Congress fails local activists on immigration reform

Kyle de Beausset

Local immigration activists, disappointed with last week’s U.S. Senate vote ending talks on immigration reform, have been forced to cope with the federal government’s failure to address contentious immigration issues.

Last Thursday, the Senate voted 53-46 against limiting debate on legislation that would have provided a path to citizenship for 12 million undocumented immigrants after certain security benchmarks were met. Despite President Bush’s heavy lobbying, the bill’s advocates in the Senate came up 14 votes short of the 60 needed to push the legislation through.

“We know the high price of continuing inaction,” said Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, D-Mass., one of the chief architects of the legislation, in a statement. “Raids and other enforcement actions will escalate, terrorizing our communities and businesses. The 12 million undocumented immigrants will soon be millions more. Sweatshops will grow and undermine American workers and wages. State and local governments will take matters into their own hands and pass a maze of conflicting laws that hurt our country.”

Frustrated over what they perceive as federal foot-dragging, state and local governments have already begun stepping up with remedies that range from punitive to protective, a trend that’s almost certain to escalate in the void Congress left.

“If Congress is going to abdicate its responsibilities, then states and cities are going to jump in,” said John Gay, senior vice president of the National Restaurant Association and leader of a business coalition that backed the failed Senate bill. “One of the arguments for opposing state and local proposals [was] that Congress is addressing it. We don’t have that anymore.”

As of April, state legislators in all 50 states had introduced at least 1,169 bills and resolutions on immigration this year, more than twice the number introduced last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Many fell by the wayside, but others made their way into law, underscoring the public’s growing intolerance of federal inaction.

Activists vowed to continue to advocate for the federal government to take action. Still, they have accepted the reality most analysts predict — that comprehensive immigration reform will not be up for debate until after the 2008 elections.

“Well, obviously the community is very upset,” said Shuya Ohno, communications associate for the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy (MIRA) Coalition. “Some people are depressed … some people are angry. There is a sense of moral disappointment and moral outrage.”

Ohno pledged that in addition to lobbying the federal government to take action, MIRA would continue its efforts in voter registration and getting immigrants to apply for citizenship.

Maria Elena Letona, executive director of the Cambridge-based advocacy group Centro Presente, expressed outrage.

“Now that you’ve brought to the fore the plight of this community,” she said, “it’s not responsible to just leave it that way.”

According to Letona, the president should issue “an immediate moratorium on raids, detentions and deportations” and “grant temporary protected status to the undocumented immigrant community.”

Centro Presente also hopes to move forward through community forums where its 3,000 primarily Latino immigrant members can learn how to navigate the social and legal complexities of stalled immigration reform efforts.

But not all involved with the legislation were despondent at its downfall. Steve Kropper, co-chair of Massachusetts Citizens for Immigration Reform (MCIR) and a staunch opponent of the bill, was jubilant about its failure, but still pressed the federal government to devise fair and reasonable legislation.

“The death of this bill is a triumph for Americans who clean hotel rooms, are nurses in a hospital, [or] work in food preparation, the building trades or landscaping,” Kropper wrote in an e-mail. Yet when asked in an interview about where to go from here, he said, “I fear we’ll go back to business as usual.”

Through MCIR, Kropper said he hopes to push for legislation that, among other efforts, would make it difficult for undocumented immigrants to obtain driver’s licenses.

All of the activists also agreed on addressing the root causes of migration, but the methods they proposed varied. Kropper described the United States as “protectionist,” and felt that “free and fair trade” would generate opportunities in migrants’ home countries. Letona, on the other hand, advocated against “free trade agreements that don’t respect the sovereignty of our countries” through the National Alliance of Latin American and Caribbean Communities.

The work of these advocates will now shift from the federal to the local level. In Marlborough, Mass., city councilors are exploring the possibility of paying city funds to set up an Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) office that would be able to arrest undocumented immigrants in the community.

Meanwhile, opinion makers and migrant advocates in Mexico said last week that the collapse of U.S. immigration reform plans hurts Mexican workers, U.S. employers and anti-terrorism efforts.

“This is very bad news for Mexican migrants in the U.S.,” said Jorge Bustamante, special rapporteur, or investigator, to the U.N. human rights commission for migrants. “It means the continuation and probably a worsening of the migrants’ vulnerable conditions.”

The Rev. Luis Kendziersky, director of a shelter for migrants in the border city of Tijuana, said it appeared senators “are focused more on the political game than on the real needs of the people.”

“According to polls, the majority of the people [in the U.S.] want legality with concessions for undocumented migrants, but the radicals make a lot of noise,” he said.

Some major Mexican newspapers called the Senate’s action hypocritical.

“It’s obvious that the politicians of that country want laborers, but they are not willing to legalize the labor that they need,” El Universal said in an editorial.

Migrants “will continue to be subjected to extraordinary means of discrimination,” the daily paper said, adding that a “subculture of illegality” in border crossings also does nothing to aid the U.S. fight against terrorism.

An editorial in the left-leaning La Jornada called the decision a “triple shipwreck” — a failure for the Bush administration, the United States and Mexican President Felipe Calderón.

“The most powerful country on the planet will have to continue living, for many more months, with the scandalous contradiction between its laws and the real needs of its economy, thirsty for cheap labor to guarantee the international competitiveness of its exports, especially in agriculture,” said the La Jornada editorial.

Material from The Associated Press was used in this report.