Protecting illegal immigrants, state by state

Advocate groups are pursuing their own campaigns on behalf of workers, including seeking a 2012 ballot measure in California.

by Michael Finnegan, Los Angeles Times

December 11, 2011

The failure of Congress and recent presidents to overhaul the immigration system led Arizona and other states to devise their own crackdowns on illegal immigrants. Now, immigrant rights groups are pursuing their own drives, state by state and in varied ways, to protect illegal immigrants.

Connecticut and Maryland have passed laws to charge lower in-state college tuition rates to students who are illegal immigrants. Utah has created identification cards for illegal immigrant "guest workers" and their families. New California laws will offer college financial aid to illegal immigrants and ensure that their cars are not seized if they are caught at traffic stops without driver's licenses — which they cannot legally obtain.

Most recently, a bipartisan group in California has drafted a November 2012 state ballot measure aimed at allowing hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants to come forward and pay income taxes without fear of deportation. It would also attempt to spare their employers from prosecution.

Organizers of the California ballot measure campaign were inspired largely by conservatives' success in pushing the tough enforcement measures in Arizona, Alabama and Georgia, where, among other steps, police were authorized to check immigration papers. Alabama's law requires public schools to check children's immigration status.

"Well, it's good for the goose, it's good for the gander," said Antonio Gonzalez, a Latino civil rights advocate who helped form the coalition sponsoring the California initiative.

Frank Sharry, the founder of America's Voice, a group that supports the sort of comprehensive reform that has eluded Presidents Obama and George W. Bush, said Washington's dysfunction was likely to "keep the immigration system mired in the status quo for a number of years."

"If that's true, then it's not only the states that want to pass anti-immigrant legislation that are going to fill that vacuum, it's also the states that want to pass pro-immigrant legislation," said Sharry, who is not involved in the new proposal.

The clash between states taking varying approaches to immigration comes as the Republican Party is roiled by tension over the issue in its presidential nomination race.

Former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney has made immigration a centerpiece of his appeals to conservatives, with a tougher approach that touts his support for a border fence and his veto of in-state tuition benefits for illegal immigrants.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry was hammered by rivals for saying that critics of tuition assistance for illegal immigrant students were heartless; he has been scrambling ever since to regain favor with conservatives.

Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, has faced attacks — so far, to no avail — for supporting steps to legalize the status of undocumented immigrants who have lived for many years in the United States and have not committed crimes.

The differing reactions suggest that at least some Republicans were more upset at Perry's personal rebuke than his policies. Indeed, recent polls suggest that Republicans overall hold relatively moderate views on immigration. A Pew Research Center poll last month found that 41% of Republicans thought that the priority for dealing with illegal immigration should be both border security and creating a path to citizenship, only slightly below the 45% of Democrats who favored such a combined approach.

In California, backers of the initiative say they will target not just Democrats and independents but also Republicans, in part by arguing that illegal immigrants who are thoroughly integrated into California society should be encouraged to pay taxes, providing the state with desperately needed cash.

"I think we're past the point in California history where anybody really believes that we're going to round up 3 million people and deport them on buses and trains," said Mike Madrid, the Republican who is managing the campaign.

The measure is sponsored by Assemblyman Felipe Fuentes (D-Sylmar) and John Cruz, a Republican who was appointments secretary to Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger. To get it on the ballot, proponents must collect 504,760 voter signatures.

The measure's legal strength is uncertain. It would set up a five-year pilot program for immigrants who lack legal papers to live or work in the United States. To qualify, immigrants must have no felony convictions and cannot be on welfare. They must file state tax returns and learn English, if they do not speak it already.

The initiative would require California's governor to ask the president not to spend federal resources to catch or deport those enrolled in the program, and not to prosecute their employers.

But there would be no guarantee that the president would direct federal authorities to cooperate. Kathleen Walker, a former president of the American Immigration Lawyers Assn., said the risk of deportation could deter many immigrants from joining the program.

"That's just a real walking-into-a-fire kind of option," she said.

The campaign to pass the initiative would also face vigorous opposition, at minimum from talk radio hosts who regularly take on illegal immigration.

"We'd be saying it's OK to sneak over here and be illegal, and we'll help you get a job, and you're going to pay taxes, you don't have to wait in line," said Richard Mountjoy, author of Proposition 187, the 1994 ballot measure that sought to ban public services for illegal immigrants. "I think that's outrageous."

Although Proposition 187 passed before being largely voided in court, it also ignited a surge in Latino voting that has helped to marginalize the Republican Party in California.

Supporters of the new immigration measure see it as a parallel to the 1996 ballot measure that legalized medical marijuana in California in defiance of federal drug laws — and as a model for laws that other states can adopt.

"The way America changes is through the states," Gonzalez said. "That's really the beauty of states' rights, stripped of its deservedly evil connotation from the Jim Crow era."

Bill Wright, a Republican who sponsored Utah's guest worker law in the state's House of Representatives, said states that disagreed with the approach taken by Arizona and Alabama had little choice but to take matters into their own hands, given the inaction of lawmakers in Washington.

