Daily news updates from CIS

October 26, 2009 -- Click here for overseas news

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[For CISNEWS subscribers --

1. Corruption, incompetence plaguing ICE
2. Repatriation program flies back fewer Mexicans
3. National nature reserves suffer effects of border crime
4. DHS waives visas for Chinese visiting CNMI
5. Sen. Durbin vows enduring support for DREAM Act
6. CIS survey: amnesty would beget more Mexican immigration
7. UT enforcement program lauded
8. Analysis: Enforcement jurisdictions more muddled than ever
9. San Fran. police chief opposes new sanctuary measure
10. Supervisor claims San Fran. no longer 'sanctuary'
11. Dallas police issued dozens of tickets for not speaking English
12. AZ county sheriff deputizes ICE agents
13. TN county denied 287(g) program
14. CO county looks to recruit more Latinos into government
15. El Paso finds Mexican violence a growth boon
16. KY counties scramble to serve growing Hispanic population
17. Denver ballot initiative would impound unlicensed drivers' vehicles (link)
18. UT university bemoans enforcement standards
19. NY libraries reach out to foreign born
20. Haitians seek action on Obama immigration goals
21. Groups continue attack on Census changes (story, 2 links)
22. WA activists host citizenship clinics
23. CA group begins amnesty work
24. CA program reaches out to Asian youth
25. Iraqis struggle with U.S. life
26. Cambodians reshape MA city
27. Tech lobby wants more foreign labor
28. VA businesses offer foreign language services
29. Google entrepreneur supports group that helped him settle
30. Boston mural promotes Census participation
31. CA veteran facing wife's deportation
32. Missing Iranian asylum seeker wins case
33. Witnesses cite rampant fraud at IA meatpacker
34. Feds probing death of Dominican detainee
35. NJ youths accused of murder face hate crime charges (link)
36. Two jailed in Florida for smuggling (link)
37. WA restaurateur jailed for illegal hires (link)

Subscribe to CIS e-mail services here: http://cis.org/immigrationnews.html

-- Mark Krikorian]


1.
Immigration agents mishandle informants
By Alicia A. Caldwell
The Associated Press, October 26, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jrKh9WBshmXcuNT28C0MyCIKNtvAD9BII8L80

El Paso, TX (AP) -- One immigration agent was accused of running an Internet pornography business and enjoying an improper relationship with an informant. Another let an informant smuggle in a group of illegal immigrants. And in a third case, an agent was investigated for soliciting sex from a witness in a marriage fraud case.

These troubling misdeeds are a sampling of misconduct by federal Immigration and Customs Enforcement personnel as the agency seeks to carve out a bigger role in the deadly border war against Mexican drug gangs.

According to documents obtained by The Associated Press under the Freedom of Information Act, ICE agents have blundered badly in their dealings with informants and other sources, covering up crimes and even interfering in a police investigation into whether one informant killed another.

At least eight agents have been investigated for improper dealings with informants since ICE was created in 2003, and more than three dozen others have been investigated for other wrongdoing, the records show.

The heavily redacted documents detail how one agent failed 'to report murders ... to her supervisor' and how another failed 'to properly document information received from a confidential source in violation of ICE policy and procedure.'

In the case involving one informant charged with murdering another, Jose Daniel Gonzalez Galeana, a smuggling manager for the Juarez cartel, was gunned down this spring in his upscale El Paso neighborhood. El Paso police say ICE delayed its investigation, steering detectives away from the man now charged with arranging the contract hit.

Kelly Nantel, an ICE spokeswoman in Washington, said in an e-mailed statement that the agency 'works with confidential informants in accordance with established best practices and guidelines of federal law enforcement agencies.'

The statement noted that ICE fired an agent last year for 'negligence in performing his duties, misdirecting funds and submitting false documents' in relation to his work with an informant. Also, an agent in Miami was sentenced to two years in federal prison and resigned from ICE earlier this year as part of a plea deal for accepting gifts from an informant.

ICE officials in El Paso have repeatedly declined to comment on the Gonzalez case, but John Morton, Homeland Security's assistant secretary for ICE in Washington, said, 'I'm aware of that situation and it is under review.' He declined to answer other questions.

Problems with ICE informants are not a new phenomenon. According to a Feb. 24, 2004, letter from the head of the DEA office in El Paso to the head of the ICE office there, a man described as 'a homicidal maniac' was allowed to continue working as an ICE snitch even after he 'supervised the murder' of an associate of the Juarez cartel.

In a recent AP interview, the informant, Guillermo 'Lalo' Ramirez Peyro, now confined to an ICE detention facility, denied participating in any homicides.

Even when not working with informants, ICE agents have gotten in trouble. The documents show that agents in field offices all over the country, and in several foreign posts, have been investigated for offenses including drunken driving in government cars, lying to other investigators in ongoing cases, and misusing their position for personal gain.

In one case, an agent was probed for having an inappropriate relationship with the target of an ICE investigation. Another agent was investigated for using his government position to ask questions from Texas about his mother-in-law's eviction in New Mexico.

El Paso, which sits on the Rio Grande across from the virtually lawless Ciudad Juarez, Mexico, is populated with numerous law enforcement agencies that try to work together on stopping the northbound flow of drugs, immigrants and violence and the southbound flow of weapons and cash.

ICE was spun off from the Immigration and Naturalization Service to become the investigative arm of the Department of Homeland Security when DHS was created after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. ICE also handles the processing and detention of illegal immigrants and miscellaneous tasks like oversight of security at federal buildings.

The agency has long been interested in joining the border drug war, and has been stepping up its efforts as drug-related violence has killed more than 13,500 people in Mexico and threatens to spill into the United States.

Some local and federal authorities in El Paso are hesitant to work closely with ICE because of the way it operates, said law enforcement officers who spoke to the AP on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to discuss the issue.

In the 2004 DEA letter, inaction by ICE officials was blamed for 'allowing at least 13 other murders to take place in Ciudad Juarez' and for endangering the lives of DEA agents and their families.

The murder of informant Gonzalez is another example of concern.

'It is interesting that an agency like ICE would be handling a cartel hit man, especially when you consider the other types of agencies in El Paso,' said Stephen Meiners, a senior analyst for Stratfor, an Austin-based global intelligence company. 'There's probably more than 50 agencies there who might be the more natural handler for that type of informant.'

Law enforcement officers say agents follow general rules on informants: Federal investigators are supposed to keep close tabs on informants, approve any criminal activity that might be necessary to complete an investigation, and cut loose an informant who gets caught violating his agreement with the agency.

But it's not always easy, considering the kind of people involved in organized crime.

'You are automatically dealing with bad guys,' said Phillip Lyons, a criminologist at Sam Houston State University. 'It's a dirty business from the outset.'

In the Gonzalez case, El Paso police were outraged by what appeared to be a deliberate attempt to steer them away from the prime suspect. They laid out their complaint in an interview with the AP.

As Gonzalez bled to death on the cul-de-sac in front of his house, his wife, Adriana Solis, made two phone calls, as her husband had instructed her to do if anything happened to him. First, she called ICE, then 911, said Lt. Alfred Lowe, the lead investigator.

Gonzalez, a Mexican national, had been living in the U.S. on an ICE-issued visa given to him as a perk for his informant work.

The ICE official his wife called, who remains unidentified, called El Paso police a bit later to tell them their murder victim worked for the Juarez cartel, but also was an ICE informant. They promised to help.

Solis told police that her husband believed a Juarez cartel assassin nicknamed 'El Dorado' was hunting him down.

According to Lowe, the ICE official didn't contact police again for three days. When he did, he gave police a photo array of Gonzalez's known associates. A Texas Ranger noticed that the array contained one less photo than the last time he'd seen it. The ICE agent said he couldn't explain the discrepancy, Lowe said.

A few days later, the agent said the missing person was a man he called 'Mayer,' an ICE informant who might have information about the Gonzalez killing.

But ICE had given the police a false name and a false lead.

Mayer was really Ruben Rodriguez 'El Dorado' Dorado, a twist police discovered when the man was arrested along with a U.S. Army solider and two other teenagers trying to steal a trailer full of televisions. Lowe said police recognized the photo of Rodriguez in the El Paso Times as that of the man identified to them as Mayer.

Nearly two months later, they charged informant Rodriguez with arranging the hit on informant Gonzalez. The soldier, the alleged triggerman, the teens and another man also are charged in the case.

Neville Cramer, a retired INS special agent, said ICE was obligated to turn over Rodriguez to police as soon as they thought he might be a murder suspect.

'If ICE knew ... this individual was involved in any manner whatsoever, they had better not have kept the information from the police, no matter what the circumstances were,' Cramer said.

Added Lowe: 'Some agencies don't take murder as seriously as drugs.'

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2.
Fewer illegal migrants flown home to Mexico
By Daniel Gonzalez
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix), October 26, 2009
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/10/26/20091026flights.html

The United States government flew 10,560 illegal immigrants back to Mexico during a 36-day period this summer, under a program aimed at reducing migrant deaths and disrupting smuggling organizations in the Arizona desert.

The repatriation program, run by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, this year averaged a record 293 people a day, but returned fewer overall than previous years.

Last year, the government flew 18,464 people, or about 264 a day, to Mexico City during the 70 days the program was run.

Homeland Security officials attributed the success of the voluntary program to cooperation with the Mexican government. Mexico does not help pay for the program, which this year cost $6 million, but the Mexican Consulate in Nogales provided personnel to help the Border Patrol interview illegal immigrants to identify volunteers for the program.

The Mexican government said about 2,180, or 20 percent, of the illegal immigrants who volunteered for the program this year were women, and 814, or about 8 percent, were minors.

Once in Mexico City, migrants were given bus tickets to their home states.

The majority of immigrants flown back to Mexico this year were from the interior or southern states, including Chiapas, Mexico, Guerrero, Michoacan, Oaxaca, Puebla and Veracruz.

Migrant deaths in Arizona climbed significantly this fiscal year, with 191 counted through August in the Tucson sector, the busiest of the nine Border Patrol regions on the U.S.-Mexican border. There were 32 more deaths than during the same 11-month period the previous year.

September's numbers are not available.

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3.
In immigration war, environment is a neglected casualty
Land, animals, plants pay price on the border
By Stephen Dinan
The Washington Times, October 25, 2009
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/25/environment-casualty-immigration-war/

Buenos Aires N.W.R., AZ -- Michael M. Hawkes, manager of the Buenos Aires National Wildlife Refuge, reaches across his desk and pulls out a homemade blue-and-red bumper sticker that reads, 'Littering is always a crime.'

It turns out that here on the U.S.-Mexico border, even that is a controversial statement - because it's aimed at the humanitarian groups that drop gallon jugs of water on public lands to help illegal immigrants crossing the rugged borderlands.

Mr. Hawkes says dealing with those groups now takes up most of his time, and it only builds on top of the pile of other pressures - an army of illegal immigrants and drug smugglers, some of them armed, facing off against the U.S. Border Patrol - that have transformed his wildlife sanctuary into ground zero for the nation's immigration wars.

Situated in the middle of southern Arizona, Buenos Aires is among the hardest-hit. But the same story is repeated across the U.S.-Mexico border on refuges, Indian reservations, national forests and the rest of the federal lands that make up 40 percent of the boundary between the two countries.

The clear losers in the clash are the land, and the plants and animals that live on the edge in this beautiful but precarious environment - innocent bystanders caught up in an escalating, seemingly endless war between the immigrants, smugglers and the drug cartels and the authorities charged with catching them.

An estimated 300,000 illegal immigrants traversed Buenos Aires' 118,000 acres in 2007, leaving tons of trash, rusting abandoned cars, biologically hazardous waste and vehicle tracks that reduced parts of the landscape to a dusty wasteland.

That hurts just about every aspect of the refuge's mission, which was established in 1985 to try to preserve the endangered masked bobwhite quail, one of seven endangered species on the refuge.

In the last two years, though, border security has been built up, with more manpower and a fence across the entire refuge boundary with Mexico. The result, according to Mr. Hawkes: The number of illegal crossers dropped to 20,600 in fiscal year 2009, or just 7 percent of what it was in 2007. Abandoned cars dropped from 100 in 2007 to zero in the most recent 12-month period. The land near the fence is already recovering.

'I've heard a lot of conservationists down on the fence. From my standpoint, it's been a blessing for this refuge, it really has,' Mr. Hawkes said. 'I'm the black sheep of the bunch because I think [Border Patrol is] doing a great job.'

But environmentalists counter that while individual species might be helped - the lesser long-nosed bat, for example, which had at one point been ousted from its roosting cave on Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in western Arizona - that's more than offset by the overall disruption to species migration.

Dan Millis with the Sierra Club's Borderlands Campaign points to a stack of photos documenting desert toads, roadrunners and mule deer staring forlornly at the fence, apparently blocked in their efforts to be on the other side.

'Hands down, the security effort to try to stop the flow of undocumented immigration is, and always has been, from our perspective, far more damaging to the environment than the flow of migrants themselves,' he said.

'The fact is, this trash and these footpaths are really a short-term problem that has a quick fix in terms of pick up the trash, rehabilitate the paths,' he said. 'This border wall does not have a quick fix, and in fact is having a very negative environmental impact that is causing extreme damage now.'

Academic work on the problem is just beginning.

A study earlier this year by Aaron D. Flesch, a graduate student at the University of Montana, suggested that the cactus ferruginous pygmy-owl, which was at one point listed as an endangered species, generally flies far lower than the height of the border fence - suggesting that the species' population could be split in two. The same study also found that desert bighorn sheep could face localized extinctions because populations are cut off from one another by fencing.

There are lives at stake here. Each year, dozens of immigrants unable to handle miles-long walks through heat that averages 100-degree highs in the summer are found dead on public lands. Thousands more give up and light signal fires or use emergency-call stations to summon help.

To combat that, humanitarian groups regularly cart water out to the remote regions of the border. And that's what prompted Mr. Hawkes to print up his 'Littering is always a crime' bumper sticker. It was meant to send a message to one group in particular, No More Deaths, a volunteer group that had dropped the water jugs along popular immigrant trails through the refuge and who named its campaign 'Humanitarian Aid Is Never a Crime.'

'They've become just as much of a problem as the illegals,' Mr. Hawkes said. It's so bad that he's asked - and the local U.S. attorney has agreed - to take the littering cases to court. Two men have been convicted, and more than a dozen are awaiting trial.

The Rev. Gene Lefebvre, who works with No More Deaths, said the group has asked that the littering cases be dropped. And after operating outside the law, they're now in negotiations with Mr. Hawkes to try to get official sanction for their activities.

Mr. Lefebvre says his group had a brief meeting with Interior Secretary Ken Salazar and since then, negotiations with Mr. Hawkes on a compromise have made progress. No More Deaths has even offered to haul out trash every time they go in with their water jugs and to make sure they carry out more than they carry in.

'Border Patrol is not our enemy. Neither is Mike. We want to come out of this with a solution that lets more migrants live, and we'll be happy with that, and make every effort on the environmental side to make Mike's jobs better,' he said.

For years, the rugged, remote nature of southern Arizona was its main protection against incursions by illegal immigrants. It was far easier for immigrants to go through more populated areas in California and Texas, so Arizona was spared.

But in the 1990s, the Border Patrol closed down those urban corridors, pushing the illegal flows straight into Arizona and the most fragile parts of the Sonoran Desert. The drug smugglers soon followed suit. The cartels' ability to adapt to the changing circumstances north of the border is remarkable.

One innovation was to post spotters inside the U.S., oftentimes on federal lands, to keep track of Border Patrol and other law enforcement movements. The one-man rock nest on a ridgeline overlooking Interstate 8 at Milemarker 141 is typical. The spot is well-camouflaged and if it weren't for the pile of empty Bud Light cans and water bottles with Spanish labels, almost impossible to spot unless you knew exactly where to look.

The smuggling cartels have thousands of these lookouts stations across southern Arizona, manned by low-level employees or people who owe a debt to the cartel.

'They're everywhere. On the smuggling corridors, most of the high points that give a good perspective of the smuggling routes or trails, there are lookouts in those areas,' said Patrick Brasington, the chief law enforcement officer for the Bureau of Land Management's Phoenix office, which oversees the land near Milemarker 141.

That brazen approach extends to the fragile landscape as well. Mr. Brasington said smugglers have actually cut a miles-long, two-track road through wilderness on BLM land, moving rocks and flush-cutting to the ground trees, brush and cactus.

Mr. Brasington described one vehicle where smugglers had apparently tried but failed to change flat tires and instead left it propped up on boulders.

'They just devastated this area. It looked like a football field, where people had been playing there in the mud for months,' he said.

In Ironwood Forest National Monument, haulers used to collect 40,000 to 50,000 pounds of trash a year. But in the fiscal year that just ended that dropped to 30,000 pounds - parts of the monument are just too dangerous for contractors to pick up the trash.

The public lands agencies are well aware of that danger to their employees.

Mr. Hawkes said two state game wardens were shot at on his wildlife refuge last year, and law enforcement reports over the years detail other dangerous run-ins, including the death of Park Service Ranger Kris Eggle, gunned down in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument in 2002 by a drug cartel hit man fleeing Mexico.

It has gotten so bad that agencies require employees here to take special training and have issued special rules on how to operate. The U.S. Forest Service warns managers not to send employees out on nighttime assignments, while the Fish and Wildlife Service said a law enforcement escort is required for employees working at night.

Despite those rules, hunters, campers, hikers and tourists enjoying the public lands don't see those same warnings. Instead, the most common alert they see is a road sign such as the one near Ironwood Forest National Monument that reads: 'Travel caution: smuggling and illegal immigration may be encountered in this area.'

A 2002 report by a drug task force in Arizona described what civilians have faced on public lands: carjacking and robbery, having rocks thrown at them and having their homes along the border invaded by immigrants looking for food, money or anything else they can carry.

Except for the occasional sign or Web site notice, the Interior Department does not publicize how dangerous the borders can be.

But a department employee did collect partial data up until he retired in late 2008. According to his figures, more than 99 percent of all marijuana seized on or near department lands over the last three years was seized along the border. The borderlands also accounted for more than 90 percent of the cocaine and more than 90 percent of vehicles seized and stolen vehicles recovered on Interior Department lands.

The border region accounted for about a quarter of the threats or violent incidents recorded in all the country's national parks, wildlife refuges, BLM land and Indian reservations, even though the borderlands account for a minuscule fraction of total department lands.

The agencies say there's a reason they issue the extra warnings to their own staffs: They fear that being government employees makes them particular targets. The Fish and Wildlife Service's new instructions issued earlier this month advise employees not to wear uniforms or any other official insignia while doing fieldwork.

Mr. Hawkes had his own, odd run-in.

Two weeks after he moved into a trailer home on the refuge, an immigrant broke in while Mr. Hawkes was out - and helped himself to a leftover dinner.

The man ate pork and beans, he stole Mr. Hawkes' new sneakers, a cell phone and the phone's charger - and then he washed the dishes he'd used, and wrote a note asking Mr. Hawkes to view his actions with compassion.

'It's just a matter of time until someone gets murdered, raped, shot,' Mr. Hawkes said.

Even the supporters of the border fence acknowledge it's not a cure-all.

Mr. Hawkes said the flow of immigrants on his refuge now looks like an hourglass, with the wall preventing incursions at the southern end, but with the immigrants and smugglers bleeding back onto his land farther north.

And he says the fence - which extends a mile on either side of his refuge, but then turns into vehicle barriers - could end up hurting some of the refuge's species if it were built farther out.

He says he's hoping the better technology promised by SBInet, the much-anticipated but long-delayed 'virtual fence' the government has been promising, will be the answer to the competing challenges of security and resource management.

The only problem: SBInet is proceeding very slowly, thanks in part to the need to comply with environmental laws.

Those laws have always been a thorn in the side of the Border Patrol, illustrating again the clash of interests between law enforcement and environmental stewardship.

One Border Patrol agent recalled a few years back when the agency wanted to begin horse patrols on Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The Park Service, which runs the monument, came back with a strange demand: that the horses be fed with seedless alfalfa, so that when they defecated they wouldn't be bringing in seeds of an invasive species.

More recently, Congress had to give the Homeland Security secretary authority to waive three dozen environmental laws to help expedite construction of the fence.

But the fights go on.

In a report last month, the Government Accountability Office said the Homeland Security and the Interior departments have been feuding over how much information the Border Patrol should provide to obtain environmental permits to build towers on public lands.

The issue has since erupted onto the House and Senate floors.

Sen. Tom Coburn, Oklahoma Republican, attached an amendment to a Senate spending bill this year that would make sure wilderness designations aren't used to keep the Border Patrol agents from doing their job.

'The tragedy is that the very intent of the Department of Interior to protect the environment is actually being made worse by their policy of not allowing law enforcement efforts, i.e., the Border Patrol, into those areas,' Mr. Coburn argued.

His amendment was accepted unanimously by the Senate, but still must survive a final House-Senate compromise bill.

On the House side, Republicans managed to attach an amendment to a national heritage area designation in Arizona that says the Department of Homeland Security must be consulted in such matters.

'I don't think Americans really know that when a Border Patrol agent crosses into a national park, he has to get out of his car, park it and walk,' said Rep. Rob Bishop, the Utah Republican who has been leading the fight to give Border Patrol greater operating freedom. 'I don't think they realize that the Border Patrol has to consult with the National Park Service before they can put up an antenna on that border.'

Nowhere are the fights between security and public lands managers more acute than those places officially designated as 'wilderness' - a heightened level of protection for places the government deems so pristine they should be preserved in that state, free from man-made intrusions.

Once land is given the wilderness designation, tough new rules go into effect for permissible activities there. The no-nos include building or improving roads and putting up permanent structures like towers - exactly what the Border Patrol needs to do.

One Border Patrol agent recalled as a young agent 10 years ago, agents were not above cutting their own trails on those lands if it meant easier access and more apprehensions.

'We had people driving across, creating little two-tracks to get roads in there. I was the idiot driving. We've progressed past that, way past,' the agent said.

Land managers and law enforcement officers like Mr. Brasington agreed that cooperation is better today between their agencies and the Border Patrol than ever before.

The agencies have reached several memorandums of understanding, and in some cases the Border Patrol has even paid to rehabilitate land they've affected, or paid to have the agencies improve roads in non-wilderness areas.

'What's working really well is the education part for Homeland Security folks,' Mr. Brasington said. 'They have opened their doors to us in the past couple years to come in and educate the officers, explain to them what a wilderness area is. ... I don't think I'm seeing new damage caused by Border Patrol or the other folks who patrol our area.'

Mark South, a former Forest Service employee who decades ago wrote the guidelines for some of the wilderness designations here, now thinks efforts to write new wilderness into law go too far.

'Tell me, which is doing more damage to the environment: the fence or the people coming through, the trails, the litter, the water bottles?' he said. 'I think now, with what we're seeing along the border, trying to preserve anything beyond the existing laws now is pointless. Are wilderness needed? Yeah. How much is too much?'

EDITOR’S NOTE: Recent CIS analysis of the environmental impact of illegal immigration is available online at: http://www.cis.org/Population

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4.
Visa waived for Chinese, Russians
By Amritha Alladi
The Pacific Daily News (Hagatna, Guam), October 23, 2009
http://www.guampdn.com/article/20091023/NEWS01/910230310/1002/Visa-waived-for-Chinese--Russians

Tourists from the People's Republic of China and Russia can visit the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands for up to 45 days through a visa-waiver parole program that will take effect on Nov. 28, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.

