To Be An American. Bill Ong Hing

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СКАЧАТЬ style="font-size:15px;">      This response has manifested itself in humiliating ways. In the early 1980s, the INS implemented an efficiency plan in Miami by which Haitian asylum hearings were often limited to fifteen minutes, immigration judges were ordered to increase productivity and hear at least eighteen cases per day, and some attorneys were scheduled for hearings at the same time for different clients in different parts of the city. The federal court of appeals chastised immigration officials for violating due process and ordered a new plan for the reprocessing of asylum claims.⁴⁴A similar suit concluded with the INS agreeing to reevaluate potentially up to half a million Salvadoran and Guatemalan asylum cases from the 1980s, due to strong evidence of INS political bias and discrimination against these applicants.⁴⁵

      The rise in anti-immigrant sentiment in the 1980s was apparent in other ways. In 1982 as part of a major legislative package, Republican Senator Alan Simpson from Wyoming initiated a crusade to eliminate the immigration category allowing U.S. citizens to be reunited with siblings. He persisted in his efforts to abolish the category until he retired in 1996. These efforts have constituted a rather transparent attack on Asian and Mexican immigrants. Combined, Asian and Mexican immigrants make up the vast majority of sibling-of-citizen immigrants. Eliminating the category would therefore curtail Asian and Mexican immigrants who might eventually petition for even more relatives. Nativism toward immigrants was manifested in rabid support for English-only initiatives across the country, as was a rise in hate crimes directed at Asian Americans.

      Casual observers of immigration policy in the 1980s might cite the Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986 as an example of a congressional swing toward a pro-immigration position because of its legalization (amnesty) provisions that led to the legalization of about 3 million undocumented aliens. The truth is that the employer sanctions provisions in the law (making it unlawful for employers to hire undocumented workers) was the main part of the law, and received overwhelming legislative support. The amnesty provision just barely eked through the House of Representatives.⁴⁶

      One explanation of the great influence that anti-immigrant groups have today is rooted in the exposure of the INS’s illegal actions against Haitian, Guatemalan, and El Salvadoran asylum applicants. The illegal actions of the INS in processing their applications was the agency’s response to complaints that the asylum system was too generous or manipulable. But once the agency’s illegal actions were exposed, exclusionist whining about the asylum system dramatically spiraled.

      When boatloads of Chinese began arriving in 1992 and 1993, the exclusionists were given new fuel. At first, this created a dissonant situation for the INS. After all, the Chinese were fleeing communism, weren’t they? But the situation seemed somehow different. Two incidents that occurred in late 1992 only days apart demonstrated the dilemma. In one, a Cuban commercial pilot commandeered a flight and landed in Miami. All aboard who wanted asylum, including the pilot, were welcomed with open arms, and none were taken into custody. Yet, a few days later, a boatload of Chinese seeking asylum landed in San Francisco Bay, and every single person on board who could be rounded up was incarcerated. Many applied for asylum arguing that they feared persecution because of their opposition to China’s one-child-per-family birth policy or because they had supported the protesting students at Tiennanmen Square in 1989. It was the nature of these claims that exclusionists labeled outrageous, citing the Chinese as perfect examples of how the asylum system was being exploited. After several Chinese boats arrived—particularly the highly publicized Golden Venture in New York Harbor in 1993—exclusionists were able to rally great public and political support for their cause, and asylum and undocumented immigration has been on the front page ever since.

      Facing a severe budget problem, California’s Governor Pete Wilson added a good deal of fuel to the fire in 1992 by blaming many of the state’s fiscal woes on immigrants. His charge was that immigrants were costing state taxpayers billions in public assistance, medical care, and education. Armed with gubernatorial support, the main lobbyist for the Federation for American Immigration Reform (FAIR) in California, the former national INS Commissioner Alan Nelson, and a former INS regional official, Harold Ezell, joined forces with other neonativists in California to place Proposition 187 on the 1994 ballot. Targeting undocumented immigrants in Proposition 187 proved to be a smart political tactic which enabled its proponents to attract supporters who might otherwise not have been opposed to immigration per se.

      Throughout the Proposition 187 debates, its major proponents claimed that they were motivated only by a concern with undocumented immigrants, and that documented immigrants were beneficial to the country. They lied, of course. As soon as Proposition 187 passed, neonativists immediately set their sights on reducing the flow of legal immigrants. Thus, responding to political pressure, the Commission on Legal Immigration Re-form, chaired by the late former Congresswoman Barbara Jordan, recommended reducing legal immigration by a third. Congressman Lamar Smith and Senator Alan Simpson also introduced proposals that would make cuts. Even before Proposition 187, Republicans in Congress attacked legal immigrants by proposing to reduce spending by eliminating lawful permanent residents from benefits that ranged from Supplemental Security Income to school lunch programs for their children. The welfare cuts were enacted by President Clinton in 1996.

      Clearly, the historical cycles of anti-immigrant backlash can successfully sway political opinion that gets manifested in the form of exclusionist legislation. Demographic changes across the country over the last couple of decades and predictions for the future provide the impetus for much of the nativist sentiment today, especially for those uncomfortable with notions of diversity and change.

      Refugees, immigrants, and their advocates have come to rely upon the final and most famous lines of the American Jewish poet Emma Lazarus’s sonnet engraved at the base of the Statue of Liberty:

       Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I lift my lamp beside the golden door!

      The problem is that long before this gift from the French people was even dedicated by President Grover Cleveland in May 1886, the United States had adopted policies antithetical to the spirit of the Lazarus poem. Her sentiment is simply not embodied in the constitution and has no legal meaning. Nativists and xenophobes have graffitied over the verse time and time again. And time and time again, the Supreme Court has found nothing in the constitution to nullify federal immigration laws related to admissions criteria, exclusion grounds, or deportation.

      The kinds of anti-immigrant statements we hear today from Pete Wilson, Patrick Buchanan, Peter Brimelow, Alan Simpson, FAIR, and others are simply not new. When their words begin to carry weight and get implemented into immigration policies, we know that the nativisttaggers have struck again, and that the powers-that-be have once more become uncomfortable with what is becoming of the definition of an American.

chapter 3 Mi Cliente y Amigo Rodolfo Martinez Padilla

      I am often asked by students and friends, especially those who work with community-based organizations, why I decided to specialize in immigration law. My sense is that they are seeking a romanticized answer about how I was moved by my parents’ struggles with the immigration process, or that I was inspired by the plight of migrants and refugees seeking freedom or a better life, or that perhaps the inequities of the immigration laws or enforcement procedures sparked my interest. Indeed any of these explanations could be plausible. But the truth is that I fell into the field because the only opening available in the office where I wanted to work was in immigration law.

      Upon entering law school, specializing in immigration law was not the plan. During the summer after my first year of law school, I volunteered as a law clerk in the Chinatown/North Beach Office of СКАЧАТЬ