An attempt to force the FBI and immigration officials to clear a huge backlog of citizenship applications by legal residents in time for election day was rejected yesterday by a federal judge.
Southern District Judge Lawrence M. McKenna refused to grant a preliminary injunction sought by the Puerto Rican Legal Defense and Education Fund and the New York Legal Assistance Group.
In an action that claimed the FBI takes far too long to process the name checks that are a prerequisite to full citizenship, the groups also sought to certify two classes of tens of thousands of legal residents who want to vote in November.
Announcing his decision dismissing all claims from the bench, Judge McKenna said that Congress requires the FBI to conduct a full criminal background check for each applicant for citizenship but, "[i]t does not require it to do so in some specific period of time."
In Milanes v. Chertoff, 08 Civ. 2354, the plaintiffs said delays of up to two to three years impose other hardships on legal residents in addition to preventing them from voting, including leaving them ineligible for important benefits and jobs and restrictions on travel.
Cesar A. Perales, the president and general counsel of the Legal Defense and Education Fund, said after the decision that the loss was a tough one. But he also said the groups would continue to press their case with an appeal as he praised the name plaintiffs in the case for their courage.
"Our clients were told by many of their friends not to bring this action because it would make it less possible for them to become citizens themselves," Mr. Perales said. "We are very, very disappointed with the decision today, but we still believe we have a very good case."
Milanes was brought under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Immigration and Nationality Act (INA) as well as the Constitution's Due Process Clause.
The groups claimed a general failure to process the applications within a reasonable time in violation of the APA 5 U.S.C. §555(b). Under the INA §336(b), they claimed, the government was failing to process their applications within 120 days of their initial examination.
The FBI is required to conduct a background check on every applicant for citizenship and until the bureau checks fingerprints and a database for an administrative or criminal record, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Service (USCIS) will not schedule an examination of the applicant.
The plaintiffs sought to certify two classes. The first was for all permanent residents who have submitted or will submit applications for naturalization with the Citizenship and Immigration Service's New York office and whose applications have not been or will not be adjudicated within 180 days. The second was a subclass of people who have not been or will not be adjudicated within 120 days of their initial examination.
In all, the plaintiffs submitted five claims for relief and Judge McKenna rejected each one.
The government had argued in its motion to dismiss that Congress has plenary power in this area and has chosen not to impose the sixth-month deadline sought by the plaintiffs.
It would be one thing if the plaintiffs were suing to compel "discrete agency action," the government said, but instead they were seeking "a programmatic revision of USCIS's practices with respect to the statutory requirement that USCIS undertake a 'full criminal background check' and a 'personal investigation' of all naturalization applicants."
Judge McKenna agreed yesterday, saying, "The only agency action that can be compelled is action legally required."
The judge said the statutory requirement of a background check takes precedence over the regulation setting a time frame for processing applications.
Assistant U.S. Attorneys Robert William Yalen, Tomoko Onozawa and Kirti Vaidya Reddy said in their papers that the agency does not have a duty to act on applications before an FBI name check and "the FBI does not owe any duty to individuals whose name check it is running."
The government also argued that the plaintiffs' due process claim should be dismissed because "no constitutional liberty or property interest of plaintiffs has been denied."
Jane Greengold Stevens, the director of the Legal Assistance Group's special litigation unit, held out hope for an appeal to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit after yesterday's ruling.
"This decision is based on a technical legal issue that doesn't speak to the suffering" of people who have been waiting to become citizens, Ms. Stevens said. "The one thing in our favor is that [Judge McKenna] believes there is grounds for certifying a class" if the plaintiffs win on appeal.
Richard Slack, a partner at Weil Gotshal & Manges who worked on the case pro bono, said his firm was approached by the Legal Assistance Group and asked to offer its services.
He said the firm agreed to work on the case because "we learned that large numbers of legal immigrants . . . had been waiting, in some cases, for years" to have their applications processed.
**Story Link
Showing posts with label state policy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label state policy. Show all posts
8/8/08
7/28/08
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."
7/25/08
AG now says college OK for illegals, by Kristin Collins (New Observer)
The state Attorney General's Office says it's legal for the N.C. Community College System to admit illegal immigrants.
That advice, given to the colleges Thursday and made public today, represents a reversal for the office of Attorney General Roy Cooper, which advised the colleges in May to bar illegal immigrants from degree programs. The colleges took that advice and issued a new policy prohibiting illegal immigrants from enrolling, even at out-of-state tuition rates. Cooper's office said at the time that post-secondary education might qualify as a public benefit to which illegal immigrants are not entitled under federal law.
But on Monday, Cooper's office got a letter from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in response to a request for clarification of the law. The letter, from former Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph, who now works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that admission to colleges is not considered a public benefit under federal law.
Federal officials made the same statement to the News & Observer in May, but officials with the community colleges and the Attorney General's Office said they wanted to wait for a formal letter.
J.B. Kelly, general counsel, advised the colleges in a letter Thursday that it is up to them to decide whether to admit illegal immigrants.
Community College System President Scott Ralls was not immediately available for comment on whether he would lift the ban on illegal immigrants.
**Story Link
That advice, given to the colleges Thursday and made public today, represents a reversal for the office of Attorney General Roy Cooper, which advised the colleges in May to bar illegal immigrants from degree programs. The colleges took that advice and issued a new policy prohibiting illegal immigrants from enrolling, even at out-of-state tuition rates. Cooper's office said at the time that post-secondary education might qualify as a public benefit to which illegal immigrants are not entitled under federal law.
But on Monday, Cooper's office got a letter from federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement, in response to a request for clarification of the law. The letter, from former Mecklenburg County Sheriff Jim Pendergraph, who now works for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that admission to colleges is not considered a public benefit under federal law.
Federal officials made the same statement to the News & Observer in May, but officials with the community colleges and the Attorney General's Office said they wanted to wait for a formal letter.
J.B. Kelly, general counsel, advised the colleges in a letter Thursday that it is up to them to decide whether to admit illegal immigrants.
Community College System President Scott Ralls was not immediately available for comment on whether he would lift the ban on illegal immigrants.
**Story Link
7/14/08
A Hispanic Population in Decline, By Nick Miroff (WP)
The family that planted corn in the front yard of their $500,000 home is gone from Carrie Oliver's street. So are the neighbors who drilled holes into the trees to string up a hammock.
Oliver's list goes on: The loud music. The beer bottles. The littered diapers. All gone. When she and her husband, Ron, went for walks in their Manassas area neighborhood, she would take a trash bag and he would carry a handgun. No more. "So much has changed," she said in a gush of relief, standing with her husband on a warm summer evening recently outside a Costco store.
A short distance away, across the river of retail commerce that is Sudley Road, Norman Gonzalez spoke of change not as renewal, but as a kind of collapse.
Business at his restaurant, Cuna del Sol, has declined 50 percent. Worse still, his extended family's slow, steady relocation from the Guatemalan town of Jutiapa to the bustling Prince William suburbs has imploded. "A year ago, I had the biggest family in all of Manassas, maybe 100 relatives," he said.
Now, Gonzalez, a legal U.S. resident, has his own list: Langley Park, Chantilly, Fairfax City. That is where his brothers have scattered, and they will not visit him. "There's too much fear here," Gonzalez said.
Since the day one year ago when Prince William County supervisors launched their crackdown on illegal immigration, the gulf between the Olivers' relief and Gonzalez's dejection has narrowed little, and possibly widened.
At least there is one thing partisans on both sides agree on: Hispanic immigrants are leaving Prince William. Whether their departure has improved the county's quality of life, or pushed its already strained economy further downward, is the new topic of contention driven largely by views of whether the presence of immigrants was a good thing in the first place.
Anecdotes of the trend outstrip hard statistical evidence, yet there are clear signs that the county's Latino population has reversed its pace of rapid growth. County officials said there are 4,000 to 7,000 vacant homes in the county. Trustee notices fill the classified section of area newspapers, chronicling the steady, staggering forfeiture of properties by homeowners with Hispanic surnames such as Mendez, Lozano, Medina and Rodriguez.
Last month, there were 776 foreclosure recordings in the Prince William County, Manassas, Manassas Park area, court records show, up from 244 in June 2007 and 19 in June 2006.
Would those homeowners have been foreclosed upon anyway, for economic reasons having nothing to do with the county's illegal immigration policies? That, too, is disputed.
