Immigration Sensations

As it gets colder outside and people everywhere start worrying about making it through the winter, I shudder to think about what this year will bring for many families across the country. We are truly at a frightening time and the latest anti-immigrant hysteria has me feeling really pessimistic.

Despite the fact that many cities across the country are rejecting 287(g) (perhaps in response to the Hispanic Caucus' and around 520 other groups' call for immigration justice) and the UN report detailing how migrant workers give far more to the countries they move to than they take, we can't seem to make substantial changes.

Obama's new immigration plan which has been called "ambitious" primarily addresses the most grievous wrongs like the incredible neglect and abuse immigrants suffer in detention facilities. (For a link to the actual report click here.) What about real change? What about conversations regarding naturalization and legalization of undocumented workers?

I guess I should be happy that Obama is planning on making detention centers gentler and that the administration is aware of how broken the system is. Forgive me for not jumping up and down. I guess I just need to see substantial changes in the fundamental attitudes of Americans to get me going -- report after report and study after study show that the us citizens (especially us middle-class citizens - see here) end up benefiting substantially from immigration, so clearly these fears are not based on fact but rather symbolic definitions of value and humanity. I just don't know how to change those! Thoughts?

It's time for change - I'm feeling optimistic

In these most desperate of times change may be coming.

Attempts to control youth are failing!! Twelve young people in Mass juvenile prisons may be liberated after the Supreme Judicial Court "struck down a law that allowed the state to keep juvenile offenders in custody for three years after they turned 18, if officials believed they would be "physically dangerous to the public.'"(read more here)
Also, even though youth curfews exist in neighboring cities and towns, a youth curfew has been overturned in Oakland after massive resistance to the mass criminalization of young people. (News report here)

AND KIDS WILL GET HEALTHCARE!! And President Obama signed the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act, expanding the SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program ) health insurance program for children of low-income families and enabling states to provide an additional 4 million children with health insurance.

Senate: Yea-66, Nay-32

House: Yea-290, Nay-135

The bill awaits the president's signature.

In Philadelphia, public schools are considering a new "turnaround” strategy for "chronically underperforming schools, one based on Chicago’s controversial Renaissance 2010 project that closes existing schools and opens new ones under a different management structure." A big part of this proposal involves charter schools which are controversial, but it COULD provide immediate relief to some of the least-resourced schools in the country.
From "The Notebook:

At the proposed “contract schools,” outside managers would have more independence than the private managers currently operating schools under the District’s existing “diverse provider” model – they would be able to employ their own staff, for example.

In addition, some schools – to be called “innovation schools” – would be reconstituted from the ground up with new teachers and leadership, but managed by the District with union teachers.

“Performance schools” would not be reconstituted with new personnel, but like the others would be given more “autonomy” over school management in exchange for “greater accountability."
Complete article here

Women in Iran are protesting for rights and what makes me excited is that this is not imposed from a foreign organization but rather from "the people" themselves:
"Women’s rights advocates say Iranian women are displaying a growing determination to achieve equal status in this conservative Muslim theocracy, where male supremacy is still enscribed in the legal code. One in five marriages now end in divorce, according to government data, a fourfold increase in the past 15 years." (Full NYT article here)

The Obama administration named three people to posts in its intergovernmental affairs office on Friday, including Jodi Archambault Gillette, a member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. The Lakota woman will serve as a deputy associate director in an office that functions as a mediator between the administration and state, tribal and local governments. This is a huge step and the highest position a Native person has held in the U.S. Details here

The Migration Policy Institute’s published a list of 36 recommendations for the Obama administration on immigration. These changes include reassessing the border fence, and ending the criminal prosecution of undocumented immigrants. The hope is that this would give the federal government a chance to look at the actual effectiveness of its enforcement mechanisms. .

From Racewire:
That pragmatism would be a great improvement over the ideologically-driven measures that immigration restrictionists have successfully pushed for the last eight years. The country could stop wasting both resources and human rights credentials in silly projects that distract us from focusing on more serious problems, like human trafficking and terrorism.

The report also recommends a number of changes that would bring due process to the immigration system, including steps that prevent indefinite, unlawful and unsafe detention of migrants. These are mostly administrative, bureaucratic changes, but they will provide relief to real human beings who are now having their border communities torn up by fence construction, being separated from their families, rounded up in raids, and held in detention centers where people are dying. One of the things we should assess is how much these practices generate racial profiling.

