Immigration Reform 2010--To be, or not to be?

There is a lot of talk around Washington today about immigration reform.  Tamar Jacoby wrote another thoughtful plea for reform, published today in the Washington Post.  Here she sites the two major positions about whether or not reform will happen this year.  One claims that Democrats will attempt to work out a thoughtful bi-partisan bill with the GOP, the other suggests that Dems should use immigration reform as a means to draw out Republicans and expose them as the anti-immigrant they appear to be.  Jacoby's position is that the latter approach might be a good political move, but would be devastating for cause.  She believes that a failure this year put immigration off the table for a long time. 

I talk to immigration reform advocates all the time, and from what I can tell, there is little hope for major reform.  Instead, many of us hope that some modest measure, like a DREAM Act, will pass.

Regardless of what plan may (or may not) be in the works, it's clear that the President is making his opinions known.  Just this afternoon the NY Times reports that the President took an opportunity to slap Arizona's latest immigration law, and made a call for comprehensive reform:

Mr. Obama said the Arizona bill threatens “to undermine basic notions of fairness that we cherish as Americans, as well as the trust between police and our communities that is so crucial to keeping us safe.”

He also said that he is monitoring the Arizona bill for civil rights and other implications.
“If we continue to fail to act at a federal level, we will continue to see misguided efforts opening up around the country,” Mr. Obama said.

He did not offer a timetable for reform, but such calls are not overly useful (as we have so painfully witnessed with the health care debate).  Nevertheless, immigration is back on the table.  How long wil it remain there?  That IS the question. 

The New Immigration Raid: Get the Shuttle

From today's NY Times:

PHOENIX — With sweeps on both sides of the border Thursday, American and Mexican authorities delivered what they called their most serious blow toward dismantling human smuggling organizations that have brought thousands of illegal immigrants to the United States.

The investigation, which used 800 law enforcement officers, the largest deployment in a human smuggling investigation, singled out what the authorities said were suspicious companies running shuttle vans provide a key link in the chain that carries illegal immigrants from the border to cities across the United States.

But the sweep was also the biggest example of whatimmigration agency officials said was a ramped up effort to curb illegal immigration by focusing more on breaking up the criminal organizations that transport people and the businesses that facilitate these networks than on simply making mass arrests of illegal immigrants and deporting them.

“What we are trying to do is rip this thing out by the roots,” John Morton, the director of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency, said in an interview here. “We are taking out the whole industry and giving such a shock to individuals that they won’t recover as they have in the past.”

While some 47 people were arrested Thursday, including some in Mexico in what officials called unprecedented cooperation with officers there, only about 17 were illegal immigrants being smuggled, and some of them will be granted permission to remain in the United States to serve as witnesses in the case, Mr. Morton said. A similar raid in Houston in February included the arrest of 80 illegal immigrants found when the businesses were raided.

Mr. Morton said the arrests would not end smuggling. That would be an ambitious goal: more people are ferried across the border here than in any other state. But Mr. Morton predicted the raid would disrupt a pipeline that has accounted for a “significant amount” of the illegal immigrants traveling deeper into the United States.

The announcement of the arrests, which focused on four shuttle van businesses in Tucson and one in Phoenix, comes at a time when the federal government has been under fire over its role and performance in immigration enforcement.

Two weeks ago, a rancher near the border was killed on his property, and the police suspect he encountered a smuggler. Since the killing, an outcry has risen over whether the federal government was doing enough to secure the border. This week, the Arizona Legislature moved closer to adopting what is widely believed to be the most stringent immigration enforcement bill among the states, giving local police agencies broad powers to check people’s legal status.

Immigrant advocacy groups on Thursday denounced what they called a climate of fear, deploring the ICE operation for coming at the same time as the legislation. A handful of protesters outside the United States attorney’s office here chanted, “We are going to beat back John Morton’s attack.”

In response to their concerns, Mr. Morton said the agency’s activity often generated “rumors and wild conjecture” but that no intimidation was intended.

Mr. Morton said the crackdown on the shuttle service industry had been stretched back more than a year and was not related to the legislation or the anger over the rancher’s killing.

But he reiterated the Obama administration’s promise to take up an overhaul of immigration law and said the arrests represented an effort to “step up our game” and attack smuggling organizations by going after the leaders.

