immigration related information as discussed on the mail list uwsa@shell.portal.com These documents carry no formal sponsorship by UWSA. They are simply the thoughts of individual UWSA Members.

Posts on Immigration related issues

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From midrogo@alamo.net
Date: Fri, 17 Mar 95 20:32:24 CST
From: Michael Idrogo
To: uwsa@shell.portal.com
Subject: Re: Asian Law Caucus Update on Welfare Reform
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From: DONAHOE@rbs.org
Newsgroups: misc.activism.progressive
Subject: Asian Law Caucus Update on Welfare Reform
Followup-To: alt.activism.d
Date: 16 Mar 1995 17:08:59 GMT

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March 16, 1995
TO: Immigrant services network
FR: Gen Fujioka, Asian Law Caucus
RE: "Welfare reform" legislation revised again

The "welfare reform" legislation is still expected to go to the full House for approval on March 20. However, the proposal has changed in certain ways. On Monday the Rules Committee re-packaged the legislation and put it in a different bill, HR 1214 (a bi ll which will in other ways radically alter welfare programs for children and families, capping funding, and transferring policy making to the states).

Aside from having a new bill number, the new legislation incorporates most of the original version contained in HR 4 with some changes in emphasis.

HR 1214 would: - DENY ALMOST ALL LEGAL IMMIGRANTS ACCESS TO SSI, MEDICAID, AFDC (IN ITS NEW FORM), FOOD STAMPS, AND CERTAIN CHILD WELFARE PROGRAMS.

As with its predescessor HR 4, HR 1214 only exempts immigrants aged 75 and over, refugees for up to five years of entry into the US and then only exceptions for veterans and emergency services. The child welfare programs impacted are those funded under so cial service block grant under Title XX of the Social Security Act.

- PROHIBIT STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS FROM PROVIDING ANY CASH ASSISTANCE OR NON-EMERGENCY 'MEANS-TESTED' ASSISTANCE TO NON- DOCUMENTED IMMIGRANTS.

In essence this makes much of Proposition 187 into federal law. California and other states will be required to deny General Assistance, pre-natal health care, and more to people if they are not legal permanent residents. (Note: A 'means-tested' program i s a program which applies an income or resource eligibility requirement. For example, some after -school programs for economically disadvantaged children might be considered "means tested" and therefore would be required to exclude low income undocumented children.)

- PERMIT STATE AND LOCAL GOVERNMENTS TO DENY LEGAL IMMIGRANTS BENEFITS UNDER NON-FEDERAL PROGRAMS.

Going beyond Proposition 187, HR 1214 will for the first time permit state and local governments to deny all means-tested services to legal immigrants (with the exceptions previously mentioned). If this provision becomes law, this would insure that anti-i mmigrant politics will expand to local budget debates particularly as competition heats up over a shrinking block grant pie.

- REQUIRE MOST FEDERAL, STATE, AND LOCALLY FUNDED PROGRAMS TO DETERMINE WHETHER AN IMMIGRANT IS ELIGIBLE FOR SERVICES BASED UPON THE COMBINED INCOME OF THE IMMIGRANT AND HIS/HER SPONSOR.

The immigrant's sponsor's income will be considered as available to the immigrant until the immigrant becomes a U.S. citizen. Thus, if a city funded battered women's shelter applies any income screening it would have to deny services to a woman if her spo use who sponsored her is employed. Note: an exception is made for federal housing and community development programs, which will not require deeming of the sponsor's income (no similar exception is made for state regulated projects). Removing some program s from HR 4's outright exclusion reflects a backing off from HR 4's absolute ban on all programs. For some immigrants, HR 1214 is an improvement over HR 4. But that improvement may be short lived as state and local governments impose their own restriction s. Thus, this legislation remains an outrageous attack on immigrant children, seniors, and the disabled. Moreover, the prospect of expanding anti-immigrant policies and politics may ultimately prove to be more troublesome that those policies contained in the original bill.

