The New York Times reports that a 2004 government counterterrorism program meant to disrupt potential terrorist plots before that year’s presidential election focused on over 2,000 immigrants from predominantly Muslim countries, with almost all of them found to have done nothing wrong. The program implemented by the Department of Homeland Security, and detailed in newly disclosed government data, identified nearly 2,500 immigrants as “priority leads” due to their potential to be security threats. At the time, DHS announced several hundred arrests, mostly of visitors whose visas had expired, but the newly-public records show that the scope of the operation reached much further. Over 2,500 immigrants were interrogated by federal agents, and over 500 arrests were made, though almost entirely every arrest related to immigration status.
Although the program was publicly known in 2004, it was vague on particular details. At the time of the 2004 operation, ICE said via press release that the program would track leads in an effort to disrupt potential terrorist plots, but emphasized that its investigations would be conducted “without regard to race, ethnicity, or religion.” This contrasts with the records, which show that 79% of the suspects were from Muslim-majority countries.
The 10,000 page document was publicly disclosed after the National Litigation Project at Yale Law School and the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee both sued for the records under the Freedom of Information Act. The results, both groups contend, showed that the government used ethnic profiling to identify terrorism suspects. “This was profiling,” said Michael Wishnie, a Yale Law professor who researched the report. “The resources devoted to this were enormous,” he said, “but the results clearly were not.” Kareem Shora, executive director for the ADC, said the findings were “a slap in the face” because the contradicted officials’ claims. “It is very disappointing to see that despite all the reassurances that they were not profiling people, this comes out.”
A former ICE project official who spoke to The New York Times on the condition of anonymity, said the operation analyzed data pools from the CIA and other agencies, to identify people who might pose particular threats to national security. “I think the intelligence we were getting was bona fide and mineable, and we were doing the best we could to follow it up,” the former official said.
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US intelligence agencies have recently loosened security-clearance measures and hiring rules, announcing that employment with these federal agencies are now open to first- and second-generation Americans, a top intelligence official told The Associated Press last week. Children of immigrant parents have long been blackballed from receiving higher security clearances because family ties to immigrants have historically been considered a security risk, said national intelligence director Ronald P. Sanders. Sanders says the US agencies’ about-face with the rule change came about with the acknowledgement that terrorism and surveillance needs those who can speak foreign languages, understand other cultures, and have associations that can stop terrorism. “Security-clearance rules served as impediment,” Mr. Sanders said. “They had their roots in the Cold War, and a lot of their assumptions are no longer valid.”
As of this month, dual citizens are actively encouraged to apply, as they can travel more freely between the US and their other nation without raising suspicions. Potentially risky new hires will have their work and associations monitored more closely throughout their employment to uncover potentially troublesome activity. Mr. Sanders is also seeking authority from the Office of Management and Budget to survey existing intelligence employees and applicants to determine their ethnic backgrounds and national ties.
In October, the same month the hire ban was lifted, National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell approved a program to hire outside experts, mostly technological professionals – for temporary projects inside the US intelligence agencies. The Pentagon received similar authority in 2004, but none of the other intelligence agencies have been able to seek temporary hires. Sanders says they would most likely be looking for experts to overhaul intelligence-personnel and financial-information systems.
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In response to widespread criticism from immigration attorneys, the Executive Office of Immigration Review (EOIR) announced last week that it will now reverse the decision to close an immigration court in Reno, Nev., according to The Associated Press. While a reversal has been made, the change is only temporary, as agency officials work to both cut costs as well as provide Reno immigrants with an adequate legal venue. “We are working with the Department of Homeland Security to implement video teleconferencing for cases located in Reno, a hearing location within a DHS facility,” said EOIR spokeswoman Elaine Komis. “In the interim, EOIR will continue the current practice of detailing immigration judges and staff to Reno to hear cases in person.”
The decision to halt proceedings in Reno was announced by EOIR last week, as the agency issued a press release saying that due to “ongoing budgetary limitations” they would no longer provide immigration judges to Reno, and would conduct all hearings in Las Vegas instead. The announcement last week to close the Reno immigration court almost instantly prompted outcry from the region’s immigration attorneys, who said that forcing their clients to travel to Las Vegas for deportation relief hearings would be difficult, costly, and time-consuming.
The region’s immigration attorneys and immigrant advocacy groups are pleased with the temporary reversal, as well as EOIR’s commitment to create a working legal system for Reno-based immigrants. Woody Wright, a Reno lawyer for Nevada Hispanic Services, said that the reversal is “very good news for all people and their families in Northern Nevada. It would have been a major hardship for pretty much everyone involved in the court. Reno-based immigration attorney Jim Kelly is pleased that EOIR and DHS “recognized that this is a very serious matter and are thinking about what needs to be done to ensure people can attend their hearings.”
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Federal judges in two separate cases last month awarded major settlements to Hispanic guest workers, and both rulings, The Christian Science Monitor reports, could potentially alter the state of immigration employment and exploitation of H-2B visa holders by employers. In October, a San Francisco federal judge ordered back pay to Braceros, the original guest workers from Mexico who laid track for American rail companies during World War II. Three days prior to this ruling, an Atlanta judge ruled that 3,000 Pineros, Guatemalan laborers who helped plant numerous pine plantations in the Southestern US, had been underpaid and subject to physical risk, and should be compensated for their treatment.
In the Atlanta ruling, Judge Clarence Cooper ruled that the CEO of labor contractor Eller & Sons is personally liable for breaking contracts with workers by paying them lower wages than promised and providing them with inadequate living conditions. The ruling, which could cost Eller & Sons $5 million in back wages, could present a hiring problem for the US forest industry, which has employed nearly 33,000 H-2B visa holders. The Pineros from Guatemala, raised the productivity standard for the industry, planting up to 4,000 trees a day, compared to the 800 averaged by American workers. Despite this, they received about half the pay that an American laborer would, even as recently as the 1990’s. “The prevailing sense [among contractors] is that we can’t ever go back because foreign labor has raised the production bar so high that American workers are never going to be able to compete,” says Vanessa Casanova, University of Texas anthropology professor and Pineros researcher.
