History > 2011 > USA > Immigration (I)

A Hmong Generation

Finds Its Voice in Writing

December 31, 2011
The New York Times
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

FRESNO, Calif. — In many ways, the preoccupations of the young writers who gather every week here over supermarket cheese and crackers are those of young people everywhere. They grapple with loneliness, the mystifying behavior of siblings, being gay, the parents who do not understand them.

But as the first generation to grow up with a written language, English — rather than the traditional spoken Hmong — the members of the Hmong American Writers’ Circle are addressing a new kind of coming of age in America. It is one in which living room sofas are moved for the arrival of a shaman on Saturday mornings and in which Fourth of July fireworks are avoided because they elicit terrifying flashbacks among their parents.

Mai Der Vang, a 30-year-old poet and a project director for New America Media, an ethnic news organization, writes about the lives her mother and father could not have:

And what you learn on back-to-school night,

when your mother does not know how to

write your name on the chalkboard

of your fourth grade class.

They call themselves the 1.75 generation, mostly born in the United States but still strongly identifying with their Hmong roots. They are the sons and daughters of the hundreds of thousands of Hmong villagers in Laos who were covertly trained by the Central Intelligence Agency to repel communist forces during the Vietnam War. Although the oldest writers were born in Thai refugee camps, most grew up in the Central Valley of California or in the Twin Cities.

In the United States, traumatic memories of wartime atrocities are often compounded by language issues, poverty and social isolation. The writers’ parents grew up not only without a written language, but without much knowledge of the outside world.

In monthly workshops and in “How Do I Begin?,” an anthology of their writing recently published by Heyday Books, Ms. Vang and her colleagues try to make sense of the dualities of growing up Hmong American, especially the hidden inner lives of parents often expressed as an inchoate sadness.

In Laos, only one child — usually the eldest son — was chosen to attend school, said Pos L. Moua, 41, a creative writing and English teacher at Merced College. When his father was younger, he spent his days “taking food to his older brother, a long journey by donkey,” Mr. Moua said. Now 74 and ailing, Mr. Moua’s father had deeply wanted an education; when his son read him a poem he had written, he wept.

“They have an urge to talk about feelings,” Mr. Moua said of his father. “But the limitations in the new world changed the way they perceived life.”

The limitations have been profound: about a quarter of Hmong families nationally live in poverty. In Fresno, the percentage is even higher, at 35 percent. And in California, nearly 43 percent of Hmong ages 25 and older have less than a high school diploma, according to the American Community Survey of the United States Census.

In a study of the Hmong community by the Center for Health Disparities of the University of California, Davis, poverty was cited by families as a major contributor to mental illness. In the 1990s, a wave of teen suicides in Fresno cast the challenges of assimilation into bas-relief, with truancy among boys still a major issue.

“In the U.S., the family power structure gets switched around,” said Shwaw Vang, a clinical social worker at Khasiah House, a Hmong mental health clinic in Madison, Wis. “It’s the young who are able to communicate with the larger community, which gives them authority, while parents are relegated to religious and healing ceremonies and taking care of the house.”

Writing is a way to reinforce “Hmongness,” said Burlee Vang, the circles’ 29-year-old founder. Mr. Vang, who favors a mohawk and a goatee and is not related to Ms. Vang, started the group seven years ago “out of loneliness,” he said. With no Hmong literary tradition, “in college, all these Asian kids were asking, ‘What’s Hmong?’ ” Mr. Vang said. “You didn’t have a history book to give them.”

The circle started inauspiciously in the party room of a Chinese restaurant where readings were interrupted by clanking ice from the soda fountain dispenser.

The themes of their work provide a rare window onto the Hmong-American experience. Mai Neng Moua, for instance, offers a tragicomic soliloquy on the role of the “nyab,” or Hmong daughter-in-law, and how it conflicts with feminist values (she suggests a handbook called “Nyab for Dummies”). Some, like Khaty Xiong, write about the abyss between Hmong parent and child:

Father learn to love me,

I promise I will cleanse the soil between your toes

And brush the dust from your hands,

If only you will love me.

In her poem “Your Janitor: Is My Father,” Ms. Vang writes about the anonymity of her father’s work picking up trash from office cubicles. Ms. Vang’s mother has suffered from depression, though as a girl Ms. Vang never understood what it was.

A clue to her mother’s circumspect nature arrived inadvertently when Ms. Vang stumbled upon an unopened suitcase in her closet. It contained the tattered embroidered jacket she wore as a girl the night she had to flee her Laotian village. Such tangible remnants, which she calls “objects of exile,” triggered her mother’s concealed memories.

“You might find these relics in a suitcase, and that’s how the stories happen,” she said. “Parents don’t sit down and say, ‘Let me tell you. ...’ ”

Several weeks ago, Ying Thao, 29, discovered, while watching a travelogue on Hmong TV, that his mother was a master artisan in Laos, celebrated for making hemp cloth from scratch.

“Here in Fresno, she goes to Hancock Fabrics, JoAnn or Walmart,” he observed. “I sensed she didn’t want to be reminded of herself.”

Mr. Thao, who is gay, has his own difficulties sharing his life with his parents. “There is literally no word for homosexuality in Hmong,” he said. He grew up in a close-knit family with four brothers and six sisters in a one-bedroom apartment in Fresno. His young nephews, however, are growing up “only eating American food and hardly speaking Hmong,” which saddens him.

Coming to terms with their parents’ experience, from Laos to Fresno, and preserving it in the printed word is the major impetus for Soul Choj Vang and his colleagues:

Now, here I am, adopted citizen,

Not rooted in this land, unable to taste

The spirit in its dust,

To sense its moods in the pollen.

How do I begin my song?

“Our parents will never write,” Ms. Vang said. “So we write for them.”

    A Hmong Generation Finds Its Voice in Writing, NYT, 31.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/us/a-hmong-generation-finds-its-voice-in-writing.html

Deportation Without Representation

December 24, 2011
The New York Times

In deciding who may stay and who must leave this country, the deportation process for immigrants tolerates unfairness at every turn. Current laws have denied basic due process protections to people held in immigration detention. And now, a new report in the Cardozo Law Review reveals a severe shortage of competent legal assistance for tens of thousands facing deportation. The study examines cases in New York, but New York is hardly unique in this failing.

The report surveyed judges in five immigration courts and found shoddy lawyering widespread. According to the judges’ responses, in nearly half the New York cases, immigrants who had lawyers received inadequate representation. In 14 percent of cases, they said the attorneys’ preparation and knowledge of the law and the facts were “grossly inadequate.”

Worse, a huge number of immigrants in New York have no representation at all. Although poor defendants in criminal courts are entitled to court-appointed lawyers, people in immigration courts are not. Over all, immigrants appeared in court without a lawyer in nearly 15,000 cases (27 percent of the total) between October 2005 and July 2010. About two-thirds of immigrants in detention were lawyerless. Other jurisdictions provided even less access to counsel: 79 percent of those arrested and transferred to immigration detention in other states lacked attorneys.

As in other areas, people with lawyers fared better. About 67 percent of those with lawyers during the period reviewed were allowed to stay, while only 8 percent of those without counsel avoided deportation.

These problems are but a subset of a much broader legal services crisis that is also forcing a soaring number of Americans to go to court without a lawyer in civil matters like home foreclosures, evictions and child support cases. Perversely, Congress has responded to the growing need for legal help by slashing the budget of the federal Legal Services Corporation. Government-financed legal assistance for people fighting deportation is nowhere on the radar.

Even so, some improvements are possible. The review of all deportation cases before the immigration courts announced last month by the Obama administration should be extended to cases in the federal appellate courts. Dismissing the many cases at that level that fall outside the administration’s focus on immigrants who have committed serious crimes or pose national security risks could free up competent lawyers for more serious cases. Private foundations and bar associations could also help improve representation by creating programs that put young lawyers to work full time on immigrant issues.

    Deportation Without Representation, NYT, 24.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/25/opinion/sunday/deportation-without-representation.html

For Illegal Immigrant, Line Is Drawn at Transplant

December 20, 2011
The New York Times
By NINA BERNSTEIN

Without treatment to replace his failing kidneys, doctors knew, the man in Bellevue hospital would die. He was a waiter in his early 30s, a husband and father of two, so well liked at the Manhattan restaurant where he had worked for a decade that everyone from the customers to the dishwasher was donating money to help his family.

He was also an illegal immigrant. So when his younger brother volunteered to donate a kidney to restore him to normal life, they encountered a health care paradox: the government would pay for a lifetime of dialysis, costing $75,000 a year, but not for the $100,000 transplant that would make it unnecessary.

For nearly two years, the brothers and their supporters have been hunting for a way to make the transplant happen. Their journey has taken them through a maze of conflicting laws, private insurance conundrums and ethical quandaries, back to the national impasse between health care and immigration policies.

The waiter’s boss sought private insurance, she and the brothers said, speaking on the condition that their names be withheld for fear of provoking immigration authorities. The Catch-22: for the first year, the waiter, called Angel, would get no coverage for his “pre-existing condition,” nor would he receive the dialysis that keeps him alive and able to work four days a week.

Doctors sought a transplant center that would take him. Hospitals in the city receive millions of taxpayer dollars to help offset care for illegal immigrants and other uninsured patients. But at one hospital, administrators apparently overruled surgeons willing to waive their fees. At another, Angel was told to come back when he had legal status or $200,000.

A last resort is a return to Mexico, where the operation costs about $40,000. But to pay off the necessary loans, Angel and his brother, a deli worker, would have to sneak back in through the desert. If they failed, they would be cut off from their children in Brooklyn, who are United States citizens.

“As a physician, it puts you in a real ethical dilemma,” said Dr. Eric Manheimer, Bellevue’s medical director, noting that a transplant would sharply reduce Angel’s risk of death from complications. “The ultimate irony is it’s cheaper to put in a transplant than to dialyze someone for the rest of their life.”

Bellevue performs no transplants but, as a trauma center, often supplies organs harvested, with family consent, from illegal immigrants fatally injured at work.

“Here’s the paradox: he could donate, but he can’t receive,” Dr. Manheimer said, calling the imbalance troubling. Organ registries do not record illegal status, but a study estimated that over a 20-year period noncitizens donated 2.5 percent of organs and received fewer than 1 percent.

To those focusing on immigration enforcement, however, the inequity runs the other way. “They should not get any benefit from breaking the law, especially something as expensive as organ transplants or dialysis,” said Representative Dana T. Rohrabacher, Republican of California, who contends that care for illegal immigrants is bankrupting American health care and has sought to require that emergency rooms report stabilized patients for deportation unless they prove citizenship or legal residence.

“If they’re dead, I don’t have an objection to their organs being used,” Mr. Rohrabacher added. “If they’re alive, they shouldn’t be here no matter what.”

To Ruth Faden, the director of the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, the brothers’ case, like the transplant statistics, illustrates how quickly firm principles on both sides unravel in practice.

“We tie ourselves up in knots,” she said, “because we’ve accepted as a country and in international human rights law that if someone shows up in extremis in your emergency room, the nurses and doctors and technicians are morally obligated, and legally obligated, to provide that life-saving care.”

How to begin refusing care, she added, becomes a dilemma for “real people in real time.”

The sudden onset of the waiter’s illness in January 2010 left no time to spare. At Bellevue, he underwent surgery to implant a temporary venous catheter in his neck, to cleanse his blood of lethal toxins. The cause of his renal disease is most likely genetic: when he was 8 — about the age of his own sons now — his father died of kidney failure.

Through quirks of legislative history, nearly everyone with end-stage renal disease in the United States, regardless of income, is covered under federal Medicare for dialysis and transplantation, except illegal immigrants. But regardless of a patient’s immigration status, hospitals can be reimbursed for emergency care by Medicaid, the federal and state insurance program for the needy.

Unlike most states, New York, California and North Carolina define outpatient dialysis as an emergency measure. Studies show such regular dialysis is cheaper, with fewer life-threatening complications, than waiting until toxin levels require hospital treatment.

“What do I have to do to become normal?” Angel remembers asking. The medical answer was clear: a transplant, and anti-rejection drugs costing about $10,000 a year. But news that his brother and sister were compatible donors came with a blunt warning, the waiter recalled: “As long as you don’t have your papers, you won’t get a transplant.”

Like many Mexican New Yorkers, Angel has relatives who migrated years ago without visas and are now citizens. An uncle still works for the restaurateur who helped him legalize. But immigration rules have changed, eliminating such paths.

“My boss, she tried to help me,” said the waiter, who supported his mother and half-siblings from the age of 16, and worked his way up from busboy, paying taxes, mastering English and learning enough French to counsel diners on the wine list. “We find no way.”

His boss kept hunting. “He deserves every break he can get,” she said.

They consulted lawyers at LegalHealth, which counsels low-income patients. Randye Retkin, the director, said the waiter was one of a dozen patients in need of transplants who were referred to the nonprofit program by hospitals last year because of immigration barriers.

For many there is no remedy, Ms. Retkin said. She cited a Mexican mother of two who died without the small-bowel transplant she needed, just as lawyers won a yearlong legal battle for Medicaid to pay for it.

The waiter turned to the Mexican consulate, which appealed to Dr. Manheimer. The doctor said he persuaded surgeons at NYU Langone Medical Center to waive their $20,000 fees, but administrators would not absorb the rest. The hospital declined to comment.

Two other doctors, Hector J. Castro, a critical care specialist, and Kann H. Patel, a hematologist, sent Angel to Mount Sinai Medical Center. But there a financial transplant counselor told him he would have to pay double the typical cost in advance, to cover any complications.

“Personally, I’m troubled by it,” said Dr. Sander Florman, who directs the Recanati/Miller Transplantation Institute at Mount Sinai. “We’re looking at human beings.”

But Dr. Florman confirmed that the waiter’s experience reflected policies at the hospital. “Our general approach is we’re not the immigration police,” he said. “On the other hand, there has to be a mechanism to pay for it.”

Mount Sinai officials say they provided $67.3 million in uncompensated care last year, and received $25 million from the state to offset such costs. “Mount Sinai struggles each day to balance its limited resources with its strong commitment to provide compassionate medical care,” it said in a statement, noting that kidney transplantation, unlike dialysis, is not an emergency procedure under Medicaid.

For nearly everyone else, however, there is a Medicare option. Scholars trace the unusual program, now costing $40 billion a year, to a 1962 Life magazine article titled “They Decide Who Lives, Who Dies,” about laymen at a Seattle hospital who judged which patients would get scarce treatment on the first “artificial kidney machine.” The outcry that followed is often credited for the birth of bioethics and for the 1972 law guaranteeing coverage.

That law did not mention citizenship, said Dr. Scott Sanoff, who teaches medicine at the University of Virginia, but later restrictions, and murky state-by-state variations in Medicaid, left decisions on illegal immigrants’ access to care to each medical center, often without any payment mechanism. The life-and-death nature of the decisions has been obscured, he added: In the case of Angel, “his life expectancy could be more than doubled with the transplant compared to dialysis.”

The waiter now shuttles between a basement dialysis center, the restaurant and his family’s cramped but well-kept walk-up. There, as their children clustered nearby, his brother, 26, said they would not give up.

“He’s more than my brother, he’s like my father,” he said. “If I can give him life, I have to.”

    For Illegal Immigrant, Line Is Drawn at Transplant, NYT, 20.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/21/nyregion/illegal-immigrants-transplant-cheaper-over-life-isnt-covered.html

Immigration Crackdown Also Snares Americans

December 13, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

A growing number of United States citizens have been detained under Obama administration programs intended to detect illegal immigrants who are arrested by local police.

In a spate of recent cases across the country, American citizens have been confined in local jails after federal immigration agents, acting on flawed information from Department of Homeland Security databases, instructed the police to hold them for investigation and possible deportation.

Americans said their vehement protests that they were citizens went unheard by local police and jailers for days, with no communication with federal immigration agents to clarify the situation. Any case where an American is held, even briefly, for immigration investigation is a potential wrongful arrest because immigration agents lack legal authority to detain citizens.

“I told every officer I was in front of that I’m an American citizen, and they didn’t believe me,” said Antonio Montejano, who was arrested on a shoplifting charge last month and found himself held on an immigration order for two nights in a police station in Santa Monica, Calif., and two more nights in a teeming Los Angeles county jail cell, on suspicion he was an illegal immigrant. Mr. Montejano was born in Los Angeles.

This year the immigration agency has been rapidly extending its leading deportation program, known as Secure Communities, with a goal of covering the whole country by 2013. Under that program, fingerprints of every person booked at local jails are checked against Department of Homeland Security immigration databases. If the check results in a match, federal immigration agents can issue detainers, asking local law enforcement authorities to hold a suspect for up to 48 hours.

Detentions of citizens are part of the widening impact on Americans, as well as on immigrants, of President Obama’s enforcement strategies, which have led to more than 1.1 million deportations since the beginning of his term, the highest numbers in six decades.

John Morton, the director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency gave “immediate and close attention” to anyone who claimed to be a citizen.

“We don’t have the power to detain citizens,” Mr. Morton said in an interview on Tuesday. “We obviously take any allegation that someone is a citizen very seriously.”

Later this month, Mr. Morton said, the immigration agency will publish new forms for its detainers. The forms, in several languages, will require the police to notify suspects who are being held on federal immigration authority, he said. They will also provide a hot line where detainees can call the immigration agency directly.

Exact numbers of Americans erroneously held by immigration authorities are hard to come by, since they are not systematically recorded. In one study, 82 people who were held for deportation from 2006 to 2008 at two immigration detention centers in Arizona, for periods as long as a year, were freed after immigration judges determined that they were American citizens.

“Because of the scale of enforcement, the numbers of people who are interacting with Immigration and Customs Enforcement are just enormous right now,” said Jacqueline Stevens, the study’s author and a political science professor at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill.

Ms. Stevens has concluded that “a low but persistent” percentage of the nearly 400,000 people held for deportation each year are citizens.

One was Mr. Montejano, when a holiday shopping outing on Nov. 5 to a Los Angeles mall with his four children ended badly. After his young daughter begged for a $10 bottle of cologne, Mr. Montejano said, he inadvertently dropped it into a bag of things he had already bought. As he left the store, he was arrested.

With no prior criminal record, Mr. Montejano, 40, expected to post bond quickly at the Santa Monica police station on the misdemeanor charge and go home. He had his driver’s license and other legal identification, but because of an immigration detainer he was denied bail and held even after a criminal court judge canceled his fine and ordered the police to let him go.

Mr. Montejano was freed on Nov. 9 after American Civil Liberties Union lawyers sent Immigration and Customs Enforcement his United States passport and birth certificate.

“Just because I made one mistake,” Mr. Montejano said, “I don’t think they should have done all those things to me.”

He said he thought the police did not believe he was an American because of his appearance. “I look Mexican one hundred percent,” he said.

Mr. Montejano had triggered a positive match in the Homeland Security Department databases, A.C.L.U. lawyers discovered, because immigration officials had failed once before to recognize his citizenship, mistakenly deporting him to Mexico in 1996. His records were not corrected.

An American college student, Romy Campos, was also trapped in a California jail last month for four days on an immigration detainer. After her Nov. 12 arrest in Torrance on a minor misdemeanor charge, Ms. Campos, 19, was denied bail and transferred to a Los Angeles County jail. A public defender assigned to her in state court said there was nothing he could do to lift a federal detainer.

“Can’t they see in my file or something that I’m a citizen?” Ms. Campos said she asked him. “He said: ‘I’m sorry, but this is state court. I can’t do anything about it.’ ”

After four days, Ms. Campos was released, soon after Jennie Pasquarella, an A.C.L.U. lawyer, provided her Florida birth certificate to the immigration agency.

Ms. Campos said the experience was shocking. “I felt misused completely, I felt nonimportant, I just felt violated by my own country,” she said.

Ms. Campos, a citizen of both the United States and Spain, later learned that she had a Department of Homeland Security record because she had once entered the United States on her Spanish passport.

United States citizens can also be tagged in a Secure Communities fingerprint check because of flukes in the department’s databases. Unlike the federal criminal databases administered by the F.B.I., homeland security records include all immigration transactions, not just violations. An immigrant who has always maintained legal status, including those who naturalized to become American citizens, can still trigger a fingerprint match.

According to Margaret Stock, an immigration lawyer in Alaska, under the nation’s complex citizenship laws, many foreign-born people become Americans automatically, through American parents or adoption. Often their citizenship is not recorded in homeland security databases, Ms. Stock said.

Other cases of possibly illegal detentions of citizens have been recently reported in Allentown, Pa., Indianapolis and Chicago.

I.C.E. agents generally cancel detainers immediately when they determine the suspect is a citizen. In no recent cases was an American placed in deportation.

But Ms. Stevens cautioned: “It’s sort of like the canary in the mine. If those who have the full due process rights of U.S. citizens are being detained, it tells us a lot about potentially unlawful people who do not have those protections.”

    Immigration Crackdown Also Snares Americans, NYT, 13.12.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/14/us/measures-to-capture-illegal-aliens-nab-citizens.html

The Price of Intolerance

November 27, 2011
The New York Times


It’s early yet for a full accounting of the economic damage Alabama has done to itself with its radical new immigration law.

Farmers can tally the cost of crops left to rot as workers flee. Governments can calculate the loss of revenues when taxpayers flee. It’s harder to measure the price of a ruined business reputation or the value of investments lost or productivity lost as Alabamians stand in line for hours to prove their citizenship in any transaction with the government. Or what the state will ultimately spend fighting off an onslaught of lawsuits, or training and deploying police officers in the widening immigrant dragnet, or paying the cost of diverting scarce resources away from fighting real crimes.

A growing number of Alabamians say the price will be too high, and there is compelling evidence that they are right. Alabama is already at the low end of states in employment and economic vitality. It has long struggled to lure good jobs and shed a history of racial intolerance.

That was turning around and many foreign manufacturers, including Mercedes-Benz, Hyundai and Honda, have set up there. Its business-friendly reputation took a serious blow with the arrest in Tuscaloosa of a visiting Mercedes manager who was caught driving without his license and taken to jail as a potential illegal immigrant.

