As thousands of students walked out of their schools to protest pending immigration bills in Congress, 17-year-old Julio Beltre stood in front of New York’s Federal Plaza last month to tell the story of his father, Juan Beltre: On a morning a year ago, in April 2005, before the sun rose, six agents from the Department of Homeland Security had woken up his father and dragged him away from their Bronx home, while his wife and four children -- all U.S. citizens -- watched in horror.
Why was he being seized? Juan Beltre had committed a single drug possession offense dating back to 1995. But in those ten long years, Beltre had completed probation, was a long-term greencard holder -- and was now suffering from a brain tumor.
"Now my mom has to raise us alone,” his son recounted at the demonstration. His father was deported back to the Dominican Republic.
The testimonies of Julio Beltre and a dozen other citizen-children with similar stories came in a week of marches, walkouts, hearings, and headlines. Immigration is the issue everywhere, from the hearts of protesters to the halls of the Capitol to the editorial pages of The New York Times.
The debate is as complex as it is heated. On March 27th, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved an immigration bill that would, if passed into law:
Yet the following morning, the front page of New York’s largest Spanish language paper, El Diario, exclaimed “TRIUMFAMOS.” Meanwhile, restrictionist commentator Lou Dobbs campaigned against the bill on television and in Mexico.
This ironic role reversal stems from one section of the proposed bill, the guestworker legalization provisions. Under the leadership of Senator Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania, the Judiciary Committee voted 12-6 to approve a new visa program, devised by Senators Edward Kennedy and John McCain, under which undocumented workers would have to register with the government, maintain continuous employment for six years, pay back and future taxes, and pass civics and English lessons in order to apply for a green card. Some hail the Senate bill as a victory because, for the first time since the amnesty passed by President Ronald Reagan in 1986, undocumented workers would have a potential pathway to work and live lawfully in the U.S.
In the coming weeks, the Judiciary proposal faces the scrutiny of the full Senate. Advocates are fighting to prevent the “earned legalization” provisions from being watered down. The main variable is whether or not the visa granted to undocumented workers will lead to a green card and eventual citizenship.
We are now at a crossroads. While the nation’s attention is focused on the legalization question, lawmakers have guaranteed only one thing: there will be no legalization-only bill. If the Senate ultimately approves anything, it will go to a closed-door conference committee to be resolved with the House bill passed in December 2005 under the leadership of Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner. The House bill concedes no greencards. Its only common ground with the Senate is provisions to expand detentions, deportations, and border police.
A shared history underlies the consensus. September 11th transformed immigration into a national security debate, with Democrats and Republicans both convinced that any immigration reform must come with tighter controls. But as the Beltre family illustrates, the New York congressional delegation has to resolve the national security agenda with a powerful reality: non-citizens are not the only affected population. Citizen spouses and children left behind are devastated because of decade-old deportation laws.
Together, the 1996 laws transformed the meaning of membership in America and substantially ramped up policing based on citizenship. There was no legalization or guestworker program. Instead, there were sweeping deportation measures that empowered the executive branch to more easily expel people already within our borders.
Prior to the 1996 laws, a New Yorker placed in deportation proceedings could typically go before an immigration judge and seek a pardon if she could demonstrate that she was no threat to society and had significant ties to her U.S. community. But the new laws instituted a system of mandatory deportation and detention whereby the vast majority of New Yorkers facing deportation are held in immigrant prisons without bail and have no opportunity to plead their case before an immigration judge. These judges are appointees of the U.S. attorney general, yet they cannot pardon or postpone the deportation of a noncitizen – even if they believe the punishment would harm U.S. citizen children and communities.
With detention and deportation as the new mandatory minimums, more than 1.3 million people have been expelled from the U.S. in the last 10 years, and immigrants have become the fastest-growing segment of our prison population. (Homeland Security does not make city-specific statistics available.) Taxpayers are footing the bill for the ever-growing deportation budget. American veterans, breadwinners, and people who have lived here since infancy have been deported through this process.
