Give Us Your Tired, Your Poor
What follows is a series of columns I wrote back in 2010 on what has remained one of the thorniest issues in American politics. The series…
What follows is a series of columns I wrote back in 2010 on what has remained one of the thorniest issues in American politics. The series looked at the issues facing New Jersey and the nation — the fact that immigrants have been forced to live in the shadows, that they often were priced out of college, that they couldn’t legally drive — and attempted to offer some suggested fixes.
In the intervening years, several comprehensive immigration bills have died in Congress, forcing President Barack Obama to step in administratively. Obama’s record on immigration was mixed — he has deported a record number of immigrants, while also signing two executive orders that protected so-called childhood arrivals, and would have protected the immigrant parents of legal residents and citizens. His first executive order protected hundreds of thousands of childhood arrivals — those who came here illegally while they were children — but the second, which expanded the original order and added parents, was struck down by the courts.
In the meantime, Donald J. Trump, a New York real estate mogul and reality-television star, ran an explicitly anti-immigrant campaign for president, one in which he promised to deport millions of the undocumented and to build a wall protecting the southern United States from Mexicans entering the country illegally.
Trump’s rhetoric — on immigration, Islam, and trade, as well as his direct appeal to white nationalism and resentment — allowed him to win the presidency. It has been almost eight years since I wrote the following columns, and not a lot has changed — to our detriment as a nation.
1.
Pity the Poor Immigrant
“Everyone’s quick to blame the alien.” — Aeschylus, “The Suppliant Maidens”
There are about 550,000 undocumented immigrants in New Jersey, about 425,000 of them working, according to a national study issued last month.
The numbers, part of a study by the Pew Hispanic Center, coincide with the release of a report on immigration in the Garden State issued by a task force appointed by the governor and have kicked up a debate on the impact of so-called illegal aliens on New Jersey.
The Pew Center, in “A Portrait of Unauthorized Immigrants in the United States,” found that New Jersey had the fifth-largest population of unauthorized immigrants in the country. The study, however, makes no comment on the impact of this figure.
That did not prevent Assembly Minority Leader Alex DeCroce, from leaping in. The Morris County Republican used the report to raise alarms about the final report from The Governor’s Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Immigration Policy. The panel, which was chaired by state Public Advocate Ronald Chen, recommended eliminating language barriers and plugging holes in social safety nets that discourage immigrants, both legal and illegal, from participating. It also recommended allowing he undocumented to apply for driver’s licenses and pay in-state tuition at New Jersey colleges if they graduated from a New Jersey high school.
Mr. DeCroce said the proposals would “cost taxpayers more and provide an undue benefit to those who illegally live in the state.”
“It would be a huge public policy mistake to embrace the panel’s suggestions,” he said. “The enormous costs associated with illegal immigration are an expense that the state is absorbing at a time when families are struggling with high taxes and making ends meet. We simply cannot afford to continue on this path. Our efforts should be aimed at assisting those who immigrated legally, instead of promulgating legislation that entices more undocumented people to migrate into the state.”
Mr. DeCroce, however, appears to be reading his own bias into the Pew study — not exactly unexpected given the national Republican Party’s obsession with the Mexican border.
The Pew study, as I said, says little about the cost of immigration, offering only what its title implies: a portrait. The numerical and demographic overview confirms some assumptions about illegal immigration (country of origin, for instance), while also exploding many of the myths that have poisoned the debate over immigration policy in recent years.
About three-quarters of undocumented immigrants are Hispanic, with about 80 percent of them coming from Mexico, ground zero for the debate, according to the survey.
The study also found that — contrary to the picture painted by such paragons of compassion as cable news hosts Glenn Beck and Bill O’Reilly — the undocumented are “more likely than either U.S. born residents or legal immigrants to live in a household with a spouse and children” and “be in the labor force.”
We are, by and large, talking about workers with families, though you wouldn’t know this if you got your impressions of this group from Fox News.
According to Media Matters for America, a liberal organization that tracks conservative media claims, Mr. Beck, Mr. O’Reilly and Lou Dobbs return repeatedly to the canard that illegal immigrants are responsible for a disproportionate amount of crime, though studies show the opposite to be true. Media Matters also found that the TV hosts and their guests regularly describe undocumented immigrants “as straining social services provided at the federal or state level by receiving Social Security, health care (hospital emergency room visits), public education, and other social services,” even though they are not eligible for most of these services and often do not take advantage of the ones for which they are eligible.
