By DAVID DUPONT
BG Independent News
In her introduction to the recent panel “Immigration Reform: A Vital Piece of Ohio’s Future,” Beatriz Maya shared some promising news. Two immigration reform bills have been introduced in the U.S. Senate, and another two bills have passed the U.S. House, one to grant legal status to “Dreamers” and the other to improve the process for farm laborers. Those are headed to the Senate.
Maya, the director of La Conexion Immigrant Solidarity Committee, said “The immigrant community is hopeful, but there will be challenges and hard work ahead of us.” (U.S. Rep. Bob Latta, R-OH5, voted against both House bills.)
Immigrants are important, Maya said, not just as employees, but as employers.
Eddie Taveras, from FWD.us, a bipartisan group that helped develop the legislation, noted that during the pandemic, essential workers have been on the frontlines of the battle with the coronavirus. Of those, 23 million are immigrants, 5 million of whom are undocumented. Many have died.
In Ohio, he said, there are 106,000 undocumented residents, they generate $2.3 billion in income and pay $300 million in federal, state and local taxes.
“These folks are an integral part of our community and our sustainability, not just today but moving forward towards the future,” he said.
The most comprehensive bit of legislation, he said, is the bill put forth by the Biden Administration and sponsored by U.S. Sen. Bob Menendez, D-New Jersey, and U.S. Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-California). “This bill really tries to reform the system, a system that hasn’t been reformed for the past 30 years.”
The last immigration overhaul, he noted, was passed during the Reagan Administration.
The bill will offer a path to citizenship for undocumented residents, including Dreamers, people who came to the United States as children with parents without documents.
Maintaining immigration is important for the United States to remain competitive with China and India and other emerging economies, Tavares said.
Beyond the economics, though, Tavares emphasized that these are people who “deserve dignity and deserve to be treated with humanity, and are a critical aspect of our communities across the United States.”
Karla Mendoza, a Dreamer and local immigration advocate, spoke about the mental health strain of being undocumented.
Her father immigrated to the United States in 2000, first to Washington D.C., and then the next year to Toledo, where she has a cousin. “He found community. He found friends.”
A chemical engineer, pastor, and musician, he came to escape the economic hardship in Peru, a place where the family didn’t know where their next meal would come from. A year later Mendoza along with her mother and sister joined him.
“Because of misinformation, my parents quickly became undocumented, and I became undocumented,” she said.
When she was 13 her favorite uncle was dying of cancer, she wished she could go to Peru to see him one last time. But that would mean the family could never return to the United States.
She had learned English quickly, and was a top student. By the time she graduated from high school, she had two years of college credits. “So I was what the dominant culture would call ‘the model immigrant.’”
Yet she couldn’t go to college. She couldn’t get a driver’s license. She couldn’t get a job.
As a Black person she faced racism even within the Latinx community.
She was, Mendoza said, “trying to assimilate to a culture that didn’t want me. I never fit into any of the boxes.” She spent her formative years hiding. That’s all she could do until 2012 when the Obama Administration unveiled the DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) Program that gave her and others at least temporary status.
Then the Trump Administration moved to cancel DACA.
Mendoza said she lives in fear of being stopped by the police, both as a Black woman and as an undocumented immigrant.
She said she has not seen her mother in five years. Her mother had to return to Peru to take care of Mendoza’s grandmother, whom Mendoza hasn’t seen in 20 years.
Now her mother cannot return to the United States, and Mendoza cannot leave knowing she would not be allowed to return.
This separation “is the worst thing I’ve ever experienced.”
The third panelist Dayton Police Chief Richard Biehl talked about changes he’s made in handling undocumented residents.
When he first took over as police chief in the state’s sixth most populous city, he received an email from a resident pointing out disparities in arrests. The message “was quite shocking to me,” he said.
“The continuing arrests are causing near panic in some parts of East Dayton,” the message said. The perception was that police were “hunting” for undocumented Hispanics. One family pulled their children out of school because of these concerns.
When Biehl looked at his department’s arrest data, he found was that were few arrests, and most for traffic offenses, “but the consequences of those arrests were significant.”
A large number of those traffic offenses resulted in deportation. “We were separating families as a result of a traffic arrest. I felt that is absolutely intolerable,” Biehl said.
The problem was people lacked a means of identification. Biehl told officers to find another way. “Let’s not make an identity problem a jail problem.” So, no one would be arrested for not having a license. Instead they would receive a citation.
That resulted in a decrease of arrests across ethnic groups, and fewer people jailed. “So every member of the community benefited from the policy that they didn’t go to jail for traffic offense.” In more recent year the decrease, he said, was the result of a change in state policy, but early on it was Dayton’s initiative that drove the arrest numbers down.
Looking at data from the Montgomery County Jail, he saw that the year before he came there was a spike in arrests, and 57 percent of those arrests resulted in deportations. “I finally understood why the community had so much concern about what was going on, I had no idea that many were arrested the year before I arrived.”
The arrest data showed a decline after the policy was in place and that continued throughout the Obama Administration. In 2017 after the election of Donald Trump, deportations went up again, though arrests did not.
Biehl opposed legislation that would punish sanctuary cities or that mandated local law officers engage in enforcement of immigration law while handling civil matters.
Some people questioned why he got involved in this instead of waiting for the federal government to decide on policy.
That is too far off, he said.
Biehl said there is bipartisan support behind comprehensive immigration reform.
That includes members of the faith community and business leaders, many of whom identify as conservative and Republican. They see, Biehl said, both the economic and moral reasons behind the need for immigration reform.
