History > 2007 > USA > Immigration (I)

Donar Antonio Ramírez Espinas of Honduras

hopped the train in Arriaga in 2004.

He dozed off one night, lost his grip and fell underneath it.

“You make the decision to look for a better life,”

he said, “without knowing that you could end up like this.”

Photograph:

Adriana Zehbrauskas for The New York Times
 

 Despite Crackdown, Migrants Stream Into South Mexico        NYT        28.1.2007

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/world/americas/28mexico.html

Demand for English Lessons

Outstrips Supply

February 27, 2007
The New York Times
By FERNANDA SANTOS

MOUNT VERNON, N.Y. — Two weeks after she moved here from her native Brazil, Maria de Oliveira signed up for free English classes at a squat storefront in this working-class suburb, figuring that with an associate’s degree and three years as an administrative assistant, she could find a good job in America so long as she spoke the language.

The woman who runs the classes at Mount Vernon’s Workforce and Career Preparation Center added Ms. Oliveira’s name to her pink binder, at the bottom of a 90-person waiting list that stretched across seven pages. That was in October. Ms. Oliveira, 26, finally got a seat in the class on Jan. 16.

“I keep wondering how much more I’d know if I hadn’t had to wait so long,” she said in Portuguese.

As immigrants increasingly settle away from large urban centers — New York’s suburbs have had a net gain of 225,000 since 2000, compared with 44,000 in the city — many are waiting months or even years to get into government-financed English classes, which are often overcrowded and lack textbooks.

A survey last year by the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials found that in 12 states, 60 percent of the free English programs had waiting lists, ranging from a few months in Colorado and Nevada to as long as two years in New Mexico and Massachusetts, where the statewide list has about 16,000 names.

The United States Department of Education counted 1.2 million adults enrolled in public English programs in 2005 — about 1 in 10 of the 10.3 million foreign-born residents 16 and older who speak English “less than very well,” or not at all, according to census figures from the same year. Federal money for such classes is matched at varying rates from state to state, leaving an uneven patchwork of programs that advocates say nowhere meets the need.

“We have a lot of folks who need these services and who go unserved,” said Claudia Merkel-Keller of the New Jersey Department of Labor and Workforce Development, noting that her state has waiting lists in every county, “from beginner all the way through proficient level.” New Jersey, like New York and many other states, does not keep statewide figures on how many people are on waiting lists.

Luis Sanchez, 47, a Peruvian truck driver for a beer distributor in New Brunswick, has been in this country 10 years — and on the waiting list for English classes in Perth Amboy five months. “You live from day to day, waiting to get the call that you can come to class,” Mr. Sanchez said in Spanish, explaining that he knew a little English but wanted to improve his writing skills so he could apply for better jobs. “I keep on waiting.”

Mr. Sanchez is unlikely to get the call soon: Perth Amboy’s Adult Education Center recently discovered that it was operating in the red and canceled 9 of its 11 evening classes in English as a second language, including all at beginner and intermediate levels. In Orange County, N.Y., where the immigrant population doubled in the past 16 years, the Board of Cooperative Education Services’ adult education program has stopped advertising for fear its already overflowing beginner classes will be overwhelmed.

In Framingham, Mass., 20 miles west of Boston, hundreds of people used to spend the night in line to register for English as a second language, so the program now selects students by picking handwritten names from a big plastic box.

“With the lottery, everyone has the same chance,” said Christine Taylor Tibor, director of Framingham’s Adult E.S.L. Plus program. “Unfortunately, you might have to enter the lottery several times before you get in.”

Census figures show that in the United States there were 32.6 million foreign-born residents 18 years or older in 2005, up about 18 percent from the 27.5 million counted in 2000 (and nearly twice the 17.1 million in 1990). Federal spending on adult education, about $580 million last year, has increased 23 percent since 2000 and more than tripled since 1990; some 45 percent of the money is devoted to English.

But financing varies widely across the states, which are required to allocate at least one quarter of what was provided by the federal government: Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma, South Dakota and Texas spent the minimum in 2003, according to the Education Department, while California and Connecticut each spent about seven times that.

In New York, the state Education Department added $76 million to the federal government’s $43 million for the 2005 fiscal year. That year, according to a recent report by the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research group based in Manhattan, there were about 86,500 people enrolled in government-sponsored adult programs for English as a second language, serving about 5 percent of the state’s 1.6 million adults with limited English skills.

Last fall, Arizona voters approved an initiative banning illegal immigrants from benefiting from all state-financed programs, including English instruction; administrators of English-as-a-second-language classes in several other states said they do not check for documentation when registering students and thus do not know how many of them may be in the country illegally.

Advocates for more English classes say the state-federal financing split leaves an adult education system whose quality and reach vary widely from place to place — and is lacking most everywhere. Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, where the immigrant population has tripled since 1990, largely because of an influx of Mexicans, sponsored a bill last year that would have given legal immigrants $500 vouchers to pay for English classes since so many of the free ones were full.

“Most education policy is the prerogative of state and local governments, but I would argue that the prerogative to help people learn our common language is a federal responsibility,” said Senator Alexander, a Republican who was education secretary under the first President George Bush. “If we make it easier for people to learn English, they will learn it. I think that ought to be a priority of our government, and I don’t think it has been.”

The government-financed classes are most often run by school districts or worker training centers and generally require only a registration fee of perhaps $10. Libraries, churches and community centers often also provide free or inexpensive classes, like the English Language Institute at Westchester Community College in Valhalla, N.Y., which offers nine levels of instruction for $76 to $247 per three-month session. Then there are private programs like the one at Pace University in Pleasantville, N.Y., which costs $790 for two classes a week for 14 weeks.

With immigrants accounting for half of the growth in the nation’s labor force from 1990 and 2000, and expected to make up all of the growth in the two decades to come, “the issue of English proficiency has become an issue of economic development,” said Tara Colton, the author of the Center for an Urban Future report. Indeed, some business owners, frustrated at the lack of low-cost classes, have begun teaching immigrants English at work.

At Skyline Furniture Manufacturing Inc. in Thornton, Ill., a suburb of Chicago, about half of the company’s 60 employees have learned English at the factory over the past five years, under a state program in which the government pays to bring teachers to work sites if companies pay workers for the hours in class.

“It makes sense to us because our workers can do their jobs better, and it makes sense to them because they can advance in their jobs,” said Cinthia Nowakowski, the plant’s manager, adding that three of the company’s eight foremen were promoted after completing the program. “Besides, it’s convenient. The guys don’t have to worry about having to arrange transportation to get to school or getting there and finding that there’s no room in the class.”

In Newburgh, N.Y., an Orange County town where one in five of the 29,000 residents are immigrants, Blanca Saravia has amassed an impressive portfolio of odd jobs since arriving from Honduras in 2004: gas station attendant, office janitor, cook’s helper, and, for the last 14 months, packager at a local nail-polish factory. Speaking in her native Spanish, Ms. Saravia said that she has been able to get by with co-workers’ translating, but that “when the boss gives orders, I don’t understand.”

So earlier this month, Ms. Saravia joined 30 others in a cramped classroom learning to conjugate the verb “to be” as part of the adult English program in Orange County, where the immigrant population doubled in the last decade — and the number of free English classes has jumped to 26 from 2 in 1995.

“If I tell her, ‘We’re full, come back in a couple of months,’ chances are she’ll get discouraged and never come back,” said Ramón Santos, who runs the Newburgh program.

Carl DeJura, director of adult basic education at Brookdale Community College in Long Branch, N.J., said he has lately crammed as many as 40 students into a class — “double what it should be.”

“If you have to cut back on textbooks, supplies and materials to serve the people who need it,” he said, “that’s what you do.”

In Mount Vernon, Haitian, Chinese, Somali, Arab, Mexican and Brazilian students flock to the beginner class each morning at 8:30 before heading out to work or to look for work. Ahmed Al Saidi, 49, who works at a gas station and moved from Yemen in 1994, said in halting English that he wants to learn the language “for better work and to talk to people when I go to the store.”

Ms. Oliveira, the immigrant from Brazil, said she still knows too little English to venture into the marketplace; her husband, who is American born and supports the couple financially, encouraged her to enroll in the classes, held five mornings a week.

“I hope that when I’m speaking a little better, I’ll be able to find a job where I can use the English I learned here and the skills I have from back home,” she said in Portuguese. “When I was on the waiting list, there were times I thought this time would never come.”

    Demand for English Lessons Outstrips Supply, NYT, 27.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/27/education/27esl.html

One Immigrant Family’s Hopes

Lead to a Jail Cell Suicide

February 23, 2007
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

It took 20 years of sacrifices and separations for Nery Romero’s parents, immigrants from El Salvador, to obtain legal residency for the whole family in the United States. But Mr. Romero, 22, quickly forfeited his right to stay.

His criminal convictions — for an attempted robbery in 2003, and for breaking into two parked cars to steal stereos in 2005 — were more than enough to make him deportable. So it was not exactly a surprise when his probation officer showed up at his parents’ home in Elmont, on Long Island, on Feb. 8 with a half-dozen immigration agents who took him from the room he shared with his girlfriend and infant daughter.

Mr. Romero was taking a powerful prescription painkiller for an unhealed leg injury, and his girlfriend says the agents took along the medication, assuring her that he would get proper care.

Five days later, he was dead. He hanged himself with his bed sheets in a cell at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, the authorities said. And they were quick to suggest an explanation.

“This guy did not want to go back,” said Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the county sheriff’s office, which houses immigration detainees from New York under contract with the federal government. He called Mr. Romero “a reputed gang member” and said he might have feared revenge in El Salvador.

