Category: immigration
Learning from Joe Paterno
By Alan Bean
According to the Christian Science Monitor, Penn State University stands to lose a large chunk of the institution’s $1.8 billion endowment to the victims of Jerry Sandusky’s abusive behavior. A scathing report issued by a group headed by former FBI director Louis Freeh alleges that Football coach Joe Paterno and other senior Penn State officials “concealed critical facts” about Jerry Sandusky’s child abuse because they feared negative publicity.
Part of the problem, I suspect, is that Penn State football, symbolized by the revered Joe Paterno, was such a central part of life in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania that any threat to the reputation of the institution, the Nittany Lions, or the iconic coach who symbolized the university and its beloved football team was doggedly resisted. It wasn’t just that Paterno had won two national championships; he was part of America’s love affair with college football. Paterno pacing the sidelines was a familiar and reassuring part of Saturday afternoons for decades. You couldn’t tell the truth about Jerry Sandusky without making Joe Paterno look bad; you couldn’t damage Paterno’s reputation without besmirching Penn State University; and you couldn’t drag the alma mater through the mud without driving a stake through the heart of Keystone State. Everything was connected. (more…)
How Immigration Reform Got Caught in the Deportation Dragnet
Things have only gotten worse since Seth Wessler published this piece in Colorlines almost two years ago. From Bill Clinton to Barack Obama, proponents of comprehensive immigration reform (CIR) have believed that tough deportation policies provided the quid pro quo concession that would bring immigration hawks to the bargaining table. It hasn’t worked. This misbegotten strategy has simply ensured that hardliners provided the harsh narrative driving the immigration debate. Minor tweaks to American immigration policy (like president Obama’s recent announcement that undocumented adolescents would no longer be targeted for deportation) aren’t sufficient. We need a thoroughgoing critique of existing policy and an alternative vision rooted in compassion and common sense. The status quo has got to go. AGB
How Immigration Reform Got Caught in the Deportation Dragnet
Thursday, October 7 2010,
On the night that Shahed Hossain left his family’s house in a Haltom City, Texas, to drive to Laredo, his mother, Habiba Hossain, cooked dinner—chicken and rice and okra picked from the garden. She piled her son’s plate high and watched him eat. Then, she took his Bangladeshi passport from a drawer and handed it to him, leaving his green card safely stored away. The 21-year-old had a penchant for losing things and a green card is not a thing to lose. She hurried him out the door and into the white utility van in the driveway where his boss waited.
“I’ll see him in a week,” she thought. Like every other time he’d set off for work trips all over Texas, she figured, her younger son would return to that house where he grew up with his brother and his parents and the dog.
But that night was the last time Shahed Hossain’s mother would see him free in United States, the last time she’d have a chance to worry he’d lose anything. Six days later, Hossain was locked up in a privately run immigration detention center near the U.S.-Mexico border. He spent more than a year there, a period he’s tried to forget, before he was shackled, loaded onto a plane and flown to Dhaka, Bangladesh. (more…)
An Innocent Question
By Alan Bean
“Is there any way that I could get a permit that would let me stay in this country?”
The question came from a young man who, the day before, had been nabbed by Border Patrol officers as he waded the Rio Grande River. Like most of the men in the courtroom, the questioner was short, thin and young. I guessed his weight at 120 pounds, but it could have been less.
Like the thirty-five men and women standing with him in the magistrate court on the fourth floor of the federal courthouse in McAllen, Texas, the man asking the question was pleading guilty to a charge of entering the United States illegally. Most of the defendants had been deported on multiple occasions, but this young man was apprehended by Border Patrol on his first attempt to enter the country illegally.
And yet he asked an innocent question; innocent in the sense that children are innocent. He meant no one any harm. He was just looking for a chance to earn a decent living. He was ready to work long and hard. He was eager to contribute to the greater good. He entered the United States for the purest of motives, and yet he was being prosecuted as a criminal. (more…)
Tom Berry: “Ten Years of Waste, Immigrant Crackdowns and New Drug Wars”
If you want to know why America’s immigration policy is so badly broken, this article by Tom Berry is a great starting place. “Continuing down the same course of border security buildups, drug wars and immigration crackdowns will do nothing to increase security or safety,” Berry says. “It will only keep border policy on the edge – teetering without direction or strategy.”
