USCIS Memo to Prosecutors Called 'Despicable'
Critics decry deportation advice
Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Immigrant advocates and lawyers in Georgia said they were alarmed this year after getting a rare glimpse inside the Immigration and Naturalization Service. They said a memo the USCIS sent to prosecutors depicts an agency eager to deport even legal immigrants convicted of petty crimes like shoplifting.
The three-page memo, written by the Atlanta USCIS office, explains immigration law and tells prosecutors what sentences will get an immigrant deported. It has found its way into the hands of defense and immigration attorneys. They say it goes too far by telling prosecutors what to do. They have posted it on members-only sections of Web sites and faxed it to colleagues. Lawyers as far away as California, New York and Washington have read it. Next month, an article in the Harvard Law Review will contain a not-so-kind mention of the memo.
Critics did not question the mandate of the USCIS to deport immigrants who commit serious crimes, but said the memo encourages prosecutors to also go after small-time criminals who get a 12-month suspended sentence -- routine in Georgia for people convicted for the first time of a misdemeanor. The USCIS says Congress ordered it to deport such immigrants when it revised immigration law in 1996.
"I think it's despicable," said Michael Shapiro, director of the Georgia Indigent Defense Council. "It clearly indicates that USCIS has an agenda to deport these people, many of whom are legal residents who have been in this country for years."
W. Fred Alexander, acting USCIS district director for Georgia and three nearby states, said his office wrote the memo at the request of district attorneys. He said the USCIS wants "Georgia prosecutors to go to court better armed with a knowledge of federal immigration law."
The memo says prosecutors should reject an immigrant's offer to plead guilty unless the plea will lead to deportation. It also says: "You may encounter alien defendants that return to court to have their sentences amended to avoid removal/deportation, i.e. reduced from 12 months to 11 months. Try to avoid this, by reducing the sentence the alien may avoid removal."
While district attorneys are being advised to push for longer sentences, some judges are actually lowering immigrants' sentences from 12 months to 11 months and 29 days --- just low enough to avoid deportation. They're not the only ones who think deportation is too harsh for some immigrants convicted of minor crimes. The Georgia Board of Pardons and Parole has paroled 10 legal immigrants in that category this year --- up from one last year. The board also asked Sen. Max Cleland (D-Ga.) to "bring some measure of relief" to people facing deportation for misdemeanor convictions. Three bills to change the 1996 law are pending in Congress.
And the state legislature passed a law, effective July 1, requiring Georgia judges to warn immigrants that a guilty plea can affect their immigration status. It is against this backdrop that the USCIS memo, written last year, circulated so widely this year that it reached the desk of Nancy Morawetz, an immigration law professor at New York University's law school. She mentions the memo in the Harvard Law Review article to be published next month about the effects of the 1996 law. She said the memo shows the need for Congress to restore discretion to immigration judges --- taken away in 1996 --- so that judges can decide whether immigrants convicted of petty crimes should be deported. Terry Everett, president of the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers, said the memo angered her because it shows the USCIS improperly trying to influence decisions that should be left to judges, prosecutors and defense attorneys. She said the suggestions, if heeded, would inject an irrelevant factor --- a person's immigration status --- into plea negotiations.
"If another country was doing this, as Americans, we'd be outraged," she said. Kermit McManus, district attorney of Whitfield and Murray counties and president of the Georgia District Attorney's Association, said the memo "wouldn't change the way my office does business." Danny Porter, the Gwinnett district attorney, said, "The USCIS doesn't tell me how to negotiate my cases." Alexander, the USCIS director in Atlanta, downplayed the criticisms of defense attorneys.
"They're going to complain because he (a client) isn't in a nice-enough prison and they're going to complain because the guy was deported," he said.
Pete Skandalakis, district attorney for Carroll, Coweta, Heard, Troup and Meriwether counties, was president of the state's district attorneys association when the memo came out. He said the "effort the USCIS is making is appreciated." He said "it helps to have some guidelines" but added, "we would not change the way we do business simply to facilitate the deportation of otherwise nonviolent" criminals.
Even if prosecutors did not follow the memo's suggestions, it's cause for concern because it gives an uncensored look at the attitudes of the BCIS, said Lawrence J. Zimmerman, a Cobb County defense attorney. He put the memo on a members-only section of the Web site maintained by the Georgia Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers and has gotten calls from California, New York and Washington state.
