Getting our act together

While we chant hosannas to the success of the campaign against the Abu Sayyaf, some 500,000 Filipinos are under threat in the US. This I gathered from letters detailing how Filipinos may be singled out because they come from "Al-Qaeda Country". When I receive letters like this, I feel I am wasting time writing on the ambitions and chicaneries of politicians that fill up our newspapers. The crisis facing 500,000 OFW’s in the US is more important and should have made the headlines. As David Murphy, a regular correspondent to this column, wrote: What if these Filipinos stop sending money from the US?

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He has very kindly passed on to me the messages. I will concentrate on the NaFFAA_forum on the debate about the crackdown on illegals in the US from "Gus Mercado" <[email protected]. The other side will be published in the next column. The letters were sent to Rodel. Some months ago I received a message on my old email address at qinet from Rodel Rodis, one of the more active Filipinos in the US, who asked me to join other Filipinos in a convention on overseas Filipinos. If you are reading this please confirm to my present e-mail address at the bottom of my columns.

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Anyway to go back to the issue of discrimination against Filipinos in the US, the debate reminds me of a similar campaign on behalf of Filipinos threatened with deportation from the UK when we were still political exiles from the Marcos regime.

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Excerpted from letter of Gus Mercado, NaFFAA Regional Chair (Emeritus) – Southwest Region National VP, U.S. Federation of Philippine American Chambers of Commerce: In the midst of your unenviable tasks of preparing for the upcoming National convention, you found time to respond favorably to my appeal on behalf of the Filipino aviation workers who were summarily rounded up and detained without bail in Mansfield, Texas after being humiliated in the newspapers and paraded on regional TV news as "aliens with suspected terrorist links", the implication being that because they are Filipinos, they are supporters of the Abu Sayyaf/Al-Qaeda gang. To save face after this grossly unfair and false accusation could not be substantiated, the authorities slapped a number of trumped up administrative charges that, if mishandled, could end up as felonies and subject the Filipino workers to deportation.

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I will accept your invitation to join your panel on Filipino Racial Profiling issue so NaFFAA can have a united stand and a sensible strategy for dealing with this very difficult issue that affects hundreds of thousands of Filipinos with immigration problems. As you probably know, LULAC and other similar ethnic federations are way ahead of us in this game. While there are leaders who are truly concerned and are trying to do something about fellow Filipinos who constantly live in fear of losing their freedoms and their livelihood, it hurts to read the strong comments of some of us who are not only indifferent to the 500,000 Filipinos who are not as fortunate as they are, but who may also be positioning to fight our efforts toe and nail….

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Most of us who came here in the ’60s and ’70s "the legal way" saw and suffered through many years of waiting and intransigence of the U.S. government vis-à-vis relaxing their rules for natives of the Eastern hemisphere, while favoring immigrants from Europe and other Western countries….This sweeping discrimination even in those days against Filipinos, exacerbated by the hardships spawned by the Marcos regime opened the floodgates for "illegal" immigration by Filipinos. It is all too easy to say that "these Fil-Ams broke the law" and should suffer the consequences. In all fairness to opponents of the proposed Amnesty bill, not all of these "illegal" Filipinos willfully broke the law.

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For example, the ten aviation workers who are incarcerated in Texas prisons have pending H1B or H2B temporary worker visas petitioned on their behalf. Some have spouses who had just been approved for H1B or Permanent Resident visas. But the Federal criminal courts in Texas would not give these arguments the light of day, focusing on the workers’ "false statements" just to pin them down on something that they can use to deport them. Their employer attests in writing that the Filipino mechanics are "model employees" and highly-skilled. Some have been working and paying taxes as aviation mechanics for more than 5 years... All but one have been fleeced of thousands of dollars by unscrupulous immigration lawyers who promised to help secure their workers’ visas but never delivered.

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Only a few weeks ago, a half-Filipina immigration lawyer from Los Angeles came down promising help, collected almost $20,000 from the families of the workers, only to hightail when the FBI and the criminal courts got involved in the case. So, there are mitigating circumstances behind the cases of some of these "illegal" Filipinos who are in grave danger of being deported "Con-Air" style. In a perfect world, all immigrants will follow the rules and there will not be any "illegal" Filipino workers. But the rules are not perfect, and the authorities are never fair when it comes to immigration matters. Why is it that Mexican violators are easily granted voluntary exits (only to return in a few days), while Filipinos are not granted the same privilege? Why is it that the Peruvian aviation workers are allowed bail while the Filipinos are not? Why is it that European violators are given leniency while Filipinos are chained together and shipped back to the Philippines chained to each other like animals?

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This brings up the crucial and current issue that our opponents overlook, i.e, the widespread racial profiling of Filipinos as "nationals of an Al-Qaeda friendly country"… I myself have some reservations about a blanket amnesty, but if that is the only recourse for our unfairly accused and desperate Filipino workers (and others similarly profiled now and in the future), then I will support the amnesty plan. The current state of the economy could be used by the opponents as an argument against amnesty, but it would not be a valid argument because the fact is – the jobs held by the vast majority of the "illegal" workers are jobs that most of us "legal" immigrants would not touch with a ten-foot-pole…

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My e-mail address:[email protected] or [email protected].