http://www.contracostatimes.com/mld/cct ... 141614.htm

Posted on Mon, Mar. 20, 2006


Panel addresses bias in immigration laws
BERKELEY: Texas lawmaker likens decline in civil liberties to start of segregation, proposes alternative solutions
By Nathaniel Hoffman
CONTRA COSTA TIMES

The national fear of terrorism and a scaling back of civil rights since 2001 is starting to resemble the early days of segregation for immigrants, a Texas congresswoman says.

The climate in the country has muddied the immigration debate, but Sheila Jackson Lee told a conference of UC Berkeley legal scholars, students and immigration activists that she still has hope.

"There should be answers that don't make immigrants the scapegoat," the Houston congresswoman said Friday.

Lee's proposals and the viewpoints of many participants in the Citizenship Without Borders conference at Berkeley's Boalt Hall are not winning the debate as Congress considers comprehensive immigration reform.

House Republicans overwhelmingly passed an immigration bill late last year that would criminalize many immigration violations and boost enforcement and security at the Mexico border. The Senate is now debating a guest worker program for immigrants - a plan that President Bush and many industry groups support.

Lee called such a proposal, "a flat-Earth concept" doomed to fail.

"You're just building a core group of internal antagonism and conflict" and creating second class citizens, Lee said.

Her proposals - a path to citizenship for undocumented workers already in the U.S., an increase in the number of new visas available and increasing opportunities for people from more nations to come to the U.S. - are considered pro-immigrant and supported by most of the Berkeley thinkers and activists.

But Lee's simultaneous call for thousands of new border guards and 100,000 more beds in detention centers raised some hackles.

Moderator Maria Echaveste, an attorney, lecturer and the Bill Clinton's former deputy chief of staff, told Lee that even as border security has been tightened in recent years, more and more immigrants are making it across.

The two-day conference explored the idea that being a good citizen does not necessarily require citizenship.

"The way to get the argument going that immigrants need more rights is to look at the way they live at the local level," said T. Alexander Aleinikoff, dean of the Georgetown University Law Center and a former immigration attorney in the Clinton administration.

Aleinikoff pointed to the involvement of U.S. immigrants - whether legally or illegally -- in local schools, communities and even state politics.

"Local citizenship tends to be an inclusive, people-to-people phenomenon," Aleinikoff said in his Thursday keynote address. National citizenship is about exclusion, about defining who "we" are, he said.

"Seeing citizenship as a local set of practices puts things in perspective," he added.

But the Minutemen, a civilian group that patrols the border, and feelings about the cost of immigration at the local level are also regional phenomenon, said Kevin Johnson, a law professor and associate dean at UC Davis.

"You often have to rely on the national government to protect immigrants," said Johnson, who edits the online ImmigrationProf blog.


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Nathaniel Hoffman covers immigration and demographics for the Times. Reach him at 925-943-8345 or nhoffman@cctimes.com.