The man in charge of building inspections in Port Chester is apologizing for his remarks in an article in the weekly Westmore News, which describes a planned crackdown:

The Building Department is concerned with the safety of all residents of the village — even those who are overcrowded. … They don’t know any better. These people come from Third World countries where they live in mud and paper shacks. Here they have a roof over their head, heat and hot water and they’re in paradise. They don’t know what they’re doing is overcrowding.

Local housing advocate Blanca Lopez objected to what she called stereotyping — and potentially, ethnic profiling — by the department. This would be the village whose local election system has been ruled discriminatory against Hispanic voters.

Acting Building Inspector Frank Ruccolo said he didn’t mean to single anyone out, and other officials are trying to strike a new tone. Trustee Daniel Brakewood put it bluntly in today’s article by Theresa Juva:

I want to reassure the residents of Port Chester that fairness and equity and public safety is what we’re concerned with. … We’re not doing anything that will get us tied up in a lawsuit.

The department is preparing to send inspectors out at night and to lodge criminal charges for sanitation violations, according to Westmore News.

The story also quotes a code enforcement officer saying he has learned enough Spanish to hold a basic conversation, adding, “I know when to duck and when to leave.”

Pro-immigrant groups are urging President Obama not to waste any time changing the nation’s immigration policies. The American Immigration Lawyers Association has a press release today, and groups of protesters rallied outside federal offices in New York, Washington, San Francisco and other cities yesterday. Their immediate push is to end indiscriminate raids.

Researchers at an Arizona law school issued a report on the mistreatment of women at immigrant detention centers. (A federal report also detailed the death of Hiu Lui Ng, a New York man who suffered from undiagnosed cancer and a fractured spine while in detention in Rhode Island.)

The White House web site has a page on Obama’s immigration agenda, but don’t expect any new details there.

Congresswoman Zoe Lofgren, a former immigration lawyer, is leaving the House immigration subcommittee to chair the ethics panel — “not a fun assignment,” in her words.

Janet Napolitano, the newly confirmed Homeland Security secretary, is making her own appointments to the top jobs in that department. Her record on the immigration issue continues to generate speculation. Many have described her approach as pragmatic. But there’s also this perspective from the Village Voice.

The new requirement for federal contractors to use E-Verify has been delayed until Feb. 20, and meanwhile the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is suing to stop it.

The Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies at City College is turning its attention to the immigration issue next month.

Powell, the former secretary of state and son of Jamaican immigrants, will speak at a Feb. 5 conference called “National Concern, Local Action, Immigrant Integration in New York.” Click here for the details.

Other names on the bill: Josh Bernstein of the Service Employees International Union; Michele Cahill of the Carnegie Corporation, and Ann Morse of the National Conference of State Legislatures, and Michael Fix of the Migration Policy Institute. On the second panel: José Calderón of the Hispanic Federation; Susan Fox of the YM-YWHA of Brighton-Manhattan Beach; Andrew Friedman of Make the Road New York, and Chung-Wha Hong of the New York Immigration Coalition.

Westchester is now on the map for the FMLN — former guerrilla coalition, modern-day political party in El Salvador. An FMLN chapter meets regularly in Long Island, and a few party organizers came to Port Chester Jan. 11 to talk politics.

The municipal elections were held Jan. 18, and the presidential race is March 15. With a moderate, business-suit-wearing candidate who has no militant past, the FMLN is hoping to take the presidency from the ARENA party for the first time. The main theme in the room was “change,” and more than one listener told me they wanted to see an Obama-like transfer of power in El Salvador.

The FMLN is certainly projecting a peaceful image, with campaign material that features a photo of a smiling woman holding a newborn infant. It was fascinating to hear the way immigration plays into politics in El Salvador. That’s what I focused on in my Journal News story Monday, posted below.

The FMLN group in Long Island has a web site here, and the pro-FMLN organization CISPES follows the developments in El Salvador on this site. In the photo is Juan Carlos Molina, the party’s New York coordinator.

