Patrick Young, who teaches immigration law at Hofstra and advises the Westchester Hispanic Coalition, deconstructs the notion of “anchor babies” today on the blog Long Island Wins. It’s part of his “Immigration 101” series on policy.

Anchor babies are a disparaging reference to the U.S.-born children of illegal immigrants, who presumably help their parents lay claim to a life in the United States. (Note that a U.S. citizen child only becomes eligible to petition for a parent when they turn 21. And if the child’s parent faces deportation, there are  few exceptions based on hardship.) (“Anchor baby” is one of the insults that appeared in the online forums about the Brewster students, as discussed in the previous post.) Anyway, there have been calls in Congress to do away with automatic citizenship at birth, and questions about the 14th Amendment’s true meaning. Young responds to a discussion by FAIR, which says such families have a divided allegiance and that the Supreme Court has never considered this issue. Young writes,

Now, I’m guessing it would be pretty hard to gauge “the allegiance” of any newborn. And “this issue has never been directly decided by the U.S. Supreme Court” because it is so darned stupid.

Meanwhile, a discussion tonight at Baruch Conference Center will look at citizenship and immigration from  a not-so-legally-minded perspective. Titled “Who Gets a Voice? Immigrants and Civic Inclusion” it will look at how the undocumented can “be engaged in civic life in a way that strengthens the social fabric of our country.” Sponsors are Demos and the World Policy Institute.

It’s a real shame that on the immigration story related to Brewster High School students learning English and assimilating, the majority of the comments following the article are so negative, and in many cases, racist.

These are kids, who are here to get a better education, to go to college and become productive citizens of the U.S. Sadly, the forum does not even give them a chance.

Most commentators often remark in general about how people who are in this country should learn English, the laws and the culture by which this society functions. This is exactly what these students are doing, but yet it’s never enough.

I’m sorry that these kids have to be subjected to such hateful rhetoric when it is their accomplishments that should be applauded.

To read the story, go here.

Here’s a roundup of the latest immigration-related news.

What does it feel like to be the first in your family to ever go to college? Ernie Garcia and Melissa Montgomery speak to some high school graduates from Yonkers, where students from immigrant families are among those blazing the trail.

Marcela Rojas reports on the first graduates of Brewster’s “sheltered English” program for English language learners.

She also reports on the cancellation of a controversial meeting in Brewster about illegal immigration. Southeast Councilman Paul Johnson says the town officials who organized the “political rally” did not have the required insurance coverage.

An annual Heritage Sunday Mass at St. John the Evangelist Church in Mahopac celebrated the immigrant experience.

Long Island Wins follows up on an alleged hate crime in Medford. Ted Hesson speaks to a neighbor who says that when government rhetoric divides immigrants by legal and illegal status, tensions are bound to increase.

Here’s an update from Marcela Rojas:

A Town Hall meeting planned for tonight on illegal hiring and housing in Southeast and Brewster has been canceled.

Town Councilman Dwight Yee, who along with Supervisor Michael Rights was hosting the event, said they have succumbed to the insurance issue raised by another Town Board member. Yee said the meeting will be rescheduled to July 16 at the Town Board’s work session at Town Hall.
“Once again these guys are throwing sand in my eye in reaching out to the community,” Yee said.
Councilman Paul Johnson said in order to hold a meeting at another facility, venues generally require certificates of insurance. The event was planned for the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union Hall, 38 Starr Ridge Road.
The Town Board, Johnson said, did not approve of using the town’s insurance to cover the “political rally.”
“They are trying to use town policy for a private event and that is an abuse,” Johnson said.
Some residents and elected officials raised concerns about the meeting and a mailer Rights and Yee sent out earlier this week, saying the men were exploiting a recent crash that claimed the lives of Lori Donohue, 37, and her daughter Kayla, 8, at the hands of a motorist who police say was drunk, unlicensed and in the country illegally.

A town-hall meeting is scheduled in Brewster tonight in relation to the June 8 drunk-driving tragedy, and some constituents are enraged at what they see as exploitation for political purposes.

Southeast Supervisor Michael Rights and Councilman Dwight Yee are convening a discussion on “the impact of illegal hiring and illegal housing in Southeast and Brewster.” This comes right after a mailing from them about immigration crackdown efforts. Marcela Rojas writes about the reaction in today’s Journal News and also has a story about a new incident involving the town supervisor. A 20-year-old woman says the town supervisor crossed a dividing line in his car, made her swerve off the road, and left the scene shortly afterward. Rights denies causing the accident.

I’m told that tonight’s meeting, at 7 p.m. in the Sheet Metal Workers’ Union Hall on
Starr Ridge Road, will be shown live on out web site at http://lohud.com/lohudlive1.

Assemblyman Greg Ball, an ally of Rights and Yee, is criticizing tonight’s meeting, saying the two should develop a “consensus for action, on both DWI and illegal immigration.” He has scheduled his own town hall meeting at the same location on July 23.

