Links I like

• As the post-Khmer Rouge generation of Cambodians grows up, they’re producing a flurry of films that mimic the vintage style of the 1960s – widely considered the country’s golden era. Much of the revival is owed to educated filmmaker refugees who are repatriating to Cambodia from France and the United States and opening the country’s first film institutes at local universities.
• Hundreds of Somali refugees are being forced at gunpoint to join rebels fighting in northern Yemen
• Paddington Bear is launching a campaign to to highlight the British Government's continued arrest and detention of hundreds of child asylum-seekers in prison-like conditions.
• A disabled athlete who has won five gold medals for Britain was set to be deported to Nigeria after losing his legal battle to live in the UK.
• British Muslims feel a greater sense of patriotism than their counterparts living in mainland Europe, according to a study by the Open Society Institute
• Rather than living in rows of neatly pegged white canvas UN tents set up in fields as the public might imagine it, aid officials have revealed that more than 50 per cent of the planet's 10.5 million refugees are now battling to get by in urban areas.
• The proportion of the population that is foreign-born has almost doubled in the past two decades to 11 per cent, or 6.7 million people.

Is Secure Communities really creating Secure Communities?

The new IPC report, The Secure Communities Program: Unanswered Questions and Continuing Concerns highlights that it may not indeed be living up to its name. Via Immigration Impact:

So how does Secure Communities work? When individuals are arrested and booked into jail, their fingerprints are sent to federal databases and are checked against immigration databases, in addition to the other ones that are standard following an arrest. This allows ICE to search for an individual’s criminal and immigration history. If there is a “hit,” meaning that the arrested person is matched to a record indicating an immigration violation, ICE evaluates each case to determine if enforcement action is needed and whether it has the resources to process the case. If ICE wishes to proceed, it will issue a detainer—a request from ICE that the arresting agency notify ICE before it releases the person so that ICE can transfer him/her to ICE custody.

ICE reports that as of August 31, 2009, 82,890 fingerprint submissions resulted in a database match. As a result of Secure Communities, ICE had issued 16,631 detainers.

Who are the people being identified through Secure Communities? At first the program claims to prioritize “the most dangerous criminal aliens” —those convicted of Level 1 crimes (major drug offenses and violent offenses), as compared to Level 2 (minor drug offenses and property offenses) or 3 (other offenses) convictions. However, the data ICE has released so far paints a somewhat different picture.

• Detainers are issued at the point of booking into jail—not conviction—so immigrants are being identified pre-conviction and are being deported even if the criminal charges are dropped. So they’re not all criminals.

• Since its inception, Secure Communities had identified more than 111,000 criminal aliens in local custody, of which more than 11,000 were charged or convicted with Level 1 crimes, while more than 100,000 had been charged or convicted of Level 2 and 3 crimes. So they’re not the most dangerous.

• More than four thousand of those who received “hits” are U.S. citizens. So they’re not even all immigrants.

It turns out that the vast majority of immigrants tagged have been charged or convicted of low level crimes such as traffic violations. In other words, while a few really bad guys have been captured, many more people who were simply charged with misdemeanors have been detained through Secure Communities. Local taxpayers are paying to detain them, and the federal government spends scarce federal dollars to deport them. We need to ask whether Secure Communities is really prioritizing the “worst of the worst,” or spreading too wide a net.

There are also concerns that police officers working in areas that have Secure Communities in their local jails have an incentive, or at least the ability, to make arrests based on race or ethnicity, or to make pretextual arrests of persons they suspect to be in violation of immigration laws, in order to have them run through immigration databases once they are jailed. Experience with the Criminal Alien Program (CAP), a similar jail-based program, has shown that arrests of Hispanics for traffic offenses increased dramatically after CAP was implemented. Is this really what ICE has in mind?

And if immigrants are afraid to report crimes to the police because they know there’s an ICE presence in the local jail, the community is not made any safer.

The Administration has big plans for Secure Communities, which is currently operating in 81 jurisdictions across nine states. ICE plans to have a Secure Communities presence in every state by 2011, and plans to implement the program in each of the 3,100 state and local jails across the country by 2013. The FY2010 DHS appropriations bill contains $1.5 billion for identifying and removing criminal aliens, including $200 million for Secure Communities.

