Immigrants and Politics Blog

[KR: Adrian Felix presented on this recently at the USC meeting of PRIEC. Brings up some interesting questions about political memberships and belonging based on death (as opposed to the standard notions of birth rights)]

June 11, 2007
In Journey Home to Mexico Grave, an Industry Rises
By EDUARDO PORTER

CONWAY, Ark. — Héctor Acevedo was 22, in this country illegally and far from his mother when he died last month in a car accident outside of town just across the Arkansas River.

But mother and son were soon reunited. The tight-knit immigrant network rallied to repatriate the body, adding Mr. Acevedo to a procession of thousands of dead Mexicans making their way home each year. A survivor of the accident approached a relative of another victim, who worked in a restaurant owned by one of Mr. Acevedo’s relatives.

An uncle identified the body, contacted the Mexican consulate in nearby Little Rock and arranged the paperwork. For $2,300, and a $500 contribution from the consulate, they bought the “Hispanic Package” at Brown’s Christian Funeral Services, which specializes in repatriation of remains to Mexico. Six days after the accident, Mr. Acevedo was buried next to his grandfather in the family plot in González, Tamaulipas, in northeastern Mexico.

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[KR: Here is the study featured in the New York Times on wide disparities in granting of asylum cases across states and according to the gender and past work experience of the immigration judge. (via SSRN)]

Refugee Roulette: Disparities in Asylum Adjudication
Ramji-Nogales, Jaya, Schoenholtz , Andrew and Schrag, Philip G.
http://ssrn.com/abstract=983946
The analysis reveals significant disparities in grant rates, even when different adjudicators in the same office each considered large numbers of applications from nationals of the same country. In many cases, the most important moment in an asylum case is the instant in which a clerk randomly assigns an application to a particular asylum officer or immigration judge.

Using cross-tabulations based on public biographies, the paper also explores correlations between sociological characteristics of individual immigration judges and their grant rates. The cross tabulations show that the chance of winning asylum was strongly affected by whether or not the applicant had legal representation, by the gender of the immigration judge, and by the immigration judge’s work experience prior to appointment.

[KR: Perhaps the Senate bill will “tear the conservative coalition asunder” as Peggy Noonan puts it. Or, just maybe… social conservatives will remain satisfied with their relatively high success rate on court appointments, abortion rulings, stem cell restrictions, etc.]
President’s Push on Immigration Tests G.O.P. Base
By JIM RUTENBERG and CARL HULSE

WASHINGTON, June 2 — President Bush’s advocacy of an immigration overhaul and his attacks on critics of the plan are provoking an unusually intense backlash from conservatives who form the bulwark of his remaining support, splintering his base and laying bare divisions within a party whose unity has been the envy of Democrats.

It has pitted some of Mr. Bush’s most stalwart Congressional and grass-roots backers against him, inciting a vitriol that has at times exceeded anything seen yet between Mr. Bush and his supporters, who have generally stood with him through the toughest patches of his presidency. Those supporters now view him as pursuing amnesty for foreign lawbreakers when he should be focusing on border security.

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