Group’s Leader Urges New Strategy on Immigrant Rights

The new leader of the nation’s largest Latino legal advocacy organization says immigrants’ rights forces should focus on modest gains–such as the right to an education for the undocumented, and the right of lesbians and gays to sponsor partners as immigrants–if Congress doesn’t overhaul the immigration system by early 2010.

“I think we’ve waited long enough. It’s time for some down payments,” Thomas Saenz, president and general counsel of MALDEF, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, said in an interview during a visit to San Francisco.

Saenz took the job in August after the Obama administration, under pressure from conservatives who saw him as too friendly to undocumented immigrants, withdrew an offer to nominate him as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division.

He said MALDEF’s top priority is still comprehensive immigration legislation that would offer a path to legalization, with a waiting period and minimal fines or penalties, to the millions of “undocumented immigrants who have been contributing to society.”

Debate ‘coarsened’

But Saenz said he is not optimistic about passage of such a measure in an election year.

The immigration debate “has been coarsened,” and President Obama is apparently trying to avoid controversy, Saenz said. {snip}

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“There seems to be a perception that (immigration) is somehow the third rail of politics,” Saenz said. He said immigrants’ rights supporters have de-emphasized some lesser measures while concentrating on their main goal, and might be wise to refocus on those measures in the coming year.

Others want to fight

Not all advocates agree.

“The environment, the way we’ve seen it . . . makes us increasingly confident that we’re going to see comprehensive immigration reform,” said Ali Noorani, executive director of the National Immigration Forum. The Obama administration, he said, has “underestimated political support for immigrants,” as shown in the health bill that the House approved Nov. 7.

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The measures that Saenz wants MALDEF and its allies to promote in 2010 would:

–Allow children who entered the United States illegally, and later graduated from high school, to earn legal residence by obtaining a college degree or serving in the armed forces.

–Allow undocumented farm workers to qualify for legal residence with five to seven years of agricultural employment.

–Allow lesbians and gays to sponsor their partners for immigration as family members, just as other U.S. citizens and legal residents can now sponsor their spouses or close relatives.

–Prohibit state and local governments from passing immigration laws that are more restrictive than federal law, such as an Arizona statute requiring employers to verify their workers’ immigration status. That law is now before the U.S. Supreme Court.

Backs sanctuary laws

“We should have one uniform nationwide policy (on immigration penalties),” Saenz said. He said cities such as San Francisco should be free to establish more generous policies through sanctuary laws that discourage authorities from reporting suspected illegal immigrants to federal authorities.

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Conservative backlash

Attorney General-designate Eric Holder offered him the Civil Rights Division job in January, but told him two months later that the administration had decided not to nominate him, Saenz said.

Some anti-immigration groups labeled Saenz an extremist and an “open-borders advocate.” But Saenz said the focus of the backlash, which followed Justice Department leaks of the prospective appointment, was his MALDEF work, particularly the Prop. 187 suit.

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Although the Obama administration has taken some courageous stands on other issues, Saenz said, in his case, “I wish they had shown more backbone.”