorial cartoon that showed Daniel Boone admiring his arrest of at least 27 illegal workers.

His approach is increasingly common. Last month, 260 illegal immigrants in Iowa were sentenced to five months in prison for violations of federal identity theft laws.

At the same time, in the last year, local police departments from coast to coast have rounded up hundreds of immigrants for nonviolent, often minor, crimes, like fishing without a license in Georgia, with the end result being deportation.

In some cases, the police received training and a measure of jurisdiction from the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, under a program that lets officers investigate and detain people they suspect to be illegal immigrants.

But with local demand for tougher immigration enforcement growing, 95 departments are waiting to join the 47 in the program. And in a number of places, including Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Iowa, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas, police officers or entire departments are choosing to tackle the issue on their own.

State lawmakers, in response to Congressional inaction on immigration law, are giving local authorities a wider berth. In 2007, 1,562 bills related to illegal immigration were introduced nationwide and 240 were enacted in 46 states, triple the number that passed in 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. A new law in Mississippi makes it a felony for an illegal immigrant to hold a job. In Oklahoma, sheltering or transporting illegal immigrants is also a felony.

It remains unclear how the new laws will be enforced. Yet at the very least, say both advocates and critics, they are likely to lead to more of what occurred here: more local police officers demanding immigrants’ documents; more arrests for identity theft; more accusations of racial profiling; and more movement of immigrants, with some fleeing and others being sent to jail.

“It is a way to address illegal immigration without calling it that,” said Jessica Vaughan, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Immigration Studies, which supports intensified local enforcement. She added, “They don’t just have to sit and wait for Washington.”

Community Complaints

Police officers here in a handful of Gulf Coast counties from Pensacola to Tallahassee said they started hearing complaints about illegal immigrants last year. With the national debate raging and the local economy sagging, many residents began to question whether illegal immigrants were taking Americans’ jobs.

It did not show up in statistics — the unemployment rate in Santa Rosa County was 3.6 percent in 2007, below state and national averages — so the arguments focused in part on unfair competition.

Donna Tucker, executive director of the Santa Rosa County Chamber of Commerce, said illegal immigration “creates havoc within the system” because businesses that used illegal labor often did not pay into workers’ compensation funds and paid workers less.

“Those businesses can survive a lot longer than the ones that are trying to do things right,” Ms. Tucker said.

Some of the frustrations also veered into prejudice.

George S. Collins, an inspector in charge of the illegal trafficking task force in Okaloosa County, said many people wanted to know “why we weren’t going to Wal-Mart and rounding up the Mexicans” — a comment Mr. Collins said was racist and offensive.

Usually though, the complaints were cultural and legal.

Interviews with more than 25 residents and police officers suggest that the views of Harry T. Buckles, 68, a retired Navy corpsman, are common. Outside his home in Gulf Breeze, Mr. Buckles said the main problem with today’s Hispanic immigrants was that they did not assimilate.

Even after hundreds flowed in to rebuild Santa Rosa County, Mr. Buckles said: “They didn’t become part of the community. They didn’t speak the language.”

Echoing the comments of others, he said he became irritated when he heard Spanish at the Winn-Dixie and saw a line of immigrants sending money home at the Western Union. Mr. Buckles said he feared his community would lose its character and become like Miami, with its foreign-born majority and common use of Spanish.

“We see things nationwide and we know that we could be overwhelmed,” he said.

In fact, only about 3 percent of the population of Santa Rosa County is Hispanic, according to census figures compiled in 2006. As a proportion of its population, the Hispanic community here is less than half the size of what is in Omaha or Des Moines — mostly white cities where the Hispanic population is still below the national average.

Santa Rosa is hardly the only place to use a tough approach against a small immigrant population. In Mississippi, where strict laws on false documentation recently passed, only about 1.7 percent of the state’s 2.9 million people were born abroad and more than half of them are in the United States legally, according to estimates from the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which favors tightening restrictions on immigration.

But here, the result is a divide often marked by a lack of in-depth interaction.

On one side are longtime residents like Sheriff Hall, who said immigrant laborers were not involved in fixing his office or home after the hurricanes, and Mr. Buckles, who said his relationship with Hispanics was based mainly on seeing them at stores or construction sites.

