Texas Immigration Lawyer Blog

Texas agrees to issue birth certificates to undocumented parents of children born in Texas

Texas babies with undocumented parents will now be issued birth certificates. Last year Texas stopped issuing birth certificates to parents who had only an ID issued by another country or a passport without a valid visa. Thanks to the Texas Civil Rights Project and Rio Grande Legal Aid for their good work in righting this wrong.

From The Texas Civil Rights Project:

 

The State of Texas has agreed to settle a lawsuit brought by dozens of immigrant families and the community organizing union, La Unión del Pueblo Entero (LUPE), challenging the State’s refusal to issue birth certificates to babies born in Texas to undocumented mothers. In a big win for immigrant families, Texas will adjust its rules to ensure that all Texas-born babies can receive the birth certificates they are legally owed. 

Without birth certificates, our clients lived in constant fear of having their families torn apart and their American-born children deported. They also struggled to get access to basic education, health, religious and childcare services. The settlement will be life-changing for them.

With co-counsel at Texas RioGrande Legal Aid, we filed suit last year after Texas began refusing to accept the two forms of IDs most commonly used by undocumented immigrants to obtain birth certificates for children born in the state. We argued that these changes were politically motivated, and effectively shut out undocumented mothers, leaving most of them unable to prove the citizenship of their American-born babies.

Under the terms of the settlement, Texas will accept several IDs that are commonly available to undocumented immigrants living in Texas. Officials also agreed to undertake significant efforts to train local registrars on the new rules. In addition, the State will run a hotline so that anyone who is wrongly turned away by local registrars can get help.

UT Austin School of Social Work Seeking USC Children of Deported Mexican Parents for a Study Exploring the Effects of Parental Deportation

The UT Austin School of Social Work is conducting a study regarding how U.S. citizen children are affected when their parent's are deported or placed in removal proceedings.  They need research participants and are looking for client referrals. They are prohibited from contacting the clients themselves, so attorneys or clients must contact them. The study is being conducted in Austin, Texas.

The project description is below:

Exploring the Effects of Parental Deportation on U.S. Citizen Children

 

Luis H. Zayas, Ph.D., Principal Investigator, University of Texas at Austin

M. Andrea Campetella, Ph.D., Project Manager, University of Texas at Austin

We are grateful for your willingness to help us in recruiting participants for this study funded by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (Grant # R21 HD068874).   We hope that our study will increase the existing knowledge about Latino families in the United States, and that this knowledge will be helpful to those trying to better serve this population.

Purpose of our study is to understand what happens to the mental health of U.S. citizen-children who have left the U.S. following their parents in deportation, or have remained in the U.S. under the care of one parent or other family or friends.  

Research participants are U.S. citizen-children of undocumented Mexican immigrant parents.  Over the course of two years, we interview a total of 80 children (50% females) between the ages of 10 and 12.  A portion of these kids can be from anywhere in Austin metro area.  Participants will be divided into four groups of 20 children each:

 

• Group A: children who accompanied their deported parents to Mexico
• Group B: children who remained in  U.S. with one parent
• Group C: children who remained in U.S. after parents’ deportation in the care of family or friends
• Group D: children whose undocumented parents are not under removal proceedings.

 Eligibility criteria for participants are

• Child must be a U.S. citizen, between the age of 10 and 12 (inclusive)
• Child cannot have a severe mental illness, autism, mental retardation, or developmental disabilities
• Child must know that his/her parent(s) are undocumented immigrants
• One or both parents are undocumented Mexican immigrant (one parent may be undocumented from another Latin American country)
• Parents in groups A, B, and C must not have been deported due to criminal felony conviction
• Parents in group D must be residing in the U.S., and must not be in removal proceedings

Each child will be interviewed twice in a span of six months to gather qualitative and quantitative data.  Parents and guardians will provide some demographic information on child and family, and will complete some clinical measures for the child.  We follow strict procedures set forth by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Texas at Austin. 