A closer look, though, reveals a different and more complicated picture of Nery Romero’s short life and unusual death. It raises questions about his treatment in the jail, where the family and other inmates say he spent days crying out for painkillers that he never received. It also shows the long shadow cast by his parents’ immigration: Like so many, they came for the sake of their children, yet disrupted the children’s lives along the way.

“I’m in hell,” Mr. Romero wrote his family from the jail in a letter delivered after his death. “I’m like a dog in here. I don’t get nothing for my pain. I think that I’m going to sign my deportation papers.”

To George A. Terezakis, an immigration lawyer from Mineola, N.Y., hired by the Romeros to investigate their son’s death, the letter reflects Mr. Romero’s acceptance of deportation. If the young man was driven to despair, it was not by the prospect of returning to his birthplace, the lawyer contends, but by untreated pain and withdrawal from his medication, hydromorphone.

The medication had been prescribed after surgery that inserted metal rods in his leg, which was smashed in a motorcycle accident last fall. Medical texts warn that abrupt withdrawal causes severe back, leg and abdominal cramps, anxiety, insomnia and other painful symptoms. An autopsy was performed last week, and toxicology tests may eventually show whether any medications were in Mr. Romero’s system, his lawyer said.

Mr. Feldman said no outside medications were allowed in the jail, adding that county employees operate a medical office there 24 hours a day, and that a full stock of medication is available from a contractor, Diamond Pharmaceuticals.

He would not answer questions about Mr. Romero’s care, citing medical privacy laws. “Even after an individual is deceased, their right to privacy does not end,” he said.

“There is no evidence that he was in his cell vocalizing any sort of discomfort,” he added. “All policies and procedures were followed properly.”

But in independent accounts provided by different lawyers, two detainees said that Mr. Romero had been denied painkillers and that his distress was common knowledge.

All the time he was in jail, Mr. Romero’s family was trying unsuccessfully to reach or visit him.

On Feb. 12, his parents, Jose, a bricklayer, and Maria, a cleaner at a motel, traveled to the jail with Mr. Romero’s girlfriend, Kimberly Barajas, 20, and their baby daughter, Genesis. They had been told Mr. Romero’s visiting hours were from 7 to 9:30 p.m., they said, but after arriving several hours early, they learned it would take a week or two to get their names on the approved visitor list. Without success, they asked to see a supervisor and to send a message to Mr. Romero.

“They are turned away,” Mr. Terezakis said. “And the next day they get a call: ‘Is this the family of Nery Romero? Sorry to tell you, he’s dead.’ ”

Mr. Romero’s cellmate had been transferred over the weekend, so Mr. Romero was alone in his cell that night. At 10:30 p.m., he was still alive, Mr. Feldman said, but 42 minutes later, a guard making the first round on the overnight shift found him lifeless.

Nery Romero was born in a village called La Fortuna in 1984, when poverty and death squads defined life in El Salvador. His father had already migrated illegally to Hempstead, N.Y., to work for a construction company, and when Nery was 6, his mother followed — “for a better future for the children.”

Last week, she broke down as she recalled how Nery had begged her not to go. She said she told him and his three siblings that she was just going to the market to buy them fruit.

“From there, I never came back,” she said, sobbing. “I didn’t tell them that I was leaving.”

To Belinda Fernandez, the bilingual guidance counselor for the Hempstead school district, it is a familiar story.

“Many parents hope the child is going to cry for half an hour and forget,” she said. “But the child wakes up and feels abandoned, rejected.”

Five years passed before a relative could smuggle the Romero children to the United States. Nery, 11 by then, started a year behind in a Uniondale elementary school and never caught up. Still lacking legal papers, he dropped out of Hempstead High School at 16, in ninth grade, with his mother’s blessing — “to avoid problems with the gangs,” she said.

That strategy, and Nery’s part-time work in a plumbing supply store, failed to keep him out of trouble. At 19, only a year after his parents obtained the family’s legal residency — under a limited amnesty that included about 225,000 Salvadoran immigrants — he joined a group of drunken friends who were trying to rob a member of a rival group with a BB gun.

His reputation as a gang member dates from that period, said Ms. Barajas, who had known him since grade school and insists he was not a member when he died. “In those days he used to hang out with S.W.P.,” she acknowledged, referring to Salvadorans With Pride, a local gang.

Ms. Fernandez, the high school guidance counselor, did not remember Nery, but she said such local gangs and the more frightening international versions, like MS-13, have a special appeal for a generation of immigrant teenagers seeking a sense of family after longed-for reunions fail to heal old wounds.

Mr. Romero was sentenced to five years’ probation for the attempted robbery. Soon after his 21st birthday, he was arrested again with one of his old companions and eventually pleaded guilty to the car break-ins. It was a red flag to immigration authorities.

By then, he had a son, now 3, and an estranged wife. She could not be reached for her views about his past.

Andrew Eichhorn, a supervisor at the Nassau County Probation Department, said his unit was shaken by Mr. Romero’s suicide.

“It’s upsetting to everybody,” he said. “We’re human, so when something doesn’t go the way it was supposed to, we look at it and ask, what could we have done differently?”

He has been trying to set up a support group and mentorship program for young people who leave gangs. “If I had had this up and running,” he said, “Nery would have been a candidate.”

    One Immigrant Family’s Hopes Lead to a Jail Cell Suicide, NYT, 23.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/23/nyregion/23suicide.html

U.S. Gives Tour of Family Detention Center That Critics Liken to a Prison

February 10, 2007
The New York Times
By RALPH BLUMENTHAL

TAYLOR, Tex., Feb. 9 — Responding to complaints about conditions at the nation’s main family detention center for illegal immigrants, officials threw open the gates on Friday for a first news media tour.

They portrayed the privately run converted prison, open since May, as a model facility “primarily focused on the safety of the children.”

Once all the barbed wire comes down, Gary Mead, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement official, said, “it’s going to look more like a community college with a very high chain-link fence.”

Among other things, critics have complained about the prisonlike conditions, the food and the limited amount of schooling and recreation provided for children.

Inside the fluorescent-lighted corridors, plastic plants had been hurriedly installed and some areas repainted, lawyers for some detainees said, and officials acknowledged that pizza was on the lunch menu for the first time. The detainees could not be interviewed.

The facility, the T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center, is operated for the government by the Corrections Corporation of America, under a $2.8-million-a-month contract with Williamson County. It is named for a founder of the company, which runs 64 facilities in 19 states.

It now holds about 400 illegal immigrants, including 170 children, in family groups from nearly 30 countries, Mr. Mead said. He called it a humane alternative to splitting up families while insuring their presence at legal proceedings.

There is only one other family detention center in the country, the smaller Berks Family Shelter Care Facility, a former nursing home, in Leesport, Pa.

Critics said the picture presented on Friday conflicted with what they had observed.

“At Hutto, we found prisonlike conditions imposed on families with no criminal background, including asylum seekers,” said Michelle Brané, a lawyer for the Women’s Commission for Refugee Women and Children and the Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service who co-authored a report on family detention to be released on Feb. 22.

Barbara Hines, clinical professor of law at the University of Texas at Austin who runs an immigration clinic and has visited clients inside, said Friday that “I don’t think children should be incarcerated at all.”

The law required the government to hold families in the least restrictive conditions possible, Ms. Hines said, adding, “I was shocked, and I have been doing this 30 years.”

The American Civil Liberties Union has also been studying conditions as it considers filing a lawsuit contending that the government was violating a 1997 settlement on the treatment of detained juveniles.

“To call it a family residential center is to mask what’s going on,” said Vanita Gupta, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. “They may be cleaning up conditions, but at the end of the day it still begs the question of why they are using such a Draconian system.”

Another A.C.L.U. lawyer, Lisa Graybill, legal director, said after visiting, “I can’t describe how depressed people are in there.”

Outside the blocky buildings with thin slit windows, protesters from a local group called Texans United for Families held up signs saying, “Don’t Jail Children for Profit.”

“If they can put an ankle bracelet on Martha Stewart so she doesn’t run off to Jamaica,” said a protester, Jose Ortan, a computer technician, “they can find ways to do it for immigrant families.”

Some of the harshest criticism of the center came last week from members of a Palestinian family held there for three months for overstaying a visa. They were released after an immigration appeals board unexpectedly reopened their plea for amnesty based on new conditions — danger from the Hamas takeover in the Palestinian territories.

Hamzeh Ibrahim, 15, said his father was sent to a facility in West Texas while his pregnant mother shared a cell-like room with the family’s 5-year-old girl; two other girls, 7 and 13, shared another room. He said they had to clean their rooms and the communal shower. “I cleaned for me and my mom because she is pregnant and her back hurt,” he said.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials who traveled from Washington to lead the tour with company staff members showed off one of the 11 dormitory areas, or pods, lined by bare pastel-tinted detainee rooms, each with a metal bunk bed, a sink and a toilet.

The rooms are not locked at night, but a laser beam alerts guards if anyone leaves a room after bedtime — 9 p.m. for children and 10 for adults. The detainees wear outfits of green and blue, which Danny Coronado, a spokesman for the corrections company, likened to scrubs but critics described as prison garb.

Officials say stays at the center are now averaging a little more than a month.

In the dining area, which has plastic tables with stools attached, Mr. Mead said, “All of our meals are planned by dietitians with calories of 3,200 a day, 3,500 for children.”

Disputing claims by some lawyers that many detainees had lost weight there, Dr. Leroy T. Soto, the chief physician on duty, said a study had actually documented weight gains. There is a medical staff of 20.

Lawyers said detainees were rushed through meals in 15 or 20 minutes. Mr. Mead acknowledged “they can’t linger,” but said it was because of classes or other activities.

