"Supposed To"

By "Rafeef Ziadah"

Alien Minors Act Could Boost US Military Ranks

By Alan Gomez,
September 24, 2010
Courtesy Of "USA TODAY"

Immigration advocates have long pushed for the DREAM Act as a way to give children who were brought to the U.S. illegally by their parents a chance to become legal residents and have access to higher education.

The less publicized part of the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors Act is that the Pentagon is pushing for it as a means to staff the armed forces.

Prospects dimmed Tuesday when SenateRepublicans prevented a vote on a defense spending bill, because the DREAM Act was attached as an amendment. SenateDemocrats vowed to reintroduce it.

When the Department of Defense published its three-year strategic plan, it listed the DREAM Act as a way it could replenish its ranks.

"If we needed to expand the pool of eligible youth, the (DREAM) initiative would be one of several ways to do it," spokeswoman Eileen Lainez said in an e-mail.

Retired Army lieutenant colonel Margaret Stock says a "crisis in military manpower" is looming as the population ages and the economy improves. She says the military struggled to recruit enough people when the economy was booming just a few years ago because people had more employment options.

"DREAM would give us the ability to tap into a huge number of people who grew up in the United States, were educated here, they talk like Americans, they look like Americans and their loyalty lies with America," says Stock, a former West Point professor who teaches political science at the University of Alaska-Anchorage.

The act would allow illegal immigrants who met several requirements — 35 or younger, came to the U.S. before turning 16, have lived here at least five years, no criminal record and have earned a high school diploma — to become conditional residents for up to six years. They would be eligible to become permanent residents if they completed two years of college or two years in the military.

The Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan research group that supports an overhaul of immigration law, estimates that more than 725,000 people would be eligible immediately for conditional residency. An addition

all 1.4 million would meet all the requirements except the high school diploma.

The military part of the act worries Jorge Mariscal, director of Latino studies at the University of California-San Diego.

He says many illegal immigrant families are too poor to pay for college.

"Our concern is that people are just going to get trapped for economic reasons into the military," says Mariscal, who otherwise supports the DREAM Act.

Roy Beck, executive director of NumbersUSA, which advocates lower levels of legal and illegal immigration, opposes the DREAM Act because it does not address the larger problems of illegal immigration.

Felipe Matos would be glad to join the military under the DREAM Act.

Born to a single mother in the slums of Brazil, he came to live with relatives in the U.S. at 14. He graduated from high school, got an associate's degree at Miami Dade College and hopes to get a four-year degree and become a high school teacher. He says he wants to repay the country that gave him the opportunity to succeed.

"I have friends who would have loved to join the military," says Matos, 24. "I feel that all of us are just trying to serve and contribute to the only country we know and love."

Fortress Europe’s Expulsion Machine

Control of migrants is now coordinated at a European level by deals that shift the surveillance of frontiers towards the East and South. And the cost in human lives is rising

By Alain Morice and Claire Rodier
First Published 2010-06-15
Courtesy Of "Middle-East-Online"

The world’s democracies unanimously welcomed the fall of the Berlin Wall as a victory for freedom 20 years ago; article 13 of the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights – “Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own” – would finally be upheld. The Council of Europe congratulated itself in 1991 that “political changes now allow for free movement throughout Europe, which is a fundamental condition for the survival and development of free societies and flourishing cultures.” It was not long before the fallout from this freedom frightened Europeans. Initially, it was stressed that, “the right to free movement as set out by international conventions does not imply the freedom to settle in another country.” There was concern about “the spectacular rise in the number of asylum seekers in western Europe and some central European countries who have been tempted to use the Geneva Convention to bypass immigration restrictions.”

New fronts appeared at the end of the cold war and along them, ramparts real and virtual were thrown up, all formidable. In the East, the EU negotiated enlargement in return for a commitment by new member states to control their borders. Every state had to build its own Berlin Wall. For countries around the Mediterranean, the 1999 European summit at Tampere had already advocated “regional cooperation between EU member states and neighbouring third countries in the fight against organised crime,” including people trafficking.

Migrants are called stowaways or victims, but are severely reprimanded as soon as they help each other, as though they were people smugglers. They have now become the target of a discourse that justifies combating them to help them. The summit of heads of state at Seville in June 2002 made the fight against illegal immigration the EU priority in its negotiations with neighbouring countries.

As a result, Old Europe, considering itself unable to control its borders, has scorned existing international accords, and set out to unload this task onto migrants’ countries of origin or transit. The research network Migreurop has popularised the term “outsourcing,” borrowed from economics, to describe these obstacles to the free movement stipulated by international treaties.

