On St. Patrick’s, remembering how the Irish became white

In case you missed it in this weekend’s New York Times - here’s a great op-ed about Irish immigration to the United States. I intend to share this with the next person of Irish (or Italian, or German, or Polish …) descent who I hear complaining about Latino immigration. Also, this reminds me that I need to finish reading How the Irish Became White.

It’s About Immigrants, Not Irishness

By PETER BEHRENS

Published: March 16, 2012

ON this side of the Atlantic, St. Patrick’s Day has become a boisterous, often bogus, celebration of America’s Irish roots. For most, the holiday is an excuse to drink, and perhaps pinch people who aren’t wearing green.

But for many Irish-Americans and Irish-Canadians, including me, St. Patrick’s Day isn’t really about Ireland. It’s about our ancestors leaving that country, often in bitter circumstances, and risking everything on a hazardous journey and being met with fierce hostility and scorn. It is about immigrants struggling, and mostly succeeding, in their new life, or making success possible for their children and grandchildren.

It is a story that should describe all newcomers to America. This March 17, on this side of the water, we ought to be celebrating immigration, not just Irishness.

Before the mass exodus from Ireland provoked by the great famine of the 1840s, new arrivals to North America were either settlers or slaves. The Catholic Gaelic Irish were the first cohort consistently labeled as “immigrants” in the modern, quasi-pejorative sense, and their experience established a stereotype, a template, applied ever since to whichever national or ethnic group happened to be the latest impoverished arrivals: French-Canadians, Chinese, Italians, Eastern Europeans, Hispanics.

It’s embarrassing to listen to prosperous 21st-century Americans with Irish surnames lavish on Mexican or Central American immigrants the same slurs — “dark,” “dirty,” “violent,” “ignorant” — once slapped on our own, possibly shoeless, forebears. The Irish were seen as unclean, immoral and dangerously in thrall to a bizarre religion. They were said to be peculiarly prone to violence. As caricatured by illustrators like Thomas Nast in magazines like Harper’s Weekly, “Paddy Irishman,” low of brow and massive of jaw, was more ape than human, fists trailing on the ground when they weren’t cocked and ready for brawling.

Read the rest here.

Deportation system takes thousands of kids from parents

What’s worse than getting deported? Getting deported without your kids.

Applied Research Center, publisher of the magazine Colorlines, just released a groundbreaking study of families broken by deportation entitled “Shattered Families: The Perilous Intersection of Immigration Enforcement and the Child Welfare System.” For years, many of us have heard anecdotes about kids getting put in foster care after their parents’ deportation. But this is the first study to show the magnitude of the problem. Analyzing government data obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, ARC found at least 5,000 children in foster care because one or more parent had been detained or deported.  Here’s an excerpt from the report:

Josefina’s baby was just 9-months old and Clara’s children were 1 and 6 when they were placed in foster homes with strangers. Clara and Josefina, sisters in their early 30s who lived together in a small New Mexico town, had done nothing to harm their children or to elicit the attention of the child welfare department.

In the late summer of 2010, a team of federal immigration agents arrived at the front door of Clara and Josefina’s trailer home in New Mexico. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE ) had received a false tip that the sisters, who were undocumented immigrants, had drugs in their home. Though they found nothing incriminating in the trailer and the sisters had no criminal record, ICE called Child Protective Services (CPS ) to take custody of the children and ICE detained the sisters because of their immigration status.

For the four months that ICE detained them, Josefina and Clara had no idea where their children were. In December, the sisters were deported, and their children remained in foster care. Josefina was very quiet as she talked by phone from Mexico a year after she was deported: “I don’t know where my child is; I have no contact with my baby. I didn’t do anything wrong to have my children taken away from me.”

This is the knee-jerk response of legal systems that don’t even communicate with one another – the various state-based child welfare systems vs. the federal immigration enforcement system.  While parents are still present in the country awaiting deportation, detention facilities won’t release them long enough to attend family court hearings about their children’s fate. What’s worse, they’re often detained hundreds or thousands of miles away from home.  Once they’re deported, they might as well have been sent to another planet as far as child welfare systems are concerned.  According to the report, child welfare officials are extremely reluctant to place children with their parents outside the country.  I have no doubt that it’s difficult for children to transition to life in a foreign country that they may have never known.  But that can’t outweigh the profound trauma of permanently separating children from the only parents they’ve ever known.

