Tonya and PQBON's WebLog
Towns Rethink Laws Against Illegal Immigrants - New York Times
RIVERSIDE, N.J., Sept. 25 - A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.
Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.
The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.
With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.
Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the townâs already tight budget. Suddenly, many people - including some who originally favored the law - started having second thoughts.
So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.
As much as the conservatives would like to sell it otherwise this isn't about economics, this isn't about security. This is about racism and xenophobia... at least for the core people. The people that are unconcerned that their downtown area is now all boarded up as long as "they" are gone. Those people are lying and cheating to get their way. They are exploiting the fears and doubts of people that don't know any better. Now there is proof that illegal immigrants don't drain the economy but in fact provide a real boost. One of their major arguments is out the window.
RIVERSIDE, N.J., Sept. 25 — A little more than a year ago, the Township Committee in this faded factory town became the first municipality in New Jersey to enact legislation penalizing anyone who employed or rented to an illegal immigrant.
Within months, hundreds, if not thousands, of recent immigrants from Brazil and other Latin American countries had fled. The noise, crowding and traffic that had accompanied their arrival over the past decade abated.
The law had worked. Perhaps, some said, too well.
With the departure of so many people, the local economy suffered. Hair salons, restaurants and corner shops that catered to the immigrants saw business plummet; several closed. Once-boarded-up storefronts downtown were boarded up again.
Meanwhile, the town was hit with two lawsuits challenging the law. Legal bills began to pile up, straining the town’s already tight budget. Suddenly, many people — including some who originally favored the law — started having second thoughts.
So last week, the town rescinded the ordinance, joining a small but growing list of municipalities nationwide that have begun rethinking such laws as their legal and economic consequences have become clearer.
“I don’t think people knew there would be such an economic burden,” said Mayor George Conard, who voted for the original ordinance. “A lot of people did not look three years out.”
In the past two years, more than 30 towns nationwide have enacted laws intended to address problems attributed to illegal immigration, from overcrowded housing and schools to overextended police forces. Most of those laws, like Riverside’s, called for fines and even jail sentences for people who knowingly rented apartments to illegal immigrants or who gave them jobs.
In some places, business owners have objected to crackdowns that have driven away immigrant customers. And in many, ordinances have come under legal assault by immigration groups and the American Civil Liberties Union.
In June, a federal judge issued a preliminary injunction against a housing ordinance in Farmers Branch, Tex., that would have imposed fines against landlords who rented to illegal immigrants. In July, the city of Valley Park, Mo., repealed a similar ordinance, after an earlier version was struck down by a state judge and a revision brought new challenges. A week later, a federal judge struck down ordinances in Hazleton, Pa., the first town to enact laws barring illegal immigrants from working or renting homes there.
Muzaffar A. Chishti, director of the New York office of the Migration Policy Institute, a nonprofit group, said Riverside’s decision to repeal its law — which was never enforced — was clearly influenced by the Hazleton ruling, and he predicted that other towns would follow suit.
“People in many towns are now weighing the social, economic and legal costs of pursuing these ordinances,” he said.
Indeed, Riverside, a town of 8,000 nestled across the Delaware River from Philadelphia, has already spent $82,000 defending its ordinance, and it risked having to pay the plaintiffs’ legal fees if it lost in court. The legal battle forced the town to delay road paving projects, the purchase of a dump truck and repairs to town hall, officials said. But while Riverside’s about-face may repair its budget, it may take years to mend the emotional scars that formed when the ordinance “put us on the national map in a bad way,” Mr. Conard said.
Rival advocacy groups in the immigration debate turned this otherwise sleepy town into a litmus test for their causes. As the television cameras rolled, Riverside was branded, in turns, a racist enclave and a town fighting for American values.
Some residents who backed the ban last year were reluctant to discuss their stance now, though they uniformly blamed outsiders for misrepresenting their motives. By and large, they said the ordinance was a success because it drove out illegal immigrants, even if it hurt the town’s economy.
