Immigration

Obama Immigration Policy: Record Arrests

Eric Lotke — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 04:55:01 -0700

New data just came in from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse (TRAC) at Syracuse University. In the first nine months of fiscal year 2009 the U.S. government reported 67,994 new immigration prosecutions, continuing and accelerating the surge from the Bush years. If this activity continues at the same pace, the annual total of prosecutions will be 90,659 for this fiscal year, up 14.1 percent from last year.

Everyone agrees there is an immigration problem in America. But accelerating arrests doesn’t look much like a solution. We’re still waiting for change.

Reality Check: Immigrants and Health Care

Immigration Policy Center — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 12:18:50 -0700

Washington D.C. - As the current debate on health care rages in town halls across the nation, immigration is being used as a way to jam a stick into the wheels of impending reform. Some are scapegoating immigrants as a way to thwart progress on the issue and are arguing that even legal immigrants be restricted from our health system. Linking these two issues does nothing to advance necessary reforms to either health care or immigration. The U.S. can do both, but public debate and discussion must be based on facts, not myths and misinformation.

The U.S. is not spending "too much" on health care for immigrants.
• A July 2009 article in the American Journal of Public Health found that insured immigrants had much lower medical expenses than insured U.S.-born citizens. Insured immigrants' per-person medical expenditures were 1/2 to 2/3 less than the U.S.-born with similar characteristics.
• Recent immigrants constituted 5% of the nonelderly adult population, but were responsible for 2% of adults' total health care costs, making their share disproportionately low.

The vast majority of people in America who don't have health insurance are U.S. citizens.
• The majority of people who do not have insurance are U.S. citizens. Noncitizens comprise a relatively small portion of the uninsured population. Four out of five people in America who have no insurance are U.S. citizens. U.S. citizens make up the majority of the uninsured (78%), while legal and undocumented immigrants account for 22% of the nonelderly uninsured.
• Furthermore, U.S. citizens account for most of the growth in the number of uninsured individuals between 2000 and 2006. Citizens made up approximately 80% of the growth in the number of uninsured persons in America, while noncitizens accounted for approximately 20% of the growth.
• The UCLA Center for Health Policy Research found that in 2005 undocumented immigrants made up only a small share of California's uninsured population. Nearly four in five of California's uninsured adults and children were citizens and legal immigrants.

Contrary to popular belief, noncitizens are significantly less likely to use emergency room services than U.S. citizens.
• According to the non-partisan Kaiser Commission, noncitizens have poorer access to care and receive less primary health care than citizens, but they are less likely than citizens to use the emergency room. In 2006, 20% of U.S.-citizen adults and 22% of U.S.-citizen children had visited the emergency room within the past year. In contrast, 13% of noncitizen adults and 12% of noncitizen children had used emergency room care. Despite the myths, immigrants use less health care, including less emergency room care, compared to U.S. citizens.
• A 2006 study published in Health Affairs found that communities with high rates of emergency room usage tend to have relatively small noncitizen populations. Cities with large immigrant populations such as Miami-Dade County, Florida and Phoenix, Arizona have much lower rates of emergency room use than areas with small immigrant populations such as Cleveland.

For more information on immigrants and health care, see:

• IPC Fact Sheet: Sharing the Costs, Sharing the Benefits: Inclusion is the Best Medicine
• IPC Blog Post: Including Immigrants in Health Care Reform Makes Economic Sense

The Next Fight: Immigration Reform

Sara Robinson — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 12:06:09 -0700

Republicans have been running on immigration as a signature issue for the past several elections, so it's ironic that progressives are the ones with the most to gain from solving the immigration problem. But before we can do that, we need to understand—and agree—on what the problems are, and what can and should be done.

That was the conclusion drawn by the four speakers at the "The Politics of Immigration: Workers, Justice, and Immigration Reform" panel at America's Future Now! on Tuesday afternoon.