For more information contact the Asian Law Caucus, 468 Bush Street, San Francisco, 415-391-1655 or c/o 76075,3004@compuserve.com.

From www5@netcom.com
Date: Sun, 19 Mar 1995 00:09:30 -0500
From: Pauline Rizzuti To: uwsa@shell.portal.com
Subject: Chinese Students Can Teach Us a Thing or Two
A FAX ON BOTH YOUR HOUSES
Norman Matloff
Department of Computer Science
University of California at Davis

(916) 752-1953
matloff@cs.ucdavis.edu

Summer, 1993

The irony is striking: the Chinese Student Protection Act (CSPA), a piece of legislation whose origins stemmed from the lack of democracy in China, turned out to itself typify the failure of the American democratic process.

Even the human-rights organization Asia Watch has said that the Act was unnecessary. Our focus here, though, is not on the Act itself, but rather on the much more general and enduring question of process: the Act provides a perfect case study as to why vo ters are so cynical about Congress' high susceptibility to sophisticated lobbying, and unabashed ``Scratch my back, I'll scratch yours'' mentality. Above all, the Act exemplifies Congress' remoteness from the American people. It illustrates, for example, a pathetic misreading of Asian-American voters, a group of emerging political significance which some in Congress have tried to court.

The act, now in the midst of implementation, was passed by Congress in 1992, after a highly sophisticated lobbying campaign led by the Independent Federation of Chinese Students and Scholars (IFCSS). The Act granted automatic immigrant status-green cards, objects treasured throughout Asia, the dream of any red-blooded foreign student in the U.S.-to an estimated 80,000 Chinese students and other Chinese nationals who had been in the United States during the student protests in Beijing in 1989. In effect, t he students were given blanket political asylum, even though only a very small fraction of them would have qualified for asylum had they applied individually.

Guided by the prominent Washington law firm Arent and Fox, which donated more than $500,000 in services, the IFCSS conducted a powerfully organized lobbying effort, inundating House and Senate offices with faxes, jamming White House phone lines, and most importantly, utilizing an insider's knowledge of the centers of power in Congress.

A novel feature of this campaign was the deft use of computer networks, which enabled IFCSS coordinators to broadcast lobbying instructions to the multitude of Chinese students nationwide in a fraction of a second. At various points during the bill's sojo urns through Congressional committees, floor votes and so on, an IFCSS coordinator would, merely by hitting the Enter key on his computer terminal, order students across the nation to their telephones and fax machines to exert pressure on designated congr esspersons.

The Act touched upon my life in various ways. I am a professor of computer science, one of the ``high-tech'' fields favored by most students from China, and have worked closely with many of them. I have close personal ties to the Chinese-American communit y. And as a liberal Democrat, I was puzzled by the actions of some prominent Democrats in Congress regarding the Act. Thus my attention was drawn from the beginning, and I watched with fascination as the story unfolded before my eyes in the Chinese studen t computer network and the Chinese-language press.

The acquisition of a green card has long been the goal of Chinese and other foreign students studying high-tech fields in the U.S. Universities in the students' home countries are treated as steppingstones for eventual emigration. One clever Chinese ditty sung in Taiwan, referring to National Taiwan University (NTU), neatly summarizes the plan as (loosely):

Come, come, come,
Come to NTU!
Go, go, go,
Go to the U.S. too!

However, as the high-tech industries matured in the late 1980's, the former labor shortage became a labor surplus. Though this presented no problem for top foreign students, who were still being sponsored by American employers for immigration, there were now obstacles for those of average ability. The situation was even more acute for students from China, according to an IFCSS memo titled ``On the Shortage of Immigrant [Quota] Slots for Chinese Students and Scholars,'' broadcast on the Chinese student com puter network. The IFCSS pointed to the Chinese Student Protection Act as a solution to these problems.
The bill asserted that it was unsafe for the students to return to China, a claim which was false in most cases. Many students admitted this to me privately, and in fact, even Sidney Jones, Executive Director of Asia Watch-the most vigilant of the human-r ights organizations monitoring China-has told the author that the Act was unnecessary. She noted that the only students who would need protection were those high-profile individuals who had made public speeches or had published articles on Chinese politic s, who comprised only a small percentage of the Chinese student population in the U.S. And these particular students could have applied for asylum on their own, without the Act.

