http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cct ... 852470.htm

Posted on Mon, Jun. 19, 2006

Immigration rights advocates contemplate their next steps

By Nathaniel Hoffman
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

Guillermo Armando Campos-Guevarra saw the writing on the wall in December.

After the U.S. House of Representatives passed a strong immigration enforcement bill, the injured construction worker from Antioch decided it was time to become a U.S. citizen. He wants protection from deportation and a chance to better influence the debate.

"I worry about my family," said Campos-Guevarra, a native of Honduras. "We want the tranquillity and peace (of citizenship)."

Millions of people took to the streets in March, April and May on behalf of immigrant rights, saying they wanted an end to the fear and worry that come with being undocumented.

Now the nonprofit organizations, soccer teams, health clinics, churches and hometown associations that brought people to the streets are sitting down to figure out what to do next.

One of their goals is growing the ranks of immigrants who vote.

Campos-Guevarra was among two dozen Spanish-speaking immigrants filling out naturalization applications at a recent Catholic Charities workshop in Concord.

Nearly all the workshop participants agreed that the pending immigration legislation inspired them to seek citizenship.

Catholic Charities offices in Santa Rosa, Tucson, Ariz.; Wichita, Kan.; and Blackfoot, Idaho all noticed dramatic increases in citizenship or residency applications in the first part of this year.

"A lot of it is just people have been awakened to feeling, 'OK, I just need to say something, to do something,'" said Sheila Chung, director of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition.

In Contra Costa County and in regional and national meetings being held throughout the summer and fall, immigrant organizers are talking about a Latino agenda, pushing citizenship and voter registration and trying to turn the turnout from May 1 into a national organization.

"Those people who attended the march, we need to listen to them" said Hector Rivera Lopez, a county psychologist who emceed one of the May 1 marches in Concord.

"The other part that nobody's touching is that we don't have leaders in this community that bring together this community," he said.

Latino activists in Contra Costa say the county is too divided between west, central and east. As they develop a response to the congressional immigration debate, Latino activists are trying to unite the county and the greater Bay Area.

"The big thing here in Contra Costa County is that mobilizing and organizing has been a challenge for the Latino community for a very long time," said community health educator Arturo Castillo. "You have these invisible barriers with West, Central and East County."

A battery of volunteer community health educators who work with Castillo at Clinica de la Raza in Concord are on the front line in keeping the Latino community informed.

"Although I have not been here long, I wanted to participate in something big," said Fernando Bautista, a 24-year-old volunteer with the clinic.

Bautista and his fellow outreach workers are credited with turning out large numbers of people May 1 in Concord and Brentwood. They decided to organize immigration forums this summer to help unite the county.

While local groups are working in many small ways to keep immigrants organized, the passage of a Senate immigration bill at the end of May has confused and divided immigrant advocacy groups.

"It's divided because these organizations that basically went for the (Senate) compromise have created a lot of confusion and division in the community," said Nativo Lopez, national president of Mexican American Political Association and a key organizer in the Los Angeles immigration demonstrations.

The majority of Bay Area immigration rights activists and many grass-roots groups across the country oppose the Senate's version of comprehensive immigration reform and believe that the best possible outcome is that both the House and Senate immigration bills die in committee.

"There was a relatively open mind as to where the Senate might go," said Peter Schey, executive director of the Center for Human Rights and Constitutional Law, a prominent immigration law firm in Los Angeles.

"People are definitely waking up and seeing that this is not what they marched for in March, and this is not what they marched for in May."

Schey said that in the 1980s Congress debated immigration reform for four years before the 1986 amnesty passed. This time around, the House acted with almost no debate or testimony from experts, and the Senate took only a shade more time.

"The politics of fear pretty much always works," Schey said.

The National Immigration Forum, an umbrella group that has been instrumental in pushing for comprehensive immigration reform in Washington, acknowledges that there are problems with the Senate bill but hopes they can be fixed.

"It is a really common occurrence that those who work in Washington are accused of taking a more pragmatic view, and those who work in the field take a somewhat more principled view of the way the policies come out," said Angela Kelley deputy director of the forum. "The best defense against this enforcement-only (House plan) is an strong offense."

But many of the grass-roots immigration groups feel the forum and other "D.C.-based groups" compromised too much.

"They were part of this compromise -- of the compromise bill in the Senate," said Mariana Bustamante of the American Civil Liberties Union's Immigrant Rights Project. "They have pushed it for a very long time. They say it's going to benefit 8.5 million people, and I don't know where they got that number. This schism is going to become more acute after we know what's going to happen with the legislation."

She said that one of the worst messages to come out of Washington was the oft-repeated slogan that "immigrants are doing jobs that Americans won't do," a notion that is particularly offensive to African-Americans and other under-employed groups.

"We need to look beyond the legislation, and one of the things that is crucial to the immigrant-rights movement is not losing the alliance with African-American groups," she said.

A new organization formed last month in the Bay Area seeks to do just that.

"Historically, there is a very close relationship between the black community and Mexico," said Phil Lawson, a retired Richmond pastor and founder of the Black Alliance for Just Immigration. "Mexico was our strongest ally during slavery."

With two versions of immigration reform stalled in Congress, immigration groups are taking the time to build a notion of what kind of legalization program and rights they expect. It is a message that echoes in Latino communities large and small.

"We're definitely still pushing for a comprehensive immigration reform," said Teresa Flores, a 17-year-old organizer with the Contra Costa Interfaith Sponsoring Committee.

Flores, who is from Brentwood, said the network of churches she works with has taken one element of the Senate bill -- the DREAM Act -- on as a priority. They are pushing representatives to support the program allowing the children of undocumented families a means of going to college.

"I definitely think that the movement will be sparked again."