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Archive for the ‘Immigration’ Category
Study: legalizing undocumented immigrants boosts economy
Thursday, January 7th, 2010The Los Angeles Times reports on the results of a study by UCLA that says legalizing undocumented immigrants would benefit the U.S. economy.
The report said that legalization, along with a program that allows for future immigration based on the labor market, would create jobs, increase wages and generate more tax revenue. Comprehensive immigration reform would add an estimated $1.5 trillion to the U.S. gross domestic product over 10 years, according to the report.
“This is not about bringing in a lot of workers. This is about your neighbors and if we are better off where everybody in the economy has the ability to fight for their families and to contribute more to the economy rather than staying in the shadows,” said the author, Raúl Hinojosa-Ojeda, an associate professor with the UCLA Department of Chicana and Chicano Studies.
National Migration Week: Renewing Hope, Seeking Justice
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010Renewing Hope, Seeking Justice is the theme of the 2010 National Migration Week, held January 3 – 9. The observance began over 25 years ago by the bishops to be a moment for Catholics to take stock of the wide diversity of the Church and the ministries serving them. As the face of the local churches continue to change, these materials are becoming more and more necessary. The materials created for National Migration Week also provide an important educational resource that can be used by individuals, families, schools, and parishes to learn about the complex issues surrounding migration phenomena.
2010 National Migration Week Poster Created and Designed by Brother Mickey McGrath
Jesuit Refugee Service/USA supports National Migration Week. Learn more here.
Detained immigrant, community leader, joins hunger strike
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010Two days before New Year’s 2010, Homeland Security shocked New Yorkers when the agency detained community leader Jean Montrevil. Now held in Pennsylvania’s York County Prison, Montrevil is beginning a hunger strike. “I am fasting side by side with nearly 60 other detainees to take a stand against this horrific deportation and detention system that is tearing families apart,” Montrevil says. Montrevil entered the U.S. from Haiti in 1986 as a legal permanent resident.
Meanwhile prominent clergy and elected leaders are calling on the feds to return Montrevil to his wife Janay, an African-American school teacher, and his four U.S.-born children.
“Jean represents all that is right about our nation and wrong with the deportation system,” says Rev. Bob Coleman of the historic Riverside Church. “He made a mistake. He paid his time. He represents a restored life. Who benefits by stripping him of his legal status?” Rev. Coleman is a leader of New York’s New Sanctuary Movement, a faith-based coalition for immigration reform that Montrevil himself co-founded in 2007.
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Disturbing picture of secret detention centers
Tuesday, January 5th, 2010In an article that could have been written by Franz Kafka, The Nation reports on “America’s Secret ICE Castles,” a system of detention centers throughout the country.
“If you don’t have enough evidence to charge someone criminally but you think he’s illegal, we can make him disappear.” Those chilling words were spoken by James Pendergraph, then executive director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) Office of State and Local Coordination, at a conference of police and sheriffs in August 2008.
The challenge of being unable to find people in detention centers … is worsened when one does not even know where to look. The absence of a real-time database tracking people in ICE custody means ICE has created a network of secret jails. Subfield offices enter the time and date of custody after the fact, a situation ripe for errors, … as well as cover-ups.
It’s also not surprising that if you’re putting people in a warehouse, the occupants become inventory. Inventory does not need showers, beds, drinking water, soap, toothbrushes, sanitary napkins, mail, attorneys or legal information, and can withstand the constant blast of cold air. The US residents held in B-18, as many as 100 on any given day, were treated likewise. B-18, it turned out, was not a transfer area from point A to point B but rather an irrationally revolving stockroom that would shuttle the same people briefly to the local jails, sometimes from 1 to 5 am, and then bring them back, shackled to one another, stooped and crouching in overpacked vans. These transfers made it impossible for anyone to know their location, as there would be no notice to attorneys or relatives when people moved. At times the B-18 occupants were left overnight, the frigid onslaught of forced air and lack of mattresses or bedding defeating sleep. The hours of sitting in packed cells on benches or the concrete floor meant further physical and mental duress.
