Without A Country

Pramila Jayapal On The Problems Immigrants Face

On the morning of September 11, 2001, India-born author Pramila Jayapal was living amid cardboard boxes in her new house in Seattle, Washington, when a friend called from the East Coast and told her to unpack her television. Over the next several days, as Americans struggled with their grief over the deaths caused by the plane hijackings and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, another set of tragedies began to unfold: hate crimes against Arabs and other ethnic minorities swept the country. In Seattle Jayapal was inundated with calls for help from Muslim women who were afraid to leave their houses in traditional dress, from immigrant taxi drivers who had been assaulted, and from Arab parents who had pulled their children from school.

Recently divorced, Jayapal had set aside her activism to carve out time to work on a book manuscript, but a few days later she met with Congressman Jim McDermott (D-WA) and presented a proposal for a campaign to make Washington a “hate-free zone.” She’d envisioned someone else leading the effort, but within twenty-four hours McDermott organized a press conference to introduce Jayapal — who maintained that she was not looking to front a new activist movement — as the head of the campaign.

During the next year, as hate crimes against immigrants in the U.S. soared by 1,600 percent and the federal government tightened immigration policies, Jayapal was drawn again and again to the defense of immigrants. Today her OneAmerica (www.weareoneamerica.org) is one of the nation’s leading immigrants’ rights organizations. On any given day Jayapal might face off against an anti-immigration pundit on talk radio, speak to a crowd of conservative rural Oklahomans, listen to the plight of Mexican farmworkers, or help argue a Somali refugee’s case before the immigration courts.

Jayapal learned early to bridge deep cultural and economic divides. When she was a girl, her father’s oil-industry job took her family from India to Indonesia, where she attended the Jakarta International School. Though she and her siblings had a modest upbringing, her classmates were often the children of wealthy embassy families from Europe and the U.S. Jayapal spent some time volunteering with charity groups in the Jakarta slums. She immigrated to the U.S. at age seventeen to study English and economics at Georgetown University and went on to receive an mba from Northwestern in 1990. She worked for a time in banking and marketing, but she found the jobs unrewarding and took a position with an international public-health organization, running a loan program that funded socially responsible health projects in developing countries. Later Jayapal spent two years living in villages and small towns in India as a fellow with the Institute of Current World Affairs, and from that experience she wrote her memoir Pilgrimage: One Woman’s Return to a Changing India (Seal Press). She became a U.S. citizen in 2000.

I met Jayapal in her office in one of Seattle’s most ethnically diverse neighborhoods. On the brightly painted walls, she and her staff had hung a U.S. immigration-history timeline alongside banners, batik cloths, and other colorful symbols of their immigrant clients. At forty-tw0, Jayapal is small framed, with a melodic voice and a flair for storytelling. As we talked, she gestured with one hand and held a mug of tea in the other, her eyes widening when she made a point.

Ostrander: When you speak about immigration, you often cite the Emma Lazarus poem at the base of the Statue of Liberty: “Give me your tired, your poor . . .” Do you think that image of a safe harbor is still a part of the American identity?

Jayapal: I think that the majority of Americans still see the U.S. as a nation of immigrants and as a generous, fair country. Of course, people want policies to govern who comes to America and whether they get to stay. And that’s a reasonable request. But research shows that Americans have strong beliefs in fairness, equality, justice, and democracy. The words due process poll well with Americans. Even if people can’t define what the phrase means, it implies to them that there’s a process, it’s fair, and everybody gets treated equally.

But the system isn’t fair, and we’re trying to publicize that. We need due process for everyone who is detained by immigration officials. More than 90 percent of people who go through the incredibly complex immigration system don’t have an attorney, and those who do get one often hire someone who exploits them and sometimes worsens their situation. My group is constantly solving problems for people who have gotten terrible legal advice or been ripped off by corrupt lawyers. And there are not enough immigration judges to hear all the cases. More and more discretion has been given to clerks to make decisions that should be made by judges, such as whether somebody’s going to be deported. 

Part of what OneAmerica does is inform people about the immigration-and-detention system. For example, after 250 detainees got food poisoning at the Tacoma Detention Center, we invited people to come and sample a detainee meal. We wanted to encourage Americans to think about what it might be like to get food poisoning while stuck in a bureaucratic jail system. Most people are horrified to learn that these things happen, but they don’t take action, because they think it’s an isolated occurrence. We’re trying to make people act on their core beliefs about how human beings should be treated. OneAmerica has worked with many clients who have had medical conditions in a detention center and been unable to see a doctor. One of our clients was pregnant and wasn’t allowed her prenatal visits. Finally, in her eighth month of pregnancy, she was released onto the street with no money. Perhaps they were afraid she would deliver her baby in the detention center.

The detention industry is enormous and growing. I think that the more the industry is privatized, the way the prison industry is becoming, the more human-rights abuses we’re going to see. 

Ostrander: How does an immigrant end up in a detention center?

