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Immigrant Friendly: On Immigration, Illinois is at the Forefront in Bucking a National Trend

Illinois lawmakers took on the federal government over its handling of immigration enforcement last spring, and nobody at the Capitol made much of a fuss.

Unions and advocates for day laborers came up with the idea, but even the Illinois Chamber of Commerce was on board. The legislation they supported would bar Illinois businesses from using a federal database called E-Verify to check the legal status of new hires, unless the feds showed the database was at least 99 percent accurate.

Backers of the bill said the database couldn’t be trusted. They pointed to the March 2006 firing of Fernando Tinoco, just four days after he started work at a Chicago meatpacking plant, because of bad information his employer got from the federal government. The database flagged Tinoco as a possible illegal worker, even though he had become a U.S. citizen nearly two decades earlier. 

“They’ve got to clean up their act,” state Sen. Iris Martinez, a Chicago Democrat and the measure’s Senate sponsor, says of the federal government. “Too many people will lose their jobs if these people don’t start being a little more careful with all the information that’s being inputted.”

On the Senate floor last spring, state Sen. Dale Righter, a Mattoon Republican, urged his colleagues to defeat the measure. The 99 percent threshold made it impossible for the federal government to comply, he explained.

“I appreciate the seriousness of the problem,” he added. “I do not believe this is the right way to address it.” Righter ended up on the short side of a 42-8 vote; the House already had approved the measure 76-39. 

It was an unremarkable debate for a remarkable development: probably the most audacious challenge to federal immigration authority in the country. Instead of embracing the get-tough immigration policies gaining popularity throughout the nation, the Land of Lincoln is headed in the opposite direction.

“Illinois does seem to be at the forefront of the states trying to subvert federal immigration law,” says Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based group advocating stricter immigration controls.

Last year’s law, Krikorian says, “was an attempt at undermining the very concept of federal immigration enforcement rather than complaining about the way it works.”

Indeed, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security wasted little time to challenge the measure in court after Democratic Gov. Rod Blagojevich signed it. Now, the state and the federal governments are trying to hammer out a compromise to avoid a legal fight.

But even if lawmakers scale back the workplace law, Illinois remains one of the friendliest states for immigrants, legal or unauthorized. It’s opened doors to universities and doctors’ offices for children in the country illegally, and it’s made a concerted effort to help legal immigrants become citizens since 1995.

Meanwhile, other states are ratcheting up pressure on unauthorized workers by cutting off public benefits, cracking down on employers who hire immigrants illegally and even enlisting police and prison guards to start deporting crime suspects.

“There is a divide along a continuum” among states, says Jonathan Blazer, an attorney for the National Immigration Law Center, an immigrant rights group, “but really it’s two camps.”

Where immigration is a new phenomenon, the backlash is the greatest, he says. California, New York, Florida and even Texas, all traditional destinations for immigrants, tend to be more welcoming, he says, but states where immigration is a “15-year phenomenon” are cracking down.

That leads to stark contrasts between states, even neighboring ones.

This spring, several state legislatures are working on legislation to punish companies that knowingly hire illegal immigrants and don’t use E-Verify, the federal database. Already a new Oklahoma law will expose employers to all sorts of legal trouble unless they sign up for E-Verify. Arizona doesn’t even give businesses the option; companies there must use the same database Illinois is trying to bar.

And Illinois made sure, if and when employers can use E-Verify, they’ll have to do so carefully. A related law allows companies to be charged with a human rights violation if they abuse the E-Verify database, such as engaging in racial discrimination or not giving applicants ample time to correct the federal records before firing them. No other state has similar sanctions.

In education, Illinois is one of 10 states that offers graduates of its high schools in-state tuition regardless of their immigration status. North Carolina lawmakers are considering whether to let unauthorized immigrants enroll in community college, which they were banned from doing until late last year. 

As Colorado forbids spending on most public benefits for illegal immigrants, Illinois offers insurance to all children, including the undocumented, under its All Kids plan.

The health care benefits are especially significant because undocumented kids are easier to sign up and more expensive for the state to cover, thanks to federal rules. That’s true even though they get the same benefits as citizens and legal immigrants.

Blagojevich’s signature achievement, the All Kids health insurance program, is actually a combination of several different state-run programs, most of which rely heavily on federal funding.  

The federal government won’t pay for children here illegally, so states that want to cover them must pick up the whole tab themselves. That means Illinois pays double to almost triple for those children, compared with the ones signed up for Medicaid or the State Children’s Health Insurance Program.

