Advocate Summary

Issue:  Student Visas & Laboratory Security
Advocate:  National Council of La Raza – Michele Waslin
Date of Interview: 6/18/02

Basic Background
For immigration policy, immediately prior to September 11th we were mainly working on the US – Mexico negotiations and on a legalization program. Basically, there are over a million undocumented immigrants, illegal immigrants, and what legalization says is they are here, there not going away, we are clearly dependent on their labor, our economy needs them, there is clearly work for them and they are forced to live in the shadows clandestinely, let’s legalize the status of those people already living here. So people that can prove they are living here and work here and pay their taxes and haven’t committed a felony - there are requirements they have to fulfill, and they could get legal status. Currently it is really difficult to get legal status here. And the Mexican government and the US government, you know Fox and Bush are supposed to have this great relationship, were working on negotiations. So those plans were moving along really well, and on Sept. 5th President Fox was here, and they had come up with a proposal and it looked like they were going to strike a deal and then on Sept. 11th, obviously everything kind of caved. So we had to just wait and see what was going to be happening. So any anti-immigration legislation that came up was going to have a huge effect on the Latino community. Even though some things are targeted at Arab Americans or terrorists, if you write legislation that is going to effect immigrants and the majority of immigrants are form Latin America, that effects our population.  And then the hate crimes, racial profiling and things that were just anti-immigrant that have been happening since Sept. 11th have also been affecting our community. So a lot of what we are doing is just monitoring what is happening.

Oh, and then they said students from Mexico and Canada can no longer cross the boarder and be part-time students. Now if you live in Canada and you wanted to go to school here you could come across the boarder and come and take a couple classes in the US, if they had the proper documentation to get into the US. And now they’re saying no more part-time students, you have to be a full time student to be able to do that. 

This Homeland Security stuff just came up last week, and I had a meeting about it yesterday with a lot of Senate staffers who are working on drafting the legislation, and trying to get our input on what we’re supposed to do with the INS. We’ve been righting letters to the White House, and we have a meeting with the Senate on Friday. I mean this is the INS, the whole enchilada as they say, and so the immigrant community is really involved, because this is completely new, you know we don’t know anything about the Department of Homeland Security, nobody does, it’s new territory. And the trick is to find out, we have our principles and we know what we think about the INS and restructuring but how that fits into this new context – we need to do some research. And the scary thing is they are trying to move this really quickly and all of us, including the people writing the bill and the administration have to learn all of this stuff immediately which seems like a bad way to go about doing a really fundamental policy change. You don’t announce this huge, huge, huge change and then try to pass a bill in a couple of weeks and look at it in even shorter time. If anything this is one area that would deserve a lot of though and research and there is a lot of turf wars going on between the agencies that are all going to be swallowed up into this agency and what does that mean. And if you are going to do a fundamental reform that doesn’t mean taking boxes and moving them around. You can’t just move the boxes and hope it will be better. So they have like a blue print and they have organizational charts which is in the administration’s bill which now goes to the House and Senate and that the leaders in the appropriate committees in each of those bodies are working on the bill and turning it into the bill. And Congress doesn’t want to lose it’s legislative oversight of an agency they don’t want to lose their influence. And it is going so fast that even if we have input with our friends that doesn’t mean that the other people are going to accept that. And in this current Congress things don’t look so good for immigrants right now. 

Prior Activity on the Issue 
None mentioned.