Moderator Gabe Gonzales of the Center for Community Change tipped his hat to the GOP for their role in galvanizing the Latino vote in recent years. He noted that the pro-immigrant demonstrations in 2006 brought over three million people out into the streets. "The Republicans have done something that hasn't happened in 30 years, " he reflected. "When they started making generalized attacks on Latino immigrants, everybody came together in self-defense. When this panel is over, I'm going to take up a collection for a statue of Pete Wilson and James Sensenbrenner -- they're the Number One and Number Two Latino organizers in the country."

Still, it's not going to be easy, especially as long as progressives themselves remain divided on the issue of immigration.

VIDEO

Watch the June 2 immigration reform panel discussion at the America's Future Now! conference.

The Politics of Immigration at America's Future Now! from AmericasFuture on Vimeo.

Angelica Salas of the Coalition for Humane Immigrant Rights of Los Angeles opened the discussion by describing the specific problems immigrants face in dealing with the US Government. Strikingly, an estimated 40 percent of undocumented immigrants do have an application for legal status pending. They're in the system, and following the law; but processing takes so long (upwards of a decade in many cases) and the system is so chaotic that their cases simply haven't been resolved.

Others have been through the process, and been denied—often for purely bureaucratic reasons. A 1996 overhaul in immigration law penalized people who waited too long after their arrival to start the application process. If you wait over six months, you can't file an application for three years; and if you wait a year, you need to wait ten years to apply. In effect, this rule means that these people can't apply for legal status at all.

And while they're waiting, these immigrants have no protection against employer abuse, discrimination, or exploitation. Since they're forced to live in the shadows, their ability to fully integrate into the mainstream of American culture is compromised, too. Immigrant parents with American-born children can be deported in an instant, forced to leave their children behind. And, Salas makes clear, as long as we tolerate this situation, these immigrants will be a perfect right-wing scapegoat that can be blamed for everything from a decaying health care system to falling wages to labor issues. Having these immigrants in our economy gives conservatives a too-perfect excuse for their failure to address a great many issues.

Empowering these immigrants can also be a major win for progressives as a movement. "Immigration will matter as long as labor issues matter," said Eliseo Medina of SEIU, which organizes more immigrant workers than any other union in the country. He stressed that we cannot solve one issue without also addressing the other -- and the way we solve both has serious implications for how we address our larger economic problems as well.

Even before the recession, said Eliseo, we were struggling with huge numbers of people without health care, growing income inequality, the erosion of pension plans, a shrinking middle class, and an increasing disregard for labor laws that drained away the size and political clout of unions. But in attacking Latino immigrants, he noted, the right wing has awakened a giant. They underestimated the number of Latino-American citizens, citizens who are now unified and voting in numbers never seen before.

"They've learned what it is to participate and win," said Medina. "And they're going to be a force going forward." He pointed out that about two-thirds of Latino voters voted for Obama. Reforming immigration will put 12 million currently undocumented people on the path to citizenship, which will further expand the coalition of progressive voters.

"Will we win?" asked Ali Noorani of the National Immigration Forum. "Yes." Noorani pointed out that last year, 20 out of 25 House races in swing states -- and five swing state Senate races -- were won by candidates who stood for comprehensive immigration reform. In North Carolina -- not exactly a progressive stronghold -- Liddy Dole spent half her war chest on anti-immigrant ads...and lost anyway.

Noorani noted that the right wing has no real coherent answers to the problem of immigration. They're mostly interested in beefing up Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and deporting immigrants and their families. Real reform involves a much broader solution that brings the immigration system back under control; restores stability and responsibility; adds structure to the system; makes application for legal status mandatory; reunifies families; gives immigrants access to due process and the courts; and builds an enforcement system that's efficient, effective, and humane both at the border and in the interior. And it needs to create a pathway that allows immigrants to integrate, and succeed.

"This is not the silver bullet to the economic crisis, but it's a critical part of it," Noorani said. Undocumented workers are a "trap door in the wage floor," exploited by crooked employers. When we let immigrants slide through that door, we're also leaving it open for those same crooked employers to exploit African-American workers, then white workers. "We close that trap door, and everybody can compete for a job on a level playing field, for a living wage."