Showing off a classroom with computers, Jean Bellinger, assistant administrator for programs, said children were divided into three age groups comparable to elementary, middle and high school for four hours’ a day of instruction plus an hour’s recreation and lunch. But she acknowledged that for several months a staff shortage limited class time to an hour a day.

That was far too little, said Scott Medlock, a prison rights lawyer for the Texas Civil Rights Project.

Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting from Dallas.

    U.S. Gives Tour of Family Detention Center That Critics Liken to a Prison, NYT, 10.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/us/10detain.html

Illegal Immigrants Slain in an Attack in Arizona

February 9, 2007
The New York Times
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 8 — Three illegal immigrants were shot to death, three were wounded and others were missing Thursday near Tucson after gunmen accosted them as they traveled north from the Mexican border, the authorities said.

The shootings came a day after gunmen in ski masks and carrying assault-style rifles robbed 18 people who had illegally crossed the border 70 miles to the south, near Sasabe. On Jan. 28 a man driving illegal immigrants from the border several miles from the scene of Thursday’s killings was ambushed and shot to death as the immigrants fled.

The federal and local authorities were investigating whether the spate of shootings was related.

Illegal immigrants crossing the Mexican border often encounter bandits, armed civilian patrols and rival smugglers bent on robbing or stopping them.

The violence has been particularly acute in Arizona, which in recent years has become the busiest crossing area for illegal immigrants.

The latest shooting appeared to be the work of bandits, law enforcement officials said, though they said they had not ruled anything out.

Investigators were still piecing together what had happened, but they said they believed that the gunmen had opened fire on the travelers, apparently all from Guatemala, about 7 a.m. along a known smuggling route in a remote area near a mine 20 miles northwest of Tucson.

Their pickup truck crashed, and two of the immigrants, a young man and a teen-age girl, were found inside, dead from gunshot wounds, said Alonzo Peña, the agent in charge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement in Arizona.

The gunmen forced the other immigrants into another vehicle and left, dropping off the wounded, including one person found dead later, along their way, Mr. Peña said. The others who were left were a woman with a gunshot wound in the neck, a 15-year-old girl and a man shot in the fingers.

The man with the hand wound hiked to a nearby mine, and workers there helped him call the police.

Mr. Peña said the authorities were trying to determine how many had been in the group of immigrants and how many were still missing. He said it appeared the smuggler driving the illegal immigrants and a guide had either escaped or were among the group taken captive.

The Associated Press, quoting officials of the Pima County Sheriff’s Department, said six or seven immigrants had left with the gunmen.

“There have been similar cases where undocumented migrants have been taken to a location and relatives in Mexico contacted and extortion took place,” Rick Kastigar, the criminal investigations chief for the sheriff’s department, told The A.P.

Mr. Peña said the increase in border security in the past year, including scores of additional Border Patrol agents assisted by National Guard troops, had prompted more immigrants to employ smugglers commanding ever higher prices.

The going rate is about $3,000, or higher for trips from Central America, for a guide to lead immigrants by foot across the Mexican border or in a vehicle, usually through treacherous terrain.

Some smuggling rings, rather than risk capture at the border, have chosen to rob rivals, leading to violence.

“Smugglers look at them as a commodity, a product, and in some cases they would rather rip off a load and try to extort money instead of taking the risk to smuggle,” Mr. Peña said.

The Border Patrol’s Tucson sector has reported that arrests of illegal aliens dropped 11 percent last year and is down 9 percent since October compared with the previous year. Officials at the agency have attributed the decline to additional manpower and newly installed fencing, cameras and sensors deterring crossers, though advocates for immigrants suggest that traffic may have shifted elsewhere.

    Illegal Immigrants Slain in an Attack in Arizona, NYT, 9.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/09/us/09immig.html

Immigration becomes KKK rallying point

Posted 2/8/2007 11:53 PM ET
USA Today
By Theodore Kim and Emily Bazar

The Ku Klux Klan is stepping up its activities in some parts of the country, a trend that its leaders and opponents tie to anti-immigrant sentiment.

In the past year, the Klan has rallied or distributed fliers in Bloomington, Ind.; Amarillo, Texas; Denison, Iowa; and elsewhere. In each case, the white-supremacist group denounced illegal immigration or targeted communities with growing immigrant populations.

"It surprised me they came," says police Sgt. Randy TenBrink in Amarillo, site of a rally in August by the Texas chapter of the Empire Knights of the KKK. It is the only local KKK rally he knows of in 30 years. "The content of their message surprised me. It was so disjointed."

The Anti-Defamation League, a group that fights anti-Semitism and racism, released a report this week citing "a surprising and troubling resurgence" of KKK activity by long-standing and new groups. "They use this immigration issue to bring in others who feel like America is under siege," says Deborah Lauter, the ADL's national civil rights director. "It's easy for hate to spread."

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, also has charted an overall increase in KKK activity and says anti-immigrant sentiment is a primary driver, says Mark Potok, director of the center's tracking operation. The number of KKK groups rose from 110 in 2000 to 179 in 2005 but fell to about 150 last year, Potok says.

The behavior parallels the periods after Sept. 11, 2001, and the launch of the Iraq war in 2003. Extremist groups recruited new members by targeting Muslims, says William Aponte, the FBI's supervisory special agent for civil rights.

Phil Lawson, who says his title is "imperial wizard" of the United Northern and Southern Knights of the KKK, would not give membership numbers but says his group is growing.

He says last year it distributed 6,000 anti-immigrant newsletters in Bloomington and other Indiana communities calling for a rally and blaming illegal workers for taking jobs.

"Everyday that our government allows this Illegal Mexican Invasion to continue, our membership numbers continue to grow in the KKK," he says in an e-mail responding to questions.

In Denison, KKK members put recruitment fliers on parked cars in August, Police Chief Rod Bradley says. Storm Lake, Iowa, also was targeted.

Bradley says, "The two communities they targeted in western Iowa are both communities that have seen an influx of immigrants in the last 10 years."

Kim reports daily for The Indianapolis Star

    Immigration becomes KKK rallying point, UT, 8.2.2007, http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-02-08-kkk-immigration_x.htm

Immigrant Entrepreneurs

Shape a New Economy

February 6, 2007
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Manuel A. Miranda was 8 when his family immigrated to New York from Bogotá. His parents, who had been lawyers, turned to selling home-cooked food from the trunk of their car. Manuel pitched in after school, grinding corn by hand for traditional Colombian flatbreads called arepas.

Today Mr. Miranda, 32, runs a family business with 16 employees, producing 10 million arepas a year in the Maspeth section of Queens. But the burst of Colombian immigration to the city has slowed; arepas customers are spreading through the suburbs, and competition for them is fierce. Now, he says, his eye is on a vast, untapped market: the rest of the country.

In the long run, like bagels, “you’re going to have arepas in every store,” predicted Mr. Miranda, whose innovations include a “toaster-friendly” version (square instead of round), and an experimental Web site that offers online sales nationwide. “But I don’t have the connections. I don’t know the people who can advise how to take us to the next level.”

As the flow of immigrants to suburban and small-town America outpaces the growth of bustling ethnic centers in New York, many foreign-born entrepreneurs like the Mirandas are facing an unfamiliar crossroads. In the city, rising rents and density hamper growth, while swelling ethnic enclaves in the suburbs generate competitors. Yet in other places, opportunity beckons as never before, as immigrants expand the tastes of mainstream America.

Whether these businesses exploit the new chances to break out or succumb to the new perils, the city’s economy will feel the effects.

“Immigrants have been the entrepreneurial spark plugs of cities from New York to Los Angeles,” said Jonathan Bowles, the director of the Center for an Urban Future, a private, nonprofit research organization that has studied the dynamics of immigrant businesses that turned decaying neighborhoods into vibrant commercial hubs in recent decades. “These are precious and important economic generators for New York City, and there’s a risk that we might lose them over the next decade.”

A report to be issued by the center today highlights both the potential and the challenge for cities full of immigrant entrepreneurs, who often face language barriers, difficulties getting credit, and problems connecting with mainstream agencies that help businesses grow. The report identifies a generation of immigrant-founded enterprises poised to break into the big time — or already there, like the Lams Group, one of the city’s most aggressive hotel developers, or Delgado Travel, which reaps roughly $1 billion in annual revenues.

In Los Angeles, at least 22 of the 100 fastest-growing companies in 2005 were created by first-generation immigrants. In Houston, a telecommunications company started by a Pakistani man topped the 2006 list of the city’s most successful small businesses.

But even in those cities and New York, where immigrant-friendly mayors have promoted programs to help small business, the report contends that immigrant entrepreneurs have been overlooked in long-term strategies for economic development.

Some are doing just fine anyway. Lowell Hawthorne, the Jamaican-born chief executive of Golden Krust Caribbean Bakery, has parlayed a single bakery, opened in the Bronx in 1989, into more than 100 franchise restaurants nationwide. The latest batch opened in Atlanta, where Jamaican-style specialties, supplied from a Bronx plant with 130 employees, draw on a mix of West Indian immigration and crossover appeal.

Other companies, like Rajbhog Foods, which started as a mom-and-pop Indian sweets shop in Jackson Heights, Queens, seem to be on the edge of a similar breakthrough, even as they struggle with rising costs and shifting immigration patterns.

“Two steps forward and then back one step,” said Sachin Mody, the chief executive and son of the founders. “That is the hardest part, to keep hurdling and keep evolving.”

Mr. Mody said the company had about 70 employees and three plants and sold its vegetarian products to stores in 41 states and Canada. Its catering operation handles Indian weddings and conventions for as many as 10,000. But six years ago, in recognition of a changing market, it began opening franchise stores in places like Jersey City and Hicksville, on Long Island, where Indians have settled in large numbers.

