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May 17, 2010

In U.S. visit, Mexican president to discuss drug war, immigration

By William Booth
Washington Post Foreign Service
Monday, May 17, 2010; A08

MEXICO CITY -- President Felipe Calderón arrives in Washington this week for a two-day state visit that was supposed to be a celebration of U.S.-Mexican cooperation in his drug war. Instead, it is likely to showcase Mexico's frustration over Arizona's tough new immigration law, which Calderón has described as anti-Mexican.

The measure requires police enforcing another law to question a person's immigration status if there is "reasonable suspicion" that the person is in the United States illegally. Its passage has put the hot-button issue of illegal immigration on the bilateral agenda.

At home, Calderón -- who is usually cautious, lawyerly and scripted in his public remarks -- speaks daily about the fight against the drug cartels, but rarely about immigration, although roughly 10 percent of Mexico's population lives in the United States.

He has been frank in his condemnation of the Arizona law, however, saying it "opens the door to intolerance, hate, discrimination and abuse in law enforcement" and noting that the U.S. economy was built with a lot of Mexican sweat, legal and not.

In remarks to Spain's El País newspaper Friday, he asserted that the law is creating tensions between the two countries.

In Mexico, the political class from right to left has closed ranks to deplore the Arizona measure, which has dominated front pages and TV news here. Elected officials from the three major parties are exhorting Calderón to challenge it in Washington, where on Wednesday he will be greeted with pomp and ceremony at the White House and feted with high-end Mexican fusion food at a state dinner, and will address a joint session of Congress.

But the atmosphere might be a little strained.

Soon after Arizona's Republican governor, Jan Brewer, signed the measure last month, Mexico issued a rare "travel advisory" to its citizens warning them of possible harassment in the state.

The governors of the six northern Mexican states that share a border with the United States have denounced the law and said they would boycott an upcoming governors' conference in Phoenix.

The Mexican Embassy in Washington is preparing amicus briefs to support lawsuits by civil rights groups seeking repeal of the measure. The head of Mexico's National Human Rights Commission declared the law "xenophobic." Mexican universities said they would suspend student-exchange programs involving Arizona. And cartoonists here have had a field day depicting an Arizona without Mexicans, where U.S. citizens are forced to cook their own food, cut their lawns, pick their crops and care for their children.

"So, yes, we don't like this law," Mexico's interior secretary, Fernando Gómez-Mont, said at a forum in Washington this month.

The drug issue

There are an estimated 460,000 illegal immigrants in Arizona, most of them from Mexico. Mexican migrants, legal and not, sent home more than $20 billion last year, the second leading source of legitimate foreign income in the country after oil sales. Illegal drug sales may account for as much as $25 billion.

The U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Carlos Pascual, who worked for six months to arrange the state visit for Calderón, has sought to calm emotions, repeating at every opportunity that President Obama and his administration consider the Arizona measure "misdirected" and are exploring legal challenges.

A former Mexican foreign minister, Jorge Castañeda, now a professor at New York University, has described the law as "stupid but useful," meaning that it may help create momentum for federal immigration reform.

The law also appears also to be feeding Mexican frustration -- usually expressed off the record -- that the United States is not doing enough in the drug war. Mexican officials are complaining more openly that authorities here are under grenade attack by drug-smuggling syndicates while pot pharmacies in Los Angeles sell bags of marijuana to so-called patients.

Authority figures in Mexico are coming under increasing assault. This weekend, a former presidential candidate mysteriously disappeared, and police think that kidnappers or drug gangs may be responsible. Diego Fernández de Cevallos, a powerbroker in Calderón's political party, went missing in the central state of Queretaro near his ranch, leaving his empty car and few clues.

Under the Merida Initiative aid package, U.S. taxpayers have contributed $1.3 billion to the fight, money that pays for Black Hawk helicopters, night-vision goggles and armored cars and trains for Mexican police and judges. Obama wants to continue the aid initiative and has asked for another $310 million for Mexico in 2011.

Calderón, who has described his northern neighbors as "the biggest consumers of drugs in the world," said last week that the binational struggle against drug trafficking will still be at the center of discussions in Washington.

"The president has to say something about the Arizona law in his speech, but he is really speaking more to Mexicans," said Raúl Benítez Manaut, an expert in national security issues and immigration at the Autonomous University of Mexico. "He also will be careful not to upset the Republicans in Congress, whom he needs to continue the fight against the cartels."

Systemic corruption

At home, Calderón has complained that billions of dollars in drug profits empower the cartels while the United States, with its freewheeling gun market, is the source of most of the weapons smuggled into Mexico.

More than 22,700 people have died in drug-related violence since Calderón declared war against the cartels in December 2006 and sent the first of 50,000 Mexican troops into the streets.

U.S. officials might push back, however. Although they have publicly applauded Calderón's courage in attacking the cartels, the fight has revealed systemic corruption in Mexico.

The latest shock was the discovery of a pile of documents that the government seized from the an associate of Mexico's most-wanted drug trafficker, Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán. The stash included lists of Mexican federal agents, their names and numbers and references to intelligence shared by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration.

Jan 27, 2010

Salvadoran Immigrants in the United States

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Salvadoran Immigrants in the United States
Source: Migration Information Source

As civil wars engulfed several Central American countries in the 1980s, hundreds of thousands of Salvadorans fled their country and came to the United States.

Between 1980 and 1990, the Salvadoran immigrant population in the United States increased nearly fivefold from 94,000 to 465,000. The number of Salvadoran immigrants in the United States continued to grow in the 1990s and 2000s as a result of family reunification and new arrivals fleeing a series of natural disasters that hit El Salvador, including earthquakes and hurricanes.

By 2008, there were about 1.1 million Salvadoran immigrants in the United States. Salvadorans are the country’s sixth largest immigrant group after Mexican, Filipino, Indian, Chinese, and Vietnamese foreign born.

The immigrant population from this tiny Central American country is now nearly as large as the immigrant population from much larger China. (As reference, China’s total population is 200 times larger and its territory is about 500 times larger than El Salvador’s.)

Jan 9, 2010

Documents Show Officials Covered Up Deaths in Immigrant Deaths

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By NINA BERNSTEIN

Published: January 9, 2010

Silence has long shrouded the men and women who die in the nation’s immigration jails. For years, they went uncounted and unnamed in the public record. Even in 2008, when The New York Times obtained and published a federal government list of such deaths, few facts were available about who these people were and how they died.

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Nery Romero, who died in immigration detention in 2007.

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Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

The family of Nery Romero in Elmont, N.Y., in 2007, after he was found hanging in his detention cell.

Boubacar Bah, who suffered fatal head injuries in an immigration jail the same year.

But behind the scenes, it is now clear, the deaths had already generated thousands of pages of government documents, including scathing investigative reports that were kept under wraps, and a trail of confidential memos and BlackBerry messages that show officials working to stymie outside inquiry.

The documents, obtained over recent months by The Times and the American Civil Liberties Union under the Freedom of Information Act, concern most of the 107 deaths in detention counted by Immigration and Customs Enforcement since October 2003, after the agency was created within the Department of Homeland Security.

The Obama administration has vowed to overhaul immigration detention, a haphazard network of privately run jails, federal centers and county cells where the government holds noncitizens while it tries to deport them.