The Dobbs-Beck-O’Reilly line is part of a historical nativist streak in the United States, one that scapegoats immigrants (the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1700s, anti-Chinese fervor in the 1800s and anger at Eastern and Southern -Europeans in the first decades of the 20th Century) at times of painful economic or social transformation.
Immigrants, however, are not the reason for the wrenching changes we’ve gone through in the past or that we are going through today. They are and always have been an important part of our economic well-being, performing jobs at both ends of the income spectrum — especially those jobs at the lowest end of the income scale that most Americans are uninterested in doing.
Reforming immigration by cracking down on immigrants is counterproductive and runs counter to the best of what we as Americans are supposed to stand for.
2.
Living in the shadows
Undocumented immigrants in central New Jersey are afraid.
They are afraid to call the police when they are the victim of a crime, afraid to call local fire departments, afraid to speak up when they are abused by employers and afraid to seek help.
The reason, according to advocates for Latino immigrants, is undocumented live in the shadows, fearful they will be housed in a detention center and eventually sent home — often without their families.
“It is a struggle to get them to apply (for services), because they are fearful to surface and make themselves known to the system,” says Maria Juega, a trustee and treasurer with the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Princeton.
“There is a constant fear among immigrant families”, especially those with children born in the United States, she says. “There is some anecdotal evidence of parents who have lost custody of their children — in some cases they may have had to surrender custody to relatives or nonrelatives. It’s hard to believe this is happening in this day and age in this country and it is happening all over the country.”
Anastasia Mann, a policy analyst with the liberal New Jersey Policy Perspective, says they live a “Hobbesian nightmare.”
“All the protections we have worked to provide our lowest-paid employees for the last 100 years just don’t exist for these people and, to the limited extend they do exist, they don’t use them,” she said.
Dr. Mann, who also is a program associate with the Eagleton Institute of Politics Program on Immigration and Democracy, wrote a report in 2008 on immigration in Mercer County for NJPP. The report identified a “climate of fear.”
“Fear of being deported by federal agents haunts many of Mercer’s undocumented immigrants as well as their U.S.-born children and family members,” she wrote. “The fears often are well founded. Neighborhood talk, reports in the local and national press and a complaint recently filed by the Center for Social Justice at Seton Hall Law School and other plaintiffs against the federal Department of Homeland Security all bring into focus what the complaint calls ‘a troubling pattern by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) teams’ in and around Mercer County.”
ICE, “the largest investigative branch of the Department of Homeland Security,” has “targeted immigrant communities in Hightstown, Princeton, Ewing, West Windsor and Trenton,” since 2004, the report said. “Operating without warrants, they scour neighborhoods looking for immigrants with outstanding deportation orders.”
This fear of deportation leaves them vulnerable to everything from wage-and-hour violations to housing problems, Ms. Juega said.
“They are subject to some abuse,” she said. “Employers don’t pay their wages. They fire employees without warning or if they complain about working conditions. And we’re also finding landlords are increasingly taking advantage of situations when a lease is terminated.
Now that there are a larger amount of vacancies, these people are moving to cheaper apartments and the landlords from their previous housing are not returning deposits.”
Roger Martindell, an attorney in Princeton who represents Latinos, said wage-and-hour violations are rampant. Undocumented workers are not entitled to work in the United States but, once hired, must be paid time-and-a-half after 40 hours of work.
A case he is litigating is typical of the problems that undocumented workers face, he said. A Mercer County landscaper hired several members of the same family, worked them more than 40 hours a week, but didn’t pay them overtime. This went on for some time, he says, until a family member got into a dispute with the landscaper, which resulted in the entire family being fired. The landscaper, he said, also did not pay them their final week’s wages. Mr. Martindell is suing the landscaper for the unpaid final week and back overtime pay.
The landscaper, unfortunately, is doing what many employers do — trying to intimidate the family. The landscaper has filed a petition with the Superior Court in Mercer County, where the case is being heard, to have the family disclose immigration status, Social Security numbers and current address.
If the judge rules in favor of the landscaper, Mr. Martindell said, the family likely will drop the suit out of fear of deportation.
“If people can hire then start deportation to get rid of employees that easily, it encourages employers to hire illegal immigrants,” he said.