Court Rules for Illegal Immigrants
SAN FRANCISCO -- A federal appeals court ruled Wednesday that illegal immigrants seeking to stay in the United States can't be disqualified simply because they used a fake Social Security card to work. In a 2-1 ruling, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a San Diego woman who came to the country illegally was eligible to apply for legal residency under the 1986 amnesty law despite her conviction for using someone else's Social Security card. The appellate court overturned an immigration judge's ruling and said Octavia Beltran Tirado, 50, did not commit a so-called "crime of moral turpitude" because she used the Social Security card only to work.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000531/aponline205850_000.htm
Court Rules for Workers Who Use False Social Security Cards
SAN DIEGO (AP) -- A federal appeals court ruled that illegal immigrants seeking to stay in the United States can't be disqualified simply because they used a fake Social Security card to work. In a 2-1 ruling issued Wednesday, a panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled a San Diego woman who came to the country illegally in 1968 was eligible to apply for legal residency under a 1986 amnesty despite her conviction for using someone else's Social Security card. The appellate court overturned an immigration judge's ruling by finding that Octavia Beltran Tirado, 50, did not commit a so-called "crime of moral turpitude" because she used the Social Security card only to work.
http://www.sacbee.com/news/calreport/calrep_story.cgi?N62.HTML
USCIS To Put Ore. Detainees in Hotel
PORTLAND, Ore. (AP) -- Foreign travelers denied entry into the country because they don't have the right documents will stay overnight in guarded hotel rooms instead of jail, immigration officials announced Thursday. The Immigration and Naturalization Service was responding to policies that have earned this city the name ``Deportland'' in some Asian countries. Records show immigration inspectors at Portland International Airport turn away foreigners nine times as often as inspectors in Seattle, though some of the visitors later gain entry through San Francisco or Seattle with the same documents. Some Japanese travel agencies have blacklisted the airport.
http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/w/AP-BCIS-Airport.html
H-1B Workers Lobby for Immigration Reform
Support groups back plan to speed green-card process
Carrie Kirby
San Francisco Chronicle
Sunil Kumar receives tempting offers from headhunters every couple of weeks, but the software engineer always turns them down. Kumar, 31, won't leave his Santa Clara startup because he has been waiting two years for his permanent-resident-status application to be processed. Changing jobs now would mean abandoning the application. And since his H-1B visa expires next year, he knows he won't have enough time to reapply for permanent resident status -- a process that often takes as long as five years in California. Kumar is among 200,000 skilled temporary workers in the United States who are trying to get permanent-resident-status cards, more commonly known as green cards. Because of the long application process and quotas that limit each country to 9,800 employment-based green cards per year, only half of today's applicants will be successful, according to a recent report by Georgetown University's Institute for the Study of International
Migration.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2000/06/02/BU96148.DTL
Small Towns Shaped by Influx of Hispanics
By Sergio Bustos and Deborah Mathis
WASHINGTON (AP) - Fueled by a hungry U.S. economy in need of workers and an unprecedented wave of immigrants from Latin America, cities and towns across America are being reshaped. No longer are the nation's 31 million Hispanics concentrated in towns along the U.S. border or in large urban hubs of California, Texas, Florida and New York. Over the past two decades, tens of thousands of immigrants from Central and South America and Mexico have moved into small towns of rural America, from Arkansas to Nevada, North Carolina and Iowa. This increasingly diverse population has revamped nearly every aspect of American life. The workplace. Grocery store. Radio dial. Voting booth. Classroom.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/ndsmon04.htm
Congress Reviewing Use of Evidence Kept Secret
By Tim Weiner
The New York Times
WASHINGTON, May 22 -- Using secret evidence to send someone to jail may be unconstitutional -- except in immigration courts, where foreigners or immigrants have been imprisoned for years on the basis of classified hearsay, federal judges have found. Now Congress is considering a bill that could alter or abolish the practice. The bill would restrict the use of evidence kept secret from a defendant and his lawyers. Nearly 100 sponsors in the House have backed the measure, the subject of a hearing scheduled before the House Judiciary Committee on Tuesday. Secret evidence has been used to jail about 100 foreigners and resident aliens in the last decade, the Immigration and Naturalization Service says. The detainees are held on the basis of evidence introduced by the government, which they cannot see or challenge, at immigration hearings. Court records show that such evidence has included rumor and innuendo -- the unsubstantiated accusations of an ex-wife, or hearsay from foreign intelligence services.
