Leadership Award Winners Join Call for New, Post 9/11 Approach to Immigration

Assert That Current Anti-Immigrant Trend Will Undermine U.S. Security

Interviews with award winners working with immigrants:
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• View Extended Interview Q&A's (pdf)

Washington, D.C. – Several winners of the 2001 Leadership for a Changing World award will lend their support to a call for a new, post-September 11 approach to immigration in the United States. Their proposals will be made at the National Immigration Forum’s annual conference, which takes place in Washington, D.C. Jan. 31 and Feb. 1.

Leadership for a Changing World (LCW) is a program of the Ford Foundation in partnership with the Advocacy Institute in Washington D.C and the Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service, New York University. Each year, it identifies 20 community leaders, provides financial support to their efforts, and involves them in an ongoing study of leadership in America. The 2001 winners include leaders in low-income housing and economic development, AIDS and the environment, prison reform and immigration.

Before Sept. 11, immigration advocates were hopeful that positive reform of immigration law was imminent, based in part on the growing voting power of immigrants.

But according to Margie McHugh, executive director of New York Immigration Coalition and an LCW award winner, growing anti-immigrant sentiment is now encouraging legislation proposals, which, if passed into law, will have a chilling effect on true security at the community level. “If the anti-immigrant trend continues, we’ll see less and less cooperation between law enforcement authorities and immigrant populations,” says McHugh. “It makes no sense expending all our law enforcement investment on that, rather than on tracking down the actual terrorists.”

The current crackdown on immigrants in the name of security is a dangerous trend, McHugh believes. It undermines long-term public security, punishes the innocent, dramatically reduces the chances for immigration law reform, and further alienates the growing immigrant communities across the country.

Along with many other leaders in this field, McHugh, who will speak at the National Immigration Forum’s conference, believes that rather than viewing certain immigrants as potential terrorists, U.S. officials should encourage immigrants to watch for potential terrorist acts and report them to law enforcement officials, without fear of arrest or deportation for minor violations of immigration laws.

“All non-citizens are targeted right now,” says Milo Mumgaard, executive director of Nebraska Appleseed Center for Law in the Public Interest in Lincoln, Nebraska. Mumgaard, an LCW award winner, will also speak at the conference.

Through the Iowa Nebraska Immigrant Rights Network, Mumgaard’s work extends across much of the Midwest, where tens of thousands of newcomers have arrived in the last decade. “Whole communities have flip-flopped demographically. Many traditional rural farm communities have become majority Hispanic,” he says. In fact, two years ago Iowa officials, confronting significant population loss as rural towns die and young people move from the state, established a program to convince immigrants to move permanently to the state. The hope: immigrants would revive dying rural towns. The controversial program drew public opposition during the past year, and public support vanished after Sept. 11.

Anti-immigrant sentiment and government sweeps threaten to drive these communities further from the mainstream of American life at a time when full civic engagement are needed more than ever, says Mumgaard. “From reporting possible terrorists in their midst to reporting a husband beating his wife – this is pushing us backward,” says Mumgaard. Nebraska also has large immigrant population from Iran and Iraq and other countries of that region. “They’ve almost gone into hibernation.”

To counter this trend and proposed anti-immigrant legislation, Mumgaard and other Nebraska immigration advocates will propose “a state newcomer policy” designed to welcome immigrants and lower barriers for participation in civic life, and provide equal opportunities. The goal: “To help build civic, social and economic opportunities in our state for generations to come and create a more integrated and healthy community.”

Security, strength, and leadership thrive in strong communities, but wither when people become isolated and marginalized, he says.

Among the other LCW winners working to create a new approach to immigration:

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