Federal immigration enforcement resources have increased significantly in recent years, as have the number of deportations. Meanwhile, states have passed harsh immigration laws intended to crack down on unauthorized immigrants. Presidential candidate Mitt Romney has announced that he supports a policy of “self-deportation.” What do these things have in common? The belief that making daily life miserable for undocumented immigrants will result in “self-deportation”—or “attrition through enforcement.”

A new paper this week out of the Immigration Policy Center connects the dots between the strategy of “attrition through deportation” and federal and state anti-immigrant proposals and explains how attrition through enforcement has gone from being a catchy phrase coined by immigration restrictionists to a frightening reality in many parts of the U.S.

Self-deportation and attrition through enforcement are not new ideas. The term “attrition” has been used by restrictionists since at least 2003. Attrition through enforcement is a deliberate comprehensive immigration-control strategy that aims to make everyday activities so difficult for unauthorized immigrants that they will decide to leave on their own, and future unauthorized immigrants will be deterred when they hear how difficult life is in the U.S.”

The strategy comes from national immigration restrictionist organizations, including the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR), Center for Immigration Studies (CIS), and Numbers USA. They have sought to market the idea of attrition through enforcement as a kinder, gentler alternative to the harsh, expensive, and unworkable strategy of mass deportation. They also appeal to those concerned with overblown budgets claiming that attrition will be less expensive than deporting 11 million people. They say they’re just enforcing current law, but in reality, they are creating new laws new penalties for violating those laws.

While attrition through enforcement might, at first, seem more reasonable than mass deportation, the goal is the same—make sure all unlawfully present immigrants leave the US, regardless of how long they’ve been here, how rooted they are in their community, and how many US citizen family members they have. The result has been undermining human rights, devastating families and communities, hurting local economies and placing unnecessary burdens on all Americans.

While not every state legislator who is legitimately concerned with unauthorized immigration or who introduces an immigration-related bill is promoting a national strategy of attrition through enforcement, it’s not too hard to see that some state laws are part of an organized strategy. Arizona’s SB1070 says right in the law that the “intent of this act is to make attrition through enforcement the public policy of all state and local government agencies in Arizona.”

State Senator Scott Beason of Alabama stated that his recently passed law “attacks every aspect of an illegal alien’s life” and is “designed to make it difficult for them to live here.”  Alabama’s state Representative Mickey Hammon said his law “was not designed to go out and arrest tremendous numbers of people. Most folks in the state illegally will self-deport and move to states that are supportive of large numbers of illegals coming to their state.”

The harsh anti-immigrant laws have had serious repercussions. In Alabama, for example, according to various reports, unauthorized parents took their kids out of school, they refuse to seek medical services, fear going to church, they don’t drive anywhere, their access to water service has been threatened. Some employers have refused to pay their workers, judges and court interpreters threatened to report suspected unauthorized immigrants.

Proponents of attrition through enforcement have made it clear that these are the intended consequences of the law. These are designed to make life in the state unbearable for unauthorized immigrants.

We need to ask ourselves whether this is the type of country we really want to be. Is “making a community so inhospitable that people will choose to leave” really the type of policy we want to support?  I think we can do better, and Congress must work to pass immigration reforms that truly address the underlying problems in the system and maintain our proud heritage as a nation of immigrants.

Michele Waslin
Immigration Impact 

The problem is, the issues that keep Latinos up at night—like double-digit unemployment rates, living at the poverty end of the wealth gap and having the highest high school dropout rates in the country—go well beyond immigration. Herein lies the challenge for President Obama. He must recast his connection with Latino voters beyond a narrow focus on immigration and engage Latinos as the multi-issue electorate they are.

It’s easy to see why Latinos have been typecast within the narrow frame of immigration. The vast majority are immigrants or the children or grandchildren of immigrants. In 2008 then-candidate Barack Obama used the issue to connect with Latinos by highlighting the importance of immigration reform. This strategy was wildly successful and netted him close to 70 percent of the Latino vote. Today that strategy is counterproductive. Latino voters are keenly aware that “La Promesa de Obama”—as his campaign pledge for comprehensive immigration reform became known—was not fulfilled. And now they have other priorities: according to the latest impreMedia-Latino Decisions tracking polls, economics have eclipsed immigration as their top concern. For Latinos, the economy and the related issue of education have come to demand the same level of attention that President Obama once gave immigration.