In the immigration system, people aren’t entitled to court-appointed legal representation, in part because the law considers immigration a “civil” matter, i.e., not as serious as a criminal case.  If a parent does have legal representation in her child welfare case, that lawyer is unlikely to have much experience in immigration law and probably has no way to even communicate with her. It’s clear that getting on the wrong side of either the immigration system or the child welfare system can have devastating consequences.  It’s bad enough to lock up people who’ve committed no crime (lacking legal immigration status is not, itself, a criminal offense under federal law) – especially while the federal government insists that it’s focusing on deporting serious criminals. Terminating the rights of parents who’ve done nothing abusive or harmful to their kids – and refusing to even let parents speak to their children or inform them of their whereabouts – for months at a time benefits no one and just seems completely unnecessary.

In my work at various legal service organizations, I’ve spoken at length with many people who’ve immigrated to the United States – some legally, some not. When I ask them why they come – especially those who’ve risked their lives by crossing the desert on foot – the overwhelming majority tell me something along the lines of “to provide a better life for my family”, “to feed my kids”, etc.  It’s profoundly cruel that while we kick people out of the country, we simultaneously deny them access to the very families they’ve risked so much to care for in the first place.

Download the full report, and read the corresponding article on Colorlines, “Thousands of Kids Taken From Parents in US Deportation System.”

Colbert to Alabama: “I Told You So!”

Last fall, Stephen Colbert testified to Congress about migrant farmworkers, calling on lawmakers to enact better legal protections for the people who harvest our nation’s crops.  Now that Alabama and Georgia’s harsh immigration law have chased away immigrant workers, leaving crops rotting in the fields, Colbert revisits the issue.

Watch the clip here: http://www.colbertnation.com/the-colbert-report-videos/400778/october-26-2011/alabama-s-migrant-workers

… And, we’re back.

Hello, dear readers!  After a long hiatus of studying for (and finally passing) the bar exam, I’ll be writing here again on a regular basis in the very near future.  In the meantime, please check out this other site I’ve been working on, the Groundswell Movement.  We recently featured this excellent reflection about the terrible new immigration law in Alabama. Stay tuned!

Thanksgiving

San Francisco college student averts deportation – for now. Tell Congress to pass the DREAM Act!

San Francisco City College student Steve Li was supposed to be deported today to Peru – a country where he knows no one  - but thanks to advocacy efforts from his family, city officials, friends and classmates it looks like he won’t be going anywhere at least for a little while longer.  California senator Dianne Feinstein has asked immigration authorities to halt Li’s deportation while she considers introducing a private bill that would allow him to stay in the United States.

Steve’s parents left China for Peru in the 1980s to escape China’s one-child policy.  Steve was born in Peru but has grown up in the United States.  His parents applied for asylum here in 2002 but were denied, and made subsequent decisions for themselves and Steve based on bad advice from their lawyer. Steve didn’t even know that he was undocumented until he and his parents were arrested by immigration officials this fall.  His parents were sent home with electronic monitoring bracelets while they await deportation to China but Steve has been jailed ever since in an immigration detention facility in Arizona.

Before his arrest, Steve was studying nursing at college.  Like thousands of other immigrant youth were brought to this country as young children, Steve  speaks English, considers himself an American and wants to contribute to U.S. society.  He would clearly be eligible for relief from the DREAM Act, which Sen. Harry Reid has promised to bring to vote in Congress’s lame duck session – which starts today.  You can tell your representative and senators to pass the DREAM Act now by clicking here and sending them a letter.

Watch: “War on the Border”

This three part documentary about the US-Mexico border from Current TV premieres on Monday. From everything I’ve heard from people who’ve made the journey north by foot,  it looks disturbingly accurate. Watch more preview clips on Current TV’s website – especially this interview with a 13 year old traveling by himself to meet his brother in LA.

Florida says “papers please” – unless you’re white.

It’s no big secret that many local efforts to crack down on immigration carry racist overtones (whether or not their proponents admit it).  Florida just wants to make it explicit.  With the support of governor-elect Rick Scott, State representative William Snyder has drafted legislation mimicking Arizona’s SB 1070 (the controversial law requiring local police to check the status of anyone they suspect of being undocumented) with one big difference. Snyder’s version contains this provision: “Even if an officer has ‘reasonable suspicions’ over a person’s immigration status … a person will be ‘presumed to be legally in the United States’ if he or she provides ‘a Canadian passport’ or a passport from any ‘visa waiver country.’” The visa waiver countries, in case you’re curious, are 36 nations whose citizens can travel freely to the United States for business or pleasure for up to sixty days without having to obtain a visa.  Most are in Europe.  All but three are countries with predominantly white populations.

