Coming out undocumented

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March 16, 2012 | 4:55 PM | By

Posts of the week: Shahs of Sunset, a ‘civil detention center,’ coming out undocumented, when people of color go missing, more

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

A student activist's t-shirt, December 2010

The past week brought us an ethnic reality TV show that had some readers fuming, a “civil detention center” for immigrants in Texas and a growing movement of undocumented young people going public with their immigration status, among other things.

In case you missed any of the week’s highlights, here are a few:

Monday

See ‘Shahs of Sunset?’ Share your thoughts The controversial Bravo reality show that debuted last Sunday has been infuriating many Iranian Americans. The show is the latest of a series of ethnic reality series similar to “Jersey Shore,” following six wealthy Iranian Americans in and around Beverly Hills. The cast members’ flashy lifestyles depicted on the show have offended viewers who say the show promotes negative stereotypes. Comments posted by several readers – including a few who defended the show – were posted in a follow-up.

Tuesday

Civil immigrant detention: Kinder and gentler, but still a boon for private prisons Immigration officials have unveiled a new immigrant detention center in Texas that is intended to embody the Obama administration’s planned reforms to the system. The center has recreational green space and a library, among other things. But like the bulk of the detention centers the government has relied on in the past decade, it will be operated by a private prison company, one of several companies whose contracts come with financial incentives to keep detention centers full.

Wednesday

Coming out undocumented: How much of a political effect has the movement had? Over the last few years, a movement that began as a handful of undocumented college students going public with their immigration status as a political act has snowballed. Has attaching a face to those who would benefit from immigration reforms, a risky but increasingly popular tactic, had an effect on the more lenient deportation policies to recently come out of the White House, or on state legislation benefiting undocumented students?

Thursday

When people of color go missing A recent report on how law enforcement agencies handled the death of Mitrice Richardson, a young black woman found dead in Malibu in 2010, didn’t address the circumstances that led up her disappearance almost a year earlier. But her case is worth revisiting for other reasons. Critics have long contended that race placed a role not only in how her case was handled, but how it was covered by the media. As a rule, there is a wide coverage gap between cases involving white crime victims and crime victims of color.

Friday

‘Where’s your green card?’ Mississippi becomes latest immigration battleground state Tensions over immigration are brewing in Mississippi as the state becomes the latest to advance anti-illegal immigration legislation, modeled after Arizona’s SB 1070. Hours after the state House approved the bill, which will likely clear the Senate, members of a university band began chanting “Where’s your green card?” during a college basketball game at a Puerto Rican-born player from out of state. (And no, Puerto Ricans don’t need green cards, they get U.S. citizenship at birth.)

FILED UNDER: Civil immigrant detention, Coming out undocumented, Green card, Immigrant detention, Mississippi, Mississippi immigration bill, Shahs of Sunset
March 16, 2012 | 3:51 PM | By

Coming out undocumented: A growing movement, but still contentious (Audio)

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

A student activist's t-shirt at a "coming out" event in Orange County, Calif., March 2011

The act of “coming out” as undocumented to make a political statement has gained traction in recent years among young immigrant activists, many of them college students or graduates who were brought to the United States illegally as children and have never been able to adjust their immigration status.

For those involved in a growing movement that has become a rite of passage for many, there is the perception of strength in numbers. But does this make going public with one’s immigration status a wise thing to do? Has it become any safer? And for those who aren’t familiar with the movement, what reactions does it elicit?

Today, at the tail end of what’s become known “National Coming Out of the Shadows Week,” KPCC’s Patt Morrisson Show addressed these and other questions in a segment; I joined Patt as a guest, along with immigration attorney and political science professor Louis A. Gordon and two young people who have both “come out,” Nancy Meza and John Perez.

Meza and Perez, both 24, have been in the United States since they were small children, and spoke of feeling empowered by choosing not to stay silent for fear of deportation. Gordon spoke of the legal risks involved in going public, along with the frustration of being unable to become a citizen, after growing up American, that drives some young people to take the risk anyway.