Advocacy Activities Undertaken
The major thing we were working on was the USA Patriot Act.  Right away there were people that wanted to put a complete moratorium on immigration, and people who wanted to say no more student visas at all, and some things much more radical. And I think we were successful in that, the USA Patriot Act is still a horrible anti-immigration piece of legislation, but it’s not as bad as some of the original proposals that came up and we were also able to work with some of our friends in Congress to ameliorate some of the worse problems. For example, there were people who said there should be no more student visas at all, and so what we have in the USA Patriot Act, is a monitoring system, so they make sure that someone is checking up to make sure they are legitimate, like if you come here to study you do show up to your classes. And I don’t think we can really say we are in favor of increased monitoring of foreign students, and the disproportionate effect on the civil liberties foreign students have, however, it was something of a necessary compromise. This might have been in the Boarder Security Act, or the USA Patriot Act or both. The USA Patriots Act is something we opposed, and a lot of groups opposed it for a lot of different reasons, there was a big Left/Right coalition that formed here in Washington around it, groups from the far right, conservative groups as well as immigrant groups and left leaning groups, were all able to agree on this set of ten principles about civil liberties of people living in the United States, and that we can be secure through other things. It was ad hoc, they sent letters together. I think the immigrant community, after the USA Patriot Act was like, you know, you can’t be anti-security, clearly we want to be pro-security as well, and we are, it’s not like calculated but we are. And you can’t just keep saying no, no, no to everything, because then you just aren’t a legitimate actor. And so the immigrant community has been very helpful in working with Senator Kennedy’s office on the Border Security Act. Which seeked to fix some of the problems, the real problems of Sept. 11th, and so for example to beef up the issuance process so that people are more closely scrutinized, before they come to the United States and also to make sure the federal agencies communicate with each other, if one finds out about a terrorist they share it with the other, it also puts more money and technology along the boarders, also on international flights they have to send a passenger manifest before the flight arrives so that there are additional places that we could catch potential terrorists, it also calls for some greencards and visas that include biometric information to make sure that these documents are more fraud proof and that the person really is who was issued the visa and the student provisions were part of it as well. So I think it was a very balanced approach to the problem, not just anti-immigrant not to scapegoat people but to provide some tools to government to stop terrorists before they enter the United States. And fix the problems that there were, I mean the INS is not a very well functioning organization, and so this was an issue we were working on for a long time, is restructuring the INS because there are so many problems with it. And the fact that the two terrorists got their student visas four months after there approval shows another ineptitude of the INS, and we’ve been saying that for years. And the organization has two different missions, enforcement and issuing visas and naturalization, and so they need to be separated but well corridinated, terrorism is a case in point, if someone is issuing the student visas and the enforcement people have their list of potential terrorists and they’re not sharing that information. And so we working on that problem for a while and now that the president has announced this Homeland Security Agency, they’re saying that all of INS should go into Homeland Security, and I think that that’s really problematic because we’ve always been a nation of immigrants and people who are lawfully here, and following the rules, and doing the right thing, and just trying to get a visa to study, or naturalize to become a US citizen shouldn’t automatically be seen through the lens of anti-terrorism, and it kind of puts a whole new swing on things, every immigrant then is immediately suspect, and not a contributor and a worker as immigrants have been in this country. And so I think that is really dangerous to put student visas now, under Homeland Security. The monitoring system, that seemed reasonable, but to take all of that visa issuance process under security without fixing the problems that are inherent in the INS in the first place you know – taking a bad agency and just moving it into a different agency isn’t going to do anything, without fundamentally changing that agency. The House already had an INS restructuring bill which we don’t really like, Senator Kennedy and Brownback have an INS restructuring proposal, which doesn’t just move around the boxes but restructures the whole thing. I looked at the legislative language on that and made comments on it. So in a round about way that’s another way we are working on student visas, making sure they aren’t all viewed as terrorists. 

A lot of this is all regulatory, through the INS or the Department of Justice. It has just been a total breakdown in checks and balances, and there has been very little opportunity for advocates to weigh in on a lot of this. So we write a lot of letters and do a lot of visits most of it is just that we have good factual information now. Anytime one of these things comes up we have to become experts in a new and exciting area that we didn’t do before. So now I have to learn all about FBI surveillance as of today. So we’ve been producing a lot of fact sheets and memos and issue briefs and just providing good credible factual information, to make sure that we are countering – the problem is that a lot of the other side, the opposition have these handy little sound bits that are often completely wrong but it’s much easier when you say “this thing lets terrorists in the country” and everybody goes oh well that’s horrible and then when you say “well actually that’s not true and these people have this visa” and you have to explain the whole process, it’s a much harder sound bite to sell. And people are predisposed to be fearful and anti-immigrant unfortunately at this moment. So it’s been really hard. So we have to enlist other people.

