Writings
WINDS OF CHANGE
An Immigration Lawyer’s Perspective of Fifty Years
excerpts
By Ira Gollobin, 1987
How much longer are non-citizens to be treated in essential constitutional respects as non-persons? Is it not time for a sustained national campaign to end this exclusion of non-citizens from the Bill of Rights?
Repeatedly, crises in American history have demonstrated that the rights of the native born and of the foreign born are indivisible, a unity affirmed by Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Franklin D. Roosevelt. This indivisibility lends special significance to the report of President Truman’s Commission on Immigration and Naturalization regarding the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952: This law “embodies policies and principles injurious to the nation. It rests upon an attitude of hostility and distrust to all aliens…. It should be reconsidered and revised from beginning to end.”
Thirty-four years have passed since the Truman Commission urged revision of the 1952 Act. Why not begin working now for a national assembly to achieve that revision, to restore to non-citizens, after nearly a century of deprivation, their constitutional due, to treat them as “persons” under the Bill of Rights, and not outcasts?
Why wait until a major social crisis arrives before focusing on the restoration of the non-citizen to the Bill of Rights? It must be made clear to the public that this is an essential act to preserve the rights of the citizen – for it is the citizen who is really the main target of “anti-alien” campaigns. This overall, basic framework can also give a general direction and thrust to numerous specific and desired changes in the immigration laws. At the very time when the Bicentennial of the Constitution is being commemorated, is it not appropriate to highlight the invidious disregard of the constitutional rights of the foreign born?
Unity with the foreign born is not an appeal for philanthropy on the part of citizens. Rather, it is a matter of common interest and the imperishable attachment to democracy of the majority of the American people. To restore to non-citizens their constitutional rights or, inevitably, to circumscribe those of citizens: this is the challenge, as well as the choice.
PHILIPPINE ECONOMY CHOKED BY U.S.
excerpts from Philippines Today, Summer 1948
By Ira Gollobin
Though three years have passed since liberation, efforts to restore the war-ravaged economy have met with little success. The promises of the U.S.-dominated government of rehabilitation and industrialization have less and less prospect of realization. As a colonial country, production before the war was chiefly for export to the U.S. and consisted mainly of gold, and to a lesser extent abaca and coconut and its products. In the course of the war many of the mines and sugar and coconut oil refineries were destroyed. Today unrefined coconut has become practically the sole export, constituting about 75% of export for 1947. Much of the food and practically all of the clothing is imported.
Despite the formal grant of independence the dependency of the Philippines on America is greater than when the country was an outright colony. This is one of the fruits of the U.S.-sponsored Bell Trade Act which geared the economy to export of raw materials in return for consumer goods. The Philippine American Chamber of Commerce which represents some of America’s largest corporations boasted that they put through the Parity Amendment under which the Philippine had to amend its constitution in order to grant to Americans equal rights in the development of Philippine resources.
The Bell Trade Act has resulted in lasting unemployment and widespread poverty in the cities. The restoration of the feudal economy is undermining the living standards of the workers. Events in the Philippines as well as elsewhere in the Far East are demonstrating that a great nationalist democratic upsurge of the people is challenging native and foreign reaction. The effort of these interests to hoodwink the nationalist movement by a merely nominal grant of independence and thus against their power by placing formal responsibility on Filipino puppets is being exposed.
ON NECLC AND CIVIL DISOBEDIENCE
By Ira Gollobin
The course presently being followed by the Reagan Administration poses sharply the propriety and timeliness for a civil liberties organization to consider its views on the growing scope of civil disobedience actions being taken by many Americans.
For millions of people, in the United Sates and abroad, there is a widening chasm between the demands of conscience and the Regan Administration’s policies and actions. To name a few: support (however veiled) for apartheid and for the contras, as well as for militarization of space and prosecution of Americans helping fleeing Salvadorans to find sanctuary here. Increasingly, the vexing question is coming to the fore of what recourse law-abiding citizens have, what means they are to take to square their actions with their conscience. The recent Holocaust commemoration makes all too vivid the moral precept that those who do not resist evil condone and even buttress it. Ever more insistingly we are being pressed to answer Thoreau’s query in Civil Disobedience: “Is there not a sort of bloodshed with the conscience is wounded?”
In some instances the choice involves breaking the law rather than disobeying conscience while in others the admonition of Thoreau is apt that “They are the lovers of law and order who uphold the law when the government breaks it.” Comparing his gadfly role to that of Socrates, Martin Luther King spoke of the positive nature of “constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.” Rebutting charges of instigating tension, he declared that we are “not the creators of tension … We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with.”