Among the listeners who shared their thoughts were a couple of immigrants who believed that revealing one’s immigration remains far too risky, in spite of recent policy changes. Many others have posted their opinions on the segment page, which poses these questions:

If you are undocumented, how do you feel about this movement? Has a friend or co-worker surprised you by telling you that he or she is in the country illegally? Should youth who were involuntarily brought to the United States be given a break and allowed to become citizens? Is the United States too harsh with its immigration policies or not harsh enough?

Listeners’ comments have been all over the map so far, but here are a few highlights. Alex wrote:

An argument can be made for both sides on
how to address our resident Illegal Immigrant issue.  Should we have
Illegal Aliens living in this country, no!  Can we realistically just
deport over 12 million Illegal Aliens overnight, no!

It’s taken decades of negligence and
incompetence from both the Democrats and Republicans get us where we are; and
now too many of the proposed solutions are simply attempts to buy votes.

Ben Johnson wrote:

This topic tugs at your heart strings but it is a double edged sword and strikes at an issue of fairness. Citizens and other legal immigrants who paid or are paying their dues are faced with high taxes paying for services they do not use that many undocumented take for granted.

Tomás Summers Sandoval wrote:

Undocumented immigrants come to this country because our economy not only desires them but actually maintains access to them via our current immigration policy–one which is purposefully geared to NOT provide a legal means of entry for most. As workers their value is in the ability of our economy to abuse them through poor work conditions and underpayment.  A pathway to legality is not only good policy, it is a MORAL one.

And Jaja Azikiwe wrote:

I don’t want to turn this into a race card issue, but black folks waited 400 years for fair representation and even today there are issues, AND WE WERE NOT HERE ILLEGALLY! Don’t they get it: THEY BROKE AND ARE BREAKING THE LAW!!!

Care to join the conversation? Post your thoughts below, or on the Patt Morrisson Show segment page at scpr.org

FILED UNDER: Coming out undocumented, National Coming out of the Shadows Week, Patt Morisson Show
March 14, 2012 | 12:35 PM | By

Coming out undocumented: How much of a political effect has the movement had?

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

A student activist's t-shirt, December 2010

It’s been two years since a group of young people in Chicago made official a movement that had been slowly growing among undocumented students, holding a “coming out” day at a local park to go public with their undocumented status as a political act.

In that time – mostly during the last year – the larger movement they launched has taken off exponentially. It received perhaps its biggest boost last June, when former Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas confessed to his undocumented status in a New York Times essay and launched an advocacy project, drawing worldwide attention.

Much else has happened in the last year: Last summer, the Obama administration released guidelines urging immigration officials to use prosecutorial discretion when pursuing deportation cases. This involved giving special consideration to certain immigrants, including people who had been here since they were children, a demographic that makes up the bulk of the young activists involved in the coming-out movement. In August, the guidelines became the backbone of an Obama administration plan to review some 300,000 deportation cases to screen out these “low priority” immigrants, a process that began late last year.

This week, more young people are going public with their status around the country as part of what’s by now become an annual ritual, National Coming out the Shadows Week. As they do, it’s worth taking a look at how much influence, if any, a movement that seeks to attach faces to those who would benefit from legal status has had on the policy changes seen this year.

Last April in a post, before the Obama administration’s new guidelines were issued, I asked several young people who had come out with their status – and readers in general – whether they thought it had become safer to reveal publicly that one is in the U.S. illegally. “Yes, it’s true!” responded a reader named Rigo. “I haven’t felt this safe in a while.”

In another post the same month, undocumented UCLA graduate and activist Nancy Meza described the role of being “out” in the peer support networks that have come to the aid of many a young person facing deportation, launching petitions and helping several win reprieves long before the federal guidelines crystallized who stood a better chance of staying.