It’s been a strategic decision too whether you want to broadcast loudly and make this a media event or if you want to do more behind the scenes work, and since some of our messages are just, difficult, really difficult, more of it’s been behind the scenes. We’ve been getting a lot of media calls and with the ethnic press in particular, like we work a lot with the Spanish language press obviously, and every time we hear that something is happening with immigrants they know they are a target. It’s a really tough issue at this point, because here’s President Bush and he’s saying he’s such a friend to the Latino community and is pro-immigrant and working on this thing with Mexico and that all but disappeared off his radar screen and in the mean time he’s allowing the Justice Department to do all kinds of crapping things to immigrants, unleashing local cops on immigrants and tracking and monitoring them and now this new registration process that’s going to happen, and every day it is something else. And it has a disproportionate effect on the immigrant community, and everybody assumes the Arab community but the Latino community is just as much affected by all of this. So one of our tactics is to say that the Latino community is growing and there are a lot of native foreign and US citizens and the Latino vote is very important, and if you keep screwing us like this you’re not going to get our votes, so that’s something our community can do. 

Future Advocacy Activities Planned
No specific activities mentioned.

Key Congressional Contact(s)/Champions
I don’t want to say partisan because immigration is not traditionally a partisan issue, Kennedy and Brownback are the leads in the Senate immigration subcommittee, and both of them and there have been others that are very pro-immigrant, and it’s been this area where the right and the left converge because of civil rights implications, you know Libertarians and all kinds of civil rights groups and people that are concerned about privacy rights, they’re not necessarily friends of immigrants but they’ve been opposed to a lot, so it’s certainly an area where there are strange bedfellows.  

Targets of Direct Lobbying
None mentioned.

Targets of Grassroots Lobbying
None mentioned.

Coalition Partners: Names/Participants
The National Immigration Forum really took the lead on the Boarder Security Act, and they’ve been working on different issues. And there is like a loose coalition of groups all around the country, different ethnicities different immigrant groups working together. Plus business groups and other organizations that have an interest in immigration policy. Another group that was really active in this was AILA, the American Immigration Lawyers Association, which is a group of all of the immigration attorneys around the country, and I’ve been working really closely with them. In DC the other big ethnic organizations have been working on it, for the Latino organizations it’s MALDA, Mexican American Legal Defense Association, National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials, and LULAC - League of United Latin American Citizens. And then we work a lot with Asian American groups, the Arab American Groups have been involved as well. The Arab American Institute is one, Arab American Anti-Defamation League , CAIR. National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium, is an umbrella group that includes a lot of south east Asian groups, which includes Sikhs, other people who have been mistaken for Arabs, and so they’ve been victims in all of this, in addition there are a lot of Muslim countries, Indonesia, and others that they represent, so they are involved as well.    

With respect to the coalition, different organizations have different areas of expertise and different priorities and there isn’t competition between groups, everybody here in Washington works together and they’ve known each other for years and we know who’s an expert in one area and who it is in another. And obviously you have to divide up the work, because everybody can’t do everything. So we all meet with each other and exchange information and work on these things together, and there is just some understanding on who’s the expert on which issues. 

Other Participants in the Issue Debate
We’ve had a couple meetings in the White House, and with the Department of Justice and the Department of Labor on some other issues and my feeling is that we had much more access in the Clinton years. Now, the way the administration is structured it is just really difficult to get in. As I understand it a lot of things are done secretly and then they pop out proposals with out consulting anybody. So our access has been more limited. And we are always sending them letters and letting them know what we think, whether they listen to them or not.

[Opposition]
- John Ashcroft
- Tom Tancredo (R-CO)
- USA, United for a Secure America 
	-FAIR

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence
That we are a nation of immigrants and that 99.999 percent of them are not dangerous, these are people who come here because they want to be with their family members or they want to study here or they want to work here, that we need their labor, that we should recruit them because we don’t have enough people to do that work because Americans aren’t taking jobs at that level. These are people that come here because they want to work and they want to contribute, and that we do clearly need a complete overhaul of our immigration system, but not from an anti-terrorist perspective. There were things that could be done and the boarder Security Act was passed and I think that included a lot of them a lot of those tools. But it seems whatever power they are getting they just want more and more and more, without really using the tools they have.

