ethnic media

Weekly Immigration Update: U.S. Citizens Increasingly the Victims of the Broken Immigration System

I. Growing media market, forum for immigration discussion - This past week, we discussed the role of ethnic media. The fact that immigration reform is an issue of top concern to immigrants, naturalized Americans, and their U.S. born descendants; combined with this type of media's growing market share makes it an important space for discussion of the latest news pertaining to immigration reform.

II. Illinois 5 - We also touched on the recent election in Illinois to fill Rahm Emmanuel's seat and its impact on immigration reform.

III. What Part of "Illegal" Don't They Understand?  U.S. citizens are also victims of the broken immigration system - More and more cases  are surfacing of U.S. citizens being illegally detained for extended periods of time. The latest cases demonstrate that event with the best intentions of the current Administration to shift enforcement priorities, the "boots on the ground" are often still the same from the raid-quota Bush era, and legal residents and citizens will continue to get caught in the cross-fire until we pass comprehensive immigration reform.  The absence of CIR only exacerbates discriminaton against immigrants and non-immigrants alike.  This has been evidenced in Arizona, where three of every four immigrants are considered "criminals."

In a drive to crack down on illegal immigrants, the United States has unlawfully locked up or deported many of its own citizens over the past eight years. A months-long AP investigation has documented 55 such cases, on the basis of interviews, lawsuits and documents obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These citizens are detained for anything from a day to five years. Immigration lawyers say that there are actually hundreds of such cases, based on their caseload.

It is illegal to deport U.S. citizens or detain them for immigration violations. Yet citizens still end up in detention because the system is overwhelmed, acknowledged Victor Cerda, who left Immigration and Customs Enforcement in 2005 after overseeing the system. The AP reports, the number of detentions overall is expected to rise by about 17 percent this year to more than 400,000, putting a severe strain on the enforcement network and legal system.

Most at risk are Hispanics, who made up the majority of the cases the AP found:

"The more the system becomes confused, the more U.S. citizens will be wrongfully detained and wrongfully removed," said Bruce Einhorn, a retired immigration judge who now teaches at Pepperdine Law School. "They are the symptom of a larger problem in the detention system. ... Nothing could be more regrettable than the removal of our fellow citizens."

And our fellow citizens are getting caught in the cross-fire of anti-immigrant fervor, a few examples:

1) Frank Ponce de Leon, a U.S. citizen and native of Mexico who lives in La Puente, Calif., spent almost three months in immigration custody - all the while insisting he was a U.S. citizen. "I knew they couldn't hold me forever, and sooner or later they would see it my way because I had every right," he said.

2) Renninson Castilo, spent almost eight months illegally detained. 

3) Pedro Guzman, a mentally disabled U.S. citizen living in Lancaster was taken by U.S. immigration officials and shipped to Tijuana in May 2007 from the Men's Central Jail in downtown Los Angeles. He was being held on a misdemeanor trespassing charge. The Los Angeles native, then 29, spent three months rummaging for food in dumps and sleeping in the Mexican borderlands as his mother, a fast-food cook, searched for him in hospitals, shelters, jails and morgues.  Eventually Guzman was reunited with his family in the border town of Calexico.

4) Thomas Warziniack was born in Minnesota and grew up in Georgia, but immigration authorities pronounced him an illegal immigrant from Russia. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has held Warziniack for weeks in an Arizona detention facility with the aim of deporting him to a country he's never seen. His jailers shrugged off Warziniack's claims that he was an American citizen, even though they could have retrieved his Minnesota birth certificate in minutes and even though a Colorado court had concluded that he was a U.S. citizen a year before it shipped him to Arizona. McLatchy reports:

"The immigration agents told me they never make mistakes," Warziniack said in an earlier phone interview from jail. "All I know is that somebody dropped the ball."

According to available data, workplace arrests rose from 517 in fiscal year 2003 to 6,274 in 2008. Julie Myers, former Homeland Security assistant secretary overseeing ICE, said agents quickly sort out which workers are citizens during raids. But the raids have already led to several lawsuits.

5) In 2007, 114 U.S. citizens and permanent residents sued after a raid on Micro Solutions Enterprises, a computer printer equipment recycler in Van Nuys, Calif. They alleged illegal detention and sought $5,000 damage each.

6) In 2008, the union representing workers at six Swift & Co. meatpacking plants sued on behalf of eight citizens and legal residents caught up in raids.

7) In one case, three citizens and nine others, all Hispanic, sued after ICE agents raided their New Jersey homes as part of what was dubbed Operation Return To Sender. The lawsuit alleges that an immigration agent pulled a gun on one of the citizens, a 9-year-old boy.

8) Ricardo Martinez, born in McAllen, Texas - like so many others - lived in Mexico between the ages of 5 and 17. He was stopped last year on his way back to Texas from visiting Mexico:

Martinez's stepfather, Florentino Mireles, said in a Feb. 27, 2008, affidavit that he called border inspectors to ask why they had taken Martinez's documents. The response, he said: An officer didn't believe Martinez was a U.S. citizen because he didn't speak English.