On Wednesday, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano issued a statement that exercises her parole authority to admit citizens of Russia and China into the CNMI on a case by case basis, until a final rule is issued by DHS, the press release stated. The interim rule will take affect Nov. 28, and would allow citizens of Russia and China--if granted parole-- to stay in the CNMI for up to 45 days.

Additionally, the interim rule would allow citizens from Hong Kong to enter Guam or the CNMI under the new joint visa waiver program, the release stated. That's because Hong Kong was formerly a British colony, its residents hold either British National Resident or Special Administrative Region passports, said Guam Visitors Bureau General Manager Gerry Perez.

Mary Torre, president of the Guam Hotel and Restaurant Association, said the parole program for the CNMI is good news for Guam. It means that Guam may be able to benefit from a similar program if the one in the CNMI proves successful.

'We've been working diligently with those in Congress to get the Guam-CNMI Visa Waiver Program in place with the rights elements (Russia and China),' Torre said. 'Should the CNMI parole program be successful, we could ask for the same thing in the future.'

This is not the first time that the islands have admitted visitors on a parole authority basis, according to a release issued by Congresswoman Madeleine Z. Bordallo's office. From May 1, 2000 through Oct. 30, 2000, visitors from Japan to Guam were admitted under parole provisions after the then-temporary visa waiver program expired and before the 106th Congress had adopted a new visa waiver program, the release stated.

Under the current Visa Waiver Program, Guam allows visitors from certain countries to stay up to 15 days, and admission is limited only to Guam. The program does not provide for onward travel to the rest of the U.S., and the list of countries includes Taiwan.

However, the joint Guam-CNMI Visa Waiver Program, which goes into effect Nov. 28, would allow visitors to stay up to 45 days, and would admit visitors to Guam or the CNMI. It would also allow visitors to enter from Hong Kong -- visa-free.

The CNMI had been seeking the visa waiver to continue receiving Chinese and Russian tourists after U.S. immigration law is phased in at the commonwealth on Nov. 28.

Meanwhile, Guam has continued to request a waiver for mainland Chinese tourists to diversify the island's visitor markets because of slowing tourist numbers from Japan, according to Pacific Daily News files.

Perez told Pacific Daily News in late September that the DHS had been reviewing a visa waiver program with mainland China and the Russian Federation

'The interim final rule that they issued during the Bush Administration is being reviewed by the incoming Obama administration to see if it is consistent with the Congressional intent of allowing markets having economic significance--China and Russia, to wit--to be included in the visa waiver program,' Perez said. 'Results of this review, and a final decision from the Department of Homeland Security, is yet to be made and announced.'

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5.
Durbin vows to pursue DREAM Act
By Sophia Tareen
The Associated Press, October 23, 2009
http://www.thehawkeye.com/story/IL-ImmigrationReform-102409

Chicago (AP) -- U.S. Sen. Dick Durbin vowed Friday to push for legislation that would allow high school graduates to continue their education or join the military as a way to become legal immigrants as long as he's 'drawing breath.'

The Illinois Democrat has sponsored the DREAM Act, or Development Relief and Education for Alien Minors, since 2001. It applies to illegal immigrants who arrived in the U.S. before the age of 16, have a high school diploma, are shown to have high moral character and have lived in the U.S. for several consecutive years.

'As long as I'm drawing breath we're going to pass the DREAM Act and make it the law of the land,' he told students during a forum on immigration at DePaul University in Chicago.

Durbin's comments come as Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., has said he is drafting comprehensive immigration reform. Durbin said Schumer has promised him the DREAM Act will be part of that legislation.

But Durbin added immigration reform won't come until next year because legislators are now focused on health care, which he said is a much larger issue.

The DREAM Act would help illegal immigrants qualify for college financial aid, among other benefits. But it has faced scrutiny over concerns of encouraging illegal immigration and national security.

Durbin said young should not be punished because of their parents' actions.

'Young people have really been victimized by this situation, they were brought to this country without their vote of approval as children,' he told The Associated Press. 'They've lived here all their lives and all they're asking for is a chance to give back to this country that they call home.'

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6.
Survey Suggests Amnesty Would Encourage Illegal Immigration
The Personal Liberty News, October 23, 2009
http://www.personalliberty.com/news/survey-suggests-amnesty-would-encourage-illegal-immigration-19411924/

Survey suggests amnesty would encourage illegal immigration A new poll by Zogby International has found Mexicans believe an amnesty that would grant legal status to undocumented immigrants would prompt more people to enter the U.S. illegally, the Center for Immigration Studies (CRS) has said.

The survey noted that 56 percent of respondents thought that legalizing the status of illegal immigrants in the U.S. would make it more likely that people they know would go there illegally. It also found that interest in immigrating to the U.S. remains strong, despite the recession, and that 36 percent of Mexicans say they would move north if they could.

That percentage represents 39 million people.

'As the top immigrant-sending country for both legal and illegal immigrants, views on immigration in Mexico can provide insight into the likely impact of an amnesty,' says the CRS.

Meanwhile, Californians for Population Stabilization (CAPS) has launched a campaign aimed at stemming population increase, and says immigration is the number one factor driving the growth in the U.S.

The organization has also pointed out the environmental consequences of immigration, citing studies which suggest immigrants create four times more carbon emissions when they arrive in the U.S. compared with their behavior at home.

Says Diana Hull, president of CAPS, ' Cutting immigration to the U.S. isn’t the only thing we should do to solve the global warming problem, but stopping mass immigration, especially from low carbon use nations, will go a long way towards a solution because it is a significant contributor to the problems we face.'

EDITOR’S NOTE: The CIS poll results are available online at: http://cis.org/ZogbyPoll-EffectsOfAmnesty

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7.
Strike force targeting illegals is lauded
By Geoff Liesik
The Deseret News (Salt Lake City), October 24, 2009
http://www.deseretnews.com/article/705338331/Strike-force-targeting-illegal-immigrants-lauded.html

A state strike force that targets illegal immigrants living in Utah who commit 'major crimes' has experienced phenomenal success during its first four months in existence, according to Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff.

The SECURE Strike Force — staffed by six investigators, a prosecutor and a paralegal, and supported by the U.S. Attorney's Office and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — has seized guns, drugs, thousands of fake ID cards and even dental equipment since its creation in June, Shurtleff said.

'The impact of violent and major financial crime committed by undocumented aliens is even more serious and profound than originally believed,' the attorney general said.

Strike force agents have conducted multiple investigations, Shurtleff said, which have also led to the removal of 76 violent gang members from Utah's streets. Some of those individuals will simply be deported from the country. Others will face charges in either state or federal court, according to authorities, serve their sentences and then be deported from the United States.

'These are not single-focus criminals,' said Ken Wallentine, chief deputy Utah attorney general for law enforcement.

'These are people who come to our land from foreign countries and perpetrate crimes or are involved in a wide gambit — drug distribution, weapons crimes, extortion,' Wallentine said. 'Their focus is anyone — anyone — in the state of Utah that they can cause pain and economic damage to, if it will bring them a profit.'

The SECURE Task Force was created by the state Legislature, which allocated almost $1.8 million from Utah's share of federal stimulus monies to fund the strike force for two years. The group's creation initially raised concerns from members of the immigrant community who worried Shurtleff's office would begin targeting all illegal aliens living in the state.

'We're not after the housemaids and the lawn workers,' Wallentine said. 'We're after the people that are perpetrating violent crime, and because of that, we're pretty popular, even in the (immigrant) community.'

Rep. Brad Dee, R-Ogden, sponsored the legislation to create the strike force. He said Wednesday that, even when the federal dollars are gone, he intends to pursue additional funding to ensure the group's continued existence.

'One of the most important things we can do as a state Legislature is provide funding for public safety,' Dee said, calling the fight against crime committed by illegal immigrants a 'front-burner' issue for him.

'As long as we continue to achieve these type of results, we're in it for the long haul,' Dee said.

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8.
County immigration authority muddled
Arpaio, foes armed with court rulings to make their cases
By JJ Hensley
The Arizona Republic (Phoenix), October 26, 2009
http://www.azcentral.com/news/articles/2009/10/26/20091026enforcement1026.html

When U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials decided to remove the street-level immigration-enforcement authority granted to the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office, it looked like the beginning of the end for Sheriff Joe Arpaio's controversial measures.

Now things are more muddled than ever.

In the two weeks since that ICE decision took hold, Arpaio has conducted another crime-suppression operation and held two news conferences citing laws and policies that shore up his contention that deputies have the inherent authority to perform the tasks of immigration agents.

One of those laws turned out not to exist - the document the Sheriff's Office passed out contained a hodgepodge of Department of Justice opinions with some state policies from around the country thrown in. And the policy Arpaio cited at a news conference on Thursday was torn from the pages of a 2005 ICE training manual that doesn't reflect the federal agency's current enforcement priorities, an ICE spokesman said.

The debate ultimately comes down to whether local law enforcement has the authority to enforce federal immigration laws, and both sides have ample legal arguments to support them.

Deputies have the authority to enforce federal immigration law if you trust a recent Department of Justice opinion and a few Circuit Court decisions.

Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, co-authored the law that created the 287(g) program and said there is no reason to question that view.

'Not only does Sheriff Arpaio have this (Department of Justice) opinion on his side, he has common sense. There are roughly 6,000 special agents working for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for enforcing immigration laws. But there are more than 600,000 state and local law-enforcement officers in America,' Smith said. 'It only makes sense that state and local law-enforcement officers should be able to voluntarily help out and enforce our nation's civil and criminal immigration laws.'

Do have authority

The most recent Justice Department opinion, reversing a 1996 decision, was issued in 2002 and says local law enforcement has the inherent power to make arrests for violating federal law.

Some observers say the 2002 opinion was crafted in the wake of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and hope for a reversal. They point to recent signs, such as ICE's renewed emphasis on 'criminal aliens,' that President Barack Obama's Justice Department may revert to the 1996 opinion.

Don't have authority

Critics of Arpaio's enforcement tactics have a handful of court rulings on their side, too, and a history of Justice Department opinions, including that 1996 interpretation, which say local law-enforcement officials don't have the authority to arrest and detain immigrants who've committed only civil-immigration violations.

The 2002 interpretation didn't fully address the 1996 opinion, they say, which was backed up by more than 20 years of Justice Department legal rulings. They also point to court rulings, such as the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals' decision that being Hispanic in a largely Hispanic area doesn't constitute reasonable suspicion, as one of the legal issues that local law-enforcement agencies can overlook when enforcing federal immigration laws.

'The sheriff's department is not charged with determining the alienage of anybody,' said Maurice Goldman, a Tucson immigration attorney. 'That is at the crux of whether someone is subject to immigration laws.'

A court will ultimately have to rectify those divergent views, experts say.

Potential fallout

The ACLU has two racial-profiling lawsuits against Arpaio moving through federal court, and attorneys there will be watching the Sheriff's Office closely to see whether potential civil-rights violations arise.

If the Sheriff's Office does illegally arrest or detain someone on a civil violation, there are two options: a civil suit or a federal criminal investigation into whether deputies violated constitutional rights.

Despite the claims of the anti-immigrant crowd, the Constitution applies to everyone, said Annie Lai, an attorney with the Arizona American Civil Liberties Union.

'In the United States Constitution, especially the Fourth Amendment (prohibiting unreasonable search and seizure), there's no exception based on your immigration status,' she said.

Arpaio said his commitment to enforcing federal immigration laws on the streets in the absence of an ICE agreement is a matter of principle.

'This is not political. I can get re-elected on pink underwear and Tent City,' he said. 'I'm just doing what I feel is right.'

Unique approach

But the Maricopa County Sheriff's Office is unique in its approach to immigration enforcement, even for agencies around the country that have ICE agreements. Most of those use the street-level enforcement agreement to target illegal immigrants who are gang members, sex offenders, parole violators and those with outstanding warrants.

Arpaio's deputies go after illegal immigrants who are human smugglers, identity thieves and passengers without ID with the same vigilance under the premise that all of those people violated a law when they illegally crossed the border and could be on the verge of committing a more serious crime.

That disparate approach reflects Arpaio's supporters and the priorities of other departments around the country, Lai said.

'It depends on local politics,' she said. 'What the people in that city or town feel about immigration or community policing.'

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9.
Chief takes sides on sanctuary law
By Heather Knight
The San Francisco Chronicle, October 25, 2009
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/10/25/BALV1AA298.DTL

New Police Chief George Gascon agrees with Mayor Gavin Newsom that the Board of Supervisors' legislation changing San Francisco's sanctuary city policy must be ignored by law enforcement officers.

Last week, the board voted 8-2 to require that undocumented youths picked up on felony charges be turned over to federal authorities only after they're convicted - not when they're first arrested. Newsom, who doesn't have the votes to sustain a veto, says he's not abiding by the legislation because it breaks federal law.

The probation officers' union promptly joined Newsom in saying they too will ignore it. And now Gascon is onboard the eight-votes-be-damned bandwagon.

'I don't think the mayor has a choice,' he told us. 'Federal law is really clear on this issue. I think this is really unfortunate that it's gotten to where it has.'

He pointed out the legislation wouldn't really affect his officers anyway. They make the arrests and bring the youths to juvenile hall, but it's the probation officers who determine whether to call U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

This week's news

Today: The Harvest Festival continues at the Ferry Building from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m.

Monday: In a truly catty case, the Board of Supervisors' City Operations and Neighborhood Services Committee is expected to discuss enacting a ban on declawing felines.

The week in numbers

$3 million How much the National Science Foundation gave the Golden Gate Bridge, Highway and Transportation District to build an interactive exhibit explaining how the bridge was made.

10 cents The rebates large grocery stores and pharmacies would be required to pay customers who bring in their own bags under legislation proposed by Supervisor Ross Mirkarimi.

Quotes of the week

Gavin Newsom, right, and Jerry Brown's campaign addressed the rumor that the two would run on the same ticket with Brown taking the top spot and Newsom acting as the wingman.

'It's absurd. It's Jerry Brown who's putting those rumors out,' Newsom said.

Steven Glazer, Brown's senior adviser, shot back: 'We do know that some of Gavin's friends have been making that suggestion due to his lack of traction in the governor's race. They want him to be successful.'

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10.
We’re No Longer a Sanctuary City, Says Campos
By Rigoberto Hernandez and Bridget Huber
Mission Local (San Francisco), October 23, 2009
http://missionlocal.org/2009/10/were-no-longer-a-sanctuary-city-says-campos/

Supervisor David Campos said that Mayor Gavin Newsom’s refusal to enforce a proposal to relax the city’s policy on reporting undocumented juveniles to immigration means that 'San Francisco is no longer a sanctuary city.'

'You would think San Francisco would never get to that point,' Campos said and pointed out that it is especially disappointing as it is happening on the eve of the 20th anniversary of San Francisco’s sanctuary city ordinance.

While the supervisor vowed to pursue steps to make the mayor comply with the expected approval of the proposal, Campos acknowledged that to work, the change in the sanctuary ordinance needs the city’s leaders to be on the same page. That is no longer the case.

On one side are the supervisors who have taken a veto-proof vote to change the 15-month-old policy of treating undocumented juvenile offenders the same as undocumented adults. The change requires officials to wait until after a felony charge is upheld to report an undocumented juvenile to immigration.

On the other side is Mayor Newsom, who favors maintaining the policy that treats undocumented juveniles the same as adults. His strongest support for this position is the federal civil law that prohibits state or local officials from restricting a public official from assisting immigration.

A July 2008 memo, drafted by the city attorney’s office when the policy of protecting undocumented juveniles was changed, said federal law does not compel the city to turn over information, 'but the City possibly cannot penalize a City employee or official for turning over information.'

In this standoff, the city official willing to turn over information is the mayor.

Campos’s remarks Thursday came in response to questions about the mayor’s assertion that he won’t enforce the new legislation because it violates federal law.

But other legal officials disagreed and said the courts have failed to settle the issue. Neither the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals or the U.S. Supreme Court have taken up the issue of whether federal law preempts sanctuary ordinances, according to the city attorney’s August 14 memo.

Campos said the mayor’s actions are unprecedented and that the board will wait until the process has run its course before deciding what to do. Once the board casts a final vote, the mayor has 10 days to veto the item and then the board has another 30 days to uphold it.

'The Mayor does not get to have the final say on whether it is illegal or not. It is up to the judge to decide that,' Campos said. 'It is premature to say what we are going to do. We have to wait and see what our options are.'

However, he acknowledged that the sanctuary laws depend on city officials being united.

Newsom, who is running for governor, said he will veto the measure and asked juvenile probation officers to continue reporting youth who are suspected to be undocumented to ICE.

Gabriel Calvillo, the president of the San Francisco Deputy Probation Officers Association, a union, said his officers would continue to report juveniles to immigration.

'I believe federal law said law enforcement agencies are mandated [to report] when they are undocumented,' he said. 'We are following federal law above local law.'

Meanwhile William P. Sifferman, the chief juvenile probation officer and head of the city’s juvenile probation force, said his department would wait until the board makes a decision.

He added that his department would continue to do their job in a way that 'comports with all laws.'

'We will await the outcome of the San Francisco legislation proceedings that are in progress. Upon the conclusion process, we will confer with the city attorney’s office and outside legal counsel regarding any impact the legislation will have on our existing protocols,' he said.

Angela Chan, a juvenile defense attorney, said that there are no federal laws that require city employees to report youth to immigration officials.

'Federal law does not and cannot require that city officials inquire [about] immigration status because that would constitute the federal government unlawfully commandeering local governments to do the work of the federal government,' she said.

Kevin Johnson, the dean of the University of California at Davis Law School and an expert in immigration law, agreed with Chan: 'Either [Mayor Newsom] is getting bad legal advice or he’s misunderstanding how the law operates,' he said.

He also speculated that the mayor’s political ambitions may be coming into play. 'He may have done the calculation that being tough on immigrants and tough on crime is politically advantageous,' he said.

Both Johnson and Chan agreed that having law enforcement officials report youth who they suspect to be undocumented may open the door to racial profiling. Chan said juvenile probation officers cannot explicitly ask about a youth’s immigration status, so they often report them to ICE based solely on suspicion.

'They are putting themselves in a very precarious position because this stinks of racial profiling,' she said. 'A probation officer has no training in immigration law.'

If the proposal passes and is not enforced, backers of the Campos proposal may ask the Board of Supervisors to make Sifferman testify on why the law isn’t being enforced, Chan said.

A last resource would be to sue the city for not enforcing it, she said.

'The mayor cannot pick and choose which laws he wants to enforce based on his political interest,' Chan said. 'It’s not just his city. It’s our city.'

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11.
Dallas police ticketed 39 drivers in 3 years for not speaking English
By Scott Goldstein
The Dallas Morning News, October 24, 2009
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/news/localnews/stories/DN-citationfolo_24met.ART.State.Edition2.4bc27b3.html

Dallas police wrongly ticketed at least 39 drivers for not speaking English over the last three years, Police Chief David Kunkle announced Friday while promising to investigate all officers involved in the cases for dereliction of duty.

Pending cases will be dismissed, and those who paid the $204 fine for the charge, which does not exist in the city, will be reimbursed, Kunkle said.

'I was surprised and stunned that that would happen, particularly in the city of Dallas,' Kunkle said. 'In my world, you would never tell someone not to speak Spanish.'

The citations were issued in several different patrol divisions by at least six different officers. One of those officers was responsible for five of the citations, Kunkle said.

The case that led to the discovery of all the others occurred Oct. 2, when Ernestina Mondragon was stopped for making an illegal U-turn in the White Rock area. Rookie Officer Gary Bromley cited Mondragon for three violations: disregarding a traffic control device, failure to present a driver's license and 'non-English speaking driver.'

In that case and perhaps the others, officials said, the officer was confused by a pull-down menu on his in-car computer that listed the charge as an option. But the law the computer referred to is a federal statute regarding commercial drivers that Kunkle said his department does not enforce.

Bromley, 33, is a trainee officer in the northeast patrol division, meaning he still works with a training officer during every shift. His training officer on that day was Senior Cpl. Daniel Larkin, 53.

According to department policy, a sergeant must also sign off on all citations. The supervisor who signed off on the Mondragon ticket was Sgt. David Burroughs, 50.

'In this case, the field training officer was aware of ultimately what the recruit officer had done,' Kunkle said. 'The field training officer is going to bear more responsibility than the recruit officer.'

Mondragon, a native Spanish speaker, challenged the charge in court and it was dropped, her daughter said. Dallas police said they will drop all charges against Mondragon, who speaks limited English and does have a Texas driver's license.

Police officials did not release the names of the officers and supervisors involved in the other cases. Kunkle said he expected the investigation to last at least a few weeks and could reach back several years.

'An officer has to know the elements of an offense or what's necessary to constitute a crime,' Kunkle said. 'In this case it appears that officers did not understand.'

It is unclear whether the erroneous tickets were reported by the courts.

Administrative Judge C. Victor Lander said Friday afternoon that he would be surprised if such charges got past a judge. He said he would conduct a review.

'If there are any outstanding warrants as a result of these kinds of cases that have been inadvertently written, I'm going to direct that they be immediately held,' Lander said. 'If there are any cases in the prosecutorial pipeline, I'm going to request the city attorney to hold the case.'

The citations amount to a small percentage of the roughly 400,000 tickets issued by Dallas police each year. But the total is large enough to have possible legal ramifications, said George A. Martinez, a professor at the Southern Methodist University Dedman School of Law.

'It sounds like a policy,' Martinez said. 'Discrimination on the basis of language ability, and that's targeting Latinos, and so that sounds pretty serious to me.'

Attorney Domingo Garcia said he has been hired to represent the Mondragon family.

'The issue has nothing to do with whether people should learn English or not. I believe they should,' Garcia said. 'It's about not following the law and issuing citations against a law that doesn't exist, against a fairly voiceless and helpless population.'

Beyond potential legal problems, some said the tickets send a troubling message to Hispanics.

'It's the principle of the matter that there are police officers out there representing our city who actually think that it's a crime not to speak English,' said Brenda Reyes, a political consultant and member of the League of United Latin American Citizens.

Kunkle, who apologized repeatedly, said he recognized the incidents probably would damage the department's relationship with the Hispanic community.

'When we deal with crime victims ... our interest is not their immigration status,' Kunkle said. 'It's not something that we concern ourselves about. We want to serve all people.'

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12.
Arpaio deputizes 15 ICE agents
By Mike Sunnucks
The Phoenix Business Journal, October 25, 2009
http://phoenix.bizjournals.com/phoenix/stories/2009/10/26/daily1.html?t=printable

Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio said he deputized 15 U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents this weekend even as his agency spares with the federal government over immigration raids.

The action allows ICE agents to enforce state and county laws in the field. The move comes after MCSO deputies turned in some of their federal law enforcement credentials after the Obama administration changed an immigration enforcement deal with Arpaio.

The previous 287(g) agreement allowed the MCSO to arrest undocumented workers only on immigration charges out in the field and during crime sweeps and business raids. The new 287(g) agreement only allows MCSO to charge illegal immigrants when they are booked into county jails on other charges.

The deputizing of the ICE agents, however, has some anti-Arpaio activists wondering if there is something else behind the action. Arpaio continues to make immigration arrests despite the changed federal agreement exercising state laws against human smuggling and businesses hiring illegal immigrants to continue to arrest undocumented immigrants.