In celebrating each year Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday, do we not as a nation affirm the rights of conscience and declare that when confronted by injustice, however legalized, that the voice of conscience is to be respected and not stilled? What shall be done here and now to safeguard the rights of those whose conscience impels them to action may in the end be no lesser question that what course our nation will take.
Democracy & Deportation Laws
Excerpts from Jewish Life, June 1948
by Ira Gollobin
Deportation is the weapon devised early in American history to deport American democracy and to import in its place the alien power of a few financial magnates over the nation. Deportation for political beliefs is the use by indirection of force and violence against the majority of Americans and their exercise of the Bill of Rights to achieve democratic progress. Americans are to be preserved from dangerous thoughts by a quarantine on ideology supposedly foreign in origin. The dangerous thoughts are to be cast out by exiling any democratic minded non-citizen. Efforts to block progress are cloaked as patriotism preserving Americans from sedition.
A political deportation law enforced by an administrative body subjects freedom of speech and belief of non-citizens to the arbitrary opinions of a host of officials, many of whom like the Attorney General were never elected to office. At most, it can only place the pretense of legality over the forceful and violent deprivation of the non-citizens right to freedom of speech to his liberty and property. It is the Attorney General, not the aliens in the many pending political deportation cases, who is guilty of subverting by force and violence our democracy.
Our present political deportation laws now stand force as only a more polished and elaborate version of the odious 1798 Alien and Sedition Acts. A struggle against these laws is as vital today as it was for the American people in 1798. The American people are moving forward to higher democratic goals. They must clear away the obstacles contained in our present unconstitutional deportation laws and defeat every attempt to deny to non-citizens the full protection of the Bill of Rights.
Ellis Island – An American Lawyer’s Odyssey
By Ira Gollobin
Excerpts from Immigration Journal, July-December 1991 issue
(part of the Oral History Project “Ellis Island: I Was There” of the American Immigration Law Foundation)
“My very first case, undertaken at the behest of the American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born, turned out to be somewhat Kafkaesque. A seaman from India – in the United States since before 1924 and therefore not deportable – had gone from Detroit to Buffalo in search of work. Essentially, the INS inspector asked him only one question: “How did he go from Detroit to Buffalo?” On ascertaining that he had taken the northern railroad route via Canada (at night, in a train that didn’t stop in Canada, and unaware he was going through Canada), INS ruled that this constituted a new entry, making him now subject to deportation. This struck me as arbitrary and unjust, the product not of law but possibly of INS drumming up cases to keep itself in business in a slow time. Upon my return from Ellis Island to Manhattan, I hurried to a law library and to my great surprise found a Federal Court of Appeals decision in New York that squarely upheld the INS position. It seemed to me the issue deserved to go before the Supreme Court. I had no anticipation that it would be my privilege some 17 years later to have a cognate case in which the Supreme Court would rule that the departure did not alter the pre-existing status. The Court of Appeals decision was the law that, for the time being I had to accept, no matter how unjust it seemed to me to be. This sharp cleavage in my feelings, between the reality I had to accept and the reality I thought should be, was crucial in my decision, then and there, to become an immigration lawyer. As such a lawyer, I concluded, I had a role to play. In the six years from then to 1942, when I went into the U.S. Army, I rode the ferries to Ellis Island many times….”
“After 55 years as an immigration lawyer, I am very glad that in this rededication of Ellis Island, the overall aspect of welcome has again come to the fore. However, physically to the rear of the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island symbolizes for me, as an immigration attorney, the ongoing need for hard work to maintain through fair treatment the Statues’ welcome to the foreign born. The essence of its present commemoration is that now and in times of social stress the immigration policies of our nation should fully harmonize with the spirit of the Statue of Liberty and the great poem inscribed at its base. This remains to be achieved!”
THE BILL OF RIGHTS AND THE FOREIGN BORN
By Ira Gollobin
February 11, 1975
Historically, anti-alienism was always a divisive racist hoax to convince the mass of people that the primary source of social evils stemmed from without, and not from within the society. In times of stress the Irish, Germans, Chinese, Italians and Slavs have been offered as sacrificial victims on the alter of governmental evasion of the American people’s true needs. A clamor for mechanical, punitive measures – the ouster of a comparatively small number of noncitizens – is used to cover up the necessity for profound internal change that might unseat those in power at the time.