And, said Noorani, this fight begins right now. Next Monday, President Obama is convening Congressional leaders to start the push for an immigration reform bill, which he wants to get passed this year. The goal is to get 279 votes in the House, and 60 in the Senate. The fight will continue through the summer and fall, so this is the moment our representatives really need to hear from us.

What will that fix look like? Noorani offered three hard criteria for any successful bill. First, it must create a pathway for quick legalization of existing undocumented workers, so they can stop living underground and be counted. Second, it has to continue America's tradition of family reunification. Point systems encourage solitary immigrants, who arrive without any community or personal support infrastructure. When families arrive together and join up into immigrant communities, they're far more successful, and ultimately assimilate more smoothly. Third, it needs to be viable over the long run: if it doesn't allow us to process future immigrants in a sane, reasonable, timely way, we're going to keep having this conversation over and over in the future.

We also need to oppose any proposal to eliminate the Constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship; recognize border-wall proposals as the boondoggles and gimmicks that they are; and reject any bill that makes undocumented workers into instant felons—a move that would drive them even further underground.

Ray Marshall, who was Jimmy Carter's labor secretary and is now teaching at the University of Texas, concluded the panel with a positive vision what the world could look like if reform succeed. He sees immigration reform as an integral part of a larger shared prosperity, because our immigrants would be fully empowered to succeed and contribute to America's culture and economy. And it's the necessary first step to improving protections for native-born American workers as well.

But first, Marshall continued, we need to convince the other side that maintaining the status quo is no longer an option—and that if they oppose it, they will be overridden in Congress. "We will have more immigrants in five years. The question is: on what terms, and how do we use the immigration process to support our shared prosperity agenda? We need a system that's fair, transparent, and in the best interest of the country."

Furthermore, said Marshall, we need to think globally. Five or ten years on, we might include Canada and Mexico in this "shared prosperity agenda," harmonizing the labor and immigration laws of all three countries in ways that discourage immigration from Mexico. "And then the world would be talking about the North American miracle, about how shared prosperity set a new standard of living for the entire hemisphere."

As the panel ended, the panelists and audience reflected on how much more useful it is for progressives to organize around ideas and goals, instead of cultural identities. Salas talked passionately about the importance of finding strength in your own identity -- but then reaching out beyond that to join with others to create a progressive vision we can all share. We all want the same things for ourselves and our children -- but because our issues are all so deeply interwined, we can only get those things by working together.

Supporters of immigration reform are encouraged to text 69866 justice to sign up for updates from the immigration action network.

A New Day for America, But Not for Immigrants?

Dennis Chin — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 14:07:46 -0800

There’s a buzz in the air in Washington, DC.

The inaugural ceremony is over and I can still feel the energy of millions of folks from across the country walking the streets, filled with the excitement of what’s to come in the next four years.

Hope’s in the air and I’m starting to feel it too.

President Obama ran on a promise of change that reminded us of the power of everyday people working together towards a better future. He tapped into the nation’s hopes and dreams to help us imagine a nation free of the last 8 year’s policies of division and fear.

This moment marks a new day for America. But I wonder if this moment rings true for everybody.

Franklin D. Roosevelt once talked about the Four Freedoms that all humans around the world should enjoy. One of these freedoms is freedom from fear. If we are to value his words and the message of hope and community that President Obama espoused during his Presidential campaign, then perhaps it’s time for us to take a deep look at the state of immigration in this nation.

For many of immigrants, the last 8 years have been marked by scapegoating, hate, and fear. I remember hearing stories of immigrant mothers sending their children to school with emergency information in case they were caught by ICE authorities and deported. I read countless stories of immigrant workers that were exploited by their employers. I remember the stories of immigrant detainees that were allowed to die in imprisonment.