The external borders of the Schengen area now benefit from a second, outer perimeter, which depends on the collaboration of third countries. Called the “external dimension of immigration and asylum” policy by the 2004 Hague programme, outsourcing has many ideological excuses. In reality, its purpose is to transfer border controls to non-European states within a partnership that is as opaque as it is unfair. But the leaders of the 27 EU countries see it as their duty to present the matter as the concerted management of immigration flow.

Outsourcing means putting in place a flexible system that consistently moves a little further away from the EU’s borders, through expatriating controls and subcontracting the fight against illegal immigration. What is lost is the right to asylum -- although all EU countries have committed themselves to respecting it by ratifying the Geneva Convention on refugees -- and the right to leave “any country including one’s own,” found in several international treaties.

As early as the 1990s, the EU sent technical advisers abroad, especially to EU accession countries, to block migration at source. A network of immigration liaison officers was formally established in 2004 with the objective of “helping to prevent and combat illegal immigration, return illegal immigrants and manage illegal immigration.” Immigration was labelled illegal before it happened. The main task of these liaison officers has been to assist local authorities in verifying the validity of travel documents in airports, which can lead to the sovereignty of the country of departure being flouted.

Strong Deterrent

In 2001 an EU directive established a system of financial sanctions against haulage contractors found guilty of moving people whose passports or visas were invalid. These sanctions are a strong deterrent, with fines of up to $630,000, and the return of any intercepted people being billed to the company. They force staff without special training to carry out pre-boarding screening of travellers. This privatisation of controls reduces screening on arrival. It has serious consequences where it affects the departure of asylum seekers in need of protection. In principle, their lack of papers or visas cannot be held against them once they have arrived in the host country -- if they can reach it. In August 2007 seven Tunisian fishermen were found guilty and imprisoned by an Italian judge for abetting illegal immigration. Their boats were confiscated. They had rescued a small craft that was sinking and transported its passengers to the closest port, Lampedusa in Sicily, as stipulated by maritime law.

Since 2005 the EU agency Frontex has coordinated interceptions between the coast of Africa and the Canary Islands, and in the Strait of Sicily. Last year the Spanish prime minister José Luis Zapatero congratulated himself on having halved the number of illegal arrivals in Spain by sea. But mortality rates among migrants, at sea or in the desert, have not fallen. Reinforced departure barriers certainly force migrants to turn to circuitous, and more dangerous, routes. Nobody knows how potential asylum seekers are identified during Frontex interventions, although this identification is theoretically mandatory under European norms. The decentralisation symbolised by Frontex takes place beyond any democratic oversight, and it also enables European countries to evade the obligations that apply to their territory because of commitments made to fundamental rights.

The outsourcing of border controls runs through the global partnership with countries of origin and transit consecrated by the European Pact on Immigration and Asylum concluded between the 27 members in 2008. The pact was initiated by France, which at the time held the EU presidency and had made the fight against uncontrolled immigration its pet subject. In the name of “synergy between migration and development,” the treaty obliges the countries from which migrants come, or through which they pass, to become border guards. They are compelled to protect Europe’s boundaries in exchange for financial or political compensation.

The advanced status that Morocco was granted by the EU in 2008 rewards a country that did not stint in its efforts in migration management. In autumn 2005 some 20 sub-Saharan migrants trying to cross the Spanish-Moroccan border fence at Ceuta and Melilla died from falls, suffocation or bullets fired by the Moroccan army. This and the ensuing deadly relocations into the desert beside the (closed) Algerian border had extensive media coverage arranged by the Moroccan government, anxious to show its zeal. The tragedy off al-Hoceima in northeast Morocco on 28 April 2008 had less press coverage: Some 30 people, including four children, drowned after their rubber craft was -- according to witness statements -- deliberately pierced by the police. No independent enquiry has been able to shed light on this.

The readmission agreements signed with neighbouring countries are a key element. To be able to expel from European soil a foreigner whose residence papers are not in order, he must be recognised by his country of origin or the last country he passed through. European states are aware that third countries see little interest in accepting the return of their citizens and even less the return of migrants who merely transited. They have therefore thrown themselves into a never-ending cycle of deals, which has led to corruption and a general decline of rights in Senegal, Ukraine and some Balkan states.

The right to asylum is a direct victim of the war of the EU and its member states against asylum seekers. Those who might be eligible for refugee status are deprived of the possibility of demanding it by being repulsed or retained in buffer countries, tasked to protect Fortress Europe. The EU pretends to believe, in the name of burden sharing, that the asylum seekers it no longer wants to accept will be hosted in good conditions by allies whose cooperation it has bought. It encourages xenophobia against people resented and forced to live precariously in countries that have neither the logistical capacity nor the political will to integrate refugees.