But as the administration moves to increase oversight within the agency, the documents show how officials — some still in key positions — used their role as overseers to cover up evidence of mistreatment, deflect scrutiny by the news media or prepare exculpatory public statements after gathering facts that pointed to substandard care or abuse.

As one man lay dying of head injuries suffered in a New Jersey immigration jail in 2007, for example, a spokesman for the federal agency told The Times that he could learn nothing about the case from government authorities. In fact, the records show, the spokesman had alerted those officials to the reporter’s inquiry, and they conferred at length about sending the man back to Africa to avoid embarrassing publicity.

In another case that year, investigators from the agency’s Office of Professional Responsibility concluded that unbearable, untreated pain had been a significant factor in the suicide of a 22-year-old detainee at the Bergen County Jail in New Jersey, and that the medical unit was so poorly run that other detainees were at risk.

The investigation found that jail medical personnel had falsified a medication log to show that the detainee, a Salvadoran named Nery Romero, had been given Motrin. The fake entry was easy to detect: When the drug was supposedly administered, Mr. Romero was already dead.

Yet those findings were never disclosed to the public or to Mr. Romero’s relatives on Long Island, who had accused the jail of abruptly depriving him of his prescription painkiller for a broken leg. And an agency supervisor wrote that because other jails were “finicky” about accepting detainees with known medical problems like Mr. Romero’s, such people would continue to be placed at the Bergen jail as “a last resort.”

In a recent interview, Benjamin Feldman, a spokesman for the jail, which housed 1,503 immigration detainees last year, would not say whether any changes had been made since the death.

In February 2007, in the case of the dying African man, the immigration agency’s spokesman for the Northeast, Michael Gilhooly, rebuffed a Times reporter’s questions about the detainee, who had suffered a skull fracture at the privately run Elizabeth Detention Center in New Jersey. Mr. Gilhooly said that without a full name and alien registration number for the man, he could not check on the case.

But, records show, he had already filed a report warning top managers at the federal agency about the reporter’s interest and sharing information about the injured man, a Guinean tailor named Boubacar Bah. Mr. Bah, 52, had been left in an isolation cell without treatment for more than 13 hours before an ambulance was called.

While he lay in the hospital in a coma after emergency brain surgery, 10 agency managers in Washington and Newark conferred by telephone and e-mail about how to avoid the cost of his care and the likelihood of “increased scrutiny and/or media exposure,” according to a memo summarizing the discussion.

One option they explored was sending the dying man to Guinea, despite an e-mail message from the supervising deportation officer, who wrote, “I don’t condone removal in his present state as he has a catheter” and was unconscious. Another idea was renewing Mr. Bah’s canceled work permit in hopes of tapping into Medicaid or disability benefits.

Eventually, faced with paying $10,000 a month for nursing home care, officials settled on a third course: “humanitarian release” to cousins in New York who had protested that they had no way to care for him. But days before the planned release, Mr. Bah died.

Among the participants in the conferences was Nina Dozoretz, a longtime manager in the agency’s Division of Immigration Health Services who had won an award for cutting detainee health care costs. Later she was vice president of the Nakamoto Group, a company hired by the Bush administration to monitor detention. The Obama administration recently rehired her to lead its overhaul of detainee health care.

Asked about the conference call on Mr. Bah, Ms. Dozoretz said: “How many years ago was that? I don’t recall all the specifics if indeed there was a call.” She added, “I advise you to contact our public affairs office.” Mr. Gilhooly, the spokesman who had said he had no information on the case, would not comment.

On the day after Mr. Bah’s death in May 2007, Scott Weber, director of the Newark field office of the immigration enforcement agency, recommended in a memo that the agency take the unusual step of paying to send the body to Guinea for burial, to prevent his widow from showing up in the United States for a funeral and drawing news coverage.

Mr. Weber wrote that he believed the agency had handled Mr. Bah’s case appropriately. “However,” he added, “I also don’t want to stir up any media interest where none is warranted.” Helping to bury Mr. Bah overseas, he wrote, “will go a long way to putting this matter to rest.”

In the agency’s confidential files was a jail video showing Mr. Bah face down in the medical unit, hands cuffed behind his back, just before medical personnel sent him to a disciplinary cell. The tape shows him crying out repeatedly in his native Fulani, “Help, they are killing me!”

Almost a year after his death, the agency quietly closed the case without action. But Mr. Bah’s name had shown up on the first list of detention fatalities, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, and on May 5, 2008, his death was the subject of a front-page article in The Times.

Brian P. Hale, a spokesman for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said in an interview that the newly disclosed records represented the past, and that the agency’s new leaders were committed to transparency and greater oversight, including prompt public disclosure and investigation of every death, and more attention to detainee care in a better-managed system.

But the most recent documents show that the culture of secrecy has endured. And the past cover-ups underscore what some of the agency’s own employees say is a central flaw in the proposed overhaul: a reliance on the agency to oversee itself.

“Because ICE investigates itself there is no transparency and there is no reform or improvement,” Chris Crane, a vice president in the union that represents employees of the agency’s detention and removal operations, told a Congressional subcommittee on Dec. 10.

The agency has kept a database of detention fatalities at least since December 2005, when a National Public Radio investigation spurred a Congressional inquiry. In 2006, the agency issued standard procedures for all such deaths to be reported in detail to headquarters.

But internal documents suggest that officials were intensely concerned with controlling public information. In April 2007, Marc Raimondi, then an agency spokesman, warned top managers that a Washington Post reporter had asked about a list of 19 deaths that the civil liberties union had compiled, and about a dying man whose penile cancer had spread after going undiagnosed in detention, despite numerous medical requests for a biopsy.

“These are quite horrible medical stories,” Mr. Raimondi wrote, “and I think we’ll need to have a pretty strong response to keep this from becoming a very damaging national story that takes on long legs.”

That response was an all-out defense of detainee medical care over several months, including statistics that appeared to show that mortality rates in detention were declining, and were low compared with death rates in prisons.

Experts in detention health care called the comparison misleading; it also came to light that the agency was undercounting the number of detention deaths, as well as discharging some detainees shortly before they died. In August, litigation by the civil liberties union prompted the Obama administration to disclose that more than one in 10 immigrant detention deaths had been overlooked and omitted from a list submitted to Congress last year.

Two of those deaths had occurred in Arizona, in 2004 and 2007, at the Eloy Detention Center, run by the Corrections Corporation of America. Eloy had nine known fatalities — more than any other immigration jail under contract to the federal government. But Immigration and Customs Enforcement was still secretive. When a reporter for The Arizona Republic asked about the circumstances of those deaths, an agency spokesman told him the records were unavailable.

According to records The Times obtained in December, one Eloy detainee who died, in October 2008, was Emmanuel Owusu. An ailing 62-year-old barber who had arrived from Ghana on a student visa in 1972, he had been a legal permanent resident for 33 years, mostly in Chicago. Immigration authorities detained him in 2006, based on a 1979 conviction for misdemeanor battery and retail theft.

“I am confused as to how subject came into our custody???” the Phoenix field office director, Katrina S. Kane, wrote to subordinates. “Convicted in 1979? That’s a long time ago.”

In response, a report on his death was revised to refer to Mr. Owusu’s “lengthy criminal history ranging from 1977 to 1998.” It did not note that except for the battery conviction, that history consisted mostly of shoplifting offenses.

A diabetic with high blood pressure, he had been detained for two years at Eloy while he battled deportation. He died of a heart ailment weeks after his last appeal was dismissed.