Immigrant communities have always been a part of our nation. And they have played a large part in Obama’s path to the presidency. If Obama is to realize the promise of hope and change in this country and if he is to fight for the right for all communities to live free from fear, then let's call on him to work to transform our immigration system so that workers don’t fear raids, families stay together, and no one lives in the shadows.

Tomorrow morning, on January 21st, the Fair Immigration Reform Movement, a project of the Center for Community Change, will be hosting a day of action to celebrate A New Day For America and a new hope for immigration reform. We are asking President Obama to fix our country’s broken immigration system with a moratorium on the raids and comprehensive immigration reform. I encourage you to join me in this march.

Visit http://www.anewdayforimmigration.org for more information.

Petur Williams

Petur Williams — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 14:22:29 -0800

Born in Iceland, grew up in Colorado, went to school in Indiana and D.C., and
worked as a consultant and practiced law, and married a Dutch American stewardess
whose airline let me fly for free. Our children are a 24 year old man and a 22 year old woman
now, and we all share houses in Colorado and Maui and Holland and Mexico and D.C., and I
read, write, ski and dive a lot, when I am not working.

Country Legend Tom Russell Predicts The Future

Bill Scher — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 10:13:56 -0700

Country legend Tom Russell, known for being one of the pioneers of Americana music, last year responded to the anti-immigrant frenzy with a brilliant song, "Who's Gonna Build Your Wall?"

I've got 800 miles of open border - right outside my door.
There's Minutemen in little pickup trucks who've declared their own damn war.

Now the government wants to build a barrier like old Berlin, 8 feet tall.
But if Uncle Sam sends the illegals home, who's gonna build the wall?

Tom, how right you were.

Blue Texan's latest Firedoglake post sums it up: "BushCo’s Border Fence To Keep Out Illegals Being Built By Illegals."

The Austin American-Statesman reports on a planned 70-mile wall in the Rio Grande Valley:

Asked whether a border wall could be built on deadline without illegal workers, [Perry] Vaughan, with the general contractors group, told the Brownsville Herald in June: "It's probably borderline impossible to be honest with you."

The remarks were widely circulated on the Internet and picked up by other news organizations. Some in cyberspace said they don't care who builds a border wall.

"I just want the damn fence built. ... I'll let the Libs and the Intellectuals sit around and worry about irony," one poster wrote on a conservative Web site.

"I was simply acknowledging that in the construction industry, a pretty significant percentage of workers are obviously undocumented," Vaughan told the American-Statesman.

Although federal law prohibits employers from knowingly hiring illegal workers, an estimated 9 percent of Texas' workforce is unauthorized; 5 percent is nationally. Many employers and business and trade groups emphasize that they don't condone immigration-related fraud but that they can't vouch for the documents their workers present.

This is merely more evidence of a complete breakdown in our economic, trade and immigration system.

Unfair trade ship American jobs abroad to chase cheap labor. Reckless industrialization disrupts local agricultural economies south of our border. Those who don't get factory work leave home, cross the border illegally so they can be exploited farther away from their home. Workers everyone lose.

Instead of helping workers, conservative politicians posture about cracking down on immigrants and building border walls, while looking the other way when it comes to employer behavior. (The Bush Administration penalized a mere 17 employers for illegally hiring unauthorized workers.)

And that means you can't build a border wall to keep out illegal immigrants, without illegal immigrants.

Immigration Raids at Casa Fiesta

Corinne Ramey — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 14:22:42 -0700

When I was a student at Oberlin College, Casa Fiesta was one of the most popular hangout spots in that small, Midwestern town. Best known for their margaritas, fajitas, and endless supply of free tortilla chips, the Mexican restaurant was always packed with students, townspeople, and professors. It was located just kitty-corner from the house where I lived, so close that sometimes I would always catch a whiff of frying garlic and onions when I walked to and from class.

But that may all have changed at about 11 am this Wednesday, when Immigrations and Custom Enforcement (ICE) officials made a series of arrests at the Casa Fiesta in Oberlin and in Casa Fiestas in Ashland, Fremont, Norwalk, Oregon, Sandusky, Vermillion and Youngstown, Ohio. Overall, 58 immigrants were arrested, although three women were eventually let go. However, they will still be required to appear before a federal immigration judge. According to ICE spokesman Greg Palmore, the immigrants -- all Mexican citizens -- are likely to be deported as soon as possible.

