History > 2015 > USA > Immigration (II)

Veronica Ramirez

waited to apply for a New York City identification card in January.

Photograph:

Mark Lennihan/Associated Press

 The Opinion Pages | Editorial

The Scrambled States of Immigration

NYT

APRIL 1, 2015

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/
opinion/the-scrambled-states-of-immigration.html

A Chill Grips a Michigan Haven

for Syrian Families

 

NOV. 23, 2015

The New York Times

By JULIE BOSMAN

BLOOMFIELD HILLS, Mich. — In late 2011, as killings, kidnappings and sectarian strife crept across the battle-scarred city of Homs, Syria, the family of four made a sorrowful decision: to flee.

Radwan Mughrbel; his wife, Sanaa Hammadeh; and their two young sons packed their bags with only a single change of clothes per person. They took a bus to Damascus and hired a taxi to spirit them across the border into Jordan. For years, they patched together a meager life, barely making enough money to eat and desperately seeking refugee status.

When the United Nations refugee agency asked where they wanted to go, the answer was obvious.

“America,” said Mr. Mughrbel, a short, wiry Muslim man of 52, his face lighting up in a smile as he sat in his bare-walled living room in this Detroit suburb last week. “They brought us here, and I feel safe, like nothing bad can happen to us. Now we have a beautiful life.”

Yet that beautiful life has been shaken. Since the terrorist attacks in Paris, a tide of anti-refugee, anti-Muslim sentiment has swept, angrily and inexorably, across the United States. Now Mr. Mughrbel and Ms. Hammadeh say Michigan is not as welcoming a place as it was before.

Gov. Rick Snyder, who in September publicly rhapsodized about the boon that refugees were to Michigan’s economy, was among the first of more than two dozen Republican governors to vow last week that they would try to keep displaced Syrians out of their states to preserve the safety of Americans from would-be terrorists.

Presidential candidates and elected officials around the country have suggested closing mosques, collecting Syrian refugees already in the country or creating a registry for Muslims.

Sentiments like those are especially jarring in Michigan, which has one of the largest and most vibrant Arab-American populations in the country and a vocal group of advocates for bringing more Syrian refugees to the United States. In the Detroit suburbs, refugees have traded a harrowing war in the Middle East for cold winters, strip malls and subdivisions with houses as uniform as Monopoly pieces.

The United States has accepted more than 1,800 Syrian refugees since October 2014. Michigan has welcomed close to 200 — more than any other state except California and Texas. The Obama administration has said it wants to bring in at least 10,000 in the next year.

Those plans have been threatened by the sudden and contentious debate over whether these refugees, many of them young children, are security threats. On Thursday, the Republican-led House voted overwhelmingly to impose new screening procedures on refugees from Syria. After Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, a Republican, said he did not want any more Syrian refugees in his state, one Syrian family destined for Indianapolis was rerouted to Connecticut.

In explaining Mr. Snyder’s opposition to Syrians coming to Michigan, his spokesman, David Murray, said the state remained “unwavering” in its commitment to helping refugees.

“But our first priority is to keep Michiganders safe,” Mr. Murray said. “After tragedies such as we’ve seen in France, Lebanon and in the skies above Egypt in recent weeks, it’s proper to pause and review background and safety procedures with our partners in the federal government.”

Regardless, advocates for refugees say they have no intention to stop helping them settle here. Many more Syrian families who have waited for refugee status for years are destined for Michigan in the coming months.

Mr. Mughrbel, who arrived with his family in July, bristled at the suggestion that refugees like him could be a threat.

“We didn’t cross illegally,” he said. He threw his hands in the air. “We went through hell to get here.”
 

Escape From War

That hell started in Homs more than four years ago.

The government, under President Bashar al-Assad, had cracked down on the rebellious city, religious sects were at war with one another, and the deadly mix of bombings, snipers and random violence forced many residents indoors. Ms. Hammadeh was afraid to leave their home to shop for fresh food. On some days, the family resorted to eating moldy bread.

The couple’s sons, Soubei and Ahmad, now 19 and 18, were then in their early teens, and their parents began to fear they would be kidnapped.

“We got scared,” Ms. Hammadeh said. “The government would see kids on the street and take them, beat them. We didn’t want them to kidnap our children.”

In November 2011, they resolved to leave.

Everything had to be left behind: furniture, photos, nearly all of their clothes. The only exception was Ms. Hammadeh’s gold wedding band and two bracelets that she slipped onto her wrist. Once the family arrived in Jordan, she sold them all for about $230.

Life in their temporary country was expensive and difficult. Mr. Mughrbel’s brother, who had also fled to Jordan, died of a heart attack. Mr. Mughrbel blamed stress.

After months of grueling trips to the United Nations refugee agency in Amman for repeated hourslong interviews as part of the refugee process, they found out they would be going to the United States.

