Immigration Watch International

Soeoth, who was appealing his case for political asylum, alleged in the lawsuit that he had been sedated with anti-psychotic drugs in December 2004 at a San Pedro detention facility. Diouf, who also was pursuing an appeal for permanent legal status, said he was medicated in February 2006 while on a commercial plane at Los Angeles International Airport.

Soeoth and Diouf became friends while being held for nearly two years at the Terminal Island detention facility in San Pedro. They reluctantly accepted the settlement when Soeoth and his wife lost their immigration appeal and were threatened with deportation, Diouf said. Soeoth, a Christian, fled his predominantly Muslim country in 1999 to escape religious persecution and “greatly feared returning to Indonesia,” Arulanantham said.

Earlier this month, immigration officials said they would no longer forcibly sedate foreign nationals without a federal court order. At the time, ACLU lawyers promised to move forward with the lawsuit to gain compensation for Soeoth and Diouf. The settlement could make it more difficult to force the government to release details about its sedation policy, Arulanantham said.

The settlement reached Monday “does not constitute admission of wrongdoing by the government,” but it does “reflect the fact that ICE has changed its policy regarding medical escorts for detainees,” said Immigration and Customs Enforcement spokeswoman Virginia Kice.

Arrested in an immigration raid in April 2006, she was ordered to leave the country voluntarily by Jan. 28. Crisostomo sought “sanctuary” in the Adalberto United Methodist Church, the same church that housed undocumented immigrant Elvira Arellano and Arellano’s U.S.-born son Saul, for more than a year. “I am taking a stand of civil disobedience to make America see what they are doing,” Crisostomo said in a statement that was translated into English. Speaking in broken English, she said immigrants are not terrorists but hard-working people contributing to the economy. “The real problem is the color and the language,” she said.

U.S. immigration officials saw the issue differently, releasing a statement that said Crisostomo was given a voluntary departure order Oct. 12, 2006. After an appeal failed in December 2007, she was given 60 more days to leave the country on her own. “Ms. Crisostomo will be taken into custody at an appropriate time and place with consideration given to the safety of all involved,” read the statement released by Gail Montenegro, spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Montenegro said that it is also illegal to “knowingly harbor an illegal alien,” and those who do so can be subject to criminal prosecution.

Last night an MP warned it showed that political leaders in Britain who preach the benefits of unlimited immigration were dangerously out of touch with the public.

The study, whose authors include the former Archbishop of Canterbury Lord Carey, was commissioned for leaders at the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. It reports “a growing fear among Europeans of a perceived Islamic threat to their cultural identities, driven in part by immigration from predominantly Muslim nations”. And it concludes: “An overwhelming majority of the surveyed populations in Europe believe greater interaction between Islam and the West is a threat.”

Backbench Tory MP David Davies told the Sunday Express: “I am not surprised by these findings. People are fed up with multiculturalism and being told they have to give up their way of life. “Most people in Britain expect anyone who comes here to be willing to learn our language and fit in with us.” Mr Davies, who serves on the Commons Home Affairs Committee, added: “People do get annoyed when they see millions spent on translating documents and legal aid being given to people fighting for the right to wear a head-to-toe covering at school. “A lot of people are very uncomfortable with the changes being caused by immigration and politicians have been too slow to wake up to that.”

The report says people have little enthusiasm for greater understanding with Islam and attempts to improve relations have been “disappointing”. And with the EU Muslim population expected to reach 15 per cent by 2025 it predicts: “Any deterioration on the international front will be felt most severely in Europe.”

But leading Muslim academic Haleh Afshar, of York University, blamed media “hysteria” for the findings. She said: “There is an absence of trust towards Muslims, but to my mind that is very much driven by an uninformed media. “To blame immigration is much harder because the current influx of immigrants from eastern Europe are by-and-large not Muslim. The danger is that when people are fearful of people born and bred in this country it is likely that discrimination may follow.”