http://www.nytimes.com/library/politics/052300congress-immig.html
Senate Oks Border Crossings Bill
WASHINGTON (AP) -- The government will create a computer database of information collected from foreigners as they enter and leave the country under legislation (H.R. 4489) that gained final approval Thursday. The measure, passed on a voice vote in the Senate, would eliminate Section 110 of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act,
set to go into effect next year. The law would require border agents to question and track each foreigner who travels in and out of the country. It was meant to catch visitors who overstay their visas. Many lawmakers from states along the Canadian border opposed the law, saying it would hold up traffic, hurting commerce and tourism.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/aponline/20000525/aponline184100_000.htm
HCC to Admit Immigrants at Same Tuition as Texans
By Edward Hegstrom
Houston Chronicle
Undocumented immigrants will be able to enroll in Houston Community College classes at the same reduced rates offered to in-state residents under a new policy adopted after lengthy private debate late Thursday. The decision means that the community college system will have to forfeit state funds. HCC administrators estimate that between 500 and 700 new students will enroll in the community college system under the new rules, costing the college about $150,000 per year, according to Chancellor Ruth Burgos-Sasscer. "It's a small amount of money for the investment," Burgos-Sasscer said in an interview before the vote. "These are young people who are staying in high school, want to go to college and want to be productive citizens." Administrators say they can absorb the cost without increasing property taxes.
http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/metropolitan/563037
Canada Suffers Net Loss of Workers to U.S. in 1990s
OTTAWA (Dow Jones)-A new study conducted by Statistics Canada shows that Canada suffered a net loss of skilled workers to the U.S. in several key knowledge-based occupations during the 1990s. Statistics Canada said estimates place annual average emigration, both permanent and temporary, to the U.S. during the 1990s in a range of 22,000 to 35,000. This represented about 0.1% of the Canadian population, a lower rate than Canada has experienced historically, the agency said. Nevertheless, evidence from the study suggests that emigration to the U.S. increased steadily during the 1990s. As well, Statistics Canada found that individuals who moved to the U.S. were better educated than both the Canada-born population and recent immigrants to Canada. It said 49% of migrants to the U.S. between 1994 and 1999 aged 16 and over had a university degree. This compares with 12% among Canadian-born people and 21% among immigrants who arrived in Canada during the 1990s. People who left Canada for the U.S. also had higher incomes, the study found. An analysis on income tax data, showed individuals earning more than C$150,000 a year were seven times as likely to leave Canada as the average
taxpayer. People who had incomes between C$100,000 and C$150,000 were five times as likely to leave Canada. In 1996, 10 industries accounted for more than one-fifth of the nearly 27,000 taxfiliers who left Canada. These industries included hospitals, university education, and elementary and secondary education. Also in the top 10 was a cluster of high-tech industries, including engineering, computer services and communications and other electronic equipment.
Movers tended to be concentrated in knowledge-intensive industrial sectors, Statistics Canada said. In addition, individuals who left Canada in 1996 were disproportionately in the 24-to-44 age group - at entry and mid-career - compared with the population as a whole. This group comprised about two-thirds of all emigrants.
EDITOR'S NOTE: More information on the Statistics Canada report is at:
http://www.statcan.ca:80/Daily/English/000524/d000524a.htm
N.E. Crisis in H-1B Visas for Foreign Workers
Boston Globe
WASHINGTON - When the nation's 115,000 visas for skilled foreign workers ran out in March, congressional leaders quickly called for more to meet the demands of a booming economy. But action has lagged far behind the words: The visa legislation has been stalled for months, contributing to an employment crisis for New England technology firms and universities during one of the most critical hiring periods of the year.
Technology companies desperate to fill some of the 14,000 vacant jobs in Massachusetts have been largely prevented from recruiting foreign-born recent graduates of local colleges. At Harvard University, officials say they are finding it increasingly tricky to hire foreign scholars and researchers for the fall semester, since the Immigration and Naturalization Service stopped accepting new applications for the specialty visas halfway through the spring.
And although leaders in Congress, in both political parties, say they support a proposal to raise the number of visas to 200,000, and could vote on the legislation as soon as this week, the delay has frustrated many in the high-tech and educational fields. Even if Congress approves the increase, it would be unlikely to take effect before October, and some personnel managers fear a backlog of applications at the BCIS, slowing down business growth further still.
''It's a foolish thing. There are lots of foreign nationals here, this is our labor pool, they're educated, and we have jobs for them,'' said Christiana Lancione, director of human resources at the Burlington-based Internet company Genuity, which is hiring up to 200 new employees a month but faces the prospect of sending several foreign-born employees home on unpaid leave this summer because their temporary visas will expire.
''Time is money,'' said Greg Garcia, the governmental relations liaison for the networking firm 3COM, which employs approximately 1,000 people in Marlborough. ''The problem is that as the demand for engineering talent increases in the high-tech community - and it does not seem to abate - the supply of math, science, and engineering graduates coming out of collegeis declining. So we've got a serious problem here.''