Dec 29, 2009

Prince George's Hispanics turn to 'Don Jorge'

Image by Edu-Tourist via Flickr

By Steve Hendrix
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, December 29, 2009; A01

At a concert in Langley Park featuring Guatemalan country music, the crowd is divisible by headwear, cowboy hats vs. baseball caps. Older immigrants wear the ranch garb of rural Central America; younger ones, the Terps and Nike caps common in suburban Washington.

At the edge of the two-stepping audience, one man stands hatless. Immigrants of all ages approach Jorge Sactic-España to shake hands and pass a few words of Spanish with the man they call Don Jorge or, sometimes, Mayor.

An older man in a white, wide-brimmed hat checks in with the don (a Spanish honorific showing great respect) about an ongoing dispute between Latino store owners and managers of La Union Mall, where the concert is taking place. A younger man (blue N.Y.C. cap) asks if he knows of any construction or painting jobs. A woman in jeans with a bare midriff seeks help with a fundraiser for hungry children in Guatemala.

Dispensing aid and advice is routine for Sactic, although he is no elected official. He owns a bakery.

His Chapina Bakery is a popular gathering spot in the two-story shopping center, the epicenter of the large Hispanic enclave in this part of Prince George's County. Sactic's cachitos and gallinitas are known as the most authentic Latin American sweet buns around.

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But it's his standing as a onetime illegal immigrant who has mastered life in the United States that makes him a bridge between newcomers and old-timers, Latinos and gringos -- the unofficial mayor of La Union Mall.

"Some people call me that," Sactic, 48, says with a dismissive wave. His nearly fluent English rises over the accordion music of Paco Pinado, a singer flown in from Guatemala to croon country ballads for homesick compatriots. "To me, it's just a matter of helping whoever I can. I see the value in all of us working together. This is in my nature."

What makes Sactic stand out from other immigrants-made-good is his continuing devotion to the neediest members of the diaspora, say those who have worked with him.

"Once they get their paperwork and a profession, their focus usually becomes more inward, toward their career, their children," says Amanda Martin, director of the Washington-based Guatemalan Human Rights Commission. Her group regularly calls on Sactic to host meetings at the bakery. "That's why it's incredible that Jorge is still so engaged. He is the cement between the bricks in that world."

Sactic, who became a U.S. citizen in 2002, represents a crucial character in the story of immigrant enclaves such as Langley Park, says Jacob L. Vigdor, a professor of public policy at Duke University and an expert on assimilation. As the rare immigrant comfortable in both worlds, Sactic acts as a "cultural concierge," he says.

"We have examples throughout the history of the country of people like this who have taken it upon themselves to serve as conduits of information," Vigdor said. "They find answers for the newcomers."

'Known to everyone'

With the campesino tunes still filling the mall, Sactic retreats to the tiny bakery office to do paperwork through the night.

Visiting La Union can feel like a quick trip to the tropics. All but a handful of the 46 shops are Latino-owned and -oriented, including the soccer supply store and the party shop packed with elaborate dresses for girls' 15th birthday celebrations.

Other shop owners want Sactic to persuade the mall's new management team to give them more time to make rent payments during the downturn and to be more open to face-to-face negotiations. Sactic works up a summary of the issues for a lawyer to review.

"It's a cultural thing," he says. "They should come and meet us and shake our hands."

He orders flour and updates the payroll for his nine employees. He plans a meeting for the immigrant group he founded, AGUA (a Spanish acronym for the Association of Guatemalans United). He works on a paper for the master's degree in international business he is pursuing through the University of Maryland's continuing education program.

The bakers have arrived to fire up the ovens for the day ahead before Sactic begins translating materials for a meeting on the proposed Purple Line's impact on Langley Park. The e-mail he sends when he finishes for the night is time-stamped 3:18 a.m.

"Late at night is when I can get things done," says Sactic, who rents a basement apartment in Hyattsville for times when the drive home to Germantown is too long and too late. "There are so many meetings, people always coming in to talk."

With a little paunch and an ever-present blue sweater vest, the soft-spoken Sactic looks more like a folk singer than a man whom immigrants, activists and embassies turn to as a leader.

Laborers come to his shop with immigration problems, parking tickets and questions about income taxes and health care. Desperate mothers ask for bread to help them get through another jobless week. Government officials from Prince George's and Guatemala City call when they need an emissary for the thousands of Latinos who fill the surrounding apartment buildings.

"When we need to reach the people, we go to Jorge," says Rita Claverie de Sciolli, deputy chief of mission at the Guatemalan Embassy. The diplomats have asked Sactic to host mobile consulate sessions, during which they process passport requests and record births, deaths and marriages.

Claverie says Sactic helped fill the gap recently after a popular embassy program was dropped because of budget cuts: one that sent home the bodies of Guatemalans who died in the Washington area.

That sad gesture of loyalty to homeland can cost a family $2,000 or more, and Sactic is nearly constantly raising money to support the shipments. Most recently, a donation box on his bakery counter featured a photo of a young man who died of a neurological disease. Earlier this month, Sactic contributed 200 sweet buns to be sold to raise money to send a cancer victim back to a mountain cemetery.

"Don Jorge is known to everyone. He helps everyone," says a 22-year-old Guatemalan standing in front of the bakery. The man, who didn't want to be identified because he is in the country illegally, has just been speaking by cellphone to his wife in Guatemala, telling her that he has landed a job as a painter's helper and will be able to send her school fees for their son. Earlier this year, Sactic had given the young worker bread when he couldn't find work.

Not that Sactic can always help. When a tiny elderly woman came to him with a stack of traffic citations, he was surprised to find that one was a ticket for driving under the influence.

"I said, 'Abuela, you need a lawyer,' " Sactic recalls with a laugh. "We see everything here."

Struggles and successes

Sactic's American experience began in 1985 with a swim across the Rio Grande at Brownsville, Tex. He was 25. The Guatemalan civil war was raging, and college students were targets of right-wing hit squads. He abandoned his studies in economics and fled north. It would be 15 years before he saw the inside of a classroom again.

"I came to Washington because my aunt was here," he says. "I started with nothing."

At first, he worked the usual entry-level jobs: sweeping floors, folding dropcloths for a painter, washing brushes. Within three years, he started his own painting company. He added construction projects, learned English, hired skilled workers.

"My dad just knows how to get things done," says Sactic's daughter, Jacqueline Manchané, 25, a receptionist at an Elizabeth Arden spa in Germantown. "That's his main talent."

Sactic, his wife, Dora, and their three children reached an immigrant milestone in 2000 when they bought a roomy house in Germantown. There have been other successes. A son, Georgie, 23, owns a cellphone store in the District.

But life wasn't easy; the couple's youngest, Edward, was born with cerebral palsy. For years, their routines revolved around doctor's appointments and 24-hour care. Edward died three years ago at 13.

Sactic's community activities ballooned after Edward's death, Manchané says. "I think before, he had to always make sure he was around," she says. "Now he has more flexibility."

Sactic received an associate's degree from Montgomery College and a bachelor's in business administration from Maryland. In 2004, sensing a literal hunger for the authentic pan dulce of Guatemala, he opened the bakery. The lines went out the door.

"We're selling sentiment," he says as customers fill plastic bins with warm, brown buns. "It's what they grew up with."