“What we’ve seen is that the more public you are, the more out there you are, the more public support you have, especially in deportation cases,” said Meza, 24. “People have seen you be involved with the community, your activism, and they are more willing to help. I think that going public is one of the ways that a person could have a better opportunity of getting deferred action.”

This is true, said Louis DiSipio, an immigration expert and political science professor at UC Irvine. There is a safety-in-numbers aspect to coming out for undocumented students and graduates involved in the movement, and to date, most of those involved have been supported and protected by their peers if they face deportation.

“By coming out, they are asserting their right to protest, but it also makes it harder for the Obama administration or local authorities acting under the Department of Homeland Security to arrest those students,” DiSipio said by in a phone interview.

As to the coming-out movement’s political effect at the national level, that’s up for debate. Frank Sharry, director the Washington, D.C. immigrant advocacy organization America’s Voice, believes the movement “has made a huge difference.”

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Coming out, Coming out undocumented, Jose Antonio Vargas, National Coming out of the Shadows Week, Uriel Alberto
December 30, 2011 | 12:34 PM | By

The top five immigration stories of 2011

Photo by Victoria Bernal/Flickr (Creative Commons)

During the past week, Multi-American has been counting down the biggest and most influential immigration stories of 2011. That’s not to say there were only five: It’s been a major year for stories related to the immigration debate, especially as the battleground has shifted to the states, record deportations have continued, and the Obama administration’s expansion of federal-local partnerships such as the Secure Communities fingerprint sharing program continues to draw controversy.

Stories that didn’t make the list are also worth mentioning, among them the passage of state tuition-aid bills for undocumented students like the California Dream Act and the continued steep drop in illegal border crossings – even as illegal immigration remains a popular talking point for candidates seeking the presidency in 2012. Here are M-A’s choices for top stories of the year.

1) The states as immigration battleground: When counting down last year’s top stories, choosing Arizona’s game-changing SB 1070 to top the list was a no-brainer. Not necessarily because news of the stringent 2010 anti-illegal immigration law dominated immigration coverage last year, but because of the lasting impact the law was bound to have on other states.

A year later, SB 1070-inspired immigration enforcement bills have made their way through statehouses around the country. Similarly strict laws have taken effect in states like Alabama, Georgia, Utah, Indiana and South Carolina.

Like the Arizona measure that inspired them, headed to the U.S. Supreme Court on a state appeal, all of these face their own court challenges. Federal judges have blocked several of these laws’ most stringent provisions, including a controversial provision in Alabama that would require public schools to check the immigration status of students, which when the law first took effect prompted a rash of school absences. Agricultural states like Georgia and Alabama, meanwhile, have experienced severe labor shortages as immigrant farm workers have fled their fields for more welcoming climes.

The new laws enacted are but one small aspect of what’s been happening in the states. The National Conference of State Legislatures reported recently that in 2011, there were 1,607 bills and resolutions relating to immigrants and refugees introduced in all 50 states and Puerto Rico, significantly up from a little more than 1,400 in 2010. Bolstered by the relative success of SB 1070, even as parts of the law remain hung up in court, immigration restriction-minded legislators in many states banded together, working with the same legal teams to draft crackdown bills.

Where does it go from here? The Supreme Court decision on SB 1070 could well hold the answer, either encouraging or putting the brakes on state bills. The high court will weigh the merits of a lower court judge’s decision to block some of the more controversial provisions of the law, including one empowering local police to check for immigration status. The case is expected to be heard in the spring.

The high court set a state-law precedent earlier this year when it ruled in favor of a previous Arizona anti-illegal immigration law, a 2007 measure mandating employers to use a federal program called E-Verify to check workers’s immigration status and punishing those who don’t comply. Many of the state laws that have followed SB 1070 have had similar employer provisions, an enforcement tactic that is becoming more popular as states find ways to crack down.