Just before September 11th, lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreed that 1996 went too far. One of its leading proponents, former Republican Congressman Bill McCollum of Florida, called the unintended impacts on families a “manifest injustice.” But such wisdom crumbled with the Twin Towers. America was left with the inflexible, even cruel legal infrastructure of 1996. Since the tragedy, the Bush Administration has poured billions into even more vigilant enforcement of these laws.
In New York as in other urban centers, the criminal justice system is a cornerstone of the immigration policing strategy. The criminal courts rely on a plea system to expedite the high volume of cases. Prosecutors issue lengthy indictments. Defense attorneys advise clients to plea to lesser charges, in order to secure a deal with little or no jail time.
Every week, hundreds of immigrant New Yorkers arrested for garden-variety crimes plead guilty under this plea-bargain system. But neither the judge nor attorney warn them that after they complete their sentence, a second punishment will follow: detention and deportation. As the federal immigration authorities’ reliance on local criminal institutions grows, there is no countervailing process to ensure that the rights of immigrants are observed.
The criminalization trends of 1996 pervade the bills in Congress today. Proposals consistently extend mandatory deportation and detention to a wider net of immigrants. Even the most progressive proposals bar immigrants who admit to crimes – like using a fake ID to get a job – from obtaining green cards.
The New York congressional delegation has been nearly mute on how America’s immigration are harming families – with one recent exception. On March 28, 2006, Congressman Jose Serrano of the Bronx introduced the Child Citizen Protection Act, a bill to restore partial discretion to immigration judges in cases where removal of an immigrant is clearly against the best interests of a U.S. citizen child. Serrano called the bill “common-sense legislation” that would protect children and families from unnecessary separation. But the other members of Congress from New York are largely silent, despite the New York families who flood their district offices – families already devastated by deportation.
“Our leaders need to change the laws,” Julio Beltre concluded his speeech during the demonstration at Federal Plaza, “before more young people like me get hurt.” On April 24th, the 10-year anniversary of the 1996 laws, he and other New Yorkers will converge in Washington D.C. with families from other cities whose lives have changed because of deportation.
Aarti Shahani is a co-founder of Families for Freedom, a Brooklyn-based defense network for immigrant families facing deportation.
I just spent a week in London where I was photographed about 300 times a day. No, the paparazzi were not interested in the civil rights topic page writer for Gotham Gazette. That is the average number of times someone in London is captured daily on closed circuit television cameras – whether in the Underground (their subway), driving into the city, or just walking along the street. The police force for the city’s square-mile financial district (called, confusingly, the City of London), photographs every person and every vehicle that comes within its boundaries.
Now, New York Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly has announced that the city will use $9.1 million in federal homeland security funds to install 505 surveillance cameras in 253 locations around the city -- and will be pushing to do what London has done, create what the department is calling a “ring of steel” around the financial district in downtown Manhattan, photographing every person and vehicle coming south of Chambers Street.
This is far from the only idea that New Yorkers have taken from our sister city -- or that some New Yorkers are advocating -- on a range of matters from transportation to security. A high number of them seem to involve civil liberties in one way or another. But in recent incidents touching on such matters, the cities are not exactly clones of one another -- and the contrast in their approaches may be instructive.
London has leap-frogged New York in the recognition of same-sex relationships, performing more than 700 “civil partnerships” in just a single month after they became legally available on December 21. The new United Kingdom law accords gay couples most of the rights of marriage, unlike the limited rights New York City has granted through domestic partnerships starting in the early 1990s.
New York City does recognize same-sex marriages -- but only if they have been performed legally elsewhere such as Canada. Mayor Mike Bloomberg is in court fighting against the obligation of the city to give marriage licenses to gay couples, a case that will be heard by New York State’s high court on May 31 in Albany. If the gay couples prevail, New York will still not catch up to London because the United States prohibits federal recognition of same-sex marriages no matter what the states may do.
