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 News from Around the Americas | June 2007 
Illegal Immigrants Face Growing Backlash Across US
 Tony Czuczka - Deutsche Presse-Agentur
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Nashua, New Hampshire - Bustling around his tiny Mexican restaurant, Jesus Hernandez briefly pauses his 10-hour workday to complain about Americans who say illegal immigrants steal US jobs.
'I think Americans don't want to do those jobs,' says the 29-year- old, who opened his business this year. 'Mexicans work harder here than in Mexico. You can't take a siesta when you're in America.'
Few would dispute that. Yet Latin American immigrants face an increasingly chilly mood across the United States - even in states like New Hampshire, 3,000 kilometres north of the Mexican border.
Some Republican presidential candidates have turned the nation's 11-12 million illegal immigrants into their signature campaign issue for 2008, supported by conservative talk show and television hosts.
A private group best known for patrolling the Mexican border, the Minuteman Civil Defense Corps, is expanding northward. It set up a state chapter in New Hampshire last year to recruit self-appointed guards for the rural border with Canada.
Equally frustrated by what they see as the federal government's inaction, a number of state and local authorities have passed laws and rules designed to get rid of illegal immigrants.
How to deal with illegal aliens has bedevilled US politicians at least since the 1980s. After President George W Bush this week failed to win over Republican lawmakers for a plan to legalise all migrants, some activists worry about the emotions whipped up by the debate.
'It's already pretty bad,' said Michele Waslin, spokeswoman for the Hispanic rights group National Council of La Raza. 'We've seen this growing anti-immigrant sentiment for quite a while.'
'People are being told 'Go back to your country,' and they've been in this country their entire lives,' she said in an interview.
Immigration hard-liners charged that Bush's plan gave amnesty to illegal immigrants and too little attention to border security, such as a planned 1,100-kilometre fence along the Mexican border.
But emotions run deeper, cutting to the core of US identity - the ideal of the melting pot, where successive waves of immigrants were welcomed and assimilated. The backdrop: Hispanics have increased to 14.5 per cent of the US population from about 6 per cent in 1980.
Tom Tancredo, a US lawmaker from the western state of Colorado who is running for president, says 'enough is enough' and suggests halting even most legal immigration to the US.
He points to the huge proliferation of customer telephone numbers in the US that let callers choose between English and Spanish.
'The process of assimilation is not going on,' the grandson of Italian immigrants claimed during a recent presidential debate in New Hampshire.
'It will take this long: Until we no longer have to press one for English and two for any other language,' he said.
Yet the system Bush says is 'broken' has served both sides: migrants who come to the US seeking a better life and overstay their visas, and employers who gamble they won't get caught using illegal labour in sectors such as construction, hotels and meat-packing.
Polls suggest that the US is torn on the issue. A June survey said only 27 per cent of Americans believe that illegal workers 'take jobs away from Americans who need them,' but another poll found them evenly split on whether immigration helps or hurts the US.
In any case, US public sensitivity is so high that several Cabinet nominees in past years withdrew after it emerged that they had employed undocumented household help.
Former New York police chief Bernard Kerik ended a bid to become Bush's homeland security chief in 2004 when questions arose about the immigration status of a housekeeper and nanny who worked for Kerik.
Hispanics make up just 2 per cent of New Hampshire's population. Still, immigration is certain to remain on the radar in the small state, where the two big US parties hold the first preference votes on their presidential candidates in early 2008.
In the reviving former textile mill town of Nashua, Hernandez's unpretentious place is steps away from Brazilian and Colombian eateries.
All of his US documents are in order, he says, and he has paid his dues working in kitchens at Chinese and American restaurants in town. He left behind life in Colima state on Mexico's Pacific coast.
'I wanted to do better,' he says. |
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