Guest Column
Immigration Reform Failure Uncovers New Status Quo
- Immigration Reform Failure Uncovers New Status Quo
- By Elena Shore
- New America Media, News Report
- Jun 28, 2007
- (In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed by HispanicVista.com (www.hispanicvista.com) wthout profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.)
SAN FRANCISCO -- Immigrant rights groups, who came down on different
sides of the immigration reform bill that failed Thursday in the Senate,
agree on one thing: things are going to get worse before they get
better.
The Senate’s failure to move the immigration bill forward Thursday
effectively put off the possibility of immigration reform until 2009.
“Today the Senate voted for the status quo,” says Michele Waslin,
director of immigration policy research at the National Council of La
Raza in Washington, D.C. Except the status quo may have changed in the
last few years, activists say, as raids, detentions and deportations
have increased nationally, and more cities and states across the country
enact anti-immigrant legislation.
Without immigration reform legislation on the table, Rich Stolz,
immigration co-team leader at the Center for Community Change, expects
the country will see more anti-immigrant ordinances passed by local
governments. These ordinances, he says, are among the biggest threats to
the civil rights of immigrants. “America will become a police state for
anyone who looks or sounds like an immigrant,” warns CCC’s Fair
Immigration Reform Movement in a statement Thursday.
Others worry about who will bear the brunt of Americans’ frustration
with an obviously broken immigration system. “I am concerned that this
frustration may be vented on undocumented immigrants, not just with
raids but with increased local initiatives that are anti-immigrant. That
is the unfortunate price that we pay,” says Karen Narasaki, executive
director of Washington’s Asian American Justice Center.
While the Asian American Justice Center was concerned about many
provisions in the Senate bill, such as the curtailment of family
reunification, they had hoped the House version could address them. “But
since the Senate failed to act, we weren’t given an opportunity,” says
Narasaki.
Meanwhile, the increase in raids, detentions and deportations affects
all undocumented immigrants and their families, adds Kerri Sherlock,
director of policy and planning at the Rights Working Group in
Washington, D.C., which lobbied to make sure the Senate bill respected
due process for undocumented immigrants in deportation proceedings.
“As long as we fail to enact reform, people will try to take reform into
their own hands,” says Sherlock, who describes “poorly managed detention
facilities” as “one of the worst human rights violations of our
country.”
Undocumented immigrants and their families aren’t the only ones who are
affected by anti-immigrant sentiment, says Waslin of NCLR. “The right
wing media has demonized immigrants and all Latinos. It goes well beyond
the undocumented.”
Hamid Khan, executive director of the Los Angeles-based South Asian
Network, a 17-year-old grassroots, community-based organization, agrees.
“The post-9/11 criminalization of certain ethnic groups will continue,”
he says, worrying that if the status quo continues, racial profiling of
South Asians and Middle Easterners will continue under the guise of
national security and “heavy-handed enforcement” of immigration laws.
The immigrant rights groups that wanted the Senate bill to move forward
did not hide their disappointment.
“It’s been a tough day for us,” NCLR’s Waslin says. Those who took part
in the immigrant rights marches across the country this year and last
year saw a real opportunity to come out of the shadows, she says. “The
community itself is devastated. People have poured their hearts and
souls into this.”
Organizations that opposed the Senate bill tried to find a silver lining
of opportunity in its failure.
Arnoldo Garcia, enforcement and justice program coordinator for the
National Network for Immigrant and Refugee Rights in Oakland, Calif.,
said the bill’s failure is “not a victory, but it’s not a setback.”
“For community organizations, nothing changes,” Garcia says. “We’ll keep
fighting.”
But Joren Lyons, staff attorney for San Francisco’s Asian Law Caucus,
which opposed the bill, says he was “not sorry to see it die today.” The
Law Caucus had objected to the Senate bill’s attempts to restrict
family-based immigration. “The Senate was trying to destroy the way
immigration worked for the last four decades,” says Lyons, pointing out
that the main source of growth for the Asian community is immigration.
“To suddenly scrap family immigration – retroactively – was really quite
shocking.”
Though many organizations like the Washington, D.C.-based League of
United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) did not get behind the “grand
bargain” of the bipartisan Senate bill, Communications Director Lizette
J. Olmos says LULAC was disappointed by the bill’s failure in the Senate
-- especially since measures they supported, like the DREAM Act, went
down with it. "We lost the battle but not the war," she says.
Some organizations are looking to the House now for leadership. “For a
long time, the House has been saying that they need the Senate to act
first,” says Eun Sook Lee, executive director of the National Korean
American Service & Education Consortium (NAKASEC) in Los Angeles. “The
House should no longer hide behind the Senate.”
But most of the attention is turning to the 2008 presidential race.
Immigration advocates say the immigration debate has proven to be so
toxic, presidential candidates will shy away from the issue in their
campaigns even though the next president will have to deal with it.
What the bill’s failure means for the prospects of Democrats and
Republicans in the upcoming elections is not yet clear.
“The Republicans were only able to deliver a paltry number of votes,”
says Angela Kelley, deputy director of Washington’s National Immigration
Forum, which supported the bill. “And they are going to have to wake up
and smell the coffee tomorrow. They cannot just tuck this issue away.
They have made a pact with the devil but it’s not sustainable for the
party.”
But for Garcia of the NNIRR, neither party was concerned enough with how
to protect the rights of the foreign-born. “The failure to move the bill
falls right in the lap of both parties,” says Garcia. He predicts that
any immigration bill that will come out of Congress in the near future
will likely be an enforcement-only bill, about the only thing both
parties can agree on. “I don’t think a Democratic president and
Democrat-majority congress is the answer. Some of the most repressive
laws, the 1996 laws, were passed under Clinton’s administration.”
But many advocates agree that as immigrants face a future of enforcement
without legalization, the movement for immigrants’ rights becomes more
important than ever.
"This country's future is at stake,” the CCC announced Thursday. “The
anger and disappointment we feel today is the fuel and energy to
continue our fight tomorrow.”
Additional reporting by Eugenia Chien, Julie Johnson, Peter Micek,
Sandip Roy and Viji Sundaram.
Original article at: http://news.newamericamedia.org/news/view_article.html?article_id=dab6189fe42397208d34703f4f9f5091