“It changed the face of Riverside a little bit,” said Charles Hilton, the former mayor who pushed for the ordinance. (He was voted out of office last fall but said it was not because he had supported the law.)
“The business district is fairly vacant now, but it’s not the legitimate businesses that are gone,” he said. “It’s all the ones that were supporting the illegal immigrants, or, as I like to call them, the criminal aliens.”
Many businesses that remain are having a hard time. Angelina Guedes, a Brazilian-born beautician, opened A Touch From Brazil, a hair and nail salon, on Scott Street two years ago to cater to the immigrant population. At one point, she had 10 workers.
Business quickly dried up after the law against illegal immigrants. Last week, on what would usually be a busy Thursday afternoon, Ms. Guedes ate a salad and gave a friend a manicure, while the five black stylist chairs sat empty.
“Now I only have myself,” said Ms. Guedes, 41, speaking a mixture of Spanish and Portuguese. “They all left. I also want to leave but it’s not possible because no one wants to buy my business.”
Numerous storefronts on Scott Street are boarded up or are empty, with For Sale by Owner signs in the windows. Business is down by half at Luis Ordonez’s River Dance Music Store, which sells Western Union wire transfers, cellphones and perfume. Next door, his restaurant, the Scott Street Family Cafe, which has a multiethnic menu in English, Spanish and Portuguese, was empty at lunchtime.
“I came here looking for an opportunity to open a business and I found it, and the people also needed the service,” said Mr. Ordonez, who is from Ecuador. “It was crowded and everybody was trying to do their best to support their families.”
Some have adapted better than others. Bruce Behmke opened the R & B Laundromat in 2003 after he saw immigrants hauling trash bags full of clothing to a laundry a mile away. Sales took off at his small shop, where want ads in Portuguese are pinned to a corkboard and copies of the Brazilian Voice sit near the door.
When sales plummeted last year, Mr. Behmke started a wash-and-fold delivery service for young professionals.
“It became a ghost town here,” he said.
Immigration is not new to Riverside. Once a summer resort for Philadelphians, the town became a magnet a century ago for European immigrants drawn to its factories, including the Philadelphia Watch Case Company, whose empty hulk still looms over town. Until the 1930s, the minutes of the school board meetings were recorded in German and English.
“There’s always got to be some scapegoats,” said Regina Collinsgru, who runs The Positive Press, a local newspaper, and whose husband was among a wave of Portuguese immigrants who came here in the 1960s. “The Germans were first, there were problems when the Italians came, then the Polish came. That’s the nature of a lot of small towns.”
Immigrants from Latin America began arriving around 2000. The majority were Brazilians attracted not only by construction jobs in the booming housing market but also by the presence of Portuguese-speaking businesses in town. Between 2000 and 2006, local business owners and officials estimate, more than 3,000 immigrants arrived. There are no authoritative figures about the number of immigrants who were — or were not — in the country legally.
Like those waves of earlier immigrants, the Brazilians and Latinos triggered conflicting reactions. Some shopkeepers loved the extra dollars spent on Scott and Pavilion Streets, the modest thoroughfares that anchor downtown. Yet some residents steered clear of stores where Portuguese and Spanish were plainly the language of choice. A few contractors benefited from the new pool of cheap labor. Others begrudged being undercut by rivals who hired undocumented workers.
On the town’s leafy side streets, some residents admired the pluck of newcomers who often worked six days a week, and a few even took up Capoeira, the Brazilian martial art. Yet many neighbors loathed the white vans with out-of-state plates and ladders on top parked in spots they had long considered their own. The Brazilian flags that flew at several houses rankled more than a few longtime residents.
It is unclear whether the Brazilian and Latino immigrants who left will now return to Riverside. With the housing market slowing, there may be little reason to come back. But if they do, some residents say they may spark new tensions.
