Backlash Against Mexican ID Cards
El Norte Digest
New California Media, Compiled and Edited by Marcelo Ballve, Posted: Jan 16, 2003
“El Norte” is a weekly report on news and views from the Latino press and communities.
Traducción en español
Backlash Against Mexican ID Cards
For watchdog groups that push for less immigration, few trends are more reviled than the spread of identification cards issued by Mexican consulates. During 2002, hundreds of U.S. businesses, governments, hospitals and police departments began accepting the cards.
But the matrícula consular—as the document is known in Spanish—is now beginning to encounter some resistance due to security fears and an intensive grassroots campaign against the cards, which are often used by illegal immigrants.
The California-based American Patrol and the Washington D.C.-based Project USA, both groups that want to limit immigration, are movers in a campaign to encourage governments and businesses to reject what the American Patrol calls “sham ID cards.” In a Jan. 13 ezine, Project USA, known for its “immigration information” highway billboards and Internet activism, said the identification cards were in reality a “stealth amnesty” for illegal aliens. Both groups cheered decisions by New York City and New York State, which in late December rejected the cards due to security concerns. Other northeastern state governments that have growing Mexican populations, including New Jersey and Connecticut, are also resisting the cards.
La Opinión, the Spanish-language daily in Los Angeles, said in an editorial last year that opponents of the cards are shortsighted, since the matriculas bring benefits to the wider community, including more immigrant bank deposits and cooperation with police departments.
For undocumented Mexicans—who may number more than 1 million in California alone—these cards can be used to open bank accounts at Wells Fargo, Bank of America or register for services in places like Oakland, Calif., Phoenix and Los Angeles. The Mexican government has issued an estimated 1 million of these cards through its 43 U.S. consulates.
Dissident’s Tour Roils Cuban-Americans
Cuban-Americans, along with many other Latinos, were transfixed by the unexpected visit to the United States of leading Cuban dissident, Oswaldo Payá. The visit revealed the deep fault-lines of opinion lingering among both U.S.-based exiles and dissidents in Cuba regarding how to approach Fidel Castro’s government.
Payá, who during his trip met with European leaders and U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell to push his Varela Project—a pro-democracy petition he is circulating in Cuba—had his toughest audience in Miami, when he met with conservative exiles Jan. 13 who accuse him of utilizing, and to some extent legitimizing, what they consider a “corrupt” system. One influential exile group, the Council for Cuban Liberty, also criticized Payá for not referring more clearly to the issue of human rights on the island during his U.S. tour.
The San Francisco Spanish-language weekly El Bohemio News featured a column by Cuban independent journalist Raúl Rivero in Havana. While acknowledging the public relations value of the trip, Rivero wrote, “the best thing for everybody would have been for Oswaldo Payá not to have traveled….”
Payá has said that the solution to Cuba’s problems should be “de-Americanized.” Payá and other dissidents within Cuba sometimes accuse exiles of relying too much on Washington for pushing change in Cuba through the increasingly unpopular trade embargo and diplomatic pressure. Payá said the embargo was not “a factor of change” in Cuba, according to the Miami Spanish-language daily, El Nuevo Herald.
“Sometimes, the reality that is most difficult to accept, not only for Cubans, but for other Latin Americans living a crisis, is that solutions need to come from within,” said Marcela Sanchez, a Spanish-language television reporter for Univision, in a column for the Washington Post.
Analysts - Free Trade Means More Latin American Immigration
While farmers staged violent anti-free trade protests in Mexico Jan.13, analysts said U.S.-brokered trade deals spreading across Latin America will damage agriculture in the region and may send larger flows of job-seeking immigrants northward.
The news that Chile had joined the United States in a free trade deal and the farm unrest triggered by the elimination of Mexico’s agricultural tariffs prompted talk of a new exodus out of Latin America’s rural areas. With the Mexican market suddenly wide open to U.S. fruit, grain and poultry—sectors once protected by tariffs as high as 48 percent— many fear a wave of farm bankruptcies.
In Fresno, California, the weekly Vida en el Valle Spanish-language newspaper published a New Year’s Day editorial calling for a guest worker program to alleviate some of the strain on the Mexican economy caused by the tariff removals. “It could help ease the pressure to emigrate,” the editorial said.
In the Dec. 2002 edition of his quarterly Migration News, University of California at Davis professor Phil Martin highlighted the following statistics—about 25 percent of Mexicans live in the country’s countryside, but farm products account for only about 5 percent of economic production. Many Latin American and Caribbean leaders, among them Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide—who focused on the subject in his year 2000 book, “Eyes of the Heart”—express worries free trade will ravage the region’s rural economies, which may not be economically dynamic, but employ millions.
Other countries in Latin America, including Uruguay and a bloc of Central American nations, also want to sign bilateral free trade agreements with the United States. The White House views these agreements as stepping stones to its engineering of a hemispheric free trade zone.
Immigrant Airport Workers Dismissed Nationwide
Security threat? That headline, in Chicago Spanish-language weekly Éxito, referred to dozens of immigrant airport workers detained as part of a federal anti-terror operation. The FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service aim to flush undocumented workers out of airport jobs that have access to runways, aircraft or other sensitive areas.
According to Éxito, 32 Mexican airport workers were arrested in Chicago raids in December. In the Los Angeles, San Jose and San Francisco areas, in what was called Operation Tarmac, over 120 airport workers, mostly Asians and Latinos, were apprehended for visa irregularities or criminal backgrounds. “We are taking a proactive approach to prevent acts threatening public safety,” said Charles DeMore, INS district director for San Francisco.
Activists complain legal residents have been wrongfully caught in the dragnet. Protests shook Chicago in early January as activists pressed authorities to drop charges or deportation orders. The protesters claimed most suspects do not deserve the harsh punishments, including bail in the thousands of dollars.
The FBI also ordered fingerprinting or 10-year background checks for a wide variety of airport workers nationwide, and it was not only those with specialized access, or non-citizen security screeners, who were fired. For example, in San Francisco, two Filipino non-citizen employees were fired after their fingerprints came back “unclassifiable” and the men were unable to provide documentation to answer for gaps in their employment history, according to the Service Employees International Union. Fingerprints can sometimes not be verified when an individual is elderly or has done manual labor.
Page
1 of 1
|
