Hundreds of thousands of people from throughout the District and the greater metropolitan area rallied on the National Mall on April 10, calling for comprehensive reform to immigration laws. For thousands of DC residents, the day began at Malcolm X Park, in Ward 1, where the group Amigas/os del Barrio, “Friends of the Neighborhood,” brought together demonstrators from Adams Morgan, Columbia Heights, Mt. Pleasant, Petworth, and beyond to march together to the Mall. “It was great and it was a very important occasion for immigrants to express themselves,” says Chucks Eleonu, who helped organize the day’s events. Organizers of the Amigas/os del Barrio march expected up to five thousand protestors, but they estimate that more than twice that number marched down 16th Street that day.

If you were among those thousands, or simply following media coverage of the momentous event, you might not have seen Roland Roebuck, an Afro-Puerto Rican marching and carrying a sign - “African descendents are present!” You might not have heard stories from Ruby Corado, a transgender woman from El Salvador and outspoken community activist. You might not know that 2000 Census statistics show that 21 percent of foreign-born persons living in DC identify as black, three times the national average. Some local activists fear that if the full diversity of immigrant communities is not included, it will be impossible to realize the potential of recent political organizing. “It’s a divide and conquer strategy,” says Haitian community activist Yves Jean Point-du-jour, of portrayals of immigrants as only Latino whose interests are at odds with non-immigrant black people.

Still, the marches and rallies of the past months have demonstrated the strength of immigrant communities, from walkouts at Bell Multicultural High School to May 1 “Day Without Immigrants” events. And activists like Eleonu, Corado and Point-du-jour say that only by drawing on the strengths of all aspects of the immigrant community will they be able to stop what they see as anti-immigrant legislation, on the federal level and in nearby jurisdictions. To that end, the events of the moment may be a catalyst for bridging the isolation of different communities, says Abdul Kamus, an organizer with the National Capitol Immigration Coalition in DC, the group that organized the April 10th protest. “We never thought we’d be leading this campaign,” Kamus says, “but the bill HR 4437 [has] really galvanized us.”

HR 4437 is the bill passed last December in the US House of Representatives that, among other things, would make unauthorized immigration a felony offense if also passed in the Senate. For local immigrants, fighting that bill and others on the national level is only part of the struggle. Although the District has some of the most progressive laws affecting immigrants in the country, the city’s especially diverse immigrant population still confronts an array of issues, from language barriers to health care access to political isolation. With the monolithic portrayal of immigrants in the current debate, showing the diverse challenges facing local immigrants communities is difficult. Nevertheless, activists say they hope the political momentum will help build stronger partnerships among immigrant communities and with non-immigrant people of color.

Federal, Local Priorities Diverging

Immigrant rights groups in the District have been working together on changes to local laws for the past several years. However, that progress has had little impact on the decisions made in local communities’ back yard - Congress, the White House, and federal agencies that have been altering laws and policies for years, making the US steadily more hostile to immigrants, local activists say.

Vietnamese immigrants, for example, living in Columbia Heights have more to worry about than the gentrification that is driving many of them out of the city, according to Ha-Hoa Dang of Boat People SOS. A national organization that offers services to Vietnamese immigrants and refugees of various statuses, their DC office is on Park Road NW, across the street from an apartment complex housing over 300 of their clients. “[The government is] redesigning the naturalization process,” Dang says, and changes to the tests, interviews and costs are having a negative impact on naturalization-seekers who are Vietnamese. “With these new changes in the process, it is harder. [Vietnamese test-takers] are failing more often than not. It’s discouraging.”

Changes to administrative processes usually fill the gaps between large legislative changes, like bills passed in 1996, 2001 and 2005. Between the 1996 Illegal Immigration Regulation and Immigrant Responsibility Act (IIRA-IRA), the USA PATRIOT Act of 2001, and REAL ID Act of 2005, new laws have given federal authorities greater powers to investigate and detain immigrants, expanded the category of crimes for which immigrants (documented or not) could be deported, reduced the possibilities for deportations to be contested, and denied many public benefits to immigrants of various statuses. The currently proposed bill, HR 4437, which faces opposition in the Senate, is titled the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act. It includes sections that would beef up patrols and fencing along the border, make unauthorized immigration a felony offense, and increase penalties on businesses that hire undocumented workers.