Jayapal: There are many ways. Sometimes it is for not having legal status or letting their legal status expire. Either they came across the border without any papers, or they came on a student, visitor, or worker visa but didn’t renew it because they didn’t know you had to, or they forgot, or they can’t read English and didn’t understand the notices. Some immigrants apply for political asylum and don’t get it — often because it’s so difficult to navigate the complex U.S. immigration system — but they choose to stay anyway rather than put themselves at risk by returning to their home countries. Others in detention have committed a crime that is considered a “deportable offense.” You would think these offenses are horrible, but Congress has continued to expand the list of deportable offenses to include more petty crimes. Someone can be deported for an offense as minor as shoplifting.

Many people don’t understand that staying in the United States on an expired visa or entering without papers is not a criminal violation but a violation of the civil immigration code. The U.S. never criminalized immigration violations. I’m not sure why, but my theory is that, if it had, the government would have had to provide immigrants with public defenders.

Since September 11, 2001, we have seen a blurring between terrorists and immigrants. The fbi may start an inquiry into a suspected terrorist, but, rather than take those terrorism charges to criminal court, it will try the suspect on immigration charges instead, because it simply doesn’t have the evidence to prove a criminal charge. It is much easier to win a case in immigration court than in criminal court, in part because you can raise the specter of terrorism without having to prove anything. A respected Somali Muslim imam we worked with was picked up on terrorism charges but tried on an immigration violation. In the immigration court they allowed an fbi informant to testify by phone, because he claimed he was too scared to testify in person. That would never have happened in criminal court.

We’re not necessarily saying all these people should be allowed to stay. We’re asking, Where’s the due process? Where’s the fair system?

Ostrander: Is it fair to extend the same rights to illegal immigrants that we do to legal immigrants and citizens? Polls show that many Americans don’t support equal rights for illegal immigrants.

Jayapal: It depends on how you word the question in the polls. I can show you polls in which 85 percent of Americans respond that immigrants who are here without legal status but have worked hard and haven’t committed any crimes should be given citizenship. Your question also assumes that we have a fair system in place and that the laws make sense. Martin Luther King Jr., in his letter from the Birmingham jail, wrote, “An unjust law is no law at all.” And remember that our Constitution provides certain rights to due process to
everyone in the U.S. regardless of legal status. We need legalization and a path to citizenship for all undocumented immigrants — and not just the Mexican immigrants but the 3 million undocumented Asian immigrants and the growing number of undocumented African immigrants. Many of these immigrants may not think of themselves as illegal because they entered the country legally but have overstayed their visas or let their immigration status lapse without even knowing it.

The immigration debate has unfortunately come to be seen as a debate only about undocumented Mexican immigrants. Hardly anyone discusses African political-asylum seekers or Cambodian refugees or even other Latin Americans: Salvadorans, Ecuadorians, Guatemalans. It’s true there are 12 million undocumented immigrants who have crossed the border illegally to work, but more than 70 percent of the immigrants who enter the U.S. each year have legal status when they arrive. And remember that one in five children in the U.S. is a child of an immigrant — so policies around immigration affect plenty of U.S. citizens too.

Ostrander: You say the immigration system doesn’t work. How is it broken?

Jayapal: For starters, there’s an enormous discrepancy between the number of immigrants permitted by law to enter the U.S. and the number needed by the economy. We need quotas that make sense. The U.S. allows roughly five thousand visas per year for low-skilled workers, but every year about four hundred thousand low-skilled jobs are filled by immigrants. National lobbyists for the farming industry have said that there are millions more agricultural jobs than can be filled by legal workers.

Then there’s what the system does to families. The Republican Party claims we’re a country of “family values,” yet our immigration policies separate husbands from wives and parents from children. There is such a backlog of immigration and visa applications — currently around 5 million waiting to be processed — that sometimes applicants have to be separated from their families for a decade. I met a mother who had escaped El Salvador and come here seeking political asylum with her five-year-old child. She had left her younger son in El Salvador in the care of grandparents. She got asylum, and she and her older child became citizens, but when she applied to bring her younger son into the country legally, the system didn’t allow it. She waited for twelve years before she finally went back to El Salvador and brought her son, who was then fourteen, into the U.S. illegally. She was forced to act because her elderly parents couldn’t care for him anymore, and at age eighteen a child can no longer enter the U.S. under a parent’s visa. Now, can any parents say they wouldn’t have done the same thing? But the son was caught and put into detention and deported back to El Salvador. If the legal system isn’t working because of inefficient bureaucracy, then people will find other ways to be with their families. It’s only human.

Ostrander: But do most immigrants who come into the U.S. illegally have such justifiable motives?