If Congress does not act, the number of new skilled-worker visas, known as H-1B visas, will drop even lower, to 107,500, this October when the 2001 fiscal year begins. The following year, the USCIS would issue only 65,000 new H-1Bs. Yet in the current employment climate, in which the national jobless rate is 4.1 percent and even lower in New England, many companies are requesting a revision of the law to enlarge the visa cap. They have also pressed for a longer-term response to the specialty worker shortfall, through programs to improve math and science education in the United States.
Congress appears willing - at least in theory - to cooperate. Bills to raise the visa cap have been approved at the committee level in both the House and the Senate. As of last night, Senate majority leader Trent Lott was reportedly in back-room negotiations with Democratic leaders to work out a plan to bring the Senate version to the floor, as part of a broader proposal on several pending bills. And President Clinton has agreed to sign any bill that results in raising the cap.
But for months, the H-1B visa issue has been stuck, caught up in a congressional deadlock between the two parties' clashing priorities. Democrats, in the Senate, threatened to use a vote on the bill to address unrelated immigration issues, while Republicans refused to bring the issue to the floor at all.
Both sides have also tried to use the stalemate for political gain. Just this week, Michigan Senator Spencer Abraham, a sponsor of the Republican bill who faces a tough reelection race, flew to Massachusetts to hold a fund-raiser in the high-tech community. While there, he pointedly reminded business leaders about their stake in the quick passage of the Republican
H-1B visa plan, members of several high-tech firms said.
Not that business leaders needed reminding. In recent weeks, technology industry leaders have lobbied members of Congress in force, pleading for at least a temporary lifting of the cap. And they have spoken in near-unison: When the Massachusetts Software and Internet Association last week e-mailed around a letter that it planned to send to Congress, 80 companies that belong to the association signed on in two days, president Joyce Plotkin said. Among them was Genuity, which currently has several foreign employees working on temporary ''practical training'' visas that will expire before the new round of visas are issued. Rather than lose the workers, whom they view as valuable technical employees, entirely, the company plans to send them home on unpaid leave - a costly measure that many industry executives see as an absurd turn of events.
''Getting anything through Congress is difficult, but this should be a non-issue. This is good for America,'' said Jack Mollen, senior vice president of human resources for the giant computer company EMC, which has some 200 H-1B visa holders, out of its employee base of 20,000 worldwide. And at Harvard, where approximately 375 H-1B visa holders work, the depletion has left a lot of people ''anxiously awaiting to see if Congress is finally moving forward,'' said Kevin Casey, the director of government affairs. ''The confusion of having reached the cap is creating a lot of uncertainty,'' Casey said.
Tech Leaders Press Issues in Washington
The Dallas Morning News
WASHINGTON -- Many of the nation's top technology executives are here this week, lobbying Congress and the Clinton administration for trade opportunities, intellectual-property protections and loosened immigration policies. Microsoft Corp. chairman Bill Gates and Intel Corp. chairman Andy Groveled the witness list Tuesday at the congressional Joint Economic Committee's High-Tech Summit. On Wednesday, the Business Software Alliance's "Titans of Tech" meet the press, the Commerce and Treasury secretaries and the congressional leadership. Carleton Fiorina, president and CEO of Hewlett-Packard Co., and Disney Co. chairman Michael Eisner headline the second day of the high-tech hearings. The Computer Systems Policy Project, led this year by IBM Corp. chairman Louis Gerstner Jr., hopes to meet with President Clinton to talk about export controls before heading to Capitol Hill.
Michael Dell, chairman of Dell Computer Corp. in Round Rock, Texas, speaks in the ballroom of the National Press Club on Thursday. One room away, computer chiefs from IBM, Unisys Corp., Sun Microsystems Inc., NCR Corp. and Compaq Computer Corp. will break bread with other writers.
Washington politicians are trying to be of service. Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash., introduced Gates to the Joint Economic Committee as "the poster child for the technology age." Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., was even more effusive: "I can think of no one in our history who has changed the dynamic of the economy as Bill Gates has." Democrats and Republicans are battling to become the high-tech party, said Holly Bailey, a campaign finance investigator with the Center for
Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan think tank that studies campaign contributions.
"Four years ago, it was nothing like this. Now all the big names come to testify and lobby," she said.
Two studies released this week point up how quickly technology's profile has risen, both in Washington and throughout the country. Information technology "has become the driving force of the American economy," Commerce Secretary William Daley said Monday.