You have to kind of broaden the argument, you have to say that this doesn’t just effect immigrants this effects everybody, you know if you refuse drivers licenses to people there going to keep driving anyway, but they’re not going to have a drivers license and they’re not going to have insurance and that makes all of us less safe. If immigrants in any community, if Arabs and Latinos are afraid to go and talk to the police about things going on in their community, that makes us all less safe. If people are afraid of the police because they fear they will call the INS and they’ll be deported and that goes for students too, now students are being monitored and they feel like they are under a microscope, if there is some kind of terrorist activity brewing on a university campus who’s going to want to go and report that information they’re afraid that they’re going to be detained indefinitely and certified a terrorist or called conspirators or whatever. And the more you make people scared and afraid to talk to the authorities then the less safe we all are. So kind of a public safety aspect. And then also pointing out that this doesn’t seem to be the way to go about getting terrorists what we need is more information gathering and analysis. You have all of these tools that, you know now it’s coming out that the FBI and the CIA had all this information but that they didn’t share it with each other, we didn’t need the Patriot act or the Boarder Security Act or all these new powers that the Department of Justice has, if you’re not going to tell somebody when you find a terrorist, well then.  If you are looking for needles in a haystack, you don’t want to make the haystack bigger, and include all of these other people in your list of potential terrorists when they are really innocent people. Also racial profiling is not an effective or efficient way to go about getting terrorists, we should be concentrating our resources on areas that have been proven to be effective and no going out after everybody and anybody that looks foreign, because that makes us all less safe.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence
None mentioned.

Targeted Arguments, Targets, and Evidence
None mentioned.

Nature of the Opposition
For that anti-immigrant people, well - John Ashcroft – well one thing I can say is that a lot of these proposals, the anti-immigrant stuff, first of all none of the Sept. 11th terrorists were immigrants they were all non-immigrants, they were all here on temporary non-immigrant visas, and a lot of the changes and the regulations affect all immigrants, and a lot of it goes well beyond the immigrant community. A lot has been targeted at undocumented immigrants, which again is a big concern for our community, and none of those people [the terrorists] were undocumented, so when you start targeting undocumented people that’s an anti-immigrant agenda, that’s not an anti-terrorism thing, they try to put it in that rhetoric but it’s not. A lot of people have pulled out these proposals that are old that they’ve had for a long time, and they’ve really taken advantage of Sept. 11th, for their anti—immigrant agenda, because they saw this as a good time to put there thing forward and they say “oh it’s a national security need” there’s organizations like FAIR – the Federation for American Immigration Reform, that is a very anti-immigrant organization. If you look at their history they’re documented to be likened to Eugenics and white supremacy and racial politics. And they have all been rallying around this security banner to promote their anti-immigrant agenda that they’ve had for decades. And unfortunately they are well funded and well organized and they’ve gotten the ear off a lot of members of Congress. The most vocal anti-immigrant person I would say is Tom Tancredo (R-CO) and he started a caucus, called the Immigration Reform Caucus in the House and now it’s got about 60 members and unfortunately there are members from both political parties on there. And he has really been much more vocal after Sept 11th. He’s been doing the anti-immigrant thing for a while but the caucus I think got together before Sept 11th, and then they started this new group called USA, United for a Secure America and it brings together FAIR and other anti-immigrant organizations and they have like a lobbyist they hired and they have funding, and they’ve been working with Tancredo and the Immigrant Reform Caucus. So they’ve become more outspoken and they unfortunately gotten more media being anti-immigrant since Sept. 11th. 

Ubiquitous Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition 
I’m not sure that anybody really knows, yeah, I guess that they’re arguing that they’re trying to stop terrorism. But when you say “well this doesn’t really seem to be an effective way to stop terrorism” sometimes they just don’t have any answer for you. And I think they are trying to go beyond anti-terrorism and they are clearly and effort to get undocumented immigrants as well.

Secondary Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition
None mentioned.

Targeted Argument(s) and Evidence Articulated by the Opposition (and Targets)
None mentioned. 

Described as a Partisan Issue
I don’t want to say partisan because immigration is not traditionally a partisan issue, Kennedy and Brownback are the leads in the Senate immigration subcommittee, and both of them and there have been others that are very pro-immigrant, and it’s been this area where the right and the left converge because of civil rights implications, you know Libertarians and all kinds of civil rights groups and people that are concerned about privacy rights, they’re not necessarily friends of immigrants but they’ve been opposed to a lot, so it’s certainly an area where there are strange bedfellows.  

Venue(s) of Activity
House and Senate – generally and immigration subcommittees
INS
Justice Department

Action Pending or Taken by Relevant Decision Makers
There are a number of anti-terrorism bills pending, including the legislation to create a Department of Homeland Security. 

Policy Objective(s) and Support for/Opposition to the Status Quo
[Working against excessively strict restrictions on visa issuance within anti-terrorism legislation and regulations.]