The EU has also encouraged -- and financed -- the development of retention camps. Since 2004, these have been built in the Ukraine, which has at least signed the Geneva convention on refugees. That is not the case with Libya, where the ill-treatment of migrants and refugees is well documented. And yet, since May 2009, Italy has been driving immigrants’ boats back to the Libyan authorities, violating international maritime law and the principle of no return, which makes it illegal to return persons who might require protection.

Co-Development Myth

These are principles that the EU must uphold as part of its commitment to fundamental rights. Yet the violations were perpetrated by a member state without provoking any reaction. In July 2009 the European Commission suggested to Libya that it cooperate in an effort to create a joint balanced management of migration, while the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) offered to act as a mediator for a humanitarian management of detention centres.

The EU’s partnership with third countries not only violates the rights of refugees but seriously threatens a fundamental freedom: that of being able to come and go. The concept of co-development, which might seem generous in associating migration with development, aids this decline. Officially, border security issues are only a part of co-development, but in reality they are predominant: many of the measures planned and monies promised concern the fight against illegal immigration (illegal as viewed from the incoming side). This April the president of Mali, having listened to his diaspora, protested against migrants being systematically escorted back to the border.

The co-development discourse makes unilateral European decisions palatable for populations suddenly described as “players in their own development,” and propagates the idea, not just in Europe but also at the points of departure, that the development of countries of origin will halt illegal immigration. In fact, a country’s economic takeoff encourages its population to be more mobile. And as for aid, this is often misappropriated by leaders. But it is an efficient trick because these countries do lock down their borders and transform themselves into prisons for their own nationals to carry out screening work.

These are the results of the cooperation between Spain and some of its African neighbours: In Algeria and Morocco, illegal emigration is a crime punishable by law, while in Senegal it is punished de facto. Locals are not fooled by this reverse blockade. As the Senegalese daily Le Soleil put it on the eve of the 2006 EU-African conference in Rabat, outsourcing means that Europe is closing our borders.

Alain Morice is an anthropologist with the CNRS, Paris. Claire Rodier is a lawyer with Gisti and vice-president of Migreurop. This article is translated by Tom Genrich.

Copyright © 2010 Le Monde diplomatique – distributed by Agence Global

In The Face Of Immigrant Bashing

Localizing International Human Rights

By JUDITH BLAU, M. RAFAEL GALLEGOS LERMA AND ALFONSO HERNANDEZ
Weekend Edition
January 1 - 3, 2010
Courtesy Of CounterPunch

Immigrant bashing is the order of the day, never mind that we brag that we are a nation of immigrants and never mind that except for the indigenous peoples (about 1 percent of the population) we all come from what demographers call, “foreign stock.”

Our ancestors, white Americans and black slaves worked hard. Early immigrants – western Europeans who came in large numbers around 1850 – worked hard, and then so did those who came in large numbers between 1880 and 1927 -- such as the Irish, Italians, Poles, and Russians. So do Latinos today. The German, Irish, Italians, Poles, and Russians, like contemporary Latinos, came to the US to work. Enterprise and labor were needed in earlier times just as the enterprise and labor of Latino immigrants are needed today. All suffered discrimination, but arguably we would expect less discrimination today compared to, say, a hundred years ago. There are, after all, global standards (treaties) and increasingly widely shared global values against discrimination.

But how can these standards be effective in the US since the US recognizes no human rights treaty? These treaties are all specialized, of course, but every single one of them stresses nondiscrimination, equality, and human dignity. Just to recognize one single treaty -- which we do not do ---would put Americans on record that we are opposed to discrimination and in favor of equality and human dignity.

There is one difference between Latinos/as and those who came before them (except Africans). That is their brown skin, which in contemporary America can trigger racism, making their accommodation more difficult than for other groups. However, resembling millions of earlier migrants, they have arrived as a result of global economic dislocation, and as a result of the loss of jobs and increasing precarious job conditions in their home countries. This may account for why Latinos/as endure social exclusion and brutal exploitation by employers (“wage theft”) in receiving communities. They receive insufferable treatment at the hands of local law enforcement officers who are deputized by the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and are denied health care and basic social services. Between 12 and 20 million unauthorized immigrants live (and work) in the US, welcomed by employers with open arms (as cheap labor), but given no path to citizenship. Yet the US does not recognize the International Convention for the Protection of All Migrant Workers and Their Families, which protects all immigrants from such egregious harms as these. Many Americans fail to recognize that Latinos/as are contributing their labor – in construction, landscaping, farming, and as domestic workers - as well through their tax dollars. Besides, studies show that immigrants without documentation - especially Latinos/as - have much lower crime rates than Americans. The paradox is painful. Overall, Latino/as are excellent workers, admirable social citizens, but cast as outlaws.