"They don't have much ability to do anything back there right now," he said, "and they'll be quite frank in telling you it's not going to happen."

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-immigration-states-20111212,0,3595399,print.story

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Harley riders donate bikes, other toys to kids on skid row

Harley-Davidson motorcycle riders gave away 550 new bicycles and 800 other toys to needy children at the Fred Jordan Mission in downtown Los Angeles on Sunday morning.

Some 800 Harley riders formed a caravan from Harley-Davidson of Glendale to the skid row mission at 445 Towne Ave. The toys were given to children who live in and around skid row, many in hotels.

"It's just the look on the kids' faces when they get a brand-new bicycle, it makes you feel good,” event organizer Richard Wagner said. “It's a pretty depressing place to live."

http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/lanow/

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The homeless on the holidays: Some food for thought

After 6 1/2 years of being homeless, holiday abundance feels like a luxury.

by Les Gapay

December 12, 2011

My church recently compiled a cookbook of favorite recipes from parishioners. I submitted my "recipes" for canned stew and chunky soup, mainstays of the dinners I ate at campgrounds while I was homeless for 6 1/2 years and living out of my truck and a tent. I wanted to remind people about those less fortunate and that cooking in a well-appointed kitchen is a luxury, not something to be taken for granted. But my submissions didn't make the book.

A lot of people never think about how the poor live. There is plenty to eat in this country, and most of us never have to give the availability of food a second thought. This is especially true during the holiday season, when the biggest problem most Americans face is how not to overeat. But it's good to put our blessings into perspective.

I've been both well off and poor. For 5 1/2 years when I was a child, I lived with my family in West German refugee camps for persons displaced by World War II. During that time, we ate rationed food given out by Allied occupying troops. Dinner was often some type of porridge and bread, or sometimes just soup. Lunch might be nothing but cottage cheese and bread, with which I would make a sandwich. But my late parents and I, who had fled Hungary, were glad just to be alive.

For a while, we and others kept a vegetable garden hidden in some woods near one of the camps. Once some other kids and I watched from a distance as Germans from a nearby village stole the vegetables we were growing, but we were afraid to stop them. That was the end of the garden.

No food was allowed to be taken from the mess halls run by troops, and the rule was strictly enforced. Once, when my uncle put his apple in his pocket to save for me for later, he was caught and sent to the brig for a day or two.

At times, my mother would sneak into farmers' pastures at night to milk cows so I would have milk to drink. And once we went to a farmer's house to buy a chicken for a very rare treat. The chicken was running around the farmer's yard. The farmer got an ax, put the chicken on a tree stump and cut off its head. It ran around squirting blood until it died. My mother plucked the feathers and we had a chicken dinner, maybe the first one I ever had.

After we came to this country, we ate much better, but it took a few years. One Christmas season, when I was 8, a priest in our Montana town brought a sack of groceries to our house. That's when I first realized we were poor. We often ate franks and beans, and our baths were in a donated horse trough in the kitchen. As my parents moved up in their hospital jobs, we moved to a better house, and on some Sundays we ate fried chicken at a restaurant. My mother took pride in the Hungarian desserts she would sometimes make, and one of her recipes made a local newspaper's cookbook.

At the time I got married, I was very thin, but within a year I had added more weight than I wanted from my wife's cooking. Eventually we ended up living on both the East and West coasts, where I worked as a journalist. We had two kids and a house in the suburbs, and later we moved to Montana, where we built a house overlooking a lake and also owned a cherry orchard a few miles away. During those 20 years of marriage we mostly ate traditional family fare, sometimes cooking from gourmet cookbooks. We prepared holiday feasts and ate at our share of good restaurants. I wouldn't say I took the abundance for granted; I just never thought about it.

Years later, when I was single again, my writing and public relations consulting work fell way off because of the economy, and I became homeless. I had my truck and tent, and I put myself on waiting lists for senior housing while I Iived off the little work I did get and on my Social Security retirement payments once I became eligible. For years, I ate canned food and cereal at campgrounds, supplemented with dollar sandwiches at fast-food joints, mostly in the Southern California desert. It didn't seem so bad; it was just necessary. At holidays, I sometimes went for a free meal for the poor at churches.

Today, sometimes to my consternation, I eat much better. For the last three years — now that I have an apartment with a kitchen — I have had to keep an eye on my weight. This Thanksgiving, I longed for a festive dinner at home while watching football, something I had enjoyed in my previous life. I cooked a turkey breast with all the trimmings and bought a pie. It was a lot of work for one person, especially the cleanup. Now, like many Americans, I'm dieting to take off the pounds I put on from eating too much during Thanksgiving week.

Soon Christmas will be here, and I will have to make a decision about what to eat for dinner, and whether eating exactly as I'd like is worth having to diet again afterward. Whatever I decide, I don't want to forget the times when I was less fortunate and didn't have that choice to make — some many pounds ago.

Les Gapay is a freelance writer living in Rancho Mirage. In 2008, he wrote for The Times about being homeless, and in 2009, about finding an apartment.

http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-gapay-food-and-gratitude-20111212,0,2806422,print.story

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