“Our life was about to change,” Mr. Mughrbel said in Arabic through a translator. “We were going to have a safe future for our kids, live a happy life, be in a better environment, be treated like a real person.”

Before departing for the United States, he and his family attended four days of orientation, where they were instructed in the ways of American life. How to drive a car. How to throw banana peels and other trash in a garbage can, not on the ground.

They were also schooled in what they should focus on when they arrived. Learn English, they were told. Find a job, because America is all about work. The United States is a wonderful place, they were told. People will respect you.

On their first morning in their new Michigan apartment, they marveled at the lawns and trees. “We didn’t walk around because we were afraid we would get lost,” Mr. Mughrbel said. “So we just looked out the window.”

“When I saw all the grass,” said Ms. Hammadeh, 43, her large eyes widening, “I felt that I was reborn.”

She sheepishly recounted trivial missteps. A used minivan, bought for $2,500, was accidentally filled with premium gas. An unfamiliar shampoo seemed to make her hair go temporarily thin.

But after four months, the family says it is financially independent, living on the earnings of the two sons, who work in a factory. Mr. Mughrbel, a cook and butcher in his native Syria, has found occasional work in a restaurant and, once his English is better, would like to open one of his own. Sometimes the family piles into the van after dinner at home and visits other Syrian families for coffee and gossip.

At home last week, family members bustled around as a soccer game played on the television, their preferred alternative to CNN and all its bleak bulletins. The smell of eggplant and spices wafted from the galley kitchen. A glance through the sliding patio doors revealed other modest but well-kept brick apartment buildings nearby.

They have kept their lives small, mostly going to work and back, and occasionally to the mosque. Mr. Mughrbel condemned the attacks in Paris. “These are criminals,” he said. “We are against this kind of stuff. You can’t just walk and kill somebody in the street. God won’t forgive you.”

 

Familiar Support

The task of keeping an eye on the new refugees has fallen to many of the 3,000 Syrian-Americans who have settled near Detroit for generations, a group known for its prosperity and devotion to higher education.

“There’s a significant number of Syrians here, so if the refugees don’t have relatives, they’ll at least have a lot of cultural connections,” said Dawud Walid, the executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. “Our community in general has been very welcoming to refugees, irrespective to their national origin.”

Many established Syrians have formed volunteer organizations to assist in the resettlement process; supplied the refugees with furniture, clothing and food; and procured apartments, often at a discounted rent.

“We’re trying to help them find their way once they are here,” said Mahmoud Altattan, 65, the owner of Altas Greenfield Market, an emporium of produce, jarred olives, nuts and pita breads in Southfield, a Detroit suburb. “They have some difficulty adjusting at first. We try to put them on the right path.”

New refugees have come to his store in search of familiar comforts: pumpkin seeds, sweets and coffees from their native country. Mr. Altattan, who arrived in the United States from Syria 27 years ago and speaks softly accented English, said he advised the refugees that their most important task was to learn the language.

“Most of the Syrian community is educated people, doctors, lawyers,” said Mr. Altattan, who proudly noted that he counts a doctor and lawyer among his four grown children. “The new Syrians who are coming now are not so educated.”

Refugee resettlement officials say many of the new refugees have worked in blue-collar jobs in Syria, as carpenters, cooks, tailors and drivers. Many were poor and vulnerable when they fled.

Case managers for the agencies that assist with resettlement spend the first few months of refugees’ time in the United States in a sort of hand-holding: making nearly daily visits to their homes, helping them book doctor’s appointments and register their children for school, and driving them to the grocery store.

“When refugees arrive to the country, they don’t know what to do,” said Jewan Poulis, a program coordinator with Lutheran Social Services of Michigan, an agency that has received about one or two Syrian families each week since June. “They have no clue what’s going on.”

Amer Sharaf, a 36-year-old Syrian refugee who arrived in Michigan in August, said he and his family had been warmly embraced by the older Syrians, who helped them by donating furniture and translating bills. A house painter when he lived in Syria, he found a job here in an automotive factory, making $9 an hour and working 50 hours a week.

But in his family’s apartment last week, as he and his wife, Marvat Mando, sipped Turkish coffee and watched their children read e-books on iPads provided by their public school, he turned to a new and troubling subject: the terrorist attacks in Paris and the governor’s subsequent criticism of Syrian refugees.

“It’s wrong,” Mr. Sharaf said. “Why is what happened everybody’s fault?”

 

Another Arrival

Last Tuesday afternoon, refugee specialists were gathered in a conference room at the suburban Detroit offices of Lutheran Social Services, discussing their final preparations for the arrival of a family of Syrian refugees on Wednesday evening.