Far from being unsafe, it was commonplace for Chinese students in the U.S. to return to China, say for family visits during summer vacations, and then come back to the U.S. to resume their studies. They did so without incident. An IFCSS document quotes th e U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service as saying,

According to a cable from the U.S. Consul in Shanghai, China, over 120 returning [students]...who had come to China for various reasons were interviewed [as they prepared to go back to the U.S.]. Not one reported any problem with the authorities.

Amazingly, a clause in the Act explicitly included such students, i.e. students who had returned to China for a visit and then come back to the U.S., in its coverage. In other words, Congress gave green cards to students who had safely returned to China-o n the grounds that they could not safely return to China! The IFCSS, noting the contradiction, broadcast a computer message on October 28 urging the students to postpone visits back to China until the Act was implemented, as such visits were greatly under mining the Act's credibility and thus its chances for implementation.

All of this was a far cry from Senator Gorton's claim that the students were afraid to return to China, because to do so would ``endanger their very lives.'' (In a wry postscript, the IFCSS, strapped for cash, has recently been running promotions on the C hinese student computer network for bargain airfares to China.)

Though people in Congress publicly spoke of the Chinese students in terms approaching sainthood, their private views were quite different. On July 8, 1991, the popular Chinese-language North American newspaper Sing Tao Daily ran a front-page article title d, ``Congress Criticizes Chinese Students in the U.S. As Selfish, Unsupportive of Human Rights in China.'' In the article, IFCSS leader Zhao Haiqing reported that there were mounting complaints in Congress that the students had given much more active supp ort to Congresswoman Pelosi's 1989 CSPA-precursor bill than to her bill which conditioned continuation of China's Most Favored Nation (MFN) trade status on improvements in human rights. Congress felt that the students were interested only in green cards, not democracy.

The MFN bill was of high importance to many in Congress. The AFL-CIO was pushing hard for it, and the Democrats were planning to make MFN an issue in the 1992 presidential election campaign, portraying George Bush, who had vetoed the bill in the past, as uncaring of democracy in China. Yet, if it became known to the general public that even the Chinese students did not support the MFN bill, the case for the bill would be greatly weakened.

Thus the CSPA became a carrot offered to the students, in exchange for their support of the MFN bill. In the Sing Tao article, Zhao warned the students that passage of the CSPA would be contingent on their support of the MFN bill. The next year, after a m eeting with Pelosi, Zhao reported in a computer message that Pelosi had once again reminded Zhao of the connection she expected the students to make between the two bills: she ``reiterated...very bluntly: `You can not argue against [the MFN bill] and only want [the CSPA].'"

While there was some truth to the Congressional claims that many students emphasized green cards to the exclusion of all else-student financial support of the IFCSS dropped sharply after the CSPA was implemented-most students did genuinely believe that th reatening to cut trade benefits was not the proper way to press China toward improvements in human rights. Thus, the Sing Tao article had noted, many students resented Congress' insisting on the MFN-for-CSPA quid pro quo. In fact, IFCSS' own poll showed t hat two-thirds of the Chinese students were opposed to Pelosi's MFN bills.

Even the Chinese government had its special interests. The IFCSS noted that the government had been ``mysteriously quiet,'' making no real effort to lobby against the CSPA, but upon reflection this did not seem strange at all. Among other things, it was n oted that a great many Chinese officials had sons and daughters studying in the U.S., who themselves would acquire the coveted American green cards if the CSPA were to become law.