During the Depression of the 1930s, alien-baiting was offered as a recipe for prosperity. Congressional bills to deport all aliens were introduced, and a deportation drive was launched against militants – especially Slavs, who were called “Moscow agents” – in unions and progressive organizations.
The fact is that U.S. legislation and corporate interests are largely responsible for so many economic refugees, persons without documents, presently misnamed “illegals,” who come here. This reversal of the traditional open-door policy for Western Hemisphere immigrants is as unrealistic as King Canute’s efforts to stop the ocean waves. The fact is that the economies of countries south of the border and in the Caribbean are basically geared to exporting raw materials to large U.S. corporations at giveaway prices while purchasing manufactured goods from U.S. corporations at inflated prices. The extremely difficult conditions of the mass of Latin Americans impel many to uproot their lifetime associations and to make every sacrifice to come here. Thus, while narrowing the door to their admission, U.S. policymakers continually seek to widen the door to those countries’ resources: to take but not to give, to intensify the causes that make Latin Americans economic refugees while denying them an opportunity to share in the benefits of their resources being utilized in the USA.
Another critical immigration arena today involved 500 Haitian refugees in Miami who face torture or even death at the hands of the Duvalier dictatorship if deported to Haiti……
The battle has begun, and a most important lesson of U.S. history is never to sell the people short, native and foreign born. Today’s embattled Latins defend not only themselves but, above all, the native born. For the native born, defense of the foreign born is not charity but self-interest….. No matter how difficult the road, people’s struggles ultimately lead to people’s victories, to higher democratic vistas.
On the eve of the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, let us firmly resolve to be part of that next great advance. Let us enlist for the duration!
Excerpts of a Speech by Ira Gollobin at a
Rally to Stop the Persecution of Cuban-Americans
June 20, 1962, New York, NY
Restriction of the foreign born occurred early in our country’s history, and is even mentioned in the Declaration of Independence of July 4, 1776. Thomas Jefferson opposed the Alien and Sedition laws of 1798 as undemocratic and unconstitutional, and when he became President he refused to enforce them. Abraham Lincoln similarly opposed the Know-Nothings in the 1840s, who attacked the rights of Irish and German immigrants.
Throughout our country’s history the foreign born have been in the forefront of social progress. They deeply understood their democratic responsibilities, having known persecution first hand in their native lands. They appreciated the great opportunities offered them here. Without the democratic contributions and the labor of the foreign born, the United States could not have been built.
History is moving at breakneck speed. Hungry, oppressed peoples all over the world have won or are struggling to win their freedom, to put an end to poverty, to end the danger of atomic war. The Cuban revolution was such a revolution of the poor, for their place in the sun. But instead of a welcome to the new Cuba, the U.S. government has cut practically all trade with Cuba. U.S. citizens are forbidden to visit Cuba, where they would see for them- selves. Cubans in the U.S. who express any support or sympathy for the government of their native land are harassed and in many cases deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service. The Immigration authorities act under the Walter-McCarran law, on the basis of which they can arrest without a warrant any person believed to be an alien, detain him without bail, and give him a hearing with very little due process of law…..
The American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born condemns this harassment of and violence against Cubans in this country, and demands that the police protect Cubans and arrest those that are guilty. Cubans who have been victimized are largely those who have lived in the United States many years – plain, hard-working and devoted to democracy. Many of them fought in World War II to defend democracy. Many of them had to flee Cuba for their lives from the tyrannies of dictators Machado and Batista.
Just as there are two kinds of Cubans, there are two kinds of Americans. One kind is the powerful, the privileged few, the reactionaries who believe the world is their oyster and who do their utmost to keep it that way. They do everything they can to keep any rays of light about Cuba from penetrating the darkness, the fog of misinformation in which the people of the United Sates are enveloped. Long ago in 1829, Simon Bolivar, the Latin American patriot, wrote: “Providence seems to have ordained the United States to plague Latin American with misery in the name of freedom.”
There is another, a progressive, a people’s side to the United States. This is the side represented by this meeting here tonight and by people’s movements throughout the country. The people do cherish their rights. The time to defend them is now, when democracy is attacked – and not when it is dead. Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and a great naturalized citizen, Albert Einstein, all declared that the people and not the government are the ultimate guardians of their rights. The people are not beggars for crumbs from the democratic table! Their rights are conferred by the Constitution and not by the generosity of the President, Congress, or the Courts. Violation of the rights of one minority opens the door to violation of the rights of others.