At the mall, the scents of Sactic's baked goods mix with the aromas of the traditional cooking of two Guatemalan cafes. "It's like being in Central America here," says Sactic, who is president of the mall's merchants association. "This could be in Guatemala City or Tegucigalpa."

At the concert, Sactic takes a break from his paperwork to enjoy the sight of his dancing compatriots. "Tonight, everyone is happy," he shouts above the ruckus. "It's one night without problems."

Then he turns to talk to another shop owner, someone else waiting for a word with the mayor.

Dec 22, 2009

America's Secret ICE Castles

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"If you don't have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he's illegal, we can make him disappear." Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement's (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008. Also present was Amnesty International's Sarnata Reynolds, who wrote about the incident in the 2009 report "Jailed Without Justice" and said in an interview, "It was almost surreal being there, particularly being someone from an organization that has worked on disappearances for decades in other countries. I couldn't believe he would say it so boldly, as though it weren't anything wrong."

ICE agents regularly impersonate civilians--OSHA inspectors, insurance agents, religious workers--in order to arrest longtime US residents who have no criminal history. Jacqueline Stevens has reported a web-exclusive companion piece on ICE agents' ruse operations.

Pendergraph knew that ICE could disappear people, because he knew that in addition to the publicly listed field offices and detention sites, ICE is also confining people in 186 unlisted and unmarked subfield offices, many in suburban office parks or commercial spaces revealing no information about their ICE tenants--nary a sign, a marked car or even a US flag. (Presumably there is a flag at the Veterans Affairs Complex in Castle Point, New York, but no one would associate it with the Criminal Alien Program ICE is running out of Building 7.) Designed for confining individuals in transit, with no beds or showers, subfield offices are not subject to ICE Detention Standards. The subfield office network was mentioned in an October report by Dora Schriro, then special adviser to Janet Napolitano, secretary of Homeland Security, but no locations were provided.

I obtained a partial list of the subfield offices from an ICE officer and shared it with immigrant advocates in major human and civil rights organizations, whose reactions ranged from perplexity to outrage. Andrea Black, director of Detention Watch Network (DWN), said she was aware of some of the subfield offices but not that people were held there. ICE never provided DWN a list of their locations. "This points to an overall lack of transparency and even organization on the part of ICE," said Black. ICE says temporary facilities in field or subfield offices are used for 84 percent of all book-ins. There are twenty-four listed field offices. The 186 unlisted subfield offices tend to be where local police and sheriffs have formally or informally reached out to ICE. For instance, in 2007 North Carolina had 629,947 immigrants and at least six subfield offices, compared with Massachusetts, with 913,957 immigrants and one listed field office. Not surprisingly, before joining ICE Pendergraph, a sheriff, was the Joe Arpaio of North Carolina, his official bio stating that he "spearheaded the use of the 287(g) program," legislation that empowers local police to perform immigration law enforcement functions.

A senior attorney at a civil rights organization, speaking on background, saw the list and exclaimed, "You cannot have secret detention! The public has the right to know where detention is happening."

Alison Parker, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, wrote a December comprehensive report on ICE transit policies, "Locked Up Far Away." Even she had never heard of the subfield offices and was concerned that the failure to disclose their locations violates the UN's Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which the United States is a signatory. She explained that the government must provide "an impartial authority to review the lawfulness of custody. Part and parcel is the ability of somebody to find the person and to make their presence known to a court."

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The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers, documented in the Human Rights Watch report, is worsened when one does not even know where to look. The absence of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret jails. Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the fact, a situation ripe for errors, hinted at in the Schriro report, as well as cover-ups.

ICE refused a request for an interview, selectively responded to questions sent by e-mail and refused to identify the person authorizing the reply--another symptom of ICE thwarting transparency and hence accountability. The anonymous official provided no explanation for ICE not posting a list of subfield office locations and phone numbers or for its lack of a real-time locator database.

It is not surprising to find that, with no detention rules and being off the map spatially and otherwise, ICE agents at these locations are acting in ways that are unconscionable and unlawful. According to Ahilan Arulanantham, director of Immigrant Rights for the ACLU of Southern California, the Los Angeles subfield office called B-18 is a barely converted storage space tucked away in a large downtown federal building. "You actually walk down the sidewalk and into an underground parking lot. Then you turn right, open a big door and voilà, you're in a detention center," Arulanantham explained. Without knowing where you were going, he said, "it's not clear to me how anyone would find it. What this breeds, not surprisingly, is a whole host of problems concerning access to phones, relatives and counsel."

It's also not surprising that if you're putting people in a warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.

Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, resident for almost six years, ended up in B-18 after she was snared in an ICE raid targeting others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For her, the worst part was not the dirt, the bugs flying everywhere or the clogged, stinking toilet in their common cell but the panic when ICE agents laughed at her requests to understand how long she would be held. "No one could visit; they couldn't find me. I was thinking these people are going to put me and the other people in a grinder and make sausages and sell them in the local market."

Sleep deprivation and extreme cold were among the "enhanced interrogation" techniques promoted by the Bush White House and later set aside by the Justice Department because of concerns that they amounted to torture. Although without the intent to elicit information, ICE under the Obama administration was holding people charged with a civil infraction in conditions approaching those no longer authorized for accused terrorists.

According to Aaron Tarin, an immigration attorney in Salt Lake City, "Whenever I have a client in a subfield office, it makes me nervous. Their procedures are lax. You've got these senior agents who have all the authority in the world because they're out in the middle of nowhere. You've got rogue agents doing whatever they want. Most of the buildings are unmarked; the vehicles they drive are unmarked." Like other attorneys, Tarin was extremely frustrated by ICE not releasing its phone numbers. He gave as an example a US citizen in Salt Lake City who hired him because her husband, in the process of applying for a green card, was being held at a subfield office in Colorado. By the time Tarin tracked down the location of the facility that was holding the husband when he had called his wife, the man had been moved to another subfield office. "I had to become a little sleuth," Tarin said, describing the hours he and a paralegal spent on the phone, the numerous false leads, unanswered phones and unreturned messages until the husband, who had been picked up for driving without a license or insurance, was found in Grand Junction, Colorado, held on a $20,000 bond, $10,000 for each infraction. "I argued with the guy, 'This is absurd! Whose policy is this?'" Tarin said the agent's response was, "That's just our policy here."

Rafael Galvez, an attorney in Maine, explained why he would like ICE to release its entire list of subfield office addresses and phone numbers. "If they're detaining someone, I will need to contact the people on the list. If I can advocate on a person's behalf and provide documents, a lot of complications could be avoided."

Cary, a suburb of Raleigh, North Carolina, has a typical subfield office at the rear of CentreWest Commons, an office park adjacent to gated communities, large artificial ponds and an Oxford University Press production plant. ICE's low-lying brick building with a bright blue awning has darkened windows, no sign and no US flag. People in shackles and handcuffs are shuffled in from the rear. The office complex has perhaps twenty other businesses, all of which do have signs. The agents, who are armed, might not wear uniforms and drive their passengers in unmarked, often windowless white vans. Even Dani Martinez-Moore, who lives nearby and coordinates the North Carolina Network of Immigrant Advocates, did not know people were being held there until she read about it on my blog.

