President Obama: Deporter-in-Chief

By Joanne Lin

The folly of decades of enforcement-first has come at a tremendous cost – to American taxpayers who have funded it, to immigrant families torn asunder, and to all of our civil liberties.

The lead statement of the House GOP immigration standards released last week says, "Border Security and Interior Enforcement Must Come First." While catchy, this phrase suggests that enforcement has not been taking place. The reality is that since 1996, our nation's singular immigration policy has been enforcement-first and enforcement-only. This folly of decades of enforcement-first has come at a tremendous cost – to American taxpayers who have funded it, to immigrant families torn asunder, and to all of our civil liberties.

Today the federal government spends more on immigration enforcement than on all other federal criminal law enforcement agencies combined. According to a Migration Policy Institute report released last year, the federal government spent nearly $18 billion in fiscal year 2012 on immigration enforcement – approximately 24 percent more than collective spending for the FBI, Secret Service, Marshals Service, Drug Enforcement Administration, and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives.

In addition, the Homeland Security (DHS) immigration enforcement agencies -- Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection – refer more cases for federal prosecution than all Justice Department law enforcement agencies combined. In recent years ICE has locked up approximately 430,000 individuals per year in detention facilities – which exceeds the total number of prisoners serving sentences in federal Bureau of Prisons facilities for all other federal crimes.

President Obama has earned the title "Deporter-in-Chief." While Republicans decry the President for failing to enforce the immigration laws, this administration is about to hit the two million deportations mark – a record for an American president. Even as President Obama makes immigration reform the top legislative priority for his second term, DHS continues to deport about 1,000 people a day – including many who could qualify for legalization under the Senate-passed immigration reform bill. The DHS enforcement machinery seemingly operates on auto-pilot, wrecking untold numbers of American families and communities every day.

Whether measured by budget allocations, criminal prosecution volumes, or people deported – it is clear that the federal government, through both Democrat and Republican administrations, has pursued an enforcement-first policy. This enforcement-first and enforcement-only approach is precisely what has produced our failed immigration state – the very state that demands comprehensive reform. Poll after poll shows that the vast majority of Americans (including 69 percent of Republicans surveyed) favor a path to citizenship for immigrants if they meet certain requirements including a wait period, pay fines and back taxes, pass criminal background checks, and learn English. The time has come to abandon the folly of enforcement-first and to focus on legalizing the 11 million aspiring Americans.

-30-

Artricle courtesy of: http://www.commondreams.org/view/2014/02/05-3

How US Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration

By David Bacon (really?) for The Nation

This article was reported in partnership with The Investigative Fund at The Nation Institute and the Puffin Foundation. Some names of the people profiled in this article have been changed.
 
Roberto Ortega tried to make a living slaughtering pigs in Veracruz, Mexico. “In my town, Las Choapas, after I killed a pig, I would cut it up to sell the meat,” he recalls. But in the late 1990s, after the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) opened up Mexican markets to massive pork imports from US companies like Smithfield Foods, Ortega and other small-scale butchers in Mexico were devastated by the drop in prices. “Whatever I could do to make money, I did,” Ortega explains. “But I could never make enough for us to survive.” In 1999 he came to the United States, where he again slaughtered pigs for a living. This time, though, he did it as a worker in the world’s largest pork slaughterhouse, in Tar Heel, North Carolina.

His new employer? Smithfield—the same company whose imports helped to drive small butchers like him out of business in Mexico.

David Ceja, another immigrant from Veracruz who wound up in Tar Heel, recalls, “Sometimes the price of a pig was enough to buy what we needed, but then it wasn’t. Farm prices were always going down. We couldn’t pay for electricity, so we’d just use candles. Everyone was hurting almost all the time.”

Ceja remembers that his family had ten cows, as well as pigs and chickens, when he was growing up. Even then, he still had to work, and they sometimes went hungry. “But we could give milk to people who came asking for it. There were people even worse off than us,” he recalls.

In 1999, when Ceja was 18, he left his family’s farm in Martinez de la Torre, in northern Veracruz. His parents sold four cows and two hectares of land, and came up with enough money to get him to the border. There he found a coyote who took him across for $1,200. “I didn’t really want to leave, but I felt I had to,” he remembers. “I was afraid, but our need was so great.”

He arrived in Texas, still owing for the passage. “I couldn’t find work for three months. I was desperate,” he says. He feared the consequences if he couldn’t pay, and took whatever work he could find until he finally reached North Carolina. There friends helped him get a real job at Smithfield’s Tar Heel packinghouse. “The boys I played with as a kid are all in the US,” he says. “I’d see many of them working in the plant.”

North Carolina became the number-one US destination for Veracruz’s displaced farmers. Many got jobs at Smithfield, and some, like Ortega and Ceja, helped lead the sixteen-year fight that finally brought in a union there. But they paid a high price. Asserting their rights also made them the targets of harsh immigration enforcement and a growing wave of hostility toward Mexicans in the American South.

