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ImmigrationProf Blog
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Resistance to the Immigration Status Quo

By immigrationprof

It is perhaps an understatement to say that we have seen some pretty nasty things in the realm of immigration over the last year or so.  But there is some resistance.  Yesterday, we posted a story about a Latino economic boycott of Prince William County in response to its new immigration ordinance.  Here are a few examples of pushback from immigrants and their supporters from today’s news.

Suit over Fee Increase

The Service Employees International Union (SEIU) has filed a lawsuit for Declaratory Relief and an injunction in federal court against Michael Chertoff and the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services for improperly raising citizenship fees. The story regarding the lawsuit is here.  A copy of the Complaint is here.

Suit Over New Enforcement Policies

The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO), the American Civil Liberties Union, the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Central Labor Council of Alameda County along with other local labor movements today filed a lawsuit charging that a new Department of Homeland Security (DHS) rule will threaten jobs of U.S. citizens and other legally authorized workers simply because of errors in the government’s inaccurate social security earnings databases. The rule violates workers’ rights and imposes burdensome obligations on employers who receive Social Security Administration (SSA) “no-match” letters that inform an employer of alleged discrepancies between employee records and the SSA database. Under the new rule, many U.S. citizens and legally authorized workers could be required to be terminated if their erroneous SSA records are not fixed within 90 days of an SSA “no-match” letter being sent to an employer. The rule is scheduled to go into effect on September 14.   According to the Office of the Inspector General in SSA, 12.7 million of the 17.8 million discrepancies in SSA’s database – more than 70% – belong to native-born U.S. citizens.

The lawsuit requests a court order preventing DHS and SSA from implementing the new DHS rule, including the initial mailing of ‘no-match’ letter packets scheduled to go out to employers on September 4, until a decision on the rule’s legality can be reached. The lawsuit also requests a finding that the rule is invalid. The lawsuit was filed today in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. In addition to the AFL-CIO, which is represented by the law firm of Altshuler Berzon, LLP, other parties bringing the lawsuit include the Central Labor Council of Alameda County, represented by the ACLU, the ACLU of Northern California, and NILC, as well as the San Francisco Labor Council and the San Francisco Building and Construction Trades Council, represented by Weinberg, Roger and Rosenfeld. In addition to Guttentag and Hincapié, lawyers on the case include Stephen Berzon, Scott Kronland, Jonathan Weissglass, Linda Lye and Danielle Leonard of Altshuler, Berzon; Jonathan Hiatt, James Copess and Ana Avendaño of the AFL-CIO; Jennifer Chang, Mόnica M. Ramírez, and Omar Jadwat of the ACLU Immigrants’ Rights Project; Alan Schlosser and Julia Mass of the ACLU of Northern California; Linton Joaquin and Monica Guizar of NILC; and David Rosenfeld and Manjari Chawla of Weinberg, Roger and Rosenfeld. The complaint can be found here.

Consumer Boycott?

Associated Press reports that, after splintering over a year ago, two Los Angeles immigrant coalitions joined forces Tuesday while calling for a Sept. 12 consumer boycott in favor of immigration reform. The groups said they united after the Aug. 19 arrest and deportation of Elvira Arellano, who lived in a Chicago church for a year to avoid deportation. Arellano was detained by immigration agents outside Los Angeles’ Our Lady Queen of Angels church near Olvera Street. The massive marches across America in the spring of 2006 brought new clout to immigrant organizing groups, but bitter infighting and rifts soon followed. While the March 25 Coalition called for and helped organized May 1 boycotts the past two years, the We Are America Coalition in Los Angeles has focused more on citizenship and voter registration drives, along with lobbying Congress. Both said they were forming the Los Angeles We are All Elvira and Saulito Coalition, and planned to organize a consumer boycott in Los Angeles.

KJ