Jury Rules in Favor of Hospital for Deportation

I have blogged about the case of a Luis Alberto Jiménez who was deported....by a hospital- Martin Memorial Medical Center in Florida. Today, a jury in Stuart, Fla., decided Monday that Martin Memorial Medical Center did not act unreasonably when it chartered a plane and repatriated a severely brain-injured Guatemalan patient against the will of his guardian.

The New York Times reports:

The case of Mr. Jiménez, which was featured in an in-depth report in The New York Times last summer, is believed to be the first to test the legality of patient repatriations and to judge the liability of the hospitals that undertake them. Such repatriations are a relatively rare but widespread practice, especially in cases involving catastrophic injuries or serious illnesses, where patients need continuing care that is not covered by Medicaid because of their immigration status.

The jurors, all of whom were white, with no Hispanics among them, declined to discuss the verdict; one said, “It was a very tough decision.”

Mr. Jiménez’s cousin and legal guardian, Montejo Gaspar, filed the lawsuit seeking nearly $1 million to cover the costs of providing care for Mr. Jiménez in Guatemala and seeking damages for what he essentially saw as the hospital’s kidnapping and deportation of his profoundly disabled cousin.

A Mayan Indian from the highlands of Guatemala, Mr. Jiménez paid a smuggler to transport him to the United States about a decade ago so he could work as a gardener and send money home to his wife and two sons. He had been living in Stuart with Mr. Gaspar for just under a year when a drunken driver in a stolen vehicle plowed into his car in the winter of 2000.

Now 37, Mr. Jiménez, who cannot walk and has the mental age of a child, lives in a one-room house in a remote village, tended by his elderly mother. He is largely confined to his bed and suffers from routine seizures. When The Times visited him last summer, he had not received medical care for over five years.

Here is the Wall Street Journal Blog.

Sixth Circuit Strikes Down Widow Penalty

Previously I have blogged a lot about the Widow Penalty. It had been upheld but the Sixth Circuit today held that:

"The sole issue before us is a question of law, which requires us to interpret language of the INA to resolve a matter of first impression in this Circuit. The question is whether an alien-spouse, whose citizen-spouse filed the necessary “immediate relative” petition form under 8 U.S.C. §§ 1187, 1255(c)(4), but died within two years of the qualifying marriage, qualifies as a spouse under the “immediate relative” provision of the INA. For the reasons set forth below, we conclude that a “surviving alien-spouse” is a “spouse” within the meaning of the “immediate relative” provision of the INA. Accordingly, we AFFIRM the district court’s grant of summary judgment for Lockhart."

See Lockhart 6 4-8-09

DHS Signals Policy Changes Ahead for Immigration Raids

Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano has delayed a series of proposed immigration raids and other enforcement actions at U.S. workplaces in recent weeks, asking agents in her department to apply more scrutiny to the selection and investigation of targets as well as the timing of raids. The Washington Post reports:

A senior department official said the delays signal a pending change in whom agents at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement choose to prosecute -- increasing the focus on businesses and executives instead of ordinary workers.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and the Congressional Hispanic Caucus made similar calls as the caucus met formally with Obama for the first time.

"Raids that break up families in that way, just kick in the door in the middle of the night, taking [a] father, a parent away, that's just not the American way. It must stop," Pelosi added at a Capitol Hill conference on border issues sponsored by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.

Immigration Officials try to Deport Deceased Immigrant

From the San Francisco Chronicle:

Relatives say immigration officials are trying to deport a dead man.

They contend Nasin Mauricio Rivera died last August, but a deportation hearing against the native Salvadoran is still set for a hearing scheduled this summer.

His former wife, Blanca Ramirez, says Rivera is already in El Salvador — his body was shipped back home for burial.

Rivera's attorney Alberto Lopez says he presented a copy of Rivera's death certificate, but officials told him it was insufficient proof that Rivera was indeed dead.

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice says a certified copy of the death certificate is usually enough, but the agency is responsible for ensuring "the integrity of the process."

DHS will Continue to Deport Haitians

The DHS has said it will continue deporting illegal Haitian immigrants, despite appeals by the Haitian government, which says deportations could destabilize a country where food, water and housing have been in extremely short supply since major storms last summer. A Feb. 25 letter to lawyers in Florida from Susan Cullen, the Homeland Security director of policy, said the department intended “to continue to coordinate the removal of Haitian nationals to Haiti.” Cheryl Little, a lawyer who has represented Haitian immigrants for more than 20 years, expressed disappointment at the response, which she characterized as “status quo.” Some 30,000 Haitians face deportation.

