One Love, One Nation,
Stop Deportation
AYPAL
and DataCenter document devastating impact of deportations
on immigrant families
by John Fong
Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and Leadership
 |
| Youth leader Michelle
Hong presents data showing a 400% increase in
deportations due to IIRIRA. |
Over 400 people showed up to a rally at the
Oakland, California Federal Building on March 22, 2004 to
call on Congresswoman Barbara Lee (D-Oakland/Berkeley) to
take a lead role in sponsoring legislation to stop deportations
that are devastating hundreds of thousands of immigrant
families every year.
The rally also featured the release of the
report Justice Detained, produced by the DataCenter
and Asian/Pacific Islander Youth Promoting Advocacy and
Leadership (AYPAL) to document the hardships that the deportations
cause. (download report)
The report release and community rally followed
an 18-month, One Love, One Nation, Stop Deportation campaign
organized by AYPAL, an Oakland-based, 300-member youth organization
seeking to change the relationship of power between young
people and policy makers.
The campaign aims to reform and repeal the
harshest elements of the 1996 Illegal Immigration and Immigrant
Responsibility Act (IIRIRA), which mandates the detention
and deportation of non-citizens convicted of crimes with
sentences of one year or more of jail and/or probation combined.
Since the 1996 IIRIRA was passed, deportable convictions
now include many nonviolent crimes and misdemeanors like
shoplifting, taking a car for a joy ride, drunk driving,
possession of marijuana and vandalism/tagging.
As
in all AYPAL campaigns, high school age youth have made
all strategic decisions and done all the work for the Stop
Deportation campaign, including working with the DataCenter's
Youth Strategy Project to do research.
Realizing that in order to move Congress, they would have
to appeal to a much larger community base than in their
previous, mostly local, campaigns, the AYPAL youth activists
spent months finding families directly hurt by IIRIRA deportations
and willing to share their stories, and to statistically
document the wide-ranging impact of the unjust legislation.
The youths' strategy was to publicize the
emotional and financial costs to spouses and children left
behind when an immigrant is deported. For example the Justice
Detained report showed the median household income for a
non-citizen family is $32,515. When the median income of
a non-citizen full-time worker ($21,164) is subtracted from
that family, the resulting household income of $11,351 would
be $2,500 below poverty level for a family with 2 children.
"Politicians
like Barbara Lee need to listen to us because we youths
know what's going on in the community and the many challenges
our people face everyday,"
said Melinda Phan, 16.
 |
In
justifying the need for IIRIRA, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX),
the chief architect of the bill, has often pointed to
the "rising crime rate among immigrants."
Yet in seven states with the largest immigrant populations,
the crime rate (ratio of prison population to overall
state population) for the Foreign Born was only 59%
of the rate for the general population. (1) |
AYPAL has made significant progress in drawing
Bay Area attention to this issue, including getting:
Because of AYPAL efforts, IIRIRA has shifted
to a front-burner issue among immigrant rights groups, progressive
community organizations, the grassroots immigrant population
including church goers, union members, residents of low
income neighborhoods and especially the Latino community;
and Congresswoman Barbara Lee, who AYPAL believes is beginning
to sense community pressure.
Although the AYPAL organizers have made significant
progress, they realize they need to continue to strive for
a concrete win in their campaign—namely the repeal
of IIRIRA. They realize an important early step is to get
not only Barbara Lee's backing, but to get her to champion
the issue and to be a leader in Congress, as she has done
on other progressive issues.
In May, AYPAL achieved
a victory when Barbara Lee agreed to co-sponsor legislation
that addresses almost all the group's demands. The
Keeping Families Together Act, introduced by Rep. Bob Filner
(D-San Diego), would repeal IIRIRA's loose definition of
what counts as an "aggravated felony" and restore
residency or status rights to immigrants who have been affected.