[...]

It’s unlikely that the Obama Administration, with enforcement-oriented Janet Napolitano at the helm of Homeland Security, will adopt most of them unless they hear from the call from US residents who aren’t ideologically tied to pushing out immigrants. Conservatives say that they only oppose undocumented immigration, but people on both sides of the debate know that the line between those with papers and without is very thin, that families and communities hold both, and that policies directed at undocumented immigrants inevitably affect the documented too.

LINK to the full RaceWire article

Boston cops may have escorted two gay porn stars to a nightclub - I'm skeptical but if so this might have beeen the most radical police action ... ever? Read about it here

AND MEXICO CITY'S MAYOR IS GIVING OUT VIAGRA TO 'POOR MEN' AGE 60 AND ABOVE. NYT Article here

Immigration Detention Reform now on the "Front Burner"

New America Media, Roberto Lovato, Posted: Feb 02, 2009

Guantanamo Bay isn’t the only prison crisis that President Barack Obama will have to deal with. There’s another crisis growing - in the many immigration detention centers carpeting the interior of the country. Long ignored by policymakers because they make up the politically lethal combination of immigration and prison reform, calls for major restructuring of the immigration detention system may soon become unavoidable. The death of German immigrant Guido Newbrough in a Virginia detention center has pushed the issue to the front burner, helped along by incessant calls for change from advocates like Gil Velazquez.

“I went through that system. I was there. I could have died too,” says Velazquez upon hearing of Newbrough’s death. Velazquez, a recently released immigrant detainee from Oaxaca, Mexico who now lives in Richmond, Virginia, is looking for action from Washington. “I wish I could speak to Mr. Obama. I would tell him ‘They (immigration authorities) jail so many people and they don’t know what they’re doing. They have no right to let people die,’” said Velazquez.

His mobility and work possibilities are limited by the big black ankle bracelet that the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency is forcing him to wear until his hearing in June. He cannot leave his sister’s apartment in the evenings. But Velazquez does not let his undocumented status limit his freedom.

“I want him (Obama) to know that we should be building schools and hospitals, things that help people, not these prisons,” the very soft-spoken Velazquez declared in his most strident cadence as he took a break from folding flyers for a protest to halt the construction of another immigrant detention center in Farmville, where Newborough died.

Velazquez’s indefatigable efforts form part of a large and growing movement to put immigration detention issues front and center of any upcoming reform of the larger immigration system from the Obama administration. He and other critics of the system see the root of Newbrough’s death and a host of other problems –death from medical neglect, denial of habeas corpus and other basic legal rights, lack of sanitation, food and other basic necessities, violent and abusive guards, to name a few- in the exponential growth of the immigrant detainee population. It has tripled since 1996, according to ICE records.

Demands for a radical restructuring of the detention and deportation system have become the main message on the placards, press statements and posters of a growing galaxy of older and new advocacy groups outside the Beltway. Groups like the Detention Watch Network, an umbrella organization made up of immigrant detention advocates from across the country, report rapid growth in membership and actions since the failure of immigration reform unleashed an unprecedented regime of raids and incarceration targeting immigrants.

Fueled by what groups like Virginia’s People United, a multi-issue activist organization, are calling the “humanitarian crisis” in immigrant detention, Velazquez and others’ increasingly vociferous calls for changes to the detention system have also created a political crisis for supporters of the more legalization-centered approach to immigration reform favored by supporters of some version of the McCain-Kennedy bill of 2006-2007 which was also supported by then Senator Barack Obama. The failure of McCain-Kennedy, gave rise not just to exponential increases in the numbers of ICE raids (an average of 11 per day); it also gave long-ignored detention reform flank of the immigrant rights movement more motivated troops and unprecedented resources - more than a dozen reports on detention issues are expected in coming months.

Many new detention reform groups have arisen and established groups like People United have placed immigrant detention near the center of their agenda in the last two years thanks to the constant stream of sad and often bizarre detention stories. “I just spoke with a man being held in the jail where Mr. Newbrough died,” said Jeff Winder, a regional organizer with People United. “The man told me that they’re cutting even more services to save money. Less than two months after the second death in that prison they’re cutting heat, toilet paper, food and other basic services. He even told me that there are 30 lights on the ceiling but that only 5 are turned on. People are crowding under lights just to read.”