Jayapal: The reasons people immigrate are multifaceted. More people are moving around the world today because of political, social, and economic strife than ever before. Many times it is U.S. foreign policy driving this migration. For instance, after the North American Free Trade Agreement [nafta] was passed, more than a million Mexican farmers were driven out of business because they could not compete with subsidized U.S. farmers, and undocumented immigration from Mexico rose by 60 percent. If somebody has to leave his or her home to earn a living, you could describe that as “seeking opportunity,” or you could call it “forced migration.” NAFTA talks about a “borderless world” in which goods are freely traded back and forth, but if people can’t legally travel across the border and access jobs on the other side, these trade agreements benefit only corporations, many of which relocate just across the Mexican border so they can pay lower wages.

And when we talk about the causes of immigration, let’s not forget that the U.S. media broadcast around the globe the idea that America is a luxurious and ideal place to live, a place where you can find opportunities that you can’t get anywhere else. If we advertise that America is the best country in the world, then we shouldn’t be surprised when people show up.

Ostrander: Why do you think some people are willing to risk their lives to enter the U.S.? In 2005 alone there were 433 deaths during illegal border crossings.

Jayapal: Many have to migrate for economic or political reasons. Some are escaping danger in countries where they don’t have rights. Others want so badly to provide a better life for their children that they’re willing to put up with an incredible amount of hardship. I know of a Mexican woman, a single parent, who came across the border illegally to work cleaning houses so that she could pay for her son to attend a university. She’s been separated from him for at least ten years. 

There are other people who simply have no other way to feed themselves and their children. Many endure abusive conditions as farmworkers in the U.S. I met one agricultural worker who had whip marks across his back.

Ostrander: Whip marks? How could that happen and go unreported?

Jayapal: The worker came to the United States and asked for political asylum, but he wasn’t approved. He couldn’t go back to his own country, where he would have been thrown in prison. He was completely under his employer’s control — as is the case with many “guest worker” programs.

Ostrander: But don’t federal guest-worker programs include some protections?

Jayapal: Right now guest workers are sponsored by and dependent on a single employer. If that employer threatens them, withholds their pay, or abuses them, they can’t file a complaint, because the employer can have them deported. People who can be deported back to a life-threatening situation in their home country really have no choice. And guest workers have no ability to obtain permanent status here or to join labor unions. Democratic congressman Charles Rangel from New York has called the guest-worker program the closest thing to slavery that he’s ever seen.

Undocumented immigrants have even fewer protections. Recently I heard about a drywall company in Seattle that hired undocumented immigrants and made them scale tall buildings without a safety harness. One of the immigrants fell and cracked his skull. The boss was so scared he would be reported for hiring undocumented workers that he refused to allow the other employees to call 911. He threatened their jobs. Finally one of them did call. The worker who fell lived but had serious brain damage, and a lawsuit was brought against the employer.

Ostrander: Do you think the federal government should crack down on employers who hire illegal immigrants?

Jayapal: The government shouldn’t be cracking down on workers or employers without fixing the broken system first. It’s ludicrous to penalize individual employers or workers when our entire economic system depends on undocumented immigrants. That’s why the raids happening across the country make no sense. It’s a temporary solution that makes anti-immigration groups happy but doesn’t do anything to solve the real problem of a broken system. And that’s not even accounting for the violations of human rights that occur in these raids.

Even former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan has said that the government should ease restrictions on immigration. Former Microsoft ceo Bill Gates has said we need immigration reform to stay economically competitive. These are not just the liberal lefties talking.

In Washington State last year thousands of apples remained unpicked because of increased government raids on undocumented workers. Workers were scared to go to work, so the apples fell and rotted. In 2006 the Swift meatpacking factory in Cactus, Texas, was subject to government raids and arrests of 295 undocumented workers. Swift has since not been able to find enough local, native-born workers to fill the jobs vacated by those raids, and it’s had to send buses to Houston to recruit Burmese political refugees. And a big raid on a slaughterhouse in Postville, Iowa, showed that the government should be focusing on implementing labor laws — the company was hiring kids to work intolerably long hours in terrible conditions — rather than cracking down on undocumented immigrants.

Unfortunately employers scared of being held liable for hiring undocumented immigrants are pushing for piecemeal immigration legislation that often downgrades worker protections. The Western Growers Association, for example, is calling for more guest-worker visas, but it says nothing about worker protections.

Some towns — for instance, Riverside, New Jersey, and Hazelton, Pennsylvania — have passed ordinances that penalize employers who hire undocumented immigrants. Even documented immigrants have left these towns, because most of them have family members who are undocumented. Because immigrants are also consumers, many small businesses in these towns have failed, and the downtowns have begun to deteriorate.

I often debate anti-immigration pundits on radio and television — like Tucker Carlson on msnbc and John Carlson, who has a conservative radio show here in Seattle. When they say, “Just deport them all!” I ask whether they’ve ever tried to live a day without the services or food provided by an undocumented immigrant. You couldn’t do anything except sit, probably in a very dirty house or hotel room. [Laughs.] I also tell them Social Security would collapse without undocumented immigrants.

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