But their organizing is nearly out of the question. Their response to questions about mobilizing for local justice goes something like this: “Yo no quiero meterme en problemas con la policía. Yo nomás quiero trabajar y ganar un poco de dinero para mí familia.(“I do not want to get into trouble with the police. I just want to work and earn some money for my family.”)

The Latino/a population does have a voice, mostly through United Farm Workers, La Raza and Reform Immigration FOR America, but these are national organizations and cannot easily be the voices of local communities. We can be. At least in one tiny patch of America. The Human Rights Center of Chapel Hill & Carrboro is located in the largest barrio in the county. Except for the three of us and a school teacher, our comrades are about 50 undergraduates. A big plus is that the students are tremendously diverse - Indians, Pakistanis, Iranians, Greeks, Africans, African Americans, white Americans, Latino/as, etc. The University of North Carolina prides itself on its diverse student body, but our class on Human Rights is especially likely to attract students from other countries. We have discovered that diversity brings with it a special chemistry.

A main program is an afterschool-program that the Center runs jointly with an elementary school. The formal goal is remediation, necessary in an extremely poor immigrant community, but the norms of the after-school program emphasize affirmation of the dignity and worth of every child, consistent with The Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is a “virtuous circle.” Such affirmation spurs high motivation to achieve.

The Center is also engaged in advocacy. For example, we presented a petition in Carrboro Town Hall to make wage theft a criminal offense, and both towns – Carrboro and Chapel Hill – have adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights that we proposed. We regularly put the towns’ police forces on notice that we are watching them watching our neighbors. No hanky-panky. We check on banks to make sure that they are treating Latinos like everybody else. We especially check on employers because we know for sure that many employers cheat our neighbors. When they do we report them to the Department of Labor, confront them, and sometimes are successful, through shame tactics, even in closing their businesses. Carrboro and Chapel Hill are progressive towns, but capitalism is pretty nasty everywhere.

We at the Human Rights Center justify everything we do in terms of the localization of international human rights treaties, such as advocating decent work for our neighbors, occasionally celebrating their festivals with them, and demanding that the larger community does not discriminate against them. We give workshops on “know your labor rights,” and “know your legal rights.” We also involve undergraduates as much as possible in the work of the Center, especially in our after-school program. One student group affiliated with the Center received a grant to install wireless in the entire apartment complex and refurbished computers to households. Access to information is a human right: it was thus declared so in Oslo, 2006. We provide space for another nonprofit to distribute food. After all, food is a human right. On Saturday and Sunday, our students play soccer with the kids in the community. The Convention on the Rights of the Child is clear that “children have the right to engage in play and recreational activities.”

We also have programs to promote social inclusion - LINC or Linking Immigrants to New Communities – run mostly by Latina students - and a family outreach program - Madres para Ninos - developed by a faculty member in the School of Education but mainly run by college students. Yes, the goal is to improve immigrants’ employability, as spelled out in The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights, but it also advances their autonomy and dignity, which is highlighted in every Human Rights Treaty. Both programs welcome both men and women, but they also see as their mission the empowerment of women, consistent with the human rights treaty on the rights of women.

One of the most sustaining visions we have is to celebrate our neighbors, and, to illustrate how, we ask them where they come from, and when they are at the Center to find their home town or rural community using Google. Most come from Mexico, but some from Ecuador, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. “What was it like?” “What do you miss?” “Are your relatives still there?” We believe this validates their culture, something they do not commonly experience in the United States. We do the same with the children. Everyone has the right to a cultural identity and society is better off if we uphold cultural pluralism. This is why we celebrated one night of Las Posadas with our neighbors, and why we will celebrate the Burmese Festival, Thingyan, in the spring. Our neighbors tell us that they had not celebrated Las Posadas since coming to the U.S., fearful that they might have been met with disapproval.

We mentioned the undergraduates. They cannot possibly know how important they are in motivating and and winning over the children (but the teacher, Nancy, knows), and we can see the social and learning growth. We can see them flourish. The children are growing intellectually and socially in ways we never anticipated, and they probably didn’t either. They are more confident and eager to get to their homework. Part of this we believe has to do with the fact that since the college students come in “all flavors,” the children feel secure and the college students who come from India or Pakistan, Iran, or an African country have a special empathy with children who come from another country.

This semester – our first full one - has been totally thrilling. Now we will learn to tack and jibe to keep the Center pursuing all its missions, with the balance that seems right to our neighbors and to us.

Judith Blau is Director of the Center and professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. jrblau@email.unc.edu

M. Rafael Gallegos Lerma is the Associate Director of the Center and a graduate student in sociology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill mrlerma@email.unc.edu

Alfonso Hernandez is Assistant Director of the Center and a student at Durham Tech. hernandez-alfonso@hotmail.com