On the other side are a smaller number of immigrants and employers who use immigrant labor.

Some of the immigrants are newly arrived, sticking mostly to themselves. But the group also includes Antonio Tejeda, 38, a roofer and naturalized American citizen from Mexico who wears an N.F.L. jersey to church and speaks English with a slight drawl; and Ruben Barragan, 19, one of the workers arrested in one of the La Hacienda restaurant raids who, though illegal, spoke English and called his infant son Eric because he wanted him to have an American name.

When told about such men, Mr. Buckles said perhaps the government could find ways to create exceptions. But he was not convinced they deserved to stay.

“They got here illegally,” Mr. Buckles said. “They broke the law as soon as they came.”

The Raids

The half-dozen officers involved in the Santa Rosa operations did not announce their arrival. They detained 13 workers at Panhandle Growers. At the two branches of La Hacienda the police quietly detained 10 workers without resistance. And at Emerald Coast Interiors, a boat-cushion factory, the police arrested a handful more.

Sheriff Hall said that his department received tips that led him to all the locations he visited and that he was responding to a steep rise in complaints about illegal immigration. He said he had been frustrated a year ago by a lack of response from Immigration and Customs Enforcement. And this time, customs officials said, he did not contact the agency for input before forming a multicounty task force that led to the February operation.

Sheriff Hall said his men were focused on identity theft and did not need special training because “it’s the same thing we do every day.” He insisted that the officers treated everyone fairly. Unlike Bay County officers, who surrounded construction sites last year and arrested immigrants who ran, “we didn’t chase anyone,” he said.

And at many locations witnesses said the police treated all workers equally.

Managers at the restaurants Okki, El Rodeo, China Sea and La Hacienda said police officers checked all employees’ documents, regardless of their ethnicity.

But other business owners, employees and residents said the police focused disproportionately on Hispanics or the foreign born and seemed determined to scare immigrants out of the area. In many cases, employers said, the officers did not even mention identity theft, narrowing their scope to immigrants.

“They were targeting all the places with Hispanic workers,” said Elvin Garcia, 26, a waiter at El Rodeo.

At Red Barn Barbecue, witnesses said that skin color clearly influenced police procedure. When several officers visited and saw no one who was Hispanic in the kitchen, they moved on. “We offered to give them records, and they said, ‘No, it’s not necessary,’ ” said Randy Brochu, whose family owns the business.

Meanwhile, at Emerald Coast Interiors, three employees — one black, one white, one Hispanic — independently said the police did, in fact, chase a handful of Hispanic employees who ran. Three women, they said, were caught in a ditch behind the main building.

Luis Ramirez, the plant’s operations manager, said the officers asked to see documentation only for the workers who fled. “It was racial profiling,” Mr. Ramirez said.

His company has not filed a lawsuit, so his accusations have not been tested. But Florida courts have repeatedly held that flight alone is not enough to justify a suspicion of criminal activity or arrest. In Bay County, officials said they tried to avoid chasing people now because prosecutors have warned that it undermines their cases.

Even without a chase, immigrant advocates say that local efforts to track down illegal immigrants undermine community safety by scaring immigrants from reporting violent crimes.

“It’s a dangerous route to take,” said David Urias, a staff lawyer with the Mexican American Legal Defense Fund, which sued Otero County in New Mexico this year after the police raided Hispanics’ homes for minor violations like an unleashed dog. “What you’re going to see,” Mr. Urias said, “is more people pushed into the shadows.”

The Aftermath

Indeed, three months after the sweeps, nearly everyone agrees that the fabric of this community has changed. Hundreds of Hispanic families, both legal and illegal, seem to have disappeared.

John Davy, a co-owner of Panhandle Growers, said some employers “treated their guys humanely” by helping them flee to other areas. “What we’re victims of is a system that’s broken,” he said.

Many residents said they felt torn between competing loyalties to compassion and the law.

“On one hand, I’m sitting here thinking when Ivan was here, you could not get enough people to do the thing that needed to get done,” said Mrs. Tucker at the Chamber of Commerce. “And these illegal aliens, people welcomed them with open arms because they were working hard, they were helping our community. But from a chamber standpoint, you’re operating on the side of the law. It’s a hard thing.”