While Republican Bloomberg was chastised by civil libertarians for his approach to free speech when he curbed mass demonstrations in New York against the Iraq War in March 2003 and the Republican National Convention in 2004, Mayor Ken Livingstone of London, a Socialist in the Labour Party, participates in his city’s protests of the war policies of President Bush and Prime Minister Blair. Now Bloomberg is scoring points with First Amendment protectors by refusing to fire the Correction Department’s top chaplain, Imam Abdul-Jalil for anti-Zionist remarks he made outside of work.
Perhaps the strangest debate over free speech is being waged over something Livingstone said that prompted a quasi-governmental board to order his suspension from office for a month beginning March 1. He appealed to the courts and the suspension was stayed.
In February 2005, Livingstone got into a verbal contretemps with a reporter he despises from the Evening Standard newspaper. He asked the reporter, Oliver Finegold, whether he had ever been a "German war criminal." The Guardian reported, "On being told that the reporter objected to the remark and was Jewish, the mayor said: 'Ah, well you might be but actually you are just like a concentration camp guard, you are just doing it because you are paid to, aren't you?'''
The Board of Deputies of British Jews complained to something called the Adjudication Panel, "the government body which deals with serious disciplinary cases involving local government," the paper wrote. They judged the mayor's remarks "insensitive" and sanctioned him because he was unapologetic.
Richie Nimmo of Manchester wrote to the Guardian, the suspension "is just the latest example of a creeping orthodoxy in British public life, according to which you cannot say anything that offends anyone if it can be construed to be in any way connected to their ethnic or religious identity. The placing of community relations above freedom of expression, satire and vigorous argument, whether in the form of the cancellation of a theatre production in Birmingham, the self-censorship of cartoons across Britain or the suspension of an elected representative in London, is a sinister development."
In his own essay in the same paper, Livingstone wrote, "The fundamental issue in this whole affair is not whether or not I was 'insensitive,' it is the principle that those whom the people elect should only be removed by the people or because they have broken the law."
If New York mayors could be suspended for "insensitive" remarks, Ed Koch and Rudy Giuliani might not have served more than a few weeks between them. Koch used to brag about "giving ulcers, not getting them." And Giuliani did things like calling an innocent man killed by the police "no altar boy," based on sealed juvenile records he was under no authority to release. Both mayors suffered a dip in the polls attributed to such off-the-cuff remarks.
Recently, Giuliani called upon his fellow Italian Americans to lighten up about their criticisms that one of his favorite TV shows, HBO's "The Sopranos," defames their ethnic group. "You could spend your whole life wanting to be insulted," he told the New York Times. "Why?” Of course, Giuliani acted deeply offended when a portrait at the Brooklyn Museum of Mary, the mother of Jesus, was displayed because it contained elephant dung. He tried to get the city to reduce the museum’s subsidy, an effort blocked in court because it involved government censorship.
While not a civil liberties issue because it does not involve censorship by the state, one of the most direct contrasts between London and New York involves a play called "My Name is Rachel Corrie." When it was mounted at the Royal Court Theatre in London, it was a sold-out hit. But a planned production of it at New York Theater Workshop was postponed, provoking much debate over self-censorship in the arts.
The play, by noted actor Alan Rickman and Kathleen Viner, is drawn from the diaries of Corrie, a 23-year old American who three years ago “was killed by an Israeli Army bulldozer in the Gaza Strip as she tried to protect a Palestinian home,” the New York Times reported. After James Nicola, the artistic director of the New York Theater Workshop, spoke to "friends and colleagues in the artistic community and to religious leaders as well as to representatives of the Jewish community, because the play involved Israeli action" (as he explains in a note on the theater company's Web site), he made the decision to postpone the production: "As we listened to various opinions and read thousands of entries on websites and blogs, we realized we needed to find ways to let Rachel’s words rise above the polemics. We regret that requesting more time to achieve that goal was interpreted as failing to fulfill a commitment and, worse, as censorship."
"I don't think we were worried about the audience," he told the New York Times. "I think we were more worried that those who had never encountered her writing, never encountered the piece, would be using this as an opportunity to position their arguments.”