In Jackson Heights, where South Asians from around the region have long come to shop for ethnic food and the latest in saris, bangles and Bollywood DVDs, business in Rajbhog’s gleaming flagship store is down 30 to 40 percent, said the owner, Nirval Shah, an Indian-born nephew of the founders.

“We try to reach out to every corner where there is an Indian community, so they don’t have to drive all the way to one location to get what they need,” he explained, allowing that such suburban shops were drawing business away from Little India in Queens, a view echoed by other merchants.

Then he pointed to the company’s newest line: frozen Indian entrees, less spiced for American palates.

In some ways, New York may have a head start on the growing pains of immigrant businesses. The nation’s recent surge of newcomers started earlier in the state and peaked by the mid-1990s, when immigration was still growing rapidly elsewhere. About 90,000 new immigrants still arrive each year in New York State, the vast majority still settling in the city, but that is down from about 168,000 in 1990.

Now, some children of the early influx are trying to build on their parents’ success — success that itself has increased the cost of doing business, by driving up rents and creating congestion.

One example is Jay Joshua, a Manhattan company that designs souvenirs and then has them manufactured in Asia and imported. Jay Chung, who arrived from South Korea in 1981 as a graduate student in design, started printing his computer-graphic designs for New York logos and peddling them to local T-shirt shops. His company is now one of the city’s leading suppliers of tourist items, from New York-loving coffee mugs to taxicab Christmas ornaments.

Mr. Chung’s son Joshua, 26, who was 3 when he immigrated, joined the company after studying business management in college, and recently helped land orders for a new line of Chicago souvenirs. But frustration mixes with pride when the Chungs, both American citizens now, discuss the company’s growth.

“It’s really hard to conduct a business over here as a wholesaler,” Mr. Chung said in the company’s West 27th Street showroom, chockablock with samples. “We get a ticket every 20 minutes, no matter what. We need more convenient places with less rent, less traffic.”

Thirty years ago their wholesale district was desolate. Now hundreds of Korean-American importers are there, said Jay Chung, who is a leader of the local Korean-American business association. They face a blizzard of parking tickets and high commercial rents — nearly $20,000 a month for 1,400 square feet, he said. Many merchants have had to subdivide and sublet their space, he added, shrinking just when they need to grow.

The association’s efforts to find an alternate wholesale site have a checkered history that underscores the importance of partnerships with the city — and the pitfalls. Responding to the city’s request for redevelopment proposals for the College Point section of Queens, more than 50 Korean merchants pooled $1 million to draw up the winning proposal, Mr. Chung said. At a news conference in 2004, Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg said it would create hundreds of new jobs. But the city backed out eight months later, after protests by older, white Queens residents and their representatives.

“They said they didn’t want the area to become like Flushing, like Chinatown,” Mr. Chung recalled. “It was a disaster for us — not only financially, but our image.”

Apologetic city development officials offered five other locations, he said in an account that the city confirmed, and the group is negotiating for a private project in Jamaica, Queens, that could yield a 13-story center in about four years. Meanwhile, however, some merchants have already moved to New Jersey.

At a time when cities woo biotechnology firms and sports arenas to jump-start local economies, the economic potential of immigrant entrepreneurs has remained largely under the radar, says the Center for an Urban Future. Though there are no precise figures to measure their economic contributions, the report said, these businesses create jobs in good times and bad. They offset the cyclical slumps of more high-profile sectors like finance in New York or energy in Houston. And they have created ethnic markets that draw shoppers into the city, balancing the loss of retail trade to the suburbs.

The report credits the Bloomberg administration for small-business initiatives that have helped some firms, but calls on public, private and nonprofit agencies to do more to connect immigrant entrepreneurs to the expertise available.

Kara Alaimo, a spokeswoman for the city’s Small Business Services Department, said it now deployed a staff speaking six foreign languages who aided almost 13,000 businesses in the five boroughs last year. “We are incredibly proud of our achievements in this arena and look forward to doing even more to provide resources to this vital community,” she said.

Immigrant entrepreneurs seem ambivalent about getting more attention from the city. Some are leery of red tape, though they would welcome, say, a municipal parking garage. Others cite concrete help they have received from city agencies.

When Mr. Miranda’s arepas company, Delicias Andinas, was struggling with high trash bills two years ago, he said, a city agent in an industry retention program referred him to a recycler. Now much of the company’s garbage — mostly corn leftovers — is sold to hog farms.

“They helped us out to a win-win situation,” said Mr. Miranda, now an American citizen who calls himself “a dyed-in-the-wool New Yorker.”

“For us, it was a big deal. Right now, I don’t need money. I need knowledge.”

Adam B. Ellick contributed reporting.

    Immigrant Entrepreneurs Shape a New Economy, NYT, 6.2.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/06/nyregion/06entrepreneurs.html?hp&ex=1170824400&en=8df879395e5347ac&ei=5094&partner=homepage

Despite Crackdown,

Migrants Stream Into South Mexico

January 28, 2007
The New York Times
By JAMES C. McKINLEY Jr.

TAPACHULA, Mexico — Four Salvadoran men in jeans and T-shirts trudged along the railroad tracks under a hot sun, their steps carrying them steadily toward a fuzzy but seductive dream.

They had been in Mexico for only a few hours and already federal police officers had forced them to strip and had taken almost all their cash, they said. They had some 1,500 miles to go to reach the United States border, with no food or water and $9 each.

They intended to walk along the Chiapas coast for the first 250 miles through a dozen towns where migrants are regularly robbed or raped. Then they planned to clamber aboard a freight train with hundreds of other immigrants for the trip north, a dangerous journey that has left hundreds before them maimed after they fell under the wheels.

“It’s dangerous, yes, one risks one’s life,” said one of the men, Noé Hernández. “One risks it if you have a family member in the States to help you. It’s not just for fun we go through Mexico.”

A month ago, Mexico’s new president, Felipe Calderón, announced measures to slow the flow of illegal immigrants across Mexico’s southern border and reduce crime in this lush but impoverished region. He stepped up the presence of soldiers and federal police here, told of plans for a guest worker program and promised joint state and federal operations to catch illegal immigrants.

But much remains to be done to stop or deter the migrants, and for now the measures have had little effect. Social workers and volunteers who aid the migrants say they keep coming.

Every three days, 300 to 500 Central Americans swarm the freight train in Arriaga, strapping themselves with ropes or belts to the tops of cars or riding between the wagons, they say.

The migrants still wade across the Suchiate River between Guatemala and Mexico with little hindrance. Corruption is rampant. Soldiers and police officers on the Mexican side extort money from the migrants but seldom turn them around, aid workers and migrants said.

“It’s an open border,” said Francisco Aceves Verdugo, a supervisor in the government agency, Grupos Beta, that gives food, water and medicine to illegal migrants. “We are confronting a monster so big in the form of corruption that we aren’t doing anything.”

The federal authorities do catch and deport illegal immigrants from Central America on their trek north — about 170,000 last year, according to Leticia Rodríguez, a spokeswoman for the National Migration Institute.

On the evening of Jan. 19, as part of Mr. Calderón’s new get-tough policy, about 400 federal police officers stopped the freight train just after it left Arriaga and arrested more than 100 immigrants who had climbed aboard.

Still, aid workers say a majority gets through. The biggest deterrent, migrants say, is not federal authorities but armed thugs who waylay them along the railroad tracks or on paths through the countryside used to avoid the immigration posts along the main highway.

This month, Misael Mejía, 27, from Comayagua, Honduras, was awaiting the train in Arriaga with nine other young men from his town. They had walked for 11 days after wading across the Suchiate to get to the railhead in Arriaga.

None of them had a dime after being ambushed a week before by three men in ski masks in daylight near Huehuetán. Two of the men carried machetes, the third a machine gun.

“They told us to lay down and take off our clothes,” Mr. Mejía said. “I lost my watch, about 500 Honduran lempiras, and 40 Mexican pesos,” about $31.

Mr. Mejía said he would press on. He has a brother in Arizona who has promised to pick him up if he can run the gantlet through the United States border patrol. He left a $200-a-month job as a driver behind, along with his wife. His brother makes $700 a week as a carpenter.

“I felt hopeless in Honduras,” he said. “Because I could never afford a house, not even a car. There is nothing I could have.”

Down the street from the tracks, at the Hearth of Mercy shelter, where illegal immigrants can get a free hot meal and medicine, Juan Antonio Cruz, 16, hunched over a bowl of rice and told how he had left El Salvador after members of the Mara Salvatrucha street gang had threatened to kill him. “They wanted me to join them,” he said.

It was his second attempt to reach Arizona, he said. The first time he had endured eight freezing nights and sweltering days aboard the train by strapping his belt to bar atop a tanker car. The border patrol caught him as he crossed into Nogales, Ariz., and sent him back home to Usulután, where the gang members threatened him again.

“When I think about the train, I feel fear and panic, for the thieves who attack you, and also for falling off,” he said softly.

For some, that is how the dream ends, with a fall under the train’s heavy, whirring wheels.

At the Shelter of Jesus the Good Pastor in Tapachula, Donar Antonio Ramírez Espinas rubbed the bandaged stumps of his legs, sheared off above the knee, as he recalled the night of March 26, 2004, when he dozed off while riding between cars, lost his grip and fell onto the tracks.

“I fell face down, and at first I didn’t think anything had happened,” he said. “When I turned over, I saw, I realized, that my feet didn’t really exist.”

Back in Honduras, he had been working menial jobs in a parking lot and at a medical warehouse, making about $120 a month. Then he and a few buddies decided to try their luck in the States.

“You make the decision to look for a better life, not to continue with the life your father led, and for this you risk your life, without knowing that you could end up like this,” he said. “An amputee.”