Since 2009 minority unemployment has been in the double digits. At its height in 2010, Latino unemployment was at
 13.9 percent; today it’s 11 percent. Latinos have been the hardest hit in the recession, and they have the steepest climb to recovery. According to the Pew Hispanic Center, Latino median wealth plummeted 66 percent between 2005 and 2009. The decrease in wealth nationally was the most acute among Latinos, leaving one-third of the community either with debt or no assets.

Latinos are losing not only their jobs, benefits and homes but their hard-earned position in the middle class. Within one generation families have gone from working class to middle class and back to working class again. The wealth gap between minorities and nonminorities is the largest since the Census Bureau began providing this information in 1984. The white-to-Latino ratio of median wealth in 2009 stood at 18 to 1, more than twice the ratio before the recession. The gap between rich and poor has also become a serious problem within the Latino community, with their wealth disparity the greatest of any group.

In addition to having experienced the steepest decrease in wealth, Latinos have the highest birthrates and the lowest levels of education. Latino dropout rates are triple those of whites and double those of African-Americans. Education is particularly important to Latinos because more than one-third are under 18. In 2008–09, in the two largest public school districts, New York City and Los Angeles, Latino children made up 41 percent and 74 percent, respectively, of incoming first graders.

At first glance it would seem that because of the magnitude of their economic losses and their grim educational position, Latinos would be the most punishing of the president’s policies. But the data suggest that Latinos want more government involvement, not less, making them unreceptive to the message of the GOP and particularly the Tea Party. During last summer’s debt debate, an impreMedia-Latino Decisions poll showed that
83 percent of Latino voters supported some sort of tax increase in the debt reduction plan. Forty-five percent supported a taxes-only route.

Even a majority of Latino Republicans preferred some taxation over a cuts-only approach to the deficit. For Latinos, economic well-being is intimately tied to the economic recovery of the nation; they are progressives who support a robust federal government. The proposal to create a National Infrastructure Bank to bring about job creation is exactly the type of policy that resonates with them.

The GOP has also failed to win the support of Latinos on education. The impreMedia-Latino Decisions polls show that 57 percent of Latino voters support President Obama and the Democrats’ education policy, which has emphasized early childhood education, school reforms and developing community partnerships. Republicans were seen as the better option by 20 percent and a disillusioned 14 percent lacked confidence in both parties.

Indeed, the Latino community’s most tangible achievements under the Obama administration are in the realm of education. The education gap between Latinos and non-Latinos shows clear signs of shrinkage. Dropout rates are decreasing, and from 2009 to 2010 Latino college enrollment grew 24 percent, an increase of 5 percent over the previous year.

And yet, despite recent comments by Jim Messina, President Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, Latino support is not a given for the president. In a December 2011 impreMedia-Latino Decisions poll, 54 percent of registered Latinos said they were certain to vote for Obama. This is a long way from the 70 percent of 2008. Tangible disillusionment was also apparent in the decreased rate of turnout among Latino voters in the 2010 midterm elections, the Pew Hispanic Center reported. In 2011 the president’s approval ratings among Latinos hovered in the 60 percent range. However, this aggregate figure combines “Strongly Approve” and “Somewhat Approve,” obscuring the fact that more than half of his approval is from the lukewarm “Somewhat Approve” category. The implication is grave, since participation is fueled by enthusiastic voters who have strong feelings about their candidate.

If the president is to get past his failed immigration pledge and reconnect with Latino voters, he must do two things: highlight the natural ideological affinities between himself and Latinos, and showcase the economic and educational programs he has implemented and will continue to promote. Simple electoral math puts Latinos at the forefront of the president’s re-election strategy in the 2012 election.

Latino voters make up at least 15 percent of the population in half of the top swing states—Colorado, Florida, New Mexico and Nevada. They are a crucial part of the electoral formula necessary to prevent President Obama from being the third Democratic president in history not to get a second term in office—and they deserve to have the full range of their concerns understood.

Victoria M. DeFrancesco Soto
Dr. VMDS 

Republished with that author’s permission from The Nation.

