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Just the facts on immigrants in America
By the Editorial Staff
Visit any major city in America. You'll likely see an Indian store next to a Mexican restaurant or perhaps a Vietnamese noodle house next to an Oriental supermarket, probably owned by a Korean, Filipino or Chinese husband-and-wife team.
Indeed, immigrants are an integral part of America. Just go to Silicon Valley and checkout some of the major barometers of the high-tech industry: Yahoo, Intel, Sun Microsystems, Solectron. They were all were founded by immigrants.
As employees, product consumers, laborers or business owners, immigrants have made an indelible mark in the U.S. economy. Unfortunately, little accurate information is available about their impact to the country as a whole. As a result, Americans, in general, fail to grasp the issues behind migration. They often hear of the negative effects of immigration, but do not realize the positive gains. Reality has often been distorted by xenophobia.
This lack of information imprinted all immigrants with a negative image, which they must bear as they try to lead new lives in their newly-adopted country; a foreign land with an unfamiliar system and an unfamiliar culture. Yet it is an unfamiliar nation that immigrants have also learned to love.
Hispanic immigrants expand political clout
It's true that even those who are not candidates have long been aware that the number and influence of Hispanics has been increasing. Labels on soap, clothes, computers, lawn mowers, candy bars, cereal boxes, over-the-counter drugs and many other products now come in English and Spanish.
In many — if not most — parts of the nation, businesses have recorded phone messages in both languages, and road signs, too, are bilingual.
Hispanic notables include slugger Sammy Sosa, pitchers Livan and Orlando Hernandez; singers Gloria Estefan , Ricky Martin and the late Selena; and TV star Jimmy Smits.
Others include such political leaders as Cruz Bustamante, the lieutenant governor of California, and the 20 Hispanic-American members of Congress.
The real news lies in a recent Census Bureau report confirming that the Hispanic population is the fastest-growing minority and that the number of Hispanics is increasing faster and in more varied places than most of us realized. — August Gribbin
America should not turn its back on the foreign-born
The notion that immigrants threaten national security in a post–September 11 world is mistaken. Yes, the September 11 hijackers were foreigners. Yes, the terrorists used the immigration system to their advantage. In the global war on terrorism, however, we cannot turn our backs on the foreign-born.
We need them to fight this war. … America became a superpower by attracting the best and the brightest to its shores, and here these immigrants have thrived and built the greatest economy and democracy the world has yet seen.
We will harm our national security if we forget this history and heritage and turn our back on it through mistaken fears. — Margaret Stock, former immigration lawyer and current law professor at U.S. Military Academy at West Point, as quoted by the Harvard Journal of Law & Gender
IN LIMBO: Policy puts American Dream on hold for thousands of immigrants
By Judy Benjamn
During their first nine years of living illegally in Florida, a Peruvian couple quietly crafted their own American dream in the thriving underground economy of the 1980s: She cleaned houses, he did landscaping. Both worked for cash.
Over the next nine years they obtained permits to work legally and climb into the middle class. Ditching their apartment, they bought a house and started taking their two children on annual trips to Disney World.
But in 1983, the Peruvian woman had done something that felt natural at the time, but came back to haunt her in a way she never could have foreseen: She went home to Peru for three months to be near her mother when she gave birth to her first child.
Three years later the U.S. Congress, seeking to move long-term illegal residents like the Peruvian couple into the mainstream, launched an amnesty program. <
It had one big caveat, however. To qualify, the illegals had to establish they had resided in the United States, without a break, for the past four years, from 1982 to 1986.
The few months the Peruvian woman spent in her native land probably would not disqualify her from the amnesty program. But because of the restrictive way the INS interpreted the four-year rule, the couple, and thousands like them, never got the chance to explain brief absences. “We are living in the closet,” said the 38-year-old woman, who asked not to be identified because she fears losing her precious work permit.
