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The Dream Act


 

After years of waiting for her petition for green card, Yuna Im, then 22 years old, found out that she was a year too old to apply for family based permanent resident status. The case had been pending since her parents, along with Im and her sisters, immigrated to the United States in 1989.

It was bittersweet that her younger sister was eligible for a permanent resident status on the very same day that Im began her life as an undocumented immigrant.

While her sister went on to college and received financial aid, Im could not afford to go to her dream school, the Fashion Institute of Technology, a State University of New York. As an undocumented immigrant, she is not qualified for any financial assistance.

"Sometimes I feel like I have nothing in the future," she told the Daily News.

For many undocumented immigrants such as Im, obtaining higher education is nearly an impossible goal. While high school education is accessible and free to all immigrant students, thanks to a1982 Supreme Court decision, college tuition has increased to the point that many cannot attend without financial aid. Last year alone, tuition at the City University of New York increased by 25 percent to more than $4,000.

Advocates said that 50,000 to 65,000 graduates of American high schools each year are children of undocumented immigrants who have lived in the United States for five years or longer.

"We want to make sure these students are able to contribute and use their potential," Anna Maria Archila of the Latin American Integration Center in Woodside told Newsday.

A federal bill aims to help these students. Last month the Senate Judiciary Committee approved The Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors, or Dream Act, that would grant conditional legal status to high school graduate who are illegal immigrants but have lived in the United States for at least five years and were younger than 16 at the time of their entry.

To get permanent resident status, the bill would have an illegal immigrant completed two years of military service or two years of college within six years of graduating from high school.

Steven Yun, executive director of the National Koran American Services & Education Consortium Inc. told Newsday that many undocumented immigrants cannot afford college tuition and work in the underground economy.

"I wanted to study computer graphics," said Im, who after a brief enrollment dropped out of college and began working illegally.

Under the proposal, undocumented students could receive a federal loan or work-study grant but they will not be eligible for other federal financial aid.

Advocates believed the Dream Act, with 40 co-sponsors in the Senate, stands a chance of passing in an election year "[Politicians] will want to 'give' something to the immigrant community for their votes," said Minerva Moya of New York Immigration Coalition.

Critics argue that the bill is another example of pandering. "This bill is a crass political calculation aimed at selling amnesty disguised s as an educative initiative," Dain Stein of the Federal for American Immigration Reform, an organization promoting stricter immigration policies, told PBS.

The US House of Representative is also considering a similar bill, the Student Adjustment Act, but it would grant legal status to students enrolled in seventh grade or above.

Regardless of the outcome of these bills, like many undocumented immigrants before her, Im plans to stay in New York city for a long time even if it means that her dream will never come true.

An immigrant from Bangkok, Thailand, Chaleampon Ritthichai is the editor of The Citizen.

Discrimination After 9/11; Also: Bill On Domestic Partnership Benefits


After the September 11th terrorist attack in 2001, New Yorkers of Arab, Muslim and South Asian descent endured a level of discrimination that only now is coming to light:

"I got fired,” one said, “and, before that, my boss used to call me Osama Bin Laden."

Of almost a thousand New Yorkers surveyed by the City Commission on Human Rights, some 69 percent said they felt subjected to discrimination or harassment due to their ethnicity. Only 17 percent of these people sought help from a government or community agency to help deal with the incidents. According to a recently-released report of the survey results, most were either fearful of making a report, convinced that nothing would be done about it, did not know where to go to file a complaint, or simply felt that the incident was not worth reporting.

The survey was conducted between October of 2002 and April of 2003. "Following the attacks on the World Trade Center, we knew people were afraid to come forward," said Commissioner Patricia L. Gatling, "so we went into these communities and asked if their lives had changed since 9/11 and how."

The largest group of incidents, 37 percent, consisted of bias-related harassment, primarily verbal but also menacing, threats, and physical assault. "Several people were spat upon and a number of women stated that they had their hijabs pulled off," the report said. "Others described their neighbors putting garbage in front of their doors and damaging cars by scratching or burning them, breaking windows or slashing tires. One person was assaulted on a train for reading an Arabic newspaper."

The study found that 26 percent experienced employment discrimination, including being told not to wear traditional headdresses to work. A "large number" encountered difficulties looking for work. Some were harassed on the job by employers, others by customers.

One-quarter of the respondents reported incidents at public accommodations, including from teachers and administrators at schools. And 11 percent experienced housing discrimination, including landlords who openly said they wouldn't rent to them "because you are a Muslim." One landlord locked a Muslim tenant out, put all his belongings on the street, and would not accept rent. Some just were subjected to a reduction in services.

