Tag: Zohran Mamdani

JHISN Newsletter 02/11/2023

Posted on February 11, 2023 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

The immigration news headlines this past week have been grim. A 26-year-old immigrant attempted suicide on Wednesday at the city’s new ‘migrant shelter’ in Red Hook where hundreds of men are being warehoused in inhumane conditions. At ICE’s Northwest Detention Center in Tacoma, WA, private guards sprayed chemical agents on detainees who had launched a hunger strike to protest bad food, unpaid labor, and harassment. 

Beneath the headlines, at a slower tempo and often out of sight, struggles for immigrant justice continue. We report on the ongoing mobilization demanding the establishment of an official NYC school holiday to mark Diwali—a major holiday celebrated by many communities here in Jackson Heights. And as we highlight the unprecedented number of immigration cases backed up in our dysfunctional US immigration system, we ally with all those calling for truly independent immigration courts. 

Newsletter highlights: 
  1. Celebrating Diwali as an official school holiday
  2. Unprecedented backlog of US immigration cases 

1. When Will Diwali Be Recognized?

“If I trusted the mayor by his words, then Diwali would have been made a school holiday on Jan. 1, because that is the promise that he made during his campaign.” –Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani

For more than 20 years, NYC’s South Asian and Indo-Caribbean communities have been trying to get Diwali—the pan-religious Festival of Light—recognized as a school holiday. Hundreds of thousands of local Hindu, Jain, Sikh, and Buddhist residents celebrate the five-day Fall holiday, which is embraced by more than a billion people around the world. But so far, neither the city nor the state has mustered the will to include Diwali on the school calendar. A new initiative in Albany is raising hopes but also provoking criticism and doubts.

In 2013, Jackson Heights City Councilperson Daniel Dromm and 16 co-sponsors were unable to get a local Diwali school holiday bill passed. Dromm tried again, without success, in 2018. At the state level, Assemblyperson Jenifer Rajkumar’s 2021 Diwali bill never made it out of committee. But many advocates were convinced that 2022 would be the breakthrough year. Before his election, Mayor Adams publicly promised that once elected, he “would take his oath of office and walk into City Hall and ‘sign it into a holiday.’”

That did not happen. Adams has adopted a new position: there is no room on the school calendar, because of the state’s requirement for 180 days of instruction. Making Diwali a holiday, he now claims, requires substituting it for another holiday, which in turn requires state approval. Mamdani strongly disputes this, noting that Adams himself had previously dismissed scheduling concerns: “There are ways to move around the calendar to get the required number of days,” Adams once told Politico. South Queens district leader Richard David points out that “whenever the city punts to Albany, it’s always a little unpredictable, and you don’t really know what’s going to happen there.” 

Many private schools in NYC already treat Diwali as a holiday. Some parents question “why Adams can’t follow his predecessor’s example when former Mayor Bill de Blasio added the Asian Lunar New Year and the Muslim holidays Eid Al-Fitr and Eid Al-Adha as fixtures on the city schools calendar.” Fed-up families have resorted to simply taking their children out of school for Diwali on their own.

While the press put a harsh spotlight on Adams’ broken promise, advocates continued to apply pressure. In September, a public school student coalition circulated a petition for the Diwali holiday which gathered almost 5,000 signatures. Finally, in October, Adams joined forces with Rajkumar and Schools Chancellor David Banks in announcing a new initiative. The plan is to get the state legislature to substitute Diwali for “Brooklyn-Queens Day” or “Anniversary Day,” a holiday commemorating the founding of the first Sunday school in Brooklyn in the 1800s. The public announcement of the new Diwali initiative had a triumphal quality, as if it was already a done deal. NBC News said that Diwali “will be a school holiday in 2023.” So did NPR and TimeOut New York. Others were more cautious: “Even with over two dozen state lawmakers signed onto the legislation, community leaders in Queens remain skeptical of the efforts being made to complete a promise that they say has been made to them before,” the Queens Daily Eagle reported.

On November 2, the new City Council held a Diwali celebration in its chambers. On January 25, dozens of lawmakers and activists gathered in Albany to lobby for a bill to carry out the Rajkumar/Adams/Banks substitution plan. In the Assembly, Queens co-sponsors include Steven Raga (D-Woodside), Ed Braunstein (D-Bayside), Catalina Cruz (D-Corona), Khaleel Anderson (D-Far Rockaway) and Zohran Mamdani (D-Astoria). The sole sponsor of the matching bill in the Senate is Flushing Democrat John Liu. Rajkumar observes that “we have never seen such enthusiasm for this cause.” 