This article, originally published in Truthout, is an edited excerpt of the policy report Berry produced for the Center for International Policy. Berry appeared on NPR’s Fresh Air in 2009 and the horrors he discussed with Terry Gross have only worsened in the ensuing three years. AGB
Border Security After 9/11: Ten Years of Waste, Immigrant Crackdowns and New Drug Wars
Prior to the September 11 terrorist attacks, the term “border security” was rarely used. Today, however, it is both a fundamental goal of US domestic security and the defining paradigm for border operations. Despite the federal government’s routine declarations of its commitment to securing the border, neither Congress
nor the executive branch has ever clearly defined the term “border security.”
Border security constitutes the single largest line item in the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) budget. Nonetheless, DHS has failed to develop a border security strategy that complements US domestic and national security objectives. DHS has not even attempted to delineate benchmarks that would measure the security of the border or specify exactly how the massive border security buildup has increased homeland security.
In its strategic plan, DHS does promise: “We will reduce the likelihood that terrorists can enter the United States. We will strengthen our border security and gain effective control of our borders.” And DHS Secretary Janet Napolitano assured us last year that, as a result of new border security spending by the Obama administration, “the Southwest border is more secure than ever before.”
Since 2003, Homeland Security and the Justice Department have opened spigots of funding for an array of border security operations. These include commitments for 18-foot steel fencing, high-tech surveillance, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), increased prosecutions of illegal border crossers and new deployments of the Border Patrol and National Guard.
Yet the federal government’s continued expressions of its commitment to border security only serve to highlight the shortcomings of this commitment and to spark opposition to long- overdue immigration reform. “Secure the border” – a political demand echoed by immigration restrictionists, grassroots anti-immigrant activists and a chorus of politicians – now resounds as a battle cry against the federal government and liberal immigration reformers. These border security hawks charge that the federal government is failing to meet its responsibility to secure the border, pointing to continued illegal crossings by immigrants and drug traffickers. Border sheriffs, militant activists and state legislatures have even started taking border security into their own hands.
The post-9/11 imperative of securing “the homeland” set off a widely played game of one-upmanship that has had Washington, border politicians and sheriffs, political activists and vigilantes competing to be regarded as the most serious and hawkish on border security. The emotions and concerns unleashed by the 9/11 attacks exacerbated the long-running practice of using the border security issue to further an array of political agendas – immigration crackdowns, border pork-barrel projects, drug wars, states’ rights and even liberal immigration reform. Yet these new commitments to control the border have been largely expressions of public diplomacy rather than manifestations of new thinking about the border. (more…)
Supreme Court rejects key portions of Arizona immigration law
By Alan Bean
The Supreme Court handed the Obama administration a big win by striking down the most egregious portions of Arizona’s controversial immigration law. Stat law enforcement can determine the immigration status of detained individuals, but cannot stop and question a person on the street simply because they suspect that person may be undocumented.
Although state police officers have a greenlight to determine the immigration status of detained persons, this merely transfers this common practice from ICE, a federal agency, to state and local law enforcement. From the standpoint of the detained individual, it hardly matters whether your status is being checked by ICE officials or by a state official–the result is the same.
Arizona won some state’s rights points, in other words, but the plight of undocumented persons (and those who merely look, by virtue of language, accent and skin-hair color, as if they might be documented) hasn’t changed on iota. Under the all-but-universal Secure Communities program, local law enforcement officials are already required to place an ICE hold on any person they detain for whatever reason. The feds will then run a check and determine whether the individual is subject to deportation.
Secure Communities is well understood in the Latino community, but Anglos hardly know the program exists because, well, they don’t have to worry about it. As a result, some Anglo reporters may interpret today’s ruling as a step toward more stringent immigration practices. It isn’t.
Few understand that few of the supposedly dangerous criminals we deport every year have ever been convicted of a violence-related crime. In the federal system, any conviction stands proxy for future dangerousness.
The good news from today’s ruling is that local and state police officers will not have the right (or the obligation) to stop and question a person suspected of being Latino. This policy, if upheld, would have been a wholesale validation of racial profiling, regardless of what Arizona governor Jan Brewer has to say to the contrary. In the absence of criminal behavior, physical appearance, accent, and the use of non-standard English would have been the only cues that could lead an officer to suspect undocumented status. In other words, Arizona wanted to legalize George Zimmerman-style hunches rooted in ethnic and racial factors and the Supreme Court said no. America just dodged a bullet.