Sheldon Day, the mayor of Thomasville, has aggressively recruited foreign companies to his town, including a Chinese company — Golden Dragon Precise Copper Tube Group — that plans to build a $100 million plant there, with more than 300 jobs.

Mayor Day is now worried about that project and future prospects. He was quoted by The Press-Register in Mobile as saying business inquiries had dried up since the law was passed. “I know the immigration issue is being used against us.”

Alabama’s competitors certainly won’t waste any time. After the Tuscaloosa incident, the editorial page of The St. Louis Post-Dispatch invited Mercedes to Missouri. “We are the Show-Me State,” it said, “not the ‘Show me your papers’ state.”

Undocumented immigrants make up about 4.2 percent of Alabama’s work force, or 95,000 people in a state of 4.8 million. For all of the talk about clearing the way for unemployed Americans, there is no evidence that Alabamians in any significant numbers are rushing to fill the gap left by missing farm laborers and other low-wage immigrant workers.

The loss of job-filling, tax-paying workers may get even worse if Alabama is allowed to enforce a law requiring people who own or rent a trailer home to obtain an annual registration sticker. This puts the undocumented in a Catch-22 — criminals if they don’t have a sticker, criminals if they try to get one. For now, a judge has issued an order blocking enforcement. But if the state wins, many thousands may simply join the exodus, tearing more shreds in the economy.

The law’s damage is particularly heartbreaking in poor towns across the state, where small businesses are the economic lifeblood. We’ve spoken with Latino shopkeepers and restaurant owners in places like Albertville who say business is catastrophically down, with customers in hiding or flight. The situation isn’t much better in Huntsville and Birmingham.

There should be no doubt about the moral repugnance of Alabama’s law, which seeks to deny hardworking families the means to live. But even some of the law’s most enthusiastic supporters are beginning to acknowledge the law’s high economic cost. There is growing talk of revising or repealing the legislation. The sooner Alabama does so — and other states learn — the better.

    The Price of Intolerance, NYT, 27.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/28/opinion/the-price-of-intolerance.html

In New York, Mexicans Lag in Education

November 24, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE

In the past two decades, the Mexican population in New York City has grown more than fivefold, with immigrants settling across the five boroughs. Many adults have demonstrated remarkable success at finding work, filling restaurant kitchens and construction sites, and opening hundreds of businesses.

But their children, in one crucial respect, have fared far differently.

About 41 percent of all Mexicans between ages 16 and 19 in the city have dropped out of school, according to census data.

No other major immigrant group has a dropout rate higher than 20 percent, and the overall rate for the city is less than 9 percent, the statistics show.

This crisis endures at the college level. Among Mexican immigrants 19 to 23 who do not have a college degree, only 6 percent are enrolled. That is a fraction of the rates among other major immigrant groups and the native-born population.

Moreover, these rates are significantly worse than those of the broader Mexican immigrant population in the United States.

The problem is especially unsettling because Mexicans are the fastest-growing major immigrant group in the city, officially numbering about 183,200, according to the Census Bureau, up from about 33,600 in 1990. Experts say the actual figure is far larger, given high levels of illegal immigration.

A small group of educators and advocates have begun various educational initiatives for Mexicans, and there is evidence of recent strides.

But the educators and advocates say that unless these efforts are sustained, and even intensified, the city may have a large Mexican underclass for generations.

“We are stanching an educational hemorrhage, but only partially,” said Robert C. Smith, a sociology professor at the City University of New York who studies the local Mexican population.

“The worst outcomes are still possible,” he added.

Experts say the crisis stems from many factors — or what Dr. Smith called “a perfect storm of educational disadvantage.”

Many Mexicans are poor and in the country illegally. Parents, many of them uneducated, often work in multiple jobs, leaving little time for involvement in their children’s education.

Some are further isolated from their children’s school life because of language barriers or fear that contact with school officials may lead to deportation.

Unlike some other immigrant populations, like the Chinese, Mexicans have few programs for tutoring or mentoring.

“We don’t have enough academic role models,” said Angelo Cabrera, 35, a Mexican immigrant who runs a nonprofit group that tutors Mexican and Mexican-American students in the basement of a church in the Mott Haven section of the Bronx.

Many young illegal immigrants in New York City say there is no point in staying in school because their lack of legal status limits their access to college scholarships and employment opportunities. Some drop out under the erroneous belief that they are not eligible to attend college. (Illegal immigrants who graduate from a high school in New York State or earn a G.E.D. are not only allowed to attend the state’s public university system, but are also eligible for in-state tuition.)

“They just give up,” said Karina Sosa, 22, a Mexican-American undergraduate at Baruch College and an education activist.

Educational achievement among Mexican immigrants is worse in New York than in the broader Mexican population around the country in part, experts say, because Mexicans in the city have shallower roots, less stable households and higher rates of illegal immigration.

Ivan Lucero, who emigrated illegally from Mexico with his mother when he was 6 and grew up in the Belmont area of the Bronx, said his parents urged him to stay in school and study. But his father was distracted by long work days, and his mother, who did not speak English, had no contact with the school.

Mr. Lucero said he began skipping classes to hang out with other young Mexicans who had formed a gang. Once heavily Italian, the neighborhood was experiencing an influx of Mexicans.

Mexican children were filling Belmont’s schools, Mexican workers were staffing restaurants in the Little Italy section around Arthur Avenue and Mexican-owned shops were popping up on every other block.

Many young Mexicans were compelled to get jobs to help their families. In high school, Mr. Lucero began working as a busboy, which further distracted him from school work, he said. He was forced to repeat 10th grade twice, though he would lie to his parents about how he was doing.

“You don’t think of nothing else but having fun with your friends, meeting up with girls, having your boys with you,” Mr. Lucero said. “The last thing you think of is school.”

He was expelled when he was 18, while still in 10th grade. Most of his Mexican friends from high school also dropped out and entered the work force, and so did one of his younger brothers.

“I don’t see many Mexican kids going to school,” said Mr. Lucero, now 28 and working as a waiter. “It’s horrible.”

These problems extend throughout the swelling Mexican immigrant diaspora in the New York region. They have also afflicted the population of second-generation Mexican-Americans: While educational achievement is far higher among American-born children with Mexican ancestry, it still lags behind the rates of most other foreign-born and native-born groups, according to census data, which was analyzed by Andrew A. Beveridge and Susan Weber-Stoger, demographers at Queens College.

Syndi Cortes, 19, one of five children of Mexican immigrants in the Highbridge section of the Bronx, said she dropped out after getting pregnant at 16. She had already been cutting most of her classes, she said, and so had most of her Mexican and Mexican-American friends.

Last year, she tried to resume school, but her mother, who was working long days as a housecleaner, was opposed to day care and forced her to drop out again to look after her baby.

Ms. Cortes said she felt stranded and regretful at not having a high-school degree. “I want to get back,” she said.

Many efforts to address the problem have centered on the City University of New York. In 2007, Jay Hershenson, senior vice chancellor for university relations, formed a special task force to study the issue, currently the only one of its kind at the university focusing on a specific immigrant population.

“The loss of talent, of human capital, was simply an educational catastrophe, one that CUNY had no intention of ignoring,” Mr. Hershenson said.

Over the past several years, CUNY, as well as the Mexican consulate in New York, several advocacy groups and others, have established afterschool tutoring, college-readiness and scholarship programs; college admissions and financial aid counseling for students and parents alike; and college fairs aimed at the Mexican population.

The New York Immigration Coalition recently started an initiative to bring more immigrant parents into the schools. Early efforts, in collaboration with the Mexican consulate, focused on Mexicans.

These programs have already yielded some gains, advocates say. In 2000, for instance, the high school dropout rate among Mexican immigrants in the city was 47 percent, six percentage points higher than the current rate.

But advocates say it has been a grinding, uphill battle.

“There are very few of us working on this problem,” said Mr. Cabrera, who founded his nonprofit organization, MASA-MexEd, after years of struggling to stay in school and get a college degree while also working to support himself. “We have thousands of students who need the support, and we can only provide the support to hundreds.”

He added, “I have to make sure that they keep their dreams alive.”

    In New York, Mexicans Lag in Education, NYT, 24.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/25/nyregion/mexicans-in-new-york-city-lag-in-education.html

On the Rise in Alabama

November 13, 2011
The New York Times

Alabama’s ruling class has dug in against the storm it caused with the nation’s most oppressive immigration law. Some of the law’s provisions have been blocked in federal court; others won’t take effect until next year. But many Alabamans aren’t waiting for things to get worse or for the uncertain possibility of judicial relief or legislative retreat. They are moving to protect themselves, and summoning the tactics of a civil rights struggle now half a century old.

The law was written to deny immigrants without papers the ability to work or travel, to own or rent a home, to enter contracts of any kind. Fear is causing an exodus as Latinos abandon homes and jobs and crops in the fields. Utilities are preparing to shut off water, power and heat to customers who cannot show the right papers.

Alabama is far from alone in passing a law whose express aim is misery and panic. States are expanding their power to hasten racial exclusion and family disintegration, to make a particular ethnic group of poor people disappear. The new laws come cloaked in talk of law and order; the bigotry beneath them is never acknowledged.

But if there is any place where bigotry does not go unrecognized, it is Alabama.

“It is a fear of folks who are not like us,” said Judge U. W. Clemon, a former state senator and Alabama’s first black federal judge, now retired. “Although the Hispanic population of the state is less than 5 percent, the leaders of the state were hell-bent on removing as much of that 4 percent as possible. And I think they’ve been fairly successful in scaring them out of the state of Alabama.”

There are, of course, significant distinctions between the civil rights movement and the fight for immigrant rights. African-Americans have endured 400 years of oppression, and toppled laws created to deny their equality and to brutalize them. Unauthorized immigrants are a group who arrived by choice, mostly. They are living outside the law, and want in.

Yet to those, like Judge Clemon, a civil rights foot soldier who fought Bull Connor and George Wallace, the common thread between then and now — the threat of racial profiling and the abuse of a cheap, exploited work force — is obvious, as is the racism driving the law.

A sponsor of the legislation, State Senator Scott Beason, chairman of the Rules Committee, was secretly taped by the F.B.I. talking about black residents of Greene County. “They’re aborigines,” he said. He is the lawmaker who urged fellow Republicans to “empty the clip” to stop illegal immigrants.

And, just as in the early days of the civil rights struggle, the oppressed and their advocates are scrambling to respond. Early this month, organizers from Alabama and around the country convened a training session for immigrant leaders in rural Albertville, where chicken plants rely heavily on Latino labor. They went from trailer home to trailer home, signing up volunteers to build immigrant networks that will help people protect one another while fighting for repeal of the law and integrating themselves into the life of their state.

This fledgling movement has been embraced by the N.A.A.C.P., whose leaders in Birmingham met recently with immigrant advocates to stress the need for blacks and Latinos to unite against the law. “Jim Crow is dead,” the Rev. Anthony Alann Johnson told the group, “but his cousins are still alive.”

    On the Rise in Alabama, NYT, 13.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/14/opinion/on-the-rise-in-alabama.html

Moving to U.S. and Amassing a Fortune, No English Needed

November 8, 2011
The New York Times
By KIRK SEMPLE

More than 40 years after arriving in New York from Mexico uneducated and broke, Felix Sanchez de la Vega Guzman still can barely speak English. Ask him a question, and he will respond with a few halting phrases and an apologetic smile before shifting back to the comfort of Spanish.

Yet Mr. Sanchez has lived the great American success story. He turned a business selling tortillas on the street into a $19 million food manufacturing empire that threaded together the Mexican diaspora from coast to coast and reached back into Mexico itself.

Mr. Sanchez is part of a small class of immigrants who arrived in the United States with nothing and, despite speaking little or no English, became remarkably prosperous. And while generations of immigrants have thrived despite language barriers, technology, these days, has made it easier for such entrepreneurs to attain considerable affluence.

Many have rooted their businesses in big cities with immigrant populations large enough to insulate them from everyday situations that demand English. After gaining traction in their own communities, they have used the tools of modern communication, transportation and commerce to tap far-flung resources and exploit markets in similar enclaves around the country and the world.

“The entire market is Hispanic,” Mr. Sanchez said of his business. “You don’t need English.” A deal, he said, is only a cheap long-distance phone call or a few key strokes on the computer away. “All in Spanish,” he added.

Mr. Sanchez, 66, said he always wanted to learn English but had not had time for lessons.

“I couldn’t concentrate,” he said in a recent interview, in Spanish. “In addition, all the people around me were speaking in Spanish, too.”

In New York City, successful non-English-speaking entrepreneurs like Mr. Sanchez have emerged from the largest immigrant populations, including those from China, South Korea and Spanish-speaking countries.

Among them is Zhang Yulong, 39, who emigrated from China in 1994 and now presides over a $30-million-a-year cellphone accessories empire in New York with 45 employees.

Kim Ki Chol, 59, who arrived in the United States from South Korea in 1981, opened a clothing accessories store in Brooklyn and went on to become a successful retailer, real estate investor and civic leader in the region’s Korean diaspora.

In the United States in 2010, 4.5 million income-earning adults who were heads of households spoke English “not well” or “not at all,” according to the Census Bureau; of those, about 35,500 had household incomes of more than $200,000 a year.

Nancy Foner, a sociology professor at the City University of New York who has written widely on immigration, said it was clear that modern technology had made a big difference in the ability of immigrant entrepreneurs with poor or no English skills to expand their companies nationally and globally.

“It wasn’t impossible — but much, much harder — for immigrants to operate businesses around the globe a hundred years ago, when there were no jet planes, to say nothing of cellphones and computers,” Ms. Foner said.

Advocates for the movement sometimes known as Official English have long pressed for legislation mandating English as the official language of government, arguing that a common language is essential for the country’s cohesion and for immigrant assimilation and success.

But stories like Mr. Sanchez’s, though certainly unusual, seem to suggest that an entrepreneur can do just fine without English — especially with the aid of modern technology, not to mention determination and ingenuity.

For Mr. Sanchez, who became an American citizen in 1985, one anxious moment came when he had to pass his naturalization test. The law requires that applicants be able to read, write and speak basic English.

But Mr. Sanchez and other entrepreneurs said that the test, at least at the time they took it, had been rudimentary and that they had muddled through it.

Mr. Sanchez immigrated to the United States in 1970 from the Mexican state of Puebla with only a fifth-grade education. He held a series of low-paying jobs in New York, including washing dishes in a Midtown restaurant. The Mexican population in the New York region was small back then, but it soon began growing, as did the demand for authentic Mexican products.

In 1978, Mr. Sanchez and his wife, Carmen, took $12,000 in savings, bought a tortilla press and an industrial dough mixer in Los Angeles, hauled the machinery back to the East Coast and installed it in a warehouse in Passaic, N.J. Mr. Sanchez spent his days driving a forklift at an electrical-equipment factory and spent his evenings and nights making tortillas and selling them door-to-door in Latino neighborhoods around New York City.

His company, Puebla Foods, grew with the Mexican population, and he was soon distributing his tortillas and other Mexican products, like dried chilies, to bodegas and restaurants throughout the Northeast. At its peak, his enterprise had factories in cities all across North America, including Los Angeles, Miami, Pittsburgh, Toronto and Washington. It has since been buffeted by competition and by the economy, and he has scaled back.

He has relied heavily on a bilingual staff, which at times has included his three children, born and raised in New Jersey.

Mr. Zhang, the cellphone accessories entrepreneur, said his lack of English had not been a handicap. “The only obstacle I have is if I get too tired,” said Mr. Zhang, who also owns a property development company and an online retail firm.

In 2001, Mr. Zhang set up a wholesale business in cellphone accessories in Manhattan. He then raised money from relatives and investors in China to open a manufacturing plant there to make leather cellphone cases for export to the United States, Canada and Latin America.

His business boomed, and he opened warehouses in Los Angeles, New York City and Washington, controlling his international manufacturing, supply and retail chain from his base in New York.

Mr. Zhang now lives in a big house in Little Neck, Queens, with his wife, three daughters and parents, and drives a Lexus S.U.V. He has not applied for citizenship, preferring to remain a legal permanent resident and maintain his Chinese citizenship, which spares him the bother of securing a Chinese visa when he goes to China for business.

While he can speak rudimentary English — he rates his comprehension at 30 percent — he conducts nearly his entire life in Chinese. His employees speak the languages of trading partners: English, Spanish, Creole, Korean and French, not to mention multiple Chinese dialects.

Over the course of a lengthy interview, he gamely tried on several occasions to converse in English, but each time he ran into roadblocks and, with a shrug of resignation, resumed speaking through a translator in Mandarin.

Mr. Kim, the Korean retailer, recalled that when he opened his first store in Brooklyn, nearly his entire clientele was Afro-Caribbean and African-American, and his customers spoke no Korean.

“You don’t have to have a big conversation,” he recalled. “You can make gestures.”

While his holdings have grown, he has also formed or led associations and organizations that focus on empowering the Korean population in the United States. As in business, modern communication has made it much easier for him to raise his profile throughout the Korean diaspora well beyond New York.

“The success of my life is not only that I make a lot of money,” he said, “but that I make a lot of Korean people’s lives better.”

Yet he admitted that he was embarrassed by his inability to speak English. He has gone so far as to buy some English-tutorial computer programs, but for years, they have gone mostly unused.

 

Jeffrey E. Singer contributed reporting.

    Moving to U.S. and Amassing a Fortune, No English Needed, NYT, 8.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/09/nyregion/immigrant-entrepreneurs-succeed-without-english.html

Race Barrier May Topple as Voters Pick Mayor

November 6, 2011
The New York Times
By ERIK ECKHOLM

SAN FRANCISCO — This city with the country’s oldest Chinatown appears likely to elect a Chinese-American mayor for the first time on Tuesday, and for many residents it is a milestone long overdue.

“Chinese-Americans feel that they are making history,” said David E. Lee, executive director of the nonpartisan Chinese American Voters Education Committee here. “They feel they are on the cusp of achieving the holy grail of San Francisco politics, electing one of their own into the mayor’s office.”

Edwin M. Lee, who was appointed to the office on an interim basis last fall after Mayor Gavin Newsom was elected lieutenant governor, is considered a strong favorite, although his support has dwindled in recent days as opponents in a scattered field of 16 seized on reports of campaign irregularities by some of his supporters.

Drawn by the historic nature of the vote, though, the city’s ethnic Chinese, making up a quarter of the population and 16 percent of registered voters, are expected to turn out in unusually large numbers, David Lee said.

Ed Lee, a trim man with a moustache, had spent years running city agencies, most recently as the city’s top administrator, when he was chosen for the interim mayor’s job. The city of 800,000 faced a large deficit and intense bickering between the mayor and the Board of Supervisors and was ready, many said, for a technocrat. Over the last year, Mr. Lee’s admirers say, he cut spending and overhauled pensions with little acrimony and has done of good job of promoting development.

Although he had taken the interim job with a firm pledge that he would not run this fall, powerful backers formed a “Run, Ed, Run” committee and he joined the race in August. He has endorsements from heavyweights like Mr. Newsom, former Mayor Willie Brown and influential leaders in the Chinese-American community — and, to the chagrin of other candidates who had taken that no-run pledge seriously, he has learned to work the wards like any politician.

In a city where political views tend to range from liberal to very liberal, the campaign has consisted less of ideological debates than of personal appeals and attacks. Mr. Lee, 59, emphasizes his competence, with posters declaring “Ed Lee Gets It Done.”

Mr. Lee’s entry into the race pulled the rug out from under others who had a similar centrist appeal, like Dennis Herrera, the city attorney; Leland Yee, a state senator who has labor union support; and David Chiu, who is president of the Board of Supervisors and was endorsed by The San Francisco Chronicle for a commitment to “shake things up at City Hall.”

Mr. Lee’s opponents say that he has destroyed his credibility and that he is too close to a shadowy establishment that runs the city for its own benefit.

“Ed Lee is too beholden to power brokers,” Mr. Yee said in an interview as he greeted commuters in a subway station. “He’s hiding behind unregistered lobbyists and consultants.”

Mr. Yee, Mr. Herrera and other critics particularly mention Mr. Lee’s close ties to Mr. Brown, the former mayor and a lawyer and consultant to developers, and to Rose Pak, a powerful business consultant and political fund-raiser in Chinatown.

Aaron Peskin, chairman of the city’s Democratic Party and a former Board of Supervisors president, was blunt. “Ed Lee’s election will mean the resurrection of the political machine of the Willie Brown era,” he said, including favoritism in contracts and appointments.

In an interview at his campaign headquarters in the depressed mid-Market corridor, where the city is promoting new development, Mr. Lee bristled at the charges. “I’ve not been in the pockets of anybody,” he said. “Willie is a big supporter, but he never tells me what to do.”

His accomplishments, Mr. Lee said, speak for themselves.

The portrayal of Mr. Lee as part of an old-guard machine gained some currency in recent weeks as evidence surfaced, in The Bay Observer and The Chronicle, that independent groups were helping Chinese-American voters fill out absentee ballots for Mr. Lee and collecting them, and that a property manager had promised to repay employees who donated $500 each to the Lee campaign.

Mr. Lee said he had no connection to these groups.

Predictions are complicated by the city’s unusual ranked-choice voting system, in which voters name their first, second and third choices. If no candidate receives more than 50 percent of the vote, the one with the least number of first-place votes is dropped, and the second choices of those who had picked that eliminated candidate are redistributed. The process repeats itself, dipping into third-place choices, if necessary, until someone has a majority.

The system can yield surprises: in Oakland, using the same approach, the candidate with the most first-place votes ended up, after eight days of counting and uncertainty, losing to Jean Quan, a candidate who had received more second and third place votes.

But the system gives a big advantage to a popular incumbent, said Corey D. Cook, a political scientist at the University of San Francisco.

Mr. Lee enjoys high support in the Chinese community and is also viewed favorably in most other groups, meaning that people with a different first choice are likely to put him second or third on their ballots, leading to ultimate victory, Mr. Cook said.