Photo by John Moore/Getty Images

A man is prepared for a deportation flight bound for San Salvador in Mesa, Arizona, December 2010

2) Another year of record deportations: In fiscal year 2011, the Obama administration broke its deportation record for the second straight year, deporting close to 400,000 people in the year that ended last Sept. 30. 

It wouldn’t be a stretch to say that news of another record-breaking year was pretty much expected, with the continued expansion of federal immigration enforcement programs like Secure Communities and 287(g), both of which have fed the deportation pipeline in recent years with a steady flow of cases stemming from local law enforcement. The number of people deported annually has crept upward steadily for years now, from 291,060 in fiscal year 2007 to 396,906 in fiscal year 2011, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement records.

These deportations have raised several questions, among them questions about just who is being deported as the Obama administration stresses an emphasis on criminal deportees, and whether the programs being used are working as intended. An October press release from ICE read that “nearly 55 percent or 216,698 of the people removed were convicted of felonies or misdemeanors — an 89 percent increase in the removal of criminals since FY 2008.” But analyses of deportation stats have pointed out gray areas.

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FILED UNDER: Birthright citizenship, Coming out undocumented, Prosecutorial discretion, Record deportations, SB 1070, Secure Communities, Top five immigration stories of 2011
December 26, 2011 | 12:57 PM | By

Top five immigration stories of 2011, #5: ‘Coming out’ undocumented

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

A student activist's t-shirt, December 2010

This week, Multi-American is counting down its top five immigration stories of 2011. It’s been a tough list to narrow down with so many major stories this year, ranging from the political battle over birthright citizenship early in the year to the ongoing record deportations to the growing number of state immigration laws, a story that’s still developing as a case involving Arizona’s precedent-setting SB 1070 heads to the U.S. Supreme Court.

We’ll start out today with one story that didn’t come out of government, though, but rather bubbled up slowly from college campuses and gained steam via social media: the trend of “coming out” as undocumented among young people, done as a political act.

What began a few years ago among a small number of undocumented student activists has developed into a movement its own right. By December of last year, growing numbers of young, undocumented college students and their supporters were publicly revealing their status as a previous version of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, a bill that would grant conditional legal status to young people who arrived before age 16 if they went to college or joined the military, moved through the House and on to the Senate.

The bill failed to clear a Senate vote, but the trend continued. In California, some of these young people threw their efforts behind two state bills called the California Dream Act (both eventually signed into law this year) which would make it easier for undocumented students to pay tuition.

Last March, a national campaign mounted by student immigrant advocacy groups urged more students to reveal their status, with groups around the country holding coming-out events.

During one coming-out event in Orange County last spring, some of those taking part talked about the trend becoming, for many, a cathartic rite of passage for many young people who were brought to the U.S. by their parents at an early age, growing up culturally American while keeping their legal status a secret from their peers.

“People have reached this point,” said Jorge Gutierrez, a 26-year-old activist and graduate of Cal State Fullerton who was brought here by his family from Mexico at age 10, but had been unable to adjust his status. “It has become a cultural phenomenon.”

The movement hit a milestone last June, when ex-Washington Post reporter and Pulitzer winner Jose Antonio Vargas revealed that he’d kept his status a secret for years, sharing it only with a close network of confidantes while navigating college and career. Vargas, who was born in the Philippines, wrote in the New York Times:

Over the past 14 years, I’ve graduated from high school and college and built a career as a journalist, interviewing some of the most famous people in the country. On the surface, I’ve created a good life. I’ve lived the American dream.

But I am still an undocumented immigrant. And that means living a different kind of reality. It means going about my day in fear of being found out. It means rarely trusting people, even those closest to me, with who I really am.

The term “coming out,” if course, is borrowed. While promoting last year’s “National Coming Out of the Shadows” week, the advocacy site DreamActivist.org posted a quote from gay rights hero Harvey Milk, the slain San Francisco city supervisor who in a 1978 speech urged his peers, “you must come out.”

