Guest Column
Immigration raid spotlights policies that hurt families and economies
- Immigration raid spotlights policies that hurt families and economies
- By Louise Rocha-McCarthy
- March 15, 2007
Common sense is sadly uncommon these days. The immigration raid last week in New Bedford, Mass., is a good example.
According to news reports, 360 suspected undocumented workers were detained and as many as 200 children were stranded.
For years, DHS has meant the Department of Human Services to New Englanders, but now it also stands for the Department of Homeland Security, which encompasses Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE as they like to be called.
The raid led to the incarceration of more than 200 people, including nursing mothers, in detention centers far away from their children.
The acronym seems more appropriate than ever. It takes icy disregard to do that.
Human services social workers interviewed the mothers to determine where their children were located.
How could mothers from El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala, the location of the Oscar-nominated documentary "Recycled Lives," be expected to reveal the whereabouts of their children to members of a department with the same acronym as the people who arrested them?
Survivors of civil wars and dictatorships seldom trust government agencies.
The detained Central American mothers were presented with a Draconian choice, one also faced by mothers caught in Maine.
According to New Bedford Mayor Scott Lang, 95 percent of the stranded children were born in the United States, so they can stay here. However, their mothers can't rejoin them legally in this country for 10 years.
Mayor Lang agreed with the government crackdown on the business, but felt the workers should have been given the chance to put their affairs in order and contact their children.
If the mothers choose to take their U.S. citizen children when deported, they go back as single parents to double-digit unemployment and scarce social services.
The baby of one detained nursing mother had to be rushed to the hospital because of dehydration.
The Associated Press noted that social service agencies put 29 children into foster care on March 7.
Meanwhile, the employers accused of running a sweat shop were bailed out the day of the arrests and went back to work.
They will no longer receive Defense Department contracts, but the $83 million they received for the current contract will probably ease the pain of forming a new company that can compete for future contracts.
So while Osama bin Laden celebrates his 50th birthday, seamstresses are arrested by the department charged with our national security.
But absurdity seems to be the norm these days. A quick look at the U.S. Department of State's Visa Bulletin Web site reveals the waiting time for family-reunification visas.
A U.S. citizen who applied for his unmarried son or daughter to join him from the Philippines in 1992, would just be getting the visa. If the son or daughter is from Mexico, the U.S. citizen parent would have to have applied in January 1994.
Apparently, the long waits aren't simply a matter of understaffing and backlogs. They are a matter of policy.
Is it any wonder people attempt to enter without visas? Such a policy drives people to human traffickers or smugglers and creates mafias.
These policies affect many nationalities.
During a snowstorm on March 7, 3,500 Irish-Americans showed up on Capitol Hill in support of comprehensive immigration reform, not punitive measures.
The Irish Lobby for Immigration Reform organized the event with volunteers from Boston, New York and Philadelphia on behalf of 50,000 undocumented Irish immigrants in the United States.
Meanwhile, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials (NALEO) and other Latino civil rights organizations sent a letter to President Bush.
It said the recent raids have hurt families and local economies without significantly reducing the number of undocumented immigrants, or stopping unscrupulous employers from exploiting workers.
Leaders of the First of May Movement are organizing another national boycott on May 1, the internationally recognized Labor Day, in order to once again bring attention to the contributions of immigrant workers in the United States by their absence.
Louise Rocha-McCarthy works as a translator and interpreter for the Portland school system.
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