USCIS to Create National Database for Foreign Student Visa Holders
By Edwin Garcia
San Jose Mercury News
SAN JOSE, Calif. -- The Immigration and Naturalization Service, often criticized for a lack of computer automation, wants to update many of its paper files by creating a national database of foreigners who hold student visas. But the proposal is strongly opposed by colleges and universities that would be asked to collect from each of those students a $95 fee _ money
the USCIS said it needs to pay for the database. "That's real onerous for colleges because we don't have a system set up to collect fees that we would then pay to the government," said George Beers, dean of international and distance education at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, home to 700 foreign students. Local college officials also are concerned that the fee would unduly burden student-visa holders, who already pay much higher tuition than legal residents and U.S. citizens. The proposal originated from the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, under a provision that allows the USCIS to build an electronic database containing each student's name, address, visa information, academic standing and disciplinary action. Students already provided that data to the BCIS, and the proposal would not require additional reporting, an USCIS spokeswoman said. "It simply requires the USCIS to automate electronically the information we collect from students, so that we make the process less cumbersome for the students, the schools and the BCIS," said Elaine Komis, an agency
spokeswoman. "Like any paper processing system, once you automate it, make it electronic, things become more efficient," Komis said. College officials say the process is not as easy as it sounds. "There are a number of inefficient burdens to the students and the college," complained Louis Gacenok, an international student adviser at San Jose State University. For one, he said, it would be time-consuming to set up a way to collect the fees. In addition, he added, international students pay more than $1,000 per class at state universities, while California residents pay much less, and an added fee may cause some of San Jose State's 1,000 international students to flee the country. Canada, Great Britain and Australia have been mounting strong efforts to recruit international students, Gacenok said. The USCIS requested and received comments on the fee and it's in the process of further evaluating the proposal. Komis said the review process could take months before USCIS officials decide whether to accept the proposal or modify it.
Immigration Lawyer May Be Disbarred over Handling of Cases
Lourdes Medrano Leslie
Minneapolis Star Tribune
For more than three years, St. Paul attorney William Kaszynski gave hope to hundreds of illegal immigrants tired of living in the shadows of immigration agents. It turned out to be false hope.Kaszynski faces possible disbarment for alleged incompetence and misconduct involving scores of botched immigration cases between 1996 and 1999 that frequently resulted in the deportation of his clients. In a two-day hearing that ended Wednesday at the Minnesota Judicial Center, a representative of the Lawyers Professional Responsibility Board used the testimony of immigrants, Kaszynski's former associates and immigration officials to portray the attorney as someone with little knowledge of immigration laws. Other allegations against Kaszynski -- who until 1996 had practiced Social Security disability, collection and family law -- range from charging excessive fees to filing frivolous immigration documents to not paying employee withholding taxes. Kaszynski wasn't at the hearing, but wrote in a letter to Judge Randall Slieter that he thought it was "fruitless" to appear in court. "It is a sad commentary on the state of affairs in this nation when an American citizen . . . can be successfully attacked by illegal aliens aided and abetted by a so-called legal aid and a so-called Board of Professional Responsibility," Kaszynski wrote. He declined to comment after the hearing. Kaszynski reportedly relied heavily on a legal assistant, Juan R. Flores -- also known as Juan Roman Flores-Olivetti -- to work on immigration cases and to translate for his mostly Spanish-speaking clients. Flores remains in prison after pleading guilty in September to charges of defrauding clients of about $60,000. "By making promises to clients that were impossible to keep, and by hiring a legal assistant who was dishonest and leaving him unsupervised to use his office, Mr. Kaszynski engaged in conduct that harmed the clients," said Betty Shaw, a senior assistant director for the board. Patricia Mattos, an immigration attorney who reviewed cases that Kaszynski had filed with the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service (BCIS), said: "He was totally incompetent; he didn't pursue any matter with diligence." She said the attorney filed incorrect forms and late appeals and failed to advise clients of risks associated with applying for legal status under toughened immigration laws passed in 1996. "He was messing up cases, he was turning [clients] in to the BCIS," she said. Residency lost? A premature visit to the local USCIS office in 1997 -- coupled with myriad foul-ups in the application process -- may have cost St. Paul resident Gilberto Robles and his family a chance to stay in this country permanently, Mattos said. Because of the large-scale changes to immigration law, he said, "it was not advisable to turn anyone in to the BCIS." Robles, 35, and his 33-year-old wife, Liliana, have an American-born son and a Mexican-born son who has lived here most of his life. Most of their extended family lives in the United States legally. Robles testified that Kaszynski assured him that for $5,000, he could help the Mexico native secure a work permit within three months and permanent residency within seven months. "He never explained to us that the law was changing," Robles said. When the USCIS later moved to deport the family, he said, Kaszynski told him that everything was "going to be all right" and to keep up the payments. Robles said the attorney didn't return his calls and later dropped his case. Mattos now represents the family. Another year of waiting probably would have made the Robles family eligible for legal status, Mattos said. But the USCIS has ordered the family to leave the country. "It was devastating," he said. "He destroyed their lives for $5,000." Judge Slieter will make a recommendation by June 1 to the Minnesota Supreme Court, which will determine whether Kaszynski can keep his license to practice law.