"You can't attribute all of what might be negative about the economy in Prince William County to the crackdown," said economist Stephen Fuller, director of George Mason University's Center for Regional Analysis. "But it certainly hasn't helped. Neighborhoods that have been weakened because of migration of the Hispanic community out of the county have economic consequences that show up as decreases in retail spending, rental income and potential decreases in the valuation of some housing."
That decrease -- home prices in some areas have fallen by half -- is well worth the improvement in quality of life, according to the most ardent supporters of the county's get-tough approach.
"We have far less residential overcrowding, and that was driving people crazy," said Greg Letiecq, a blogger and president of Help Save Manassas. He helped write the county's policy and has been its most vocal champion. "We'd much rather live next door to a vacant house," he said, speaking for his members at a recent Help Save Manassas meeting.
"With an empty house, there's hope that the house is going to have somebody move into it that's going to be a good neighbor, rather than an overcrowded house that is a neighbor from hell," Letiecq said, adding that his Manassas area home has dropped $100,000 in value in the past year.
The numbers suggest that tensions over crowding have subsided: Complaints about residential overcrowding dropped to 30 last month from 79 in July 2007, according to the county's Neighborhood Services Division.
While some Hispanic immigrants have walked away from their homes, others have left the county in the custody of federal agents. County jail officials have turned over 757 illegal immigrant inmates to Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers in the past year through an agreement that county supervisors approved as part of the crackdown.
Police have referred more than 300 additional suspects to the immigration and customs branch since March, when the county's patrol officers began screening for residency status.
Catching illegal immigrants has made Prince William safer, said Corey A. Stewart (R-At-Large), chairman of the board of county supervisors said. Stewart also said the county's policies have led to "a plummeting of the crime rate." Police statistics show that the county's crime rate has been declining since 2004, even as the population increased.
More importantly, Stewart said, Prince William has become a model for other jurisdictions hoping to act against illegal immigration. "We've started a wildfire in terms of other localities and states adopting similar tactics," said Stewart, who discussed the county's immigration enforcement success Tuesday with the House Republican Policy Committee on Capitol Hill.
While critics say ethnic tensions in Prince William have worsened in the past year, Stewart said he believes the debate over illegal immigration has empowered residents to speak up after "stewing" in frustration for years. "It's allowed people to discuss their feelings," Stewart said, citing a new level of public interest in local government. The board's chambers have been packed with hundreds of residents on several occasions over the past year.
"It's better for people to feel free to speak out about something they care about rather than holding it inside, and in that sense, the controversy has been good for the county as well as the country," Steward said.
Paying for the crackdown has been an ongoing source of tension, and supporters have long maintained that the county would save money through a decreased need for English classes for students who speak another language at home. After years of steady increases, the percentage of students enrolled in English as a Second Language classes appears to have peaked.
In September, the number of students with limited English proficiency, not all of whom were Hispanic, was a record 13,404 in the county school system. By the end of the school year, the total had fallen 4.7 percent, to 12,775.
Then there are the many smaller, symbolic signs that the county has changed in the past year. Rodeo-themed Latino festivals at the county fairgrounds, once a summer staple, have been canceled without explanation by organizers. The El Primero Mercado supermarket on Centreville Road is now a Shoppers International store. And several county services, including drug-treatment programs and in-home care for seniors, now require proof of citizenship.
Starting this month, for example, a county-funded house-cleaning service for the elderly will make sure all recipients are legal U.S. residents.
Such restrictions may not keep illegal immigrants out of Prince William if the steep decline in housing prices eventually lures legal and illegal immigrants back to the county. And advocates said Latinos have learned "clear political lessons" in the past year.
"The community has learned that votes matter," said Mauricio Vivero, director of the Ayuda Business Coalition, which has lobbied legislators and has run commercials on CNN warning other municipalities of the economic consequences in following Prince William's lead.
Vivero said that fewer than half of the Latinos in Prince William who were registered to vote in 2004 did so. In November, he predicted, "there will be a much bigger turnout in Northern Virginia, and [Prince William's crackdown] has helped push it."
**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of By Carol Guzy (WP): "At a meeting last year, immigrants ask questions about the crackdown. Since then, the Latino population has declined and foreclosures are up."
7/1/08
Immigrant groups launching countrywide push to sign up voters, By By Antonio Olivo and Deborah Horan (Chicago Tribune
In a sustained push to win greater influence during the next presidential administration, immigrant groups across the country are launching a major door-knocking campaign to register hundreds of thousands of new voters.
The local effort is scheduled to begin Saturday at Foreman High School on the West Side, where organizers also will help immigrants fill out U.S. citizenship applications, while volunteers from 14 states kick off a six-day "boot camp" in Chicago geared toward getting out the vote in the fall.
That will coalesce with the work of more than 300 unions, churches and grass-roots organizations that plan to register new voters over the next several months, under a national Campaign for Community Values advocating Immigration reform, better health care and workers' rights, organizers said.
With voter turnout at record levels, a strong immigrant showing could help re-energize federal discussions about legalization, school funding, neighborhood safety and other issues, said Juan Salgado, president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which is helping coordinate the effort.
"The level of participation is going to be important to determine what gets done and when," Salgado said. Advocates are pushing federal Immigration officials to clear a backlog of some 900,000 U.S. citizenship applications, fearing they may not be processed in time for those immigrants to vote in November. Prompted by the Immigration debate and an impending increase in application fees that has since been implemented, a record 3 million citizenship applications were filed last year.
Since October, nearly 1,900 lawsuits have been filed on behalf of immigrants whose applications have been held up, according to federal statistics.
Esperanza Vargas, 71, is worried her application won't go through in time for her to vote. The Little Village resident who arrived from Mexico 49 years ago said she was inspired to become a citizen and vote by the Immigration marches in Chicago.
"I saw so many undocumented people not allowed to work who have families to feed," Vargas said.
A coalition of unions, immigrant advocacy groups and other organizations called the We Are America Alliance has registered about 120,000 new voters since February, most of them immigrants, said Marissa Graciosa, a spokeswoman.
In 2004, 52.1 percent of all eligible Latino immigrants cast a ballot, compared with 49.6 percent during the 2000 election, a report this year by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials showed. For non-Latino immigrants, the turnout increased to 54.3 percent in 2004 from 51 percent four years earlier.
At Foreman High on Saturday, Venezuelan immigrants Maria Martinez and her father, Ernesto, plan to encourage others to make their voices heard. After she turns 18 in October, Maria Martinez, who became a U.S. citizen this year, will be eligible to vote. Ernesto Martinez, 45, became a citizen in 2005 after nine years in the country.
During the primary elections in their Northwest Side apartment, they found themselves arguing policy in front of the TV, bonding in the process. "I love this election!" Maria Martinez said. "The fact that all my friends are into this has kept me so energized."
**Story Link
The local effort is scheduled to begin Saturday at Foreman High School on the West Side, where organizers also will help immigrants fill out U.S. citizenship applications, while volunteers from 14 states kick off a six-day "boot camp" in Chicago geared toward getting out the vote in the fall.
That will coalesce with the work of more than 300 unions, churches and grass-roots organizations that plan to register new voters over the next several months, under a national Campaign for Community Values advocating Immigration reform, better health care and workers' rights, organizers said.
With voter turnout at record levels, a strong immigrant showing could help re-energize federal discussions about legalization, school funding, neighborhood safety and other issues, said Juan Salgado, president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, which is helping coordinate the effort.
"The level of participation is going to be important to determine what gets done and when," Salgado said. Advocates are pushing federal Immigration officials to clear a backlog of some 900,000 U.S. citizenship applications, fearing they may not be processed in time for those immigrants to vote in November. Prompted by the Immigration debate and an impending increase in application fees that has since been implemented, a record 3 million citizenship applications were filed last year.
Since October, nearly 1,900 lawsuits have been filed on behalf of immigrants whose applications have been held up, according to federal statistics.
Esperanza Vargas, 71, is worried her application won't go through in time for her to vote. The Little Village resident who arrived from Mexico 49 years ago said she was inspired to become a citizen and vote by the Immigration marches in Chicago.
"I saw so many undocumented people not allowed to work who have families to feed," Vargas said.
A coalition of unions, immigrant advocacy groups and other organizations called the We Are America Alliance has registered about 120,000 new voters since February, most of them immigrants, said Marissa Graciosa, a spokeswoman.