The lobbying prowess of the IFCSS was prodigious. By broadcasting regular announcements over the computer network, it provided telephone and fax numbers of key congresspersons, suggested wording for messages to Congress, and continually exhorted the stude nts to keep up the pressure. When the bill reached the House Judiciary Committee, for instance, the IFCSS broadcast a message saying, ``At this moment, perhaps one of the most critical junctions, we strongly urge students across the country to call/fax [t he following congresspersons]...Three members need to be targeted more than others...'' Another typical message read, ``We need to exert maximum pressure [on] the whole Senate as quickly as possible...Starting tomorrow...flood every single Senator's offic e with phone calls and faxes.''

Senator Simpson from Wyoming, in an earlier Senate speech, had warned that the Chinese students are tough. They have people who are really setting them up [in their lobbying techniques]. They have FAX machines, they have used the computer systems of every major university. I received 1,000 Christmas cards [from Chinese students], and that is more than I get from Wyoming. They are good and they know exactly what they are doing.

Rep. Conyers tried to add a rider to the bill, allowing temporary U.S. residence for Haitian refugees. The IFCSS, fearing that this would kill the bill, immediately mounted a campaign against the rider. The students swamped Congress with phone calls, and meanwhile Zhao headed straight for Capitol Hill, where he knew exactly which Congressional buttons to push:

Immediately after the Judiciary Committee's mark-up, I and Ji Yingquan went to meet with a senior aide of Rules Committee chairman Moakley, briefing him with the current situation, alerting him of the possible problems with the Haitian refugee issue, and expressing clearly our request for a quick vote of closed-rule [which would disallow addition of riders to the bill]. At the same time, I contacted the offices of leadership from both Houses and Senator Kennedy's office regarding the Haitian refugee issue and the perspective of scheduling floor votes before the recess.

Offended by the Chinese students' apparent lack of sympathy for the Haitians, Rep. Brooks and others in Congress remarked about the injustice of giving 80,000 Chinese permanent U.S. residence while denying 11,000 Haitians even temporary residence. But the IFCSS campaign was successful in the end, and the rider was not added to the bill.

Perhaps the most egregious action by Congress regarding the Act emerged in a computer message broadcast by Zhao on August 1. Zhao stated that their key supporters in Congress, as well as their law firm, told them that the bill should be kept quiet, out of the press, because many Americans would oppose the legislation if they knew about it. Thus, no article on the bill appeared in major newspapers during the time it was pending in Congress.

One convenient consequence of this lack of publicity was that virtually all the mail received in Congress regarding the bill was from the Chinese students themselves, and thus congresspersons could state, when questioned, ``Yes, I support the bill. My mai l is running heavily in favor of it.'' When I asked an aide to then-Senator Bentsen about this distortionary effect of keeping the bill quiet, she became quite indignant. The American populace should indeed have known about the bill, she said, since it wa s in the Congressional Record! (Or as Marie Antoinette might have put it, ``Let them read the Congressional Record.'')

Again due to the anticipated unpopularity of the bill, its sponsors seem to have made efforts to distance themselves from it. Pelosi, one of the sponsors of the House version, had been a freshman in Congress at the time of the 1989 Chinese student movemen t, and has built her career around legislation concerning China. She has always had extensive press coverage of such legislation, and yet there has been nothing from her in the English-language press in the case of the CSPA. Even after the bill was implem ented in July 1993, Pelosi's name was absent from a San Francisco Chronicle article on the implementation, an absence that normally would seem odd in view of the fact that Pelosi was an author of the bill and was the local San Francisco congresswoman.

Under the guidance of their law firm, the IFCSS lobbyists became expert spin doctors. On July 31 they broadcast a computer message informing the students that in lobbying Congress it was crucial to avoid the term ``immigration'' at all costs. This word va nished from the IFCSS vocabulary from that point onward. For instance, when the Act was implemented a year later, and some newspaper articles noted that the implementation came at a time when the Clinton administration was trying to tighten immigration co ntrols, IFCSS President Geng Xiao pointedly explained to the San Francisco Chronicle that the CSPA was not an immigration bill, for if it had been one, ``it never would have been passed by the House.'' Statements such as this acquired a rather surreal air to those of us viewing from the sidelines, since IFCSS internal documents had always featured titles like ``Report on Immigration Lobbying,'' and the text of the bill had repeatedly used the term ``immigrant.''