Every six months either she or her husband must report to INS for a work permit renewal. And in the past year, the agency has yanked 45,000 of them from people whose situation is similar to the Peruvian couple's.
“We are living like normal American people, but we are not normal because we don't have papers. If something happens (to our work permits), we lose everything,” the woman said. When she first applied for amnesty, she was tripped up by an INS procedure called “front-desking.”
A security guard met her at the door of an immigration service center and glanced over her paperwork. Noticing she had traveled to Peru , the guard refused to allow her to even enter the center.
Federal judges criticized front-desking and the agency eventually abandoned the practice. But now, after being sued by immigrant advocates, the INS is going through the lengthy process of trying to determine which applicants were wrongly turned away.
And in the meantime, the agency is yanking work permits. About 350,000 so-called late amnesty-seekers from more than 180 countries have been caught for the past 12 years in this legal limbo that is growing increasingly precarious. About 10 percent of them, or 35,000, live in Florida.
For the Peruvian family, their status is a worrisome secret. Not only does the couple hide their predicament from co-workers and neighbors, they have trouble explaining the situation to their 16-year-old daughter. The girl has no memory of Peru, even though her grandmother raised her there until age four while her mother worked in Florida.
She begs her parents to let her drive a car and to join the ROTC at her public school, but can do neither because she is not a legal resident. “She doesn't understand,” said her mother. “She cries and cries. She asks me, ‘Mommy, why do you have to go to the Immigration always?' ”
After lying dormant for many years, the late amnesty issue has taken on new urgency. A provision of the 1996 Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act stripped federal courts of the right to hear class-action lawsuits brought by late amnesty seekers.
In one of the lawsuits, a federal judge blocked the agency from deporting class members, forcing it instead to issue them temporary work permits until the case could be resolved.
But that judge was second-guessed by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, which put on hold his order requiring temporary work permits. In September 1998, an INS memo directed service officers to stop renewing class-action members' work permits. In the year since, about 45,000 permits have been revoked. The revocations outrage advocates for the amnesty-seekers.
“We've taken a step backward,” said Peter Schey, a Los Angeles-based attorney who has been arguing on their behalf for 12 years.
Several times a week, Schey said, he gets frantic calls from people — taxi drivers, police dispatchers, construction workers — who have lost their work permits to the INS for reasons they do not understand. Employers, fearful of being fined for undocumented workers, dismiss anyone who cannot show proof of permission to work in the United States.
“You have people being terminated from $20-an-hour jobs and going back to $5-an-hour jobs in the underground economy,” Schey said. “It's absurd.”
INS counters that some of the late amnesty seekers represented by the class-action lawsuits simply did not qualify under the terms set by Congress. The agency continues to resist efforts to force its hand through the courts. Since the work permit revocations began, groups of late amnesty seekers have sprouted nationwide. They lobby Congress and use Internet Web sites to share information about the complex and ever-changing set of laws governing their fate. “This has gone on for so long,” said Roger Maharaj, president of the Coral Springs-based Organization for Residency and Citizenship in America . The group claims 500 members in South Florida.
Maharaj, himself a late amnesty applicant, thinks his group should never have been excluded. “We are not criminals. We have contributed to this country and want the right to have a voice in this country,” said Maharaj, a real estate agent.
Maharaj, 49, went from Trinidad to New York City on a tourist visa in 1981 and helped relatives run a convenience store. In 198, attracted by Florida 's climate and less hectic pace, he opened a convenience store of his own in Tamarac. Through all those years, however, Maharaj continued to travel periodically between the United States and Trinidad to visit family. When he attempted to apply for amnesty at an immigration service center in Fort Lauderdale, an officer refused to accept his form. Since then, he has rested his fate with the now-frozen class-action lawsuits.
“To me it is like a set-up. They tell you they will offer amnesty but then you find out it is only if you did not leave the country. We don't think that's right,” Maharaj said. “They have all these people hanging on a string.”
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