In 2004, 52.1 percent of all eligible Latino immigrants cast a ballot, compared with 49.6 percent during the 2000 election, a report this year by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials showed. For non-Latino immigrants, the turnout increased to 54.3 percent in 2004 from 51 percent four years earlier.
At Foreman High on Saturday, Venezuelan immigrants Maria Martinez and her father, Ernesto, plan to encourage others to make their voices heard. After she turns 18 in October, Maria Martinez, who became a U.S. citizen this year, will be eligible to vote. Ernesto Martinez, 45, became a citizen in 2005 after nine years in the country.
During the primary elections in their Northwest Side apartment, they found themselves arguing policy in front of the TV, bonding in the process. "I love this election!" Maria Martinez said. "The fact that all my friends are into this has kept me so energized."
**Story Link
6/16/08
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
6/9/08
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
1/18/08
Facing Deportation but Clinging to Life in U.S., By Julia Preston (NYT)
WAUKEGAN, Ill. — She is a homeowner, a taxpayer, a friendly neighbor and an American citizen. Yet because she is married to an illegal immigrant, these days she feels like a fugitive.
Whenever her Mexican husband ventures out of the house, “it makes me sick to my stomach,” said the woman, who insisted on being identified only by a first name and last initial, Miriam M.
“I’m like, ‘Oh, my God, he took too long,’ ” she said. “I’ll start calling. I go into panic.”
Over the last year, thousands of illegal immigrants and their families who live here have retreated from community life in Waukegan, a microcosm of a growing underground of illegal immigrants across the country who are clinging to homes and jobs despite the pressure of tougher federal and local enforcement.
From Illinois to Georgia to Arizona, these families are hiding in plain sight, to avoid being detected by immigration agents and deported. They do their shopping in towns distant from home, avoid parties and do not take vacations. They stay away from ethnic stores, forgo doctor’s visits and meetings at their children’s schools, and postpone girls’ normally lavish quinceañeras, or 15th birthday parties.
They avoid the police, even hesitating to report crimes.
“When we leave in the morning we know we are going to work,” said Elena G., a 47-year-old illegal Mexican immigrant and Waukegan resident of eight years who works in a factory near here. “ But we don’t know if we will be coming home.”
Last year, federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents arrested more than 35,000 illegal immigrants, including unauthorized workers and immigration fugitives, more than double the number in 2006. They sent 276,912 immigrants back to their home countries, a record number.
Since about three-quarters of an estimated 11.3 million illegal immigrants nationwide are from Latin America, and many have spouses, children or other relatives who are legal immigrants and citizens, the sense of alarm has spread broadly among Hispanics.
A survey by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research group in Washington, found in December that 53 percent of Hispanics in the United States worry that they or a loved one could be deported.
Stores catering to Hispanic immigrants in places like Atlanta and Cincinnati have closed because of the drop in customers. Michael L. Barrera, president of the United States Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said anecdotal reports had indicated that small storefront businesses had been the hardest hit by a sharp decline in spending by immigrants.
“The raids have really spooked them in a big way,” said Douglas S. Massey, a Princeton demographer who has studied Mexican immigrants for three decades.
Based on his own surveys and recent reports from other scholars doing field research in the Southwest and in North Carolina and other states, Professor Massey said the “palpable sense of fear and of traumatization” in immigrant communities was more intense than at any other time since the mass deportations of Mexican farm workers in 1954.
Federal immigration officials say that stepped-up enforcement over the last year by the Bush administration and some local authorities has persuaded growing numbers of illegal immigrants to return home. But in places like Waukegan, a racially mixed middle-class suburb north of Chicago, most have chosen to stay, held by families and jobs.
This city has been an immigrant landing for generations. Latinos have been coming since the 1960s and now are 40 percent of the population of 91,000. The number of illegal immigrants among them swelled in the last decade.
Despite their illegal status, those immigrants found steady jobs in factories and landscaping. Lacking Social Security numbers, they used Internal Revenue Service taxpayer numbers to open stores and businesses, enroll in the community college and take out bank loans to buy cars and homes.
The welcome began to fade four years ago, when the city government increased fines and penalties for driving without a license. Since Illinois requires a valid Social Security number for a license, many illegal immigrants lost their cars when they could not afford the fees for impounded vehicles.
Last summer the City Council voted to enter an agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency, to train Waukegan police officers to initiate deportations of immigrants who were convicted felons. While city officials insisted the officers would handle only cases of imprisoned criminals, rumors spread that the traffic police would check the immigration status of anyone they stopped.
Also, in recent months federal immigration agents conducted two big raids nearby.
“People came to me and said, ‘Father, when did we become the enemy?’ ” said the Rev. Gary M. Graf, a Roman Catholic priest whose Waukegan parish includes many Latino immigrants.
City officials said that the tougher traffic ordinances were not intended to single out illegal immigrants or Hispanics, but to reduce accidents with uninsured drivers.
“The only reason we did it was for safety,” Mayor Richard H. Hyde said. “We don’t want anybody on the road that doesn’t have a license.”
Nonetheless, for many residents fear has become a daily companion. One woman, a 37-year-old naturalized citizen who was born in Central America but grew up in Waukegan, has decided to stay away from the city even though her mother still lives here. The woman, a lawyer practicing in the Chicago area, fell in love with an illegal immigrant from Guatemala.
After they were married in 2004, she realized that under immigration law it would be difficult for him to become legal, even though she is a citizen. Because he had crossed the border illegally, seeking legal status would require him to return to Guatemala for years of separation, with no guarantee of success. She abandoned plans to move back to Waukegan. She and her husband feel safer in Chicago, with its large Hispanic population.
“I know everything about Waukegan; it’s my town,” said the woman, who asked to remain anonymous because of her husband’s status. “I know the high school, the first Mexican restaurant. I should feel free to go in and out whenever I want to. But it’s not the same freedom anymore.”
Raimundo V., 30, an illegal Mexican immigrant who has lived here for 13 years, said he canceled repairs on his home, which he owns, stopped buying in local stores, and was trying to save as much money as he could in case he should be arrested and deported.
“My expectation here is to be prepared for anything that comes,” Raimundo said.
Miriam M. and her husband, married in 2004, own a tidy house on a peaceful street and are raising four children from previous marriages, all United States citizens. He runs his own landscaping company, paying business and property taxes.
Even though Miriam M. is a citizen, it is difficult for her husband to obtain legal papers, since he entered illegally from Mexico 12 years ago. She did not focus on her husband’s illegal status when she first met him.
“Boyfriend and girlfriend, you don’t think much about it,” she said. “All right, maybe I didn’t want to think much about it.”
Now he stays close to home and avoids downtown Waukegan, driving around the city limits when he can.
Another immigrant, L. Gómez, 36, a Colombian recently on her way to becoming legal, said she had gone to the police and the courts in years past for protection from a violent husband. Since the crackdown, she said, she has avoided the authorities, even when her husband threatened her.
Hispanic business owners in Waukegan complain of a sales slump that they said went beyond the effects of a sluggish national economy.
“People are turning away from Waukegan business and going elsewhere to invest or to buy,” said Porfirio García, a Mexican-American who is president of Exit/Re-Gar Realty, a real estate brokerage firm.
At the Belvidere Mall, which caters to Hispanic customers, María Sotelo, a legal Mexican immigrant, said she was closing her store there after 17 years because her sales dropped in the last six months to $500 a week from $5,000. She sold satin and voile dresses for quinceañera parties and T-shirts from Mexican soccer teams.
“Since it all started with immigration, people don’t come here anymore,” Ms. Sotelo said.
Mr. Hyde and other city officials said they expected to wait several years before Congress adopted new laws to control illegal immigration. Meanwhile, the mayor said, he will do what he can by enforcing local law.
“Do I believe in closing the borders?” Mr. Hyde said. “Do I believe in putting troops down there? You bet your life. Illegal is illegal, and that’s the end of the conversation, really.”
**Story Link
**Photo Courtesy of Sally Ryan for The New York Times
1/2/08
For Republicans, Contest's Hallmark Is Immigration, By Jonathan Weisman (WP)
The imagery of the mailings is designed to pack a wallop: a Mexican flag fluttering above the Stars and Stripes, the Statue of Liberty presiding over a "Welcome Illegal Aliens" doormat, a Social Security card emblazoned with the name "Juan Doe," a U.S. passport proclaiming, "Only one candidate has a plan to STAMP out illegal immigration."