Yet at the same time, many efforts were made, both by the students and some congresspersons, to rationalize the bill by stating that the Chinese students would fill a claimed labor shortage in America's high-tech industries. This is thoroughly contrary to fact. First, we have had a high-tech labor surplus, not a shortage, ever since the formerly-booming high-tech industries reached maturity in the late 1980's. Second, existing immigration channels have always provided our nation's industry and academia wi th whatever special foreign talent they need; the Act only adds those of average ability to the labor pool, dispensing with merit as the selection criterion.

Some in Congress seemed to be under the impression that by enacting the CSPA they would score points with Asian-American voters. An aide to then-Senator Cranston told me that the Senator supported the Act because ``he supports all Asian-American causes.'' A similar statement had been made by Senator Simpson during debate on Pelosi's CSPA-precursor bill. Though Simpson opposed that bill, he said (alluding to the so-far undertapped political potential of Asian-Americans):

There are some who look upon this as the greatest opportunity of outreach into the Asian community and the Asian fundraising community that we would ever know, a new part of Fort Knox. I understand that.

Yet, beside the (equally-serious) error of viewing Asian America as one monolithic bloc, Congress' assumption here, i.e. that Chinese-Americans would be in favor of the Act, had no foundation in fact. The Cranston aide conceded, for example, that they had merely ``assumed'' that Chinese-Americans would be in favor of the Act, and had made no effort to verify this. Actually, contrary to this assumption, most Chinese-Americans I had talked to had regarded the bill as unwarranted.

Interestingly, a similar error had occurred regarding Pelosi's MFN bills. Congress had assumed that Chinese-Americans supported these bills, yet a Sing Tao poll found 79% of the respondents indicating opposition, a result similar to that of the IFCSS stud ent poll.

It is quite dismaying to think that in these ``enlightened'' 1990's, Congress still treats Asian-America as a scientific black box, whose contents can only be guessed. The old canard that Asians are ``inscrutable'' appears to be alive and well.

The American people have become cynical, even resigned, about politics. The CSPA is a perfect case study of the causes of this despair. And yet even the most jaded of us must marvel at the irony that an organization originally formed to promote democracy in China was able to so skillfully exploit the dark side of the American political system.

Norm Matloff
Wed Mar 15 20:27:54 PST 1995
From pat.curci@sdcs.org

Date: Sun, 19 Mar 95 11:12:17 -0700
From: pat.curci@sdcs.org
To: uwsa@shell.portal.com
Subject: Immigration Policy

"All people have a right to be free. But not all people are capable of maintaining a free government. Two complementary qualities are needed: moderation or self-control, and courage or self-assertion. On self-control, James Madison wrote that if `there is not sufficient virtue among men for self-government,' then `nothing less than the chains of despotism can restrain them from destroying and devouring one another.' On self-assertion, he wrote that freedom can be maintained only by `the vigilant and manly spirit which actuates the people of America.' Without this spirit, `the people will be prepared to tolerate anything but liberty.' ....

"Imagine, as a thought experiment, that we expand our southern borders to Guatemala or Colombia tomorrow. No one would deny that America would quickly become a very different country, as the new population's attitudes and upbringing permeated the laws and customs of our society. Since 1965, when today's immigration policy began, we have effectively put into place a modified version of this border change. In huge numbers, we have admitted people from areas of the world where political liberty does not exis t and, in most cases, has never existed. Furthermore, so-called illegal immigration has been quasi-legal: the national government has simply refused to enforce the law in a serious way. ....

"Thus is the immigration issue inextricably tied to those issues that concern all Americans, regardless of race or ethnicity -- tax rates, welfare dependency, property rights, crime...."

Source: Thomas C. West, professor of politics, University of Dallas, quoted in National Review, March 20, 1995.

Patrick C. Curci
P.O. Box 60070
San Diego, CA 92166-8070
pat.curci@sdcs.org

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