Can it happen here?
A controversial Arizona law makes it a misdemeanor for someone who is not a U.S. citizen to be in Arizona without carrying documents attesting to their citizenship. The law also penalizes those who hire or shelter “aliens.”
Local residents in multi-ethnic Hudson County are concerned that a similar law could find its way to New Jersey. They have good reasons to worry.
At least seven bills similar to the Arizona law are pending in the state legislature. They were proposed by Assemblywoman Alison Littell McHose (R-Sussex) even before the Arizona law passed.
These bills confront illegal immigration on various fronts, from prohibiting employing undocumented immigrants to barring companies that employ them from receiving state economic incentives for seven years.
“New Jersey is multiethnic and this law would discriminate against foreign people, many of whom built this country.” – Simon Jones
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New Jersey officials say they hope legislation resembling Arizona’s will never get enough political support to be enacted here.
Among them is U.S. Sen. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), a Hoboken resident, former Union City mayor, and the only Hispanic serving in the U.S. Senate.
“I find it hard to believe that a state as diverse as New Jersey, and with a history that it has of such diversity, would ever adopt the Arizona law,” said Menendez in a short interview last week. “But it is a wakeup call to everybody in the country that we need comprehensive immigration reform so we are not faced with types of laws that states start to pursue because they are frustrated.”
New Jersey has a sizable immigrant population, including an estimated 360,000 immigrants who are without legal documents as of January 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The Arizona law, known as the Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act, was signed by that state’s governor in April and goes into effect on July 29. At least a dozen states, including Texas, Oklahoma, and Georgia, have similar legislation pending.
Locals concerned
Downtown Jersey City resident Alfa Demmellash, in many ways, embodies the American Dream.
The 30-year old native of Ethiopia immigrated to the United States from her home country at the age of 13, joining her mother, who was already living in Boston, Mass. Demmellash graduated from Harvard University in 2003, where she met her future husband Alex Forrester. Both then moved to Jersey City.
Demmellash and her husband run Rising Tide Capital, the Jersey City-based non-profit that has worked with budding entrepreneurs since 2004, many of them immigrants, to help them become business owners.
“I am really worried about this bill in Arizona and the likelihood of a similar law passing in New Jersey,” Demmellash said. “For immigrants like me who have a distinct and painful memory of living in a dictatorship, it is all about what happens on the ground and how a law is actually practiced.”
Simon Jones is the owner and operator of Simon’s Parking, a parking lot located on the corner of Montgomery and Grove streets in downtown Jersey City. Like Demmellash, he is opposed to such a bill ever coming to New Jersey.
Jones, a native of the Dominican Republic, said, “New Jersey is multiethnic, and this law would discriminate against foreign people, many of whom built this country.”
Rev. Eugene Squeo is the son of immigrants from Italy. Squeo, the parish priest at St. Patrick’s Roman Catholic Church on Ocean Avenue in Jersey City, has been involved in immigrants rights issues for over 30 years.
Squeo has organized rallies over the years to bring attention to undocumented immigrants who have been sitting in detention centers in the New York/New Jersey area on minor charges. Some have remained there for months or years before they are deported.
Squeo doesn’t see an Arizona-type law coming to New Jersey, but says that the bills proposed by Assemblywoman McHose are “very unsettling.”
“The federal government needs to address the immigration issue in this country as soon as possible,” he said, “before it penalizes the poor people who came to this country just to help their families.”
Ricardo Kaulessar can be reached at rkaulessar@hudsonreporter.com.