Hani Aziz, a refugee specialist who is an Iraqi refugee himself, was assigned to pick up the family of three at 8 p.m., at the end of a long journey flying from Jordan to Frankfurt to Chicago and, finally, to Detroit.

Two days earlier, Mr. Snyder had proclaimed his opposition to new Syrian refugees entering the state. The specialists mentioned his name defiantly.

“If Snyder’s at the airport tomorrow, pushing them back onto the plane, then we know he’s for real,” Sean de Four, the vice president of children and family services at the agency, said wryly.

But when Wednesday evening came, the family’s flight was delayed for almost four hours. Standing in the arrivals terminal beneath an enormous Christmas wreath, Mr. Aziz scanned the crowds nervously, not knowing anything about the family except for names.

Finally, just after midnight, the family emerged, looking remarkably unrumpled: Nayef Buteh, 45; his wife, Feryal Jabur, 41; and their 8-year-old son, Arab.

Ms. Jabur was poised and elegant but sank onto a bench near the baggage claim.

“It was very tiring,” she said through a translator, looking glassy-eyed and exhausted. The couple’s son, wearing a black bomber jacket and jeans, slumped wordlessly next to her and lowered his dark eyelashes.

Mr. Buteh was polite but agitated, his eyes darting toward the exit. It had been 10 hours since his last cigarette. He stepped out into the mild November air and lit up.

“Thank God,” he said in Arabic, taking a deep drag.

Worn down by the grinding war in Syria, the family fled in March 2013 on the bed of a pickup, destined for a refugee camp in Jordan. But water was scarce there, and medical care was poor. Arab kept getting sick. The three sneaked out illegally, heading to a larger city and finding an apartment with relatives.

Close to two years later, the family was granted refugee status.

“They said, ‘We’ll send you to Michigan,’ ” Mr. Buteh said as the minivan driven by Mr. Aziz hurtled down the nearly empty highway. “They told us it’s very beautiful, with a large Middle Eastern community and jobs in car factories.”

About 2 a.m., the van delivered the family to its small motel, where a spread of tea, chicken, rice, apples and pickles awaited on a night stand.

Mr. Buteh stepped out into the deserted parking lot and rapidly smoked another cigarette. He patted the beige, puffy coat he was wearing and glanced upward.

“I was not expecting it to be warm,” he said. “I came here expecting snow.”

A version of this article appears in print on November 24, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline:
A Chill Grips a U.S. Haven for Syrian Families.

A Chill Grips a Michigan Haven for Syrian Families,
NYT, NOV. 23, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/24/us/
syrian-refugees-cling-to-a-longtime-haven-in-michigan.html

Time to Retire the Term ‘Alien’

OCT. 20, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Lawmakers probably meant no harm when they codified the term “alien” into the landmark 1952 bill that remains the basis of America’s immigration system. Since then, “alien” has found its way into many parts of the statute: foreigners granted temporary work permits are “non-permanent resident aliens”; those who get green cards by making investments in American businesses are “alien entrepreneurs”; Nobel laureates and pop stars who want to make America home can apply to become “aliens of extraordinary ability.”

Over the years, the label has struck newcomers as a quirky aspect of moving to America. Many, understandably, have also come to regard it as a loaded, disparaging word, used by those who regard immigrants as less-than-human burdens rather than as assets.

Recognizing how dehumanizing the term is to many immigrants, officials in California recently took commendable steps to phase it out. In August, Gov. Jerry Brown signed into law a bill that deletes the term from the state’s labor code. Last month, the California Republican Party adopted a new platform that does not include the term “illegal alien,” saying it wanted to steer clear of the vitriolic rhetoric that the presidential candidate Donald Trump has injected into the 2016 race.

Several news organizations have adopted policies discouraging its use in reporting about immigrants. According to a review by the Pew Research Center in 2013, the use of the term in newspaper articles dropped sharply between 2007 and 2013. The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that administers immigration benefits, has removed the word from some documents, including green cards.

But the term remains firmly embedded in conservative discourse, used by Republicans to appeal to the xenophobic crowd. Mr. Trump, the leading Republican presidential candidate, uses the term 12 times in his ruinous immigration plan, which calls for the mass deportation of millions of unauthorized immigrants and proposes that Washington bill Mexico to build a wall along the border. It was often uttered by former Gov. Mitt Romney, the 2012 Republican presidential nominee, whose idiotic immigration plan called for “self-deportation” by unauthorized immigrants.

“If you want to demonize a community, you use words that demonize,” said Muzaffar Chishti, the director of the Migration Policy Institute at New York University School of Law. “Alien is more demonizing than immigrant.”

Semantics may seem like a trivial part of immigration reform, but words, and their evolution, matter greatly in fraught policy debates.

