immigration – Page 5 – Memphis Flyer

All you have to do is answer “yes” or “no” to one simple question. Okay, the question is a teeny bit complicated, with 81 words, more subordinate clauses than IRS instructions, and a kicker that could get your terrorist-sympathizing ass kicked out of the country.

But hey, if you’re a red-blooded American, then what are you scared of? You Muslim immigrants, on the other hand, might want to pass. Ready? Here it is:

“Have you ever engaged in, conspired to engage in, or do you intend to engage in, or have you ever solicited membership or funds for, or have you through any other means ever assisted or provided funds for, or have you through any other means ever assisted or provided any type of material support to any person or organization that has ever engaged in or conspired to engage in sabotage, kidnapping, political assassination, hijacking or any other form of terrorist activity?”

Of course, you’re not a terrorist. You’re probably not even an immigrant. And if you were, you wouldn’t have a problem with this. Would you?

But wait. Ever sent $20 to the American Civil Liberties Union, which proudly defends all manner of criminal scum, losers, degenerates, and less-than-100-percent Americans? Or to one of the liberal arms of the Methodist, Unitarian-Universalist, Congregationalist, or Baptist churches? Or to an Orthodox synagogue? Or to the Black Panthers or Greenpeace or Students for a Democratic Society back when you were in college? Gotcha.

The question appears on an immigration document called an I-485, a petition for permanent resident alien status in the United States, commonly known as the green card.

If you answer “no” but the government thinks you’re lying for whatever reason, it can have the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force investigate you. If it finds that you “have ever engaged in, conspired to engage in, etc.,” it can criminally indict you, lock you up, give you a pair of tan prison pajamas, and deport you.

That’s what happened last week to 34-year-old Bassam Darwishahmad, or “Sam Darwish” as he was known to his neighbors and acquaintances in Germantown and Collierville where he sold cars and bought and sold houses after fixing them up. He is being deported for his association with a Palestinian group when he was a young man.

Darwishahmad, who is tall, fair-skinned, and reed-thin, pleaded guilty Tuesday in federal court in Memphis to one count of making a false statement on the I-485. He was locked up on February 26th. In exchange for his plea, two other counts on his indictment were dropped and he will be immediately deported, never to return legally to the United States. Glancing backward at his Tennessee-bred wife, who was sobbing on the back row of the courtroom, he quietly answered “yes” when U.S. district judge Jon McCalla asked him if he understood the consequences of what he was doing.

Darwishahmad came to the United States in 2001, got married, raised a son, and did not get arrested until this year. The government was prepared to show that as a teenager in Palestine, Darwishahmad was recruited by Fatah, which the U.S. government classifies as a terrorist organization. In 1990, he tossed a grenade-like bomb at a bus of Israelis and threw a Molotov cocktail at Israeli soldiers, later lying that he had only thrown rocks at them. Fatah wanted him to bomb an Israeli police station on the West Bank, but he never did.

Rehim Babaoglu, a Memphis attorney who specializes in immigration cases, said he was not surprised at Darwishahmad’s deportation, once the Fatah connection, however long ago, became known. Darwishahmad clinched his fate by lying on the I-485 form. Babaoglu said whether to deport or prosecute “is a policy decision among prosecutors” and varies from state to state. The U.S. Justice Department under President Bush has made immigration violations a priority.

“If they can’t get you on a criminal charge, they get you this way,” Babaoglu said.

Previous criminal prosecutions of illegal immigrants in Memphis have included a Syrian-American marriage-scam mastermind and a University of Memphis student with an unusual interest in airports, pilot gear, and flying jet planes.

So remember: Right here in Memphis, your government is watching. And think carefully about the forms you sign.

John Branston is a Flyer senior editor.

You’ve seen them, the ads picturing politicians crouching beside walls and fences along America’s southern borders. And you’ve heard the words coming out of their mouths as they proudly proclaim their opposition to “illegals.” As the midterm election races heat up, this travesty has co-opted what was once a bipartisan movement to rewrite outdated immigration laws. Candidates and our elected officials have traded serious debate on an issue that affects us all for cheap, meaningless photo ops and polarizing tactics designed to reap short-term gain.

Despite the candidates’ rhetoric, the failure of our immigration system is not about security or cultural preservation. It is about people. By using terms such as “illegal aliens” or “illegals,” political opportunists relegate human beings to a sub-species. They ask us to forget that individuals are at the very foundation of the immigration debate — people driven by despair and inhuman poverty to make perilous journeys in search of the opportunity to create a better life for themselves and their families.

And they work hard for those chances. Thousands of undocumented workers were the first to begin the rebuilding of New Orleans and the Gulf Coast, despite pervasive, documented exploitation. Politicians point to crimes committed by undocumented workers, but they forget to talk about the work “illegals” do throughout the rural South: They harvest our fruits and vegetables. They work in dire conditions in chicken and beef processing plants and perform backbreaking labor in our forests.

The current system leads to a devastating waste of resources. Every year in the United States, 65,000 undocumented youngsters, full of energy and potential, graduate from high school, but because of our outdated laws, they are relegated to the underclass in our society. They are kids like María Gonzalez,* who, at the age of 14, has lived in Memphis for 13 years, speaks perfect English, and although she has never known another home, will be denied any chance to enroll in higher education or to legally pursue a meaningful career.

Our elected officials seem to have forgotten that we elect them to solve problems facing our society. Instead they prefer to go on political road shows and pass punitive, visionless laws that fail to recognize the magnitude of our current immigration mess. Last December, Congress passed H.R. 4437, which sought to classify all undocumented immigrants as criminal felons. About a month ago, Congress passed H.R. 6061, which authorized the construction of a 700-mile fence along our southern border.

A fence is not going to fix our broken immigration laws. The bill is a cowardly diversionary tactic. Congress can pass a fence law, but it is incapable of building a bridge across the partisan divide, leaving us with no comprehensive immigration reform.

In 1964, the Civil Rights Act was passed after 80 days of difficult debate in the U.S. Senate. Back then — before gerrymandering, professional lobbyists, big money, and constant polling — politicians debated, filibustered, and fought, but ultimately they passed legislation that improved society. Sadly, those days seem to be behind us, and the current politicization of the immigration debate — characterized by outrageous hyperbole, manipulation of facts, and a fuzzy understanding of how the U.S. economy actually functions — is shameful.

The Civil Rights Act debate taught us the importance of tearing down discriminatory practices as a way to strengthen our democracy. In 2006, we’re literally building fences rather than focusing on the root cause of our immigration crisis, i.e. our own outdated, inconsistently applied, and unjust immigration laws.

We desperately need authentic, comprehensive reform designed to rebuild our outdated immigration laws in a way that addresses the actual source of our current crisis: the U.S. economy’s ravenous appetite for a constant and cheap labor supply which has been the engine of expanding profit margins in key sectors of our economy.

In his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” Martin Luther King Jr. noted that an unjust law “degrades human personality” and “ends up relegating persons to the status of things.” Is this not a telling indictment of our current immigration system and the political debate surrounding it?

* Name changed for privacy.

Michael LaRosa is an associate professor of history at Rhodes College.
Bryce Ashby is a third-year law student at the University of Memphis and editor-in-chief of Law Review.