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Members of the Rockland Immigration Coalition watched today’s inauguration ceremony at Konbit Neg Lakay in Spring Valley, the Haitian community organization where the group meets monthly. There were moments of celebration along with solemnity, and a cake frosted with the words, “A new day has come.”

President Obama’s speech made reference to immigrants historically as being among those who pushed the country forward: “For us, they packed up their few worldly possessions and traveled across oceans in search of a new life.”

But some of the biggest responses from this group came when the president said the nation “cannot prosper long when it favors only the prosperous” and that in the global context, “we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.”

Renold Julien, the head of Konbit Neg Lakay, noted Obama’s sense of humility. “The more power that you have, the more careful that you should be,” he said, echoing a theme from the speech.

Presler Julien — who is not related to Renold, but grew up with him in Haiti and helped found the KNL organization — was struck by the way Obama emphasized unity on both a national and global scale. “At the end it’s one country, one world,” he said, calling Obama’s presidency “a global treasure.”

I spent time during the last two months at an ESL class in Port Chester where the immigrant students are using Barack Obama’s memoir, “Dreams from My Father,” as their reading material.

The students told me that they could relate to Obama’s story on many levels, and they’ve used it as the basis for discussions about what it’s like to be singled out because of race, ethnicity, or a “funny name.” Below is the story I had in The Journal News on Sunday.

(Photos: Ricky Flores, Stuart Bayer/The Journal News)

PORT CHESTER — The reading material in Camille Linen’s English class is no small challenge for her immigrant students, who have puzzled over terms like “lanky,” “off-color jokes,” and one that really threw them, “miscegenation.”
Barack Obama’s memoir “Dreams From My Father” is the class textbook, and it can be rough going for a non-native speaker of English. But it has turned out to be a rewarding history lesson and vocabulary drill for the multinational collection of adults who attend her advanced class. On weekday mornings at the Carver Center, her students take turns reading the book aloud and writing essays in response.
The class, apparently without any partisan discord, has embraced the book and delved into its subtext of race, class and ethnicity in America.
“It was not until I read about his parent’s marriage to know that interracial marriage was prohibited in many parts of the South even in 1960s,” wrote Rie Shibata, a 39-year-old student from Japan.
In another essay addressed to the president-elect, Shibata borrowed the adjective “thunderous,” which Obama used to describe the waves off Hawaii’s North Shore. To Shibata it portended the turmoil of the presidency.
“It seems like you are going to sail a boat in the thunderous sea, without seeing the place you reach,” Shibata wrote. “Many people, of course including me, got a positive power from you, and we believe in you strongly.”
The students identify closely with the sense of dual identity that Obama expresses throughout his book — a feeling of never being settled in just one place, Linen said. “Dreams from My Father,” published in 1995, explores Obama’s heritage as the son of a black Kenyan father and a white American mother. The first section is titled “Origins.”
“Obama, not being an immigrant, to me is like an immigrant,” Linen said. “Because he didn’t know where he belonged.”

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The Migration Policy Institute, a Washington think tank, has been studying the question of whether immigrants are returning home in any great numbers because of the economic crisis.

The answer won’t make a snappy headline, but the findings are intriguing. First of all, the report cites evidence that the foreign-born population is leveling off. It points to the Pew Hispanic Center’s research on the slowdown in the growth of the unauthorized immigrant population. And it notes that the slowdowns match up with two recent recessions, as seen in this graph. (The recession years are shaded in gray.)

But there is no hard evidence yet of a pattern of “return migration.” There is plenty of anecdotal evidence; I’ve spoken to travel agents in Port Chester and New Rochelle who say they’ve been selling mostly one-way plane tickets to their immigrant clientele. Illegal immigrants tend to be affected more than others by economic conditions, MPI says, but they also have some good reasons to stay put in United States. A lot depends on the economy in their home country and the value of the currency there.