The bias was spread out amongst the boroughs, with most of it taking place right where the respondents live and work. Some people who can "pass" as non-Middle Eastern hear "people you thought were cool, reasonable, and sane exposed for their racism and ignorance," making comments about "others" right in front of them.

The picture isn't entirely bleak. A Jordanian man said that when another customer in a Manhattan café was harassing him, the owner asked the perpetrator to leave. "It was in the night and all the people around us in the place, Americans and other ethnicities, acted against the intruder and asked him to leave and I believe this is the best response that I can imagine." And a Muslim mother sounded a note of defiance: "People look at you like you are a terrorist, but let them look because I know who I am. They are the ones with the problem."

In terms of solutions, the commission report notes that the agency could have investigated many of the incidents recounted in the surveys, but that formal complaints were not made. In the course of disseminating the surveys, the commission worked to educate the affected communities about the Human Rights Law and its protections. And working on the project created many new connections between the agency and these communities.

The Commission on Human Rights concluded the report with five recommendations, saying it "encourages the following for government agencies and community organizations:"
1) a climate of tolerance and respect in the city;
2) interfaith and community integration through activities that involve all members of the community;
3) participation of people from the Muslim, South Asian, and Arab communities in civic and political activities (e.g., police councils, block associations, school leadership teams);
4) media campaigns to promote understanding and discourage discriminatory behaviors;
and 5) the entrance of South Asians, Arabs, and Muslims into public service positions (e.g., police and fire fighting).
Copies of the full report are available by calling the 311 Citizen Service Center.

The 2000 census found 71,000 Arabs and 216,000 South Asians living in the five boroughs.

Hearing On Domestic Partners Bill for City Contractors

The biggest civil rights debate in the City Council this year will come on November 13 when the first public hearing will be held on Intro 271, the Equal Benefits Bill, before Councilmember Robert Jackson's contracts committee. This legislation, sponsored by 36 council members (In PDF Format) but opposed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg, would require those with city contracts of more than $100,000 to offer the domestic partners of their employees the same benefits that they offer the spouses of their workers. While there has been little public notice of this bill, it is bound to incite controversy, especially when it comes to religiously affiliated contractors.

The Salvation Army has indicated that it is likely to give up its contracts rather than comply with a law that they say would make them compromise their disapproval of gay relationships. The Catholic Archdiocese of New York, historically a voice against lesbian and gay rights in the city, has not indicated how it will deal with the pending legislation, though the San Francisco Archdiocese found a way to comply with the 1997 law out there. The Episcopal Diocese of New York is part of an 80-group coalition seeking to pass the legislation.

Proponents of the bill say that those receiving city funds to perform public services must treat all of their employees fairly, including people in domestic partnerships. Some contractors who do not yet offer domestic partner benefits said that the bill's passage would help compel more insurance carriers to offer policies that include domestic partners. California's outgoing Governor Gray Davis just signed the first statewide equal benefits bill in the nation, another development that may boost the prospects of the New York City bill.

Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights. 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..

Bias Violence On Staten Island


 

At the end of a long month of bias-based violence on Staten Island (for details, click on "Links In the News"), the City Commission on Human Rights on September 24 opened up its first permanent office on the island in the commission's 48-year history. The office was long-planned, says Human Rights Commissioner Pat Gatling. But the Bloomberg administration is clearly concerned. New York City mayoralties have been made and unmade by responses to bias violence.

In the summer of 1989, when Yusef Hawkins, a 16-year-old African American from Bedford Stuyvesant in Brooklyn, visited the mostly white Bensonhurst neighborhood in the borough, a mob of white youth killed him. That incident marked the end of the re-election bid of three-term Mayor Ed Koch, who had often been viewed as insensitive in racial matters. It also catapulted Manhattan Borough President David Dinkins into City Hall, the first African American to be mayor.

Just one year later, black New Yorkers rioted in Crown Heights, Brooklyn after a car in a Hasidic motorcade sped through a red light and killed 7-year old Gavin Cato. Shouts of "Kill the Jew" went up and Yankel Rosenbaum, a 29-year old Australian rabbinical student, died from stab wounds inflicted by Lemrick Nelson in a case that was only recently resolved in the courts. The fact that it was not resolved in 1993 when Dinkins ran for re-election and Governor Mario Cuomo released a critical report on the matter during the campaign, contributed to Dinkins's narrow loss to Rudy Giuliani, who had been quite vocal in accusing the mayor of holding police back during the riots.

The first incident this past month occurred in a playground late at night Labor Day in Eltingville on Staten Island, when a mob of some 17 white men and women reportedly confronted an 18-year old black woman named Rachel Carter visiting from New Jersey. They uttered racial slurs and told her she didn't belong in the neighborhood. Then they attacked her and her five companions (who were white, black and Latino), using a sickle and a broken bottle --ugly stuff made worse because the police from the 122nd Precinct tried to discourage the victims from filing complaints. Eleven arrests have been made so far in the Labor Day attack.