The NJPP report says employers of this expanding, unregulated workforce “routinely violate wage and hour laws, disregard health and safety standards and subject employees to sexual harassment.”
It is a problem that ultimately affects everyone — by driving wages down, weakening workplace safety rules and creating safety hazards in neighborhoods with large populations of the undocumented.
“We’re all demeaned and put at risk when we have a subclass in our midst of people who are afraid to call the fire department if a fire breaks out or the police if a crime is committed,” Dr. Mann said. “It is not good for anybody.”
3.
The tuition trap
Marisol Conde-Hernandez was, by any standard, an excellent student when she was at South Brunswick High School.
She graduated in 2005 with a 3.5 grade-point average, was a member of the National Honor Society and president of the National French Honor Society and was active in all aspects of school culture.
But unlike many of her friends who were applying to Ivy League and other top-ranking schools, Ms. Conde-Hernandez was unsure what her future held, whether she could even go to college and what she might do if she graduated. And while she is now a junior at Rutgers University in New Brunswick majoring in sociology, she says her future remains unclear.
The reason: She is not a legal resident of the United States.
Ms. Conde-Hernandez immigrated to New Jersey when she was 18 months old from Puebla, Mexico, in 1988 with her mother and her maternal grandfather to join her grandfather and father. Her grandfather left Mexico in 1984, applied for amnesty under the 1986 immigration reforms and eventually became a citizen. Her father, because he arrived after the 1985 amnesty cutoff, remains undocumented — as does she.
That means she cannot drive legally, qualify for any kind of healthcare or school tuition assistance and is limited in the kinds of jobs she can work.
Because of her immigration status, she also is considered an out-of-state student at Rutgers, which means she pays more than twice what her siblings or cousins — all of whom were born in the United States and are citizens — would pay at a New Jersey school.
She paid $6,467 for 10 credits — Rutgers charges $632 per credit, plus fees, for out-of-state students — during the 2008–2009 school year. She is 12 classes from graduating, which she estimates could take three years and could cost her more than $30,000.
“The only documents I have are a birth certificate and a passport that can prove I am from Mexico,” she said during a telephone interview. “My vaccination records, my associates degree, my high school diploma — all of them have New Jersey stamps on them. But I still pay out-of-state tuition regardless of all the documents that can prove my New Jersey residency since 1988.”
The question, of course, is why someone who spent all 12 years of grade school in New Jersey schools, who graduated with top marks and has the drive to succeed at the college level should be treated differently than any other New Jersey student.
Immigration hardliners, as The New York Times reported recently, say granting in-state tuition to people like Ms. Conde-Hernandez “could result in illegal immigrants taking college slots from legal residents and would cost the state money that could otherwise be used to benefit citizens.”
The chances of that happening are pretty slim, given that the number of undocumented students is relatively small and is likely to remain small. Plus, as Princeton immigration attorney Ryan Stark Lilienthal points out, the approach is unnecessarily harsh, punishing students who had little choice but to join their parents in their trek north, treating students differently who may have identical school backgrounds.
“You have kids growing up in the state of New Jersey who are really smart,” he said. “But instead of growing up to be doctors or lawyers or engineers, they can’t afford college and they do something that doesn’t reflect their abilities.”
That’s why the state panel on immigration convened by Gov. Jon Corzine recommended that undocumented immigrant students who live in New Jersey be treated as state residents for tuition purposes. Under most of the proposals that have been made over the years, none of which have made it very far in the state Legislature, undocumented students with a high school diploma would be eligible if they attended a high school in the state for three years.
“If I was granted the right to pay in-state tuition, I could afford to do six classes in a semester and finish next year,” Ms. Conde-Hernandez says.
She works between 20 and 40 hours a week, pays $500 a month to share an apartment and pays more than $20 a week in bus fare.
It doesn’t leave a lot left over at the end of the day. As it is, she hopes to take two classes a semester and finish in three years — which is better than most students in her situation.
“I can afford it, because I have a good job,” she says. “I live independently. Not every student can get a good job because they don’t know how to and because of their status. I know kids who have to work 60 to 70 hours a week and have just enough to cover their rent.”
4.
A driven debate
Undocumented immigrants are going to drive, whether the state allows them to or not.
And if they are going to drive, they should be regulated like any other driver — tested for proficiency, their cars inspected and forced to carry liability insurance designed to attract the rest of the people on the road.