States that use the word alien in their laws should consider following California’s lead. The federal government should scrub it from official documents where possible. In the end, though, it will be up to Congress to recognize that there is no compelling reason to keep a hostile term in the law that sets out how immigrants are welcomed into the country.

A version of this editorial appears in print on October 20, 2015, on page A24 of the New York edition with the headline: Time to Retire the Term ‘Alien’.

Time to Retire the Term ‘Alien’,
NYT, OCT. 20, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/20/opinion/time-to-retire-the-term-alien.html

Flow of Central American Children

Headed to U.S. Shifts but Doesn’t Slow

OCT. 6, 2015

The New York Times

By AZAM AHMED

The recent images of tens of thousands of desperate asylum seekers streaming into Europe recall a smaller but significant migration crisis unfolding along the southern border of the United States: Waves of Central American migrants — many of them children — were detained at the border last year.

A disturbing number of unaccompanied children from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala have tried to reach the United States in the past two years, risking detention by law enforcement, abuse by human traffickers and dire conditions along the way.

From the beginning of October 2013 through July of this year, nearly 80,000 unaccompanied minors from those Central American countries were detained by United States authorities along the Mexican border.

And those were the ones who made it that far. Others were ransomed by the very smugglers to whom their families paid thousands of dollars to sneak them into the United States. Some lost limbs during the journey or found themselves sold into sexual slavery, still others turned back.

What would drive children to make such a perilous journey without their parents or another adult?

Endemic gang violence in Central America and lack of economic opportunity for young people, as well as governments unable to adequately respond to those problems, have driven many young migrants north. Others have sought to be reunited with their families who had already left in search of a better life in the United States.

The situation has alarmed American officials and forced them to confront a growing crisis to the south. The authorities responded by announcing a plan for $1 billion in development aid to help address the causes of the crisis.

Even before those funds have been approved, the number of migrants reaching the United States has begun to drop: Fewer Central Americans have been stopped along the southern border with Mexico in the last fiscal year. Some American officials have said this shows the success of tighter border controls and better public information campaigns in the region. However, there was a slight increase in migrants stopped at the border in August.

In reality, the problem seems to have simply been pushed farther south: Many of the young migrants are now stopped entering Mexico instead.

The Mexican government detained close to 92,000 Central American migrants from October 2014 to April 2015. During the same period, the United States held 70,448 people from places other than Mexico, according to data from the Washington Office on Latin America.

The desperation in Central America driving people north has not abated. The escape route for many migrants has, for now, just shifted.

Flow of Central American Children Headed to U.S. Shifts but Doesn’t Slow,
NYT, OCT. 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/07/world/americas/
honduras-el-salvador-guatemala-mexico-us-child-migrants.html

The Immigration Dividend

OCT. 6, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Op-Ed Contributor

By TED WIDMER

IMMIGRATION is not the easiest issue to debate. It stokes emotions about “homelands” and invasions, as we have seen all summer, both in the Republican presidential contest and in the tragic situation in Europe. These arguments tend to produce more heat than light, making objective analysis difficult. Many politicians find that their poll numbers rise the further from reality they stray — as the Donald J. Trump playbook continues to prove. A recent Pew report confirms that the parties remain far apart, with Republicans far more certain than Democrats (53 percent versus 24 percent) that immigration is making our society worse.

But history provides some clarity about the relative costs and benefits of immigration over time. Fifty years ago this month, Lyndon B. Johnson signed the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 at the foot of the Statue of Liberty. By any standard, it made the United States a stronger nation. The act was endorsed by Republicans and Democrats in an era when cooperation was still possible. Indeed, the most serious opposition came from Southern Democrats and an ambivalent secretary of state, Dean Rusk. But it passed the Senate easily (76-18), with skillful leadership from its floor manager, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, and Johnson himself.

Since 1924, United States immigration policy had been based on a formula, derived from the 1890 census, that made it relatively easy for Northern Europeans to immigrate. But the formula set strict limits for everyone else. That seemed ridiculous to John F. Kennedy, who was trying to win hearts and minds in the Cold War, and it seemed even more so to his successor in 1965, as Johnson was escalating the war in Vietnam. The act’s passage was one of the few positive legacies of that complex moment in American foreign policy.

Johnson promised his opponents that the act would “not reshape the structure of our daily lives.” But that prediction proved utterly untrue. By destroying the old national-origins system, the act opened the floodgates to the parts of the world that had been excluded in the past.

What ensued was arguably the most significant period of immigration in American history. Nearly 59 million people have come to the United States since 1965, and three-quarters of them came from Latin America and Asia. It was not unrestrained immigration — the act created preferences for those with technical training, or family members in the United States. But it was vastly more open than what had come before.

There is little doubt that the act succeeded in the ways that its progressive supporters hoped — it made America a genuinely New Frontier, younger and more diverse, truer to its ideals. But it also was a success when measured by a more conservative calculus of hard power. It certainly increased American security. Significant numbers of immigrants and their children joined the United States military after 1965, and in every category the armed forces became more ethnically diverse.

