OCA - GREATER SEATTLE CHAPTER
April 3, 2006
Dear Senator:
As the Senate continues its debate on immigration, the undersigned Asian Pacific American (APA) organizations ask that you support comprehensive immigration reform as those principles are embodied in the Judiciary-passed bill, while opposing the overbroad anti-immigrant provisions in both the First bill and the Judiciary-passed bill.
Because of our history, the APA community is painfully aware of the ways in which immigration law and policy can be used against certain populations. Beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, immigration law and policy was used to systematically exclude Asians from the United States. National origin quotas that discriminated against Asians were not fully eliminated until 1965. The few Asians who were allowed to immigrate to the U.S. during this time were prohibited from becoming U.S. citizens until the 1940s. As a result, Asian Americans became easy targets of discriminatory measures such as the Alien Land Law, which prohibited non-citizens from owning property.
Bearing this in mind, we strongly opposed H.R. 4437, the bill that the House of Representatives passed last December, because it is an enforcement-only legislation that would not fix our broken immigration system but instead was replete with measures that would harm all segments of the APA community, from U.S. citizens to legal immigrants and nonimmigrant to undocumented immigrants.
We commend the Senate, particularly the Judiciary Committee, for working to reform our immigration system in a more rational and comprehensive manner. We are pleased that the bill that passed the Judiciary Committee last week includes the DREAM Act, as well as provisions to eliminate the legal immigration backlogs, provide legal status and eventual path to citizenship for hard-working undocumented immigrants, and create a program with labor protections for essential workers to come to the U.S. legally to contribute to our economy.
But we are equally concerned that many of the provisions that lead us to oppose the House bill are also included in the two bills now being debated by the Senate. Some of the most problematic measures in both bills include:
• New barriers to naturalization, including giving unprecedented power to low level agency employees to deny U.S.
citizenship to long-term lawful permanent residents for arbitrary reasons.
• Expanding grounds of deportability, thereby making currently legal immigrants illegal.
• Indiscriminate detention of immigrants without Due Process or individualized consideration.
• Criminalization, detention, and deportation of immigrants based on documentation and registration issues.
The APA community strongly supports comprehensive immigration reform. But no reform of our broken immigration system will succeed if it is accompanied by measures that undermine the civil rights and civil liberties of all Americans.
Sincerely,
President
Organization of Chinese Americans
Greater Seattle Chapter