After the accident, he spent two years at the shelter in Tapachula, wrestling with depression and thoughts of suicide. When those black days finally passed, he returned home for five months, only to find his parents, his former wife and even his three children had trouble accepting his disability. “My 9-year-old said, ‘Papa, why did you come back like this?’ ” he remembered. “I didn’t dare answer him.”

Mr. Ramírez has returned to the shelter here, where he hopes to learn a trade — fashioning prosthetic legs and arms for other victims of the train. Others at the shelter told similar stories. Some doubted they would be able to make a living in their home countries, where even getting a wheelchair is hard.

But some of those with lesser injuries insisted their accident was just a temporary setback. Minor Estuardo Cortez, 33, from Guatemala, lost his left foot under a train wheel while climbing aboard in Oaxaca State. At the shelter, he has healed and learned to walk with a prosthetic foot. He intends to continue his journey. If he reaches Houston, he says, he has relatives who can get him a construction job.

“If something happens to me, I don’t scare easy,” he said. “I’ll do it again to see who wins, the train or me. Only thing is I can’t run, so I’ll have to wait until it’s stopped to get on.”

    Despite Crackdown, Migrants Stream Into South Mexico, NYT, 28.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/world/americas/28mexico.html

U.S. immigration

swoop targets criminal aliens

Wed Jan 24, 2007 8:25 AM ET
Reuters

PHOENIX (Reuters) - U.S. immigration police have rounded up hundreds of criminal aliens in southern California, as part of one of their largest ever roundups of foreign lawbreakers and immigration violators, police said on Tuesday.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice said the week-long sweep identified 423 criminal aliens due for release from jails across five counties in the Los Angeles area, and took them into custody.

The operation also led to the arrest of 338 undocumented immigrants in the area, more than 150 of whom were classed as "immigration fugitives" -- foreign nationals who ignored final deportation orders.

"It is one of the largest crackdowns on criminal aliens ever carried out in the United States," Kice told Reuters in a telephone interview.

"The goal of our enforcement efforts is two-fold. First, it's about restoring integrity to our nation's immigration system. Second, it's about safeguarding our communities from those who brazenly disregard our laws," she added.

Those arrested in the swoop have all either been removed from the United States already or face deportation.

The sweep came as part of "Operation Return to Sender," a nationwide initiative targeting criminal aliens, foreign nationals dodging deportation orders and other immigration violators.

ICE said most of those detained came from Mexico, although the sweep also netted nationals from 14 countries including Ukraine, India, Japan, Poland and Trinidad.

The operation is the latest in a series of raids in the interior of the United States, where immigration enforcement has been stepped up in recent months.

In December, ICE agents arrested more than 1,300 mostly Mexican workers in coordinated swoops on Swift & Co. meat processing plants in six states.

    U.S. immigration swoop targets criminal aliens, NYT, 24.1.2007, http://today.reuters.com/news/articlenews.aspx?type=domesticNews&storyID=2007-01-24T132519Z_01_N23399757_RTRUKOC_0_US-USA-IMMIGRATION-CRIMINALS.xml&WTmodLoc=Home-C5-domesticNews-2

Refugees Find Hostility and Hope

on Soccer Field

January 21, 2007
The New York Times
By WARREN ST. JOHN

CLARKSTON, Ga., Jan. 20 — Early last summer the mayor of this small town east of Atlanta issued a decree: no more soccer in the town park.

“There will be nothing but baseball and football down there as long as I am mayor,” Lee Swaney, a retired owner of a heating and air-conditioning business, told the local paper. “Those fields weren’t made for soccer.”

In Clarkston, soccer means something different than in most places. As many as half the residents are refugees from war-torn countries around the world. Placed by resettlement agencies in a once mostly white town, they receive 90 days of assistance from the government and then are left to fend for themselves. Soccer is their game.

But to many longtime residents, soccer is a sign of unwanted change, as unfamiliar and threatening as the hijabs worn by the Muslim women in town. It’s not football. It’s not baseball. The fields weren’t made for it. Mayor Swaney even has a name for the sort of folks who play the game: the soccer people.

Caught in the middle is a boys soccer program called the Fugees — short for refugees, though most opponents guess the name refers to the hip-hop band.

The Fugees are indeed all refugees, from the most troubled corners — Afghanistan, Bosnia, Burundi, Congo, Gambia, Iraq, Kosovo, Liberia, Somalia and Sudan. Some have endured unimaginable hardship to get here: squalor in refugee camps, separation from siblings and parents. One saw his father killed in their home.

The Fugees, 9 to 17 years old, play on three teams divided by age. Their story is about children with miserable pasts trying to make good with strangers in a very different and sometimes hostile place. But as a season with the youngest of the three teams revealed, it is also a story about the challenges facing resettled refugees in this country. More than 900,000 have been admitted to the United States since 1993, and their presence seems to bring out the best in some people and the worst in others.

The Fugees’ coach exemplifies the best. A woman volunteering in a league where all the other coaches are men, some of them paid former professionals from Europe, she spends as much time helping her players’ families make new lives here as coaching soccer.

At the other extreme are some town residents, opposing players and even the parents of those players, at their worst hurling racial epithets and making it clear they resent the mostly African team. In a region where passions run high on the subject of illegal immigration, many are unaware or unconcerned that, as refugees, the Fugees are here legally.

“There are no gray areas with the Fugees,” said the coach, Luma Mufleh. “They trigger people’s reactions on class, on race. They speak with accents and don’t seem American. A lot of people get shaken up by that.”

Lots of Running, Many Rules

The mayor’s soccer ban has everything to do with why, on a scorching August afternoon, Ms. Mufleh — or Coach Luma, as she is known in the refugee community — is holding tryouts for her under-13 team on a rutted, sand-scarred field behind an elementary school.

The boys at the tryouts wear none of the shiny apparel or expensive cleats common in American youth soccer. One plays in ankle-high hiking boots, some in baggy jeans, another in his socks. On the barren lot, every footfall and pivot produces a puff of chalky dust that hangs in the air like fog.

Across town, the lush field in Milam Park sits empty.

Ms. Mufleh blows her whistle.

“Listen up,” she tells the panting and dusty boys. “I don’t care how well you play. I care how hard you work. Every Monday and Wednesday, I’m going to have you from 5 to 8.” The first half will be for homework and tutoring. Ms. Mufleh has arranged volunteers for that. The second half will be for soccer, and for running. Lots of running.

“If you miss a practice, you miss the next game,” she tells the boys. “If you miss two games, you’re off the team.”

The final roster will be posted on the bulletin board at the public library by 10 Friday morning, she says. Don’t bother to call.

And one more thing. She holds up a stack of paper, contracts she expects her players to sign. “If you can’t live with this,” she says, “I don’t want you on this team.”

Hands — black, brown, white — reach for the paper. As the boys read, eyes widen:

I will have good behavior on and off the field.

I will not smoke.
I will not do drugs.
I will not drink alcohol.
I will not get anyone pregnant.
I will not use bad language.
My hair will be shorter than Coach’s.
I will be on time.
I will listen to Coach.
I will try hard.
I will ask for help.
I want to be part of the Fugees!

A Town Transformed

Until the refugees began arriving, the mayor likes to say, Clarkston “was just a sleepy little town by the railroad tracks.”

Since then, this town of 7,100 has become one of the most diverse communities in America.

Clarkston High School now has students from more than 50 countries. The local mosque draws more than 800 to Friday prayers. There is a Hindu temple, and there are congregations of Vietnamese, Sudanese and Liberian Christians.

At the shopping center, American stores have been displaced by Vietnamese, Ethiopian and Eritrean restaurants and a halal butcher. The only hamburger joint in town, City Burger, is run by an Iraqi.

The transformation began in the late 1980s, when resettlement agencies, private groups that contract with the federal government, decided Clarkston was perfect for refugees to begin new lives. The town had an abundance of inexpensive apartments, vacated by middle-class whites who left for more affluent suburbs. It had public transportation; the town was the easternmost stop on the Atlanta rail system. And it was within commuting distance of downtown Atlanta’s booming economy, offering new arrivals at least the prospect of employment.

At first the refugees — most from Southeast Asia — arrived so slowly that residents barely noticed. But as word got out about Clarkston’s suitability, more agencies began placing refugees here. From 1996 to 2001, more than 19,000 refugees from around the world resettled in Georgia, many in Clarkston and surrounding DeKalb County, to the dismay of many longtime residents.

Many of those residents simply left. Others stayed but remained resentful, keeping score of the ways they thought the refugees were altering their lives. There were events that reinforced fears that Clarkston was becoming unsafe: a mentally ill Sudanese boy beheaded his 5-year-old cousin in their Clarkston apartment; a fire in a crowded apartment in town claimed the lives of four Liberian refugee children.

At a town meeting in 2003 meant to foster understanding between the refugees and residents, the first question, submitted on an index card, was, “What can we do to keep the refugees from coming to Clarkston?”

A Coach With a Passion

Luma Mufleh, 31, says she was born to coach. She grew up in Amman, Jordan, in a Westernized family, and attended the American Community School, for American and European expatriates and a few well-to-do Jordanians. There, Muslim girls were free to play sports as boys did, and women were permitted to coach.

Her mentor was an American volleyball coach who demanded extreme loyalty and commitment. Ms. Mufleh picked up on a paradox. Though she claimed to dislike her coach, she wanted to play well for her.

“For the majority of the time she coached me, I hated her,” Ms. Mufleh said. “But she had our respect. Until then, I’d always played for me. I’d never played for a coach.”

Ms. Mufleh attended college in the United States, in part because she felt women here had more opportunities. She went to Smith College, and after graduation moved to Atlanta. She soon found her first coaching job, as head of a 12-and-under girls soccer team through the local Y.M.C.A.