Terrorism Concerns Land Immigrants in Judicial Limbo
By Gerald F. Seib
Wall Street Journal
HANY KIARELDEEN HAS survived the kind of judicial nightmare the State Department likes to criticize in its annual report on human-rights problems around the globe. For 19 months, he was held in jail on vague assertions that he was involved in terrorism. He wasn't told of the specific evidence against him, and the courts refused to disclose who had accused him. That information, he was told, would be kept secret from him and his lawyers on national-security grounds. For a year and a half he was in limbo, he says, never charged with any terrorist act or even questioned. The most noteworthy aspect of the Kiareldeen case is the country where it transpired: He was held in the U.S., under a little-known "secret evidence" law that was part of an antiterrorism act passed in 1996. The battle against terrorism continues, of course, as underscored by Tuesday's disclosure by the White House that a planned visit to a Bangladeshi village by President Clinton was canceled due to fears of a terrorist attack. But there is a growing feeling that the secret-evidence law has taken the battle on terrorism a bridge too far. An odd-bedfellow group in Congress, led by Republican Rep. Thomas Campbell of California and Michigan Democratic Rep. David Bonior, is sponsoring "The Secret Evidence Repeal Act," [H.R. 2121] which would roll back the 1996 statute. As evidence that civil-liberties issues can unite wildly incompatible liberals and conservatives, they are joined by leftist Democrat John Conyers of Michigan and rightist Republican Bob Barr of Georgia. In a private meeting with Arab-American leaders three weeks ago, President Clinton also expressed interest in changes. Thus, in an election year when partisan politics promise to halt many initiatives, change is possible in the secret-evidence law. "Nothing, frankly, is more important," Rep. Campbell says. "It's a violation of the Constitution. It's that simple and that outrageous, and we shouldn't tolerate it." REP. CAMPBELL GUESSES that 90% of his colleagues didn't even realize that the secret-evidence provision was included when they passed the indelicately named "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act." The provision allows the Immigration and Naturalization Service to arrest, detain and deport noncitizens on the basis of evidence that doesn't have to be disclosed to either the alien or his lawyers. In practice, this has meant that the Federal Bureau of Investigation passes on evidence to the BCIS, which grabs immigrants as they try to change or extend their legal status in the U.S. Only a judge sees the evidence. The FBI argued in congressional testimony last month that telling even suspects and their lawyers would compromise foreign intelligence services and confidential informants, who would stop sharing information. The FBI says secret evidence is being used in only about a dozen cases. BUT THOSE HELD, most often Arabs and Muslims, find that they have no way to respond to charges they aren't told about. Mazen al-Najjar is a Palestinian college professor and father of three young daughters who has lived in the U.S. for 18 years. Almost three years ago, he was arrested in Florida on charges of a visa violation, and then learned he was being held as a national-security threat for an alleged association with a terrorist group. He now has been in jail for more than 1,000 days, though David Cole, one of his attorneys, says he has never received even a summary of the evidence against him. Mr. Kiareldeen is more lucky. After his 19 months in jails in New Jersey, a series of judges who saw the evidence against him decided it didn't justify holding him, and he was freed in October. The government eventually provided summaries alleging, among other things, that he hosted a meeting at his New Jersey apartment to discuss plans to bomb the World Trade Center. Once they learned of that assertion, Mr. Kiareldeen's attorneys successfully showed that he didn't actually live in the apartment until a year and a half after the Trade Center bombing. Mr. Kiareldeen and his lawyers strongly suspect the allegations originated with a disgruntled former wife, with whom he has been locked in bitter child-custody proceedings, but they can't be sure. Rep. Campbell sees a possible compromise, in which new legislation might put a limit of 30 days on the time anyone could be held on secret evidence. The Clinton administration might not accept the compromise, but it would represent movement on what the congressman calls "the most important constitutional issue that we will have presented to us this year."