The flood of new immigrants also promoted prosperity in ways that few could have imagined in 1965. Between 1990 and 2005, as the digital age took off, 25 percent of the fastest-growing American companies were founded by people born in foreign countries.

Much of the growth of the last two decades has stemmed from the vast capacity that was delivered by the Internet and the personal computer, each of which was accelerated by immigrant ingenuity. Silicon Valley, especially, was transformed. In a state where Asian immigrants had once faced great hardship, they helped to transform the global economy. The 2010 census stated that more than 50 percent of technical workers in Silicon Valley are Asian-American.

Google was co-founded by Sergey Brin, who emigrated from the Soviet Union with his parents at age 6. The new C.E.O. of United Airlines is Mexican-American. And an extraordinary number of Indian-Americans have risen to become chief executives of other major American corporations, including Adobe Systems, Pepsi, Motorola and Microsoft.

In countless other ways, as well, we might measure the improvements since 1965. A prominent AIDS researcher, David Ho, came to this country as a 12-year-old from Taiwan. Immigrants helped take the space program to new places, and sometimes gave their lives in that cause (an Indian-American astronaut, Kalpana Chawla, perished in the Columbia space shuttle disaster). Almost no one would argue for a return to pre-1965 American cuisine, which became incomparably more interesting as it grew more diverse. Baseball has become a more dynamic game as it, too, has looked south and west. The list goes on and on.

There will always be debates over immigration, and it’s important to acknowledge that opponents of immigration are usually correct when they argue that immigration brings dramatic change. But a careful consideration of the 1965 Immigration Act shows that our willingness to lower barriers made this a better country. To convey that hard-earned wisdom to other nations wrestling with the same issues, and to open our own doors more widely, would be a modest way to repay the great contributions that immigrants have made on a daily basis to the United States over the past 50 years.

Ted Widmer is a senior fellow at the Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs. He edited “Listening In: The Secret White House Recordings of John F. Kennedy.”

A version of this op-ed appears in print on October 6, 2015, on page A31 of the New York edition with the headline: The Immigration Dividend.

The Immigration Dividend,
NYT, OCT. 6, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/opinion/the-immigration-dividend.html

Puerto Ricans Seeking New Lives

Put Stamp on Central Florida

 

AUG. 24, 2015

The New York Times

By LIZETTE ALVAREZ

KISSIMMEE, Fla. — When Manuel Hernandez, a teacher in Puerto Rico, looked at the reasons to stay home or to take a chance on joining the ever-growing Puerto Rican diaspora in Central Florida, it was not a hard call.

“I was fed up,” Mr. Hernandez said of his life in San Juan, “and my wife was fed up; frustrations were building.”

So last October, Mr. Hernandez got off a plane and arrived here, a place best known for hosting Mickey Mouse and rodeos, but also increasingly seen as a faraway suburb of Puerto Rico, a trend that has quickened with the island’s deepening economic morass.

Florida is now poised to elbow out New York as the state with the most Puerto Ricans — close to one million, according to the Center for Puerto Rican Studies at the City University of New York. Nearly 400,000 Puerto Ricans have settled in the Orlando area, and by some estimates, thousands continue to arrive monthly, a marked increase from a decade ago.

Not all the newcomers are from the island; a large number also hail from the Northeast and Chicago, spots they traded for the warm weather and more affordable lifestyle of Central Florida.

The migration — the third and largest wave here in four decades and one that began several years ago — is transforming a corridor of Central Florida that is increasingly viewed as economically powerful, culturally diverse and politically pivotal.

“Puerto Rico has 78 municipalities,” said Art Otero, a Kissimmee city commissioner who was born in San Juan and is running for mayor here, as he sat amid the bustle of the Melao Bakery, a popular pit stop for mallorcas, the sugar-topped Puerto Rican sweet rolls. “Now they say we will be the 79th.”

As United States citizens, Puerto Ricans from the island, who generally favor Democrats but are less party conscious than their mainland brethren, can easily register to vote. And in the past two presidential elections they have turned out in large numbers, helping hand President Obama his victories in Florida. But they also helped elect Charlie Crist as governor when he was a Republican.

Their turnout and willingness to consider both parties make them a highly coveted group, a crucial swing vote in the nation’s largest swing state.

“There is a large number of independents and people who vote on a candidate’s appeal; party affiliations mean less to them,” said Edwin Meléndez, the director of the Center for Puerto Rican Studies, which analyzed the most recent census data on the latest migration. “The Puerto Rican vote here is not just captured by one party. The candidates have to talk to us.”

