Political Economist

Last month, as thousands of students walked out of their schools to protest pending immigration bills in Congress, 17-year-old Julio Beltre stood in front of New York’s Federal Plaza to tell the story of his father, Juan Beltre: On a morning in April 2005, before the sun rose six agents from the Department of Homeland Security had woken up his father and dragged him away from their Bronx home. His wife and four children – all U.S. citizens – watched in horror.

Why was he being seized? Juan Beltre had committed a single drug-possession offense dating back to 1995. But in those 10 long years, Beltre had completed probation, was a long-term green card holder – and was now suffering from a brain tumor.

“Now my mom has to raise us alone,” his son recounted at the demonstration. His father was deported back to the Dominican Republic.

Which Way Will The Pendulum Swing?

The debate is as complex as it is heated. Before it recessed, the Senate Judiciary Committee was debating an immigration bill that would, if passed into law:

• expand the grounds of deportation;
• use domestic military bases for immigration detention;
• legalize the indefinite detention of non-citizens;
• authorize New York City police and other local officers to enforce federal immigration laws;
• erect a border fence;
• enable Homeland Security agents to expel suspected foreigners indiscriminately; and
• create a national identification system for all workers.

Yet many are hailing this as success. The front page of New York’s largest Spanish language paper, El Diario, exclaimed “TRIUMFAMOS.” Meanwhile, restrictionist commentator Lou Dobbs campaigned against the bill on television and in Mexico.

This ironic role reversal stems from one section of the proposed bill, the guestworker legalization provisions. Under the leadership of Sen. Arlen Specter (R-Penn.), the Judiciary Committee voted 12-6 to approve a new visa program, devised by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.) and Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), under which undocumented workers would have to register with the government, maintain continuous employment for six years, pay back and future taxes, and pass civics and English lessons in order to apply for a green card. Some claim the Senate bill as a victory because undocumented workers would have a potential pathway to work and live lawfully in the United States.

Fighting To Keep The Legalization Provisions

Advocates are fighting to prevent the “earned legalization” provisions from being watered down. The main variable is whether or not the visa granted to undocumented workers will lead to a green card and eventual citizenship.

We are now at a crossroads. While the nation’s attention is focused on the legalization question, lawmakers have guaranteed only one thing: there will be no legalization-only bill. If the Senate ultimately approves anything, it will go to a closed-door conference committee to be resolved with the House bill passed in Dec. 2005. The House bill concedes no green cards. Its only common ground with the Senate is provisions to expand detentions, deportations and border police.

A shared history underlies the consensus. September 11 transformed immigration into a national security debate with Democrats and Republicans both convinced that any immigration reform must come with tighter controls. But as the Beltre family illustrates, the New York congressional delegation has to resolve the national security agenda with a powerful reality: non-citizens are not the only affected population.

Ten Years Of Deportations

It’s not the act of terror we remember best. In April 1995, a white veteran of the first Gulf War blew up the Oklahoma City federal building. One year later, to memorialize that tragedy then-President Bill Clinton signed a sweeping immigration enforcement measure: the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act. A sister bill, the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act, passed just months later.

Together, the 1996 laws transformed the meaning of membership in America and substantially ramped up policing based on citizenship. There was no legalization or guestworker program. Instead, there were sweeping deportation measures that empowered the executive branch to more easily expel people already within our borders.

Prior to the 1996 laws, a New Yorker placed in deportation proceedings could typically go before an immigration judge and seek a pardon if she could demonstrate that she was no threat to society and had significant ties to her U.S. community. But the new laws instituted a system of mandatory deportation and detention whereby the vast majority of New Yorkers facing deportation are held in immigrant prisons without bail and have no opportunity to plead their case before an immigration judge.

More than 1.3 million people have been expelled from the United States in the last 10 years, and immigrants have become the fastest-growing segment of our prison population. Taxpayers are footing the bill for the ever-growing deportation budget. American veterans, breadwinners and people who have lived here since infancy have been deported through this process.

Plea Bargains Lead To Deportations

In New York, as in other cities, the criminal justice system is a cornerstone of the immigration policing strategy. Defense attorneys advise clients to plea to lesser charges in order to secure a deal with little or no jail time. Every week, hundreds of immigrant New Yorkers arrested for garden-variety crimes plead guilty under this plea-bargain system. However, a second punishment may follow: detention and deportation. As the federal immigration authorities’ reliance on local criminal institutions grows, there is no countervailing process to ensure that the rights of immigrants are observed.

Connecting Past & Present Policy

The New York congressional delegation has been nearly mute on how America’s immigration are harming families – with one recent exception. On March 28, 2006, Congressman Jose Serrano of the Bronx introduced the Child Citizen Protection Act, a bill to restore partial discretion to immigration judges in cases where removal of an immigrant is clearly against the best interests of a U.S. citizen child. But the other members of Congress from New York are largely silent despite the New York families who flood their district offices – families already devastated by deportation.

“Our leaders need to change the laws,” Julio Beltre concluded his speech during the demonstration at Federal Plaza, “before more young people like me get hurt.” On April 24, the 10- year anniversary of the 1996 laws, he and other New Yorkers will converge in Washington, D.C., with families from other cities whose lives have changed because of deportation.

Aarti Shahani is a co-founder of Families for Freedom, a Brooklyn-based defense network for immigrant families facing deportation. This is an edited version of an article originally published by the Gotham Gazette, www.gothamgazette.com.

