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 News from Around the Americas | June 2007 
Immigrants Disappointed Over Defeat
 Tara Burghart - Associated Press
| | Elvira Arellano listens to advocates speak for immigration reform Friday, June 8, 2007, at the Adalberto United Methodist Church, where she's taken sanctuary with her son since August in defiance of a deportation order. Arellano and others said they'll pressure President Bush for a moratorium on raids and deportations of undocumented workers. (AP /Charles Rex Arbogast) |
Along the Mexican border in Brownsville, Texas, Esmeralda Gavino echoed the disappointment of many illegal immigrants like her when she said that the immigration reform bill torpedoed on Capitol Hill was not perfect, but it was at least something.
"It's sad that the senators can say, `OK, let's just roll up the carpet. We have more important things,'" said the 35-year-old woman, who cleans houses for a living and was with her two young daughters at a parish community center. "They don't have enough time for discussions, but they have time to build a wall. It wasn't a very good reform in my opinion, but it was something. It was a light."
The measure that failed a crucial test vote in the Senate on Thursday would have tightened the borders while also giving up to 12 million illegal immigrants a pathway to legal status — provided they are willing to pay thousands of dollars in fees and penalties and return to their homelands to apply.
Now illegal immigrants and businesses that employ them are left wondering what the future holds.
"We're just in limbo," said illegal immigrant Mario Zapata, 34, who has spent half his life living in Tucson, Ariz. "I don't know. Are they going to pass it? Are they not going to pass it? I can't be at peace. I'm anxious."
Zapata, a day laborer, spent a year and a half in prison after he was caught by the Border Patrol, but said his three children are American citizens, and he intends to stay in Tucson forever. "If they catch me again, I'll come back. It doesn't matter," he said.
Advocacy groups in Chicago plan a meeting on Monday to decide their next step.
Jorge Mujica, a spokesman for Chicago's March 10th movement, said one possibility is a boycott by illegal immigrants and their supporters against certain companies — perhaps national restaurants — to demonstrate the community's economic might.
"It's not that we want to radicalize the movement," he said. "But we have marched and lobbied and made phone calls and written letters, and nothing has come out of those strategies."
Tom Nassif, president and chief executive of the Western Growers Association, which represents about 3,000 fruit and vegetable farmers in California and other states, said he expects some growers worried about a worker shortage to reduce plantings.
The agriculture industry has pushed for a guest worker program that would let laborers work here legally but require them to return to their home countries.
"We're constantly losing our market share to foreign competition because it is getting increasingly more expensive to grow fruits and vegetables in this country," Nassif said.
Porfirio Quintano, who arrived from Honduras in 1996 as a political refugee and is now an American citizen living in San Francisco, said he does not believe the bill's setback will have any effect on immigrants' decisions to come here.
"The roots of immigration are at home - there is no work, no way to move forward," he said. "Nothing is changing that — nothing is affecting the reasons people leave."
Associated Press writers Adrian Sainz in Miami, Giovanna Dell'Orto in Atlanta, Arthur H. Rotstein in Tucson, Juliana Barbassa in San Francisco, Olivia Munoz in Frensco, Calif., Verena Dobnik in New York City, Lynn Brezosky in Brownsville, Texas and Carla K. Johnson in Chicago also contributed to this report. |
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