Tucson students protesting Chicano Studies cuts.

When the great Muhammad Ali was asked how many sit ups he did, he responded,  “I don’t count my sit-ups, I only start counting when it starts hurting, that is when I start counting, because then it really counts, that’s what makes you a champion.”

These words resonate in Tucson where Latina/o students are fighting for an education by sitting-in in the office of  Tucson Unified School District Superintendent of Schools John Pedicone, walking out of classes, demonstrating, and taking to the streets.

Students are dispelling the myth that Mexican Americans do not care about education; they have started counting because it hurts. They know the difference between being warehoused, sitting through classes where teachers go through the motions. They know when the subject matter is relevant; and the teachers believe in what they are teaching.

At my own campus at California State University Northridge students are mobilizing.  Up until now, a small minority protested the rising cost of tuition, which now tops $5,550 a year, promising to climb another 30 percent next year.

Because of the lack of accessibility to education, they are growing disillusioned with our system of government. They don’t believe the promises made by President Barack Obama during his State of the Union address. Desperate, many students are dropping out of school.  The straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back occurred this week.

CSU Chancellor Charles Reed issued a threat to all state campuses that any institution that exceeded its target enrollment by more than three percent would be docked $7 million.  The CSUN administration panicked and froze classes, not allowing needy students to enroll in classes, even when professors agreed to take them as an overload.

The result has been pandemonium. Many students are unable to get the requisite 12 units for financial and other scholarship aid. This action takes money out of needy students’ pockets; the tuition for 12 units and 19 units is the same. Graduation will  be deferred by a couple of years.  For administrators earning $120,000 – $350,000 annually it is no big deal. But for poor and middle-class students it is a big deal.

The freeze has forced many students to start counting.  It has dawned on them that they are being shut out of what the Tucson students are fighting for, a college education.  Conservatives have always maintained that everyone has an equal opportunity; tragically many poor people believed that the myth.

However, this fairytale is being debunked by what is happening in California’s community colleges. Once a safety net where students could attend college almost tuition free and could live close to home and work, this is no longer the case.

Although the fees are still affordable at the two-year colleges, the campuses have been flooded consequent to the pushdown of students who qualify for the University of California and the California State University systems but can’t afford it.  Consequently, the problem for community colleges is not so much tuition but the flood of students that have drowned them.

Filled beyond capacity their infrastructures have been inundated, and even when students are matriculated they face the impossible task of getting classes. This situation promises to worsen as the UC resorts to the vigorous recruiting of wealthy foreign and out of state students who are displacing residents.

If by this time, we are not counting, we should be because the hurt will worsen.

The challenge for students is to develop a strategy. It is not going to do us any good to say I told you so or to get angry.  We have to get even.  The reason the system will continue as if the crash never happened is because we did not get even.  Very few people have gone to jail, and the gaggle of thieves on Wall Street and government were not stigmatized.

Talk about class warfare, society differentiates between white and blue collar crime.  Pure and simple, we are complicit and let the big ones get away.

In Tucson, the rich benefit directly from the destruction of the Mexican American Studies program. Brutalizing immigrants and Latino students is part of the grand strategy to keep Mexicans in their place.

The assassination of nine-year old Brisenia Flores in her home sent a chilling to other Mexicans. Shawna Forde, who had ties with the Minutemen and FAIR, the Federation For American Immigration Reform, led the assassins, but the truth be told, the Tucson white elite were complicit, they benefited.

Let me be clear, the purpose for the destruction of the MAS program was to intimidate other minorities. African, Native and other Americans were put on notice that they will suffer a similar fate if they protest too loudly. They heard about Mexican American students being forced to stand by while the banned books were boxed and carted away. Students watched in silence, they sobbed.  Books had become important to them.

In the past I have spoken about Adolph Hitler’s “The Big Lie.” In that instance, the Jews and the gypsies were scapegoated.  Hitler used hate to rally the German people.  In a similar way, the anti-Mexican and anti-foreign hysteria helps conceal the criminality of ALEC (the American Legislative Exchange Council) that owns the Arizona state legislature and SALC (the Southern Arizona Leadership Council) that controls public and private institutions in southern Arizona. Superintendent Pedicone rose through SALC’s ranks and was its vice-president.