“That is what this is all about, border security,” Mr. Morton said.

For nearly a decade, federal immigration authorities have been stymied by a fleet of shuttle vans, similar to those that carry people to airports and the like, that they say have operated under a veil of legitimacy.

When stopped, even if the passengers were found to be illegal immigrants, drivers would profess not to know the legal status of their passengers, and prosecutors doubted a case would stick.

“That has been a very hard defense to overcome,” said Matthew Allen, who directs ICE in Arizona. “Now we have been able to get past that and show they do know.”

Smugglers would guide people, typically on foot, across the border. A car or sport utility vehicle would pick them up and take them to Tucson, where in “very quick handoffs,” an ICE official said, the migrants would board the shuttle vans to Phoenix. From there, after having paid fees of several thousand dollars — $75,000 in the case of some Chinese immigrants — to be taken into the United States, they would transfer to private cars and head to destinations across the United States.

Mr. Allen said that agents had made extensive use of surveillance, technology and leads from people in the United States and Mexico to build the case, which began about a year ago.

He said agents had recovered extensive records, including fake tickets the passengers would show law enforcement officers in case the van was stopped for an immigration check. In those situations, it has been difficult to prosecute the drivers because it was nearly impossible to prove they were aware their passengers were in the country illegally.

Agents on Thursday morning searched the offices of Sergio’s Shuttle on a busy street lined with mechanic shops, bodegas and small businesses. Two vans, with a tiger emblem on the side, sat in front of an office that advertised a schedule to several cities on both sides of the border.

No one answered the phone number listed on the side of the van or the office.

Alfonso Quintero, who owns a muffler repair shop a few doors down, said he often saw people coming and going from the vans at all hours but nothing raised his suspicions.

“I didn’t see anything illegal,” Mr. Quintero said. “Looked like they just wanted a ride."

Arizona's new get-tough anti-immigration laws

When local jurisdictions take on immigration, they claim to do so because the federal government has failed to take action. These moves, along with calls from Latino voters and immigration advocates, increase the stakes on the Obama administration for a long-requested and much-needed overhaul of the nation’s immigration laws.


Yesterday Arizona became the latest state to move ahead with tough anti-illegal-immigrant legislation. It is widely considered to be the most stringent in the states. The legislation would allow Arizona's police to have broad powers to check the legal status of people they reasonably suspect are illegal immigrants.


As we in Virginia have observed, "reasonably suspicious" can be interpreted differently. It can include any person DWL (driving while Latino) or the result of an arrest for a distinct offense.  It also opens the possibility that Arizona residents will suffer violations of their civil rights.


Under the new law, Arizona police would be authorized to arrest immigrants who are unable to show documents authorizing their presence in the country.  It would also leave drivers open to sanctions in some cases for knowingly transporting an illegal immigrant, even a relative. Most troubling, the legislation expressly forbids cities from adopting “sanctuary” policies that restrict the police and public workers from immigration enforcement (though it is a matter of debate if any cities have such policies).


It's a scary time to be an immigrant in the U.S.  If state and local laws like the ones passed in Arizona aren't reason enough for Congress to get moving on immigration reform, I don't know what is.

Whispers of Immigration Reform

Over the last week there have been stirrings across the country that perhaps immigration reform is finally at hand. Senator Harry Reid has promised reform as a legislative priority for 2010, and Democrats are paying attention to the fact that Latinos are starting to cool toward them--a sure sign that something needs to be done.

My hope is that Reid and his colleagues will consider something small and reasonable to start. My opinion is that modest reform is better than none at all. The DREAM Act would be a good place to start. After all, who can legitimately argue against legalizing children who were brought to the U.S. by their parents and want to go to college?

I often ponder the risks and benefits of attempting all out reform. Would we have another health care debate (long, drawn out, tedious)? Or would this simply never get off the ground? I think it would be politically good for immigration reform supporters to force their opponents to take a public stand on their position.

Bilingual Higher Education

The news that two U.S. universities are starting advanced degree programs that allow students to receive advanced degrees in Spanish and English is bound to be a limited trend. Nevertheless, it is a big step forward for the advancement of bilingual education in the U.S.