The Casa Fiesta arrests are just the latest in what has become a disturbing pattern of workplace raids by ICE. In Postville, Iowa, this past May, ICE arrested over 400 workers at a kosher meat plant, Agriprocessors, Inc. Other raids have been carried out at restaurants, plants, and workplaces in Texas, California, and across the nation. According to Reuters, "ICE said it had made 949 criminal arrests in worksite-related raids since October 2007, including the arrests of 105 owners, managers, supervisors or human resources employees who face charges ranging from harboring to knowingly hiring illegal aliens."

However, the impact of these raids extends way beyond the 949 arrests. They impact the lives of the immigrants' families, children, and homes. They extend to the children who fear ICE arrests when they go to school, families who are impacted by raids for life, and to the communities where they live. As David Leopold, a Cleveland immigration lawyer, said of the Casa Fiesta workers, "These people are not criminals. The worst thing you can say about them is they came here to feed their families."

Within these communities, both immigrants and non-immigrants have felt the effects of the raids. Restaurants have been shut down and family businesses have closed. Churches have lost their members, and businesses and factories struggle for workers. For example, after the Iowa raids the town struggled to recover:

The tiny northeast town was home to the nation's largest kosher meatpacker, which recently lost nearly half of its work force after a huge raid by immigration officials. The raid sent shockwaves through the town, which has served as a multicultural model...But after the raid, many here are wondering if the future of the town is in jeopardy. Some 2,300 people lived in Postville before the raid; about half of them were Hispanic.

Our country is economically reliant on immigrants. Immigrants pay taxes -- between 1996 and 2003 alone, undocumented immigrants alone contributed nearly $50 billion in taxes -- and contribute to our struggling social security system. They increase consumer demand and generate economic growth. In 2004, the expansion of Hispanic and Asian-American consumer markets was an estimated 12% of America's purchasing power. Raids like the one in Oberlin aren't just bad for the immigrants themselves or for all those college students who will be missing their Mexican food -- immigration raids are bad for the nation as a whole.

“A Line Was Crossed At Postville”

OurFuture.org Staff — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 08:00:29 -0700

Eating American on the Fourth of July

Rachel Larris — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 09:12:20 -0700

By Rinku Sen

On this Fourth of July, I will be eating hot dogs. While I was trying to fit in as an Indian immigrant child throughout the 1970's, they represented the quintessential American food. I begged my mother to let me have them for dinner every night instead of chicken curry and rice. She nixed the hotdogs but sometimes allowed spaghetti and meatballs -- straight from a can. Hotdogs were "invented" by German immigrants serving their traditional sausages in the hustling streets of the new world, and spaghetti, everyone knows, came from Italy. If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, neither would have been on the menu. In those days, Germans and Italians weren't considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors in the 1880's, the press reported these incidents as "race riots."

I'll be sharing this holiday with a group of restaurant workers, largely immigrants. Along with the hotdogs, we'll have tacos, samosas, falafel. According to one side of the immigration debate, we can keep our goodies to ourselves. America doesn't want them, or us.

Immigration restrictionists argue not only that we need to stop undocumented immigration, but cut back drastically on legal immigration as well. They argue that this economy -- no longer industrial but focused on information and service -- has no room for masses of poor immigrants. There's a fear that technology makes travel and communication so easy that new immigrants won't break ties with the old country and reassign their loyalty. To them, the telephone is a dangerous device and communication with relatives a terribly un-American act.

Restrictionists have tried to modernize their argument, but it hasn't changed much through the years. Immigration of the late 19th century was dominated by Italians, Poles, Hungarians, Jews, and other groups from southern and eastern Europe. At that time, these new residents were widely seen as inferior to native-born whites. They were reviled for their refusal to speak English, for their political and economic demands on American corporations, for being so poor that they became "public charges" or undercut the wages of the native-born workers, and for their unacceptable sexual behavior.