Arpaio said deputizing the ICE agents is in the best interest of public safety.

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13.
Bradley County skipped again for immigration program
By Perla Trevizo
The Chattanooga Times Free Press (TN), October 25, 2009
http://www.timesfreepress.com/news/2009/oct/25/bradley-county-skipped-again-for-immigration/

A federal program that gives state and local officers the ability to enforce immigration law continues to grow, but it still hasn't been authorized for Bradley County.

'We tried to apply for the 287(g) a long time ago, and we received a notice (in August) that we were not accepted into program,' said Bradley County Sheriff Tim Gobble, whose office applied in 2007 to be part of the program.

But from the attempts to receive training for 287(g), the sheriff's office got into the Criminal Alien Program, where officers try to verify the legal status of everyone arrested in Bradley County. An arrested person found to be in the country illegally is turned over to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after serving any county sentence imposed by a court.

ICE workers help local law enforcement determine the best programs to fit a community's needs, spokeswoman Nicole Navas said. They also look at the local criminal illegal immigrant population to determine if 287(g) is needed, she said.

'In Bradley County, the needs of identifying criminal aliens that are a threat to public safety are being met through ICE's Criminal Alien Program,' she added.

Federal officials recently announced 287(g) agreements with 67 local and state law enforcement agencies, one more than last year. The agreements put a priority on deporting illegal immigrants who commit other crimes, according to a news release.

Seven law enforcement agencies in Tennessee and Georgia participate in the program, including the Whitfield County Sheriff's Office.

Many immigrant and civil rights groups say the program leads to racial profiling and separates families.

Some are worried that immigrants may be arrested for minor offenses as a guise to initiate deportation proceedings.

To address those concerns, the new agreement 'requires participating local law enforcement agencies to pursue all criminal charges that originally caused the offender to be taken into custody,' Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano said in the release.

Sheriff Gobble said even though his office didn't get into 287(g), the Criminal Alien Program has worked well.

'We feel we are making some progress in the illegal immigration area,' he said. 'We are very active in trying to identify those who are here illegally and commit other crimes; we don't want to be a sanctuary county for illegal immigration.'

WHAT IS 287(g)?

* An agreement between the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and state and local law enforcement agencies to perform immigration functions

* Designated officers trained under the supervision of sworn U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers are permitted to enforce immigration law

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14.
Boulder, Boulder County: Recruitment key to finding minority leaders
By Heath Urie
The Daily Camera (Boulder, CO), October 24, 2009
http://www.dailycamera.com/election/ci_13629085

Many Boulder city officials, past and present, agree that more needs to be done to recruit Hispanics, Latinos and other minorities into local government.

Realizing that finding and providing leadership opportunities to those underrepresented groups has been difficult over the years, there's a renewed push at the city and county levels to reach out to potential minority leaders.

The Boulder-based Community Foundation in June launched the Boulder County Leadership Fellows Program in an effort to recruit a diverse group of people into leadership roles.

'We had several good, strong leadership-development programs but many of them were not really achieving all their diversity goals,' said Morgan Rogers, the civic forum director for the Community Foundation.

The program grew out of a 2008 survey that concluded enrollment costs prohibited many people of color from participating in leadership cultivation classes, and that Boulder County lacks opportunities for diverse groups of people to have mentoring relationships with local leaders.

Rogers said the first batch of 21 people, recruited from the business, religious and neighborhood sectors, are working on creating a vision statement about 'what leadership in Boulder County could be' with new voices and participation.

Another program finding its feet is the city of Boulder's 'Immigrant Advisory Committee,' a group tasked with reviewing local, state and national policies and reporting to the city manager about how they affect Boulder's growing immigrant population.

The program began as an experiment in 2007, pulling together a group of seven U.S. citizens and non-citizens from Brazil, Germany, Iran, Mexico and Syria. The group came up with a laundry list of ways the city could better include underrepresented populations, including:

Providing more city information in other languages, and hiring more Spanish-speaking staff;

Better publicizing affordable housing programs;

Including larger homes in affordable-housing programs to accommodate larger families; and

Providing discounted passes for recreational activities for those who can't afford such services.

'The United States has always been a nation of immigrants, and the contemporary experience of being an immigrant is very different than for other Boulder residents,' said Carmen Atilano, a staff liaison to the committee. 'There's language and cultural barriers, and I think that since we are the dominant culture we have that responsibility to reach out to those sectors and invite their participation.'

But some argue that Boulder's voters have made that participation more difficult.

In 2004, Boulder's Council Charter Revision Committee decided not to adopt recommendations that non-U.S. citizens should be allowed to serve on city boards and commissions.

The city last year took the issue to voters, who narrowly defeated a measure that would have allowed non- citizens who were 18 or older and had lived in the city for at least a year to serve on boards and commissions.

City Councilwoman Angelique Espinoza said the measure would have been a good step toward showing that Boulder is open to Latino participation, in particular.

'There are many people living in our community who aren't able to get citizenship,' she said. 'Because of our broken immigration system, it takes many years, decades even, to get citizenship.'

Boulder County, meanwhile, is also continuing its efforts to recruit people of color to serve on local boards and committees, through its People Engaged in Raising Leaders program.

The county-sponsored program focuses on empowering people of color to participate and become more involved in community civics. It's only 2 years old, but organizers say the effort is paying off.

'Our main goal is to get them more engaged in those positions,' program manager Perla Delgado said. 'It truly diversifies the boards that represent the communities that these individuals live in.'

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15.
Mexicans Fleeing Violence Spur a Boom in El Paso
Spike in Murder Rate in Juárez Is Among the Factors Boosting Nightlife and Home Sales in U.S. Border City
By Ana Campoy
The Wall Street Journal, October 26, 2009
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB125651480451107029.html

El Paso, TX -- This buttoned-down city on the Mexican border feels like a boomtown these days, as entrepreneurs fleeing drug violence in Ciudad Juárez head across the Rio Grande to open hip clubs and hot restaurants here.

The violence in Mexico has provided an unexpected economic boost to El Paso, a city of more than 600,000 residents at the westernmost tip of Texas. The unemployment rate here was 9.8% in September, equal to the national average but far lower than in other border towns such as Brownsville and McAllen.

Cindy Ramos-Davidson, chief executive of the El Paso Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, said her staff was swamped with requests from Juárez businesspeople wanting to settle in El Paso. They started more than 200 companies in the 12 months ended July 31, a 40% jump from the same period last year.

'It's the largest migration of wealthy Mexican nationals [to El Paso] since the Mexican Revolution,' said Beto O'Rourke, an El Paso city councilman, referring to the decadelong rebellion that began in 1910.

Not all newcomers to El Paso are refugees from violence. Other factors helping to boost the city's economy include a multibillion-dollar expansion of Fort Bliss, a military base that is attracting thousands of soldiers and aiding the local building industry, said Bill Gilmer, a senior economist at the El Paso branch of the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas.

But El Paso is drawing hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Juárez residents looking for a safe place to live.

There is no official estimate of the influx, but real-estate agents report a bump in home sales to Juárez residents. The apartment occupancy rate is about 92%, higher than in cities such as Houston and Dallas, where occupancy rates have slipped below 90%, according to MPF Research, which compiles apartment market information.

It isn't hard to understand why: The number of murders in Juárez exploded in the spring of 2008 and grew to more than 300 a month by August and September 2009, the highest monthly levels in a particularly violent year.

One migrant is Aril Anzures, who recently opened a branch of his family's burrito business on busy North Mesa Street in El Paso. After several kidnapping attempts, the Anzures family moved north earlier this year, though they still own seven restaurants in Mexico.

'It was getting pretty awful,' Mr. Anzures said. 'We're not rich people, but we had to travel with bodyguards.'

He said he didn't worry about his safety in El Paso, where Burritos Crisostomo offers the same freshly made flour tortillas and fillings as in Mexico. Many of his clients are fellow Juárez expatriates. Business is so good, said Mr. Anzures, that he expects to open another location in El Paso next month.

Rafael García used to manufacture plastic parts for vacuum cleaners but fled Juárez after being kidnapped. He is now a restaurateur in El Paso, serving dishes such as ravioli stuffed with cuitlacoche, a black corn fungus considered a delicacy in Mexico.

New arrivals like Mr. García are importing a nightlife that didn't exist in El Paso. In the past, many people who wanted a good time would cross the river into Mexico.

Lariza Varela, a 28-year-old who works for a financial firm, has cut her weekend visits to Juárez in recent months, turning instead to a new El Paso nightclub called 33.

'El Paso is really boring, but here they play music in Spanish and it's almost like you are over there,' she said. A gaggle of waiters make sure clients don't have to get up to get more beer, just like in Juárez, and every weekend a jovial musician named Walterio Magdaleno sings mariachi songs.

Carlos Chávez said he and his brother opened the bar to replace the one they closed in Juárez after patrons became too worried about drug violence to go out for drinks.

Despite fears of violence spilling across the border to El Paso, the city remains one of the safest in the nation for its size, according to federal statistics, with 10 homicides in 2009.

In Mexico, some are lamenting the flight of citizens. 'You can definitely feel their absence,' said Lucinda Vargas, director of a nonprofit that promotes development in Juárez, noting that the departures further complicate the task of reclaiming the city from the drug lords.

But for certain El Paso residents, the recent arrivals are a clear boon. Jorge Villegas, a contractor, said that more than half of his construction projects are for people from Juárez. And Pedro Gómez, who owns a landscaping business, said he has redone the yards for many recent Juárez transplants.

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16.
Counties scramble to serve a growing Hispanic community
By Andrea Uhde
The Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), October 26, 2009
http://www.courier-journal.com/

As a part-time translator for La Grange Elementary School in Oldham County, George Corral sees a steady stream of parents who need help reading field trip permission slips, communicating with teachers and even paying family bills.

Sometimes the language barriers are so severe that 'they don't understand what the students are doing,' said Corral, who works with around 80 Hispanic students and their parents.

In the last decade, Oldham and other suburban Kentucky counties have seen their Hispanic populations more than double, sending schools, social service agencies, churches and businesses scurrying to add translators, Spanish brochures or events geared toward Hispanic families.

In Oldham County Schools, the number of teachers working with students who speak limited English has doubled from six to 12 in the last five years. Recently, school, church and non-profit leaders gathered for the county's first roundtable discussion on ways to improve communication and services for the growing population.

In Shelby County, a 14-year-old non-profit agency called Centro Latino opened a second building this summer to offer literacy and computer classes, in addition to food, clothing and other services.

And while many groups have been working to reach out to the Hispanic community, some business and community leaders say more must be done as the population climbs and more Hispanics need translators and other services.

'We just can't wait to see a problem grow,' said businessman Peter DelValle of Crestwood, who started a Spanish 'shopper' magazine last year that circulates throughout Kentuckiana. 'There is a population that isn't using the necessary services, that don't know what's available to them.'

Newcomers drawn by job opportunities

Hispanics immigrants increasingly have been drawn to Kentucky in hopes of getting jobs at horse farms, construction businesses or factories, say demographers and people in the Hispanic community.

When Leticia Huerta moved to Oldham County from Mexico 14 years ago to be closer to family members who had come to find jobs, she barely spoke English and knew few people.

'No one spoke Spanish,' Huerta, 36, said recently through a translator because her English skills are limited. 'It was kind of a culture shock.'

She now lives in Copperstone Pointe mobile home park in La Grange, a neighborhood dense with Spanish-speaking immigrants and within walking distance from Mexican restaurants and a Mexican market.

Between 2000 and 2008, Oldham's Hispanic population jumped 129 percent, rising to 1,376 people. Oldham has the third fastest-growing Hispanic population in the state, although Hispanics still only make up 2 percent of the county's total population.

Shelby County, with 42,000 residents, saw its Hispanic population grow 139 percent to 3,600. Gallatin County saw the most growth, with a 160 percent increase, with 213 Hispanic residents in the county of 8,000.

In Jefferson County, where the Hispanic population is much larger, there was an 82 percent increase to 22,572 residents, while neighboring Bullitt County had a 115 percent increase, to 824 Hispanics, in 2008.

But the actual number of Hispanic residents may be significantly higher because Census estimates don't account for illegal immigrants and many of the Hispanic migrant workers, said Michael Price with the Kentucky State Data Center.

There's also a wave of educated Hispanics, especially women, who are coming to the area to fill nursing and teaching positions, Price said.

'Wherever there's a demand, we seem to attract immigrants to fill in,' he said.

Kentucky has 102,000 Hispanics, according to 2008 estimates. The Pew Research Center estimates that the state has about 45,000 undocumented residents.

Southern Indiana also has seen an influx of Hispanic residents. Floyd County's Hispanic population is nearly 1,200, up from 772 nine years ago. Clark County is home to 3,300 Hispanics, up from 1,799 in 2000.

Huerta said she hears from other Hispanics who hope there are job opportunities in Kentucky.

'A lot of people I know live in California and Texas, and they call here and ask about jobs,' said Huerta, whose husband, Manuel, has residency papers but still struggles to find a job in construction or carpentry.

Changing communities

In suburban counties such as Shelby and Oldham, where fewer Hispanics lived a decade ago, the change has been significant.

Spanish publications, radio stations and an array of Mexican restaurants and food markets are more common.

DelValle started his monthly publication, El Shopper Latino, in October 2008 and said it now circulates among 10,000 people in Kentuckiana and Lexington.

Several churches offer Spanish worship services, and some communities host Hispanic churches.

In La Grange, a group that began five years ago as an English class for Hispanics has started a Hispanic church that has 100 or more people each Sunday, the Rev. Jon Young said.

At hospitals and health departments, administrators have hired translators and often host events in Hispanic communities.

The health department in Shelby County has eight translators on staff and a bilingual nurse. At least 65 percent of its patients are Hispanic, and the department performed 25,200 services for Hispanic patients last fiscal year, public health director Renee Blair said.

'When we hire nurses, that's an asset we look for,' Blair said.

Cynthia Stafford, who runs a clinic for uninsured patients in La Grange, said her non-profit agency, HDB Service Group, is raising money to open a satellite clinic in the Goshen area, where a number of Hispanics work on horse farms.

'I'm a firm believer in taking services to the people,' Stafford said.

Schools reach out

School districts have hired staff, created programs and redirected resources to address the growing number of students who speak limited English.

Oldham County Schools hired a full-time teacher to work in its English Language Learners program at La Grange Elementary School, which has about 85 Hispanic students - the largest number in the district. Across Oldham schools, 10 other teachers work in the program that serves 260 students.

In February, the district held its first Hispanic family night, which drew 200 people. A second family night is planned in November.

'A lot of times the Hispanic parents in particular may be hesitant to communicate with school personnel' because of the language barrier, said Donald Craig, the director of Oldham's English Language Learner's Program.

The district is considering a structure similar to Jefferson County Public Schools, where students with limited English skills attend designated schools, he said.

In Shelby County, where 882 of 6,493 students are Hispanic, the district hired eight instructional assistants to work with students with limited English skills in the last five years, bringing the total to 18, Superintendent James Neihof said.

Shelby's elementary and middle schools have Latino Nights for staff, parents and students, and translators often provide parents information ranging from attendance to academic expectations, Neihof said.

Ben Ruiz, co-chairman of the Hispanic Latino Coalition of Louisville, said he expects to see more adult education centers to address family literacy in rural areas where there is continued Hispanic growth.

'We will know where the nucleases are, and we will branch out to reach them at the right time,' he said.

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17.
Impound initiative, tax measures on Colo. ballots
By Steven K. Paulson
The Associated Press, October 24, 2009

Denver (AP) -- A Denver initiative requiring police to impound the vehicles of unlicensed drivers is the highest-profile measure to go before Colorado voters on Nov. 3, due to the debate over whether it targets undocumented immigrants who can't get driver's licenses.

The Denver City Council passed a proclamation earlier this month urging voters to defeat the measure because it would be too expensive and tie up police resources.

Councilman Doug Linkhart said police should have discretion about whether to tow vehicles of drivers who don't have license with them.

Dan Hayes, who sponsored the measure, said police are ignoring an initiative passed last year requiring them to seize vehicles of drivers not carrying licenses. Hayes rejected claims that the law targets illegal immigrants.

'This isn't racist. Everyone is treated the same,' Hayes said.

Sabrina Karim, spokeswoman for the Coloradans for Safe Communities campaign, said illegal immigrants would be among those most affected by the ordinance. She said the move could create a safety nightmare by forcing police to impound all vehicles and strand drivers and passengers.

'I don't think this gets to the heart of the public safety issue,' Karimret said.

Police said they seize about 50 cars a day under the current ordinance and estimate that number would double if they were required to seize all vehicles. In the past, the department has said it prefers its officers have discretion.

Legal challenges kept similar measures off the ballot in Lakewood and Aurora. Hayes said he's pursuing a statewide initiative next year.
. . .
http://cbs4denver.com/wireapnewsco/Denver.car.impound.2.1268458.html

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18.
Utah colleges say SB81 difficult to implement
By Jennifer W. Sanchez
The Salt Lake Tribune (Salt Lake City), October 23, 2009
http://www.sltrib.com/news/ci_13630566

Utah's new anti-illegal immigration law could jeopardize a $180,000 scholarship endowment at the College of Eastern Utah.A resident donated the money -- the largest single gift to the Price campus during the past three years -- to fund international students' scholarships. The endowment was about 10 percent of the campus's $2 million in endowments, said Brad King, the college's vice president for institutional advancement and student services.

Under SB81, King said undocumented students cannot receive private scholarships provided through the university.

Now, if the donor decides he doesn't want students to undergo an immigration-status check, the college must return the money, King said. Negotiations with the donor are continuing.

'It will not affect the university,' King said in a phone interview Friday. 'But, it might affect incredibly the life of one of two students.'

The possible loss of CEU's scholarships is an example of unintended consequences Utah colleges have faced since SB81 took effect July 1.

Some higher education officials also believe the law -- and its implementation -- takes up too much time for something that affects very few students. The Utah System of Higher Education SB81 Implementation Plan wasn't formally announced until Oct. 16 during a Board of Regents meeting.

No action was required and the board's four-page plan is now in effect at Utah's nine public universities and colleges, said Cameron Martin, the agency's economic development and planning associate commissioner.

In addition to confirming a student's legal immigration status in order to receive a private scholarship through the university -- as in the CEU case -- student ID cards are also affected.

Before SB81 passed, college ID cards were considered state-issued IDs, but are no longer.

To save money, most colleges are opting against paying a 50-cent-per-student immigration verification fee and putting 'For 'institution name' Purposes Only' on all IDs, Martin said.

Brad King, a former six-term member of the state House of Representatives, doubts lawmakers approved SB81 with higher education in mind.

King considers the law an unfunded mandate, under which universities are expected to 'eat the costs' to implement the legislation.

Martin agrees, saying the law is 'really problematic,' and added other universities will do what they can to hold down costs implementing SB81 as schools face shrinking budgets.

Martin also said it's 'adding another layer of burden and expense' in state resources, such as employees receiving training on how to implement the law, which affects just 0.4 percent of the state's 165,000 college students.

This fall, there are 590 undocumented students among eight Utah public colleges, according to system data.

'It's taken quit a bit of energy [to work on the law's implementation], when we could be using our resources and time to actually be improving our economy instead,' Martin said Thursday.

Still, Martin said the agency is working with universities to ensure the law gets implemented.

'We're trying to do it in a way that is cost effective,' Martin said.

jsanchez@sltrib.com The college

The Utah System of Higher Education SB81 implementation plan

Institutions must change their student identification cards. Student ID cards must say 'For 'institution name' Purposes Only' and are longer considered state-issued IDs. Institutions can verify the immigration status of students.

The legal immigration status of part-and full-time institution employees, including students, must be verified.

The legal immigration status of students who receive a local or state 'public benefit,' such as an institutional scholarship, tuition waiver, grant or loan, must be verified.

An annual report on undocumented students in the Utah System of Higher Education must be produced and submitted to state officials.

Source ª Utah System of Higher Education By the numbers

The number of undocumented students attending Utah's nine public universities and colleges this fall:

University of Utah ª 117

Utah State University ª 32

Weber State University ª 71

Southern Utah University ª Six

Dixie State College ª Three

College of Eastern Utah ª Three

Utah Valley University ª 181

Salt Lake Community College ª 177

Snow College ª 0

Total ª 590

Total number of students in system statewide ª 165,000

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19.
In diverse times, libraries seek to broaden appeal
By Deepti Hajela
The Associated Press, October 24, 2009
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/6420ap_ny_libraries_beyond_books.html

NYC (AP) -- Sheryl Toque settled into her seat in the East Elmhurst branch of the Queens Library, her children playing nearby.

She wasn't there to borrow a book. But she did want information the 33-year-old Philippines native wants to become an American citizen. So she went to the library for a seminar with a civics teacher and a lawyer to go through the immigration process. It wasn't the first time she's used the Queens Library for help; she has also taken English classes at another branch.

'It's usually free so you don't have to spend anything extra,' she said. 'I like it because I could also bring my kids with me.'

Libraries have always been in the business of providing information. But as diversity continues to grow in the United States, libraries like the system in Queens are trying to remain vital and relevant to their communities by offering information in a range of new ways.

They're doing that not only by adding material in multiple languages to their collections, but also through programming that includes citizenship courses, tax help and cancer screenings.

'It's inevitable that all public libraries are affected and impacted by the diversity of this country,' said Sari Feldman, president of the Public Library Association, a division of the American Library Association.

'We've become more relevant and more critical to people's lives than ever before.'

So in Dallas, the schedule includes a bilingual introductory computer class among its events. In Seattle, library offerings include multilingual help with filling out forms at tax time. And when the library closed for a week last month because of budget problems, the notice was translated into 12 languages.

The demographics of Seattle have changed, so 'as a library we have to be responsive to those changes and meet the needs of our diverse and changing customer base,' said Andra Addison, spokeswoman for the Seattle Public Library.

'Libraries have recognized the critical role that they play in information and also in education,' Feldman said.

Nowhere is that more true than in Queens, which was named the 2009 Library of the Year by the Library Journal. Admirers say it has become a prime example of how libraries can remain relevant and vital to the changing communities they serve. Its collection contains works in several dozen languages, and programming includes such topics as English literacy and health screenings.

That's what's needed in a borough that, with more than 2 million residents, is larger than most American cities. Census estimates show that almost half of those residents are foreign-born. More than half speak a language other than English at home, and of those, a majority say they don't speak English very well.

The demographics of what is arguably the country's most diverse county would present a challenge for any organization looking to connect to its community. But for the library, taking on that challenge has proved to be an opportunity to thrive.

'They do it in Queens in ways that we hadn't even seen before,' said John N. Berry III, editor-at-large at Library Journal.

Michael Fix, the senior vice president and co-director of the National Center on Immigrant Integration Policy, said the system was a model. He noted that the library has a full-time employee whose job is to analyze the demographics of the borough.

'In each case, what they do is widely recognized as representing the best practices in the field,' he said.

The Queens library system is one of three in New York City; Brooklyn has its own system, and the New York Public Library covers the boroughs of Manhattan, the Bronx and Staten Island.

Among its offerings, the Queens system 61 branches along with a main headquarters holds story hours and other programs in multiple languages; provides classes for immigrants and natives wanting to learn or improve their English; offers sessions where those needing to file visa and immigration paperwork online can get help; holds seminars on topics including how to start a business and foreclosure prevention; and works with other groups to offer information on where to get health screenings and medical treatment.