Puerto Rico’s Sistema Universitario Ana G. Méndez attracted thousands of adult students to an accelerated degree program, AHORA, by stressing the kind of flexibility and practicality that one would expect from a program called “now.”

But when administrators and faculty started considering how to expand into the continental United States they realized it wouldn’t work to simply shift their program a few hundred miles north.

“Offering a program all in Spanish wouldn’t do the best for our students and there are plenty of English programs out there,” says Luis J. Zayas, the university system’s vice president for U.S. and Latin American affairs. “We had to think about how to serve a Spanish-speaking population living in a predominantly English-speaking place.”

What they created is what Zayas and his colleagues believe to be the first-ever discipline-based, dual-language postsecondary degree program. Both languages are used equally in instruction and assignments; faculty and staff are all bilingual; and, Zayas says, “the courses are designed so that you can have a native English speaker or a native Spanish speaker go through with the same level of comfort."

In its sixth year of operation in Orlando and its fourth in the Miami suburb of Miramar, the mainland AHORA program has an enrollment totaling 1,700 and has awarded 373 bachelor’s degrees and 303 master’s degrees. Enrollment numbers continue to grow, and a third location, in Tampa, is set to open in the fall. Online courses are also in development.

The effort is the result of an unusual partnership. Ana Méndez, a private nonprofit university system, teamed up with Regis University, a nonprofit in Denver with extensive experience in online education for adults, to create AGMUS Ventures, a for-profit unit through which they run these programs. It is accredited by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education, which doesn't normally oversee programs in Florida, but which is the accreditor for Puerto Rico.

Almost all classes are scheduled for nights or weekends, and students are almost exclusively working adults over the age of 23. Most are more comfortable speaking and writing in Spanish than in English. Though they may have earned college credit or even a degree in their home countries, Zayas says, they “don’t know the language well enough” to do well in courses that are offered exclusively in English.

Deborah A. Santiago, vice president for policy and research at Excelencia in Education, could point to only one program like Ana Méndez’s – a dual-language associate’s degree in Miami Dade College’s honors college. But the students in that program, which enrolled its first class in 2006, are generally traditional-age and headed toward transfer.

While rare in higher education, the dual language model of instruction is more established in American elementary and secondary schools, where it’s sometimes used to help students whose families speak another language learn English, but is often used to develop fully bilingual students.

Ana Méndez’s Spanish-language and dual-language courses are based on Regis University’s modular curriculum for accelerated adult learning. Regis’s New Ventures arm -- which helps other colleges and universities adapt to their cultures and course offerings – worked with Ana Méndez officials in the mid-1990s to create the Spanish-language program used on its home campuses. It now enrolls more than 8,000 students.

The two universities each made an initial investment of $500,000 and share profits equally. The operation’s annual budget has grown to $13 million.

The chair of AGMUS’s board of directors, Thomas R. Kennedy, who is also CEO of New Ventures and Regis’s vice president for institutional partnerships, describes the program as “not just a bilingual program where you help Spanish-speaking people learn English” but “a wonderful way to bring people along in both languages.”

The campuses offer degrees that are awarded by Ana Méndez’s three universities – Universidad del Este, Universidad del Turabo and Universidad Metropolitana. There are offerings in education, criminal justice, psychology, business, nursing and hotel management, among other fields.

Kennedy said that the average student is about 35 years old. In Orlando, the enrollment is 70 percent female. In Miramar, it’s about 60 percent female. These students, like so many other adult learners, are “really pulling themselves up, to create a better life,” Kennedy says. “They’re fulfilling a dream.” In all, 93 percent of students receive financial aid of some kind.

For native Spanish speakers, the dual-language curriculum helps ease them into English. For native English speakers, the curriculum helps them ease into Spanish. Courses generally meet for five weeks and the four-hour class sessions alternate languages each week. When a week’s class is in English, all the reading and other assignments to prepare are in English. When a class is set to be in Spanish, all work is in Spanish.

Students aren’t required to buy books or other materials; they receive a module booklet that includes their reading and assignments. Other resources are available through course Blackboard sites and a web-based virtual library where students can access journal articles and e-books. Many modules are in the process of being revised.

