Gideon Aronoff, president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, is urging President Obama and Congress “to make immigration reform a top priority.”
Photo courtesy HIAS
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February 5, 2009
A coalition of Jewish community leaders is urging the reform of immigration policy before Passover begins on April 8.
Called “Progress by Pesach,” the campaign began with a Jan. 29 conference call to members of the Jewish media chaired by the president of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, Gideon Aronoff of South Orange.
Participants urged President Barack Obama and Congress to curtail the use of raids as a primary tool of immigration enforcement.
They set a goal of collecting 10,000 signatures by April 8 on a petition encouraging “humanitarian immigration reform.”
“We are calling upon President Obama and Congress to make immigration reform a top priority,” Aronoff said. “For too long, our government has relied primarily on enforcement, but immigration raids only cause suffering for immigrants and communities and do nothing to solve the underlying problem of immigration.”
Asked by NJ Jewish News to specify the types of reform his coalition is advocating, Aronoff spoke of “addressing a path to citizenship for the undocumented people already here” and “creating just and effective enforcement of immigration law at the borders and in communities.” He also said he hoped reforms would address “the backlog of family immigrants who have come in and future flows of immigrants so that the numbers of immigration visas and jobs in our communities are in sync.”
Aronoff said there was “no specific package of legislation pending.”
In a separate interview with NJJN, Shai Goldstein, executive director of the New Jersey Immigration Policy Network, asserted that New Jersey has had a disproportionate number of immigration raids — in private homes as well as workplaces.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids “should have been suspended a long time ago,” Goldstein said. “The whole system is broken.”
However, Allyson Gall, executive director of the American Jewish Committee’s Metro New Jersey Area and a member of the Immigration Policy Network, did not fully agree with Goldstein.
“AJC is not for a categorical end to the raids,” she told NJJN. “We are saying you do have to enforce laws, but you also have to have reform. Obviously we strongly believe in a comprehensive solution, but that does mean some enforcement, as well as civil rights and human rights and bringing people out of the shadows.”
Taking part in the conference call, Vic Rosenthal, executive director of Jewish Community Action in St. Paul, Minn., urged Jewish grassroots efforts to offset the influence of groups that oppose an easier path to legalization for undocumented foreigners and seek criminal penalties and deportation for such immigrants.
Stephen Steinlight, senior policy analyst at Center for Immigration Policy, said, “Real Jews are horrified by the positions taken by Jewish defense agencies.”
Photo courtesy Center for Immigration Policy
“There have been a huge number of letters and phone calls that have come in from right-wing and anti-immigrant groups,” he said. “What we want to be able to show in the next 80 to 100 days is that we can get thousands of Jewish people and their allies to demonstrate their support for a comprehensive solution to solve the problem and not ignore the fact that it is a problem.”
‘Cockroach capitalism’
But Stephen Steinlight, senior policy analyst at Center for Immigration Policy, disagreed strongly with those aims. Steinlight, a frequent critic of immigration policies promoted by the major Jewish policy groups, did not take part in the telephone conference.
“There is a gigantic chasm between those who purport to speak in the name of Jews and what real Jews think,” he told NJJN. Those promoting immigration reform “are dead wrong on this issue, and they do not represent Jews. It is an outrage that they claim to. Real Jews are horrified by the positions taken by Jewish defense agencies.”
Unlike the reform advocates on the conference call, Steinlight said, he strongly supports federal raids aimed at snaring undocumented workers.
“Thank God for those raids by ICE. If it were not for those raids, we wouldn’t know the kind of cockroach capitalism that gets practiced by the people who want illegal immigration,” he said.
Steinlight predicted that political reality will force the Obama administration to abandon support of immigration reform.
“My guess is that given that we are heading toward a second great depression, I am not sure he wants to be in the business of the mass importation of poverty, which is what contemporary immigration is. This stimulus package, which is there to create new jobs, will not even keep up with the surge of immigrants from abroad, let alone help American workers,” he said.
Goldstein countered that Steinlight is making undocumented workers scapegoats for the current economic downturn.
“What is going on is a global economic crisis that has nothing to do with immigration or migration,” said Goldstein. Steinlight’s stance “is a completely spurious, obnoxious argument and does not deserve any credence at all.”
The “Progress by Pesach” coalition also includes Jewish Council on Urban Affairs in Chicago, the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish Reconstructionist Federation, the National Council of Jewish Women, the Rabbinical Assembly, the Union for Reform Judaism, and a number of regional organizations.
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