Illegal Aliens Leaving Country
By Kenna Griffin
The Oklahoman
YUKON -- All of the 39 Mexican illegal immigrants arrested Monday for trying to obtain Oklahoma driver's licenses have agreed to return home voluntarily, federal officials said Tuesday. Lynn Ligon, district spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service, said there is a difference between deportation and voluntary return. "Voluntary return is an admission of guilt by their part, and means simply escorting them to the border and escorting them across," he said.Ligon said the immigrants are being interviewed to find out where they entered the country. He said most illegal immigrants have been coming through Arizona. "Most of them are heading to the Carolinas or Georgia," Ligon said. "Some of them already know exactly where they are going to, others just have the hope of employment in those areas based on reports back from other people who have already moved or have gotten to those areas." Ligon said he believes the immigrants in Yukon were coming from Kansas.
Court Backs Whistleblower Asylum
By Bob Egelko
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- A federal appeals court has opened the door to political asylum claims by government whistleblowers from other countries. The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled Tuesday that an employee of a foreign government who exposes corruption, then flees to the United States because of threats of retribution, can claim political persecution, one of the legal grounds for asylum. The ruling, binding on federal courts in nine western states, revived the asylum case of a former Customs Bureau policeman from the Philippines who said he was threatened with death after revealing smuggling by high-level supervisors.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000308/aponline075030_000.htm
EDITOR'S NOTE: The ruling in Grava v. BCIS, 98-70981, is on line at:
http://www.ce9.uscourts.gov/opinions
Driver's License Bill Focus of Vigil Law Called Biased Against Illegals
By Daniel Gonzalez
The Arizona Republic
Illegal immigrants are sticking accident victims with medical and property costs, Latino activists contend, because they are unable to buy auto insurance, in part, because they have no driver's licenses. And because the Arizona Legislature appears ready to bypass a possible remedy, activists representing 16,000 petitioners plan today to begin a three-day vigil at the Capitol. The round-the-clock vigil is a memorial to auto-accident victims involving illegal immigrants. The number of victims has grown since 1996, the activists contend, after the Legislature blocked licenses from being issued to illegal immigrants. "It's a very big issue in our community," said Sen. Joe Eddie Lopez, D-south Phoenix, the main sponsor of a measure that would reverse the 1996 action and again allow illegal immigrants to get a driver's license. "A lot of people are having accidents with people who don't have driver's licenses and insurance, and they are getting stuck with the whole (insurance) bill."