In late October 2008, Mark Lyttle, then 31, was held in the Cary office for several hours. Lyttle was born in North Carolina, and the FBI file ICE had obtained on him indicated he was a US citizen. Lyttle used his time in the holding tank attempting to persuade the agents who had plucked him out of the medical misdemeanor section of a nearby prison, where he had been held for seventy-three days, not to follow through on the Cary office's earlier decision to ship him to Mexico. Lyttle is cognitively disabled, has bipolar disorder, speaks no Spanish and has no Mexican relatives. In response to his entreaties, a Cary agent "told me to tell it to the judge," Lyttle said. But Lyttle's charging document from the Cary office includes a box checked next to the boilerplate prohibition: "You may not request a review of this determination by an immigration judge."

Lyttle made enough of a fuss at the Stewart Detention Center in Lumpkin, Georgia, that the agents there arranged for him to appear before a judge. But the checked box in the Cary paperwork meant he never heard from the nonprofit Legal Orientation Program attorneys who might have picked up on his situation. William Cassidy, a former ICE prosecutor working for the Executive Office of Immigration Review, ignored Lyttle's pleas and in his capacity as immigration judge signed Lyttle's removal order. According to Lyttle, Cassidy said he had to go by the sworn statements of the ICE officers.

Meanwhile, Lyttle's mother, Jeanne, and his brothers, including two in the Army, were frantically searching for him, even checking the obituaries. They were trying to find Lyttle in the North Carolina prison system, but the trail went cold after he was transferred to ICE custody. Jeanne said, "David showed me the Manila envelope [he sent to the prison]--'Refused'--and we thought Mark had refused it." Jeanne was crying. "We kept trying to find out where he was." It never crossed their minds that Mark might be spending Christmas in a shelter for los deportados on the Mexican side of the Rio Grande.

ICE spokesman Temple Black first told me the list was "not releasable" and that it was "law enforcement sensitive," but coordinator for community outreach Andrew Lorenzen-Strait e-mailed me a partial list of addresses and no phone numbers. I then obtained a more complete list, including telephone numbers, in response to a FOIA request. That list, received in November and dated September 2009, is about forty locations shy of the 186 subfield offices mentioned in the Schriro report and omits thirty-nine locations listed in an August ICE job announcement seeking applicants for immigration enforcement agents. These include ICE postings in Champlain, New York; Alamosa, Colorado; Pembroke Pines, Florida; and Livermore, California. The anonymous ICE official neither answered questions about why I was sent an incomplete list nor accounted for the disparity in official explanations of the list's confidentiality.

ICE obscures its presence in other ways as well. Everyone knows that detention centers are in sparsely populated areas, but according to Amnesty International's Reynolds, policy director of migrant and refugee rights, "Quite a lot of communities don't know they're detaining thousands of people, because the signs say Service Processing Center," not Detention Center, although the latter designation is used for privately contracted facilities. The ICE e-mail stated that the "service processing" term was first used when the centers were run by the predecessor agency Immigration and Naturalization Service, "because these facilities were used to process aliens for deportation," ignoring the fact that these structures were and are distinctive for confining people and not the Orwellian "processing."

Even the largest complexes, which are usually off side roads from small highways, are visible only if you drive right up to the entrance. Unlike federal prisons, detention centers post no road signs to guide travelers. The anonymous ICE official would not provide a reason for this disparity.

ICE agents are also working in hidden offices in one of the grooviest buildings in one of the hottest neighborhoods in Manhattan. Tommy Kilbride, an ICE detention and removal officer and a star of A&E's reality show Manhunters: Fugitive Task Force, is part of the US Marshals Fugitive Task Force, housed on the third floor of the Chelsea Market, above Fat Witch Bakery and alongside Rachael Ray and the Food Network. Across the street are Craftsteak and Del Posto, both fancy venues for two other Food Network stars, Tom Colicchio and Mario Batali. Above their restaurants are agents working for the FBI's Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Someone who had been working in that building for about a year said he had heard rumors of FBI agents, though he didn't see one until nine months later when a guy was openly carrying a gun through the lobby. In November, at midday, he saw two men in plain clothes walk a third man in handcuffs through a side-street door behind Craftsteak. "It was weird, creepy," he said, adding that the whole arrangement made him uncomfortable. "I don't like it. It makes you wonder, what are they hiding? Is it for good reasons or bad reasons?"

Natalie Jeremijenko, who lives nearby and is a professor of visual arts at New York University, pointed out the "twisted genius" of hiding federal agents in the "worldwide center of visuality and public space," referring to the galleries and High Line park among these buildings. Jeremijenko was incensed. "For a participatory democracy to work, you need to have real-time visual evidence of what is going on" and not just knowledge by professors who file a FOIA request or even readers of a Nation article.

In response to a question about the absence of signs at subfield offices, the ICE e-mail stated, "ICE attempts to place signs wherever possible, however there are many variables to consider such as shared buildings, law enforcement activities, zoning laws, etc." Except for "law enforcement activities," the reasons did not apply to the facilities listed here, as evidenced by signs on adjacent businesses.

The Obama administration continued to ignore complaints about the LA subfield office known as B-18 until April 1, when Napolitano and Attorney General Eric Holder, as well as ICE officials, were named as defendants in a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and the National Immigration Law Center. In September, the parties reached a settlement. The ACLU's Arulanantham said, "I never understood what [ICE] had to gain. The fact that after we filed the suit they completely fixed it makes it more mysterious" as to why their months of earlier negotiation brought few results. At the time of the lawsuit, he said, the nearby Mira Loma Detention Center had space. When I asked if ICE was trying to punish people by bringing them to B-18, Arulanantham said, "No, no one was targeted," adding, "If it were punitive, it would be less disturbing."

Arulanantham's response is, alas, more than fodder for a law school hypothetical about whether intentional or unintentional rights violations are more egregious. In 2006 ICE punished several Iraqi hunger strikers in Virginia--they were protesting being unlawfully held for more than six months after agreeing to deportation--by shuffling them between a variety of different facilities, ensuring that they would not encounter lawyers or be found by loved ones. This went on from weeks to months, according to Brittney Nystrom, senior legal adviser for the National Immigration Forum. "The message was, We're going to make you disappear."

As an alternative to the system of unmarked subfield offices and unaccountable agents, consider the approach of neighborhood police precincts, where dangerous criminals are held every day and police carry out their work in full view of their neighbors. Not only can citizens watch out for strange police actions, and know where to look if a family member is missing; local accountability helps discourage misconduct. ICE agents' persistent flouting of rules and laws is abetted by their ability to scurry back to secret dens, avoiding the scrutiny and resulting inhibitions that arise when law enforcement officers develop relationships with the communities they serve.

Indeed, the jacket Kilbride wears during arrests says POLICE in large letters. Working out of a heretofore secret location--Manhunters has no exterior shots--one that his supervisor had requested I not reveal, gives their operation the trappings of a secret police. An attorney who had a client held in a subfield office said on background, "The president released in January a memorandum about transparency, but that's not happening. He says one thing, but we have these clandestine operations, akin to extraordinary renditions within the United States. They're misguided as to what their true mission is, and they are doing things contrary to the best interests of the country."

About Jacqueline Stevens

Jacqueline Stevens, a political theorist, is the author of the recently published States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals (Columbia)

Dec 7, 2009

Struggles of the second generation

U.S.-born children of Latino immigrants fight to secure a higher foothold

By N.C. Aizenman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, December 7, 2009

Javier Saavedra slumped his burly frame into a worn, plaid couch in the cramped basement room he shares with his girlfriend and their 2-year-old daughter, his expression darkening as he ticked off all the wrong turns that had gotten them stuck below the economy's ground floor.