On top of the unfounded detention, the Customs officials threatened that if Martinez did not admit to being in the country illegally and sign such an affidavit, he'd go to jail. Like so many other legal immigrants and citizens, he signed his own order for deportation.

Attorney Lisa Brodyaga discussed the report, "I've been doing this for 30 years and I've seen bureaucratic bungling. This is more than that," she said. "This is an atmosphere of suspicion and hostility, particularly for Mexican-Americans on the border."

What is clear is that immigration detentions - including those of citizens - have soared in recent years. Largely thanks to the political climate since 9-11 that encouraged a tough stance on illegal immigration. The inability to pass immigration reform legislation almost three years ago has only exacerbated this problem.

Before 2007, just seven state and local law enforcement agencies worked with ICE officials under 287(g) agreements that empower localities to an extent to enforce immigration aw. By last November, more than 950 officers from 23 states had attended a four-week program on how to root out and jail "suspected illegal immigrants."

IV. No doubt, this zealousness in enforcement is largely fueled by some of the most shocking displays of racism our country has seen - What is most shocking is how the demonization of Hispanics and bigotry, when directed at people thought to be immigrants, is somehow acceptable. Examples this week: 1) Glenn Beck - hating on all things, period. 2) Betty Brown, a Republican state representative, is facing numerous demands that she apologize for having said that voters of Asian descent should adopt names that are "easier for Americans to deal with." 3) In your neighborhood - A Washington Post piece yesterday by Jonathan Mummolo noted how recent arrest data in Prince William County further questions the contention that "illegal immigrants" are only detained once they have committed a serious crime. The data concludes that about 2 percent of the people charged with major violent crimes in Prince William County last year were illegal immigrants.

V. Do We Want Immigrants? - Last week we discussed growing news reports on how H-1B workers and the U.S. itself are increasingly affected by policies that are anti-immigrant, at best. See this interesting editorial piece in the New York Times that asks, "Do We Need Foreign Technology Workers?" and today's piece in the CQ, on the H-1B visa debate.

 

In Sinking Media Market, Hispanic and Other Ethnic Media Thrive

There is coverage today of a new study indicating that Hispanics made up nearly half of the more than 1 million people who became U.S. citizens in 2008 - almost 1 of 2 new Americans are Latino.  Additionally, the number of Latinos who became American citizens in FY 2008 more than doubled from the previous year.  It stands to reason the sucess of ethnic media that reflects this growing multicultural reality. A piece by Mandalit de Barco today on NPR's morning edition focuses precisely on the growing market share of "ethnic media," happening for various reasons: 

Many of these newspapers and broadcast stations are doing well because they've tapped into an expanding audience - the sons and daughters of immigrants.  In Los Angeles, the No. 1 TV station isn't NBC, CBS, ABC or Fox - it's Spanish-language KMEX, the flagship of Univision. And it isn't just Los Angeles' top station - Nielsen says it's No. 1 in the U.S. with viewers aged 18-49. KMEX built big numbers with immigrant audiences, but is now drawing their sons and daughters - and even their grandchildren.

University of Southern California journalism professor Felix Gutierrez says it's more than just language that's attracting those younger viewers.  "I was watching last night, and they were talking about the border wars - drug smuggling and all that. But they were covering it from the Mexican side. They had the same kind of footage, but it was a different perspective, a different angle that I don't see on CBS, NBC, CNN and the other networks," Gutierrez says.

Largely in response to the ties of many immigrants, one will undoubtedly find that these multicultural outlets have a great deal more international news than local, and thus a wider breadth of stories.  They must cover the local school, storm, or kindapping, in addition to the elections in El Salvador, violence on the border, and new constitution in Bolivia.

Not only is the content more diverse than traditional media, these outlets are forced to be more dynamic and market to a more diverse, multigenerational, audience: 

Previously, these stations used to rely on ethnic audiences that had few other options because they weren't comfortable in English. But that's not necessarily true of immigrants' children.

"We know that the first generation watches us," [Eric Olander] says. "The second generation's much more difficult to capture, in part because they have language skills, which allow them to watch MTV, to go listen to NPR. They have a much wider array of choices. Not to mention, the second generation, which are younger, is watching less TV - they're on the Web, they're not reading the newspapers in the numbers they were. Their media patterns are changing."

That's why in addition to its broadcasts, KSCI now offers podcasts, blogs and video online in various Asian languages and in English.

The biggest Spanish language daily newspaper in the country, La Opinion, is also reaching out online. The Los Angeles paper's circulation has dipped, but it still has half a million readers.

Publisher Monica Lozano says the newspaper, which was started in 1926 by her grandfather, survived the Great Depression, battles over immigration and world wars, and it's now adapting to the recession and new media appetites. Lozano says Latino households tend to be multigenerational, multilingual and multimedia.

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