On the field, Ms. Mufleh emulated her volleyball coach, an approach that did not always sit well with American parents. When she ordered her players to practice barefoot, to get a better feel for the soccer ball, a player’s mother objected on the grounds that her daughter could injure her toes.

“This is how I run my practice,” Ms. Mufleh told her. “If she’s not going to do it, she’s not going to play.”

Ms. Mufleh’s first team lost every game. But over time her methods paid off. Her players returned. They got better. In her third season, her team was undefeated.

When Ms. Mufleh learned about the growing refugee community in Clarkston, she floated the idea of starting a soccer program. The Y.M.C.A. offered to back her with uniforms and equipment. So in the summer of 2004, Ms. Mufleh made fliers announcing tryouts in Arabic, English, French and Vietnamese and distributed them around apartment complexes where the refugees lived.

For a coach hoping to build a soccer program in Clarkston, the biggest challenge was not finding talented players. There were plenty of those, boys who had learned the game in refugee camps in Africa and in parking lots around town. The difficulty was finding players who would show up.

Many of the players come from single-parent families, with mothers or fathers who work hours that do not sync with sports schedules. Few refugee families own cars. Players would have to be self-sufficient.

On a June afternoon, 23 boys showed up for the tryouts.

From the beginning, the players were wary. A local church offered a free basketball program for refugee children largely as a cover for missionary work.

Others simply doubted that a woman could coach soccer.

“She’s a girl — she doesn’t know what she’s talking about,” Ms. Mufleh overheard a Sudanese boy say at an early practice.

She ordered him to stand in the goal. As the team watched, she blasted a shot directly at the boy, who dove out of the way.

“Anybody else?” she asked.

In Brutal Pasts, a Bond

Jeremiah Ziaty, one of those early players, is a typical member of the Fugees.

In 1997, in the midst of Liberia’s 14 years of civil war, rebels led by Charles Taylor showed up one night at the Ziatys’ house in Monrovia. Jeremiah’s father was a low-level worker in a government payroll office. The rebels thought he had money. When they learned he did not, they killed him in the family’s living room.

Beatrice Ziaty, Jeremiah’s mother, grabbed her sons and fled out the back door. The Ziatys trekked through the bush for a week until they reached a refugee camp in the Ivory Coast. There, they lived in a mud hut and scavenged for food. After five years in the camp, Ms. Ziaty learned her family had been accepted for resettlement in Clarkston, a town she had never heard of.

The United States Committee for Refugees and Immigrants in Washington estimates that there are now more than 12 million refugees worldwide and more than 20 million people displaced within their own nations’ borders. In 2005, only 80,800 were accepted by other nations for resettlement, according to the United Nations.

The Ziatys’ resettlement followed a familiar script. The family was lent $3,016 for one-way airline tickets to the United States, which they repaid in three years. After a two-day journey from Abidjan, they were greeted in Atlanta by a case worker from the International Rescue Committee, a resettlement organization. She took them to an apartment in Clarkston where the cupboard had been stocked with canned goods.

The case worker helped Ms. Ziaty find a job, as a maid at the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in the affluent Buckhead section of Atlanta, one that required an hour commute by bus. While walking home from the bus stop after her first day, Ms. Ziaty was mugged and her purse stolen.

Terrified of her new surroundings, Ms. Ziaty told her son Jeremiah never to leave the house. Like any 8-year-old, Jeremiah bristled. He especially wanted to play soccer. Through friends in the neighborhood, he heard about tryouts for the Fugees.

“When he tell me, ‘Mom, I go play soccer,’ I tell him he’s too small, don’t go out of the house,” Ms. Ziaty recalled. “Then he would start crying.”

Ms. Ziaty relaxed her rule when she met Ms. Mufleh, who promised to take care of her son.

That was three years ago. At age 11, Jeremiah is a leader of the 13-and-under Fugees, shifting among sweeper, center midfielder and center forward.

Other members of the Fugees also have harrowing stories. Qendrim Bushi’s Muslim family fled Kosovo when Serbian soldiers torched his father’s grocery store and threatened to kill them. Eldin Subasic’s uncle was shot in Bosnia. And so on.

The Fugees, Ms. Mufleh believed, shared something intense. They knew trauma. They knew the fear and loneliness of the newcomer. This was their bond.

“In order to get a group to work together, to be effective together, you have to find what is common,” she said. “The refugee experience is pretty powerful.”


• • •

Ms. Mufleh made a point never to ask her players about their pasts. On the soccer field, she felt, refugees should leave that behind.

Occasionally, though, a boy would reveal a horrific memory. One reported that he had been a child soldier. When she expressed frustration that a Liberian player tuned out during practice, another Liberian told her she didn’t understand: the boy had been forced by soldiers to shoot his best friend.

“It was learning to not react,” Ms. Mufleh said. “I just wanted to listen. How do you respond when a kid says, ‘I saw my dad shot in front of me’? I didn’t know.”

As a Jordanian in the Deep South, Ms. Mufleh identified in some ways with the refugees. A legal resident awaiting a green card, she often felt an outsider herself, and knew what it was like to be far from home.

She also found she was needed. Her fluent Arabic and conversational French came in handy for players’ mothers who needed to translate a never-ending flow of government paperwork. Teachers learned to call her when her players’ parents could not be located. Families began to invite her to dinner, platters of rice and bowls of leafy African stews. The Ziatys cut back on the peppers when Coach Luma came over; they learned she couldn’t handle them.

Upon hearing of the low wages the refugee women were earning, Ms. Mufleh thought she could do better. She started a house and office cleaning company called Fresh Start, to employ refugee women. The starting salary is $10 an hour, nearly double the minimum wage and more than the women were earning as maids in downtown hotels. She guarantees a 50-cent raise every year, and now employs six refugee women.

Ms. Mufleh said that when she started the soccer program, she was hopelessly naïve about how it would change her life.

“I thought I would coach twice a week and on weekends — like coaching other kids,” she said. “It’s 40 or 60 hours a week — coaching, finding jobs, taking people to the hospital. You start off on your own, and you suddenly have a family of 120.”

Off to a Rough Start

On a Friday morning in August, the boys come one by one to look for their names on the roster at the public library. Many go away disappointed, but six do not.

The new players are:

¶Mohammed Mohammed, 12, a bright-eyed Iraqi Kurd whose family fled Saddam Hussein for Turkey five years ago and who speaks only a few words of English.

¶Idwar and Robin Dikori, two rocket-fast Sudanese brothers, 12 and 10, who lost their mother, sister and two younger brothers in a car crash after arriving in Clarkston.

¶Shahir Anwar, 13, an Afghan whose parents fled the Taliban and whose father suffered a debilitating stroke soon after arriving in this country.

¶Santino Jerke, a shy 11-year-old Sudanese who has just arrived after three years as a refugee in Cairo.

¶Mafoday Jawneh, a heavyset boy of 12 whose family fell out of favor after a coup in Gambia, and who has a sensitive side; his older brother ribs him for tearing up during “The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

Ms. Mufleh is uncertain of her team’s prospects. She will have to teach the new players the basics of organized soccer. There are no throw-ins or corner kicks in the street game they have been playing.

In her occasional moments of self-doubt, Ms. Mufleh asks herself: Can I really get these boys to play together? Can I really get them to win?


• • •

The Fugees’ first practice this season is on a sultry August afternoon, with thunderclouds looming in the distance. After 90 minutes of studying, the team runs for half an hour and groans through situps, push-ups and leg lifts.

But the Fugees have no soccer goals. The Y.M.C.A., which sponsors the team, did not place the order, despite a $2,000 grant for the purpose. Ms. Mufleh quietly seethes that a team of wealthy children would probably not have to wait for soccer goals. She likens practice to “playing basketball without a hoop.”

The team’s first games portend a long season. The Fugees tie their first game, 4-4. In their next game, they surrender a lead and lose, 3-1. The team isn’t passing well. Players aren’t holding their positions.

On a sweltering afternoon in early September, the Fugees prepare to take the field against the Triumph, a team from nearby Tucker. Even before the game, there is a glaring difference between the Fugees and their competition. The Triumph have brought perhaps 40 parents, siblings and friends, who spread out with folding chairs and picnic blankets and are loaded down with enough energy bars and brightly colored sports drinks for an N.B.A. team.

Though this is technically a home game, no one is on the Fugees’ side. During the course of the season, only one Fugees parent will make a game.

The Fugees lead, 2-0, at halftime. In the second half, they put on a show: firing headers, bicycle kicks and a gorgeous arcing shot from 30 yards out. Even the parents of the Triumph gasp and clap in appreciation. At the final whistle, the Fugees have won, 5-1.

“Not bad,” Ms. Mufleh tells her team. “But next week will be a much better game, O.K.?”

A Call for Change

Ms. Mufleh has a list of complaints about the Fugees’ practice field: little grass, no goals. Neighborhood children regularly wander through the scrimmages, disrupting play.

But after a gang shooting in an apartment complex behind the field in late September, she concludes that the field is not safe. She cancels practice for two days. Fed up, she storms into Mayor Swaney’s office, demanding use of the empty field in Milam Park.

When Lee Swaney first ran for City Council in Clarkston more than 15 years ago, he did so as an unabashed representative of “Old Clarkston” — Clarkston before the refugees. It was certainly the more politically viable stance. Because few of the refugees have been in the country long enough to become citizens and vote, political power resides with longtime residents. The 2005 election that gave Mr. Swaney a second four-year term as mayor of this town of 7,100 was determined by just 390 voters.

As mayor, Mr. Swaney has frequently found himself caught between these voters and the thousands of newcomers. But he has also taken potentially unpopular steps on behalf of the refugees. In 2006 he forced the resignation of the town’s longtime police chief, in part because of complaints from refugees that Clarkston police officers were harassing them. Mr. Swaney gave the new chief a mandate to purge the Police Department of rogue officers.

