The roots of AZ’s new law
Earlier this month, I and several other reporters had the privilege of sitting down with Dan Stein, FAIR’s president, to talk candidly about his views on immigration reform. This was during a conference at the University of Oklahoma’s Gaylord College in mid-April. Stein was very clear in his belief that immigration laws and national policy don’t fit the modern era, but many of his and his organization’s views are far from fair. During his talk, Stein accused big business and pro-immigrants groups of wanting no limits to immigration and fighting reform efforts in the hopes of keeping a supply of cheap labor and like-minded voters. FAIR seeks to end illegal immigration through improved enforcement strategies (read: deporting as many people are possible) and reducing levels of legal immigration to around 300,000 annually … though he couldn’t answer any questions about how he or his organization ever came to that number.
Oklahoma has had a similar anti-immigrant law to Arizona’s on the books for nearly nearly two-and-a-half years now. (Read one of my colleague’s columns about how it is affecting the lives of local Oklahomans.) When we spoke to Stein, just days before Arizona announced its big news, Stein upheld Oklahoma’s law as “the gold standard” for all states. I’m sure there’s a new gold standard now, and I’m not surprised to find that FAIR is also behind it.
Subscribe to the comments for this postCensus ads seek to boost minority participation
Dancers Marisol Ramirez, left, Keith Grubb, center, and Diana Robles, right, from the Harvard Ballet Folklorico, perform En Son de La Negra, a Mexican folk dance, during the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition's annual Immigrants Day celebration Tuesday at the State House in Boston. (AP Photo/The Boston Globe, Yoon S. Byun)
AP: Census ads seek to boost minority participation
This is really interesting: Ads promoting participation in the 2010 U.S. Census are appearing in 28 languages this year, up from 17 in 2000. Although minority groups make up just 26% of the population, more than half of the bureau’s $140 million ad-placement budget will target these hard-to-count groups:
“Minority populations are historically more difficult to reach,” said Phil Sparks, a former Census Bureau director who oversaw the 2000 ad campaign and now leads the Census Project, a nonpartisan census watchdog.
Language barriers keep some from filling out their forms, while others haven’t been in the country long enough to understand that congressional districts are drawn up and federal resources allocated based on the count.
Still others are wary of cooperating with a public agency like the Census Bureau because of fears over confidentiality or feelings that they’ve been neglected by the government in the past.
Kansas is doing quite well with a participation rate of 69% so far in the federal census campaign, as compared to the 64 % national return rate. Check out your community’s participation rate at the Take 10 Challenge Map or read Saturday’s Telegram for a closer look at how the participation rates are playing out in southwest Kansas.
Resources dire in western Kansas
Muna Ibrahim and her husband, Mamfoud Mohaned. listen to information being presented March 27 during a meeting of the Board of Ethnic Minority Leaders in Garden City at the Finnup Center. Brad Nading/Telegram
“The numbers just aren’t there” to justify federal immigration resources in western Kansas, our elected congressmen and their staffers say — but that assertion is “just flat wrong.”
Those aren’t my words but the words of Garden City Commissioner Reynaldo Mesa.
And he’s absolutely right. Alien residents in this area and other documented immigrants and refugees probably number in the thousands, but federal officials just don’t believe it because there are no studies to back the claim, Mesa said Tuesday, when he spoke publicly about last week’s Washington D.C. trip. That sentiment, the former mayor said, continues to create an unnecessary burden for residents in this area because their access to federal services are limited and inhibited: To take care of many procedural matters, many residents have to drive all the way to Wichita and/or Kansas City, Mo., often times more than once.
That’s why for nearly the last half decade congressional delegates from the Southwest Kansas Coalition — member cities include Garden City, Liberal and Dodge City — have been pushing Sens. Roberts and Brownback and Rep. Moran to institute an office (or, at the very least, an officer) in this part of the state. Garden City Manager Matt Allen also said that the city would put forward the effort to locate office space if federal officials would just provide the people. And if they couldn’t provide the people, then the city would put forth the people, if federal officials would just provide the training! It’s obvious local officials recognize that the need here is dire, and it’s why the tri-cities coalition outlined the issue as one of their top legislative priorities for the years ahead.