Mr. Hilton, the former mayor, said some of the illegal immigrants have already begun filtering back into town. “It’s not the Wild West like it was,” he said, “but it may return to that.”
Art for life's sake - Haaretz - Israel News
Budapest, 1944. Precise information from an informer led an officer of the Arrow Cross militia to search for a Jewish man who had slipped away from the ghetto at the studio of painter Lajos Szentivanyi. There was no time to arrange a proper hiding place, and the Jew simply concealed himself behind a screen in a room that was bad for hiding in, his yellow shoes peeking out beneath it. Fortunately, in the room was a spectacular nude painting that Szentivanyi was working on and from which the officer could not look away. Whether or not he saw the shoes, he stopped searching, spoke a few words to Szentivanyi and left.
It is amazing and important that these stories are still coming out. It is also heartening to hear how many people didn't turn a blind eye during WWII. At least for me it helps reinforce the belief that I would wouldn't turn a blind eye were this to happen again.
Full text in the extended...
Art for life's sake
By Anshel Pfeffer
Budapest, 1944. Precise information from an informer led an officer of the Arrow Cross militia to search for a Jewish man who had slipped away from the ghetto at the studio of painter Lajos Szentivanyi. There was no time to arrange a proper hiding place, and the Jew simply concealed himself behind a screen in a room that was bad for hiding in, his yellow shoes peeking out beneath it. Fortunately, in the room was a spectacular nude painting that Szentivanyi was working on and from which the officer could not look away. Whether or not he saw the shoes, he stopped searching, spoke a few words to Szentivanyi and left.
The incident is one of the war stories of a small group of teachers and students from the Open School of Art in Hungary, founded by Karoly Koffan, which saved hundreds of Jews and other victims of the Nazis. There is something naive, almost comical, in their stories about forging documents and impersonating soldiers in order to enter the ghetto and take out Jews who pretended to be art students. They did not belong to any organized underground and had neither diplomatic immunity nor access to the resources available to a large organization. They did not have a plan to follow and did not keep orderly records of their activities. They helped people on the basis of personal acquaintanceship, motivated by humanitarian feelings and a sense of adventure. And just as their work had begun in an unstructured manner, after liberation and the end of the war they went on with their lives, without memorializing their deeds or asking for credit.
The story of the bohemian underground that was active during the year of the German occupation of Hungary's capital, from March 1944 to February 1945, is coming to light now, over 60 years later, thanks to a young German, Lauren Krupa, who had heard about it in his childhood. Now, together with some friends, he is trying to make a documentary about the Koffan group and to have its members recognized as Righteous Gentiles by Yad Vashem Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority.
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It is difficult to imagine anyone less suited than Karoly Koffan to be cast as the leader of a clandestine rescue group. On the eve of the war Koffan was a 30-year-old painter living in Paris. In addition to painting, he also worked in sculpture and graphics, built a puppet theater and made furniture. He was not a political person but like many people in his milieu, he was a member of the Communist Party, and when the Germans occupied Paris in 1940 he fled back to his homeland, Hungary. In Budapest Koffan established the Open School of Art, where he tried to reproduce the cosmopolitan atmosphere he had known during his five years in Paris.
The school, many of whose students were Jewish, had no regular course of study. Students could go into any class, move from one teacher to another and even pay for a single class. Tuition fees were often waived for promising but poor students, who were like family at the school at Erzsebet Square, the top floor of which was the home of Koffan, his wife Keska and their two young children.
Hungary was a German ally. Although tens of thousands of immigrant Jews were deported from the country and murdered, Jewish citizens of Hungary were not touched. Koffan's school enjoyed relative freedom for three years, until 1944, when Germany decided to take over the country. One of the Germans' first actions after entering Budapest on March 19, 1944, was to arrest opponents of the Fascist regime. Among those who were arrested was Lajos Szentivanyi's father, who was sent to the Mauthausen concentration camp in Austria.