Will 2023 be the year Diwali makes it onto the public school calendar in NYC? Advocates say it is possible, if the state legislature gives approval by July. 

WHAT CAN WE DO?
  • Follow the fight for a Diwali holiday at the Diwali Coalition Twitter feed.
  • See footage of Diwali being celebrated in India in this short video.

 

2. Dramatic Backlog in US Immigration System

“When I started [as a lawyer] about 15 years ago, I could take on an asylum case, and within a three-month time frame you’d get a hearing before a judge. Now that time frame has stretched up to a five-year waiting period just to get a court date.” –Karla McKanders, Director, Vanderbilt Law School Immigration Practice Clinic

The numbers are stunning. Over 2 million pending cases in immigration courts at the end of 2022—a number that has more than doubled in the past 5 years. 9.5 million pending applications at US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) as of February 2022, with a surging backlog. At least 1,565,966 asylum seekers currently waiting for immigration hearings in the US, according to TRAC’s Immigration Project.

Behind these numbers are real people living in limbo for months and years, and spiraling stories of partners, families, beloveds, children, workplaces, and communities trying to manage profound uncertainty while sustaining hope and connection.

There are multiple reasons for the growing case backlogs. One major culprit is a history of underfunding of the immigration court system under both Democrat and Republican administrations, which has led to shortages of staff, technology, and resources. COVID shutdowns certainly played a role. Increased migration over the past decade due to economic dispossession, state violence, and environmental devastation is a factor. Also, the Trump administration intentionally jammed the immigration machinery, weakening due process protections in US immigration courts, while simultaneously increasing bureaucratic obstacles to legal immigration.

And there is no easy fix. There are no less than five different federal agencies involved with immigration processing, and four different congressional appropriations committees that fund—and underfund—their work. Right-wing electeds are actively working to slow the wheels of legal immigration while maximizing detention and deportation. Bringing down the number of backlogged immigration cases isn’t an easy target for grassroots activism. And the complexity of the US immigration bureaucracy makes popular education about the backlog difficult. All this contributes to a problem that feels increasingly intractable even as it grows more consequential.  

One step in the right direction for reforming the dysfunctional and backlogged immigration system would be for Congress to create and fully fund truly independent US immigration courts. For historically perverse reasons, US immigration courts are currently housed in the executive branch, under the jurisdiction of the Department of Justice-–a law enforcement agency. Together with the American Bar Association and the National Association of Immigration Judges, we support a separate immigration court system that, like other parts of the US judiciary, has meaningful autonomy from the whims of executive branch authority and is less subject to political pressure. An independent, accountable immigration court system might help to bring justice to the hundreds of thousands of lives currently stalled by the unprecedented backlog of pending immigration cases.

 

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

 

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN. 

Feature Image – Khokarahman, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

 

 

JHISN Newsletter 10/15/2022

Posted on October 15, 2022 by - News, Newsletter

Dear friends,

As Fall leaves turn, we reflect on the seasons of struggle immigrants experience in our community and beyond. In this newsletter, we celebrate a season of debt relief for taxi workers—the triumphant result of years of resolute organizing, sacrifice, and deep solidarity. And we challenge the revival of austerity politics, which aims to keep us frozen in a winter of injustice and income inequality. As the taxi workers just showed us, it’s a lie that New York “can’t afford” to address the needs of its working-class residents.

Newsletter highlights:
  1. Finally, real debt relief for taxi workers
  2. “We can’t afford it” is a lie

Taxi Workers’ Victory “Brought to Life”

Last November, taxi drivers danced in the streets, ending a 40-day round-the-clock protest outside City Hall and a 15-day hunger strike. “We won!,” declared Bhairavi Desai, director of the New York Taxi Workers Alliance (NYTWA), which represents 20,000 mostly immigrant drivers. That historic workers’ victory secured a promise of millions of dollars in taxi medallion debt relief.

 Two weeks ago, the NYTWA, city officials, and politicians marked a milestone in the ongoing struggle, announcing at a press release that $225 million in loans to taxi drivers had been closed out. The Medallion Relief Program, launched in August 2022 with federal funds, has so far allowed more than 3,000 eligible NYC cab drivers to write down their loans to a maximum of $175,000—loans that had often been originally $500,000 or more.