http://www.azcentral.com/news/0308licenses.shtml
BCIS-FBI Fingerprint Merger Outlined
WASHINGTON (AP) -- It will take five years and cost well over $200 million to merge the fingerprint files of the FBI and Immigration and Naturalization Service in a bid to avert a repeat of the BCIS' release last year of a suspected ``railroad killer,'' the Justice Department says. Congress ordered the department to devise such a plan when it enacted this year's budget. It was reacting to the case of a Mexican drifter, Angel Maturino Resendiz, who used the alias Rafael Resendez-Ramirez. Last June 2, he was picked up by Border Patrol agents for illegal entry into the United States and sent back to Mexico. Agents said they were unaware he was wanted by Houston police and the FBI for questioning in connection with several murders along rail lines. He surrendered in El Paso, Texas, on July 13 after being put in the FBI's 10 Most Wanted List. Authorities wanted to question him about nine killings along railroad lines in this country, including four people whose bodies were found after his June 2 release. He has been charged in seven of those murders. The department said Wednesday that it plans to put the USCIS fingerprints on the FBI's computerized system and upgrade it so that Border Patrol agents can check the records of the 1.5 million illegal aliens they seize each year in two minutes or less. When fully implemented after five years, the new system ``will minimize the possibility that an apprehended or detained alien is incorrectly released,'' the department outline said.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-BCIS-FBI-Fingerprints.html
Kennedy To Offer Alternative H-1B Visa Bill
Newsbytes
In a largely symbolic gesture, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., offers a much toned-down substitute to the high-tech related H-1B visa bill. Kennedy's proposal will call for the cap on available H-1B visas to be immediately raised from 115,000 to 145,000, and will include a massive proposed boost in funding for educational efforts aimed at training US workers for high-tech related jobs, Kennedy spokesperson Will Keyser said. The Kennedy legislation will be offered as a last-minute substitute to a bill introduced by Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, earlier this year, which proposes raising the visa cap to 195,000 in 2000, with additional increases in 2001 and 2002.
http://au.dailynews.yahoo.com/headlines/20000309/nbtech/952556880-1007599657 .html
Illegal Workers Can Breathe Easier
By Louis Uchitelle
The New York Times
CHICAGO -- Salvador Silva often used to worry that immigration agents would raid the commercial laundry where he works. If they did, he had a plan. He would jump onto a table, hoist himself into an air-conditioning duct, and hide there until the agents left. He practiced this more than once. "We lived with the uncertainty of raids," said Silva, 26, who has worked
illegally in this country for 10 years, ever since he walked across a bridge from Juarez to El Paso, and flew to Chicago to join a brother. Only now is he beginning to relax. "For the first time," he said, "I don't fear the raids." Such raids have all but stopped around the country over the past year. In a booming economy running short of labor, hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants are increasingly tolerated in the nation's workplaces. The Immigration and Naturalization Service has made crossing the border harder than ever, stepping up patrols and prosecuting companies that smuggle in illegal immigrants or blatantly recruit them. But once inside the country, illegal immigrants now largely are left alone. Even when these people are discovered, arrests for the purpose of deportation are much less frequent; such arrests dropped to about 8,600 last year from 22,000 two years earlier, the immigration service reported. The USCIS now concentrates on picking up illegal immigrants who have committed crimes. The rest are, in effect, allowed to help American employers fill jobs. "It is just the market at work, drawing people to jobs, and the USCIS has chosen to concentrate its actions on illegal immigrants who are a danger to the community," said Robert Bach, the agency's associate commissioner for policy and planning.
http://www.austin360.com/statesman/editions/thursday/news_4.html
Clinton Supports H-1B
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Clinton administration, responding to pleas from high-tech companies, said today it supports a ``reasonable increase'' in the number of visas issued to foreign computer workers. Congress temporarily expanded a program in 1998 that grants special six-year visas, raising the maximum from 65,000 to 115,000 per year. But that has not satisfied the appetite of American high-tech firms that cannot fill specialized computer jobs. The industry has been lobbying Congress for another expansion of the visa program, known as H-1B visas. Both Democrats and Republicans have drafted proposals to do that despite criticism from labor unions, which contend that foreign workers limit job opportunities for American workers and
depress wages by accepting lower salaries. ``We are ready to support a reasonable increase in the number of H-1B visas as long as it reflects a balanced approach that protects and prepares the U.S. work force,'' White House spokesman Jake Siewert said.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-High-Tech-Visas.html
Criminal Aliens Often Released Instead of Deported
By Michael Hedges, Scripps Howard News Service
Denver Rocky Mountain News
WASHINGTON - More than 35,000 criminal aliens have been released from custody in the United States in the past five years, and an average of about 37 percent of them have committed new crimes, according to government documents. At least 1,376 criminal aliens _ non-citizens in custody for a crime committed a violent crime after being released, such as homicide, rape, armed robbery or kidnapping, according to Immigration and Naturalization Service figures. Several thousand others were charged with drug offenses or fraud, burglary, car theft and other "non-violent" crimes. In addition to the 35,318 criminal aliens released, another 245,000 aliens who committed crimes were deported between October 1994 and May 1999, the USCIS said. Under the law, all criminal aliens are supposed to be deported, but for a variety of reasons ranging from plea bargains to the refusal of a few governments to take back their criminals, that doesn't always happen, an USCIS spokesman said. The statistics on release rates for criminal aliens were obtained by the Senate Appropriations Committee's subcommittee overseeing the USCIS budget this week.
