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No More Waiting?


Kendo McDonald only slept a couple of hours a night at his home in Queens. The rest of the night, he camped out in a sleeping bag in front of the office of Citizenship and Immigration Services at Federal Plaza. His mission was to secure an appointment with the immigrant agency for his client. Because the agency can only take up to about 150 walk-in cases a day, people started to line up earlier and earlier, and the line got longer and longer.

“Before I didn’t have to do this 3 o’clock in the morning thing,” he told the New York Times. “I could come at 8 am.” By the time the office opens, a line usually wraps around the building.

But McDonald might be out of a job and this long line might soon be history. The immigrancy agency has introduced an online appointment system that will allow immigrants to make an appointment without going to Federal Plaza themselves.

“By the fall of this year, I predict that there will be no lines outside of the federal district offices of the United States,” said Eduardo Aguirre, director of United States Citizen and Immigration Services.

Following Miami, Dallas and Los Angeles, the immigration agency in New York City implemented Infopass in late July to help curb the waiting line for walk-in cases.

According to the agency, 1,400 people visit the New York office on a daily basis. Jason Wong was one of the more than 350,000 people who visited the New York office last year.

“I waited for hours and hours outside of the building and then a few more hours inside” he said. “This new system will definitely help cut the waiting time.”

Immigrant officials acknowledged that people often have to wait for several hours to do business with the agency but had not done much to help fasten the process, until an official in Miami saw people lining up on Sunday night to secure spot on Monday’s morning. His staff member came up with the idea of using the Internet-based appointment system.

“It’s a win-win for everyone,” said agency spokesman Chris Bently.

It is too soon to tell whether infopass can actually help reduce the lines in New York. So far the results in Miami and Los Angeles have shown that it actually does.

But critics said that Infopass is not for everyone.

“It’s great for people who use the Internet. But what about the other half of the population who don’t use it” said Roger Elasmar, an immigration lawyer. “My experience is that most of my clients and a lot of immigrants do not go online to check anything.”

More importantly, immigrant advocates argued that by choosing to spend its already tight budget on infopass, the agency ignore the real problem.

“They need to have money to hire staff and to put in systems to deal with these unacceptable backlogs,” said Dan Smulian of the New York Immigration Coalition.

He added that Infopass will only change the way people have to wait. “Instead of waiting three or four hours outside to be told that their case is pending, now they will get an appointment online and go there to be told that their case is still pending.”

The waiting time for a green card in New York City now averages 25 months, compared to 14 months in Los Angeles, according to the agency.

The program will be implemented nationwide later this year. It will be available in 12 languages – Arabic, Chinese, Creole English, French, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Spanish, Tagalog, Russian and Vietnamese.

An immigrant from Bangkok, Thailand, Chaleampon Ritthichai is the editor of The Citizen. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Daycare Workers


Daycare workers have one of the most undervalued jobs in our society. They are in reality early childhood teachers who are required to have the same qualifications as teachers in public school and Head Start staff.

But even though research has long shown that putting children in quality childcare before they are school-aged leads to greater academic success, these teachers earn up to $10,000 less than newly-hired Head Start teachers with the same training. Indeed, the average pay for a daycare worker, which also includes support staff, such as cooks, bookkeepers and custodians, is $27,000 a year. So in June, the daycare workers and daycare directors joined forces and struck for three days in an effort to get the city to the negotiating table, which it had avoided for a year.

Daycare workers have been without a contract since January 2001, and the daycare directors have been without one since March 2001. Neither group has had a raise since April 2000 and the cost of living has gone up almost 13 percent since. The two unions watched as the city negotiated raises with all municipal employees during the last contract negotiations - raises of four percent, four percent, and one percent over 27 months. Now the mayor is offering the daycare workers and directors a $1,000 bonus and a three percent and two percent raise over two years, while saying that no funding will be available for raises until April 2006 unless they are paid for with give-backs. These are the only raises offered for six years.

The unions representing the 7,000 daycare employees, DC 1707, and the 460 daycare directors, CSA, (Council of School Supervisors and Administrators), are not the most powerful or sophisticated in the city. Their members are mostly women of color. But more than these political drawbacks, the reason the unions have not been able to get the mayor's attention is because technically they are not city employees. "It is not fair to our hardworking city employees and to the taxpayers to provide them with a better raise than our own workers," says mayoral spokesman Jordan Barowitz.

The workers are employed by non-profit organizations that run the 346 daycare centers across the city and they negotiate their contracts with the Day Care Council of New York, which represents the boards of the non-profits. But although the workers are not city employees, the sole funder of their programs is the city, which awarded $690 million last year in contract childcare programs and vouchers. That makes the city the sole determiner of how much is available for the daycare contracts. (Parents who can afford to, pay on a sliding-fee scale.) The city's Administration for Child Services and Human Resources Administration places 96,000 children from families on public assistance and with low and moderate incomes in daycare programs and voucher-funded childcare providers. This is only a third of eligible preschool children however, and 20 percent of school-aged children.

The mayor was able to find the money for all the other city-funded workers in 2002, says Sandy Socolar, DC 1707's policy analyst. "He says he doesn't have the money to go back before his administration," Socolar says. "But he did go back in the case of the teachers, Queens bus drivers -- who are not municipal employees -- staff police sergeants, all of whom went back before the 2001 contract period."

"We are two contracts behind!" says Richard Oppenheimer, director of family day care at the Nuestros Ninos Child Development School in Williamsburg and a vice president of the daycare directors union. "The city's treatment of this group is shocking. To single us out, to be the only union that are two contracts behind is unconscionable. I've never struck, I've never had to. But this period of time without a contract is the longest ever."

