|
Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition
310 Eighth Street, Suite 303 Oakland, California 94607
phone: 510-839-7598 fax: 510-465-1885 www.immigrantrights.org
For Immediate Release: October 20, 2004
Sheila Chung, Director, Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (510) 839-7598 (English and Spanish)
Rayan Elamine, Program Director, American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, San Francisco (415) 861-7444 (English and Arabic)
Maria Jimenez, Program Director, Mujeres Unidas y Activas, (510) 261-3398 (Spanish)
HOUSE ADVANCES WORST IMMIGRATION
LEGISLATION IN A DECADE
Bay Area immigrant groups denounce H.R. 10, advocate that CONGRESS strike anti-immigrant provisions from legislation
OAKLAND, CA. After the 9-11 Commission spent months hearing testimony and developing recommendations to protect Americans from future terrorist attacks, extremist legislators in the House of Representatives have advanced a bill that completely ignores the Commission’s recommendations and threatens to include sweeping anti-immigrant measures.
Sheila Chung, Director of the Bay Area Immigrant Rights Coalition (BAIRC), explains that the “9-11 Recommendations Implementation Act” (H.R. 10) “is a thinly-veiled attempt to pass the worst immigration legislation in a decade. No matter what side of the aisle you’re on, we all agree that our immigration system needs to be reformed. A thoughtful, comprehensive immigration reform – not H.R. 10 – is the solution.”
H.R. 10 would place new barriers on legitimate asylum-seekers, put millions of immigrants at higher risk of deportation, eliminate judicial review of several immigration decisions, prohibit immigrants from using consular identifications or obtaining driver’s licenses, and remove foreign nationals back to persecution or torture in countries with histories of human rights abuses.
“H.R. 10 does nothing to make our country safer. It simply terrorizes immigrant communities while sidestepping the very issue legislators say they want to address – terrorism,” said Maria Jimenez from Mujeres Unidas y Activas (Women United and Active), a BAIRC member organization.
“After September 11, innocent Muslim, South Asian and Arab Americans were unjustly targeted in the name of national security,” explained Rayan Elamine from the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, a BAIRC member organization. “H.R. 10 would continue this disturbing trend by condoning indefinite detentions and due process violations.”
Last week, the Senate responded to the 9-11 Commission report by passing a bi-partisan bill that immigrant advocates say closely adheres to the Commission’s recommendations and does not contain harmful and divisive anti-immigrant provisions like its House counterpart. The “National Intelligence Reform Act of 2004” (S. 2845) passed by a vote of 96-2 on October 6.
Senate and House conferees will begin reconciling the disparate House and Senate bills today. California conferees, Representatives David Dreier (R-26th), Duncan Hunter (R-52nd) and Jane Harmon (D-36th), will be part of these negotiations. Immigrant advocates are calling on these and other conferees to follow the Senate’s lead and remove all anti-immigrant provisions from the joint House-Senate bill.
|
|