Supreme Court upholds key part of Arizona for now; strikes down other provisions
By Robert Barnes, Updated: Monday, June 25, 1:26 PM
The Washington Post
But the ruling also in part vindicated the Obama administration, with the court rejecting three provisions that the federal government opposed.
The court ruled that Arizona cannot make it a misdemeanor for immigrants to fail to carry identification that says whether they are in the United States legally; cannot make it a crime for undocumented immigrants to apply for a job; and cannot arrest someone based solely on the suspicion that the person is in this country illegally.
The court also said the part of the law it upheld — requiring officers to check the immigration status of those they detain and reasonably believe to be illegal immigrants — could be subject to additional legal challenges once it is implemented.
The other major decision of the court’s term — the constitutionality of President Obama’s health-care law — will come Thursday, on the final day of the term.
In a statement Monday, Obama said he was “pleased that the Supreme Court has struck down key provisions of Arizona’s immigration law.” He added that the decision makes clear “that Congress must act on comprehensive immigration reform,” since a “patchwork of state laws is not a solution to our broken immigration system.” At the same time, Obama said, he remains “concerned about the practical impact” of the part of the law that was allowed to stand.
“No American should ever live under a cloud of suspicion just because of what they look like,” Obama said. “Going forward, we must ensure that Arizona law enforcement officials do not enforce this law in a manner that undermines the civil rights of Americans, as the Court’s decision recognizes.”
Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney, for his part, issued a statement that did not comment on the specifics of the ruling but instead said the decision “underscores the need for a President who will lead on this critical issue and work in a bipartisan fashion to pursue a national immigration strategy.”
Obama “has failed to provide any leadership on immigration,” the former Massachusetts governor said.
Romney did not speak to reporters accompanying him Monday on a campaign trip to Arizona, and aides refused to say whether he agrees with the Supreme Court’s ruling or even whether he supports Arizona’s immigration policy.
“The governor supports the states’ rights to craft immigration laws when the federal government has failed to do so,” spokesman Rick Gorka said. “That’s all we’re going to say on this issue.”
Why Obama changed course on immigration
By Alan Bean
Kung Li’s latest article in Facing South underscores the foolishness of believing that comprehensive immigration reform would be realized as soon as Obama and the Democrats proved they were serious about securing the border.
Getting tough simply created an appetite on the right for yet more bodies on the border, ever greater deportation stats, and an ever-expanding role for local law enforcement.
No matter how far to the right Obama moved on the immigration issue, his conservative opponents had no choice but to raise the ante.
The only way to produce credible and comprehensive immigration reform is to humanize the problem. Obama’s “we’re only deporting the worst of the worst” stance was wrongheaded and counterproductive from the drop.
First, we aren’t deporting the worst of the worst.
The federal court system uses any past felony violation as a proxy for “dangerousness” whether or not the offense involved violence or the threat of violence. Instead, federal officials are examining the immigration status of every person apprehended by local law enforcement for any reason. The assumption is that undocumented residents who have a criminal record of any kind are a threat to public safety. In most cases, the government has no good reason to believe the folks we are shipping back to Mexico are dangerous criminals.
The Obama administration was simply jacking up its deportation statistics in the unfounded hope that a show of toughness at the border would induce Republicans to embrace genuine immigration reform. When ill-informed voters hear that 400,000 dangerous criminals have been deported, they view all undocumented persons with fear and suspicion.
Republicans will oppose any measure proposed by the Obama administration unless it has overwhelming bipartisan support. The president extended an olive branch to the DREAM Act community because he realized, finally, that his original tactic could do nothing but fail.
On immigration, cutting the ties between enforcement and legalization
Kung Li
Facing South
June 22, 2012
The cover of Time Magazine released on June 14 featured Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Jose Antonio Vargas and 35 other undocumented immigrants. The next day, Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano issued a memorandum that will, when implemented, grant deferred status and possibly work authorization to between 800,000 and 1.4 million undocumented people who meet age, education, and criminal history criteria. President Obama stepped out later that afternoon into the Rose Garden to add some Presidential love — if not an executive order — to the policy. It was a significant shift for someone who had, a year earlier, insisted it would be inappropriate for him to do exactly what he is now doing. (more…)
Will demographic trends doom the GOP?