But private polls have suggested a tightening of the race in the last two weeks, he said, making the contest “interesting.”

One candidate who seems to have gained ground is Mr. Herrera, the city attorney, who is popular with gay voters, another large bloc here, for his strong efforts on behalf of same-sex marriage (a cause that all the major candidates support). He has also opposed a costly new subway line, which would bring the system up to Chinatown and is firmly promoted by Mr. Lee and others.

John Avalos, a member of the Board of Supervisors who is seen in San Francisco as a progressive because he prefers, for example, protecting renters to fostering new higher-end developments, is making a strong last-minute appeal from the left.

The Occupy San Francisco encampments, in a park and on a busy sidewalk, were a potential minefield for the interim mayor. Mr. Lee initially demanded that the tents come down. But after seeing the violent clashes across the bay in Oakland, he softened his tone and now says the city will work with the demonstrators.

In the interview, Mr. Lee said he was not all that excited about the prospect of being the first elected Chinese-American mayor, in part because he is already in the post and because “I’ve been the first of several things before.”

But Ms. Pak, the Chinatown consultant who is close to Mr. Lee and Mr. Brown, said a major reason for pushing Mr. Lee to run was to make sure that a Chinese-American would finally be elected to the city’s top post.

She and fellow Chinatown leaders concluded that candidates like Mr. Yee and Mr. Chiu were unlikely to win, she said. “We realized that if Ed Lee doesn’t run, then we’ll wait another 50 years.”

    Race Barrier May Topple as Voters Pick Mayor, NYT, 6.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/07/us/san-francisco-may-get-first-chinese-american-mayor.html

Standing in the Schoolhouse Door

November 5, 2011
The New York Times

Surely Alabama’s attorney general, Luther Strange, did not mean to summon the memory of Gov. George Wallace when he picked a fight with the Department of Justice last week over the state’s new immigration law.

Surely no law-enforcement official of his stature would have responded to a fact-gathering request by challenging the federal government’s “legal authority” to investigate reports of civil rights abuses. Could there be an attorney general in the South — or anywhere — who is not acutely aware, and mindful, of the Civil Rights Act of 1964?

The federal inquiry was prompted by the state’s new immigration law, which took effect in September, part of which requires schools to check the immigration status of schoolchildren and their parents. The Justice Department has already sued Alabama over the law, the nation’s cruelest collection of immigration enforcement schemes and punishments. After receiving reports that students were being harassed and bullied, and that frightened parents were keeping children out of school, the department asked 39 school superintendents for data on student absences and withdrawals since the school year began.

Instead of acknowledging that the Supreme Court has upheld every child’s right to a public education regardless of immigration status, and that the new law requires schools to collect the information that the government was seeking, Mr. Strange sent Thomas Perez, head of the Civil Rights Division, an ultimatum.

“I was perplexed and troubled to learn that you have personally written to Alabama’s school superintendents demanding information related to the pending litigation,” he wrote. “Your letter does not state your legal authority to demand the information or to compel its production. If you have such legal authority, please provide it to me by noon Central Standard Time on Friday, November 4, 2011. Otherwise, I will assume that you have none and will proceed accordingly.”

Mr. Perez’s reply, sent Friday, was to the point. He cited Title IV of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act. He also reminded Mr. Strange of an array of other laws that federal agencies would be considering when investigating possible violations in Alabama: the Fair Housing Act, the Safe Streets Act, the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, the Fair Labor Standards Act and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, “among others.”

Alabama has seized from the federal government the job of controlling immigration within its borders. The law’s architects and supporters proclaim that their goal is to catastrophically disrupt the lives of illegal immigrants and their families. With reports of harassment and panic, and of a mass exodus of immigrants fleeing the state, the potential for civil rights abuses is acutely obvious.

That Alabama’s attorney general would not welcome a federal inquiry, but bristle instead, with an implicit appeal to state’s rights — with all the defiant history of intolerance and minority oppression those words suggest — says volumes. All Americans should feel ashamed.

    Standing in the Schoolhouse Door, NYT, 5.11.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/06/opinion/sunday/standing-in-the-schoolhouse-door.html

It’s What They Asked For

October 19, 2011
The New York Times

Alabama’s new anti-immigrant law, the nation’s harshest, went into effect last month (a few provisions have been temporarily blocked in federal court), and it is already reaping a bitter harvest of dislocation and fear. Hispanic homes are emptying, businesses are closing, employers are wondering where their workers have gone. Parents who have not yet figured out where to go are lying low and keeping children home from school.

To the law’s architects and supporters, this is excellent news. “You’re encouraging people to comply with the law on their own,” said Kris Kobach, the Kansas secretary of state, who has a side career of drafting extremist immigration legislation for states and cities, notoriously in Arizona and now in Alabama.

Alabama’s law is the biggest test yet for “attrition through enforcement,” a strategy espoused by Mr. Kobach and others to drive away large numbers of illegal immigrants without the hassle and expense of a police-state roundup. All you have to do, they say, is make life hard enough and immigrants will leave on their own. In such a scheme, panic and fear are a plus; suffering is the point.

The pain isn’t felt just by the undocumented. Legal immigrants and native-born Alabamans who happen to be or look Hispanic are now far more vulnerable to officially sanctioned harassment. Many of those children being kept home from school by frightened parents are born and bred Americans.

The problems do not stop there. Farmers are already worrying that with the exodus, crops will go unpicked. Like much of the rest of the country, Alabama needs immigrant labor, because too many native-born citizens lack the skill, the stamina and the willingness to work in the fields — even in a time of steep unemployment.

The new law has also added frustrating layers of paperwork for Alabamans who must now prove legal status when enrolling schoolchildren, signing leases and interacting with government. After the law went into effect, the lines at the Department of Motor Vehicles in Birmingham grew so long that officials had to bring in portable toilets.

Alabama’s reputation has also taken a huge hit just when it is trying to lure international businesses. No matter how officials may try to tempt foreign automakers, say, with low taxes and wages, the state is already infamous as a regional capital of xenophobia.

If Alabama succeeds in driving out all of its estimated 120,000 unauthorized immigrants, restrictionists will surely cheer. They will have only 49 states and 11 million more people to go.

There is another more humane and realistic path in which immigrants could earn the right to stay — if Congress would accept its responsibility and move ahead with serious immigration reform. America’s history shows that assimilation works better than deportation — for everyone. If first-generation immigrants don’t all learn English, their children and grandchildren invariably do. They may be poor, but their children grow up to be productive citizen taxpayers. Unless, of course, you frighten and oppress them, and forbid them to work, live and go to school.

Other states that are tempted to follow should look at what is happening in Alabama. Nobody is winning there.

    It’s What They Asked For, NYT, 19.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/opinion/its-what-they-asked-for.html

Comments on Immigration Alienate Some Hispanics

October 19, 2011
The New York Times
By TRIP GABRIEL

Today, Republican candidates are competing over who can talk the toughest about illegal immigration — who will erect the most impenetrable border defense; who will turn off “magnets” like college tuition benefits.

But after such pointed proposals heated up yet another Republican debate, on Tuesday night, some party officials see a yellow light signaling danger in battleground states with large Hispanic populations in November 2012. Will Hispanic voters remember and punish the eventual Republican nominee?

“The discussion of creating electrified fences from sea to sea is neither prudent nor helpful,” said Ryan Call, chairman of the Republican Party of Colorado, where Hispanics cast 13 percent of votes in 2008 and helped President Obama flip the state to blue. “They’re throwing red meat around in an attempt to mollify a particular aspect of the Republican base.”

Besides Colorado, Mr. Obama cemented his victory in part by carrying three other swing states with large Hispanic voting populations: Florida, Nevada and New Mexico.

Republican strategists have hoped to win many of these voters back by appealing to their discontent over the economy and to their social conservatism, issues that helped George W. Bush win a historically high 44 percent of Hispanic voters in 2004.

Now, however, that pitch may be thwarted, according to some Republican strategists.

Both Herman Cain, the former business executive, and Representative Michele Bachmann are proposing a 1,200-mile border fence — electrified, in Mr. Cain’s case, double-walled in Mrs. Bachmann’s.

Mitt Romney has attacked Gov. Rick Perry of Texas as soft on illegal immigration. Mr. Perry punched back in the debate on Tuesday in Las Vegas, accusing Mr. Romney of “hypocrisy” because, Mr. Perry said, “you had illegals working on your property.”

Robert Ramirez, a Republican state representative from Colorado who attended the debate, said Hispanic voters in his state “are sick and tired of empty promises from the Democratic Party.”

Nevertheless, Mr. Ramirez was concerned about the nominees’ lack of sensitivity. “We can’t pretend the Latino vote doesn’t exist,” he said. “It’s time we became the party of inclusion.”

Even Mr. Romney, who has been more measured in his remarks, may have lost Hispanic support over his criticism of a Texas law that allows some children of illegal immigrants to attend state colleges on in-state tuition.

“He can make as many trips to Florida and New Mexico and Colorado and other swing states that have a large Latino population, but he can write off the Latino vote,” said Lionel Sosa, a strategist in Texas who advised Mr. Bush and Senator John McCain on appealing to Hispanics. “He’s not going to gain it again.”

In each of those states, plus Nevada, Hispanics are a growing share of eligible voters, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. Although these voters have traditionally favored Democrats, Mr. Obama’s 67 percent share of the Hispanic vote in 2008 dipped to 60 percent who voted Democratic during the 2010 Republican wave that swept the midterm elections, said Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew center.

In a Pew survey that year, Hispanic voters ranked education and the economy as their top issues. But there was strong support for state-level “Dream” acts allowing children of illegal immigrants to attend colleges on in-state tuition, and 61 percent disapproved of more border fencing.

Many analysts credit the Democratic victories that year of Harry Reid of Nevada, the Senate majority leader, and Senator Michael Bennet of Colorado to get-out-the-vote efforts by Latinos.

“Sharron Angle got destroyed in the election because of her anti-immigration stand,” said Andres Ramirez, a Democratic strategist in Nevada, referring to Mr. Reid’s opponent, a Tea Party darling. Mr. Ramirez predicted that Hispanic participation in the 2012 election in Nevada would surpass the 15 percent from 2008, and he said that Republicans missed an opportunity in holding a debate in Las Vegas to showcase more moderate immigration views.

“Their rhetoric on illegal immigration was very over the top,” he said. “It will cost them in the future.”

Heidi Smith, the Republican national committeewoman from Nevada, said the focus on illegal immigration was a distraction. “It’s taking time off of the big issue, and that is we don’t have any jobs,” she said.

In Florida, where the Hispanic vote has traditionally leaned Republican because of large numbers of conservative Cuban-Americans, immigration issues may be especially divisive in 2012. The state’s favorite son Republican senator, Marco Rubio, seems only too happy to duck immigration issues, and the Republican-controlled State Senate refused to pass a bill this spring with a tough requirement on employers to check workers’ immigration status.

Joe Gruters, chairman of the Republican Party of Sarasota County in Florida, said that showing toughness against illegal immigration was an “electrifying” issue and could bump a Republican candidate many points in primary polls. He is disappointed by the moderation of candidates’ proposals so far. “Nobody said, ‘We have to repeal the 14th Amendment,’ ” he said, referring to the constitutional guarantee of citizenship to a child born in the United States. Critics of illegal immigrant mothers who supposedly enter the country to have “anchor babies” sometimes propose repealing the Reconstruction-era amendment.

Mr. Gruters was quick to concede that such positions would cost an eventual Republican nominee.

“In case they’re the nominee, it could be a deal-breaker where they take themselves out as a serious contender,” he said.

    Comments on Immigration Alienate Some Hispanics, NYT, 19.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/us/politics/immigration-talk-turns-off-some-hispanics.html

Some Cheer Border Fence as Others Ponder the Cost

October 19, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

In the debate over immigration among the Republican presidential candidates, Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota signed a pledge last week to build double-fencing the entire length of the 2,000-mile border with Mexico.

Herman Cain called for an electrified border fence, 20 feet high with barbed wire.

Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, claiming superior experience as the leader of the state with 1,200 miles of the border, advocated a more complex strategy, combining fencing and surveillance technology with “a lot of boots on the ground.” Mr. Perry said that building a border-length fence would take “10 to 15 years and $30 billion” and would not be cost-effective.

Proposals for an imposing border fence have drawn cheers at Republican rallies. Border security appears to be an area where some Republican candidates are ready to set aside their priority on fiscal discipline, since security analysts say very little research is available on how much a border-length fence would cost.

Based on what studies do exist, the analysts say that building and maintaining a fence through the remote or hostile terrain along the border would run into billions of dollars, with no documented impact on diminishing illegal crossings.

So far border authorities have built 650 miles of hard fence along the southwest border, including about 299 miles of vehicle barriers.

In 2009, the Congressional Search Service reported that the Department of Homeland Security had spent roughly up to $21 million per mile to build a primary fence near San Diego. The cost had ballooned as the fence extended into hills and gullies along the line.

The same year, Customs and Border Protection estimated costs of building an additional 3.5 miles of fence near San Diego at $16 million per mile. Even this lower figure would yield a rough projection of $22.4 billion for a single fence across the 1,400 miles remaining today.

These estimates do not include the costs of acquiring land, nor the expense of maintaining a fence that is exposed to constant efforts by illegal crossers to bore through it or under it or to bring it down. In March, Customs and Border Protection estimated it would cost $6.5 billion “to deploy, operate and maintain” the existing border fencing over an expected maximum lifetime of 20 years. The agency reported repairing 4,037 breaches in 2010 alone.

Border Patrol officials have not been eager to extend the fence beyond its current length. In testimony in the House of Representatives on Oct. 4, Michael J. Fisher, the Border Patrol chief, said the existing fence covered the ground “where Border Patrol field commanders determined it was operationally required.”

The Border Patrol has welcomed fences in urban areas or at heavily traveled crossing points, where they slow illegal crossers, giving agents time to detain them. But border authorities have focused instead on flying unmanned drones to more accurately scan the length of the border and building forward stations so that agents can be posted closer to the line.

Richard F. Cortez, the mayor of the Texas border town of McAllen, noted that much of the state’s border is defined by rivers. “It is a winding river,” Mr. Cortez, a political independent, said in an interview on Wednesday. “Where in the world are you going to put fencing? To propose that suggests ignorance of the border and the terrain.”

    Some Cheer Border Fence as Others Ponder the Cost, NYT, 19.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/20/us/politics/border-fence-raises-cost-questions.html

At the Border, on the Night Watch

October 12, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

DOUGLAS, Ariz. — The lanky young man with two bales of marijuana slung over his back who was apprehended by Border Patrol agents in a rugged area about a mile from the border here one recent night represented both the significant strides the country has made in controlling its southern border and the challenges that remain.

“If you would have visited 11 years ago, it was like a scene out of a movie,” said Mario Escalante, a Border Patrol agent who used to work in the Douglas area but has since moved to the headquarters in Tucson. “We were overrun. People were coming across in groups of 30 or 50 or 100 or more. We were catching thousands of people a day.”

As darkness fell on this border town in the southeast corner of Arizona, the radio inside Mr. Escalante’s Chevrolet Suburban indicated the different reality that now exists — with illegal migration down, but not out.

“Three bodies approaching the fence,” an agent reported over the radio in clipped language, using the Border Patrol slang for migrants.

“TBS,” the same voice said, reporting that the three potential crossers were now “turning back south.”

There were radio reports — all of them encrypted to keep smugglers from listening in — of people on the Mexican side climbing up the fence and peering over, only to shinny back down when they spotted the authorities.

Potential crossers were seen carrying a ladder to the fence, only to retreat once the Border Patrol made its presence known.

A night with the swing shift in the Douglas area, which used to be one of the major crossing points in Arizona, illustrated the cat-and-mouse nature of catching crossers, the permeability of the much-ballyhooed border fence and the fact that, no matter the dire rhetoric often heard in political circles, crossings at this stretch of border are nowhere near what they once were.

The radio traffic talked of “ones,” which are single crossers, and “twos,” pairs of people hustling over the fence and making their way north, and occasional “threes.”

The large groups that Mr. Escalante recalled as a junior agent were not spotted.

Fencing is part of it. Douglas used to have a modest barrier right around the port of entry. Smugglers took drugs and migrants around the edges and just ran north, playing the percentage game.

Over the years, the fences near Douglas and along the rest of the border grew in both length and height, with the United States trying various materials, among them recycled scrap metal from the military, mesh and the steel beams used today.

Some older-generation barriers blocked the view of Mexico, but the Border Patrol found those frustrating because agents could not see the migrants amassing on the other side. The new generation of border walls allows one to see across, and even reach across, into Mexico, permitting the Border Patrol’s surveillance to begin even before prospective migrants set foot on American soil. Such openness has its drawbacks though, since drug smugglers are now suspected of passing contraband across from Mexico to the United States.

Although 21 feet high in some stretches and designed to be difficult to scale, the barrier can be overcome, sometimes with ladders or ropes and sometimes by just holding on tight and climbing.

“When you say ‘wall,’ I say ‘fence,’ ” said Mr. Escalante, who grew up along the Texas border but has spent the bulk of his career in southern Arizona. “When you think wall, you think Berlin, China. You think of a big structure you can’t get across.”

The young man the authorities say was caught with the marijuana had approached the fence with two others. A package was hurled over. Two of the three people were seen turning back south. There was confusion among the agents over the whereabouts of the third man.

Agents in SUVs scrambled over the area in search of him. Agents on foot sought to cut him off at the pass. Agents on all-terrain vehicles swarmed the rugged wilderness farther along, where he would probably be headed.

Finding him was both a high-teach exercise and a low-tech one. Agents used flashlights to look for footprints in the dirt. They also dragged a device behind their vehicles to smooth out the ground and make it more obvious if someone crosses on foot. Sometimes there was confusion, as agents radioed one another to ask what the imprint was like on their boots so they did not waste time tracking a colleague.

The smugglers know all about these techniques. The young man who the authorities say was caught with the drugs had booties over his sneakers, the soles made of fluffy cloth so as to leave minimal tracks. “You like them?” he asked the agents, who stared down at his feet after arresting him in a thicket about a mile from the border.

He did not know it, but he probably would have been caught no matter what he was wearing on his feet. He was picked up on an infrared tracking device installed in a Border Patrol vehicle. An agent saw him clear as day on a monitor inside the vehicle and called out instructions to the pursuing agents, who were working in pitch dark. “You just passed him,” the agent called out to his colleagues. “He’s under that tree to your right,” he added. Eventually, the suspect was cornered.

The man was somewhere around the 325,000th illegal crosser apprehended along either the Mexican or Canadian border in the fiscal year that ended last month, the authorities said. Back in 2000, when Mr. Escalante was patrolling the line, 1.6 million people were caught trying to enter the country illegally, and an untold number got away. Over that period, the number of agents has more than doubled, which means these days that sometimes it may be six or eight agents pursuing a single crosser.

“When you get one person and he says: ‘You’re everywhere. It’s getting hard to get across,’ that’s what you want,” said Mr. Escalante, clearly relishing a break from his desk job as the agency’s spokesman for a night at the border again. “That one person could, once they are sent back, change the minds of many.”

    At the Border, on the Night Watch, NYT, 12.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/13/us/border-patrols-in-arizona-look-for-mexican-immigrants.html

When the Uprooted Put Down Roots

October 9, 2011
The New York Times
By PATRICIA LEIGH BROWN

SAN DIEGO — At the Saturday farmer’s market in City Heights, a major portal for refugees, Khadija Musame, a Somali, arranges her freshly picked pumpkin leaves and lablab beans amid a United Nations of produce, including water spinach grown by a Cambodian refugee and amaranth, a grain harvested by Sarah Salie, who fled rebels in Liberia. Eaten with a touch of lemon by Africans, and coveted by Southeast Asians for soups, this crop is always a sell-out.

Among the regular customers at the New Roots farm stand are Congolese women in flowing dresses, Somali Muslims in headscarves, Latino men wearing broad-brimmed hats and Burundian mothers in brightly patterned textiles who walk home balancing boxes of produce on their heads.

New Roots, with 85 growers from 12 countries, is one of more than 50 community farms dedicated to refugee agriculture, an entrepreneurial movement spreading across the country. American agriculture has historically been forged by newcomers, like the Scandinavians who helped settle the Great Plains; today’s growers are more likely to be rural subsistence farmers from Africa and Asia, resettled in and around cities from New York, Burlington, Vt., and Lowell, Mass., to Minneapolis, Phoenix and San Diego.

With language and cultural hurdles, and the need to gain access to land, financing and marketing, farm ownership for refugees can be very difficult. Programs like New Roots, which provide training in soil, irrigation techniques and climate, “help refugees make the leap from community gardens to independent farms,” said Hugh Joseph, an assistant professor at the Friedman School of Nutrition at Tufts, which advises 28 “incubator” farms representing hundreds of small-scale producers.

Cameroonian peanut plants are growing at Drew Gardens in the Bronx, chronicled on the Facebook page of Angela Nogue, a refugee farmer. Near Phoenix, a successful goat meat farm and store was begun by Ibrahim Sawara Dahab, an ethnic Sudanese from Somalia. “In America, you need experience, and my experience was goats,” he said.

The Office of Refugee Resettlement in Washington formed a sustainable farming program in 1998, financing 14 refugee farms and gardens, including one in Boise, Idaho, where sub-Saharan African farmers have gradually learned to cope with unpredictable frosts.

Larry Laverentz, the program manager for refugee agriculture with the Office of Refugee Resettlement, said inspiration came from the Hmong, Mien and Lao refugee farmers of Fresno County, Calif., who settled in the late 1970s and now have 1,300 growers specializing in Asian crops.

These small plots of land can become significant sources of income for refugees, with most farmers able to earn from $5,000 to more than $50,000 annually, as the Liberian refugees James and Jawn Golo do on their 20-acre organic farm outside Phoenix, including sales to five farmers’ markets, restaurants and chefs.