Jacqueline Flood has been using the library since she was 6 years old, but not like this. The 56-year-old Flood, unemployed for 18 months, has an appointment for a mammogram at a mobile screening center that visits library branches.

'A lot of people use the library,' she said. 'It's good to know they're able to supply the community with things other than books.'

The Queens library continues to try offering such services even as the financial downturn has cut into funding, as it has for libraries around the country.

The library had to close an art gallery, took a bookmobile off the road and has frozen hiring. As some branches have reduced hours, some cultural programs have been trimmed. CEO Thomas Galante said he hopes the economic situation will improve before the system has to cut staff positions or make any other changes to library offerings.

Even with a broader range of programming, the library still fills its traditional role it has more than 22 million items in circulation per year, a figure that puts it among the top libraries anywhere. Those materials are available in a number of languages.

'For a library to be relevant over the next decades,' he said, 'you need to be a community place that offers lots of different services all around information and access to technology.'

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20.
Haitian activists want Obama to address immigration goals
By Lesley Clark and Jacqueline Charles
The Miami Herald, October 26, 2009
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/southflorida/story/1300026.html

Haitian-American and immigrant activists who greeted President Barack Obama's election with high hopes are growing frustrated with the administration's failure to deliver one of their top goals.

Obama said in July he was ``very sympathetic'' to the community's request to allow Haitian immigrants now illegally in the country to stay temporarily, but no decision has been announced. Some activists say their patience is wearing thin.

``I feel they are stringing us along, and we are in an awkward position,'' said Randolph McGrorty, head of Catholic Charities Legal Services, who brought the subject to a head with a stinging e-mail sent to House, Senate and administration staffers last week. ``Do we allow them to string us along because they are our allies or do we start calling them on the carpet for it?''

The unrest comes as Obama plans a trip to Miami on Monday to raise money for House and Senate Democrats. Presidential candidate Obama did not promise to grant undocumented Haitian immigrants temporary legal status in the United States -- a designation known as Temporary Protected Status, or TPS -- but activists said they believed the first African-American president would give the issue special consideration.

Instead, former President Bill Clinton -- a United Nations special envoy to the country -- and the United Nations have taken the lead in rebuilding a storm-battered Haiti after last year's four back-to-back storms that killed hundreds and left nearly $1 billion in damages.

Challenge

The issue of TPS poses a challenge for Rep. Kendrick Meek, a Miami Democrat who is depending on a robust turnout in the politically active Haitian-American community to boost his Senate bid. But critics say South Florida's congressional Democrats, including Meek, have not been as vocal about pushing the Obama administration on Haiti as they were during the Bush administration.

Meek, who represents the largest group of Haitian-American voters in the United States, said Friday he's had meetings with the administration and is optimistic that it is taking a serious look at the policy.

``It may not come as soon as we want to, but I can tell you the Obama administration has made steps the Bush administration wouldn't have made in 100 years,'' Meek said, noting that the administration has temporarily stayed deportations of noncriminals to Haiti. ``The ultimate goal is to have Haiti in a position where Haitians can stay in Haiti and not take to the sea.''

Still, Broward Democrat Rep. Alcee Hastings chastised the administration last week, looking to prod it by attaching an amendment to a Coast Guard spending bill that would require the agency to review the effect of changing immigration policy toward Haiti. Critics have suggested TPS could lead Haitians to rush to the U.S. shore.

``Temporary Protected Status or some other comparable relief for our Haitian neighbors is long overdue and this administration has been stalling for far too long,'' Hastings said in support of his amendment.

He said the review would ``hopefully help us show that our government has rationally and realistically examined all possible scenarios and we are well-equipped to contend with any possible effects.''

U.S. Policy

When Obama brought up the issue in July, he said the administration is reviewing U.S. policy on deporting undocumented Haitians, suggesting that the issue would be ``part of a broader conversation about immigration.''

But immigration groups say the pace on overhauling the nation's immigration system is too slow and fear no progress next year during a volatile election.

The White House this week referred questions on TPS to the Department of Homeland Security, which said it had made no changes in policy, adding that, ``no one should attempt to come to the U.S. in the hopes of being granted TPS.''

Advocates for Haitian Americans, including Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center, said they've written a number of letters and e-mails to the administration seeking a response to their request for TPS -- and in recent months have offered less-sweeping alternatives to TPS to help the estimated 35,000 undocumented Haitians currently living in legal limbo.

``Washington needs to know we are not going to fade into the woodwork,'' Little said. ``We are going to continue to make the case for TPS and be critical of this administration when they don't do the right thing.''

Advocate

Earlier this month, Little appealed to former President Clinton who, during two appearances in Miami recently, spoke of his support for TPS. He said if the decision was up to Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, ``it would have been done. Hillary strongly supports this.''

A spokesman for the State Department declined to comment on Clinton's remarks, saying they were the former president's ``personal comments'' and it would be ``inappropriate for us to make any official declarations on the issue'' since the decisions are being made by Homeland Security.

Advocates acknowledge the administration has quietly made some changes. It has temporarily suspended the deportation of noncriminal, undocumented Haitians. Undocumented Haitians with no criminal records who are detained by immigration authorities are being released from detention centers as long as they agree to a final order of removal.

Once released, they can apply for work permits but must periodically check in with immigration authorities until they are eventually deported.

`BABY STEPS'

But critics dismiss the changes as ``baby steps,'' noting that by not granting undetained migrants a chance to apply for work permits, they're unable to support themselves or assist struggling families back home. An impoverished Haiti is dependent on remittances from abroad.

``That is not nearly enough,'' Little said. ``That is not even a half-hearted attempt at doing the right thing here.''

The Haitian-American Grassroots Coalition met Wednesday to discuss the issue and plans to protest at Obama's fundraiser in Miami on Monday. Haitian activists protested outside the White House last month.

``As far as we are concerned, regarding Haiti, the Obama administration is maintaining the same status quo as the Bush immigration policy,'' said Jean-Robert Lafortune, the coalition's president.

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21.
Groups lobby against proposed census change
By Deborah Barfield Berry
The Shreveport Times (LA), October 24, 2009
http://www.shreveporttimes.com/article/20091024/NEWS01/910240313/1060

Washington, DC -- Civil rights groups urged senators earlier this week to oppose an amendment proposed by Sen. David Vitter that would require the 2010 census to include a question about citizenship.

'The Vitter amendment would bring the census 2010 to a complete halt,' said Wade Henderson, president of the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights, a coalition of national civil rights groups.

With only six months until the start of the census, Henderson said Vitter's last-minute change is 'inflaming public attention about illegal immigration. Census 2010 is not a partisan issue. It's a national issue.'

Vitter's amendment to the Commerce, Justice and Science spending bill would ban use of federal funds if the census does not include questions about citizenship. Originally, Vitter's amendment also included a question about a person's legal status.

The 2010 census form, which includes only 10 questions, does not ask about citizenship or legal status.

Pressing his case for the amendment on the Senate floor last week, Vitter said, 'When we use the census for congressional redistricting, we should count citizens; but we should not count non-citizens, including illegals. This is a democracy to represent citizens of the United States.'

Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, said the change should be particularly important to lawmakers from states that could lose congressional seats, including Iowa, Louisiana, Maine, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina and Pennsylvania.

Sen. Roger Wicker, R-Miss., has said he supports the amendment. Sen. Mary Landrieu, D-La., said she is reviewing the revised amendment.

'Vitter is tapping into public resentment over illegal immigration,' Henderson said. 'There are some members who are susceptible to that siren song.'

Census officials have said changing the questionnaire would be costly and create a logistical nightmare.

Opponents also say lawmakers had plenty of time to propose additional questions.

'It sounds simple. It's not that simple,' Terry Ao, director of census and voting programs at the Asian American Justice Center, said of the process of crafting the questions. Ao noted the 'chilling effect that such a question would have on participation, which would impact the accuracy.'

The census is an official count every 10 years of people living in the United States. The numbers are used to determine the distribution of $400 billion in federal funds and the number of congressional seats each state gets.

Sen. Bob Bennett, R-Utah, a co-sponsor of the amendment, dismissed complaints that he should have proposed the changes earlier.

'Well, OK, I'm starting early,' for the next census, he said. 'The issue is about apportionment in Congress. All I'm asking for is information.'

Vitter said the question of citizenship has been asked in other longer census forms and hasn't been a problem.

'The objections coming from the census and their supporters are the typical intransigence of an entrenched bureaucracy,' Vitter said in a statement.

Key Democrats, including Sen. Barbara Mikulski, D-Md., said they will work to defeat the amendment.

'It will add to the cost and slow the census down,' said Mikulski, who chairs the committee that funds the Census Bureau.

Delaware Sen. Tom Carper, chairman of a subcommittee that oversees the census, called Vitter's amendment 'problematic' and noted the opposition from former census directors.

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Proposal would require census to count illegal immigrants
Asking for immigrants' status would reduce participation, activists say
By Edward Sifuentes
The North County Times (Escondido, CA), October 23, 2009
http://www.nctimes.com/news/local/sdcounty/article_597b2dff-ef02-5413-a3e4-ea5955de4d00.html

New census query on immigration status would diminish state’s clout
By Timothy Pratt
The Las Vegas Sun, October 23, 2009
http://m.lasvegassun.com/news/2009/oct/23/new-census-query-would-diminish-states-clout/

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22.
State joins with advocacy group to hold clinics on how to become citizens
The Lewiston Morning Tribune (ID), October 24, 2009
http://www.tdn.com/articles/2009/10/23/breaking_news/doc4ae1c818441b6055843118.txt

Seattle -- In an effort to encourage legal permanent residents to become U.S. citizens, Washington state and an immigrant advocacy group will host free citizenship clinics across the state today.

Immigration attorneys, paralegals and interpreters will assist people in preparing naturalization applications at no cost in Bellingham, Pasco, Centralia and Port Angeles.

Today's clinics mark the first of three free offerings for legal residents. Two more are scheduled in 2010 in a total of 12 cities across the state.

Last year, Gov. Chris Gregoire directed a policy council to create ways for legal residents to become citizens, resulting in the free clinics.

The state partnered with OneAmerica, a Seattle-based immigrant advocacy group, for the 'Washington New Americans' campaign. The state chapter of American Immigration Lawyers Association is also contributing.

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23.
Marin Organizing Committee has coming-out party in San Rafael
By Brent Ainsworth
The Marin Independent Journal (CA), October 25, 2009
http://www.marinij.com/marinnews/ci_13640676

Gilbert Mejia, an 18-year-old Novato boy whose family has been at the center of an immigration rights controversy in Marin the past several months, told 1,100 people packed into the San Rafael High gym on Sunday that the upstart Marin Organizing Committee can be a powerful forum for those who are forced to 'live in the shadows.'

Mejia received a standing ovation after he spoke about his family's dilemma at the Marin Organizing Committee Founding Convention. Heads of nonprofits, religious congregations and local and state government shared the podium with Mejia, whose undocumented parents are scheduled to be deported to Mexico on Nov. 2. He was born in Mexico and is undocumented himself but safe from deportation until a hearing in July 2010.

Saying that he was speaking for the county's undocumented Hispanic population, he said, 'We are rarely heard from and are forced to live in the shadows even though we work, we pray and we study just like every other human being here.'

The Marin Organizing Committee, founded in 2005, is a nonpartisan conglomerate of delegates who were essentially staging a coming-out party Sunday. Saying they were 'standing for the common good,' the organizers hope to influence political leaders to pay attention to issues that are important to Marin's diverse community.

Among the committee's goals are a permanent homeless shelter, greater accountability of county mental health funds, affordable housing, fair care at local hospitals, immigration rights and helping senior and teens in need.

'I'm exhilarated,' said Rabbi Lavey Derby of Tiburon's Congregation Kol Shofar, who co-chaired the convention with pastoral associate Vicky Otto of St. Raphael Catholic Church in San Rafael.

'There were some historic moments here, and it felt wonderful,' Derby said. 'The government works so much better when people are involved and all are represented. ... We hope politicians will come to see us as a partner in government to help solve problems.'

Political leaders in attendance included Assemblyman Jared Huffman, D-San Rafael, Marin County Supervisor Steve Kinsey and members and candidates for the San Rafael City Council.

'The more people participating in government, the better the government will be,' Kinsey said.

Suzanne Walker of the St. Vincent de Paul Society said she has been working on homeless shelter issues for two years and said she was encouraged to hear the willingness of politicians to listen to the Marin Organizing Committee.

'Two years ago we had some of our supervisors said homelessness wasn't an issue for their constituents,' she said. 'People coming out and publicly telling their stories about it is so important. To be finally be heard and feel as if there will be a real working relationship is amazing.'

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24.
A helping hand for Asian families
Asian Youth Center in San Gabriel helps bridge cultural divides with parenting classes and other programs.
By Ching-Ching Ni
The Los Angeles Times, October 21, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-asian-center22-2009oct22,0,7752867.story

Taiwanese immigrant Thomas Liu was locked in a constant battle with his son Gordon throughout his years at Arcadia High School. The father disapproved of his son's baggy pants, loud music and computer games.

After Gordon's parents forbade him to play online video games, hired him a tutor and got him into college, they thought everything would finally be all right. Instead, their son buckled under the pressure, started taking drugs and nearly dropped out of school.

The elder Liu eventually sought help in a parenting class at the Asian Youth Center in San Gabriel. There he learned that his troubles were among many challenges facing new immigrants struggling with parenthood in their adopted country.

'Before, I talked to him like, 'You have to obey my orders,' ' said Liu, 50. 'Now when I am very angry, I have to calm down first, listen to him, find out why he does what he does, let him express his feelings, then find a solution together.'

The Asian Youth Center, a nonprofit that runs after-school programs and parenting classes for Asian immigrants in the San Gabriel Valley, was founded in 1989 as a project of the United Way. Today it has a staff of about 50 and serves roughly 5,000 youths and 1,000 parents a year, including some non-Asian families.

One of the biggest challenges for counselors is teaching Asian families how to balance the sometimes conflicting values of their homeland and their adopted country, said May L. To, executive director of the center, which celebrated its 20th anniversary Thursday night with an awards banquet.

'Parents have a huge impact on youth from Asia,' To said. 'The old culture influences how they raise their children here in America. Yet their children are bringing the new culture of America home, creating conflicts. It's a constant struggle at home if there is no balance.'

The center currently offers four to five parenting workshops a week, in both Mandarin and Cantonese dialects. Parents are encouraged to criticize less, listen more, and to discipline their children with respect, said Sun H. Lui, a counselor at the center.

All parents clash with their kids, but Asian parents have the extra burden of language barriers and cultural expectations that can deepen the generational divide, To said.

'Sometimes Asian parents want their children to be 100% obedient, from clothing to behavior to gesture to language,' she said. 'Their children feel very deprived. They cannot go out, wear makeup, date or party. Sometimes they turn to drugs because they are upset with their parents.'

Liu and his son said that counseling at the center helped bring their family closer. 'I notice he's trying to communicate with me more,' Gordon, now 22, said of his father. 'Before he was always isolated from me. We wouldn't really talk.'

Michelle Hoang, whose son is 5, is a regular at the parenting workshops. The 37-year-old mother said she struggles with anger issues.

'I want to be a better parent before it's too late,' Hoang said. 'The East can be too negative -- the child is never good enough. The West can be too positive -- no matter what you do it's always 'good job.' In America, we should take the best of the East and West.'

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25.
Abandoned. Adrift. Enduring.
Weary Iraqi refugees describe how life in Chicago and America has left them with very few options
By James Janega and Antonio Olivo
The Chicago Tribune, October 25, 2009
http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/chi-iraqi-refugees-intro_janega-oct25,0,4215433.story

A safe home. A good job. Stability for their children after years on the run from death threats and the mayhem of war -- that is what the Iraqi refugees envisioned when told they were coming to America.

Instead, one family is assigned an apartment on Chicago's North Side so full of cockroaches and filth they couldn't stay the night.

A veterinarian from southern Iraq relies on relatives in Karbala to pay his rent in Chicago, upending the traditional immigrant experience.

An Iraqi mother of three, unable to pay her rent with her husband still in the Middle East, finds little help warding off the predatory advances of male acquaintances offering assistance.

'This is what they brought us when they invaded our country?' cried Wafaa Falah, 40, a Baghdad refugee handed food stamps and a bus pass when she arrived at her new apartment in West Rogers Park. 'They don't care about us. They brought us here and abandoned us.'

The number of Iraqi refugees in Illinois doubled to 2,400 this year, mirroring a sharp increase in asylum for Iraqis across the nation. An additional 21,000 are in the pipeline to the U.S., more than all previous arrivals since 2003.

As the numbers grow, so do concerns about the shortcomings of a refugee system that was set up in 1980 to welcome Vietnamese and Cambodians but that aid groups and government officials say needs an overhaul.

Following two severely critical studies of how Iraqis fare across the U.S., the Obama administration has vowed to review the entire refugee resettlement process. Officials say the White House soon will seek to strengthen support for refugees and their new communities.

Among the problems cited in studies by Georgetown University Law School and the International Rescue Committee are paltry resettlement funds that quickly evaporate, dim job prospects, mounting loan debts, repeat eviction notices, a dearth of funds for mental health counseling, and even the prospect of homelessness.'I'm ashamed. I feel like I'm selling a lie,' said Greg Wangerin, executive director of Interfaith Refugee and Immigration Ministries, among several Chicago nonprofit organizations that help refugees.

Though rooted in war, the problems facing the refugees also trace back to local, national and international bureaucracies.

Fleeing violence, roughly 2 million Iraqis have flooded neighboring countries such as Syria and Jordan. For those who cannot return home safely, the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees finds new countries willing to take in those refugees who pass security checks and health exams.

Increasingly, that destination is the U.S., where the State Department now accepts three-quarters of them. Iraqis are a quarter of all refugees arriving in the United States.

Once in the U.S., they are placed by agencies such as Wangerin's. But their numbers have outstripped the capacity of the agencies to adequately house and help them, especially with the sour economy. The resettlement experience can be tough for Iraqis, many of whom were professionals with middle-class dreams who grapple with psychological barriers to starting from scratch.

Most of the Iraqis say they had no idea they would end up in the U.S., a country many of them blame for the chaos that followed the 2003 invasion to oust Saddam Hussein. Many of them say it never would have been their first choice.

Smells of home and roach spray

Along the dingy hallways of a Rogers Park apartment building, the smells of fish soup, curry and other ethnic cuisine merge with the tinny scent of roach spray binding four floors of immigrants from around the world.

It was move-in day for Sattar Naama, a onetime mechanic who escaped Iraq to Lebanon in 2008 ahead of militants who killed a younger brother, who was an Iraqi soldier, and a sister who was with him. Naama and his wife arrived in Chicago in July. Originally settled in Des Plaines by Heartland Alliance, the couple moved this month to Rogers Park when layoffs at a cosmetics factory in Waukegan ended an assembly line job for Naama after 10 days.

What greeted them were roaches marching across their new apartment and a kitchen sink stained black. Such conditions illustrate one of the findings in the recent Georgetown University report on Iraqi refugees: Because of 'insufficient' cash assistance, many of them land squarely into impoverished settings.

The couple slept that night in the home of another Iraqi family, while a case worker attended to the problem.

'I imagined the situation here would be very good,' said Naama. 'I thought it was going to be white. But it is black.'

The math for refugees is unforgiving. In Chicago, the average cost for rent, a security deposit, food and rudimentary furniture is $1,550, according to state estimates. The State Department provides a one-time $425 grant per adult refugee.

Responsibility for the rest lies with local aid organizations. In the last year, they scrambled to secure government benefits normally intended for the poor and worked hard to raise a relatively small $1 million by repeatedly approaching private donors contending with their own looming shortfalls.

The goal is providing eight months of assistance to refugees. At rates frozen in the early-1980s, they say they often can provide no more than four weeks.

'The financing for all this is abysmal,' said Edwin Silverman, the refugee resettlement coordinator in Illinois.

Promise of a new life loses its luster amid hard times

Ahlam Mahmoud's daily charity rounds end in Chicago's Edgewater community among the Iraqis in her building, a run-down apartment complex bustling with refugees from Myanmar, Somalia and elsewhere.

Padding through the hallways, she finds yet another frustrating tale in a friend's crowded apartment.

Though trying to reunite with her husband, who remains in Jordan, Layla Mousa, 40, is a woman living alone with three children, and therefore assumed by some Iraqi men to be available.

Unable to cover rent and other bills, the former hairdresser was shocked when male acquaintances crudely offered her money for intimacy. She rebuffed them and their aid, but it was after already failing to find help from refugee organizations, public aid workers and other Iraqi families. She called a mosque, and then a church.

'No one helped,' she said in a tiny voice. At that moment, her 4-year-old son Mustafa ran across the cramped room and threw his arms around her neck.

Ultimately, Mahmoud and a friend, Fatima Hindi, helped Mousa find a donor from Chicago's larger Muslim community to pay the rent. But the U.S. no longer seems like a promising place.

'Now I want to go back to Iraq, not even Jordan,' she said. 'America is just a lie.'

Helping others while battling eviction; 'I live a crazy life'

On her rounds in a battered Mercury station wagon filled with pots, wooden spoons, hand-me-down coats and fuzzy blankets, Ahlam Mahmoud, 44, has come to know better than anyone the troubled lives of her fellow Iraqi refugees in Chicago.

She travels the side streets of Edgewater and Rogers Park, calling up in her Baghdad-accented Arabic to the brick apartments where the Iraqis have resettled. She offers donated wares and home-spun support.

'Aeni,' she coos to them. It means 'my eyes' in Iraqi Arabic, a term of compassion and the kindest thing a stranger can say to another person. 'Kindness costs nothing,' she explained.

On one stop, Wafaa Falah greeted her in the rain and broke into sobs, wearing an oversized Chicago Bears T-shirt, orange rubber slippers and a sagging gray sweater, a long way from her life in Baghdad's once-plush Karrada neighborhood. She rifled through items in Mahmoud's car for cookware, plates, and clothes for the cold.

For Falah and many other refugees, Mahmoud is about as reliable a safety net as they can expect.

She didn't have it easy herself. When she and her two children arrived in Chicago in 2008, she had only the clothes she was wearing when she left Syria, where, she says, she was imprisoned for refusing to spy on foreigners. The apartment they got in Chicago had three beds, one plate, a fork, a spoon and two knives.

Following up on her charity work for aid agencies in Iraq -- work that drew sinister notice of local militias -- she set out to help others here, too. In February, she worked with new contacts in Chicago to found the Iraqi Mutual Aid Society, even as she fends off her own eviction notices and unpaid bills.

'I have nothing,' she said at the wheel between stops, her laughter mixing with sobs. 'I live a crazy life.'

Family's world is upside-down

More than a year after coming to the U.S., Jaber Turfee and his family acknowledge they now rely on relatives back in war-weary Iraq.

They are from Karbala, a holy Shiite city that saw its share of sectarian violence but now is stable enough that family members there send money to pay the rent for Turfee's third-floor apartment in Rogers Park.

It is an increasingly common arrangement among Iraqi refugees, according to the Georgetown University and International Rescue Committee reports. But it is the opposite of what most immigrants envision when they come to America expecting to quickly land a job and send money home from the land of opportunity.

