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Immigrants
Hit by Backlash Four men screaming "terrorist" chased down a Sikh man running to escape as the World Trade Center towers were hit. Since then, the FBI and the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) have unleashed a dragnet against Arabs, South Asians and Muslims, and have detained some 1,200. New government "anti-terrorist" policies such as the USA Patriot Act have targeted all immigrants as terrorist suspects. Immigrants have been subjected to detention, violations of their civil rights, unfair job harassment and firings, and racist hate crimes across the country. Marina Neri, a Filipina immigrant who screens baggage at Oakland Airport, was fired in January, supposedly for returning two minutes late from her break. Some believe she was actually fired for presenting a workers' petition protesting abusive treatment resulting from the Aviation Security Act. IMMIGRANT WORKERS SCREENED OUT Among other things, the Act, passed by Congress in November, provides that all airport baggage screeners must be U.S. citizens. Some 10,000 non-citizen baggage screeners stand to lose their jobs at airports across the nation. At the San Francisco International Airport, where 80 percent of the screeners are non-citizens, some 500 Filipino immigrants alone may be laid off by the Act's November 19, 2002 deadline. The Service Employees International Union (SEIU), which represents some airport screeners, is leading a national campaign to overturn the citizenship requirement. The SEIU says that since non-citizens are allowed to be airplane pilots and flight attendants and can serve as police or military personnel, why can't they be airport screeners? The campaign also wants current baggage screeners to be exempt from the policy and is pressing the INS to speed the citizenship applications of immigrant screeners. In Salt Lake City, 271 airport workers were fired in the name of anti-terrorism before the Olympic Games. Charged with falsifying information on their job applications, 200 were dealt with "administratively," usually meaning deported; 69 were ordered arrested, including 63 undocumented Latino immigrants. Unable to raise bail, some were forced to leave their children parentless. Fired workers were denied back wages and are under orders not to work or leave the country. DETENTION AND HATE But jobs are not the only things on the line for immigrants. Of the more than 1,200 Arab, South Asian and Muslim men detained by the FBI since September 11, only one has been charged in connection to the attacks. Yet Attorney General Ashcroft refuses to release the detainees' names and their whereabouts to their families or allow them access to lawyers. Incidents of racial harassment of immigrants by ordinary people have also grown dramatically. Between September 11 and November 29, the Council on American Islamic Relations documented over 1,400 hate crimes against Arabs and Muslims, including eleven murders. Prior to September 11, police departments across the country were on the defensive about racial profiling. Since then, racial profiling has emerged as a respectable law enforcement practice. For example, the FBI asked local police departments to conduct "voluntary interviews" with 5,000 Middle Eastern men. Fortunately, a few police departments, like that of Portland, Oregon, have refused to cooperate because state law forbids questioning individuals not suspected of wrongdoing. Meanwhile, the INS has added the names of 314,000 immigrants scheduled to be deported to the FBI's criminal database. Stan Mark,
an attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, points
out, "The Justice Department, Attorney General John Ashcroft, the
INS and other agencies are using the immigration system to conduct a criminal
investigation against the immigrant community." He adds, "If
people think the new anti-terrorism law is only limited to non-citizens
from certain parts of the world-it's a mistake. Anybody from anywhere
in the world could be targeted for deportation." |
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