As Republican presidential candidates troll for votes, they have flooded mailboxes in Iowa and New Hampshire with such loaded images. Their campaigns have filled the airwaves, packed their Web sites and taunted their adversaries, proclaiming their concern over porous borders and accusing opponents of insufficient vigilance.
No issue has dominated the Republican presidential nomination fight the way illegal immigration has. Under consistent attack for inconsistent conservatism, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has turned to the issue again and again to shore up his conservative credentials. Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, running as the law-and-order candidate, has been forced onto the defensive by immigration policies in his city.
And just days after he delivered a passionate defense of the humanity of undocumented children in a Republican debate, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee presented one of the most punitive immigration platforms seen in this campaign season, rejecting legislation to provide the children of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship if they finish high school, attend two years of college or join the military.
Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney have all used illegal immigration to try to prove to voters that they are the toughest and most conservative candidates in the field. And they have used it with brutal consistency in an attempt to marginalize Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), whose vocal support for legislation to clamp down on border security while offering illegal immigrants a path to citizenship helped cost him his front-runner status.
Romney, despite facing criticism about some of his own immigration policies in Massachusetts and the fact that he was forced to dismiss a company that tended his lawn after it was revealed that it employed illegal immigrants, has attacked all of his rivals on the issue. A new CNN poll shows Romney with sizable advantages over the competition on the handling of illegal immigration, with a lead of 17 percentage points over Huckabee on the matter.
"You have a strong field, but their strengths and weaknesses cancel each other out. No one candidate is standing out as particularly stronger than the rest of the field or more conservative than the rest of the field," said Ken Mehlman, President Bush's former campaign manager, who spent years courting Latino voters for the Republican cause. "And in that dynamic, the desire is to stand up on every issue and say, 'I'm the strongest, and I'm the most conservative.' "
And nowhere is that more obvious than in the debate over immigration, he said.
The strategy poses a real risk. As the rhetoric and the policy proposals have grown increasingly strident, the eventual nominee's ability to win Latino support in swing states such as Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico may be coming increasingly into question.
"For Republican primary politics, this may be the most significant issue. Clearly, there is a segment that is hotly anti-immigrant, and they're very engaged," said Cecilia Mu¿oz, senior vice president for public policy at the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino political organization. "But I don't understand what these guys are going to say to my community when it's time to run" a general-election campaign.
But if Republicans can focus the debate on law-breaking, border security and the strain that illegal immigrants are placing on public services, the issue could also place a wedge between many Democrats and their eventual nominee.
Less than a year after Bush resumed his push to offer the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, most of his would-be GOP successors could not have moved further from his platform. Even McCain now embraces policies to clamp down on employers and to seal the border with fencing, unmanned aerial vehicles and beefed-up border patrols. Only when the border is certified as closed would he then consider what to do with the illegal immigrants already in the country.
Huckabee's "Secure America" plan twins a similar crackdown with a proposal to give all illegal immigrants 120 days to register with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and to leave the country. Those who register would face no penalty if they later applied to immigrate or visit. Those who do not "will be, when caught, barred from future reentry" for a decade, Huckabee's plan states.
Huckabee proved so mindful of the issue that he used last week's assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto to argue for stronger border controls, "to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country."
Romney would cut federal funds to any city that refuses to comply with federal immigration laws or to cooperate with a crackdown. Giuliani would issue all noncitizen workers and students a single, tamper-proof biometric identity card and create a single database to track all noncitizens in the country.
Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who joined the presidential campaign solely to pursue his hard-line agenda on illegal immigration, was so comfortable with the direction that his fellow GOP candidates were taking that he dropped out of the race last month and pronounced the field "Tancredo-ized."
Since Bush's first-term push for immigration reform, the political environment has changed dramatically, in large part because the geography of immigration has changed. It is no longer solely a border-state concern. States such as Iowa and New Hampshire have recently experienced their first real influxes of immigrant communities in decades.
"This is the most volatile issue I have measured since busing in 1972," said Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster. "It's not like abortion or gay rights, which may touch some people or offend the moral values of some. This is something that affects everyone."
Hart compared the issue of immigration to the treaty returning to Panama the Panama Canal, which drew a visceral response in conservative circles and turned President Gerald R. Ford's GOP nomination campaign in 1976 from a cakewalk to a dogfight.
"It's been like boiling water," said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party chairman and a co-chairman of Romney's campaign in the state. "It's an issue that was in the back of Americans' minds that needed to get fixed. It wasn't a priority until numbers got out of hand. Then Congress took it up, put it on the front burner, and when nothing got done, the voters turned exasperated. Can we live with such a significant breaking of the rule of law and not be morally outraged?"
Latino and other minority groups see racial codes in many of the words the Republican candidates have used -- for instance, "illegals" rather than "illegal immigrants." And hovering around the campaigns are far more strident figures and organizations. Immigration groups were taken aback when Huckabee accepted the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the border-security Minuteman Project, calling it "providential."
Mothers Against Illegal Aliens recently posted a plea for people to bring their own sheets and utensils to hotels and restaurants because "the person who cooked your meal or made your bed may very well be the one who picked your fruit and vegetables," suggesting that immigrants are spreading disease.
"We as a community are under attack," Mu¿oz said.
Its members have pledged to fight back. A coordinated campaign, by Latino political groups, service unions, Spanish-language television and radio stations and print-media outlets helped entice more than 1 million immigrants to apply for citizenship through October, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund. The campaign is now shifting to voter registration and education.
"I think many folks underestimate how sophisticated immigrants and immigrant voters are," Vargas said. "People are seeing participation in the political arena as an act of self-defense."
Officials in most of the Republican campaigns say they are not worried. Their candidates have distinguished between their opposition to illegal immigration and their support for legal immigration. And all voters share concerns about security and the rule of law, said Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for the Giuliani campaign.
But other Republicans are not as sanguine. Mehlman warned that without a concerted effort to woo back the Latino voters the campaigns have turned off, the GOP may be in trouble. "Is there a basic concern?" he asked. "The answer is 'yes.' "
**Story Link
As Republican presidential candidates troll for votes, they have flooded mailboxes in Iowa and New Hampshire with such loaded images. Their campaigns have filled the airwaves, packed their Web sites and taunted their adversaries, proclaiming their concern over porous borders and accusing opponents of insufficient vigilance.
No issue has dominated the Republican presidential nomination fight the way illegal immigration has. Under consistent attack for inconsistent conservatism, former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney has turned to the issue again and again to shore up his conservative credentials. Former New York mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, running as the law-and-order candidate, has been forced onto the defensive by immigration policies in his city.
And just days after he delivered a passionate defense of the humanity of undocumented children in a Republican debate, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee presented one of the most punitive immigration platforms seen in this campaign season, rejecting legislation to provide the children of illegal immigrants a path to citizenship if they finish high school, attend two years of college or join the military.
Giuliani, Huckabee and Romney have all used illegal immigration to try to prove to voters that they are the toughest and most conservative candidates in the field. And they have used it with brutal consistency in an attempt to marginalize Sen. John McCain (Ariz.), whose vocal support for legislation to clamp down on border security while offering illegal immigrants a path to citizenship helped cost him his front-runner status.
Romney, despite facing criticism about some of his own immigration policies in Massachusetts and the fact that he was forced to dismiss a company that tended his lawn after it was revealed that it employed illegal immigrants, has attacked all of his rivals on the issue. A new CNN poll shows Romney with sizable advantages over the competition on the handling of illegal immigration, with a lead of 17 percentage points over Huckabee on the matter.
"You have a strong field, but their strengths and weaknesses cancel each other out. No one candidate is standing out as particularly stronger than the rest of the field or more conservative than the rest of the field," said Ken Mehlman, President Bush's former campaign manager, who spent years courting Latino voters for the Republican cause. "And in that dynamic, the desire is to stand up on every issue and say, 'I'm the strongest, and I'm the most conservative.' "
And nowhere is that more obvious than in the debate over immigration, he said.
The strategy poses a real risk. As the rhetoric and the policy proposals have grown increasingly strident, the eventual nominee's ability to win Latino support in swing states such as Colorado, Arizona, Nevada and New Mexico may be coming increasingly into question.