Revealing another problem haunting an increasing number of refugees, Turfee acknowledged he does not know how to repay a $7,000 travel loan from an aid agency contracted by the U.S. government, which covered air fare and moving expenses to the U.S. His loan already is months in arrears.

'In Iraq, I'm very active. Here? I can do nothing,' the former veterinarian said, wearing the dapper suit he wore in Karbala, where he led an American-funded nonprofit for women's rights.

After militants drove them from Iraq, Turfee and his family landed in Chicago in August 2008. For a few weeks, he unloaded boxes at a CVS pharmacy until it exacerbated a recurrent back injury. On federal disability, he says he is looking for new work, but like many Iraqis, he is holding out to find something in his old profession.

'My family sends some money to pay for the rent, for groceries, things like this,' Turfee said, laughing darkly. 'What you can say?'

Helping others is reigniting hope

The survivor of an ordeal no less tragic than her neighbors', Fatima Hindi says she restored purpose to her life by helping fellow refugees and sees glimmers of hope as she accepts her new surroundings.

Hindi, 40, is a former Iraqi government official who lives in a studio apartment in Chicago's Edgewater community with her daughter, Takwa, 3. They sleep in a single bed, wedged behind a sofa.

In Baghdad, she was a journalist and Baghdad University professor asked to join the U.S.-backed interim Iraqi government in 2004. Then she was kidnapped, held for 18 days and accused by her attackers of collaborating with Americans. Though she was released, her life fell apart.

She fled to Egypt, where her problems continued. When she applied for refugee status, she was shocked to find the UN wanted to send her to the U.S.

'They kidnapped me because of America. America couldn't protect me,' she said. 'When I first got here, I cried on the street.'

After some time, however, she began accepting help from American neighbors to fend off eviction notices. She started to learn English, found work and began a new life.

She now volunteers helping other Iraqis. She teaches Arabic to her new neighbors in Edgewater, and ponders offering classes in Iraqi cuisine.

Each day, the wafting smells from her cooking lure other homesick Iraqis to her cramped apartment, where they sit down for a Baghdad-style lunch in a new home.

Mentally drained, he lives for sons

Jasim Alkinani, 40, embodies the strain facing refugees after years of trauma and loss. At the end of his emotional rope, he worries about his sons so much he does not even want to leave the house, and he has forgone a rigorous job search so he can spend more time by their side.

'I have to help them understand this country,' he said. But he adds that he too feels utterly lost in their new surroundings.

An Iraqi Shiite, he fled to Jordan in 1998 after trouble with Saddam's regime. He married a Sunni Palestinian woman, who died in a car accident in 2005. Because Iraqis have no legal standing in Jordan, his in-laws could have demanded custody of his children, so he applied for refugee status in secret, and was sent to the U.S.

His eight months of refugee assistance ran out without him seeking a full-time job. He volunteers at an Edgewater food pantry and gets help from parishioners at St. Gertrude Catholic Church.

On a recent chilly day, he visited Mahmoud's cluttered apartment and painstakingly tapped an Arabic poem onto the computer screen.

In translation, it read: 'Every morning is like the darkest night. And spring days? They are forbidden.'

'This how I feel,' he said, with a tired smile.

Worked With Americans in Iraq: Even With Head Start, Life is Bumpy

Having met by chance after arriving in Chicago, the three Iraqis jokingly call themselves 'al ameel,' Arabic for 'the traitors.'

Back home, they worked for the Americans, as translators, project specialists and office managers. For that, they received death threats from militants opposed to the U.S., and they ask to remain anonymous, fearing retribution against relatives in Iraq.

But the experience positioned them to better succeed once they arrived to apartments in East Rogers Park.

Unlike most Iraqi refugees in the U.S., this group of recent immigrants came to the U.S. by choice, working within an exclusive system established to accommodate them: the special immigrant visa program for former employees of the U.S. military and American contractors.

It is hard to know how many settled in Chicago, but records show 6,300 Iraqi and Afghan translators, other former employees of the U.S. and their families have come to the U.S. under the program.

On the whole, these Iraqi refugees speak better English than others from their country. . They have a better understanding of American culture. And they received a helping hand.'The U.S. government's done a lot for us. They paid us in Iraq. They brought us here. We're good with that,' said a 30-year-old former project manager for General Electric in Baghdad.'There, you have to sleep like a wolf, with one eye open,' he said. 'If anything, I can sleep at night [here]. To me, it's a paradise.'

The new apartment he shares with his wife and two daughters overlooks North Sheridan Road, though it is still sparsely decorated. One 29-year-old Sunni who worked in Baghdad's Green Zone for five years turned down a $15-an-hour job because it involved cleaning. That is twice what many non-English speaking Iraqis might earn, if they could find such an offer.

'I have different goals,' the man shrugged. 'I've got computer skills.'

Yet even for them, there is no clear sense of how to find a job in America, they said.

'I'm learning,' the former GE employee said, 'on the Internet.'

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26.
In 30 years, Cambodian immigrants have redefined city's mosaic
By David Perry
The Lowell Sun (MA), October 25, 2009
http://www.lowellsun.com/ci_13638976

Socheath Uch remembers a frigid welcome to his new country.

'Cold!' says Uch, 67, smiling. 'So cold. Snow everywhere. But they gave us jackets.'

On Jan. 16, 1981, Uch and his wife, Lily, now 59, landed at Boston's Logan Airport, headed for a new life, tasting their first crisp New England winter.

No more refugee camps. No more dodging land mines. Far from murderous Pol Pot and his well-armed Khmer Rouge troops. Icy winter was a good trade.

Before them stood a new hill to climb, an entirely new culture to absorb and eventually, to join.

That night, four days before Ronald Reagan became the nation's 40th president, President Jimmy Carter delivered his State of the Union address.

'We cannot hope to build a just and humane society at home if we ignore the humanitarian claims of refugees, their lives at stake, who have nowhere else to turn,' Carter says. 'Our country can be proud that hundreds of thousands of people around the world would risk everything they have -- including their own lives -- to come to our country.'

Victims of a four-year genocide that claimed up to 2 million people, refugees from Cambodia all lost something, or someone, on their journey here.

When the Uchs arrived, a trickle of Cambodian refugee families had settled in Lowell already, part of a long tradition, following clusters of Irish, German, Greeks, Hispanics and others.

But unlike others, who came for work in mills, the first Cambodians came here for shelter from brutality.

The first were the Leys, on July 11, 1979.

'Thirty years ago, you would see Cambodian people walking down the street in Lowell,' says Linda Silka, former director of UMass Lowell's Center for Family, Work and Community. 'And they tended to walk closer to the edge of buildings. As if they didn't belong, it wasn't their city.

'Now, they walk right down the middle of the sidewalk, and know they're an important part of the community. There is now a sense of, this is a place I belong, we're part of the community.'

Thirty years ago, newcomers clustered most often in the Acre and Lower Highlands sections. A concentration of Cambodian residents and businesses remains.

'It's a story of progress, though not full success,' says Mehmed Ali, the longtime local historian who followed the progress of local Cambodians and served on the board of the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association. 'Like any immigrant groups, eventually the demographics will be on their side to excel in all areas of the city. Lowell has a rich history of ethnic groups, but people are so much more mobile today. Cambodians have moved into the suburbs.'

But they first settled in Lowell's Acre, which offered low rents.

Early on, for many, participation in the new world's politics was neither a priority nor an attraction. Survival was first. Jobs. Caring for family.

Scars left by a murderous government did not heal easily. Distrust for anyone who wanted personal information -- which had been used to kill people by Pol Pot's regime -- ran deep here, too.

Census forms were never completed.

Even now, appeals from officials to participate in the 2010 Census come with reassurance: Information is private and will not be used against you.

Few registered to vote. Crime went unreported to police, who were seen as an arm of the government. And in Cambodia, government had not been kind.

'Thirty years ago, the question was, would we be alive the next day,' says Vong Ros, executive director of the CMAA. Ros arrived in Santa Ana, Calif., in 1981, his own journey out of genocide finally over.

'When we arrived here, our first priority was work and doing whatever was necessary. To go to school, to get a job. It was basic survival. Whatever hours you have to work, you were going to work. It was not a priority to say, 'I dictate policy of the city.''

Refugees found plentiful work in the area's high-tech industry. 'The economy, when we got first got here, had a lot of low-skill manufacturing jobs,' Ros says.

Socheath Uch and his wife worked separate shifts in different facilities for Wang, which was a thriving computer business. One of them would always be home for the children.

In three decades, Cambodians have come to constitute as much one-fourth of Lowell's population, though no one knows precisely. Some say 25,000 to 35,000 Cambodians live here; a few estimates rise to 40,000. (The American Community Survey, a yearly sampling by the Census, estimates 16,900 to 26,500 Asians lived in the city in 2008.)

From their ranks came Rithy Uong, the nation's first Cambodian elected to city government, in 1999. He was re-elected twice before resigning during his third term.

The city does not break down population by nationality, says Gail Cenik, office manager for the city's Election and Census Commission.

Lowell's is the second-largest Cambodian population in the U.S., behind Long Beach, Calif. Proportionally, Lowell's Cambodian population is larger. In April, the Cambodian government opened a consulate office on Chelmsford Street, the third in the U.S. after Long Beach and Seattle.

The city has absorbed the breadth of Cambodian culture, from an array of restaurants, markets and other small businesses to the annual Southeast Asian Water Festival, which draws thousands each summer to the banks of the Merrimack River.

But there were problems.

The scars of genocide do not heal quickly, and post-traumatic stress from the Pol Pot years emerged, as did alarming rates of hypertension and diabetes.

The culture of gangs attracted some young Cambodians, and violence pocked the city's streets, most often aimed at their own.

Survivors of Pol Pot's brutality were often reluctant to recount their harrowing stories, even to their own children. Their offspring were often more interested in Americanization than their parents' past.

'The whole story of them coming here wasn't really clear until I was in college, really,' says Sochenda Uch, 25, the second of the Uchs' three children.

'We watched The Killing Fields and I learned from that, but I didn't understand what they went through. Now I understand. I listen more and realize, they were right all along. When you're a teenager here, you think, well, you're not in Cambodia anymore. So yes, there was a gap.'

Socheath Uch was a military police officer when Pol Pot took control of Cambodian in the mid-1970s, and spread his Khmer Rouge troops throughout the nation to cultivate an agrarian utopia.

Troops targeted those who threatened Pol Pot's vision: The educated, the privileged, those who worked for the previous government.

'Soldiers, teachers, doctors,' Uch says. 'They killed them first.'

So he lied, telling them he was a farmer. The troops watched him work closely, as they did others.

'If you lie, they can tell,' Uch says. 'And they saw the ones who lied, and killed them.'

Uch' parents were farmers. He worked their rice fields each day after school, convincingly.

'I know how to do everything on the farm,' he says, seated below a vivid painting of the Angkor Wat temple complex.

For three years and eight months, he toiled under the eye of the troops for 14 hours a day.

Finally, when the Vietnamese invaded Cambodia, Uch and others fled to Thailand and the Kao-I-Dang refugee camp.

They dodged land mines with each step,

He left behind his mother, a brother, an uncle and others and has never known what became of them.

He married Lily after spotting her among her family in a crowded camp on the Thai/Cambodian border.

With her family's blessing, they married on Feb. 3, 1980, amid thatched huts.

In pictures, she rarely smiles.

Sochenda Uch looks at the photograph of his mother on the document that got her to the U.S.

'I have seen pictures,' he says. 'And she isn't smiling in any of them until about two years later.'

Upon arrival in Lowell from the ruins of Cambodia, Socheath Uch sought to create community. He was among those who helped create the Cambodian Mutual Assistance Association, serving on its early board.

'I tell all my friends, we have to help each other. People die or have a home burn, we can help them,' he explained. 'So we collect $5, $10 each month. We want to make a Cambodian community.'

The CMAA was incorporated in 1984 as a nonprofit, and has been an agency central to the Cambodian community.

Robin Ley didn't feel like much of a pioneer when his family arrived. His father had done this before, fleeing China and the Communists with his father.

In Lowell, the Leys were the first grains of a new layer of the Mill City's already rich immigrant history, following the Greeks, the Irish, the French and others.

All the Leys brought was rice. Someone told them there was no rice in the U.S, only bread. So they carried it through Bangkok, Calcutta, Kuwait, Athens, Copenhagen, Glasgow and finally, Boston.

On July 11, 1979, he stepped off a plane at Logan and felt 'sad.'

The oldest of the Leys' five children at 19, he knew no English. His first name was Phann, 'peace' in Khmer.

Newspaper stories heralding his family's arrival became inspiration.

'Every time in the newspaper they talk about my family, I cut it out,' he says. Some day, he vowed, he would be able to read them.

Brought to the U.S. by the Refugee Resettlement Coordinating Committee, a group of Lowell-area churches, the Leys stayed with George and Joyce Adam of Billerica before moving to Coburn Street in Lowell.

The guest family marveled at their new world. A telephone. The dishwasher.

Robin's father, Kao Ley, was a farmer, used to carrying water in buckets for his crops. He lectured Joyce Adam about the use of a lawn sprinkler; a waste, he told her.

Kao Ley found work packaging pasta at Prince Spaghetti, and his wife, Phuong Taing, worked as a machine operator at Bard.

Robin attended Northern Essex Community College for a semester before moving to UMass Lowell, where he earned a degree in industrial management in 1986.

The family scrimped, took loans and began buying properties. Robin managed them. He married in 1988, and the couple had a son.

On the evening of June 30, 1990, the family came home from a trip to the mall. Attackers fought their way into the home, and Robin's younger brother, Chhoeung, was shot in the stomach before they fled. He died a few hours later. The intruders fled with nothing, but left terror.

'I had no idea why somebody would shot and get nothing, no reason,' Ley says. 'We were so scared. We sleep on the plywood floor for weeks. They must have thought we had money because we own property. But we had, maybe $10, $20 at the most.'

In June 1991, Robin proudly became a U.S. citizen.

The Leys live in Dracut and oversee their Top Donut shops, two each in Lowell and Lawrence. They have three children, 20, 19 and 15.

Every July 4, Ley closes Top Donut in honor of the nation's birth.

'This is my country,' he says. 'I am proud and thankful.'

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27.
US tech firms want to change visa rules so they can hire more workers from abroad.
By Tom Abate
The Global Post, October 25, 2009
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatch/technology/091008/congress-skilled-worker-visa-h-1b

The U.S. technology lobby is hoping lawmakers will soon tackle an immigration overhaul that would include measures to make it easier for tech firms to hire talent from abroad.

Tech firms want it to be easier to hire college-educated workers from abroad and also want to reform the green card process to make it easier to convert the temporary visa holders they hire into permanent residents.

The H-1B visa program allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations but caps the number of workers who can obtain these visas.

Tech interests argue that the United

Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union all have more favorable rules on the entry of skilled foreign workers, putting the United States at a competitive disadvantage.

'We have catching up to do,' said attorney Bo Cooper, a former senior official in the U.S. immigration bureaucracy and now an adviser to Compete America, a lobby of high-tech and business interests. 'Other countries have realized that it's in the national interest to bring talented people into your economy.'

The H-1B program has long been dogged by complaints that imported tech workers take jobs from domestic engineers. There have also been reports of high-tech migrants being abused by companies that sponsor their employment visas.

During the Clinton era, when tech was booming and unemployment was low, Congress twice passed bills authorizing temporary increases in the number of H-1B visa holders that U.S. firms could hire.

By the time those increases expired under the Bush administration, the dot.com bubble had burst and tech employment had softened. Lawmakers decided that any immigration bill had to address an entire range of issues, including undocumented immigration and not just the tech interest in skilled workers.

After a comprehensive immigration reform proposal died in U.S. Senate two years ago, the tech agenda entered a dormant period. Some hope was rekindled when President Obama mentioned immigration reform in April and June, although he focused on the undocumented issue.

Compete America recently issued a press release noting that applications for basic H-1B visas had not reached the annual quota of 65,000, as it had in past years when the economy was stronger -- evidence, the group said, that the market regulates demand and that a numerical cap is unnecessary.

That assertion was greeted with derision by John Miano, a board member of the Programmers Guild, an organization of U.S. tech workers that says most H-1B visas are issued to foreign workers with bachelor's degrees who are not exceptionally skilled and who undercut U.S. wages.

Miano said the unemployment rate for architects and engineers, who are grouped together by the Labor Department, is now in the 9 percent range, much higher than is typical for such professionals.

'The tech lobby is bragging there were only 46,000 H-1B visa applications,' he said. 'We've got so many engineers out of work it should have been zero.'

These pro and con arguments could be moot if the health care debate derails Congress from taking up immigration. What hope does exist lies in the cooperation of Democratic Senator Charles Schumer of New York and Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, who have been trying to fashion the broad outlines of an agreement on immigration.

Meanwhile, the H-1B program has recently come under renewed attack on two fronts.

Iowa Republican Senator Charles Grassley this month demanded that U.S. immigration authorities do a better job of policing the program 'so that foreign workers are not flooding the market, depressing wages and taking jobs from qualified Americans.'

On the flip side, a Business Week cover story, titled 'America's High-Tech Sweat Shops,' focused on consulting firms that sponsor visa applicants with the promise of placing them in good tech jobs but fail to deliver and end up soaking applicants with fees.

The tech constituency with the biggest personal stake in immigration reform is the growing community of engineers who came to the United States from India under H-1B visas, applied for permanent residency and now face long waits for green cards under present rules.

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28.
In business, diversity in language brings benefits
By Steven G. Vegh
The Virginian-Pilot (Norfolk, VA), October 26, 2009
http://hamptonroads.com/2009/10/business-diversity-language-brings-benefits

Virginia Beach -- As the owner of DW's Grill on Laskin Road, Daniel Zhang speaks English daily with suppliers, customers and workers.

But when he shopped for home, auto and business insurance two years ago, the Chinese-born Zhang gravitated to Petula Moy, a Farmers Insurance Group agent who also is fluent in Chinese.

'That is my first language, and there are some details she can explain to me easier,' Zhang said of Moy, who was born in Hong Kong. 'For me, it's better.'

For Farmers Insurance, as well as companies including BB&T, Liberty Tax and Nancy Chandler Associates, reaching customers in their first language is smart business in a metropolitan area as diverse as Hampton Roads.

'People tend sometimes to work better with someone who understands their cultures and have similarities,' said Zack Mansell, a Farmers Insurance district manager based in Virginia Beach.

Unlike mass marketing, 'affinity marketing' assumes that consumers will be more comfortable and do more business with companies that recognize their cultural background or use their native language.

At BB&T, 'sound business reasons' drive the bank's niche marketing, said Jorge Moller, senior vice president for multicultural markets.

Its efforts are evident on the Eastern Shore, which is home to a large Hispanic population. The BB&T branch in Mappsville is designated a multicultural banking center, featuring bilingual employees and merchandising.

Moller said Hispanics' need for bank accounts and financial services is a growing market BB&T wants to tap. Hispanics are expected to account for 32 percent of the Mappsville area's population by 2013, he said.

'Without having those services in Spanish, we're limited in what we can provide them,' and a competitor would surely step in to meet Hispanics' needs, Moller said.

In real estate, Hispanics account for 3 to 4 percent of all home sales in Hampton Roads, double the amount 15 years ago, said John Chandler of the real estate firm Nancy Chandler Associates.

To respond, the firm's Web site has an icon touting 'Mi Casa su Casa' - 'my house your house' - that directs viewers to a Spanish-language page and bilingual agents who specialize in Hispanic clients.

'Frankly, it makes good business sense for us to provide the widest range of services possible to all our clients,' Chandler said.

Liberty Tax Service vigorously markets to Spanish-speakers, said Yeidy Cor¬dero , a Puerto Rico-born owner of a Liberty Tax franchise in Virginia Beach. Liberty Tax hosts seminars for Spanish-speakers about tax requirements for immigrants, families and entrepreneurs starting businesses.

Immigrants, for example, learn they should get a taxpayer number from the Internal Revenue Service and file a return even if they don't have a Social Security number.

'We're not selling a tax product at that moment as much as creating a relationship with our neighborhoods,' she said.

That relationship often generates future business for Liberty from Hispanics.

'Once they find someone who speaks their language and helps them, there's a lot of referrals,' Cordero said. 'It's definitely good for my business.'

To recruit new independent agents, Farmers Insurance is offering to reimburse bilingual candidates up to $5,000 for business startup costs after they complete company training, Mansell said.

He started looking for bilingual agents via ads this summer in Tidewater Hispanic and El Eco de Virginia, local Spanish-language newspapers. Farmers Insurance also ran commercials on Tele¬mundo, a Spanish-language TV network.

South Hampton Roads' Vietnamese, Korean, Indian, Chinese, Filipino and Hispanic populations all are prospective sources of recruits and customers, he said.

Ruby Paguiligan-Putnam, a Filipino agent with Farmer s in Virginia Beach, said her fluency in Tagalog - spoken in the Philippines - helps in sales and in servicing claims for Filipino customers. Virginia Beach is home to a large Filipino population .

'When you have a loss, especially from fire, explaining in their own language what the policy does cover and doesn't is very important,' Paguiligan-Putnam said.

Moy, the Hong Kong native, has been working for Farmers Insurance since 2004. When she works with a Chinese-speaking client, she speaks Chinese and provides Chinese-language pamphlets from Farmers describing insurance options. She advertises via direct mail printed in both Chinese and English.

Her background is a plus with first-generation Chinese immigrants, she said, and with Vietnamese clients whose culture is similar to China's.

Zhang said he switched to Farmers after 15 years of being insured by Allstate, which offered him service only in English.

Since then, he's steered Chinese friends toward Moy and Farmers Insurance.

'A lot of Chinese people, they don't speak English well, so it helps them a lot, too,' Zhang said.

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29.
Billionaire Aids Charity That Aided Him
By Stephanie Strom
The New York Times, October 25, 2009
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/25/us/25donate.html?hpw

Were it not for the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, there might be no Google.

Thirty years ago today, Sergey Brin, a 6-year-old Soviet boy facing an uncertain future, arrived in the United States with the help of the society.

Now Mr. Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google, is giving $1 million to the society, widely known as HIAS, which helped his family escape anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union and establish itself here.

''I would have never had the kinds of opportunities I've had here in the Soviet Union, or even in Russia today,'' Mr. Brin said in an interview. ''I would like to see anyone be able to achieve their dreams, and that's what this organization does.''

The gift is small, given Mr. Brin's estimated $16 billion in personal wealth, but he said it signaled a growing commitment by him and his wife, Anne Wojcicki, to engage more substantially in philanthropy.

''We've given away over $30 million so far, which isn't so tiny but obviously small in terms of our, um, theoretical wealth,'' Mr. Brin said. ''Our philanthropy is something I want to take my time with and develop and systematize.''

He has already learned enough about philanthropy to add immediately: ''Our foundation is not soliciting proposals. Please make sure to include that.''

Mr. Brin noted that Bill Gates, the chairman of Microsoft, was widely criticized for not giving away enough money but is now known as one of the world's leading philanthropists. ''While everyone was criticizing him, he was generating a whole lot more money for his foundation, and ultimately, when he got serious about philanthropy, he did it really well,'' Mr. Brin said. ''I'd like to learn from that example.''

The bulk of the money the Brins have given away has gone to the Michael J. Fox Foundation and other research organizations devoted to Parkinson's disease. But this year, in honor of the 30th anniversary of the Brin family's immigration to the United States, they have given gifts to several Jewish organizations that aided along the way. HIAS, which helped the family navigate the cumbersome process of leaving the Soviet Union for the United States, paid for tickets, gave them money and helped them apply for visas, received the largest amount.

