A Sad Day in SW Michigan & Everywhere in the U.S.A.

Huseyin Parlak, a Turkish national who fears for his life in Turkey, was deported by trickery yesterday. His case doesn't enjoy the notoriety of his brother Ibrahim's case, but is connected to it by blood and legal theory. For anyone who knows the Parlak brothers, this is truly a sad development. For anyone who doesn't, read on. My guess is that you'll be a bit annoyed by the end of this entry.

Ibrahim Parlak and Huseyin Parlak are Kurdish, which is to say they are members of an ethnic minority in Turkey that has long been persecuted and mistreated by the government of Turkey. Ibrahim Parlak successfully applied for asylum in the U.S. in the early 1990s, and converted it to lawful permanent residence. His problems began when he applied for U.S. citizenship five years later. The government decided that he had lied on his naturalization application by not checking the box asking if he had ever been arrested.

His only arrest was by Turkish forces who arrested, beat and tortured him for months at a time for his outspoken views on Kurdish independence. He was convicted of "separatist activities" by a Turkish Security Court, which has since been disbanded because it used torture and other inhumane techniques to extract confessions.

Ibrahim knew that the U.S. government was aware of those "arrests", because they were precisely why he was given asylum. He and his lawyer at that time did not believe it was necessary to check yes when it was clear the government knew of those detentions. He had never had any real criminal problems anywhere, at any time.

After Ibrahim's naturalization case was denied, they put him in removal proceedings for the unchecked box. Ibrahim did what any one of us with a small child and life in the United States would do. He fought back. Ibrahim and his supporters dug their heals in, and got organized, American style. They formed committees, they told his story, and told it well.

The U.S. government wasn't pleased with Ibrahim's competence in getting his message out. Senators and other Congressional members became irritated that our country was doing this to a man who had seemingly done nothing wrong. He is a pillar of his community. He is a family man.

The government became so annoyed, they decided to up the ante and retaliate against Ibrahim. While I don't profess to know what they were actually thinking, the circumstantial evidence in their actions is enough for me to comfortably label it as retaliation. The government alleged that Ibrahim's activities as a Kurdish rights activist constituted acts of terrorism under the new definitions provided by the Patriot Act. This included an alleged affiliation with an organization that he was allegedly sympathetic to in Turkey 15 years prior to it being characterized as a terrorist organization. In other words, the government applied the Patriot Act retroactively to his same activities that had once garnered him asylum and permanent residency. Even a federal judge eventually agreed that what they were doing was "piling on". A federal judge ordered Ibrahim to be released from custody while his case was appealed. It remains on appeal.

Enter Huseyin, his soft-spoken brother who kept the restaurant open while Ibrahim was being held in a maximum security federal penitentiary in Battle Creek for nearly a year. Huseyin came to the United States as a student, attended school and was prepared to return to Turkey. He changed his mind when the the U.S. government broke out the terrorist label. He knew returning to Turkey would now be a problem for his safety.

Like his brother Huseyin has never been arrested or convicted for any crime, and has not been accused of any nefarious activities anywhere, at any time. The government caught up to Huseyin and put him in deportation proceedings as well, perhaps figuring they could demoralize Ibrahim by taking a run at his family (again, circumstantially, there is no other explanation) Oh, and while the government was at it, they tried to shut down the brothers' enormously popular restaurant, Cafe Gulistan. They tried to revoke his liquor license because he again did not list his arrest and torture from Turkey on his liquor license application.

I am not making this up.

He hired lawyers and once again beat the government back from taking away his livelihood.

Huseyin's bid for asylum was denied by an immigration judge who (1) didn't believe his story of past persecution because of minor differences between his written application and his testimony, and (2) because the IJ viewed the country conditions in Turkey as vastly improved and downright balmy. The problem with this view is that it is fiction. The U.S. State Department's own country condition report on human rights belies the immigration judge's conclusions that all is well in Turkey. It is still crucible of persecution for Kurds and especially Kurd activists, and is a very dangerous place indeed if you are of that ethnicity.

Huseyin appealed the Immigration Judge's decision to the Board of Immigration Appeals. It is the administrative appeals unit for the immigration court system, and is severely over-taxed by too many cases and too few judges. Meaningful reviews are hard to come by in this forum, but one has to exhaust his appeals there before proceeding to the federal courts, where resources flow freely, as does intellect and thoroughness. Very bright people have come to see that the administrative forum for removal and asylum cases is completely inadequate. This includes Judge Posner from the Seventh Circuit, as well as other circuit court judges.

The Board upheld the immigration court's denial of his claim, without discussing those problematic country condition reports at all. That's a problem according to all of the precedent decisions in the federal courts. Huseyin and his lawyer (me) appealed to the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals where he will point out these significant shortcomings when the briefing schedule is issued. In the meantime though, Congress, in its infinite wisdom, decided that the government ought to be able to remove foreign nationals while their first appeal to the federal courts is pending. The idea of that being fair and American is quite a stretch, but it is what the law currently provides.

