UNITED STATES: Groups Say Bill Will Harm Asylum Seekers, Mexicans

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

NEW YORK, Oct 2 1996 (IPS) - The White House and Congress alike are happy with a new bill that intends to crack down on illegal immigration, but immigrants’ rights advocates say legal immigrants, asylum seekers, and Mexicans will suffer.

Far from being a measure directed only at stopping illegal immigration, the bill is an attack on immigration itself, they argue.

“While the bill is much less restrictive than (versions) that were originally proposed, it still says clearly, ‘Don’t come’,” says Roseann Micallef, executive director of the Centre for Immigrants’ Rights in New York.

Micallef says that “whatever rights immigrants continue to have will be whittled away” as a consequence of the bill, which Congress approved Monday as part of a giant budget package President Bill Clinton intends to sign.

The bill proposes to double the number of agents stationed at the U.S.-Mexican border, adding 5,000 new officers over the next five years. It also offers 12 million dollars for a new fence at the border, and restrictions on sponsorship of legal immigrants and on applications for asylum from people claiming political persecution.

The bill “hearkens back to days when there was more of an Anglo-Saxon character to the United States,” argues Dan Kesselbrenner, head of the Immigration Project of the National Lawyers’ Guild. “It’s biased against people coming from this hemisphere and people who come in on foot.”

But Kesselbrenner contends the proposals do more to combat migrants coming from the South than they do to counter illegal immigration in general.

He notes that, according to data from the Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS), more than half of the undocumented immigrants each year are people who overstay their visas — and “those people come generally from Europe,” he adds. The bill, Kesselbrenner points out, does not deal with those overstays.

Instead, the proposals focus squarely on the southern border argues Maria Jimenez, who directs a project to monitor law enforcement on the Mexican border for the American Friends Service Committee. That focus, she says, shows the bill is “basically anti-Mexican immigrants.”

INS statistics claim that only 39 percent of undocumented U.S. immigrants are Mexicans, and Jimenez adds that not all of the Mexicans come across the border. Yet 85 percent of the federal resources that go into the fight against illegal immigration are spent on border control, she says — a figure sure to go up if Clinton signs the current bill.

Certainly the bills’ roots come from Republican legislators in Congress who come from states — notably Texas and California — where the Mexican border has become a big issue. An estimated 300,000 illegal immigrants enter the United States yearly, with the plurality of undocumented immigrants coming from Mexico, the INS says.

Original versions of the bill included clauses which would have cut off education and most other public services from the families of illegal immigrants and ended a wide range of federal benefits to legal immigrants.

Those issues have boiled steadily in states like California for years, peaking with the passage in 1994 of the now-suspended Proposition 187, a California measure that would have barred all undocumented families from receiving public assistance, health and education.

The White House claimed a victory in removing the worst aspects of the bill after Clinton threatened a veto, and the bill’s defenders now contend the harm to legal immigrants, especially, has passed.

“The worst provisions in this bill on legal immigrants are now gone,” says Senator Edward Kennedy of Massachusetts, who helped engineer a compromise on the legislation.

Those changes, however, only mean that the bill “went from horrendous to horrible,” Kesselbrenner contends.

Micallef notes that legal immigrants still face new challenges before they can sponsor their families to come to the United States. Legal immigrants, under the compromise draft, must have incomes at least 25 percent above the federal poverty level before they can sponsor other immigrants. Under those terms, a family of four would have to have an income of some 18,000 dollars before they could try to bring in any other relatives.

The hurdle was lowered from initial Republican proposals that immigrants earn at least twice as much as the federal poverty level before being able to sponsor others, Micallef concedes — but, she adds, “the hurdle is still there.”

Micallef also objects to new provisions that would allow INS agents to make immediate determinations of asylum claims from people seeking a safe haven in the United States. “That really puts a lot of power in the hands of an INS agent in an airport,” she argues. “It flies in the face of the country’s history of being a haven.”

In general, the advocates claim, the INS receives too much power and freedom from accountability from the legislation.

The new bill would prevent groups from filing class action suits — legal action on behalf of an entire group rather than individuals — against the INS.

Jimenez, whose group receives some 1,200 complaints about INS abuses at the border each year, calls the INS “an agency ridden with systemic abuse” and worries that the new provisions will make the agency almost completely unaccountable.

Class action suits, she notes, resulted in rulings against INS practises in El Paso, Texas, where Mexican-American students complained of being persecuted by border patrols, and among Salvadorans and Guatemalans, who argued the agency was biased against their asylum claims.

“If President Clinton signs this bill, he says he agrees with prejudices against Mexicans … and that he agrees with certain government agencies being above the law,” she argues.

But Clinton and the Republican and Democratic supporters of the bill all stand to benefit at the polls. Immigration control remains widely popular, especially in such crucial vote-rich states as California.

“Unfortunately, there’s a political climate where these filthy ideas have gained currency,” Kesselbrenner says. What is not being told, he argues, is that immigration is not an economic problem, and that immigrants from the developing world have not placed any burden on U.S. public services. “This is all posturing, smoke and mirrors.”