Perhaps that is why the people at the school, in contrast to a large part of the population, including the many Jews who had flocked to Budapest, understood immediately what was about to happen. The Nazi takeover of Budapest, the arrest of the Jews and their deportation to Auschwitz were swift and not as orderly as in other countries in the Third Reich. Thus, hundreds of thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths, but there were also many opportunities for rescue. Koffan and Szentivanyi ran the group's rescue activities, while three students, carried out the missions. The students - Andre Meszaros, Laszlo Ridovics and Sandor Kovacs - were dispatched to bring Jews forged documents as well as to rescue people from the ghetto and the death marches and bring them to a hiding place.
"Suddenly, many people I knew had to wear a yellow patch and this bothered me very much," Ridovics says in the film Krupa is making about the group. "We were ashamed." At first the group helped anyone who was in danger from the Nazis and their Fascist partners. "It made no difference whether someone was a political refugee, a Jew or a leftist," Ridovics said. Eventually, however, the Jews became the main target for their assistance. "We were a group of people who were determined to stop this slaughter," Meszaros explains simply in the film.
Linoleum prints
The first stage was to prepare false documents. A painter at the school who worked in a government office obtained blank baptism certificates. Szentivanyi and Koffan filled out the forms, which they sealed using linoleum block prints they had made. To deter detection, they wrote in birthplaces that were already under Russian control.
The students' role was to bring the documents to those who needed them, including fellow students and their families as well as personal friends of Koffan, among others. "We didn't ask questions. They asked us to do something and we did it," Ridovics says in the film. "Everyone we knew at the school was involved. Outside of the school, we didn't know who could be trusted. There were houses marked with a yellow star that people who weren't Jewish were forbidden to enter. We would enter."
The group also brought packages and money to Jews. When foreign diplomats like Switzerland's Carl Lutz and Sweden's Raoul Wallenberg began issuing tens of thousands of schutzpasse, fake quasi-passports that protected Jews from deportation to Auschwitz, the Koffan group helped distribute them.
"They gave us Swiss or Swedish documents and told us to bring them to a certain person," Ridovics recalls. "Sometimes people's names didn't match the document. Some were saved by the documents, others weren't. It wasn't always possible to find the people. I was just the messenger. They told me where to go and I went. I was young and I didn't even imagine anything happening to me. Often we didn't know the people's real names and we didn't ask," Ridovics said.
In October 1944, the Germans gained full control over Hungary and appointed Ferenc Zalasi, the head of the Fascist Arrow Cross party, head of state. Mandatory military conscription was imposed, but Koffan's students quickly defected and returned to their rescue activity. Their army coats helped them to go into the ghetto, the walls of which were incomplete.
"We didn't know names but there were people who said, 'Hide us,'" Meszaros related. "In a situation like that you don't say, 'Go away, I don't know you.' You have to hide him. I would simply leave the ghetto with someone. If you walked down the street with a Jew, people knew. I wouldn't say anything, I'd wear an army coat and lead a young man out. I'd speak to him as if he were a slave, ordering him: 'Move. Walk in front of me.'" Sometimes they even used the army uniforms in order to hitch a ride back in a German truck.
'Run fast or I'll shoot'
Danger was a constant companion, as Ridovics related. "I was in the ghetto and a soldier came up to me: 'What are you doing here? You aren't a Jew.' He searched my pockets and there was a Schutzpass in one of them. He stood me up against a wall and he had a pistol and then he said: 'Run over there and I'll fire in the other direction, but if you don't run fast, I'll shoot you in the ass.'"
Later on, the students even began going into the transit camps where Jews were sent before being transported to Auschwitz. They tried to rescue them physically as well as by using documents. Edith Weinberger, a Jewish student at the Open School, who was rescued, along with her brother, with the help of the group, relates in the film how Ridovics carried on his back a Jewish man who collapsed during a deportation march. At the time, the school served as a temporary hiding place for Jews and others who were trying to flee to safety. Early in the morning, before classes, students would bring the people to other, nearby hiding places. Sometimes as many as 20 people stayed at the school overnight.