The Immigration Acts of 1920 and 1924, the most restrictive immigration policies we've ever had, limited new entrants to 150,000 per year, which was less than a quarter of the total immigration rate at that time. These laws crafted large quotas for northern Europeans while setting limits for countries like Russia and Italy. Thousands of southern and eastern Europeans, however, continued to come.

As immigrants were deported for violating the quota policies, social reformers began to fight for long-time residents who had built families and communities in the U.S. These reformers won a series of changes that gave immigration officials the ability to change someone's status.

The liberalization remade the American identity, but kept it white. Mexicans, for example, were left behind by the process. According to historian Mae M. Ngai, They weren't explicitly excluded, but they had little access to the mechanisms through which to change their status, and no one cared to correct that oversight. In 1929, Congress also passed the Registry Act, allowing people to change their status if they paid $20, hadn't left the U.S. since 1921, and were of good moral character. Of the 115,000 people who were forgiven between 1930 and 1940, 80 percent were European or Canadian. The attorney general began to suspend deportation orders after 1940, and an internal Justice department study in 1943 revealed that the overwhelming majority of suspensions went, ironically, to Germans and Italians; only 8 percent involved Mexicans. Instead of liberalization, Mexicans got a guest worker program, and in 1954, Operation Wetback, the country's first mass deportation program.

Restrictionists have frozen images of a "true" America, as though our identity hasn't changed since 1776. Stasis, however, is a fiction. Cultures do not stand still, nor should we want them to. We have the chance now to remake our immigration policy in the modern era, not by taking it back to the 1920's, but by grappling honestly with the fact that the American identity is always undergoing cultural change. Modernity challenges us to create a policy that finally recognizes the full humanity of all immigrants without regard to their racial identity.

If we are indeed what we eat, Americans are already eating like the world. It's time for our policy to catch up to our palates.
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Sen is the president of the Applied Research Center and the publisher of ColorLines magazine. Her book, The Accidental American, will be released in September.
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Copyright (C) 2008 by the American Forum. 6/08

Challenge and Community in the Heartland

Alan Jenkins — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 09:54:33 -0700

The nation’s eyes are again on Iowa this week, as its residents struggle with the aftermath of violent storms and devastating flooding. People from Cedar Rapids to Columbus Junction to Des Moines are dealing with the tragic loss of life and the grim destruction of homes and property.

The catastrophe has understandably eclipsed recent developments in Northeast Iowa, where residents are coping with the fallout from a different kind of trauma: the biggest immigration raid in US history, made by federal officials last month at a Postville, IA, meatpacking plant. Nearly 400 workers—more than one-third of the plant’s employees and nearly 10% of the town’s population—were taken into custody.

The two phenomena are, of course, very different, especially because the flooding and tornadoes have taken precious lives. But to some Iowans in the Postville area, the immigration raids and their aftermath have felt like a catastrophic event. Postville School superintendent David Strudthoff told the Washington Post [http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/05/17/AR2008051702474.html] that the sudden incarceration of more than 10 percent of the town’s population “is like a natural disaster—only this one is manmade.”

After the Postville raid, half of the local school system’s 600 students were absent. Many businesses were shuttered and churches left empty. And many families and friends were separated. But, unlike this month’s terrible storms and twisters, the Postville raid could have happened differently, or not at all.

The rise in federal immigration raids makes for big headlines, and may placate some Americans who are understandably frustrated by our nation’s broken immigration system. But, ultimately, the raids are the wrong approach to a complex dilemma: they duck the real problems with our system while upending communities and creating mayhem. And they fail to live up to the ideals that we hold as a country.

When it comes to immigration, most Americans want workable solutions that uphold our national values and move our country forward together. Raids like the one in Postville fail that test on multiple counts. First, the raids are designed for show instead of effective problem-solving. There are some 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States today working America’s farms, factories, and small businesses. The idea that these 12 million people can be rounded up and deported or somehow driven out of the country simply defies reason.