FEARS the citizenship test is unfair to migrants have been proved unfounded by a review showing a stunning 93 per cent pass rate. Indians and Filipinos are doing far better on the exam than Brits and New Zealanders. But a high number of newcomers from war-torn states, most of them refugees, are struggling to get through the quiz, according to an analysis released last night. The study indicates that migrants keen to get citizenship are swotting up on their new country and taking the test seriously.

Immigration Minister Chris Evans said the Government wanted to ensure the test was not a barrier to migrants in need of support. But he said: “The test can play a valuable role in helping new citizens understand the rights and responsibilities of citizenship.”

It was introduced by the former government to “assist” people who want to become Australians understand “Australian values, traditions, history and national symbols”. The test, which started on October 1, has to be taken by migrants aged 18-60, before they apply for citizenship.

The Department of Immigration review from October to the end of December found 92.9 per cent passed on their first or subsequent attempts. Candidates are allowed as many attempts as they want. But there were some surprises:

The lowest failure rate was 0.9 per cent for the 338 South African applicants, followed by just 1.1 per cent for the 634 from India, and 1.9 per cent for the 254 from the Philippines. The 1103 British migrants had a 2.26 per cent failure rate, and the 282 New Zealanders, 2.8 per cent. Skilled migrants, who made up 44 per cent of the 9043 people from 172 countries who sat the test, had the best pass rate of 97 per cent, and family reunion migrants, 21.6 per cent of participants had a 90 per cent success rate. However, for migrants here on humanitarian grounds [Mostly Africans] the success rate fell to 80 per cent.

Asked directly about the issue now, her California campaign spokesman said Clinton “believes the solution is to pass comprehensive immigration reform.” “Barack Obama has not backed down” on driver’s licenses for undocumented people, said Federico Pena, a former Clinton administration Cabinet member and Denver mayor now supporting Obama. “I think when the Latino community hears Barack’s position on such an important and controversial issue, they’ll understand that his heart and his intellect is with Latino community.”

Obama’s intention is to draw distinctions between himself and Clinton on what are otherwise indistinguishable positions on immigration. Both have adopted the standard Democratic approach of favoring tougher enforcement along with earned legalization.

The Illinois senator is differentiating himself in three key areas: driver’s licenses, a promise to take up immigration reform his first year in office, and his background as the son of an immigrant (his father was Kenyan) and a community organizer in Chicago.

By dragging his own father into the debate, Obama is also signaling that he’ll blur the line between legal and illegal immigration. Most legal immigrants will not appreciate this move, at all. This policy emphasis may help Obama in the primaries but it certainly won’t help him in the general election if he’s the nominee.

“Justice has been done,” said Avraham Nagosa, who heads an umbrella organization for Ethiopian immigrants. “We said they haven’t finished and that they need to check whether there are more people who meet the criteria. We asked only that they do the basic thing of checking them. This High Court decision is the beginning, and ultimately all the 8,000 [Falashmura] left will be checked.”

However, the Interior Ministry downplayed the decision, saying: “The High Court accepted the state position not to open the lists. Nonetheless, it said the state would do well to determine whether there is room to expand the list of eligibles to 17,000. It is not an order, and the state was asked to announce within three months what it has decided. The matter has been transferred to the cabinet secretary for a decision.”

The government decided a year ago that by June, 2008 it would stop bringing over Falashmura and close its offices in Ethiopia. The Foreign Ministry representative in the Ethiopian city of Gondar, who was responsible for investigating the eligibility of Ethiopians seeking to move to Israel, was recalled to Israel a few weeks ago. Some 1,400 Falashmura in Gondar have already received approval to move here, and that group will be immigrating at a rate of 300 a month.

Ethiopian organizations in Israel, and their supporters the world over, have criticized the government plan to bring the Falashmura immigration to an end, arguing that there are more than 8,000 members of the community in Gondar who meet the government criteria for immigration.