Koffan and Szentivanyi continued with their art even during the war. That is how the unfinished nude came to save the Jewish man hiding behind the screen in Szentivanyi's studio. "So many Jews and Communists hid at Szentivanyi's place that you could hardly open the door," Meszaros related. "Jews escaped from the marches and ran to Koffan's home and cried out to be hidden. At first they would hide behind the curtains but Mrs. Koffan said to take them out and took them into the living room. She said that either we would be saved together or we would die together. When the soldiers came in, she gave each one an art book." Amazingly, the ruse worked; the soldiers thought they were students in a class.
In the atmosphere of suspicion that characterized the Soviet bloc after the war, it was not always comfortable for those who had acted outside of the Communist organizations to talk about what they had done. Koffan, who had been a Communist, achieved fame as an artist after the war and became a senior lecturer at the Hungarian College of Fine Arts. But after taking part in the 1956 Hungarian Revolution against the Soviet regime he was fired and lost his status. He switched to photography, and by the time of his death, in 1985, he was considered one of the greatest bird photographers of the period.
Edith Weinberger relates in the film that Szentivanyi and his colleagues were monitored by Soviet authorities, who examined their paintings. Some members of the group got in trouble with the regime, and a number of them immigrated to the United States, although most continued with their art.
Moral debt
The Open School was bombed in February 1945, when the Red Army captured Budapest. After the war a parking lot was built on the site, where the luxurious Hotel Kempiniski stands today. The director of Yad Vashem's Righteous Among the Nations Department, Irena Steinfeldt, says it is not unusual for new stories about the rescue of Jews to appear, even today. "We are contacted by all kinds of survivors who feel that now, 60 years later, they must repay a moral debt to their rescuers," Steinfeldt says. "It's not necessarily surprising that we hadn't heard about these cases until now. There were all sorts of groups that organized, of all different kinds, and it must be remembered that after the war Stalinism reigned there and not everyone was able to speak out."
According to Dr. Robert Rozett, Director of the Libraries at Yad Vashem and an expert on the Holocaust of Hungarian Jews, "Even those who came to Israel didn't speak up, because there was a feeling in this country that the only worthy response was to fight." In the commemoration of the rescue of Hungary's Jews, to a large extent Raoul Wallenberg's story overshadowed the stories of many others who were involved. Kathleen Garam, a member of the Weinberger family who knew some members of the Koffan group well,, believes that it was not politics but rather humility that kept them from speaking. "They simply felt that they were doing their humanitarian duty. And there was also something of the adventurousness of young people. The whole story wouldn't have come out had a certain young fellow not heard about the story and been fascinated by it," Garam says.
Krupa, a law student, was born in Berlin in 1981. His mother was French; his father was a psychoanalyst and a neurosurgeon who had fled from Hungary. As a boy, he knew Meszaros and Robert Weinberger, one of the Jews saved by the Koffan group. They were friends of his father, who had lived in Paris before moving to Germany. "I grew up with this story of how Andre [Meszaros] saved Robert. When I realized that even their children didn't know the story, I feared it would die with them," Krupa said.
For the past four years, Krupa - with a few friends - has devoted most of his time to the documentary, and even established a production company that specializes in short films as part of the enterprise. While he does not share the Germans' collective responsibility, he admits that, "As someone who has grown up in Berlin, the capital of Nazism, this history has always been present for me. I feel German, but it is the Germanness of Goethe, Schiller, Freud and all the other Germans the Nazis hated. For me, the Nazis aren't Germans, at least not the Germans I love."
The film is self-financed for now. Krupa and his friends go to Paris and Budapest to interview the members of the group who are still alive. "At first it was still hard for them to talk about the subject, for the first time in 60 years," Krupa related. "Andre wept before he was able to start to speak. When we talked to them we realized that the whole subject had been taboo; they wanted to live a new life and not be involved with the past."