"For Republican primary politics, this may be the most significant issue. Clearly, there is a segment that is hotly anti-immigrant, and they're very engaged," said Cecilia Mu¿oz, senior vice president for public policy at the National Council of La Raza, the nation's largest Latino political organization. "But I don't understand what these guys are going to say to my community when it's time to run" a general-election campaign.
But if Republicans can focus the debate on law-breaking, border security and the strain that illegal immigrants are placing on public services, the issue could also place a wedge between many Democrats and their eventual nominee.
Less than a year after Bush resumed his push to offer the nation's 12 million illegal immigrants a path to citizenship, most of his would-be GOP successors could not have moved further from his platform. Even McCain now embraces policies to clamp down on employers and to seal the border with fencing, unmanned aerial vehicles and beefed-up border patrols. Only when the border is certified as closed would he then consider what to do with the illegal immigrants already in the country.
Huckabee's "Secure America" plan twins a similar crackdown with a proposal to give all illegal immigrants 120 days to register with U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and to leave the country. Those who register would face no penalty if they later applied to immigrate or visit. Those who do not "will be, when caught, barred from future reentry" for a decade, Huckabee's plan states.
Huckabee proved so mindful of the issue that he used last week's assassination of former Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto to argue for stronger border controls, "to make sure if there's any unusual activity of Pakistanis coming into the country."
Romney would cut federal funds to any city that refuses to comply with federal immigration laws or to cooperate with a crackdown. Giuliani would issue all noncitizen workers and students a single, tamper-proof biometric identity card and create a single database to track all noncitizens in the country.
Rep. Tom Tancredo (Colo.), who joined the presidential campaign solely to pursue his hard-line agenda on illegal immigration, was so comfortable with the direction that his fellow GOP candidates were taking that he dropped out of the race last month and pronounced the field "Tancredo-ized."
Since Bush's first-term push for immigration reform, the political environment has changed dramatically, in large part because the geography of immigration has changed. It is no longer solely a border-state concern. States such as Iowa and New Hampshire have recently experienced their first real influxes of immigrant communities in decades.
"This is the most volatile issue I have measured since busing in 1972," said Peter D. Hart, a Democratic pollster. "It's not like abortion or gay rights, which may touch some people or offend the moral values of some. This is something that affects everyone."
Hart compared the issue of immigration to the treaty returning to Panama the Panama Canal, which drew a visceral response in conservative circles and turned President Gerald R. Ford's GOP nomination campaign in 1976 from a cakewalk to a dogfight.
"It's been like boiling water," said Al Cardenas, a former Florida Republican Party chairman and a co-chairman of Romney's campaign in the state. "It's an issue that was in the back of Americans' minds that needed to get fixed. It wasn't a priority until numbers got out of hand. Then Congress took it up, put it on the front burner, and when nothing got done, the voters turned exasperated. Can we live with such a significant breaking of the rule of law and not be morally outraged?"
Latino and other minority groups see racial codes in many of the words the Republican candidates have used -- for instance, "illegals" rather than "illegal immigrants." And hovering around the campaigns are far more strident figures and organizations. Immigration groups were taken aback when Huckabee accepted the endorsement of Jim Gilchrist, the founder of the border-security Minuteman Project, calling it "providential."
Mothers Against Illegal Aliens recently posted a plea for people to bring their own sheets and utensils to hotels and restaurants because "the person who cooked your meal or made your bed may very well be the one who picked your fruit and vegetables," suggesting that immigrants are spreading disease.
"We as a community are under attack," Mu¿oz said.
Its members have pledged to fight back. A coordinated campaign, by Latino political groups, service unions, Spanish-language television and radio stations and print-media outlets helped entice more than 1 million immigrants to apply for citizenship through October, said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials Educational Fund. The campaign is now shifting to voter registration and education.
"I think many folks underestimate how sophisticated immigrants and immigrant voters are," Vargas said. "People are seeing participation in the political arena as an act of self-defense."
Officials in most of the Republican campaigns say they are not worried. Their candidates have distinguished between their opposition to illegal immigration and their support for legal immigration. And all voters share concerns about security and the rule of law, said Maria Comella, a spokeswoman for the Giuliani campaign.
But other Republicans are not as sanguine. Mehlman warned that without a concerted effort to woo back the Latino voters the campaigns have turned off, the GOP may be in trouble. "Is there a basic concern?" he asked. "The answer is 'yes.' "
**Story Link
12/18/07
Immigration, and Its Politics, Shake Rural Iowa, By Monica Davey (NYT)
Along the main thoroughfare of this small meatpacking town, the transformation of a single shop, once known as the Ken-A-Bob restaurant, tells the story of the town itself.
The Ken-A-Bob, an old-fashioned buffet with American classics of fried chicken and roast beef, went out of business and reopened as Sichanh market, catering to a wave of immigrants from Laos. Now the shelves are also packed with Mexican spices, tostadas, chicharrones, the walls covered in signs in Spanish for Mary Kay cosmetics, baby sitters and Senator Barack Obama.
The nation’s struggle over immigration may seem distant in states like Iowa, hundreds of miles from any border, but the debate is part of daily life here, more than ever now as residents prepare to pick a president. Nearly all of more than two dozen people interviewed here last week said they considered immigration policy at or near the top of their lists of concerns as they look to the presidential caucuses next month.
And yet, nearly everyone interviewed said that none of the political candidates had arrived at a position on immigration that fully satisfied them. In real life, they said, the issues surrounding immigration, both legal and illegal, were far more complicated than bumper sticker slogans or jabs on a debate stage or even the carefully picked language of campaign policy papers.
The subject went largely unaddressed in Wednesday’s Republican debate in Des Moines after the moderator discouraged discussion of immigration, suggesting that Iowans already were familiar with the candidates’ positions.
Those who said they favored granting a path to citizenship for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants already in this country were leaning mainly toward Democratic presidential candidates, but most said they wished their candidate could better explain how to carry out such a path practically and fairly.
And those who said they favored tough and immediate penalties for illegal immigrants said they mostly favored Republicans (though not Senator John McCain, who seemed to draw special ire here for what people called his disappointingly lax position), but said they had doubts that so many people could really be found or punished.
“I care about the illegal immigration issue a lot,” said David F. Friedrich, a farmer who said he was a supporter of President Bush and had yet to decide who he would support. “But when you start looking for solutions, I just don’t know. I think it’s too far gone.”
Like a handful of communities in Iowa — places named Denison, Ottumwa, Postville and Marshalltown — Storm Lake, a city of about 10,000, offers a glimpse at how new immigration has transformed the nation’s rural middle and with it, the political landscape.
Two decades ago, less than 1 percent of the people in Buena Vista County, where Storm Lake is the county seat, were Hispanic. By last year, the county had the highest percentage of Hispanic people of any county in Iowa, with 19.2, compared with less than 4 percent statewide. Buena Vista County also ranks highest in Iowa in percentages of those learning English in school, of recent international immigrants and of residents born in other countries.
In the interviews here, peoples’ focus on immigration held regardless of what perspective they brought to the debate, whether they were Democrats or Republicans, Hispanic or not, recent arrivals or lifelong Iowans.
Some, like Bob DeMey, said they were troubled by all the change in Storm Lake, which was once almost exclusively white but which, Mr. DeMey said, has come to be known among his friends as Little Mexico. So much immigration — mainly illegal immigration, he says — has taken meatpacking jobs away from the locals, left the schools jammed, and driven up crime.
“They ought to be all shipped back to where they came from,” said Mr. DeMey, who is retired.
Others, like Cindy Molgaard, said they worried that raids on illegal immigrants would drive away a group that kept Storm Lake thriving and growing and selling goods even as other Midwestern towns shriveled and eventually disappeared.
“As a country, we have saved so many human beings, so why wouldn’t we save the people who are already right here with us, part of us?” Ms. Molgaard, who favors Mr. Obama, said of creating a path to grant citizenship for those who are already here. “I used to swear there was not a bigot anywhere in Storm Lake, but as soon as minorities started moving in, they came out of the woodwork.”
Steve Salts, who sells cars, said he considered himself a “damn good Democrat” and was leaning toward Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, but was upset by notions the Democrats had offered in support of an immigration package, which failed this year in Washington and would have given some illegal immigrants a chance, ultimately, to stay.
“What’s right is right, and I just don’t like the illegal alien part of it with the Democrats,” said Mr. Salts, who added that he had been impressed by elements of what Fred D. Thompson, a Republican and former Tennessee senator, had suggested, including tough border enforcement and making English the official language.