NEW ORLEANS—Every morning in New Orleans, a group of Latino men line up by the side of a traffic circle named for Robert E. Lee, under a large banner reading: “Remember Those Suffering from Katrina and Rita.” These men, whose faces change every day, have come to New Orleans over the past seven months following rumors of high-paying demolition and construction work. Few speak English, and many do not have visas to work in the United States. Adrift in a city with few resources for Latinos, they rely heavily on their employers, sometimes sleeping in the same hurricane-damaged buildings they work on all day. Caught between financial necessity and immigration law, they are unlikely to challenge the often unsafe work conditions they encounter as they do the dirty work of rebuilding New Orleans.

“Right now there are more ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents on the ground than Department of Labor agents,” says Jennifer Whitney, cofounder and co-coordinator of the Latino Health Outreach Program, a weekly clinic offering free vaccinations and safety equipment to migrant laborers. “No one knows for sure how many migrant workers have passed through here, but tens of thousands is a reasonable estimate – doing really dangerous work without training or proper equipment.”

On a typical Wednesday at Lee traffic circle, Whitney and a group of other activists from the Common Ground Health Clinic arrive at six in the morning to transform a gas station parking lot into the only Spanish-language clinic in greater New Orleans. Their vaccination program runs out of a few small coolers and focuses on tetanus and Hepatitis A, two pathogens common to flood-damaged buildings. On one side of the lot, an enthusiastic volunteer gives a flight attendant-style demonstration in Spanish on how to use a dual-cartridge respirator. In a more secluded space behind a station wagon, Whitney and other volunteers consult with patients who will need to arrange for a translator’s help to visit a specialist. A shy, dark-skinned man with a large neck wound wanders up from the street and is escorted back to this area.

A Honduran man named Reyes waits while his friends receive their vaccinations. He tells me that he has lived in Houston and Baton Rouge before coming to New Orleans, and that New Orleans is more daunting for a Latino worker than those other cities. “The city here has not seen many Hispanics,” he says. “The police are much tougher here.”

Before Katrina, Latinos made up only 3 percent of the population of New Orleans, far below the norm for an American city of its size. While Latino immigration nationwide had peaked in recent decades, New Orleans’s economy had lagged behind that of the rest of the country, and a large black underclass had served to fill the least desirable jobs.

The exodus of poor blacks in the aftermath of Katrina cleared the way for migrant workers like Reyes to seek dangerous work cleaning out buildings that had festered for weeks in dirty water. President Bush’s decision to waive requirements for employment eligibility documents opened up a great migration of day laborers from across Central and North America. Some now estimate that New Orleans is up to 30 percent Latino, though reliable data is unavailable.

On March 17 at Lee traffic circle, forty workers were arrested while waiting to be picked up for construction jobs. This was the largest of many immigration raids in New Orleans since last fall. Police have implied that migrant workers have ties to Central American gangs, and now sometimes strip detainees to their underwear to search for tattoos.

The Advancement Project, a legal activist group working in New Orleans, tries to arrange support for detained migrant workers. However, according to Whitney, lawyers sometimes do not receive access to detainees for four days or more.

Spanish-speaking migrants are often perceived as an economic threat by both black and white populations in New Orleans, and as a result they have difficulty finding political sympathy or logistical support.

Whitney points to interracial worker associations in Los Angeles and other American cities as examples of what could be done right in the future. With her peers from the Common Ground Health Clinic, she hopes to help found a New Orleans Worker Justice Coalition, which would include a permanent health clinic for Latino laborers as well as some training and advocacy. “We expect that the numbers [of Latinos in New Orleans] will continue to go up,” says Whitney. “We’re not looking to be a disaster relief organization. We’re going to stay.”

For now, workers like Reyes are happy just to have the chance to pick up a muchneeded vaccination and some functional safety equipment on the way to work. “The Latinos here don’t know the city well,” he says. “Without this, we’d have to go to a private clinic where the service would be very expensive. Many wouldn’t do it.”

For more info, see www.cghc.org, Common Ground Health Clinic.

On Jan. 1. 1994, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) went into effect, liberalizing trade, investment and capital flows across Mexico, Canada and the United States. One of the effects of NAFTA has been to increase Mexican immigration into the United States as many small farmers have lost their lands, unable to compete against heavily subsidized U.S. agribusinesses.

One of NAFTA’s main provisions was the reduction of price supports by the Mexican government for agricultural products. The treaty permitted the United States to continue agricultural subsidies, however, allowing farmers to sell their agricultural products on the Mexican market at rock-bottom prices – in the case of corn, about 35 percent below the cost of production. From 1995 to 2004, U.S. corn farmers received $41.9 billion in government subsidies.

A study published in 2004 by the nonprofit policy group Americas Program found that while the price of domestic corn in Mexico has fallen since 1994 the price of corn-based tortillas has increased by 279 percent. While some 3 million farmers in Mexico continue to grow corn, Mexico has now switched from a corn-exporting country to a corn-importing country.

The cultivation of corn first began in Mexico some 5,000 years ago, and thousands of varieties abound through the country. As a consequence of the low prices, many small farmers and their families have had to leave their homes and their land to survive. For those farmers who choose to stay, the only crops they can still make a living from are usually marijuana and poppies.

“Since the passage of NAFTA in 1994, more than three million campesinos have been forced to abandon agricultural production and look for jobs in maquiladoras [export-only factories] or as undocumented workers in the U.S.,” said Tom Hansen, National Coordinator for the Mexico Solidarity Network.

In 2000, Mexican president Vicente Fox raised the idea of free flow of people across the U.S.-Mexico border as a second phase of NAFTA. The events of Sept. 11 derailed this plan, however.

“Immigration morphed from a largely temporary, circular phenomena pre-1994 that involved perhaps 100,000 Mexicans annually, to a more permanent trend that involves almost halfa- million Mexicans annually, representing about one percent of the entire Mexican workforce,” Hansen stated.