The Commerce Department reported that while information technology products account for only 8.3 percent of the gross national product, they have provided one-third of the economic growth in the last four years while shaving a half-percent off the rate of inflation. Dr. Andrew Whinston, director of the Center for Research in Electronic Commerce at the University of Texas, said his studies show that the Internet industry added 650,000 jobs last year and reached $524 billion in revenue _ a 62 percent increase over 1998. Whinston estimates a repeat performance is possible in 2000, bringing industry revenue to $850 billion. The tech chiefs are in Washington because key public policy issues complicate the growth horizon.
Intel's Grove urged the Senate to normalize trade relations with China, clearing the way for industry to take advantage of the world's third-largest information technology market.
Gates testified about several philanthropic and corporate efforts to train teachers in the use of computers and the Internet, and he urged Congress to do the same. "Of all the high-tech issues in front of Congress, the most important relate to education," he said. "The lifeblood of our industry is not capital equipment, but human capital." He said nothing about Microsoft's antitrust fight with the federal government, and none of the committee members asked.
Carol Bartz, chairman and CEO of software company Autodesk Inc., urged Congress to seek tougher enforcement of copyright protections. "More than 2 million Web pages worldwide hawk stolen software at rock-bottom prices. At this rate, the Internet should be called the Home Shoplifting Network," she said. Also high on the high-tech wish list is immigration reform. The industry has appealed to Congress for several years to raise the ceiling on work-related temporary visas known as H1-B visas. This year's ceiling was 115,000, which the industry hit in March. Industry trade associations estimate hundreds of thousands of technology jobs go begging because qualified applicants can't be found in the United States. Without more immigrants, the work on software development and other technology contracts will move offshore, Gates said.
"Either someone else overseas gets the job here or gets the work there," he said. Grove differed with many of his industry colleagues by endorsing two government activities that many high-tech companies oppose: taxation of Internet sales and federal privacy protections.
"Privacy is a valuable good," he said. "Property rights have not been left to voluntary actions. The government regulates them. I think privacy rights are the same." Grove said that applying sales taxes to Internet commerce, while a complex challenge, should be done to treat all sales alike. "As a matter of public policy, I don't see where no tax on Internet sales is justified," he said.
USCIS Extends Hondurans and Nicaraguans Registration Deadline
Miami Herald
Conceding that they did not allow more than 100,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans sufficient time to register for a renewal of their temporary legal status, U.S. immigration authorities on Tuesday extended the registration deadline by 30 more days. The extension gives those Hondurans and Nicaraguans who already have Temporary Protected Status or pending applications until July 5 to re-register for the benefit, which allows them to live and work legally in the country for one year. All those who reapply will also receive an automatic extension of their one-year work permits until Dec. 5, though they must still apply separately for a renewal.
The Clinton administration originally granted the temporary protection from deportation to Hondurans and Nicaraguans who were in the country before Dec. 31, 1998, in an effort to avoid burdening the Central American countries' recovery from Hurricane Mitch. On May 5, the administration announced it would extend their TPS for one more year, or until July 5, 2001. But it gave beneficiaries until this coming Monday to re-register, a period that advocates complained was far too short to get the word to the roughly 106,000 Hondurans and Nicaraguans with TPS across the country, given how slowly news can take to penetrate immigration communities isolated by language barriers.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service agreed. ``The reasoning was this: We had over 100,000 who have applied already, and we didn't feel that 30 days would be sufficient time for so many people to reapply,'' said Dan Kane, spokesman for the USCIS in Washington. ``We felt it was important to reach eligible Hondurans and Nicaraguans not only in large cities, but in rural centers where information may be more sporadic.''
Advocates said that some immigrants were falling prey to misinformation or unscrupulous immigration ``consultants'' charging exorbitant amounts to fill out a simple form. The advocates, who had asked for 90 extra days, said they were satisfied by the 30-day extension. ``This is a huge breather,'' said Joséé Lagos, president of Honduran Unity in Miami. ``This extension basically helps us to combat misinformation and corruption.
``Some people think it's an automatic extension, that they don't have to re-apply. Others are being taken advantage of by unscrupulous people, when you don't need an attorney to fill out this form.'' The USCIS cautioned that applications must be received by July 5, and advise applicants to mail them in well ahead of the deadline. They must submit form I-821 and, only if they wish to extend employment authorization, form I-765 along with a $100 filing fee. The forms are available from the toll-free USCIS Forms line, 1-800-870-3676, or from the USCIS Web site, www.ins.usdoj.gov.