Your role is to help identify potential participants and put them in touch with our team.  We cannot approach families until they agree to be contacted.  You or your staff will need to make sure that eligibility criteria are met and tell parents briefly about the study.  If parents are interested in more information or in participating, they can contact us directly.  Or, parents may give you permission to share their contact information with us (mostly a telephone number).  You and we will assure parents and children that if they decline to participate, there will be no adverse effects on the services they receive from your agency or organization.  We have received a Certificate of Confidentiality from the National Institutes of Health that provides protection against compulsory disclosure, such as subpoena, for all data collected for this study.

You can expect that we will a) Protect families’ privacy.  We protect the privacy and identity of study participants.  We follow all HRPO regulations as well as guidelines that the research team has set in place in an effort to protect the identity of our participants.  b) Dedicate ourselves to learning from our partners and study participants, and to helping immigrant families and changing immigration policies for the better.  c) Communicate actively with you, be available for questions you might have, and keep you informed on the study’s progress.

Contact for this project in Austin is Andrea Campetella at [email protected], phone 512-471-1458

 

Texas GOP Stands By New Immigration Position FOR Guest Workers AGAINST DREAM Act, Birthright Citizenship

Texas Tribune by Julian Aguilar

Texas Republicans are defending themselves against claims by Democrats that portions of a recently adopted GOP platform policy are little more than a move to pander to Latinos.

In doing so, Republicans are also highlighting divisions within the party on immigration matters.

Last week at the state GOP convention in Fort Worth, delegates adopted a party platform calling for a “Texas solution” for immigration reform, which includes a secure border, alternatives to mass deportations and a national guest-worker program. Party leaders have hailed the guest-worker stance as evidence that Republicans are on the side of economic migrants and the employers who need them.

But the platform also includes support for repealing birthright citizenship — a polarizing issue that has been linked to extreme terms like “terror babies” and one that Democrats say proves the GOP is pandering.

Brad Bailey, a member of the party’s immigration committee and co-author of the party platform measure, said the final version doesn’t reflect total unity, but rather a compromise.

“It’s a baby step,” he said. “There are still some things that personally, I don’t agree with. [On] birthright citizenship, our original wording that passed the temporary committee and went on to the permanent committee, it got changed at the last minute.”

The original language, he said, called for “clarification” from the executive and legislative branches of the federal government on the 14^th Amendment, which was ratified in the 1860s during Reconstruction.

Bailey added that more conservative members of the party tried to eliminate the entire immigration plank several times, but two-thirds of the delegates consistently voted them down. It symbolizes a new unity when it comes to specific matters of immigration, he said. He added that the guest-worker provision was a result of remarkable conversations the committee had with moderates and with groups like the Minutemen movement.

“It was very exciting to see that our party, who often times gets labeled anti-immigrant, anti-Hispanic, anti-Latino, overwhelmingly on the floor voted in favor of this,” Bailey said. “We produced a solution and we believe that Arizona Republicans did not put forth a solution; they produced a law that actually damaged and harms businessowners in their state.”

* * *

Rebecca Acuña, the communications director for the Texas Democratic Party, said that the agenda was proof that the “Republicans want to create a permanent underclass among this community” and that the Democrats instead, support the DREAM Act, federal legislation that would provide a pathway to legal status for certain illegal-immigrant students and military service members, which is something not mentioned in the GOP platform. Martinez said the Democrats had their chance when the party controlled Congress, but it failed to act on immigration reform.

The GOP platform, however, does include a provision supporting limiting in-state tuition to only legal residents and citizens. Under a measure signed into law in 2001 by Gov. Rick Perry, illegal-immigrant students can pay in-state costs if they attended a public school for at least three years. Martinez said the provision to modify that came from the education committee. As far as the DREAM Act, he said the guest-worker program would affect more immigrants.

“Whether you agree with the DREAM Act or not, it affects less that 1 percent of immigrants,” he said. “[Democrats mention it] because they like to tug at the hearts and minds of constituents and that was fine, but we were tired of rhetoric from either party; we want a solution,” he said. “So our plan helps 99 percent of immigrants, not just the kid who went to Harvard and got a doctorate, which is for that kid.”