In the immigrant community, fears now cloud the most basic routines. Many Hispanics said they avoided being seen or heard speaking Spanish in Wal-Mart, even if they live here legally. Others detailed their habit of meticulously checking their cars’ headlights, blinkers and registration to avoid being pulled over.

The message many Hispanics have taken from the raids is simple. “We’re Mexican — they don’t want us here,” said Erika Barragan, 20, whose husband, Ruben, came here illegally roughly six years ago and was one of 23 people scheduled to be deported after the February raids. She said she would go back to Mexico this summer.

Her husband’s employers, Geronimo Barragan (no relation) and his wife, Guilla, are trying to remain positive.

They are citizens and parents of four American-born children, ages 2 to 16. They have lived in Santa Rosa County for more than a decade, founding a Baptist church here and working 16-hour days, six days a week to build two restaurants known for their affordable food and Christian atmosphere, which extends to a ban on alcohol.

They said the raids came as a shock.

“We love the community, and we always tried to do our best,” Mr. Barragan said.

Mrs. Barragan put it more bluntly. “This,” she said, “is like our promised land.”

The Barragans said they did not know their workers were illegal because they provided Social Security numbers and other information that was required. Like most employers, they asked for nothing more.

They have not publicly opposed the sheriff’s actions, and in their effort to move on, they have distanced themselves from his critics. Mr. Barragan even visited Sheriff Hall at his office to tell him he had no hard feelings and would do everything he could to comply in the future.

And yet, the cost has been significant. Both of the restaurants were closed for more than two months. Only one has recently reopened.

Unable to find people in the area who can cook Mexican food, Mr. Barragan, 41, has been scouring the nation, recruiting in Houston, Chicago and Baton Rouge. He has yet to find all the workers he needs, relying on a handful of new hires with work visas that expire in November. He said he wished that Congress could find a way to bring more foreign workers to America legally.

For Mrs. Barragan, 39, a warm, thin woman with hair to her waist, the consequences have been more personal. On a recent Wednesday night, her church’s prayer service was half-empty. Many of her friends have left. And many of the employees that her family mentored in the ways of America are gone, taken away by the police.

“That’s what had the most effect on our lives,” Mrs. Barragan said, speaking in Spanish so she could be more specific. “Not closing La Hacienda, or ‘we’re not going to make money,’ or ‘how are we going to pay our bills?’ I personally didn’t think about that. It hurt me more to see them there — handcuffed. The way they went out.”

Her husband agreed, explaining between bouts of tears that some of the deported workers’ families had become victims of more violent crime. “One of them has a small daughter and someone robbed their house while he was in jail,” Mr. Barragan said. “Twice.”

**Story Link
**Photo Courtesy of Dan Anderson for The New York Times

With Migrant Workers in Short Supply, a Farmer Looks to Machines, By Joshua Brustein (NYT)

APPLETON, N.Y. — Scores of Jim Bittner’s cherry trees are now just heaps of roots and sticks, piled in his fields here along Route 18. Some of the branches lying on the ground are dotted with small blossoms, the season’s earliest evidence that sweet cherries were on their way. But for Mr. Bittner, having sweet cherries would have meant hiring someone to prune the trees and harvest the fruit, and he was not sure that he could do it this year. So he cut his trees down.

“We always assumed we could find the labor we would need,” said Mr. Bittner, who has managed Singer Farms since 1991. “We’re not making that assumption anymore.”

Mr. Bittner said he was planning to grow blueberries, or tart cherries for use in pies, because those crops could be harvested by machine and did not require migrant workers.

Others managing the fields and dairies of western New York State are starting to make the same calculation. For the last several years, crackdowns on illegal immigrants and the lack of comprehensive immigration reform have increased anxiety among the region’s farmers, many of whom rely on a migrant labor force from Latin America to work their fields. Some have begun making changes in their operations to reduce their reliance on that labor force.

For some, this has meant making temporary adjustments, like putting in less cabbage, or resisting the temptation to put in profitable, labor-intensive crops like asparagus.