“Then again, maybe we can’t remove all these people,” Mr. Salts said. “Maybe we’ve got to just live with it. I mean, look around.”
With processing plants for hogs and for turkeys, Storm Lake sits in Iowa’s northwestern region, an agricultural area with strong Republican leanings and one some say feels more than geographically remote from Des Moines, the state’s urban center.
In 1970, people of mostly German and Scandinavian ancestry dominated this town. Soon, refugees from Southeast Asia began arriving, many working in meatpacking. Then, in the 1990s, a wave of Latinos appeared, said Sara Huddleston, a native of Mexico first elected to the Storm Lake City Council more than four years ago.
Today, minority residents make up more than 40 percent of the population, law enforcement officials here say; the numbers in the local schools, the authorities there say, are even higher — 49 percent Hispanic, 10 percent Asian, 4 percent African-American.
What no one knows is how many of the immigrants are illegal. At Tyson Fresh Meats, which now owns the plant that was first built in 1953 and employs 1,800 people (about half of them Hispanic), officials said they had “zero tolerance” for employing people who were not authorized to work in the United States.
Residents here seem sympathetic to the companies; people who want to cheat will find a way to do it, they said. Most scoffed at the recent complaints against Mitt Romney, a Republican candidate, for employing a landscaping company that included illegal workers.
“It’s easy to say you’re against illegal immigration but how do you know who is who?” said Mike Rust, the owner of Rust’s Western Shed, which sells uniforms and work boots to Tyson employees.
Russell Eddie, a local Republican Party leader, said he thought illegal immigration would play a significant role in the presidential election. And Representative Steve King, an Iowa Republican who has taken an extremely firm line against illegal immigration and has won three terms, said he heard from concerned constituents about it constantly.
But some Latinos here said the issue would backfire for the Republicans.
Raids in other meatpacking towns have left some people here fearful, said Roberto Gonzalez, who was working behind the counter of a Mexican restaurant. Some will not even venture outside now, Mr. Gonzalez said. But those who can vote, he said, will oppose the Republicans.
“To me, they look like they’re just about discrimination against Hispanics,” Mr. Gonzalez said, adding that he favored Mrs. Clinton. “She is for the Hispanics,” he said.
Inside the old Ken-A-Bob, now the Sichanh market, where the sign boasts “Mexican food” out front, Siamphay Khamphavong says she has yet to pick a candidate. Ms. Khamphavong, 21, who came to the United States from Laos at age 3 and whose relatives worked at the meatpacking plant before they bought this market, said she believed that immigration had brought a positive change to Storm Lake, that people mostly got along, that everyone could surely co-exist.
Still, she said, whoever becomes president must secure the border and stop illegal immigration right away. “If you don’t get the right papers, you need to go back,” she said. “You can’t just run in and not follow the rules.”
**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of Eric Thayer for The New York Times: "I care about the illegal immigration issue a lot." DAVID F. FRIEDRICH, a farmer, with his wife, Patricia
11/7/07
In the Ballot Booths, No Fixation on Immigration, By Amy Gardner (WP)
Voters across Virginia chose candidates in state and local elections yesterday not out of anger over illegal immigration but based on party affiliation, a preference for moderation and strong views on such key issues as residential growth and traffic congestion.
With a few notable exceptions, the trend benefited Democrats and not those who campaigned the loudest for tough sanctions against illegal immigrants.
Fairfax County continued its transformation into solid Democratic territory, with as many as five legislative seats poised to fall out of Republican control. In Loudoun County, Democrats who campaigned on a promise to slow residential growth took over the county board. Even in Prince William County, where the board's chairman, Corey L. Stewart (R), won easily on a vow to crack down against illegal immigrants, the volatile issue was tempered by the victory of state Sen. Charles J. Colgan (D-Manassas), who had been painted as soft on the issue.
The returns provided the sharpest evidence yet that Democratic gains in recent state elections represented more than a temporary dip in Republicans' popularity. Yesterday's initial results showed that a more long-term structural realignment may be occurring and that voters are increasingly drawn by Democrats' promises to improve schools and ease traffic and away from Republican conservatism on such issues as taxes and social policy, particularly in fast-growing Northern Virginia.
"I did not think that immigration in and of itself would carry the day," said Sen. Richard L. Saslaw (Fairfax), who would become majority leader under Democratic control. "The results are proving that, while immigration is a concern to people -- and it should be -- it is not returning the votes that they thought that it would."
Greg Blevins, a 17-year resident of Prince William, might have been a typical voter deciding yesterday's crucial contests. Although concerned about enforcement of immigration law, Blevins said he voted for both Democrats and Republicans because his main concerns also include roads and schools, for which he is willing to pay higher taxes. "I want to see tax money spent where it is raised," he said.
The most significant impact of yesterday's results will be in the state Senate, where power will shift dramatically to Northern Virginia. Colgan is in line to become chairman of the Finance Committee, gaining the power to increase spending for Northern Virginia colleges and universities, hospitals, roads, cultural institutions and more. Other regional lawmakers are in line to lead committees, making them able to set the agenda on such topics as controlling development, redrawing political district lines after the next census and recalculating school aid formulas to benefit the region.
In the House of Delegates, Republicans will still hold a significant if smaller majority.
State Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach) said his party didn't drum up the immigration issue out of nowhere. Candidates were forced to talk about it by constituents who wanted the issue addressed, he said.
Republican losses yesterday, even in solidly GOP districts, he said, were more often the result of a candidate being too conservative for the moderate direction most voters want Virginia to take.
"If you want to take a look at who's winning in the Republican Party, it's middle-of-the-road Republicans who have not moved too far to the right that they're considered extremists," he said.
Stolle conceded that Democrats carried a huge advantage this election year in part because of the role of such popular leaders as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and former governor Mark R. Warner, who have been touring the state pressing voters to seek the same change in the legislature that they sought when they voted them into office in the past two gubernatorial races.
Fairfax Board Chairman Gerald E. Connolly, who easily defeated Republican Gary H. Baise to win a second term, said the Democratic effort in his county was "unprecedented," punctuated yesterday morning by the effort of hundreds of volunteers who worked across the county hanging signs, making calls and knocking on doors.
"That's a culmination of a coordinated campaign effort that's been going on since the spring," he said. "We had 12 full-time staffers working in Fairfax County. We had a trailer at the back of our headquarters with 20 or 30 computers. We made 10,700 phone calls yesterday alone."
One advantage for Democrats was the poor approval ratings of President Bush and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. Another was the growing tide of Democratic-leaning voters moving into fast-growing Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.
Robert D. Holsworth, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, called it the "decline of the Republican brand" and credited it with rallying Democratic activists, bringing forward credible Democratic candidates and attracting hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to Democratic campaigns.
Democratic supporters of J. Chapman Petersen, who beat state Sen. Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, the Republican incumbent, in Fairfax, said they had long hoped that a candidate would come along who could match her on the issues. "Chap's a good Democrat," said voter John C. Wasley IV, a librarian who has lived in the area most of his life. "Transportation and the environment were the big issues for me, and Chap's on the right side of both of them."
Republicans were noticeably less organized in the final weeks of the campaign, with fewer and smaller rallies across the state and with their top leaders, including party chairman John H. Hager, Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell and Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, barely in public view in the final days.
What is still unknown is the effect of yesterday's results on 2008, another tumultuous election year when Virginians will choose a replacement for retiring U.S. Sen. John W. Warner (R) and when the state might even be in play in the presidential contest. A Democratic presidential candidate hasn't gained a majority of Virginians' votes since 1964.
**Story Link
With a few notable exceptions, the trend benefited Democrats and not those who campaigned the loudest for tough sanctions against illegal immigrants.
Fairfax County continued its transformation into solid Democratic territory, with as many as five legislative seats poised to fall out of Republican control. In Loudoun County, Democrats who campaigned on a promise to slow residential growth took over the county board. Even in Prince William County, where the board's chairman, Corey L. Stewart (R), won easily on a vow to crack down against illegal immigrants, the volatile issue was tempered by the victory of state Sen. Charles J. Colgan (D-Manassas), who had been painted as soft on the issue.