 

 

American Heritage Dictionary Redefines “Anchor Baby” Term as “Offensive” and “Disparaging”

Immigration Impact 

The firestorm around the inclusion of the term “anchor baby” in the new edition of the American Heritage Dictionary has led to a dramatic reversal in the definition. Not only did the executive editor, Steven Kleinelder, emphatically apologize for the initial definition, he promised swift action to change it. By Monday morning, the term was labeled as “offensive.” By Monday afternoon, a new definition appeared online, one that was crafted to reflect more accurately just how artificial a term it really is:

anchor baby n. Offensive Used as a disparaging term for a child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially when the child’s birthplace is thought to have been chosen in order to improve the mother’s or other relatives’ chances of securing eventual citizenship.

 

UPDATE: American Heritage Dictionary to Revise “Anchor Baby” Definition

Immigration Impact

In response to ImmigrationImpact.com’s critique of the definition of “anchor baby” included in the latest edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, the executive editor of the dictionary has agreed to revise the definition of to reflect the derogatory nature of the term. In conversations with Mary Giovagnoli, Director of the Immigration Policy Center, Executive Editor Steven Kleinedler promised a swift and careful revision of the term. Mr. Kleinedler noted that the editors are already undergoing further review on how the term is commonly used and said “we will be adding a label to the term, either derogatory or offensive, which I acknowledge should have been done in the first place, and we will determine how to revise the definition. Then on Monday we begin making the actual change—first on the website, and then we begin propagating the change out to the electronic products and in the next printing.”

ImmigrationImpact.com will continue to monitor the changes and urges the editors to adopt a definition that reflects the truly insidious nature of this term.

In an email I received today, Kleinedler said, "The treatment of this unquestionably offensive term was mishandled, and we are working on a revision this weekend."

"Anchor Baby” Added to New American Heritage Dictionary

Immigration Impact 

The degree to which the immigration debate has coarsened over the last few years is no more evident than in the pages of the recently released fifth edition of the New American Heritage Dictionary. Among the new entries is the term “anchor baby.” You might think that the definition would read something like: slang, a pejorative description of a child born in the United States to parents without legal status, implying that the parents intend to leverage the child’s citizenship to “anchor” their own presence in the U.S.” You would be wrong.

Instead, the definition reads:

anchor baby n. A child born to a noncitizen mother in a country that grants automatic citizenship to children born on its soil, especially such a child born to parents seeking to secure eventual citizenship for themselves and often other members of their family.

According to the dictionary’s executive editor, the trick to defining new words is to “to define them objectively without taking sides and just presenting what it is. And, in some cases up, you know, anchor baby is definitely a very charged, politically charged word.” 

Although the politically charged nature of the word made defining it difficult, the editors ultimately felt it was best to put the word in with no commentary, claiming “it falls into a gray area where we felt it was better just to state what it was, and then people can filter their own life experiences through the word and judgments on it as they see fit.”

The trouble with this philosophy is that “anchor baby” is not a neutral term, nor from what we have been able to find, has it ever been. 

Read the rest of the Immigration Impact blog.

 

Washburn Law October 2011 Symposium: Breaching Borders: State Encroachment into the Federal Immigration Domain?

Breaching Borders: State Encroachment into the Federal Immigration Domain?
October 20-21, 2011
Sponsored by the Washburn University School of Law Center for Law and Government and the Washburn Law Journal
http://washburnlaw.edu/breachingborders

Washburn Law is pleased to host a symposium exploring the political and legal controversies mounting at the intersection of federal and state immigration law. Three plenary sessions will provide a comparative assessment of state immigration policies, explore immigration and employment, and re-visit the concept of birthright citizenship.

Speakers and panelists include:

- Kris W. Kobach, Secretary of State for Kansas;
- Nora V. Demleitner, Dean and Professor of Law, Hofstra University School of Law;
- Peter H. Schuck, Simeon E. Baldwin Professor Emeritus of Law, Yale Law School;
- Margaret Stock, Adjunct Instructor, University of Alaska Anchorage, Department of Political Science;
- Peter S. Vincent, Principal Legal Advisor, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

A complete schedule of presentations and speaker information is available at
http://washburnlaw.edu/breachingborders

 

The Bogus Case Against Birthright Citizenship

Reason.com by Shikha Dalmia

Anti-immigration hysteria has blinded conservatives to their own principles

Excellent opinion piece on the 14th Amendment.