That is the conclusion offered by a state panel convened by Gov. Jon Corzine to study immigration and offer recommendations on the best ways to integrate immigrants into society. There are about 550,000 or so undocumented immigrants in the state, according to the Pew Hispanic Center, many of whom the Governor’s Blue Ribbon Advisory Panel on Immigration Policy found “drive even though they are not permitted to obtain licenses.”
The reason, as advocates for immigrants point out, is that not driving is not an option in a sprawling region like suburban Central Jersey that lacks public transportation.
“In New Jersey, you need a car to survive,” says Roger Martindell, a Princeton attorney who represents many undocumented immigrants. “Unless you live in a big city like Newark or Trenton, or you live in a little town where there is enough work for service workers and you can walk, which is Princeton. But if you live out in East Windsor or West Windsor or Hopewell, forget it. You need a car.”
Maria Juega, treasurer for the Latin American Legal Defense and Education Fund in Princeton, agrees.
“Undocumented immigrants are caught between a rock and a hard place,” she says. “In Mercer County, you can’t adequately survive without your own transportation. There is not adequate public transportation and, at some point, you have to jump in the car to go to the doctor, to get groceries or for other reasons.
“The bus may be available for certain things, but not others. It is a matter of survival.”
State law, however, mandates that potential drivers prove citizenship — Social Security card, birth certificate — or legal immigration status. Because of this, according to the governor’s panel, “many New Jersey residents who do not qualify for these licenses are either driving without licenses or fleeing to other states with less restrictive licensing qualifications to obtain licenses.”
The result, according to the report, is that “Unlicensed drivers are not examined to assure their knowledge of the rules of the road, are not checked to establish identity, and cannot procure liability insurance that protects other drivers and passengers in the event of accident. Thus, there may be significant costs and losses imposed on innocent third parties as a result of not bringing within our driver’s license regulatory scheme those who, as a practical matter, are driving on our roads anyway. And it may also enhance safety, security and law enforcement efforts if state government has access to some basic information about the identity of undocumented immigrants.”
Not everyone buys the argument. Groups like the Center for Immigration Studies, which advocates what it calls “attrition through enforcement,” say issuing driving permits to undocumented workers would erode national security and leave Americans vulnerable to terrorism, identity theft and a host of other criminal activity. They also say that issuing licenses or permits rewards the undocumented for illegal behavior.
It is an argument, however, based more on anecdotal evidence and fear than on any hard data. After all, there are an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, the vast majority who work and pay taxes.
Gov. Corzine, who supports many of the recommendations offered by the immigration panel, called the drivers’ license issue “problematic.”
“There are some recommendations, no matter how well intentioned, that cannot be accomplished without a comprehensive policy at the federal level, and drivers’ licenses for the undocumented is one of them,” he said in March. “This is a tremendously important but complex issue that cannot be resolved with piecemeal solutions at the state level absent of a comprehensive federal policy.”
That’s a copout. There obviously is a need for federal reforms, but that doesn’t excuse the state from taking action designed to better the lives of all New Jersey residents.
The federal identification program known as Real ID — which standardizes procedures and rules governing the issuance of state identification cards like driver’s licenses — does not prevent states from granting a limited driving permit to the undocumented. But it does give state-level politicians an excuse they can use to avoid what has become another so-called “third-rail” issue.
Ryan Stark Lilienthal, a Princeton immigration attorney, said the license issue is one of many examples of how lack of action at the federal level is creating a problem for the states — i.e., that undocumented immigrants need to drive to work or take their children to school or the doctor’s office, but they are not legally allowed to drive.
“They are driving on the streets of New Jersey, the highways of New Jersey, without licenses, without insurance, and that creates a problem not only for them but for the rest of us who are at risk of being in an accident with these individuals,” he said.
The security of our borders may be a legitimate concern — though, like Mr. Martindell, I have to wonder why we are focusing on Mexico and Central America. In any event, we are pushing the undocumented further underground.
“You don’t want to issue a card that can be used for other purposes that maybe someone can use to kind of cloud their existence in the state,” Mr. Lilienthal said. “Create a card that can only be used in limited circumstances like for driving.”
Anastasia Mann, a policy analyst with the liberal New Jersey Policy Perspective and a program associate with the Eagleton Institute of Politics Program on Immigration and Democracy, agrees.