The unions say the city is siphoning off funds allocated to childcare in order to pay for other things, a charge Barowitz denies. The city puts in its own money, along with funds it receives from the Child Care Block Grant, a mix of state and federal aid awarded originally as part of the 1996 federal welfare reform (In PDF Format). In the beginning the block grant funds paid for a third of the city's childcare need and the city paid two-thirds, but over the years the city has been reducing the amount it puts in. Now the percentage of the block grant that pays for the city's childcare programs has risen to nearly 75 percent and the city only pays a quarter. "State regulations specify that you cannot use these funds for any other purpose," Socolar says. "The money we got from the Feds was intended not only to let us increase the supply but to increase the pay as the cost of living goes up for the childcare work force."

Not surprisingly, daycare centers have been suffering a prolonged staffing crisis. "At this point our daycare centers are finding it almost impossible to fill those positions because they are being drained off into Head Start and the schools," Socolar says. "Job openings are listed for five or six months with no takers. People who stay in daycare do it by choice, but how long can they stand it if their pay is frozen at levels four years old? If you can't attract qualified people, there's higher turnover and the children pay for it with teachers who have inadequate preparation."

City-funded daycare came out of World War II, when large numbers of women went into the paid workforce to replace the men who had gone to fight. Ever since the workers unionized in the 1970s they have had conflict with the city, but up to now they've always reached an agreement. "I don't really know why the mayor has been so heavy-handed, so discriminatory," Socolar says. "We haven't had this with any other mayor before, even in the depth of the fiscal crisis. They each came up with a comparable package for what the municipal employees were getting. Not this one."

At least now the city and the unions are talking, which gives Oppenheimer hope. "It's been a year since we've been at the table," he says. "It was at least a real conversation taking place. We were not happy with the initial offer, but it was a real offer. It was a different conversation." The offer was not acceptable to the unions because in essence it means a seven percent cut in their real wages because of the rising cost of living.

Negotiations are continuing. "We can't talk about this contract until the contract for the first 27 months gets settled," Socolar says. "We are asking for the same raise that everybody else got for that period - and teachers got a lot more. Then everything else will fall into place fairly easily."

Sasha Nyary, formerly on the staff of Life Magazine and the mother of a public school student, edits the newsletter of The Fifth Avenue Committee, a community-based organization. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Regulating Immigration Consultants


Hoping that she could quickly qualify for US residency, Izabela Dechnik, a Polish cleaning woman, gave $2,000 to a woman named Adela Holzer, who claimed that she could expedite the process with the help of a senator in Washington D.C.

Dechnik was not the only person to whom Holzer made this promise.

"She always said that this was the senator who was going to grant us residency," Pascual Diez, who gave Holzer more than $5,000, told Hoy.

Though Holzer promised "fast track service," years passed and not one of the immigrants who paid Holzer received a green card. Holzer, very simply, was conning them. In 2002, she was convicted of grand larceny and fraud for stealing a total of $50,000 from her immigrant clients.

Stories such as this are common in immigrant communities, which is why the government is trying to do something about it.

In June the City Council unanimously passed a new bill that would require immigration assistant service providers to give a written contract to their clients, and would prevent them from making statements promising government action or suggesting that they have special influence. The New York State legislature passed a similar bill. Both only await the signatures of Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki, respectively, to be turned into law.

"Assisting immigrants is a thriving industry in certain areas, and one that for long has been left unchecked," said State Senator Frank Padavan, who had introduced the bill in the State Senate. With these new laws, immigrant service providers will be regulated for the first time.

There is agreement of course that scam artists should not be tolerated. But there is sharp disagreement over the role of immigrant assistance service providers, some questioning whether the new laws won't legitimize an occupation that shouldn't really exist at all.

Many immigration service providers call themselves "notarios," which means lawyers in Spanish, when they are, in fact, just a notary public. The new laws will require that they post a sign stating that they are not attorneys and not allowed to give legal advice.

"How would you feel if you were sick and going to see a doctor who has a sign hanging in the office saying that 'I am not a doctor,' said Eugene Glicksman, chairman of the County Lawyers Immigration and nationality committee. "What these bills say is that we are going to let anybody represent immigrants."

According to the federal law, only attorneys and accredited individuals or non-profit organizations can represent immigrants. Under the new law, immigration service providers can transcribe responses to government agencies; translate instructions and questions from forms, assist in getting documentation. They are prohibited from giving legal advice to clients.

Proponents of the bills argue that regulating, instead of outlawing, immigration service providers, allows some room for legitimate business to exist.

"While there are some bad actors who have been ripping off immigrants, at the same time there are some immigrant consultants who do play some helpful and legitimate role to immigration communities," said Mark Lewis of New York Immigration Coalition.

But lawyers said it is difficult for immigrant assistance service providers to avoid giving legal advice. Even the selection of the forms is in effect the practice of law, they argue, because one has to understand the law in order to pick the right application.

"If people need legal advice, they should seek out the services of an immigration attorney," Padavan said.

But for many immigrants, hiring a lawyer could cost an entire month's wages. "Many immigrants chose to go to immigration consultants because they provide low cost services," said Lewis, who added that "some of the notarios understand the law better than lawyers."

Some immigrants questioned why they should pay a lump sum of money to a lawyer to simply filling out forms. "I have been filing things myself without a lawyer," said Christelle Arcostanzo, an immigrant from France.

"There is no such thing as just filling out the form," Claudia Slovinsky of the Association Bar of New York told the New York Law Journal. “That form is tip of a big, huge iceberg.”

If Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Governor George Pataki approve the measures as expected, lawyer groups said they would consider constitutional challeges on the ground that these bills go against federal law.

"These bills do not require immigration assistants to have even the most minimal knowledge, training or experience," Glicksman said. "I would not be surprised if there were litigation on this."

An immigrant from Bangkok, Thailand, Chaleampon Ritthichai is the editor of The Citizen.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



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