In response to a High Court petition on the matter, filed by representatives of the Falashmura, Justices Ayala Procaccia, Miriam Naor and Edna Arbel issued an interim verdict last week stating that the government must allow an additional 1,500 Falashmure to immigrate because the government said in 2004 that there were 17,188 potential Falashmura immigrants, but only 14,620 have received permission to move here.

An overwhelming majority of American adults say a candidate’s stance on immigration is important to their voting decisions, a new Zogby Interactive poll shows. More than 76 % of the online poll respondents said a candidate’s position on immigration is a “very important” or “somewhat important” factor in their decision on who to vote for in the presidential elections of 2008. When asked to choose from among possible policies the United States should adopt as part of its foreign policy with Latin America, the largest percentage of poll respondents, 36%, identified “job creation to stem migration…” as the most important policy.

The Zogby Interactive poll included 7,106 adults nationwide and was conducted January 18-21, 2008. It carries a margin of error of +/- 1.2 percentage points.

“This survey suggests that the United States public sees Latin America increasingly through an immigration lens, and a very negative one at that,” said Peter Hakim, the President of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank that collaborated with Zogby on the poll. “The fact is that most Americans think U.S. foreign policy in the hemisphere should prioritize stopping immigration,” he added. “U.S. debates over immigration, tinged with anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic sentiments, have sounded mean-spirited and disparaging of Latin America,” Hakim said, “and this sours prospects for improving U.S. policy and relations with the region in the years ahead.”

The poll also found U.S. public disapproval over remittances, the money sent from migrant workers in the U.S. to their families back home. An ample majority (61%) believe remittances by immigrants to family members living in Latin America “take a significant amount of money away from the United States economy.” That figure is particularly surprising, considering that over 20% of the public said in the survey they had either sent remittances or know someone who had.

While immigration and remittances are on the minds of the American public, the poll suggests that Latin America is not a major concern to Americans beyond that

Fuller, Britain’s most senior black police officer, also warns the soaring cost of translation services is placing a strain on resources. He says he will need more than 500 extra constables if the population increase caused by immigration continues.

The warning will embarrass the government. Last night the Labour-dominated home affairs committee promised to investigate Fuller’s complaints that government funding has failed to take into account “surges” in arrivals from overseas. In his letter to Smith dated October 22 last year, the police chief states: “I feel it is essential that I set out the impact that population growth is having in Kent and the pressure it is placing on finite resources.”

Fuller estimates 78% of the population growth is accounted for by migration. This has contributed to a rise of more than a third in violent crimes over five years to about 7,800 incidents last year. He estimates the total additional cost to the force to be 34 million pounds over the past three years, but claims increases in funding from the Home Office have failed to keep pace.

Fuller, Britain’s first black chief constable, is regarded as a high-flyer. He recently qualified as a barrister, training in his spare time, and has been tipped as a future Metropolitan police commissioner. In his letter he warns that government predictions about immigration and population growth have proved unreliable. He concludes: “There is a danger that if the future funding regime fails to respond to dynamic changes in migration the extra demand this generates will impact negatively on performance.”

Fuller says translation services account for an increasing proportion of his budget, with costs having risen by a third over the past three years. According to Fuller, the total population of Kent is forecast to rise from 1.6m now to 1.9m in 2029. Most of this increase will be a result of immigration. He says that if these predictions are correct, he will need an extra 561 constables.

He also warns that Kent suffers special problems policing the ferry ports and Channel tunnel. “As the gateway to Europe, Kent has unique geographical status which places additional strain on limited resources.” Fuller is not the first police chief to complain that government funding is failing to take account of rising immigration. Julie Spence, of Cambridgeshire police, warned last year that new arrivals, often from eastern Europe, had left her force struggling to deal with certain offences including knife crime and drink driving. She said immigrant communities had “different standards” from the UK.

When asked last month about Kent, ministers claimed no assessment had been made of the impact of immigration on costs. In a parliamentary answer, Tony NcNulty, the police minister, said: “Kent police do not separately identify costs incurred as a result of immigration.”

