Forum.RttP{Support the Mass Coalition for Immagration Reform}

Here's what it's about...

Immigrant policy has its critics: Local group would put lid on foreigners moving to U.S.

Quincy resident Armelino Marchesini, 38, a native of Brazil, takes the oath of citizenship with people from 80 nations on Wednesday at the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center in Boston. (GREG DERR/The Patriot Ledger)
By SUE REINERT
The Patriot Ledger

A. Robert Casimiro spends much of his time going where he and his small band of anti-immigration activists are not wanted.

Recently the retired engineer from Weymouth showed up with one ally at a Suffolk University Law School forum dominated by the enemy: immigration advocates.

‘‘We're always outnumbered wherever we go,'' he said.

Casimiro, 66, is executive director of the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform, virtually the only organized voice in Massachusetts for immigration restrictions.

The small but vocal group has grown to about 130 members since Lorrie Hall of Duxbury helped create it in 1998, Casimiro and Hall said.

Like most mainstream organizations that favor limiting immigration, the coalition argues that immigrants cause sprawl and environmental problems by increasing the population, bring Third World diseases to the United States and take jobs and depress wages of American workers.

Members want the government to cut back legal entrants to about 300,000 people a year from the current 1 million and eliminate illegal immigration.

‘‘The United States is the fastest-growing country in the world because of immigrants,'' Hall said.

Cutting immigration by 70 percent might well have closed the door to Armelino Marchesini, a 38-year-old baker from Quincy who became a U.S. citizen on Wednesday. He arrived 10 years ago from Brazil.

‘‘If someone comes from a country where the economic opportunity isn't there to meet your basic human needs, that's what this country is all about,'' said his wife, Diane Kelley-Marchesini, who watched proudly from the balcony of the Hynes Veterans Memorial Convention Center in Boston as her husband and 1,433 others took the oath of citizenship.

‘‘Read what's engraved on the Statue of Liberty. These are good, hard-working people who don't get in trouble as a rule. They're not a threat to the average American.''

Massachusetts ranks high among the preferred destinations for immigrants to the United States. The state has added an average of 23,000 new foreign-born residents every year since 1988, the seventh highest total in the nation.

Overall, the state's immigration rate has increased 9 percent since 1999, slightly under the national average.

Although Casimiro's coalition focuses primarily on legal immigration, illegal immigration remains the hot-button issue nationally.

Last month, voters in Arizona passed a ballot measure to keep illegal immigrants from obtaining some government services, and groups in Georgia, Idaho, California and Colorado are considering similar proposals.

Called Proposition 200, the controversial Arizona law is intended to prevent illegal immigrants from obtaining food stamps, welfare and other social services. It requires proof of immigration status to obtain certain government services.

Ali Noorani, director of the Massachusetts Refugee and Immigrant Advocacy Coalition, has heard the arguments for restricting immigration many times.

He counters that immigrants don't contribute to sprawl and pollution because most of them settle in environmentally efficient cities instead of suburbs, that any international traveler can bring back disease and that lifting immigration restrictions will improve conditions for all workers by preventing exploitation of illegal aliens.

Of Casimiro's coalition, he says, ‘‘This is a group that is trying to incite the politics of fear.''

Lorrie Hall and Casimiro traveled different paths to their activism.

Casimiro was galvanized by the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, he said.

‘‘Like a lot of Americans, when that happened I was personally wounded,'' he said.

After a year and a half of research into immigration policies, he joined the coalition, he said.

As for the immigrant heritage that he shares with most Americans, Casimiro said the situation was different when his grandparents came to this country in 1905 from the Azores, the Portuguese-owned islands off West Africa.

‘‘They came here legally and immigration levels were not so high,'' he said.

Hall, who moved to Duxbury from Reading in 1997, ‘‘was interested in reducing immigration for a long time because I was concerned about sprawl,'' she said.

Hall is a member of the Sierra Club, the national environmental group that split sharply over immigration policy and its effect on the environment. After members voted in 1998 not to support immigration restrictions as part of population control, some continue to lobby for the cause.

Although Hall said she didn't form the coalition in response to the Sierra Club turmoil, environmental issues drive her concern over immigration, she said. In Duxbury, ‘‘I see every lot and farm being carved up,'' Hall said. ‘‘It's the population push that's doing it.''

Although most Americans have ancestors who were foreign-born, anti-immigration causes have attracted supporters since the 1700s, historians say.

Hall and Casimiro say their opposition to immigration is not based on race and say they don't have any quarrel with individual immigrants.

‘‘It upsets me when people refer to us as anti-immigrant,'' Casimiro said.

Said Hall, ‘‘It has nothing to do with racism, it has to do with common sense.''

Yet Casimiro talks of illegal Mexican immigrants whose ‘‘culture is antithetical to the American culture.''

‘‘They have one party that ruled for years,'' he said. ‘‘They're not getting anything through their government so they have to disobey the law. It's understandable in Mexico but we don't want that type of thing here.''

Noorani, the immigration advocate, said he and opponents like Hall and Casimiro can agree on one thing.

‘‘When I talk to them, we both agree that the immigration system is broken,'' he said.

"They are always asking why so many illegal immigrants are coming in. I would say it's broken because it's unfair and doesn't allow legal immigration.''

Both sides also seem to agree on another issue: the limited success of the Massachusetts Coalition for Immigration Reform in making progress toward its goals.

‘‘We don't have a lot of influence because the advocates have been at it for a long time,'' Casimiro said. ‘‘Our only voice generally goes through talk radio.''

Noorani said members of the anti-immigrant coalition try to get their views heard by ‘‘following us around.''

‘‘They're not tapping into a more widespread view,'' he said.

‘‘I would not quibble with the fact that nationally there is an anti-immigrant sentiment, but in Massachusetts we are trying to stem that.''