The returns provided the sharpest evidence yet that Democratic gains in recent state elections represented more than a temporary dip in Republicans' popularity. Yesterday's initial results showed that a more long-term structural realignment may be occurring and that voters are increasingly drawn by Democrats' promises to improve schools and ease traffic and away from Republican conservatism on such issues as taxes and social policy, particularly in fast-growing Northern Virginia.
"I did not think that immigration in and of itself would carry the day," said Sen. Richard L. Saslaw (Fairfax), who would become majority leader under Democratic control. "The results are proving that, while immigration is a concern to people -- and it should be -- it is not returning the votes that they thought that it would."
Greg Blevins, a 17-year resident of Prince William, might have been a typical voter deciding yesterday's crucial contests. Although concerned about enforcement of immigration law, Blevins said he voted for both Democrats and Republicans because his main concerns also include roads and schools, for which he is willing to pay higher taxes. "I want to see tax money spent where it is raised," he said.
The most significant impact of yesterday's results will be in the state Senate, where power will shift dramatically to Northern Virginia. Colgan is in line to become chairman of the Finance Committee, gaining the power to increase spending for Northern Virginia colleges and universities, hospitals, roads, cultural institutions and more. Other regional lawmakers are in line to lead committees, making them able to set the agenda on such topics as controlling development, redrawing political district lines after the next census and recalculating school aid formulas to benefit the region.
In the House of Delegates, Republicans will still hold a significant if smaller majority.
State Sen. Kenneth W. Stolle (R-Virginia Beach) said his party didn't drum up the immigration issue out of nowhere. Candidates were forced to talk about it by constituents who wanted the issue addressed, he said.
Republican losses yesterday, even in solidly GOP districts, he said, were more often the result of a candidate being too conservative for the moderate direction most voters want Virginia to take.
"If you want to take a look at who's winning in the Republican Party, it's middle-of-the-road Republicans who have not moved too far to the right that they're considered extremists," he said.
Stolle conceded that Democrats carried a huge advantage this election year in part because of the role of such popular leaders as Gov. Timothy M. Kaine and former governor Mark R. Warner, who have been touring the state pressing voters to seek the same change in the legislature that they sought when they voted them into office in the past two gubernatorial races.
Fairfax Board Chairman Gerald E. Connolly, who easily defeated Republican Gary H. Baise to win a second term, said the Democratic effort in his county was "unprecedented," punctuated yesterday morning by the effort of hundreds of volunteers who worked across the county hanging signs, making calls and knocking on doors.
"That's a culmination of a coordinated campaign effort that's been going on since the spring," he said. "We had 12 full-time staffers working in Fairfax County. We had a trailer at the back of our headquarters with 20 or 30 computers. We made 10,700 phone calls yesterday alone."
One advantage for Democrats was the poor approval ratings of President Bush and the unpopularity of the war in Iraq. Another was the growing tide of Democratic-leaning voters moving into fast-growing Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads.
Robert D. Holsworth, a political science professor at Virginia Commonwealth University, called it the "decline of the Republican brand" and credited it with rallying Democratic activists, bringing forward credible Democratic candidates and attracting hundreds of thousands of dollars in contributions to Democratic campaigns.
Democratic supporters of J. Chapman Petersen, who beat state Sen. Jeannemarie Devolites Davis, the Republican incumbent, in Fairfax, said they had long hoped that a candidate would come along who could match her on the issues. "Chap's a good Democrat," said voter John C. Wasley IV, a librarian who has lived in the area most of his life. "Transportation and the environment were the big issues for me, and Chap's on the right side of both of them."
Republicans were noticeably less organized in the final weeks of the campaign, with fewer and smaller rallies across the state and with their top leaders, including party chairman John H. Hager, Attorney General Robert F. McDonnell and Lt. Gov. Bill Bolling, barely in public view in the final days.
What is still unknown is the effect of yesterday's results on 2008, another tumultuous election year when Virginians will choose a replacement for retiring U.S. Sen. John W. Warner (R) and when the state might even be in play in the presidential contest. A Democratic presidential candidate hasn't gained a majority of Virginians' votes since 1964.
**Story Link
10/24/07
GOP Finds Hot Button in Illegal Immigration, By Jonathan Weisman (WP)
When Republican Jim Ogonowski launched his long-shot bid for Congress, he prepared for an upbeat campaign in his Democratic, working-class district of Massachusetts, based on a winning sum: affable hay farmer, former Air Force lieutenant colonel, and brother of an American Airlines pilot whose hijacked plane slammed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11, 2001.
But by last month, although opinion polling showed that he was well liked, he was still running 10 points behind Democrat Niki Tsongas with just weeks to go before a special election. The campaign needed a way to go beyond biography, to persuade Northern Massachusetts to vote Republican. They found it in illegal immigration.
On Tuesday, Ogonowski still fell short, but Tsongas's 51 to 45 percent victory was a shocker in a district where both John F. Kerry and Al Gore took 57 percent of the vote, and where liberal Democratic Rep. Martin T. Meehan served comfortably for eight terms. The underwhelming victory of the wife of deceased former senator Paul Tsongas has rekindled Democratic concerns about an immigration issue they had hoped had been put to rest.
"This issue has real implications for the country. It captures all the American people's anger and frustration not only with immigration, but with the economy," said Rep. Rahm Emanuel (Ill.), chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and an architect of the Democratic congressional victories of 2006. "It's self-evident. This is a big problem."
Republicans, sensing a major vulnerability, have been hammering Democrats, forcing Congress to face the question of illegal immigration on every bill they can find, from agriculture spending and housing assistance to the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP).
House Democrats are so concerned that they have resumed talks on a new legislative push, even though the collapse of an immigration deal in the Senate this spring has left virtually no chance that a final bill can be passed in this Congress.
But even in the early stages of this renewed effort, negotiations have only underscored the party's problems. Some Democratic leaders want what they call a "mini bill," emphasizing border control, penalties on firms that employ illegal immigrants and stronger efforts to deny illegal immigrants government benefits. But Rep. Luis V. Gutierrez (D-Ill.), the point man on the bill, said he will never accept a measure that does not include a pathway to citizenship for the 12 million undocumented workers in the country.
"I think the Democrats are on the wrong side of this issue, and if they continue down this path, they are going to lose a lot of seats," said Matt Wylie, a strategist for the Ogonowski campaign.
The issue has shifted since concerns about illegal immigrants triggered angry calls for border fences and deportation two years ago. Now, voter anger appears to revolve around the belief that illegal immigrants are unfairly consuming government benefits, a fear that stems more from economic uncertainty than culture clashes, Democratic and Republican pollsters say.
Those concerns are not everywhere. But they are glaring in some of the white, working-class districts in Kansas, Indiana, North Carolina and New Hampshire that gave the Democrats control of the House last year. And they were on clear display in Lowell, Mass.
"Immigration played into the economic issue," said Francis Talty, a political science professor at the University of Massachusetts at Lowell who followed the Tsongas-Ogonowski contest. "Do you want illegal immigrants to get in-state [university] tuition? Do you want them to get driver's licenses? Do you want their children to get benefits under SCHIP? It was the benefit side that has real resonance, not the deportation thing."
A new national poll for National Public Radio, conducted by the Democratic polling firm Greenberg Quinlan Rosner, and the Republican firm Public Opinion Strategies, found that voters are more likely to side with Democrats than Republicans on war, taxes and spending, the economy, health care and health insurance for children, often by wide margins. On immigration, the Republicans hold a 49 to 44 percent lead.
But even that might be deceptively tight, said Glen Bolger, a partner with Public Opinion Strategies. In the poll, the GOP position was framed as getting control of the border, requiring illegal immigrants to reenter the country legally, stopping illegal immigrants from getting government benefits and sending illegal immigrants who are criminals packing. The Democratic position was, "It is impractical to expel 12 million people, but we need tougher controls at the borders, tougher penalties on employers who hire illegal immigrants and we should bar illegal immigrants from getting most government benefits, while allowing the law-abiding immigrants to get on a long path to citizenship."
That Democratic message is much tougher than the one most voters are hearing, Bolger argued. "They're actually in worse shape than they think they are," he said.
Dustin Olson, Ogonowski's campaign manager, said the candidate did not intend to make government benefits for illegal immigrants a centerpiece of the campaign, but it came up unbidden, again and again.