http://insidedenver.com/shns/story.cfm?pk=CRIMINALALIENS-03-09-00&cat=AN
Immigrants May Use Canada as 'Insurance' Second Choice U.S. Is the First Option
The Vancouver Sun
VANCOUVER - A growing number of foreign nationals in the United States are applying for landed immigrant status in Canada as "an insurance policy" in case they are not allowed to stay in the United States, an Immigration Canada employee warned his superiors in an internal e-mail. He also wrote the problem could lead to the "serious abuse" of our government programs as immigrants "double dip" into both countries' social services. The e-mail, written by Ab Lelievre to Richard Farmer, manager of the Ontario ports of entry, notes that in one month alone he had to refuse to land four applicants from China and one from Pakistan who appeared to have no intention of staying in Canada. "The frequency of this type of case appears to be on the increase ... More and more I am getting the impression that many of these 'immigrants who aren not immigrants' are basically buying (their) way into Canada," he writes. "Purchasing an insurance policy, if you will, to hedge against not getting immigrant status in the U.S.A." He continues: "This situation, if left unchecked, will lead to serious abuse of the immigration system and social and health services in Canada. Many of these people will be in a position to double dip in the U.S. and Canada at the same time."
http://www.nationalpost.com/news.asp?s2=national&f=000306/224445.html
Japan Opens a Door to Emigrants' Descendants
By Kathryn Tolbert
The Washington Post
TOKYO -- Toru Saito drew up a list of Asian countries and checked their status in four categories: war experience with Japan, staple food, religion and number of Japanese settlers. Thailand fit perfectly. It was not occupied by Japan during World War II. Thais are rice eaters and Buddhists. More than 7,000 first-generation Japanese live in Thailand. So Saito concluded that Thailand could be part of the solution to Japan's looming shortage of home health care helpers for its aging population. "Countries with a war relationship with Japan are not ideal because they look at our elderly people and remember their grandparents, who were harmed by these people," said Saito, who heads an organization that helps foreigners in Japan. "Thailand is the only country that fits." Ten years ago, when Japan's economy was booming and workers were in demand, the immigration law changed to allow unskilled foreigners with a Japanese ancestor as far back as three generations to live and work in Japan.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-03/07/053l-030700-idx.html
Illegal Immigrants Getting Help
By Chad Roedemeier
ATLANTA (AP) -- Hispanic immigrants hold many of the lowest-paying and most backbreaking jobs in America. They sweat in chicken processing plants, on construction sites and for landscaping firms. On top of that, some employers cheat them out of their already meager wages by taking advantage of deportation fears, their inability to speak English and their ignorance of labor laws. Some employers refuse to pay workers if they find out they are in the country illegally, even threatening to call immigration officials on the workers. But federal law says even illegal immigrants deserve to be paid fairly. And now AFL-CIO leaders are showing their support - calling for repeal of a 1986 law they say makes it hard to unionize or improve conditions for undocumented workers.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000219/aponline025933_000.htm
Immigrant Smugglers Thriving
By Rene Romo
Albuquerque Journal
EL PASO -- Need a good deal on a truck, minivan, even a tractor-trailer? You might try a lot in El Paso where the seized vehicles of immigrant smugglers are put up for auction. At any time, 30 percent to 40 percent of the roughly 350 vehicles in the lot run by Lone Star Auctioneers Inc. are vans, pickups or commercial trucks, facility manager Joe Solis said. Smugglers increasingly have turned to large vehicles, especially the trailers of 18-wheelers, to transport immigrants, Border Patrol agents say. Smuggling used to be a small-scale affair. Illegal immigrants simply bought cars and drove across the border. But in the past four years, as federal agents tightened their grip on the Mexican border, immigrant smuggling has thrived. In the process, passenger safety is sacrificed as immigrants are crammed into vans and the crawl spaces of tractor-trailers.