Second, the raids have failed to uphold our national values, which include accountability, due process, public safety, and community. Recent raids conducted by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have swept up citizens, legal permanent residents, and undocumented immigrants, often on the basis of race or ethnicity. They are chaotic and disruptive to whole communities and, as a recent study by the Urban Institute found[http://www.urban.org/UploadedPDF/411566_immigration_raids.pdf], they have particularly harmful effects on children and the people and institutions that care for them.

Recent raids around the country have left children stranded at school or daycare, denied many parents access to telephones to communicate with their families, and moved many parents to remote detention facilities out of the states in which they were arrested. In the Iowa raid, those arrested were taken by bus to Waterloo, IA, for processing, some 75 miles away, where they were processed at the National Cattle Congress fairgrounds.

Some readers may have little sympathy for the plight of these parents, or even their kids. If they wanted to avoid this kind of disruption or separation, some will say, they should not have come here in the first place. That response, while perhaps understandable, ignores both the urgent drive of all parents to give their kids a better life, and the reality of the immigrant experience in the United States. America’s 12 million undocumented immigrants are a part of our nation’s economic engine, and part of the social fabric of many, many communities around the country. They are caregivers and mechanics, laborers and professionals, college students and soldiers. They are among the volunteers fighting Iowa’s rising flood waters. They are a part of us.

Accordingly, recent raids have unsettled not only individual workers and their families, but also entire schools, workplaces, congregations, and larger communities. In Postville, Sister Mary McCauley of St. Bridget's Catholic Church asked attendants to light a candle for 20 congregants arrested in the raid. "If we had 400 candles, we would have lit them all," she told the Des Moines Register[http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=2008806130370].

Third, by focusing on workers, the raids ignore the pervasive employer practices that negatively affect all Americans and our economy. Not one official of the company that owns the Postville plant, Agriprocessors, Inc.[ http://www.agriprocessor.com/], was hauled away or charged that day. This is true despite a string of alleged legal and ethical violations by Agriprocessors that have little to do with immigration but lots to do with unsafe and exploitative labor practices.

According to the Washington Post[http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/06/01/AR2008060101059.html], the Iowa Department of Labor found numerous workplace safety violations at the plant, including improper storage and handling of hazardous chemicals and inadequate training in the use of respirators. Occupational Safety and Health Administration records show workplace incidents that led to five amputations, broken bones, eye injuries, and hearing loss at the plant between 2001 and 2006. An affidavit filed by an immigration agent alleged that a supervisor blindfolded one worker and struck him with a meat hook. The state of Iowa is investigating allegations of child labor law violations at the plant, and the company recently lost a federal appellate court case over whether it could ignore a vote by workers at its Brooklyn distribution center to unionize.

A federal enforcement strategy concerned with public safety and accountability would have focused on these alleged practices which, if true, pose a real threat to economic opportunity within the state. And it would fix our broken immigration system so that immigrant workers can be realistically and fairly held accountable.

The next president should reject headline-grabbing factory raids that exacerbate problems instead of solving them. Instead, he should pursue smarter, more just solutions that serve our country’s best interests. A pathway to citizenship for immigrants willing to work, pay taxes and learn English must be combined with measures that hold employers, workers, and other institutions accountable to firm rules that are fairly applied. So long as millions of immigrants live in the shadows, their will be exploitation of the kind that happens in too many meatpacking plants, sweatshops, and corporate farms around the country. That, in turn, hurts all workers and communities.

By offering an earned pathway to citizenship and directing enforcement at employer practices that threaten all workers’ health and prosperity—sub-standard wages, dangerous conditions, exploitation, racial discrimination, child labor and fair labor violations—a new administration can promote shared prosperity along with fair, pragmatic, and legal immigration. Disruptive, arbitrary raids should give way to effective approaches that enforce our laws while upholding the fairness, accountability, and protection that are so important to our Democracy.