Within three months, the chief, a black man of Trinidadian descent named Tony J. Scipio, fired or accepted the resignations of one-third of the force.

Soccer is another matter. Mr. Swaney does not relish his reputation as the mayor who banned soccer. But he must please constituents who complain that refugees are overrunning the town’s parks and community center — people like Emanuel Ransom, a black man who moved to Clarkston in the late 1960s.

“A lot of our Clarkston residents are being left out totally,” Mr. Ransom says. “Nobody wants to help,” he says of the refugees. “It’s just, ‘Give me, give me, give me.’ ”

Mr. Swaney encourages Ms. Mufleh to make her case at the next City Council meeting. So in early October she addresses a packed room at City Hall, explaining the team’s origins and purpose and promising to pick up trash in the park after practice.

Mr. Swaney takes the floor. He admits concerns about “grown soccer people” who might tear up the field. But these are kids, he says, and “kids are our future.”

He announces his support of a six-month trial for the Fugees’ use of the field in Milam Park.

The proposal passes unanimously. At least for six months, the Fugees can play on grass.

Getting Back in the Game

Early on the morning of Oct. 14, Jeremiah Ziaty is nowhere to be seen. The Fugees have a 9 a.m. game an hour from Clarkston, against the Bluesprings Liberty Fire, one of the top teams. Ms. Mufleh had told her players to meet at the library by 7.

Ms. Mufleh usually leaves players behind if they aren’t on time. But she knows Jeremiah’s mother is now working nights at a packaging factory; she gets home at 3 a.m. and won’t be up to wake Jeremiah. So the coach orders the bus driver to the Ziatys’ apartment. Jeremiah is sound asleep. Awakened, he grabs his uniform and fumbles toward the bus.

From the outset of the game, the Fugees, and especially Jeremiah, seem groggy. They fall behind, 1-0. But in the second half, they tie the score, fall behind, and tie it again, 2-2. Jeremiah is now playing fearsome defense. With minutes to go, the Fugees score. They win, 3-2.

“We played as a team,” says Qendrim Bushi, the boy from Kosovo. “We didn’t yell at each other. Last game, when they scored, all of us were yelling at each other. And Coach made us do a lot of stuff at practice. That’s why we win. Only because of Coach.”

As the Fugees leave the field, a man on the Bluesprings sideline yells to them, “I’d have paid money to watch that game!”


• • •

The Fugees have a knack for inspiring such strong reactions, both positive and negative. After one game Ms. Mufleh thought for a moment she was being chased by a rival parent.

“We’ve heard about your team,” the man said when he caught up with her. “We want to know what we can do to help.”

The rival team donated cleats, balls and jerseys.

Then there was the game in rural Clarkesville last season at which rival players and even some parents shouted a racial epithet at some of the African players on the Fugees.

After being ejected from a game against the Fugees in November, a rival player made an obscene gesture to nearly every player on the Fugees before heading to his bench. And opponents sometimes mocked the Fugees when they spoke to each other in Swahili, or when Ms. Mufleh shouted instructions in Arabic.

There were even incidents involving referees. Two linesmen were reprimanded by a head referee during a pregame lineup in October for snickering when the name Mohammed Mohammed was called.

Ms. Mufleh tells her players to try their best to ignore these slights. When the other side loses its cool, she tells them, it is a sign of weakness.

Ms. Mufleh is just as fatalistic about bad calls. In her entire coaching career, she tells her players, she has never seen a call reversed because of arguing.

The Fugees are perhaps better equipped to accept this advice than most. Their lives, after all, have been defined by bad calls. On the field, they seem to have a higher threshold for anger than the American players, who often respond to borderline calls as if they are catastrophic injustices. Bad calls, Ms. Mufleh teaches her players, are part of the game. You have to accept them, and move on.

On Oct. 21, Ms. Mufleh is forced to put this theory to the test. The Fugees are on their way to Athens, an hour’s drive, for their biggest game, against the undefeated United Gold Valiants. A win will put them in contention for the top spot in their division. Ms. Mufleh sets out in her yellow Volkswagen Beetle, the back seat crammed with balls and cleats. Her team follows in a white Y.M.C.A. bus.

Just outside Monroe, Ms. Mufleh looks to her left and sees a Georgia State Patrol car parallel to her. She looks at her speedometer. She isn’t speeding.

The brake light, she thinks.

Ms. Mufleh noticed it early in the week, but between practices, work and evenings shuttling among her players’ apartments, she neglected to get it fixed. The trooper turns on his flashing lights. Ms. Mufleh eases to the side and looks at her watch. If this doesn’t take too long, the team will make the field in time to warm up.

It isn’t so simple. Because of a clerical error, a ticket Ms. Mufleh paid a year before appears unpaid. Her license is suspended. The trooper orders her from her car. In full view of her team, he arrests her.

In the bus, the Fugees become unglued. Santino Jerke, in the country only a few months, begins to weep, violating the unwritten team rule that Fugees don’t cry. Several of the Fugees have had family members snatched by uniformed men, just like this. They have been in the United States too little time to understand court dates or bail.

Ms. Mufleh tells the team’s manager and bus driver, Tracy Ediger, to take the team to Athens. They know what to do. They can play without her.

Coachless, though, the Fugees are lost. Athens scores within minutes. And scores again. And again. The final score is 5-0.

After the game, Ms. Ediger drives the team back to Monroe. She puts together the $800 bail for Ms. Mufleh and signs some papers. In a few moments, the coach appears. Later, Ms. Mufleh says she thought at that moment about all the times she had told the Fugees to shake off bad calls, to get back in the game, to take responsibility. She walks straight to the bus and her players.

“This was my fault, and I had no excuse for not being there,” she tells them. “I should have been there and I wasn’t, and the way it happened probably messed you guys up.”

Ms. Mufleh asks about the score.

“It was a really hard team, Coach,” says Idwar Dikori, the Sudanese speedster.

“Were they better than you?”

“No!” the Fugees shout in unison.

“Come on, guys — were they?”

“No, Coach,” Robin Dikori says. “If you were there, we were going to beat them.”

Back in Clarkston that night, Ms. Mufleh takes some sweet rolls to the family of Grace Balegamire, a Congolese player. Grace’s 9-year-old brother has heard about the arrest, but doesn’t believe it.

“If you were in jail,” the boy says, “you wouldn’t be here.”

Ms. Mufleh explains that she gave the people at the jail some money and promised to come back later, so they let her out.

“How much money?” he asks.

“Enough for 500 ice creams.”

“If you pay 500 ice creams you can come out of jail?” he asks.

Ms. Mufleh grasps the boy’s confusion. The boys’ father is a political prisoner, in jail in Kinshasa, under circumstances that have drawn condemnation from Amnesty International and the Red Cross. The government there has issued no word on when, or if, he will be released.

At the Ziatys’ home, the arrest has a similarly jarring effect. Jeremiah locks himself in his room and cries himself to sleep.

Battling to the End

It’s late October, and with just two weeks left in the season, a minor miracle occurs in the arrival of two 10-foot-long cardboard boxes: portable soccer goals for the Fugees. The administrator at the Y.M.C.A. finally put in the order. Ms. Mufleh and Ms. Ediger assemble the goals in Milam Park.

The goals and the new field offer Ms. Mufleh new opportunities to coach. On grass, players can slide-tackle during scrimmages, a danger on the old, gravelly field. A lined field makes it easier to practice throw-ins and corner kicks. And goals: well, they provide a chance for the Fugees to practice shooting.

A disturbing trend has emerged in recent games. The Fugees move the ball down the field at will, but their shots are wild. They tie two games despite dominating play.

Perhaps the Fugees are missing shots for the reason other teams miss shots: because scoring in soccer, under the best conditions, is deceptively difficult. But Ms. Mufleh also wonders if the absence of goals for most of a season doesn’t have something to do with it.

Even so, the Fugees end the regular season on a misty Saturday with a 2-1 victory, to finish third in their division with a record of 5-2-3, behind undefeated Athens and the Dacula Danger, a team the Fugees tied. The season finale will be a tournament called the Tornado Cup. To a player, the Fugees think they can win.

“What makes us work as a team is we all want to win bad — we want to be the best team around,” Qendrim says. “It’s like they’re all from my own country,” he adds of his teammates. “They’re my brothers.”


• • •

The Tornado Cup comes down to a game between the Fugees and the Concorde Fire, perhaps Atlanta’s most elite — and expensive — soccer academy. The Fugees need to win to advance to the finals.

Standing on the sideline in a sweatshirt with “Soccer Mom” on the back, Nancy Daffner, team mother for the Fire, describes her son’s teammates as “overachievers.” One is a cellist who has played with the Atlanta Symphony. Her son wakes up an hour early every day to do a morning radio broadcast at his school.

The Fire are mostly from the well-to-do Atlanta suburb of Alpharetta. They have played together under the same coach for five years. They practice twice a week under lights, and have sessions for speed and agility training.

Over the years, the parents have grown close. During practice, Ms. Daffner says, she and the other mothers often meet for margaritas while the fathers watch their sons play. The team has pool parties and players spend weekends at one another’s lake houses. In the summer, most of the players attend soccer camp at Clemson University. Ms. Daffner estimates that the cost of playing for the Fire exceeds $5,000 a year per player, which includes fees, travel to tournaments and, of course, gear. Each player has an Adidas soccer bag embroidered with his jersey number.