Republican politicians have exploited the hatred of Mexicans, using it to their economic and political advantage. The same goes for the Koch Brothers, the Tea Party, the minutemen, and the prison and gun industries, not to mention the bankers who launder money made from selling arms to the Mexican cartels.

Politicos such as Attorney General Tom Horne and Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction John Huppenthal have built their careers by spreading lies and bashing Mexicans.  Tolerating them is like speaking respectfully of Hitler. ALEC and SALC leaders are criminals and child abusers. We should not abet their malfeasance by being respectful.

Some readers will say, “Rudy, you are going too far!” But am I going too far? Have they ever seen a 14-year-old strung out on drugs, or a teenager that has a difficult time in explaining his or her thoughts?  Who has created these conditions? Who is to blame?

Cal State Northridge students protesting budget cuts leading to enrollment cuts.

I once told my wife when she was getting frustrated tutoring a second grader, “if Jorge does not learn to read, he will end up in jail.” She started to cry. Have you ever met a second grader who was bad?

Because of my early parochial education, I have a strong sense of right and wrong. For me, “sometimes there is no other side.”   I have a mind, and as my teachers would tell me, “use it.” It is idiotic to say we are all equal in this country, it is a myth. In my vernacular, the word exploitation is the willful taking advantage of the poor.  It is an abomination and cannot be tolerated

The wonderful quality about students is that many have retained the sense to be outraged at injustice.  Reasoned moral outrage corrects the imperfections of society and achieves justice for all. And, that is precisely why the TUSD cabal is banning books. ALEC, SALC, the Tea Party and their gaggle can’t handle the truth, it is subversive.

William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was banned. Why? It is threatening because it talks about colonialism. It is about the Earls of Southampton, investors in the Virginia Company. At court they support a Protestant-expansionist foreign policy. King James opposes it because he does not want trouble with Spain. Eventually this leads James to executed Sir Walter Raleigh.

The Tempest is told through the eyes of Caliban, a native of a colonized island. It is about his accusations against the colonial governor, Prospero.

Prospero is the colonizer; Caliban, the colonized.  Prospero looks at Caliban as being genetically inferior. The story betrays Prospero’s colonial mentality; he has little respect for the natives or the environment. His demeanor resembles that of Superintendent Pedicone and the white establishment of Tucson who regard Mexicans, whether born on this side or the other side of the border as aliens.

Rather than use history or literature to correct the imperfections of society, Huppenthal and the majority of the TUSD board chose to censor books. The Tucson cabal believes that it can hide the truth, and thus keep Mexicans in their place. It is similar to the efforts of many former confederate states to erase any mention of slavery as if it had never existed.  According to them, African Americans were happy under slavery. It is similar to the efforts of neo-Nazis to deny the holocaust or the Turks’ denial of the Armenian genocide.

Their view is if people don’t know about it, it did not happen. Consequently, Mexicans can continue to drop out of school, go to prison, work at minimum wage jobs, and believe in fairy tales.   If they learn, they may start counting.

Rodolfo F. Acuña

Rodolfo F. Acuña is the founding Chairperson of the Chicana/o Studies Department at California State University, Northridge and author of Occupied America.

GOP presidential candidate Mitt Romney stole a page from the restrictionists’ playbook this week when he promoted the idea of “self-deportation” during a presidential debate. “If people don’t get work here,” Romney stated, “they’re going to self-deport to a place where they can get work.” Rather than initiate a constructive solution to our nation’s immigration problems, Romney is jumping in bed with immigration restrictionist groups who support policies that tear American families and communities apart, devastate local economies, and place unnecessary burdens on U.S. citizens and lawful immigrants.

Romney’s use of the term “self-deportation” is not at all surprising given his recent collaboration with Kris Kobach, the current Secretary of State of Kansas who continues to serve as chief legal counsel to the Immigration Reform Law Institute (IRLI), an arm of the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR).

Kobach, the self-professed author of several state and local immigration-control bills, advised Romney on immigration during his 2008 presidential bid and has long-promoted the strategy of “attrition through enforcement”— the immigration-control strategy to drive away the unauthorized population by making their lives so miserable that they will choose to “deport themselves” rather than remain in the U.S.