We filed a Motion to Stay his removal, which is a very difficult remedy to gain. This is because courts don't like to step on Congress's will unless the situation is extreme. We argued that Huseyin's case presented those extremes, but the Sixth Circuit denied the motion. It should be said that very few of these motions are granted, and many appellate courts that eventually sustain appeals first deny motions for a stay. Most foreign nationals in that situation are issued orders of supervision and are permitted to stay pending their appeal. Huseyin was treated a bit differently, because he is the brother of a person who has made the government look bad by publicizing their over-zealous action.

I attended his first check in appointment with the Detroit office of ICE with him and met with his deportation officer. The officer explained that because he has a valid appeal pending, and because he was not a flight risk or a danger to others, he would be permitted to stay in the United States, without detention, on a OS ("order of supervision"). That order was given to me on April 10, 2007. It required that Huseyin return to Detroit on May 14, 2007 to check in. This is all very standard in a case like this. Except that the officer lied to us.

Our motion for a stay was denied on Friday, May 11, 2007. This came as no surprise, and did not cause us alarm, because Huseyin had been given an order of supervision. Furthermore, the fact that the motion was pending does not stop the government from executing an removal order. The Sixth Circuit's opinion was very brief, and did not arrive by mail until Monday, May 14 at about 2:00 p.m. Huseyin was on a plane at the time I opened the decision.

Huseyin was detained, cuffed and whisked - triple time - away yesterday when he reported at his check in appointment. The government usually takes at least several days to actually deport someone in custody once the decide to take that step. Sometimes it takes weeks or even months. Not this time. They had him on a plane within an hour or two.

The most disturbing part of this case is that the merits of his case - the objective country conditions in Turkey with respect to vocal Kurds, or those perceived as taking part in Kurdish activism - has yet to be addressed in his case. The immigration judge didn't discuss that evidence. The Board of Immigration didn't bother explaining why it wasn't important, or why it didn't apply to Huseyin; nor could it in its one page opinion. The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals is the first forum that will discuss that evidence. Now, it could be too late.

This isn't sour grapes, or one man's thoughts. The government's overreaching not only in this case, but in many others, is becoming frightening. It would be downright disingenuous to even suggest that Huseyin would have been lied to, arrested and deported so quickly if he wasn't Ibrahim's brother. The government can say what it wants about following the law and its own procedures, but the way they handled this stinks.

His family is devastated, and worried, and most of all disappointed. They thought the government of the United States stood for justice, and stood for what is right. They thought the government's agents could be trusted. They were wrong.

Governments are made of people, and people are fallible. Systems break down. It's not as easy as good vs. evil, competent vs. incompetent. It's history's oldest lesson: Too much power mixed with the wrong messages from leadership creates an inevitably poison cocktail.

Drink at your own risk, or contact your Senator or Congressional Rep to express your discontent. Or do nothing at all and hope U.S citizens who express their opinions aren't treated with the same disregard for due process.

Why Immigration is Good for the Economy

Congress is considering major immigration reform, in large part to enable employers to bring more immigrant workers into the country to fill critical positions. Rather than present the reasons why this is necessary, below is a perfectly articulated rendition of why immigration is good for the U.S. economy. Leon Sequeira is the current Assistant Secretary for Policy for the U.S. Department of Labor. He testified before the House of Representatives on May 3, 2007 about the impact of immigration on our economy, and said in part:

"While the number of immigrants as a percentage of the population might seem large, it is in fact far lower than other periods of heavy immigration in our history. Over the past ten years, 8.8 million immigrants added about 3.4 percent to the population. In contrast, throughout the 19th century, immigration added 6.2 percent to the population each decade, rising above 9 percent during the 1850s and 1880s, and immigration peaked at 10.4 percent of the population during the decade between 1901 and 1910. After 1910, immigration rates fell dramatically, merely adding 5.7 percent to the population during the 1911-1919 decade, further falling to 0.4 percent in the 1930s, and then slowly rising to a still low 2.0 percent in the 1970s. Immigration rates rose in the 1980s (3 percent) and 1990s (3.4 percent) and have since remained stable.

The growth of the foreign-born workforce has not produced significant adverse effects on native-born workers. During the last ten years, the unemployment rate for native-born workers fell from 5.4 percent to 4.7 percent. The unemployment rate for African-Americans has declined from 10.5 percent in 1996 to 8.3 percent today. While unemployment has gone down, wages have gone up. Over the last decade, as the foreign born workforce increased, average hourly earnings of production and non-supervisory workers increased 8.7 percent after adjustment for inflation. In 2006, the median usual weekly earnings of foreign-born full-time wage and salary workers were $532, compared with $698 for the native-born.

There are three fundamental reasons why immigrants are important to our economy. First, the U.S. workforce is aging. Second, continued immigration will allow us to maintain a higher ratio of workers to retirees than other major economies such as China, Japan and Germany. Third, immigrants contribute significantly to innovation and entrepreneurship in our economy.

