UH academic: Enforcement of immigration laws damaging to immigrants!

The Chronicle's Susan Carroll reports that "immigrant rights" organizers are putting together a downtown protest march next month:

Immigrant advocates in Houston on Wednesday called for supporters of comprehensive immigration reform to join a May 1 march downtown as part of a larger, nationwide protest.

The Houston march is scheduled to coincide with protests, marches and rallies across the country, said Maria Jimenez, a longtime Houston activist, calling it a "national mobilization." Organizers had no projected turnout for the march, which will start at 2 p.m. in front of the Mickey Leland Federal Building at 1919 Smith St., and end at Antioch Park at 1400 Smith St.

"We're inviting the community to stand up for itself," said Cesar Espinoza, an organizer with the Central American Resource Center in southwest Houston. "We need to fight laws that damage our communities and our families."

Organizers said they were hoping to bring attention to a bill pending in Congress called the SAVE Act, the Secure America through Verification and Enforcement Act, which would add an estimated 8,000 U.S. Border Patrol agents and require employers to use federal databases to verify the status of all workers. The SAVE Act offers no path toward legalization for the estimated 12 million illegal immigrants in the U.S.

Lorenzo Cano, associate director of the University of Houston Center for Mexican American Studies, said the act misses the crux of the immigration issue by focusing primarily on enforcement and ignoring the millions of immigrants drawn to the U.S. for work.

The notion that the U.S. shouldn't begin to make some minimal effort to enforce its immigration laws because illegal immigrants think that's mean doesn't seem all that convincing to us -- but then again, we aren't illegal immigrants or academics at UH's Mexican American Studies program.

Posted by Kevin Whited @ 04/09/08 10:18 PM | Houston Miscellany | Technorati | Sphere | Comments (9)

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