While the federal government has been moving in one direction, DC government has been moving in another. Hoping to give some immigrants a greater voice in local decision-making, the Voting Rights For All DC Coalition has worked to extend voting rights to documented permanent residents in every District of Columbia local election. Legislation was introduced in 2004, but council member and mayoral contender Vincent Orange’s opposition killed it in committee. “Several municipalities throughout the nation have passed similar legislation in recent years, including neighboring Takoma Park, Maryland,” says Mario Cristaldo, general coordinator of the Coalition.

In fact, DC immigrant communities have achieved several important changes to laws and policies on the local level. Most notably, in 2004 a coalition of immigrant groups helped pass the DC Language Access Act. “It essentially requires District agencies to make their services accessible to limited English speakers,” says Jayne Park of the Asian Pacific Legal Resource Center, who lobbied for the legislation. Getting the law implemented has been just as much of a struggle. “On the ground, nothing much has changed. The government is a huge bureaucracy. [Once] you’ve got commitments from the heads of District agencies, how do you filter it down to front line workers, to actually get the systems in place [like] bilingual staffing, and interpretation services. It’s a huge undertaking.”

It’s also a cutting-edge undertaking, says Gustavo Velasquez of DC’s Office on Latino Affairs. “We’re only the third jurisdiction in the country to have such an act.”  Velasquez says another District policy is progressive as well--forbidding police officers to inquire about immigration status. These laws highlight the vast difference between the approach of the District and the federal government. Velasquez says he doubts HR 4437 will ever become law, but he notes that it if it did, it would have profound consequences for the District. “Local jurisdictions are responsible for the health and safety of all people within their boundaries,” he explains, noting that DC’s program for low-income uninsured residents, which is open to all regardless of immigration status, would be illegal under a provision of the proposed bill that would criminalize organizations that assist unauthorized immigrants.

The proposed legislation only continues a recent trend. “We’ve been seeing over the course of years an increase of enforcement and framing of immigration as a national security issue,” says Deepa Iyer, executive director of South Asian American Leaders of Tomorrow, who spoke at the April 10 rally in DC. After years of detentions, deportations and special registration for South Asians, Arabs and Muslims, says Iyer, the bills in Congress right now are just the latest in a long line of ‘get tough on immigration’ efforts.

One reason such enforcement-heavy legislation is detrimental is because its cookie-cutter approach ignores differences in communities’ and individuals’ experiences, adds Anjali Nagpaul, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Domestic Violence Resource Project in DC. Although domestic violence survivors are exempt from much of the past legislation, explains Nagpaul, “for those who do choose to leave a domestic violence situation, economic hardship is one of the biggest challenges, and [legislative] changes denying immigrants access to public benefits worsens that hardship.” Ha-Hoa Dang of Boatpeople SOS also criticizes the ‘one bill fits all’ approach, noting that increased emphasis on enforcement and deportation “brings the Vietnamese population uniquely into the discussion. Vietnam does not accept deportees from the United States, so that means you’d be in indefinite detention.” HR 4437 includes provisions to not only increase deportations of undocumented immigrants, but also to stop immigration from countries that don’t accept deportees, such as Vietnam.

One of the major barriers to organizing for change, says Will Youmans, a Palestinian-American, is that “our communities are struggling with different issues at different times, and we need to come together more.” To illustrate, Youmans tells the story of how Arab Americans tried to flex political muscle against new government policies in 1996. “The government started using secret evidence against us, and we found that it had already been used in Border States against Latinos for a while. When we started getting involved, Latinos said ‘welcome to the club, where have you been?’ And it was the same response from African Americans when we started working on racial profiling.” Eugenio Arene tells a similar story about the National Capitol Immigration Coalition. “We had started a group called the Regional Coalition of Latino Organizations,” says Arene, Executive Director of the Council of Latino Agencies, “but we realized it had to go beyond Latinos” in order to be truly effective. The second group he and other Latinos formed with leaders from African and Asian communities, the NCIC, went on to organize the local action of the past months.

Not Just a Latino Thing        

Despite the large turnouts at the recent demonstrations, many activists say they wish more Africans, Caribbeans and Asians had attended, which they partially blame on the fact that the public debate on immigration doesn’t portray the diversity of immigrant communities. “Somehow both media and policy-makers imply that it’s only Latinos,” says Chucks Eleonu.

It’s not just the media failing to include African immigrants in the discussion, says Eugene Eastman a Liberian immigrant. “Somehow we have been forgotten,” by people who are pro- or anti- immigration.” Eastman is not the only one with such sentiments. “We have been at every event, but as audience members, never as organizers,” adds Nagpaul of the Asian Pacific American Domestic Violence Resource Project. “It’s disappointing how little [Asian-Americans have] been represented, and how little turnout we’ve had.”