Deporting Liberians

Liberians are facing mass deportation from the United States on March 31 when a federal immigration status created for humanitarian purposes expires. Jessica Slavin, professor at Marquette University Law School, on "Failures of Refugee Law and the Inhumane Prospect of Deporting Settles Liberians from the United States:"

How do we reconcile the fact that we welcomed Liberians here for five, ten, fifteen or more years, with the word “temporary” we attached to their official legal status? Proponents of the deportations have claimed that allowing Liberians to stay “makes a mockery of the concept of short-term temporary humanitarian protection,” but any such mockery happened years ago, as protection was extended, again and again, with the label “temporary” still attached. That dry, legalistic phrase, “extending TPS,” had the real life result of allowing human beings to build lives here. Thousands of Liberians made their homes here in the United States for years and years in such a “temporary” status. And thank God for that. It allowed them to feel safe, to forget the horrors many of them had experienced, to build new lives. Find jobs, buy houses, start businesses, have children. Become members of their communities. Tearing those human beings from their lives here cannot change the fact that the lives we allowed them to build here were not “temporary.”

More on Deporting Abu Qatada

Britain's highest court has ruled that the extremist preacher Abu Qatada, once described as Osama bin Laden's ambassador in Europe, can be deported to Jordan. The New York Times reports:

Abu Qatada is accused of being a threat to national security, of raising funds for terrorist groups and of providing spiritual guidance to Islamic terrorists.

British authorities have been trying to deport him to Jordan, where he has been convicted for his role in two bombings, but appeals courts had ruled that he could not be sent there because he could face torture.

The Home Office appealed, and the Law Lords on Wednesday reversed the appeal court ruling.

Abu Qatada — whose real name is Omar Mahmoud Mohammed Othman — arrived in Britain in 1993 and claimed asylum for himself and his family.

The lawyers for Abu Qatada and three other men who were also accused of terror offenses will appeal their cases to the European Court of Human Rights. None of the men will be deported while that appeal is pending, said Tom Porteous, London director of Human Rights Watch.

Rwandan Professor to be Deported from the U.S.

A professor at a Maryland college has been accused of genocide in his home country, Rwanda, and faces deportation. The New York Times reports:

The professor, Leopold Munyakazi, 59, taught French at Goucher College in this city north of Baltimore until he was suspended with pay in December after the college learned that he had been indicted on murder and several genocide-related charges in Rwanda, according to court papers.

Dr. Munyakazi was arrested at his home in Towson for overstaying his visa, said Brandon A. Montgomery, an ICE spokesman. Mr. Montgomery said that Dr. Munyakazi was released from custody on the condition that he wear a monitoring device and that he faced a deportation hearing in April.

University officials also pointed out that the indictment was prepared a month after Dr. Munyakazi gave a controversial talk in Delaware while he was a professor at Montclair State University in New Jersey. In that speech, Dr. Munyakazi questioned the Rwandan government’s official account of events during the genocide.

“I refer to it as civil war, not genocide; it was about political power,” Dr. Munyakazi said in that speech, according to a University of Deleware news release from October 2006. “Ethnicity is not really understood about Rwanda. In Rwanda there are no tribes. There are social groups. They are one single people.”

However, it is worth noting (from Slate):

Goucher President explains in an open letter that the charges—which Munyakazi denies—were brought to his attention in December by "a producer from NBC News … working on a series about international war criminals who are living in the United States." The producer was accompanied by a Rwandan prosecutor, Ungar adds.

A network series about hunting for war criminals among us?

Sounds strange to my ears—and to those of Ungar, a former journalist and one-time dean of American University's School of Communications. In his open letter, Ungar continues: "Some question the unusual circumstance in which the prosecutor traveled around the United States with a television producer and camera crew, rather than talking with the appropriate U.S. government officials through standard channels."

Also 'Colored Opinion'

No Child Left Behind: Over 100,000 citizen children's parents deported

The Associated Press reports that "[m]ore than 100,000 parents whose children are U.S. citizens were deported over the decade that ended in 2007, a Department of Homeland Security's investigation has found." The parents were removed from the country on immigration violations or because they had committed crimes. The removals of the 108,434 parents were among the approximately 2.2 million carried out by immigration officials between 1998 and 2007.