In Burlington, a four-acre farm started by Bhutanese-Nepali, Somali Bantu and Congolese farmers is still reeling from the flooding of the Winooski River after Hurricane Irene, which ruined crops at the height of the season and caused an estimated $15,000 in losses.

“This is a significant supplement to our diet, and budgets are geared to it,” said Yacouba Jacob Bogre, 38, executive director of the Association of Africans Living in Vermont and a lawyer from Burkina Faso. “Emotionally, we lost a lot, along with fresh vegetables for our households.”

New Roots in City Heights, which Michelle Obama visited last spring, is a model for today’s micro-enterprise. (It is also a culinary education, where a Zimbabwean grower can discover bok choy.) It was started at the request of his Somali Bantu community, said Bilali Muya, the effervescent trainer-in-chief. “There was this kind of depression,” he said. “Everyone was dreaming to come to the U.S.A., but they were not happy. The people were put in apartments, missing activity, community. They were bored.“

They were also homesick for traditional food, grown by hand. In City Heights, where half the residents live at or below the federal poverty line, the three-year-old farmer’s market was the city’s first in a low-income neighborhood, a collaboration between the nonprofit International Rescue Committee and the San Diego County Farm Bureau.

One can hear 15 different languages there, amid the neat rows of kale, rape and banana plants — but body language is the lingua franca.

“If I see a weed, I pull it, shaking my head,” said Mrs. Musame, the Somali farmer. “We understand each other.”

The hub of refugee life, City Heights was largely home to African-Americans and Mexican immigrants until the fall of Saigon in 1975, when thousands of Southeast Asian refugees arrived to a massive tent city at nearby Camp Pendleton.

From 1980 through 1990, the population almost doubled with immigrants and refugees (most recently from Iraq). The changing demographics of the neighborhood resemble an electrocardiogram of international conflict.

But the exquisite fruits and vegetables for sale, lovingly grown, belie the life experiences of the growers. Mrs. Salie, the Liberian, was raped by rebels and hid for two years in the bush after reporting the crime, she said. Mrs. Musame, a Somali Bantu, came to San Diego as a widow after her husband and three of her sons were gunned down.

And Mr. Muya said Somalis had taken his father, who dug irrigation trenches for a local banana farm, and tortured him, his screams echoing through the village. His grandfather went to help and was beaten with the butt of a rifle. Many hours later, Mr. Muya said, the villagers were told: “Come pick up your dogs.”

“As a Somali Bantu, you don’t go to sleep really deep,” Mr. Muya continued. “You sleep awake.”

In addition to accepting food stamps, the market offers $20 a month to low-income shoppers to buy more produce (financing comes from Wholesome Wave, a nonprofit based in Connecticut, and a $250,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention).

“Especially in tough times, farmers are becoming pharmacists — providing healthy fresh local fruits and vegetables to vulnerable families,” said Gus Schumacher, a former under secretary of the United States Department of Agriculture and now an executive vice president of Wholesome Wave.

Their produce is sold to restaurateurs like George and Samia Salameh, who buy the farm’s tomatoes and mint. Mr. Salameh, a former airline pilot, came to the United States from Lebanon 37 years ago. “This product is absolutely fitting for me,” he said.

The country’s pioneering refugee farm program, in Lowell, Mass., was founded by Tufts University and continues to thrive.

Visoth Kim, a Khmer refugee from Cambodia, now 63, farms land in Dracut, Mass., owned by the widow of John Ogonowski, the pilot of American Airlines Flight 11 that crashed into the World Trade Center on Sept. 11. Mr. Ogonowski, whose ancestors were Polish immigrants, made land available to Hmong and Cambodian refugees, teaching them modern irrigation techniques in exchange for fresh vegetables.

Mr. Kim, who witnessed mass starvation in Cambodia, losing a brother, refers to his two-acre plot as “my plenty.” His fellow farmer Sinikiwe Makarutsa grew up in Zimbabwe and now grows maize on land rented from a local church. She made enough money to buy a tractor and rototiller.

Ms. Makarutsa was inspired to farm, she said, after tasting supermarket tomatoes. She uses the Zimbabwean phrase “Pamuzinda” to describe her seven-acre plot.

Roughly translated, she said, “It means ‘where you belong.’ ”

    When the Uprooted Put Down Roots, NYT, 9.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/10/us/refugees-in-united-states-take-up-farming.html

After Ruling, Hispanics Flee an Alabama Town

October 3, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

ALBERTVILLE, Ala. — The vanishing began Wednesday night, the most frightened families packing up their cars as soon as they heard the news.

They left behind mobile homes, sold fully furnished for a thousand dollars or even less. Or they just closed up and, in a gesture of optimism, left the keys with a neighbor. Dogs were fed one last time; if no home could be found, they were simply unleashed.

Two, 5, 10 years of living here, and then gone in a matter of days, to Tennessee, Illinois, Oregon, Florida, Arkansas, Mexico — who knows? Anywhere but Alabama.

The exodus of Hispanic immigrants began just hours after a federal judge in Birmingham upheld most provisions of the state’s far-reaching immigration enforcement law.

The judge, Sharon Lovelace Blackburn, upheld the parts of the law allowing state and local police to ask for immigration papers during routine traffic stops, rendering most contracts with illegal immigrants unenforceable and requiring schools to ascertain the immigration status of children at registration time.

When Judge Blackburn was finished, Alabama was left with what the governor called “the strongest immigration law in this country.” It went into effect immediately, though her ruling is being appealed by the Justice Department and a coalition of civil rights groups.

In the days since, school superintendents have reassured parents — one even did so on television in Spanish — that nothing had changed for children who were already enrolled. Wary police departments around the state said they were, for now, awaiting instructions on how to carry out the law.

For many immigrants, however, waiting seemed just too dangerous. By Monday afternoon, 123 students had withdrawn from the schools in this small town in the northern hills, leaving behind teary and confused classmates. Scores more were absent. Statewide, 1,988 Hispanic students were absent on Friday, about 5 percent of the entire Hispanic population of the school system.

John Weathers, an Albertville businessman who rents and has sold houses to many Hispanic residents, said his occupancy had suddenly dropped by a quarter and might drop further, depending on what happens in the next week. Two people who had paid off their mortgages called him asking if they could sell back their homes, Mr. Weathers said.

Grocery stores and restaurants were noticeably less busy, which in some cases may be just as well, because some employees stopped showing up. In certain neighborhoods the streets are uncommonly quiet, like the aftermath of some sort of rapture.

Drawn by work in the numerous poultry processing plants, Hispanic immigrants have been coming to Albertville for years, long enough ago that some of the older ones gained amnesty under the immigration law of 1986. But the influx picked up over the last decade, and the signs on Main Street are now mostly bilingual, when they include English at all.

What the new immigration law means on a large scale will become clearest in a place like Albertville, whether it will deliver jobs to citizens and protect taxpayers as promised or whether it will spell economic disaster as opponents fear.

Critics of the law, particularly farmers, contractors and home builders, say the measure has already been devastating, leaving rotting crops in fields and critical shortages of labor. They say that even fully documented Hispanic workers are leaving, an assessment that seems to be borne out in interviews here. The legal status of family members is often mixed — children are often American-born citizens — but the decision whether to stay rests on the weakest link.

Backers of the law acknowledge that it might be disruptive in the short term, but say it will prove effective over time.

“It’s going to take some time for the local labor pool to develop again,” said State Senator Arthur Orr, Republican of Decatur, “but outside labor shouldn’t come in and just beat them every time on cost and put them out of business.”

Mr. Orr said there were already signs that the law was working, pointing out that the work-release center in Decatur, about 50 miles to the northwest, was not so long ago unable to find jobs for inmates with poultry processors or home manufacturers. Since the law was enacted in June, he said, the center has been placing more and more inmates in these jobs, now more than 150 a day.

On Monday morning, one of the poultry processing plants in Albertville had a job fair, attracting an enormous crowd, a mix of Hispanic, black and white job-seekers, lining up outside the plant and down the street.

“This needed to be done years ago,” Shannon Lolling, 36, who has been unemployed for over a year, said of the law.

Mr. Lolling’s problem seemed to be with the system that had brought the illegal-immigrant workers here, not with the workers themselves.

“That’s why our jobs went south to Mexico,” he said. “They pay them less wages and pocket the money, keep us from having jobs.”

Not far from the plant, in the Hispanic neighborhoods, it is hard to differentiate the silence of the workday, the silence of abandonment or the silence of paralyzing fear.

Many Hispanics have chosen to stay for now, saying, with little apparent conviction, that the law will surely be blocked by the president, the judge, “the government.” Until then, they are not leaving their homes unless absolutely necessary. They send others to buy their groceries and tell their children to quit the soccer team and to come home right after school. Rumors of raids and roadblocks are rampant, and though the new law has nothing to say about such things, distrust is primed by anecdotes, like one told by a local Hispanic pastor who said he was pulled over outside Birmingham on Wednesday, within hours of the ruling. His friend who was driving — and who is in the United States illegally — is now in jail on an unrelated misdemeanor charge, the pastor said, adding that while he was let go, a policeman told him he was no longer welcome in Alabama.

“I am afraid to drive to church.,” a 54-year-old poultry plant worker named Candelaria said, adding, “The lady that gives me a ride to work said she is leaving. She said she felt like a prisoner.”

All summer long, Allen Stoner, a lawyer in Decatur, has been helping his Hispanic clients fill out forms appointing friends or family members as guardians of their children, who are in many cases American-born citizens. This way, the children would not be transferred to social services if the parents were arrested and deported.

Much of this was done by the time the judge’s ruling came down, though last week Mr. Stoner’s clients began to contact him immediately to ask what they should be doing. Monday was quiet.

“We had a lot of phone calls Thursday and Friday,” Mr. Stoner said, “but it has plummeted.”

He did not know for sure, but he figured his clients were gone.

    After Ruling, Hispanics Flee an Alabama Town, NYT, 3.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/us/after-ruling-hispanics-flee-an-alabama-town.html

Alabama’s Shame

October 3, 2011
The New York Times

Only about 3.5 percent of Alabama’s population is foreign-born, according to the Census Bureau. Undocumented immigrants made up roughly 4.2 percent of its work force in 2010, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. But the drafters of Alabama’s harsh immigration law wanted to turn their state into the country’s most hostile territory for illegal immigrants. They are succeeding, as many of Alabama’s most vulnerable residents can attest.

The law went into effect over the weekend, after being largely upheld by a federal district judge. Volunteers on an immigrant-rights group’s hot line said that since then they have received more than 1,000 calls from pregnant women afraid to go to the hospital, crime victims afraid to go the police, parents afraid to send their children to school.

School superintendents and principals across the state confirm that attendance of Hispanic children has dropped noticeably since the word went out that school officials are now required to check the immigration status of newly enrolled students and their parents.

That rule is part of the law’s sweeping attempt to curtail the rights and complicate the lives of people without papers, making them unable to enter contracts, find jobs, rent homes or access government services. In other words, to be isolated, unemployable, poor, defenseless and uneducated.

The education crackdown is particularly senseless and unconstitutional. In 1982, the Supreme Court found that all children living in the United States have the right to a public education, whatever their immigration status. The justices’ reasoning was shaped not by compassion but practicality: it does the country no good to perpetuate an uneducated underclass.

Officials in Alabama — some well meaning, others less so — insisted that nothing in the new law is intended to deny children an education. School districts, they noted, are supposed to collect only numbers of children without papers, not names.

“I don’t know where the misinformation’s coming from,” Alabama’s interim state school superintendent, Larry Craven, told NPR. “If you have difficulty understanding the language anyway, then who knows what they’re being told?” With comments like that, it’s not surprising that any of “them” would be frightened.

The Obama administration was right to sue to try to stop the Alabama law. It needs to press ahead with its appeal of the ruling and challenge similar laws in Utah, Georgia, Indiana and South Carolina.

President Obama needs to show stronger leadership in defending core American values in the face of the hostility that has overtaken Alabama and so many other states. He can start by scrapping the Secure Communities program, which encourages local immigration dragnets and reinforces the false notion that most undocumented immigrants pose a threat to this country’s security.

As for Alabama, one has to wonder at such counterproductive cruelty. Do Alabamans want children too frightened to go to school? Or pregnant women too frightened to seek care? Whom could that possibly benefit?

    Alabama’s Shame, NYT, 3.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/04/opinion/alabamas-shame.html

Crossing Over, and Over

October 2, 2011
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

AGUA PRIETA, Mexico — "My wife, my son — I have to get back to them," Daniel kept telling himself, from the moment he was arrested in Seattle for driving with an expired license, all the way through the deportation proceeding that delivered him to Mexico in June.

Nothing would deter him from crossing the border again. He had left his hometown at 24, he said. Twelve years later, he spoke nearly fluent English and had an American son, a wife and three brothers in the United States. "I’ll keep trying," he said, "until I’ll get there."

This is increasingly the profile of illegal immigration today. Migrant shelters along the Mexican border are filled not with newcomers looking for a better life, but with seasoned crossers: older men and women, often deportees, braving ever-greater risks to get back to their families in the United States — the country they consider home.

They present an enormous challenge to American policy makers, because they continue to head north despite obstacles more severe than at any time in recent history. It is not just that the American economy has little to offer; the border itself is far more threatening. On one side, fences have grown and American agents have multiplied; on the other, criminals haunt the journey at every turn.

And yet, while these factors — and better opportunities at home — have cut illegal immigration from Mexico to its lowest level in decades, they are not enough to scare off a sizable, determined cadre.

"We have it boiled down to the hardest lot," said Christopher Sabatini, senior director for policy at the Council of the Americas.

Indeed, 56 percent of apprehensions at the Mexican border in 2010 involved people who had been caught previously, up from 44 percent in 2005. A growing percentage of deportees in recent years have also been deported before, according to Department of Homeland Security figures.

For the Obama administration, these repeat offenders have become a high priority. Prosecutions for illegal re-entry have jumped by more than two-thirds since 2008. Officials say it is now the most prosecuted federal felony.

President Obama has already deported around 1.1 million immigrants — more than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower — and officials say the numbers will not decline. But at a time when the dynamics of immigration are changing, experts and advocates on all sides are increasingly asking if the approach, which has defined immigration policy since 9/11, still makes sense.

Deportation is expensive, costing the government at least $12,500 per person, and it often does not work: between October 2008 and July 22 of this year, Immigration and Customs Enforcement spent $2.25 billion sending back 180,229 people who had been deported before and come back anyway. Many more have returned and stayed hidden.

Some groups favoring reduced immigration say that making life harder for illegal immigrants in this country would be far more efficient. They argue that along with eliminating work opportunities by requiring employers to verify the reported immigration status of new hires, Congress should also prohibit illegal immigrants from opening bank accounts, or even obtaining library cards.

"You’d reduce the number of people who keep coming back again and again," said Bob Dane, a spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform. The alternative, says Doris Meissner, the country’s top immigration official in the mid-1990s, is to accept that illegal immigrants like Daniel "are people with fundamental ties to the United States, not where they came from."

"Our societies are so deeply connected," Ms. Meissner said, referring primarily to the United States and Mexico, the main source of illegal immigrants. "And that is not reflected at all in policy."

The administration acknowledges that immigrants like Daniel are rooted in the United States and typically have otherwise clean criminal records. But under its new plan introduced in August — suspending deportations for pending low-priority cases, including immigrants brought to the United States as children — repeat crossers are singled out for removal alongside "serious felons," "known gang members" and "individuals who pose a clear risk to national security."

Administration officials say they are trying to break the "yo-yo effect" of people bouncing back, as mandated by congress when it toughened laws related to illegal re-entry in the 1990s.

But some experts argue that this commingling actually undermines security. After a decade of record deportations, critics argue, it has become even harder to separate the two groups that now define the border: professional criminals and experienced migrants motivated by family ties in the United States.

"If you think drug dealers and terrorists are much more dangerous than maids and gardeners, then we should get as many visas as possible to those people, so we can focus on the real threat," said David Shirk, director of the Transborder Institute at the University of San Diego. "Widening the gates would strengthen the walls."

 

Crime and the Border

The border crossers pouring into Arizona a decade or two ago were more numerous, but less likely to be threatening. David Jimarez, a Border Patrol agent with years of experience south of Tucson, recalled that even when migrants outnumbered American authorities by 25 to 1, they did not resist. "They would just sit down and wait for us," he said.

Over the past few years, the mix has changed, with more drug smugglers and other criminals among the dwindling, but still substantial, ranks of migrants.

The impacts are far-reaching. In northern Mexico, less immigration means less business. Border towns like Agua Prieta, long known as a departure point, have gone from bustling to windblown. Taxis that ferried migrants to the mountains now gather dust. Restaurants and hotels, like the sunflower-themed Girasol downtown, are practically empty. On one recent afternoon, only 3 of the 50 rooms were occupied.

"In 2000, we were full every day," said Alejandro Rocha, the hotel’s manager.

New research from the University of California, San Diego, shows that crime is now the top concern for Mexicans thinking of heading north. As fear keeps many migrants home, many experienced border guides, or coyotes, have given up illegal migration for other jobs.

In Tijuana, across the border from San Diego, one well-known coyote is now selling tires. In Nogales, the largest Mexican city bordering Arizona, power has shifted to tattooed young men with expensive binoculars along the border fence, while here in Agua Prieta — where Mexican officials say traffic is one-thirthieth of what it once was — the only way to get across is to deal with gangs that sometimes push migrants to carry drugs.

It is even worse in Matamoros, across from Brownsville, Tex. Just standing at the border fence brings out drug cartel enforcers demanding $300 for the right to pass. Migrants and the organizations that assist them say cartel lieutenants roam the shelters, looking for deportees willing to work as lookouts, earning $400 a week until they have enough to pay for passage north.

"I was thinking about doing it, too," said Daniel, looking down. "But then I thought about my family."

American law enforcement officials say the matrix of drugs, migration and violence has become more visible at the border and along the trails and roads heading north, where more of the immigrants being caught carry drugs or guns — making them more likely to flee, resist arrest or commit other crimes.

"There’s less traffic, but traffic that’s there is more threatening," Mr. Jimarez, the border agent, said.

Larry Dever, the sheriff of Cochise County, Ariz., which sits north of Agua Prieta, agreed: "The guys smuggling people and narcotics now are more sinister."

His county, 6,169 square miles of scrub brush, ranches and tiny towns in the state’s southeast corner, has been an established crossing corridor since the mid-1990s. Since 2008, the police there have tracked every crime linked to illegal immigrants, in part because state and federal officials frequently requested data, treating the county as a bellwether of border security.

Indeed, when a Cochise rancher named Robert Krentz was killed in March 2010 after radioing to his brother that he was going to help a suspected illegal immigrant, the county quickly became a flash point for a larger debate that ultimately led to SB 1070, the polarizing Arizona bill giving the police more responsibility for cracking down on illegal immigrants.

Yet, crime involving illegal immigrants is relatively rare (5 percent of all local crime, Sheriff Dever said). Mostly it consists of burglaries involving stolen food. And, public records show, in 11 of the 18 violent crimes linked to illegal immigrants over 18 months, immigrants were both the victims and attackers.

This is not the portrait given by Republican border governors, including Rick Perry of Texas, a presidential candidate who recently said that "it is not safe on that border." But while Mexican drug cartels have increased their presence from Tucson to New York — sometimes engaging in brutal violence after entering the country illegally — Americans living near the border are generally safe.

A USA Today analysis of Texas, Arizona, New Mexico and California in July found that crime within 100 miles of the border is below both the national average and the average for each of those states — and has been declining for years. Several other independent researchers have come to the same conclusion.

But the border is not safe for people crossing or patrolling it. The number of immigrants found dead in the Arizona desert, from all causes, has failed to decline as fast as illegal immigration has, while assaults on Border Patrol agents grew by 41 percent from 2006 to 2010, almost entirely because of an increase in attacks with rocks. The heightened risks have stimulated a debate: Has the more aggressive approach — bigger fences, more agents and deportations — contributed to, or diminished, the danger?

Sheriff Dever, lionized as an "illegal immigration warrior" by immigration opponents, says that increased enforcement has made Americans safer and should continue until his neighbors tell him they are no longer afraid.

But some immigration advocates contend that the government’s approach is too broad to be effective. "We have to really separate out the guy who is coming to make a living with his family from the terrorist or the drug dealer," said Peter Siavelis, an editor of "Getting Immigration Right: What Every American Needs to Know."

Home Is Where the Children Are

Deportations have muddled that delineation. In a recent line of deportees piling off a bus on the San Diego side of a metal gate leading to Tijuana, all were equal: the criminal in prison garb with the wispy goatee; the mother averting her eyes; and longtime residents like Alberto Álvarez, 36, a janitor and father of five who said he was picked up for driving without a license.

"Look, I’ve been in the U.S. 18 years," he said, slinging a backpack over his Izod shirt. "Right now, my children are alone, my wife is alone caring for the kids by herself — they’ve separated us."

During the immigration wave that peaked around a decade ago, deportations often meant something different: many deportees had not been in the United States for long; they were going home.

But now that there are fewer new arrivals, the concept of home is changing. Of the roughly 11 million unauthorized immigrants in the United States, 48 percent arrived before 2000. For the 6.5 million Mexicans in the United States illegally, that figure is even higher — 55 percent, according to the Pew Hispanic Center. There are now also 4.5 million American-born children of unauthorized immigrant parents.

Experts on both sides of the debate say this large group of rooted immigrants presents the nation with a fundamental choice: Either make life in the United States so difficult for illegal immigrants that they leave on their own, or allow immigrants who pose no threat to public safety to remain with their families legally, though not necessarily as citizens.

Steven A. Camarota, a demographer at the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, said the government should revoke automatic citizenship for children born to illegal immigrants, and seize assets from deported illegal immigrants so they have fewer incentives to return.

President Obama, having made no progress on getting his legalization plan through Congress, has instead been trying to make enforcement more surgical. Under the new guidelines, officials will use "prosecutorial discretion" to review the current docket of 300,000 deportation cases, suspending expulsions for a range of immigrants.