Both Meszaros and Edith Weinberger died in the course of the work on the film. Another member of the group, Sandor Kovacs, immigrated to Canada decades ago and they have not been able to locate him. The sole surviving member of the group is Ridovics.
Krupa visited Israel last week in order to persuade Yad Vashem to hurry up and recognize the members of the group as Righteous Gentiles. Two years ago he gave Yad Vashem a CD containing the testimonies of the members and of Karoly Jr. Meszaros was declared a Righteous Gentile only after his death, last February.
"Ridovics is 82 already and I very much hope that he will live to see this," Krupa says. He also hopes to find, either in Israel or elsewhere, an archive that will lend footage of Budapest during the war for use in his film. "So far we have found only material that costs 300 euros a minute and we can't afford that," Krupa says. He and his partners hope this article will help them locate other people who took part in the group's activities or were saved by them.
While Tonya and I were separated from Katie for our move we made time each evening to communicate with her. One night while we were trying to talk to Katie on the phone it occurred to me that because my mother also has a Mac Book Pro could do better then the phone.
I was typing away on my Mac Book Pro when Tonya was starting the conversation with Katie. I happed to have iChat open and it dawned on me that iChat allows the use of the iSight camera with the AOL AIM protocol.
I had my mother send me her screen name. I added her to my contact list. Then I initiated a video chat with her.
Katie almost exploded when her mommy and daddy appeared on the screen in front of her. On the phone she would never talk much and mostly liked to hit the buttons. On the video chat she was animated and happy. On the phone we can normally get her to blow us a kiss or two but on the computer she would bend in and kiss the screen (would couldn't see the kiss since the iSight is above the screen and her head would block the iSight but my mother would describe to us what she was doing). She did this relatively frequently. She talked and sang. She counted to 10 for us and answered questions. She was really excited and babbled constantly.
The first night we did this she got very very upset when Tonya and I had to go. The second night was a lot easier for her to say goodbye. It may have been due to the fact that the second time we were at a Starbucks because our cable modem had been disconnected. It was hard for us to hear her and she may not have been hearing us that well either.
Our move is more or less done. Just about everything going into storage is in storage. Just about everything that is being unpacked is unpacked. Some stuff has even been put away.
In the 90 - 110 degree heat this past week I have really really missed the Bay Area. Katie does not miss the bay area. She gets up every morning at between 6am and 7:30am saying: downstairs and Oma. She really really wants to go downstairs and see my mother. This is much earlier then she used to get up at 8am to 9am. We miss those days.
I have been off work this past week. In this week we did some family activities. We took Katie to Old Sacramento and the Train Museum. It was fun and I got lots of picture of the trains. Tonya fell in love with some of the old rail road china they had on display in a real railway dining car. Katie was a little intimidated by the size of the trains. She liked them but didn't want to get too close and it was a little challenging to get her to go inside them. She really enjoyed the upstairs where they have Lionel toy trains and wooden tracks and trains (Thomas the tank engine trains) for kids to play with.
We also took Katie to the Folsom Zoo. The Folsom Zoo is not quite a normal zoo. However, I don't mean that it doesn't have some major exhibits (it has very large tigers and bears and wolves). It is different because is an animal rescue center. All the animals on exhibit have been rescued from either certain death as young abandoned animal, from injuries, or as neglected "pets". For a small zoo in a small town it is a pretty good little zoo. The Folsom Zoo also has the last 12" gage steam locomotive in commercial operation. For a few bucks you can ride the miniature steam train on a loop of 12" wide track. Katie wasn't really thrilled and the whistle scared her. However, she and I rode the train for 1 loop. Tonya thinks Katie will do better next time as Katie is often a little scared for new experiences like amusement park rides.
Tomorrow I start back at work. I have to unpack my new office and setup all my gear. Later tonight I'm going to finally get around to checking my work email. I have been too busy and tired to check it most of the week.