Syndia Nazario-Cardona, director of the Miramar campus, describes the adjunct instructional workforce as “facilitators, because what they’re doing is facilitating the learning process” rather than simply lecturing for the entirety of a four-hour class session. Many have day jobs as high school or college teachers or professors.

Alexander Easdale, a facilitator who teaches social sciences and history courses, worked as a high school teacher and college-level tutor before joining Ana Méndez but still went through extensive training before entering the classroom two and a half years ago.

“This university does a very good job screening and training professors before sending them out there,” he says. “Unlike a lot of the other people, I haven’t been a teacher my whole life, so I went through numerous workshops before leading a class.” His day job is in fundraising at a Hispanic-serving nonprofit.

His classes “are in many ways similar to a graduate school seminar,” he says. “As opposed to a traditional format of the lecture, where you stand in front of the class and teach, this is a mix of activities.” Though he may lecture a bit at the start of a session, classes generally include discussions, group projects and oral presentations.

Though he alternates between Spanish and English from week to week, “because most students are Latino and most are immigrants, and their stronger language tends to be Spanish,” Easdale says he “tends to have to push them a lot harder when it’s English week.” He’ll occasionally have a student whose English is stronger than his or her Spanish.

Students’ language struggles are most apparent “when you have a student one week and they can’t shut up and the next they’re not talking at all.” It’s his job, he says, “to help students lose that fear of speaking the language.”

The vast majority students at the Orlando campus are of Puerto Rican heritage. The Miramar campus has students and faculty from 25 countries.

Most students, Kennedy says, “would never have gone to another college or university … where it’s all English or just a smattering of Spanish and not a welcoming situation for them.” The dual-language program offers them an opportunity to develop language skills while learning subject area content, rather than having to first spend months or years in a non-credit ESL class before being able to work toward a degree.

Though there are some students who are more comfortable with English than with Spanish, he concedes they’re a very small group. “We don’t have very many people at all who are English speakers trying to bring up their Spanish,” he says. “We have a very high percentage of students who speak Spanish at home.”

Roxanna Pietri, associate director for corporate relations, thinks the major factor deterring students with strong English skills from enrolling at Ana Méndez is price. “If a student in Orlando or South Florida is comfortable speaking English, it’s easier and cheaper for them to go to a state university than [it is] to pay more for a credit with us,” she says.

Undergraduate credits cost $310 and graduate credits are $360 each. At Miami Dade, for instance, associate's degree credits are $67.60 and bachelor's degree credits cost $74.95 each.

Applicants are generally required to have attempted at least 24 college credits, but if a student were to take the full 126 credits needed to earn an Ana Méndez bachelor’s degree at the institution, it would cost a total of $39,060. That's more than a degree from a Florida public institution, but less than full freight at many other privates. Students without prior college experience or who are under the age of 23 can start out by taking eight eight-week transitional courses.

Easdale says that the focus on developing language skills has yielded some “unbelievable” results in just the five- or eight-week period of a semester. “I give my students good, honest feedback. I tell them, don’t expect roses in the feedback I’ve given,” he says. “And it makes a difference in the end.”

Zayas says he’s received “lots of anecdotal feedback from the students that it was really the only way they could have done it – they couldn’t have done a whole degree in English.”

Despite its success, AGMUS has resisted rapid expansion. “We’ve been approached by some investors but so far we’ve not done anything along those lines,” Kennedy says. “They see dollar signs. But the number one priority is not just making money. The number one priority is serving our students.”

But Kennedy and Zayas have met with administrators at colleges in New York, Illinois, Texas, Pennsylvania, Texas and the Washington, D.C., area who might want to work with AGMUS to introduce their own dual-language programs. “We know there are universities that would benefit from the possibility of turning some of their own programs into dual-language,” Zayas says. “There really has to be a strong desire of students, a way to reach out to students who aren’t being served, a space – not only a building but also a space within the college -- for these programs, and hiring or having a bilingual staff.”

Kennedy adds that while AGMUS sees “so many opportunities, we need to pick and choose what’s going to make the most sense. We can’t reach all the students out there who need us.”

He’s expected to see competitors crop up, but none have. “By now, we thought the University of Phoenix or someone would’ve picked up on this,” he says. “I don’t think they know how to fully reach out to the Hispanic population yet, but there's a whole lot of it that needs to be served."