The law’s backers claim they’re just trying to be “sensitive” to Florida’s many tourists from Canada.   But Florida – particularly Miami – draws thousands of visitors from all over the world, especially Latin America and the Caribbean.  If Florida’s lawmakers were really trying to be more welcoming to tourists, targeting them for additional scrutiny and harassment based solely on their nationality seems like an odd way to it.

In any event, the local police shouldn’t be enforcing immigration law in the first place.  Yes it’s the federal government’s job to do so, but putting questions of federalism aside,  it’s just too damned complicated for someone who’s not an immigration specialist.  Immigration law is far more nuanced than “legal” and “illegal.” There are literally dozens of different kinds of visas that can authorize someone’s stay in the United States, and it’s not at all easy tell from someone’s passport or other documents what their status is, how they got it, and if/when it expires.  Some visas allow their holders to work and get a social security number, and others don’t. Some people are allowed to legally remain in the United States while their immigration applications are pending, and others aren’t.  Some people have been “paroled” into the United States, meaning that for a variety of reasons, even though they don’t have legal status, immigration knows they’re here and isn’t planning to deport them.

You get the point.  It doesn’t make any sense to ask a local police officer who has had no training in immigration law to figure all this out and fairly enforce it.  And it really doesn’t make any sense to explicitly authorize the police to treat white people (it’s hard to argue that Europeans, Canadians and Australians aren’t more likely to be white than people from other countries) differently from everyone else.  After all, there are thousands of Brits, Canadians and Irish (to name a few) who don’t go home after their legally authorized temporary stay, making them just as “illegal” as someone else who swam or walked over a border to get here.

Also, as I’ve said before, putting local law enforcement in charge of immigration enforcement has a definite chilling effect.  It makes immigrant communities afraid to trust the police.  Even if you have legal status, your sister/neighbor/grandma might not, and if you know that contacting the polie will put you or someone else at risk of deportation you’re much less likely to report crimes or cooperate with police investigations.  That makes everyone less safe.  And it’s not just immigrant advocates who think so – chiefs of police from Los Angeles, Houston, and other cities across the country, along with the Police Foundation, have spoken out against local enforcement of immigration laws.

Nevertheless the push to “solve” immigration on the local level continues.  Though perhaps unique in its blatant racism, Florida is just the latest in a list of states who’ve made efforts to copy Arizona’s tough anti-immigrant law.  South Carolina, Minnesota, Michigan, Rhode Island and Pennsylvania are also considering copycat bills.  And as NPR’s recent investigation highlights, the nationwide push to criminalize immigration at the local level has its roots in private conferences like the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC) conference, to which state lawmakers are wooed with golf tournaments, parties and banquets and where they are basically spoon industry-drafted legislation – all with little or no public oversight.   It was at ALEC that Arizona State Senator Russ Pearce and others were introduced to the legislation that became SB1070, which was drafted by lobbyists for the Corrections Corporation of America (CCA).  The same CCA that makes millions from warehousing immigrant detainees.   Perhaps CCA just isn’t interested in locking up immigrants if they’re white.

Better Know a Mariachi

California is a Place, a short film project documenting life in the Golden State, just released this lovely, seven-minute film about Mariachi players in Los Angeles.  Watch it here!

Midterm Election Round-Up

At least a fewer saner heads prevailed in yesterday’s tumultuous midterm elections.  Some of the most strident anti-immigrant candidates were defeated.  Sharron Angle – notorious for her fear-mongering ads using stock footage of “scary Latinos”- failed to take Harry Reid’s Nevada Senate seat.  Former Representative and ardent anti-immigrant (a Sister of Mercy I know once described him as a “Neanderthal on immigration”) Tom Tancredo lost his Colorado gubernatorial campaign to Denver Mayor John Hickenlooper, who definitely has the best name of this election cycle.  And California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman – who spent a record $140 million of her own money – lost to veteran governor Jerry Brown, due in no small part to the revelations earlier this fall that she fired her undocumented housekeeper “like a piece of garbage“.

Meanwhile, Harry Reid who maintains leadership of a slim majority in the Senate, has promised to bring the DREAM act to a vote again in the Senate before the year is up.  The bill, which would legalize the status of thousands of undocumented high school graduates who attend college or serve in the military, was stalled after the Senate refused to vote on it earlier this fall. Versions of the DREAM Act have been kicking around Congress for nearly a decade. While politicians keep delaying the dreams of thousands of deserving kids, the bills’ young supporters have become increasingly, publicly, vocal - even coming out as “illegal” and putting themselves at risk of arrest and deportation to further their cause.  Reid’s announcement about reviving the DREAM, which came just days before the election, undoubtedly won him votes from at least a few Latinos in Nevada so let’s hope he does his best to keep his word while he has the chance.