Texas GOP Members Call for Immigration Reform, Less Punitive Laws

Texas Tribune by Julian Aguilar

Calling on Washington to fix the country’s “discriminatory” immigration system, Hispanic Republicans in the Texas Legislature also fired off the first salvos in what could be a divisive battle within the party over legislation aimed at challenging the country’s birthright citizenship law and benefits to children born to undocumented parents.

Just hours before the Texas Legislature’s bill-filing deadline on Friday afternoon, Rep. John V. Garza, R-San Antonio; Aaron Peña, R-Edinburg; Raul Torres, R-Corpus Christi; Dee Margo, R-El Paso; and Jose Aliseda, R-Beeville, filed HCR 88, a nonbinding resolution that calls on the federal government to fix the country’s “broken immigration system” and cites current policies as “promoting illegal immigration and producing a class of vulnerable persons.”

In a statement released after the bill was filled, the Hispanic Republican legislators said they cannot support state legislation that punishes the children of immigrants, including those whose parents are here illegally.

"I cannot support any legislation which would result in Hispanic American citizens being treated as a ‘suspect class’ or attempt to remove any right from the US Citizen children of immigrants,” Garza said in the statement. “In America, children are never held liable for the unlawful actions of their parents.”

Texas State Rep. Berman Son of Immigrants Leads Charge Against Undocumented

Texas Tribune by Reeve Hamilton

Last session, [75-year old state Rep. Leo Berman's, R-Tyler] bills — like the one restricting illegal immigrants to certain geographical regions or another denying them access to higher education — failed to gain traction in the roughly evenly divided House. But with this session’s Republican supermajority, it could very well be the session of Leo.

* * *

He has filed his own version of Arizona’s Senate Bill 1070, as well as bills mandating that employers verify employees’ legal status electronically, making English the state’s official language and eliminating birthright citizenship — an issue he hopes provokes a lawsuit he can take all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.

Another bill would add an 8 percent surcharge on money wired back to Latin America, which he would earmark for hospitals providing free health care to illegal immigrants — who Berman says are bringing in drug-resistant tuberculosis, malaria, polio, plague and leprosy. 

(According to the Texas Department of State Health Services, the only incident of plague in Texas in the last decade was in 2006, and it was contracted during a hunting trip in New Mexico. The most recent case of polio in Texas, contracted during an individual’s travels abroad, was in 1995.)

“We want to make things not uncomfortable, but do things in such a way that they’re going to self-deport,” Berman said.

A first-generation American, Berman knows the significance of immigration in the country’s history. His parents came through Ellis Island in the 1920s — his father from Latvia and his mother from Poland. They learned English, opened a business and flourished. “That was a long time ago,” Berman said. “Now, we have no Ellis Island. We just have a wide-open southern border where people are climbing through the fence, and they are illegal aliens.”

Berman’s stance puts him uncharacteristically at odds with members of the state’s conservative business community, like Texas Association of Business President Bill Hammond, who believes immigration reform is a federal matter. “I think most of what’s being proposed is unconstitutional,” Hammond said. “The Constitution is pretty clear that immigration is a federal matter. I hold Rep. Berman in very high regard and consider him a friend, and as friends will do from time to time, we disagree in this area.”

Berman’s immigration bills, and their heightened chances of moving this session, are one factor that led state Rep. Lon Burnam, D-Fort Worth, who is as liberal as Berman is conservative, to call this “the most racist session of the Texas Legislature in a quarter of a century.” Not since the mid-20th century, Burnam said, has the state seen so much legislation focused at subjugating a community of color. “All of this legislation is really directed that way,” he said. “Everybody knows it. They can pretend like it’s not, but it is.”

See also, Texas Tribune article by Ross Ramsey about immigration and the growing Texas hispanic population.