The experience of Veracruz migrants reveals a close connection between US investment and trade deals in Mexico and the displacement and migration of its people. For nearly two decades, Smithfield has used NAFTA and the forces it unleashed to become the world’s largest packer and processor of hogs and pork. But the conditions in Veracruz that helped Smithfield make high profits plunged thousands of rural residents into poverty. Tens of thousands left Mexico, many eventually helping Smithfield’s bottom line once again by working for low wages on its US meatpacking lines. “The free trade agreement was the cause of our problems,” Ceja says.

Read the whole article in The Nation by clicking here or the header...

-30-

Profiling's enabler: High court ruling underpins Arizona immigration law

By Gabriel J. Chin and Kevin R. Johnson

Washington Post

In its challenge to Arizona's controversial immigration law last week, the Justice Department argues that the state law conflicts with federal law, intruding on federal power and ability to regulate immigration. For many Americans, however, the lawsuit is needed because of concerns that Arizona's legislation, S.B. 1070, will lead to police harassment of people, particularly those of color, who cannot prove they are in this country legally. Yet for all the controversy over those concerns, few are talking about the real legal issue underlying the law.

Supporters and opponents of S.B. 1070 assume that racial profiling is unconstitutional, largely because many Americans believe that it ought to be. In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court has approved the racial profiling permitted -- indeed encouraged -- by S.B. 1070.

In a 1975 case regarding the Border Patrol's power to stop vehicles near the U.S.-Mexico border and question the occupants about their citizenship and immigration status, United States v. Brignoni-Ponce, the high court ruled that the "likelihood that any given person of Mexican ancestry is an alien is high enough to make Mexican appearance a relevant factor." In 1982the Arizona Supreme Court agreed, ruling in State v. Graciano that "enforcement of immigration laws often involves a relevant consideration of ethnic factors."

Arizona's immigration law states that a "law enforcement official or agency . . . may not consider race, color or national origin in implementing the requirements of this subsection except to the extent permitted by the United States or Arizona constitution." Although supporters of the law, including Gov. Jan Brewer (R) and other state officials, have said repeatedly that racial profiling is prohibited in its enforcement and that those charged with carrying out the law will be trained to avoid it, the fact that the legislature included this careful exception is significant.

Lawmakers took care to embrace the reliance on race permitted by cases such asBrignoni-Ponce. This choice deserves acknowledgment and discussion, just like that received by the rest of the law.

Brignoni-Ponce has resulted in immigration enforcement that many contend is race-based and in violation of the U.S. Constitution. In case after case, in states including Florida, Iowa and New York, defendants arguing that Border Patrol stops constituted unlawful searches and seizures under the Fourth Amendment have encountered claims by the U.S. government -- including the current administration -- that "Mexican" or "Hispanic" appearance, along with other factors, justified an immigration stop. Border enforcement officers regularly admit in court that "Hispanic appearance" is one reason for an immigration stop.

Racial profiling results from the perceived statistical association of particular races or nationalities with undocumented immigration -- the idea, in other words, that many undocumented immigrants are from Mexico. This rationale ignores the fact that the law generally requires individual suspicion to justify criminal investigation; that a "Mexican appearance" is a vague and ambiguous description and that people from Mexico bear an array of appearances.

We suspect that Brignoni-Ponce and its incorporation into S.B. 1070 have escaped the notice of many Americans because of the ways in which racial sensibilities have evolved since the 1954 ruling in Brown v. Board of Education. Modern American values and most of modern constitutional law are simply inconsistent with the equation of race and suspicion authorized and encouraged by Brignoni-Ponce. Today, being subject to questioning by law enforcement for no other reason than that others of your race, religion or national origin are supposed to commit more of a particular type of crime is nothing short of un-American.

The federal lawsuit raises a number of questions. We think the government's claim of federal preemption is likely to prevail: There is room for one immigration law, not a 50-state patchwork of immigration laws. But the discussion should not stop there. Perhaps that is why last Friday the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC) filed another challenge focusing on S.B. 1070's potential for racial profiling. For the Arizona officials who enacted S.B. 1070, the next step is to repeal the part of the law that authorizes racial profiling. As for the legal system as a whole: Brignoni-Ponce has been exceptional and out of the constitutional mainstream since it was decided. The U.S. and Arizona Supreme Courts should reconsider the endorsement of race-based law enforcement, which is contrary to modern notions of equality in America, and conform constitutional law to the principles held dear by most Americans.

Gabriel J. Chin is a professor at the University of Arizona Rogers College of Law. Kevin R. Johnson is dean and a professor of public interest law and Chicana/o studies at the University of California Davis School of Law.

-30-