Archive for the 'Immigration' Category

Alberto Gonzales: Oblivious with Good Reason

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 30, 2008
in Immigration and Politics
. 0 Comments

Josh Patashnik at The Plank:

…immigration judges aren’t minor backroom bean counters; they’re responsible for conducting formal court proceedings to determine what should be done with aliens who have been apprehended by federal authorities. Yet the former attorney general of the United States admits that he literally didn’t know how they were being screened and selected by people under his direct supervision… It’s particularly disappointing that someone with extensive experience practicing law in a border state would have so little regard for selecting qualified immigration judges.

It is indeed pretty horrifying that an Attorney General was (or pretended to be) ignorant about the hiring portfolio of one of his employees, regardless of what that hiring portfolio included. But the situation is a little more complicated than Patashnik admits.

In fairness, I don’t blame people who haven’t been spending their days at immigration court for the last few weeks like I have (it’s so I can write one of these, though I doubt it’ll attract the attention of future generations of oppo researchers) for not understanding the bizarrely nebulous relationship immigration court has with the DoJ (through the Executive Office of Immigration Reform, which employs judges) and the Department of Homeland Security (Citizenship and Immigration Services, Customs and Border Protection and ICE all have some role in referring cases; prosecutors are employed through ICE as well).

Suffice to say that it’s undeniably true that the DoJ hires immigration judges, but immigration court itself is a weird melange of departmental responsibilities. It’s not that the division of labor is unclear, at least in terms of the system: one of my sources explained to me that a 2003 law provided summary clarification by listing all the cases in which the phrase “at the discretion of the Attorney General” should be replaced by “at the discretion of the Secretary of Homeland Security.”

At the level of individual cases, there’s often some wiggle room regarding whether a case should be handled judicially through EOIR or administratively through CIS. That’s to be expected, but the push-and-pull doesn’t stop there. To cite just one example, hearings for detained individuals are held in a courtroom in ICE offices; cases for non-detained individuals are heard across the street, in a courtroom at EOIR offices. The same ICE attorneys and EOIR judge preside at both.

At the federal level, of course, it’s clear that more emphasis and resources are being placed on immigration court on the ICE end than the EOIR end: think how many people might have been involved in planning the Postville raid, and then think of the understaffing of immigration judges. Furthermore, ICE initiatives like Operation Streamline, which are currently overwhelming federal (criminal) judges in border states, were designed to decrease the caseload on immigration judges — making EOIR even more secondary to immigration proceedings. (This is also why, contra Patashnik, Gonzales’ legal experience in a border state didn’t make him automatically more likely to pay attention to immigration judges as Attorney General.)

Clearly, there were broader failures in corporate culture at the Department of Justice under Gonzales. But the obliviousness regarding immigration judges speaks just as much to another paradigmatic failure: the tendency of the federal government to treat immigration exclusively as an issue of Homeland Security despite its roots in Justice, to the extent that the latter is forgotten entirely.

I’m well aware that in some anthropological circles it may be considered compromising my fieldwork to blog about it during the period I’m in the field, even though most of this information is publicly available through other means and none of it is confidential. I’m also well aware that in some anthropological circles the question of “relevance” is paramount, and relevance doesn’t wait for formal peer review. Besides, I’m an undergraduate. Cut me some slack.

In which the U.S. Conference of Mayors agrees with me.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 7, 2008
in Immigration, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

Insofar as Noah’s response to my post of yesterday can be summarized as “The most pragmatically viable response is to blame employers because it’s better than blaming immigrants,” I agree completely. Insofar as it can be summarized as “We shouldn’t be talking about changing our own perception in ways that can’t make for more viable public narratives” I disagree vehemently.

The initial reason that I wrote the post was actually that I’m frustrated generally with a refusal to expect business owners to see their workers as human beings rather than warm bodies and this is a very good example of that. But Noah’s attribution of it to my radical localism on immigration is also valid. I suspect that a paradigm shift will be a more durable solution to the issue than even the most liberal legislation will, and the xenophobes are more likely to change their minds when they get to know actual immigrants — or at least have to confront them at marches and town-hall meetings — than through narratives delivered on the national stage.

The short-term effects will be pretty bad in places like Hazleton or Prince George’s County, but the short-term effects will be pretty bad there anyway, and what ICE is doing — in those cities as well as more immigrant-friendly places like New Haven and LA — is worse by orders of magnitude. And if the news out of the Conference of Mayors is any indication, local governments are largely at least somewhat pro-immigrant in their outlook. So pragmatically we’re in decent shape.