Turning first to the aging of our labor force, there are 25.5 million persons in the labor force who are age 55 or older and who will be approaching retirement age in the next few years. This is up 59 percent from 10 years ago. And while the number of older Americans in the workforce is increasing, the number of young workers in the workforce has changed little. Those in the labor force who are 16-24 years old numbered 22.4 million in 2006, up just 5.7 percent from a decade earlier—less than one-tenth as fast as the growth among older workers. Clearly, the baby boomers are beginning to retire, and there is not a corresponding boom of native-born young workers entering the workforce to replace those retirees.

The challenge of finding qualified workers is likely to be much greater in the coming years. The U.S. population is projected to grow by 6.8 percent from 2007 to 2014, while the labor force is projected to grow 6.2 percent over that time, with immigration projected to be the main driver of population growth and hence labor force growth. Recent data shows that the immigrant labor force participation rate of 68.6 percent is higher than the 65.8 percent participation rate for native-born workers. The unemployment rate for foreign-born workers was 4.0 percent in 2006, lower than the average unemployment rate of 4.7 percent for native-born workers. Men make up a larger proportion of the foreign born labor force, 60 percent, than they do of the native-born labor force, 53 percent. Significantly, the proportion of 25- to 54-year olds is higher for foreign-born workers (76percent) than for the native-born labor force (67 percent).

Immigration also helps to maintain U.S. competitiveness with our trading partners. As I noted previously, the distribution of the foreign-born population is more highly concentrated in the working-age cohort than the native-born. The presence of our foreign-born population is a major reason the United States has relatively more workers per retirees than our major trading partners. While the ratio of working-age populations to the total populations of China, Japan, Germany and the U.S. are all projected to decline in the coming years, the U.S. population will remain more balanced than those of our trading partners due to the immigrant component of our workforce."

Contact your Congressional Representative to weigh in on whether we need immigration reform.

The Strive Act of 2007: Congress' New Legislation

Congress is a busy place. It is a body of our government that undertakes enormously complicated issues, seeking to reach the best solutions through enacting complex laws. All within the boiling hot cauldron of politics. No thank you - I'd rather eat lint than do that for a living. But I digress again - back to Congress....
As we all know from studying for our naturalization test, Congress has two chambers: The House of Representatives and the Senate. Immigration Reform has been a hot topic for some time now, with the House of Representatives killing the Senate's best efforts at passing a workable solution for our immigration problems in 2005. It did so by responding to the Senate's bill by passing an enforcement only bill that was the polar opposite of the Senate bill.

A promising new bill called the Strive Act of 2007 was recently introduced in the House. If you have serious problems getting to sleep at night, you can read all about it at the Library of Congress here. I will give you the skinny on what the law proposes as concisely as I can.

Strive is an acronym for The Security Through Regularized Immigration and a Vibrant Economy Act. It was introduced in the house by Rep. Jeff Flake (R-AZ) and Rep. Luis Gutierrez (D-IL) on March 22, 2007. The House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, chaired by Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), is reviewing the legislation now, and it appears the Senate is close to introducing and voting on its own version of immigration reform. Senators McCain and Kennedy will likely sponsor that legislation in the coming days.

The high points of the House version include:

• A new worker program allowing for 400,000 new temporary visas to be issued for workers in shortage occupations. The visas would be called H-2C visas. Most importantly, the bill provides a path to permanent residency for qualified workers if the employer agrees to sponsor the foreign national. The legislation seeks to protect American workers by requiring the same wages, benefits and working conditions as similarly situated U.S. workers. Further, any would-be petitioning employer must first offer the opportunity to a U.S. worker. New workers on H-2C visas would also be prohibited outright from working in areas with an unemployment rate of more than 9 percent for low skilled positions;
• An earned legalization program for the undocumented population in the United States with a twist - a "touchback" provision that requires people who are in the U.S. without status to return home and re-enter with their new status. This idea of penalizing beneficiaries of the law by requiring them to return home and enter with a clean slate, was apparently an effort to placate certain legislators who wanted to include some measure of a penalty along with the benefits of allowing a track towards permanent residency and eventually citizenship;
• An increase to the annual employment-based visa quota from 140,000 to 290,000. Such an increases would alleviate the new backlogs in the EB-3 category that have led to thousands of valuable workers having to leave the United States because the visa they once had in their sights evaporated;
• An increase to family-based visas by taking "immediate relatives" out of the 480,000 annual quota.

There is no point in reviewing the minutiae of the proposed bill because even if STRIVE becomes law, it will undergo significant changes during the legislation process in the coming months. Suffice it to say, no matter the final rendition, new legislation will add a few hundred, if not thousand, of pages to the Immigration Law and Regulations book I cart around with me on a daily basis. I look forward to understanding how it will help thousands of good people who will add to the quilt of our amazing country. Stay tuned.