The family lived in Paris for several months while waiting for visas and then moved to Maryland, and the relationship with HIAS ended. ''Although they gave us tremendous help, we didn't stay connected with HIAS,'' said Eugenia Brin, Mr. Brin's mother. ''Then a few years ago, I guess because of Google, we got a call from HIAS asking if we could help them digitize their archives.''

Eventually, Mrs. Brin joined the HIAS board and started a social networking site, mystory.hias.org, initially to encourage Russian Jewish immigrants to post their stories and eventually to attract the stories of other immigrants.

Gideon Aronoff, chief executive of HIAS, said the gift would be put to a variety of uses, like increasing the organization's use of technology and supporting advocacy on immigration policy.

''One of the most important things that Sergey Brin's gift signifies, not just for HIAS but more importantly for the nation,'' Mr. Aronoff said, ''is the possibilities inherent in being a refugee. The debate over immigration has frequently become so bitter that an important element has been lost: refugees are as varied in their skills sets and contributions as the rest of us.''

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30.
In Fields Corner, art with purpose
Mural promotes census awareness
By Jenara Gardner
The Boston Globe, October 26, 2009
http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2009/10/26/in_fields_corner_art_with_purpose/

To urge immigrants in Boston to participate in the 2010 Census, volunteers and community groups came together yesterday to paint a mural at the Fields Corner MBTA stop.

Supported by the Boston Regional Census Center, Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority, Artists for Humanity, and Fields Corner Main Street, the mural was conceived as a way to create awareness about the importance of the 2010 Census and beautify the community, said Kathleen Ludgate, director of Boston Regional Census Center.

An elongated version of the Boston Regional Census Center's logo, the mural is of large, colorful hands interwoven with the message ``Everyone Counts'' in five languages - English, Vietnamese, Spanish, Haitian Creole, and Cape Verdean Creole.

``We used other languages because they are the other four prevalent languages spoken in the community,'' said Norman Eng, a partnership specialist with the Boston Regional Census Center. ``We're hoping it will connect and when they get the form in March they will think of the mural and realize the census is safe, important, and easy.''

In 2000, only 48.9 percent of residents in Fields Corner returned their census questionnaires, compared with 57 percent in the rest of Boston and 69 percent in Massachusetts. US census figures are vital in determining the number of congressional representatives and the amount of federal funding a state receives. Some advocacy groups for illegal immigrants are calling for a boycott of the 2010 Census, to pressure politicians to address the problems some illegal immigrants face.

Ludgate said a boycott would hurt the underrepresented: ``If you don't get counted, you don't get the chance to have your voice heard.''

``I think people have to believe it's for their own good,'' said Hoai Le, an 18-year-old Tufts University student whose family has lived in Fields Corner since they emigrated from Vietnam in 1991. ``The community is going to try and use that money to help them. They just need to have a little faith.''

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31.
Struggling Iraq vet may lose his anchor
His wife, whose family brought her to the U.S. illegally at age 6, is about to be deported. 'She's my everything.'
By Teresa Watanabe
The Los Angeles Times, October 26, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-immig-soldier26-2009oct26,0,144983.story

The nightmares still plague him. The terrifying mortar attacks. The loss of an Albanian soldier and ally, mutilated by shrapnel. The Iraqi children, bloodied and battered, lined up for medical care at the U.S. base at Mosul.

Two years after returning from his service in Iraq, U.S. Army Spc. Jack Barrios, 26, is fighting sleeplessness, sud-den angry outbursts, aversion to emotional intimacy and other fallout from his post-traumatic stress disorder.

But as he undergoes counseling and swallows anti-depressants, the soldier is fighting an even bigger battle: to keep his family from collapsing as his wife, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala, faces deportation.

His wife, 23-year-old Frances, was illegally brought to the United States by her mother at age 6, learned of her status in high school and discovered just last year that removal proceedings have been started. Her possible deportation has left Barrios in panic as he contemplates life without her.

The Army reservist says his wife is the family's anchor, caring for their year-old daughter and 3-year-old son and helping him battle his post-traumatic stress.

'She's my everything,' Barrios said as he sat glumly in the family's sparsely furnished but tidy Van Nuys apart-ment. 'Without her, I can't function. It would be like taking away a part of my soul.'

Hundreds of U.S. soldiers are facing the same trouble as they fight to legalize their spouses' status, a difficult proc-ess that has affected their military readiness, according to Margaret Stock, a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves and an immigration attorney specializing in military cases.

Stock, speaking as a private attorney, said she gets at least one call a day from soldiers facing the deportation of spouses. Many are so stressed out they can't concentrate on their jobs, she said.

'The whole military system depends on families being support networks for soldiers,' said Stock. 'They're an inte-gral part of military readiness, so we need to take care of them.'

Concerned about the effect immigration problems are having on military families, U.S. Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-San Jose) has held hearings on the issue and last year introduced a bill to give undocumented spouses of U.S. soldiers a chance at gaining legal status.

Lofgren, who heads the House immigration subcommittee, said she plans to include the provision for military families in the comprehensive immigration reform bill that could be unveiled early next year.

'It's about respecting the American soldier and the sacrifices they have made,' Lofgren said.

The issue has divided traditional allies. Her bill was co-sponsored by two Republican members of the House Armed Services committee but opposed by their GOP colleagues on the House immigration subcommittee.

The American Legion spoke out against the bill, but the Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America supported it.

'Our soldiers fight and, in some cases, give their lives to preserve the rule of law. It seems ironic indeed that some would propose to disregard the rule of law just as another reward or inducement to serve our country,' U.S. Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa) told the House immigration subcommittee at the May hearing last year.

But the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans group has made the issue of legal status for military families one of its legis-lative priorities.

'The last thing troops in the American military should be worrying about while deployed is the possibility that their spouses at home may be deported,' the group's legislative agenda says.

The issue has also been highlighted in a new documentary, 'Second Battle,' by the Brave New Foundation, a Culver City-based media group that has launched a film series exploring the effect of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars on Americans.

For most families like the Barrioses, the options are bleak. Because she entered U.S. illegally, Frances cannot apply for a green card unless she returns to her native country. If she did that, her illegal status would bar her from returning to this country for 10 years unless she got a waiver. Getting one is difficult, Stock said.

Some soldiers have quit the military to move with their spouses. Others have divorced or chosen to live apart, often to give their children a better life in America, Stock said.

A few have managed to attract high-level attention and receive legal status. In 2007, Michael Chertoff, then the sec-retary of Homeland Security, asked the courts to end removal proceedings against the illegal immigrant wife of Army Spc. Alex Jimenez, who went missing in action that year. The action, requested by Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), allowed Jimenez's wife to apply for a green card.

Jessica Dominguez, the Barrios family's attorney, said one glimmer of hope is that Frances has been in the U.S. longer than 10 years. That gives her standing to seek cancellation of her removal orders by arguing that her deportation would cause her U.S. citizen husband and children 'exceptional and extremely unusual hardship.'

To Jack Barrios, his wife is just as American as he is. She speaks better English than Spanish and has a high school diploma and ambitions to be a teacher. She has no criminal record.

Their roots in Van Nuys run deep. Jack was born in Los Angeles and moved to the Valley with his family as a child. They went to the same school, Erwin Elementary, where their son, Matthew, now attends preschool.

They live in the same complex on Oxnard Street where Frances Barrios grew up. The two-bedroom apartment is decorated with Jack's military photos, an Army medal of commendation and a certificate of wartime service in Iraq.

When Jack announced in 2004 that he wanted to join the Army, Frances was apprehensive. They wanted to start a family and she worried about his deployment to dangerous areas. But Jack had made up his mind.

'You've got to give back something to this country for the freedoms we have,' Jack said then, reminding his wife of their blessings here. Jack's sister, a pharmacist who lived in Guatemala, was shot and killed when her office refused to pay protection money to local gangs, he said.

The call for deployment to Iraq came in 2006, when Matthew was just a few months old. Frances said she was terri-fied, especially when she had to sign copies of her husband's will and life insurance papers.

He returned a year later -- safe, but not sound.

When Frances Barrios tried to talk about how much her husband had changed after Iraq, she began to sob quietly.

He used to be a clown, she said, always the life of the party. Now, she said, he erupts in anger. He seems cold. He barely speaks. Not about his day. Not about his dreams. Certainly not about Iraq.

Sometimes, he wakes up in the middle of the night and sits in the darkened living room, mute and expressionless, staring straight ahead. When Frances asks what's wrong, he doesn't even acknowledge her, she said.

'I love him, but it does hurt,' she said, tears rolling down her cheeks. 'He has changed so much, and I wish I had the other Jack back.'

Jack cannot easily express why he has changed so much. Maybe, he said, he shut down his emotions to get through the daily terrors in Iraq.

He said he is constantly on guard and can no longer stand crowds. He knows he is impatient with his children.

He knows he is stressed out by his daily life: a two-job, 15-hour workday that begins with him waking up at 3:30 a.m. to get to his first job as a driver for UPS, then to his second job at an auto parts firm.

And, he said, he knows that his life will collapse without his wife by his side.

As his parents speak of their pain, Matthew squeals with delight on his Playskool truck. Moon-faced Allanna gurgles and smiles as she crawls across the living room.

Whatever happens, the children, both U.S.-born citizens, will stay here. There is no future for them in Guatemala.

But their mother's heart breaks at the thought of separation. 'I'm with them all day,' Frances says of her children, sobbing. 'I cook, I clean. It will be too much for Jack. It's hard enough for him already.'

Barrios said his wife never intentionally broke any laws. She was just a small child when she was taken across the border without papers.

'I just want my girl to stay here and be part of this country,' he says. 'Why should we have to break up our family? We just want to have the American Dream, just like everyone else.'

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32.
Asylum seeker realized her dream but now is missing
After years on the run, Gilda Ghanipour stumbled upon a retired immigration judge and his Pepperdine law students, who championed her quest for asylum. She won her case. But she doesn't know it.
By Duke Helfand
The Los Angeles Times, October 24, 2009
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-asylum24-2009oct24,0,6616785.story

Gilda Ghanipour has spent the last nine years on the run.

Abandoned by her Muslim family for converting to Christianity, she has shuttled from one address to the next, terrified of being deported to her native Iran, where apostasy can be punished by death.

Last year, Ghanipour stumbled upon a retired immigration judge and his Pepperdine University Law School students, who championed her quest for asylum.

Ghanipour won the case. But she doesn't know it.

The devoutly religious woman vanished shortly before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services delivered on her dream at the end of August.

Her Pepperdine legal advocates are desperately searching for her -- calling churches she frequented, scouring prison databases, knocking on doors where she once lived.

Somewhere in Los Angeles, they believe, Ghanipour is wandering alone, as she has for most of the last decade, probably clutching her beloved Bible, possibly sleeping in a homeless shelter or in someone's spare bedroom.

Police haven't been able to find her. The coroner has no record of her. Efforts by The Times to locate her through relatives, churches and homeless advocates also were unsuccessful.

The disappearance of the 49-year-old Ghanipour, who speaks three languages and once attended medical school, is especially difficult for those at Pepperdine Law School's Asylum Clinic.

Gilda, as they've known her, was their first client. She offered the lawyers-in-training an early taste of victory. They have only a grainy black-and-white photo to remind them of her thick black hair, her proud smile, her opinionated ways. And they are worried, knowing that Ghanipour has been in ill health.

'Part of me doesn't want to celebrate until we find her,' said Kristin Heinrich, a third-year law student.

Ghanipour recounted her life story in declarations accompanying her asylum application. According to the written statements, she spent her childhood in the city of Arak and her adolescence in Tehran, about 200 miles to the north. She married in 1979 shortly after graduating from high school and moved with her husband to Germany to escape the strict fundamentalist rule of the Islamic Revolution.

While in Germany, she studied medicine. She periodically visited relatives in California and returned briefly to Iran on several occasions to help her father sort out her mother's will. While touring historical sites on one of those trips, according to her declarations, she was arrested by the Iranian secret service and interrogated about suspicions that she was a German spy.

The experience left her shaken. Divorced from her husband in Germany, she accepted an invitation to join her relatives in California, arriving in June 2000 on a six-month visitors visa, she wrote in the asylum papers.

While staying with a cousin in Diamond Bar, she had an encounter that would change her life. An evangelical Christian family knocked at the door. Their message about God's love through Christ resonated with Ghanipour, who had never been especially religious but had experienced what she described as an encounter with God after her mother's death years before in Iran.

'I immediately knew in my heart that this is what I was looking for,' she wrote in her asylum declaration. 'And on the 30th of November 2000, while on a legal visit in the U.S., I received Jesus Christ as my savior and became a Christian believer.'

The decision alienated her family. 'One by one my relatives turned away from me,' she wrote.

With no family, no job and an expired visa, Ghanipour wandered from place to place, relying on the kindness of friends, many from churches she attended. Her asylum paperwork listed 25 addresses in the last five years alone, including locations in Woodland Hills, Glendale, North Hollywood, Sherman Oaks, Inglewood, Hawthorne and Ontario.

'She was afraid she would be arrested and removed' from the United States, said Bruce Einhorn, a retired federal immigration judge who runs Pepperdine's Asylum Clinic. 'She lived on the run.'

Ghanipour tried repeatedly to resolve her immigration problems. She filed for an extension of her visa, only to see it rejected because the wrong fee had been submitted, she wrote in her asylum paperwork. That happened, she wrote, because a Sherman Oaks notary who had posed as an immigration attorney provided an outdated form, defrauding her of money in the process (she did not say how much).

She met with other attorneys, one of whom advised her to hold off on her legalization efforts because of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. Another suggested that she 'pray and ask Jesus Christ to reveal the truth' about the notary who allegedly scammed her.

Ghanipour prayed often and fervently. Faith was the one constant in her life.

'She seemed to be a very committed Christian,' recalled Roger Bosch, the associate pastor of outreach at Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, where Ghanipour was baptized in 2004 and attended services and Bible study.

'She was always concerned that her life would reflect her faith,' he said.

Ghanipour disappeared from the church about four or five years ago, Bosch said. She drifted to homes and churches across the region, landing in June 2008 at the Union Rescue Mission on L.A.'s skid row. A case manager there referred her to the Pepperdine Legal Aid Clinic, which is housed in the mission. The clinic's attorneys typically do not handle immigration matters, so they turned to Einhorn.

At the time, Einhorn was preparing to open a new legal clinic at Pepperdine to represent indigent asylum clients, particularly those who faced religious persecution. Ghanipour filled the bill.

But by applying for asylum, Ghanipour would be doing precisely what she had tried to avoid all these years: bringing herself to the attention of immigration authorities.

Einhorn informed her of another risk. The majority of asylum seekers, he explained, are rejected and wind up being referred for removal proceedings in Immigration Court. But Ghanipour insisted on pressing ahead.

In May, she appeared with Einhorn and another clinic attorney before an asylum officer with the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services. The interview lasted 6 1/2 hours. Einhorn and Ghanipour returned two weeks later, hoping for a decision, but were told that it would be mailed.

Then, in late July, Ghanipour disappeared. Her cellphone went dead. She no longer returned e-mails. Her legal advocates were surprised by her silence because she had been so persistent and vocal about her case.

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33.
Witnesses say fraud in Postville occurred for years
By Grant Schulte
The Des Moines Register (IA), October 26, 2009
http://www.desmoinesregister.com/article/20091026/NEWS/910260314/-1/SPORTS12

Sioux Falls, SD -- The eastern Iowa meat plant founded on an immigrant's dream was spiraling toward disaster years before federal agents arrested one-third of the company's workers, according to witnesses in the fraud trial of its former top executive.

Details of an alleged financial scheme have come to light in the past two weeks of testimony in Sholom Rubashkin's 91-count fraud and laundering trial. Testimony from 28 government witnesses centered on corruption that long preceded the May 2008 immigration raid and stretched well beyond Rubashkin, who managed the plant's day-to-day operations.

Witnesses painted a picture of an Agriprocessors Inc. that survived on poor record-keeping, under-the-table deals, inflated salaries for top executives and leadership that tried to expand the kosher meat producer beyond its means.

Bank officers who lent the plant millions may have looked the other way while managers cut corners and hired cheap, illegal-immigrant workers, witnesses implied.

Rubashkin's father, who founded the slaughterhouse two decades ago in Postville, Ia., pushed to build a meat-rendering plant and other facilities that the company could scarcely afford, according to former employees.

Then came the May 2008 immigration raid, and the arrest of 389 workers. Production froze. Sales crumbled. And Agriprocessors, the titan of kosher meat, tumbled into bankruptcy.

Long list of charges

Rubashkin, who turns 50 Thursday, has pleaded not guilty to charges of mail, wire and bank fraud, money laundering, and ignoring an order to pay livestock providers in the 48-hour window required by law.

His first federal trial could lead to a possible 1,280-year prison term if the South Dakota jury convicts him of all 91 financial fraud charges.

Rubashkin then faces document fraud and immigrant-harboring charges during a second federal trial expected to last four weeks. He faces a maximum 715-year sentence if convicted on all 72 immigration-related counts.

Rubashkin's lawyers acknowledge that the plant operated on dangerously thin margins and a day-to-day executive who, they say, knew little about meatpacking. Their argument hinges on the notion that Rubashkin's behavior was sloppy - even unethical - but not illegal.

Many government witnesses who detailed the corruption also recalled Rubashkin as a generous, excitable, well-intentioned man. Some testified only after being subpoenaed.

Rubashkin lent employees money and helped workers' relatives find jobs, one witness testified. Another remembered when Rubashkin threw a company party, invited even the lowest assembly-line workers and water-skied on the Mississippi River.

False sales invoices

Sholom Mordechai Rubashkin walked into Agriprocessors' customer service department with a yellow legal pad and a pen, a former plant employee testified.

At a cubicle sat Darlis Hendry, a sales coordinator from Postville who had worked at the plant since 1999. It was August 2007 and Hendry had just replaced a longtime employee who had died.

Rubashkin asked to talk in private, Hendry told jurors. In a conference room, he requested her help writing sales invoices for meat products he claimed to be selling on the side.

It started slowly. Rubashkin visited one or two times a week, with a customer name and a dollar figure scribbled on the pad, Hendry testified.

Hendry said she took the number - usually rounded, always more than $25,000 - and wrote invoices with made-up orders for cutlets, meat from Uruguay, whatever happened to fit.

'I didn't think much of it, at first,' she testified. The requests seemed odd, 'but it wasn't for me to question him.'

Prosecutors say the fake sales records were part of a broader scheme to mislead First Bank Business Capital, the plant's St. Louis lender, and collect advances on a $35 million credit line.

Rubashkin paid relatives and several top executives under the table, said former financial officer Yomtov 'Toby' Bensasson, who pleaded guilty in August to a conspiracy charge.

He testified that he collected $1,000 per week, after taxes, but also received at least $750 each week that was not reported to the Internal Revenue Service. He said he also was given a monthly $1,805 'completion check' for his role in the alleged fraud.

Scrambling after raid

The collapse began the morning of May 12, 2008, when federal agents with M-16s and bulletproof vests stormed Agriprocessors and detained 389 illegal immigrant workers.

Bensasson, the top financial officer, was in his office around 9 a.m. when he heard shouting. A federal agent burst through his door and shouted, 'Freeze!'

The women in the customer service department were crying, he said. One agent was trying to break into a nearby office. A heavyset man walked up, and told him: 'This is an ICE raid. You have to show me right now how to shut the plant down.'

In September, several disastrous months later, the Rubashkin family met with New York lawyer and family friend Bernard Feldman in Postville. Feldman testified that Rubashkin's father, Abraham Aaron Rubashkin, wanted a new face for his company.

Top managers, meanwhile, were scrambling to sell stored meat at what one plant salesman described as 'ridiculous' low prices. Rubashkin's brother, Heshy, approached several customers about bulk purchases of kosher meat out of the company's freezers.

Hendry, who has not been charged in the case, said that after the raid, Rubashkin began to visit her several times a day, sometimes with as many as 20 invoice requests. By then, she said, she knew the sales records were fake.

Farmers called Agriprocessors, angry that they had not yet received payment for cattle. Elvira Rowland, a bookkeeper, told jurors that she asked Rubashkin and Bensasson what she should say.

'Did the defendant give you an elaborate explanation?' Assistant U.S. Attorney C.J. Williams asked.

'He said they were in the mail,' she replied.

Invoice folder vanishes

On Oct. 30, 2008, U.S. Attorney Matt Dummermuth announced federal immigration charges against Rubashkin. The financial allegations would come later, as investigators plunged deeper into the plant's books.

Rubashkin turned himself in and appeared before a federal judge in Cedar Rapids. He walked out past a throng of reporters with a monitoring bracelet strapped to his ankle.

Later that day, at the plant, Hendry said she opened the filing cabinet for the blue folder marked 'Sholom' that held the allegedly fake invoices.

The folder was gone, Hendry testified. She called her boss.

'I asked if he took them,' Hendry testified. 'He said yes, but not to worry, I'm not in trouble and I didn't do anything wrong.'

Rubashkin had been in the sales office that morning, shortly after 6 a.m., and appeared more nervous than usual, customer service employee Verla O'Shaughnessy testified.

She testified that she had seen the invoices Hendry produced for Rubashkin. The numbers, she knew, could not be real.

Prices were incorrect. Some reported shipments were too large to fit on a truck. One record showed a sale to a customer she handled, which she knew had never taken place.

Investigators discovered the financial problems when the plant's court-appointed bankruptcy trustee tried to collect customer debts shown in the company's records.

Prosecutors showed Eleazer Meyer, a Brooklyn, N.Y., businessman, a sales invoice showing that he had bought $44,325 worth of meat. But Meyer, a Rubashkin family friend for at least 40 years, owned a clothing store. His debts to Agriprocessors, he testified, had never totaled more than $10,000 at a time.

More details to come

Today will be the eighth day of Rubashkin's trial in Sioux Falls.

On Thursday, both sides showed signs of fatigue. Defense lawyer Guy Cook nursed an energy drink and fought the sniffles. Matt Cole, one of the three U.S. attorneys assigned to the case, had just returned from a sick day. Lawyers traded objections, and the back-and-forth seemed testy at times.

'It's been a long week,' said U.S. District Chief Judge Linda Reade. 'Everyone go home and rest up.'

Rubashkin watched, expressionless, as witness after witness described the alleged scams. At times he jotted notes on a white legal pad, whispered to his attorneys, and stroked his beard. At one point, Bensasson testified about his earlier statements to a federal grand jury.

'You told the grand jury that one mistake Sholom made was, he was too good,' Cook said.

'That's the thing about the Rubashkins,' Bensasson replied. 'They don't realize that, when you're too good, you get stepped on.'

How the alleged bank fraud worked

Allegedly bogus records created the appearance that customers owed Agriprocessors money but had not yet paid their debt. First Bank, as a result, was willing to lend Agriprocessors more as long as the debt was less than 60 days old.

The customer payments - from kosher meat stores, animal feed companies and others - were supposed to go directly into a Decorah Bank and Trust 'sweep' account, before they were wired to First Bank.

But Sholom Rubashkin allegedly routed the money to a different eastern Iowa bank, and used the cash to pay the plant's operational costs. He referred to big-dollar payments as 'his own s---, his own stuff, his 'tootsies,' ' former financial officer Yomtov 'Toby' Bensasson testified.