The de facto deportation of U.S. citizen children when there parents are deported from the United States has long been a problem, and troubled federal judges like Ninth Circuit Judge Harry Pregerson (He submitted dissents in a series of unpublished dispositions and contends that, in those cases, ordering the deportation of a noncitizen parent in effect will result in the deportation of a U.S. child).

The Widow Penalty

Today, USCIS is deporting the widows of American citizens, with full authority and sanction from the current Administration, automatically and without exception, where the death of the American spouse occurred before lengthy administrative visa processing could be completed. This practice is morally corrupt, and an injustice.

Attorney and advocate Brent Renison of Surviving Spouses Against Deportation asks the Obama transition team to take a look at the unjust, nonsensical "widow penalty" that the current administration is using to deport surviving spouses of deceased U.S. citizens

Some stories of these widows on CBS:

Raquel, like all the other widows 60 Minutes met, had entered the U.S. legally. Still, immigration has been rejecting requests for permanent residence if the American spouse died before they had their immigration interview to prove their marriage was based on love. But the government can take months - sometimes more than a year - to schedule that interview. Raquel's mother-in-law, Linda, says Raquel shouldn't be penalized because the bureaucracy didn't move fast enough. ‘They were doing things legally. They filed the right papers. They filed them in a timely manner. Things were not processed in a timely manner. And they're, and then my son died. This was not something that you can foresee,' Linda says."

More on Maher Arar

I have posted about Maher Arar before. But recent development in Canada have drawn attention to his case. The New York Times reports:

Even if the government agreed with a Canadian citizen’s claims that American officials sent him to Syria in 2002 to be tortured, he should not be allowed to sue for damages because there was no Constitutional violation and Congress has not authorized such lawsuits, a Justice Department lawyer argued on Tuesday before a federal appeals court in Manhattan. The lawyer, Jonathan F. Cohn, added emphatically that the government did not agree with the claims made by the man, Maher Arar, who has been trying to sue for the deprivation of his rights. His case has come to symbolize the hotly debated government policy, known as extraordinary rendition, of moving terror suspects to countries that engage in torture.

Mr. Arar, who was detained in September 2002 as he changed planes at Kennedy International Airport on his way to Canada from a vacation in Tunisia, was later sent to Syria, where he spent a year in confinement and, he says, was tortured.

He was released in 2003, and Canadian officials later concluded that he had had no involvement with terrorism.

A suit filed by Mr. Arar was dismissed in 2006 by a federal judge in Brooklyn. That ruling was affirmed in June by a three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit.

But in a highly unusual step, the appeals court decided to rehear the matter, and on Tuesday 12 judges engaged in a spirited debate with Mr. Cohn and Mr. Arar’s lawyer — and with one another — over whether Mr. Arar could sue.

Deportations to Haiti Re-Start

U.S. immigration authorities have resumed deportations to Haiti, ending a three-month-plus reprieve of sending Haitians back:

"We determined that it was appropriate to resume based on the circumstances in Haiti," Nicole Navas, a spokeswoman with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said, declining to comment further.

"The individuals being returned have final orders of removal and the necessary travel documents."

The move to deport Haitians comes at a time when Haiti is still trying to recover from back-to-back storms that heaped wide scale devastation. The tempests -- two of them full-fledged hurricanes -- left at least 800 people dead, tens of thousands homeless, and caused about $1 billion in damages.

Immigrant advocates found hope in the suspension, issued in September. They said the halt could pave the way for temporary protected status, or TPS, a program that temporarily suspends deportations and allows undocumented Haitians to obtain work permits.

Immigrant advocates expressed further relief when authorities allowed more than 50 Haitians to be released from a Broward detention center. Ankle bracelets were used to monitor their whereabouts, they said.

Tuy Sobil Brings Street Dance to Street Boys of Cambodia

Tuy Sobil (K.K.) was a former gang member by way of a federal prison, who was deported four years ago from his homeland, the United States, to the homeland of his parents, Cambodia. The New York Times tells his story:

K.K. is not here because he wants to be. He is one of 189 Cambodians who have been banished from the United States in the past six years under a law that mandates deportations for noncitizens who commit felonies. Hundreds more are on a waiting list for deportation. Like most of the others, K.K. is a noncitizen only by a technicality. He was not an illegal immigrant. He was a refugee from Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge “killing fields” who found a haven in the United States in 1980. He was an infant when he arrived. In fact, he was born in a refugee camp in Thailand and had never seen Cambodia before he was deported. But K.K.’s parents were simple farmers who failed to complete the citizenship process when they arrived.