Advocate’s Experience: Tenure in Current Job/Previous Experience
I started here Sept 4, and I had just moved here the week before so it’s been quite a roller coaster. 
I have a PhD in political science, I got a BA in 1990, and then I got a masters in international relations in 93 and then I worked three years in Chicago with Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, so that’s a statewide coalition of immigration groups in Illinois, I did policy analysis there, and then I went back to school and kind of put it all together, so I studied Human Rights and Human Rights violations in Latin America, and Immigration, and Organizations and Coalition Politics that all formed my dissertation, Coalition Politics amongst Organizations that work on Human Rights in Mexico.  

Reliance on Research: In-House/External (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
We do a combination of both, NCLR has some really good publications and we do a lot of research in-house as well. Specifically, there are other issue areas within the Latino community, were we have the statistics and we put out all of that information. We are putting out a big memo on this issue of local law enforcement and enforcing immigration laws and how they’ve had a really bad track record, we have a lot of specific information about racial profiling and violations of civil right in the Latino community were local cops have become involved.  We get information on things that effect the Latino community and the undocumented community. But we don’t do the legal analysis we leave that to another group, to ALA, to do the legal analysis.   

Number of Individuals Involved in Advocacy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
9 or 10

Units in Organization Involved in Public Affairs/Policy (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
The National Council of La Raza is the largest constituency based Hispanic organization in the United States, so here we have a staff of about a hundred. Concentrating in areas of education, health, and the policy is just one component of NCLR. We also have a network of affiliate organizations of about 250 located throughout the United States.  

This is the Office of Research Advocacy and Legislation, and I think there are about 20 of us in this component, and so we have like 9 or 10 legislative analysts, and I’m the only immigration analyst but our president is also an immigration expert. So we are divided by issue area, so there is a civil rights area, education policy, economic mobility, health and benefits, and state and local policy. 

Advocate’s Outstanding Skills/Assets (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
None mentioned.

Type of Membership: None, Institutions, Individuals, Both (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)
Individuals 

Membership Size (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Organizational Age (Code for Organizational Advocates Only)

Miscellaneous

And there was this other issues we were working on, I don’t know if it relates to student visas, but Aviation Security Act was passed to create this new department and federalize airport security but there was this clause included that said that all baggage screeners had to be US citizens not only was that bad in an of itself because there are a lot of legal permanent residence that have those jobs and are all getting fired by the end of the year, so a lot of legal immigrants are loosing their greencards but also it sets a really dangerous precedence, to equate immigrants with terrorists and somehow that all immigrants are suspect. I don’t know what the student angle is but there are probably students that study here and then won’t be able to get these jobs because they are not US citizens. I guess that would be like national origin discrimination, people aren’t hiring immigrants or asking people their immigration status, and then not hiring non-citizens, Universities or anywhere else. 

Another issue is drivers licenses, since they discovered that some of the terrorists had drivers licenses, like valid drivers licenses a lot of different states have tried to restrict immigrant access to drivers licenses and they’ve done this haphazardly, every state has it’s own restrictions only a few have passed, but saying that if you have a visa for less than a year – if you are here less than a year than you can’t get a drivers license, or they’ve restricted the list of documents you can use to get a drivers license for your identity and your residency – they’ve narrowed that list, so like a certain visas weren’t on the list so this effected student visas. Other’s have linked the expiration date of the visa to the expiration date of the license, and a lot of the people at the DMV are just completely ignorant of what visas even look like, and so they’ve denied people visas. And so students have been effected by this, they are living here for a short amount of time and they can’t get drivers license, so we’ve been getting stories of students getting denied drivers licenses. So you know then they can’t get to and from school and if they have a job they can’t get to and from work, and this is people that are legally here, even legal immigrants that can’t get license. So everyday it’s something else.  

So we have to enlist other people, like this one issue local cops are going to have to enforce immigration policy and we think it’s just a horrible, horrible thing, and it’s one of the top issues I’m working on, and we have to prepare all sorts of legal arguments saying why this is not a good legal opinion and second of all we are contacting all of these chiefs of police and sheriffs and all these people we never work with across the country and getting them to say our police department doesn not support this policy, we will not enforce immigration law because that destroys all the trust and relationships that we have in our community, people can’t be scared to come to policemen so we will not be checking people’s immigration status. And that’s a lot of tedious work, going out and explaining what’s going on to the cops and the sheriffs and getting pages and pages of quotes from local cops.