The people of the United States, of Cuba, and the peoples of the world desire to – and united, can – build a world of peace, plenty, and freedom. In this way, the United States, itself a “nation of nations,” can be joined with Latin America and Canada to truly form – as the poet Walt Whitman put it – “a continent indissoluble.”
Let us all, “keep our hands on the plough, hold on!” We shall overcome! Companeros: ni un paso atras! Duchando unidos! Venceremos!
HELPING HAITIANS AND HELPING OURSELVES
By Ira Gollobin
The course presently being followed by the Reagan Administration poses sharply the propriety and timeliness for a civil liberties organization to consider its views on the growing scope of civil disobedience actions being taken by many Americans.
For millions of people, in the United Sates and abroad, there is a widening chasm between the demands of conscience and the Regan Administration’s policies and actions. To name a few: support (however veiled) for apartheid and for the contras, as well as for militarization of space and prosecution of Americans helping fleeing Salvadorans to find sanctuary here. Increasingly, the vexing question is coming to the fore of what recourse law-abiding citizens have, what means they are to take to square their actions with their conscience. The recent Holocaust commemoration makes all too vivid the moral precept that those who do not resist evil condone and even buttress it. Ever more insistingly we are being pressed to answer Thoreau’s query in Civil Disobedience: “Is there not a sort of blood shed with the conscience is wounded?”
In some instances the choice involves breaking the law rather than disobeying conscience while in others the admonition of Thoreau is apt that “They are the lovers of law and order who uphold the law when the government breaks it.” Comparing his gadfly role to that of Socrates, Martin Luther King spoke of the positive nature of “constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth.” Rebutting charges of instigating tension, he declared that we are “not the creators of tension … We merely bring to the surface the hidden tension that is already alive. We bring it out in the open where it can be seen and dealt with.”
In celebrating each year Martin Luther King’s birthday as a holiday, do we not as a nation affirm the rights of conscience and declare that when confronted by injustice, however legalized, that the voice of conscience is to be respected and not stilled? What shall be done here and now to safeguard the rights of those whose conscience impels them to action may in the end be no lesser question that what course our nation will take.
By Ira Gollobin
General Counsel, American Committee for Protection of Foreign Born
May 5, 1978 – National Council of Churches Conference
In a sense, the United States is of mankind, “a nation of nations,” as Walt Whitman said, constituted of immigrants from every portion of the globe. From many we have become one – not in the sense of uniformity but as a rich intermingling of diverse cultures. The sacrifices, courage, and imagination of immigrants, their skills, inventive talents and arduous labor, created factories farms and mines from wilderness, prairie and desert.
Yet the first immigrants came not to empty expanses, but a land peopled by Native Americans, the many tribes which from time immemorial possessed a cherished identity and dignity. These Native Americans extended a welcome to the stranger from Europe, the pilgrims. The survival of American’s first immigrants depended on the hospitality of America’s only non-immigrants.
The saga of mastery of the wide expanse from the Atlantic to the Pacific is largely the Odyssey of the immigrant, of the poor “yearning to breathe free.” Equally, it is a trail of sorrow, the exile of Native Americans into reservations far from their ancestral lands, the decimation of those who previously had breathed free from about 12 million to approximately one million survivors today.
Although hospitality to the stranger comported with the Biblical mandate as well as with enlightened self-interest, contrary voices were heard from early times. …. The common underlying credo in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights is George Washington’s declaration that America is open to receive “the oppressed and persecuted of all nations and religions whom we shall welcome to a participation of all our rights and privileges….” This credo has been a guiding star – albeit sometimes dimmed and even in eclipse – in our country’s advance to greatness among the family of nations.
American has two traditions: one that welcomes the stranger at the gate, who, as Benjamin Franklin noted, is in the forefront of defending democracy; and another that, in times of crisis, uses the foreign born as a scapegoat for unsolved social problems. In Jefferson’s words, “The friendless alien is the safest subject for a social experiment but the citizen will soon follow.”
The question arises: Is not the current propaganda against “aliens” as a threat to our livelihood and way of life again essentially a cover-up for the real problems of citizens alienated from their representatives in government?
Finally, as in the case of the rights of Black people, the voice of the American people has to be heard with regard to the rights of the foreign born! A welcome to the stranger and the assurance of constitutional rights – the unity of native and foreign born – is both a moral imperative and a practical necessity for the American people in the great contests ahead that will give a new and higher meaning to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
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