Like some children of poor immigrants, K.K. drifted to the streets, where he became a member of the Crips gang and a champion break dancer. It was only after he was convicted of armed robbery at 18 that he discovered that he was not a citizen.

Like many deportees, he arrived in Cambodia without possessions and without family contacts. He was a drug counselor at first and then founded his break dancing club, Tiny Toones Cambodia, where he now earns a living teaching about 150 youngsters and reaching out to hundreds more. With the financial support of international aid groups like Bridges Across Borders, based in Graham, Fla., he has expanded his center into a small school that teaches English and Khmer and computers in addition to back flips, head stands and krumping, or crazy dancing.

Hospitals Still Deporting Immigrants

Earlier I posted about hospitals deporting immigrants. This past week the New York Times highlighted another story of this:

Soon after Antonio Torres, a husky 19-year-old farmworker, suffered catastrophic injuries in a car accident last June, a Phoenix hospital began making plans for his repatriation to Mexico. Mr. Torres was comatose and connected to a ventilator. He was also a legal immigrant whose family lives and works in the purple alfalfa fields of this southwestern town. But he was uninsured. So the hospital disregarded the strenuous objections of his grief-stricken parents and sent Mr. Torres on a four-hour journey over the California border into Mexicali.

For days, Mr. Torres languished in a busy emergency room there, but his parents, Jesús and Gloria Torres, were not about to give up on him. Although many uninsured immigrants have been repatriated by American hospitals, few have seen their journey take the U-turn that the Torreses engineered for their son. They found a hospital in California willing to treat him, loaded him into a donated ambulance and drove him back into the United States as a potentially deadly infection raged through his system.

By summer’s end, despite the grimmest of prognoses from the hospital in Phoenix, Mr. Torres had not only survived but thrived. Newly discharged from rehabilitation in California, he was haltingly walking, talking and, hoisting his cane to his shoulder like a rifle, performing a silent, comic, effortful imitation of a marching soldier.

Thumbs up to the California Medical Association, which voted in October to oppose the forced repatriation of patients. Thumbs down to the American Medical Association for not coming to a resolution for this:

While expressing concerns about repatriations and what they called the “inappropriate discharge of patients,” declined to take a stand before examining in detail the legal, financial and medical issues involved.