It can also mean making fundamental changes that cannot be easily reversed. Mr. Bittner cut down 25 acres of sweet cherry trees, some of which were 30 years old. He also dug up 20 acres of peach trees that were 12 to 15 years old.

In all, he razed more than 10 percent of his fruit orchards this year, a decision that he said was a direct response to the immigration situation. There will be no harvest from the newly cleared fields until at least 2011.

“We don’t take it lightly to make these changes,” Mr. Bittner said.

Other farms are making large capital investments in mechanical systems that will allow them to cut their work force significantly. Fewer farmers are willing to buy neighboring properties, a traditional method of expansion for agricultural businesses.

At least one food-processing company claims that it is already having trouble buying produce in the quantities it needs. Great Lakes Kraut, based in Shortsville, N.Y., which relies heavily on farmers in western New York for the cabbage it ferments to make sauerkraut, has been able to buy only about 80 percent of what it needs this year, according to the company’s vice president, Ben Frega. That will not lead to a shortage of sauerkraut, but Mr. Frega said it did play a role in a 10 percent price increase.

“It’s been more difficult to secure our crops than any year I can remember,” Mr. Frega said.

There are no data on the number of farmers changing crops because of the labor problem. Farmers’ organizations and state officials said that only small numbers of farmers were making major changes and that there was no immediate threat of major disruptions in local agricultural markets.

But experts monitoring New York’s agricultural industry said that the shift away from labor-intensive crops would accelerate if the uncertainty over migrant labor and immigration policies remained unresolved. (On May 20, an attempt by Senator Dianne Feinstein of California to attach a guest worker program to an Iraq spending bill failed.)

“I don’t believe that we are seeing those numbers right yet, but I do think that this is a serious conversation that farmers are having,” said Jessica Chittenden, a spokeswoman for the state’s Department of Agriculture. “One of the things that will change is the fresh market crops that need to be handpicked. They’re fresh, they’re fragile and they need that special personal harvest.”

Last fall, the Farm Credit Associations of New York, which finance farmers in the area, issued a projection, using federal Department of Agriculture data, showing that 800 farms in the state with total sales estimated in excess of $700 million were “highly vulnerable to going out of business or forced to severely cut back their farm operations.”

Farms in New York and elsewhere in the Northeast may be particularly sensitive to the effects of an uncertain labor market. Because of the climate, the proximity to large urban markets and the relatively high cost of land, many farms in the state focus on fresh market vegetables that bring in high price-per-acre yields. Unlike row crops, like corn and soybeans, most fresh produce must be handpicked to avoid bruising.

Dale Hemminger, the owner of Hemdale Farms in Seneca Castle, N.Y., for one, said he was adjusting his planting. Great Lakes Kraut pleaded with him to grow more cabbage, he said, but he declined.

“They begged me and bugged me and bugged me to plant more acres,” Mr. Hemminger said. “I just backed away because I was so unsettled about getting this stuff grown and harvested.”

He cut his cabbage crop by 15 percent this year. What keeps him in the cabbage business at all, he said, are technological advances that have allowed him to cut his labor force significantly.

His farm includes a 700-cow dairy, which is undergoing a bigger change to reduce its need for workers. Mr. Hemminger recently bought four robotic milkers, each of which can milk 70 cows a day. He had been considering the move for years, but the cost had scared him away — the total investment was $1.2 million to $1.4 million.

But the transition to the robotic system, with lasers guiding the machines to the teats and computers keeping track of when each cow is milked, has been smooth, and Mr. Hemminger said he was thinking about adding machines next year.

For Mr. Hemminger, farmers’ labor troubles have been a generation in the making. The labor force that worked for his father when he started farming on his return from World War II dried up long ago, he said. He found that fewer and fewer local people would work the odd and dirty hours that these jobs required.

The last local milker, a single mother, left in 2005 to take a lower-paying job at a factory because she could not find a baby sitter willing to arrive at 5 o’clock in the morning.

The shift toward Hispanic immigrants has been gradual and tacitly accepted, Mr. Hemminger said, adding that it was frustrating to watch those workers, who have become mainstays for his industry, being pulled away.