Prosecutors say Rubashkin covered his tracks with two organizations he controlled: the Torah Educational Program and the Kosher Community Grocery Inc. in Postville.

Rubashkin sent money to the school and the grocery store, Bensasson said. He then allegedly had both organizations write checks back to Agriprocessors, creating a false 'customer payment' that could go to First Bank undetected.

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34.
Investigation begins in death of ICE detainee
By Karen Lee Ziner
The Providence Journal, October 25, 2009
http://www.projo.com/news/content/DETAINEE_DEAD_24_10-25-09_34G75O8_v8.3619598.html

As a government investigation got under way, family members scheduled a funeral in New York for Pedro Juan Tavarez, 49, a Rhode Island man who died at a Boston hospital Monday while in immigration custody. No cause of death has been released.

Tavarez, a native of the Dominican Republic, was brought from the Suffolk County House of Correction to Brigham & Women s Hospital with suspected pneumonia, according to U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement.

But Dominico Cabral, consul general with the Dominican Consulate in Boston, said Tavarez had previously been taken to two other hospitals Lemuel Shattuck and Faulkner Hospital both in Jamaica Plain, after he complained of feeling sick on Wednesday. [ICE declined to explain the disparity yesterday.]

Family members told The Journal that Tavarez was on life support by the time they were notified early Saturday morning that he had been hospitalized. They said doctors told him his organs were failing and that infection had spread throughout his body.

It doesn’t make sense, his daughter, Judith Tavarez, 23, said Thursday.

She and Tavarez s former longtime companion, Marian Martes, said Tavarez said he had recently stopped receiving insulin he required for diabetes while at the Suffolk County House of Correction.

The death is being investigated by the ICE Office of Professional Responsibility, as a matter of ICE policy with any detainee death, said spokesman Michael Gilhooly. ICE OPR investigates allegations of misconduct involving ICE and customs and border patrol employees.

Tavarez had been in ICE custody since Rhode Island State Police stopped him for speeding on Route 95 in Warwick, in April 2008. State Police Capt. David Neill said Tavarez presented a license with the name Felix Baez on it. A check of that license led to discovery that he was actually Pedro Juan Tavarez, who had an outstanding deportation warrant, said Neill.

Tavarez s lawyer, Martin D. Harris of Providence, said he is urging the family to pursue an investigation.

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35.
Men charged in Plainfield beating death of Hispanic immigrant are also accused of hate crime
By Julie O'Connor
The Star-Ledger (Newark, NJ), October 25, 2009

A murder conviction would put the five young men accused of robbing and brutally beating a Guatemalan immigrant in Plainfield behind bars for at least 30 years. Even so, the youngest of the alleged attackers could be out by the age of 47.

But the men have also been charged with committing a hate crime -- which could tack an additional 15 to 30 years onto their jail time if found guilty of the 2007 slaying of Lazaro Tista.

This case, with its next hearing Nov. 13, appears to be the first prosecution in Union County for a bias crime involving a homicide, authorities say. The attackers allegedly targeted their victim because he was Hispanic, which would be a crime under a relatively new state statute.
. . .
http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2009/10/men_charged_in_plainfield_beat.html

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36.
Judge sentences 2 men in migrant smuggling case
The Associated Press, October 24, 2009

Miami (AP) -- A judge sentenced two men to federal prison in connection to a migrant smuggling operation that resulted in the drowning death of a passenger near Palm Beach.

U.S. District Judge Daniel T.K. Hurley on Friday sentenced Aurelio Sanchez-Ortega, 21, to 75 months in prison to be followed by 36 months of supervised release. Angel Julio Navarro-Lliteras, 36, got 19 months in prison to be followed by 36 months of supervised release.
. . .
http://www.miamiherald.com/news/florida/AP/story/1298229.html

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37.
Restaurateur pleads guilty to immigration charges
The Associated Press State, October 24, 2009

Seattle (AP) -- An owner of a chain of popular Seattle-area Thai restaurants has pleaded guilty to immigration charges, admitting she recruited U.S. citizens to engage in sham marriages with Thai nationals.

The point of the marriages was to allow the Thai citizens to obtain legal status to stay in the United States.
. . .
http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2010126997_apwathaigingerimmigration.html

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Overseas News

1. Canada: Senior Mexican statesman bemoans visa restrictions
2. Canada: Authorities release several from Sri Lankan ship
3. Chile: Easter Islanders vote to restrict immigration
4. U.K.: Gov’t defends immigration policies (2 stories)
5. U.K.: Lords to consider bill targeting foreign labor abuse
6. U.K.: Repatriation of eight Afghans cost £120,000
7. U.K.: Activists, victims strike back against 'honor' violence
8. Greece: Gov't to investigate E.U. funds for detainees
9. Greece: Gov't pledges to improve detention conditions
10. Italy: New legislation cracks down on illegal foreigners (story, link)
11. Italy: MP brands instruction on Islam in schools 'impossible'
12. Malta: Polish PM pledges assistance in immigration dilemma (story, link)
13. Malta: Smugglers branching out into drug trade
14. Zimbabwe: Repatriated workers return with little to show for efforts
15. Hong Kong: Laws to crack down on asylum seeker employment

Subscribe to CIS e-mail services here: http://cis.org/immigrationnews.html

-- Mark Krikorian]

1.
Visa controls on Mexico ‘humiliating,' senator says
By Michael Valpy
The Globe and Mail (Canada), October 23, 2009
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/visa-controls-on-mexico-humiliating-senator-says/article1336866/

A senior Mexican senator and former foreign affairs minister yesterday called Canada's visa controls on Mexico a humiliation and questioned whether Canadian-Mexican relations will improve as long as Stephen Harper is Prime Minister.

In a blunt speech to a Toronto business and academic gathering, Senator Rosario Green Macias detailed the information she was required to provide to the Canadian government to enter Canada – proof of property ownership, her last six bank statements, a letter from the Mexican senate stating she is a senator and personal information about other members of her family.

'That has to stop,' said Ms. Green, who is president of the external relations commission of Mexico's senate, an academic, a former secretary-general of Mexico's Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI) and a one-time senior United Nations official as well as diplomat and cabinet minister.

She wore a silk scarf with a Mountie emblem, a gift from her daughter who attended private school in Quebec's Eastern Townships.

She repeatedly told her audience that the Mexican-Canada relationship is troubled. Twice she used the word 'humiliating' to describe Canada's visa controls, linking them to the wall – which she also called a humiliation – that the United States is building along the U.S.-Mexican border to keep out illegal migrant Mexicans.

Later, talking to journalists, she said the relationship will improve 'when you change prime ministers,' then realized what she'd said and asked not to be quoted.

The two journalists who heard her did not give her that assurance and Ms. Green did not press her request.

Canada imposed visa requirements on Mexicans in July after a huge upsurge in the number of Mexicans arriving in Canada and claiming refugee status.

Ottawa said most of the claims were bogus and had been orchestrated by unscrupulous Mexican firms giving advice on how to take advantage of Canada's asylum system.

They were blocking the Canadian refugee assessment process, said Citizenship and Immigration Minister Jason Kenney.

Ms. Green, who spoke at the launch of a joint forum by Mexican and Canadian non-government policy institutes to improve relations between the two countries, said the Canadian government first should have proposed a study with the Mexican government to resolve the problem before suddenly imposing visas.

Mexico, she said, was working on curbing illegal migrants.

She criticized the media's portrait of Mexico as nothing more than a society of illegal migration, drugs and violence, and she said her fellow citizens found it amazing that Mexican asylum seekers in Canada were claiming their government couldn't protect them from the drug wars and corrupt and abusive security forces.

Ms. Green also said the North American free-trade agreement should be re-launched with a new attitude that recognized Mexico as an equal partner with Canada and the U.S. and not as an irritant.

On Monday, Bill Graham, Canada's former foreign affairs minister, will speak in Mexico City on the bilateral relationship. The forum is sponsored by the Canadian Foundation for the Americas (FOCAL) and the Consejo Mexicano de Asuntos Internacionales (COMEXI).

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2.
Man from migrant ship ordered released
By Jane Armstrong
The Globe and Mail (Canada), October 24, 2009
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/man-from-migrant-ship-ordered-released/article1336965/

Vancouver -- A Sri Lankan Tamil who was among the 76 migrants whose ship sailed into Canadian waters off the West Coast a week ago has been ordered released from custody after a detention review hearing on Wednesday.

All the other migrants have been kept in custody because border officials haven't been able to verify their identities.

Lawyer Narinder Kang said the man would be released shortly, with several conditions, including a requirement that he report regularly to border authorities. He said the man has relatives in Canada and will likely reside with them.

All the migrants aboard the ship are Tamils who intend to make refugee claims in Canada.

However, many of the men still haven't been interviewed by border authorities. In addition, officials still aren't satisfied they can verify the men's identities.

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3.
Easter Island to curb immigrants
By Gideon Long
The BBC News (U.K.), October 25, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/8325095.stm

The inhabitants of Easter Island in the South Pacific have voted to restrict immigration amid overpopulation fears.

More than 90% of those who voted in this weekend's referendum said they were worried about an influx of residents from Chile.

Chile has administered the remote island outpost, famous for its carved stone statues, since the 19th century.

The referendum was organised by the Chilean government, which says the island is struggling to cope.

Constitutional change

With a population of just 4,000 people, Easter Island might not sound that crowded.

But the island is just 20 miles (32km) from one end to the other.

It is also more than 2,000 miles from the Chilean mainland, which generates all sorts of problems.

Disposing of rubbish in a sustainable, environmentally friendly way, for example, is becoming increasingly difficult.

Some 50,000 tourists visit the island each year to see the famous Maoi, the enigmatic carved stone heads that are dotted around the island.

As tourism has increased, hundreds of Chileans have moved in from the mainland to work in hotels, bars and as taxi drivers.

The Chilean parliament must now approve a change to the constitution to bring the new rules into effect.

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4.
Migration boom claims dismissed
The BBC News (U.K.), October 26, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8326501.stm

The government has dismissed claims that it set up an immigration boom in an effort to make the UK more diverse and 'rub the right's nose' in it.

Former Downing Street aide Andrew Neather alleged last week that this had been a 'driving political purpose' of Labour policy from 2000.

But Home Office minister Phil Woolas told the Commons such views were due themselves to 'political motivation'.

The Tories accused Labour of acting in its own - not the UK's - interests.

Mr Neather, a speechwriter who worked for former Prime Minister Tony Blair and in the Home Office, wrote in the London Evening Standard last week that the government had relaxed controls in an effort to 'open up the UK to mass migration'.

'Utterly disgraceful'

As well as bringing in migrants to ease labour shortages, there had been a 'driving political purpose', with ministers hoping to change the UK radically and 'rub the right's nose in diversity'.

Speaking in the Commons, shadow home secretary Chris Grayling said: 'What, of course, Mr Neather, the former adviser concerned, said was that the policy of rapid expansion was done to put pressure on the right.

'Would it not be utterly disgraceful for a government to make immigration policy not in the interests of the country but the interests of a political party and is that what happened?'

Mr Woolas replied: 'I don't know to whom he is referring or what he is referring to, but if one wants to take the views of somebody with a political motivation, that's up to him.'

He added that 'this government has reintroduced border controls... despite the opposition of the honourable gentleman opposite'.

In his article Mr Neather said the 'major shift' in immigration policy had come after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think-tank.

The published version promoted the labour market case for immigration, but Mr Neather said: 'Earlier [unpublished] drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

'I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended - even if this wasn't its main purpose - to rub the right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.'

The 'deliberate policy' had lasted from late 2000 until 'at least February last year', when the new points-based immigration system was introduced, he added.

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Labour wanted mass immigration to make UK more multicultural, says former adviser
Labour threw open Britain's borders to mass immigration to help socially engineer a 'truly multicultural' country, a former Government adviser has revealed.
By Tom Whitehead
The Telegraph (U.K.), October 23, 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6418456/Labour-wanted-mass-immigration-to-make-UK-more-multicultural-says-former-adviser.html

The huge increases in migrants over the last decade were partly due to a politically motivated attempt by ministers to radically change the country and 'rub the Right's nose in diversity', according to Andrew Neather, a former adviser to Tony Blair, Jack Straw and David Blunkett.

He said Labour's relaxation of controls was a deliberate plan to 'open up the UK to mass migration' but that ministers were nervous and reluctant to discuss such a move publicly for fear it would alienate its 'core working class vote'.

As a result, the public argument for immigration concentrated instead on the economic benefits and need for more migrants.

Critics said the revelations showed a 'conspiracy' within Government to impose mass immigration for 'cynical' political reasons.

Mr Neather was a speech writer who worked in Downing Street for Tony Blair and in the Home Office for Jack Straw and David Blunkett, in the early 2000s.

Writing in the Evening Standard, he revealed the 'major shift' in immigration policy came after the publication of a policy paper from the Performance and Innovation Unit, a Downing Street think tank based in the Cabinet Office, in 2001.

He wrote a major speech for Barbara Roche, the then immigration minister, in 2000, which was largely based on drafts of the report.

He said the final published version of the report promoted the labour market case for immigration but unpublished versions contained additional reasons, he said.

He wrote: 'Earlier drafts I saw also included a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural.

'I remember coming away from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended – even if this wasn't its main purpose – to rub the Right's nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date.'

The 'deliberate policy', from late 2000 until 'at least February last year', when the new points based system was introduced, was to open up the UK to mass migration, he said.

Some 2.3 million migrants have been added to the population since then, according to Whitehall estimates quietly slipped out last month.

On Question Time on Thursday, Mr Straw was repeatedly quizzed about whether Labour's immigration policies had left the door open for the BNP.

In his column, Mr Neather said that as well as bringing in hundreds of thousands more migrants to plug labour market gaps, there was also a 'driving political purpose' behind immigration policy.

He defended the policy, saying mass immigration has 'enriched' Britain, and made London a more attractive and cosmopolitan place.

But he acknowledged that 'nervous' ministers made no mention of the policy at the time for fear of alienating Labour voters.

'Part by accident, part by design, the Government had created its longed-for immigration boom.

'But ministers wouldn't talk about it. In part they probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn't necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men's clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.'

Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the Migrationwatch think tank, said: 'Now at least the truth is out, and it's dynamite.

'Many have long suspected that mass immigration under Labour was not just a cock up but also a conspiracy. They were right.

'This Government has admitted three million immigrants for cynical political reasons concealed by dodgy economic camouflage.'

The chairmen of the cross-party Group for Balanced Migration, MPs Frank Field and Nicholas Soames, said: 'We welcome this statement by an ex-adviser, which the whole country knows to be true.

'It is the first beam of truth that has officially been shone on the immigration issue in Britain.'

A Home Office spokesman said: 'Our new flexible points based system gives us greater control on those coming to work or study from outside Europe, ensuring that only those that Britain need can come.

'Britain's borders are stronger than ever before and we are rolling out ID cards to foreign nationals, we have introduced civil penalties for those employing illegal workers and from the end of next year our electronic border system will monitor 95 per cent of journeys in and out of the UK.

'The British people can be confident that immigration is under control.'

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5.
'Anti-slavery laws' before Lords
The BBC News (U.K.), October 26, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/politics/8325158.stm

The House of Lords is expected to vote later on proposed new laws for England and Wales to deal with what campaigners are calling modern-day slavery.

Liberty and Anti-Slavery International say servitude and forced labour remain widespread, with some migrants being held against their will on low wages.

They say prosecutions are difficult because of a lack of clear offences criminalising such practices.

Ministers have insisted current laws give victims enough protection.

The campaign groups argue existing employment laws and legislation covering offences such as false imprisonment are inadequate.

They hope to see two new offences created - one of holding someone in servitude, punishable by up to 14 years in prison, and a second offence of forced labour, punishable by a maximum of seven years in prison.

Passports taken

A proposed amendment to the Coroners and Justice Bill has the support of the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, as well as the Unite union and the Gangmasters Licensing Authority.

Campaigners say some migrant workers are being forced to accept low wages and long working hours because of intimidation and threats from their employers.

They cite cases of domestic workers who have their passports taken and are not allowed to leave the homes of the families they work for.

Many agricultural workers are also exploited, they say.

Aidan McQuade, from Anti-Slavery International, said: 'Forced labour will remain a reality in the UK unless adequate legislation is put in place and enforced.

'Getting the police to prosecute those who hold people in modern-day slavery is extremely difficult because of the lack of a clear offence criminalising this practice.

'The existing legal provisions fail to protect victims or ensure that the perpetrators of these crimes are brought to justice.'

Campaigners have warned that the UK could be taken to the European Court of Human Rights because many cases are not being prosecuted.

The director of Liberty, Shami Chakrabarti, said: 'In an age when new criminal offences have flown out of Westminster like confetti, the lack of an effective anti-slavery law is a gaping hole in the protection of the vulnerable.'

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6.
Taxpayer funds £120,000 flight to return just eight Afghans
A charter flight costing the taxpayer £120,000 was used to fly just eight failed asylum seekers back to Afghanistan, The Daily Telegraph can disclose.
By Tom Whitehead
The Telegraph (U.K.), October 26, 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/lawandorder/6416385/Taxpayer-funds-120000-flight-to-return-just-eight-Afghans.html

Home Office officials had planned to use the private jet to return up to 30 individuals but more than two thirds won last minute reprieves after applying for judicial reviews against their removals.

But the plane was still used, meaning the public paid £15,000 per failed asylum seeker on a journey dubbed the 'ghost flight' by immigration staff.

The case reignites concerns over spending on private jets to return failed asylum applicants, foreign prisoners and illegal immigrants.

Figures earlier this year showed spending on charter flights had almost doubled to £8.2 million in 2008/09 – the equivalent of more than £22,500 per day.

That was a sharp increase on the £4.8 million spent during the previous year and means more than £22.5 million has been spent on private jets in the last four years.

In total, the taxpayer has been left with a bill for £81 million to fly such individuals home since 2005, once spending on seats on scheduled flights is included.

Susie Squire, of the Taxpayer's Alliance, said: 'While it is very important to ensure successful deportations, this is an absurd amount of money to spend per passenger.

'There needs to be a case by case assessment as to whether a charter flight is the correct course of action.'

A second flight to Afghanistan left the UK this week and successfully returned 23 individuals but it is not known if any were among those postponed last week.

The Home Office insisted it regularly reviews flight costs and remains 'content that charter flights currently offer the most economical option'.

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7.
Ending the silence on 'honour killing'
The number of young women – and men – being killed or assaulted after supposedly bringing shame on their families keeps on rising. But more than ever before, those who have escaped violence are speaking out to break the code of silence. Old attitudes of accepting the crimes in the name of cultural sensitivity have also disappeared and the police are targeting the abusers.
By Tracy McVeigh
The Guardian (U.K.), October 25, 2009
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2009/oct/25/honour-killings-victims-domestic-violence

Zena had been following a murder trial in London with an interest verging on obsession.'I really wanted to go to court myself but I can never risk going to the city and being seen by someone,' she said.

'But I feel such a bond with other women who may have been through what I went through, even though you never meet these girls; you just hear about them when these 'honour killing' trials come up. I wish I could get involved with the support groups and help but you know, I'm just a coward.'

Having first walked out of an abusive marriage at the age of 17 and then from a hostile family who had had a meeting to discuss whether or not she should die, Zena does not lack courage but she is still very scared.

She has every reason to be. Her Bangladeshi-born mother had suggested that Zena might be allowed to poison herself rather than be murdered for bringing shame on the family. Zena, born in England, is second-generation British Asian and her accent betrays where she was brought up although it is far from where she lives now.

'I'm sorry to be so cloak-and-dagger but you never know what they might be capable of, I know there are plenty of young men who would love to play bounty hunter just for a bit of kudos in the community.'

Another court case six years ago had shocked Zena into climbing out of the window of her locked bedroom and leaving home with £46 and a change of clothes, an impulsive act she believes saved her life.

It was the story of Heshu Yones, 16, from Acton, west London, who was stabbed 11 times and then had her throat cut by her father who said he had to kill her because other men in his circle of Kurdish friends thought she had a boyfriend and his honour was shamed. Abdalla Yones was convicted of murder and jailed for life in 2003.

'A family member told me that there had been a meeting about killing me but it was seeing that case in the paper that made it real,' said Zena. The threat to women in this country from such violence is very real and the list of names of girls and women killed in the name of 'honour' is growing.

Police estimate at least 12 are dying each year in the UK but others will be hidden – forced suicides and murders made to look like suicide are widely believed to take place undetected. Women aged 16-24 from Pakistani, Indian and Bangladeshi backgrounds are three times more likely to kill themselves than the national average for that age and it is impossible to tell what pressures some must have been under. And for every woman who dies, it seems certain that there are many, many more living with honour-based abuse and hidden away in shuttered communities.

Support groups are springing up. The Henna Foundation is based in Cardiff and Jasvinder Sanghera, who fled a forced marriage and made a new life for herself, set up a charity called Karma Nirvana in Derby after her sister Robina killed herself to escape the misery of her loveless marriage.

When it opened its helpline in April 2008, Karma Nirvana received 4,000 calls in the first year and is now taking 300 calls a month from people under threat of honour-based violence, often linked to forced marriage.

After the government's forced marriage unit was set up in April last year, it received 5,000 calls and rescued 400 victims in the first six months.

Sanghera believes about 3% of women manage to escape forced marriage in the UK and when they leave they have to live with fear and rejection of not only their families but also their communities and sometimes their friends.

They also face being hunted down, said Detective Chief Inspector Gerry Campbell of the Metropolitan police. 'It's not uncommon to have bounty hunters out hunting down young people who have left forced marriages or fled from a family where they are at risk. It's rare for [one person] to take unilateral action, it's all done in consultation and there is logistical support and collusion in the extended community,' he said.

Campbell, head of the Met's violent crime directorate, has lead a number of investigations into honour-based violence and hate crimes. He believes the Met has learned some tough lessons from tragedies such as that of Banaz Mahmod, who made contact with police five times to say she thought her life was in danger but always drew back from pressing charges. Banaz, 19, a Kurd, was murdered by family members at her home in Mitcham, Surrey, in 2006.

She had been raped and beaten by the older man she had been forced to marry, and had left him. Her elder sister, Bekhal, had also left home to escape their father's violence and the extended family was beginning to regard Mahmod Mahmod as a man who had lost control of his daughters. The shame became so unbearable that he held a meeting to discuss killing his daughter and her new boyfriend.

'We have had previous investigations where mistakes have been made but we at the Met have improved the frontline training for our officers and been quite clear around the issues with community groups that we're working with too,' said Campbell. 'I'm confident that no victim will ever be turned away in London and that officers know that to do nothing is not an option.

'Honour is about a collection of practices used by the family to control behaviour, to prevent perceived shame, but there's no honour in murder, rape, or kidnapping and with 25% of the [cases] we are seeing involving a person under 18: this is a child abuse issue too. The simple message is: If you do this you will be caught and brought to justice.

'Young woman are predominately the victims of honour-based violence but we are seeing an increase in young men and boys – it's now about 15% of the total numbers,' he said.

'Honour-based violence is complicated and a sensitive crime to investigate. It's fathers, brothers, uncles, mums and cousins and the victim, or potential victim, has a fear of criminalising or demonising their family so they can be reluctant to come forward.'

