Ed. Note: After a brief hiatus, the Diaspora is back! We're very excited to have Erin Rosa on board for this project. Please stay tuned for a the latest developments on the immigration reform front every Thursday morning.
Fed up with Congress and frustrated with President Barack Obama's brief mention of immigration reform in the State of the Union address, immigrant rights supporters are now organizing around the clock to push legislators to move on reform in 2010. It will not be an easy feat.
Congress is already bogged down with health care reform and a lingering economic crisis. While Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) has proposed a bill in the House of Representatives to provide a pathway to citizenship for the estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States, immigration reform could be doomed for 2010 if it's not introduced in the Senate by this Spring. Otherwise, it's very unlikely that Congress will get around to debating the issue by the end of the year.
Aware of these bitter facts-and even more cognizant of the human rights abuses that will continue so long as the status quo is maintained-reform proponents are gearing up for a number of key battles to improve the immigration system.
La marcha
Born from dissatisfaction with Congress and Obama's inability to deliver reform, organizers from around the country are preparing to march on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. On March 21, the first day of Spring. The objective is to draw tens of thousands of immigrant rights supporters to Capitol Hill. As New America Media reports, March for America "will be a test of immigrant advocates' organizing capacity and their increasing use of technology to stoke a popular groundswell on immigration."
The march, which is organized by the Reform Immigration For America coalition, will also "bring together advocates focused on different parts of the immigration policy agenda," including supporters of agricultural labor, better immigrant detention standards, and the DREAM Act, federal legislation that provide a pathway to citizenship for certain immigrants who entered the United States before the age of 16.
While mainstream media coverage of the march has been relatively quiet, with many English-language outlets ignoring it completely, the organizing behind the scenes has been even more hush hush. This is a massive grassroots effort to raise public awareness around the country. Members from hundreds of state immigration groups are attending churches, making phone calls, knocking on doors, and organizing caravans to get people to Washington in March. Even mainstream Spanish-language outlets have gotten involved and encouraged their audiences to contact the Reform Immigration For America campaign for all the latest information.
Perhaps most refreshing is that unlike the immigration reform fight in 2007, which was plagued by a number of organizational hurdles, national immigration organizations in Washington have reached out to grassroots groups across the nation for the march. As Bill Chandler, an executive director for the Mississippi Immigrant's Rights Alliance, told the National Radio Project recently, "The grassroots groups were left out of the discussion [in 2007] and what we're trying to do is make sure that doesn't happen again."
Speed bumps on the Trail of Dreams
While organizers are preparing for his month's march, four young students are continuing a 1,500 mile trek on foot, dubbed the "Trail of Dreams," in support of the DREAM Act. The students, three of whom are undocumented immigrants, started their journey on Jan 1. in Miami and are currently hiking through Georgia on their way to Washington, where they are expected to arrive in May. Along the way, they are educating people about how the DREAM Act would help kids like them.
Under current law, some of the walkers still face deportation, even though they were only children when their parents brought them into the United States. While the four students have encountered a lot of support from the communities that they've visited, they've also come across some ugly opposition. As AlterNet notes, a recent Ku Klux Klan rally in Georgia "was timed to occur when the Trail of Dreams walkers were passing through the area," and there was a "a stark difference between the messages of the two groups: one for tolerance and human rights, the other for hatred and racism.
Immigration Detention Abuses Continue
The Varick Federal Detention Facility, a privately-run immigration prison in New York city that was overseen by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, is closing and relocating approximately 250 of its inmates to a New Jersey lockup. As RaceWire reports, the move is "partially because of public pressure" since "Varick has a well-documented track record of detainee abuse and fatal medical negligence," but "shutting down one facility doesn't address the broader system."
When immigration officials granted a media tour to The Nation shortly before the prison closed, reporter Jackie Stevens described the scene inside: "The dorms are packed with rows of narrow beds, fifty in all; the law library has dated resources; there is no privacy; and there is no natural light, ever."
On top of that, even "the agents hosting the tour seemed embarrassed and emphasized the upcoming transfer as we looked through a long hall window at men slouching, feet on the floor, using their beds as backless chairs." Varick is just one of many immigration detention facilities with documented abuses, and while the Department of Homeland Security, the agency that ultimately controls ICE, has promised to reform the system, they have still refused to introduce any legally-binding regulations for detainee treatment.
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This past summer, The Opportunity Agenda conducted a scan (PDF) to determine the state of immigration advocacy on the social web, looking specifically at the following: blogs that frequently cover politics and reach a mass audience, Twitter, YouTube, and the two largest social networking sites (Facebook and MySpace). This research built on a similar scan we conducted in 2007.
