Activists up in arms over bill criminalizing immigrant aid

Yawu Miller

Just as Felix Arroyo began his speech to immigrant activists, a heckler stepped between him and the news cameras.

“Everyone who’s here legally raise your hand,” the heckler demanded of the stunned audience.

Not one to be overshadowed, Arroyo demanded, “Everyone who loves, raise your right hand and everyone who hates raise your left hand.”

Amid a sea of right hands, Arroyo declared victory.

“All right, the loves have it,” he said. “We want a nation of love, not a nation of fear.”

In arguing against House Resolution 4437, which would make it a felony to assist undocumented immigrants in the U.S., Arroyo was preaching to the converted. With the exception to the heckler, who left angrily, his breath reeking of alcohol, the audience members were all members of civil rights organizations, unions and immigrants-rights groups.

The bill, sponsored by Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner, would effectively criminalize anyone who lends aid — even unknowingly — to an undocumented immigrant.

Additionally, the bill would allow police to question, demand papers and detain people who can’t prove they have legal status in the U.S., make it a crime for international students to change a class without contacting Homeland Security or even a foreign business person whose flight is canceled and stays in the country an extra day, according to a fact sheet published by the National Immigration Forum.

Arroyo and other activists wore fake handcuffs to symbolize their opposition to the bill which Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition Executive Director Ali Noorani said, “would throw us all in jail for being human beings, for being compassionate.”

Sister Lena Deevy, executive director of the Irish Immigration Center, said the bill would make most of the people at the press conference into criminals.

“Unfortunately, Congressman Sensenbrenner would for the first time since slavery criminalize a whole class of people in the United States,” she said. “Overnight it would make 11 million people illegal.”

While most of the Massachusetts delegation to Congress is thought to oppose the bill, the current atmosphere in Washington is volatile, according to Maria Elena Letona, executive director of the Cambridge-based immigrant organization Centro Presente.

“Right now the environment around immigration policy is full of hatred and lies,” she said. “We’re afraid this could become a wedge issue.”

Letona and other immigrant advocates in Massachusetts are still feeling the sting of the In-state Tuition Bill, which would have given the children of undocumented immigrants the right to pay resident tuition rates for state universities. The bill was defeated amid fears of a Republican backlash in November.

At the national level, anti-immigrant rhetoric is on the increase as U.S. citizens are seeing their standard of living decline and right-wing ideologues are preaching anti-immigrant rhethoric.

“People are full of anxiety,” Letona said. “There are 40 million working Americans without health care. When they ask what’s wrong, they say people are losing jobs to immigrants, which is a lie. People are not talking rationally.”

Picking up on that point, Union of Minority Neighborhoods executive director Horace Small told the gathering that very little of the rhetoric around immigrants makes sense.

“Jim Sensenbrenner is a right-wing psychopath,” Small said. “If you have an overwhelming need to run to a bar because none of this is making any sense to you, I understand.”

Small told the activists to take heart in the support they are receiving.

“I want you to know that I work every day in communities of color and black people stand with immigrants,” he said. “We will continue to work with the immigrant community.”

The Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition is working in coalition with other groups in Massachusetts and other coalitions across the country to fight Sensenbrenner’s bill, according to Noorani.

While President Bush, who supports the bill, and others are introducing anti-immigrant measures, Noorani says immigration activists are presenting an alternate vision of an immigration system that would give immigrants a path to legal status.

“Across the country networks like ours are embarking on a campaign to bring about meaningful change to immigration laws,” he commented.