“It’s not like we said one day, ‘Hey, let’s hire all these Mexicans,’” he said.

Farmers near the Canadian border say they and their workers are facing increasing scrutiny by federal immigration agencies. Last summer, Mr. Bittner said, he set up a workshop for his employees at which the director of the Cornell Farmworker Program answered their legal questions. There were about 20 immigrants working on the farm at the time, he said; 60 people showed up for the session.

**Story Link
**Photo Courtesy of James Rajotte for The New York Times

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

American Apparel: Recently Published Ad in The New York Times

"America's immigration system is outdated, unsuited to the needs of our economy and to the values of our country. We should not be content with laws that punish hardworking people who want only to provide for their families, and deny businesses willing workers, and invite chaos at our border." - President George Bush, State of the Union Address, February 5, 2005

At American Apparel, we agreed with the President's call for immigration reform, so why has nothing been done for the last three years?

It's time to give a voice to the voiceless. Businesses are afraid to speak to the media about immigration, frightened of reprisals by government agencies. But we cannot just sit in the shadows and watch the government and politicians exploit and misrepresent this matter to advance their own careers.

Over 12 million human beings have become integral to our society, economy and culture here in the USA, yet they do so in legal purgatory. While no serious political voice calls to send them back to their previous home countries, very few have the courage to admit that the only realistic option is some form of legal integration, coupled with a legitimate, forward-thinking immigration policy.

Migration and economic experts generally agree that the productivity and hard work of immigrants improves the economy, makes goods more affordable and available to US citizens, and created more jobs for US workers. Immigrants not only increase the wealth of the nation, they have contributed significantly to major scientific, medical and industrial advancements, as well as to the arts. Many of them have become great entrepreneurs too.

At what point are we going to recognize that the status quo amounts to an apartheid system? At what point will America stop living in a state of denial?

At American Apparel we support our workers. We support our community. We support Los Angeles. We support the pride of America and the American Dream.

Enough is enough.

It's time to Legalize LA, and Legalize the USA.

A Global Trek to Poor Nations, From Poorer Ones, By (NYT)

JUAN GÓMEZ, Dominican Republic — The scrap-wood shanties on a muddy hillside are a poor man’s promised land.

They have leaky roofs and dirt floors, with no lights or running water. But hundreds of Haitian migrants have risked their lives to come here and work the surrounding fields, and they are part of a global trend: migrants who move to poor countries from even poorer ones.

Among them is Anes Moises, 45, a dark-skinned man with flecks of gray hair, who has worked the Dominican banana fields for more than a decade, always illegally. Farm bosses pay him $5 a day and tell him that Haitians stink. Soldiers have called him a dark-skinned “devil” and deported him four times.

Still, with the average income in the Dominican Republic six times as much as in Haiti, Mr. Moises has answered each expulsion by hiring a smuggler to bribe the border guards and guide him back in.

“We are forced to come back here — not because we like it, but because we are poor,” he said. “When we cross the border, we are a little better off. We are able to buy shoes and maybe a chicken.”

Across the developing world, migrants move to other poor countries nearly as often as they move to rich ones. Yet their numbers and hardships are often overlooked.

They typically start poorer than migrants to rich countries, earn less money and are more likely to travel illegally, which raises the odds of abuse. They usually move to countries that offer migrants less legal protection and fewer services than wealthy nations do. Yet their earnings help sustain some of the poorest people on the globe.

There are 74 million “south to south” migrants, according to the World Bank, which uses the term to describe anyone moving from one developing country to another, regardless of geography. The bank estimates that they send home $18 billion to $55 billion a year. (The bank also estimates that 82 million migrants have moved “south to north,” or from poor countries to rich ones.)

Nicaraguans build Costa Rican buildings. Paraguayans pick Argentine crops. Nepalis dig Indian mines. Indonesians clean Malaysian homes. Farm hands from Burkina Faso tend the fields in Ivory Coast. Some save for more expensive journeys north, while others find the move from one poor land to another all they will ever afford. With rich countries tightening their borders, migration within the developing world is likely to grow.