Legal immigration is even harder to predict based on economic conditions. There was a decline in immigration during the Great Depression, but that could be a result of the immigration quotas of the 1920s, the report says. Here’s a timeline looking at legal immigration levels throughout history.

To read more (and to see that timeline more clearly), click here.

A new report charts the Bush administration’s prosecution of immigration cases, showing the number of cases quadrupling over that time. The big jump came at the end of the last fiscal year, says the report from the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse. The Dallas Morning News has a story here.

The proportion of cases involving immigration matters has shifted dramatically, according to the data. Immigration filings made up 18 percent of the total during Bush’s first year — and more than half the total during the 2008 fiscal year. TRAC, a research center at Syracuse University, collects data from the Justice Department under the Freedom of Information Act. It has an incredible collection of reports and statistics on immigration — complete with a glossary — linked to this page.

The report goes on to show fluctuations in other kinds of cases, including white-collar crime.

I’ve been working on a couple of stories over the last few days about a Guatemalan immigrant from Brewster who died recently and whose family consented to having his organs donated.

Benigno Lopez died on Dec. 30 of causes that are unclear though elevated blood sugar levels may have contributed to his passing. The 32-year-old had arrived like most other undocumented immigrants crossing the Mexican border by foot in 2006. During the time he was here, he sent money to his mother and siblings in Guatemala, enough to build her a home and pay for his brother’s education.

When one of his brothers, who is also living in Brewster, was confronted with the decision to donate Benigno’s organs, he did not hesitate because he said it’s what his brother would have wanted. He consulted with his mother back in Guatemala first and all agreed that it was the right thing to do. In the end, Benigno’s heart, liver, kidneys, pancreas and lungs were donated.

We often hear about the burden illegal immigrants are on school systems, hospitals and social services. But here’s a family who opted to give back by offering the greatest gift of all—life.

As a New Jersey doctor said in an L.A. Times article related to organ donation and whether illegal immigrants have the right to transplants: “People are people, and when you make an incision in an organ donor, you don’t find little American flags planted on their organs.”

Photo of Benigno Lopez courtesy of Lopez family

Immigrants who are fighting civil charges — namely, deportation — do not have a right to legal counsel, the way criminal defendants do. Some hire a private attorney to fight their case. Which brings us to the news this week of a ruling by Attorney General Michael Mukasey that has some groups outraged.

The ruling makes it harder for immigrants to appeal a deportation on the grounds that a hired lawyer mishandled the case.

The American Immigration Law Foundation (the legal arm of AILA, an association of immigration attorneys) blasted the decision as yet another swipe at due process during the last days of the Bush administration.

I spoke with AILF’s Nadine Wettstein to find out more. The Sixth Amendment limits the right of legal counsel to criminal proceedings — No dispute there, she said. This controversy centers on the Fifth Amendment’s right to a fair hearing. The Board of Immigration Appeals traditionally followed court decisions known as Lozada and Assad, saying immigrants had a right to counsel under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause. So previously, if your lawyer was ineffective, that could form the basis of an appeal, or a “motion to reopen” your case, Wettstein said. Now, cases will be reopened only at the government’s discretion.

“The attorney general is trying to say: ‘this is entirely our decision, the courts have nothing to do with this, it’s up to us,’” she said.

And what’s the real world effect? Immigration courts are rife with stories of fraudulent and bad lawyering. “These people are very easy to victimize, and so there are a lot of victims,” Wettstein said. Beyond that, the stakes are high. If an attorney fails to notify a client about a court appearance or a removal order, that person might go years without realizing they’ve been ordered to leave the country.

Some defend the AG’s decision for clarifying the rules and addressing a common stalling tactic.

How is it that the attorney general gets to decide this, anyway? Mukasey’s decision was made under a little-used immigration regulation that allows the attorney general to review and overrule a decision by the Board of Appeals, Wettstein said.

The legal decision is available here and AILF has its own say here.