Their growing numbers — about 15 percent of the area’s population in 2013 — have also made it easier for them to organize and mobilize on issues that affect Puerto Rico, including a push for equity in Medicare and Medicaid on the island, and for changes that would provide for some debt relief through bankruptcy laws.

And they are gradually gaining a political foothold of their own in local commissions and the State Legislature, where there are six lawmakers of Puerto Rican descent, half of them Republicans. One state senator, Darren Soto, is running for an open seat in Congress.

The Puerto Rican stamp on the area’s culture and work force is unmistakable. Typically bilingual to varying degrees, Puerto Ricans are often recruited for jobs, including those as doctors, teachers and engineers, but also to work at Disney World and in hotels.

Just two years ago, the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration, seeing the growth in population, opened an office here to help Puerto Ricans resettle in the area.

Restaurants dishing out mofongo are no longer hard to find in this once low-key city, where Disney World rose from the swamp. Puerto Rican universities and companies, including those specializing in food, aviation and language training, are also moving into the area to cater to the newest arrivals.

But the surge of Puerto Ricans does not always make for an easy transition. Increasingly, it is also having an impact on schools and government service agencies, both of which are working to help absorb the latest arrivals, particularly those with children in schools.

As a result, schools are scrambling to hire more bilingual teachers (some of them also from Puerto Rico) and expand dual-language programs that can best suit Puerto Ricans. In the last month alone, the Osceola County School District, which is home to Kissimmee, registered more than 1,000 new students, many of them Puerto Ricans, said Dalia Medina, the director of the multicultural department for the school district.

“We are a mini-Puerto Rico here,” she said. “We are now 58 percent Hispanic in the schools, and every year we have increased.”

But in their rush to move to the Orlando area, complications sometimes arise, particularly for those with no jobs waiting for them, no invitations from relatives and insufficient cash to see them through. Finding affordable housing in the area, where rents are higher than in Puerto Rico, and ponying up deposits can pose a problem for many.

Some Puerto Ricans find themselves living week to week in run-down motels that line Kissimmee’s main artery because that is the only option, Mr. Otero said.

And many realize that their English, while passable in Puerto Rico, needs refining here, making it tricky to find jobs, said Betsy Franceschini, the head of the Puerto Rico Federal Affairs Administration office here. Her advice: Enroll in English classes.

Reports of people packing up and moving back to Puerto Rico appear to be on the rise, she said. “Those that plan have better success,” she said. “It’s a shock to those who did not do the research ahead of time.”

Even when someone arrives with a good job and perfect English, the transition can be rocky. Mr. Hernandez, who was recruited from Puerto Rico, where he trained teachers to work for Osceola High School because of his specialty in teaching English language learners, wound up first sharing a mobile home with a stranger, then in two motels (including one with bedbugs) with his wife and child. He said other Puerto Ricans were also living in the motels.

His Osceola job offer had arisen unexpectedly, and he had just returned from an expensive vacation with his family, leaving little cash for deposits. Ultimately, he got help through a program called Families in Transition.

“The living conditions were horrible in the motel,” said Mr. Hernandez, who is originally from New York and has participated in a TEDx talk on teaching English as a second language.

But returning to Puerto Rico, where his career seemed frozen, raises were nonexistent and taxes were escalating, seemed unthinkable.

Now he is in a two-bedroom “beautiful apartment” across from the school, and the family is settling in nicely and his teaching career glimmers with promise.

“I really believe that I am in the right place in the right time,” he said.

A version of this article appears in print on August 25, 2015, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Puerto Ricans Seeking New Lives Put Stamp on Central Florida.

Puerto Ricans Seeking New Lives Put Stamp on Central Florida,
NYT, AUGUST 24, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/25/us/
central-florida-emerges-as-mainland-magnet-for-puerto-ricans.html

End Immigration Detention

MAY 15, 2015

The New York Times

The Opinion Pages | Editorial

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Of all the malfunctioning parts in the country’s broken-down immigration machinery, probably the most indefensible is the detention system.

This is the vast network of jails and prisons where suspected immigration violators are held while awaiting a hearing and possible deportation. Immigrant detainees are not criminal defendants or convicts serving sentences. They are locked up merely because the government wants to make sure they show up in immigration court.

Detention is intended to help enforce the law, but, in practice, the system breeds cruelty and harm, and squanders taxpayer money. It denies its victims due process of law, punishing them far beyond the scale of any offense. It shatters families and traumatizes children. As a system of mass incarceration — particularly of women and children fleeing persecution in Central America — it is immoral.

The director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, Sarah Saldaña, on Wednesday announced a set of reforms to the family detention system. Federal officials do this from time to time after advocates and journalists expose — as they have for years — the abuses within detention walls. Ms. Saldaña says she wants the “optimal level of care” for detainees, and so she will create a committee and give lawyers more working space to meet with clients, among other things.