Two weeks later, there were nine bias incidents citywide reported on a single weekend, including several on Staten Island, such as a black man accosted by a white mob in a Staten Island deli and a black man shooting at white teens. The cycle of bias violence continued on Staten Island a week after that, when one of the alleged perpetrators in the Labor Day attack was himself assaulted by three Latino men in what law enforcement officers reportedly described as a "retaliatory assault." All in all, in the month after Labor Day, there were a dozen suspected bias incidents on Staten Island alone. Some newspapers began painting Staten Island as a hotbed of bigotry.

None of these incidents are as incendiary as the bias murders of Yusef Hawkins and Yankel Rosenbaum. But the administration is careful to show their concern. At the opening of the human rights office on Staten Island, Commissioner Gatling said, "Mayor Bloomberg and the commission are committed to using all of our resources to ensure that the people of this city do not become hostages to prejudice. This new office will be used to educate, mediate, and enforce the strongest anti-bias laws in the country. Our message is a simple one: Discrimination will not be tolerated in our city." One action already taken is the disciplining of three police officers in connection with the handling of Rachel Carter's Labor Day complaint.

But it's not just individual police officers who are being criticized for their failure to take such civil rights violations seriously. The commission itself is under attack from the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York for not fulfilling its responsibility to enforce the city's human rights law. In a scathing report, attorney Craig Gurian, director of the non-profit center, said that the commission "had eliminated a decades-long backlog of cases in part by a newfound determination to do so, and in part by what the report refers to as 'the Big Case Dump.'" The report charges that the commission found no probable cause against discriminators in more than 98 percent of cases, leveled civil penalties just once, conducted only two trials, almost always failed to interview those accused of discrimination, and "failed to understand and apply basic principles of discrimination law."

Commissioner Gatling responded in the Times that the report "demonstrates a lack of understanding of the commission's objectives and practical application of the city's Human Rights Law," whatever that means. (She didn't elaborate.)

For all the criticism, the mayor has insisted that Staten Island is getting an unfair rap - that the incidents of bias have actually decreased by 25 percent on the island. Of course, these are the official statistics, based on people actually filing complaints - which, as evident from the police reaction to the Labor Day incident, is not always encouraged. But in a way, the mayor surely has a point in asking that Staten Island not be singled out. The truth is, bias violence is not restricted to one part of the city, nor targeted just at one group.

The New York City Gay and Lesbian Project has documented a 52 percent rise in attacks on people who either are or are perceived to be gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgendered. A recent weekend saw three reported incidents, including six men beating a man after he exited a subway stop in Chelsea.

Clarence Patton of the Anti-Violence Project attributed the rise in anti-gay incidents to the massive increase in the visibility of gay people in the news and on TV entertainment shows, contributing to a backlash. He also cited the downturn in the economy and tensions over the war with Iraq.

Commissioner Gatling is also conscious of these factors. The main perpetrators of bias violence, she says, are young people 17 to 22 years old for whom "the economy looks bleak" and for whom there are fewer after-school options in the economic downturn. But even while acknowledging these factors in play, she said that New York is experiencing less bias violence than cities like Los Angeles and Chicago. "We don't have it like they do," she said.

Even while playing down the dimensions of the problem on Staten Island, Gatling said she has spoken to the superintendent of schools there about stepping up conflict resolution and tolerance programs, some of them offered by the commission itself. "I'm a big proponent of peer mediation," she said.

The commission and its critic, the Anti-Discrimination Center of Metro New York, do agree on testing neighborhood tolerance in at least one concrete way. They are both sending out testers to pose as people looking for a job or a home, to see if local real estate agents and employers treat all comers equally. Most often, a white tester and a black tester who pose as similar applicants (same educational level or same income level) approach the same employer or real estate agent at different times to see if they receive the same treatment. One finding so far: In Howard Beach, both testers were treated the same. This might be surprising to those who see the Queens neighborhood as a bastion of bigotry because of past incidents, most notoriously in 1986 when a gang of white youths attacked three black men, killing one of them.

Mayors and mediators, boosters and borough presidents like to say that New York, which is probably still the most diverse city on earth, is a largely successful experiment in peaceful coexistence. One question provoked by the latest incidents is whether New Yorkers get along as well as we do only as long as all members of each group stay in their own neighborhoods. This is a city that, as Gotham Gazette's demographics columnist Andrew Beveridge has pointed out, "remains among the most segregated areas of the United States" - or, as one observer famously said, the only place New York is integrated is on the subway.

Andy Humm is a former member of the City Commission on Human Rights. 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.



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