“South to south migration is not only huge, it reaches a different class of people,” said Patricia Weiss Fagen, a researcher at Georgetown University. “These are very, very poor people sending money to even poorer people and they often reach very rural areas where most remittances don’t go.”

The Haitian migration to the Dominican Republic, its neighbor on the island of Hispaniola, has been large, longstanding and filled with strife. The Spanish-speaking Dominicans still refer angrily to a Haitian occupation that ended in 1844. The Creole-speaking Haitians point to 1937, when a Dominican massacre along the border is estimated to have taken the lives of tens of thousands of Haitians.

Haitian workers started coming in large numbers nearly a century ago, as seasonal help in sugar cane fields. But many now work year-round on farms or urban construction sites, which raises their visibility and the chance for conflict. Estimates vary greatly, but Dominican officials put Haitian migrants at one million, or 11 percent of the population.

As Haitians see it, the problems go beyond hard work and low pay to the systemic violation of their rights. Dominicans profit from their labor, they say, but deny them work papers, deport them at will and discriminate on the belief that Haitians have darker skin.

“There is no justice here,” Mr. Moises said.

Dominicans often present themselves as generous neighbors of limited means, forced to bear the burden of Haiti’s failed state, indigence and epidemic disease. They say they offer Haitians jobs and health care — 30 percent of the public health budget is spent on Haitians, government officials say — while enduring lectures about human rights from countries far from the fray.

“Ay-yai-yai-yai,” said Gen. Adriano Silverio Rodríguez, the commander of a new border force, when describing how Americans would respond if they shared a border with a country as troubled as Haiti. “That wall they’re building — it would be longer and taller.”

Per capita income in the Dominican Republic is $2,850; in Haiti it is $480.

The clash of civilizations can be seen along the Massacre River, a muddy, waist-deep waterway that divides them. On the Dominican side, Dajabón is a market town of 10,000 people, with paved streets, public utilities and a new Internet cafe. Its Haitian counterpart, Ouanaminthe, is seven or eight times as big, with no municipal lights or running water. The dirt roads are filled with trash and pigs.

Twice a week, Dominicans open the bridge, and thousands of Haitians rush across to buy goods that are scarce on their side: eggs, nails, flour, concrete, carrots, salami, juice, cooking oil, chickens and plastic chairs. Guards patrol the area, trying to ensure the Haitians’ return.

Bribery and violence are common. In a case now before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, Dominican soldiers are accused of indiscriminately firing on a smuggler’s truck, killing six Haitians. Two dozen Haitians in a smuggler’s truck suffocated last year. Their bodies were dumped on the road.

Unwritten Rules

The village of Juan Gómez lies 35 miles east of the border, past three military checkpoints that search for illegal migrants. But its illegal migrants, like Mr. Moises, live in plain view. Their open presence points to the capricious unwritten rules: Haitians caught at the border are usually sent back, while those needed by employers are often left to stay, at least until someone objects.

“We do not intervene in the workplace,” said Carlos Amarante Baret, the Dominican immigration director. “We understand the needs of the agricultural sector.” He acknowledged that the situation “benefits the landowner.”

Gathered here at a small hilltop church squeezed among the shanties, the workers talked of the hardships they had fled and those they had encountered. Jacqueline Bayard said the threat of deportation left the workers powerless. Katline Auguste said the lack of legal papers had kept her from visiting her children in Haiti for three years.

Lorvil Seus said he lived in fear of vigilante violence, as in a famed incident in nearby Hatillo Palma, in which a Haitian pastor was killed — and 2,000 Haitians deported — after the murder of a Dominican woman. Reprisal killings spread, and three Haitians were burned to death near the capital, Santo Domingo.

Mr. Moises voiced gratitude as well as complaints, explaining that he had once walked from Haiti with his malarial daughter in his arms, and Dominican doctors had saved her. “We can only thank them because they helped us,” he said.

Dominican society, in his view, is complex. Some politicians want Haitians deported, he said, but employers “need us to work.” Poor Dominicans claim Haitians are stealing jobs, but refuse those jobs themselves. Officers sometimes order raids to curry political favor, he added, but low-paid soldiers want the Haitians around to extort bribes. “It’s a business they have,” he said.