But committees and cubicles won’t touch the heart of the problem. It’s time to end mass detention, particularly of families. Shut the system down, and replace it with something better.

A powerful case for ending immigration detention, along with an array of alternatives, is made in a new report from the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops and the Center for Migration Studies. It traces how the system has grown immense, from housing 85,000 detainees in 1995 to more than 440,000 in 2013. There are many reasons for this growth, including state and local immigration crackdowns, federal dragnet programs like Secure Communities and the flood of money from Congress to the private prison operators that have profited so fruitfully from immigrant criminalization. The system has gotten more sprawling and scandal-prone, but reforms don’t stick. The notorious Hutto family detention center in Texas, where children went to classes in prison scrubs, stopped housing families. But the surge of families at the border seeking refuge last year created a political crisis and led the department to resurrect family detention, with new centers with thousands of prison beds for mothers and children.

The report points out that the detention system has become an enormous funnel for the crushingly overburdened, underfunded immigration courts, which receive a meager $300 million from Congress each year, one-sixtieth of what ICE and Customs and Border Protection get. By the end of March, nearly 442,000 cases were pending before immigration judges, with an average case waiting 599 days to be heard, and delays in some courts of more than two years. This is not efficiency or due process.

Ending mass detention would not mean allowing unauthorized immigrants to disappear. Supervised or conditional release, ankle bracelets and other monitoring technologies, plus community-based support with intensive case management, can work together to make the system more humane. But neither Congress nor the Homeland Security Department has embraced these approaches, which would be far cheaper than locking people up.

No one can expect such reforms soon from Congress, which by law requires the Department of Homeland Security to maintain, at all times, 34,000 detention beds, no matter the need. But the problem has to be acknowledged: the inhumanity and wasted expense of imprisoning people who could be working and providing for their families. The American immigration system should reflect our values. The detention system does not do that.
 

Follow The New York Times Opinion section on Facebook and Twitter, and sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter.

A version of this editorial appears in print on May 15, 2015, on page A30 of the New York edition with the headline: End Immigration Detention.

End Immigration Detention,
NYT, MAY 15, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/15/opinion/end-immigration-detention.html

Black Immigrants Have Quadrupled

Since 1980, Study Says

APRIL 9, 2015

The New York Times

By JESS BIDGOOD

The number of black immigrants in the United States has more than quadrupled since 1980, a new study has found, and that group is expected to make up an increasing share of the nation’s black population in the decades ahead.

The study, released Thursday by the Pew Research Center, found that 3.8 million black immigrants lived in the United States in 2013, and their share of the black population in the country “is projected to rise from 9 percent today to 16 percent by 2060,” said Mark Hugo Lopez, the director of Hispanic research at Pew and an author of the study along with Monica Anderson.

That differs from the Hispanic population, Mr. Lopez said, because the share of Hispanics in America who are immigrants is declining.

Part of the reasons for the growth has been a number of federal laws over the years that have eased restrictions on immigrants, particularly for nations that had been underrepresented.

Half of the United States’ black immigrants are from Caribbean nations like Jamaica and Haiti, and 9 percent are from South and Central American countries. But the primary driver of the growth from 2000 to 2013 was the 137 percent increase in African immigrants, who now number 1.4 million.

About 30 percent of the sub-Saharan immigrants who arrived during that period came as refugees or were seeking asylum, fleeing the violence and fighting in that region of the continent.

More than 80 percent of the nation’s black immigrants live in the Northeast or the South. The New York-New Jersey-Newark metropolitan area is home to 27 percent of the nation’s black immigrants, and the Miami-Fort Lauderdale-West Palm Beach metropolitan area has 12 percent.

“Africa has a relatively young population, and many worldwide migration projections project that Africans will play a wider role in worldwide migration going forward,” Mr. Lopez said. “We are starting to see some of the beginnings of that.”

Black immigrants have become increasingly prominent in American culture; in recent years, novels like “Americanah,” by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and “Open City,” by Teju Cole, featured immigrants from Africa as protagonists. The Pew study found that black immigrants over 25 are more likely than their American-born counterparts to have a bachelor’s degree and that all black immigrants are less likely to live in poverty.

Christina Greer, a political scientist at Fordham University and the author of “Black Ethnics: Race, Immigration and the Pursuit of the American Dream,” said that might be because many immigrants who leave their home country can afford to do so, and there are often prior social networks to ease their transition.

Black immigrants, Ms. Greer said, often identify strongly with their home countries even as they are settling here, instead of assimilating quickly as many other immigrant groups have done.

“We’re not seeing that same desire among black immigrants to just become black Americans,” Ms. Greer said, “because there are certain assumptions and stereotypes about becoming black Americans in this country, and so many black immigrants just prefer to maintain their ethnic identity in ways that we haven’t seen white immigrants in the past.”