Damian Green, Conservative immigration spokesman, said ministers had misled the public: “This is clear evidence that all over the country public services have found it impossible to cope with the unplanned and rapid rise in population over the past few years. “This is another largely rural police force which is having to spend money on translation services and cope with extra pressures caused by fast rates of immigration. Without properly controlled immigration this problem will only get worse.”

Keith Vaz, Labour chairman of the home affairs committee, said: “Mike Fuller raises very important issues concerned with the changing needs of local areas as a result of migration. It is important that in looking at funding formulas the government understands that there are pressures that need to be addressed. We will be looking at this issues when we launch our forthcoming inquiry into policing.” A Home Office spokesman said: “We will consider any evidence provided by the police.”

Even though a federal judge ruled last week that there will be no prosecutions under the law until March, it has done little to prevent a phenomenon being dubbed “Hispanic Panic.” “There’s a lot of fear and some people are leaving,” said Salvador Reza, an immigrant-rights activist who runs a day labor center in Phoenix. “The fear is not only at the worker level, it’s at the employer level. I’ve never seen that before in my life.”

Workers are going back to Mexico or to other states, Reza said. He predicted small businesses forced to lay off skilled employees like welders will now pay them in cash, creating a black economy. “The underground economy is going to take hold now, and there will be less money for the state,” Reza said.

Ten men were laid off at Ironco, a steel fabrication company in Phoenix which builds large-scale construction projects. “We had to let them go,” president Sheridan Bailey said. “Unfortunately some of these people were our best workers. This is terribly tragic.” Two out of three men who apply at Ironco, a construction firm that specialises in buildings and parking garages made with heavy steel, are Hispanic or foreign-born Hispanic, the company said.

Ironco has raised steel fitters’ wages 30 percent from a year ago, according to Bailey. “We’ve raised wages, competing for a diminishing supply (of workers),” he said. “We?ve been on a campaign of quality improvement, training, scouring the waterfront, so to speak, for American vets, ex-offenders trying to find their way back into society.”

A crew leader who worked for Rick Robinson’s Phoenix landscaping company left the state because his wife is an illegal worker. The worker was scared his wife would be deported. “I’ve talked to other companies who have said they can’t find anybody,” Robinson said. “I’ve heard they’re going to Utah or Texas or New Mexico because they don’t have a law like this. We and other landscape companies are uncertain as to how far-reaching it will be. People don’t know what they can and can’t do. The whole thing is confusing, gross, and unfair.”

David Jones, head of the Arizona Contractors Association, said he knows of three construction companies which have laid off 30, 40, and 70 employees respectively since the beginning of the year. “They can’t stand the risk of losing their license,” Jones said. Many workers are heading to neigboring Nevada to find jobs. “We’ve created a climate which will make Arizona’s construction industry subordinate to Nevada,” Jones said. “We’re all frustrated (with illegal immigration), but I don?t think this is the right approach. If we don?t have a functional guest worker program in this country, we?re going to be in trouble.”

Businesses feel exposed to discrimination lawsuits and anonymous malicious complaints from competitors, said Greater Phoenix Chamber of Commerce vice president Todd Sanders. “What we’re hearing from folks is a level of uncertainty because there are some loose ends in the law,” Sanders said.

The ripple in Arizona’s economy has spread to other sectors. Real estate agent John Aguero Sr. said he gets four to seven calls each day from people asking about what they can do with their homes. Fifteen out of 100 people who call Aguero “are just walking away from their property,” he said. One man called and asked how long the foreclosure process would take if he skipped his 1,600 house payments. Aguero told him four months. “Well, I’ll save that and just go home (to Guatemala),” Aguero said. “His wife is a citizen but he’s not. The whole family will pack up and leave. He has three children, all of whom were born here.”