Turning specifically to social networking sites, we found a landscape transformed. In 2007 anti-immigrant groups dominated social networking sites approximately two to one. Today the majority of groups on Facebook with a focus on immigration support commonsense reform. MySpace, meanwhile, seems to no longer serve as an active tool for advocacy.
While the main point of our scan was to provide a snapshot of online immigration advocacy in the summer of 2009, our research did lead to a number of recommendations.
First, we wish to point out the success of DREAM Act-related groups on Facebook. Of all the immigration groups on the site, these were the most popular in terms of membership. We speculate that an important reason for this was the ability of these groups to consistently update their content and have active members routinely post information and news related to the DREAM Act. This is key. Members often need to see the vibrancy of a group before they will participate. Once they do, these members' networks see this activity and learn of the group. It is this cycle, we believe, that led to much of the success seen by these groups.
Our crude measure for participation in these groups, membership, is not uncommon. As seen by the proliferation of Facebook groups looking for "1,000,000 for..." any number of causes, it would help the movement to combine its numbers to show unity and support for practical immigration re- form. The best example, again, is the dream Act with its 33 different groups advocating for the same piece of legislation. Despite the difficulties in doing so, it would be beneficial to work toward fewer groups and higher membership rolls.
Again read the full report online for more. Meanwhile, any more tips? Let us hear them in the comments below.
President Obama has often stated that immigration reform cannot be approached in a piecemeal fashion, and that his administration would tackle the issue in 2009. This week, Obama will be meeting with members of Congress to kick off a bi-partisan approach to reform. These meetings don't guarantee any legislative action will take place this year, but are at least an encouraging sign. In the meantime, the deportation industry shows no sign of slowing, hate crimes are rising and hate groups are being main streamed. As a result, the polarization between reform advocates and foes is getting worse.
The Latino/a community has had ample reason to hope that President Obama would take on immigration reform in a humane manner. While Obama is undeniably centrist in his political approach, and has long been fond of language stressing punitive solutions to the immigration issue, he certainly seems to understand that "America is changing and we can't be threatened by it." Enforcement policies are becoming a threat, not only to immigrants, but the country at large.
This week's immigration blog round-up covers a new report on low-wage Latino workers and some state immigration news.
A new Southern Poverty Law Center report finds that low-wage Latino workers in the South are "are cheated out of wages, subjected to inhumane conditions, subjected to wide-spread racial profiling and are regularly harassed by law enforcement." The report also found that:
-Eighty-eight percent of Georgia respondents believed that Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials targeted and treated Latinos differently, including immigrants of other backgrounds;
-41 percent of responders reported that they had personally experienced wage theft, meaning they had not been paid for work they completed; and
-Although only 44 percent of survey participants were women, 77 percent of them reported that sexual harassment was a major problem on the job.
Last weekend in Baltimore, a coalition of organizations and people of African descent come together to form the Black Immigration Network to address immigration and racial equity issues surrounding African Americans and immigrants of African descent. The convening included participants from the Center for New Community and the NAACP.
The Center for New Community has more on their initiative to address race and immigration here. They reject the notion that immigrants and African Americans compete for jobs and argue that proof of citizenship legislation disenfranchises African Americans.
Representative Michael Honda, Chair of the Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus, has joined Rep. Luis Gutierrez on the Family Unity tour. Asians make up 12 percent of the undocumented population.
The Latino Coalition is working to ensure that Latino entrepreneurs secure their share of government small business contracts and procurement opportunities. They will be holding an Economic Summit in DC on May 6th.
For more from The Opportunity Agenda, visit our blog.
Last Friday, 13 people were killed at the American Civic Association in Binghamton, New York. The event shocked the nation and was "the worst mass shooting in the United States since the 2007 massacre at the Virginia Tech college," as New America Media reports. Because the violence erupted at an immigrant service center, the immigrant community has been especially affected, and immigration opponents are predictably using the tragedy to justify, or at least voice, their vitriol toward the undocumented population.
As we are days away from ushering in a new president, hopes are high that relief can be had in federal immigration law. Yet, the Bush administration has made last minute changes to immigration law, reminding us once more of the incompetence in which we have been living for eight years.
Some time this week or next, the DREAM Act will die a quiet death. For those of you who don't know, the DREAM Act provides a path to citizenship for undocumented children so long as they complete two years of college or serve in the military for two years. It provides hope for children who had no say in the decisions of their parents and have no home other than the United States. It is a bi-partisan bill that has support ranging from the likes of Orin Hatch to Barbara Boxer. Promised to be voted on as a part of the Department of Defense appropriations by Democratic leadership, one of the few remaining legislative priorities of the Latino community has been buried.
Rather than give Latinos a reason to vote Democrat, the Rahm Emmanuels and Chuck Schumers of the world have cast the Party's hope for 2008 on the ability of Republicans to turn off this critical voting bloc.