Nicola has been attacked by everyone from 2005 British Nobel Prize winner Harold Pinter to Tony Award winning playwright Tony Kushner, whose work is often produced at the Workshop. Viner, writing in the Guardian where she is an editor, said, “Since when did theatre come to be about those who don't go to see it? If the play itself, as Mr. Nicola clearly concedes, is not the problem, then isn't the answer to get people in to watch it, rather than exercising prior censorship? With freedom of speech now at the top of the international agenda, and George Clooney's outstanding â€Good Night, and Good Luck’ reminding us of the dangers of not standing up to witch-hunts, Americans should not be denied the right to hear Rachel Corrie's words -- words that only two weeks ago were deemed acceptable.”
The play will now get a West End (their equivalent of Broadway) production in London starting on March 28, and the search for another American producer is currently underway.
London is an easier place to protest publicly, despite all the security. Anti-war demonstrators are virtually camped out 24 hours a day on the sidewalk directly across from the entrance to Parliament, unthinkable these days either at City Hall or at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, DC. During the world-wide protests at the start of the Iraq War in February 2003, demonstrators in London had the run of the town and paraded right past the Houses of Parliament. In New York, the police department prevented marchers from going past the United Nations and even from joining the demonstration on the side streets to which it was restricted.
When I was in London, I passed a peaceful anti-war vigil of about 40 people in Trafalgar Square one evening. There were no police in sight. In New York a few months ago, by contrast, a small picket of housing activists working for home rule on rent regulation laws was not only prevented from marching past the home of Mayor Michael Bloomberg on East 79th Street, but there were swarms of cops and virtually everyone in the demonstration was photographed and videotaped by a police unit.
On the other hand, there may have been no effective difference in the surveillance: After all, the London demonstrators were no doubt picked up by the omnipresent closed circuit cameras.
New York frequently follows London’s lead in instituting security measures. It wasn’t directly after 9/11 or when Spain’s commuter trains were bombed by terrorists in 2004 that New York began making spot bag checks for people entering the subways; it was when London was attacked this past July.
And now the New York Police Department is proposing to take London's lead in saturation surveillance of Wall Street, and reportedly contemplating similar treatment for midtown Manhattan as well. There is also a plan to install closed circuit cameras throughout our subway system, which is scheduled for completion in 2008.
Those who advocate for such heightened surveillance echo the sentiments of Jack Gin, who heads a private security company in Great Britain called Extreme CCTV: “I suggest that without security, we would lose the foundation upon which civil liberties exist," he said shortly after the London bombings. "Without security, we would have no freedom."
The New York Civil Liberties Union sees it differently: “What's next? A GPS [Global Positioning System] tracking device on every bumper? Cameras in our living rooms? Where does it end?” Donna Lieberman and Christopher Dunn of the New York Civil Liberties Union asked in the Daily News.
Critics point to a 2005 study of closed circuit TV surveillance in 14 British cities, which found that it had no significant effect on crime in 13 of them, mostly due to understaffing of monitors and poor images at night. They did play a key role in identifying the July 7 Underground and bus bombers, but only after they had done their deeds.
Liberty, the British equivalent of the American Civil Liberties Union, is wary of the misuses of images captured by all the TV cameras. But the organization is more stirred up about proposals for the future -- a national identification card and a national registry, which, it says, " will fundamentally change the relationship between the individual and the state,” intrude on privacy, and adversely affect race relations without having a real impact on crime and terrorism.
But if in some ways London has instituted, and is contemplating, stricter security measures than those in New York, in other ways they are less strict. Bag checks are not a routine experience in London. The British Museum and most others do not ask to look into the bags of people entering, whereas guards at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York always do so now.