Royal Palms Middle School serves a largely Hispanic and immigrant area of the city. Three or four students have formally left the school since the beginning of the year. Twice that number haven’t shown up to school in ten days. Attendance is down five percent. “We’ve tied what we’re hearing to attendance,” said principal Lenny Hoover. An announcement was made to students that police cannot come into the school and seize them. “What I have noticed is a great deal of student mental diffidence about it,” Hoover said. “They?re worried about it, and kids don?t worry about a lot.”

The arrests — some 800 miles from the Mexican border — represented a new and dramatic shift in U.S. immigration enforcement strategy. Federal agents, with help from local law officers like McLendon, a Pearl detective, have begun intercepting illegal immigrants and smugglers along stretches of highway deep in the U.S. interior, where those who have slipped into the country usually have little chance of getting caught. “They think they’re pretty much home free once they get up here,” said Bill Botts, the assistant chief patrol agent in charge of the Border Patrol’s Gulfport, Miss., station. But Operation Uniforce, as the two-week crackdown begun Jan. 13 is called, “is pretty much a shocker for the smuggling organizations.”

More than 300 immigrants and suspected smugglers had been arrested as of Tuesday, more than a week into the operation. Interstate 20 has become a major corridor for immigrant smugglers. It peels off from I-10 in West Texas and runs across the South, passing through Atlanta and linking up with other major highways, including I-95, which leads to Miami to the south and Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York and Boston to the north. About 40 Border Patrol and customs agents who normally work at or close to the border have been temporarily assigned to the crackdown. They and local law officers have spread out along several miles of I-20 and some of its connecting highways, parking their vehicles out in the open in the median or by the side of the road. After the two weeks are up, they will return to their usual jobs and evaluate what they learned. In the coming weeks or months, they may return to I-20 and do it again.

The hope, though, is whether they come back or not, the crackdown will put immigrant smugglers on notice and disrupt their business by forcing them to take longer, slower and more costly detours. Border Patrol spokesman Ramon Rivera said the vast majority of those caught in the crackdown are Mexicans headed to the East Coast, where they typically land jobs in agriculture, construction and manufacturing. Agents also found a Mexican who had paid a smuggler $400 to get him home to avoid a murder charge in Chicago.

But perhaps more important, the agents also uncovered vital information about a few prolific smuggling rings and a popular Texas stash house where immigrants were being kept after crossing the border. “The intelligence we are getting is absolutely priceless,” Rivera said.

The Border Patrol said it had no immediate estimate of the cost of Operation Uniforce. Federal agents ran three such operations closer to the border last year: two in Baton Rouge, La., and one in Mobile, Ala. Those efforts seemed to force the smugglers north from I-10 to I-20. So this time, agents picked up and moved deeper into the interior to I-20, some 800 miles from the nearest border crossing, at Brownsville, Texas.

The Associated Press was allowed to document the operation during an nighttime ride-along last week in Mississippi. On that night, McLendon, who normally pulls over motorists in a search for drugs, found the exhausted immigrants crammed in the Suburban, shoes off, a few blankets on the floorboards, a half-empty jug of water in the back. The passengers, including a girl of about 10, had crossed into the United States from Mexico near Nogales, Ariz., some 1,200 miles away from this Mississippi town.

It was unclear whether they sneaked across the open desert on foot, or passed through a border crossing station and then climbed into the SUV. But the Suburban had made it all the way from the border in Arizona — a receipt in the vehicle showed that someone bought a new battery there on Wednesday — and passed through Dallas on Thursday — the driver stopped for an oil change about 1:30 p.m. — before being stopped outside Jackson, Miss.

If McLendon had come across these immigrants a week earlier, he would have issued a ticket for the missing light and sent them on their way. The nearest fixed Border Patrol station is 160 miles away in Gulfport, and he wouldn’t have called it because the agents wouldn’t have made the three-hour trip for such a routine matter. This time, Border Patrol agents posted along the highway promptly arrived on the scene, and all 16 people were arrested and held for deportation. “When Border Patrol pulled up you could see the disappointment on their face, that they would be going all the way back,” McLendon said.