“Attrition through enforcement” laws—like Arizona’s SB1070 and Alabama’s HB56—were explicitly designed to interfere with the everyday activities of immigrants and go far beyond denying unauthorized immigrants work. These laws deny access to housing, school, work, and even water and electricity to anyone who can’t prove legal status.  The laws’ supporters have made it clear that making people miserable and encouraging them to leave the state is the intended consequence of their policies.

It’s troubling that a serious Presidential candidate would adopt the code words of extremist immigration control organizations and propose that making people’s lives miserable so that they’ll leave is an acceptable policy goal.  By using the term “self-deportation,” Romney is making it clear that he is on board with restrictionists groups’ strategy to force all unauthorized immigrants to leave the U.S., regardless of the time they have spent here, U.S. citizen family members, and their years of tax contributions.

Doesn’t this country deserves to hear more detailed and thoughtful approaches from politicians and policy makers—approaches that offer a way forward rather than divisive and punitive so-call “solutions” to unauthorized immigration?

Michele Waslin
Immigration Impact 

A new report issued this month by the Greater Houston Partnership (GHP), a business advocacy organization, confirms that legalization of unauthorized workers would result in those workers earning higher wages and paying more taxes. Potential Tax Revenues from Unauthorized Workers in Houston’s Economy uses data from the Pew Hispanic Center to estimate the number of unauthorized immigrant workers, by industry, in the Houston area. Then, assuming that legalized workers would earn the prevailing wage in their industry, GHP estimates their projected incomes to which it applies the standard tax rate.

GHP estimates that, if all unauthorized workers in the Houston region were legalized and they and their employers paid Social Security, Medicare, unemployment insurance, and federal income taxes, additional tax revenues would exceed $1.4 billion. The report also demonstrates that even with less than 100% legalization, there are still significant potential revenues. For example, if only 25% acquire legal status, an additional $356.1 million in tax revenues would be generated.

This study examines an important question about what legalizing the currently undocumented would do. However, it does have a few problems stemming from some of the assumptions made about the undocumented population.

The report assumes unauthorized workers and their employers are not currently paying any taxes and that only legalization would require them to pay taxes. However, we know that many undocumented workers and their employers already pay Social Security, Medicare, unemployment, and federal income taxes. Once legalized, many would likely get better jobs with higher wages, not the prevailing wage, meaning they would pay even more in taxes than the report estimates.

The report should also include sales and property taxes which are already paid by unauthorized immigrants right now. The gains from these taxes would also likely increase because legalized workers making higher incomes would spend more on consumption and pay more tax.

Despite those concerns, the new GHP report adds to the literature that legalization is an economic plus for our communities.

Hopefully, this report will encourage more people to look at what immigration brings to an economy as opposed to the usual discussion over how much unauthorized immigrants cost—discussions which often cite dubious sources. Conveniently absent from many of those discussions is the fact that these immigrants are workers, taxpayers, and consumers who benefit the economy in significant ways. More importantly, in contrast to spending billions of dollars on mass deportation, legalization would lead to higher tax revenues and higher consumption which boosts the economy.

Michele Waslin
Immigration Impact 

As if Mitt Romney’s repeated promise to veto the DREAM Act wasn’t alienating enough, advocates warn that Romney’s continued relationship with famed anti-immigrant hawk Kris Kobach is killing future support from Latino voters, especially in key states like New Mexico, Nevada, Colorado and Florida. Kobach, co-author of Arizona and Alabama’s extreme immigration enforcement laws, appeared in South Carolina Monday night to spin for the Romney campaign following the GOP debate.

Following Kobach’s endorsement of Gov. Mitt Romney last week, the Romney campaign issued a statementaccepting Kobach’s endorsement and supporting his leadership on extreme immigration enforcement last in Arizona and South Carolina. Now, however, with Kobach actually appearing on Romney’s campaign trail, advocates say Kobach will damage Romney’s image among Latino voters.