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According to The Washington Post, The Migration Policy Institute recently published its findings on a study conducted to determine the level of education that immigrants have in the US, and if it is relatable to their current jobs. The study reveals that approximately one in five college-educated immigrants in the US is either unemployed or working in an unskilled service job.
The study argues that college-educated Hispanic and African immigrants fare substantially worse in the US job market than Europeans or Asians. Almost half of newly arrived college-educated Hispanics hold unskilled jobs, as do more than one-third of those who have been in the country for over 10 years. Surprisingly, the legal immigration status of Hispanics did not make a difference in hiring practices and job availabilities, as the authors argue that this employment problem persists even if a Hispanic immigrant is legally cleared to live and work in the US.
The study determined that although African immigrants are more likely to hold high-skilled jobs than a Latin American immigrant with the same qualifications, they have the highest unemployment rates of all foreign-born groups. By contrast, employment patters of well-educated Europeans are virtually indistinguishable from their US-born counterparts, regardless of how long they have currently been working in the US.
Although employer discrimination could be attributed for some of these job discrepancies, study co-author Michael Fix warns that language skills play a large factor in the unemployment/underemployment facing both Latin American and African Immigrants. According to the study, highly skilled immigrants who speak only limited English are twice as likely to work in an unskilled job as those who are proficient in English. The study says that 44% of Latin American immigrants educated at foreign colleges speak English poorly or not at all, compared with 32% of Europeans and 23% of Asians. Additionally, while African immigrants, at 15% had the lowest percentage of immigrants with inadequate English, they lowest immigrant group surveyed that has their entry sponsored by an employer: 10% for African immigrants compared to 17% of Europeans and 35% of Asians; Latin Americans, at 6%, have the lowest percentage of employer-sponsored visas of these groups.
Fix and co-author Jeanne Batalova suggest that federal and state officials could do more to ease the way for highly-educated immigrants by providing more assistance with English classes, offering loans to offset the cost of preparing for professional certification exams, and working on making a more universal data system to make it easier for immigrants to more easily produce their foreign academic and professional credentials.
The MPI report is available online at: http://www.migrationpolicy.org/pubs/BrainWasteOct08.pdf.
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The chancellor of the University of Arkansas recently suggested to the state’s leaders must do everything it can to encourage more students to seek bachelor’s degrees, including the possibility of allowing undocumented immigrants to pay the same tuition rates as in-state residents would. The Associate Press reports that UA Chancellor G. David Gearhart said that the state’s education officials should be “frankly forgiving if we can” when it comes to students living illegally in the state.
“I don’t think it would be appropriate for me to argue against any qualified student getting a four-year degree at our institution simply because of their parents,” Gearhart said in an interview last week. “To me, it’s not really the student’s fault that they came here and their parents had an issue with immigrant. To me, that’s penalizing the student.”
Former state Rep. Joyce Elliott, who won her state Senate election race last week, has said that she intends to offer a bill next session to offer in-state tuition rates for undocumented immigrants. “I don’t think anyone is against student having the opportunity,” Elliot said. “It’s just that we’re having to try to find a way to work within the laws.”
If the legislation is issued, it will create new opportunities for the 150,000 Hispanics currently living in Arkansas. Governor Mike Beebe, who has repeatedly said that “illegal means illegal,” has long opposed offing in-state tuition to children of undocumented immigrants. As attorney general, Beene issued a 2005 opinion that said that offering this benefit would violate the Equal Protection Clause in the 14th Amendment.
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The Native-American tribe of the Yakima Nation announced that it intends to create a tribal guest-worker program that would require licenses for foreign workers and nontribal citizens working on their land, The Seattle Times reports. The program, the first of its kind introduced by a Native-American tribe, was created in order to help foster a safer and more stable work environment.
Yakama land has many orchards and vineyards that attract a large migrant work force each year. However, tribal leaders have had no way of knowing fully who is entering their Washington-state, 1.2 million-acre reservation, whether they are in the US legally, and how long they intend to stay. Former tribal Councilman Wendel Hannigan, who proposed the initiative, cites concerns about crime on the reservation and a growing number of undocumented workers in the area which prompted him to consider the program. He says he’s not trying to hamper the local farming industry but wants to create a legal and stable work force on the reservation. “Hopefully, the community would embrace the effort,” Hannigan said in an interview.
The initiative has been met with some criticism from agricultural officials. Mike Gempler of the Washington Growers League isn’t convinced that the tribe could obtain authority to handle immigration issues, a responsibility that largely belongs to the federal government. “I think we would need to see what the position of the United States government was before we would be willing to take the next step.
However, some feel that the initiative by the Yakama Nation is the next logical step in regulating migrant inflow. Matthew Fletcher, director of the Indigenous Law and Policy Center at Michigan State University notes that although non-Indians outnumber tribal members on many reservations, there are few other tribes that have the large influx of migrant workers that the Yakamas do. “I don’t think it’s a big problem yet, but you’re seeing a lot of tribes buying resorts in rural areas, and resorts depend on a migrant work force, he said.
Because tribes receive federal benefits and tribal members are US citizens, they are not viewed as sovereign nations when it comes to immigration law, said ICE spokeswoman Lorie Dankers. Dankers said the Yakamas probably would not have the authority to enforce US immigration laws, but declined to elaborate, saying that ICE’s attorneys would have to conduct more research.