Several factors prompt "particular care and consideration" for a reprieve, including whether the person has been in the United States since childhood, or is pregnant, seriously ill, a member of the military or a minor, according to a June memo that initiated the change.

The issue of "whether the person has a U.S. citizen or permanent resident spouse, child or parent" appears in the memo’s secondary list of factors to consider. But it is not clear how broadly leniency will be applied. Repeat crossers are given a special black mark, and the administration has already deported hundreds of thousands of minor offenders, despite claiming to focus on "the worst of the worst."

Several Democratic governors and law enforcement officials are particularly angry about Secure Communities, a program to run the fingerprints of anyone booked by the police to check for federal immigration violations. A large proportion of those deported through this process — 79 percent, according to a recent report by the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University — were low-level offenders, often arrested for traffic violations.

Administration officials dispute that, saying the ratio of serious criminals is increasing, and that ultimately they must enforce immigration law against all violators. They have mandated that the program be used nationwide by 2013.

Mexico’s border cities offer a portrait of what that could mean. Nearly 950,000 Mexican immigrants have been deported since the start of fiscal 2008. And in Tijuana — a former hub for migrants heading north, which now receives more deportees than anywhere else — the pool of deportees preparing to cross again just keeps growing.

Maria García, 27, arrived here after being deported for a traffic violation. She said she had spent six years living in Fresno, Calif., with her two Mexico-born sons, 11 and 7. She was one of many who said that without a doubt, they would find their way back to the United States.

"They can’t stop us," she said.

The constant flow of deportees has become a growing concern for Mexican officials, who say the new arrivals are easy recruits, and victims, for drug cartels.

One former deportee was arrested this year for playing a major role in the deaths of around 200 people found in mass graves. In Tijuana, a homeless camp at the border has swollen from a cluster to a neighborhood, as deportees flow in, many carrying stories of being robbed or kidnapped by gangs who saw their American connections as a source for ransom.

Minutes after he arrived, Mr. Álvarez, the janitor, said he was worried about surviving — "you’re playing with your life being here," he said. But his twin sons would turn 2 in a few weeks, and like many others, he said that no matter how he was treated in the United States, he would find his way back.

"I feel bad being here, I feel bad," he said. "I’ve got my kids over there, my family, my whole life. Here" — he shook his head at the end of his first day in Tijuana — "no."

    Crossing Over, and Over, NYT, 2.10.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/03/world/americas/
    mexican-immigrants-repeatedly-brave-risks-to-resume-lives-in-united-states.html

Fatal Accident Puts Focus on Deportation Program

September 29, 2011
The New York Times
By ABBY GOODNOUGH

BOSTON — A fatal accident that the police say involved an illegal immigrant driving drunk has stirred outrage in Massachusetts and put Gov. Deval Patrick on the defensive for his resistance to a federal program intended to deport criminals.

According to the police, the immigrant, Nicolas Guaman from Ecuador, struck and killed a young motorcyclist in Milford last month while intoxicated, dragging him for a quarter of a mile. Mr. Guaman has a previous criminal record, the police said, and many here have pointed to his case as an example of why the federal program, known as Secure Communities, is necessary.

Under Secure Communities, the fingerprints of anyone booked into jail by the state and local police are sent through the F.B.I. to the Department of Homeland Security, which tracks immigration violations. Immigration agents then decide whether to deport immigrants flagged by such checks.

Mr. Patrick, a Democrat, announced in June that Massachusetts would not participate in Secure Communities, citing concerns that it casts too wide a net and leads to the deportation of immigrants with no criminal histories. Two other Democratic governors, Pat Quinn of Illinois and Andrew M. Cuomo of New York, have also rejected the program, though the Obama administration has announced plans to expand it nationwide, with or without states’ support, by the end of 2013.

The Guaman case and several others — including that of Onyango Obama, a Kenyan uncle of President Obama who was arrested last month outside Boston on drunken-driving charges and found to be in violation of a 1992 deportation order — have become part of a growing debate over whether Massachusetts is too easy on illegal immigrants.

Critics, including some Democrats, are also asking why Mr. Patrick, a close ally of Mr. Obama’s, would reject a program central to Mr. Obama’s immigration enforcement plan. The Obama administration has taken steps recently to focus its deportation strategy on illegal immigrants who have been convicted of violent and drug-related crimes.

“Unfortunately, the governor doesn’t think it’s a serious enough problem to deal with,” said State Senator Richard T. Moore, a Democrat whose district includes Milford. “We’re hearing from the public constantly: what are we going to do about this problem?”

Mr. Moore is co-sponsoring new bipartisan legislation meant to crack down on illegal immigration, in part by imposing tougher penalties, including possible jail time, for driving without a license and not registering cars properly. Mr. Guaman was not carrying a license at the time of his arrest.

Onyango Obama, the half brother of the president’s father, who did have a driver’s license, was taken into custody on an immigration detainer after his arrest in Framingham on Aug. 24. Immigration and Customs Enforcement released him on Sept. 8 but has refused to say why, citing federal privacy laws.

In another recent case, a Mexican immigrant was arrested on a charge of drunken driving last weekend in Boxborough, and the police said he had five previous drunken-driving convictions. The man, Eduardo A. Torres, had been deported three times previously, according to immigration officials.

On Wednesday, Mr. Moore joined three county sheriffs at a State House news conference calling for Mr. Patrick to embrace the Secure Communities program immediately. Also on Wednesday, Senator Scott Brown, a Republican facing re-election next year, urged Janet Napolitano, the homeland security secretary, to “proceed with the full activation” of the program in Massachusetts.

He also suggested that Mr. Patrick’s resistance would delay the program’s activation in Massachusetts; it currently operates only in Boston. But a spokesman for the immigration agency, which runs the program, said that would not be a factor.

The sheriffs of Bristol, Plymouth and Worcester Counties, all Republicans, said they were working with federal officials to adopt elements of the program in their counties immediately. Mr. Patrick said on Wednesday that the state already sends fingerprints of arrestees to the F.B.I., which is free to share them with immigration agents. The state also sends fingerprints of convicted criminals directly to the immigration agency once they arrive in state prisons, he said.

“This is about grandstanding and headlines,” Mr. Patrick said of his critics on the issue. “Meanwhile, the public should know that every fingerprint is sent to the federal government; they should know that every felony is referred to the federal government.”

It is far from certain that Mr. Moore’s bill will pass both houses of the legislature; similar crackdowns in recent years have passed the Senate but not the more liberal House of Representatives. But Eva Millona, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition, said she was worried.

“We seem to continue to lose supporters,” she said.

Ms. Millona added that it was unfair to connect drunken driving with illegal immigration. “Drunk driving is another issue, and people should be punished for it,” she said. “But immigration status has nothing to do with it.”

    Fatal Accident Puts Focus on Deportation Program, NYT, 29.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/us/politics/fatal-accident-puts-focus-on-deportation-program.html

2,901 Arrested in Crackdown on Criminal Immigrants

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By CHARLIE SAVAGE

WASHINGTON — The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency announced on Wednesday that it had arrested 2,901 immigrants who have criminal records, highlighting the Obama administration’s policy of focusing on such people while putting less emphasis on deporting illegal immigrants who pose no demonstrated threat to public safety.

Officials from the agency portrayed the seven-day sweep, called Operation Cross Check, as the largest enforcement and removal operation in its history. It involved arrests in all 50 states of criminal offenders of 115 nationalities, including people convicted of manslaughter, armed robbery, aggravated assault and sex crimes.

“These are not people who are making a positive contribution to their communities,” said the agency’s director, John Morton. “They are not the kind of people we want walking our streets.”

More than 1,600 of those arrested had been convicted of a felony. The remainder had a misdemeanor conviction for matters like theft, forgery and driving while intoxicated, the agency said. Those arrested included illegal immigrants and lawful resident noncitizens who had been convicted of crimes that made them eligible to be deported.

The agency did not release the names of all the people arrested. But a sampling that showed the geographical breadth of the operation included one person from the New York City area: Virgilio Lopez-Ruiz, a 54-year-old Dominican who was living in the Bronx. He had been convicted on Nov. 16, 1988, of second-degree attempted murder, it said. It did not provide his immigration status.

Mr. Morton issued a memo in June suggesting that the agency should place a priority on deporting noncitizen criminals like drug dealers and gang members, as well as people who have flagrantly violated immigration laws, for example by ignoring deportation orders or re-entering the country after being removed. Under that approach, it would give less emphasis to removing illegal immigrants who are not a public safety or national security threat.

In August, the White House essentially ratified that approach, announcing that the Department of Homeland Security would, on a case-by-case basis, suspend deportation proceedings against people who posed no public safety threat. The policy shift has been criticized by some Republicans as a backdoor form of the so-called Dream Act — a bill, which has stalled in Congress, that would provide relief to illegal immigrants who were brought to the United States as children and who want to attend college or join the armed forces.

But Mr. Morton said Wednesday that there were far more illegal immigrants in the United States than the agency has the resources to remove. He said that the agency has been deporting about 390,000 people annually for the past several years, a record level, and that the question is who those people should be. In 2008, he said, about a third were criminal offenders, but this year about half have been, and the majority of the remainder have been flagrant violators of immigration law.

    2,901 Arrested in Crackdown on Criminal Immigrants, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/us/
    crackdown-on-criminal-immigrants-operation-cross-check-brings-2901-arrests.html

Alabama Wins in Ruling on Its Immigration Law

September 28, 2011
The New York Times
By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON

A federal judge on Wednesday upheld most of the sections of Alabama’s far-reaching immigration law that had been challenged by the Obama administration, including portions that had been blocked in other states.

The decision, by Judge Sharon Lovelace Blackburn of Federal District Court in Birmingham, makes it much more likely that the fate of the recent flurry of state laws against illegal immigration will eventually be decided by the Supreme Court. It also means that Alabama now has by far the strictest such law of any state.

“Today Judge Blackburn upheld the majority of our law,” Gov. Robert Bentley said in a brief statement he delivered outside the State Capitol in Montgomery. “With those parts that were upheld, we have the strongest immigration law in the country.”

The judge did issue a preliminary injunction against several sections of the law, agreeing with the government’s case that they pre-empted federal law. She blocked a broad provision that outlawed the harboring or transporting of illegal immigrants and another that barred illegal immigrants from enrolling in or attending public universities.

The governor, in his statement, said he believed even the sections that were temporarily enjoined on Wednesday would eventually be upheld, and added that the state would consider appealing if that did not happen.

For the most part, Judge Blackburn, who was appointed by the elder President George Bush, disagreed with the Justice Department’s arguments, including those that had been successful in challenges to laws in Arizona and Georgia.

The judge upheld a section that requires state and local law enforcement officials to try to verify a person’s immigration status during routine traffic stops or arrests, if “a reasonable suspicion” exists that the person is in the country illegally. And she ruled that a section that criminalized the “willful failure” of a person in the country illegally to carry federal immigration papers did not pre-empt federal law.

In both cases, she rejected the reasoning of district and appeals courts that had blocked similar portions of Arizona’s law. Legal experts expected the Justice Department to appeal.

“The department is reviewing the decision to determine next steps,” Xochitl Hinojosa, a department spokeswoman, said in a statement. “We will continue to evaluate state immigration-related laws and will not hesitate to bring suit if, in fact, a state creates its own immigration policy or enforces state laws in a manner that interferes with federal immigration law.”

The Alabama law was the latest, and broadest, of the state laws against illegal immigration, going further than one passed in Arizona.

While Alabama is estimated to have a relatively small population of people who are in the country illegally, the numbers have been growing.

Acting on a pledge that they would crack down on illegal immigration, Republicans passed the bill when they won a supermajority in the State Legislature in the 2010 elections. Mr. Bentley signed it into law in June.

Del Marsh, the Republican president pro tem of the Alabama Senate, said in a statement after Wednesday’s ruling, “Our goal has always been to make sure Alabama jobs and taxpayer-funded resources are going to legal Alabama residents, and Judge Blackburn’s ruling is a significant win for this cause.”

All summer, rallies for and against the law have been taking place throughout the state. Farmers and even the state agriculture commissioner have raised concerns about the law’s effect on farms, sheriffs have condemned it as too onerous for financially hurting counties and others have worried that it could seriously hinder the state’s efforts to rebuild after last April’s devastating tornadoes.

The law’s backers argued that most of the concerns arose out of a misreading of the law that they believed in some cases was intentional.

The judge ruled on three suits challenging the law on Wednesday, one brought by the federal government, another by a group of church leaders and another brought by civil rights groups.

She dismissed the suit brought by church leaders, who had argued that the law prevented them from carrying out crucial duties of their ministry, concluding that they did not have standing to challenge one part of the law and that she had addressed the other challenge in her ruling on the federal law.

Judge Blackburn agreed with the arguments of the civil rights groups on several sections or subsections of the law, but did not address many of their arguments because they overlapped with those put forth in the Justice Department’s suit.

“We’re really disappointed,” said Andre Segura of the American Civil Liberties Union, which represents plaintiffs in one of the suits. “We already know that this is going to cause a lot of problems in Alabama.”

The civil rights groups are planning an appeal.

Among the other sections Judge Blackburn upheld: one that nullifies any contracts entered into by an illegal immigrant; another that forbids any transaction between an illegal immigrant and any division of the state, a proscription that has already led to the denial of a Montgomery man’s application for water and sewage service; and, most controversially, a section that requires elementary and secondary schools to determine the immigration status of incoming students.

The civil rights groups challenged this last section on the ground that it would unlawfully deter students from enrolling in school, even if it did not explicitly allow schools to turn students away. The judge dismissed their challenge for lack of standing, though she did not rule on the argument’s merits.

Peter J. Spiro, a law professor at Temple University, said: “This decision really gives the anti-immigration folks more of a victory than they’ve been getting in other courts. There’s a lot for them to be happy about.”

Still, Professor Spiro added, “This is not the last word on the constitutionality of this statute.”

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: September 30, 2011

An article on Thursday about a federal judge’s ruling that upheld most of Alabama’s far-reaching immigration law misstated the role of the American Civil Liberties Union in one of the lawsuits challenging the law. The A.C.L.U. represents plaintiffs in the suit; it is not itself a plaintiff.

    Alabama Wins in Ruling on Its Immigration Law, NYT, 28.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/29/us/alabama-immigration-law-upheld.html

Oscar Handlin,

Historian Who Chronicled U.S. Immigration, Dies at 95

September 23, 2011
The New York Times
By PAUL VITELLO

Oscar Handlin, a prolific, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian whose best-known book altered public perceptions about the role of immigration in the arc of American history, died on Tuesday at his home in Cambridge, Mass. He was 95.

His death was confirmed by his wife, Lilian.

Dr. Handlin wrote many scholarly volumes on immigration, race and ethnic identity during his nearly half century as a history professor at Harvard. His work as a chronicler of the migrations of Puerto Ricans and African-Americans to the cities attracted a generation of historians and sociologists to urban studies during the 1950s, when the field was considered marginal.

But his best-known work, “The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People,” which won the 1952 Pulitzer for history, was aimed at an audience of general readers in making his case that immigration — more than the frontier experience, or any other episode in its past — was the continuing, defining event of American history. Dispensing with footnotes and writing in a lyrical style, Dr. Handlin emphasized the common threads in the experiences of the 30 million immigrants who poured into American cities between 1820 and the turn of the century. Regardless of nationality, religion, race or ethnicity, he wrote, the common experience was wrenching hardship, alienation and a gradual Americanization that changed America as much as it changed the newcomers.

The book used a form of historical scholarship considered unorthodox at the time, employing newspaper accounts, personal letters and diaries as well as archives. The New York Times described it as “history with a difference — the difference being its concern with hearts and souls.”

Dr. Handlin, whose parents were Jewish immigrants from Russia, was among the first Jewish scholars appointed to a full professorship at Harvard, where he taught from 1939 until 1984. His family’s immigrant background, and the influence of a mentor, the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Sr., who pioneered the field of immigration studies at Harvard, led him to the subject of his Ph.D. dissertation, and his first book, “Boston’s Immigrants: 1790-1880.”

Published in 1941, it was considered innovative for its use of census data, the archives of German and Irish immigrant newspapers and sociological concepts in tracing how immigrants, most of them coming from rural communities steeped in ancient traditions, adjusted to life without the support of those traditions in an American city where they were scorned.

“All his work tried to capture the voice and experience of people undergoing this uprooting process, this process of immigration,” said David J. Rothman, a history professor at Columbia University and a former student of Dr. Handlin’s. “He was alert to the fact that every group was different. But this process, regardless of whether you were Irish or Jewish, was something shared.”

In the often-quoted opening line of the introduction to “Uprooted,” Dr. Handlin wrote: “Once I thought to write a history of the immigrants in America. Then I discovered that the immigrants were American history.”

Oscar Handlin was born in Brooklyn on Sept. 29, 1915, the oldest of four children of Joseph and Ida Handlin. His father owned a grocery store. Oscar Handlin told interviewers that he decided to become a historian when he was 8, and began reading avidly, even while delivering groceries to his father’s customers.

He graduated from Brooklyn College in 1934, at 19, and received a master’s degree in history from Harvard the next year. He taught at Brooklyn College from 1936 until 1938 while working toward his doctorate, which he received from Harvard in 1940.

His first wife, Mary Flug Handlin, a historian, died in 1976 after 40 years of marriage. He was married again, in 1977, to Lilian Bombach Handlin. Dr. Handlin is also survived by three children from his first marriage, David, Joanna Smith, and Ruth Manley; four grandchildren; a great grandchild and a brother, Nathan.

In 1965, Dr. Handlin lent his weight as the nation’s most eminent immigration scholar to the effort to pass legislation abolishing an immigration quota system, in place since the 1920s, which discriminated against many groups, including Asians. He testified before Congress, and was said to have played an important behind-the-scenes role. The legislation was adopted.

His views on immigration became less popular in the late 1960s and ’70s, when a younger generation of scholars began to examine historic events through the prisms of race, class and gender. He clashed with fellow scholars who were, to him, distorting American history by viewing it through the politics of the Vietnam-era culture war. His support for the war frequently placed him at odds with students and fellow members of the faculty.

But Dr. Handlin changed the way Americans view American history, said James Grossman, a historian and executive director of the American Historical Association. “He reoriented the whole picture of the American story,” he said, “from the view that America was built on the spirit of the Wild West, to the idea that we are a nation of immigrants.”

    Oscar Handlin, Historian Who Chronicled U.S. Immigration, Dies at 95, NYT, 23.9.2011?
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/24/us/
    oscar-handlin-historian-who-chronicled-united-states-immigration-dies-at-95.html

Borderline Ridiculous

September 16, 2011
The New York Times

The United States is home to 11 million illegal immigrants. The undocumented hold jobs, have children, pay taxes, use government services — and too often live in fear. What is to be done about them? It’s a difficult question, and one the Republican presidential candidates in the last two debates spent a great deal of effort avoiding.

Unlike Ronald Reagan, none of these Republicans favor “amnesty,” and President George W. Bush’s comprehensive solution — tougher enforcement and legalization, with penalties — has gone nowhere. Comprehensive reform is President Obama’s answer, too, which means no Republican today dares support it.

Asked about illegal immigrants, the candidates settled on the simplest-sounding response: seal the border. What about immigrants already here? Same answer: seal the border. This was both a nonanswer and a call for billions in new government spending, which was very strange to hear from politicians also determined to slash even the most basic public services any chance they get. The seal-the-border answer is not only not a solution, it cynically misrepresents what’s happening on the ground. It falsely paints the border region as a dangerous place when American border cities are among the safest in the country. It also denies the fact that Presidents Bush and Obama have already spent years and billions on border fencing, more Border Patrol officers and National Guard troops, spy planes, even seismic sensors.

As for spending billions more to stanch the “flood,” illegal crossings are at the lowest they have been in decades, because of the fence and the terrible economy.

We were hoping that Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, Rick Perry of Texas and Jon Huntsman of Utah would at least offer sensible solutions, having dealt with the reality of immigration in their years as governors. But reality is clearly not on the agenda.

Mr. Romney has slipped into and out of practically every immigration position possible. He endorsed President Bush’s call to create a path to citizenship, but when Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy offered a bill to do just that, he opposed it. As governor he blocked in-state tuition for undocumented students. He now opposes “amnesty,” rejects a “special deal” on legalization and supports building a fence, “technologically.”

Mr. Perry maintains that fencing off Texas’s 1,250-mile border is too expensive. Instead, he favors more troops and spy planes. Mr. Huntsman, who once endorsed comprehensive reform and driver’s licenses for the undocumented, called Mr. Perry’s skepticism about a fence “pretty much a treasonous comment.”

Mr. Perry was also attacked for signing a bill giving in-state tuition to the undocumented. “I’m proud that we are having those individuals be contributing members of our society rather than telling them, ‘You go be on the government dole,’ ” he explained. For that he was booed.

But even this assertion of an old American ideal — of immigrants as contributing members of society — was only a faint echo of Mr. Perry’s former moderation. In 2001, he told The Dallas Morning News that he was “intrigued” by and “open to” President Bush’s comprehensive reform approach. A legalization plan, he said then, was better than “illegal immigrants living in fear of the law and afraid to access basic services.” That’s the definition of a sensible, pro-American immigration policy. Today, it’s also Republican heresy.

    Borderline Ridiculous, NYT, 16.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/17/opinion/borderline-ridiculous.html

Immigration Advocates Split Over Arizona Boycott

September 14, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

PHOENIX — The boycott of Arizona is on. No, the boycott of Arizona is off. Deciding whether to visit this state, which may or may not be boycotted, is as disorienting as peering into the depths of the Grand Canyon.

After Arizona’s passage of controversial immigration legislation in April 2010, musicians canceled Arizona concerts, tourists canceled Arizona vacations and convention organizers bypassed Arizona in favor of less politically toxic states. But the very activists who put the boycott in place, hurting the state’s pocketbook in the process, are now divided over whether it ought to continue.

Some called for the boycott’s end last year, after a federal judge blocked the most contentious elements of the immigration law. Others have peeled off more recently, with the National Council of La Raza, a Latino advocacy group, announcing last week that it no longer backed the boycott. Still other activists have dug in their heels, insisting that Arizona ought to remain off limits for the foreseeable future.

