Immigration

Even before Pope Benedict landed in the United States last month, he addressed immigration as an issue that will determine the future of the Catholic church in America and will test the moral authority of U.S. bishops in shaping the debate over national policy. Benedict’s remarks reflected consistent papal teaching and a balanced approach from the U.S bishops: National borders must be respected, but the economic and political realities that drive immigration must also be acknowledged with an orderly, fair, humane system that addresses the inevitable flow of desperate people seeking to enter the United States to work, either temporarily or on a path to permanent legal status. Human dignity and family integrity must be paramount in any policy.

Immigrant restrictionism is stiffing hundreds of thousands of American citizens and legal residents out of their tax-rebate checks. Hard-liners were so intent on keeping the cash out of the hands of undocumented workers that they restricted the rebate to people with Social Security numbers. An Individual Taxpayer Identification Number, issued by the Internal Revenue Service to people who pay taxes but do not qualify for Social Security numbers, will not do. If a married couple files jointly, and one spouse is not eligible for the rebate, neither gets the money. This hurts all manner of people who are working and paying taxes: American soldiers stationed abroad who happen to have married foreigners; high-tech immigrants in Silicon Valley and other places whose spouses are not authorized to work or have not yet had their paperwork processed. These are people who are perfectly legal, economically vital and politically inconvenient.

A federal immigration raid at a kosher meatpacking plant in northeast Iowa was the largest such operation in U.S. history, with nearly 400 people arrested, federal officials said Tuesday. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials said at least 390 people were arrested on immigration charges as part of a raid Monday morning at Agriprocessors Inc. in Postville. The plant had about 900 workers before the raid. Most of the 314 men and 76 women arrested are from Guatemala and Mexico, but some were from Ukraine and Israel. "Based on the number of ... arrests, this is the largest single site operation of its kind ever in the United States," said ICE spokesman Tim Counts.

The repercussions of the workplace raid in Postville Monday, the largest single-site raid in the nation, are wrenching on so many levels. Federal immigration agents and other law officers who descended on Agriprocessors Inc., the kosher slaughterhouse in Postville, were doing their jobs. They executed search warrants related to criminal activity as well as a civil search warrant for people believed to be in the country illegally. But that does not diminish the painful fallout from escalating raids resulting at least in part from the failure of Congress and the president to repair the nation's broken immigration system. Such raids, though record in size, ultimately do little to resolve how this nation should sensibly regulate immigration levels or how it should address the 12 million illegal immigrants already in the United States, many with children who are U.S. citizens. Voters should make it clear in the 2008 elections that they expect their elected representatives to pass practical, humane reforms.

The economic downturn unfolding across the United States is imposing a particularly punishing toll on Hispanics, a group that was among the primary beneficiaries of the expansion in recent years. What had been a story of broad and steady advances has given way to growing joblessness, diminishing paychecks and lost homes. What were once the fastest-growing areas of the nation, including states with expanding Hispanic populations like Florida, California, Georgia and Nevada, are often bearing the brunt of the pain.

House Democratic leaders worried about the November election want to thwart enforcement-only immigration legislation supported by colleagues in districts where immigration is a hot-button issue, a leading House liberal said Thursday. "People who are very committed to comprehensive reform but who are charged with the responsibility for the next elections think about Lou Dobbs and the power of this issue in different local election contests," said Howard Berman, D-Calif. Dobbs is a CNN anchor who advocates tough action against illegal immigration. He frequently criticizes the "comprehensive" approach, which would couple strict enforcement with a path to citizenship for the nation's estimated 12 million illegal immigrants. Speaking at an immigration-policy conference, Berman said leading House Democrats want to avoid a vote on legislation that would require employers nationwide to check the legal status of all workers with a federal verification system.

The head of a Congressional subcommittee looking into complaints of inadequate medical care in immigration detention announced on Tuesday that she had introduced legislation to set mandatory standards for care and to require that all deaths be reported to the Justice Department and Congress. “This should not be part of the debate about illegal immigration,” the chairwoman, Representative Zoe Lofgren of California, said of the bill, which she introduced late last week. “This is about whether the government is conducting itself according to the basic minimum standards of civilization.”

Around the world, May 1 is celebrated as International Workers' Day. For the last two years, Americans have marked the holiday with marches demanding reforms to improve the lot of working people and immigrants, both legal and illegal. It's an instructive transformation because, political posturing and media demagoguery notwithstanding, America's immigrants belong to the world of work, and their interests and those of the U.S. economy are inextricably linked.

Thousands of supporters of immigrant rights gathered in more than a dozen cities on Thursday afternoon. But the crowds seemed smaller than at comparable events in past years, with the turnout apparently depressed by fear of arrest.
The rallies, held in Los Angeles, Chicago and New York among other cities, called for changes in immigration laws and a reduction in police raids and arrests that have led to increased deportations in recent years. Many people who took part in the rallies — some of them community leaders, others the loved ones of immigrants or immigrants themselves — said they were there to press for basic human rights. “I saw an ad in the paper last night, and I said I had to be here,” said Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Sklba of the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Milwaukee, who took part in a march of roughly three miles in that city. “I am here to support immigration reform, and to support care for all illegal immigrants.”

An aggressive crackdown on illegal immigration and a weak U.S. economy have driven an estimated 3.2 million Latinos to stop sending money to family members in their home countries, according to a survey released Wednesday by the Inter-American Development Bank. The report confirms the hardships that millions of people from Mexico and other Latin American countries have been feeling. Experts say that people in Latin America who depend on remittances, or money transfers, from relatives abroad will fall below the poverty line as a result.