Thursday, April 03, 2008

The human side of immigration

Carrerainside

While Governor Carcieri and his critics continue to square off on immigration, Amy Littlefield has a profile in this week's Phoenix of Stella Carrera, coordinator of immigration and advocacy services for the Diocese of Providence, a piece that tells us something about the stories behind the debate.

Carrera knows better than most how complicated the US immigration system can be. She came here, from Colombia, with a visitor’s visa in 1973 and overstayed her visit.

She moved to New York to be with her older brother and sister, and worked in a cosmetics factory, filling nail polish and mascara bottles, for minimum wage with no benefits. Carrera says someone from a local union heard about the mistreatment of the workers and he came around with some fliers. The owner caught wind of it and called immigration authorities.

When Carrera went outside for a cigarette and a coffee that day, she saw the cars and the officers. Immigration authorities shut the doors, herded everyone into a room, and asked them, one by one, for their paperwork.

Carrera remembers helping a woman who was several months pregnant, and who began to hyperventilate. Another woman curled up inside a cardboard box for two hours, praying to God she wouldn’t sneeze, while authorities combed through the factory. There were probably 10 cars, Carrera says. They probably took away 100 people that day.

At least 300 workers were detained after a similar raid last march in New Bedford, Massachusetts. History repeats itself, Carrera says. “Nothing changes.”

Littlefield also reports from Mexico on some of the factors that influence immigration to the US:

Miguel Pickard, who works for a social-research organization in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas, says that the mainstream US media often overlooks how neo-liberal policies like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) have contributed dramatically to the rise in Mexican immigration. Following NAFTA’s implementation in 1994, subsidized US agricultural products flooded the Mexican markets, and Mexican farmers couldn’t compete with the cheap imports.

Immigration to the US became a “survival strategy,” Pickard says, for campesinos that could no longer make money selling corn and other agricultural products, as they had for many years. As a result, immigration to the US from Mexico tripled after 1994, leading “millions” of people to make the trip, he says.

NAFTA’s impact illuminates how the source of the Latino immigration “problem” is sometimes closer to home than we are willing to admit.

Governor Donald L. Carcieri | Immigration | Jobs/Economic Development | Racial/ethnic issues