And he mentions in his press release that “For more than three years, I have tried to move our community forward to embrace a crack down on illegal housing and illegal hiring.”

The White House immigration summit this afternoon certainly did not end with any general consensus. Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano will head a working group on the issue with members of Congress, President Obama announced afterward. “But it’s going to require some heavy lifting, it’s going to require a victory of practicality and common sense and good policymaking over short-term politics,” he said. Obama’s remarks are posted on Politico. The meeting included New Yorkers Sen. Charles Schumer and Rep. Nydia Velázquez.

New programs for temporary workers were mentioned as one of the sticking points. Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he would not support a bill that doesn’t have a new program for guest workers, The Hill reports. The big labor coalitions have come out against such programs.

Obama promised improvements to the web site of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services and better access to updates about the status of one’s application.

New York Sen. Charles Schumer is attending the twice-delayed immigration meeting at the White House this afternoon, and gave a speech yesterday on his intentions. As chair of the Senate Judiciary’s immigration subcommittee, he is taking over for Sen. Ted Kennedy as the main proponent of an immigration overhaul.

This time, he emphasized, Democrats will try harder to convince Republicans that they are “serious about enforcement.” You can already tell by the language he’s using, and his listing of seven principles starting with, “illegal immigration is wrong, and a primary goal of comprehensive immigration reform must be to dramatically curtail future illegal immigration.” (The quotations come from his prepared remarks for a Migration Policy Institute event in D.C. yesterday.)

The idea of legalizing undocumented immigrants is presented not as a giveaway, or a jumping-through-hoops, but a crackdown:

All illegal aliens present in the United States on the date of enactment of our bill must quickly register their presence with the United States Government — and submit to a rigorous process of converting to legal status and earning a path to citizenship — or face imminent deportation.

And he apparently will try to get people not to use the phrase “undocumented workers,” because it sounds weak.

When we use phrases like ‘undocumented workers,’ we convey a message to the American people that their Government is not serious about combating illegal immigration, which the American people overwhelmingly oppose.

The newsiest element of his remarks is the biometric employer verification system. It is a stepped up version of E-Verify, which lets employers check a person’s immigration status using Social Security numbers. That system is considered severely limited because it can’t detect someone who is using someone else’s SSN. Schumer said the subcommittee will hash through different proposals for a new system during a hearing in July.

The speculation will continue about whether Congress will deal with a bill this year, and whether it has to be this year in order to pass during Obama’s term. The latest came from Rahm Emmanuel, who said today that a comprehensive bill still lacked the necessary number of votes, reports the Washington Post. He said immigration was unlikely to pass this year, but that it was important to start the effort this year.

A group of people held a press conference in Brewster yesterday to call attention to crimes committed by illegal immigrants and to demand that something be done to enforce the immigration laws.

“While crime is crime and the victims suffer equally whether the perpetrator is a citizen or illegal alien, what makes illegal alien crime so different is that the crime would have never happened if our government was doing its constitutionally mandated duty and enforcing immigration laws,” Ed Kowalski said in a press release from 9/11 Families for a Secure America. “This unequal enforcement of the law also makes it much more difficult on the victim’s families.”

Terry Corcoran has a story in today’s Journal News about the event. In essence, the message was that illegal immigrants are an inherent threat because their identities cannot truly be known. And illegal immigrants are by definition contemptuous of the law, the message goes. “Every illegal is a person who has shown contempt for American law, and every employer of illegals is a co-conspirator in any crime perpetrated by an illegal alien,” Kowalski said in his statement.

“Tomorrow’s terrorist is today’s cab driver,” Peter Gadiel said.

Here I’ll look a couple of statistics mentioned at the press conference, suggesting that illegal immigrants commit more crime than other people. The numbers came from Michael Cutler, who said he’d worked in a number of roles at U.S. immigration agencies.

The first claim: “About 30 percent of the inmate population are identified as being illegal aliens.”

Assemblyman Greg Ball has also made this claim in reference to New York state prisons. The actual percentage of inmates who are identified as illegal aliens in New York is 4 percent, according to state corrections officials. According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics, about 6 percent of state and federal inmates are non-U.S. citizens – a group that would include both legal and illegal immigrants. This 2005 report gives further details and percentages. For example, noncitizens accounted for 19 percent of federal inmates. Those federal inmates accounted for just 8 percent of the combined state/federal prison population. Here is the 2007 report, though you have to do the math yourself.

Statistics coming from local jails are not as complete. Eighty-four percent of jails track the numbers of noncitizen inmates, and based on that data, noncitizens accounted for 8 percent of the U.S. jail population in 2007, according to BJS. Again, the 8 percent would include both legal and illegal immigrants.