Correction: April 12, 2015

An earlier version of this article misstated the location of Mexico. It is in North America, not Central or South America.

A version of this article appears in print on April 10, 2015, on page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: Black Immigrants Have Quadrupled Since 1980,

Black Immigrants Have Quadrupled Since 1980, Study Says,
NYT, APRIL 10, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/10/us/
black-immigrants-have-quadrupled-since-1980-study-says.html

The Scrambled States of Immigration

 

APRIL 1, 2015

The New York Times

By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

The Opinion Pages | Editorial
 

A country that has abandoned all efforts at creating a saner immigration policy has gotten the result it deserves: not one policy but lots of little ones, acting at cross purposes and nullifying one another. Not unity but cacophony, a national incoherence — one well illustrated in a recent report in The Times on the various ways the states, forsaken by Congress, are adjusting to the millions of unauthorized immigrants living outside the law.

Some, like Washington and California, allow such immigrants to earn driver’s licenses, having concluded that roads are safer when drivers are tested and insured. Other states balk at any such benefit for people they consider undeserving. They prefer to tolerate illegal driving to make a point about illegal immigration.

Twenty-six states have sued to block President Obama’s executive actions giving some immigrants work permits and protection from deportation. They argue that the actions harm them somehow, though they lack evidence, mainly because the opposite is true. A federal district judge in Texas has sided with the plaintiffs, blocking the Obama administration’s programs nationwide.

But 14 states and the District of Columbia have pleaded with the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit to let the programs proceed. They understand that immigrants who are working legally and paying taxes, supporting themselves and bolstering the economy, are a benefit for all, and that the government is far better off using its limited resources deporting criminals.

Some states, notably Arizona and Alabama, have toiled mightily to thwart unauthorized immigrants at every turn, to make them miserable and unemployable. Others have decided that undocumented workers and their families are an asset to be nurtured, with benefits like more access to higher education, through in-state tuition and financial aid. They understand the reasoning of Plyler v. Doe, the Supreme Court decision asserting all children’s right to primary schooling, and have chosen not to squander their costly investment in an educated population.

California is a national leader in embracing the potential of its newcomers, with 26 new laws benefiting the undocumented, including a driver’s license law and one limiting local law-enforcement involvement in the federal immigration dragnet. New York City, under Mayor Bill de Blasio and Speaker Melissa Mark-Viverito of the City Council, has made much progress, too, with programs like a municipal ID card. The message: We want you here.

(New York State should be a national leader in this swelling immigrant-rights movement, but it isn’t. Modest reforms, like a bill to grant college financial aid and scholarships to the undocumented, have languished in its underachieving Legislature, thwarted by a Republican-led Senate and a governor, Andrew Cuomo, who gives the issue lip service but has other priorities.)

The federal government has its own problems with coherence. It spends billions on its prison-and-deportation pipeline, yet the Homeland Security Department is not on the same page with itself. It is supposed to be using more discretion in whom it deports, but it is applying the policy erratically. A man who fits no sane definition of a threat — Max Villatoro, a Mennonite pastor in Iowa, a father of four citizen children — was recently deported to Honduras.

Meanwhile, the leader of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, Sarah Saldaña, was recently asked at a congressional hearing whether she supported changing the law so that local police departments would be required to hold immigrants in custody for possible deportation beyond the time they would normally be released. “Amen,” she said, showing that she either didn’t know or didn’t accept that the Homeland Security Department actually opposes mandatory detainers. She later issued a clarification bringing her views in line with those of her boss, Jeh Johnson, the homeland security secretary, calling mandatory detainers “a highly counterproductive step” that would “lead to more resistance and less cooperation in our overall efforts to promote public safety.”

Depending on how the Fifth Circuit rules on the lawsuit challenging Mr. Obama’s executive actions, his valiant effort to repair some of the damage to the immigration system could well be undone, and everybody, families and felons, may get put back in the shadowy line of potential deportees. Meanwhile, the Army is expanding and fast-tracking a program to give citizenship to unauthorized immigrants with special language or medical skills.

Who is on the right side of this argument — the Army, Mr. Obama, Gov. Jerry Brown of California, Mr. de Blasio? Or Texas, Alabama, Arizona and the Republicans whose resistance to reform has left the nation in this mess? Those die-hard opponents fail to remember that laws and policies that deny rights and promote exclusion have been the source of shame and regret throughout American history. Integration and assimilation are the core values of a country that is in danger of forgetting itself.
 

A version of this editorial appears in print on April 2, 2015,
on page A26 of the New York edition with the headline:
The Scrambled States of Immigration.

The Scrambled States of Immigration,
NYT, APRIL 1, 2015,
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/02/opinion/
the-scrambled-states-of-immigration.html