Probes of legal status a no-no?
Immigration would become non-issue under Evanston law
By Deborah Horan | Tribune staff reporter
January 11, 2008
Evanston is poised to approve an ordinance that may make it the first suburban "sanctuary city" in the Chicago area by barring city employees and police from asking about a person's immigration status in most cases.

The City Council's Human Services Committee unanimously approved a draft resolution Monday prohibiting such inquiry unless it is required by law or deemed integral to a police investigation. The resolution also calls on government workers and police to accept a passport or consular card in lieu of a driver's license as proof of identity.

"It's an intent to guide our behavior," said Ald. Cheryl Wollin (1st). "The title of it [includes the words] 'humane and just treatment.' I don't see how anyone can be against humane and just treatment." The resolution is set to come before the City Council as early as February.

The ordinance would anchor the North Shore community at one end of a trend that has seen more and more local governments weigh in on immigration enforcement in the absence of federal reform, analysts said. Municipalities at the other end of the spectrum -- including Waukegan and Carpentersville -- have moved to help enforce immigration policy and have adopted ordinances that many immigrants believe are aimed at chasing them out.

"You see trends in both directions," said Muzaffar Chishti, director of the Migration Policy Institute's office at New York University, a non-partisan think tank. "One trend is the enforcement of immigration law. There's also a trend in the opposite direction, where local authorities and especially police forces say the police should not do it."

Chishti said there is no comprehensive database tracking municipal action on immigration matters, but many major metropolitan areas, including Chicago, have become so-called sanctuary cities -- a politically charged phrase that means authorities have directed police and city employees not to ask about immigration status.

Cook County approved a similar resolution last year after a heated debate over whether undocumented immigrants seeking medical care would burden county hospitals, among other issues.

Meanwhile, Waukegan, Carpentersville and Lake County have moved in the other direction, applying for federal training to start deportation proceedings against undocumented immigrants arrested on criminal charges.

"Towns are picking which side they are going to be on," said Roy Beck, president of NumbersUSA, a group that bills itself as an "immigration-reduction organization."

Beck believes cities that pass such ordinances will become magnets for illegal immigrants, who he says will use social services at the expense of legal residents. But as he sees it, letting each locality decide its own policy is "kind of a fair system."

"The towns that want to subsidize illegal aliens can, and the towns that don't want to don't have to because they can push the illegal aliens out," Beck said.

Of about a dozen people questioned in downtown Evanston on Thursday, none agreed with Beck's belief that illegal immigrants will drain city services.

"That's an illusionary idea out in the public, but it's not backed up by statistics," said Evanston resident Christopher Maylone, 44.

Sanctuary cities are mostly symbolic, said David Abraham, professor of immigration and citizenship law at the University of Miami School of Law.

"Local government officials are not immigration officers," Abraham said. "No sanctuary policy that I've ever heard of goes beyond a commitment to follow existing law. They're all crafted to endorse the status quo."

Evanston is the only Chicago suburb to take up the matter as a proposed ordinance, according to data from the National Immigration Law Center, though many police departments, including those in Skokie, Cicero and Oak Park, have directed officers not to inquire about immigration status unless there is an indictment or conviction.

"If they begin to ask about immigration, they lose the trust of witnesses coming forth, and community policing becomes much more difficult," Chishti said.

Evanston City Council members admit the ordinance is largely symbolic in that the city's police and government agencies don't ask about immigration status anyway. Officials said they merely want to give an unofficial policy the weight of an ordinance to put at ease the city's foreign-born population -- which makes up roughly 12.5 percent of Evanston's 74,000 residents, according to a 2006 American Community Survey by the U.S. Census Bureau.

And indeed, much of the resolution is political. It concludes, for instance, by calling on the president of the United States to support comprehensive immigration reform that would provide "a road to citizenship ... so that residents are not forced to live in fear of deportation."

Started through a grass-roots effort by clergy, teachers, local officials and activists, Evanston's draft resolution has gained support from interfaith organizations, the YWCA and Evanston's former police chief, as well as U.S. Rep. Jan Schakowsky (D-Ill.) and State Sen. Jeff Schoenberg (D-Evanston).

"We have been very disturbed in the last number of months by the extremely virulent anti-immigrant rhetoric creeping across the country," said Rachel Heuman, a grass-roots activist who helped craft Evanston's draft resolution.

Several of Evanston's aldermen said they expect the draft resolution to be approved. It's being held in committee to await input from immigrant groups and residents, said Ald. Steve Bernstein (4th).

"My hope is that everybody is given basic human rights everywhere," Bernstein said. "But it better start with Evanston."

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dhoran@tribune.com

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