Raised by Mexican immigrant parents, Saavedra was a gang member by 13, a high school dropout by 16 and a father by 21. Now 23, he has been trying to turn his life around since his daughter, Julissa, was born.

But without a high school diploma, Saavedra was unable to find a job that paid enough for him and his girlfriend, Mayra Hererra, 20 and pregnant with their second child, to move out of her parents' brick home in Hyattsville.

Even the dim, wood-paneled room piled with baby toys and large plastic bags of clothing was costing them $350 a month.

"I get so upset with myself," Saavedra said. "I should have a better chance at a job [than our parents]. I want to be helping them with their bills, not them still helping me."

Millions of children of Latino immigrants are confronting the same challenge as they come of age in one of the most difficult economic climates in decades.

Whether they succeed will have consequences far beyond immigrant circles. As a result of the arrival of more than 20 million mostly Mexican and Central American newcomers in a wave that swelled in the 1970s and soared during the 1990s, the offspring of Latino immigrants now account for one of every 10 children, both in the United States and the Washington region.

Largely because of the growth of this second generation, Latino immigrants and their U.S.-born children and grandchildren will represent almost a third of the nation's working-age adults by mid-century, according to projections from U.S. Census Bureau data by Jeffrey S. Passel, a demographer with the nonpartisan Pew Hispanic Center in Washington.

Not since the last great wave of immigration to the United States around 1900 has the country's economic future been so closely entwined with the generational progress of an immigrant group. And so far, on nearly every measure, the news is troubling.

Second-generation Latinos have the highest high school dropout rate -- one in seven -- of any U.S.-born racial or ethnic group and the highest teen pregnancy rate. These Latinos also receive far fewer college degrees and make significantly less money than non-Hispanic whites and other second-generation immigrants.

Image via Wikipedia

Their struggles have fueled an outcry for stricter immigration laws, with advocates saying that the rapid increase in Latino immigrants and their children has strained the United States' resources and social fabric.

"The last 30 years of immigration have made our country more unequal, poorer than we would have been otherwise, more fractious and less cohesive," said Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies in Washington, which favors tighter restrictions on immigration.

Supporters of Latino immigrants say that the newcomers and their children have spurred economic growth and contribute far more to society than they take from it. They also note that even a complete halt to future immigration would not change the footprint of the 15.5 million U.S.-born offspring of Latino immigrants already in the country.

Perhaps the only yardstick by which the second generation has achieved unambiguous success is the one that has stirred the most public controversy: English proficiency. Despite fears among some people that English usage is diminishing in the Latino community, census data and several studies indicate that by the second generation, nearly all Latinos are fluent in English and that by the third generation, few can even speak Spanish.

The second generation's lack of success on educational and economic fronts is largely explained by their immigrant parents' extremely low starting point. Forty percent of second-generation Latino children are born to parents who never completed high school. Only 12 percent have a parent with a college degree or higher.

Saavedra's parents, who entered the United States illegally but later obtained legal permanent residency, didn't get beyond the third grade in Mexico. They were often at a loss when it came to helping him with homework. "They didn't even know how to get you the stuff you needed" for science projects, he said.

Although adding on a year or two of education beyond high school can boost their incomes, to be truly guaranteed a middle-class lifestyle, second-generation Latinos need at least a bachelor's degree -- a feat that the last major wave of immigrants, from Eastern and Southern Europe, took three or four generations to achieve.

"The second generation is doing way better" than their parents, said Ruben Rumbaut, a professor at the University of California at Irvine and a leading scholar on second-generation Latino immigrants. "But way better can still mean they are high school dropouts with 11 years of education, as opposed to their parents, with six years. And in this economy, an 11th-grade dropout is not going to make it."

Rage and remorse

Saavedra is determined to be the exception, although he knows it won't be easy.

The sun was burning down from a late-April sky, and Saavedra's brow filled with sweat as he mixed cement with a shovel at a Northern Virginia construction site.

When he was a child, his father would sometimes take him to sites like this in hopes of motivating the boy to stay in school.

"He used to say to me, 'What do you think is heavier: the pencil or the shovel?' " Saavedra recalled.

Still, this was the first work he had gotten in a month, and he seemed eager to show his gratitude to his girlfriend's Mexican-born father for taking him along. He sprang quickly to lug the heaviest equipment and joked in Spanish with the slender immigrant working alongside him.

"Somos como 'El Gordo y La Flaca' " -- We're like 'The Fat Man and the Skinny Lady' -- said Saavedra, referring to a popular TV talk show.

Yet for all his cheer, Saavedra knew that the one-day, $12-per-hour assignment to build a trash lot behind a hotel wouldn't cover his and Herrera's $106 cellphone bill.

And even Saavedra's outfit -- sparkly stud earrings, a basketball jersey that fell to his thighs and baggy pants that ballooned around his ankles -- broadcast his gnawing sense that he didn't belong among the crew of Mexican immigrants.

Technically, he is what researchers call a "1.5-generation" immigrant, because he was born in Mexico and moved to the United States as a 4-year-old. But with no memory of living anywhere other than Maryland, Saavedra considers himself, and tries to dress like, a member of the second generation.

He hauled an 80-pound bag of cement onto his shoulder and cracked a grin that was half-smirk, half-wince.

"It's times like these," he said, "that I think, 'Oh, man! Why didn't I finish high school?' "

The short answer is that he joined a gang and was kicked out of Bladensburg High School for fighting in his sophomore year. The long answer, Saavedra said, is that he was too filled with rage to put much stock in school.

The youngest boy in a family of seven children, he said he grew up fearing his father's temper and often felt ignored by his parents. "You know, like they'd buy [my older brother] Air Jordans but say there wasn't enough to buy them for me."

School offered little solace. As his family moved around Prince George's County, Saavedra passed through five elementary schools. Each time he started a new school, he said, "people tried jumping me and saying, 'Oh, you're the new guy.' . . . The hate started building up in my heart until I just got so tired."

By the time he got to William Wirt Middle School in Riverdale, Saavedra was an eager recruit for the Latino gangs that held sway there. He soon started his own clique of the gang Sur 13, transforming himself from his family's invisible youngest son to Casper, the nickname he chose as leader of some of the toughest guys in the neighborhood.

"All my life," he said, "I've always wanted to be known for something."

Hererra, who met Saavedra at a family party and started dating him in high school, said she wished the rest of the world could see the kind, thoughtful side of his personality he reserved for her. "Towards me he'd show emotion," she said. "He was always so attentive. . . . But towards everyone else, he'd just show anger."

Although Saavedra listened respectfully to her pleas to leave the gang, he didn't start reconsidering his choices until months after he had left high school. Without a diploma, he was cycling through low-paying, occasional jobs: cleaning carpets, driving for FedEx, working construction.

Friends started getting killed, including Edward Trujillo, a gang leader whom Saavedra had looked up to as a boy. He was gunned down on a residential street in the Riverdale area.

Saavedra himself narrowly missed being shot on four occasions. And he was constantly in brawls. "Some guy would call at 2 in the morning about a fight, and he'd be off," Hererra said.

Although Saavedra was not convicted of any crimes, he was picked up multiple times on suspicion of vandalism, assault and theft. Sgt. George Norris, a member of the Prince George's police gang unit, said he made a point of pulling Saavedra over for questioning and locking him up when possible. When Saavedra moved, Norris surprised him by turning up at the new address.