Andy Humm, a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights, has been in charge of the civil rights topic page since its inception in 2001. He is co-host of the weekly "Gay USA" on Manhattan Neighborhood Network (34 on Time-Warner; 107 on RCN) on Thursdays at 11 PM. Â
The long-awaited immigration debate in the U.S. Senate is finally about to get underway. The next few weeks in the Senate will be crucial in determining how this country will treat the 11 million undocumented immigrants who have come in search of the American Dream but who lack legal status to live and work here. In the end, we’ll find out if we are capable of reforming the failing immigration system to manage migration flows better, and if we can do it in a way that treats immigrants fairly.
The Senate Judiciary Committee is expected to begin working on sweeping immigration reform legislation in early March. Whatever bill emerges from that committee will then go to the full Senate for consideration and eventually a vote, most likely in April.
The stakes could not be higher for New York City, where an estimated half a million city residents live and work without legal immigration status, and many more are affected by family separation and immigration processing backlogs.
In order to understand the context of the Senate debate, it’s necessary to look at some of the major proposals on the table. In January 2004, President George W. Bush made the first of several speeches in which he called for stepped-up enforcement combined with a guestworker program that would offer temporary work visas to undocumented workers and workers from abroad.
The president’s plan pleased just about no one, however. Immigrant advocates criticized his guestworker plan because it would kick workers out of the country after six years and offer them no path to permanent residence and citizenship. Anti-immigrant restrictionists, meanwhile, labeled even this very limited guestworker program an “amnesty” that rewards lawbreakers.
In a few whirlwind days near the end of the session in December, House Republicans, led by Judiciary Committee Chairman James Sensenbrenner, railroaded through to passage the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act (H.R. 4437).
The House bill (if approved by the Senate as well) would ratchet up border and interior enforcement and create severe new penalties for immigration violations. Unlawful presence –- when someone’s visa status expires, for example -– would no longer merely be a civil violation but would become a felony crime. Anyone who “assists” or “encourages” an undocumented immigrant to remain in the country could be sent to prison for five years –- a provision that has social workers, advocates, and others wondering if their work with undocumented populations is going to land them in jail if H.R. 4437 becomes law.
The enforcement-only approach taken by the House bill makes no attempt to deal realistically with the millions of undocumented immigrants in this country, other than to criminalize, arrest and deport as many of them as possible. Immigrant advocates insist that a more comprehensive and solution-oriented approach to fixing the broken U.S. immigration system is needed, and they have been riding on the hope that more moderate voices in the Senate will prevail.
A number of different immigration bills, all claiming to be comprehensive, have been introduced in the Senate, including a bill by Senators John McCain and Edward Kennedy, and one by Senators John Cornyn and Jon Kyle. On February 23rd, however, Senator Arlen Specter, chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee, released his “Chairman’s Mark,” a draft bill that ends the speculation about which bill would serve as the starting point for consideration of immigration reform in the Senate Judiciary Committee.
Senator Specter’s draft bill attempts to cobble together a compromise from various existing proposals. The bill, to immigrant advocates’ dismay, incorporates many of the severe enforcement provisions from the Sensenbrenner House bill. Like the Bush plan, it would create a guestworker program to allow needed workers from abroad to spend up to six years working in the United States before being forced to return to their country of origin.
The bill’s treatment of undocumented workers constitutes perhaps the most strained compromise of all. Specter’s bill would grant temporary visas of indefinite duration to undocumented immigrants; the visa status would not expire after a certain number of years. However, there would be no specific path to permanent residence and citizenship for these workers. This provision basically creates millions of workers stuck in a permanent second-class status.
Immigrant communities are protesting the Chairman’s Mark as falling far short of the basic principles needed for effective and realistic immigration reform, which include:
These compelling principles need more champions in Congress if we are to achieve a humane and workable immigration system. New York’s senators have been largely missing from the immigration debate so far. But Senators Charles Schumer and Hillary Clinton could make a crucial difference in the weeks ahead in avoiding a rush to a compromise position drawn from deeply flawed proposals.
Norman Eng, an immigration attorney, is communications and research coordinator with The New York Immigration Coalition. For more immigrant news, see The Citizen.Â