Dee Dee Garcia Blase of the grassroots Republican Latino group Somos Republicans said “Romney committed political suicide” when he welcomed Kobach’s endorsement. Outspoken immigration advocate Congressman Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) called Kobach’s affiliation with the Romney campaign “appalling” and characterized Kobach as the “Dark Lord of the anti-immigration movement” on a teleconference. And earlier this month, Hispanic Leadership Fund’s Mario Lopez said Romney’s approach to immigration was hurting him as a candidate and the Republican party in general.

Kris Kobach

As previously reported by the Southern Poverty Law Center, Kris Kobach has built a long and varied career out of attacking immigrants—first in the Bush Administration targeting legal immigrants from Muslim and Arab countries and later as the architect of city ordinances and state laws targeting unauthorized, mostly Latino immigrants.

But the addition of Kobach to Romney’s campaign is just the latest in Romney’s hard line on immigration. Romney again indicated yesterday that he would veto the DREAM Act should it come up in Congress, arguing that “aiding those eligible under the DREAM Act”—a bill that puts undocumented students who were brought here by their parents on a path towards citizenship—“would only encourage more people to enter the country without documentation.”

Appearing tough on immigration may not hurt Romney during the GOP primary, but come general election time, many wonder how Romney plans to win the Latino vote. Matt Barreto of the University of Washington said that Romney will not win the presidency without at least 40% of the Latino vote, a vote Congressman Luis Gutierrez believes Romney will not receive given his current approach to immigration.

“There is no route to the White House that does not go through a Latino neighborhood. Any winner in either party needs a significant proportion of Latino voters. When you say you want millions of us to leave the country … we will vote against you.”

When it comes to immigration, American voters have established that they want solutions not smears. Politicians, however, continue to read from a different playbook written by a narrow group of voters and commentators.

Seth Hoy
Immigration Impact 

Romney’s hostile stance against even immigrant children who arrived here when they were very young does not sit well with Latinos, to say the least.

Like all voting groups, Latino registered voters represent a heterogeneous bunch of individuals with diverse political viewpoints and backgrounds, from liberal to moderate to conservative. This includes Chicanos from East Los Angeles, Puerto Ricans from the Bronx, and Cubans from “Little Havana” in Miami.

However, as a voting bloc, Latino voters tend to support the rights of undocumented immigrants and vote Democrat at a higher rate compared to all registered voters. For instance, according to a recent poll from the Pew Hispanic Center, while 42 percent of all Latino registered voters favor a pathway to citizenship for the 11 million undocumented immigrants in this country, only 24 percent of all registered voters support this position. Also, in a hypothetical matchup between President Obama and Romney for the 2012 election, an overwhelming 68 percent of all Latino voters favor Obama, while only 23 percent support Romney.

Obama gave Romney an opening with Latinos, as 59 percent of Latinos disapprove of Obama’s inhumane deportation policy of breaking up families. But Romney didn’t take it.

Instead, he has tacked to the right on the immigration issue. He has denounced Texas Gov. Rick Perry for approving in-state tuition for immigrant students, claiming this represents a magnet for illegal immigration. He recently vowed to veto the DREAM Act, which would enable children of undocumented immigrants to become citizens if they go to college or serve in the military. And he opposes any amnesty for undocumented immigrants, despite their daily contributions to this country.

All undocumented immigrants, Romney says, should return to their country of birth and then get in the back of the line if they want to re-enter the United States legally.

These views do not endear Romney to Latinos, who represent a growing — and perhaps pivotal — voter bloc.

Romney’s anti-immigrant stance may be helping him win the Republican nomination but is spoiling his chance to win the White House. He may have plenty of time on his hands, after November, to ponder that irony.

Alvaro Huerta

Alvaro Huerta, Ph.D., is a visiting scholar at UCLA’s Chicano Studies Research Center.

Republished with the author’s permission from The Progressive.

Friday, the administration took another important step toward fixing one of the most notorious problems with our broken immigration system—the 3 and 10 year bars. The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) announced Friday that it was filing a notice of intent to change a rule which would streamline the application process for many relatives of U.S. citizens currently eligible for permanent resident status, thereby minimizing the amount of time that applicants would have to be away from their families before being admitted into the United States.