“There’s been confusion surrounding every aspect of this issue from the start,” said Kristen Jarnagin, the spokeswoman for the Arizona Hotel and Lodging Association, whose members were battered by the boycott and want it officially and completely kaput. “We’re glad some say it’s over. To the others, we’d hope they’d be as quick to retract the boycott as they were to get in line at the start.”

Whether it is on or off, studies have pointed to significant drops in convention and hotel business in Arizona since the boycott was declared. Besides that, activists point with pride to the letter that Arizona business leaders, fearing more protests, wrote to state lawmakers this year urging that they back off from even tougher immigration measures they were considering.

But the mixed signals are creating confusion among those who are sympathetic to the cause.

The singer Steve Earle, who joined the boycott last year, scheduled a concert in Tucson in July, thinking the boycott had been lifted. After being criticized, he canceled but expressed frustration as he did so.

Mr. Earle said in a statement that he wanted “to do more research about the boycott and its effects because as someone who supports the immigrants rights movement, I am not convinced that it is useful to continue to stay away from progressive fans in the state.”

Other artists have decided to perform in Arizona, boycott or no boycott.

Los Lobos, which initially backed the boycott and canceled its Arizona shows last year, went ahead with a concert in May in Tucson. To show its opposition to the Arizona law, the band allowed immigrant rights groups to raffle off a signed guitar and to distribute literature to concertgoers in the lobby. Four groups joined in, but not Coalición de Derechos Humanos, an immigrant rights group in Tucson, which issued a statement saying the concert would “diffuse the effect that boycotts and event cancellations have.”

One of the early public officials to back away from the boycott was Representative Raúl M. Grijalva, a Democrat from Tucson, who found his constituents up in arms about the prospect of even more economic suffering.

“I am telling people to come back to Arizona,” Mr. Grijalva said last week. “My opinion is the new strategy ought to be to invite people to come but to urge them to help change the political climate.”

The Service Employees International Union, an influential boycott proponent, ended its support for economic sanctions against Arizona in December. But the Sound Strike, a Los Angeles group that urged entertainers to steer clear of the state after the passage of Senate Bill 1070, said last week that the boycott continued.

Juan Ramos, a pastor at Love International, a large bilingual church in central Phoenix, recently persuaded a national group of evangelicals to hold its convention in Arizona, arguing that the boycott, which he never supported, was hurting the immigrants it was supposed to help.

But Kat Rodriguez, program director for Coalición de Derechos Humanos, continues to recommend that tourists stay away, musicians cancel for-profit concerts and conventions look elsewhere for meeting space.

“Our interest is not boycotting for the sake of boycotting,” Ms. Rodriguez said. “We want the state not to continue with business as usual. People think S. B. 1070 was last year’s news, but immigrants in this state are still suffering.”

The law never fully went into effect. A federal judge blocked the provision that required police officers to check the immigration status of those they stop who are suspected of being in the country illegally. The State of Arizona has appealed the case to the United States Supreme Court. Gov. Jan Brewer, who gained both political traction and scorn by signing the law, has condemned the boycotters as misguided, saying on one occasion, “They’re hurting the people they pretend they want to help.”

As it is, some activists say the boycott is over, others say it is on, and many take an intermediate stance in which they call on visitors to make a difference if they come to the state.

“We’re looking for real actions and not just people coming here to play golf at some convention or go to the Grand Canyon for the views or Sedona to stand in front of the vortexes,” Ms. Rodriguez said.

Many of the municipalities and school districts that joined in the boycott last year have not changed their stances. “We’re just watching the situation,” said John Stiles, spokesman for Mayor R. T. Rybak of Minneapolis, who last year ordered department heads to steer clear of Arizona.

Unsure whether the boycott was still in effect, the National Hispanic Christian Leadership Conference, the largest organization of Latino evangelical churches in the country, reached out to Arizona pastors before deciding to hold its conference in Tucson this month. Those pastors were eager for moral support, said the Rev. Samuel Rodriguez, president of the group.

“What prompted us to hold our summit in Arizona is that we don’t want people to forget Arizona,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “We don’t want the immigration issue on the back burner. We want to remind people that this is a state that attempted to incorporate racial profiling into its law.”

Javier Gonzalez, the organizer of the Sound Strike, said that the group had been holding concerts in Arizona throughout the boycott but that they were events from which the bulk of the proceeds went to immigrant rights groups.

“We need to look at the next step,” Mr. Gonzalez acknowledged. “There is a difference of opinion that exists. Some artists want to never play in Arizona again. Others want to know when they can go back.”

Lady Gaga’s decision to forgo the boycott, even though she denounced the immigration law from the stage during her July 2010 concert in Phoenix, drew criticism from some activists. A concert planned this month in Phoenix by Manu Chao, a French singer of Spanish heritage, is drawing praise because it is free and in support of the National Day Laborer Organizing Network.

One reason the boycott has lost its effectiveness, some immigration advocates say, is that the legislation aimed at making life difficult for illegal immigrants has spread from Arizona nationwide.

“With Alabama, Georgia and South Carolina passing similar or more onerous legislation, the point of telling people not to visit Arizona is moot now,” Mr. Grijalva, the Tucson Democrat, said. “And I’m not sure it makes sense to have a long list of boycotted states.”

    Immigration Advocates Split Over Arizona Boycott, NYT, 14.9.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/15/us/immigration-advocates-are-split-over-arizona-boycott.html

U.S. Issues New Deportation Policy’s First Reprieves

August 22, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

The call came in the morning to the lawyer representing Manuel Guerra, an illegal immigrant from Mexico living in Florida who had been caught in a tortuous and seemingly failing five-year court fight against deportation.

With the news early Thursday that federal immigration authorities had canceled his deportation, Mr. Guerra became one of the first illegal immigrants in the country to see results from a policy the Obama administration unveiled in Washington that day. It could lead to the suspension in coming months of deportation proceedings against tens of thousands of immigrants.

Administration officials and immigrant advocates said Monday that the plan offered the first real possibility since President Obama took office — promising immigrants and Latinos he would overhaul the law to bring illegal immigrants into the system — for large numbers of those immigrants to be spared from detention and deportation.

For Mr. Guerra, who said he wants to remain in the United States to study to become a Roman Catholic priest, the news “was like something from above, from heaven. I don’t want to go back to Mexico,” he said, “and I’ve been fighting this for five years.”

A working group from the Homeland Security and Justice Departments met Friday to initiate a review of about 300,000 deportation cases currently before the immigration courts. Under the policy, immigration authorities will use powers of prosecutorial discretion in existing law to suspend the deportations of most immigrants who, although they have committed immigration violations (which generally are civil offenses), have not been convicted of crimes.

In particular, officials will look to halt deportations of longtime residents with clean police records who came here illegally when they were children, or are close family of military service members, or are parents or spouses of American citizens.

“This is a great first step,” said Hector E. Sanchez, a Hispanic labor leader who oversees immigration policy for the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a coalition of the country’s major Latino groups. “We really need to see action on a common-sense approach to immigration and not just promises.”

Mr. Obama had been facing increasingly vocal protests from disappointed Latino and immigrant groups after he made no progress in Congress on his immigration overhaul agenda, and enforcement authorities set a modern record for deportations, with nearly 800,000 foreigners removed in the past two years.

Homeland Security officials said Monday that their goal is to quickly identify noncriminals on swollen immigration court dockets and close those cases, clearing the way for speedier removals of gang members, drug traffickers or foreigners who repeatedly return after being deported. Wait times for a hearing in immigration courts can now be as long as 18 months.

A senior Homeland Security official said that deportations would be canceled case by case. While many immigrants in those cases will be eligible for work permits, he said, employment authorization will come only after a separate process.

The immigrants will remain in a sort of legal limbo, not vulnerable to deportation but with no positive immigration status, which can be conferred only by Congress.

But White House officials and Congressional Democrats said they expected the measures would lead to relief during the coming year for virtually all young illegal immigrants facing deportation who might have won legal status under a bill called the Dream Act. A proposal to benefit illegal immigrant high school graduates who came to the country before they were 16, it failed in the Senate last year.

Mr. Guerra, now 27 and living in Indiantown, Fla., is one of those immigrants. He said he came to this country to escape a violent gang in Mexico. His lawyer, Richard A. Hujber, said Mr. Guerra’s efforts to straighten out his legal status went wrong because they were originally mishandled by an accountant claiming falsely to be a lawyer.

In recent years, even though he was undocumented, Mr. Guerra has been a Florida leader of the illegal immigrant student movement, helping to organize a protest walk by four students to Washington and a mock university held by students wearing mortarboards on Capitol Hill.

“That was so big to me, all these students organizing a school so we could go without our papers,” Mr. Guerra said. If he can obtain a work permit, he and Mr. Hujber said, he could be legally eligible for the first time to apply for financial aid that would allow him to continue his religious studies.

The administration’s announcement also had an immediate impact on a case in Denver, where an immigration judge on Friday postponed the deportation of Sujey Pando, a lesbian from Mexico legally married in Iowa to an American from Colorado, Violeta Pando. Although federal law does not recognize same-sex marriages, administration officials said they would consider same-sex spouses as “family” in their review of deportation cases.

The judge, Mimi Tsankov, cited the flux in laws and policies affecting same-sex cases in delaying a decision on Sujey Pando’s deportation at least until January, said Lavi Soloway, a lawyer for the couple.

Some Latino Democrats who have been deeply critical of Mr. Obama on immigration issues praised the policy shift.

“This is the Barack Obama I have been waiting for, that Latino and immigrant voters helped put in office to fight for sensible immigration policies,” said Representative Luis V. Gutierrez of Illinois, a Latino leader on immigration issues who has been arrested twice in protests in front of the White House.

However, the announcement appeared to signal an end to efforts by the White House to court some of its Republican opponents, with administration officials acknowledging those efforts have failed and there is little chance for broad immigration legislation to pass before elections next year.

Republican leaders reacted to Mr. Obama’s new policy by stepping up their rejection of his approach. Representative Peter T. King of New York, chairman of the Homeland Security Committee in the House, said the president was making “a blatant attempt to grant amnesty to potentially millions of illegal aliens in this country,” which he called “totally unacceptable.”

    U.S. Issues New Deportation Policy’s First Reprieves, NYT, 22.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/23/us/23immig.html

Fewer Youths to Be Deported in New Policy

August 18, 2011
The New York Times
By ROBERT PEAR

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration announced Thursday that it would suspend deportation proceedings against many illegal immigrants who pose no threat to national security or public safety.

The new policy is expected to help thousands of illegal immigrants who came to the United States as young children, graduated from high school and want to go on to college or serve in the armed forces.

White House and immigration officials said they would exercise “prosecutorial discretion” to focus enforcement efforts on cases involving criminals and people who have flagrantly violated immigration laws.

Under the new policy, the secretary of homeland security, Janet Napolitano, can provide relief, on a case-by-case basis, to young people who are in the country illegally but pose no threat to national security or to the public safety.

The decision would, through administrative action, help many intended beneficiaries of legislation that has been stalled in Congress for a decade. The sponsor of the legislation, Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Senate Democrat, has argued that “these young people should not be punished for their parents’ mistakes.”

The action would also bolster President Obama’s reputation with Latino voters as he heads into the 2012 election. Just a week ago the leaders of major Hispanic organizations criticized his record, saying in a report that Mr. Obama and Congress had “overpromised and underdelivered” on immigration and other issues of concern to Latino voters, a major force in some swing states.

The chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, Representative Lamar Smith, Republican of Texas, denounced the new policy.

“The Obama administration has again made clear its plan to grant backdoor amnesty to illegal immigrants,” Mr. Smith said. “The administration should enforce immigration laws, not look for ways to ignore them. Officials should remember the oath of office they took to uphold the Constitution and the laws of the land.”

White House officials emphasized that they were not granting relief to a whole class of people, but would review cases one by one, using new standards meant to distinguish low- and high-priority cases.

“The president has said on numerous occasions that it makes no sense to expend our enforcement resources on low-priority cases, such as individuals” who were brought to this country as young children and know no other home, Ms. Napolitano said in a letter to Mr. Durbin.

She said that low-priority cases were “clogging immigration court dockets” and diverting enforcement resources away from individuals who pose a threat to public safety.

Mr. Durbin said he believed the new policy would stop the deportation of most people who would qualify for relief under his bill, known as the Dream Act (formally the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act).

Some experts have estimated that more than two million people might be eligible to apply for legal status under the Dream Act. Mr. Durbin’s office estimates that 100,000 to 200,000 could eventually earn citizenship, though the numbers are uncertain.

Under the new policy, the government will review 300,000 cases of people in deportation proceedings to identify those who might qualify for relief and those who should be expelled as soon as possible.

White House officials said the new policy could help illegal immigrants with family members in the United States. The White House is interpreting “family” to include partners of lesbian, gay and bisexual people.

Richard Socarides, a New York lawyer who was an adviser to President Bill Clinton on gay issues, said, “The new policy will end, at least for now, the deportations of gay people legally married to their same-sex American citizen partners, and it may extend to other people in same-sex partnerships.”

J. Kevin Appleby, director of migration policy at the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops, said the initiative would keep immigrant families together. “It is consistent with the teaching of the church that human rights should be respected, regardless of an immigrant’s legal status,” he said.

Cecilia Muñoz, a White House official who helped develop the new policy, said officials would suspend deportation proceedings in low-priority cases that, for example, involve “military veterans and the spouses of active-duty military personnel.”

Stephen W. Yale-Loehr, who teaches immigration law at Cornell, said the new policy could also benefit “illegal immigrants who were stopped for traffic violations and thrown into deportation proceedings, as well as people whose only violation of immigration law is that they stayed beyond the expiration of their visas or worked here illegally.” Ms. Napolitano said her agency and the Justice Department would do the case-by-case review of all people in deportation proceedings.

Those who qualify for relief can apply for permission to work in the United States and will probably receive it, officials said.

The new policy “will not provide categorical relief for any group” and “will not alleviate the need for passage of the Dream Act or for larger reforms to our immigration laws,” Ms. Napolitano said.

People in deportation proceedings stand to benefit most from the new policy. The new enforcement priorities also make it less likely that the government will begin such proceedings in the future against people who have no criminal records and pose no threat to national security.

White House officials said the new policy ratified guidance on “prosecutorial discretion” recently issued by John Morton, the director of immigration and customs enforcement at the Department of Homeland Security.

The Senate majority leader, Harry Reid, Democrat of Nevada, praised the new directive, saying it would allow federal agents to “focus on serious felons, gang members and individuals who are a national security threat, rather than college students and veterans who have risked their lives for our country.”

Roy H. Beck, the president of Numbers USA, a nonprofit group that wants to reduce legal and illegal immigration, said he could understand the decision to defer deportation in some cases. But he said the decision to grant work permits was distressing.

“This is a jobs issue,” Mr. Beck said. “The president is taking sides, putting illegal aliens ahead of unemployed Americans.”

Julia Preston contributed reporting from Hershey, Pa.

    Fewer Youths to Be Deported in New Policy, NYT, 18.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/19/us/19immig.html

Federal Policy Resulting in Wave of Deportations

Draws Protests

August 16, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

A program that is central to President Obama’s immigration enforcement strategy has drawn protests by Latino and immigrant organizations in six cities in the last two days, as those groups stepped up their confrontation with the administration over the fast pace of deportations.

In Los Angeles, about 200 immigrants and their supporters walked out of a stormy hearing Monday evening that was called by a task force advising the enforcement program, known as Secure Communities. Bearing signs that said “Stop Ripping Families Apart,” the protesters called for an end to the program, which they said had led to the deportation of victims who reported domestic violence to the police, and to parents of American citizen children.

On Tuesday in Chicago, several dozen protesters delivered thousands of petitions calling for an end to the program to the headquarters of Mr. Obama’s re-election campaign. Petitions were also delivered by small groups of protesters to Democratic Party offices in Miami, Atlanta, Houston and Charlotte, N.C.

About two dozen prominent immigrant advocacy organizations issued a report denouncing the program and calling on the administration to halt it.

Organizers said the protests were a response to an announcement on Aug. 5 by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency that runs Secure Communities, that the program would continue to expand to meet its declared goal of covering the whole country by 2013. Clarifying doubts about whether states and cities could choose whether to participate, John Morton, the agency’s director, said that agreements with state and local officials were not required for the agency to proceed.

President Obama has made no headway in a divided Congress toward an immigration overhaul that would give legal status to millions of illegal immigrants. At the same time, in each of the last two years immigration authorities have deported nearly 400,000 people.

Under Secure Communities, fingerprints of anyone booked into jail by the state and local police are sent to the F.B.I. for criminal checks — long a routine practice — and also to the Department of Homeland Security, which records immigration violations. Immigration agents decide whether to detain noncitizens signaled by fingerprint matches.

The ferment on Tuesday exposed vastly differing views of the program between immigrant advocates and Obama administration officials. In an interview, Mr. Morton said the program was working effectively to carry out his agency’s focus on deporting immigrants convicted of serious crimes.

“It’s the law, and we think it is very good policy, to focus our resources on people who are here unlawfully and also committing crimes,” Mr. Morton said.

He said agency figures showed that about 90 percent of those deported under Secure Communities since it was started in 2008 were either convicted criminals or foreigners who had failed to obey a court order to leave the country or who had returned to the United States illegally after deportation.

Immigration officials pointed to the arrest in January in Los Angeles of a Mexican man on charges of driving with a suspended license. After a Secure Communities match, the police learned that he had been convicted of drug trafficking and burglary and deported six times. Another Mexican arrested in Los Angeles was found to have been convicted in the killing of a child in 1997.

Mr. Morton said he had created the advisory task force, which went to work in June, to recommend fixes that would lower the numbers of deportations of illegal immigrants who did not have criminal convictions.

Also on Tuesday, the American Immigration Lawyers Association published a report that cast light on how Secure Communities and other enforcement programs have stirred tensions in immigrant communities. The association, which includes 11,000 immigration lawyers, polled its members to see how many were handling cases of immigrants facing deportation after being stopped by local police officers for minor offenses, like traffic violations.

Gregory Chen, director of advocacy for the lawyers’ association, said his office was deluged with responses.

“Department of Homeland Security practices have ushered in a sea change in who is being deported, and our attorneys have literally been flooded with people coming in to their offices who have been picked up by local police for small time stuff,” Mr. Chen said. The report, which presents a sample of 127 cases from 24 states, was the “the tip of the iceberg,” he said.

The lawyers’ report includes the recent case of an immigrant in New Mexico detained for deportation after the local police questioned him about burning leaves in the front yard. A woman in Minnesota was held by federal agents after the traffic police stopped her saying she failed to signal a right turn. An immigrant facing deportation from Florida was a passenger in a vehicle pulled over in a traffic stop; the vehicle was driven by his wife, a United States citizen.

In 87 cases, the report found, the illegal immigrants facing deportation had no criminal history, and 79 of them were close relatives of American citizens or legal permanent residents. Many had lived for more than a decade in the United States.

“Fundamentally, D.H.S. is saying one thing but doing another,” Mr. Chen said, arguing that the lawyers’ findings contradicted figures provided by immigration officials. He said the agency, by detaining large numbers of immigrants after minor offenses, was “distorting its own mission of focusing on public safety and national security risks.”

Eleanor Pelta, the president of the lawyers’ association, urged Mr. Morton to improve screening procedures so that arrests by local police did not lead automatically to federal deportation.

Cecilia Muñoz, the White House official who oversees immigration policy, said Mr. Obama strongly favored Secure Communities because he does not have the option of saying, “While I’m waiting for Congress to come forward, I am not going to bother to enforce the law.”

The program is “the best tool we have,” she said, “to enforce the law in the best possible way.”

Fear and frustration about Secure Communities spilled over during the hearing on Monday in Los Angeles, one of five organized by the task force. One speaker, Isaura Garcia, 20, said she had been reported to immigration authorities by the Los Angeles police after she called 911 when she was beaten by her boyfriend.

The program drew praise from a representative of a Los Angeles County supervisor, Michael D. Antonovich, a Republican. But an official from the office of Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, a Democrat, echoed immigrants’ criticisms.

Shouting erupted after one citizen, Julio Giron, yelled from the crowd to defend the program, which he said was needed because Mr. Obama had failed to secure the border. Soon after, most of the opponents, who significantly outnumbered the supporters, marched out, calling on the task force to resign.

 

Ian Lovett contributed reporting.

    Federal Policy Resulting in Wave of Deportations Draws Protests, G, 16.8.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/17/us/politics/17immig.html

It Gets Even Worse

July 3, 2011
The New York Times

If you thought the do-it-yourself anti-immigrant schemes couldn’t get any more repellent, you were wrong. New laws in Georgia, Alabama and South Carolina are following — and in some ways outdoing — Arizona’s attempt to engineer the mass expulsion of the undocumented, no matter the damage to the Constitution, public safety, local economies and immigrant families.

The laws vary in their details but share a common strategy: to make it impossible for people without papers to live without fear.

They give new powers to local police untrained in immigration law. They force businesses to purge work forces and schools to check students’ immigration status. And they greatly increase the danger of unreasonable searches, false arrests, racial profiling and other abuses, not just against immigrants, but anyone who may look like some officer’s idea of an illegal immigrant.

The laws empower local police officers to demand the documents of people they meet, and to detain those they suspect are here illegally. That means they can make warrantless arrests for assumed civil immigration violations, a stunning abuse of power.

The laws also make it illegal to give a ride to the undocumented, so a son could land in jail for driving his mother to the supermarket, or a church volunteer for ferrying families to a soup kitchen. They require businesses to check employees against the error-plagued federal E-Verify database, and to fire those who are flagged as unauthorized. Once the purge takes hold in agriculture, there will be no one left to pick onions, peaches and cotton. The immigrant labor shortage is already being felt in Georgia, where crops are rotting and the governor has called for using jobless ex-convicts in the fields.

