Posted on 07/29/2007 6:30:32 PM PDT by DogByte6RER
Immigrants, Supporters Pour In For ID
by Melissa Bailey
July 24, 2007 3:44 PM
When City Hall opened its doors for the first members of the public to sign up for the city’s controversial new ID card, so many people showed up that the line — including many undocumented immigrants— still snaked down the hallway at closing time.
By day’s end, officials reported that 250 people signed up for their Elm City Residency Card. The office stayed open an hour later to accommodate some of the extra crowd; others were told to return on Wednesday.
Visitors signing up for the city’s new Elm City Residency Card passed through a gauntlet of protesters on the way into City Hall. The line included undocumented Mexican immigrants, like Jaime Rojas and (pictured with Ruby Diaz), who saw the card as an “opportunity” for a safer life.
Mayor John DeStefano, Jr. commended undocumented immigrants for their “courage” in enduring the suburban hecklers on their way in. “Tell me who represents the best of America — who’s outside or who’s inside,” he said.
Organizers called the turnout a success: “There were a lot more people than we expected,” said mayoral staffer Emily Byrne.
The office, on City Hall’s first floor, will be open from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. on weekdays for people wishing to obtain a card.
After a soft launch Monday, city officials kicked off the program officially Tuesday morning with a ribbon-cutting at the new Office of New Haven Residents inside City Hall. The new ID card, available to all city residents regardless of immigration status, facilitates access to a range of municipal services and serves as a photo ID.
The city created the program because U.S. legislators “don’t have the will to pass a coherent border strategy,” the mayor said Tuesday. Instead legislators have allowed immigrants to move here, but forced them to be “invisible,” said the mayor.
The card, which offers a range of services to people of all ages, was conceived as a symbolic gesture of recognition and a way give immigrants acceptable ID to open bank accounts, so that they won’t be easy prey for robbers. DeStefano urged those who live in the city to support one another by getting the card.
Service to one another to help one another, more than waving the American flag, defines the spirit of the American soul,” said the mayor (pictured), alluding to the flag-toting protesters outside who denounced immigrants as a threat to American jobs.
Would the card bring an influx of new immigrants to the city? reporters wanted to know. DeStefano said immigrants move “not for a piece of plastic, but for the opportunity to work.”
West River Alderman Yusuf Shah heralded the program: “We believe that services should be given to everyone equally, to everyone.” Two days after aldermen approved the ID plan with an overwhelming 25 to 1 vote, federal immigration agents swept the city, arresting 32 people whom they charged were illegal immigrants. In the terror that followed, parents were afraid to leave their homes to pick up their kids from school. Some said that sense of fear would scare immigrants away from signing up for an ID.
Pasqual Rojas who came here illegally from Mexico 14 years ago, said he wasn’t afraid. “I want to be part of New Haven,” he said in Spanish. The card would be signify “they respect us as citizens of New Haven.”
Many of the immigrants who showed up said they were encouraged to come by Father Jim Manship of St. Rose of Lima Church in Fair Haven.
As protesters outside argued over whether illegal immigrants were stealing low-paying jobs from American citizens, the Rev. Boise Kimber stood inside awaiting his ID. He didn’t see illegal immigrants as a threat to those in poorer neighborhoods of the city. “We rely on them to do jobs that no one else desires to do,” he said. Kimber said he was supporting the ID because “it is every religious leader’s moral obligation to stand up for the disenfranchised… I do not want people to suffer as African-Americans did when they came to this country.”
"If you look on the coin, it says ‘E Pluribus Unum’ — so they’re right on the money!” said Yale Law School Dean Harold Koh (pictured at left) before snapping a photo for his city ID. The Yale Law School, through professors Bob Solomon and Mike Wishnie and the Yale law clinics, has pledged to represent the city in any legal battle over the ID.
Of those who oppose the plan, Koh said: “I’m not sure how their life is diminished by people being able to prove they’re part of the city.”
Lou Gold is part of a group that claim the ID is a conspiracy hatched by the mayor to profit from a new community bank. Gold stood in line anyway because his friend, Mike Buchina (pictured at right), thought an ID card would help him open a bank account.
The group claims DeStefano will profit from the ID because he is on the board of directors at the First City Fund Corp, a $25 million fund formed as a benefit to the community when the New Haven Savings Bank got converted into NewAlliance Bank. The mayor said he would probably sit on the board of directors of the new community bank, which has agreed to let patrons open a new bank account using the Elm City ID.
DeStefano dismissed the issue as a bogus argument veiling underlying bigotry. “There is no compensation whatsoever” to board members, he said. “[Protesters] are afraid to articulate their ignorance and their prejudice about this population, so what they do is they lie. They lie, and they cloak themselves in the American flag as they do it.”
Time for a “recall” campaign in New Haven.
Had enough of the Democrats, people of Connecticut, or will you let your other cities continue to decline like Bridgeport, etc?
What a shame. Once a beautiful state.
Fourteen years and the SOB can't speak English.
He doesn't want to be part of New Haven, he wants the freebees.
If enforcing immigration law, according to the open border amnestybots, is a federal affair and therefore towns and cities (Hazleton) can’t enforce immigration laws, shouldn’t the issuance of immigration documents also be limited to the federal government?
Where is the Connecticut Judge Munley to come up with this ruling?
Connecticut already has rep for letting repeat rapists
and murderers go free to kill its citizens.
NOW, they will pay in perpetuity for them, too.
"The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government,
1. The act of invading; the act of encroaching upon the rights or possessions of another; encroachment; trespass.
QUISLING: a synonym for traitor, someone who collaborates with the invaders of his country.
Services? I thought they came to "work".
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