http://www.abqjournal.com/news/3news02-20-00.htm
Boosting the Count
The Washington Post
IN AN EFFORT to encourage participation in the 2000 census, the Immigration and Naturalization Service will instruct its agents to put off routine enforcement actions this spring that might interfere with census activities. The move is part of a broader government campaign to boost responses to the census, which swings into high gear next month when questionnaires are mailed to households across the country. Residents will be asked to complete the forms and return them by April 1. After that, an army of census workers will fan out and begin knocking on doors, seeking to count those who didn't respond. The Census Bureau is working against a history of declining participation, fueled in part by cynicism--census forms are just more junk mail--and in part by fear that private information given to census-takers will be shared with other government agencies. The nervousness is understandable, and it's not surprising that immigrants are disproportionately likely to be missed in the count: Long-form questionnaires, which go to about one in six households, ask where respondents were born, whether they are citizens and when they came to the United States. But in outlining the guidelines for agents Monday, USCIS official Ken Elwood emphasized that the immigration agency does not want and cannot legally request information from individual census forms.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/21/002l-022100-idx.html
Chinese Immigrants Lose Savings and Hopes in Citizenship Swindle
By Terry Pristin
The New York Times
NEW YORK -- It was a familiar swindle, but it worked, as it often does, like a charm: A fly-by-night operation promises to smooth the way to citizenship -- for a fee. Then the schemers pull up stakes, and the once-hopeful immigrant is left poorer and afraid of being deported. This time, the victims were Chinese living in Brooklyn and Manhattan. As many as 1,000 paid up to $750 each to a Brooklyn company that guaranteed that they would become naturalized U.S. citizens. While there is no shortage of immigration fraud cases, this could be one of the biggest. "In terms of the number of people affected," said Jules Polonetsky, the city's commissioner of consumer affairs, "this is the largest case I've heard about." The state attorney general's office and the Brooklyn district attorney are also investigating. The immigration con game is not new, and it also often depends on the complicity of the victim, who may be suspicious of the transaction yet takes the chance to win citizenship or working papers. There is no evidence that these schemes are more prevalent in Chinese communities, but, according to immigration experts, recent arrivals from China feel unusual pressures to seek citizenship, and so are particularly vulnerable to swindlers who say they can help them. Several hundred of these immigrants complained in January of being duped by First U.S. Citizens Service Center, which had offices in Chinatown in Manhattan and in Sunset Park in Brooklyn and advertised in newspapers and on radio stations catering to the Chinese community. Polonetsky said the offices have shut down.
http://www.nytimes.com/00/02/24/news/national/regional/ny-immig-fraud-trims.html
Perdue Ends Program For Korean Immigrants Brokers Charged Workers High Fees
By Peter Pae
The Washington Post
Perdue Farms Inc., the nation's third-largest poultry producer, has terminated a program that brought hundreds of Korean immigrants to work in its processing plants on the Eastern Shore.The company said it made the decision after an internal investigation prompted by a Washington Post article detailing how white-collar, middle-class Koreans, desperate to immigrate to the United States, were paying as much as $30,000 each to work in chicken plants. For more than 25 years, hundreds of Koreans a year have come to the United States by paying immigration brokers who advertise the poultry jobs in Korean newspapers as a shortcut to America. In return for working at the chicken plants, the immigrants receive legal permanent U.S. residency for themselves and their families under a federal program to fill unskilled jobs. Even under the program, it can take years for a worker to enter the United States, but the arrangement still sharply reduces the usual wait. Some Korean immigrants coming to the chicken plants were required by brokers to sign a pledge to work at the plant for one year and to make an additional $5,000 deposit that would be returned only after they completed the term.