Alabama’s law is the most extreme. It forces public school districts to determine the immigration status of students and their parents and report the data to the state. Alabama still can’t bar them from enrolling, since the Supreme Court declared in Plyler v. Doe that all children are entitled to a public education. The state’s law seems designed to challenge that ruling, as it turns school officials into de facto immigration agents and impels frightened parents to keep their children home.

It has long been clear that America is suffering for lack of a well-functioning immigration system that better protects workers and families, promotes lawfulness at the border and in the workplace, and gives hardworking people a path to legality.

Congress’s inaction has let the states run amok with their own destructive ideas. Supporters insist they are only trying to enforce the law. But trying to catch and deport 11 million people is lunacy. The damage to this country — its citizens and its laws — is enormous.

Civil rights organizations are suing or threatening to sue to block these noxious state laws. So far federal courts have enjoined parts of bad local laws in Arizona, Georgia, Utah and Indiana. President Obama’s Department of Justice has sued Arizona but not the other states. It needs to fight harder.

    It Gets Even Worse, 3.7.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/04/opinion/04mon1.html

In Border City Talk,

Obama Urges G.O.P. to Help Overhaul Immigration Law

May 10, 2011
The New York Times
By JACKIE CALMES

EL PASO — President Obama came to this border city on Tuesday to argue that he is doing his part to crack down on illegal immigration, and that Republicans must now join him in overhauling the nation’s immigration laws for the millions of workers already here illegally.

Mr. Obama’s speech at a park within sight of the border with Mexico — and a billowing 162-foot-by-93-foot Mexican flag — was heavy with political overtones for 2012 and beyond, given the growing ranks of Latino voters in a number of swing states. He sought to reassure those increasingly frustrated voters of his commitment to liberalizing immigration laws as a moral and economic imperative, and to blame “border security first” Republicans in Congress for his inability to deliver on that promise.

“We have strengthened border security beyond what many believed was possible,” Mr. Obama said, citing increases since the George W. Bush administration in the amount of fencing and aerial surveillance and the number of border agents, National Guard troops, intelligence analysts and deportations of illegal immigrants.

His first stop here was at an inspection facility on the Rio Grande, one of the busiest of the 327 official ports of entry to the United States for cargo, vehicles and even walkers entering from Ciudad Juárez, a sprawling city afflicted by Mexico’s drug wars.

“We have gone above and beyond what was requested by the very Republicans who said they supported broader reform as long as we got serious about enforcement,” he added. “All the stuff they asked for, we’ve done. But even though we’ve answered these concerns, I’ve got to say I suspect there are still going to be some who are trying to move the goal posts on us one more time” — to the point of seeking a moat and alligators, he joked. “That’s politics.”

Mr. Obama’s own politics were central to the trip, his first to the border since he was elected with 67 percent of the Latino vote, which makes up a significant and expanding portion of the electorate in battleground states like Arizona, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and North Carolina.

In Texas, where Republicans have dominated since the 1980s, Democrats likewise look to one day regain power through the state’s expanding Latino electorate — though not likely in 2012. Even so, broadcasts of Mr. Obama’s trip reached next door into New Mexico.

The visit, however, underscored a tension over Mr. Obama’s immigration record that colors his re-election prospects: his boasts of strengthening border security win him no credit among Republican lawmakers and only alienate many Latinos so long as he cannot deliver on his campaign promise to them — a path to citizenship for the estimated 11 million immigrants already here illegally, many of them for years.

“If they think that this is going to be the thing that mobilizes an increasingly disappointed Latino electorate, I think they’re wrong,” said Frank Sharry, executive director of America’s Voice, a group advocating for liberalized immigration. “They are going to have to make some big administrative action to make up for the fact that he promised something big.”

Mr. Obama did not push comprehensive immigration legislation in his term’s first two years, when Democrats controlled Congress, and it has virtually no chance of passage now that Republicans have a House majority. And he does not plan to introduce such legislation now, to the disappointment of some advocates.

But in his speech, Mr. Obama reiterated his goals: a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants that would require them to come forward, pay taxes and a penalty, and learn English; legal status for foreigners who graduate from colleges here and want to remain and start businesses; and the so-called Dream Act, providing citizenship to young people who were brought to the United States as children and receive an education or want to enter the military.

Back in Washington, Congressional Republicans dismissed his proposals.

“Providing a path to citizenship for illegal immigrants, as the president called for again today, without requiring illegal immigrants to return to their countries of origin and apply for legal status, is amnesty,” said Representative Elton Gallegly of California, the chairman of a House subcommittee on immigration. “Amnesty will not pass Congress, Mr. President.”

Without much chance of immigration changes becoming law, pro-immigration advocates are pushing Mr. Obama to take executive actions at least. Chief among them, they want the administration to quit deporting illegal immigrants and residents without criminal records. But Mr. Obama refuses to do that — as he acknowledged here.

His administration is not acting “haphazardly,” he told the crowd, but “as long as the current laws are on the books, it’s not just hardened felons who are subject to removal, but sometimes families who are just trying to earn a living, or bright, eager students, or decent people with the best of intentions.”

The president’s trip to Texas was his fifth event in four weeks to promote comprehensive immigration changes. He previously hosted three meetings at the White House with a wide range of groups, including Republicans, business leaders and Latino celebrities like the actress Eva Longoria of “Desperate Housewives.” And Mr. Obama gave the commencement address at Miami-Dade Community College in Florida, where his lines on immigration were among the most applauded.

Through the increased activities, including those involving cabinet members, the White House is seeking to show that Mr. Obama is not just checking a political box with an occasional speech or rally, but is actively pressing the issue — and making sure people know Republicans are standing in the way.

“For the president’s message to take hold, he must show that this is not a Hispanic issue, this is an American issue,” said Lillian Rodríguez-López, chairwoman of the National Hispanic Leadership Agenda, a coalition of the 30 leading Hispanic organizations in the United States.

“With a struggling economy and weakened labor force,” Ms. Rodríguez-López added, “we cannot afford to prohibit the millions currently living in the shadows from fully contributing to our economy.”

Mr. Obama similarly put his case in economic terms. “One way to strengthen the middle class in America is to reform the immigration system so that there is no longer a massive underground economy that exploits a cheap source of labor while depressing wages for everybody else,” he said.

As with many trips lately, Mr. Obama combined the immigration policy speech with Democratic fund-raising. From El Paso, he flew to Austin, the state’s liberal capital, for two such events, one a larger rally with lower-priced tickets and the other a smaller private dinner for high-dollar donors.

 

Julia Preston contributed reporting from Tucson,
and Michael D. Shear from Washington.

    In Border City Talk, Obama Urges G.O.P. to Help Overhaul Immigration Law, NYT, 10.5.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/us/politics/11obama.html

Arriving as Pregnant Tourists, Leaving With American Babies

March 28, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

SAN GABRIEL, Calif. — The building inspectors and police officers walked into the small row of connected town houses here knowing something was amiss. Neighbors had complained about noise and a lot of pregnant women coming and going. And when they went into a kitchen they saw a row of clear bassinets holding several infants, with a woman acting as a nurse hovering over them.

For months, officials say, the house was home to “maternity tourists,” in this case, women from China who had paid tens of thousands of dollars to deliver their babies in the United States, making the infants automatic American citizens. Officials shut down the home, sending the 10 mothers who had been living there with their babies to nearby motels.

“These were not women living in squalor — it was a well taken care of place and clean, but there were a lot of women and babies,” said Clayton Anderson, a city inspector who shut down the house on March 9. “I have never seen anything like this before. We really couldn’t determine the exact number of people living there.”

For the last year, the debate over birthright citizenship has raged across the country, with some political leaders calling for an end to the 14th Amendment, which gives automatic citizenship to any baby born in the United States. Much of the debate has focused on immigrants entering illegally from poor countries in Latin America. But in this case the women were not only relatively wealthy, but also here legally on tourist visas. Most of them, officials say, have already returned to China with their American babies.

Immigration experts say it is impossible to know precisely how widespread “maternity tourism” is. Businesses in China, Mexico and South Korea advertise packages that arrange for doctors, insurance and postpartum care. And the Marmara, a Turkish-owned hotel on the Upper East Side in New York City, has advertised monthlong “baby stays” that come with a stroller.

For the most part, though, the practice has involved individuals. The discovery of the large-scale facility here in the San Gabriel foothills raises questions about whether it was a rare phenomenon or an indication that maternity tourism is entering a new, more institutionalized phase with more hospital-like facilities operating quietly around the country.

The San Gabriel town houses are nestled in a small street lined with modest houses, small apartment buildings and palm trees. A construction crew was at work late last week, closing up walls that had been knocked down between units, in violation of the housing code.

Signs of a makeshift maternity house were evident everywhere. In one kitchen, stacks of pictures showing a mother holding her days-old baby sat next to several cans of formula. In another, boxes of prenatal vitamins were tucked into rice cookers. Several bedroom doors had numbers on them. Some rooms were rather luxurious — B9, for instance, had a large walk-in closet, a whirlpool and a small personal refrigerator.

The Center for Health Care Statistics estimates that there were 7,462 births to foreign residents in the United States in 2008, the most recent year for which statistics are available. That is a small fraction of the roughly 4.3 million total births that year.

Immigration experts say they can only guess why well-to-do Chinese women are so eager to get United States passports for their babies, but they suspect it is largely as a kind of insurance policy should they need to move. The children, once they turn 21, would also be able to petition for their parents to get United States citizenship.

Angela Maria Kelley, the vice president for immigration policy and advocacy at the Center for American Progress, a liberal-leaning research group, said the existence of businesses helping foreign women give birth in the United States had only just begun to enter the public consciousness.

“If this is something that was really widespread and happening all over, you would have expected it to really have revealed itself,” Ms. Kelley said. “I think it deserves a lot more study and a lot more attention. But to say that you want to change the Constitution because of this feels like killing a fly with an Uzi.”

The State Department, which grants tourist visas, is not permitted to deny visa applications simply because a woman is pregnant.

“These people aren’t doing anything in violation of our laws,” said Mark Krikorian, the executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates tougher immigration controls. “But if anything, it is worse than illegal immigrants delivering a baby here. Those kids are socialized as Americans. This phenomenon of coming to the U.S. and then leaving with people who have unlimited access to come back is just ridiculous.”

San Gabriel, about 20 miles east of Los Angeles, has grown rapidly in recent years and is now a hub of businesses catering to Asian immigrants — tea shops fill the strip malls and for-sale signs in Chinese and Vietnamese are planted in front of several homes.

Mr. Anderson said a kind of “semitransient” community had a strong presence in this suburb. It is not uncommon for a single residence to be home to as many as 40 people. But as in other cities, the boarders are usually men, often working to send money to their families back home.

City officials asked basic questions to the women they found in the maternity house: how did they get here and who paid for them to come? The answers: on a tourist visa, and our family paid. The house’s owner, Dwight Chang, was fined $800 for code violations. Mr. Chang did not return several phone calls, and one worker at the building said he was traveling and not available.

“We didn’t do an extensive interview of the women; that wasn’t their job nor should it be,” said Jennifer Davis, the director of community development for the city. The city did alert public health officials, she said, who found nothing wrong with the babies.

Ms. Davis said city officials had also alerted the immigration authorities. Virginia Kice, a spokeswoman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement said the agency had investigated a similar situation in another Southern California city last year, but it yielded no evidence of any federal violations. She declined to say whether federal officials were investigating the San Gabriel operation, citing agency policy.

Yolanda Alvarez, who walks her dog past the town houses twice each day, said neighbors had complained among themselves for nearly a year, noticing “many, many young women” going in and out of the house.

Several pictures of a nurse posing with new mothers were scattered on the counters Friday. A framed tile was collecting dust amid the construction. “Home,” it said, “is where your story begins.”

    Arriving as Pregnant Tourists, Leaving With American Babies, NYT, 28.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/29/us/29babies.html

Arizona, Bowing to Business, Softens Stand on Immigration

March 18, 2011
The New York Times
By RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.

Arizona established itself over the past year as the most aggressive state in cracking down on illegal immigrants, gaining so much momentum with its efforts that several other states vowed to follow suit. But now the harsh realities of economics appear to have intruded, and Arizona may be looking to shed the image of hard-line anti-immigration pioneer.

In an abrupt change of course, Arizona lawmakers rejected new anti-immigration measures on Thursday, in what was widely seen as capitulation to pressure from business executives and an admission that the state’s tough stance had resulted in a chilling of the normally robust tourism and convention industry.

The State Senate voted down five bills that among other things sought to require hospitals to inform law enforcement officials when treating patients suspected of being in the country illegally and to prod the Supreme Court to rule against automatic citizenship for American-born children of illegal immigrants.

The Senate move was a victory for the Arizona business lobby, which on many issues is more moderate than state lawmakers. And it was a rebuke for the State Senate president, Russell Pearce, a Republican and the driving force behind tough immigration measures, including the law passed last April requiring police to question the status of anyone they stop if they have a “reasonable suspicion” that the person might be an illegal immigrant.

Opponents of the five bills said that the state’s image had been hit hard, and that it did not make sense to pass new measures while the state had already put itself so far out in front of other states and the federal government on the issue — at a cost to tourism and other industries.

They said that previous immigration bills were still being reviewed by the courts, and that it was not smart to pass new legislation that plainly conflicted with the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.

“I don’t believe that anyone, including myself, foresaw the national and international reaction” to April’s bill, said Glenn Hamer, chief executive of the Arizona Chamber of Commerce and Industry, who said estimates of lost tourism business ranged from $15 million to $150 million. “Now we have that experience under our belts. We know these measures can cause economic damage; it’s just a matter of degree.”

A letter signed by 60 state business leaders this week blamed last year’s bill for boycotts, canceled contracts, declining sales and other economic setbacks.

“Arizona’s lawmakers and citizens are right to be concerned about illegal immigration,” the letter said. “But we must acknowledge that when Arizona goes it alone on this issue, unintended consequences inevitably occur.”

While Mr. Hamer said he doubted the bills could have been defeated on Thursday without broad-based business opposition, he cautioned that support for tighter restrictions on immigration remained strong in a number of quarters. But, he added, “Our hope is that these types of measures have crested and we could spend our time on efforts that could rebuild our economy.”

Indeed, state politicians and other officials interviewed after the bills’ defeat said it was too soon to tell whether the turnabout represented a long-term change, or merely a breather until the economy rebounds. Concerns about illegal immigration remain a significant issue, and many state leaders are angry with what they describe as the federal government’s unwillingness to take firm action.

But for now, “enough is enough,” said State Senator John McComish, a Republican who voted no on all five bills.

Gov. Jan Brewer, a Republican, did not take a position on the five bills that were voted down Thursday — her normal practice on legislation that has not reached her desk, a spokesman said on Friday.

An aide said Senator Pearce was unavailable for comment.

Crucial to changing the discussion was a clearly articulated and executed strategy by the state business lobby, which made concerns over negative economic effects a far more significant factor than in the debate last year.

State Senator Kyrsten Sinema, a Democrat, said business opposition — in contrast to what she called the tepid and delayed efforts of its leaders last year — gave Republicans the political protection they needed to vote no.

“They have been working since January to provide people cover against these bills,” Senator Sinema said. Twenty-one of 30 state senators are Republicans, and none of the bills would have been defeated without many of them voting in opposition.

The effect on the state’s convention and tourism industry after the April vote was immediate. Convention bookings plunged in Phoenix, one of the top destinations in the United States, with large organizations citing the immigration bill when canceling their reservations.

“It was definitely a drastic decline,” said Kristen Jarnagin, vice president of communications for the Arizona Hotel and Lodging Association. She and other business officials pointed to data on bookings showing Phoenix’s ranking, on some measures, had dropped from the top four destinations nationwide to 23rd.

So far, Arizona-style anti-immigration bills have not lived up to their advance billing in other states, which despite strengthened Republican legislative majorities have failed to pass any identical bills. Similar proposals are still advancing in some states, but they, too, have encountered strong business opposition.

“Our legislature and our state are suffering from immigration fatigue,” Senator McComish said. “We’ve been at the forefront of this issue, and I think it is time for a timeout.”

    Arizona, Bowing to Business, Softens Stand on Immigration, NYT, 18.3.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/19/us/19immigration.html

Long Arms Reach for the Rim

February 19, 2011
The New York Times
By JOSH KRON

JUBA, Sudan — His first two attempts sprung off the back of the rim, the ball careening through the air, the crowd sighing loudly. Mangistu Deng, 16, dribbled back to halfcourt, pounding the ball for his final dunk of the night.

Deng called over a friend, who stood just in front of the foul line, stiff as possible, back to him. Then Deng took off like a grasshopper into the night and soared over his friend. The fans rose to their feet. Cellphone cameras clicked.

Mangistu Deng — slam-dunk champion, Juba City, 2011.

After decades of civil war, peace has finally settled in southern Sudan. The south will soon declare independence from the north, and with this newfound freedom, the southern Sudanese are beginning to rediscover themselves, reacquaint themselves with all that has been stunted or twisted or buried under the weight of war.

Crazy for basketball is part of who they are, or were. Manute Bol, their pioneer, became an N.B.A. star a quarter-century ago. Since then, many talented players, some driven out of southern Sudan by the years of violence, have had solid collegiate careers in the United States.

With the legends came the clichés about Africans and basketball, the laughs and the bad Kevin Bacon movie.

Now, though, at the dawn of peace, there appears to be emerging an exuberant re-embrace of the sport, and with it a second wave of talent to be recruited, prospects perhaps no longer seen chiefly as curiosities.

They are versatile, freakishly athletic, and with a confidence for the game. Their hero is not Bol, who died last June; it is Luol Deng, a star with the Chicago Bulls.

The N.B.A. has noticed.

“We are very much in tune with what’s going on in southern Sudan,” said Amadou Fall, the vice president for development with N.B.A. Africa, the league’s outreach arm. “Southern Sudan does have an abundance of tall, well-talented players. We have to pay attention.”

Two years ago, Mangistu Deng was any other third-world teenager, stuck in the usual miserable circumstances: unrivaled poverty, violence, instability.

Now he has found a way out.

Each day, Deng slips away from the daily chaos of the southern capital, Juba, to the sanctuary he has cultivated: Nimra Tilata, the hallowed basketball court near the Nile River. Now he is one of southern Sudan’s top basketball prospects and the face of a new sporting generation. He has not always had a lot in this life, but he has a place to play.

“I was born in war,” he said. “So, I thought, when I grow up, I will be a soldier. But then basketball just came.

“God gave me this talent. It was not my choice. I really appreciate it.”

At Nimra Tilata, he meets his friends Makur Puou and Hakim Nyang. Coach Bill Duany brings the ball, and in the midday heat, the youngsters scrimmage, and hustle and sweat. The backdrop of the independence rallies and campaign posters, the dust bowls and the meandering children fade away.

The rekindled passion for the game has been fueled in part by the return of the Sudanese basketball diaspora. Duany, who played Division I college basketball in the United States five years ago, is one who came back.

“There are guys here with N.B.A.-caliber talent,” said Duany, who serves as a coach to many of the local boys.

The obvious attributes endure. The Dinka and Nuer tribes of southern Sudan are considered among the tallest people in the world.

“South Sudanese are tall, they run well for guys of their size, and they’re very skillful,” Duany said. “They’ve passed that requirement already.”

Now Duany is here to help them get to the next level. In southern Sudan, one of the poorest places in the world, the chance to play basketball may be the chance of a lifetime.

“I want to show my country I can do something,” Deng said.

Bol, a 7-foot-6 Dinka cattle herder, was the first to show what a Sudanese player could do on the world stage. He was the first African-born player to be drafted into the N.B.A., and for years, he was, if an incomplete player, a shot-blocking sensation.

Bol, though, was not just a defender on the court. He used his N.B.A. salary to help bankroll the southern Sudanese liberation movement, which fought an insurgency against the north during the civil war.

If all goes according to plan, Deng, who is 6-7; Puou, who is 16 and 6-8; and Nyang, who is 15 and 7-1, will be playing this fall at Mooseheart, a prep school in Illinois.

In the United States, they will join a growing list of Duany’s recruits, including the 7-1 Chier Ajou, who has committed to New Mexico, and Peter Jurkin, a highly rated center, who is headed to Indiana.

But basketball’s long-term future here hangs on the quality and lasting nature of independence. Political separation between north and south is not yet complete, and Duany said it was difficult obtaining passports for southern players to travel and play outside the country.

Although southern Sudan is unlikely to field a national basketball team by the 2012 Olympics, it hopes to compete in 2016.

For at least one night last month, the future seemed to have arrived at Nimra Tilata court. The slam-dunk contest was a carousel of spins, jabs and hang time. By the end, only one person was still standing — or floating.

The crowd stood silent as Deng rose higher, tongue out in a Jordanesque swagger, before exploding in applause as he ripped the ball through the rim.

“I am waiting,” he said, days after finding out he had been accepted to Mooseheart. “Any time. Any minute. Any hour. I am ready.”

    Long Arms Reach for the Rim, 19.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/20/sports/basketball/20sudan.html

Egyptians in America Ponder a Return

February 18, 2011
The New York Times
By JENNIFER MEDINA

LOS ANGELES — This week, Khaled Abou El Fadl has greeted each fellow Egyptian he sees with one word: “mabrook,” or congratulations.

But quickly, their joy over the toppling of the presidency of Hosni Mubarak gives way to a rapid string of questions. Can they raise money here in the United States to help clean up Tahrir Square? Can they help revive the economy by urging friends to invest in Egyptian companies? Can they successfully lobby for the right to vote even though they have lived abroad for years?

And, after weeks of watching events thousands of miles away unfold on television, another thought keeps nagging at them: Is it time to go home?

That is a profound conundrum for Egyptian immigrants, many of whom left the country to escape an autocratic government and have built a prosperous life for themselves in the United States. They are eager to help rebuild their home country and wonder if they might put their talents to use there, bringing their own experience with democracy to help reshape society. And yet, many are loath to give up the very freedoms they hope to see blossom in Egypt.