"I wanted him to know that wherever he went, whatever he did, I was going to be there," Norris said.

But after Saavedra decided to get free therapy from a local youth group, Norris also offered support, inviting him to speak at conferences and berating him when he showed signs of slipping back into gang life.

The hour-a-week therapy sessions helped Saavedra get more of a handle on his temper.

Perhaps most significantly, Hererra became pregnant and threatened to leave him if he didn't put the safety of their child first.

All in all, "it took him a good year to come around," she said. "He wasn't really changed until he saw the baby being born."

Progress and setbacks

Some weeks after the construction job, Saavedra lay on an operating table in Bethesda, tensing his torso as a doctor traced a laser over a tattoo of a teardrop just below his eye.

With funding from a local youth group called Identity, he had already had a number of his old gang tattoos removed, including the large, black SUR in gothic letters on his right arm, and the 13 written on his left. The teardrops would be the last to go.

"Without this on my face, I can probably get a better job," he said as he walked out of the doctor's office carrying Julissa's sippy cup in one hand and her pink diaper bag in the other. "I won't be getting pulled over for looking suspicious. People won't be thinking, 'Oh, he must've murdered someone.' "

Still, Saavedra said, he sometimes misses the status of being a gang leader. But he had recently hit on what seemed a perfect way to fill the void: a club of mostly former gang members who trick out lowrider bicycles with velvet seats, chrome wheels, twisted metal handlebars and plaques decorated with the gothic letters and fearsome imagery popular with Latino gangs.

Saavedra said he also hopes the club, called Street Nations, will offer his nephews and other young boys an alternative to joining a gang. "They like the gang lifestyle. But I be trying to tell them, 'It's not cool. If you want to be in gangs, later on you'll regret it.' "

A few days later, Saavedra took extra-small T-shirts printed with the Street Nations logo to give to his nephews at the club's first official meeting in a Riverdale park.

Hererra chuckled at the sight of the couple's youngest nephew posing for photographs next to the group's heavily tattooed, pierced older members. "Chris!" Saavedra shouted at the 8-year-old. "Stay in school and you get a bike!"

Saavedra and Hererra were trying to make their own educations a priority as well.

Despite her pregnancy, Hererra had continued to take classes toward a business degree at a Northern Virginia vocational college. Now 21, she hopes to graduate next year and get a job in human resources.

Saavedra had subscribed to an online course to work toward a high school diploma. His plan was to do a lesson a week on the computer next to his and Hererra's bed in the basement.

But Saavedra ended up whiling away his time updating the Street Nations Web site and chatting with other members on its message board -- "your Twitter," Hererra called it.

By summer's end, the online course was all but forgotten. FedEx had come through with a steady delivery job, and between the 12-hour workdays and evenings taking care of Julissa and his newborn son, Anthony Javier, so Hererra could go to class, Saavedra said, "I'm not even focused on my GED right now."

At $500 a week, his wages still aren't enough for the couple to get a place of their own. There are nights when Saavedra wonders whether they ever will.

"I try to stay positive," Saavedra said. "But sometimes inside me, I just feel like giving up and running away from this. You know, just getting lost. Honestly, sometimes that's just how I feel."

Nov 20, 2009

Getting Tough on Exploitation - Nation

Image by New York Public Library via Flickr

Last week, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano announced that the Obama administration would seek legal status for 12 million undocumented immigrants in early 2010. Hard-right tea party organizers reportedly switched gears immediately to denounce the move. Congressman Lamar Smith found it "ironic" that Napolitano framed the push for comprehensive immigration reform as a way to improve the economy. But Napolitano is absolutely right: reforming the nation's immigration laws to bring millions of people already participating in our economy out of the shadows would boost tax revenue, lift the economy and protect working Americans from the unfair labor market competition they now face. The biggest problem is that Congress may be dangerously slow to act: even the much-needed extension of unemployment benefits took the Senate months to approve.

While legislators drag their feet, the Obama administration can act quickly on its own to stop the erosion of middle-class jobs. Directing his agencies to enforce the nation's existing labor and employment laws more vigorously, while halting the enforcement of broken, economically harmful immigration laws is one powerful way to do it.

To the uninformed, the relationship between unemployment and immigration looks simple: if we could just deport all undocumented workers and restrict legal immigration, those jobs would instantly become available to American citizens, driving down unemployment. But the old "immigrants steal American jobs" myth holds no water. The reality is that all types of immigrants, including the undocumented, boost the American economy as taxpayers, workers, consumers and business owners. Through their work and consumption, immigrants generate economic activity that creates new jobs, jobs that wouldn't exist if immigrants were not part of our economy. As the President's Council on Economic Advisors concluded in 2007, US natives gain $37 billion a year from immigrants' participation in the economy. If enforcement efforts were effective and we somehow succeeded in pushing undocumented workers out of the country (not a likely scenario, even in these dark economic times), we would lose jobs rather than gain them.

But if the presence of undocumented immigrants doesn't harm the US economy, the fact that they are so vulnerable to exploitation in the workplace does. Because undocumented workers are often too afraid of deportation to speak up about workplace abuses, unscrupulous employers can cut immigrants' wages and benefits and degrade working conditions with impunity. Exploiting undocumented workers can drag down wages for other workers, especially those with little education: as their employers are forced to compete with companies that exploit immigrants, entire industries may see wages decline. Indeed, violations of minimum wage, overtime and workplace safety laws are rampant in the nation's immigrant-dominated low-wage industries, according to a recent eye-opening study by researchers at UCLA, the University of Illinois and the National Employment Law Project. Their in-depth investigation in three American cities reveals that as many as one in four low-wage workers--including hundreds of thousands of American citizens in these cities alone--were paid less than the minimum wage in the week prior to the survey. And while undocumented immigrants appear to be the most vulnerable to abuses, this research vividly illustrates the way that exploitation of immigrants goes hand-in-hand with an atmosphere in which citizens are also taken advantage of on the job. As long as such violations persist, economic recovery will never reach these workers.

That's why a shift from immigration enforcement to labor and employment law enforcement is so critical. Enforcing laws against undocumented immigrants--even by penalizing employers rather than raiding workplaces, as the Obama administration has chosen to do--increases immigrants' fear and corrupt employers' incentive to keep workers off the books. As a result, immigrants are driven further underground and see their risk for exploitation increases. In fact, immigration enforcement itself can be manipulated by employers to undermine all workers' rights and continue to pursue workplace violations, as another recent study illustrates.

Legalizing undocumented workers is ultimately the best way to ensure that they can exercise rights in the workplace and stop undercutting other American workers. Once everyone participating in the US economy is openly subject to American labor laws, pursuing violations of workplace protections, including minimum-wage laws, will become easier. What's more, an analysis of the mass legalization enacted in the United States in 1986 suggests that legalization would raise immigrant wages and lift up entire communities, boosting the US economy. Legalization would require an act of Congress, which may be slow in coming. But the Obama administration could unilaterally halt the enforcement of broken immigration laws, delivering tremendous economic benefits. As the Progressive States Network has pointed out, state governments can also improve conditions for workers by shifting enforcement emphasis from immigration infractions to workplace violations.