Good Books About Immigration

• Religion and Social Justice for Immigrants by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo: The essays in this book analyze the different ways in which organized religion provides immigrants with an arena for mobilization, civic participation, and solidarity. Contributors explore topics including how non-Western religious groups such as the Vietnamese Caodai are striving for community recognition and addressing problems such as racism, economic issues, and the politics of diaspora; how interfaith groups organize religious people into immigrant civil rights activists at the U.S.-Mexican border; and how Catholic groups advocate governmental legislation and policies on behalf of refugees.
• Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants by David Bacon: Through interviews and on-the-spot reporting from both impoverished communities abroad and American immigrant workplaces and neighborhoods, Bacon shows how the United States' trade and economic policy abroad, in seeking to create a favorable investment climate for large corporations, creates conditions to displace communities and set migration into motion. Trade policy and immigration are intimately linked, Bacon argues, and are, in fact, elements of a single economic system. Bacon powerfully traces the development of illegal status back to slavery and shows the human cost of treating the indispensable labor of millions of migrants—and the migrants themselves—as illegal. Illegal People argues for a sea change in the way we think, debate, and legislate around issues of migration and globalization, making a compelling case for why we need to consider immigration and migration from a globalized human rights perspective.
• Enemy Aliens: Double Standards And Constitutional Freedoms In The War On Terrorism by David Cole: About 5,000 foreign nationals have been detained by the United States since September 11 and denied basic constitutional rights in the name of "wartime" expediency. Cole, who has litigated civil liberties cases on behalf of resident aliens and writes for the Nation, argues that denying foreigners rights within our legal system usually ends with citizens being stripped of those same rights. Cole documents how this process has already started and discusses provisions of the Patriot Act that he believes will allow for even further government encroachment on our freedom. He also provides detailed historical examples of the government's record of persecuting opposition voices in the name of security against a foreign menace. He argues for the moral and pragmatic importance of avoiding a double standard and according foreigners the same rights as citizens.
• Brother, I'm Dying by Edwidge Danticat: Edwidge Danticat's father and uncle chose very different paths: the former struggled to make a new life for himself in America, while the latter remained in the homeland he paradoxically loved. In following their lives and their impact on future generations, Danticat's powerful family memoir explores how the private and the political, the past and the present, intersect. The most poignant section focuses on Joseph's tragic trip to the United States at age 81, but Danticat also tells a wider story about family and exile, the Haitian diaspora, the Duvalier regime, and post-9/11 immigration policy. Emotionally resonant and exceptionally clear-eyed, Brother, I'm Dying offers insight into a talented writer, her family history, and the injustices of the modern world.
• Keeping Out the Other: A Critical Introduction to Immigration Enforcement Today by David C. Brotherton, ed: David C. Brotherton and Philip Kretsedemas provide a history and analysis of recent immigration enforcement in the United States, demonstrating that our current anti-immigration tendencies are not a knee-jerk reaction to the events of September 11. Rather, they have been gathering steam for decades. With contributions from social scientists, policy analysts, legal experts, community organizers, and journalists, the volume critically examines the discourse that has framed the question of immigration enforcement for the general public. It also explores the politics and practice of deportation, new forms of immigrant profiling, relevant case law, and antiterrorist operations. Some contributors couch their critiques in an appeal to constitutional law and the defense of civil liberties. Others draw on the theories of structural inequality and institutional discrimination. These diverse perspectives stimulate new ways of thinking about the issue of immigration enforcement, proving that "security" has more to do with improving legal rights, social mobility, and the well-being of all U.S. residents than keeping out the "other."
• The Abandoned Ones: The Imprisonment and Uprising of the Mariel Boat People by Mark S. Hamm: A veteran of Arizona's prison system, Hamm trained and led a team of students who served in the late '80s as release-hearing legal representatives for Cuban detainees moved from Atlanta and Oakdale to the Terre Haute, Indiana, penitentiary. Hamm argues here that Ronald Reagan's rhetoric, Ed Meese's venality, and the politicized incompetence of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service created the powder keg that exploded in late 1987 with the announcement that Cuba would take back 2,543 Marielitos and prolonged the Oakdale and Atlanta standoffs. Official lies about repression inside Cuba were matched by lies about detainees' "criminality" ; Hamm found they were "nonviolent criminals (in Cuba), the disadvantaged, petty criminals (in the U.S.), and the doubly punished." U.S. Bureau of Prisons officials win Hamm's praise for restraint; virtually all other agencies involved either participated in or failed to short-circuit what Hamm calls the "politics of cruelty" that controlled the Cuban detainees' lives both before and after the riots. A devastating narrative of homegrown human rights violations.
• Gender and U.S. Immigration: Contemporary Trends by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, ed: Resurgent immigration is one of the most powerful forces disrupting and realigning everyday life in the United States and elsewhere, and gender is one of the fundamental social categories anchoring and shaping immigration patterns. Yet the intersection of gender and immigration has received little attention in contemporary social science literature and immigration research. This book brings together some of the best work in this area, including essays by pioneers who have logged nearly two decades in the field of gender and immigration, and new empirical work by both young scholars and well-established social scientists bringing their substantial talents to this topic for the first time.
• Deporting Our Souls: Values, Morality, and Immigration Policy by Bill Ong Hing: In the past three decades, images of undocumented immigrants pouring across the southern border have driven the immigration debate and policies have been implemented in response to those images. The Oklahoma City bombings and the tragic events of September 11, both of questionable relevance to immigration policy have provided further impetus to implement strategies that are anti-immigration in design and effect. This book discusses the major immigration policy areas - undocumented workers, the immigration selection system, deportation of aggravated felons, national security and immigration policy, and the integration of new Americans - and the author suggests his own proposals on how to address the policy challenges from a perspective that encourages us to consider the moral consequences of our decisions. The author also reviews some of the policies that have been put forth and ignored and suggests new policies that would be good for the country economically and socially.
• Securing Borders: Detention And Deportation In Canada by Anna Pratt: Detention and deportation are the two most extreme sanctions of an "immigration penality" that enforces borders, polices non-citizens, identifies those who are dangerous, diseased, deceitful, or destitute, and refuses them entry or casts them out. As such, they are constitutive practices that work to "make-up" and regulate national borders, citizens, and populations. In addition, they play a key role in the reconfiguration of citizenship and sovereignties in the global context. Despite popular and political exclamations, it is not a brand new world. The denigration of refugee claimants, heightened and intersecting anxieties about crime, security, and fraud, and efforts to fortify the border against risky outsiders have been prominent features of Canadian immigration penality since well before September 11th, 2001.
• Deportation Nation: Outsiders in American History by Daniel Kanstroom: Deportation Nation is a chilling history of communal self-idealization and self-protection. The post-Revolutionary Alien and Sedition Laws, the Fugitive Slave laws, the Indian "removals," the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Palmer Raids, the internment of the Japanese Americans--all sought to remove those whose origins suggested they could never become "true" Americans. And for more than a century, millions of Mexicans have conveniently served as cheap labor, crossing a border that was not official until the early twentieth century and being sent back across it when they became a burden. By illuminating the shadowy corners of American history, Daniel Kanstroom shows that deportation has long been a legal tool to control immigrants' lives and is used with increasing crudeness in a globalized but xenophobic world.