As Mesa said Tuesday, the next time the Mexican consulate from Kansas City rolls into town, city officials need to invite those nay-saying senators and staffers to come see the situation for themselves. There are hundreds of people out here who are unduly inhibited from immigration processes because of proximity. Yes, it’s easy to sit in Washington D.C. and ignore the need that exists here because there are no studies to back the claims – but the stark reality of the situation qualifies justification for federal resources more so than any study could ever quantify it.
Bipartisan Immigration Reform
Saul Linares, left, waves an American flag after arriving at a church in Baltimore, Thursday, March 18, 2010, after walking the past six days from Hempstead, NY. Linares, a factory worker, will join other immigrants, most of them undocumented Hispanics, in Washington, D.C., for a Sunday march to dramatize their pleas for immigration reform. (AP Photo/Rob Carr)
U.S. Sens. Charles Schumer, D-NY, and Lindsay Graham, R-SC, laid out a blueprint for immigration reform legislation in the Washington Post today. In their editorial, the senators admitted that the current system is “badly broken” and outlined four “pillars” of immigration reform legislation:
• requiring biometric Social Security cards to ensure that illegal workers cannot get jobs
• fulfilling and strengthening (the federal government’s) commitments on border security and interior enforcement
• creating a process for admitting temporary workers
• and implementing a tough but fair path to legalization for those already here
There are roughly 11 million undocumented individuals in the country right now, and I pleased to see that a bipartisan effort does not ignore this humanitarian problem. The senators also rightly addressed the severe challenges both high-skilled and low-skilled workers currently face, the former for whom it is very difficult to permanently settle in the U.S. due to excessively long green-card wait-times and the latter for whom a process to work legally — even seasonally — does not even exist! The senators write
“Our blueprint creates a rational system … allowing more lower-skilled immigrants to come here when our economy is creating jobs and fewer in a recession; and permitting workers who have succeeded in the workplace, and contributed to their communities over many years, the chance to earn a green card.”
The senators are right: The American people deserve more than empty rhetoric and impractical calls for mass deportation. I encourage others to join in a thoughtful discussion below.
Primary refugees in Garden City?
Mae La is the largest of seven refugee camps along Thailand’s border with Burma (the country renamed Myanmar by the military dictatorship). Many of Garden City's Burmese residents say they arrived in the U.S. after spending years in camps like this one. (Source: flickr.com)
I heard a surprising fact today: Refugees have been relocating to Garden City for a long time, but now many are coming directly here, to raise their families and hopefully find work at the Tyson plant in our backyard.
That from Velia Mendoza, the refugee coordinator at the Adult Learning Center at Garden City Community College. I spoke with her and several other staff at the refugee center located there, which the federal government designated earlier last year to track the movements and whereabouts of these families in this corner of the state, including in and around Dodge City and Liberal. (A little late on the ball, I would add, on the fed’s part.) Dubbed ‘primary refugees,’ many of these newest families of Somalian and Burmese descent are moving to Garden City directly after they are brought to the U.S., in part because they hope to find work at the local beef-packing plant and mostly because many already know some of the other hundreds of families that already live and work here, Mendoza said.
And that raises several additional challenges for both the community college staff and the other organizations that help these families, such as the local SRS, Catholic Social Services and private church groups, because unlike ’secondary refugees’ (many of the Somalian families in Garden City relocated here after the Emporia beef-packing plant shut down) they are completely new to American life and culture. On top of that, Tyson isn’t hiring as much as it used to, the staff added, and many heads of households are out of work currently. The center’s staff is having an awfully hard time helping them find work in the area — with the language, cultural and limited-education barriers for several breadwinners, finding work outside meatpacking is extremely difficult.
“So now what?” Hector Martinez, the director of the Adult Learning Center asked today. Good question. I don’t know. But there are several issues to be explored here about Garden City’s newest residents, and I plan to explore several of them over the next few months as the center continues to try to meet its ever-increasing demand for services. (The center offers ESL and driving classes, translation assistance, and more). Stay turned for many of these stories, and I welcome input below about what kinds of questions you have, as well.