He said that in many cases it was not new immigrants but third or fourth generation families where the worst problems lay. 'People who actually are hanging on to traditions that in the country of origin have gone, things have moved on back home but they don't know that.

'We don't know how many victims are out there suffering in silence but as an example in the financial year of 2008-9 we had 132 forced marriage and honour-based violence offences reported to us. From April to the end of September this year we have had 129 cases so it's rising all the time. We've been learning about this for 10 years and have been really galvanised over the past four years so while we are not complacent we have come on leaps and bounds.

'This crime genre transcends every nationality, religious faith or group, nor is it unique to the UK, every country in the world has honour-based violence. But we want to make it clear that people can come forward to us; they will be believed.'

Things have undoubtedly improved since the cases that campaigners see as the low points in the fight against honour killings, such as the sentence of six-and-a-half years handed down to Shabir Hussain who in 1995 deliberately drove over and crushed to death his cousin and sister-in-law, Tasleem Begum, 20. The acceptance of a plea of manslaughter through 'provocation' by the court was widely attacked by women's groups. Tasleem was killed because she had fallen in love with a married man she worked with.

Roger Keene, QC, prosecuting, told the court: 'The family as a whole, including the defendant, had been distressed for some time about the behaviour of the deceased.'

The behaviour of women seen to have dishonoured their families can be as harmless as wearing make-up or talking to boys. One suspected murder is believed to have been caused by a girl having a love song dedicated to her on a community radio show.

Diana Nammi, who runs the Iranian and Kurdish Women's Rights Organisation in London, has been working to encourage more women to seek help when they are in danger. 'The number of women that we know of and hear about and the cases dealt with in court is really just a handful of the full picture,' she said. 'But even one case is too many. For someone to be killed for their make-up or clothes or having a boyfriend or for refusing to accept a forced marriage is so brutal and unacceptable.

'A few years ago when Heshu Yones was killed it was silent, but her sister gave evidence against her father and that was a turning point. Those same communities who were silent seven years ago when Banaz was killed, when people were aware she was in danger and did nothing, they are not happy to stay quiet any more, this silence is being broken.

'It is not a problem of culture or religion or education – it is happening in educated families. It's not one person but several who are dangerous for that woman; sometimes even the woman might underestimate the danger she is in.

'Here in the UK younger people are at risk because they have grown up in this country and they want to adapt and live in the modern world, they don't want barriers to who they can be in love with or not be in love with, whether they wear traditional clothes or not, basic freedoms that many traditional families don't like.

'Honour is a very old tradition but it cannot operate in this country. The children do not even understand it. It's two lives for these children and the differences put huge emotional pressures and guilt on them and leave them very vulnerable,' she said.

'Before Heshu, honour killing was not a serious crime and perpetrators were treated leniently under the name of cultural sensitivity. Now there are no reductions in sentence. In the case of Banaz, the judge said that if this is the culture then the culture needs to be changed, not the women sacrificed for the culture.' Nammi believes that patriarchal religious leaders are failing women.

'Those who are lagging behind now are the religious leaders. They may pay lip service to change but they have networks and contacts and they are not trying to change anything. Sharia courts are letting Muslim women down and I am sorry to say that the British government is turning a blind eye to these courts. We have civil laws that cover every individual; none of these religious courts provide the same rights and protections for women.'

Irfan Chishti, a leading imam in Manchester, said the phenomenon was so secretive that it could be hard to identify who was at risk: 'It is not an Islamic issue, it's more of a tribal tradition that cuts across several faiths, but I can say categorically that it is not acceptable.

'It's difficult to ascertain the extent of this problem but I like to think that faith leaders are speaking out against it. Honour is a way of measuring dignity and respect and it is a very individualistic thing. Dishonour to one person is not the same as to another but we have to be very clear that there is never any justification for such horrific crimes.'

Honour-based violence can be a socioeconomic issue. Experts say there is a strong correlation between violence against women and issues such as inequality between men. In deprived communities where men are struggling to earn a living they can feel subordinated and lacking in respect, and so try to get their authority back by dominating anyone below them, usually women.

In Pakistan the practice of honour killing – called karo-kari – sees more than 10,000 women die each year. In Syria, men can kill female relatives in a crime of passion as long as it is not premeditated. It is legal for a husband to kill his wife in Jordan if he catches her committing adultery. Crime of passion can be a full or partial defence in a number of countries including Argentina, Iran, Guatemala, Egypt, Israel and Peru.

Confusion in immigrant communities where people feel adrift in a new culture and try to anchor themselves to the past is a key factor, says Haras Rafiq, a former government adviser on faith issues and the co-founder of the Sufi Muslim Council. 'Religion becomes infused with cultural practices and honour takes on an overinflated importance,' he said.

He agreed with anti-forced marriage campaigners that women were being let down by their religious and community leaders.

'The Sharia courts are not doing anything about the forced marriage or honour killing issue as a whole,' he said. 'Other countries, the places many immigrants have come from, have moved on, but the immigrant doesn't know that and he needs to be told.'

He wants his children to do whatever he tells them to do and this he sees as right but from a religious perspective it is not. 'The reality is that honour killing is a crime and a crime of deep shame,' he said.

For Zena, she has her life but does not have her freedom. 'When I first ran away I would go to the library and read loads of spy books to pick up tips. You have to teach yourself how to best keep hidden,' she said. 'My life is about keeping a very low profile now and about looking over my shoulder, but at least I know I am alive and I grieve for those poor girls who are not.'

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8.
Probe into EU aid for migrants
Kathimerini (Greece), October 24, 2009
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100010_24/10/2009_111844

Deputy Citizens’ Protection Minister Spyros Vougias yesterday heralded an investigation into the fate of several hundred thousand euros in European Union funding released to the previous conservative government for the purpose of accommodating a relentless influx of illegal immigrants into Greece from neighboring Turkey.

'We are going to look at where this money went as we have noted serious problems with infrastructure and outstanding debts resulting from the provision of care to migrants,' Vougias told reporters in a briefing in Athens yesterday. He referred to the example of the Pagani reception center on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos which reportedly owes some 2 million euros to suppliers. During a visit to the center on Wednesday, Vougias condemned conditions there as 'wretched and inhumane' and pledged to work with other government ministries to improve the quality of accommodation offered to would-be migrants and refugees arriving in Greece from Turkey.

Yesterday a group of 47 residents of the center lodged an official complaint about the alleged beating of a 17-year-old migrant on Wednesday afternoon when police were called to the facility to contain the unrest that had broken out following the departure of the visiting minister. According to the complaint submitted by the migrants, the 17-year-old sustained serious injuries to his head, legs and arms after allegedly being beaten by officers.

During his briefing with reporters in Athens yesterday, Vougias added that the government would push for more operational support from the European Commission in view of the particular burden Greece faces as an external border state of the EU and the problems created by Turkish authorities which refuse to honor a bilateral pact for the repatriation of migrants, signed by Athens and Ankara in 2003. 'The prime minister will broach the subject during the EU summit [in December] so that the EC can assume its responsibilities and assess the role of Turkey in this situation,' Vougias said.

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9.
Gov’t vows to improve centers for migrants
Kathimerini (Greece), October 23, 2009
http://www.ekathimerini.com/4dcgi/_w_articles_politics_100008_23/10/2009_111813

Deputy Citizens’ Protection Minister Spyros Vougias yesterday condemned the 'wretched and inhumane' conditions at an overcrowded migrant detention center on the eastern Aegean island of Lesvos and pledged to work with other government ministries to improve the quality of accommodation offered to would-be migrants and refugees arriving in Greece from Turkey.

'We will seek to upgrade infrastructure and curb bureaucracy so that the migrants are detained for shorter periods of time and with more dignity,' Vougias told reporters after touring the Pagani center. He described the center, designed to hold 300 people but currently accommodating more than double this number, as 'a concentration camp' and said it was 'not a place for human beings.'

Vougias said he would try to secure the release from the center of dozens of young children, many of them unaccompanied minors, reportedly living in extremely cramped quarters in one of the warehouse rooms.

In a related development yesterday, Citizens’ Protection Minister Michalis Chrysochoidis chaired a meeting of senior ministry and coast guard officials as well as top-ranking police officers and immigration experts to discuss ways of tackling the relentless influx of would-be migrants into Greece from Turkey. According to sources, the minister is planning a redistribution of coast guard resources with the aim of putting more staff and resources in 'hot spots,' chiefly in the eastern Aegean where most smuggling ships are intercepted.

Chrysochoidis is also said to be planning closer cooperation between coast guard and police officers, particularly in the eastern Aegean.

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10.
Italy's immigrants feel the sting of strict new legislation
While immigrants have become crucial to the economic well-being of north-eastern Italy, many face discrimination and worse.
By Mathieu Gorse
The Telegraph (U.K.), October 26, 2009
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/expat/expatnews/6439797/Italys-immigrants-feel-the-sting-of-strict-new-legislation.html

A law passed in July tightening immigration policy and making illegal immigration punishable by jail has put a sword of Damocles above the heads of immigrant workers, who have been more likely to be laid off amid the financial crisis.

Those from 'outside the community' - that is, the European Union - have contributed greatly to north-eastern Italy's economic boom.

'First we viewed immigration as a problem, then we started to think of it as an opportunity, and now it's a necessity,' said Mario Cortella, a businessman in the region who heads a small bath accessories company called Kristallux.

'Our young people don't want to do the jobs that immigrants are doing,' he added.

'With this law making the illegal foreigner a criminal, if he loses his job he has to leave within a few months,' said Said Nejjari, a Moroccan-born union representative.

'We're talking about people who have lived here for years, who have children at school,' said Nejjari at the steel mill where he works in nearby Verona.

'It's a very sensitive problem,' said Cortella, asserting that he did 'everything possible' to avoid laying off immigrant workers despite the crisis to prevent them from being deported.

At the Kristallux factory, Albanian immigrant Senaj Enver was soldering towel racks.

'My story is the same for all immigrants. I fled the Albanian regime in 1993 for a better life,' Enver said, adding that he arrived aboard a dinghy provided by human smugglers.

'At first it was really hard,' he said. 'But now I feel like an Italian, and I've bought a house.'

Immigrant labour is crucial to the economy of the region.

In Padua province, the immigrant population has risen from two per cent in 2000 to nearly 15 per cent today. At the national level they make up 6.5 per cent of the population.

Three in five of Italy's four million or so immigrants live in the north.

Employers aware of their importance have set up training programmes and language courses and helped immigrants find housing so that 'they are not considered workers who should vanish after they've put in their eight hours', Cortella said.

Many immigrants, especially Muslims, face a hostile social environment.

The Northern League party, which helped conservative Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi return to power for a third time last year, is notorious for its anti-immigration stance.

The debate often centres on religion in the predominantly Roman Catholic, conservative region.

Two years ago in Padua, a prominent Northern League figure unleashed a storm of controversy when he led a pig across the site of a future mosque.

'We are in a secular state where church bells do not ring at certain hours so as not to disturb people,' said Verona's Northern League mayor, Flavio Tosi, sitting at his desk with a picture of Pope Benedict XVI behind him.

'Imagine a muezzin (the cantor who calls Muslims to prayer) five times a day. That's not possible here,' Tosi said.

Nejjari said he had the right to remember his roots.

'Integration is a two-way street. They say that the immigrants are closed, I say it's the Italians who are closed,' said Nejjari, adding that he was 'disappointed that Italy, which has sent lots of manpower overseas, is not more sensitive to the problems of immigrants.'

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In northern Italy, immigrants unloved but needed
By Mathieu Gorse
Agence France Presse, October 26, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5i56IItFadtoYt-xz5vYPIhJh-hNQ

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11.
Italy: Concordat with Islam 'impossible' says MP
ADN Kronos International (Italy), October 26, 2009
http://www.adnkronos.com/AKI/English/Religion/?id=3.0.3914270031

Rome (AKI) -- An Italian MP has rejected calls by Italy's foreign minister Franco Frattini for a possible Concordat or treaty with Islam to teach the religion in the country's public schools as a way of improving integration with Muslim immigrants.

'Minister Frattini should know that a Concordat with Islam is impossible, because of the lack of an 'Islamic Church', and the existence only of groups or associations.

'The issue about teaching of the Koran should be faced within a process of cultural exchange,' said Italian MP Savino Pezzotta from the Union of the Centre coalition or UDC.

Pezzotta - who is also the president of the White Rose political party - was responding to calls by Frattini to establish a Concordat with Islam and the Italian state. The 1929 Concordat (also known as the Lateran treaty) established Catholicism as the religion of Italy, among other things.

'We need an agreement with the Islamic religion, similar to that which Italy has with the Vatican,' said Frattini in an interview with Italian daily La Stampa published on Monday.

'Without it, we cannot distinguish between those who preach an orthodox and strict doctrine and those who favour a moderate Islam which is open to dialogue, interactive and which favours integration and equal rights for all.

'Integration by immigrants requires solidarity and equity, without disregarding our identity and history. We need rules and principles to become good Italians, before becoming a good Muslim,' said Frattini.

He said it was vital to ensure an 'Italian Islam' was established before bringing the Koran to the country's schools.

Last week, Italy's interior minister Roberto Maroni from the anti-immigrant Northern League party said he would not back a proposal to teach Islam in Italian schools to improve integration.

The proposal was put forward by the deputy minister of economic development, Adolfo Urso.

In September, the Vatican said that religion in Italian schools should have the status of a school subject. The Vatican's Congregation for Catholic Education expressed the view in a letter sent to the Italian Bishops' Conference (CEI).

The head of the CEI, Mons. Angelo Bagnasco quickly rejected the idea of an 'Islam hour' in schools.

The CEI also said that the teaching of different religions could generate religious relativism and did not support the proposal because it could cause 'confusion' or 'damage'.

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12.
Polish Prime Minister promises concrete assistance on migration
By Annaliza Borg
The Independent (Malta), October 23, 2009
http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=96038

Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk promised concrete and practical assistance for Malta to deal with the burden of immigration.

The Polish Prime Minister was in Malta on a state visit which focused on migration, climate change and bilateral economic and political relations.

'Poland is ready to be involved and share its responsibilities,' Mr Tusk said. By the end of the year, it plans to present a schedule of how the assistance will be provided. However when questioned, Mr Tusk failed to divulge much and said he was being cautious to be sure the suggestions will be implementable.

He explained that Poland considered the EU to be founded on the practical dimension of solidarity. No country should carry a heavy burden on its own and Malta’s migration problem is a matter of the entire union.

He noted that Poland has its own migration problems from eastern countries but they were not as large and serious as they were for Malta.

The EU must determine what needs to be done to stop the problem while finding specific solutions for Malta, Mr Tusk said. It also committed itself to see a successful solution in the high level climate change summit in Copenhagen which will be held in December.

Meanwhile, Poland will support Malta’s aspirations in migration and climate change issues.

Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said they also discussed bilateral matters including potential business and trade. Climate change and its direct link to migration due to lack of water, fertile land and political upheaval was brought up. Dr Gonzi emphasized the human tragedy of migration and the needs to deal with human beings rather than numbers.

The union for the Mediterranean was also discussed during a business dinner in the evening.

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Forced burden-sharing ‘difficult’ – Polish PM
But Poland ready to help on immigration
By Kurt Sansone
The Times of Malta, October 23, 2009
http://www.timesofmalta.com/articles/view/20091023/local/forced-burden-sharing-difficult-polish-pm

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13.
Malta’s migration route turns from human to cocaine and heroin trafficking
By David Lindsay
The Malta Independent, October 25, 2009
http://www.independent.com.mt/news.asp?newsitemid=96197

The Libya-Malta-Italy migration route so often used by human traffickers in the past has diversified over the last year to include the smuggling of cocaine and heroin into the European Union, a report published this week by Europol has found.

In its 'EU Organised Crime Threat Assessment 2009' report, Europol also cites that a smuggling route passing through Libya and Algeria to Malta, Italy and Spain has been 'reactivated' in the recent past.

The reactivation of the route and the drug smuggling operations could very well have come in response to the considerably lower demand for human trafficking in the southern Mediterranean witnessed over the last year, as both the numbers of asylum seekers making their claims in Malta and Italy plummeted this summer.

The report, moreover, explains how Libya, and its capital Tripoli in particular, is serving as a feeder for a number of EU criminal hubs.

'Criminal organisations based in the country (Libya) are involved in the facilitation of illegal immigration and trafficking of human beings across the Mediterranean, and recently the use of the route has diversified to include the smuggling of cocaine and even heroin into the EU,' the report finds.

Such operations in what Europol describes as the EU’s southern criminal hub, which includes Malta, are shaped mainly by the central role played by certain Italian organised criminal groups, which have, in turn, developed important synergies with organised crime groups outside the EU.

'The influence of the southern hub,' the report notes, 'is mostly felt in the criminal markets of trafficking of cocaine and cannabis products, illegal immigration, smuggling of counterfeit goods and genuine and counterfeit cigarettes, and the production and distribution of counterfeit euros.'

But, the report highlights, such criminal hubs do not exist by or for themselves, and are, as such, supplied by so-called feeders in locations just inside or outside the EU’s borders, which provide goods to the important European hubs, namely the northwest, northeast, southwest, and southeast and southern European criminal hubs.

The feeders, such as those apparently in Libya, and which are supplying Malta and Italy, can also have different roles. In some cases they are relatively passive transit zones to the EU, in others they are active centres in which business deals on commodities are negotiated, logistics defined, goods stored and re-packaged, and strategies for the delivery of the goods defined and agreed.

'In any case,' the report continues, 'the role of the feeders is crucial: they procure and move goods from the origin closer to the EU and in some cases even alter or finalise the commodities in preparation for their various stages of final distribution in the EU and Europe.'

The southern criminal hub, of which Malta forms part, is established around the geographical position of Italy as one of the gateways into the EU and the central role of Italian organised crime groups with contacts in many countries and regions all over the world.

All the main Italian organised crime groups, the reports adds, are once again active in drug trafficking but, in some cases, are being challenged by, but in general co-operating with, ethnic Albanian, Colombian, Turkish and African criminals.

Certain Italian groups, the report adds, often maintain a low profile but in reality influence many criminal markets in the southern criminal hub, the EU and beyond, either independently or through cooperation with other organised crime groups.

Their direct contacts with Colombian criminal syndicates as well as the Spanish, French and Portuguese organised crime groups ensure them a powerful role in the cocaine trade. The role of the Italian organised crime groups in the drug market enables them to source the commodity directly and to use and collaborate with other groups for further distribution in the EU.

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14.
For Zimbabwe's deportees, shame at empty-handed return
By Griffin Shea
Agence France Presse, October 25, 2009
http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5iDk394E8-JDHjAF6LFoHnwEkwkzQ

Plumtree, Zimbabwe -- Onias was 16 years old when he ran away from his home in rural Zimbabwe. Schools were shuttered and his village had run out of food. But after his mother died, leaving him an orphan, he set out on his own.

So he borrowed some money from a friend and made his way to the border with Botswana some 250 kilometres (150 miles) away, slipping across unnoticed at once of the many rural crossing points.

He made it as far as Francistown, Botswana's second city located near the border, where he spent months doing odd gardening jobs until police stopped him last month.

'The police stopped me on my way home. They said, 'We need to see your passport'. But I didn't have a passport,' Onias said.

Onias is among the average 110 Zimbabweans deported by Botswana every day, a small fraction of the 100,000 Zimbabweans believed living illegally in the country, according a report by the UN High Commissioner for Refugees.

Like most of the deportees, he simply can't afford a passport, which costs 143 US dollars, slightly less than Zimbabwe's per capita gross domestic product last year which was 200 dollars.

The UN's International Organisation for Migration (IOM) runs a centre just inside the Zimbabwean border, where Botswana authorities take the deportees in clean white trucks.

Some have little more than the clothes they're wearing, but others unload an astonishing cache of plasma televisions, kitchen appliances and overstuffed sacks of clothing -- whatever the authorities would allow them to pack.

IOM gives them a meal, medical care if needed, a place to spend the night, and helps them organise transportation to their homes in Zimbabwe. Minors like Onias are given an escort for their trip home, explained Andrew Gethi, who manages the centre.

Since Zimbabwe's unity government took office in February, the numbers of deportees have dropped sharply, down from a peak of 237 a day in January, Gethi said.

Traffic across the border generally has slowed, as Zimbabwe's economy has stabilised with the abandoning of the local currency, left worthless after years of hyperinflation.

Shops that were empty last year have re-stocked while import restrictions have eased, meaning Zimbabweans can again buy food locally.

'The number of cross-border traders has dropped, because goods are locally available again,' Gethi said, adding that tens of thousands of Zimbabweans still cross the border legally every month.

Botswana's migration problem is small compared to the estimated 1.2 million Zimbabweans living in South Africa, but has an outsized effect on a nation with only 1.9 million people.

The exiles are among the at least two million Zimbabweans who have fled their country's daily hardships, forming a lifeline to their families back home.

Since Harare abandoned its local currency, remittances from relatives abroad is one of the only ways rural Zimbabweans can receive the foreign currency now needed to survive.

For that reason, the overwhelming sentiment among the deportees is the painful shame that they can no longer provide for their families.

'I left everything in Botswana. I was working as a hair stylist, and now I've come back empty-handed,' said a woman who gave her name only as Molly.

She was arrested in eastern Botswana town of Serowe, but said her family in Zimbabwe would never learn of her deportation.

'I have to go back to my business,' she said.

Botswana spends more than any country in the region except South Africa on deportations, about 285,000 dollars a month, according to the UNHCR study.

But South Africa this year stopped deporting Zimbabweans after changing its immigration laws to grant them 90-day, renewable visas that allow them to take jobs.

Botswana's labour ministry said last month that authorities were also considering changes to its policy of arresting and deporting illegal migrants, but no new proposals have been announced.

Meanwhile, many of the deportees say they will just slip across the 800-kilometre (500-mile) border.

'We are going back tonight,' said Andrew Patson as he registered to receive a meal at the IOM centre. 'We miss home, but we can't go home empty-handed.'

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15.
Tougher laws planned to cut down on asylum seekers
Deutsche Presse Agentur, October 25, 2009
http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/asiapacific/news/article_1509154.php/Tougher-laws-planned-to-cut-down-on-asylum-seekers

Hong Kong (DPA) -- Tougher laws are being planned to make it a criminal offence for illegal immigrants seeking political asylum to work in Hong Kong, government broadcaster RTHK said Sunday.

Police have intercepted hundreds of illegal immigrants, mainly from South Asian and African countries, entering the territory since a court ruling in March which allowed asylum seekers to work in Hong Kong while their applications were being assessed.

The Immigration Department received more than 2,400 applications, mostly from illegal immigrants, for political asylum between January and September. More than 90 per cent of the claims were made after the immigrants were arrested by police.

Police believe criminal gangs in China and Hong Kong are smuggling illegal immigrants from the mainland to the territory, telling them they can work if they apply for asylum, the report said.

It said the gangs, commonly known as snakeheads, have been charging people about 6,000 Hong Kong dollars (769 dollars) to be smuggled across the border into Hong Kong by boat or truck.

RTHK said Hong Kong's administration will present amendments in November to make it a criminal offence for those claiming asylum to take up jobs in the territory.

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Center for Immigration Studies
1522 K St. NW, Suite 820
Washington, DC 20005
(202) 466-8185 fax: (202) 466-8076
center@cis.org www.cis.org
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