The “30 percent” figure has been widely circulated, and it comes from a 2005 GAO report that said 27 percent of federal inmates were “criminal aliens.” Again, this is just the federal prison population, and a “criminal alien” can be a legal or illegal immigrant. (In the jargon, a criminal alien is a noncitizen who has been charged with a crime.)

The second claim: “What this really means is that Illegal aliens are about five times as likely to commit a felony as are U.S. citizens and resident aliens.”

Cutler said this calculation is based on the 30 percent figure and the widely accepted estimate that 12 million people in the country are illegal immigrants. Demographer Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Hispanic Center estimates the unauthorized population at 12 million, or 4 percent of the nation’s population.

There have been a number of studies on immigrants and crime. The Public Policy Institute of California examined the incarceration data as a measure of whether immigrants commit more crime than other people. In a 2008 report (click here for the PDF), it found that immigrants are much less likely to be incarcerated than others. It’s difficult to break out the undocumented population, the report said, but it’s possible to compare foreign-born and native-born prisoners with similar education levels and ages.

Because immigrants tend to be young, male and less educated, there would be reason to expect a higher level of criminal activity, not a lower one, the report says. But the foreign-born accounted for 35 percent of California’s adult population and 17 percent of the adult prison population.

The institute looked further: Could the lower incarceration rates be explained by deportation? What about the jail population, which isn’t counted in the prison data? What if you look at only recently-arrived immigrants, or the ones who have accumulated more years here? What if you look at crime rates in individual cities where immigrants are going? What about the children of immigrants? What if you look only at the ones with less than a high school diploma?

The conclusion was that “the foreign-born have low rates of incarceration and institutionalizations, and that these rates hold true across education and region-of-origin subgroups.” The report ends, “In particular, from a public safety standpoint, there would be little reason to further limit immigration, to favor entry by high-skilled immigrants, or to increase penalties against criminal immigrants.”

A Suffolk County task force will get started next week on a series of meetings on hate crimes, reports Long Island Wins. The committee was prompted by the killing of Ecuadorean Marcelo Lucero in Patchogue last November.

Their work gets started as a civil rights group draws attention to the rise in hate crimes against Hispanics, coinciding with increased anti-immigrant rhetoric in the immigration debate. African-Americans remain the most frequent targets of hate crimes nationally. Attorney General Eric Holder is urging an update of  hate-crimes legislation.

Prosecutors in Long Island said other Latino men had been subject to attacks and harassment. About 50 complaints of other crimes were investigated but no further arrests were made. Today, Suffolk police charged a man with assault as a hate crime against two gay men, Newsday reports. The suspect is accused of yelling anti-gay epithets and injuring the two men in Central Islip.

Today’s panel discussion about the Brewster crash, convened by the Journal News editorial board, turned out to be a remarkable exchange. There was debate about whether the tragedy — a drunk-driving incident that killed a mother and child — had anything to do with the illegal immigration issue. The man indicted in the crash was identified as undocumented and unlicensed, a horse-farm laborer originally from Guatemala.

Brewster Mayor James Schoenig said he knew immediately what reaction he would receive. He described receiving a series of phone calls “saying that they want to line all the immigrants up on Main Street and shoot them, (and ranging) to, let’s find a local tree and get some rope and hang them.”

Resident Patti Hupp described the level of anger and agony that she and others are feeling over the deaths of Lori and Kayla Donahue, and why that  spills over into anger over day labor and illegal immigration. “We’re still in a grieving process,” she said. Hupp, who is leading twice-daily marches on Main Street in support of the Donahue family, said women feel unsafe in Brewster because of the numbers of men lining Main Street and that they feel angry at the thought that the laborers do not pay taxes. “Money is a powerful thing, and it makes people angry and it’s not fair,” she said.

I’ll write in more detail about the ensuing discussion about those assertions, about the scapegoating of immigrants and Hispanics, about popular attitudes toward drinking and drunkenness, and about local measures aiming to combat drunk driving. Reporter Marcela Rojas is writing a story for tomorrow’s Journal News. To me, as someone who has followed the immigration and day labor issues in Brewster over the last decade or so, this sort of direct, face-to-face discussion has been rare in Brewster.

The other speakers were Ana Lopez, a Brewster resident and a case worker at the Westchester Hispanic Coalition; Betsy Palmieri of the Hudson Valley Community Coalition; Mel Berger of the Mount Kisco Drug and Alcohol Abuse Prevention Council, and Carole Sears of the Westchester chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

To watch the video, click here and hit the On-Demand button at the bottom of the player. Then select “Editorial Board talks with members of Brewster Community” which (as of this afternoon) is at the top of the list.

(Photos: Rory Glaeseman / The Journal News )

Top photo: Mayor Schoenig and Patti Hupp

Second photo: Betsy Palmieri and Carole Sears

Third photo: Ana Lopez

Last photo: Mel Berger