At the “Homeland ‘In’Security: Race, Immigration and Labor in Post-September 11 North America” symposium on Thursday night, Magdaleno Rose-Avila, the executive director of the Northwest Immigrant Rights Project, proposed a solution for getting rid of illegal aliens in Seattle.
“Just go around, listen to people’s conversations, and whenever you hear someone say, ‘Eh?’ pick them up,” he said. “When was the last time you saw a roundup of Canadians?”
The audience laughed at the farcical proposal. But Rose-Avila pointed out that the scenario wasn’t entirely a joke. Immigration enforcement agents in Seattle are targeting Spanish-speakers.
His proposal illustrated his belief that immigration policy targets certain groups for deportation. White Canadians are not one of these groups.
The symposium, which examined how the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks impacted immigration policy and perceptions of race, opened Thursday night with the keynote address by Roberto Lovato, a writer for the Pacific News Service. The symposium ended Friday.
“National identity is being subsumed by national security identity,” Lovato said.
Lovato said especially after Sept. 11, paranoia is shaping the United States’ view of outsiders and itself. Though after Sept. 11 Arab-Americans and Muslims were heavily targeted, Latinos also felt the impact of this paranoia.
Lovato spoke about the Arizona Rangers, a paramilitary group who patrols the borders. It has been known to kill and capture immigrants, he said.
“These white men are lamenting their loss of citizenship, their sense of whiteness, their sagging sense of being men,” he said of the rangers.
Even the media and entertainment contribute to this phenomena, he said.
“You have corporate America really playing into these dangerous stereotypes, and these people are taking it to a new level,” he said.
The media in Arizona, he said, offers a prime example.
“The media response in Arizona was ‘vigilantes or heroes?’” he said. “If you had a bunch of brown guys at the border with guns? Vigilantes y punto (vigilantes period).”
But this paranoia isn’t only reflected in people’s attitudes, immigration lawyer Raquel Hecht said. It’s reflected in anti-terrorism legislation.
“We need to be really careful not to confuse anti-terrorism with anti-immigration,” she said. One of her clients, a former University student, was recently detained by the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement because her country was on a terrorist watch list and her student visa had expired.
Carmen Urbina, outgoing director of Centro LatinoAmericano in Eugene and one of the panelists on Friday, said anti-terrorism legislation impacts Eugene, but not because of terrorists.
“In the past six months, almost 88 of our families have lost their jobs,” she said in a panel titled Brown Borders. “So this is what 9/11 did to our community.”
Anti-terrorism legislation, she said, has made it more difficult for undocumented immigrants to keep their jobs. The Lane County Jail now rents space to ICE, the agency responsible for arresting and holding undocumented immigrants, Urbina said.
Ibrahim Hamide, the owner and chef of Café Soriah and a peace activist, said Eugene is frequently inhospitable to Muslims and Arabs as well.
On campus, associate geography professor Shaul Cohen said, the University can be unresponsive to mitigating the effects of such paranoia. Cohen was part of a committee that dealt with the response to Sept. 11. Part of the committee’s charge was to ensure Arab and Muslim students felt safe.
However, Cohen said, the administration responded after it became clear that the population of foreign students at the University was declining.
“Foreign students represent cash,” he said. “And when cash talks, the administration listens.”
The symposium ended on an optimistic but cautionary note.
“What they do to the Islamic community they’ll do to you,” Rose-Avila said. “If they point to one group and say they’re terrorists, you could be next.”
But Cohen said that with a lot of hard work, understanding will trump the irrational paranoia.

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