Under current rules, thousands of people who qualify for legal status must leave the U.S. to obtain their permanent resident status, but as soon as they leave, they are immediately barred from re-entering the U.S. for 3 or 10 years because of their unlawful presence in the United States. Many are eligible for a family unity waiver (which waives the bar to admission if extreme hardship to a spouse or parent can be established), but the way the law is currently implemented, the waiver can only be applied for from overseas That process can often take many months or even years, deterring otherwise eligible applicants from applying for legal status who instead remain unauthorized in the U.S. rather than risk separation from their families. (For more information on 3 and 10 year bar, see this fact sheet by the Immigration Policy Center.)

Under the proposed “in-country processing” rule change, spouses and children of U.S. citizens who apply for residence, but need a family unity waiver to re-enter the United States, will be allowed to apply for the waiver without leaving the U.S. The new rule seeks to help only spouses and children of U.S. citizens, not spouses and children of legal permanent residents, and does not alter or revise the eligibility standards for green cards or waivers. The proposed new rule would only affect persons whose sole need for a waiver is based on having lived in the U.S. without authorization (persons seeking a waiver on other humanitarian grounds must still leave the U.S.)

This “in-country processing” proposal means that USCIS could grant a provisional waiver here in the U.S, and many applicants would not face the same waiting period outside the country.  It is important to note that applicants would still be required to depart from the U.S. before receiving final approval and legal status.  But eligible immigrants will be encouraged to go through the process rather than remain unlawfully in the U.S.

Although the actual rule change will not go into effect for several months—a “notice of intent” to change the rules governing the adjudication of waivers for the 3 and 10 year bars was published in today’s Federal Register and will be followed by a call for comments and a comment period—the revision will make a huge difference in the lives of many U.S. families.

Applicants currently face long separations from their U.S. citizen family members as well as dangerous situations while they wait.  Many waivers are processed in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, a city wracked with violence over the last several years.  This small step of allowing these family members to apply for and receive waivers inside the U.S. may save them from long, potentially dangerous separations from their families.

Some may argue that this rule change is an example of the president overstepping boundaries and bypassing Congress to reform the immigration system. These claims are wrong. While Congress writes the laws—including the 3 and 10 year bars—the executive branch decides how to execute the laws through rules and regulations which align with their priorities and current agency resources.

The waivers are currently processed overseas because of an administrative rule, and the current administration has every right to change that rule, just as all administrations before them.

The Obama administration is proposing a rule change that will partially ameliorate one of the most contradictory rules of immigration law, thereby encouraging legal immigration and helping to keep U.S. families together.

Michele Waslin
Immigration Impact 

Photo by Kevin Luu.

Secure Communities program partners local police with federal immigration authorities. Whenever an individual is booked in a participating state, their fingerprints and immigration status is sent to the federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) database. Some states, like Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts have opted out of the program because it encourages racial profiling and discourages people from calling the police even in emergency situations for fear of immigration-related consequences, including the possibility of deportation. Although California is signed up to participate, San Francisco, San Jose, and a couple other cities have tried to opt out.

“The program started under the Bush administration and has been significantly enhanced and expanded under the Obama administration,” said Pasquarella. “Basically it’s an immigration enforcement program that is aimed at identifying people who are deportable through the criminal justice system.”

Pasadena Police Chief Phillip Sanchez

According to Pasquarella, any person who is picked up by the police or comes into contact with police and is booked into a city or county law enforcement facility and gets their fingerprints taken during the booking process, their fingerprints and information is then instantly shared with ICE. It goes into a centralized database that keeps information about everybody, so any one of us who have been fingerprinted are in these databases.

“If you’re an American citizen or someone who has had any contact with Immigration then they have a lot of information about you,” Pasquarella said. “If you are an undocumented immigrant, ICE officials will tell the local police to put an immigration hold on you, then interview you about your immigration status and can put you through deportation proceedings.”

ICE maintains that this program is needed to catch the worst of the worst, basically undocumented immigrants who commit serious crimes. Pasquarella explained that the reality is Secure Communities has not only identified those types of people, it has identified everyone who come through the criminal justice system, a lot of whom have done nothing wrong. She said this has unjust consequences on everyone’s civil liberties, on community-police relations, and that ICE is utilizing a lot of resources on a program that ultimately breaks up families and harms our communities.

“From my perspective, Pasadena Police Department doesn’t concern itself with community members’ immigration status,” said Sanchez. “So my officers don’t come up to your door and say, ‘Where are you from?’ or ‘Are you in this country legally?’”