“We are living in their country,” he said. “We have to take it.”

Colliding Interests

Dominican officials often say that the colliding interests that surround immigration are similar to those in the United States, but that poor countries like theirs have fewer resources to cope. Carlos Morales Troncoso, the Dominican foreign minister, said that the solution to the Haitians’ problems was to promote development in Haiti and urged the United States to do more. “The developed countries talk a lot about Haiti, but the necessary aid just doesn’t come,” he said. By providing jobs, he said, “we do more than the whole international community combined.”

Some south to south migrants are “pushed” by wars and political crises. Others are “pulled” by jobs and better wages. Some follow seasonal work. Some put down roots. Some countries — Argentina is one — have been quick to give amnesty to migrants. Others, including Nigeria and Indonesia, have subjected them to mass deportations.

Many countries simultaneously send and receive large migrations. One reason there are jobs for Haitians is that so many Dominicans have left for the United States. The president, Leonel Fernández, was largely reared in New York City.

That exposes what Dilip Ratha, an economist at the World Bank, calls a common double standard. “Many countries want good treatment for their own people abroad but they don’t treat immigrants well themselves,” he said.

Egyptian police officers killed 26 Sudanese migrants last year in an attack on their squatter camp. An Indian film star, Hritik Roshan, set off a deadly riot in Katmandu, Nepal, in 2000 when he was quoted as saying he “hated” the Nepalis. Costa Ricans sometimes deride Nicaraguans as “Nicas.” In 2005, two Rottweilers killed a Nicaraguan suspected of being a burglar, as an approving crowd watched. Jokes flooded the country, praising the dogs.

Still, Manuel Orozco of Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington research group, warned against viewing south to south migration solely in a negative light. He estimates that Haitians in the Dominican Republic send home $135 million a year.

“Destination countries benefit from foreign labor,” Mr. Orozco said, while migrants get jobs. The challenge, he said, is to create policies that “promote development for both countries, while protecting migrants and their families.”

“Just letting migration happen is not good enough,” he added.

The Dominican Republic has no such framework. This year alone, the conditions of its Haitians have been the focus of two documentary films, a photo exhibit in Paris and a United Nations investigation that found “a profound and entrenched problem of racism.”

Who Is a Citizen?

One battle now playing out involves the right to citizenship, which the Dominican Constitution promises to anyone born on Dominican soil except the children of diplomats and visitors “in transit.” But in 2005 the Supreme Court ruled that illegal immigrants were essentially in transit — though some lived in the country for decades — and therefore their children had no citizenship rights.

Critics say that the ruling conflicts with international law, including a decision by the Inter-American Court of Human Rights two months earlier. They also said the government was using it to deny papers to Dominicans of Haitian descent, impeding their ability to work, study and vote.

Nationalists are trying to get the anti-citizenship provisions written into the Constitution.

“We could have hundreds of thousands of so-called Dominican nationals who on cultural, emotional and political grounds would see themselves as Haitian,” said Pelegrín Castillo, a leading nationalist legislator.

“Every day there are more Haitians in the Dominican Republic,” he added. “We are overwhelmed.”

For many Haitians, the journey ends where it began — in the muddy border town of Ouanaminthe, which receives scores of deported migrants each week. Most arrive penniless. Some sleep in City Hall.

Wesbert Sertil, 27, was among the unfortunates. Tired of hearing his in-laws complain that he could not feed his children, he borrowed $50 a year ago and boarded a smuggler’s truck. But the construction work he found was sporadic, and he sent money home just twice, totaling $90.

He was leaving work one day when military men asked for his papers. After a few days in a border-town jail, he was sleeping in abandoned houses, and asking a religious group for food.

His village was an eight-hour bus ride away, and the family that had urged him to go was unaware of his pending return. Smugglers approached him on the streets, but Mr. Sertil planned to use any money he could scrounge to buy a ticket home. “I got desperate and went to the Dominican Republic,” he said. “I’m not going back again.”

He noted that there were plenty of Haitians willing to take his place.

**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Richard Perry (NYT): "Dajabón, a Dominican border town, opens its gated bridge twice a week to allow Haitians to buy goods unavailable in their country."