By Alan Bean
No matter how depressing present political realities may be, Democrats look to the future with confidence. By mid-century, they say, America will be a majority-minority nation and that can only help the left.
Jamelle Bouie questions this reasoning on two counts: Republicans could win back the most prosperous sector of the Latino community by returning to the moderate immigration policies of George W. Bush; and, as minorities are absorbed into the affluent mainstream, their resistance to conservative politics will diminish.
In other words, future trends can never be predicted with confidence, especially when we’re gazing 37 years down the road.
This “the future is ours” rhetoric should make genuine reformers cringe. We can’t get locked into the culture war categories of the present hour. Between 1950 and 1970, Democrats and Republicans switched sides on civil rights. It is hard to believe that the Republican Party on display during the primary election season could move to the left on anything; but stranger things have happened in American politics. If public sentiment shifts (as it always does) politicians will shift along with it. Reformers should be trying to nudge both parties in the direction of compassion and common sense, even when it feels silly. Life is full of surprises.
The worst thing that could happen would be for Democrats to eschew the hard work of rethinking the entire progressive narrative because “we are bound to start winning sooner or later”. Democrats have been on the wrong side of plenty of issues in recent memory (think the war on drugs, mass incarceration and the deregulation of the financial sector), and the blue team will continue to get things wrong if they misread the writing on the wall.
The tepid politics of triangulation has been weighed in the balance and found wanting.
Nothing in public life is inevitable. Change is always hard work. Justice demands courage. Patience is a virtue; complacency is not.
The Democrats’ Demographic Dreams
June 14, 2012
If Democrats agree on anything, it’s that they will eventually be on the winning side. The white Americans who tend to vote Republican are shrinking as a percentage of the population while the number of those who lean Democratic—African Americans and other minorities—is rapidly growing. Slightly more than half of American infants are now nonwhite. By 2050, the U.S. population is expected to increase by 117 million people, and the vast majority—82 percent of the 117 million—will be immigrants or the children of immigrants. In a little more than 30 years, the U.S. will be a “majority-minority” country. By 2050, white Americans will no longer be a solid majority but the largest plurality, at 46 percent. African Americans will drop to 12 percent, while Asian Americans will make up 8 percent of the population. The number of Latinos will rise to nearly a third of all Americans. (more…)
Obama says no to mass deportation
By Alan Bean
In a major development, the Obama administration has decided to enforce key provisions of the failed DREAM Act essentially by presidential fiat. Young people who came to the United States as children, who have graduated from high school and have a clean criminal record, will be allowed to remain in the United States. The plan does not include a pathway to citizenship, but qualifying applicants will receive two-year work visas that can be renewed indefinitely.
Although this plan does not give the immigrant rights movement everything it wants (this is no substitute for comprehensive reform), it means that 800,000 young people are no longer targeted for deportation.
President Obama is calculating that, like his recent support for marriage equality, his softened position on deportation will help him more than it hurts. It will certainly raise his prospects with Latino voters who are far more likely to show up on election day now that the administration has addressed the mass deportation issue.
In the process, Obama has handed Mitt Romney a potential campaign issue. But Republicans will have to think carefully before accusing the administration of introducing de facto “amnesty” contrary to the express wishes of Congress. Demonizing “illegal aliens” has worked well for the conservative movement, but public opinion could shift in a more progressive direction simply because somebody, finally, is making the case for compassion and common sense.
An update to the article below can be found here.
Administration plan could spare hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants from deportation
By Associated Press,
Friday, June 15,
WASHINGTON —
WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will stop deporting and begin granting work permits to younger illegal immigrants who came to the U.S. as children and have since led law-abiding lives. The election-year initiative addresses a top priority of an influential Latino electorate that has been vocal in its opposition to administration deportation policies. (more…)
Evangelicals call for immigration reform
By Alan Bean
Evangelical organizations from the left-leaning Sojourners to the right-leaning Focus on the Family, have joined in a plea for immigration system. If you’re curious, you can find a list of all the signatories here (scroll to the bottom of the page).
Critics will note that there are few concrete policy proposals mentioned in the brief list of principles released by the Evangelical Immigration Table. But the fact that conservative religious leaders are calling on political leaders to “welcome the stranger” is noteworthy. Here’s the statement: (more…)
Friends of Justice 