Internal polling found that Ogonowski's tough stance was winning 60 percent to 30 percent over the positions articulated by Tsongas, said Rob Autry, another Public Opinion Strategies partner who served as Ogonowski's pollster. Ogonowski's position on taxes had a narrower, 13 percentage point lead. Every other issue "was dicey," he said.
Then, just two days before Tuesday's balloting, Tsongas said illegal immigrants should each be allowed to get a driver's license. The final radio ad of the Ogonowski insurgency intoned, "And now for something truly incredible. You already know Niki Tsongas supports amnesty for illegal immigrants, but today we learned Niki Tsongas would go even further. Tsongas told the Boston Herald she wants to give driver's licenses to illegal immigrants."
John Walsh, chairman of the Massachusetts Democratic Party, said the final vote proved the limits of the immigration message. The district may be less Democratic than the presidential numbers make it appear, he cautioned. Republican gubernatorial candidates have carried it handily since 1990, until Deval L. Patrick, the current Democratic governor, won it with 51 percent of the vote, the same percentage Tsongas took.
If Ogonowski's internal polling showed him trailing by 10 points in September, his immigration blitz made up only five points, he said.
But in districts where Democrats do not have five points to give, those numbers loom large. "For the American people, and therefore all of us, it's emerged as the third rail of American politics," Emanuel said. "And anyone who doesn't realize that isn't with the American people."
**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of AP(Democrat Niki Tsongas won by only 51 to 45 percent in a district that gave presidential hopefuls Al Gore and John F. Kerry 57 percent of the vote)
10/15/07
States' Immigrant Policies Diverge, By Anthony Faiola (WP)
NEW YORK -- In New York, state officials are about to offer driver's licenses to illegal immigrants and already have extended limited medical coverage to those battling cancer. In Illinois, the state legislature just passed a law forbidding businesses there from using a federal database to check the legal status of employees.
Oklahoma, meanwhile, recently passed some of the toughest immigration laws in the nation, including one making it a felony to "transport" or "harbor" an illegal immigrant -- leading some to fear that people such as school bus drivers and church pastors may be at risk of doing time. Tennessee's legislature this year revoked laws granting illegal immigrants "driving certificates" and voted to allow law enforcement officers to effectively act as a state immigration police.
As the Bush administration and Congress sit gridlocked on an immigration overhaul, states are jumping into the debate as never before. In the process, they are creating a national patchwork of incongruous immigration laws that some observers fear will make it far more difficult to enact any comprehensive, federally mandated bill down the line.
The number of states passing immigration-related bills has skyrocketed this year. No fewer than 1,404 pieces of immigration-related legislation were introduced in legislatures during the first half of 2007, with 182 bills becoming law in 43 states. That is more than double the number of immigration-related state laws enacted during all of 2006, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Some observers are alarmed by the trend, calling the widely divergent laws further evidence of America's cultural divide and saying they could pose new hurdles in reaching a national consensus on immigration. Piecemeal policymaking is opening the door to a flurry of legal battles -- the Department of Homeland Security, for instance, is suing Illinois for banning businesses there from confirming an employee's legal status through the federal E-Verify database, which state officials have called flawed and unreliable.
Others argue that the inability to reach a national solution has left states no choice. Governors are grappling with cities and towns that, in the absence of a national or state policy, have taken it upon themselves to pass local immigration laws either protecting or cracking down on illegal immigrants. This has occasionally lead to radically different regulations within individual states.
Still others assert that the rush of state activism has created an unforeseen opportunity. By viewing states as laboratories and studying the successes and failures of their various policies, Americans may find useful information, even a road map, for developing a national strategy.
Perhaps the most compelling current example is Oklahoma, where a package of tough new laws will not only make it a crime to transport or harbor illegal immigrants, but will also strip such immigrants of any right to receive most health care, welfare, scholarships or other government assistance; penalize employers who hire illegal workers; and force businesses to verify the legal status of new hires.
That "comports with my philosophy that illegal aliens will not come to Oklahoma or any other state if there are no jobs waiting for them," said Randy Terrill, a Republican state legislator and the author of the bill. "They will not stay here if they know they will get no taxpayer subsidy, and they will not stay here if they know if they ever come into contact with one of our fine law enforcement officers, they will stay in custody until they are physically deported."
Hispanic business groups, citing school enrollment losses and church parish figures, say the laws, which start going into effect later this year, have caused as many as 25,000 undocumented workers to flee the state in recent months. The loss is being decried by the Oklahoma State Home Builders Association.
"In major metro areas we are seeing people leave based on the perception that things are going to get bad for them and that this state doesn't want them here," said Mike Means, executive vice president of the association. "Now we're looking at a labor shortage. I've got builders who are being forced to slow down jobs because they don't have the crews. And it's not like these people are going back to Mexico. They're going to Texas, New Mexico, Kansas, Arkansas, anywhere where the laws aren't against them."
Means said that while construction wages haven't yet gone up in Oklahoma, they are likely to do so if the shortage worsens. Advocates of such laws say that is precisely how strict regulations on illegal immigration can help American workers -- by forcing wages higher. But construction industry leaders counter that a wage increase in Oklahoma, where builders are already paying $15 to $20 an hour for labor in a state with low unemployment, would lead to a net loss of jobs as some businesses are forced to close, particularly if other states allow less stringent hiring practices.
"This is what happens when you don't have a national policy," Means continued. "If I'm an Oklahoma builder on the border with Texas, you're going to face unfair competition because they don't have the laws we do. This needs to be standardized."
While local governments have been enacting a growing number of pro- and anti-immigration ordinances, states, with notable exceptions such as California, have until recently been more cautious. Experts say that is partly because achieving consensus on a state level is far harder than in smaller communities, but also because many states have awaited guidance from the federal government.
But as state officials have concluded that they can no longer afford not to act, they are often finding that doing so is an invitation for discord.
That is particularly true in New York, where Gov. Eliot L. Spitzer (D), the former attorney general who championed labor rights for immigrants, touched off a firestorm after announcing last month that he was reversing pre-Sept. 11 rules that had made it virtually impossible for illegal immigrants in the state to obtain a driver's license.
"The federal government has failed to establish a coherent or rational policy, and as a consequence, we are left to deal with this on a state level," Spitzer said in an interview with The Washington Post last week. "We're left dealing with the reality of up to 1 million [illegal] immigrants in New York. . . . I would prefer to have [them] carrying a legitimate form of identification, a driver's license that allows them to get insurance, allows our law enforcement to track their driving records and brings these drivers out of the shadows."
The ruckus over the policy change has been particularly heated because several of the Sept. 11, 2001, hijackers used illegally obtained driver's licenses as identification when renting vehicles or boarding flights. Spitzer argues that his plan will make it harder to get a license illegally, by requiring new electronic equipment in motor vehicles offices across New York to verify foreign passports and other documents used to obtain a license.
But many here counter that no matter what equipment is used, granting driver's licenses with a foreign passport as a primary proof of identity constitutes a significant security threat. Still others argue against the notion that illegal immigrants should be awarded any kind of government-issued identification.
Opposition is so fierce, particularly among state Republicans, that a handful of county clerks have publicly rebelled. Several have said they will instruct their driver's license offices -- many of which are staffed by county, not state, employees -- to disregard the new guidelines. And the Monroe County government, near Rochester, has gone as far as voting to continue making a valid Social Security number a requirement for a driver's license, setting up a potential legal showdown with the state.
"The government is trying to bring them into the fold, but how can you extend a privilege to drive legally in the United States to someone who is here illegally?" asked Frank J. Merola, the Republican clerk of Rensselaer County, near the state capital, Albany. "I'm not saying, 'Let's go out there and round them up,' but I am saying that it's wrong to reward them for breaking the law."
Not surprisingly, the plan, to go into effect in phases within eight months, is being hailed by New York's thriving immigrant community. A 33-year-old Manhattan lounge singer who would provide only his first name, Amilcar, because he arrived in the United States illegally from Mexico, said he has had to turn down numerous offers for work in New Jersey and elsewhere because he could not drive himself and was unable to afford the cost of transporting his equipment.
"But this is going to open new doors for me now," he said excitedly, noting that he has already made plans to buy a car. "I feel like having a driver's license is a going to be a great new freedom. It's why I came to America in the first place."
**Story Link
**Image Courtesy of AP: State Rep. Randy Terrill wrote strict new laws for illegal immigrants in Oklahoma. "Illegal aliens will not come to Oklahoma . . . if there are no jobs waiting for them," he said.
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