Alla Suvorova, 26, a Mission Hills, California, resident for almost six years, ended up in B-18 after she was snared in an ICE raid targeting others at a Sherman Oaks apartment building. For her, the worst part was not the dirt, the bugs flying everywhere or the clogged, stinking toilet in their common cell but the panic when ICE agents laughed at her requests to understand how long she would be held. “No one could visit; they couldn’t find me. I was thinking these people are going to put me and the other people in a grinder and make sausages and sell them in the local market.”
Read the full article here.
Immigration Advocates Cheer End of ‘Widow Penalty’
Friday, January 1st, 2010U.S. lawmakers have approved a measure that would end the government’s practice of annulling foreigners’ applications for permanent residency when their American spouses die within the first two years of the marriage.
Read the story here on Voice of America.
Asylum seekers testify to life in Libya
Monday, December 21st, 2009Jesuit Refugee Service Malta released the following statement to mark International Migrants Day Dec. 18:
“Does the international community know about this, what is happening here? This is what we used to ask each other when we were in prison in Libya.” – Asad, an asylum seeker in Malta
Since May 2009, some 1409 migrants, attempting to reach a place where they could obtain protection or the possibility to live in safety and dignity, were pushed back to Libya.
These actions were widely criticized and held by many to be a violation of international law, as Libya does not have the mechanisms in place to grant protection to those who need it and there is evidence that those returned would be at risk of harm.
“International Migrants Day is a good time to ask ourselves whether we are fully aware of the possible consequences of these actions for the people concerned. We believe that many who see this as a quick solution to the pressures that Malta is facing would think differently if they knew about the treatment that migrants face there,” said JRS Malta Director, Fr. Joseph Cassar, S.J.
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U.S. buses undocumented immigrants to ‘nowhere’
Friday, December 18th, 2009NPR reports today on a U.S. program to deport migrants to the middle of nowhere.
The Border Patrol has hit on an idea to discourage undocumented immigrants from entering southern Arizona, the nation’s busiest illegal border crossing. When agents catch them, they put them on a bus and send them 570 miles away to the remote port of entry between Presidio, Texas, and Ojinaga, Mexico.
The crossing is the least trafficked of the entire 2,000-mile border. North of Ojinaga is the storied Big Bend country of far West Texas, a sea of thorn brush desert, canyons and steep mesas. There are no large cities where undocumented immigrants can blend in, which is precisely why the Border Patrol sends them here.
Read and listen to the story here.
Jesuit Refugee Service is a partner in the Kino Border Initiative, which assists undocumented migrants after they are deported to Nogales, Mexico, often hundreds of miles from their homes and with nothing but the clothes on their back. Learn more about the KBI here and here.
Immigrant workers are particularly vulnerable to wage theft
Friday, December 18th, 2009An Associated Press story speaks to the issue of how immigrant workers – especially undocumented – are taken advantage of in the workplace by employers who also take advantage of their local communities by not paying taxes on the same workers they exploiting.
Across the nation, the long-simmering problem of employers who don’t pay their workers appears to be getting worse, especially for immigrant laborers.
In the absence of aggressive federal action, some states and local governments have begun to tackle the issue on their own. They say employers who don’t pay overtime or minimum wage are unlikely to pay into state workers’ compensation or unemployment insurance funds — bilking taxpayers even as they’re cheating workers.
The Los Angeles-based National Day Laborer Organizing Network says at least 50 percent of day laborers — there are 120,000 on a given day in the U.S. — experience some form of wage theft.
Read the full story here.
UN: migrants too often victims of human rights violations
Friday, December 18th, 2009The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights marked International Migrants Day today by drawing attention to the plight of an estimated 200 million migrants worldwide, many of whom are exposed to violations of their basic rights and continue to be treated as commodities.
“Despite the increased efforts of the international community, including civil society, in promoting sound, equitable, humane and lawful conditions of migration, the human rights of migrants often remain out of sight,” Navi Pillay said in a statement. (more…)