Winder also pointed to several recent events – a hostage situation in Texas, hunger strikes across the country, legal victories for detainees claiming they were physically and psychologically abused, other deaths in detention – as examples of the “scandal in immigrant detention we see every week.” The steady stream of bad detention news is forcing Winder and other activists to find balance in the optimism mirrored by the Obama moment. “There’s a real mood of hope in the country. The end of the horrible abuses of Bush is very important and historic. I celebrate that, he said, adding, “But I’m waiting to see what President Obama will do about creating really viable alternatives to detention.”

Asked about the alternatives, Winder cited a 1998 government-funded study by the Vera Institute of Justice. The study found that, with a battery of community services costing less than $12 per person per day (versus the national average of $120 per day for people in immigration detention centers) the government could drastically reduce the numbers of people in immigrant detention facilities. “Reducing the number of people is important,” said Winder. “But the more important question President Obama will have to answer why we have so many people rotting in immigrant prisons in the first place.”

New name, same game for immigration enforcement?

By Michelle Chen

from Racewire

Activists looking to the Obama administration to repudiate Bush’s most draconian immigration policies may find little to cheer about so far under Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano. A new policy directive from her office seems geared toward refining the status quo: an enforcement-heavy approach focused on securing borders rather than dealing with the social impacts of migration.

Though the plans are still emerging (a full departmental assessment of various immigration programs is due out later this month), Napolitano’s initial outline emphasizes immigration as a crime and law enforcement issue: programs to enlist local police in immigration crackdowns, efforts to facilitate the deportation of immigrants convicted of crimes, and targeted round-ups of “fugitive” immigrants.

The directive also calls for an assessment of immigrant detention facilities and the effectiveness of the heavily criticized “E-verify” system for work authorization.

Though these moves signal an effort to make immigration law enforcement more efficient and effective, Tom Barry at the Transborder Project of the Americas Policy Program cautions that the aim seems to be crystallize, not decisively break from, the harsh initiatives promoted by predecessor Michael Chertoff. Despite apparent resolve to evaluate and challenge the previous programs and practices, he writes:

"the new directive will certainly disappoint those hoping for a rejection of Chertoff’s law-and-order regimen for immigration by Napolitano and the Obama administration. Instead of rejecting the enforcement-only approach as inhumane, Napolitano seems intent on rationalizing and finessing the crackdown launched by her predecessor, while making improvements around the edges....

"No questions or concerns about the multitude of issues and problems that resulted from the security-driven campaign to fortify the border and round up suspect immigrants – the value of the border wall, the central role of private prisons in immigrant detention, the wisdom of U.S. drug policy with respect to border drug-related violence, the decreased attention to political asylum and refugee policy, the consequences of workplace raids, etc.

"A professional bureaucrat and politician, Napolitano is busy organizing, systematizing, and improving the crackdown that Chertoff so zealously spearheaded."

Perhaps one should expect as much from a law-enforcement focused bureaucracy. But that's all the more reason to keep the pressure up for a wholesale restructuring of federal immigration policy via legislation.

Immigration update

Immigration issues are still on the forefront of politics and news, some updates below:

Democratic Representative Kirsten Gillibrand, who will be taking Senator Hillary Clinton's seat, has come under fire for her restrictive stance on immigration issues. Gillibrand, who was appointed by Gov Paterson, has consistently opposed former Governor Spitzer's proposal to allow undocumented immigrants to get driver's licenses. She has also supported English-only initiatives and opposed any amnesty measures for undocumented immigrants. She also opposes many gun control measures. Her appointment was viewed by many as a slap in the face to immigrant New Yorkers, and many Democrats have expressed disappointment and upset over her appointment, even threatening to run against her next year. Full NYT article here

One week ago, Fair Immigration Reform Movement (FIRM) organized over a thousand immigrant rights supporters to march and rally in Washington, DC on Obama’s first day in office. Marchers gathered at L’Enfant Plaza and proceeded to ICE headquarters where faith leaders from across the country called for an end to raids that are destroying immigrant communities and fComment Moderationor “just and humane immigration reform.”

Members of the Restaurant Opportunities Center New York accompanied by Judson Memorial’s Jeff Mansfield, traveled to DC for the march. For a film clip of the rally look here

For more information, please visit these organizations:
FIRM: www.anewdayforimmigration.org
ROC-NY: www.rocny.org