“It is an arena where government regulation is called for,” she says. “For the state to cede that responsibility, to throw up its hands, is pretty bad.”
5.
Fixing a broken system
Princeton attorney Ryan Stark Lilienthal has seen first-hand the dysfunction of the nation’s immigration rules.
As an immigration attorney, he has represented workers facing deportation, many of whom have been in the United States for years. Many have families, some with children born in the states, children who are citizens. They own houses, have worked the same jobs for years, have created stable and productive lives. Then they visit family in their home country, get stopped at the border on their return and end up paying for something they may have done 25 or 30 years in the past. Or they get caught in a raid.
An Immigration and Customs Enforcement raid in Trenton stands out, he said. The family hid in the basement, hearing the footsteps of the agents above them. The agents, he said, then made their way down the basement steps, guns drawn, as they sought the father.
“They were looking for the husband/father, had the gun pointed at the family and asked the son where the father was hiding,” he said. They forced the son to tell them where he was.
“There you go,” Mr. Lilienthal said. “Welcome to America.”
It’s the kind of thing you read about in the papers, in stories from the Middle East or a Latin American dictatorship — in countries that, as Mr. Lilienthal said, “we don’t see ourselves as.”
Raids like this are just the most visceral example of how our broken immigration system has warped our values, causing us to engage in behaviors counter to the and why reform is desperately needed. There are an estimated 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, and they are the targets not only of official government sanction, but vilification and in some cases violence.
But the immigrants are not the problem. They are a “symptom of the problem,” Mr. Lilienthal said, one that cries out for humane reform that includes a path toward legalization, a reduction in the backlog of visa applications, due-process reforms and stricter workplace standards (enforcement of minimum wage, safety and organizing rules). Without these reforms, he said, the unscrupulous — employers seeking to pay the lowest possible wages, “coyotes” who smuggle workers into the country — will continue exploiting the undocumented.
A coalition of about 200 labor, religious and civil rights organizations — Reform Immigration FOR America — has kicked off a campaign hoping to place immigration reform back on the federal agenda. The organization held a press conference June 4 in Washington, according to New American Media, an ethnic media consortium, at which it outlined its goals, which included family reunification and many of the reforms advocates like Mr. Lilienthal propose.
“Our nation’s broken immigration system isn’t working for anybody,” AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker said during the press conference, “not immigrant workers who are routinely exploited by companies, and not U.S. born workers whose living standards are being undermined by the creation of a new ‘underclass.’ As a part of broad-based economic recovery, we need a comprehensive solution — and soon.”
Senate President Harry Reid, D-Nev., said Friday that he wants to see reform legislation this year, while President Barack Obama has said he wants to jump-state the debate this year.
That’s not going to be easy. Opponents of what I’ll call humane reform — i.e., the “close-the-border” crowd — have no interest in helping the folks already here. Americans for Legal Immigration, for instance, is calling for a crackdown on employers and workers, including denial of basic services, and deportation of many here illegally.
The Federation for American Immigration Reform also views reform through the prism of punitive measures that focus on “deterrence, apprehension and removal” with “beefed up investigation capacity, asylum reform, documents improvements, major improvements in detention and deportation procedures, limitations on judicial review, improved intelligence capacity, greatly improved state/federal cooperation, and added resources.”
Such an approach, however, ignores a basic economic reality, says Anastasia Mann, a policy analyst with the liberal New Jersey Policy Perspective.
“People are here because there are jobs for them,” she said.
That’s why, she said, reform that focuses on enforcement is destined to fail.
Mr. Lilienthal agrees. He said the vast majority of immigrants he has dealt with would prefer legal status — something that is not available to most. He said there are holes in the current visa system that prevent employers in a number of industries — including construction, food service, child care — from offering work visas to people who want to come to the United States.
“There is no legal vehicle for them,” he said. “In these industries, there has been a high demand for labor that has not been met and employers who need workers need to rely on those willing to come to this country.”
So, he said, “they break the rules, come to the country without legal entry.” It’s a Catch 22, of course, because there is “not a way for them to come to the country legally if they were to choose to do so,” he said.
The failing economy may have altered the need for workers, he said, which is why reform needs to be flexible and “more in line with our economic our workforce needs” but respects “our human values about public safety and a social safety net.”