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Year of the immigrant

Posted on January 6, 2011January 6, 2011 by Staff

By Domenic Powell
Last year was a difficult one for those who worked for a sane immigration system.
While liberals were keen to call the system “broken,” their frustration spared those who broke it: businesses like J & A Framing and Carpentry, which is being investigated for, in part, allegedly hiring human traffickers to bring immigrants to North Carolina, and meat producers like Pilgrim’s Pride, which continued to hire immigrants without verifying their status (it faced a civil suit over its hires in 2007). Conservatives who talked about “enforcement,” like Sen. Richard Burr, never did so in reference to malicious employers – favoring cheap shots against the politically vulnerable.
(You may note that I use neither “illegal” nor “undocumented” above to refer to immigrants without a current immigration status. Reason being: Can someone who files annual tax returns be either of those?)
Also in 2010, the president of the national lobbying firm ALIPAC, Raleigh’s own William Gheen, asked if Sen. Lindsey Graham was blackmailed into supporting immigration reform by liberals who claimed to know he was secretly gay. Local and national media continue to quote Gheen as someone with a legitimate opinion. Unfortunately, those ugly words successfully deterred Graham. When the time came for Sen. Kay Hagan to vote on the DREAM Act last month, she sided with Gheen over the progressives and minority constituencies that elected her. Let me know if you want to run against her in the primary.
In the meantime, 2011 promises tumult for the immigrant community. We have the first Republican General Assembly in over a century (emboldened, in part, by anti-immigrant furor) as well as a Democratic Party that lacks the spine to stand up for immigrants. Georgia banned students without papers from its universities; our legislature could do the same. It may choose to ban them from community colleges, or even pass a version of Arizona’s S.B. 1070. In 2010, those students paid out-of-state tuition and were forced to wait to register last for their community college classes. At UNC, no less than six students could be kicked out this year because of their status.
There is a word for what is happening, an ugly one: segregation. North Carolina has returned to segregation – to putting people in the back of the bus. To answer, Carrboro should be the first community in North Carolina to stand up and say that it will be a community of conscience – that it will lead in a new movement for civil rights.
Hundreds of students in Chapel Hill-Carrboro City Schools are making their way toward graduation, and doors are already shutting on them. Fifty-one thousand youth statewide would have been eligible for the DREAM Act, meaning they came to the U.S. before age 16, have a clean criminal record and have lived here for at least five years. With the bill, they could have become legal residents by going to college or joining the military.
Educators know these young people and their potential. They know that without the legal and financial barriers in their path, college and successful, productive lives would lay ahead for them. America has yet to show them mercy, forcing them now to demand justice. We need to empower these young people to lead. We need to tell them that they have a voice and it’s time to use it.
“Change” for immigrants failed to come through the ballot box in 2008. Deportations reached record levels last year; many of those deported were DREAM Act-eligible. Despite that, young people who couldn’t vote in 2010 managed to successfully lobby Congress, organize and rally others to their cause, reminding citizens that democracy is about so much more than voting. This year will be the Year of the Immigrant.
Domenic Powell is a member of the immigrants’ rights group the NC DREAM Team. He is a recent graduate of UNC and former columnist for the Daily Tar Heel.

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