 It is only because of the drivers’ persistent disciplined struggle that the city government has finally agreed to provide relief—for a problem it helped create. JHISN reported a year ago on the city’s complicit role in creating the scandal of crushing debt for local drivers:  

“… [C]ity agencies ripped off thousands of owner-drivers. First, they knowingly created an unsustainable bubble in taxi medallion prices and encouraged predatory loans, leaving drivers drowning in debt when the bubble burst. Then the city let tens of thousands of unregulated, no-medallion Uber and Lyft cars drive off with their fares. The pandemic delivered a final blow. Amid a wave of forced medallion foreclosures, nine drivers died by suicide.”—JHISN newsletter 10/16/21

Astoria Assembly representative Zohran Mamdani, who supported the NYTWA during their years-long fight for economic justice, celebrated the historic deal that has now finally been “brought to life.” But he also remembered and honored the taxi drivers’ lives lost to the crisis:

 “While we can never bring those brothers back, those who took their own lives because of this horrific system of debt. Their families should always know that their struggles, their stories, those things are why we are here today lifting the debt off of other drivers’ backs … It was because of what they went through and how they shared their struggle with the world that we are able to ensure that we don’t lose a single additional driver to the same struggle.” –Z. Mamdani (QNS, 9/27/22)

WHAT CAN WE DO?

 

The Big Lie

As federal pandemic relief money starts to recede in the rearview mirror, New York’s political elites are reviving a familiar mantra: “we can’t afford it.” Working-class communities are being ripped apart by homelessness, disease, unemployment, mental health crisis, crumbling schools, and food insecurity, but not much can be done—“we can’t afford it.” 

In the back of our minds, we all know this mantra is a lie. “We can’t afford it” is just another excuse for income inequality.

There’s over $3 trillion in private wealth in New York City alone—more than the wealth of all but a few entire countries. There are more rich people here than in any other city in the world. And 1% of NYC residents “earn” roughly 90% of all income. There’s literally nothing these people can’t afford. But they have no intention of paying their share. 

Bloomberg, a long-time mouthpiece of the oligarchy, puts a cynical spin on it:  “Gotham’s future will be decided by how many of these super-wealthy people remain after the pandemic is over….They paid $4.9 billion in local income taxes, making up 42.5% of total income tax collected.” Hmm. 90% of the income, but 42.5% of the income tax? Is this rich peoples’ idea of progressive taxation? And notice the sneaky threat that they might abandon the city if we ask them to pay more? 

The hypocrisy of “we can’t afford it” is stark, and yet it’s a common part of New York political discourse. Mayor Adams just declared a “state of emergency” because the richest city in the world “can’t afford” to house desperate asylum seekers or other homeless people. At the same time, Adams’ right-wing appointees to the Rent Guidelines Board handed landlords the largest rent increases since the Bloomberg years. They don’t care if renters facing eviction can “afford it” or not. Before migrant buses even started arriving from Texas, Adams had already reduced the schools’ budget, then ordered all city agencies to cut spending by 3 percent for the upcoming fiscal year. These cuts, in a time of high inflation, will be devastating for working-class families.

At the state level, the same hypocrisy rules. In Albany, this fall, more than 100 groups fought for relief for 175,000 immigrant excluded workers. They watched as the “can’t afford it” state decided instead to fork out $600 million to subsidize a sports stadium owned by an upstate billionaire. Governor Hochul and Adams are also proposing billions in tax breaks for Penn Station redevelopment to benefit their donors at mega-realtor Vornado Realty.

Immigrant justice groups and other grassroots advocates are expected to accept zero-sum austerity: competing for an artificially limited pot of funding. Or rather what’s left in the pot after the government pays for militarized cops and subsidies for big real estate and interest to the banks. (Almost half of NYC’s $100 billion budget goes to servicing debt.) Battle by battle, organizers struggle to pry scarce social services out of a stingy government, or plead for funding from donors, foundations, and charities.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Tapping the vast wealth and income of the super-rich to meet the needs of New York’s working-class people is pivotal to social justice, including immigrant justice. Self-serving oligarchs, demanding deference and special treatment, are robbing our future from us moment by moment. When we take back what they are stealing from us, it will be obvious that we “can afford” a just, thriving society–one where migrants are not an “emergency,” but welcome new neighbors.

WHAT CAN WE DO?
  • Join with coalitions fighting to tax the rich, like #OccupyTheHamptons and #TaxtheRich.
  • Demand that your public officials do something about income inequality, instead of just talking about it.

In solidarity and with collective care,

Jackson Heights Immigrant Solidarity Network (JHISN)

Follow @JHSolidarity on Facebook and Twitter and share this newsletter with friends, families, neighbors, networks, and colleagues so they can subscribe and receive news from JHISN.