It’s not that the District’s immigrant population isn’t diverse. According to the 2000 census, 13 percent of DC’s population is foreign born. Since undocumented immigrants are usually undercounted, says David Dixon of the Migration Policy Institute, that percentage may be higher. The top three countries of birth for people living in DC who were born outside of the US were El Salvador, Jamaica, and China in 2000, though other countries like India, Trinidad, and Ethiopia were not far behind.

The diversity of local immigrants means they face a variety of issues, but they also have many in common. One example is language, says Point-du-jour, who has hosted a Haitian-focused radio show on community station WPFW 89.3FM since 1984. “We all speak different languages,” and require services in those different languages, he explains. But because “we also all need to learn English,” different communities can work together to push for English as a Second Language courses, or can use English to communicate and organize around their issues, whether common or diverse.

Facing hurdles of limited English skills and lack of cultural competency, many immigrants rely on ethnic-specific services, which are never enough to meet the need. And there is no substitute for many public services, like hospitals: “When Haitians go to the emergency room, if no one is there to translate for them, that is an issue,” says Point-du-jour. Many immigrants struggle with a variety of issues, on top of “learning to navigate the system,” says Abdul Kamus. He names some of the concerns as “wages, employment and discrimination, affordable housing, health care, and limited English language abilities.”

Even efforts to address these needs often fail to include all immigrants, such as groups that provide services, but don’t address lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) immigrants’ specific needs. Ruby Corado, of the LGBT activist group Latinos/as en Acción, contributed to a recent report that named lack of services for LGBT Latino youth as a major problem in DC. Other issues not addressed by mainstream groups are the ban on HIV-positive immigrants, and reunification for LGBT immigrants’ families. “We need to find a way for immigrants to have their partners come over,” says Eugene Eastman, who is gay. Changes to immigration law and its application over the years have also weakened the tool of political asylum, used by LGBT immigrants like Corado to get residency. Policy changes have made it harder “to prove the dangers they face when they go home. The question is whether to hide, live illegally, or be killed” for many LGBT immigrants seeking asylum, according to Lisbeth Meléndez Rivera, a convener of the National Latino Coalition for Justice.

This steady change of policies and laws, without a comprehensive discussion of immigration issues, has put different communities under pressure at different times. Activists hope the current debate will help to bring the struggles of those various communities together to make lasting change.

From Fighting Back to Moving Forward

“Most immigrant communities have worked in isolation,” explains Eleonu, which creates miscommunication and biases, making it more difficult to build coalitions. Another barrier is a lack of organizations that focus on advocacy and organizing in these communities. “The majority of [non-profits organizations] that we have are focused on direct services and meeting immediate client needs,” adds Jayne Park, “but I’m not sure how many are thinking about systemic change and their role in it.”

There is also the challenge of building relationships between immigrant communities and non-immigrant black communities. Pro-immigrant messages such as ‘we take jobs no one else wants’ reinforce stereotypes about black Americans, says Eugene Eastman. “It’s almost like people are saying ‘these black people are bad and immigrants are good because they work hard and don’t do crime.’ They’re pitting us against each other.” At the same time, says Eleonu, some Caribbean and African immigrant rights organizers have “called for a dialogue and the burden is on African American leaders. They must put [immigration] on the table.”

The burden rests both with native-born black and immigrant communities says the Rev. Graylan Hagler, one of the few DC black leaders that has taken a visible organizing role on immigration.  Black communities must understand the “economic paradigm” that forces immigrants to come to the US, explains Hagler, the senior pastor at the Plymouth Congregational Church in Ward 4.  “It is all of the NAFTAs and CAFTAs that have been passed” that have hurt the working class in the US and increased poverty elsewhere, says Hagler, forcing people to migrate to look for economic opportunity.  However, Hagler adds that immigrant communities must understand that working hard and assimilating into the US will not eliminate their experience with racism and xenophobia. “[Immigrants] are in solidarity with black people just by who [they] are.”

Despite these challenges, many organizers express hope for the future, in part because current events are making important conversations happen. While recognizing some weaknesses in organizing so far, many agree with Deepa Iyer that this is “a real opportunity to build these coalitions with other people of color and immigrant communities. We need to see the commonalities that do exist. At the end of the day we’re calling for immigrants [and everyone else] to be treated fairly and equally.”