Today we are going to continue our discussion on immigration. I speak with Milli Atkinson, the Legal Director of the San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative. The collaborative is made up of 15 different non-profit organizations. The collaborative aims to provide legal representation and a host of culturally competent areas of support for people with immigration related challenges. Legal representation is particularly important because immigrants have no right to legal representation in our country. Milli gets into the real life challenges that immigrants and our government face. She describes our system as it was before 2017, and how it has evolved. Milli goes through a case that she tried and how things have changed since she tried that case. We speak about the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency (ICE) and how Rapid Response Networks have been developed to deal with ICE's tactics. If you would like to learn more about the San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative, you can visit their website at SFILDC.org.
For a little context, in the US, prior to 1965, legal immigration was organized on the basis of ethnic quotas. With the Civil Rights movement, the unfairness of such a system was partially recognized by the government. Illegal immigration at the time wasn’t really a big issue. Our foreign born population was quite static. Our border with Mexico was porous. Douglas Massey studied migration and observed that immigration was circular. Seasonal workers would come to the US, then return home.
In about 1973, things changed. Leonard Chapman, a retired Marine, was the Commissioner of Immigration and Naturalization Service. A good military man, he made it his job to organize and control the movement of people. He decided that US borders be rigorously and efficiently controlled. Perfectly natural for a commander in war who is trying to control territory.
The problem with this rigorous enforcement of the border crossings was that it then became much more difficult for seasonal workers to enter the US. And of course, once they got here to work, they knew it would be difficult to return to the US again, so they had a huge incentive to stay in the US. And, since they were going to be staying here, they also had a huge incentive to have their family members join them here in the US.
The result was that the foreign born population doubled from 1970 to 1990. It doubled again between 1990 and 2010. The increase in the 1990’s and first decade of 2000 was in part due to violence and social unrest caused by the civil war in El Salvador, as well as the destabilization of economies, and gangland development in El Salvador, Honduras and Guatemala.
Some people may argue, not our people, not our problem. Illegal immigrants use more social services than they pay for here, and that isn’t fair. The illegal immigrants take American jobs, and that isn’t fair. I submit, however, that these complaints are simplistic and lack basic compassion. How can you expect people to pay for social services when they are not allowed to pay taxes? The US Government, the Pew Research Center and dozens of Scholars have performed empirical studies that show that immigrants, increase job production and economic growth. The economist Christophe Albert, and others argue that low skilled illegal immigrant workers actually produce more jobs and increase the well-being for others more than legal immigrants and native US workers in the same sector of the economy.
Regardless of where one falls in their opinions, most everyone should agree that there are basic human rights, and that people should be treated fairly and with respect. The San Francisco Immigrant Legal Defense Collaborative aims to p