The Business of Deportation

While airlines in the U.S are struggling to meet the high costs of energy reducing amenities on board, and some are trying to avoid bankruptcy, there is one airline that is offering free service anywhere around the world- leather seats, free food, and legroom included: ICE Air. It may be the fastest growing airline to Central America.

The Wall Street Journal reports:

This carrier is run by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, the federal agency responsible for finding and deporting undocumented immigrants. A crackdown on illegal immigration has led to a spike in deportations and the creation of a de facto airline to send the deportees home. The air service, called Repatriate by air-traffic controllers, is known simply as ICE Air to agency employees. Its planes have headrests emblazoned with ICE's name and seal. In-flight service is polite.

ICE Air operates much like a commercial carrier, flying passengers to hub cities where they connect to international flights. But those hub cities -- such as Mesa, Ariz., and Alexandria, La., which are close to illegal-immigrant detention sites -- are relatively obscure. And the final destinations are primarily in Latin America, including up to three flights daily to Guatemala City and two to Tegucigalpa, Honduras. Also to the Philippines, Indonesia and Cambodia.

In all, the U.S. government deports people to more than 190 countries. Outside of Mexico, ICE flew home 76,102 illegal immigrants in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, up from 72,187 last year and 50,222 two years ago.

ICE Air's patrons are what the airline industry calls "non-revenue passengers," since Washington foots the bill at $620 a person on average for the one-way flight home. The agency now flies 10 aircraft, twice as many as last year, including leased and government jets. Each passenger is entitled to 40 pounds of luggage, which is carefully labeled.

Kudos to Microsoft

While I am a mac user, I have to congratulate Microsoft on its new initiative to provide free legal help to hundreds of illegal-immigrant children who are on their own and facing deportation.

Through Kids in Need of Defense (KIND), the Redmond company and a group of law firms in nine cities will spend about $14.5 million over the next three years on an immigration legal-defense program for children. Actress Angelina Jolie is the spokesperson for the initiative.

The Seattle Times Reports:

Last year, about 8,000 illegal-immigrant children with no official adult supervision were processed in immigration court. They came from all over the world — the majority from Central America — some fleeing untold horror and abuse. Unlike adults, they are not placed in U.S. detention centers but in juvenile shelters scattered across the country. The youngest — sometimes just 3 or 4 years old — are placed in foster care. In the end, some are reunited with family members here in the U.S., but many are deported back to their home countries.

Microsoft already helps to fund a program called Volunteer Advocates for Immigrant Justice, which screens adults and children to determine their eligibility for asylum or other legal status, and trains attorneys to represent them as they work through the system.

National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) Ruling

A government program that required certain nonimmigrants to register with immigration authorities after the September 11, 2001, attacks was constitutional and did not violate administrative law, according to a recent court ruling. The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected the legal challenges brought by four immigrants ordered removed from the United States as a result of their participation in the Special Registration portion of the National Security Entry-Exit Registration System (NSEERS) program. NSEERS required adult male nonimmigrants from designated countries to present themselves to immigration authorities for registration, fingerprinting, and questioning.