I get the importance of narratives. But I suspect it’s the smaller, private changes in attitude that will end up driving immigration reform on a human scale.

A clinic for the cure of bleeding hearts.

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 7, 2008
in Immigration and Politics
. 2 Comments

Another day, another story about immigration-law processes in the MSM. This one is the Washington Post with an article about the increasing popularity of immigration clinics at law schools, which ought to be reassuring but instead is just hugely depressing.

Apparently, despite sources at a number of schools, the Post couldn’t find anyone who had actually gone into practice advocating for immigrants after participating in one of these clinics as a law student. The best they could do was a current student who “definitely plans to” do so, and an alumna who’s now a lawyer for the government because she wants to “push for the middle.” (Because if we’ve learned anything from Guantanamo, it’s that moderate-minded lawyers have high efficacy and job satisfaction.)

Don’t get me wrong; I appreciate that the clinic system allows immigrants — not to mention disadvantaged clients of other clinics — access to talented legal minds. But it seems to me that rather than giving students a taste of a field that leads them to develop a career interest, clinics actually have the effect of allowing students to quiet their consciences when they take the (lucrative) beaten path after graduation: “Hey, I did the do-gooder thing back in law school, I’ve done my part.” Part of this might be that the culture of law schools does a lot to encourage defeatist attitudes toward social-justice-y but unglamorous areas of legal practice.

The perspective this enables is one I’ve run into most frequently in high-school theatre. Sure, students appreciate the opportunity to get out and do what they love, not to mention the recognition: from what I know of pre-law undergrads, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if the prestige of “hot” immigration clinics drew ambitious students who didn’t much care about immigration. But regardless of how fulfilling they find it now, they shrug it off with “but of course I’m not crazy enough to do it for a living.”

What we seem to be left with is a system where the ranks of immigration lawyers are populated by clinic students on one side, and clinic alumni on the other. That bodes poorly for the students — not to mention those they represent.

The table next to me at the Cosi where I’m blogging is occupied by two young lawyers, one of whom just said to the other: “But I’m just out of law school, I couldn’t just go work for the Obama campaign.” Case in point?

Layover NYT blogging

Published
by
Dara Lind
on July 6, 2008
in Immigration, Media and Politics
. 0 Comments

The more I learn about immigration policy, the more frustrated I get with the (mostly) uncritical consensus that employers who hire undocumented immigrants deserve to be prosecuted. Today’s NYT lead story reads to me like a step and a half in the right direction.

First of all, since employers are lobbying for more liberal immigration policy at the grassroots and state as well as federal levels, they’re more likely to have an impact where the legislative action is as well as changing citizens’ opinions. (Public opinion, incidentally, is offered by Secretary Chertoff at the end of the article as the reason immigration policy can’t be liberalized — which would be a satisfactory explanation if his department’s own ICE, wholly unaccountable to public opinion, weren’t pursuing more aggressive anti-undocumented-immigrant practices in the absence of any change in law.)

Second of all, this is being covered without recourse to the phantom the pro-immigrant Left usually raises over this issue: “employers who hire undocumented immigrants engage in abusive and inhumane practices!” It’s true that noncitizens don’t have the leverage to protect their rights that would make abuse impossible, but from what I’ve heard in the field the phenomenon is greatly exaggerated.

In fact, the relationship between employer and employee is often more humane than it’s usually given credit for being, and I’m disappointed that the Times didn’t touch on this as well (hence the half-step). Most employers the NYT quotes are driven by their need to “fill” positions, i.e. with warm bodies — providing at least some credibility to the claim of inhumane treatment. One employer goes further in recognizing her employees as human beings, arguing that their skill and knowledge make them “irreplaceable.”

But no one the Times quotes finds himself (or is willing to admit he finds himself) in the position that I hear is most common: having been presented with documentation that appeared to be legitimate at the time of hiring, employers don’t want to confront their workers about it now because they feel a personal connection to them and don’t want to leave them out in the cold. Perhaps this is mostly true of small business owners, who are less likely to be on the radar of a Times reporter; but it seems to me that much of the reason no one says these things in the press is that no one expects them to do so.

Both Left and Right expect employers to treat their employees according to a purely transactional logic rather than a corporate one — some call it exploitation, some entrepreneurialism. And they’re expected to lobby as business owners protecting their interests, not people engaged in relationships with others. But the ability of various dynamics to play into a single relationship — economic and personal, for example — is one of the strongest arguments for integrating immigrants into their communities completely rather than allowing them to remain in the shadows. Failing to recognize the humanity of business relationships makes it impossible to talk about this, and impugns the transactional logic by which we’re expected to talk about business in general.