Congress also wanted to make certain that illegal immigrants weren’t signing up illicitly for Medicaid, so in 2006 it approved stringent new rules requiring recipients to prove their legal status. Usually, that means Medicaid enrollees now have to show a birth certificate, passport or green card; the rules for the state-run program aren’t as strict.

But All Kids benefits depend on a family’s income, not on its members’ immigration status. Poor families can get health benefits for free, while slightly better-off families get a subsidy. Families who have a child with a chronic condition who might be impossible to insure in the private market can also buy in. 

Illinois isn’t the only state to let undocumented children get public health benefits, but it’s certainly in the minority. Hawaii, Massachusetts, New York, Washington and, to a certain extent, Rhode Island do as well. Republican California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger proposed covering those children as part of a universal health care proposal he announced last year, but that plan died.

The one glaring exception to Illinois’ pro-immigrant stance is the fact that illegal immigrants still can’t get state authorization to drive, despite more than five years of effort by immigrant groups and Latino lawmakers.

Proponents believe they came very close last spring, when the proposal passed the Illinois House for the first time and only got bottled up in the Senate because of infighting among Senate Democrats.

By contrast, North Carolina, Tennessee, Michigan and Oregon stopped letting unauthorized immigrants drive in the last two years, and Maine could soon join the list. The states backed off because of concerns about fraud and the trouble of complying with the federal REAL ID law, which all but requires states to beef up the security standards of their driver’s licenses.

And there was not nearly the outcry in Illinois as there was in New York when embattled former Democratic Gov. Eliot Spitzer announced his support in September for letting illegal immigrants drive. Even after revising his plan, Spitzer was forced to let the idea drop because of ferocious public opposition.

His proposal even became a hot potato in the presidential race. At a Democratic debate, U.S. Sen. Hillary Clinton, a New York Democrat, waffled when asked if she supported her governor’s idea. Later, she clarified that she opposed it while her main Democratic rival, U.S. Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois, said he supported it. Of course, his position was already a matter of public record: He had voted for a similar measure in the Illinois Senate.

Several factors could explain why state government in Illinois has adopted such immigrant-friendly policies. They include: a long history of immigration, the diversity of newcomers, complete Democratic control of state government, recent immigrants organizing as a political force and the way the policies have been included as part of efforts with more universal appeal.

The biggest of those, advocates say, is the long history of immigration to Illinois — and Chicago in particular.

“There’s segregation in Chicago, no doubt. But at the same time, people work together across race and across immigrant groups. They’re more open to people having an accent. They understand how hard it is to learn another language and how that takes time,” says Tim Bell, executive director of the Chicago Workers’ Collaborative, which advocates on behalf of day laborers in the city and the suburbs.

And Joshua Hoyt, executive director of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, notes that the immigrants coming into Illinois are diverse. 

Although half of them come from Latin America, roughly a quarter come from Europe and another quarter are from Asia. About 3 percent come from Africa. 

As a practical matter, Hoyt explains, that means newcomers from Ireland, the former Soviet Union or Poland connect with communities that are already here, giving them natural allies in the political arena. So it wasn’t just Latinos pushing the driver’s license bill. Irish groups made their case with Irish-American lawmakers, while African immigrants turned to African-American legislators.

Billy Lawless, head of Celts for Immigration Reform and a Wrigleyville bar owner, was one of those who came to Springfield to support the license measure. He says he’s met many undocumented Irish living in Chicago who work in construction and the hospitality industry. 

“I got involved purely because of the Irish scene. We all get involved because of our own people, OK?” he says. “We need this labor. … We need it in the restaurant business, construction, forestry, fisheries, horticulture, you name it.”
 

The new wave of immigrants, though, isn’t just settling in the city; it’s spreading through the suburbs. Sometimes, tensions have boiled over, as they have when Waukegan and Carpentersville discussed local ordinances trying to crack down on illegal immigration.

Suburban immigrant communities, particularly in northwest Cook County, are getting more involved with elections, according to Hoyt. They’re especially effective in swing districts for both the General Assembly and Congress where organized immigrants could tilt an election toward a Democrat or a Republican, Hoyt says.

“What we’ve been teaching people all across the country is to look at where your numbers are,” he says. “Look at where you have the potential for getting more numbers, like through citizenship. Look at doing it in those places where immigrants are the soccer moms and NASCAR dads, that mythical swing voter.”