http://search.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/WPlate/2000-02/25/083l-022500-idx.html
Chinese PM Orders Smuggle Crackdown
By Charles Hutzler
BEIJING (AP) -- China's premier has ordered customs agents to step up their efforts in an 18-month-old smuggling crackdown that has already uncovered the biggest corruption scandal in 50 years of communist rule. Premier Zhu Rongji's issued the order on state television's national evening newscast Sunday. His remarks appeared aimed at conveying the Communist Party's resolve to end the scandal, which has led to the arrest of several high-ranking officials. "Some dark sheep and termites have been exposed and severely punished by law," Zhu said. This "shows our party has the determination, the ability and the means to punish corruption and excise this malignant tumor." Zhu told customs officials to beef up their ranks, instill discipline and ferret out corruption. He ordered customs agents to step up their attacks on smugglers and improve coordination with a task force set up at the start of the crackdown in July 1998. President Jiang Zemin was also shown on state television lecturing party officials about the need for purity. "Communist Party members and leading cadres must be honest in performing their duties," Jiang said. "In the face of the corrosive influences of money worship, hedonism, extreme individualism and drinking and merrymaking, they must not be stained by one blot."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000220/aponline135349_000.htm
Critics Assail USCIS Proposal to Track Students
By Milton D. Carrero Galarza
Chicago Sun-Times
URBANA--A proposal by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service that universities collect a $95 fee from international students and set up a database to gather information about them and their families is stirring opposition. "They already monitor international students more, and now they want to charge us more so that they can keep track of us," said Ruxandra Costescu,president of the Romanian student association at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The USCIS plan would require universities to inform the government about the students' legal record, academic status, current address, employment history, country of origin and visa status. U. of I. administrators say they'd have to spend about $48,000 a year to gather information on 3,400 international students. They could be investigating as many as 6,000 people because the rule also applies to the students' spouses and children, said Ivor Emmanuel, the university's director of international student affairs.
http://www.suntimes.com/output/news/ins27.html
FBI Pressured USCIS to Aid L.A. Police Anti-Gang Effort
By Anne-Marie O'Connor
Los Angeles Times
Immigration and Naturalization Service agents ordered to deport immigrants detained by anti-gang officers in the Los Angeles Police Department's Rampart Division told investigators the assignment was "rammed down our throats" over the objections of the U.S. attorney's office after pressure from the FBI, according to federal documents. The 27 USCIS agents, who were interviewed for an internal immigration service report, create a composite picture of an unpopular program launched by overzealous USCIS managers over the objections of agents in the BCIS' own Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force--known by the acronym OCDETF. They said they repeatedly told John McAllister, the USCIS assistant district director for investigations, that their involvement in the program did not conform to their congressional mandate to combat large-scale drug trafficking. LAPD's cooperation in the effort may have violated a special city order that restricts police inquiries into residents' immigration status. Moreover, the task force coordinator, John Del George, raised moral objections to its operations, saying that "only a very small portion of those arrested were actually hard-core gang members." According to the report, Del George "recalled interviewing one 'gang member' who was actually an assistant manager at McDonald's, was married, had kids, and had been out of 'gang' life for years."
http://www.latimes.com/news/state/updates/lat_rampart000229.htm
High-Tech Workers Are Trapped in Limbo by I.N.S.