Milk was calling for a political act during an era when coming out the closet was not a cultural expectation or norm, but a dangerous thing to do, as it still is in many places. But the danger didn’t involve deportation, as it does for people who aren’t in the country legally.

Young people who have come out as undocumented say they are aware of the risks; they also say that the more of them choose to come out, there more safety they believe there is in numbers. Student activist networks have come to the aid of those who land in deportation proceedings, launching petition drives and social media campaigns.

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FILED UNDER: Politics/Justice, California Dream Act, Coming out, Coming out undocumented, Dream Act, Harvey Milk, National Coming out of the Shadows Week, Top five immigration stories of 2011
June 27, 2011 | 4:37 PM | By

2011 version of the Dream Act to get its first Senate hearing

Photo by CSU Stanislaus Photo/Flickr (Creative Commons)

A new and slightly revised version of the federal Dream Act will get its first Senate hearing tomorrow morning, more than a month after Illinois Democratic Sen. Dick Durbin and other top Senate Democrats announced plans to bring it back.

The new Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act differs only slightly from the one approved by the House last December, which moved to the Senate but failed to draw enough votes for cloture.

Like prior versions, the bill would grant conditional legal status to qualifying young people who are in the United States illegally but were brought here as minors under 16, so long as they attend college or join the military. There are only a few key differences from last year’s version:

  • The age cap for applicants, which was reduced to age 29 last year, has been bumped back up to 35 years of age or younger
  • The length of conditional legal status before applicants may obtain permanent legal resident status has been reduced to six years, as in an earlier version, from 10 years
  • This version would, as did an earlier version (but not the House-approved one), seek to repeal a ban on in-state tuition rates for beneficiaries

To obtain permanent legal status, in addition to maintaining “good moral character” during the conditional period, beneficiaries would need to: a) have acquired a degree from an institute of higher learning, or at least completed two years in good standing toward a bachelor’s or higher degree; b) served at least two years in “uniformed services” and, if discharged, received an honorable discharge. More details can be found in a previous post.

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FILED UNDER: Health/Education, Politics/Justice, Coming out undocumented, Dream Act, Jose Antonio Vargas, Sen. Dick Durbin
April 22, 2011 | 5:00 PM | By

‘Dreamers’ and social media: It’s not your parents’ immigrant support network

A student's bold statement, December 8, 2010

On Wednesday, a young woman who is a law student at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. tweeted this message:

My name is Prerna Preshika Lal. I’m alien number 203-128-987. I’ve never committed a crime. But I’m being deported away from my family.

It was a wrenchingly personal tweet from the Fijian-born 26-year-old, who for the past few years has been an outspoken advocate for legalizing undocumented youths brought here as minors, as she was at age 13. The message is also an example of one facet of a growing movement as more young people go public with their immigration status, relying on social media to build a network of support – and, in some cases, to help them stay in the country.

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FILED UNDER: Coming out undocumented, Dream Act
April 12, 2011 | 10:10 AM | By

Readers respond: Has ‘coming out’ undocumented become less risky?

Photo by Leslie Berestein Rojas/KPCC

A student's bold statement, December 8, 2010

A post yesterday on the trend among young, undocumented student activists and their supporters of revealing their immigration status, done as a political act, has drawn some interesting comments.

They were posted in response to a question: Has revealing immigration status truly become less risky for those who do it?

Recent statements from federal immigration officials have indicated that there’s less of a priority being placed on deporting people who would have been eligible for the Dream Act, proposed legislation that failed in the Senate late last year, and which would have granted conditional legal status to young people brought here as minors who went to college or joined the military. Some youths in high-profile cases have had their deportation suspended. Is the risk of deportation for these young people who “come out” no longer so great?

A reader named Rigo wrote:

Yes, it’s true! I haven’t felt safer than this in a while. #out

Continue reading →

FILED UNDER: Health/Education, Politics/Justice, Coming out undocumented, Dream Act, National Coming out of the Shadows Week