Before the 9/11 round-ups, INS detention had already grown into a system handling 150,000 immigrants a year. Tram Nguyen looks for the connections
...In addition to the 9/11 detainees, the ranks of INS detainees include thousands of undocumented immigrants held for deportation, asylum seekers whose petitions weren't granted, and legal permanent residents with criminal convictions considered deportable offenses. In a given year, about 150,000 people pass through the detention system, according to INS estimates, and about 21,000 people remain in detention camp limbo.
Criminal Alien
...The present detention crisis has its roots in an expansion of enforcement policies toward immigrants that began long before September 2001. Immigrant scapegoating in the 1980s focused at first on illegal immigration and the burdens it represented for social services, jobs, and other resources supposedly being sucked up by hordes of the undocumented.
Concern over illegal immigration reached a level of obsession in the '90s that was unmatched since the height of nativism during the '20s, according to Joseph Nevins in his book Operation Gatekeeper. Political theater and media hype surrounding events such as the 1993 World Trade Center bombing pumped "a growing perception of a country under siege from without," Nevins wrote.
Military policing of the U.S.-Mexico border represented another arm in building an infrastructure and ideology of enforcement against immigration. And as the parameters of U.S. society narrowed even more, the "criminal alien" became significant in drawing the line between citizens and both undocumented and documented noncitizens.
In this get-tough climate, Congress passed the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1986, which introduced "aggravated felony" as an expanded category of crimes requiring deportation.
"Everything passed since then has had some sort of enforcement provision," says Diego Bonesatti, policy analyst with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights. "Anti-immigration acts often try to cast immigrants in general as bringing crime, like disease, with them."
Detention Takes Off
A pair of laws in 1996 buttressed the framework that equated immigration law with criminal law. The Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act (AEDPA) re-established guilt by association for anyone supporting even lawful political or humanitarian activities of any foreign group designated by the Secretary of State as terrorist. The Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRIRA) established mandatory detention for noncitizens with criminal convictions, expanding the list of offenses that made legal residents deportable to more than 50 categories of crimes. Selling marijuana, gambling, prostitution, and drunk driving are some of the crimes that count for deportation.
Together, these laws provided the underpinnings for the use of secret evidence, mandatory and indefinite detention, and toughening of criminal provisions that radically increased the number of noncitizens subject to detention and would have far-reaching implications for immigrant communities....
"Even immigrant rights advocates were less willing to advocate for more reasoned policies regarding noncitizens with criminal records, because that might jeopardize the tenuous rights of 'innocent' noncitizens," says Heba Nimr, a Soros Justice Fellow at INS Watch in San Francisco.
"It was and is a seriously short-sighted strategy to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' immigrants, because policies that arise from demonizing one sector of immigrants will ultimately hurt all immigrants."...
<http://www.arc.org/C_Lines/CLArchive/story5_2_03.html> ***** -- Yoshie
* Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://solidarity.igc.org/>