By Sara Robinson
The New York Times
SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 27 -- Like thousands of other professionals, Nick Saw came to this country to apply his skills in the booming high-technology industry, working under a temporary visa. And like many temporary workers, Mr. Saw wants to stay. But the prospect of establishing a lasting foothold in the United States makes him, in some ways, a captive to his employer, which sponsored his visa application. If he tries to switch companies, or is laid off, he has to start the immigration process all over. Even the company he works for, Hewlett-Packard, cannot promote him if it will change his basic job description. And the period of limbo for such workers can be long. Mr. Saw, a 30-year-old British citizen, applied for a green card, which givespermanent residency status, when he arrived two years ago; he will probably have to wait several more years. He plans to stay with his job for now, he says, but he is frustrated about having so little control over his future. "I'd sooner leave the country than put my life on hold all over again," he said. Legions of foreign professionals at high-tech companies across the country are in the same position. Over the last decade, tens of thousands have been admitted to the United States each year on temporary work visas to address what the technology industry says is a severe shortage of skilled workers. Now the industry is pushing to expand the largest such visa program, known as H-1B, which allows workers to stay in the United States for six years. Under legislation introduced this month in the Senate, the annual allotment of the six-year visas -- which had already grown to 115,000 in 1998 from 65,000 in 1990 -- would be temporarily increased to 195,000. Those with advanced degrees from American universities will be exempt from the limitations.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/00/02/biztech/articles/29immig.html
Bill Would Raise High-Tech Visas
By Michelle Mittelstadt
WASHINGTON (AP) -- Amid complaints of acute high-tech worker shortages, the chairman of the House immigration subcommittee introduced legislation (H.R.3814) Wednesday that would boost a visa program for skilled foreigners by 45,000 this year. The proposal by Rep. Lamar Smith, R-Texas, is far leaner than a Senate bill that would increase the number of H-1B visas from 115,000 to 195,000 per year for three years. While welcoming Smith's effort, high-tech industry officials said his measure is laced with onerous requirements on business and new user fees. "It's a good news, bad news story. The good news is that Chairman Smith, who has been skeptical in the past about the need for more H-1Bs, has now indicated he clearly does accept there is a serious problem," said Harris Miller, president of the Information Technology Association of America. But when it comes to the actual provisions of Smith's bill, "We have lots of concerns."
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000301/aponline172355_001.htm
EDITOR'S NOTE: Congressman Smith's statement and more information on H.R. 3814 can be found at: http://www.house.gov/lamarsmith/H1B/home.htm
Changes at Border Bring Aliens Here
By Michael McNutt
The Oklahoman
OKLAHOMA -- If they were tourists, Oklahoma's merchants would be delighted. If they were coming to the state to live, their numbers likely would mean the state could keep its six-member congressional delegation. However, they're just passing through. And they're illegal. They're immigrant workers, mostly from Mexico, being brought through Oklahoma for field work or construction jobs in the United States, said Lynn Ligon, a spokesman with the Dallas district office of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. About 120 have been stopped in seven separate incidents during February in northwest Oklahoma. All of them were found to be illegal immigrants from Mexico and were sent back. Unknown hundreds likely have driven by unnoticed, Ligon said. The increased traffic of immigrant workers can be attributed to improved weather for field work in Georgia, Florida and other states, Ligon said. It's also a result of improved Texas and California border checks by the U.S. Border Patrol, Ligon said. Immigration agents also are cracking down on Interstate 40 and Interstate 35. Now most of those crossing the Mexican border into the United States are doing so in Arizona, Ligon said. To get to promised jobs in the southeastern United States, they must pass through Oklahoma.
http://www.oklahoman.com/cgi-bin/shart?ID=454901&TP=getarticle
Sharansky Lauds 'Immigrant Mosaic'
By Gil Hoffman
The Jerusalem Post
Interior Minister Natan Sharansky yesterday praised the accomplishments of the aliya from the former Soviet Union, telling a Jewish media conference that the immigrants have succeeded in changing Israeli society from that of a melting pot that breaks down immigrants to a "mosaic of cultures." Sharansky told the Jewish Agency-sponsored International Conference of Jewish Media that the lot of immigrants has changed as they have achieved vast amounts of power nationwide in a short period of time. "The melting pot of Israeli society, where everyone had to become a new Israeli, has weakened as society has grown more open," Sharansky said. "Now we're becoming members of society faster than ever." Sharansky cited the fact that immigrants from the former Soviet Union represent 35 percent of Israel's hi-tech work force and the success of the Tel Aviv-based Russian-language Gesher Theater as examples of how Russian speakers have contributed to the fabric of Israeli society.
http://www.jpost.com/Editions/2000/02/28/News/News.3301.html