Mr. Abou El Fadl, a law professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and a critic of Mr. Mubarak, has spent hours on the phone in the last several days discussing ways to rewrite the Egyptian Constitution, including speaking with some of the jurists selected to serve on the panel created by the military there.

“My heart, my soul and my intellect is just completely tied up into that, the democratic constitution we need in the Arab world,” he said. “One of the first calls I got was from a colleague there asking me to help. Would I quit my job? I don’t know that yet. I don’t know how to best contribute.”

The conversation about whether to stay or go is repeating itself at countless dinner tables, in urgent telephone calls and in posts on Facebook, particularly among highly educated and younger Egyptians who may have the most to lose by leaving the United States, but also the most to gain.

“I don’t think any of us are not seriously considering moving there,” said Nadine Wahab, 34, a public relations executive in Washington and a leader of the Egyptian Association for Change, which helped organize protests throughout the United States during the last several weeks. “Everyone is asking what can I do? What would I be going back to? Where am I going to make the most impact?”

There are roughly 300,000 Egyptians living in the United States, according to the most recent census data, with the largest concentrations in Southern California and New York, and a smaller but close-knit cluster around the District of Columbia.

Hana Elhattab left Egypt five years ago to start college at the University of Maryland. Her parents had moved there three years earlier and Ms. Elhattab figured she was saying goodbye to Egypt for good. “I wasn’t going to move back ever,” she recalled telling people. “But the moment Mubarak was going to be gone, I knew I was going back.”

Since graduating last year, Ms. Elhattab has worked as a policy analyst for a Middle East research organization in Washington. When the protests began last month in Cairo, Ms. Elhattab immediately began translating Twitter posts from Arabic to share with a wider English-speaking audience.

“Everything I have done since I got here has been about creating a career here,” she said. “Now I have to start that over and figure out what is going to be relevant and helpful there. I need to do something that is a real job. I don’t want to go and just be another liability there.”

First, Ms. Elhattab plans to look for a job in the United States in international development and to go to graduate school, which means it could be two or three years before she returns to Egypt. “If I could go tomorrow, I would,” she said.

The same kind of anxious impatience is tugging at Rania Behiri, 31, who left Egypt with her family when she a toddler. She traveled back often though, and last year married Rami Serry, an Egyptian racecar driver she met over the Internet.

Ms. Behiri was reluctant to move her two sons, 9 and 12, from a previous relationship, to Egypt from West Covina, Calif., and Mr. Serry refused to leave Cairo, so the two resigned themselves to a long-distance marriage.

But last week Ms. Behiri quickly changed her mind and is preparing to move with her sons next month. When she arrives in Egypt, she plans to work for a professional development company her father-in-law runs. A group of Egyptian-born businessmen are planning a fund-raiser in the next several weeks to help underwrite her efforts.

“People don’t have trust, they don’t have faith and they have been just so oppressed and messed up by the laws that they need to learn how to think for themselves,” Ms. Behiri said. “It’s going to be invaluable. This whole thing showed that people truly can make a difference — so now I feel like, of course, I want to be a part of it.”

Ms. Behiri is one of countless Egyptian immigrants speaking in such grand terms these days, driven by what they saw happen to their birthplace. Many in the Egyptian diaspora here say they hope to educate people back home before elections and will press for the right to vote as well.

After years of oppression, Ms. Berhiri said, many Egyptians might be easily deceived by unscrupulous or power-hungry politicians. Friends her age, for example, could be so focused on improving Egypt’s economy that they are too willing to overlook religious demands by public officials.

It is not unheard of for exiles to return to their birth country to help rebuild after a revolution. Less than a decade ago, millions of Afghan refugees were repatriated, and many found a place in government, including President Hamid Karzai.

Hundreds of Egyptians come to the United States on student visas, planning to earn graduate degrees and look for a job in academia. For years, many of them scrambled to find jobs anywhere in the world outside Egypt. They worried that working as a professor there would not provide enough money to support a family. And more worrisome, they said, was the prospect of limited academic freedom.

Nora Muharram and her husband, Said Fares, assumed that they, too, would try to find a way to remain in the United States once he finished his doctorate in Islamic studies at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the spring.

“We never looked forward to going back,” Ms. Muharram said “The environment would not allow him to publish the kinds of papers he wanted to do or give my children the kind of education I wanted for them. Now, all of that has changed and we are very, very optimistic.”

Ms. Muharram said she was confident that with her background as an electrical engineer, she would be able to find a job.

“People are going to want a better life, to change things, to do something,” she said, her voice rising in excitement. “The picture is still not clear, but at least now I am hearing the hope from everyone.”


Ian Lovett contributed reporting.

    Egyptians in America Ponder a Return, NYT, 18.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/19/us/19return.html

American Immigration Agent Killed by Gunmen in Mexico

February 15, 2011
The New York Times
By DAMIEN CAVE

MEXICO CITY — Gunmen on a highway in northern Mexico killed an agent with United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday and wounded another, in an attack that signaled the escalating risk for American officials fighting Mexican crime gangs that move drugs and migrants into the United States.

The United States homeland security secretary, Janet Napolitano, said in a statement that the agents were assigned to the customs agency’s attaché office at the American Embassy in Mexico City, and that they had been shot in the line of duty while driving between the city and Monterrey.

The agent who was killed was identified as Jaime J. Zapata. He joined the agency in 2006 and served in Laredo, Tex., before a recent assignment to Mexico City. The name of the other agent was not released, but a statement from the immigration and customs agency said he was in stable condition.

It was the first time that an employee of the immigration and customs agency had been wounded or killed in the line of duty in Mexico, American officials said.

Typically American immigration agents are involved in major investigations of trafficking, in conjunction with Mexican law enforcement. And on Tuesday, the American agents were clearly driving into dangerous territory. The police in San Luis Potosí State said the attack occurred on a main highway about midway between Mexico City, the capital, and Monterrey, the same highway where, a month ago, a group of armed men clashed with the federal police in a running battle that left five presumed criminals dead.

The American agents’ destination, Monterrey, a large, wealthy city two hours from McAllen, Tex., has become an epicenter of drug gang battles over the past year as the Gulf Cartel and an offshoot, the Zetas, have fought for control of smuggling routes.

American and Mexican authorities have warned that roads throughout the area are rife with false checkpoints run by drug cartel gunmen, and recent victims have not been limited to rivals. This week, a senior police intelligence official was found dead in his burning armored car in Monterrey.

On Jan. 26, two American missionaries — Sam and Nancy Davis — were ambushed on a highway between Reynosa and Monterrey. Ms. Davis was killed.

Mexican government officials have said they are making progress in the area, citing recent arrests. But experts contend that the wave of violence has shown no sign of diminishing.

While attacks on American law enforcement officials have been rare in Mexico, threats from the leaders of drug gangs have sometimes escalated. The killing of an agent from the Drug Enforcement Administration in Mexico in 1985 led to strained relations between officers on both sides of the border, and between the Mexican and American governments.


Randal C. Archibold contributed reporting from Mexico City, and Julia Preston from New York.

    American Immigration Agent Killed by Gunmen in Mexico, NYT, 15.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/16/world/americas/16mexico.html

After a False Dawn, Anxiety for Illegal Immigrant Students

February 8, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

MILWAUKEE — It was exhilarating for Maricela Aguilar to stand on the steps of the federal courthouse here one day last summer and reveal for the first time in public that she is an illegal immigrant.

“It’s all about losing that shame of who you are,” Ms. Aguilar, a college student who was born in Mexico but has lived in the United States without legal documents since she was 3 years old, said of her “coming out” at a rally in June.

Those were heady times for thousands of immigrant students who declared their illegal status during a nationwide campaign for a bill in Congress that would have put them on a path to legal residence. In December that bill, known as the Dream Act, passed the House, then failed in the Senate.

President Obama insisted in his State of the Union address and in interviews that he wanted to try again on the bill this year. But with Republicans who vehemently oppose the legislation holding crucial committee positions in the new House, even optimists like Ms. Aguilar believe its chances are poor to none in the next two years.

That leaves students like her who might have benefited from the bill — an estimated 1.2 million nationwide — in a legal twilight.

The president says he supports their cause, and immigration officials say illegal immigrant students with no criminal record are not among their priorities for deportation. But federal immigration authorities removed a record number of immigrants from the country last year, nearly 393,000, while the local police are rapidly expanding their role in immigration enforcement. Students often get caught.

Illegal immigrants also face new restrictions many states are imposing on their access to public education, driver’s licenses and jobs. And for those like Ms. Aguilar who came out last year to proclaim their illegal status, there is no going back to the shadows.

Republicans who will lead their party in the House on immigration issues say illegal immigrant students should not be spared from deportation. Representative Lamar Smith of Texas, chairman of the Judiciary Committee, led the opposition to the Dream Act, calling it “an American nightmare” that would allow illegal immigrants to displace American students from public colleges.

Mr. Smith and other Republicans on the Judiciary Committee have pledged to block any legislation giving legal status to illegal immigrants, which they reject as amnesty for lawbreakers. Still, as Politico first reported on Monday, Senators Charles E. Schumer of New York, a Democrat, and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a Republican, have begun preliminary talks to see whether there is enough support in Congress to try to pass a comprehensive immigration overhaul in coming months.

In the weeks since the Senate vote, many young illegal immigrants are grappling with the letdown after a campaign that mobilized thousands of them for sit-in protests and text message blitzes of Congressional lawmakers.

“Many have become extremely frustrated, sad, confused and without a lot of answers as to how to move forward,” said Roberto G. Gonzales, a sociologist at the University of Washington who has surveyed young illegal immigrants. “They had a lot of hope that their activities were going to change the minds of the country. Having the door slammed in their face hit many of them really hard.”

A moment of truth, Mr. Gonzales said, comes when the students graduate from college. Many excel academically, but without work authorization, they cannot be legally employed. Some immigrants with bachelor’s degrees end up busing restaurant dishes and cleaning offices, falling back on the jobs of their less educated parents, who often struggled to put them through college.

Hostility toward illegal immigrants has grown in many states. Lawmakers in Georgia and Virginia are considering measures to ban illegal immigrants from all public colleges. Bills to deny state resident tuition rates to illegal immigrants are under consideration here in Wisconsin, as well as in Arkansas, Kansas, Nebraska and Indiana. Only a few states, like Colorado and Maryland, are going the opposite direction, debating measures to allow illegal immigrants to pay the lower in-state tuition rates.

In the absence of a student bill in Congress, Obama administration officials are doing little to assist illegal immigrants who might be eligible for legal status if it passed. Department of Homeland Security officials said they would continue to reject any broad moratorium on deportations for those students.

Immigration agents have been instructed to focus on arresting immigrants who are convicted criminals, implicitly steering away from students without criminal records. When students do get caught, officials are using executive powers to postpone or cancel their deportations, they said.

Brian P. Hale, the senior spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said the agency “uses discretion on a case by case basis, as appropriate.”

But senior administration officials said they did not want to make wider use of those powers for fear of deepening the conflict with Mr. Smith and other Republicans, who might try to limit the authority granted by immigration law and further stiffen their opposition to measures like the Dream Act. The officials spoke anonymously, saying they could discuss policy more freely that way.

The strategizing in Washington is doing little for Ms. Aguilar, 19, a junior at Marquette University here.

“If your name is out there immediately attached with ‘undocumented,’ then there is always this fear of being deported,” she said.

But Ms. Aguilar said she was not as dispirited as many other students like her because she still felt the elation that came after she revealed her illegal status, then traveled to Washington to watch the December vote from the Senate gallery.

“I think losing the shame overshadows the fear,” she said. “I’d much rather clarify to the public that being undocumented is just a circumstance I find myself in. I’d much rather have that out in the public than just living in fear.”

Immigrant activists say that coming out may have given some protection to student leaders like Ms. Aguilar, since administration officials would prefer to avoid the furor that would follow if one of them was detained. Ms. Aguilar also admits she has not yet had to face some of the hardest consequences of her status. An honors student in her Milwaukee high school, she was accepted to Marquette, a private Jesuit university, on a full tuition scholarship.

After the Senate vote, she said, she is working with an immigrant organization here to build new support for the student bill.

“It failed and we were all like super bummed out,” she said. “So we came out of there crying, but defiant. We were like, one day we’re going to pass this, don’t even worry about it.”

That pluck is not shared by José Varible, 19, another illegal immigrant from Mexico, who was brought to the United States at age 9 by his parents. A student in business management at Gateway Technical College, a community college in Kenosha, Wis., Mr. Varible also held a formal coming out ceremony last summer.

Since he is not eligible for any financial aid, Mr. Varible struggles to pay his tuition. He cannot drive, since Wisconsin does not issue licenses without proof of legal United States residence. With a knack for technology hardware, he taught himself to repair computers. But without a Social Security number, he can take only odd jobs doing that work.

Combined with his new exposure as an illegal immigrant, he said, those limitations sometimes sink him into depression. He has even considered moving to Australia.

“You know, the thing is, I just don’t feel welcome here,” he said. “You cannot live as an undocumented immigrant.”

    After a False Dawn, Anxiety for Illegal Immigrant Students, NYT, 8.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/09/us/09immigration.html

11.2 Million Illegal Immigrants in U.S. in 2010, Report Says; No Change From ’09

February 1, 2011
The New York Times
By JULIA PRESTON

About 11.2 million illegal immigrants were living in the United States in 2010, a number essentially unchanged from the previous year, according to a report published Tuesday by the Pew Hispanic Center, a nonpartisan research organization in Washington.

Despite continuing high unemployment among American workers, record deportations by the Obama administration and expanding efforts by states to crack down, the number of unauthorized immigrants in the work force — about eight million — was also unchanged, the Pew report found. Those workers were about 5 percent of the American work force.

The population of illegal immigrants leveled off after peaking in 2007 at 12 million, then dropping sharply over two years to 11.1 million in 2009, according to the report, which is based on census data. The declines occurred primarily because fewer people from Mexico and Central America came illegally to the United States, Pew concluded.

The report found no evidence of an exodus of illegal immigrants from the country. In particular there is no sign that Mexicans, who are the largest group — 58 percent — of illegal immigrants, are leaving in larger numbers, the report finds.

The Pew report suggests that the high numbers of unauthorized immigrants are confounding enforcement efforts by the Obama administration and also a recent spate of measures by state legislatures to crack down locally on illegal immigration. Federal immigration authorities deported about 400,000 immigrants in each of the last two years, the highest numbers in the country’s history, according to Department of Homeland Security officials.

“We just don’t see indications that enforcement is pushing people to leave the U.S.,” said Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer and co-author, with D’Vera Cohn, of the Pew report.

The report’s findings appeared to bring bad news for groups advocating for a strategy called attrition through enforcement, which inspired many of the tougher state measures, including a law Arizona enacted last year that caused a furor. According to supporters, those laws are intended to make life so difficult for illegal immigrants that they will opt to go home. Although much of Arizona’s law was held up by federal courts, other states, including Georgia, Oklahoma and South Carolina, have also adopted tough laws in recent years.

But some advocates for that approach said the Obama administration’s decision to end high-profile raids in workplaces might have contributed to illegal immigrants’ remaining here.

“It could be that the shift away from work-site enforcement is making it more attractive for illegal immigrants to stay here, since they do not feel as threatened at work,” said Jessica Vaughan, director of policy studies at the Center for Immigration Studies, which seeks reduced immigration to the United States.

The Pew report found that about 350,000 babies were born in 2009 to families with at least one illegal immigrant parent, a number also unchanged from the previous year, representing about 8 percent of all newborns.

Conservative lawmakers in Congress and state legislatures have announced initiatives to cancel automatic United States citizenship for children born here of illegal immigrant parents. They argue that birthright citizenship, which is described in the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, encourages illegal immigrants to sneak in to have babies here in order to gain American citizenship for them.

The Pew report found that about two-thirds of the illegal immigrant parents of the newborns had been living in the United States for at least five years.

    11.2 Million Illegal Immigrants in U.S. in 2010, Report Says; No Change From ’09, NYT, 1.2.2011, http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/02/us/02immig.html

Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle

January 4, 2011
The New York Times
By MARC LACEY

NOGALES, Ariz. — Of the 50 or so women bused to this border town on a recent morning to be deported back to Mexico, Inez Vasquez stood out. Eight months pregnant, she had tried to trudge north in her fragile state, even carrying scissors with her in case she gave birth in the desert and had to cut the umbilical cord.

“All I want is a better life,” she said after the Border Patrol found her hiding in bushes on the Arizona side of the border with her husband, her young son and her very pronounced abdomen.

The next big immigration battle centers on illegal immigrants’ offspring, who are granted automatic citizenship like all other babies born on American soil. Arguing for an end to the policy, which is rooted in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution, immigration hard-liners describe a wave of migrants like Ms. Vasquez stepping across the border in the advanced stages of pregnancy to have what are dismissively called “anchor babies.”

The reality at this stretch of the border is more complex, with hospitals reporting some immigrants arriving to give birth in the United States but many of them frequent border crossers with valid visas who have crossed the border legally to take advantage of better medical care. Some are even attracted by an electronic billboard on the Mexican side that advertises the services of an American doctor and says bluntly, “Do you want to have your baby in the U.S.?”

Women like Ms. Vasquez, who was preparing for a desert delivery, are rare.

Still, Arizona — whose tough law granting the police the power to detain illegal immigrants is tied up in the courts — may again take the lead in what is essentially an effort to redefine what it means to be an American. This time, though, Arizona lawmakers intend to join with legislators from other states to force the issue before the Supreme Court.

This coalition of lawmakers will unveil its exact plans on Wednesday in Washington, but people involved in drafting the legislation say they have decided against the painstaking process of amending the Constitution. Since the federal government decides who is to be deemed a citizen, the lawmakers are considering instead a move to create two kinds of birth certificates in their states, one for the children of citizens and another for the children of illegal immigrants.

The theory is that this could spark a flurry of lawsuits that might resolve the legal conflict in their favor.

“This is not a far-out, extremist position,” said John Kavanagh, one of the Arizona legislators who is leading an effort that has been called just that. “Only a handful of countries in the world grant citizenship based on the GPS location of the birth.”

Most scholars of the Constitution consider the states’ effort to restrict birth certificates patently unconstitutional. “This is political theater, not a serious effort to create a legal test,” said Gabriel J. Chin, a law professor at the University of Arizona whose grandfather immigrated to the United States from China at a time when ethnic Chinese were excluded from the country. “It strikes me as unwise, un-American and unconstitutional.”

The 14th Amendment, adopted in 1868, was a repudiation of the Supreme Court’s 1857 ruling, in Dred Scott v. Sandford, that people of African descent could never be American citizens. The amendment said citizenship applied to “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof.”

In 1898, the Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, interpreted the citizenship provision as applying to a child born in the United States to a Chinese immigrant couple.

Still, some conservatives contend that the issue is unsettled. Kris Kobach, the incoming secretary of state in Kansas and a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City who has helped draft many of the tough immigration regulations across the country, argued that the approach the states were planning would hold up to scrutiny.

“I can’t really say much more without showing my hand,” Mr. Kobach said in an e-mail. “But, yes, I am confident that the law will stand up in court.”

The legal theories are lost on Laura Gomez, 24, who crossed into Arizona from Mexico five years ago while expecting and is now pregnant with her second child. But like many other pregnant women in Arizona who are without papers, she has been following the issue with anxiety.

“It doesn’t seem fair to just change the rules like that,” Ms. Gomez said.

Despite being called “anchor babies,” the children of illegal immigrants born in the United States cannot actually prevent deportation of their parents. It is not until they reach the age of 21 that the children are able to file paperwork to sponsor their parents for legal immigration status. The parents remain vulnerable until that point.

Maria Ledezma knows as much. Just off a bus that deported her from Phoenix to the Mexico border town of Nogales, she was sobbing as she explained the series of events that led her to be separated from her three daughters, ages 4, 7 and 9, all American citizens.

“I never imagined being here,” said Ms. Ledezma, 25, who was brought to Phoenix from Mexico as a toddler. “I’ll bet right now that my girls are asking, ‘Where’s Mom?’ ”

Blended families like hers are a reality across the United States. A studyreleased in August by the Pew Hispanic Center found that about 340,000 children were born to illegal immigrants in the United States in 2008 and became instant citizens.

In April, Representative Duncan Hunter, Republican of California, one of those pushing for Congressional action on the issue, stirred controversy when he suggested that children born in the United States to illegal immigrants should be deported with their parents until the birthright citizenship policy was changed.

“And we’re not being mean,” Mr. Hunter told a Tea Party rally in Southern California. “We’re just saying it takes more than walking across the border to become an American citizen. It’s what’s in our souls.”

Immigrant advocates say intolerance is driving the measure. “They call themselves patriots, but they pick and choose which parts of the Constitution they support,” said Lydia Guzman, a Latino activist in Phoenix. “They’re fear-mongerers. They’re clowns.”

Like many states, Arizona is suffering a severe budget crisis, prompting even some lawmakers who have supported immigration restrictions in the past to question whether it is the right time for another divisive immigration bill. They say the state’s fiscal issues need to be resolved before Arizona jumps back into a controversial immigration debate.

“I was born and raised in New York,” responded Mr. Kavanagh, who is chairman of the Appropriations Committee of the Arizona House. “I can ride a subway, drink coffee, read the newspaper and make sure my pockets are not picked all at the same time.”

Scholars who have studied migration say it is the desire for better-paying jobs, not a passport for their children, that is the main motivator for people to leave their homes for the United States.

Even Ms. Vasquez, who was preparing for a desert delivery, agrees with that. While she preferred to have her child be born in the United States, she said, it was the prospect of a better economic future, with or without papers, that had prompted her and her family to cross when they did. “I’ll try again — but once the baby’s born,” she said.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: January 4, 2011

An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated the year that the Supreme Court, in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, applied the citizenship provision to a child born

in the United States to Chinese immigrants; it was 1898.

    Birthright Citizenship Looms as Next Immigration Battle, NYT, 4.1.2011,
    http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/05/us/politics/05babies.html