One group, the upstart Mexicanos for Political Progress, is trying to step up pressure by organizing voters around immigration issues, albeit with little initial success. The group backed a primary challenger to Democratic U.S. Rep. Dan Lipinski in February and weighed in on a Carpentersville village board race, losing both. 

Juan Salgado, the group’s treasurer, spoke mainly of getting involved in congressional and local contests — not Statehouse races. Tellingly, though, the group’s first event was a fundraiser for Blagojevich, himself the son of a Serbian immigrant, because of the governor’s work on immigrant issues.

Salgado says their election work helped get a meeting with Lipinski on his immigration stances after months of futile efforts. The Mexicanos for Political Progress will become more effective as it increases its ability to cover more territory, insists Salgado, who’s also director of the Institute for Latino Progress in Chicago and president of the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights.

If the pro-immigrant forces are modest at a statewide level, the anti-immigrant movement in Illinois is almost nonexistent. That’s a stark contrast to states in the Southwest and the South, where people calling for more curbs on illegal immigrants are vocal, organized and effective. 

Not everyone’s convinced, though, that the only way to win elections in immigrant-heavy areas is with lenient immigration policies. 

State Sen. Chris Lauzen, an Aurora Republican, lives in an area where the immigrant population is ballooning. Lauzen notes that Aurora is about 37 percent Hispanic and 11 percent black. 

But Lauzen says he still enjoys support from Aurora voters, including Republicans who backed him in his unsuccessful primary bid for a U.S. House seat in 
February. The people he talks to, he says, think there’s a “clear difference” between immigrants here legally and those here illegally.

Lauzen cast the lone dissenting vote when the Senate agreed to let some undocumented college students get in-state tuition, and he disagreed with the E-Verify restrictions, too. 

“People say you have to pander to this demographic — this seismic change. I think that is inaccurate,” Lauzen says.

In fact, Republicans chose a notoriously hard-line candidate on immigration over Lauzen in the primary to take the seat of former U.S. House Speaker Dennis Hastert. But Democrat Bill Foster, a former Fermilab scientist, will replace Hastert for the rest of the year and will run for a full two-year term in November.

In Springfield, the Democratic leaders are keeping serious talks of crackdowns and benefit cuts off the table. Even under Republican rule in the 1990s, the issue never caught fire in the Capitol.
It’s the Democrats’ control that prevents Lauzen from getting what he calls his “common sense” immigration-related proposals heard in the Senate, the senator says.

Senate President Emil Jones Jr., a Chicago Democrat, has blocked Lauzen’s efforts to have the state study the net costs and benefits of illegal immigration to 
Illinois. Jones also buried a more ambitious Lauzen proposal that would require proof of citizenship for voting, bar undocumented children from All Kids and prevent state housing money from providing mortgages to illegal immigrants.

The Democrats’ dominance of Springfield also explains the Illinois Chamber of Commerce’s willingness to support the E-Verify measure.

Jay Shattuck, executive director of the chamber’s Employment Law Council, says businesses reported that errors were “way too high,” which caused trouble between management and workers. Shattuck says the chamber figured the legislation would send a clear message to the federal government to improve the system.

But there was also some political calculus at work. The strength of labor with the Democratic majority means business interests have to pick their battles, Shattuck says.

“We’ve been getting kicked in the teeth pretty regularly from the Democratic-controlled General Assembly and the Democratic governor. So we tried to cut our losses in as many areas as we can,” he explains. 

Still, immigrant advocates say Illinois government started championing immigrant issues well before Democrats stormed to power in 2003. 

For example, former Republican Gov. Jim Edgar opened the Refugee and Immigrant Citizenship Initiative, the first outreach effort of its kind, in 1995, and his Republican successor, Gov. George Ryan, continued the program. It provides courses in English as a second language, civics and U.S. history and has helped more than 100,000 immigrants apply to become citizens.

Blazer, the attorney from the National Immigration Law Center, says the way Illinois politicians presented benefits for immigrants helped ensure their passage. All Kids, for example, was a measure that could include everyone in the state.

“Couching it in universal terms rather than a particular interest group gave it a broader public appeal and made people understand this is not a special right,” Blazer says.

Certainly, that’s the message of Martinez, the senator who sponsored the E-Verify measure. She says the law protects employees’ rights at the workplace. “People want to work, and people that readily can work are being denied. It’s a worker’s protection issue, it’s a worker’s rights issue,” she says. “It’s a human right.” 


Daniel C. Vock, a frequent contributor to Illinois Issues, is a reporter for the Washington, D.C.-based Stateline.org. 

 

 

Illinois Issues, April 2008

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