The Obama administration is moving in the right direction with the recognition that it is corrupt employers, not undocumented workers, who are a threat to the middle class, but it needs to focus on the real problem: not immigration violations but the exploitation that often accompanies them. While we wait for stronger economic recovery measures and the overhauls of immigration and labor law that American workers need, a shift in enforcement strategy can begin to provide an immediate boost to the economy and the nation's hardest-hit workers.

About Amy Traub

Amy Traub is the director of research at the Drum Major Institute for Public Policy and author of the recent report, Principles for an Immigration Policy to Strengthen and Expand the Middle Class.

Nov 16, 2009

Immigration looms as sticking point in health-care legislation - washingtonpost.com

Image by wblo via Flickr

Immigration and health House measure omits Senate panel's legal test

By David Montgomery
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, November 16, 2009

The 31-year-old woman creeping gingerly into Adventist HealthCare's free-standing emergency department in Germantown was obviously in pain, and physician Orlee Panitch quickly diagnosed the problem: gallstones.

The case wasn't an emergency -- yet -- but the woman, who is an illegal immigrant, didn't know where else to go for care.

"Her inability to access care is a problem," Panitch said. "At some point, untreated, she'll need emergency surgery to deal with this."

That question of access to care for some immigrants, and who should pay for it, could well become one of the most contentious sticking points in the coming weeks as members of Congress sit down to reconcile the health-care bill passed by the House on Saturday with the yet-to-emerge Senate version.

The controversy centers largely on whether illegal immigrants should benefit at all under a revised health-care system. Democratic leaders had vowed that only legal residents would receive subsidies to buy insurance. And after Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) famously shouted "You lie" at President Obama when he made that vow to Congress, both the White House and the Senate Finance Committee went a step further. They pledged that undocumented workers would be barred not only from receiving subsidies but also from buying insurance through federally sponsored exchanges -- even if they used their own money.

Last week, when some House Democratic leaders pressed to match the Senate Finance Committee version, Hispanic lawmakers threatened to revolt and ultimately prevailed: Under the bill approved by the House, illegal immigrants would not be barred from the exchanges.

That stark debate, however, has largely obscured the distinct challenge raised by immigrant families as reformers try to provide coverage to as many Americans as possible. Because so many of the nation's 38 million immigrants -- legal and illegal -- live in households that include both categories, families must often rely on a patchwork of care and funding. And while the legislation could have a significant impact on how millions of immigrants obtain care, it is clear that large gaps in coverage will remain, not only across immigrant communities but also even within individual families.

Maria Salmeron, for example, is a legal resident from El Salvador who has insurance through her job in the kitchen of a nursing home. But her husband, a construction worker who is trying to legalize his status, has no insurance. Their youngest child, Isabella, a 2-year-old citizen in pigtails, requires a ventilator to breathe. Her medical needs are covered by state and federal programs.

On a recent fall day, Salmeron took Isabella to a pediatric clinic in Falls Church, where a bilingual pediatrician, Albert Brito, checked her for a cold and helped her mother make an appointment with a kidney specialist for the child.

Meanwhile, the nurse who comes to the family's home to help take care of Isabella has no insurance. J. Katan, a legal resident from Nigeria, said she cannot afford the premiums for the plan offered by her nursing agency.

"If I need to see a doctor," she said, "I go myself, and I pay."

Locally and nationwide, roughly two-thirds of working-age immigrants who are legal residents are insured, and more than one-third of illegal immigrants also have insurance, according to a new study by the Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank. The group estimates that as many as 2.8 million uninsured legal residents of working age could benefit from reform, by qualifying for expanded Medicaid or proposed subsidies to purchase insurance. Nearly 1 million uninsured legal immigrants also work at firms that could be required to provide insurance. And 1.8 million uninsured illegal immigrants work for firms that may be required to provide insurance, according to the institute.

Even as lawmakers remain divided over how far to extend the new safety net, some health providers already have fashioned multi-layered systems to match care with the mixed needs of immigrant families.

The Falls Church pediatric clinic that treated Isabella was created by the Inova Health System, part of a cluster strategy that includes a maternity clinic for uninsured women, a nutritionist, a low-cost pharmacy, a lab, classrooms and social workers to help families navigate the system.

"We're basically a community safety net as well as a medical safety net," said Geoffrey DeLizzio, director of the clinics.

Ramiro Herbas, who came from Bolivia eight years ago, recently brought his son, Demothi, 2, for a checkup and a flu shot to the Falls Church pediatric clinic. American-born Demothi qualifies for Medicaid. Herbas said he has a work permit, but his construction jobs don't offer insurance. If he gets sick he visits a doctor's office in Seven Corners, where discount practices cater to immigrants, $40 a visit.

For some, the emergency department will remain the only option -- especially for patients like Susy, the illegal immigrant with gallstones, who would be excluded from subsidies.

"The pain is strong," said Susy, a babysitter who came from Peru six years ago. Because of her immigration status, she spoke on the condition that her last name not be published.

As Susy lay on a bed, Marcos Pesquera, executive director of Adventist's center on health disparities, picked up the phone and made an appointment for her with a surgeon, who, two weeks later, removed her gallbladder at Shady Grove Adventist Hospital.

Susy said she was initially asked to make a deposit of $3,500 to the hospital. Ultimately she made a deposit of just $100, she said, but she added that she may be asked to pay more.

The surgeon declined to comment, but his colleague, Jason Brodsky of Inpatient Surgical Consultants, said in an e-mailed statement: "We are pleased to provide this care regardless of a patient's insurance status."

Most of the cost of Susy's care will end up being absorbed by Adventist.

Like Inova, Adventist HealthCare, a $1.2 billion nonprofit provider, has stitched together services on its Germantown campus with a cluster of clinics and emergency care, paid for by an array of public and private players.

Next door to the emergency department where Susy was treated, Monica Peñaherrera, 53, sat in an examination room at a clinic operated by the nonprofit Mobile Medical Care. Peñaherrera is an American citizen but has had no health insurance since her husband's construction business declined. When she felt a pain in her breast recently, she came to the clinic she had heard about at her church.

"I'm comfortable here," Peñaherrera said after she was examined by nurse practitioner Marylynn Gonsalves. "I think of her as my family doctor."

For Peñaherrera's visit, she pays $30. Montgomery County pays $62. "That is way less than half what our costs would be," says Bob Spector, executive director of Mobile Med. The rest comes from cash and diagnostic support from Adventist, plus Mobile Med's own fundraising and reliance in some cases on donated medical expertise.

The patchwork of services is also paid for by taxpayers and people with insurance.

"We have to try to cover for those who can't pay or won't pay with the revenues that come from people who can and do pay," says Bill Robertson, president of Adventist HealthCare, which provided about $51 million in uncompensated care -- to poor, uninsured patients like Susy -- in their two local hospitals last year. The hospital covers the gap with money from other patients' insurance plans that pay more than cost.

Downstairs from Mobile Med is a maternity clinic for uninsured women, where Socorro Almejo, 38, an immigrant from Mexico, brought her 17-year-old daughter, Reina, who is pregnant, for a routine prenatal exam. Reina is receiving a full range of pregnancy checkups for $450 through a county-subsidized program. Almejo herself has no insurance and goes to another clinic when she is sick. "I'm glad at least my children have [coverage], even if I don't," she said.

Dianne Fisher, the county health department's nurse administrator for women's health services, said the goal was to ensure healthy pregnancies and births. "Otherwise," she said, "they would show up in the emergency room, with more problems."