The Pasadena Police Department participates in Secure Communities, according to Sanchez, because it is mandated to do so by the state of California and the federal government and because Pasadena’s  Police Department uses a centralized county-administrated booking system.

“If you are arrested and booked at the Pasadena jail, we use a system called Live Scan, which is administered by the LA County Sheriff’s Department and instantly shares your fingerprints and information with the federal government,” said Sanchez. “We can only hold someone for 72 hours, so if there are holds or mandates to hold them by ICE, they have to be transferred to an LA County jail.”

Sanchez insisted that the police department he runs enforces the law without concern for anyone’s immigration status. He said that there are different dynamics to any situation and there’s not one blanket effort to target or profile anyone as far as the Pasadena Police Department is concerned.

Sanchez is unaware of resources at the department that have been used to create a pattern or trend of someone, and that he doesn’t participate in profiling or identifying trends in respects to someone’s immigration status. Based on statistics from the federal government, Sanchez reported that about 487,000 people were deported last year.

Sanchez thinks one of the unintended consequences of 9/11 and information sharing might have been Secure Communities and the attempt to increase information sharing between state, local, and federal might have resulted in this outcome.

“It’s important to note that California was the first to sign a statewide agreement with the federal government to participate in Secure Communities,” Bergquist said during his opening remarks. “Though I must say it’s very gratifying to hear what Chief Sanchez is saying. We (CHIRLA) are based in LA. We hear a lot of the same from Chief Beck. I’m not saying it doesn’t happen here, but we’re seeing more potential profiling in places like Alabama and Arizona where this program is also used.”

Berquist estimates that of the couple hundred folks that had immigration retainers placed on them by ICE in Pasadena in fiscal year 2009-10, maybe one or two of those folks were arrested for whatever reason but to no fault of the Pasadena Police Department they could have wound up in ICE custody though they were not the kind of people that ICE claims to be looking for.

“The problem with Secure Communities is it incentivizes profiling and creates problems for mistaken arrests,” Berquist concluded.

Justin Chapman
ACLU Pasadena/Foothills

Using the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2010 Current Population Survey, the Pew Hispanic Center estimated that:

• 35% of unauthorized adult immigrants have resided in the U.S. for 15 years or more (a number that doubled since 2000)
• 28% for 10 to 14 years
• 22% for 5 to 9 years
• and 15% for less than five years (a number that has fallen by half since 2000)

Pew also found that nearly half of all undocumented immigrants in the U.S. (4.7 million) are parents of minor children. Additionally, Pew estimates that roughly 9 million people in the U.S. live in a mixed-status home—meaning that at least one immigrant parents is undocumented and at least one child is U.S. born.

After living in the U.S. for 10 years or more, many in mixed-status homes, it’s reasonable to assume that these unauthorized immigrants are integrated into American society—they live here, they send their children to school here, they go to church here, they pay taxes here. The idea that harsh state immigration enforcement policies are “working”—that is, forcing unauthorized immigrants to return home—just doesn’t seem to hold water.

As Pew’s report concludes, the data “reflects the fact that relatively few long-duration unauthorized immigrants have returned to their countries of origin.” While some may return to their home countries, others likely migrate to neighboring states, states where they have family or can find work.

Clearly, the current enforcement-only approach to addressing immigration isn’t working. In fact, state immigration laws like Alabama’s HB 56 are actually hurting states’ economies—wasting scant resources, burdening state businesses, stirring distrust in communities and creating a hostile environment that will likely steer foreign investments elsewhere.

What we need, say experts like Doug Massey of Princeton University, is an earned path to legalization—apath that even conservative voters think is necessary. According to Massey, given the recent post-recessiondip in migration from Mexico and the apparent lack of self-deportation of unauthorized immigrants who have long resided in the U.S., “there is really only one thing that remains to be accomplished … the creation of a pathway to legalization for long-term undocumented residents.”

Until then, Congress and states legislatures will continue to waste time, resources and money on enforcement measures that do nothing to address the realities of our broken and outdated immigration system.

Seth Hoy
Immigration Impact 

Photo by Nathan Gibbs.