There is one other expenditure. The parents of the Fire collectively finance the play of Jorge Pinzon, a Colombian immigrant and the son of a single working mother. He isn’t from Alpharetta, but from East Gwinnett County, a largely Latino area outside Atlanta. Fire parents go to great lengths to get Jorge to games, arranging to meet him at gas stations around his home, landmarks they can find in his out-of-the-way neighborhood. Jorge is the best player on the team.

Ms. Mufleh gathers the Fugees before warm-ups.

“Play to the whistle,” she tells them. “If the ref makes a bad call, you keep playing. O.K.? You focus on the game and how you’re going to win it. Because if you don’t, we’re going to lose your last game of the season, and you’re going home early.”

Just before the opening whistle, some of the Fugees see a strange sight on the sideline. A teacher from the school of Josiah Saydee, a Liberian forward, has come to see him play. Some older refugee children from the complexes in Clarkston have managed rides to the game, an hour from home. Several volunteers from resettlement agencies show up. For the first time all year, the Fugees have fans.

The Fugees come out shooting — and missing — frequently. They lead, 1-0, at the half. In the second half, it’s as if a force field protects the Fire’s goal. After a half-dozen misses, the Fugees score again midway through the second half, to lead by 2-1.

Then, with just minutes to go, Jorge Pinzon of the Fire gets free about 25 yards from the Fugees’ goal. He squares his shoulders and leans into a shot that arcs beautifully over the players’ heads. Eldin Subasic, the Fugees’ Bosnian goalie, leaps. The ball brushes his hands and deflects just under the bar, tying the game.

The final whistle blows moments later. The Fugees’ season is over.

“You had them,” Ms. Mufleh tells her team after the game. “You had them at 2 to 1, and you wouldn’t finish it.”

The Fugees are crushed.

“We lost, I mean, we tied our game,” says Mafoday Jawneh, the sensitive newcomer to the team. “It was so. ...” His voice trails off. “I don’t know what it was.”

An Unpleasant Holiday Gift

The holidays are a festive time in Clarkston. Santa Claus arrives by helicopter at City Hall. The mayor is there to greet him, as are some of the Fugees.

They have other concerns besides Christmas. The Fugees have held two carwashes in town, to raise $1,000 to go to a tournament in Savannah in late January. They have come up $130 short, and Ms. Mufleh tells them that unless they raise the money, they are not going. When one player suggests asking their parents, Ms. Mufleh says that any player who asks a parent for tournament money will be kicked off the team.

She tells them, “You need to ask yourselves what you need to do for your team.”


• • •

“You need to ask yourself what you need to do for your team,” Jeremiah Ziaty says.

He is at home in his kitchen, talking with Prince Tarlue, a teammate from Liberia, making a case for a team project. Some of the boys are to meet at Eldin Subasic’s apartment. They can knock on doors in town and offer to rake leaves to raise the money to get to Savannah. No need telling Coach, unless they raise enough cash. Prince says he is in. Grace is in, too. Some older boys in the refugee community offer to help out as well. Late on a Sunday morning, they set out.

That afternoon, Ms. Mufleh’s cellphone rings. It’s Eldin, who asks if she will pick up Grace and take him home. They have been raking leaves all day, he says, and Grace does not want to walk home in the dark. Oh, Eldin adds, he wants to give her the money.

“What money?” she asks.

“You said we needed $130,” he tells her. “So we got $130.”


• • •

Ms. Mufleh and Ms. Ediger, the team manager, spend the holiday vacation visiting the players’ families. On Dec. 26, Ms. Mufleh receives a fax on Town of Clarkston letterhead.

Effectively immediately, the fax informs her, the Fugees soccer team is no longer welcome to play at Milam Park. The city is handing the field to a youth sports coordinator who plans to run a youth baseball and football program.

Questioned by this reporter, Mayor Swaney says he has forgotten that in October the City Council gave the Fugees six months. A few days later, he tells Ms. Mufleh the team can stay through March.

In early January, Ms. Mufleh logs on to Google Earth, and scans satellite images of Clarkston. There are green patches on the campuses of Georgia Perimeter College, and at the Atlanta Area School for the Deaf, around the corner from City Hall. She hopes to find the Fugees a permanent home.

Refugees Find Hostility and Hope on Soccer Field, NYT, 21.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/21/us/21fugees.html

First-Baby Sweepstakes

Fuels Immigration Debate

January 6, 2007
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

It seemed like a perfect formula for good publicity: A national sweepstakes would award a $25,000 United States savings bond to the first American baby born in 2007, courtesy of the toy chain Toys “R” Us and its Babies “R” Us division.

Instead, after disqualifying a Chinese-American baby girl born in New York Downtown Hospital at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s, the toy company finds itself caught in the glare of the immigration debate, stumbling over the nation’s new demographic realities.

The baby girl, Yuki Lin, was an American citizen from the second the ball dropped in Times Square, where the Toys “R” Us flagship store draws thousands of shoppers from around the world. But like 6 out of 10 babies born in the city — including at least two others born in Brooklyn about the same moment — she has immigrant parents. And according to the contest’s fine print, the chain decided, she was ruled out because her mother was not a legal resident.

The first baby of the year is usually a one-day story. But Albert H. Wang, a corporate lawyer who read about Yuki Lin’s lost chance on the Web site of the Chinese-language newspaper The World Journal, was outraged enough to start an e-mail campaign that is enlisting the ire of prominent Chinese-Americans like the president of the Asian American Business Development Center and officers of the Organization of Chinese Americans.

Their criticism, and threats of a media campaign against the company, come just a month after the chain opened its first store in China, in Shanghai.

“They want business from China,” said Mr. Wang, 39, adding that most of the chain’s toys are made by Chinese workers in China. “But when it comes to this Chinese-American U.S. citizen, she was deprived of $25,000 intended to be used for her college education, because of who her parents are.”

Kathleen Waugh, a spokeswoman for the company, confirmed yesterday that Yuki Lin, born at 6.5 pounds and 19 inches long, had been close to winning the prize. The baby won a random drawing to break a three-way tie with hospitals in Gainesville, Ga., and Bay Shore, N.Y., which also claimed a baby born at midnight.

But, Ms. Waugh added, “in working with New York Downtown Hospital to verify the potential winner’s information and obtain a signed affidavit of eligibility — which is required under the official rules of the sweepstakes — the sweepstakes administrator was informed that the mother of the baby born at New York Downtown Hospital was not a legal resident of the United States.” Contest rules say that only mothers who are legal residents are eligible, Ms. Waugh said, adding that such requirements are common in sweepstakes.

The award went instead to the runner-up in the drawing, Jayden Swain, born 19 seconds after midnight at Northeast Georgia Medical Center to Renee Swain, 20, described by her mother as “a black American.” “She’s an American all the way,” Ms. Swain’s mother, Janet K. Keller, said in a telephone interview.

The baby at Bay Shore was born to a couple from El Salvador.

Mr. Wang and other Chinese-Americans say the winner was to be the baby, not the mother, and they see implications of second-class citizenship that strike an ugly chord. It only seemed to add insult to injury, they said, that the baby was instead given a $100 gift basket, just like all the others the chain gives to the first New Year’s babies born in any hospital that signs up for it.

“People are just pretty much outraged,” said John Wang, president of the 13-year-old Asian American Business Development Center, on Wall Street, adding that he was perplexed by the company’s actions.

“The schools accept children whose parents are illegal aliens in this country, so why is Toys ‘R’ Us taking this kind of position?” he asked. “They’re supported by many people, whether they’re legal or illegal, shopping in their stores, and they’re injecting themselves into this debate.”

The parents could not be reached for comment, and their exact immigration status was unclear. Vanessa Warner, a spokeswoman for New York Downtown Hospital, would not answer questions about the event, though an upbeat account of the birth and photos of the parents and medical team were on the hospital Web site yesterday. The mother is Han Lin and the father is Yan Zhu Liu, both 22-year-old restaurant workers.

Leo Y. Lee, 49, an engineer who is past national vice president of the Organization of Chinese Americans, an advocacy organization, pointed out that the savings bond was awarded in the name of the baby, not the mother, and that there was no legal requirement for a rule barring the American-born child of an illegal immigrant.

“I am strongly opposed to the Toys ‘R’ Us decision to give the award to another baby just based solely on the mother’s status,” he said. His group, he said, does not “condone or approve illegal immigration, but anyone who is here should be protected by law — especially a baby with the same rights as any other citizen.”

But comments by Ms. Keller, the grandmother of the winning baby, hinted at the wrath that the company risked from the other side at a time when the most stringent critics of illegal immigration have called for an end to birthright citizenship, saying the children born to illegal immigrants are “anchor babies” who encourage illegal entry.

“If she’s an illegal alien, that makes the baby illegal,” said Ms. Keller, 50. Told otherwise, she remarked, “Sounds like a double standard to me,” adding, “She was disqualified — that should be it. Don’t go changing your mind now.”

Adding to the confusion were promotional materials that called for “all expectant New Year’s mothers” to apply to the contest, and allowed hospitals and Ob/Gyn offices to apply on behalf of their patients. The hospitals were offered a chance to win a $10,000 prenatal education grant. About 8,000 mothers and more than 800 hospitals participated in the contest, Ms. Waugh said.

Ole Pedersen, a spokesman for Brookdale University Hospital and Medical Center in Brooklyn, said the hospital initially believed it had won the sweepstakes with the midnight birth of Odunayo Muhammed to a Nigerian immigrant couple, Christiana and Abdul Muhammed. Later he learned that the doctor who reported the birth online had missed the contest’s 6 a.m. deadline on Jan. 1 by an hour and a half.

As for a mother’s legal status, Mr. Pedersen added, “We wouldn’t have even thought of that.”

First-Baby Sweepstakes Fuels Immigration Debate, NYT, 6.1.2007, http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/06/nyregion/06toys.html